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NUCLEAR
Weapons chief censors Baghdad arms declaration
Bush in clash with UN over Iraq weapons dossier
Iraq Says Report to the U.N. Shows No Banned Arms
Iraq Challenges Critics Over Documents
American Policies and Presence Under Fire in South Korea
Californians debating the dangers of N-waste
Los Alamos Probed For Misuse of Funds
Report Finds Security Flaws at Indian Point
Report: Nuclear Plant Owner Finds Flaws
Return of the Iran-Contra brigade
Will Bush's March to War Be Slowed?
Senators Urge Bush to Release Evidence of Banned Arms in Iraq
MILITARY
How did Iraq get its weapons? We sold them
Serbian Elections Fail Again, Observers Say
Desert Rat speaks out against war
At least 23 die in Colombian violence
Iraq says chem-bio programs ended in '91
A Crude View of the Crisis in Iraq
Lack of Hard Evidence Complicates U.S. Aims
Arafat: Israel Seeking Cover for Military Campaign
U.S. special forces to be based in Jordan
Walker's World: NATO rides again
Does Democracy Help Pakistan?
Russia shocked by elite forces' killing spree
Lawmakers Want Cabinet Post for an Intelligence Director
Mossad enters global terror war
'Sci-Fi' Weapons Going to War
U.S. Headquarters Is Ready for War
Buildup Leaves U.S. Military Nearly Set to Start Attack
American Military Presence Near Iraq
AC - 130 Gunships Packs Awesome Firepower
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS
Sen. Graham: Intelligence Czar Needed
ENERGY AND OTHER
Wind Turbines Are Sprouting Off Europe's Shores
Use of Renewable Energy Took a Big Fall in 2001
Report slams Israel on sex slavery
ACTIVISTS
Where the Cold War Continues
Anti-US protests grow in Seoul
Philip Berrigan, Peace
Pacifist Philip Berrigan dies of cancer
Democracy Now! Archived Philip Berrigan Coverage
Iran Student Movement Finds New Vitality
400 March in Boston to Urge Cardinal Law to Resign
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- inspections
Weapons chief censors Baghdad arms declaration
By Julian Coman in Washington and David Wastell, Diplomatic Correspondent
08/12/2002
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2002/12/08/wirq108.xml/
A furious row has broken out within the United Nations Security Council over a ruling by Hans Blix, the chief weapons inspector, denying America and Britain full access to Iraq's 11,807-page weapons declaration, handed over in Baghdad yesterday.
White House officials complained that they had been "blind-sided" by Mr Blix's decision, which he revealed behind closed doors late on Friday, to provide only what one UN official called a "sanitised version" of the declaration to the 15 members of the Security Council.
Mr Blix, the head of the UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (Unmovic), said inspectors would vet the declaration before it is passed on, because of the risk that details of Iraq's nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programmes could be used as a "cookbook" by other states or terrorists trying to build their own weapons.
He proposed that the most sensitive information should be purged from the text by inspectors, to ensure that it did not leak. To do otherwise would breach international treaties on weapons proliferation, he said.
Although Britain and America supported the plan to hold back sensitive information from the 10 rotating members of the council - notably Syria, which Washington has accused of supporting terrorism - they are determined that they, France, Russia and China, as the five permanent members, should see the whole text. Their assessment of the Iraqi declaration will be crucial to the fate of Saddam Hussein's regime.
"There was no agreement about who should see what," said a western UN diplomat. "The Americans simply expect to get the whole report. Other countries are determined to see anything that America sees. They'll be arguing about it well into next week. It wasn't just Syria. Mexico and several other countries were adamant as well."
UN officials said that in the interests of "equity" all 15 Security Council members should receive the same information. Mr Blix said: "All the governments are aware that they should not have access to anything that everyone else does not have access to."
Another UN official said: "It would be quite wrong for some members to get a sanitised version but not others. That is not what was agreed on Friday." American officials were furious at the decision, having been led to believe on Thursday that they would receive the declaration at around 10pm tonight.
American intelligence officials are waiting to compare the document with their own information on Iraq's weapons programmes. A White House official privately accused Mr Blix of throwing a last-minute "curveball".
The Bush administration said it would wait until Mr Blix reports to America and other Security Council members early this week before making its feelings known. American officials said privately that Mr Blix could not be allowed to have sole control of the Iraqi document.
The UN resolution ordering the declaration states that Iraq must provide its weapons declaration to the UN weapons inspectors "and the Security Council".
Britain, like the US, wants to see the document in its entirety, and "went along with the agreement" in the belief that it would eventually see the full text, officials close to the Security Council said. The Foreign Office refused to comment last night.
The delay means that although the Iraqi declaration will be delivered tonight to UN headquarters in New York and the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna, Security Council members will not see it until the end of the week at the earliest.
----
Bush in clash with UN over Iraq weapons dossier
By David Blair in Baghdad and Julian Coman in Washington
08/12/2002
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2002/12/08/wirq08.xml/
Iraq yesterday handed the United Nations a 43-volume 11,807-page declaration on its weapons of mass destruction as America reacted with fury to a ruling that it will not be allowed to see the full report. The contents of the document will decide whether Iraq faces war. An Iraqi official shows documents on Iraq's arms programmes to journalists in Baghdad
Hans Blix, the chief UN weapons inspector, has told the 15 Security Council members that they will be given the report only after sensitive information about weapons manufacture had been removed.
The purged details are expected to be the most sensitive - precisely the information that America most needs to compare with its own intelligence.
Washington believes that the document will provide the trigger for military action as it is certain that Iraq has left out key information. That would put Saddam Hussein's regime in "material breach" of UN resolutions, paving the way for an American-led attack.
A senior US official said that Washington would provide the inspectors with evidence, including some not made public before, that Iraq has retained and accelerated prohibited weapons programmes.
UN inspectors in Baghdad were given what Iraqi officials called an "accurate, full and complete" report covering 11 years of intensive work on nuclear, biological and chemical weapons.
Baghdad hopes to head off the threat of war by providing details of secret weapon programmes whose existence it once denied.
In a cynical attempt to forge an anti-American alliance in the Arab world, Saddam last night apologised for the first time to the people of Kuwait for invading the emirate in 1990.
He also urged Muslims to join any Iraqi struggle against "occupation forces". But Kuwait rejected the apology last night.
Saddam's aides persisted in denying that the country possessed banned weapons. "Some ministries perhaps contain some activities which are dual-use and they are declared fully, completely and accurately," said Maj-Gen Hussam Mohammed Amin, the head of Iraq's National Monitoring Directorate.
The weapons declaration was presented to the world in chaotic fashion after journalists were told to follow a government vehicle driven across Baghdad at breakneck speed to a secret location.
They were told that they would see the declaration in groups of six, but the information ministry failed to announce which would be allowed in first.
This provoked pandemonium as cameramen besieged the office and smashed a window. Officials then scribbled out a hasty list and journalists were allowed two minutes each in the room with the 43 spiral-bound volumes and 12 CD-roms.
The report was flown to Cyprus last night en route to the UN in New York. Officials will pore over the text and the inspectors in Iraq will have the task of verifying every claim.
President George W Bush said that Washington would take some time to judge the declaration, but repeated that the US would disarm Iraq by force if necessary.
----
Iraq Says Report to the U.N. Shows No Banned Arms
December 8, 2002
New York Times
By JOHN F. BURNS
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/08/international/middleeast/08IRAQ.html
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Dec. 7 - Iraq today delivered a 12,000-page declaration on banned weapons to the United Nations, meeting a Security Council deadline with more than 24 hours to spare. Officials said flatly that the documents confirmed that Saddam Hussein's government had no current programs to develop weapons of mass destruction, in contradiction of American and British claims.
Mr. Hussein also chose today to deliver a statement on Kuwait, apologizing to the Kuwaiti people for the 1990 invasion, but criticizing the government there and asking Kuwaitis to join him in fighting "the foreign occupier."
At a news conference, the Iraqi official in charge of preparing the declaration, Maj. Gen. Hussam Muhammad Amin, said the documents "verified" the position Iraq had taken ever since the United States and Britain accused Baghdad earlier this year of continuing with secret nuclear, biological and chemical weapons programs, and threatened to go to war. Iraq contends that it has abandoned all such projects and met longstanding demands that it disarm.
In the new report, General Amin said, "We declare that Iraq is empty of any weapons of mass destruction." To hammer the point home, he told reporters summoned to have an early sighting of the documents at Baghdad University that Mr. Hussein, the Iraqi leader, had ordered that officials to be "fair and frank" in its declaration, "and that means that when we say we have no weapons of mass destruction we are speaking the truth."
The Iraqi report appears to set the stage for a still sharper confrontation between the United States and Iraq, with the ball effectively now back in the American court.
At 8:05 p.m., Iraqi officials delivered the documents and additional information on computer disks to United Nations officials at the Canal Hotel on the capital's eastern outskirts, converted for use as the United Nations headquarters in Iraq.
Several men in a beige-colored four-by-four carried two bags and four cardboards boxes into the building, where they met briefly with officials of the United Nations weapons-inspection team and took a receipt. They left again in minutes.
The handover put Iraq a full day ahead of a deadline of midnight Sunday that the United Nations Security Council set last month in demanding a "currently accurate, full and complete" declaration by Iraq of any banned weapons programs or related work in nonmilitary fields.
Leaders of the current weapons inspection team in Baghdad, which began work 11 days ago, have said that Iraq has delivered at least eight previous "full and complete" declarations of its secret weapons programs over the past 10 years, only for each to be shown later to have omitted entire programs banned under Security Council resolutions.
Officials of the United Nations weapons inspection team in the Iraqi capital said the Iraqi report would be flown out of Baghdad tonight to a United Nations staging post in Larnaca, Cyprus, and transferred there to a long-haul jet for the flight to New York. They said the cargo of spiral-bound documents, CD-ROM's and large, snap-shut filing folders would arrive in New York on Sunday and be delivered straight to the offices of the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Observation Commission, the agency set up to ensure the disarmament of Iraq.
A second copy of the documents will go to the International Atomic Agency in Vienna, which has responsibility for monitoring Iraqi nuclear programs. The New York-based inspection agency has the task of searching out and destroying any prohibited biological or chemical warfare projects, as well as plans to develop ballistic missiles with a range longer than 94 miles. All the restrictions were imposed after Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990, triggering the Persian Gulf war and Iraq's ouster from Kuwait the following spring.
Mr. Hussein's statement on Kuwait today contrasted oddly with his speech on Thursday in which he struck a mollifying note on the crisis with the United States, saying that Iraq should allow the new weapons inspectors to do their work so as to prove to the world that Iraq has no banned weapons, and to "keep our people out of harm's way."
The statement coupled his apology with a new stream of invective, including a passage in which he appeared to congratulating Islamic militants in Kuwait who recently attacked American soldiers.
The purpose of the the Iraqi leader's latest statement, which was read on Iraqi television, appeared to be to foment opposition to the government of Kuwait, and upset if possible Americans plans to use bases in Kuwait for any war with Iraq.
"Isn't anyone of the Iraqis or of the people of Kuwait right to ask: Since the agents have joined forces by the will of the foreigner to harm Iraq and the Arab nation, why don't the believers and mujahedeens in Kuwait join forces with their fellow believers and mujahedeens in Iraq under the umbrella of God the Almighty instead of the umbrella of London or Washington or the Zionist entity" - meaning Israel - "to discuss their affairs?" Mr. Hussein said.
In the days before the declaration, senior Bush administration officials had repeated their contention that Iraq does have the weapons programs it has now formally denied, and warned, again, that Mr. Hussein would be running the gantlet of war if he returned to the patterns of the past, trying to deceive the world about his secret projects.
In his radio address today, President Bush warned that the declaration must hold up to American scrutiny if Baghdad is to avoid military attack.
"We will judge the declaration's honesty and completeness only after we have thoroughly examined it, and that will take some time," he said in his weekly radio address.
The next crucial stage will come when the documents are handed over to the United States and other member states of the Security Council, a step that Hans Blix, one of the chiefs of the United Nations agencies monitoring Iraqi disarmament, said on Friday could take several days.
Mr. Blix said the delay would be necessary to give United Nations experts time to purge the Iraqi documents of any technical information that, in the wrong hands, would lead to "proliferation"- meaning the spread of deadly weapons to rogue states or terrorists.
Theoretically, the United States could short-circuit the cumbersome United Nations procedures by taking the declaration General Amin made today, that Iraq has no banned weapons or weapons programs, and immediately producing some of the intelligence that President Bush has repeatedly said Washington has of the existence of such schemes.
However, in an interview on Friday, a senior administration official said President Bush had elected another course: to take the time to analyze the Iraqi declaration both at the C.I.A. and the national laboratories, where much of the government's expertise on weapons of mass destruction is located. Then it will be compared, the official said, "to past lists of what was there, to previous inspection reports, and to our own intelligence."
"Eventually we will make our assessment available," said the official, whose tone indicated that Mr. Bush was not in any particular hurry to use the report as a reason to go to war.
United Nations weapons inspectors in Baghdad have said that the Iraqi declaration will set a "baseline" of truth, and that any deceit by Iraq in the declaration could open the path to an immediate swoop by the inspectors on sites where banned programs are under way.
At the events today in Baghdad, Iraqi officials appeared acutely aware of the risks Iraq now faces.
Even without the new intelligence that the United States says it has on secret Iraqi weapons sites, the Security Council, once it has the documents, will have an immediate benchmark for establishing whether Iraq, this time, has made a clean breast of it secret weapons work. This benchmark, these officials say, will lie in whether Iraq, in the new declaration, has accounted for the weapons and weapons materials that U.N. inspectors came to know about in the 1990's, but were never able to find.
The list includes 4,000 tons of chemical warfare "precursors," meaning materials needed to make anthrax, mustard-gas and other weapons, as well as hundreds of tons of chemical warfare agents; 31,000 chemical warfare munitions, including 550 jmustard gas shells; as many as 20 Soviet-made Scud missiles adapted by the Iraqis to deliver chemical and biological warheads; and 600 tons of "precursors" for the deadly VX gas, enough to make 200 tons of the gas itself. Western experts have said that this would be enough to wipe out the entire world population.
Asked at the news conference whether the declaration included these allegedly missing items, General Amin answered obliquely. "Generally speaking, the declaration will answer all the questions that have been raised in the past months and years", he said.
"If the intention of the United States and Britain is to disarm Iraq, I think this declaration satisfied Chapter Three of Resolution 1441, and this should prevent any threat of war" General Amin said in reference to the measure the Security Council approved unanimously on Oct. 8, under intense American pressure.
Few documents in recent history have been so tensely awaited as the Iraqi declaration, and the countdown to the handover suggested that Iraqi officials, who had said that they were facing serious difficulties in gathering the information needed to meet the Security Council's demands, may have had last-minute dramas in putting the huge dossier together.
At his news conference, General Amin referred glancingly to the strains, saying that "tens" of Iraqi scientists and officials had worked to pull the information together. "We feel proud that we fulfilled everything in the specified time," he said.
After announcing on Thursday that the declaration would be completed and turned over to the United Nations in Baghdad today, Iraqi officials repeatedly delayed General Amin's news conference and a quick first sighting of the Iraqi documents that had been promised to the scores of Western reporters now in Baghdad.
The reporters were told to be ready at 8 a.m., then noon, then 2.15 p.m.. Finally, it was past 3 p.m. when an Iraqi government car led a motorcade of reporters in a high-speed chase across Baghdad to the university campus, where the Iraqi weapons-monitoring monitoring agency that General Amin heads, the National Monitoring Directorate, maintains its offices.
There, on a campus lined with palm trees, scenes of chaos developed as Western television news crews and news agency reporters, facing deadlines and desperate to be among the first to see the documents, joined in a melee of pushing, shoving and shouting to try to get ahead in the crush.
After a senior Information Ministry official had appealed for the newsmen to behave "in a civilized manner," tensions calmed. Allowed to enter an upper room in the monitoring directorate in small groups, the reporters found a long wooden table laid out with sheaves of spiral-bound documents looking like university theses, with clear and blue plastic covers, and titles in English and Arabic that spelled out more than a decade of secret arms work.
Here, in one room, even if the Iraqis have not been fully candid about their current programs, was a astonishing archive of the clandestine project to make Iraq a military superpower that has been at the heart of Mr. Hussein's 23 years in power.
Overseeing everything was a solemn, black-and-white portrait of Saddam Hussein, and a gold-lettered panel, in Arabic, that quoted the Iraqi leader on the importance of distinguishing between truth and lies. An Iraqi official, asked what it said, stepped forward with evident satisfaction, and translated. "May God open our hearts and our eyes and give us the light to distinguish whether what others tell us is the truth, or lies, and what it is that they have in the hearts, love or hatred," it said.
--------
Iraq Challenges Critics Over Documents
December 8, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Iraq-Arms-Declaration.html
BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- Iraq challenged the United States on Sunday to produce evidence it still has weapons of mass destruction. ``Why play a game?'' a top adviser to President Saddam Hussein asked.
As the huge collection of documents on Iraq's nuclear, chemical and biological programs was being flown to the U.N. headquarters, Lt. Gen. Amer Al-Saadi said the declaration demanded by the United Nations is accurate and complete.
Al-Saadi told reporters that the report contains no new Iraqi evidence to answer lingering questions inspectors have about crucial part of Baghdad's chemical and biological weapons programs. Baghdad has previously presented ``first-class evidence'' that was ignored for political reasons, he said.
A U.N. inspector brought a copy of the part of the report dealing with Iraq's nuclear program to Vienna on Sunday and handed it over to the International Atomic Energy Agency, the U.N. agency overseeing nuclear inspections in Iraq. IAEA experts were to begin examining the documents Sunday night, a spokeswoman said.
Two more copies of the report -- which in its complete form totals more than 12,000 pages -- were on their way to New York, one for the Security Council and the other for the U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission.
The U.N. resolution requiring the declaration be filed by Sunday also called on Iraq to declare any stocks or programs in chemical, biological or nuclear weapons. The Baghdad government says it has none.
Bush administration officials reject such Iraqi denials and threaten war if, in their view, Baghdad does not meet U.N. arms control demands. They say they have ``solid evidence'' Iraq retains weapons of mass destruction, but U.N. inspectors indicate they have seen no conclusive evidence thus far from U.S. or other sources.
Al-Saadi, a British-educated, former chief of military production for Iraq, told reporters the Iraqi declaration was ``accurate'' and ``truthful.'' Then he added:
``If they have anything to the contrary, let them forthwith come up with it, give it to (the U.N. inspectors). They are here. Why play a game?''
Al-Saadi said the report ``will embarrass some nations and companies'' cited as having assisted in Iraq's pre-1991 efforts to build weapons of mass destruction, which Baghdad insists it no longer holds.
Al-Saadi said the document was so complete that if the council makes it all public, ``this means that the Security Council is participating in the proliferation of materials'' relating to prohibited weapons. He said the council already was discussing how to handle the report during a meeting in New York on Tuesday.
He complained that the U.S. administration, even before reading the dossiers filed Saturday, had ridiculed the mass of Iraqi documents as a ``telephone directory.''
``We don't understand this rush to judgment,'' he said. ``A superpower should study and take its time in judging, especially since everyone is looking on as it prepares for a huge military campaign, for an aggression against Iraq. It should behave wisely.''
Asked whether Iraq itself has included new evidence in its declaration to address major unanswered questions posed by the U.N. inspectors, al-Saadi focused on two issues: reported discrepancies in the disposition of large amounts of lethal VX nerve agent produced by Iraq in the 1980s, and large gaps in documentation linked to Iraq's biological weapons program.
On VX, he said, ``some first-class evidence'' was given in the 1990s, but did not satisfy the inspectors then ``because they were mainly led by personnel from the United States and Britain.'' As for biological weapons, he said further evidence doesn't exist because ``the program didn't exist after 1991.''
The U.N. plane carried the Iraqi declaration out of Baghdad to Cyprus for onward flights. On its return, the plane brought reinforcements for the U.N. weapons inspectors in the Iraqi capital, 25 new investigators who will double the staff and allow quick expansion of the inspection schedule.
The inspectors' first helicopter was being assembled Sunday at Baghdad's Saddam International Airport. They expect eight in all, enabling them to range farther afield with their daily surprise inspections.
The U.N. teams continued those missions Sunday, visiting a government mining and survey company in Baghdad with past association with uranium processing, which could help make fuel for nuclear bombs, and a pesticide plant west of Baghdad. Pesticide production can be converted to chemical weapons making.
The long-awaited Iraqi declaration comprised at least a dozen bound volumes accompanied by computer disks, covering such subjects as the 1990s U.N. weapons inspection regime in Iraq, when many arms and much production equipment were destroyed, and ``dual-use'' industries that can alternate between civilian and military production.
The arms declaration will draw weeks of scrutiny from nuclear engineers, chemists, microbiologists, missile technicians and other specialists as the United Nations searches for clues, among the dry accounts, of hidden arms programs or remaining caches of weapons of mass destruction.
``I hope the international community will bear with us and give us time to do a proper job,'' said Mohamed ElBaradei, the IAEA director-general.
The U.N. experts are expected to ``sanitize'' the documents for distribution to representatives of 15 Security Council member nations, by removing sensitive information on producing chemical, biological or nuclear weapons. Translating from Arabic may also cause delays.
The U.N. agencies will compare the new Iraqi information with past Iraqi reports and with their own databases of past inspections and other information. What they learn ``will be integrated in our overall strategy'' as they plan targets for surprise visits in the coming weeks, said Jacques Baute, leader of the nuclear inspection team here.
``The information provided in this declaration will have to be verified, and the onus of that will fall on us,'' said Demetrius Perricos, operational chief for the U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission, responsible for chemical and biological weapons and missiles.
If Iraq is eventually found to have cooperated fully with the inspectors, U.N. resolutions call for the Security Council to consider lifting economic sanctions imposed on Iraq after it invaded Kuwait in 1990.
Although Washington was dismissive of the Iraqi document submitted this weekend, the Russian Foreign Ministry, by contrast, issued a statement saying the declaration shows Iraq is committed ``to act in compliance'' with U.N. requirements.
In the Persian Gulf emirate of Qatar, meanwhile, the U.S. Central Command prepared to inaugurate a seven-day, computer-assisted war game Monday that some observers speculate could be a rehearsal for a war against Iraq. The exercise will not involve troops in the field, but rather ``tabletop'' scenarios played out by staff officers.
-------- korea
American Policies and Presence Under Fire in South Korea
December 8, 2002
New York Times
By HOWARD W. FRENCH with DON KIRK
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/08/international/asia/08KORE.html
SEOUL, South Korea, Dec. 5 - Buddhist monks and Christian groups have held hunger strikes near the hulking United States Embassy here all week, and while the riot police keep the demonstrators from the gates, they cannot stop the taxi drivers from honking their horns in protest.
In even angrier demonstrations, students have launched firebombs at American military bases here. During a recent music award show, meanwhile, a pop star smashed a model of an American tank on live television, drawing a rousing cheer. Foreign diplomats say universities have withdrawn speaking invitations to the American ambassador, for fear of trouble if he appeared on campus.
South Korea and the United States have long been the closest of trans-Pacific friends, but the recent turbulence goes well beyond youthful fashion or passing unrest in a country with a long tradition of protest. The growing estrangement has been evident in the race for president, to be decided in an election on Dec. 19, and many here are warning that the relationship is undergoing fundamental changes, with even more difficult times ahead.
Roh Moo Hyun, the candidate who holds a narrow lead according to opinion polls, has repeatedly criticized Washington's Korean policies as "hard-line," and he boldly said that if elected he would "guarantee the security of North Korea." The 37,000 American troops here are committed to protecting South Korea from any attack by North Korea, and President Bush has said the North is a member of an "axis of evil."
The immediate source of anti-American sentiment was an incident in June in which two 14-year-old girls were accidentally crushed by an American armored vehicle as they walked to a birthday party on a narrow road north of Seoul. Simmering anger has flared into outrage with the acquittal last month of two United States Army sergeants by an American panel in a military trial.
But many authorities say the divide has deeper roots, involving this country's rapid passage to affluence and its perception that its distant ally is heavy handed and insensitive, particularly with regard to North Korea.
Relations are worse than they have been in about 25 years, said Shim Jae Hoon, an analyst of Korean affairs. Others say even longer.
"The main issue then was human rights," said Mr. Shim. "Today the main issue is North-South relations. The two countries don't see eye to eye on foreign policy, and neither of them is handling the worsening relationship very well."
The widening gulf between the two allies, and in their perceptions of North Korea, is reflected in numerous public opinion polls. In September, a Gallup Korea poll found that a majority of 1,056 South Koreans surveyed felt there was little or no chance of an attack by North Korea. After a disputed call during the 2002 Winter Olympics, when a jostled South Korean skater lost the gold medal to an American rival, another Gallup poll here reported that nearly 60 percent of respondents "disliked" the United States.
Another poll taken before the deaths of the schoolgirls, which was published in November 2000 by The Dong-A Ilbo newspaper, found that only 42 percent of respondents supported maintaining the current number of American troops in South Korea, while 15 percent supported withdrawing them altogether.
Mr. Roh, a labor lawyer and a former legislator and cabinet member with a background in social activism who has never visited the United States, also once said that American troops were not needed in South Korea. Nowadays he calls the military alliance vital.
But he routinely emphasizes that this is an alliance badly in need of a revision, and the popular anger toward the United States has even forced his main rival, Lee Hoi Chang, a conservative whose international views are generally more in line with those of the Bush administration, to campaign for major changes.
For a half century, the alliance has been the bedrock of South Korea's prosperity and of Washington's security planning in Asia.
Few countries have made the economic strides that South Korea has made in recent decades. It leads the world in broadband Internet access, and it is second in shipbuilding; it is also the third-leading producer of semiconductors and fifth in automobile manufacturing.
An important psychological lift came in June when South Korea served as a co-host, with Japan, for the World Cup soccer tournament, and its team made it to the semifinals. For the first time in the modern era, Koreans feel a swaggering sense of self-assurance.
Yet daily life still serves up rude collisions between this newfound confidence and the country's dependence on what many Koreans now consider an ally that sometimes seems overbearing.
For travelers, a bracing dose of this comes upon arrival at South Korea's dazzling new airport, just outside Seoul, where often the first thing passengers may see are American sergeants in combat fatigues barking orders to arriving American servicemembers.
Also jarring is the gigantic Yongsan Army Garrison, covering 630 acres in the heart of this crowded city. The location of the post, in the center of the capital, is often justified by the nearness of the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea - 40 miles away - but it is still something that other countries with American bases, like Japan and Germany, do not have to endure.
"We have a joint working group with our Korean partners to study ways to move this out of the central city," said the American ambassador, Thomas C. Hubbard. "We recognize the imposition that having a command headquarters in the middle of Seoul causes for many Koreans."
Diplomatically, on both sides of the Pacific, many people say things began to go wrong at the first meeting between the freshly inaugurated President Bush and President Kim Dae Jung at the White House in March 2001. Mr. Kim came to Washington hoping to maintain the momentum of the last months of the Clinton administration, when it appeared that a historic security agreement with North Korea was in reach.
Instead of an endorsement, many South Koreans, including some who are not partisans of Mr. Kim, felt that Mr. Bush showed insufficient deference to their president and was dismissive of Mr. Kim's policy of reconciliation with North Korea.
For his part, Mr. Kim failed to understand how much Washington's outlook had shifted with the change in administrations, his critics say. "The perception is that the U.S. has been vacillating, but over the years, the Koreans have vacillated at least as much as the U.S. has," said one Western diplomat.
Things have only grown worse since then, with Washington leading a campaign to force North Korea to abandon a nuclear weapons program whose existence, secret until recently, violates many arms control agreements. South Korean officials say that their country's intelligence agencies, and not the United States as is commonly believed, first detected the existence of the North Korean nuclear program, and yet Mr. Kim, in the waning months of his presidency, has continued to press for engagement with the North. Mr. Kim is barred by the Constitution from seeking a second five-year term.
With their overwhelming economic superiority and vastly better weaponry compared with their neighbor, South Koreans increasingly regard an unprovoked attack by North Korea as unimaginable, and public opinion has largely followed Mr. Kim. More than 62 percent of 1,013 respondents in a Sisa Journal-Media Research survey earlier this year called Mr. Bush's approach toward North Korea unhelpful.
"The Bush administration looked at the political calendar and made a calculation that they would be in office after Kim Dae Jung, and have given the appearance of just trying to wait him out," said Scott Snyder, the Korea representative of the Asia Foundation. "The unintended consequence is that Koreans have been getting the impression that their country isn't taken seriously.
"Depending on what happens with North Korea," Mr. Snyder said, "I think the entire relationship could be on the table."
Western diplomats deny there has ever been a strategy to simply await the end of Mr. Kim's term to reactivate diplomacy concerning North Korea. In any event, today the payoff of such an approach looks uncertain at best.
Until less than a month ago, Mr. Lee, the conservative opposition leader, looked like a shoo-in for the presidency, but the merger of Mr. Roh's campaign with that of a third-party candidate and the uproar over the American acquittals in the deaths of the two girls have transformed the tenor of the race. The changes helped make a favorite out of Mr. Roh, whose diffidence toward Washington would almost certainly make for a pricklier relationship.
Some analysts say that the biggest challenge to the South Korean-American alliance may be generational. Since the division of the Korean Peninsula was solidified after the Korean War, South Koreans have felt an ache from the separation of tens of thousands of families. Despite this country's prosperity, there is a deep anger over having been victimized by outside powers.
"For Koreans, it is very ironic that we were divided by World War II, and Japan, your defeated enemy, was not," said Chung Mong Joon, the scion of the Hyundai industrial empire, and the unsuccessful candidate who merged his campaign with Mr. Roh's. "In Europe, Germany was defeated and divided, but Japan was aided by the Korean War, which left us divided. This is very unfair."
As the generations age, fewer people have memories of the horrors of the Korean War, and of the poverty that South Korea overcame, and that benefits North Korea.
"There are perfectly sound arguments that can be made for the U.S. presence, but they are less clear now that they have been in some time," said Nicholas Eberstadt, a Korea expert at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington. "In the meantime, U.S. forces are making sonic booms over people's houses, causing environmental damage and doing the unpleasant things that unattached men all over the world sometimes do.
"If the alliance has a purpose that is spelled out, then people can tolerate these sorts of things," Mr. Eberstadt added. "If not, we will have problems."
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
-------- california
Californians debating the dangers of N-waste
Sunday, December 8, 2002
By Miguel Bustillo
Los Angeles Times
http://deseretnews.com/dn/print/1,1442,450019278,00.html
For at least a decade, California has allowed mildly radioactive waste from old nuclear sites to go to recycling plants and city dumps not licensed to handle radioactive material of any type.
Yet neither landfill owners nor their employees, nearby residents nor elected officials, were ever notified of the state's policy, details of which are only now becoming public after a lawsuit and questions from concerned state lawmakers.
Anti-nuclear activists, environmental groups and others are demanding to know more about where the state has allowed the waste - mostly soil, concrete and metal with residual traces of radiation - to be disposed of.
But the California Department of Health Services contends that it did not keep detailed records on slightly radioactive trash because officials never considered it contaminated enough to pose a health hazard.
"There is a lot of public fear and concern about anything radioactive; it's a polarizing issue," said the deputy director of the Health Services Department, Kevin Reilly. But the slightly radioactive trash, he said, "does not pose a significant health risk. And it is not just California's opinion; it is a near-universal opinion within the scientific community.
"When you get down to low levels, you don't have any scientific evidence to suggest they are a threat, especially when you take into account the ability of the human body to repair itself," he added.
Experts disagree on whether exposure to the material - most commonly debris from old buildings where radioactive experiments took place - is a serious health risk.
The danger is greatest for those who live or work near the waste and are more likely than others to be exposed to it repeatedly.
And even though they insist that the waste is harmless, state attorneys refuse to release records on its likely sources - the more than 1,400 former nuclear sites that the state has released from oversight in the last 15 years - because of post-Sept. 11 concerns that terrorists might be trying to collect radioactive materials for a "dirty bomb."
State legislators and environmental groups alarmed by the dumping had hoped to examine the inventory of sites to determine the danger for themselves.
They criticized the state's decision to keep the information private, saying it raises troubling questions about the nature of the radioactive junk that might have been shipped from the sites. The state claimed to have decommissioned the sites only after they were cleaned up to safe levels.
"It's so safe we can sprinkle it on your children's cereal, but we can't tell you about it because Osama bin Laden might want to use it to make a bomb to blow up Los Angeles? There's a bit of a disconnect there," said Daniel Hirsch of the anti-nuclear Committee to Bridge the Gap. He noted that the old sites were supposedly cleaned up to safe levels before the state unconditionally released them from oversight.
Meanwhile, Gov. Gray Davis' administration is moving forward with new guidelines to allow at least some dumping and recycling to continue.
-------- new mexico
Los Alamos Probed For Misuse of Funds
Nuclear Lab Fires 2 Whistleblowers
By Dan Morgan
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, December 8, 2002; Page A19
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A24305-2002Dec7?language=printer
House investigators, following up on a criminal probe launched by the FBI, have asked for dozens of records relating to allegations of illegal procurement practices, theft and misuse of government funds at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.
Three employees of the nation's oldest nuclear weapons facility are on administrative leave, and several others are under investigation, officials said last week. Two lab employees who filed a whistleblower complaint about the lab's handling of their reports of irregularities were fired Nov. 25.
Saying that the events have raised "serious questions" about procurement policies and oversight practices, Rep. James C. Greenwood (R-Pa.) requested the records in a letter to Richard C. Atkinson, president of the University of California, which manages the facility under a contract with the federal government that expires in 2005.
Greenwood, who is chairman of the oversight and investigations subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, gave the university until Monday to provide the material. He said staff investigators would be sent to Los Alamos as early as this week to interview officials.
"We're determined to get to the bottom of this mess," committee spokesman Kenneth Johnson said Friday.
The discovery in 1999 that Los Alamos scientist Wen Ho Lee had downloaded classified nuclear information onto portable computer disks that could not all be accounted for prompted demands for improved controls at one of the world's premier government laboratories.
Officials said there is no evidence of new security breaches or loss of classified material in the new allegations, and no one has been charged with a crime. But several investigators said the disclosures and the lab's response suggest that management problems still may exist.
"In terms of specific issues at Los Alamos right now, the university is determined to get to the bottom of any problem and respond appropriately," said Jeff Garberson, a spokesman for the University of California.
On Oct. 31, FBI agents armed with search warrants entered the homes of two employees attached to the lab's nonproliferation and international security division. Sources said investigators are attempting to determine whether thousands of dollars worth of goods recovered, ranging from hunting knives and clothing to lock-picking devices, may have been acquired through the improper use of government purchasing orders.
Both men are on administrative leave, lab officials confirmed. Investigators are also looking into whether a third employee, also on leave, may have tried to use a government credit card to buy an automobile. The employee denied the charge, sources said.
Greenwood said Friday that his staff was also concerned about the lab's recent firing of Glenn Walp and Steven Doran, who had joined the lab's Office of Security Inquiries earlier this year. The office is charged, among other things, with looking into property loss and vandalism.
Walp, a retired commissioner of the Pennsylvania state police, said last week that he learned of a major theft problem at the lab soon after arriving. Separately, he said, informants inside the lab also contacted the FBI, which began an investigation in July.
But Walp said he and Doran were taken off the investigation into illegal use of purchasing orders several days before the FBI search. Subsequently, Walp said, lab officials were reluctant to press criminal charges against an employee suspected of falsifying a voucher.
Walp and Doran received top evaluations in October, Walp said. But he said lab officials may have been angered when a memo he had written in March outlining his concerns about theft and misuse of taxpayer money had been leaked to the media. He denied responsibility.
Lab spokesman Jim Danneskiold said Walp and Doran were fired because they had "lost the confidence of the organization they were required to work with."
-------- new york
Report Finds Security Flaws at Indian Point
December 8, 2002
New York Times
By RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/08/nyregion/08INDI.html
Security guards at the Indian Point nuclear plant did not believe they could protect the plant from an attack, and said their bosses discouraged them from raising security concerns, according to a report written early this year for the plant's owner.
"Only 19 percent of the security officers stated that they could adequately defend the plant after the terrorist event of Sept. 11," the report, which was completed by a security consultant to the plant's owner last January, said. It also questioned the training and fitness of the guards.
"Some officers believe that as many as 50 percent of the force may not be physically able to meet the demands of defending the plant," said the report, a copy of which was given to The New York Times by Riverkeeper, an environmental group that wants the plant closed. "The current physical agility test is extremely lax and is not adequate to evaluate the actual physical conditioning of the security force."
Entergy Nuclear Northeast, the company that recently bought Indian Point's two active reactors, said that many concerns raised by the report had been addressed. The company, a subsidiary of Entergy Corporation, one of the nation's largest power companies, also said that the plant met security requirements set by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, an assessment confirmed by the commission and by the report.
But in interviews, several current and former guards said that if anything, the report understated the problems, many of which persist, and they still consider the plant very vulnerable.
Guards told of minimal training, of other guards reporting for duty drunk, of security drills that were carefully staged to ensure that mock attackers would be repelled, and of out-of-shape guards forced to work 70 to 80 hours a week or more. Both the guards and the report referred repeatedly to often-broken electronic security equipment.
An Entergy spokesman, James F. Steets, said, "We accepted the conclusions in the report," though he added that "some parts of that report might be overly alarming."
"We took it seriously," he said, "and we took appropriate actions to address the findings in it."
Among the improvements made in the last year were a new perimeter fence, concrete barriers near the main gate, more-sophisticated security cameras and bullet-resistant enclosures for guards in a few spots.
But guards said that many of the problems listed in the report had not been addressed, including frequent breakdowns in alarm systems that are supposed to warn of an unauthorized entry into the plant. They told of alarm tripwires held together with electrical tape. Fitness requirements for guards have not changed, and the guards' training, they said, has changed little.
"This assessment of security at Indian Point confirms what we've suspected all along, which is that the plant is not adequately defended from a terrorist attack," said the executive director of Riverkeeper, Alex Matthiessen. "If this isn't a wake-up call for elected officials, I don't know what is."
Mr. Steets said the plant's problems were inherited. Entergy Nuclear Northeast bought the Unit 3 reactor from the New York Power Authority in 2000, and Unit 2 from Consolidated Edison last year, days before Sept. 11.
Some concerns, like long hours, have been fairly common in the nuclear power industry, but others, like the manipulation of security drills and the suppression of security complaints, have not.
Indian Point's critics, who have been vigorously campaigning to shut it down, call it a special case. The plant, in Buchanan, in northern Westchester County, is in the most densely populated area of any nuclear plant in the country, and it lies in the flight path taken by one of the hijacked jets that struck the World Trade Center.
The security report deals only with Unit 2. Guards said security conditions were marginally better at Unit 3, but that work hours were longer there.
Entergy directly employs the Unit 3 guards, who are paid somewhat higher wages than those at Unit 2, who work for the Wackenhut Corporation, a large company under contract to provide security to Indian Point and to other power plants. Calls to Wackenhut were not returned.
Unit 2 has experienced some highly publicized security lapses this year. In September, a Glock semiautomatic handgun carried by one of the guards was reported missing from Unit 2; it still has not been found.
Entergy commissioned the security report in November 2001, to respond to complaints raised by guards before and after Sept. 11, and it addresses a few specific areas. The author, Keith G. Logan, a former Nuclear Regulatory Commission investigator, interviewed more than 50 guards at Unit 2.
The 33-page report says that 59 percent of the guards "stated that they believe that a chilled environment exists" about raising security concerns, and that 12 percent reported that they had suffered retaliation for doing so.
Guards told Mr. Logan that their supervisors admonished them for trying to raise security concerns during their group meetings. They said supervisors told guards not to fill out incident reports about security lapses - reports that must be filed and become a part of the plant's official record. Instead, they insisted that the complaints be written on blank sheets of paper.
"The chilled environment, that's an issue that we immediately addressed, with training and emphasizing the value of our employee-concerns program," Mr. Steets said. He said that discouraging people from filing formal written reports was "clearly unacceptable," but he could not say if the practice had ended.
The plant increased the number of guards on each shift after Sept. 11, by having them work more. A standard workweek now is five or six 12-hour shifts, and guards say that often, shifts are extended to 16 hours, or that they are ordered to work extra days.
Mr. Logan's report did not directly address the issue, but guards said that fatigue was a serious problem. Even before Sept. 11, they said, mandatory overtime was common and many of them felt they were too tired to perform well.
"They are working six 12's, we recognize that," Mr. Steets said. "In January, we plan to hire about 30 new officers to accommodate that."
Several guards spoke of a handful of instances of guards reporting for duty drunk and being sent home, but not disciplined. A security sergeant, Foster Zeh, said that twice he reported one officer for showing up "drunk as a skunk," but that the officer was not punished. The officer has since left the plant.
Mr. Steets said no record of such incidents existed, and that management was unaware of them, "so I really wonder whether that's true or not."
Mr. Zeh is on a paid suspension, Mr. Steets said, but he would not say why. Mr. Zeh said that he was not given a reason, but that he believed the suspension was in retaliation for his complaints about security.
Guards say their training and testing is very limited, and anyone who can walk at a steady pace, climb a few flights of stairs and shoot a gun with moderate accuracy can pass the employment test. In interviews with The Times and with Mr. Logan, many guards complained that their colleagues were in very poor physical shape, and had to be given multiple chances to pass agility and shooting tests. Mr. Logan found that some test results - though not of tests required by federal rules - had been falsified.
"Our whole security program is based on what is required of us by the N.R.C., and we meet those requirements," Mr. Steets said.
Mr. Zeh, who helped train other guards, and who recently moved to Unit 3 after five years at Unit 2, said they received no meaningful training in tactics. "There's no ability to act together as a team," he said. "The testing is a joke. An armed assault on the plant cannot be stopped. It's that simple."
Several guards complained that "force-on-force" drills, in which an incursion into the plant is simulated, were too controlled - an area Mr. Logan's report did not touch on. An attack team includes no more than three people; the regulatory commission is considering requiring larger numbers.
"The people playing the attackers were given specific routes of travel, and if they deviated from the routes of travel, the management had a cow," said John R. Kite, who was a sergeant at the plant until early this year, when he quit and moved to Arizona. "The defenders had done this enough times, they knew exactly what the routes could be. The attackers were told to take it easy. And even so, the defenders a lot of times couldn't stop them."
Mr. Steets said: "Yes, those drills are proscribed for the attackers, but they do run a variety of scenarios, so the defenders don't know. We're not aware of anyone being told not to push it. That's something we might look into."
Mr. Kite's account of the drills was confirmed by several other guards who still work at the plant and who asked that their names not be used because they feared retaliation. Mr. Zeh said the simulated attacks were "designed to fail."
Mr. Logan's report also referred to complaints of sexual harassment of guards; again, guards said that the problem was more prevalent than the report indicates, and went beyond sexual harassment. A Jewish guard has sued the plant, charging that he was subjected to anti-Semitism. Some guards tell of colleagues' being abused because they were female, black or gay.
--------
Report: Nuclear Plant Owner Finds Flaws
December 8, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Indian-Point.html
NEW YORK (AP) -- Security guards at the Indian Point nuclear plant do not believe they could protect the plant from an attack, and said there was no encouragement to raise security concerns, a published report said Sunday.
``Only 19 percent of the security officers stated that they could adequately defend the plant after the terrorist event of Sept. 11,'' said a report conducted for the plant's owner and obtained by The New York Times.
The 33-page report also said 59 percent of the guards described a ``chilled environment'' for raising security concerns, and that 12 percent said they had suffered retaliation for doing so.
Entergy Nuclear Northeast, the company that owns Indian Point's two active reactors, commissioned the report in November 2001 in response to complaints by guards made both before and after the Sept. 11 terrorists attacks.
An Entergy spokesman told The Times many of the security concerns had been resolved since the report was completed last January.
The New York Times obtained a copy of the report from Riverkeeper, an environmental group that wants the plant closed.
-------- us politics
Return of the Iran-Contra brigade
Sunday December 8, 2002
The Observer (UK)
http://observer.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,856095,00.html
The selection of Elliot Abrams last week as President George Bush's director of Middle Eastern affairs triggered a cloud of controversy over both the administration's Middle East policy.
Abrams pleaded guilty in 1987 to withholding information from about the Nicaraguan Contra case from Congress, before being pardoned by the first President Bush in 1992. Four officials now in the Bush administration worked for President Reagan in the mid-1980s, when money from arms sales to Iran was diverted to aid the Contra rebels in Nicaragua:
Elliott Abrams
NOW Senior director for Near East and North African Affairs at the National Security Council
THEN Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs
Pleaded guilty to withholding information about the case from Congress. Was later pardoned by President George Bush Sr
John D. Negroponte
NOW US Ambassador to the United Nations
THEN Ambassador to Honduras
Was the Reagan administration's 'point man' for efforts to back the Contras from Nicaragua's neighbour, Honduras
John M. Poindexter
NOW Director of the Information Awareness Office at the Pentagon's research agency
THEN National Security Adviser
Was convicted in 1990 of five felony counts, including making false statements to Congress. The convictions were later overturned
Otto J. Reich
NOW Special envoy for Western Hemisphere Affairs, and was Assistant Secretary of State
THEN Director of the office of public diplomacy at the State Department
Led an office found to have engaged in prohibited acts of domestic propaganda to generate support for the Contras
----
NEWS ANALYSIS
Will Bush's March to War Be Slowed?
December 8, 2002
New York Times
By PATRICK E. TYLER
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/08/international/middleeast/08ASSE.html
WASHINGTON, Dec. 7 - The arrival of Iraq's encyclopedic declaration of weapons data this weekend impels the Bush administration toward the last "off ramp" along the road to war.
Even as America mobilizes for a campaign to disarm and decapitate the Baghdad government, President Bush is facing final determination of whether the Iraqi arms declaration is an honest rendering - a step toward disarmament - or a capricious lie that establishes the basis for disarmament by force, a step Mr. Bush says he will take as a last resort.
Therefore the last off ramp - the expression is a favorite of Secretary of State Colin L. Powell - is the one that leads to a relentless United Nations inspection program, backed by a credible threat of force, that persuades Mr. Hussein to surrender everything that could be construed as illicit weapons or the banned tools for making them.
It may be wishful thinking that Mr. Hussein can ever change or abandon his ambition to lead the Arab world. But the question that clings to the capital like the first snow of winter is whether anything will be enough for Mr. Bush.
"Everyone in this town who claims to know the president's mind says he is determined to finish off the Saddam weapons of mass destruction problem and the regime," said Fritz W. Ermarth, who was chairman of the National Intelligence Council under the first President Bush and is now a resident at the Nixon Center.
Still, he added: "We are at a colossally important milestone. How this plays out is extremely important for the international order, for the credibility of the United States as a power, and as a consensus leading power, or not."
Diplomats and statesmen were seized by the momentousness of the deliberations over Iraq. Many echoed Mr. Ermarth, saying that decisions made in coming weeks will heavily influence the rules for security, war and intervention at a time of unrivaled American power.
Yet most Americans seem to focus more immediately on whether there will be another military dash across the desert like the one the president's father ordered in the Persian Gulf war in 1991. Polling data shows that an impressive majority of Americans are game. They would like Mr. Bush to work within the United Nations system in confronting Iraq, but also realize that he may not be able to abide constraints on the goals he has set for himself for changing the Iraqi government.
Mr. Ermarth, who used to make his living handicapping the likelihood of nuclear war, regional conflicts and other great events for the Central Intelligence Agency, sees the possibility of delay and obfuscation by Mr. Hussein.
"Saddam is playing for delay, and a lot of other international actors are playing for that, too," he said. Other nations, some close allies, want time to see what the inspections yield. Others want to see more intelligence on whether Iraq actually has the capacity to develop a nuclear weapon over the next five years.
"We all know that Saddam is a terrible fellow," said Brian Urquhart, a former under secretary general of the United Nations. "But there is no real serious or credible information about his nuclear program." With inspectors now inside the country, he asks why not give them time to find the truth about the risks.
At the United Nations, there was a substantial measure of skepticism that Mr. Bush was looking for an off ramp at all. Some officials questioned whether the administration, with its bellicose statements on regime change, was trying to undermine the diplomatic and inspection track.
"There is a very fine line between showing a seriousness of intent and conveying the impression that you are going to war no matter what happens, and that fine line should not be crossed," said a United Nations official who spent the week trying to evaluate the statements emanating from Washington. "It is one thing to show determination to go to war if inspections fail, but it is quite another to convey that whether inspections succeed or not, the intent is to go to war."
What seemed new this season was that the president, in a prominent interview with Bob Woodward, extended earlier public remarks on how fighting terrorism would be the focus of his presidency into a broader vision that seems almost quixotic.
Mr. Bush described his presidency as one devoted to confronting the remaining despotic regimes in the world. He said he loathed Kim Jong Il, the North Korean leader, for "starving his people."
Mr. Bush told Mr. Woodward, "They tell me we don't need to move too fast" to take action to free oppressed peoples. "I just don't buy that," he said. "Either you believe in freedom, and want to - and worry about the human condition, or you don't."
These comments suggest that Mr. Bush is not engaged in an opportunistic whipping up of an Iraq crisis, as some of his critics allege, as a way to divert the country from a troubled economy during the election campaign. They also suggest that Mr. Bush might not be willing to take the last off ramp, even though a timely exit would allow him to pocket the credit for bringing Iraq back under United Nations supervision.
The hawks in the administration are now nervous, some observers say.
"They are nervous that he will not pull the trigger," said Michael McFaul, a professor of political science at Stanford University who has advised both the Bush and Clinton administrations on Russian policy.
"They thought they were in the driver's seat," he said, "and now they are panicked" because they agreed to drive Mr. Bush to the United Nations, which is now in charge on the ground in Iraq. Their fear is that Mr. Bush will balk at writing unilateral rules of the new international game.
For now, administration officials seemed poised to make significant investments in an extended United Nations inspection effort.
War could still break out, but Mr. Ermarth, asked to assess the odds, said, "By a hair, I would bet that things get dragged out." But there is always the winter after next.
--------
Senators Urge Bush to Release Evidence of Banned Arms in Iraq
December 8, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/08/politics/08WIRE-IRAQ.html
WASHINGTON -- The White House must decide soon to release intelligence data to the United Nations and the public if the Bush administration is to make its case that Iraq is lying when it denies that it holds or is developing weapons of mass destruction, lawmakers said Sunday.
"We are in possession of what I think to be compelling evidence" of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's weapons program, said Senate Intelligence Committee chairman Bob Graham, D-Fla.
The timing for the release of that information to Americans and the world, he said on CBS' "Face the Nation," "is going to be an important strategic decision for this administration." He compared the situation to the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, when the Kennedy administration came forth with information on Soviet missile sites in Cuba.
Baghdad, in releasing a 12,000-page arms document Saturday, denied it was producing or stocking weapons of mass destruction. President Bush has rejected that and warned that continued Iraqi attempts to hide the arms could lead to military retaliation.
Last week, White House press secretary Ari Fleischer said there was a "solid basis" for assertions that Saddam possessed banned weapons, and the United States would provide intelligence to U.N. inspectors. He did not say what the evidence was.
"It may very well be that the advice of our allies will be that we ought to go very public, that we ought to have worldwide opinion," said Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Ind., the next Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman. "I think these are delicate judgments."
Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle of South Dakota told CNN's "Late Edition" that he supported going public with information that contradicts Saddam's denials. "We have to put our best evidence forward, especially if it's a question of Saddam Hussein again denying all of these assertions," Daschle said.
He said U.S. intelligence, the Iraqi arms documents and the results of U.N. inspectors must be scrupulously analyzed before the United States decides its next course of action.
Former Vice President Al Gore, speaking on ABC's "This Week," acknowledged that the administration "is really facing a difficult situation here" in deciding whether to stick to a multilateral, inspections-based approach or take unilateral action in response to Iraqi deceptions.
But he said that if it could be proved that Iraq is hiding weapons of mass destruction, the United States would be justified in using military force regardless of whether the United Nations had voted its approval.
-------- MILITARY
-------- arms sales
How did Iraq get its weapons? We sold them
By Neil Mackay and Felicity Arbuthnot
Sunday Herald (UK)
08 September 2002
http://www.sundayherald.com/print27572
THE US and Britain sold Saddam Hussein the technology and materials Iraq needed to develop nuclear, chemical and biological wea pons of mass destruction.
Reports by the US Senate's committee on banking, housing and urban affairs -- which oversees American exports policy -- reveal that the US, under the successive administrations of Ronald Reagan and George Bush Snr, sold materials including anthrax, VX nerve gas, West Nile fever germs and botulism to Iraq right up until March 1992, as well as germs similar to tuberculosis and pneumonia. Other bacteria sold included brucella melitensis, which damages major organs, and clostridium perfringens, which causes gas gangrene.
Classified US Defence Dep-artment documents also seen by the Sunday Herald show that Britain sold Iraq the drug pralidoxine, an antidote to nerve gas, in March 1992, after the end of the Gulf war. Pralidoxine can be reverse engineered to create nerve gas.
The Senate committee's rep orts on 'US Chemical and Biological Warfare-Related Dual-Use Exports to Iraq', undertaken in 1992 in the wake of the Gulf war, give the date and destination of all US exports. The reports show, for example, that on May 2, 1986, two batches of bacillus anthracis -- the micro-organism that causes anthrax -- were shipped to the Iraqi Ministry of Higher Education, along with two batches of the bacterium clostridium botulinum, the agent that causes deadly botulism poisoning.
One batch each of salmonella and E coli were shipped to the Iraqi State Company for Drug Industries on August 31, 1987. Other shipments went from the US to the Iraq Atomic Energy Commission on July 11, 1988; the Department of Biology at the University of Basrah in November 1989; the Department of Microbiology at Baghdad University in June 1985; the Ministry of Health in April 1985 and Officers' City, a military complex in Baghdad, in March and April 1986.
The shipments to Iraq went on even after Saddam Hussein ordered the gassing of the Kurdish town of Halabja, in which at least 5000 men, women and children died. The atrocity, which shocked the world, took place in March 1988, but a month later the components and materials of weapons of mass destruction were continuing to arrive in Baghdad from the US.
The Senate report also makes clear that: 'The United States provided the government of Iraq with 'dual use' licensed materials which assisted in the development of Iraqi chemical, biological and missile-system programmes.'
This assistance, according to the report, included 'chemical warfare-agent precursors, chem ical warfare-agent production facility plans and technical drawings, chemical warfare filling equipment, biological warfare-related materials, missile fabrication equipment and missile system guidance equipment'.
Donald Riegle, then chairman of the committee, said: 'UN inspectors had identified many United States manufactured items that had been exported from the United States to Iraq under licences issued by the Department of Commerce, and [established] that these items were used to further Iraq's chemical and nuclear weapons development and its missile delivery system development programmes.'
Riegle added that, between January 1985 and August 1990, the 'executive branch of our government approved 771 different export licences for sale of dual-use technology to Iraq. I think that is a devastating record'.
It is thought the information contained in the Senate committee reports is likely to make up much of the 'evidence of proof' that Bush and Blair will reveal in the coming days to justify the US and Britain going to war with Iraq. It is unlikely, however, that the two leaders will admit it was the Western powers that armed Saddam with these weapons of mass destruction.
However, Bush and Blair will also have to prove that Saddam still has chemical, biological and nuclear capabilities. This looks like a difficult case to clinch in view of the fact that Scott Ritter, the UN's former chief weapons inspector in Iraq, says the United Nations des troyed most of Iraq's wea pons of mass destruction and doubts that Saddam could have rebuilt his stocks by now.
According to Ritter, between 90% and 95% of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction were des troyed by the UN. He believes the remainder were probably used or destroyed during 'the ravages of the Gulf War'.
Ritter has described himself as a 'card-carrying Republican' who voted for George W Bush. Nevertheless, he has called the president a 'liar' over his claims that Saddam Hussein is a threat to America.
Ritter has also alleged that the manufacture of chemical and biological weapons emits certain gases, which would have been detected by satellite. 'We have seen none of this,' he insists. 'If Iraq was producing weapons today, we would have definitive proof.'
He also dismisses claims that Iraq may have a nuclear weapons capacity or be on the verge of attaining one, saying that gamma-particle atomic radiation from the radioactive materials in the warheads would also have been detected by western surveillance.
The UN's former co-ordinator in Iraq and former UN under-secretary general, Count Hans von Sponeck, has also told the Sunday Herald that he believes the West is lying about Iraq's weapons programme.
Von Sponeck visited the Al-Dora and Faluja factories near Baghdad in 1999 after they were 'comprehensively trashed' on the orders of UN inspectors, on the grounds that they were suspected of being chemical weapons plants. He returned to the site late in July this year, with a German TV crew, and said both plants were still wrecked.
'We filmed the evidence of the dishonesty of the claims that they were producing chemical and biological weapons,' von Sponeck has told the Sunday Herald. 'They are indeed in the same destroyed state which we witnessed in 1999. There was no trace of any resumed activity at all.'
-------- balkans
Serbian Elections Fail Again, Observers Say
December 8, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Serbian-Elections.html
BELGRADE, Yugoslavia (AP) -- Serbia failed for a second time to elect a president on Sunday, as too few voters showed up to cast ballots, deepening a political crisis in the dominant Yugoslav republic, according to exit polls.
The Center for Free Elections and Democracy, an independent group of observers, said turnout was around 45 percent, about the same as when the vote failed in October for not meeting the required 50 percent turnout.
``We can definitely say'' the elections failed, said Zoran Lucic, a group spokesman.
The low turnout was a serious blow to the top contender, Yugoslav President Vojislav Kostunica, who gathered 58 percent of the vote Sunday, independent observers said. Kostunica, a moderate nationalist with pro-democratic views, also dominated the October ballot.
It was unclear what would happen if officials declared Sunday's vote invalid. The Serbian constitution has no provisions regarding the repeated failure of the vote. But a failure likely would fuel the political feud between Kostunica and his top rival, Serbian Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic.
Djindjic's pro-Western government did not field its own candidate and has refrained from endorsing Kostunica -- mostly because of his nationalist and anti-reformist views.
Kostunica has indicated he would seek early parliamentary elections in an effort to bring down Djindjic. His rival would like to see the law changed to have the president elected by Serbia's parliament, instead of by a popular vote.
That would give Djindjic a chance to nominate a candidate of his choice who would be assured of victory because Djindjic controls the Serbian legislature.
Kostunica led the popular movement in 2000 that toppled Slobodan Milosevic, the autocratic Yugoslav ex-president now on trial for war crimes at the U.N. court in The Hague, Netherlands.
He faced two extremists: Vojislav Seselj of the ultranationalist Serbian Radical Party -- an ally of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, and Borislav Pelevic of the Serbian Unity Party, founded by late Serb warlord Zeljko Raznatovic, better known as Arkan.
Exit polls also showed that Seselj won 36 percent, while Pelevic had 3.4 percent, election monitors said.
Complete unofficial results were expected later Sunday. Many voters stayed home amid widespread apathy and freezing temperatures, analysts said.
Slow economic and social reforms, scandals and perpetual power struggles between Kostunica and Djindjic have disillusioned Serbs, who are more concerned with their dire living standards and rampant unemployment.
Though the national currency, the dinar, has remained stable, buying power has eroded as prices climb. The cost of feeding a family of four has risen from $150 to $400 per month in the past two years, according to government figures.
``What is there to vote for when nothing will change after Sunday?'' asked Radmila Micic, an unemployed economist and mother of two. ``I'd better stay home Sunday and see to lunch.''
The presidential vote, two years after Milosevic's ouster, aims to pick a successor to incumbent Milan Milutinovic, whose term ends in January.
Milutinovic was indicted along with Milosevic for war crimes in Kosovo and likely will face extradition once his mandate expires. From his Netherlands prison cell, Milosevic has urged Serbs to vote for Seselj.
Serbia's presidency is expected to gain in importance as the post of Yugoslav president will be dismantled when the Yugoslav federation is transformed early next year.
-------- britain
Desert Rat speaks out against war
BBC
December 9, 2002
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/panorama/2551707.stm
Maj Gen Patrick Cordingley thinks a Gulf War will be a massacre The man who led the Allied armoured forces into Iraq during the last Gulf War has criticised those planning renewed military action against Saddam Hussein.
Major General Patrick Cordingley believes a second Gulf War would be pointless as it would only lead to tens of thousands of Iraqis being needlessly killed.
As commander of the Desert Rats (the 7th Armoured Brigade) during the 1991 conflict, he led the Allied armoured forces into Iraq.
But despite such heavy involvement last time around, Maj Gen Cordingley has told BBC One's Panorama programme that he has strong reservations about a fresh conflict.
In the Gulf War, the British and Americans lost less than three hundred men, while the Iraqis lost tens of thousands.
Catastrophic
Inevitably the enemy will take a large number of casualties
Maj Gen Patrick Cordingley
Maj Gen Cordingley now fears that the Iraqi land forces - which have been weakened by sanctions - could suffer even heavier losses if the armed forces are sent in again.
He said: "I think it is the fact that fire-power today is so massive, so overwhelming, so catastrophic when it's used that inevitably the enemy will take a large number of casualties."
The retired officer also feels that some British soldiers will not feel the cause is just - especially if President Bush decides to attack without the explicit backing of the United Nations.
He added: "It is a great shame if you get a situation where they're being used in a way that the British public are not easy with.
World War III
Robert Baer Ex-CIA man Robert Baer thinks it will be WWIII
"I'm not going to dispute that and they will do their job and get on with it, but if I was a Commander out there, I would feel sad that we're being used in a way that did not have the support of the nation."
Also opposed to another conflict in the Gulf is Robert Baer, a former CIA agent who was wrongly accused by the FBI of plotting to murder Saddam.
In fact, he had been involved in a plot by Kurds and Iraqi dissidents to unseat the Iraqi dictator - encouraging an uprising which was brutally crushed by the Iraqi leader.
But he is against another war in Iraq, believing it will create massive instability in the region.
"What we're inviting is World War Three. In the Middle East. It's too late to invade Iraq a second time," he said.
Revenge
A war against an Arab country is going to cause several governments in the Middle East to fall
Robert Baer
Mr Baer claims that his fears are echoed by his former paymasters in the intelligence business.
He added: "I talk to people in the CIA. They're worried about the stability of the region."
"A land war or a massive air war, against an Arab country is going to cause several governments in the Middle East to fall. Among them Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and possibly Egypt.
"I think people in Washington are so hurt, so damaged by the attacks on September 11th, that they want to take revenge. And Saddam happens to be the vehicle."
Panorama: the Case Against War, will be shown on BBC One on Sunday 8 December at 2240 GMT.
-------- colombia
At least 23 die in Colombian violence
AFP
SUNDAY, DECEMBER 08, 2002
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/cms.dll/html/uncomp/articleshow?artid=30624251
BOGOTA: At least 23 people have died in a wave of violence around Colombia including seven rebels killed in a foiled bomb attack on a strategic oilfield, authorities said on Saturday.
Two indigenous leaders, a teacher and a farmer were murdered late Saturday by unidentified gunmen, and another two indigenous people were kidnapped in Florida, southwest of Bogota, in one of the worst incidents.
And seven National Liberation Army (ELN) leftist rebels were killed as they attempted to bomb the Cano Limon oil field, one of the biggest in the South American country, General Martin Carreno said.
The rebels were surprised by air transported troops as they prepared to bomb the installations.
On Friday, the military stymied an attempt to bomb the pipeline by the ELN. An explosion last month attributed to the same rebel group disrupted the production of some 95,000 barrels of oil.
The pipeline, which carries oil from the Cano Limon oilfield and is operated by US firm Occidental Petroleum, normally produces some 105,000 barrels of oil per day.
Washington has offered to train Colombia's military brigades to protect the 780 km of pipeline.
The ELN is opposed to foreign involvement in Colombia's oil industry.
The National Liberation Army is Colombia's second-largest rebel force, with some 4,000 members.
On Friday five rebels with the country's largest rebel group, the 17,000-strong Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), were killed by army troops, while two soldiers were killed when they stepped on a FARC minefield.
-------- iraq
Iraq says chem-bio programs ended in '91
December 8, 2002
UPI
http://www.washtimes.com/upi-breaking/20021208-115105-4471r.htm
WASHINGTON, Dec. 8 -- Iraq said Sunday all its chemical and biological weapons programs came to an end in 1991 and that the country had never reached the assembly or testing stage for nuclear weapons.
Current United Nations weapons inspections, mandated in November by U.N. Security Council Resolution 1441, were "intrusive," disruptive and a bitter pill, but Iraq would cooperate, it said.
"Some things are like medicine," Brig. Amer al-Saadi, a scientific adviser to President Saddam Hussein told reporters at a Baghdad news conference broadcast abroad. "They are bitter pills."
Al-Saadi, speaking the day after Iraq turned over a nearly 12,000-page report to the Security Council and International Atomic Energy Agency, said the report detailed all previous programs, actions taken to dismantle them, and steps taken over the years to meet U.N. mandates.
The report, he said, answered U.S. and British accusations about a continued development and possession of proscribed weapons "truthfully, honestly and comprehensively" and was not a "telephone book" -- a clear reference to an earlier White House jibe.
U.S. Sen. Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., speaking of Fox News Sunday, said he doubted the veracity of the Iraqi documentation.
"There's always a chance (it is accurate)," he said. "But it would represent one of the most shocking and I suppose encouraging conversions in world history, which is that Saddam would start telling the truth instead of lying as he has been for more than a decade to the United Nations, cheating deceiving."
Lieberman said the 100 pounds of documents, based on intelligence reports he's seen, Iraq's past lies and other evidence, were probably a "12,000-page, 100-pound lie."
Richard Butler, former head of weapons inspector before they department Iraq in 1998 over Baghdad's non-compliance and interference with the inspection process, also took a cautious approach.
"Of course there will be useful information there," he said on CNN's Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer. "Iraq has followed a technique that it's used in the past of almost trying to kill with kindness.
"You know, giving so much information that it doesn't necessarily clarify. It actually, to some extent, makes the task more difficult. But leaving that aside, the basic political and real construct here is that Iraq is obliged under international law, not only to have no weapons of mass destruction, but now to declare to the Security Council the exact status of all its relevant programs, weapons related, and those that could be weapons related.
"The job of the inspectors is to verify that declaration. It's to see where it stands out, where it's true and where it's false. And this is what we're now going to see play out. It's a bit like Sherlock Holmes, it's real forensic work, because the inspectors will want to also discern from this document what Iraq has not said."
In destroying its chemical and biological weapons programs, al-Saadi said Iraq had made a "mistake" -- it had also destroyed the documentation of the programs and their termination.
"It never existed after 1991," al-Saadi said when asked about development of VX gas. "It was totally removed."
Iraq used chemical weapons against Iran during its war against the Islamic regime in the 1980s. It also used chemical weapons against dissident Kurds in the north of the country.
Al-Saadi said the report also contains information of dual-technology and materials (items that could have a military application).
Washington and London, which claim to have intelligence proving Iraq is continuing to try to develop such weapons, as well as a nuclear weapons capability, argue that Iraq poses a unique threat to peace. Given Iraq's previous denials of possessing such weapons -- later disproved -- current denials are unreliable, they say.
Under Resolution 1441, passed after strong pressure from the United States, Iraq is considered in material breach of previous U.N. Security Council Resolutions. Any deceit or failure to cooperate fully with new inspections and requirements to disarm, would be considered a new breach, resulting in the international body imposing unspecified "serious consequences."
President Bush has vowed to lead a "coalition of the willing" to forcibly disarm Iraq if it fails to do so voluntarily. Thousands of U.S. troops are already in the Gulf to underline and back up Washington's resolve.
U.N. weapons inspectors will review the documents and redact sensitive passages that could give away arms development techniques before distributing copies to members of the Security Council.
----
A Crude View of the Crisis in Iraq
By Daniel Yergin
Sunday, December 8, 2002; Page B01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A21166-2002Dec6?language=printer
If oil is the question, Iraq is not the answer.
Some people say the Iraq crisis has been manufactured to cloak an "oil grab" by the United States and the American oil industry. Others believe that a liberated Iraq will flood the world market with cheap oil and provide a quick fix for concerns about our energy security.
These perspectives, while very different, are based on a fundamental misperception -- of both scale and timing. Yes, Iraq is a major oil country, with the world's second-largest known reserves. But in terms of production capacity, Iraq represents just 3 percent of the world's total. Its oil exports are on the same level as Nigeria's. Even if Iraq doubled its capacity, that could take more than a decade. In the meantime, growth elsewhere would limit Iraq's eventual share to perhaps 5 percent, significant but still in the second tier of oil nations.
But even that scenario assumes that Iraq will welcome foreign investors on a reasonable timetable -- and, history tells us, that is not a foregone conclusion. After the 1991 Gulf War, a liberated and grateful Kuwait announced that it would open its oil industry to foreign investment in order to boost production. Eleven years later, that still hasn't happened, owing to nationalistic opposition in Kuwait's parliament.
While this crisis is focused on overall security -- Iraq's weapons of mass destruction -- there is a clear energy dimension to the confrontation: the security and stability of the Persian Gulf region, from which flows almost a quarter of the world's oil. Saddam Hussein's drive to dominate the region is obvious and cannot be dismissed. He invaded Iran in 1980 and then, a decade later, invaded Kuwait and threatened Saudi Arabia. The other Persian Gulf states have no love for him, and with good reason.
But it requires several leaps of logic -- as well as inattention to developments in the rest of the world's markets, particularly in Russia, the Caspian region and West Africa -- to conclude that the current Iraq crisis is all about oil. No U.S. administration would launch so momentous a campaign just to facilitate a handful of oil development contracts and a moderate increase in supply -- half a decade from now.
How would a Persian Gulf without Saddam affect the future of Iraqi oil? The discussion now underway in Washington and elsewhere -- which takes place under the rubric of "the day after" -- is dominated more by the uncertainties and risks than the benefits. The most immediate question involves a possible war, and the resulting damage that it might do to Iraq's output at the very moment when a new regime would desperately need oil revenues to secure its own stability. There also is much apprehension that Saddam would torch Iraq's oil facilities in a Pyrrhic defeat. That is exactly what Iraqi forces did on their way out of Kuwait in 1991. It took eight months to extinguish the fires in the Kuwaiti oil fields. This time, however, some Iraqi commanders might be loath to obey any such orders, as they would have to answer after the war for their actions.
The next critical issue, when "the day after" arrives, will be the question of authority. Who would be in charge? If there is a temporary military government, either U.N.- or U.S.-led, it would be preoccupied with establishing firm control over Iraq's weaponry and laying the basis as quickly as possible for a new Iraqi government with broad representation. It would certainly be focused on security, including the oil facilities. After all, the country earns the bulk of its living by exporting oil. For that reason, a temporary military authority would be keen to see the "new" Iraq maximize its oil earnings. But a military authority is unlikely to want to get much involved in the decision-making about the future of the industry. Rather, it will try to push the responsibility into the hands of a new Iraqi government -- or an interim group of technocrats.
A new Iraqi government, for its part, will just as surely want to get its hands on its number one economic resource so that it can generate revenue for reconstruction and development. Iraq is not Afghanistan. It has the means, through oil, to pay for rebuilding the country. At the same time, a new government would also be determined to bolster its sovereignty, legitimacy and nationalist credentials -- all of which will be essential requirements for holding the country together. This ensures that Iraq will be a very tough negotiator when it sits down with the oil companies.
It is often assumed in the "it's all about oil" discussions that Iraq would turn over its current 2.8 million barrels per day of production capacity to international companies -- that this is the new "prize" up for grabs. But that's another shaky assumption. If the new Iraqi government brings in foreign companies, it will have to split revenue -- keeping perhaps 88 cents of every dollar of earnings for itself, but with 12 cents or so going to the companies. Why not keep the whole dollar for itself and simply buy what it needs in terms of technology and equipment for the existing fields?
What a post-Saddam government will need is capital -- lots of it -- for exploration and new production from its currently undeveloped fields. And that is where a new regime is likely to turn to international oil companies. But which ones?
It will have no shortage of suitors. Once things are clear, companies will be eager to get in line to sign contracts with a country that has 11 percent of the world's proven reserves. (Saudi Arabia, the highest, has 25 percent; the United States, just two.) But they will be very cautious when it comes to spending billions of dollars until they are pretty confident about security and stability -- and "stability" applies not only to the new regime but also to the contracts they sign.
Companies from several countries -- Russia, France, Italy and China, among others -- already hold contracts, but they are not operational because of U.N. sanctions still in place. Companies without contracts, including the American ones, will have to assess how much time and trouble they are willing to bear. For the oil companies, the big issue, wherever they operate in the world, is how to manage the range of risks -- from the geological to the political. In response, they often work together in consortia and partnerships. This approach hedges their bets, spreads their investments and diversifies their portfolios.
And that's likely to be the outcome for Iraq. The companies with existing contracts will likely team up with other companies -- American, European, Canadian, Australian, Japanese -- to form new partnerships. Such partnerships would meet the crucial need of a new Iraqi government, which would want to strengthen its position by dealing with a diversified political portfolio of companies representing many different nationalities.
None of this will take place swiftly. It might take a new regime a year or so just to get things organized and begin to negotiate contracts. When it does, it will have to face the deteriorating condition of the Iraqi oil industry. Production capacity has dropped from its peak of 3.5 million barrels a day in 1980, before the Iran-Iraq War, to about 2.8 million barrels per day and falling. Reservoirs have been damaged by years of mismanagement. The infrastructure -- whether wells, pipelines, pumping stations or ports -- is in poor shape. Equipment is rusting and malfunctioning. Environmental considerations are widely ignored.
To get back to 3.5 million barrels could take three years or more, at an estimated cost of at least $7 billion. This would put Iraq back into the leagues of Norway, Iran, the United Arab Emirates, Mexico and Venezuela. Another 2 million barrels per day would require a major push, and it would still leave Iraq several rungs below the capacity of the Big Three producers -- Saudi Arabia, the United States and Russia. Making that leap to 5.5 million barrels a day would come sometime after 2010 -- at a cost of upwards of $20 billion.
As its output increased, Iraq would begin jostling its neighbors for market share. Thatwould not, however, give Iraq enough clout to be an OPEC-buster. It would not have the ability to "flood" the market. Nor the desire. Its intense need for revenues would make it much more interested in oil at $20 or $25 a barrel, rather than at a cut-rate $10.
By the year 2010, world oil demand, driven by countries such as China and India, could be almost 90 million barrels a day -- 17 percent greater than today. And where will that oil come from? Here's where the picture grows more complex.
One can already see the beginning of a larger contest. On one side are Russia and the Caspian countries, primarily Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan; on the other side, the Middle East, including Iraq. Over the last three years, spurred by what has been called "the miracle in the Russian oil fields," Russian output has increased by about 25 percent, to 8 million barrels a day. The race heated up with the recent announcement by four Russian oil companies of their intention to build a new Arctic port to export directly to the United States.
Right now, Russia and the Caspian nations seem to have the edge in this race. All that, however, is subject to change. The outcome will be determined not only by geology and the balancing of opportunity and risk by companies, but also by political and economic stability and by the decisions governments make.
But the prize of this larger race to meet growing world demand is very tangible -- by 2010, an additional $100 billion or more a year in oil revenues flowing into national treasuries. After "the day after," Iraq will be in a better position to compete for its share. But it will be only one of several strong contestants.
Daniel Yergin, chairman of Cambridge Energy Research Associates, is author of "The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power," which won the 1992 Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction. He is co-author of "Commanding Heights: The Battle for the World Economy" (Touchstone).
----
Lack of Hard Evidence Complicates U.S. Aims
By Michael Dobbs
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, December 8, 2002; Page A38
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A24123-2002Dec7?language=printer
During his recent trip to Europe to drum up support from the allies, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz was asked by NATO ambassadors what it would take to prove that Iraq has failed to give up its weapons of mass destruction. His reply illustrated the subjective nature of the evidence against Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, which depends on the eye of the beholder.
"It's like the judge said about pornography," Wolfowitz told the closed-door audience, according to a participant. "I can't define it, but I will know it when I see it."
As Baghdad complies with the deadline set by the U.N. Security Council and hands over a detailed report on Iraqi weapons programs, few experts in or out of government are expecting to find a smoking gun buried in the mound of documentation.
A far more likely result, they say, is further ambiguity about Hussein's arsenal and widely differing opinions about the need for war with Iraq.
While the Bush administration may need little convincing that Iraq is in material breach of U.N. resolutions demanding its disarmament, a much higher standard of evidence will be required to convince key U.S. allies, including Turkey and Saudi Arabia, of the case for war. Even Britain, America's most dependable ally, has signaled differences with Washington over how long the inspection process should be permitted to continue before declaring that Hussein is cheating.
Now that Iraq has completed its report, pressure will mount on the United States to produce solid evidence to bolster its contention that Hussein still has an extensive program to produce nuclear, chemical and biological weapons in violation of the cease-fire that ended the 1991 Persian Gulf War. U.S. officials have refrained from providing such evidence until now on the grounds that it would enable Baghdad to fill in gaps in its "full and final" accounting of its arsenal.
In briefings last week, senior administration officials went out of their way to play down expectations of dramatic new evidence showing that Iraq has been caught red-handed. As one White House official put it, this will not be like the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, when the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Adlai Stevenson, shocked the Security Council with spy-plane photos of Soviet missile emplacements in Cuba.
"The intelligence process is an art, not a science, requiring synthesis of a lot of information from a wide variety of sources," said a top administration expert on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. He added that over the last four decades, Iraq and other countries have invested huge resources in covering up their tracks, including moving key facilities underground, making them difficult to detect by overhead surveillance.
Rather than a smoking gun, U.S. officials say, the rest of the world should expect a pattern of telltale signs that lead to "only one logical conclusion": that Hussein still has weapons of mass destruction and "values these weapons very dearly."
In the absence of dramatic, unambiguous evidence proving that Hussein is lying, European officials say much will depend on the conclusions of the U.N. inspection teams allowed back into Iraq last month after four years.
"We must give the inspections a serious chance," a West European diplomat said. "If the Americans want to bring the sensible majority of Security Council members with them, it will have to be on the basis of the inspectors' analysis."
Giving the inspectors a chance raises problems of timing, however. Many experts believe it will take the inspectors many months, if not years, to come up with convincing evidence of large-scale cheating by Baghdad. This will push the timetable for an invasion of Iraq past February, the optimum period for fighting a war, before desert temperatures begin to rise and chemical protection suits become too hot to tolerate.
This explains why some Washington hawks would like to orchestrate a showdown with Iraq over the next few weeks, rather than get involved in a protracted cat-and-mouse game with Baghdad.
"If you think the result of the inspections process will be ambiguous, then the best time to strike is now," said Kenneth Pollack, a former CIA expert on Iraq now with the Brookings Institution. "You should make a crisis now because you are not going to have any better cause for a crisis in six months. It is a fantasy to think the inspectors will come up with a smoking gun."
The drawback to engineering a crisis with Iraq based on something less than a smoking gun is that it becomes much more difficult -- although not necessarily impossible -- to assemble an international coalition to overthrow Hussein. Officials from Turkey and Saudi Arabia, which are home to large U.S. military bases bordering Iraq, have said they will require a second Security Council resolution authorizing the use of force before allowing their countries to be used as the springboard for an invasion.
In the case of Saudi Arabia, alternative bases are available in Kuwait and Qatar, where the U.S. military has just inaugurated a new command and control center duplicating many of the facilities available at the Prince Sultan air base outside Riyadh.
Turkey's cooperation, however, is crucial for access to northern Iraq, given that neither Iran nor Syria is friendly with the United States.
Bush administration officials have put a good deal of effort into wooing the new Turkish government after the election victory of a moderate Islamic party, many of whose supporters are strongly oppose to a U.S. attack on a neighboring Muslim state. When Wolfowitz visited Ankara last week, he brought a big bag of incentives for Turkey, including economic assistance, a role in deciding the future of northern Iraq and full integration with Europe.
"The United States has become the champion of Turkey joining the European Union," said a European diplomat, noting that Wolfowitz spent one-third of a major foreign policy address in London supporting Turkish political aspirations. "These things are all linked."
U.S. experts on Turkey believe that Ankara will eventually go along with the Bush administration's wishes on Iraq, and provide Washington the facilities it needs, if only because Turkey cannot afford to stand aside, given the geopolitical stakes involved.
Successive Turkish governments have been determined to prevent the emergence of an autonomous Kurdish state in northern Iraq, fearing that this would encourage secessionist pressures from Turkey's own Kurdish minority.
A former Turkish prime minister, Turgut Ozal, summed up the Turkish dilemma on Iraq when he noted that during the run-up to the Gulf War, Turkey wanted to be "at the table as a guest, not as a menu item."
In order to secure a minimum level of international endorsement of an attack on Iraq, the Bush administration will need the support of Britain and France, who have veto rights on the Security Council. While London has loyally supported Washington throughout the current crisis with Iraq, the two governments' positions are not identical. British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw last week made clear that London wants the inspectors to be given time to "nail" Hussein's "lies."
France, meanwhile, has the taken the lead in insisting on a second U.N. resolution to clear the way for a U.S. attack on Iraq. In the end, however, most observers expect the French to fall into line. "The French will be persnickety in demanding respect for international law," said a European diplomat, "but when the chips are down, they will be there."
-------- israel / palestine
Arafat: Israel Seeking Cover for Military Campaign
December 8, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-mideast-arafat.html
RAMALLAH, West Bank (Reuters) - Yasser Arafat said on Sunday Israel was using trumped-up accusations of Palestinian links to al Qaeda and U.S. threats of war on Iraq as cover for stepping up its military campaign in Palestinian areas.
Arafat said in an interview with Reuters at his battered West Bank compound that Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon had made clear he had no desire for peace and instead was intent on escalating military operations against the Palestinians.
The Palestinian president, under pressure at home and abroad for democratic reforms, also said a general election set for January 20 would have to be delayed unless Israeli forces withdrew from all Palestinian-ruled cities and towns.
Sharon said on Thursday Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network, blamed by Washington for the September 11 attacks, had established a presence in Palestinian-ruled areas of Gaza and in Lebanon, aiming to attack Israel.
``A big, big lie. He wants to cover his military attacks against the Palestinians now with a new face,'' Arafat said in a cramped room in one of the few buildings left standing at his Ramallah complex following an Israeli army siege in September.
HUNKERED DOWN
The 73-year old has been hunkered down inside his compound for months as Israeli tanks have held positions within sight of the sandbagged building.
Surrounded by aides and bodyguards, he works, sleeps and eats in a second-floor conference room dominated by a long, wooden table.
Arafat denied any connection between al Qaeda and the Palestinians despite bin Laden's espousal of the Palestinian cause following the September 11 attacks on the United States.
Al Qaeda has claimed responsibility for a suicide bombing at a hotel in Mombasa, Kenya, last week that killed 13 Kenyans and three Israelis, and a failed attempt to down an Israeli plane taking off nearby.
Arafat voiced concern that if a possible U.S. military strike against Iraq occupied the world's attention, Sharon would have a freer hand to step up his crackdown on the Palestinians.
``He will use it when all the world will be involved (with Iraq) to make his crimes during that period against us,'' Arafat said, wearing his trademark black-and-white keffiyeh head-dress arranged in the shape of historic Palestine.
Israeli officials were not immediately available for comment. Sharon has vowed, following a wave of Palestinian suicide bombings, that Israel will not let up on its military pressure until Arafat reins in militants behind the violence.
Arafat reiterated his condemnation of Palestinian attacks on Israeli civilians but made clear he considered attacks against armed Jewish settlers living on occupied territory to be acts of self-defense.
He said a new round of talks was under way in Gaza between his Fatah faction and the militant group Hamas, aimed at convincing the Islamic movement to halt attacks in Israel. Previous talks in Egypt failed to yield an agreement.
TROOPS PREVENTING ELECTIONS
Arafat made clear on Sunday the presence of Israeli troops and tanks, which have reoccupied most of the West Bank following a wave of Palestinian suicide attacks, would make it impossible to go ahead with elections as scheduled.
He said Palestinians would need at least one month and possibly up to three months free of Israeli military occupation to allow for campaigning for the ballot.
Arafat issued a presidential decree in September calling for the first Palestinian general election since 1996 after coming under pressure from the United States, the European Union and his own people for an overhaul of his Palestinian Authority.
President Bush had shunned Arafat by calling on Palestinians to choose new leaders ``not compromised by terror.'' But opinion polls suggest Arafat would win an election.
``At least one month (before elections), they have to withdraw from all our cities and towns so that our people will start their (political) campaigns,'' he said.
Arafat said he wanted to travel to Bethlehem to attend mass on Christmas eve after Israel refused to let him go last year. But he said Israel might again bar him from the town revered as the birthplace of Jesus.
-------- mideast
U.S. special forces to be based in Jordan to hunt Scuds in case of war in Iraq
By Nathan Guttman,
December 8, 2002
Ha'aretz
http://www.haaretzdaily.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=238337&contrassID=2&subContrassID=1&sbSubContrassID=0&listSrc=Y
The U.S. plans to station special forces in Jordan in case of a war with Iraq, in order to hunt down missile launchers aimed at Israel in the western Iraqi desert, American sources said this week.
These sources, who are familiar with the operational plans being developed for the war, added that Jordan wants to help the U.S. war effort, but prefers to maintain a low profile. Thus, instead of posting regular troops in the kingdom, which would require massive logistical support, the U.S. has decided on special forces. Their job will be to move into the Iraqi desert to locate Scud missile launchers such as those used against Israel in the 1991 Gulf War.
To counter concerns in Jordan that the kingdom will lose its essentially free oil supply from Baghdad, the Americans have arranged for it to get oil from Gulf states, including Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, if the Iraqi flow does dry up.
The U.S. is now working on shoring up its Arab support for the move against Iraq. After winning Turkish approval for the use of bases for command and control of the air war, the Americans are now trying to persuade Saudi Arabia to allow it to use similar bases in its territory for coordinating the attack on Iraq. After Saudia Arabia made clear it would not allow the U.S. to use peninsula bases for an assault, the Americans shifted their air bases to Qatar and Kuwait, but the conventional wisdom is that there is no replacement for the Saudi bases, so the U.S. will promise not to beef up its troop presence there and to keep the Saudis uninvolved in the war effort.
Meanwhile, a new trial for the Egyptian-American dissident Sa'ad Adin Ibrahim, jailed for articles critical of the President Hosni Mubarak's regime, appears to be a sign of improved Cairo-Washington relations, which have been strained over the trial and Cairo's opposition to a war on Iraq. The U.S. has also been critical of the Egyptian TV series based on the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion." An Egyptian delegation, possibly headed by Mubarak, is expected in Washington soon.
-------- nato
Walker's World: NATO rides again
December 8, 2002
By Martin Walker
UPI Chief International Correspondent
http://www.washtimes.com/upi-breaking/20021207-063053-9225r.htmhttp://www.washtimes.com/upi-breaking/20021207-063053-9225r.htm
WASHINGTON, Dec. 7 (UPI) -- The NATO alliance has survived its worst threat -- American indifference. The Bush administration, without ever admitting its initial blunder in churlishly spurning the European allies' instinctive offer of help after the Sept. 11 attacks, is now urgently seeking their support for the prospect of war with Iraq.
The warm glow of last month's successful summit in Prague still surrounds NATO, with the completion of the American commitment to foster "a Europe whole and free" as seven new members from eastern Europe joined the alliance. The Americans got everything they wanted at Prague, from a promise of support on Iraq to a new global focus for a new Response Force of 20,000 troops available for swift deployment to trouble spots around the globe. The once Europe-rooted NATO is now, in the words of U.S. Ambassador Nick Burns "an alliance with global reach."
As a result, NATO is back in high favor in Washington. National Security Council officials positively purred goodwill to a Franco-German security conference this week. "I feel like I have been licked all over," grinned one still-skeptical French defense aide after the White House charm offensive.
There are good reasons for his skepticism, beyond the still inflamed row with German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder over his refusal to join "an American military adventure" in Iraq. The Europeans may deep down be loyal allies when they wear their NATO hats. But when they put on their alternative headgear -- their European Union hats -- they are still aggrieved by Bush administration attitudes to global warming, trade rows, the International Criminal Court and all the other irritants to the Transatlantic relationship. Stiffing NATO during the Taliban war just served to undermine American friends in Europe's armies and defense ministries.
"We could have handled it better," is as far as White House officials have gone in acknowledging the ill-considered decision 14 months ago to launch the Afghan campaign against the Taliban as an overwhelmingly American operation. There was token British participation, but the bulk of the allies felt demeaned by the U.S. rejection of their decision to invoke Article V of the NATO treaty -- an attack against one is an attack against all.
But since then, the aftermath of the Afghan war has become a NATO operation in all but name. The mission has been led by NATO allies: Britain first, succeeded by Turkey until the end of this year, with the Dutch and Germans then following in January -- with NATO staff back at the headquarters in Mons, Belgium, running logistical support.
After the trip to NATO headquarters in Brussels by U.S. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, the allies are now being actively courted for the Iraq mission. NATO pledged "effective action" to enforce the United Nations resolutions at its summit in Prague last month and even though the Germans have emphasized that they will take no active military part, Wolfowitz arrived in Brussels with a shopping list.
The Americans, Wolfowitz said, wanted help in guarding Turkey against Iraqi incursions, with Patriot anti-missile systems and troops. They wanted AWACS aircraft and in-flight refueling tankers, minesweepers and patrol boats, and troops to guard bases, thus freeing American soldiers for combat. They also wanted troops and combat engineers, field hospitals and military police, for the post-war challenges.
With the exception of the indispensable Czech chemical warfare troops, and the British who are seen as the serious allies, most of the NATO forces requested will be doing the secondary work of soldiering, essential, but less dangerous and -- in this televisual age -- less glamorous.
The problem is that there was a sound military reason for the spurning of NATO in the Afghan war; with the exception of the British and French, none of the other allies can provide the all-weather mobile forces and precision-guided weaponry that are the key to modern war. However, there are duties, like infantry and armored car patrols, military policing, engineering work and field hospitals, that even the low-tech NATO allies can perform.
Few armies relish being treated as the hewers of wood and drawers of water for a warrior elite, and that looks to be the fate of most NATO armies as the technological and investment gap widens. That is why so many of them are now busily training their own Special Forces, most of whom saw some action in Afghanistan, which have the advantage of being a good military return on investment as well as elite.
And yet NATO will still be needed for the well-honed planning and logistics skills of its multinational staff, and also for the essential political support -- and diplomatic legitimacy -- that the alliance brings. Even though the Germans will not deploy troops, and the French, Italians and Canadians say the use of force will require a new U.N. resolution, the United States can count on most of the allies.
Britain, Denmark, Spain, Portugal, Norway, Poland, the Czech Republic and Turkey last week all expressed "strong and unequivocal support for the U.S. policy that if diplomacy fails, force is going to be necessary," according to one NATO official. "And a number of these countries would want to participate in military operations."
That's a good start. But if NATO's revival is to prove lasting, the Americans are going to have to find more meaningful jobs for their allies than guarding bases, repairing bridges and sweeping minefields. Without the comradeship of shared dangers and shared victories, an alliance dedicated to shared security can fade into hollowness fast.
(Walker's World -- an in-depth look at the people and events shaping global geopolitics -- is published every Sunday and Wednesday.)
-------- pakistan
Does Democracy Help Pakistan?
December 8, 2002
New York Times
By DAVID ROHDE
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/08/weekinreview/08ROHD.html
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan -- SIX weeks ago, in Pakistan's legislative elections, nobody - not the semi-authoritarian president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf; not the religious parties who think General Musharraf isn't radical enough; and not the other parties in between - emerged in full control. Now a government has finally been cobbled together through arm-twisting, party defections and backroom deals redolent of pressure from the president's office, and many here are disgusted with the whole thing.
So the question arises: Is the "guided democracy" that President Musharraf has promoted as the way to keep Pakistan's radicals under control proving to be as unstable as the "flawed democracy" he has vowed to replace?
It is a question not just for Pakistan. The election results brought Islamist radicals to power in two areas along the Pakistani-Afghan border, where Qaeda and Taliban fighters are believed to be hiding.
Under the religious parties, whose agenda includes expelling American soldiers from Pakistan and implementing Islamic law, these areas could become even more of a safe haven for terrorists.
So Washington is left with two grim alternatives: It can keep sending F.B.I. agents to aggressively pursue Qaeda members in the border area, risking a dispute with an elected government. Or the raids could be reduced, leaving the hunting of terrorists to the Pakistani intelligence agencies who worked with the Taliban in the past.
No wonder there has been little celebration in Washington over the results of this election, even though it had been promoted as a careful step toward full democracy.
In fact, the elections, which created the country's new National Assembly, have raised new questions about General Musharraf's political astuteness. Repeatedly, the president, whose power stems from his military role, vowed to be neutral. But many here say the mainstream parties would have done far better had he not tried to manipulate the election rules in favor of his allies among the divided moderates.
In the end, expectations of a rigged election dissuaded many moderates from voting at all, while the religious parties turned out voters in droves. So none of the mainstream parties won an outright mandate. And the hard-line Islamic religious parties received 10 percent of the popular vote, enough to bid seriously, if unsuccessfully, for a role in forming a national coalition.
So the battle for the soul of Pakistan, a country whose identity has vacillated h between being a more secular and a more Islamic state, remains in play, even as the American interest in events here has grown. Pakistan is the only Muslim country known to have a nuclear bomb. And American intelligence officials have concluded that Osama bin Laden remains alive - perhaps somewhere in Pakistan.
What is unclear is how to contain the effects of the elections.
Talat Masood, a retired Pakistani general who says he is pro-Western, said the United States could undermine the religious parties by changing foreign policies that are widely resented - toward Iraq, Israel and Afghanistan. Failing that, he said, the worst thing the United States can do is openly threaten the religious parties where they govern. Instead, he suggests that if the hard-liners are allowed to govern, Pakistanis might reject them, having seen what life under strict Islamic law is like. The raids by American F.B.I. agents in the border areas are an immediate flash point. President Musharraf can continue them - but only at the risk of being called an American lackey.
Backing down to the Islamists also involves political risks, though. Since the election, the religious parties have proved bold and politically astute, and they have leveraged their vote gains into a surprising amount of political power.
PRESIDENT MUSHARRAF, on the other hand, has been left with a reputation for clumsiness. The beneficiary of a 1999 coup himself, he banned former Prime Ministers Nawaz Sharif and Benazir Bhutto, both now in exile, from the race. When supporters of their parties failed to turn out, allies of President Musharraf won the most legislative seats, but not enough to form a government. They managed to do so only by persuading 10 members of Ms. Bhutto's party to defect. Six of these became government ministers.
American officials called the new government an incremental step forward in the return to democracy. Critics of military rule dismiss it as a sham. "It's not incremental," said Samina Ahmed, project director for the International Crisis Group, a policy organization. "It didn't even start."
Even with those maneuvers, the ruling coalition is perilously thin. Zafarullah Jamal was elected prime minister by a single vote, and his government must survive a confidence vote within a few months.
Meanwhile, Western diplomats say they will wait and hope. In the best outcome, they say, religious parties would fail to produce the jobs, better schools and clean government Pakistanis desperately want while economic reforms by Mr. Musharraf's government show results.
Until then, the general is in a precarious position - leading a fragile government trapped between American demands that F.B.I. raids continue and rising anti-Americanism among Pakistanis, with religious parties claiming a democratic mandate.
-------- russia / chechnya
Russia shocked by elite forces' killing spree
Nick Paton Walsh, Kaliningrad
Sunday December 8, 2002
The Observer
http://www.observer.co.uk/europe/story/0,11363,856103,00.html
They were among the elite of the Kremlin's special forces. The cream of the Russian equivalent of the US Navy Seals, they were trained to parachute into water from 13,000 feet, to reach land in safety and to kill with stealth.
Now they face a life behind bars, after a motiveless killing spree that terrified Russia and exposed the crisis at the heart of the forme