public opinion

interesting statistics mentioned on the PBS Newshour political wrap last night:
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/political_wrap/jan-june03/sb_3-14.html

in 1939, after France and England had declared war against Germany:
-- 98% of the american public were opposed to US involvement
-- 79% opposed even if germany were to take over france and britain!

in 1991, only 44% of the american public were for US involvement in desert storm

currently, 65% of the american public support a war with UN approval

"DAVID BROOKS: From my point of view 65-30 for a war is an incredibly high percentage. We are all sort of used to it now, but it's historically very unusual."

one leg up

went to a very interesting party last night for sexually open minded people that was like a toned down scene from Eyes Wide Shut. a friend of mine's friend's friend's girlfriend (what a mouthful) works for the girl that runs these parties, and the locale (owned by my friend Cliff from my club scene days) was right around the corner from where i live in the LES. so it was hard to protest going over there for free last night for the entertainment.

my friends' friend told her that this was a pretty select scene, but i still didn't know what to expect. i didn't want to go to anything hard core with gross slimy people. when we arrived, however, the place was full (but not packed) with a respectable looking mix of uptown and downtown types.

in the front, there was a guy painting girl's breasts with glitter paint. a lot of girls were getting it done and walking around proudly showing them off. others walked around topless with electricians tape over their nipples. at the bar, there was a guy tying naked people up. but most people were relatively clothed.

i talked to one short cute chinese girl who was topless and tied up. she seemed very pleasant (despite being naked and tied up!), worked at a hedge fund, and seemed totally normal. her boyfriend though was a little strange, and was giving my friend dirty looks.

despite the fact that there were lots of people walking around without little or nothing on, the whole scene was surprisingly cordial. everyone was on their best behavior (probably so they wouldn't be barred from future events). people didn't stare at all. they just seemed to look, appreciate, and then go back to their conversations, not wanting to look like an ingenue.

towards the end of the party, that magic moment arrived when strange things began to happen. we looked over from where we were sitting and were a little shocked to see a girl going down on her boyfriend next to her. then another girl joined in. later as the crowd was thinning out, we saw two girls leaning over a banquette both getting humped from behind. we left shortly after that. too bad i couldn't take any pictures.

Hitomi Kuroki

[this is the woman who plays rinko in the very excellent film Lost Paradise...]

Poster poachers rip off titillating tax talent-o
By Ryann Connell / MDN Staff Writer
March 6, 2003
http://mdn.mainichi.co.jp/waiwai/face/0303/06hitomi.html

Japan is notorious for its fixation for schoolgirl cheesecake, but middle-aged actress Hitomi Kuroki is also showing that guys can long for the long in the tooth, according to Shukan Taishu (3/17).

Though long a top performer in Japan's entertainment world, Hitomi skyrocketed to superstardom five years ago in the movie "Shitsurakuen," when she played the part of a woman who carries out a suicide pact with her married lover.

And now the 42-year-old Hitomi is still as steamy, but has caused something of a taxing problem.

Hitomi is currently winning hearts playing a female flight attendant, incidentally another favorite among Japan's fetishists, in the high-rating TBS drama "Good Luck!"

"Hitomi is probably the perfect woman for middle-aged Japanese men. She attracted attention for her incredibly steamy bed scene in 'Shitsurakuen' and her acting now is just oozes sexuality," a reporter on the TV industry tells Shukan Taishu. "The program's high ratings are all because of her."

But that's not the only area where Hitomi is proving a hit.

Hitomi is this year's pinup girl of the National Taxation Agency and her face adorns posters urging people to file their returns during the current tax period. But as fast as posters featuring the middle-aged thespian's puss are being put up, they're being ripped off and secreted away by fans smitten by the mature madam's mug.

"We were certainly flooded with calls from people who wanted a copy of the Kuroki poster. But we had only budgeted for 320,000 posters to cover the entire country, so there were hardly any left when we'd finished with them," a desk jockey from the National Taxation Agency tells Shukan Taishu. "The posters are there to get everybody to file their tax returns, so all we can do is ask citizens not to take them away."

Though they'd never say as much, the tax agency appears delighted with the success Hitomi has brought to the project.

"To become the 'face' of the taxation agency, you need to be scandal-free and be reasonably well known. It also helps if you're paying large amounts of tax, too," a source close to a talent agency tells Shukan Taishu. "You often hear of posters featuring young girls clad in bikinis being stolen, but this is the first time I've heard of people pinching posters of an actress in her 40s. It's as though all the dirty old men are acting like teen fans."

Blonde Power: Its Siren Call

Blonde Power: Its Siren Call
By ALAN RIDING
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/08/arts/08BLON.html

LONDON, March 3 — Blondes. The very word sets off reactions: identification, hostility, envy, attraction, even jokes. All are relatively harmless compared with the impact of blondes through the ages. In the West alone, they have variously personified seduction, sanctity, innocence, immorality, intellectual simplicity and racial superiority.

What exactly is the strange power exercised by blondes?

Joanna Pitman, an English journalist, first asked herself the question 20 years ago when she was working for a medical aid charity in a remote part of Kenya, where the sun had bleached her hair yellow. Because of her hair color, she recalled, the Africans attributed to her powers of healing. Then, during her stint as a foreign correspondent in Tokyo, provincial Japanese were no less fascinated by her hair, staring at it and even wanting to touch it.

Years later, back in London, her hair again its natural light brown, the question stayed with her. When she found no satisfactory answer on the shelves of the London Library, she decided to write her own history of blondes, from Greek times through the Roman Empire, the Middle Ages, the Italian Renaissance, the Victorian era and into the 20th century. The book, titled "On Blondes" (Bloomsbury), proves once and for all: there is definitely more to blondes than meets the eye.

For Ms. Pitman, 39, a Cambridge University graduate who is now the photography critic of The Times of London, much of the work involved research into art, religion and politics. But first, as if to test her premise, she bleached her hair blond. Her surprised husband remarked that she looked like Andy Warhol but, more significantly, when she stepped out into London, she felt different. Above all, she was treated differently.

"I got wolfish looks from men and complicit smiles from blond women, who seemed to acknowledge my beaconlike hair as if I was now a member of an elite club," she writes, recalling that she was suddenly given preferential treatment at the market as well as at the London Library. Her new look also made her feel "younger and, strangely, more positive." And she muses: "After a while I wondered whether I could afford not to be blond."

She is hardly alone. While among white American and northern European women, only one in 20 blondes is naturally so, in the urban West, Ms. Pitman writes, "one in three white adult female heads is dyed a shade of blond, be it honey, platinum, ash, `dirty pillow slip' or any other color from our rich lexicon of blond shades." And they have role models aplenty.

Coinciding with the publication of "On Blondes," two photography shows in London are presenting famous blondes of the 20th century. "Blondes," which runs through April 26 at the Getty Images Gallery, introduces Jean Harlow as the first platinum blond goddess of the screen, and includes Marilyn Monroe, Jayne Mansfield, Kim Novak, Grace Kelly and Brigitte Bardot. "British Blondes," at the National Portrait Gallery through July 6, offers 20 British celebrities, among them the actresses Diana Dors and Julie Christie, as well as Margaret Thatcher and Diana, Princess of Wales.

"Mrs. Thatcher is a good example of the power blonde," said Ms. Pitman, who selected the photographs for "British Blondes." "She became more blond as she rose in the political ranks. By the end, her helmet of rigid blond hair symbolized her authority over this country. With Lady Diana, who spent a fortune dyeing her hair blond, it enabled her to appear as a victim, as a motherly person and as a sexy blond. She knew the effect on the media."

Certainly, whether created by nature, artists or beauty parlors, blondes through the ages have rarely been ignored.

Ms. Pitman starts her story in 360 B.C., when Praxiteles may have used his voluptuous mistress, Phryne, as his model for a statue of a blond Aphrodite, who came to represent all forms of love. The statue was endlessly reproduced, inspiring prostitutes to find ways to lighten their hair. The poet Menander decreed that "no chaste woman ought to make her hair yellow," but Homer preferred to imagine Aphrodite emerging from the sea wearing nothing but her blond tresses.

In Roman times, the role of Aphrodite was assumed by Venus, another erotic goddess with golden locks. Again, she inspired prostitutes, but the look also caught on as naturally blond Germans were taken to Rome as slaves by conquering armies. By the third century A.D., Christian preachers had concluded that the blond and naked Venus was evil, yet lightening the hair or wearing a blond wig remained a popular way of standing out among the dark-haired Romans.

Ms. Pitman then jumps more than a millennium to the Middle Ages, when blondes, at least those with dyed hair or wigs, were still considered hussies. And by now, she notes, Venus has transmogrified into Eve, duly portrayed as a beautiful — and blond — temptress. "In her wake trailed Mary Magdalene, one of her most promiscuous descendants," Ms. Pitman writes, pointing to Masaccio's 1426 "Crucifixion," which shows Magdalene at the foot of the cross, her long blond hair tumbling over a vivid red cloak.

Simultaneously, however, a battle over the symbolism of blondness was taking place in other parts of Europe where the Virgin Mary was being portrayed as a blonde. These images were inspired by Saint Bridget, a 14th-century Swedish holy woman and presumably a blonde herself. Soon blondness was also representing purity. The 14th-century "Wilton Diptych" by an unknown artist shows a blond Virgin holding a blond child surrounded by 11 blond female angels.

During the Renaissance, the Virgin continued to be portrayed as blond by Raphael and others, but Venus also returned to fashion — and again as a blonde. "Venus," by Botticelli's workshop, shows her naked, with only her long blond hair providing some modesty. And in both Titian's "Danaë" and his "Venus of Urbino," his naked model seems to pulsate with passion. Of course, the very streets of Venice offered ample evidence of the power of blondes, not least Lucrezia di Borgia, whose "glowing hair" became the stuff of sonnets.

In 16th-century England, the russet-haired Queen Elizabeth chose blondness as a symbol of her virginity, and while it is not known whether she actually dyed her hair blond, this was how she was often portrayed, not only by poets like Spenser but also by painters. A coronation portrait painted around 1600, 42 years after she came to the throne, shows a young Elizabeth with long blond hair. The implied association between the Virgin Queen and the Virgin Mary was not accidental.

The battle between the blond angel and the blond devil escalated anew in Victorian England. "For Victorian men this powerful blond imagery was sinister, frightening, grasping — and irresistible," Ms. Pitman writes. "The quivering, glinting blond locks worked on them like alcohol or cocaine; stimulating, exciting and deadly. In their fevered imaginations, fired by the prudery of Victorian society, blond hair became the source of overt temptation, the most menacing sexual man trap yet."

In contrast, for writers like Dickens and Robert Browning, for Pre-Raphaelite painters like Rossetti and Millais, even for early photographers like Charles Dodgson, better known as Lewis Carroll, blondness represented innocence, above all in children. But artistic images of long blond hair were also often charged with hidden eroticism, with the danger of seduction never far away.

In the 20th century, however, much of the ambiguity disappeared with the emergence of the blond as a symbol of racial superiority. Long before Hitler seized power in Germany in 1933, anti-Semitism was accompanied by a new myth of Aryanism, encouraged by the new fad of eugenics. But Ms. Pitman also draws interesting parallels between the Nazis' adulation of the blond, the Soviet Union's promotion of the dynamic blond ideal and "the development of a radiantly sunlit blond American ideal, the WASP American dream."

In Hollywood, she notes, movies starring young blondes fed racial paranoia by playing up the perils of mixed-race sex. "But the film offering the most outrageously heavy-handed dose of racial paranoia was `King Kong,' " she writes, adding that it became one of Hitler's favorite movies.

In the United States, though, by the 1940's the vampish images of the likes of Jean Harlow and Mae West had been replaced by what Ms. Pitman calls "socially well-behaved blondes," like the wartime pin-up Betty Grable. Yet within a decade, prudery had again been swept aside by Marilyn Monroe. Soon there were "dumb blondes" like Jayne Mansfield, regal blondes like Grace Kelly and girl-next-door blondes like Debbie Reynolds. And young American girls had their own blondes in the shape of Barbie dolls. All that has changed since the 1960's is that it has become simpler to become a blonde.

Why this continuing fixation with blondness? Ms. Pitman has no single answer, but she suggests that, by choosing to become blond, women may feel younger, whiter and sexier. And if this idea was long promoted by poets and painters, it is now constantly drummed into the public by television and magazine advertising.

"The blonde that everyone wants" was the pitch of a long-running Mexican television spot. On the screen was a beautiful blonde; her job was to sell "blond" beer.

I'd give them all

"How like the stillness..."
from Unicorn (1980)
by Whitin Badger

How like the stillness in my lonely room
Become my days since you are gone away,
The tireless clock turns round and yet the bloom
Lies permanent on flowers. The time of day
Is dusk no matter where the sun may be.
Some memory of your passing stirs the air,
Dust falls on velvet and mahogany,
And footsteps long since gone descend the stair.
All of the beauty that our world has known,
All knowledge, passion, and the worth of gold,
And spirits that from eye to eye have flown
The soul's errand -- I'd give them all to hold,
Just for an instant and without demands,
Your warm and loving hands within my hands.

Pinchas Zukerman, Studio Ghibli, and War

last night my friend linda took me to another performance at the philharmonic. i was especially excited as the program included pinchas zukerman playing the bruch violin concerto. it was the first time i had seen him in person, and he was in perfect form -- delicate and quite meticulous yet emotional and powerful at the same time. the orchestra in contrast, led by david zinman, was at times a little soft. but overall it was a quite excellent performance. the second half featured dvorak's seventh, and i was lost to my thoughts as the music flowed through me. afterwards, we had a late dinner at leshkos in the east village and tried to catch up. but with a pack of the loudest drunk birthday girls at a large table next to us, it became hard to hear ourselves think!

at home, i felt too lazy to do any work, so i watched the next of my Studio Ghibli movies (the 10th so far out of the 12 i have). this time, and in stark contrast to the others i have seen (like Spirited Away or Princess Mononoke), it was "Grave of the Fireflies", a heartbraking account of two children who become orphans and struggle to survive during WWII in japan. it reminded me of another poignant animated movie (When the Wind Blows) about an elder british couple who try to survive after a nuclear war.

it also made me think of what my dad's life must have been like during the war as they fled from the japanese in mainland china. (admittedly, as my grandfather was on chiang kai shek's staff and later li zong ren's (李宗仁), they had had a much easier time than most other people.) it made me think of those pictures of my grandmother as a teenager in front of tiantan in beijing, dreaming of a beautiful life, only to have it altogether changed by the war.

seeing the movie made me consciously realize again -- especially for civilians, and despite technological advances and political considerations that make this a very different localized "surgical" war -- what a horrible horrible thing is war. for most of us, growing up in the west under a pax americana, we have been too priviledged and spoiled to really know true hardship.

SADDAM'S SOLDIERS SURRENDER?

saw this on another blog -- "Terrified Iraqi soldiers have crossed the Kuwait border and tried to surrender to British forces - because they thought the war had already started. . . . The stunned Paras from 16 Air Assault Brigade were forced to tell the Iraqis they were not firing at them, and ordered them back to their home country telling them it was too early to surrender." would be kind of funny if it's true.

SADDAM'S SOLDIERS SURRENDER
Mar 9 2003
Mike Hamilton reports from Camp Coyote in Kuwait
http://www.sundaymirror.co.uk/news/news/page.cfm?objectid=12715943&method=full

TERRIFIED Iraqi soldiers have crossed the Kuwait border and tried to surrender to British forces - because they thought the war had already started.

The motley band of a dozen troops waved the white flag as British paratroopers tested their weapons during a routine exercise.

The stunned Paras from 16 Air Assault Brigade were forced to tell the Iraqis they were not firing at them, and ordered them back to their home country telling them it was too early to surrender.

The drama unfolded last Monday as the Para batallion tested mortars and artillery weapons to make sure they were working properly.

The Iraqis found a way across the fortified border, which is sealed off with barbed-wire fencing, watchtowers and huge trenches.

A British Army source in Kuwait contacted me to explain how the extraordinary surrender bid unfolded. The source said: "The British guys on the front-line could not believe what was happening. They were on pre-war exercises when all of a sudden these Iraqis turned up out of nowhere, with their hands in the air, saying they wanted to surrender.

"They had heard firing and thought it was the start of the war.

"The Paras are a tough, battle-hardened lot but were moved by the plight of the Iraqis. There was nothing they could do other than send them back.

"They were a motley bunch and you could barely describe them as soldiers - they were poorly equipped and didn't even have proper boots. Their physical condition was dreadful and they had obviously not had a square meal for ages. No one has ever known a group of so-called soldiers surrender before a shot has been fired in anger."

Last night the Ministry of Defence officially denied the incident had taken place, but the story was corroborated by an intelligence source.

Meanwhile Saddam Hussein has ordered thousands of troops back to Baghdad as he turns the city into a fortress.

It is believed that two rings of steel are being established around Baghdad. The outer one consists of regular Iraqi army soldiers and the inner one is made up of Republican Guard fighters - thought to be the only troops that will put up fierce resistance.

Collective Security

amabelle writes in her comments -- "they're cutting the budget for the san francisco unified school district as well. . . . makes me wonder why we're fighting a war for oil when we can't even afford to educate our own children."

i've been hearing quite a few comments like this from some people. and i ask myself, can we really afford to fight this war? not to be a "cassandra" here, or to continue flogging the issue, but i think the question is really -- can we afford *not* to fight this war?

i'd like to be an idealist and think that we can wait this out and everything will be ok. i'd also like to win the lottery. bankers and engineers (being realists) are trained to expect and prepare for the worst case. this is one scenario where the worst case better *never* happen.

this is *not* a war for oil (as evidenced by the lack of rich US oil barons from the 1991 war), it is a war for *collective security*.

some people (me included) believe that social programs (including essential ones) are only as good as the collective security that allows them to happen. e.g. [as an extreme,] i don't think there was a whole lot of academic "learning" going on in shanghai when the japanese overran the city.

although the *method* with which we are going to war may be questioned. nobody questions the *desire* that iraq disarm. and since saddam doesn't seem to be cooperating, and since it is impossible to find everything that someone who has had 12 years to hide has hidden (just as we can't seem to stop hidden drug production/proliferation that we've been fighting for years in our own free country), some believe that this is the *last resort* before he has nukes and before he is able to proliferate those or other mass destructive weapons, as well as an important *warning* of our resolve to all others that may have similar ideas (e.g. north korea & iran).

some countries (france & germany [& to a certain extent south korea]) seem to have taken collective security for granted. and for good reason, as the US has afforded them "free" collective security for the last 50 years. (one need only to count the bases, equipment, and US troops on foreign soil. who pays for that? yes, the US taxpayer.)

maybe france is right. maybe over the next few *years* we will be able to find *everything* that iraq has hidden and continuing to develop. but can we take that chance? especially since we have been at this game for a good 12 years already? and since it was only the threat and manifestation (three carrier groups and 200,000 troops) of US force that got the inspectors back in there in the first place?

its Chirac who says -- "It's not for you or me to say whether the inspections are effective, if Iraq is sufficiently cooperative..." if France, the US, or the UN cannot say whether or not inspections are effective, then isn't this a greater charade? why inspect at all?

saddam has *and will* play a continual game of hide and seek, hoping to delay international action until he has succeeded in producing weapons of mass destruction that he can use, proliferate, and with which he can blackmail the international community. nobody doubts that. so how long can we take the chance? days, months, more years until no one cares (like the last time the inspectors were withdrawn in 98)?

i'd like to be an idealist and think that we can wait this out and everything will be ok. i'd also like to win the lottery. bankers and engineers (being realists) are trained to expect and prepare for the worst case. this is one scenario where the worst case better *never* happen.

this is *not* a war for oil (as evidenced by the lack of rich US oil barons from the 91 war), it is a war for *collective security*.

The Right Reasons

The Right War for the Right Reasons
By JOHN MCCAIN
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/12/opinion/12MCCA.html

WASHINGTON — American and British armed forces will likely soon begin to disarm Iraq by destroying the regime of Saddam Hussein. We do not know whether they will have the explicit authorization of veto-wielding members of the United Nations Security Council. But either way, the men and women ordered to undertake this mission can take pride in the justice of their cause.

Critics argue that the military destruction of Saddam Hussein's regime would be, in a word, unjust. This opposition has coalesced around a set of principles of "just war" — principles that they feel would be violated if the United States used force against Iraq.

The main contention is that we have not exhausted all nonviolent means to encourage Iraq's disarmament. They have a point, if to not exhaust means that America will not tolerate the failure of nonviolent means indefinitely. After 12 years of economic sanctions, two different arms-inspection forces, several Security Council resolutions and, now, with more than 200,000 American and British troops at his doorstep, Saddam Hussein still refuses to give up his weapons of mass destruction. Only an obdurate refusal to face unpleasant facts — in this case, that a tyrant who survives only by the constant use of violence is not going to be coerced into good behavior by nonviolent means — could allow one to believe that we have rushed to war.

These critics also object because our weapons do not discriminate between combatants and noncombatants. Did the much less discriminating bombs dropped on Berlin and Tokyo in World War II make that conflict unjust? Despite advances in our weaponry intended to minimize the loss of innocent life, some civilian casualties are inevitable. But far fewer will perish than in past wars. Far fewer will perish than are killed every year by an Iraqi regime that keeps power through the constant use of lethal violence. Far fewer will perish than might otherwise because American combatants will accept greater risk to their own lives to prevent civilian deaths.

The critics also have it wrong when they say that the strategy by the United States for the opening hours of the conflict — likely to involve more than 3,000 precision-guided bombs and missiles in the first 48 hours — is intended to damage and demoralize the Iraqi people. It is intended to damage and demoralize the Iraqi military and to dissuade Iraqi leaders from using weapons of mass destruction against our forces or against neighboring countries, and from committing further atrocities against the Iraqi people.

The force our military uses will be less than proportional to the threat of injury we can expect to face should Saddam Hussein continue to build an arsenal of the world's most destructive weapons.

Many also mistake where our government's primary allegiance lies, and should lie. The American people, not the United Nations, is the only body that President Bush has sworn to represent. Clearly, the administration cares more about the credibility of the Security Council than do other council members who demand the complete disarmament of the Iraqi regime yet shrink from the measures needed to enforce that demand. But their lack of resolve does not free an American president from his responsibility to protect the security of this country. Both houses of Congress, by substantial margins, granted the president authority to use force to disarm Saddam Hussein. That is all the authority he requires.

Many critics suggest that disarming Iraq through regime change would not result in an improved peace. There are risks in this endeavor, to be sure. But no one can plausibly argue that ridding the world of Saddam Hussein will not significantly improve the stability of the region and the security of American interests and values. Saddam Hussein is a risk-taking aggressor who has attacked four countries, used chemical weapons against his own people, professed a desire to harm the United States and its allies and, even faced with the prospect of his regime's imminent destruction, has still refused to abide by the Security Council demands that he disarm.

Isn't it more likely that antipathy toward the United States in the Islamic world might diminish amid the demonstrations of jubilant Iraqis celebrating the end of a regime that has few equals in its ruthlessness? Wouldn't people subjected to brutal governments be encouraged to see the human rights of Muslims valiantly secured by Americans — rights that are assigned rather cheap value by the critics' definition of justice?

Our armed forces will fight for peace in Iraq — a peace built on more secure foundations than are found today in the Middle East. Even more important, they will fight for the two human conditions of even greater value than peace: liberty and justice. Some of them will perish in this just cause. May God bless them and may humanity honor their sacrifice.

John McCain, a Republican, is a senator from Arizona.

South Korea: The Yanks may go home

South Korea: The Yanks may go home
by Robyn Lim IHT
Wednesday, March 12, 2003
http://www.iht.com/articles/89454.html

NAGOYA, Japan South Koreans who have been demanding that the United States withdraw its forces from their country may soon have their wish fulfilled. But they may rue the consequences.
.
Some senior South Korean officials are pleading for the U.S. military to remain based in the country. However, their pleading comes too late. U.S. forces in South Korea are now hostages, not tripwires, to a possible North Korean attack.

If North Korea starts reprocessing plutonium at its nuclear facility at Yongbyon, a preemptive strike must be on the list of U.S. military options. That would almost certainly prompt Pyongyang to retaliate by attacking U.S. and possibly other targets in South Korea.
.
If America fails to halt North Korea's move to develop nuclear weapons, it will have to reconcile itself to living with all the dangers that would entail - including the risk that Pyongyang would sell such weapons to states or terrorist organizations hostile to America. Moreover, soon North Korea will possess missiles capable of striking the U.S. homeland.
.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has been talking about the need to "rebalance" American forces in South Korea. He wants U.S. forces stationed near the Demilitarized Zone dividing North and South Korea to be moved further south, shifted to other countries in the region, or brought home.
.
South Korea now looks to China as its protector. President Roh Moo Hyun says that he has Beijing's support in seeking a peaceful solution to the Korean crisis, by urging Washington to talk to North Korea.
.
That plays into the hands of the North Korean leader, Kim Jong Il. By ever more provocative behavior, Kim seeks to impel others, for fear of war, to urge Washington to negotiate on his terms. Such tactics are working.
.
Meanwhile, Roh remains bent on appeasement. When North Korean fighters intercepted an unarmed U.S. surveillance aircraft in international airspace this month, in an apparent attempt to force it to land so that the crew could be held hostage, Roh said that America should refrain from provocative behavior. That was probably the last straw for Rumsfeld.
.
North Korea's next move might be to launch a Nodong missile into international waters near Japan, possibly when America and its allies invade Iraq. Pyongyang's purpose would be to convince Tokyo to urge Washington to negotiate on North Korean terms. That way, the North hopes to secure a guarantee that it will not be attacked.
.
Until recently, Japan was reluctant to join the United States in developing missile defenses, mainly because China disapproved. Now, as fear of North Korean missiles grows in Japan, some Japanese complain that America is insufficiently attentive to Japanese fears about North Korea. The United States prefers to work with allies, but South Korea no longer qualifies. It forgot that America has options. Japan will have to decide where it stands, and soon.
.
The writer is professor of International Relations at Nanzan University in Nagoya, Japan.

The Asian Front

The Asian Front
By WILLIAM SAFIRE
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/10/opinion/10SAFI.html

France has promised to veto the U.S.-British-Spanish resolution to end Saddam Hussein's manipulation of the U.N. Two other veto-bearing members of the Security Council, Russia and China, are expected to join in protecting Iraq from being forced to disarm.

President Bush has made it clear he will call for the vote that will expose the council as unwilling to protect the world from blackmail by terrorist states with ultimate weapons.

This means that the U.N., as now constituted, may continue humanitarian activity but need no longer function as the umbrella under which strong nations restrain aggression.

It has failed dismally before. Because Russia had the veto to protect Serbia's dictator, the U.S. had to turn to NATO to act in the U.N.'s stead against aggression in Bosnia and Kosovo, interceding after tens of thousands of lives had been lost. A half-century before, only the temporary absence of the Soviet delegate enabled the U.S. to fly the U.N. flag in stopping North Korea's invasion of the South.

As the Security Council exhibits its irrelevance again, the U.S. and its many allies will step in to fill the void. These Allied Nations will assume the burden of replacing Saddam and removing his arsenal of terror.

But what of the threat of terror opening a second front in Asia? True to form, the U.N is frozen. Russia and China will do nothing to contain the nuclear threat from their neighbor, North Korea. France and Germany look away, urging the U.S. to buy off the extortionists unilaterally.

This is a further abdication of collective security. It may be that the U.S., even during the attention-consuming eviction of Saddam, will have to create another regional coalition of free nations to deal with the nuclear danger posed by North Korea.

The Communist regime in Pyongyang is revving up its reactors to produce plutonium and is ominously testing its medium-range missiles. With malice aforethought, it tried to force down our unarmed reconnaissance aircraft so as to take its crew hostage.

How to respond? With the U.N. paralyzed as usual, we see a complacent China, a mischievous Russia, an appeasing South Korea — as well as accommodationists in the U.S. — demanding that the U.S. submit to another round of blackmail.

A month ago, I characterized our 37,000 troops stationed near the border of North Korea as a "reverse deterrent." If we were forced to bomb the facilities producing nuclear weapons for sale to terrorists, one-third of these U.S. troops within range of 11,000 Communist artillery pieces would be the first casualties of a North Korean attack. With so many Americans as the North's human shields, Pyongyang's blackmailers are emboldened — the opposite of deterred.

South Korea's leaders have gained popularity by vilifying Americans stationed along the demilitarized zone and demanding the U.S. accede to the North's demands. Seoul's press and public have wanted to jail U.S. soldiers who get into traffic accidents.

Recently, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld expressed an interest in redeploying endangered Americans southward, or to other bases. At the same time, he ordered 20 long-range bombers to our base in Guam.

South Korea's new prime minister got the message. "The role of U.S. troops as a tripwire," the worried official told our ambassador, "must be maintained." Previously anti-American politicians are suddenly encouraging pro-American demonstrations.

Too late. America's strategic interest in this post-Security Council era is to let the strong South defend its territory while we make clear to weapons traders in the North that their illicit nuclear production is vulnerable to air attack from a nation soon to show its disarmament bona fides in Baghdad.

That readiness will bring about what diplomatists call "a fruitful, regional, multilateral negotiation." No war needed. No Security Council obfuscation necessary. Allies like Australia, Japan and the Philippines, neutrals like South Korea and Indonesia, and non-allies like China and Russia will find it in their national interest to enlist North Korea and the U.S. in talks to react to the starving and to starve the reactors.

Leagues of nations too ponderous to act need realignment into more agile, responsive coalitions. We can thank the Franco-German power grab for precipitating the diplomatic crisis that could usher in a post-Security Council era.

Grapes of Wrath

Grapes of Wrath
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/12/opinion/12FRIE.html

I have a confession to make. Right after 9/11, I was given a CD by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, which included its rendition of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic." I put it in my car's CD player and played that song over and over, often singing along as I drove. It wasn't only the patriotism it evoked that stirred me, but the sense of national unity. That song was what the choir sang at the close of the memorial service at the National Cathedral right after 9/11. Even though that was such a wrenching moment for our nation, I look back on it now with a certain longing and nostalgia. For it was such a moment of American solidarity, with people rallying to people and everyone rallying to the president.

And that is what makes me so sad about this moment. It appears we are on the verge of going to war in a way that will burst all the national solidarity and good will that followed 9/11, within our own country and the world.

This war is so unprecedented that it has always been a gut call — and my gut has told me four things. First, this is a war of choice. Saddam Hussein poses no direct threat to us today. But confronting him is a legitimate choice — much more legitimate than knee-jerk liberals and pacifists think. Removing Saddam — with his obsession to obtain weapons of mass destruction — ending his tyranny and helping to nurture a more progressive Iraq that could spur reform across the Arab-Muslim world are the best long-term responses to bin Ladenism. Some things are true even if George Bush believes them.

The second thing my gut says, though, is that building a decent peace in Iraq will be so much more difficult than the Bush hawks think. Iraq is the Arab Yugoslavia. It is a country, congenitally divided among Kurds, Shiites and Sunnis, that was forged by British power and has never been held together by anything other than an iron fist. Transforming Iraq into a state with an accountable, consensual and decent government would be the biggest, most audacious war of choice any U.S. president has ever made — because it doesn't just involve getting rid of Saddam, but also building an integrated Iraq for the first time.

Which explains my third gut feeling — that to succeed in such an undertaking, in a country with so many wounds and pent-up resentments, will require an unrushed process that is viewed as legitimate in Iraq, the region and the world. It cannot be done if we are looking over our shoulders every day, which is why U.N. approval and allied support are so important.

My main criticism of President Bush is that he has failed to acknowledge how unusual this war of choice is — for both Americans and the world — and therefore hasn't offered the bold policies that have to go with it. Instead, the president has hyped the threat and asserted that this is a war of no choice, then combined it all with his worst pre-9/11 business as usual: budget-busting tax cuts, indifference to global environmental concerns, a gas-guzzling energy policy, neglect of the Arab-Israeli peace process and bullying diplomacy.

And this brings me to my last gut feeling: despite all the noise, a majority of decent people in the world still hunger for a compromise that forces Saddam to comply, or be exposed, and does not weaken America.

So, Mr. President, before you shake the dice on a legitimate but audacious war, please, shake the dice just once on some courageous diplomacy. Pick up where Woodrow Wilson left off: fly to Paris, bring the leaders of France, Russia, China and Britain together, along with the chairman of the Arab League summit, and offer them any reasonable amount of time for more inspections — if they will agree on specific disarmament benchmarks Saddam has to meet and support an automatic U.N. authorization of force if he doesn't. If France still snubs you, the world will see that you are the one trying to preserve collective security, while France only wants to make mischief. That will be very important to the legitimacy of any war.

Mr. President, I never felt more traumatized as an American than in the days after 9/11. But despite the very real threats, I also never felt more optimistic — because of the national unity we had, and you had, to face those threats. If whatever is left of that post-9/11 solidarity is exploded by a divisive, unilateral war in Iraq, we will not only be sacrificing good feelings, but also the key to managing this complex, dangerous world. That is our ability to stand united and with others — our ability to sing, together, "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" and have the world at least hum along.

Persona Non Grata

I Vant to Be Alone
By MAUREEN DOWD
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/12/opinion/12DOWD.html

It will go down as a great mystery of history how Mr. Popularity at Yale metamorphosed into President Persona Non Grata of the world.

The genial cheerleader and stickball commissioner with the gregarious parents, the frat president who had little nicknames and jokes for everyone, fell in with a rough crowd.

Just when you thought it couldn't get more Strangelovian, it does. The Bush bullies, having driven off all the other kids in the international schoolyard, are now resorting to imaginary friends.

Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defense, spoke to the Veterans of Foreign Wars here yesterday and reassured the group that America would have "a formidable coalition" to attack Iraq. "The number of countries involved will be in the substantial double digits," he boasted. Unfortunately, he could not actually name one of the supposed allies. "Some of them would prefer not to be named now," he said coyly, "but they will be known with pride in due time."

Perhaps the hawks' fixation on being the messiahs of the Middle East has unhinged them. I could just picture Wolfy sauntering down the road to Baghdad with our new ally Harvey, his very own pooka, a six-foot-tall invisible rabbit that the U.S. wants to put on the U.N. Security Council.

Ari Fleischer upped the ante, conjuring up an entire international forum filled with imaginary allies.

He suggested that if the U.N. remained recalcitrant, we would replace it with "another international body" to disarm Saddam Hussein. It wasn't clear what he was talking about. What other international body? Salma Hayek? The World Bank? The Hollywood Foreign Press Association?

The not-so-splendid isolation of the White House got worse this afternoon when Donald Rumsfeld suggested the unthinkable at his Pentagon briefing: we might have to go to war without Britain.

Even though Tony Blair said he was working "night and day" to get us international support (and beating back a revolt in his own party), Mr. Rumsfeld dismissively remarked that it was "unclear" just what the British role would be in a war.

Asked whether the U.S. would go to war without "our closest ally," he replied, "That is an issue that the president will be addressing in the days ahead, one would assume."

The Brits covered up their fury with typical understatement, calling Rummy's comment "curious." But behind the scene, Downing Street went nuts and began ringing Pennsylvania Avenue, demanding an explanation. How could Rummy be so callous about "the special relationship" after Mr. Blair had stuck his neck out for President Bush and courageously put his career on the line, and after he had sent one-quarter of the British military to the Persian Gulf?

Even though Mr. Rumsfeld scrambled later to mollify the British, one BBC commentator drily said that perhaps he was trying to be sensitive, but "as we all know, Donald Rumsfeld doesn't do sensitive very well."

Now we've managed to alienate our last best friend. We are making the rest of the world recoil. But that may be part of the Bush hawks' master plan. Maybe they have really always wanted to go it alone.

Maybe it has been their strategy all along to sideline the U.N., deflate Colin Powell and cut the restraining cords of traditional coalitions. Their decision last summer to get rid of Saddam was driven by their desire to display raw, naked American power. This time, they don't want Colin Powell or pesky allies counseling restraint in Baghdad.

Rummy was unfazed by Turkey's decision not to let our troops in, and he seemed just as unruffled about the prospect of the Brits' falling out of the war effort. And in a well-timed display of American military might, the Air Force tested a huge new bomb called MOAB in Florida. Tremors traveled through the ground, and the scary dust cloud could be seen for miles.

"These guys at the Pentagon — Wolfowitz, Perle, Doug Feith — when they lie in bed at night, they imagine a new book written by one of them or about them called, `Present at the Recreation,' " an American diplomat said. "They want to banish the wimpy Europeanist traditional balance of power, and use the Iraq seedbed of democracy to impose America's will on the world."

The more America goes it alone, the more "robust," as the Pentagon likes to say, the win will be.

News analysis: Chirac's casual 'no'

News analysis: Chirac's casual 'no'
French leader plays down consequences
by John Vinocur/IHT International Herald Tribune
Wednesday, March 12, 2003
http://www.iht.com/articles/89421.html

PARIS On one hand, there was the French president telling his country, with a strong dose of diplomatic disingenuousness, that a French break with the United States would mean little to trans-Atlantic or French-American relations, and hardly deepen the European fractures that have traumatized its hopes for a unified future.
.
On the other, there was Jacques Chirac's calm, almost pleasurable explanation Monday night on national television of France's intent to use its United Nations veto against an American-led war on Saddam Hussein.
.
The reposed manner and Chiracquian bonhommie looked authentic. But the president's assertion that a French veto of an American Security Council resolution enabling the United States to strike the Iraqi dictator "is not an exceptional phenomenon," indeed that "it's in the nature of things," seemed at a vast distance from reality. And it magnified Chirac's attempt to avoid discussion of France's particular responsibility in a process that has brought grave risk to both the integrity of the UN and NATO.

"I know the Americans too well to imagine they could use such methods," Chirac said, brushing off a French journalist's question about whether there would be a price to pay for France's stance. And more: "I'm perhaps one of the people who know best how (Europe) functions" he claimed, and said, "it won't be divided when the crisis is over" - this in reply to another interviewer's observation that brutal new internal disputes over who holds power in the European Union had shaken it since the Iraq dispute began.
.
The two television news presenters facing Chirac spared him any direct questions about a possible implosion of the Security Council's role as a result of a French veto, or about recent French obstruction at NATO on supplying defensive material to Turkey against a vast majority of its membership, or what France's attitude would be if allied troops fighting Saddam were felled by Iraqi chemical or biological weapons.
.
But Chirac's effort at turning a Western institutional confrontation of proportions unknown since de Gaulle's decision to pull France out of NATO in the 1960s into a disagreement among friends went as far as insisting that after Saddam's defeat "France, very obviously, will have its place" as an invited participant in Iraq's reconstruction.
.
If this was wishful thinking, it showed no regard for the State Department's assertions that a veto was "unfriendly" and would have unspecified serious consequences. If it was an attempt to smooth away an international perception that France was embarked on a single-minded campaign to thwart the United States on the tactically favorable terrain of the Security Council, then it did not sway a commentator like Henry Kissinger, who told French television, just after Chirac spoke, that he could not understand how an ally had created agitation throughout the world against America at a "vital period" for the United States.
.
Simply, Chirac seemed to be telling the French the country could continue on its present policy line at odds with the United States at no cost.
.
Both in the interest of diplomacy and perhaps in the nearly extinct hope of a French change of heart before a vote on the resolution, President George W. Bush and Secretary of State Colin Powell have spoken - each once - of France's remaining a friend and ally.
.
Still, there were other responses from outside France, none minimizing, in Chirac's manner, the gravity of the circumstances. Tony Blair talked Tuesday about the dangerousness of a veto that would result in "dividing America from Europe." Friedbert Pflueger, the Christian Democrat foreign policy spokesman in the German Bundestag, said a veto would be part of a process splitting Europe apart and making it irrelevant. Chirac and Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, he said, "could already count three victims: NATO, the UN, and a common European foreign policy."
.
In France, where publicly objecting to a veto has become a near-subversive activity, there was quasi-general support for Chirac's willingness to confront America on what he insisted is an issue of principle rather than one of geopolitical calculation.
.
Perhaps curiously, alongside approval for the threat of a veto, there was a lot less willingness to go along with Chirac's don't-worry-be-happy description of the aftermath of France turning against the United States
.
This was a step, according to a French parliamentarian, that was likened on Feb. 26 by Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin to firing a bullet in the Americans' back. One of Chirac's interviewers made reference to the phrase on Monday night, but the president did not respond directly.
.
The notion was not exactly on message.
.
To the contrary, drive-time commuters listening to commentary Tuesday morning on RTL, the radio station with the country's biggest audience, were told that the Chirac's approach presented enormous risks, would change France's relations with its allies, and, concerning the Americans, had elements that went beyond crisis into the realm of psychodrama and a possible divorce.
.
In fact, Francois Bayrou, president of the UDF, a centrist party making up part of Chirac's National Assembly majority, scoffed at Chirac's idea that the European Union would emerge serenely and remorsefully from France and Germany's dispute with a majority of member countries and candidates on supporting an American strike on Iraq.
.
"I absolutely disagree," he said. "I think the EU is in deep crisis. And you're naturally in a more fragile situation afterwards than before you started."
.
Uffe Ellemann-Jensen, the former Danish foreign minister, chastised Chirac and Schroeder last week for failing to understand that the breakdown in the EU and NATO effectively reduced pressure on Saddam and raised the probability of war. He likened Chirac to King Lear, saying that the loss of its European primacy left France, "in the face of diminishing influence, alone with its impotent rage."
.
By contrast, the padded edges of Chirac's approach challenged credibility with less frankness and a more muffled type of excess.
.
What of the 200,000 U.S. soldiers already in place in the Gulf, Chirac asked rhetorically during his 40 television minutes Monday night.
.
"But they've already won!" the president said. "I told that to President Bush not very long ago. It's highly probable if the Americans and the British hadn't deployed these large forces, Iraq would not have produced this more active cooperation that the inspectors demanded and are now getting. So, in reality, you can say that in so far as their strategy for disarming Iraq goes, the Americans have already reached their objective. They've won."

Sandbags Already on Streets, Baghdad Is a City in Waiting

Sandbags Already on Streets, Baghdad Is a City in Waiting
By NEIL MacFARQUHAR
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/12/international/middleeast/12BAGH.html

BAGHDAD, Iraq, March 11 — As the likelihood of war ratchets steadily upward, the what-me-worry mood that prevailed here just weeks ago has given way to an anxious waiting. This has become a city taut with nervous energy.

At Baghdad University's college of art, a first-year student, Walid Mizhar, put down his charcoal pencils and water colors half an hour before his studio class was finished, ignoring the model and propping a newspaper up on his easel.

He was attempting to decipher whether the wrangling at the United Nations meant that war is about to crash down on Iraq.

"The news is neither black nor white, it's kind of gray," he said. "It would be black if there was going to be war and white if there was none, but it is just not clear."

Some of the nervousness stems from the landscape, with sandbagged positions springing up around government ministries and major intersections. Some comes from superstition — the women who read fortunes in coffee cup grounds have found in them the prophecy of a March 15 start to the war. Some of it is in the atmosphere, with minarets booming with sermons calling on Iraqis to die fighting the infidel. But mostly it is simple fear.

"Two weeks ago before this crisis heated up the students were doing much more creative things," said Nidal Mohammed, 42, the professor overseeing one three-hour drawing class. "Now they are all thinking about the war — how to prepare, how to get cooking oil, food, where they can hide."

Officially, the Iraqi government is counting on the opposition of France, Germany and Russia, buttressed by worldwide protests, to prevail over the Bush administration.

But even distant rumblings of war quickly drown out this rosy view. A few mornings ago pedestrians froze in their tracks on Baghdad sidewalks as warplanes scratched across the sky high overhead.

"We are afraid because we expect to be attacked at any moment," said Raghad Majid, an art student who said she was ready to ditch her oil painting of a male head because it seems stilted.

"You feel like someone is watching you continuously; you can't work freely," she said. "Students like me from outside Baghdad don't want to come to class anymore because we are afraid we won't be able to get back."

Friday prayer sermons exhort Iraqis to fight as a religious duty. "Anyone who has dust on his feet from the field of battle will never enter hell on judgment day," boomed Abu Bakr al-Sammerai, the prayer leader at Abdel Qadr al-Gaylani mosque in downtown Baghdad. "Mohammed said fight the infidels with everything you have."

The virulently anti-Christian tone of some sermons moved the leadership of the Chaldean Church, a branch of the Roman Catholic faith, to lodge an objection with the Ministry of Religious Affairs.

"You have some mullahs denouncing the Crusaders and the infidels from the minaret, sometimes meaning us as the Christians here," said Bishop Shlemon Warduni of the Chaldean Church.

The fact that President Bush stresses his Christian faith has given Muslim fundamentalists inside Iraq new ammunition to use against the Christian community here, one of the world's oldest. In recent decades it has shrunk to under a million, or less than 3 percent of Iraq's 24 million people.

"The fanatics in Iraq are using it as an excuse to act against the Christians," Bishop Warduni said. He said Christians are unsettled about the possibility of attacks against them, especially if any war results in the kind of violent anarchy that southern Iraq experienced after the Persian Gulf war.

In fact many Iraqis fear renewed anarchy. Given that Mr. Hussein has been in power for more than three decades, his abrupt departure might create the kind of vacuum where violence thrives.

One gauge of that fear is the trade at gun shops. Most Iraqi households own at least one gun, so there has been no particular run on armaments. But some gun shop owners report as much as a 50 percent jump in ammunition sales.

"I came in to buy a hunting gun, but I'm also thinking about how to protect my house and the neighborhood streets," said Yasser Abu Bilal, looking at a 12-gauge pump-action shotgun at the Trigger gun shop in the upscale Mansour neighborhood.

If there is fear, there is also anger. Just weeks ago any American reporter wandering the streets would be told that the Bush administration may be despised but other Americans were most welcome. That sentiment is ebbing.

"We only hate the soldiers," said a customer at the Target gun shop, just off the square of the Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves fountain. "Nah, we hate them all," the owner, a tribal leader, growled.

Such attitudes are not limited to the tribes, whose leaders relish recounting stories of how their grandfathers described to them the flocks of vultures circling overhead when tribal gunmen helped take on the British Army, which invaded in 1916.

Educated Iraqis have grown prickly at the prospect of war, rarely willing to criticize their government lest it somehow help the cause of those who want to attack.

"You disarm us and then you come and kill us and you say you are coming to make things better, to make life happier," one Iraqi artist shouted scornfully.

Friction has also developed between Western antiwar activists and the Iraqi government over where to place human shields. The activists wanted to be positioned at hospitals or schools, but the Iraqi government instead placed them at industrial locations like the Doura oil refinery.

The government ordered five of the organizers to leave last week after protests erupted over the choice of sites.

"There are inappropriate sites like water facilities located too close to army bases, too close to legitimate strategic targets," said Gordon Sloan, an Australian architect and one of those ordered out of the country. "In general I think everyone should leave."

But dozens of shields remain, including a group of 40 who alternate between three trailers on the grounds of the Doura refinery and a four-bedroom bungalow in the family housing for refinery and other workers. Down the street sits the Great Victory Company, which helps complete the welding for some short-range Iraqi missiles.

Those shields who are staying say they are unfazed, the possible danger balanced by trying to protect so many families. "In the West sometimes you get the impression that the only person who lives in Iraq is Mr. Saddam Hussein," said Luis Fuste, a 26-year-old French shield.

The idea that the Iraqi leader might step down still gets trotted out by the Bush administration. But foreign diplomats and Iraqis alike believe Mr. Hussein will fight it out because that coincides with his image of himself as the descendant of a long line of glorious Arab leaders, including Saladin, who came from his hometown.

Little hints of that crop up in odd places. The Museum of the Triumphant Leaders has half a dozen rooms of gilded palm trees, jeweled swords and other bric-a-brac that visitors have bestowed on Mr. Hussein over the years.

At the entrance, the president's own musings on glory and immortality are carved into white marble with gilded letters in Arabic and English. They read, "The clock chimes away to keep a record of men and women, some leaving behind the mark of great and lofty souls, while others leave naught but the remains of worm-eaten bones."

Loves Microsoft, Hates America

Loves Microsoft, Hates America
By ADAM DAVIDSON
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/09/magazine/09ENCOUNTER.html

Fadi is a 23-year-old unemployed computer programmer who lives in his parents' apartment in a nice, middle-class neighborhood in Amman, Jordan. Down one street is the big Amman McDonald's, down another is Fadi's mosque, where he prays several times a day. Stocky, with a big, messy beard, Fadi speaks softly, hunched over, looking at the ground. When he makes an important point, he asks you to repeat it, and when you show you understand, he lifts his head, leans back with a great smile and says, ''Sah,'' ''correct.'' One day, he explained to me in careful detail why he wants to be a shaheed, a suicide bomber against the United States, quoting at length from the Koran. But when he's not talking about blowing himself up and killing American troops, Fadi talks about his other great dream. ''I want to be a programmer at Microsoft,'' he says. ''Not just a programmer. I want to be well known, famous.''

Fadi gives me a tour of his parents' apartment: it is long and narrow, with a private living room for the family and another, more ornate one, for guests. Fadi's bedroom is in the back, and it is small and bare. Everything Fadi has on display sits on a small desk: a copy of the Koran, in blue leather with ornate gold Arabic script on the cover, and a few boxes of audiotapes that he listens to every day.

''This is NLP,'' he explains. ''It's very good. Neuro-Linguistic Programming.'' NLP, which originated at the University of California, Santa Cruz, is a sort of modern ''The Power of Positive Thinking,'' and Fadi says it has helped him overcome the barriers to his dreams. ''Six months ago, I was much more negative,'' he says. ''I would get frustrated.'' For example, Fadi says he finds it frustrating that it is so difficult to get a visa to the United States, so he can't train for a job at Microsoft. But the tapes teach him to remain positive about reaching his dreams.

Fadi doesn't see anything strange about using American self-help tapes to get a job at an American company, while at the same time harboring hatred of the American government to the point of self-annihilation. Self-help, computer programming, the Koran and jihad are all aspects of the same thing, he says: a search for a way for a good Muslim to live in the modern world.

On the level of governments, Jordan is America's best friend in the Arab world: the most moderate, most pro-Western Arab state. But Fadi's Jordan is a different place, where just about every citizen has developed a deep loathing for the United States. I haven't seen any polls that determine how many Jordanians hate the United States; it seems very unlikely that the king's government would allow them to be taken. But the estimates never change.

''You can start thinking of a number above 95 percent,'' says Laith Shubeilat, a leading Jordanian Islamist.

''I think it's close to 100 percent,'' says Sari Nasir, a prominent secular sociologist at the University of Jordan. There have always been pockets of anger against the United States -- you could have found it in any of Jordan's poor Palestinian refugee camps any time in the last few decades -- but that anger has spread to everyone: the poor, the middle class, the upper class, Islamists, the secular, Christians, liberals.

Still, just like Fadi, almost everyone in Jordan sees his own future, his own happiness, tied up with America. American movies and TV shows and fast food have never been more popular. American computers are everywhere. It's difficult to find a professional who didn't study in the United States, and harder still to find an ambitious young person who isn't eager to do the same.

Fadi prays at his local mosque five times a day. But he is never satisfied with the imam's speeches. Occasionally, there are tame jabs at the United States, but Fadi says -- and Jordan's minister of state for political affairs and information, Mohammad Adwan, confirms -- that the government keeps a close watch on imams and won't allow them to say anything that could incite the population to violence.

Oddly, the place Fadi feels the most free to express his anti-American views is a pizza restaurant near his house that is modeled after one in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. It's small: only room for two round tables, the pizza oven and a counter. It has red and white tiles like any American pizza place. It is run by two brothers, friends of Fadi's who both lived in the United States for a long time.

Y., the younger brother, is chubby and short. He was the first Arab barber in Brooklyn, he says, pulling out a contact sheet of photos of his customers, all with variants of a stylized buzz cut. ''Bay Ridge is beautiful,'' he says.

The older brother, O., says his pizzas are as good as any in New York.

''It's very good,'' Fadi says and orders the special: a large pie with mushrooms, olives, sausage and tomatoes. Fadi comes here about once a week and sits with Y. and O. to discuss jihad and America.

O., who is tall and lean, was an electrician in the United States and wasn't impressed by the Americans he worked with. He worked hard, he says, but his co-workers loafed around, knowing they would be paid more if the job took longer. He wants to commit jihad against America, but he says it's too difficult. ''The Mukhabarat are everywhere,'' he says, referring to the Jordanian secret police. He can't find a group to join. But, he says, the biggest barrier to jihad is himself. ''I am too much in love with this life,'' he says apologetically. ''I'm in love with my family and my business. I'm too weak. But I'm getting stronger.''

Y., the chubby brother, doesn't want to be a jihadi, he says. He won't sit at our table; he stands a few feet away, listening attentively and every now and then laughing, a bit derisively.

O. and Fadi say they talk a lot about which jihad would be best.

''We have a few jihads we can do: Palestine, Chechnya, Kashmir or Iraq,'' O says. ''Palestine is too difficult. You can't get across the border. Chechnya, they already have enough people. Kashmir is easiest.''

''Yes,'' Fadi says. ''You fly to Pakistan, and someone will help you to Kashmir.'' But the best jihad, they both agree, is Iraq, which means a jihad against the American troops they expect will soon invade Iraq.

''If I see an American soldier in Jordan on his way to Iraq, I'll kill him,'' O. says.

This begins a long argument between Fadi and O. Fadi says the Koran is strict on this: you can't kill anyone who came to your country expecting peace. So, an American soldier here now cannot be harmed. O. says this isn't true. ''If an American soldier comes in to my place, I will poison his pizza,'' O. says. ''I will kill him.''

''You can't do it,'' Fadi argues.

''I'd just give him his pizza,'' Y. says, laughing. ''Business is business.''

''If you feed an American soldier, I will fire you,'' O. tells him.

''You mustn't feed a soldier,'' Fadi says. ''You can't help them. But you also can't kill them.''

The biggest blow to Fadi's Microsoft dream came a few weeks ago. He was let go from his job as in-house programmer for a customer-service call center. Fadi's job search is not going well. Occasionally he lands an interview, but then he is told that the company isn't hiring.

Fadi's father, Rasem, is furious. ''His beard is the main problem,'' Rasem says, flicking his hands wildly in the air. ''That's why he can't find a good job. They're afraid he's a religious Muslim. They don't want problems. Fadi doesn't know anything about business. Fadi is very good, but he has to shave. He has to help his brothers.''

Rasem is sitting in his furniture store, a small, dirty, overpacked place, and he's crumpled into one of the couches he's hoping to sell. For the past year and a half, Fadi provided the family's main income. Now that his son is unemployed, Rasem is desperate, he says, living off a 3,000-dinar loan (roughly $4,000) from a bank. He points at a framed photocopy of Fadi's college diploma hanging on the wall. ''He has to work,'' he says to me. ''Tell him to shave his beard.''

Fadi has heard about a job at the University of Jordan, and he takes me along to check it out. It is a massive campus -- about 27,000 students, huge utilitarian concrete buildings. He says it will be a good place to work, because many people here wear beards and are religious.

After he drops off his resume at the administration building, Fadi and I sit on a bench at the center of campus and watch a constant parade of young men and women walking by or sitting on other benches. Fadi says this is where he sees some of the worst influences of American culture on young Jordanians. ''They want to look like Americans,'' he says. ''They want to go on dates,'' he says.

It's hard to see what Fadi is talking about. About 90 percent of the female students wear the hijab head scarf. About 1 in 10 of those also wear the khimar, a scarf that covers their faces as well. The hijab and khimar are not part of Jordanian traditions. Twenty-five years ago, few Jordanian women wore them, but recently more and more Jordanians -- and more young women than old -- have put on the scarf. In the last two years, as a form of protest against Western culture, student groups have called upon all Muslim women to cover their hair. But Fadi isn't impressed; the campus is still too American for him, especially the female students. ''You can tell which ones mean it,'' he says, ''and which ones are just doing it.''

He points to one woman in a hijab wearing blue jeans and those overly thick-soled shoes popular among American teenagers. ''She wouldn't dress like that if she was serious,'' he says.

America, Fadi says, is just too powerfully present in the lives of his generation of Arabs. America decides what young people will wear and what music they'll listen to. America decides whether there will be war or peace. It's so hard for a young man to feel proud of being an Arab, he says, when it is America that determines his chances for happiness and success.

Every now and then as we talk, a woman or a group of women walk by looking completely Western: no hijab, heavy makeup, a T-shirt, sometimes with several earrings or sexy boots.

''Do you look at the pretty girls here, or just ignore them?'' I ask.

''Of course I look,'' he says. ''I'm a human being.''

''Do you prefer the girls with hijabs or the Western-looking girls?''

''I prefer the hijab, of course.''

''You think the girls with hijabs are prettier?''

''Let's be realistic,'' he says, laughing. ''Maybe they're not prettier. Maybe I prefer the Western-looking girls. But I wish they would wear the hijab.''

Adam Davidson is the Middle East correspondent for the Minnesota Public Radio program ''Marketplace.''

Weary Sailors Are Long Way and Long Time From Home

Weary Sailors Are Long Way and Long Time From Home
By LYNETTE CLEMETSON
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/11/international/middleeast/11CARR.html

ABOARD U.S.S. ABRAHAM LINCOLN, in the Persian Gulf, March 10 — As the standoff over Iraq intensifies and worldwide protests against a United States-led strike to disarm Saddam Hussein grow, American sailors aboard one of the country's premier aircraft carriers, at sea for longer than any carrier since the Persian Gulf war, are struggling to maintain morale.

The Abraham Lincoln left its home port in Everett, Wash., in July for a six-month deployment to patrol the no-flight zone over Iraq. Now in its eighth month away from home — its 233rd day, many weary sailors note off the top of their heads — this 97,000-ton nuclear-powered carrier is weathering the longest deployment in more than a decade.

The ship's top officers estimate that by the time the Abraham Lincoln gets home, it will have logged one of the longest deployments since the Vietnam War.

With military action drawing ever closer, the officers have begun to worry about the stamina of the more than 5,200 sailors and aviators aboard. "As tensions escalate and de-escalate, it's tough for the crew to be at the peak of combat readiness," said Capt. Kendall L. Card, the ship's commander. "After so many days, you sense that they need to get their edge back."

In recent days, that feeling has been palpable in everything from short-tempered grumbles in the ship's narrow passageways, to a slight "crunch" — when two carrier planes touch one another during transit — Sunday night on the flight deck. "They barely touched paint," Captain Card said.

Still, he acknowledged, it was the first time that had happened in recent memory.

Since the January extension of deployment, there has been a 10 to 15 percent increase in emergency leaves from the ship, according to the captain.

Matthew Perry, 25, an enlisted network administrator from Memphis who was supposed to marry his high school sweetheart on Feb. 7, was one of several crew members forced to postpone a wedding. "Everybody is making sacrifices," he said.

Realizing the need to rejuvenate his resources, the ship's commander ordered the crew to scale back from their regular 12-to-15-hour days and take some downtime.

It was not a tough sell. Many crew members took advantage of the recreation day to sleep in today. Others spent extended time on e-mail. A group of fighter pilots watched a Seinfeld marathon and played backgammon.

As a light, cool rain fell in the afternoon haze, some wound-up crew members gathered on the far end of the 4.5-acre flight deck to drive golf balls into the gulf. On the opposite end of the deck, Robert Smith, an aviation specialist who helps clean, inspect and launch fighter jets, tossed a football with several of his work mates.

"Tensions are high, and it feels good to laugh and blow off some steam," the 21-year-old from Nacogdoches, Tex., said as his buddies tossed a $10 football between rows of F-14 and F-18 jets worth up to $50 million each.

"Besides, I think this is going to be one of our last times to chill out for a while," he said. "They don't tell us much, but I think things are going to kick off pretty soon."

During the brief respite, nearly losing the football over the side of the ship produced more anxious groans than occasionally pinging it off the wings of the fighter jets.

Captain Card, while encouraging the break, was sensitive to the thousands of ground troops deployed in the desert. "On a daily basis, there's a much more down-and-dirty job than ours," he said.

But relaxation is crucial, he insisted, to maximize performance in the coming days. A "steel beach picnic" — a barbecue and party on the flight deck — is planned for Tuesday.

The Abraham Lincoln could partly stand down, said Captain Card, 47, because there are two other American carriers in the region, the Kitty Hawk which arrived last month, and the Constellation, which arrived in December, originally to relieve the Abraham Lincoln.

The carrier had just finished a scheduled break for Christmas in Perth, Australia, and had gotten as far as Guam on its trip back home when, on New Year's Day, it was ordered to redeploy to the Persian Gulf.

The Nimitz, which left the United States on March 1, is technically the Abraham Lincoln's replacement. But with war now appearing increasingly likely, most doubt that the ship will be able to leave the combat zone.

So life has become a daily waiting game for war. Some sailors mark the time with daily hash marks on calendars. Others keep count by the number of pizza nights in the mess hall, a once weekly treat. Lt. Christopher Towery, a ship security manager from Idaho, and a group of friends decided to grow mustaches and keep them until they set foot on land.

But this week, accepting the fact that a homecoming is still probably weeks away, Lieutenant Towery relented and shaved.

Keeping the carrier in a holding pattern requires more than just sustaining morale. Lt. Cmdr. Kristen Fabry, who is responsible for the ship's food and supplies, budgeted tightly for six months. When the tour was suddenly extended, stopping back in Australia for supplies, she had to scramble to restock the ship for an indefinite period.

"We probably bought every Snickers bar in Australia," said Commander Fabry, a Naval Academy graduate and Harvard M.B.A. whose father was also a Navy supplier.

For all the fatigue and frustration, most crew members insist that the mission keeps them motivated. "At the end of the day, everyone knows we're here standing up for freedom," said Cmdr. Dale Horan, executive officer for one of the ship's squadrons of Super Hornets, a new F-18 fighter attack jet making its debut on the Abraham Lincoln.

"If the president says go in the next 7 to 10 days, we won't have any morale problems," Captain Card said while watching his crew members jog, laugh and relax from his seat in the ship's bridge. "People are here for a purpose, and that is peace through deterrence and executing the will of the president, and when the time comes, the morale will be sky high."

Still, all the diplomatic wrangling in Washington wears thin after so long.

"If we're going to do it, I want to get it done," said Michelle Lykins, 20, an enlisted sailor who cleans the officers' mess.

Texans See as Much to Lose as to Gain From War

Texans See as Much to Lose as to Gain From War
By PETER T. KILBORN
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/10/national/10TEXA.html

ANDREWS, Tex., March 8 — As a welcome to a town with the red, white and blue walls of Buddy's drive-in diner, the slapped-up, steel-skinned service shops of long-ago booms and the horizon of grasshopper-like pumping jacks silently sucking up West Texas crude, the banner at the east end of Broadway is no mere salute to civic aspirations.

As long as a tanker truck and newly painted to keep its sentiments fresh, it proclaims: "Andrews Loves God, Country & Supports Free Enterprise."

Andrews, population close to 10,000, lies 42 miles through mesquite-carpeted rangeland from Midland, President Bush's hometown. Patriotism, faith and freedom to make and lose a buck, touchstones of the Bush presidency, form the bedrock of everyday life in the towns of the Permian Basin, still the biggest source of American oil.

Yet in this heart of Bush country, views of war with Iraq run the gamut of national opinion. For every unswerving proponent of war, there is a foe or equivocator. People here want something done about Saddam Hussein, but many cast doubt on their favorite son's diplomacy, urgency and willingness to go it alone. In terms of both their faith and their oil-dependent pocketbooks, they can see as much to lose as to gain from war.

"I feel like we will go to war, and I'll support it," said Jana Peters, 44, office manager at an oil exploration company. "I think that's the only way we can ensure our safety in my country. If Iraq doesn't want to comply with the United Nations, somebody's got to do it."

But Jonnie Miller, 56, a hardy, crew-cut preacher and owner of L & M Backhoe, which specializes in cleaning up spills in the oil fields, worries about war and a loss of lives. "The Scripture says God placed President Bush in office to take care of us," he said, "and my job is to pray for those in power to make godly decisions.

"But who over there," Mr. Miller asked, "wants us doing what we're doing except us and Kuwait? All life is precious to me. I don't want to see one Iraqi killed. I don't want to see Charles Manson killed."

To protesters who see a blood-for-oil impetus to war, people in Andrews say: don't include us. West Texas oil production has been surging, but largely because of commitments in acquiring drilling rights and lining up rigs made one to four years ago, before much talk of war. "It's not like turning on a tap," said Bradley W. Bunn, 37, a proponent of war who this week completed his seventh well in just over a year.

As in much of the Southwest where towns bloomed by cashing in on their gold, silver, copper, potash and uranium, and then atrophied when the commodities ran down or cheaper foreign commodities dislodged them, West Texas towns of Permian Basin have been slowing down since the early 1970's. Some are ghosts.

Texas produced 364 billion barrels of oil last year, 250 billion fewer than in 1992 and 15 percent of the peak production in 1973. In 2000, according to the census, the median family income in Andrews County, population 13,000, was $37,017, down from $43,756 in 1980. The median home value dropped to $42,500 from $59,558.

This city's movie theater has closed. The Hillcrest Motel is shuttered, with a For Sale sign in front. Among the biggest shops left in town are discounters — Alco, Dollar General and Family Dollar.

Lately, however, resurgence is in the air. Oil prices have rebounded from as low as $10 a barrel in the 1980's here, to $20 a year ago to nearly $40 now. By late last month 169 rigs were drilling into the basin, 20 more than in January and 40 more than a year ago, said Morris Burns, executive vice president of the Permian Basin Petroleum Association in Midland. "That's a big increase," he said.

In Andrews, flatbed 18-wheelers lugging drilling and casing pile rumble through town, want ads are looking for welders, electricians, roughnecks and roustabouts. Companies that reactivate long-silenced wells are busy. L & M Backhoe added two more roustabouts to its team of six last week.

Economists attribute much of the rise to faster economic growth and to shrinking supplies of oil because of the oil industry strike in Venezuela and the cold winter. The markets' anticipation of war is contributing, too, they say. A shutdown of Iraqi oil fields or another Arab oil embargo could spur world prices and domestic American production.

But in Andrews, people say the more likely outcome is a short-lived spike in prices, like the one to nearly $40 a barrel as the last war in the Persian Gulf began, followed by the collapse to $20 as it ended. "We're all waiting for the hammer to fall — the next downturn in prices," said Don Ingram, publisher of the twice-weekly Andrews County News. "Everyone assumes it will go down just like before."

At Buddy's, an unabashedly patriotic diner that has held on since 1969 largely on the local appeal of a fat-encrusted deep-fried specialty called steak fingers, a table of oil business retirees while away an hour.

"We've got to get rid of Saddam Hussein," said B. L. Tipton, 77.

But what the oil patch needs most, the men said, is relative price stability like the kind they knew until the mid-1980's. "War is disruptive," said Joseph Golden, 87. "You can't get stabilized."

Anxiety about war has touched Andrews High School. An article in the latest edition of the Round Up, the student newspaper, tells of two senior girls with boyfriends in the armed forces. "I am terrified," it quotes Sara Blodgett saying. "I think they could resolve this without war."

Marcy Hubbard said, "I support a military move against Iraq, because it is better to get rid of him now so that our children and grandchildren won't have to do it." But she added, "If I could say one thing to President Bush and his military advisers, I would tell him to do what they can to protect our military personnel."

On a personal level, President Bush is widely admired in Andrews by many Democrats as much as he is by Republicans. At Buddy's, Elmer Feland, 72 and retired, voted against him and supports a war. "He still needs to be got out of there," he said of Mr. Bush. His wife, Betty, 65 and retired, said: "I agree with that. But he's likable. I like that he believes in God and prayer."

Like him or not, some people here find the president's style in promoting war grating and unstatesmanlike. "I think of Teddy Roosevelt walking softly and carrying a big stick," Mr. Ingram said. "I think that still holds around here."

Edward J. Phillips, 75, a barber, is a Democrat-turned-independent who voted for Mr. Bush. "I think he's a good man, but he needs to slow down on some of his talking" he said. "I wish he wouldn't make so many talks. You can say more in five seconds than you can straighten out in a lifetime."

Between haircuts, Mr. Phillips unfolds a map of the Middle East. Tallying up the population there, he warned of retaliation against the United States. "If all those countries banded together, we would have problems. There's a lot of innocent people who are going to get killed if we go to war."

Mr. Bunn, who contends that the risk of not going to war against Saddam Hussein in Iraq exceeds the risk of trying to remove him from power, said: "I think anybody who listens to the president's speeches would find his language has been even and diplomatic. The idea that he's been too forceful is a bad rap.

"But there's a strain of West Texas straight talk that unfortunately may be misunderstood." Mr. Bunn said. In West Texas, he said, "black is black, white is white and an apple is an apple. We mean what we say."

Marketers Brace for War

Marketers Brace for War
By STUART ELLIOTT
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/10/business/media/10ADCO.html

The prospect of war in the Middle East is casting a lengthening shadow over Madison Avenue as worried advertisers postpone media-buying decisions, threatening to derail the industry's nascent recovery after one of its most difficult periods since the Depression.

In recent weeks, advertisers like Gucci and Merrill Lynch have informed agencies and media companies that they may cut ad budgets or scale back commitments even before a war breaks out. Scores more have put into place contingency plans in case of war, which require the immediate suspension of campaigns or the shifting of commercials and print ads away from any coverage of hostilities. And some marketers, media executives say, are signaling that they would stop all spending until a war ends or the crisis abates.

"The war seems to be putting a fog in front of their eyes," said William D. Holiber, the publisher of U.S. News & World Report in New York. "They all seem to want to wait until there is more clarity."

The cutbacks and slowdowns are hurting radio, monthly magazines, newspapers and local television stations the most. The broadcast television networks, which have been leading the ad-spending resurgence, have been less affected.

"The business in general is holding its breath," said Mel Berning, president for United States broadcast at MediaVest Worldwide in New York, a large media services agency that is part of the Starcom MediaVest division of the Publicis Groupe.

"The one question everyone in our jobs has to answer," he added, "is, what would this do to advertising budgets over the next 18 months?"

Most forecasters, heartened by continued strong demand for television commercial time from movie studios, packaged-food companies and retailers, are predicting an increase in ad spending for 2003 of 3 percent to 7 percent. Last year ad spending showed a modest uptick of 2.6 percent compared with 2001, when spending fell 6.5 percent, the largest decline since 1938.

There are even predictions that the coming market for commercial time on broadcast TV networks sold ahead of the 2003-2004 season could increase 10 percent atop the robust gains registered last spring.

But those forecasts become more tenuous each day a war appears more likely.

The problem is "the Iraq overhang," said David B. Doft, an analyst for CIBC World Markets in New York.

"Why make a decision to go ahead with launching a new campaign or a new product when you can wait a couple of months and play it safe?" Mr. Doft said. "The caution comes from not wanting your ads to show up on TV next to dead bodies."

As a result, he added, "we have noticed a definite hesitancy on the part of advertisers and media buyers in terms of going ahead with full-fledged new initiatives."

Even before any possible wartime disruptions, many advertisers have already trimmed their budgets, particularly in categories like airlines, energy and petroleum products, financial services, insurance, lodging, luxury goods and travel.

If the contingency plans come into play, that would reduce ad revenue for media companies even further as marketers like American Express, Boeing and Northrop Grumman would withdraw to the sidelines until the dust settled. (The Army, and the other armed services, worried about the juxtaposition between recruitment and reality, have standing policies to stop advertising during a war.)

"Every advertiser has contingency plans," said Steve Lanzano, chief executive for the North American operations of Mediaedge:CIA, a large media services agency in New York owned by the WPP Group.

If a war were to begin, there would be little or no opportunity at the onset to advertise on most broadcast and cable networks, which under standard procedure would limit or eliminate commercials if they are presenting war coverage. For the print media like daily newspapers and weekly magazines, war coverage would overwhelm other subjects.

"Most of our clients are resigned to the prospect of war," said Michael Drexler, the chief executive at Optimedia International in New York, a media services agency that is part of the ZenithOptimedia Group. "They plan to hold off advertising during the initial phase of any attack and see how it plays out." ZenithOptimedia is owned by the Cordiant Communications Group and Publicis.

Jon Mandel, co-chief executive and the chief negotiator at MediaCom in New York, the large media services agency owned by the Grey Global Group, offered this assessment: "For most advertisers, it's not so much a question of what are they going to do as it is a question of what they're not going to do. They're not going to want to be in or near war news."

For that reason, some media outlets are making plans to mollify skittish advertisers.

"If Time is covering a war, that will in all probability be the lead of the magazine, but we're still going to cover the arts, science, technology," said Edward R. McCarrick, the publisher of Time magazine in New York, a part of the Time Inc. division of AOL Time Warner. Worried marketers can request that their ad pages run only in those departments.

"We're taking great pains to make sure the adjacencies fit the criteria the advertisers establish," he added, referring to ad pages adjacent to editorial pages, "and do our absolute best to accommodate them as we can."

Adjacencies were a thorny issue after Sept. 11, when some marketers were outraged to see their ads next to graphic photographs of or articles about the terrorist attacks.

"We learned from 9/11 coverage that advertisers wanted to be as far away as possible" from such material, said Mr. Holiber of U.S. News & World Report, which as a result will publish "when and if the war starts" two-part issues with a front half devoted to war news and a back half, separated by a second cover, with other articles.

Another lesson learned from Sept. 11 was how quickly consumer sensitivities can shift over the tone of ads, particularly those suddenly rendered inappropriate by serious events. For instance, readers of the issue of People about Sept. 11, were aghast to see a humorous ad next to a page of news coverage — an ad making light of airline food, no less.

Even if marketers want to return to advertising after war breaks out as quickly as circumstances warrant, Mr. Mandel at MediaCom said, "they may have to change the creative content of their ads, and that is not done overnight."

"So instead of taking out of the year two weeks of advertising," he added, it may be more, "which could have the impact of making worse" any decline in ad spending.

Not everyone is perceiving the circumstances so pessimistically.

"There are certainly concerns in the advertising community," said Jon Nesvig, president for sales at the Fox Broadcasting Company in New York, part of the News Corporation, "but I don't think it's paralyzing people."

The Consumer Insight Group of MindShare, another large giant media services agency owned by WPP, concluded in a report released internally on Feb. 28 that while "momentous events do disrupt the consumer mindset and the media environment in the short term," there could be a "return to something approaching normalcy in a few weeks."

Rich Hamilton, the chief executive for the Americas at ZenithOptimedia in New York, said that his agency "is encouraging clients if a war happens to essentially get back to what they normally do as soon as possible."

That would mean advertisers will spend later in the year the ad dollars they intended to spend during the war, mitigating the negative effects on the industry's fledgling turnaround.

Indeed, said Mr. Lanzano of Mediaedge:CIA, "If there's a four-to-six-week war, ad spending could really pick up in the second half of the year."

White House Listens When Weekly Speaks

White House Listens When Weekly Speaks
By DAVID CARR
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/11/arts/11WEEK.html

WASHINGTON — It's been a good if busy season for the Weekly Standard and its aggressive version of American greatness. A change of administrations and 9/11 have made the tiny journal, the prime voice of Republican neoconservatives, one of the most influential publications in Washington.

The circulation of The Weekly Standard, which was founded by the News Corporation in 1995, is only 55,000. The Nation, a liberal beacon, has 127,000, The New Republic has 85,000, and National Review, long a maypole for conservatives, counts 154,000 readers. But the numbers are misleading in a digital age in which thought and opinion are frequently untethered from print and reiterated thousands of times on Web sites, list servers and e-mail in-boxes.

"Reader for reader, it may be the most influential publication in America," said Eric Alterman, a columnist for The Nation and author of "What Liberal Media?" (Basic Books).

The circulation may be small, but "they are not interested in speaking to the great unwashed," Mr. Alterman said. "The magazine speaks directly to and for power. Anybody who wants to know what this administration is thinking and what they plan to do has to read this magazine."

A few weeks ago President Bush attended the annual dinner of the American Enterprise Institute to compliment Irving Kristol. Now 83, he is the forebear of the neoconservative movement that his son, William, The Weekly Standard's editor, now champions.

The younger Mr. Kristol, 50, was happy that President Bush graciously acknowledged his father, but he was even more pleased by the text of his speech, which seemed lifted from The Weekly Standard's hymnal.

"If we have to act, we will act to restrain the violent and defend the cause of peace," the president said. "And by acting, we will signal to outlaw regimes that in this new century the boundaries of civilized behavior will be respected."

Five years ago, during the Clinton administration, The Weekly Standard made the broad, seemingly preposterous assertion that America was entitled and even compelled to engineer regime change in Iraq. But under the current administration, driven by 9/11, that contention has become conventional wisdom.

"I'm a little amused, but pleased and happy that the bus has become more crowded and that it is heading in the right direction," Mr. Kristol said, sitting in the dining room of the Mayflower Hotel here, where the blood sport of politics is accompanied by the occasional clink of china.

"I admire what the president has done so far and am happy that we are in agreement," Mr. Kristol said as he poked at a bowl of berries. "Everyone, including me, is worried about what it might take, but the cost of doing nothing seems higher."

Mr. Kristol has spent 18 years in Washington. He served as chief of staff to Vice President Dan Quayle and has done occasional stints as a pariah of both the right and left. He acknowledged that the staff he helped assemble seven years ago has made a quick trip from rock-throwing revolutionaries to an amen corner for the administration. But he stressed there was a significant difference between editorializing and governing.

"Look, these guys made up their own minds," he said. "I would hope that we have induced some of them to think about these things in a new way. We have a lot of writers who have independently articulated a version of how we deal with this new world we live in that has been read by Dick Cheney, Condi Rice and Donald Rumsfeld. Hopefully it had some effect."

The modesty is becoming — and consistent with Mr. Kristol's nature — but may not be altogether merited.

Broadcasters like Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly may have a monopoly on the angriest white men, but observers from both sides of the debate acknowledge that The Weekly Standard has been setting the agenda among a much more rarefied constituency.

"I am impressed by their success," said Senator John McCain, whom The Weekly Standard supported for the presidency. "Their timing has been excellent. In normal times, not much attention is paid to their major issue, which is the conduct of national security, but they have been fortunate in that people are interested right now."

David Plotz, the Washington bureau chief of Slate, said: "The Weekly Standard is hugely influential in policy making, much more so than any other magazine. What they are doing seems to sway what is going on in the administration. This has become a good and important war, in part because of what they have written."

The Weekly Standard has not achieved influence by cuddling up the administration. Beyond backing Senator McCain, the magazine has taken dissenting positions on issues ranging from China policy to United Nations inspections.

"This administration hates criticism, but they react to criticism," Mr. Kristol said. "We have a funny relationship with the top tier of the administration. They very much keep us at arm's length, but Dick Cheney does send over someone to pick up 30 copies of the magazine every Monday."

His magazine is not the only way that the younger Mr. Kristol's influence is delivered to the White House. In June 1997 he formed the Project for a New American Century, which issued papers supporting essentially unilateralist efforts to police the world. It was a call to arms that compelled neoconservatives, who say that America is best protected by exporting its values, but it also stirred people with allegiances to traditional conservatism, who have generally had more isolationist impulses and who have been wary about using American troops to patrol the world.

Signers at the time included many people who are now in a position of power, including Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, along with others with a more neoconservative impulse, including Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle, who heads the Defense Policy Board, which advises the Pentagon.

Those significant contacts within the administration, along with the ubiquitous presence on television of Mr. Kristol and Fred Barnes, executive editor of The Weekly Standard, often mean that the magazine is editorially annotating policy it had a significant influence over.

Mr. Alterman said the magazine's influence begins with Mr. Kristol but hardly ends there. "He is a political genius, pure and simple," Mr. Alterman said. "He is articulate about his viewpoint without insulting his opponent. And his magazine publishes writers that could work anywhere."

The magazine's roster includes Robert Kagan, David Brooks, Christopher Caldwell and David Tell, lively political and cultural theorists with significant credentials. The Weekly Standard distinguished itself by replacing some of the inherent defensiveness and indignation of conservative discourse with humor and nuance. The formula is reaching beyond the choir of people who worship The National Review.

It was Mr. Kagan, a former State Department official writing from Brussels, who suggested that Western Europe, nestled beneath the nuclear wing of the last remaining superpower, has developed a naïve belief in a new, post-conflict paradigm that was somehow inherently secure. America, he postulated, lived in a harsher, more traditional, Hobbesian world of threat and military power. He tartly concluded that "Americans are from Mars and Europeans are from Venus." The Weekly Standard is Mars central.

"They reflect a certain wing of the party that happens to be in the middle of things right now," said James Carville, the Democratic political operative. "They don't much care for the rest of the world, for the U.N., for Colin Powell and a long list of other things.

"They are nice guys about it — Kristol is an affable guy — but I don't think they have calculated the consequences of existing in a world where nobody likes you."

The Weekly Standard's willingness to domesticate and Americanize the globe, at gunpoint when necessary, gives a shiver of delight to most conservatives, but others wonder how that strategy might end.

"They are urging a de facto return to empire," said Jessica Mathews, president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where Mr. Kagan remains a senior fellow. "Announcing a global crusade on behalf of democracy is arrogant, blind to local realities, dangerous and ignorant of history."

Mr. Kristol advocates just such a crusade in "The War Over Iraq" (Encounter Books), a new book he wrote with Lawrence F. Kaplan, a senior editor at The New Republic. The collaboration with a writer from a magazine identified with the Democratic Party is one more symptom of The Weekly Standard's transformation from outré journal of the right to the Boswell of the new global agenda.

Peter Beinart, The New Republic's editor, dedicates a significant amount of space in his magazine to the Bush administration's domestic foibles, but in terms of foreign policy his magazine's biggest argument with The Weekly Standard is over who is the more ferocious hawk.

"I think that we are in a moment in time that is going to maximize areas of agreement in terms of foreign policy," he said, in between taking calls about a story about the impact of the war in Iraq on the Democratic nomination. "There was a period of time during the late 90's when impeachment was the subject, when there was much less in common."

The Weekly Standard was conceived less as a publishing enterprise than as a conservative antidote to The New Republic. Executives said The Weekly Standard loses a little more than a million dollars a year, but it has been a remarkable success in the marketplace of ideas.

The man who runs News Corporation, Rupert Murdoch, has seen his Fox News morph from a running joke to a runaway success, and he is, say to those who know him, pleased to match its mass with the class — and growing cachet — of The Weekly Standard. (Mr. Murdoch did not return a call for comment.)

The Standard must now confront the burden of success: producing a contrarian conservative magazine when the Senate, Congress, executive branch and judiciary all share a similar perspective.

"When I was in college, we spent some time on the problem of what happens when the revolutionaries win," said Carter Eskew, a Democratic strategist. "They are now very much like the Republican Party: after years in the wilderness, they are in control, and I think they now have to confront the challenge of being in charge. It's the price of winning."

Mr. Kristol does not seem worried about defining the magazine that he edits even though a few of its more dedicated readers happen to work at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

"The world will cooperate and the administration will cooperate by not doing what we would like them to do," Mr. Kristol said. "We will have plenty to criticize for the foreseeable future."

Capitalists in Chinese Legislature Speak Out for Property Rights

Capitalists in Chinese Legislature Speak Out for Property Rights
By CHRISTOPHER BUCKLEY
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/12/international/asia/12CHIN.html

BEIJING, March 11 — Mao warned against "capitalist roaders" overpowering China's revolution. But he perhaps never imagined that actual capitalists would one day press their cause here in his Great Hall of the People.

The presence of more than a hundred of them at the current meeting of the National People's Congress is part of the Communist Party's tightening embrace of the market economy. The assembly is a largely ritual gathering that meets for a fortnight every year to endorse the party leadership's policies. But so far the capitalist representatives have indicated that they will not be meek partners in this marriage of political power and economic muscle.

Since the opening of the Congress on March 5, several groups of pro-business representatives have issued loud public calls for a constitutional amendment to protect private property from arbitrary confiscation and marauding officials.

The national chamber of private businesses warned the legislature that the lack of secure property rights was forcing investors to send money abroad. The Congress should, it said, "make it clear that property is a citizen's basic right and give state protection to citizens' legitimate private property rights."

A group of 30 legislators from Guangdong, the booming southeastern coastal province, called for a constitutional amendment making private property "sacrosanct and inviolable." Other legislators called for special laws to protect and encourage private businesses. Government officials have made it clear that there will be no such amendment during this year's session.

Several of the business representatives attending said they expected that an amendment would be passed in the next couple of years.

One who lobbied for stronger legal protection of private property was Lou Zhongfu, a building entrepreneur from Zhejiang Province, south of Shanghai. In an interview, he explained that private businesses wanted the long-term security that clearer legal recognition would provide.

He added that representatives from the business world had also lobbied for more favorable policies from the government, especially more bank credit, much of which is currently directed to supporting government-owned factories.

Mr. Lou, 50, a short, rough-hewn man with a junior high school education, parlayed a small rural business into a huge private fortune during the 1990's. Like many other capitalist delegates, he juggles membership of the Communist Party and a distrust of sweeping political change with a robustly hands-off vision of the government's role in the economy.

"The government's functions have to change," Mr. Lou said. "It mustn't dominate and control the market. A private economy needs rule of law, not commands."

There are 133 bosses of private enterprise in the Congress, according to a senior government official. That is a sliver of the total of nearly 3,000 representatives, a great majority of whom are government officials and Communist Party members, but it is nearly three times the number in the last Congress. A new Congress is chosen every five years.

Capitalist legislators are concentrated in China's richest, most influential provinces. One representative at the Congress, Su Zengfu, 62, is the founder and chairman of Supor, a company with 3,800 employees that sold $120 million of pots and rice cookers last year.

"America is strong because its private corporations are strong," Mr. Su said, "and China is inevitably headed in the same direction."

Head of China's Legislature Bids Farewell

Head of China's Legislature Bids Farewell
By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/10/international/asia/10CND-CHIN.html

BEIJING, March 10 — The head of China's National Legislature, Li Peng, gave his last major speech as a central leader today, effectively ending a long and contentious political career.

Whatever his achievements as a legislator, Mr. Li will be forever despised both here and abroad as the leader who announced the imposition of martial law in June 1989, signaling the army's arrival in Beijing to break up pro-democracy student protests around Tiananmen Square.

In recent years he has also been plagued by charges of corruption and nepotism, particularly concerning the involvement of his wife and sons in state-owned power companies.

Mr. Li's departure marks a watershed of sorts in that he was the last Communist hard-liner in a top leadership position. But, in practical terms, his absence will not make much difference because this faction has already lost nearly all its influence in the last few years.

"It is good for China that Li Peng is retiring," said a senior newspaper editor who spoke on condition that he not be identified. "Some people see him as a symbol or the massacre, the chief planner. I don't think its as simple as that, but his retirement takes one obstacle to a re-evaluation out of the way."

Mr. Li is expected to be replaced by Wu Bangguo, 61, who is widely regarded as more reform minded and liberal. "The retirement of Li Peng takes away the key representative of the leftist faction," the editor said. "I think Wu Bangguo is certain to be more open than him."

Today Mr. Li presented to the legislature his report on the achievements of the 9th National People's Congress, which closes its five-year term next week. He said the congress, China's legislative body, had written dozens of laws, monitored government budgets and helped create China's emerging court system, noting that "a socialist legal system with Chinese characteristics is initially taking shape."

He also announced the approval of a plan to restructure the government, which will reduce the number of ministries from 29 to 28 by merging two trade bodies that were formerly separate.

Known as a stiff politician, Mr. Li nonetheless departed from his formal scripted presentation to add a word of advice to his successors.

"The pupil often surpasses the master," he said. "I believe that the work of the 10th National People's Congress will be even better than the work of the 9th National People's Congress, even more outstanding."

Mr. Li, 74, is the last of the the classic old breed of Communist Party officials, whose authority derives almost entirely from his personal links with the 1949 revolution that brought the Communists to power. An orphan, he was raised by Zhou Enlai, China's revered first prime minister and revolutionary hero.

A Russian-trained engineer, Mr. Li was never an enthusiastic supporter of China's opening to the outside world or its economic reforms. And, in 1989, as student protesters gathered day in and day out around Tiananmen Square demanding democracy, it was natural that he would become the government's bad cop.

Then prime minister, he supported the use of military force to quell the students, a decision that led to the deaths of hundreds, if not more. Human rights activists here and abroad have been demanding his resignation ever since, giving him the sobriquet, "The Butcher of Beijing."

In Beijing, he is generally hated for that, as well as for allegations of corruption that have plagued him and his family about their ties to China's lucrative power industry.

Many scholars here believe that the central government has been reluctant to investigate and pursue high-level corruption cases, for fear that it would be criticized for allowing Mr. Li to remain in office. "Li Peng's retirement will take away the protection enjoyed by corrupt officials," the newspaper editor said.

Rangers vs. Panthers

a friend invited me out to a NY Rangers game last night. add that to the small handful of sports games i've been to. this was my first hockey game. my friend got the tickets at the last minute from a friend of hers, so we were lucky not to have to wade through all the crowds getting in. we got drinks and hot dogs and i enjoyed being part of the masses. it felt like i was on a date!

in the course of the action, we got to see two fights. one that was a gloves off fist throwing drag down fight! i was pretty shocked that the refs just stood there and let them go at it. but i guess that's what the fans are paying for, right?

and how did the *ice* hockey game turn out against a team from *sunny* florida? Don't Ask!!

Glenn

Mizuguchi had been single-minded in his devotion to his job. How strange and ironic it was that someone like that should have died while a useless leftover like himself went on living. . . . Kuki recalled his single visit to the hospital three months ago, when Muzuguchi had told him, 'Everybody gets old and dies in the end, so you've got to do the things you want to while you still can.' . . . . He gazed at the photograph, palms pressed together in a gesture of respect. What did you go and die for? -- from A Lost Paradise, by Jun'ichi Watanabe

just got the news this evening that my friend glenn passed away. he had been working out with another friend when he had acute chest pains. he died at the hospital.

he had been so full of life. and so careful. when we went to st. barths over the millenium, he insisted on taking the boat from St Maarten, since landing by plane just inside a small valley on a tiny runway was reputedly so hazardous. he was a doctor himself. and he worked out religiously.

it seemed like he had just been married. and they have one small child, and another on the way. we'll miss you glenn...