The Liberation That Went Sour

...The second factor, especially since 9/11, is the impression of the incumbent as protector of the people...

...Where does that authority come from...

...Governments are slow to address the threat of epidemics with the color-coded sense of urgency that attends the war on terrorism...

...But it is Iraq that has struck the heaviest blow against the Bush Administration's aspiration for a democratically transformed post-Saddam Hussein Middle East...

...Washington accused Iran of working on the development of nuclear weapons, and U.S...

...I lied to my editors...

...It cooperated in the war against AI Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan, and it denounced the 9/11 terrorists...

...The risk of failure was still great, but, as Bush the younger has said in other connections, the risk of inaction could be greater...

...A taped message last February purporting to originate with Osama bin Laden included Morocco on a list of apostate Arab nations...

...And Abbas' initial meeting with Sharon on May 17 was followed by a burst of five suicide bombings that killed a dozen Israelis...

...Probably more important to the winnowing process than reviews by the critics, though, is the ability to raise money...

...He invented characters like a teenage computer hacker...

...For too long the World Health Organization was barred from coming in to diagnose what was happening...

...He also hedged his acceptance with a long list of reservations the U.S...

...Indeed, the word "reality" has a special meaning on television, as in "reality-type" Survivor episodes on distant islands...

...No one can say how many lives would have been saved by quarantine and precautions about public gatherings if the Chinese government had been up front from the start...

...And that, in turn, has further exacerbated tension with the Iraqis...

...Promotion videos for health products by Walter Cronkite, Morley Safer and Aaron Brown were made to look like news reports...

...The New Teflon President In 1983 former Representative Pat Schroeder (D- Colo...

...The situation may well call for a strengthened World Health Organization, with a system of sanctions and with powers of inspection to cope with such plagues without borders...

...Fifteen thousand additional troops to help maintain order brought the American troop level in Iraq to almostl60,000.This represents 40 per cent of the Army's 10 active divisions, and it dims the hope of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld for any early reorganization of the military into smaller, more agile units...

...First among these is the economy...

...and operations to salvage the road map were under way...

...New disease strains, spreading rapidly from person to person and country to country, are in part a price of this age of easy travel and gregarious habits...

...Glass was telling how he had served up fabrications for years as a writer for the New Republic and other publications, until he was fired in 1998...

...A sense of quagmire hovers over the liberation that went sour...

...Those efforts resulted in a grand conference in Madrid, and led to the Oslo peace process that President Bill Clinton tried and failed to bring to fruition...

...The conspirators were reported by the Washington Post to have obtained arms from members of the Saudi Arabian National Guard, which, ironically, is Americantrained...

...Although supported by only 12 of 23 Cabinet members, Sharon had the backing of 56 per cent of Israelis in an opinion poll...

...His central thesis, that tax cuts mean jobs, was rejected by 48 per cent of the respondents...

...American officials believe the three attacks on housing compounds in Riyadh that killed 34 persons involved Saif Adii, a high-ranking AI Qaeda figure...

...And now there is Jayson Blair, recently forced out of the New York Times after it turned out that a story he did on the family of a soldier missing in Iraq was apparently borrowed from another newspaper, the San Antonio Express-News...

...The Iraqis bitterly complain that the occupiers have done little to help them...

...But how long that will last rests on factors beyond his control...

...I remember outright falsehoods like the unlabeled re-enactment on ABC of an espionage meeting between American diplomat Felix Bloch and his Soviet handler in 1989...

...For a day it appeared that the President's intervention might actually have opened a path to conciliation...

...On the other hand, many do not share his priorities...

...But that was only the climax of a long series of lies...

...Instead, a three-way summit was held in Aqaba, Jordan, on June 4. The President was somewhat in the position of his father, who 12 years ago used the prestige gained in a war against Iraq to try to crack what may be the world's most durable conflict...

...Five attacks in Casablanca at a cost of 41 lives suggested a Moroccan cell linked to an international network...

...Some of the disconnect between the man and his policies is positively peculiar...

...Yet confidence in his ability to manage the economy had dropped 7 points to 47 per cent in a month when he was out on the stump selling his program...

...All kinds of lies...

...I lied to all of the readers...

...As full disclosure, if that is needed, I should note that I have bias against journalists who lie...

...A recent New York Times-CBS poll showed him at 67 per cent in job approval and 70 per cent in admiration for his leadership qualities...

...Lies come in all sizes and all shapes...

...Worried about the loss of tourists and investment, they are tempted to conceal the dimensions of infection and thus accelerate the spread of disease...

...and Britain advised the UN that they were the ruling authority, and their soldiers were becoming the new centurions, charged with pacifying a disorderly realm...

...When the cover blew off two top officials were fired, scapegoats for a disastrous policy...

...After that, relations with Iran seemed to improve...

...Then Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the Al Aksa Martyrs Brigades resumed their killing...

...Fearful of the effects on foreign investment-and perhaps losingthe2008Olympics-Beijing initially engaged in a massive cover-up...

...There was the other famous 1981 episode involving talented Washington Post reporter Janet Cooke, who won a Pulitzer Prize for a series of articles about a ghetto child hooked on drugs—a child she had invented...

...The Washington Post's David Broder found Senator Bob Graham short on aggressive salesmanship, and Senator Joe Lieberman of Connecticut "clearly a grown-up...

...Fifty-eight per cent said they did not expect more money in their paychecks because of tax cuts, and 63 per cent said the 2001 tax cuts had not helped the economy...

...In any event, I don't know how you feel, but when I read about Stephen Glass, who lied about everything and is now peddling a book rewarding himself for having done so, I wince...

...It was mainly Democrats, like Florida Senator Bob Graham, who suggested the President shirked the war on terror to pursue the war on Iraq...

...History teaches that, in recent times, the candidate who raises the most money by the start of the election year wins the nomination...

...Bush's image soared after the successful invasion of Iraq and his war-hero appearance on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln...

...And now, having written a book about it—presented as a work of fiction—he is cashing in on his deceptions one more time...

...The Hague document says, "The authority of legitimate power having, in fact, passed into the hands of the occupier, the latter shall take all the measures in his power to restore and ensure as far as possible public order and safety...

...American GIs are not like the Roman legions, especially trained to spread order, language and civilization across the empire...

...is back to threatening confrontation with "any outlaw regime that has ties to terrorist groups...

...China's response recalled Tiananmen Square in 1989—people dying and the government lying...

...And I lied to the people I was writing about...

...Clearly, though, the unprecedented warming of relations that followed 9/11 is over for the foreseeable future...

...Whether the current sluggish economy will continue until the election cannot, of course, be predicted...

...Now it may be time to dust off the Teflon appellation for the current Oval Office occupant, who can turn an aircraft carrier into a photo op as smoothly as Reagan made the Normandy beachhead his stage on the 40th D-Day anniversary...

...In some 60 years in journalism, I have always thought of the reporter as a guardian of reality...

...Misleading on television is a more complicated matter, because the medium lends itself so readily to deception...

...Fifty-eight per cent want a greater priority given to reducing the deficit, and a whopping 81 per cent want emphasis on access to health care rather than cutting taxes...

...The U.S...

...Incumbents generally lose in hard times, witness Herbert Hoover, Gerald R. Ford, Jimmy Carter, and George H.W Bush...

...Anti-American sentiment has been fueled by delays in restoring basic services and in controlling widespread crime and vandalism...

...Money raising could be called "the invisible primary," before Iowa, before New Hampshire...

...Lies in All Sizes And Shapes In an interview on CBS News' 60 Minutes, Stephen Glass said: "I lied to the people who were my co-workers and cared about me, I lied to my family...

...Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas was in the delicate position of being required to suppress anti-Israeli violence in the first phase of the peace plan...

...Senator Pete V Domenici said at an Appropriations Committee hearing, "There's a real chance that the victory we claim is not a victory at all...

...Plunging into the Mideast Maelstrom In the Israel-Palestine dispute, the three parties to the so-called road map peace plan took risks of varying magnitude...

...Without advertising it, the United States and Britain have taken charge...

...The idea of inviting the principals to Washington was dropped as too visible...

...It did not immediately occur to Americans that the Al Qaeda-linked car bombings in Riyadh raised questions about the validity of Bush's antiterrorist premise for invading Iraq...

...The known number of those infected with SARS in the first month was about 3,900 in 25 countries and rising fast...

...The U.S...

...There was the famous episode of the New Yorker's Janet Malcolm, who in a 1981 article about a psychoanalyst put words in his mouth he never uttered, then waved off criticism by saying: "Every journalist is a confidence man...

...A Plague Without Borders A biological war is in progress, and the coalition called the international community is ill-prepared to wage it...

...No longer does Defense Secretary Rumsfeld speak of a quick departure for American troops, or wave away looting and violence as part of the "untidiness" of war...

...He staked a lot on winning enough concessions toward statehood at the bargaining table to keep his embryonic reform government afloat...

...Even as the President proposed to spend $ 15 billion combating AIDS in Africa and the Caribbean, a new and deadly strain of pneumonia appeared out of south China and Hong Kong with no known cure...

...That, in turn, has prompted the Anglo-American occupation forces-and they are now officially "occupation forces"-to put off the transfer of power to an interim Iraqi authority...

...The Bush Administration, no great respecter of international treaties, wrote the United Nations Security Council invoking The Hague regulations of 1907 and the Geneva Convention of 1949...

...For a second time, Iran is suspected by the United States of complicity in bombings in Saudi Arabia...

...Another phenomenon of the Teflon Presidency has been Bush's faring better in the opinion polls than his policies do...

...As Lieutenant General David McKiernen has stated, "The troops patrolling Baghdad and other cities will assert absolute authority within Iraq...

...The 12 years, climaxed by the second intifada, had not made the conflict any more tractable...

...When an interim government of Iraqis is formed it will have a mainly advisory role...

...North Carolina's Senator John Edwards became an instant contender when he pulled in slightly more than Senator Kerry-$7.4 million in the first quarter of the year...

...Bush plunged into the Middle East maelstrom after Secretary of State Colin L. Powell returned from a trip there and reported that nothing less than the President's involvement had any chance of success...

...Israel responded with deadly helicopter missile attacks in Gaza...

...But he remained hostage to the technically sidelined president of the Palestinian Authority, Yasir Arafat, whose influence with terrorist groups left him able to undercut a cease-fire...

...These spell out an occupier's responsibilities after an invasion...

...But the identity of the Democratic standardbearer may ultimately be less important than external factors influencing the perception of the incumbent...

...William Safire of the New York Times found Representative Richard A. Gephardt of Missouri to be shining with his health proposal, and Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts failing to develop a rationale for his candidacy...

...He falsely alleged that prominent lawyer Vernon Jordan behaved lecherously with young women...

...officials charged it with sending agents into Iraq to incite anti-American sentiment among the Shi'ites...

...Iran denied any link with the "fundamentalist and violent" network...

...The event was essentially a fashion show, giving the press a preview of 2004 political styles...

...Since President George W. Bush's State of the Union address last year designating Iran as one of the axis of evil, however, relations have plunged downward...

...coined the phrase "the Teflon President" for President Ronald Reagan, to whom nothing bad seemed to stick-not economic troubles, not terrorist attacks, not the Iran-contra scandal, not even dozing off during an audience with the Pope...

...Fifty-four per cent say Bush policies favor the rich, yet 67 per cent believe the President cares about their needs and problems...

...Seemingly least hazardous was the position of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, who made it clear that he signed on mainly to avoid a confrontation with the Bush Administration...

...Suicide bombings show some international influence of a revived Al Qaeda, but the bombers tend to be indigenous...

...It reported only 10 per cent of the known cases, hiding some patients in military hospitals...

...promised to address, including rejecting the right of return for Palestinian refugees to what is now Israel...

...But Arafat soon dismissed Sharon's concessions as nothing new...

...In an interview with NPR in August 1996, Defense Secretary William Perry expressed the belief that Iran was responsible for the truck bombing of the Khobar Towers barracks, which killed 19 Americans and injured hundreds...

...Where Perception Is Key Nothing like a favorite emerged from the May 3 debate in South Carolina featuring nine Democratic Presidential hopefuls, but that was expected...