The Congress, by Public Law 85-529, as amended, has designated May 1 of each year as "Loyalty Day," and I ask all Americans to join me in this day of celebration and in reaffirming our allegiance to our Nation.

NOW, THEREFORE, I, GEORGE W. BUSH, President of the United States of America, do hereby proclaim May 1, 2003, as Loyalty Day. I call upon all the people of the United States to join in support of this national observance. I also call upon government officials to display the flag of the United States on all government buildings on Loyalty Day.

IN WITNESS WHEREOF, I have hereunto set my hand this thirtieth day of April, in the year of our Lord two thousand three, and of the Independence of the United States of America the two hundred and twenty-seventh.

GEORGE W. BUSH

Skillfully negotiating with their French counterparts, Jefferson's emissaries in Paris, Robert Livingston and James Monroe, shook the huge, ripe Louisiana plum off its French tree. Jefferson overcame his constitutional scruples and agreed to the deal: $15 million for much of what would become the great interior territory of the United States. "An Empire for Liberty," he called it.

Rarely has such fruit been harvested so easily and cheaply -- no war, no conquest, little debt. And rarely has such fruit brought so many alloyed legacies.

The benefits of the Purchase were recognized immediately and realized quickly. The size of the infant republic, already in 1803 the largest in the world, doubled with few pen strokes and the exchange of modest funds. If the example of its young government and its unprecedented social ways weren't already distracting the governments of other nations, its greatly augmented size was enough to make the United States a force to reckon with.

But the huge territory that fell to the United States was not just the symbol of future strength. Those acres, whose exploration Meriwether Lewis and William Clark began that same year, were to yield agricultural and mineral bounty beyond the dreams of men. The roots of American economic might, planted earlier, suddenly reached deep and far.

Yet with bounty came aspiration and responsibility, both deeply stained. The spread of European settlement set in motion the extermination of the Indian tribes. And the new lands to the west released slavery to travel beyond the Mississippi River. The Louisiana Purchase bequeathed to us the racism, inequality, bad faith and shame that are with us still.

More to the point today, the acquisition of the vast Louisiana domains embedded in Americans' imagination a dream of missionary empire. The Purchase vastly strengthened an American disposition to claim for itself what it wished and gave it the muscle to do so. . . .

Goethe once remarked that the New World had it better than the Old. On the evidence of the Louisiana Purchase, he might more accurately have said that we have always had it easier -- an inland empire for virtually nothing, and then the rest for little blood or money. Today, we reap the harvest of such comparatively easy triumphs. Jefferson's empire for liberty, like all others, has always threatened to become a different kind of empire.

Ease is always the breeding ground of prideful acts, and imperial vision has always given way to rot. The empire of ancient Rome, Napoleon's France, Britain's world-circling rule and successive 20th century efforts of the Kaiser, Hitler and Stalin to extend German and Soviet might all came to naught after causing immeasurable misery and death.

If Jefferson's Declaration of Independence gave Americans a noble and enduring way to think of themselves, the Louisiana Purchase encouraged them to realize that self-image in lesser, sometimes baser, forms. The great historian of that generation, David Ramsey, comparing the Purchase with the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, wrote that "the acquisition of Louisiana is the greatest political blessing ever conferred on these states."

Already, 200 years ago, the hint of presumptuousness was in the air.

Forget truth. That is the message from our government and its apologists in the media who insist that the Iraq invasion is a great success story even though it was based on a lie.

In the statement broadcast to the Iraqi people after the invasion was launched, President Bush stated: "The goals of our coalition are clear and limited. We will end a brutal regime, whose aggression and weapons of mass destruction make it a unique threat to the world." To which Tony Blair added: "We did not want this war. But in refusing to give up his weapons of mass destruction, Saddam gave us no choice but to act."

That claim of urgency -- requiring us to short-circuit the U.N. weapons inspectors -- has proved to be a whopper of a falsehood. Late Sunday, the U.S. Army conceded that what had been reported as its only significant WMD find -- two mobile chemical labs and a dozen 55-gallon drums of chemicals -- "showed no positive hits at all" for chemical weapons. . . .

It is expected that despots can force the blind allegiance of their people to falsehoods. But it is frightening in the extreme when lying matters not at all to a free people. The only plausible explanation is that the tragedy of Sept. 11 so traumatized us that we are no longer capable of the outrage expected of a patently deceived citizenry. The case for connecting Saddam Hussein with that tragedy is increasingly revealed as false, but it seems to matter not to a populace numbed by incessant government propaganda.

The only significant link between Al Qaeda and Hussein centered on the Ansar al Islam bases in the Kurdish area outside of Hussein's control. That's the "poison factory" offered by Colin Powell in his U.N. speech to connect Hussein with international terror. But an exhaustive investigation by the Los Angeles Times of witnesses and material found in the area "produced no strong evidence of connections to Baghdad and indicated that Ansar was not a sophisticated terrorist organization." Moreover, the purpose of this camp was to foster a holy war of religious fanatics who branded Hussein as "an infidel tyrant" and refused to fight under the "infidel flag" of his hated secular regime.

The embarrassingly secular nature of the government was summarized in another Los Angeles Times story on the status of women: "For decades, Iraqi women -- at least those living in Baghdad and some other big cities -- have enjoyed a degree of personal liberty undreamed of by women in neighboring nations such as Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf emirates."

Those freedoms -- to drive, study in coeducational colleges and to advance in the professions -- are now threatened by the fundamentalist forces unleashed by the invasion. The former U.S. general now governing Iraq has stated that he will not accept a reversal of those freedoms, but our long history of cozy relationships with the oppressive Gulf regimes can't be reassuring to Iraq's women.

President Bush's single-minded pursuit of regime change in Iraq during the last 15 months would not have surprised the unsentimental 18th century creators of our government. They expected the executive to pursue his foreign policy goals. What they would not have foreseen was Congress' supine acceptance of the president's usurpation of their constitutional authority to declare war and approve peace treaties. . . .

Explanations abound as to why Congress has failed to exercise its constitutional authority in the years since the fall of the Berlin Wall. But few would deny that a loyal opposition is needed more than ever today, as a president with a wind at his back and little ballast sails into new diplomatic waters.

What might an alternative foreign policy, championed by Congress, look like?

It could begin with the premise, shared by the administration, that the inordinate power of the U.S. gives it unique concerns that other nations do not have, both as a target of hostility and a possessor of military might. This recognition could lead to the frank admission that we will act on our own, if need be. "If need be" would be the anchor of an oppositional group that sought ways to avoid future unilateral, preemptive strikes.

Congress could insist on strengthening existing alliances, bolstering multilateral agreements and monitoring trouble spots, whether generated by famine, autocratic governments or handicaps in global commerce. It could lead world debate on health, birth control and sweat labor. It could articulate those venerable principles of American foreign policy that run counter to the radical bellicosity implicit in the Bush Doctrine.

Nothing can replace an opposition crafted within the walls of Congress, where constitutional authority over war and peace still lodges.

NEAR KUT, Iraq, May 3 -- A specially trained Defense Department team, dispatched after a month of official indecision to survey a major Iraqi radioactive waste repository, today found the site heavily looted and said it was impossible to tell whether nuclear materials were missing.

The discovery at the Baghdad Nuclear Research Facility was the second since the end of the war in which a known nuclear cache was plundered extensively enough that authorities could not rule out the possibility that deadly materials had been stolen. The survey, conducted by a U.S. Special Forces detachment and eight nuclear experts from a Pentagon office called the Direct Support Team, appeared to offer fresh evidence that the war has dispersed the country's most dangerous technologies beyond anyone's knowledge or control. . . .

U.S. authorities do not know what is missing, if anything, because of an ongoing conflict between the Bush administration and the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency, as well as a dispute within the administration about how much to involve the IAEA in Iraq. The unresolved struggle has kept U.S. forces out of Tuwaitha's nuclear storage areas, but a brief outdoor inspection on April 10 found the door to one of them had been breached.

The special nuclear team that surveyed the Baghdad facility this morning had been eager to make the trip for weeks.

Twenty-three days ago, a smaller U.S. survey team passed by and recommended an immediate increase in security. The following day, April 11, the IAEA listed this site and Tuwaitha as the two requiring the most urgent protection from looters. U.S. Central Command sent a detachment of the Army's 3rd Infantry Division to control the facility's gate.

President George Bush's National Security Adviser, Condoleezza Rice, is now acknowledging that Iraq's weapons of mass destruction program is less clear-cut, and probably more difficult to establish, than the White House portrayed before the war.

She has no doubt that the US-led coalition, assisted by experts from Britain and Australia, will find Iraq's WMD programs. But for the first time, Dr Rice is saying publicly that it is less likely many actual weapons will be found. Rather, she described the programs as being hidden in so-called "dual use" infrastructure. In other words, chemicals and biological agents could be in plants, factories and laboratories capable of being used for legal and prohibited purposes. . . .

She had a new explanation too for Iraq's ability to launch these weapons that were not assembled. "Just-in-time assembly" and "just-in-time" inventory, as she put it.

But in the months before the Iraq war, Mr Bush and his advisers, including the Secretary of State, Colin Powell, gave far more frightening descriptions of Iraq's stockpile of weapons of mass destruction.

Addressing the UN Security Council on February 5, Mr Powell said recent intelligence showed a missile brigade outside Baghdad was "dispersing rocket launchers and warheads containing biological warfare agent to various locations". Mr Bush was equally alarmist, describing satellite evidence showing that Saddam Hussein was reconstituting Iraq's nuclear weapons programs with his top nuclear scientists, his "nuclear mujahideen". Iraq's deadliest weapons could end up in the hands of terrorists.

"We cannot wait for final proof," Mr Bush said. "The smoking gun that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud."

When Hans Blix, the chief UN weapons inspector, suggested Iraq's WMD program could be more fragmented and degraded, he was pilloried as naive or incompetent. When his inspectors talked of a more complex search for WMD, where components or precursors could be in the form of legal, dual-use chemical or biological agents that had to be monitored, they were dismissed as flatfooted and overcautious.

Yet Dr Rice's descriptions of Iraq's weapons program is far closer to Dr Blix's analysis than she would want to concede.

BAGHDAD, May 4 (Reuters) - Hundreds of unarmed Iraqi police returned to Baghdad streets on Sunday under the supervision of U.S. forces trying to restore order in the chaotic capital.

But in a reminder of the mammoth task facing police, looters also made a comeback, making forays into a presidential palace to scavenge whatever was left from earlier bouts of looting. . . .

Baghdad's new police chief resigned on Saturday in a setback to U.S. efforts to revitalise the force.

U.S. forces spokesman Lieutenant-Colonel Alan King quoted police chief Zuhir al-Naimi as saying he wanted to make way for a younger man. No other explanation was given for the resignation of a man appointed only on April 24.

A 10-nation force led by the United States, Britain and Poland plans to deploy in Iraq by the end of this month to try to stabilise a country rocked by lawlessness.

BAGHDAD: Several dozen Iraqis staged a rally in Baghdad on Sunday to thank the United States for removing strongman Saddam Hussein.

"Yes, yes for democracy," they chanted in Arabic in front of the Palestine Hotel where many foreign correspondents are based.

Some of the banners in English held up at the demonstration read, "Iraqis thank the United States" and "Iraq-US cooperation equals peace."

Median CEO pay at the 37 largest defense contractors rose 79 percent from 2001 to 2002, while overall CEO pay climbed only 6 percent, according to a new report from United for a Fair Economy, More Bucks for the Bang: CEO Pay at Top Defense Contractors, by Chris Hartman and David Martin.

Median pay was 45 percent higher in 2002 at defense contractors than at the 365 large companies surveyed by Business Week magazine. The typical U.S. CEO made $3.7 million in 2002, while the typical defense industry CEO got $5.4 million.

The jump in median defense contractor CEO pay far exceeded the increase in defense spending, which rose 14 percent from 2001 to 2002.

Compared with an army private's pay of $19,585, the average CEO at a major defense contractor made 577 times as much in 2002, or $11,297,548. This is also more than 28 times as much as the Commander in Chief's salary of $400,000.

The study also looked at the size of campaign contributions by the largest defense contractors and found a strong correlation between campaign contributions made by a company in the 2000 and 2002 election cycles and the value of defense contracts awarded to that company. Ninety percent of the difference in contract size can be accounted for by size of contributions. For example, top arms contractor Lockheed Martin was also the top campaign contributor among defense firms.

The Bush administration is maniacally intolerant of dissent. It doesn't give a damn what Congress thinks about anything. The good news is: That combination of enforced loyalty and executive arrogance is reining in the environmentally disastrous, economically ludicrous pork-barrel projects of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. This fledgling corps reform campaign hasn't gotten much attention -- because "corps reform" sounds like something Michael Dukakis might read about on the beach, and environmentalists are too busy portraying President Bush as the second coming of the Exxon Valdez to give credit where it's due -- but corps reform could end up doing more to benefit the American environment than a dozen Arctic refuges. . . .

The Army Corps is one of the most bizarre bureaucracies in the federal government and one of the most effective at generating work to keep itself busy. From its roots as a tiny regiment in George Washington's army, it has grown into a public works behemoth with 35,000 employees -- more than the departments of Labor, Education, and Energy combined. A third of them work on military programs that are usually uncontroversial -- the recent flap over the contract to Halliburton in Iraq was an exception -- but the rest focus on civil works that reflect the agency's addictions to concrete and the control of nature. The corps has dredged and deepened America's ports and harbors, armored and manhandled America's rivers, and pumped sand onto America's beaches. It has built thousands of dams, dikes, locks, levees, seawalls, and floodgates, often justified by dubious economic benefits. And in the late 1990s, under leaders who behaved like dot-com executives seeking to increase market share -- "Seek Growth Opportunities" was actually one of three planks of the agency's "Corps Vision" -- the corps mission expanded to include construction of schools and sewage plants, cleanup of hazardous and radioactive waste, and massive restoration projects designed to revive ecosystems it damaged in the past. It is now overseeing an $8 billion effort to resuscitate the Florida Everglades, the largest environmental project in world history.

Over the years, the corps has become a true rogue agency, operating virtually independently of its supposed bosses in the executive branch, taking marching orders almost exclusively from the congressional porkers who lard its budget with their pet projects. The corps has clashed with every president since Franklin Roosevelt, and it has won almost every battle, thanks to its protection racket on Capitol Hill. In 2000, for example, after corps leaders were caught manipulating an economic study in order to justify a billion-dollar Mississippi River project and devising a secret "Program Growth Initiative" in order to boost their budget by 50 percent, the Clinton administration tried to issue a few mild guidelines reminding them to obey civilian authorities. But a few powerful senators vowed that the guidelines would not stand, so the administration withdrew them a week later. Sen. Christopher Bond, R-Mo., then proposed legislative language designed to prevent any administration from changing anything about the corps at any time.

CRAWFORD, Tex., May 4 -- Tacitly acknowledging that North Korea may not be deterred from producing plutonium for nuclear weapons, President Bush is now trying to marshal international support for preventing the country from exporting nuclear material, American and foreign officials say. . . .

For a decade, the United States' declared policy has been that North Korea would be prevented, by any means necessary, from producing plutonium or highly enriched uranium. President Bill Clinton ordered the Pentagon to draw up plans for a military strike when the North threatened to begin production in 1994, but a nuclear freeze agreement was reached later that year.

Mr. Bush's new focus on blocking the sale of nuclear material to countries or terrorist groups reflects intelligence officials' conclusion that they cannot ascertain whether North Korea was bluffing when it claimed last month that it had already reprocessed enough spent nuclear fuel to make many weapons.

"The president said that the central worry is not what they've got, but where it goes," said an official familiar with the talks between Mr. Bush and Mr. Howard. "He's very pragmatic about it, and the reality is that we probably won't know the extent of what they are producing. So the whole focus is to keep the plutonium from going further."

I'm told by a person involved in the Niger caper that more than a year ago the vice president's office asked for an investigation of the uranium deal, so a former U.S. ambassador to Africa was dispatched to Niger. In February 2002, according to someone present at the meetings, that envoy reported to the C.I.A. and State Department that the information was unequivocally wrong and that the documents had been forged.

The envoy reported, for example, that a Niger minister whose signature was on one of the documents had in fact been out of office for more than a decade. In addition, the Niger mining program was structured so that the uranium diversion had been impossible. The envoy's debunking of the forgery was passed around the administration and seemed to be accepted -- except that President Bush and the State Department kept citing it anyway.

"It's disingenuous for the State Department people to say they were bamboozled because they knew about this for a year," one insider said.

Another example is the abuse of intelligence from Hussein Kamel, a son-in-law of Saddam Hussein and head of Iraq's biological weapons program until his defection in 1995. Top British and American officials kept citing information from Mr. Kamel as evidence of a huge secret Iraqi program, even though Mr. Kamel had actually emphasized that Iraq had mostly given up its W.M.D. program in the early 1990's. Glen Rangwala, a British Iraq expert, says the transcript of Mr. Kamel's debriefing was leaked because insiders resented the way politicians were misleading the public.

WASHINGTON, May 6 -- President Bush today announced the appointment of L. Paul Bremer III, a retired diplomat and counterterrorism expert, as his special envoy to Iraq, making him the senior civilian in charge of rebuilding the country's government and infrastructure.

Mr. Bremer will take charge of a multibillion-dollar enterprise currently run by a retired lieutenant general, Jay Garner, who reports to Gen. Tommy R. Franks, the commander of allied forces in Iraq. Mr. Bremer will report directly to Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, administration officials said.

The shift underscores the White House's intention to speed the transition from a military occupation toward civilian administration, senior administration officials said. Although he is largely being supplanted by Mr. Bremer, to whom he will report, the officials said General Garner would not resign, even as his role was still being worked out. In Iraq today, General Garner confirmed as much, saying: "I'll stay awhile. There's got to be a good handoff."

By announcing the appointment himself, and by elevating Mr. Bremer to the level of presidential envoy, Mr. Bush sought to resolve a sharp dispute over the last several days between the State Department and the Pentagon for control of the reconstruction project. The State Department has argued that a civilian with diplomatic skills and foreign policy experience should coordinate reconstruction, while Pentagon officials have insisted that the project remain under the military's control. . . .

Sean McCormack, the spokesman for the National Security Council, said Mr. Bremer, who may leave for Iraq as soon as this weekend, would guide overall reconstruction policy while General Garner would handle day-to-day reconstruction work.

"General Garner will continue doing what he's been doing, getting the lights turned on, the water flowing, the sewers working," Mr. McCormack said.

Zalmay Khalilzad, who has been the White House liaison to former Iraqi opposition groups, will also stay on to advise Mr. Bremer on Iraqi politics and assist in starting a representative government, Mr. McCormack said.

While administration officials described the appointment as a compromise, some analysts said the Pentagon had still come out on top because Mr. Bremer would still take his orders from Mr. Rumsfeld.

"My sense is that no one can claim this is a Powell victory," said Ivo Daalder, a former National Security aide in the Clinton administration who now works at the Brookings Institution. "The person you report to is the key, and while Bremer reports to the president, he does it through Rumsfeld, not Powell."

The appointment of an anti-terrorism expert like Bremer becomes even more telling when one realizes that US designs in Iraq have far-reaching implications for the entire Middle East region.

Bremer, 62, once chaired an anti-terrorism commission in the US, and was part of a group which fully a year-and-a half before the Sept. 11 attacks prepared a report warning of a 'grave terrorist threat.' The report predicted that in the not-too-distant future, the US could fall prey to a devastating terrorist attack rivaling the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor.

The US is now moving to abandon its bases in Saudi Arabia and no longer needs Turkey's military assistance. Iraq is the new staging ground for US forces in the Middle East. But what does all this mean? Bush's choice of a retired anti-terrorism expert rather than an ex-military man gives us clues to the answer to this question: The US' top priority in Iraq is not the country's reconstruction but rather gaining an extensive foothold in the region, under the guise of the war against terrorism, so as to be able to besiege all the countries of the Middle East. According to Bremer, to prevent new terrorist attacks against the US, countries such as Libya and Iran must be strictly controlled and kept under constant pressure.

Last week, Robin Rafael, an American diplomat working under Jay Garner, the retired American lieutenant general who has been in charge of reconstruction here, decided to reinstate the Baath Party leadership of Baghdad University, the largest in the country. Mr. Hussein's personal physician, Muhammad al-Rawi, who is president of the university, was granted permission to preside over the graduation of 17,000 seniors who will return to classes on May 17.

Ms. Rafael, like most American officials here, is working behind heavy security that prevents contact with a broad cross-section of Iraqis or anyone else. She was not available for comment. But one of her colleagues suggested that her decision was a pragmatic one to get the university open under current management and then try to sort out the Baathists later.

One man with strong feelings about this decision is Professor Hilal al-Bayyati, a computer scientist who studied in the United States during the 1960's and built the National Computer Center in Iraq. During the months after his arrest in late 2000, he found himself talking to insects.

By the thousands they shared his 6-foot-by-4-foot cell at the intelligence headquarters in Baghdad. . . .

So Mr. Bayyati and some of his colleagues have sprung into action to seek reversal of Ms. Rafael's decision. First they organized a committee of faculty members that met to demand new elections for deans, department heads and administrators as a means to throw out Dr. Rawi and the other senior Baathists at the university.

Dr. Rawi locked them out of the meeting hall, but more than 250 of them they managed to convene anyway and quickly agreed to resist the administration and seek American support. They demanded that the university groundskeepers tear down a statue of Mr. Hussein. But the maintenance staff refused, saying Dr. Rawi had given no such order.

When American officials would not meet with them, Mr. Bayyati and his colleagues went to the headquarters of Ahmad Chalabi, one of the political figures who has returned to Iraq and is working with both American forces and other political groups to form an interim government. Like all of the political headquarters in Baghdad, Mr. Chalabi's is accessible to Iraqis in every way the American headquarters is not.

"There are walk-ins here," said one American official. "We can't have walk-ins over there," he added, referring to General Garner's headquarters at Mr. Hussein's Republican Palace.

Mr. Chalabi and his security staff organized a raid on the university. The Hussein statue was leveled by an armored vehicle and its head cut off and returned like a trophy to the lawn of Mr. Chalabi's headquarters.

On Monday, Mr. Bayyati went to Ms. Rafael's fortified headquarters and handed a note to an American soldier to deliver to her.

"I stood in the sun for one-and-a-half-hours," he said. "I didn't get any answer and I couldn't enter."

But as he turned to leave, Mr. Bayyati caught sight of a face he would never forget, that of Ali al-Jabouri, the warden of Abu Ghraib prison, where the professor spent 18 months in a sea of Iraqis headed for secret execution.

The warden, a senior Baath Party official, approached and kissed him on both cheeks and told him that the best thing about his job had been meeting people like the professor. Then he went past the American guards and inside the building. He did not say who he was going to see, the professor said.

Halliburton, the company formerly run by the US vice-president, Dick Cheney, has been granted a far broader role in Iraq than previously disclosed and is already operating oilfields in the country, the US army admitted yesterday.

Kellogg Brown and Root, a Halliburton subsidiary, is pumping up oil despite earlier claims that its contract with the American government was for fighting oil fires, a spokesman for the Army Corps of Engineers told the Guardian.

The bigger role, said corps spokesman Scott Saunders, was being exercised "due to the needs of the Iraqi people". About 125,000 barrels a day were produced, he said, for domestic purposes only.

The revelation came after Henry Waxman, a Democratic congressman, published correspondence in which the army said KBR's emergency contract allowed for its involvement in "operation of facilities and distribution of products". The existence of the contract, awarded with no competition before the war, was made public only in March.

Diplomats interviewed for this story -- all of whom insisted on anonymity because of the sensitivity of the political infighting -- said they are profoundly worried about what they describe as the administration's arrogance or indifference to world public opinion, which they fear has wiped out, in less than two years, decades of effort to build goodwill toward the United States. . . .

"The votes [against the U.S.] in the U.N. had nothing to do with Iraq. It was personal" toward America, a senior diplomat said. "I don't think this group realizes how arrogant they come off. It's a PR nightmare."

The official said he agreed with the president's decision to go to war in Iraq, and so did most officials at State, contrary to the department's reputation among neoconservatives as a bastion of wimpy multilateralism. "The issue for a lot of us is the way it's been done," he said. . . .

Many inside the Beltway regard the increasingly public rift between the agencies as just another in unending bureaucratic wars that mark life in Washington, but one that could damage U.S. interests if it encourages foreign countries to try to exploit the conflict. In South Korea, for example, many officials believe the North Korean leadership is more likely to miscalculate U.S. intentions because of the policy rift between administration hawks and doves. . . .

[W]hat is widespread within the State Department is the view that the U.S. intervention in Iraq ultimately must be judged in part by whether it generates more anti-American terrorism. Diplomats worry that the administration is insensitive to the risks its policies carry.

"When I was a kid, conservatives were the ones who did not want to take big risks" to change the world, recalled one middle-aged veteran at State, adding that "these people seem willing to take huge risks" that can truly be termed radical.

"Their willingness to roll the dice with people's lives I find troubling," he said.

A month after U.S. forces seized Baghdad, the Pentagon's occupation authority remains plagued by insufficient resources and inadequate preparations, fueling complaints from Iraqis and doubts about the Bush administration's promise to reconstruct the country swiftly and set its politics on a new, democratic course. . . .

Officials in the White House, Pentagon and State Department said before the war that speedy delivery of supplies was needed to help build Iraqi support for a difficult transformation to follow. But failure to provide salaries and restore a sense of security after a month threaten to do the opposite, alienating the population and impeding an already difficult reconstruction. In addition, some Iraqis have been angered by U.S. decisions to invite former members of the corrupt police force to return to work and to allow members of Hussein's Baath Party to reclaim senior government jobs.

In this atmosphere, anti-American sentiments appear to be growing: among people waiting in cars for a whole day to get gas, among military veterans milling about officers' clubs with the hope someone will arrive with their pensions, among college students upset that Baathist administrators are back on the job.

When several hundred people seeking jobs were turned away from a hotel recently by U.S. soldiers, they held a spontaneous protest and began chanting: "Down! Down! U.S.A." Then, comparing President Bush to the fictional thief from "A Thousand and One Nights," they yelled: "Bush! Bush! Ali Baba!"

The slow start also has prompted clerics, tribal sheiks and once-exiled opposition leaders to fill the void, particularly the Shiite Muslim clergy eager to claim political influence in a country with a 60 percent Shiite majority. Many have assumed roles as de facto mayors and neighborhood bosses, setting up militias to guard against looters, commandeering generators to provide power and distributing food seized from government warehouses.

Many clerics and sheiks have no intention of ceding those roles when a new government is formed, raising the possibility of a struggle between U.S.-sanctioned national leaders and self-proclaimed local ones. . . .

One concept common to most of the plans, U.S. officials said, was to hit the ground running. There was a recognition it would be important for the reconstruction team to develop momentum quickly if it wanted to realize its long-term ambition of transforming Iraq into a stable democracy.

But when Baghdad fell, Garner and his team remained in Kuwait because the military said it was too dangerous for them to work in Iraq. It was not until April 21, 12 days after Hussein's rule collapsed, that Garner and a small group of aides arrived in Baghdad; the bulk of his staff drove up a few days later.

"There was lots of talking about it, but just not enough doing it," said an aide to Garner who advises one of Iraq's ministries.

Problems inside Garner's headquarters -- the 258-room Republican Palace on the banks of the Tigris River -- illustrate the point. Garner's aides, assigned to run the most important ministries and the Baghdad city government, do not have working telephones in their offices. They waste time walking corridors in search of one another. If they want to communicate with the outside world, they must stand outdoors and use handheld satellite telephones, which do not work indoors.

"There was supposed to be a cell phone network set up for 5,000 phones. Where the hell are they?" one exasperated Garner aide said.

The movement's grand ambition -- one can no longer say grandiose -- is to roll back the twentieth century, quite literally. That is, defenestrate the federal government and reduce its scale and powers to a level well below what it was before the New Deal's centralization. With that accomplished, movement conservatives envision a restored society in which the prevailing values and power relationships resemble the America that existed around 1900, when William McKinley was President. Governing authority and resources are dispersed from Washington, returned to local levels and also to individuals and private institutions, most notably corporations and religious organizations. The primacy of private property rights is re-established over the shared public priorities expressed in government regulation. Above all, private wealth -- both enterprises and individuals with higher incomes -- are permanently insulated from the progressive claims of the graduated income tax.

These broad objectives may sound reactionary and destructive (in historical terms they are), but hard-right conservatives see themselves as liberating reformers, not destroyers, who are rescuing old American virtues of self-reliance and individual autonomy from the clutches of collective action and "statist" left-wingers. They do not expect any of these far-reaching goals to be fulfilled during Bush's tenure, but they do assume that history is on their side and that the next wave will come along soon (not an unreasonable expectation, given their great gains during the past thirty years). Right-wingers--who once seemed frothy and fratricidal -- now understand that three steps forward, two steps back still adds up to forward progress. It's a long march, they say. Stick together, because we are winning.

Many opponents and critics (myself included) have found the right's historic vision so improbable that we tend to guffaw and misjudge the political potency of what it has put together. We might ask ourselves: If these ideas are so self-evidently cockeyed and reactionary, why do they keep advancing? The right's unifying idea--get the government out of our lives--has broad popular appeal, at least on a sentimental level, because it represents an authentic core value in the American experience ("Don't tread on me" was a slogan in the Revolution). But the true source of its strength is the movement's fluid architecture and durability over time, not the passing personalities of Reagan-Gingrich-Bush or even the big money from business. The movement has a substantial base that believes in its ideological vision--people alarmed by cultural change or injured in some way by government intrusions, coupled with economic interests that have very strong reasons to get government off their backs--and the right has created the political mechanics that allow these disparate elements to pull together. Cosmopolitan corporate executives hold their noses and go along with Christian activists trying to stamp out "decadent" liberal culture. Fed-up working-class conservatives support business's assaults on their common enemy, liberal government, even though they may be personally injured when business objectives triumph.

The right's power also feeds off the general decay in the political system -- the widely shared and often justifiable resentments felt toward big government, which no longer seems to address the common concerns of ordinary citizens.

I am not predicting that the right will win the governing majority that could enact the whole program, in a kind of right-wing New Deal--and I will get to some reasons why I expect their cause to fail eventually. The farther they advance, however, the less inevitable is their failure.

Several senior Republican senators are seeking wider party backing for a bold plan that would break the Democrats' filibuster of President Bush's judicial nominees.

Their approach calls for employing a rarely used parliamentary tactic to overturn current Senate procedures.

Under the strategy envisioned by Senate Judiciary Chairman Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), among others, the Republicans would strip any Senate minority -- currently the Democrats -- of their ability to filibuster presidential nominees.

Approval by Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (Tenn.), which is being sought, would all but assure that the plan would go forward.

Under the most likely scenario now under discussion, they would secure a ruling from the chair that Senate Rule XXII does not apply to executive submissions to the Senate -- and that includes judicial nominees. Rule XXII provides for unlimited debate on all legislative issues that reach the floor unless three-fifths of the Senate calls a halt.

With such an approach, a favorable ruling from the chair on limiting the scope of Rule XXII could stand after only a simple majority approved it.

Anticipating these moves, Democrats have already asked the Senate parliamentarian to weigh in on the issue in their defense.

From the standpoint of the proponents, the appeal of this “silver-bullet� strategy is that it would quash the Democratic blockade without requiring 60 votes, the number needed by current rules to halt such delaying tactics, or 67 votes, the number needed to change a filibustered Senate rule.

One drawback of this proposed tactic is that it might destroy whatever is left of the working relationship between Democrats and Republicans. That is why some legislative experts liken the parliamentary tool to a legislative nuclear bomb.

Bush's actions on September 11 have been the subject of lively debate, mostly on the internet. Details reported that day and in the week after the attacks - both the media reports and accounts given by Bush himself - have changed radically over the past 18 months. Culling hundreds of reports from newspapers, magazines, and the internet has only made finding the "truth" of what happened and when it happened more confusing. In the changed political climate after 9/11, few have dared raise challenging questions about Bush's actions. A journalist who said Bush was "flying around the country like a scared child, seeking refuge in his mother's bed after having a nightmare" and another who said Bush "skedaddled" were fired. . . . We should have a concise record of where President Bush was throughout the day the US was attacked, but we do not.

What follows is an attempt to give the most complete account of Bush's actions - from Florida to Louisiana to Nebraska to Washington, DC.

(Emperors-clothes.com has more.)

A Norwegian parliamentarian nominated President Bush . . . and British Prime Minister Tony Blair . . . for the Nobel Peace Prize on Thursday, praising them for winning the war in Iraq . . .

"Sometimes it's necessary to use a small and effective war to prevent a much more dangerous war in the future," Jan Simonsen, a right-wing independent in Norway's parliament, told Reuters.

The new American civilian administrator of Iraq arrived in Baghdad today amid a shake-up of key US reconstruction personnel.

Paul Bremer, a former ambassador and head of America's counter-terrorism office, takes over from the retired general Jay Garner in the latest sign of US frustration over the failure of its post-war team to restore order.

The move comes one day after the Bush administration sacked Barbara Bodine, the US coordinator for central Iraq, after only three weeks in the post. Four more key personnel from the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance are expected to be flown home in the coming days, according to a report in today's New York Times.

Mr Bremer stopped in Basra before flying on to the capital, where the civilian reconstruction agency is based. He said: "We intend to have a very effective, efficient and well-organized handover."

Asked whether he was, in effect, directing a US plan to colonise Iraq, Mr Bremer said: "The coalition did not come to colonise Iraq. We came to overthrow a despotic regime. That we have done. Now our job is to turn and help the Iraqi people regain control of their own destiny."

Attempting to stifle reports that his replacement of Mr Garner represented a policy shift, Mr Bremer said: "I also want to say how proud I am of the work my good friend Jay Garner and the people who are working for him, how proud I am of everything they have done here in the last couple of weeks under extraordinary circumstances." He said Bodine was being reassigned back to Washington by the state department "for its own reasons."

The US yesterday sacked one of its most senior envoys to Iraq after only three weeks, in an admission that the task of running the country is proving tougher than expected.

With Baghdad still in a state of chaos, there was a whiff of panic about Washington's removal of the top layer of its team responsible for reconstruction. There was also a hint that it is being forced to rethink its post-war strategy.

Barbara Bodine, the US coordinator for central Iraq, was ordered back to Washington, a casualty of the failure to restore law and order or basic public services to the capital, Baghdad. . . .

Ms Bodine, a former ambassador to Yemen, has been a victim of Iraq before: she was on assignment in Kuwait before the 1991 Gulf war and was held captive for 137 days by Saddam's invading forces.

Her relations with Gen Garner are reported to have been strained, and she was also said to have been unhappy at the dispatch of Paul Bremer, a former US diplomat, to oversee the political process. He is due in Iraq this week.

Britain has sent John Sawyer, an ex-ambassador to Cairo and former Downing Street policy adviser, to work alongside Mr Bremer. Mr Sawyer, who has been designated special envoy to the Iraq political process, said he wanted a new Iraqi government that was broad-based and credible.

The US military task force hunting for chemical, biological and nuclear weapons in Iraq is to leave within a month, having found no trace of any illegal weapons, according to a report yesterday.

Troops with the 75th Exploitation Task Force, which has led the search for Saddam Hussein's banned weapons programme over the past seven weeks, say they are increasingly frustrated with their failure to find any banned weapons, the Washington Post said. . . .

Another, larger US force -- the Iraq Survey Group -- will be sent out to continue the search for weapons, but it will include fewer specialists, the paper said. Coalition officials, including George Bush himself, have said recently that the work of inspecting sites had only just begun.

Of a US central command list of 19 top weapons sites, all but two have been searched already. Another 45 sites searched so far from a list of 68 thought to contain some evidence of banned weapons have also yielded nothing.

"We came to bear country, we came loaded for bear, and we found out the bear wasn't here," an officer with the US defence intelligence agency was quoted as saying.

Iraq's newly appointed health minister resigned suddenly yesterday amid mounting criticism over his career as a senior Ba'ath party official.

His departure represents a significant embarrassment for the American authorities who chose him as the first minister in the post-Saddam government. It also brings another costly delay in the already slow reconstruction process.

Iraqi medical sources told the Guardian that Dr Ali Shnan al-Janabi quit yesterday morning and was not likely to be replaced. The health ministry will instead be run by a large committee on which all doctors, nurses and hospital staff are represented. . . .

As the number three at the ministry under Saddam Hussein, Dr Janabi was regarded by doctors as complicit in the appalling corruption and mis management of the decrepit health system. Yet hours before he resigned, senior US officials continued to defend him as a man of "honesty" and "great courage".

Hundreds of doctors and medical staff gathered outside the ministry last week to protest at his appointment. "Clean this corrupted ministry," reads the graffiti on the wall surrounding the building.

Dr Janabi ignored the disapproval over his appointment and on Saturday held day-long meetings with Jay Garner, the retired general appointed to lead the reconstruction of Iraq, and Stephen Browning, a US special adviser to the health ministry.

The minister, along with all the doctors and ministry staff at the meeting, was required to fill out a form renouncing his membership of the Ba'ath party and denouncing it and the Saddam regime.

At a news conference afterwards, Dr Janabi said he was no longer a party member, but he defended it. "I didn't commit a criminal act against humanity or against the children of Iraq," he said. Asked if he would denounce the party, he refused. "You will find a lot of the ideology is very, very good," he said.

The speed with which the US is forfeiting the goodwill it had in Iraq is breathtaking. With the exception of the Kurds, most Iraqis opposed the invasion of their country, and once US troops had succeeded in toppling Saddam Hussein without massive casualties or tides of refugees the dominant emotion was relief. Public displays of gratitude were few, but there was widespread satisfaction that the dictator and his regime were gone.

A month later, the mood has changed. Iraqis are staggered that the efficiency of the US fighting machine was not matched by post-conflict competence worthy of a superpower. Overriding everything is the issue of governance. Who is going to run Iraq, and will it be done for the benefit of Iraqis or of outside powers? Some reports suggest that Iraqis do not care who governs them, as long as someone competent ends the chaos soon. That is a false perception. American mismanagement in the first month of occupation has led an increasing number of Iraqis to distrust the whole US enterprise.

Even America's Iraqi friends are having second thoughts. Many Iraqi exiles who were recruited months ago by Washington's Future of Iraq project, to work in Baghdad ministries alongside American "advisers" after regime change, are hesitating to take up their posts for fear of being seen as collaborators.