By Peter Greste BBC correspondent in Baghdad It was a single shot – nothing spectacular – but that split-second act of Iraqi resistance might well be recorded as the point at which America turned from liberator to occupier.

The soldier who died was on a foot patrol through the Baghdad University.

There was no sign of imminent danger, according to the politics and engineering students who saw what happened.

The soldier was almost certainly feeling relaxed and at ease as he sipped his soft-drink in the stifling heat.

Like all American troops on patrol here, he was sweating beneath his Kevlar flak-jacket and helmet.

They provided no protection whatsoever from the man who walked through the lunch-time crowd, put a pistol to the back of the soldier’s skull, and pulled the trigger.

Options narrow

The killing was an audacious strike that forced the US military planners here to once more re-think their strategy across Iraq.

We’ve learned, to our cost, that as soon as you let your guard down, the bad guys whack us out of nowhere US soldier “Every time there’s another attack, our bosses look at it and work out how to avoid the same thing happening again,” said Lieutenant Brian Kendrick of the 1st Armoured Division.

“We’re getting new orders all the time, but I’m not sure how you stop that kind of thing, unless we give up the foot patrols. But they are the best way of getting in touch with people, and gathering intel (intelligence)”.

As the steady drum-beat of attacks strike the coalition forces each day, the options for the military planners narrow.

‘Hard to fight back’

There are no more foot patrols through the Baghdad University now.

Soldiers hardly ever leave their armoured Humvee vehicles, and every Iraqi civilian is treated as a potential attacker.

And for every death, there are at least a dozen other attacks that do not make the daily press bulletins.

In military terms, they are barely a pinprick on the rump of the American military, but they are taking their toll on the individual soldiers.

“You can’t ever relax here,” said one.

“There’s no obvious danger, but we’ve learned to our cost that as soon as you let your guard down, the bad guys whack us out of nowhere. But with so many civilians around, it’s hard to fight back.”

But some American troops are.

Sapping morale

Soldiers at a checkpoint recently believed they had spotted a sniper preparing to attack from the roof of a nearby building.

They fired at the position, and went to see what was there.

They found they had indeed killed someone – an 11-year-old boy.

It is a complex, messy and badly defined battlefield that is driving the Americans ever further from the very people they are supposed to be liberating, and sapping morale at the same time.

“I don’t mind doing my duty. That’s why I signed up,” Sergeant Todd Lewis said.

“But the problem is I don’t know how long I’m going to have to do it. I was married two years ago, and I’ve only seen my wife for six months in that time.

“We usually know how long we’re going to be away, but the most our bosses are telling us now is ‘We’ll try to have you home before Christmas’. I don’t think they really know what they’re doing. I certainly don’t,” he said.

In and out?

And so, the question of an exit strategy has now become central to the issue of flagging troop morale.

It exists in broad theoretical terms – the plan is to set up political structures, draft a new constitution, hold elections and then pray that the result will be a Western friendly and oil-rich government in Baghdad.

But that is not the kind of clear “roadmap”, to borrow a term, with defined timetables and obvious way-points along the route that the Iraqi people or coalition soldiers want to see.

“First they said we’d be in and out as quickly as possible,” said Sergeant Lewis.

“Now they’re saying that we’ll be here for as long as it takes to establish freedom and democracy. The longer I’m here, the less sure I am that it will happen.”

Story from BBC NEWS: http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/middle_east/3055553.stm

Published: 2003/07/10 11:42:31 GMT

© BBC MMIII

The New York Times April 5, 2003

How Books Have Shaped U.S. Policy By MICHIKO KAKUTANI

President Bush has never been known as a bookworm. An instinctive politician who goes with his gut, he has usually left the heavy reading in the family to his wife, Laura, a former librarian. He is “often uncurious and as a result ill informed,” his former speechwriter, David Frum, wrote in a memoir this year, adding that “conspicuous intelligence seemed actively unwelcome in the Bush White House.”

It is curious then that books by historians, philosophers and policy analysts have played a significant role in shaping and promulgating the administration’s thinking about foreign policy, America’s place in the world and the war against Iraq.

Michael Harrington’s book “The Other America” is widely credited with helping catalyze the Kennedy-Johnson war on poverty in the 1960’s and the creation of Great Society programs. George Gilder’s book “Wealth and Poverty” was publicly endorsed by President Ronald Reagan, who embraced its message of tax cuts. George H. W. Bush’s comparison of Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait to Hitler’s annexation of the Sudetenland was informed by his reading of Martin Gilbert’s book “The Second World War.” And Robert D. Kaplan’s book “Balkan Ghosts,” which emphasized the ancient hatreds of the region, is said to have contributed to the initial reservations of President Bill Clinton about becoming more boldly involved there.

In this White House, no single book is pivotal, but an array of writings ‹ many by neoconservative authors closely affiliated with administration officials or their intellectual mentors ‹ have provided a fertile philosophical matrix for policy decisions as various as the doctrine of pre-emption and civilian oversight of military affairs.

Indeed Mr. Bush, whose father was accused of lacking the “vision thing,” presides over an administration that is driven in high degree by big and often abstract theories: theories that promote a “moral” (some might say moralistic) approach to foreign policy; an unembarrassed embrace of power; a detestation of relativistic thinking; and an often Manichaean view of the world that, like the president’s language, manages to be darkly Hobbesian and willfully optimistic at the same time.

It is less a matter of outside scholars and experts preaching to members of the administration than an incestuous world of policy making, policy analysis and historical commentary in which like-minded colleagues and friends trade ideas, egg one another on and sometimes provide spin on one another’s behalf. In the last few years a growing number of theorists have published books to promote their ideas. Most of them have a distinctively instructive or prescriptive tone: this is what is wrong (with America, with the military, with the world); this is what needs to be done to fix it.

Last summer President Bush ‹ whose favorite book had been Marquis James’s 1929 biography of Sam Houston, who evolved from being the man the Cherokees called Big Drunk to the father of Texas ‹ made it known that he was reading “Supreme Command” by Eliot A. Cohen, a member of the Defense Policy Board (along with its former chairman, Richard N. Perle) and a professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (where Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz was once dean). The book was widely circulated at the Defense and State Departments and came emblazoned with a blurb from the editor of The Weekly Standard, William Kristol, saying it was the single volume he most wished Mr. Bush to read.

On March 21, as the war was beginning, Mr. Kristol said at the American Enterprise Institute that Mr. Bush “seems to understand, better than many presidents, I would say, the lesson of our friend Eliot Cohen’s book of about a year ago, `Supreme Command,’ that political strategy should drive military strategy.” The ubiquitous Mr. Kristol is also the author, along with Lawrence F. Kaplan, of a new book called “The War Over Iraq: Saddam’s Tyranny and America’s Mission,” which applauds the administration’s determination to “liberate” Iraq and tries to place the president’s “robust approach to the international scene” in the tradition of Ronald Reagan and Harry S. Truman.

As for the Cohen book, its central thesis, in Clemenceau’s famous words, is that “war is too important to be left to the generals.” It exhorts civilian leaders to query, prod and give orders to their subordinates ‹ an interesting thesis given the allegations in the military that Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld ignored the advice of senior officers and initially committed insufficient troops to Iraq.

“Supreme Command” charges that the president’s father abdicated responsibility in favor of the military in the first Persian Gulf war, ending it too early and allowing Saddam Hussein to stay in power. In interviews Mr. Cohen has chided the American military, saying he is wary when it naïvely dabbles in geopolitics. One example he has cited concerns the military’s worry that the Arab street might erupt in protest if the United States ousted President Hussein. And he has praised Mr. Rumsfeld for exercising the sort of civilian control over the Pentagon that he admires.

“The point is that Rumsfeld is really ‹ is on top,” Mr. Cohen told Brit Hume of Fox News last year. “He’s asking the tough, probing questions. Churchill once said, it’s always right to probe, and I think that’s the right motto for a civilian leader.” Two of Mr. Rumsfeld’s favorite books are reportedly William Manchester’s biography of Winston Churchill, “The Last Lion,” and Roberta Wohlstetter’s study of intelligence failure, “Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision.”

Several books and thinkers also appear to have helped form the thinking of Vice President Dick Cheney, whose position on Iraq became increasingly akin to that of neoconservatives like Mr. Kristol in the year after 9/11. Last fall he read “An Autumn of War” by Victor Davis Hanson, a classicist, military historian and National Review contributor, whom he later invited to dinner. In that volume Mr. Hanson wrote approvingly of the ancient Greek view of war as “terrible but innate to civilization ‹ and not always unjust or amoral if it is waged for good causes to destroy evil and save the innocent.”

He asserted that we were in an “outright bloody war against tyranny, intolerance and theocracy,” and he called for going to war “hard, long, without guilt, apology or respite until our enemies are no more.”

Newsweek said that “Cheney told his aides that Hanson’s book reflected his philosophy.”

Newsweek also reported that after 9/11 Mr. Cheney spent much of his time in an undisclosed location reading books about weapons of mass destruction and consulting with scholars about the Middle East. Among them was Bernard Lewis, the Princeton historian who wrote the best-selling “What Went Wrong? Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response” and was a participant in a pre-Sept. 11 study of ancient empires, sponsored by Mr. Rumsfeld’s office, to understand how they maintained their dominance.

Mr. Lewis reportedly told Mr. Cheney that the Arab world looked down on weakness and respected the exercise of force. After talks with him and other Middle East experts like the Johns Hopkins scholar Fouad Ajami, Time reported, Mr. Cheney “gradually abandoned his former skepticism about the potential for democracy in the Middle East,” a development that became a tipping point in the tilt toward war.

Early this year Mr. Lewis wrote an article for Newsweek International in which he made a case for American intervention in Iraq and argued that “worries about Iraqi civilians ‹ fighting in the streets, popular resistance” were overblown. Now Mr. Lewis has written an article for The Wall Street Journal Europe in which he argues that Iraqis may be reluctant to welcome American soldiers because antiwar protests reinforce their worry that “the United States may flinch from finishing the job.”

Mr. Hanson also predicted a quick war, three to four weeks, he told The Los Angeles Times, while Mr. Cohen told the House Armed Services Committee last October that establishing a moderate regime in Baghdad “would have beneficial consequences well beyond Iraq, including in our war against Islamic extremism.”

Many of the thinkers in the continuing dialogue among administration officials and the neoconservatives urging them toward war wear several hats. For instance, Robert Kagan is best known as the author of the hot new policy book “Of Paradise and Power,” in which he writes that on “major strategic and international questions today, Americans are from Mars and Europeans are from Venus.”

Although the book has been hailed for its incisive and in some ways prescient analysis of trans-Atlantic differences, it can also be read as a defense of America’s aggressive unilateralism. Mr. Kagan has played a prominent role, along with Mr. Kristol, at the Project for the New American Century, a group that calls for the United States to adopt a muscular military posture and “challenge regimes hostile to our interests and values.”

Among the people who signed the project’s 1997 statement of principles were Mr. Cheney, Mr. Rumsfeld, Mr. Wolfowitz, I. Lewis Libby (Mr. Cheney’s chief of staff) and Mr. Cohen. Also signing were Mr. Kagan’s father, the Yale classics professor Donald Kagan (who provided an enthusiastic blurb for Mr. Hanson’s book), and the theorist Francis Fukuyama, whose 1992 book, “The End of History and the Last Man,” famously (and to some, absurdly) trumpeted the triumph of the West and the exhaustion of alternatives to liberal democracy.

Supporters of the Project group like Mr. Fukuyama, Mr. Wolfowitz and William J. Bennett (former secretary of education) ‹ along with other neocons like Justice Clarence Thomas and Alan Keyes (the conservative presidential candidate) ‹ are followers of the late Leo Strauss, who was a political philosopher at the University of Chicago and a godfather of sorts to the neocon movement. “Straussians,” the conservative author Dinesh D’Souza has written, like to use the philosophy of “natural right” ‹ which for the ancients was a basis for differentiating between right and wrong ‹ “to defend liberal democracy and moral values against their adversaries both foreign and indigenous.” Many of Strauss’s ideas were popularized by Allan Bloom, who was the author of the best seller “The Closing of the American Mind” and a mentor to both Mr. Fukuyama and Mr. Wolfowitz (who became the inspiration for a minor character in “Ravelstein,” Saul Bellow’s 2000 roman à clef about Bloom).

Both Strauss and Bloom reviled moral relativism, invoked the teaching of the classics and took an elitist view of education. As teachers in the Socratic tradition, they also ardently believed in mentors, a role that Mr. Kristol, an avowed Straussian, filled so energetically as Vice President Dan Quayle’s chief of staff that he became known as “Dan Quayle’s brain.”

In “Ravelstein,” Mr. Bellow, described the Wolfowitz and Bloom characters talking about Desert Storm. “And it was essential to fit up-to-the-minute decisions in the gulf war ‹ made by obviously limited pols like Bush and Baker,” he wrote, “into a true-as-possible picture of the forces at work ‹ into the political history of this civilization.” In 1992 Mr. D’Souza put it this way: “Straussians have an intellectual rigor that is very attractive. They have extolled the idea of the statesman and the notion of advising the great, the prince, like Machiavelli or Aristotle. This is necessary because the prince is not always the smartest guy in the world.”

Practice to Deceive Chaos in the Middle East is not the Bush hawks’ nightmare scenario–it’s their plan.

By Joshua Micah Marshall

Imagine it’s six months from now. The Iraq war is over. After an initial burst of joy and gratitude at being liberated from Saddam’s rule, the people of Iraq are watching, and waiting, and beginning to chafe under American occupation. Across the border, in Syria, Saudi Arabia, and Iran, our conquering presence has brought street protests and escalating violence. The United Nations and NATO are in disarray, so America is pretty much on its own. Hemmed in by budget deficits at home and limited financial assistance from allies, the Bush administration is talking again about tapping Iraq’s oil reserves to offset some of the costs of the American presence–talk that is further inflaming the region. Meanwhile, U.S. intelligence has discovered fresh evidence that, prior to the war, Saddam moved quantities of biological and chemical weapons to Syria. When Syria denies having such weapons, the administration starts massing troops on the Syrian border. But as they begin to move, there is an explosion: Hezbollah terrorists from southern Lebanon blow themselves up in a Baghdad restaurant, killing dozens of Western aid workers and journalists. Knowing that Hezbollah has cells in America, Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge puts the nation back on Orange Alert. FBI agents start sweeping through mosques, with a new round of arrests of Saudis, Pakistanis, Palestinians, and Yemenis.

To most Americans, this would sound like a frightening state of affairs, the kind that would lead them to wonder how and why we had got ourselves into this mess in the first place. But to the Bush administration hawks who are guiding American foreign policy, this isn’t the nightmare scenario. It’s everything going as anticipated.

In their view, invasion of Iraq was not merely, or even primarily, about getting rid of Saddam Hussein. Nor was it really about weapons of mass destruction, though their elimination was an important benefit. Rather, the administration sees the invasion as only the first move in a wider effort to reorder the power structure of the entire Middle East. Prior to the war, the president himself never quite said this openly. But hawkish neoconservatives within his administration gave strong hints. In February, Undersecretary of State John Bolton told Israeli officials that after defeating Iraq, the United States would “deal with” Iran, Syria, and North Korea. Meanwhile, neoconservative journalists have been channeling the administration’s thinking. Late last month, The Weekly Standard’s Jeffrey Bell reported that the administration has in mind a “world war between the United States and a political wing of Islamic fundamentalism … a war of such reach and magnitude [that] the invasion of Iraq, or the capture of top al Qaeda commanders, should be seen as tactical events in a series of moves and countermoves stretching well into the future.”

In short, the administration is trying to roll the table–to use U.S. military force, or the threat of it, to reform or topple virtually every regime in the region, from foes like Syria to friends like Egypt, on the theory that it is the undemocratic nature of these regimes that ultimately breeds terrorism. So events that may seem negative–Hezbollah for the first time targeting American civilians; U.S. soldiers preparing for war with Syria–while unfortunate in themselves, are actually part of the hawks’ broader agenda. Each crisis will draw U.S. forces further into the region and each countermove in turn will create problems that can only be fixed by still further American involvement, until democratic governments–or, failing that, U.S. troops–rule the entire Middle East.

There is a startling amount of deception in all this–of hawks deceiving the American people, and perhaps in some cases even themselves. While it’s conceivable that bold American action could democratize the Middle East, so broad and radical an initiative could also bring chaos and bloodshed on a massive scale. That all too real possibility leads most establishment foreign policy hands, including many in the State Department, to view the Bush plan with alarm. Indeed, the hawks’ record so far does not inspire confidence. Prior to the invasion, for instance, they predicted that if the United States simply announced its intention to act against Saddam regardless of how the United Nations voted, most of our allies, eager to be on our good side, would support us. Almost none did. Yet despite such grave miscalculations, the hawks push on with their sweeping new agenda.

Like any group of permanent Washington revolutionaries fueled by visions of a righteous cause, the neocons long ago decided that criticism from the establishment isn’t a reason for self-doubt but the surest sign that they’re on the right track. But their confidence also comes from the curious fact that much of what could go awry with their plan will also serve to advance it. A full-scale confrontation between the United States and political Islam, they believe, is inevitable, so why not have it now, on our terms, rather than later, on theirs? Actually, there are plenty of good reasons not to purposely provoke a series of crises in the Middle East. But that’s what the hawks are setting in motion, partly on the theory that the worse things get, the more their approach becomes the only plausible solution.

Moral Cloudiness

Ever since the neocons burst upon the public policy scene 30 years ago, their movement has been a marriage of moral idealism, military assertiveness, and deception. Back in the early 1970s, this group of then-young and still mostly Democratic political intellectuals grew alarmed by the post-Vietnam Democrats’ seeming indifference to the Soviet threat. They were equally appalled, however, by the amoral worldview espoused by establishment Republicans like Henry Kissinger, who sought co-existence with the Soviet Union. As is often the case with ex-socialists, the neocons were too familiar with communist tactics to ignore or romanticize communism’s evils. The fact that many neocons were Jewish, and outraged by Moscow’s increasingly visible persecution of Jews, also caused them to reject both the McGovernite and Kissingerian tendencies to ignore such abuses.

In Ronald Reagan, the neocons found a politician they could embrace. Like them, Reagan spoke openly about the evils of communism and, at least on the peripheries of the Cold War, preferred rollback to coexistence. Neocons filled the Reagan administration, and men like Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Frank Gaffney, and others provided the intellectual ballast and moral fervor for the sharp turn toward confrontation that the United States adopted in 1981.

But achieving moral clarity often requires hiding certain realities. From the beginning, the neocons took a much more alarmist view of Soviet capacities and intentions than most experts. As late as 1980, the ur-neocon Norman Podhoretz warned of the imminent “Finlandization of America, the political and economic subordination of the United States to superior Soviet power,” even raising the possibility that America’s only options might be “surrender or war.” We now know, of course, that U.S. intelligence estimates, which many neocons thought underestimated the magnitude and durability of Soviet power, in fact wildly overestimated them.

This willingness to deceive–both themselves and others–expanded as neocons grew more comfortable with power. Many spent the Reagan years orchestrating bloody wars against Soviet proxies in the Third World, portraying thugs like the Nicaraguan Contras and plain murderers like Jonas Savimbi of Angola as “freedom fighters.” The nadir of this deceit was the Iran-Contra scandal, for which Podhoretz’s son-in-law, Elliot Abrams, pled guilty to perjury. Abrams was later pardoned by Bush’s father, and today, he runs Middle East policy in the Bush White House.

But in the end, the Soviet Union did fall. And the hawks’ policy of confrontation did contribute to its collapse. So too, of course, did the economic and military rot most of the hawks didn’t believe in, and the reforms of Mikhail Gorbachev, whom neocons such as Richard Perle counseled Reagan not to trust. But the neocons did not dwell on what they got wrong. Rather, the experience of having played a hand in the downfall of so great an evil led them to the opposite belief: that it’s okay to be spectacularly wrong, even brazenly deceptive about the details, so long as you have moral vision and a willingness to use force.

What happened in the 1990s further reinforced that mindset. Hawks like Perle and William Kristol pulled their hair out when Kissingerians like Brent Scowcroft and Colin Powell left Saddam’s regime in place after the first Gulf War. They watched with mounting fury as terrorist attacks by Muslim fundamentalists claimed more and more American and Israeli lives. They considered the Oslo accords an obvious mistake (how can you negotiate with a man like Yasir Arafat?), and as the decade progressed they became increasingly convinced that there was a nexus linking burgeoning terrorism and mounting anti-Semitism with repressive but nominally “pro-American” regimes like Saudi Arabia and Egypt. In 1996, several of the hawks–including Perle–even tried to sell Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on the idea that Israel should attack Saddam on its own–advice Netanyahu wisely declined. When the Oslo process crumbled and Saudi Arabian terrorists killed 3,000 Americans on 9/11, the hawks felt, not without some justification, that they had seen this danger coming all along, while others had ignored it. The timing was propitious, because in September 2001 many already held jobs with a new conservative president willing to hear their pitch.

Prime Minister bin Laden

The pitch was this: The Middle East today is like the Soviet Union 30 years ago. Politically warped fundamentalism is the contemporary equivalent of communism or fascism. Terrorists with potential access to weapons of mass destruction are like an arsenal pointed at the United States. The primary cause of all this danger is the Arab world’s endemic despotism, corruption, poverty, and economic stagnation. Repressive regimes channel dissent into the mosques, where the hopeless and disenfranchised are taught a brand of Islam that combines anti-modernism, anti-Americanism, and a worship of violence that borders on nihilism. Unable to overthrow their own authoritarian rulers, the citizenry turns its fury against the foreign power that funds and supports these corrupt regimes to maintain stability and access to oil: the United States. As Johns Hopkins University professor Fouad Ajami recently wrote in Foreign Affairs, “The great indulgence granted to the ways and phobias of Arabs has reaped a terrible harvest”–terrorism. Trying to “manage” this dysfunctional Islamic world, as Clinton attempted and Colin Powell counsels us to do, is as foolish, unproductive, and dangerous as détente was with the Soviets, the hawks believe. Nor is it necessary, given the unparalleled power of the American military. Using that power to confront Soviet communism led to the demise of that totalitarianism and the establishment of democratic (or at least non-threatening) regimes from the Black Sea to the Baltic Sea to the Bering Strait. Why not use that same power to upend the entire corrupt Middle East edifice and bring liberty, democracy, and the rule of law to the Arab world?

The hawks’ grand plan differs depending on whom you speak to, but the basic outline runs like this: The United States establishes a reasonably democratic, pro-Western government in Iraq–assume it falls somewhere between Turkey and Jordan on the spectrum of democracy and the rule of law. Not perfect, representative democracy, certainly, but a system infinitely preferable to Saddam’s. The example of a democratic Iraq will radically change the political dynamics of the Middle East. When Palestinians see average Iraqis beginning to enjoy real freedom and economic opportunity, they’ll want the same themselves. With that happy prospect on one hand and implacable United States will on the other, they’ll demand that the Palestinian Authority reform politically and negotiate with Israel. That in turn will lead to a real peace deal between the Israelis and Palestinians. A democratic Iraq will also hasten the fall of the fundamentalist Shi’a mullahs in Iran, whose citizens are gradually adopting anti-fanatic, pro-Western sympathies. A democratized Iran would create a string of democratic, pro-Western governments (Turkey, Iraq, and Iran) stretching across the historical heartland of Islam. Without a hostile Iraq towering over it, Jordan’s pro-Western Hashemite monarchy would likely come into full bloom. Syria would be no more than a pale reminder of the bad old days. (If they made trouble, a U.S. invasion would take care of them, too.) And to the tiny Gulf emirates making hesitant steps toward democratization, the corrupt regimes of Saudi Arabia and Egypt would no longer look like examples of stability and strength in a benighted region, but holdouts against the democratic tide. Once the dust settles, we could decide whether to ignore them as harmless throwbacks to the bad old days or deal with them, too. We’d be in a much stronger position to do so since we’d no longer require their friendship to help us manage ugly regimes in Iraq, Iran, and Syria.

The audacious nature of the neocons’ plan makes it easy to criticize but strangely difficult to dismiss outright. Like a character in a bad made-for-TV thriller from the 1970s, you can hear yourself saying, “That plan’s just crazy enough to work.”

But like a TV plot, the hawks’ vision rests on a willing suspension of disbelief, in particular, on the premise that every close call will break in our favor: The guard will fall asleep next to the cell so our heroes can pluck the keys from his belt. The hail of enemy bullets will plink-plink-plink over our heroes’ heads. And the getaway car in the driveway will have the keys waiting in the ignition. Sure, the hawks’ vision could come to pass. But there are at least half a dozen equally plausible alternative scenarios that would be disastrous for us.

To begin with, this whole endeavor is supposed to be about reducing the long-term threat of terrorism, particularly terrorism that employs weapons of mass destruction. But, to date, every time a Western or non-Muslim country has put troops into Arab lands to stamp out violence and terror, it has awakened entire new terrorist organizations and a generation of recruits. Placing U.S. troops in Riyadh after the Gulf War (to protect Saudi Arabia and its oilfields from Saddam) gave Osama bin Laden a cause around which he built al Qaeda. Israel took the West Bank in a war of self-defense, but once there its occupation helped give rise to Hamas. Israel’s incursion into southern Lebanon (justified at the time, but transformed into a permanent occupation) led to the rise of Hezbollah. Why do we imagine that our invasion and occupation of Iraq, or whatever countries come next, will turn out any differently?

The Bush administration also insists that our right to act preemptively and unilaterally, with or without the international community’s formal approval, rests on the need to protect American lives. But with the exception of al Qaeda, most terrorist organizations in the world, and certainly in the Middle East, do not target Americans. Hamas certainly doesn’t. Hezbollah, the most fearsome of terrorist organizations beside al Qaeda, has killed American troops in the Middle East, but not for some years, and it has never targeted American civilians on American soil. Yet like Hamas, Hezbollah has an extensive fundraising cell operation in the States (as do many terrorist organizations, including the Irish Republican Army). If we target them in the Middle East, can’t we reasonably assume they will respond by activating these cells and taking the war worldwide?

Next, consider the hawks’ plans for those Middle East states that are authoritarian yet “friendly” to the United States–specifically Egypt and Saudi Arabia. No question these are problem countries. Their governments buy our weapons and accept our foreign aid yet allow vicious anti-Semitism to spew from the state run airwaves and tolerate clerics who preach jihad against the West. But is it really in our interests to work for their overthrow? Many hawks clearly think so. I asked Richard Perle last year about the dangers that might flow from the fall of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. “Mubarak is no great shakes,” he quipped. “Surely we can do better than Mubarak.” When I asked Perle’s friend and fellow Reagan-era neocon Ken Adelman to calculate the costs of having the toppling of Saddam lead to the overthrow of the House of Saud, he shot back: “All the better if you ask me.”

This cavalier call for regime change, however, runs into a rather obvious problem. When the communist regimes of Eastern and Central Europe fell after 1989, the people of those nations felt grateful to the United States because we helped liberate them from their Russian colonial masters. They went on to create pro-Western democracies. The same is unlikely to happen, however, if we help “liberate” Saudi Arabia and Egypt. The tyrannies in these countries are home grown, and the U.S. government has supported them, rightly or wrongly, for decades, even as we’ve ignored (in the eyes of Arabs) the plight of the Palestinians. Consequently, the citizens of these countries generally hate the United States, and show strong sympathy for Islamic radicals. If free elections were held in Saudi Arabia today, Osama bin Laden would probably win more votes than Crown Prince Abdullah. Topple the pro-Western autocracies in these countries, in other words, and you won’t get pro-Western democracies but anti-Western tyrannies.

To this dilemma, the hawks offer two responses. One is that eventually the citizens of Egypt and Saudi Arabia will grow disenchanted with their anti-Western Islamic governments, just as the people of Iran have, and become our friends. To which the correct response is, well, sure, that’s a nice theory, but do we really want to make the situation for ourselves hugely worse now on the strength of a theoretical future benefit?

The hawks’ other response is that if the effort to push these countries toward democracy goes south, we can always use our military might to secure our interests. “We need to be more assertive,” argues Max Boot, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, “and stop letting all these two-bit dictators and rogue regimes push us around and stop being a patsy for our so-called allies, especially in Saudi Arabia.” Hopefully, in Boot’s view, laying down the law will be enough. But he envisions a worst-case scenario that would involve the United States “occupying the Saudi’s oil fields and administering them as a trust for the people of the region.”

What Boot is calling for, in other words, is the creation of a de facto American empire in the Middle East. In fact, there’s a subset of neocons who believe that given our unparalleled power, empire is our destiny and we might as well embrace it. The problem with this line of thinking is, of course, that it ignores the lengthy and troubling history of imperial ambitions, particularly in the Middle East. The French and the English didn’t leave voluntarily; they were driven out. And they left behind a legacy of ignorance, exploitation, and corruption that’s largely responsible for the region’s current dysfunctional politics.

Another potential snafu for the hawks is Iran, arguably the most dangerous state in the Middle East. The good news is that the fundamentalist Shi’a mullahs who have been running the government, exporting terrorism, and trying to enrich their uranium, are increasingly unpopular. Most experts believe that the mullahs’ days are numbered, and that true democracy will come to Iran. That day will arrive sooner, the hawks argue, with a democratic Iraq on Iran’s border. But the opposite could happen. If the mullahs are smart, they’ll cooperate just enough with the Americans not to provoke an attack, but put themselves forth to their own people as defenders of Iranian independence and Iran’s brother Shi’a in southern Iraq who are living under the American jackboot. Such a strategy might keep the fundamentalists in power for years longer than they otherwise might have been.

Then there is the mother of all problems, Iraq. The hawks’ whole plan rests on the assumption that we can turn it into a self-governing democracy–that the very presence of that example will transform politics in the Middle East. But what if we can’t really create a democratic, self-governing Iraq, at least not very quickly? What if the experience we had after World War II in Germany and Japan, two ethnically homogeneous nations, doesn’t quite work in an ethnically divided Iraq where one group, the Sunni Arabs, has spent decades repressing and slaughtering the others? As one former Army officer with long experience with the Iraq file explains it, the “physical analogy to Saddam Hussein’s regime is a steel beam in compression.” Give it one good hit, and you’ll get a violent explosion. One hundred thousand U.S. troops may be able to keep a lid on all the pent-up hatred. But we may soon find that it’s unwise to hand off power to the fractious Iraqis. To invoke the ugly but apt metaphor which Jefferson used to describe the American dilemma of slavery, we will have the wolf by the ears. You want to let go. But you dare not.

And what if we do muster the courage to allow elections, but the Iraqis choose a government we can’t live with–as the Japanese did in their first post-war election, when the United States purged the man slated to become prime minister? But if we do that in Iraq, how will it look on Al Jazeera? Ultimately, the longer we stay as occupiers, the more Iraq becomes not an example for other Arabs to emulate, but one that helps Islamic fundamentalists make their case that America is just an old-fashioned imperium bent on conquering Arab lands. And that will make worse all the problems set forth above.

None of these problems are inevitable, of course. Luck, fortitude, deft management, and help from allies could bring about very different results. But we can probably only rely on the first three because we are starting this enterprise over the expressed objections of almost every other country in the world. And that’s yet another reason why overthrowing the Middle East won’t be the same as overthrowing communism. We did the latter, after all, within a tight formal alliance, NATO. Reagan’s most effective military move against Moscow, for instance, placing Pershing II missiles in Western Europe, could never have happened, given widespread public protests, except that NATO itself voted to let the weapons in. In the Middle East, however, we’re largely alone. If things go badly, what allies we might have left are liable to say to us: You broke it, you fix it.

Whacking the Hornet’s Nest

If the Bush administration has thought through these various negative scenarios–and we must presume, or at least pray, that it has–it certainly has not shared them with the American people. More to the point, the president has not even leveled with the public that such a clean-sweep approach to the Middle East is, in fact, their plan. This breaks new ground in the history of pre-war presidential deception. Franklin Roosevelt said he was trying to keep the United States out of World War II even as he–in some key ways–courted a confrontation with the Axis powers that he saw as both inevitable and necessary. History has judged him well for this. Far more brazenly, Lyndon Johnson’s administration greatly exaggerated the Gulf of Tonkin incident to gin up support for full-throttle engagement in Vietnam. The war proved to be Johnson’s undoing. When President Clinton used American troops to quell the fighting in Bosnia he said publicly that our troops would be there no longer than a year, even though it was widely understood that they would be there far longer. But in the case of these deceptions, the public was at least told what the goals of the wars were and whom and where we would be fighting.

Today, however, the great majority of the American people have no concept of what kind of conflict the president is leading them into. The White House has presented this as a war to depose Saddam Hussein in order to keep him from acquiring weapons of mass destruction–a goal that the majority of Americans support. But the White House really has in mind an enterprise of a scale, cost, and scope that would be almost impossible to sell to the American public. The White House knows that. So it hasn’t even tried. Instead, it’s focused on getting us into Iraq with the hope of setting off a sequence of events that will draw us inexorably towards the agenda they have in mind.

The brazenness of this approach would be hard to believe if it weren’t entirely in line with how the administration has pursued so many of its other policy goals. Its preferred method has been to use deceit to create faits accomplis, facts on the ground that then make the administration’s broader agenda almost impossible not to pursue. During and after the 2000 campaign, the president called for major education and prescription drug programs plus a huge tax cut, saying America could easily afford them all because of large budget surpluses. Critics said it wasn’t true, and the growing budget deficits have proven them right. But the administration now uses the existence of big budget deficits as a way to put the squeeze on social programs–part of its plan all along. Strip away the presidential seal and the fancy titles, and it’s just a straight-up con.

The same strategy seemed to guide the administration’s passive-aggressive attitude towards our allies. It spent the months after September 11 signaling its distaste for international agreements and entangling alliances. The president then demanded last September that the same countries he had snubbed support his agenda in Iraq. And last month, when most of those countries refused, hawks spun that refusal as evidence that they were right all along. Recently, a key neoconservative commentator with close ties to the administration told me that the question since the end of the Cold War has been which global force would create the conditions for global peace and security: the United States, NATO, or the United Nations. With NATO now wrecked, he told me, the choice is between the Unites States and the United Nations. Whether NATO is actually wrecked remains to be seen. But the strategy is clear: push the alliance to the breaking point, and when it snaps, cite it as proof that the alliance was good for nothing anyway. It’s the definition of chutzpah, like the kid who kills his parents and begs the judge for sympathy because he’s an orphan.

Another president may be able to rebuild NATO or get the budget back in balance. But once America begins the process of remaking the Middle East in the way the hawks have in mind, it will be extremely difficult for any president to pull back. Vietnam analogies have long been overused, and used inappropriately, but this may be one case where the comparison is apt.

Ending Saddam Hussein’s regime and replacing it with something stable and democratic was always going to be a difficult task, even with the most able leadership and the broadest coalition. But doing it as the Bush administration now intends is something like going outside and giving a few good whacks to a hornets’ nest because you want to get them out in the open and have it out with them once and for all. Ridding the world of Islamic terrorism by rooting out its ultimate sources–Muslim fundamentalism and the Arab world’s endemic despotism, corruption, and poverty–might work. But the costs will be immense. Whether the danger is sufficient and the costs worth incurring would make for an interesting public debate. The problem is that once it’s just us and the hornets, we really won’t have any choice.

Joshua Micah Marshall, a Washington Monthly contributing writer, is author of the Talking Points Memo.

Cairo dispatch: The papers that cried wolf Brian Whitaker looks at how the American media are softening up public attitudes to war with Iraq

Monday December 16, 2002

Last week brought yet another terrifying headline from an American newspaper: “US suspects al-Qaida got nerve agent from Iraqis”.

The 1,800-word story in the Washington Post last Thursday got off to a reasonably promising start by saying: “The Bush administration has received a credible report that Islamic extremists affiliated with al-Qaida took possession of a chemical weapon in Iraq last month or late in October, according to two officials with firsthand knowledge of the report and its source.”

Less promisingly, the second paragraph begins: “If the report proves true … ” The remaining 28 paragraphs offer little to suggest that it actually is true, and several reasons for thinking it may not be. Paragraph six tells us: “Like most intelligence, the reported chemical weapon transfer is not backed by definitive evidence.”

Paragraph eight says: “Even authorised spokesmen, with one exception, addressed the report on the condition of anonymity. They said the principal source on the chemical transfer was uncorroborated, and that indications it involved a nerve agent were open to interpretation.”

In paragraph 12, we are told that the report may be connected to a warning message circulated to American forces overseas and an unnamed official is cited as saying that the message resulted only from an analyst’s hypothetical concern.

As one would expect from the Washington Post, the story is carefully written and meticulously researched. But it’s basically worthless.

The reporter had clearly spoken to a lot of different people but he failed – not for want of effort – to substantiate the claim that Iraq provided al-Qaida with nerve gas. Although some officials were happy to describe the claim as “credible”, none appeared willing to stand up and say that they, personally, believed it.

The sensible course of action at that stage would have been to abandon the story, or at least file it away in the hope of more evidence coming to light. That might have happened with any other story, but in the case of Iraq at present the temptation to publish is hard to resist.

This particular story was more tempting than many because it carried, as the American military would say, a multiple warhead. It not only suggested that Iraq – contrary to its recent declaration – does possess chemical weapons but, additionally, that it has close links with al-Qaida.

The effect, if not the intention, of publishing the story was to give currency to both these ideas. Stories in the Washington Post are instantly regurgitated by other news organisations around the world, usually at much shorter length and without all the cautionary nuances of the original.

Iraq itself helped the story along by issuing a denial which – since it could produce no evidence by way of rebuttal – simply sounded unconvincing.

The Post’s story is also discussed on the BBC website. Under the headline “Wanted: an Iraqi link to al-Qaida “, Paul Reynolds, the website’s world affairs correspondent, views it as part of a long and unsuccessful effort to link Iraq with al-Qaida.

“One of the most intriguing questions in the ‘war on terrorism’,” he writes, “is whether there are contacts between Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden’s al-Qaida network. Intelligence agencies are constantly looking for the ‘missing link’.”

The quotation marks around “missing link” distance the BBC from the idea that such a link exists, though the definite article preceding it suggests otherwise. Why are intelligence agencies looking for “the” missing link and not “a” missing link?

Journalistically, it’s more interesting to talk about a “missing” link than a “possible” link but even when the tone of discussion is sceptical – as it was in the BBC’s case – there’s still a drip effect. The more we mention missing links, the more people will assume they are out there somewhere, waiting to be found.

The risk of giving currency to false or questionable claims is now a daily problem for those of us who try to write about Iraq without turning into other people’s weapons of mass deception.

Even a simple reference to Iraq’s weaponry can be problematic. Some readers object that “weapons of mass destruction” is a tendentious phrase. “Chemical, biological and nuclear” is accurately descriptive, though it becomes too much of a mouthful when used repeatedly in a story. Reuters news agency and others increasingly – and rather emotively – talk about “doomsday weapons”. In practice, “doomsday” is beginning to mean anything nasty possessed by Iraq, though not by the United States.

Last Wednesday, for example, a Reuters report stated: “The United States threatened possible nuclear retaliation against Iraq if its forces or allies were attacked with doomsday weapons.” Let’s see how that looks the other way round: “The United States threatened retaliation with doomsday weapons against Iraq if its forces or allies were attacked with chemicals.”

In terms of mass death, it takes 28 Halabjas to make one Hiroshima.

Meanwhile, to the delight of pharmaceutical companies, the United States is pressing ahead with its smallpox vaccination programme – though the recent New York Times “scoop” about an Iraqi smallpox threat looks increasingly shaky. On December 3, Judith Miller, the paper’s “bioterrorism expert” reported an unverified claim that a Russian scientist, who once had access to the Soviet Union’s entire collection of 120 strains of smallpox, may have visited Iraq in 1990 and may have provided the Iraqis with a version of the virus that could be resistant to vaccines and could be more easily transmitted as a biological weapon. (See “Poisoning the Air”, World Dispatch, December 9.)

Since the article was published, colleagues of the now-dead scientist, Nelja Maltseva, have said that she last visited Iraq in 1971-72 (as part of a global smallpox eradication effort) and last travelled abroad (to Finland) in 1982.

Another of Ms Miller’s scoops, on November 12, cited “senior Bush administration officials” as saying that Iraq had ordered a million doses of atropine, which is an antidote to nerve gas, but also a routine drug for treating heart patients. This was interpreted as evidence that Iraq not only possesses nerve gas but intends to use it in a conflict with the United States – hence the need to protect its own forces from accidental injury.

The US then threatened to block a continuation of Iraq’s oil-for-food programme unless atropine were included in the list of “suspect” items that Iraq cannot import without permission from the United Nations’ sanctions committee.

As I pointed out in world dispatch last week, the sudden horror over atropine was very strange, given that the US had previously allowed Iraq to buy large quantities on normal medical grounds, and that UN had lifted all restrictions on Iraqi purchases of the drug only six months earlier.

This highly relevant information, which Ms Miller had failed to mention, eventually found its way into the Washington Post and the wires of Associated Press. The response from the New York Times was to run the Associated Press report without reference to Ms Miller’s flawed scoop.

By no means do all the dubious scare stories about Iraq come from shadowy intelligence sources or officials who can’t be named.

Last September, Turkish police announced the arrest of two men in a taxi who were apparently smuggling 35lb of weapons-grade uranium to Iraq from somewhere near the Syrian border. But a few days later it emerged that the material was harmless, containing only zinc, iron, zirconium and manganese. Its actual weight was only 5lb but the police, in their excitement, had weighed the lead container as well.

One day, perhaps, one of these scare stories may turn out to be true – but don’t hold your breath waiting for it. In the meantime, readers are welcome to send more examples by email, to the address below.

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The Bush administration and the American media have passed by the anniversary of the anthrax attacks on leading congressional Democrats in virtual silence. There has been little media commentary assessing the meaning of the attempt to kill Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle and Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, whose offices were targeted with letters filled with trillions of lethal anthrax spores that could have killed dozens, if not hundreds, of people.

The mailings to Daschle and Leahy followed a series of mailings of less potent anthrax spores to media outlets—a tabloid office in Florida, the New York Post, and NBC News. The Democrats and the media are habitual targets of the ultra-right in the United States. But both federal investigators and the media itself have been largely silent about the likelihood of a right-wing political motivation for the anthrax attacks.

Nor has the media spotlight been placed on the manifest failure of federal investigators to apprehend the person or persons responsible for the attacks, which killed five people and caused serious and potentially disabling illness in a dozen others. Once it became clear, within a few days of the attack, that the most likely suspects were fascist-minded elements in the US military-intelligence establishment, not terrorists affiliated with Al Qaeda or Iraq, the FBI effectively shoved its investigation onto the back burner.

According to scientists who have discussed the investigation with the press, there are extraordinary delays and unexplained wrong turns in the FBI investigation:

* The FBI could have identified the institutions that possessed the Ames strain of anthrax used in the attacks with a routine database search. But subpoenas for samples of the bacteria were not sent out until February, four months after the attacks.

* Receipt of the samples was delayed by another two to four months because no proper storage room had been prepared at the Ft. Detrick Army germ warfare lab, which was to test them.

* Investigators did not locate the contaminated mailbox in Princeton, New Jersey, where the anthrax letters were likely mailed from, until August, ten months after the attacks. Testing of the 600 mailboxes on that postal route should have taken only two weeks, one expert said.

* Investigators waited until September 2002, 11 months later, to conduct exhaustive environmental testing at the Florida tabloid newspaper building where the first person to die of anthrax, photo editor Robert Stevens, worked.

* Investigators have still not spoken with all of the US scientists who made anthrax for the military’s biological weapons program in the 1950s and 1960s, although only two dozen are still alive. None were interviewed until months after the attacks.

Strangest of all, of course, is the treatment of Dr. Steven Hatfill, whose name was reportedly provided to the FBI within a few days of the anthrax attacks. Hatfill had a grievance against the government because his security clearance was revoked in August 2001, ultimately costing him his job at defense contractor SAIC. He was, according to his own resume, familiar with both dry and wet forms of the anthrax toxin. He had written a novel about a germ warfare attack on the US Congress, and commissioned a study of the threat of anthrax-laced letters that included information on the best size of particles and kinds of envelopes.

Although Hatfill had opportunity, motive and the necessary skills, and reportedly failed several lie detector tests, he was never arrested or detained. His name only came to public attention after a campaign of exposure by Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, a bioweapons expert at the Federation of American Scientists, and New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof.

Rosenberg charged that Hatfill was being given high-level protection by the government because of his involvement in top secret germ warfare projects. “We know that the FBI is looking at this person, and it’s likely that he participated in the past in secret activities that the government would not like to see disclosed,” she wrote. “And this raises the question of whether the FBI may be dragging its feet somewhat and may not be so anxious to bring to public light the person who did this.”

Kristof detailed Hatfill’s role as a military/intelligence operative for white racist-ruled Rhodesia and South Africa. He suggested that Hatfill—whom he initially called “Mr. Z.”, in deference to the government’s refusal to name him—was still on active duty for the US government in operations in Central Asia.

As the World Socialist Web Site commented at the time: “Kristof’s central accusation is that the anthrax investigation has reached a dead end, not because of the lack of evidence, but because the prime suspect has powerful friends in high places and enjoys official protection….Kristof’s column points inexorably to the conclusion that the Bush administration is an accessory after the fact—if not before it—in the attempted assassination of the official political opposition.”

Neither Rosenberg nor Kristof provided definitive proof that Hatfill was the anthrax terrorist. But they detailed circumstantial evidence that was far more convincing than the vague suspicions, or racist innuendo, used by the Justice Department in its roundup of thousands of Arab and Muslim immigrants after the September 11 terrorist attacks. The Justice Department’s reluctance to move against Hatfill was in sharp contrast to the agency’s practice in other terrorist investigations. If the prime suspect in the anthrax case had been a Muslim—or even better, an Iraqi—Attorney General John Ashcroft would likely have designated him an “enemy combatant” and had him locked up indefinitely.

That Hatfill had—and still enjoys—high-level protection is demonstrated by political associations that came to light after the FBI was compelled to move more openly against him. After the third search of Hatfill’s Frederick, Maryland apartment, the Justice Department sent a letter to Louisiana State University to forbid the school to hire Hatfill as a $150,000 deputy director of the National Center for Biomedical Research and Training, an LSU lab financed by the federal government.

Hatfill fought back, holding a public press conference at which he denied any connection to the anthrax attacks. He has rallied sections of the ultra-right to his defense. His press spokesman and close friend, Pat Clawson, is a former CNN journalist who now works on the radio talk show of right-wing activist and Iran-Contra plotter Oliver North. The right-wing propaganda outfit Accuracy in Media hosted his press conferences and published statements denouncing the alleged FBI “persecution.” Senator Charles Grassley, an Iowa Republican, raised the issue in the Senate Judiciary Committee and wrote a letter of protest to Ashcroft, declaring, “‘ It is important that the government act according to laws, rules, policies, and procedures, rather than make arbitrary decisions that affect individual citizens.”

Perhaps the most significant intervention came from the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, which denounced Rosenberg and Kristof for pressuring the FBI, and declared that the real culprit in the anthrax attacks was Iraq.

On October 9, the Baltimore Sun—one of the few daily newspapers to pursue the anthrax issue seriously—published a report claiming that Hatfill had lied repeatedly about his educational and employment record, including forging a bogus certificate for a Ph.D. from Rhodes University that he had not received.

Again, the double standard is staggering. Muslim and Arab immigrants were seized by federal authorities and detained indefinitely for missing deadlines for submitting routine paperwork that would never have been the occasion for arrest or prosecution before September 11.

The anthrax attacks had extraordinary political significance. Daschle and Leahy are among the highest-ranking leaders of the official opposition party in Washington. Daschle is Senate majority leader, the top Democrat in Congress, while Leahy’s committee handles such politically sensitive issues as the confirmation of judicial nominees and legislation on abortion, criminal justice and civil rights.

During the first several days after an anthrax-laced letter was opened October 15, 2001 by a Daschle aide, sending spores into the ventilation system of the office building, the entire building had to be closed and cleaned, putting dozens of senators into temporary accommodations for several months. The Republican-controlled House of Representatives voted to adjourn indefinitely, and Senate Republican leader Trent Lott initially proposed that the Senate do likewise.

There is a curious coincidence between what Lott proposed and the decision by the Bush administration after the September 11 terrorist attacks to establish a shadow government in secret bunkers which would provide continuity in the event of a nuclear/chemical/biological attack that destroyed Washington DC. The shadow government was also limited to the executive branch, making no provision for the safeguarding or reconstitution of an elected legislature.

The political consequences of the anthrax terrorism and the Bush administration’s plans for a shadow government dovetailed completely. Both would have shut down the legislative branch and left the executive branch with virtually unrestricted power.

It was revealed last December that the anthrax spores in the Daschle and Leahy letters were genetically identical to those produced at US germ warfare facilities at Ft. Detrick, Maryland and Dugway, Utah. In other words, the Democratic Party leadership was targeted for assassination using weapons produced by (or stolen from) the American military itself. The whole affair exudes the stench of an attempted political coup.

See Also:

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