The Outrage Sweepstakes

...Former Secretary of State George P. Shultz said in a speech in May that pre-emption with military force is now an operative idea with wide support...

...Suryono complained to the Orlando prosecutor that the Princess held her under conditions of involuntary servitude and on one occasion pushed her down a flight of stairs...

...The American command eventually announced a full-scale investigation...

...Neither the Afghans nor the Kurds are central to America's strategic concerns...

...Many of them complain about being exploited and abused...

...Pre-empting Terrorism At the top of the agenda now is terrorism, which has introduced the notion of pre-emption...

...Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said on television in February that you have to take the battle to the terrorists...

...President Ronald Reagan established a warm relationship with President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, marred by an angry clash over missile defense at the 1986 summit in Iceland...

...and, borrowing from his anti-terrorism manual, a Corporate Fraud Task Force...

...By the end of 1991, Gorbachev was out and Boris N. Yeltsin was in, to preside over the demise of the Soviet Union...

...But public outrage over corporate greed today bids fair to be a real electoral factor...

...But John Burns of the New York Times, on a trip to the area, found Kurdish leaders disinclined to join a U.S.-led military campaign...

...Khrushchev ended up building a wall to divide Berlin...

...and the conflict of interest of auditor-consultants...

...The Kurds would be a natural ally— they already operate an autonomous ministate in northern Iraq...

...She was Princess Buniah alSaud, 41, niece of King Fahd of Saudi Arabia, living in Orlando, Florida and studying English at a local university...

...On Capitol Hill, that is jocularly referred to as "The Hague Invasion Act...

...Government's Comeback" read another headline in the Washington Post...

...Targeting unscrupulous executives in a speech in New York on July 9, President George W. Bush talked of "conscience" and "character," but proposed only limited legislative reforms: Suffer sentences for mail and wire fraud and document shredding...

...They paid a $ 1,000 fine and S131 in court costs...

...In the face of massive disapproval, the Bush Administration eventually negotiated a face-saving "compromise" and backed down on its veto threat...

...The idea of an American in the dock before apanel of foreigners is clearly politically unpalatable...

...The proportion of Federal employees who felt very satisfied with their jobs had dropped from 49 to 43 per cent, it was found...

...Suryono went home to Indonesia for her mother's funeral, expecting to return for the trial...

...In June 1967 Israel launched a pre-emptive strike against the Egyptian Air Force that brought on the Six-Day War, and in 1981 it famously knocked out Baghdad's nuclear reactor...

...In the outrage sweepstakes the overarching issue is the deregulatory climate in which the corporate scandals occurred, and whether it is time for re-regulation to establish ground rules to reinforce "character" and "conscience...

...Because the Bush Administration continues to fear that the court, designed to prosecute war crimes and human rights abuses, might latch onto an American soldier...

...Apparently not...

...There were some observable reasons...

...As Light summed it up, "Federal employees are losing confidence in their ability to make a difference...

...In a five-minute hearing, they pleaded no contest and promised the judge a letter from their client expressing regrets about the injuries suffered by her former maid...

...It wasn't just firefighters and construction workers, but civil servants tending to the needs of a stricken nation...

...But it broke down again when the Soviet leader stormed out of the four-power summit in Paris in 1960 because of Eisenhower's refusal to apologize for the U-2 spy flight over the Soviet Union...

...Out of the stock market collapse of 1929 came the SEC, created by Franklin D. Roosevelt in his effort to save capitalism by underpinning it with regulation...

...We may moralize about the condition of women in Arab countries, but we permit an Arabian princess to import repression of women into our country...

...In the past, financial scandal has sometimes led to drastic reform...

...No more do the headlines read: "Government to the Rescue...

...Terrorist plots generally have no known address...

...None of the other 13 8 countries that signed the 1998 Rome Treaty seems to fear for its own nationals, and the treaty was amended several times to overcome American misgivings...

...To win the outrage mantle, however, the President may have to address the larger corporate malady of self-enrichment practices that undermine investor confidence without necessarily being criminal: Theastronomicalpaypackages for CEOs...

...Republican-sponsored legislation moving through Congress would authorize the use of any means necessary, including force, to rescue Americans from criminal court detention...

...Other summit relations were more amicable...

...In the 1996 Presidential campaign Republican challenger Robert Dole got nowhere asking "Where is the outrage...

...In the latest and most sanguinary accidental attack, civilians in southern Afghanistan were devastated by what they charged was an air assault on a wedding party and nearby villages that left 48 dead and 117 wounded...

...Now, with confrontation over and Russia headed into the Western camp, the Bush-Putin meeting in Moscow and St...

...In the early 1970s President Nixon had the CIA organize a Kurdish rebellion, then walked away from it for reasons of high policy, leaving hundreds of thousands of Kurds to flee the wrath of the Iraqi government...

...It is also hard to see how military pre-emption can be applied against a perceived mass destruction threat...

...the stock options that represent hidden expenditures...

...But occasionally we need a friend among the peoples who live along the front lines of troubled regions, and we are fast running out of them...

...That would have left to an uncertain fate the 18,000-strong NATO peacekeeping force in Bosnia, with some 3,700 Americans...

...This comes at a time when a new report by a group of Arab intellectuals commissioned by the UN warns that Arab societies are being crippled by a lack of political freedoms and the repression of women...

...The Princess did not return to Florida...

...over President Bill Clinton's fund-raising improprieties...

...As the Bush Administration gears up for military action against Iraq, we are forced to ask how much support the United States will have from the internal opponents of Saddam Hussein...

...Those who thought they contributed a great deal through accomplishing their organization's mission had dropped from 56 to 45 per cent...

...Perhaps that was a reason the defense work force was more likely than nondefense workers to report a renewed sense of purpose...

...her former servant is not...

...Her lawyers got the charges against her reduced from a felony to a misdemeanor battery...

...President Dwight D. Eisenhower got along well with Communist Party chief Nikita S. Khrushchev at the first postwar summit in Geneva in 1955, introducing him to the dry martini...

...It was presented as a full-blown doctrine in the President's commencement speech at West Point on June 1. Containment and deterrence have become irrelevant, he said, and "we must confront the worst threats before they emerge...

...Missing from our lexicon of abstract regret is an acknowledgment of responsibility...

...In response to Khrushchev's threat to cancel Western rights in Berlin, Kennedy called up the reserves and urged Americans to build bomb shelters...

...The assassination of Vice President Abdul Qadir, the leading Pashtun in the coalition and the second Cabinet member to be killed, has sharpened the ethnic tensions that threaten national unity...

...The Americanled assault on the Taliban in Afghanistan was partly retaliatory, partly pre-emptive...

...And a famously businessfriendly MBA President is walking a tricky line trying to capture the mantle of chief champion of public anger...

...Is the superpower too big to be accountable to less powerful peoples...

...Presidents Clinton and Bush, relations moved steadily toward cooperation...

...Israel has justified its incursion into the West Bank, and India its threatened attack on Pakistan, as intended to preempt terrorism...

...Suryono's employer was no ordinary person...

...The signing of the Bush-Putin treaty on the reduction of nuclear arsenals seems to be the end of the line for arms control summits...

...President Hamid Karzai's shaky regime in Kabul is caught between unfriendly and friendly fire...

...A Brookings Institution task force went back and questioned some of the government workers interviewed then...

...more money for the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC...

...But before gearing up for the next war against it, the Bush Administration had better make sure it doesn't lose the war in Afghanistan...

...The Wall Street Journal notes a "swing of the American political pendulum away from a quarter-century of bipartisan deference to capitalists...

...Two years ago Congress passed the Violence Against Women Act, enabling them to bring charges against their employers...

...President Richard M. Nixon got along well with General-Secretary Leonid I. Brezhnev, and, only weeks before resigning, foundrelief from Watergate pressures in Brezhnev's dacha on the Black Sea...

...Other UN peacekeeping missions would have been in danger of extinction as their mandates come up for renewal...

...Government to the Rescue" read a headline in the Wall Street Journal...

...They have bitter memories of betrayal at the hands of the Americans...

...Paul Light, the Brookings scholar, also noted that President Bush did not mention civil servants in his State of the Union address when he thanked the military and crime fighters for their contributions...

...The meeting itself was historic in no small part because it marked the end of a summitry era...

...have launched its pre-emptive strike...

...The battleground between the Administration and Congressional Democrats now becomes the laws that will be needed to satisfy public outrage about corporate governance that has failed them...

...Losing Confidence It looked like a renaissance for government after September 11...

...And the "Spirit of Geneva," as it was called, collapsed when Soviet tanks cranked into Hungary the following year...

...When Winston Churchill called for a "parley at the summit," he inaugurated a half-century of personal diplomacy aimed at keeping the lid on nuclear confrontation...

...Secretary of State Henry Kissinger is reported to have commented, "Covert action should not be confused with missionary work...

...The effort to restore summit relations resumed with Khrushchev's American trip in 1959...

...Again in 1991, at the end of the Gulf War, President Bush the elder called for rebellion in Iraq...

...Frustration is up because Federal employees have become more aware of the bureaucratic barriers to performance...

...And perhaps that's a good thing, because hand-to-hand encounters on the lonely peaks can produce some dangerous situations...

...If it had advance knowledge of the September 11 hijackings, where would the U.S...

...And when General McNeill finds itnecessary to say, "It is not a policy of this coalition to target innocents...

...Gearing Up for Iraq Iraq, on the other hand, is one military target that does have an address...

...Petersburg had an ostentatiously friendly character...

...What needs serious attention, though, is how this superpower behaves after it makes mistakes that hurt the people it is trying to befriend...

...Under Russian Presidents Yeltsin and Putin and U.S...

...The Princess is now free to return to the United States...

...Fifty-nine per cent of defense personnel, as compared with 43 per cent government wide, said they were being given the chance to do things they do best...

...Against a princess of Saudi Arabia, the Violence Against Women Act does not help very much...

...President Kennedy considered a pre-emptive strike at Soviet missiles in Cuba in 1962...

...Because the Bush Administration objects to the reach of the new United Nations International Criminal Court, it threatened to veto the continuation of the 1,500-member UN police training mission in Bosnia, which includes a few dozen Americans...

...President Bush said he told President Karzai on the telephone, "Any time innocent life is lost, we're sad...

...It is 47 years since Eisenhower and Khrushchev started down the arms control track...

...In due course, she received a subpoena from the Orlando prosecutor...

...The elder President George Bush got on well with Gorbachev, and, at the Helsinki summit of 1990, was the first to speak of the Soviet Union as a "partner...

...Theodore Roosevelt wielded the antitrust club against monopolies engaged in restraint of trade...

...It took almost a week before Lieutenant General Dan McNeill, the allied commander, admitted there were civilian casualties—no number mentioned— and that no ordnance was found in the area to support the claim that American planes were responding to antiaircraft fire...

...In practice, though, pre-emption tends to isolate America from the international community...

...A surprise attack, by its very nature, does not lend itself to much advance consultation with allies...

...A Weak Case Relations with allies among the industrialized countries require some attention, too...

...There is not much America can do about those violent feuds...

...Where have we come when some Afghani citizens no longer talk of America as a liberator but as an enemy...

...End of a Summitry Era On May 24, Presidents Bush and Vladimir V. Putin signed a historic arms reduction treaty...

...A nonchalant attitude about the harm we sometimes do to our friends in the developing world can have its price...

...In February, the Princess was allowed to go home to Saudi Arabia on her promise to come back for the trial...

...But even though the Violence Against Women Act makes provision for visas in such cases, the American consul in Jakarta refused to issue one on the ground that she might try to stay...

...Pre-emption, as a concept, is not new...

...But Khrushchev complained about Eisenhower's refusal to meet with him alone...

...In May, Ms...

...The Princess and the Maid Ismiyati Suryono, 36, an Indonesian, was one of some 45,000 women and girls brought to this country annually as domestics...

...A Berlin crisis the next year assumed more dangerous proportions with a grim face-off between Khrushchev and President John F. Kennedy in Vienna...

...Such unilateralism may sound like politics as usual, but one would have thought that September 11 and Bush's constant emphasis on a need for allies in the war against terrorism would have moderated the Administration's tendency to walk away from international commitments...

...Why was the United States willing to go to the verge of making peacekeeping an endangered species...

...A doubled prison sentence for document shredding may not be enough...

...President Bush had asked for a smaller pay increase for civilian employees than for the military...

...The Kurds responded with an uprising, received no military support and were slaughtered by the thousands at the hands of Saddam Hussein's forces...

...But it didn't last, and now, as Congress wrestles with the creation of a new Cabinet-level Department of Homeland Security, civil servants are expressing themselves as less happy in their work than before 9/11...

...Actually, the idea of pre-emptive strikes against terrorists was gestating in the Bush Administration for some time...