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Help Wanted: GOP Managers

by THOMAS GEOGHEGAN

[from the May 15, 2006 issue]

It seems that the Republican Party, the business party, the party of management, has a lot of difficulty managing. Our government cannot execute the basic plays. Let's look past Katrina, and FEMA, and Michael Brown. Let's look past the mismanagement of the oil and gas leases out West, the FDA's bungling over Guidant and its appointment (subsequently retracted) of a veterinarian to head the Office of Women's Health. Let's just consider the new Medicare drug program. The Bush Administration can't even perform a simple thing like getting people off the state Medicaid computer list and onto the Medicare computer list. In 2004 there was a serious shortage of flu vaccine. John Kerry failed to make an issue of it, but the voters should have been alarmed. It was an omen of the bungling to come in New Orleans. This is a government that cannot do even simple things.

It appears that the Republicans when in power have no good managers. In an economy of superstars who make millions, the GOP can't afford to hire them, especially the ones who are indifferent to public service and gravitate to the Republicans in the first place--or to no party at all. Three decades ago the average pay of CEOs of the hundred biggest American corporations was a mere $1.3 million. By 2000 the average pay had climbed to $37.5 million. One can see why the old Republican well-to-do, like Henry Stimson or C. Douglas Dillon, are no longer in government. By contrast, this summer who will still remember John Snow, who is soon to be our former Treasury Secretary?

What may be more crippling to Bush's efforts to recruit people is not the CEO pay but the pay of the vice presidents just below them. That's where the government might look for talent to manage at the assistant secretary level. But it is questionable how many of these managers can afford public service--for a year perhaps, but not for three or four, much less two presidential terms. A friend of mine in a top-rank job at a huge global firm told me of a colleague of his in a rising American company. The colleague was now head of personnel, or human relations. "And do you know what his salary is?" my friend told me. "It's $5 million a year."

Five million dollars a year--for a personnel director. It is unlikely this man is going to go home and tell his wife, "I'm ready to work for $120,000 a year because I want to help George Bush reorganize the Census Bureau."

The proof of the Bush predicament is that he has to hire lawyers--and not even the ones who have experience managing corporate firms. Those are also out of his reach, in terms of income. To head Homeland Security and take on a staggering management challenge, Bush brought in a government lawyer, Michael Chertoff, with scant management experience; recently as a judge he had a secretary and two law clerks. And when Chertoff recruits, he seems to struggle to find anyone besides other government lawyers, also with no serious management experience.

When I was 28 and a young policy analyst at the Energy Department under Jimmy Carter, I met a lot of old hands from the Environmental Protection Agency, the Interior Department and even a few from the Office of Management and Budget. The old salts, even the liberals, admired the Republicans as managers. "The Democrats come up with the programs," a grizzled liberal numbers cruncher told me once, "and then the Republicans come in and show you how to manage them." But he meant Republicans of the Eisenhower-Nixon-Ford era: grumpy old men who were vice presidents at big companies like Ford or General Motors. "Here's a telling fact," said a professor friend at a law school. "The biggest increase in rule-making, literally the increase in the pages of the Federal Register, came in the Nixon-Ford Administration." It was not the center-left but the center-right that brought in the managers who issued all the rules that made the liberal programs work.

Now what is most distinctive about Bush is that he's floundering to find managers. "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job" is going to be a mantra of this age. Alas for the public weal, the Republican Party has undergone a makeover from the Eisenhower era: Now it's the party of academics and neocons, i.e., of people with "ideas," or who think they have ideas, and with no idea how to manage. (Why do intellectuals have such trouble giving credit to the people under them?)

There should be some sympathy for George Bush's attempts to persuade a talented human relations manager to give up $5 million a year to take a job writing regulations for the Federal Register. It seems unfair to question the patriotism of such people. After all, it's not a sacrifice for one year; it's a sacrifice for four, or even eight. It's hard to take in the scale of the sacrifice. Liberals tend to sneer about the revolving door and how so many in the GOP cash in on public service via lobbying on K Street. That's true enough for the types like Michael Brown or others who end up in government because they can't hold a decent job. But it seems far less true about talented corporate managers. The cut in pay is just too breathtaking. So Bush is left to recruit among, well, failed businesspeople like himself, or other lost souls like Brown, or lawyers with a bent for public service. Yet in the big firms where the partners make $2.5 million a year, many lawyers will no longer take a pay cut, as they may have done in the 1960s or even the '70s.

It's harder even for lawyers to escape the golden handcuffs--though it's easier if, like Chertoff, one never made this kind of money. To be sure, lawyers still have a certain Robespierre-like urge for public service. A judge I admire has a cartoon tacked on his door: a hooded executioner saying to another hooded man with an ax, "Yes, I could make more money in the private sector, but in the private sector I can't chop off people's heads." I doubt corporate managers put up such cartoons, for even in the private sector, they do have opportunities to cut off people's heads. The point is, we lawyers are no substitute for good corporate managers.

The only decent managers left are now in the Army. That's why some think the Army will end up running Medicare. But even young West Point grads are bailing out for corporate jobs.

It's easy to sympathize with Bush's management predicament, but he and his Republican predecessors did much to create it. They have created a country with super-sized, bloated executive salaries. They have helped create a plutocracy. If a plutocracy has trouble governing, virtually by definition, since it cannot call upon its own for public service, then Bush and the Republicans have themselves to blame.

The irony is, to get the old Republican expertise, we have to turn to Democrats. Indeed, many of the Democrats really are like the old Stimson-type Republicans. Bill Clinton can recruit from the business world in a way that a Republican cannot. Of course, as a union-side labor lawyer, I was and still am dismayed by the political views of these business Democrats. Yes, Robert Rubin and the other Clintonite types have their flaws. OK. But at least they know how to manage. Look at the revolving-door people in Bush's DC--it's unclear how many of them could hold a serious corporate job.

The problem for Bush is that even the minions of Big Business get the salaries of sports superstars. In the new plutocratic United States, the bumbling Bush Administration has trouble even pulling in players from the minors.

Copyright © 2006 The Nation

May 19, 2006

Democratic Ideas, II: On Immigration

by Steven Jonas, MD, MPH

This week George Bush and his allies in the Congress and on the Privatized Ministry of Propaganda (headed by the Fox "News" Channel) are making an extra big push for the passage of an "immigration" bill. In his speech earlier in the week, Bush offered something to each of his major support groups. To his hard-right core he offered a "tough" policy at the border, assigning National Guardsmen with no training in border patrol and control to back up the clearly undermanned official Border Patrol. To his let's-employ-undocumented-workers- at-the-lowest-possible-cost corporate base he offered continued access to undocumented workers already here. To his military-industrial complex base he offered the prospect of constructing a high-tech "virtual fence" along significant portions of the (Mexican, not the totally open Canadian) border. To his Latino base (44% in the last Presidential election) he offered a path to citizenship for undocumented workers already here, otherwise known as "amnesty" (although the devils will be found in the details, if indeed it is ever enacted).

What Bush did not address in any way was the causes of the continued movement of undocumented Mexican and Central American workers across the Southern border of the US. But then Georgite Republicans rarely if ever address the cause of problems for which they offer programs. This is the principal reason why their programs so often are extremely ineffective in dealing with problem as they define it (viz. the "anti-terrorism" War on Iraq, the Medicare "drug" program, Social Security privatization if they could get it) and extremely expensive while being extremely profitable to certain corporate interests.

The primary cause of the continued influx of undocumented workers from south of the border are the polices of the major US and Mexican employers. US employers just love having them because of the low wages, with no benefits, they can pay them. The reason that so many Mexicans want to come here is that Mexican employers pay very low wages themselves, so low that many employed persons (the majority of those seeking to reach the US) simply cannot make ends meet with Mexican wages.

Addressing causes of the problem, then, not the political and economic interests of one's principal supporters, leads one to recommend the following program (presented here only in outline form):

1. Massively increased enforcement of US laws against employment of undocumented workers.

2. Significant increase in US minimum wage, for all workers employed in the US. Massive increase in minimum wage law enforcement.

3. An aid program for Mexico, with the requirement that profits must be reinvested in Mexico. A provision that if such a package is put together, Mexico will increase its own minimum wage. Any profits from future US investment in Mexico must be re-invested in Mexico.

4. A significant increase in trained US Border Patrol personnel. The prohibition of vigilante private border patrol organizations which can only complicate an already complicated situation.

5. As of the date of the introduction of the legislation, any undocumented workers in the U.S. for less than two years would be subject to deportation. Undocumented workers in the US for more than two years would be admitted to a citizenship program.

6. The "guest worker" program would be phased out over a three year period following the enactment on the legislation, accompanied by a significant increase in the visa allotment for Mexican and other Central American applicants.

7. A language requirement for both "guest workers" and persons on the track to citizenship under this program would be instituted, with the provision of educational opportunities in the US, paid for by employers.

8. Repeal of NAFTA, the original cause of the massiveness of the problem now presenting itself.

9. Replacement of the Bush Administration, which could not possibly administer such a complex program.

Steven Jonas, MD, MPH is a Professor of Preventive Medicine at Stony Brook University (NY) a weekly Contributing Author for The Political Junkies (www.thepoliticaljunkies.net) and a Columnist for BuzzFlash.

© BuzzFlash.

Like so much that has defined the course of the war, the realities on the ground in Iraq did not match the planning in Washington. An examination of the American effort to train a police force in Iraq, drawn from interviews with several dozen American and Iraqi officials, internal police reports and visits to Iraqi police stations and training camps, reveals a cascading series of misjudgments by White House and Pentagon officials, who repeatedly underestimated the role the United States would need to play in rebuilding the police and generally maintaining order.

Before the war, the Bush administration dismissed as unnecessary a plan backed by the Justice Department to rebuild the police force by deploying thousands of American civilian trainers. Current and former administration officials said they were relying on a Central Intelligence Agency assessment that said the Iraqi police were well trained. The C.I.A. said its assessment conveyed nothing of the sort.

After Baghdad fell, when the majority of Iraqi police officers abandoned their posts, a second proposal by a Justice Department team calling for 6,600 police trainers was reduced to 1,500, and then never carried out. During the first eight months of the occupation — as crime soared and the insurgency took hold — the United States deployed 50 police advisers in Iraq.

Against the objections of Colin L. Powell, then the secretary of state, the long-range plan was eventually reduced to 500 trainers. The result was a police captain from North Carolina having 40 Americans to train 20,000 Iraqi police across four provinces in southern Iraq.

Throughout Iraq, Americans were faced with the realization that in trying to rebuild the Iraqi force they were up against the legacy of Saddam Hussein. Not only was the force inept and rife with petty corruption, but in the wake of the invasion the fractious tribal, sectarian and criminal groups were competing to control the police. Yet for much of last year, American trainers were able to regularly monitor fewer than half of the 1,000 police stations in Iraq, where even officers free of corrupting influences lacked basic policing skills like how to fire a weapon or investigate a crime.

While even a viable police force alone could not have stopped the insurgency and lawlessness that eventually engulfed Iraq, officials involved acknowledge that the early, halting effort to rebuild the force was a missed opportunity.

Frank Miller, a former National Security Council official who coordinated the American effort to govern Iraq from 2003 to 2005, conceded in an interview that the administration did not put enough focus on the police.

"More attention should have been paid to the police after the fall of Baghdad," said Mr. Miller, one of the officials who objected to the original proposal to deploy thousands of advisers. "That is obvious. Iraq needed law and order established."

What attempts there were to train the police were marred by poor coordination, civilian and military officials said. During the first two years of the war, three different government groups developed three different plans to train Iraq's police, all without knowing of the existence of the other.

Bernard B. Kerik, the former New York City police commissioner sent to Iraq in 2003 to lead the police mission, said Pentagon officials gave him just 10 days notice and little guidance.

"Looking back, I really don't know what their plan was," Mr. Kerik said. With no experience in Iraq, and little time to get ready, he said he prepared for his job in part by watching A&E Network documentaries on Saddam Hussein.

Field training of the Iraqi police, the most critical element of the effort, was left to DynCorp International, a company based in Irving, Tex., that received $750 million in contracts. The advisers, many of them retired officers from small towns, said they arrived in Iraq and quickly found themselves caught between poorly staffed American government agencies, company officials focused on the bottom line and thousands of Iraqi officers clamoring for help.

When it became clear that the civilian effort by DynCorp was faltering, American military officials took over police training in 2004, relying on heavily armed commando units that had been established by the Iraqis. Within a year, members of Iraq's Sunni Muslim population said some units had been infiltrated by Shiite Muslim militias and were kidnapping, torturing and executing scores of Sunni Muslims.

In interviews, White House and Pentagon officials defended their decisions, saying that it would have been impossible to find thousands of qualified trainers willing to go to Iraq and that deploying large numbers of foreign officers would have angered Iraqis and bred passivity.

"Where it was possible to have a light footprint, that was preferable to a heavy-handed approach," the National Security Council said in a written response to questions. "The strategy was to support the Iraqis in every way possible and to enable them to do their jobs, not to take over their jobs."

Administration officials say that the insurgency, more than any other factor, has slowed their progress. While field training has been limited, they point out that most of the 152,000 police officers have attended nine new training academies, some for as long as 10 weeks.

This spring, three years after administration officials rejected the large American-led field training effort, American military commanders are adopting that very approach. Declaring 2006 the year of the police, the Pentagon is dispatching a total of 3,000 American soldiers and DynCorp contractors to train and mentor police recruits and officers across Iraq.

American commanders now see the force, which is to increase to 190,000, as the linchpin of a new strategy to protect the population, secure reconstruction projects and help facilitate the withdrawal of American troops.

But moving ahead is complicated by Iraqi politics. The battle over who would run the Interior Ministry, which commands the country's police, stalled the creation of the new Iraqi government for weeks. Even yesterday, the new government was announced without the post being filled. Iraqi officials said they were determined that the new interior minister be politically independent, free of the taint of death squads, someone who could reassure Iraq's Sunnis that the police are not their enemy.

And conditions on the ground make progress even more difficult.

Col. Muhammad Raghab Fahmy, a police commander in Baghdad, said the police struggled to perform the most basic duties. "They need weapons," he said, and they need to learn "how to use their vehicles, how to operate a checkpoint, writing skills and how to react when being attacked."

The Prewar Plan

In March 2003, three weeks before American forces invaded Iraq, Lt. Gen. Jay Garner, who retired from the Army in 1997, met with senior National Security Council officials to brief them on his plans to manage the country after the overthrow of Mr. Hussein.

Plucked from his civilian job at a defense contracting company six weeks earlier, General Garner, a blunt 64-year-old who led relief operations in northern Iraq after the first Persian Gulf war, was scrambling to put together a staff and a plan to control a fractious nation the size of California.

General Garner and his aides believed that a large number of American and European police officers would be needed to train a new Iraqi force and help it police a country they feared could quickly slip into lawlessness.

In the March meeting, General Garner raised an ambitious plan by Richard Mayer, a Justice Department police-training expert on his staff, to send 5,000 American and foreign advisers to Iraq. Mr. Mayer said his detailed, inch-and-a-half-thick plan included organizational tables, budgets and schedules.

The proposal was sweeping but not unprecedented. In Kosovo, one-tenth the size of Iraq, the United Nations fielded about 4,800 police officers. In Bosnia, 2,000 international police officers trained and monitored local forces.

Two lessons had emerged from the Balkans, Mr. Mayer said. "Law and order first," a warning that failing to create an effective police force and judicial system could stall postwar reconstruction efforts. Second, blanketing local police stations with foreign trainers also helped ensure that cadets applied their academy training in the field and helped deter brutality, corruption and infiltration by militias, he said.

General Garner said he and others on his staff also warned administration officials that the Iraqi police, after decades of neglect and corruption, would collapse after the invasion. The police were "at the bottom of the security food chain," General Garner said in an interview. "They didn't train. They didn't patrol."

In February, Robert M. Perito, a policing expert and a former official at the National Security Council and the State and Justice Departments, recommended to the Defense Policy Board that 6,000 American and foreign police officers be dispatched to Iraq. The board advises Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld.

But at the meeting with N.S.C. officials, General Garner's proposal was met with skepticism by council staff members, who contended that such a large training effort was not needed. One vocal opponent was Mr. Miller.

"He didn't think it was necessary," General Garner said in an interview.

Mr. Miller, who left the government last year, confirmed his opposition. He said the assessment by the C.I.A. led administration officials to believe that Iraq's police were capable of maintaining order. Douglas J. Feith, then the Defense Department's under secretary for policy, said in an interview that the C.I.A.'s prewar assessment deemed Iraq's police professional, an appraisal that events proved "fundamentally wrong."

But Paul Gimigliano, a spokesman for the C.I.A., said the agency's assessment warned otherwise. "We had no reliable information on individual officers or police units," he said. The "C.I.A.'s written assessment did not judge that the Iraqi police could keep order after the war. In fact, the assessment talked in terms of creating a new force."

A copy of the document, which is classified, could not be obtained.

John E. McLaughlin, deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency from 2000 to 2004, said intelligence officials made it clear in prewar planning sessions that the police were troubled.

"I left these meetings with a clear understanding that this police force was not one that we could rely on in the sense that we think of a Western police force," Mr. McLaughlin said. "I don't remember the agency, or intelligence more broadly, reassuring people about the police force."

Administration officials also contended that the missions in Bosnia and Kosovo had shown that finding enough trainers would be difficult, Mr. Miller said.

Moreover, the officials said they wanted to minimize the American presence and empower Iraqis. "The strategic thought that we had is that we are going to get into very big trouble in Iraq if we are viewed as our enemies would have us viewed," Mr. Feith said. "As imperialists, as heavy-handed and stealing their resources."

Even before General Garner presented his case, Pentagon officials were criticizing reconstruction efforts known as "nation building." In a speech on Feb. 14, 2003, Mr. Rumsfeld warned that international peacekeeping operations could create "a culture of dependence" and that a long-term foreign presence in a country "can be unnatural."

At the White House meeting, Condoleezza Rice, then the national security adviser, said the administration would revisit the issue after Mr. Hussein was removed from power, General Garner said. The meeting then moved on to other issues.

"We settled for, 'Don't make the decision not to do this yet,' " General Garner recalled. "Let us get there and then make the decision on what was needed."

Ms. Rice did not respond to a request for comment.

On March 10, 2003, Mr. Bush approved guidelines for how the United States would govern postwar Iraq, Mr. Miller said. One of them was that only a limited number of American advisers would be sent. They would not have the power to enforce the law. That would be left to the Iraqi police.

A Security Vacuum

As American forces advanced across Iraq in late March and early April of 2003, Iraqi police officers abandoned their posts by the tens of thousands. In the resulting security vacuum, mobs looted and burned police stations and government ministries.

American troops stood by, having received no orders to stop the looting. When General Garner and other American officials arrived in Baghdad, 16 of 23 major government ministries were stripped shells.

General Garner, though, would never have the chance to raise his police training proposal again. Three weeks after arriving in Baghdad, he was replaced by L. Paul Bremer III, a retired career diplomat and counterterrorism expert. Mr. Bremer said he participated in no prewar planning and was never told of General Garner's plan.

"I had only two weeks to get ready for the job," Mr. Bremer said. "I don't remember being specifically briefed on the police."

Two days after Mr. Bremer's appointment, Mr. Kerik, who had never trained police officers outside the United States, received his assignment from the Pentagon. He also said he was never told of General Garner's plan.

When Mr. Bremer landed in Baghdad on May 12, 2003, a month after the city fell, government offices were still burning and looting had not stopped. That night, Mr. Bremer gave his first speech to his staff.

"I put the very first priority on police and law and order," he recalled. "I said we should shoot the looters."

After Mr. Bremer's speech leaked to the press, American military officials promised him an additional 4,000 military policemen in Baghdad.

Three days later, a 25-member Department of Justice assessment team arrived in Baghdad to draw up a plan to rebuild Iraq's police and its court and prison systems.

One team member, Gerald Burke, a 57-year-old retired Massachusetts State Police major, drove onto the grounds of the Baghdad police academy. Thousands of people, some civilian crime victims in search of aid, others police officers in search of orders, besieged a small group of American military policemen.

"We had people drive in with bodies lashed to the hood and lashed to the trunk," Mr. Burke said. "It was the only police facility that was open. People didn't know what to do."

Nationwide, 80 percent of Iraq's police had not returned to duty, the team estimated. Iraqis hailed Mr. Hussein's ouster but bitterly complained that the United States was not doing enough about spiraling crime. A population that had lived in a police state with virtually no street crime for 25 years was dismayed as murder, kidnapping and rape soared.

On May 18, Mr. Kerik arrived in Baghdad and found "nothing, absolutely nothing" in place. "Twelve guys on the ground plus me," he recalled. "That was the new Ministry of Interior."

Mr. Mayer, the author of General Garner's police training plan who worked in the Department of Justice, had fallen ill in the United States, and the Justice Department team was apparently unaware of his prewar plan. Working from scratch, the team pulled together a new plan to train 50,000 to 80,000 members of an Iraqi police force.

"If you took all of the postconflicts from the 1990's and combined them together, it would not equal what you're up against in Iraq," recalled R. Carr Trevillian IV, the senior Justice Department official on the team. "Even if it were a benign environment."

At first, members suggested that Iraqi police recruits receive six months of academy training, the amount trainers settled on in Kosovo. Mr. Kerik said he "started laughing," and calculated that it would take nine years to train the force.

The team reduced academy training to 16 weeks, and eventually 8 weeks. Later, a 2005 State Department audit found that translating classes from English to Arabic ate up 50 percent of training time. With translation, Iraqi recruits received the equivalent of four weeks of training.

To make up for the shortened classes, the Justice Department team proposed a sweeping field training program similar to Mr. Mayer's. The team calculated that more than 20,000 advisers would be needed to create the same ratio of police trainers to recruits in Iraq as existed in Kosovo.

Deeming that figure unrealistic, they recommended placing 6,600 American and foreign trainers in police stations across the country to train Iraqis and, if necessary, enforce the law.

DynCorp, the Texas company that was to provide the trainers, had already located 1,150 active and retired police officers who had expressed interest about serving in Iraq.

Two weeks after the Justice Department team arrived in Baghdad, they submitted their proposal to Mr. Bremer. The administration now had a second plan for training the Iraqi police. On June 2, Mr. Bremer approved it, he and Mr. Kerik said.

A Plan Begins to Unravel

The 6,600 police trainers never showed up.

Over the next six months, just 50 police advisers arrived in Iraq, officials said, even as the widening insurgency was presenting an additional, and much more lethal, set of problems.

Officials at the State and Defense departments blame one another for the police plan unraveling.

"We and DynCorp were ready to go by June," said a senior State Department official involved in the police training effort who requested anonymity because he was not authorized to comment. "But no money was provided for this purpose."

Mr. Miller, the former National Security Council official, said Mr. Bremer never made the need for field trainers a major issue in Washington.

"If at any point Mr. Bremer had said, 'I just saw a report and I need 6,600,' that would have made this a front burner issue," Mr. Miller said. "I don't recall that as an issue."

Mr. Bremer said he repeatedly pushed for more trainers during the summer of 2003 but was told that no foreign countries were willing to send large numbers of police officers, and that DynCorp was unable to find Americans.

"DynCorp was not producing anybody," Mr. Bremer said. "We were doing the best we could with what we had."

Mr. Kerik and two dozen retired American police officers and other workers, meanwhile, tried to reopen academies and stations, screen thousands of Iraqis claiming to be policemen and choose new police chiefs. Across Baghdad, 2,600 military policemen carried out joint patrols with Iraqis and tried to secure a city twice the size of Chicago.

Outside Baghdad, American military commanders desperate for police support declared local tribal leaders new police chiefs or welcomed repentant former supporters of Mr. Hussein back on the job. Enterprising American soldiers began ad hoc police training programs that varied from three days to three weeks.

Working frantically as insurgent attacks intensified, advisers managed to bring back 40,000 Iraqi police officers nationwide and reopen 35 police stations in Baghdad. But as time passed it became clear that large problems existed with the fledgling Iraqi police force. Insurgents and former criminals were successfully posing as policemen, corruption was rampant and some officials chosen on the fly to be police chiefs were mistrusted by large parts of the population.

By August, the field training plan had shrunk. Mr. Bremer said his staff, frustrated by the inability to get enough manpower, dropped the target number to 3,500 trainers from 6,600. By September, it fell to 1,500.

By the end of the year, the State Department opened a sprawling center in Jordan that would train 25,000 police recruits in the next 12 months, but few field trainers would be in place to monitor them once they took up their posts.

At the same time, no American officials publicly sounded the alarm about the troubled situation. After spending three and a half months in Iraq, Mr. Kerik returned to the United States and praised the police during a news conference with President Bush on the South Lawn of the White House.

"They have made tremendous progress," Mr. Kerik said. "The police are working."

American military officials in Iraq, meanwhile, became frustrated with the slow pace of the civilian-led police effort. In October, American military officials announced that their training programs had produced 54,000 police officers around the country and that they planned to train another 30,000 in 30 days.

Mr. Bremer said he repeatedly complained in National Security Council meetings chaired by Ms. Rice and attended by cabinet secretaries that the quality of police training was poor and focused on producing high numbers.

"They were just pulling kids off the streets and handing them badges and AK-47's," Mr. Bremer said.

As 2003 came to a close, criminals running rampant in Baghdad diminished popular support for the American-led occupation, Mr. Bremer said.

"We were the government of Iraq, and the most fundamental role of any government is law and order," Mr. Bremer said. "The fact that we didn't crack down on it from the very beginning had sent a message to the Iraqis and the insurgents that we were not prepared to enforce law and order."

Mr. Burke, the retired Massachusetts State Police major, said he was impressed by the eagerness of Iraqi police officers to build a professional new force but appalled by the American effort.

"We had such a golden opportunity in the first few months," he said. "These people were so willing. Even the Sunni policemen wanted change."

By January 2004, Mr. Bremer himself viewed the field training program as impractical. With the insurgency in full force, American military officials did not have enough troops to guard civilian trainers posted in isolated police stations, particularly in the volatile Sunni Triangle, he said.

Bryan Whitman, a Pentagon spokesmen, said it would have been irresponsible to deploy lightly armed American police officers with little combat experience in Iraq.

Mr. Bremer and his staff backed a plan to reduce the number of field trainers to 500 from 1,500, and use the remaining funds to intensively train senior Iraqi police officials.

Mr. Powell and Richard L. Armitage, then the deputy secretary of state, said in e-mail and phone interviews that they both fought the reduction. They argued that the police trainers could still operate in safer areas outside the Sunni Triangle.

They lost the fight in Washington in March 2004. The field training of a new Iraqi police force — at this point some 90,000 officers — was now left to 500 American contractors from DynCorp.

A Contractor Takes Over

When DynCorp trainers landed in Iraq in 2004, they had hopes of being "part of an emerging democracy, part of history," as one of them said.

Those hopes were quickly doused.

A year and a half after the invasion, the police barely functioned. American trainers had to attend to the most elementary needs, like designing forms for crime reports. Reed Schmidt, a police chief from Atwater, Minn., said he was teaching the police in Najaf his two-cop method for pulling a driver over when they told him they preferred their own method — the one that involved two pickup trucks with seven officers in each to surround the car with 14 guns.

When Mr. Schmidt realized that if any of the Iraqi police opened fire they would shoot one another, he said he asked, "Aren't you worried about hitting another officer?"

Mr. Schmidt recalls them replying, "Sometimes that happens."

In northern Iraq, Ann Vernatt, a sheriff's investigator from Eastpointe, Mich., said she and five other trainers checked on 55 stations each month. The hourlong visits left her impressed by the officers' motivation, but dismayed by the bleak conditions.

"They had rusted Kalashnikovs, which they cleaned with gasoline. Most of their weapons did not work. And they got paid very little," she said. "They'd sell their bullets to feed their families."

Several DynCorp employees said their greatest frustration was simply having too many police officers to train.

Jon Villanova, a North Carolina deputy sheriff hired by DynCorp, said he was promoted to manage other trainers in southern Iraq four months into his yearlong stint. Under the plan drawn up by the Justice Department team, he would have commanded a battalion of at least 500 trainers.

What he got instead was a squad of 40 men to train 20,000 Iraqi policemen spread through four provinces. He said he could not even dream of giving them the kind of one-on-one mentoring that American police cadets received. His team struggled merely to visit their stations once a month.

"That hurt," he said in a recent interview at his home in Mebane, N.C. "You need a lot of time to develop relationships and rapport so they trust you and are receptive to what you are trying to teach them."

David Dobrotka, the top civilian overseeing the DynCorp workers, said he did not seek to hire more trainers, even though there were only 500 in Iraq, because some were not even getting out of their camps because of security concerns. "Early in the mission, 500 were too many," he said. "Some were just sitting." DynCorp executives also said that they knew the federal program only allowed for 500 trainers.

In some ways, officials and trainers said, the entire training operation was short on manpower. That was true as well for the officials assigned to oversee DynCorp.

Two government employees and one contractor in Baghdad monitored the performance of the 500 DynCorp police advisers in Iraq, State Department officials said.

Government investigators are examining reports of criminal fraud by DynCorp employees, including the sale of ammunition earmarked for the Iraqi police, said a senior government official who requested anonymity because the investigation is continuing. After one of its subcontractors working at the police training academy in Jordan stole fuel worth $600,000 in 2003, the company failed to install proposed fraud controls, federal auditors said.

Anne W. Patterson, the State Department official who assumed oversight of DynCorp's work in December, said she ordered a "top to bottom" review of all of DynCorp's contracts with the State Department.

DynCorp officials said they fired the employees involved in the fuel theft and reimbursed the government, and put the controls in place. They said the company kept close watch on ammunition.

"We'd be very surprised if any of the U.S. officers we hired to train Iraqis are involved in anything like this," said Greg Lagana, a company spokesman. "If there is an investigation, we'll cooperate vigorously."

Richard Cashon, a DynCorp vice president, said the company billed the government about $50 million a month for its police trainers, including their $134,000-a-year salaries as well as security and other operating costs.

DynCorp officials, who noted that they never received field reports from their trainers, said they were not to blame for the inadequacies in police training.

"We are not judged on the success or failure of the program as they established it," Mr. Cashon said. "We are judged on our ability to provide qualified personnel."

Whatever impact the police training program was having on law enforcement was being weakened by the toll the insurgency was taking on the police. Increasingly, police officers and recruits were targets of violence. From September 2004 through April this year, 2,842 police officers were killed and 5,812 were injured, according to American records, which are not available for the first 17 months of the war. Twenty DynCorp employees involved in police training have also been killed.

By December 2004, there were also signs that the police were being drawn into the evolving sectarian battles. Senior officers in the police department in the southern city of Basra were implicated in the killings of 10 members of the Baath Party, and of a mother and daughter accused of prostitution, according to a State Department report.

By then there was a growing sense among American officials that the civilian training program was not working, and the United States military came up with its own plan. It was the Americans' third strategy for training the Iraqi police, and it would run into the worst problems of all. Basra was just the beginning.

Max Becherer contributed reporting from Baghdad, Iraq, for this article, and Christopher Drew from New York.

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

Until now, every generation of Americans has traded safety for liberty. From the Lexington Green to the Normandy beaches, from the Sons of Liberty to the Freedom Riders, it has been part of the American narrative that risks are taken to expand freedom, not freedoms sacrificed to avoid risk.

The Founders challenged the most powerful military on earth, the British army, all the while knowing that defeat would send them to the gallows. The American colonists spurned their relative comfort as British subjects for a chance to be citizens of a Republic dedicated to the vision that some rights are “unalienable” and that no man should be king.

Since then, despite some ups and downs, the course of the American nation has been to advance those ideals and broaden those freedoms.

In the early years of the Republic, African-American slaves resisted their bondage, often aided by white Abolitionists who defied unjust laws on runaways and pressed the government to restrict slave states and ultimately to eliminate slavery.

With the Civil War and Abraham Lincoln’s emancipation of the slaves, the United States underwent a painful rebirth that reaffirmed the nation’s original commitment to the principle that “all men are created equal.” Again, the cause of freedom trumped safety, a choice for which Lincoln and thousands of brave soldiers gave their lives.

In the latter half of the Nineteenth Century and into the Twentieth, the Suffragettes demanded and fought for extension of basic American rights to female citizens. These women risked their reputations and their personal security to gain the right to vote and other legal guarantees for women.

When fascist totalitarianism threatened the world in the 1930s and 1940s, American soldiers turned back the tide of repression in Europe and Asia, laying down their lives by the tens of thousands in countless battlefields from Normandy to Iwo Jima.

The march of freedom continued in the United States in the 1950s and 1960s, as the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights fighters – both black and white – risked and sometimes lost their lives to tear down the walls of racial segregation.

For two centuries, this expansion of freedom always came with dangers and sacrifices. Yet, the trade-off was always the same: safety for liberty.

Reversed March

Only in this generation – only on our watch – has the march reversed.

Instead of swapping safety for liberty, this generation – traumatized by the 9/11 attacks and under the leadership of George W. Bush – has chosen to trade liberties for safety.

Instead of Patrick Henry’s stirring Revolutionary War cry of “give me liberty or give me death,” this era has Sen. Pat Roberts’s instant-classic expression of self over nation. “You have no civil liberties if you are dead,” the Kansas Republican explained on May 18 before the Senate Intelligence Committee, which he chairs.  

Roberts’s dictum echoed through the mainstream media where it was embraced as a pithy expression of homespun common sense. But the commentators missed how Roberts’s preference for life over liberty was the antithesis of Henry’s option of liberty or death.

Roberts’s statement also represented a betrayal of two centuries of bravery by American patriots who gave their own lives so others could be free.

After all, it would follow logically that if “you have no civil liberties if you are dead,” then all those Americans who died for liberty were basically fools. Roberts’s adage reflects a self-centeredness, which would shame the millions of Americans who came before, putting principle and the interests of “posterity” ahead of themselves.

If Roberts is right, the Minutemen who died at Lexington Green and at Bunker Hill had no liberty; the African-Americans who enlisted in the Union Army and died in Civil War battles had no liberty; the GIs who died on the Normandy beaches or Marines who died at Iwo Jima had no liberty; Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights heroes who gave their lives had no liberty.

If Sen. Roberts is right, they had no liberties because they died in the fight for liberty. In Roberts’s view – which apparently is the dominant opinion of the Bush administration and many of its supporters – personal safety for the individual tops the principles of freedom for the nation.

This security-over-everything notion has emerged as the key justification for stripping the American people of their “unalienable rights,” liberties that were promised them in the Declaration of Independence and enshrined in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

But the American people are now told that the President is exercising “plenary” – or unlimited – powers as long as the indefinite “war on terror” continues. Bush has been ceded these boundless powers with only a meek request from the populace that he make life in the United States a little safer from the threat of another al-Qaeda attack.

Discretionary Rights

So, Bush holds discretion over the constitutional guarantee of a fair trial, the right to know the charges against you and to confront your accuser, the protection against warrantless searches and seizures, the delicate checks and balances designed by the Founders, the prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment, the power to wage war, even the right to freedom of speech.

In claiming “plenary” powers as Commander in Chief and arguing that the United States is part of the battlefield, Bush has asserted that all rights are his, that they are given to the people only when he says so, that the rights are no longer “unalienable.”

Like before the Declaration of Independence, the American people find themselves as “subjects” reliant for their rights on the generosity of a leader, rather than “citizens” possessing rights that can’t be denied. [For details, see Consortiumnews.com’s “The End of Unalienable Rights.”]

As a trade-off for accepting Bush’s unlimited powers, the American people have gotten assurances that Bush will make protecting them his top priority. Yet, the presidential oath says nothing about shielding the public from danger; rather it’s a vow to “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

Since George Washington first took the oath, it has been the Constitution that is paramount, because it enshrines the liberties that define America.

Within that presidential oath and within the nation’s historic commitment to freedom, there is no assurance against risk or danger. There is no government guarantee of safety, nor is there a promise that harm might not come to American citizens.

Indeed, it has been assumed by all previous generations of Americans – dating back to the beginning of the Republic and ending only with today’s fearful generation – that risk and danger were part of the price for maintaining and spreading freedom.

Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq, can be ordered at secrecyandprivilege.com. It's also available at Amazon.com, as is his 1999 book, Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth.'

"When he loses likeability, the president loses the benefit of the doubt," said Dennis Goldford, a political scientist at Drake University in Iowa. "That makes it much harder for him to steer."

Aides in the president's circle say Bush still has it. They suggest that his likeability will serve as a get-out-of-trouble card no matter how mad people get about the war in Iraq or other woes.

"The American people like this president," White House political guru Karl Rove said last week. "People like him. They respect him. He's somebody they feel a connection with. But they're just sour right now on the war. And that's the way it's going to be. And we will fight our way through."

Rove said he based his confidence on a private poll done for the Republican National Committee that showed Bush's personal approval rating higher than 60 percent, far above his job approval. "The polls I believe are the polls that get run through the RNC," Rove said. "I look at the polls all the time."

The Republican National Committee wouldn't release a copy of the poll. Spokeswoman Tracey Schmitt said she couldn't explain why public polls show a decline in Bush's personal popularity except to say that, "you can ask a poll question four different ways and get four different answers."

Six public polls in recent weeks showed the opposite of Rove's account - that Bush's personal approval ratings have dropped since he was re-elected in 2004:

-A recent Gallup poll for USA Today showed that 39 percent had a favorable opinion of Bush, while 60 percent had an unfavorable opinion. In mid-November 2004, 60 percent had a favorable opinion and 39 percent unfavorable.

-Pollster John Zogby found 42 percent with a favorable opinion and 55 percent unfavorable. In November 2004, it was 58 percent favorable, 40 percent unfavorable.

-A poll for CBS and the New York Times showed that 29 percent had a favorable opinion of Bush, while 55 percent had an unfavorable opinion.

"The president's public perception problem is not only about his dismal job performance, but also his striking lack of personal favorability," said Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg.

Personal favorability can encompass many things in the minds of voters: character, respect, warmth, kinship, even whether a voter would want to have a beer with a politician. Or in the case of the teetotaling Bush, a soda.

Bush has lost ground on most of those measures.

Gallup, for example, found drops in the number of people who think that Bush is honest and trustworthy, that he shares their values and that he cares about people like them.

Personal popularity can swing elections and affect governing.

Ask Al Gore, whose wooden personality likely cost him votes in the 2000 campaign against the warmer Bush.

"Likeability certainly was an issue in 2000," said Chris Lehane, an aide to Gore in the vice president's office and later in the campaign. He noted, however, that he thought job approval ratings were a better measure of voter sentiment. He also said that likeability was more important in a time of seeming peace and prosperity than it will be in the next election. With the country at war, he said, voters will be less interested in personality and more concerned with competence.

Or ask former California Gov. Gray Davis, a cool and standoffish politician who had no reserve of personal goodwill when his state faced a budget crisis. He fell in a recall election to charismatic movie actor Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Popularity can help a politician govern.

Reagan, for example, enjoyed a personal bond with Americans that helped him when the country went through a wrenching recession and when his administration was rocked by the Iran-Contra scandal.

"It protected him," said Sherry Bebitch Jeffe, a political scientist at the University of Southern California.

"Look at where Bush is today. You could argue that, even though his job approval rating was low, if he had a significantly higher personal approval rating, congressional Republicans would not have strayed as far from him."

(The Gallup Poll of 1,011 adults was conducted April 28-30 and had a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points. The CBS-New York Times poll of 1,241 adults was conducted May 4-8 and had a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points. The Zogby poll surveyed 979 likely voters May 12-16 and had a margin of error of plus or minus 3.2 percentage points.)

© 2006 KR Washington Bureau and wire service sources.
http://www.realcities.com

Democratic Activists Seek to Punish Their Own for Backing Bush

May 19 (Bloomberg) -- Democratic activist groups that mounted an aggressive campaign against President George W. Bush in the 2004 election have a new target: Democrats who support his policies.

A loose network of organizations, ranging from women's groups to Internet bloggers, is pressuring incumbents such as Senator Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut and Representatives Jane Harman of California and Melissa Bean of Illinois, in some cases by backing insurgent candidates in primary elections.

The groups charge that these and other Democrats have been too supportive of Bush on issues like Iraq and trade, and say they're trying to energize voters disillusioned with a party that has failed to draw clear distinctions with Republicans.

With Democrats holding a wide advantage in public-opinion polls six months before the congressional elections, the party must define its identity, said David Sirota, a Democratic activist.

``If Democrats are really about to get into power, now's the time to let them know what they need to be for,'' said Sirota, who wrote ``Hostile Takeover,'' a book about political corruption.

The organizations and Web logs that identify themselves as the party's ``progressive'' wing include MoveOn.org, a coalition of groups that raised $60 million and enlisted 100,000 volunteers in the 2004 elections; DailyKos, a blog that averages 20 million visitors a month; and Democracy for America, a political action committee with 500 affiliates.

The issues they're promoting include setting a timetable for withdrawing troops from Iraq, building environmental protections into U.S. trade agreements and cracking down on what they say is price-gouging by oil companies.

Angry Public

And they're tapping into public anger. Polls show that more than half of Americans say the U.S. shouldn't have invaded Iraq, and most think the Bush administration has no clear plan for keeping down energy prices.

Ed Kilgore, vice president for policy of the Democratic Leadership Council -- a Washington-based group that says it represents the party's ``vital center'' -- cautions that the primary challenges risk undermining the Democratic Party just as it may be poised to regain control of Congress.

``At a time when we're desperately trying to take back Congress and win a majority of governorships, I'm not sure it makes a whole lot of sense for Democrats nationally to be wasting money on primary challenges,'' Kilgore said.

Connecticut Challenge

In Connecticut, Lieberman, the Democrats' 2000 vice presidential nominee, is facing a challenge in the August primary from Ned Lamont, a 52-year-old Greenwich businessman stressing his opposition to the Iraq war. A recent poll by Rasmussen Reports, an independent survey company in Ocean Grove, New Jersey, showed about a third of Democratic primary voters backing Lamont, the great-grandson of legendary J.P. Morgan & Co. Chairman Thomas W. Lamont, over Lieberman, 64, a supporter of Bush's war policies.

On May 16, the National Organization for Women announced its endorsement of Lamont, and MoveOn.org said yesterday it will poll its 50,000 Connecticut members in an online ``primary'' on May 25 to determine whether they want to back Lieberman or Lamont.

In California, Harman, 60, a six-term House veteran, has a rare primary challenger in Marcy Winograd, 52, president of Progressive Democrats of Los Angeles. Winograd has criticized Harman's support for the Patriot Act, which expanded law- enforcement authority to fight terrorism, and the Iraq war. Winograd's supporters temporarily blocked the state party's endorsement of Harman, although the incumbent ultimately received the backing for the June primary.

Teamsters and Trade

In Illinois' eighth district, the Teamsters union is withholding support for one-term incumbent Bean, 44, over her support for the Central American Free Trade Agreement.

In Washington state, incumbent Senator Maria Cantwell, 47, faces several challengers in a September primary whose campaigns are fueled by anger over her support for the war. They include Mark Wilson, a former Marine who's running as a Democrat, and Aaron Dixon, a former Black Panther Party leader who is running as a Green Party candidate.

In Texas, Representative Henry Cuellar fought off a challenge from Ciro Rodriguez, an opponent backed by labor and environmental groups who got 41 percent of the vote in the Democratic primary in March.

In Pennsylvania, Senate candidate Bob Casey Jr.'s anti- abortion stance was attacked in television ads. While Casey, the state treasurer, fought off a primary challenge this week from Alan Sandals, his opponent won the support of a number of local officials.

Minnesota, Oregon

Gubernatorial races in Minnesota and Oregon, where Governor Ted Kulongoski faces re-election, have also featured challenges from the left. Kulongoski, 65, came under criticism from environmentalists, health-care advocates and some labor groups before the state's May 16 primary. Former state Treasurer Jim Hill, who opened his campaign by declaring that Kulongoski is ``not a good Democrat,'' got almost a third of the vote despite a late start to his campaign.

The Democratic Leadership Council's Kilgore says it isn't true that the party is failing to provide an alternative to Republican policies. ``It's ludicrous,'' he said. ``There's less doubt right now than there's ever been about the differences.''

Ignoring the rift won't make it disappear, said Tom Matzzie, Washington director for MoveOn.org. ``There's already a gigantic gulf in the party,'' he said.

The activist groups say their strategy is broader than merely challenging Democrats in primaries. They say they also want to pressure party-backed candidates to take definitive positions.

`Stand Up'

``The other part of this is getting candidates to stand up for what they believe in and not being mealy-mouthed about it,'' said Jim Dean, president of Democracy for America, a group inspired by former Vermont Governor Howard Dean's presidential run in 2004. Jim Dean, Howard's brother, cited Massachusetts Senator John Kerry's call in October for a phased withdrawal from Iraq and expression of regret over his vote for the war.

Even though progressives will find it difficult to win in the primaries, that's unlikely to deter them, said Mark Rozell, a public policy professor at George Mason University in Arlington, Virginia. ``To pull off some victories here and there will be enough to energize much of the left base,'' he said.

To Rozell, what's at stake is ``the heart and soul'' of the Democratic Party. ``The Republicans had that battle, and the moderates pretty much lost,'' he said. ``The Democrats now have to confront where the center of the party is.''

To contact the reporter on this story:

Heidi Przybyla in Washington at  hprzybyla@bloomberg.net. 

Last Updated: May 19, 2006 00:11 EDT

©2006 Bloomberg L.P.

Bob Englehart, Hartford, Connecticut -- The Hartford Courant,

'Blood is about to be spread' in Gaza

Tension runs high as Hamas, Fatah square off in streets

CAROLYNNE WHEELER

Special to The Globe and Mail

GAZA CITY -- Their government is broke, it is under boycott by the entire Western world and yesterday one of Hamas's senior officials was caught trying to smuggle more than €600,000 as he walked in through Gaza's Rafah border crossing with Egypt.

With armed and competing security forces stationed on literally every street corner in this overpopulated, poverty-stricken coastal strip, the power struggle between Hamas, the Palestinian Authority's governing party, and Fatah, the party of Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas, has now begun in earnest.

"It's a kind of race between them," said Hazem Abu Shanab, a media professor and analyst from Gaza's Al-Azhar University. "What's worse is seeing that Palestinian blood is about to be spread on the streets."

The streets were tense but quiet yesterday, and buzzing with the news that Palestinian border guards loyal to Mr. Abbas had confiscated the equivalent of $914,600 from Sami Abu Zuhri, a Hamas spokesman who tried to bring in €500 notes in money pouches carried under his clothes.

A few hundred members of Hamas's new security militia headed to Rafah to confront the border guards. But although Mr. Abbas has called for an investigation, the money was quickly returned after Hamas officials made it clear it was destined for the monthly stipends of families of prisoners in Israel and "martyrs," the Palestinian term for those who have died in suicide bombings and Israeli incursions.

"At a time when people are starved and under siege, we are upset that officials are acting this way," Mr. Abu Zuhri told reporters in Rafah.

The incident was the latest in a competition for the loyalties of the 60,000-member official security force, the majority of whom have so far been loyal to Fatah. With interior ministry orders going unheeded, Saeed Seyam, the interior minister, retaliated by this week launching a 3,000-member security force loyal to Hamas.

Led by Jamal Abu Samhadana, a founder of the militant Popular Resistance Committee who is one of Israel's most-wanted men and has twice escaped assassination, the new militia had its first gunfight with Palestinian security forces in the early hours of Thursday morning outside the Palestinian Legislative Council building in Gaza. Four people were injured.

"My men that have been deployed in the street are ready to act against any sort of anarchy," said Imad Deeb, a Hamas commander. "We have nothing to do with the Palestinian Authority [security]. We are Hamas. This group is made up of fighters whose objectives are different. Their objective is to create law and order."

The official Palestinian security forces kept a comparatively low profile yesterday. A day earlier, 2,000 of them had marched through the streets in a show of loyalty to Mr. Abbas.

"I don't feel that they compete with us. We are controlling the chaos ourselves," said Kamal Hamad, 31, an assistant commander in the Palestinian security forces. "[Hamas] can stand there as much as they want. They are not part of the Palestinian Authority security."

Mr. Abbas this week ordered the Hamas-backed security removed from the streets, though he did not command his own troops to use force. And Hamas prime minister Ismail Haniyeh made it clear yesterday that he had no intention of disbanding his troops.

"I assure you that we don't intend to take any step back. The force will stay and will be integrated into the police force, and will be active within this system," news agencies reported him saying.

Loyalty to Hamas was still strongly evident on the streets of Gaza yesterday, even as its government approaches a third month of being unable to meet its payroll. It has resorted to canvassing faithful Muslims outside mosques after Friday prayers for spare shekels, to be put towards the administration's bills.

Yesterday, several hundred supporters crowded in front of a street stage, many thrusting bills, coins and bits of jewellery into the hands of a half-dozen men in Hamas-green caps.

Dozens of others marched in the streets after prayers, showing their support for their government.

"These support forces are there to guard the people," said Maryam al-Beid, who wore a green Hamas ball cap over her black hijab as she marched. "There are a lot of people who are against Hamas, and they are the ones who will be responsible for a civil war."

The recognition that the increasing factionalism could well end in civil war can also be found in the mosques and in the media. Friday sermons piped onto the streets and broadcast on radio warned followers against the dangers of fighting in factions against each other.

"It should be agreed that all factions have to be disarmed, because these weapons have no serious military value against Israel," human-rights advocate Iyad Saraj wrote in Al-Quds newspaper yesterday. "These weapons should be handed over to the police, because their risk is to the Palestinian side alone."

© Copyright 2006 Bell Globemedia Publishing Inc.

Afghanistan gripped by worst fighting since 2001

By Noor Khan in Kandahar

Published: 21 May 2006

Two French special forces troops and a US soldier were among 34 combatants killed in Afghanistan in a fresh upsurge of the deadliest fighting since the removal of the Taliban in 2001. In the worst clash, militants hiding in a vineyard ambushed an Afghan army convoy, shooting dead four soldiers but losing 15 of their own.

Fears of a resurgence of the Taliban have been fuelled by a sharp rise in violence during recent weeks, much of it in Helmand province, where 3,300 British troops are deploying. Some 120 people died in 24 hours last week before a brief respite, but attacks resumed on Friday, claiming another 34 lives by Saturday afternoon.

The two French died yesterday while fighting the Taliban in Kandahar province, the French Defence Ministry said. It gave no further details. France has had 200 special forces officers in south-eastern Afghanistan since 2003 as part of the US-led coalition.

The American soldier was killed and six others wounded on Friday in Uruzgan province, also in the south, when a joint patrol with Afghan forces encountered enemy fighters. Uruzgan had seen some of the heaviest fighting within the past year, but militants suffered high losses in battles with coalition forces.

Helmand, the main opium poppy-growing region, where drug profits are believed to fund the insurgency, has become the main focus of violence, but the past week has also seen attacks in Zabul province and the western city of Herat.

Two French special forces troops and a US soldier were among 34 combatants killed in Afghanistan in a fresh upsurge of the deadliest fighting since the removal of the Taliban in 2001. In the worst clash, militants hiding in a vineyard ambushed an Afghan army convoy, shooting dead four soldiers but losing 15 of their own.

Fears of a resurgence of the Taliban have been fuelled by a sharp rise in violence during recent weeks, much of it in Helmand province, where 3,300 British troops are deploying. Some 120 people died in 24 hours last week before a brief respite, but attacks resumed on Friday, claiming another 34 lives by Saturday afternoon.

The two French died yesterday while fighting the Taliban in Kandahar province, the French Defence Ministry said. It gave no further details. France has had 200 special forces officers in south-eastern Afghanistan since 2003 as part of the US-led coalition.

The American soldier was killed and six others wounded on Friday in Uruzgan province, also in the south, when a joint patrol with Afghan forces encountered enemy fighters. Uruzgan had seen some of the heaviest fighting within the past year, but militants suffered high losses in battles with coalition forces.

Helmand, the main opium poppy-growing region, where drug profits are believed to fund the insurgency, has become the main focus of violence, but the past week has also seen attacks in Zabul province and the western city of Herat.

© 2006 Independent News and Media Limited

Event reflects political clout of conservative Christians

By ERIKA BOLSTAD
ebolstad@MiamiHerald.com

ORLANDO - In a sign of the clout of conservative Christian activists in Florida politics, candidates for nearly every statewide Republican office attended the first-ever Florida Family Policy Council awards dinner in Orlando Friday night.

The event featured a speech by Gov. Jeb Bush, who outlined his legacy and the conservative blueprint for leadership he hoped his successors would follow. But he stopped short of endorsing either of the two Republicans hoping to fill his shoes: Attorney General Charlie Crist and Chief Financial Officer Tom Gallagher.

Bush was awarded the Florida Family Policy Council's first-ever Daniel Webster award, named for the Republican state senator from Winter Haven who has been a standard-bearer for conservative Christian issues.

The Florida Family Policy Council, which was active in efforts last year to keep Terri Schiavo alive, also announced its intention Friday night to set up a separate legislative arm to lobby state officials on their prioirities: ending abortion, prohibiting same-sex marriage and addressing so-called judicial activism in American courts.

The council is affiliated with Focus on the Family, the national conservative Christian advocacy group headed by James Dobson.

The first-ever event drew about 1,000 people, making it see-and-be-seen spot on the campaign trail for Republicans seeking the votes of the key conservative constituency in the primary election for governor. Bush noted his respect for that constituency's influence in his opening remarks:

''There are so many fine public servants here, which is a reflection of the incredible influence of the Florida Family Policy Council, the growing influence,'' Bush said.

The event also drew many political reporters eager to see how Republican candidates for statewide offices would fare among the conservative Christian crowd -- especially Crist, who initially was not slated to attend. The council's president, John Stemberger, has already endorsed Gallagher, whom the group asked to recite the Pledge of Allegiance.

Bush said after the event that reaching out to people of faith was an important part of the Republican primary process, but refused to endorse either one of his potential successors.

''I think they're both really able candidates and people, and they will both serve as governor really well,'' Bush said. ``I think the Republican Party is fortunate to have two candidates of that caliber.''

He also said he was surprised that so many reporters were interested in covering the event, and criticized the media for treating the Christian right as an unusual and niche movement. But then Bush launched his own zinger at one religious movement, the Clearwater-based Church of Scientology.

''People who act on their faith are a large number of people in our