McCain, Traveling Along a Tightrope

Bush Policy Is A Presence as He Meets With Leaders

By Michael D. Shear
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, March 24, 2008; A06

PARIS -- Standing along the edge of the Gaza Strip and flanked by a hero of the Israeli military, Sen. John McCain last week invoked the tough rhetoric of President Bush, warning of Iranian influence in the Middle East and cautioning against negotiations with terrorists.

A day later, standing outside London's 10 Downing Street, McCain found himself arguing against his president as he eagerly recounted for reporters his lengthy conversation with British Prime Minister Gordon Brown about the need for worldwide action to prevent global warming.

Throughout a week-long trip that took him to more than a dozen meetings with leaders in five countries, McCain walked a fine line on Iraq and other issues as the all-but-certain Republican nominee confronted perhaps the central dilemma of his presidential campaign -- the question of what role Bush and the legacy of the past seven years will play in his campaign for the White House.

At home, the answer may determine how well McCain succeeds in keeping his Republican base happy while also attracting the independents and Democrats he will need to win in November. And, win or lose, it will shape his image abroad, where a debate is already raging over whether a McCain presidency would be a de facto third term for the embattled incumbent.

In every city, foreign leaders and journalists attempted to reconcile what they deemed the two sides to McCain: his bellicose rhetoric on Iran and North Korea -- which is more aggressive than Bush's -- and his desire to heal the rift with Europe's leaders by closing the Guantanamo Bay prison, ending what he regards to be the use of torture by American forces and reducing pollution.

Europeans "see him as a trusted hand, knowledgeable," said Philip Gordon, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who has advised Democratic candidate Barack Obama on foreign policy. "But I think they are a bit worried about him."

Gordon said many Europeans were stunned when U.S. voters reelected Bush in 2004 despite the deteriorating situation in the Middle East. "If we now, after all this, elect someone who agrees with the Iraq policy and is perhaps more hawkish on Iran, they will be surprised," he said.

McCain repeatedly insisted last week that his government-funded trip was not a campaign stunt aimed at voters. Rather, he said, it was a fact-finding mission similar to trips abroad taken regularly by members of Congress in both parties.

"I'm here assessing the situation," McCain barked at an Israeli reporter in the border town of Sderot near Gaza, after flying over Israel with Defense Minister Ehud Barak. "It would not be frankly appropriate for me to talk about what I would do as president."

But the trip was by no means exclusively an information-gathering exercise for McCain.

He paused for a fundraiser with about 100 wealthy American expatriates living in London, who gathered at the ancestral home of Princess Diana and dined on duck salad and ice cream flamb¿. (His aides said the campaign reimbursed the government $3,000 for travel because of the political nature of the fundraiser.) McCain also gave numerous interviews to U.S. television network correspondents who followed him across the continent and to local newspapers in each country, which touted exclusives on their front pages. And he was hardly treated like a member of Congress by world leaders now eyeing him as a potential equal.

In Paris, French President Nicolas Sarkozy led McCain into the ¿lys¿e Palace past a throng of cameras, where the pair sipped cappuccino around a large table set with grapes. In Israel, he walked past Chagall stained-glass windows to meet with President Shimon Peres at his ceremonial home. In London, protocol dictated the absence of a red carpet at 10 Downing, but there was a photo op in the White Drawing Room.

McCain's political advisers say those images were a valuable reminder to voters of a key asset. "This trip has shown the world Senator McCain's foreign policy credentials and highlighted the depth of his knowledge on international affairs," Rick Davis, his campaign manager, wrote in a memo to supporters.

But there were missteps as well. By incorrectly saying that Iran was training al-Qaeda insurgents rather than Shiite extremists, McCain sparked days of headlines questioning that depth of knowledge he so often boasts of on the campaign trail.

And at the Western Wall in Israel, overzealous photographers sparked a near-riot with police officers, overshadowing McCain's visit to the holy site.

"Was it a good trip? Yeah, it was good" was how one of McCain's senior advisers summed up the journey as the senator from Arizona headed to London for a few days of downtime with his wife, Cindy. "The impression that came back to the American people was someone who was deeply comfortable there in a way that showed he's ready to be president."

McCain's partners on the trip were his two closest allies in the Senate, Joseph I. Lieberman (Conn.), who now describes his political affiliation as "independent Democrat," and Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.). In an interview as he traveled by train between Paris and London, Graham said McCain's long-held position on Iraq demonstrates his independence from Bush. While embracing Bush's "surge" policy in Iraq, McCain has never shied from saying that the administration bungled the planning and preparation for the conflict.

"When he thought it was going badly, he was pushing back against the administration. When he thought the policy was going right, he was right with him," Graham said. "The idea that John is an extension of another politician will fail miserably."

Democrats are already trying to morph McCain into Bush, counting on the president's sagging poll numbers and the unpopular war in Iraq to drag McCain down, especially among independents.

In a biting Internet ad that seems a foreshadowing of attacks to come, the Democratic National Committee mocked McCain as nothing more than a clone of Bush. "Why is this man so happy?" the ad asks, showing a picture of a laughing Bush. "Because he found someone to promise a Third Bush Term."

Democrats also hammered McCain for turning a policy trip into a political one and called on him to reimburse the government for the tens of thousands of dollars it would have cost to charter a plane for the exercise. At a news conference at the ¿lys¿e Palace, one reporter asked whether the trip had been a "taxpayer rip-off."

All three senators became indignant. "I'm proud to have taken this trip," McCain declared. "I'm proud to have built up the relationships I have with the president of France and with other leaders."

Lieberman called McCain's willingness to travel the world "one of his great attributes." And Graham noted that McCain had been to Iraq eight times since the war began. "We know the differences between Iraq this year and Iraq last year. These trips have been unbelievably valuable," he said.

And yet, throughout the week there were telltale signs of the presidential campaign.

At the Western Wall, a gray-haired man in the flowing garb of a rabbi repeatedly stood on a stool and yelled: "Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. John McCain, the next president of the United States of America."

And when McCain's motorcade pulled up in front of the Yad Vashem Holocaust museum in Jerusalem, a lone American tourist yelled out, "Mac is back!"

Pentagon chief talks tough on Russia

By Peter Spiegel
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

March 17, 2008

U.S. Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates on Sunday expressed frustration with Russian leaders about the pace of talks over a new U.S. missile defense site in Eastern Europe.

Gates, who will be joined in Moscow by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice for two days of talks with Russian leaders starting today, said the Bush administration in October had offered a "very forward-leaning" proposal that would allow Russia to participate directly in the controversial new system.

"At some point, the Russians are going to have to decide whether they want to be true partners, which we're offering, or whether this is just all a sham game on their part to stall the whole deal," Gates told reporters aboard his plane en route to Moscow.

Gates' remarks were among the most pointed by a senior administration official about the stalled bilateral talks and reflected a growing frustration that the Kremlin may be looking to wait out the current administration in Washington, betting that Poland and the Czech Republic will not agree to allow the United States to begin construction on the sites without Russian acquiescence.

The missile defense system has become among the thorniest issues between Moscow and Washington, with senior Russian officials accusing the Bush administration of building the system to counter Russian ballistic missiles.

The Bush administration has vehemently denied the accusations, insisting the system is aimed at shooting down Iranian long-range missiles that could reach NATO allies in Western Europe and the U.S. mainland sometime in the next decade.

peter.spiegel@latimes.com

Hard-Liners Take Early Lead In Iranian Elections

Hard-line conservatives allied with President Mahmud Ahmadinejad have taken an early lead in Iran's parliamentary elections according to unofficial results.

Iranian state television is reporting that hard-line conservative supporters of Ahmadinejad have taken 53 out of 144 contests tallied so far. Moderate conservatives have won 38 mandates and reformists 18. Another 35 winners are independents.

There are 290 seats in the Iranian parliament, called the Majlis, and most results have not yet been tabulated.

Hasan Khanlou, a spokesman at Iran's Interior Ministry, nevertheless says turnout was more than 65 percent of Iran's 44 million eligible voters -- up significantly from the 51 percent who voted in the 2004 election.

The election, held on March 14, is seen as a crucial test for Ahmadinejad in advance of next year's presidential elections where he is expected to face challenges from moderate conservatives and -- to a lesser degree -- from reformers.

Iran's conservatives are divided between hard-line supporters of Ahmadinejad and a more moderate faction alligned with former nuclear negotiator Ali Larijani.

Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamanei and other senior officials had called for a big turnout to defy the countries they say are Iran's enemies. Reformists had also urged their supporters to vote to deny conservatives clear dominance in the next parliament.

Outside The Empowered Circle

Still, many Iranians have complained about a lack of choice after the Guardians Council -- an unelected body of clerics and jurists -- disqualified some 1,700 mostly moderate candidates on the grounds that they were insufficiently loyal to Islam or Iran's 1979 revolution.

"In this eighth parliamentary election [since Iran's 1979 Islamic revolution], we have unfortunately seen the omission of most of the reformists, nationalists, and candidates who stand outside the current empowered circle," former reformist legislator Jalal Jalalizadeh told Radio Farda on March 14. "As a result, in most of the polling areas there are no candidates other than the ones who are close to the ruling bloc. This has led to the disappointment of people and thus in many electoral areas they have not participated."

One unidentified man, voting in Tehran, told Reuters that "there wasn't a candidate on the lists that actually appealed to me...I couldn't find the right candidate."

In Washington, State Department spokesman Sean McCormack has criticized the elections, saying the results were "cooked" because the Iranian people were not able to vote for a full range of candidates.

Challenges Ahead

Analysts say, however, that despite the bias toward conservative candidates, Ahmadinejad will likely have a more difficult time with the new parliament than he had with the outgoing legislature.

"Reformists -- many of whom have been banned from running -- will, in the most optimistic view, succeed in getting one third of the seats in parliament," Mashaollah Shamsolvaezin, a Tehran-based journalist, told Radio Farda on March 14. "This powerful minority, along with the majority of the traditional and technocratic conservatives who oppose Ahmadinejad's policies, can form a remarkable majority, in order to put an end to the Ahmadinejad's current policies in terms of lawmaking. On the other hand, they can provide a tighter control over Ahmadinejad's domestic and foreign policy, especially in the field of economy."

Likewise, Mohammad Ali Abtahi, a close ally of reformist former President Mohammad Khatami said he expected Ahmadinejad to face "more challenges" with the next parliament.

Reformists and some conservatives have accused Ahmadinejad of fueling inflation, which now stands at 19 percent, with loans and subsidies. Reformists have also criticized him for his vitriolic anti-Western rhetoric, which has led to Tehran's increased international isolation.

The president is facing increased opposition from moderate conservatives led by Tehran Mayor Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf, former Islamic Revolution Guards Corps chief Mohsen Rezaie, and former nuclear negotiator Larijani.

There are also two coalitions of moderate reformers: the Reformist Coalition inspired by former reformist President Khatami and the National Confidence Party led by former parliament speaker Mehdi Karroubi.

(RFE/RL's Radio Farda contributed to this report)

Is There a Cure for Cuba?

By George F. Will
Sunday, March 9, 2008; B07

On Dec. 29, 1962, 11 months before he was murdered by an advocate for Fidel Castro's regime (Lee Harvey Oswald had distributed propaganda on a New Orleans street for the Fair Play for Cuba Committee), President John Kennedy, speaking in Miami's Orange Bowl to veterans of the Bay of Pigs fiasco, received from them a Cuban flag and vowed, "I can assure you that this flag will be returned to this brigade in a free Havana." In Cuba, too, regime change has turned out to be more problematic than American policymakers imagined.

Even after the Bay of Pigs -- arguably the most feckless use of U.S. power ever-- Cuba unhinged some American officials. In his biography of Robert Kennedy, Newsweek's Evan Thomas reports that one high-ranking CIA operative had a plan "to surface an American submarine just over the Havana horizon to fire star shells into the night sky, in the hopes of convincing the Cubans that the Second Coming was imminent, thus spurring them to get rid of the anti-Christ -- Castro." Skeptics called this "elimination by illumination."

The question of what should be done now begins with the matter of the U.S. trade embargo. Cuban Americans demanded its imposition in 1961, applauded its strengthening in 1996 and largely favor its continuation. Changing it would be politically problematic. The Cuban American vote can be decisive in Florida, whose 27 electoral votes are 10 percent of the 270 needed to win the presidency. Add the 15 electoral votes of New Jersey, another state with a large Cuban American community, and 16 percent of the 270 can turn on policy toward Cuba.

The embargo was imposed when Cuba was a salient of Soviet values and interests in this hemisphere. Today, Cuba is a sad, threadbare geopolitical irrelevancy. Far from threatening Castro's regime, the embargo has enabled Castro to exploit Cubans' debilitating mentality of taking comfort from victimhood -- the habit, more than a century old, of blaming problems on others, first on Spain and then on the United States.

Those facts do not, however, by themselves make the case for ending the embargo without some reciprocal liberalization by (the other) Castro's regime. Granted, it is arguable that the embargo should be abandoned, or significantly eased, regardless of how the Cuban regime behaves, because the regime has much to fear from any increased permeation of Cuba by foreign commercial and intellectual presences.

U.S. policy toward Cuba should, however, be conditioned, and perhaps haunted, by U.S. policy toward China. That policy was supposed to result in steady, slow-motion regime change through candid subversion in broad daylight. The premise has been that the cure for communism is commerce with the capitalist world. The assumption is that capitalism brings, because it requires, an ethic of trust and the rule of law in the form of promise-keeping (contracts). Also, the protection of private property gives individuals a sphere of sovereignty and whets their appetites for a politics of popular sovereignty.

This has been called "the Starbucks fallacy" (see James Mann's book "The China Fantasy"): When people become accustomed to many choices of coffee, they will demand many political choices. This doctrine may be being refuted by the emergence of a China that has become wealthier without becoming less authoritarian.

Cuba has negligible democratic traditions and no living experience with a culture of pluralism and persuasion. In Iraq, Russia and elsewhere, we have seen how decades of tyranny degrade a public's capacity for a democratic culture. We also have tested, and found questionable, the proposition that democratic institutions can precede and create such a culture.

The embargo is being partially vitiated by dollars -- about a billion of them, equivalent to about 2 percent of Cuba's gross domestic product -- sent to Cuba by the Cuban diaspora, 1.5 million strong. That diaspora supports the embargo, but dollar remittances from abroad can be spent only in government stores, so they accrue to the benefit of the regime.

Castro, whose personal worth is estimated at nearly $1 billion, has sternly -- and proudly -- told Cubans, whose average annual income is less than $200, "We're not a consumer society." That is not news where shampoo is scarce.

Six years ago, Castro's regime gathered 8 million signatures from among the 11 million captive Cubans for a petition -- was that necessary? -- to amend Cuba's constitution (is it necessary?) to declare communism "irrevocable." Let us now praise the much-misunderstood Viking King Canute, who commanded the tide to recede in order to demonstrate that it would not obey.

georgewill@washpost.com

U.S. to stay the course on Cuba

Bush says Havana still has 'the same system, the same faces.' He chides other nations for not pushing for democracy.
By James Gerstenzang
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

March 8, 2008

WASHINGTON — President Bush said Friday that Fidel Castro's "supposed retirement" meant only that Cuba was replacing "one dictator with another" and that the U.S. would not relax its strict opposition to the regime.

Bush's remarks were his most extensive on the change taking place in Cuba, with Raul Castro's elevation to the presidency in place of his ailing older brother. Fidel Castro, who ran Cuba for 49 years, last month announced that he was stepping down as president but would remain first secretary of the nation's Communist Party and a member of parliament.

With two Cuban dissidents who had been expelled from the island nation joining him at the White House, Bush chastised other countries for not speaking out for democratic change in Cuba. And when that change comes, Cubans "will remember the few brave nations that stood with them, and the many that did not," he said.

The president added, with stern demeanor, that Fidel Castro was "still influencing events from behind the scenes."

"This is the same system, the same faces and the same policies that led Cuba to its miseries in the first place," Bush said.

He spoke after meeting in the Oval Office with Miguel Sigler Amaya and his wife, Josefa Lopez Pena. Bush said Amaya was imprisoned in a crackdown five years ago in which teachers, librarians, journalists and others were arrested in what came to be known as "Black Spring." The couple were ordered out of Cuba after Amaya was released in 2005.

Expanding on a call for change that he made in brief remarks after Castro announced his resignation in a letter Feb. 19, Bush said it was not time for the U.S. to shift its policies toward Cuba.

Rather, he said, Cuba must initiate "peaceful democratic change," release all political prisoners, demonstrate respect for human rights and "pave the way for free and fair elections."

Describing life in what he called "the tropical gulag," Bush said that Cuban police had arrested protesters wearing bracelets bearing the Spanish word for "change" and that "much of the world was silent." He said a similar lack of protest greeted the tear-gassing of parishioners at a Roman Catholic church in the southeastern city of Santiago in December.

He noted that former members of the Soviet bloc were outspoken in calling for "human freedom in Cuba," but "the list of countries supporting the Cuban people is far too short -- and the democracies absent from that list are far too notable."

james.gerstenzang@latimes.com

Obama aides attack Clinton on foreign policy

By Caren Bohan

CHICAGO (Reuters) - Hillary Clinton's foreign policy would be more of the same failed Republican approach, Barack Obama's campaign said on Thursday, as aides stepped up their attacks after losses in this week's Democratic presidential nominating race.

Clinton, who revived her struggling campaign with victories on Tuesday in closely watched contests in Texas, Ohio and Rhode Island, has been hammering away at Obama on national security, painting him as too inexperienced to handle a world crisis.

Sen. John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee and a former prisoner of war in Vietnam, has used a similar line of criticism against Obama.

Obama aides seized on the simultaneous attacks to accuse the New York senator of choosing to "align herself with Sen. McCain."

"I guess Sen. Clinton believes that the way to beat Sen. McCain in a debate is to talk like he talks, act like he acts, and vote like he votes on national security issue," Obama adviser Greg Craig told reporters on a conference call. "We believe that Democrats in the past have lost national security debates to the Republicans for these reasons."

The defeats for Obama in the hard-fought large states of Ohio and Texas on Tuesday snapped an earlier winning streak. In their aftermath, the Illinois senator expressed frustration with what he said was a "very negative" campaign Clinton had run and he vowed to hit back harder against her criticisms.

Many political analysts think a television commercial that Clinton launched focusing on national security had succeeded in raising doubts about Obama.

The ad featured sleeping children and a phone ringing at the White House as a narrator ominously warns: "It's 3 a.m., and your children are safe and asleep. But there is a phone in the White House and its ringing. Something is happening in the world."

The narrator then asks whether the person answering the White House phone is "tested" enough to keep America safe.

On the conference call, Craig said Clinton had "aligned herself" with McCain on some specific issues, such as putting too much trust in Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf and supporting a legislative amendment aimed at stepping up pressure on Iran.

But the Clinton campaign shot back that such comments distorted the New York senator's record.

"Distorting Hillary's record won't address the doubts voters have about Senator Obama's readiness to be commander-in-chief," said Clinton campaign spokesman Phil Singer.

Clinton held a meeting in Washington on Thursday with top military leaders and experts, and said their support showed confidence in her ability to make important national security decisions, including those in which "lives are on the line."

The Obama campaign has derided Clinton's characterization of herself as steeped in foreign policy experience based on her years as first lady and her travels and work as a senator.

Obama adviser Susan Rice said the ability to handle that 3 a.m. crisis phone call is not something that can be acquired "merely by being married to a commander-in-chief."

(Reporting by Caren Bohan, editing by Philip Barbara)

Belarus expels U.S. ambassador

The Associated Press
Friday, March 7, 2008

MINSK, Belarus: The Belarusian Foreign Ministry on Friday demanded the U.S. ambassador leave the country and recalled its own ambassador to the U.S over economic sanctions Washington imposed on Belarus last year.

The action reflects rising tensions between the government of Belarus' authoritarian President Alexander Lukashenko and the United States. Washington has slapped travel restrictions on Lukashenko and members of his inner circle as well as financial sanctions against Belarusian authorities over their crackdown on opposition and free media.

It was not immediately clear whether U.S. Ambassador Karen Stewart had left the country. The U.S. Embassy refused to comment.

The Belarusian Foreign Ministry said its demand that Stewart leave had been prompted by U.S. sanctions against Belarus' state-controlled oil-processing and chemicals company, Belneftekhim. The U.S. last year froze the company's assets and barred American companies from doing business with it.

The United States and the European Union, which also introduced economic and travel sanctions against Belarus, have made clear that Lukashenko must free political prisoners and allow more democratic freedoms before sanctions can be lifted and relations normalized.

Lukashenko began signaling a desire for better relations with the West after Russia's decision to sharply raise prices for oil exports to Belarus — exports on which the country's Soviet-style, centrally controlled economy had long depended. He cast the release of several opposition activists this year as a goodwill gesture to the West.

The U.S. State Department welcomed the releases of opposition activists as positive steps, but urged Lukashenko to free another opposition leader, Alexander Kozulin, as a condition to start a dialogue on normalizing ties. Belarusian authorities allowed Kozulin to attend his wife's funeral, but then put him back behind bars.

Kozulin, who challenged Lukashenko in the 2006 presidential election, was arrested during a postelection protest.

Stress Builds Over Colombia Raid

Regional Leaders Urge Calm; Police Cite Rebel Documents

By Monte Reel
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, March 4, 2008; A13

RECIFE, Brazil, March 3 -- More accusations of cross-border meddling intensified diplomatic tensions Monday between Colombia and its neighbors Ecuador and Venezuela, as other Latin American leaders tried to defuse a crisis they fear could threaten regional stability.

Venezuela and Ecuador deployed troops to their borders with Colombia, which on Saturday attacked a jungle encampment in Ecuadoran territory used by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC. A senior leader of the Marxist insurgency, which has battled the Colombian government for more than four decades and profits from the drug trade, was killed in the raid.

Ecuador's President Rafael Correa formally cut diplomatic ties with Colombia and has joined Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez in denouncing the attack as a violation of his country's sovereignty. Venezuela said later that it would expel the Colombian ambassador and other diplomatic personnel. Regional leaders, including officials in Brazil and Chile, strongly questioned Colombia's military incursion into Ecuador, but urged peaceful negotiations to avert a regional military conflict.

Colombian officials said Monday that they do not plan to send troops to the borders with Venezuela and Ecuador. But they contended that the raid proved their long-held suspicion that Colombian guerrillas have been using neighboring countries as havens from which to attack Colombian forces.

"We are accustomed to the Colombian government's lies," said Ramón Carrizalez, Venezuela's executive vice president. "They can invent whatever they like to try to cover up the violation of Ecuadoran territory."

Gen. Óscar Naranjo, director of Colombia's national police, said computers recovered from the camp revealed numerous links between the rebels and the governments of Ecuador and Venezuela, including evidence of more than $300 million in payments from Chávez to the FARC. Colombia's government, led by U.S. ally Álvaro Uribe, has accused the populist administrations of Chávez and Correa of sympathizing with the FARC's stated cause.

The documents were recovered from three computers, according to Naranjo, and their contents will be analyzed by inspectors from the Organization of American States. He said the documents also contain details of international drug deals and efforts to acquire 50 kilograms of uranium. Naranjo did not provide evidence to back those allegations, but he suggested that the documents should spur other countries to get involved in the crisis.

"This means the FARC is taking big steps in the world of terrorism to become a global aggressor," Naranjo said during a news conference. "This is transnational terrorism."

Leaders throughout Latin America tried Monday to cool the crisis. In Brazil, an adviser to President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva told a radio station that the conflict was "beginning to destabilize regional relations." Lula planned to talk with Argentine President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner on Monday to coordinate diplomatic efforts, said the adviser, Marco Aurélio Garcia.

"We are mobilizing all of Brazil's diplomatic resources and those of other South American capitals to find a lasting solution," Garcia was quoted as saying.

Chile's President Michelle Bachelet suggested that Colombia has the responsibility to thoroughly explain the decision to attack with airstrikes and ground troops across the Ecuadoran border. The raid killed at least 16 people, including Luis Edgar Devia, a top FARC commander also known as Raúl Reyes.

"A situation of this nature requires an explanation from Colombia to Ecuadorans -- to the president of Ecuador and the entire region," Bachelet said in comments broadcast by TV Chile. "We are very worried."

Though the incident that sparked the crisis did not involve Venezuela, Chávez -- a close ally of Correa's and a frequent critic of Colombia's close relations with the United States -- jumped into the dispute.

Relations between Chávez and Uribe have been particularly tense since Chávez tried to mediate a swap of prisoners between FARC and the Colombian government last year. The FARC has since released six hostages to Venezuelan authorities.

On Sunday, Chávez threatened to go to war if Colombia ever carried out a similar attack against the FARC in Venezuelan territory.

"When you threaten war against a country, that's pretty serious," said Peter Hakim, president of the Washington-based policy group Inter-American Dialogue. "Certainly if it were coming from anyone but Hugo Chávez, people would be taking it extremely seriously. But our experience is that he tries to take advantage of what situation emerges to get himself this kind of international attention."

The U.S. State Department defended Colombia's pursuit of FARC members and encouraged bilateral discussions to solve the crisis.

"From our perspective, this is an issue between Colombia and Ecuador," Tom Casey, a department spokesman, told the Associated Press. "I'm not sure what this has to do with Venezuela.

U.S. Policy in Africa Faulted on Priorities

Security Is Stressed Over Democracy

By Stephanie McCrummen
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, February 22, 2008; A17

NAIROBI, Feb. 21 -- In his tour of Africa, President Bush steered clear of countries where stability, human rights and progress toward democracy have degenerated during his tenure, among them Somalia, Ethiopia, Sudan, Chad, Uganda and Kenya.

In those countries, Bush's focus on counterterrorism has overtaken his other stated foreign policy goals of promoting democracy and human rights, according to analysts.

"While democratization has clearly been one of the three major stated objectives of the Bush administration -- the others being security and development -- democratization probably ranks third," said Joel Barkan, a senior associate with the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. "You can see it in several ways, but it's mainly the subordination of democratization to the so-called war on terror."

Money for once-robust programs aimed at strengthening democratic institutions such as courts and parliaments has dried up, Barkan said. And critics say that several less-than-democratic African leaders have skillfully played the anti-terrorism card to earn a relationship with the United States that has helped keep them in power.

While Bush has received praise across the continent for his fight against malaria and AIDS, many Africans who hoped that the United States would support their struggle for more just and open societies have been disappointed. They include opposition groups, human rights activists, intellectuals, professionals and, significantly in Kenya and Somalia, moderate Muslims who've felt unjustly targeted in the U.S.-driven hunt for terrorism suspects.

"There was a time when Muslims here would trust the U.S.," said Ibrahim Ahmed, a lawyer who ran for Kenya's parliament last year. "As a Muslim, I can say that U.S. foreign policy has really destroyed the trust that existed."

Ethiopia, with U.S. backing, invaded Somalia in December 2006 to oust the Islamic movement, which the United States accused of having ties to al-Qaeda. Ethiopia then installed a U.S.-backed transitional government headed by Abdullahi Yusuf, who analysts say has used the fight against terrorism as an excuse to attack his political and business enemies.

More than a year later, no high-level terrorism suspects have been killed or captured. Yusuf and the Ethiopian government are accused of committing war crimes against Somali civilians. And analysts say a more radicalized contingent of Islamic fighters has joined an insurgency battling for control of the capital, Mogadishu.

By some measures, Somalia is now the worst humanitarian crisis on the continent, with more than 1 million people displaced by fighting that has left thousands dead in the past year.

"I actually think it's paradoxical: America is advocating democracy and at the same time using ruthless and brutal warlords in Somalia that have no democratic credentials at all," said Sheikhdon Salad, a doctor in Mogadishu.

The Bush administration's policy in Somalia has had ramifications across the region, especially in Ethiopia.

The 2005 elections there were initially praised as among the country's most open and democratic. But when the opposition leveled accusations of vote-rigging, protesters took to the streets. Ethiopian security forces fired into the crowd, leaving at least 193 people dead. Many opposition leaders were jailed.

U.S. criticism soon flagged, analysts say, because the United States was relying on Ethiopia as its key military ally in the region and later needed Ethiopian military and intelligence cooperation in Somalia.

"Dictators are using and abusing the U.S. anti-terrorism campaign for their own ends," said Marara Gudina, a member of Parliament who chairs an opposition party in Ethiopia. "I think democracy is secondary on the list of U.S. policy priorities."

In Sudan, analysts have suggested that U.S. reliance on Sudanese counterterrorism intelligence has prevented a tougher stance on the crisis in the country's western Darfur region, where a government crackdown on rebels has left as many as 450,000 people dead and 2.5 million displaced.

Charles Onyango-Obbo, a columnist in Kenya who writes about the region, said some African leaders with good relations with the United States often feel so powerful that they see no need to engage with opposition groups.

He cited Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni, who cast himself as a staunch U.S. ally in the fight against terrorism at a time when he was facing growing criticism for his increasingly dictatorial rule. Museveni, who has been in power for more than 20 years, changed the constitution ahead of the 2006 election to allow himself a third term, and jailed a leading opposition candidate.

As U.S. ambassador, James Kolker was critical of Museveni's government, but his successor was less vocal as the United States pressed Museveni to send peacekeepers to Somalia. Uganda sent 1,500 troops as part of an African Union force that has had trouble pulling in other participants.

"Museveni has very cleverly played the U.S. like a violin," said Barkan, of the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Barkan noted that the Bush administration's response to Kenya's post-election crisis has been a welcome exception to the pattern.

The Bush administration initially congratulated President Mwai Kibaki, who is accused of rigging the vote, but diplomats have since become increasingly critical of his government's refusal to compromise with opposition leader Raila Odinga. On Monday, Bush dispatched Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who said the United States would not conduct "business as usual" with Kenya unless a settlement is reached.

Critics say that sort of pressure has been lacking at crucial moments in other African countries over the past several years.

Rep. Donald M. Payne (D-N.J.), who chairs the House Foreign Affairs subcommittee on Africa, said that by ignoring electoral problems and human rights violations, the United States often winds up dealing with the consequences of political chaos.

"Turning a blind eye to government abuses and wanton disregard for human dignity often leads to political instability and massive humanitarian disasters," Payne said. "And we always end up paying for it."

Special correspondents Kassahun Addis in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and Mohamed Ibrahim in Mogadishu contributed to this report.

Letter from China: Myanmar crackdown sheds light on Beijing's aspirations

by Howard W. French
Friday, September 28, 2007

SHANGHAI: The unfolding civil crisis in Myanmar is precisely the kind of test that China's image as an emerging global power will increasingly face in coming years, as Beijing's economic reach and international influence steadily grow.

The question people in this region and in capitals around the world will be asking is beyond the well-worn official rhetoric: What kind of power does China really aspire to be?

Is it a slick free rider on an international system whose workings have done so much to favor its emergence, hiding behind a platitude-based foreign policy while allowing others to do the world's heavy lifting?

Has it placed a bet on America's inevitable decline and settled on Deng Xiaoping's advice about concealing one's strengths until the time when all the pieces of its national reconstruction effort have fallen into place, and it can openly aspire to what it forswears today: hegemony?

Or is it a nation in the midst of a subtle but momentous transition toward a more traditional sense of great power rights and responsibilities?

Tenable arguments and counter-arguments for all of the above exist today, and the best answer may be that no one knows, not even the Chinese themselves.

What is certain is that the unrest in Myanmar, formerly known as Burma, is not any ordinary crisis for China. It is a special case whose resolution will tell us a lot about where China's head is right now.

Beijing doesn't advertise such things, least of all to its own citizens, but the Burmese regime and North Korea are among the closest things that China has to real allies in the world today.

In reality, the word ally doesn't do justice to the complex relationship with the Burmese generals. Ties between the two countries are more akin to the vassal-patron relations that China traditionally sought to maintain all along its vast perimeter.

In truth, China is not the only country the Burmese crisis puts on the spot. France has tremendous oil interests in Myanmar, and how its influence will be used and what kinds of sacrifices a Paris under new leadership is willing to make in the name of principles like human rights remains an open question.

Democratic India would like to vie with China for influence in Myanmar and has so far taken an ostrich-like approach to the crisis, as if believing that looking the other way will make it cease to exist. The world, meanwhile, waits for a more democratic ethos to manifest itself in India's foreign policy.

The United States, too, very quick to announce new sanctions, seems to have reached an impasse in its foreign policy, where reflexive invocation of punitive measures, together with Washington's exhausting preoccupation with conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, may have resulted in diminishing returns.

Still, for China the Burmese crisis conjures especially difficult questions, all the more because, unlike its Western counterparts, the country is fashioning a new identity for itself on the world stage, not merely managing one.

There are signs that Beijing had already recently begun edging in tiny, carefully measured steps away from its longtime mantra of non-interference in other countries. It must be said that the policy has always only been selectively applied, but in the ever-more-demanding interest of its own image as a global player, China has recently found ways to apply pressure on countries like North Korea, Sudan and Zimbabwe so as not to be on the wrong side of history, or at least of global opinion.

Cases like these were fairly clear-cut, though, and in most instances, Beijing's moves were subtle; nothing like the bully pulpit tactics long favored in the West, and without dramatic results to show, either.

Myanmar is not testing nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles, like North Korea, and it is not situated on a faraway continent, where China has no colonial baggage, like Sudan and Zimbabwe.

What it is, in point of fact, is what's most important. Myanmar is a highly repressive state that has been run into the ground by incompetent leaders who have been partially enabled by China. It is, moreover, a country whose people are now risking their lives peacefully for freedom.

This must very nearly be something like a bad dream for Beijing's foreign policy establishment. One gets a hint of confirmation of this from the way the Burmese crisis has been covered in the Chinese press. The official People's Daily carried nothing Friday from Myanmar beyond statements of the Chinese Foreign Ministry.

Most other accounts so far have lacked detailed descriptions of the violence, including the beating and arrest of monks or the use of machine guns against unarmed civilians.

What we are left with are calls for stability and restraint on the one hand, and accusations of "slander" and "ulterior motives" wielded against foreigners who have raised the question of whether China has used its full influence to prevent violence.

Is stability a good thing in a country like Myanmar, after so many years of oppressive misrule? Where does China stand on the question of the democratic rights that Burmese are clamoring for, with or against the people?

In China, the images of peaceful civilian confrontation of heavily armed soldiers, a challenge that has been met in the streets of Yangon with automatic weapons fire, carry uncomfortable echoes of the bloody events of Tiananmen Square.

Surely, from Beijing's perspective it would be better if this would all blow over, the sooner the better. The status quo ante was just fine.

The problem is that the world is made up not just of governments that can agree to formulate rules of a see-no-evil international system and just get on with things however they see fit. It is also made up of people who have needs that often go unmet and rights that go unrespected, and when this persists too long, things go boom in the night. It is how China responds to this piece of the equation that will determine its new image, and it's up for Beijing to decide.

For a Democrat, Options in Iraq Could Be Few

Hopefuls Seen as Unlikely To Effect Rapid Change

By Thomas E. Ricks
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, September 29, 2007; A01

In their debate Wednesday night in Hanover, N.H., none of the three top Democratic presidential candidates would promise to have the U.S. military out of Iraq by January 2013 -- more than five years from now.

"I think it would be irresponsible" to state that, said Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.).

"I cannot make that commitment," added former senator John Edwards of North Carolina.

And Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.) put it simply when she outlined the dilemma that Democratic presidential aspirants face on Iraq. "It is very difficult to know what we're going to be inheriting," the party's front-runner said.

After President Bush's announcement this month of a limited troop drawdown and a continuation of the "surge" strategy through next summer, the key question for centrist Democrats in the presidential race is no longer whether U.S. forces will remain in Iraq but what size, mission and length a post-buildup, post-Bush force would take on. Even if the Democratic hopefuls decline to offer specifics, some of the people mentioned as possible defense secretaries under a Democratic White House offer a vision of a U.S. presence in Iraq that does not differ markedly from that of the Bush administration.

"There's a fairly narrow band of choice here, a relatively limited set of options," said David Kilcullen, an Australian counterinsurgency expert who has advised Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq. "I think a Democratic or Republican administration will be doing fairly similar things."

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said recently that he hopes to bring the U.S. presence in Iraq down to about 100,000 troops by the end of 2008, eventually falling to a long-term presence of roughly 40,000 to 60,000 troops, whose job would be mainly to back up Iraqi forces.

John J. Hamre, a Clinton-era Pentagon official mentioned as a possible successor to Gates in a Democratic administration, said in an e-mail that when a new president takes over in January 2009, the U.S. mission will include "force protection, overwatch (of Iraqi security operations), continued training/mentoring of Iraqi security forces and direct action operations against known bad guys." There is likely to be some patrolling by U.S. forces in Baghdad," Hamre noted, "but it should be considerably reduced."

At that point, said Richard Danzig, a former Navy secretary also on the Democratic short list for defense secretary, the next president should talk to Iraqi officials about setting a target date for leaving Iraq but make it clear that the date is negotiable, depending on the political progress Iraqis make. Bush has fiercely resisted setting such a timetable. Danzig, an adviser on defense issues for Obama, emphasized that he was speaking for himself.

A third possibility for defense secretary, Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.), a former officer in the Army's 82nd Airborne Division, said he agrees with the Democratic candidates that "the reality is that there is a likelihood of an American presence" in Iraq in 2013 but added that he hopes it would be a small, noncombat force. As for the mission under a new administration, Reed said the U.S. military will not have enough troops in Iraq to continue the current effort to protect the population and will have to focus on training, counterterrorism and perhaps border security missions.

Whoever the next president is, said retired Army Col. Robert Killebrew, "the war in Iraq will go on at least for two or three years into the new president's first term."

The first clue to determining how many U.S. troops will be in Iraq in 2009 -- and what they will be doing -- will come in the spring. As the buildup ends and U.S. forces begin to draw down, the United States will assess whether Iraqi forces are able to take over providing security. The U.S. strategy of "clear, hold and build" depends on Iraqi troops and police ultimately being able to "hold." But there has been little evidence so far of their ability to do so in areas that are being contested, analysts note, especially in and around Baghdad.

"Recent U.S. government estimates state that the Iraqi security forces will not be capable of taking on this mission for at least 18 to 24 months," said Nora Bensahel, a security analyst at Rand Corp., "and I think there are reasons to be skeptical about this forecast, since that's the same time frame that U.S. government estimates included in both 2005 and 2006."

The second unknown is whether the U.S. standoff with Iran escalates, or other regional problems emerge that knock the U.S. effort in Iraq off track. "Wild cards that could alter the present trajectory include escalating tensions with Iran and/or Syria, as well as the physical or political meltdown of the Iraqi government in Baghdad," said Patrick Cronin, director of studies at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, a think tank in London.

Finally, the third factor is the outcome of the U.S. presidential election in November 2008, with the vote likely to be shaped in part by how the United States stands in Iraq.

After years of worrying about "mission creep" -- that is, the expansion of its tasks -- the U.S. military will have to adjust to a shrinking mission. The ambitious goals that the Bush administration set forth in 2003 of turning Iraq into a beacon of democracy for the Middle East have been set aside, replaced by the more limited aim of a stable Iraq that does not fall apart, does not engage in a full-blown civil war and does not spill over into a regional strife.

As the force is cut, said Kilcullen, the U.S. mission will have to change to training, advising, supplying and backing up Iraq forces. The hardest part of this transition for U.S. officials will be giving up control of operations, he predicted: Once the United States sets broad parameters, it will have to defer to Iraqi officials on issues such as timetables and nature of the operations to be carried out.

But if the mission is narrowed too much or too fast, then the U.S. position in Iraq could deteriorate rapidly, some military experts argue. In this view, the U.S. military only recently has begun to get the strategy right, by moving troops off big bases and into the population.

If the United States "reduces troop strength" and "withdraws from living with the population," worried retired Army Col. Howard Clark, a veteran policy planner, it would be quite possible to have a full-blown civil war emerge, with Sunnis fighting Shiites and the Kurds combating Turkish forces in the north. This could be followed by Iranian intervention on behalf of the Shiites and Saudi intervention to support the Sunnis. Some possible consequences, he noted, would be spiraling oil prices, destabilization of Pakistan and further problems in Afghanistan.

Even if it goes well, Americans may not be happy with the result, officers who have served in Iraq warned. If the empowerment of local tribes and militias continues, the country may break up. And if it does not, said one Army lieutenant colonel who has served two tours in Iraq, "the most likely outcome is a Shia tyranny of the majority, either with our assistance or despite our opposition."

Ultimately, however, it appears now that no matter who inhabits the White House, the United States may be resolved -- or resigned -- to an enduring presence in Iraq. "America has taken a deep breath," Kilcullen said, "looked into the abyss of pulling out, and decided, 'Let's not do it yet.' "

When Bush Comes to Iran

The view of American tough talk from Tehran.
By Reza Aslan
Posted Monday, Sept. 3, 2007, at 8:02 AM ET

My cousin Kamran is a successful software engineer in Tehran with a house, a thriving business of his own, and a brand new Peugeot, which he likes to show off by careening through the city's clogged streets at maniacal speeds. Like most of Iran's young and highly educated population, he must rely on other means to make ends meet. So, in addition to running his software business, Kamran tutors neighborhood children, raises chickens on his aunt's farm, hires himself out as a guide and translator for tourists, dabbles in real estate, and occasionally sells imitation designer handbags out of the trunk of his car.

"What kind of life is this?" he confides in me. "I have a master's degree. I fought in the Iran-Iraq war. I have my own business. But here I am forced to sell purses out of my car to feed my family?" He laughs to hide his shame. "I tell you, when Bush comes, things will be different."

When Bush comes. It is a popular joke in Tehran, akin to saying, "when pigs fly." Of course, behind every joke lurks a genuine sentiment. Sure, Kamran laughs when he says it. But then he grips the wheel and, for a brief moment, glances up at the sky, as though expecting an American fighter jet to zoom overhead.

I can't blame him. There is a palpable sense among many Iranians that the United States might start dropping bombs on them at any moment. After all, Iran is literally surrounded by American troops: The U.S. maintains military bases in Oman, Qatar, Kuwait, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. A fleet of heavily armed American warships is conducting military exercises in the Persian Gulf. The CIA just received a presidential directive to launch black-ops meant to destabilize the Iranian government. The Bush administration might well be believed to be considering launching its own nuclear weapons (so-called bunker busters like the B61-11) against Iran's suspected nuclear sites. And Congress has approved another $75 billion to "promote democracy" in Iran, which means, unapologetically, regime change.

All of this makes Kamran chuckle. "Regime change. Regime change," he mocks in an American accent. It's not that he doesn't want an end to the clerical regime. He'd love nothing more than to drag the mullahs out of the halls of government. But he has stopped caring. Like the rest of his friends, Kamran has grown so disenchanted with Iran's political system and so suspicious of American intentions in the wake of the Iraq war that he has simply given up. He doesn't vote in Iranian elections anymore. He barely reads the newspapers. He's stopped watching CNN International and the BBC. He has more immediate concerns, like how to pay his mortgage, how to afford skyrocketing gas prices, what to do about the impoverished Iraqis flooding into the country, and, most of all, how to use his immense computer expertise to make a decent living. The only time he pays any attention to the news is when the Iranian press announces yet another impending threat from America.

Those stories are popping up a lot lately. In the past couple of weeks, President Bush has raised the rhetorical stakes again, first by threatening to label Iran's military/intelligence branch, the Revolutionary Guard, a terrorist organization (essentially a declaration of war in the age of the "War on Terror"), then by announcing in a fiery speech before the American Legion that he is authorizing U.S. forces in Iraq "to confront Tehran's murderous activities." Both moves come after months of accusations that Iran is arming and training Shiite militias who are killing both American soldiers and Iraqi civilians.

The accusations of Iran's meddling in Iraq are no doubt true. But consider this: According to a report released by the New York Times, of the 60 to 80 fighters who enter Iraq each month to join al Qaida in Mesopotamia, half are from Saudi Arabia. The majority of suicide bombers are Saudis, as are about 45 percent of all foreign militants targeting U.S. troops and Iraqi civilians. And nearly half of the foreign prisoners in U.S. custody in Iraq are from Saudi Arabia. Yet, far from threatening to confront Saudi Arabia's murderous activities, Bush has just offered to supply billions of dollars in advanced weaponry to that country. Why? According to State and Defense department officials, to help ward off Iranian influence.

No wonder Kamran is so paranoid about an impending U.S. invasion. He's not alone. For all its blustering confidence, the Iranian government is convinced it is the next for the "Axis of Evil." And Iran has learned the obvious lesson from its fellow Axis members. The country without nuclear weapons (Iraq) was attacked and occupied by U.S. forces. The country with nuclear weapons (North Korea) is being plied with hundreds of millions of dollars to give them up. It's not hard to figure out why Iran is so frantic to develop nuclear capabilities. In fact, almost everything the Iranian regime does—from accelerating its nuclear program to arming Shiite militias in Iraq to crushing opposition movements at home—must be viewed from the prism of the overpowering fear of a coming military attack.

Perhaps no event is more indicative of the regime's paranoia than its detainment of four Iranian-Americans, including Haleh Esfandiari of the Woodrow Wilson Center on International Policy, on charges of spying for the United States. (Esfandiari, who was specifically accused of trying to start a velvet revolution in Iran, was finally released on bail last week.) The charges are absurd, of course. But the Iranian government's actions cannot be isolated from the announcement made by the CIA in May that the United States is actively recruiting Iranian-Americans who, in the words of one intelligence officer, "have links with their families at home," and who could be "a good two-way source of information." Kamran shakes his head when I tell him this. "How did you think the mullahs were going to react to that?" he asks.

It's true that President Bush has made a concerted effort to temper his administration's saber rattling with direct appeals to the Iranian people. "My message to the Iranian people is: You can do better than this current government," Bush said last week. "You don't have to be isolated. You don't have to be in a position where you can't realize your full economic potential."

But such statements enrage Kamran and the rest of Tehran's young and struggling middle class even more than the threats of military attack. It's not so much the fact that not a penny of the $75 million for "democracy" has been accepted by any organization inside Iran. It is that Bush's comments only exacerbate the paranoia of the Iranian government, resulting in further suppression of dissent, greater international isolation, and less opportunity for Iranians like Kamran to achieve their "full economic potential."

That explains why Iran's most prominent advocates of democracy have repeatedly asked the president to stop reaching out to them. Noble Peace Prize winner Shirin Ebadi, who is also Esfandiari's lawyer, has argued that Washington's policy of "helping" the cause of democracy in Iran "has made it more difficult for the more moderate factions within Iran's power hierarchy to argue for an accommodation with the West."

On my last visit to Tehran I asked Kamran what the United States could do to foster democratic reform in Iran. "Just leave us alone," he said wearily.

Then, after a beat, "And please, no bombs."

Iraq Reports To Be Released Soon

• The August 23 Iraq NIE
  On August 23, the Director of National Intelligence released a mixed National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) reflecting some successes, notably cleavage between Sunnis and Al Qaeda in Iraq, but an overall lack of political breakthroughs necessary for success in Iraq.
  
  Both sides of the Iraq debate have used this report as ammunition.


• The GAO Report
  Karen DeYoung and Tom Ricks of The Washington Post were given an advance copy of this "strikingly negative" report from the GAO, a legislative branch auditing and research agency, by a government official afraid the report's conclusions would be watered down when it is officially released.
  
  It is due to be released on Tuesday, September 4.
  
  The GAO Report was prepared at Congressional direction and GAO does not have the leeway other required reporters have in stating that Iraq's government has made "progress" toward specific benchmarks. It mus make a "success" or "failure" determination on each benchmark.
  
  Stung by the harsh conclusions of the report, the Bush Administration has pushed back, emphasizing the report's limitations.
  
  An interesting point of cleavage highlighted by the report is the backsliding of formerly relatively independent Iraqi military units. These have declined from 10 to 6. Some U.S. military leaders in Iraq have stated that training and building of Iraqi forces is a slow-building success. But General James Dubik, who is is in charge of U.S. training efforts, has stated that the problems of Iraqi forces are significant and should not be taken lightly.


• The Jones Report
  This report was prepared by a group headed by recently-retired SACEUR and Marine Corps Commandant James L. Jones, consisting of 14 former military and law enforcement officers.
  
  One of the group's major recommendations has been a complete reformation of the Iraqi National Police and Iraqi local police. The Iraqi police have been cited by nearly everyone as an Iraqi institution that has been thoroughly infiltrated by sectarian militias. In Shiite areas, the police are known to actively collaborate with militias against U.S. forces.
  
  Democrats will certainly seize on this reported failure, though the Department of Defense and Bush Administration have stated that they will not give up on the existing Iraqi police. The report is due to be presented to Congress next week, and Administration officials were briefed on it last week.


• The Petraeus Report
  It is hard to overstate the extent to which the Bush Administration's efforts continue fighting the war in Iraq are tied to the credibility of one man, General David Petraeus. To a significant extent, Congress has held off on a full-throated effort to end the war in Iraq until General Petraeus has an opportunity to implement his new counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq.
  
  Next week, General Petraeus is to report on the successes and failures of American strategy in Iraq under his leadership. A poor report will give impetus to Democratic efforts to end the war. A positive report will give the Bush Administration war effort a stronger hand.
  
  Petraeus is to testify to Congress along with our Ambassador in Baghdad, Ryan Crocker, on September 10.
  
  At present, the only thing that has been agreed by everyone in Congress and the White House is that they will consider the Petraeus Report very important. Due to its importance, the report is likely to be significantly influenced by the White House and will be viewed skeptically by Democrats in Congress.


• The Report To Petraeus
  A military official and intelligence officer reported to General Petraeus in an internal assessment that concludes the Shiite-dominated Iraqi government is truly unenthusiastic about a government of national unity. Apparently Petraeus receives a reports like this frequently. It reflects the intellectual struggle within the military to define and address the problem we face in Iraq.


• Conclusion
  None of these reports is likely to change many minds. But these reports will be the ammunition that Congress, the White House, press and the public will have to get used to using over the momentous Iraq debates likely to come during the next couple of months.

British Generals Criticize Rumsfeld on Iraq

By Mary Jordan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, September 2, 2007; 12:30 PM

LONDON-- The general who headed the British army during the 2003 Iraq invasion said that former U.S. defense secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld's handling of postwar Iraq was "intellectually bankrupt" and pointed to Rumsfeld as "one of those most responsible for the current situation in Iraq."

Mike Jackson, the British former chief of general staff who retired last year, strongly criticized Rumsfeld and the U.S. postwar effort in Iraq in his new book, "Soldier." The Daily Telegraph is to begin serializing the book Monday, after publishing some excerpts and an interview Saturday.

Jackson's stinging comments come at a time of growing tension between the British and U.S. military efforts in Iraq. Britain has been Washington's closest ally since the war began in 2003, but the military relationship has frayed, and Prime Minister Gordon Brown is under growing pressure to speed the reduction of British troops in Iraq.

Jackson criticized President Bush for putting the Pentagon in charge of the postwar administration of Iraq rather than the State Department.

"All the planning carried out by the State Department went to waste," Jackson wrote. He said the Pentagon did not deploy even half the troops it would have needed for a country the size of Iraq.

He said Rumsfeld and those around him took it as "an ideological article of faith that the coalition soldiers would be accepted as a liberating army."

Jackson also characterized Rumsfeld's claim that U.S. forces "don't do nation-building" as "nonsensical."

In another newspaper interview Sunday, a second retired British general also slammed the United States over its Iraq policy, saying that it had been "fatally flawed."

Tim Cross, a retired major general and the most senior British officer involved in the postwar planning, said he had raised concerns about the possibility of Iraq falling into chaos but said Rumsfeld dismissed the warnings, the Associated Press reported.

"Right from the very beginning we were all very concerned about the lack of detail that had gone into the postwar plan and there is no doubt that Rumsfeld was at the heart of that process," Cross said in the Sunday Mirror newspaper.

The Insurgency's Psychological Component

By Shankar Vedantam
Monday, September 3, 2007; A03

At the core of this fall's debate over Iraq lies one simple question: Can an increased number of U.S. troops subdue the Iraqi insurgency?

The question turns out to have complex answers, and not just because the political stakes are so high. Washington is already buzzing with arguments over Gen. David H. Petraeus's upcoming report about the effect of the U.S. "surge," but beyond the politics, social scientists have come up with some empirical answers.

Their analyses show that the outcome of the troop increase hinges on whether the insurgency is primarily a mathematical phenomenon or a psychological phenomenon.

If the insurgency follows the rules of conventional mathematics, increasing the number of U.S. troops should produce a greater counterinsurgency effort and a more peaceful Iraq. That is what one analysis found. Alex Braithwaite of Colorado State University tracked insurgent attacks across Iraq's provinces over a six-month period from January to June 2005. On average, there were 16 attempted attacks in each province each week. Braithwaite found an inverse relationship between insurgent attacks and the presence of U.S. troops.

"The insurgency is most severe where U.S. troop presence is low," Braithwaite said, as he presented his findings last week at the American Political Science Association meeting in Chicago. "U.S. troops dampen the effects of the insurgency."

But if Braithwaite's finding is good news for the Bush administration and other proponents of the war, there is also troubling evidence that the insurgency simultaneously has a psychological component. Increased levels of U.S. troops might produce tactical victories against insurgents -- but might also paradoxically provide the strategic fuel that grows the insurgency.

One of the most prominent advocates of this position is the political scientist Robert Pape of the University of Chicago. Increasing troops in Iraq, Pape argues, will win the United States a lot of battles with insurgents but also make it more likely that Americans will lose the war.

Pape's conclusions are based on a detailed examination of suicide attacks over the past 25 years. His central finding is that, contrary to conventional explanations, suicide attacks follow a certain strategic logic. From 1980 to 2006, Pape has counted 870 completed suicide attacks -- with the Iraqi insurgency accounting for the majority of such attacks in recent years.

Of the total, Pape has found that 824 of the attacks, or 95 percent, have come from groups that are fighting against military occupations of their homeland. Pape found that 85 percent of all the suicide attacks in the last quarter-century have come about in response to U.S. combat operations. There were eight times as many suicide attacks in Iraq in 2006 as there were in 2003.

While suicide attacks account for only a part of the overall Iraqi insurgency, Pape argues that these attacks provide the most reliable measure of the state of the insurgency. Furthermore, they are among the deadliest sources of mayhem in Iraq today. Every case that Pape counts has been corroborated by at least two independent sources. Pape's figures are considered so rigorous that U.S. government officials now use his database, and he gets funding from the Department of Defense.

"If you look at the chart [of suicide attacks] from 2004 to 2006, you see Iraq and Afghanistan exploding," Pape said. "American combat operations are directly associated with suicide terrorism. There was no suicide terrorism, and we go in and now there is suicide terrorism."

Pape believes his findings offer empirical proof that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have not lowered the risk of suicide attacks. Contrary to President Bush's argument that those wars provided the best way to lower the risk of suicide terrorism, Pape says the data show that launching overseas wars appears to be a way to increase the risk of suicide attacks. Improved homeland security, rather than foreign military occupations, the political scientist argues, is the way to lower the risk of suicide terrorism.

Unlike many of the other theories circulating in Washington, his theory can be put to a simple test, Pape said. For the first time, Pape said in an interview at the political science convention in Chicago, the troop buildup in Iraq has aggressively targeted Shiite groups, such as Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army. Until now, suicide attackers have been largely limited to Iraq's minority Sunni population. Pape believes that U.S. operations against Shiite groups will cause increasing numbers of Shiites to see the Americans the way many Iraqi Sunnis do -- as occupiers, rather than liberators.

If foreign occupations do indeed provide the strategic fuel for insurgencies, Pape said, Americans should expect to see a spate of Shiite suicide attacks. He said he could not predict when the insurgency would take that disturbing turn but said it would be soon: "We're heading toward the cocktail of conditions that favor suicide terrorism from the Shia."

Reports add fuel to Iraq debate

Updates on the war are expected to pit Bush and Congress; they may also redefine military and political strategy.
By Doyle McManus
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

September 2, 2007

WASHINGTON — President Bush and the Democratic-led Congress are heading for another collision over the war in Iraq this month, framed by a flurry of conflicting assessments of military and political progress, and culminating in an impassioned debate over how soon U.S. forces should be withdrawn.

Even before the debate has formally begun, officials on both sides are forecasting its likely course: The general who commands U.S. forces in Iraq will report that the current increase in troops has improved security, and will ask that it continue. Democrats will try again to impose a timetable for a withdrawal but acknowledge they don't have the votes in the Senate. Bush will continue to resist pressure for a major change in strategy but will weigh what aides call "adjustments."

On one level, the battle may merely look like a rerun of the fiery but abortive one that Congress staged only two months ago, when Senate Democrats failed to pass measures that would have forced Bush to begin withdrawing troops from Iraq.

"It's going to be 'Groundhog Day,' " predicted Mark Helmke, an aide to Sen. Richard G. Lugar (R-Ind.), who has criticized Bush's handling of the war.

But there could still be surprises.

Republican members of Congress and some Bush aides have urged the president to begin laying out a new strategy for next year, when the buildup of troops is scheduled to end.

Meanwhile, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), who was widely criticized for cutting off debate on compromise measures in July, now says he is willing to seek a middle ground.

And even if the clash doesn't lead to an immediate change in policy, it may produce -- as a side effect -- an important debate over the future of the war. Administration officials say they recognize that the buildup cannot be sustained next year as the Army and Marine Corps run out of available troops, that political progress in Baghdad has fallen short and that U.S. strategy in Iraq must be redefined.

But the central elements of that strategy remain unresolved: How fast will the post-buildup drawdown be? How far will it go? How will the mission of the remaining forces be defined? What kind of Iraqi political order should the administration seek?

"The essential question is: What should our objective in Iraq be today?" said Dennis Ross, who was a Middle East negotiator under Presidents George H.W. Bush and Clinton. "The president says we're going to prevail without saying clearly what the objective is. There are people on the other side who say, 'Let's pull out,' but they need to spell out what happens next if you do. . . . I don't think this will be the center of the debate in September -- everybody has already staked out their turf -- but it ought to be."

A flurry of reports

This month's showdown was set up in the spring, when Congress agreed to fund Bush's additional 22,000 combat troops on the condition that he report by Sept. 15 on whether the offensive was working.

The first reports have already come in. An official "estimate" from the nation's intelligence agencies released last month found that the buildup had produced "uneven improvements in Iraq's security situation" and little or no political progress -- but warned that a U.S. withdrawal would make things worse. A draft report by the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, found that Iraq's government had met only three of the 18 benchmarks for political progress that the administration accepted as goals.

This week, Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, and Ryan Crocker, the U.S. ambassador in Baghdad, are to brief the president on their assessments. Next week, they are to deliver them in public before four committees of the House and Senate.

Petraeus and Crocker have frequently said they believe the buildup is making progress. Petraeus "wants to keep as much force on the ground as we possibly can, for as long as we possibly can," said one administration official, who was not authorized to speak on the record and asked not to be identified.

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and Marine Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, are also scheduled to testify before Congress next week. That could provide a telling contrast. Officials say that Pace and the other members of the Joint Chiefs are worried that continuing the buildup too long would do serious damage to the Army and Marine Corps, and that they favor a significantly smaller force in Iraq next year.

The buildup has increased the number of U.S. troops in Iraq to about 162,000, from about 130,000 last year. Under current plans, the force will gradually shrink to its pre-buildup level of 130,000 by late next summer.

The debate within the military has been over whether the buildup should continue longer than planned and whether troop levels should be held at 130,000 or reduced to about 100,000. Continuing the buildup could require deployments to be extended; they've already lengthened to 15 months, from an initial 12 months.

Congress will also hear from retired Marine Gen. James L. Jones, who has drafted a report on the Iraqi security forces that gives relatively good marks to the Iraqi army but recommends that the National Police be rebuilt from scratch.

Petraeus is key

The White House hopes that a bullish assessment from Petraeus, who is widely respected by both Republicans and Democrats in Congress, will swing public opinion in favor of the buildup and prevent further erosion in GOP support for the war.

"There are a number of reports coming out," but only one will provide the complete picture, White House spokesman Tony Snow said last week. "The people who are going to be best able to do that are the folks who live and work there every day, and that would be Gen. Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker."

Said Republican political consultant David Winston: "Petraeus will define the starting point. If a lot of people actually sit down and watch his testimony, there could be a public reaction -- and Congress will respond if the public reacts one way or the other."

Meanwhile, Bush used speeches before veterans organizations last month to hammer at three major themes he will return to this month: The "surge" has been a military success; the administration has a new "bottom-up" strategy of promoting regional political leaders to compensate for the apparent failure of its "top-down" effort focused on Prime Minister Nouri Maliki; and the consequences of withdrawal would be disastrous.

Some members of Congress -- and some Bush advisors -- have urged the president to add another theme: that the buildup will soon end, the number of U.S. troops in Iraq will decline, and responsibility for security will increasingly shift to newly trained Iraqi forces.

"The surge can't go on forever; we don't have the manpower to do that," Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said last week. "I think it's entirely possible that the president will lay out a strategy that takes us into a different place."

But so far, there has been no sign that Bush intends to soften his stance by talking publicly about a troop drawdown, even one that looks inevitable. Policymakers fear that announcing even a partial withdrawal will convince U.S. adversaries in Iraq and the Middle East that the United States intends to leave entirely -- giving "the wrong signal," one official said.

In effect, the administration faces a dilemma: It would like to reassure Americans that it will soon begin withdrawing troops from Iraq, but reassure its Iraqi allies that it plans to stay.

Democrats, on the other hand, face a dilemma of their own: Their party's most fervent supporters insist that Congress force Bush to withdraw from Iraq within months. But even with a handful of Republican dissidents joining Democrats, Reid is short of the 60 votes he needs under Senate rules to pass such a controversial bill.

In July, the result was a theatrical all-night debate, an angry standoff, and a controversial decision by Reid to cut off debate without allowing several compromise proposals to come to a vote. At the time, Democratic strategists said they expected public opinion to swing dramatically in their direction over the summer and put considerable pressure on Republicans.

But that didn't happen. Last week, in a change of strategy, Reid told the Washington Post that he was willing to help pass a bipartisan compromise. "I don't think we have to think that our way is the only way," he said.

Reid spokesman Jim Manley acknowledged that it might still be impossible to pass a binding timetable for troop withdrawals. "Until you have 60 votes, you can't force a change in policy," he said. "Sen. Reid remains committed to changing the course in Iraq and bringing the troops home, but there are a number of ways to do that legislatively."

One leading possibility, he said, is a proposal by Sen. Jim Webb (D-Va.) that would limit the administration's ability to deploy troops by requiring that the duration of soldiers' leaves be at least as long as their most recent deployment. The measure would not explicitly set a timetable for withdrawal, but it would have a similar effect.

"It is another way to get at the issue," Manley said.

In July, Webb's measure won 56 votes, seven of them from Republicans.

The White House has said Bush would veto a bill that included Webb's language.

In the end, an administration official said, the White House is confident that war critics remain far short of the 67 votes they would need to overcome a veto -- and thus unable to tie Bush's hands between now and the end of his term in January 2009.

"There's no indication that President Bush is going to change course in any significant way," said Ross, the former Middle East negotiator and author of a new book, "Statecraft: And How to Restore America's Standing in the World."

"But we should be negotiating a timetable with the Iraqis. We should be organizing a national reconciliation conference. We should be dealing with the neighbors more seriously," said Ross.

"We still need to answer the question of how we marry our security strategy to a political strategy. It would be nice if this debate in Congress could do that, but it's not very likely."

With Russia, Pray for Cynicism

By Jim Hoagland
Sunday, September 2, 2007; B07

Russian prosecutors say that the separate grisly murders of two of the Kremlin's most vocal opponents during the past year have a common motive: They were committed by enemies of Vladimir Putin to frame and embarrass his government.

A similarly sinister hidden agenda lies behind U.S. plans to create antimissile sites in Poland and the Czech Republic, Russian officials are telling Western diplomats. The silos that the Americans say are needed to defend against Iranian missile attacks will, in the Russian version, be stuffed with multiple-warhead offensive rockets aimed at Moscow.

These "explanations" of murders and missiles raise a chilling question about Putin's Kremlin: Is it worse if the Russians are cynically offering up blatantly implausible tales as propaganda -- or if the Russian president and his aides actually believe their own accounts?

Americans should root for cynicism. Hostile governments run by delusional fantasy are far more dangerous than those run by knowing lies -- especially when the government in question possesses a vast nuclear arsenal and when the Bush administration is tempted at times by its own version of delusional thinking.

Two disturbing patterns emerged more clearly last week when Yuri Chaika, Russia's prosecutor general, announced 10 arrests in the slaying last October of investigative reporter Anna Politkovskaya, who was shot to death in an elevator in her apartment building. Chaika portrayed the assassination of Politkovskaya -- a fierce critic of the Kremlin's policies in Chechnya -- as the work of a Chechen crime boss who hired Russian police officers as killers to embarrass the government.

Politkovskaya's death emphasized the growing dangers of practicing independent journalism in Russia. In March, Ivan Safronov, a defense correspondent for Kommersant, mysteriously fell from the window of his Moscow apartment. The U.S.-based Committee to Protect Journalists reports that as many as 13 journalists have been murdered in Russia by paid killers since 2000.

The second pattern can be found in the motives cited by Chaika in Politkovskaya's killing. The prosecutor's account echoed the Kremlin's explanation of the poisoning in London last November of dissident Alexander Litvinenko with radioactive polonium-210. Behind this plot, which was once again aimed at defaming Putin, was exiled oligarch Boris Berezovsky, Russian officials suggested, without offering any evidence to support the theory.

The diplomatic argument between Washington and Moscow over missile defense in Central Europe also turns to a great extent on Russian suspicions that balance on a thin line between cynicism and paranoia. It does not help that Kremlin distrust on this issue has been stimulated by the Bush administration's refusal to engage Putin's repeated demands for new discussions on nuclear arms control and other confidence-building measures.

Publicly, the Russians reject the U.S. contention that modest deployments of U.S. radars and interceptors in Poland and the Czech Republic will help defend against Iranian long-range missiles. In private conversations with Western diplomats and others, some Russians have been even more scathing.

The Russian argument holds that the Iranian missile threat "might" materialize only 15 years from now. So U.S. haste on deployments in the two former Soviet satellites is a cover for "creating facts on the ground" and gaining an offensive strategic edge over Russia.

It's worth asking if this is merely psychological projection at work: We know you Americans are going to hide MIRVs because it is what we would do in your shoes. You, after all, must be as cynical as we are. Your offers of unprecedented transparency and inspection rights (which were conveyed by Defense Secretary Robert Gates to Putin) are just one more trick and will not fool us.

The KGB graduates who run the Kremlin do seem to see Bush as being far more cunning and purposeful in planning to undermine their rule than is indicated by any available evidence. The same can be said of Berezovsky and for Chechen crime bosses -- if, that is, you are not a prosecutor trying to close politically explosive cases.

Other factors suggest that the Russian-American relationship today is a matter more amenable to psychology than to diplomacy, which runs its course as Putin and Bush move deeper into lame-duckhood.

The Russian leader leaves office next spring. He is not likely to have another encounter with Bush as substantive as their July meeting in Kennebunkport -- which in fact produced no concrete results. In retrospect, Kennebunkport looks more like a leave-taking that seems to have augmented Russian anxiety over Bush's intentions and capacities -- precisely because nothing happened.

"We cooperate where we can and compete where we have to," Russian and American officials say when describing the uneven relationship the two leaders have forged. Perhaps only a cynic would have expected any better result.

Propping Up the Weak as a Policy

By DAVID E. SANGER

WASHINGTON

JUST how much President Bush’s goals abroad are now at the mercy of some of the world’s weakest leaders was clear last week in how the White House reacted to events in Pakistan.

Quietly, the administration cheered on an alliance of convenience between a once-unchallenged strongman, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, and an exiled former prime minister, Benazir Bhutto, whose turns in office in the 1980s and 90s were widely viewed as a mixture of incompetence, powerlessness and suspected corruption.

The administration was betting that a Musharraf-Bhutto combination, however fragile, would be the best bet for keeping a nuclear-armed state from descending into violence that could end Mr. Bush’s last hopes of wiping out Osama bin Laden’s sanctuary.

General Musharraf is just one example of weak leadership. Iraq’s prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, has let pro-Shia loyalties inhibit progress toward the power-sharing compromises with the Sunnis. The Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas failed to rein in Hamas and end the endemic corruption in his own party when he first won power two years ago. And President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan, whose authority over warlords is still a matter of daily challenge, now faces a resurgent Taliban.

If the nemesis of Mr. Bush’s first term was the Axis of Evil, the bane of his last 17 months in office may be the Nexus of Weakness.

The driving question inside the White House is how to build up these weak leaders or maneuver around them, at a time when arms sales, aid programs and presidential photo-ops yield diminishing returns.

A senior official said last week that in recent meetings, “Every once in a while you heard a debate about whether it’s time to cut one of these guys free — particularly Musharraf and Maliki. Then someone in the back of the room would ask, ‘Then what?’ ”

There are agonized searches for other alternatives, and the limited choices in Iraq were played out for more than an hour on Friday in the secure Pentagon room where the Joint Chiefs of Staff meet. Much of the talk, administration officials said, concerned how Mr. Bush could work around Mr. Maliki and reward Sunnis in Anbar Province for their recent decision to start shooting at Al Qaeda in Iraq, instead of at Americans forces.

The discussion included how to encourage early elections that would put Sunnis in government posts and how to get the central government to finance more projects in the region.

“It quickly became a discussion of the political and economic rewards we can encourage, rather than the math of how many forces we need to keep there,” said one official. He wondered aloud whether the United States would still be in Iraq if “we had the same conversation four summers ago.”

That point — how late in the game it is — also preoccupies Washington.

The administration’s critics and its war-weary veterans alike agree that using America’s remaining leverage in each place requires matching American promises of help with tangible results. For example, Mr. Bush has talked about bringing reconstruction to those countries. But the delivery has failed.

“Timing is to statecraft what location is to real estate,” said Dennis Ross, a Middle East expert who served under Presidents George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton, and whose book, “Statecraft” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007) lays out what he sees as missed opportunities.

With Mr. Abbas, he said, “We had a chance right after his election” in 2005, “and we didn’t show a sense of urgency, for example helping find way to lower 40 percent unemployment.” The Islamic movement Hamas exploited that and won the subsequent election, he said.

“Karzai is a weak leader whose problem from the beginning was that he needed a way to take on the warlords,” he continued. “We didn’t deliver with the kind of reconstruction that the president promised, or a way for him to extend his authority and writ beyond Kabul. And so he had to start cutting deals with everyone.”

Of course, missteps in Washington only contribute to a leader’s weakness; rarely do they cause it. Would General Musharraf’s suddenly tenuous position in Pakistan be stronger had the Bush administration given him the one thing he asked for most urgently after 9/11? He wanted duties on Pakistani textiles lifted, an action opposed by textile-manufacturing states here. It seems a stretch to think that lower duties would have made him more able to trap Qaedists in their Pakistani lairs today.

On the other hand, it is reasonable to ask whether things would be different in Iraq, Afghanistan or the Palestinian territories had the administration had what Henry Crumpton, the former C.I.A. officer who helped oust the Taliban in 2001 and became the counterterrorism head at the State Department, calls an “expeditionary foreign service” that could help nations create courts, central banks and job programs.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice sees the logic of that.

“I think we’ve begun to build that rudimentary capability, but it’s frankly something that the country has probably needed since the Balkans” in the mid-1990’s, she said a few weeks ago.

“You have to have a civilian capacity to do it,” she said. “And that’s the capability we’re trying to build now.”

A big problem, though, is that the leaders Mr. Bush wants to embolden know that Mr. Bush cannot promise anything past 12:01 p.m. on Jan. 20, 2009. Every day they calculate their own moves accordingly.

Mr. Maliki made the calculation out loud last week. Angered by the crescendo of calls in Washington for his ouster — by Democrats and Republicans — he warned that Iraq had “other friends” who “will support us in our endeavor.” He was clearly talking about Iran.

A G.O.P. Senator Charts a Middle Path

By CARL HULSE

MURFREESBORO, Tenn., Aug. 30 — Senator Lamar Alexander, the Tennessee Republican and career consensus seeker, finds himself in a familiar position when it comes to the war in Iraq: somewhere in the middle.

With Congress set to take pivotal votes on the war soon after lawmakers begin returning to Washington on Tuesday, radio advertisements in Knoxville from a group that supports the Bush administration are urging voters to call lawmakers and demand they stand firm on Iraq, a plea that sends as many as 25 telephone calls per day in support of President Bush to Mr. Alexander’s local office.

In Nashville, on the edge of the campus of Vanderbilt University, scores of antiwar demonstrators gathered recently at the entrance to Centennial Park to read solemnly a toll of the war dead and pass out fliers encouraging people to call Tennessee politicians “often” to push for a troop withdrawal. Organizers, who had Mr. Alexander’s office number at the top of their list, considered it a pretty fair turnout for Nashville, the country-and-western capital that practically banished the Dixie Chicks for their anti-Bush comments in 2003.

Mr. Alexander, who is positioned to play a central role in the coming Iraq debate, is in neither camp, leaving both sides frustrated. He is opposed to the fixed withdrawal date sought by many Democrats but has bucked the administration by pushing for a change of mission in Iraq and the formal adoption of the recommendations put forward by the Iraq Study Group.

“I am even more convinced that I am right,” said Mr. Alexander, who was among the many lawmakers from both parties to make a personal inspection of conditions in Iraq during the Congressional recess. Since then, he has traveled his state, laying out his views on the war, raising money for a re-election bid and touching base with constituents at events like a meeting on new financing for math and science in Murfreesboro on the campus of Middle Tennessee State University.

While September once loomed as a likely turning point for the Congressional debate over the debate, the political center of gravity on what to do about Iraq does not appear to have shifted significantly in the month Congress has been away.

The White House has made some headway in convincing lawmakers that the escalation of American troops in Iraq has improved security conditions there, and lawmakers of both parties say they have seen such evidence themselves. Yet there is little sign of the political improvement that was supposed to follow the troop buildup, they say. Some lawmakers who visited Iraq also got a taste of the risks faced by American troops when their aircraft was shot at by an insurgent missile.

Mr. Lamar and many other members of Congress say that though they are struggling with what to do about the war, they do not expect a series of pending government reports to make their job much easier. They say that coming reviews from General David H. Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker, the top American government officials in Iraq, will most likely present a mixed picture, and may well clash with independent assessments of the state of Iraq sought by Congress.

“I think the report will be in several directions, but it won’t be a clear path forward,” said Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, who is also a potential swing vote on Iraq policy. “Those of us who are concerned about the current policy are going to be facing the same kind of choices and dilemmas we did prior to the report.”

Mr. Alexander, who is up for re-election next year, has served as governor and as president of the University of Tennessee. He was secretary of education under the first President Bush and has twice run for president himself.

As he toured the state recently, Mr. Alexander took the opportunity to explain his approach on Iraq, which essentially boils down to gradually shifting United States forces from direct combat operations to more training and equipping of Iraqi forces, with a concentration on stabilizing the country province by province. He said such a strategy could lead to a significant drawdown of troops within a year or slightly longer.

Despite the gravity of the issue, Mr. Alexander typically had to raise the subject on his own or respond to news media questions on the subject; he was not pressed on it directly by the public even after a detailed talk on Iraq at a crowded Rotary Club meeting in Jackson or his appearance in Murfreesboro.

Representative Jim Cooper, a Democrat who appeared with Mr. Alexander in Nashville, said a certain numbness had set in among Tennesseans when it came to the war. “It is kind of like a low-grade fever,” Mr. Cooper said. “It worries them, but they are so used to the drumbeat of death, destruction and confusion they don’t know how to react.”

Mr. Alexander said it would be a mistake to interpret silence as indifference, however, considering the thousands of Tennessee residents in the National Guard who have served multiple tours in Iraq. And General Petraeus, the former commander of the 101st Airborne Division — which straddles the Tennessee-Kentucky state line — remains a popular figure here.

Mr. Alexander said he did hear from agitated Tennesseans, some of whom had called to tell him he was undermining the president. He hears from the other side as well. At the antiwar vigil near Vanderbilt, protesters dismissed the senator’s stance as posturing, since he does not back a firm withdrawal date.

“It is just cover,” said Myra Sloan, who helped coordinate the event with the group MoveOn.org.

Mr. Alexander shrugs off such criticism, saying that at this stage in his long career he has to do what he believes is best.

And what he says he thinks is best is for Congress and the president is to find common ground on a practical but effective way out of Iraq, and for both sides to back away from partisanship over the war.

His push could find a more receptive audience in the Senate now that Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority leader, said he might be more open to compromise after blocking a vote on an Iraq plan offered by Mr. Alexander and Senator Ken Salazar, Democrat of Colorado.

“We just can’t keep shouting at one another,” Mr. Alexander said, adding. “I think it is inexcusable for United States senators to be lecturing Baghdad about being in a political stalemate, yet we can’t come up with a consensus ourselves.”