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Today's News and Views

U.S. won't push for immediate cease-fire

By NEDRA PICKLER, Associated Press Writer

3 minutes ago

White House officials said President Bush remains opposed to an immediate cease-fire to stop violence in the Middle East, despite personal pleas from ally Saudi Arabia that he help stop the bloodshed.

Saudi King Abdullah beseeched Bush to intervene in Israel's military campaign against Hezbollah in Lebanon, where the death toll is approaching 400 after less than two weeks of bombing. Abdullah's request was hand-delivered to Bush by Saudi officials who requested a meeting Sunday at the White House.

"We requested a cease-fire to allow for a cessation of hostilities," Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal told reporters as he departed the West Wing.

"I have brought a letter from the Saudi king to stop the bleeding in Lebanon, and there has been an agreement to save Lebanese lives, Lebanese properties and what the Lebanese have built, and to save this country from the ordeal it is facing," Saud said.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice also participated in the Oval Office meeting before making a surprise visit to Lebanon on Monday in a show of support for that country's weakened democracy, which is struggling to contain the fighting between the Hezbollah militia and Israel.

"We all want to urgently end the fighting. We have absolutely the same goal," Rice told reporters traveling with her.

It was the first U.S. diplomatic effort on the ground since Israel began bombing Lebanon on July 12. The fighting has killed hundreds in Lebanon and dozens in Israel.

The Bush administration has refused to press for an immediate cease-fire in the conflict.

"Our position on an immediate cease-fire is well known and has not changed," said White House national security spokesman Frederick Jones.

On the way to a refueling stop in Ireland, Rice discussed the possibility of working with Syria to resolve the crisis. In recent weeks, the Bush administration has blamed Syria, along with Iran, for stoking the recent violence by encouraging Hezbollah to attack northern Israel.

"The problem isn't that people haven't talked to the Syrians. It's that the Syrians haven't acted," she said.

"It's not as if we don't have diplomatic relations," she said. "We do."

Officials from the United Nations, Europe and other Arab countries have already urged an end to the fighting. Rice and Bush have rejected calls for an immediate cease-fire, saying it does not make sense if the terrorist threat from Hezbollah is not addressed. They have said Israel has a right to defend itself from terrorism and Hezbollah must return two captured Israeli soldiers and stop firing missiles and rockets into Israel if they want the fighting to stop.

For years, the Saudis have been among the United States' closest allies in the Arab world, despite strains from U.S. pressures aimed at increasing democracy in the conservative kingdom.

Nail al-Jubeir, a Saudi embassy spokesman, said the Saudis would not release the letter or get into other details of the proposal because it was a private communication between Abdullah and Bush. Asked whether the Saudis requested that Bush directly pressure Israeli leaders for a cease-fire, al-Jubeir said they cannot tell the president whom to telephone. But he noted Bush has a unique influence to negotiate with Israel.

"The U.S. has the authority, it has the clout with Israel," he said. "For us to go and talk to the Israelis isn't going to do anything."

A White House spokeswoman, Eryn Witcher, would not comment on the Saudi proposal. She said Bush and the Saudis have "shared goals of helping the people of Lebanon and restoring sovereignty of the government of Lebanon and building stronger Lebanese armed forces."

"They discussed the humanitarian situation and reconstruction and putting conditions in place for an end to violence," Witcher said.

Witcher said participants in the meeting including Saud; Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the secretary general of the Saudi national security council; Prince Turki al-Faisal, the Saudi ambassador to the United States; Adil al-Jubayr, the counselor to Abdullah; and Rihab Massoud, the deputy secretary general of the Saudi national security council.

Rice plans meetings in Jerusalem and the West Bank with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. In addition, she will go to Rome for sessions with representatives of European and moderate Arab governments, including Saudi Arabia, with the goal of shoring up the weak democratic government in Lebanon.

Stakes are high in `big box' clash

Wal-Mart and allies take stand against `living wage' law

By Barbara Rose, Tribune staff reporter. Staff reporter Sandra Jones contributed to this story

July 23, 2006

Additional material published July 24, 2006:

CORRECTIONS AND CLARIFICATIONS

A Page 1 story Sunday about the "living wage" dispute between the city of Chicago and so-called big box retailers such as Wal-Mart misstated a comparison between Jewel Food Stores and Wal-Mart entry level wages in Chicago. Baggers at Jewel start at $6.55 an hour, according to the union contract. Wal-Mart?s lowest paid workers earn $7.25 an hour.

Toni Foulkes tells customers there's a reason the cakes she sells at a South Side Jewel store cost more than cakes at Sam's Club.

"They don't put love in 'em like I do," she says. "And their employees don't make what I make."

She's on the front lines of a fight to make Chicago the first major city to require retailers like Sam's Club owner Wal-Mart to pay a "living wage" of at least $10 per hour with $3 in benefits by 2010. For her, the struggle comes down to a simple equation: All workers are threatened unless communities hold big corporations accountable for paying better-than-poverty-level wages.

On the other side is Lisa Cox, a Wal-Mart worker who sees big stores as beacons of opportunity for communities like her West Side neighborhood. "They're going to run them out of the city instead of bringing in business here" if they single out big stores, she said.

The stakes are high amid a frenzied lobbying campaign in advance of a City Council vote on Wednesday.

On one side is one of the city's biggest and fast-growing industries--retailers, which employ about 250,000 workers in Chicago--and their Wal-Mart-led allies. On the other is organized labor and a broad coalition of neighborhood and advocacy groups. Both sides predict a close vote, and a legal challenge is all but certain. "If it becomes law we will end up in the courthouse," said David Vite, president and chief executive of the Illinois Retail Merchants Association.

The proposed "big-box" ordinance covering stores of 90,000 square feet and up with gross annual sales across the region of $1 billion would affect 42 Chicago outlets employing about 7,500 people, according to the retail association. They range from Wal-Mart, Target and Home Depot to Bloomingdale's, Nordstrom and Sak's.

The debate is being framed for maximum emotional impact, forcing council members to choose in an election year between constituents' calls for wages that lift working people out of poverty and retailers' promises to bring jobs to neighborhoods with double-digit unemployment.

Target said three stores slated for predominantly African-American communities were on hold pending the vote, a move labeled "scare tactics" by the law's proponents.

Chicago, with large densely populated neighborhoods barren of major retail outlets, is a promising frontier for the likes of Wal-Mart. Under pressure from Wall Street to expand sales, the nation's biggest employer is targeting urban areas.

South and West Side Chicago residents spend an estimated $1.3 billion annually--more than half their total retail spending--outside their communities, according to the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law.

"Retailers are never going to love this law," said economist Annette Bernhardt, deputy director of Brennan Center's poverty program. "The question is whether they can afford to live with it, and everything we know about the economics of the industry and Chicago says they can."

Retailers disagree. "It will slow development here," Vite said. "Expanding retail companies are not going to invest their money in a community that doesn't respect their right to operate their business in a fashion that's OK in 99.9 percent of the rest of the country."

Signs of lobbying are everywhere. At Ald. Anthony Beale's 9th Ward office on the Far South Side, aides fielded 200 phone calls in a two-day period last week, evenly divided, as opposing phone banks kicked into high gear. Scores of postcards stacked up urging "yes" or "no" votes. There were visits from Wal-Mart executives, retail association leaders, labor leaders and prominent clergy.

Wal-Mart financed an ad campaign warning, "Don't Box Us Out!" and called on its vendors to contact elected officials, including Mayor Richard Daley, who has come out against the measure, saying it would hurt economic development.

Wal-Mart Chief Executive H. Lee Scott Jr. called Daley recently, prompting speculation that Scott asked the mayor to consider vetoing the ordinance if it is passed. A spokeswoman for Daley's office declined to comment on a private conversation.

For organized labor and especially the United Food and Commercial Workers union, which for years has waged a costly and largely ineffective battle to organize Wal-Mart workers, the Chicago drive is important. It's a test of whether a re-energized labor and community coalition can open a new front on a "living wage" campaign that has gained momentum nationally.

More than 100 municipalities, including Chicago, adopted living wage laws in the mid-1990s affecting city contractors, said political scientist Dorian Warren, a Columbia University assistant professor who studies living wage campaigns.

"What we're seeing now is a much broader reach," Warren said. "Chicago's big-box ordinance is unique in that it targets a private industry."

Tactics also have changed.

"This latest drive is much more of a coalition," said labor expert Robert Bruno at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Seeds for the coalition were planted two years ago when the City Council approved Wal-Mart's request to build a store on the West Side, its first in Chicago, while narrowly denying its bid for a South Side outlet.

The votes were a wake-up call. When Wal-Mart's West Side store opens, some entry-level workers will earn $7.25 per hour, or about $1 less than entry-level wages for Jewel and Dominick's workers represented by UFCW Local 881 in Chicago.

Wal-Mart, the country's biggest grocer, has had little presence in Chicago's grocery market but is preparing a big push over the next three years.

Within two months of the votes, Local 881 had joined Acorn, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, and other community-based advocates to introduce Chicago's big-box ordinance. Their template was Costco, a big-box store that offered $10 per hour starting wages to employees at a North Side store.

Rather than painting a bull's-eye on Wal-Mart, the ordinance targets employers in an industry where the median wage for sales associates is $9.43 per hour in Chicago, or $19,611 a year, according to the Brennan Center.

The living wage issue resonated with more than 30 groups who joined the loose coalition coordinated by Chicago's Grassroots Collaborative, which spearheaded earlier living wage campaigns.

"The Chicago labor movement is realizing it needs now more than ever community alliances to help win its goals at the contract table," Warren said. "The old way of doing things is not working anymore."

Cox, the Wal-Mart worker, isn't following the debate closely, but she looks forward to no longer commuting to work at a suburban Northlake Wal-Mart when the West Side store opens five minutes from her home. She makes $13.47 per hour as a supervisor, making sure checkout lines flow smoothly and greeters and cart-gatherers keep customers happy.

The 40-year-old single mother dropped out of high school in the 11th grade and worked two jobs while raising her son. She started at Wal-Mart eight years ago as a part-time cashier, making $7.25 per hour. "You don't have a problem moving [up] at Wal-Mart," she said. "There's nothing I can't do."

Foulkes, 42, a college-educated Jewel worker and Local 881 steward, remembers her excitement as a teenager when one of her girlfriends started dating a Jewel worker.

"He has benefits and he's in the union!" she recalled them chattering. "We didn't even know what the union was, but we knew our parents talked about it. We thought the boys who worked for Jewel were the greatest guys."

She lives on the same block in West Englewood where she learned to ride a two-wheeler, rooted in a life revolving around decorating cakes and training workers in Jewel's bakery, volunteer work and community activism. She made about $35,000 last year at her $12.85 per hour job, including overtime.

"It's a passion for me, it's not just a job," she said. "I think people should go to a job they love, work hard and get paid well for it."

She preaches to anyone who will listen about the big-box ordinance, delivering tough rhetoric with a disarming smile. "We know they can afford to pay it and we're going to fight for it," she said. "We're going to fight until our knuckles bleed."

berose@tribune.com

Sources: Negroponte Blocks CIA Analysis of Iraq “Civil War”

Posted on Friday, July 21, 2006. By Ken Silverstein.

Sources

I reported in May that despite the deteriorating situation in Iraq, no National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) has been produced on that country since the summer of 2004. The last NIE, a classified document that the CIA describes as “the most authoritative written judgment concerning a national security issue,” was rejected by the Bush Administration (after being leaked to the New York Times) as being too negative, though its grim assessment subsequently proved to be highly accurate.

The situation has gotten even darker since my initial story—a United Nations report cited in Wednesday's New York Times found that an average of more than 100 Iraqi civilians were killed each day in June—and I've learned from two sources that some senior figures at the CIA, along with a number of Iraq analysts, have been pushing to produce a new NIE. They've been stonewalled, however, by John Negroponte, the administration's Director of National Intelligence, who knows that any honest take on the situation would produce an NIE even more pessimistic than the 2004 version. That could create problems on the Hill and, if it is leaked as the last one was, with the public as well.

“What do you call the situation in Iraq right now?” asked one person familiar with the situation. “The analysts know that it's a civil war, but there's a feeling at the top that [using that term] will complicate matters.” Negroponte, said another source regarding the potential impact of a pessimistic assessment, “doesn't want the president to have to deal with that.”

The sources said that forces at the CIA have been lobbying for the new NIE for about six months. Not only is one overdue, but there's also a fear that if the Democrats win control of at least one chamber of Congress this November, the agency is going to get hammered for not having produced an NIE for so long.

When the topic of a new NIE was first raised, the Directorate of National Intelligence agreed to consider the matter, but advocates heard nothing back. They raised the topic again several months ago and were told that Negroponte was still mulling over the matter. Since then, there's been no indication that the DNI intends to authorize a new NIE. “He's not going to allow [analysts] to call the situation warts and all,” said one source. “There's real angst about it inside.”

A third source, a former CIA officer who served in Iraq, said he had no direct knowledge of Negroponte blocking the NIE but that it jibed with past practice. “The NIE is a crucial document . . . that tells you how to tweak your policy,” he said. “That's hard to do if you don't want to look at it.” He said he had two recent conversations with people in Iraq, one an official at the Ministry of Interior who told him that as of two days ago there were 1,600 bodies piled up at the central morgue in Baghdad. The second conversation, he said, was with an Iraqi general officer who told him, “I never thought I would see my capital like this. It's on fire.”

“[The administration] can call it whatever they want,” said the former CIA officer. “There's a civil war going on in Iraq.”

The Ostroy Report

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Saturday, July 22, 2006

Cheney Gloms on Middle East Crisis in Fear-Mongering Attempt to Rally Votes for GOP Incumbents this November

Stumping in Tampa, Fla. Friday for Republican state legislator Gus Bilirakis, whose seeking to win the 9th Congressional District seat being vacated by his 12-term father Mike Bilirakis, vice president Dick Cheney ratcheted up the Middle East rhetoric, citing the current crisis as another reason to keep Republicans in control of both the House and Senate.

"This conflict is a long way from over," Cheney warned at a fundraiser of over 200 party loyalists at Tampa's Wyndham Westshore hotel, which raked in over $230,000 for the GOP candidate. "It's going to be a battle that will last for a very long time. It's absolutely essential that we stay the course....If anyone thinks the conflict is over or soon to be over, all the have to do is look what's happening in the Middle East today." (This is the same Cheney who declared May 31, 2005: "The level of activity that we see today from a military standpoint, I think, will clearly decline. I think they're in the last throes, if you will, of the insurgency"). What's this...Cheney's a flip-flopper?

Clearly, the Bushevik fear-mongering is no longer now limited to its desperate attempt to justify the Iraq war and magnify the terrorist threat from al Qaeda. It's going to fully exploit for political purposes the escalating violence between Israel and Hezbollah just as it has the 9/11 attacks for the past five years. But what's going on in the Middle East right now has nothing to do with Bush's disaster in Iraq. While they constantly try to link that colossal military failure to the threat from al Qaeda, the reality is that there's no connection whatsoever. I'm not sure what's more despicable, this deception or how they're now trying to connect our mission in Iraq to that of the Israeli's fight against Hamas and Hezbollah.

"The central front of the war today is Iraq, and we can expect further acts of violence," Cheney said. "But progress has been steady." By the way, Dick, just where exactly is this "progress" again? Because it appears to me that the entire Middle East is imploding.

About the Bilirakis fundraiser, the Democratic challenger Phyllis Busansky, a former Hillsborough County commissioner, said, "I'm amazed that amid everything that's going on--increase in the violence in the Mideast, the skyrocketing oil prices--that the vice president has time to come to Tampa. I think this makes it perfectly clear that Gus Bilirakis stands firmly with Dick Cheney and his policies."

Group decries Bush's law interpretations

By GINA HOLLAND, Associated Press Writer

Mon Jul 24, 3:02 AM ET

President Bush's penchant for writing exceptions to laws he has just signed violates the Constitution, an American Bar Association task force says in a report highly critical of the practice.

The ABA group, which includes a one-time FBI director and former federal appeals court judge, said the president has overstepped his authority in attaching challenges to hundreds of new laws.

The attachments, known as bill-signing statements, say Bush reserves a right to revise, interpret or disregard measures on national security and constitutional grounds.

"This report raises serious concerns crucial to the survival of our democracy," said the ABA's president, Michael Greco. "If left unchecked, the president's practice does grave harm to the separation of powers doctrine, and the system of checks and balances that have sustained our democracy for more than two centuries."

Some congressional leaders had questioned the practice. The task force's recommendations, being released Monday in Washington, will be presented to the 410,000-member group next month at its annual meeting in Hawaii.

ABA policymakers will decide whether to denounce the statements and encourage a legal fight over them.

The task force said the statements suggest the president will decline to enforce some laws. Bush has had more than 800 signing statement challenges, compared with about 600 signing statements combined for all other presidents, the group said.

Noel J. Francisco, a former Bush administration attorney who practices law in Washington, said the president is doing nothing unusual or inappropriate.

"Presidents have always issued signing statements," he said. "This administration believes that it should make clear ... when the Congress is getting close to the lines that our Constitution draws."

Francisco said the administration's input is part of the give and take between the branches of government. "I think it's good that the debate is taking place at a public level," he added.

White House Press Secretary Tony Snow said last month that "it's important for the president at least to express reservations about the constitutionality of certain provisions."

The ABA report said President Reagan was the first to use the statements as a strategic weapon, and that it was encouraged by then-administration lawyer Samuel Alito — now the newest Supreme Court justice.

The task force included former prosecutor Neal Sonnett of Miami; former FBI Director William Sessions; Patricia Wald, former chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit; former Republican Rep. Mickey Edwards; and former Reagan administration lawyer Bruce Fein; and law school professors and other lawyers.

___

On the Net:

American Bar Association: http://www.abanet.org

Times Online July 21, 2006

Rice warns against 'false' Middle East ceasefire

From James Bone in New York, and Jenny Booth

Condoleezza Rice tonight warned that an immediate ceasefire in the Middle East would be a false promise unless the underlying causes of the violence were addressed.

The US Secretary of State spoke after Britain and the United States found themselves isolated and under fire at the United Nations Security Council for blocking a concerted international call for an end to the hostilities.

"We do seek an end to the current violence and we seek it urgently," said Ms Rice, who is leaving for the Middle East after the weekend for a round of diplomacy that will include visits to Israel and Italy.

Condoleezza Rice, the US Secretary of State (Kirsty Wrigglesworth/AFP/Getty Images)

"More than that, we seek an end to the root cause of the violence so that an enduring peace can be established.

"But if we look for a ceasefire that simply freezes the status quo ante, then we will be back here again in another six months, or nine months, or a year, looking for another ceasefire as Hezbollah uses southern Lebanon as a base to launch rockets against Israel."

Several hours earlier, Britain and the United States proposed a UN statement vowing to prepare conditions for a ceasefire, in the face of growing pressure to halt the fighting.

Criticism has mounted that the two countries are blocking the 15-nation Security Council from endorsing the UN secretary-general’s call for an immediate suspension of fighting.

More than 300 Lebanese civilians and nearly 30 Israelis have died since the fighting started, and half a million Lebanese civilians have been displaced. Israel has warned that it is now preparing a ground invasion to eradicate Hezbollah strongholds in the south of Lebanon, a move that can only add to the misery of the civilian population.

The British and American proposal called for the Security Council to express its intention "to create the conditions for a permanent solution and to bring about an immediate end to hostilities." It also called on all sides to exercise restraint and to allow humanitarian access.

Ms Rice put the blame for the current crisis on the shoulders of Hezbollah. "In UN Resolution 1559 the world calls for the government of Lebanon to be allowed to function as a sovereign government without the intervention of foreign powers. That is why Syrian forces were asked to leave Lebanon," she said.

"The government of Lebanon needs to be able to extend authority over the whole of its territory. You can't have a situation where the south of Lebanon is a haven for unauthorised armed groups that sit and fire rockets into Israel, plunging the whole country into chaos, when the Lebanese government didn't even know what was going to be done."

Britain too says that the focus of international diplomacy must be on what action can be taken to bring about a "durable" ceasefire. Tony Blair intends to discuss the Middle East crisis with President Bush at the White House in a week's time, on July 28, it emerged today.

Other countries do not agree with the US and British analysis. France, by contrast, has called for an "humanitarian truce" to alleviate the suffering of civilians as soon as possible. It has proposed that the Security Council call for a ceasefire, while addressing the underlying causes of the conflict.

Russia, Greece, Congo, Peru and Qatar, the sole Arab representative on the Security Council, have all also endorsed the need for an immediate cessation of hostilities. Qatar has accused council-members of "vacillating" and called for a Security Council resolution as soon as possible.

Jan Egeland, the UN’s emergency relief coordinator, today reiterated Mr Annan's appeal for a ceasefire as he briefed the Security Council this afternoon on what he described as a worsening humanitarian crisis. "The war, the terror, the attacks on civilans and civilian infrastructure has to stop in Lebanon, northern Isreal and Gaza," he said.

But Vijay Nambiar, the leader of the UN mediation team in the Middle East, warned the Security Council that there remained serious obstacles to a comprehensive ceasefire, and that efforts should focus on securing some form of cessation of hostilities.

"This is essential so that captives are protected and released, humanitarian access is assured, civilian casualties are dramatically reduced, and the political space is opened to negotiate a full and durable ceasefire," he said.

Mr Nambiar said that Israel had told the UN team that the violence "was not, as in the past, a response to a particular incident - the abduction of the two soldiers - but was definitive response to an unacceptable strategic threat by Hezbollah, and a message to Iran and Syria that threats by proxies would not longer be tolerated".

Israel, meanwhile, agreed to a "humanitarian corridor" for people fleeing Lebanon, diplomats said.

"We have asked for humanitarian corridors," said Jean-Marc de La Sabliere, France’s UN ambassador, said. "We have a partial answer. We understand that there is an agreement from the Israelis to ahve a corridor to go out of Lebanon. Still the question is to have a corridor inside, to have corridors for food supplies and health services."

Mr Annan’s six-point peace plan calls for an "enlarged peacekeeping force", to help the Lebanese army move into the south. He also calls for an international conference to disarm Hezbollah.

Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, today urged Mr Blair and Mr Bush to change their minds and back the UN's call for an immediate ceasefire. The Pope has also called for a cessation of hostilities.

Dr Williams warned the British and US governments that they would have to reckon with a rising level of public despair and dismay at the escalating conflict.

Beware the stain of Atwater's, Rove's tactics

By SYBIL HINKLE

Monday, July 24, 2006 1:13 AM PDT

The architect of today's "anything goes" campaign style was a southerner by the name of Lee Atwater. A mentor and close friend of young Karl Rove and then young George W. Bush, Atwater, young, brash, personable and devoid of restraint when it came to winning campaigns, began the Republican strategy in the south in the early '70s. By the time 1988 rolled around, Atwater had amassed an amazing 28-4 campaign win (Rove's from 1986 is 34-7) and earned himself a top berth on the presidential campaign of George H.W. Bush, where he was credited with the turn-around campaign ad against then Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis. It featured "Willie Horton," a fierce, African-American man who had been granted prison parole from one of Massachusetts' state prisons and had committed a rape.

Atwater sensed early in his political career that people were more motivated to vote from their anger and fears than their hopes and dreams. Termed the "Darth Vader of Republican politics," Atwater frequently used deep-seated racial fears and divides to get out the vote. Nor was he averse to using "plants" in the audience who would rise with a question that was bound to make his opponent look unfit for public service. Another tactic Atwater invented was called "push polling." These were fake surveys distributed against opponents to convince people of all manner of distortions and lies.

Fate was to put an end to Atwater's career when he was diagnosed with an inoperable brain cancer at the age of 40. When he learned of his impending death, he was filled with remorse and began apologizing to the people he had harmed. Repentant and dying, Atwater wrote in Life Magazine in 1991, "My illness helped me to see that what was missing in society was missing in me: a little heart, a lot of brotherhood."

If Atwater died regretting his campaign tactics, it apparently effected no change of heart in his friend and successor Karl Rove, who by the time of Atwater's death, had risen to a high rung on the Republican success ladder.

Rove first met Atwater in 1973 when Rove was running for National Republican College President and Atwater, the Republican Regional Coordinator, came down to run his campaign. They became good friends, crisscrossing the country together and sharing ideas for campaign strategy. Both of them managed to avoid the Vietnam draft at its height in the early '70s.

Rove's early life and beginning campaigns were fraught with troublesome questions beginning with the Atwater-led campaign, where Rove was attacked by his own Republican opponent in an article in the Washington Post, accusing Rove of teaching young volunteers dirty campaign tactics. When he was 19, he was involved in an Illinois campaign in which he used a false identity to enter Democrat Treasurer Alan Dixon's office where he stole campaign letterhead, which he later distributed to rock concerts and homeless shelters promoting free beer and women.

Karl Rove has an unfortunate family history. The man he was raised to believe was his father divorced his mother in 1969. The mother later committed suicide and Rove was to learn that another man, whom he did not meet until he was 30, was his real father.

A fateful meeting took place in 1993 when Rove was then special assistant to the Republican National Committee. Bush elder asked Rove to deliver a set of car keys to his son. Just home from Harvard, George W. and the man who was later to catapult him to the presidency had never met. Here is how Rove remembers the fateful meeting: "Huge amounts of charisma, swagger, cowboy boots, flight jacket, wonderful smile, just charisma, you know? Wow."

Since that fateful day, it's been a long journey for Rove with the man who calls him "Turdblossom." One wonders if the memory of Atwater still lingers. Did he lift a glass to his old mentor and teacher when he "swiftboated" John Kerry?

There was a time in American history when candidates appealed to our hopes and dreams rather than our fears and prejudices, our divisions and hates. As long as winning is achieved through the kind of tactics that Atwater and Rove have honed to perfection, don't expect to see a change.

(Hinkle lives in Napa.)

Magazine

July 21, 2006

The Way We Live Now

Ballots and Bullets

By NOAH FELDMAN

This article will appear in the July 30 issue of The Times Magazine

When Hamas and then Hezbollah kidnapped Israeli soldiers a few weeks ago, the Israeli government could have held its fire and avoided a major confrontation in which dozens of Israelis — and many more Palestinians and Lebanese — have died. There might have been a strategic rationale for such a policy, since starving kidnappers of attention may be the best way to deter them. But Israel's leaders could not consider this option: they are responsible to an electorate that will tolerate war deaths but will not tolerate the neglect of kidnapped soldiers.

In the past, Israel was the only democracy in the region, and its enemies, whether autocratic states or free-floating terrorist groups, were not similarly accountable to a voting public. This time, however, things are different. With the Iraq war, the United States introduced to the Middle East a bold new policy of democratization by destabilization. That policy encouraged elections in Lebanon and Palestine, opening the door to entities like Hezbollah and Hamas that are now experimenting with a potent cocktail of electoral politics, radical Islamist ideology and violence. Destabilizing the old order really has changed the rules of the game. We are now witnessing the most serious regional test so far to the wisdom of starting down this uncertain path.

The most important new feature of the present situation is the strange hybrid character shared by Hamas and Hezbollah: both are simultaneously militias and democratically elected political parties participating in government. In the case of Hamas, which won the Palestinian elections in January, the political wing may not be able to control the military wing, yet the party maintains a basic unity of purpose. Hezbollah, for its part, does not hold a majority in the Lebanese Parliament, but its elected leaders participate in the Lebanese government, whose democratic credentials have been cited by the Bush administration as a sign of progress in that troubled country.

The dual political and military structures of Hamas and Hezbollah are not unique. In Iraq, both the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq and Moktada al-Sadr's movement play major roles in the elected government while maintaining counterpart militias that they have been unwilling to disband. The model of Islamist organizations that combine electoral politics with paramilitary tactics is fast becoming the calling card of the new wave of Arab democratization.

The fact that Hamas and Hezbollah pursue democratic legitimacy within the state while also employing violence on their own marks a watershed in Middle Eastern politics. For one thing, the boundary between state and nonstate violence has essentially been erased. Has the Palestinian government demanded an exchange of prisoners with Israel, or has the Hamas militia? Israel has been acting as if it were at war with Lebanon — its targets have included a Lebanese Air Force base and Beirut's international airport - but Hezbollah began the hostilities, not the Lebanese government.

More important still, the fact that Hamas and Hezbollah owe much of their present standing to elections calls into question the viability of Middle Eastern democracy as a peaceful practice. In choosing these Islamists, Palestinians and Lebanese Shiites were in effect endorsing not only their political aims but also their commitment to violence, which was never hidden during their campaigns. (The same is true, to a lesser degree, of voters in Iraq who opted for the Shiite alliance.) It was possible that once in power, the politicians at the helm of Hamas and Hezbollah would distance themselves from violence or at least refrain from initiating it. That would have been a reasonable strategy if they wanted to persuade the voters that they could actually govern and use the resources of the state to improve their constituents' lives. We now know definitively that the leaders have rejected this path.

II.

How will the constituencies that support Hamas and Hezbollah react, over time, to kidnappings and rocket attacks that were calculated, it would seem, to provoke Israeli military reprisals? The elected Islamists are gambling that popular anger at Israel, apparent in the streets of Gaza and southern Lebanon in the first weeks of battle, will translate into redoubled enthusiasm for Islamist intransigence and rejectionism. This has sometimes worked for both Hamas and Hezbollah in the past. Both groups came to power in part because they were perceived as the only local actors willing to fight Israel head-on.

For its part, Israel is gambling that the right strategy is to make the people who elected Hamas and a government that includes Hezbollah reckon the costs of their representatives' recklessness. That is why Israel has targeted not only Hezbollah leaders and strongholds but has also bombed infrastructure that sustains daily life for everybody in Lebanon. From Israel's standpoint, this is no longer a fight with nonstate terrorists who are holding their fellow citizens hostage to their tactics. It is, rather, war between Israel and countries that are pursuing (or tolerating) violent policies endorsed (or at least accepted) by their electorates.

Israel withdrew from southern Lebanon in 2000 and from Gaza last year on the theory that disengagement would lead to fewer attacks on it, not more. Right-wing Israelis argued that withdrawal rewarded Islamist violence and that rockets would soon be fired into Israel from the very areas being vacated. Now those critics claim to have been vindicated. The reply of the centrist Israeli government — elected on the promise that it would unilaterally withdraw from the West Bank too — is to insist that in the long run Hamas and Hezbollah can be deterred like Israel's other Arab enemies. The route to deterrence, claims the government, is to degrade the capabilities of Hamas and Hezbollah and in the process inflict on Gaza and Lebanon the punishment of defeat in war — the same approach that eventually led the major Arab powers to stop attacking Israel a generation ago.

The catch for Israel is that, taken too far, the strategy of making all Palestinians and all Lebanese pay for the actions of Hamas and Hezbollah may well backfire. Destroying the economic prosperity that had begun to return to Lebanon is likely to generate fresh hatred of Israel, and Palestinians under the gun have in recent years tended to become more radicalized, not less. Provided that democratic institutions in Palestine and Lebanon remain intact, the long-term success of Israel's campaign will probably depend on how the Palestinian and Lebanese electorates evaluate all that has happened. They will be doing so against the backdrop of deeply conflicted feelings: Hamas and Hezbollah may have sparked this round of fighting, but the bombs raining down on their cities and the soldiers in their bases still come from Israel, and no one likes to be bombed.

Democracy means that you cannot blame someone else for troubles caused by your own government. That is a comparatively new lesson in the region, and whether it is learned or not will determine the prospects for democracy itself there. But dodging missiles and running from tanks is not the ideal circumstance for rational reflection on the nature of self-rule. As in Iraq, what is especially risky and worrisome about democratization through destabilization is that it comes accompanied not by peace but by the sword. In this dangerous environment, the costs of democracy — the weakness of government, the uncertainty, the violence — can be felt everywhere. The benefits of democracy, though, are barely palpable.

III.

Although elections in Lebanon and the Palestinian territories owe much to America's democracy agenda, the Bush administration has, from the start, generally taken a hands-off approach to the region once known as the Levant. This is in part a function of limited capacity. Officials who have been focused since 9/11 on Afghanistan, and then on Iraq, cannot spare the time or attention to supervise the ins and outs of Israel's dealings with the Palestinians or with Lebanon. It also reflects the fact that the Bush administration — mindful of President Clinton's ultimate failure at Camp David — is wary of squandering its credibility on an ever-elusive peace deal. But it results, too, from a shift in perspective created by the Iraq-driven nature of the democratization policy itself. This has led the administration to see developments outside the Persian Gulf as democratic aftershocks of Saddam Hussein's removal — and to believe it best to stand aside and let destabilization and the democratic spirit do their slow work.

Lebanon, in particular, has been treated by the Bush administration as a success of democratization. In a sense it has been one. Mass demonstrations, largely free of violence (including several organized by Hezbollah), set the tone for domestic Lebanese politics in the wake of last year's assassination of Rafiq Hariri, the former prime minister. These protests would have been hard to imagine without the American commitment to democratization in Iraq. For once acting with European allies, the Bush administration was able to respond by pressuring Syria to reduce its involvement in the country. The only difficulty was that once elections were held, Hezbollah took on a substantial role in the governance of the country while retaining its close ties to Syria and Iran. Until this latest crisis, the American attitude toward this problem was to leave it alone.

In Israel and the Palestinian territories, a hands-off strategy appeared to be working. Successful elections following the death of Yasir Arafat, coupled with the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, made it seem that the permissive approach was the right one. Until Hamas's election victory this January, it even seemed conceivable that democratization might eventually create a Palestinian government capable of saying yes to Israeli peace overtures and delivering Palestinian popular support for an eventual deal.

The sudden explosion of Israel's fronts with Gaza and Lebanon represents a major challenge to the Bush administration's detachment. Leaders and political observers in the region instinctively expect the Bush administration to respond to the crisis the way earlier administrations dealt with previous crises — namely, by becoming deeply involved and trying not merely to halt the violence temporarily but also to guide the parties toward a comprehensive solution. Among some in the region, you can almost sense a nostalgic yearning to become once again the center of attention for American foreign policy.

How the United States responds to this latest crisis will therefore set an important historical precedent: has Iraq once and for all displaced Israel and its neighbors as the focal point of American interest and attention in the broader Middle East? Should the Bush administration limit its involvement to stanching the bloodshed in the short term and then disengage from serious negotiations, it would be a sign that we really have shifted the focus of our regional policy away from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — a shift that may last a quarter-century. (It could take at least that long for the United States to come to terms with its involvement in Iraq — win, lose or draw.)

Letting relations between Israel and its neighbors develop on their own, without our stage management, would suggest that the Bush administration is taking seriously its own argument that democratization is a messy, long-term business that must run its course, unimpeded. According to this claim, the regional destabilization that followed the Iraq invasion is just the cost of democracy. The new wave of violence is one storm center in that destabilized atmospheric system. If the strategy of democratization remains in place, other storms will form — and they, too, will have to be weathered.

IV.

Of course, even if President Bush did take on the task of negotiating something more than a stopgap to the bombing, American diplomats would face a more difficult challenge than their predecessors ever did. In the past, crises involving Israel were addressed by dealing with the regional Arab powers, Syria, Saudi Arabia and Egypt, all of which exerted influence of different kinds on the actors. Today, however, Iran has become the predominant external influence on Hezbollah, and perhaps even on Hamas. And American leverage over Iran, never very significant since the Iranian revolution, is today at its lowest ebb in years in the wake of the U.S. involvement in Iraq and the election of the populist anti-American Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

The point is not that Iran necessarily gave a direct order to either Hamas or Hezbollah to initiate a new round of hostilities by kidnapping Israeli soldiers. No direct evidence of any such order has been made public, and the complex internal workings of Hamas — which moved first — are not particularly susceptible to such a chain of command. Rather, Iran clearly gains by the mess that has emerged, and both Hamas and Hezbollah know that serving Iranian interests is sure to result in continued, active support from Tehran.

The main issue for Iran is, of course, the threat of American intervention against its growing nuclear capacity. Iran's primary foreign-policy goal is therefore to deter the United States through the threat of repercussions. One potential arena is Iraq, where U.S. troops can barely handle the Sunni-led insurgency and would face the danger of being overwhelmed if there were serious attacks on them from either Shiite militias financed by Iran or Iranian irregulars. But Iran has more tricks up its sleeve. The attacks on Israel not only harm America's closest regional ally, but, by generating an expanding circle of violence, also substantially destabilize the region. It is as if the Iranians were saying to the United States, ''You have your strategy of creative destabilization, and we have ours.''

Iran's support for Hamas and Hezbollah is already being cited as evidence by those who want the United States to intervene directly against Iran. If their argument prevails, then Israel's little wars with Hamas and Hezbollah will turn out to have been a pair of proxy wars leading to the big one right around the corner. In Lebanon in the 1980's, Israel and Syria fought such a proxy war on behalf of the United States and the Soviet Union respectively. That it remained a proxy war is something for which we can be grateful.

But the cold-war days of balanced powers are behind us now. Faced with the threat of terror, the remaining superpower chose to unleash at once the forces of freedom and instability. From Baghdad to Beirut, Gaza City, Haifa and beyond, the consequences are beginning to be realized. We are in the world of asymmetry, of democratically legitimated militias and armed bands that fight wars with powerful states. Democracy can no longer be seen as an end in itself, and the fate of peoples lies in their own hands.

Noah Feldman, a contributing writer for the magazine, is a law professor at New York University and adjunct senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

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