James van Luik

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 Wednesday, December 15^th, 2004

Volume 3, No. 20

7 Articles, 12 Pages

 

 

1. Will There Be A War Against the World After November 2^nd

2. 'Israeli' Jazz Star Praises Yasir Arafat

3. Afraid to Look in the Moral Abyss

4. Johnnie Been Good?

5. The Kerry Mandate: Strong and Wrong

6. A Few Words on the Death of My Father

7. Pakistan and the True WMD Threat

  1. WILL THERE BE A WAR AGAINST THE WORLD AFTER NOVEMBER 2^ND

BY

JOHN PILGER

 102804 – There is a surreal quality about visiting the US in the last days of the presidential campaign. If George W. Bush wins, according to a scientist I met, who escaped Nazi-dominated Europe, America will surrender many of its democratic trappings and succumb to its totalitarian impulses. If John Kerry wins according to most Democrat voters the only mandate he will have is that he is not Bush.

 Never have so many liberal hands been wrung over a candidate whose only memorable statements seek to out-Bush Bush. Take Iran. One of Kerry's national security advisers, Susan Rice, has accused Bush of 'standing on the sidelines while Iran's nuclear programme has been advanced;. There is not a shred of evidence that Iran is developing nuclear weapons, yet Kerry is joining in the same orchestrated frenzy that led to the invasion of Iraq. Having begun his campaign by promising another 40,000 troops for Iraq, he is said to have a 'secret plan to end the war' which foresees a withdrawal in four years. This is an echo of Richard Nixon, who in the 1968 presidential campaign promised a 'secret plan' to end the war in Vietnam.

 Once in office, he accelerated the slaughter and the war dragged on for six an a half years. For Kerry, like Nixon, the message is that he is not a wimp. Nothing in his campaign or his career suggests he will not continue, even escalate, the 'war on terror', which is now sanctified as a crusade of Americanism like that against communism. No Democratic president has shirked such a task; John Kennedy on the cold war, Lyndon Johnson on Vietnam.

 This presents great danger for all of us, but none of it is allowed to intrude upon the campaign or the media 'coverage'. In a supposedly free and open society, the degree of censorship by omission is staggering. The New York Times, the country's liberal standard-bearer, having recovered from a mild bout of contrition over its abject failure to challenge Bush's lies about Iraq, has been running tombstones of column inches about what-went-wrong in the 'liberation' of that country.

 It blames mistakes; tactical oversights, faulty intelligence. Not a word suggests that the invasion was a colonial conquest, deliberate like any other, and that 60 years of international law make it 'the paramount war crime', to quote the Nuremberg judges. Not a word suggests that the American onslaught on the population of Iraq was and is systematically atrocious, of which the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib was merely a glimpse.

 The coming atrocity in the city of Fallujah, in which British troops, against the wishes of the British people, are to be accessories, is a case in point. For American politicians and journalists – there are a few honourable exceptions – the US marines are preparing for another of their "battles". Their last attack on Fallujah, in April, provides a preview. Forty-ton battle tanks and helicopter gunships were used against slums. Aircraft dropped 500 lb bombs; marine snipers killed old people, women and children; ambulances were shot at. The marines closed the only hospital in a city of 300,000 for more than two weeks, so they could use it as a military position.

When it was estimated they had slaughtered 600 people, there was no denial. This was more than all the victims of the suicide bombs the previous year. Neither did they deny that their barbarity was in revenge for the killing of four American mercenaries in the city; led by avowed cowboys, they are specialists in revenge. John Kerry said nothing; the media reported the atrocity as 'a military operation', against 'foreign militants' and 'insurgents', never against civilians and Iraqis defending their homes and homeland.

 Moreover, the American people are almost totally unaware that the marines were driven out of Fallujah by heroic street fighting. Americans remain unaware, too, of the piracy that comes with their government's murderous adventure. Who in public life asks the whereabouts of the 18.46 billion dollars which the US Congress approved for reconstruction and humanitarian aid in Iraq?

 As UNICEF reports, most hospitals are bereft even of pain-killers, and acute malnutrition among children has doubled since the 'liberation'. In fact, less than 29 million dollars has been allocated, most of it on British security firms, with their ex SAS thugs and veterans of South African apartheid. Where is the rest of this money that should be helping to save lives? Non-wimp Kerry dares not ask.

 Neither does he nor anybody else with a public profile ask why the people of Iraq have been forced to pay, since the fall of Saddam, almost 80 million dollars to America and Britain as 'reparations'. Even Israel has received an untold fortune in Iraqi oil money as compensation for its 'loss of tourism' in the Golan Heights – part of Syria it occupies illegally. As for oil, the 'o-word' is unmentionable in the contest for the world's most powerful job. So successful is the resistance in its campaign of economic sabotage that the vital pipeline carrying oil to the Turkish Mediterranean has been blown up 37 times. Terminals in the south are under constant attack, affectively shutting down all exports of crude oil and threatening national economies. That the world may have lost Iraqi oil is enveloped by the same silence that ensures Americans have little idea of the nature and scale of the blood-letting conducted in their name.

 The most enduring silence is that which guards the system that has produced these catastrophic events. This is Americanism, though it dares not speak its name, which is strange, as its opposite, anti-Americanism, has long been successfully deployed as a pejorative, catch-all response to critical analysis of an imperial system and its myths. Americanism, the ideology, has meant democracy at home, for some, and a war on democracy abroad.

 And the serious purpose behind this? Madeleine Albright, Bill Clinton's secretary of state, once told the UN that America had the right to 'unilateral use of power' to ensure 'uninhibited access to key markets, energy supplies and strategic resources'. Or as Colin Powell, the Bush-ite laughably promoted by the media as a liberal, put it more than a decade ago; "I want to be the bully on the block." Britain's imperialists believed exactly that, and still do; only the language is discreet.

 That is why people all over the world, whose consciousness about these matters has risen sharply in the past few years, are 'anti-American'. It has nothing to do with the ordinary people of the US, who now watch a Darwinian capitalism consume their real and fabled freedoms and reduce the 'free market' to a fire-sale of public assets. It is remarkable, if not inspiring, that so many reject the class and race based brainwashing begun in childhood, that such a class and race based system is called 'the American dream'.

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 2. 'ISRAELI' JAZZ STAR PRAISES YASIR ARAFAT

BY

CHRISTIAN HENDERSON

 While Yasir Arafat's death was met with a gloating silence by many Israelis, jazzman and writer Gilad Atzmon was one of the few who had something good to say about the departed Palestinian leader.

 "It is clear that this man, this brave man, this hero, the biggest 20^th century freedom fighter, went through a hell of a time," said Atzmon in a telephone interview from his North London home.

 But Atzmon is not your average Israeli. In fact, he takes offence at even being called Israeli.

 "Let me make it clear, I am not an Israeli. I was born in Israel, for the first 22 years of my life I thought of myself as an Israeli. But when I realized what Israel was all about, I stopped regarding myself as an Israeli. I demand not to be seen as one. I am a Hebrew-speaking Palestinian," he says.

 Atzmon's transformation from Israeli to Hebrew-speaking Palestinian began when he visited an Israeli prison camp in south Lebanon with an Israeli army band. 

He was so disgusted by the treatment of the Palestinian and Lebanese prisoners that he began to dissent from Israel and Zionism.

 Ten years later he turned his back on Israel and left for London where his musical career took off.

 After a stint playing with Ian Dury and the Blockheads, he founded his own band, the Orient House Quartet, naming it after the Palestinian Liberation Organization's headquarters in Jerusalem.

 'A racist set-up'

 Atzmon has just released his fourth album, is published in 15 languages, banned in Israel and remains an ardent anti-Zionist.

 "For me it is clear that Zionism is a racist, nationalist and a fundamentally religious perception, and I don't want to live in a racist set-up," he says.

 "Everything I liked about this place (Israel) the smell of it, the authenticity of it, the food, hummus, the falafel, didn't belong to Jewish nationalism it belonged to the Palestinian people."

 Atzmon says the only solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is a single state with two people living side by side.

 "Palestine belongs to the Palestinian people. The two state solution doesn't address the Palestinian cause and never addressed the Palestinian cause," he says.

 New album

 But despite his anger over the plight of the Palestinians, Atzmon's music expresses his feeling in the most serene ways.

 He is a master at blending styles and the end result is an eclectic mix of east and west, Jewish and Arab and just about everything in between.

 On his last album Exile, voted by the BBC as the best jazz album of 2003, he reworks an Israeli anthem written about the conquest of Jerusalem in the 1967 war, and adds the words of renowned Palestinian poet, Mahmud Darwish.

 On another track on Exile, Atzmon took a Jewish song that commemorates the Nazi holocaust called Brother our Ghetto is Burning and renames it Jenin, a sad and soulful number dedicated to the residents of the West Bank refugee camp of the same name that was invaded and smashed by the Israeli army in April 2002.

 Atzmon says his new album addresses the hijacking of popular music by American-led globalization and big corporations.

 "In my new album I don't attack Israelis any more than I attack the globalized world. I don't see any difference between the Israeli abusive treatment of the Palestinian people and the American abuse of the Arab world," he said.

 'Qualified imbecile'

 Oddly, Atzmon thinks the re-election of George Bush is not quite the disaster that many believe it to be.

 "America is a superpower. No one can topple it. The only people who can topple America are Americans themselves and they have done it.

 "They have elected a qualified imbecile to run their administration. They are getting involved in so many wars and they are far from being successful in any of them. This empire is falling apart," he said.

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3. AFRAID TO LOOK IN THE MORAL ABYSS

BY

JAMES CARROLL

 Why don't we Americans look directly at the war? We avert our gaze, knowing that the situation in Iraq grows more desperate by the day. Vaunted "coalition" efforts to "break the back" of the "insurgency" have only strengthened it. The violence among Iraqis would surely qualify as a civil war – except that only one side is fighting. The structures of relief and repair are gone. Whole cities are destroyed, populations displaced. The hope of Iraqi elections is mortally compromised. "Coalition" members are dropping out. The mission of American force is to secure the country, but it can't secure itself. The performance of US intelligence has been consistent: Its strategic failures caused the war, and its tactical ignorance of the enemy is losing the war.

 Meanwhile, in America, this, the gravest foreign policy crisis in a generation, source of a crisis of conscience for tens of millions of citizens, is not a subject of political debate. For many months, overt opposition to the war was sublimated in the effort to defeat George W. Bush in the November election. John Kerry's fatal ambivalence about Iraq sealed the war off from the great quadrennial decision, with the result that the voices of those who hated the war were muted, and the uneasiness of those who were troubled by it was never addressed.

 Astoundingly, the Democrats cooperated with the Republicans in assuring that the war in Iraq – the one thing that might have defeated Bush – was not an issue. That marginalizing of the anti-war impulse continues in the suspended animation of a period after the American election and before the Iraqi election.

 The new Bush administration has moved to reconfigure itself in most ways but one. The president's affirmation of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, in combination with his naming  of Condoleezza Rice as secretary of state, reflects a blind determination to "stay the course" in Iraq, never mind that the course is heading off a cliff.

 The main US news media treat the "story" of Iraq as if it is a morality tale about 20-year-old Americans – a few of whom are shown making bad choices, but most of whom are lionized as heroes. When their deaths are mourned on television each night – that heartbreaking silence under those smiling commissary snapshots – the effect is to deepen the paralysis of the American public, which can only look away.

 The barbarity of the Iraq insurgency has been a particular source of repugnance. First it was hostage-taking, and beheading – low-tech "shock and awe" assaults aimed at "foreigners," precisely to terrorize their sponsoring populations. The apparent murder of the admirable Margaret Hassan, war-opponent and humanitarian worker, was especially deplorable.

 Then it was systematic attacks on Iraqis themselves, anyone daring to cooperate with the "coalition" occupiers. The execution-style murders of Iraqi police recruits and soldiers in recent weeks has been chilling, and now workers on a bus are massacred. What makes these tactics so appalling is their intensely personal character.

 But it takes a disciplined imagination to acknowledge that the less personal savageries of bombs, missiles, artillery, and heavy weapons are, to those blown to smithereens, also barbaric. The main horror of what the "coalition" is doing is not a matter of the occasional soldier who, in the heat of battle, commits a war crime, but the steady destruction rained on cities, villages, the Iraqi people. This violence is wreaked calmly, from a distance, within the rules of engagement.

 The war itself is the American war crime. But that is lost in the "normalcy" of the news.

 On the other side, it is the proliferation of suicide-bombing that has come to seem normal. Soldiers commonly risk their lives for nation, honor, or buddy – but they will not kill themselves with forethought, in large numbers, except for the most transcendent of reason. The US has given itself an enemy that shows by its central tactic that it is fighting for God.

 Americans, meanwhile, are so confused about religion that we have just been through an election in which "religious values" were defined as key, but precisely in ways that kept the war out of the discussion. America's purpose in Iraq is a compound of such deflection, self-deception, half measures, and shallow thinking. The opposition, meanwhile, is absolute and unblinking. That difference partly answers the question with which this column began, but mainly we avert our eyes because the war is a moral abyss. If we dare to look , as Nietzsche said, the abyss stares back.

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 4. JOHNNIE BEEN GOOD?

BY

GREG PALAST

 The millionaires are dancing now. The balloons are falling on John Kerry, John Edwards and their nuclear families.

 They're playing "Johnnie B. Goode" over the loudspeakers. Democrats are hopping up and down like JFK never went to Dallas; like Bill Clinton didn't blow it for us; like there's a chance to bring the boys home alive; like America can crawl out of Dick Cheney's bunker and look at the sun again.

 But has Johnnie Kerry been good so far?

 He told us tonight about some poor bastard in Ohio whose job evaporated when his company unbolted the equipment and sent it south. Hey, Johnnie, didn't you vote for NAFTA?

 I applauded when he said the White House should stop treating teachers and school kids like fugitives from justice and help them out. But, Johnnie, didn't you vote for George Bush's "No Child's Behind Left" assault on public education?

 Then there was that little story meant to show us all he is Man for All Seasons, above, party politics. "I broke with many in my own party, " he said, "to vote for a balanced budget, because I thought it was the right thing to do." No, John, it wasn't. It was craven political cowardice, going with the anti-government hysteria that put a knife into the heart of the programs you cried over tonight.

 He told us the sad story of the poor homeless guy huddled in front of the White House. Is this the same John Kerry that voted for Clinton's welfare "reform"? That put a five-year limit on food stamps, making child starvation the law of the USA. At least Ronald Reagan offered ketchup as a vegetable.

Kerry made good use of the cash he saved on feeding the poor. "I fought to put 100,000 cops on the street." Hey, thanks, John.

 But my absolute favorite of the night was when Kerry told us, "Saying there are weapons of mass destruction in Iraq doesn't make it so. As President, I will ask hard questions and demand hard evidence."

 But, as Senator, you didn't. No questions asked: you just closed your eyes and voted for the lie. I know it, and you sure as hell know it.

 And you mentioned a time or two tonight that you served your country. Got yourself a medal for it, too. I'm sorry, but shooting a Vietnamese teenager in the back who was defending his country doesn't make you a hero.

 Yesterday, my buddy Michael Moore and I held a press conference in Boston. Some joker of a reporter asked Mr. Fahrenheit about Kerry's gung-ho keep'm-in-Baghdad position. Michael fudged and fidgeted. I felt bad for him as he faked the answer, "President Kerry would not have sent us to war." But as Senator, Kerry did.

 I've got an easier job than Michael: as a journalist I don't have to defend any candidate. Nevertheless, I know that my Democratic Party friends will want to ship me to Guantanamo for asking, "You believe in Kerry, but does he believe in you?"

 Remember comrades, I'm only asking questions, here. I'm sorry if the answers make you uncomfortable about your favorite rich guy.

 I know what you're going to say. "Isn't Bush worse?"

 By a long shot. Asking if Kerry is as bad as Bush is like asking if a slap in the face is as painful as a brick to the skull.

 But don't you get tired of being slapped around by privileged politicos on hypocrisy hyper-drive – then having to applaud?  It can't be pleasant, no matter how many pretty balloons they drop on your head.

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5. THE KERRY MANDATE: STRONG AND WRONG

BY

JONATHAN SCHELL

 "During the Vietnam War, many young men, including the current President, the Vice President and me, could have gone to Vietnam and didn't. John Kerry came from a  privileged background. He could have avoided going, too. But instead he said, 'Send me.'

 "When they sent those Swift Boats up the river in Vietnam… John Kerry said, 'Send me.'

 " And then when America needed to extricate itself from that misbegotten and disastrous war, Kerry donned his uniform once again, and said, 'Send me'; and he led veterans to an encampment on the Withington Mall, where, in defiance of the Nixon Justice Department, they conducted the most stirring and effective of the protests, that forced an end to the war.

 "And then, on my watch, when it was time to heal the wounds of war and normalize relations with Vietnam… John Kerry said, 'Send me.'"

 So spoke President Clinton at the Democratic convention—except that he did not deliver the third paragraph about Kerry's protest; I made that up. The speech cries out for the inclusion of Kerry's glorious moment of antiwar leadership; and its absence is as palpable as one of those erasures from photographs of high Soviet officials after Stalin had sent them to the gulag. Clinton's message was plain.

 Military courage in war is honored; civil courage in opposing a disastrous war is not honored. Even thirty years later, it cannot be mentioned by a former President who himself opposed the Vietnam War. The political rule, as Clinton once put it in one of the few pithy things he has ever said, "We [Democrats] have got to be strong…. When people feel uncertain they'd rather have somebody who's strong and wrong than somebody who's weak and right."

 And now the United States is engaged in a war fully as wrong as the one in Vietnam. The boiling core of American politics today is the war in Iraq and all its horrors: the continuing air strikes on populated cities; the dogs loosed by American guards on naked, bound Iraqi prisoners; the kidnappings and the beheadings; the American causalities nearing a thousand; the 10,000 or more Iraqi casualties; the occupation hidden behind the mask of an entirely fictitious Iraqi "sovereignty"; the growing scrap heap of discredited justifications for the war. But little of the is mentioned these days by the Democrats. The great majority of Democratic voters, according to polls, ardently oppose the war, yet by embracing the candidacy of John Kerry, who voted for the Congressional resolution authorizing the war and now wants to increase the number of American troops in Iraq, the party has made what appears to be a tactical decision to hid its faith.

 The strong and wrong position won out in the Democratic Party when its voters chose Kerry over Howard Dean in the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary. An antiwar party rallied around a prowar candidate. The result has been one of the most peculiar political atmospheres within a party in recent memory. The Democrats are united but have concealed the cause that unites them. The party champions free speech that it does not practice. As a Dennis Kucinich delegate at the convention said to Amy Goodman on Democracy Now!, "Peace" is "off-message." A haze of vagueness and generality hangs over party pronouncements. In his convention speech, President Carter, who is on record opposing the war, spoke against "pre-emptive war" but did not specify which pre-emptive war he had in mind. Al Gore, who has been wonderfully eloquent in his opposition to the war, was tame for the occasion. "Regardless of your opinion at the beginning of this war," he said, "isn't it now abundantly obvious that the way this war has been managed by the Administration has gotten us into very serious trouble?"

 What of the antiwar sentiment that is still in truth at the heart of most Democrats' anger? It has been displaced downward and outward, into the outlying precincts of American politics. The political class as a whole has proved  incapable of taking responsibility for the future of the nation, and the education of the American public has been left to those without hope of office. Like a balloon that squeezed at the top expands at the base, opposition to the war increases the farther you get from John Kerry. Carter and Gore can express a little more of it. Howard Dean, who infused the party with its now-muffled antiwar passion, can express more still. Representative Kucinich, a full-throated peace candidate, has endorsed Kerry and has kind words to say about him but holds fast to his antiwar position. On the Internet, Tomdispatch.com, AlterNet.org, Common Dreams.org. antiwar.com. MoveOn.org and many others are buzzing and bubbling with honest and inspired reporting and commentary. Michael Moore is packing audiences into 2,000 theaters to see Fahrenheit 9/11.

 I know, I know: It's essential to remove George W. Bush from the White House, and Kerry is the instrument at hand. I fully share this sentiment. But I am not running for anything, and my job is not to carry water for any party but to stand as far apart form the magnetic field of power as I can and tell the truth as I see it. And it's not too early to worry about the dangers posed by the democrats' strategy. In the first place, they have staked their future and the country's on a political calculation, but it may be wrong. By suffocating their own passion, they may lose the energy that has brought them this far. They have confronted Bush's policy of denial with a politics of avoidance. Bush is adamant in error; they are feeble in dedication to truth. If strong and wrong is really the winning formula Bush may be the public's choice. In the second place, if Kerry does win, he will inherit the war wedded to a potentially disastrous strategy. If he tries to change course, Republicans – and hawkish Democrats (Senator Joe Lieberman has just joined in a  revival for the Committee on the Present Danger) – will not fail to remind him of his commitment to stay the course and renew the charge of flip-flopping. But the course, as retired Gen. Anthony Zinni has commented, may take the country over Niagara Falls. Then Kerry may wish that he and his admirers at this year's convention had thought to place a higher value on his service to his country when he opposed the Vietnam War.

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6. A FEW WORDS ON THE DEATH OF MY FATHER

BY

L. A. THIEL

 My father died three weeks ago He fell and fractured his skull after hitting his head on a bookcase poorly placed at the foot of the stairs in his house. He had lived a full life, achieved success in his career, provided for his family, seen the world.

 As he lay on the hospital gurney, shielded by flimsy curtains, a ventilator tube in his throat, he looked nothing like the man I remembered. The wound to his head had stretched his skin taught across his face, his mouth gaped wide, and his labored breathing rent the air.

 They removed the life support – there was nothing they could do for him. I told them I would stay with him until he passed on, and he was moved to a little side room where we could be alone. Although he was in a coma, as I slid my hand around his, he gripped my fingers tightly and I knew he was still there somewhere, and that he was afraid.

 The nurses were wonderful. They called my father by name and spoke to him as if he could hear what they were saying. But as I sat in that anonymous room, with its green-painted walls and linoleum floor, I was saddened by the fact that my father should be in this place at the time of his passing. For as kind and compassionate as the medical staff had shown themselves to be, they did not know who my father was. To them, he was another elderly man who had taken a fatal fall and was clinging to the last tenuous threads of life. And so I wept, for both his passing and the way it had come about, holding his hand to let him know that he was not alone at this undoubtedly frightening time in his life.

 I grieved for his passing, especially in the anonymous environment in which he drew his final breath. He had a history uniquely his own. He had been a baby, full of hope and potential, loved by his parents. He had been a lieutenant during WWII, and I discovered photographs showing he'd had some girl friends (one or two hot babes) before he married my mother (an equally hot babe.) There were many pictures of him as a vibrant young man, a glowing father, and as a successful businessman. And endless snapshots of him with the dogs he'd loved over the years.

 My father died during the bombardment of Fallujah. On the night of his passing, I lay awake, and tried to understand my feelings. I grieved for his passing, even as I was sure that he was in a better and happier place. And I felt a deep anger. Not for my father, but for all the people who had died that day in Fallujah. Because each of these people was like my Dad. They had been born in hope. They had come into the world with the potential to love and be loved. They had each been given the gift of life, and had used it in their own unique way. Each and every one of them was special – a father, a daughter, a brother, a niece. And too many of them had been taken from life before they had ever had the chance to live. They had been taken in hate and fear, and had been robbed of their potential to enrich the lives of those around them.

 For those who say, "Kill them! Let them die! They are the face of Satan and are the enemy!" remember: They are people. They love. They dream. They hope. They want to feel safe, and they want to watch their children grow. They have just as much right to live and to wish as you, or any other. When you demonize them you dehumanize yourself, and you spread darkness upon the world. No one, be they Iraqi civilian, or American soldier, should die needlessly. No one should die alone and afraid, and every life should be honored for what it was and what it could have been.

To the US administration, I can only echo the words of Michael Moore: "Shame on you!" You hide the casualties in Iraq and, in refusing to count the dead, pretend that they have not been killed. And by doing so, you deny them that most important of dignities – the recognition that they have lived. You work so assiduously to protect the unborn child, yet take the lives of innocent people without a second thought. You cause them to be killed, and then claim that they have never existed, thereby aborting those who have already been born.

You are not special! You are no more worthy of life, have no more right to be remembered, than any of those who have died in your God-forsaken conflict. On the contrary, any who believe they are chosen to mete out death in the name of an ideology or for gain, are already one step removed from the humanity that make us unique and worthy of another's remembrance and grief. You should be marginalized, and prevented from spreading your message of hate and death. We need to turn away from your fetid breath of inhumanity, and honor our collective spirit, regardless of where we live and which gods we worship. For if we don't, then we too may be doomed to die alone, never to have existed.

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 7. PAKISTAN AND THE TRUE WMD THREAT

BY

ROBERT SCHEER

 If it had been even a primitive nuclear weapon that hit the World Trade Center three years ago, hundreds of thousands of people would have died instead of fewer than 3,000, and the free society we enjoy almost certainly would have been a causality as well. In the shock of that moment, the administration probably would have created a national network of detention camps for suspected terrorists, and military retaliation might have included the launch of nuclear missiles with the capability of killing millions. All of which is exactly why it was so terrifying to read in an investigative article in the Los Angeles Times on Saturday 120704 that our "allies" in Pakistan, who have done so much to spread nuclear weapons technology in recent years, are still capable of doing so.

 "Senior investigators said they were especially worried that dangerous elements of the illicit network of manufacturers and suppliers would remain undetected and capable of resuming operations once international pressures eased," The Times reported. The article dissected the inability of investigators worldwide to fully penetrate the illicit nuclear weapons bazaar, which was run until last year by Pakistan's top nuclear scientists, Abdul Qadeer Khan.

 Khan is currently under the protection of Pakistan's military dictator, President Pervez Musharraf, the same man who pardoned Khan and refuses to allow foreign investigators to speak with him. Yet it was Musharraf whom President Bush spent the weekend praising and accommodating.

 As The Times article made clear, what "officials call the world's worst case of nuclear proliferation" – in which sophisticated nuclear technology was supplied to Libya, Iran and other rogue nations – never would have been possible without the support of the Pakistani military. This is the same complex and powerful organization that made Pakistan a dictatorship in a 1999 coup by Musharraf. Yet within two years of this coup, Bush dropped US sanctions against Pakistan, showing clear disregard for international nonproliferation restraints. The rationale then and now was Pakistan's alleged support in the "war on terrorism" after 9/11.

 And despite the exposure of the Khan black market ring, nothing has changed: In a White House meeting Friday, Bush honored Musharraf – who since seizing power has purged his country's Supreme Court and rewritten its constitution – as a "courageous leader."

 The administration again hastened to explain that Musharraf was vital in the three-year effort to capture Osama bin Laden "dead or alive," as Bush frequently has proclaimed. How embarrassing then, when hours later Musharraf conceded in a Washington Post interview that Bin Laden's trail had grown completely cold but that the arch-terrorist is still very much alive and functioning.

 Musharraf complained that attempts to pin down bin Laden and his Al Qaeda operatives had been seriously undermined by what he politely called "voids" in US troop commitment to the area, which are equal to a mere 15% of the US  forces in Iraq. The US strategy instead has been to rely on Pakistan's military to trap Bin Laden, a dependence that Bush administration officials have cited while refusing to pressure for access to Khan.

 Musharraf complains that calls for international access to Khan show "a lack of trust" in Pakistan, but his real problem is the scientist's enormous popularity as the "father " of Pakistan's nuclear bomb program. Khan "has been a hero for the masses," said the general who has survived several assassination attempts and faces the possibility of a revolt if he tilts too far toward the West.

 Meanwhile, Bush is so eager to cater to Musharraf that he is even championing the dictator as key to the creation of a democratic Palestinian state "that is truly free. One that's got an independent judiciary; one that 's got a civil society; one that's got the capacity to fight off the terrorists; one that allows for dissent; one in which people can vote. And President Musharraf can play a big role in helping achieve that objective."

 What balderdash. None of those conditions of a free society exist in Pakistan, nor are they likely any time soon in US-occupied Iraq.

 Yet while we chase the chimer of democratizing the Islamic world through the use of force, the true cost of this crusade can be measured by our indifference to our original justification of the Iraq invasion: stopping the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.

 And there's no margin for error here. Next time the terrorists could take Manhattan and a whole lot more.

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