Still, 'What about Iraq?'

...But something funny happened...

...America has yet to find a unifying principle for this age of terror...

...We simply wanted to know why our husbands were killed," explained Kristen Breitweiser of Middletown, New Jersey...

...It is hard to apply American military power when one doesn't know where to apply it...

...When Hezbollah terrorists abducted several Americans in Lebanon, President Reagan responded by illegally selling missiles to Iran in return for the release of two American hostages, who were promptly replaced by the abduction of two more Americans...

...she said only that tragically, for all the talk of war before September 11, the country was simply not on a war footing...

...And his duck hunting holiday with Justice Antonin Scalia shortly after the Court announced it was taking the case has a lot of his supporters shaking their heads...

...a U.S...

...The fiery cleric says he has forged links with the Palestinian Hamas and the Lebanese Hezbollah...

...The Chief Justice replied that the High Court has no formal procedure for reviewing a justice's own decision, and he suggested that the Senators' complaint was ill considered...

...Fought without United Nations support or any major European support, it has left a system of alliances and collective security built over half a century in tatters...

...It was ironic when the United States, which has scorned the UN, sought its aid in extricating itself from Iraq by helping to organize the transfer of power to the Iraqis...

...Rice skirted her disagreement with Clarke by suggesting a difference of recollection about the memo he had submitted prior to 9/11 calling for a more active antiterrorism policy...

...an Air Force installation in Saudi Arabia...

...Some of the accused women say the new regime is just like the old one: Steal the money and blame the employees...

...Time's headline read: "Is Cheney an Asset or a Liability...

...A contributing factor, she stressed, was inadequate cooperation and coordination among intelligence agencies...

...That the question was even raised indicated what tough times these are for the Vice President...

...In no other courtroom in the land, perhaps in the world, is it left to a judge to decide solely on his or her own whether the appearance of conflict requires stepping back from a case...

...How did the American public react to all this...

...The duck hunting camp is owned by the head of a local oil services company...

...Nevertheless, the President insists that the June 30 date for transfer of authority to some Iraqi entity holds...

...But returning to haunt the President is a promise he made six months into his term that any legislation in the field of health would strengthen Medicare's long-term financial security...

...into the Pentagon...

...A Pew Research poll taken after Falluja found that 57 per cent of Americans still believed going to war in Iraq was the right decision...

...Clearly it failed to foresee that some Iraqis might fight for liberation from the liberators...

...Justice Scalia has so far refused to recuse himself, to disqualify himself, from the Cheney case...

...Clarke had also indicated that Bush neglected the antiterror war in his preoccupation with toppling Saddam Hussein in Iraq...

...Democratic Senators Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont and Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut have written Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist asking whether Scalia could be a fair and impartial adjudicator in the Cheney matter...

...In 1995, terrorist Ramzi Youssef planned to fly a plane into CIA headquarters in Virginia...

...From the New York Times we have learned that an organization headed by Ahmed Chalabi, who fed the Pentagon a lot of dubious information about weapons of mass destruction, is still getting $340,000 a month for intelligence that some officials consider useless, misleading or even fabricated...

...But Cheney has fallen upon politically hard times...

...I remember asking Israeli Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin on his last visit to Washington whether he had an answer to suicide bombing...

...But in a liberated Iraq the taint of scandal continues...

...The report concludes that the insurance program is in danger of running out of money by 2019—or, seven years earlier than was forecast only a year ago...

...The head of the company that originally got the contract was—who else?—a friend of Ahmed Chalabi...

...The banknotes were exchanged over a threemonth period, and then a Finance Ministry audit showed that $22 million more in dinars had been given out than had been taken in...

...military encircled the city, set a nighttime curfew and put up barricades across possible escape routes...

...But other substantial causes are the new Medicare bill's steering more money into private health plans and adding a prescription drug benefit...

...Sunnis and Shiites fighting on the same side have confronted the American-led coalition with a new and unexpected two-front insurgency...

...She repeated a line that has proved successful on television: "There was no silver bullet that could have averted the September 11 attacks...

...After the statue ofSaddamwastoppled, the occupation authority decided it would be a good idea to recall the dinars bearing the dictator's picture and issue new currency with images from Iraq's history...

...Failed Foresight In Falluja thousands cheered as Sunni Muslims paraded the mutilated bodies of four Americans through the angry streets...

...Should you have known...

...Unlike her former assistant Richard A. Clarke, she offered no apology for failure...

...destroyer off Yemen...

...In This Age of Terror I was invited by the University of California (Los Angeles) to deliver the Daniel Pearl Memorial Address, in honor of the Wall Street Journal correspondent murdered two years ago in a war without clear front lines...

...Volunteers for the holy war are reported infiltrating from Syria...

...As early as August 2002, he told an audience of veterans: "There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction...

...Neither had anything to say after Bush announced his position...

...Maybe it's time to dust off that unhappy word from Vietnam days—"quagmire...

...We knew Saddam Hussein's regime was deeply corrupt, so it came as no surprise when some of his own captured records showed that he had exploited the United Nations oil-for-food program to siphon off millions in oil allocations for companies and individuals he favored...

...Willingness to die confers great power...

...Defying the White House Medicare's chief actuary, Richard Foster, has testified before the House Ways and Means Committee that the senior citizen health program faces deep financial trouble...

...There is no doubt he is amassing them to use...

...Cheney had said that he would support any stand the Presidenttook...

...Had this been known, it might have stalled the Administration's bill...

...So unless the strong-minded Scalia changes his mind and recuses himself from the case involving his duck hunting friend, you can expect in coming weeks to hear a lot of, "If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck...

...Rice touched on this in gingerly fashion...

...But 57 per cent— the same ratio—did not think Bush had a clear plan for ending it...

...Now a lot of women bank tellers have been locked up in an investigation of who pocketed the missing currency...

...Following is an excerpt: When the Cold War ended, America was left facing a very different kind of war...

...But the spreading violence there has cast a shadow over the hearings...

...Perhaps the most painful episode for Cheney arose from President Bush's decision to support a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage...

...His troubles are of several sorts...

...The local police were asked to keep their presence a secret—speak of undisclosed location...

...But after their departure, the trip became known to the Associated Press and the Los Angeles Times...

...It will have to repair alliances and relations with the UN...

...troops...

...Marines in Lebanon...

...Had I known the enemy was going to use airplanes that fateful morning . .." says the President...

...Next came the Iraqi currency scandal...

...Three weeks later, on January 5, Justice Antonin Scalia and several other persons flew down to southern Louisiana with the Vice President on his official plane, Air Force Two, for a few days of duck hunting...

...Looking for somewhere else to apply force of arms, the Bush Administration chose Iraq on the questionable assumption that Saddam Hussein was cooperating with the Al Qaeda terrorists...

...In addition, Cheney's strange refusal to tell what companies he consulted with as head of the Bush energy task force has created an issue now before the Supreme Court...

...and, climactically, against the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington...

...Turning Grief into Action Once it became apparent that the White House had withheld thousands of pages of documents from the September 11 Commission, the Family Steering Committee got on the case, demanding to know if the investigation was being compromised...

...Judging by the report of the Medicare trustees, the new law will have the opposite effect...

...Just Like Old Times It begins to look as though the new Iraq is being born in a sea of corruption and a welter of scandal...

...The widows are asking: Could you have known...

...Now comes unsettling word about the fund's future in the annual report to Congress of Medicare's board of trustees, largely researched by Foster...

...Cheney's daughter, Mary, who works for the re-election campaign, is openly lesbian...

...Polishing the Golden Boy Speaking to the annual Republican Governors Association meeting, held in Washington, the President volunteered some high praise for his Vice President...

...Perhaps the Japanese Kamikaze attacks of World War II were too long ago and too far away to register...

...One question awaiting an answer is whether the government, even if it had been more attentive to the AI Qaeda terrorist threat, could have imagined a suicide attack with hijacked planes...

...A generally successful operation in Afghanistan rooted out Al Qaeda training camps...

...Today America fights a war against what are called enemy combatants, a loose term that permits the compromising of civil liberties...

...Foster, itwill be recalled, made headlines by defying the White House and going public with the news that the Administration had kept secret, until its Medicare bill passed, the estimate that the changes would cost $139 billion more over 10 years than Congress was told...

...It was they who had formed a lobby powerful enough to bring about the creation of an independent investigating commission, and then had forced it to require the testimony of officials up to and including President Bush...

...or into the White House...

...In the Baghdad neighborhood of Sadr City, formerly Saddam City, the radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, whose father and two brothers were executed by Saddam Hussein, triggered a militia uprising in which eight American soldiers were slain...

...A lower court has ordered Cheney to release the records...

...Vice President Dick Cheney has for more than two years been resisting demands that he release records of the energy task force he headed...

...That the President found it necessary to volunteer this endorsement for someone who has been the golden boy of his Administration seemed odd...

...This was the latest example of how some family members of the 3,000 9/11 victims have turned their grief into action...

...The Administration has appealed to the Supreme Court, which announced last December 15 that it would hear the case...

...The Sierra Club and Judicial Watch want to know especially whether industry figures like Kenneth Lay of Enron helped to write a policy favoring oil and gas companies...

...I have taken the measure of this man," said Bush...

...This is attributed in part to rising health costs...

...After the fever pitch of anticipation generated by the original refusal of President George W. Bush to let his National Security Adviser testify in public, the appearance of Condoleezza Rice before the independent September 11 Commission was something of an anticlimax...

...America will have to find itself before it can lead this new kind of war against this new kind of enemy...

...From the Wall Street Journal we have learned that the Pentagon is bringing the Justice Department into a widening investigation of the Halliburton Company, alleged to have overcharged for fuel from Kuwait and food services for U.S...

...He compared the trip to being invited to dinner at the White House...

...They don't come any better...

...When President Bush said Iraq was a central front in the war on terrorism, he may have been only premature...

...A recent Time-CNN poll found Americans evenly split on whether Cheney should be nominated again...

...The Administration is working strenuously to rebuff suggestions that it was overly fixated on Saddam Hussein to the derogation of the larger war on terrorism...

...Almost a year after "Mission Accomplished" was proclaimed from the deck of the carrier A braham Lincoln, the return of 13 5,000 American troops is on hold and the Pentagon mumbles something about reinforcement as a contingency...

...The signature on most of these terrorist acts was suicide...

...Then there is the fact that Cheney took the lead in talking up the necessity for invading Iraq and made some of the most unqualified statements about the imminence of an Iraqi threat...

...All that spells trouble for Bush in the election campaign...

...And then there was the fact that slipped through the cracks of American intelligence: Some Saudis were taking lessons in flying planes, but not in taking off or landing...

...And I am proud to have Dick Cheney by my side...

...efforts to hold down doctors' fees are not working...

...President Bush has said, "Had I known the enemy was going to use airplanes that fateful morning, I would have done everything in my power to protect the American people...

...against American embassies in Africa...

...Iraq became not a unifying principle but a disorganizing principle...

...First, there is the fact that his old company, the Halliburton Corporation, has been caught overcharging for gasoline and for meals served to American troops in Iraq, and is now under investigation for alleged bribery to get foreign contracts...

...But then, the United States Supreme Court is rather special—as we learned again on December 12,2000, when five Justices handed the Presidency to George W. Bush...

...For those too young to remember, quagmire means that, whether or not you should have been there in the first place, you're stuck now because you can't get out without making things infinitely worse...

...In different terms than when the President spoke in September 2001, the question arises: "What about Iraq...

...From the Washington Post we have learned that a contract for more than $300 million to outfit the new Iraqi Army was canceled because of irregularities in the bidding process...

...He shook his head and said, 'There is no answer to suicide bombing.' America was not prepared for a war that lurked in the shadows...

...In 1998, there was a reported plan by Al Qaeda-linked terrorists to crash a plane into the World Trade Center...

...In a written statement, he said, "I do not think my impartiality could reasonably be questioned...

...Ironically, the al-Sadr insurrection was touched off by the American suppression of his incendiary newspaper— democracy in Iraq is still a tentative thing...

...If It Looks Like a Duck...

...But the battle in the Fallujaarea went on with adozen Marines killed in one day...

...Then came a series of bombings directed against the U.S...

...She spoke of the President as not wanting to respond to Al Qaeda one attack at a time...

...The U.S...

...It wasn't surprising, Rice said, that the President would say after 9/11: "What about Iraq...

...That war did not begin on September 11,2001, but at least a quarter century earlier, when young Ayatollah Khomeini zealots in Iran seized the American Embassy and its staff...

...The war in Iraq is not, as such, on the commission's agenda, so little was made of the point...

...It will have to overcome the widespread feeling that we are all involved in some clash of civilizations...

...But more recently, in 1994, there had been an attempt by Algerian terrorists to hijack an Air France plane and fly it into the Eiffel Tower...

...he was tired of "swatting flies...

...In 1999, a Federal Intelligence report said in so many words, "Suicide bomber could crash plane into U. S. airport...