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The Poisoned Well
By FOUAD AJAMI

At was not so much the guns of Oct. 6, 1973, and the assault of the Egyptian and Syrian armies against Israel, that changed contemporary history and remade our world. It was the use 11 days later of the "oil weapon," and the price increases that followed, which tipped the scales of history.

By the time OPEC unsheathed the oil weapon, 30 years ago today, the tide of battle had turned. Israel had regained the initiative: its soldiers had crossed to the western side of the Suez Canal, and were within striking distance of Damascus as well. It was then, on the edge of yet another Arab calamity, that the Saudi monarch, King Faisal, broke with his American protectors and began what turned into a frontal assault on the very bases of the post-World War II international order.

On Oct. 17, 1973, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries raised the price of oil to more than $5 a barrel from $3 a barrel; a day later it cut production by 5 percent a month; three days later, it imposed an embargo on petroleum exports to the United States. Then the shah of Iran struck with a rebellion of his own. In Tehran, just before Christmas, he secured the consent of the other oil-producing nations for yet another price increase, to $11.65 a barrel.

In the "Thousand and One Nights," the recurring theme is of the beggar becoming king and the king a beggar. So it was when OPEC imposed its embargo. It was an attempt to turn the stuff of fantasy into reality, to make the largest transfer of wealth in the annals of nations. Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger was among those who realized this. "Never before in history," he wrote in his memoirs, "has a group of such relatively weak nations been able to impose with so little protest such a dramatic change in the way of life of the overwhelming majority of the rest of mankind."

No tears were shed, though, for the old order of things in those countries rich with oil, or in the large stretches of the Arab-Muslim world on their periphery. The peoples of those lands had long dreamt of just such a moment. They hadn't quite foreseen how the dream would play out. Still, the modern nationalisms of the Arabs and the Iranians had always revolved around the use of oil; the grievances of these nationalisms were tales of how Western prospectors and explorers, and their powerful world-spanning companies, had worked their way on the politics of the Arab Middle East and brought about its subjugation.

These lands, it seemed, were now done with that history. Everywhere in the Arab world there was a palpable sense of excitement, of defeats avenged. Nothing was out of reach. New wealth would bring the latest technology and training and secure the withdrawal of Israel from the lands it occupied in 1967. Modern history itself could be short-circuited; poor, unskilled societies would be able to join the era of technology and industry.

For a historically minded people, this new wealth signaled the return of history, the bestowing of a second baraka (blessing) on the Arabian Peninsula. The first, of course, had been the rise of Islam in the first half of the seventh century. But Islam's power, and its center of gravity, then shifted to other lands — to Damascus, Baghdad, Córdoba, Cairo, Istanbul.

When the balance of power tilted back to the Arabian Peninsula, it was said to be piety's vindication. Lands hitherto left to pestilence and anarchy — in the desert domains, locusts were a common source of protein before the age of oil made possible more lavish meals — were given a sign of divine favor and its material rewards. In the days of scarcity, Kuwaitis had led a harsh, simple existence: they were pearl divers and fishermen who sailed their dhows to ports in India and the Arabian Sea. They had known hunger and need.

Now the world came calling on Kuwait. The cities of the Levant and the Fertile Crescent, which had brokered the meeting of the civilization of the West with their own, were reduced to begging for a share of the new wealth. There was a diminishment of Beirut, Damascus, Cairo, Tunis, and a new ascendancy of the oil states. Hucksters and peddlers of every kind and contraption descended on the oil states.

The wealth worked its way into these societies with astounding velocity. A world that had been whole, where people had little but shared more, was bulldozed. The social balance was ruptured.

A fault line opened between those who fell into riches and those left behind. The ditch was even deeper if measured by cultural pretensions; there were those who succumbed to the ways of the glamorous foreign world and those who watched and lamented as their world and its verities spun out of control.

This second group soon fell back on an aggrieved nativism. The new wealth had a new nemesis: Americanization was overtaken by a fierce anti-Americanism, a mighty wind of wrath and resentment.

A Pied Piper rose in Iran: a turbaned mullah, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who summoned his people back to the safety of tradition. A middle class created by the oil wealth, educated men and women who would live to regret their new religious zeal, rallied to him.

The shah of Iran, Muhammad Reza Pahlavi, had been one of the chief architects of OPEC's policy; he had wanted to turn his country into an Asian Germany, to extirpate the role of the religious class and to herd his people into the modern age. He was the first victim of oil's curse. A bare five years after he engineered the big price hike, he gathered a handful of soil, left his country, and started roaming the world in search of a place of exile.

From the distance of three decades, we can see oil's curse — and its ambiguous gift. It wasn't just Iran that was undone by sudden wealth. On the shores of the Mediterranean, Algeria succumbed to barbarous slaughter; a war erupted between that country's rulers and insurgents who draped their wrath, and the fury of their dispossession, in Islam's banners: Hezbollah (the Party of God) on one side, Hizb Fransa (the Party of France) on the other. For nearly 15 years, the slaughter went on in the cities of the country, while the work of oil continued uninterrupted in the Sahara. The killer squads of the regime and the merciless insurgents both fought for oil's bounty.

In Iraq, the ruin had a different story line: here oil was tethered to state terrorism, and a displaced peasant thug from the town of Tikrit, fired up by the dreams of money and oil, set out to wreck his country and to plunge the world into endless discord.

We are still in the grip of that historical moment. That wayward son of Arabia, Osama bin Laden, is a child of the oil revolution. He came of age amid the new wealth; it was petromoney that he took to the impoverished mountainous land of Afghanistan.

And it was petromoney that brought about the demographic explosion that has swamped and unsettled Arabia. Thirty years ago, less than 7 million people lived in Saudi Arabia; today the estimate is about 17 million. For every member of the lucky generation that came into its own in the years of plenty, there are several more younger claimants now choking on failure and disappointment.

The mind plays tricks here: as the wealth of 1973 was evidence of divine favor, so the retrenchment is a sign of divine disfavor, and a call on the faithful to rectify the course of history. Belligerent piety now fills the void, gives order and meaning to the capricious cycle of history, its boom and bust.

Men and women are not given the gift of foresight. If they were, would the crowds that thrilled to what October 1973 represented have been so triumphant, knowing the heartbreak and ruin that lay in store for them, and for us all?


Fouad Ajami, professor of Middle Eastern studies at Johns Hopkins University, is author of "Dream Palace of the Arabs: A Generation's Odyssey."

Don't leave me this way..... but rough sex might not be out of the question!
Poll: Most in Baghdad Want Troops to Stay
By WILL LESTER
Associated Press Writer


WASHINGTON (AP)--When Gallup set out recently to poll Baghdad residents, the biggest surprise may have been the public's reaction to the questioners: Almost everyone responded to the pollsters' questions, with some pleading for a chance to give their opinions.

``The interviews took more than an hour to do, people were extremely cooperative with open-ended questions,'' said Richard Burkholder, director of international polling for Gallup. ``People went on and on.''

But many of those Iraqis still have sharply mixed feelings about the U.S. military presence.

The Gallup poll found that 71 percent of the capital city's residents felt U.S. troops should not leave in the next few months. Just 26 percent felt the troops should leave that soon.

However, a sizable minority felt that circumstances could occur in which attacks against the troops could be justified. Almost one in five, 19 percent, said attacks could be justified, and an additional 17 percent said they could be in some situations.

These mixed feelings in Baghdad come at a time when many in the United States are urging that the troops be brought home soon.

Almost six in 10 in the poll, 58 percent, said that U.S. troops in Baghdad have behaved fairly well or very well, with one in 10 saying ``very well.'' Twenty 20 percent said the troops have behaved fairly badly and 9 percent said very badly.

Gallup, one of the nation's best-known polling operations, hired more than 40 questioners, mostly Iraqi citizens directed by survey managers who have helped with other Gallup polling in Arab countries. Respondents were told the poll was being done for media both in Iraq and outside their country, but no mention was made that the American polling firm was running it.

To conduct the poll, Gallup did interviews face-to-face in people's homes chosen at random from all geographic sectors of the city, and more than nine in 10 agreed to participate, at least double the response rate for many U.S. telephone polls. Pollsters in the United States have an increasingly difficult time getting cooperation from people called on the phone.

``This is the way we did polling in the United States before telephone ownership got to the point that we could do reliable phone surveys,'' Burkholder said in an interview with The Associated Press. The poll of 1,178 adults was taken between Aug. 28 and Sept. 4 and had a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.

Burkholder said Gallup plans to do further polling in Baghdad in coming months and hopes eventually to expand throughout Iraq. Gallup plans to release much of the data through its subscription service, the Gallup Poll Tuesday Briefing.

Gallup started its operation in Baghdad because it felt Baghdad would have the lowest security risks after the war, but that hasn't turned out to be the case, Burkholder said. Six in 10 Baghdad residents said that within the past four weeks they had been afraid at times to go outside their homes during the day.

A King's Appeal

By Jim Hoagland
Thursday, October 16, 2003; Page A25


Western democracies won the Cold War by shaking open closed societies and exposing their failures and crimes to citizens who then refused to go on living that way. The great political challenge of today is to induce similar change in Arab nations and other Islamic countries that do not respect the rights and dignity of their own citizens.



Think of it as collateral repair: The coming wave of epochal change must also be driven by internal forces, with restrained but committed support from abroad. The ultimate goal is reform within Islam conceived and carried out by Muslim leaders, scholars and civic groups, substantively welcomed by the West.

And that reform must begin with the role and rights of women in the Islamic world. A question posed last week in as important a speech as I have read recently makes that unblinkingly clear:

"How can society achieve progress while women, who represent half the nation, see their rights violated and suffer as a result of injustice, violence and marginalization, notwithstanding the dignity and justice granted them by our glorious religion?"

The irrefutable logic about the high cost of institutionalized gender discrimination was voiced by Morocco's King Mohammed VI last Friday at the opening of Parliament in Rabat. He then outlined far-reaching changes in family and divorce laws for the kingdom that would effectively lessen the intrusive reach of religious authorities into gender issues.

I am aware that speeches are given in the Arab world, as well as in Washington, to postpone or avoid the actions they describe. And in fairness to the globe's 1.2 billion Muslims, it has to be noted that all religions have been used at some point as a tool of control by unscrupulous political and religious leaders, and misogynists of all stripes -- as Islam is used today far too often.

But Mohammed VI outlined highly specific remedies and committed both his religious and political authority to getting them enacted. And he repeatedly invoked the language of the Koran to denounce the unfairness of polygamy, marriage contracts, guardianships and divorce laws as they are practiced in his country and by implication elsewhere in the Muslim world.

As befits a 40-year-old monarch whose followers call him "the Commander of the Faithful" and who claims descent from the prophet Muhammad, the king argued that solutions can and should be found in Islam. But his words also implicitly acknowledged that Islam has been deformed into an instrument of repression in much of the Arab world and elsewhere.

Consider this: Two-thirds of all illiterate Arab adults are women, who are kept out of schools by custom, lack of resources and, in many places, by determined opposition from religious authorities. The Moroccan king took aim at a sickness that deprives many Islamic societies of the talents and productive labor of half their populations.

Morocco perches on the North African Atlantic shoulder of the Arab world. The immediate, direct consequences of Mohammed VI's words in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere may be slight. (They went largely unreported in the United States as well.) But the king's embrace of this cause represents both catalyst and reflection of broader change that is rapidly bearing down on the region.

It is part generational change as aging autocrats give way to younger leaders. Change is also being stirred by the deposing of a uniquely evil regime in Iraq, a thunderclap that is reverberating throughout the region, and by the pressures of the shadow war being fought between global terrorists and the U.S.-led coalition.

Mohammed VI's speech makes clear that he was not intimidated by the bombings in his country last May carried out by Islamic fundamentalists tied to al Qaeda. Nor does he seem cowed by the reactionary religious establishments that have contributed so much to the backwardness and turmoil now evident in Islamic nations.

An effective reform movement is straining to be born. In the same week the Moroccan king spoke, the Nobel Committee awarded the 2003 peace prize to Shirin Ebadi, an Iranian lawyer who leads the fight in her country for women's rights and democracy -- two causes that cannot be separated in the Islamic world. This is a good example of collateral repair: restrained but focused Western encouragement of reform.

Mohammed VI provides a standard to which Arabs, Iranians, Pakistanis and others can and should be held. They are not being asked to live up to Western standards by improving the opportunities and lives of "their" women. This is a descendant of the prophet, not Gloria Steinem, who is telling them that they must change or fall ever deeper into self-destructive decline.

More Rummy right stuff from Ken Pollack:

Saudi Arabia's Big Leap
By KENNETH M. POLLACK

ASHINGTON — Saudi Arabia's announcement on Monday that within a year it will hold elections for municipal councils could be the first tremor in a slow-moving Middle Eastern earthquake.

First, some caveats. We don't have all the details yet and, as things often do in the Middle East, this might not live up to its advance billing. A year is a long time away. The initiative might get derailed. The elections may not be as fair and free as promised. We do not know if women will be allowed to vote. And it is only a baby step toward addressing vast structural flaws within the Saudi system.

But still, the Saudi announcement is potentially a very big deal, and the cynics should take note: more so than even the pluralist maelstrom in Iraq, moves toward democratization in Saudi Arabia could have ripples throughout the Middle East.

In fact, because Saudi Arabia is the most conservative of the Arab states, Riyadh's decision to start a process of democratization, no matter how gradual, is already beginning to force many Arabs to rethink where the tides of Middle Eastern history are headed. As long as the Saudis keep moving down this path, no matter how sluggishly, it will be hard for the other countries of the region not to follow. The other governments will have no answer when their people ask why, if the Saudis can adopt more pluralistic political institutions, can't they as well?

What's more, such reforms are the only way to deal with the two major threats that the United States faces from the dysfunctional Saudi system. The first is that Saudi society has become an important contributor to violent terrorist groups like Al Qaeda. Osama bin Laden himself is Saudi, and he has found many of his recruits among his disaffected young countrymen. And, knowingly or not, many wealthy Saudis — including, probably, members of the royal family — have contributed to Islamic charities that were fronts for terrorist organizations.

The second threat is that much of the anger and frustration that makes Saudi Arabia a fertile recruiting ground for Osama bin Laden have also made Saudi internal politics increasingly volatile, raising the specter of a violent upheaval. As long as Saudi oil production remains a linchpin of the global economy, we cannot afford an Islamic revolution there. Even if civil war or a fanatical new regime did not shut Saudi oil production altogether, either might result in a reversal of the high-production, low-price oil policy that the Saudi royals adhere to. This would set off recessions around the globe.

Both of these threats spring, at least in part, from a common source: more than any other Arab state, Saudi Arabia is in desperate need of comprehensive political, economic, social, legal and educational reform. The economy is faltering badly, which in turn has meant that the kingdom can no longer afford the profligate ways of the royal family or the cradle-to-grave social welfare system erected during the fat years of the 1970's and 80's. The Saudi educational system is useless, emphasizing the humanities and Islamic studies at the expense of science and mathematics. Because of its reliance on rote memorization, even college graduates have few marketable job skills. Saudi Arabia's decrepit legal system is distorted by xenophobic strictures, like laws limiting foreign investment, and is undermined by abuses by the royal family.

The result is that unemployment probably exceeds 30 percent, and among males in their 20's — the talent pool for terrorists and revolutionaries — it is probably even higher. No job means no income, no dignity, probably no wife, no sons and no place in Saudi society. Many of these angry young men focus their wrath at the autocratic Saudi regime, for not addressing these problems and for giving them no legal method of redress, and at the United States, for supporting that regime.

The only way for the Saudis to get at these deep-seated problems is through modernization, and that process has to start with the political system. Until there is greater transparency, accountability and participation in the political process, Riyadh will not be able to deal with the corruption and inertia that have paralyzed the economy and society. And as long as the royals are seen as running the kingdom purely for their own benefit, those preaching violent change will find plenty of willing executioners.

So what can the United States do to see that Monday's announcement actually leads to something significant?

First, we should endorse it, but not trumpet it. Crown Prince Abdullah, the leading reformist in the kingdom, and his supporters need to know that America appreciates what they are trying to do. Likewise, the opponents of reform among the royal family and the bureaucracy need to understand that Washington will hold accountable anyone who impedes change. However, the United States can't be seen by the Saudi public as embracing the effort too tightly — Saudi demagogues would no doubt make political hay by claiming that anything America favors must be bad for Saudi Arabia.

Second, we may need to hold the Saudis' feet to the fire. We must make sure that electoral progress continues and is not an excuse for backsliding in other areas: legal reform, foreign ownership of Saudi businesses, educational reform and others. Yet Americans should keep in mind that the pace of reform is likely to be slow (if only because everything is slow in the kingdom) and that this is actually good for us and for them. As F. Gregory Gause III, a Saudi expert at the University of Vermont, has pointed out, if we could magically create democracy in Saudi Arabia tomorrow, we would probably find Islamic fundamentalists elected by overwhelming margins. It will take years of political liberalization before enough moderate political leaders emerge to offer an alternative to the Islamists and the regime.

In addition, we should come up with measures that might remove other pressures on Riyadh. Crown Prince Abdullah and his supporters will be loath to push electoral reforms if they face other problems at home. We could start with quiet conversations between Bush administration officials and members of the Saudi government to get a better feel as to how we can help them. For example, one good reason (among many) for the United States to work more vigorously with the Israelis and Palestinians is that the Saudi population's anger over the Arab-Israeli standoff has made the Saudi leadership cautious of taking actions that they expect could be unpopular.

But above all, we have to stay focused on our long-term priorities: shutting down terrorist financing and recruitment, supporting the reconstruction of Iraq and pursuing Saudi internal reform. Too often, we have saddled the Saudis with a host of other demands, from financing our pet projects (like Bosnian reconstruction) to purchasing expensive American military equipment, to lobbying members of the United Nations Security Council on our behalf. The more we press the Saudis on unpopular secondary issues, the slower they will move on terrorism and reform. And in the end, those are the issues that really endanger American interests and lives.


Kenneth M. Pollack is director of research at the Saban Center of Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution and a former director for Persian Gulf affairs at the National Security Council.

Does this prove Rummy right?

Saudis announce first elections


Saudi Arabia, an absolute monarchy, has announced it will hold its first council elections, in a move seen as the kingdom's first real political reform.
The government decided to "widen the participation of citizens in running local affairs through elections", the state news agency SPA reported.

Half the members of future councils will be elected under the reform.

The desert kingdom has never had political elections at any level since its creation in 1932.

The council elections are to be held within a year, SPA said, quoting from a statement by the Council of Ministers.

"[This decision comes] to implement King Fahd's speech about widening popular participation and confirming the country's progress towards political and administrative reform," the statement added.


The announcement came as a conference on human rights - the first ever in Saudi Arabia - got under way in the capital, Riyadh.
Academics and human rights activists from around the world are attending the two-day event.

The BBC's Middle East analyst, Roger Hardy, reports from Riyadh that the conference, entitled "Human rights in peace and war", is being prominently reported in the country.

Among the issues on the agenda will be the rights of women and children.

Opening the conference, the Saudi Interior Minister, Prince Nayef Bin Abdul Aziz, referred to the millions of people around the world whose rights were threatened by war and terrorism.

He singled out the plight of the Palestinians, and our correspondent says his remarks indicate that the Saudi authorities want the conference to be broadly rather than narrowly focused.

Pressure

Our correspondent says the prospect of limited council elections may be too little for some in Saudi Arabia, who have been calling for full national elections.

Observers report that Saudi Arabia has been under mounting pressure to reform its institutions.

The issue has gained urgency since the wave of suicide bombings in Riyadh on 12 May which left 35 people dead, including the nine bombers.

Saudi citizens were also extensively involved in the 11 September attacks on America. US politicians and commentators have accused Saudi Arabia's mixture of autocratic rule and puritanical Wahabi Islam of providing a fertile breeding ground for fanaticism and violence.

Within the country, the attacks have spurred liberals and moderate Islamists to openly express their dismay at what they consider an expanding "culture of violence" promoted by religious radicals.

Story from BBC NEWS:

DANGEROUS DIPLOMACY

Foggy Bottom's Friends
Why is the State Department so cozy with the Saudis?

BY JOEL MOWBRAY Monday, October 13, 2003 12:01 a.m. EDT

(Editor's note: This is adapted from , "Dangerous Diplomacy: How the State Department Threatens American Security," which you can buy from the OpinionJournal bookstore.)

The date was April 24, 2002. Standing on the runway at Ellington Air Force Base in Houston, the cadre of FBI, Secret Service and Customs agents had just been informed by law-enforcement officials that there was a "snag" with Crown Prince Abdullah's oversized entourage, which was arriving with the prince for a visit to George W. Bush's Western White House in Crawford, Texas. The flight manifest of the eight-plane delegation accompanying the Saudi would-be king had a problem. Three problems, to be exact: One person on the list was wanted by U.S. law enforcement authorities, and two others were on a terrorist watch list.

This had the potential to be what folks in Washington like to refer to as an "international incident." But the State Department was not about to let an "international incident" happen. Which is why this story has never been written--until now.

Upon hearing that there was someone who was wanted and two suspected terrorists in Abdullah's entourage, the FBI was ready to "storm the plane and pull those guys off," explains an informed source. But given the "international" component, State was informed of the FBI's intentions before any action could be taken. When word reached the Near Eastern Affairs bureau, its reaction was classic State Department: "What are we going to do about those poor people trapped on the plane?" To which at least one law-enforcement official on the ground responded, "Shoot them"--not exactly the answer State was looking for.

State, Secret Service and the FBI then began what bureaucrats refer to as an "interagency process." In other words, they started fighting. The FBI believed that felons, even Saudi felons, were to be arrested. State had other ideas. The Secret Service didn't really have any, other than to make sure that the three Saudis in question didn't get anywhere near the president or the vice president. State went to the mat in part because it was responsible for giving visas to the three in the first place. Since this was a government delegation--for which all applications are generally handled at one time--the names were probably not run through the normal watch lists before the visas were issued.

Details about what happened to the three men in the end are not entirely clear, and no one at State was willing to provide any facts about the incident. What is clear, though, is that the three didn't get anywhere near Crawford, but were also spared the "embarrassment" of arrest. And the House of Saud was spared an "international incident." That normally staid bureaucrats engaged in incredible acrobatics to bail out three guys who never should have been in the United States in the first place says a great deal about State's "special relationship" with the Saudis.

The State-Saudi alliance really does boil down to one thing: oil. At least that's what former secretary of state George Shultz seems to think: "They're an important country," he told me. "They have lots of oil. You do pay a lot of attention to that." Foggy Bottom agrees, and has been conditioned to do so by the 1970s oil shocks. When the infamous oil crisis of 1973 was ballooning, America was confident that its tight relationship with the Saudis would ensure an uninterrupted flow of cheap oil. This confidence was shattered--and world oil prices more than tripled--when the Saudis pursued their own economic interests. Saudi power inside Washington skyrocketed, with bureaucrats realizing that the House of Saud could not be taken for granted.

When the next oil crisis struck in 1979, prices shot up by more than 150%--but that was mostly driven by other countries: a substantial drop in Iraqi production and the sudden halt in Iranian production. Consumer panic, hoarding by nervous companies and individuals, and price gouging also contributed. Saudi Arabia did little to deepen the crisis--Saudi-controlled OPEC implemented two comparably modest price increases in 1979--and actually was seen by many as an invaluable ally. The balance of power managed to shift even further in the Saudi direction in following years--and State became ever more willing to accede to Saudi demands.





The bond between Washington and Riyadh may have deepened because of the oil crises, but it began decades earlier. FDR initiated the oil-for-protection relationship in 1945. President Eisenhower enshrined this arrangement as a strategic goal with his Eisenhower Doctrine in 1957, where he declared the protection of the Arab world--with particular focus on Saudi Arabia--to be a national-security priority.
While official policy was coziness with the House of Saud and Foggy Bottom was dominated by Arabists, there was some degree of tension, with many officials uncomfortable with the radical Wahhabi clerics who dominate everyday life in Saudi Arabia. In 1962, President Kennedy became increasingly concerned that the civil war in Yemen--in which Egypt backed the pan-Arab revolutionaries, and Saudi Arabia backed the royalists--posed a tremendous threat to the stability of the region. According to Hermann Eilts, a former ambassador to both Saudi Arabia and Egypt, Kennedy pushed the House of Saud to engage "in internal economic and political reform and end all aid to the Yemeni royalists." Such pressure, though, turned out to be short-lived. Mr. Eilts, in a review of a book by a fellow Arabist, former ambassador to Saudi Arabia Parker Hart, noted that promotion of reform--something Mr. Eilts himself found unpleasant and unhelpful--was abandoned entirely just a few years after it started.

Not until Lyndon Johnson's administration did then-secretary of state Dean Rusk wisely discontinue all such exhortations for reform, which by then had become almost rote and counterproductive. The Saudi leadership, Rusk believed, was best qualified to judge its own best interests.

But in the intervening years, the State Department's refusal to press for reform in Saudi Arabia turned into humiliating obsequiousness. Wahhabi Islam--the militant strain endorsed by the ruling family--is the only permitted religion in the kingdom. Christians are not allowed to worship on Saudi soil--and Jews are not even allowed in the country. Even Shiites, the majority population in the oil-rich Eastern Province, are not free to practice their denomination of Islam. Not only does State not push to change this flagrant violation of religious liberty, it behaves like the House of Saud when asked to do so. In 1997, the U.S. Consulate in Jeddah banned the offering of Catholic Mass on the premises--Protestant services had already been relegated to the British Consulate--because of the Saudi government's "displeasure."





Perhaps former assistant secretary (the lead position of a bureau) for Near Eastern Affairs Ned Walker said it best when he told the Washington Post, "Let's face it, we got a lot of money out of Saudi Arabia." Mr. Walker meant "we" as in the U.S. government, but he easily could have used it to refer to former Foggy Bottom officials who benefit financially after retirement. Some do it directly--and in public view, because of stringent reporting requirements--while most, including Mr. Walker, choose a less noticeable trough.
The gravy train dates back more than 25 years. In that time, it has created a circle of sympathizers and both direct and indirect lobbyists. But the most important--and most indirect--byproduct of lining the pockets of former State officials is that the Saudi royal family finds itself with passionate supporters inside Foggy Bottom. Which is precisely the intended effect. Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the Saudi ambassador to Washington, was quoted in the Washington Post: "If the reputation then builds that the Saudis take care of friends when they leave office, you'd be surprised how much better friends you have who are just coming into office." This is not to say that State officials make decisions with visions of dollars dancing in their heads, but at the very least, they probably take a more benign view of the royal family that "takes care of" their friends and former colleagues.

Among the first former Foggy Bottom officials to work directly for the House of Saud was former assistant secretary for congressional affairs Frederick Dutton, starting in 1975. According to a 1995 public filing (mandated for all paid foreign agents), Mr. Dutton earns some $200,000 a year. Providing mostly legal services, Mr. Dutton also flacks for the House of Saud and even lobbies on the royal family's behalf from time to time. One of his successors as head of congressional affairs, Linwood Holton, also went to work for the Saudis, starting in 1977. Rounding out the current team of retired State officials now directly employed by the Saudis is Peter Thomas Madigan, deputy assistant secretary for legislative affairs in the first Bush administration.

Most of the Saudi money, though, goes indirectly to former State officials, most commonly by means of think tanks. This approach pays dividends in many ways: Foggy Bottom retirees get to have their cake--without the public realizing they're eating it--and the Saudis get to have "indirect" lobbyists, who promote the Saudi agenda under the cover of the think-tank label. Three organizations in particular are the primary beneficiaries of Saudi petrodollars, and all are populated with former State officials: the Meridian International Center, the Middle East Policy Council and the Middle East Institute.

After a long and "distinguished" career in the Foreign Service, Walter Cutler took the reins at the Meridian International Center. He had served as ambassador to Zaire and Tunisia, and twice in Saudi Arabia, and he stayed close to the Saudis after leaving State. Mr. Cutler told the Washington Post that the Saudis had been "very supportive of the center." Meridian is not alone. The Middle East Policy Council, which also receives significant Saudi funding, counts among its ranks former ambassadors--career Foreign Service members all--Charles Freeman, Frank Carlucci, and Hermann Eilts.

The Middle East Institute, officially on the Saudi payroll, receives some $200,000 of its annual $1.5 million budget from the Saudi government, and an unknown amount from Saudi individuals--often a meaningless distinction since most of the "individuals" with money to donate are members of the royal family, which constitutes the government. MEI's chairman is Wyche Fowler, who was ambassador to Saudi Arabia from 1996-2001, and its president is Ned Walker, who has served as the deputy chief of Mission in Riyadh and ambassador to Egypt.

Also at MEI: David Mack, former ambassador to the United Arab Emirates and deputy assistant secretary for Near Eastern affairs; Richard Parker, former ambassador to Algeria, Lebanon, and Morocco; William Eagleton, former ambassador to Syria; Joseph C. Wilson, career foreign-service office and former deputy chief of mission in Baghdad; David Ransom, former ambassador to Bahrain and former deputy chief of Mission in Yemen, the United Arab Emirates and Syria; and Michael Sterner, former ambassador to the UAE and deputy assistant secretary of Near Eastern affairs.

For Meridian and MEI, at least, the House of Saud is not the only government entity lining up to fund them; Foggy Bottom is as well. Meridian does significant amounts of work with State, particularly in coordinating the International Visitors Program, which determines the individuals and groups invited--and not invited--to Washington for a chance to curry favor with State officials in person. MEI last year was slated to handle a conference of Iraqi dissidents--which was going to exclude the umbrella organization of pro-democracy groups, the Iraqi National Congress--in London. (The conference was cancelled after public outcry over MEI's role.) The grant for holding the conference was a staggering $5 million--more than three times MEI's annual budget.

The money, the favors, and State's affinity for Saudi elites over the decades have all helped contribute to the "special relationship" between State and the House of Saud. Notes Hudson Institute senior fellow Laurent Murawiec, "This is a relationship that has been cemented by 40 years of money, power, and political favors that goes much deeper than most people realize."





State has by no means been acting as a rogue department in dealing with Saudi Arabia, somehow coddling a nation that various White Houses considered hostile. But the lengths to which State goes to pamper the Saudis is something largely carried out of its own volition. There is no better example of this than Visa Express, the program that required all Saudis (including noncitizens) to turn in their visa applications at private Saudi travel agencies, which then sent them in bundles to the U.S. Embassy in Riyadh or the Consulate in Jeddah. Visa Express was entirely of State's own making; it was conceived of and planned for while Bill Clinton was president, and was officially launched when President Bush was in the White House. And in the three months it was operational before the September 11 attacks, Visa Express let in three of the hijackers. But State did not shut it down. It took 10 months--and tremendous public pressure--before that happened.
From the moment in early 1993 that Mary Ryan became head of Consular Affairs, the division that oversees visa issuance, consulates and embassies, traditional requirements for visa applicants started getting pared down. Partial versions of Visa Express--though not by that name--were implemented in various countries in the mid- to late 1990s. But nowhere in the world had State launched a program whereby all residents, citizens and noncitizens alike, would be expected to submit visa applications to local, private travel agencies. It was a bold--and untested--plan. Yet State chose to try out this ambitious project in a nation that was a known hotbed of al Qaeda extremists.

To be fair, most Americans were not thinking about national security in late 2000 and early 2001, but State should have been. That's its job. Khobar Towers, the U.S. military dormitory, had been attacked by Hezbollah terrorists in 1996, killing 19 U.S. soldiers and wounding 372. And State had ample information that al Qaeda was fully operational inside Saudi Arabia. Yet State went ahead with plans to launch its first nationwide Visa Express program.

Although State vociferously defended Visa Express when it came under intense scrutiny--claiming that it was almost irrelevant that travel agencies had been deputized to collect visa applications (and more, as it turned out)--the truth is that Visa Express was an incredible threat to U.S. border security. State's official line was that travel agencies did no more than, say, FedEx would in collecting and passing on applications. This was simply not true.

According to internal State documents, travel agencies were expected to conduct preinterviews and ensure compliance. In other words, people with financial incentive to obtain visas for others were helping them fill out the forms. At first blush, this might not sound significant. But the average visa application is approved or refused in two to three minutes, meaning that there are key indicators a consular officer looks for in making his decisions. With a two-page form--one page of which has questions like "Are you a member of a terrorist organization? (Answering 'yes' will not necessarily trigger a refusal)"--a travel agent who handles dozens or hundreds of applications daily could easily figure out the red flags that are to be avoided. Armed with that information, it would be relatively easy to help an applicant beat the system. Visa Express also arranged it so that the overwhelming majority of Saudi applicants never came into contact with a U.S. citizen until stepping off the airplane onto American soil.

Apparently oblivious to the glaring security loopholes created by Visa Express, State proudly implemented the program in June 2001. In an e-mail that, in hindsight, is shocking for its gleeful tone, the deputy chief of mission in Riyadh, Thomas P. Furey, wrote to Mary Ryan about Visa Express being a "win-win-win-win"--with nary a mention of security concerns. In the e-mail, Mr. Furey notes that the program started with Saudi nationals--whom he amazingly refers to as "clearly approvable"--and then says that Visa Express had been expanded to include non-Saudi citizens one day earlier, on June 25, 2001. Visa Express also resulted in the overwhelming majority of Saudi applicants never coming into contact with visa applicants. "The number of people on the street and coming through the gates should only be fifteen percent of what it was last summer," Mr. Furey wrote.

The four wins Mr. Furey boasts about? From his e-mail:


The RSO [regional security officer, an American responsible for coordinating embassy security with local police] is happy, the guard force [Saudi residents who provide embassy and consulate security] is happy, the public loves the service (no more long lines and they can go to the travel agencies in the evening and not take time off from work), we love it (no more crowd control stress and reduced work for the FSNs [Foreign Service Nationals, Saudi residents]) and now this afternoon Chuck Brayshaw and I were at the Foreign Ministry and discovered the most amazing thing--the Saudi Government loves it!
It would be easier to defend State's creation of Visa Express if it had abandoned it on Sept. 12, 2001--or at least had done so after it realized that 15 of the hijackers were Saudis, including three who got in through the program. But in the month after September 11, out of 102 applicants whose forms were processed at the Jeddah consulate, only two were interviewed, and none were refused. When word leaked to the Washington Post that 15 of the 10 terrorists were Saudis, the embassy in Riyadh assured the Saudis that the U.S. had "not changed its procedures or policies in determining visa eligibility as a result of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001."
After my investigative story on Visa Express came out in mid-June 2002, State's initial change was cosmetic--literally. It dropped the name "Visa Express," but changed nothing about the program itself. Only after a month of a full-court press defending the suddenly nameless program did State shutter it. And even then, it was not because it had realized the error of its ways, but because it needed to offer some proof to Congress--set to vote near the end of July to strip State of the visa authority altogether--that it was indeed fit to handle such a vital function of U.S. border security. (The gambit worked--Congress sided with State.)

After the program was sacked, officials at State "openly worried that Saudi relations would worsen with the stricter requirements," according to an official there. If only they had expressed such "worry" about the wisdom of fast-tracking visas in a nation teeming with Islamic extremists.

Saudi Arabia, after all, is the home of Wahhabi Islam, and Wahhabi true believers' favorite catch phrase is "Death to America"--well, maybe the second favorite, after "Death to Israel." But look again at Mr. Furey's e-mail. He was clearly--frighteningly--blind to this reality. He referred to Saudi nationals as "clearly approvable." What he saw was a nation filled with people he believed belonged in the United States. Mr. Furey, in his e-mail, summed up his idealized vision of Saudi Arabia quite succinctly: "This place really is a wonderland."





State's obliviousness to reality--and security--had an even more incredible result: One of the 10 travel-agency companies contracted as a Visa Express vendor is a subsidiary of a suspected financier of terrorism. Fursan Travel & Tourism is owned by the Al-Rajhi Banking & Investment Corporation, or RBIC, which is one of the alleged financiers of al Qaeda listed in the "Golden Chain" documents seized in Bosnia in March 2002 (detailing the early supporters of al Qaeda back in the late 1980s, after the Soviets left Afghanistan). RBIC was also the primary bank for a number of charities raided in the United States after Sept. 11 for suspected ties to terrorist organizations. RBIC maintained accounts for the International Islamic Relief Organization, the Saudi Red Crescent Society, the Muslim World League and the World Assembly of Muslim Youth. RBIC also was used to wire money to the Global Relief Foundation in Belgium, which the United States has designated as a terrorist organization.
Records recovered by Spanish authorities show that several members of an al Qaeda affiliate there held accounts at RBIC, and the terror cell's chief financier told a business partner to use RBIC for their transactions in a fax recovered by Spanish police. And they were not the only al Qaeda terrorists who did business there. Abdulaziz Alomari, who helped Mohamed Atta crash American Airlines Flight 11 into the north tower of the World Trade Center and was one of the three terrorists who received a visa through Visa Express, held an account at RBIC as well. Because his visa application form--which I obtained--does not indicate which travel agency he used, it is not known whether Alomari submitted his application to the agency owned by RBIC.

The founder and namesake of RBIC, Suleiman Abdul Aziz al-Rajhi, also started the SAAR Foundation, whose successor, Safa Trust (SAAR liquidated, but most of the same people and operations carried over to Safa) was at the center of the FBI's investigation into the extensive financial network of mostly Saudi-financed terrorist activities in the U.S. Operation Greenquest, as it was called, resulted in the raiding of 23 different Muslim organizations' offices, including Safa Trust and several charities that had bank accounts with RBIC. Although the raids occurred after September 11, the FBI had been investigating the elaborate financial arrangements--which regularly included SAAR--for years before the September 11 attacks.

Yet the State Department was so careless in choosing its Visa Express vendors that one owned by a suspected financier of terrorism became deputized to handle the collection and initial processing of U.S. visas.





When driving from Jeddah to Mecca, one encounters two road signs. The first tells Muslims that Mecca is straight ahead. The other tells non-Muslims to proceed no further and take the last available exit. Welcome to Saudi Arabia, where some Muslims can practice their religion freely, and no one else can. Shiite Muslims, the majority population of the oil-rich Eastern Province, are not only not free to practice their version of Islam, but they can be imprisoned and tortured for doing so. History helps explain some of this disdain and contempt for non-Wahhabists. Mohammed ibn Saud, ancestor to the current king, struck a pact with Mohammed ibn Abd al-Wahhab some 250 years ago, whereby Wahhab's fundamentalist clerics and followers would support the Saud family, in exchange for the royal family's generous financial support of Wahhabism, Wahhab's militant version of Sunni Islam. Modern-day Wahhabists hate nothing more--aside from Christians, Jews, and other infidels--than Muslims practicing non-Wahhabist Islam.
In a June 28, 2000, letter to then-secretary of state Madeleine Albright, the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, which was established by Congress in 1998 to advise Foggy Bottom, wrote:


In Saudi Arabia, the government brazenly denies religious freedom and vigorously enforces its prohibition against all forms of public religious expression other than that of Wahabi Muslims. Numerous Christians and Shi'a Muslims continue to be detained, imprisoned and deported. As the Department's 1999 Annual Report bluntly summarized: "Freedom of religion does not exist."
Even worshipping or praying in the dark of night can be a dangerous activity in Saudi Arabia, for Saudi police regularly storm into homes if they have reason to believe Christians are attempting to worship. Punishment can be severe. In 1998, a Christian Ethiopian got 1,000 lashes--carried out over several months--after merely being accused of distributing religious materials.
The worst punishments are reserved, though, for those who leave Islam. The punishment for people who commit apostasy--the "crime" of converting from Islam to another religion--is beheading. The House of Saud, however, promotes conversions of a different kind--bringing people into Islam, particularly those who work in embassies. Paid on a sliding scale, those who cajole others into converting to Islam are rewarded with bounties of up to $20,000. The highest payment is for converting an American diplomat; lower payments of a few hundred dollars are given for converting a foreign national from one of the non-Western embassies.

Based on overwhelming evidence of religious persecution and overall denial of any form of religious liberty, the Commission on International Religious Freedom recommended--for the fourth year in a row--that State designate Saudi Arabia as one of the handful of nations considered a "country of particular concern (CPC)." According to the commission, Saudi Arabia qualified under every criterion--and was actually seen as the worst offender in the world.

But for the fourth year in a row, State didn't comply. The CPC designation is despised by listed countries, because it automatically triggers sanctions, though those sanctions can be easily waived for reasons of U.S. national interest. Under the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998, which both created the commission and mandated that State provide annual reports on international religious freedom, State has no leeway on whether or not to report a country that meets certain standards of religious persecution or denial of religious liberty.

There is a simple explanation for the Saudi exclusion: higher-ups at State put their collective foot down. According to an administration official familiar with the internal squabbling surrounding the Saudi-CPC question, "It was Armitage's decision. He made the call." That would be Richard Armitage, Foggy Bottom's No. 2 official, Secretary Colin Powell's right-hand man, and a trusted friend of the Saudis. In the Powell State Department, Mr. Armitage is the filter through which all major policy changes must go. And Mr. Armitage made it quite clear, according to another official, that Saudi Arabia was not to be given the CPC designation. A different administration official, however, says that although politics played a part, Mr. Armitage's role in the process was a bit more nuanced, meaning those writing the report were made to "know" early on how things operate and what wouldn't be tolerated. "Let's put it this way: the decision [on Saudi Arabia] was made a long time before it was actually 'made,' " explains the official. Either way, the House of Saud received another free pass.





Prince Bandar is often considered the most politically savvy of all the foreign ambassadors living in Washington. That may or may not be true--but he certainly is the best-protected. According to a Diplomatic Security official, Prince Bandar has a security detail that includes full-time participation of six highly trained and skilled DS officers. (DS officers are federal government employees charged with securing American diplomatic missions.) The DS officers and a contingent of private security officers guard him at his northern Virginia residence and travel with him to places like Florida or his ski resort in Aspen, Colo.
A State Department official, speaking on condition of anonymity, claimed that State was reimbursed by the Saudi government for the use of the DS officers, though he refused to provide any specifics or evidence to that effect. Even if the salaries are reimbursed, though, six skilled DS agents are diverted from meaningful work, such as investigating visa fraud, in order to protect one person.

To show his appreciation for their presence, Prince Bandar provides the DS agents with catered meals every day, and with fresh-brewed coffee and gourmet pastries to start out the mornings. The agents enjoy these delicacies from the comfort of an extra house on the premises reserved for the security staff. When the DS agents join Prince Bandar in Aspen--where they have their own ski chalet--he typically buys them full ski outfits and other gifts.

But each agent who works for Bandar is cycled off-rotation very quickly: on average about 30 days after arriving. There doesn't seem to be any real reason for this, other than that Bandar might hope that the more agents he serves catered meals and buys fancy gifts for, the more friends he is likely to have. But with the number of "friends" he--and the rest of the Saudi royal family--already have at Foggy Bottom, one wonders why he would need more.

Routy in DC:

Senators Say Bush Needs to Take Control
Iraq Policy Disputes Cited

By Dana Priest
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, October 13, 2003; Page A14


A key Republican lawmaker urged President Bush yesterday to take control of his fractious foreign policy team and plans for Iraq's reconstruction, as one Democrat deepened his criticism of the administration's arguments for going to war.

"The president has to be president," Sen. Richard G. Lugar (R-Ind.), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said on NBC's "Meet the Press." "That means the president over the vice president, and over these secretaries" of state and defense. National security adviser Condoleezza Rice "cannot carry that burden alone."

In the first week of the administration's public relations campaign to explain its Iraq policy and highlight its achievements, Lugar noted that Vice President Cheney, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Rice had given speeches whose tone "was distinctly different" and that senators were rightly concerned about "the strength, the coherence of our policies."

Lugar, a moderate Republican, predicted Iraq's reconstruction would cost $50 billion more than the $87 billion the White House is seeking from Congress for military and reconstruction efforts, and that the duration of U.S. involvement in Iraq "may be comparable to Bosnia," where U.S. and European peacekeepers are nearing their eighth year of deployment.

He and the ranking member of the committee, Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.), predicted narrow approval of the $87 billion Iraq reconstruction request. But both said the administration had to improve its plan for turning over power to Iraqis, and Lugar added that it should make "a genuine attempt" to persuade competent allies, including "Germany, France, Russia and China" to join the peacekeeping effort.

Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.), who is seeking the Democratic presidential nomination, said yesterday he was "inclined not to" vote for the $87 billion request and criticized Bush for "haphazard, shotgun, shoot-from-the-hip diplomacy" on Iraq.

Divisions over Iraq policy reflect larger ideological differences within Bush's national security team. Cheney and Rumsfeld have pursued more hard-line, unilateralist approaches to Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and North Korea; Powell favors dialogue and greater efforts to include allies.

Last week, with rising concerns about the direction and public perception of the Iraq reconstruction project, the White House put Rice in charge of the effort, possibly at the expense of the Defense Department, which had been running the show.

Biden, responding to news that Bush had asked Rice to unify the differing views on Iraq, said Bush had to "take charge, settle this dispute. Let your secretary of defense, state, and your vice president know, 'This is my policy. Any one of you that divert from the policy is off the team.' "

Kerry, who voted for the congressional war resolution before the invasion, stepped up his attacks on Bush's decision to go to war in the first place. He said some of the administration's pre-war assertions about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction "misled America."

"They told us there were aerial vehicles" to deliver Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. "They weren't there," he said, speaking on ABC's "This Week." "They told us they had a 45-minute deployment period for weapons of mass destruction. That wasn't true. They told us they were on the road to nuclear weaponization. That was not true."

"He ought to apologize to the people of this country because what they've done now is launch a PR campaign instead of a real policy," Kerry said. "We need to go to the United Nations more humbly, more directly, more honestly, solicit help in a way that brings the United Nations into this effort, or you are going to continue to see bomb after bomb after bomb."

Kerry also derided the administration's effort to portray current efforts in Iraq as international in nature. "We have a fraudulent coalition, and I use the word 'fraud.' It's a few people here, a few people there. It's basically the British, and, most fundamentally, the United States of America."

"This administration has alienated people all across this planet," he said. "They have, in fact, made America less safe."

WOW! Now this is getting to be pretty strong!

A Tale of Two Fathers
By MAUREEN DOWD
WASHINGTON

It's a classic story line in myth, literature and movies: a man coming into his own is torn between two older authority figures with competing world views; a good daddy and a bad daddy; one light and benevolent, one dark and vengeful.

When Bush the Elder put Bush the Younger in the care of Dick Cheney, he assumed that Mr. Cheney, who had been his defense secretary in Desert Storm, would play the wise, selfless counselor. Poppy thought his old friend Dick would make a great vice president, tutoring a young president green on foreign policy and safeguarding the first Bush administration's legacy of internationalism, coalition-building and realpolitik.

Instead, Good Daddy has had to watch in alarm as Bad Daddy usurped his son's presidency, heightened its conservatism and rushed America into war on the mistaken assumption that if we just acted like king of the world, everyone would bow down or run away.

Bush I officials are nonplused by the apocalyptic and rash Cheney of Bush II, a man who pushed pre-emption and peered over the shoulders of C.I.A. analysts, as compared with the skeptical and cautious Cheney of Bush I (who did not even press to march to Baghdad in the first gulf war, when Saddam Hussein actually possessed chemical weapons).

Some veterans of Bush I are so puzzled that they even look for a biological explanation, wondering if his two-year-old defibrillator might have made him more Hobbesian. Mr. Cheney spent so much time in his bunker reading gloomy books about smallpox, plague, fear and war as the natural state of mankind.

Last week, for the first time, W. — who tried to pattern his presidency as the mirror opposite of his real father's — curbed his surrogate father's hard-line crony Rummy (Mr. Cheney's mentor in the Ford years).

The incurious George, who has said he prefers to get his information from his inner circle rather than newspapers or TV, may finally be waking up to the downside of such self-censorship. You can end up hearing a lot of bogus, self-serving garbage from Ahmad Chalabi, via Mr. Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz, instead of unpleasant reality.

I hope Mr. Bush at least read the news coverage of his vice president's Iraq speech on Friday, which was a masterpiece of demagogy.

On a day when many Republicans were finding a lesson of moderation in Arnold Schwarzenegger's victory in California, Mr. Cheney once more chose a right-wing setting, the Heritage Foundation, to regurgitate his rigid ideology. While Arnold was saying to voters, "You know best," Mr. Cheney was still propounding "Father Knows Best."

Even after the president was forced to admit after Mr. Cheney's last appearance on "Meet the Press" last month that the link the vice president drew between Saddam and 9/11 did not actually exist, that did not deter Mr. Cheney. He repeatedly tied Saddam and 9/11 and said, all evidence to the contrary, that the secular Iraqi leader "had an established relationship with Al Qaeda."

He characterized critics as naïve and dangerous when his own arguments were reductive and disingenuous. In justifying the war, he created a false choice between attacking Iraq and doing nothing.

The war in Iraq and its aftermath have proved that Mr. Cheney was wrong to think that a show of brute strength would deter our enemies from attacking us. There are improvements in Iraq, but it is still a morass, with 326 soldiers dead as of Friday. It's hard to create security when we are the cause of the insecurity.

Mr. Cheney lumped terrorists and tyrants into one interchangeable mass, saying that Mr. Bush could not tolerate a dictator who had access to weapons of mass destruction, was allied with terrorists and was a threat to his neighbors. Sounds a lot like the military dictator of Pakistan, not to mention the governments of China and North Korea.

To back up his claim that Saddam was an immediate threat, the vice president had to distort the findings of David Kay, the administration's own weapons hunter, and continue to overdramatize the danger of Saddam. "Saddam built, possessed and used weapons of mass destruction," Mr. Cheney said. Yes, but during the first Bush administration.

Perhaps the president now realizes the Cheney filter is dysfunctional. If Mr. Bush still needs a daddy to tell him what to do, he should call his own.

The Least Bad Option
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

As a precondition for helping us in Iraq, the U.N. is demanding that the U.S. hand over "early sovereignty" to an interim Iraqi government and then let those Iraqis invite in the U.N. to oversee their transition to constitution-writing and elections. I too would like to see Iraqis given more control faster and the U.N. more involved. But people are tossing around this idea without answering some hard questions first.

Would the U.S. handing power to an interim Iraqi government really stop the attacks on U.S. forces, Iraqi police, the U.N. and Iraq's interim leaders? I doubt it. These attackers don't want Iraqis to rule themselves, these attackers want to rule Iraqis. Why do you think the attackers never identify themselves or their politics? Because they are largely diehard Baathists who want to restore the old order they dominated and will kill anyone in the way. Will the U.N., which has basically left Iraq, not flee again when its officials get attacked again — which will happen even after Iraqis have sovereignty? Could the Iraqi Governing Council agree now on who should lead an interim government? Will the Europeans really pony up troops and billions of dollars for Iraq, if the U.S. hands the keys to an Iraqi interim government? Will the U.S. public want to stay involved then, as is needed?

Until we are sure these questions can be answered, without Iraq spinning out of control, I'd stick with the status quo as the least bad option — in part because genuine sovereignty means running your own affairs and the U.S. has already done more to build that at the grass roots than most people realize.

I spoke the other day with Amal Rassam, an Iraqi-American anthropologist, who has been spearheading this effort. Since April, U.S. Army officers and Ms. Rassam's teams from RTI International, an NGO, have gone out to all 88 neighborhoods of Baghdad, met with local leaders and helped them organize, through informal voting, 88 "interim advisory councils." Then the 88 councils elected nine district councils, and the nine district councils elected an interim 37-member Baghdad city council. For the first time ever, a popularly based city council, including women, is demanding to set budgets, set priorities and decide who will police their neighborhoods, and is making the city's managers accountable to them.

Similar town councils have been set up all over Iraq. U.S. and British teams have been schooling the Iraqi councils in how to hold a meeting, set an agenda, take a vote and lobby. They have also provided seed money for women's groups and all sorts of other civil society organizations that Iraqis are scrambling to start. They have not unearthed any W.M.D., but they have unearthed a lot of aspiring Iraqi democrats.

"I have worked in many parts of the world," said Ms. Rassam, "and it is very gratifying to come here and see that we are beginning to get some natural leaders to emerge, men and women, from the real grass roots. . . . We had two women from the councils, a Christian and a Muslim who keeps her head covered, go to a [U.S.-sponsored] conference in Hilla the other day and speak about their experiences with incipient democracy. . . . They came back and said to me, `We want to talk to [the U.S. administrator Paul] Bremer and tell him there must be a quota for women on the constitution-writing committee.' To see these two women — one Christian, one veiled — stand up and say, `You have really helped us come out and have self-confidence and now we don't want to stop here, we want women on the constitution-writing committee' — that is real democracy-building. I don't think you can put them back in their place, at least I hope not. . . . These councils are a natural arena for leaders to emerge from the people."

Oh yes, these councils have their crooks and power hogs, some of whom have already been purged by their colleagues. But even with their warts, they are providing Iraqis a forum for the kind of horizontal conversation — between Sunnis, Shiites, Turkmen, Christians and Kurds — that Saddam never allowed and must happen for any Iraqi democracy to have a solid base.

I also spoke the other day with Nasreen Barwari, Iraq's new (Harvard-trained) minister of public works. She made it very clear to me that she and her colleagues want sovereignty as soon as they are really able to run things. But to those demanding early sovereignty in Iraq, as a precondition for helping, she said: "If you want me to be sovereign, come and help me reconstruct my country. . . . Help me get ready quicker."