My Life and Times

today's papersPower to the CIABy David SarnoPosted Sunday, March 6, 2005, at 3:38 AM PT
The New York Times leads with its finding that immediately after Sept. 11, 2001, the Bush administration gave the CIA carte blanche to "render" prisoners—or secretly fly them to foreign countries for interrogation. The article's main source, "a senior United States official," says that the CIA has "gone to great lengths to ensure that [prisoners] were detained under humane conditions and not tortured." The article goes on to cite a "half-dozen current and former government officials" who all believe that "the administration's approach may have involved turning a blind eye to torture." The Washington Post's top non-local story is Syrian President Bashar Assad's statement Saturday that he would begin withdrawing his troops from Lebanon by moving them to the country's eastern border. Critics called the announcement politically motivated, pointing to Assad's failure to set a timeline for the action, or to say if the troops would actually cross the border once they got there. The Los Angeles Times leads (at least online) with an in-depth description of the BTK case and the capture of suspected killer Dennis Rader.
The NYT lead is quietly incredulous about the administration's stated policy against torture. The second half of the article features CIA chief Porter Goss equivocating something awful to Congress about it: "We have a responsibility of trying to ensure that [prisoners] are properly treated, and we try and do the best we can to guarantee that. But of course once they're out of our control, there's only so much we can do." The piece also repeatedly notes the increasing number of former prisoners claiming they were detained in secret, flown to undisclosed locations, and tortured, all without being charged. In most cases, the interrogations were conducted in countries "identified in a State Department human rights report released last week as practicing torture in their prisons."
CBS's 60 Minutes will broadcast a report on rendition tonight at 7 p.m.
The LAT's BTK coverage reads like a macabre police procedural, following the killer through the first years of his murder spree, then cutting to the police station where cops slowly weave clues (including a word-search game with the killer's address hidden in it) into a murky profile. The WP focuses instead on challenging the image of Dennis Rader as a cheery, selfless Samaritan by day. In fact, according to neighbors he was "mean-spirited and a coward," and they "didn't know anyone on the street who didn't despise him." A co-worker claimed he "nitpicked people to death [and] was a total control freak."
An NYT front wonders gleefully if it's the beginning of the end for authoritarian Arab regimes. In addition to the groundswell of antigovernment protest in Lebanon, it points out, the last few months have seen viable elections in Iraq and Palestine, the possibility of another in Egypt, and at least a hint of progress in Saudi Arabia, where the government just allowed men (but not women) to vote on a limited basis for municipal councilmen. The piece cautions that "the changes wrought in each country thus far appear minor and preliminary," but still, the optimism is hard to resist.
The WP fronts an outrager on how credit card companies are swamping poor people with a torrent of increasingly hefty late fees, over-limit penalties, and stratospheric interest rates. Because of these added costs, debtors who conistently make their minimum monthly payments can, over several years, still see their total balance grow dramatically—one woman with an original debt of $1,900 shelled out $3,500 in monthly payments over six years. Her ending balance? $5,500.
Saddam Hussein's trial is about to begin in Iraq, reports the LAT. But will it be fair? Human-rights advocates are questioning several aspects of the trial, including the poorly defined rules of evidence, and what they view as Saddam's limited access to legal representation. Critics have recommended that the trial be moved out of the war zone—one judge was recently assassinated outside of his home in Baghdad—and into a safe, neutral location in another country with experienced judges and international oversight.
The NYT runs a wrenching survey of the tsunami's aftermath in one small town in Sri Lanka. Navalady lost nearly half its people in the disaster, and the town itself was obliterated. Most of the remaining inhabitants witnessed the death of multiple relatives—parents, siblings, children, in some cases all three—and have barely begun to cope, though from reading the article, you have to wonder if coping is even a relevant term here.
80-Foot Wave: In Australia, a group of 40 surfers broke the world record for tandem surfing on Saturday by all riding to shore together on one giant surfboard. The board itself was 40 feet long and 10 feet wide and carried its army of riders for a whopping four minutes (an eternity in surfing). The previous world record for large-group surfboarding was a paltry 14.David Sarno is a writer in Iowa City.Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2114431/

Ferrari 2005 Australian Grand Prix 

Australian Grand Prix 2005 

The Most Expensive Album Never Made
By JEFF LEEDS



WEST HOLLYWOOD, Calif.
IN the faint red light of the Rainbow Bar and Grill, Tom Zutaut sips at his drink and spills a bit of regret. It's been 19 years since he signed the then-unknown rock band Guns N' Roses to a contract with Geffen Records, where they turned into multiplatinum superstars. Back in those days, the Rainbow was their hangout of choice.
Years after he left the label, he returned in 2001 to try to coax Axl Rose, the band's magnetic leader and by then its only original member, into completing one of the most highly anticipated albums in the industry: an opus tentatively titled "Chinese Democacy." The deadline for turning in the album had passed two years earlier.
"I really thought I could get him to deliver the record," said Mr. Zutaut, who spent nine months trying. "And we got close."
He is speaking in relative terms. Mr. Zutaut is but one of a long series of executives and producers brought in over the years to try to conjure up the maddeningly elusive album - to cajole the reclusive rock star into composing, singing, recording, even just showing up. Like everyone else who had tried, or has tried since, Mr. Zutaut came away empty-handed.
Mr. Rose began work on the album in 1994, recording in fits and starts with an ever-changing roster of musicians, marching through at least three recording studios, four producers and a decade of music business turmoil. The singer, whose management said he could not be reached for comment for this article, went through turmoil of his own during that period, battling lawsuits and personal demons, retreating from the limelight only to be followed by gossip about his rumored interest in plastic surgery and "past-life regression" therapy.
Along the way, he has racked up more than $13 million in production costs, according to Geffen documents, ranking his unfinished masterpiece as probably the most expensive recording never released. As the production has dragged on, it has revealed one of the music industry's basic weaknesses: the more record companies rely on proven stars like Mr. Rose, the less it can control them.
It's a story that applies to the creation of almost every major album. But in the case of "Chinese Democracy," it has a stark ending: the singer who cast himself as a master of predatory Hollywood in the hit song "Welcome to the Jungle" has come to be known instead as the keeper of the industry's most notorious white elephant.
AT THE STROKE of midnight on Sept. 17, 1991, Guns N' Roses was the biggest band in the world. Hundreds of record stores had stayed open late or re-opened in order to cash in on the first sales that night of "Use Your Illusion," Vols. 1 and 2, the band's new twin albums. On the strength of that promotion - and the coattails of the band's blockbuster 1987 debut - the band set a record: for the first time in rock history, two albums from one act opened at Nos. 1 and 2 on Billboards national album sales chart. But by 1994 their fortunes had changed. After years of drug addiction, lyric controversies, onstage tantrums and occasional fan riots, their members had started to drift away, their lead singer had become bogged down in personal lawsuits, and "The Spaghetti Incident?," their collection of cover versions of classic punk songs, had been released to mixed reviews and disappointing sales.
The members of the band - what was left of it - reconvened at the Complex, a Los Angeles studio, in a massive soundstage with a pool table and a Guns N' Roses-themed pinball machine, to prepare for their next album, which Geffen executives expected to release some time the following year. But they quickly began suffering from an ailment that has proved fatal to bands from time immemorial: boredom.
"They had enough money that they didn't have to do anything," said a longtime observer of the band, one of the 30 people involved with the album who spoke for this article. He spoke on the condition of anonymity, as did many others who had signed a confidentiality agreement while working with Mr. Rose. "You couldn't get everyone in the room at the same time."
Mr. Rose had appointed himself the leader of the project, but he didn't seem to know where to lead. As Slash, the band's longtime guitarist, said recently, in reference to the singer's songwriting style: "It seemed like a dictatorship. We didn't spend a lot of time collaborating. He'd sit back in the chair, watching. There'd be a riff here, a riff there. But I didn't know where it was going."
Geffen was riding toward an uncertain destiny as well: its founder, David Geffen, retired, and its corporate parent, MCA Inc., was sold to the liquor giant Seagram, led by Edgar Bronfman Jr. With all those changes swirling, and with old Guns N' Roses material still ringing up millions in new sales, executives decided to leave the band alone to write and record.
A cover of the Rolling Stones' "Sympathy for the Devil," however, which was released as part of a movie soundtrack, would be the last addition to the original band's catalog. Slash quit the band in 1996; the drummer Matt Sorum and the bassist Duff McKagan were the next to go. Of the founding members, that left just Mr. Rose. But instead of starting something new, he chose to keep the band's name and repopulate it with new musicians. Geffen wasn't in much of a position to deny him. The label was on a cold streak and wagered that fans would still flock to the singer, even if a band had to be rebuilt around him.
Geffen wasn't in much of a position to prod him forward, either. In 1997 Todd Sullivan, who was then a talent executive for the company, sent Mr. Rose a sampling of CD's produced by different people, and encouraged him to choose one to work on "Chinese Democracy." Mr. Sullivan says he received a call informing him that Mr. Rose had run over the albums with a car.
The singer had encouraged everyone in the band's camp to record their ideas for riffs and jams, hours and hours of song fragments that he hoped to process into full compositions. "Most of the stuff he had played me was just sketches," Mr. Sullivan recalled. "I said, 'Look, Axl, this is some really great, promising stuff here. Why don't you consider just bearing down and completing some of these songs?' He goes, 'Hmm, bear down and complete some of these songs?' Next day I get a call from Eddie" - Eddie Rosenblatt, the Geffen chairman - "saying I was off the project."
Around the start of 1998 Mr. Rose moved the band that he had assembled to Rumbo Recorders, a three-room studio deep in the San Fernando Valley where Guns N' Roses had recorded parts for its blockbuster debut, "Appetite for Destruction." The crew turned the studio into a rock star's playground: tapestries, green and yellow lights, state-of-the-art computer equipment and as many as 60 guitars at the ready, according to people involved in the production. But Mr. Rose wasn't there for fun and games. "What Axl wanted to do," one recording expert who was there recalls, "was to make the best record that had ever been made. It's an impossible task. You could go on infinitely, which is what they've done."
As time and dollars flew by, pressure mounted at Geffen. The label's dry spell lingered, making them more dependent than ever on new music from their heavy hitters. "The Hail Mary that's going to save the game," the recording expert who spoke on the condition of anonymity explained, "is a Guns N' Roses record. It keeps not coming and not coming." The label paid Mr. Rose $1 million to press on with the album, with the unusual promise of another $1 million if he delivered "Chinese Democracy" by March 1 of the following year. Geffen also offered one of the producers Mr. Rose had recently hired extra royalties if the recording came in before that.
He never collected. The producer, who goes by the name Youth (his real name is Martin Glover), started visiting the singer in the pool room of his secluded Malibu estate, to try to help him focus on composing. But that collaboration didn't go any better than his predecessors' had. "He kind of pulled out, said 'I'm not ready,' " Youth said. "He was quite isolated. There weren't very many people I think he could trust. It was very difficult to penetrate the walls he'd built up."
Youth's replacement was Sean Beavan - a producer who had previously worked with industrial-rock acts like Marilyn Manson and Nine Inch Nails - and under his care the riffs and song fragments that the band had recorded slowly began to take shape. But costs were spiraling out of control. The crew rented one piece of specialized equipment, for example, for more than two years - at a cost well into six figures - and used it for perhaps 30 days, according to one person involved with the production.
Mr. Rose appeared sporadically, some weeks just one or two days, some weeks not at all. "It was unorganized chaos," the same person said. "There was never a system to this. And in between, there were always parties to go to, different computers Axl was trying out or buying. There were times when we didn't record things for weeks."
So the studio technicians burned as many as five CD's per week with various mixes of different songs, which were driven to Malibu for Mr. Rose to study. The band's archive of recorded material swelled to include more than 1,000 digital audio tapes and other media, according to people who were there at the time, all elaborately labeled to chart the progress of songs. "It was like the Library of Congress in there," said one production expert who spent time on the album there.
By one count, the band kept roughly 20 songs it considered on the A list and another 40 or so in various stages of completion on the B list.
All that material, however, didn't do much to reassure the band's label. "In 1998 and 1999 you start getting a little bit nervous," Mr. Rosenblatt, the executive who led the outfit after David Geffen's departure, said delicately. "Edgar Bronfman picks up the phone more than once. He wanted to know what was going on. You unfortunately have got to give him the answer, you don't know. Because you don't." To take the pressure off, Mr. Rose's manager at the time presented the idea of releasing a live album from the original band, which. Mr. Rose's crew began to assemble.
In January 1999 Seagram orchestrated a massive restructuring of its music division, firing 110 Geffen employees, including Mr. Rosenblatt, and folding the unit into the corporation's bigger Interscope Records division. The unfinished album was placed in the hands of Interscope's chairman, Jimmy Iovine. Mr. Iovine declined to comment for this article.
Mr. Rose was said to be crushed by the departure of his Geffen contacts - just as "White Trash Wins Lotto," a musical satire that sent the singer up as a star-eyed hayseed forced to learn the harsh lessons of the music industry, was developing a cult following in Los Angeles. When he missed his March deadline, however, he set a pattern that would repeat itself for years to come: a flurry of energetic activity, followed by creative chaos and a withdrawal from the studio.
That June he allowed a version of the old Guns N' Roses hit "Sweet Child O' Mine" that begins with the original band playing but almost seamlessly shifts into the new band to appear on the soundtrack of the film "Big Daddy." Later that summer he agreed to release his first original song in eight years, the industrial-flavored "Oh My God," for another soundtrack and introduced it in a commercial on MTV. (Mr. Rose fussed over the song so much that he, Mr. Iovine and studio technicians stayed up until nearly dawn adjusting the final mix, according to people involved.) News of its release stoked speculation that an album might follow. But it was panned by many critics and quickly forgotten.
In late 1999 he invited Rolling Stone to preview about a dozen tracks. The magazine reported the album appeared "loosely scheduled" for release in the summer of 2000. In fact, Mr. Rose's visits to the studio had become so irregular, according to several executives and musicians involved with the band, that an engineer working with him, Billy Howerdel, and the band's drummer, Josh Freese, found time during that period to start their own project, the band A Perfect Circle, and to begin recording an album, "Mer de Noms," which went on to sell 1.7 million copies.
Label executives still clung to the idea that if they could just bring in the right producer, he could find a way to finish the album and finally bring a return on their ever-growing investment. They summoned Roy Thomas Baker, famed for his work with the art-rock band Queen. (Mr. Beavan, who was said to have tired of the project, soon bowed out.) But instead of wrapping things up, Mr. Baker decided that much of what the band had needed to be re-recorded - and painstakingly so, as he sometimes spent as long as eight hours on a few bars of music.
The process was drawn out even further after Mr. Rose hired two new musicians - the guitarist Buckethead, a virtuoso who wore a mannequin-like face mask and a KFC bucket on his head, and the drummer Brian "Brain" Mantia - whom the singer directed to re-record all the music that their predecessors had spent months performing.
Still, Mr. Rose seemed to be emerging from his sullen shell. In mid-2000, for what was thought to be the first time since the "Illusions" tour ended in 1993, he performed in public, with the Thursday night bar band at the Cat Club on the Sunset Strip. "He was psyched," recalled one person who worked with the band at Rumbo. "It seemed like it boosted him again, people still want to hear him."
At about 4 a.m on New Year's Day 2001, at the House of Blues in Las Vegas, he and the new lineup of the band finally unveiled some of their new material. "I have traversed a treacherous sea of horrors to be with you here tonight," Mr. Rose told the crowd, which received him with roars of approval. Warm reviews followed. Making the most of the moment, he took his band on the road, going to Brazil to play in the Rock in Rio festival.
With the band's return, Mr. Rose's machinery cranked up again. One internal cost analysis from the period pegs the operation's monthly tab at a staggering $244,000. It included more than $50,000 in studio time at the Village, a more modern studio where Mr. Baker had moved the band. It also included a combined payroll for seven band members that exceeded $62,000, with the star players earning roughly $11,000 each. Guitar technicians earned about $6,000 per month, while the album's main engineer was paid $14,000 per month and a recording software engineer was paid $25,000 a month, the document stated.
Label executives were losing patience. Interscope turned to Mr. Zutaut, the original band's talent scout. Could an old friend succeed where so many others had failed? He was offered a roughly 30 percent bonus, he said, if he could usher the project to completion within a year.
But Mr. Rose's renewed energies were not being directed toward the finish line. He had the crew send him CD's almost daily, sometimes with 16 or more takes of a musician performing his part of a single song. He accompanied Buckethead on a jaunt to Disneyland when the guitarist was drifting toward quitting, several people involved recalled; then Buckethead announced he would be more comfortable working inside a chicken coop, so one was built for him in the studio, from wood planks and chicken wire.
Mr. Rose was far less indulgent of his producers and label. Around Christmas, he ousted both Mr. Baker and Mr. Zutaut (who said there had been a miscommunication). It would be weeks before the singer would even allow an Interscope executive to visit him in the studio, according to people involved with the production. Interscope dispatched a senior talent executive, Mark Williams, to oversee the project. Mr. Williams declined to comment for this article.
If Mr. Rose appeared more remote, his vision of the project became more grandiose, people involved with the band said. He directed that music produced by Mr. Baker be redone again, those people said. He now spoke of releasing not merely one album but a trilogy. And he planned one very big surprise.
At MTV's annual awards show in 2002, publicists buzzed through the audience whispering about a big finale. And with just minutes to go in the broadcast, a screen lifted away to reveal the band and Mr. Rose, in cornrows and a sports jersey, looking strikingly young. The musicians burst into "Welcome to the Jungle," one of the original band's biggest hits, and the crowd went wild. But on television Mr. Rose quickly seemed out of breath and out of tune. He ended the performance, which included the new song "Madagascar" and the original band's hit "Paradise City" in a messianic stance, raising his arms and closing his eyes. He left the audience with a cryptic but tantalizing message: "Round one."
Round two never came. The band went on a successful tour, but in the hours after their triumphant Madison Square Garden appearance, Mr. Rose was reportedly refused entry to the Manhattan nightclub Spa because he was wearing fur, which the club does not allow. That killed the mood. He didn't show up for the band's next performance, and the promoter canceled the rest of the tour.
Months dragged on as the band waited for Mr. Rose to record more vocals. In August 2003 when label executives announced their intention to release a Guns N' Roses greatest-hits CD for the holidays, the band's representatives managed to hold them off with yet another promise to deliver "Chinese Democracy" by the end of the year. But the album, of course, did not materialize. And then the game was over.
"HAVING EXCEEDED ALL budgeted and approved recording costs by millions of dollars," the label wrote in a letter dated Feb. 2 , 2004, "it is Mr. Rose's obligation to fund and complete the album, not Geffen's." The tab at Village studio was closed out, and Mr. Rose tried a brief stint recording at the label's in-house studio before that too was ended. The band's computer gear, guitars and keyboards were packed away. Over a legal challenge by Mr. Rose, the label issued a greatest-hits compilation, in search of even a modest return on their eight-figure investment.
Released in March of 2004, it turned out to be a surprisingly strong seller, racking up sales of more than 1.8 million copies even without any new music or promotional efforts by the original band. The original band's debut, "Appetite for Destruction," which has sold 15 million copies, remains popular and racked up sales of another 192,000 copies last year, according to Nielsen SoundScan. It is a sign that Mr. Rose's audience still waits.
Mr. Rose is reportedly working on the album even now in a San Fernando Valley studio. "The 'Chinese Democracy' album is very close to being completed," Merck Mercuriadis, the chief executive officer of Sanctuary Group, which manages Mr. Rose, wrote in a recent statement. He added that other artists including Peter Gabriel and Stevie Wonder "have throughout their careers consistently taken similar periods of time without undeserved scrutiny as the world respects that this is what it can sometimes take to make great art." There's certainly more than enough material; as Mr. Zutaut says, even years ago "people felt like the record had been made four or five times already." But of course, rumors of the album's imminent release have circulated since almost the very beginning of the tale, more than a decade ago.
And at the center of that tale, now as then, is the confounding figure of Axl Rose himself. A magnetic talent, a moody unpredictable artist, a man of enormous ideas and confused follow-through, he has proven himself to be an uncontrollable variable in any business plan.
His involvement on "Chinese Democracy" has outlasted countless executives, producers and fellow musicians - even the corporate structure that first brought the band to worldwide celebrity. Even, in fact, the recognizable configuration of the recording industry as a whole, which since the band first went into the studio in 1994 has consolidated to four major corporations from six, and staggered amid an epidemic of piracy, leaving it more focused than ever on the bottom line, and on reliable musicians with a proven track record of consistent performance. The sort of rock stars that the original members of Guns N' Roses, who recently submitted a claim seeking $6 million in what were called unpaid royalties from its catalog, used to be. But which Mr. Rose, with his mood swings, erratic work habits and long dark stretches, no longer is.
He hasn't disappeared entirely. His voice can be heard on the latest edition in the "Grand Theft Auto" video game series, in the character of a grizzled 70's-style rock D.J. "Remember," he advises the radio station's audience, "we're not outdated and neither is our music."
Interscope has taken "Chinese Democracy" off its schedule. Mr. Rose hasn't been seen there since last year, when he was spotted leaving the parking area beneath Interscope's offices, where witnesses reported that a small traffic jam had congealed when attendants halted other cars to clear a path for his silver Ferrari. Mr. Rose punched the gas and cruised into the day.
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# posted by Michael P. Whelan : 9:45 PM  0 comments

In Iraq, two forces - modernizing and reactionary - are trying to benefit from the collapse of the old order. The same dynamic is at work throughout the Middle East.

March 6, 2005 What's in It for America? By ROGER COHEN

IN the Middle East, an old order is weakening - that of authoritarian, repressive states walled off from modernity. A new order is rising, with democracy stirring in countries from Iraq to Egypt, mass demonstrations pushing out Syrian troops from Lebanon and a Palestinian leader apparently committing himself to an open political system. But will this emergent democratic current, if consolidated, make America safer? President George W. Bush has argued that America's ideals are now synonymous with its interests; the spread of freedom will drain the frustration and rage on which terrorism feeds. The argument is beautiful in its simplicity. But it is precisely in democratic Europe that Mohammed Atta, a mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, lived for about a decade, and it is from Britain, scarcely a stranger to liberty, that Richard Reid, the would-be shoe bomber of American Airlines Flight 63 from Paris to Miami, hailed. Democracy can open the way for many things including illiberal opinion. Turkey, long a pliant ally under military or military-backed rule, has proved more restive under the government of a democratically elected moderate Islamic party, forcing the United States to revise its Iraq invasion plans by denying access to American troops. A fully democratic and independent Lebanon would presumably reflect the fact that many Lebanese think Hezbollah, viewed as a terrorist organization in Washington but not in Paris, is a force for good, helping the needy and resisting Israel. For a long time, American policy toward the Middle East was guided precisely by such fears: democracy could be, and likely would be, dangerous. A blind eye was turned to authoritarianism because it kept the shop in order, quieted the Arab street and served American interests. But then the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, showed how treacherous the status quo could be. "The traditional United States approach for the past half-century ignored what went on inside Middle Eastern societies so long as they cooperated on energy, security and diplomacy," said Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations. "The president has now rejected that. The question is: can he deliver an orderly transition?" That question will likely not be answered for several years. But what is clear already is that a region long marked by inertia is in flux. Events from Saudi Arabia to Syria suggest that the invasion of Iraq and the election there have indeed had a catalytic effect, opening up debate, tearing down walls. Democracy is getting a toehold. But terrorism remains a mystery. Nobody knows exactly what leads a young Muslim to blow himself up in the name of a holy war against the West. As Walter Laqueur, the historian specializing in political violence, has observed, "There can be no final victory in the fight against terrorism, for terrorism (rather than full-scale war) is the contemporary manifestation of conflict, and conflict will not disappear from earth." In other words, democracy is no panacea, but nor is anything else. Terrorism will not crumble like Communism or Fascism, defeated by containment or force of arms or economic measures or the ballot box. Indeed, it is possible the greater proximity of Western ideas and practices may only redouble the jihadist urge, which has been driven in part by the desire to re-create an infidel-free caliphate. But it is also possible that a more open system may cool apocalyptic urges in the Middle East as it has elsewhere. "Democratic governments in the Middle East are going to be much more difficult for the United States to handle because there will be more direct expression of sentiment, much of it hostile," said Rashid Khalidi, a professor of Middle Eastern studies at Columbia University. "But in the end it will be healthier and, yes, democracy could provide an outlet for the frustration that drives people to jihadism." For many years, Islamism seemed the only such outlet. In varying degrees, the Iranian revolution, jihadist successes in Afghanistan, and the anti-Western teachings of men like the executed Egyptian writer Sayyid Qutb contributed to this vogue. So, too, did the hypocrisy of the West in making it clear that democracy was not for countries like Egypt or Saudi Arabia or Algeria, where a democratic election that seemed about to usher Islamists to power was quashed in 1991. But in both the West and the Middle East, the currents that produced this drift seem to be ebbing. The Algerian experience was scarcely edifying; it ushered in a period of terrible conflict. Turkey may be harder to handle as a democracy, but it has scarcely ceased to be an ally. The Bush administration has concluded that Middle Eastern democracy is preferable, however uncomfortable it may prove. Among Muslims, too, the forces prodding a rethinking are significant. The Afghan model for a fundamentalist Islamic society has been demolished. The fervor of the Iranian revolution has faded. The invasion of Iraq has brought into the Arab heartland a model - still fragile and bitterly contested - of a liberal and democratic society. Democracy is no longer an abstraction, a risible plaything selectively dangled by Western powers with interests more compelling than ideals. It is right there, on the doorstep, or on the screen in the living room. "The discourse is changing in the Arab world," said Patrick Clawson, the deputy director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. "If you want to adopt a radical cause, Islamism is no longer the only answer. You can go join those 500 demonstrators for democracy surrounded by 3,000 police in the streets of Cairo." Of course, if you're angry enough, you can also blow up kids at a Tel Aviv discothèque, or drive an explosives-laden car into police recruits in Iraq, or kill a judge preparing to conduct the trials of Saddam Hussein's henchmen. There are plenty of Arabs still ready to do this in the service of plenty of causes: fanatical Islamic fundamentalism, anti-imperial nationalism, anti-Zionism or simply the defense of threatened privilege. The argument that the American invasion of Iraq has boosted recruitment for Al Qaeda and other jihadist groups, increased Muslim hatred of the West, injected a dangerous instability into a turbulent region, and given suicide bombers new cause for their zeal cannot be ignored. The push for democracy through force or arms and unbending rhetoric may only have increased the danger, at least in the short term. "The barrier of fear is beginning to break," said Murhaf Jouejati, the director of Middle Eastern studies at George Washington University. "President Bush has shaken the status quo, shaken the apathy." But he added: "I do not think the ideology of Al Qaeda is fading or weakening for the moment. On the contrary, it is reacting to, and in some ways benefiting from, Western penetration. You have two contradictory forces; Islamic fundamentalism is not yet on the retreat." In Baghdad, the epicenter of the ideological struggle, the theater that now draws every global current of anti-American fanaticism, the clash of the two forces - modernizing and reactionary - that are trying to benefit from the collapse of the old Middle Eastern order is intense. When electricity is cut again, or when your car pivots at high speed because a hooded gunman has been spotted, or when fires flicker in empty streets inhabited only by skittering trash, or when not even children will look you in the eye, this whole American-led effort to transform a country and a region appears doomed. But unexpected voices rise from the chaos. "People are beginning to feel their own authority, to feel they can create things for themselves, which is the beginning of democracy," said Humam Hamoudi, a prominent Shiite in Iraq and a leader of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution. Such sentiment may be significant: the promise of paradise in another life has surely proved persuasive to the suicide-bomber jihadist in part because closed societies made any change in this life seem out of reach. The West has tried cold-war containment in the Middle East, living with conflict on a regional scale. It has tried the quiet or sometimes flagrant hypocrisy that characterized the response to the 1991 Algerian election or the decision to let 4,000 Saudi princes do what they like. What has not been tried is the proposition now being tested: that the Middle East is not some strange exception, but will, as Europe and the Americas have, find in democracy a cause for peace. "I think the United States has shifted the momentum in its favor," said Paul Berman, the author of "Terror and Liberalism." "The jihadists' utopia in Afghanistan has been overthrown. We have given democratic ideas a chance in Iraq, although I think we did it badly. It was never Western liberals who were going to defeat these ideologues. It was the liberals of the Muslim and Arab world, and they are stronger today." A couple of months ago, I sat in a Gaza office with a beautiful view of the Mediterranean listening to one such liberal, a Palestinian psychologist, Dr. Eyad Serraj, explain the culture of martyrdom; explain how shame is transposed into honor through self-sacrifice and defeat is conquered by assuming "the ultimate power, the power to kill"; explain how martyrs were on the level of prophets and so could not be questioned "although their acts are devastating to us politically." It was this culture that Yasir Arafat encouraged, a culture of hopelessness, of the victim, of victory only in death. In so doing, he was representative of his region. He was a dictator who, like Saddam Hussein, offered only one escape: another world. "Arafat was untouchable," said Mr. Serraj. "But Mahmoud Abbas is a human being like the rest of us. He's bringing us back to reality, beyond rhetoric and slogans. I hope we will now get realism and pragmatism." Democracy, the kind Mr. Abbas is promoting as the Palestinians' new president, is all about realism and pragmatism. That is what Iraqis are finding now as they try to form a government. Their experience may just be infectious and make America safer. At least it looks that way for now. Roger Cohen writes the "Globalist" column for The International Herald Tribune. Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company Home Privacy Policy Search Corrections RSS Help Back to Top

# posted by Michael P. Whelan : 8:49 PM  0 comments

March 6, 2005 Fisichella Wins Australian GP By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Filed at 4:02 p.m. ET MELBOURNE, Australia (AP) -- Giancarlo Fisichella was exuberant, and it was tough to blame him. He gulped and sprayed champagne after winning the season-opening Australian Grand Prix on Sunday in a decided change of pace for Formula One -- a winner other than Michael Schumacher. Schumacher, the seven-time world champion who won 13 of 18 races last season, was never in contention and failed to finish in his bid to defend his title. His Ferrari teammate, Rubens Barrichello, was second while Fisichella's Renault teammate, Fernando Alonso, was third. David Coulthard was fourth for Red Bull Racing, formerly Jaguar. This was Fisichella's second Formula One victory. His first came after 100 starts, and he had to wait five days to have it confirmed. So it was with good reason he punched the air as he crossed the line and stood in the cockpit as his crew pushed him toward the postrace ceremony. ``It's my first time to celebrate the victory on the podium,'' the 32-year-old Italian said. ``It's been fantastic, a great experience. I want to do it again.'' The 2003 Brazilian Grand Prix initially was awarded to Kimi Raikkonen when the race was stopped in heavy rain. It took a few days for officials to realize stewards had miscounted, and Fisichella's Jordan was leading when the race was stopped. It took 12 days before he received recognition in Imola, Italy. ``It's completely different now -- it's a great day for me,'' said Fisichella, who led from the pole position and completed 57 laps of the 3.295-mile circuit in 1 hour, 24 minutes, 17.336 seconds, just more than 5.5 seconds ahead of Barrichello. Schumacher, who last season won his fifth drivers' championship in a row and sixth consecutive constructors' title for Ferrari, collided with Williams driver Nick Heidfeld and retired on the 43rd lap. He fell 25 seconds off the pace in the first of two qualifying runs, struggling in driving rain. He started from the back after having a new engine installed in his Ferrari and worked up to seventh before his tangle with Heidfeld. ``There are some positives -- we were competitive, Rubens drove a superb race despite the fact we had last year's car,'' Schumacher said. ``We can be satisfied and regard this weekend as a good sign for the rest of the championship.'' Sunday's result was a reward for driver skill, with Fisichella known as one of the finest stylists behind the wheel, easy on the tires and engine and smooth around the course. That was the intent of a raft of new regulations introduced this year -- a two-day qualifying format, restrictions of one set of tires per race and one engine for two race weekends, and aerodynamic changes to reduce downforce and make handling harder. Fisichella says the downpour Saturday -- just after he finished his first qualifying run and just as Schumacher was starting his -- contributed to his victory. ``After 10 years in Formula One I never showed my talent because I never drove the right car,'' said Fisichella, who joined Renault from Sauber this season. ``This time I have a great car. I don't want to lose the opportunity to show my talent.'' Ferrari is running modified versions of its 2004 scarlet cars for the first three GPs before introducing its 2005 model. Barrichello said his result showed his team has no problems. ``It proves Ferrari has no crisis,'' he said. ``We are here, we are going to fight.'' Notes:@ Alonso had the quickest lap (1 minute, 25.683 seconds), giving Renault confidence for the March 20 Malaysian Grand Prix. ... Former world champion Jacques Villeneuve, in his first drive for Sauber, finished 13th. ... BAR-Honda, second in the 2004 constructors' championship, had a bad weekend with Jenson Button 11th and Takuma Sato 14th. ... Narain Karthikeyan, the first Indian driver in F1, was 15th. Copyright 2005 The Associated Press | Home | Privacy Policy | Search | Corrections | RSS | Help | Back to Top

 

# posted by Michael P. Whelan : 7:53 PM  0 comments

March 6, 2005 OP-ED COLUMNIST Taming of the Shrews By MAUREEN DOWD

WASHINGTON Arabs put their women in veils. We put ours in the stocks. Every culture has its own way of tamping down female power, be it sexual, political or financial. Americans like to see women who wear the pants be beaten up and humiliated. Afterward, in a gratifying redemption ritual, people like to see the battered women be rewarded. That's how Hilary Swank won two Oscars. That's how Hillary Clinton won a Senate seat and a presidential front-runner spot. And that's how Martha Stewart won her own reality TV show and became a half-billion dollars richer while she was in prison. We've come a long way, baby, from the era of witch trials, when women with special power who knew how to curse were burned at the stake. Now, after a public comeuppance, they are staked to a lucrative new career. In this century, the scarlet letter morphs into a dollar sign. Maybe temperamental, power-mad divas always needed to be brought down a peg. They used to do it to themselves. Judy Garland and Marilyn Monroe were gorgeous monsters, but were so self-destructive there was no need to punish them further. But Hillary and Martha - the domestic diva with the new ankle bracelet echoed Judy Garland on her Web site yesterday that "there is no place like home" - are not self-destructive. They are brass-knuckled survivors who elicit both admiration and an enmity that Alessandra Stanley memorably dubbed "blondenfreude." From pornography to "Desperate Housewives," women being degraded has an entertainment value far greater than men being degraded. People liked Hillary and Martha a lot more once they were "broken," like one of Martha's saddle horses, ice queens melted into puddles of vulnerability. Maybe it's because both women sometimes overreached, treated the help badly and displayed an unseemly greedy streak. Maybe it's because a dichotomy about their roles made them seem disingenuous: they gained renown for traditional feminine roles, and apron-and-hearth books, assuming guises to achieve male power and taking a route to the mahogany epicenter through the kitchen. Hillary was America's first lady, photographed smiling in her designer dress as she oversaw table settings and placement for state dinners, even though we knew she did not care about such domestic piffle and was instead maneuvering to take over huge chunks of domestic policy. Martha was America's first lady of gold-leaf designer lifestyle nesting, even though we knew that her über-nest was so scary that her husband had flown the coop. Though she was the ultimate professional homemaker and nurturer, she left her daughter out of the litany of things - cats, canaries, horses, chickens and dogs - she would miss in jail. Obviously, many men are uncomfortable with successful women, so when these women are brushed back, alpha men can take comfort in knowing that alphettes are not threateningly all-powerful and that they had better soften those sharp edges. I learned covering Geraldine Ferraro's vice presidential bid that the reaction of women to extraordinarily successful women is also ambivalent, with as much hostility as sisterly pride. An Icarus crash can mitigate the jealousy, while intensifying the feminist attachment. After her husband's philandering with Monica, Hillary played the victim card all the way to the Senate. After her own bad judgment about her stocks, Martha metamorphosed from jailbird to phoenix. Why don't we need to see Oprah, another titan known by her first name, slapped back? Probably because Oprah never had an icy or phony side to her public persona and because her struggles in her childhood and with her weight take the edge off any animus that might be leveled at her for a net worth of $1.3 billion. And what about Condi, who's now being touted for the Republican ticket in 2008? Perhaps she does not need to play the victim to make people feel better about her power because she was never seen as a termagant, pushing people around and bending them to her will. She always seemed subservient to President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, a willing handmaiden and spokesman for their bellicose bidding. One Democratic image maker admiringly predicts that, having survived their virago and victim phases, our two most relentless blondes will outlast everyone: "When the world ends, there will be left only a few cockroaches, Cher, Hillary and Martha." E-mail: liberties@nytimes.com Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company Home Privacy Policy Search Corrections RSS Help Back to Top

# posted by Michael P. Whelan : 7:34 PM  0 comments