Spain revisited

George Bush, rebuffed in his initial attempt to get incoming Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Zapatero to understand his proper role as vassal to the US, has gone public,

scolded[ing] the people of Spain for voting Aznar out, saying, "Terrorists want the world to cower."

What happened in Spain, he said, will never happen in the United States. "They'll never shake the will of the United States. We understand the stakes and we will work with our friends to bring justice to the terrorists."

Donald Rumsfeld joined the chorus, singing "If you think that by feeding the alligator you'll be the last thing it eats, you're going to be wrong."

So in effect, Bush called the Spanish cowards and Rumsfeld called them appeasers. Yeah, that'll get them back with us.

Meanwhile, a piece in the Washington Post on Tuesday contained something that all the pundits seem to have found unnecessary: actual informed analysis on why the Spanish electorate voted the way it did.

The part that struck me the most was this:

Usually analysts expect a dramatic disaster such as last week's synchronized attacks on morning rush-hour commuters to solidify support for governing parties with well-defined law-and-order policies. At first, when officials blamed the Basque separatist movement known as ETA for the bombings, the pattern seemed to be holding, with opinion polls suggesting the ruling party might increase its grip on power.

That pretty much blows apart the charge that the Spanish are cutting and running in the face of terrorism. What turned things within the next couple of days was a combination of considerations:

- As I noted on Monday, there was a great deal of anger toward Aznar's government, rooted in the sense that it was manipulating intelligence for its own benefit. The Post notes that this was not the first time that issue had come up; it's been charged that Aznar's government "concealed damaging information about a major oil spill off Spain's Atlantic coast two years ago."

- There was "a lack of confidence in Spain's intelligence and security services, which failed to detect warning signals that the attack was imminent."

- A number of people were, as I suggested yesterday, unwilling to pay a price for a policy they opposed, that of support for the US in Iraq.

"We love America - Faulkner, Hemingway, Coca-Cola and Marilyn Monroe - but we have something against your government," said Luis Gonzales, 56, a high school Spanish literature teacher, as he stopped to view the rows of candles, flowers and makeshift signs at the central Puerta del Sol. "Aznar took us into a war that wasn't our war but only for the benefit of the extreme right and the American companies."

- And, significantly,

[s]everal [analysts] added that it also reflected a sense of alarm and despair that appears to cut across the political spectrum over the way the United States is wielding power in the world.

That opinion is by no means limited to Spain.

Across Europe and in key Muslim countries allied with the US, publics continue to hold negative views of the US, its handling of its leadership position in the world, and the war in Iraq,

according to the latest survey by the Pew Global Attitudes Project, as reported by the Christian Science Monitor on Wednesday.

The survey was conducted from late February to early March in nine nations: predominantly Muslim Jordan, Morocco, Pakistan and Turkey; France, Germany, Russia, and the UK in Europe; and the US.

"The divide between the US and Europe is only getting wider," says Carroll Doherty, editor of the Pew Research Center. "It's beyond a question of America's image, it's now to the point where people want action based on their opposition to the US."

USA Today says the results show

a sharp and growing disconnect between the views of Americans and people who live in other countries. ...

The overwhelming opposition in France and Germany has increased since a survey in May. In Britain, where last year most people backed the war, more are now opposed to the war than support it. ...

Only in the USA do most people think it has helped the war on terrorism. In the other eight nations, by double-digit margins, people say the war in Iraq has hurt the effort against terrorism. ...

Solid majorities in every country but the USA hold an unfavorable opinion of President Bush. In Morocco, Jordan and Pakistan, his unfavorable ratings are higher than Osama bin Laden's.

In fact, CSM says,

Support for Osama bin Laden remains strong in countries ranging from Jordan to Pakistan - where the Al Qaeda leader is viewed favorably by 65 percent of the population. ...

"It's not that people say they support what bin Laden did on Sept. 11[" Doherty said, "]but for people who oppose US policy, he is seen as someone who stands up to America."

An America that is viewed with wide and deep distrust. Majorities in six of the surveyed nations and a plurality in one - Russia - say the war in Iraq is not a sincere effort against terrorism but an effort to control Middle Eastern oil. Only in the US and the UK do majorities disagree. As an illustration of just how bad opinion has gotten in the Muslim world, USA Today says that, according to the survey,

70% of those in Jordan, 66% in Morocco and a 46% plurality in Pakistan say suicide bombings against Americans and other Westerners in Iraq are justified. Nearly one-third in Turkey agreed.

Disconnect, indeed.

It's appalling how insular we are, how ignorant of the world around us, of how we affect others and how we are viewed by them. Initially, I was going to say astonishing, but that's not the right word. Astonishing means astounding, greatly surprising, and this actually isn't. It is, rather, an expression of the point where our culture and human history intersect.

I'm tempted to go off on a long philosophical rampage about this, as friends know I'm apt to do at times, but the truth is that right now it's nosing toward 4:30 am and I'm really not up for it. I'll just say here that our national psyche is wrapped up in the Marlboro man (albeit without the cigarette these days) - strong, free, independent, self-reliant, do for yourself, go for yourself. Note that it doesn't matter whether we are strong, free, independent, and all the rest, only that we desire to see ourselves that way. As individuals, we admire those who "take no guff from anybody" and "don't suffer fools gladly." As a people, we "chart our own course." (In this light, it's significant that the GOP sneeringly claims that John Kerry wouldn't defend the US unless he "got permission from the UN" - we regard the idea of needing approval from anyone else to be demeaning.)

Add to this our position in the world. Throughout history, on a personal, a cultural, and a national level humans in positions of power have not felt the obligation - or, usually, even the inclination - to attend to the desires or concerns or attitudes of the less powerful, even less the powerless. Power leads to arrogance, to the conviction that things are as they are because they're supposed to be as they are, which leads to indifference. On that personal level, tell the truth: How often are you really aware of the server in the restaurant, the clerk in the store, even when you're interacting with them? When was the last time you really noticed the orderly in the hospital, the kid with the push broom in the grocery store? They are largely invisible to us, and in fact they are supposed to be just that.

Indeed, there can come a point below which they were not important enough to notice at all. When was the last time you watched where you were walking to make sure you didn't step on any ants?

That last is hyperbole, of course, but the point is valid. The US stands astride the world, a giant, and like any other giant feels that once it sets a course, it need have concern only with its own direction and it's up to others to avoid its footfalls. The USA Today story contained a revealing quote from Madeleine Albright:

"What I am worried about is that the psychology of partnership that prevailed for decades between Europe and the United States has been replaced by a psychology of competition."

But what existed for decades was not a partnership, but European submission to US desires and policies, a condition we saw (and, apparently, at least some here still see) as natural and right because of our power.

So give a people who believe they shouldn't care too much what others think the power to not have to care too much what others think, and what do you get? A people who aren't even aware of what others think - and would probably feel genuinely wronged if they ever did become aware of it. It is, as I said, appalling. But it's not astonishing.

Footnote one: I should note for the sake of completeness that a poll of Iraqis just released, about which I hope to have more later, had a more favorable but still decidedly mixed view of the US role in their nation.

Footnote two: One other thing about the events in Spain. As a contributor to BuzzFlash points out, doesn't the attack in Madrid thoroughly demolish the "flypaper" ad hoc, ex post facto justification for invading Iraq?

Jeopardy!

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What is Allstate?

JEOPARDY!
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The 4-h club uses one of these in its symbol.

As long as I'm already depressed, redux

It started with hopes so high, with both sides seemingly ready to finally make the necessary compromises.

United Nations officials will hold new separate meetings today with Cypriot President Tassos Papadopoulos and Turkish-Cypriot leader Rauf Denktash, amid general pessimism at the prospect of a peace deal emerging in the next five days.

In that case, Greece and Turkey will join in a new round of talks in Switzerland. If these also prove fruitless, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan will draft a deal that will be put to referenda on both sides of the ceasefire line on April 20. ...

It is unclear, however, whether the meetings - to be held at the resort of Burgenstock, on Lake Lucerne, according to sources in Switzerland yesterday - will be attended by Denktash.

Late on Monday, speaking to a delegation of hardline nationalists who called on him to resign in order to lead opposition to Annan's peace blueprint, Denktash said such a move could be on the cards.

"You know I will do that if necessary," he told the delegation. "We will all see whether this becomes necessary or not." Denktash is due in Ankara for consultations on Sunday.

Those consultations will very likely make a real difference. As long as Denktash feels he has Turkey (and Turkish troops) behind him, it's likely he'll continue to be obstinate. But Turkey, possibly wanting to get Cyprus off the table before a semi-autonomous Kurdistan becomes a reality, has previously said Denktash's "loyalty" was an issue. If Ankara tells him to shove it, we have more important things to attend to, I suspect things will turn around very quickly on Cyprus. The consultations, that is, will tell us much more about Turkey's intentions than Denktash's.

As long as I'm already depressed

From AP.

A thunderous car bomb shattered a five-story hotel housing foreigners in central Baghdad on Wednesday night, killing 27 people and leaving a jagged, 20-foot-wide crater just days before the anniversary of the start of the Iraq war.

Flames and heavy smoke burst skyward from the Mount Lebanon Hotel, torching nearby homes, offices and shops along with palm and eucalyptus trees. Rescuers pulled bodies from the rubble and searched for other victims of the attack, which wounded 41 people. ...

The blast ignited at least eight cars, one of which was hurled into a store. Some vehicles were little more than mangled piles of metal. The explosion blew bricks, air conditioners, furniture, wires and other debris hundreds of yards from the hotel. ...

Across the street from the Mount Lebanon Hotel, the one-story house of a Christian family of seven was virtually destroyed. The bodies of a man and a woman were pulled from the debris.

A two-story annex belonging to the Baghdad Hospital was in flames, with one side sheared off. A separate two-story complex of offices and shops was also badly damaged.

The bomb was estimated by the US military as containing 1,000 pounds of explosives in a mix of plastic explosives and artillery shells. In the hours following the blast, some officials named Abu Musab al-Zarqawi as a chief suspect. That is a real possibility, but Zarqawi is becoming Iraq's version of al-Qaeda: Every attack, it seems, is somehow "linked" to him by the authorities.

The hotel was a so-called "soft" target, not as heavily protected as some other places. But why was it targeted? Interesting, although the place catered to foreigners,

some residents in the area said they believed guests left the hotel a week ago after its management received threats.

I wonder if the bombers knew that. And if they did, would it have mattered.

Oh no oh no oh no

From the International Herald-Tribune for March 17. What's past has again proved to be prologue.

Kosovska Mitrovica, Serbia-Montenegro - Serbs and ethnic Albanians traded heavy gunfire Wednesday across the Ibar River, killing at least six people and wounding almost 300 in the worst outbreak of violence in this ethnically divided city since a bus bombing three years ago. ...

Clashes between Serbs and ethnic Albanians were also reported in several other towns in the region. ...

[N]ear Pristina, hundreds of ethnic Albanians broke through barricades erected by U.N. police and NATO-led peacekeepers to march on the Serb village of Caglavica. U.N. spokeswoman Angela Joseph said there were reports that hand grenades had been thrown and that two Serb houses were on fire. ...

In a live radio broadcast from Caglavica, an unidentified witness said people were attacking each other with sticks and stones in village streets, amid the sound of explosions and gunfire.

In the western village of Belopolje, ethnic Albanians drove out Serb residents and set fire to their houses, Joseph said. And in Pec, 50 miles west of Pristina, ethnic Albanians had attacked the regional U.N. headquarters and damaged U.N. vehicles.

Sometimes reality breaks through, sometimes I get reminded in a very visceral way of the existence of the depths of hatred, not even for identifiable individuals, but against whole groups of people, of which the human heart is capable, a level of sustained rage beyond my experience and comprehension. This is not even the mind of a political terrorist, who thinks they are acting on behalf of some cause, this is wanting to maim, to kill, to inflict suffering and pain and death, on another simply because they are another.

Sometimes the reality breaks through. I so much regret when it does. Because at those times I just want to give up....

Who?

From an email making the rounds, based on the fact that Hu Jintao was named chief of the Communist Party in China.

Scane: The Oval Office. George Bush is at his desk. Condolezza Rice enters.

George: Condi! Nice to see you. What's happening?
Condi: Sir, I have the report about the new leader of China.
George: Great. Let's hear it.
Condi: Hu is the new leader of China.
George: That's what I want to know.
Condi: That's what I'm telling you.
George: That's what I'm asking you. Who is the new leader of China?
Condi: Yes.
George: I mean the fellow's name.
Condi: Hu.
George: The guy in China.
Condi: Hu.
George: The new leader of China.
Condi: Hu.
George: The Chinese!
Condi: Hu is leading China.
George: What are you asking me for?
Condi: I'm telling you. Hu is leading China.
George: Well, I'm asking you. Who is leading China?
Condi: That's the man's name.
George: That's whose name?
Condi: Yes.
George: Will you or will you not tell me the name of the new leader of China?
Condi: Yes, sir.
George: Yassir? You mean Arafat is in China? I thought he was in the Middle East.
Condi: That's correct.
George: Then who is in China?
Condi: Yes, sir.
George: Yassir is in China?
Condi: No, sir.
George: Then who is?
Condi: Yes, sir.
George: Yassir?
Condi: No, sir.
George: Look, Condi. I need to know the name of the new leader of China. Get me the Secretary General of the UN on the phone. I bet he knows.
Condi: Kofi?
George: No, thanks.
Condi: You want Kofi?
George: No.
Condi: You don't want Kofi.
George: No. But now that you mention it, I could use a glass of milk. And then get me the UN.
Condi: Yes, sir.
George: Not Yassir! The guy at the UN.
Condi: Kofi?
George: No, milk! Will you please make the call?
Condi: Call who?
George: Who is the guy at the UN?
Condi: Hu is the guy in China.
George: Will you stay out of China!
Condi: Yes, sir.
George: And stay out of the Middle East! Just get me the guy at the UN!
Condi: Kofi?
George: All right! Light with sugar. Now get on the phone. (Condi picks up the phone.)
Condi: Rice here.
George: Rice? Good idea. And a couple of egg rolls, too.

The only possible good news about the new Medicareless law

The truth, some say, will out. And hopefully payback will indeed be a bitch.

Washington, March 16 (New York Times) - When President Bush signed into law the biggest expansion of Medicare in 38 years last December, the moment was widely considered one of unalloyed triumph for the Republicans. ...

But the partisan war over Medicare did not end; if anything, it has escalated in recent days. And Mr. Bush and the Republicans have arguably wound up with more headaches than political advantage from the new law, at least so far.

Such headaches - may they be not cluster headaches, not migraines, but clusters of migraines - are only what they deserve.

- They lied about the cost.
- They threatened to fire the chief actuary of the program if he told Congress the truth about the cost.
- They kept a "15 minute" vote open for three hours while they convinced a few waverers to change their votes, "convincing" which included political threats and possibly offers of bribes.
- They lied about the effects of the program.
- They packed it full of corporate favors, including a ban on "Medigap" insurance for drugs as of 2006, hindrances to import of cheaper drugs from Canada, and a prohibition against the government using its bulk purchasing power to negotiate lower prices.
- And now they're using public monies to tout the program as a "good thing" under the claim of "educating the public."

Political headaches? That's the least they deserve.

Evil is as evil does

The Toronto Star reports that Israeli officials have charged that Palestinian militants tried to smuggle a bomb through an Israeli military checkpoint with the help of an unwitting 11-year-old boy.

Israeli authorities said the boy, sixth-grader Abdullah Quraan, was carrying explosives and that his handlers intended to blow him up near the checkpoint.

Moran Bokent, 19, a military policewoman monitoring the checkpoint, said she checked the boy's backpack. "I opened it and saw on top a box with wires coming out and a plate with metal balls on it."

She then called the bomb squad.

The boy, and others, claimed the bag he was carrying - swiftly blown up by soldiers - contained auto parts.

Regular readers know that I have been very critical of Israeli policies regarding the Palestinians, including how they are treated at roadblocks. And with the bag destroyed, there is obviously no way to tell if it was actually a bomb or not. But I can hardly fault Israel for a "better safe than sorry" attitude in cases like this.

What I wanted to say here, however, is that if the charge is true, if some murderous fanatic (or fanatics) tried to turn an unwitting 6th-grader into a walking bomb, there are no words to express the depth of my contempt.

Everything you need to know about George Bush's economic policies, in under 30 seconds

Courtesy of the March 17 New York Times.

New Delhi - Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, encountering the other side of a tempestuous debate in the United States, sought to assure Indians on Tuesday that the Bush administration would not try to halt the outsourcing of high-technology jobs to their country.

Powell called "outsourcing" - corporate-speak for firing people here to hire others for less money somewhere else - "a natural effect of the global economic system and the rise of the Internet and broadband communications."

Fruitcakes! Getcha fruitcakes right here!

Lifetime supply!

Dayton, Tenn. (AP. March 17) - The county that was the site of the Scopes "Monkey Trial" over the teaching of evolution is asking lawmakers to amend state law so the county can charge homosexuals with crimes against nature.

The Rhea County commissioners approved the request 8-0 Tuesday.

Commissioner J.C. Fugate, who introduced the measure, also asked the county attorney to find a way to enact an ordinance banning homosexuals from living in the county.

"We need to keep them out of here,'' Fugate said.

Speaking of lower life forms...

Frontiers of law enforcement

Apparently infected by a mosquito-borne parasitic worm that cuts off blood flow to brain cells, District Attorney Donald Williams in Kingston, NY, has charged two Unitarian Universalist ministers with

criminal offenses Monday for marrying 13 gay couples in what is believed to be the first time in the United States that clergy members have been prosecuted for performing same-sex ceremonies,

AP reported. They were charged with multiple counts of solemnizing a marriage without a license. Each count could bring a fine of $500 or up to two years in jail.

The same charges were earlier leveled against Jason West, mayor of New Paltz, who married 25 same-sex couples on February 27 before being stopped by a court order.

Williams said his decision

was influenced by New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer's opinion that gay marriage is illegal in New York and by the injunction issued by a state supreme court justice against West.

Scene one: an auto showroom.

"I want to buy a car."

"You're undermining the auto industry!"

Scene two: a military recruiting station

"I want to join the army."

"You're undermining the military!"

Scene three: an employment agency

"I want to get a job."

"You're undermining the economy!"

Scene four: City Hall, License Bureau

"My partner and I want to get married."

"You're undermining marriage!"

Footnote: The battle is far from over.

In Oregon, Multnomah County commissioners decided Monday that they will continue to issue gay marriage licenses despite legal objections from the state.

About 2,000 gay couples from around the nation have flocked to Portland to be married since a March 3 county review of state law concluded that denying such applications would be unconstitutional.

Portland remains the only major city in the United States where gay couples can get married.

I hear Portland is a wonderful place for a honeymoon.

Update to the Footnote: Actually, Oregon as a whole is rather pretty.

(CNN, March 16) - Commissioners in a second Oregon county voted Tuesday to begin issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples.

The board of commissioners of Benton County agreed to follow in the footsteps of Multnomah County, a Benton spokeswoman said.

The county's district attorney said county officials will begin distributing the licenses March 24. Benton County, about 70 miles southwest of Portland, is home to the city of Corvallis and Oregon State University.

Meanwhile, in Massachusetts, efforts are continuing toward a proposed amendment to the state constitution to ban same-sex marriages. The initial attempt floundered but a "compromise" that would define "marriage" as one man and one woman but allow for same-sex "civil unions" has gained support at a constitutional convention. If approved by the convention, the proposal would also have to pass both houses of the state legislature in 2005 and succeed as a ballot question in the 2006 elections in order to be added to the constitution.

The problem with "civil unions" is that they write second-class citizenship into the constitution, because even if interpreted as being legally the same as marriage in terms of Massachusetts law and benefits, they not only provide less protection anywhere else but they are meaningless in terms of federal law and benefits. One obvious example - April 15 being less than a month away - is that such couples could not file federal income taxes as "married" but would have to pay separately at the higher "single" rate.

Decades ago, we admitted as a society that as a legal principle, "separate but equal" is not equal. Now, however, we're expected to enshrine "separate and unequal" into the most basic legal documents of our governments. Have we - skip the obvious jokes - learned nothing?

Just thought you'd like some good news

The March 16 Toronto Star reports that an alliance including 80 health ministries, two drug companies, UNICEF, and the World Bank, intended to

rid the world of elephantiasis, one of the most disfiguring and disabling tropical diseases, has already had remarkable success in 37 countries, says a new report.

The alliance, headed by the World Health Organization, has led to the "fastest ramp up of a global public health program in history," and the disease could be eliminated in 20 years, according to the report, released today on the eve of the alliance's third annual meeting in Cairo.

Already, more than 80 million people, including 30 million children, have been treated for lymphatic filariasis (LF), which in its final stages causes elephantiasis, a horrible swelling of arms, legs and genitals.

The disease is caused by a mosquito-borne parasitic worm that invades the lymphatic system.

Footnote: If you go to the link, there is one mistake in the article; it says that John Merrick, the "elephant man," suffered from elephantiasis. He didn't. It was formerly believed that he suffered from neurofibromatosis, but it's now believed that he actually had Proteus Syndrome.

A Spanish influence?

Tuesday morning, Bush met with Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende of the Netherlands; afterwards, there was the usual photo op and a few questions. BuzzFlash makes note of the exchange that occurred when Bush was asked about Kerry's statement that some world leaders had told him privately that they supported him over Bush and Shrub wound up getting a pointed evasion from Balkenende:

President Bush: I think it's - if you're going to make an accusation in the course of a presidential campaign, you ought to back it up with facts.

Prime Minister Balkenende: I won't talk about that issue.

President Bush: Okay, fine.

Prime Minister Balkenende: It has to do with the campaign here in the United States.

However, BuzzFlash missed the next exchange, which I think is much more significant. Bush was asked if he'd convinced Balkenende to keep Dutch troops in Iraq.

President Bush: The Prime Minister will make a - the appropriate decision. It's his decision to make. We both agree that a free Iraq is essential to a peaceful world. We both understand the stakes. We both know that al Qaeda is interested in fighting us in Iraq. How do we know? We know because they've said so publicly. Al Qaeda understands the stakes. Al Qaeda wants us out of Iraq, because al Qaeda wants to use Iraq as an example of defeating freedom and democracy. And so the Prime Minister has got issues at home that he'll deal with. But there's no doubt that he understands the stakes and the historic opportunity with which we're faced.

Prime Minister Balkenende: It's good to add that we did not talk about the situation after the half of July. That is the responsible of the Dutch government and Dutch parliament and we'll talk about it, as I made it clear already, earlier. But I think it's very good to look always to the situation of the Iraq people and the international struggle against terrorism. Therefore, it's so important that countries are working together and they can draw the same lines. That's very important, but it has nothing to, at this moment, to the decision-making as far as the situation after the 1st of July is concerned.

Translation: Bush is still in there pitching but the Netherlands has made no commitment to keeping troops in Iraq beyond July 1. In fact, it sounds more like Balkenende is laying the ground for a withdrawal.

Why that might be true is easy to see: Balkenende's Christian Democrats, like their soulmates of the Popular Party in Spain, are a generally conservative body facing massive public opposition to their involvement in Iraq. In Spain, the PP tried to downplay the whole issue, simply making a seemingly offhand reference a while back saying there'd be no troop withdrawal "in the near future," which sounded to me like an attempt to look like they were stepping toward the majority position without actually changing policy. In Spain, that proved to be not good enough. Balkenende, by hinting at the possibility of a definite change after July 1, may be trying to avoid that outcome.

Jeopardy!

YESTERDAY'S QUESTION
What is a lion? (Acceptable: Leo)

JEOPARDY!
Classic Logos for $600

Hands cupped together, holding a house and a car, was the classic symbol for this insurer.

Viva Zapatero!

The incoming government of Spain under Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero has indicated its intent to chart a foreign policy independent of that of the US. As reported by Reuters on March 15, Zapatero "said he wanted 'cordial' ties with Washington but 'magnificent' relations with France and Germany."

More significantly, keeping true to a campaign promise, Zapatero

indicated Monday he would pull his troops out of the "disastrous" occupation of Iraq....

"Mr Blair and Mr Bush must do some reflection and self-criticism... you can't organize a war with lies," he said in remarkably frank comments for the next prime minister of Western Europe's youngest democracy and fifth largest economy. ...

Zapatero, due to take office within the next month, repeated several times Monday his campaign pledge to pull out troops unless the United Nations takes charge in Iraq by mid-year - a shift in control that he said was unlikely. ...

"We have been very clear about the risk and the threat that we were all facing with this illegal war in Iraq, and unfortunately Spain has paid the price," Spain's likely next foreign minister Miguel Angel Moratinos told Reuters.

"The sooner we admit that the wrong policy has been made, the better for the future of the international community."

Those are both bold and welcome words. It remains to be seen how faithfully they can be kept when the US turns on the pressure, as it most assuredly will. The line of argument is already being laid out.

Some analysts said it could be an alarming first case of Islamist militants influencing, by violence, the outcome of a major Western election. ...

Sunday would go down in history as "the day when Islamic fundamentalism was seen as dictating the outcome of a European election," said Wilfried Martens, head of the European People's Party, an umbrella group for European conservative parties.

Now, according to polls, over 90% of Spaniards opposed their nation's involvement in the war in Iraq and Zapatero made the pledge to get out a centerpiece of his election campaign. Prior to the bombings, Aznar's party had been expected to win by a few percentage points, holding on to power but with a reduced majority. In other words, it wasn't exactly a runaway and the Socialists were already expected to make gains.

Then there was

anger over Aznar's handling of the suspected al Qaeda attack on Madrid commuter trains that also wounded 1,500 people.

After Thursday's attacks Aznar's government initially blamed the armed Basque separatist group ETA, which denied involvement.

As I mentioned yesterday, people felt that Aznar deliberately played down the possibility of an Islamic source for the attacks for its own political reasons.

So the war was unpopular, the government was losing support, it was felt the government manipulated a tragedy for its own ends, and the attacks were considered proof of the foolishness of the policy. (Gee, this sounds oddly familiar.) Yet the reactionaries would have it that unless you continue to vote for people and policies you oppose, "the terrorists win." (Compare and contrast Wilfried Martens and Rep. Tom Cole, R-OK.)

This is not only foolish, it's an attack on the very idea of democracy. Even assuming that it was the conviction that it was Islamic radicals who carried out the bombings which tipped the balance toward the Socialists, it still means that the voters of Spain - or at least the greatest number of them - have declared that they are not willing to bear the cost of continuing a policy which they oppose. That is their right as a people. (Full disclosure which I'm certain isn't necessary: I'm happy that they made the decision they did.) To suggest otherwise, to suggest that they had no right to do what they did and by doing so they have surrendered to terrorists, is nothing short of evil.

Update: As reported in the March 16 International Herald Tribune, the prowar crowd is starting to pile on Spain.

"Al Qaeda won the election," said a former conservative member of the Spanish Parliament, Pedro Schwartz....

"It's appeasement. The terrorists have gotten away with it. There's no better victory for them than in cowing the enemy."

"Appeasement," indeed "appeasement at its worst," was also the epithet of choice for Friedbert Pfluger, the foreign policy spokesman for Germany's opposition Christian Democratic Party, who also called the Spain's intention to leave Iraq "naive."

Andre Glucksmann, a leading French political essayist, charged that in just three days,

"the killers turned public opinion around. How can the murderers not come to the conclusion that they're the ones who decide and that terrorism is stronger than democracy?

"If the Socialists keep their promise to pull out of Iraq, they will be backing the terrorists' deepest conviction: that crime pays...."

He also labeled Spanish voters as ousting Aznar's Popular Party because they were "afraid of punishing the real responsible party."

Further, the Sunday issue of the Frankfurter Allgemeine newspaper (Germany) claimed support for Spain was "isolationist logic" which "only bring[s] shame to the victims."

I don't know if Zapatero and his party were prepared for the tsunami of vituperation from the screeching harpies of the right that they doubtless were in for, for the horrible crime of actually proposing to do what they said they would do, hopefully they were - but what I find significant here is how much of the spittle-frothed condemnations are directed not against the Socialist Worker's Party itself but against the people of Spain, who are, by these writers, ignorant, naive, cowardly, appeasers who bring shame to those who died.

It's hard for me to contain the level of utter disgust and revulsion I feel for this condescending, cruel, demeaning, insulting, evil, self-serving bull spewed out by these subhuman scumbags. How dare they!

Happily for the sake of my composure, the rantings of the bloodthirsty can be demolished with just a couple of facts which they omit - being fact-challenged being a congenital condition of the right.

The first is that, as was noted above but still generally overlooked, Zapatero proposes to pull out Spanish troops when they end their rotation this summer - unless there is a UN mandate for a UN force to replace the US as providers of security. Now, no one actually expects that to happen, which I think reveals a lot about Washington's expectations and aims. The point is, however, that Zapatero did not say Spain would have no part of Iraq, rather he in effect said that Spain would have no part of being support troops for US intentions, a significant difference. Those who insist he can't take that path are actually saying he can't contradict US policy, which sounds like a demand that he surrender national sovereignty.

Second, it omits the level of anger against Aznar's government for its attempt to point fingers at ETA and thus away from any other source before there was any basis to do so. Indeed, there is evidence that the attempt was conscious and deliberate: Foreign Minister Ana Palacio

sent directives to all Spanish embassies urging her country's diplomats to stress the ETA connection, European officials said.

"You should use any opportunity to confirm ETA's responsibility for these brutal attacks, thus helping to dissipate any type of doubt that certain interested parties may want to promote," the newspaper El Pais quoted Palacio as writing in a memorandum.

As a commentary in the Tuesday edition of the Greek newspaper Kathimerini puts it:

[D]emocracy's sacrosanct principle is that, at least on fundamental issues, the rulers have no right to lie or mislead, and they have no right to put personal and party interest above the common good. This principle was blatantly violated by former Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar. His haste to blame ETA, the Basque separatist organization, for Madrid's gory terrorist attacks was condemned by the electorate.

Third and perhaps most importantly, all the accusations might have had some validity if and only if the bombings changed opinions about involvement in Iraq. But by universal agreement, 90% or more of the people of Spain were against the war and against sending troops. Zapatero campaigned against the war. The very most that could be said for the bombings in terms of the election is that in some people's minds they changed the relative importance of the issue of Iraq as compared to others. Considering that the Popular Party got nearly 40% of the vote, it would mean that something approaching a third of those opposed to involvement in Iraq still voted for Aznar's party despite that opinion and despite the bombings. Lacking any evidence the attacks actually caused a change of opinion - and there isn't any - the claim that the vote is an act of appeasement is not only bogus, it's contemptible.

Update to the Update: David Brooks and Edward Luttwak add their voices to the cacophany of condemnation in the March 16 New York Times. Brooks relies on the standbys of "appeasement" and "shameful," while Luttwak says he

cannot take seriously the Zapateros of Europe, who seem bent on validating the crudest caricatures of "old European" cowardly decadence. ...

The Spanish political community has failed the test of terrorism.

He also says it was "colossal irresponsibility" to have criticized Aznar's government for accusing ETA - even though the accusation was based on nothing, contradicted earlier experience with ETA, was denied by ETA, and was, it now appears, altogether wrong.

But that's the sucker logic we get from the right - sucker logic being the sort of trickery that wins cheap bar bets, that sounds good so long as you don't have time actually think about it. Brooks, for example, says that

reversing course in the wake of a terrorist attack is inexcusable. I don't care what the policy is. You do not give terrorists the chance to think that their methods work.

Now aside from the fact that neither the Spanish public nor the Socialist Worker's Party "changed course," since both were opposed to the war and the deployment from the beginning, and aside also from the much-ignored fact that Zapatero said his first priority is resisting terrorism, consider what Brooks is really arguing: You don't get attacked, there's no reason to change your policy. You do get attacked, you dare not change your policy. Therefore, you can never your change policy, no matter what.

Luttwak, however, wins the bizarro prize here.

Paradoxically, Mr. Zapatero can redeem Spanish democracy only if he repudiates the popular mandate he received and announces that there will be no withdrawal from Iraq because of any act of terrorism, Muslim or Basque.

Now, of course Basque terrorism would have nothing to do with Iraq, so it's inclusion there is stupidly irrelevant and will be ignored to avoid causing Luttwak unnecessary embarrassment.

What he's saying here is that the freely-expressed will of a people is not democracy unless it results in policies of which he approves - and that democracy is expressed in candidates campaigning on a pledge, getting elected on that pledge, and immediately declaring they will do exactly the opposite of what they pledged.

Spanish democracy needs no "redemption" from such as Edward Luttwak.

Footnote to the Update to the Update: In what was for me an unexpected development, the New York Times editorial board had this to say on the matter:

If Al Qaeda organized the bombings, as now seems to be the case, the outcome may be seen by some as a win for the terrorists. We disagree.

After saying the bombings "scrambled the political calculus," the editorial says

Spaniards who might not otherwise have voted turned out in large numbers and voted against a government that they opposed before the bombs went off. Others may have turned against the government over its early emphatic insistence that the bombings had been the work of Basque, rather than Islamic, terrorists. Either way, it was an exercise in healthy democracy, in which a change of government is simply that, and not a change of national character.

It is possible to support the battle against terrorism wholeheartedly and still oppose a political party that embraces the same cause.

I wouldn't have expected to have cause to say this, but right on, New York Times.

Jeopardy!

YESTERDAY'S QUESTION
What is a unicorn?

JEOPARDY!
Classic Logos for $200

Metro's bird lost out to this animal to be the symbol of the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studio.

Voting on Haiti

Jean-Bertrand Aristide has arrived in Jamaica for what's expected to be an eight to ten week visit with his daughters while he makes plans for a permanent home in exile in another country, AP reports on March 15.

He'd sent his daughters to the US for their safety when things began to deteriorate in Haiti.

Interim Haitian Prime Minister Gerard Latortue, installed by a US-backed "council of sages," had previously called the decision by Jamaican Prime Minister P.J. Patterson to allow Aristide's visit an "unfriendly act" that would increase tensions in Haiti. He responded to Aristide's arrival in Kingston by suspending both diplomatic relations with Jamaica and Haiti's membership in the Caribbean Community and suggesting Aristide was paying Haitians "to destabilize the country."

(Sidebar: This was after Francois Bozize, president of the Central African Republic, decided he would "allow" Aristide to leave the country. Remember how when Aristide got there we were assured he had gone willingly and was in "no way" a prisoner?)

Breaking ties to the Caribbean Community likely has very little to do with Aristide or Jamaica and a great deal to do with the fact that CARICOM

has called for an international investigation into Aristide's claim that he was abducted by U.S. officials and forced to leave Haiti.

Okay, show of hands here: How many of you think that Latortue's anger has to do with public safety, that is, protecting the lives and property of innocent Haitians, and how many of you think it's about government safety, that it, protecting the positions of the clique now establishing itself in Port-au-Prince?

Footnote: If any of your are unsure of your vote, you should read the following carefully. It's from BBC News, March 14.

Top US general Richard Myers has warned it will take time to restore stability in Haiti after the departure of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

Speaking during a brief visit, General Myers said violence would not be tolerated and would be "dealt with". ...

General Myers said that it was not the mission of the peacekeepers to take sides, adding that the troops will only fire when fired upon....

Reports say the mission of the peacekeepers has expanded from securing key installations to disarming the local population, particularly in areas where support for the former president is strong.

Read that last part again and tell me how that is not taking sides. And when you're done, explain how violence can't be tolerated now but apparently could be until Aristide was forced out. Then vote.

Way off topic, but dammit....

Prince is getting into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Chubby Checker isn't.

Doggone it, that's not right.

Just a passing thought

Atrios has a nice excerpt from Donald Rumsfeld's appearance on Face the Nation on Sunday, showing Mr. "We may still find banned weapons in Iraq" reduced to a stuttering boob after claiming that no one in the administration had said Iraq was an "immediate" threat only to be faced with a quote where he said exactly that.

Sometimes I wonder, though, if instead of playing these stupid parsing games we should respond to claims that "we never said it was imminent" by just saying "of course you did" and then letting them stew in it, focusing instead on the fact that the more they distance themselves from terms like "imminent" and "immediate" the weaker their own case for the war becomes. That is, by their own words they are undermining their own previous arguments.

The war was, after all, supposedly a response to a "grave and gathering threat." But if the supposed threat, even if "gathering," wasn't "immediate," why couldn't we - for example - wait as inspections continued for a few more months, as Hans Blix said the inspectors needed? What was the rush?

Just askin'.

Correction: It appears i misread the excerpt; the quote that flustered Rumsfeld seems to have come from Vice President Cheney, not Rumsfeld himself.

This is a bit creepy

Anyone who knows me knows that I'm not a conspiracy buff. I tend to doubt claims of overarching plots that would involve hundreds of people keeping completely silent about what they knew, sometimes for decades.

I have never thought we have been visited by creatures from another planet. (Leaving aside some of the obvious punch lines.)

I do not believe JFK was assassinated by the CIA.

More recently, I was amused by the claims last fall that Saddam Hussein already had been captured and was being held so he could be "caught" at the most politically-beneficial time for the Bush administration. I was doubly amused when after he was nabbed in December the story smoothly segued to it being Osama bin Laden who was in the bag, waiting to be "seized" at the right time.

That last idea got new circulation a few days ago when Iranian state radio reported exactly that: bin Laden had been captured and Bush was withholding the announcement until the elections.

The deeply weird part, however, is that when Secretary of Homeland Security (a title that retains its own measurable creepiness value) Tom Ridge was asked about it by reporters during a trip to Bangkok, Thailand this week - specifically, he was asked if it was true that bin Laden is hemmed in and would be caught or killed closer to November to boost Bush's popularity - he evaded the question. Instead, he gave some lame answer about how

"with the help" of American allies, the United States continues to pursue him. Ridge also said he has "no doubt within time" the United States will track bin Laden down and "bring him to justice."

You'd think he'd make some kind of denial, either vague - "we're after him and we're gonna get him and it's going to be as soon as we can get him, whether that's next week, next month, or next year, but we're gonna get him" - or angrily specific - "absolutely false and the idea that we would let that murderous madman remain free for the sake of petty political advantage is outrageous." But he did neither.

Very, very strange. : shudder :

Link via BuzzFlash - which, it should be noted, endorses the "Osama October Surprise" idea and earlier promoted the "Saddam October Surprise" notion.

Still, questions

Attention is starting to focus more on an Islamic source for the bloody bombings in Madrid.

Spanish authorities have announced the arrest of five men in the case - three Moroccans and two naturalized Spaniards - one of who was named in an indictment last fall as a "follower" of Imad Yarkas, now imprisoned in Spain under a charge of helping to plan the 9/11 attacks in the US.

There is also the videotape, supposedly done by "al-Qaeda's military spokesman in Europe" which says that his group is behind to blasts. However, the man, who identified himself as Abu Dujan al-Afgani, is said to be unknown to intelligence services. Still, it may mean something that he was described as speaking Arabic with a Moroccan accent.

Meanwhile, ETA has repeatedly stated that it was not involved in the attacks.

While the finger of guilt has yet to be clearly pointed, there has definitely been a political fallout from the attack.

BBC correspondents in Madrid say people are on the streets protesting against the government late into [Saturday] night in the wake of the alleged al-Qaeda claim.

They say that if voters believe it was an al-Qaeda attack, they could turn against the ruling party when they go to the polls in a matter of hours. ...

The demonstrators charge that the government downplayed the theory that it might have been al-Qaeda.

They say the government is scared of losing votes in Sunday's general election because of its unpopular decision to support the invasion of Iraq.

That is, they were charging that the government was investigating an act of terrorism with its own political future in mind. My word! How could they think such a thing? Why do they hate Spain so much?

Their hatred knew no bounds, it seems.

Madrid, Spain (AP) - Voters ousted Spain's ruling party in elections Sunday, with many saying they were shaken by bombings in Madrid and furious with the government for backing the Iraq war and making their country a target for al-Qaida. ...

Turnout was high at 76 percent. Many voters said Thursday's bombings, which killed 200 people and wounded 1,500, was a decisive factor, along with the government's much-criticized handling of the initial investigation.

Terrorist-lovers.

What He Shoulda Said Dept.: In reacting to the bombings, according to the Beeb, UK Prime Minister Tony Blair

said each generation had its wars to fight, but the war of this generation "is not a conventional war."

"It is fought by dangerous fanatics," he said. "They are terrorists without any mercy and without any thought."

He then added thoughtfully "and the people that we're against aren't any better, either."

And the beat goes on

Thursday, local time: Two US soldiers killed when the vehicle they were in was hit by a roadside bomb in Habbiniyah.

Saturday morning: Two US soldiers killed, five wounded by an IED (improvised explosive device) in central Tikrit.

Saturday afternoon: A store owner was killed, two passers-by wounded, when an explosion rocked a Muslim clothing store on a busy Baghdad street.

Saturday night: Three US soldiers killed when their patrol struck a roadside bomb in Baghdad.

Sunday morning: One US soldier killed by an IED in Baghdad.

Sunday night: Twin suicide bombs in the Israeli port city of Ashdod kill 10 people and wounded 20 more; Hamas and the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades claim joint responsibility.

Monday morning: Israeli helicopters fire at several Palestinian locations in Gaza City.

Meanwhile, Back At The Ranch Dept.: Prominent Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr has slammed the interim constitution as "a sale of Iraq, and it is a stamp of shame for whoever signed it." He demanded all parties to veto the document and endorse a new one.

Jeopardy!

YESTERDAY'S QUESTION
What are testimonials?

Sorry, I forgot to give you today's Final Jeopardy! category yesterday. But since you weren't actually betting anything, well, I forgive myself.

FINAL JEOPARDY!
Astronomy

A large but faint constellation, Monoceros represents this mythical creature.

And this is how he does it

One of the five Britons recently released from Guantanamo Bay told a British paper that US guards at the camp tortured him, the BBC reported on Friday.

Jamel Udeen, of Manchester,

says he was beaten by men in riot gear after refusing to have a mystery injection. ...

They were shackled and attached to metal rings on the floor during interrogation, Mr Udeen claimed....

[He] said inmates were kept in wire cages with concrete floors and no protection from the elements.

He claims water to the cells was often cut off before prayers so Muslim prisoners could not wash themselves as their religion instructs them to. ...

[T]heir "recreation" time involved being untied and allowed to walk up and down a strip of gravel.

"They actually said: 'You have no rights here'. After a while, we stopped asking for human rights - we wanted animal rights."

In fact, methods such as sleep and food deprivation, being shackled and hooded in cortorted positions for hours, being slapped and shaken just short of permanent injury, methods dubbed "torture lite",

are now a prevalent part of the U.S.-led war on terror, human rights groups say.

These methods - which U.S. officials describe as "stress and duress" rather than torture - recall the "moderate physical pressure" Israel's Shin Bet security service uses on detainees believed to be withholding information about impending attacks.

According to Israeli security sources, the Shin Bet has shared interrogation expertise with American counterparts since the mid-1990s amid fears of new Islamist violence on U.S. soil.

So under the Clinton administration we began to learn from the Israelis how to break people physically and mentally without leaving any evidence and while pretending that we weren't doing anything all that bad, not really, no. Now, apparently, those in Gitmo are the targets of such means.

Which brings us back to those just released and an additional question. The five UK citizens were sent back home after being determined to be "low risk." But to be blunt, I just don't understand how that can possibly be true. I mean, after all, the US justifies the total lack of civil or even human rights for those trapped in Gitmo on the grounds that they are "the baddest of the bad."

in fact, they're so bad that

Pentagon officials have confirmed that Guantanamo detainees may still be kept in detention, even if they are found not guilty by a military tribunal ... if they are considered a security risk.

If found guilty, they could also be held beyond any sentence laid down by the tribunal.

And they're so confident in the prisoners' guilt that a Pentagon memo describing a proposed annual review process for them says that it gives a prisoner the chance "to explain why he is no longer a threat to the United States...." (And have you stopped beating your wife, too?)

So how in hell could these guys have been "low risk?" There were supposed to be no such people at Guantanamo, only, again, "the baddest of the bad." Could it be - no matter how incredible it seems - but could it possibly be that the militarists occupying the White House exaggerated just the least little bit? If so, How many of the other "baddest" are actually "low risk?" And how would we ever know, since the Bushites' position is that either we take their word for it or we're on the side of the terrorists?

And how is it that after two years of detention and interrogation under inhumane conditions, after two years of being held without a hearing, without evidence, without even a charge, these men are in effect just shipped off to the UK without even a "sorry for the inconvenience?" And how is it that it took two years for the US to determine they were "low risk" when Britain managed to release them all without charge in a little over a day following their return?

How is it all possible?

Footnote: "Baddest of the bad," indeed. One of the five, Jamal al-Harith,

was picked up by the Taliban in Afghanistan because he had a British passport and couldn't account for his presence. U.S. forces found him in a Taliban jail.

I wonder how long it took him to realize that the US forces were not going to rescue him.

Update: All five returnees have now accused US forces of mistreating them during their time in captivity. They spoke of beatings, extended sensory deprivation, being forced to hold painfully contorted positions, and being interrogated while kneeling "with a guy standing on the backs of my legs and another holding a gun to my head." They also said that before their release, the FBI tried to get them to sign statements admitting links to terrorism. All refused.

Footnote to the Update, Bizarro Award Dept.: Secretary of State Colin Powell denied accusations of mistreatment, saying "because we are Americans, we don't abuse people who are in our care."

Uh, "care?"

This one I will title "George Bush makes the world a safer place, chapter 74"

This past Tuesday, a bomb attack in Istanbul, Turkey, killed one man and injured six other people.

The attack was on a Masonic lodge in the largely residential Asian area of the city. According to the BBC,

[t]he highly secretive international society of Masons is seen by radical Islamic groups as a supporter of the policies of Israel and the United States.

If that was indeed the reason, it would seem the lodge was just a target of opportunity. I can't help but imagine a small, isolated, and frankly paranoid cell of people indulging in revolutionary daydreaming who imagined that by blasting a handful of anonymous people they were striking a hammer blow for The Cause. It wouldn't be the first time. Or the first place.

Uh, why?

From the New York Times for March 12:

Port-au-Prince, Haiti, March 11 - The newly appointed prime minister, Gerard Latortue, said Thursday that it might take as long as two years to prepare for elections. That would put a new elected government beyond the 2005 timeline envisioned in the United States-backed transition plan to help Haiti recover after the departure of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

"We really want to give an equal chance to all political parties, to all candidates," said Mr. Latortue, in his first interview since returning to Haiti on Wednesday after decades of living in United States and elsewhere. "We want not to go fast, but to take time."

From me for February 26:

I have already said that I believe Aristide should step down as part of a settlement involving an orderly transition and guarantees of arrangements for elections, elections, I add here, which should take place under international supervision. I still believe that....

The elites have made some motions in regard to the first half of that but, I think tellingly, have been very coy about the second part. Lacking such enforceable guarantees, I fear the time for elections will not prove to be "ripe" until the outcome can be as pre-ordained as it was in Iran, with all the show and none of the substance of democracy, with the rich back in their mansions and the army in control of the poor in their hope-drained hovels.

"Take time," indeed.

Jeopardy!

YESTERDAY'S QUESTION
What is overexposure? (Acceptable: overexposing)

DOUBLE JEOPARDY!
Five-Syllable Words for $2000

From Latin for "witness," these ads may use celebrities or regular folks to sing a product's praises.

Well, we'll just see - or hear

Air America Radio is a startup venture promising a liberal alternative to rightwing talk radio.

The rollout for the network is March 31. It will only be in four markets initially, but they are large ones with potentially enough liberal or at least fed-up-with-Limbaugh-types moderates to make the thing worthwhile: New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and San Francisco.

The marquee name is Al Franken, who intends to call his three-hour show The O'Franken Factor.

Whether or not this thing will fly depends on a lot of business factors, obviously. And it's unlikely that a boatload of corporate advertisers are going to be knocking down their doors. However, one hopeful sign is that they've avoided the major mistake previous attempts at liberal talk radio have made: going for the big liberal names rather than people with experience in radio. The result for the most part was bor-ing.

But these people seem to have on-air ability more firmly in mind. Even Franken, while not a radio personality, is an entertainer with a sense of pacing and structure - and is being cohosted (as are the other non-radio people, such as Janeane Garofalo) by an experienced radio person.

One thing to realize is that this is a liberal network - not a radical one, not even a progressive one. What it seems to lack is what such efforts always seem to lack: a firebreather. I'm a big believer in the idea that the left needs it's own flamethrowers, who attack - even go over the top in attacking - but never look back and never back down. On the right, Ann Coulter admits that's exactly what she is.

(Sidebar: It's a telling demonstration of how much the right wing is composed of immature bullies that when they get hit with half of what they dish out they squeal like stuck pigs and mewl their crybaby whines about how "unfair" it is. I've said it many times before but it bears repeating: What sends reactionaries into paroxysms of anguished phony outrage faster than anything else is other people being willing to play by the rules they set down.)

Even so, it still should be worth a listen. If you're not in one of the cities named, the shows are supposed to be available via streaming audio at airamericaradio.com after the 31st.

Pain without answers

Shards of twisted metal scattered by rails. Bodies strewn across platforms. One body blown onto a roof. Severed arms and legs. People screaming and running, blood pouring from wounds on some.

Later, the bodies of the dead, some with cell phones ringing unanswered as frantic relatives try to contact them, being carried away by rescue workers.

"I won't forget this ever. I've seen horror," said Enrique Sanchez, an ambulance worker.

I had thought to title this something like "George Bush makes the world a safer place, chapter 74" or some such - but I decided I couldn't be sarcastic about the worst terrorist attack in Spain's history, which at the most recent count I've seen has left nearly 200 dead and 1,200 more injured.

A total of ten bombs went off in a 15-minute period during Thursday's morning rush hour in four train stations in Madrid. The carnage would have been even worse had police not found and safely detonated three more bombs.

The question that seems to be of greatest concern to officials now is who is responsible. Spanish officials immediately blamed the radical Basque separatist group ETA (Euskadi Ta Askatasuna, "Basque Homeland and Freedom").

"There is no doubt Eta is responsible," said Spain's interior minister.

"Eta had been looking for a massacre in Spain," the minister, Angel Acebes, said after an emergency cabinet meeting.

"Unfortunately, today it achieved its goal," he told a news conference, saying the security services were certain Eta was behind the blasts.

One of the reasons for pointing to ETA is that the bombers used titadine, a kind of compressed dynamite also found in a bomb-laden van intercepted last month as it headed for Madrid, in an incident blamed at the time on the group.

However, by Thursday evening Acebes was saying that

a tip had led the police to a stolen van in the town of Alcalá de Henares, 35 kilometers, or 25 miles, west of Madrid, a point of departure for the trains that bore the bombs. The van, he said, held seven or eight detonators and some Arabic tapes of verses from the Koran. Acebes, while still asserting that ETA was viewed as the No. 1 suspect, said the discovery had opened "a new line of investigation."

Adding to the suspicion of Islamic terrorists was the fact that

[t]he Arabic newspaper Al-Quds al-Arabi said it had received a claim of responsibility issued in the name of al-Qaida. The e-mail claim, signed by the shadowy Brigade of Abu Hafs al-Masri, was received at the newspaper's London offices and said the brigade's "death squad" had penetrated "one of the pillars of the crusade alliance, Spain."

"This is part of settling old accounts with Spain, the crusader, and America's ally in its war against Islam," the claim said.

However,

[t]he United States believes Al-Masri sometimes falsely claims to be acting on behalf of al-Qaida. The group took credit for blackouts in the United States and London last year. ...

A U.S. counterterrorism official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said it was too early to determine who was responsible. The official noted that al-Qaida usually does not take responsibility for attacks.

In fact, little is known about al-Masri; one source even suggested it could be little more than one person with a computer trying to take credit for events.

At the same time, there is reason to doubt that ETA was the source of the attacks.

Customarily, ETA plants small bombs to strike selected targets, usually along the coast, phones in warnings to the police ahead of time and takes responsibility for the blasts afterward. But the attacks this time ... were well-coordinated, involved a number of terrorists and led to a huge loss of life.

Such coordination in particular is regarded as a hallmark of what might be called an al-Qaeda style. In addition, ETA has been hard hit by arrests in both Spain and France over the last few years, so much so that "many people predicted it had reached a nadir and would soon die out." Basque politicians argued that the massive loss of civilian life was not in keeping with ETA's previous attacks, which had tended to concentrate on police stations and similar targets - previous bombings whose greatest death toll was 21.

But it's possible that may be changing and the very successes there have been against ETA may be producing a more desperate, more radical, more freelancing membership.

[Parliament member Gustavo de] Aristegui, himself a Basque, said in a telephone interview that the planting of bombs was not new to ETA but just seemed that way because previous attempts had been thwarted by the police, who have successfully infiltrated it.

"They've been trying to do this for years," he said. "They tried to plant two huge bombs just after the 14-month truce expired in September 1999. Each one was over 700 kilos," or 1,500 pounds. On Dec. 24, police averted a bombing attempt at Chamartín, another railroad station, arresting two people they suspect of being ETA members. And on Feb. 29, the police stopped a van filled with 530 kilograms of explosives on a back road in Cuenca, southeast of Madrid. They arrested two young men they described as ETA members and said one had said they had planned to attack two conservative newspapers situated in an industrial area of the capital.

Back on November 21 I raised the idea, which terrorist investigators shared, that al-Qaeda was becoming more of a "brand name," an idea rather than an organization. No one knows yet who was responsible for Thursday's bloodshed, but it seems to me that one very dark possibility is that there has been an additional step of removal and non-Islamic groups, who may share little if any of al-Qaeda's politics or philosophy, are nonetheless schooling themselves in its methods.

The fantasy of the entire "war on terrorism" is that it can be "won" by arresting, killing, or otherwise dismantling the leadership of certain specific groups, just like in "regular" warfare among nations. But here, all that seems to do is to turn a few coordinated networks into a mass of uncoordinated little pieces, each one capable of inflicting serious damage and by their very splintered and almost anonymous nature, that much harder to track down. And so we go from bad to worse.

We have to face the truth that we will never "rid the world" of terrorism, even by the narrow definition of it maintained by nation states, which exempt themselves from that rubric. Short of divine intervention - on which I do not count - there will always be those prepared to inflict pain on innocents for their own gain. What we can do, indeed all we can do, is minimize it. Doing that will require strenuous application of the one tool we have thus far refused to employ: I say now, as I have said before, that the only true answer to terrorism, ultimately the only effective "weapon" against terrorism, is justice, a justice that may well mean sacrifices on the part of the haves - and in terms of the world as a whole, that includes virtually all of us - in favor of the have-nots. Not sacrifices of freedoms or philosophies, but of finances.

So I invite you to ask yourself how much you would be prepared to inconvenience yourself, how many (for example) of our high-tech goodies we'd be willing to give up or pay more for, in order to bring that justice to others.

In the meantime, the one thing that is clear here is that, in the words of Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar, "March 11, 2004, now holds its place in the history of infamy."

Jeopardy!

YESTERDAY'S QUESTION
What is archaeology?

DOUBLE JEOPARDY!
Five-Syllable Words for $1200

It's what happens to film that's in the light too long or a celebrity who's in the limelight too long.

US intelligence is an oxymoron

In the two years leading up to the attack on Iraq, US intelligence agencies received but

dismissed reports from Iraqi scientists, defectors and other informants who said Saddam Hussein's government did not possess illicit weapons, according to government officials,

says the March 6 New York Times.

Those reports were never publicly acknowledged by government officials before the war.

The first public hint of those reports came in a speech on Friday by Jane Harman, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee. Speaking at the American Enterprise Institute, she said "indications" were emerging from the panel's inquiry into prewar intelligence that "potential sources may have been dismissed because they were telling us something we didn't want to believe: that Iraq had no active W.M.D. programs."

Other government officials privately confirmed Ms. Harman's account.

Let me repeat and summarize just to make sure that this is clear: In the two years preceding the invasion of Iraq, US intelligence was told - not once by one source, but several times by several sources - that Saddam Hussein did not have banned weapons. And those sources were deliberately ignored because they didn't tell us what we wanted to hear.

So who were we listening to? Why, Ahmed Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress, that's who - because he did tell us what we wanted to hear: that Iraq had biochemical weapons in such quantities as to make your head swim and nukes were just a trip to the uranium shop away. As is now clear to everybody (except perhaps for George "It's too soon to tell" Tenet), the information supplied by Chalabi's crew was wildly exaggerated where it was not downright false or completely fabricated. Chalabi doesn't even deny that, saying last month that as long as it resulted in Saddam's ouster, it doesn't matter.

So what do we do with Chalabi and his gang, liars where they weren't incompetents and incompetents where they weren't liars? Why, we continue to pay him lots of money, of course.

Washington (Reuters, March 10) - The United States pays the Iraqi National Congress exile group headed by Ahmed Chalabi about $340,000 a month for intelligence about insurgents and other matters, U.S. officials said on Wednesday.

The money is apparently being paid by the DIA, as indicated by this exchange:

At a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing this week, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, a New York Democrat, asked CIA Director George Tenet about continued payments to the INC. Tenet replied, "We're not paying them."

She then turned to Vice Adm. Lowell Jacoby, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, and asked if he was paying them. Jacoby replied: "Senator, you have me in a situation where this would be best dealt with in closed session. I could give you detail."

In the immortal words of Bugs Bunny, "what a bunch of maroons."

Footnote: The times says that the CIA refused to comment on Jane Harman's remarks.

But an intelligence official said: "Human intelligence offering different views was by no means discounted or ignored. It was considered and weighed against all the other information available, and analysts made their best judgments."

Considering that it's hard to imagine how what we got could have been more wrong, if that actually, truly, sincerely did represent their "best judgment," it is so - what's a good phrase - mind-bogglingly stupid that it makes you wish it had been plain, straightforward deception, which at least allows room for basic competence.

Gee, ya think?

Amid all the Nader-knocking and Kerry-kissing that surrounds us, Charles Derber, a professor of sociology at Boston College, dares to say on TomPaine.com that "regime change" in the US involves more than getting rid of George Bush. It requires, he writes, a broader shift. Moreover,

Kerry's own corporate ties and cautious instincts make him an unlikely regime changer. He's being embraced as a candidate simply because he is seen as the electable anti-Bush and not because he represents a force for changing the system.

Nevertheless, he says, "Kerry's election could set the stage for generational political change."

The campaign itself has begun to take on the rhetoric of regime-changing politics. Kerry must embrace that populist rhetoric in order to win - and if he wins, it will become leverage for deeper political change after the election.

Personally, I think Professor Derber is right about Kerry but over-optimistic about the results of a Kerry win. We've been down this road before, of rooting for the "moderate" Democrat to reverse the reactionaries only to spend four years feeling frustrated and being betrayed. Think Jimmy Carter. Think Bill Clinton - twice.

This is not to say I think that it makes no difference at all whether it's Bush or Kerry being inaugurated next January. It's rather that I think that the best we can expect from a Kerry administration is that things will get worse more slowly and I fear we will settle for that because it will feel somehow like an improvement - again, as we have done before.

But just as "the lesser of two evils is still an evil," getting worse more slowly is still getting worse. Nonetheless, it is still more slowly and it could give us a breather in which to act.

The important point is that if we do manage somehow to break the stranglehold the selfish powerful have on our political discourse and do manage to expand justice and move to improve the lot of the many rather than the few, it'll be by our own efforts, not by virtue of having a different face in the White House. That is, it won't be because John Kerry provided "leverage." It will be because - unwittingly - he bought us time.

US v. Afghanistan

On December 6, a botched attack on a suspected Taliban militant in Afghanistan left 10 dead and the suspect away and unharmed. Nine of the dead were children. In the wake of criticism of the attack by the UN and the Afghan government, the military performed an investigation.

And guess what? The military investigated itself and found itself not guilty.

The U.S. military insisted yesterday it followed "appropriate" rules of engagement in a botched December air strike....

A military spokesperson said the probe into the Dec. 6 attack that killed the children concluded the military had followed the rules of war.

How thorough, how complete, how fair was this investigation? They won't tell us. The results are classified "top secret." Intelligence and all that, you know. We are at war, after all. Don't you trust us, you terrorist lover? We know, you'd be happier if the Taliban was still in power.

Of course we trust them. After all, they are, as Marc Anthony said "all honorable men."

Oh, one last thing: Despite having found themselves as pure as new-fallen snow, military officials also said that in the wake of the massacre they modified the rules of engagement. But they won't say how.

Frontiers of free enterprise

Oh - my - word.

Moscow, Russia (AP, March 10) - Orion, the Big Dipper and Andromeda could be joined in the heavens by ads for soft drinks and cigarettes if a Russian inventor's device catches on.

Alexander Lavrynov, a spacecraft designer, said he has patented a device for putting advertising into space that would be seen from Earth, Interfax news agency reported Wednesday.

"Space commercials could embrace huge areas and a colossal number of consumers," he said. "This would literally be intercontinental coverage."

He said the satellites would be visible in the night sky by employing sunlight reflectors, with multiple satellites linked together to create a message large enough to be seen.

"People would be able to see writing in the skies from the Earth no worse than they see the stars," he said.

"Dad, we read in our history books about something called constellations. What were they?"

"Well, kids, at night you used to be able to see things called stars. For example, over where the Coke sign is now...."

Voters v. corporations

Measure H, an initiative that was on the March 2 ballot in Mendocino County, California, would make it illegal to propagate, cultivate, raise or grow genetically modified organisms in the county. A local paper, the Press-Democrat (Santa Rosa), reported on March 2 that

[a] consortium of the nation's biggest agribusinesses Monday reported pumping $150,000 in last-minute contributions into a campaign to defeat a Mendocino County initiative that would ban genetically engineered farm products.

CropLife America, a Washington, D.C., group representing global biotech companies, has now donated $500,000 over a two-month period to fight Measure H.

Only $5,000 of $518,000 raised by opponents came from within the country. They outspent supporters by 7-1.

The reason for the flood of money, shattering the record for spending on a ballot question in the county, was fear that success could, you'll pardon the expression, produce a bumper crop of similar resolutions elsewhere.

With funding from CropLife, Measure H opponents have mounted a carefully orchestrated campaign guided by political advisers in Sacramento and Seattle. Mendocino voters have been inundated with almost daily mailers, radio spots and local newspaper advertising attacking Measure H as poorly written and ill-founded.

The CropLife campaign has focused on themes of "government intrusion" and "higher taxes," raising questions about how the county would enforce a ban on genetically modified organisms, or GMOs. It has chosen not to contest arguments by Measure H supporters who question the adequacy of scientific research and regulatory review of GMOs.

Another well-intentioned measure doomed to defeat at the hands of a corporate-funded PR campaign.

Except:

Mendocino County voters on Tuesday were the first in the nation to ban genetically engineered crops and animals.

By a margin of 56 percent to 44 percent, they approved Measure H, an initiative pushed by the county's organic farmers....

As the paper notes, the effect is more symbolic than practical because such crops are unlikely to appear in the county for years, but supporters felt people

should take a stand in the global debate over the adequacy of safeguards surrounding a fast-emerging biotechnology industry.

The voters, not cowed by the high-profile corporate opposition, agreed.

Update: Those GM crops may appear in Mendocino County sooner than expected, based on the March 11 Christian Science Monitor.

Traditional corn, soybeans, and canola seeds available for sale to American farmers have a small percentage of genetically modified seeds mixed in with them, a new study by the Union of Concerned Scientists shows.

Intentionally or not, such contamination of traditional seeds with GM seeds could turn a future possibility into a fait accompli without our even being aware of it.

Powell v. rationality - footnote to the preceding

According to the International Herald Tribune, on March 9, Colin Powell told Fox News that

the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq was an inappropriate subject for election-year debate.

"We shouldn't be having a political debate over issues like that."

So the evidence of the massive failure, the massive deception, of the primary justification offered for "pre-emptive" invasion of another country is off the table, huh? Other nations disappear people, we disappear issues.

But well, okay, then, Mr. Secretary of State, what should we be having a political debate over? Maybe you'd prefer, oh, I don't know, the economy?

I didn't think so....

Tenet v. truth

Since the New York Times is not noted for a sense of humor in its news columns, I have to assume this really happened.

In a truly surreal event, CIA Director George Tenet told the Senate Armed Service Committee that intelligence agencies may have made misjudgments in their prewar assessments of Iraq.

May have?

But that was only the beginning. He also, the Times says, "insisted again ... that it was too soon to draw firm conclusions about the extent to which intelligence agencies erred," apparently unable to find a word that describes a concept beyond "totally."

He also claimed with a straight face that the White House did not misrepresent facts to justify the Iraq war even though he also claimed that

he had privately intervened on several occasions to correct what he regarded as public misstatements on intelligence by Vice President Dick Cheney and others and that he would do so again.

(That from Daily News Online.)

Meanwhile, the International Herald Tribune notes that Tenet acknowledged that analysis on whether Iraq had sought African uranium was "wildly inconsistent." He also admitted not knowing until last week that Douglas Feith, head of the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans, which cherry-picked intelligence to justify the war, had given briefings to the NSC and the Vice-president's office. Despite that, he still insisted that his voice was the chief one on intelligence.

He wrapped up what in retrospect can be recognized as a brilliant piece of performance art by refusing to speculate on the risks of civil war in Iraq

but warned that former Saddam Hussein loyalists and foreign terrorists "continue to pose a serious threat," as illustrated by the devastating bombings last week in Baghdad and Karbala.

"They hope for a Taliban-like enclave in Iraq's Sunni heartland that would be a jihadist safe haven," he said, with the ultimate goal of creating "an Islamic state."

Exactly why loyalists of the secular "infidel" Saddam Hussein would want to set up an Islamic state was left for the audience to determine.

US v. Haiti

It becomes more obvious with each day that while it's unlikely that the US directly prompted the coup in Haiti, it certainly wasn't an unwelcome turn of events.

- First there was State Department flak Richard Boucher doing his best Bill O'Reilly imitation, saying of Aristide on March 9, "If Mr. Aristide really wants to serve his country, he really has to, we think, let his nation get on with the future and not try to stir up the past again."

Translation: "Shut up! Just shut up!"

- Then in the wake of the wake of former Supreme Court chief justice Boniface Alexandre being sworn in as interim president in an extra-legal procedure (such a move is supposed to be approved by the national assembly),

US Secretary of State Colin Powell said the US was working to find a prime minister replacement,

BBC News for March 9 tell us.

And just why in hell were we looking for a replacement prime minister? And why should there have been one anyway? I thought Aristide himself was the issue. Oh, right, I forgot, now his whole administration should be put on trial.

The new prime minister is Aristide critic and former Foreign Minister Gerald Latortue. He's been living in the US for the last 16 years, most recently in Boca Raton, FL, working as a business consultant. He fled Haiti after a military coup in 1988. So naturally, one of the first things he says, reports the March 10 Toronto Globe & Mail, is that he might bring back Haiti's army, which Aristide dissolved in 1995. The restoration of the army is a prime demand of rebel leader and multiple coup-plotter Guy Philippe.

- And of course there was the announcement yesterday that the role of US Marines in Haiti is being expanded to include intervening in violence, confiscating weapons from any Haitians found with them in the capital, and,

"as we develop intelligence and can find weapons caches, we are going to go after those," [Army Gen. James] Hill said.

That is, pretty much everything that there was "no interest in doing," was just impossible even to contemplate, would stretch our forces too thin, when Aristide was still there.

I don't know the official name for the deployment in Haiti, but I'm sure it's something like Operation Securing Democracy or some such bull. It's really quite depressing and our involvement in generating the chaos through our unremitting efforts to undermine economic change in Haiti are a disgrace. What's really depressing is that it looks like we're going to get away with it again.

Sports v. reality

I'm tired of hearing about "pampered, overpaid sports stars." Yes, they are pampered and yes many are overpaid, but we're missing the point.

For one thing, while many are very much overpaid by any standards of economic justice, they're not by the cold standards of the economic system in which we live. You should, rather, think of their salaries as a measure of how much they are worth to their bosses and through that just how much of a Big Business professional sports really is.

They're pampered by their teams for much the same reason: They are a valuable asset, an investment in hopes of profit, and you don't want them damaged. They're pampered by the fans because they're emblematic of displaced dreams of success. The first gives them money, the second gives them fame.

So when you see them acting out, remember that it's not because they're spoiled brats, it's because they're rich and famous. Well, okay, that means they are spoiled brats, but you get my point.

The worst part of this tolerance of selfishness is the unwillingness of most professional sports to treat violence in the game - and I don't mean aggressive play like a hard block or some pushing in the paint or even a brushback pitch, I mean violence - seriously. And it's damn well about time it was taken seriously and regarded as just that: violence. Not as "part of the game," but as physical assault. Yeah, yeah, I know all about fines and suspensions that cost some of these players little more than pocket change. What I'm talking about is actual enforcement, actual consequences.

What prompted this is that as the Toronto Star reports, in a hockey game Monday night,

Vancouver Canucks star Todd Bertuzzi ... sucker-punched Colorado Avalanche forward Steve Moore, leaving him with a concussion and a fractured neck. ...

Bertuzzi came up behind Moore, reached around and punched him in the face before landing on top of him. Moore fell face first and had to be taken off the ice on a stretcher. ...

He suffered cracked vertebrae in his neck, a concussion, deep cuts to his face, and abrasions on his cheek, forehead and upper lip.

The incident, apparently in retaliation for a hard hit Moore made in a previous game, followed Bertuzzi's repeated attempts to goad Moore into a fight. Failing that, he grabbed Moore's sweater with one hand and reached around to punch him in the face with his gloved hand before pushing him forward onto the ice. Moore lay in a pool of blood until he was carried off on a stretcher.

"Regardless of the fact that this involves a player in the National Hockey League, this will be a routine assault investigation," Vancouver police Constable Sarah Bloor told reporters.

"Crown counsel will be responsible for making a decision as to whether or not anyone is charged."

Whether or not?

"I have stood by in amazement at hockey players permitted to pound each other to a pulp when if the same thing were done outside the arena, it would instantly result in criminal charges," said Toronto lawyer Julian Falconer, who practises both criminal and civil law.

"If those same fists were flying in a barroom there would be criminal charges and I can conceive of no reason why there wouldn't be charges in an arena," he said.

But here it's "if" someone is charged.

Perhaps there will be charges. But the truth is, if the powers-that-be in professional sports really want to get rid of the violence that is not part of the game, if they really mean what they say, they will have to not only not oppose but welcome such charges. Then and only then can anyone believe they're serious.

Footnote: Bertuzzi has issued a tearful apology after a day of silence and it appears Moore will recover fully. Both of those should affect the severity of Bertuzzi's legal consequences; they should not change the fact of it.

Kurds v. Turkmen

This is a lengthy excerpt from a commentary in the Daily Star (Lebanon). We - and I mean we newshounds and bloggers - pay too much attention to the Green Zone and not enough to what's going on out in the countryside.

Kirkuk, Iraq: Once united in opposition to Saddam Hussein’s brutal oppression against them, Iraq’s Shiites and Kurds now appear increasingly divided over how to share the spoils of the new Iraq.

And nowhere is that tension more apparent than in this oil-rich city in northern Iraq which many residents fear is close to exploding into violence between Kurds and the mainly Shiite Turkmen.

"We are sitting on a barrel of TNT, and it will take only one small flame to blow up the whole place. And I’m sure it’s going to happen," said Yehya Abdullah, owner of a shop which was looted by a Kurdish mob last week.

The long-simmering ethnic friction between the city’s Kurdish and Turkmen communities is taking on an ominous sectarian direction. Thousands of Shiite militiamen recently arrived here to protect their Turkmen and Arab co-religionists against Kurdish designs to incorporate Kirkuk into Kurdish controlled provinces in the north. ...

In Kirkuk, the unexpected split in the council has exacerbated the distrust between Kurds and the mainly Shiite Turkmen.

"The Shiites have no right to deny us our rights. Even if there’s a sea of blood, we won’t give up Kirkuk," said Najat Jumaa, 43, a shopkeeper in the city’s Kurdish district of Tebeh.

At the root of Kirkuk’s problems is the thorny question of who is the majority, and, therefore, who has the right to control the city ­ and its massive oil wealth. Kirkuk sits on northern Iraq’s largest oil field with 10 billion barrels in proven reserves.

The true demographic composition of this city vanished long ago in a Baathist legacy of manipulated census figures, deportations, mass resettlement programs and coerced identity changes. Still, Kurdish and Turkmen officials reel off numerous conflicting statistics and historical facts to back their respective claims. ...

With the removal of the Baathist regime, thousands of Kurds and Turkmen are returning to Kirkuk to lay claim to their former homes, deepening the city’s already complex demographics. A proposed census in the coming months may well put to rest the population dispute, but until then relations are likely to remain cold with Kurds and Turkmen continuing to accuse each other of attempting impose their will on the city.

And concern that those tensions will spill over into violence has grown with the arrival of several Shiite militias here in recent weeks.

They include the Army of the Mahdi, the militia of the youthful firebrand cleric Moqtada al-Sadr; the Badr Brigades, the military wing of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq; Iraqi Hizbullah led by Abdel-Karim Mahoud al-Mohammedawi, a Marsh Arab from the south who sits on the Governing Council; and the Dawa party, Iraq’s oldest existing Shiite political organization.

At the beginning of the month some 2,000 armed militiamen and women from the Army of the Mahdi staged a march through Kirkuk. Some militants wore black in deference to the Shiite holy month of Muharram, while others were dressed in white to signify their willingness to become martyrs.

Kurds viewed the march as a provocative demonstration of Shiite force. The following day a mob of some 100 Kurds ransacked the headquarters of the Iraqi Turkmen Front and looted nearby shops owned by Turkmen and Arabs.

"It’s a bad sign and makes us uncomfortable," said the PUK’s Jawhar, referring to the Shiite march. "We are trying to build a new Iraqi Army, so why do we have to have this Army of the Mahdi. It creates worries for everyone." However, Shiite officials say they have no intention of clashing with the Kurds.

"We are Muslims and we have an army, and armies must march to show their strength. But we didn’t make the march against the Kurds," said Sayyed Abdel-Fatah al-Mussawi, the representative in Kirkuk for the youthful firebrand cleric Moqtada Sadr.

Mussawi said that the Army of the Mahdi includes Arab, Kurdish and Turkmen Shiites ­ and its numbers are growing. ...

Jassem Mohammed, a Shiite Turkmen who owns a roadside cigarette stall, said that he joined the Army of the Mahdi out of loyalty to Ayatollah Mohammed Sadeq al-Sadr, father of Moqtada who was killed by Saddam’s regime in 1999 and is widely revered by Iraqi Shiites.

"We have always lived peacefully with Arabs and Kurds in Kirkuk," he said. "But the outsiders are the ones making trouble now."

Outsiders? "The Kurds," he muttered, before looking over his shoulder.

Some Kurdish officials say that Iran is backing the Shiite presence in Kirkuk as a bulwark against Kurdish attempts to control the city. Iraq’s neighbors ­ Iran, Syria and Turkey ­ oppose Kurdish autonomy, fearing it will enflame their own sizeable Kurdish populations.

"It’s going to be bad here," said Mariwan Hamid, a 43-year-old Kurd.

"If the Turkmen insist on the Shiite militias, then the civil war will start in Kirkuk."

That last line is significant, partly because of what it actually says - and partly because I find it frightening how easy the talk of "civil war" has become in Iraq.