Guardian : Two 9/11s, one story

Two 9/11s, one story

To understand better what happened in New York in 2001, go back to Chile in 1973

Roger Burbach | The Guardian | September 11, 2003

On the morning of September 11 I watched aircraft flying overhead. Minutes later I heard explosions and saw fireballs of smoke fill the sky. As a result of these attacks thousands died, including two good friends.

I am not writing about September 11 2001 in New York City. I am writing about another September 11 - an equally horrible one - in 1973. The planes I saw were warplanes and their target was the presidential palace in Santiago, Chile. These two September 11s are related in many ways, and both help us understand why George Bush has led the US into a quagmire in Iraq.

On September 11 1973 Salvador Allende resided in the Chilean presidential palace. He was the first freely elected socialist leader in the world, and ever since his victory in September 1970, the CIA and the US government, headed by Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, were determined to oust Allende and his Popular Unity coalition.

It was on September 11 1973 that they succeeded. Led by General Augusto Pinochet, the Chilean military overthrew Allende, who died in the presidential palace. More than 3,000 people perished in the bloody repression that followed under Pinochet's rule, including two American friends of mine, Charles Horman and Frank Terrugi.

Prior to the attack on the Pentagon on September 11 2001, the most sensational foreign-led terrorist action in Washington had been carried out by a team of operatives sent by the Pinochet regime. On September 21 1976, agents of the Chilean secret police organisation, Dina, detonated a car bomb just blocks from the White House, killing a leading opponent of Pinochet's, Orlando Letelier, and his assistant, Ronni Moffitt.

These assassinations were linked to the first international terrorist network in the west, Operation Condor. Begun in 1974 at the instigation of the Chilean secret police, it was made up by the intelligence services of at least six South American countries that collaborated in tracking, kidnapping and assassinating political opponents. Based on documents divulged under the Chile Declassification Project of the Clinton administration, it is now recognised that the CIA knew about these international terrorist activities and may have abetted them.

After the murders of Letelier and Moffitt, the CIA concluded that Condor was a rogue operation and may have tried to contain its activities. However, the network continued to act throughout Latin America at least until the early 1980s. Chilean and Argentine military units assisted the dictator Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua, and helped set up death squads in El Salvador. Argentine units also aided Honduran military death squads that began operating in the early 80s with the direct assistance and collaboration of the CIA.

Similarities abound between the emergence of terrorist networks in Latin America and events leading to the rise of al-Qaida. Osama bin Laden first became involved in militant Islamist activities when he went to Afghanistan in the 1980s to fight with the Mujahideen against the Soviet-backed regime that had taken power. Even in the 1980s it was recognised that many of those fighting against the Soviets and the Afghan government were religious fanatics who had no loyalty to their US sponsors. Ronald Reagan likened them to America's "founding fathers".

In Central America, Reagan called thousands of former soldiers of Somoza's national guard "freedom fighters" as they fought the Sandinista government in Nicaragua. And when the Sandinistas went to the world court to press charges against the US for sending special operatives to bomb its port in Corinto, Reagan withdrew from the court, refusing to acknowledge the rule of international law.

In the aftermath of the attack on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon, former US government officials and conservative pundits attempted to rewrite this sordid history. Instead of acknowledging that past CIA operations had gone awry, they insisted that Bin Laden's network had flourished because earlier US collaboration with terrorists had been curtailed. Kissinger said the controls imposed on US intelligence operations over the years had facilitated the rise of international terrorism. He alluded to the hearings of the senate foreign relations committee in 1975, headed by senator Frank Church, which strongly criticised the covert operations approved by Kissinger and led to the first legal restrictions on CIA activities, including the prohibition of US assassinations of foreign leaders.

Other Republicans, including George Bush Sr, who was director of the CIA when the agency worked with many of these terrorist networks, pointed the finger at Bill Clinton for allegedly undermining foreign intelligence operations. They argued against his 1995 order prohibiting the CIA from paying and retaining foreign operatives involved in torture and death squads. Today, we see the consequences of the Bush administration's refusal to learn from the past. Instead of ending transgressions against other nations, the US has spread carnage and war, violating civil liberties and human rights.

Like many advocates of a world based on law rather than violence, the Spanish judge Baltesar Garzón, who issued the warrant for the arrest of Pinochet in London in 1998, proclaimed on the eve of the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001: "Lasting peace and freedom can be achieved only with legality, justice, respect for diversity, defense of human rights and measured and fair responses." The failure of the US to bring stability to Iraq and Afghanistan, along with stepped up terrorist activities around the world, demonstrates that the US war against terror is a failure.

But even in the midst of this war, judges, lawyers and human rights activists remain determined to see that international justice is carried out. Using the principle of "universal jurisdiction", 19 citizens of Iraq filed a suit in Belgium courts in May against Tommy Franks, the commander of the US invasion. They charged that his troops stood by as hospitals in Baghdad were looted, while other US soldiers fired on ambulances that were carrying civilians. The Bush administration threatened Belgium with "diplomatic consequences" if it allowed the case to go forward. Eventually, Belgium kowtowed to US demands and altered its laws relating to universal jurisdiction. But as we achieve some distance from the war, perhaps charges will yet be brought against the US invaders of Iraq.

The struggle is joined. The years to come will focus on the great divide that has emerged out of the two September 11s. On the one side stands an arrogant unilateralist clique in the US that engages in state terrorism and human rights abuses while tearing up international treaties. On the other is a global movement that is determined to advance a broad conception of human rights and human dignity through the utilisation of law, extradition treaties and limited policing activities. It is fundamentally a struggle over where globalisation will take us, whether the powerful economic and political interests of the world headed up by reactionary US leaders will create a new world order that relies on intervention and state terrorism, or whether a globalist perspective from below based on a more just and egalitarian conception of the world will gain ascendancy.

· Roger Burbach is the author of The Pinochet Affair: State Terrorism and Global Justice, which has just been published by Zed Books

IHT : Bold script, weak actors

Bold script, weak actors

By Henry A. Kissinger | Tribune Media Services | October 23, 2007

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has clearly spelled out how the Bush administration expects the Palestinian peace process now under way to unfold.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert are to hold preparatory meetings to define major elements of a settlement. The draft outline is then to be submitted to an international conference to be assembled in Annapolis, Maryland, at the end of November with a membership yet to be chosen.

The secretary of state has shown determination and ingenuity to bring matters to this point. Her next challenge will be to steer the process so as to avoid the risk of what happened at Camp David in 2000, when Israeli and PLO leaders sought an agreement only to see it blow up into a new crisis that continues to this day.

What is unique about the Annapolis conference is that the outcome is to be agreed in advance. What remains uncertain is the ability to implement it.

The process is being driven by the assumption that the parties can be led to accept by the end of November - or have already tacitly accepted - the so-called Taba Plan of 2000, developed in the wake of the abortive Camp David meeting by technically non-official negotiators.

It provides for Israeli withdrawal to essentially the 1967 borders (with minor rectifications), retaining only the settlements around Jerusalem but narrowing the corridor between two principal Israeli cities, Haifa and Tel Aviv, to about 20 miles. The to-be-created Palestinian state would be compensated by some equivalent Israeli territory, probably in the underpopulated Negev.

Israel seems prepared to agree to an unrestricted return of refugees to the Palestinian state but adamantly refuses any return to Israel. Plausible reports have the Israeli government willing to cede the Arab neighborhoods of Jerusalem (as yet undefined) as the capital of a Palestinian state.

If matters are indeed brought to this point, it would reflect a revolutionary change of perceptions on both sides.

The intifada and the global momentum of radical Islamism have brought home to the Israeli public and leadership that their state is threatened by four new and growing dangers: first, an altered security environment in which the principal threat is from groups with no defined geography and operating from small, mobile bases; second, the demographic challenge because the alternative to a two-state solution could become a single state in which the Jewish population turns into a minority; third, the existential threat of nuclear proliferation, especially from Iran; and finally, an international environment in which Israel finds itself increasingly isolated because of the growing perception in Western Europe and in small but influential circles in the United States that Israel's alleged intransigence is the cause of Arab hostility to the West.

At the same time, the emerging fear of Iran has caused a reordering of priorities in the Arab world. For the moderate Sunni states, the danger of a dominant Iran has emerged as their principal preoccupation.

The confluence of American, Arab, Israeli and European concerns encourages the hope that an agreement between Israel and its Arab neighbors would ease, or even eliminate, their common fears.

Will diplomacy be able to deliver on these expectations?

The interlocutors on both sides have extremely shaky domestic positions. The governing coalition in Israel has collapsed, and the approval ratings of the Cabinet are at a historic low.

The definition of a Palestinian partner has so far proved elusive. Gaza is governed by Hamas, which is unwilling to recognize the legitimacy of Israel, not to speak of the specific terms under negotiation. Who then takes responsibility for Gaza? And it is unclear how much of the West Bank population Abbas can speak for.

Several Arab states have declared their willingness to recognize Israel once it returns to the 1967 borders. But recognition of the existence of a state has historically been treated as a factual, not a policy, matter. A key question, therefore, becomes exactly what is meant by "recognition." Will the moderate Arab states place pressure on Hamas to accept the premises of the peace process? Or will the fashionable pressure for "engagement" with Hamas turn into an alibi for evading that necessity?

Are the moderate Arab states prepared to expand and strengthen the small group committed to genuine co-existence? Will recognition of Israel bring an end to the unrelenting media, governmental and educational campaign in Arab countries that presents Israel as an illegitimate, imperialist, almost criminal interloper in the region?

Several moderate Arab states have been extraordinarily reluctant to come to Annapolis. If they appear, will they treat their presence as their principal contribution for which one-sided pressure on Israel is deemed an appropriate concession?

Even more portentous will be the profound implications for the balance of forces within the Arab world. Moderates there will be less praised for their achievement than accused of having betrayed the Arab cause.

The U.S. will be able to sustain the proposed course only if it is prepared to extend long-term support to its Arab partners against the foreseeable onslaught.

The peace process will therefore merge with the generic conflicts of the Middle East. The Annapolis conference cannot be the end of a process; rather, it should lay the groundwork of a new, potentially hopeful phase that will continue into future administrations.

But it should not be driven by the U.S. political calendar. If either America's Arab or Israeli friends are asked to take on more than they are able to withstand, there's the risk of another, even larger blow-up.

The secretary of state is surely right in insisting that the Olmert-Abbas talks avoid the ritualistic adjectives of previous efforts still awaiting definition after decades, such as the "just" and "lasting" peace within "secure" and "recognized" borders of UN Security Council Resolution 242 and the appeal to a "just, fair and realistic" solution of the refugee problem called for by the road map.

Specific agreements regarding enforcement and guarantees are also essential - an especially delicate matter when demilitarization and resistance to terrorism are imposed on an emerging sovereign entity.

American leadership on realistic parameters with Israel and moderate Arab countries is an essential precondition to success in Annapolis. In its absence, deadlock and American isolation beckon.

The strength of the forces of moderation depends on the standing of America in the region and not only with respect to Palestine. No more in Palestine than in Iraq can American influence be fostered by an image of retreat. All the peoples of the region, friend or foe, will be judging the sum total of America's purposes and its steadfastness in pursuit of them.

Henry A. Kissinger heads the consulting firm Kissinger & Associates. This article was distributed by Tribune Media Services.

Global villain or strategic genius? Neither, asserts new book on Henry Kissinger

Global villain or strategic genius? Neither, asserts new book on Henry Kissinger

Jeremi Suri | July 9, 2007

MADISON - Author: "What are your core moral principles - the principles you would not violate""

Henry Kissinger: "I am not prepared to share that yet."

This peculiar exchange hints at one of the central themes of a new book about the enigmatic statesman, "Henry Kissinger and the American Century," written by University of Wisconsin-Madison historian Jeremi Suri. In examining Kissinger's complicated and controversial legacy, Suri creates a portrait of a man whose political career was motivated by deep moral convictions, yet the outcomes of many of his policies were viewed as morally horrendous.

While many books have been written about Kissinger's policies, Suri says his book is the first to offer a deeper understanding of the man based on Kissinger's remarkable life history. Suri conducted intensive research on all phases, including Kissinger's childhood in Furth, Germany; the disturbing rise of Hitler and his family's status as Jewish-German refugees in New York City; his return to occupied Germany as an American soldier in World War II; his Harvard-educated rise to international prominence as a Cold War strategist; and his foreign policy counsel to nearly every president of the modern era.

Suri's book examines how these life experiences - especially Kissinger's Jewishness - impacted the way he viewed the world and its threats. Suri also had unprecedented access to the man himself, getting the opportunity over three years to have more than a dozen sit-down interviews with Kissinger.

Kissinger is an extremely polarizing figure, and much of what is written about him falls into the extreme camps of "strategic genius" or "war criminal." "Kissinger and the American Century," released in June by Harvard University Press, argues that neither camp is correct.

"What I am more interested in," Suri says, "is how can someone who is so smart - and entered politics for moral reasons, because the experience of the Holocaust loomed so large in his life - how does someone like that produce results such as the bombing of Vietnam?"

The key to that answer begins with Kissinger's youth in Germany, Suri says, where he witnessed the sophisticated and highly democratic society of Weimar, Germany, destroyed by the Nazi regime with little apparent resistance. It deeply impressed in Kissinger a view that democracies were inherently weak and frequently under siege, and that protecting Western civilization sometimes requires the morally compromising need to support "the lesser of two evils."

"The experience of being a Jew in World War II certainly made him more skeptical of human rights and idealism," Suri says, noting that the phrase "human rights" is almost completely absent from his policy lexicon. "I think he saw - in his own phrase - that there was 'evil in the world' and that for greater moral purposes, you had to presume that sometimes you had to use immoral means."

Kissinger's legacy as secretary of state from 1969-1977 will be tarnished by his policy of escalated bombings in Vietnam that killed thousands of innocent civilians, as well as his open support for General Pinochet's murderous regime in Chile. Suri says that Kissinger had a propensity to too quickly dismiss legitimate concerns about the human rights implications of his decisions.

While Kissinger made costly mistakes in his career, he is without question the chief architect of post-World War II American foreign policy - an architecture that is still standing today, Suri notes. The opening of U.S. relations with China, a hallmark Kissinger achievement, would have been impossible without his unwavering commitment to diplomacy with friends and adversaries.

On the topic of Kissinger's Jewish heritage, Suri uncovered evidence that it had a ubiquitous impact on his political life - a fact, Suri says, Kissinger stubbornly refuses to acknowledge. "He spent his entire life surrounded by people who were either anti-Semitic or at least mildly prejudiced against Jews," he says, including President Nixon. "He had to appeal to these people for power."

The issue was especially acute during his work for a peace agreement in the Middle East in the early 1970s. Suri says that every time he met with leaders from Saudi Arabia, he was handed a copy of "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion," a fictitious anti-Semitic pamphlet that describes a conspiracy theory about Jewish plans for world domination.

"Every time he meets with Egyptians, there was an assumption that he speaks on behalf of the Jewish world," Suri says. "Every time he meets with Israelis, there's a presumption he should be doing more because he's 'one of them.' His Jewishness is always on the table."

But remarkably, rather than disable his political career, he found ways to use the prejudices to his political advantage by essentially playing it differently in negotiations with Israelis and Arab nations, Suri says. And in spite of those prejudices, he is highly respected by leaders throughout the world.

There are other Kissinger traits that help explain his profound political influence and longevity. He has a relentless work style and "simply outworked everyone around him," and has an amazing capacity to assimilate massive amounts of information and frame issues in forceful ways. For example, he carefully scrutinized briefing papers in more depth than anyone else and preferred to review original documents to extract the information he needed.

"That gave him enormous power because he was often the only person in the room who knew the whole story," he says. "He's the type of thinker who can lay out three options and make it clear in the end there's only one good option - his."

Suri takes Kissinger's legacy all the way up to the present-day war in Iraq, which perhaps represents the first significant diversion from the Kissinger template of embracing moderate regimes (usually dictatorships), maintaining access to (but not control over) oil resources, and using indirect force through proxy regimes to maintain stability.

"What the Bush administration did differently is they tried to promote democracy, but Kissinger was always opposed to the idea that you can bring democracy to the Middle East," Suri says. "Ironically, the failure of the Bush administration to bring democracy to Iraq is going to result in a more Kissingerian world. We will be essentially creating a proxy regime, the same thing Kissinger was doing in Egypt and Israel."

Kissinger's political ideals centered on protecting the greatness of Western civilization, Suri says. "What does he mean by Western civilization" Not necessarily democracy, but law and order, rules of fairness, basic personal freedoms and a hierarchy of values."

Suri says that Kissinger - who had witnessed the absolute worst of hatred and violence during the Nazi regime - believes that hatred and violence are persistent forces in the world and that foreign policy must reflect that reality. Defeating those forces usually requires a combination of diplomacy, force and compromise - rather than rhetoric about democracy and moral absolutes.

Suri concludes that despite the intense criticism of Kissinger's legacy, critics have failed to offer a more effective foreign policy alternative. "The 21st Century awaits Kissinger's successor," he writes.

Salon : Imperial presidency declared null and void

Imperial presidency declared null and void

Bush may ignore the 4th Circuit's stinging rebuke of his war paradigm. But his policies are losing the cloak of legality.

By Sidney Blumenthal | Jun. 21, 2007

In private, Bush administration sub-Cabinet officials who have been instrumental in formulating and sustaining the legal "war paradigm" acknowledge that their efforts to create a system for detainees separate from due process, criminal justice and law enforcement have failed. One of the key framers of the war paradigm (in which the president in his wartime capacity as commander in chief makes and enforces laws as he sees fit, overriding the constitutional system of checks and balances), who a year ago was arguing vehemently for pushing its boundaries, confesses that he has abandoned his belief in the whole doctrine, though he refuses to say so publicly. If he were to speak up, given his seminal role in formulating the policy and his stature among the Federalist Society cadres that run it, his rejection would have a shattering impact, far more than political philosopher Francis Fukuyama's denunciation of the neoconservatism he formerly embraced. But this figure remains careful to disclose his disillusionment with his own handiwork only in off-the-record conversations. Yet another Bush legal official, even now at the commanding heights of power, admits that the administration's policies are largely discredited. In its defense, he says without a hint of irony or sarcasm, "Not everything we've done has been illegal." He adds, "Not everything has been ultra vires" -- a legal term referring to actions beyond the law.

The resistance within the administration to Bush's torture policy, the ultimate expression of the war paradigm, has come to an end through attrition and exhaustion. More than two years ago, Vice President Dick Cheney's then chief of staff I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby and then general counsel David Addington physically cornered one of the few internal opponents, subjecting him to threats, intimidation and isolation. About that time, the tiny band of opponents within approached Karen Hughes, newly named undersecretary of state for public diplomacy, hoping that the longtime confidante of President Bush, now assigned responsibility for the U.S. image in the world, might be willing to hear them out on the damage done by continuation of the torture policy. But she rebuffed them.

Two weeks ago, Hughes unveiled her major report, extolling "our commitment to freedom, human rights and the dignity and equality of every human being," but making no mention of detainee policy. The action part consists of another of her campaign-oriented rapid-response schemes, this one a Counterterrorism Communications Center, staffed by military and intelligence officers, to rebut the false claims of terrorists. Asked whether the administration's policies might be a factor contributing to the problem, Sean McCormick, the State Department spokesman, replied, "You're always going to get people criticizing policy."

Gen. David Petraeus' declaration on May 10 against torture reflected less the ringing authority of an order than the impotence of a personal credo. "Beyond the basic fact that such actions are illegal, history shows that they also are frequently neither useful nor necessary," he said. But his moral sentiment had been dismissed long before he had uttered it. The commander's strongly worded statement, putting him by implication in the category of "people criticizing policy," had no effect on the elaborate system of "enhanced interrogation techniques," black site prisons, maintenance of Guantánamo, or the 20,000 Iraqi prisoners incarcerated on U.S. military bases without due process. Petraeus has no more influence over the president who says he listens to his military commanders than the commanders who have opposed the policy since its inception.

In the year since the Supreme Court ruled (on June 29, 2006) in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld that the Bush administration's military commissions for detainees violated the Uniform Code of Military Justice and the Geneva Conventions -- and Bush promptly got the Republican-led Congress to legislate approval of the illegal commissions as well as suspend habeas corpus -- further court decisions have thrown his "war paradigm" into a legal twilight zone.

In February, a Cheney protégé, Susan J. Crawford, was appointed as the convening authority for military commissions. An armed forces appeals court judge, she had been Cheney's special counsel when he was secretary of defense under the elder Bush and had become a family friend. She has long been close to Libby and Addington. She facilitated the unusual transfer of David Hicks, a former kangaroo skinner from Australia, captured in Afghanistan as a fighter with the Taliban and held at Guantánamo. Charged with a host of crimes, including murder, Hicks filed an affidavit alleging torture. When the Hamdan decision was handed down, the charges against him were dropped, but after passage of the Military Commissions Act he was newly charged with providing material aid to terrorism. His five-year detention in Guantánamo provoked a public outcry in Australia. Cheney flew there to confer with Prime Minister John Howard, who wanted to defuse the issue. Soon afterward, a deal was worked out: Hicks pleaded guilty to the lesser charge of providing material aid, he was released to Australian authorities, and he is serving a reduced nine-month sentence.

Crawford's appointment, however, did not prevent military commission judges at Guantánamo from ruling on June 4 that the commissions had no jurisdiction over enemy combatants who were not designated as "unlawful." In effect, this decision threw the commissions into a void. According to the judges' decision two prisoners, Omar Kadhr, captured as a 15-year-old child soldier and accused of killing a U.S. Special Forces medic on the battlefield, and Salim Hamdan, one of Osama bin Laden's former drivers, did not fall under the category that would enable them to be tried by the commissions.

On June 11, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit, the most conservative in the country, issued a decision striking at the heart of Bush's conception of the presidency. In al-Marri v. Wright, the court ruled that Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri, a resident of Qatar, arrested as a student at Bradley University in the United States, accused of aiding al-Qaida, could not be held in indefinite detention as an "enemy combatant" and must be remanded to the civilian criminal court system. (Al-Marri, in an affidavit, claimed to have been tortured.) The decision acknowledged that al-Marri might have committed serious crimes. But the government's assertion that the president has "inherent constitutional authority," rooted in his "war-making powers," is a "breathtaking claim" contrary to U.S. constitutional law and history.

"The President," the court said, "claims power that far exceeds that granted him by the Constitution." This extraordinary decision, citing the Framers, declared Bush's actions -- and his imperial presidency -- null and void. It is worth quoting at some length:

Put simply, the Constitution does not allow the President to order the military to seize civilians residing within the United States and detain them indefinitely without criminal process, and this is so even if he calls them "enemy combatants" ... Of course, this does not mean that the President lacks power to protect our national interests and defend our people, only that in doing so he must abide by the Constitution. We understand and do not in any way minimize the grave threat international terrorism poses to our country and our national security ... The Court has specifically cautioned against "break[ing] faith with this Nation's tradition" -- "firmly embodied in the Constitution" -- "of keeping military power subservient to civilian authority." Reid, 354 U.S. at 40. When the Court wrote these words in 1957, it explained that "[t]he country ha[d] remained true to that faith for almost one hundred seventy years." Id. Another half century has passed but the necessity of "remain[ing] true to that faith" remains as important today as it was at our founding.

Then, the court delivered the coup de grâce to Bush's "war paradigm." Having cited the Framers, it now cited the example of Abraham Lincoln.

In an address to Congress at the outset of the Civil War, President Lincoln defended his emergency suspension of the writ of habeas corpus to protect Union troops moving to defend the Capital. Lincoln famously asked: "[A]re all the laws, but one, to go unexecuted, and the government itself to go to pieces, lest that one be violated?" Abraham Lincoln, Message to Congress in Special Session (July 4, 1861), in Abraham Lincoln: Speeches and Writings 1859-1865 at 246, 254 (Don E. Fehrenbacher ed., 1989). The authority the President seeks here turns Lincoln's formulation on its head. For the President does not acknowledge that the extraordinary power he seeks would result in the suspension of even one law and he does not contend that this power should be limited to dire emergencies that threaten the nation. Rather, he maintains that the authority to order the military to seize and detain certain civilians is an inherent power of the Presidency, which he and his successors may exercise as they please. To sanction such presidential authority to order the military to seize and indefinitely detain civilians, even if the President calls them "enemy combatants," would have disastrous consequences for the Constitution -- and the country. For a court to uphold a claim to such extraordinary power would do more than render lifeless the Suspension Clause, the Due Process Clause, and the rights to criminal process in the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, and Eighth Amendments; it would effectively undermine all of the freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution. It is that power -- were a court to recognize it -- that could lead all our laws "to go unexecuted, and the government itself to go to pieces." We refuse to recognize a claim to power that would so alter the constitutional foundations of our Republic.

Few, if any, presidents have ever been the subject of such a devastating legal decision. While presidential actions have been ruled illegal or unconstitutional in the past, they were individual acts. But in the case of Bush, the al-Marri decision not only discredits Bush's position but denies his idea of his presidential legitimacy in the American tradition. The decision also declares that Bush's idea is a mortal threat to the Constitution. And this ruling was issued by the most conservative court in the land.

And yet, nothing changes. After such a stinging rebuke as the decision handed down by the 4th Circuit a reasonable president might well contemplate changing his approach. Instead, Bush digs in, doubles down, surges. As with his other discredited policies, Bush attempts to salvage them through willpower and extra effort, throwing more resources down black holes. Ultimately, his position is losing its cloak of legality. Piece by piece, case by case, the courts are exposing it as ultra vires.

The impulse for supporting the policy, on one level, remains visceral and virulent. Stephen Holmes, professor at the NYU School of Law, describes the concept of "mirror imaging" in his new book, "The Matador's Cape: America's Reckless Response to Terror": "If our enemies have renounced the laws of civilization, so will we. If they organized a sneak attack, then we will respond with a dirty war. If they terrorized us, we will terrorize them."

For some, this vengeance -- "We need to humiliate them," according to Henry Kissinger -- requires something more; it involves upholding faith that transcends law. On June 16, Associate Justice Antonin Scalia of the Supreme Court, at an international conference on torture and terrorism in Ottawa, Ontario, sought to resolve the question on a moral basis. His disquisition consisted of a defense of Jack Bauer, the fictional hero of the torture-porn Fox TV series "24." "Are you going to convict Jack Bauer? Say that criminal law is against him? 'You have the right to a jury trial?' Is any jury going to convict Jack Bauer? I don't think so. So the question is really whether we believe in these absolutes. And ought we believe in these absolutes." Thus, for this conservative jurist, torture, dramatized through popular entertainment, remained the same obsession with "absolutes" as it had been during the Inquisition, which after all developed the enhanced coercive techniques used today.

By contrast, Bush's stance is merely political, a raw assertion of unaccountable and unlimited power. Yet the political idea he seeks to defend -- a presidency operating by fiat above the rule of law -- finds itself increasingly in conflict with the American system of justice, and not only on the question of detainees and torture.

SMH : Woodward's book damns Bush team

Woodward's book damns Bush team

by Michael Gawenda | October 2, 2006

THE White House is bracing for a week of damage control in the wake of the publication of a new book by the Watergate journalist Bob Woodward in which the Bush Administration is described as dysfunctional and faction-ridden, and President George Bush as "intellectually incurious".

State of Denial, of which almost a million copies were rushed to American bookshops at the weekend, claims Mr Bush's then chief-of-staff tried to convince him to fire the Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, at least twice in the last two years, the second time with the support of the first lady, Laura Bush.

It also reveals that the 82-year-old Henry Kissinger, secretary of state during the Nixon administration, has become an adviser to the President. Dr Kissinger, who has long argued that the Vietnam War was lost because of a lack of political will, has confirmed he has had regular meetings with Mr Bush, "just me and the President".

Several recent books have revealed how the White House has ignored advice from senior military officers and State Department officials that more troops were needed to defeat the growing insurgency in Iraq, warnings that came within weeks of Mr Bush declaring victory.

State of Denial confirms all of this and goes further, revealing how Mr Bush has never sought to question virtually any of the officials who had issued these warnings, instead relying on advice from senior commanders in the military who were loath to tell the President hard truths.

Mr Bush emerges from the book as a man of little self-doubt, who constantly tells his aides that as commander-in-chief, his job is to exude confidence in his decisions. He is, according to Woodward, a man of deep faith who prays regularly for guidance and believes his prayers are answered.

While Woodward's reporting that the then secretary of state, Colin Powell, and Mr Rumsfeld could not stand one another is not new, his assertion that Mr Powell's successor, Condoleezza Rice, urged Mr Bush to sack Mr Rumsfeld is. By the time she urged the sacking, Dr Rice and Mr Rumsfeld were hardly talking. At the urging of the Vice-President, Dick Cheney, Mr Bush refused to sack Mr Rumsfeld.

A number of Administration officials, including Andrew Card, who was the White House chief of staff until March this year, urged Mr Bush to sack Mr Rumsfeld, as did Mrs Bush, though the White House has emphatically denied this.

The book also reveals that both of Mr Bush's parents have become increasingly concerned about the war in Iraq.

At one stage, at a function, his mother, Barbara, approached David Boren, a former Democratic Party senator who had worked closely with her husband when Mr Bush senior was CIA director in the 1970s. She asked him to be candid about the war.

"Are we right to be worried about this Iraq thing?" Mrs Bush asked

"Yes, very worried," he said.

"Do you think it's a mistake?"

"Yes, ma'am. I think it's a huge mistake if we go in … "

"Well, his father is certainly worried and is losing sleep over it. He's up at night worried."

"Why doesn't he talk to him?"

"He doesn't think he should unless he's asked."

Woodward suggests that President Bush never asked his father for advice about whether going to war in Iraq was a good idea, and has not talked to him at any great length about Iraq since the war started.

Indeed, Woodward's description of the relationship of President Bush with his father suggested that the President may love his father but does not respect him very much as a politician.

At one stage, according to Woodward, the Republican Party presidential hopeful John McCain was asked whether President Bush had ever asked him for his views on Iraq.

"No, no, he hasn't," Mr McCain says. "As a matter of fact, he's not intellectually curious.

"But one of the things he did say one time was 'I don't want to be like my father. I want to be like Ronald Reagan'."

There are some minor but revealing revelations in the book.

Mr Bush and his senior adviser, Karl Rove, for instance, enjoy fart jokes, which they tell each other sometimes in the middle of Oval Office meetings.

Raw Story : President's advisor denies Bush in 'state of denial'; Woodward didn't 'connect his own dots'

President's advisor denies Bush in 'state of denial'; Woodward didn't 'connect his own dots'

by Ron Brynaert | Sunday October 1, 2006

On a Sunday morning talk show, one of the president's closest advisors, Dan Bartlett, denied that Bush was in a "state of denial," and suggested that investigative journalist Bob Woodward "had already formulated some conclusions even before the interviewing began."

Appearing on ABC's This Week with George Stephanopoulos, Bartlett also said that he had spoken to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice earlier that morning about a reported "impending terrorist attack" warning she allegedly "brushed off" two months before the 9/11 attacks. Rice told Bartlett that the account by former CIA director George Tenet in Woodward's book was a "very, grossly misaccurate characterization of the meeting they had."

Stephanopoulos noted that Bartlett had endorsed Woodward's previous book, Plan of Attack, then said, "I take it you're not going to do that with State of Denial."

"Well, George, it is a book that we participated at various levels within the administration, both in the White House and other parts of the administration and the Department of Defense, and State," Bartlett responded. "But I must say, George, I think as we worked with Bob on this project from the very outset, it was unfortunate that we felt he had already formulated some conclusions even before the interviewing began."

"That's a pretty stiff charge," Stephanopoulos returned. "You're saying he was a biased reporter on this?"

Bartlett said that he "was really struck by the fact that the central thesis of this book, the claim that the president was in a state of denial, that he was misleading the American people about what was happening in Iraq, quite frankly is not backed up with own facts of the book."

Defending Woodward, Stephanopoulos told his guest that he was "making a pretty serious charge here."

"You're saying that Bob Woodward, been around Washington for an awful long time, went into this with an agenda and basically wasn't an honest reporter," said Stephanopoulos.

Bartlett said that he wasn't calling Woodward's honesty into question, and he refused to use "biased" to describe the Pulitzer-winning journalist, but insisted that he didn't "connect his own dots" in the book.

"What he talks about in here is that there is a grim picture in Iraq that the president wasn't sharing with the American people, but we didn't have a strategy, when in fact he references throughout the book, time after time after time where the president was being presented with the bad information, was pushing the internal process to make sure that we were adapting to the enemy, and he was sharing this news with the American people," said Bartlett.

"But not always," said Stephanopoulos.

"The front page of the Washington Post this morning has an excerpt, they talk about May of this year when the Joint Chiefs of Staff presented a private intelligence report to the Pentagon and it said the report predicted a more violent 2007," Stephanopoulos cited as an example.

The report said that "insurgents and terrorists retain the resources and capabilities to sustain and even increase the current level of violence through the next year."

"The very same month, a public report goes from the Pentagon to Congress," said Stephanopoulos. "The public report sent to Congress said, 'The appeal and motivation for continued violent action will begin to wane in early 2007.'"

"That does seem like a contradiction," argued Stephanopoulos.

Bartlett said that that was an incorrect assessment, and that the report was just "one data point," and what "this book shows is that there is a lot of disagreement, there's a lot of people who are very smart, very experienced, grappling with very difficult issues, sometimes coming to opposite conclusions."

Full transcript of Bartlett's interview on ABC's This Week:
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MR. STEPHANOPOULOS: Good morning, everyone. Before Congress left town Friday, they gave President Bush the military tribunal legislation he demanded, but the White House and Republicans were also hit by a triple whammy of bad news late this week. A new report on Jack Abramoff, Congressman Mark Foley's resignation, and of course, Bob Woodward's new book, State of Denial, also on the cover of Newsweek this morning.

Here to talk about all that is one of the president's closest advisors, Dan Barlett. Welcome back to "This Week."

MR. BARTLETT: Thanks, George. Nice to be with you.

MR. STEPHANOPOULOS: Now, in 2004, Bob Woodward wrote a book, "Plan of Attack." You went out publicly, urged people to go buy it and read it. I take it you're not going to do that with State of Denial.

MR. BARTLETT: Well, George, it is a book that we participated at various levels within the administration, both in the White House and other parts of the administration and the Department of Defense, and State. But I must say, George, I think as we worked with Bob on this project from the very outset it was unfortunate that we felt he had already formulated some conclusions even before the interviewing began.

MR. STEPHANOPOULOS: That's a pretty stiff charge. You're saying he was a biased reporter on this?

MR. BARTLETT: Well, we've had a lot of experience with Bob. And I think -- in the first two books, as you did mention -- and what we found in those books is that he came in very much with an open mind, very much wanting the facts to lead him to a conclusion. And after reading this book over the weekend, I was really struck by the fact that the central thesis of this book, the claim that the president was in a state of denial, that he was misleading the American people about what was happening in Iraq, quite frankly is not backed up with own facts of the book.

MR. STEPHANOPOULOS: Well, I want to get there in one second, but before we get there, because you're making a pretty serious charge here. You're saying that Bob Woodward, been around Washington for an awful long time, went into this with an agenda and basically wasn't an honest reporter.

MR. BARTLETT: I didn't say that he wasn't an honest reporter. Reporters come in with conclusions or some firm ideas about where they want to take a book and on certain occasions when he met with administration officials and they would come to talk to me about their meetings with him, there was just a sense that despite spending hours with him that their points weren't getting across.

MR. STEPHANOPOULOS: So you found he had an agenda?

MR. BARTLETT: I'm not going to use the word "agenda," but we did feel like he approached this book different than he did the first two and that's why we made the decision that the president was not going to --

MR. STEPHANOPOULOS: And the vice president didn't speak with him, either.

MR. BARTLETT: That's correct.

MR. STEPHANOPOULOS: So, looking at it from the outside, it looks like, well, if Bob Woodward's going to write a positive book, he gets cooperation, he gets praise. If it's a negative book, well, he didn't have an agenda, but he didn't approve of his approach.

MR. BARTLETT: Well, I'll make the point, though, we didn't agree with everything he put in his second book, either. But the fact of the matter is many people in the administration, including myself, including the national security advisor, including the secretary of state, including the joint chairmen -- the chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of staff, including many other people who did participate in this book. But what we were struck by was the fact that time after time after time counter-evidence was provided to Bob, and we didn't feel like our point was getting across and, you know, it's my job to make judgments like that as to whether the president ought to participate. And you know, we made the --

MR. STEPHANOPOULOS: And you don't feel he included the counter- evidence in the book?

MR. BARTLETT: Not as much as we thought. But as I said, what's interesting about this book is that he doesn't connect his own dots. What he talks about in here is that there is a grim picture in Iraq that the president wasn't sharing with the American people, but we didn't have a strategy, when in fact he references throughout the book, time after time after time where the president was being presented with the bad information, was pushing the internal process to make sure that we were adapting to the enemy, and he was sharing this news with the American people.

MR. STEPHANOPOULOS: But not always. And let's look at some of the specifics. The front page of the Washington Post this morning has an excerpt, they talk about May of this year when the Joint Chiefs of Staff presented a private intelligence report to the Pentagon and it said the report predicted a more violent 2007. "Insurgents and terrorists retain the resources and capabilities to sustain and even increase the current level of violence through the next year." The very same month, a public report goes from the Pentagon to Congress. The public report sent to Congress said, "The appeal and motivation for continued violent action will begin to wane in early 2007." That does seem like a contradiction.

MR. BARTLETT: Well, no. The fact of the matter is that the reports that go to Congress, the entire intelligence community takes a look at all data points for an assessment such as like that. The one specific memorandum that he points to is one data point. All of these are taken into consideration. But the fact of the matter is he uses these daily attack charts or weekly or monthly attack charts as if this is some shocking revelation, when in fact, those very attack charts are --

MR. STEPHANOPOULOS: But that's not what I was talking about here. This is very specific. On the one hand, you have the Joint Chiefs of Staff intelligence report saying insurgents and terrorists retain the capabilities to increase the level of violence and then the public report says you expect basically the appeal and motivation for the insurgents to wane in 2007.

MR. BARTLETT: And the assessment made then, and remember, you've got to take yourself back into the point of May and this is in the wake of the Golden Samarra mosque bombing in which sectarian violence is beginning to increase. We have a new government that is being formed. And I think the prediction by many of the people looking at this is that if you have a unity government that is fighting the forces of evil in Iraq that you are going to see better assessments.

Having said that, the president has been very clear with the American people that the difficulties of the fight in Iraq was one that's going to take some time. We've had generals go before Congress and argue very forcefully that this is a very difficult fight, that it's going to require our troops to be on the ground.

George, the politically-expedient thing for the president to do in the last two years has been let's just pull out the troops and get out. Let's not follow a time-table -- a conditions-based approach to this. What he has done is said I'm going to listen to my commanders on the ground. I'm going to constantly adapt our tactics to meet a very important strategic objective. And what this book shows is that there is a lot of disagreement, there's a lot of people who are very smart, very experienced, grappling with very difficult issues, sometimes coming to opposite conclusions. But at the end of the day, what we see is a process that is showing us "adapt to the enemy." And the enemy is very good. And they have been, to our extent, more vicious and more violent than we probably originally expected and the president has talked about that with the American people.

MR. STEPHANOPOULOS: One of the more explosive allegations in the book goes back to before the war in Iraq. It goes back to 2001, he talks about a meeting, July 10, 2001, two months before 9/11, CIA Director George Tenet and his counterterrorism chief, Cofer Black, are reading intelligence, they are so caught up by what they are seeing. They see an attack coming. They call up Condi Rice for an unscheduled meeting, go to the White House, warn her of this, say that need action. But after the meeting, they both felt they were not getting through to Rice. "She was polite, but they felt the brush-off. A coherent plan for covert action against Bin Laden was in the pipeline, but it would take some time." They believe it was a mistake not to act after that meeting.

MR. BARTLETT: Well, I must say, myself and other members, including Secretary Rice, who it alleges was in this meeting, there was a meeting --

MR. STEPHANOPOULOS: You've spoken to her?

MR. BARTLETT: I spoke to her this morning. She believes that this is a very, grossly misaccurate (sic) characterization of the meeting they had. Look, George, the first eight months of President Bush's presidency has been some of the most investigated eight months in any presidency because of the 9/11 attack. We had the 9/11 Commission, a bipartisan commission, look at all of it, look at all of the information that was provided to government officials. They testified before it. Now, four and a half, five years later, we're just now hearing about these vivid accounts of meetings with Secretary Rice?

MR. STEPHANOPOULOS: Cofer Black says, "The only thing we didn't do was pull the trigger to the gun we were holding to Rice's head."

MR. BARTLETT: And Cofer Black and George Tenet and others also testified before the 9/11 Commission. Why is it now that --

MR. STEPHANOPOULOS: So this didn't happen?

MR. BARTLETT: And that's Secretary Rice's view that that type of urgent request to go after Bin Laden, as the book alleges, in her mind didn't happen. But I don't want to leave the wrong impression, George. Everybody in government felt we could have done a better job before 9/11. We had huge gaps in our intelligence-gathering capabilities. The wall between law enforcement and intel, and that's why we've worked so hard in the last couple of years to reform these things so we can do a better job of protecting the American people.

MR. STEPHANOPOULOS: Finally on this book, Woodward reports that not only the Chief of Staff Andy Card but also the Secretary -- who wanted Rumsfeld to go -- but also the Secretary of State, the National Security Advisor, and her deputy all recommended a new national security team after the election, that the president didn't take that advice, he said Colin Powell has to go, Donald Rumsfeld should stay. Why?

MR. BARTLETT: Well, as you would expect a chief of staff to do at the beginning of a new term is to make an assessment of all senior staff, as well as your cabinet, and that's exactly what Andy Card did, in fact, recommending to the president that he may want to change his chief of staff himself. And what Steve Hadley and Condi Rice and others said, "Mr. President, maybe you ought to think about just bringing in a whole new team. Do it all at once." And the president decided that's not the approach he wanted to take. And Andy, as a chief of staff should do, was providing options to the president in case he decided to make changes. But as everybody knows, the president decided months ago that Secretary Rumsfeld is the right person for the job --

MR. STEPHANOPOULOS: Except Newsweek is reporting this morning that the president is actually sounding out people, including Henry Kissinger and James Baker, about whether he should replace Rumsfeld. And it quotes a senior White House official saying, "So far, the advice has been Rumsfeld should stay, but I can't predict the future." Is his job secure throughout this term?

MR. BARTLETT: I can only speak for the president. The president has full confidence in Secretary Rumsfeld. Every cabinet member serves at the pleasure of the president. He's doing an enormously difficult job, fighting a war, trying to transform our military to meet the new threats of the 21st Century. We recognize that he has his critics. We recognize that he's made some very difficult decisions. Some people don't like his bedside manner. But what President Bush looks to in Secretary Rumsfeld is to bring him the type of information he needs to make the right decisions in this war. And make no mistake about it, George, this has been a difficult war. The enemy we're up against is determined to do everything they can to bring America to its knees and we have to do everything we can to fight this enemy. And he believes that Secretary Rumsfeld is the right person to help him lead that fight.

MR. STEPHANOPOULOS: Let me turn to this issue, the congressional report on White House contacts with Jack Abramoff, alleged some more than 400 contacts with Abramoff and his clients when he was active. When Scott McClellan, the White House Press Secretary, was asked about contacts earlier this year, here's what he said.

VOICE OF UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: Can you be more specific about the contacts with the senior staff? You said you were going to get back to us on that.

SCOTT McCLELLAN (Former White House Press Secretary): (From videotape.) I did check. There were a few staff level meetings.

MR. STEPHANOPOULOS: Now, this report also says there were about 187 contacts over drinks and meals with White House staffers, for a tab of almost $25,000. There seems to be a great discrepancy between what Scott McClellan and the White House has admitted to and the evidence in this report.

MR. BARTLETT: Well, George, I don't think that's the case. And the report itself concludes that you can't draw any firm conclusion from the quote, unquote, "contacts." Because many times these so- called contacts were just an excuse for Jack Abramoff and his cronies to bill their clients for activities that didn't really take place. The comment that Scott McClellan --

(Cross-talk)

MR. BARTLETT: What Scott McClellan was talking about and what all the discussion back then was about, what was called Waves Records, these are basically the records of people coming in and out of the White House --

MR. STEPHANOPOULOS: Well, let me stop you there, because there was more than that. He was also there on several occasions over those days, can you talk about context, can you talk about -- do you have records of any phone calls or emails between staff members and Mr. Abramoff? He was asked several times on several different occasions. He always chose to answer by saying there were just a few high-level staff meetings, when in fact there were far more contacts.

MR. BARTLETT: Well, George, what Scott was saying is we were not going to go on a fishing expedition looking for people's contacts when there was no suggestion of wrongdoing. The bottom line about this report and about this whole scandal was the fact of how much this person, Jack Abramoff, bilked his clients for work they didn't do.

MR. STEPHANOPOULOS: But it also does show --

MR. BARTLETT: And every time he shows, and now this is important for the viewers to understand, is that he didn't get anything from this administration. He billed his clients thousands upon thousands upon thousands of dollars for very casual contacts. In fact, in one case, he sees Karl Rove at a gridiron dinner, which is the Washington media dinner, and he bills his client for it. So he --

MR. STEPHANOPOULOS: Well, it actually does show, let me discuss it with you, because it does show that some of these clients did get funding after, the emails say White House intervention. But more specifically, his former aides, Susan Ralston, became Karl Rove's aide. There is dozens of contacts between the two. She's shown in these emails negotiating for a job and according to the evidence here, accepted tickets to sporting events, concerts, on seven different occasions for a total of about $2,000. That seems, on its face, to be a clear violation of White House ethics rules.

MR. BARTLETT: Well, George, this report was received on Friday. We're obviously looking at all the different things in this report. I will make a couple distinctions that are important to understand. It's that there are different reporting requirements for different levels of staff. There are different standards for people who have prior relationships and Susan Ralston, as you may know, used to work for Jack Abramoff. So these are all mitigating factors that we will look at, but this is still under review and we're going to look at the evidence that was brought forward by this report.

MR. STEPHANOPOULOS: One final quick question on this Mark Foley situation in the House. Number one, was the president aware of any of these allegations? Number two, the Washington Post is calling for an independent investigation. Do you think that's appropriate?

MR. BARTLETT: The president was not aware of this. It is a shocking revelation to see this type of allegation. The members of the House of Representatives, of the leadership, appear to be very aggressive in pursuing this investigation and I think that's the best place is for the leadership to determine the way forward.

MR. STEPHANOPOULOS: Dan Bartlett, thanks very much.

MR. BARTLETT: Thanks for having me, George.
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NYT : A Portrait of Bush as a Victim of His Own Certitude

A Portrait of Bush as a Victim of His Own Certitude

By MICHIKO KAKUTANI | September 30, 2006

In Bob Woodward’s highly anticipated new book, “State of Denial,” President Bush emerges as a passive, impatient, sophomoric and intellectually incurious leader, presiding over a grossly dysfunctional war cabinet and given to an almost religious certainty that makes him disinclined to rethink or re-evaluate decisions he has made about the war. It’s a portrait that stands in stark contrast to the laudatory one Mr. Woodward drew in “Bush at War,” his 2002 book, which depicted the president — in terms that the White House press office itself has purveyed — as a judicious, resolute leader, blessed with the “vision thing” his father was accused of lacking and firmly in control of the ship of state.

As this new book’s title indicates, Mr. Woodward now sees Mr. Bush as a president who lives in a state of willful denial about the worsening situation in Iraq, a president who insists he won’t withdraw troops, even “if Laura and Barney are the only ones who support me.” (Barney is Mr. Bush’s Scottish terrier.) Mr. Woodward draws an equally scathing portrait of Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, who comes off as a bully and control freak who is reluctant to assume responsibility for his department’s failures, and who has surrounded himself with yes men and created a system that bleached out “strong, forceful military advice.” Mr. Rumsfeld remains wedded to his plan to conduct the war in Iraq with a lighter, faster force (reflecting his idée fixe of “transforming” the military), even as the situation there continues to deteriorate.

Mr. Woodward reports that after the 2004 election Andrew H. Card Jr., then White House chief of staff, pressed for Mr. Rumsfeld’s ouster (he recommended former Secretary of State James A. Baker III as a replacement), and that Laura Bush shared his concern, worrying that Mr. Rumsfeld was hurting her husband’s reputation. Vice President Dick Cheney, however, persuaded Mr. Bush to stay the course with Mr. Cheney’s old friend Mr. Rumsfeld, arguing that any change might be perceived as an expression of doubt and hesitation on the war. Other members of the administration also come off poorly. Gen. Richard B. Myers is depicted as a weak chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who routinely capitulated to the will of Mr. Rumsfeld and who rarely offered an independent opinion. Former C.I.A. director George J. Tenet is described as believing that the war against Iraq was a terrible mistake, but never expressing his feelings to the president. And Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice (who appears in this volume primarily in her former role as national security adviser) is depicted as a presidential enabler, ineffectual at her job of coordinating interagency strategy and planning.

For instance, Mr. Woodward writes that on July 10, 2001, Mr. Tenet and his counterterrorism coordinator, J. Cofer Black, met with Ms. Rice to warn her of mounting intelligence about an impending terrorist attack, but came away feeling they’d been given “the brush-off” — a revealing encounter, given Ms. Rice’s recent comments, rebutting former President Bill Clinton’s allegations that the Bush administration had failed to pursue counterterrorism measures aggressively before 9/11.

As depicted by Mr. Woodward, this is an administration in which virtually no one will speak truth to power, an administration in which the traditional policy-making process involving methodical analysis and debate is routinely subverted. He notes that experts — who recommended higher troop levels in Iraq, warned about the consequences of disbanding the Iraqi Army or worried about the lack of postwar planning— were continually ignored by the White House and Pentagon leadership, or themselves failed, out of cowardice or blind loyalty, to press insistently their case for an altered course in the war.

Mr. Woodward describes the administration’s management of the war as being improvisatory and ad hoc, like a pickup basketball game, and argues that it continually tried to give the public a rosy picture of the war in Iraq (while accusing the press of accentuating the negative), even as its own intelligence was pointing to a rising number of attacks against American forces and an upward spiral of violence. A secret February 2005 report by Philip D. Zelikow, a State Department counselor, found that “Iraq remains a failed state shadowed by constant violence and undergoing revolutionary political change” and concluded that the American effort there suffered because it lacked a comprehensive, unified policy.

Startlingly little of this overall picture is new, of course. Mr. Woodward’s portrait of Mr. Bush as a prisoner of his own certitude owes a serious debt to a 2004 article in The New York Times Magazine by the veteran reporter Ron Suskind, just as his portrait of the Pentagon’s incompetent management of the war and occupation owes a serious debt to “Fiasco,” the Washington Post reporter Thomas E. Ricks’s devastating account of the war, published this summer. Other disclosures recapitulate information contained in books and articles by other journalists and former administration insiders.

But if much of “State of Denial” simply ratifies the larger outline of the Bush administration’s bungled handling of the war as laid out by other reporters, Mr. Woodward does flesh out that narrative with new illustrations and some telling details that enrich the reader’s understanding of the inner workings of this administration at this critical moment.

He reports, for instance, that the Vietnam-era Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger “had a powerful, largely invisible influence on the foreign policy of the Bush administration,” urging President Bush and Vice President Cheney to stick it out. According to Mr. Woodward, Mr. Kissinger gave the former Bush adviser and speechwriter Michael Gerson his so-called 1969 salted peanut memo, which warned President Richard M. Nixon that “withdrawal of U.S. troops will become like salted peanuts to the American public; the more U.S. troops come home, the more will be demanded.”

As with Mr. Woodward’s earlier books, many of his interviews were conducted on background, though, from the point of view of particular passages, it’s often easy for the reader to figure out just who his sources were. In some cases he recreates conversations seemingly based on interviews with only one of the participants. The former Saudi Arabian ambassador Prince Bandar bin Sultan, Mr. Card, Mr. Tenet, Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage and Brent Scowcroft, the former national security adviser (to Bush senior), appear to be among the author’s primary sources.

Whereas Mr. Woodward has tended in the past to stand apart from his narrative, rarely pausing to analyze or assess the copious material he has gathered, he is more of an active agent in this volume — perhaps in a kind of belated mea culpa for his earlier positive portrayals of the administration. In particular, he inserts himself into interviews with Mr. Rumsfeld — clearly annoyed, even appalled, by the Pentagon chief’s cavalier language and reluctance to assume responsibility for his department’s failures.

Mr. Woodward reports that when he told Mr. Rumsfeld that the number of insurgent attacks was going up, the defense secretary replied that they’re now “categorizing more things as attacks.” Mr. Woodward quotes Mr. Rumsfeld as saying, “A random round can be an attack and all the way up to killing 50 people someplace. So you’ve got a whole fruit bowl of different things — a banana and an apple and an orange.”

Mr. Woodward adds: “I was speechless. Even with the loosest and most careless use of language and analogy, I did not understand how the secretary of defense would compare insurgent attacks to a ‘fruit bowl,’ a metaphor that stripped them of all urgency and emotion. The official categories in the classified reports that Rumsfeld regularly received were the lethal I.E.D.’s, standoff attacks with mortars and close engagements such as ambushes.”

Earlier in the volume, in a section describing the former Iraq administrator Jay Garner’s reluctance to tell the president about the mistakes he saw the Pentagon making in Iraq, Mr. Woodward writes: “It was only one example of a visitor to the Oval Office not telling the president the whole story or the truth. Likewise, in these moments where Bush had someone from the field there in the chair beside him, he did not press, did not try to open the door himself and ask what the visitor had seen and thought. The whole atmosphere too often resembled a royal court, with Cheney and Rice in attendance, some upbeat stories, exaggerated good news and a good time had by all.” Were the war in Iraq not a real war that has resulted in more than 2,700 American military casualties and more than 56,000 Iraqi civilian deaths, the picture of the Bush administration that emerges from this book might resemble a farce. It’s like something out of “The Daily Show” or a “Saturday Night Live” sketch, with Freudian Bush family dramas and high-school-like rivalries between cabinet members who refuse to look at one another at meetings being played out on the world stage.

There’s the president, who once said, “I don’t have the foggiest idea about what I think about international, foreign policy,” deciding that he’s going to remake the Middle East and alter the course of American foreign policy. There’s his father, former President George Herbert Walker Bush (who went to war against the same country a decade ago), worrying about the wisdom of another war but reluctant to offer his opinions to his son because he believes in the principle of “let him be himself.” There’s the president’s national security adviser whining to him that the defense secretary won’t return her phone calls. And there’s the president and Karl Rove, his chief political adviser, trading fart jokes.

Mr. Woodward suggests that Mr. Rumsfeld decided to make the Iraq war plan “his personal project” after seeing a rival agency, the C.I.A., step up to run operations in Afghanistan (when it became clear that the Pentagon was unprepared for a quick invasion of that country, right after 9/11). And he suggests that President Bush chose Mr. Rumsfeld as his defense secretary, in part, because he knew his father mistrusted Mr. Rumsfeld, and the younger Bush wanted to prove his father wrong.

Many of the people in this book seem not only dismayed but also flummoxed by some of President Bush’s decisions. Mr. Woodward quotes Laura Bush as telling Andrew Card that she doesn’t understand why her husband isn’t upset about Mr. Rumsfeld and the uproar over his handling of the war . And he quotes Mr. Armitage as telling former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell that he’s baffled by President Bush’s reluctance to make adjustments in his conduct of the war.

“Has he thought this through?” Mr. Armitage asks. “What the president says in effect is, We’ve got to press on in honor of the memory of those who have fallen. Another way to say that is we’ve got to have more men fall to honor the memories of those who have already fallen.”

Chris Floyd : War in Heaven: Woodward's Book and the Establishment Insurgency

War in Heaven: Woodward's Book and the Establishment Insurgency

by Chris Floyd | September 30, 2006

Bob Woodward has long been the voice of the American Establishment – or of certain quadrants of it, at any rate. When Richard Nixon's criminal depredations and mental instability had gone too far and it was decided to rein him in, former military intelligence officer Woodward was there as a safe pair of hands to receive the damning revelations of "Deep Throat" and help bring down the Nixon presidency. When the Establishment decided it was best to throw in with the Bush Faction's aggressive militarism after 9/11 – lots of big money to be made out of war and fear, and those tax cuts were just too sweet to pass up -- Woodward was there again, with a series of stories and books which, as Michiko Kakutani notes in the New York Times, "depicted the president — in terms that the White House press office itself has purveyed — as a judicious, resolute leader, blessed with the 'vision thing' his father was accused of lacking and firmly in control of the ship of state."

And now, when it is clear that George W. Bush is – to put it plainly – a self-deluding addlepate in the late Nixon mode (without any of Nixon's considerable intelligence, of course), and that the orgy of war profiteering and corporate welfare he has thrown for the elite has reached a level of such murderous frenzy that it threatens to kill the whole golden goose of American power – or at least seriously damage the bottom line for years to come – the Establishment has turned to Woodward once again. And the old trouper has delivered.

His new book, State of Denial, is a stinging attack on the Bush-Cheney Faction, although, as Kakutani astutely notes, there's nothing really new in its depiction of the moral nullity, rank stupidity and sheer incompetence of the Faction -- beyond the usual telling anecdotes and killer quotes that Woodward garners, often second or third-hand, from his sources. But it is those sources which clue us in to what's going on. Again, Kakutani: "The former Saudi Arabian ambassador Prince Bandar bin Sultan, Mr. Card, Mr. Tenet, Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage, Brent Scowcroft, the former national security adviser (to Bush senior), appear to be among the author’s primary sources." This is heavy Establishment artillery, and the presence of "Bandar Bush," the Saudi royal, and Scowcroft, the Bush Senior courtier, among Woodward's main sources tells us that Daddy Bush has reverted back to the old-line, white-bread, "Eastern Establishment" in a move against the Sunbelt oil men, crank pseudo-Christians and Nixonian diehards like Cheney and Rumsfeld that Junior Bush has thrown in with.

(Speaking of Nixonian diehards, one of Woodward's few original revelations is the extent to which Henry Kissinger has been advising Bush and Cheney, even resurrecting old memos he wrote to Nixon about "staying the course" in Vietnam and not letting the American people get a taste of peace and sanity by allowing even a partial withdrawal of troops. Such a move would “will become like salted peanuts to the American public; the more U.S. troops come home, the more will be demanded," Kissinger told Nixon – and pressed the same memo on the poltroons now polluting the Oval Office. )

So parts of the American Establishment are at last making a move against the Bush Faction. Unlike the Nixon takedown, this could be too little, too late. For one thing, Nixon didn't have 9/11 to play with; nor did he have use of the Mighty Wurlitzer of the hard-right media juggernaut that serves Bush with Goebbelsian intensity and fidelity; nor did he have control of the Congress, with a party full of lockstep lickspittles and genuine moral and intellectual cretins willing to follow him over a cliff. In addition, Bush doesn't face constant riots in the streets against his foolishly and murderously prolonged pointless war; the American people are infinitely more docile, distracted and servile than they were in Nixon's day, as anyone who was alive then can vividly remember.

Nor did the Republicans in Nixon's time possess the extensive, high-tech vote-manipulation and vote-suppression systems that they have today, which have so far ensured that the Faction retains its overwhelming power – despite the overwhelming unpopularity of almost all of its core policies. In Nixon's day, Republican Establishment members had to worry about a backlash at the polls; this is still a danger for them, of course, but not nearly to the same extent. Today, it is possible – just – that an actual, massive landslide for the Democrats might result in a very narrow victory at the polls; it remains to be seen if the Bush Faction's vote-fixing machinery can plausibly handle anything beyond a fairly close losing vote for their side. But certainly nothing less than an historic landslide against the Republicans has a chance of bringing even a miniscule Democratic majority back into power.

So although Woodward's book clearly signals that the game's afoot, and another civil war among the American Establishment is gathering strength, the outcome is by no means assured. We've seen signs of this before, particularly before the Iraq invasion, when again it was Scowcroft leading the way – and every time, the Bush Faction has managed to fight off – or buy off – its Establishment opponents. (Think of Sumner Redstone's craven announcement, after "Rathergate," that he, an old-time liberal Democrat, would be voting for Bush in 2004 because that would be "better for the corporation.")

Nixon was a loner, a bagman who used his own sinister savvy to scale the greasy pole, yet remained forever outside the golden circle of the Establishment (as he never stopped complaining about); but Bush Junior is to the manner born, a true scion of the predatory elite that has served as America's aristocracy for generations. That fact alone will make it harder for the Establishment to bring Bush to heel than it was to flush the lowborn Nixon away. And that's why it will never come to impeachment or resignation; such things would reflect too badly on the elite itself, not least on Daddy Bush, one of its leading lights.

But some strong shots across the bow, some public humiliation, something to get Bush and Cheney to alter the disastrous course in Iraq – that's fair game, and that's what we're seeing today from some of the old-line Establishment factions. And as ever, Woodward is a key player, toting heavy lumber for the cause.

(Note: is not the destruction of constitutional liberties that concerns these factions and brings them out against Bush, of course. They could care less about that – in fact, it's yet another good argument to them for keeping the Bush Faction in power, albeit chastened somewhat on the military aggression front. Not that these elite players don't hold the same ideal of American domination of global affairs that drives the Bush Faction; they do, in spades. But they recognize that after a certain point you get more buck for less bang. As the Emperor Tiberius used to tell his satraps when he sent them out to govern the conquered lands: "I want my sheep shorn, not shaved.")

In the corrupted currents of our day, Woodward's book – and the factional struggle within the Establishment it represents – is to be welcomed. Anything that can mitigate some of the evil being done by the Bush Faction must been seen as a positive intervention. But only in the sense that having an ink pen jammed through your trachea when you are choking to death is a positive intervention. For make no mistake: what we are seeing is a "war in heaven," an intramural struggle between elites, a falling out among thieves, and, literally, a family quarrel in the imperial house. It has nothing to do with the welfare of the American people, or the restoration of democracy. The "consent of the governed" will play no part in how the affairs of the state are finally ordered by the exalted ones.

SMH : Bush is lying to you about Iraq, Americans told

Bush is lying to you about Iraq, Americans told

Michael Gawenda | Herald Correspondent in Washington | September 30, 2006

THE Bush Administration has lied about the level of violence in Iraq, especially against American troops, according to the investigative reporter Bob Woodward, who has spent the past two years researching and writing his new book State of Denial.

Woodward says that not only has the Administration lied about the level of violence, but it has buried intelligence reports that warn of the insurgency in Iraq getting worse in 2007.

The book, a detailed account of the war in Iraq, will hit the book stores in the next few weeks, and observers say it will not please the US President, George Bush - who agreed to be interviewed by Woodward - or his senior officials.

Woodward will be interviewed on the American program 60 Minutes tomorrow and The Washington Post will publish excerpts of the book at the weekend.

According to Woodward, there is an insurgent attack on coalition forces in Iraq every 15 minutes, which means close to 100 attacks a day. The Pentagon last month reported 800 attacks a month in Iraq, including attacks on Iraqi forces and Iraqi civilians - far below Woodward's figures.

On a clip for 60 Minutes, Woodward says both the White House and the Pentagon are not telling Americans the truth.

"The truth is that the assessment by intelligence experts is that next year, 2007, is going to get worse and, in public, you have the President and you have the Pentagon saying, 'Oh no, things are getting better"', he said.

"Now there's public and then there's private. But what did they do with the private? They stamp it 'secret'. No one is supposed to know. The insurgents know what they are doing. They know the level of violence and how effective they are. Who doesn't know? The American public."

The Woodward claim came just two days after a US intelligence report, parts of which were declassified by Mr Bush after leaks of key findings to the media, said that the war in Iraq had became a "cause celebre" for jihadists around the world.

White House and Pentagon officials denied Americans were being lied to about the level of violence in Iraq.

Woodward also claims Mr Bush and the Vice-President, Dick Cheney, often meet with a former secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, who has become an informal White House adviser.

"Now what's Kissinger's advice?" Woodward said. "On Iraq, he declared very simply, 'Victory is the only meaningful exit strategy.' This is so fascinating. Kissinger's fighting the Vietnam War again because, in his view, the problem in Vietnam was we lost our will."

Meanwhile, on a mid-term election campaign swing through Alabama, Mr Bush significantly increased his rhetoric, accusing Democrats of "lacking the stomach" to combat terrorism.

"Five years after 9/11, the worst attack on the American homeland in our history, Democrats offer nothing but criticism and obstruction and endless second-guessing," he said.

"The party of FDR and the party of Harry Truman has become the party of cut and run."

This was the first time Mr Bush has used the words "cut and run", though it has been used regularly by Mr Cheney and by senior congressional Republicans.

ABC [Australia] : White House denies understating Iraq violence

White House denies understating Iraq violence

September 30, 2006

The White House has denied wilfully understating violence in Iraq, one of a barrage of charges stemming from a new book that reportedly paints top US officials in disarray over the war.

At issue is State of Denial, the new tome by veteran journalist Bob Woodward, whose reporting on the Watergate scandal three decades ago helped force then-president Richard Nixon to resign.

According to the Washington Post, where Woodward is an assistant managing editor, the writer found that the Pentagon in May predicted in a secret intelligence estimate that violence in Iraq would increase through 2007.

And in a recent interview with CBS television, Woodward also said that US President George W Bush's administration was keeping secret that the frequency of attacks on US troops in Iraq has sharply increased.

"Nobody's tried to mislead anyone about it," countered Mr Bush's spokesman Tony Snow, who declined to spell out whether US forces are facing more or fewer attacks because "classified briefings remain classified".

"I can neither confirm nor deny" that US troops are attacked every 15 minutes, said the spokesman.

"Sometimes the attacks go up and sometimes they've gone down."

Mr Snow confirmed Woodward's claim that Mr Bush has been taking advice on the strategy for Iraq from Henry Kissinger, the controversial Vietnam war-era national security adviser turned secretary of state.

"The role is not an extraordinary one," the spokesman said after speaking to Dr Kissinger.

"The President has a lot of people in, and he listens to them, and Dr Kissinger was one of them."

"Dr Kissinger says he agrees with the overall thrust of American policy. He thinks we're doing the right things. He said he also may have times when he disagrees on details," Mr Snow said.
Internal feuding

On another front, Mr Snow denied that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld feuded to the point that he would not return her telephone calls.

"I talked with secretary Rice today and her quote was, 'This is ridiculous, and I told that to Woodward'," said Mr Snow, who added that Dr Rice and Mr Rumsfeld take part in a daily telephone call with the national security adviser.

He stopped well short of denying another bombshell reportedly in Woodward's book: that former White House chief of staff Andrew Card had twice pushed Mr Bush to fire Mr Rumsfeld.

Mr Snow said he had not yet spoken to Mr Card about the claim, but stressed: "It's typical, as a matter of fact, quite often in administrations at this point people are asked to submit their resignations".

"People serve at the pleasure of the President. If tomorrow the President decided that he didn't want Don Rumsfeld to serve as secretary of defence, Don Rumsfeld would no longer serve as secretary of defence," he said.
Rebuttal

Mr Bush on Friday accused critics who say the Iraq war has fuelled terrorist recruitment of buying into "the enemy's propaganda".

Democrats have seized on a US Government report that the conflict fuels global terrorist recruitment to contradict Mr Bush's longstanding claim that the March 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq has made the world safer.

"This argument buys into the enemy's propaganda that the terrorists attack us because we're provoking them," Mr Bush said.

"Iraq is not the reason the terrorists are at war against us.

"If that ever becomes the mind set of the policymakers in Washington, it means we'll go back to the old days of waiting to be attacked and then respond."

- AFP/Reuters

BBC : Bush 'concealing Iraq violence'

Bush 'concealing Iraq violence'

By Justin Webb | BBC News, Washington | September 29, 2006

Veteran US journalist Bob Woodward has claimed that the true extent of insurgent attacks in Iraq has been hidden by the administration.

He makes the claim in a book, State of Denial, due to be released on Monday.

Mr Woodward has had better access to policymakers in the Bush White House than any other writer.

In a preview interview he also revealed that former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger has become a frequent adviser to President Bush.

State of Denial is a follow up to earlier volumes on the Bush White House which have contained a vivid detail of who said what to whom but have been largely uncritical of the President.

Indeed, they have been recommended as essential reading by Bush supporters.

This book appears to be much more challenging, with Bob Woodward making at least one eye-catching and politically damaging claim that the true extent of the violence in Iraq is being hidden.

"Now, there's public and then there's private, but what do they do with the private - they stamp it secret. No-one's supposed to know," Mr Woodward said.

He added that the insurgents knew how effective they were - but the US public did not.

Old hand

In response the White House compared the book to candyfloss that looks substantial but melts on contact.

The White House spokesman pointed out that Iraq casualty reports are public knowledge.

Still, the book is likely to sell well and certainly has a wealth of detailed information which the White House is not entirely denying.

Mr Woodward says he was stunned to be told by the Vice-President Dick Cheney that the veteran former Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, -who served Presidents Nixon and Ford during the Vietnam war - was also serving President Bush.

"He's back. In fact Henry Kissinger is almost like a member of the family. If he is in town he can call up and if the President's free he will see him," Mr Woodward said.

He added that Mr Kissinger's message was that victory was the only meaningful exit strategy.

"So fascinating. Kissinger's fighting the Vietnam war again," Mr Woodward added.

The book which goes on sale here on Monday, is expected to be a bestseller.

SMH : The world offered unity. It was rejected

The world offered unity. It was rejected

Paul McGeough was there as the twin towers collapsed. Today he concludes his series on The War of Ideas, a 10-week assignment that has taken him to Afghanistan, Iran, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq, the Palestinian territories and back to where it all started, New York.

by Paul McGeough | September 11, 2006

Maybe this is still the early days. There could be worse to come. Looking across the emptiness of ground zero last week, two sickening feelings assailed me. Might there be another strike? If there was, would the response be any different?

I was in the streets of lower Manhattan as the twin towers came crashing down - an unbearable day. Then, on to Afghanistan as the Taliban were routed, and Osama bin Laden got away. Later, to Baghdad, to watch American troops stage-manage the toppling of a statue of Saddam Hussein: a spontaneous cry for democracy, we were told, that now struggles against the savagery of civil war.

It sounds trite, but it's true. Good and evil did clash here on this day five years ago. By its very nature, evil writes itself out of the equation; but what about goodness and its defenders - how have they performed? Did they cope well? In their parlance, did they keep the faith?

The authors of the neo-conservative ideology that demanded the invasion of Iraq confidently predicted that the "virtue of American foreign policy" would be their trump card. All would lie down before the United States as it set out to reshape the world.

But in Baghdad, virtue seems an absent friend when I catch up with an acquaintance who is close enough to the Shiite death squads to keep me abreast of their ghoulish activities. He likes to sit back after we've eaten. He pats his paunch and declares: "Mr Paul, everything is beautiful."

I move on and it's interesting to hold in mind this idea of American virtue as I have tea in the streets of Tehran and catch up with old contacts in Gaza City.

Sure, the Iranians seem to understand that they are playing with fire. But, they insist, as a country surrounded by other nuclear powers they are within their rights. And the Palestinians - from their perspective, the crude tactics they adopt are not so different to those used against them by the Jews as they set about carving out the state of Israel back in the 1940s.

Go on to Beirut. Read Rami Khouri, who writes in The Daily Star more as a constructive globalist than as a blinkered local cheerleader. Hear him in the aftermath of the recent Israeli invasion: "The strength and assertiveness of the Islamist movements - whether through military confrontation like Hezbollah or through winning elections as in many other cases - is a sign that [Arab majorities] are not content to remain docile and dejected, in the state of subjugation and defeat that has defined them for decades."

Back in 2003, I was uneasy as the huge Saddam bronze bounced on the pavement in Baghdad's Firdos Square - and certainly not because it was the end of the man and of his ghastly regime. But we had already been through more than a year of the Washington enterprise in Afghanistan - which had been marked by an obsession with pursuing Osama bin Laden that was so single-minded that there was little or no thought for the interests or rights of the Afghan people. There still isn't.

My unease in Firdos Square was because, once again, this was a US-scripted show and the rest of the world - not to mention rank-and-file Iraqis - was not getting a look in.

Layers of often petty international tension and niggardliness were blown away with the twin towers. It never amounted to a global rallying around the "virtue of American foreign policy", but at the time a frightened world wanted to help a stricken power and it offered something the US refused to accept: unity. Instead, Washington thrust back with something the globe could not take: a self-assigned right for pre-emptive strikes against any or all; and a new level of unilateral decision-making.

This came to be called the Bush Doctrine and it is based on a huge contradiction - the US is strong enough to organise the world as it sees fit, but weak enough for the likes of al-Qaeda to pop through the back door.

They dressed it up in technical terms that gave it a veneer of diplomatic respectability. In the context of US attacks on Afghanistan after the Taliban regime refused to hand over bin Laden, objections were not voiced publicly. But as Washington segued from Kabul to Baghdad, some US voters were able to see the doctrine for the frat-house battle cry that it was - an opinion poll early in 2003 found that 59 per cent feared that taking the war to Iraq would create the risk of more terrorism against the US.

The American interest in Afghanistan never really went beyond the pursuit of bin Laden. Hamid Karzai, the man they engineered into the national presidency - to be endorsed later by a democratic vote - is still mocked as the mayor of Kabul.A hydra-headed monster - Taliban insurgents, corruption and drugs - has the country by the throat and the Americans want to sign off. But instead of handing power to a civilian authority, they have just given control of the explosive south to NATO forces, who in turn have given themselves six months to prove to sceptical and fearful locals that they can best resurgent Taliban forces. And despite all Washington's tut-tutting, Afghanistan this year is expected to produce more than 90 per cent of the world's opium - a stunning achievement in lawlessness, given that thousands of hectares of poppy crops had to mature right under American noses before they could be harvested.

Iraq is worse. A country that sits on more than 20 per cent of the world's oil reserves is exporting just a trickle of the black gold because insurgency and sectarian violence make exports virtually impossible.

Remember how the former US deputy defence secretary Paul Wolfowitz predicted that the invasion would cost the US almost nothing, because Iraqi oil would pay for reconstruction? And how he believed that by the summer of 2004, US troop numbers in Iraq would be down to 30,000?

They are still at 130,000-plus and American flanks are exposed as thousands of soldiers are being pulled from outlying areas of Iraq in the latest in a series of US efforts to liberate Baghdad by quelling the sectarian mayhem now overlaying the insurgency chaos that the Americans previously failed to clean up.

One of the worst failings of the doctrine is that little thought was given to how to back out of any messes it might create. It means that today the biggest obstacle to retooling the US response to September 11 is that virtually anything other than more of the same will be seen - rightly and dangerously - as US weakness and a retreat.

But it is more complex. Iraq and Afghanistan are just two of what the US scholar Anthony Cordesman sets out as "America's Six Long Wars": the actual wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; the Palestinian and Lebanese struggles with Israel; the crisis with Iran; and, lastly, the war on terrorism.

Writing that each of these conflicts promises a decade or more of religious, ideological, political and perceptual struggles, he warns in one of his regular email appraisals of the war on terrorism: "The irony is that there was never a time when the US needed bipartisan realism and allies more than today. The reality, however, is growing and largely opportunistic partisanship, uncertain realism at best, and an ongoing compulsion [by the US] to transform or to pressure allies rather than to treat them as partners."

"The US can lose quickly in some of these cases, but it can't win quickly in any; it can't act unilaterally - in every case, success depends on international and regional partners."

And notwithstanding a combination - in imprecise portions - of good luck and good management, the Bush Doctrine has not made the world any safer and whether what the Americans call "the homeland", is any safer is a point of hot debate.

One of the most widely quoted fifth-anniversary scorecards for the war on terrorism is that by Michael Scheuer, a 22-year CIA veteran who headed the agency's bin Laden unit.

Is the US safer or more vulnerable to terrorism? More vulnerable, he says. "Billions have been spent to stop the dumb-head who tries to come into the country ... [But] we're not safer because we're still operating on the assumption that we're hated because of our freedoms, when in fact we're hated because of our actions in the Islamic world. From the standpoint of democracy, Saudi Arabia looks much worse than Iran. We [the US] now use the term 'Islamofascism' - but we're supporting it in Saudi Arabia, with Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, and even Jordan is a police state."

Why hasn't there been another attack on the US? "It's not just a lack of capacity; they are not ready to do it ... They could shoot up a mail truck [but] the next attack has to be bigger than 9/11."

Has the war in Iraq helped or hindered? "It broke the back of our counter-terrorism program. Iraq was the perfect execution of a war that demanded jihad to oppose it - you had an infidel power invading and occupying a Muslim country and it was perceived to be unprovoked ..."

Afghanistan? "The idea that we can control Afghanistan with 20,000 soldiers is far-fetched - the Soviets couldn't do it with 150,000 soldiers and utter brutality". Lebanon? "It validates bin Laden ... it shows that the Americans will let Israel do whatever it wants."

Wolfowitz and the Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, told parents of raw Americans their soldier sons and daughters would be welcomed by "liberated" Iraqis with candy and flowers - but thousands have come home in flag-draped coffins and tens of thousands have been wounded.

Worse, the democratic fundamentals that Washington insists must be exported to these states have been prostituted in spectacular form - not only was the case for war against Iraq a fabrication, but Americans are being told their civil liberties and the human rights of others must be curbed for the greater good. Washington is aping the US general who told reporters in Vietnam: "We had to bomb the village to save it."

The Administration now runs a campaign of fear, likening any who dare to criticise its policies to the appeasers of Hitler and warning Americans that it may be necessary to confront "the enemy" in the aisles of their supermarkets.

They have cheekily coined the term "Defeatocrats", but their audacity is breathtaking. Rumsfeld leads the charge with cries of appeasement - but just as Chamberlain was photographed shaking the hand of Hitler at Munich, it was Rumsfeld who was snapped shaking the blood-soaked hand of Saddam as the US curried favour with Baghdad during the Iraq-Iran war.

And on Friday, after five years of White House fact manipulation and spin-doctoring, a 364-page tome by the Senate intelligence committee lobbed in Washington: Saddam only ever saw bin Laden in a bad light and had no truck with Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, it says without qualification.

In a swipe at Rumsfeld, the report quotes the CIA on the search for Saddam's illegal weapons: "There comes a point when the absence of evidence does indeed become the absence of evidence." It was a play on Rumsfeld's haranguing of United Nations weapons investigators in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq, when the Defence Secretary told reporters: "The absence of evidence [of WMD] is not evidence of absence."

But just who is the enemy of the US becomes more complicated by the day, especially as Americans try to wrap their heads around the emergence of Tehran as a regional power in the Muslim Middle East, at a time when the US-led invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq have reignited the Sunni-Shiite schism that is at the heart of Islam.

Bush and Rumsfeld now hector a non-specific entity they call the "Islamofascists". But who are they - the Shiite-controlled Government of Iraq, which, nominally at least, is a US ally but also increasingly an ally of Iran and is dependent for political support on murderous militias? Or are they the mad mullahs of Tehran, who also are Shiite? Or are they the West-friendly Sunni House of Saud, which controls Saudi Arabia's huge oil wealth and has for decades funded the propagation of the virulent Wahabi strain of Islam that underpinned the Taliban in Afghanistan and al-Qaeda?

And what of Washington's other ally, Pakistan? Does the distribution of nuclear know-how and parts to rogue states or the provision of shelter to al-Qaeda fugitives make it Islamofascist?

As the Bush Doctrine was revealed to be a Hollywood-scripted gangland shoot-out, some Americans started asking what had happened to the US tradition of "foreign policy realism". Some of Washington's Arab friends are still asking.

A senior, pro-US official in the Middle East was derisive about what Washington seemingly thought was a generous $US230 million contribution towards rebuilding Lebanon - after it had let Israel destroy it. He told me: "In Iraq and in Lebanon, the US and Israel respectively have demonstrated failure and shortcomings in a region in which both were believed to know all and to be invincible.

"[But] Iraq is not being rebuilt; Palestine is being destroyed and it is Hassan Nasrallah who is rebuilding Lebanon. The US has done nothing to win the hearts and minds of a population that has turned on them. $US230 million? It's nothing compared with the cost of the weapons they gave Israel to destroy Lebanon."

Tonight, Bush will address the nation from the Oval Office. It is one of a series of speeches by himself, the Vice-President, Dick Cheney, and Rumsfeld in which they are attempting to redirect the national discourses. It will be a powerful evocation of the night five years back when the President first laid out the Bush Doctrine.

But much has changed since then - in the past year several such spin blitzkriegs have failed to move public opinion in his favour and these days some of his Republican colleagues who are candidates for the November mid-term elections refuse to be seen with him in public.

This President's tone and word-choice often jar with what is required, giving rise to a sense that he is no more than a cardboard cut-out. New information is a bother - the former secretary of state, Colin Powell, said of Bush: "He knows kind of what he wants to do and what he wants to hear is how to get it done."

But the risk for Bush now is that he has swerved his rhetorical pick-up into a cul-de-sac. Robbed of successive claimed justifications for invading Iraq, he now has to fall back on the war on terrorism - but his only positive poll rating is the war on terrorism and he is putting that at risk because as more and more US voters see Iraq going down the gurgler, it may not be long before they see the war on terrorism going after it.

Bush briefly came clean a few weeks ago - when a reporter asked what Iraq had to do with September 11, his mouth opened and the word "nothing" fell out - but he was back on cue last week, seemingly telling the truth to the CBS anchor Katie Couric: "One of the hardest parts of my job is to connect Iraq to the war on terror."

These days, neocon-knockers are a dime a dozen. But just as the counter-terrorism expert Richard Clarke was the only White House official to apologise for the multiple institutional failures revealed by September 11, Francis Fukuyama is one of the few in the now discredited neoconservative movement who has seriously addressed what went wrong.

At the end of the Cold War the zealots in the movement claimed nations-in-need-of-change would comply with a US agenda because of the "unusually high degree of morality" that infused American foreign policy.

After the Iraq cold shower,earlier this year he wrote: "The Bush Administration, and its neoconservative supporters, did not simply under-estimate the difficulty of bringing about congenial political outcomes in places like Iraq; they also misunderstood the way the world would react to the use of American power ... America would be the first country to object if Russia, China, India or France declared a similar right of unilateral action."

Fukuyama urged that the so-called global war on terrorism be demilitarised; that the US pursue its objectives through effective international institutions, rather than boggy "coalitions of the willing" - like that for which Australia signed up to invade Iraq.

But most importantly, he urges a rethink on the role of promoting democracy in US foreign policy. Revealing the inner Fukuyama as an old-guard Kissinger realist, he writes: "... promoting democracy and modernisation in the Middle East is not a solution to the problem of jihadist terrorism". He lists nine countries in which the US has had a hand in the democracy process, but then declares: "The overarching lesson ... is that the US does not get to decide when and where democracy comes about. By definition, outsiders can't 'impose' democracy on a country that doesn't want it; demand for democracy and reform must be domestic."

The question now is, if Washington thinks it timely or wise, how does it jump the policy rails with minimum embarrassment? The rhetoric of all the fifth anniversary speech-making still has all the bully-boy bombast. And the Bush Administration was rather gleeful when it found that it could subcontract the dirty work in Lebanon to the Israelis.

But there are signs of a return to the old foreign policy realism in its approach to the Iranian and North Korean crises - Washington is talking, it's listening and it's working with other governments. Bush sneered at Bill Clinton's shuttle diplomacy, but Condoleezza Rice is on the bus.

Iran is the big test. Washington is indicating that it wants to avoid confrontation. But how far can it go? Writing in Foreign Affairs, the Brookings Institution's Philip Gordon asks: "What if that requires direct engagement with the radical regime of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and an end to US efforts to promote regime change? That might be a bridge too far for this team."

Trying to second-guess US voters is tricky. But as they prepare for the mid-term elections for half of the Congress and the Senate in November, independent analysts are predicting that opposition to the Iraq war may well deliver control of the Congress back to the Democrats.

What an irony that would be. Team Bush used the horror of September 11 to promote its phoney, pre-planned war in Iraq which created the quagmire that is a rallying point for al-Qaeda and its imitators. And what Bush sees as a struggle between US freedom and oppression is actually what the Islamic scholar Vali Nasr describes in The Shia Revival as the age-old battle of the two halves of Islam, Shiite and Sunnis. "This," he says, "is the conflict that [liberating] Iraq has rekindled and this is the conflict that will reshape its future."

And what of the shape of America's future? In its fifth anniversary issue, the Carnegie Endowment's Foreign Policy invites the historian Niall Ferguson to canvass the diminishing longevity of global empires.

He concludes: "... the costs of running countries like Iraq and Afghanistan look too high to most Americans; the benefits of doing so seem at best nebulous; and no rival empire seems able or willing to do a better job.

"With its republican institutions battered but still intact, the US does not have the air of a new Rome ... but ... the calculus of power could swing back in its favour tomorrow."