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Saturday, November 27, 2004

FREE THE UKRAINE! WOLNA UKRAINA!

Przewodnicz?cy parlamentu Ukrainy za powtórk? wyborówPAP, jkl / 2004-11-27 11:52:00
Wo?odymyr ?ytwyn/AFPPrzewodnicz?cy parlamentu ukrai?skiego Wo?odymyr ?ytwyn popar? ??dania ukrai?skiej opozycji i opowiedzia? si? za powtórzeniem drugiej tury wyborów prezydenckich z 21 listopadaPrzewodnicz?cy ukrai?skiego parlamentu Wo?odymyr ?ytwyn powiedzia? w Radzie Najwy?szej, ?e sytuacja powyborcza na Ukrainie to "najgorszy mo?liwy wynik" kontrowersyjnej drugiej tury wyborów 21 listopada."Dzi? mamy skandal mi?dzynarodowy - Ukrain? po raz kolejny poni?ono" - powiedzia? ?ytwyn, nawi?zuj?c do trwaj?cego od pi?ciu dni kryzysu politycznego, do rozwi?zania którego potrzebne by?o po?rednictwo zagranicy.Skrytykowa? przy tym ekip? prezydenta Leonida Kuczmy."To co mamy teraz, to rezultat polityki ostatnich lat" - powiedzia? w czasie debaty parlamentarnej nad próbami wyj?cia z kryzysu politycznego.Zaatakowa? przy tym próby separatystyczne wschodnich regionów, które w pi?tek zacz??y mówi? o przej?ciu w?adzy w terenie."To przest?pstwo, za które b?dziecie odpowiada?" - powiedzia? zwracaj?c si? do zwolenników premiera Wiktora Janukowycza z obwodów donieckiego, charkowskiego i ?uga?skiego.Pod budynkiem i na otaczaj?cych go ulicach znajduj? si? dziesi?tki tysi?cy opozycyjnych demonstrantów. Ich manifestacje przebiegaj? spokojnie.

Wednesday, November 24, 2004

Once again, the EU has a chance to show its committment to the right values.The fraudulent election results in the Ukraine are the perfect occasion for Mr. Solana to stand on his own Eastern Border and firmly invite his neighboring country's illegitimate government to let go. All he needs to do is stand there and say " Let freedom reign", or " Tear down that Tyranny" or " People of the Ukraine, get rid of your chains!".

For now, all we have seen and heard, are Polish MPs, Polish Euro MPs and Polish ex-President lech Walesa roaming the streets of the Kiev supporting the people's peaceful fight for freedom and liberty. Where are the magniloquious Western Europeans?

Where are your values "Europe"?

Probably down one of Vladimir Putin's oil wells. Once again: SHAME, SHAME, SHAME!

A Tug of War Over Ukraine

By STEVEN LEE MYERS

MOSCOW, Nov. 23 - Not since NATO's war in Kosovo, or perhaps the cold war itself, have the political differences between Russia and the West appeared so starkly as they have in Ukraine's disputed presidential election.

It is not just that Russia and President Vladimir V. Putin himself have come out so strongly for the candidate promising closer relations with Moscow, Viktor F. Yanukovich, while Europe and the United States are supporting Viktor A. Yushchenko, albeit more subtly.

It is that both sides - rivals in what the United Financial Group, a Moscow investment banking company, calls "a cold-war-style proxy confrontation" - have staked out diametrically opposed views of what unfolded in Ukraine.

Mr. Putin, through a Kremlin spokesman, called "open and honest" an election that the European Union, the United States and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe called everything but that. The returns of the Sunday vote showed a victory for his candidate, whose opponent disputes the results.

Senator Richard G. Lugar of Indiana, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, who led an American delegation to Ukraine, cited "a concerted and forceful program of election-day fraud and abuse." The speaker of Parliament, Boris V. Gryzlov, whose presence in Ukraine no doubt was intended as a counterweight to Mr. Lugar's, declared that "the election was as democratic as they come."

The collapse of the Soviet bloc was supposed to erase the old divisions of Europe. For a time, even the words East and West sounded faintly anachronistic as the former Soviet republics and satellites of Eastern Europe embraced democracy, however hesitantly.

Increasingly, a new division has become apparent, defined not by competing political ideologies but by competing economic and political interests and contradictory ideas about what democracy represents.

In Mr. Putin's Russia, the use of government resources on behalf of loyal candidates or the state's control over the media - both factors criticized by international observers in Ukraine - are accepted tools of politics. So is wielding the president's personal prestige, carefully preserved on those state channels, to influence elections, even those outside the country's borders.

Mr. Putin stepped on accepted diplomatic protocol by campaigning so overtly on Mr. Yanukovich's behalf, playing host to him in Moscow and visiting Ukraine before each round in the election. Imagine the reaction if President Vicente Fox of Mexico had hit the campaign trail for President Bush, or the reverse.

The Russian president trampled on protocol altogether on Monday by congratulating Mr. Yanukovich on a victory that his opponent had not yet conceded and that even his patron, President Leonid D. Kuchma, still had not acknowledged as official.

Joining Mr. Putin on Tuesday in offering congratulations was President Aleksandr G. Lukashenko of Belarus, the man often called the last dictator of Europe.

"We do not want their values imposed on us," Mr. Lukashenko said earlier this month, dismissing the Western criticism heaped on the presidential referendum in October that effectively lifted any limit on his own stay in power.

Masha Lipman, an analyst with the Carnegie Moscow Center, a research institute, said the election in Ukraine highlighted what she called "a value gap" between Russia and Belarus on one side and the rest of Europe on the other.

"The fact that Russia does not think of itself as part of the West has become very explicit," she said.

It was inevitable that Ukraine would become a battleground.

The candidates offered starkly divergent visions for the country's future. Mr. Yanukovich promised to carry out Mr. Kuchma's legacy, while deepening relations with Russia. Mr. Yushchenko fashioned himself as a liberal, democratic reformer eager to break the power of the state as it turns to Europe.

Given the distribution of votes in the runoff on Sunday, with the Russian-speaking eastern half of the country strongly behind Mr. Yanukovich and the capital and the more "European" western half strongly behind Mr. Yushchenko, Europe's new dividing line seems to run somewhere east of the Dnieper River.

Sergei A. Markov, director of the Institute for Political Studies in Moscow, who was among the many Russian advisers to Mr. Yanukovich's campaign, said in an interview that the election was not a struggle over ideas as much as influence.

In Russia's view, the country remains a vital part of the "near abroad," the former Soviet republics with deep economic, historical and, in Ukraine's case, cultural, linguistic and ethnic bonds. Mr. Putin has invested considerable effort in drawing Russia, Belarus, Ukraine and Kazakhstan into an economic and political union.

Mr. Markov dismissed Western criticism of the election, saying Mr. Yanukovich had won fairly. Europe and the United States protested, he said, only because their favorite lost.

Increasingly, though, Russia and the West seem to be talking past each other. "I think there could be a new cold war," Mr. Markov said, "not a result of competition of interests, but because of miscommunication."

It only intensified Tuesday. In Portugal, where he was making the first state visit of a Russian leader, Mr. Putin called European criticism of the results "inadmissible" in the absence of official results. Ukraine, he added pointedly, according to The Associated Press, "does not need to be lectured."



Tuesday, November 23, 2004

Arab politics and society: A generation's passing brings opportunity

Mona Eltahawy International Herald Tribune

Tuesday, November 23, 2004

NEW YORK A few years ago, I stood in a public square in an Arab capital and watched the funeral procession of an Arab leader. Women fainted and were carried away for resuscitation, men pushed to get closer, and police officers pushed them back in an attempt to maintain control.
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The country's youthful population had known no other leader. "It's like eclipse of the sun," one man told me. "This is a black day. It's a catastrophe for the country."
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It doesn't matter what country this was or which leader, because the scenario is likely to be played out several times over the next few years in most Arab countries as one by one, the old men who have ruled us succumb to the vagaries of time and age. And we will hear others call each death a catastrophe. But is it a catastrophe or the dawn of a welcome new era?
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It is customary in obituaries to list achievements. But often, the only achievement in an Arab leader's obituary is how long he managed to stay in power. It is as if they are in a competition to see who can stay the longest. It matters little what good they achieved, whether their people have jobs, comfortable lives, the freedom and ability to express themselves politically or artistically, or if the people simply are optimistic about the future.
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Most Arab leaders are in their 70s or 80s. Their years in power have straddled momentous inventions and world change: The Internet was invented, Communism died and new countries have come into being. And yet the Arab political world has survived intact, and our leaders continue as if nothing has changed.
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So complete is their grip that when discussing the legacy of many Arab leaders, instead of complaining that they have stood in the way of a functioning democracy, we complain that they have not named a successor. Not only have we accepted their unchecked power, but we also want them to tell us who should continue tyrannizing us after they go.
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Isn't it time to hold the Arab citizen in higher regard than the Arab leader? Leaders will come and go, but we must not be held hostage to their health or their age. In an irony that bodes well for the future, the older Arab leaders become, the younger their subjects are. A majority of the Arab world is under 30. While this leaves the leaders hopelessly out of touch with their citizens, it also means that over the next few years the Arab world can consider a new way of being and thinking that was never possible while our aging leaders clung to power.
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If they truly cared about their citizens and wished to be remembered well, Arab leaders would long ago have stepped aside and made way for a younger generation of leaders. And by that I don't mean their sons. Arab civil society is full of educated, dynamic men and women who are truly driven by a wish to serve their respective countries.
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Instead, leaders of our republics behave like monarchs and groom their sons to take over, others stage referendums that waste public time and money to boast that close to 100 percent of their public wants them to stay, and in those countries with term limits, parliaments rubber stamp a change to the constitution to keep presidents in power.
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But the one thing our leaders cannot cheat or change is death. And when their day comes, there will not be an eclipse of the sun nor will blackness enshroud the people just because a human being has returned to his maker. If we see darkness, it is not an eclipse but the sun setting in preparation to rise and herald a new day tomorrow.
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(Mona Eltahawy is a columnist in New York for Asharq al-Awsat, the London-based Arabic newspaper.)
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See more of the world that matters - click here for home delivery of the International Herald Tribune.
< < Back to Start of Article NEW YORK A few years ago, I stood in a public square in an Arab capital and watched the funeral procession of an Arab leader. Women fainted and were carried away for resuscitation, men pushed to get closer, and police officers pushed them back in an attempt to maintain control.
.
The country's youthful population had known no other leader. "It's like eclipse of the sun," one man told me. "This is a black day. It's a catastrophe for the country."
.
It doesn't matter what country this was or which leader, because the scenario is likely to be played out several times over the next few years in most Arab countries as one by one, the old men who have ruled us succumb to the vagaries of time and age. And we will hear others call each death a catastrophe. But is it a catastrophe or the dawn of a welcome new era?
.
It is customary in obituaries to list achievements. But often, the only achievement in an Arab leader's obituary is how long he managed to stay in power. It is as if they are in a competition to see who can stay the longest. It matters little what good they achieved, whether their people have jobs, comfortable lives, the freedom and ability to express themselves politically or artistically, or if the people simply are optimistic about the future.
.
Most Arab leaders are in their 70s or 80s. Their years in power have straddled momentous inventions and world change: The Internet was invented, Communism died and new countries have come into being. And yet the Arab political world has survived intact, and our leaders continue as if nothing has changed.
.
So complete is their grip that when discussing the legacy of many Arab leaders, instead of complaining that they have stood in the way of a functioning democracy, we complain that they have not named a successor. Not only have we accepted their unchecked power, but we also want them to tell us who should continue tyrannizing us after they go.
.
Isn't it time to hold the Arab citizen in higher regard than the Arab leader? Leaders will come and go, but we must not be held hostage to their health or their age. In an irony that bodes well for the future, the older Arab leaders become, the younger their subjects are. A majority of the Arab world is under 30. While this leaves the leaders hopelessly out of touch with their citizens, it also means that over the next few years the Arab world can consider a new way of being and thinking that was never possible while our aging leaders clung to power.
.
If they truly cared about their citizens and wished to be remembered well, Arab leaders would long ago have stepped aside and made way for a younger generation of leaders. And by that I don't mean their sons. Arab civil society is full of educated, dynamic men and women who are truly driven by a wish to serve their respective countries.
.
Instead, leaders of our republics behave like monarchs and groom their sons to take over, others stage referendums that waste public time and money to boast that close to 100 percent of their public wants them to stay, and in those countries with term limits, parliaments rubber stamp a change to the constitution to keep presidents in power.
.
But the one thing our leaders cannot cheat or change is death. And when their day comes, there will not be an eclipse of the sun nor will blackness enshroud the people just because a human being has returned to his maker. If we see darkness, it is not an eclipse but the sun setting in preparation to rise and herald a new day tomorrow.
.
(Mona Eltahawy is a columnist in New York for Asharq al-Awsat, the London-based Arabic newspaper.)
.

Monday, November 22, 2004

SHAME! SHAME! SHAME!

Diplomats asked to revise ties with Cuban opposition
17.11.2004 - 09:23 CET | By Andrew Beatty EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - The EU has agreed to revise the way it deals with Cuba's dissidents in order to develop political dialogue with Fidel Castro's government.

Representatives from the EU-25 on Tuesday (16 November) agreed to look into ways of making contacts with dissidents and civil society "more effective", according to the Dutch Presidency.

Diplomats said on Tuesday that they would continue to engage with Cuba's opposition but were looking to do so in a more productive way, leaving the path open for talks with government officials.

A largely symbolic move to invite dissidents to national festivities at EU embassies has seen Cuba restrict European diplomats' access to top Cuban officials.

The EU stepped up contacts with the opposition figures in June 2003 following the summary execution of three men who attempted to hijack a boat to the US - ending Cuba's de facto moratorium on the death penalty.

The matter is now likely to be dealt with at Foreign Minister level.

Dissention
"Their [the Cuban government's] logic is that this puts government officials at the same level as the opposition... they find this unacceptable", Joaquín Roy, Director of the Centre for EU studies at the University of Miami told the EUobserver on Tuesday.

Since Spain's left of centre government took power in March this year, Madrid has been most active in lobbying to revise the EU's common position.

With Fidel Castro now thought to be 78, focus is now on how to help ensure Cuba receives a "soft landing" - as some commentators have put it.

"When the transition happens [EU] member states, and in particular Spain, would like to be in a better position, rather than in a vacuum where they have no presence", said Dr Roy.

However, the move has not gone down well with Cuban pro-democracy campaigners.

Earlier this week, Oswaldo Paya, a 2002 laureate of the European Parliament's Sakharov Prize, urged the EU not to change its common position.

In a letter to the heads of Parliament and Commission Mr Paya said that the position of some governments would be understood, but that a change of EU policy is not in Cuba's interests.

"They can act according to their interests and abandon this ethical position, for reasons of their interests. But what no-one can say, without insulting our intelligence, is that to abandon this position and destroy these acts and symbols is in the interests of Cuba and peaceful change", he said.

The Real Humanists
Revolution from Afghanistan to Iraq.
In September and early October 2001 we were warned that an invasion of Afghanistan was impossible — peaks too high, winter and Ramadan on the way, weak and perfidious allies as bad as the Islamists — and thus that the invasion would result in tens of thousands killed and millions of refugees. Where have all these subversive ankle-biters gone? Apparently into thin air — or to the same refuge of silence as all the Reagan-haters of the 1980s who swore that a nuclear freeze was the only humane policy of dealing with Soviet expansionism.
After the seven-week defeat of the Taliban, these deer-in-the-headlights critics paused, and then declared the victory hollow. They said the country had descended into rule by warlords, and called the very idea of scheduled voting a laughable notion. We endured them for almost two years. Yet after the recent and mostly smooth elections, Afghanistan has slowly disappeared from the maelstrom of domestic politics, as all those who felt our efforts were not merely impossible but absurd retreated to the shadows to gnash their teeth that Kabul is not yet Carmel. Western feminists, homosexual-rights advocates, and liberal reformists have never in any definitive way expressed appreciation for the Afghan revolution now ongoing in the lives of 26 million formerly captive people. They never will. Instead, Westerners simply now assume that there was never any controversy, but rather a general consensus that Afghanistan is a "good thing" — as if the Taliban went into voluntarily exile due to occasional censure from The New York Review of Books.
The more ambitious effort to achieve similar results in Iraq is following the same script, despite even more daunting challenges. Fascistic neighbors rightly see elections in Iraq as near fatal to their own bankrupt regimes. Some have oil; others have terrorists; still more, like Iran and Saudi Arabia, have both. Unlike Afghanistan, there is no neutral India or Russia nearby to keep Islamists wary, only the provinces of the ancient caliphate to supply plenty of jihadists to continue the work of September 11. Our mistakes in the reconstruction of Iraq were never properly critiqued as naïve and too magnanimous, but rather they were decried by the Left as cruel and punitive — as if being too lax was proof of being harsh.
Yet, thanks to the brilliance of the U.S. military and despite the rocky reconstruction and our own election hysteria, there is a good chance that the January elections can begin a cycle similar to what we see in Afghanistan. And at that point things should get very, very interesting.
Just as the breakdown of a few Communist Eastern European states led to a general collapse of Marxism in the east, or the military humiliation in colonial Africa and the Falklands led to democratic renaissance in Iberia and Argentina, or American military efforts in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Panama City brought consensual government to Central America, a reformed Afghanistan and Iraq may prompt what decades of billions of dollars in wasted aid to Egypt, Jordan, and the Palestinians, the 1991 Gulf War, and 60 years of appeasement of Gulf petrol-sheiks could not: the end of the old sick calculus of Middle East tyrannies blackmailing the United States through past intrigue with the Soviet Union, then threats of oil embargos and rigged prices, and, most recently, both overt and stealthy support for fundamentalist killers.
The similar effort to isolate Arafat, encourage the withdrawal from Gaza, and allow the Israelis to proceed with the fence have brought more opportunity to the Middle East than all of Dennis Ross's shuttles put together, noble and well-meant though his futile efforts were. The onus is on the Palestinians now either to turn Gaza into their own republic or give birth to another Lebanon — their call before a globalized audience. They can hold elections and shame the Arab League by being the embryo of consensual government in the Middle East, or coronate yet another thug and terrorist in hopes that again the United States will play a Chamberlain to their once-elected Hitler.
If someone wonders about the enormous task at hand in democratizing the Middle East, he could do no worse than ponder the last days of Yasser Arafat: the tawdry fight over his stolen millions; the charade of the First Lady of Palestine barking from a Paris salon; the unwillingness to disclose what really killed the "Tiger" of Ramallah; the gauche snub of obsequious Europeans hovering in the skies over Cairo, preening to pay homage to the late prince of peace; and, of course, the usual street theater of machine guns spraying the air and thousands of males crushing each other to touch the bier of the man who robbed them blind. Try bringing a constitution and open and fair elections to a mess like that.
But that is precisely what the United States was trying to do by removing the Taliban, putting Saddam Hussein on trial, and marginalizing Arafat. Such idealism has been caricatured with every type of slur — from both the radical Left and the paleo-Right, ranging from alleged Likud conspiracies and neo-con pipe dreams to secret pipeline deals and plans for a new American imperium in the Middle East shepherded in by the Bush dynasts. In fact, the effort not just to strike back after September 11, but to alter the very landscape in which our enemies operated was the only choice we had if we wished to end the cruise-missile/bomb-'em-for-a-day cycle of the past 20 years, the ultimate logic of which had led to the crater at the World Trade Center.
Oddly, our enemies understand the long-term strategic efforts of the United States far better than do our own dissidents. They know that oil is not under U.S. control but priced at all-time highs, and that America is not propping up despotism anymore, but is now the general foe of both theocracies and dictatorships — and the thorn in the side of "moderate" autocracies. An America that is a force for democratic change is a very dangerous foe indeed. Most despots long for the old days of Jimmy Carter's pious homilies, appeasement of awful dictatorships gussied up as "concern" for "human rights," and the lure of a Noble Prize to ensure nights in the Lincoln bedroom or hours waiting on a dictator's tarmac.
In the struggle in Fallujah hinges not just the fate of the Sunni Triangle, or even Iraq, but rather of the entire Middle East — and it will be decided on the bravery and skill of mostly 20-something American soldiers. If they are successful in crushing and humiliating the fascists there and extending the victory to other spots then the radical Islamists and their fascistic sponsors will erode away. But if they fail or are called off, then we will see Days of Sorrow that make September 11 look like child's play.
We are living in historic times, as all the landmarks of the past half-century are in the midst of passing away. The old left-wing critique is in shambles — as the United States is proving to be the most radical engine for world democratic change and liberalization of the age. A reactionary Old Europe, in concert with the ossified American leftist elite, unleashed everything within its ample cultural arsenal: novels, plays, and op-ed columns calling for the assassination of President Bush; propaganda documentaries reminiscent of the oeuvre of Pravda or Leni Riefenstahl; and transparent bias passed off as front-page news and lead-ins on the evening network news.
Germany and France threw away their historic special relationships with America, while billions in Eastern Europe, India, Russia, China, and Japan either approved of our efforts or at least kept silent. Who would have believed 60 years ago that the great critics of democracy in the Middle East would now be American novelists and European utopians, while Indians, Poles, and Japanese were supporting those who just wanted the chance to vote? Who would have thought that a young Marine from the suburbs of Topeka battling the Dark Ages in Fallujah — the real humanist — was doing more to aid the planet than all the billions of the U.N.?
Those on the left who are ignorant of history lectured the Bush administration that democracy has never come as a result of the threat of conflict or outright war — apparently the creation of a democratic United States, Germany, Japan, Italy, Israel, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Panama, Serbia, and Afghanistan was proof of the power of mere talk. In contrast, the old realist Right warned that strongmen are our best bet to ensure stability — as if Saudi Arabia and Egypt have been loyal allies with content and stable pro-American citizenries. In truth, George Bush's radical efforts to cleanse the world of the Taliban and Saddam Hussein, bring democracy to the heart of the Arab world, and isolate Yasser Arafat were the most risky and humane developments in the Middle East in a century — old-fashioned idealism backed with force in a postmodern age of abject cynicism and nihilism.
Quite literally, we are living in the strangest, most perilous, and unbelievable decade in modern memory.
— Victor Davis Hanson is a military historian and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. His website is victorhanson.com.

Postcards From Iraq
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN


Of all the images I saw on a short visit to Iraq last week, two stand out in my mind. One was a display that the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit, in the Sunni Triangle, prepared for the visiting chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Richard Myers. It was a table covered with defused roadside bombs made from cellphones wired to explosives. You just call the phone's number when a U.S. vehicle goes by and the whole thing explodes. The table was full of every color and variety of cellphone-bomb you could imagine. I thought to myself that if there is a duty-free electronics store at the gates of hell, this is what the display counter looks like.

The other scene was a briefing by Lt. Gen. John Sattler, the Marine commander in Falluja. General Sattler was explaining how well the Marines, Army, Air Force and Navy Seabees had worked together in Falluja as a combined task force. As General Sattler was speaking, I looked around at the assembled soldiers in the room. It was a Noah's Ark of Americans: African-Americans and whites, Hispanic Americans and Asians, and men and women I am sure of every faith. The fact that we can take for granted the trust among so many different ethnic groups, united by the idea of America - and that the biggest rivalry between our Army and Navy is a football game - is the miracle of America. That miracle, and its importance, hits you in the face in Iraq when someone tells you that the "new" Iraqi police unit in a village near Falluja is staffed by one Iraqi tribe and the "new" National Guard unit is staffed by another tribe and they are constantly clashing.

What unites these two scenes is the obvious fact, which still bears repeating, that we are trying to plant the seeds of decent, consensual government in some very harsh soil. We are not doing nation building in Iraq. That presumes that there was already a coherent nation there and all that is needed is a little time and security for it to be rebuilt. We are actually doing nation creating. We are trying to host the first attempt in the modern Arab world for the people of an Arab country to, on their own, forge a social contract with one another. Despite all the mistakes made, that is an incredibly noble thing. But for Iraqis to produce such a social contract, such a constitution, requires a minimum of tolerance and respect for majority rights and minority rights - and neither of those is the cultural norm here. They are not in the drinking water.

I have been to this play before, though. Fifteen years ago I wrote a book about the Arab-Israel conflict, including a chapter on the Marines in Beirut in 1982. I called that chapter "Betty Crocker in Dante's Inferno." It was my way of expressing the contrast between the truly pure intentions of those Marines trying to refashion Lebanon into a more decent, democratic polity and the harsh soil that was Lebanon of that day.

Cultures can change, though. But it takes time. And, be advised, it is going to take years to produce a decent outcome in Iraq. But every time I think this can't work, I come across something that suggests, who knows, maybe this time the play will end differently. The headlines last week were all about Falluja. But maybe the most important story in Iraq was the fact that while Falluja was exploding, 106 Iraqi parties and individuals registered to run in the January election. And maybe the second most important story is the relatively quiet way in which Iraqis, and the Arab world, accepted the U.S. invasion of Falluja. The insurgents there had murdered hundreds of Iraqi Muslims in recent months, and, I think, they lost a lot of sympathy from the Arab street. (But if we don't get the economy going on the Iraqi street, what the rest of the Arab world thinks will be of no help.)

Readers regularly ask me when I will throw in the towel on Iraq. I will be guided by the U.S. Army and Marine grunts on the ground. They see Iraq close up. Most of those you talk to are so uncynical - so convinced that we are doing good and doing right, even though they too are unsure it will work. When a majority of those grunts tell us that they are no longer willing to risk their lives to go out and fix the sewers in Sadr City or teach democracy at a local school, then you can stick a fork in this one. But so far, we ain't there yet. The troops are still pretty positive.

So let's thank God for what's in our drinking water, hope that maybe some of it washes over Iraq, and pay attention to the grunts. They'll tell us if it's time to go or stay.



Clues on Hostages Emerge From Houses in Falluja
By ROBERT F. WORTH

FALLUJA, Iraq, Nov. 21 - In one house hung a black banner with the words "One God and Jihad" and a distinctive yellow sun, terrifyingly familiar as the backdrop to videotaped beheadings by the group of that name. In another house there was a wire cage large enough to hold a human and a wall marked with Arabic writing and what appears to be a fingerprint in dried blood.

Before the doors to these houses in Falluja were thrown open to two reporters on Sunday, soldiers and intelligence officers had carried away other items from them, handcuffs, shackles, militant propaganda, bayonets, and knives - crusted with what looked like blood and resembling the ones used in the beheadings. A detailed photograph-catalog of the items was shown to the reporters.

American and Iraqi government officials have long said that Falluja was a center of the Iraqi insurgency and a depot where militants held hostages with impunity before the American-led invasion two weeks ago. A tour of the two houses on Sunday represented the first time that American journalists saw direct evidence of the places where the hostages may have been imprisoned and, in some cases, killed in videotaped executions.

Even so, there is no way to know for now exactly what happened here. The houses were discovered only a few days ago, and forensic investigators have not yet done DNA testing, analyzed the catalogued items that were removed, or compared this setting with the videos. So it cannot be said for certain that these were the last rooms that foreign or Iraqi hostages saw.

But both locations were found through Iraqi informants, one of them someone who said that he had been held hostage in the house with the black banner, American investigators said. They quoted the informant as saying he had heard the voices of at least three hostages in neighboring rooms, including one he believed to be that of Kenneth Bigley, the British engineer decapitated in early October.

The houses are among almost 20 sites discovered during the past two weeks in Falluja where American and Iraqi military officers contend that atrocities were committed. Maj. Jim West, an intelligence officer with the First Marine Expeditionary Force, said the sites included houses where Western hostages appear to have been held and others where insurgents tortured or killed residents to help enforce their rule in the city, some of them basement rooms with bloody handprints on the wall.

Last week, Iraqi soldiers searching a house discovered what appeared to be a command center for militants associated with Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian militant who is the most wanted insurgent in Iraq. In that house, the soldiers found what they said were believed to be letters between Mr. Zarqawi and some of his lieutenants, along with weapons, computers, bomb-making materials and medical supplies.

And there has been at least one discovery of a quite different kind. Near the house with the cage, soldiers searched a house that officials said contained a primitive chemical weapons lab. They said the lab had sodium cyanide, potassium cyanide, sulfuric acid, hydrochloric acid and other chemicals, along with indications that insurgents were trying to use them to make bombs.

It is not clear how the officials identified the chemicals or what kind of weapons the insurgents had been hoping to make. There were no reports of chemical weapons used in the battle for Falluja.

The two houses that had been filled with the paraphernalia of torture, though, provided the most graphic glimpse yet of what seem to have been horrific prisons.

The black banner was found inside a house in southeast Falluja, site of the worst fighting last week. In full, the yellow lettering on the banner read "The organization of One God and Jihad," the former name of the network run by Mr. Zarqawi.

The group, which has changed its name to Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, is believed to be responsible for bombings, beheadings and ambushes that have left hundreds dead across Iraq. Eliminating Mr. Zarqawi's network was one of the goals of the American-led offensive in Falluja.

One of the houses, in a residential area strewn with rubble, contains two rooms where American military officials say they believe that hostages were kept, with metal handcuffs, plastic zip cuffs and shackles. A shackle had been attached to a rod in the bathroom, apparently to keep hostages chained, officials said.

When a reporter toured the house with Marine officers on Sunday, the handcuffs and shackles had been removed, but it was still strewn with the black masks and black tennis sneakers favored by the insurgents.

Underneath a staircase is an alcove where American officials believe that hostages were interrogated and tortured. Its walls are stained with a dark substance, with two large nails sticking out.

Investigators also found cellphones, computer disks, burned documents and cassette players in the house, as well as the bayonets and large knives, officials said. The other house is in a residential neighborhood closer to the center of the city. Inside it is a cage fashioned out of wire and metal about seven feet high, seven feet wide and four feet deep, set against a brick wall in a corner. Within the cage was a discarded I.V. bag, an empty bag of potato chips and a fluorescent light.

On Sunday, two Marine officers stood in front of the cage and held up a photograph of Mr. Bigley, who was videotaped in a similar cage before he was decapitated last month. One officer said the cages did not appear to match. Others who were present, though, said the evidence recovered earlier at least suggested that people had been kept in the cage.

In a windowless room nearby, there was a fingerprint on the wall, in what looked like dried blood. Near it was the word "hope," written on the wall in Arabic letters. Also on the wall were the words for "put," "kept," "plan" and "to pass on," in no intelligible order, according to an Army translator.

In another room, a piece of wire hung from the ceiling. Verses from the Koran were scrawled on walls in several places. Children's clothing, pictures and a child's pink bicycle were heaped into a corner, as though squatters had moved in and pushed aside the inhabitants' belongings.

Thin mattresses and frying pans with scraps of food in them were on the floor. By the window, covered with curtains fashioned from detergent sacks stitched together, was a box of onions, still fresh.

Two houses away was the makeshift chemical lab, where plastic bags of powder with Arabic labels sat on a shelf. Across the room were several rubber gloves and bottles of chemicals. A grenade sat upright on the table, its detonator removed. One plastic bag of pale powdery substance was labeled TNT. A faint chemical odor hung in the air.

Chief Warrant Officer Lee Fair of the First Battalion, Eighth Marines, said another room held evidence that someone had been mixing chemicals to make a "blood agent," a highly toxic compound. There were also blasting caps, apparently to spread the agent through explosives, he said.

"Anyone that knew what they were doing could put those things together and make something very dangerous," he said.


This article was reported by Robert F. Worth in Falluja and written by James Glanz in Baghdad.


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