The Campaign as Spectator Sport

...The Russian president had another message for America, subtly delivered but ominous...

...He suggested that maybe he had not been tough enough...

...The Pew Global Attitudes Project, which conducted a great deal of the research, concludes that the war in Iraq has further inflamed the Muslim world and widened the rift with Western Europe...

...and only 11 per cent approve of President Bush...

...He left the CIA connection to be inferred...

...It is not only that opinion surveys after the first debate in Coral Gables, Florida, reversed the lead in the polls that President George W. Bush had established over Senator John Kerry after the Republican National Convention in New York's Madison Square Garden...

...In the case of Iran, Feith's favorite exile is Manucher Ghorbanifar...

...The Franklin investigation has served to lift the veil on the Pentagon's backchannel operations with shadowy Iranian exile groups...

...It is becoming clear that in the preinvasion years, the darling of the Pentagon neocons was Ahmed Chalabi, who led the Bush Administration down the garden path of imaginary weapons stockpiles and collected millions of dollars in American subsidies...

...For Israel, it is therefore crucial to have up-to-the-minute intelligence on the status of Iran's nuclear program...

...The Scoop That Wasn't The trickster who took the mighty 60 Minutes and Dan Rather to the cleaners will occupy a prominent place in the annals of political hoaxes...

...The tension between the Agency and the White House was visible...

...Eighty-eight per cent of Greeks, 63 per cent of the Dutch, 55 per cent of the British—and a surprisingly low 52 per cent of the French...

...It was recently revealed that Lawrence Franklin, a Farsi-speaking analyst in Feith's bureau, has been under investigation by the FBI for two years, suspected of passing on to supporters of Israel information about Iran that may compromise methods of interception...

...That he proceeded to do for three and a halfhours, until midnight...

...A lot of people look back to the Soviet era with nostalgia," Putin said...

...That day on the ranch three years ago, when President Bush said he looked into Putin's soul and liked what he saw—that is a dim memory...

...Then he reminded the world that Russia is still one of the world's greatest nuclear powers...

...In the media age an election campaign takes on some of the characteristics of a spectator sport...

...The leak of the National Intelligence Estimate reporting the dire prospects for Iraq looked like a CIA shot across the White House bow...

...Allawi to the Rescue President Bush has a lot riding politically on Interim Prime Minister Allawi...

...All this suggested that someone who had seen documents from Killian's file— possibly removed, possibly discarded— had cleverly created reasonable facsimiles of official letters...

...In any event, Rather persuaded Bill Burkett to confess all in a taped interview...

...He said, "We showed weakness and weak people are beaten...

...Columnist Novak reported that after the President dismissed the CIA estimate as "just guessing," the author of the analysis, Paul Pillar, defended it at a private dinner and spoke of unheeded warnings...

...Senator John Kerry has now taken the position that invading Iraq has created a crisis of "historic proportions...

...Ideology versus Pragmatism During his visit to Washington in September, Iraqi Interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi confirmed to me, at a meeting of the Council on Foreign Relations, his longstanding relationship with the CIA...

...Secretary General Kofi Annan's assertion that the invasion of Iraq was "illegal" makes it unlikely that the UN will give much help in managing an election in January—if there is one...

...It was conservative columnist Robert Novak who wrote that in Coral Gables the President appeared at his least attractive: Smirking, bored, annoyed, he looked as though this was the last place in the world he wanted to be...

...According to the New York Times, huge gains in registration have occurred in areas with large low-income and minority populations...

...By last May, however, Chalabi, a Shiite, was being investigated on various grounds, including peddling secrets to Iran...

...What is visible becomes disproportionately important...

...We exiles were fighting Saddam when the United States was supporting Saddam," he said...

...The documents spelled trouble for the President, especially in combination with a revelation by Ben Barnes, one-time Democratic speaker of the Texas House, that he helped Congressman George H. W Bush's son get named, out of turn, to a slot in the Guard and thereby avoid the draft and Vietnam...

...What was not expected was that he would lose for such things as lamenting what hard work the Presidency is...

...Nothing is more dangerous to Iraq's reconstruction and a successful election than submitting to hostage blackmail...

...It was thought that Bush would easily win the foreign policy debate on his credentials as commander in chief...

...It sounded like a hard-line policy in the making...

...Adding to the uncertainty was Killian's former secretary, who said she had not typed those memos, although they did accurately reflect Colonel Killian's views...

...Initially, White House officials said they had no reason to doubt their authenticity...

...It is rare for a debate to determine the outcome of an election...

...And it was...

...Yet this is a particularly chilling set of numbers that will interest anyone who cares what the rest of the world thinks of us...

...During October, Iraq's fledgling National Guard, supported by American forces, will have to break the insurgents' hold on several towns they control...

...After the invasion of Kuwait in 1990, he noted, the Iraqi opposition worked with many governments, including the United States...

...The invasion of Iraq deepened anti- Americanism in Arab countries...

...At the root of the disagreement is a conflict between ideology and pragmatism...

...Let me stipulate that as an alumnus of Ed Murrow's CBS News, I discuss this without joy...

...Then came a reminder of how the U. S. justified the war in Vietnam: "You in the West should understand there is a domino theory here in the Caucasus...

...No country is more worried about Iran's nuclear potential than Israel, which in 1981 destroyed Iraq's nuclear reactor with an air strike...

...To their surprise, he sent word that he wanted to go ahead with the meeting, which he opened by saying, "This isn't the best time for me, but I owe it to you to answer your questions...

...Like President Bush after 9/11, Putin said his country was under attack...

...Russia is on the front line...

...But only occasionally, as in the backing of different candidates in Iraq, does the depth of the conflict come to the surface...

...Harvard Professor Graham Allison points out in a new book, Nuclear Terrorism, that 90 per cent of all fissile material outside the U. S. is stored in the former Soviet Union...

...The leaked National Intelligence Estimate speaks of civil war as one of three possibilities...

...Accompanying the President to the United Nations General Assembly, Allawi could observe the stone-cold reaction of the delegates to Bush's assurance that Iraq was on its way to stability and democracy...

...Your security is under threat, not just Russia's...

...Back then the CIA circulated an interagency notice that Ghorbanifar was considered a serial fabricator...

...The insurgents are displaying pictures of murdered hostages on the Internet, their preferred medium of communication...

...When asked about negotiating with Chechen leaders, Putin asked whether President Bush would invite Osama bin Laden to the White House for negotiations...

...The CIA, considering Chalabi to be a fraud, was putting its money on Allawi, who led an abortive coup against Saddam Hussein in 1996...

...Feith presides over a task force of 1,500 that is virtually a separate State Department within the Defense Department...

...But they were sure he would cancel because of the schoolhouse massacre in the town of Beslan, in southern Russia...

...And peace slowly returned to the battlements...

...Here goes: Only 12 per cent of Muslims believe the United States respects Islamic values...

...Moreover, because of its huge supplies, its shaky safeguards and its extensive corruption, Russia poses the greatest threat of "loose nukes...

...The outcome of all this was a draft Presidential directive that would authorize covert action to bring down the Iranian regime...

...Like Bush, he reserved the right to take preemptive action...

...The President later said he misspoke, and the CIA said the Pillar dinner was just part of its general outreach program...

...His star no longer in the ascendant, Chalabi was ditched by the Pentagon, his home was raided with American help, and his nephew was fired from the group preparing Saddam Hussein's trial...

...only 7 per cent think the West understands Muslim culture...

...The view is held by 85 per cent of Germans, 80 per cent of the French, 73 per cent of the British, and 68 per cent of Italians...

...He was brought here to spread the word that things are going well in Iraq despite manifest evidence to the contrary...

...Their antagonism was fanned by the rivalry between the Pentagon and the CIA...

...Putin Peddles Fear A group of Western scholars, in Moscow in September for a conference on Russia's future, had a longstanding appointment with President Vladimir V. Putin...

...CBS thought it was onto a hot scoop when it came into possession of four documents bearing the signature of the late Lieutenant Colonel Jerry Killian, onetime Air National Guard commander and Lieutenant George W. Bush's superior...

...In a series of decrees the Kremlin has tightened control over the news media, reduced Parliament to a rubber stamp, and asserted authority over regional governments...

...Just 13 per cent of Egyptians, 6 per cent of Jordanians, and 3 per cent of Saudi Arabians hold a favorable opinion of the United States...

...Like the American President, he was loud in his praise of the country's Armed Forces, who had put their lives on the line trying to save the children...

...Itis also that since well before the debates began there has been an unusual surge in voter registration in many states...

...A Turkish construction company halted operations in Iraq in the hope of saving the lives of 10 kidnapped employees...

...Whether it would authorize air strikes if Iran's nuclear development reached a threatening point is not clear...

...The prospects for an election have assumed inordinate importance to Bush, who has a political need to have it appear that the balloting in Iraq is on track...

...It encourages further hostage-taking, and it discourages foreign contractors from doing the sorely required work of repairing Iraq's infrastructure...

...What do our European friends think of us...

...But the debates have come to loom especially large in the current contest, in terms of style as well as substance...

...is acting solely out of its own interest, without regard for the interests of its allies...

...A media watershed," the Wall Street Journal called it...

...I think I'll forgo any comment of my own...

...The President, probably relieved, called for an investigation of the documents...

...The internecine battle in the Bush Administration goes on...

...Suspicion soon fell on Bill Burkett, a former Guard officer who lives in Baird, Texas, and is no friend of Bush...

...And like Mr...

...Suggestions from Washington that the Russian leader should seek a political solution with the Chechen separatists fall now on very stony soil...

...During the run-up to the Iraq War, it was Feith's bureau that dealt with selected exiles like Chalabi...

...Eventually CBS named a commission headed by Republican former Attorney General Richard Thornburgh to investigate the whole affair...

...How this will affect the actual turnout remains to be seen...

...Chalabi, with his Iraqi National Congress, and Allawi, with his Iraqi National Accord, were bitter rivals...

...Putin's move to tighten his control has created a dilemma forme Bush Administration...

...The Killian documents represented the Guard commander as bridling under pressure to sugarcoat Lieutenant Bush's performance record and refusal to take a required physical examination...

...Large majorities in seven out of eight Muslim countries worry about a military threat from the United States: 74 per cent in Indonesia, 72 per cent in Nigeria, 72 per cent in Pakistan, and 71 per cent in Turkey...

...On the Iranian Front There is a certain déjà vu quality about the way Douglas Feith, undersecretary of defense for policy, has been working on plans for regime change in Iran, which the Administration believes is developing nuclear weapons...

...But the Wall Street Journal talked of the "CIA's insurgency...

...It would undoubtedly try to repeat the feat in Iran if it felt menaced...

...They were compiled by Daniel Yankelovich, an opinion expert who is the chairman and founder of Public Agenda...

...That may have happened when John F. Kennedy went up against Richard M. Nixon, and perhaps when Ronald Reagan took on Jimmy Carter...

...The United States has reason to worry about an unstable Russia...

...It started in June, and has reached proportions that have overwhelmed some registration offices...

...A measure of security countrywide will also have to be demonstrated...

...Clearly, CBS regarded the promise of confidentiality as inoperative in a case where the source had committed a hoax...

...The Nunn-Lugar program, designed to help in financing the removal of Russian nuclear weapons, has not been faring well under the Bush Administration...

...In some countries, Yankelovich says, distrust and dislike of the United States doubled and tripled in the space of a single year...

...The signs have not been promising...

...But then it began to appear, under closer examination, that the documents were typed a lot more recently than 1972, and that Killian's signature was a photocopy...

...Calculating Global Resentment Let me warn you, the next paragraphs are all about numbers, not usually the stuff of light reading...

...Putin clearly had some ideas about Russia's future after the bloody confrontation in Beslan, and clearly his ideas were meant for American ears...

...He is the arms merchant who almost two decades ago helped to embroil the Reagan Administration in the illegal sale of missiles to Iran...

...How many of America's traditional friends in Europe join the Muslims in considering the United States a threat to world peace...

...Nevertheless, the Pentagon has signed up Ghorbanifar to help arrange secret meetings with Iranians (two of them were held in Rome) for the purpose of discussing how to topple the regime in Tehran...

...The post-9/11 perception in Europe is that the U.S...

...Bush, he labeled the attackers "terrorists...