"The Bush administration's ability to restore confidence in the market is hobbled because its frontman on the issue has to be SEC
Chairman Pitt, who since he took office has been labeled as the accounting industry's defense attorney. Pitt is actually moving the
SEC in the right direction. He has launched initiatives on important accounting and accountability issues. He has sicced the
SEC's vaunted enforcement division on each new scandal that breaks, though they are rapidly running short of troops.
Pitt, however, still wears the scarlet letter -- A for "accounting" -- and he is facing a no-win decision on his future role in the
corporate credibility crisis.
When he took office last year, Pitt followed the rules and recused himself for one year from having anything to do with issues
involving his former clients. The year is almost up. There are calls for Pitt to extend his recusal indefinitely. If he doesn't, his
participation in accounting investigations will be suspect. If he does, he will have to sit out the most important work on his
agency's agenda."
Excerpt from No Market Rebound Until Companies Come Clean
washingtonpost.com
© 2002 The Washington Post Company
>>>>>>>>>>>>
Baldur, I think you are right! Also, if the country goes to war with IRAQ and this seems to be Bush's
intention the threat of terrorism will increase. Also, the war with Iraq could last a very long time.
Maybe five years or more.-- MEPHISTO
See following article:
>>>>>>>>>>>>>
The Case Against a Mini-Palestine
By Shibley Telhami
The Washington Post
Tuesday, June 18, 2002; Page
A19
As President Bush considers
an important speech on the
Middle East, the idea of a
limited Palestinian state is
one option on the table.
There is only one way such
an option can work: as part
of a staged implementation of a final settlement, after the
parties agree on its parameters. Establishing such a limited
state with the idea that it would then negotiate issues of
final settlement with Israel would be a serious mistake that
would come back to haunt the parties -- and the United
States.
Consider the problems. Any state, no matter how small, must
have international borders and thus the capacity, if not the
right, to import arms. It must be contiguous. So, Israel would
have to remove some of its settlements and pay the domestic
political price that comes with that.
The Palestinian Authority would face public fear that this
small entity was the final state, which would thus be rejected
by much of the Palestinian public. Arab states would be
unlikely to provide the incentives that they offered Israel at
the Beirut summit (normal relations with the Arab world)
without a final settlement. So each side would have to pay a
significant price while providing limited incentives to its
public.
In the short term, it might be possible to limit violence and
improve Palestinian lives -- the best feature of such an option.
But in the process of implementing this mini-state, and
making the case for limiting the violence, each side would
portray the agreement as a grand achievement. The United
States, in its effort to rally international financial support for
the Palestinian state, and to shift attention in the Middle
East from the Arab-Israeli issue to Iraq, would undoubtedly do
the same.
In the process, the Israeli public would feel that it had
already done most of its compromising just by accepting a
Palestinian state, while the Palestinians would believe that
this was only a minor step in the process to get full Israeli
withdrawal from the rest of the West Bank and East
Jerusalem. In the meantime, all the tough issues would
remain: Jerusalem, refugees, borders and settlements.
The primary advantage would be that the negotiations would
now take place between two legally sovereign states. But the
asymmetry of power would continue: The Palestinians would
have little leverage in negotiating the remaining issues, and
would be increasingly under pressure to allow a "military
option," this time with the capacity to import arms.
The Israeli public, feeling it had already offered a lot, would
have even less tolerance for violence emanating from a
Palestinian state. Worse yet, each side would maneuver to
maximize its leverage over the remaining difficult issues in a
way that would make their resolution even more difficult. It
would be Oslo all over again, except that the public on both
sides would have less patience and would not accept mere
promises.
From the U.S. point of view, it may seem that such an option
could at least buy time, perhaps a couple of years --
seemingly enough to go to war with Iraq. But the Iraq war
option is no less than a five-year effort, if one considers that
the goal of removing Saddam Hussein is the easy part
compared with the essential objective of ensuring a favorable
and stable outcome in Iraq and the rest of the region
afterward.
And just as this difficult later task was starting, the
Palestinian-Israeli issue might be stalemated again over
details of a final settlement. The ground in the Arab world
could become more fertile for recruitment into global terror
than before. Saddam Hussein might be gone, but terror might
increase.
All this, of course, assumes the best-case scenario in the
early stages of implementing a mini-Palestinian state and
leading up to a possible war with Iraq.
It is tempting to search for an easy way out, but t no solution
to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict can be arrived at on the
cheap. The administration is correctly trying to balance
demands in the Arab world for a comprehensive settlement
with the reality that Israel's current government prefers
incrementalism. But there are two ways to mediate these two
forces: the easy way of postponing the tough issues yet again,
in order to achieve a short-term success, and the more
difficult but prudent course of urging the parties to agree on
the final parameters of a settlement, while accommodating
Ariel Sharon through incremental implementation of an
agreement.
Nothing less than the latter path can lead to peace and
stability in the Middle East.
The writer is Anwar Sadat Professor for Peace and Development at
the University of Maryland anda senior fellow at the Brookings
Institution.
© 2002 The Washington Post Company
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