The Hai al-Muallimin tragedy provides a glimpse of two ugly emerging trends in post-war Iraq. The first, growing Iraqi anger and resentment, is being chronicled extensively as Iraqi groups jockey for power and challenge the US plans for their country. But the second trend, the ongoing death toll related to the now-completed 'liberation' of Iraq, has been all but overlooked by the mainstream media -- but not by Human Rights Watch. The group on Sunday released a report indicating that the number of civilians killed or wounded since the war ended in northern Iraq "is higher than it was during the conflict." The group cites three factors in the continued bloodshed: the general lawlessness which followed the collapse of the Baghdad regime; the ready availability of weapons; and the presence of both unused ammunition and unexploded ordnance throughout the country. Said Hania Mufti, director of the group's Middle East and North Africa division: "In some ways, the peace has proved more lethal than the war."

The Iraqi army abandoned vast caches of ammunition and explosives, many in public buildings such as schools and hospitals. And, as the Hai al-Muallimin blast shows, that detritus of war can be deadly. But the leftover ammunition -- much of which is being gradually collected by US and British troops -- may pose less danger to Iraqi civilians than the unexploded bombs which litter the landscape. Michael Howard of The Guardian writes that such deadly debris have already killed or maimed scores of Iraqis, many of them children.

"In the two weeks after the cessation of hostilities on the northern frontline, which divided the Kurdish self-rule area from government-controlled territory, as many as 80 civilians have died and more than 500 have been injured.

...

The Guardian was told of 44 deaths caused by landmines or unexploded ordnance in the five days after the collapse of the city on April 9. And, on April 15, 17 people were killed and three injured in one blast in the district of Dibs. They were reportedly trying to take scrap from unexploded shells."

Of particular concern, say volunteer mine-clearing groups, are unexploded cluster bomblets. As Paul Watson of the Los Angeles Times writes, "cluster bombs are known for killing civilians."

"A large percentage don't explode when dropped, but lie in wait for victims who can't see them or don't know what they are.

Many are curious children such as Nabil Khalil, 14, who is in a Kirkuk hospital after playing with a yellow cluster bomblet that he found in an abandoned Iraqi army camp. He lost one hand, suffered severe face injuries and can barely open his eyes.

The first to discover a new cluster-bomb field often become victims of the devices. Two weeks ago, a crewman working to rebuild a severed power line on the highway to Mosul stepped on a cluster bomblet that blew his leg off, said Waheed Khalid, a field operations manager for the non-governmental [Mines Advisory Group]."

And the Pentagon isn't exactly going out of its way to help the MAG volunteers remove the danger. Watson reports that US military officials have yet to provide details of where warplanes dropped cluster bombs. Moreover, Pentagon officials are doing their best to deflect the criticism -- insisting last week that only one of the nearly 1,500 cluster bombs dropped by US and British plans resulted in civilian casualties.

"'An initial review of all cluster munitions used and the targets they were used on indicate that only 26 of those approximately 1,500 hit targets within 1,500 feet of civilian neighborhoods,' said General Richard Myers, chairman of the military's Joint Chiefs of Staff. 'And there's been only one recorded case of collateral damage from cluster munitions noted so far.'"

Of course, the Pentagon's figures account only for immediate cluster bomb detonations. The deaths related to after-the-fact detonations of unexploded bomblets -- like the one that Tom Hundley of The Chicago Tribune reports killed two children and injured two more -- are ignored by the military's report.

"The children had been playing in the "garden"--in reality a rubble pile.

There was an explosion.

The neighbors had heard about the American cluster bombs but had never seen one.

'We didn't know,' said Amira Warrid, 18, a relative.

After the children were rushed to the hospital, U.S. soldiers came to the neighborhood. They found more bomblets, which they detonated. They promised to come back and look for more. Meanwhile, children continued to play in the rubble."

Nation-Building 101
The Bush administration is stuck between a rock and a hard place in post-war Iraq. Leave too quickly, and there will be cries of abandonment. Stay too long, and there will be accusations of imperial occupation. For now, the country seems just this side of utter chaos. Those in the thick of it, like former general Jay Garner, have become prone to somewhat bizarre pronouncements about America's commitment to stay as long as necessary and leave as quickly as possible.

Why the doublespeak? It's one thing to topple a dictator. Building a democracy, as it turns out, is quite another.

		Monday, April 28 Friday, April 25 Thursday, April 24 Wednesday, April 23 Tuesday, April 22

"Clear differences among the delegates emerged, with former exiles generally seeking a diminished role for Washington and those who lived under Saddam's rule saying Iraq needed the United States for now to help stabilize the country.

Delegates spoke out about their own agendas, and the meeting lasted two hours longer than planned.

'If it goes like this, it will take months to get a government,' said Serdar Jaf, leader of a Kurdish clan. 'People are only speaking out what they want to speak about. Everyone has his own ideas. There's no program, no agenda.'

[I]n a symptom of the disorganization and communications problems that have plagued the U.S. occupation, dozens of delegates couldn't reach the hall immediately. Instead, they drove in circles around traffic-choked central Baghdad, repeatedly blocked by Army checkpoints. The opening was delayed by two hours."

Naturally, amid the chaos, the pundits and politicians are happily weighing in, reviewing best practices and dispensing advice on nation-building. The dominant questions for all, predictably, are whether to invite foreign rebuilders to the all-American party, and how the UN will figure in. Both answers, of course, are contingent upon what role the US establishes for itself at the outset.

The dilemma, writes Alan Eisler for Reuters, is one of timing.

"[T]he longer U.S. occupation forces stay in Iraq, the greater the risk of fueling anti-American Islamic fundamentalism in the country. But the sooner they depart, the more of a mess they will leave behind, which could have the same result, as well as creating a power vacuum that anti-American forces could fill.

[Many analysts] believe that President Bush will have no choice but to swallow his reluctance to invite the United Nations to help share the task of running Iraq until sufficient physical, political and legal infrastructure is up and running.

Democratic Sen. Joseph Biden has been making this point for weeks, even before the war began March 19. 'Acting under a U.N. flag, as opposed to a U.S. flag, will minimize resentment from malcontents in the region and beyond,' Biden said March 11 during a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on humanitarian assistance and reconstruction in Iraq."

Rachel Belton doesn't agree. As far as Belton is concerned, any international coalition is likely to be an unreliable and committee-heavy method of creating democracy. Writing in the Washington Post, she argues that, while coalitions are crucial to America's war against terror, "a coalition is the wrong method for reconstructing Iraq." Citing failures in Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan, she writes:

"The failure of these efforts to build autonomous, sovereign democracies lies in the very structure of international coalitions. Coalitions diffuse responsibility.

Those who support multilateral reconstruction believe we can begin repairing rifts in the international system by diffusing responsibility for reconstruction. Yet under all proposed scenarios, America is going to run the reconstruction effort. Our detractors will still frame us as occupiers, while our attempts to placate international critics will sentence Iraq to a decade of uncertainty and limbo under international auspices.

Helping Iraq build a functioning democracy in which Iraqis can soon govern on their own is essential to our international legitimacy and crucial to the Iraqi people. The United Nations and other international organizations are staffed by many capable, intelligent, well-intentioned people. They should be encouraged to run humanitarian relief efforts in Iraq and should create a broad, multilateral coalition to control Iraq's oil revenue to expunge the accusation that this has been a war for oil. Yet in concert, they would fail to democratize Iraq and would prevent it from regaining its autonomy and sovereignty. The Pentagon has succeeded in the past, and it has the unified structure that will allow it to succeed again. Let it do the job."

Still, history may not be with Belton or Biden. As Post staff writers Joe Stephens and David B. Ottaway report, neither the UN nor the US have had much luck lately with nation-building. The pair cite the "dicey history" of efforts in such places as Haiti, Bosnia, East Timor, and Afghanistan, noting that "lawlessness, spotty oversight and ethnic strife all have vexed past rebuilding efforts, according to audits and reports by public and private institutions." In Afghanistan, they write, "security remains so precarious that a recent federal analysis concluded that auditors may be unable to track the spending of U.S. tax dollars." Finally, the Post reporters cite a report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies, which includes several concrete recommendations for whomever leads the reconstruction, among them:

Plan to handle retribution. The first NATO peacekeepers stationed in Kosovo were unprepared for waves of 'score-settling violence.'

Reestablish the local justice system. In East Timor, a prison shortage forced authorities to free career criminals. In Kosovo, the U.N.'s delay in bringing in international judges and prosecutors continues to plague the justice system today, and has thwarted efforts to tackle rampant organized crime.

Find the right power-sharing balance with the locals. Exclusion of local residents from decision-making in Kosovo and East Timor has been blamed for slowing the development of democracy. Conversely, in Afghanistan, a "light footprint" approach in support of President Hamid Karzai has been criticized as evidence of inadequate international commitment to reconstruction.

Writing on Slate, David Plotz tries to strike a balance between Washington's go-it-alone approach and the growing calls for a heavy UN presence. Plotz encourages the nation-builders to delay elections, bring in international observers when possible, and let the UN organize the political process.

"Granted, the United Nations has ineptly handled most of its rebuilding missions. It should not be trusted to impose order in Iraq or restore the economy. The United States should boss these matters.

But one recent moral of nation-building is that a puppet democracy may be worse than no democracy. An Iraqi democratic leader who's perceived as an American tool will be challenged, delegitimized, emasculated, and probably assassinated. A political process under U.N. auspices would possess a legitimacy that a U.S. process would not, says Stephen Stedman, acting co-director of Stanford's Center for International Security and Cooperation. The United States can (and should) manipulate the process behind the scenes, but it needs the United Nations' stamp to make the result authoritative. Afghan President Hamid Karzai 'has escaped the label of being an American puppet' because the United Nations ran the process that selected him, says Stedman. 'Whatever problems Karzai may have, he is still seen as being legitimate internally.'"

Perhaps it all depends on vantage point. Noeleen Heyzer, the executive director of the United Nations Development Fund for Women, just wants to see women included in the process. In a Boston Globe op-ed, Heyzer argues that "it is essential to know that a way to achieve consensus and compromise in Iraqi society is to ensure the extensive participation of women. Indeed, the perspectives of women offer the best promise of meaningful reconstruction and the development of a working democracy."

Finally, there are rare areas of agreement. Writers from both the left and right, for instance, are advising Iraq to steer clear of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank -- albeit for different reasons.

"'Their over-all macro-economic record is horrible. After a 20-year experiment in developing countries throughout the world, there are no success stories; not in Asia, Russia, Brazil, Argentina -- the list is endless,' said Marc Weisbrot, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a left-leaning think tank in Washington, D.C. 'Why would you want them determining economic policy in postwar Iraq?'

While Weisbrot and other progressives think the World Bank and IMF go too far in forcing privatization and open trade, critics on the right take the Bank and IMF to task for forcing high tax rates and establishing an unhealthy reliance on foreign aid, with equally disastrous results.

'Frankly, Iraq would probably be better off not to rely on their aid and advice,' said Ian Vasquez, director of the Project on Global Economic Liberty at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank in Washington, D.C."

"There were a lot of people who were armed and who were throwing rocks. How is a US soldier to tell the difference between a rock and a grenade?" -- Lt. Col. Eric Nantz, after soldiers under his command opened fire on Iraqi protesters in Falluja, killing at least 13.   Coalition Watch: Blair Worries About a Transatlantic Cold War (The Telegraph); Washington, London Take Aim at Euro-Defense Plan (BBC) Media Watch: NBC's Banfield Critical of 'Glorious' War Coverage (Reuters) Policy Watch: A Reality Check for the Rumsfeld Doctrine (The Financial Times)

Did the president's stage-managed stopover in Michigan skew our view of Iraqi-American sentiment?

Weapons of What?
Saddam's weapons of mass destruction haven't materialized. Does it matter?
At Ease in Dearborn
With the US invasion of Iraq, Dearborn, Michigan has become a media pivot. The Detroit suburb is home to one of the largest Iraqi-American communities in the country, and has become a favorite locale for reporters seeking to capture the Arab-American response to the war in Iraq.

Reporters were on hand three weeks ago, when Dearborn residents took to the streets to celebrate the collapse of Saddam Hussein's regime. And reporters were back in force on Monday, as President Bush arrived to deliver a policy speech before a crowd of cheering community leaders.

Judging only from the president's highly stage-managed address, one might conclude that Dearborn's Iraqi immigrants remain as overjoyed about the "liberation" of their homeland as they were earlier this month. But, in fact, recent interviews suggest that Iraqi-Americans are deeply worried about their country's future, and deeply ambivalent about the Bush administration's plans.

Writing on the eve of Bush's arrival in Dearborn, Jeffrey Ghannam of The Boston Globe reported that, for many in the Iraqi-American community, "demands for democracy and a withdrawal of American troops once Iraq is stabilized are common refrains." And Ghannam writes that many worry about the kind of democracy that will emerge, and how it will ensure the kinds of freedoms they "have come to expect."

Jonathan Curiel and Laura Hubber of the San Francisco Chronicle found even deeper ambivalence among Iraqi-Americans, reporting that "their dreams of a post-Hussein Iraq have turned to stone -- at least for now." While many are still optimistic about the country's long-term future, and thankful for the removal of Saddam Hussein, Iraqi-Americans are troubled by the lack of order and the internal conflicts apparent in the country, the pair write.

Even the Voice of America described an Iraqi-American community deeply conflicted about the war and the US role in Iraq.

"Imam Mohammed Qatanan, spiritual leader of the Islamic Center in Passaic County, one of New Jersey's best-known mosques, says that before the war, Iraqi-Americans in his community were hopeful about Iraq's future. He says they were happy Saddam Hussein was brought down, but rue the high cost of victory. 'Hundreds of thousands of homes have been destroyed, the communication, the ministry, everything has been destroyed in Iraq, so they are now upset about what happened,' he says. 'They cannot accept that price because of Saddam.'

Dr. Bakir Altai, a heart surgeon from Northern New Jersey, left Iraq and his many relatives in 1977. After finishing his surgical degree in Scotland, Dr. Altai moved to the United States, embracing what he calls 'an American state of mind.'

Dr. Altai says there is no doubt in the minds of Iraqi-Americans that the Iraqi leader had to be stripped of his power. But he is concerned about what the post-war future will hold for Iraq's 24 million people as they wait for their country to be rebuilt. 'If you have a weed in your garden, you don't destroy your whole garden to kill the weed. You get rid of that weed. That's what happened in Iraq,' he says. 'We had a tyrant, a criminal, and we destroyed the whole country.'"

Such worries were, predictably, not on display during the president's visit. The event -- including Bush's so-called roundtable discussion with 17 community leaders -- was thoroughly choreographed by White House handlers. It was a made-for-TV affair, as evidenced by the fact that administration officials reportedly asked two young women wearing black Muslim head scarves to sit directly behind the president. Only once did the stage-management break down, and Amy Goldstein of The Washington Post writes that Bush quickly and easily brushed the issue aside.

"At a roundtable discussion before his speech, Bush met with 17 leaders of the local Iraqi community. None of them raised civil rights concerns, and most indicated that they were in no hurry for U.S. forces to depart.

At one point, when a participant who identified himself as a Kurdish Sunni suggested that Iraq perhaps be partitioned to accommodate religious divisions, Bush interrupted him. 'We are not going to have a debate on the form of government,' he said. 'This debate is going to take place in Iraq.'"

Of course, there is every reason to believe that the debate is actually taking place in Washington. The Pentagon, after all, has already declared that the US won't accept a theocratic form of government. So, what exactly was the point of the president's scripted-for-broadcast visit to Dearborn?

Clearly, the White House chose the venue because they knew that a cheering audience of Iraqi-Americans would add gravity to the president's policy speech, in which he pledged that America will "help Iraqis build a prosperous and peaceful nation" and "ensure that all Iraqis have a voice in the new government and all citizens have their rights protected." For Bush, heavily-scripted public appearances like the one in Dearborn have taken the place of press conferences. He has appeared before the White House press corps exactly twice in the last 20 months, and the last appearance, on March 6, was so scripted as to seem positively surreal.

Finally, it doesn't hurt that Dearborn is in Michigan, a state that Bush lost during the 2000 election but has visited 9 times since becoming president. The White House has refused to comment on the president's re-election campaign, and the president himself downplayed the issue during the Dearborn visit when one of the community leaders invited to join in the round-table discussion enthusiastically predicted a second term for Bush ("Forget that, please," he demurred). But, as Jeff Zeleny of the Chicago Tribune reports, the re-election campaign is quietly gearing up, out of the public eye.

"The fundraising operation that yielded a record $101 million in his last election is quietly being organized for activation by early summer with a target of $250 million.

'Everything is in place. Everything has been mapped out, but nothing has been put to paper,' said a senior Republican strategist with ties to the White House. 'All the people are putting their money aside; they just haven't written their checks yet.'"

  Discuss this article.

Weapons of What?
Before the hostilities, in the shifting sands of justification for the US war on Iraq, one assertion seemed fairly stable: Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. The relative lack of evidence surfacing to support that claim has prompted a new set of readjustments for those defending America's attack on Iraq, amidst new concerns that if there were or are weapons of mass destruction, we still don't know where they are.

Last week, the Washington Post reported that Bush was "losing confidence in its prewar belief that it had strong clues pointing to the whereabouts of weapons of mass destruction." The administration's iron clad certainty that the WMDs existed melted into vaguer concerns that former Baath Party officials may be behind some of the looting, and that evidence of the WMDs has been destroyed, or worse:"

"If such weapons or the means of making them have been removed from the centralized control of former Iraqi officials, high-ranking U.S. officials acknowledged, then the war may prove to aggravate the proliferation threat that President Bush said he fought to forestall.

...

Bush launched and justified the war with a flat declaration of knowledge "that Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction." Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, who took the lead public role in defending that proposition, said, among other particulars, that "our conservative estimate is that Iraq today has a stockpile of between 100 and 500 tons of chemical weapons" agents."

The British paper The Independent, meanwhile, accuses both Prime Minister Tony Blair and George W. Bush of ignoring the protests of their intelligence agencies and maintains that "the road to war was paved with lies,":

"One high-level UK source said last night that intelligence agencies on both sides of the Atlantic were furious that briefings they gave political leaders were distorted in the rush to war with Iraq. "They ignored intelligence assessments which said Iraq was not a threat," the source said. Quoting an editorial in a Middle East newspaper which said, "Washington has to prove its case. If it does not, the world will for ever believe that it paved the road to war with lies", he added: "You can draw your own conclusions."

UN inspectors who left Iraq just before the war started were searching for four categories of weapons: nuclear, chemical, biological and missiles capable of flying beyond a range of 93 miles. They found ample evidence that Iraq was not co-operating, but none to support British and American assertions that Saddam Hussein's regime posed an imminent threat to the world.

...

Some American officials have all but conceded that the weapons of mass destruction campaign was simply a means to an end -- a "global show of American power and democracy", as ABC News in the US put it. "We were not lying," it was told by one official. "But it was just a matter of emphasis." American and British teams claim they are scouring Iraq in search of definitive evidence but none has so far been found, even though the sites considered most promising have been searched, and senior figures such as Tariq Aziz, the former Deputy Prime Minister, intelligence chiefs and the man believed to be in charge of Iraq's chemical weapons programme are in custody."

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At The Nation, Washington editor David Corn seems only too pleased to point out that not only haven't we found any weapons, but Bush and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld don't even seem all that concerned about tracking them down any more:

"But what is surprising--if not scandalous--is that two weeks after US troops moved into Baghdad the Bush Pentagon has not yet mounted a full sweep of Iraq for WMD, or even dispatched a sufficient amount of trained troops and specialists to conduct such a mission. It's as if the Bush administration and the Pentagon had not bothered to listen to their own rhetoric about Iraq's purported weapons of mass destruction while planning the invasion and occupation....

Shouldn't a mess of these units have been scrambling across Iraq--using all that prewar intelligence that allowed administration officials to declare without pause that Saddam Hussein controlled enough of these dangerous weapons to be a direct threat to the United States--within days, if not hours, of the collapse of Hussein's murderous regime?

...

Is it dumb to ask, why wasn't all this ready to go when the war started?

It's not as if the invasion came as a shock."

The Bush administration, for its part, is backpedaling and couching the weapons of mass destruction, once an imminent threat to American soil, in the midst of other concerns. While the delays in finding WMDs once seemed to be entirely Hans Blix's fault, as of last Friday, delays were simply part of the process:

"Another official said Bush will stress that with the war ending, "we are still working to achieve our objectives in Iraq, which is to make it secure, make it free of weapons of mass destruction, and help the Iraqi people transition to a better, more prosperous life and society under a democratically elected government."

...

He told NBC in an interview the United States is learning from interrogations and interviews with Iraqi scientists that "perhaps he (Saddam) destroyed some, perhaps he dispersed some" and that "it's going to take time to find them."

Over on the right, the pundits and the politicians are insisting that it was never necessary to find actual WMDs. Writing in the National Review, Congressman J.D. Hayworth argues that Saddam himself was the problem (although we haven't found him yet, either), and that Saddam's unpredictable potential justified the war:

"So while the threat to U.S. interests from Saddam was never imminent, it was always inevitable. Given that realization, the question became Do we wait for Saddam to field WMDs or do we act immediately to remove the threat? Considering that Saddam acknowledged one of his major blunders was invading Kuwait before he had nuclear weapons, the case for a preemptive strike was overwhelming -- even if WMDs were never found."

Hayworth also adopts what is becoming a familiar rhetorical dodge -- insisting that the US invasion was primarily to "help the people."

"One would think that the smiling faces of the newly liberated Iraqi people, the emptying of a jail for child political prisoners, the mass graves, the thousands of earless men, and the gruesome discoveries of numerous torture chambers would be all the justification anyone would need."

True, we removed a terrible, repressive dictator from power in Iraq. But the New York Times inimitable Paul Krugman wonders why American compassion tends to be so selective.

"In 2001 the World Health Organization -- the same organization we now count on to protect us from SARS -- called for a program to fight infectious diseases in poor countries, arguing that it would save the lives of millions of people every year. The U.S. share of the expenses would have been about $10 billion per year -- a small fraction of what we will spend on war and occupation. Yet the Bush administration contemptuously dismissed the proposal.

Or consider one of America's first major postwar acts of diplomacy: blocking a plan to send U.N. peacekeepers to Ivory Coast (a former French colony) to enforce a truce in a vicious civil war. The U.S. complains that it will cost too much. And that must be true -- we wouldn't let innocent people die just to spite the French, would we?"

Most experts agree that the US is eventually likely to find some evidence of nonconventional weapons -- the new, slightly less inflammatory phrase being bandied about. But the evidence suggests that the broader claims about the threat posed by Saddam were unsupported. As the sands continue to shift, however, it doesn't seem to matter what facts emerge, as long as new allegations surface to push the facts aside. No matter that no weapons of mass destruction, or any chemical or biological weapons to speak of have surfaced to bolster previous claims. Tony Blair has already told the Associated Press that "as more intelligence emerges, in particular from inside Iraq and the former Iraqi intelligence unit, I think you will find increasing evidence of links between the previous Iraqi regime and terrorist organizations."

Here at War Watch, we're not holding our breath.

  Discuss this article. {publish-page-break}

"Where is Saddam? Where are these arsenals -- if they were really there?" -- Russian President Vladimir Putin, in a remarkable public snub during a joint press conference with British Prime Minister Tony Blair.   Occupation Watch: David Plotz: Be Ruthless in Iraq (Slate); Daniel Pipes: Appoint a Strongman in Iraq (New York Post); PG-Rated Democracy in Iraq (The Jordan Times); Death Toll Climbs in Fallujah Clashes (The Mirror); In Flashpoint Fallujah, Iraqis Vent Anger (BBC) Weapons Watch: Top Iraqi Prisoners All Deny WMD Claims (The Associated Press); Washington Changes Tune on Weapons Threat (The Age); London: Weapons May Never Be Found (The Mirror) Saddam Watch: Arabic Daily Publishes 'Letter From Saddam' (Islam Online) Coalition Watch: Blair Suffers a Double Rebuff in Russia (The Independent) Money Watch: Australia Left Out of the Postwar Bonanza (Sydney Morning Herald); For BP, Iraq War Fuels a $3.7 Billion Windfall (The Independent)

 
The Continental Four
The push for a purely European defense force exposes Cold War-era divisions on the continent.

Yesterday's Newt?
If Newt Gingrich's vituperative attack on the State Department was a Pentagon-prepared trial balloon, it was a total flop.
The Continental Four
With US critics labeling them the "coalition of the unwilling" and the "Gang of Four," France, Germany, Belgium and Luxembourg met this week to discuss plans for a new headquarters to lead a purely European defense force, independent of NATO. The US press has covered the meeting (if at all) almost entirely from the perspective of what it means for US/European relations in the wake of the war in Iraq. But European leaders and journalists see the conflict as a contintental affair, in which the US is only a partial player.

The Bush administration, of course, is profoundly averse to any type of united European force outside of the US-dominated NATO umbrella. Secretary of State Colin Powell's dismissive treatment of the European meeting was sufficient evidence of that. In Europe, however, the press sees evidence of something deeper than a simple threat to US power: the resurgence of older, Cold-War-era divisions on the continent.

While the Four insisted that their defense force was not intended to weaken NATO, the BBC covered the meeting under the headline "diplomatic warfare breaks out in NATO." On one side stand those who see the meeting as a blatant attempt to "expand the EU role in defense at the expense of NATO." On the other side stand those who see the new HQ as a way of simply strengthening Europe's position without interfering with or duplicating NATO's efforts. The divisions fall along familiar Cold War lines that British Prime Minister Tony Blair has already warned could be dangerous, as the BBC'sPaul Reynolds writes:

"Add this row to the fall-out from Iraq and you have the beginnings already of the 'divisions that we wanted to get rid of when the Cold War finished' feared Tony Blair in remarks on Monday.

Mr Blair himself had personal experience of these divisions when he ran into a Russian roadblock during his talks with President Putin on Tuesday.

Russia is refusing to unblock United Nations sanctions on Iraq until UN inspectors formally complete their searches for weapons of mass destruction. The US and UK want sanctions removed immediately.

The meeting in Brussels on Tuesday may in the end have been more symbolic than practical in pointing the way towards the European Union as the basis of European defence, but it is a sign that the debate is developing. So are the divisions."

Blair, who found out about the Gang of Four meeting while on his way to his unsuccessful meeting with Putin, has called the entire endeavor "divisive" and "unhelpful." Secretary of State Colin Powell, on the other hand, delivered a more flippant rebuke, saying simply, "what we need is not more headquarters."

Although the US reaction has been a complete brush-off, the meeting is not shaping up as a simplistic slap in the face to NATO and the US. The Los Angeles Times notes that the four European leaders made vague pledges to invest more to modernize their armies and bolster NATO."

"They also endorsed other proposals, such as creating a European arms procurement agency, that are to be discussed with other European Union members at a June summit in Greece.

Washington has long complained that its North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies don't spend enough on defense."

Most importantly, as the Washington Post reports, French and German leaders took pains to tone down some of Belgium's more extreme requests, particularly the recommendation that a full-fledged European military headquarters be established separate from NATO.

These mild moves to make amends lend credence to suggestions that the Gang of Four did not, in fact, meet purely out of spite towards the US. At stake is not just their relationship with the US or NATO but also their vision of a different and independent European future. As The Times of London reports:

"All four believe that their initiative will eventually lead to the formation of a European security and defence union containing as many EU countries as possible. They compared it to the support for a single currency by a small group in the early 1990s which eventually saw the birth of the euro a decade later."

On both sides of the pond, experts agree that the divisions among European nations could signal the beginning of a shift in the world order. The fallout from the Iraqi war, along with NATO's expansion, and diplomatic tensions between the U.S. and France over the Ivory Coast, are all factors creating a new transatlantic reality. As Charles Kupchan, director of Europe studies at the Council on Foreign Relations and a professor of international relations at Georgetown University, told the PBS's Newshour, we are entering a "very fluid period where both United States and various European countries are tying to take stock, figure out how much damage has been done, figure out where the Atlantic alliance can be repaired":

"[I]t's particularly fluid in Europe because the French, the Germans, the Belgians and others are saying we probably can't go back. We have done damage to the alliance here that may mean America's days as Europe's protector are coming to an end. We need to take steps to do more for our own defense.

That leaves what is called the donut alliance, the smaller countries in the rim land of Europe to make some critical choices. Will they continue to back the US to ensure that the US stays put? Will they be fearful that the US is ending its days as Europe's guarantor and then throw their lot behind the Franco-German coalition? It's too soon to tell but my own opinion is that we are entering a brave new world here that the Atlantic alliance as we've known it is coming to an end and that there will be bumpy days ahead across the Atlantic."

  Discuss this article.

Yesterday's Newt?
On the day after former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich publicly vilified the State Department, neocon nabob Frank Gaffney went on an ideological bender. The National Review regular was so taken that he gushingly called Gingrich's address "one of the most important foreign-policy addresses by a former national leader" since Winston's Churchill's famed 1946 "iron curtain" speech. Just a week later, Gaffney returns to the theme -- but under remarkably different circumstances. Writing in friendly territory on the Washington Times op-ed page, Gaffney again praises Gingrich -- but only after asking the Washington establishment to lay off the former speaker.

Gingrich was the toast of the neocon's little beltway universe on the day of his speech, but the Republican establishment was far less impressed. Two of the party's elder statesmen, former Reps. Vin Webber and Jack Kemp, emerged from political obscurity to lambaste Gingrich. Like Gaffney, Kemp also found reason to cite Churchill -- but only in the pursuit of puncturing Gingrich.

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"Newt, I'm sorry to say, fits Winston Churchill's description of a particularly rowdy politician in Britain: 'He's the only case I know of a bull who carries his own china shop around with him.'

Heaven knows the Department of State needs reforming and has for a long time. But isn't it interesting that when he had an opportunity to push for reform while he was Speaker of the House Newt didn't avail himself of the opportunity? It appears now he is attempting to drive a wedge between the president and his Secretary of State in the name of reform, which plays right into the hands of America's adversaries. It also plays right into the hands of the Daschle Democrats who would love nothing better than to create dissention over foreign policy within the ranks of the Bush Administration."

Another GOP elder, former Secretary of State James Baker, also weighed in, calling Gingrich's speech "totally inappropriate," especially as it "came from someone with no foreign policy or national security experience, and who was in effect forced to resign."

In the days after Gingrich's speech, Washington pundits speculated that it had been a rhetorical 'trial balloon' floated on behalf of the Pentagon's hawkish civilian leadership. As Edward Walsh and Juliet Eilperin of The Washington Post write, the speculation was supported by Gingrich's close ties to the Bush administration's top hawks, including Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who appointed the former speaker to the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board (along with that other neocon lightning rod, Richard Perle).

"He is a longtime friend not only of Rumsfeld but of Vice President Cheney, who served in the House with him. He has never been shy about expressing his opinions. One participant in Defense Policy Board meetings said Gingrich often shows up with an outline of the points he wants to make to Rumsfeld.

...

A source familiar with Pentagon workings said Gingrich uses his access to Rumsfeld to pepper the defense secretary with e-mails on defense-related topics. Whether Gingrich's advice affects administration policy remains unknown."

Washington insiders are citing several surprising aspects of Gingrich's speech as evidence that his words were at least vetted -- if not drafted -- by somebody at the Pentagon. Jonathan Kaplan, who covers the House Republicans for The Hill, notes that former Gingrich aides, used to hearing the former Speaker expound "with only short outlines notes and without missing a beat" were taken aback by the fact that the former Speaker spoke from a prepared text.

"Speculation as to which Rumsfeld aides were told about Gingrich's criticism centered on Stephen A. Cambone, who directs the Office of Program Analysis and Evaluation, and Douglas Feith, an undersecretary of defense policy and a former AEI fellow.

They did not respond to repeated requests for comment."

If Gingrich's speech was a Pentagon trial balloon, it didn't stay aloft for long. Not only did Webber, Kemp, Baker, and other GOP icons rip into Gingrich, the former speaker was also reportedly chewed out by the president's political guru, Karl Rove. The primary concern for all, it seems, is that Gingrich's messy, vituperative attack could easily splash over onto the president. The editorial page writers at The Boston Globe cite exactly that possibility, even as they dismiss Gingrich's comments as "either misplaced or just plain silly."

"Just this week President Bush said Bashar Assad seems to be bending to US pressure. Powell will go to Damascus not to play the wimp but to make Assad an offer he is hardly in a position to refuse -- an offer from Bush. What is ludicrous is Gingrich's pretense that Powell would be selling out his commander in chief by committing diplomacy in Damascus.

Gingrich was equally frivolous in denouncing Bush's plan to release a road map for Mideast peace in partnership with Russia, the European Union, and the United Nations and in excoriating administration plans for rebuilding Iraq. If he persists with his amateurish complaints, Gingrich might succeed in casting doubt on the foreign policy of the current president, much as he once tarred the president's father for raising taxes."

Already, some pundits are turning the Gingrich speech in exactly that direction. The editorial writers at the Baltimore Sun, for instance, suggest that Gingrich's "broad condemnation of the Bush administration's diplomatic failures" was on the mark; but not his placement of the blame.

"President Bush shapes the diplomatic policy of this administration. His words, his tone, his image. His intentions toward Iraq were so clear from the beginning that the bid to bring other nations along seemed a mere afterthought. No wonder few came. His unilateral approach to world problems is not conductive to building alliances.

The challenge now for Mr. Bush is to learn how to use America's military might as a tool of diplomacy rather than an alternative to it.

That, and to push Mr. Gingrich back down in his box."

The Minneapolis Star Tribune is even more direct, declaring that Secretary of State Colin Powell failed because "[he] and his diplomats were handed a horribly bad policy to sell." And, like their colleagues in Boston, the Star Tribune editorial writers encourage Gingrich to "return to the political obscurity that he earned for himself nearly five years ago."

"What the American people are witnessing here is a struggle for control of American foreign policy. Gingrich speaks for the neo-conservatives who control the Pentagon and Washington's conservative think tanks. They want the United States to harness its incredible military and economic power to a much more aggressive, unilateralist set of policies. Their influence is held in check only by the moderating views of Powell and British Prime Minister Tony Blair. Gingrich had it exactly backward: It is the neocons and their worldview, not Powell, who really and truly worry much of the world."

So what does Gaffney make of all the Newt-bashing? Well, in addition to calling the critiques akin to "the gruesome punishment of 'drawing and quartering'", Gaffney declares that the uproar is simply an indication that "Gingrich has struck a nerve."

War Watch has to wonder; when conservatives vilified Senator Minority Leader Tom Daschle for bemoaning the Bush administration's "failed" diplomatic efforts before the war, did they do so because he "struck a nerve" as well? Seems only logical.

  Discuss this article. {publish-page-break}

"What he knows about Iraq could not quite fill a thimble." -- An anonymous former senior State Department official, on L. Paul Bremer, who the White House has tapped to become the civilian administrator in Iraq.   Occupation Watch: Iraq's Communists Back in the Light (Asia Times); Women Could Lose Freedoms in New Iraq (The Globe and Mail) Weapons Watch: Geoffrey Wheatcroft: Weapons of Mass Distortion (The Guardian) Media Watch: How TV Performed Bringing the War Home (Philadelphia Inquirer)); Embeds and Unilaterals in Iraq (Slate) Money Watch: War Propels Exxon Profits (The Guardian)

'As Long as Necessary'
So, what exactly did we learn from the Bush and Rumsfeld speeches? Very little, it turns out.
'As Long as Necessary'

"Our goal is to restore stability and security so that you can form an interim government and eventually a free Iraqi government -- a government of your choosing, a government that is of Iraqi design and Iraqi choice. We will stay as long as necessary to help you do that, and not a day longer."

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, in a televised address to the Iraqi people.

"We are helping to rebuild Iraq, where the dictator built palaces for himself instead of hospitals and schools for the people. The transition from dictatorship to democracy will take time, but it is worth every effort."

President Bush, in his speech aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, steaming towards the California coast.

So, what exactly have we learned in the past 48 hours? Very little, it turns out.

The president and the Pentagon boss each delivered highly-anticipated speeches, the latter in a Baghdad television studio, the former on the deck of a US aircraft carrier. But the speeches, while both triumphant in tone, were equally empty of details. And, in both cases, the language used appears chosen to obscure as much as it revealed.

Just hours before Rumsfeld flew into Baghdad to make his televised bid for Iraqi hearts and minds, US soldiers again opened fire on a crowd of angry protesters calling for American forces to vacate their country. And even as the secretary spoke, military officers from more than 10 countries were meeting in London to discuss the creation of an international peacekeeping force for Iraq. As The Guardian reports, the creation of such a force is seen by many in Europe as a key step away from the US and British military occupation of Iraq. But is also raises questions about exactly how long the foreign military presense will be considered "necessary" by Rumsfeld and other administration hawks -- and whether Iraqis will be any more receptive to a multinational force.

British officials were keeping mum about which countries sent representatives to the London meeting, but the list of invitees is almost certain to read very much like a list of Washington's 'coalition of the willing.' Two members of that coalition, Denmark and Poland, have already announced they have been asked to provide troops. And a third, Australia, is apparently being pr