Bush fell short on duty at Guard -- Records show pledges unmet

Boston.com
The Boston Globe
Bush fell short on duty at Guard
Records show pledges unmet

September 8, 2004

This article was reported by the Globe Spotlight Team -- reporters Stephen Kurkjian, Francie Latour, Sacha Pfeiffer, and Michael Rezendes, and editor Walter V. Robinson. It was written by Robinson.

In February, when the White House made public hundreds of pages of President Bush's military records, White House officials repeatedly insisted that the records prove that Bush fulfilled his military commitment in the Texas Air National Guard during the Vietnam War.

But Bush fell well short of meeting his military obligation, a Globe reexamination of the records shows: Twice during his Guard service -- first when he joined in May 1968, and again before he transferred out of his unit in mid-1973 to attend Harvard Business School -- Bush signed documents pledging to meet training commitments or face a punitive call-up to active duty.

He didn't meet the commitments, or face the punishment, the records show. The 1973 document has been overlooked in news media accounts. The 1968 document has received scant notice.

On July 30, 1973, shortly before he moved from Houston to Cambridge, Bush signed a document that declared, ''It is my responsibility to locate and be assigned to another Reserve forces unit or mobilization augmentation position. If I fail to do so, I am subject to involuntary order to active duty for up to 24 months. . . " Under Guard regulations, Bush had 60 days to locate a new unit.

But Bush never signed up with a Boston-area unit. In 1999, Bush spokesman Dan Bartlett told the Washington Post that Bush finished his six-year commitment at a Boston area Air Force Reserve unit after he left Houston. Not so, Bartlett now concedes. ''I must have misspoke," Bartlett, who is now the White House communications director, said in a recent interview.

And early in his Guard service, on May 27, 1968, Bush signed a ''statement of understanding" pledging to achieve ''satisfactory participation" that included attendance at 24 days of annual weekend duty -- usually involving two weekend days each month -- and 15 days of annual active duty. ''I understand that I may be ordered to active duty for a period not to exceed 24 months for unsatisfactory participation," the statement reads.

Yet Bush, a fighter-interceptor pilot, performed no service for one six-month period in 1972 and for another period of almost three months in 1973, the records show.

The reexamination of Bush's records by the Globe, along with interviews with military specialists who have reviewed regulations from that era, show that Bush's attendance at required training drills was so irregular that his superiors could have disciplined him or ordered him to active duty in 1972, 1973, or 1974. But they did neither. In fact, Bush's unit certified in late 1973 that his service had been ''satisfactory" -- just four months after Bush's commanding officer wrote that Bush had not been seen at his unit for the previous 12 months.

Bartlett, in a statement to the Globe last night, sidestepped questions about Bush's record. In the statement, Bartlett asserted again that Bush would not have been honorably discharged if he had not ''met all his requirements." In a follow-up e-mail, Bartlett declared: ''And if he hadn't met his requirements you point to, they would have called him up for active duty for up to two years."

That assertion by the White House spokesman infuriates retired Army Colonel Gerald A. Lechliter, one of a number of retired military officers who have studied Bush's records and old National Guard regulations, and reached different conclusions.

''He broke his contract with the United States government -- without any adverse consequences. And the Texas Air National Guard was complicit in allowing this to happen," Lechliter said in an interview yesterday. ''He was a pilot. It cost the government a million dollars to train him to fly. So he should have been held to an even higher standard."

Even retired Lieutenant Colonel Albert C. Lloyd Jr., a former Texas Air National Guard personnel chief who vouched for Bush at the White House's request in February, agreed that Bush walked away from his obligation to join a reserve unit in the Boston area when he moved to Cambridge in September 1973. By not joining a unit in Massachusetts, Lloyd said in an interview last month, Bush ''took a chance that he could be called up for active duty. But the war was winding down, and he probably knew that the Air Force was not enforcing the penalty."

But Lloyd said that singling out Bush for criticism is unfair. ''There were hundreds of guys like him who did the same thing," he said.

Lawrence J. Korb, an assistant secretary of defense for manpower and reserve affairs in the Reagan administration, said after studying many of the documents that it is clear to him that Bush ''gamed the system." And he agreed with Lloyd that Bush was not alone in doing so. ''If I cheat on my income tax and don't get caught, I'm still cheating on my income tax," Korb said.

After his own review, Korb said Bush could have been ordered to active duty for missing more than 10 percent of his required drills in any given year. Bush, according to the records, fell shy of that obligation in two successive fiscal years.

Korb said Bush also made a commitment to complete his six-year obligation when he moved to Cambridge, a transfer the Guard often allowed to accommodate Guardsmen who had to move elsewhere. ''He had a responsibility to find a unit in Boston and attend drills," said Korb, who is now affiliated with a liberal Washington think tank. ''I see no evidence or indication in the documents that he was given permission to forgo training before the end of his obligation. If he signed that document, he should have fulfilled his obligation."

The documents Bush signed only add to evidence that the future president -- then the son of Houston's congressman -- received favorable treatment when he joined the Guard after graduating from Yale in 1968. Ben Barnes, who was speaker of the Texas House of Representatives in 1968, said in a deposition in 2000 that he placed a call to get young Bush a coveted slot in the Guard at the request of a Bush family friend.

Bush was given an automatic commission as a second lieutenant, and dispatched to flight school in Georgia for 13 months. In June 1970, after five additional months of specialized training in F-102 fighter-interceptor, Bush began what should have been a four-year assignment with the 111th Fighter-Interceptor Squadron.

In May 1972, Bush was given permission to move to Alabama temporarily to work on a US Senate campaign, with the provision that he do equivalent training with a unit in Montgomery. But Bush's service records do not show him logging any service in Alabama until October of that year.

And even that service is in doubt. Since the Globe first reported Bush's spotty attendance record in May 2000, no one has come forward with any credible recollection of having witnessed Bush performing guard service in Alabama or after he returned to Houston in 1973. While Bush was in Alabama, he was removed from flight status for failing to take his annual flight physical in July 1972. On May 1, 1973, Bush's superior officers wrote that they could not complete his annual performance review because he had not been observed at the Houston base during the prior 12 months.

Although the records of Bush's service in 1973 are contradictory, some of them suggest that he did a flurry of drills in 1973 in Houston -- a weekend in April and then 38 days of training crammed into May, June, and July. But Lechliter, the retired colonel, concluded after reviewing National Guard regulations that Bush should not have received credit -- or pay -- for many of those days either. The regulations, Lechliter and others said, required that any scheduled drills that Bush missed be made up either within 15 days before or 30 days after the date of the drill.

Lechliter said the records push him to conclude that Bush had little interest in fulfilling his obligation, and his superiors preferred to look the other way. Others agree. ''It appears that no one wanted to hold him accountable," said retired Major General Paul A. Weaver Jr., who retired in 2002 as the Pentagon's director of the Air National Guard.

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Cheney continues Bush-Cheney scare tactics to try to win election

DES MOINES, Iowa Sept. 7, 2004 — Vice President Dick Cheney said today that the nation faces the threat of another terrorist attack if voters make the "wrong choice" on Election Day, suggesting that Sen. John Kerry would follow a pre-Sept. 11 policy of reacting defensively.

Democratic vice presidential candidate John Edwards issued a statement, saying, "Dick Cheney's scare tactics crossed the line today, showing once again that he and George Bush will do anything and say anything to save their jobs. Protecting America from vicious terrorists is not a Democratic or Republican issue and Dick Cheney and George Bush should know that."

"John Kerry and I will keep America safe, and we will not divide the American people to do it," Edwards added.

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Record Deficit: $422 Billion

CBO Projects $442 Billion Federal Deficit
Congressional Analysts Project This Election-Year's Federal Deficit Will Reach A Record $422 Billion.

Somehow Bush sees this as positive news!

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9/11 Legislation Is Introduced as Congress Returns to Capitol

The New York Times
September 7, 2004
9/11 Legislation Is Introduced as Congress Returns to Capitol
By CARL HULSE and DAVID STOUT

WASHINGTON, Sept. 7 — Members of Congress returned to the Capitol today to begin what is likely to be a spirited debate over a bill that would put into effect the 41 recommendations of the Sept. 11 commission.

Senators John McCain, Republican of Arizona, and Joseph I. Lieberman, Democrat of Connecticut, introduced the measure this afternoon, just about the time that the Sept. 11 commission's leaders, Chairman Thomas H. Kean and Vice Chairman Lee Hamilton, began testifying before the Senate Intelligence Committee in support of the bill.

The independent, bipartisan 9/11 commission's most important recommendations, and the ones almost sure to generate the hottest arguments, are the creation of a national counterterrorism center and the establishment of a new post, that of national intelligence director, who would have sweeping powers — including budget authority — over the entire intelligence bureaucracy.

"I believe we must — we must — take legislative action," Mr. McCain said this afternoon as he expressed hope that the legislation would not be stalled because of election-season politicking. "These are not normal times."

Mr. Lieberman said the legislation embodied "bold and comprehensive reform that changes the status quo." The status quo, he added, had failed the American people.

"The sweep of reform contained in this bill is broad and historic, as it should be, because the threats that confront us are broad and historic," Mr. Lieberman said.

Companion legislation is about to be introduced in the House of Representatives as well, by Representatives Christopher Shays, Republican of Connecticut, and Carolyn Maloney, Democrat of New York.

Noting the approaching third anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Mr. McCain paid tribute to the families of the victims. Without them, he said, the commission headed by Mr. Kean, a Republican and former governor of New Jersey, and Mr. Hamilton, a former Democratic Congressman from Indiana, would never have been created.

Mr. McCain embraced Mr. Lieberman at this afternoon's announcement. "Thank you very much, fellow loser," Mr. McCain said in a jocular allusion to their respective failed presidential runs.

Senator Evan Bayh, an Indiana Democrat, who sits on the Senate Armed Services and Intelligence Committees, said lawmakers had already shown that "we can rise above politics in the national interest."

But he added: "It remains to be seen whether we can rise above bureaucratic inertia, turf jealousies and divisions within Congress, and the executive branch can do the same. I am very hopeful that we can. For the sake of our country, I believe that we must."

The Sept. 11 legislation heads a busy agenda that the lawmakers face upon their return from a six-week recess. The lawmakers must also dispose of a dozen required spending bills as well as decide what to do about a popular highway measure and a host of other proposals, all while jockeying for advantage in the November elections, which will decide control of both houses.

To that end, each party has a distinct political agenda. Democrats say they will pressure the Republicans to embrace the Sept. 11 commission's 41 recommendations fully or face the political consequences.

Republicans intend to use their control of both chambers to schedule legislation in an effort to put Democrats on the spot. In the House, the majority plans to hold a vote this month on the proposed constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage and will force floor fights over abortion, taxes and reforms to the legal system. In the Senate, Democrats say they expect a floor vote on a proposed constitutional amendment barring flag desecration.

"We should be dealing with the security of the American people, and the Republicans appear to be poised to use the remaining time to score political points," Senator Tom Daschle of South Dakota, the Democratic leader, said in an interview.

In the next pivotal weeks, Republican officials in the House and the Senate say, much of the time will be devoted to the intelligence changes called for in the Sept. 11 report.

"It will be all 9/11, all the time," said Bob Stevenson, a spokesman for Senator Bill Frist, Republican of Tennessee, the majority leader.

It is unclear how long Congress will remain in session at a time when all House members and a third of the Senate are facing re-election. Adjournment is scheduled for Oct. 1, but lawmakers are likely to stay in the capital until mid-October, with a postelection session becoming a possibility.

When the commission report was issued late in July, House Republican officials indicated that they did not expect to move legislation this year. But commission members and relatives of those killed in the Sept. 11 attacks joined Democrats in calling for swifter action, and the Senate indicated that it would also move ahead, putting momentum behind the recommendations.

A rare series of August hearings was conducted on the findings, and a bipartisan group of senators is expected to introduce legislation incorporating the recommendations early this week. Republicans and Democrats alike expect legislation to reach the floor rapidly, with the chief political fight coming over how far the proposals go toward fulfilling the commission's recommendations.

Democrats and some Republicans say Congress must accept all the recommendations. Other Republicans say that while Congress must approve a sweeping set of changes, it will first take aim at the recommendations that have the most direct effect on national security.

"You have to move quickly on the things that will make us safer immediately," said Stuart Roy, a spokesman for the House majority leader, Representative Tom DeLay of Texas. "We are not going to let those things bog down."

Republicans also say that the intelligence legislation could include elements historically opposed by some Democrats, like capital punishment provisions and immigration restrictions, perhaps forcing lawmakers to accept those provisions if they want the overall bill enacted.

Congress appears to be moving with less urgency on the commission's suggestion that both houses change the way they oversee intelligence and domestic security. The Senate has formed a working group to explore changes, including creation of a new joint intelligence committee with broad new powers. But many lawmakers and aides expect that the reorganization covering the executive branch will come first.

With the focus on national security, Congress is unlikely to pass all 13 separate spending bills by the start of the new fiscal year Oct. 1. Just one, the Pentagon bill, has been sent to the president so far. Lawmakers also expect to move quickly on domestic security spending, considering changes in how money is distributed, based on the threats facing large metropolitan areas. Lawmakers could decide to combine many of the other measures into a single bill or choose to continue spending at this year's level and complete the bills after Election Day.

Mr. Daschle said Dr. Frist had told him that he intended to hold a vote as early as this week on the flag amendment. The proposal has passed repeatedly in the House but has always fallen short in the Senate. The issue can cause problems in an election year for lawmakers like Mr. Daschle, who is running for re-election in a conservative state, as well as Senators John Kerry and John Edwards, the Democratic nominees for the White House.

In the House, Mr. Roy said a vote on the same-sex-marriage amendment would probably occur this month. The Republican leadership also intends to schedule a vote on a measure prohibiting courts from hearing challenges to the wording of the Pledge of Allegiance — largely over inclusion of the phrase "under God" — and will consider a series of bills intended to limit lawsuits.

The outlook is less certain for a measure that many lawmakers consider the most important of the year: a highway and transportation bill packed with billions of dollars for local road and bridge projects. President Bush has said he will veto any measure that exceeds his spending target, and House Republican leaders are reluctant to get into a showdown so close to the election. If lawmakers are unable to reach a deal, they will have to extend the current program at existing spending levels.

The House and the Senate are also in negotiations over a measure intended to provide tax relief to corporations that now face some trade penalties as a result of actions by the World Trade Organization. That bill could also provide a vehicle to buy tobacco growers out of a Depression-era quota system, an initiative sought by tobacco-state lawmakers, in combination with giving the Food and Drug Administration the power to regulate tobacco.

Lawmakers are also expected to move quickly to provide emergency money for hurricane relief in Florida, with a vote on about $2 billion in aid coming this week.

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More Than 1,000 U.S. Deaths in Iraq

BAGHDAD, Iraq Sept. 7, 2004 — U.S. military deaths in the Iraq campaign passed 1,000 Tuesday, an Associated Press tally showed, as a spike in fighting with both Sunni and Shiite insurgents killed seven Americans in scattered clashes in the Baghdad area.

The count includes 998 U.S. troops and three civilian contractors killed while working for the Pentagon. The tally was compiled by the AP based on Pentagon records, AP reporting from Iraq, and reports from soldiers' families.

There were about 200 U.S. deaths in Iraq at the time President Bush declared victory over a year ago.

Losing over 1,000 U.S. citizens by invading a country that did not pose any threat to the U.S. and was not involved in any way in the 9/11/01 attack on the U.S. is a serious crime, not leadership. President Bush should be impeached immediately.

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Send President Clinton a get well message

Here is the link to send President Clinton a get well message:
http://www.clintonpresidentialcenter.org/getwell.htm

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TRICKY GEORGE IS IMITATING TRICKY DICK

jimhightower.com
September 07, 2004

"TRICKY GEORGE IS IMITATING TRICKY DICK"

See if this sounds familiar. A sour and rabidly-partisan Vietnam vet named John O'Neill is plucked from obscurity by the Republican White House to be used as an attack dog against John Kerry. O'Neill creates a hokey "citizens" group as a political front for no other purpose than to pound Kerry about his war service.

But the assault I'm describing is not this year's effort by O'Neill to ambush Kerry with a dummy operation he has labelled "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth." Rather I'm talking about O'Neill's first tour of duty in service to a Republican president's campaign – none other than Richard Nixon's!

Yes, Tricky Dick, the guy who invented our detestable modern-day politics of personal destruction, was the one who first unleashed O'Neill on Kerry, way back in 1971. Kerry then was the just-returned war hero who was so elequently speaking out and helping turn public opinion against Nixon's expanding war. So Tricky Dick decided to try killing the messenger through a nasty personal attack on Kerry.

Of course, a president can't be seen doing such dirty work himself, so Nixon's top political hatchetman, the infamous Chuck Colson, recruited O'Neill specifically to make the hit on Kerry. Back then, O'Neill called his front group "Vietnam Veterans for a Just Peace," but it was the exact same kind of negative scam he's fronting today.

It's unclear whether George W has personally met with O'Neill to urge him on, as Nixon did in 1971, but it's clear that the Bush political operation and funding network is behind O'Neill's smear campaign. Not only is the truth of this coming out, but so is the hilarious, knee-slapping irony of watching George trying to shuck and jive around the smear. Since Bush can't even produce proof that he showed up for his National Guard duty in Mississippi (a secure 8,000 miles from action in Vietnam) – he should not be trying to spit on the five medals that Kerry earned in combat.

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Soros Demands Apology From Hastert Over Drug Comment, Hill Says

Soros Demands Apology From Hastert Over Drug Comment, Hill Says

Sept. 1 (Bloomberg) -- George Soros, head of the 10th largest hedge-fund company, demanded an apology from U.S. House Speaker Dennis Hastert, an Illinois Republican, after the lawmaker speculated that some of Soros's money might come from drug cartels, The Hill newspaper reported.

``I don't know where -- if it comes overseas or from drug groups or where it comes from,'' Hastert, 62, told Fox News Sunday. Asked whether Soros got funds from drug cartels, Hastert said Soros ``has been for legalizing drugs in the country. So I mean, he's got a lot of ancillary interests out there.'' Soros has given $12.6 million to groups opposing President George W. Bush, according to Internal Revenue Service records.

Soros, 74, faxed Hastert a letter yesterday saying the implication that he gets money from criminals is untrue and offensive. Hastert, chairman of this week's Republican National Convention in New York, ``should be ashamed'' and back up his claims or apologize, Soros wrote, according to the newspaper.

``He's not going to apologize,'' Hastert spokesman John Feehery told Bloomberg News. Hastert was referring to Soros- funded groups such as the Open Society Institute and the role they may play with independent political organizations called 527 groups. Soros supports legalizing marijuana for medical purposes.

``The simple fact is that the Speaker was talking about the fact that 527s are unaccountable and that no one knows where their money is coming from,'' Feehery said. ``He never said drug cartels. He was talking mostly about drug groups like Open Society and other groups that Mr. Soros has funded and that promote the legalization of narcotics.''

Soros didn't respond to a call for comment. Soros was the highest-paid hedge fund manager in the world last year, earning about $750 million, according to a survey by Institutional Investor's Alpha magazine.

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A Mythic Reality

NY Times
September 7, 2004

A Mythic Reality
By PAUL KRUGMAN

The best book I've read about America after 9/11 isn't about either America or 9/11. It's "War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning," an essay on the psychology of war by Chris Hedges, a veteran war correspondent. Better than any poll analysis or focus group, it explains why President Bush, despite policy failures at home and abroad, is ahead in the polls.

War, Mr. Hedges says, plays to some fundamental urges. "Lurking beneath the surface of every society, including ours," he says, "is the passionate yearning for a nationalist cause that exalts us, the kind that war alone is able to deliver." When war psychology takes hold, the public believes, temporarily, in a "mythic reality" in which our nation is purely good, our enemies are purely evil, and anyone who isn't our ally is our enemy.

This state of mind works greatly to the benefit of those in power.

One striking part of the book describes Argentina's reaction to the 1982 Falklands war. Gen. Leopoldo Galtieri, the leader of the country's military junta, cynically launched that war to distract the public from the failure of his economic policies. It worked: "The junta, which had been on the verge of collapse" just before the war, "instantly became the saviors of the country."

The point is that once war psychology takes hold, the public desperately wants to believe in its leadership, and ascribes heroic qualities to even the least deserving ruler. National adulation for the junta ended only after a humiliating military defeat.

George W. Bush isn't General Galtieri: America really was attacked on 9/11, and any president would have followed up with a counterstrike against the Taliban. Yet the Bush administration, like the Argentine junta, derived enormous political benefit from the impulse of a nation at war to rally around its leader.

Another president might have refrained from exploiting that surge of support for partisan gain; Mr. Bush didn't.

And his administration has sought to perpetuate the war psychology that makes such exploitation possible.

Step by step, the fight against Al Qaeda became a universal "war on terror," then a confrontation with the "axis of evil," then a war against all evil everywhere. Nobody knows where it all ends.

What is clear is that whenever political debate turns to Mr. Bush's actual record in office, his popularity sinks. Only by doing whatever it takes to change the subject to the war on terror - not to what he's actually doing about terrorist threats, but to his "leadership," whatever that means - can he get a bump in the polls.

Last week's convention made it clear that Mr. Bush intends to use what's left of his heroic image to win the election, and early polls suggest that the strategy may be working. What can John Kerry do?

Campaigning exclusively on domestic issues won't work. Mr. Bush must be held to account for his dismal record on jobs, health care and the environment. But as Mr. Hedges writes, when war psychology makes a public yearn to believe in its leaders, "there is little that logic or fact or truth can do to alter the experience."

To win, the Kerry campaign has to convince a significant number of voters that the self-proclaimed "war president" isn't an effective war leader - he only plays one on TV.

This charge has the virtue of being true. It's hard to find a nonpartisan national security analyst with a good word for the Bush administration's foreign policy. Iraq, in particular, is a slow-motion disaster brought on by wishful thinking, cronyism and epic incompetence.

If I were running the Kerry campaign, I'd remind people frequently about Mr. Bush's flight-suit photo-op, when he declared the end of major combat. In fact, the war goes on unabated. News coverage of Iraq dropped off sharply after the supposed transfer of sovereignty on June 28, but as many American soldiers have died since the transfer as in the original invasion.

And I'd point out that while Mr. Bush spared no effort preparing for his carrier landing - he even received underwater survival training in the White House pool - he didn't prepare for things that actually mattered, like securing and rebuilding Iraq after Baghdad fell.

Will it work? I don't know. But to win, Mr. Kerry must try to puncture the myth that Mr. Bush's handlers have so assiduously created.

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Bush: "Too many OB/GYN's aren't able to practice their love with women all across the country."

You can't make this stuff up!

From the NY Times, Sept. 6, 2004:

At a rally in Poplar Bluff, Mo., he was breezing through his domestic agenda when he came to a favorite: what he calls medical liability reform.

"We got an issue in America," he began, in a folksy diction aimed at his small-town crowd. "Too many good docs are getting out of the business."

Mr. Bush then turned to another point he has been making lately to appeal to women - that among those doctors being driven from the business are many obstetricians and gynecologists.

But Mr. Bush seemed to get derailed on the way to his point.

"Too many good OB/GYN's aren't able to practice their" - he paused a split second, as if searching for a word, then continued - "their love, with women all across this country," he said.

Women all across the country might actually be relieved by such a shortage.

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Bob Novak - Biased and Untrustworthy

Bob Novak - Biased and Untrustworthy

In an August 9 op-ed piece in the Washington Times titled "Veterans Against Kerry," Novak gives support to the emergence of the "Unfit for Command" book as a "passionate but meticulously researched account of how Kerry went to war." He continues to repeat this claim on CNN, What was unknown to readers of Novak's column, and is unknown by CNN viewers, is that Novak's son, Alex Novak, is the director of marketing for Regnery Publishing Inc., which published the book.

This is the same Bob Novak who, in July 2003, disclosed the name of CIA operative Valerie Plame (placing her in extreme danger) without alerting editors that he had considered and rejected a CIA request to withhold her name.

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Rewarding 'Unskilled' Workers

washingtonpost.com
Rewarding 'Unskilled' Workers

By Beth Shulman

Monday, September 6, 2004; Page A23

Too many workers lack skills, declared Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan in response to growing pay inequality and wage sluggishness.

This mantra -- that American workers simply aren't taking advantage of training that will magically secure them well-paid jobs -- is appealing. But is it really only workers' skills that need upgrading?

As Morgan Stanley's chief economist, Stephen Roach, recently pointed out, from March to June, hiring in lower-end industries in our hourglass economy has accounted for 44 percent of the workforce. Twenty-five percent of our nation's workers earn less than $8.70 an hour (or $18,000 a year) before taxes or health insurance, which puts a family of four under the federal poverty level. These low-wage jobs -- nursing aides, security guards, teachers' assistants, janitors, home health aides, retail sales and food preparation -- are among the country's fastest-growing employment opportunities. Meanwhile, manufacturing and service jobs that once provided a middle-class income for millions of American families are disappearing. As Greenspan himself acknowledged, people are having a hard time finding jobs that pay as much as the "lost" ones.

Unfortunately, Greenspan's facile dismissal of low-wage jobs as "unskilled" is a way to avoid acknowledging these essential jobs and the men and women who perform them. It is a way of justifying their poverty wages and meager benefits and blaming them for our failure to properly reward them.

In fact, skills are not the real problem. Today's workers have the requisite skills for their jobs as child-care providers, nursing-home aides, poultry processors and janitors. Without question, better education and fluency in new technologies are essential to improving job options for this and the next generation of working men and women. People in virtually any position should receive training throughout their careers to increase their opportunities for job and social mobility.

Yet these labor-intensive employers will continue to demand large numbers of workers. They are not prospects for outsourcing, because the jobs must be done in specific locations, face to face with patients or customers. For the people who hold these jobs to be in a position to support themselves and their families, the rewards of their jobs must be improved.

Without improvement, the rising gap between the haves and the have-nots will continue to grow, straining an already divided nation. A forthcoming study from the Russell Sage Foundation shows that once the income divide becomes entrenched, it is increasingly difficult for workers and their families ever to break free. Falling incomes among the poor make it more difficult for them to improve or escape from underfunded public schools, limiting their chances for future success.

If work does not work for millions of Americans, it undermines our most fundamental ideal: that if you work hard, you can support yourself and your family. Consigning millions of Americans to dead-end, low-wage jobs endangers the notion of equal opportunity.

A key to turning this around is understanding what made "good jobs" good. There is nothing inherent in welding bumpers onto cars or manufacturing steel girders that makes those better jobs than caring for children or guarding office buildings. Workers organizing through unions, and the passage of social legislation, raised wages and created paid leave and health and retirement benefits in these initially "bad" manufacturing jobs, changing them into good middle-class positions.

Fortunately, we can make choices as a society to make today's "bad" jobs "good" ones.

First, we can raise the minimum wage. Its earning power has not kept up with inflation. Frozen at $5.15 an hour since 1997, its value is 30 percent less today than in 1968, leaving millions of workers and their families well below the federal poverty line.

Second, we can clear the way for workers to unionize. Recent Labor Department statistics show that, on average, unionized service jobs pay nearly twice as much as nonunion service jobs. Compare the same positions in hotel-casinos in Reno and Las Vegas. They vary by more than $5 an hour, depending not on the skills of those who hold them but on whether they are unionized.

Third, we can reward businesses that provide their employees a living wage and basic benefits by offering taxpayer subsidies, contracts or grants.

Finally, we can provide access to health insurance for all Americans. Workers in the growing low-wage service sector are the least likely to get health insurance from their employers.

As a nation, we can decide to ensure that the people who protect and help our families can support themselves and their loved ones by making service jobs the good jobs of the 21st century. We must not simply label certain jobs "unskilled" and sentence a quarter of our population to a life of poverty just for doing their jobs.

Beth Shulman, author of "The Betrayal of Work," is a spokeswoman for the Russell Sage Foundation's project on social inequality.

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Dangerous Errors

washingtonpost.com
Dangerous Errors

Monday, September 6, 2004; Page A22

"Today's convictions send a clear message: The Department of Justice will work diligently to detect, disrupt and dismantle the activities of terrorist cells in the United States and abroad."

SO SAID ATTORNEY General John D. Ashcroft on June 3, 2003, the day Karim Koubriti, Ahmed Hannan and Abdel-Ilah Elmardoudi were convicted in Detroit in the first major terrorism prosecution to follow the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Barely a year later, the department's work on the case looks far from diligent, and it is by no means clear that the government disrupted a terrorist cell. The lead prosecutor is facing a criminal investigation, and the evidence he presented in court has been so discredited that the Justice Department asked the court last week to overturn the convictions and dismiss the terrorism charges. U.S. District Judge Gerald E. Rosen agreed that the government had "materially misled the Court, the jury and the defense [about] critical evidence that provided important foundations for the prosecution's case." Mr. Ashcroft, so quick to crow about a victory in court, now owes a candid, public explanation of what has happened.

The defendants, along with one other, were accused of being part of a sleeper cell of Islamic fundamentalists, collecting intelligence for possible attacks abroad and in the United States. Two were convicted of conspiracy to support terrorism and document fraud, one on only the lesser charge; one was acquitted. Now the department acknowledges that it "failed to disclose matters which, viewed collectively, were 'material' to the defense" and the information it withheld "significantly undermines the basis" of the most serious charges. In its 60-page filing, the department eviscerates its own case. Prosecutors withheld information impeaching their star witness's reliability, it says. A drawing said at trial to be a "casing" sketch did not correspond with photographs of the site it supposedly depicted -- photographs that were never disclosed. Prosecutors' characterization of another sketch, the government now says, was controversial within the government; it may have been an innocent doodle. A videotape said to be surveillance of possible targets may have been taken by Tunisian tourists. There is, quite simply, nothing solid left of the case.

The chief problem here appears to have been the lead prosecutor, Richard Convertino, whom the department yanked from the case after the allegations arose and whose conduct it is now investigating. Judge Rosen described him as having "simply ignored or avoided any evidence or information which contradicted or undermined" his belief in the defendants' guilt. Mr. Convertino has sued the department, alleging a smear, and his lawyer called the withheld materials "insubstantial" and said they would not have prompted a "reasonable possibility that a different verdict would have resulted after trial." But it is highly unusual for the Justice Department to scuttle its own case as it has here. It would be all the more extraordinary if the materials it withheld were not, in fact, important.

The Justice Department responded seriously to the problem, appointing a special attorney to clean up the mess. Its filing last week was comprehensive and candid, and Judge Rosen lavished praise on the new team for "vigorously pursuing and producing to the Court all possible evidence" related to the train wreck. But how did errors so fundamental go undiscovered for so long in such a high-profile case? Why were the department's counterterrorism officials not more closely supervising the work of prosecutors in the field? Why were red flags not raised when officials of different agencies -- as the department now reports -- became concerned that Mr. Convertino was interested only in analysis that supported his case? Mr. Ashcroft needs to answer these questions and make sure that future terrorism cases are not plagued by such dangerous errors again.

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An Economy That Turns American Values Upside Down

NY Times
September 6, 2004

An Economy That Turns American Values Upside Down
By BOB HERBERT

The Labor Department reported last week that 144,000 payroll jobs were created in August. Let's put that in perspective.

The number was below market forecasts. It was also below the number of jobs needed to accommodate the growth in the employment-aged population. In short, this was not good news. It's only by the diminished job-creation standards that have prevailed since the last recession that any positive spin could be put on last month's performance.

As the Economic Policy Institute tells us, in a book-length report it is releasing today: "The United States has been tracking employment statistics since 1939, and never in history has it taken this long to regain the jobs lost over a downturn."

In "The State of Working America 2004/2005," the institute shows in tremendous detail how those lost jobs and other disappointing aspects of the recovery are taking a severe economic toll on working families.

According to the institute:

"After almost three years of recovery, our job market is still too weak to broadly distribute the benefits of the growing economy. Unemployment is essentially unchanged, job growth has stalled, and real wages have started to fall behind inflation. Today's picture is a stark contrast to the full employment period before the recession, when the tight labor market ensured that the benefits of growth were broadly shared.

"Prolonged weakness in the labor market has left the nation with over a million fewer jobs than when the recession began. This is a worse position, in terms of recouping lost jobs, than any business cycle since the 1930's."

What is happening is nothing less than a deterioration in the standard of living in the United States. Despite the statistical growth in the economy, the continued slack in the labor market has resulted in declining real wages for anxious American workers and a marked deterioration in job quality.

From 2000 through 2003 the median household income fell by $1,500 (in 2003 dollars) - a significant 3.4 percent decrease. That information becomes startling when you consider that during the same period there was a strong 12 percent increase in productivity among U.S. workers. Economists will tell you that productivity increases go hand-in-hand with increases in the standard of living. But not this time. Here we have a 3.4 percent loss in real income juxtaposed with a big jump in productivity.

"So the economic pie is growing gangbusters and the typical household is falling behind," said Jared Bernstein, the institute's senior economist and a co-author of the new book.

This is the part of the story that spotlights the unfairness at the heart of the current economic setup in the U.S. While workers have been remarkably productive in recent years, they have not participated in the benefits of their own increased productivity. That doesn't sound very much like the American way.

According to the institute, "Between 1947 and 1973 productivity and real median family income both grew 104 percent, a golden age of growth for both variables." That parallel relationship began to break down in the 1970's, but it is only recently that it fell apart altogether, leaving us with the following evidence of unrestrained inequity:

"In the 2000-03 period income shifted extremely rapidly and extensively from labor compensation to capital income (profits and interest)," so that the "benefits of faster productivity growth" went overwhelmingly to capital.

American workers are in an increasingly defensive position. In a tight labor market, when jobs are plentiful, workers have leverage and can demand increased wages and benefits. But today's workers have lost power in many different ways - through the slack labor market, government policies that favor corporate interests, the weakening of unions, the growth of lower-paying service industries, global trade, capital mobility, the declining real value of the minimum wage, immigration and so on.

The end result of all this is a portrait of American families struggling just to hang on, rather than to get ahead. The benefits of productivity gains and economic growth are flowing to profits, not worker compensation. The fat cats are getting fatter, while workers, at least for the time being, are watching the curtain come down on the heralded American dream.

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Amnesia in the Garden

NY Timew
September 5, 2004

Amnesia in the Garden
By MAUREEN DOWD

The Manichaean Candidate sees the world only in terms of good and evil, black and white.

He scorns gray, nuance, complexity, context, changing circumstances and inconvenient facts. Real men make their own reality.

Trying to match John Kerry, who roused the base at his convention with a line bashing the House of Bush-House of Saud coziness, George W. Bush roused the base at his convention with a liberal-media-elite-bashing line.

Painting himself as the noble agent for "the transformational power of liberty" abroad, he said "there have always been doubters" when America uses its "strength" to "advance freedom": "In 1946, 18 months after the fall of Berlin to Allied forces, a journalist in The New York Times wrote this: 'Germany is a land in an acute stage of economic, political and moral crisis. European capitals are frightened. In every military headquarters, one meets alarmed officials doing their utmost to deal with the consequences of the occupation policy that they admit has failed.' End quote. Maybe that same person's still around, writing editorials."

She isn't. Anne O'Hare McCormick, who died in 1954, was The Times's pioneering foreign affairs correspondent who covered the real Axis of Evil, interviewing Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini and Patton. She was hardly a left-wing radical or defeatist. In 1937, she became the first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize in journalism, and she was the first woman to be a member of The Times's editorial board.

The president distorted the columnist's dispatch. (Download a PDF of the original column.) The "moral crisis" and failure she described were in the British and French sectors. She reported that the Americans were doing better because of their policy to "encourage initiative and develop self-government." She wanted the U.S. to commit more troops and stay the course - not cut and run.

Mr. Bush Swift-boated her.

The Manichaean Candidate's convention was a brazen bizarro masterpiece. The case to sack John Kerry featured the same shady tactics used to build the case to whack Saddam - cherry-picked facts, selective claims and warped contexts.

W. took a page from Arnold Schwarzenegger's "Total Recall," a futuristic movie about inserting fully formed memories into the minds of unsuspecting victims.

The president and vice president ignored all the expert evidence now compiled indicating no link between 9/11 and Saddam, and no Saddam threat to U.S. security. After talking about "the fanatics who killed some 3,000 of our fellow Americans," Dick Cheney boasted: "In Iraq, we dealt with a gathering threat, and removed the regime of Saddam Hussein."

Though the convention mythologized Mr. Bush's bullhorn moment at ground zero, there was no mention of Osama, the fiend W. vowed to catch that day. The speakers did not acknowledge the brutal spiral in Afghanistan and Iraq, or the re-emergence of the Taliban, now finding sanctuary with our ally, Pakistan.

Mr. Cheney, king of hooey, bragged about a "Taliban driven from power," even though just as the convention got under way, at least seven people, including two Americans, were killed by Taliban fighters in Kabul.

W. stormed ahead with the discredited domino theory of democracy promoted by the neocons and Ahmad Chalabi - ignoring the widening F.B.I. probe into alleged leaks from neocon central at the Pentagon to Mr. Chalabi, an accused Iranian spy, and to an Israeli lobby. "Because we acted to defend our country, the murderous regimes of Saddam Hussein and the Taliban are history," the president said, adding that "democracy is coming to the broader Middle East."

The $445 billion deficit? Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney erased it. In their inside-out universe, the economy is blossoming, there's money to pay for Mr. Bush's to-do list and No Child Left Behind is more than an empty slogan.

W. suddenly proclaimed himself a compassionate conservative again, even though extra-chromosome conservatives, as Lee Atwater called them, were in closed meetings calling for a culture war to curb the rights of women and gays.

Mr. Bush even tried to implant in our heads that he is the son of Reagan. He didn't give his dad a speaking slot, though the last two Democratic presidents spoke in Boston, and he spent more time in his speech lionizing Gip than Pop.

Inside Madison Square Garden, W. kept insisting he'd made the world safer. Outside, the exploding world didn't seem safe at all.

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GOP Prism Distorts Some Kerry Positions

GOP Prism Distorts Some Kerry Positions

By Glenn Kessler and Dan Morgan
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, September 3, 2004; Page A01
washingtonpost.com

Speakers at this week's Republican convention have relentlessly attacked John F. Kerry for statements he has made and votes he has taken in his long political career, but a number of their specific claims -- such as his votes on military programs -- are at best selective and in many cases stripped of their context, according to a review of the documentation provided by the Bush campaign.

As a senator, Kerry has long been skeptical of big-ticket weapons systems, especially when measured against rising budget deficits, and to some extent he opened himself to this line of attack when he chose to largely skip over his Senate career during his acceptance speech at the Democratic convention last month. But the barrage by Republicans at their own convention has often misportrayed statements or votes that are years, if not decades, old.

For instance:

• Kerry did not cast a series of votes against individual weapons systems, as Sen. Zell Miller (D-Ga.) suggested in a slashing convention speech in New York late Wednesday, but instead Kerry voted against a Pentagon spending package in 1990 as part of deliberations over restructuring and downsizing the military in the post-Cold War era.

• Both Vice President Cheney and Miller have said that Kerry would like to see U.S. troops deployed only at the direction of the United Nations, with Cheney noting that the remark had been made at the start of Kerry's political career. This refers to a statement made nearly 35 years ago, when Kerry gave an interview to the Harvard Crimson, 10 months after he had returned from the Vietnam War angry and disillusioned by his experiences there. (President Bush at the time was in the Air National Guard, about to earn his wings.)

• President Bush, Cheney and Miller faulted Kerry for voting against body armor for troops in Iraq. But much of the funding for body armor was added to the bill by House Democrats, not the administration, and Kerry's vote against the entire bill was rooted in a dispute with the administration over how to pay for $20 billion earmarked for reconstruction of Iraq.

In remarks prepared for delivery last night, Kerry denounced the Republican convention for its "anger and distortion" and criticized Cheney for avoiding the military draft during the Vietnam era.

Bush campaign spokesman Terry Holt defended the statements made by convention speakers, though he declined to address details beyond supplying the campaign's citations of votes. "Whether it was in the '70s, '80s or '90s, Sen. Kerry has demonstrated a general pattern of hostility to a strong national defense," Holt said.

Votes cast by lawmakers are often twisted by political opponents, and both political parties are adept at combing through legislative records to score political points. Former senator Robert J. Dole's voting record was frequently distorted by the Clinton campaign eight years ago -- as well as by his GOP rivals for the Republican nomination.

One document frequently cited by Republicans is a 350-word article in the Boston Globe, written when Kerry was lieutenant governor of Massachusetts and battling to win the Democratic nomination for senator in 1984 -- a period of soaring deficits in the wake of a huge defense buildup by President Ronald Reagan. Calling for a "strong defense," the article said, Kerry proposed to slow the rate of growth in defense spending by canceling 27 weapons systems, in part to reduce the deficit and also restore cuts Reagan had made in domestic programs.

While Cheney said Kerry opposed Reagan's "major defense initiatives," the campaign does not cite any votes against such defense programs while Reagan was president, relying instead on a campaign speech before he was elected senator.

Six years later, Kerry took part in a complex and serious debate in Congress over how to restructure the military after the Cold War.

Cheney, at the time defense secretary, had scolded Congress for keeping alive such programs as the F-14 and F-16 jet fighters that he wanted to eliminate. Miller said in his speech that Kerry had foolishly opposed both the weapons systems and would have left the military armed with "spitballs." During that same debate, President George H.W. Bush, the current president's father, proposed shutting down production of the B-2 bomber -- another weapons system cited by Miller -- and pledged to cut defense spending by 30 percent in eight years.

Though Miller recited a long list of weapons systems, Kerry did not vote against these specific weapons on the floor of the Senate during this period. Instead, he voted against an omnibus defense spending bill that would have funded all these programs; it is this vote that forms the crux of the GOP case that he "opposed" these programs.

On the Senate floor, Kerry cast his vote in terms of fiscal concerns, saying the defense bill did not "represent sound budgetary policy" in a time of "extreme budget austerity." Much like Bush's father, he singled out the B-2 bomber for specific attention, saying it is "one of the most costly, waste-ridden programs in a long history of waste, fraud and abuse scandals that have plagued Pentagon spending."

Asked why the campaign was attacking Kerry for having similar positions as Cheney, White House communications director Dan Bartlett responded: "I don't have the specifics of [when] then-Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney was in charge of the Pentagon, but I think we'd be more than willing to have a debate on whether Dick Cheney or John Kerry was stronger on defense."

Appearing on CNN, Miller said he had "gotten documentation on every single one of those votes that I talked about."

Cheney, in his own speech, skipped over that period, going directly from Kerry's vote against authorization for the first Persian Gulf War to the post-Sept. 11, 2001, period.

Republican documents also cite a long list of Kerry votes against various weapons systems, including the B-2 bomber. But Kerry's opposition in the 1990s often hinged on his concerns about the impact on the budget deficit of congressional efforts to add money for the plane.

"We are going to build B-2 bombers even though the Pentagon does not want the B-2 bombers, even though the Pentagon never submitted a request for the B-2 bombers," Kerry said during a budget debate in October 1995.

Kerry's vote last year against the administration's $87 billion proposal to fund troops in Iraq and pay for Iraqi reconstruction has also been the focus of Republican attacks. "My opponent and his running mate voted against this money for bullets, and fuel, and vehicles, and body armor," Bush said last night.

Kerry actually supported all those things, but as part of a different version of the bill opposed by the administration. At the time, many Republicans were uncomfortable with the administration's plans and the White House had to threaten a veto against the congressional version to bring reluctant lawmakers in line.

In a floor statement explaining his vote, Kerry said he favored the $67 billion for the troops on the ground -- "I support our troops in Iraq and their mission" -- but faulted the administration's $20 billion request for reconstruction. He complained that administration "has only given us a set of goals and vague timetables, not a detailed plan."

Yesterday, the State Department said that only $1 billion of that money has been spent in the 11 months since the bill was passed.

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Feel the Hate

NY Times
September 3, 2004

Feel the Hate
By PAUL KRUGMAN

I don't know where George Soros gets his money," one man said. "I don't know where - if it comes from overseas or from drug groups or where it comes from." George Soros, another declared, "wants to spend $75 million defeating George W. Bush because Soros wants to legalize heroin." After all, a third said, Mr. Soros "is a self-admitted atheist; he was a Jew who figured out a way to survive the Holocaust."

They aren't LaRouchies - they're Republicans.

The suggestion that Mr. Soros, who has spent billions promoting democracy around the world, is in the pay of drug cartels came from Dennis Hastert, the speaker of the House, whom the Constitution puts two heartbeats from the presidency. After standing by his remarks for several days, Mr. Hastert finally claimed that he was talking about how Mr. Soros spends his money, not where he gets it.

The claim that Mr. Soros's political spending is driven by his desire to legalize heroin came from Newt Gingrich. And the bit about the Holocaust came from Tony Blankley, editorial page editor of The Washington Times, which has become the administration's de facto house organ.

For many months we've been warned by tut-tutting commentators about the evils of irrational "Bush hatred." Pundits eagerly scanned the Democratic convention for the disease; some invented examples when they failed to find it. Then they waited eagerly for outrageous behavior by demonstrators in New York, only to be disappointed again.

There was plenty of hatred in Manhattan, but it was inside, not outside, Madison Square Garden.

Barack Obama, who gave the Democratic keynote address, delivered a message of uplift and hope. Zell Miller, who gave the Republican keynote, declared that political opposition is treason: "Now, at the same time young Americans are dying in the sands of Iraq and the mountains of Afghanistan, our nation is being torn apart and made weaker because of the Democrats' manic obsession to bring down our commander in chief." And the crowd roared its approval.

Why are the Republicans so angry? One reason is that they have nothing positive to run on (during the first three days, Mr. Bush was mentioned far less often than John Kerry).

The promised economic boom hasn't materialized, Iraq is a bloody quagmire, and Osama bin Laden has gone from "dead or alive" to he-who-must-not-be-named.

Another reason, I'm sure, is a guilty conscience. At some level the people at that convention know that their designated hero is a man who never in his life took a risk or made a sacrifice for his country, and that they are impugning the patriotism of men who have.

That's why Band-Aids with Purple Hearts on them, mocking Mr. Kerry's war wounds and medals, have been such a hit with conventioneers, and why senior politicians are attracted to wild conspiracy theories about Mr. Soros.

It's also why Mr. Hastert, who knows how little the Bush administration has done to protect New York and help it rebuild, has accused the city of an "unseemly scramble" for cash after 9/11. Nothing makes you hate people as much as knowing in your heart that you are in the wrong and they are in the right.

But the vitriol also reflects the fact that many of the people at that convention, for all their flag-waving, hate America. They want a controlled, monolithic society; they fear and loathe our nation's freedom, diversity and complexity.

The convention opened with an invocation by Sheri Dew, a Mormon publisher and activist. Early rumors were that the invocation would be given by Jerry Falwell, who suggested just after 9/11 that the attack was God's punishment for the activities of the A.C.L.U. and People for the American Way, among others. But Ms. Dew is no more moderate: earlier this year she likened opposition to gay marriage to opposition to Hitler.

The party made sure to put social moderates like Rudy Giuliani in front of the cameras. But in private events, the story was different. For example, Senator Sam Brownback of Kansas told Republicans that we are in a "culture war" and urged a reduction in the separation of church and state.

Mr. Bush, it's now clear, intends to run a campaign based on fear. And for me, at least, it's working: thinking about what these people will do if they solidify their grip on power makes me very, very afraid.

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Heads in the Sand

NY Times
September 3, 2004

Heads in the Sand
By BOB HERBERT

When asked this week on CNN how long the U.S. military is likely to remain in Iraq, Senator John McCain replied "probably" 10 or 20 years. "That's not so bad," he said, adding, "We've been in Korea for 50 years. We've been in West Germany for 50 years."

Reporters have come to expect candor from Senator McCain, and in this case he didn't disappoint. But there weren't any speakers mounting the podium at the Republican National Convention to hammer home the message that G.I.'s would be in Iraq for a decade or two.

That's not the understanding most Americans had when this wretched war was sold to them, and it's not the view most Americans hold now.

If Senator McCain is correct (and the belief in official Washington is that he is), then boys and girls who are 5 or 10 years old now will get their chance in 2015 or 2020 to strap on the Kevlar and engage the Iraqi "insurgents" who, like the indigenous forces we fought in Vietnam, will never accept the occupation of their country by America.

Marcina Hale, a protester who came to New York this week from suburban Westport, Conn., said she has two teenage boys and that Iraq "is not a war that I'm willing to send my sons to." As the years pass and the casualties mount, that sentiment will only grow.

The truth is always the first casualty of politics. But there was a bigger disconnect than usual between the bizarre, hermetically sealed perspective that was on display in Madison Square Garden this week and the daunting events unfolding without respite in the real world.

Iraq is a mess. While the cartoonish Arnold Schwarzenegger was drawing huge laughs in the Garden and making cracks about economic "girlie men," reports were emerging about the gruesome murder of 12 Nepalese hostages who had traveled to Iraq less than two weeks earlier in search of work.

At the same time, an effort to disarm insurgents in the militant Baghdad slum of Sadr City collapsed, and the death toll among American forces in Iraq continued its relentless climb toward 1,000.

The Los Angeles Times noted yesterday that a report by the respected Royal Institute of International Affairs in London has concluded that Iraq will be lucky if it avoids a breakup and civil war. The often-stated U.S. goal of a full-fledged Iraqi democracy is beyond unlikely.

In Afghanistan, a legitimate front in the so-called war against terror, much of the country remains in the hands of warlords, and the opium trade is flourishing. Experts believe substantial amounts of money from that trade is flowing to terrorist groups.

In Israel, 16 people were killed by suicide bombers who blew themselves up on a pair of crowded buses on Tuesday. In Russia, a series of horrific terror attacks, in the air and on the ground, have cast a pall across the country.

Despite all the macho posturing and self-congratulating at the Republican convention, the wave of terror that's been unleashed on the world is only growing. The American-led war in Iraq is feeding that wave, causing it to swell rather than ebb.

Any serious person who looked around the world this week would have to wonder what the delegates at the G.O.P. convention were so happy about.

The Republican conventioneers spent the entire week reminding America that we were attacked on Sept. 11, 2001. But interestingly, there was hardly a mention by name of those actually responsible for the attacks - Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda.

Discussions about the nation's real enemies were taboo. We don't know where they are or what they're up to. The over-the-top venom of some of the speakers and delegates was reserved not for Osama, but for a couple of mild-mannered guys named John.

What Americans desperately need is a serious, honest discussion of where we go from here. If we're going to be in Iraq for 10 or 20 more years, the policy makers should say so, and tell us what that will cost in money and human treasure. The violence associated with such a long-term occupation is guaranteed to be appalling.

Vietnam tore this nation apart. As we've seen in this campaign, the wounds have yet to heal. Incredibly, we're now traveling a similarly tragic road in Iraq.

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