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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: MSI who wrote (306877)	10/10/2002 8:25:58 AM
From: stockman_scott	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769670

Bush's fear of fear itself By Ellen Goodman Columnist The Boston Globe 10/10/2002 THE NEWS CRAWLED across the bottom of the screen as a surreal footnote to the president's speech on Iraq. President offers federal help for victims of sniper shooting... Oliver North is 59... Audiences hunger for Hannibal as ''Red Dragon'' tops box office. Sometime between the news of soccer players unionizing and the Nobel Prize for medicine, the president made his case against a ''homicidal dictator.'' He warned the country that without action against Iraq, the United States would ''resign itself to fear.'' ''That is not the America I know,'' Bush said, lowering his voice, ''That is not the America I serve.'' And then he added: ''We refuse to live in fear.'' Were you surprised that he identified fear as the motive? This was not the first time in the last weeks that the president cited fear as the justification for preemptive war against Iraq. By now it seems that he has framed this rush to conflict, this forced political march, as a war to end all fear. When Americans asked, ''why now?'' the president answered, ''There's a reason. We have experienced the horror of Sept. 11.'' He cited the Al Qaeda terrorism of September 2001 as the reason for Iraqi war, October 2002. Indeed, that day expanded the horizons of our terrorized imagination. But when I listen to the rationale of fear, I wonder two things. Does this president believe that we can simply refuse to live in fear? Doesn't this commander-in-chief even suspect that war is equally - or perhaps more - fearful? The president and I are not far apart in age. Our grandparents lived through the disastrous war to end all wars. Our fathers served in World War II under Franklin Roosevelt, the man who listed the freedom from fear as one of four freedoms. We were freed, gratefully, from the fear of Nazism. But even that Good War, as it was dubbed, ended in a punctuation mark the shape of a mushroom cloud that hovered over our lives. Were Bush's childhood nightmares so different from the rest of his generation? How many times during the Cold War - the Cuban missile crisis, the Reagan ''evil empire'' era - did the minute hand on the nuclear clock move closer to midnight? How many frightening scenarios played out ''On the Beach'' and ''The Day After''? On Monday, the president tried to make the case that Saddam Hussein is ''unique.'' He skipped over Osama bin Laden and Iran and North Korea and all the other points in an evolving axis of evil. Do many of us believe that a war against Iraq would end all fear? Or that we can ''refuse to live in fear?'' I don't discount Saddam as a dangerous man. We saw it in Kuwait. We saw it in the stockpiles of biological and chemical weapons that were - by the way - disarmed by earlier teams of UN inspectors. We know it from his attempts to build nuclear weapons. We are rightly wary of his intent and watchful of his timing. We are right to urge a sluggish UN to return to a feisty role as inspector. But why doesn't the president also talk about the other fear - of war? This administration makes the worst-case scenario for Saddam as an imminent danger - one that demands immediate action even if we go it alone. But it makes the best-case scenario for war - forecasting a victory, a regime change, democracy all around. In fact, the president who speculates freely about what Saddam would do if he were unchallenged says little about what this ''homicidal dictator'' would do if he were cornered. The administration worries about innocent American civilians. But is it entirely impermissible to wonder about Iraq's innocent civilians? And while there is breathless talk of ''regime change,'' can we wonder about that next regime? In the midst of the talk of ''fear and war,'' I have also been listening to people grappling with ''justice and war.'' The ''just war'' conversation is not an ivory tower seminar among religious and academic folks who have never seen the barrel of a gun. It's a struggle to identify international moral standards. When is war right and when is it wrong? These standards have practical effects in the world. What troubles many who think about ''just war'' is the idea of a preemptive strike without convincing proof of an imminent threat. Last week, William Galston, a political theorist, asked rhetorically, ''How can we announce a new doctrine of preemption as the centerpiece of our foreign policy while insisting that it applies to us alone?'' What happens when fear becomes a guiding - or misguiding - principle of war for every country? That's the fear we can refuse to live with. Ellen Goodman's e-mail address is ellengoodman@globe.com. © Copyright 2002 Globe Newspaper Company. boston.com

To: MSI who wrote (306877)	10/10/2002 11:57:44 AM
From: jlallen	Respond to of 769670

Ahhhhhhh.... More silly pinheadisms..... You never disappoint....

To: MSI who wrote (306877)	10/10/2002 12:47:03 PM
From: Skywatcher	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769670

How could he NOT know about $64 MILLION in assets being transfered?....he KNEW! Bush risks hypocrisy charge over Harken accounts David Teather in New York Thursday October 10, 2002 The Guardian President George Bush was yesterday laid open to further allegations of hypocrisy in his condemnation of the aggressive business practices of the 1990s when more details of his own dealings were published. Harken Energy, the oil and gas company behind the US president's wealth, used an off balance sheet entity to move poorly performing assets and debts off its books, according to a report which draws comparisons with Enron. The off balance sheet entity, a partnership with the investment arm of Harvard University, was formed in 1990 at a critical time for the company's finances. HarvardWatch, an alumni and student group which monitors the university's investments, likened the venture to those used at the disgraced energy firm Enron to disguise debts before it collapsed. Mr Bush was a director at Harken from 1986 to 1993 and at the time in question was a $100,000 a year consultant. Minutes show that he personally approved the deal. "The partnership bears strong resemblance to the widely-condemned Enron partnerships, controlled by insiders and disguising the dismal prospects of the company," the watchdog said. The venture enabled Harken to shift $20m (£13.1m) in debt and liabilities off the balance sheet. Harvard's venture capital division, Aeneas, contributed $64.5m of drilling assets to the partnership. In return Harken received a much-needed injection of cash - $100,000 a month in management fees, and drilling and services fees of more than $3m in the first year. The deals were disclosed at the time to the US regulator, the securities and exchange commission and complied with accounting rules. It is the kind of aggressive financial engineering that the president has strongly criticised. Over the summer political rivals made capital of a 1991 insider dealing investigation into the future president by the SEC. Mr Bush sold 212,140 shares for $849,000 two months before the company reported a $23.2m quarterly loss but the SEC closed the case without taking action. The White House dismissed any hint of wrongdoing. A spokesman said: "Independent reports note that [the partnership] complied with accounting rules, so there is no comparison with Enron." There were also reports yesterday that New York prosecutors are considering criminal charges against auditors at PricewaterhouseCoopers who failed to report the alleged looting of Tyco by its former chief executive officer, Dennis Kozlowski. CC