While the nation was distracted last month by images of Saddam Hussein's spider hole and dental exam, President George W. Bush quietly signed into law a new bill that gives the FBI increased surveillance powers and dramatically expands the reach of the USA Patriot Act.

The Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2004 grants the FBI unprecedented power to obtain records from financial institutions without requiring permission from a judge.

Under the law, the FBI does not need to seek a court order to access such records, nor does it need to prove just cause.

Previously, under the Patriot Act, the FBI had to submit subpoena requests to a federal judge. Intelligence agencies and the Treasury Department, however, could obtain some financial data from banks, credit unions and other financial institutions without a court order or grand jury subpoena if they had the approval of a senior government official.

The new law (see Section 374 of the act), however, lets the FBI acquire these records through an administrative procedure whereby an FBI field agent simply drafts a so-called national security letter stating the information is relevant to a national security investigation.

And the law broadens the definition of "financial institution" to include such businesses as insurance companies, travel agencies, real estate agents, stockbrokers, the U.S. Postal Service and even jewelry stores, casinos and car dealerships.

The law also prohibits subpoenaed businesses from revealing to anyone, including customers who may be under investigation, that the government has requested records of their transactions. . . .

Charlie Mitchell, legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union, said many legislators failed to recognize the significance of the legislation until it was too late. But he said the fact that 15 Republicans and over 100 Democrats voted against the Conference Report of the bill indicated that, had there been more time, there probably would have been sufficient opposition to remove the provision.

"To have that many people vote against it, based on just that one provision without discussion beforehand, signifies there is strong opposition to new Patriot Act II powers," Mitchell said.

He said legislators are now on the lookout for other Patriot Act II provisions being tucked into new legislation.

"All things considered, this was a loss for civil liberties," he said. But on a brighter note, "this was the only provision of Patriot II that made it through this year. Members are hearing from their constituents. I really think we have the ability to stop much of this Patriot Act II legislation in the future."

My message is to urge jihad to repulse the grand plots hatched against our nation, such as the occupation of Baghdad, under the guise of the search for weapons of mass destruction, and the fierce attempt to destroy the jihad in beloved Palestine by employing the trick of the road map and the Geneva peace initiative.

The Americans' intentions have also become clear in statements about the need to change the beliefs and morals of Muslims to become more tolerant, as they put it.

In truth, this is a religious-economic war. The occupation of Iraq is a link in the Zionist-crusader chain of evil. Then comes the full occupation of the rest of the Gulf states to set the stage for controlling and dominating the whole world.

For the big powers believe that the Gulf and the Gulf states are the key to global control due to the presence of the largest oil reserves there. The situation is serious and the misfortune momentous.

The west's occupation of our countries is old, but takes new forms. The struggle between us and them began centuries ago, and will continue. There can be no dialogue with occupiers except through arms. Throughout the past century, Islamic countries have not been liberated from occupation except through jihad. But, under the pretext of fighting terrorism, the west today is doing its utmost to besmirch this jihad, supported by hypocrites.

Jihad is the path, so seek it. If we seek to deter them with any means other than Islam, we would be like our forefathers, the Ghassanids [Arab tribes living under the Byzantine empire]. Their leaders' concern was to be appointed kings and officers for the Romans in order to safeguard the interests of the Romans by killing their brothers, the peninsula's Arabs.

Such is the case of the new Ghassanids, the Arab rulers. Muslims, if you do not punish them for their sins in Jerusalem and Iraq, they will defeat you. They will also rob you of the land of the two holy places [Saudi Arabia].

Today they have robbed you of Baghdad and tomorrow they will rob you of Riyadh unless God deems otherwise. What is the means to stop this tremendous onslaught? Some reformers maintain that all popular and government forces should unite to ward off this crusader-Zionist onslaught.

But the question strongly raised is: are the governments in the Islamic world capable of pursuing their duty to defend the faith and nation and renouncing all allegiance to the United States?

The calls by some reformers are strange. They say that the path to defending the homeland and people passes though the doors of those western rulers. I tell those reformers: if you have an excuse for not pursuing jihad, it does not give you the right to depend on the unjust. God does not need your flattery of dictators.

The Gulf states proved their total inability to resist the Iraqi forces [in 1990-1]. They sought help from the crusaders, led by the United States. These states then came to America's help and backed it in its attack against an Arab state [Iraq in 2003].

These regimes submitted to US pressure and opened their air, land and sea bases to contribute towards the US campaign, despite the immense repercussions of this move. They feared that the door would be open for bringing down dictatorial regimes by armed forces from abroad, especially after they had seen the arrest of their former comrade in treason and agentry to the United States [Saddam Hussein] when it ordered him to ignite the first Gulf war against Iran, which rebelled against it.

The war plunged the area into a maze from which they have not emerged to this day. They are aware that their turn will come. They do not have the will to make the decision to confront the aggression. In short, the ruler who believes in the above-mentioned deeds cannot defend the country. Those who support the infidels over Muslims, and leave the blood, honour and property of their brothers to their enemy in order to remain safe, can be expected to take the same course against one another in the Gulf states.

Indeed, this principle is liable to be embraced within the state itself. And in fact the rulers have started to sell out the sons of the land by pursuing, imprisoning and killing them. This campaign has been part of a drive to carry out US orders.

Honest people concerned about this situation should meet away from the shadow of these oppressive regimes and declare a general mobilisation to prepare for repulsing the raids of the Romans, which started in Iraq and no one knows where they will end.

-- This is an edited extract of a recording believed to have been made by the al-Qaida leader, transmitted by al-Jazeera and translated by the BBC Monitoring Service

Investigators have found no support for the two main fears expressed in London and Washington before the war: that Iraq had a hidden arsenal of old weapons and built advanced programs for new ones. In public statements and unauthorized interviews, investigators said they have discovered no work on former germ-warfare agents such as anthrax bacteria, and no work on a new designer pathogen -- combining pox virus and snake venom -- that led U.S. scientists on a highly classified hunt for several months. The investigators assess that Iraq did not, as charged in London and Washington, resume production of its most lethal nerve agent, VX, or learn to make it last longer in storage. And they have found the former nuclear weapons program, described as a "grave and gathering danger" by President Bush and a "mortal threat" by Vice President Cheney, in much the same shattered state left by U.N. inspectors in the 1990s.

A review of available evidence, including some not known to coalition investigators and some they have not made public, portrays a nonconventional arms establishment that was far less capable than U.S. analysts judged before the war. Leading figures in Iraqi science and industry, supported by observations on the ground, described factories and institutes that were thoroughly beaten down by 12 years of conflict, arms embargo and strangling economic sanctions. The remnants of Iraq's biological, chemical and missile infrastructures were riven by internal strife, bled by schemes for personal gain and handicapped by deceit up and down lines of command. The broad picture emerging from the investigation to date suggests that, whatever its desire, Iraq did not possess the wherewithal to build a forbidden armory on anything like the scale it had before the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

David Kay, who directs the weapons hunt on behalf of the Bush administration, reported no discoveries last year of finished weapons, bulk agents or ready-to-start production lines. Members of his Iraq Survey Group, in unauthorized interviews, said the group holds out little prospect now of such a find. Kay and his spokesman, who report to Director of Central Intelligence George J. Tenet, declined to be interviewed. . . .

Late last month, fresh evidence emerged on a very old question about Iraq's illegal arms: Did the Baghdad government, as it said, rid itself of all the biological arms it produced before 1991? The answer matters, because the Bush administration's most concrete prewar assertions about Iraqi germ weapons referred to stocks allegedly hidden from that old arsenal.

The new evidence appears to be a contemporary record, from inside the Iraqi government, of a pivotal moment in Baghdad's long struggle to shield arms programs from outside scrutiny. The document, written just after the defection of Saddam Hussein's son-in-law on Aug. 8, 1995, anticipates the collapse of cover stories for weapons that had yet to be disclosed. Read alongside subsequent discoveries made by U.N. inspectors, the document supports Iraq's claim that it destroyed all production stocks of lethal pathogens before inspectors knew they existed.

The defection of Hussein Kamel was a turning point in the U.N.-imposed disarmament of Iraq in the 1990s. Kamel, who had married one of Saddam Hussein's daughters, Raghad, and controlled Baghdad's Military Industrial Commission, told his Western debriefers about major programs in biological and nuclear weaponry that had gone undetected or unconfirmed. Iraq was forced to acknowledge what he exposed, but neither inspectors nor U.S. officials were sure Kamel had told all there was to tell.

A handwritten Iraqi damage report, composed five days after the defection, now suggests that Kamel left little or nothing out.

WASHINGTON, Jan. 7: The Bush administration has quietly withdrawn from Iraq a 400-member military team whose job was to scour the country for military equipment, according to senior government officials.

The step was described by some military officials as a sign that the administration might have lowered its sights and no longer expected to uncover the caches of chemical and biological weapons that the White House cited as a principal reason for going to war last March.

A separate military team that specializes in disposing of chemical and biological weapons remains part of the 1,400-member Iraq Survey Group, which has been searching Iraq for more that seven months at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars. But that team is "still waiting for something to dispose of," said a survey group member.

Some of the government officials said the most important evidence from the weapons hunt might be contained in a vast collection of seized Iraqi documents being stored in a secret military warehouse in Qatar. Only a small fraction have been translated.

A report published Wednesday in The Washington Post cited a previously undisclosed document that suggested that Iraq might have destroyed its biological weapons as early as 1991. The report said investigators had otherwise found no evidence to support American beliefs that Iraq had maintained illicit weapons dating from the Persian Gulf war of 1991 or that it had advanced programs to build new ones.

The report also documented a pattern of deceit that was found in every field of special weaponry. It said that according to Iraqi designers and foreign investigators, program managers exaggerated the results they could achieve, or even promised results they knew they could not accomplish ? all in an effort to appease Saddam Hussein. In some cases, though, they simply did it to advance their careers, the report said, or preserve jobs or even conduct intrigues against their rivals.

WASHINGTON, Jan. 8 ? Secretary of State Colin L. Powell conceded Thursday that despite his assertions to the United Nations last year, he had no "smoking gun" proof of a link between the government of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and terrorists of Al Qaeda.

"I have not seen smoking-gun, concrete evidence about the connection," Mr. Powell said, in response to a question at a news conference. "But I think the possibility of such connections did exist, and it was prudent to consider them at the time that we did."

Mr. Powell's remarks on Thursday were a stark admission that there is no definitive evidence to back up administration statements and insinuations that Saddam Hussein had ties to Al Qaeda, the acknowledged authors of the Sept. 11 attacks. Although President Bush finally acknowledged in September that there was no known connection between Mr. Hussein and the attacks, the impression of a link in the public mind has become widely accepted ? and something administration officials have done little to discourage.

The huge black hole in the US budget and the country's ballooning trade deficit are threatening to push up interest rates across the globe and destabilise the international economy, one of the world's most powerful financial institutions has warned.

The budget deficit - which has swung from a healthy surplus in 2000 to a forecast blowout of more than $US400 billion ($521.2 billion) this year - was a "significant risk" for the rest of the world, the International Monetary Fund said yesterday.

"Sustained fiscal deficits lower national savings in the United States and will eventually raise real interest rates both in the United States and abroad," said Charles Collyns, deputy director of its western hemisphere department. . . .

The fund said the US would soon have a foreign debt totalling 40 per cent of its gross domestic product - an "unprecedented level debt for a large industrialised country".

This could trigger a "disorderly" plunge in the US dollar - and a corresponding jump in other currencies, including the Australian dollar - rocking the global financial system.

"The possible global risks of a disorderly exchange rate adjustment . . . cannot be ignored," the fund said.

While the fund's report said the US deficits were a medium-term problem for the world economy, this could have a more immediate impact because financial markets tend to respond quickly to future threats. . . .

The IMF said the US Government must develop a credible five- to 10-year plan to balance its budget and warned this would mean spending cuts and tax rises. While US Government spending had provided valuable support to the weak global economy in recent years, the "large US fiscal deficits also pose significant risks for the rest of the world", it said.

NEW HAVEN, Conn.--On the heels of Friday's glum Labor Department report, Americans have a right to be confused. Soaring growth, stocks and consumer confidence have heartened investors. And yet, the country remains mired in a jobless recovery. The reality is that the economy has become more uncertain and anxiety-producing for most of us ? not just over the past three years, but over the past 30. But by fixating on the day-to-day ups and downs, analysts have largely missed the more telling trend: an increasing shift of economic risk from government and corporations onto workers and their families.

Signs of this transformation are everywhere: in the laid-off programmer whose stock options are suddenly worthless, in the former welfare mom who can get a job but not health care or day care, in the family forced into bankruptcy by the sickness of a child. But these episodes, while viewed with sympathy, are usually seen in isolation, rather than as parts of a larger problem. This blinkered view stands in the way of both diagnoses of the causes of the new economic insecurity and prescriptions for its cure.

Consider the accompanying chart. The line traces the year-to-year instability of family income from 1972 to 1998, based on the University of Michigan Panel Study of Income Dynamics. It measures the extent to which a family's income from both government and the private sector fluctuates from year to year, controlling for the size of the family and the general rise of income among all Americans (so as not to confuse upward mobility with instability).

The formula captures both changes in the income of families and changes in families themselves, like divorce and separation, that alter their standard of living. What it shows is that family finances have grown much more insecure. Although insecurity dropped in the booms of the late 1980's and late 1990's, the long-term trend is sharply upward. In fact, the instability of family incomes was roughly five times greater at its peak in the 1990's than in 1972.

Kurds in Iraq have rejected a US-backed plan for very limited autonomy in the north of the country, which has enjoyed a status close to independence for more than a decade. "It gave us even less than Saddam Hussein offered us in the past," a Kurdish leader said yesterday.

The Kurds, who have fought against control by Baghdad for most of the last 80 years, restated their determination to keep substantial control of their own affairs to Iraqi Arab political leaders during two days of talks last week in the Kurdish mountain headquarters at Salahudin in northern Iraq.

The US and senior Arab members of the interim Iraqi Governing Council have been pressing the Kurds to accept integration into a post-Saddam Iraq, with only local powers for the Kurdish authorities. Massoud Barzani and Jalal Talabani, the top Kurdish leaders, told seven or eight council members, all former members of the Iraqi opposition, that this was wholly unrealistic.

The Kurds have said they are willing to turn over control of foreign policy, defence, fiscal policy and natural resources to a central government. But in practice they will retain most of the powers they won a dozen years ago when Saddam Hussein withdrew his armies from Kurdistan.

The Kurdish leaders are conscious that they are in a very strong position. They lead the third-largest Iraqi community, smaller in numbers than the Shia and the Sunni Arabs but well organised and armed. They are also the only Iraqi community which supports a long-term American occupation, and Iraqi Kurdistan is the only part of the country where US forces can move in relative safety.

GEORGE Bush's former treasury secretary Paul O?Neill has revealed that the President took office in January 2001 fully intending to invade Iraq and desperate to find an excuse for pre-emptive war against Saddam Hussein.

O'Neill's claims tally with long-running investigations by the Sunday Herald which have shown how the Bush cabinet planned a pre-meditated attack on Iraq in order to "regime change" Saddam long before the neoconservative Republicans took power.

The Sunday Herald previously uncovered how a think-tank -- run by vice-president Dick Cheney; defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld; Paul Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld's deputy; Bush's younger brother Jeb, the governor of Florida; and Lewis Libby, Cheney's deputy -- wrote a blueprint for regime change as early as September 2000.

The think-tank, the Project for the New American Century, said, in the document Rebuilding America's Defences: Strategies, Forces And Resources For A New Century, that: "The United States has for decades sought to play a more permanent role in Gulf regional security. While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein".

The document -- referred to as a blueprint for US global domination -- laid plans for a Bush government "maintaining US global pre-eminence, precluding the rise of a great-power rival, and shaping the international security order in line with American principles and interests". It also said fighting and winning multiple wars was a "core mission".

O'Neill was fired in December 2002 as a result of disagreements over tax cuts. He is the first major Bush administration insider to attack the President. He likened Bush at cabinet meetings to "a blind man in a room full of deaf people", according to excerpts from a CBS interview to be shown today.

"From the very beginning, there was a conviction that Saddam Hussein was a bad person and that he needed to go," O'Neill said. "For me, the notion of pre-emption, that the US has the unilateral right to do whatever we decide to do, is a really huge leap."

Imagine that President Bush and Secretary of State Colin Powell had made a case for the invasion of Iraq along the following lines: "Saddam Hussein is an evil dictator who has long oppressed the Iraqi people and threatened Iraq's neighbors. It is U.S. policy to seek regime change in Iraq, and we propose to do that now, by military force. Saddam does not pose a risk to the United States now, and any threat he eventually may pose is years or decades away. His programs for developing weapons of mass destruction have been dormant since the end of the Gulf War. We have no evidence of links between Saddam and the terrorists of Al-Qaida or other groups capable of attacking the United States. Any invasion of Iraq is not related to the war on terrorism.

"Nevertheless, removing Saddam and creating a free, democratic Iraq is a worthy goal, though it will not come cheap. It will cost tens upon tens of billions of dollars raised from American taxpayers. International assistance will be minimal. Hundreds of fine young Americans will be killed in the process, and thousands will suffer debilitating wounds that will alter their lives forever. We call upon the American people to willingly shoulder those costs in the name of a free Iraq."

That, of course, isn't the case Bush and Powell made. The American people would have rejected it, and properly so.

Instead, the administration's case was based on two central pillars: Saddam possessed chemical and biological weapons in large quantities and was hot in pursuit of nuclear weapons; he also is closely tied in with Al-Qaida and other terrorist groups, to which he could at any time provide weapons of mass destruction for use against the United States or its friends.

Neither of those assertions was true, and the administration had reason to know they weren't true. Indeed, according to a new book, former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill says that as early as January 2001 the Bush administration was talking about removing Saddam from power.

Saddam had no WMD, and he had no links to Al-Qaida. The invasion of Iraq was an invasion of choice, not necessity, and it diverted U.S. attention and resources away from the real war against terrorism.

Over the past few months, we have been insistent on keeping that reality in front of our readers. Frequently, that has brought accusations that we're making these points only because of "liberal" or "Democratic" bias. Despite our thick skins, these accusations are worrying, for they go to the question of our credibility with readers. The accusations also are false; consider those who share our view on the war:

The Cato Institute, a conservative Washington think tank best known for pushing the privatization of Social Security, says the war in Iraq was "the wrong war" because "the enemy at the gates was, and continues to be, Al-Qaida. Not only was Iraq not a direct military threat to the United States (even if it possessed WMD, which was a fair assumption), but there is no good evidence to support the claim that Saddam Hussein was in league with Al-Qaida and would have given the group WMD to be used against the United States."

From the U.S. Army War College comes a new study warning that the U.S. war on terrorism is unfocused and may have set the nation "on a course of open-ended and gratuitous conflict with states and non-state entities that pose no serious threat to the United States." The war in Iraq, the report says, was "an unnecessary preventative war" which "diverted attention and resources away from securing the American homeland against further assault by an undeterrable Al-Qaida."

The most detailed critique comes from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Carnegie's scholars think deeply and well about the reasonable application of power to preserve peace. The war in Iraq was not one of those reasonable applications, they conclude. Findings from the study include:

• "There was and is no solid evidence of a cooperative relationship between Saddam's government and Al-Qaida."
• "There was no evidence to support the claim that Iraq would have transferred WMD to Al-Qaida and much evidence to counter it."
• In 2002, a dramatic shift occurred in U.S. intelligence estimates of Iraq's WMD capabilities, suggesting "that the intelligence community began to be unduly influenced by policymakers' views sometime in 2002."
• "Administration officials systematically misrepresented the threat from Iraq's WMD and ballistic missile programs . . . ."
• "Considering all the costs and benefits, there were at least two options clearly preferable to a war undertaken without international support: allowing the [U.N.] inspections to continue until obstructed or completed, or imposing a tougher program of 'coercive inspections' backed by a specially designed international force."

SUMMARY OF KEY FINDINGS

Iraq WMD Was Not An Immediate Threat

• Iraq's nuclear program had been suspended for many years; Iraq focused on preserving a latent, dual-use chemical and probably biological weapons capability, not weapons production.
• Iraqi nerve agents had lost most of their lethality as early as 1991.
• Operations Desert Storm and Desert Fox, and UN inspections and sanctions effectively destroyed Iraq's large-scale chemical weapon production capabilities.

Inspections Were Working

• Post-war searches suggest the UN inspections were on track to find what was there.
• International constraints, sanctions, procurement, investigations, and the export/import control mechanism appear to have been considerably more effective than was thought.

Intelligence Failed and Was Misrepresented

• Intelligence community overestimated the chemical and biological weapons in Iraq.
• Intelligence community appears to have been unduly influenced by policymakers' views.
• Officials misrepresented threat from Iraq's WMD and ballistic missiles programs over and above intelligence findings.

Terrorist Connection Missing

• No solid evidence of cooperative relationship between Saddam's government and Al Qaeda.
• No evidence that Iraq would have transferred WMD to terrorists-and much evidence to counter it.
• No evidence to suggest that deterrence was no longer operable.

Post-War WMD Search Ignored Key Resources

• Past relationships with Iraqi scientists and officials, and credibility of UNMOVIC experts represent a vital resource that has been ignored when it should be being fully exploited.
• Data from the seven years of UNSCOM/IAEA inspections are absolutely essential. Direct involvement of those who compiled the more-than-30-million- page record is needed.

War Was Not the Best -- Or Only -- Option

• There were at least two options preferable to a war undertaken without international support: allowing the UNMOVIC/IAEA inspections to continue until obstructed or completed, or imposing a tougher program of "coercive inspections."

After [Ken] Auletta observed an Oval Office interview Bush gave to a British tabloid, he spoke with the President about a mutual friend, Tom Bernstein, a former co-owner, with Bush, of the Texas Rangers. Bernstein, a proponent of human rights, has often been criticized by liberal friends, for supporting the President. "Bernie is great," Bush said, and then added, "No President has ever done more for human rights than I have."

In retrospect, the unceremonious firing of Paul O'Neill in December 2002 made perfect sense. It is rather his hiring two years earlier that remains one of the great mysteries of the Bush administration.

No one, least of all Mr O'Neill himself, seems to understand why an old-fashioned moderate Republican pragmatist with a reputation for disarming bluntness and unpredictable views was given one of the top jobs in a ideological and radical cabinet obsessed with secrecy, discipline and loyalty.

It is clear now that the president's recruiting of the elderly businessman is going to damage Mr Bush's image. A new book, The Price of Loyalty, is based on Mr O'Neill's recollections of the Bush cabinet - along with 19,000 pages of documents he took with him when he was sacked.

The book was written by a Pulitzer prize-winning journalist, Ron Suskind. Mr O'Neill's version of events, particularly his assertion that the administration was determined to invade Iraq from its first day in office, is now being hotly challenged by others in the administration. . . .

The public will be in a better position to judge for itself over the next two weeks, when many of Mr O'Neill's documents are due to be made public on the internet. The archive promises to provide one of the most devastating insiders' accounts of US governmental dysfunction since the Nixon administration (in which Mr O'Neill also served, and which emerges from the book as a paragon of level-headedness compared to the current White House). . . .

In the alarming portrait Mr O'Neill paints, the new president is petulant and detached because he is out of his depth. In their discussions about the economy in the two years that followed, the president listens in blank silence to his treasury secretary's concerns and recommendations.

Earlier this week, Wesley Clark had some strong words about the state of the nation. "I think we're at risk with our democracy," he said. "I think we're dealing with the most closed, imperialistic, nastiest administration in living memory. They even put Richard Nixon to shame."

In other words, the general gets it: he understands that America is facing what Kevin Phillips, in his remarkable new book, "American Dynasty," calls a "Machiavellian moment." Among other things, this tells us that General Clark and Howard Dean, whatever they may say in the heat of the nomination fight, are on the same side of the great Democratic divide. . . .

The real division in the race for the Democratic nomination is between those who are willing to question not just the policies but also the honesty and the motives of the people running our country, and those who aren't.

What makes Mr. Dean seem radical aren't his policy positions but his willingness ? shared, we now know, by General Clark ? to take a hard line against the Bush administration. This horrifies some veterans of the Clinton years, who have nostalgic memories of elections that were won by emphasizing the positive. Indeed, George Bush's handlers have already made it clear that they intend to make his "optimism" ? as opposed to the negativism of his angry opponents ? a campaign theme. . . .

But even Bill Clinton couldn't run a successful Clinton-style campaign this year, for several reasons.

One is that the Democratic candidate, no matter how business-friendly, will not be able to get lots of corporate contributions, as Clinton did. In the Clinton era, a Democrat could still raise a lot of money from business, partly because there really are liberal businessmen, partly because donors wanted to hedge their bets. But these days the Republicans control all three branches of government and exercise that control ruthlessly. Even corporate types who have grave misgivings about the Bush administration ? a much larger group than you might think ? are afraid to give money to Democrats.

Another is that the Bush people really are Nixonian. The bogus security investigation over Ron Suskind's "The Price of Loyalty," like the outing of Valerie Plame, shows the lengths they're willing to go to in intimidating their critics. (In the case of Paul O'Neill, alas, the intimidation seems to be working.) A mild-mannered, upbeat candidate would get eaten alive.

Finally, any Democrat has to expect not just severely slanted coverage from the fair and balanced Republican media, but asymmetric treatment even from the mainstream media. For example, some have said that the intense scrutiny of Mr. Dean's Vermont record is what every governor who runs for president faces. No, it isn't. I've looked at press coverage of questions surrounding Mr. Bush's tenure in Austin, like the investment of state university funds with Republican donors; he got a free pass during the 2000 campaign. . . .

[W]hat the party needs is a candidate who inspires the base enough to get out the message that he isn't a radical ? and that Mr. Bush is.

Former Vice President Al Gore said yesterday that the Bush administration was "wholly owned by the coal, oil, utility and mining industries" and that President Bush was a "moral coward" for not standing up to his campaign contributors when their interests conflicted with those of the public.

Mr. Gore's speech in New York, billed as an attack on Mr. Bush's environmental record, proved to be a far broader critique.

The former vice president used environmental issues to highlight what he called moral failures and deceptions by the Bush administration.

"While President Bush likes to project an image of strength and courage, the real truth is that in the presence of his large financial contributors he is a moral coward, so weak that he seldom if ever says `no' to anything, no matter what the public interest might mandate," Mr. Gore said to a standing ovation.

The speech, co-sponsored by the group MoveOn.org, was his fourth in a series that takes the administration to task while helping keep Mr. Gore in the nation's political dialogue. He is not a candidate for office, but he looked and sounded like one with a speech that blended humor with outrage.

The chairman of the Republican National Committee, Ed Gillespie, called Mr. Gore's remarks "political hate speech" and said in a statement: "Instead of repudiating these tactics, Al Gore chose to embrace the vile tactics that are becoming the hallmark of the Democrat Party at its highest levels.

"Like the Democrat presidential candidates, Al Gore has once again chosen to use his time at the podium to attack the president rather than put forward a positive agenda of his own."

Tens of thousands of protesters marched through Basra yesterday to demand a general election, as an aide to Iraq's most senior Shia cleric warned that he may issue a fatwa against the proposed new government.

The demonstration in the southern Iraqi city was a rare show of strength in support of Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani's call for direct elections to choose a new government, and comes as a blow to Washington's plans for a smooth handover of power.

Last night one of the cleric's aides warned that if the US administrator in Baghdad, Paul Bremer, does not accept his demand, Ayatollah Sistani may issue a ruling telling Iraq's Shia majority not to accept the new government, which is due to take power by July.

"If Bremer rejects Ayatollah Sistani's opinion, he would issue a fatwa depriving the US-appointed council of its legitimacy," Ayatollah Mohammed Baqer al-Mohri told Abu Dhabi television. "After this, the Iraqi people will not obey this council. This US plan is not in line with Sistani's views." . . .

Ayatollah Sistani, a moderate and usually apolitical cleric, has issued a series of statements in the past week criticising an American plan, agreed last November by the Iraqi governing council, to hold indirect elections to select a new government by July. US officials say that since security is still a problem in many areas, and there is no accurate electoral roll, organising a general election is too difficult at this stage.

Last June he criticised an earlier American political programme as "fundamentally unacceptable", and the administration in Baghdad was forced to rethink its approach. Mr Bremer flew to Washington yesterday for further talks with the Bush administration.

Last November's agreement envisages a complex system of provisional caucuses. A committee of 15 Iraqis appointed in each province will select a local caucus which will in turn elect representatives to a new parliament by May. A nationwide general election will not be held until the end of 2005.

[The Bush administration] focused on Saddam Hussein, while it should have been working to destroy Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaida. This was not, as administration officials now claim, a continuation of President Bill Clinton's approach; it was a sudden, radical change.

The Bush administration was only a week old, [Paul] O'Neill says, and already Iraq and Saddam had become a focus. After one meeting, [Ron] Suskind writes, O'Neill wondered what was going on: "Was a multipronged assault on Saddam Hussein really a priority in early 2001? The dialogue today had been mostly about hows -- how to weaken or end Saddam's regime. With the administration at the start of its second week, O'Neill wondered, when, exactly, the whys -- why Saddam, why now, and why this was central to U.S. interests -- were to be discussed." Osama bin Laden wasn't even on the agenda.

He should have been. When Bush took office, the White House was told that a Predator drone had spotted Bin Laden several times recently in Afghanistan, and Richard Clarke wanted the suspended drone flights resumed to track the terrorist down and kill him.

Clarke was a holdover from the Clinton administration, chief of the Counter-Terrorism Security Group. He had special concerns about Bin Laden; after the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole in October 2000, Clarke had put together a comprehensive plan for attacking Al-Qaida with military force, with efforts to stop its international financing network, with police attacks on known cells in foreign countries and with counterterrorism aid to countries like the Philippines and Uzbekistan.

Clarke wanted to take the fight aggressively to Al-Qaida, but his plan was completed only in December 2000, as Clinton was leaving office, so Clarke and his plan were forwarded for consideration by the new Bush team.

Consideration was not forthcoming; the Predators weren't put back in the air, and the administration sat on Clarke's attack plan. Meanwhile, Bush was contemplating his "multipronged assault on Saddam Hussein."

It gets worse: In the summer of 2001, officials in Washington were frantic; Time magazine reported that, "Intelligence services were picking up enough chatter about a terrorist attack to scare the pants off top officials." Al-Qaida was planning "something spectacular" and soon, they knew. But they didn't know where or when.

Incredibly, Clarke still couldn't work his way onto the agenda, even though he had in hand a completed plan for moving offensively against Al-Qaida. Despite all the worry about what Bin Laden was up to, Clarke's approach wasn't even cleared for forwarding to Bush until Sept. 4, a week before the attack.

Why was that, and what role did Bush's preoccupation with Saddam play? For those answers, Americans must await the report of the independent commission investigating the attack. The head of the commission, former New Jersey Gov. Tom Kean, has said the attack could have been prevented. O'Neill may have put his finger on one reason why it wasn't.

America has had periods of single-party dominance before. It happened under FDR's New Deal, in the Republican 1920s and in the early 19th-century "Era of Good Feeling." But if President Bush is re-elected, we will be close to a tipping point of fundamental change in the political system itself. The United States could become a nation in which the dominant party rules for a prolonged period, marginalizes a token opposition and is extremely difficult to dislodge because democracy itself is rigged. This would be unprecedented in U.S. history.

In past single-party eras, the majority party earned its preeminence with broad popular support. Today the electorate remains closely divided, and actually prefers more Democratic policy positions than Republican ones. Yet the drift toward an engineered one-party Republican state has aroused little press scrutiny or widespread popular protest.

We are at risk of becoming an autocracy in three key respects. First, Republican parliamentary gimmickry has emasculated legislative opposition in the House of Representatives (the Senate has other problems). House Majority Leader Tom DeLay of Texas has both intimidated moderate Republicans and reduced the minority party to window dressing, rather like the token opposition parties in Mexico during the six-decade dominance of the PRI.

Second, electoral rules have been rigged to make it increasingly difficult for the incumbent party to be ejected by the voters, absent a Depression-scale disaster, Watergate-class scandal or Teddy Roosevelt-style ruling party split. After two decades of bipartisan collusion in the creation of safe House seats, there are now perhaps just 25 truly contestable House seats in any given election year (and that's before the recent Republican super gerrymandering). What once was a slender and precarious majority -- 229 Republicans to 205 Democrats (including Bernie Sanders of Vermont, an independent who votes with Democrats) -- now looks like a Republican lock. In the Senate, the dynamics are different but equally daunting for Democrats. As the Florida debacle of 2000 showed, the Republicans are also able to hold down the number of opposition votes, with complicity from Republican courts. Reform legislation, the 2002 Help America Vote Act (HAVA), may actually facilitate Republican intimidation of minority voters and reduce Democratic turnout. And the latest money-and-politics regime, nominally a reform, may give the right more of a financial advantage than ever.

Third, the federal courts, which have slowed some executive-branch efforts to destroy liberties, will be a complete rubber stamp if the right wins one more presidential election. . . .

Is this one-party scenario inevitable? For a variety of structural reasons noted above, Democrats are unlikely to take back Congress this decade, absent a national crisis or massive scandal that overwhelms the governing party. But, contrary to the views of some of my colleagues, I think a Democrat could well win the White House in 2004. The Democratic base is aroused in a fashion that it has not been in decades, and swing voters may yet have second thoughts about George W. Bush. It's not at all clear what the economy and the foreign-policy scene will look like next fall, or what scandals will ripen.

Democrats have also begun fighting back against legislative dictatorship, and this may yet become a public issue. When the Republican Senate leadership unveiled rules changes to make it effectively impossible for Democrats to block extremist judicial nominees with a filibuster, the Democratic leadership threatened to use parliamentary tactics to shut the place down. House Democrats are now almost as unified as their Republican counterparts, and, if anything, even angrier. Tom DeLay may be sowing a whirlwind. And if a variation of the 2000 Florida theft is attempted in 2004, it is inconceivable that Democratic leaders and activists would show the same docility that Al Gore displayed.

We've seen divided government before, with a Democratic president and a fiercely partisan Republican Congress. It is not pretty. But it is much more attractive than a one-party state.

The Bush administration's inability to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq -- after public statements declaring an imminent threat posed by Iraqi President Saddam Hussein -- has begun to harm the credibility abroad of the United States and of American intelligence, according to foreign policy experts in both parties. . . .

"The foreign policy blow-back is pretty serious," said Kenneth Adelman, a member of the Pentagon's Defense Advisory Board and a supporter of the war. He said the gaps between the administration's rhetoric and the postwar findings threaten Bush's doctrine of "preemption," which envisions attacking a nation because it is an imminent threat.

The doctrine "rests not just on solid intelligence," Adelman said, but "also on the credibility that the intelligence is solid."

Already, in the crisis over North Korea's nuclear ambitions, China has rejected U.S. intelligence that North Korea has a secret program to enrich uranium for use in weapons. China is a key player in resolving the North Korean standoff, but its refusal to embrace the U.S. intelligence has disappointed U.S. officials and could complicate negotiations to eliminate North Korea's weapons programs.

Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, said the same problem could occur if the United States presses for action against alleged weapons programs in Iran and Syria. The solution, he said, is to let international organizations such as the International Atomic Energy Agency take the lead in making the case, as has happened thus far in Iran, and also to be willing to share more of the intelligence with other countries.

The inability to find suspected weapons "has to make it more difficult on some future occasion if the United States argues the intelligence warrants something controversial, like a preventive attack," said Haass, a Republican who was head of policy planning for Secretary of State Colin L. Powell when the war started. "The result is we've made the bar higher for ourselves and we have to expect greater skepticism in the future."

James Steinberg, a deputy national security adviser in the Clinton administration who believed there were legitimate concerns about Iraq's weapons programs, said the failure of the prewar claims to match the postwar reality "add to the general sense of criticism about the U.S., that we will do anything, say anything" to prevail.

There really should be no contest.

On one side is history's most awesome superpower, victorious in war, ruling Iraq with nearly 150,000 troops and funding its reconstruction to the tune of $20 billion this year. On the other side is an aging cleric with no formal authority, no troops and little money, who is unwilling to even speak in public. Yet last June, when Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani made it known that he didn't like the U.S. proposal to transfer power to Iraqis, the plan collapsed. And last week, when Sistani announced that he is still unhappy with the new U.S. proposal, L. Paul Bremer rushed to Washington for consultations. What does this man have that the United States doesn't?

Legitimacy. Sistani is regarded by Iraqi Shiites as the most learned cleric in the country. He is also seen as having been uncorrupted by Saddam Hussein's reign. "During the Iran-Iraq war, Sistani managed to demonstrate that he could be controlled neither by Saddam nor by his fellow ayatollahs in Iran, which has given him enormous credibility," says Yitzhak Nakash, the leading authority on Iraqi Shiites. . . .

A power struggle has begun in Iraq, as could have been predicted -- and indeed was predicted. Sistani is becoming more vocal and political because he faces a challenge to his leadership from the more activist cleric Moqtada Sadr. "Al-Sadr does not have Sistani's reputation or training as a scholar and thus presents himself as a populist leader who will look after Shia political interests," Nakash says. It's turning into a contest to see who can stand up to the Americans more vociferously and appeal to Shiite fears. The Iraqi Shiites are deeply suspicious that the United States will betray them, as it did in 1992 after the Persian Gulf War, or that it will foist favored exiles such as Ahmad Chalabi upon them. Sistani recently told Iraq's tribal leaders that they should take power, not "those who came from abroad."

The tragedy is that while Sistani's fears are understandable, Washington's phased transition makes great sense. It allows for time to build institutions, form political parties and reform the agencies of government. An immediate transfer would ensure that the political contest will overwhelm all this institutional reform. But Washington lacks the basic tool it needs to negotiate with the locals: legitimacy. (This is something well understood by anyone who has studied the lessons of Bosnia, Kosovo and East Timor.) Belatedly it recognizes that the United Nations can arbitrate political problems without being accused of being a colonizer.

U.S. policymakers made two grave mistakes after the war. The first was to occupy the country with too few troops, creating a security vacuum. This image of weakness was reinforced when Washington caved to Sistani's objections last June, junked its original transition plan and sped things up to coincide with the U.S. elections. The second mistake was to dismiss from the start the need for allies and international institutions. As it turns out, Washington now has the worst of both worlds. It has neither enough power nor enough legitimacy.

According to advance reports, George Bush will use tonight's State of the Union speech to portray himself as a visionary leader who stands above the political fray. But that act is losing its effectiveness. Mr. Bush's relentless partisanship has depleted much of the immense good will he enjoyed after 9/11. He is still adored by his base, but he is deeply distrusted by much of the nation.

Mr. Bush may not understand this; indeed, he still seems to think that he's another Lincoln or F.D.R. "No president has done more for human rights than I have," he told Ken Auletta.

But his political handlers seem to have decided on a go-for-broke strategy: confuse the middle one last time, energize the base and grab enough power that the consequences don't matter.

What do I mean by confusing the middle? The striking thing about the "visionary" proposals floated in advance of the State of the Union is their transparent cynicism and lack of realism. Mr. Bush has, of course, literally promised us the Moon — and Mars, too. And the ever-deferential media have managed to keep a straight face.

But that's just the most dramatic example of an array of policy proposals that don't withstand even minimal scrutiny. Mr. Bush has already pushed through an expensive new Medicare benefit — without any visible source of financing. Reports say that tonight he'll propose additional, and even more expensive, new initiatives, like partial Social Security privatization — which all by itself would require at least $1 trillion in extra funds over the next decade. Where is all this money going to come from?

Judging from the latest CBS/New York Times Poll, these promises of something for nothing aren't likely to convince many people. It's not just that the bounce from Saddam's capture has already gone away. Unfavorable views of Mr. Bush as a person have reached record levels for his presidency. It seems fair to say that many Americans, like most of the rest of the world, simply don't trust him anymore.

But some Americans will respond to upbeat messages, no matter how unrealistic. And that may be enough for Mr. Bush, because while he poses as someone above the fray, he is continuing to solidify his base.

The most sinister example was the recess appointment of Charles Pickering Sr., with his segregationist past and questionable record on voting rights, to the federal appeals court — the day after Martin Luther King's actual birthday. Was this careless timing? Don't be silly: it was a deliberate, if subtle, gesture of sympathy with a part of the Republican coalition that never gets mentioned in public. . . .

The question we should ask is, Where is all this leading?

Some cynical pundits think that Mr. Bush's advisers plan to leave the hard work of dealing with the mess he's made to future presidents. But I don't think that's right. I can't see how the budget can continue along its current path through a second Bush term — financial markets won't stand for it.

And what about the growing military crisis? The mess in Iraq has placed our volunteer military, a magnificent but fragile institution, under immense strain. National Guard and Reserve members find themselves effectively drafted as full-time soldiers. More than 40,000 soldiers whose enlistment terms have expired have been kept from leaving under "stop loss" orders. This can't go on for four more years.

Karl Rove and other insiders must know all this. So they must figure that once they have won the election, they will have such a complete lock on power that they can break many of their promises with impunity.

What will they do with that lock on power? Their election strategy — confuse the middle, but feed the base — suggests the answer.

British officials in Basra no longer oppose early elections in Iraq, saying security and procedural obstacles to polls could be surmounted before the transfer to civilian control on June 30.

"We have a working hypothesis that you could manage an electoral process within the timeframe and the security available," said Dominic D'Angelo, British spokesman for the UK-led southern zone of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Basra.

The volte face comes after demonstrators packed Basra's streets on Thursday in response to a call from Ayatollah Ali Sistani, Iraq's senior Shia cleric, to back his demand for an elected assembly. British officials estimated there were between 100,000 and 300,000 protestors.

Coalition officials fear Ayatollah Sistani could issue a fatwa, or religious edict, to his followers to suspend co-operation with the coalition authorities if polls do not go ahead. . . .

The Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad has had an unofficial policy banning even local elections since the end of the war, according to US military officials interviewed at locations throughout Iraq. This is despite the assessment of the military that elections are feasible within very short periods of time.

At the end of May, for example, a US Marine unit in the city of Najaf had prepared to hold an election for a local assembly, which was cancelled by Mr Bremer days before it was to take place.

In a matter of a few weeks, US marines in Najaf had built ballot boxes, a US army civil affairs unit had arranged for voter registration and polling stations throughout the city, and candidates had campaigned.

A US army civil affairs officer interviewed at the time clearly felt that the election was feasible, but declined to comment on the CPA's decision.

In their greatest show of political strength since the war tens of thousands of Iraqi Shia Muslims marched through Baghdad yesterday chanting slogans in favour of free elections for a new government.

About 100,000 protesters marched through Baghdad to al-Mustansiriyah University shouting "Yes to elections" and "No to occupation".

The Shia, believed to number some 15 to 16 million out of a total Iraqi population of 25 million, fear the US and its local allies will seek to rob them of power by appointing members of a new assembly and government to which the US has pledged to hand over power on 1 July.

The demonstration was clearly aimed at Kofi Annan, the secretary general of the UN, seeking to persuade him not to endorse US plans for indirect elections. Mr Annan met Paul Bremer, the chief US official in Iraq, and a delegation from the US-selected Iraq Governing Council in New York yesterday.

The UN is likely to be very wary of returning to Iraq after a suicide bomber killed 31 people and injured 120 - mostly Iraqi labourers - at the entrance to the US headquarters in Baghdad on Sunday.

Many of the demonstrators carried pictures of Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the most influential Shia cleric, who has resolutely rejected the US plan for provincial caucuses to choose an assembly under an agreement signed on 15 November. It was he who called for the demonstration. . . .

The demonstration marks another stage in the elevation of Ayatollah Sistani, the 73-year-old leader of the Hawza, or network of religious schools in Najaf, as perhaps the most important Iraqi leader. If he issues a fatwa denouncing the political process organised by the US and the Governing Council then it will have little legitimacy in the eyes of Iraqis.

Key provisions of the Patriot Act are set to expire next year. (Applause.) The terrorist threat will not expire on that schedule. (Applause.) Our law enforcement needs this vital legislation to protect our citizens. You need to renew the Patriot Act. (Applause.) . . .

Some in this chamber, and in our country, did not support the liberation of Iraq. Objections to war often come from principled motives. But let us be candid about the consequences of leaving Saddam Hussein in power. We're seeking all the facts. Already, the Kay Report identified dozens of weapons of mass destruction-related program activities and significant amounts of equipment that Iraq concealed from the United Nations. Had we failed to act, the dictatator's weapons of mass destruction programs would continue to this day. Had we failed to act, Security Council resolutions on Iraq would have been revealed as empty threats, weakening the United Nations and encouraging defiance by dictators around the world. Iraq's torture chambers would still be filled with victims, terrified and innocent. The killing fields of Iraq -- where hundreds of thousands of men and women and children vanished into the sands -- would still be known only to the killers. For all who love freedom and peace, the world without Saddam Hussein's regime is a better and safer place. (Applause.)

Among Iowa's several voter messages, the most important was pragmatic. Democrats desire, above all, a winner. Given the utter awfulness of Mr Bush, as they see it, this is not a time for gallant losers or the ideologically pure in heart. They want a man (since a woman is not currently available) who has the credibility, character, experience and resourcefulness to stay the national course. That may be the main explanation for John Kerry's run from behind; and why Wesley Clark, who kept his powder dry for New Hampshire next week, may be the one who trips him up. . . .

The high levels of public engagement and the possibly record-breaking turnout in Iowa showed how important this election really is. The Kerry upset showed, encouragingly, how wrong the know-all media pundits (but not the last-minute polls) can get it. Yet Iowa also showed how very rocky the road ahead will be. This race is still wide open. There is no clear favourite now. Iowa, notoriously, is no safe predictor; in New Hampshire, on past form, the yellow jersey will change hands again. This race may recycle all the way to the "Super Tuesday" primaries on March 2 and beyond.

And all the time Mr Bush, who hits the trail today fresh from his State of the Union address, will be strutting his presidential, war-leading stuff while adding more millions to his war chest. He is not leaving anything to chance. In recent days, Mr Bush (or his administration) has bought $50m worth of surplus orange juice in Florida (as in 2000, a key swing state), promised yet more tax cuts, torn up immigration policy to win Latino votes and shamelessly milked the memory of Martin Luther King. There is probably very little Mr Bush would not do to get re-elected, including going to Mars. The Democrats need a Democrat with the same hunger. They are still looking.

When the president delivers his State of the Union address, we like to listen respectfully and respond politely. It is always easy to find things worth applauding. Last night, for instance, President Bush mentioned job retraining, immigration law reform and programs to help newly released prisoners re-enter society. The impulse is always to split the difference — to decry the ideas we disagree with and then note the ones we like. This time, such evenhandedness seems impossible. The president's domestic policy comes down to one disastrous fact: his insistence on huge tax cuts for the wealthy has robbed the country of the money it needs to address its problems and has threatened its long-term economic security. Everything else is beside the point.

Mindful that American voters seem more concerned about their personal fortunes than Iraq's, Mr. Bush highlighted the domestic side of his agenda. His only look backward at the fiscal mess he created was to call on Congress to make his $1.7 trillion in tax cuts permanent. The cuts have been wedged into the budget temporarily to give the illusion that the books will come somewhere near balance over the long run. Chiseling them into stone will do nothing to spark the current economy, and if some future president feels the need to stimulate business, he or she will find precious few ways left to do it.

The idea that the cuts are a rough tool to shrink the federal government seems increasingly ludicrous, given the Republican Congress's determination to pork up every bill with new spending plans. There are only two reasons why Mr. Bush could be so determined to do the wrong thing: because his Congressional majorities mean that he probably can, and because the wealthy donors helping to underwrite his campaign expect that he will. . . .

It is actually a cruel hoax to pretend that Washington can afford to do anything new, even with the modest grab bag of small new initiatives and familiar retreads suggested by the president. In that context, his decision last night to re-endorse the Social Security overhaul plan from his last campaign was terrifying.

Mr. Bush has long advocated that younger workers be allowed to set aside part of their Social Security tax payments for private investments in stocks or bonds. He has never explained how he would pay for such a plan. The Social Security taxes that come in are used to pay for the benefits of those already retired. If part of the current workers' money is redirected without corresponding tax increases, the difference would have to be made up through budget cuts or — far more likely — a disastrous addition to the amount of debt the government continues to roll up every day.

In the face of record deficits, a costly new prescription drug program, and mounting costs in Iraq and Afghanistan, it was as breathtaking as it was unsurprising that Mr. Bush repeated his call to make the tax cuts permanent. We would welcome a responsible national debate about putting Social Security on a sustainable financial path, but Mr. Bush's breezy revival of his 2000 campaign push for private accounts failed to confront the complexities and costs of such a change. He devoted twice as much time to rallying professional athletes to "get rid of steroids now" as he did to Social Security reform.

To his supporters, Mr. Bush proffered political bouquets -- doubled funding for teenage abstinence programs, a nod to the possible need for a constitutional amendment to prohibit gay marriage. To his opponents, Mr. Bush signaled that he is not about to cede any campaign ground. Whatever the Democratic candidates for president have seen as potential fodder -- the anti-terrorism Patriot Act, the No Child Left Behind legislation, even his controversial visit to an aircraft carrier -- Mr. Bush defended and embraced. Making the rounds of fundraisers in recent months, Mr. Bush has been fond of saying that the "political season is going to come in its own time." That time, it would seem, arrived last night.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics measures employment in two ways. In the Establishment Survey, it gathers payroll data from 400,000 companies and then estimates how many Americans have jobs at companies. The payroll figures are derived from these numbers. The Household Survey is based on surveys of individuals in 60,000 households, and it produces the unemployment rate. Occasionally, the two surveys show divergent trends in job growth, and the payroll survey has been known to undercount jobs when an economy is coming out of recession. Last October, I dubbed the debate over the two surveys "antidisestablishmentarianism."

In the past two weeks, antidisestablishmentarianism has become the creed the White House and its sympathizers are busy broadcasting. After the December employment was released on Jan. 9, Brian Wesbury, chief economist at Griffin, Kubik, Stephens & Thomson, Inc. and a noted antidisestablishmentarian wrote in this report: "there is something terribly wrong with the non-farm payroll statistics and the Establishment survey that produces them. We find it very hard to believe that the December increase of just 1,000 jobs was anywhere near accurate."

In his brief reaction, Treasury Secretary John Snow engaged in another favorite antidisestablishmentarian tactic. He changed the subject from unfavorable payrolls to the more favorable unemployment rate. "Following five months of job growth, the unemployment rate fell in December to a 14-month low." . . .

The comparatively strong Household Survey figures were also one of the reasons cited by Republicans in Congress when they decided not to extend unemployment benefits last month.

Last night, Bush didn't mention many specifics about jobs figures other than to note that "Productivity is high, and jobs are on the rise." (Of course, high productivity is one reason that jobs may not be on the rise.) His grab bag of proposals called "Jobs for the 21st Century" -- more emphasis on reading and math in schools, encouraging science professionals to teach in high schools, more Pell Grants, and more cash for community colleges -- dodged the question of employment doldrums.

At this late date, changing the subject and casting doubt on the validity of payroll numbers seems like the best strategy for Bush appointees and supporters. It's looking ever more likely that Bush will indeed be the first president since Herbert Hoover to preside over a four-year term in which payroll jobs fell. Does that sound a wee bit demagogic? Absolutely. Under Hoover, the nation lost 24 percent of its payroll jobs. Under Bush, the United States has lost fewer than 2 percent. But it's effective rhetoric.

The divergence between the payroll and household figures does raise some interesting questions over which economists will surely puzzle. Has the slack corporate job market turned millions of Americans into self-employed entrepreneurs who don't get counted in the payroll survey? Have American companies simply become so ingenious at wringing productivity out of existing workers and technology that they don't need to hire? It's a debate that won't be settled for at least a year, when this year's figures get revised. It's possible the antidisestablishmentarians may indeed be right. But at this point, the official disdain for the payroll survey and the embrace of the Household Survey is more about belief than data.

Suddenly sensitive to the fact that 44 million Americans have no health insurance while millions more fear losing it because of skyrocketing premiums, the White House has spent the last few days promising that this year's State of the Union address would include a new plan to make health insurance more affordable.

But there was nothing "new" about the "plan" President Bush unveiled last night. It was a hodgepodge of ideas he first touted as a presidential candidate in April 2000, and that he has deployed strategically whenever the polls show health insurance affordability is an issue. More important, it's unlikely these ideas will make health insurance "more affordable" — at least, not for the people who most need the help.

The ideas are so unserious they're barely worth considering, except insofar as they demonstrate just how far out of touch this White House really is.

Malpractice reform: Almost every serious study looking at the relationship between malpractice lawsuits and rising health care costs has shown the relationship to be essentially nonexistent. There's probably a case for reforming the system on other policy grounds: the court system is a lousy mechanism for regulating safety. But it's got almost nothing to do with the cost or availability of health insurance.

Tax credits: This is the most reasonable idea Bush is offering, since it's not hard to imagine how well-crafted tax credits could help a few million people struggling to afford health insurance. But the big problem for the uninsured isn't that they don't have the money to buy a reasonably priced insurance policy; it's that reasonably priced insurance policies aren't available to individual purchasers. Insurance only becomes affordable when you buy it as part of a group (which is why it helps to work for a big company that provides benefits). Without some kind of program to make good group health insurance available to individuals, tax credits would make only a modest dent in the number of uninsured Americans — lowering that number by a few million at best. Meanwhile, tax credits might encourage more employers to stop offering coverage altogether, enough so that at least some studies suggest the overall impact would be negligible.

Association Health Plans (AHPs): These sound like a great idea. Since, as I just explained, it's hard for small groups to buy health insurance, why not let small businesses band together to buy insurance together? Well, no reason at all. But small businesses can already do that in most states. The reason more don't exercise that option is that states regulate insurance pretty tightly — to make sure the benefits are decent, that there's no discrimination against the infirmed, and that the providers of insurance are solvent and legitimate businesses. What Bush and the conservatives aren't saying about their plan is that it would get rid of these regulations. No doubt, rates would get cheaper for many businesses as insurers started offering stripped-down plans perfectly adequate for healthy people — and altogether lousy for the sick. That's one reason that, a few years ago, the Congressional Budget Office looked at AHPs and decided that they, too, would not significantly increase the number of people with health insurance.

If you're a real wonk, you can read more about these policies. But the more important lesson to draw from Bush's speech is what it says about his overall priorities: Even if you accept the most optimistic — and, frankly, wildly unrealistic — estimates of what these proposals would do, they'd reduce the number of uninsured by less than ten million. Compare this to what the Democratic presidential candidates are proposing. The least generous plan out there right now is John Edwards's, which would reduce the number of uninsured by some 21 million — i.e., more than twice as much. The most ambitious plan, by Howard Dean, would reduce the number of uninsured by more than 30 million. John Kerry's would nearly match that, while simultaneously reducing the cost of insurance for those who already have it.

All of these things cost money, naturally — between $50 and $90 billion a year — which is why all of the Democratic candidates are proposing to repeal some or all of the Bush tax cuts to pay for them. But this deal is a no-brainer. Because health insurance is so prohibitively expensive when individuals buy it on their own, the extra cash they'd get from tax cuts isn't nearly as valuable as access to government-provided group coverage, which is essentially what the Democratic plans would provide. It's clear Bush sees the trade-off differently: He'd rather give the money away as tax cuts — most of them for the wealthy — than help people get insurance. What remains to be seen is whether the millions of voters who say health care is a top election concern will grasp this before November.

The US-led coalition in Iraq is on the verge of bowing to Shia Muslim pressure for direct elections before the handover of power on June 30, the Guardian has learned.

According to British officials, the Blair government has been swayed by Shia arguments and the US is also shifting ground.

They believe that Paul Bremer, the US head of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) running Iraq, has been persuaded of the need for direct elections, provided it can be shown that they are practicable.

"Iraq could become a reasonably functioning democracy, or else it will eventually fall apart," said one senior British official. "Democracy loosens things up."

The official added: "Jack [Straw, the foreign secretary] has been telling Colin Powell [the US Secretary of State] that the process is a bit like riding a bike. You've got to keep it moving, even if it wobbles all over the place."

A shift in plans for elections follows a series of abrupt policy changes made by the coalition over the last few months, mainly forced by events on the ground, and will add to the sense of disarray in the CPA.

The CPA has come under sustained pressure in recent days from Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the most senior Shia cleric in Iraq. Tens of thousands of his supporters staged protests in Baghdad and across Iraq yesterday and on Monday demanding direct elections this summer.

Until now, the US has said there is insufficient time to organise such elections and they should be delayed until next year. But Mr Straw has been arguing that, though the arguments are finely balanced, the security situation would be significantly better if full elections could be staged, even if there is no formal electoral roll.

British officials insist that the argument has been accepted by Mr Bremer and the state department but they are less certain that the whole Republican administration has accepted the position.

The Foreign Office has been examining options for holding direct elections, such as using ration cards as means of identification - a hangover from Saddam Hussein's regime - or using dyes to stamp voters' hands.

A key factor in the timing of elections in Iraq has been George Bush's determination to have power transferred to Iraqis before the US presidential election in November.

WASHINGTON -- Republican staff members of the US Senate Judiciary Commitee infiltrated opposition computer files for a year, monitoring secret strategy memos and periodically passing on copies to the media, Senate officials told The Globe.

From the spring of 2002 until at least April 2003, members of the GOP committee staff exploited a computer glitch that allowed them to access restricted Democratic communications without a password. Trolling through hundreds of memos, they were able to read talking points and accounts of private meetings discussing which judicial nominees Democrats would fight -- and with what tactics.

The office of Senate Sergeant-at-Arms William Pickle has already launched an investigation into how excerpts from 15 Democratic memos showed up in the pages of the conservative-leaning newspapers and were posted to a website last November.

With the help of forensic computer experts from General Dynamics and the US Secret Service, his office has interviewed about 120 people to date and seized more than half a dozen computers -- including four Judiciary servers, one server from the office of Senate majority leader Bill Frist of Tennessee, and several desktop hard drives.

But the scope of both the intrusions and the likely disclosures is now known to have been far more extensive than the November incident, staffers and others familiar with the investigation say. . . .

As the extent to which Democratic communications were monitored came into sharper focus, Republicans yesterday offered a new defense. They said that in the summer of 2002, their computer technician informed his Democratic counterpart of the glitch, but Democrats did nothing to fix the problem.

Other staffers, however, denied that the Democrats were told anything about it before November 2003.

Sources with knowledge of the case tell TIME that behind closed doors at the E. Barrett Prettyman federal courthouse, nearby the Capitol, a grand jury began hearing testimony Wednesday in the investigation of who leaked the identity of CIA operative Valerie Plame to columnist Robert Novak and other journalists.

Prosecutors are believed to be starting with third-party witnesses, people who were not directly involved in the leak of Plame's identity. Plame's husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, claims that the leak was an act of retaliation against him for undercutting Bush's weapons-of-mass-destruction rationale for going to war in Iraq. Soon enough, witnesses with more direct knowledge will be called to testify, and a decision to subpoena journalists for their testimony will also be made. In December, the FBI asked some administration staffers to sign a waiver releasing reporters from confidentiality agreements in connection with any conversations they had about the Wilson affair. Novak's attorney, Jim Hamilton, had no comment about the latest developments.

Grand juries aren't always used in criminal probes, but they are the preferred way to go in cases with potential political fallout, if only to lend credibility to the result. One conclusion to be drawn from this latest step, said one lawyer familiar with the case, is that investigators clearly have a sense of how the case is shaping up. "They clearly have a sense of what's going on and can ask intelligent questions" to bring the grand jury up to speed. A grand jury is not a trial jury, but is used as an investigative tool and to decide whether to bring indictments in a case. . . .

It's also possible that prosecutors will learn who perpetrated the leak but won't have enough to bring charges. But true to form, the Bush administration continues to be extremely tight-lipped about the investigation -- even internally. "No one knows what the hell is going on," says someone who could be a witness, "because the administration people are all terrified and the lawyers aren't sharing anything with each other either."

THE PRESIDENT: I need some ribs.

Q Mr. President, how are you?

THE PRESIDENT: I'm hungry and I'm going to order some ribs.

Q What would you like?

THE PRESIDENT: Whatever you think I'd like.

Q Sir, on homeland security, critics would say you simply haven't spent enough to keep the country secure.

THE PRESIDENT: My job is to secure the homeland and that's exactly what we're going to do. But I'm here to take somebody's order. That would be you, Stretch -- what would you like? Put some of your high-priced money right here to try to help the local economy. You get paid a lot of money, you ought to be buying some food here. It's part of how the economy grows. You've got plenty of money in your pocket, and when you spend it, it drives the economy forward. So what would you like to eat?

Q Right behind you, whatever you order.

THE PRESIDENT: I'm ordering ribs. David, do you need a rib?

Q But Mr. President --

THE PRESIDENT: Stretch, thank you, this is not a press conference. This is my chance to help this lady put some money in her pocket. Let me explain how the economy works. When you spend money to buy food it helps this lady's business. It makes it more likely somebody is going to find work. So instead of asking questions, answer mine: are you going to buy some food?

Q Yes.

THE PRESIDENT: Okay, good. What would you like?

Q Ribs.

THE PRESIDENT: Ribs? Good. Let's order up some ribs.

Q What do you think of the democratic field, sir?

THE PRESIDENT: See, his job is to ask questions, he thinks my job is to answer every question he asks. I'm here to help this restaurant by buying some food. Terry, would you like something?

Q An answer.

Q Can we buy some questions?

The President is fortunate that until now, the bipartisan National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States has received far less attention than controversies over the design for a World Trade Center memorial. At every step, from his opposition to its creation, to his abortive appointment of Henry Kissinger as its chair, to his refusal to provide it with adequate funding and cooperation, Mr. Bush has treated the commission and its essential work with contempt.

In the latest development, the President’s aides refused additional time for the 9/11 commission to complete its report. Although the original deadline in the enabling legislation is May 27, the commissioners recently asked for a few more months to ensure that their product will be "thorough and credible."

Earlier this month, Thomas Kean—the former New Jersey governor who has chaired the commission since Mr. Kissinger recused himself—explained why the commission needs more time. As the genial Republican told The New York Times, he is only permitted to read the most important classified documents concerning 9/11 in a little closet known as a "sensitive compartmented information facility" (or SCIF). He cannot photocopy the documents, and if he takes notes about them, he must leave the notes in the SCIF when he leaves.

Other recent statements by Mr. Kean, which he subsequently modified, suggest that the White House has ample reason to worry about what the commission’s report will say. In December, he told CBS News that he believes the 9/11 attacks could have been prevented—and that incompetent officials were at fault for the failure to uncover and frustrate the plot.

Following the creation and staffing of the commission, many months passed before the administration agreed to let Mr. Kean look at any of those crucial documents. The commission still has hundreds of interviews to conduct, and millions of pages to examine, before its members begin to draft their conclusions.

But the President’s political advisers, concerned about the political impact of the commission’s report, are unsympathetic to its requests for additional time—and House Speaker Dennis Hastert, who would have to approve an extension, is perfectly obedient to his masters in the White House. According to Newsweek, the administration offered Mr. Kean a choice: Either keep to the May deadline, or postpone release of the report until December, when its findings cannot affect the election.

Mr. Bush doesn’t want his re-election subject to any informed judgment about the disaster that reshaped the nation and his Presidency. But why should such crucial facts be withheld from the voters? What does the President fear?

Perhaps inadvertently, Mr. Kean provided a clue to the answers in his Times interview. Asked whether he thinks the disaster "did not have to happen," he replied, "Yes, there is a good chance that 9/11 could have been prevented by any number of people along the way. Everybody pretty well agrees our intelligence agencies were not set up to deal with domestic terrorism …. They were not ready for an internal attack." Then, asked whether "anyone in the Bush administration [had] any idea that an attack was being planned," he replied: "That is why we are looking at the internal papers. I can’t talk about what’s classified. [The] President’s daily briefings are classified. If I told you what was in them, I would go to jail."

But the commission’s final report may well indicate what the President was told in his daily briefing of Aug. 6, 2001, when he was sunning himself in Crawford, Tex.—as well as the many warnings he and his associates were given by the previous administration. That kind of information could send him back to Crawford for a permanent vacation.

WASHINGTON, Jan. 23 — David Kay, who led the American effort to find banned weapons in Iraq, said Friday after stepping down from his post that he has concluded that Iraq had no stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons at the start of the war last year.

In an interview with Reuters, Dr. Kay said he now thought that Iraq had illicit weapons at the end of the 1991 Persian Gulf war, but that the subsequent combination of United Nations inspections and Iraq's own decisions "got rid of them."

Asked directly if he was saying that Iraq did not have any large stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons in the country, Dr. Kay replied, according to a transcript of the taped interview made public by Reuters, "That is correct." . . .

The assessment Dr. Kay provided to Reuters on Friday was far more conclusive about Iraq's weapons programs than the report he delivered to the White House and Congress in October. At that time, he said he and his team "have not yet found stocks of weapons, but we are not yet at the point where we can say definitively either that such weapon stocks do not exist or that they existed before the war and our only task is to find where they have gone."

But he also reported in October that his team had uncovered evidence of "dozens of W.M.D.-related program activities and significant amounts of equipment that Iraq concealed from the United Nations during the inspections that began in late 2002."

Although the White House stood by its statements last year that Mr. Hussein possessed stores of banned weapons, a position reiterated on Thursday by Vice President Dick Cheney, other administration officials said anonymously on Friday that the prospects that the search would turn up substantial caches of chemical or biological weapons were much diminished.

Dr. Kay told Reuters that one of the reasons he left was that the team he headed, the Iraq Survey Group, had been diverted to some degree for use in battling the insurgency in Iraq. That diversion, he said, left him short of the resources needed to complete the job by the end of June, when the United States plans to return sovereignty to the Iraqis.

He and his team were "not going to find much after June," he said. "I think we have found probably 85 percent of what we're going to find."

Democrats said Dr. Kay's statements raised serious questions about the administration's case for war and the quality of American intelligence. "It is increasingly clear that there has been a massive intelligence failure," Representative Jane Harman of California, the senior Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said in a statement. "The potential threat posed by Iraq's stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons and Iraq's nuclear weapons program was central to the case for war. In light of Dr. Kay's statement, the president owes the American public and the world an explanation."

Can anyone name any veteran who has been a major candidate for the presidency in the past half-century who has not released his military records?

This list, it must be remembered, includes John McCain, Robert Dole, George H.W. Bush, Gerald Ford, Barry Goldwater, and Dwight D. Eisenhower. Not to mention John Kerry, Wesley Clark, Al Gore, Jimmy Carter, George McGovern, Lyndon Baines Johnson, John F. Kennedy, and Harry Truman.

The answer, as near as I can determine: One. George W. Bush.

An influential Sunni Muslim group in Iraq said yesterday it was opposed to partial elections scheduled for the summer and wanted a vote taken only when American forces had left the country.

The opposition of the newly organised Council for Sunnis in Iraq represents another dilemma for the US-led administration in Baghdad, which is already under pressure to rewrite its political programme in Iraq a second time.

Earlier this month, officials at the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) began to reconsider their idea of regional caucuses to select a new government because of criticism from a powerful Shia cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, who demanded democratic direct elections.

At the same time, the authority must balance the mounting frustration of the Sunni community, which although smaller than the Shia, has traditionally formed the ruling class and feels excluded from the political process.

Sabah al-Qaisi, one of the founders of the Sunni council, told the Guardian that his members would not accept any elections organised by the US-led authority. The council, formed last month, is one of the first political groups to have emerged to represent the Sunni community since the Ba'ath party was outlawed last year. It comprises around 160 Sunni clerics, from moderates to extreme Islamists, although it cannot claim to speak for the entire community.

"Trying to push the Sunnis away from their political rights will leave the country in a mess," said Mr Qaisi, a cleric who spent two years and three months in jail under Saddam Hussein for following the hardline Salafi school of Islam. . . .

"We want real, free and decent elections. Elections under occupation are not the correct way to do it. We want the Americans to leave and then we will hold elections."

One of the reasons that the CPA has said it is impractical to hold direct elections in Iraq this summer is the poor security situation. Military commanders say that insurgents are expected to launch attacks to disrupt the process. Polling stations in the Sunni heartland north and west of Baghdad, which has proved the most violent area of Iraq, are likely to be particularly vulnerable.

That might further discourage Sunnis from voting and produce a government even more heavily weighted in favour of the Shias.

"Because of the security situation, I am telling you the elections will not succeed," said Mr Qaisi. "There will not be elections and the Sunnis will not participate in any elections."

PRESIDENT BUSH: Well, I think the Iraq Survey Group must do its work. Again, I appreciate David Kay's contribution. I said in the run-up to the war against Iraq that -- first of all, I hoped the international community would take care of him. I was hoping the United Nations would enforce its resolutions, one of many. And then we went to the United Nations, of course, and got an overwhelming resolution -- 1441 -- unanimous resolution, that said to Saddam, you must disclose and destroy your weapons programs, which obviously meant the world felt he had such programs. He chose defiance. It was his choice to make, and he did not let us in.

The federal deficit will reach $477 billion this year, up sharply from last year's $375 billion level, and the government is on track to accumulate nearly $2.4 trillion in additional debt over the next decade, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said yesterday.

The government's $4 trillion debt could more than double if President Bush succeeds in making permanent an array of tax cuts that are set to expire by 2011, the CBO's annual budget report added.

Measured against the size of the economy, this year's deficit -- a record in dollar terms -- will still be smaller than those in six deficit years under Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. CBO officials acknowledged that the cumulative deficit would shrink dramatically from 2005 to 2014 -- from $1.9 trillion to $785 billion -- if all spending in Iraq and Afghanistan were to end this year. That is a scenario the White House and Congress do not envision.

Where the deficit goes from here, the CBO said, will depend in part on a major decision facing Congress: whether to follow Bush's admonitions and make permanent the $1.7 trillion in tax cuts passed in 2001 and 2003, or to let them expire by 2011.

If they do expire, the 2004 peak deficit would gradually decline until the books balance in 2014. But if they are extended, the government would continue to run large deficits well into the next decade.

"If you look forward, sustained, large deficits in the face of a fully operating economy will have economic consequences," warned CBO Director Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a former economist in the Bush White House.

Regardless of those future decisions, the government's long-term finances have worsened considerably in the past six months, largely because of the war in Iraq and passage of the $400 billion law adding a prescription drug benefit to Medicare. In August, congressional forecasters predicted a 10-year deficit of $1.4 trillion through 2013. That figure has jumped nearly a trillion dollars since then.

Even conservatives are starting to admit that George Bush isn't serious when he claims to be doing something about the exploding budget deficit. At best — to borrow the already classic language of the State of the Union address — his administration is engaged in deficit reduction-related program activities.

But these admissions have been accompanied by an urban legend about what went wrong. According to cleverly misleading reports from the Heritage Foundation and other like-minded sources, the deficit is growing because Mr. Bush isn't sufficiently conservative: he's allowing runaway growth in domestic spending. This myth is intended to divert attention from the real culprit: sharply reduced tax collections, mainly from corporations and the wealthy. . . .

A recent study by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities does the math. While overall government spending has risen rapidly since 2001, the great bulk of that increase can be attributed either to outlays on defense and homeland security, or to types of government spending, like unemployment insurance, that automatically rise when the economy is depressed.

Why, then, do we face the prospect of huge deficits as far as the eye can see? Part of the answer is the surge in defense and homeland security spending. The main reason for deficits, however, is that revenues have plunged. Federal tax receipts as a share of national income are now at their lowest level since 1950.

Of course, most people don't feel that their taxes have fallen sharply. And they're right: taxes that fall mainly on middle-income Americans, like the payroll tax, are still near historic highs. The decline in revenue has come almost entirely from taxes that are mostly paid by the richest 5 percent of families: the personal income tax and the corporate profits tax. These taxes combined now take a smaller share of national income than in any year since World War II.

This decline in tax collections from the wealthy is partly the result of the Bush tax cuts, which account for more than half of this year's projected deficit. But it also probably reflects an epidemic of tax avoidance and evasion. Everyone who wants to understand what's happening to the tax system should read "Perfectly Legal," the new book by David Cay Johnston, The Times's tax reporter, who shows how ideologues have made America safe for wealthy people who don't feel like paying taxes.

I was particularly struck by Mr. Johnston's description of the carefully staged Senate Finance Committee hearings in 1997-1998. Senators Trent Lott and Frank Murkowski accused the I.R.S. of "Gestapo"-like tactics, and Congress passed new rules that severely restricted the I.R.S.'s ability to investigate suspected tax evaders. Only later, when the cameras were no longer rolling, did it become clear that the whole thing was a con. Most of the charges weren't true, and there was good reason to believe that the star witness, who dramatically described how I.R.S. agents had humiliated him, really was engaged in major-league tax evasion (he eventually paid $23 million, insisting he had done no wrong).

And this was part of a larger con. What's playing out in America right now is the bait-and-switch strategy known on the right as "starve the beast." The ultimate goal is to slash government programs that help the poor and the middle class, and use the savings to cut taxes for the rich. But the public would never vote for that.

WASHINGTON, Jan. 27 — President Bush declined Tuesday to repeat his claims that evidence that Saddam Hussein had illicit weapons would eventually be found in Iraq, but he insisted that the war was nonetheless justified because Mr. Hussein posed "a grave and gathering threat to America and the world."

Asked by reporters if he would repeat earlier expressions of confidence that the weapons would be found in light of recent statements by the former chief weapons inspector in Iraq, David A. Kay, that Mr. Hussein had gotten rid of them well before the war, Mr. Bush did not answer directly.

"I think it's very important for us to let the Iraq Survey Group do its work, so we can find out the facts and compare the facts to what was thought," he said at an appearance with the visiting president of Poland.

Mr. Bush praised Dr. Kay's work and came to the defense of the Central Intelligence Agency, whose reporting on Iraq's weapons programs Dr. Kay sharply criticized in interviews over the weekend. "These are unbelievably hard-working, dedicated people who are doing a great job for America," Mr. Bush said of the intelligence community.

Yet at the White House and on Capitol Hill, many officials said it was obvious that the intelligence reports about Iraq had been deeply flawed. They said they doubted that Mr. Bush would have the luxury of waiting to confront the issue.

Democrats demanded that an independent panel examine how the National Intelligence Estimate — the 2002 document that Mr. Bush used as the basis of his comments that Iraq posed a direct threat to the United States and its allies — could have been so flawed. The White House expressed no interest in the formation of such a panel.

"I think it is critical that we follow up and find out what went wrong," the Senate minority leader, Tom Daschle of South Dakota, said on Tuesday, before meeting with Mr. Bush with a group of other Congressional leaders from both parties. At the meeting, Mr. Daschle noted that Congressional leaders had depended on sound intelligence in voting on the war. Officials knowledgeable about the exchange said Mr. Bush interrupted Mr. Daschle and argued that the Iraq war was a "worthy" effort and that the administration had not manipulated the evidence. The president also said he had not given up the search for the weapons.

Dr. Kay resigned last week as head of the Iraq Survey Group. In an interview with Reuters last week, he said one reason he stepped down was that his team had been diverted to some degree to help battle the insurgency.

In private, some administration officials acknowledged Tuesday that Dr. Kay's conclusion that the intelligence was deeply flawed was becoming an unwelcome political problem that the White House would have to confront, either now or when the presidential campaign heats up.

Two administration officials reported that a debate has erupted within the administration over whether Mr. Bush should soon call for some kind of reform of the intelligence-gathering process. But the officials said Mr. Bush's aides were searching for a formula that would allow them to acknowledge intelligence-gathering problems without blaming the Central Intelligence Agency or the director of central intelligence, George J. Tenet, who approved that National Intelligence Estimate.

The former chief U.S. weapons inspector in Iraq said yesterday that there should be an independent investigation into the flawed intelligence about Saddam Hussein's weapons capability, fueling a partisan feud over the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

In testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, the former inspector, David Kay, said it is "important to acknowledge failure." Responding to questions from Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), he said: "I must say, my personal view, and it's purely personal, is that in this case you will finally determine that it is going to take an outside inquiry, both to do it and to give yourself and the American people the confidence that you have done it."

The testimony, in which Kay repeated his previous assertions that stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction probably did not exist in Iraq, widened a rift between Democratic lawmakers and the White House and its GOP allies in Congress that promises to color this year's elections. The White House dismissed the notion of an outside investigation, saying that the U.S. inspectors in Iraq need more time and that the ouster of Hussein was justified regardless of the state of his weapons programs. Democrats suggested that the problem went beyond failed intelligence and involved an administration that exaggerated the threat Hussein posed. . . .

Some in the administration favor a frank public acknowledgment that the intelligence on Iraq was wrong, but that is not yet the prevailing view. National security adviser Condoleezza Rice is scheduled to appear today on news shows, in which she is expected to continue calling for more time to search.

Supporters and opponents of President Bush say this public strategy -- delaying a judgment on the weapons while justifying the war on other grounds -- is risky. By postponing a reckoning on the weapons, Bush is gambling that the news in Iraq will improve so that the American public will not be concerned about the weapons, that a weapons discovery will be made, or that the ISG will not finish its work until after the November elections. But Bush's strategy, they say, also allows the matter to linger as part of the presidential campaign and raises the possibility of the issue coming to a boil just before Election Day.

Listen to Bigfoot journalists like Peter Jennings and Tim Russert, and you'd think that one of the most pressing presidential issues this year is whether Gen. Wesley Clark should have immediately denounced his supporter, the gadfly filmmaker Michael Moore, for calling George W. Bush a "deserter" while campaigning for the general in New Hampshire. It's almost enough to give "chutzpah" a bad name.

In the first place, what a weird question. When, in the 1992 or 1996 elections was either George H.W. Bush or Bob Dole asked to disassociate himself from any supporter who termed Bill Clinton a "draft dodger?" Clinton did not "dodge" the draft. He sought and was given a deferment. But the term became common currency among conservatives.

Moreover, why would Wes Clark be expected to be sufficiently familiar with the complicated history of Bush's record of military service in the early 1970s to pass judgment on whether the term "deserter" was so outrageous so as to demand repudiation? Almost no reporters seem to be.

In fact, the question whether George W. Bush pulled a fast one on the Texas Air National Guard-or had one pulled for him-to save him the ignominy of being termed a "deserter" is hardly the open and shut case that Jennings, Russert and virtually every journalist seems to assume it is. . . .

Dare we call the president of the United States a "deserter?" Well, technically, no, of course. If he eventually got the papers, he's retroactively innocent of that charge. But what would have happened if, say, during late 1972, some by-the-books Alabama MP had happened upon Bush in a bar and was unaware that this son of a congressman would eventually be able to work out a deal with the higher-ups. He would be in Alabama without permission while his unit was training in Texas. Might that have been enough to throw Bush into the brig?

It's hardly an outrageous question, but even raising it seems to place one beyond the pale. And I doubt Tim Russert or Peter Jennings could have answered it more articulately than Gen. Clark had either one been willing to examine the issue with the seriousness it so clearly deserves.

Friends,

I would like to apologize for referring to George W. Bush as a "deserter." What I meant to say is that George W. Bush is a deserter, an election thief, a drunk driver, a WMD liar and a functional illiterate. And he poops his pants. In fact, he shot a man in Tucson "just to watch him die."

Actually, what I meant to say up in New Hampshire last week was that "We're going to have Bush for dessert come November!" I'm always mixing up "dessert" and "desert" -- I'm sure many of you have that problem.

Well, well, well. As George W. would say, "It's time to smoke ‘em out of their hole!" Thanks to my "humorous" introduction of Wesley Clark 10 days ago in New Hampshire -- and the lughead way the no-sense-of-humor media has covered it -- there were 15 million hits this weekend on my website. Everyone who visited the site got to read the truth about Bush not showing up for National Guard duty.

The weird thing about all this is that during my routine I never went into any details about Bush skipping out while in the Guard (it's not like it's the biggest issue on my mind or facing America these days!) I was just attempting my best impersonation of that announcer guy for the World Wrestling Federation, asking the cheering crowd if they would like to see a smackdown ("debate") which I called "The Generaaal Versus The Deserterrrr!!" (You can watch it here -- hardly anyone in the media has shown this clip because viewers would suddenly see the context of my comments.)

When the press heard me use that word "deserter," though, the bells and whistles went off, for this was one of those stories they knew they had ignored -- and now it was rearing its ugly, truthful head on a very public stage. Without a single other word from me other than the d-word, they immediately got so defensive that it looked to many viewers like they—the press—maybe had something to hide. After all, when I called Bush a deserter, how did they know I wasn't referring to how he has deserted the 43 million Americans who have no health coverage? Why didn't they assume I was talking about how Bush is a deserter because he has deserted the working people of this country (who have lost 3 million jobs since he's taken office)? Why wasn't it obvious to them that I was pointing out how Bush had deserted our constitution and Bill of Rights as he tries to limit freedom of speech and privacy rights for law-abiding citizens?

Instead, they have created the brouhaha over Bush's military record, often without telling their audience what the exact charges are. It seems all they want to do is to get Clark or me -- or you -- to shut up. "We have never investigated this and so we want you to apologize for bringing it up!" Ha ha ha.

Well, I'm glad they have gone nuts over it. Because here we have a Commander in Chief --who just took off while in uniform to go work for some Republican friend of his dad's -- now sending our kids over to Iraq to die while billions are promised to Halliburton and the oil companies. Twenty percent of them are National Guard and Reserves (and that number is expected to double during the year). They have been kept in Iraq much longer than promised, and they have not been given the proper protection. They are sitting ducks.

What if any of them chose to do what Bush did back in the early 70s -- just not show up? I've seen Republican defenders of Bush this week say, “Yeah, but he made up the time later.” So, can today's National Guardsmen do the same thing -- just say, when called up to go to Iraq, "Um, I'm not going to show up, I'll make up the time later!"? Can you imagine what would happen? Of course, none of them are the son of a Congressman, like young Lt. Bush was back in 1972.

Today, MoveOn.org has put together its response to this issue, and I would love to reprint it here. It lays out all the facts about Bush and the remaining unanswered questions about where he went for many, many months:

Here are what appear to be the known facts, laid out recently in considerable detail and documentation by retired pilot and Air National Guard First Lt. Robert A. Rogers, and in a 2003 book, “The Lies of George W. Bush,” by David Corn.

1. George W. Bush graduated from Yale in 1968 when the war in Vietnam was at its most deadly and the military draft was in effect. Like many of his social class and age, he sought to enter the National Guard, which made Vietnam service unlikely, and fulfill his military obligation. Competition for slots was intense; there was a long waiting list. Bush took the Air Force officer and pilot qualification tests on Jan. 17, 1968, and scored the lowest allowed passing grade on the pilot aptitude portion.

2. He, nevertheless, was sworn in on May 27, 1968, for a six-year commitment. After a few weeks of basic training, Bush received an appointment as a second lieutenant – a rank usually reserved for those completing four years of ROTC or 18 months active duty service. Bush then went to flight school and trained on the F-102 interceptor fighter jet. Fighter pilots were in great demand in Vietnam at the time, but Bush wound up serving as a “weekend warrior” in Houston, where his father’s congressional district was centered.

A Houston Chronicle story published in 1994, quoted in Corn’s book, has Bush saying: “I was not prepared to shoot my eardrum out with a shotgun in order to get a deferment. Nor was I willing to go to Canada. So I chose to better myself by learning how to fly airplanes.”

3. Sometime after May 1971, young Lt. Bush stopped participating regularly in Guard activities. According to Texas Air National Guard records, he had fewer than the required flight duty days and was short of the minimum service owed the Guard. Records indicate that Bush never flew after May 1972, despite his expensive training and even though he still owed the National Guard two more years.

4. On May 24, 1972, Bush asked to be transferred to an inactive reserve unit in Alabama, where he also would be working on a Republican senate candidate’s campaign. The request was denied. For months, Bush apparently put in no time at all in Guard service. In August 1972, Bush was grounded -- suspended from flying duties -- for failing to submit to an annual physical exam. (Why wouldn't he take this exam from a doctor?)

5. During his 2000 presidential campaign, Bush’s staff said he recalled doing duty in Alabama and then returning to Houston for still more duty. But the commander of the Montgomery, AL, unit where Bush said he served told the Boston Globe that he had no recollection of Bush – son of a congressman – ever reporting, nor are there records, as there should be, supporting Bush’s claim. Asked at a press conference in Alabama on June 23, 2000 what duties he had performed as a Guardsman in that state, Bush said he could not recall, “but I was there.”

6. In May, June and July, 1973, Bush suddenly started participating in Guard activities back in Houston again – pulling 36 days at Ellington Air Base in that short period. On Oct. 1, 1973, eight months short of his six-year service obligation and scheduled discharge, Bush apparently was discharged with honors from the Texas Air National Guard (eight months short of his six-year commitment). He then went to Harvard Business School.

Documents supporting these reports, released under Freedom of Information Act requests, appear along with Rogers’ article on the web at http://democrats.com/display.cfm?id=154.

In the absence of full disclosure by the President or his supporters, only the President and perhaps a few family or other close associates know the whole truth. And they’re not talking.

Bush was apparently absent without official leave from his assigned military service for as little as seven months (New York Times) or as much as 17 months (Boston Globe) during a time when 500,000 American troops were fighting the Vietnam War. The Army defines a “deserter” -- also known as a DFR, for “dropped from rolls” – as one who is AWOL 31 days or more: www-ari.army.mil/pdf/s51.pdf.

Well, there you have it. Someone got some special treatment. And now that special someone believes he has the right to conduct a war -- using other not-so-special people's lives.

My friends, I always call it like I see it. I don't pussyfoot around. Sometimes the truth is hard to take. The media conglomerates are too afraid to take this on. I understand. But I'm not. That's my job. And I'll continue to do it.

And when I'm wrong, like the thing about Bush pooping his pants, I'll say so.

Yours,

Michael Moore
mmflint@aol.com
www.michaelmoore.com

US combat deaths in Iraq have risen sharply during January despite a drop in the number of attacks and the capture of former dictator Saddam Hussein over a month ago.

As of Thursday, 33 American soldiers and one civilian had been killed by hostile fire during the month. That compares with 24 US combat deaths in December, and a total of 32 coalition combat deaths.

The figures appear to show that the security situation in Iraq is not improving, contrary to earlier claims from the US military and politicians.

The US casualties are also mounting Afghanistan, where seven US soldiers were killed on Thursday in an explosion near an ammunition dump in the south of the country.

The US military on Thursday declined to confirm or deny the figures for combat deaths in Iraq this month, which were calculated from press releases from US Central Command in Florida. A US military spokesman in Baghdad said figures were only kept for two-month periods, and a computer malfunction made it impossible to calculate an official casualty count for separate months.