Which one are you?  The ancient parable of the fox and the hedgehog has come into increasing view in popular culture lately.  And while its origins are somewhat ambiguous, the allegory has been applied to entrepreneurs, scientists, philosophers, playwrights, business leaders, economists, and even US presidents.

One of the fables goes something like this (sorry, no link to a source … I am paraphrasing a story from my childhood):

A fox and a hedgehog were strolling through a country path.  Periodically, they were threatened by hungry wolves.  The fox — being blessed with smarts, speed and agility — would lead packs of wolves on a wild chase through the fields, up and down trees, and over hill and dale.  Eventually the fox would return to the path, breathless but having lost the wolves, and continue walking.  The hedgehog, being endowed with a coat of spikes, simply hunkered down on its haunches when menaced by the wolves and fended them off without moving.  When they gave up, he would return to his stroll unperturbed.

According to the great liberal (before that was a dirty word) historian and thinker Isaiah Berlin who in 1953 wrote the Essay “The Hedgehog and the Fox“, interpreting the works of Tolstoy, Foxes are complex thinkers who account for a variety of circumstances and experiences while hedgehogs have the keen ability to focus and drive along a single path.  As examples, Berlin flags such thinkers as Plato, Lucretius, Dante, Pascal, Hegel, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Ibsen, and Proust as Hedgehogs and slots Herodotus, Aristotle, Erasmus, Shakespeare, Montaigne, Moliere, Goethe, Pushkin, Balzac, Joyce, Anderson as Foxes.

More recently, Jim Collins (author of “Good to Great“) took this concept into the business world in his book and it is one of the central unifying themes of his work.  In his book and other writings Collins comes down pretty hard on Foxes:

Those who built the good-to-great companies were, to one degree or another, hedgehogs. They used their hedgehog nature to drive toward what we came to call a Hedgehog Concept for their companies. Those who led the comparison companies tended to be foxes, never gaining the clarifying advantage of a Hedgehog Concept, being instead scattered, diffused, and inconsistent.

This is understandable.  Collins, a former Stanford University Business Professor, comes from a hedgehog factory.  He has made a career of spooling hedgehogs into mainstream companies at the mid-management level and consulting with large, heavily-matrixed companies on business strategy and leadership.  In many respects he lives in a world constructed by and for hedgehogs — so it makes sense that he could see the “Great” companies he writes about in his books (all typically fortune 500 players) as hedgehogs.  On a long enough timeline we are ALL wrong, but it is worth pointing out that a number of Collins’ “Great” companies have suffered badly from (and others have caused) the current economic downturn, eg. Circuit City.

As Nicholas Kristof describes the dichotomy in the NY Times:

Hedgehogs tend to have a focused worldview, an ideological leaning, strong convictions; foxes are more cautious, more centrist, more likely to adjust their views, more pragmatic, more prone to self-doubt, more inclined to see complexity and nuance. And it turns out that while foxes don’t give great sound-bites, they are far more likely to get things right.

John Kerry is clearly a Fox: A self-doubting; complicated; unable to present absolute, sound byte-friendly answers to complex questions.  George W. Bush, however, presents himself as a hedgehog: simple, direct, ideological, and absolutely assured of his correctness.  In 2004, America signed up for its second term of 4 years of hedgehog leadership to substantial effect.

In our industry, hedgehogs have the benefit of focus and the ability to keep their heads down and companies out of trouble during tough times.  They succeed through the avoidance of substantial risk and through the ability to see things through.  When they fail, it’s because their conservatism holds them back, and markets move past them; or because they can’t release their death grip on that singular idea and move on to the next thing.

The Fox has the benefit of broad vision and the ability to perceive the complex interaction of seemingly dissonant ideas, and they succeed because they are able to travel outside of marked pathways with their ideas and make substantial gains.  When they fail it’s because their reach exceeds their grasp, because they are too far ahead of the market, or because they have difficulty maintaining focus to see things through.

The one problem that Mr. Collins cannot cop to is that while Hedgehogs are mass-produceable through training and discipline (this is what MBA factories do), Foxes are not so easy to come by:  their behaviour is learned but it is most likely interdisciplinary and tangential.  As a modern example, one could strongly argue that Steve Jobs, Reid Hoffman, and many successful tech entrepreneurs are foxes.

On the other hand Bill Gates, who at one time was the richest man in the world:  pure hedgehog.  Rupert Murdoch?  Count the spikes.  There are many successful hedgehogs in the mainstream business world and far fewer Foxes.  The structure of businesses, after all, are generally designed around hedgehogs. In general larger corporate structures aren’t great at absorbing foxes.  It’s why Jobs quit Apple, before going back as CEO under a mandate that embraced his wide-ranging aspirations.  It’s probably why entrepreneurs such as Evan Williams, who blew out of Google as soon as he could after selling blogger.com to them, generally can’t wait to get out of the mother ship after a their lock-up periods are done.  A friend and the CEO of a company acquired by Microsoft always referred to Redmond as “they” and never “we” even while he took down an amazing salary serving as a VP for two years.

Innovation is a concept which we modernists tie into every description of a person’s thinking process.  Wikipedia says there are a few different types of innovation:  “It may refer to incremental, radical, and revolutionary changes in thinking, products, processes, or organizations.”  Perhaps the razor cuts this way:  Perhaps hedgehogs deliver incremental changes while foxes deliver radical, revolutionary changes.

As a fox, I know that many of my successes have come when paired with hedgehogs.  A hedgehog can pluck a singular concept from the maelstrom of energy emanating from the fox and run with it along a narrow path.  Steve Jobs had Wozniak on the engineering side, and just as significantly Mike Markkula on the financing and business affairs side.  The latter two are quintessential hedgehogs.

While it’s valuable to know whether you’re a fox or whether you’re a hedgehog, it is not particularly constructive to assign a static value judgment to one versus the other.  At varying points in the arc of a business, a prevalence of influence from either a fox or a hedgehog can make or break a company.  Witness the foxes that artificially inflated hyper-economies at Enron (Jeff Skilling) and AIG (Joseph Cassano) to great personal benefit but ultimately destroyed hundreds of billions of dollars in wealth.  And meet the Hedgehogs, Gil Amelio and John Sculley, who sapped the growth of Apple, diluted its brand value, and very nearly bankrupted the company.

So figure out what you’re good at, chase the visions you believe in, and if you’re fortunate enough to work in an environment that embraces and supports your particular attributes, you’ll ultimately be successful.

POOR Q. In one James Bond film after another, the top secret service engineer has provided whiz-bang gizmos for the cars that Agent 007 drives. The Aston Martin Vanquish in the latest, 20th, movie, “Die Another Day,” has machine guns under the hood and rockets behind the grille — nothing new in the Bond world. The film’s really novel effects are not Q’s inventions, but marketing gimmicks. Lasers and atomic ray guns are passé; brand synergy is what drives Bond these days. Advertisement Alt Text

The Bond films, of course, are the ultimate product placement for automakers. This time, Ford is the “supplier of choice,” thanks to its ownership of Aston Martin, the small British automaker that supplied the most notable of all Bond cars, the DB5 grand tourer made famous in “Goldfinger.” (A replica of that car is displayed in the International Spy Museum in Washington.)

In “Die Another Day,” which opens on Nov. 22, Pierce Brosnan drives the Vanquish, Halle Berry has a Thunderbird and there’s a Jaguar XKR for the villain, Zao (Rick Yune). Advertisements for all three cars are tied to the film, and there are cameos by other cars from the Ford Motor Company’s stable: a Range Rover, a Volvo S60 and an S80, the Ford StreetKa from Europe, a vintage Fairlane and a GT40 racecar.

Such a wealth of on-screen placements from one company hasn’t been seen since the short-lived “Viper” television series, in which the Dodge sports car was chased by cops in Chryslers, leaving scattered Jeeps and Voyager minivans in its wake.

Ford’s bonds have been downgraded on Wall Street, but Bond’s Fords are a blue-chip product placement. Estimates of the value of the deal among Ford; Eon Productions, which owns the rights to James Bond; and MGM, the studio distributing the film, have ranged from $40 million (in Variety) to $140 million (in The Daily Mail in London).

But Ford isn’t talking. “We did not pay to have the cars in the films,” said Paige Johnson, a Ford spokeswoman. “The deal is about mutually beneficial marketing.” That red-blooded males are drawn to the cars that 007 drives is a proposition road-tested by four decades of the Bond oeuvre. But Ford is going further. “We are putting a special focus on the Bond-girl persona for this film,” said Jan Valentic, vice president for global marketing at Ford.

A Ford news release asks, “What woman hasn’t dreamed of being a Bond girl?” The company needs only 700 dreamers; that’s all the limited-edition T-Bird’s it plans to sell. (The number is 007 backwards.)

The T-Bird in the film has no armament. “The only bombshell in the Thunderbird is Halle Berry,” Ms. Johnson said. The car’s coral paint, she noted, matches the coral two-piece bathing suit that Ms. Berry wears in the film. Those who buy the car can get matching Revlon cosmetics — the Limited Edition 007 Color Collection — or go for contrast with From Russia With Love Red.

Those with less active fantasy lives or more limited means can settle for one-eighteenth-scale models of the cars, which join a vast fleet of Bond toy cars offered by Corgi (http://www.corgi.co.uk/us/bond_main.ihtml) and other model makers that serve as a reminder of how many 007 cars there have been over 40 years (and 5 actors playing Bond). Here are some of them:

DR. NO (1962) Sean Connery drives an unassuming blue Sunbeam Alpine.

FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE (1963) As in most of the original Ian Fleming novels, 007 shows up in a black Bentley.

GOLDFINGER (1964) Aston Martin makes its Bond-movie debut. The “silver birch” DB5 has an ejection seat (“Don’t touch that button!”) as well as devices that create smokescreens and oil slicks. Goldfinger prefers a Rolls-Royce Phantom III, and his sidekick, Odd Job, shows up in a Ford Ranchero.

THUNDERBALL (1965) The Aston Martin DB5.

CASINO ROYALE (1967) A vintage Bentley, black and supercharged.

YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE (1967) Bond gets a rare Toyota 2000GT, a limited-edition supercar converted to a convertible for this film.

ON HER MAJESTY’S SECRET SERVICE (1969) George Lazenby and Diana Rigg leave their wedding in an Aston Martin DBS. They also traverse Swiss ski slopes in a Mercury Cougar. (The Cougar was an offbeat choice, as was Mr. Lazenby; neither made an encore.)

DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER (1971) Bond’s DB5 is in the repair shop, so he rents a Mustang Mach I to screech through Las Vegas.

LIVE AND LET DIE (1973) Roger Moore’s debut. He drives a London double-decker bus.

MAN WITH THE GOLDEN GUN (1974) To chase villains in an American Motors Matador — which turns into an airplane — Bond grabs an A.M.C. Hornet. It makes a 360-degree corkscrew leap across a ruined bridge.

THE SPY WHO LOVED ME (1977) A Lotus Esprit got the role after an executive pointedly parked one in front of the producer, Albert Broccoli. The car also becomes a submarine.

MOONRAKER (1979) A moon buggy.

FOR YOUR EYES ONLY (1981) Lotus Esprit Turbo. In one sequence, Bond drives a Citroën 2CV that takes a lot of abuse but keeps on ticking.

OCTOPUSSY (1983) Bond is chased in a stolen Alfa Romeo GTV by police on the Avus speedway in Berlin. He also shows up in a VW Beetle.

NEVER SAY NEVER AGAIN (1983) Sean Connery makes his curtain call with a black Bentley and a Yamaha XJ 650 Turbo motorcycle.

A VIEW TO A KILL (1985) Roger Moore again, this time in a Renault 11 taxi.

THE LIVING DAYLIGHTS (1987) Timothy Dalton, in the first of two Bond appearances, drives an Aston Martin V-8 Vantage and a V-8 Volante. The latter car has rockets and a stash of spikes that puncture pursuers’ tires.

LICENCE TO KILL (1989) Bond is mostly chauffeured in a blue Rolls, but ends up driving a Kenworth tractor-trailer full of gasoline and drugs.

GOLDENEYE (1995) The BMW Z3 roadster makes a brief appearance, upstaged by Bond (now Pierce Brosnan) in the Aston Martin DB5 revived from earlier films. It races a Ferrari 355 GTS down the Corniche highway above Monte Carlo.

TOMORROW NEVER DIES (1997) The BMW 750iL can be driven remotely by an Ericsson cellphone.

THE WORLD IS NOT ENOUGH (1999) Bond’s BMW Z8 is sawed in half.

———–

Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety. – Ben Franklin (1706-1790) Historical Review of Constitution and Government of Pennsylvania.

On 27 October 2002

The Observer, London

The ENEMY WITHIN by Gore Vidal

On 24 August, 1814, things looked very dark for freedom1s land. That was the day the British captured Washington DC and set fire to the Capitol and the White House. President Madison took refuge in the nearby Virginia woods where he waited patiently for the notoriously short attention span of the Brits to kick in, which it did. They moved on and what might have been a Day of Utter Darkness turned out to be something of a bonanza for the DC building trades and up-market realtors.

One year after 9/11, we still don’t know by whom we were struck that infamous Tuesday, or for what true purpose. But it is fairly plain to many civil libertarians that 9/11 put paid not only to much of our fragile Bill of Rights but also to our once-envied system of government which had taken a mortal blow the previous year when the Supreme Court did a little dance in 5/4 time and replaced a popularly elected president with the oil and gas Cheney-Bush junta.

Meanwhile, our more and more unaccountable government is pursuing all sorts of games around the world that we the spear- carriers (formerly the people) will never learn of. Even so, we have been getting some answers to the question: why weren1t we warned in advance of 9/11? Apparently, we were, repeatedly; for the better part of a year, we were told there would be unfriendly visitors to our skies some time in September 2001, but the government neither informed nor protected us despite Mayday warnings from Presidents Putin and Mubarak, from Mossad and even from elements of our own FBI. A joint panel of congressional intelligence committees reported (19 September 2002, New York Times) that as early as 1996, Pakistani terrorist Abdul Hakim Murad confessed to federal agents that he was learning to fly in order to crash a plane into CIA HQ.

Only CIA director George Tenet seemed to take the various threats seriously. In December 1998, he wrote to his deputies that “we are at war” with Osama bin Laden. So impressed was the FBI by his warnings that by 20 September 2001, “the FBI still had only one analyst assigned full time to al-Qaeda”.

From a briefing prepared for Bush at the beginning of July 2001: “We believe that OBL (Osama bin Laden) will launch a significant terrorist attack against US and/or Israeli interests in the coming weeks. The attack will be spectacular and designed to inflict mass casualties against US facilities or interests. Attack preparations have been made. Attack will occur with little or no warning.” And so it came to pass; yet Condoleezza Rice, the National Security Advisor, says she never suspected that this meant anything more than the kidnapping of planes.

Happily, somewhere over the Beltway, there is Europe-recently declared anti-semitic by the US media because most of Europe wants no war with Iraq and the junta does, for reasons we may now begin to understand thanks to European and Asian investigators with their relatively free media.

On the subject, “how and why America was attacked on 11 September 2001”, the best, most balanced report, thus far is by Nafeez Mossadeq Ahmed… Yes, yes, I know he is one of Them. But they often know things that we don1t-particularly about what we are up to. A political scientist, Ahmed is executive director of the Institute for Policy Research and Development “a think-tank dedicated to the protection of human rights, justice and peace” in Brighton. His book, The War on Freedom, has just been published in the US by a small, but reputable publisher.

Ahmed provides a background for our ongoing war against Afghanistan, a view that in no way coincides with what the administration has told us. He has drawn on many sources, most tellingly on American whistle-blowers who are beginning to come forth and bear witness ? like those FBI agents who warned their superiors that al-Qaeda was planning a kamikaze strike against New York and Washington only to be told that if they went public with these warnings under the National Security Act. Several of these agents have engaged David P. Schippers, chief investigative counsel for the US House Judiciary Committee, to represent them in court. That majestic Schippers managed the successful impeachment of President Clinton in the House of Representatives. He may, if the Iraqi war should go wrong, be obliged to perform the same high service for Bush, who allowed the American people to go unwarned about an imminent attack upon two of our cities as preemption of a planned military strike by the US against the Taliban.

The Guardian (26 September 2001) reported that in July 2001, a group of interested parties met in a Berlin hotel to listen to a former State Department official, Lee Coldren, as he passed on a message from the Bush administration that “the United States was so disgusted with the Taliban that they might be considering some military action the chilling quality of this private warning was that it came-according to one of those present, the Pakistani diplomat Niaz Naik-accompanied by specific details of how Bush would succeed…” Four days earlier, the guardian had reported that “Osama bin Laden and the Taliban received threats of possible American military action against them two months before the terrorist assaults on New York and Washington… (which) raises the possibility that bin Laden was launching a pre-emptive strike in response to what he saw as US threats.” A replay of the ‘day of infamy’ in the Pacific 62 years earlier?

Why the US needed a Eurasian adventure

On 9 September 2001, Bush was presented with a draft of a national security presidential directive outlining a global campaign of military, diplomatic and intelligence action targeting al-Qaeda, buttressed by the threat of war. According to NBC News: ‘President Bush’ was expected to sign detailed plans for a worldwide war against al-Qaeda but did not have a chance before the terrorist attacks… The directive, as described to NBC News, was essentially the same war plan as the one put into action after 11 September. The administration most likely was able to respond so quickly… because it simply had to pull the plans “off the shelf”.”

Finally, BBC News, 18 September 2001: “Niaz Naik, a former Pakistani foreign secretary, “was told by senior American officials in mid-July that military action against Afghanistan would go ahead by the middle of October. It was Naik1s view that Washington would not drop its war for Afghanistan even if bin Laden were to be surrendered immediately by the Taliban.”

Was Afghanistan then turned to rubble in order to avenge the 3,000 Americans slaughtered by Osama? Hardly. The administration is convinced that Americans are so simple minded that they can deal with no scenario more complex than the venerable lone, crazed killer (this time with zombie helpers) who does evil just for the fun of it ’cause he hates us, ’cause we’re rich ‘n and free ‘n he’s not, Osama was chosen on aesthetic grounds to be the frightening logo for our long-contemplated invasion and conquest of Afghanistan, planning for which had been “contingency” some years before 9/11 and, again, from 20 December 2000, when Clinton1s outgoing team devised a plan to strike at al-Qaeda in retaliation for the assault on the warship Cole. Clinton1s National Security Adviser, Sandy Berger, personally briefed his successor on the plan but Rice, still very much in her role as a director of Chevron-Texaco, with special duties regarding Pakistan and Uzbekistan, now denies any such briefing. A year and a half later (12 August 2002), fearless Time magazine reported this odd memory lapse.

Osama, if it was he and not a nation, simply provided the necessary shock to put in train a war of conquest. But conquest of what? What is there in dismal in dry sandy Afghanistan worth conquering? Zbigniew Brzezinski tells us exactly what in a 1997 Council on Foreign Relations study called The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and its Geostrategic Imperitives.

The Polish-born Brzezinski was the hawkish National Security Adviser to President Carter. In The Grand Chessboard, Brzezinski gives a little history lesson. “Ever sense the continents started interacting politically, some 500 years ago, Eurasia has been the centre of world power.” Eurasia is all the territory east of Germany. This means Russia, the Middle East, China, and parts of India. Brzezinski acknowledges that Russia and China, bordering oil rich central Asia, are the two main powers threatening US hegemony in that area.

He takes it for granted that the US must exert control over the former Soviet Republics of Central Asia, know to those who love them as “the Stans”: Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikstan and Kyrgyzstan all ‘of importance from the standpoint of security and historical ambitions to at least three of their most immediate and most powerful neighbors-Russia, Turkey and Iran, with China signaling’. Brzezinski notes how the world’s energy consumption keeps increasing; hence, who controls Caspian oil/gas will control the world economy. Brzezinski then, reflexively, goes into the standard American rationalization for empire. We want nothing, ever, for ourselves, only to keep bad people from getting good things with which to hurt good people. It follows that Americas primary interest is to help ensure that no single (other) power comes to control the geopolitical space and that the global community has unhindered financial and economic access to it.”

Brzezinski is quite aware that American leaders are wonderfully ignorant of history and geography so he really lays it on, stopping just short of invoking politically incorrect manifest destiny. He reminds the Council just how big Eurasia is. Seventy-five percent of the worlds population is Eurasian. If I have done the sums right, that means weve only got control, to date, of a mere 25 percent of the world1s folks. More! Eurasia accounts for 60% of the worlds GNP and three-fourths of the world1s known energy resources.”

Brzezinskis master plan for our globe has obviously been accepted by the Cheney-Bush junta. Corporate America, long over-excited by Eurasian mineral wealth, has been aboard from the beginning.

Ahmed sums up: Brzezinski clearly envisaged that the establishment, consolidation and expansion of US military hegemony over Eurasia through Central Asia would require the unprecedented open-ended militarisation of foreign policy, coupled with an unprecedented manufacture of domestic support and consensus on this militarisation campaign.

Afghanistan is the gateway of all these riches. Will we fight to seize them? It should never be forgotten that the American people in either of the twentieth century1s world wars but President Wilson maneuvered us into the first while Roosevelt maneuvered the Japanese into striking the first blow at Pearl Harbor, causing us to enter the second as the result of a massive external attack. Brzezinski understands all this and, in 1997, he is thinking ahead-as well as backward. “Moreover, as America becomes an increasingly multicultural society, it may find it more difficult to fashion a consensus on foreign policy issues, except in the circumstance of a truly massive and widely perceived direct external threat.” Thus was the symbolic gun produced that belched black smoke over Manhattan and the Pentagon.

Since the Iran-Iraq wars, Islam has been demonised as a Satanic terrorist cult that encourages suicide attacks – contrary, it should be noted, to the Islamic religion. Osama has been portrayed, accurately, it would seem, as an Islamic zealot. In order to bring this evil-doer to justice (“dead or alive”), Afghanistan, the object of the exercise, was made safe not only for democracy but for Union oil of California whose proposed pipeline from Turkmenistan to Afghanistan to Pakistan and the Indian Ocean port of Karachi, had been abandoned under the Taliban1s chaotic regime. Currently, the pipeline is a go-project thanks to the junta’s installation of a Unocal employee (John J. Maresca) as US envoy to the newly born democracy whose president, Hamid Karzai, is also, according to Le Monde, a former employee of a Unocal subsidiary. Conspiracy? Coincidence!

Once Afghanistan looked to be within the fold, the junta, which had managed to pull off a complex diplomatic-military caper, abruptly replaced Osama, the personification of evil, with Saddam. This has been hard to explain since there is nothing to connect Iraq with 9/11. Happily, “evidence” is now being invented, but it is uphill work, not helped by stories in the press about the vast oil wealth of Iraq which must ? for the sake of the free world- be reassigned to us and European Consortiums.

As Brzezinski foretold, “a truly and massive and widely perceived direct external threat made it possible for the president to do a war dance before congress. “A long war!” he shouted with glee. Then he named and incoherent axis of evil to be fought. Although Congress did not give him the FDR Special-a declaration of war-he did get permission to go after Osama who may now be skulking in Iraq.

Bush and the dog that did not bark

Post – 9/11, the American media were filled with pre-emptory denunciations of unpatriotic conspiracy theorists, who not only are always with us but are usually easy for the media to discredit since it is an article of faith that there are no conspiracies in American life. Yet, a year or so ago, who would have thought that the most corporate America had been conspiring with accountants to cook their books since ? well, at least the bright dawn of the age of Reagen and deregulation. Ironically, less that a year after the massive danger from without, we were confronted with an even greater enemy from within: Golden Calf Capitalism. Transparency? One fears that greater transparency will only reveal armies of maggots at work beneath the skin of a culture that needs a bit of a lie-down in order to collect itself before taking its next giant step which is to conquer Eurasia, a potentially fatal adventure not only for our frazzled institutions but for us the presently living.

Complicity. The behavior of President George W. Bush on 11 September certainly gives rise to all sorts of not unnatural suspicions. I can think of no other modern chief of state who would continue to pose for warm pictures of himself listening to a young girl telling stories about her pet goat while hijacked planes were into three famous buildings.

Constitutionally, Bush is not only chief of state, he is commander-in-chief of the armed forces. Normally, a commander in such a crisis would go straight to headquarters and direct operations while receiving the latest intelligence.

This is what Bush actually did-or did not do-according to Stan Goff, a retired US Army veteran who has taught military science and doctrine at West Point. Goff writes, in The So-called Evidence is a Farce: “I have no idea why people arent asking some very specific questions about the actions of Bush and company on the day of the attacks. Four planes get hijacked and deviate from their plan, all the while on FAA radar.”

Goff, incidentally, like the other astonished military experts, cannot fathom why the government’s automatic ‘standard order of procedure in the event of a hijacking’ was not followed. Once a plane has deviated from its flight-plan, fighter planes are sent up to find out why. That is law and does not require presidential approval, which only needs to be given if there is a decision to shoot down a plane. Goff spells it out: The planes were hijacked between 7:45 and 8:10 am. Who is notified? This is an event already that is unprecedented. But the President is not notified and going to a Florida elementary school to hear children read.

By around 8:15 am it should be very apparent that something is terribly wrong. The President is glad-handing teachers. By 8:45 when American Airlines Flight 11 crashes into the North Tower, Bush is settling in with children for his photo op. Four planes have obviously been hijacked simultaneously and one has just dived into the twin towers, and still no one notifies the nominal Commander-in-Chief. ‘No one has apparently scrambled (sent aloft) Air Force interceptors either. At 9:03, Flight 175 crashes into the South Tower. At 9:05 Andrew Card, the Chief of Staff whispers to Bush (who) ‘briefly turns sombre’ according to reporters. Does he cancel the school visit and convene an emergency meeting? No. He resumes listening to second graders… and continues the banality even as American Airlines Flight 77 conducts an unscheduled point turn over Ohio and heads in the direction of Washington DC.

‘Has he instructed Card to scramble the Air Force? No. An excruciating 25 minutes later, he finally deigns to give a public statement telling the United States what they have already figured out ? that there1s been an attack on the World Trade Centre. There1s a hijacked plane bee-lining to Washington, but has the Air Force been scrambled to defend anything yet? No.

At 9:35, this plane conducts another turn, 360 degree over the Pentagon, all the while being tracked by radar, and the Pentagon is not evacuated, and there are still no fast-movers from the Air Force in the sky over Alexandria and DC. Now the real kicker: a pilot they want us to believe was trained at a Florida puddle-jumper school Piper Cubs and Cessnas, conducts a well-controlled downward spiral descending the last 7,000 feet in two-and-a-half minutes, brings the plane in so low and flat that it clips the electrical wires from across the street from the Pentagon, and flies it with pinpoint accuracy into the side of the building at 460 knots.

When the theory about learning to fly this well at the puddle-jumper school began to lose ground, it was added that they received further training on a flight simulator. This is like saying you prepared your teenager for her first drive on the freeway at rush hour by buying her a video driving game There is a story being constructed about these events.

There is indeed and the more it is added to the darker it becomes. The nonchalance of General Richard B. Myers, acting Joint Chief of Staff, is as puzzling as the Presidents campaigning-as-usual act. Meyers was at the Capitol chatting with Senator Max Cleland. A sergeant, writing later in the AFPS (American Forces Press Service) describes Myers at the Capitol. While in an outer office, he said, he saw a television report that a plane had hit the World Trade Centre. “They thought it was a small plane or something like that,” Myers said. So the two men went ahead with the office call.

Whatever Myers and Cleland had to say to each other (more funds for the military?) must have been riveting because, during their chat, the AFPS reports, the second tower was hit by another jet. “nobody informed us of that,” Myers said. “But when we came out, that was obvious. Then, right at that time, somebody said the Pentagon had been hit.” Finally, somebody thrust a cellphone in Myers hand and, as if by magic, the commanding general of Norad ? our Airspace Command ? was on the line just as the hijackers mission had been successfully completed except for the failed one in Pennsylvania. In later testimony to the Senate Armed Forces Committee, Myers says he thinks that, as of his cellphone talk with Norad, the decision was at that point to start launching aircraft, It was 9:40 AM. One hour and 20 minutes after air controllers knew that Flight 11 had been hijacked; 50 minutes after the North Tower was struck.

This statement would have been quite enough in our old serious army/air force to launch a number of courts martial with an impeachment or two thrown in. First, Myers claims to be uninformed until the third strike. But the Pentagon had been overseeing the hijacked planes from at least the moment of the strike at the first tower: yet not until the third strike, at the Pentagon, was the decision made to get the fighter planes up. Finally, this one is the dog that did not bark. By law, the fighters should have been up at around 8:15. If they had, all the hijacked planes might have been diverted or shot down. I don1t think Goff is being unduly picky when he wonders who and what kept the Air Force from following its normal procedure instead of waiting an hour and 20 minutes until the damage was done and only then launching the fighters. Obviously, somebody had ordered the Air Force to make no move to intercept those hijackings until… what?

On 21 January 2002, the Canadian media analyst Barry Zwicker summed up on CBS-TV: That morning no interceptors responded in a timely fashion to the highest alert situation. This includes the Andrews squadrons which are 12 miles from the White House Whatever the explanation for the huge failure, there have been no reports, to my knowledge, of reprimands. This further weakens the “Incompetence Theory”. Incompetence usually earns reprimands. This causes me to ask whether there were “stand down” orders.?? On 29 August 2002, the BBC reports that on 9/11 there were only four-fighters on ready status in the north-eastern US. Conspiracy? Coincidence? Error?

It is interesting how often in our history, when disaster strikes, incompetence is considered a better alibi than well, yes, there are worse things. After Pearl Harbor, Congress moved to find out why Hawaiis two military commanders, General Short and Admiral Kimmel, had not anticipated the Japanese attack. But President Roosevelt pre-empted that investigation with one of his own. Short and Kimmel were broken for incompetence. The truth is still obscured to this day.

The medias weapons of mass distraction

BUT PEARL HARBOR has been much studied. 11 September, it is plain, is never going to be investigated if Bush has anything to say about it. In January 2002, CNN reported that Bush personally asked Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle to limit the Congressional investigation into the events of 11 September The request was made at a private meeting with Congressional leaders Sources said Bush initiated the conversation He asked that only the House and Senate intelligence committees look into the potential breakdowns among federal agencies that could have allowed the terrorist attacks to occur, rather than a broader inquiry Tuesdays discussion followed a rare call from Vice President Dick Cheney last Friday to make the same request

The excuse given, according to Daschle, was that resources and personnel would be taken away from the war on terrorism in the event of a wider inquiry. So for reasons that we must never know, those breakdowns are to be the goat. That they were more likely to be not break- but stand-downs is not for us to pry. Certainly the one-hour 20-minute failure to put fighter planes in the air could not have been due to a breakdown throughout the entire Air Force along the East Coast. Mandatory standard operating procedure had been told to cease and desist.

Meanwhile, the media were assigned their familiar task of inciting public opinion against bin Laden, still not the proven mastermind. These media blitzes often resemble the magicians classic gesture of distraction: as you watch the rippling bright colours of his silk handkerchief in one hand, he is planting the rabbit in your pocket with the other. We were quickly assured that Osamas enormous family with its enormous wealth had broken with him, as had the royal family of his native Saudi Arabia. The CIA swore, hand on heart, that Osama had not worked for them in the war against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. Finally, the rumour that Bush family had in any way profited by its long involvement with bin Laden family was ? what else? ? simply partisan bad taste.

But Bush Jrs involvement goes back at least to 1979 when his first failed attempt to become a player in the big Texas oil league brought him together with one James Bath of Houston, a family friend, who gave Bush Jr. $50,000 for a 5 per cent stake in Bushs firm Arbusto Energy. At this time, according to Wayne Madsen (In These Times ? Institute for Public Affairs No. 25), Bath was the sole US business representative for Salem bin Laden, head of the family and a brother (one of 17) to Osama bin Laden In a statement issued shortly after the 11 September attacks, the White House vehemently denied the connection, insisting that Bath invested his own money, not Salem bin Ladens in Arbusto. In conflicting statements, Bush at first denied ever knowing Bath, then acknowledged his stake in Arbusto and that he was aware Bath represented Saudi interests after several reincarnations, Arbusto emerged in 1986 as Harken Energy Corporation.

Behind the junior Bush is the senior Bush, gainfully employed by the Carlyle Group which has ownership in at least 164 companies worldwide, inspiring admiration in that staunch friend to the wealthy, the Wall Street Journal, which noted, as early as 27 September 2001, If the US boosts defence spending in its quest to stop Osama bin Ladens alleged terrorist activities, there may be one unexpected beneficiary: bin Ladens family is an investor in a fund established by Carlyle Group, a well connected Washington merchant bank specialising in buyouts of defence and aerospace companies Osama is one of more than 50 children of Mohammed bin Laden, who built the familys $5 billion business.

But Bush pere et fils, in pursuit of wealth and office, are beyond shame or, one cannot help but think, good sense. There is a suggestion that they are blocking investigation of the bin Laden connection with terrorism. Agence France Press reported on 4 November 2001: FBI agents probing relatives of Saudi-born terror suspect Osama were told to back off soon after George W. Bush became president According to BBC TVs News-night (6 Nov 2001), just days after the hijackers took off from Boston aiming for the Twin Towers, a special charter flight out of the same airport whisked 11 members of Osamas family off to Saudi Arabia. That did not concern the White House, whose official line is that the bin Ladens are above suspicion. Above the Law (Green Press, 14 February 2002) sums up: We had what looked like the biggest failure of the intelligence community since Pearl Harbor but what we are learning now is it wasnt a failure, it was a directive. True? False? Bush Jr will be under oath during the impeachment interrogation. Will we hear What is a directive? What is is?

Although the US had, for some years, fingered Osama as a master-mind terrorist, no serious attempt had been made pre-9/11 to bring him to justice dead or alive, innocent or guilty, as Texan law of the jungle requires. Clintons plan to act was given to Condoleezza Rice by Sandy Berger, you will recall, but she says she does not.

As far back as March 1996 when Osama was in Sudan, Major General Elfatih Erwa, Sudanese Minister for Defense, offered to extradite him. According to the Washington Post (3 October 2001), “Erwa said he would happily keep close watch on bin Laden for the United States. But if that would not suffice, the government was prepared to place him in custody and hand him over (US officials) said, “just ask him to leave the country. Just dont let him go to Somalia”, where he had once been given credit for the successful al-Qaeda attack on American forces in 93 that killed 18 Rangers.” Erwa said in an interview, “We said he will go to Afghanistan, and they (US officials) said, “Let him.”

In 1996 Sudan expelled Osama and 3,000 of his associates. Two years later the Clinton administration, in the great American tradition of never having to say thank you for Sudans offer to hand over Osama, proceeded to missile-attack Sudans al-Shifa pharmaceutical factory on the grounds that Sudan was harboring bin Laden terrorists who were making chemical and biological weapons when the factory was simply making vaccines for the UN.

Four years later, John ONeill, a much admired FBI agent complained in the Irish Times a month before the attacks, “The US State Department-and behind it the off lobby who make up President Bushs entourage ? blocked attempts to prove bin Ladens guilt. The US ambassador to Yemen forbade ONeill (and his FBI team) from entering Yemen in August 2001. ONeill resigned in frustration and took on a new job as head of security at the World Trade Centre. He died in the 11 September attack.” Obviously, Osama has enjoyed bipartisan American support since his enlistment in the CIA1s war to drive the Soviets out of Afghanistan. But by 9/11 there was no Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, indeed there was no Soviet Union.

A World Made Safe for Peace and Pipelines

I watched Bush and Cheney on CNN when the Axis of Evil speech was given and the long war proclaimed. Iraq, Iran and North Korea were fingered as enemies to be clobbered because they might or might not be harboring terrorists who might or might not destroy us in the night. So we must strike first whenever it pleases us. Thus, we declared “war on terrorism” ? an abstract noun which cannot be a war at all as you need a country for that. Of course, there was innocent Afghanistan, which was leveled from a great height, but then whats collateral damage ? like an entire country ? when youre targeting the personification of all evil according to Time and the NY Times and the networks?

As it proved, the conquest of Afghanistan had nothing to do with Osama. He was simply a pretext for replacing the Taliban with a relatively stable government that would allow Union Oil of California to lay its pipeline for the profit of, among others, the Cheney-Bush junta.

Background? All right. The headquarters of Unocal are, as might be expected, in Texas. In December 1997, Taliban representatives were invited to Sugarland, Texas. At that time, Unocal had already begun training Afghan men in pipeline construction, with US government approval. BBC News, (4 December 1997): A spokesperson for the company Unocal said the Taliban were expected to spend several days at the companys (Texas) Headquarters a BBC regional correspondent says the proposal to build a pipeline across Afghanistan is part of an international scramble to profit from developing the rich energy resources of the Caspian Sea. The Inter Press Service (IPS) reported: some Western businesses are warming up to the Taliban despite the movements institutionalization of terror, massacres, abductions and impoverishment. CNN (6 October 1996): The United States wants good ties (with the Taliban) but cant openly seek them while women are being oppressed.

The Taliban, rather better organized than rumoured, hired for PR one Leila Helms, a niece of Richard Helms, former Director of the CIA. In October 1996, the Frankfurter Rundschau reported that Unocal has been given the go ahead from the new holders of power in Kabul to build a pipeline from Turkmenistan via Afghanistan to Pakistan This was a real coup for Unocal as well as other candidates for pipelines, including Condoleezzas old employer Chevron. Although the Taliban was already notorious for its imaginative crimes against the human race, the Wall Street Journal, scenting big bucks, fearlessly announced: “Like them or not, the Taliban are the players most capable of achieving peace in Afghanistan at this moment in history.” The NY Times (26 May 1997) leapt aboard the pipeline juggernaut. The Clinton administration has taken the view that a Taliban victory would act as counterweight to Iran and would offer the possibility of new trade routes that could weaken Russian and Iranian influence in the region.

But by 1999, it was clear that the Taliban could never provide us the security we would need to protect our fragile pipelines. The arrival of Osama as warrior for Allah on the scene refocused, as it were, the bidding. New alliances were now being made. The Bush administration soon buys the idea of an invasion of Afghanistan, Frederick Starr, head of the Central Asia Institute at Johns Hopkins University, wrote in the Washington Post (19 December, 2000): The US has quietly begun to align itself with those in the Russian government calling for military action against Afghanistan and has toyed with the idea of a new raid to wipe out bin Laden.

Although with much fanfare we went forth to wreak our vengeance on the crazed sadistic religious zealot who slaughtered 3,000 American citizens, once that war was under way, Osama was dropped as irrelevant and so we are back to the Unocal pipeline, now a go-project. In the light of what we know today, it is unlikely that the junta was ever going to capture Osama alive: he has tales to tell. One Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld1s best number now is: “Where is he? Somewhere? Here? There? Somewhere? Who knows?” And we get his best twinkle. He must also be delighted ? and amazed ? that the media have bought the absurd story that Osama, If alive, would still be in Afghanistan, underground, waiting to be flushed out instead of in a comfortable mansion in Osama-loving Jakarta, 2,000 miles to the East and easily accessible by the Flying Carpet One.

Many commentators of a certain age have noted how Hitlerian our junta sounds as it threatens first one country for harbouring terrorists and then another. It is true that Hitler liked to pretend to be the injured ? or threatened ? party before he struck. But he had many great predecessors not lest Imperial Rome. Stephen Gowans War in Afghanistan : A $28 Billion Racket quotes Joseph Schumpeter who, “in 1919, described ancient Rome in a way that sounds eerily like the United States in 2001: “There was no corner of the known world where some interest was not alleged to be in danger or under actual attack. If the interests were not Roman, they were those of Romes allies; and if Rome had no allies, the allies would be invented The fight was always invested with an aura of legality. Rome was always being attacked by evil-minded neighbors.” We have only outdone the Romans in turning metaphors such as the war on terrorism, or poverty, or Aids into actual wars on targets we appear, often, to pick at random in order to maintain turbulence in foreign lands.

As of 1 August 2002, trial balloons were going up all over Washington DC to get world opinion used to the idea the Bush of Afghanistan had gained a title as mighty as his fathers Bush of the Persian Gulf and Junior was now eager to add Iraq-Babylon to his diadem. These various balloons fell upon Europe and the Arab world like so many lead weights. But something new has been added since the classic Roman Hitlerian mantra, they are threatening us, we must attack first. Now everyone is more or less out in the open. The International Herald Tribune wrote in August 2002: The leaks began in earnest on 5 July, when the New York Times described a tentative Pentagon plan that it said called for an invasion by a US force of up to 250,000 that would attack Iraq from the north, south and west. On 10 July, the Times said that Jordan might be used as a base for the invasion. The Washington Post reported, 28 July, that “many senior US military officers contend that Saddam Hussein poses no immediate threat” And the status quo should be maintained. Incidentally, this is the sort of debate that the founding fathers intended the Congress, not the military bureaucrats, to conduct in the name of we the people. But that sort of debate has, for a long time, been denied us.

One refreshing note is now being struck in a fashion unthinkable in imperial Rome: the cheerful admission that we habitually resort to provocation. The Tribune continues: Donald Rumsfeld has threatened to jail anyone found to have been behind the leaks. But a retired army general, Fred Woerner, tends to see a method behind the leaks. “We may already be executing a plan,” he said recently. “Are we involved in a preliminary psychological dimension of causing Iraq to do something to justify a US attack or make concessions? Somebody knows. That is plain.

Elsewhere in this interesting edition of the Herald Tribune wise William Pfaff writes: A second Washington debate is whether to make an unprovoked attack on Iran to destroy a nuclear power reactor being built with Russian assistance, under inspection by the International Atomic Energy Agency, within the terms of the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty of which Iran is a signatory No other government would support such an action, other than Israil’ (which) would do so not because it expected to be attacked by Iran but because it, not unjustifiably, opposes any nuclear capacity in the hands of any Islamic government.

Suspect states and the tom-toms of revenge

Of all the enemies to public liberty, war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. As the parent of armies, war encourages debts and taxes, the known instrument for bringing the many under the domination of the few. In war, too, the discretionary power of the executive is extended and all the means of seducing the minds, are added to those of subduing the force, or the people Thus, James Madison warned us at the dawn of our republic.

Post 9/11, thanks to the domination of the few, Congress and the media are silent while the executives, through propaganda and skewed polls, seduces the public mind as hitherto unthinkable centres of power like Homeland Defence (a new Cabinet post to be placed on top of the Defence Department) are being constructed and 4 percent of the country has recently been invited to join Tips, a civilian spy system to report on anyone who looks suspicious or who objects to what the executive is doing at home or abroad?

Although every nation knows how ? if it has the means and the will ? to protect itself from thugs of the sort that brought us 9/11, war is not an option. Wars are for nations not rootless gangs. You put a price on their heads and hunt them down. In recent years, Italy has been doing just that with the Sicilian Mafia; and no one has yet suggested bombing Palermo.

But the Cheney-Bush junta wants a war in order to dominate Afghanistan, build a pipeline, gain control of the oil of Eurasias Stans for their business associates as well as to do as much damage to Iraq and Iran on the grounds that one day those evil countries may carpet our fields of amber, grain with anthrax or something.

The media, never much good at analysis, are more and more breathless and incoherent. On CNN, even the stolid Jim Clancy started to hyperventilate when an Indian academic tried to explain how Iraq was once our ally and friend in its war against our Satanic enemy Iran. None of that conspiracy stuff snarled Clancy. Apparently, conspiracy stuff is now shorthand for unspeakable truth.

As of August, at least among economists, a censensus was growing that, considering our vast national debt (we borrow $2 billion a day to keep the government going) and a tax base seriously reduced by the junta in order to benefit the 1 per cent who own most of the national wealth, there is no way that we could ever find the billions needed to destroy Iraq in a long war or even a short one, with most of Europe lined up against us. Germany and Japan paid for the Gulf War, reluctantly ? with Japan, at the last moment, irritably quarreling over the exchange rate at the time of the contract. Now Germanys Schroder has said no. Japan is mute.

But the tom-toms keep beating revenge; and the fact that most of the world is opposed to our war seems only to bring hectic roses to the cheeks of the Bush administration (Bush Snr of the Carlyle Group, Bush Jnr formerly of Harken, Cheney, formerly of Halliburton, Rice, formerly of Chevron, Rumsfeld, formerly of Occidental). If ever an administration should recluse itself in matters dealing with energy, it is the current junta. But this is unlike any administration in our history. Their hearts are plainly elsewhere, making money, far from our mock Roman temples, while we, alas, are left only with their heads, dreaming of war, preferably against weak peripheral states.

Mohammed Heikel is a brilliant Egyptian journalist-observer, and sometime Foreign Minister, On 10 October 2001, he said to the Guardian: Bin Laden does not have the capabilities for an operation of this magnitude. When I hear Bush talking about al-Qaeda as if it were Nazi Germany or the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, I laugh because I know what is there. Bin Laden has been under surveillance for years: every telephone call was monitored and al-Qaeda has been penetrated by US intelligence, Pakistani intelligence, Saudi intelligence, Egyptian intelligence. They could not have kept secret an operation that required such a degree of organization and sophistication.

The former president of Germanys domestic intelligence service, Eckehardt Werthebach ( American Free Press, 4 December 2001) spells it out. The 9/11 attacks required years of planning while their scale indicates that they were a product of state-organized actions. There it is. Perhaps, after all, Bush Jnr was right to call it a war. But which state attacked us?

Will the suspects please line up. Saudi Arabia? No, no. Why we are paying you $50 million a year for training the royal bodyguard on our own holy if arid soil. True the kingdom contains many wealthy well-educated enemies but Bush Snr and Jnr exchange a knowing look. Egypt? No way. Dead broke despite US baksheesh. Syria? No funds. Iran? Too proud to bother with a parvenu state like the US. Israel? Sharon is capable of anything. But he lacks the guts and the grace of the true kamikaze. Anyway, Sharon was not in charge when this operation began with the planting of sleepers around the US flight schools 5 or 6 years ago. The United States? Elements of corporate America would undeniably prosper from a massive external attack that would make it possible for us to go to war whenever the President sees fit while suspending civil liberties. (The 342 pages of the USA Patriot Act were plainly prepared before 9/11.) Bush Snr and Jnr are giggling now. Why? Because Clinton was president back then. As the former president leaves the line of suspects, he says, more in anger than in sorrow: “When we left the White House we had a plan for an all-out war on al-Queda. We turned it over to this administration and they did nothing. Why Biting his lip, he goes. The Bushes no longer giggle. Pakistan breaks down: I did it! I confess! I couldnt help myself. Save me. I am an evil-doer!

Apparently, Pakistan did do it ? or some of it. We must now go back to 1979 when the largest covert operation in history of the CIA was launched in response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Central Asia specialist Ahmed Rashid wrote (Foreign Affairs, November-December 1999): With the active encouragement of the CIA and Pakistans ISI (Inter Services Intelligence) who wanted to turn the Afghan jihad into a global war, waged by all Muslim states against the Soviet Union, some 35,000 Muslim radicals, from 40 Islamic countries joined Afghanistans fight between 1982 and 92 more than 100,000 foreign Muslim radicals were directly influenced by the Afghanistan jihad. The CIA covertly trained and sponsored these warriors.

In March 1985, President Reagan issued National Security Decision Directive 166, increasing military aid while CIA specialists met with the ISI counterparts near Rawalpindi, Pakistan. Janes Defence Weekly (14 September 2001) gives the best overview: The trainers were mainly from Pakistans ISI agency who learnt their craft from American Green Beret commandos and Navy Seals in various US training establishments. This explains the reluctance of the administration to explain why so many unqualified persons, over so long a time, got visas to visit our hospitable shores. While in Pakistan, mass training of Afghan (zealots) was subsequently conducted by the Pakistan army under the supervision of the elite Special Services In 1988, with US knowledge, bin Laden created al-Qaeda (The Base); a conglomerate of quasi-independent Islamic terrorist cells spread across 26 or so countries. Washington turned a blind eye to al-Qaeda.

When Mohammed Attas plane struck the World Trade Centres North Tower, George W. Bush and the child at the Florida elementary school were discussing her goat. By coincidence, our word tragedy comes from the Greek: for goat tragos plus oide for song. Goat-song. It is highly suitable that this lament, sung in ancient satyr plays, should have been heard again at the exact moment when we were struck by fire from heaven, and a tragedy whose end is nowhere in sight began for us.

Copyright Gore Vidal

www.karalla.com eme [at] karalla [dot] com 212 860 8900

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Adrian Hamilton 09 August 2002

The idea that a pre-emptive strike could save the world a heap of trouble isn’t entirely idle. Think, if Genghis Khan could have been taken out when he was still the leader of just a band and not the whole Mongol race, Europe and Asia would have been saved several million dead and the destruction of much of its civilisation. Remove Napoleon from the scene on his return from his ill-fated Egyptian foray and Europe would have been a different place.

The last century doesn’t provide such good examples, of course. To have “changed regime” in Berlin in the early Thirties would have meant overturning a democratically elected leader in Hitler. As for the efforts by the allies to stop the course of the Russian revolution with troops after 1918, the results were disastrous despite having well-armed local allies.

Nonetheless George Bush has done something in the last week to set out the parameters to pre-emptive action. “We owe it,” he put it in Maine last weekend, “to the future of civilisation not to allow the world’s worst leaders to develop and deploy and therefore blackmail free countries with the world’s worst weapons.” And he went on to define such enemies of the people as regimes intent on building up weapons of mass destruction, oblivious of international law and UN resolutions, governments who imprisoned their opponents without trial and who could not claim democratic legitimacy at home.

Significantly, nowhere in the series of speeches he made this week did Mr Bush actually name these rogue regimes. But it is pretty clear reading the descriptions whom he must have meant. The government which is spending by far the most on weapons of mass destruction, and is now planning to raise its budget by an increase greater than the total defence spending of Europe, is, of course, based in Washington. Not only is it building an arsenal the like of which the world has never seen, it has unilaterally withdrawn from the treaties designed to limit the spread of nuclear weapons, and has refused to accept any kind of international monitoring of its chemical or nuclear weapons facilities.

It has a government in power without the legitimacy of a democratic majority, in the hands of a coterie from a single part of the country and clearly aiming at a dynasty of rule. Its rhetoric is one of violent aggression against anyone seen as its enemies. It opponents are locked up without trial or the right to habeas corpus.

Of course there are those who say the country’s threats are greatly exaggerated and the rhetoric of world mastery must not be confused with a real intention of using its weaponry in defiance of international law. True, it has a has a history of interfering with and invading its neighbours – Panama, Grenada, Haiti et al. But since the long and debilitating war in Vietnam, it has kept largely to its own region.

Of course it has a peculiarly obnoxious regime, ready to poison its own people with corrupt capitalism and deregulated pollution. But give it time, and pressure from the outside world, and it will pay up its UN dues, rejoin the nuclear proliferation pacts and the Kyoto treaty and start behaving as a responsible member of the community again.

Against this, the hard men of the right would say that time is exactly what the world does not have on its side. Washington has showed itself determined to enforce its hegemony, come what may. It has shown itself ready to use weapons of aerial bombardment that make no discrimination between combatants and civilians, to show precious little remorse when it is guilty of “mistakes”.

It is no friend of democracy, having announced its refusal to deal with the only two elected leaders of the Islamic world – Khatami in Iran and Yasser Arafat in Palestine, the latter the only Arab leader ever elected with western observers checking the process. The country has armed and succoured state terrorism and assassination by the Israelis. It has installed the worst sort of warlord gangsters in Afghanistan and, according to “intelligence”, been party to upsetting (albeit briefly) the elected president of Venezuela. The world cannot afford to await its next move.

The problem remains the practicalities. Whereas in Afghanistan the allies could rely on a local opposition force on the ground, no such scenario can be relied on in this case. The Spanish speaking minority in the south might be induced to rise up. There could be assistance from Minutemen in the mountains. But the democratic opposition is too defeated and divided to provide much help. The answer could be an “inside-out” strategy using special forces to take Washington and a few key nuclear bases. Provided the rest of the country was left to get on with its business, there would probably be little internal opposition to a seizure of the capital.

That leaves the substantial problem of an “exit strategy”. There is no point in a repeat of 1812. But the experience of America in Japan after the Second World War could provide a model. A period of occupation of five to 10 years could provide an opportunity to inculcate ideas of true democracy, with a fair electoral system based on absolute majority, abolition of the death penalty, introduction of unions into hi-tech industries and a break-up of the Zaibatsu, the overweening corporations such as Microsoft, Exxon and General Electric.

Given time, this rogue superstate might then be able to take its place once again among the family of peace-loving nations.

a.hamilton [at] independent.co [dot] uk

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October 6, 2002 The De Facto Capital By FRANK RICH The New York Times

They got it right the first time. New York was the capital of the nation at its birth. The first presidential inauguration, in 1789, wasn’t far from ground zero, and the first presidential residence, at 3 Cherry Street, was on a spot now occupied by one of the supports for the Brooklyn Bridge. George Washington slept there, but not for long. In a political deal purportedly made on a downtown sidewalk, Alexander Hamilton traded away the location of the capital to Thomas Jefferson to entice the South to give the federal government power to assume state debts. A year later, Congress and the president decamped to Philadelphia, and a decade after that, they settled into a new federal city next to which the City of Brotherly Love seems like Shangri-La. As Jack Lait and Lee Mortimer, two New York tabloid reporters of a later day, would assess the fateful final choice of a national capital in their 1951 best seller, ”Washington Confidential”: ”The founding fathers, whose infinite wisdom gave us a Constitution and form of government well nigh perfect, located the seat of that government in a stinking, steaming swamp.”

The country’s seat may still be mired in that swamp, but its heart, soul and brains are more evident than ever in its first capital, 200 miles to the north. While New York has long been the nation’s center of culture, finance, fashion and media, the city in the aftermath of Sept. 11 cohered into something more than the sum of its perennially celebrated parts. After its highest towers were taken down, New York rose from its initial shock to illustrate in real time what America actually is, a huge and resilient democracy animated by citizens of every conceivable stripe, pursuit and ethic (from those who gave their lives for others at the World Trade Center to those who looted its shopping mall). Instead of seeming, as it often had, like an eccentric island adrift from the rest of the country, the city found itself valued instead as a concentrated representation of the whole. That outsiders would regard it as the true American capital was proof that Americans now define themselves far more by their cultural choices, most of which are tweaked and marketed by the information factories of Manhattan, than by their choice (if any) of political party. Not that New York is shy about offering political leadership if it spots a vacuum. When the White House’s occupant was nowhere to be found on the day the country needed him most, New York went so far as to offer up its own chief executive as the nation’s paterfamilias. America is still grateful.

Even at the literal level, New York is more representative of American political values than the official capital. Washington, where I grew up and where my family has lived since the Civil War, is still a colony where the voters are denied the full rights of self-determination. Its citizens and public officials alike remain in thrall to a federal government over which they have virtually no say, in the shadow of a president who serves as the de facto prince regent of the tourist precincts, the only part of the city most Americans see. Washington is less an exemplar of democracy than an agglomeration of marble facades paying unctuous tribute to that aspiration. George W. Bush, and he is hardly the first president to do so, treats it as a politically obligatory diorama that he can flee any and every chance he gets.

New York doesn’t think of itself as competing with Washington — the same cannot be said of the reverse — but periodically it does so, if only to let the world know who’s really boss. After World War II, suburban Virginia tried to lure the fledgling United Nations to metropolitan Washington, until someone belatedly realized that an international citizenry would not take kindly to segregated schools. In 1959, the Washington Board of Trade mounted an elaborate campaign to make the ”Capital of the Free World” the site of the 1964 World’s Fair. According to one account, the D.C. advocates’ hard sell leaned heavily on the annual cherry-blossom festivals, the ”colorful parades constantly held when distinguished foreign guests visit the city” and ”the elaborate and dignified presidential inauguration celebrations.” That was all it took to persuade the World’s Fair Commission to reach unanimity in awarding the plum to Robert Moses’s posse from New York.

This year brought the Olympics bake-off. To increase its odds as a site for the 2012 summer games, Washington entered into a shotgun marriage with the more plausibly urban Baltimore. The capital’s confidence was such that it took for granted a Washington Post report in July that D.C. and San Francisco were ”the apparent front-runners,” beating out New York and Houston. The next month brought the shocking news that it was Washington that had been eliminated along with Houston (the only other city that can match both its toxic summer weather and complement of former Enron executives). After this defeat, there was much local muttering that ”politics” was the culprit and that Washington might have been punished because of the unpopularity abroad of the incipient war on Iraq.

How much easier for Washingtonians to blame Saddam than to take a hard look at their own city. D.C. may have talked a good game about sports to the U.S. Olympic Committee, but for three decades it has lacked a major-league team in the most American sport of them all. It purports to be as up to date as the new economy, but the signature digital-era companies to put down roots there, AOL and MicroStrategy, are synonymous with the dot-com bust. The capital’s Maryland and Virginia suburban enclaves are famous for having some of the country’s most over-the-top houses as measured by square footage but none of the most imaginative architecture.

Such is Washington’s appeal to tourists that it did not make the list of the Top 10 North American cities in this year’s Travel and Leisure magazine readers’ poll. (New York came in first.) The capital’s restaurants can’t compete with those of Vegas, let alone New York, Chicago and the Seattle-to-Los Angeles culinary axis of the West. Its taxicabs have a suspect fee structure as gerrymandered as the map of Congressional voting districts. While New York has contributed to the American language such joyous words as ”whoopee” and ”hot dog,” Washington has coined ”inside the Beltway” and ”Department of Homeland Security.” America’s songwriters and poets have repeatedly celebrated Manhattan, the Bronx and Staten Island too — not to mention San Francisco, Chicago and St. Louis — but where is that romantic lyric about the capital? ”Hail to the Redskins” will have to do.

First appearances can be deceptive to new visitors to D.C. Edmund Wilson once observed that Washington, ”after other American cities, seems at first such a relief, so agreeable,” but ”turns out, when one has stayed there any length of time, to have little personality of its own and to come to taste rather flat.” Or as Cindy Adams wrote this year: ”Even folks who live in Washington don’t want to be there. The high point for a visitor? Catching a glimpse of Trent Lott in Person? I mean, please.”

By contrast, you have to pry people away from New York. The gaping wound only deepened the citizenry’s already intimate connection to their city. In the poignant opening episode of the post-9/11 season of ”Sex and the City,” Carrie went so far as to choose the city over sex, spurning the advances of a Fleet Week sailor after he committed the sin of knocking her town. It was the patriotic thing to do.

New Yorkers who were out of town on 9/11 felt desperate to return. Since then, we seem inexorably drawn to the watering holes and restaurants and merchants downtown, as if to fill in the shadow of death with the lubricious glow and laughter of irrepressible life. We are more aware of our neighbors than before: not just the firemen and the cops and the family that lost someone, but the guy who lost his business in the undertow, the guy who is trying to rebuild, the all-American Sikh cabbie who bedecks his windshield with flags lest he be victimized (as in New York he has generally not been) by guilt-by-turban. The fate of ground zero is, inevitably, a noisy political and aesthetic debate, but whatever acrimony may attend it, it is also a classic American project: a battle between money and values, between commerce and art, between powerful interests and upstart citizenry, between past and future, all staged on an open 16-acre expanse that is urban America’s largest frontier.

Not only were the dire predictions of a mass exodus wrong, but the reverse may be happening. A New York Times/CBS News poll in August found that the number of inhabitants who think that New York will be a better place to live in 10 or 15 years is the same as it was the month before the attack. Manhattan’s residential real-estate values were clocked this summer at 15 percent higher than they had been pre-Sept. 11; signed contracts on apartments were up this July over last, too, reflecting the possibility that more people are arriving than leaving, even during an economic downturn. Neighborhoods reinvent themselves faster than anyone can keep count, from Harlem to the Lower East Side. Queens, generally an also-ran in any five-borough hipness sweepstakes, shows signs of becoming the new Brooklyn (though it still lacks its own Zagat). The Museum of Modern Art lives in Queens now, and so do a disproportionate number of artists, writers, dancers and musicians — including the novelist Jonathan Safran Foer, who is only the latest in a long list of Washington-spawned talents (from Duke Ellington to Paul Taylor) who fled the capital’s culturally parched environment to reach full bloom in the enriching concrete of New York.

In Washington, there is far more culture than there used to be, but spectacle, in keeping with the town’s own bombastic aesthetics, tends to be the hottest ticket — blockbuster shows at the National Gallery, Disney musicals and the Bolshoi on tour. Cities as small as Minneapolis and Seattle have a more lively indigenous arts scene than Washington. The plight of culture in the capital is symbolized by the Kennedy Center, an afterthought not even deemed worthy of its own stop on the city’s part-time Metro system. A world-class impresario, Michael Kaiser, has at last been imported to revive the place, and this summer he performed a Heimlich maneuver in the form of the well-received Sondheim Celebration. But half the weekend audience was New Yorkers, to whom Kaiser may have to continue to cater. The low-slung performing arts barn on the Potomac has for so long been isolated from the best American culture, high, middle and pop, that its annual low-rated televised honors have of late been reduced to bestowing some of their medallions on Brits rather than native genius. (This year’s Kennedy Center knight, Paul McCartney, has taken a rain check.) Such is President Bush’s respect for the capital’s temple of culture that among his first appointments to its board was Bo Derek.

With the exception of the B-list Hollywood names who get all dressed up (once, anyway) for the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, artists turn up in the city en masse only when Congress is posturing about the arts and humanities endowments. As for what American pop culture thinks of Washington as a city, as opposed to a government, one need only look at ”Minority Report,” in which the capital’s defining trait, even years in the future, is its historically high crime rate. The movie’s point seems to be that nothing short of the ability to arrest suspects before they commit a crime would have enabled D.C.’s benighted police force to crack a case like Chandra Levy’s.

New York is hardly without crime, but it also has the positive side of urban friction: the manifest humanity that results when millions of people of all kinds are packed together to make a go of it. The fundamental DNA of the city has never changed. It has always been a gateway for immigrants as well as an arena for big money. Its crowds have been large and raucous from the start. That ”culture of congestion,” in the phrase of the architect Rem Koolhaas, leads to a nonstop chain reaction of serendipitous human fusion, creative and sexual and economic, that is as American as you can get. The byproducts include hyphenated talents, melting-pot families, a constant, bubbling hands-on laboratory for social, political and cultural change in which the experiments alternately succeed big and fail catastrophically, in full public view.

At some point, Washington had its own dreams of being a sizzling capital. In ”Political Terrain,” Carl Abbott writes of how in the late 19th century it was still hoped that D.C. ”could aspire to be the Rome of America in the arts, the Berlin of America in education and the Paris of America as a city of beauty and pleasure.” But the city stood still while those roles were respectively claimed by New York, Boston and San Francisco. (Though George Washington had offered to help endow a major university for the new capital, few of its grandees seconded his enthusiasm.) Despite early hopes that the federal district might be an economic hub, it was as hard for capitalism to take root as culture. As Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace write in ”Gotham,” it became apparent early in the 19th century that the United States ”would have two centers, one governmental, the other economic.” It was a ”separation of powers as emphatic as anything in the Constitution” with ”no parallel in the Western world.” The American capital that emerged was, in John Kennedy’s famous formulation, a city of ”southern efficiency and northern charm” — a rare point of agreement between him and Richard Nixon, who pronounced Washington ”a city without identity” and voted with his feet to spend most of his political exile in New York prior to his 1968 comeback.

If Washington has an indistinct identity, it does have its own DNA — that of a town of transients. When legislative sessions were far briefer than they are now, Congress and the Supreme Court took residence in temporary quarters, then fled to better climes (as they still do when in recess). ”The greatest and most respectable business that is done in Washington is keeping boarding houses,” said an 1829 handbook for new arrivals. It wasn’t until well into the 20th century, as the federal government expanded during the New Deal (with its hefty infusion of F.D.R. New Yorkers) and World War II, that the city’s population did as well. By then it had long since missed out on the great wave of turn-of-the-century immigration that gave New York and every other East Coast metropolis their human and cultural variety. Even now, the capital lacks the ethnic spectrum of other major American cities. In the 2000 census, the Asian population of New York — almost 10 percent of the city’s eight million inhabitants — was substantially larger than the entire population of D.C., where the Asian population is only 2.6 percent. Though the number of Hispanics is rising in Washington as elsewhere, in 2000 they still made up, at most, 9 percent of the city, as opposed to a quarter of New York.

When the W.P.A. assembled its guidebook to the capital during the Depression, the authors seemed almost desperate to imbue their subject with distinction. One wistful accolade paid tribute to the city’s ”profusion of shade trees.” When the book was revised in 1942, the district’s most distinctive aspect was played down — the references to the second-class citizenship of its black residents, who like all Washingtonians had no right to vote, even in presidential elections, but who also continued to suffer many of the deprivations of slavery, from discrimination to poor public health and schools. In a 1983 reissue, a new editor set the record straight, but noted as compensation that ”it is easier to find one’s bearings in Washington than in other American cities.” (So true, and so what?)

Though opponents of full home rule for the District then and now can give all sorts of highfalutin constitutional arguments for their position, the perennial sub rosa reason for its substatus remains the same as it was before anyone had heard of Marion Barry’s coke bust or of the hapless current mayor, Anthony Williams, whose fraudulent nominating petitions contained ”signatures” from New York celebrities like Martha Stewart and Billy Joel. In 1965, Washington became the first major American city in which blacks outnumbered whites by more than 10 percent. Given the Republican Party’s inability to attract large numbers of black voters, it has hardly been in any rush to empower more of them at the price of likely handing the Democrats two voting seats in the Senate and one in the House.

The only time the capital’s residents had true self-rule was during a short-lived biracial governance experiment during Reconstruction, soon ended by white resistance. Though Washingtonians can now vote for president (since 1961), they have but a single nonvoting member of Congress. Under their limited form of home rule, in place only since the early 1970’s, the City Council, the mayor, the budget and even citizen-passed ballot initiatives can all be overruled by congressmen from states whose constituents’ firsthand knowledge of the capital may be limited to the compulsory school trip. It could be argued that nowhere in the country is the plantation mentality still more embedded in civic life than in an African-American city whose citizens lack the full rights of citizenship, even as their Army National Guard units are called on active duty for the war on terrorism. This antediluvian, or at least antebellum, state of affairs makes D.C. a strikingly anachronistic capital of America in the 21st century, whatever its validity as a capital before the passage of the 13th Amendment. Indeed, America’s capital has less democratic autonomy than President Bush this year demanded of the Palestinians.

Whatever Washington lacks in actual democracy, it makes up, of course, in monuments. But what represents the spirit of modern America more than the Statue of Liberty? The view of Lait and Mortimer, Washington’s churlish chroniclers of the 1950’s, still holds. They likened the city’s tourist appeal to that of Hollywood’s Forest Lawn cemetery, where busloads of Americans come to visit the movie stars’ graves. ”Its gleaming public buildings of white marble are like so many mausoleums,” they wrote. ”Where it doesn’t look like a cemetery it resembles a movie set. It has a feel of unreality.” But if politics is show business for ugly people, as the old joke has it, you can’t push the Hollywood analogy too far. ”Washington is dominated by elected and appointed functionaries who are schooled to believe they must never be caught having fun,” Lait and Mortimer wrote. ”Therefore, after dark, it is more like Paducah than Paris.” Unlike New York, which has winked at mayoral girlfriends from Jimmy Walker’s to Rudolph Giuliani’s (and doesn’t care where its current bachelor mayor spends his weekends), Washington was the last to discover John Kennedy’s sex life and is still as open-mouthed as an Edvard Munch screamer when contemplating Bill Clinton’s.

Washington’s idea of a Hollywood sex symbol is a cast member in ”The West Wing” — no matter whom — because what could be more erotic than a powerful government bureaucrat? The city’s idea of an intellectual is a Sunday-morning talking head; its literary apotheosis is the trade journal. Its loudest academic posturing emanates from the so-called university without students, the think tank, invented by the Brookings Institution in 1927 and a major Washington growth industry since the 1970’s. The think tanks’ tenured ”professors,” with grandiose titles that might have been lifted from the Marx Brothers’ ”Duck Soup,” are often out-of-office ideologues with more position papers than books to their credit. Only in this heady environment could William Bennett be mistaken for Harold Bloom and CNN’s ”Capital Gang” for the Algonquin Round Table. Unlike decision makers in other capitals, Washington’s power elite don’t routinely commingle with top-rung scholars, scientists, novelists, artists and musicians who might broaden their thinking beyond the parameters set by the city’s army of lobbyists and single-issue advocates.

Though Washington suffered its own grievous wound on Sept. 11, it remains as insular as it was before the attack. As the country’s official capital, it is to New York as Ankara is to Istanbul, Canberra is to Sydney, Brasilia is to Rio. Strolling through downtown and past the alabaster public buildings on a beautiful afternoon, you find that the sparse pedestrian traffic is often limited to government workers in cookie-cutter garb and cadres of tourists hoping to find some semblance of urban brio after having had their fill of the National Air and Space Museum. (They’d be better advised to hightail it to the city’s black or gay enclaves or even the suburbs.)

Take a similar walk through the central commercial districts of New York, whatever the borough, and you’ll find not just animated sidewalks packed with locals but also signs of a city in perpetual renewal, pursuing creation and demolition with equal abandon, always testing the limits. That hope, that drive, that hunger to keep moving no matter what, is America at its highest throttle. Should the Olympians come to the true capital, they won’t automatically own the town, as they would if they had landed in Washington. In New York, they’ll find that no sooner do the games begin than they are locked into the even tougher competition of winning the city’s favor, just like every other newcomer who has ever come here with dreams of going for the gold.

Frank Rich is a Times columnist and a senior writer for the magazine.

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BERLIN (Reuters) – An aging Berlin playboy has come up with an unusual offer to lure women into his bed by promising the last woman he sleeps with an inheritance of about $244,000.

Rolf Eden, a 72-year-old west Berlin disco owner famous in the German capital for his countless number of sex partners, said he could imagine no better way to die than in the arms of an attractive young woman — preferably under 30.

“I put it all in my last will and testament — the last woman who sleeps with me gets all the money,” Eden told Bild newspaper Wednesday.

“I want to pass away in the most beautiful moment of my life. First a lot of fun with a beautiful woman, then wild sex, a final orgasm — and it will all end with a heart attack and then I’m gone.”

Eden, who is selling his popular “Big Eden” nightclub later this year, said “applicants” shouldn’t wait long because of his advanced age.

“It could end very soon,” he said. “Maybe even tomorrow.”

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