Bush’s hawks and doves George Bush has to balance strong personalities of his foreign policy team By Rob Watson Washington Correspondent

During the recent tensions between the United States and China, the favourite point of discussion in the game of Washington whispers was who was ascendant in the Bush foreign policy team – the hawks or the doves?

The so-called hawks, Vice President Dick Cheney and Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld kept a low profile during the crisis.

More in evidence were the more dove-ish National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice and Colin Powell at the State Department.

On paper at least President George W Bush has the foreign policy dream team – a mix of experience and charisma in Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell and Rice.

Tension

But according to many, including James Lindsay at the Brookings Institution, the administration has already developed the classic tension between the departments of state and defence and their charismatic bosses.

“The two leaders, Powell and Rumsfeld, have very different styles – Rumsfeld, the hard-nosed bureaucratic infighter and Powell, the soldier turned statesman,” Mr Lindsay said. Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld Donald Rumsfeld differs in style and policy from Secretary of State Colin Powell

And they also have policy differences, he adds.

“Rumsfeld is a big believer in technology, the ability of military might to solve problems, and oddly enough, Powell, as the former warrior, is very attuned to diplomacy,” he said.

In past administrations such divisions have proved near fatal, but experienced Washington watcher Nick Berry, at the Centre for Defence Information, says the famous four are different.

“There is a fault line, but they have rules. They have made an agreement. They will fight strongly and recommend their positions, so they will struggle, but they will come together,” he said.

“They are team players.”

Treacherous politics

In a town where it is all about access to the president, the question is who of the four has Mr Bush’s ear.

Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute says the answer is surprising. National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice Despite conventional wisdom, Rice has Bush’s ear

“The conventional wisdom around town is that with national figures like Colin Powell, strong personalities and senior people like Donald Rumsfeld and the powerful vice president, the odd person out will be Condoleeza Rice, the national security adviser,” he said.

But he said that Ms Rice is well schooled in treacherous politics having been a provost of a university, and despite the conventional wisdom, she has the ear of Mr Bush more than any of the other players.

Bush’s test

But before everyone gets too hyped up about fault lines and face time, Norman Ornstein, an analyst with the American Enterprise Institute, says it is important to remember the big four have more in common than divides them.

“What you have here is a group of people who believe in free trade, internationalism, a strong American role in the world with some difference more in tactics than basic philosophy,” he said.

Most notably absent, he added, is that not one of the four represents the “populist, isolationist protectionism that elsewhere is out there in conservative thought”.

That said managing such undoubtedly powerful figures, will take some skill from Mr Bush, a man who prides himself on running the White House like a business, but who is still relatively untested.

If the decline in the conventional capability of the Russian Military forces them to rely more heavily on their nuclear capability, how does that affect how an adversary would size them up in a political or military dispute?

How does this impact the Americans? Does the fact that they have such a strong conventional force and the ability to wage war without using nasty weapons make them a lot less scary? Does the fact that US Voters (even if you scared them a LOT) might revolt against their government if they used weapons of mass destruction make them totally useless?

-Ian.

—— http://tms.physics.lsa.umich.edu/214/other/news/071099russia- military.html

July 10, 1999

Maneuvers Show Russian Reliance on Nuclear Arms; Atomic Attack Simulated By MICHAEL R. GORDON

MOSCOW — Reflecting its growing dependence on nuclear weapons for defense, Russia’s military carried out mock nuclear strikes in a major exercise last month, the Defense Minister said Friday.

The exercise was the largest since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. It involved 50,000 troops, bombers, tanks and warships from the Barents Sea to the Black Sea.

One of the scenarios for the exercise underscored the expanding role nuclear weapons have been playing in the Russian military’s strategy and plans in recent years.

According to the script for the military exercise, disclosed Friday at a news conference by Defense Minister Igor Sergeyev, Russia came under attack by an unspecified Western foe, which used non-nuclear forces.

At first, Russia also tried to limit its attacks to conventional forces. But its cash-starved non-nuclear forces failed to stop the enemy onslaught, forcing the leadership to turn to its still formidable nuclear arsenal.

“The exercise tested one of the provisions of Russia’s military doctrine concerning a possible use of nuclear weapons when all other measures are exhausted,” Marshal Sergeyev said. “We did pursue such an option. All measures were exhausted. Our defenses proved to be ineffective. An enemy continued to push into Russia. And that’s when the decision to use nuclear weapons was made.”

During Soviet times, Moscow and Washington piled up huge nuclear arsenals as they sought to best each other in the arms race.

Still, Russia’s conventional forces were enormous. In those years it was NATO, fearing that it was outnumbered, that openly threatened to initiate the use of nuclear weapons in response to a non-nuclear attack.

Now that the Soviet Union has collapsed, however, the tables have turned. The West has become less dependent on nuclear weapons. As the conflict with Yugoslavia showed, NATO fights its wars with with laser-guided and satellite-guided non-nuclear bombs and missiles.

But with Russia’s military spending projected this year at about $4 billion (compared with about $260 billion for the Pentagon), the once-mighty conventional forces have deteriorated.

Russia’s forces failed to defeat Chechnya’s rebels, and Russian generals are no longer confident that they can prevail over more serious threats. And with a faltering economy, nuclear forces are virtually the only way Russia can lay claim to being a world power.

“Russia’s military believes that it must rely more than ever on the first use of nuclear weapons,” said Bruce Blair, a specialist on Russian nuclear capabilities at the Brookings Institution. “It is part psychological and partly a planning assumption.”

The first sign of Russia’s increasing dependence on nuclear weapons came in 1993 when the Defense Ministry abandoned the Soviet-era pledge not to be the first to use nuclear weapons.

Then, as NATO’s bombing of Yugoslavia reinforced the sense here that the West has a huge lead in conventional military technology, President Boris N. Yeltsin met with his top national security advisers to discuss plans to compensate for Russia’s faltering conventional capabilities by developing short-range, tactical nuclear weapons.

The projects and plans that were approved remain secret. But Vladim Putin, the secretary of the Security Council, said Yeltsin had approved a “blueprint for the development and use of non-strategic nuclear weapons.”

None of this means that NATO and Russia are necessarily on a collision course. The Yeltsin Government has pledged to cooperate on arms control, including seeking Parliament’s approval of the Start-2 treaty reducing strategic nuclear arms.

And on Thursday, Yeltsin enjoined a group of Russian generals to cooperate with NATO in enforcing the peace in Kosovo.

“The problem of our relations with NATO and the U.S.A. is very subtle, delicate and difficult,” Yeltsin said. “Every one of you must pursue the same line — the President’s line. We shall certainly not quarrel with NATO outright, but nor do we intend to flirt with it.”

Russia’s recent exercise, however, demonstrated the competitive nature of the relationship. The weeklong exercise, which was held in late June, was planned last year but adapted to take account of the Yugoslav conflict, including NATO’s ability to attack at long range with precision-guided bombs, Marshal Sergeyev said.

The military aim of the exercise was to test command procedures for defending western Russia and Belarus from an attack from the West.

“To verify the authenticity of the decisions and test procedures for troop control, more than 50 military units participated in the exercise,” Marshal Sergeyev said. “There have been extensive structural changes to the forces in recent years, and we have to practice their management and regain units’ operational skills.”

The political aim appeared to be to demonstrate to the world as well as to the Russian public that the military is still a credible fighting force.

During the exercise, two old turbo-prop Bear bombers approached Iceland while a couple of new Blackjack bombers approached Norway. Russian ships maneuvered under the watchful eyes of Western reconnaissance ships and aircraft.

Officially, the Defense Ministry declined to specify who the imaginary enemy was. The aim, Marshal Sergeyev told the Russian Itar-Tass news agency, was to rehearse the defeat of the enemy and the recapture of lost territory.

Some Russian observers were less diplomatic. The Defense Ministry, the newspaper Nezavisimaya Gazeta noted, refuses to say who the adversary is. “But few doubt that the enemy is NATO’s armed forces in Europe,” it added.

Copyright 1999 The New York Times Company

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.

———–

Does Fast Internet Need a Push? High-Speed Access Seen as Economic Catalyst

By Jonathan Krim Washington Post Staff Writer Tuesday, January 15, 2002; Page A01

At a recent Washington dinner, four high-tech heavyweights compared notes about their home computer systems.

One is a top technologist at the Federal Communications Commission. One lobbies for high-speed Internet access on behalf of a Silicon Valley trade group. One is a senior legal adviser to the FCC, and one is a senior Commerce Department official for tech policy.

Yet only one of them has high-speed Internet access at home.

This drives Bruce Mehlman nuts. Mehlman, assistant secretary of commerce for technology policy, tells the story to illustrate the challenge of convincing Americans that broadband is the next big thing. (Mehlman has cable-modem service and a wireless network in his house.) If these people don’t want or need it, who will?

High-speed Internet access, otherwise known as broadband, has long been touted to consumers as an always-connected nirvana, eliminating the hassle of dial-up modems and allowing users to take full advantage of the Internet — downloading movies, perhaps even attending college classes remotely.

Now, broadband is a new battle cry in Washington, as the country struggles with the post-Internet-bubble, post-Sept. 11 recession.

More broadband is an economic priority for the Bush administration, said Mehlman, a former policy strategist for the networking company Cisco Systems Inc. Late last year, FCC Chairman Michael K. Powell began an intensive review of all regulations that affect broadband deployment. And just last week, Senate Majority Leader Thomas A. Daschle (D-S.D.) called for universal broadband access as one of his party’s recommendations for economic revival.

Today, the technology industry plans to launch a major lobbying effort to get the federal government to set national targets for broadband rollout and adoption. Often competitors in the marketplace, tech companies are united in their view that broadband could be a catalyst not just for recovery of their own battered sector but also for the next economic boom.

But whether, and how, the government should push broadband along will be fiercely debated. The broadband highway is littered with special interests and strewn with potholes. Like Mehlman’s dinner companions, most Americans so far are staying off the road.

To date, roughly 80 percent of the country’s homes have broadband service available to them — via cable lines, satellite or souped-up telephone lines (known as digital subscriber lines, or DSL). Yet only about 10 percent, or 10 million homes, have signed up.

The number of subscribers has risen steadily since broadband became widely available five years ago, but the rate of growth slowed last year. In the first quarter of 2001, the number of subscribers increased 27 percent from the previous quarter. It increased 17 percent in the second quarter and 13 percent in the third, according to Jupiter Media Metrix Inc.

In a recent test in LaGrange, Ga., 13,000 of the town’s homes were offered broadband, free of charge, for a year. Only half the town wanted it.

For those who decide they want broadband, it can take weeks for service to begin once it has been ordered. Self-installation kits can lead to hours of tech-support calls. Recently, hundreds of thousands of broadband subscribers were temporarily cut off from their cable-modem service after Internet access provider At Home Corp. declared bankruptcy.

“I’m really irritated with the whole thing,” said Angelene Hernandez, a licensed massage therapist in Phoenix who is a Cox Communications Inc. customer. Hernandez said that although her high-speed connection is helpful for linking with the college where she is taking classes, the months-long service problems she has encountered are beginning to outweigh the convenience.

Even without such problems, the general price tag for broadband, $40 to $50 a month, has kept away many consumers. Increasing numbers already have it at work and don’t see the need for another connection. For others, broadband has yet to deliver anything exciting beyond always-on connections and faster surfing and downloading speeds.

“There’s no broadband content yet that is especially compelling,” said Jeff Eisenach, president of the Progress & Freedom Foundation, a conservative think tank that supports widespread rollout of the technology.

One major obstacle is that current broadband technology is not fast enough to enable the kinds of whiz-bang, video-intensive applications that will help drive consumer use.

At current broadband speeds “it would take longer to download a movie than to go to a video store and rent it,” Rick Lane, vice president of government affairs for entertainment and media giant News Corp., said at a recent broadband summit.

Even if the speed were there, the major studios are not making their video entertainment available online until they are certain it cannot be pirated.

One of the biggest early drivers of broadband adoption was Napster Inc., the Internet service company that enabled users to download and swap music files. But the service was all but shut down by the recording industry, which won injunctions against what it claimed was theft of copyrighted works.

Some believe that unless copyright restrictions are adapted to enable individual file sharing, broadband adoption will be stunted.

Still, no one argues broadband’s potential. Large companies have benefited for years from networked high-speed access. Now, residential-level broadband service is essential to many small and home-based businesses, which rely on the Internet for conducting commerce.

Mehlman and other broadband evangelists argue that the current sign-up rate is not out of line with consumer adoption of new technologies in the past, including telephones and televisions.

For individuals, the benefits range far beyond entertainment, proponents say. Were broadband ubiquitous, startling advances would be possible in such areas as education and medical care via videoconferencing. Government services could be transformed, and telecommuting would become commonplace, saving energy, cutting road-maintenance costs and reducing pollution.

Michigan, for example, just created a virtual state court, where lawyers can file briefs online and put in their court appearances by teleconference.

For the technology industry, still clawing its way back from the depths of its implosion, broadband offers the best hope for a return to the days of robust growth. Higher-speed connections drive a continuing need for more powerful computers with faster chips, new forms of networking equipment and expanded software applications, generating sales throughout the technology food chain.

“You have to have broadband for the economy to really take the next big bite,” said Matthew Flanigan, president of the Telecommunications Industry Association, which represents equipment manufacturers. “It will create hundreds of thousands of jobs.”

In a study published last summer, Brookings Institution economist Robert Crandall estimated that if broadband use were universal, it could be worth as much as $300 billion a year to the U.S. economy.

Such projections have been widely touted by local phone companies such as Verizon Communications Inc., which paid for the study, to bolster their arguments that government should do everything in its power to promote broadband rollout.

But there is hardly consensus on the best way to increase rollout of high-speed connections, reduce prices and spur broadband demand.

Several bills in Congress offer various stimulative prescriptions, from investment tax credits to deregulation, that proponents claim will spur faster broadband deployment. Many of these have languished, however, polarized by what one lobbyist calls the “telecom food fights” between telephone and cable companies that are jockeying for maximum advantage in selling broadband service.

The phone companies continue to push legislation, sponsored by Reps. W.J. “Billy” Tauzin (R-La.) and John D. Dingell (D-Mich.), that would remove a number of regulations that govern how much the companies must open their lines for use by competitors. The bill also would allow the companies to enter the market for carrying long-distance data without opening their local markets to competition, as is currently required.

The phone companies argue that these restrictions dampen their incentive to invest in rolling out more broadband service.

Long-distance and cable companies such as AT&T Corp. strenuously object, as do competitors, who say that the regional phone giants are dragging their feet in sharing their lines with competitors.

Today, TechNet, a potent network of 300 senior executives from large and small technology firms, venture capitalists and investment bankers, plans to call on Washington to drop those battles. Instead, the group, whose members include Cisco, International Business Machines Corp., Microsoft Corp. and Intel Corp., will call not only for national targets for broadband adoption but also for commitment to an “advanced broadband” that is at least 100 times as fast as what exists today.

The group will not seek tax incentives for industry, nor will it seek legislation that benefits a particular technology.

“No one knows what the technological solution is going to be” to increase broadband speed, said Rick White, a former congressman who is the president and chief executive of TechNet. But the group will urge legislation to clear a path for higher-speed lines to be built, by overriding certain state and local land-use restrictions.

“What we’re seeing right now are interim technologies . . . makeshift adaptations,” White said. “We need to leap over that and set very ambitious goals by the end of the decade.”

Next week, the Computer Systems Policy Project, a smaller group of computer and chip manufacturing companies headed by Michael S. Dell, founder of Dell Computer Corp., plans to make a similar pitch and meet with congressional and administration officials.

Others argue that the way to ensure more broadband is for government to guarantee competition.

“Monopolists have been allowed to control the pace of rollout,” said Mark Cooper, research director of the Consumer Federation of America. Cooper said that subsidizing a small group of telecommunications giants, through tax credits or anti-competitive deregulation, is “the Soviet model for growth.”

Instead, he said, the government should focus on reducing prices and increasing choice, particularly when there is so much more broadband available than there are people who are signing up for it.

“The capitalist model is to squeeze out all the demand first,” Cooper said. That way, “the companies minimize their risk and maximize their return on their existing set of assets.”

Staff writer Christopher Stern contributed to this report.

© 2002 The Washington Post Company