As the Stanley Cup playoffs rage on, a select crew of Canadian players whose teams are out of the running are over in Moscow defending Canada’s great cultural hockey tradition at the IIHF Hockey World Championships. The 2007 team, which was given a pass this year by past, current, and future greats like Sidney Crosby, Joe Sakic and Ryan Smyth so they could lick the wounds of a tough NHL season, is led on the ice by one Mr. Shane Doan.

But as the quest for the cup continues and the Worlds are well underway, they’re both being overshadowed by another Canadian cultural tradition: the self-promoting protestations of… what, exactly? by Canada’s official cultural muckraker, Liberal MP Denis Coderre. Apparently Shane, during a heated battle in Montreal where the calls by four francophone officials were definitely not in his team’s favour he is alleged to have had the audacity to say something nasty about them. In a hockey game, no less, which are of course known for the pleasantries and politeness exchanged among the league’s dainty, sensitive skaters.

Here, dear friends, is the offending quote (cover your eyes, kids!):

“Four French referees in Montreal, Cuje, figure it out.”

That’s what he said, as was determined by the NHL investigation, including testimony from goaltender Curtis “Cujo” Joseph, conducted after the December 13, 2005 game. But of course that’s not what linesmen Michel Cormier, from 30 feet away or what Coderre, several electoral ridings away, heard. Their imaginative ears inferred far fewer syllables: “f$cking French”. A fitting synopsis, perhaps, but not what he said.

In any case, either statement may be on record as the mildest response to having the opposing team run your goalie without receiving a penalty in NHL history.

But of course, this isn’t really about what he said or didn’t say, is it?

And this isn’t the first time Coderre, formerly the Liberal cabinet member responsible for sport, has gone after Doan. The first time was in early 2006, when Doan was called to play for the Canadian olympic team — and when Coderre was fighting to be re-elected in his fiercely Québécois riding of Bourassa, the Bloc Québécois candidate nipping at his heels as they have throughout his career. What a tidy coincidence that Doan made himself such a worthy target for the Liberals, whose government was under siege for having siphoned millions of dollars in graft to their Quebec constituents. Actually that number likely tops hundreds of billions, but that’s another issue. The battle between Denis Coderre and Shane Doan has raged ever since through defamation lawsuits.

It would be foolish to deny that in hockey circles there is a palpable animosity between anglophone and francophone hockey players in Canada — friends of mine who played bantam and junior pored over their French textbooks looking for worthy insults to utter as they lined up for faceoffs against kids from Quebec. Even the CBC show “Making The Cut” (now on GlobalTV), which searched for the top 6 unsigned hockey players in its first season, aired the fiery utterance by one of the anglophone players against a Québécois competitor who’d slashed him during tryouts: “that’s typical cheap french bullsh#t.” He later apologized, but the reality is that when insults fly out on the ice, no matter how harsh they might sound, they are rarely sincere.

It would be much more foolish to give credence to this “affair”, as it will inevitably be called, which drags Hockey Canada chief Bob Nicholson to testify before a bogus parliamentary committee as the Bloc Québécois clamors to ring in on the subject and defend le Quebec Libre, while Coderre plays the jubilant ringmaster. He must be thankful that someone has said something mean about his constituents so that he can rise to defend their honour against the slightest .. er .. slight.

But the whole process is, in the grand Candian parliamentary tradition, a farce. Hockey Canada is not even a federal agency, though it receives funding from the ministry responsible for promoting sport. What’s more, it is illegal for Parliament to accuse a Canadian citizen of a crime (is there a crime here?) for which he has never been convicted — this is called a Bill of Attainder and it’s been rejected by most western democracies since, oh, the 19th century. But this waste of time serves a grander purpose that makes it easy for our honourable MPs to pack the bandwagon full of proponents: it’s distracting the nation from the fact that 8 more Canadian soldiers died last month in Afghanistan, and that the violence (and our inability to cope with it) is escalating.

Nope. This isn’t about hockey, racism or ethnic slurs. It’s about grandstanding, and the age-old Canadian sport of politicians capitalizing on a societal victim mentality which has ingrained itself in the minds of Canada’s francophone minority. This is about the politics of culture, and Shane Doan is a pawn in a perpetual cycle pandering to and exploiting the irrational fears of a distinct society by Canada’s politicians, Nationalist and Separatist alike.

Those of us who understand and play the sport of hockey, which was originally promoted by Lord Stanley to unify the budding Canadian nation, believe and respect the fact that what happens on the ice stays on the ice.

In this case it is clearly the gross misconduct of politicians, not of hockey players, that shames our nation.

-Ian.

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

By Joshua Micah Marshall

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

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

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

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

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

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

Moral Cloudiness

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

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

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

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

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

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

Prime Minister bin Laden

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Whacking the Hornet’s Nest

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Google vs. Evil

The world’s biggest, best-loved search engine owes its success to supreme technology and a simple rule: Don’t be evil. Now the geek icon is finding that moral compromise is just the cost of doing big business.

By Josh McHugh

Life used to be so much easier for Sergey Brin. In the autumn of 1998, he and Larry Page unleashed Google with a clear mission: Help computer users find exactly what they want on the Internet. Newbies flocked to the site, grateful for a simple search engine that was both powerful and intuitive. More sophisticated techies came to appreciate Google’s computational elegance and its willingness to shun the “portal” model that crammed ecommerce down their throats. Within months, Google became one of the most popular sites on the Web – and not long after that, “Google” became a verb. Today, Internet users spend about 15 million hours a month on the site. Google.com logs more than 28 million visitors each month, nearly as many as Yahoo! and MSN. Nearly four out of five Internet searches happen on Google or on sites that license its technology.

Google owes its swelling popularity to deft algorithms that quickly divine what’s useful on the Web. But there’s more to it than that. At Google, purity matters. Over the years, Brin and Page have resisted pressure to run banners, opting instead for haiku-like text ads and unintrusive sponsored links. They’ve taken a stand against pop-ups and pop-unders and refused ads from sites they consider to be overly negative. All the while, they’ve stubbornly kept the Google homepage concise and pristine. On just a faint whisper of a marketing campaign, the company pulled in an estimated $70 million last year (a third from licensing fees and the rest from ads).

The Google strategy appeals to every engineer’s sense of The Way It Should Be. Build the best entry in the science fair. Do not tart it up. Do not make it more clever than it needs to be.

But a funny thing is happening on the way to Internet adulthood – Google’s awkward teen years. The company’s growth spurt has spawned a host of daunting questions that no data-retrieval system can easily answer. Should Google play ball with repressive foreign governments? Refuse to link users to “hate” sites? Punish marketers who artificially inflate site rankings? Fight the Church of Scientology’s attempts to silence critics? And what to do about the cache, Google’s archive of previously indexed pages? In April, the German national railroad threatened legal action to remove an obsolete site containing sabotage instructions.

Most major companies refer to a detailed code of corporate conduct when considering such policy decisions. General Electric devotes 15 pages on its Web site to an integrity policy. Nortel’s site has 34 pages of guidelines. Google’s code of conduct can be boiled down to a mere three words: Don’t be evil.

Very Star Wars. But what does it mean?

“Evil,” says Google CEO Eric Schmidt, “is what Sergey says is evil.”

Of the Google triumvirate, Schmidt makes sure the company stays on course financially and strategically; Page keeps busy in the R&D lab, cranking out new features; and the 29-year-old Brin, in his role as Google’s conscience and head policymaker, spends his days gripping the moral tiller – and in so doing, imposes his worldview on everyone else.

That puts Brin at the flashpoint of most of the major Internet-related controversies. He knows his decisions have far-reaching consequences. He feels the pressure that attends Google’s growing power. “I do get fairly stressed,” Brin says. “I’d like to feel a little less scrutinized.”

Google has succeeded by adhering to one, pure principle: Do good by users. Now, for the first time in its history, Google is facing rifts between what’s good for users and what’s good for Google. And Sergey Brin is finding that purity just doesn’t scale.

II.

Don’t be evil. Brin has had to refer back to those three words quite a bit over the past year. Governments, religious bodies, businesses, and individuals are all bearing down on the company, forcing Brin to make decisions that have an effect on the entire Internet. “Things that would normally be side issues for another company carry the weight of responsibility for us,” Brin says.

In March, lawyers representing the Church of Scientology requested that Google stop linking to a Norwegian anti-Scientology site called Operation Clambake. The church claimed the site, xenu.net, displayed copyrighted Scientology content and that by providing links to the information, Google was in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Much to the dismay of many First Amendment fans, Google caved, removing the offending pages from its index.

In May, Anita Roddick, the outspoken British founder of the Body Shop, blasted Google in her blog for yanking a text ad for her site. Google’s explanation: Roddick had called actor John Malkovich a “vomitous worm” in her blog, violating a Google policy against accepting ads for sites that are “anti-” anything. After Roddick protested, Google offered to reinstate the ad in exchange for a promise from Roddick that she would remove the Malkovich reference from the first page of her site. When she refused, Brin had a decision to make: Should he give in and accept Roddick’s money, or stand by his principles? He chose his principles.

Three months later, Daniel Brandt, who runs google-watch.org, attacked PageRank, the algorithm at the heart of Google’s vaunted system, accusing the company of being unfair and undemocratic. Brandt urged the FTC to investigate Google and regulate it as a public utility – as a company that, in effect, controls access to the Internet’s natural resources. The mainstream press tended to dismiss Brandt as a webmaster spurned by a low Google ranking, but in the online forums and weblogs, many agreed with his assertion. As far as search engines go, Google has become the only game in town.

Then in the first week of September, Brin found himself pulled into matters of foreign policy. He received several emails from users telling him that the Chinese government, worried about political dissent in the weeks before the 16th Chinese Party Congress, had shut down access to the site. “Our Chinese traffic was down by a factor of five,” Brin says. “We were blocked.”

Brin was no expert on international diplomacy. So he ordered a half-dozen books about Chinese history, business, and politics on Amazon.com and splurged on overnight shipping. He consulted with Schmidt, Page, and David Drummond, Google’s general counsel and head of business development, then put in a call to tech industry doyenne Esther Dyson for advice and contacts. Google has no offices in China, so Brin enlisted go-betweens to get the message to Chinese authorities that Google would be very interested in working out a compromise to restore access. “We didn’t want to do anything rash,” Brin says. “The situation over there is more complex than I had imagined.”

Four days later, Chinese authorities restored access to the site. How did that happen? For starters, the Chinese government was deluged with outcries from the nation’s 46 million Internet users when access to Google was cut off. “Internet users in China are an apolitical crowd,” says Xiao Qiang, executive director of New York-based Human Rights In China. “They tend to be people who are doing well, and they don’t usually voice strong views. But this stepped into their digital freedom.”

The quick workaround: Chinese authorities tweaked the national firewall, making the new Google China different from the site that was turned off. Today, Chinese who use Google to search on terms like “falun gong” or “human rights in china” receive a standard-looking results page. But when they click on any of the results, either their browsers are redirected to a blank or government-approved page, or their computers are blocked from accessing Google for an hour or two. “They have a new mechanism that can block the results of certain searches,” Brin says. Did Google help China find or obtain the filtering technology? “We didn’t make changes to our servers” is all he’ll say.

In late October, a report by two Harvard researchers revealed that Google had begun filtering its own servers to block users in Germany, France, and Switzerland from accessing sites carrying material likely to be judged racist or inflammatory in each country. Neither Brin nor anyone else at Google will talk about about the preemptive self-censoring moves in Europe.

In the wake of these international incidents, members of Google’s loyal, tech-savvy constituency began to question the company’s motives. “I am a little on the fence about Google’s latest actions,” wrote Brian Osborne, a staff writer for Geek.com, a news site. “On one hand, I understand Google’s stance that it must remain in compliance with German and French laws. Nevertheless, Google is putting itself on a very slippery slope.”

III.

“What is this?” asks a visitor squinting at the form he must sign before proceeding to the cafeteria at Google’s Mountain View, California, headquarters. “An NDA? To have lunch?”

The receptionist shrugs. “This is Google,” she says. “They’re crazy that way.”

The Googleplex, contrary to almost every written account of the place, is hardly a haven of easygoing geek whimsy. The cafeteria is adorned with a tie-dyed banner, but the Google employees aren’t humming any Dead songs. Most of them appear deadly serious. Brin’s second-floor office overlooks a courtyard festooned with empty hammocks. A book about Enron rests on his coffee table.

Brin’s designation as Google’s policy maven is relatively new. He, the big thinker, and Page, the mad scientist, complemented each other and shared nearly every role in Google’s early years. “Larry was always the driver,” says Scott Hassan, who did much of the programming for the original Google. “A big part of his role was going around and yelling ‘Why can’t it do this? Why isn’t this working?'” Brin would sit next to Hassan and watch him write code, pointing out errors and taking an occasional turn at the keyboard.

The frenetic Page looked at all the popular engines at the time and decided they were going about search the wrong way. By relying on HTML code – meta tags as well as page text – they would bring back all sorts of irrelevant information and open themselves up to massive manipulation by webmasters looking to increase their own rankings. Brin took Page’s observation and ran with it. He figured the best way around the problem was to harness the vast repository of human judgments already preserved on the Internet in the form of hyperlinks. “Most people search for local maximums – like figuring out how to get the best car, the best immediate situation,” Hassan says. “Sergey is always searching for global maximums.”

By 2001, Google’s breakneck growth convinced Page and Brin it was time to establish a more rigid structure. Page handed over the CEO title to Schmidt and became copresident with Brin. The move freed up Page to focus on developing his knack for product development (as a child, he crafted a printer out of spare parts and Lego blocks). Brin’s passion for the big picture made him the natural choice to spend time on Google’s growing role in the world.

Which means Brin’s views on politics and policy matter quite a bit. Not that he’s willing to talk. He tells me he listens to NPR on his morning drive to work. I think Democrat and ask about his voter affiliation. He says he votes across party lines. Independent? He smiles and tells me there’s no easy shortcut toward figuring out how he comes to his decisions about good and evil. And even if there was, he wouldn’t let me in on it. If I succeed in figuring out exactly what he considers good and evil, people who don’t care about Google users might start gaming him the way they try to game his search engine.

Born in Moscow and raised in the suburbs of Washington, DC, Brin grew up listening in on conversations at the dinner parties thrown by his father, a math professor, and his mother, a NASA scientist. Talking about his decisions and the values he holds most dear, Brin chooses his language carefully, but one word he repeatedly comes back to is “useful.” And while Google’s policy decisions over the past year look a bit haphazard at first glance, they begin to make more sense in a worldview where usefulness is the paramount virtue.

Aside from the indisputable goodness of causing hard-line Communist Party officials to say the word “Google” to one another for a few days, it’s difficult to say on which side of the good-evil line the company’s China resolution falls. Brin seems at peace with how it all turned out. “Political searches are not that big a fraction of the searches coming out of China,” he says. “You want to look at the total value picture that a search engine like Google brings and think of all that it’s used for.”

But Xiao Qiang, the activist, thinks the company should have taken a firmer stand. “Ultimately, China’s state censorship mechanism will have to submit to this growing demand for freedom from Chinese netizens,” Xiao says. “It’s important to protect integrity, particularly for an Internet firm.”

On the same day that China blocked access to Google, it also flipped the switch on AltaVista. AltaVista issued a defiant statement to the media and went on to list several ways to access the site. Months later, AltaVista is still blocked. Brin figures that by meeting China halfway, Google remained available – and useful – to visitors and also preserved its advertising revenue there. “You have to look at the total value picture,” he says.

What about the Scientology mess? Didn’t Google give in too easily? Jennifer Urban, a fellow at Berkeley’s Boalt Hall School of Law and a member of Chilling Effects, an organization formed to document attempts to stifle speech on the Internet, says that from a legal standpoint, Google’s hands were tied. “To qualify for safe harbor protection from liability, they really have to err on the side of taking down the link,” Urban says.

In fact, Google didn’t fold entirely. After consulting with Brin, Kulpreet Rana, Google’s head of IP, found a way that Google could comply with the law without letting the Scientologists erase their critics from the Internet. The solution: When Google gets a request to remove a link under the safe harbor provisions of the DMCA Section 512, it substitutes a link to a form on the Chilling Effects’ site. The form contains the Web address of the page in question, and anyone still interested in the site can direct their browser to the address.

Does abiding by the letter of a bad and flimsy law absolve Google from charges that it squashed free expression? Cindy Cohn, legal director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, is certain that a vigorous legal challenge would put an end to the steady flow of Section 512 filings Google receives but admits she doesn’t expect Google to devote its resources to such a broad fight. And while some cheered Google’s workaround as evidence of a rebellious bit of payback – a small point scored against the enemies of unfettered speech – the move is another instance of Brin choosing the path of usefulness over a righteous crusade.

IV.

If Brin’s code of good and evil permits the company to negotiate with sovereign governments and allows for some legal meddling from unpopular religions, there is no wiggle room – no gray area whatsoever – when it comes to those who attempt to subvert the power of Google to their own commercial ends. One thing Brin is sure of: On the side of evil lies trickery.

I ask Brin to imagine, for a moment, running his company’s evil twin, a sort of anti-Google. “We would be doing things like having advertising that wasn’t marked as being paid for. Stuff that violates the trust of the users,” he says, describing a site that sounds not unlike the pay-for-placement search site Overture. “Say someone came looking for breast cancer information and didn’t know that some listings were paid for with money from drug companies. We’d be endangering people’s health.”

The anti-Google might also be more amenable to the growing business of “optimization,” the altering of Web sites so that they rank higher in search engine results. For a fee, there’s help for a Dallas plumber who’s unhappy that his site is on the 17th page of results when someone types “Dallas plumber” into Google. An optimizer will tweak the site in such a way that boosts it to, say, the 3rd page of results.

To pull this off with Google, an optimizer needs to understand how the company’s search mechanism works. Google uses 100 or so closely guarded algorithms to determine its search results. The best known of the lot is called PageRank, which allocates relevancy to a page according to the number and importance of pages linked to it, the number and importance of pages linked to each of those pages, and so on. One ploy is to create “link farms,” in which an optimizer gets clients to link to one another, racking up relevancy points. In general, optimizers make a living by guessing what Google regards as important. The way Brin sees it, the optimizers are co-opting Google’s bond of trust with its users. He regards optimizers the way a mother grizzly might regard a hunter jabbing at her cub with a stick.

Every month, when Google updates its index and its mix of algorithms, it rakes a disruptive claw across the optimizers’ systems. In the industry, the monthly shuffle is known as the Google Dance, and Brin doesn’t mind letting on that if Google ends up dancing all over the optimizers, so much the better. “When we change and improve our technology, things get shuffled around,” Brin says, “and sometimes it has a disproportionate effect on optimization sites.”

Consider the case of Bob Massa, a former solid oak dining room furniture salesman who lives in Oklahoma City and runs SearchKing, an optimization company he started in 1997. Last summer, Massa received a rare gift from Google in the form of the Google Toolbar, a software program that lets users perform searches without going to Google.com. More important for Massa, the Toolbar shows the approximate PageRank, on a scale of one to ten, of whatever page a user is visiting. It was the first time since Brin and Page were in grad school that they’d shared so much technical information. After years of watching Google’s every move like an Etruscan high priest trying to augur divine intent from cloud formations, Massa had a piece of the goods. On August 9, Massa started selling optimization based on PageRank.

After the Google Dance of September 20, most of Massa’s customers suddenly found themselves in a heap at the very bottom of Google’s 3 billion site index. It seems that the improvements Google had made included a severe downgrade of sites with links to SearchKing. Massa’s customers, needless to say, were very, very unhappy. “Everyone thinks I’m the biggest idiot in the world for making Google mad,” Massa said in October.

He filed suit a few weeks later, charging that Google downgraded his customers’ scores in a deliberate attempt to put him out of business. The suit asks for an injunction forcing Google to restore the scores to pre-Dance levels, and seeks $75,000 in damages. “It’s a classic good versus evil thing,” says Massa, turning Brin’s framework back on Google itself. “I knew they wouldn’t like it. I didn’t think they’d go so far as to wipe out all these little people.”

The day Massa’s suit was filed, the reaction from the Slashdot crowd and most other forums was predictably vociferous, with posters stumbling over themselves to craft metaphors painting Massa as a criminal suing his victim. But gradually, a surprising number of people, while careful not to look as though they were defending Massa, began tagging the search engine as a Google-opoly. It’s hard to sympathize with a David as parasitic as Massa, but Slashdotters tend to be uneasy with Goliaths of any stripe, especially when their methods are kept secret.

And the real problem with Massa is that he’s simply the termite Brin is able to see. There are thousands more behind the wall, invisibly boring away at the very structure of Google’s house. “It’s easy to become overly obsessed with those kinds of things,” Brin admits.

It would make things a lot easier for Brin if the world’s webmasters would just act as though his site didn’t matter, but that’s not human nature. There’s no way around it – as long as Google remains the search engine of choice, the arms race between Google coders and the hordes of optimizers will go on.

V.

As proficient as Google is at revealing information, Brin is adept at keeping key morsels under wraps. In a way, that makes a lot of sense. Although the obvious image of Google is one of accumulation, the essence of data retrieval is just the opposite. Google is about division and subtraction, narrowing down billions of choices before revealing the most promising. Brin’s world isn’t as simple as visible equals good, hidden equals evil. Google’s effectiveness as a search tool depends largely on how well it’s able to shroud the site’s inner workings from the commercial interests that clutter so much of the Internet today.

But here’s the thing: If Brin thinks his job has become more difficult over the past year, it may soon become near impossible. In September, at the height of the China controversy, Google legal eagle Drummond spotted an article about the prospect of a Google IPO, which, the story said, might be the spark to ignite the dormant public offerings market. Drummond forwarded the story with some sardonic comments. In his office, Brin tries to find the email for me but can’t. He notes the irony in that, and goes on to paraphrase the note: “Oh, OK, now we’re going to reform the Chinese government – and on top of that, we’re going to fix Wall Street.”

Schmidt claims the company is in no rush to go public, but his appointment and the hiring of CFO George Rayes last August were unmistakable steps in that direction. When the IPO comes, it will bring riches – and more problems.

As a private company, Google has one master: users. As a public company, there are shareholders to worry about. And more than happy users, shareholders want ever-greater profits. Thus far, Brin and Page have succeeded in standing up to pressures that might compromise Google and the user experience. Google’s influential stand against pop-up ads extends beyond its own domain – the company rejects advertisers whose links take Google users to pages that feature pop-ups. (AOL followed suit in October, announcing its own pop-up moratorium.) But when Google becomes a public company, shareholders might force the site to take a more amenable position, if the price is right. After all, for several years, Yahoo! refused to accept anything but fast-loading banner ads, claiming that it was looking out for users. That policy lasted until right about the time that the company’s stock price began to cave.

Such pressure could cause Brin to rethink other policies, like his decision to refuse all alcohol and tobacco advertising. The fact that Google accepts advertising for adult content sites is an intriguing commentary on Brin’s morality: Cigarettes and booze are evil; porn is not. It’s a policy that would become progressively harder to defend were Google to go public. Then there’s the Google cache to consider. Today’s users love having access to a warehouse of information that was once published on the Internet but has since disappeared. Some information goes away for a reason, though. The cache could get Google in trouble, and Brin & Co. could soon find themselves facing all sorts of libel, defamation, or copyright lawsuits.

Increased competition may also cause Brin to do other things he’s loath to do. So far, Google has gotten by without much in the way of competition from the other Internet superpowers. But in May, Yusuf Mehdi, the head of MSN, said he views Google as “more of a competitor than a partner” in the effort to become the default homepage on millions of browsers. What if, as Google.com solidifies its position as the focal point of the Internet, Yahoo! and AOL begin to rethink the millions in licensing fees they pay to what has become a top competitor? Brin may be forced to make the kind of concessions that he’s thus far reserved for international governments.

The utilitarian manner in which Google has achieved its success has made it a sentimental favorite among the code-parsing set. Tech-community sites like Slashdot are almost uniformly pro-Google. Those with the temerity to bring lawsuits against Google ultimately feel the burn of online flames, watching their servers wither under the quasi-zealous wrath of thousands of engineers defending one of their own. But as Google is forced to make more concessions to realpolitik, its bonds with that idealistic constituency will inevitably continue to fray.

And without any sort of technological lock-in, it would be very easy for Google’s visitors to simply start using other search engines. Fast Search & Transfer, based in Norway, boasts a 2.1 billion-page index at www.alltheweb.com, and its search engine works as quickly as Google’s. What’s more, it does a complete crawl of the Internet every 7 to 11 days compared with Google’s 28 days. What if an influential group of politically active netizens makes a rousing case for boycotting Google on the grounds that it is anti-free speech and in cahoots with repressive governments? How long can a hugely powerful company that plays its decisions so close to the vest and refuses to justify itself publicly count on the devotion of the average information-hungry Web user?

It’s inevitable that a company of Google’s size and influence will have to compromise on purity. There’s a chance that, in five years, Google will end up looking like a slightly cleaner version of what Yahoo! has become. There’s also a chance that the site will be able to make a convincing case to investors that long-term user satisfaction trumps short-term profit. The leadership of the Internet is Sergey Brin’s to lose. For now, at least, in Google we trust.

Josh McHugh (josh [at] buzzkiller [dot] net) wrote about Wi-Fi campus life in Wired 10.10.

———–

November 28, 2002 Postcards From Planet Google By JENNIFER 8. LEE

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.

AT Google’s squat headquarters off Route 101, visitors sit in the lobby, transfixed by the words scrolling by on the wall behind the receptionist’s desk: animación japonese Harry Potter pensées et poèmes associação brasileira de normas técnicas.

The projected display, called Live Query, shows updated samples of what people around the world are typing into Google’s search engine. The terms scroll by in English, Chinese, Spanish, Swedish, Japanese, Korean, French, Dutch, Italian – any of the 86 languages that Google tracks.

people who shouldn’t marry “she smoked a cigar” mr. potatoheads in long island pickup lines to get women auto theft fraud how to.

Stare at Live Query long enough, and you feel that you are watching the collective consciousness of the world stream by.

Each line represents a thought from someone, somewhere with an Internet connection. Google collects these queries – 150 million a day from more than 100 countries – in its databases, updating and storing the computer logs millisecond by millisecond.

Google is taking snapshots of its users’ minds and aggregating them. Like a flipbook that emerges when successive images are strung together, the logged data tell a story.

So what is the world thinking about?

Sex, for one thing.

“You can learn to say ‘sex’ in a lot of different languages by looking at the logs,” said Craig Silverstein, director of technology at Google. (To keep Live Query G-rated, Google filters out sex-related searches, though less successfully with foreign languages.)

Despite its geographic and ethnic diversity, the world is spending much of its time thinking about the same things. Country to country, region to region, day to day and even minute to minute, the same topic areas bubble to the top: celebrities, current events, products and computer downloads.

“It’s amazing how similar people are all over the world based on what they are searching for,” said Greg Rae, one of three members of Google’s logs team, which is responsible for building, storing and protecting the data record.

Google’s following – it is the most widely used search engine — has given Mr. Rae a worldview from his cubicle. Since October 2001, he has been able to reel off “anthrax” in several languages: milzbrand (German), carbonchio (Italian), miltvuur (Dutch), antrax (Spanish). He says he can also tell which countries took their recent elections seriously (Brazil and Germany), because of the frenzy of searches. He notes that the globalization of consumer culture means that the most popular brands are far-flung in origin: Nokia, Sony, BMW, Ferrari, Ikea and Microsoft.

Judging from Google’s data, some sports events stir interest almost everywhere: the Tour de France, Wimbledon, the Melbourne Cup horse race and the World Series were all among the top 10 sports-related searches last year. It also becomes obvious just how familiar American movies, music and celebrities are to searchers across the globe. Two years ago, a Google engineer named Lucas Pereira noticed that searches for Britney Spears had declined, indicating what he thought must be a decline in her popularity. From that observation grew Google Zeitgeist, a listing of the top gaining and declining queries of each week and month.

Glancing over Google Zeitgeist is like taking a trivia test in cultural literacy: Ulrika Jonsson (a Swedish-born British television host), made the list recently, as did Irish Travelers (a nomadic ethnic group, one of whose members was videotaped beating her young daughter in Indiana) and fentanyl (the narcotic gas used in the Moscow raid to rescue hostages taken by Chechen rebels in late October).

The long-lasting volume of searches involving her name has made Ms. Spears something of a benchmark for the logs team. It has helped them understand how news can cause spikes in searches, as it did when she broke up with Justin Timberlake.

Google can feel the reverberations of such events, and others of a more serious nature, immediately.

On Feb. 28, 2001, for example, an earthquake began near Seattle at 10:54 a.m. local time. Within two minutes, earthquake-related searches jumped to 250 a minute from almost none, with a concentration in the Pacific Northwest. On Sept. 11, searches for the World Trade Center, Pentagon and CNN shot up immediately after the attacks. Over the next few days, Nostradamus became the top search query, fueled by a rumor that Nostradamus had predicted the trade center’s destruction.

But the most trivial events may also register on Google’s sensitive cultural seismic meter.

The logs team came to work one morning to find that “carol brady maiden name” had surged to the top of the charts.

Curious, they mapped the searches by time of day and found that they were neatly grouped in five spikes: biggest, small, small, big and finally, after a long wait, another small blip. Each spike started at 48 minutes after the hour.

As the logs were passed through the office, employees were perplexed. Why would there be a surge in interest in a character from the 1970’s sitcom “The Brady Bunch”? But the data could only reflect patterns, not explain them.

That is a paradox of a Google log: it does not capture social phenomena per se, but merely the shadows they cast across the Internet.

“The most interesting part is why,” said Amit Patel, who has been a member of the logs team. “You can’t interpret it unless you know what else is going on in the world.”

So what had gone on on April 22, 2001?

That night the million-dollar question on the game show “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” had been, “What was Carol Brady’s maiden name?” Seconds after the show’s host, Regis Philbin, posed the question, thousands flocked to Google to search for the answer (Tyler), producing four spikes as the show was broadcast successively in each time zone.

And that last little blip?

“Hawaii,” Mr. Patel said.

The precision of the Carol Brady data was eye-opening for some.

“It was like trying an electron microscope for the first time,” said Sergey Brin, who as a graduate student in computer science at Stanford helped found Google in 1998 and is now its president for technology. “It was like a moment-by-moment barometer.”

Predictably, Google’s query data respond to television, movies and radio. But the mass media also feed off the demands of their audiences. One of Google’s strengths is its predictive power, flagging trends before they hit the radar of other media.

As such it could be of tremendous value to entertainment companies or retailers. Google is quiet about what if any plans it has for commercializing its vast store of query information. “There is tremendous opportunity with this data,” Mr. Silverstein said. “The challenge is defining what we want to do.”

The search engine Lycos, which produces a top 50 list of its most popular searches, is already exploring potential commercial opportunities. “There is a lot of interest from marketing people,” said Aaron Schatz, who writes a daily column on trends for Lycos. “They want to see if their product is appearing. What is the next big thing?”

Google currently does not allow outsiders to gain access to raw data because of privacy concerns. Searches are logged by time of day, originating I.P. address (information that can be used to link searches to a specific computer), and the sites on which the user clicked. People tell things to search engines that they would never talk about publicly – Viagra, pregnancy scares, fraud, face lifts. What is interesting in the aggregate can be seem an invasiion of privacy if narrowed to an individual.

So, does Google ever get subpoenas for its information?

“Google does not comment on the details of legal matters involving Google,” Mr. Brin responded.

In aggregate form, Google’s data can make a stunning presentation. Next to Mr. Rae’s cubicle is the GeoDisplay, a 40-inch screen that gives a three-dimensional geographical representation of where Google is being used around the globe. The searches are represented by colored dots shooting into the atmosphere. The colors – red, yellow, orange – convey the impression of a globe whose major cities are on fire. The tallest flames are in New York, Tokyo and the San Francisco Bay Area.

Pinned up next to the GeoDisplay are two charts depicting Google usage in the United States throughout the day. For searches as a whole, there is a single peak at 5 p.m. For sex-related searches, there is a second peak at 11 p.m.

Each country has a distinctive usage pattern. Spain, France and Italy have a midday lull in Google searches, presumably reflecting leisurely lunches and relaxation. In Japan, the peak usage is after midnight – an indication that phone rates for dial-up modems drop at that time.

Google’s worldwide scope means that the company can track ideas and phenomena as they hop from country to country.

Take Las Ketchup, a trio of singing sisters who became a sensation in Spain last spring with a gibberish song and accompanying knee-knocking dance similar to the Macarena.

Like a series of waves, Google searches for Las Ketchup undulated through Europe over the summer and fall, first peaking in Spain, then Italy, then Germany and France.

“The Ketchup Song (Hey Hah)” has already topped the charts in 18 countries. A ring tone is available for mobile phones. A parody of the song that mocks Chancellor Gerhard Schröder for raising taxes has raced to the top of the charts in Germany.

In late summer, Google’s logs show, Las Ketchup searches began a strong upward climb in the United States, Britain and the Netherlands.

Haven’t heard of Las Ketchup?

If you haven’t, Google predicts you soon will.

———–

MOSCOW, Russia (AP) — Russia’s biggest television station announced Tuesday it was teaming up with the country’s space agency to create a reality show that will be literally out of this world.

The show will follow contestants as they go through the rigorous training required for cosmonauts, and the winner will spend a week on the Russian segment of the International Space Station, said Channel 1, also known as ORT.

The station said it planned to send the first winner to space in the fall of 2003.

A recent attempt to combine space travel and entertainment failed when pop star Lance Bass was excluded from the crew that is to fly to the space station this month. Bass, of the group ‘N Sync, was unable to come up with the US$20 million fee, and Russian space officials said on September 3 that he would not be part of the crew despite weeks of training. A seven-part television documentary was planned around his flight.

“We closely followed the development of the epic around the flights of space tourists and proposed a TV project that would demonstrate the space achievements of our country and give the winner a chance to go to space,” Channel 1 director Konstantin Ernst said in the station’s press release.

The station quoted Yuri Koptev, head of the Russian Space Agency, as saying the project was “attractive and promising,” for the country’s space program.

Space agency spokesman Sergei Gorbunov said the agency had signed a preliminary agreement with Channel 1. He told the Interfax news agency that a final contract would be signed in a month or two.

Gorbunov said any television viewer could apply to participate in the project. Through various tests and competitions, the participants will be narrowed down to 15-20 people, “who will then undergo the medical examination necessary to be admitted to special training” at Russia’s cosmonaut training center, he said, according to Interfax.

In the past two years, Russia has sent two paying tourists to the space station as a way to raise money for its cash-strapped space program. California millionaire Dennis Tito and South African Internet tycoon Mark Shuttleworth paid about US$20 million each for their trips.

———–

– Carlyle, Historian, 1905

The Fourth Estate has failed.

Whether you’re Socialist, Liberal, or Conservative you’ve got to be alarmed by the lack of substance in our media diet which follows from the 1990s. Long criticized for being too “Left Wing” the American media have become irresponsible and unintentional (we hope) tools of the prevailing authority.

Whereas Clinton could have bombed Moscow while the press focused on the size of Linda Tripp’s nose and the exact detail of what his definition of “sex” really is, Bush could be and is in fact conducting a war at the behest of his corporate sponsors while the press focuses on the next Special Forces photo op.

Below is yet another example of a complicit media attempting to positively affirm an “audience” that only they perceive to be a seething mass of milquetoasts.

Question: What’s the difference between a media that is focused on squashing messages of dissent in order to preserve its bottom line (Bushism) and one which is directly controlled by the governing powers (Stalinism)?

Where we are failed by the Free Market economy folks such as Michael Moore (with his book “Stupid White Men”), Drew Carey, et al become unwitting combatants in a battle to establish a voice which is TRULY reflective of the populous.

We are intelligent people, but we are also busy people. For the most part, we eat what we are fed. Only when the people are given CHOICE does the real discourse of Democracy begin, and that is supposed to be the role of the Fourth Estate.

Am I the only one among us who is deeply disturbed by the >LACK< of actual reflective, investigative journalism that is occurring during this war? In Vietnam we saw the brutality of war: American teenagers being mortally wounded, innocent civilians being executed in the streets, villages burning while napalm-covered children fled. This made war appear to be what it is -- utterly abhorrent -- and it ultimately brought that war to a stop. The Fourth Estate played its hand in the political poker game. Camera crews were welcomed on the battle front and offered protection by the military, and us such they got to stories that compelled them-- and us-- to stop. In Desert Storm, the US government began to manage the media, no longer allowing them to move freely among the combatants. They were not offered any sort of amnesty and were promised that, if they lurked into the battle zone, that they would likely become the object of "Friendly Fire". Instead the US Government provided pool footage. The logo "cleared by US Military" appeared over every piece of video and every photo from the event. Now we have moved a step further. There is NOTHING. No information, no footage, no actual reporting -- just news releases from the Pentagon. The Fourth Estate has been muted. We see satellite trucks in Kabul doing remote hits featuring reporters wearing flak vests; who are reading press releases that have been faxed to them from Washington-based correspondents. We have a media desperate for ratings attempting to maintain the perception of reality, but it's less real than ever. So where does it stop? This is where the clash of two worlds -- the Western, electronic world, and the Eastern, developing world -- brings one or the other to a humiliating defeat. The West is dependent upon its control of the media to continue the war, and the East is dependent upon its ability to channel religious fervor into resistance. Time will tell which grasp is stronger. Admittedly this rant only has a little bit to do with Drew Carey, but the article below documents the tip of the iceberg for a much more sinister form of Censorship. It's an example where the media is censoring itself in an effort to conform to a nethery concept called "popular opinion". I don¹t think that in our history the media has been so far out of touch with what people really think out there. The media have a responsibility to raise dissent and to stimulate discourse, and that responsibility is not being met. -Ian. ---- http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/eo/20020306/en_tv_eo/drew__wh ose_show_is_it_anyway_&cidy7

Drew: Whose Show Is It Anyway? Wed Mar 6, 1:29 PM ET

Just to clear things up: Cleveland rocks. Network censorship does not rock.

That about sums up Drew Carey’s feelings, after the sitcom star says he had a run-in with network censors regarding an episode of The Drew Carey Show making fun of airport security.

Carey is peeved at ABC (join the club) after he says the network threatened to halt production on his show unless he made changes to the episode. The installment, set to be taped Thursday and air next month, features Carey’s goofball buddies Lewis (Ryan Stiles) and Oswald (Diedrich Bader) scoring jobs as airport security.

ABC, however, was purportedly concerned that the script didn’t feature anyone “competent” on the airport security staff. Carey claims the censors then threatened to toss the entire episode if producers didn’t make changes.

“I’ve never had a threat like that from the network…Everybody was kind of in shock,” Carey tells the Los Angeles Times. “If you can’t satirize authority institutions, what’s the point?”

ABC couldn’t immediately be reached for comment Wednesday. But a network source told the Times that censors were concerned it might be irresponsible to make all airport security look incompetent. (After all, where would the writers get such a bizarre idea in the first place?)

Producers for the Warner Bros. Television production ultimately agreed to change some jokes in time for the show’s taping.

It’s not like airport security guards haven’t already endured their share of ribbing over the past few months. Security has replaced airline food humor as the gripe du jour on the stand-up comedy circuit. And just last week, Daily Show host Jon Stewart opened the Grammy Awards with a sketch poking fun at security, as he was groped by guards and stripped of his clothing.

But as anyone who watches Drew Carey can attest, presenting “competent” characters isn’t exactly the show’s strong point. “I think we have a pretty good track record of not being serious on the show,” Carey said.

ABC, meanwhile, is having one heck of a time keeping its dirty laundry out of the press. Carey’s public ranting comes just a day after Ted Koppel took to the Op-Ed pages of the New York Times, lambasting ABC executives who said his news show Nightline was not “relevant.” The Disney-owned network also has had very public run-ins over the past year with Regis Philbin and Barbara Walters over Who Wants to Be a Millionaire (news – web sites) and 20/20, respectively.

Beats Club Med.

Of course, if a bunch of wacky Japanese investors get their way, we’ll all be throwing down $26,000.00 (the cost of a New York Steak in Tokyo) to hop on their re-usable rocket to lounge on a space station by 2016.

http://www.chron.com/cgi-bin/auth/story.mpl/content/interactive/space/news/2 001/20010104.html

-Ian.

—— http://washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A14956-2001Apr28.html

American Fulfills Joy-Ride Dream Russian Rocket Lifts Tourist Into Space

By Peter Baker Washington Post Foreign Service Sunday, April 29, 2001; Page A17

KOROLYOV, Russia, April 28 — If it weren’t for the spacesuit and roaring engines, it might have been difficult to tell that Dennis Tito was fulfilling a lifelong dream to travel to the stars. As a Russian rocket lifted off today, the American millionaire sat calmly and quietly, his face virtually free of emotion.

No whoops of joy. No cry of fear. His one concession to expression was a quick little wave to the television camera in the Soyuz capsule. Mostly, he sat stoically, studying the instruction sheet in his hand, almost as if he were checking out his stock portfolio.

If so, it would be a stock portfolio that’s $20 million lighter as a result of today’s flight. Forty years almost to the day after launching the first human into space, Russia today sent off the world’s first paying space tourist and, in the process, ushered in a new era in the commercialization of the cosmos. Although other amateurs have ridden into space before, Tito was the first to dig into his own pocket to buy a ticket.

And what a ticket. Tito snagged a window seat, giving him a priceless view of his planet as he circles it every 90 minutes at a clip of nearly 18,000 miles per hour. He had dreamed of this moment since he heard about the first Sputnik as a teenager. He had fought the NASA bureaucracy that had tried to stop him from going. Yet in the end, he reacted with all the reserve of a soft-spoken, 60-year-old investor from Los Angeles who owns a Ferrari but insists he doesn’t drive it very fast.

“How do you feel, Dennis?” he was asked from the ground. “Khorosho,” he answered in Russian. “Good.”

The launch went off at 3:37 a.m. EDT, right on schedule, as Tito’s girlfriend, ex-wife and children watched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. Within minutes, he and cosmonauts Talgat Musabayev and Yuri Baturin were in orbit, prompting applause among the technicians here at mission control near Moscow.

Despite the objections of the United States and others, the financially challenged Russian space program hopes Tito won’t be the last to pay for a seat aboard one of its rockets and a tour of the international space station. His $20 million — the last installment will clear the bank only after he returns safely — will pay for this mission plus a good deal more. According to one Russian official, a Soyuz mission costs about $10 million.

“It’s a precedent,” said mission control chief Vladimir Solovyov. “Let’s hope that interest [in space tourism] will be shown. There are a lot of rich people. Why shouldn’t they fly for their own pleasure?”

One such customer might be “Titanic” director James Cameron, who has indicated interest in going next. “If he will sign a contract, every citizen of the planet [can ride] if his health permits him and he comes through with the money,” said Yuri Grigoryev, deputy designer at the state-run Energia rocket company. “The station is open to commercialization.”

Such prospects could reignite protests from NASA, which complained that the Russians had unilaterally forced a rookie on them while the space station remains under construction. NASA said its astronauts would have to suspend much of their work just to make sure Tito doesn’t damage anything; it gave in after Tito agreed to pay for anything he might break. But the dispute flared again in the hours before today’s launch as NASA unsuccessfully sought a delay to allow its astronauts to resolve computer problems aboard the station.

In their one compromise, Russian space officials agreed that the Soyuz TM-32 will not dock with the station until the U.S. space shuttle Endeavor departs. However, Endeavor might leave Sunday, since the crippling computer problems were fixed today, and this could clear the way for Soyuz to arrive as slated at 4:07 a.m. EDT on Monday.

For the Russian space program, the Tito controversy created tension internally as well as externally. Yuri Koptev, director of the Russian space agency, initially was leery of aggravating tensions with his U.S. partners. But Energia chief Yuri Semyonov pushed for Tito’s passage because, officials said, his corporation had not been paid for the Soyuz craft.

The matter came at a sensitive time for the proud Russian program. Just this month, it celebrated the 40th anniversary of Yuri Gagarin’s trailblazing space flight, an event that also highlighted the humble state of Russia’s current space efforts. Last month, Russia had to send its aging Mir space station hurtling to its demise in the Pacific Ocean and, for all the brave talk of building a “Mir-2,” the former superpower no longer has the money.

At least not without the help of a few more Titos. A onetime aerospace engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., Tito recognized as a young man that he was likely never to get into space through the usual route, so he left to work in finance. He hit it big, developing the Wilshire 5,000 stock index and building an estimated $200 million fortune.

If all goes according to plan, Tito will spend six days aboard the space station with his video camera, CD player and nine discs (eight opera and one Beatles). While he was listed as a “systems operator,” he will not be allowed to touch much and will need an escort when he visits the American section of the station.