9/11 CONSPIRACY THEORIES [The First Post, February 19, 2007] NEO-CONS Neo-cons at the Council on Foreign Relations initiated or permitted the attacks to initiate US conflict in the Middle East, and establish America as the sole global power. In 2000 they'd said that only an event like a new Pearl Harbour could catalyse such militarism. While at the University of Chicago, it's claimed, future neocons Wolfowitz and Leith used to talk 'all the time' about such things. MOSSAD Israeli agents orchestrated events to involve America in battles with enemies of the Jewish state. This theory plays particularly on the news that five men with links to Mossad and with lots of money in their socks were seen preparing to film the attacks. FRIENDS IN OIL Seventy-five top professors and scientists comprising '9/11 Scholars For Truth' believe people in the oil industry, along with President Bush, puppetered the events to secure oil reserves. They arranged a 'stand-down' of the air-force for the event. Some see a cover-up to protect the Saudi royal family and Enron's interests in Afghanistan. Others see an Al-Qaeda chain of command which ran through pro-Western Saudis and Pakistani intelligence to forces in the US (and MI6). PSYCHOS Scientologists have claimed that 'Thetan psychologists', with evil in mind, controlled the hijackers' actions using 'drugs and psycho-political methods.' THE TOWERS' OWNERS This theory proposes that the destruction of the towers required explosive demolition. Ownership of the building had changed, for the first time, shortly before the 9/11 attacks, and new owner Larry Silverstein made a $500m insurance profit. Theorists note that John O'Neill, a senior counter-intelligence officer (who had resigned from the FBI in August 2001) took over security at the WTC on the day of the attacks. THE CIA President Bush, puppetered the events to secure oil reserves. They arranged a 'stand-down' of the air-force for the event. Some see a cover-up to protect the Saudi royal family and Enron's interests in Afghanistan. Others see an Al-Qaeda chain of command which ran through pro-Western Saudis and Pakistani intelligence to forces in the US (and MI6). Some believe that the CIA was kept informed of the attack by Al Qaeda and blocked FBI investigations, by saying they would stop it before it happened - but then allowed it. Others argue that the CIA was directly involved and point to reports of explosions in different parts of the Towers, and that WTC Building 7, which has CIA offices in it, was demolished, which they believe was an attempt to destroy evidence of the centre of operations for the Twin Towers attack next door. THE MILITARY-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX Forces at the Pentagon, keen on a coup d'etat by the military-industrial complex, are said to have covered up that a drone plane or missile hit the Pentagon. Furthermore they shot down Flight 93 into a field when it became surplus to requirements. Some, including former MI5 whistleblower David Shaylor, believe no planes were involved in the attack, but missiles shrouded in holograms. SINO FORCES Others, noting that Bush's presidency began with a US spy plane drama over China, propose that 9/11 was a strike against America by the Chinese. NEW WORLD ORDER A higher government, possibly linked to the Knights Templar, kept Bush and Cheney in the dark or used them as patsies, and also controlled Bin Laden. ROBBERS Comex was believed to have had $950m worth of gold under the WTC prior to the attack, and only $230m is said to have been recovered, leading some to believe 9/11 was the cover for a massive robbery or fraud; the biggest 'safe cracking' ever. [FIRST POSTED SEPTEMBER 11, 2006]

THE PROBLEMS OF FEEDING THE WORLD'S EVER-INCREASING POPULATON

[BBC, November 24, 2006] As part of Planet Under Pressure, a BBC News series looking at some of the biggest environmental problems facing humanity, Alex Kirby explores the challenge of feeding the world without destroying the planet. The proportion of hungry people is coming down. More of us are eating more and better than ever before. World cereal consumption has more than doubled since 1970, and meat consumption has tripled since 1961. The global fish catch grew more than six times from 1950 to 1997. None of this happened by magic, though, but only by giving Nature a massive helping hand. The World Resources Institute said in 1999 that half of all the commercial fertiliser ever produced had been applied since 1984. So one question is whether the world can go on increasing its harvests at this rate -- or even faster, to cater as well for the extra 75 million people born annually. Our recent achievements are impressive -- while global population doubled to 6 billion people in the 40 years from 1960, global food production more than kept up. The proportion of malnourished people fell in the three decades to the mid-1990s from 37% to 18%. But we may not be able to go on at this rate. For a start, much of the world's best cropland is already in use, and farmers are having to turn to increasingly marginal land. And the good land is often taking a battering -- soil degradation has already reduced global agricultural productivity by 13% in the last half-century. Many of the pesticides on which the crop increases have depended are losing their effectiveness, as the pests acquire more resistance. A key constraint is water. The 17% of cropland that is irrigated produces an estimated 30-40% of all crops, but in many countries there will be progressively less water available for agriculture. Many of these are poor countries, where irrigation can boost crop yields by up to 400%. There are ways to improve irrigation and to use water more effectively, but it's not clear these can bridge the gap. Biotechnology, in principle, may offer the world a second Green Revolution, for example by producing drought-resistant plants or varieties that withstand pest attacks. But it arouses deep unease, not least because of fears it may erode the genetic resources in thousands of traditional varieties grown in small communities across the world. Nobody knows what the probable impacts of climate change will be on food supplies. Modest temperature increases may actually benefit rich temperate countries, but make harvests even more precarious across much of the tropics. Another question concerns the huge cost to other forms of life of all the progress we've made in securing our own food supply. The amount of nitrogen available for uptake by plants is much higher than the natural level, and has more than doubled since the 1940s. The excess comes from fertilisers running off farmland, from livestock manure, and from other human activities. It is changing the composition of species in ecosystems, reducing soil fertility, depleting the ozone layer, intensifying climate change, and creating dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico and other near-coastal seas. The sheer amount of the Earth we need to produce our food is having an enormous impact. Globally, we have taken over about 26% of the planet's land area (roughly 3.3 billion hectares) for cropland and pasture, replacing a third of temperate and tropical forests and a quarter of natural grasslands. Another 0.5 billion has gone for urban and built-up areas. Habitat loss from the conversion of natural ecosystems is the main reason why other species are being pushed closer to the brink of extinction. Food security comes at a high price. In any case, it is a security many can only envy. At the moment we are not on course to achieve the Millennium Development Goal of halving world hunger by 2015. Although the proportion of hungry people is coming down, population increase means the actual number continues to rise. In the 1990s global poverty fell by 20%, but the number of hungry people rose by 18 million. In 2003, 842 million people did not have enough to eat, a third of them in sub-Saharan Africa, according to the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation. Hunger and malnutrition killed 10 million people a year, 25,000 a day -- one life extinguished every five seconds. The world does produce enough to feed everyone. But the food is often in the wrong place, or unaffordable, or can't be stored long enough. So making sure everyone has enough to eat is more about politics than science. But whether we can go on eating the sort of diet we've grown used to in developed countries is far from clear. Much of it travels a long way to reach us, with the transport costs adding hugely to the "embodied energy" it contains. There's a lot to be said for eating local, seasonal food where we can. And meat usually demands far more than grain -- water, land, grain itself (34% of world grain supplies are fed to livestock reared for meat). Yet, worldwide, the richer we grow the more we turn to meat. Something's got to give -- and not only our waistbands.

AL JAZEERA NEWS SERVICE -- FRIEND OR FOE?

[foreignpolicy.com, July/August 2006] It is vilified as a propaganda machine and Osama bin Laden’s mouthpiece. In truth, though, Al Jazeera is as hated in the palaces of Riyadh as it is in the White House. But, as millions of loyal viewers already know, Al Jazeera promotes a level of free speech and dissent rarely seen in the Arab world. With plans to go global, it might just become your network of choice. “Al Jazeera Supports Terrorism” False, though the network makes little attempt to disassociate itself from those who do. This claim is one of the loudest arguments that Western critics have levied against the Arabic-language news channel since its inception 10 years ago, when the Doha, Qatar-based network pledged to present all viewpoints. Just as it describes in its motto, “The opinion and the other opinion,” Al Jazeera has lent airtime even to hated political figures and extremists, including prominent members of al Qaeda. It’s this willingness to present terrorists as legitimate political commentators that has prompted outspoken critics such as U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to refer to Al Jazeera’s coverage of the U.S.-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq as “inaccurate and inexcusable.” After all, when Al Jazeera offers its estimated 50 million viewers exclusive interviews of Osama bin Laden, it’s easy to confuse access with endorsement. And when a journalist who conducts those interviews is jailed for collaboration with al Qaeda, as Tayssir Alouni was in a Spanish court last year, the line between impartial observer and impassioned supporter is certainly blurred. In addition, al Qaeda is not the only terrorist group that reaches out to Al Jazeera. Besides the infamous bin Laden tapes—at least six of which the network has still never aired—Al Jazeera has also received tapes from insurgent groups in Iraq, renegade Afghan warlords, and the London suicide bombers. But the network has never supported violence against the United States. Not once have its correspondents praised attacks on coalition forces in Iraq. The network has never captured an attack on the coalition “live,” and there’s no evidence Al Jazeera has known about any attack beforehand. Despite claims to the contrary, the network has never aired footage of a beheading. As for Alouni’s case, conclusive evidence has yet to be presented to the public. And there is nothing to suggest that the network’s funding is illegitimate. Allegations of supporting terrorism remain just that—allegations. “Al Jazeera Is Anti-Semitic” Wrong. Just as Al Jazeera has proven willing to present al Qaeda’s “perspective,” it has also devoted airtime to and welcomed another regional pariah—Israel. The network was the first Arab channel to allow Israelis to present their case in their own words, in Hebrew, English, or Arabic. This move was a major departure from past practices and truly shocked the Arab public. Until Al Jazeera arrived, most Arabs had never even heard an Israeli’s voice. Al Jazeera regularly airs clips of Israeli officials within news bulletins and conducts live interviews with six to 10 Israelis each month. The network covers Israeli affairs extensively and is widely watched in Israel. In fact, Al Jazeera gives more airtime to Israeli issues than any other channel outside Israel itself. Although Israel has accused Al Jazeera of bias and anti-Semitism (and some of the network’s guests have certainly fit that bill), the network’s coverage has occasionally been of concrete benefit to the Israelis. When Israel invaded Jenin in the spring of 2002, Al Jazeera’s exclusive television reports from within the besieged city thoroughly dispelled rumors of a “massacre,” leading to a U.N. special investigating committee appointed by the secretary-general being unceremoniously disbanded. Many Israelis even regard Al Jazeera as an important new force for change in the Arab world. Gideon Ezra, former deputy head of the Israeli General Security Service, once remarked that he wished “all Arab media were like Al-Jazeera.” Not all Arabs would agree. Although many Westerners think Al Jazeera has a pro-Arab bias, many Arabs believe exactly the opposite. It is widely held in the Arab world that Al Jazeera is financed and run by Mossad, MI5, or the CIA, so as to undermine Arab unity. Just as Bahrain banned Al Jazeera from reporting from inside the country because of a perceived Zionist bias in 2002, Al Jazeera’s bureaus in Arab countries have often been closed down, accused of besmirching the Palestinians or disseminating other kinds of imperialistic anti-Arab propaganda. “Al Jazeera Is Spreading Political Freedom” Wishful thinking. It’s true that Al Jazeera established the tradition of investigative reporting in the Arab world and rolled back the boundaries of debate within Arab families, breaking all kinds of taboos about what could be discussed on television. Improving upon the sycophantic Arab news channels that existed prior to 1996, Al Jazeera better informs the Arab public about their leadership and provides Arabs with a forum through which they can more easily ask of their rulers, “Why are we in this mess?” In fact, Al Jazeera’s programs about Western politics have done more to inform Arabs about democracy than any nation or station. After 9/11, Al Jazeera’s Washington bureau started two weekly talk shows to illuminate American democracy for a foreign audience: From Washington, in which the bureau chief interviewed U.S. politicians, including members of the Bush administration; and U.S. Presidential Race, which covered the U.S. elections in great depth, including most of the major primaries. However, to assume satellite television will transform Arab societies into transparent, just, and equal democracies is to presume that the current state of affairs in the Arab world results from an information deficit, which is not true. Except in the most authoritarian Arab countries, news has long been available to determined citizens via the BBC or Voice of America radio, and neither one of those remade the region. Al Jazeera encourages free speech in the Middle East, but that is no substitute for real political reform. Just because a woman in Saudi Arabia can now see a debate on TV, and can even contribute in real time, doesn’t mean she can go out and vote in an election or join a political party. Arab autocrats have come to realize that even if information on satellite TV cannot be packaged and manipulated the way it was with state-run media, Al Jazeera may not be as deadly a threat to their regimes as they first feared. They can still ban Al Jazeera from opening a bureau, as has happened in Saudi Arabia and Tunisia, or evoke emergency laws to confiscate equipment or arrest journalists, as happens in Egypt. Arab press unions, like Arab opposition political parties, are still prevented from growing strong. “Al Jazeera Is Biased” True, but no more so than Fox News or CNN. Al Jazeera employs the same stringent editorial processes as the Western media, but it ends up with a different product. During the war in Iraq, Al Jazeera’s tone was notably sympathetic to the Iraqis and hostile toward the Americans. Similarly in Afghanistan, the Taliban was often presented as the noble underdog and America as the vengeful, colonial aggressor. A general cynicism about Arab regimes allied to America is detectable, and though Al Jazeera has employees from many religions, including Jews, the network is clearly sympathetic toward the Palestinians. This bias in no way invalidates the network’s news. Knowing it is scrutinized more rigorously than any other news channel in the world, Al Jazeera is fastidious in presenting all sides of a story. Certainly compared to most other Arab news stations, Al Jazeera remains a model of professionalism and objectivity. Journalists around the world treat Al Jazeera with the same respect they treat news from any other major international news network. Al Jazeera has sharing agreements with CNN, ABC, NBC, FOX, BBC, Japan’s NHK, and Germany’s ZDF, all of which regularly use Al Jazeera’s footage and reports. If Al Jazeera has a bias, it is a commercial one. Despite the fact that it enjoys an estimated annual budget of around $100 million, subsidized largely by the gas-rich Emir Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani of Qatar, Al Jazeera wants to win audience share and it wants to sell advertising. The network has consistently lost money since its launch, which is unsurprising, as no Arab channel makes a profit. The network targets a particular demographic (namely Arab men over the age of 25), and, like the mainstream cable networks or FM radios stations in the United States, it tries hard to pitch itself to viewers by luring them with dramatic trailers and lead-in segments. They often feature montages of violence from the Palestinian territories, Afghanistan, or Iraq, accompanied by pounding music. Critics argue that such montages are deliberately inflammatory. The network counters that it is not its job to sanitize images of war. What is indisputable is that Al Jazeera has different standards of taste from Western networks when it comes to showing casualties. “Al Jazeera Is Censored” Not yet. Al Jazeera occupies a peculiar space in the Arab media. It presents itself as a beacon of free speech and editorial independence in the region. Yet, the chairman of the network’s board of directors is Sheikh Hamad bin Thamer Al-Thani, the former Qatari deputy minister of information. There’s no question that Al Jazeera remains heavily dependent on the emir. And he has proved to be an unflinching sponsor. When he came to power in 1995, the emir calculated that hosting a popular television network would help Qatar shore up Western support in the event that Iran, Iraq, or Saudi Arabia should decide to invade. The gamble paid off, both for Al Jazeera and for the emir. Despite its dependence on the state, Al Jazeera regularly criticizes Arab regimes, including Qatar’s. For example, when a coup to depose the emir was foiled in February 1996 and the plotters put on trial, proceedings were televised live on Al Jazeera—a first in the Arab world. Al Jazeera’s viewers had a front-row seat when the defense counsel claimed that the defendants had been subjected to torture, and when a spokesman from Amnesty International who had been invited to attend the trial attacked the Qatari criminal justice system. Talk shows on Al Jazeera have discussed whether it was right or wrong for Qatar to host an American air base. At the height of the intifada and in the run-up to the war in Iraq, when America’s allies were being hounded in the Arab world, politicians, guests, and callers frequently attacked Qatar on Al Jazeera. Yet there remains a deeply held belief from government ministries right down to the Arab street that the Qatari ruling family is the real power behind Al Jazeera. The exact nature of the relationship remains opaque, but it is a testament to the vision of the emir that, so far at least, he has been tolerant. Whether he will continue to keep his fingers off the channel remains to be seen. “Al Jazeera Wants to Compete with CNN and the BBC” Yes, and it plans to. Although it wasn’t part of the original launch plan back in November 1996, the network’s incredible success during the past decade has prompted the emir to expand his goals for Al Jazeera. This fall, a sister English-language station, called Al Jazeera International, or AJI, will launch around the world. It expects to reach 30 to 40 million households on its first day. AJI is directly competing with BBC World and CNN International for the world’s English-speaking audience of 1 billion people. Although it has hired a large number of Western journalists, it won’t look much like CNN. The network’s coverage will “follow the sun” throughout the day, airing from Kuala Lumpur for 4 hours, Doha for 11 hours, London for 5, and Washington for the remaining 4. Reporters and editors in each locale will present news from their region’s perspective, and the entire world will watch the same satellite feed at the same time. “We’re the first news channel based in the Mideast to bring news back to the West,” says Nigel Parsons, managing director of AJI. “We want to set a different news agenda.” And CNN and the BBC are taking the new global competition seriously. The BBC has unveiled plans for an Arabic-language television news service, slated for launch in early 2007, and both networks are busy reassessing how they cover news in the developing world. “Only Arabs Will Watch Al Jazeera International” Not so fast. This venture is the biggest challenge yet for the network. Whereas the launch of the Arabic Al Jazeera network meant competing with the likes of Egyptian, Lebanese, and Saudi television, Western networks are much meatier competition, and Al Jazeera will face them on their home turf. In English. For its part, AJI has said it will focus on developing-world issues and use more indigenous reporters and freelancers than other channels. It is widely expected to win large market share in Asia, where the Al Jazeera brand already enjoys a favorable reputation and where many more people speak English than Arabic. Pakistan has 160 million Muslims, and Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim country, has 215 million Muslims, many of whom will be interested in following events in the Arab world closely. Of course, it won’t be so easy to break into America. Even securing distribution for AJI has been tough: As of press time, not one U.S. cable company had offered to carry the channel as part of a general news package. Ironically, it is the world’s freest media market that poses the biggest challenge to Al Jazeera. None of which changes the fact that Al Jazeera has permanently reshaped the landscape of world news to and, soon, from the Arab world. In a region where the United States is engaged in a protracted war in one country and the West as a whole faces a nuclear impasse in another, it hardly makes sense to simply turn the dial—and remain confined to an echo chamber of recycled opinion. If Al Jazeera International hits the airwaves this fall, America would do well to tune in. Want to Know More? FOREIGN POLICY Letters are welcome and readers should address their comments to: fpletters@CarnegieEndowment.org.

JOURNALISTS PUT THEIR LIVES ON THE LINE IN IRAQ

[By Paul McGeough, April, 2006] Three years ago, on May 2, President George W Bush announced that “major combat operations in Iraq have ended”. The Americans are still there. Paul McGeough has probably spent more time in Iraq than any other Australian journalist, reporting on its shambolic uncertainties, from invasion to the brink of civil war. The media rules in Iraq are simple – there are none. Foreign reporters arrive with firmly held convictions about their right to cover the story. But such thoughts dissolve as their feet hit the tarmac at Baghdad Airport. The brutal nakedness and shambolic uncertainty of reporting Iraq-style was revealed with heart-stopping force in mid-March, when three high-profile Iraqi media figures were assassinated in a week. Muhsin Khudhair, editor of the magazine Alef Ba, was gunned down as he drove home from meeting colleagues to formulate a forlorn appeal for formal recognition of media neutrality in the conflict. Munsuf Abdallah al-Khalidi, a poetry presenter on a TV channel run by Iraq’s largest Sunni Arab political party, was murdered as he travelled to Mosul, in the north, to interview a group of poets. And when he came under attack as he left his home, Amjad Hameed became the 11th staff member of the US-funded and state-run al-Iraqiya TV channel to die in this conflict. Their deaths tipped the scales – more reporters are being murdered in Iraq now than are killed in the crossfire of battle. At the same time nothing had been heard of Jill Carroll, a 28-year-old correspondent for The Christian Science Monitor, who was abducted by armed gunmen as she left the office of a senior Sunni political figure on January 7. Then, after a painful 12 weeks for her colleagues and family, she was released on a Baghdad pavement on March 30. We knew enough from the survivors of insurgency captivity to appreciate Carroll’s grim predicament. And as hostage currency goes, she was high value – American and female. Yet Carroll said that while she had been confined to a small room she had been treated well and had not been threatened. While it was cold comfort for her colleagues and family desperate for her release, Carroll’s chances of survival – in purely statistical terms – were always high. Thirty-nine journalists have been kidnapped since the start of the conflict – 31 have been released; six were murdered; and two remain unaccounted for. Even among US media kidnap victims, the statistics were in her favour. Before her abduction, there had been seven – two died but the other five were released, mostly within 48 hours. But the 12 weeks in which the silence on her fate was broken only by three threats to kill her was devastating. Our Iraqi colleagues are still grieving after the death of Atwar Bahjat, one of the few women working on the frontline for any of the Arab media. She and two male colleagues were snatched while reporting on the aftermath of the February 22 bombing of the Shiites’ revered Golden Mosque. Burying the 26 year old, four mourners died when her funeral procession came under attack, making it another of the Iraqi flashpoints that Atwar had covered so doggedly and courageously for al-Arabiya TV. The death toll for journalists in Iraq is appalling – of the 67 who have died, 48 were Iraqi; six were women, 61 were men; half were murdered, the other half caught in crossfire; half worked for local outlets and half for foreign ones. After only three years, the toll in Iraq is about double that for the much longer 1990s Balkans and 1980s Philippines conflicts – each of which claimed 36 media deaths. It’s on a par with all media deaths in the last great global conflict, World War II (68); with Vietnam (66); with 30 years of ongoing conflict in Colombia (52); and with the 1990s Algerian civil war (58). In addition, 24 media support staff have been killed in the Iraq war – drivers and guards, interpreters and technicians. All except one were Iraqi. Liberated Baghdad is surreal. I’m writing late at night while, outside, 11 floors below my balcony at the Palestine Hotel, the rowdy voices of young Iraqi men playing street soccer are sliced and diced by the thump of passing choppers, the wail of police sirens, repeated gunfire and the odd thud of a mortar landing somewhere. Mad and dusty at the best of times, the city is consumed in an intimidating maze of blast walls. Made of reinforced concrete and standing about four metres high, they surround any building that is even vaguely important – often squeezing traffic to a single, snail’s-pace lane as they encroach on the bitumen. The walls have prompted a new Iraqi joke – the Americans can’t leave, because they’ll never find their way back out through their own concrete jungle. The Palestine, Sheraton and Al-Hamra hotels, where many foreign journalists lodge, have all been targeted by suicide bombers, rockets and mortars. The last time the Palestine was hit was five months ago. The lobby still looks as though all its decorative fittings were scraped out by a giant spatula; plastic sheeting covers gaping holes that once held plate-glass sheets; and there is a fight for rooms on the south side – best for satellite reception – because many lost their windows in a mighty triple-bomb blast that killed about 20 people last October. Major highways and back roads get snap-frozen at short notice for security reasons, often leaving stricken foreigners locked in dense traffic. Like sitting ducks, most of us try to avoid detection by shrouding our heads in a chequered keffiyeh and praying that the gridlock will break before an insurgency spotter can make a phone call ahead – to a gunman who could be stationed on a nearby rooftop or who might be cruising oncoming traffic that is on the move. Between them, the insurgency, militias and criminal gangs have reduced whole slabs of Baghdad to no-go zones for foreigners. For all that, members of the foreign press corps enjoy a luxury denied to ordinary Iraqis – choice. We are here to report the crisis, but they live it and unless they have exceptional wealth they have to suffer all the privations and risks from outside the blast walls – kidnappings, bombs and, what sticks most in their craw, utility services that are no better than in Saddam’s day. Iraqi security is a shambles. Wearing balaclavas to conceal their identity, the jittery men of the new Iraqi security forces career around, swinging from the sides of their new pick-ups and 4WDs. With weapons pointing every which way, they compete for road space with US military and privately contracted security convoys whose aggression towards Iraqis has to be the worst imaginable advertisements in the Middle East for Washington and democracy. As I drove to the Oil Ministry bunker in the eastern suburbs last week, an unmarked Iraqi police patrol sprayed bullets around the car in front of mine – it had got too close. Australian military security in Iraq is paranoid – they refused to give me a map to find the Aussie camp in the southern desert even though I was invited to cover the ANZAC Day Dawn Service there last year. The directions they did provide were the reverse of what they should have been. I had to surrender my driver as a hostage to a group of local factory guards before they would allow one of their colleagues to guide me to the Dawn Service in the desert. US security is paranoid and angry. The troops jump at shadows with the result that too many Iraqis have died simply for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. In the early days of the occupation, an American soldier threatened to shoot me as I crossed a road in Baghdad. By contrast, more often than not the British are calm and sensible – possibly because of their past role in this region… and their experience in Northern Ireland. Iraq is a dangerous new chapter in the history of war reporting. There have never been so many foreign reporters ‘behind enemy lines’ as there were in Baghdad during the US-led invasion in 2003. And there have been few such high-octane conflicts that have involved so many nations in such an ill-defined and multi-dimensional war. There is no conventional frontline between opposing forces – the battle space is all of Iraq. Media movement is like it was in the old Yugoslavia in the 1990s – but as the statistics reveal, it is far more dangerous for journalists than the Balkans ever was. In the days when I was reporting the wars in Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia you never knew when you might hit a checkpoint and, when you did, you dared not speak until you had established which side was manning it. In Iraq there are the same problems of language and education, politics and religion. He might be wearing a uniform, but there is no guarantee that the man to whom you produce your passport and press credentials is not a Sunni insurgent or a Shiite militiaman. Equally, there is no guarantee that he can read and often the mere fact that you have notebooks with indecipherable English and shorthand is proof-positive that you are a spy. Driving from Basra to Baghdad in mid-2005, I was pulled in at an isolated official checkpoint. About 20 Iraqi military and police crowded around. There was no chain of command – whoever yelled loudest was in charge. I was in the back of the car in full Arab dress. I was ordered out of the car, and back into the car, out of the car again and back into it. Finally a soldier who had been staring uncomprehendingly at my Irish passport reached a conclusion – “Syrian terrorist!” All drew their guns and I was dragged from the car and marched to the police station at a nearby intersection. My notebooks were deemed to be incriminating evidence that needed to be put under lock and key immediately. Then there was more yelling and much more shouting. In the din I noticed a British military convoy passing through the crossroads. The door back into the street was open, so I bolted. The British saved me – a couple of their senior officers and their interpreter came back with me, examined my documentation and then in a careful way that helped save face for the Iraqis, they vouched for me. Amidst the mayhem, you have to steel yourself to get out of the hotel on a daily basis – there is little point in being here if you can’t stay close to ordinary Iraqis. They, better than most foreign diplomats and military officers or any partisan Iraqi official, are the best windows into the story. Iraqis have an uncanny knack of reading their own mood and the psyche of their leaders. To understand the complexity of the insurgency, you also need to talk to its fighters. It’s as nerve-racking as it is frustrating, but if you are patient, meetings can be set up by intermediaries who, so far in my case, have proved trustworthy. There is much debate among journalists about going out personally armed – especially among our Iraqi colleagues. Some travel in souped-up and armour-plated BMWs or mini-APCs – I have opted for low-key travel in one of three beaten-up sedans that we use randomly. My fixer assures me that he has two weapons hidden in the car: a pistol and a Kalashnikov. I have never seen the AK47, but occasionally the butt of a German-made SIG Sauer can be seen shoved in his waistband. Venturing beyond Baghdad is almost impossible unless you accept all the limits of embedding with Coalition forces. In the capital, the pavement interviews and tea-house chat that used to be so much fun are out. But regularly I go to see people in their homes – provided they have a compound and we can ring ahead so that the gate is opened as we arrive, and then is closed immediately behind us. Other times I use the lobbies of the more protected hotels, and sometimes I use the homes or offices of friends. But the security crisis makes juggling interviews a fraught business. Often it calls for great caution and hurried diplomacy. Earlier this month, traffic delays meant that one person I was to interview arrived at the same pre-arranged location before another had left. Strangers to each other, they came face-to-face in the same room, sitting at either end of the same couch.On the left was the Sunni community leader deeply distressed about the abduction from his neighbourhood of dozens of people in what was a classic death-squad operation; and at the other end, a Shiite militia fighter who I have good reason to believe led the pre-dawn attack. Reporting from Iraq is narrowing. I remember in those heady days immediately after the invasion, sitting around speculating with other journalists if it would come to this. It was clear then that key Iraqis wanted the foreign press here, but we wondered if they would prefer that we were not still here when they came to carving up the country among themselves. Some newsrooms are reluctant to assign staff to Baghdad; and some that are willing have difficulty finding volunteers. Others are retreating to the regions – after Rory Carroll’s abduction in Baghdad in October, The Guardian does much of its reporting from the relative safety of Kurdistan, in the north. Staff members at AP have complained that “we’re not allowed to leave the city”; al-Jazeera has been run out of town; and some Western reporters have been taken to a police station to be lectured on the tone of their reports. Iraqi reporters have been detained without charge for months by US and Iraqi forces; and after a one-hour trial in Kurdistan, in liberated Iraq, one of our colleagues was jailed for 30 years for criticising the corruption of a local leader. The fear for journalists’ safety is very real and it is our Iraqi colleagues who are paying the highest price. Because they can move around with greater ease than any pale-faced Westerner, dozens of them have landed jobs in foreign bureaux, showing immense bravery as they tackle much of the riskier reporting – like Falluja and the immediate aftermath of dozens of suicide bombings. Hopefully, there will be a positive professional spin-off from this. In a country that had no independent press for 35 years of dictatorship, their exposure to the ways of journalism at some of the more revered mastheads in the democratic world is shaping them as the foundation of a new Iraqi media – even as it struggles daily against entrenched corruption. As the tragic consequences of a bungled occupation are revealed in the reports from Baghdad, some of the armchair critics have taken to deriding it all as anti-US fiction. They are welcome to come here. In their working lives the worst that might happen is that the froth on their cappuccino could blow away – here they would find that whole journalists get blown away. [Paul McGeough is writer-at-large and chief correspondent for The Sydney Morning Herald. In 2003 he was awarded the Walkley for journalistic leadership.]

US JOURNALIST BELIEVES WITHDRAWL FROM IRAQ IS BEST POLICY

[Foreign Policy, March 10, 2006] When President Bush speaks derisively about advocates of “cutting and running” from Iraq, he has in mind people like Nir Rosen, a journalist whose reporting has led him to the conclusion that U.S. withdrawal is the best policy. Rosen recently explained to FP why leaving Iraq is the best option, why Moktada al-Sadr is the only man who can keep Iraq together, and why Iran and the United States are natural allies. FOREIGN POLICY: What does the current stalemate over the appointment of a prime minister say about the political process in Iraq, and whether the tensions on the ground can be discussed and eased at a political level? Nir Rosen: I think it shows just once more that events inside the Green Zone have really no relation to what happens on the street in Iraq. They are bickering among themselves about how to create a government. But outside the Green Zone, they wouldn’t last a minute, not one of these leaders, they would immediately be killed. Events inside the zone have been a big theater: What it does show is that they can’t even cooperate at a political level. Meanwhile, their militias are already fighting each other, whether they are Kurdish, Shia, or Sunni. It shows there is no hope of any political rapprochement. Not that that would have an impact on the ground, because on the ground it is the militia leaders who are in charge. Every neighborhood has its own little army, every mosque has its own little army, that’s where the power lies in Iraq, with the guys with the guns on the street. FP: Is civil war in Iraq inevitable now? Is there a way out? NR: People have been asking me that a lot lately. There’s been a civil war in Iraq since 2004. It’s on a low scale, and nobody has really been paying attention because it’s happening at night, away from where the journalists are. The casualty numbers are still fairly low, but they’ve been steadily increasing. In the north, immediately after the war, the Kurds emptied a lot of areas of non-Kurds, and Arabs have “ethnically cleansed” some areas of Kurds. So it’s been reciprocal. In the south, soon after the war started, Shiites were taking over Sunni mosques. In Baghdad, Shiites and Sunnis attacked each other’s clerics and mosques starting in 2004. In Sunni-majority neighborhoods, they drove out Shiites with threats and killings. There were population exchanges basically. It was sort of like “Bosnia light.” Militias are getting stronger and stronger. Hatred is growing between Sunnis and Shiites. To Sunnis, all Shiites are Iranian. To Shiites, all Sunnis are Baathists, Saddamists or Wahabbis. Iraq is now not just in a civil war, it’s practically a regional war, because you have Iran strongly supporting the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution, and Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and individuals from Syria supporting the Sunnis because they’re terrified of a Shiite-dominated Iraq. And as the civil war in Iraq escalates, you’re going to find that the nation-state concept is sort of irrelevant. If a Sunni tribe is attacked in Iraq and they have relatives in Jordan, Syria, or Saudi Arabia, as many do, those tribal relatives are going to come in at a certain point, too, and it’s going to draw in the whole region. FP: Are these tribal and sectarian ties stronger than the Iraqi national identity? NR: This wasn’t the case in the beginning. I think the United States contributed to this. There certainly were grudges, Shiites had good cause for that, as they were the primary victims of Saddam. But in 2003, nobody used the words “Shiite” or “Sunni”, there was a very strong nationalist discourse. Sunnis and Shiites held joint prayers, and sectarian attacks were rare. [Abu Musab al] Zarqawi’s movement contributed a great deal, of course, because his ideology despises Shiites more than anything—even Jews or Christians, in fact. And U.S. policy alienated the Sunnis right from the beginning, dismissing the army and the Baathists for example, which disenfranchised the community and treated it as the enemy. And by apportioning seats on the interim Governing Council according to the faction—Kurdish, Sunni, and Shiite—we sort of enshrined sectarianism. And we made the Shiites the good guys, the Sunnis the bad guys, this is a process that Washington contributed to. And it’s going to get much worse. I think you’re looking at Mogadishu in 1991 or Beirut in 1982. Soon we will stop seeing 50 people dead every day, and start seeing thousands. My friends in Amria, the Sunni neighborhood, tell me that three bodies are found every morning lying there on the main street. FP: You favor a withdrawal of U.S. forces. Wouldn’t a withdrawal empower Islamist extremists and result in even greater bloodshed? NR: Islamic extremists took over the country on April 9, 2003. The U.S. military was present, but it wasn’t in control. The vacuum we created by dissolving the security forces immediately led to clerics and tribal leaders taking over—the most reactionary, conservative forces of Iraqi society. The country hasn’t recovered from that. The looting contributed as well, there was no Iraqi infrastructure left, there were only clerics controlling various neighborhoods, both Shia and Sunni. And one of the reasons why Washington resisted Iraqi calls for elections in the spring of 2003 was because it was afraid that clerics and tribal leaders would win the elections. In fact, they both took over in January 2005. So we basically had almost two years of destruction for nothing. At this point, U.S. forces perhaps control whatever military base they’re on, but when it comes to ruling Iraq, the clerics are in control. FP: In a recent article, you suggested that Moktada al-Sadr is the only man who can keep Iraq together. How? NR: I don’t think anyone can keep Iraq together at this point. But if you try to think of a leader who is respected by all sides, ironically, it’s Moktada, because his rhetoric is Iraqi nationalist and people identify him as an Arab, whereas they view the Supreme Council in Dawa as Iranian implants. Moktada, right from the beginning, held joint prayers and demonstrations with radical Sunnis, he helped them in their fight against U.S. forces. And radical Sunnis have helped Moktada fight U.S. forces in the south. So when I speak to insurgents, Moktada is the only leader they respect. His own men refer to the two intifadas they fought against the Americans in the spring and summer of 2004. His staunch anti-Americanism is actually what unites Sunnis and Shiites. But at this point, I don’t think anybody can save Iraq, but at least he is somebody who hopefully will be involved in bringing the tensions down at some point, though unfortunately his men have recently been involved in a lot of sectarian reprisals as well. FP: How will the Iraq war impact geopolitics in the long term? NR: I think we are going to see decades of hostility between the West and the Middle East now. Very well-trained fighters who have gained experience in Iraq can now go to Europe and elsewhere in the Middle East. There have been several attempts in Jordan recently. Just last week they arrested 2 Iraqis and one Libyan, with a lot of explosives attempting to bomb some civilian location. Likewise in Saudi Arabia, in Syria, you are going to see increased sectarianism. I think the Muslim Brotherhood will take over in Syria, and sectarianism is increasing even in Lebanon, where Sunni and Shiite hostility had not been so intense before. There were recently demonstrations where Sunnis where chanting for Zarqawi and threatening the Shiites of Hezbollah. So throughout the region you have a huge civil war. It’s looking bad everywhere. I’m not the first one to say this, but Iran is the big winner in all of this. The United States has no leverage over Iran at this point. If the United States were to strike Iran, Iran could simply support the Shiites in Iraq. And if the Iraqi Shiites start attacking U.S. and British forces en masse, it will make the Sunni insurgency look like child’s play. Since the war, radical Islam has strengthened in Iraq. Hamas won in Palestine, and the Muslim Brotherhood gained strength in Egypt. Throughout the region, political, radical Islam, which might have been a spent force until a few years ago, is only strengthening. This is blowback, just like in the 1980s when a generation of Arab jihadists went to Afghanistan and gained skills. We are now going to have a new generation of young fighters experienced in jihad from Iraq. They’re going to lead the fight for the next 20 years. When I was in recently in Pakistan, near the Afghan border, I bought a magazine dedicated to the heroes of Fallujah. I was in Mogadishu this summer, and there was actually a store named after Fallujah, and guys walking around wearing Fallujah T-shirts. Throughout the Muslim world, people actually believe that America is the enemy of Islam and even if this might not be true, they have Abu Ghraib and the destruction of Iraq to point to. We’ve also given reform and democracy a bad name. Suddenly, the dictatorships in the Arab world don’t look so bad, in comparison to Iraq, and people are more suspicious of change. FP: Christopher Hitchens has proposed a “Nixon goes to China” approach to Iran. What do you think of this idea? NR: I think that’s probably the first intelligent thing I’ve heard Hitchens say in the past five years. I think that’s very important. Had this happened earlier, perhaps Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would have not won the elections. The Iranians have been speaking about a dialogue of civilizations for a long time, and Washington has responded only with threats and enmity, really. I think increased business ties would certainly strengthen the U.S.-Iranian relations. I don’t think there’s any reason for the United States and Iran to be enemies, apart from the Iranian-Israeli hostility. I think they are natural allies. It’s about time Washington made an overture to Iran. We certainly don’t want to miss the boat and let the Europeans make inroads economically in Iran, a market the United States needs. The Iranian people have no inherent hostility toward the United States. I think such a move would work. [Nir Rosen is a fellow at the New America Foundation. His writing has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Harper’s, and The New Republic. His book on postwar Iraq, In the Belly of the Green Bird: The Triumph of the Martyrs in Iraq, will be published by Free Press in May 2006.] Read more articles from FOREIGN POLICY

"APOCALYPSE SOON" -- Former US Defense Secretary Robert McNamara Warns of US Nuclear Policy

By ROBERT McNAMARA, former US Secretary of Defense. [May, 2005] It is time—well past time, in my view—for the United States to cease its Cold War-style reliance on nuclear weapons as a foreign-policy tool. At the risk of appearing simplistic and provocative, I would characterize current U.S. nuclear weapons policy as immoral, illegal, militarily unnecessary, and dreadfully dangerous. The risk of an accidental or inadvertent nuclear launch is unacceptably high. Far from reducing these risks, the Bush administration has signalled that it is committed to keeping the U.S. nuclear arsenal as a mainstay of its military power—a commitment that is simultaneously eroding the international norms that have limited the spread of nuclear weapons and fissile materials for 50 years. Much of the current U.S. nuclear policy has been in place since before I was secretary of defense, and it has only grown more dangerous and diplomatically destructive in the intervening years. Today, the United States has deployed approximately 4,500 strategic, offensive nuclear warheads. Russia has roughly 3,800. The strategic forces of Britain, France, and China are considerably smaller, with 200–400 nuclear weapons in each state’s arsenal. The new nuclear states of Pakistan and India have fewer than 100 weapons each. North Korea now claims to have developed nuclear weapons, and U.S. intelligence agencies estimate that Pyongyang has enough fissile material for 2–8 bombs. How destructive are these weapons? The average U.S. warhead has a destructive power 20 times that of the Hiroshima bomb. Of the 8,000 active or operational U.S. warheads, 2,000 are on hair-trigger alert, ready to be launched on 15 minutes’ warning. How are these weapons to be used? The United States has never endorsed the policy of “no first use,” not during my seven years as secretary or since. We have been and remain prepared to initiate the use of nuclear weapons—by the decision of one person, the president—against either a nuclear or non-nuclear enemy whenever we believe it is in our interest to do so. For decades, U.S. nuclear forces have been sufficiently strong to absorb a first strike and then inflict “unacceptable” damage on an opponent. This has been and (so long as we face a nuclear-armed, potential adversary) must continue to be the foundation of our nuclear deterrent. In my time as Secretary of Defense, the commander of the U.S. Strategic Air Command (SAC) carried with him a secure telephone, no matter where he went, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. The telephone of the commander, whose headquarters were in Omaha, Nebraska, was linked to the underground command post of the North American Defense Command, deep inside Cheyenne Mountain, in Colorado, and to the U.S. president, wherever he happened to be. The president always had at hand nuclear release codes in the so-called football, a briefcase carried for the president at all times by a U.S. military officer. The SAC commander’s orders were to answer the telephone by no later than the end of the third ring. If it rang, and he was informed that a nuclear attack of enemy ballistic missiles appeared to be under way, he was allowed 2 to 3 minutes to decide whether the warning was valid (over the years, the United States has received many false warnings), and if so, how the United States should respond. He was then given approximately 10 minutes to determine what to recommend, to locate and advise the president, permit the president to discuss the situation with two or three close advisors (presumably the Secretary of Defense and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff), and to receive the president’s decision and pass it immediately, along with the codes, to the launch sites. The president essentially had two options: He could decide to ride out the attack and defer until later any decision to launch a retaliatory strike. Or, he could order an immediate retaliatory strike, from a menu of options, thereby launching U.S. weapons that were targeted on the opponent’s military-industrial assets. Our opponents in Moscow presumably had and have similar arrangements. The whole situation seems so bizarre as to be beyond belief. On any given day, as we go about our business, the president is prepared to make a decision within 20 minutes that could launch one of the most devastating weapons in the world. To declare war requires an act of congress, but to launch a nuclear holocaust requires 20 minutes’ deliberation by the president and his advisors. But that is what we have lived with for 40 years. With very few changes, this system remains largely intact, including the “football,” the president’s constant companion. I was able to change some of these dangerous policies and procedures. My colleagues and I started arms control talks; we installed safeguards to reduce the risk of unauthorized launches; we added options to the nuclear war plans so that the president did not have to choose between an all-or-nothing response, and we eliminated the vulnerable and provocative nuclear missiles in Turkey. I wish I had done more, but we were in the midst of the Cold War, and our options were limited. The United States and our NATO allies faced a strong Soviet and Warsaw Pact conventional threat. Many of the allies (and some in Washington as well) felt strongly that preserving the U.S. option of launching a first strike was necessary for the sake of keeping the Soviets at bay. What is shocking is that today, more than a decade after the end of the Cold War, the basic U.S. nuclear policy is unchanged. It has not adapted to the collapse of the Soviet Union. Plans and procedures have not been revised to make the United States or other countries less likely to push the button. At a minimum, we should remove all strategic nuclear weapons from “hair-trigger” alert, as others have recommended, including Gen. George Lee Butler, the last commander of SAC. That simple change would greatly reduce the risk of an accidental nuclear launch. It would also signal to other states that the United States is taking steps to end its reliance on nuclear weapons. We pledged to work in good faith toward the eventual elimination of nuclear arsenals when we negotiated the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) in 1968. In May, diplomats from more than 180 nations are meeting in New York City to review the NPT and assess whether members are living up to the agreement. The United States is focused, for understandable reasons, on persuading North Korea to rejoin the treaty and on negotiating deeper constraints on Iran’s nuclear ambitions. Those states must be convinced to keep the promises they made when they originally signed the NPT—that they would not build nuclear weapons in return for access to peaceful uses of nuclear energy. But the attention of many nations, including some potential new nuclear weapons states, is also on the United States. Keeping such large numbers of weapons, and maintaining them on hair-trigger alert, are potent signs that the United States is not seriously working toward the elimination of its arsenal and raises troubling questions as to why any other state should restrain its nuclear ambitions. A Preview of the Apocalypse The destructive power of nuclear weapons is well known, but given the United States’ continued reliance on them, it’s worth remembering the danger they present. A 2000 report by the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War describes the likely effects of a single 1 megaton weapon—dozens of which are contained in the Russian and U.S. inventories. At ground zero, the explosion creates a crater 300 feet deep and 1,200 feet in diameter. Within one second, the atmosphere itself ignites into a fireball more than a half-mile in diameter. The surface of the fireball radiates nearly three times the light and heat of a comparable area of the surface of the sun, extinguishing in seconds all life below and radiating outward at the speed of light, causing instantaneous severe burns to people within one to three miles. A blast wave of compressed air reaches a distance of three miles in about 12 seconds, flattening factories and commercial buildings. Debris carried by winds of 250 mph inflicts lethal injuries throughout the area. At least 50 percent of people in the area die immediately, prior to any injuries from radiation or the developing firestorm. Of course, our knowledge of these effects is not entirely hypothetical. Nuclear weapons, with roughly one seventieth of the power of the 1 megaton bomb just described, were twice used by the United States in August 1945. One atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. Around 80,000 people died immediately; approximately 200,000 died eventually. Later, a similar size bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. On Nov. 7, 1995, the mayor of Nagasaki recalled his memory of the attack in testimony to the International Court of Justice: “Nagasaki became a city of death where not even the sound of insects could be heard. After a while, countless men, women and children began to gather for a drink of water at the banks of nearby Urakami River, their hair and clothing scorched and their burnt skin hanging off in sheets like rags. Begging for help they died one after another in the water or in heaps on the banks. Four months after the atomic bombing, 74,000 people were dead, and 75,000 had suffered injuries, that is, two-thirds of the city population had fallen victim to this calamity that came upon Nagasaki like a preview of the Apocalypse.” Why did so many civilians have to die? Because the civilians, who made up nearly 100 percent of the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, were unfortunately “co-located” with Japanese military and industrial targets. Their annihilation, though not the objective of those dropping the bombs, was an inevitable result of the choice of those targets. It is worth noting that during the Cold War, the United States reportedly had dozens of nuclear warheads targeted on Moscow alone, because it contained so many military targets and so much “industrial capacity.” Presumably, the Soviets similarly targeted many U.S. cities. The statement that our nuclear weapons do not target populations per se was and remains totally misleading in the sense that the so-called collateral damage of large nuclear strikes would include tens of millions of innocent civilian dead. This in a nutshell is what nuclear weapons do: They indiscriminately blast, burn, and irradiate with a speed and finality that are almost incomprehensible. This is exactly what countries like the United States and Russia, with nuclear weapons on hair-trigger alert, continue to threaten every minute of every day in this new 21st century. No Way To Win I have worked on issues relating to U.S. and NATO nuclear strategy and war plans for more than 40 years. During that time, I have never seen a piece of paper that outlined a plan for the United States or NATO to initiate the use of nuclear weapons with any benefit for the United States or NATO. I have made this statement in front of audiences, including NATO defense ministers and senior military leaders, many times. No one has ever refuted it. To launch weapons against a nuclear-equipped opponent would be suicidal. To do so against a non-nuclear enemy would be militarily unnecessary, morally repugnant, and politically indefensible. I reached these conclusions very soon after becoming secretary of defense. Although I believe Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson shared my view, it was impossible for any of us to make such statements publicly because they were totally contrary to established NATO policy. After leaving the Defense Department, I became president of the World Bank. During my 13-year tenure, from 1968 to 1981, I was prohibited, as an employee of an international institution, from commenting publicly on issues of U.S. national security. After my retirement from the bank, I began to reflect on how I, with seven years’ experience as secretary of defense, might contribute to an understanding of the issues with which I began my public service career. At that time, much was being said and written regarding how the United States could, and why it should, be able to fight and win a nuclear war with the Soviets. This view implied, of course, that nuclear weapons did have military utility; that they could be used in battle with ultimate gain to whoever had the largest force or used them with the greatest acumen. Having studied these views, I decided to go public with some information that I knew would be controversial, but that I felt was needed to inject reality into these increasingly unreal discussions about the military utility of nuclear weapons. In articles and speeches, I criticized the fundamentally flawed assumption that nuclear weapons could be used in some limited way. There is no way to effectively contain a nuclear strike—to keep it from inflicting enormous destruction on civilian life and property, and there is no guarantee against unlimited escalation once the first nuclear strike occurs. We cannot avoid the serious and unacceptable risk of nuclear war until we recognize these facts and base our military plans and policies upon this recognition. I hold these views even more strongly today than I did when I first spoke out against the nuclear dangers our policies were creating. I know from direct experience that U.S. nuclear policy today creates unacceptable risks to other nations and to our own. What Castro Taught Us Among the costs of maintaining nuclear weapons is the risk—to me an unacceptable risk—of use of the weapons either by accident or as a result of misjudgment or miscalculation in times of crisis. The Cuban Missile Crisis demonstrated that the United States and the Soviet Union—and indeed the rest of the world—came within a hair’s breadth of nuclear disaster in October 1962. Indeed, according to former Soviet military leaders, at the height of the crisis, Soviet forces in Cuba possessed 162 nuclear warheads, including at least 90 tactical warheads. At about the same time, Cuban President Fidel Castro asked the Soviet ambassador to Cuba to send a cable to Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev stating that Castro urged him to counter a U.S. attack with a nuclear response. Clearly, there was a high risk that in the face of a U.S. attack, which many in the U.S. government were prepared to recommend to President Kennedy, the Soviet forces in Cuba would have decided to use their nuclear weapons rather than lose them. Only a few years ago did we learn that the four Soviet submarines trailing the U.S. Naval vessels near Cuba each carried torpedoes with nuclear warheads. Each of the sub commanders had the authority to launch his torpedoes. The situation was even more frightening because, as the lead commander recounted to me, the subs were out of communication with their Soviet bases, and they continued their patrols for four days after Khrushchev announced the withdrawal of the missiles from Cuba. A Dangerous Obsession On Nov. 13, 2001, President George W. Bush announced that he had told Russian President Vladimir Putin that the United States would reduce “operationally deployed nuclear warheads” from approximately 5,300 to a level between 1,700 and 2,200 over the next decade. This scaling back would approach the 1,500 to 2,200 range that Putin had proposed for Russia. However, the Bush administration’s Nuclear Posture Review, mandated by the U.S. Congress and issued in January 2002, presents quite a different story. It assumes that strategic offensive nuclear weapons in much larger numbers than 1,700 to 2,200 will be part of U.S. military forces for the next several decades. Although the number of deployed warheads will be reduced to 3,800 in 2007 and to between 1,700 and 2,200 by 2012, the warheads and many of the launch vehicles taken off deployment will be maintained in a “responsive” reserve from which they could be moved back to the operationally deployed force. The Nuclear Posture Review received little attention from the media. But its emphasis on strategic offensive nuclear weapons deserves vigorous public scrutiny. Although any proposed reduction is welcome, it is doubtful that survivors—if there were any—of an exchange of 3,200 warheads (the U.S. and Russian numbers projected for 2012), with a destructive power approximately 65,000 times that of the Hiroshima bomb, could detect a difference between the effects of such an exchange and one that would result from the launch of the current U.S. and Russian forces totalling about 12,000 warheads. In addition to projecting the deployment of large numbers of strategic nuclear weapons far into the future, the Bush administration is planning an extensive and expensive series of programs to sustain and modernize the existing nuclear force and to begin studies for new launch vehicles, as well as new warheads for all of the launch platforms. Some members of the administration have called for new nuclear weapons that could be used as bunker busters against underground shelters (such as the shelters Saddam Hussein used in Baghdad). New production facilities for fissile materials would need to be built to support the expanded force. The plans provide for integrating a national ballistic missile defense into the new triad of offensive weapons to enhance the nation’s ability to use its “power projection forces” by improving our ability to counterattack an enemy. The Bush administration also announced that it has no intention to ask congress to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), and, though no decision to test has been made, the administration has ordered the national laboratories to begin research on new nuclear weapons designs and to prepare the underground test sites in Nevada for nuclear tests if necessary in the future. Clearly, the Bush administration assumes that nuclear weapons will be part of U.S. military forces for at least the next several decades. A Moment of Decision We are at a critical moment in human history—perhaps not as dramatic as that of the Cuban Missile Crisis, but a moment no less crucial. Neither the Bush administration, the congress, the American people, nor the people of other nations have debated the merits of alternative, long-range nuclear weapons policies for their countries or the world. They have not examined the military utility of the weapons; the risk of inadvertent or accidental use; the moral and legal considerations relating to the use or threat of use of the weapons; or the impact of current policies on proliferation. Such debates are long overdue. If they are held, I believe they will conclude, as have I and an increasing number of senior military leaders, politicians, and civilian security experts: We must move promptly toward the elimination—or near elimination—of all nuclear weapons. For many, there is a strong temptation to cling to the strategies of the past 40 years. But to do so would be a serious mistake leading to unacceptable risks for all nations. [Robert S. McNamara was U.S. Secretary of Defense from 1961 to 1968 and President of the World Bank from 1968 to 1981.]

European smoke stack spews pollution into the atmosphere.

URBAN GREENIES OUT OF TOUCH WITH NATURE, SAYS PROFESSOR

By IAN PLIMER, Professor of Geology at the University of Melbourne, February 16, 2005 I write from the Arkaroola Wilderness Resort in the far north Flinders Ranges of South Australia where I do geological field work in this mountainous and unforgiving wilderness in summer. This is a privilege. Field work is an attempt to understand nature and this intimacy with nature stimulates questioning. Science is based on dominant paradigms that are open to change at any time. Our understanding of nature requires a depth and breadth of knowledge, a healthy uncertainty, a willingness to change and a measure of awe provoked by the complexity of nature. Nature changes rapidly and continues to surprise. Climate, sea level, the atmosphere, life, landscapes and temperature all change rapidly by many mechanisms for a diversity of reasons. For millions of years hominids and other organisms have survived, adapted and become extinct as a result of these changes. Nature is not mysterious; it is quantifiable. Science is married to evidence and divorced from value judgement. We scientists argue about the data, which may be from measurement, calculation, observation or experiment. The explanation of data -- a theory -- is the neatest way of explaining such data and this, too, provokes healthy argument. New data or a re-evaluation of old data commonly results in the abandonment of a treasured popular paradigm. This is the methodology of science. Herein lies the problem with city-based greens and religious fundamentalists such as creationists. The idol for worship is a dogmatic ideology enshrined in value judgements that allows no change despite scientific data to the contrary. Nature is made the mystery by greens in isolation from integrated interdisciplinary scientific knowledge, somewhat contrary to traditional Christian views where the mystery is the supernatural. It is for this reason that I argue that environmental groups are a modern urban religion, albeit terribly flawed. From Paul Tillich's theological perspective, the change from the dominant paradigm to dogma is a shift from preliminary to ultimate concerns resulting in evil. Creationists have not evolved from the science and inexact literalist contradictory theology of the mid-17th century when the popular scientific paradigm was that the planet was 6,000 years old and a mythical great flood shaped the planet's surface, deposited fossiliferous sediments and killed sinners. The greens can not accept that the good old days were not good old days, that natural changes are far greater than even their worst case human-induced doomsday scenario and that we now live in a society blessed with saviours such as science, technology and industry. Our greens bathe in the benefits of an industrial society yet, for reasons of nefarious politics, hypocrisy and ignorance, decide to be both within and without our industrial society. Many city folk have lost contact with nature and this can be deeply disturbing. Such disconnection produces a romantic yearning for that which never existed, a yearning to be at one with nature despite a lack of understanding of nature and a yearning to do something, whatever something might be. This disconnection produces irrationality, contradictions and the creation of green fundamentalism as the new religion of urban environmentalists. Disconnection of city people from nature has only added to the frustration of depoliticised rural people, thereby creating political instability. In the cities, this disconnection is exacerbated by the lack of connection between seasons and seasonal foods or killing and meat protein and an uncompromising dogma about those outside cities who take risks to produce the energy, water, food and mineral resources we so voraciously consume. We watch asinine survival programs unaware that there are 20 film support crew out of shot. Such programs appeal to our primitive instincts yet show how disconnected from nature we really have become. We plant gardens comprising water-hungry northern European vegetation, consume more and more water, don't build new dams and don't collect roof rainwater. We buy a four-wheel-drive to use on highways in the wilderness or watch concocted nature programs on television. We feel good to see large green areas on maps called national parks and then promptly forget about these areas. The ancient monastics were correct. An extended time in a desert wilderness allows the discarding of trivialities, an interaction and connection with nature and an understanding of our place in the world. And it is not really a very important place after all.

EMINENT ENVIRONMENTALIST GIVES GRAVE WARNING ABOUT GREENHOUSE GAS EFFECT

[Interview on ABC Lateline, October 18, 2004] TONY JONES: Professor Lovelock is convinced that without a radical change in power generation the planet will reach a tipping point within 40 years. At that stage he says the process of global warming will be irreversible. Many scientists disagree with his doomsday thesis. But, as you've heard, his nuclear power solution is gathering some powerful adherents. TONY JONES: What do you say to those of your fellow scientists who still maintain that warnings of global warming are exaggerated or that the science behind them is flawed and inconclusive? JAMES LOVELOCK SCIENTIST & ENVIRONMENTALIST: I have to tell them that they're unfortunately almost certainly wrong. TONY JONES: Yes, indeed. If they were to argue, to toss with you, though, what would you say? JAMES LOVELOCK: I would say, "Look at the evidence that's coming in from the Earth, "particularly in the last year or so." Two or three things stick out in my mind. “First was the summer in Europe of 2003 when over 20,000 people died, mainly in northern Europe, not in the south. In France, southern Germany, Spain and so on, and this was an unprecedented event. It was no mere heat wave. A meteorologist had calculated that the odds against it being just a heatwave were 300,000:1. Now, as a scientist, I take such odds as meaning it's almost certain. TONY JONES: Why do you think, though, there is such a difference of opinion? I know that perhaps the largest body of science is still behind global warming, but you still get some significant signs that some governments like to bring up as an excuse, if you like, for what they continue to do with their industry. People like Professor William Gray from the University of Colorado who says the small temperature increases in the past 25 years are likely to be due to natural changes that have re-occurred in the planet for aeons. JAMES LOVELOCK: Well, he would have been right 25 years ago, but things have changed. Global warming is accelerating much as we predicted some time back, and the models made by good climate centres like the Hedley Centre here in Britain and the Potsdam Centre in Germany and I think one or two in America, particularly I think of the National Centre for Atmospheric Research in Boulder all tend to confirm that global warming is accelerating and likely to continue to accelerate and we approach a rather dangerous point in the near future. TONY JONES: These are computer models? JAMES LOVELOCK: Those are computer models, but they tend to underestimate what is actually happening in the world itself. TONY JONES: There are, of course, sceptics once again deny that there is enough power in even the most powerful super computers to even come close to approximating what the actual climate is doing because it's so much more complex. JAMES LOVELOCK: It would be truer to say that weather is exceedingly complex. Indeed, it's chaotic, but climate is not so complex and it's perfectly possible to model climate change with a reasonable degree of confidence. TONY JONES:Can you tell us a little bit about your own work? There is no question that your own research has been absolutely central to influencing this debate. From your work, what is the anticipated rise in global temperature? What do you think is going to happen over the next decade, for example? JAMES LOVELOCK: Well, I tend to think that those modellers who suggest that the global temperatures may rise 6 degrees Celsius or more are the ones to watch. I think they're either right or they're underestimating. Now, to put that into perspective, the change of temperature between the last Ice Age 12,000 years ago and now was about 3.5 degrees Celsius so we're talking about a change at least twice as great as the change from the Ice Age until now. Now, that's horrendous when you think of it. I mean, 12,000 years ago, the sea level was 120m lower than it is now and there were glaciers down as far as London. It was a totally different world and it has all changed. Well, the change we're going to see as a result of global warming is of that order or greater. TONY JONES: How quickly could it be possible to see a change in temperatures of 6 degrees? What time scale are we talking about? JAMES LOVELOCK: Well, they're talking about, by the end of this century, a rising temperature as large as that may occur. Now, the consequences of that rise, like the melting of the ice caps, will not immediately take place. It will take hundreds of years for that to happen, but once it rises not 6, but merely 2.7 to 3 degrees, the Earth is committed to continue warming and the ice caps will then begin to melt. TONY JONES: I think that's what is known as the tipping point, isn't it? JAMES LOVELOCK: That's right. TONY JONES: And one of the fears is when global ocean temperatures reach a certain point, there is no turning back. JAMES LOVELOCK: Exactly, and we're not far off that tipping point. This is really the crunch of it all. The estimates are somewhere between a CO2 level of 400 and 600 parts per million we cross the tipping point. Well, we're 380 now and it's rising at two points a year, so it's not long before we reach that tipping point. TONY JONES:Professor Lovelock, is there any kind of consensus among environmental scientists now that that is the point we're headed towards? JAMES LOVELOCK: It's difficult for me to answer that one because I tend to work as a solo scientist. I meet the people in the climate community, but not often enough to give you a firm idea about a consensus. All I can say is that the climatologists in this country and quite a few in Europe are agreed in this way. I think in America they tend to disagree more. TONY JONES: Your own work is concentrated on sea algae that's instrumental, as you say, in the formation of cumulus clouds above the sea. What is the significance of what's happening there? JAMES LOVELOCK: It's very significant. It's really quite simple. You don't need any complexity. As the sea grows warmer, and there it is growing warmer, there is no doubt about that -- measurements show it -- so does the top layer tends to stabilise. And when that happens, it's difficult for nutrients that exist in the waters below to mix up in it. So the algae, the phytoplankton, begin to die from a lack of food. As a result, the whole ocean ecosystem gets less and less and less. Now, two things happen then. If there are less algae, there will be less pumping down of the carbon dioxide because they need it to go. And there is less emission of the gas that helps to produce clouds above the oceans. The clouds reflect the sunlight back to space and act as cooling agents. So as the Earth warms, the algae are being driven closer and closer to the poles and the tropics become a desert. TONY JONES: What effect is that having on the great belts of ocean currents which actually drive so much of our climate at the moment? JAMES LOVELOCK: I don't think anybody is quite sure about it. Most modellers feel that the north Atlantic drift, what we call the Gulf Stream may collapse and start flowing, but nobody has agreed as to whether that would produce disastrous cooling in northern Europe, even though the rest of the world is fine, or whether it will do very little. We will have to wait and see because it's almost certain to happen. TONY JONES: James Lovelock, the critical question is, right now do you believe we're in a situation where this is actually reversible. JAMES LOVELOCK: We are now. This is the whole crux of it. This is why I keep advocating governments to use nuclear powers to kind of bandage, to produce energy without putting CO2 in the air while they find better ways of doing it. I admit that nuclear has a few dangers, but they are trivial compared with the dangers of just letting global warming happen. I don't think people understand. If we get this 6 degree Celsius rise of temperature by the end of the century, we're talking about billions of deaths. TONY JONES: How much time do we buy by taking the nuclear power option and how widespread would it have to be to make a genuine difference in the world? JAMES LOVELOCK:Well, to answer the second part first, it would have to be quite widespread. Most governments would have to weigh in towards getting 20 per cent to 50 per cent of their power from that source. I never see it as the only source, but we have very little time to do it in. It usually takes a long time to set up a nuclear power station because there are so many hearings and objections to putting it up. I think there would have to be Draconian and stop that and put that up straightaway and they could probably do it in five years. The French reckon that's how long it takes. TONY JONES: Your arguments seem to have won over at least one world leader. Tony Blair is saying Britain may need to build an entire new generation of power stations in order to defeat the threat from global warming, but if you're right, all world leaders are going to have to start taking that decision. JAMES LOVELOCK: I think so, but it's a puzzle to me. The French are not in the least bothered about it and they're actually going to increase their already heavy dependence on nuclear power. Lots of countries are doing it. It's just Britain and Germany that seem to be afraid of tackling it. TONY JONES: One of the problems, of course, with the nuclear power solution is that most environmentalists appear to hate it. How can you possibly get this message across to the green movement around the world which bitterly opposes nuclear power stations? JAMES LOVELOCK: Well, I am a green and one of the original greens, and I've been advocating it for years, and they will listen to me, but they don't act. And I think they don't act because the green movement is to an extent, political, and it depends on the perception of its supporters, and it's not so much the leaders of the green movement, I think that have to be persuaded, but the public at large, and this is where the media comes in. I think they could do a good job on this. I mean, for example, whenever nuclear waste is talked about, people start rabbiting on how it will destroy the whole biosphere. This is absolute nonsense. It's a tiny quantity, a small lump of stuff. Nobody ever mentions that the yearly output of carbon dioxide would fill an area a thousand miles wide and 10m high. It will cover the whole of the British Isles and part of Europe in a blanket of CO2 10m high. That's the amount we put out of coal waste, if you like and oil waste every year. TONY JONES: What do you say then to 24 scientists who believe there are potential new technologies where you can actually pump the CO2 back underground and hold it and store it underground? JAMES LOVELOCK: I think it is a splendid idea. The problem is all of those are at the early development stage and so are all of the renewables, whereas nuclear is standing there ready. It has had 40 or 50 years of trial. It is now well engineered and quite safe and they could use it straightaway. All these other things would take 30 to 50 years to develop to the point where they were global supplying energy on a reasonable scale. That's what I feel. TONY JONES: What do you think will be necessary to achieve a breakthrough on this point to get world leaders to understand that you may be right and the threat is to the existence of the world, when so many of them are simply refusing to do so? JAMES LOVELOCK Well, I'm sorry to have to answer that by saying that the world itself will tell them. The rate at which nasty events are happening is accelerating and it won't be long before the public are starting to say, "My God, we must do something about this." TONY JONES: Now, professor, it was you that came up with the Gaia theory of the world. What happens to Gaia? What happens to the world itself as opposed to the human population, I suppose. If this process just continues, will the world correct itself at some point? JAMES LOVELOCK: It will, but its time scale is much longer than ours. If we just, you know, go for broke, business as usual, it will take thousands of years for the system to get back to where it's at before we started. It will not matter a damn to Gaia. It suffered far worse things in its 3.5 billion years of existence and what we're doing is bad mainly for us and mainly for civilisation because that's the most fragile thing. I think no amount of change will kill off people altogether. There will always be breeding pairs of humans around, but civilisation is much more fragile. What worries me is I don't want to go back to another Stone Age and start all over again. TONY JONES: You have been in this game, if I can put it as crudely as that, for a very long time. You have been making these warnings for a very long time. Now you say we're reaching the stage where it's getting desperate. Do you despair that nothing will happen? JAMES LOVELOCK: I don't despair ever. It's not my nature to despair, and I might add that in the past I've tended to be much more on the sceptic side than on the side of the doom mongerers, but this time I really do feel it is deadly serious and we have very little time to do anything about it. That's the main message. I think despair is the wrong attitude altogether. One way to look at it is we've chosen to go to war with the Earth itself. And the Earth, Gaia, is a powerful enemy, much more powerful than we are.