With the Iraqi people free to speak for the first time since Saddam took power in 1979, there also will be dramatic and horrific tales of his human-rights crimes.
 
    Already we know about the specific exploits of his cousin, Ali Hassan al-Majid -- "Chemical Ali" to his friends -- who "pacified" the Kurds in the north and the Shia in the south, and his sadistically perverted sons. A former top U.N. human-rights official says Saddam's brutality is so grave that it has "few parallels" since World War II, drawing comparisons to Hitler and Stalin.
 
    Former CIA and Clinton national security aid Ken Pollack, in his influential book "The Threatening Storm" vividly describes the scope of these horrors: "This is a regime that will gouge out the eyes of children to force confessions from their parents and grandparents. This is a regime that will crush all the bones in the feet of a two-year-old girl to force her mother to divulge her father's whereabouts. This is a regime that will hold a nursing baby at arm's length from its mother and allow the child to starve to death to force the mother to confess. This is a regime that will slowly lower its victims into huge vats of acid, either to break their will or simply as a means of execution.

This is a regime that applies electric shocks to the bodies of its victims, particularly their genitals, with great creativity. This is a regime that in 2000 decreed that the crime of criticizing the regime (which can be as harmless as suggesting that Saddam's clothing does not match) would be punished by cutting out the offender's tongue."
 
    Yes, his monstrous acts are no secret, but as victims put a face on gruesome crimes it will shock many. Beth Ann Toupin, the Iraqi expert at Amnesty International, suggests that while many of the atrocities against the Kurds have been publicized, the comparable carnage of the Shias will emerge in the weeks and months after regime replacement. She notes one tactic that distinguishes Saddam from many other brutal regimes: the pervasive pattern of torturing entire families, including small children. (Amnesty International has been chronicling these abuses for decades, but Ms. Toupin notes that "the United States government cares about these human-rights violations is a relatively new phenomenon." )
 
 

    Obama is the most liberal -- let me say definitively the most extremely liberal candidate -- to run for the Senate in Illinois history. If he were to go to the Senate, he would be the most liberal senator in that body.
 
    Now, as liberal as Kerry is, he voted for the war in Iraq; Obama would not have. Moreover, once the troops got to Iraq, Obama would not have supported the $87 billion the president requested for reconstruction of Iraq and Afghanistan, which also supported the troops there. Kerry says he would have supported it if it were accompanied by a tax hike to pay for the $87 billion. Obama's position has been a flat no -- and once again is to the left of Kerry. In opposing the funding for troops, Obama was the only candidate in the Illinois Democratic field (an extremely liberal field) to take the position.

Underscoring the extremism of his position: Even Wisconsin's Russ Feingold and Illinois' Dick Durbin, severe critics of the war, voted for this troop assistance.
 
    He has stated flatly that the war on terrorism is not his immediate priority. When the Sun-Times asked what his top priority is, he responded ''health care.'' (GOP nominee Jack Ryan said it is the war on terrorism.)
 
    An Obama win will be seen as an affirmation by voters of Illinois -- ranking with the election in Spain -- that the war is wrong and we should pull out, a pretext of radical change in the nation's anti-terrorism course.
 
    Obama's victory would signify abandonment of our troops as with Vietnam, and write ''failure'' to all that has gone before.

    An American victory over Hussein will vastly improve the lives of ordinary citizens.
 
    That is true even if we fall short of constructing a truly democratic Iraq. The numbers Hussein has killed are gargantuan, in the hundreds of thousands. I do not understand how peace activists see the continuation of this cruel dictatorship as a true gain for human rights. They simply ignore the true character of the Baath regime, which grew out of Arab contacts with the Nazis and, for good measure, added many Stalinist elements.
 
    The number of humans that Saddam has imprisoned, tortured, raped and killed is so large that it is hard to comprehend.

So let me give two concrete examples, both from testimony to a British human-rights group chaired by a member of Parliament, Ann Clwyd.
 
    Iraqis testified that women have been hung by their hair and raped while their families were forced to watch. Others described a giant machine designed to shred plastic but used to shred people. Let me repeat: shred living people. Hussein's younger son and heir apparent, Qusai, personally supervised as human beings were dropped into the machine, sometimes feet first, sometimes head first, and died with blood-curdling screams. Mind you, this regime will keep torturing its people for decades to come unless it is removed by force.

    When I caught him [Kerry] on the stump in New Hampshire, he was still using his line about how, instead of building a ''legitimate coalition,'' Bush ''built a fraudulent coalition.''
 
    ''Fraudulent''? Kerry makes much of his rapport with veterans, but I'd love to see him tell the brave British, Australian and Polish troops who helped liberate the Iraqi people that their participation was ''fraudulent,'' just as I'd love to see Maureen Dowd, who dismisses the coalition as ''a gaggle of poodles and lackeys,'' tell Britain's Desert Rats or the big beefy Fijians escorting Iraqi currency exchange convoys that they're ''poodles.'' Indeed, I'd gladly fly Kerry and Dowd first-class to Iraq and put them up in the best hotel in Basra (separate rooms, I hasten to add) just for the privilege.

The reaction of these allies might even startle Kerry's features from their present allegedly Botoxicated immobility.
 
    But just to make it simple: The G-7 comprises the world's major industrial democracies. Aside from America, there are six other countries. Three -- the United Kingdom, Italy and Japan -- have troops in Iraq. Three -- France, Germany and Canada -- do not. So a majority of G-7 nations are members of this ''fraudulent coalition.'' Eleven of the 19 NATO members have contributed troops to the ''fraudulent coalition.'' Thirteen of the 25 members of the newly enlarged European Union have forces serving in the ''fraudulent coalition.''

    PARIS--The warriors of France were out in full force last night.
 
    Their field of battle was the perimeter around the United States Embassy in the heart of Paris. Their arms were water cannons, nightsticks and tear gas. Their foe was the French peace movement.
 
    Masked under black and red banners--the colors of anarchism and socialism--as well as the obligatory Palestinian flags, this vast gathering joins French President Jacques Chirac, a conservative nationalist, in opposing U.S. action in Iraq. But in little else.
 
    It is a coalition of extreme leftists willfully in denial of the truths of history and Parisian students ignorant of history altogether.
 
    As implausible as it seems to anyone conversant with Saddam Hussein's crimes against his countrymen and his neighbors, the Parisian marchers would genuinely prefer more brutal dictatorship for Iraq than American-led change. They are true believers.
 
    Mr. Chirac, by contrast, is a consummate cynic who believes in nothing but politics.
 
    As the morning Parisian daily, Le Figaro, told its readers approvingly: Mr. Chirac had three reasons for his long diplomatic campaign against the United States. All of them had to do with enhancing French power. None of them had to do with the welfare of the Iraqis or peace in the Middle east.
 
    First, President Chirac wants to lessen American influence in the world--because it now dwarfs the old great powers like his. Timothy Garton Ash, another opponent of the war, said nearly the same thing in Thursday's British daily, the Guardian.

    "Jacques Chirac believes that it's unhealthy for any single country to have so much power, but it's particularly dangerous if that country happens to be America [rather than shall we say, France].''
 
    Secondly, Le Figaro says, Mr. Chirac is trying to support the development of a distinctly European voice in world affairs. The end of the Cold War confrontation between the Soviet bloc and the West was supposed to create--according to the French and Germans--a new world of many powers.
 
    But it turns out that was just one last illusion of that long dangerous period.
 
    When genocidal war returned to Europe in the appalling disintegration of Yugoslavia, there was no power there to restore humanity. Only the United States had the will and the might to end ethnic cleansing in the heart of the old world.
 
    And besides, the states newly freed from Soviet enslavement want nothing of Mr. Chirac's European pole of influence. They have overwhelmingly backed the United States. Mr. Chirac's most enthusiastic supporters are Russia and China, the victors of Chechnya and Tibet, respectively.
 
    Britain, anxious not to be drowned in a Europe dominated by French bureaucracy and German money, has opted for an Anglo brotherhood.
 
    Thirdly, Le Figaro notes, President Chirac has sought to elevate the Security Council of the UN into a sort of steering committee for global affairs.

    Nowhere in the world, aside from certain occupied villages of the Ivory Coast, does France exercise more power than in the UN offices in New York. As one of five permanent members of the Security Council with a veto against all action, France is in a position to determine at least what will not happen under the aegis of the UN.
 
    This legalistic notion of international right and wrong allowed the French foreign minister Thursday to look at the assault on Iraq by America, Britain and Australia--with the support of more than 40 other nations--and say that this is an operation "without any legitimacy.''
 
    UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan abets this epic silliness with comments like the one he made earlier this week: "It is a sad day for the UN and the international community.''
 
    This presumes there is some genuine community of interest that joins the North Koreans and Iraqis with Americans and the British.

Mr. Annan would piously say that world peace or the welfare of children bind us universally. But a mere glance of how the North Koreans and Iraqis treat their subjects shows how preposterous that thought is.
 
    The truth is there is no such thing as an international community. It is a polite fiction that is for those who dream of the perfectibility of man a beautiful vision.
 
    But today there are just nations and their interests. President Bush is pursuing the security concerns of his nation. President Chirac is trying to advance the international influence of his.
 
    The difference is the American president is seeking to unseat a murderous dictator who has sinned against every standard of human decency. President Chirac has been seeking to keep him safe to sin again.
 
John Cruickshank is vice president of editorial of the Chicago Sun-Times.

    France has persistently undermined sanctions and the effort to disarm Saddam and bring him into compliance with his own commitments by means short of war. "Politics is about interests. Politics is not about morals," Iraq's U.N. ambassador explained to the Washington Post a year ago. "If the French and others will take a positive position in the Security Council, certainly they will get a benefit. This is the Iraqi policy."
 
    Thus the huge Majnoun and Nahr Umr fields were reserved for TotalFinaElf, partly owned by the French government. Not even Jacques Chirac can pretend that such concessions weren't France's reward for acquiescing in Iraq's diligent strategy to escape sanctions and resume its pursuit of exotic weapons.

    The drama of recent weeks is a visible coda to the drama of the past 12 years, in which the U.S. and Britain were alone in trying to make Saddam obey the U.N. resolutions and peace terms his regime agreed to. All the while Saddam was encouraged to hold out by countries that made it clear that they would readily support a waiving of sanctions and anything else Saddam wanted in return for oil contracts and other financial benefits.

    LONDON -- The outcome of the Azores summit this weekend foreshadows a new era in geopolitics. It reminds us of the old wartime meetings between Roosevelt and Churchill in which the two leaders planned the next phase of the war against Hitler. As President Bush left the meeting assured of a French veto of the resolution, the world finally moved on from the stalemate of the past two weeks at the U.N.
 
    We shall see much more of this kind of diplomacy in the future, in which deals are struck on a bilateral or trilateral basis to suit the needs of the moment. Roosevelt and Churchill's meetings were often attended by one or more government heads, whose presence was deemed relevant to the subjects discussed.
 
    At the heart of the new diplomacy will be, of course, what Charles De Gaulle then (and Jacques Chirac now) bitterly called "Les Anglo-Saxons" -- America and Britain, whose common culture and attachments to freedom and democracy make them not just allies, but "family." Building on this sure foundation, the U.S., as the sole superpower, will make its arrangements with other states on an ad hoc basis rather than through international organizations.
 
    We have to face the ugly fact: Internationalism -- the principle of collective security and the attempt to regulate the world through representative bodies -- has been dealt a vicious blow by Mr. Chirac's bid to present himself as a world statesman, whatever the cost to the world. France is a second-rate power militarily. But because of its geographic position at the center of Western Europe and its nominal possession of nuclear weapons, which ensures its permanent place on the U.N. Security Council, it wields considerable negative and destructive power.

On this occasion, it has exercised such power to the full, and the consequences are likely to be permanent.
 
    The first body Mr. Chirac has damaged, perhaps fatally, is the U.N. The old Security Council system will have to go: It is half a century old and no longer represents reality because three of the world's most important entities -- Japan, Germany and India -- have no permanent place on it. More important, however, the United States, whose support for the U.N. is essential to its continuance, has lost confidence in its usefulness in moments of real crisis, as the Azores summit shows. The Security Council will now be marginalized and important business will be transacted elsewhere. Indeed, it may prove difficult to keep the U.S. within the organization at all.
 
    Mr. Chirac's heavy hand has also fallen on the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. By trying to manipulate NATO against the U.S., its co-founder, principal member and chief supplier of firepower, France made a fundamental mistake. Both the U.N. and NATO were originally created precisely to keep the U.S. committed to collective security and the defense of Europe, and to avoid a U.S. return to isolationism. America's victory in the Cold War meant that there was no longer a case for keeping a large proportion of its armed forces in Western Europe.
 
    It now makes much more sense, militarily and geographically, to base America's rapid-reaction force for the European theater in reliable Britain, and on this basis construct practical bilateral deals with all the countries of Central and Eastern Europe, whose freedom and democracy depend on U.S. goodwill. In this new system, France will become irrelevant. We will see then what Germany will do.

My guess is that it will come to its senses and scuttle quickly under the U.S. umbrella.
 
    The third organization Mr. Chirac has damaged is the European Union. Although under French pressure the EU has been scrambling toward monetary and constitutional union, the Iraq crisis -- which has split the EU into a dozen fragments -- shows that it has made no progress at all toward a common foreign policy. The only country that joined the Franco-German axis is Belgium. Two of the five major members, Italy and Spain, sided with the U.K., as have most of the newcomers and aspirant members -- thereby earning the East Europeans personal abuse from Mr. Chirac. This is the man who likes to be called "the first gentleman of Europe."
 
    The crisis demonstrated plainly enough that the EU's armed forces do not exist and, on present showing, never will. Mr. Chirac could not hold off the Anglo-American option of force because he could not make a significant contribution. Anglo-American commanders have learned, from their experience in the Balkans, not to trust the French forces. So, having no "war card" to play, Mr. Chirac played the "peace card," the only one he possessed. As a result, a dozen or more EU members, or would-be members, are now rethinking their commitment to the EU.

The U.K. is wondering, for instance, whether its future is with continental Europe. Once again, for the British, the Channel has proved wider than the Atlantic.
 
    Mr. Bush has a busy time ahead. Not only must he and Mr. Blair devise a workable post-war settlement for Iraq (and plan the next move against terrorist states like North Korea and Iran), but America has to construct a vision of a safe world which can get by without NATO and with a marginalized U.N. It is high time that America began the "agonizing reappraisal" that the former U.S. secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, once threatened.
 
    In it, America must think hard whether it can offer a viable alternative to European states which no longer wish to commit themselves to a European Union dominated by a selfish and irresponsible France. Today, in 2003, I see no reason why this reappraisal should be agonizing. On the contrary, it is welcome and overdue, and can be constructive and exhilarating.
 
Mr. Johnson's latest book, "Napoleon," was published last year in the Penguin Lives series.

    Well, this whole quagmire seems to be getting worse, eh? I see the Bush junta has now been reduced to staging fake scenes of supposed jubilation on the alleged streets of what purports to be Baghdad.
 
    Oh dear, oh dear. I do hope this column isn't going to get bogged down in a gloating quagmire. Let us turn instead to the shape of the postwar world. Watching that statue of Saddam fall just before 7 p.m. Iraqi time on Wednesday, one understood immediately that here was the great symbolic image of this war: the one that they'll be playing in the TV news round-ups of the year, and the decade.
 
    The only question is: What precisely does the great symbolic image symbolize? Is it the Middle Eastern equivalent of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, an act that rippled across half a continent? Or is it something smaller, more contained, a crack in the ice but the hard face of the rest of the lake remains frozen? You could hear the bafflement in the coverage of the Arab state TV networks as their commentators struggled to explain the pictures of joyous Iraqis cheering the first Western troops to march in to occupy a major Middle Eastern city since General Allenby took Jerusalem for the British 85 years ago, and the first to take Baghdad since General Maude's Indian Army the year before. The Baghdad of 1917 was a very different place from the grim Saddamite sprawl of today: It was the second great Jewish city of the Middle East, a lively urban mix of races and religions. Muslims, Jews and Christians. Victory in Mesopotamia was a first stage in the unravelling of the Ottoman Empire. This week's liberation marks the beginning of a similar epochal, transformational shift.
 
    That kind of talk unnerves some people, if only because the present arrangements suit them quite nicely.

Bookending the liberation of Baghdad were two summits: Bush and Blair in Belfast on Monday, Chirac and Schroeder and Putin in Moscow on Friday. It's nice to have the choices put so plainly: On the one hand, the Coalition of the Willing; on the other, the Coalition of the Willing To Go On Selling Saddam Nuclear Reactors In Exchange For Oil Concessions For Another Decade Or Three No Matter How Many People He Kills. The French mock the ''coalition of the willing'' as ''les Anglo-Saxons,'' and if that's the best insult they can come up with I'll take it. Nothing new about this: In Eastern Europe in the '80s, Thatcher and Reagan were the heroes, not Mitterrand and Schmidt. Liberated peoples are rarely grateful to those who found it more convenient to keep them in prison. ''Anglo-Saxon'' may be a sneer in France and Belgium, not in Eastern Europe--and not in Iraq, either.
 
    So the meeting of the Coalition of the Irrelevant is of interest only to students of the terminal stages of Chirac's Gallic hauteur. When the Iraqis are in the streets waving posters of Bush and playing soccer with the Brits, is not the best time for a photo op with Dominique de Villepin.
 
    Since ''Anglo-Saxon'' is the preferred French shorthand for the Bush-Blair view of the world, we may as well keep things simple and designate the Chiraquiste alternative as ''French.'' The ''Anglo-Saxon'' view--the Bush Doctrine--thinks that liberty will do for the Middle East what it's done for Eastern Europe and Latin America. The ''French'' view is that it's much easier if relations with the world's dictators are managed by a sleazy transnational elite. If Chirac and de Villepin and the French oil consortium TotalFinaElf can live with Saddam, why can't the Iraqis live with Saddam, 24/7, forever and ever?

    In the last year, we all had plenty of time to make our choices. Eastern Europe chose to support ''les Anglo-Saxons.'' The North American and west European left voted ''French'': In the '60s, the peaceniks thought the Communists would transform South Vietnam into an agrarian utopia; this time round, it didn't bother going through the motions of even rhetorical progressivism--they marched to keep the Iraqi people in chains, and they were happy to do so. A week ago, a European poll revealed that a third of the French people wanted Saddam to win the war. If he makes it out from under that rubble with his mustache intact and manages to hop a fishing smack to Marseilles, maybe he should try running for a seat in the National Assembly in Paris.
 
    The left are not great detail guys. Here's how the fall of Saddam was marked by Robert Fisk, The Independent of London's widely respected foreign correspondent (by ''widely respected'' I mean, of course, that he gets pretty much everything wrong): The Americans, he writes, ''did their best--in the late Seventies and early Eighties--to arm him and service his economy and offer him political support, to turn him into the very dictator he became.'' Really? According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, between 1973 and 2002 Russia supplied 57 percent of Iraq's arms, France 13 percent, China 12 percent, Brazil 2 percent . . . Brazil? Hang on, where's Washington? Where's London? Well, it turns out Brazil supplied more arms to Iraq than America and Britain combined. London and Washington between them account for less than 2 percent of the Iraqi dictatorship's weapons; the parties that met on Friday account for three-quarters.

    ''Les Anglo-Saxons'' are not perfect. But if the alternative is the French, who never met a dictator they didn't like, then Bush and Blair are the best hope of mankind. France, Germany, Russia, Belgium and Canada are not on the side of peace or morality or the Iraqi people. The pictures from the streets of Baghdad make that plain.
 
    On the other hand, they're cheerfully on the side of TotalFinaElf, the Western corporation closest to Saddam Hussein. Total had secured development rights to 25 percent of Iraqi oil reserves, a deal that depended on Saddam remaining in power. TotalFinaElf's largest shareholder is a subsidiary of Montreal's Power Corp. Power Corp's co-chief executives are Paul Desmarais Jr., who sits on the Total board, and his brother Andre Desmarais. Andre Desmarais' father-in-law is the prime minister of Canada, Jean Chretien. Canada refused to join the war to liberate Iraq on ''principle.'
 
    Got that? For months, the anti-war crowd has insisted that ''it's all about oil,'' that the only reason the Iraqi people were being ''liberated'' was so that the second biggest oil reserves in the world could be annexed in perpetuity by Dick Cheney and Halliburton and the rest of Bush's Texas oil patch gang. Instead, it turns out that, if it is all about oil, then the principal North American beneficiary of the continued enslavement of the Iraqi people is the family of the Canadian prime minister--that's to say, his daughter and his grandchildren.
 
    What a delightful footnote to the Chretien-Chiraquiste war effort. This week is a victory not just for the Iraqi people but for ''Anglo-Saxon'' reality over French postmodern cynicism.

    The 59th session of the UN Human Rights Commission opened in Geneva on Monday. The spectacle of the opening session makes clear why UN New York bodies have been found wanting on Iraq.
 
    Assuming the commission chairmanship was the representative of Libya, Najat Al-Hajjaji. As she started to speak, hundreds of leaflets were dropped in silence from second-floor balconies by the non-governmental organization Reporters Without Borders, based in Paris. They read: ''The UN has finally appointed someone who knows what she is talking about! Disappearances, torture, arbitrary arrests, detention without charge or trial, pervasive censorship . . . Ms. Al-Hajjaji can be proud of her new job . . . Libya . . . knows a thing or two about human rights violations.''
 
    This prompted the Cuban delegate to take the floor and demand immediate action to withdraw the credentials of the group. His call was met by sustained applause from other delegations, which at this year's commission include Algeria, China, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Syria and Zimbabwe. The real threat to us all, ranted the Cuban, was imperialist hegemony.
 
    In case there was any doubt as to what the senior UN intergovernmental human rights body is about, the chairwoman was obligingly transparent. In her opening remarks, which past incumbents have understood as a general welcome and vision of the session to come, the Libyan threw down the gauntlet. First on her list of priorities was the Middle East, where she spoke only of ''Palestinians humiliated, killed and deprived of self-determination.'' Next, came the United States, to which she directed without name, the following diatribe:

''We see black clouds gathering . . . ominous of a catastrophic war which will certainly violate all human rights . . . Some countries . . . violat[e] the rights of migrants and refugees and minorities and even visa applicants . . . [W]e will have to treat the root causes of anger and frustration. Among the causes there are . . . double standards.''
 
    Statements were also made by South Africa on behalf of the UN African regional group, Malaysia on behalf of the UN Asian regional group, and Pakistan on behalf of the Organization of the Islamic Conference. This was the sum total of the speakers on the opening morning. They weren't shy about making their views known. The context of a human rights commission was no impediment. They complained about country-specific resolutions directed at their countries, called for an end to ''naming and shaming,'' for more responsible participation from NGOs, increasing the number of paid personnel in the UN-human rights bureaucracy from their countries and objected to information-sharing about women's rights violations between the UN Commission on Human Rights and the UN Commission on the Status of Women.
 
    In the meantime, High Commissioner Sergio Vieira de Mello tried to distinguish himself and his future UN career from this sinking ship. Nevertheless, after opening generalities, he said: ''I think particularly of the situation in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories.'' And what did he think? Security and freedom from terrorism required peace, and that in turn required a foundation of human rights.

No clarion call from the high commissioner that terrorism lays waste any such foundation. On the contrary, he said, agonizingly seeking some middle ground: ''Terrorism is a form of political expression. Certainly, it is not without reasons, some probably better than others.''
 
    Opening day just about summed up what's wrong with the UN:
 
• Western governments are timid, ashamed to be forthright about values, and notoriously cowed by baseless accusations of imperialism and evil hegemony
 
• Repetition of the lies about double standards have a habit of taking root--all you have to do is watch British Prime Minister Tony Blair ape the ''Israel equals Iraq'' profanity.
 
• The idea of the UN as a harmless forum for blowing off steam, or a feel-good sanctuary for perpetual losers on the actual protection of rights scale, is dangerously naive.

    The sooner one recognizes that diplomacy severed from moral moorings has serious consequences, the better. One is reminded of the hapless Iraqi dissident who weeks ago frantically climbed into a UN weapons inspector's Jeep in Iraq, only to be hauled off by Iraqi guards to certain torture. Commenting after the incident, Chief Inspector Hans Blix told reporters: ''What an inelegant way of approaching UN inspectors.''
 
    ''Technicalities over realities'' was how former Swedish Foreign Minister Per Ahlmark described Blix.
 
    The UN Human Rights Commission will certainly be full of elegant parties of the diplomats, by the diplomats and for the diplomats. But for those of you whose loved ones found themselves instead sitting on the bus or airplane beside a suicide bomber, your invitation to the UN Human Rights Commission is in the mail.
 
Anne Bayefsky is an international lawyer and a member of the governing board of the Geneva-based UN Watch.

    Russia's foreign minister, Igor Ivanov, was decidely testy yesterday, saying that his country's firms have not violated sanctions on Iraq. "There is no evidence confirming violations by Russian firms of existing sanctions," he stated, before aiming sharp words at the U.S. He has reason to be so defensive. Russia's involvement in the arming of Iraq goes beyond supplying radar-jamming systems and the personnel to maintain them. Moscow has supported Iraq's development of weapons of mass destruction and connived with Baghdad in hiding its role as a main supplier of the materials and know-how to weaponize anthrax, botulism and smallpox.
 
    Russian support for Iraq is not new. Gary Milhollin and Kelly Motz's July 2001 article in Commentary notes that inspectors found a 300-page file detailing a 1995 deal for Russian aircraft. The agreement not only included military craft that the embargo banned, but engines and guidance systems for remote-controlled drones, which could deliver gas or germ-warfare agents.
 
    In 1999 Russia agreed to sell Saddam Hussein $100 million worth of military hardware. The deal involved Ahmed Murtada Ahmed Khalil, the transport and communications minister, who ran the biological weapons program at the Salman Pak facility outside Baghdad, and who knew exactly what Iraq would need in order to rebuild its WMD program after the Gulf War. Under his tenure, Russian involvement in the development of Iraq's WMD program has increased. Iraq's Scud-C or al-Hussein missiles were acquired from high-level military officials and Russian arms dealers. The al-Hussein was retrofitted to deliver chemical and biological weapons with Russian technology.

In 1998, the U.N. Special Commission was prevented from verifying Iraqi claims that it had destroyed the al-Hussein warheads. At that time, Russia joined with France and Germany in taking up Iraq's campaign to weaken the inspection authority and opposed the Clinton administration's decision to bomb Iraq back into compliance. To this day, inspectors believe that Iraq retains a stock of chemical munitions, including chemical/biological al-Hussein ballistic missile warheads, 2,000 aerial bombs, 15,000-25,000 rockets, and 15,000 artillery shells. Iraq may also retain bio-weapon sprayers for its Mirage F-1s.
 
    Russia appears to be helping Iraq build a better biological and chemical weapons program. Richard Spertzel, the former head of Unscom's biological weapons inspectors, points to negotiations in 1995 between Russia and Iraq for the supply of fermentation equipment, including a 5,000-liter fermentation vessel. He notes that the vessel that Moscow agreed to sell Iraq for use in making single-cell animal protein was 10 times larger than the largest vessel Iraq has admitted using to brew germs. Documents he uncovered call for an agreement between leaders of Iraq's weapons programs and Russian experts for the "design, construction and operation of the plant." The agreement -- which Russia maintains was for the purchase of equipment to manufacture animal feed -- includes the names of the director of Iraq's botulinum toxin program, the chief engineer for the Al Hakam chemical weapons plant, and prominent members of Iraq's military industrial commission. Iraq publicly admitted producing anthrax and botulinum toxin at Al Hakam.

Though Russia flatly denied involvement, it refused to allow Mr. Spertzel to interview Russians to determine whether the equipment was actually delivered. Though inspectors decommissioned Al Hakam in 1996, Mr. Spertzel believes that the Russian equipment was delivered and stored elsewhere.
 
    Key Unscom scientists were Russians who had been deeply involved in the Soviet bioweapons program. Tariq Aziz worked with Premier Yevgeny Primakov to pack inspection teams with Russians picked by Moscow. The manipulation paid off. Mr. Spertzel recalls the Russians were "constantly giving the Iraqis the benefit of doubt. They said, 'no way could Al Hakam be a dual-use facility.'" Yet Mr. Spertzel is "100% convinced that Iraq has weaponized smallpox," and that the Russians on the inspection team were "paranoid" about his efforts to uncover smallpox production. They had reason to be, since it is likely that Russia supplied the original virus. The CIA determined that in the 1990s, a Russian scientist, Nelja N. Maltseva, had brought the strain -- named the Aralsk strain after a 1971 smallpox outbreak in the town of Aralsk, at the northern end of the Aral Sea -- to Iraq. The Soviets hushed up the 1971 outbreak; and their successors in Moscow now deny that Maltseva handed any virus over to the Iraqis.
 
    In 2002, Alan Zelicoff, an adviser to inspection teams and a senior scientist at Sandia National Laboratories who has run a hepatitis C monitoring program with Russian epidemiology units, uncovered a Soviet-era secret report about the Aralsk outbreak.

When forced to admit its occurrence, Dr. Zelicoff's Russian counterparts claimed it was a natural outbreak triggered by the "garden variety" smallpox virus. But after interviews with victims and an analysis of the outbreak's timing and trajectory, Dr. Zelicoff determined that it was caused by "a new and lethal strain of smallpox that traveled at least 20 miles from a secret biological weapons testing site on an island in the Aral Sea to infect people downwind on a ship." Of the six adults who were exposed to the strain, five contracted smallpox despite being immunized. Dr. Zelicoff and others believe that the strain is more communicable, and might be vaccine-resistant. He asked colleagues in Russia to help him locate the strain last summer and to determine if the current smallpox vaccine can protect people from infection. They replied curtly that no such strain existed, a stance they maintain to this day.
 
    Other countries have -- through carelessness or complicity -- provided Iraq with the materials and equipment needed to build up its biological and chemical weapons program. But none have done more to rebuild Saddam's arsenal, and none have been more aggressive in helping hide the truth, than Russia. If these weapons are deployed against our troops, or wind up in terrorist hands, Vladimir Putin might find that he never gets asked to the Bush ranch again.
 
Mr. Goldberg is a writer specializing in bioterrorism and medical innovation.

    Why did Russian President Vladimir Putin join Jacques Chirac in threatening to veto an 18th United Nations resolution mandating Iraq's disarmament? Perhaps it was because of the role Russia has played in arming Saddam Hussein.
 
    Over the weekend the Bush Administration announced that several Russian companies have been selling electronic jamming equipment, antitank missiles and night-vision goggles to the Iraqi regime in violation of U.N. sanctions. The Washington Post quotes a U.S. official as saying that Aviaconversiya, the company that makes the jamming devices, now has workers in Baghdad "showing Iraqis how to use them and how to fix them."
 
    An intelligence source tells CNN the U.S. is "worried this equipment can disorient pilots and cruise missiles." America is waging a precision bombing campaign designed to wipe out Iraq's dictatorial regime while doing minimal damage to non-military targets. If the Russian-provided equipment succeeds in sending American missiles and bombs astray, the result might be carnage among Iraqi civilians.

    The alleged weapons sellers are private companies, not Russian state enterprises, but it is the responsibility of governments to ensure that their citizens comply with U.N. sanctions. The Bush Administration says it has been asking Moscow privately to stop the weapons sales for more than a year, and that its entreaties were met first with denials, then with false assurances. In one case just last month, the U.S. says it provided enough information for Moscow to stop a shipment of night-vision goggles -- but the goggles went to Baghdad anyway.
 
    Yesterday Secretary of State Colin Powell said that while the matter is a "serious problem," he is optimistic Washington and Moscow can resolve it. Perhaps they can. But the episode is another reason to be skeptical about the future of the U.N. Security Council. The Council is worse than useless if its core members hold its mandates in such contempt.

    There are deaths that weigh no more than a feather. Entire peoples who don't count. They have only one right, the right to disappear. They are absent from our concerns and from our television screens, even before the tanks, the bombs, the raids and the landmines reduce them to nothing. The Chechens live in absolute solitude, surrendered to the pleasures of a massacring Russian army. And no one -- not the United Nations, not world public opinion, not any one of the democracies that are so proud of their principles -- cries bloody murder!
 
    Neither of the conflicts that has gotten the attention and sympathy of the world -- Iraq or Palestine -- is as cruel as this one. The Chechen nation counts barely a million individuals, of whom between 100,000 and 200,000 have died at the hand of the Russian army, which first invaded in 1994 and left a few years later, humiliated. To celebrate the millennial year 2000, President Vladimir Putin sent the troops back and razed the Chechen's capital Grozny, and transformed their tiny country into permanent hell. The few travelers who risk the ire of the authorities to visit Chechnya (and I was one of them) bear witness to the worst of the worst that dishonors this good year of 2003.
 
    On Sunday, presidential elections organized by Moscow will take place on this devastated terrain. No one lends them legitimacy. Not even the Kremlin. Its candidate, Akhmad Kadyrov, the current chief of the pro-Russian administration, enjoys feeble popularity (13%). Bought or threatened with death, all of the competitors capable of challenging him have backed off or are forbidden to run. As for the people, pushed towards the ballot boxes with a Kalashnikov, they know that it's not the ballots that will decide, but rather the armed man who will count and invent them (200,000 dead Chechen "souls" are on the electoral lists).

Such a farce fools no one, not the Chechens, not the Russians, nor the Europeans.
 
    What good are such theatrics? Well, this staged election is a useful operation by which Moscow sends a triple message:
 
    To the Chechens, the occupying army -- 100,000 men -- and the collaborationist Chechen militia say that the war will be fought to the finish. No question of negotiating with the non-Islamic independence movement or with former President Aslan Maskhadov, who was elected under the auspices of the OSCE but is now on the run. Given the habits of candidate Kadyrov's own secret police, whose cruelty sometimes scares the Russian "services," Sunday's vote will force the Chechen voter to sign his own sentence to either death or servitude.
 
    To the Russian population of Chechnya (of whom a majority, according to recent surveys, is favorable to negotiations with Mr. Maskhadov), the Kremlin sends an implicit ultimatum: If you don't obey orders, you too will be treated as rebels. From Nicolas I, to Stalin, to President Putin, there's an implacable continuity: Colonial war in the Caucasus turns inexorably into the extermination of the local people, put to the sword, deported to the last man, villages razed, pogroms, blood and ruins.
 
    Why so much cruelty? The great Russian writers revealed the secret: It's an educational exercise. The Chechen incarnates the spirit of resistance. Over the centuries, the Kremlin has bled Chechnya and made it a model for the rest of Russia, forced to submit to the central powers-that-be. The Russian autocracy is born and born again in the very exemplary laying- to-waste of a little people.

    Russian diplomacy's third message to the civilized world is: Get lost! Yes, Sunday's elections make a mockery of democratic rules, but you will all close your eyes. Paris and Berlin compromise, too eager to integrate into their improbable "peace camp" on Iraq a Russia that is carrying out the dirtiest war of the dawn of the 21st century. Thirsty for Russian oil and natural gas, the European Union swallows its principles and rolls over. Washington, partly out of strategy (nuclear balance), partly out of cynicism, forgets the support in arms and in advice that Moscow gave to Saddam Hussein up until the last minute. Mr. Putin's hands are free and he ridicules democracy by holding up his bloody ballot boxes to the world.
 
    The global capitulation to the Caucasian butchery, worse than a crime, is a grave error. The democratic governments and the millions of demonstrators "against war," who take to the streets against George W. Bush and never against Vladimir Putin, are guilty of not helping a people on the verge of extermination. Indifferent, but not ignorant. They know about the four years of massacres, savagery, terror and horror -- but they don't care.
 
    Do they not suspect that the Afghan scenario is repeating itself? The Soviet Red Army broke Afghanistan, set up gangsters in the ruins. Then the Taliban and Osama bin Laden came. The fall of the Twin Towers was the result. With the West's abandonment of Chechnya, the tragedy repeats itself. How long will the survivors of the Russian "cleansing" hold back on the slippery slope of suicidal terrorism? How long until a crazy missile is aimed at a nuclear reactor?

Mr. Putin is a pyromaniac fireman and his relentlessness places us all on the edge of the abyss.
 
    Everyone senses this supreme risk -- no Russian site is any more immune to a suicide attack than Manhattan was -- even as they buy into Mr. Putin's "final solution": No more Chechens, no more terrorist threat. The silence of the pacifists and world leaders is tantamount to their benediction.
 
    And so they try to justify such a weighty complicity. For months after Sept. 11, it was trumpeted that Osama bin Laden was protected by an iron guard composed of "Pakistanis, Arabs and . . . Chechens." The rumor, started by Moscow, was taken at face value. After the defeat of the Taliban, not one Chechen was discovered in Afghanistan, dead, alive, in the prisons or at Guantanamo. I'm still waiting for the rectification by the world media, so quick with their accusations. The incorrect news sweeps away our bad conscience, by stigmatizing the entire population.
 
    Lies, blindness, indifference pave over the leaden silence. Worse, world opinion, tacitly adopts the genocidal impulses that drive the Russian military. The world media rids us of our scruples and washes them away -- a good Chechen is a dead Chechen. We witness a world first in the Caucasus: murder with universal premeditation.
 
Mr. Glucksmann is most recently the author of "Dostoievsky a Manhattan" (Robert Laffont, 2002). This article was translated from the French by Lisbeth Shepherd.

Jer23..1 "Woe to the shepherds who destroy and scatter the sheep of My pasture!" says the Lord.
19 Behold, a whirlwind of the Lord has gone forth in fury--A violent whirlwind! It will fall violently on the head of the wicked.
20 The anger of the Lord will not turn back until He has executed and performed the thoughts of His heart. In the latter days you will understand it perfectly.

Acts20..28 "Therefore take heed to yourselves and to all the flock, among which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers, to shepherd the church of GOD which He purchased with His own blood.
29 "For I know this, that after my departure savage wolves will come in among you, not sparing the flock.
30 "Also from among yourselves men will rise up, speaking perverse things, to draw away the disciples after themselves.

Jn10..11 "I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd gives His life for the sheep.
12 "But a hireling, not the shepherd, one who does not own the sheep, sees the wolf coming and leaves the sheep and flees; and the wolf catches the sheep and scatters them.
13 "The hireling flees because he is a hireling and does not care about the sheep.

2Pet2:14 having eyes full of adultery and that cannot cease from sin, enticing unstable souls. A heart trained in covetous practices, accursed children.
 
1Jn2..18 Little children, it is the last hour; and as you have heard that the Antichrist is coming, even now many antichrists have come, by which we know that it is the last hour.
19 They went out from us, but they were not of us; for if they had been of us, they would have continued with us; but that they might be made manifest, that none of them were of us.

    Government "reform" rarely works, as these columns often point out. But eight years after Congress ended welfare as a federal entitlement, the evidence is undeniable that this experiment in conservative social policy is a historic success. The only problem is that some people still won't forgive the reformers for being right.
 

    The Senate spent this week debating a five-year extension of the law, which officially expired in 2002. So it's worth recalling some of the dire predictions tossed around during the original debate in 1996. Typical was Marian Wright Edelman of the Children's Defense Fund, who called the measure an "outrage" and predicted it "will hurt and impoverish millions of American children." Georgia Congressman John Lewis demanded to know "how can any person of conscience vote for a bill that will push a million children into poverty?" The reform, he bellowed from the House floor, "is mean, it is base, it is low-down."
 
    Think tank prognosticators also weighed in. An Urban Institute report declared that the new law would force 2.6 million people, including 1.1 million children, into poverty. And a Center for Budget and Policy Priorities study said the Republican Congress was going to "make many children who are already poor poorer still." These outfits are still quoted whenever reporters need someone to claim that conservative ideas will savage the poor.

    Their predictions were exactly wrong. Even worse, they were wrong according to the measuring sticks that they themselves set. According to the Census Bureau, since the enactment of welfare reform there is less overall poverty in the U.S., less child poverty and significantly less black child poverty.
 
    The Department of Agriculture reports that between 1995 and 2001, the number of children it counted as "hungry" was cut in half. And over that same period the number of children living in "deep poverty" -- defined as families with income less than half of poverty level income -- dropped to 5.1 million from 5.9 million.
 
    One of the most impressive trends post-reform has been the drop in poverty among children of single mothers -- a group whose numbers had barely budged in the previous quarter-century. In 1995 the poverty rate for this demographic was 50.3%, down only slightly from 53.1 percent in 1971. By 2001, and notwithstanding the recession, the number had fallen to 39.8%, a record low.
 

    These positive results are holding up despite the recession and sluggish recovery in the job market. Liberals insisted that the 1990s boom, not new work incentives, was driving down poverty, and certainly economic growth has helped. But welfare rolls -- down by more than 60% since 1996 -- continue to shrink even four years after the stock bubble burst, and today there are 2.9 million fewer children living in poverty than in 1995. Moreover, the employment rate for poor single moms, who under the old system were most likely to become long-term welfare recipients, is up 50%.
 
    All of this was accomplished not under the Great Society policy of government handouts that liberals still defend today. Instead, the reform motivation was to break the cycle of dependency that 40 years of open-ended social welfare policies and perverse incentives had created.
 
    The 1996 law gave states the freedom to stop extending benefits to poor people capable of working. And the states discovered there were many such people.
 

Critics said the states would stage a "race to the bottom," but this was always an example of Beltway condescension. Thanks to state welfare innovations, many formerly indigent parents are now part of the labor market and consequently passing along some sort of work ethic to their children. It also bodes well that more adults are now reaching the first rung of the economic ladder, developing skills and habits that could help them ride out future economic downturns.
 
    Not that any of this good news, documented by everyone from the Heritage Foundation to the Brookings Institution, seems to have changed many liberal minds. Last year, when the Republican-controlled House passed an extension of the welfare law, the vote was along party lines. And in the Senate, where 21 (of 46) Democrats opposed the original 1996 bill, the Democratic leadership was at it again this week. This is yet another sign that Democrats are reverting to pre-Clinton welfare-state liberalism.

    Welfare reform is too popular with the public to oppose on its face, so Ted Kennedy and others are trying to stop the bill from coming to a vote by insisting on unrelated amendments. Unemployment insurance, minimum wage laws and overtime pay may deserve consideration, but Senator Kennedy knows full well that they have nothing to do with welfare reform. This is filibustering by other means.
 
    Democrats already have managed to water down the work requirements that made welfare reform so successful. We're told Republicans plan to strengthen them later in House-Senate negotiations, and we hope the GOP shows the discipline to do so. Far from shrinking from this debate, they should herald welfare reform as the greatest advance for America's poor since the rise of capitalism.

    We predicted Democrats would use the 9/11 Commission for partisan purposes, and that much of the press would oblige. But color us astonished that barely anyone appreciates the significance of the bombshell Attorney General John Ashcroft dropped on the hearings Tuesday. If Jamie Gorelick were a Republican, you can be sure our colleagues in the Fourth Estate would be leading the chorus of complaint that the Commission's objectivity has been fatally compromised by a member who was also one of the key personalities behind the failed antiterror policy that the Commission has under scrutiny. Where's the outrage?
 
    At issue is the pre-Patriot Act "wall" that prevented communication between intelligence agents and criminal investigators -- a wall, Mr. Ashcroft said, that meant "the old national intelligence system in place on September 11 was destined to fail." The Attorney General explained:
 
    "In the days before September 11, the wall specifically impeded the investigation into Zacarias Moussaoui, Khalid al-Midhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi. After the FBI arrested Moussaoui, agents became suspicious of his interest in commercial aircraft and sought approval for a criminal warrant to search his computer. The warrant was rejected because FBI officials feared breaching the wall.
 
    "When the CIA finally told the FBI that al-Midhar and al-Hazmi were in the country in late August, agents in New York searched for the suspects. But because of the wall, FBI headquarters refused to allow criminal investigators who knew the most about the most recent al Qaeda attack to join the hunt for the suspected terrorists.
 
    "At that time, a frustrated FBI investigator wrote headquarters, quote, 'Whatever has happened to this -- someday someone will die -- and wall or not -- the public will not understand why we were not more effective and throwing every resource we had at certain 'problems.' "
 
    What's more, Mr. Ashcroft noted, the wall did not mysteriously arise: "Someone built this wall." That someone was largely the Democrats, who enshrined Vietnam-era paranoia about alleged FBI domestic spying abuses by enacting the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).
 
    Mr. Ashcroft pointed out that the wall was raised even higher in the mid-1990s, in the midst of what was then one of the most important antiterror investigations in American history -- into the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

On Tuesday the Attorney General declassified and read from a March 4, 1995, memo in which Jamie Gorelick -- then Deputy Attorney General and now 9/11 Commissioner -- instructed then-FBI Director Louis Freeh and United States Attorney Mary Jo White that for the sake of "appearances" they would be required to adhere to an interpretation of the wall far stricter than the law required.
 
    Ms. White was then the lead prosecutor in cases related to the Trade Center bombing. Ms. Gorelick explicitly references United States v. Yousef and United States v. Rahman -- cases that might have greatly expanded our pre-9/11 understanding of al Qaeda had investigators been given a freer hand. The memo is a clear indication that there was pressure then for more intelligence sharing. Ms. Gorelick's response is an unequivocal "no":
 
    "We believe that it is prudent to establish a set of instructions that will more clearly separate the counterintelligence investigation from the more limited, but continued, criminal investigations. These procedures, which go beyond what is legally required, will prevent any risk of creating an unwarranted appearance that FISA is being used to avoid procedural safeguards which would apply in a criminal investigation." (emphases added)
 
    In case anyone was in doubt, Janet Reno herself affirmed the policy several months later in a July 19, 1995, memo that we have unearthed. In it, the then-Attorney General instructs all U.S. Attorneys about avoiding "the appearance" of overlap between intelligence-related activities and law-enforcement operations.
 
    Recall, too, that during the time of Ms. Gorelick's 1995 memo, the issue causing the most tension between the Reno-Gorelick Justice Department and Director Freeh's FBI was not counterterrorism but widely reported allegations of contributions to the Clinton-Gore campaign from foreign sources, involving the likes of John Huang and Charlie Trie. Mr. Trie later told investigators that between 1994 and 1996 he raised some $1.2 million, much of it from foreign sources, whose identities were hidden by straw donors. Ms. Gorelick resigned as deputy attorney general in 1997 to become vice chairman of Fannie Mae.
 
    From any reasonably objective point of view, the Gorelick memo has to count as by far the biggest news so far out of the 9/11 hearings.

The Mary Jo White prosecutions and the 2001 Moussaoui arrest were among our best chances to uncover and unravel the al Qaeda network before it struck the homeland. But thanks in part to the Clinton Administration's concern with appearances and in part to its legacy, these investigations were hamstrung.
 
    Ms. Gorelick -- an aspirant to Attorney General under a President Kerry -- now sits in judgment of the current Administration. This is what, if the principle has any meaning at all, people call a conflict of interest. Henry Kissinger was hounded off the Commission for far less.

It's such a big conflict of interest that the White House could hardly be blamed if it decided to cease cooperation with the 9/11 Commission pending Ms. Gorelick's resignation and her testimony under oath as a witness into the mind of the Reno Justice Department. What exactly was the purpose of the wall?
 
The above is "Gorelick's Wall" - Review & Outlook The Wall Street Journal - Thursday, April 15, 2004

    Attorney General John Ashcroft rebuked the Clinton administration, which, he charged, had hamstrung the FBI and CIA with "government-imposed restrictions" and had "blinded itself to its enemies."
 
    Commissioner Jamie Gorelick, who worked under President Bill Clinton's Attorney General Janet Reno, has been ruthless in her questioning of Bush administration officials.

She recused herself from interviewing Reno and former FBI chief Louis Freeh only when it was pointed out -- by a reproving Ashcroft -- that she had written a memo during her tenure at the White House creating more barriers between the FBI and CIA.
 
The above was excerpted from "Intelligence-gathering panel shouldn't be in attack mode" Chicago Sun-Times - Thursday, April 15, 2004

    The 9/11 Commission hearings are something to watch.
 
    Take a look at the harshest questioner of Rice on the panel, Jamie Gorelick. Gorelick pummeled Rice with questions -- no, accusations -- on how poorly the administration had done and how poorly Rice's national security efforts had been in not preventing the 9/11 attacks.

    Gorelick wrote the order to prevent FBI agents from sharing information on its investigations, and her law firm represents a client that could well be the major source of funding for the al-Qaida terrorists.
 
The above was excerpted from "9/11 panel member should step down" by Mary Laney Chicago Sun-Times - Monday, April 19, 2004

    So President Bush and Vice President Cheney had their long-awaited sit-down with the 9/11 Commission last week -- an event the Commissioners took so seriously that two of them walked out early citing prior commitments. Meanwhile, White House Spokesman Scott McClellan says the President disapproved of the Justice Department's release last week of further memos relating to the pre-Patriot Act "wall" between intelligence and law enforcement.
 
    Sigh. We hope Mr. Bush is merely trying to rise above the partisanship that has surrounded the Commission since its grandstanding over Richard Clarke and Condoleezza Rice. Because what John Ashcroft and his team have revealed about the wall is by far the most important thing to come out of the hearings so far. So long as the 9/11 Commissioners are refusing to probe this matter further for fear of damaging a colleague, someone has to look out for the public's right to know.
 
    Readers will recall that in his testimony Attorney General Ashcroft declassified a March 1995 memo written by 9/11 Commissioner Jamie Gorelick -- then Deputy Attorney General -- instructing federal prosecutors and the FBI director to go "beyond what the law requires" in limiting their cooperation. Ms. Gorelick has since responded that she played only a subordinate role in setting this policy, and was only implementing settled law in any case. But the newly released memos appear to contradict Ms. Gorelick on both counts, further strengthening the case for having her resolve the issue in testimony and under oath.
 
    A key piece of evidence is a June 13, 1995 memo to Attorney General Janet Reno from Mary Jo White, then U.S. Attorney and lead World Trade Center bombing prosecutor, and a recipient of the March memo Mr. Ashcroft referenced: "You have also asked whether I am generally comfortable with the instructions. It is hard to be totally comfortable with instructions to the FBI prohibiting contact with the United States Attorney's Offices when such prohibitions are not legally required."
 
    Ms. White added: "Our experience has been that the FBI labels of an investigation as intelligence or law enforcement can be quite arbitrary depending upon the personnel involved and that the most effective way to combat terrorism is with as few labels and walls as possible so that wherever permissible, the right and left hands are communicating" (emphases added).
 

    Then Ms. White asked for a number of changes to the proposed guidelines, most of which Gorelick subordinate Michael Vatis recommends rejecting in a June 19 memo to Ms. Reno. That memo is accompanied by a handwritten note from Ms. Gorelick saying that she concurs.
 
    Or to sum up the exchange: The principal U.S. terrorism prosecutor was trying to tell her boss that she foresaw a real problem with the new and "not legally required" wall policy, but Ms. Reno -- again delegating that policy to Ms. Gorelick -- largely rebuffed her concerns.
 
    Commission Chairman Tom Kean has thus far been a staunch defender of Ms. Gorelick's refusal to testify. Perhaps he can explain how all of the above squares with Ms. Gorelick's recent remarks on CNN that "The wall was a creature of statute. It's existed since the mid-1980s. And while it's too lengthy to go into, basically the policy that was put out in the mid-'90s, which I didn't sign, wasn't my policy by the way, it was the Attorney General's policy . . ."
 
    We've never expected much from this Commission, but the stonewalling is getting ridiculous. Everyone knows the wall contributed to serious pre-9/11 lapses, such as the FBI's failure to search "20th Hijacker" Zacarias Moussaoui's hard drive following his arrest on immigration violations in August 2001. Yet the Commissioners are treating reasonable requests that they explore the wall fully as some sort of affront.
 
    U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois Patrick Fitzgerald summed up the core issue last October in testimony to Congress: "I was on a prosecution team in New York that began a criminal investigation of Osama bin Laden in early 1996. . . . We could talk to local police officers. We could talk to other U.S. government agencies. We could talk to foreign police officers. Even foreign intelligence personnel. . . . But there was one group of people we were not permitted to talk to. Who? The FBI agents across the street from us in lower Manhattan assigned to a parallel intelligence investigation of Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda. We could not learn what information they had gathered. That was 'the wall.'"
 
    That's also what the 9/11 Commissioners now seem determined to ignore. How long will they continue protecting their colleague at the cost of their own credibility?

    HOUSTON -- In 1971, I debated John Kerry, then a national spokesman for the Vietnam Veterans Against the War, for 90 minutes on "The Dick Cavett Show." The key issue in that debate was Mr. Kerry's claim that American troops were committing war crimes in Vietnam "on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command." Now, as Sen. Kerry emerges as the presumptive Democratic nominee for the presidency, I've chosen to re-enter the fray.
 
    Like John Kerry, I served in Vietnam as a Swift Boat commander. Ironically, John Kerry and I served much of our time, a full 12 months in my case and a controversial four months in his, commanding the exact same six-man boat, PCF-94, which I took over after he requested early departure. Despite our shared experience, I still believe what I believed 33 years ago -- that John Kerry slandered America's military by inventing or repeating grossly exaggerated claims of atrocities and war crimes in order to advance his own political career as an antiwar activist. His misrepresentations played a significant role in creating the negative and false image of Vietnam vets that has persisted for over three decades.
 
    Neither I, nor any man I served with, ever committed any atrocity or war crime in Vietnam. The opposite was the truth. Rather than use excessive force, we suffered casualty after casualty because we chose to refrain from firing rather than risk injuring civilians. More than once, I saw friends die in areas we entered with loudspeakers rather than guns. John Kerry's accusations then and now were an injustice that struck at the soul of anyone who served there.
 
    During my 1971 televised debate with John Kerry, I accused him of lying.

I urged him to come forth with affidavits from the soldiers who had claimed to have committed or witnessed atrocities. To date no such affidavits have been filed. Recently, Sen. Kerry has attempted to reframe his comments as youthful or "over the top." Yet always there has been a calculated coolness to the way he has sought to destroy the record of our honorable service in the interest of promoting his political ambitions of the moment.
 
    John Kennedy's book, "Profiles in Courage," and Dwight Eisenhower's "Crusade in Europe" inspired generations. Not so John Kerry, who has suppressed his book, "The New Soldier," prohibiting its reprinting. There is a clear reason for this. The book repeats John Kerry's insults to the American military, beginning with its front-cover image of the American flag being carried upside down by a band of bearded renegades in uniform -- a clear slap at the brave Marines in their combat gear who raised our flag at Iwo Jima. Allow me the reprint rights to your book, Sen. Kerry, and I will make sure copies of "The New Soldier" are available in bookstores throughout America.
 
    Vietnam was a long time ago. Why does it matter today? Since the days of the Roman Empire, the concept of military loyalty up and down the chain of command has been indispensable. The commander's loyalty to the troops is the price a commander pays for the loyalty of the troops in return. How can a man be commander in chief who for over 30 years has accused his "Band of Brothers," as well as himself, of being war criminals? On a practical basis, John Kerry's breach of loyalty is a prescription of disaster for our armed forces.

    John Kerry's recent admissions caused me to realize that I was most likely in Vietnam dodging enemy rockets on the very day he met in Paris with Madame Binh, the representative of the Viet Cong to the Paris Peace Conference. John Kerry returned to the U.S. to become a national spokesperson for the Vietnam Veterans Against the War, a radical fringe of the antiwar movement, an organization set upon propagating the myth of war crimes through demonstrably false assertions. Who was the last American POW to die languishing in a North Vietnamese prison forced to listen to the recorded voice of John Kerry disgracing their service by his dishonest testimony before the Senate?
 
    Since 1971, I have refused many offers from John Kerry's political opponents to speak out against him.

My reluctance to become involved once again in politics is outweighed now by my profound conviction that John Kerry is simply not fit to be America's commander in chief. Nobody has recruited me to come forward. My decision is the inevitable result of my own personal beliefs and life experience.
 
    Today, America is engaged in a new war, against the militant Islamist terrorists who attacked us on our own soil. Reasonable people may differ about how best to proceed, but I'm sure of one thing -- John Kerry is the wrong man to put in charge.
 
Mr. O'Neill served in Coastal Division 11 in 1969-70, earning two Bronze Stars and additional decorations for his service in Vietnam.

    In an e-mailed account of his recollection of Kerry's treatment and in two phone interviews, Letson said Kerry, then a Navy lieutenant, appeared at Cam Ranh Bay on Dec. 3, 1968, with a slight wound "covered with a Band-Aid."
 
    "There wasn't much blood to it," he said. "It looked like a splinter."
 
    Letson described a "small piece of metal sticking very superficially in the skin of Kerry's arm. The metal fragment measured about 1 centimeter" and did "not look like a round from a rifle," he said.
 

    According to Letson, several of Kerry's crew members later told a different version to medical personnel: "They did not receive any fire from shore," he wrote, "but that Kerry had fired a mortar round at close range to some rocks on shore. The crewmen thought that the injury was caused by a fragment ricocheting from that mortar round when it struck the rocks."
 
    Letson added that the crew's account "seemed to fit the injury which I treated."
 
Los Angeles Times

    The Vietnam War has become the subject of ads and accusations in the presidential campaign. Kerry's staff Monday announced the campaign was spending $25 million to run TV ads that highlight his service in Vietnam. Kerry, 60, received a Bronze Star and a Silver Star for valor and three Purple Hearts for being wounded in Vietnam.

    Hibbard raised questions about whether Kerry deserved his first Purple Heart in a Boston Globe interview published last month in which he said Kerry's wound was a ''little scratch.'' On Tuesday, he and the other veterans criticized Kerry's actions in 1971, when he was leading veterans groups protesting the war.

    Financier George Soros is vowing to defeat President Bush in this year's election.
 
    "I have made rejection of the Bush doctrine the central project of my life," Soros declared in January.
 
    Normally, such partisan rhetoric from a wealthy Democratic donor would be dismissed as typical election-year sloganeering.
 
    But Soros' statements rightly have attracted considerable media attention.
 
    The international currency speculator has developed a well-earned reputation for being a can-do individual who accomplished his goals -- both in business and politics.
 
    Always prone to a kind of sentimental liberalism, the maverick billionaire has in the past several years embraced a radical left-wing agenda that champions legalizing drugs, euthanasia, open borders and the repeal of welfare reform. But his main target is economic globalization.
 
    "Capitalism is coming apart at the seams," Soros said at the time of the Asian financial crisis. He believes that the rise of "laissez-faire capitalism" threatens democratic governance and international stability by concentrating too much power in the hands of corporations.
 
One Government
    To offset the ravaging effects of global markets, Soros argues that nations should be made subservient to international institutions. The billionaire insists that, in order to stabilize and regulate the global economy, there needs to be "some global system of political decision-making."
 
    In other words, the solution to the supposed capitalist crisis is to create a one-world government.

    His left-wing globalism extends to foreign policy as well. Soros compares the U.S under Bush's leadership to Nazi Germany. A ferocious critic of the war in Iraq, he believes that America has degenerated into a militaristic fascist empire bent on spreading its "ideology of American supremacy."
 
    His world view can be distilled to one simple idea: American "unilateralism" is evil, while United Nations-style multilateralism is good.
 
    The billionaire now hopes to inject his anti-American, anti-capitalist message into this year's U.S. presidential race. Soros has already given nearly $20 million to anti-Bush groups. He is vowing "to give more" if necessary. The financier has become the sugar daddy of the "shadow" Democratic Party -- a collection of eight progressive nonprofit groups dedicated to defeating Bush.
 
Soros Is A 'Nut'
    The most famous of the groups is MoveOn.org, an organization originally formed to defend President Clinton during his impeachment. By virtue of his enormous wealth, Soros has become one of the most powerful figures within the Democratic Party.
 
    The Bush campaign should not allow the billionaire's growing influence among Democrats to go unchallenged. Bush needs to ask Sen. John Kerry whether the presumptive Democratic nominee shares any of Soros' extreme views. The electorate has a right to know if the financier's money comes with strings attached.
 
    For ultimately what is dangerous about Soros is not his fringe politics, but his messiah complex.

    Referring to himself as a "stateless statesman," the financier confessed to biographer Michael Kaufman that his "goal is to become the conscience of the world."
 
    He has also admitted that he has "godlike, messianic ideas" and that he sometimes thinks of himself as "superhuman."
 
    "I am a kind of nut who wants to have an impact," he told Kaufman.
 
    The 20th century is littered with examples of messianic visionaries -- Lenin, Hitler and Castro -- whose megalomania and absolute desire for power have wreaked unimaginable havoc.
 
    Soros' brand of neo-Marxism is no different. His one-world globalism and hostility to capitalism are part of the radical left's long-term ambitions to alter human reality through social engineering.
 
    Like the Nazi and communist projects, the results would be disastrous. The financier's call for international income redistribution would significantly undermine the West's prosperity, increasing poverty and instability around the world.
 
    Meanwhile, his desire for a system of global government would in reality empower numerous Third World dictators at the expense of Western democracies, which are much smaller both in number and population.

    If implemented, Soros' utopianism would eventually lead to a form of one-world authoritarianism and economic collectivism.
 
Sever The Link
    Soros is a rabid ideologue who is seeking to use the Democratic Party to advance his own radical aims.
 
    The Democrats need to understand that their alliance with this man may come with a heavy price tag. Their association with a self-confessed "nut" undermines their credibility and opens them up to charges of being sympathetic to his ideological persuasion.
 
    If the Democrats will not cut their ties to him, then the GOP would be wise to make Soros a major campaign issue. The billionaire-turned-activist has boastfully declared war on Bush. It is time for Republicans to declare war on him.
 
Jeffrey T. Kuhner is the editor of the Ripon Forum and communications director at the Ripon Society, a centrist-oriented think tank in Washington, D.C. He can be reached at jkuhner@riponsoc.org.