I Am Iraq

I Am Iraq
By MICHAEL IGNATIEFF
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/23/magazine/23WWLN.html

Back in the 60's, when I marched against the war in Vietnam, I learned that it is a mistake to judge a cause by the company it makes you keep. I slogged through the streets with Trotskyites who thought America was an evil empire, and I chanted slogans under banners that called for socialist revolution in Brooklyn. I stood arm in arm with pacifists, who made me wonder whether they would have fought Hitler. Since I was anti-Communist, I actually had more in common with the liberal hawks who thought they were defending South Vietnam against advancing Communist tyranny. But I believed nothing could save the weak and corrupt South Vietnamese government. This time, over Iraq, I don't like the company I am keeping, but I think they're right on the issue. I much prefer the company on the other side, but I believe they're mistaken.

I don't like the president's domestic policies. He should be helping state and local governments maintain jobs and services, especially for the poor. His attack on affirmative action turns back decades of racial progress. The tax breaks for the rich are unjust. His deficits are mortgaging the future. It's wrong to lock up so-called unlawful combatants on Guantanamo and in military brigs, denying them due process. The president's attorney general is dangerously cavalier about the civil liberties he is supposed to protect. The bullying tone the president adopted in his diplomacy at the United Nations diminished his chances of U.N. support. But I still think the president is right when he says that Iraq and the world will be better off with Saddam disarmed, even, if necessary, through force.

A lot of my friends think that supporting the president on this issue is naive. The company you keep, they argue, matters in politics. If you can't trust him on other issues, you have no reason to trust him on this one. If he treats freedom at home so lightly, what makes you believe that he will say what he means about staying the course to create freedom in Iraq?

My friends also imply that the company I am keeping on this war is a definition of what kind of person I am. So where we all stand has become a litmus test of our moral identities. But this shouldn't be the case. Opposing the war doesn't make you an antiglobalist, an anti-Semite or an anti-American, any more than supporting the war makes you a Cheney conservative or an apologist for American imperialism.

In fact, the debate over war is not so much a clash of competing moral identities as a battle within each of us to balance competing moral arguments. Sometimes it is easier to see this in the positions of the other side than in your own.

Recently, 14,000 ''writers, academics and other intellectuals'' -- many of them my friends -- published a petition against the war, at the same time condemning the Iraqi regime for its human rights violations and supporting ''efforts by the Iraqi opposition to create a democratic, multiethnic and multireligious Iraq.'' But since they say that ''the decision to wage war at this time is morally unacceptable,'' I wonder what their support for the Iraqi opposition amounts to. One colleague refused to sign the petition because he said it was guilty of confusion. The problem is not that overthrowing Saddam by force is ''morally unjustified.'' Who seriously believes 25 million Iraqis would not be better off if Saddam were overthrown? The issue is whether it is prudent to do so, whether the risks are worth running.

Evaluating risks is not the same thing as making moral choices. It is impossible to be certain that improving the human rights of 25 million people is worth the cost because no one knows what the cost will be. Besides, even if the cost could be known, what the philosophers call ''consequential'' justifications -- that 25 million people will live better -- run smack against ''deontological'' objections, namely that good consequences cannot justify killing people. I think the consequential justifications can override the deontological ones, but only if the gains in human freedom are large and the human costs are low. But let's admit it, the risks are large: the war may be bloody, the peace may be chaotic and what might be good in the long run for Iraqis might not be so good for Americans. Success in Iraq might win America friends or it might increase the anger much of the Muslim world feels toward this country.

It would be great if moral certainty made risk assessment easier, but it doesn't actually do so. What may be desirable from a moral point of view may be so risky that we would be foolish to try. So what do we do? Isaiah Berlin used to say that we just have to ''plump'' for one option or the other in the absence of moral certainty or perfect knowledge of the future. We should also try to decide for ourselves, regardless of the company we keep, and that may include our friends, our family and our loved ones.

During Vietnam, I marched with people who thought America was the incarnation of imperial wickedness, and I marched against people who thought America was the last best hope of mankind. Just as in Vietnam, the debate over Iraq has become a referendum on American power, and what you think about Saddam seems to matter much less than what you think about America. Such positions, now as then, seem hopelessly ideological and, at the same time, narcissistic. The fact is that America is neither the redeemer nation nor the evil empire. Ideology cannot help us here.

In the weeks and years ahead, the choices are not going to be about who we are or whose company we keep, or even about what we think America is or should be. The choices are about what risks are worth running when our safety depends on the answer. The real choices are going to be tougher than most of us could have ever imagined.

Michael Ignatieff is a contributing writer for The Times Magazine.

QUESTIONS FOR ALFONSO CUARÓN

QUESTIONS FOR ALFONSO CUARÓN
Altering the Script
Interview by LYNN HIRSCHBERG
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/23/magazine/23QUESTIONS.html

LH: "Y Tu Mamá También,'' the movie that you directed and wrote with your brother, is nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. It was a surprising nominee: it's in Spanish and, because of its sex scenes, was released without a rating.

AC: ''Y Tu Mamá También'' is one of the first unrated movies to be nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. But many video stores won't take a movie that's not rated, so I had to make the movie an R.

How much did you have to cut?

I cut a bunch of penises. I castrated my movie. It's ridiculous. It's ridiculous that teenagers can see a violent movie like ''Hannibal'' and not my film.

In Mexico, the movie was temporarily banned for certain audiences.

It was more than banned in Mexico; it was censored. The government forbade kids under 18 to see the film. It was so hypocritical -- you cannot show a film about a 17-year-old kid to a 17-year-old kid. I had to sue the Mexican government over its rating system.

Is that sort of censorship why you no longer live in Mexico?

I left after my first film, ''Love in the Time of Hysteria,'' in 1991. I live in New York now, but America is not my country. I left Mexico for artistic survival. If I had stayed, I would have been forced by the government, who control the movie business, to direct TV shows or commercials or infomercials for the government.

Has America been liberating artistically?

It's a cliche, but Americans are puritanical. In their movies, they are scared of sex, but they overindulge in violence. I could have cut a G-rated version of ''Y Tu Mamá También'' that would have pleased the American ratings board, but it would have been five minutes long.

After ''Y Tu Mamá También,'' you must have been surprised when you were approached by Warner Brothers to direct the third Harry Potter film.

I was shocked. I had just made this sexy, scandalous movie, and I didn't understand why they were sending me the script. I was unfamiliar with the Harry Potter universe, but I read the books, and I saw the potential. Thematically, it's actually very close to ''Y Tu Mamá También.'' Harry Potter is about finding your own identity, and so is ''Y Tu Mamá.''

But ''Y Tu Mamá'' deals with class and homosexuality. Doesn't Harry Potter have fewer political overtones?

No. Harry Potter deals with class, with race, with power. I see this book as a metaphor for our times. The evil Voldemort is very similar to Saddam Hussein. Or George Bush. They're really the same. I believe George Bush and Saddam Hussein should go to a desert island together and relax. It would be a love affair, like in ''Y Tu Mamá También.'' And then there would be no war.

You're currently filming Harry Potter in London. Has the anti-America feeling in Europe spilled over into other areas? For instance, is there a negative reaction to American movies?

No. People here distinguish between American government and America. I love America, but I don't want war. That doesn't mean I feel any less passionately about American films and pop culture. It doesn't change Miles Davis's music or F. Scott Fitzgerald's novels or Martin Scorsese's movies. It's sad. After Sept. 11, the world embraced America, and that goodwill has evaporated. But American pop culture is still revered. I don't see that changing.

Is that why you're now making a big studio movie like Harry Potter as opposed to an independent foreign-language film like ''Y Tu Mamá También''?

I'm just trying to do good work. It's important to separate art from politics. I'm against how the Mexican government operates, but I'm not anti-Mexican, just as I love America and disagree with the U.S. government. I tried to show that dichotomy in ''Y Tu Mamá.''
The movie is an observation of teenagers coming of age, and it's an observation of a country coming of age. There's a lot of coming in the movie. I tried to show it all.

Approach of War Reveals an Alienation in California

Approach of War Reveals an Alienation in California
By DEAN E. MURPHY
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/20/international/worldspecial/20WEST.html

SAN FRANCISCO, March 19 — As Americans braced in recent days for a war against Iraq, many Californians were feeling strangely out of it. The great expanse between the two coasts appeared ever vaster. The sense of threat, so acute in the East, was real but less immediate here.

The University of California Board of Regents canceled a meeting in San Francisco today because of "concerns about travel," but the National Guard soldiers posted at the Golden Gate Bridge amounted to a small fraction of the deployments in New York or Washington.

Even when the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences decided to forgo the traditional red carpet entrance to Sunday's Oscar ceremonies in Los Angeles, officials said it was more a matter of wartime propriety than battle-eve jitters.

From stockbrokers in San Francisco to software engineers in Silicon Valley to studio executives in Los Angeles, many Californians were puzzled by the connection between the terror attacks of Sept. 11 and the danger posed by Saddam Hussein, something taken for granted in many other parts of the country.

"I am hoping the administration has so much more knowledge that it can justify its actions, because on the face of it, I can't see a reason for doing this," said David Randall, a philanthropic fund-raiser in San Francisco.

"There are many good reasons to get rid of Saddam," Mr. Randall said. "But when did the events of Sept. 11 get transformed into going to war with Iraq? Why war with this one country, right now? I can't figure out how we got to this point."

That confusion is evident even though California has contributed more men and women to the call-up of reservists and National Guard forces than any other state. The defense industry pumps about $30 billion a year into California's economy. And while 29 military bases were closed in the 1990's, 61 installations remain in use statewide.

But California's isolation from Washington, both geographically and, in recent years, politically, has helped foster a sense of alienation. The state, which had such an affinity for Bill Clinton, voted decisively against President Bush in 2000.

"There is a growing disbelief among Californians that the White House is really representing their views and interests," said Mark Baldassare, the director of research at the Public Policy Institute of California, a nonpartisan group in San Francisco that recently conducted an opinion poll of public attitudes toward President Bush, the war, which was then imminent, and other issues.

Mr. Baldassare said this attitude had been building for several years, starting with the state's energy crisis and the administration's handling of it. "Because of this disconnect," he said, "many Californians don't give the president the benefit of the doubt on the issue of Iraq any more than they give the president the benefit of the doubt on whether we really need to do away with taxes on dividends or whether a tax cut will lead to a better economy."

In fact, many people acknowledged that they might feel differently if a Democrat were leading them into battle. "I was wondering if I would feel more comfortable if it were Bill Clinton and Al Gore saying we needed to do this now, and I think I would," said Felicia Marcus, who was the regional administrator in California for the United States Environmental Protection Agency in the Clinton administration.

During some lunchtime and office-cooler chatter there has even been longing for President Clinton, a Hollywood favorite, who, the reasoning goes, would never have allowed a war to play havoc with Oscar night, one of the state's most hallowed traditions.

By some accounts, the chasm in attitudes between East and West is new only in its intensity. Many residents have always enjoyed thinking of themselves as different from the rest of the country, especially those working in the Hollywood pop-culture factory.

"Californians love that sense of distinctiveness," said Peter Bart, editor of Variety. "We're not going to see the 60's again, but I think we are going to see a lot of rebellion against the mandates of Washington. This is an unpredictable and bizarre place, and I think we are definitely heading into an intensely politicized time in Hollywood."

Since many of the most prominent antiwar spokesmen in recent months have been Hollywood celebrities, this has further bolstered California's self-image and the state's image around the country as the epicenter of antiwar sentiment. The Academy Awards on Sunday night, if they come off as planned, will probably only harden that perception.

Robert Greenwald, a Hollywood producer and director who helped found Artists United to Win Without War, said a number of celebrities had committed to wearing antiwar pins at the awards, including Ben Affleck, Kirsten Dunst, Jake and Maggie Gyllenhaal, Dustin Hoffman, Jessica Lange, Meryl Streep and the entire U2 rock band.

Doubting in California, however, is not the sole province of Hollywood, or even of the career leftists and peace advocates who were among those blocking streets today in downtown San Francisco. The police said one peace demonstrator died when he jumped from the Golden Gate Bridge in an apparent suicide.

"There is less fear of conforming here," said Warren Langley, the former president of the Pacific Stock Exchange. "People are more willing to question what the president says."

Mr. Langley found himself in an unusual place last week: At the San Francisco jail after being arrested for blocking the entrance to the exchange in an antiwar protest. The blockade was his first act of civil disobedience — he even attended an evening of training in preparation — but probably not his last, he said.

"It has been 30 years since I even had a traffic ticket," said Mr. Langley, who led the exchange between 1996 and 1999 and was arrested in a suit and tie. He also happens to be a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel who was once an instructor at the Air Force Academy, "We are not going to stop this war. I know that," he said. "But I have to find a way I can help others, help us as Americans become good citizens of the world again."

It is also the case, some say, that Californians do not feel as unsafe as people in other parts of the country.

"We didn't feel or see any of the shocks of Sept. 11 except on television," said Steven Maviglio, a spokesman for Gov. Gray Davis. "We don't have anything like they do in Washington, where trucks are rolled up on the grounds of the Washington Monument, or where there was a mad rush for duct tape."

Robert J. Waste, a professor of public policy at California State University, Sacramento, said the state's ethnic and racial diversity and large immigrant population also played a part, making it distinctive — and less receptive to the president's message.

"The deepest penetration of the president's case for war is among white males and Republicans," Professor Waste said. "That is not the whole of California."

An opinion poll conducted last week in the Sacramento area by the university's Institute for Social Research pointed to diversity as a determining factor on the war question.

The poll showed that support for a war was weakest among racial minorities and strongest among men. In El Dorado County, a mostly white and conservative area in the Sierra Nevada, 65 percent of respondents favored military action. In Sacramento County, where there are large immigrant and minority communities, support was 49 percent.

"California is more diverse than the rest of the country, and this diversity is the hardest part of the sell for war," Professor Waste said.

Mr. Baldassare of the Public Policy Institute said an opinion poll conducted last month by the group showed that the troubled California economy had colored the views of residents about many subjects, like the popularity of Governor Davis (he registered a 60 percent disapproval rating; to the state's future (only 28 percent said the state was headed in the right direction), to President Bush's handling of the situation in Iraq (50 percent said they disapproved, while 46 percent approved).

"People are in a kind of nervous mood I haven't seen since the early 1990's," Mr. Baldassare said. "They are very wary of the state's vulnerable position economically right now. That has made people cautious about things they might view as extraneous events, including going to war with Iraq."

It is not just Californians who view themselves as different and apart. So do some of their visitors.

David Houston, a self-described conservative from Tampa Bay, Fla., who was on a monthlong vacation in California, said many people in the state struck him as out of touch with the rest of America. "It is obvious a lot of people here are against the war," he said. "Of course, if a lot of them went to visit the World Trade Center, they might think differently."

Their Mission: Intercepting Deadly Cargo

Their Mission: Intercepting Deadly Cargo
By SETH SCHIESEL
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/20/technology/circuits/20secu.html

IN a sparkling Tuesday morning last week, just across the harbor from the gap in Manhattan's skyline, Kevin McCabe's team was trying to prevent another Sept. 11.

Mr. McCabe, the chief customs inspector for the New York and New Jersey seaport, gestured across the wind-swept water. "The towers were right there," he said. "It was like you could reach out and touch them. That's what we're doing here."

What Mr. McCabe and his team were doing at the Red Hook cargo terminal in Brooklyn was employing some of the latest high-tech tools in what has become his agency's top priority: fending off terrorism.

Just yards from the water, a boom extended from an International Harvester truck chassis. At the end of the boom was a suitcase-size box that emitted beams from a pellet of radioactive cesium 137. As 20-foot-long cargo containers inched past the box, two inspectors, like gun-toting radiologists, peered at a computer screen in the truck's cab, trying to decipher the ghostly images of the containers' interiors.

"You see, this one is supposed to be household goods," one inspector said, scanning a computer printout representing the container's contents. "But look here."

Most of the image was a haze, but at the bottom loomed a solid cylindrical shape. "That's obviously something really dense, and it doesn't look like household goods," the inspector said. "We're going to open that one up. Look, it could be a propane tank. It could be a statue." Left unsaid was the possibility that it could be something much more dangerous.

Before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the main purpose of what was then known as the Customs Service was to slow the flow of illegal drugs into the United States. Now, the renamed Bureau of Customs and Border Protection is expanding its use of advanced technologies in the service of its new No. 1 mission: stopping potential terrorist weapons.

It is a big job. According to the customs bureau, 7.2 million shipping containers entered the country in the year ended last September, in addition to 11.1 million trucks, 2.4 million railroad cars, 768,000 commercial airline flights and 128,000 private flights.

Complementing the government's array of fiber-optic cameras (for looking into containers without opening them), vapor tracers (for detecting conventional explosives) and other technologies, most of the new devices in the customs arsenal seem designed to detect components of a nuclear weapon or a radiological "dirty bomb."

At ports, hand-held radiation detectors are used by teams like Mr. McCabe's, along with the imaging systems; at border crossings, trucks are routed through radiation-detection portals. The bureau is also working on tools to detect chemical and biological materials.

It can be difficult to measure the effectiveness of systems meant to detect or deter the unthinkable, and while government officials are reluctant to discuss what their high-tech tools have detected, there is no public indication they have uncovered terrorist activity. And to be sure, the new systems do not cover the entire range of potential threats, including air piracy like that used on Sept. 11 or conventional explosives of domestic origin.

Still, with security agencies at a heightened level of alert, federal officials say the new technologies are critical. "Technology is our greatest ally in preventing terrorists from getting weapons of mass destruction across our borders," said Robert C. Bonner, commissioner of the customs bureau, part of the new Homeland Security Department. "It is technology that is allowing us to facilitate the movement of goods and people while simultaneously giving us the capacity to detect weapons of mass destruction."

Some of the new anti-terrorism systems were being used before Sept. 11, mostly to look for narcotics, and have been adapted; others are newly deployed. The systems are getting a look from agencies beyond the customs bureau, like the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which operates the region's airports and many of its bridges and tunnels.

The challenge of securing the nation's gateways alone suggests how daunting a task it will be, even with the latest technological advances, to extend such efforts inside the country. The price tag is substantial; a unit like the one used by Mr. McCabe's crew costs more than $1 million. But the attraction is evident: all of the new technologies enable the government to screen more vehicles and cargo containers.

"These systems have given us much more flexibility and have made us more efficient," Todd A. Hoffman, the acting director for interdiction and security at the customs bureau's office of field operations, said in a telephone interview. Previously, inspecting a container shipment usually meant unloading it. "You could maybe do one or two a day because it's so labor-intensive," he said. "Now, you can easily do 8 or 10 an hour through a mobile system, and we're getting better."

The digital nerve center of the customs bureau lies far from the ports and border crossings that are the domain of field inspectors like Mr. McCabe. Just down Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House, the bureau's National Targeting Center sifts through information about all of the shipments entering the nation by sea. Under a federal rule that took effect late last year, information about cargo bound for the United States must be provided to the federal government at least 24 hours before ships leave their foreign ports.

The National Targeting Center then uses advanced computerized risk-assessment techniques to sort the information according to more than 100 variables. Citing security concerns, federal officials refused to list those variables, but some officials said that the port of origin, the nature of the cargo and the track records of the exporter and importer were among the criteria.

"I can tell you that if you say you're importing bananas from Iceland, you're going to score higher," a federal official said.

Inspectors also scan manifests and information on the shipper and work with the National Targeting Center to identify shipments that pose the highest risk.

The containers being inspected by Mr. McCabe's crew in Brooklyn last week had been unloaded the previous day from a boat that had started its voyage in Karachi, Pakistan, and had picked up more cargo in Port Qasim, Pakistan, before stopping in the United Arab Emirates in the Persian Gulf and at least two Mediterranean ports in Europe on its way to New York. Of the 498 containers that were to be unloaded in New York, 89 held shipments that had been given a high-risk designation by the National Targeting Center or by agents in New York.

Each of the 89 containers was scanned by the truck-mounted cesium-detection system called Vacis, for vehicle and cargo inspection system.

Vacis, made by the Science Applications International Corporation, uses the gamma rays emitted by radioactive material rather than the X-rays commonly used in medical procedures. (The newer systems use cobalt rather than cesium because cobalt can penetrate thicker steel walls than cesium does. The trade-off is that while cesium has a half-life of 30 years, cobalt's half-life is barely five years, so cobalt systems must have their radioactive material replaced more often.)

The radiation is picked up by hundreds of advanced sensors that convert the information into a picture that a customs inspector examines to detect anomalies in density. Drivers and others exposed to the system's radiation absorb a dose comparable to what humans normally receive in an hour from natural sources, and far less than that of a medical X-ray, the company said.

The customs bureau deployed Vacis in the late 1990's to help detect narcotics shipments. Since the Sept. 11 attacks, however, the bureau has stepped up its purchasing, placed the devices all around the country and used them primarily to detect potential terrorist weapons. "Instead of just focusing on the southwestern border, now we've got these out to other locations to address other threats," Mr. Hoffman said.

The 112 systems now used by the customs bureau are mounted on rail cars, on tracks, in stationary car-wash-type enclosures and on trucks. The truck-mounted systems cost about $1.3 million each.

In addition to installing the system in the United States, the government is beginning to deploy it overseas to scan cargo containers before they leave for American ports.

The gamma-ray imaging is only part of the effort. In the late 1990's the bureau also began equipping its field agents with radiation pagers, hand-held devices that are sensitive enough to detect an office colleague who recently had radiation therapy.

Before Sept. 11, the bureau had perhaps 3,500 such pagers, each costing about $1,400. Now, it has 6,000, and it preparing to buy as many as 15,000 more, Mr. Hoffman said. Inspectors wear the pagers as they work but also wield them to scan the outside of high-risk containers.

If radiation is detected, inspectors use a hand-held isotope identifier to gauge what sort of radiation it is.

The isotope identifiers can be connected to a computer to send the information to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California for analysis, Mr. Hoffman said.

Of the containers scanned by the Vacis system, about 5 percent are opened and physically inspected by agents, Mr. McCabe said. Even when the inspectors open a container, however, they rarely find contraband. That ominous cylindrical shape in Red Hook, for instance, turned out to be an industrial stove much like a pizza oven.

The radiation pagers generally give an alert far less often. One inspector said that in the two years he has carried a pager, it has shown abnormal levels of radiation only about 10 times, and never as a result of potential weapons components.

Each of those systems was in use before Sept. 11, though not nearly as widely as today. Then, last October, a new tool was added to the effort: radiation-detection portals.

Used mostly for truck traffic, the portals are like metal detectors for radiation. They tell the operator if a vehicle is emitting gamma radiation, which can be associated with legitimate materials like cat-box litter, or neutron radiation, which is more often associated with what are known euphemistically as "special nuclear materials."

Bob Thompson, the portal project manager at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, which is advising the customs bureau on the project, said that such portal systems had long been used at government installations to help prevent the theft of sensitive materials, and in the scrap metal industry to detect radioactive materials before smelters or other equipment could be contaminated.

Jayson Ahern, the bureau's assistant commissioner for field operations, said that portals were already screening all trucks crossing the border at Buffalo and Detroit, and at least some passenger vehicles in Detroit. By next month, the bureau intends to institute 100 percent screening for trucks at the border crossings at Champlain, N.Y., Port Huron, Mich., and Blaine, Wash.

"We want to get the commercial centers on the northern border because these are the locations where there might be something hidden on a truck that might be a radiological dispersion device," Mr. Ahern said.

Mr. Hoffman said that trucks and other vehicles generally roll through the radiation portals at 4 to 7 miles per hour but do not generally add to delays at the border.

Roughly one vehicle in 1,000 sets off an alarm, prompting a scan with the isotope identifier, he said.

The radiation portals, which cost about $80,000 each, have not yet been deployed widely to screen shipping traffic, but the customs bureau has entered into a joint venture with the Port Authority to begin installing the systems to screen seaborne containers coming into the New York area.

"The Vacis equipment and radiation portal devices are both very effective, and we support Customs' deployment of them," said Allen Morrison, a spokesman for the Port Authority. "We are also in the process of evaluating this equipment and other devices for possible use at nonport facilities." A transportation official in the area said that less intrusive devices like hand-held radiation detectors were already in use by police officers at bridges and tunnels.

While drug smuggling is no longer the customs bureau's top priority, customs officials said that Vacis continued to detect such shipments. The systems are also used to monitor outbound shipments. A multiagency task force in the Miami area, for instance, uses the system to look for illegal shipments of stolen cars.

Mr. Ahern of the customs bureau said that one of his department's top goals for the future was to push for cargo containers that could electronically detect when they have been opened, and perhaps even by whom.

Because there are millions of cargo containers in the world, however, and the cost of such an enhancement would largely be borne by private industry, the day of the "smart container" appears to be years away, customs officials said.

For now, the array of high-tech devices used by the customs service continues to be backstopped by a low-tech alternative: the dog.

While dogs cannot detect radiation directly, the customs bureau is training dogs to sniff out chemicals that could be used in terrorist weapons.

Systems like Vacis operate by allowing inspectors to detect anomalies within a cargo container, "but what if the container is already full of scrap metal or trash and car parts?" Mr. Hoffman said. "Think about what that would look like in an image. In that case, a canine could help us."

"Besides," he added, "they're cheap."

Marriage Provides Short-Lived Boost in Happiness

Does Marriage Make You Happy?
Study: Marriage Provides Short-Lived Boost in Happiness
By Sid Kirchheimer / Reviewed By Michael Smith, MD
on Monday, March 17, 2003
WebMD Medical News
http://content.health.msn.com/content/article/62/71621.htm

March 17, 2003 -- First the good news. Marriage can make you a little happier -- at least initially. Now even better news. If you were happy before getting married, chances are you'll stay that way.

People tend to get a boost in overall life satisfaction from being married, but the increase is small and typically short-lived, finds a new study. In other words, getting married may initially make people feel happier about their lives in general, but staying married has little long-term effect on being happy.

"What we found is that on average, there is a reported boost in happiness right around the time of marriage -- the year before, the year of, and the year after getting married," says lead researcher Richard Lucas, PhD, of Michigan State University. "But after two years of marriage, most people are pretty much back to where they started before marriage."

And what was their boost in self-reported levels of happiness? A mere one-tenth of a point on an 11-point scale, reports the study, published in the March issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

Lucas' study tracked data on 24,000 people living in Germany from1984 to 1995 who were periodically surveyed to gauge their overall level of happiness. The researchers took into account factors such as changes in Germany due to the fall of the Berlin Wall when evaluating their results.

The findings aren't to suggest that proverbial honeymoon ends with the literal one. In fact, various studies -- including this one -- indicate that married people are typically happier than those who aren't. "But those people who tend to get married typically report being happier before they got married, they're just overall happier people," says Lucas. His study didn't measure how children impact a marriage's happiness, but others have shown it typically dips when kids are teenagers and then rebounds.

So what changes with marriage? Apparently, life's goals -- which may explain the upward happiness blip among newlyweds and those preparing to walk down the aisle.

"As life circumstances change, most people adjust their goals and expectations," Lucas tells WebMD. "Before getting married, one's goal might be to get married. So when that goal is achieved or about to be, they're very happy. But as they settle into marriage, their goals might change -- maybe to have children or build their career. And they focus on achieving those new goals to lead them to happiness."

His take-home advice from his finding: "Many people may enter a marriage with an expectation that it will provide all these benefits for making them happier," says Lucas. "But they shouldn't expect that."

So what should newlyweds expect to boost their chances of living happily ever after the wedding band begins to age?

"You should understand that where there is contact, there is going to be friction," says Bonnie Maslin, PhD, a New York psychotherapist who has written several books on marriage, including The Angry Marriage and Not Quite Paradise: Making Marriage Work. ""When you are romantically involved and at a distance, there is a tendency to idolize that person. Just like if you're looking at a rare tapestry from far away, you're not going to see stains that you see up close.

"But the closer you get, the more you see the texture of person -- their good and bad points -- and the more ambivalence you may feel about your mate," she tells WebMD. "People who stay marriage well are those who can tolerate this ambivalence."

SOURCES: Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, March 2003. Richard Lucas, PhD, assistant professor of psychology, Michigan State University, East Lansing. Bonnie Maslin, PhD, psychotherapist, New York.

clarifications, justifications, and consequences

amabelle posted and several others responded with thoughts on military action in iraq. first, a few clarifications to what has been posted thus far. second, a summary of why we are going to war. third, a few self reflective questions.

I. CLARIFICATIONS

1) this war is *not* about oil. as hien correctly points out, US oil would actually suffer from the subsequent drop in oil prices after a successful war (although oil engineering companies would benefit). oil is a factor for the larger general economy (think what $4/gallon would do for the US trucking industry, for the airlines, for produce prices in the grocery store). but there are much bigger factors. those factors are *national survival* and *collective security*. (which i will discuss below)
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/10/national/10TEXA.html
http://www.browndailyherald.com/stories.asp?storyID=503
http://www.movementsforsocialism.com/contents\not_war_oil.htm
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0301/S00170.htm

2) the reason we are attacking iraq now is *precisely* because they don't have nukes yet (although they do possess and have used chemical weapons). we can't attack North Korea without precipitating a potential nuclear conflict. in addition, saddam has a history dedicated to developing, proliferating, and using WMDs. we hope that others (north korea, iran) do not follow in that example. this war serves as a big warning to all others that might follow saddam's example.

3) just as there is no one cure for all illnesses, there is no one solution for every political problem. likewise, lack of consistency does not de-legitimate the rationale for action. (just as punishing one murderer among many, perhaps from inability to catch them, does not delegitimate that punishment.) there are many more cases which we will need to deal with. north korea is one. this action against iraq is only the second stage of war against a new world order of lawlessness perpetuated by terrorists and dictators that pursue WMD as a means to their ends.

4) biological and chemical weapons *are* very dangerous. especially to civilians. less deaths have occurred from anthrax or sarin gas versus car accidents or cancer or AIDS only because of the *degree* of deployment. only a few grams of anthrax were deployed in our last scare; saddam has created and reputed to still possess *thousands of tons* of anthrax. who knows if he has much more powerful smallpox or VX or other nerve agents as well that could be crop dusted over san francisco or NYC. would people improve their lives if they concentrated on personal discipline health and happiness? yes they would -- that is, if they were still alive after a conventional or nuclear or chemical or biological weapon attack.

II. WHY WAR?

1) Sovereignty

in the last decade, notions of sovereignty have changed to include some protection for human rights -- specifically, the right to *exist*. in fact, the definition of sovereignty itself has been a recent construction (treaty of westphalia in 1648). after international and UN inaction and subsequent genocide in rwanda, somalia, and kosovo, the concept of sovereignty has weakened to exclude an international responsibility to protect humans right to exist. that is, we can no longer turn a blind eye and use sovereignty or "playing God" as pretexts for inaction. as Michael Ignatieff (Carr Professor of Human Rights Practice, and Director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, JFK School of Government, Harvard University) asserts:

"The fact that states are both late and hypocritical in their adoption of human rights does not deprive them of the right to use force to defend them. The disagreeable reality for those who believe in human rights is that there are some occasions -- and Iraq may be one of them -- when war is the only real remedy for regimes that live by terror."

2) Collective Security

after 911, notions of collective security have also changed, challenging the ability and effectiveness of "containment". although it may be possible to contain *national* military power (as we did with the USSR), it is impossible to "contain" terrorist groups that seek to deploy WMD who are *non-territorial* and *suicidal*. to combat this new threat, it is *not enough* to seek out the terrorists (as it will be impossible to find them all); we must also seek out and destroy their potential sources of WMD.

3) National Survival

because the deployment of WMD are so catastrophic, we cannot afford to have *even one* used against us without a concomitant catastrophe. there were only 3000 killed on 911. a nuke or chemical weapon could kill millions. there is no room for probability or error here. and we cannot count on blind hope to allay the efforts of those sworn to destroy us. (even the american liberal establishment understands that.)

4) Saddam -- Why should we care?

saddam has a dedicated and self-stated history of developing, proliferating, and using WMD. he would be (and may already have been) a perfect source for terrorist groups to obtain WMD and other resources. although the international community has tried for 12 long years to disarm him, he has resolutely thwarted those efforts at every turn (we have not changed our principle demand to disarm, only our methods for making it happen). it is only a matter of time before he does possess nukes. as a matter of national survival, we cannot afford to let that happen. that is why we care. yes, there are others, and they will be next. this current war should be a big warning to all others that would follow his example. (jimmy is right -- let a bad kid get away with a little, and he and others will soon grow uncontrollable.)

5) Concerns and Consequences

there are many consequences of and considerations to military action, especially with little international or popular support -- the sliding definitions of sovereignty and collective security, the rebuilding and democratization of iraq, the polarization of the islamic world, the israel palestinian conflict.

[in fact, many assert that it is only with a demonization of "terrorist" activity as a viable political means, that the palestinian question may ever be concluded. that is, israel will never tolerate a state that has as its expressed aim, the destruction of the state of israel.]

we are not playing god here, nor are we free from guilt; then again this is not a war to decide who is more just/moral, it is a war for survival. i'd rather answer to an incensed international community whose motivations are the limitation of american power, than to an iraqi people repressed with brutal force.

and what is the alternative to war? -- a world of dictators free to develop and use WMD. *that* is a scary world. our alternative? as bill kristol asserted last night on charlie rose -- a strong america. also scary? perhaps. but i'll take that alternative any day.

yes, there are many dangers here, but also many opportunities.

III. A LITTLE SELF REFLECTION

1) East vs. West Coast Thinking?

i find it interesting that amabelle and her brother and brother-in-law (and some of my friends and relatives) on the west coast are so similar in their anti-war thinking. just as my family on the east coast (except for my sister who lives in paris and is largely against the war) are also so similar in our pro-war thinking.

despite other delineators like city/suburb/rural, education levels, or income brackets, all of which i think are not different here, i wonder if there is also an east coast / west coast sensibility that affects our rationalization for or against military action. my general impression of people who live on the west coast is that they are much more dedicated to having a full balanced life that they can enjoy, whereas east-coasters seem much more (and foolishly perhaps) resigned to sacrifice life enjoyment for more work. (which is why NYC people i find are often so one-dimensional and overly focused.) i know there are anti-war people on both coasts, i'm just wondering....

[coincidentally, just found this the next day in the paper:]
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/20/international/worldspecial/20WEST.html

2) Taking Security for Granted?

ever since my trip to asia, i've been trying to think of the many things that we take for granted, so that i can teach myself to appreciate them more. lately, i've been reminded of those thoughts reading Dune on my palm pilot when i'm riding or waiting for the bus and subway. as i read of their almost fanatical awareness to conserve water, i watch myself washing dishes and letting the water run, and it makes me think. growing up in america and with the 50 year pax americana, we have been so spoiled with security, that i wonder if we really understand what national or collective security even means. what would it have been like to live through the 30 year war before westphalia in 1648. or through WWII. or through the Khmer Rouge, or rwanda, or somalia, or kosovo or shanghai in the 1930s? do we even know what those people went through?

3) Emotional vs. Rational Thought

with all the talk of war, people have been so emotional on both sides of the issue. often, i think emotions generally become most visible when people care deeply about an issue (most powerfully from personal experience), but do not always have a delineated and cogent rational justification for their views. (thus the general warning not to discuss religion or politics.) the emotions come out from a frustration to rationally construct, defend, and convey that argument. so when i feel most emotional, i remind myself to examine my rational construct. is it valid? or am i just being emotional.

it is understandable to be emotional about issues about which we care deeply, but it is also important not to allow visceral reactions substitute for solid rational thought.

Rumsfeld Seeks Consensus Through Jousting

Rumsfeld Seeks Consensus Through Jousting
By THOM SHANKER and ERIC SCHMITT
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/19/politics/19PENT.html

WASHINGTON, March 18 — During a White House planning session with his top military advisers late last month, President Bush turned to Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, with a pressing question: How long would war with Iraq last?

But before General Myers could respond, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld put a hand on his arm and said, "Now, Dick, you don't want to answer that."

The exchange is recounted by senior officials at the White House and State Department, as well as the Pentagon, as a window into Mr. Rumsfeld's complicated management style — and, indeed, it presents a Rorschach test to separate Mr. Rumsfeld's detractors from his supporters.

Critics cite the meeting as evidence that Mr. Rumsfeld muzzles the military, as an effort by the defense secretary to prevent the nation's highest-ranking general from performing his lawful duty to give his best military thinking, unvarnished, to Mr. Bush.

Not at all, say senior Defense Department officials, who describe Mr. Rumsfeld as unwavering in his refusal to give specific answers to questions he regards as unanswerable — or at least to questions whose answers depend on as many variables as there are unknowns on the battlefield.

"When you're talking about war with Iraq, you don't want to overpromise or underperform, especially in front of the president," said one senior Pentagon official. "There are so many things we don't know. How can you give an answer?"

Usually it is Mr. Rumsfeld doing the asking — and poking and probing — to develop a war plan in a give-and-take-and-give-again process. General Myers is but one member of a Pentagon brain trust of about two dozen that Mr. Rumsfeld now convenes each workday morning to review war planning for Iraq and other global hot spots. If Mr. Bush orders the nation to war in the hours ahead, decisions reached by Mr. Rumsfeld and his brain trust after months of fierce debate will be weighed and tested on the battlefields of Iraq.

Senior officials acknowledge that their war plan accepts several risks: fielding far fewer ground troops than a decade ago to attack an Iraqi army that is much larger than — but vastly inferior to — the American force; putting faith in American advancements in surveillance and precision bombing to stun the Iraqi military and regime into submission; and counting on intelligence, highly trained Special Operations Forces and pinpoint bombing to pre-empt or mitigate Iraq's possible use of chemical or biological weapons against allied soldiers and civilians.

In reaching these consensus decisions, senior civilian and military officials who spend the most time with Mr. Rumsfeld have come to understand his management style, which is equal parts debating club and wrestling match.

These are the essential elements: Sometimes Mr. Rumsfeld states an extreme position, and other times he offers a plan he knows is just a 30 percent solution. "He takes a strong position for people to shoot at," said one senior official. "He welcomes the challenge to his assertions."

But those who challenge the secretary must be prepared for withering cross-examination in a style that some, especially military commanders who are used to a more respectful hearing, find so abrasive that one senior officer has dubbed it "the wire brush treatment."

Advocating a policy position to Mr. Rumsfeld "is death by a thousand questions," said another senior official. "He keeps people off guard. That's how he gets better work from them."

Or as Mr. Rumsfeld put it in an interview: "It's a process where everyone is learning and everyone is contributing. By the time you end up with a product, it's almost impossible to know who it came from or how it evolved."

The War Council

At 7 a.m., Mr. Rumsfeld convenes his wartime brain trust in a windowless, secure conference room on the Pentagon's third floor.

The group includes familiar faces, including the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz, the administration's chief hawk on Iraq, but also more anonymous but influential aides like Stephen A. Cambone, the new undersecretary for intelligence, who as Mr. Rumsfeld's roving bureaucratic commando is in his third senior Pentagon post in two years.

Senior Pentagon officials say the morning meetings, which started over a week ago, are brisk and succinct, circling the world in 30 or 40 minutes as the war council discusses overnight developments from the Iraqi front and other hot spots. If American troops go to war, the meetings will grow from six days a week to seven, and will be the first place each day where Pentagon leaders hash out developing strategy.

"What we have here is a reflection, too, that the problems we are wrestling with are multifaceted, involving all of the services, civilians as well as the military," Mr. Rumsfeld said. "It requires an approach that solicits and benefits from the kinds of senior brain power and varied experiences that exist in this building."

After the war council meeting, Mr. Rumsfeld and a handful of the senior-most advisers stay for a secure videoconference session with Gen. Tommy R. Franks, the commander who would lead allied forces against Iraq, or his deputies. These meetings bore in on issues from Iraqi missile movements to the positioning of American forces.

From these meetings, Mr. Rumsfeld and General Myers take their war brief to the White House for near-daily gatherings with Mr. Bush and his top advisers, including Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and the national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice.

The Military and the Civilians

Among the senior military officers on his war council, Mr. Rumsfeld relies most heavily on three men.

General Myers is a low-key former fighter pilot who flew combat missions in Vietnam. As the top military adviser to the secretary and the president, he meets or talks to Mr. Rumsfeld several times a day. While he troubleshoots the war plan, General Myers acts more as a conduit between combatant commanders worldwide and the civilian leadership in Washington.

Gen. Peter Pace, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs, commanded a Marine rifle platoon during Vietnam's vicious urban battle at Hue in 1968, and brings a ground commander's perspective to the table. He is pointman for pushing Mr. Rumsfeld's goal to transform the military to handle 21st-century conflicts.

Finally, General Franks, the head of the United States Central Command, is a lanky Army artillery officer who talks to Mr. Rumsfeld at least once a day, working out operational details of the war planning.

By most accounts, Mr. Rumsfeld got off to a rocky start in his second tour of duty at the Pentagon, a quarter-century after holding the same job under President Gerald Ford.

Many in the new Bush administration said that civilian control over the military eroded during the Clinton administration, and Mr. Rumsfeld set out to make clear who was boss. Early fights over budgets and revamping military strategy left senior brass feeling bruised and left out by what some officers said was Mr. Rumsfeld's autocratic style.

Today, the war plan for Iraq has been endorsed by the Joint Chiefs, and at least in the view of three- and four-star officers whose orbits most often intersect the defense secretary's, the Pentagon has gotten down to business.

Mr. Rumsfeld has alienated some senior officers, mostly those who have not figured out that the secretary, a former wrestler at Princeton, is constantly testing them. "He's aggressive, and if you're not aggressive right back, he'll roll right over you," said one senior officer.

General Pace tells associates how he unknowingly won an early personal test when he held his own with Mr. Rumsfeld. The defense secretary had stepped in close, physically crowding him during an early meeting — whether on purpose or subconsciously is anyone's guess — and General Pace did not flinch. They have had an excellent rapport ever since.

As senior commanders adjusted to Mr. Rumsfeld's style, they also grew accustomed to his demand that he be involved in war planning from the start. Mr. Rumsfeld, for instance, dismissed the initial concepts for an Iraq war plan that General Franks brought him; it looked too much like the 1991 gulf war, with a prolonged air campaign followed by a conventional ground attack. Mr. Rumsfeld asked if more could not be done with far fewer troops, and faster.

After months of review, the initial attacking force still numbers about 250,000 troops, about twice as large as many Rumsfeld aides originally thought was necessary — but only about 130,000 are ground troops. The plan now envisions a shorter, more intense air campaign, and a more simultaneous ground action that will attack from multiple fronts.

And even as the military has adjusted to Mr. Rumsfeld and his management style, so too has Mr. Rumsfeld recalibrated his thinking toward them.

"Rumsfeld actually has recognized that he has senior military folks around him with actual intellectual juice and who are willing and able to think outside the box," said one top-ranking military officer.

Mr. Rumsfeld has jousted not only with top military officers, but also with senior civilian appointees on the policy staff who arrived at the Pentagon with a far more ideological view of the world than the intensely conservative, but also immensely practical, defense secretary.

Most recently, as Turkey continued to rebuff requests for the right to fly attack missions from aircraft carriers in the eastern Mediterranean through Turkish airspace and into Iraq, some of the hardliners pushed for ordering the carrier-based warplanes to fly over Israel.

But Mr. Rumsfeld, backed by his senior military advisers, decided that bombing an Arab nation from a vector over the Jewish state was politically tone deaf, and risked further alienating large segments of the Islamic world.

The war council scratched the idea.

The Cheney Connection

Outside of his Pentagon advisers, Mr. Rumsfeld speaks regularly to Mr. Powell, Ms. Rice and George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence. He meets privately with Mr. Bush at least once a week, aides say. And they all get together on a near-daily basis now for National Security Council meetings.

Mr. Rumsfeld said he also consulted many outside experts, including Henry Kissinger, the former secretary of state, and James R. Schlesinger, the former secretary of defense.

But perhaps Mr. Rumsfeld's closest relationship outside the Pentagon war council is with his former protégé, Mr. Cheney. The two have known each other for more than 30 years, dating to the Nixon administration — when Mr. Rumsfeld hired Mr. Cheney — and they have both served before as White House chief of staff and as defense secretary.

"They're very, very close friends, and they trust each other's judgments," said one senior Defense Department official.

Mr. Cheney's experience leading the Pentagon during the 1991 gulf war gives him an unusual insight into the challenges Mr. Rumsfeld faces.

Mr. Rumsfeld said that just this past Friday, the vice president "told me about an anecdote from the gulf war that I raised today with some people, that had been considered but had not benefited from the particularized experience the vice president had." Mr. Rumsfeld declined to elaborate, but the war council is now examining the issue.

U.S. Mobile Labs Are Poised to Hunt Iraqi Arms

U.S. Mobile Labs Are Poised to Hunt Iraqi Arms
By JUDITH MILLER
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/19/international/middleeast/19WEAP.html

KUWAIT, March 18 — The Bush administration has deployed mobile labs and new specialized teams of intelligence officials and disarmament experts to Kuwait to help the military search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq as soon as war begins, according to senior administration officials.

Defense officials are also reaching out to former international weapons inspectors, as part of an ambitious top-secret effort to rapidly find, secure and ultimately destroy the caches of chemical, biological and other unconventional weapons the administration asserts President Saddam Hussein is hiding.

In recent interviews, officials described the plans as one of the most delicate and crucial missions of the war against Iraq. Never before, they said, had the United States proposed to disarm a nation of unconventional weapons by force.

The Pentagon has deployed several new tactical units called mobile exploitation teams, or MET's, with state-of-the-art equipment and novel tactics to locate and survey at least 130 and as many as 1,400 possible weapons sites.

In addition, officials said the military was planning to find and interview hundreds of Iraqi scientists who worked on germ, chemical or nuclear-related projects, and to seek their cooperation in disarming Iraq of the weapons that the United Nations required Mr. Hussein to destroy after the Persian Gulf war in 1991.

The administration has assigned top priority to the hunt for weapons of mass destruction, officials said. After months of relatively fruitless international inspections, the discovery of such arms, officials said, would vindicate the administration's decision to go to war to disarm Iraq. Conversely, failure to find them would leave the administration vulnerable to charges that it had started a war needlessly.

Administration officials are determined to find illegal weapons before Mr. Hussein can send them out of the country and perhaps sell them to other rogue nations or terrorist groups.

The American plans to eliminate illegal Iraqi arms were drawn up independently of United Nations weapons inspections and reflect the Bush administration's belief that those inspections would never succeed in disarming Iraq in the face of Mr. Hussein's resistance. The inspectors withdrew from Iraq today after Secretary General Kofi Annan ordered their evacuation.

Maj. Gen. James A. Marks, a senior Army intelligence officer in the Iraq operation who helped draft overall plans for the hunt for unconventional weapons, said the mission was challenging because Mr. Hussein has had more than a decade to find ways of hiding them.

"He's the master of where's the pea," General Marks said.

Senior national security aides approved the concept of the mission at a White House meeting almost two months ago and put the Pentagon in charge of it. Two mobile labs that can analyze chemical and biological samples in less than 24 hours with 90 percent confidence were recently sent to Kuwait.

The Defense Department has assembled teams of highly trained disarmament and technical experts from several different Pentagon offices — organized in the mobile exploitation teams — who will accompany troops with a special mandate to hunt for unconventional weapons.

On the teams are small units of intelligence analysts and technical and security experts, whose goal is to locate sites, take samples and interview Iraqi scientists who have had central roles in Iraq's weapons programs.

In the last two weeks, the Pentagon has made contact with several former international inspectors who worked for the now-extinct United Nations Special Commission, or Unscom, which conducted inspections in Iraq from 1991 through December 1998. Administration officials are asking them to join the specialized Pentagon teams and help the military spot hidden storage and production sites, collect documents about the programs and identify and interview crucial Iraqi scientists as well as military and security officials who might know where such weapons have been made or may be stored.

The Pentagon's Defense Threat Reduction Agency, which is charged with carrying out the military's plans for its weapons hunt, has printed some 9,000 booklets to help front-line troops identify suspect facilities and dangerous chemicals, germs and other materials.

The booklets, small enough to be tucked away in a soldier's pocket and printed on sturdy waterproof paper, also instruct soldiers about how to handle such dangerous material, and outline proper procedures for isolating and securing such sites.

Administration officials said there were still no precise estimates of the mission's scope or how much it would ultimately cost.

"We are doing the most careful planning we can in light of the large number of unknowns," said Douglas J. Feith, under secretary of defense for policy. "People who are demanding precision now are being unrealistic."

Defense Department officials describe the effort as unique. The plans draw upon lessons learned from the war against terrorism in Afghanistan, where for example, a mobile lab was first deployed at some 60 sites. But the officials say they have never before undertaken such an ambitious "search and destroy" mission for unconventional weapons.

"We're going to hit some dry holes; they know we're coming," said Lisa Bronson, assistant secretary of defense for international security policy, whose office is overseeing the project.

The plans, officials stressed, are still evolving. Defense officials said they were told only in December to draw up plans to "rapidly disable" unconventional weapons production and storage sites. And the Defense Threat Reduction Agency was officially charged with responsibility for carrying out the mission only about two weeks ago.

The White House and defense planners decided less than three weeks ago that it could be useful to include former international arms inspectors on the military teams. A formal decision to do so has still not been made. But five inspectors, all of whom asked not to be identified, said they were asked about joining the mission within the last 10 days. A few of them said they were still trying to get their employers' permission to join the mission.

Though the White House officially blessed the outlines of the mission about eight weeks ago, planning for the hunt began at the Pentagon last July, officials said. In August, the Pentagon-operated National Defense University in Washington held a secret meeting to consider how best to go about disarming Iraq. In September, former inspectors of the old Unscom met with officials from several Pentagon offices, including the Central Command in Tampa, Fla., to discuss the lessons learned from the inspectors' eight-year effort to disarm Iraq of unconventional weapons.

Senior officials said the disarmament teams included veterans of the Cooperative Threat Reduction programs that worked to disarm former Soviet germ, chemical and nuclear weapons facilities. Other experts have investigated Iraqi weapons programs as intelligence analysts for a decade. Others are seasoned chemists, biologists and other experts experienced in sampling and modern lab techniques. Still others are linguists and students of Iraqi and Arab culture.

"You can't send amateurs to do this job," an official said.

Tension persists, however, between the Central Intelligence Agency and the Pentagon over how intelligence and technical experts should be used. The Pentagon has been given the lead in hunting for Iraqi weapons, but C.I.A. experts will not be included in the mobile exploitation teams, officials said, and will have a separate effort.

White House and Pentagon policy planners say disarming Iraq will involve four basic stages, the first two while the fighting is still under way. At first, sites, documents and scientists will be quickly assessed for information that can protect troops and civilians. The second stage will focus on securing and disabling weapons sites.

The third and fourth stages will prepare sites for destruction or long-term monitoring.

Divided Democrats Concerned About 2004

Divided Democrats Concerned About 2004
By ADAM NAGOURNEY
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/19/politics/19DEMS.html

WASHINGTON, March 18 — With rising intensity and emotion, the Democratic Party finds itself divided over war in Iraq. The turmoil in the party — and the rising voices of the antiwar wing — are shaping the nation's view of the Democrats as they approach a national election that could turn on the question of the country's security, party leaders said.

Officials in both parties say the image of high-profile Democrats challenging President Bush's war policy right up through his address to the nation on Monday — and, in fact, beyond the speech, as was clear here today — could reinforce a perception that Republicans are better suited to deal with threats from abroad.

Should that happen, Democrats say, it could pose a serious obstacle for the party if the White House and Congressional contests in 2004 — unlike the contests of 1992, 1996 and 2000 — are fought out on issues of national security and foreign policy.

The discord is apparent in every corner of the Democratic Party: on Capitol Hill, among presidential candidates divided over whether it is appropriate even to criticize Mr. Bush's Iraq policy with the nation almost at war, and at gatherings like a Democratic Party convention in California last weekend, where two White House candidates were booed for their pro-war stands.

Polls show that rank-and-file Democrats are much more likely than the nation at large to oppose an invasion of Iraq, particularly without the consent of the United Nations. Many middle-level Democratic officials, not facing the pressure the party's presidential contenders have to take a stand immediately, are hedging their bets, in part because of the memory of the embarrassment of Democrats who opposed what turned out to be the successful invasion of Iraq by Mr. Bush's father in 1991.

Perhaps the most striking rift has been between the two power centers of the Democratic Party: its Congressional leaders in Washington and some of its best-known presidential candidates.

Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the House Democratic leader, and Senator Tom Daschle of South Dakota, the Senate Democratic leader, criticized Mr. Bush's war policies right until Mr. Bush began his White House speech, reflecting the sentiment of many in their party caucuses. By contrast, four of the major presidential candidates, aware that the electorate that will vote in next year's general presidential election is much more in favor of the war than Democrats, voiced support for removing Mr. Hussein from office, even as they questioned Mr. Bush's diplomatic skills.

Democratic leaders said the divisions were emblematic of a party that has always fought its battles in public, and of an issue — war and peace — that has starkly divided Republicans and Democrats since the Vietnam War. Party officials, recalling that President Bush's father lost re-election after waging a successful and popular war against Iraq in 1991, said they remained hopeful that a second Iraq war would also be eclipsed by worries about the economy, and noted that polls showed unhappiness with Mr. Bush's management of it.

Even so, many analysts said the unfolding global turmoil means that foreign affairs could be as central to the 2004 elections as in any presidential race since 1980, when hostages were being held in Teheran and the Soviet Union rattled the West with its invasion of Afghanistan. Several suggested that should the war turn out well for Mr. Bush, he could undercut the Democrats' national security credentials next year. In 2002, Mr. Bush campaigned for a Republican Congress by focusing on Democratic opposition to aspects of legislation creating a domestic security agency.

"I don't think given the instability in the world today that the American people will elect a Democrat as president unless they trust a party on foreign affairs and defense issues," said Howard Wolfson, who was executive director of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in 2002, when Democrats lost six seats, an outcome that many Democrats attributed to Mr. Bush's success in focusing on national security.

Mr. Wolfson recalled that his committee's polls charted rapid drops in public support for Democrats when the debate on the Iraq resolution began last fall. "This is a threshold issue," he said. "It's possible that it goes away, but I wouldn't bet on it."

Most Democratic presidential contenders said they would refrain from criticizing Mr. Bush while troops were heading into battle. But Howard Dean, a former governor of Vermont who is running as an antiwar candidate declared he would continue his attacks, war or no war.

Dr. Dean's position prompted concern among aides to his rivals, who suggested today that it was playing into the White House's hands. "If Howard Dean didn't exist, Karl Rove would have to invent him," said a senior adviser to one of Mr. Dean's rivals, in a reference to Mr. Bush's senior political adviser.

One of the Democratic candidates who was booed in California last week, Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, said today: "In the first few days, America needs to band together and be supportive of the troops. This is not going to take very long, and if Howard — I think anybody who knows anything about this knows there will be plenty of time to be critical."

Though worried, some Democratic leaders predicted that the potential war with Iraq would ultimately have little effect on the outcome of Mr. Bush's re-election campaign.

"Let's remember that this war — if there is a war — is likely to be a distant memory by November of 2004," Gov. Gray Davis of California said.

"The dominant concern will be the economy and what has happened to individual Americans," he said.

Ms. Pelosi said she did not believe Mr. Bush could successfully use the issue against her party. "They try to convey that image of the Democrats as weak on defense," she said. "I don't think we should take that. There is no party position on the war, much to the dismay of our grass-roots constituents."

Still, in a poll conducted for The Los Angeles Times in December, Americans by nearly 2 to 1 said Republicans would do a better job handling national security and the fight against terrorism.

"The party is more of a party that tends to look for diplomatic solutions before military solutions," said Bob Kerrey, a former Nebraska senator and Vietnam veteran who ran for president in 1992. "It's not the image — it's what the party is."

At least three of the major Democratic presidential contenders — Mr. Kerry and Senators Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut and John Edwards of North Carolina — view security as a crucial issue next year. Mr. Kerry gave a speech today outlining measures that he said should be taken to protect Americans from terrorism.

That such opinions exist in the Democratic Party is testimony to how much it has changed since Bill Clinton led it back to power in 1992. He encouraged the rise of a moderate wing that resisted the image of Democrats as weak on defense.

The four Democratic presidential contenders who support removing Mr. Hussein from power — Representative Richard A. Gephardt of Missouri and Senators Kerry, Edwards and Lieberman — all have ties to the Democratic Leadership Council, the group that helped propel Mr. Clinton's rise to national power.

Bill Kristol, Keeping Iraq in the Cross Hairs

Bill Kristol, Keeping Iraq in the Cross Hairs
By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, March 18, 2003; Page C01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A43043-2003Mar17.html

Moments after the Persian Gulf War was halted, Bill Kristol got a call from columnist Charles Krauthammer, and both were fuming over what they saw as unfinished business.

"I was one of those who thought we should have finished off Saddam at the end of the war," Kristol recalls. "We both agreed this was a big mistake."

As Vice President Dan Quayle's chief of staff, Kristol had little influence over administration policy. But over the next dozen years, in various incarnations and guises, he would mount a political, journalistic and intellectual campaign to push the government closer to the goal of regime change in Iraq.

Kristol's magazine, the Weekly Standard, has been loudly beating the war drums. He has launched a hawkish think tank that churns out petitions backed by big-name scholars and former officials. He presses his case privately with the likes of national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, and publicly on Fox News Channel. He teaches at Harvard, speaks to such groups as the World Affairs Council in San Francisco. And he's co-authored a new book called "The War Over Iraq."

"You have this intellectual trickle-down effect," says Gary Schmitt, who runs the Project for the New American Century, which Kristol chairs. Indeed, Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen once dubbed the looming conflict "Kristol's War."

If so, he has plenty of allies. Kristol, 50, is part of an informal neoconservative network, ranging from Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz to former Pentagon official Richard Perle, that has been pushing for a more muscular approach against dictators like Hussein.

"It's been an example of opinion leadership -- formulating ideas in a way that would eventually connect with a much broader audience," Perle says. Kristol "filled a vacuum" in the 1990s, says Perle, when Republicans "weren't terribly interested in foreign and defense policy."

Not everyone is enamored of Kristol's role. "This is a Svengali," says Ian Lustick, a political science professor at the University of Pennsylvania. "He and his comrades are operating a cabal. . . . They're willing to whip up passions and fear because they're so certain they must utilize this window for the war."

Part journalist, part GOP strategist, Kristol plays all the angles. The seven-year-old Standard, financed by Rupert Murdoch, is a money-losing venture with a modest circulation of 60,000. But with Kristol as editor, it has achieved an outsize degree of influence, especially since closing ranks behind President Bush's war on terrorism.

As Kristol declared in an editorial last week: "We look forward to the liberation of our own country and others from the threat of Saddam's weapons of mass destruction, and to the liberation of the Iraqi people from a brutal and sadistic tyrant."

"Prior to September 11," says Fred Barnes, the magazine's executive editor, "Iraq was an issue that an awful lot of people in politics and journalism forgot. The Weekly Standard did not."

A champion of John McCain during the 2000 primaries, Kristol has incurred the wrath of both Vice President Cheney and Secretary of State Colin Powell.

"It's more of a marriage of convenience," says a White House official who insisted on anonymity. "People appreciate what he's doing. But there's still hesitation and trepidation about where Bill would stand if our interests weren't mutual."

Barnes echoes this assessment: "You know how the Bush family is -- they have long memories and bear deep grudges."

Still, Kristol remains well wired. He meets periodically with Rice, whom he first courted at Stanford University when she was provost there. Kristol, Krauthammer and a few other conservative commentators huddle privately with Karl Rove in the political czar's White House office every three months.

Kristol is close to Pete Wehner, a Rove deputy whom Kristol hired in 1985 when he was working for President Reagan's education secretary, William Bennett. Two Bush speechwriters, Matthew Scully and John McConnell, worked for Kristol as Quayle speechwriters.

The normally affable Kristol gets riled when critics suggest that he, Perle and Wolfowitz, among others, are somehow pushing war with Iraq to help Israel.

That charge "really is just about the fact we are Jewish," Kristol says. He dismisses the claim "that neoconservatives, which really means Jews, hijacked the Bush administration. It's a little creepy."

As the son of two prominent New York scholars, Irving Kristol and Gertrude Himmelfarb, the McLean resident has had his greatest impact in the world of ideas. When he founded the Standard in 1995, Kristol hired Robert Kagan, a former Reagan administration official, as a contributing editor, and they churned out editorials supporting President Clinton's stance on Bosnia. The following year the duo wrote an influential piece for the journal Foreign Affairs that called the Democrats weak on foreign policy and chided the Republicans as too isolationist.

"In the realm of foreign policy," they began, "conservatives are adrift."

The two became "the main proponents of what you might call the American greatness school," Krauthammer says, and they took their share of heat. The New Republic, for example, argued that "this sanctimonious preening is a recipe for endless and reckless intervention everywhere." But Kristol kept up the drumbeat, with a 1997 cover story in the Standard headlined: "Saddam Must Go."

"He has a certain fearlessness," says Kagan, now with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "We spent the '90s attacking Republicans, mostly. That's not an easy thing for the editor of a conservative magazine to do, and it brought quite a lot of hostility from official Republican circles."

Out of power and out of step with many in his own party, Kristol launched the New American Century group, financed by conservative foundations, which in effect organized a hawkish cabinet in exile.

In 1998, the organization sent a petition to President Clinton that called his Iraq policy "dangerously inadequate" and said America's goal must be "removing Saddam Hussein and his regime from power." It was signed not just by Perle and Bennett but by Donald Rumsfeld, Elliott Abrams, John Bolton, Wolfowitz, Paula Dobriansky and Robert Zoellick -- all of whom would assume senior posts in the Bush administration.

Kristol became a major booster of McCain's presidential bid, drawn by the senator's strong support for intervening in Kosovo. "I've spent a lot of time with him over the years discussing the issues, and he's helped inform me," McCain says. But he says that Republicans haven't always appreciated Kristol's candor.

"There's a certain demand for uniformity, particularly on the right, that in my view is distasteful -- that anyone who disagrees is unfortunately branded an enemy."

Friends say Kristol has a knack for sounding reasonable, even while pushing war. "He knows how to operate behind enemy lines, in a generally liberal-dominated media world," says Marshall Wittmann, a former Christian Coalition official.

In the early months of the Bush administration, Kristol, who had already ticked off such GOP stalwarts as Newt Gingrich and Bob Dole, became something of a pariah at the White House. When Bush apologized to win the release of a U.S. flight crew detained by China, Kristol and Kagan wrote that the president had caused a "profound national humiliation."

"One of the more disreputable commentaries I've seen in a long time," said Cheney, accusing Kristol of trying to "sell magazines." Powell called the piece "absurd."

The political climate -- and Kristol's role -- changed dramatically after Sept. 11. As Bush declared war on al Qaeda and began targeting Iraq, the Standard moved into cheerleading mode. Kristol signed with Fox after being dropped as a panelist by ABC's "This Week," doggedly defending Bush on Murdoch's network.

Over the years, he says, "we were making what was then a pretty unpopular case for a foreign policy that now resembles the Bush foreign policy, post-9/11."

With U.S. forces on the verge of bombing Baghdad, this would seem to be Kristol's moment. But he insists he's just one voice among many.

"If we've had some influence, I'm happy with that influence. Everything I do is out in the open. I'm not one of the more shadowy figures in Washington."

Hong Kong Working to Grasp Scope of Mysterious Ailment

Hong Kong Working to Grasp Scope of Mysterious Ailment
By KEITH BRADSHER
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/18/health/18CND-HONG.html

HONG KONG, March 18 — Government health officials said here today that a small but unknown number of carriers of a mysterious kind of pneumonia were somewhere in this city, but they added that the moderate rate of new infections around the world suggested that the disease was not as contagious as initially feared.

The official acknowledgment that the problem extended beyond people already in isolation wards at hospitals came as local doctors have been increasingly critical of the government. Many doctors have been calling for the government to do more to warn residents of the dangers posed by what the World Health Organization has labeled Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, or SARS.

Dr. Leung Ka-lau, the president of the Hong Kong Public Doctors' Association, said in an interview today that in repeatedly playing down the gravity of the problem, the government was going too far in seeking to preserve Hong Kong's image as an attractive tourist destination.

"They have to balance the health of the public and the economy and image of Hong Kong," Dr. Leung said. "From the health point of view, I would tend to alert the public more."

Dr. Yeoh Eng-kiong, Hong Kong's secretary of health, welfare and food, defended the accuracy of the government's tallies of SARS victims, which Dr. Leung and other doctors here described as not including dozens of cases of atypical pneumonia that might well be SARS.

"We have not left out any cases because we want to cover up anything," Dr. Yeoh asserted today. Rather, the government has been concerned that the World Health Organization's definition of SARS is overly broad, he explained, adding that it has followed the advice of its own panel of local doctors in categorizing cases.

Professor K.Y. Yuen, a microbiologist at Hong Kong University, said at the same news conference that the disease did not appear to spread as easily through the air as influenza. Taking a position that American and European doctors are starting to adopt as well, Professor Yuen said that it appeared that the disease was transmitted when healthy people came in contact with fairly sizable droplets from an infected person, especially during medical procedures, and not through casual contact.

The government here also set up an Internet site today to provide the public with information about the outbreak, and has encouraged people to avoid crowded places with poor ventilation. But it has not taken other steps suggested by local doctors, like urging employers to provide sick leave to workers at the first hint of illness or quarantining Prince of Wales Hospital, where most of the cases have occurred.

Two more hospitals reported clusters of cases today, bringing the total to six. The appearance of new cases shows that not everyone with the disease has been found, Dr. Yeoh admitted.

By contrast, Dr. Yeoh said over the weekend and on Monday that increases in the official tally of cases here were occurring almost entirely among people already in the hospital with pneumonia who were being reclassified as having SARS.

Dr. William Ho, the chief executive of the Hong Kong Hospital Authority, said today that the tally of confirmed cases had risen since Monday by 28, to 111, while 12 more people are hospitalized and are strongly suspected of having the disease as well.

Dr. Leung, a surgeon at Prince of Wales Hospital, said doctors there were nervous that they might yet fall ill. He noted that it took two to seven days for symptoms to present themselves after infection. Some seemingly healthy doctors with families have moved into temporary housing to reduce the risk of infecting spouses and children, but Dr. Leung said that he lives alone and still goes home every day.

"Maybe we are clean or maybe we are in the incubation period," Dr. Leung said. "What we are waiting for is for the incubation period to expire."

Margaret Ng, a Legislative Council member who represents the legal community and has been a fierce critic of the government's move to impose strict internal security laws, said that she did not believe that information was being actively concealed from the public.

"I don't feel that they are really hiding anything, but I get the feeling they don't have the measure of it yet," she said.

A Trip to the Heart of Dim Sum

A Trip to the Heart of Dim Sum
By R. W. APPLE Jr.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/19/dining/19HONG.html

HONG KONG -- ELEVEN o'clock Sunday morning, in the 25th-floor kitchen of the Mandarin Oriental hotel's Cantonese restaurant, Man Wah. Kong Tseuk Tong, 47, dressed in the white tunic and checked trousers worn by chefs around the world, stands at an immaculate stainless-steel counter, ready to work his magic. His assistants wait at a respectful distance.

Like a cabinetmaker or a glass blower, he is a skilled craftsman, the product of years of exacting training. Dim sum is his craft, and in Hong Kong Sunday lunch is show time for the dim sum master. It is then that families rich and poor — children, grannies and all — gather to drink tea, discuss the week's events and eat the savories made by Mr. Kong and others like him.

Of course, North Americans and Europeans also like dim sum, which literally means "touch of the heart." Australians like it, too, although they call it yum cha, which means "drink tea." Restaurants like Yank Sing in San Francisco and Sun Sui Wah in Vancouver and especially Lai Wah Heen in Toronto (where in season you will find delicately sweet pea-sprout dumplings) serve dim sum worthy of any gourmand's palate.

But Hong Kong, which has about 10,000 places to eat, probably more per capita than any other city, is utterly obsessed with dim sum, and no place else comes close to offering dim sum of equal excellence and variety. This is dim sum nirvana.

Some people eat it every day. If few can afford to eat the meticulously hand crafted creations of Mr. Kong, and in a setting as ritzy as the Mandarin, nobody need go without. There is a dim sum parlor to fit every pocketbook, and at the biggest, noisiest and most frenetic of them people wait in line for up to an hour for their dose of char siu bao (fluffy white buns stuffed with barbecued pork) and har gau (translucent little purse-shaped dumplings filled with chopped shrimp and bamboo shoots).

"There are hundreds of kinds of dim sum, and new ones are developed every week," said Henry Ho, the Man Wah's courtly manager, who started there as a bus boy in 1969. "Ours are a bit fresher than most, made to order from the best ingredients we can find, but the same rules apply here that apply everywhere else: take char siu bao and har gau off the menu this Sunday, and next Sunday you won't have any customers."

The best chefs apply special touches to the classics. I watched Mr. Kong, a stocky, powerfully built man with corded forearms and asbestos hands, apply his.

First he mixed rice flour, a bit of potato starch and boiling water in a small metal bowl — "must be boiling," he explained, "or the pastry won't be clear." He turned out the resulting dough on the counter, kneaded it for a minute or so and added a bit of carrot juice before plopping the dough back into the bowl. "Carrot juice?" I asked. "Wait and see," he answered.

Next he nipped out a bit of dough, flattened it into a circle with a single blow from the side of his cleaver, and dropped a tiny lump of premixed filling (shrimp, bamboo shoots, pork fat and coriander leaves, all chopped finely) into its center. Holding the nascent dumpling in his left hand and pushing up its sides until he had a cup shape, he repeatedly pinched the top with his right to close it, moving so fast that I could scarcely follow what he was doing. A final shaping on a wooden board, and he was nearly done.

But not quite. He cooked a mixture of flour and beet juice on a propane stove, made a tiny pastry tube from kitchen parchment and used it to apply two red dots to the golden dumpling. Then he set the finished item in front of me. "Goldfish har gao," he said, laughing. Of course. With red eyes.

The whole process had taken about four minutes, and it took four more to steam the "fish," along with three others, in a bamboo basket. When it came to the table, it looked astonishingly realistic, its tail and fins wobbling slightly when the steamer was opened, as if it were swimming languidly in a pond. The bright green of the coriander and the pink of the shrimp were on display beneath the thin pastry "skin," exactly as Mr. Kong had promised.

MY wife, Betsey, and I sampled several other dim sum specialties at the Man Wah, including siu mai (a pork dumpling), topped unusually with a quarter-size slice of abalone and crab roe; a miraculously crisp deep-fried mango and seafood roll; and an ethereal coconut tart. There were 28 choices on the menu, which changes every three months, and that only scratches the surface of Mr. Kong's repertory. He told me he can make 15 kinds of pastry, European as well as Asian, and like many dim sum chefs he is adept at baking, pan-frying, deep-frying and steaming both sweet and savory dishes.

Man Wah's choice of teas was equally impressive, including oolongs like Ti Kwan Yin, a fruity green brew from Fujian Province, on the southeast coast; flower-flavored teas like rose, chrysanthemum and jasmine, which is the most popular; mild, yellowish Silver Needle, a "white" tea made from unopened buds; and my favorite, Pu-Er, a potent, earthy fermented tea from Yunnan Province, not far from the Burmese border. All are served with sober ceremony.

Such refinement is a long way from the origins of dim sum. The Cantonese teahouses of centuries ago were boisterous places, where a man came to eat, argue and sometimes bet that his caged bird could outsing the one owned by the nobody at the next table. Like pubs in England and cafes in France, they flourished in part because only the very wealthy had houses or apartments big enough to receive friends.

Originally, the morsels on a Hong Kong dim sum menu were almost all Cantonese in origin. But as John J. Clancey, an American former priest who has lived in Hong Kong for many years and is married to a Chinese woman, explained to me over drinks one evening, the Cantonese are great assimilators. Salty Hunan ham, served with honey inside a hinge of soft white bread, is often encountered in local teahouses these days. Pot stickers, a dim sum standby, originated in Beijing, in the far-off north. Soup dumplings, like the impeccably juicy ones served at Xiao Nan Guo on Des Voeux Road in Hong Kong, migrated south from Shanghai.

And custard tarts, like the marvelous version served at Victoria City Seafood in central Hong Kong (more about it later), combine flaky European pastry with a smooth and creamy Chinese filling.

But the Cantonese are also keen businesspeople, and sometimes they cut corners, even in the most traditional of places, like the Luk Yu Teahouse. Wealthy men, leaving their Rolls-Royces and BMW's in Stanley Street in the care of their drivers, idle there for hours every morning. One of the teak booths is often occupied by a chic woman who consumes newspapers and cigarettes just as avidly as tea and dim sum.

The ceiling fans, the brass spittoons and the grumpy waitresses with tin trays slung around their necks have changed little in 50 years.

I joined William Mark Yiu-Tong at Luk Yu at 8 o'clock one morning, and I got an earful. A noted dim sum connoisseur, he drew diagrams of proper dim sum techniques on the tablecloth with a chopstick dipped in soy sauce, and he complained.

Complained that once-mandatory three-year apprenticeships are disappearing, that chefs are no longer willing to come to work at 3 or 4 a.m. to prepare dim sum for breakfast, that craftsmanship is giving way to machines and that "half the dim sum in Hong Kong is made across the border in Shenzhen," an hour away, and hauled in by refrigerated trucks.

"The quick-buck mentality," he said, tugging his Charlie Chan goatee and adjusting his red cardigan. "These are delicacies. They must be delicate."

Relenting a bit, Mr. Mark, who goes to the Luk Yu six mornings a week, praised the house's spring rolls — "obviously handmade and hand-filled," he said, "because the pastry is slightly uneven." They shattered satisfyingly when cut in two. But he was less generous about the har gau, although the skin was nicely translucent: "They've used sodium bicarbonate on the shrimp as a tenderizer," he said, "and look here, there are only nine pleats, when there should be at least 10."

Because I was sitting with Mr. Mark, I was shielded from the Luk Yu's notorious indifference (some would call it hostility) to foreigners. Immediately after World War II, the owners put up a sign saying, "We are licensed to serve Chinese only," which was patently untrue. But then even the Chinese can have bad moments in Stanley Street. Harry Lam, a local millionaire, was gunned down last Nov. 30 by a hit man, apparently from the mainland, as he finished his tea.

Dim sum is not expensive. At the plainer places, simple dishes like steamed chicken feet, popular with the locals but not, I confess, with me, cost only $2. Even in the dining rooms of the grand hotels, like the Mandarin, the Kowloon Shangri-La and the Peninsula, which serve dim sum only at lunchtime and in some cases only on weekends, a portion of something comparatively recherché like bird's nest dumplings or marinated goose costs only $8.50.

For the basic no-frills experience, the help of a Cantonese speaker is required, because no English is spoken in most of the bare-bones spots. We were lucky to have the company of Susan Macnaughton, a Scottish lawyer, and her Hong Kong-born assistant, Katherine Cheung, on our visit to Chiu Chow Garden, a great barn of a place, with geese hanging behind a plate glass window, near the main Wing On Department Store.

Ms. Cheung showed us how to say thank you over the din caused by clashing plates and bellowing waitresses: simply tap two fingers on the table. I have heard a half-dozen explanations of this gesture, mostly relating it in some obscure way to the old custom of kowtowing to the emperor. She ordered lovely daffodil tea, and taught us how to slide the lid of the pot to the side when we wanted a refill. And she helped us to suss out what was being offered on each of the carts careering noisily around the room, identified (but not for us) by white plastic signs on the front.

Our visit came right before the Chinese New Year — red banners and lanterns wishing everyone good luck in the Year of the Goat were up all over town — and one of the things we ate were turnip squares, traditionally associated with the holidays because they could be made from staples when the shops were closed. Actually, they contain no turnips, but rather shredded daikon radish combined with cured pork, dried shrimp and chopped coriander, shaped into a flat cake, steamed and fried. Slightly sweet, slightly bitter, they are addictive. I could have eaten a dozen.

BUT there were other carts to pillage — shark's fin dumpling ("only one fishy bite in there," Ms. Cheung said; "it costs too much"), crunchy taro puffs, a meatball subtly flavored with dried citrus peel and an absolutely fabulous, if daunting-sounding, dish of beef lungs, tripe and liver, steamed in a broth rich with star anise. Fabulous for an innards-lover like me, that is, but not for the women. Ms. Macnaughton announced that she had a culinary rule, "nothing above the neck or below the waist," and the others passed, too.

Even Ms. Cheung could not completely solve the day's mystery. It centered on a scrumptious bunch of greens that a waitress plunged into the vat of boiling stock on her cart, trimmed with scissors and dressed with a light, gingery sauce. The sign identified it only as "green vegetable"; it was obviously a member of the cabbage family, but there are 200 Chinese brassicas, many with no English names. Questions were asked, heads were scratched, a name was finally proffered — "wong tai choy," literally "king vegetable." No help.

We found dim sum everywhere, even Oz dim sum, at a place called Oscar's Australian, which we didn't try. Also a couple of dozen first-rate vegetarian dim sum at a sweet little place with marble-top tables near the Happy Valley race track called, with negligible originality, Dim Sum. For us, Dim Sum's best dim sum weren't vegetarian at all. No, we voted for the good old pot stickers, made here with bits of pork, chives and carrots, unusually spicy for Hong Kong, crisp and caramelized on the outside, served with a zippy vinegar-based sauce. Two less familiar offerings were our runners-up — cha siu so, pork in pastry cases, almost as eggy as challah, studded with sunflower seeds, was one; shrimp dumplings with sweet chili sauce the other.

Maxim's Palace, in the City Hall, with windows looking across the harbor to the ships docked at the Kowloon piers, is just as big as Chiu Chow Gardens (more than 100 tables), but much snappier. Head waitresses in yellow jackets and long black skirts split to the thigh patrolled the room beneath three enormous crystal chandeliers. They (and most of their customers) chattered constantly into their cellphones. Starched white cloths covered the tables and, wonder of Chinese wonders, there was a no-smoking section.

Here, too, service was from carts, but communication was much easier. Succulent, chewy bits of veal in a sauce liberally laced with black pepper reminded Betsey of the grillades served with grits in New Orleans. I liked the crisp scallion pancakes. We both scarfed down the spring rolls, filled with shredded chicken, which looked as if they had been made from antique vellum, and something we had not encountered before — cheung fun, which are rolls of steamed rice paste, about six inches long, filled in this case with shrimp and yellow Chinese chives, but sometimes with barbecued pork or with beef. As with many dim sum, the taste of the rolls had an agreeable suggestion of sweetness .

The tea, boiling hot and almost too astringent, played a key balancing role, cutting through the richness of many of the things we ate.

Victoria City Seafood, atop the Citic Tower a block or so away, serves what many, including the writer Nina Simonds, consider Hong Kong's premier dim sum. Who am I to argue, after the lunchtime banquet they served the two of us?

It included steamed crab coral dumplings, chock full of rich, smoky, highly perfumed juice and the intense flavor of mud crab; small, roundish Shanghai minced meat pies, pavéed with sesame seeds as a ring is pavéed with diamonds, giving them a fine crunch; vegetable dumplings, as sheer as a stocking, filled with Chinese parsley, perilla and carrots; and a miniature packet of glutinous rice with bites of chicken, ham and wood-ear mushrooms, all wrapped in a lotus leaf.

We drank wine, not tea, which was a sacrilege, I suppose, but the temptation was great. A reserve wine vault was filled with magnums and jeroboams of first-growth claret, and I couldn't resist a fine Coldstream Hills pinot noir from Australia.

When the unctuous mango pudding with coconut sauce came out, I surrendered. Even my mother's banana pudding, one of my favorite childhood sweets, couldn't hold a candle to it. But then she had no mangoes.

Good Morning, New York

Good Morning, New York: Eggs Over Easy, Business on the Side
By FLORENCE FABRICANT
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/19/dining/19BREA.html

IT could have been lunch. Although nearly every table at Michael's restaurant in Midtown was occupied, it was only 8:45 a.m. And in the private garden room, there was a party of 30 corporate technical officers.

"I dropped in to meet someone for breakfast," said Sue Huffman, a founder of the Television Food Network who was eating at Michael's on a weekday morning last week. "They asked if I had a reservation. For breakfast! I was stunned. They managed to fit us in."

New York City's hotel restaurants have always served breakfast — they have to. And many restaurants capitalize on weekend brunches. But all over the city, in restaurants that are better known for lunch or dinner, breakfast is becoming increasingly important. Breakfast is now on the menu at Balthazar, Otto, @SQC and the Brasserie, among others. And chefs like David Page at Home, Geoffrey Zakarian at Town and Terrance Brennan at Terrance Brennan's Seafood and Chop House are lavishing the attention on breakfast usually reserved for lunch or dinner.

The simplest explanation is economic. Restaurants can fill tables that would otherwise be empty. "I'm paying rent around the clock, so why not take advantage of it," Scott Campbell, the chef and owner of @SQC on the Upper West Side, said.

For the business customer, economics is a factor, too. A meeting over breakfast costs the host about one-third the price of a business lunch. Breakfasts in restaurants also tend to be less expensive than at fancy hotels.

When Mr. Campbell opened @SQC last year, he served only breakfast for the first 10 days. "It was the easiest way to get the place going, to fine-tune it," he said. "Besides, breakfast has changed, especially in this neighborhood. People are no longer tied to offices, they're working — or not working — at home, and this is a better option than meeting someone at Starbucks."

Mr. Page, the chef and an owner of Home in Greenwich Village, said the dozen or so breakfast customers he serves every day are mainly people who work at home and are meeting someone. "Serving breakfast pays my sous-chef's salary for the day," Mr. Page said.

At Michael's it could pay for more than that. The well-dressed crowd often includes executives from the worlds of publishing, real estate and luxury establishments with offices nearby like Cartier, Veuve Clicquot and Mont Blanc.

"We had only two tables when we started seven years ago," Michael McCarty, the restaurant's owner, said. "It took a few years to get it going but now it's packed, and the demand keeps increasing. Regulars make reservations and insist on certain tables, just like lunch." Only cheaper. Breakfast is usually one course, not three, and it does not generally include alcohol.

For Stanislas de Quercize, the president of Cartier, who is a regular at Michael's, a breakfast meeting is more personal than lunch or dinner. "It's an intimate moment at the start of the day," he said. "Michael's is comfortable for me, like a club."

Others are not so happy to be up early. Marc Hacker, an architect in David Rockwell's office, said he found breakfast meetings to be a necessary evil. "They do tend to be more intimate and friendly than lunch or dinner," he said. "Perhaps because you're more exposed at that hour."

Phil Lempert, the food trends editor for the "Today" show, sees breakfast as a growing business not just in New York but around the country. "And not just in hotels," he said. "Restaurants have done an exceptional job of changing their breakfast menus, offering more elaborate fare, for people who don't want to be in and out in 15 minutes."

Robert Gregory, the publisher of Rolling Stone, has business breakfasts at Michael's several times a week. "When I walk into Michael's I feel like a mogul," he said. "Maybe it helps that I'm a regular, but they seem to treat everyone that way. It puts me in a great mood for the day and it also makes my guests feel important." Mr. Gregory sometimes returns to Michael's for lunch.

Indeed, restaurants that open for breakfast have a good chance of seeing business spill over to other times. At Bin 36 in Chicago, Daniel Sachs, an owner, said that his breakfast customers tended to be New Economy entrepreneurs, "the same people who come for dinner."

Nick Valenti, the chairman of Restaurant Associates, which owns the Brasserie, echoed Mr. Sachs. "Once a customer comes in for breakfast, if they're happy it's likely they'll be back for lunch or dinner," he said. Mr. Valenti estimated that the Brasserie serves 150 breakfasts each weekday.

At Balthazar, in SoHo, breakfast is low-key and relaxed, and is considered by some to be New York's best-kept secret. Patrick Martin, the director of the Slow Food organization, a group that approves of a sit-down breakfast, not something grabbed from a coffee cart, called it "civilized." To Marion Nestle, the chairwoman of the food studies department at New York University, breakfast at Balthazar is "a great New York treat."

Though the restaurant always offered a continental breakfast with items from its bakery, recently, Keith McNally, the owner, expanded the breakfast menu to include soft-boiled eggs, shirred eggs and omelets. True enough, it has increased business, but Mr. McNally said another reason for adding the eggs was personal. "I love those dishes," he said. "I miss them, especially the soft-boiled eggs and the oeufs en cocotte."

Appetites at breakfast often seek the familiar. The anthropologist Margaret Visser wrote in "The Rituals of Dinner" (Grove Weidenfeld, 1991): "We reject, for instance, anything fancy for breakfast, feeling fragile and unadventurous just after the little daily trauma of getting out of bed."

Just as Mr. McNally has done, other chefs, including Kurt Gutenbrunner at Cafe Sabarsky and Mario Batali at Otto, are offering the breakfast foods they themselves prefer. Tom Colicchio plans to open his new cafe, Wichcraft, for breakfast, partly because he wants to be able to eat breakfast there.

Breakfast came to Cafe Sabarsky, on the Upper East Side, just last week. The menu is brief: orange juice, soft-boiled eggs in a glass, coffee or tea, and bread, pastries and croissants with Austrian jam. "I want it to be just like in Vienna," Mr. Gutenbrunner said. "It's very simple. Eggs any style is not what it's about."

At Otto, breakfast is just as limited. Blood-orange juice, little Italian rolls stuffed with mortadella, ciabatta with mascarpone and jam, biscotti, gelato and coffee, all served at the bar. It's a menu that the owners say is "evolving."

"I live right across the street, so it's great for me, and for my family," Mr. Batali, an owner, said. "We open at 9 so we can jump-start the service before people start pounding on the door at 11:30."

On many mornings, John Leguizamo and his wife, Justine Maurer, are at Otto with their two small children. There are likely to be only a few other customers. "It's still a secret," Mr. Leguizamo said.

But as much as they may love Italian food, how many New Yorkers are willing to forgo a bagel with their latte for a mortadella sandwich?

"Breakfast more than any other meal is structured by expectations and governed by cultural conventions," said John Finn, a professor of government at Wesleyan University who is a graduate of the Culinary Institute of America and who teaches a course called "Culture and Cuisine." "There is now developing a code of behavior, rules for a business breakfast. For example, what is appropriate to eat, and how much should you eat when you're having a business meeting? For some people, the nice thing is that you can actually get away with eating just about nothing, which you cannot do at lunch."

Does that mean that chefs like Mr. Zakarian, who has put items like breakfast panini and house-smoked salmon on the menu at Town, or Mr. Brennan, at Terrance Brennan's Seafood and Chop House, who is scrambling eggs at tableside and offering an array of condiments, including caviar, are wasting their time?

"People are very particular about breakfast," Mr. Zakarian said. "For a new place it takes a couple of years to catch on. It's not like lunch or dinner. No one reviews breakfast."

Mr. Page of Home said dishes like garlic potato cake with roasted tomato sauce and poached eggs reflected the kind of food he serves at other meals. "It's what we're known for and our customers expect it."

Breakfast food also has a kind of popularity that overrides the morning hour. Norma's opened in the Parker Meridien hotel five years ago, offering a breakfast menu until 3 p.m.

"Breakfast is something we're obligated to provide because we're a hotel," Deborah Carr, the manager, said. "But we have travelers on different time zones, and in the past people were disappointed when they came in at 10 a.m. and we told them we had stopped serving. Breakfast food is easy food to eat all day long. Now we're grossing $3 million a year on bacon and eggs."

Kicking the Secularist Habit

[excellent article from the atlantic monthly by David Brooks (Weekly Standard and PBS Newshour) cited by lok]

Kicking the Secularist Habit: A six-step program
by David Brooks
http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2003/03/brooks.htm

Like a lot of people these days, I'm a recovering secularist. Until September 11 I accepted the notion that as the world becomes richer and better educated, it becomes less religious. Extrapolating from a tiny and unrepresentative sample of humanity (in Western Europe and parts of North America), this theory holds that as history moves forward, science displaces dogma and reason replaces unthinking obedience. A region that has not yet had a reformation and an enlightenment, such as the Arab world, sooner or later will.

It's now clear that the secularization theory is untrue. The human race does not necessarily get less religious as it grows richer and better educated. We are living through one of the great periods of scientific progress and the creation of wealth. At the same time, we are in the midst of a religious boom.

[A]s the sociologist Peter Berger has pointed out, the phenomenon that really needs explaining is the habits of the American professoriat: religious groups should be sending out researchers to try to understand why there are pockets of people in the world who do not feel the constant presence of God in their lives, who do not fill their days with rituals and prayers and garments that bring them into contact with the divine, and who do not believe that God's will should shape their public lives.

Islam is surging. Orthodox Judaism is growing among young people, and Israel has gotten more religious as it has become more affluent. The growth of Christianity surpasses that of all other faiths. In 1942 this magazine published an essay called "Will the Christian Church Survive?" Sixty years later there are two billion Christians in the world; by 2050, according to some estimates, there will be three billion. As Philip Jenkins, a Distinguished Professor of History and Religious Studies at Pennsylvania State University, has observed, perhaps the most successful social movement of our age is Pentecostalism (see "The Next Christianity," October Atlantic). Having gotten its start in Los Angeles about a century ago, it now embraces 400 million people—a number that, according to Jenkins, could reach a billion or more by the half-century mark.

Moreover, it is the denominations that refuse to adapt to secularism that are growing the fastest, while those that try to be "modern" and "relevant" are withering. Ecstatic forms of Christianity and "anti-modern" Islam are thriving. The Christian population in Africa, which was about 10 million in 1900 and is currently about 360 million, is expected to grow to 633 million by 2025, with conservative, evangelical, and syncretistic groups dominating. In Africa churches are becoming more influential than many nations, with both good and bad effects.

Secularism is not the future; it is yesterday's incorrect vision of the future. This realization sends us recovering secularists to the bookstore or the library in a desperate attempt to figure out what is going on in the world. I suspect I am not the only one who since September 11 has found himself reading a paperback edition of the Koran that was bought a few years ago in a fit of high-mindedness but was never actually opened. I'm probably not the only one boning up on the teachings of Ahmad ibn Taymiyya, Sayyid Qutb, and Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab.

There are six steps in the recovery process. First you have to accept the fact that you are not the norm. Western foundations and universities send out squads of researchers to study and explain religious movements. But as the sociologist Peter Berger has pointed out, the phenomenon that really needs explaining is the habits of the American professoriat: religious groups should be sending out researchers to try to understand why there are pockets of people in the world who do not feel the constant presence of God in their lives, who do not fill their days with rituals and prayers and garments that bring them into contact with the divine, and who do not believe that God's will should shape their public lives.

Once you accept this—which is like understanding that the earth revolves around the sun, not vice-versa—you can begin to see things in a new way.

The second step toward recovery involves confronting fear. For a few years it seemed that we were all heading toward a benign end of history, one in which our biggest worry would be boredom. Liberal democracy had won the day. Yes, we had to contend with globalization and inequality, but these were material and measurable concepts. Now we are looking at fundamental clashes of belief and a truly scary situation—at least in the Southern Hemisphere—that brings to mind the Middle Ages, with weak governments, missionary armies, and rampant religious conflict.

The third step is getting angry. I now get extremely annoyed by the secular fundamentalists who are content to remain smugly ignorant of enormous shifts occurring all around them. They haven't learned anything about religion, at home or abroad. They don't know who Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins are, even though those co-authors have sold 42 million copies of their books. They still don't know what makes a Pentecostal a Pentecostal (you could walk through an American newsroom and ask that question, and the only people who might be able to answer would be the secretaries and the janitorial staff). They still don't know about Michel Aflaq, the mystical Arab nationalist who served as a guru to Saddam Hussein. A great Niagara of religious fervor is cascading down around them while they stand obtuse and dry in the little cave of their own parochialism—and many of them are journalists and policy analysts, who are paid to keep up with these things.

The fourth step toward recovery is to resist the impulse to find a materialistic explanation for everything. During the centuries when secularism seemed the wave of the future, Western intellectuals developed social-science models of extraordinary persuasiveness. Marx explained history through class struggle, other economists explained it through profit maximization. Professors of international affairs used conflict-of-interest doctrines and game theory to predict the dynamics between nation-states.

All these models are seductive and partly true. This country has built powerful institutions, such as the State Department and the CIA, that use them to try to develop sound policies. But none of the models can adequately account for religious ideas, impulses, and actions, because religious fervor can't be quantified and standardized. Religious motivations can't be explained by cost-benefit analysis.

Over the past twenty years domestic-policy analysts have thought hard about the roles that religion and character play in public life. Our foreign-policy elites are at least two decades behind. They go for months ignoring the force of religion; then, when confronted with something inescapably religious, such as the Iranian revolution or the Taliban, they begin talking of religious zealotry and fanaticism, which suddenly explains everything. After a few days of shaking their heads over the fanatics, they revert to their usual secular analyses. We do not yet have, and sorely need, a mode of analysis that attempts to merge the spiritual and the material.

The recovering secularist has to resist the temptation to treat religion as a mere conduit for thwarted economic impulses. For example, we often say that young Arab men who have no decent prospects turn to radical Islam. There's obviously some truth to this observation. But it's not the whole story: neither Mohammed Atta nor Osama bin Laden, for example, was poor or oppressed. And although it's possible to construct theories that explain their radicalism as the result of alienation or some other secular factor, it makes more sense to acknowledge that faith is its own force, independent of and perhaps greater than economic resentment.

Human beings yearn for righteous rule, for a just world or a world that reflects God's will—in many cases at least as strongly as they yearn for money or success. Thinking about that yearning means moving away from scientific analysis and into the realm of moral judgment. The crucial question is not What incentives does this yearning respond to? but Do individuals pursue a moral vision of righteous rule? And do they do so in virtuous ways, or are they, like Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, evil in their vision and methods?

Fifth, the recovering secularist must acknowledge that he has been too easy on religion. Because he assumed that it was playing a diminishing role in public affairs, he patronized it. He condescendingly decided not to judge other creeds. They are all valid ways of approaching God, he told himself, and ultimately they fuse into one. After all, why stir up trouble by judging another's beliefs? It's not polite. The better option, when confronted by some nasty practice performed in the name of religion, is simply to avert one's eyes. Is Wahhabism a vicious sect that perverts Islam? Don't talk about it.

But in a world in which religion plays an ever larger role, this approach is no longer acceptable. One has to try to separate right from wrong. The problem is that once we start doing that, it's hard to say where we will end up. Consider Pim Fortuyn, a left-leaning Dutch politician and gay-rights advocate who criticized Muslim immigrants for their attitudes toward women and gays. When he was assassinated, last year, the press described him, on the basis of those criticisms, as a rightist in the manner of Jean-Marie Le Pen, which was far from the truth. In the post-secular world today's categories of left and right will become inapt and obsolete.

The sixth and final step for recovering secularists is to understand that this country was never very secular anyway. We Americans long for righteous rule as fervently as anybody else. We are inculcated with the notion that, in Abraham Lincoln's words, we represent the "last, best hope of earth." Many Americans have always sensed that we have a transcendent mission, although, fortunately, it is not a theological one. We instinctively feel, in ways that people from other places do not, that history is unfulfilled as long as there are nations in which people are not free. It is this instinctive belief that has led George W. Bush to respond so ambitiously to the events of September 11, and that has led most Americans to support him.

Americans are as active as anyone else in the clash of eschatologies. Saddam Hussein sees history as ending with a united Arab nation globally dominant and with himself revered as the creator of a just world order. Osama bin Laden sees history as ending with the global imposition of sharia. Many Europeans see history as ending with the establishment of secular global institutions under which nationalism and religious passions will be quieted and nation-states will give way to international law and multilateral cooperation. Many Americans see history as ending in the triumph of freedom and constitutionalism, with religion not abandoned or suppressed but enriching democratic life.

We are inescapably caught in a world of conflicting visions of historical destiny. This is not the same as saying that we are caught in a world of conflicting religions. But understanding this world means beating the secularist prejudices out of our minds every day.

the weight of consequence

this weekend was my birthday. i had a few birthday dinners/lunches with close friends. i serendipitously bumped into more friends and people i haven't seen in a long time at parties, restaurants, and on the street all weekend throughout the city (almost like a conspiracy!). the weather was almost too beautiful for march. we went rollerblading in the park. and both downtown and uptown, it felt like summer had arrived with everyone out on the streets and in the park enjoying the day.

i should have been happy. but i kept thinking about how i missed my girlfriend, how old i was getting, how much time and lost opportunity had elapsed over the last year, and, in addition, our country was going to war. visions of "The Sum of All Fears" flashed through my mind. i wondered if NYC would get hit by another terrorist attack. i wondered if my brother (a captain in the army) would get the call soon to leave.

maybe it was just the contrast of a too beautiful weekend and the stark reality of what could happen in the next few weeks. but all weekend, and even now, i felt the heavy weight of consequence. it's more than depressing. and i actually support this war and believe in its necessities!

i know we're the lucky ones here (so far at least). for citizens of iraq, war will become a much colder reality for daily survival. [i don't think they'll be enjoying a weekend in the park like mine any time soon.] on the other hand, maybe they are at the birth of new hope, freedom, and a new way of life. we can only pray that it will be so. the road will not be easy, and the cost will not be cheap.

Bush's Doctrine for War

Bush's Doctrine for War
By DAVID E. SANGER
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/18/international/middleeast/18ASSE.html

WASHINGTON, March 17 — In announcing tonight that he had chosen war, President Bush cut through the debate over who has the right to enforce United Nations resolutions or overthrow brutal regimes.

His argument boiled down to one precept: In an age of unseen enemies who make no formal declarations of war, waiting to act after America's foes "have struck first is not self-defense, it is suicide."

President Bush thus turned America's first new national security strategy in 50 years — the doctrine of pre-emptive military action against foes — into the rationale for America's latest war.

It is a view of America's role that Mr. Bush never discussed when he ran for president, when he spoke of the need for a "humble" approach to the world. Yet he began to embrace it within months of entering the Oval Office, and it became a fierce passion after Sept. 11, 2001.

Standing in the White House this evening, Mr. Bush seemed to complete that evolution, describing America as having virtually a duty to police the world if the United Nations fails to do so, and giving Saddam Hussein 48 hours to get out of Iraq.

The speech marked the culmination of the rupture with the United Nations and with two of America's closest post-war allies — France and Germany — that has been building for months. Mr. Bush's speech almost certainly confirmed some of the world's worst fears about George Bush's America: that when the United Nations will not bend to its will, when allies will not go along, Mr. Bush will simply break away and pull the trigger.

"To them, it will show that this whole U.N. detour was an exercise in futility — that this is what the president planned to do all along," Stanley Hoffmann, the Harvard professor who has spent a lifetime studying war and the trans-Atlantic alliance, said today. "There is no room in the U.N. charter for the president's doctrine of pre-emption, for anticipatory self-defense."

But Mr. Bush was not talking to Europe tonight. He was speaking first to the American people, explaining a war that seems certain to come in days, and casting it as a matter of national survival. And he was speaking to the people of Iraq — in translated radio broadcasts beamed in around Saddam Hussein's radio jammers — promising food and freedom.

"In a free Iraq," he said, "there will be no more wars of aggression against your neighbors, no more poison factories, no more executions of dissidents, no more torture chambers and rape rooms. The tyrant will soon be gone. The day of your liberation is near."

Mr. Bush's words were, in many ways, drawn straight from the days of World War II — an era of far clearer challenges and more obvious threats. The president portrayed the Iraqi threat as one so large and so imminent that it challenges America's survival — an argument his critics were already saying tonight was exaggerated to justify a preventive war.

He described Mr. Hussein as a modern-day Hitler, whom America — and its allies — must confront. He openly compared the United Nations and the countries that have refused open confrontation with Mr. Hussein — Germany, France and Russia — to the nations that turned a blind eye as Nazi Germany re-armed.

"In the 20th century, some chose to appease murderous dictators whose threats were allowed to grow into genocide and global war," Mr. Bush said, his voice far steadier, and his anger far better controlled than it was Sunday afternoon in the Azores following his war council with Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain and José María Aznar of Spain.

"In this century, when evil men plot chemical, biological and nuclear terror, a policy of appeasement could bring destruction of a kind never before seen on this earth."

But the rest of the world is unlikely to see the confrontation in such terms, and that will be only the first of many challenges as Mr. Bush turns the doctrine of pre-emption into a war of pre-emption.

In Europe, his message will undoubtedly play into the favorite image of Mr. Bush as gunslinging cowboy. In the past, the White House has always dismissed that view as a gross caricature, meant to exaggerate Mr. Bush's views so that they could be discredited.

But now, Mr. Bush's allies — and his political advisers — have decided that the image may have its advantages.

"As a Westerner, I don't think that's necessarily a bad idea," his vice president, Dick Cheney, said on television on Sunday. "He's exactly what the circumstances require."

What has surprised the world is the audacity with which Mr. Bush has pursued that vision — to the point today of drawing up detailed plans for making Iraq an American protectorate, for as long as it takes to transform it into a peaceful nation.

Many, including some Republican leaders on Capitol Hill and some people inside the administration, fear that that process could become a trap for Mr. Bush's new doctrine.

In the optimistic view of Mr. Bush's team, the war will be as quick — or quicker — than the first gulf war. Mr. Hussein will be ousted in days, they hope, after his military heeds Mr. Bush's warning tonight that they should signal early surrender, and that it would be foolish to "fight for a dying regime."

What will follow, his aides hope, is jubilation and a shift to an American administration accepted by Iraqis.

But as the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Richard Lugar, put it succinctly today, "that is not a sure shot." In moments of candor, even some of Mr. Bush's most senior national security aides say they have no idea what they will find after they lift the top off a dictatorship.

"If it's not post-war Japan — if it's more like post-war Yugoslavia — we will have a huge and expensive problem on our hands," one of those advisers conceded recently. "And I can't honestly tell you we are prepared for that, because there is no way to prepare for that."

Mr. Bush himself has acknowledged that he will need allies to help rebuild Iraq. Whether they are willing to help after such an open breach with Washington is unknown.

"We are going to want someone to pay for all this," said Joseph Nye, the dean of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. "And that is when you discover the cost of relying too much on efficiency, and not enough on establishing the legitimacy of your military actions."

The other question is whether Mr. Bush takes his doctrine to what is arguably next logical step: stopping other countries that pose an even greater threat of proliferation.

North Korea? It seems an obvious choice — but it can strike back in ways Mr. Hussein can only dream about, hitting American troops and allies. Iran? Perhaps, but it has an identifiable democracy movement that could suffer immensely from American meddling.

But both countries pose potential threats to the United States at least as imminent as those posed by Iraq. And they are not only points on Mr. Bush's "axis of evil," they are in the sights of the more hawkish members of the Bush administration, who won the Iraq debate.

In Iraqi Capital, People Prepare for the Conflict

In Iraqi Capital, People Prepare for the Conflict
By JOHN F. BURNS
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/18/international/middleeast/18BAGH.html

BAGHDAD, Iraq, March 17 — The people of Baghdad hastened today to prepare for war, taping windows, shuttering shops and restaurants, and hauling away everything of value they could load into cars, minivans and trucks.

The 4.5 million residents of the city had little official information about the outside events that made war appear imminent, notably President Bush's announcement in the Azores on Sunday that he was calling a halt to months of United Nations diplomacy over Iraq's banned weapons and Saddam Hussein's government.

All that Iraqis learned from official outlets came in the form of defiant statements from President Hussein and his ministers, who vowed in vitriolic language that American troops would be defeated.

But Iraqis have had decades of practice in evading government controls on information, relying on shortwave radio broadcasts from Europe and the United States and illicit satellite television systems that defy severe government penalties. So from the moment that Baghdad woke up today, the city was buzzing with ordinary people preparing for the conflict ahead, and rife with talk about what American war plans might portend.

As best an outsider could judge, given the widespread fear here of any candor in discussing political matters, the mood was one of deep apprehension of the immediate consequences for ordinary Iraqis of American air and ground assaults. But coupled with that, though barely whispered, there was a suppressed but fevered anticipation of the changes for the better that could come if American troops accomplish Mr. Bush's aim of toppling Mr. Hussein.

Amid the apprehension and anticipation, the people of Baghdad concentrated on doing what they could, and as almost everyone who spoke to Western reporters said, trusting the rest to God.

Huge lines formed at gas stations as people filled up with fuel that, at 2 cents a liter, is one of the few material privileges left here. Others went shopping for water storage tanks, kerosene lamps, electrical generators, flashlights and batteries, and canned food.

At a suburban school, 14-year-old boys were ordered to dig a series of trenches about 10 feet long and 5 feet deep, while chanting, "This may look like trench, but it's not, it's George W. Bush's grave."

Jewelers and dress-shop owners and restaurateurs emptied their premises of valuables, then locked up. The expressway westward to Jordan, an oasis of relative freedom whose border lies about 350 miles from Baghdad, was said to be busier than usual with families who had bribed officials for exit visas.
Iraqis looking for guidance from Mr. Hussein found little to help them today. State television reported that he had greeted Tunisia's foreign minister, Habib Ben Yahia, with a promise that Iraq's forces, said by Western experts to be depleted and demoralized, would overwhelm the Americans.

"We hope that the war will not take place, thanks be to God, because we do not need to test the courage and resistance of our people," he was reported to have said.

But he added: "We are ready to sacrifice our souls, our children and our families so as not to give up Iraq. We say this so no one will think that America is capable of breaking the will of the Iraqis with its weapons. If the evil were to come, we would defeat it."

On Sunday, Mr. Hussein set the tone by vowing that the United States "should realize that the battle between us will be waged wherever there is sky, earth and water," suggesting that Iraq could somehow strike far outside its own borders, perhaps even in the United States.

That was coupled with remarks in which he again denied that Iraq had any banned chemical, biological or other weapons, and mocked American allegations to the contrary, saying, "Well, give us time and the necessary means and we will produce any weapon they want, and then we will invite them to come and destroy them."

Today, Iraqi ministers followed up with a welter of attacks on the United States. The information minister, Mohammed Said al-Sahhaf, described the Azores meeting as "a summit of outlaws" and "war merchants" who had failed to produce any proof that Iraq had banned weapons. In an interview tonight on Al Jazeera, the Arabic-language network, he said, "I promise President Bush and Prime Minister Blair that they will leave office, and President Saddam Hussein will still be in power here."

For years, it has been plain that the official adulation of Mr. Hussein echoed in almost every Iraqi's conversation with the Western press has masked a deep yearning for relief from repression. As American pressures have peaked in recent days, those yearnings have found new expression among people who have dared to start saying things against Mr. Hussein that still carry the potential for severe retribution, apparently because they believe that time is too short now for their worst nightmares to be realized.

Even reporting what those Iraqis say can be dangerous, and not only for the Iraqis themselves. As the hours ticked away toward the time set for Mr. Bush's televised address setting a 48-hour ultimatum for the Iraqi leader to quit power — 4 a.m. Tuesday in Baghdad — reporters for Western newspapers and television channels who have been working in Baghdad engaged in their own debate about whether to stay or leave, and a growing number chose to depart.

The 150 reporters still in the city, down from about 300 a week ago, were rapidly becoming the largest group of foreigners remaining. About 60 United Nations weapons inspectors, along with about 100 staff members, were expected to leave Baghdad on Tuesday morning.

One factor weighing on everyone's mind was Mr. Hussein's weekend announcement that Iraq was to be divided into four military districts, and that the Baghdad region would be under the personal command of his 36-year-old younger son, Qusay. Iraqis debated among themselves about how Saddam Hussein and his inner circle — especially Qusay Hussein, long regarded as the heir apparent to the unlimited powers accumulated over 23 years by his father, and his 38-year-old older brother, Uday, who controls the paramilitary force known as Saddam's Holy Fighters — would respond to an American attack on Baghdad.

Would Saddam Hussein, his sons and other high-ranking officials make a last stand in one of their many palaces, or in the vast underground network of tunnels and bunkers that German and other Western companies helped them build in the 1980's? And would they order the arrest of Westerners to be deployed as human shields at potential American bombing targets, as Saddam Hussein did with scores of Western businessmen before the Persian Gulf war in 1991, an expedient that the Iraqi leader eventually abandoned before the conflict began?

Or would they simply disappear, as Osama bin Laden did in Afghanistan, and become "shadows" eluding their American pursuers, as Tariq Aziz, one of Saddam Hussein's most trusted advisers, predicted in an interview with an American reporter last October?

Allies Hope to Move Quickly to Seize City in Iraq's South

Allies Hope to Move Quickly to Seize City in Iraq's South
By PATRICK E. TYLER
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/18/international/middleeast/18BASR.html

KUWAIT CITY, March 17 — One of the first major objectives in the war against Iraq will be to seize its largest southern city, Basra, and secure its port facilities and nearby oil fields.

Officials say they are aiming for a rapid and "benign" occupation of Basra that results in flag-waving crowds hugging British and American soldiers — all of which would create an immediate positive image of American and British war goals while undermining Iraqi resistance elsewhere in the country.

But things rarely go as planned in war, and as the onset of conflict appeared imminent today, soldiers prayed and prepared to move. Everywhere a sense that the waiting was almost over was palpable among military units.

This afternoon, soldiers of the Third Infantry Division's First Brigade Combat Team began packing up and dismantling parts of a mobile command center in the Kuwaiti desert. They packed their own bags, too. The division is to head for Baghdad and beyond.

"You could call it relief, almost, that something is happening," said Capt. Andrew J. Valles, the brigade's civil-military operations officer.

[In a further sign that military activity was rapidly speeding up, marines at the forward headquarters in Kuwait for the First Marine Division, which will lead the drive toward Baghdad, began on Tuesday morning to load their gear onto Humvees, trucks and other vehicles. There was a sense that they would not be returning to the base, Camp Matilda, anytime soon.]

As a military objective, Basra, a largely Shiite Muslim city of more than one million people with no great affection for President Saddam Hussein's government, is thought to be vulnerable.

The Iraqi military command has ordered all of its front-line divisions to pull back to defend Baghdad, officials said, leaving poorly trained and equipped garrison units to protect the port city and the oil fields that straddle the border region with Kuwait, just 40 miles south of Basra.

The city is a key to Iraq's southern oil region. Not all of the signals suggest that it will fall easily. Last week President Hussein appointed the most notorious member of his inner circle, Ali Hassan al-Majid, to direct the defense of southern Iraq. Mr. Majid, known as "Chemical Ali," has been accused of war crimes for his use of mustard and nerve gases against the Kurdish population in northern Iraq in 1988.

American officials are not certain whether Mr. Hussein appointed Mr. Majid, a close relative, to ensure that the restive Shiites of southern Iraq remained loyal to Baghdad, or whether Mr. Majid has been entrusted with executing a military strategy devised to blunt or undermine the American-British invasion.

"We fully recognize his image and his track record," a military official said.

One fear is that Mr. Hussein, by appearing to expose Basra to easy occupation, is preparing to surprise American and British forces by attacking them with chemical or biological weapons.

"All I can tell you is that the marines will be wearing their chem suits," the official added, referring to the protective clothing and gas masks designed to protect soldiers from attacks with chemical or biological weapons.

The fate of Basra is viewed as critical. "The first image of this war will define the conflict," said Maj. Chris Hughes, a Marine Corps spokesman. Military officials said the 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit, under the command of the British Royal Marines, had been designated to take Basra.

An early success, if secured, would inoculate the military to some extent against any setbacks that occur in Baghdad, where a powerful American army of tanks, mobile artillery and infantry will face down Mr. Hussein's most loyal and best armed Republican Guard divisions. The willingness of these Guard divisions to fight will determine in greatest measure the human cost of the war, military officials say.

If Basra falls, American and British officials are planning to organize relief convoys of food and other aid that can roll into the city from depots positioned here and in Iranian cities that lie just east of Basra across the Shatt-al-Arab waterway.

Soldiers will carry packets of food to pass out to children, and medics will provide care to Iraqis in need as the occupation forces roll in, military officials said. To speed the relief work, the Pentagon has dispatched a 60-member disaster response team that will enter the city with British and American troops.

American officials said they had begun radio broadcasts and leaflet drops in and around Basra to notify residents that the attacking allied forces will use kid gloves in taking the city.

They will avoid bombing electrical and other civilian infrastructure targets, the officials said, and are advising civilians that they will be safe in their homes and that there is no need to flee the city.

Still, Major Hughes said there was no guarantee of success.

"As important as images are, we don't have a lot of control over it," he said.

Nevertheless, American and British military officials are already discussing plans to act at the first sign that Basra's residents are ready to greet them with open arms. They have discussed busing journalists into the city, and even flying in television correspondents by helicopter to record any scenes of jubilation.

Such scenes, in the view of many analysts, are possible if the Basra campaign is carefully orchestrated.

Iraq's southern population is dominated by Arabs who follow the Shiite branch of Islam. Theirs is a history of discontent since the Ottoman Empire collapsed at the end of World War I and the province of Basra was incorporated into a new Iraqi state dominated by Baghdad and the Sunni Muslims of central Iraq.

Basra's Shiites staged an uprising at the end of the Persian Gulf war in 1991, after the first President Bush encouraged all Iraqis to overthrow Mr. Hussein. Thousands were killed, tortured or imprisoned when Mr. Hussein's scattered army regrouped and brutally suppressed a series of rebellions in the south and among the Kurds in the north.

This time, Saudi and Kuwaiti intelligence services have worked with Western officials to communicate to tribal leaders in Iraq that the British and American forces are coming to liberate them for good.

"The Iraqis inside Iraq are talking about one thing: the salvation," said Abdel Reda al-Asiri, a professor at Kuwait University and a scholar of Shiite history in the region.

Today, he added, Iraqis regard the impending invasion by a Western army as "a war that will end all their misery, wars and tyranny."

Iraqis, he said, though they are still isolated, get enough information from foreign radio broadcasts to understand the difference between the impending military operations and the 1991 war to push Iraqi forces out of Kuwait.

"During the uprising in 1991 the people felt powerless," he said. "But now you can be assured there will be tens of uprisings this time around the south. In '91 the Americans came to liberate Kuwait; in 2003 they are coming to liberate Iraq."

British and American officials would not comment on the size of the British and American marine force that is to peel away from the main army that marches on Baghdad. A British official said a "pumped up" division of 15,000 to 20,000 British marines was ready in Kuwait.

An American official said the 15th Marine Expeditionary Force, which saw extensive action in Afghanistan, could contribute as many as 2,500 marines.

For Britain a successful campaign to liberate Basra would be a vindication of its last war in Mesopotamia, which sought to claim Iraq and its oil wealth during World War I.

The Ottoman Empire was collapsing, and after taking Basra in 1914, a small British force under the command of Maj. Gen. Charles Townshend marched up the Tigris to within 25 miles of Baghdad, only to fall back in the face of Turkish counterattacks. British losses were 23,000 dead and wounded, with another 7,000 British prisoners dying after Townshend's surrender.

Bush's Speech on Iraq

Bush's Speech on Iraq:
'Saddam Hussein and His Sons Must Leave'
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/18/politics/18BTEX.html

Following is a transcript of President Bush's speech last night on Iraq, as recorded by The New York Times:

My fellow citizens, events in Iraq have now reached the final days of decision.

For more than a decade, the United States and other nations have pursued patient and honorable efforts to disarm the Iraqi regime without war. That regime pledged to reveal and destroy all its weapons of mass destruction as a condition for ending the Persian Gulf war in 1991. Since then the world has engaged in 12 years of diplomacy. We have passed more than a dozen resolutions in the United Nations Security Council. We have sent hundreds of weapons inspectors to oversee the disarmament of Iraq. Our good faith has not been returned.

The Iraqi regime has used diplomacy as a ploy to gain time and advantage. It has uniformly defied Security Council resolutions demanding full disarmament. Over the years, U.N. weapon inspectors have been threatened by Iraqi officials, electronically bugged and systematically deceived. Peaceful efforts to disarm the Iraqi regime have failed again and again because we are not dealing with peaceful men. Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised.

This regime has already used weapons of mass destruction against Iraq's neighbors and against Iraq's people. The regime has a history of reckless aggression in the Middle East. It has a deep hatred of America and our friends. And it has aided, trained and harbored terrorists, including operatives of Al Qaeda.

The danger is clear. Using chemical, biological or, one day, nuclear weapons, obtained with the help of Iraq, the terrorists could fulfill their stated ambitions and kills thousands or hundreds of thousands of innocent people in our country or any other.

The United States and other nations did nothing to deserve or invite this threat, but we will do everything to defeat it. Instead of drifting along toward tragedy, we will set a course toward safety. Before the day of horror can come, before it is too late to act, this danger will be removed.

The United States of America has the sovereign authority to use force in assuring its own national security.

Recognizing the threat to our country, the United States Congress voted overwhelmingly last year to support the use of force against Iraq. America tried to work with the United Nations to address this threat because we wanted to resolve the issue peacefully. We believe in the mission of the United Nations. One reason the U.N. was founded after the Second World War was to confront aggressive dictators actively and early before they can attack the innocent and destroy the peace.

In the case of Iraq, the Security Council did act in the early 1990's. Under Resolutions 678 and 687, both still in effect, the United States and our allies are authorized to use force in ridding Iraq of weapons of mass destruction. This is not a question of authority, it is a question of will.

Last September, I went to the U.N. General Assembly and urged the nations of the world to unite and bring an end to this danger. On Nov. 8, the Security Council unanimously passed Resolution 1441 finding Iraq in material breach of its obligations and vowing serious consequences if Iraq did not fully and immediately disarm. Today, no nation can possibly claim that Iraq has disarmed, and it will not disarm so long as Saddam Hussein holds power.

For the last four and a half months, the United States and our allies have worked within the Security Council to enforce that council's longstanding demands. Yet some permanent members of the Security Council have publicly announced that they will veto any resolution that compels the disarmament of Iraq. These governments share our assessment of the danger, but not our resolve to meet it.

Many nations, however, do have the resolve and fortitude to act against this threat to peace. And a broad coalition is now gathering to enforce the just demands of the world. The United Nations Security Council has not lived up to its responsibilities, so we will rise to ours.

In recent days, some governments in the Middle East have been doing their part. They have delivered public and private messages urging the dictator to leave Iraq so that disarmament can proceed peacefully. He has thus far refused. All the decades of deceit and cruelty have now reached an end. Saddam Hussein and his sons must leave Iraq within 48 hours. Their refusal to do so will result in military conflict, commenced at a time of our choosing. For their own safety, all foreign nationals, including journalists and inspectors should leave Iraq immediately.

Many Iraqis can hear me tonight in a translated radio broadcast. And I have a message for them. If we must begin a military campaign, it will be directed against the lawless men who rule your country and not against you. As our coalition takes away their power we will deliver the food and medicine you need. We will tear down the apparatus of terror. And we will help you to build a new Iraq that is prosperous and free.

In a free Iraq there will be no more wars of aggression against your neighbors, no more poison factories, no more executions of dissidents, no more torture chambers and rape rooms. The tyrant will soon be gone. The day of your liberation is near.

It is too late for Saddam Hussein to remain in power. It is not too late for the Iraqi military to act with honor and protect your country by permitting the peaceful entry of coalition forces to eliminate weapons of mass destruction. Our forces will give Iraqi military units clear instructions on actions they can take to avoid being attacked and destroyed.

I urge every member of the Iraqi military and intelligence services, if war comes, do not fight for a dying regime that is not worth your own life. And all Iraqi military and civilian personnel should listen carefully to this warning. In any conflict your fate will depend on your actions. Do not destroy oil wells, a source of wealth that belongs to the Iraqi people. Do not obey any command to use weapons of mass destruction against anyone, including the Iraqi people. War crimes will be prosecuted. War criminals will be punished. And it will be no defense to say I was just following orders.

Should Saddam Hussein choose confrontation, the American people can know that every measure has been taken to avoid war. And every measure will be taken to win it. Americans understand the cost of conflict because we have paid them in the past. War has no certainty except the certainty of sacrifice. Yet the only way to reduce the harm and duration of war is to apply the full force and might of our military. And we are prepared to do so.

If Saddam Hussein attempts to cling to power, he will remain a deadly foe until the end. In desperation he and terrorist groups might try to conduct terrorist operations against the American people and our friends. These attacks are not inevitable. They are, however, possible. And this very fact underscores the reason we cannot live under the threat of blackmail.

The terrorist threat to America and the world will be diminished the moment that Saddam Hussein is disarmed. Our government is on heightened watch against these dangers. Just as we are preparing to ensure victory in Iraq, we are taking further actions to protect our homeland. In recent days American authorities have expelled from the country certain individuals with ties to Iraqi intelligence services. Among other measures I have directed additional security at our airports and increased Coast Guard patrols of major seaports.

The Department of Homeland Security is working closely with the nation's governors to increase armed security at critical facilities across America. Should enemies strike our country they would be attempting to shift our attention with panic and weaken our morale with fear. In this they would fail. No act of theirs can alter the course or shake the resolve of this country. We are a peaceful people, yet we're not a fragile people, and we will not be intimidated by thugs and killers. If our enemies dare to strike us, they and all who have aided them will face fearful consequences.

We are now acting because the risks of inaction would be far greater. In one year or five years the power of Iraq to inflict harm on all free nations would be multiplied many times over. With these capabilities, Saddam Hussein and his terrorist allies could choose the moment of deadly conflict when they are strongest. We choose to meet that threat now where it arises before it can appear suddenly in our skies and cities.

The cause of peace requires all free nations to recognize new and undeniable realities. In the 20th century some chose to appease murderous dictators whose threats were allowed to grow into genocide and global war. In this century when evil men plot chemical, biological and nuclear terror, a policy of appeasement could bring destruction of a kind never before seen on this earth. Terrorists and terrorist states do not reveal these threats with fair notice in formal declarations. And responding to such enemies only after they have struck first is not self-defense, it is suicide. The security of the world requires disarming Saddam Hussein now.

As we enforce the just demands of the world, we will also honor the deepest commitments of our country. Unlike Saddam Hussein, we believe the Iraqi people are deserving and capable of human liberty. And when the dictator has departed, they can set an example to all the Middle East of a vital and peaceful and self-governing nation.

The United States with other countries will work to advance liberty and peace in that region. Our goal will not be achieved overnight. But it can come over time. The power and appeal of human liberty is felt in every life and every land. And the greatest power of freedom is to overcome hatred and violence, and turn the creative gifts of men and women to the pursuits of peace. That is the future we choose. Free nations have a duty to defend our people by uniting against the violent. And tonight, as we have done before, America and our allies accept that responsibility.

Good night and may God continue to bless America.

'Lost City' Yielding Its Secrets

'Lost City' Yielding Its Secrets
By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/18/science/social/18INCA.html

NEW HAVEN — Working with new evidence and a trove of re-examined relics, many of them recovered from the basement of a Yale museum here, archaeologists have revised their thinking about the significance of Machu Picchu, the most famous "lost city" of the Incas.

The new interpretation comes more than 90 years after the explorer Hiram Bingham III bushwhacked his way to a high ridge in the Andes of Peru and beheld a dreamscape out of the pre-Columbian past.

There, set against looming peaks cloaked in snow and wreathed in cloud, was Machu Picchu. Before his eyes, rising from the green undergrowth of neglect, were the imperial stones that have entranced and mystified visitors and scholars alike.

The expression "lost city," popularized by Bingham, was the magical elixir for rundown imaginations. The words evoked the romanticism of exploration and archaeology at the time, in the summer of 1911. And the lanky and vigorous Bingham seemed to personify the spirit that was driving discoveries of a forgotten past, the curiosity and courage to go seeking in remote places, as well as the hardihood to succeed.

But finding Machu Picchu proved to be easier than solving the mystery of its place in the Inca empire, arguably the richest and most powerful in the New World when Europeans arrived. The imposing architecture attested to the skill and audacity of the Incas. But who had lived at this isolated site and for what purpose?

Bingham, a historian at Yale, advanced three hypotheses — all of them dead wrong. A revival in research in recent years, experts say, has solved the mystery and, to a large degree, demystified Machu Picchu.

The spectacular site was not, as Bingham supposed, the traditional birthplace of the Inca people or the final stronghold of the Incas in their losing struggle against Spanish conquest in the 16th century. Nor was it a sacred spiritual center occupied by chosen women, the "virgins of the sun," and presided over by priests who worshiped the sun god.

Instead, Machu Picchu was one of many private estates of the emperor and, in particular, the favored country retreat for the royal family and Inca nobility. It was, archaeologists say, the Inca equivalent of Camp David, albeit on a much grander scale.

This interpretation and other new research inform a major exhibition at the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale. The show, "Machu Picchu: Unveiling the Mystery of the Incas," will be here until May 3. Then it is to travel to Los Angeles, Pittsburgh, Denver, Houston and Chicago.

Dr. Richard L. Burger, the director of the Peabody and a specialist in Inca archaeology, said the show, the largest on the Incas ever assembled in the United States, would "change the way people see Machu Picchu." Dr. Burger and Dr. Lucy C. Salazar, also an archaeologist, are co-curators of the exhibit.

"Bingham's work was very important in putting Inca archaeology on the map," said Dr. Burger, who is married to Dr. Salazar. "But we can now set aside all his ideas about the meaning of the Machu Picchu site."

The new interpretation, generally supported by other experts, is based largely on a study of 16th-century Spanish legal documents and a more detailed analysis of pottery, copper and bronze jewelry, tools, dwellings, skeletal remains and other material found in the ruins.

Many of the artifacts were themselves a forgotten treasure. Shipped back by Bingham, they were stashed in the museum basement, where they remained, still in their original boxes and wrapped in pages of The New York Times from the 1920's, until renewed interest in the Incas led scientists to poke into the stash.

Until recently, there had not been much scholarly interest in Machu Picchu. Although the site has long been Peru's most popular tourist draw and a mecca for seekers of mystical and spiritual experiences, the haunting shells of temples, palaces and other structures had ceased to attract many archaeologists.

"A lot of people felt it had become so much an icon for the Inca and Peru," said Dr. Craig Morris, a specialist in Peruvian archaeology at the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan. "They became more interested in working in places not so well known."

Bingham's long shadow may also have discouraged research. In his three expeditions to Machu Picchu from 1911 to 1915, he established himself as the "discoverer" and foremost interpreter of the lost city. His 1930 book, "Machu Picchu: A Citadel of the Incas," endured as the definitive treatise on the site. His maps and photographs of the ruins were authoritative and evocative.

But he was untrained in archaeology and he did not conduct systematic excavations and rigorous analysis. "His excavation notes," Dr. Burger said, "included more on what they were eating than what they were finding."

Bingham eventually resigned his professorship at Yale to enter politics, becoming lieutenant governor and governor of Connecticut and a senator. But his influence on Inca research remained strong, in part because of his fervid writing style.

In "Lost City of the Incas," a best seller, he wrote: "Here, concealed in a canyon of remarkable grandeur, protected by nature and by the hand of man, the `Virgins of the Sun' one by one passed away on this beautiful mountain top and left no descendants willing to reveal the importance or explain the significance of the ruins which crown the beetling precipices of Machu Picchu."

Archaeologists today forgive some of Bingham's lapses in excavation, but they have destroyed his theories.

For example, Dr. Salazar's exhaustive examination of pottery contradicted Bingham's speculation that Machu Picchu was somehow associated with the earliest Incas. All the pottery styles were 15th century. That and other evidence suggest that construction on the site began around 1450.

That was in the reign of Pachacuti, considered the Alexander the Great of the Incas. His creation, like the empire, had a relatively brief history. From the recovered pottery and Spanish documents, scholars estimate that the site was largely abandoned after only 80 years.

Plague, brought to the New World by Spaniards, had by then left the land in turmoil, and in 1532 the Spanish conquered Peru with little resistance. The few Incan holdouts, including the last emperor, capitulated in 1572 at a tropical valley refuge that bore no resemblance in Spanish descriptions to Machu Picchu. So much for another of Bingham's suppositions.

His theory about a sanctuary for virgins and priests began to unravel in 1990 with the publication of research by Dr. John Howland Rowe, an anthropologist at the University of California at Berkeley.

In archives at Cuzco, the former Inca capital, Dr. Rowe found a 16th-century suit filed by descendants of Pachacuti. They sought the return of family lands, including a retreat called Picchu. The finding sent Dr. Burger, a onetime student of Dr. Rowe, and Dr. Salazar back to Machu Picchu.

"We then felt this was a royal estate, a country palace," Dr. Burger recalled. "All Machu Picchu is a big palace, the emperor's residence across from the temple, the dwellings and workshops, everything spread out around a great plaza."

As early as the 1960's, María Rostworowski, an ethnohistorian in Lima, pointed out that Inca rulers had established a chain of royal estates through the region. They served as occasional royal residences, but mainly as administrative centers. Many of the estates were razed by Spanish soldiers searching for gold, and some were built over and modified beyond recognition. But remote Machu Picchu, at an elevation of 6,750 feet, survived unscathed.

Dr. Susan A. Niles, an archaeologist at Lafayette College who is the author of "The Shape of Inca History," published in 1999, explained that it has long been known that the estates were peculiar to Inca royalty. Each ruler established his own and built a palace there as a monument to himself.

Each estate was the ruler's own private property, which was left to his family after death. The succeeding son could use the estates, but not own them. So he immediately began building his own monuments.

The estates, Dr. Niles said, were important centers for the economic management of agricultural lands, forests and mines in the surrounding region. That was presumably true, as well, of Machu Picchu.

Dr. Burger and Dr. Salazar agreed, but said little evidence had been found that ordinary administrative affairs were regularly conducted there. They emphasized the role of the site, 50 miles from Cuzco, as a country retreat for entertaining visiting dignitaries and for royal relaxation.

Though called a "lost city," it was not a true city. Probably no more than 750 people ever lived there at any given time, and in the rainy season the population dropped to just a few hundred. They were presumably the servants and artisans who attended to the royal family and their elite guests.

Bingham was not entirely wrong about the religious aspects of Machu Picchu. The buildings, ritual chambers, fountains and gardens, Dr. Salazar said, seemed to be arranged with Incan cosmology in mind. Rulers were believed to be descended from the sun, and wherever they went was sacred. Pachacuti, in particular, was looked upon as a creator god.

New investigations turned up bones of animals probably sacrificed in religious ceremonies. And there were dozens of obsidian pebbles, which scientific analysis showed had come from a revered volcano more than 200 miles away. The obsidian had never been modified for use as cutting tools. It is likely, Dr. Burger said, the obsidian had symbolic meaning. The Incas worshiped high mountains as the source of supernatural forces.

But Bingham had gone too far with his "virgins of the sun" hypothesis, experts say. He was misled by the findings of the party's osteologist, who reported that most of the skeletons buried at the site were those of women.

In new studies, Dr. John W. Verano, a physical anthropologist at Tulane University, determined that the ratio of female to male skeletons was comparatively even. His research also showed that many families and newborn infants lived there, not what one would expect in a community of virgins.

All the burials at the site were simple, with only modest grave goods. These were the remains of the retainers rather than royalty.

"This mortuary pattern," Dr. Burger said, "is not surprising, because if members of the Inca elite had died while residing at the country palace, they would have been transported to their principal residence in Cuzco rather than being buried at Machu Picchu."

Life at the country retreat must have been reasonably healthy. An analysis of bones showed that the workers apparently ate well. There were cases of tuberculosis and parasites, as well as considerable tooth decay from the corn diets. But nearly all the burials were of adults, including quite a few who were older than 50, an advanced age in that day.

The workers were brought from all over the empire, Dr. Verano concluded. The ethnic diversity was seen in the shapes of skulls, which had been deformed through binding in infancy. Different cultures over a wide geographic range had distinctive cranial deformations. Some came from the coast, and others from the highlands and as far away as Lake Titicaca.

Investigations by Dr. Alfredo Valencia Zegarra, a Peruvian archaeologist, and Kenneth Wright, a hydrological engineer from Boulder, Colo., have uncovered the magnitude of Machu Picchu as an engineering achievement. The Incas had not only terraced the slopes for agriculture, hauling up fine sand and topsoil from the valley and erecting stone retaining walls that have survived more than 500 years. But they had also taken an uneven ridge surface and transformed it to the flat mesalike surface seen today.

Before any of the buildings rose, the Incas leveled the site with loose rock and other fill, stabilizing it with immense walls deep beneath the surface. Mr. Wright estimates that the invisible subsurface construction constitutes some 60 percent of the effort invested in building Machu Picchu.

Whatever Pachacuti, the empire builder, had in mind, Dr. Salazar said, Machu Picchu "shows what the New World had achieved before the Spanish arrived." Some of the engineering and architecture was better than in Seville, she noted, and the Spanish "could not believe how people, people without writing, could have built something like this."

Archaeologists today may have demystified the lofty ruins, but their awe remains undiminished.

Dr. Niles of Lafayette College said the "overpowering landscape alone may be why Pachacuti chose the place for what his legacy to the world should be."

Conceding that he was biased, Dr. Morris of the Natural History Museum said that Machu Picchu "is to me the most spectacular archaeological site in the world."

Bush address tonight

In Address, Bush to Tell Hussein to Step Down or Face War
By TERENCE NEILAN
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/17/international/17CND-NATI.html

Adding to increasing indications that war with Iraq is imminent, the White House said today that President Bush will address the nation this evening.

The president scheduled his 8 p.m. EST address a day after the United Nations was advised by Washington to withdraw its inspectors from Iraq. Reports from Baghdad indicated that the inspectors were complying with the recommendation.

In Washington, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell gave a preview of the president's address, declaring this morning that Mr. Bush ``will issue an ultimatum to Saddam Hussein.''

Mr. Powell said the ultimatum will make clear that the only way for the Baghdad regime to avoid military action against it is for ``Saddam Hussein and his immediate cohort to leave the country.''

In response to a question, the secretary said he would leave it up to the president to tell the Iraqi dictator to leave his country. And when asked whether the Iraqi leader could undertake ``any form of disarmament'' at this late hour to ``save his skin,'' Mr. Powell did not even mention disarmament in his reply.

``The time for diplomacy is past,'' Mr. Powell said. ``I can think of nothing Saddam Hussein could do diplomatically.''

At the United Nations, the United States, Britain and Spain, clearly realizing that they would not have sufficient backing, said they would not seek a Security Council vote on a resolution approving the use of force against Iraq.

The British envoy, Sir Jeremy Greenstock, said the decision now cleared the way for military action. Sir Jeremy blamed the French for the decision, saying they had made it clear they would veto any resolution.

``The co-sponsors reserve their right to take their own steps to secure the disarmament of Iraq,'' he added.

The French envoy to the United Nations, Jean-Marc de la Sablière, responded by saying that there was ``a huge majority'' on the Security Council against using force in Iraq.

Word of advice to United Nations inspectors to pull out of Iraq was first disclosed by the chief nuclear weapons inspector.

Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, based in Vienna, said a similar recommendation was also given to the agency headed by Hans Blix, the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission

``I immediately informed the president of the Security Council and asked for guidance,'' Dr. ElBaradei said in a report to the agency's board of governors.

``I also informed the United Nations Secretary General. I understand that the Security Council will take up the issue today. Naturally, the safety of our staff remains our primary consideration at this difficult time.''

In another sign of impending military action, the United States and Britain today urged their citizens to leave Kuwait immediately, citing the risk of chemical or biological attack.

Dr. ElBaradei, who today noted increased Iraqi cooperation in the past few weeks with the atomic energy agency, added: ``I earnestly hope - even at this late hour - that a peaceful resolution of the issue can be achieved, and that the world can be spared a war.''

Mr. Blix, however, sounded a less optimistic note today about the chances of a military conflict.

In an interview with the Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet, Mr. Blix said: ``Yes, just now it does not look like there is very much hope. But I do not have the right to give up, and neither do I want to do that. We will in any case continue and try to work until the last minute.''

At the United Nations, staff members have been preparing for a consultative session scheduled for today to discuss the latest report by Mr. Blix, chief inspector for chemical and biological weapons.

President Bush and Prime Ministers Tony Blair of Britain and JosÀe MarÀia Aznar, following a meeting in the Azores, issued an ultimatum to the Security Council that diplomacy must end today and that war would be the inevitable next step.

Mr. Powell said that, in any event, the resolution that was not offered today ``is not a resolution we thought was necessary.''

The secretary said the United States remains committed to the United Nations, and he was sure it would survive the turmoil over how to deal with Iraq. But he added, pointedly, that he saw the indecision over what to do as ``a test that, in my judgment, the Security Council did not meet.''

United Nations officials have said the inspectors and support staff still in Iraq could be evacuated in as little as 48 hours.

Inspection teams were pulled out of Iraq in December 1998, a day before British and American warplanes began several days of air attacks after allegations that Baghdad was not cooperating with the teams.

The teams now in Iraq, which returned on Nov. 27 after a nearly four-year absence, had drawn up contingency plans to evacuate even before their redeployment.

``A lot depends on the Iraqis,'' a senior United Nations inspector told The Associated Press on condition of anonymity.

``If they let us use aircraft to get out, we could be gone in 48 hours or even less. If they won't let us fly out, we would have to drive to a border, and that could mean an eight-hour journey across hot desert. It would take longer, but we would get out.''

In Washington, the State Department ordered all government dependents and nonessential staff out of Kuwait. Britain took similar action and pared down its embassy staff and said it would close its consular and visa sections on Tuesday.

Both countries warned their citizens against travel to Kuwait, where the bulk of 300,000 troops are based, and urged nationals already there to get out while commercial flights are still running.

A Long, Winding Road to a Diplomatic Dead End

A Long, Winding Road to a Diplomatic Dead End
By STEVEN R. WEISMAN
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/17/international/middleeast/17RECO.html

WASHINGTON, March 16 — Dining in September with a group of foreign ministers at the elegant Hotel Pierre in New York, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell was uneasy. France was advocating that a first resolution at the United Nations Security Council, demanding that Iraq promptly disclose its weapons and disarm, must be followed by a second resolution authorizing war if Iraq refused.

"Be sure about one thing," Mr. Powell told Dominique de Villepin, the French foreign minister. "Don't vote for the first, unless you are prepared to vote for the second."

Mr. de Villepin assented, officials who were there said.

But in the months since, France has rejected any second resolution clearing the way for war. And Mr. de Villepin won over most of the other 13 Council members.

With some bitterness, American officials now say France never really intended to support a war with Iraq. French officials say equally bitterly that the United States never intended anything but a war in the spring of 2003.

Just about everyone involved now acknowledges that a train of miscalculations and misunderstandings has produced a setback for American diplomacy and world standing.

The United States and Britain appear likely to lead an attack, against the will of Europe's biggest states, without the military help of Turkey, despite deep anxieties among Arab countries and fought to the sound of angry protest throughout much of the world.

"We have had our share of mistakes," said a senior administration official. "But fundamentally we have fallen victim to a different reading from many of our friends about the necessity of dealing with the problem of Iraq. The more these differences arose, the more they aggravated resentment over American power in the world."

In more than a dozen interviews, top policy makers in the United States and other countries ascribed the current situation to many factors.

Some cite international anger over the Bush administration's opposition to the Kyoto global warming agreement, several arms control treaties and other mechanisms of international law.

Administration officials acknowledge that as the White House switched its signals — was the aim to disarm Iraq, or to defeat its leaders? — the mixed messages undercut the claim that the United States, too, wanted to avoid a war.

Still others say that by seizing on the first report by Hans Blix, one of the two chief United Nations weapons inspectors, as a prima facie case for war, the United States and Britain made him ever more cautious in his conclusions.

Some criticize Mr. Powell for not engaging in shuttle diplomacy to build support around the world. "He should get off the phone and get on a plane," said an administration official.

Mr. Powell's defenders blame the blunt criticism of Europe by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld for undercutting his efforts to build support there.

In the last month or two, others say, American tactics backfired as diplomats tried to persuade smaller, undecided countries to accept a faster timetable. The more the pressure, the more the resentment it generated, some said.

Assertions that Iraq was linked to Al Qaeda backfired, too, European officials said, as intelligence services in Europe told their leaders that even the Central Intelligence Agency had doubts about the connection.

Even Mr. Bush's efforts to paint a grand vision of democracy in the Arab world, starting in Iraq, backfired, with Mr. de Villepin gaining support by warning that the United States had dreams of remaking the Middle East in its own image of democracy.

The Fall of 2002
Misunderstanding At United Nations

Despite misgivings among his aides, Mr. Powell got President Bush to accede to a French request last fall to pass one measure at the Security Council on Iraq in November, and to allow the Council a second opportunity to discuss what to do if President Saddam Hussein failed to comply with the first.

With Mr. Bush surrounded by skeptics — Vice President Dick Cheney, Mr. Rumsfeld and Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser — administration officials said Mr. Powell tried to convince that inner circle that at the end of the process, the French would recognize the failure of the inspections and agree to war.

"Condi was the tipping factor," said an administration official, referring to Ms. Rice. "Powell convinced her that the French would be with us. It was wrong then, and it is wrong today."

Whereas the United States saw the resolution as a way of rallying the world around its charge that Mr. Hussein was defying the inspections and the demands to disarm, France and others saw it as a way of pressing the inspections forward as long as they were bearing fruit, with or without Iraqi cooperation.

This misunderstanding, many say, was compounded by the fact that the entire process of trying to avert a war through inspections and negotiations was undercut by the military buildup that the United States said was necessary to force Iraq to comply — a buildup that some officials later argued could not be reversed without the United States losing face.

"In retrospect, the military buildup and the diplomacy were out of sync with each other," said Richard C. Holbrooke, ambassador to the United Nations in the Clinton administration. "The policies were executed in a provocative way that alienated our friends."

By mid-September, the contradictions were apparent to both sides. It was then that Iraq acceded to receiving the inspections, with Secretary General Kofi Annan at the United Nations helping Iraq draft the statement letting them in.

French officials recall that, whereas they were elated at this development, they detected that American officials seemed to be upset. "It should have been a happy moment," said a French official. "But the Americans saw it as a setback. They showed they never wanted the inspections to work."

The negotiations to produce Resolution 1441 at the Security Council were a high-water mark for Mr. Powell, who won worldwide praise for his efforts to avert war by giving Mr. Hussein one last chance for a peaceful exit through disarmament and disclosure, if not by relinquishing power voluntarily.

Mr. Powell told associates that he truly believed that the process could work, and the administration began changing its rhetoric from "regime change" to "disarmament."

But a top official called this whole process "a willful suspension of disbelief" — there was a feeling that no one wanted to admit publicly that it was like "sprinkling pixie dust" on the problem, as one put it.

A Cold New Year
Show of Agreement Slips, Then Is Lost

According to American, French and United Nations diplomats, the pretense of agreement slipped away in December and got lost in January.

First came Iraq's declaration of its weapons on Dec. 7, falling far short of the disclosure demanded by the United Nations. The Bush administration debated whether to go to the United Nations then and there and demand a new declaration that Iraq was in "material breach" of its obligations.

But a senior administration official said it was decided that such a move would be seen as too provocative and too much evidence of American desire for war. Some in the administration now say the decision not to confront the United Nations at that time was a mistake, because it would have started the debate on using force much earlier.

If there was a turning point in this period, the French say, it occurred when Mr. Blix, the co-chief United Nations weapons inspector, began circulating a timetable for how he would proceed with his job in mid-January.

Because Resolution 1441 did not have a timetable, Mr. Blix and his team reverted to one from the 1990's calling for a step-by-step introduction of inspectors, setting up their infrastructure and then establishing "tasks" for Iraq to carry out. The "tasks" are due to be listed on March 27.

Once the United States got a look at the plan, there were objections. Ms. Rice and others, including John D. Negroponte, the American ambassador to the United Nations, issued statements saying the United States could not wait until that date.

"That was the moment of truth, when we suddenly realized we were going to war," said a French official.

But American diplomats regard the French view as disingenuous, a reflection of French unwillingness to see that the inspections could not be strung along forever.

The French-American alienation reached the breaking point on Jan. 20, when Mr. Powell attended a Security Council session presided over by Mr. de Villepin, ostensibly to discuss terrorism. Afterward, the French foreign minister held a news conference and declared forcefully, "Nothing! Nothing!" justified war. American officials did not hear about the news conference until the next day.

"We looked at each other and said, `What the hell is going on here?' " said an aide to Mr. Powell. "I think it all started to come apart after that moment."

The Inspections
Inconclusive Process For the U.S. and Blix

If there is one point on which American and other officials agree, it is that the administration failed to appreciate the dynamics of the inspections process.

Several diplomats at the United Nations said American leaders were confident that Mr. Blix would either be rebuffed by the Iraqis or he would find evidence of weapons of mass destruction that would make it obvious that the only solution was war.

The Americans were not expecting an inconclusive inspections process that would be seized upon by others as evidence that, while Iraq was far from cooperative, the process itself was working.

Some in the administration say that before Mr. Blix went in, Mr. Bush or Mr. Powell should have made a major speech framing the issue the way that the United States saw it — that small, niggling steps by Iraq were not evidence that inspections were workable.

But again, they said, there was a desire not to be seen as too eager for war even though the eagerness was barely disguised anyway.

To coax the process along, Mr. Powell made his presentation to the United Nations Security Council on Feb. 5. For about an hour and a half, he presented photographs, intercepts and assertions from informants about Iraq's weapons programs, and he generally won praise for his presentation.

An initial report by Mr. Blix that Iraq was not complying adequately was seized on by the United States with such enthusiasm that, according to one person close to him, Mr. Blix shrank back in subsequent reports and was exceedingly careful not to give the United States further ammunition.

Consequently, there were bitter feelings among American officials, underscored as Mr. Blix repeatedly seemed to side with France and others that he would be able to find more evidence of weapons if only he had more time.

Mr. Blix's mantra was that he was making progress in finding weapons, that inspectors had after all destroyed more weapons in the 1990's than had been destroyed during the Persian Gulf war in 1991, that Mr. Hussein was now less dangerous than he had been before because he was trapped "in a box with the inspectors inside the box."

Administration officials say they continue to respect Mr. Blix's standing, and many say they should have figured out how to outmaneuver him early on. But by the time they realized he was not going to help the United States cause, it was too late.

Outflanking the French
Seeing Easy Support, Facing Hard Sells

Once the Bush administration realized it had lost France, its diplomatic strategy centered on trying to enlist Russia to support, or at least not veto, a resolution that would declare Iraq as failing to comply with the United Nations demands. The five veto-bearing Security Council members are Russia, China, Britain, France and the United States.

The American thinking was that if Russia acquiesced, China would as well, and there would then be a good chance of getting at least five additional votes from six undecided countries: Pakistan, Chile, Mexico, Cameroon, Guinea and Angola.

But Russia was a hard sell because of its own longstanding relationship with Iraq and Mr. Hussein. President Vladimir V. Putin was still smarting from having to accept Bush administration policies from NATO expansion to scrapping the treaty barring antiballistic missiles.

But the more the United States tried to dangle incentives, like help in paying off $8 billion in debts owed by Iraq to Russia, the more such efforts seem to backfire.

"The argument we made was that if you want your $8 billion, aren't you more likely to get it from a regime that's integrated into the world economy, and that you have helped put in power?" said a senior official. "We were not pushing a quid pro quo. It was just a matter of political logic." Nonetheless, the Russians ended up joining with France and Germany to oppose a speeded-up timetable for authorizing a war against Iraq.

Among the six undecided countries on the Security Council, Americans and Pakistanis agree that President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan would have gone along with the United States if he had been the ninth and final vote and was needed. That meant lining up two of the three African countries.

Last weekend, Mr. de Villepin went to all three of the African countries, but his efforts seemed to backfire. Then it was the Americans' turn to feel that their efforts had backfired. Some of the last-minute compromise proposals — like extending the inspections process to later in March, then passing a resolution — were pushed by Britain in response to Mexico and Chile.

But officials said President Vicente Fox of Mexico was too boxed in politically after the United States gave him little of his own agenda, particularly easing curbs on Mexican immigrants in the United States.

There were hints for Chile that if it went along with Washington, it might smooth the way for its free-trade agreement pending in Congress. But Chilean leaders reacted negatively, saying the agreement benefited the United States just as much as Chile.

"I always thought the United States would have been able to get nine votes for just about anything," said a diplomat involved in the process of the last few months. "What I didn't expect was that the skeptics would become more entrenched. One African official said to me, `What can the Americans do to us? Are they going to bomb us? Invade us?' "

The Powell Conundrum
Diplomatic Efforts Made From Home

Throughout the last several months, one of the puzzles at the State Department and throughout the administration is why Mr. Powell, one of the best-known and best-liked Americans in many parts of the world, never engaged in a campaign of public appearances abroad as energetic as the telephone and broadcast interview campaign he pressed from his office, home and car.

"His travels abroad are too few and far between," said an official, noting that the only trips Mr. Powell made to Europe since the beginning of last year were to accompany the president or to attend short-lived conferences.

The secretary also never traveled to Turkey to help line up support for using its territory as a base for a northern front in the war, although State Department officials say doing so would have undercut his stance that he was trying to prevent a conflict.

Mr. Powell is known to dislike travel. "I think I have a right balance between phone diplomacy, diplomacy here in Washington, and diplomacy on the road," he said recently when questioned about his schedule.

Some specialists say that if Mr. Powell had gone to Europe to do town meetings and to answer questions, he might have generated good will of the sort that Prime Minister Tony Blair has in Britain.

"I'm a great advocate of what I call gardening," said former Secretary of State George P. Shultz. "If you plant a garden and you ignore it for six months, it's taken over by weeds. But if you keep at it, month after month, then it grows. In diplomacy, the same thing is true."

Mr. Shultz said Mr. Powell had been an "exemplar" of the kind of patient cultivating of diplomacy he advocates, adding that it was unfair to criticize him for not traveling more because he and Mr. Bush had cultivated relations with counterparts very well.

The Man Who Would Be President

The Man Who Would Be President
By THOMAS POWERS
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/16/weekinreview/16POWE.html

If war comes — the phrase used so often in recent months — the fighting may be quick or prolonged, but few experts doubt that the huge American force now concentrating in the Middle East will prevail in the end. When the regime finally changes in Baghdad, and Saddam Hussein is dead, in custody or in exile, 70 years of Iraqi independence will end, political authority will pass into the hands of George W. Bush and Western rule will be planted on Arab soil for the first time since the French and British left the region in the middle of the last century.

What then happens to Iraq's 23 million people, its oil and its relations with its neighbors will remain the personal responsibility of Mr. Bush and his successors in the White House until one of them chooses to surrender it.

This dramatic expansion of President Bush's job description, little discussed during the long months of argument at the United Nations over Iraqi weapons, will be the immediate practical result of an American military victory and the occupation of Iraq by the Army's Central Command.

As the military commander in chief, the president will have virtually unlimited power to change and rebuild Iraq as he sees fit, far greater power, for example, than Queen Victoria's over India in the 19th century.

Spokesmen for the White House say the president's plans for Iraq are fair and generous: to root out the worst elements of Mr. Hussein's Baath Party, and to create a constitution and government that will make it a beacon of democracy for the Arab world.

Recent experience in Kosovo and Afghanistan suggests that the American military finds it hard going to rebuild shattered civil societies, get food and medicine to those who need it and stop ancient enemies from settling scores after the sun goes down. But keeping the lights on and the oil pumping will seem easy next to the task of bringing democracy to a country that has never known it, is divided along religious and ethnic lines and is struggling on incomes about a tenth of what they were in 1980.

So while the political details of the new regime are being sorted out, the army of occupation will not be idle. At the top of the list will be ferreting out Iraq's weapons of mass destruction — not just the factories, laboratories and stocks of lethal material, but the scientists, military units and agencies that ran the effort. The Bush administration is convinced that there is plenty to find, but as was learned in recent months, it does not know where it all is, despite a decade of intelligence effort.

Iraq's unexpected willingness to grant access to United Nations weapons inspectors presented American intelligence with a challenge to put up or shut up. The analysts scored one small success by pointing out glaring omissions in Iraq's 12,000-page arms declaration; Iraq was known to have possessed large quantities of material for biological and chemical weapons, for example — what happened to it? But scoring rhetorical points was not the same as giving inspectors a street address for stocks of anthrax, or sending a team in protective gear to the one palace among Mr. Hussein's many with a radioactive basement.

The plain fact, after many weeks of diplomatic wrangling now drawing to a close, is that the Central Intelligence Agency doesn't know what Mr. Hussein has, if anything, or even who knows the answers, if anyone.

Intelligence experts attached to the army of occupation will find the missing people, places and records. They will identify, with dollar figures, just who sold contraband to Mr. Hussein and how shipment was arranged — a prospect bound to worry some people in Europe and Asia.

Finding Mr. Hussein's weapons of mass destruction is a political as well as military necessity. But just as important now will be everything else his regime learned over the decades: in a word, the files. The Baath Party's 35-year-rule has been maintained by police and intelligence organizations — General Security (Amn al Aam), established by the British after World War I; Military Intelligence (Istikhabarat at Askariya); the internal secret police, or General Intelligence Directorate (Dairat al Mukhabarat al Ammaa); and a National Security Bureau (Maktab Amn al Qawami) personally set up by Mr. Hussein in 1970 to oversee the other agencies.

The soul of intelligence work is the keeping of files. Because small bits of information sometimes make a big difference, and because it is impossible to know in advance which bits it will be, intelligence services universally make a habit of recording everything and saving it forever.

If Mr. Hussein did any favors for Al Qaeda it will be in the files, but that is only a small part of what American intelligence analysts will want to get their hands on. It is the trove itself that will open up the secret history of the Middle East like a field of sunflowers: the immense paper record of decades of secret meetings, intercepted communications, interrogations and debriefings, exchanges with other intelligence services, the comings and goings of arms dealers, terrorists and every kind of influence peddler.

Shredding files sounds easy but is hard to do, and the order generally comes too late, when the bureaucrats assigned the job are already thinking about hiring on with the newcomers. What the C.I.A. learns from the Iraqi files will transform the war on terrorism, but anyone else who ever caught Mr. Hussein's eye will be exposed as well.

Gaining information from Iraqi files, and making sure that any weapons of mass destruction have been found are two goals that can be met only with Mr. Hussein's ouster followed by military occupation. Then there is the third, perhaps most important goal: establishing an American presence in the region. In its 15,000-word National Security Strategy released last September, the administration linked "the unparalleled strength" of American forces with "their forward presence" as guarantors of peace. "The presence of American forces overseas is one of the most profound symbols of the U.S. commitment to allies and friends."

Dropping talk of "regime change" was an American compromise necessary to win unanimous Security Council support for the resolution passed in November. But the administration has said nothing that suggests it would accept less than complete Iraqi disarmament confirmed by American boots on the ground. That it would come to war in the end was always implicit in the American military buildup in the region, difficult to halt or reverse. In remarks last October, for example, the president's special envoy to the Iraqi exiles, Zalmay Khalilzad, issued unvarnished calls for getting rid of Mr. Hussein.

"We are of the view that disarming Iraq is extremely unlikely without regime change," Mr. Khalilzad said in a speech in Washington. He conceded it was a possibility that a provisional Iraqi government might be formed before a war to take over the country afterward, but noted, "It's more likely that there would have to be liberation first, and then a government put in place." He did not say what has since become apparent: that the administration effectively opposed creating a government in exile that could take power when Mr. Hussein fell.

This means the postwar power in Iraq will fall to the Pentagon's Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance, established by President Bush in January. The office's chain of command runs through Gen. Tommy R. Franks of the Central Command, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the secretary of defense and finally to Mr. Bush.

The Pentagon's official statement is that the United States will stay "as long as necessary" to get things going, and then leave "as soon as possible." When closely questioned by members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee who wanted more of an answer, the under secretary of state for political affairs, Marc Grossman, conceded on Feb. 11 that he did not think power could be completely turned over to an Iraqi government in less than two years. As for how many American troops will be required, the Army's top general recently said he thought it would take 200,000. The Pentagon immediately said no, not so many, without saying how many.

Whatever the number, they will become a target for Arab nationalists and terrorists, who have proved in the past that they can find a way through American security perimeters. In 1983 in Lebanon, where President Ronald Reagan sent American troops to help resolve a civil war, terrorists twice struck American targets with devastating effect. A bomb outside the American embassy in Beirut wrecked the building, killing more than 60 people including the entire C.I.A. station. A second bomb, outside a building converted into a barracks for American marines, killed 241 servicemen, and led to a complete American withdrawal within months. Responsibility for the attacks was never proved, but in both cases the C.I.A. suspected terrorist groups supported by the government of Iran, which shares a 730-mile border with Iraq, soon, perhaps, to be defended by Americans. C.I.A. analysts also suspect Iran's involvement in the 1996 bombing of the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, which killed 19 Americans.

The Bush administration does not dismiss any of these events as ancient history, regarding Iran as part of the "axis of evil" for its support of Hezbollah and Hamas, both classified as terrorist organizations, and for its pursuit of nuclear weapons, which Iran denies pursuing.

Iran was quick to denounce the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks by Al Qaeda, but the thaw in relations was brief. Last summer, Mr. Khalilzad charged that Iran's "unelected few" — the administration's customary way of referring to the clerics in power — are "aggressively pursuing nuclear weapons and the missiles to deliver them." This is supported by the C.I.A. as well as civilian groups that monitor weapons development; all agree Iran's nuclear program is bigger and closer to success than Iraq's. Iran's "continuing support for terrorists," Mr. Khalilzad said, "heightens our concern."

For President Bush the combination of nuclear weapons, "rogue states" and terrorists is the sum of all fears. In releasing the National Security Strategy last fall, President Bush said, "America will act against such emerging threats before they are fully formed."

It is fear of Iraq that will bring the American military to Iran's doorstep in the Middle East, and it is likely that fear of Iran will keep them there until the differences between Washington and Tehran are resolved by diplomacy or war, whichever comes first.

Thomas Powers is the author of "Intelligence Wars: American Secret History From Hitler to Al Qaeda."

France likely to suffer reprisals from America

France likely to suffer reprisals from America
by Joseph Fitchett International Herald Tribune
Saturday, March 15, 2003
http://www.iht.com/articles/89892.html

PARIS France seems bound to suffer a wave of economic and political losses at American hands, U.S. and French officials said Friday.
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The U.S. backlash against France is likely to range widely, they said, from moves to reduce the importance of the Security Council and other international bodies that buoy French prestige to blows against trans-Atlantic industrial cooperation that infuses American technology into French companies.
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Most uncontrollable of all the responses, they said, might be consumer boycotts that hit French products and services.

One official suggested that Washington may press for reforms at the Security Council to downgrade France's role. One example might be an enlarged Security Council in which a veto would require "no" votes from at least two members - and in which France and Britain would give up their permanent seats in place of a single seat for the European Union.
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A sense of foreboding is palpable among French business leaders, several of whom, speaking anonymously, fear a determined U.S. campaign to hurt French industry, not only by refusing to buy aircraft and other items manufactured in France but also by actively trying to supplant France in other world export markets.
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The outlook for industrial cooperation - in defense-related technologies, for example - will be chilled, Bush administration officials said.
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That would hurt major French companies that depend partly on cooperation with U.S. manufacturers - Thales with Raytheon in electronic warfare, for example, or Snecma with General Electric in aircraft engines.
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Even worse, according to these executives, some American investment is likely to flee, depriving the Paris stock market of investments that until recently accounted for up to a quarter of the total value of shares on the exchange. Right now, several major French companies desperately need fresh capital after drastic slumps in their sectors.
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The most obvious economic risk for France is exclusion from the opportunities in a postwar Iraq, starting with the country's major oil fields. The French oil giant TotalFinaElf SA has signed colossal drilling contracts, reportedly worth as much as $50 billion, with the current Iraqi regime that would go into effect at the end of international economic sanctions against Baghdad.
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In the event of U.S. military victory in Iraq, that French foothold would probably be lost.
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"The contracts, signed while Iraq was a pariah state, are so lopsidedly favorable to France that no successor regime would respect them, and a new team in Baghdad brought to power by Washington will certainly want to think again," a Bush administration official said.
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The Pentagon can prevent French defense companies from getting access to U.S. technology, but its leverage has to be viewed against wider U.S. interests, officials said. France's military establishment is considered to be the wing of French government most favorable to forceful U.S. policy on Iraq.
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"Do we want to cut military and intelligence cooperation and alienate a potentially influential lobby in France or do we hope to see the military play a role in a rethinking of some attitudes in the Chirac government?" a diplomat said.
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President Jacques Chirac has publicly brushed aside threats of U.S. retaliation, and American diplomats agree that Washington needs to be wary of moves that may be disallowed by the rules of the World Trade Organization. In the globalized world economy, many U.S. jobs depend on American sales to France and even French-owned companies in the United States.
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Richard Perle, head of the Pentagon's defense review board, said: "I think pinpricks can be counterproductive, but I also think that the time will come when France wants help from the United States and they will find no sympathy."
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U.S. officials recall that when Chirac triggered international indignation by resuming French nuclear testing in the Pacific in 1995, the Clinton administration voiced no criticism but gave French military scientists access to U.S. technology for simulating nuclear explosions.
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Today, the Bush administration might be unwilling to help France with its nuclear deterrent, U.S. officials said.
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While French officials take a reassuring line against any economic warfare, they also, unofficially, discount U.S. retaliation by saying that Washington already was waging an undeclared commercial war on France. Last year Washington successfully pressed the Czech Republic and Poland, both prospective members of the European Union, to buy warplanes from the United States instead of Britain and France. After the Gulf War a decade ago, France got only a tiny part of the reconstruction contracts in Kuwait even though French forces had played a combat role against Iraq.
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A State Department official in Europe said that the problems with France will dictate a future U.S. crisis approach based on bilateral deals with major allies instead of multilateral cooperation inside alliances and international institutions.
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"We will want to make sure that the United States never gets caught again in a diplomatic choke point in the Security Council or in NATO," he said.

Tally of Illness Cases Doubled in Hong Kong

Tally of Illness Cases Doubled in Hong Kong
By KEITH BRADSHER
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/17/international/asia/17CND-HONG.html

HONG KONG, March 17 — Health officials today nearly doubled their tally of confirmed cases here of a mysterious outbreak of respiratory disease, and acknowledged that further cases of pneumonia were under investigation, feeding fears that the disease may be spreading.

Dr. Yeoh Eng-kiong, Hong Kong's secretary of health, welfare and food, said that extensive tests had now ruled out the presence of avian influenza, of which Hong Kong has had two small outbreaks in the last six years, and of human influenza, or flu.

As a result, he said, health officials here now suspect that they are dealing with a previously unknown virus that is spread by tiny droplets released when an infected person coughs or sneezes.

While many samples have been distributed to laboratories around the world, no researchers have yet succeeded in isolating the new organism, Dr. Yeoh added.

Prime Minister Helen Clark of New Zealand asserted today that some World Health Organization officials believe the new illness could be as deadly as the influenza pandemic that killed 20 million people worldwide in 1918 and 1919.

But the health group's officials have tried in the last two days to tone down their warnings slightly, saying that the disease may be the same as one that appears to have become less virulent as it was passed from person to person earlier this year in Guangdong Province, which adjoins Hong Kong.

The official count for cases of what the World Health Organization now calls Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome rose to 83 today from 42 on Sunday, with 12 additional people under observation in hospital today and suspected to have the disease.

There were only four truly new cases today, with the rest of the increase, 37 cases, reflecting a decision to include people who were already in hospital with atypical pneumonia but are only now being included among the sufferers from the apparently new disease, Dr. Yeoh said.

The newly confirmed cases include 22 relatives and other visitors to infected patients at a single hospital here, the Prince of Wales Hospital, along with 15 medical students at the hospital. Dr. Yeoh had insisted until today that the disease was only infecting hospital doctors and nurses. He said today that the disease had still not spread far into the community because the infected relatives, visitors and medical students had all been hospitalized fairly quickly.

Prince of Wales Hospital has stopped taking patients for elective procedures and doctors there have been given temporary accommodations so that they will not have to run the risk of going home and possibly infecting family members, the Hong Kong Hospital Authority said today.

Most of the newly confirmed cases appear to have been infected by a single patient who was not identified by hospital staff as having pneumonia at the time of admission because the patient had a high fever but no other symptoms of pneumonia, Dr. Yeoh said. While Dr. Yeoh refused to divulge any details about the patient's health or gender, or even whether the patient was still alive, he did say that some of those infected were doctors who treat victims of cardiac arrest.

People with heart conditions often have shortness of breath, which is also a symptom that doctors are watching for in the current outbreak.

There are four clusters of confirmed cases in Hong Kong now, three at public hospitals and one at a private clinic. Dr. Yeoh also said that another small cluster of suspected cases had been found at a private hospital, but that the Health Department was not yet ready to declare that they were cases of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, as opposed to pneumonia caused by a medically understood infectious agent.

Dr. Yeoh's handling of the outbreak, especially his steadfast emphasis on minimizing the gravity of the problem and preserving Hong Kong's image as a tourist destination, has been the subject of increasing controversy.

Dr. Leung Ka-lau, the chairman of the Public Doctors' Association here who is also a doctor at Prince of Wales Hospital, publicly criticized Hong Kong authorities over the weekend for not providing more information to the territory's residents; he did not return phone calls or an e-mail message today.

Dr. Yeoh has gone to particular lengths to try to protect Hong Kong's international image, saying that the territory is not necessarily where the disease originated and that it might seem more common here simply because of better medical surveillance for new diseases.

"When HIV-AIDS was reported in America, nobody said you shouldn't go to America," he said, also noting that he planned to speak with foreign consul-generals here on Tuesday to try to allay their concerns.

Tourism accounts for slightly over 5 percent of Hong Kong's economic output, and is one of the few sectors of the economy that is expanding even as many jobs in manufacturing, distribution and even retailing have moved across the border to lower-cost cities in mainland China.

The government announced here this evening that unemployment had climbed to 7.4 percent in the period from December through February from 7.2 percent in the period from November through January.

Joseph Tung, the executive director of the Hong Kong Travel Industry Council, which represents the Chinese territory's 1,320 travel agents, said that there has been little effect so far on the number of tourists arriving from Europe and North America.

But new bookings for visitors from elsewhere in Southeast Asia have plunged by up to 80 percent in the last several days as countries like Singapore and Thailand have discouraged their citizens from taking unnecessary trips here.

Hong Kong is the world's fifth-busiest airport in terms of international passenger departures.

China Provides Information on Deadly Health Threat

China Provides Information on Deadly Health Threat
By LAWRENCE K. ALTMAN
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/17/health/17INFE.html

Chinese health officials yesterday gave the World Health Organization the first, sketchy details about a mysterious respiratory ailment that is believed to have first broken out in Guangdong province last November and that Chinese officials say has tapered off in recent weeks.

W.H.O. officials were elated to receive the information, because it was the first official communication from China about the outbreak and because it provides a longer-term view of how the illness has behaved since the first cases were detected. Although the new information hints that the outbreak may be ending in Guangdong for unknown reasons, W.H.O. officials say they need more information to be certain.

"If it has burned out, it certainly will give us optimism over its control" elsewhere, Dr. David L. Heymann, executive director in charge of communicable diseases for the W.H.O., said in an interview. "That is why we need more information to know what the natural history of the illness has been since November."

The W.H.O., an agency of the United Nations, on Saturday declared the ailment "a worldwide health threat." The agency calls the ailment severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, and says it has caused at least nine deaths in Canada and five other countries in recent weeks. The spread of the ailment, a form of atypical pneumonia, has been aided by international air travel. New cases, including many hospital workers, are being reported daily in affected countries, according to the W.H.O.

Laboratories in at least five countries have failed to identify any known infectious agent as a cause of the illness. The illness starts with the sudden onset of fever of 101.4 degrees or higher, muscle aches, headache, sore throat, dry cough and shortness of breath. X-rays show pneumonia or respiratory distress syndrome. Laboratory tests show low numbers of white blood cells and platelets, which help blood clot.

There have been no reports of the illness in the United States. But a 32-year-old doctor from Singapore and his 62-year-old mother-in-law are being treated for pneumonia in isolation in a German hospital after having attended a medical conference at the Crowne Plaza Hotel in New York City. Officials believe he may have contracted the illness in treating the first two cases in Singapore, where there are now 20 reported cases.

The doctor has a fever and a slight cough, and his mother-in-law has a high fever, doctors at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe-University Hospital in Frankfurt said at a news conference yesterday. They said that the doctor's 30-year-old wife, who is pregnant, has shown no symptoms.

New York City health officials said it was highly unlikely that the doctor or his family had given the illness to anyone in the city.

When asked about the issue at a St. Patrick's Day parade yesterday, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said he had spoken with the health commissioner, Thomas R. Frieden, and said, "Let me stress that the commissioner is reasonably confident that this guy did not infect anybody" in New York.

Health officials say they believe it takes direct and sustained contact to transmit the illness. But health officials have asked doctors to be alert to patients with flu-like symptoms who have recently traveled to Asia.

Coincidentally, infectious diseases were the subject of the meeting that the Singapore doctor attended, and news of the respiratory ailment was a hot topic in the hallways. The doctor attended the conference for two hours, said Dr. Marcelle Layton, New York City's assistant health commissioner for communicable diseases.

Dr. Layton said the Singapore doctor reported that he did not sit near other participants in the meeting and that he had minimal contact with anyone else during his stay in New York City. Dr. Layton said she had interviewed the doctor by telephone from his hospital room in Germany.

"He was very cooperative and helpful," Dr. Layton said in an interview.

Mr. Bloomberg said yesterday that health officials "have interviewed every single person that he had contact with when he was here and we are observing all of them."

Dr. Frieden "is reasonably confident that this guy did not infect anybody," Mr. Bloomberg said.

The doctor, whose name has not been released, had treated Singapore's first two cases of the illness. One patient was a doctor who had traveled to Singapore from Hanoi, Vietnam, where the outbreak has affected 46 people.

Before the Singapore doctor left home for the United States on March 11, he developed a fever, severe muscle aches and a rash, which disappeared within two to three days.

Dr. Barry M. Rosenthal, a physician at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City, said in an interview that late Thursday night he had received a call from the Singapore doctor, who said he had a rash and fever and wanted to know where he could get a blood test because he suspected he had dengue fever, a mosquito-borne viral infection.

Dr. Rosenthal referred the doctor to another physician. New York City health officials said that X-rays showed pneumonia in one lobe of the doctor's left lung and that he was treated with oral antibiotics.

The Singapore doctor called a colleague in Singapore before leaving for home via Frankfurt. The colleague notified W.H.O. officials, who arranged to have the doctor hospitalized in Germany. Yesterday, hospital officials said his condition had worsened slightly but that he was awake, alert and asking to read newspapers.

Information about the cases was distributed to participants at the New York City conference, which ended yesterday. More information would have been given to the public if the risk of transmission had been considered greater, Dr. Layton said.

The ailment has affected hundreds of patients in China, Hong Kong, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam, according to the W.H.O. In Canada, where two patients have died, there are eight other suspected cases.

The organization had previously listed Indonesia, but the cases seen there do not meet the working definition of the illness, Dr. Heymann said. Australian officials said they were monitoring a number of cases that did not meet the definition.

According to information gathered by the Chinese government over recent months but released to the W.H.O. only yesterday, SARS has behaved differently from past outbreaks of influenza, which can cause atypical pneumonia, or nonbacterial pneumonia. Chinese scientists at first thought the cases might be avian influenza but could find no evidence of any influenza virus. The current outbreak, in Guangzhou, the capital of Guangdong province, involves clusters of cases, particularly among hospital workers and family members of patients.

Chinese officials reported earlier that there were 305 cases, including five deaths. The cases have involved men and women in all age groups, but most have occurred among young adults.

The outbreak began in November and was at its peak Feb. 3 to Feb. 14. "The number of new cases decreased markedly after Feb. 15, and no new cases were detected in other cities," the Chinese reported.

Because the report appears to conflict with earlier reports from the W.H.O. that the epidemic in Guangdong had ended and the government's statement that the outbreak was confined to Guangzhou, Dr. Heymann said the W.H.O. was asking for clarification.

In Guangdong, the fever was of long duration, but officials did not say for how long. Most patients experience a dry cough, and any sputum is often tinged with blood.

Chest X-rays of many patients showed pneumonia in both lungs. In many patients, the disease progressed rapidly, even if the fever dropped. Some experienced a secondary pneumonia caused by bacteria.

Seven percent of patients experienced such severe difficulty in breathing that tubes had to be inserted in their windpipes and presumably connected to a ventilator.

The X-rays of many patients resembled the pattern of pneumonia produced by a microbe, Pneumocystis carinii pneumoniae, or PCP, that is common in patients with AIDS but rarely seen in people with normal immune systems.

A point of confusion was a statement by the Chinese that some seriously ill patients showed "immune system functions at a low level." There was no mention of whether such patients were infected with H.I.V., the AIDS virus. Dr. Heymann said the W.H.O. was seeking a clarification.

The Chinese report also said that "most of the patients could be cured after treatment, especially the patients who have no bacterial co-infection." The report gave few details of such a cure but said that "antibiotics did not have an obvious effect."

The Chinese provided no numbers, and Dr. Heymann said that W.H.O. was asking for clarification of those statements.

Electron microscopy showed evidence of infection in four patients with one of two microbes, Chlamydia psittaci, or parrot fever, and para-chlamydia. The W.H.O. said chlamydia had not been identified in cases outside of Guangdong.

The Chinese also said that "generally, transmission became weaker and weaker," a hint that if the cause is an infectious agent, it becomes less virulent as it is passed along.

W.H.O. officials have said that they expect to be able to send experts to Guangdong soon to clarify all the points of confusion and that they expect that their work will solve the riddle of the illness.

Outbreak Prompts Travel Warning in Asia

Outbreak Prompts Travel Warning in Asia
By LAWRENCE K. ALTMAN with KEITH BRADSHER
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/14/international/asia/14CND-HONG.html

Hundreds of people in Vietnam, Hong Kong and China have been stricken by a mysterious respiratory illness that has killed at least six people and left all the others with severe breathing difficulties from which they have yet to fully recover, worried officials of the World Health Organization said today.

The agency said an international team of scientists had been unable to determine the cause of the illness, or even whether it is caused by an infectious agent.

They said it was unlikely to be related to terrorism.

The organization issued an alert to health officials around the world, advising them of the illness, which the agency described as an "atypical pneumonia," and asking them to report new cases.

In addition to the breathing problems, the illness causes a dry cough and other flulike symptoms. The symptoms seem to develop within four to five days after exposure and start with a high fever followed by muscle aches, headache and sore throat.

Among the survivors, "no one has gotten well yet," said Dr. David Heymann, a top expert in communicable diseases at the World Health Organization. "It is not clear what is going on and it is not clear what the extent of spread will be."

The Geneva-based organization, a unit of the United Nations, has sent a team of experts from the United States, Japan, England, France and Australia to the affected areas. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta is also sending epidemiologists to Hanoi, where at least 42 cases have occurred, and Hong Kong where there have been 43.

The authorities in Hong Kong and Vietnam have established their own teams to try to contain the disease.

Earlier, Chinese officials said 305 people in Guandong Province had developed a similar illness. Chinese officials said the Guandong outbreak was over.

"These are areas where there is a lot of international travel," Dr. Heymann said.

Although some people seem to get better for a day or so, they relapse, developing acute respiratory distress and some needing to have a tube inserted in their windpipe and attached to a ventilator to help them breathe.

"It is not a very good situation," Dr. Heymann said in a telephone interview. "It is a very difficult disease to figure out, and this has been going on for the last 10 days to two weeks."

So far, laboratory scientists from three countries who are aiding in the investigation have not been able to identify a known or novel infectious agent, Dr. Heymann said.

Japanese officials have said the cause is not the influenza virus.

With relatively few deaths, "one might think we are overreacting to the cases," said Dick Thompson, a spokesman for the W.H.O. "But when you do not know the cause, when it strikes hospital staff, and it certainly is moving at the speed of a jet, we are taking this very seriously," Mr. Thompson said.

Hong Kong's secretary of health, welfare and food, Dr. Yeoh Eng-kiong, said that 43 hospital staff members had been admitted to hospitals with symptoms of the sickness, and 29 had been found to show signs of what is believed to be the atypical pneumonia. An American businessman who lives in Shanghai died of the illness at a Hong Kong hospital on Thursday.

The businessman had passed through Hong Kong to Hanoi, where he fell ill, entered a hospital and was then evacuated to Hong Kong when his condition deteriorated and the disease began spreading through the hospital staff. Officials in Vietnam said that 30 doctors and other employees had fallen ill at the hospital where the man was treated.

Seeking to allay concerns that might hurt the territory's important tourism industry, however, Dr. Yeoh said that the disease still appeared to be confined to medical workers and was not spreading through the general population. Hospital officials here acknowledged, however, that there might be additional cases among family members of hospital workers.

The authorities in Taiwan announced after Dr. Yeoh's news conference that the businessman had developed pneumonia and that his wife was developing flulike symptoms after their recent trip to Shenzhen, the mainland city adjacent to Hong Kong, in China's Guangdong Province. The couple had passed through Hong Kong on the way home.

Singapore's Ministry of Health announced today that nine people there had fallen ill: three recent arrivals from Hong Kong plus six people who cared for them, including two hospital workers.

While Taiwan mildly discouraged its citizens from taking nonessential trips to Hong Kong and Guangdong Province, Singapore's Ministry of Health advised citizens "to avoid travel to Hong Kong, Hanoi and Guangdong Province in China for the time being, unless absolutely necessary.`

Singapore and Hong Kong are fairly similar city states that compete fiercely for tourists and corporate headquarters, however, and have a history of sometimes sharp criticism of each other.

Top Air Force General Backs Independent Inquiry in Rapes

Top Air Force General Backs Independent Inquiry in Rapes
By ERIC SCHMITT
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/27/national/27CADE.html

WASHINGTON, Feb. 26 — The top general in the Air Force endorsed a Congressional call today for an independent inquiry at the Air Force Academy, where at least 20 women say they have been raped or sexually assaulted in recent years.

At the same time, the officer, Gen. John P. Jumper, the Air Force chief of staff, promised that a team of Air Force officers dispatched to the academy in Colorado Springs from Washington would "vigorously investigate" accusations that current and former cadets who reported sexual assaults faced indifference or even retaliation by academy officials.

"I welcome any investigation that is put out there, but there's none that's going to be more thorough than mine," General Jumper told reporters at a breakfast meeting.

In his most detailed comments on the widening scandal, General Jumper, a former fighter pilot and a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, spoke in unusually personal terms about an issue that he said struck close to home. He is the father of three daughters, two of them captains in the Air Force. The third begins officer training next year.

"You're looking at a dad who has absolutely no patience for that sort of thing, if it's true," General Jumper said.

Mindful of the Navy's mishandling of the Tailhook sexual harassment debacle a decade ago, General Jumper and his civilian boss, Air Force Secretary James G. Roche, have personally taken lead roles in addressing the issue as a rising number of women have gone public with accounts of being raped or sexually assaulted at the academy.

Mr. Roche is to address the cadets on Thursday night at the academy.

Mr. Roche and General Jumper have talked about having to address what some cadets who are women say is a male-dominated culture at the academy that discouraged reporting the attacks and failed to give them adequate emotional or legal support afterward. Several women have said that in the inquiries into their accusations, academy officials seized on other violations that occurred before the assaults like drinking or inappropriate fraternization to undermine their credibility.

The general said, "The allegations, as we read them from the females who've come forward, tell us that the process is not working and that there is intimidation in the chain of command that would suggest they should not report or press these infractions."

He made his comments as anger and outrage over the women's accusations grew on Capitol Hill. Senators Susan M. Collins, Republican of Maine, and Joseph I. Lieberman, Democrat of Connecticut, the chairwoman and the ranking Democrat on the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee, have asked the inspector general of the Defense Department, Joseph E. Schmitz, to examine the accusations immediately.

While praising Mr. Roche for dispatching the Air Force team to the academy, the senators said in a letter on Monday:

"It is imperative that an independent investigation be conducted. Even if only a portion of the allegations are true, such behavior is intolerable, and corrective actions are required immediately."

A spokesman for the Pentagon said Mr. Schmitz's office had received the letter and was considering the request.

Aides to Senator Wayne Allard, the Colorado Republican who brought the cadets' statements to Mr. Roche's attention last month, said today that 20 women had contacted the senator's office to say they had been raped or sexually assaulted while at the academy.

A spokesman for Mr. Allard, Dick Wadhams, said that eight women remained enrolled and that the rest had left as a result of their experiences and disillusionment with a system that they say did not protect them.

General Jumper repeated that he had no patience for academy officials who might have dismissed or discounted accusations of sexual assault because the women might have broken other rules.

"Sexual assault and rape is a crime of violence," General Jumper said. "There is nothing you can do in the way of minor infractions leading up to a crime of violence that excuses the crime of violence."

He added that he had talked to his daughters about the cases and their processing. Neither of the two older women, one a nurse and the other a maintenance officer, went to the academy and neither has ever been sexually assaulted, he said.

At a time when General Jumper's days and thoughts are consumed with the likelihood of war with Iraq, he said, he had turned to his daughters for advice on ensuring that cadets could freely report any assaults and be assured the cases would be properly investigated.

"They feel strongly that the processes have to be there for people to be able to report these and be able to carry them up the chain of command, with confidence they'll be acted on," he said. "But they also caution me that on the emotional side of this there are a lot circumstances that cause these things to be very carefully investigated to make sure that the whole truth is out there."

His remarks echoed answers that he gave on Tuesday to senators who questioned him at a hearing of the Armed Services Committee.

"Let me assure you and other members of the committee that there is no place in the United States Air Force for any potential officer who would treat any other potential officer in the way that has been alleged," the general told Mr. Allard. He also mentioned his daughters.

Mr. Allard, who has criticized top academy officials for being part of the problem, said General Jumper's comments reassured him.

"I got the impression he was as irritated as I was," Mr. Allard said in telephone interview.

Mr. Allard said the panel was planning hearings on the problem.

"I feel better now," he said. "But we will be following the investigation very closely."

Women Recount Cadet Life: Forced Sex and Fear

Women Recount Cadet Life: Forced Sex and Fear
By MICHAEL JANOFSKY with DIANA JEAN SCHEMO
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/16/national/16CADE.html

TUCSON, March 14 — Like other women accepted into the United States Air Force Academy, Sharon Fullilove was a star of her high school graduating class. Her academy application in 1999 included letters of commendation from President Bill Clinton and Vice President Al Gore.

But in November 1999, six months after entering the academy, she quit — devastated, she says, from being raped by a fellow cadet and convinced that she would find no help in the academy's male-dominated culture.

The daughter of an Air Force colonel, Ms. Fullilove said she believed that a majority of women in the academy are raped or molested, and that most choose not to report it because they fear an official investigation would expose them to shame, ridicule and retribution, if not dismissal. About 18 percent of the 4,200-member cadet corps are women.

"During the school year, you talk to people it has happened to, even upperclassmen, and they all say the same thing," Ms. Fullilove, 23, said in an interview here, where she is attending the University of Arizona. "They tell you to expect getting raped, and if it doesn't happen to you, you're one of the rare ones. They say if you want a chance to stay here, if you want to graduate, you don't tell. You just deal with it."

Ms. Fullilove's views are shared by dozens of other women who have left the academy before graduating, saying they were victims of rape and other sexual attacks. Many have come forward in recent months, recounting their ordeals and expressing their outrage, as Ms. Fullilove did, about an environment that they say favors men and protects them against complaints of sexual assault. She said that long after her rape, she learned that her assailant worked at the time as a counselor who answered the academy's hot line for women who want to report a rape or other sexual attacks.

The Air Force acknowledges that at least 56 cases of rape or other sexual assaults at the academy have been investigated in the last 10 years, though only one male cadet has faced a court-martial as a result of any accusation, in 1995. He was acquitted. Eight other male cadets have been expelled in sexual attacks since 1996. The academy concedes that it has no records of sexual assaults in the first 20 years of women's admission, starting in 1976.

Now, with the academy facing growing Congressional pressure over the issue, Secretary James G. Roche of the Air Force, and the chief of staff, Gen. John P. Jumper, have promised that an investigation into past cases and the failures of a system that was designed to prevent them will lead to major changes. So far, Air Force officials have said they will establish living areas for men and women at opposite ends of halls and provide counselors for women who bring their complaints forward. Just today, the Air Force inspector general announced that the Pentagon had set up a confidential phone line for victims of sexual assaults.

The full list of proposed changes is expected by the end of the month.

Mr. Roche said in an interview today that perceptions of Ms. Fullilove and other women who are victims "just sicken me," asserting that the Air Force was ill-served by an academy culture that would appear to condone aggressive behavior by men, leaving women to feel intimidated, inferior and overwhelmed. Changing that culture, he said, is the focus of the current investigation.

"This subject just drives me up a tree," he said of the threatening atmosphere women describe. "It's the worst of any of this. I don't want young women to feel that they have to make that kind of humiliating sacrifice to become officers."

He added, "That's why we're going to look at the whole place."

Many of the women who have come forward say they had dreamed of becoming fighter pilots and officers. But their ordeals, they say, convinced them that the cards were always stacked against them.

Sometimes the message is all too easy to see. Ms. Fullilove's mother, Col. Michaela Shafer, a 20-year Air Force veteran who serves as commander of in-patient and emergency room services at the academy hospital, said in an interview that dozens of commanders and teachers, some as highly ranked as colonel, often wear canary-yellow baseball hats bearing the black letters "LCWB." She said these initials were commonly known on campus to evoke a vulgar phrase celebrating the graduating class of 1979, the last class with men only.

Colonel Shafer said the same letters are visible on license plates and at pep rallies for academy football games. At one rally, she said she complained to men holding a sign bearing the letters, only to be told, "Tough. Deal with it."

While Mr. Roche said he was disturbed that men would flaunt such a message with caps and signs, Colonel Shafer said it reflected to many women at the academy a place driven by "an over-riding good-old-boy network that still doesn't want women there."

That is the impression Jessica Brakey, 23, a former cadet from Dodge City, Kan., said she had after she was raped during an outdoor training exercise between her freshman and sophomore years. Academy medical documents confirm the rape occurred.

While she told no one about the incident for nearly two years, she said it quickly affected her behavior. A psychological evaluation at the academy last April determined she suffered "personality disorder," stemming from a fight with a former boyfriend and "a week of disruptive behavior" toward a faculty member. She was judged unfit to become an officer.

The same report noted that she suffered " `sexual rape' by male cadet" and she "refuses to discuss or report incident." But nothing in the analysis suggests that academy officers ever considered the rape as a factor in her behavior.

Ms. Brakey finally reported the rape to academy investigators last August. While she was waiting for academy officials to decide her case, she said she was told to attend weekly group therapy sessions with other cadets who are women who had been sexually assaulted. Upon arriving, she said, she was astonished to find only the group of women, no therapist. She viewed it as a sure sign of command indifference toward women who had been traumatized.

"We had all been told the same thing," Ms. Brakey said. "Just shut up and go to the meeting."

Early in her senior year last November, academy officials concluded she was unworthy of being an officer and dismissed her from the academy. Her assailant was not punished, she said.

Ms. Brakey, who had played for the women's basketball team and sung in the gospel choir, said life at the academy for many women feels like "slavery expanded," adding, "Men totally disrespect females. You hear it all the time, `Women shouldn't be here. They slow us down. They're bad for morale.' This place is a boys' club, and for women, no matter how hard you work, how hard you try, it's never good enough."

"There are too many forces at work against you," she said, explaining why she waited so long to report her rape. "It's why girls don't come forward. They know that the minute you're on the stand, you'll be torn to shreds, humiliated, embarrassed, degraded and made to feel like less than a person."

Andrea Prasse, 23, a former cadet from Elm Grove, Wis., also refrained from reporting an incident in her freshman year. On her way to the bathroom one night, she said, a drunken cadet pulled her into his room and threw himself on top of her, opening his pants. She wept and pleaded, escaping the attempted rape. "I knew it was dangerous to report it," she said. "I was a freshman, and he was a junior."

Three years later, as a senior on track to graduate in the top third of her class, Ms. Prasse did seek help, asking her superiors if she could see regulations on sexual harassment after she accused a male classmate of stalking her and sabotaging her classwork.

But instead of investigating the other cadet, a member of the honor guard, Ms. Prasse said, officers advised her to try harder to get along with him. Eight days before graduation, an honor board found her guilty of lying about her accusations, recommending that she be expelled.

The board did not consider the evidence of earlier harassment by the cadet, according to a transcript of the hearing. Ms. Prasse said that if her initial complaints had been taken seriously back in December 2001, the academy could have stopped the harassment before her conflict with the cadet escalated.

"It was all being put on me," she said. "I had to get along. It was my fault, just like the rape victims."

Marie, another former cadet, who asked that her full name not be published, said she was called into another cadet's room, and they drank too much. She said she was raped after losing consciousness, and an academy counselor accompanied her to a local hospital, which collected evidence of sexual violence.

The academy is investigating the case, but investigators also determined that Marie's rape was, in part, her fault for drinking. She received 7 Class D hits, or infractions, and was sentenced to 265 hours of marching in circles.

But it was the single infraction for having sex — which she said was the rape — in a dormitory room that led her to resign, bitterly disillusioned.

"Being drunk, you deserve a hangover," she said. "You deserve an alcohol hit. But you don't deserve to be raped."

When women were first admitted to the academy, a vast complex of buildings and training sites at the foot of the Rocky Mountains 15 miles north of downtown Colorado Springs, life for them was designed to be no different than for men. Men and women eat, train and attend classes together and, after several years of separate living quarters, now reside in co-ed dormitories, where the only distinction is that women have their own bathroom facilities.

The first year is especially difficult for cadets, who slog through a crucible of pre-dawn drills and shrill commands from upperclassmen in a typical military effort to break down bad habits, build up new ones and create a bond among cadets. But many women say the absolute power upperclass males wield can have heavier burdens that their male counterparts seldom face. Ms. Brakey called it "10 months of pure hazing," adding, "It's all about rank. If you're outranked, you do whatever they say. If they say jump, you say how high."

But problems arise, she and other women said, when men demand that women comply with other commands that sound innocent enough at first but lead to unwanted sexual advances, like an order to talk in private with an older male cadet.

Ms. Brakey, who has hired a lawyer to help her gain reinstatement to the academy, said a supervisor on her training exercise made repeated attempts to spend time with her, which she said she avoided. One night he awoke her from her tent and insisted they talk. Outranked, she complied and followed him down a path away from tents where others were sleeping, she said. After a few minutes of conversation, she said, he pinned her on top of a picnic table and raped her.

Her attacker graduated is now an Air Force officer, she said.

Ms. Fullilove said her ordeal started much the same way, in her freshman year, after what seemed like a harmless offer from a junior in her squadron, a man she knew, to drive her to her dormitory after a group of cadets had watched a movie in the student lounge.

On the drive, she said, the cadet pulled off to the side of the road and forced himself on her.

Two days later, she said, the cadet appeared at her dormitory door and said, "Sorry if I did anything inappropriate."

By the end of the day, Ms. Fullilove notified commanders that she wanted to leave the academy, certain that she could never feel comfortable or safe there again. Nobody, she said, asked her anything more than, "Are you sure?"

It took Ms. Fullilove, who once dreamed of being an F-15 fighter pilot, more than a year to tell anyone about her rape, and by last March she and her mother informed academy officials of what happened, filing a report with investigators. It was not until this week that they heard back. Colonel Shafer said she received a call from an investigator, who told her the file had mysteriously been destroyed.

"My daughter was ready to die for the United States," Colonel Shafer said. "She knew she could have been captured by an enemy, raped and pillaged in war. She did not expect to be raped and pillaged at the United States Air Force Academy. It's just unbelievable how she was taken advantage of. It makes me sick."

China Leader Steps Down, but Not Out of the Picture

China Leader Steps Down, but Not Out of the Picture
By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/16/international/asia/16CHIN.html

BEIJING, March 15 — This past week, Jiang Zemin, China's former Communist Party chief and departing president, spent hours on the phone with leaders in the United States, Britain, France and Germany, discussing the fate of a possible United Nations resolution on Iraq as well as the standoff over North Korea's nuclear program.

Today, Mr. Jiang stepped down as president, and Hu Jintao — the party leader since last fall and a man with little foreign policy experience — was elected to succeed him in a vote by China's legislature. That has left diplomats and scholars wondering how China's foreign relations will be affected by Mr. Jiang's departure while the world is in crisis.

During his decade-long tenure, Mr. Jiang evolved into a skilled diplomat. His primary legacy will almost certainly be seen as raising China's profile on the international scene and, especially in the past couple years, developing relations with the United States. Once a large but relatively isolated country, China has stepped firmly onto the world stage.

Of course, no one expects Mr. Jiang to fade into the woodwork. Today, he was re-elected as chairman of the state Central Military Commission — he already headed the party's military commission — and one of his chief allies, Zeng Qinghong, was elected vice president, giving Mr. Jiang a continuing government power base. In internal speeches and meetings with foreign diplomats, he has made it clear that he expects to be directing foreign policy, especially in dealings with the United States and Taiwan.

But now he must as least coordinate that message with China's official new leaders, and exercising his influence on international issues may prove more difficult without his official seat of power. "Will Jiang try to keep the foreign policy and military all to himself for a long time, and who do we talk to when we have something to say?" asked a Western diplomat. "That is a question now."

Wu Jiaxiang, a Chinese political commentator, said, "If I were President Bush, I'd first give Jiang Zemin a call and then place a second one to Hu Jintao, because Hu Jintao is clearly now the highest civilian authority and formally China's top leader, but Jiang Zemin remains China's most senior de facto leader."

In recent months, Mr. Jiang has publicly positioned himself as an arbiter of crisis situations whose continued input is sorely needed.

He has developed a personal friendship with President Bush, visiting his ranch in Crawford, Tex., in November as one of his last acts as party leader. American officials have repeatedly described China as being extremely helpful in fighting terrorism and have said they doubted that China would veto an American-sponsored resolution on Iraq, out of respect for the relationship.

In the last week, the Chinese news media have been filled with reports of Mr. Jiang's late-night phone talks with Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain and Mr. Bush, as he joined Germany and France in diplomatic efforts to stave off a war with Iraq.

In a speech in January, Mr. Hu expressed appreciation to Mr. Jiang for staying on in the military role and has emphasized the importance of maintaining "harmony between the generations." But as Mr. Hu matures as a politician and makes his own contacts, it is unclear how the two men will work together.

From today's voting, it was clear many in China wish that Mr. Hu would be allowed to develop his own foreign policy sooner rather than later. Though there were no other candidates, almost 10 percent of legislative delegates opposed Mr. Jiang as chairman of the Military Commission. Almost 20 opposed Mr. Zeng's assuming the vice presidency.

Those were distinctly dissenting votes in a legislature where the norm is unanimity. "Often these days, you get 10 or a dozen votes opposed," said Mr. Wu, the commentator. "But 10 percent, that's really not a small number. I think it clearly reflects the public opinion that Jiang Zemin's decision to hang on to power this way has damaged his reputation."

Of course, there remain many indirect routes for Mr. Jiang to retain his influence on foreign policy, notably through Mr. Zeng, who has accompanied Mr. Jiang on many overseas trips, including one to the United States. Many government observers say that he will be placed in charge of the important Taiwan Affairs Leading Group, overseeing policy toward the island.

China regards Taiwan as a breakaway province that must be eventually reunited with the mainland, by force if necessary. But the United States has vowed to provide Taiwan with the means for its defense, leaving the Taiwan issue as a huge sticking point in relations with Washington.

The new official foreign policy team has not been announced. A new foreign minister is to be named on Sunday.

But some political observers here guess that Mr. Hu may be happy for the moment to have his predecessor calling the shots with so many foreign policy minefields on the horizon.

The Parliament today also chose Wen Jiabao, a longtime party functionary and technocratic manager, as prime minister, giving him primary responsibility for managing the world's sixth largest economy.

The largely rubber stamp legislature confirmed the Communist Party's choice of Mr. Wen, 60, a former vice premier, to suceed his boss, Zhu Rongji, who guided China into the World Trade Organization during his five years in China's top administrative post.

Mr. Wen's promotion has been assured since he was elevated to the third-ranking member of the new Communist Party Politburo in November. He will inherit responsibility for keeping China's long streak of rapid economic growth on track and for tackling the growing and politically sensitive gap between incomes of urban and rural residents.

Wen Jiabao -- China's New Prime Minister

China's New Prime Minister Seen as Careful Conciliator
By JOSEPH KAHN
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/17/international/asia/17CHIN.html

BEIJING, March 16 — Wen Jiabao, a number-crunching chief of staff who self-effacingly served China's top leaders for two decades, was formally appointed prime minister today. His election by the National People's Congress gives him day-to-day command of China's economy and its 100-million-person bureaucracy and completes the leadership transition that began last fall.

Mr. Wen, 60, who succeeds the formidable and sometimes brusque Zhu Rongji, will face the challenge of keeping the economy primed. He has vowed to do more to raise the income of peasants and to help workers displaced by wrenching economic changes.

Like his superior Hu Jintao, who became Communist Party chief last November and state president on Saturday, Mr. Wen scaled the one-party political hierarchy leaving few footprints and making no known enemies. People who have worked with him say he is conspicuous mainly for being fastidious. He lets policy documents sit on his desk for at least three days before signing off, they say, so he can slow-cook the contents in his mind and triple-check the grammar.

"Like an insect in a spider web, he knows if he moves too fast he'll get caught," said Wu Jiaxiang, a political analyst and former high-ranking party official. "The main thing about Wen is that he never makes political mistakes."

Although he is now the main manager of the world's sixth-largest economy, Mr. Wen ranks third in the Communist Party hierarchy, behind Mr. Hu and Wu Bangguo, who now heads the legislature. Jiang Zemin, the recently retired president and party chief, remains chairman of the Central Military Commission and is likely to exert broad influence.

But as Mr. Wen and Mr. Hu prepared to take control of government and party affairs in recent weeks, they have signaled a subtle shift from the decade-long reign of Mr. Jiang.

Mr. Jiang courted capitalists and sought to foster a middle class, while steering billions of dollars in state funds to build roads, bridges, subways and ports in prosperous east coast cities.

Mr. Wen spent the Chinese New Year holiday at the bottom of a coal shaft in the less developed west. Mr. Hu visited herders in frigid Inner Mongolia. They have emphasized building a social security system to replace the withered socialist welfare state that has left tens of millions of workers without adequate pensions or health care. They have stressed the urgency of reducing the wealth gap between urban and rural residents.

Their focus on the poor reflects worries that the traditional constituents of the Communist Party could threaten its hold on power. Protests by laid-off workers and overburdened farmers are a regular feature of Chinese life, alarming authorities who insist on political stability.

It is difficult to tell if the speeches and demonstrations of concern for the socially dispossessed will lead to new aid programs. But Mr. Wen does appear to want to tackle the problems energetically.

Though born in the eastern port city of Tianjin in 1942, he learned firsthand about rural backwardness during the 14 years he spent working as a geologist and party official in the arid western province of Gansu. He has said that improving the lives of the 700 million people who live in rural areas is the "central and basic goal" for the future.

As deputy prime minister, the position he held before becoming prime minister, he arranged experiments in Anhui Province to reduce the taxes imposed on farmers. Those experiments have since spread nationwide, though it is too early to gauge their effectiveness.

Mr. Wen also seems committed to moving China toward a market economy. He was the top deputy and a close adviser of Mr. Zhu, widely regarded as the Chinese leader most strongly committed to integrating the country with the world economy.

In style, Mr. Wen could offer a stark contrast with the fiery Mr. Zhu, who publicly belittled bureaucrats and harrumphed about the intransigence of the Chinese system. Analysts say the bespectacled Mr. Wen tends to prize consensus and avoid confrontation. They predict he may get results.

"When it comes to how to deal with banks or rural development, the debate is about solutions, not ideological principles," said Kang Xiaoguang, a political scientist at the Chinese Academy of Science.

Mr. Wen's political leanings are more obscure.

Before becoming deputy prime minister in 1998, he served three successive party bosses as the director of the general office of the Communist Party Central Committee, or, effectively, the party chief of staff. The three bosses were Hu Yaobang, Zhao Ziyang and Mr. Jiang.

The feat was not unlike serving three presidents as White House chief of staff. Each of the Chinese successions was acrimonious — Mr. Zhao succeeded Mr. Hu and Mr. Jiang succeeded Mr. Zhao after political purges. But Mr. Wen transformed himself into a trusted aide to each party leader, managing paper flow and even handling his bosses' personal security.

Both Mr. Hu and Mr. Zhao, who ruled the party during a period of relative openness in the mid-to-late 1980's, were considered more eager to experiment with political reform than Mr. Jiang, who took over after the bloody crackdown on pro-democracy protests in 1989.

Mr. Wen helped draft proposals for political change, raising at least the possibility that he sympathized with those efforts and might want to liberalize China's repressive political system.

But one thing seems indisputable about Mr. Wen. He has the malleability of a survivor, not the gumption of a maverick.

His mix of loyalty and cunning became the stuff of legend in 1989 during the Tiananmen Square protests. Mr. Zhao, having been effectively deposed as head of the party after intense infighting, decided to make a public visit to the square to show solidarity with protesters camped out there.

As deputy, Mr. Wen went along with Mr. Zhao. The two were pictured together visiting demonstrators in a front-page photograph in the People's Daily, the Communist Party newspaper. Shortly after that rare act of political bravado, Mr. Zhao was placed under house arrest, where he remains 14 years later.

Two well-connected party officials said Mr. Wen survived what could have been a career-ending move because he had telephoned Mr. Zhao's rival, the hard-liner Li Peng, to consult about what to do before joining Mr. Zhao in the square. Mr. Li agreed that Mr. Wen should remain loyal as long as Mr. Zhao remained party chief.

Deal Reached on Khmer Rouge Trial

U.N., Cambodia Reach Deal on Khmer Rouge Trial
By REUTERS Filed at 5:16 a.m. ET
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-cambodia-rouge.html

PHNOM PENH (Reuters) - The United Nations and Cambodia reached a landmark agreement on Monday to set up a special court to try those most responsible for the Khmer Rouge genocide, officials said.

An estimated 1.7 million people died at the hands of the ultra-Maoist regime in the 1970s, but despite a huge wealth of evidence documenting their atrocities no Khmer Rouge leader has ever been placed in the dock.

Cambodians, who have been waiting more than two decades for justice, hailed the deal that could bring elderly former guerrilla leaders before a court.

The surprise breakthrough after 11 rounds and more than five years, came after a weekend of talks in the Cambodian capital to try to finalize a draft agreement on the trial format.

``This is the end of the technical level of this very long, complicated and delicate process,'' Cambodian Senior Minister and chief negotiator Sok An told guests at a hastily arranged lunch to celebrate the outcome.

``We initialled the draft in front of the prime minister,'' he said, referring to Prime Minister Hun Sen.

The draft legal agreement now requires approval by the U.N. General Assembly and the Cambodian parliament.

``If both sides adopt the articles of agreement and support it, then everything will begin to work,'' Cambodian negotiator Om Yentieng told reporters.

Disagreement over who would control court proceedings -- the United Nations or Cambodia -- have dogged the talks for years.

Negotiations broke down last year with the United Nations saying Phnom Penh's vision of the court could not guarantee a free and fair trial.

Since then, and the subsequent U.N. decision to return to the table with a mandate from the U.N. General Assembly, both sides appear to have had the political will to make compromises although details of their Monday agreement were not available.

The U.N. General Assembly overwhelmingly backed a resumption of talks in December, so it is highly likely the international community will back a trial under the agreed guidelines.

Approval from the Cambodian side seems assured since chief negotiator Sok An is one of Hun Sen's senior ministers.

PRAISE FROM VICTIMS

The Khmer Rouge, a jungle guerrilla movement spawned during the Cold War, ruled the Southeast Asian nation from 1975 to 1979.

Their vision for a peasant utopia failed and descended into the nightmare of the ``Killing Fields,'' during which victims died of torture, starvation, execution or exhaustion.

Monday's breakthrough won immediate praise from surviving Cambodians.

``Congratulations to both sides for this achievement. This is what I have been waiting for years and years,'' Vann Nath, one of the seven survivors of Phnom Penh's notorious 'S-21' torture camp, told Reuters.

``If they need me to testify, I will be happy to step forward against Duch,'' he added, referring to the head of 'S-21' who is likely to be among the handful of Khmer Rouge leaders to go on trial.

The regime's supreme leader, Pol Pot, died in 1998 but his second-in-command, 'Brother Number Two' Nuon Chea, and former Khmer Rouge president Khieu Samphan are also likely to be among those in the dock.

Other probable defendants are ex-Khmer Rouge foreign minister Ieng Sary and military chief Ta Mok, also known as 'The Butcher'.

In an early sign that a deal had finally been struck, chief U.N. negotiator Hans Corell toured the venue earmarked for any trial -- Phnom Penh's Chaktomuk Theater, sited at the confluence of the Mekong and Tonle Sap rivers.

Corell, a Swedish lawyer who first visited Cambodia three years ago, said it was time for the international community to make up for abandoning Cambodia at its darkest hour.

``Where were we in the time of the Khmer Rouge? Since then, I think the world community owes a debt to Cambodia. I hope we can now repay that debt if this agreement comes into force, and we can assist,'' he told guests at the lunch.

Om Yentieng said the two negotiating teams had even sorted out who would be picking up the bill for the court. ``We have also worked the financial details,'' he said without elaborating.

Surviving Amid the Horrors of Idealistic Killing Fields

Surviving Amid the Horrors of Idealistic Killing Fields
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/14/books/14BOOK.html

The only Westerner known to survive a Khmer Rouge prison, François Bizot — a French ethnologist specializing in Southeast Asian Buddhism — was a witness, back in 1971, to the looming terror that would leave an estimated two million people dead in Cambodia by the end of the decade.

During his three-month captivity in a Khmer Rouge camp, where he was accused of being a C.I.A. spy, Mr. Bizot developed a close, bantering relationship with one of Pol Pot's lieutenants: a man named Douch, who would procure his release and who would later become the director of the notorious Tuol Sleng prison, where thousands of people were tortured and killed. The two men's relationship, which forms the narrative spine of Mr. Bizot's harrowing new book, was one worthy of a novel by Graham Greene or John le Carré — a relationship made up in equal parts of guilt and fear and intellectual gamesmanship; affection, manipulation and cross-cultural Socratic fascination.

How did Douch, an individual Mr. Bizot knew in the early 1970's as "one of those pure, fervent idealists who yearned above all for truth," become one of history's monsters? How did this man, who worked so hard to obtain Mr. Bizot's release because he believed him innocent of the charges against him, become a savage, indiscriminate killer, "the one responsible for so much infamy"? Those questions lie at the heart of "The Gate," and they underscore the larger questions of how Cambodia became a killing field, the site of one of the worst genocides in modern history.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE GATE
By François Bizot. Translated by Euan Cameron. With a foreword by John le Carré.
276 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. $24.
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In "The Gate," already an award-winning best seller in France, Mr. Bizot recounts with unsparing detail and emotion the story of his arrest and imprisonment and his later efforts to help evacuate foreigners, trapped in the French Embassy in Phnom Penh. Though the narrative is filled with odd elisions and gaps (the author is curiously vague about his activities from 1971 to 1975, and even vaguer about the fate of the mother of his daughter, Hélène), though it would have benefited enormously from additional background material that might have situated events in a larger historical context, Mr. Bizot's story possesses the indelible power of a survivor's testimony.

He writes as a man haunted by the terrible things he has experienced and seen: shackled and humiliated for months in the Cambodian forest, torn between hope and the probability of a violent death; witness to the abasement of his fellow prisoners and, later, witness to the terror of refugees denied asylum in the French Embassy or turned back at the Thai border. He writes, he says, with "a bitterness that knows no limit," a fearsome knowledge of the monstrous things human beings are capable of doing to one another.

"I now believe only in things; the spirit can detect what is eternal beneath their outward appearance," he writes. "Does not the most enlightened philosophy teach us to mistrust man? The optimal being, the supreme creature, the natural aristocrat of the living world? Man who — when, exceptionally, he becomes his true self — can bring about excellence, but also bring about the worst. A slayer of monsters, and forever a monster himself . . ."

Mr. Bizot is uncompromising in his condemnation of utopian movements like the Communism of the Khmer Rouge, which leads people to justify means by ends and has led to some of "the bloodiest exterminations in history." And he is equally contemptuous of Western intellectuals, who embraced the 1975 Khmer Rouge victory with an ovation "so frenzied as to drown out the protracted wailing of the millions being massacred."

Of American involvement in Cambodia, he writes: "In 1970, when the Americans arrived in Cambodia, I saw them as allies in my impossible quest. But their irresponsibility, their colossal tactlessness, their inexcusable naïveté, even their cynicism, frequently aroused more fury and outrage in me than did the lies of the Communists. Throughout those years of war, as I frantically scoured the hinterland for the old manuscripts that the heads of monasteries had secreted in lacquered chests, I witnessed the Americans' imperviousness to the realities of Cambodia. Yet today I do not know what I reproach them for more, their intervention or their withdrawal."

The central drama in "The Gate," however, remains Mr. Bizot's tortured relationship with his onetime captor and savior, Douch, which is painfully and minutely dissected in these pages. "The peculiarities of my character, my way of thinking, and my reactions made him aware that there was another way of living and existing, one very different from his own, which seemed to appeal to him," Mr. Bizot writes. "I was aware that I rarely provided him with arguments he could make use of, but I nevertheless placed my fate squarely in his hands. I made my liberation depend directly upon him, and I told him so: `If you don't believe me . . . who will?'

"In fact, Douch was the only card I had to play, and somehow I trusted him. Of course he would have me killed without hesitation if the order came, inventing any pretext (which I would have believed) to lure me to the place of horror, but only after genuinely trying to save my life. This terrible man was not duplicitous; all he had were principles and convictions. And if that hypothesis was true, then I had an ally."

On the eve of his leave-taking, Mr. Bizot realizes that Douch, a former math teacher and a conscientious leader of his men, has also been the one beating and terrorizing the other prisoners, and he has a dark intimation of the horrific events to come: "For the good of the cause, he had resolutely set off into the labyrinthine quagmire of ideology, to try and reach the flowers of deceit growing in the shadows, no longer able to look up to the sky. From then on, his lot was to obey the rule of terror, but in conditions of such darkness and silence that I wonder whether he had ever been aware of the appalling power he had been granted."

Authentically Black

'Authentically Black': Don't Call Him a Black Conservative
By MICHAEL MASSING
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/16/books/review/016MASSIT.html

Not long ago, John McWhorter was a little-known associate professor of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, specializing in creole languages. While attending conferences and social gatherings, however, he was struck by how often other accomplished middle-class blacks insisted that the white man kept them down. McWhorter decided to vent his dismay. ''Losing the Race,'' which appeared in 2000, chided African-Americans for subscribing to a cult of ''victimology'' that caused them to shun learning and shrink from challenges. Full of brash pronouncements, the book was praised and panned on editorial pages and radio talk shows. McWhorter was invited to speak at colleges and to write essays for magazines like The New Republic and the Manhattan Institute's City Journal.

Now he is publishing a collection of those essays. ''Authentically Black'' covers everything from reparations and racial profiling to Cornel West and the use of the word ''nigger.'' In his preface, McWhorter notes that he dislikes the ''black conservative'' tag that has been pinned on him since the appearance of ''Losing the Race.'' He writes, he says, to rankle both the left, with its belief that ''black people can only achieve when society is perfect,'' and the right, with its notion that ''black people need to just get real and put up or shut up.''

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AUTHENTICALLY BLACK
Essays for the Black Silent Majority.
By John McWhorter.
264 pp. New York: Gotham Books. $25.
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On an issue as polarized as race, such resistance to being pigeonholed is refreshing. And in places McWhorter delivers. In an essay titled ''The 'Can You Find the Stereotype?' Game,'' he deftly mocks analysts who, despite the profusion of black shows on television, continue to insist that the media provide a ''misleading'' picture of black America. Almost every black portrayal since 1970, no matter how engaging, he complains, is dismissed as a stereotype. Thus, ''all large, nurturing black women'' are ''Mammies,'' and any prickly black male is an ''Angry Black Man.''

McWhorter does not oversell his point. He concedes that some black shows are trashy, and that black characters on white shows often go undefined. But this, he convincingly argues, is outweighed by the growing richness of the black presence on television. And, disarmingly, he confesses that he loves TV and watches way too much of it.

McWhorter offers an equally fresh take on black history. Every February, when Black History Month rolls around, black call-in shows light up with complaints that African-Americans don't know their history because it is unavailable. This is silly, he writes, given the ''thousands of books'' on the subject. The problem, he contends, is that those books are overly narrow, focusing either on Africa, which seems too distant, or a succession of tragedies, which seems too negative. What is needed, he declares, is ''an energetic chronicle of what ordinary blacks have been able to accomplish in this country communally.'' As examples, McWhorter mentions the black business districts that flourished in big cities in the early 1900's and the high-quality black high schools that, until the 1950's, turned out stellar students despite many obstacles.

Midway through, however, the essay takes a tendentious turn. Among the subjects McWhorter wants black textbooks to address is the decline of the nation's inner cities. He mentions a number of common explanations -- racial discrimination, the exodus of middle-class blacks, the flight of blue-collar jobs to the suburbs -- and rejects them all as products of ''leftist brainwashing.'' If such jobs moved, McWhorter demands, why didn't urban blacks follow them? He thinks he knows the answer: ''The reason so many black people just sat on their hands and descended into slovenly dependence in the late 1960's was that the expansion of welfare deprived them of any urgent reason to do otherwise.''

The subject of inner-city decline has, of course, given rise to a vast literature. And while few observers today would deny the part that welfare played, McWhorter's insistence that this was the sole factor, and that anyone who believes otherwise is a deluded leftist, seems ideological, not empirical.

Unfortunately, ''Authentically Black'' is full of such sound bites. McWhorter regularly denounces the scourge of affirmative action, the spinelessness of black leaders and the '' 'Jonathan Kozol' camp'' of analysts who believe that low test scores among black students reflect social inequalities. While extravagantly praising the Republicans, he regularly derides the Democrats, who, he claims, have ''championed identity politics for decades, reveling in the self-congratulatory smugness of treating blacks as helpless.''

McWhorter's language seems not only overheated but also underedited. He has W. E. B. Du Bois turning in his grave twice, overuses trendy words like ''trope'' and ''paradigm'' and serves up warring metaphors. The reason the word ''nigger'' ''is such a hot potato,'' he writes, ''is that its use supposedly cuts the addressee like a knife.''

McWhorter reserves special ire for what he calls the ''new black double consciousness.'' While African-Americans celebrate their progress in private, he writes, in public they continue to lash out at their white oppressors. Being ''authentically black'' means insisting, in the presence of whites, that most African-Americans are poor, even though this is not borne out by statistics. ''Nor,'' he adds, ''does a walk down the street of an American downtown give any suggestion that most of the blacks one sees are living hand to mouth.''

Of course, much depends on which street one chooses to walk down. In ''Authentically Black'' McWhorter draws heavily from his personal encounters on campus and at colloquiums. His book abounds in passages like, ''I recall a 20-something black man . . . at an African-American studies conference.'' In discussing the Cornel West-Lawrence Summers commotion at Harvard, McWhorter describes his own busy life as a ''public intellectual,'' in which he must take time out from his academic work to answer the ''voluminous e-mail correspondence I get every day.''

When McWhorter sticks to subjects he knows firsthand, like television and diversity on campus, he can be sharp and provocative. But when he attempts to address issues in the broader world, like the inner city, he becomes polemical. ''Authentically Black'' will do nothing to remove from McWhorter the tag of black conservative.

Michael Massing is the author of ''The Fix,'' a critical study of America's war on drugs.

A Lifelong Obsession With Women, in Pictures

A Lifelong Obsession With Women, in Pictures
By HOWARD W. FRENCH
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/15/international/asia/15FPRO.html

TOKYO — Slowly, ever so slowly, the model comes to life.

Clad tightly in a green kimono with bright red flowers, she seems bound, plastic doll-like, and would almost pass for lifeless, were it not for the playful tugs she executes on her blousy sleeves as she poses.

But with a velvety Anita O'Day CD upholstering the bare cement studio with plush renditions of old jazz standards, and the ecstatic man behind the lens — Nobuyoshi Araki — coaxing, praising, grunting encouragements with the force of an Olympic shot-put thrower as he squeezes off frames, the once timid and uncertain subject gradually begins to exude a brilliant, sensual vitality.

Who is this jittery impresario, this photographic Pygmalion, this man with the black, toothbrush-bristle mustache and the Einsteinian shocks of hair that explode from opposite hemispheres of his shiny, otherwise bald pate? "I am the genius, Araki," he proclaims.

Controversy has followed the career of Japan's most famous photographer at every step, primarily for rendering women, his one constant focus, as objects. He has been known to string them up in trees, half-naked, like strange fruit; he has a penchant for producing bondage books that some critics say come close to calculated exploitation; and he has even been accused of taking advantage of the death of his wife in 1990 from cancer.

But after four decades of Araki's prolific output, continual growth and exploration — albeit focused mainly on nudes, flowers, his cat and mournful skies — few critics in Japan dispute the artist's appraisal of himself as Tensai Araki, or Araki the Genius.

WHAT is most remarkable about the man is that after 300 photography books, by his own rough estimate, four or five major shows in Japan every year, and frequent overseas shows, including one that opened in New York on March 6 at the Roth Horowitz gallery, he gives not the least sign of slowing down, nor of boredom with his most cherished subject matter, the female form.

On the contrary, with his almost morbid reserves of energy, Araki runs panting teams of assistants, who these days are on hand to aid his every move. A ragged figure, he thrives on three or four hours of sleep a night, often shooting 40 rolls of film per day, firing off images through the windows of taxis stopped at red lights or while walking down the street, and leaving others to sift through his immense output.

All the while, the photographer speaks faster than a stand-up comedian, and with just as much wordplay. His own jokes are the only relief from work, and they are invariably accompanied by infectious gales of staccato laughter that sweep everyone in his company along with the mood.

What keeps a man of 62 running like this, however, is not comic at all, if one is to take Araki at his word. His motivations, he insists, are the great, eternal themes of art — love and death — which are forever twinned in his work, and which, he says, find their ultimate expression in explorations of the female nude.

Told in an interview that someone once defined an intellectual as a person who had discovered there were things in life that were more fascinating than women, this son of a cobbler rocketed out of his seat and emitted something close to a primal scream.

"Really," he shouted, startled and still airborne. "There is nothing more interesting than women, and nothing more exciting. Their biggest attraction is being mysterious.

"You absolutely cannot understand them," he added, seated in the Rouge, a favorite haunt in the Shinjuku district of Tokyo, where his nudes line the walls of the bar's semicircular private booths.

Throughout Araki's career, Shinjuku's Kabukicho area has been a favorite stamping ground. The seedy, neon-drenched combat zone of massage parlors, peep shows, and narrow walk-up buildings crowded with an unimaginable variety of sex clubs is the direct descendant of the prewar "floating worlds" of geisha houses, tea shops and bordellos, brought up to date for a Japan that has dispensed with most of its quaint prudery about sex and, as with nearly everything else, gone zestfully industrial.

Driven, as he was, by an obsession with women, the young Araki could have chosen no better place. He settled in as the neon playground's latter-day Toulouse-Lautrec.

These days, although he still returns to Shinjuku, which he calls "the womb of Tokyo," Araki has no need to haunt the sex district in search of subjects willing to undress for him.

He has so famously become the master of the nude that would-be subjects — housewives, celebrities, college students, aspiring actresses, dancers and models — haunt him.

"Beautiful or ugly, I am not so interested in their surface, but in their inner, human qualities," he said. "Every woman has an interesting face and life. If it were possible, I would like to live forever, and to face every woman.

"What I lack is time."

Although always interested in women, and in nudes, Araki's career took a sharp turn with the death of his wife, Yoko. Under the effects of mourning, his work became dark and depressive, from scenes of hothouse flowers just on the point of wilting that seem to reek of death, to black and white skies whose clouds appear laden with tears and ready to burst.

For a time, his nudes took a pornographic turn, and by his own account, his life descended into unprecedented debauchery, with the photographer claiming to have slept with virtually every woman he shot.

His preoccupation with physical sex has slowed, he says, partly because of age. But his attachment to the female image is, if anything, even more intense.

"In the end, you reach shunga," he said, referring to the tradition of sexually explicit woodblock prints. "I understand why Picasso painted erotica when he was older. As your physical capacity declines, the artist's mind becomes more excited. People say shunga depicted physicality, but it is actually the representation of these fantasies."

Araki spoke with shifting emotions when asked about his wife. "Yoko was not my partner, we were one mind, one body," he said, ensconced in his booth at the Rouge. "She was not my muse, but photographing her was everything to me. I shot her more than any other woman, and she was my most exciting subject.

"January 27 was the anniversary of her death," he announced, with a sudden shameful bow of the head. "But I forgot it, and spent the day at a love hotel with another woman. That was bad of me."

Araki's pictures of Yoko, collected in books like "Sentimental Journey/Winter Journey," easily qualify as some of his most consistently affecting work. The portraits of her are unblushingly intimate, utterly unaffected and natural in the manner of a 19th-century realist, and while the nudes and bondage studies that fulfill Western fantasies of Japanese exoticism are most popular abroad, Yoko's images, more than anything else, have made his reputation at home.

Some critics have denounced him for emotional manipulation, selling books focusing on his wife's decline, for example. But many women who approach Araki nowadays in hopes of getting him to photograph them often speak of the impact of the emotional honesty they felt in these portraits.

"If you look closely at the women I photograph, they are satisfied," Araki said, in his own defense. "My behavior, my words are a form of caress that glorifies women. In return, they give me loving expressions. They are not troubled at all."

Strutting Down the Runway With a Severe Case of the Blahs

[the aliens are here, and they're models!!]

Strutting Down the Runway With a Severe Case of the Blahs
By GUY TREBAY
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/16/fashion/16MODE.html

PARIS. In a "Sunset Boulevard" vein, Richard Avedon once reminisced about the days when fashion models had real faces. Having spent decades gazing through the lens at women as beautifully disparate as Veruschka, China Machado, Nadja Auermann, Cindy Crawford and Iman, Mr. Avedon was in a position to know. A tendency had developed, the photographer complained, for editors to fill magazine pages with young ciphers whose faces were about as interesting, he said, as pie plates with holes punched in them.

Paris and Milan are the two places where modeling agencies each season import new talent to be started in a difficult business. Tastes in beauty tend to be adventurous among European fashion makers, and it is on the Continent that trends in beauty also take flight.

It is in Paris and Milan that the industry books odds on the new stars of magazines and runways. During the fashion season, certain streets in these two cities have something of the quality of the magical river bends certain anglers dream about, where extraordinary creatures arise above the water, hatched out of who knows where, and are just as suddenly gone. One year it is lush Brazilians or beaky Belgians or quirky Britons or Russians with child's pouts and sexy, suspicious hooded eyes. Styles roll on inexorably, however, and on the evidence of four fashion weeks in New York, London, Milan and Paris, this bids to be a pie-plate year.

With no obvious new national or ethnic vein being mined by talent scouts (and certainly not one that benefits black, Latina or Asian models), the current preference in the business where beauty is capital is for young people of no particular beauty — women with attenuated limbs, tiny heads and a range of expression that can sometimes put an observer in mind of an aquarium.

Elise Crombez, Madeleine Blomberg or Adina Fohlin are a few of the aggressively nondescript women seen everywhere on catwalks this season, frequently in the first entrance (which is called an exit) at a fashion show, a position that signals designer favor and often a trend. "She is the show star of the season," Nian Fish, the creative director of KCD, a fashion show producer, said of Ms. Crombez, backstage at the Chloé presentation in Paris a week ago. The usual gaggle of slender young women were clustered behind clothes racks on a bright early morning, laughing and gossiping and smoking Marlboro Lights.

"Elise is Belgian, but she's a sexy Belgian," said Ms. Fish of Ms. Crombez, who is 21 and comes from Koksijde, a town near the border of France. "She opened Prada," added Ms. Fish, referring to one of Fashion Week's most important runways shows, one that was notable this year for its tone of chic but anonymous androgyny.

Ms. Blomberg is a severe young Swede who opened the Louis Vuitton show last week and is featured in the latest Miu Miu campaign. She was cast for Vuitton, the designer Marc Jacobs said, less for her facial beauty than for her height and her peculiarly somnambulist walk.

Ms. Fohlin is another Swede ubiquitous on runways this season. Not long ago she had decided to quit the modeling business, which had been unreceptive, only to discover suddenly that designers like Alexander McQueen, who featured her prominently in his Paris show, were seeking precisely "a girl who doesn't look like a typical model," said Myriam Obadia, the creative director of Ms. Fohlin's agency, Next.

What she, Ms. Crombez and Ms. Blomberg look like are "students on the runway for the first time," Emmanuelle Ault, the fashion director of French Vogue, said.

If modeling is "always a business that creates the looks," said Ms. Obadia, a vehicle for transporting to the global-image market whatever form of beauty seems fresh at the time, there will likewise always be changes in how beauty is symbolized.

There are moments, Ms. Obadia added, when "it's all about a particular strong kind of beauty," the kind exemplified by supermodels in the 1990's, a time when the steady flow of money created a backdrop for a certain kind of vain, hoof-stamping loveliness — that of, say, Linda Evangelista, whose famous remark that she would not get out of bed for less than $10,000 a day now seems emblematic of a dated opulence.

IN leaner times, beauty, too, gets pared down. "These things come in cycles," said Alex de Betak, the director of Bureau Betak, one of the premier fashion show production houses. "It's a trend like every other trend."

Mr. Betak was speaking at last week's Chanel show, held in the Carrousel du Louvre. The parade of models deployed by Chanel's designer, Karl Lagerfeld, included most of the big name "girls" currently at work; as a group, they displayed Mr. Lagerfeld's clothes efficiently, a progression of sleek but interchangeable cogs.

Also working in the Chanel show that morning was the lovable, and lovably off-kilter, 1970's model Pat Cleveland, along with her son and daughter, Noel and Anna Van Ravenstein.

As Ms. Cleveland mugged from the runway, blew kisses to friends in the front row and pranced in delight, she gave some observers the impression of being a representative of fashion's sister planet, a place where personality is a natural complement to beauty and where the height of beauty is not an ability to impersonate an automaton.

"Designers don't want someone too recognizable at the moment," said Mr. Betak, whose wife, the French gamin Audrey Marnay, seemed faintly out of place in the show. "Now what is more important and more efficient," Mr. Betak added, "is neutrality in whoever is wearing the clothes."