The over reaching capacity of the human race : an open letter to an American Conservative.

“You probably have already seen this... I know the situation that we are in... I have a sense of what is happening to our ecology...there are far fewer birds than when I was a child...It can be as simple as that... We are individuals and we can only do what each of us is equipped as individuals can do....I get hurt when I sense you being bitter and angry and I feel you are wasting energy being that way. You have a wonderful creative mind...that can be freed to other purposes when it’s not bogged down in bitterness and anger towards those we cannot control. We cannot control others...we can only control ourselves. You have talents... Share them...use them to make some difference...some small difference there in Oregon...a small difference that can grow... who knows where it will lead...”
- an American Conservative

Part One - The DNA Frontier
In the basement of Mac Hall at OHSU I came across a massing of corporate and institutional communications–flyers, brochures, folders, postcards, catalogs. Two examples caught my eye. The first was an 8 1/2” x 11” trifold, printed on an 80 pound cover stock that allowed it to stand rigidly, the contemporary 4 color process created a seamless blue gradient to make the message read airy and coolly, and the typography unflinchingly stated “Get the Gene You Want”. The inside spread housed a handsome chart that described the production flow of managing gene sequences.

Next to the trifold was a 30 page catalog. There you could shop for then purchase the laboratory supplies, instruments, and machines that allowed any human being with proper knowledge to engineer genes.

“Our large, collaborative faculty apply
experimental approaches that include
molecular biology, genetics, biochemistry,
and microscopy. Using these tools, we pursue
an understanding of the regulatory
mechanisms that underlie the behavior of
cells, tissues, and organisms.”
- http://www.ohsu.edu/cellbio/

“The function of the nucleus is to maintain the integrity of genes and to control the activities of the cell by regulating gene expression.”
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cell_nucleus

“Gene expression, or simply expression, is the process by which the inheritable information which comprises a gene, such as the DNA sequence, is made manifest as a physical and biologically functional gene product, such as protein or RNA.

Several steps in the gene expression process may be modulated, including the transcription step and the post-translational modification of a protein. Gene regulation gives the cell control over structure and function, and is the basis for cellular differentiation, morphogenesis and the versatility and adaptability of any organism. Gene regulation may also serve as a substrate for evolutionary change, since control of the timing, location, and amount of gene expression can have a profound effect on the functions (actions) the gene in the organism.”
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene_expression

Next to the pile of communications in the basement of Mac Hall, there was a vending machine. The kind of vending machine you can find across this country which normally serve up candy bars and snack chips. Yet, the object of this vending machines purpose was to dispense concentrated samples of enzymes.

Taken together, a dedicated student can learn management strategies to manipulate the structural quality of a cell, the internal functioning of a cell, and the resources within the environment which a cell lives. This body of knowledge is growing. Human beings now regularly intervene upon the lives of cell communities (tissue). Of course there is the desire to better manage the much more complicated task, the task that cells themselves have already achieved, the management of complex tissue structures (organisms).

“Genetics is the science of heredity and Genetic variation in living organisms. Knowledge that desired characteristics were inherited has been implicitly used since prehistoric times for improving crop plants and animals through selective breeding. The science comes from human experience to improve crop and animals through the use of method such as domestication. However, the modern science of genetics, which seeks to understand the mechanisms of inheritance, only began with the work of Gregor Mendel in the mid-1800s.
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetics

Part Two - Cataloging a Conversation on Politics and History

Last night we took two sides on an issue. I was against human beings existence as it now stands due to the brilliant yet clumsy implementation of its corpus of knowledge and the integrity of the organizations that manage the implementation of that knowledge. Too much power has been accumulated and this species is not responsible enough to wield its power. I continued by doubting that we would ever be so organized. We are adept at observing and engineering though we lack the faculty to manage a reasonable balance after we have intervened. A reasonable balance would mean less luxury for human beings for the sake of luxury, less death to other life forms as an expense of that luxury and to cease the activities which destroy ecosystems that spawn life.

You defended human beings as they are now, and you defended America in particular. Your arguments are used by conservatives in general and those who are against the ideas of a liberal society. For the American Right I sense that they believe that strength, particularly spiritual, economic and military strength, is the virtue that will allow them to prevail-which in the end is quite clannish and tribal. One of the favorite slogans for the American Right while sabre rattling in 2001-2002 was, “You are either with us or against us”. Blind faith in free markets is a core belief of the American Right, too. Advocating capitalistic consumption simply because they find their good fortune boosted by that kind of organization is not a justification for how that organization affects all other life forms and impacts the ecosystems that we share.

In our conversation, your first defense was that human beings did not need to be brilliant in its use of the knowledge they have accumulated. Human beings need not be burdened with accountability and do not have responsibility towards the environmental situation they have created. It is out of the individuals control thus it should be put out of the individuals mind. Human beings need only to survive and human beings need only pursue and experience joy. Human beings should succumb to the idea that they have no control and that human beings simply need ‘to be’. This is quite enough for you I imagine due to your faith in the lovely qualities of the human soul. This perspective might help an individual sort through their identity, an aid for contemporary personal reflections on the self. Though this conversation is not about the individual human being.

Your defense for human beings then focused on an abstraction–the experience of joy itself. Your sense of ‘joy’ was based on something deeply private and quite ethereal. In context of the conversation, you insist that the human ability to experience private joy some how justifies any social, environmental or ecological cost. You did not want to speak of the daily atrocities that modern human society inflicts upon the world. Private joy is all that needs to be considered.

At its root, your defense was tiredly Western. To be Western, one discusses the world with human experience considered supreme. The entrenched power of the Christian church, along with its brother the Humanities, do nothing but perpetuate this view point unquestioned.

In the end your last counter point was simple and Bushian. America is not evil compared to other evil civilizations, therefore it was good. This is empty rhetoric and text book egocentrism.

To counter this perspective, I viewed human beings as a social group and spoke about its accumulated history. This tactic must give an ironic nod to the Humanities itself, particularly the French Structuralists, Post-Structuralists and ultimately Foucault. In our conversation I looked back on the grisly history of modern culture. I began the time line with American Civil War atrocities, footnoted a contemporary war in China that saw 20 million perish in over a decades time, and then, like a good high school debate from the 1980’s, emphasized the impact of the nuclear bomb. I quickly advanced a time line of American war, industrialization, and technical dominance by human beings upon the massive variety of life forms that inhabit this planet.

We have created an existence overwhelmed by industrialized process. We nurse life to maturity in order to slaughter it for food. We mine resources, manufacture to our delight, then create nasty sinks where we dump our waste. This unchecked activity destroys numerous habitats and ecosystems. The ecological footprint in order to maintain this kind of civilization we so enjoy is stressing fresh water supplies, radically altering the climate and the quality of the air, land and ocean.

The examination of our material world shows how human beings, particularly over the past 150 years, have not shown a collective maturity to handle the knowledge that they are creating. We use it predominantly in this society for wealth creation–a collective activity which does not redeem our existence.

America: Climate Change Debate Hinges On Economics

Climate Change Debate Hinges On Economics
Lawmakers Doubt Voters Would Fund Big Carbon Cuts
By Steven Mufson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, July 15, 2007; Page A01

Here's the good news about climate change: Energy and climate experts say the world already possesses the technological know-how for trimming greenhouse gas emissions enough to slow the perilous rise in the Earth's temperatures.

Here's the bad news: Because of the enormous cost of addressing global warming, the energy legislation considered by Congress so far will make barely a dent in the problem, while farther-reaching climate proposals stand a remote chance of passage.

Despite growing public concern over global warming, the House has failed to agree on new standards for automobile fuel efficiency, and the Senate has done little to boost the efficiency of commercial office buildings and appliances. In September, Congress is expected to start wrestling with more ambitious legislation aimed at slowing climate change; but because of the complexity of the likely proposals, few expect any bill to become law. Even if passed by Congress and signed by President Bush, the final measure may not be tough enough to slow global warming.

"I don't think there's any question that what is being talked about now would, over the long term, be insufficient," said Philip Sharp, president of the think tank Resources for the Future and a former House member. "The issue is: Will Congress get in place a larger architecture that sends a signal to the economy that accelerates change?"

The potential economic impact of meaningful climate legislation -- enough to reduce U.S. emissions by at least 60 percent -- is vast. Automobiles would have to get double their current miles to the gallon. Building codes would have to be tougher, requiring use of more energy-efficient materials. To stimulate and pay for new technologies, U.S. electricity bills could rise by 25 to 33 percent, some experts estimate; others say the increase could be greater.

Most of the technologies that could reduce greenhouse gases are not only expensive but would need to be embraced on a global scale, scientists say. Many projections for 2030 include as many as 1 million wind turbines worldwide; enough solar panels to cover half of New Jersey, massive reforestation; a major retooling of the global auto industry; as many as 400 power plants fitted with pricey equipment to capture carbon dioxide and store it underground; and, most controversial, perhaps 350 new nuclear plants around the world.

"The scope of the problem is really enormous," said Prasad Kasibhatla, associate professor of environmental chemistry at Duke University's Nicholas School of the Environment. Not only must Congress and the White House reach agreement on emissions limits, developing nations must also act to achieve temperature goals. "If the climate change bills go through Congress and could somehow be coupled to a multinational agreement, then things could really start to change," Kasibhatla said. "But I'd like to start seeing real agreements between countries before I call myself an optimist."

Measures taken by the world's governments to reduce greenhouse gases could cost 1 percent of world economic output, according to a report commissioned by the British government and written last year by former World Bank chief economist Nicholas Stern. But Stern said the cost of not taking those steps would be at least five times as much, hitting the developing world hardest.

The shape of U.S. legislation targeted exclusively at climate change remains a matter of debate.

"I sincerely doubt that the American people are willing to pay what this is really going to cost them," John D. Dingell (D-Mich.), chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, said in a recent C-SPAN interview, adding that he intended to introduce legislation that would impose a carbon tax "just to sort of see how people really feel about this." He said his proposal would boost the gasoline tax by 50 cents a gallon and establish a "double-digit" tax on each ton of all carbon-dioxide emissions.

In the Senate, five climate change bills have been introduced recently -- with sponsors from both parties. They do not tax carbon but use variations on Europe's cap-and-trade system. Europe modeled its system on the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which the Senate rejected and President Bush later dismissed, saying it would cause the U.S. economy "serious harm."

A cap-and-trade system creates a new market where a limited, decreasing number of permits for emitting greenhouse gases, measured in metric tons of carbon dioxide, are traded. One hedge fund manager compared the importance of such a move to the creation of paper money. If implemented in the United States, it would alter the calculations of almost every business; hundreds of billions of dollars of energy investments would be redirected.

It's impossible to pinpoint the price a ton of carbon dioxide in the United States, because a cap-and-trade system would leave the price to the market. In Europe, however, the price for a permit to emit a ton of carbon dioxide in December 2008 is $29.

John M. Deutch, former CIA director and now a physical chemistry professor at MIT, thinks that price is about right. He has been pressing policymakers to speed development of technology that would capture carbon dioxide gases released by power plants and store them underground for centuries. This so-called carbon capture technology, currently applied in a handful of pilot projects, costs at least $200 million to $300 million per plant and hasn't been demonstrated on a commercial scale.

Deutch says that the technology, seen as a vital part of almost any strategy to slow global warming, won't be commercially viable until carbon dioxide reaches $30 a ton. That would translate into a 25 percent average increase in electric bills nationwide, Deutch said.

"It's certainly affordable for our economy and our society," Deutch said.

But the price might be too high for members of Congress and voters. Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.), chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, is the lead sponsor of one of the cap-and-trade bills. Like Europe's system, it would establish a ceiling for emissions and let companies buy or sell extra allocations, or credits. But unlike Europe's plan, Bingaman's would create a "safety valve" so that the price of a ton of carbon dioxide would not surpass $12 in 2012. When the price hit that level, the government would sell permits until the price goes down. The ceiling level would rise 5 percent a year above the inflation rate.

In response to critics, Bingaman would also give a certain number of extra credits to carbon capture and storage projects.

Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (I-Conn.), who chairs the subcommittee that will draft a law, opposes a safety valve, and he is planning another proposal with Sen. John W. Warner (R-Va.), but they haven't worked out details. In 2003, Lieberman worked with Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) on an earlier cap-and-trade bill, which garnered support from 43 senators. With today's greater sense of urgency about climate change, there may be more support for a cap-and-trade bill now.

But countless technical details each worth billions of dollars to regions and companies remain a matter of debate. Utilities like PNM Resources based in New Mexico, which burns coal for 64 percent of its power, want more allowances for current emitters like itself; environmentalists call these companies "pollution squatters" seeking rewards for bad past behavior. By contrast, California-based Sempra Energy, which has efficient natural gas plants that emit relatively few greenhouse gases, fears it will be penalized for its good behavior. Sempra president Neal Schmale says California, which has high electricity rates, shouldn't subsidize the rest of the country.

"The thing I'm struck by is the magnitude of the challenge," said James Rogers, chief executive of Duke Energy, after listening to a talk on carbon capture and storage. Rogers said that he feared that the United States is far -- "we're not even three Zip codes away" -- from a price that would make that technology economically viable.

In Europe, there is a much greater sense of urgency about combating climate change, as Bush discovered at last month's meeting of the Group of Eight major industrial nations. German Chancellor Angela Merkel wants to slash greenhouse gas emissions by 40 percent by 2020 and 80 percent by 2050. Merkel is expected to push for big increases in power plant productivity and more renewable energy, although Germany is already the leading country in Europe for wind and solar power. Spain and Italy are offering incentives of about 40 cents a kilowatt hour for solar-power installations.

While some energy-intensive industries complain that the European cap-and-trade program is driving manufacturers to developing countries where greenhouse gases aren't regulated, German government officials say that the campaign to reduce emissions will foster new technologies and jobs, helping the German economy.

Neither Congress nor the Bush administration is considering figures anywhere near the cuts Merkel supports. Bingaman's bill would take effect in 2012 and bring emissions back to 2006 levels by 2020. The Bush administration has talked about lowering carbon intensity, meaning the amount of gases emitted for every unit of economic output. But in a growing economy, it could still mean additional emissions overall.

The deepest proposed U.S. cuts are in the bill introduced by Sens. Bernard Sanders (I-Vt.) and Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.). Falling in between are proposals by Sens. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), Thomas R. Carper (D-Del.), John F. Kerry (D-Mass.), Olympia J. Snowe (R-Maine), McCain and Lieberman. The bills also differ over whether to cover all industries or just utilities; on whether to distribute allocations or auction them; and how much to allow offsetting credits for projects, such as reforestation, that reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

One issue for U.S. lawmakers is that the impact of greenhouse gas restrictions would vary by region and lifestyle. Some utilities rely more heavily than others on coal, which faces a big challenge if progress isn't made on carbon capture and storage. Other utilities are poised to take advantage of new regulations. Areas where wind can power huge turbines might benefit. Wealthier Americans might be better able than poor Americans to afford new equipment -- more efficient air conditioners, better insulated windows, solar panels -- to cut energy costs. In recent lobbying, utilities from Southern states, who said they would be disadvantaged, successfully dissuaded the Senate from adopting renewable-energy standards that would have applied evenly across the country.

In 2009, one of the first issues to confront the new U.S. president is likely to be climate change legislation. In addition to domestic pressures, the European Union will want a deal including the United States because the Kyoto framework it is using expires in 2012, and it takes time for all the member countries to ratify a new plan.

"Doing something about global warming requires an intelligent use of lead time," said David Hawkins, director of the climate change section of the Natural Resources Defense Council. "Changing the way our economy functions so that it isn't polluting is like turning a supertanker. You can't wait until you're on the reef before deciding how to steer the ship."

Iraq: Operation Last Chance

When President George W Bush announced a “surge” of American troops in Iraq, Nick Smarro, 26, an army transport driver, was one of the first to be sent to the front line. He has already survived one roadside bomb, which was buried under a heap of rubbish. It burst the tyres and shattered the windows of his vehicle but left him with only minor injuries. Two days later he was back on patrol.

“He is scared to death,” says Tina Smarro, his mother. “He tells me he will never get out of his vehicle unless he absolutely has to.”

Nick is stationed just outside Baghdad, where US soldiers are taking the fight to Sunni insurgents and Al-Qaeda. Every day he runs a gauntlet of small arms fire and rocks thrown by hostile Iraqis. He feels like a duck in a shooting gallery, never knowing when his luck will run out.

“He doesn’t trust the Iraqi police,” his mother says. “When you don’t see them around, you know something is about to happen. They melt away.”

Smarro held a huge “welcome home” party for her son on his return to America a
fortnight ago, but his ordeal is not over. In two days’ time he is heading
back to the Sunni triangle for another year of duty. He doesn’t complain
much to strangers. When asked what life is like out there, he says: “You
don’t want to know.”

His mother feels most Americans have preferred not to know, until now. There
has been no “shared sacrifice” with military families, she says. But as the
death toll of soldiers has risen to more than 3,600, more and more Americans
are decrying the lack of progress after so much blood has been spilt.

In theory the surge is a carefully laid plan to bring security to Baghdad and
buy time for the Iraqi government to reach out to opponents. In practice, as
one defence official out it: “The troops are paying with their lives for
clearing streets in crummy neighbourhoods without any strategic context.”

In the past five months an extra 30,000 troops have arrived in Iraq, boosting
total US forces to 160,000. Operation Phantom Thunder, launched in June, is
rolling through the Baghdad “belts” in the hope of denying insurgents havens
from where they can launch attacks and car bombings. “We couldn’t call it
what it is – Operation Last Chance,” one senior military official admitted.

US soldiers are living in Baghdad hot spots in joint security stations
alongside Iraqi forces, yet the number of unidentified bodies in the capital
was 40% higher in June than at the start of the surge. A suicide bomb in a
market near Kirkuk killed more than 100 people last week.

In Anbar province there have been some notable successes, with US forces
teaming up with formerly hostile Sunni tribes-man to take on Al-Qaeda in
search-and-destroy missions. Yet there has been little progress towards
political reconciliation by the Shi’ite-domi-nated government.

Ryan Crocker, the American ambassador in Iraq, says: “There are no
consequences for them when they screw up. Whatever is wrong we take care of
it.”

Even if the war is still winnable in Iraq, it is now being lost at home.
Roughly half of Republican senators whisper privately that they have given
up on Iraq, while a growing number are in open revolt. Bush’s own officials
are expressing doubts about sustaining a war that will cost $135 billion
this year. A record 71% of Americans want most troops out of Iraq by the
spring. Bush’s approval rating has plunged below 30%.

Britain, America’s staunchest ally, is inching away from the president under
the new semi-detached leadership of Gordon Brown. In an interview yesterday,
Lord Malloch-Brown, a minister at the Foreign Office, said that the British
prime minister and US president would “no longer be joined at the hip”.

Last week Bush remained defiant. “The real debate over Iraq is between those
who think the fight is lost or not worth the cost or those who think the
fight can be won,” he said. Increasingly, it is an argument between the
president and everybody else.

Bush says he is waiting for the verdict of history, but historians might
conclude that this was the week Americans lost the will to win.

Bush’s hopes of salvaging his tattered legacy now rest with “King David”, as
General David Petraeus, the US commander in Iraq, is known. “I’m going to
wait for David . . . to come back and give us the report on what he sees,”
the president said last week. But will the general deliver the answers Bush
wants?

“Petraeus is an ambitious person,” said a senior defence source. “He might
move into politics one day so he’s looking for bipartisan support. He is a
very pragmatic guy.”

Petraeus believes it takes 10 years for a counterinsurgency war to succeed,
yet he has just two more months to turn the course of the war around before
he presents his progress report to Congress in September.

He knows America’s overstretched army cannot continue at its current troop
levels beyond the spring.

The American commander’s prediction of a disparity between “two clocks” – one
ticking in Baghdad, the other in Washington – is already being borne out by
events. In advance of his report he is bracing for Sunni insurgents to mount
a “mini-Tet”, a reference to the 1968 offensive against the Americans in
Vietnam that undermined public support for that war.

The signs are that Robert Gates, the defence secretary, will begin withdrawing
troops in Iraq this autumn to presurge levels. With luck, Petraeus will be
able to supply a few rosy scenarios to justify such a move. If not, the
pull-out is likely to start anyway to forestall a mutiny by Republican
politicians. The hope is to reduce troops to 60,000 or 70,000 by the end of
2008 and take the sting out of the war as an election issue.

Harry Reid, the Democratic Senate leader, provoked accusations of treason when
he said only a few months ago that Bush knew the war was “lost”. Now the
president himself is raising the spectre of defeat and the dire consequences
of “surrendering to Al-Qaeda” as a last-ditch means of rallying support for
his policy.

Bush looked defensive and peevish when he delivered his interim report on the
troop build-up at a televised press conference on Thursday. He admitted that
progress in an “ugly war” had been unsatisfactory. “Sometimes the decisions
you make and the consequences don’t enable you to be loved,” he said.

Peggy Noonan, President Reagan’s speech-writer, was appalled by his vanity.
Writing in The Wall Street Journal, she noted that Bush liked to present
himself as an idealist, who made decisions “on principle”, unlike his
critics, who were selfish, isolationist and “ever watchful of the polls”.

It is “ungracious”, Noonan pointed out. “Part of the story of his presidency
is he gets to be romantic about history and the American people get to be
the realists . . . This is extremely irritating.” She concluded, “Americans
can’t fire their president right now, so they are waiting it out.”

THEY have, as Bush admitted, “tired of the war”, as its terrible toll hits
home. Many veterans feel brutalised by their experiences. Michael Harmon,
24, an army medic, said he turned against the invasion after a two-year-old
girl was shot. “An IED went off, the gun-happy soldiers just started
shooting anywhere and the baby got hit,” he recalled. “And this baby looked
at me, wasn’t crying, wasn’t anything . . . I know she couldn’t speak. It
might sound crazy but she was like asking me why. You know, ‘Why do I have a
bullet in my leg?’ I was like, this is it. This is ridiculous.”

The few remaining optimists on Iraq are becoming marginalised figures – none
more so than John McCain, the former frontrunner for the Republican
nomination, who might be forced by lack of campaign funds and declining
support to pull out of the 2008 presidential race, as The Sunday Times
revealed last month.

In the Senate last Tuesday, the Arizona senator urged his colleagues to stand
fast. “The terrorists are in this war to win it. Are we?” he asked. McCain
had just returned from Baghdad and, “from what I heard and saw while there,
I believe that our military, in cooperation with the security forces, is
making progress”, he told the fainthearted.

But that day McCain was in desperate straits. Two aides revealed they had
resigned from his presidential campaign after it had blown $22m and was
beset by internal feuding. The Vietnam war hero had to slink away to the
Senate cloakroom in the midst of the Iraq war debate to make a call on his
mobile phone urging fund-raisers not to desert him. His presidential
ambitions are so shattered that he is referred to as Dead Man Walking.

Antiwar critics used to be said to suffer from Bush derangement syndrome. Now
those who back Bush are the ones who appear out of touch with reality. The
rot set in for McCain last April when he was ridiculed for declaring the
surge a success after strolling around a Baghdad market under heavy armed
guard.

As soon as he lost the support of independent voters, Republicans who had
never cared for him but regarded him as a winner began baling out of his
campaign. The McCain implosion was a stark lesson for other politicians,
particularly those facing elections: back Bush at your peril.

In Congress last week, Republicans put Bush on notice that their support for
the war was running out. “Wimps!” scoffed John Boehner, the house Republican
leader. For some perhaps, it was a question of political survival – one war
critic learnt recently that he would face a well-funded antiwar challenge
for his Senate seat.

John Warner, 80, the former chairman of the Armed Services Committee, who is
expected to retire at the next election, said he was still haunted by the
memory of Vietnam. “The army generals would come in [and say], ‘Just send in
another five or 10 thousand [troops]’,” he recalled. “You know, month after
month. Another 10 or 15 thousand. They thought they could win it. We kept
surging in those years. It didn’t work . . . You don’t forget something like
that.”

The polling company Gallup has tested the opinion of American voters on
various conflicts, asking whether it was mistake to send troops. The company
reported this month that “the only war that compares to the current conflict
in terms of public opposition is the Vietnam war”. WHILE the White House was
dealing with its own row over Iraq, the first “wobble” of the new regime in
Downing Street broke out. Douglas Alexander, the secretary of state for
international development, a close ally of the prime minister, delivered a
speech in Washington which was said to “reorder” Britain’s relationship with
America.

Alexander’s call for a “multilateralist, not unilateralist” foreign policy was
cast as a dig at Blair’s unquestioning support for Bush. “In the 20th
century a country’s might was too often measured by what they could
destroy,” he said. “In the 21st century strength should be measured by what
we can build together.”

Had Brown sided with the waverers to win votes back home? The headlines on
Friday morning sparked a flurry of panic at No 10. Brown called a meeting
with his advisers shortly after lunch, where there was talk of sacking one
of Alexander’s aides for spinning the speech – a sin in the supposedly new
spin-free zone in Downing Street.

At the White House and State Department, senior officials went ballistic and
demanded explanations from their British counterparts. “It has severely
irritated the administration,” said a senior British source. “Douglas
Alexander and his team caused a lot more problems for the prime minister
than they knew.”

No 10 tried to play down suggestions of Britain taking a more independent
line. Blaming spin, however, is too easy an explanation for the
miscom-munication. Sources acknowledge that Alexander intended to deliver a
“subtle” message in Washington for British consumption – just not with the
megaphone that the White House heard loud and clear.

Besides, 24 hours later, another of Brown’s new ministers stoked the
suspicions. Mal-loch-Brown, former deputy secretary-general of the United
Nations, said: “What I really hate is the effort to paint me as
antiAmerican, but I am happy to be described as antineocon. If they see me
as a villain, I will wear that as a badge of honour.”

He went on to say that he hoped British foreign policy under Brown would
become “much more impartial”.

Brown is now preparing to fly to Washington in the next couple of weeks to
reassure Bush about the strength of the alliance. “He may need to come out
quicker than he intended,” a British official said. “He will have to undo
some of the damage.”

David Miliband, the foreign secretary, is also said to be furious and might
arrive in Washington before Brown. Simon MacDonald, No 10’s foreign policy
adviser, will fly out this week to meet Stephen Hadley, the US national
security adviser.

A senior government source insisted Britain’s policy on Iraq remained the
same. “We are not drawing up some political timetable for withdrawal. That
would be nonsensical. Not only that, but how would you explain it to our
troops?

“If we said we were going to withdraw by the end of the year based on some
political calculation, then our military leaders would quite rightly say,
‘Well, why don’t we just pull out now?’ ” Thomas Friedman, the New York
Times commentator, noted last week that the British were already quietly
pulling out of southern Iraq, with important consequences for America.

“Look at the British in Basra,” he wrote. “The British forces there have
slowly receded into a single base at Basra airport. And what has happened?
The void has been filled by a vicious contest for power among Shi’ite
warlords, gangs and clans, and British troops are still being killed
whenever they venture out.

“We should not kid ourselves,” he concluded. “Our real choices in Iraq are
either all in or all out.”

Hoshyar Zebari, the Iraqi foreign minister, warned last week that an American
withdrawal could provoke a blood-bath. “The dangers could be a civil war,
dividing the country, regional wars and the collapse of the state,” he said.

The problem is that staying and propping up the Iraqi government is doing
nothing to stop the present violence. Political divisions among Iraq’s
various factions remain as entrenched as ever. Last week Taha al-Luhaibi, an
MP from the National Accord Front, told The Sunday Times: “The government is
a sectarian government which is not based on the constitution and did not
respect its agreements with the other political blocs. This government is
part of the problem and not part of the solution.”

Saleh al-Mutlek, leader of the National Dialogue party, accused the government
of working in the interests of “external forces”, not Iraqis. America, he
said, had brought “nothing to Iraq except destruction and lack of security”.

On Friday the Republican revolt against Bush’s strategy gathered pace. Warner
and Richard Lugar, another Republican senator, proposed legislation that
envisaged a withdrawal of troops beginning as early as January 1.

WHATEVER the manner and timetable of troop reductions in Iraq, and the
consequences for civilians there, another factor plays on the American mood.
At the American Enterprise Institute, the neoconservative think tank where
so many hopeful plans for the war were hatched, a recent meeting discussed
the dangers of abandoning the “surge” prematurely.

But as the meeting drew to a close, Danielle Pletka, a leading hawk, glumly
noted that the panel and audience had spent two hours discussing the war
with barely a mention of Al-Qaeda or the threat of terrorism. The focus was
almost entirely on America’s diminishing will to win.

Days later the contents of a new US intelligence report were leaked to the
Associated Press. Al-Qaeda, an official revealed, was “considerably
operationally stronger than a year ago” and has “regrouped to an extent not
seen before 2001”. Michael Chertoff, the homeland security chief, said he
had a “gut feeling” that terrorists were planning to attack the United
States this summer.

After billions of dollars and thousands of lives expended, America, it seems,
is back where it started on the eve of September 11, 2001.

Additional reporting: Ali Rifat, Jordan

2003

March 20 Invasion starts

May 1 George W Bush makes ‘mission accomplished’ speech on USS Abraham
Lincoln

May 11 Paul Bremer becomes head of the Coalition Provisional Authority.
Disbands Iraqi army

September 25 UN orders almost total withdrawal of its staff from Iraq

December 13 Saddam Hussein captured by US troops near Tikrit

2004

Janaury 23 David Kay, head of Iraq Study Group, says Iraq had no WMD

April 29 Pictures of Iraqi prisoners being humiliated by US
troops shown on American television

June 17 Independent US commission reports that there was no link
between Saddam Hussein and 9/11 attacks

June 28 Bremer stands down. Interim Iraqi government sworn in

July 9 US Senate committee says US and its allies went to war on
‘flawed’ information

November 7 Battle to drive insurgents from stronghold of Fallujah
begins

2005

January 30 8m Iraqis vote in elections

March 16 Iraq's new parliament opens

August 3-4 21 marines killed near Haditha

August 31 Up to 1,000 people killed in stampede of Shi’ite
pilgrims in Baghdad after bomb rumours

October 25 2,000th US soldier killed

November 19 Reports suggest 24 unarmed Iraqi civilians, including women
and children, killed by US marines in Haditha

2006

January 31 100th British soldier killed

February 22 Bomb destroys Al-Askari mosque in Samarra, one of the
holiest sites in Shi’ite Islam, deepening sectarian strife

June7 Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, leader of Al-Qaeda in Iraq, killed

June29 British and Iraqi ministers announce plan to transfer security
to Iraqi troops by the end of the year

November 7 Democrats win control of Congress

November 8 Donald Rumsfeld, a key architect of the war, resigns

December 6 US Iraq Study Group recommends Bush abandon his policy or be
‘doomed to failure’

December 30 Saddam Hussein hanged

2007

February 1 Surge of additional 30,000 troops begins

February 18 News reports reveal scandal of wounded US soldiers being
poorly treated at Walter Reed army medical centre

April 12 Suicide bomber gets inside Iraqi parliament, killing three MPs
and injuring five others

July 12 Bush says some military progress being made, but admits no
political solution in sight. US House of Representatives votes to withdraw
most troops by April 2008

• US dead 3,612

• UK dead 159

• Estimates of Iraqis killed by the war range from 73,000 to more than 600,000

What now for Iraq?

Wishful thinking

The Iraqi government of Nouri al-Maliki moves towards political reconciliation
between Shi’ite, Sunni and Kurd factions. A deal is agreed on oil revenues.
Iraqi forces successfully take over internal security. US troop numbers
fall, leaving 50,000 to fight Al-Qaeda and protect the border. Phased
withdrawals continue under the new president, whether Republican or
Democrat.

Hopeful pragmatism

US forces withdraw in stages, but Iraqi forces melt away as sectarian militias
run out of control. The government falls and civil war worsens between Sunni
and Shi’ite areas. The worst of the carnage is soon over and factions agree
spheres of influence. Iraq is effectively divided into three – autonomous
Kurds in the north, a Sunni central area and a Shi’ite south. Baghdad
remains the thorniest problem.

The fear

Coalition troops withdraw and civil war rages, spilling over into neighbouring
countries. Iran aids the Shi’ites, while Saudi Arabia defends its Sunni
brethren. As the fighting continues it fans further violence throughout the
region, particularly in Lebanon and the Palestinian territories. Al-Qaeda
establishes new havens to plot terror attacks on the West.

For Deborah Haynes's blog from Iraq, go to www.timesonline.co.uk/insideiraq

Race for PM in England to Lean Left

Mr Meacher said he would support Mr McDonnell at hustings around the country, and said their "united left platform" would focus on tackling wealth inequality, boosting house-building, reducing poverty in old age, a foreign policy that was not "subservient to America", reversing privatisation of public services, reviving democratic accountability and dealing with climate change.

Brown set to face challenge as Meacher withdraws
Matthew Tempest, David Hencke, Hélène Mulholland and Deborah Summers
Monday May 14, 2007
Guardian Unlimited

Gordon Brown is set to face a contest for the leadership after Michael Meacher tonight stood aside to give John McDonnell a clear shot at the leftwing vote.
Mr McDonnell urged Labour MPs to back his campaign, insisting it was an "issue of democracy".

"What we are doing today is launching an appeal to Labour MPs to nominate the only candidate that there is to ensure that there is an election for the leader of the Labour party," he said.

"We are doing that not just because we want them to support our political platform, but also because, if they don't nominate, hundreds of thousands of party members and trade unionists will be denied the opportunity to vote for the leader of this party.

"This is an issue of democracy."

Mr Meacher confirmed that he had agreed to step aside after receiving fewer pledges of support from other MPs than Mr McDonnell, but neither would say how many each of them had got.

They confirmed that some names had had to be "eradicated" from their lists after it turned out they had offered their support to both men.

Mr McDonnell said: "The pledges of support we have got should ensure I will be on the ballot paper, but there are many MPs out there who haven't made their minds up. We have got pledges, but we need to convert those pledges into nominations."

He called on Mr Brown to ensure that there was a "climate of opinion" where Labour MPs felt able to nominate an opponent to challenge him for the leadership.

And he insisted that he expected to win significant support if a contest took place: "If we get on the ballot paper, you will be shocked at the depth of support among rank-and-file members and trade unions.

"There is a demand for change and I think that demand for change will translate into votes."

Asked if he would offer Mr Brown a job if he won the election, Mr McDonnell joked: "I would certainly give him a job, but not necessarily in this country."

Mr Meacher said he would support Mr McDonnell at hustings around the country, and said their "united left platform" would focus on tackling wealth inequality, boosting house-building, reducing poverty in old age, a foreign policy that was not "subservient to America", reversing privatisation of public services, reviving democratic accountability and dealing with climate change.

The two challengers made a pact two weeks ago whereby the one with the least support would step aside to avoid splitting the leftwing vote.

If Mr McDonnell gets enough backers, he and Mr Brown will face a six-week hustings campaign selling themselves, in effect, to party members.

Nominations for both the leadership and deputy leadership opened today, and close on Thursday.

Any challenger for either post needs 45 backers including him or herself.

There will be 11 hustings events before the results of the contest or election are announced at a special one-day leadership conference in Manchester on Sunday 24 June - three days before Tony Blair will formally step down as prime minister.

Deputy leadership hopefuls Harriet Harman, Peter Hain and Hazel Blears have published lists of at least 45 backers. Alan Johnson is thought to have more than the required backers.

Jon Cruddas and Hilary Benn say they are "confident" of getting to 45.

Quiet Bush Aide Seeks Iraq Czar, Creating a Stir

New York Times
April 30, 2007
Quiet Bush Aide Seeks Iraq Czar, Creating a Stir

By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG
WASHINGTON, April 29 — Stephen J. Hadley would be the first to tell you he does not have star power. But Mr. Hadley, the bespectacled, gray-haired, exceedingly precise Washington lawyer who is President Bush’s national security adviser, is in the market for someone who does — with the hope of saving Iraq.

Mr. Hadley is interviewing candidates, including military generals, for a new high-profile job that people in Washington are calling the war czar. The official (Mr. Hadley, ever cautious, prefers “implementation and execution manager”) would brief Mr. Bush every morning on Iraq and Afghanistan, then prod cabinet secretaries into carrying out White House orders.

It is the kind of task — a little bit of internal diplomacy and a lot of head-knocking, fortified by direct access to the president — that would ordinarily fall to Mr. Hadley himself. After all, he oversaw the review that produced Mr. Bush’s troop buildup in Iraq. But his responsibilities encompass issues around the globe, and he has concluded that he needs someone “up close to the president” to work “full time, 24/7” to put the policy into effect. He hopes to fill the job soon.

“What we need,” he said in a recent interview, “is someone with a lot of stature within the government who can make things happen.”

Even so, the idea that the national security adviser is subcontracting responsibility for the nation’s most pressing foreign policy crisis — and must recruit someone of stature to get the attention of the cabinet — is provoking criticism of Mr. Hadley himself, and how he has navigated the delicate internal politics of a White House famous for its feuding.

“Steve Hadley is an intelligent, capable guy, but I don’t think this reflects very well on him,” said David J. Rothkopf, author of “Running the World,” a book about the National Security Council. “I wouldn’t even call it a Hail Mary pass. It’s kind of a desperation move.”

Mr. Rothkopf sees the new position as “a tactic to separate the national security adviser from Iraq” — a way to save Mr. Hadley’s reputation. Ivo Daalder, a former Clinton administration official who is co-writing a book on national security advisers, said the proposal “raises profound questions” about Mr. Hadley’s “ability to put heads together and make sure that the president’s wishes are in fact his commands.”

At 60, Mr. Hadley has been around Washington long enough to know pretty much everyone in town. He arrived in 1972 to work at the Pentagon (after attending law school at Yale with Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York) and has served Republicans since Richard Nixon. His relationships with Vice President Dick Cheney and Donald H. Rumsfeld, the former secretary of defense, date from the Ford administration.

He is regarded as a sharp negotiator, more of a pragmatic conservative than a neoconservative. Despite his mild-mannered appearance, he has shown flashes of toughness on those rare occasions when the White House curtain is pulled back. By one account, which he does not deny, Mr. Hadley pressed for the ouster of Mr. Rumsfeld early in Mr. Bush’s second term. He delivered a stinging assessment of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki in a confidential memo to the president last year.

Today, after serving as deputy to Condoleezza Rice when she was national security adviser, and then replacing her when she became secretary of state, Mr. Hadley is one of Mr. Bush’s closest advisers. He is the first person the president sees in the Oval Office each morning and a constant, sober presence on international trips. Yet he is so relentlessly low-profile that it is difficult to get a fix on his views. Even his admirers have a hard time assessing his performance.

“I’m a big fan of Steve Hadley,” said Kurt Campbell, founder of the Center for New American Security, an independent research organization in Washington. “Whether he’s in the right job, and whether it’s too difficult, I’m not really sure.”

In a city filled with people who crave the spotlight, Mr. Hadley is an aberration. Every once in a while, Dan Bartlett, the chief White House communications strategist, prods him into appearing on a Sunday morning news program, if only, Mr. Bartlett says, because he comes across as so “even-handed and credible.” Friends lament that no one sees the warm, witty Mr. Hadley that they know.

“He seems like a functionary when I watch him on television — he’s very controlled,” said Amy Dickinson, author of the syndicated Ask Amy advice column, who knows Mr. Hadley from church. “But he’s somebody who I think of in other contexts as being very warm, very funny.”

And strait-laced. One story around the White House — Mr. Hadley calls it “one of the great urban myths” — is that he wore penny loafers to cut brush with the president on his Texas ranch. Last year, during Mr. Bush’s surprise trip to Baghdad, Mr. Hadley’s concession to comfort on the overnight flight was to change out of his business suit into gray flannel pants.

“We got him to at least take his jacket off,” Mr. Bartlett said.

On Capitol Hill, Mr. Hadley has become sort of a fix-it man for the Bush White House. When Republicans like Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina revolted over the legislation creating military commissions to try terrorism suspects, Mr. Hadley was sent to Capitol Hill to straighten out the mess.

“He is a cross between a law school professor, an accountant and — ” Mr. Graham said, pausing for a few seconds before adding, “Jon Stewart.” Mr. Hadley, upon hearing this, did not bat an eye at being compared to the host of the Comedy Central news show but complained about the accountant reference. “An accountant?” he asked. “I’m not that great with numbers.”

But to the public, Mr. Hadley is nearly invisible. He has transformed a position once inhabited by some of the most vivid personalities in foreign affairs — among them Henry A. Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski and Ms. Rice — into one that many Americans do not know exists.

“No one is ever going to talk about the Hadley era in U.S. national security,” Mr. Rothkopf said. “He is definitely this administration’s man in the gray flannel suit.”

Mr. Brzezinski said: “He’s straightforward, nice, to the point. But there’s a kind of bureaucratic regularity to him.”

That is precisely the way Mr. Hadley wants it. Some, like Mr. Kissinger and Mr. Brzezinski, have taken an expansive approach to the job, using it as a platform to advance their own ideas. Mr. Hadley, like Ms. Rice before him, sees himself as “an honest broker,” he said, “somebody who is not pushing a particular policy view.” When the big egos of the White House — the vice president, secretary of state or defense chief — disagree, he says, he presents opposing views, and Mr. Bush decides.

The White House was rife with such disputes when Mr. Hadley took his job at the beginning of the second term, and former colleagues say he quickly set about bridging the gaps — and pushing himself into the background.

“He made a very deliberate decision to let Rice be the face of foreign policy,” said Michael Green, a former top Asia specialist at the National Security Council. He also tried to smooth relations with Mr. Rumsfeld by bringing Pentagon officials onto the security council staff. But when the defense secretary fired off lengthy memos, dubbed snowflakes, to the council, Mr. Hadley firmly fired snowflakes back.

Still, questions about whether he had the backbone for the job persisted.

“A lot of people wonder, how will Hadley stand up to Cheney or Rumsfeld or Rice,” Mr. Hadley said last year, in a rare interview in which he talked about himself. “The answer is: you don’t have to. They are 600-pound gorillas, but I work for the 1,500-pound gorilla.”

That was before the 1,500 pound gorilla — Mr. Bush — fired Mr. Rumsfeld after the November midterm elections. In his book “State of Denial,” the journalist Bob Woodward writes that Mr. Hadley argued for Mr. Rumsfeld’s ouster much earlier. Mr. Hadley showed a rare flash of anger when asked about it. But, asked if it was true, he did not deny it.

“One of the things I try not to do,” he said stiffly, “is talk publicly about my advice to the president.”

With Mr. Rumsfeld gone and Mr. Bush taking a more assertive role in managing the war, people inside and outside the White House say the balance of power has shifted, and Mr. Hadley has emerged as more of a force. As Fred Kagan, a military historian who is considered the co-author of the troop buildup strategy, said, “I get the sense of a guy who is trying to do his job at a very difficult time and is actually being allowed to do it for the first time.”

That is one reason the war czar proposal has left some in Washington scratching their heads. At a recent press conference, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates described it this way: “This is what Steve Hadley would do if Steve Hadley had the time.”

But Mr. Daalder, who is now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, was mystified. “If Hadley doesn’t have time for this,” he asked, “what does he have time for? Our policy toward Nicaragua?”

David E. Sanger contributed reporting.

Filler in Animal Feed Is Open Secret in China

April 30, 2007

By DAVID BARBOZA and ALEXEI BARRIONUEVO
ZHANGQIU, China, April 28 — As American food safety regulators head to China to investigate how a chemical made from coal found its way into pet food that killed dogs and cats in the United States, workers in this heavily polluted northern city openly admit that the substance is routinely added to animal feed as a fake protein.

For years, producers of animal feed all over China have secretly supplemented their feed with the substance, called melamine, a cheap additive that looks like protein in tests, even though it does not provide any nutritional benefits, according to melamine scrap traders and agricultural workers here.

“Many companies buy melamine scrap to make animal feed, such as fish feed,” said Ji Denghui, general manager of the Fujian Sanming Dinghui Chemical Company, which sells melamine. “I don’t know if there’s a regulation on it. Probably not. No law or regulation says ‘don’t do it,’ so everyone’s doing it. The laws in China are like that, aren’t they? If there’s no accident, there won’t be any regulation.”

Melamine is at the center of a recall of 60 million packages of pet food, after the chemical was found in wheat gluten linked this month to the deaths of at least 16 pets and the illness of possibly thousands of pets in the United States.

No one knows exactly how melamine (which is not believed to be particularly toxic) became so fatal in pet food, but its presence in any form of American food is illegal.

The link to China has set off concerns among critics of the Food and Drug Administration that ingredients in pet food as well as human food, which are increasingly coming from abroad, are not being adequately screened.

“They have fewer people inspecting product at the ports than ever before,” says Caroline Smith DeWaal, the director of food safety for the Center for Science in the Public Interest in Washington. “Until China gets programs in place to verify the safety of their products, they need to be inspected by U.S. inspectors. This open-door policy on food ingredients is an open invitation for an attack on the food supply, either intentional or unintentional.”

Now, with evidence mounting that the tainted wheat gluten came from China, American regulators have been granted permission to visit the region to conduct inspections of food treatment facilities.

The Food and Drug Administration has already banned imports of wheat gluten from China after it received more than 14,000 reports of pets believed to have been sickened by packaged food. And last week, the agency opened a criminal investigation in the case and searched the offices of at least one pet food supplier.

The Department of Agriculture has also stepped in. On Thursday, the agency ordered more than 6,000 hogs to be quarantined or slaughtered after some of the pet food ingredients laced with melamine were accidentally sent to hog farms in eight states, including California.

The pet food case is also putting China’s agricultural exports under greater scrutiny because the country has had a terrible food safety record.

In recent years, for instance, China’s food safety scandals have involved everything from fake baby milk formulas and soy sauce made from human hair to instances where cuttlefish were soaked in calligraphy ink to improve their color and eels were fed contraceptive pills to make them grow long and slim.

For their part, Chinese officials dispute any suggestion that melamine from the country could have killed pets. But regulators here on Friday banned the use of melamine in vegetable proteins made for export or for use in domestic food supplies.

Yet what is clear from visiting this region of northeast China is that for years melamine has been quietly mixed into Chinese animal feed and then sold to unsuspecting farmers as protein-rich pig, poultry and fish feed.

Many animal feed operators here advertise on the Internet, seeking to purchase melamine scrap. The Xuzhou Anying Biologic Technology Development Company, one of the companies that American regulators named as having shipped melamine-tainted wheat gluten to the United States, had posted such a notice on the Internet last March.

Here at the Shandong Mingshui Great Chemical Group factory, huge boiler vats are turning coal into melamine, which is then used to create plastics and fertilizer.

But the leftover melamine scrap, golf ball-size chunks of white rock, is sometimes being sold to local agricultural entrepreneurs, who say they mix a powdered form of the scrap into animal feed to deceive those who raise animals into thinking they are buying feed that is high in protein.

“It just saves money if you add melamine scrap,” said the manager of an animal feed factory here.

Last Friday here in Zhangqiu, a fast-growing industrial city southeast of Beijing, two animal feed producers explained in great detail how they purchase low-grade wheat, corn, soybean or other proteins and then mix in small portions of nitrogen-rich melamine scrap, whose chemical properties help the feed register an inflated protein level.

Melamine is the new scam of choice, they say, because urea — another nitrogen-rich chemical — is illegal for use in pig and poultry feed and can be easily detected in China as well as in the United States.

“People use melamine scrap to boost nitrogen levels for the tests,” said the manager of the animal feed factory. “If you add it in small quantities, it won’t hurt the animals.”

The manager, who works at a small animal feed operation here that consists of a handful of storage and mixing areas, said he has mixed melamine scrap into animal feed for years.

He said he was not currently using melamine. But he then pulled out a plastic bag containing what he said was melamine powder and said he could dye it any color to match the right feed stock.

He said that melamine used in pet food would probably not be harmful. “Pets are not like pigs or chickens,” he said casually, explaining that they can afford to eat less protein. “They don’t need to grow fast.”

The resulting melamine-tainted feed would be weak in protein, he acknowledged, which means the feed is less nutritious.

But, by using the melamine additive, the feed seller makes a heftier profit because melamine scrap is much cheaper than soy, wheat or corn protein.

“It’s true you can make a lot more profit by putting melamine in,” said another animal feed seller here in Zhangqiu. “Melamine will cost you about $1.20 for each protein count per ton whereas real protein costs you about $6, so you can see the difference.”

Feed producers who use melamine here say the tainted feed is often shipped to feed mills in the Yangtze River Delta, near Shanghai, or down to Guangdong Province, near Hong Kong. They also said they knew that some melamine-laced feed had been exported to other parts of Asia, including South Korea, North Korea, Indonesia and Thailand.

Evidence is mounting that Chinese protein exports have been tainted with melamine and that its use in agricultural regions like this one is widespread. But the government has issued no recall of any food or feed product here in China.

Indeed, few people outside the agriculture business know about the use of melamine scrap. The Chinese news media — which is strictly censored — has not reported much about the country’s ties to the pet food recall in the United States. And few in agriculture here do not see any harm in using melamine in small doses; they simply see it as cheating a little on protein, not harming animals or pets.

As for the sale of melamine scrap, it is increasingly popular as a fake ingredient in feed, traders and workers here say.

At the Hebei Haixing Insect Net Factory in nearby Hebei Province, which makes animal feed, a manager named Guo Qingyin said: “In the past melamine scrap was free, but the price has been going up in the past few years. Consumption of melamine scrap is probably bigger than that of urea in the animal feed industry now.”

And so melamine producers like the ones here in Zhangqiu are busy.

A man named Jing, who works in the sales department at the Shandong Mingshui Great Chemical Group factory here, said on Friday that prices have been rising, but he said that he had no idea how the company’s melamine scrap is used.

“We have an auction for melamine scrap every three months,” he said. “I haven’t heard of it being added to animal feed. It’s not for animal feed.”

David Barboza reported from Zhangqiu and Alexei Barrionuevo reported from Chicago. Rujun Shen also contributed reporting from Zhangqiu.

Another NY Times Hillary Expose

April 14, 2007
Wellesley Class Sees ‘One of Us’ Bearing Standard

By TAMAR LEWIN
For her Wellesley classmates, Hillary Clinton’s quest to become the first female president is a generational mirror. Some like what they see; others are less certain.

They were there for her fiery commencement speech, delivered at the height of the Vietnam War, when she described her class’s search for a “more immediate, ecstatic and penetrating mode of living” and said that every protest was “unabashedly an attempt to forge an identity in this particular age.” The speech landed Hillary Rodham in the spotlight as a celebrated archetype of a new generation of women.

“We were very proud of her: she was a feminist; she was outspoken,” said Jane Moss, a classmate who now teaches French at Colby College. “Hillary was speaking for all of us, for a generation that felt we weren’t being heard.”

From their days at Wellesley, where they attended Wednesday teas and fought to end parietal hours and curfews, to their pioneering careers in law, academia and science, the 400 members of that Class of 1969 have been marked by the profound shift in women’s roles that accompanied their coming of age.

Throughout their journey, Hillary Rodham Clinton has been both a standard-bearer and a touchstone to measure themselves against.

They have winced at her struggles over how to be a modern first lady and her marital humiliations, rejoiced with her election to the Senate, puzzled over how her guarded and cool political persona is so different from the warm, funny and outspoken woman they know.They still see her as the thoughtful friend who called every week after a husband died, or wrote a charming note about the birth of a grandson.

And some are raising money or volunteering in Mrs. Clinton’s effort to become the first woman elected to the White House.

“Just knowing that one of us is trying to be the first woman president is a kick in the butt,” said Jayne Abrams, executive director of a Pennsylvania nonprofit group, “enough to keep you going at an age when some of us might be thinking of slowing down.”

Mrs. Clinton’s struggles as the first woman in her Arkansas law firm, and then first lady of Arkansas resonate with her classmates, too, in their own battles as “first woman” in workplaces dominated by men, trying to navigate what now seem like quaint battles over whether a woman can take a business trip with a man, or whether a pregnant professor should get tenure.

“When Hillary had the class reunion at the White House, there were 325 of us there,” said Catherine S. Gidlow, a lawyer in St. Louis. “I turned to someone and said, ‘I think there are 324 of us here who feel like failures,’ and she said, ‘No, I think there are 325 of us who feel like failures.’ ”

But if Mrs. Clinton is elected the first female president, it will represent an enormous success, the payoff for decades of campaigning, compromising and personal challenges.

“When she came to Maine campaigning for Bill the first time, she was very stylish, very blond, very thin,” said Nancy Wanderer, director of the legal research and writing center at the University of Maine law school. “It was like she was in a Halloween costume and I thought, ‘Who is that?’ She looks more natural now. I think she’s had to tamp herself down a lot, but now that Bill’s out of the White House, it’s her chance, and I think she’s just warming up.”

The ’60s still loom large in American politics, providing the underlying text, for example, in the last presidential campaign’s debate over President Bush and Senator John Kerry’s different records in the Vietnam War. Mrs. Clinton’s Wellesley senior thesis on Saul Alinsky, the radical Chicago community organizer, kept under wraps during the Clinton presidency, has been an endless source of fascination to her conservative critics.

On the cusp of seismic social change, and because of Mrs. Clinton, the class of 1969 has been much scrutinized. A book on the class, “Rebels in White Gloves: Coming of Age With Hillary’s Class — Wellesley ’69” (Times Books, 1999), found that most came from Republican families, with homemaker mothers, but that most had at some point outearned their husbands — all like Mrs. Clinton.

“We always felt a little special, because we were the ones who were there when all the rules changed,” said Susan Doull, who has lived in Europe for the last 20 years, running hotels. “We were the last class before Wellesley was diluted by men’s colleges like Yale going coed, and Wellesley was where we began to focus on the idea that we would have careers.”

It has not been easy to mesh the sense of unlimited possibility they got at Wellesley with the practical realities of being the first generation of professional women to enter the workplace en masse.

“I went to work for Citibank for two years after college,” Ms. Doull said, “and I was supposed to take a business trip with the officer I reported to, but his wife wouldn’t let him go with me, or he was afraid to tell her. I don’t think our daughters really grasp how different things were.”

Many of the women in the class have similar stories. Lawyers tell of using the back door or the freight elevator to attend meetings at men-only clubs. Academics described difficult fights for tenure.

“The French department had never had a woman in a tenure-track position when I got to Colby,” Professor Moss said, “and when I got pregnant before tenure, they literally didn’t know what to do. When I came up for tenure, my male colleagues voted against me and I got tenure, but you can imagine my feelings at department meetings for the next few years.”

Some of Mrs. Clinton’s classmates say they take personally criticism that she is “shrill” or “strident.”

“I hear these anti-Hillary attacks by men, especially right-wing men, and I feel like it’s just as much an attack on me,” said Cheryl Lynn Brierton, an in-house lawyer for the California courts. “It’s an effect of intelligence that you come across as intense, that you have strong views. I’ve always felt that the way she is singled out and attacked is very indicative of how society reacts to smart women.”

When she herself started working, Ms. Brierton said, she had to tone herself down and find a voice that would not be off-putting. So when she hears criticism of Mrs. Clinton, she said, “I’m constantly thinking, There but for the grace of God go I.”

Ms. Abrams, executive director of ParentWorks, a nonprofit parent-education and child-abuse prevention group based in Harrisburg, Pa., also identifies with Mrs. Clinton. “In my community, I think I’m perceived as Hillary-esque,” she said. “I talk too much, I advocate and my husband says he can’t take me anywhere because I’m always trying to raise money.”

Although she is a Republican, Ms. Abrams said she might well vote for Mrs. Clinton.

“She’s a brilliant charismatic woman,” Ms. Abrams said. “When we were in college, arguing about Vietnam, she knew what she was talking about, unlike the rest of us. She’s still brilliant, she’s still charismatic, but she’s also polarizing.”

Many of the Wellesley women have watched with sadness as the Hillary they knew changed from a passionate and outspoken figure to a more guarded and careful one as she put her husband’s political career first, campaigning at his side and then finding herself in uncharted territory as a new kind of first lady.

“What was striking even at Wellesley was Hillary’s boldness, her boundarylessness; she was way off the charts in being engaged in her community and in the world, taking personally what was happening and wanting to do something about it,” said Jan Piercy, a friend of Mrs. Clinton who was appointed United States executive director at the World Bank by President Clinton.

But, Ms. Piercy said, the boldness has been tempered. “If you spend all your adult life in the public eye,” she said, “you necessarily have to create a kind of protection, a caution, that will lead to the perception that you’re joyless or calculating or not spontaneous or Machiavellian.”

Eleanor Dean Acheson, the general counsel who was in the Clinton administration’s Justice Department, said Mrs. Clinton was only now emerging from her husband’s shadow.

“What people now perceive as Hillary’s distance, the criticism that she’s cold and calculating, and does nothing without a focus group, finds its root in that she has had to be, for 25 years, in the spotlight, and in the shadow of Bill,” Ms. Acheson said. “I think she’s going to get more relaxed as this campaign goes, and show more of the personal qualities her friends have always seen.”

Some of the classmates believe Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign seared his wife, especially the attacks on her statements about not being “some little woman standing by my man like Tammy Wynette” or not having “stayed home and baked cookies.”

“When she saw that something as seemingly innocuous as that cookie statement set off such a firestorm, it took me by surprise and it must have taken her by surprise, too,” said Cheryl L. Walker, a literature professor at Scripps College. “I think her strong commitments are the same, but she is definitely savvier, more cautious, and probably more cynical, than she was then. And actually, when she published her recipe, I made it, and it became the standard in my house, the ones my children liked best.”

Catherine Neal Parke, an English professor at the University of Missouri, said she saw her classmate’s life as a political and domestic allegory.

“She goes to a women’s college, gives that gangbuster graduation speech, then goes to Arkansas, continues her career in the stellar way, makes more money than her husband, has only one child,” Ms. Parke said. “Then she becomes the first lady, makes the cookies remark, tries health-care reform, but when it doesn’t work, she has to become the housewife of the White House, because that’s the required persona. Now that her husband’s out, though, she can go back to pursuing her own career.”

Of the marriage, Mr. Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky and his impeachment, many classmates are reluctant to offer judgments. “I feel no need to draw any kind of conclusion,” Ms. Gidlow said. “It must have taken great perseverance to go on.”

Pamela C. Colony, a scientist who teaches at SUNY Cobleskill in upstate New York, said: “My husband thinks staying with Bill was a big mistake, but I have kind of mixed feelings. Part of me respects her for sticking with him, and part of me wonders why did she stick with him, was it for love-based reasons or political ones?”

Professor Colony and others sound rueful, too, about what they see as Mrs. Clinton’s political compromises. “She reaffirms for me the fact that as soon as you get into politics you have to compromise on your goals, if not your ideals,” the professor said. “It’s incredibly upsetting, but I think it’s a fact of life.”

High Stakes: Chávez Plays the Oil Card

April 10, 2007
new york times

By SIMON ROMERO and CLIFFORD KRAUSS
CARACAS, Venezuela, April 9 — With President Hugo Chávez setting a May 1 deadline for an ambitious plan to wrest control of several major oil projects from American and European companies, a showdown is looming here over access to some of the most coveted energy resources outside the Middle East.

Moving beyond empty threats to cut off all oil exports to the United States, officials have recently stepped up the pressure on the oil companies operating here, warning that they might sell American refineries meant to process Venezuelan crude oil even as they seek new outlets in China and elsewhere around the world.

“Chávez is playing a game of chicken with the largest oil companies in the world,” said Pietro Pitts, an oil analyst who publishes LatinPetroleum, an industry magazine based here. “And for the moment he is winning.”

But this confrontation could easily end up with everyone losing.

The biggest energy companies could be squeezed out of the most promising oil patch in the Western Hemisphere. But Venezuela risks undermining the engine behind Mr. Chávez’s socialist-inspired revolution by hampering its ability to transform the nation’s newly valuable heavy oil into riches for years to come.

As Mr. Chávez asserts much greater control over Venezuela’s oil industry, his national oil company, Petróleos de Venezuela, is already showing signs of stress. Management has become increasingly politicized, and money for maintenance and development is being diverted to pay for a surge in public spending.

During the last several decades, control of global oil reserves has steadily passed from private companies to national oil companies like Petróleos de Venezuela. According to a new Rice University study, 77 percent of the world’s 1.148 trillion barrels of proven reserves is in the hands of the national companies; 14 of the top 20 oil-producing companies are state-controlled.

The implications are potentially stark for the United States, which imports 60 percent of its oil. State companies tend to be far less efficient and innovative, and far more politicized. No place captures the shift in power to nationalist governments like Venezuela.

“We are on a collision course with Chávez over oil,” said Michael J. Economides, an oil consultant in Houston who wrote an influential essay comparing Mr. Chávez’s populist appeal in Latin America with the pan-Arabism of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi of Libya two decades ago. “Chávez poses a much bigger threat to America’s energy security than Saddam Hussein ever did.”

Consider the quandary facing Exxon Mobil after its chairman, Rex W. Tillerson, recently suggested that Exxon might be forced to abandon a major Venezuelan oil project because of its growing troubles with Mr. Chávez.

The energy world took notice. So did Mr. Chávez’s government.

Only a day later, Venezuelan agents raided Exxon’s offices here in the San Ignacio towers, a bastion for this country’s business elite. The government said that the raid was part of a tax investigation, but energy analysts said the exchange of threat and counterthreat was all too clear.

Politics and ideology are driving the confrontation here as Mr. Chávez seeks to limit American influence around the world, starting in Venezuela’s oil fields. Mr. Chávez views the Bush administration as a threat, in part because it indirectly supported a coup that briefly removed him from power five years ago. Yet the United States remains Venezuela’s largest customer.

Mr. Chávez recently decreed that Venezuela would take control of heavy oil fields in the Orinoco Belt, a region southeast of Caracas of so much potential that some experts say it could give the country more reserves than Saudi Arabia. The United States Geological Survey describes the area as the “largest single hydrocarbon accumulation in the world,” making it highly coveted despite Mr. Chávez’s erratic policies.

By setting a May 1 deadline for what some foreign oil executives consider an expropriation, the Venezuelan leader risks losing Exxon, ConocoPhillips and other companies, which are loath to put their employees and billions of dollars in assets under Venezuelan management.

A departure of expertise and investment could weaken an oil industry already unsettled by being transformed into Mr. Chávez’s most crucial tool for carrying out his reconfiguration of Venezuelan society.

Mr. Chávez has raised taxes on foreign oil companies and forced other oil ventures to come under his government’s control. And he has purged more than 17,000 employees from Petróleos de Venezuela after a debilitating strike about four years ago.

The talks have bogged down over how much the oil companies’ stakes in four big Orinoco projects are worth, whether Venezuela’s cash-short oil company would pay for the assets in oil instead of cash and, most important, who would manage the reduced operations of the foreign oil companies.

Still prevented from producing oil in places like Saudi Arabia and Mexico, the companies desperately want to hold on to their Venezuelan reserves. Companies like Exxon, whose Venezuelan assets were nationalized in the 1970s and returned to it in the 1990s, know the pitfalls of operating here and figure that Mr. Chávez will not be around forever.

With oil prices at high levels, oil-rich countries as varied as Angola, Norway and Russia are also waiting to see how the talks unfold. Governments in Kazakhstan and Nigeria are trying to negotiate better terms with foreign oil companies as well. But none are doing so with Mr. Chávez’s revolutionary flourish.

“It is a defining moment,” said Christopher Ruppel, a geopolitical risk analyst at John S. Herold Inc., the energy consulting firm.

Last week, Rafael Ramírez, Venezuela’s energy minister, sent a chilling signal to the oil companies, saying Venezuela might sell refineries in Texas and Louisiana that process crude from Exxon’s Venezuelan oil fields. Analysts say Venezuela could be setting the stage to produce much less oil in ventures with American oil companies for export to the United States.

The oil companies decline to talk publicly about the negotiations, but people in the industry say Exxon and ConocoPhillips, two of the largest American companies in Venezuela, are digging in their heels. The companies, however, lack a united front: Chevron is expected to accept Mr. Chávez’s terms, since it is also negotiating access to a large natural gas project in Venezuela.

“If the majors want to negotiate a settlement, they have to be able to let Chávez save face and look like he has won this with his people,” said Michael S. Goldberg, head of the international dispute resolution group at Baker Botts, a law firm in Houston that represents many of the major oil companies around the world.

For decades, Venezuela has been a leading supplier of oil to American refineries, a resilient economic relationship that remains intact despite deteriorating political ties. Venezuela is the fourth-largest supplier of oil to the United States, accounting for more than 10 percent of American oil imports.

Once Venezuela’s heavy oil is counted, its reserves may surpass those of Saudi Arabia or Canada, though the oil will be worthless without ventures to extract it. American oil producers are drawn here by Venezuela’s 80 billion barrels of proven oil reserves, among the largest outside the Middle East.

But Mr. Chávez is chipping away at those ties by forming ventures with state oil companies from China, Iran, India and Brazil. Venezuelan exports of oil and refined products to the United States fell 8.2 percent to a 12-year low in 2006 of about 1.3 million barrels a day, according to the Energy Information Administration.

Meanwhile, Mr. Chávez has accepted higher shipping costs to reach China, expanding exports tenfold to about 160,000 barrels a day since 2004.

“If the United States wants to diversify its oil supplies for reasons of national security, then Venezuela should be allowed to diversify its customer base for the same reason,” said Mazhar al-Shereidah, an Iraqi-born petroleum economist who is one of Venezuela’s leading energy experts.

But even under the best of circumstances, China’s retooling of its refineries to handle Venezuela’s sour, or high-sulfur, crude oil could take five to seven years. And it is not clear whether Mr. Chávez’s new foreign energy partners are prepared to invest heavily until they are confident they can trust him.

In a country where many facets of life are politicized, output levels are no exception. Venezuela says it produces 3.3 million barrels a day, but OPEC officials say production is closer to 2.5 million, 1 million barrels less than in 1999 when Mr. Chávez’s presidency began.

No one sees an immediate crisis at Petróleos de Venezuela. But its windfall from high oil prices masks the devilish complexity and rising costs of producing heavy oil.

Meanwhile, the company acknowledged last month that spending on “social development” almost doubled in 2006, to $13.3 billion, while its spending on exploration badly trailed its global peers. And Petróleos de Venezuela’s work force has ballooned to 89,450, up 29 percent since 2001 even as production declined.

Independent analysts are alarmed by a troubling increase in explosions and refining accidents during the last two years, which authorities brush off as sabotage. Mr. Ramírez, the energy minister, declined repeated requests for an interview.

With heavily subsidized domestic oil consumption surging, the government spends an estimated $9 billion to keep gasoline prices under 20 cents a gallon. Moreover, Mr. Chávez uses Petróleos de Venezuela to finance other nationalizations, like its $739 million purchase of an electric utility in Caracas from the AES Corporation.

Petróleos de Venezuela’s cash is said to be running short as Mr. Chávez uses its revenue to cement political alliances with Bolivia, Cuba and Nicaragua. The company has borrowed more than $11 billion since the start of the year, a rapid debt buildup that reflects a wager by Mr. Chávez that oil prices will remain high indefinitely.

Simon Romero reported from Caracas, Clifford Krauss from Houston.

Lavish Paydays and Info Graphics

click to enlarge
click to enlarge
click to enlarge
click to enlarge

Counselor To Gonzales Announces Resignation

Goodling Had Refused to Testify on Prosecutor Firings
By Dan Eggen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, April 7, 2007; A01

The senior counselor to Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales submitted her resignation yesterday, becoming the third high-ranking Justice Department aide to quit in the aftermath of the firings of eight U.S. attorneys.

The departure of Monica M. Goodling, 33, comes two weeks after she first refused to answer questions from Congress about the firings, invoking her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.

Goodling's resignation also comes amid signs of sinking morale in some U.S. attorney's offices. In Minneapolis, three top managers staged a revolt Thursday, choosing to demote themselves rather than work for the newly confirmed U.S. attorney there, who is a former Gonzales aide, officials said. The department was so alarmed that it sent a Washington-based Justice official to Minneapolis this week to try to talk the three out of their plans, officials said.

Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee also stepped up their demands yesterday for hundreds of pages of unreleased records related to the firings that the Justice Department has deemed too sensitive for release to Congress.

Gonzales, meanwhile, has largely disappeared from public view as he prepares for a crucial April 17 appearance before the committee to explain his role in the firings.

Seven prosecutors were dismissed in December and another was removed earlier as part of a plan set in motion by the White House to replace U.S. attorneys viewed as insufficiently loyal to President Bush or his policies. Gonzales has sought to minimize his role in the firings, but recently released documents and testimony show he was regularly briefed on the effort.

Goodling's departure follows the resignation last month of D. Kyle Sampson as Gonzales's chief of staff. Sampson went on to testify before the Judiciary Committee that Gonzales was more directly involved in the firings than he had acknowledged, and that the attorney general was aware of proposals to circumvent the Senate confirmation process for some U.S. attorneys.

The Justice official who carried out the firings, Michael A. Battle, also left the department last month. Battle and other department officials have said his departure was not connected to the dismissals.

"Attorney General Gonzales's hold on the department gets more tenuous each day," said Sen. Charles E. Schumer (N.Y.), who has been among the most vocal Capitol Hill Democrats calling for Gonzales's resignation.

Sampson and Goodling worked closely together on the firings, particularly in the case of an Arkansas prosecutor removed to make way for a former aide to presidential adviser Karl Rove. Both participated in briefings for Deputy Attorney General Paul J. McNulty and others prior to testimony before Congress that has since been shown to be inaccurate.

Goodling and her attorneys have cited McNulty's complaints about her role in those briefings as a key reason for her refusal to testify.

In a letter late yesterday to Sens. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) and Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), the Justice Department said Goodling's departure renders moot any concerns about conflicts between her and others who remain employed at Justice.

Acting Assistant Attorney General Richard A. Hertling also wrote that Gonzales and McNulty have "taken steps to ensure that no actual or apparent conflict of interest would arise" in connection with the prosecutor firings.

Another conflict erupted this week between Justice and Democrats over other records connected to the firings that have not been released to Congress. The committee is set to approve subpoenas Thursday demanding the release of those records, along with uncensored versions of previously released documents.

"We are trying to get to the truth," Leahy, Schumer and Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) wrote in a letter to Gonzales yesterday. "Documents should be provided without restrictions on disclosure so that they may be used to question witnesses -- including yourself -- on any issue that is an important part of our inquiry."

Throughout the week, Gonzales has been reaching out to lawmakers, predominantly House Republicans. Aides on Capitol Hill confirmed that the attorney general spoke with Rep. Chris Cannon (Utah), the top Republican on a Judiciary subcommittee, and to Rep. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.), the minority whip and a close ally of Christian conservatives, who in the past have not been outspoken in support of Gonzales.

The discontent in Minnesota centers on U.S. Attorney Rachel K. Paulose, 34, who previously worked for Gonzales and his deputy, McNulty. She is part of a wave of more than a dozen Bush administration insiders appointed as federal prosecutors over the past two years, according to government records.

Paulose said in a statement that "the management team supports the decision of the three to step down" and that "the community will benefit from their focus on prosecuting high-profile, sophisticated cases in the years to come."

"We have work to do," Paulose said. "The office remains focused on our law enforcement priorities and service to this community."

David Schultz, a law professor at Hamline University in St. Paul, Minn., said the Minneapolis U.S. attorney's office had been relatively free of discontent in recent administrations.

"You never really hear political rumblings out of that office, so it comes as some surprise to see three people step down like this all at once," Schultz said. "It raises the question of whether attorneys are starting to become uncomfortable about the politicization that seems to be going on at Justice."

Paulose replaced veteran prosecutor Thomas B. Heffelfinger, who served as U.S. attorney under both President Bush and President George H.W. Bush. Heffelfinger abruptly resigned early last year to enter private practice.

Heffelfinger has said that he does not know whether he was slated for removal. E-mails from Sampson indicate that two U.S. attorneys targeted for dismissal resigned in early 2006; Heffelfinger is one of two who quit during that time to enter private practice. Heffelfinger declined to comment yesterday.

Paulose has drawn complaints from taxpayer advocates for an allegedly lavish "investiture" ceremony held last month to commemorate her confirmation as U.S. attorney, although Justice officials say the cost to the department was only $225. Paulose has also gained attention for her aggressive efforts to obtain "righteous sentences" in child pornography cases.

Washingtonpost.com staff writer Paul Kane and Washington Post staff researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.