Veterans for Common Sense

‘Support our troops’ — bring them home alive

Plain Talk By Al Neuharth, USA TODAY Founder, August 11, 2005

They’re burying young Marine reservists in Ohio this week. Fourteen of them, ages 19 and up, were killed last week when their amphibious landing vehicle was blown up by a roadside bomb in Iraq.

President Bush won’t be at any of the Ohio funerals. He has not attended any funeral for any of the 1,840 servicemen and women killed in Iraq, although he has met with some groups of families who lost loved ones.

Bush simply called this latest tragedy a “grim reminder” that we are at war. It also should remind anyone who knows anything about war that lightly-armored amphibious vehicles never were meant to transport troops on bomb-laden roads. They were designed for sandy beaches.

They’re being misused because, nearly 2½ years after we invaded Iraq, we still don’t have enough heavily armored transport vehicles. Some soldiers themselves make “hillbilly armor” out of sand bags and scrap metal.

“Support our troops” has been an appropriate rallying cry for every war president. Nearly all civilians nearly always respond, supporting not just troops but also the commander in chief. Now, that’s changing. Results of a nationwide poll this week by USA TODAY/CNN/Gallup:

•54{cd9ac3671b356cd86fdb96f1eda7eb3bb1367f54cff58cc36abbd73c33c82e1d} say Bush’s war in Iraq was a mistake.

•33{cd9ac3671b356cd86fdb96f1eda7eb3bb1367f54cff58cc36abbd73c33c82e1d} say we should withdraw all troops from there.

“Support our troops” has become a sad, empty slogan for Bush.

Public support for the troops still is there, with candy, cookies and yellow ribbons. But government support sadly is lacking. No effective overall war plan. Inadequate or outdated equipment. No exit strategy.

That’s why the best way to support our troops in Iraq is to insist that Bush bring them all home. Alive. Sooner rather than later.

U.S. Lowers Sights On What Can Be Achieved in Iraq

Administration Is Shedding ‘Unreality’ That Dominated Invasion, Official Says

By Robin Wright and Ellen Knickmeyer
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, August 14, 2005; A01

The Bush administration is significantly lowering expectations of what can be achieved in Iraq, recognizing that the United States will have to settle for far less progress than originally envisioned during the transition due to end in four months, according to U.S. officials in Washington and Baghdad.

The United States no longer expects to see a model new democracy, a self-supporting oil industry or a society in which the majority of people are free from serious security or economic challenges, U.S. officials say.

“What we expected to achieve was never realistic given the timetable or what unfolded on the ground,” said a senior official involved in policy since the 2003 invasion. “We are in a process of absorbing the factors of the situation we’re in and shedding the unreality that dominated at the beginning.”

Administration officials still emphasize how much they have achieved despite the chaos that followed the invasion and the escalating insurgency. “Iraqis are taking control of their country, building a free nation that can govern itself, sustain itself and defend itself. And we’re helping Iraqis succeed,” President Bush said yesterday in his radio address.

Iraqi officials yesterday struggled to agree on a draft constitution by a deadline of tomorrow so the document can be submitted to a vote in October. The political transition would be completed in December by elections for a permanent government.

But the realities of daily life are a constant reminder of how the initial U.S. ambitions have not been fulfilled in ways that Americans and Iraqis once anticipated. Many of Baghdad’s 6 million people go without electricity for days in 120-degree heat. Parents fearful of kidnapping are keeping children indoors.

Barbers post signs saying they do not shave men, after months of barbers being killed by religious extremists. Ethnic or religious-based militias police the northern and southern portions of Iraq. Analysts estimate that in the whole of Iraq, unemployment is 50 percent to 65 percent.

U.S. officials say no turning point forced a reassessment. “It happened rather gradually,” said the senior official, triggered by everything from the insurgency to shifting budgets to U.S. personnel changes in Baghdad.

The ferocious debate over a new constitution has particularly driven home the gap between the original U.S. goals and the realities after almost 28 months. The U.S. decision to invade Iraq was justified in part by the goal of establishing a secular and modern Iraq that honors human rights and unites disparate ethnic and religious communities.

But whatever the outcome on specific disputes, the document on which Iraq’s future is to be built will require laws to be compliant with Islam. Kurds and Shiites are expecting de facto long-term political privileges. And women’s rights will not be as firmly entrenched as Washington has tried to insist, U.S. officials and Iraq analysts say.

“We set out to establish a democracy, but we’re slowly realizing we will have some form of Islamic republic,” said another U.S. official familiar with policymaking from the beginning, who like some others interviewed would speak candidly only on the condition of anonymity. “That process is being repeated all over.”

U.S. officials now acknowledge that they misread the strength of the sentiment among Kurds and Shiites to create a special status. The Shiites’ request this month for autonomy to be guaranteed in the constitution stunned the Bush administration, even after more than two years of intense intervention in Iraq’s political process, they said.

“We didn’t calculate the depths of feeling in both the Kurdish and Shiite communities for a winner-take-all attitude,” said Judith S. Yaphe, a former CIA Iraq analyst at the National Defense University.

In the race to meet a sequence of fall deadlines, the process of forging national unity behind the constitution is largely being scrapped, current and former officials involved in the transition said.

“We are definitely cutting corners and lowering our ambitions in democracy building,” said Larry Diamond, a Stanford University democracy expert who worked with the U.S. occupation government and wrote the book “Squandered Victory: The American Occupation and the Bungled Effort to Bring Democracy to Iraq.”

“Under pressure to get a constitution done, they’ve lowered their own ambitions in terms of getting a document that is going to be very far-reaching and democratic. We also don’t have the time to go through the process we envisioned when we wrote the interim constitution — to build a democratic culture and consensus through debate over a permanent constitution,” he said.

The goal now is to ensure a constitution that can be easily amended later so Iraq can grow into a democracy, U.S. officials say.

On security, the administration originally expected the U.S.-led coalition to be welcomed with rice and rosewater, traditional Arab greetings, with only a limited reaction from loyalists of ousted Iraqi president Saddam Hussein. The surprising scope of the insurgency and influx of foreign fighters has forced Washington to repeatedly lower expectations — about the time-frame for quelling the insurgency and creating an effective and cohesive Iraqi force capable of stepping in, U.S. officials said.

Killings of members of the Iraqi security force have tripled since January. Iraq’s ministry of health estimates that bombings and other attacks have killed 4,000 civilians in Baghdad since Prime Minister Ibrahim Jafari’s interim government took office April 28.

Last week was the fourth-worst week of the whole war for U.S. military deaths in combat, and August already is the worst month for deaths of members of the National Guard and Reserve.

Attacks on U.S. convoys by insurgents using roadside bombs have doubled over the past year, Army Brig. Gen. Yves Fontaine said Friday. Convoys ferrying food, fuel, water, arms and equipment from Kuwait, Jordan and Turkey are attacked about 30 times a week, Fontaine said.

“There has been a realistic reassessment of what it is possible to achieve in the short term and fashion a partial exit strategy,” Yaphe said. “This change is dictated not just by events on the ground but by unrealistic expectations at the start.”

Washington now does not expect to fully defeat the insurgency before departing, but instead to diminish it, officials and analysts said. There is also growing talk of turning over security responsibilities to the Iraqi forces even if they are not fully up to original U.S. expectations, in part because they have local legitimacy that U.S. troops often do not.

“We’ve said we won’t leave a day before it’s necessary. But necessary is the key word — necessary for them or for us? When we finally depart, it will probably be for us,” a U.S. official said.

Pressed by the cost of fighting an escalating insurgency, U.S. expectations for rebuilding Iraq — and its $20 billion investment — have fallen the farthest, current and former officials say.

Pentagon officials originally envisioned Iraq’s oil revenue paying many post-invasion expenses. But Iraq, ranked among world leaders behind Saudi Arabia in proven oil reserves, is incapable of producing enough refined fuel amid a car-buying boom that has put an estimated 1 million more vehicles on the road after the invasion. Lines for subsidized cheap gas stretch for miles every day in Baghdad.

Oil production is estimated at 2.22 million barrels a day, short of the goal of 2.5 million. Iraq’s pre-war high was 2.67 million barrels a day.

The United States had high hopes of quick, big-budget fixes for the electrical power system that would show Iraqis tangible benefits from the ouster of Hussein. But inadequate training for Iraqi staff, regional rivalries restricting the power flow to Baghdad, inadequate fuel for electrical generators and attacks on the infrastructure have contributed to the worst summer of electrical shortages in the capital.

Water is also a “tough, tough” situation in a desert country, said a U.S. official in Baghdad familiar with reconstruction issues. Pumping stations depend on electricity, and engineers now say the system has hundreds of thousands of leaks.

“The most thoroughly dashed expectation was the ability to build a robust self-sustaining economy. We’re nowhere near that. State industries, electricity are all below what they were before we got there,” said Wayne White, former head of the State Department’s Iraq intelligence team who is now at the Middle East Institute. “The administration says Saddam ran down the country. But most damage was from looting [after the invasion], which took down state industries, large private manufacturing, the national electric” system.

Ironically, White said, the initial ambitions may have complicated the U.S. mission: “In order to get out earlier, expectations are going to have to be lower, even much lower. The higher your expectation, the longer you have to stay. Getting out is going to be a more important consideration than the original goals were. They were unrealistic.”

Knickmeyer reported from Baghdad.

Iraq’s leaders and military will be unable to lead the fight against insurgents until next summer at the earliest, a top U.S. military official said Wednesday, trying to temper any hopes that a full-scale American troop withdrawal was imminent as Iraq moves toward elections scheduled for December.

Both Americans and Iraqis need “to start thinking about and talking about what it’s really going to be like in Iraq after elections,” said the military official, who spoke in an interview on the condition he not be named. “I think the important point is there’s not going to be a fundamental change.”

The official stressed that it was “important to calibrate expectations post-elections. I’ve been saying to folks: You’re still going to have an insurgency, you’re still going to have a dilapidated infrastructure, you’re still going to have decades of developmental problems both on the economic and the political side.”

U.S. military officials in Iraq said last month that it might be possible to withdraw 20,000 to 30,000 of the 138,000 American troops by next spring if Iraqi civilian leaders managed to meet deadlines for drafting a new constitution and holding elections.

On Wednesday, the military official said a significant spring withdrawal was “still possible.” But while primary military responsibility for some parts of Iraq could likely be handed over even before the elections, the official said, U.S. forces would have to play a lead role in fighting the insurgency for at least a year. Even if a new government is elected on time in December, “the earliest they’re going to be capable of running a counterinsurgency campaign is . . . next summer,” the official said.

The warnings came on a day when the U.S. military reported five service members killed in action. In addition, a U.S. citizen in Iraq was kidnapped and released, a U.S. official confirmed, and a car bomb in Baghdad killed four Iraqi civilians and three policemen.

Meeting in Baghdad, leaders of Iraq’s factions reported no immediate progress on the key issues– such as how much autonomy regions should have — blocking agreement on a new constitution, with the deadline for the draft’s approval just five days away.

“The constitution should be written in time. It is in our benefit to have one word to agree on,” urged Prime Minister Ibrahim Jafari, whose government faces possible dissolution under current accords if drafters miss the Monday deadline.

The existing timeline calls for a national vote on the constitution on Oct. 15, to be followed by elections for a full-term government on Dec. 15. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld pushed Iraqis again this week to finish the draft constitution on time, after citing rising U.S. combat fatalities.

In Baghdad, the U.S. military official sought to tamp down any hopes that political progress would immediately improve security.

The Iraqi government’s opponents “certainly are not going to pack up and go away, there’s no doubt about it,” he said. Instead, he suggested, insurgent attacks are likely to surge as Iraq’s new constitution and government take shape.

If “you’re a terrorist or an insurgent, what I can say to myself is, if I can kill this process, I’ve got to do it this year,” the official said. “I think they’re going to pull out all the stops.”

President Bush’s approval ratings have fallen as U.S.-led forces and their Iraqi allies struggle to make a dent against an insurgency composed of foreign fighters and disaffected Iraqis. U.S. deaths in combat hit one of their highest marks of the war last week, led by a bombing that killed 14 Marines and their Iraqi interpreter. Killings of Iraqi forces and civilians have surged since Jafari’s government took office in late April, as insurgents try to wreck the government-building process.

“As we go along, everything we do has that motive: leave it so they can sustain it after we’re gone,” the official said. “Everything we do with the military we do so they can sustain it after we’re gone. Just so we’re all thinking the same thing, this is not going to be someone flips a switch and all of a sudden we go from 138,000 to nothing. This is going to be gradual.”

Efforts to train Iraqi security forces involve direct U.S. military presence with the troops on the ground, the official said. “This is a bottom-up process based on the progress of these units. It’s not going to be a precipitous process. As these guys come on line, we’re backing ourselves out. It’s tied to real, measurable” progress.

“But,” he added, “you can’t build an army overnight.”

He said it was essential to help Iraq control its borders, cutting off what U.S. and Iraqi officials say is a flow of foreign fighters from neighboring Syria. “They’re not coming in in waves, but they’re coming in in sufficient numbers,” he said. “And the only way to deal with them is to drive a wedge between them and Iraqi people, and kill or capture them, and close the door on letting them come in.”

He also warned of possible overthrow attempts by forces of ousted president Saddam Hussein. “The Saddamists, the Baathists — they can have a long-term strategy and bide their time,” the official said.

If Iraq manages to stay on track, he said, “I think we’re going to be in pretty good shape” by 2007.

Jafari, in his news conference Wednesday, said joint Iraqi-U.S. efforts were making “some progress” against the insurgency.

Jafari’s Shiite Muslim-led government, many of whose top figures spent years in exile in Iran while Hussein was in power, also insisted Wednesday that U.S. reports of bombs being smuggled into Iraq from Iran were “exaggerated.” Rumsfeld said Tuesday that weapons were being moved across the border, although he said it was impossible to tell whether they were coming from the Iranian government.

Iraq’s most influential Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, called Wednesday for Iraq’s disparate blocs to move forward on the constitution “as there is not enough time left,” Shiite political leader Abdul Aziz Hakim said after meeting with Sistani. The cleric also emphasized the role Islam should play in the constitution, Hakim said.

Staff writer Robin Wright in Washington, correspondent Jonathan Finer in Baghdad and special correspondents Omar Fekeiki, Bassam Sebti and Naseer Nouri in Baghdad and Saad Sarhan in Najaf contributed to this report.

The news coming out of Iraq yesterday was that several more American soldiers had been killed. August’s toll so far has been mind-numbing. For American troops, it’s been one of the worst periods of the war. And yet there’s still no sense of urgency within the Bush administration.

The president is on vacation. He’s down at the ranch riding his bicycle and clearing brush. The death toll for Americans has streaked past the 1,800 mark. The Iraqi dead are counted by the tens of thousands. But if Mr. Bush has experienced any regret about the carnage he set in motion when he launched the war, he’s not showing it.

Writing about Vietnam in the foreword to David Halberstam’s book “The Best and the Brightest,” Senator John McCain said:

“It was a shameful thing to ask men to suffer and die, to persevere through god-awful afflictions and heartache, to endure the dehumanizing experiences that are unavoidable in combat, for a cause that the country wouldn’t support over time and that our leaders so wrongly believed could be achieved at a smaller cost than our enemy was prepared to make us pay.”

That point is no less relevant now. The administration is not willing to commit to an all-out effort to defeat the insurgents in Iraq, and is equally unwilling to reverse course and bring the troops home. Most Americans are abandoning the idea that the war can be “won.” Polls are showing that they’re tired of the conflict and its relentlessly mounting toll. It’s hard to imagine that the population at large will be willing to sacrifice thousands of additional American lives over several more years in pursuit of goals that remain as murky as ever.

Ask a thousand different suits in Washington why we’re in Iraq and you’ll get a thousand different answers. Ask how we plan to win the war, and you’ll get a blank stare.

Administration types and high-ranking members of the military have recently been teasing the media and the public with comments that are designed to give the impression that substantial numbers of American troops could be brought home next year.

Not only are these comments hedged with every imaginable caveat – if the transition to a permanent government goes smoothly, and if the Iraqis prove capable of providing their own security – but they are coming at a time when the U.S. is planning to increase American troop strength in Iraq in anticipation of elections scheduled for December.

I wouldn’t schedule any homecoming rallies just yet, not with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld warning that the current horrific violence may well escalate as the elections approach. And no one believes that the Iraqi security forces will be up to the task of securing the country any time soon.

When asked on Tuesday about a possible exit strategy for American troops, Mr. Rumsfeld told reporters it depended on many “variables,” including:

“What are the Iranians doing? Are they going to be helpful or unhelpful? And if they’re increasingly unhelpful, then obviously the conditions on the ground are less advantageous. Same thing with the Syrians.”

Got that?

When Lyndon Johnson sent American troops into the flaming disaster of Vietnam he had no real strategy, no plan for winning the war. The idea, more or less, was that our boys, tougher and much better equipped, would beat their boys. Case closed. Fifty-eight thousand American troops succumbed to this schoolyard fantasy.

George W. Bush has no strategy, no real plan, for winning the war in Iraq. So we’re stuck in a murderous quagmire without even the suggestion of an end in sight.

The administration has never been straight with the public about the war, and there’s no reason to believe it will start being honest now. There is a desperate need for a serious national conversation about alternatives to the Bush approach in Iraq, which is tantamount to a permanent American military presence in that country.

The president, ensconced in a long vacation, exemplifies the vacuum of leadership on this crucial issue, which demands nothing less than the sustained attention of the wisest men and women the U.S. has to offer. They could be politicians, academics, civic or religious leaders, corporate executives – whoever. The longer they remain on the sidelines, the longer the carnage in Iraq will continue.

Motorists got a barrelful of bad news Wednesday when oil prices soared to a new high, gasoline set another record in California and the Department of Energy warned that pump prices could remain above $2 a gallon through much of next year.

The latest round of woe was spurred by a spate of refinery problems in the U.S., increasing instability in the Middle East and a growing imbalance between demand for petroleum, which is rising rapidly, and production capacity, which isn’t.

After briefly touching $65 a barrel, the U.S. benchmark crude closed at a record $64.90, up $1.83, or almost 3{cd9ac3671b356cd86fdb96f1eda7eb3bb1367f54cff58cc36abbd73c33c82e1d} on the New York Mercantile Exchange. That was up 46{cd9ac3671b356cd86fdb96f1eda7eb3bb1367f54cff58cc36abbd73c33c82e1d} from a year ago and boded ill for motorists already paying sky-high prices for gasoline — which also hit a new national record Wednesday.

“It is scary. We are in limbo,” said Yolanda Chacon, a Lancaster resident who paid $51.97 to fill her minivan Wednesday afternoon at an Arco station in Echo Park. “It feels like it’s going on and on and on,” said Chacon, who sometimes gases up twice a day while ferrying her husband and daughter to and from their jobs in Los Angeles and Santa Clarita.

“I’m really spreading it thin,” she said.

Nationally, pump prices rose an average of 2.2 cents a gallon to $2.376 on Wednesday, according to AAA — 27{cd9ac3671b356cd86fdb96f1eda7eb3bb1367f54cff58cc36abbd73c33c82e1d} above a year ago. In Southern California, where gasoline prices typically run well above the national norm, a gallon of regular hit a record $2.676 on Wednesday, up almost 13 cents from a month ago and 26{cd9ac3671b356cd86fdb96f1eda7eb3bb1367f54cff58cc36abbd73c33c82e1d} higher than the year-ago price of $2.120. Diesel fuel prices also set new records in California and around the country.

The latest jump in crude prices — which have climbed 14{cd9ac3671b356cd86fdb96f1eda7eb3bb1367f54cff58cc36abbd73c33c82e1d} in the last three weeks — killed a Wednesday morning rally on Wall Street as investors fretted that high energy prices could throttle the U.S. economy.

Economists, however, noted that oil would need to rise to more than $85 a barrel to top the inflation-adjusted peak hit in 1980. That, and the fact that the United States uses fuel more efficiently today, helps explain why the economy has been able to absorb the surge in energy costs.

“We as a nation are not as oil dependant as we were back then,” said Christopher Thornberg, senior economist at the UCLA Anderson Forecast.

Consumers in Europe and Japan have been paying close to $4 a gallon for gasoline for years, he added. “To some extent, people are going to have to suck it up and realize this is a new reality.”

The Bush administration said this week that although high energy prices were taking a toll on consumers, they were not slowing the overall economy.

“It’s been a resilient economy, it’s responded well and job creation has proceeded apace,” said Ben Bernanke, chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisors.

That’s little relief to Eric Valdez, though. He has a job, a car and a place to live, but finds that the rising cost of fuel for the daily commute between his home in Chatsworth and his job in Glendale is gobbling up what’s left of his paycheck after the rest of the bills are paid.

“I’m frustrated,” the 21-year-old jewelry store employee said. “The amount of money I make plus the cost of the commute to work and the cost of living means I’m just barely breaking even.”

Some analysts and economists believe that kind of pain will have to be shared by much of the population before oil prices start dropping.

The high prices for both crude oil and refined petroleum products such as gasoline, heating oil and jet fuel show “we haven’t hit the price yet where we have significantly curtailed demand,” said oil analyst John Snell, a principal at Chicago-based Risk Management Inc., an energy cost advisor to industry.

Gasoline consumption is up 1.4{cd9ac3671b356cd86fdb96f1eda7eb3bb1367f54cff58cc36abbd73c33c82e1d} from this same time last year, the Energy Department reported. And with the national thirst for fuel running at a record pace, refineries that have been working overtime to keep up have begun breaking down, shaving production of gasoline and diesel fuel at the peak of the summer travel period.

“It seems every day there’s a story of a refinery with a problem,” said Rick Mueller, senior oil analyst at Energy Security Analysis Inc. in Wakefield, Mass.

“Chevron in El Segundo, BP in Texas, Exxon Mobil in Illinois…. Speculators are wondering if we aren’t pushing the refineries too hard and are looking at more outages,” Mueller said.

The narrow margin is beginning to show up in the nation’s gasoline stockpiles, which are down 2.5{cd9ac3671b356cd86fdb96f1eda7eb3bb1367f54cff58cc36abbd73c33c82e1d} compared with the week ended Aug. 6, 2004, according to government figures released Wednesday.

That helped boost the price of gasoline for September delivery by 7.39 cents to $1.896 a gallon after briefly hitting a record $1.899 in New York futures trading. The price one year ago was $1.10.

For traders, the decline in gasoline stockpiles took precedence over a rise in crude inventories, which gained 2.8 million barrels to 320.8 million barrels last week, according to the Energy Department. Many analysts say the market no longer pays heed to crude oil inventories and instead frets about energy security issues.

“At least $15 of the price of a barrel is psychological, because of traders’ worry about the future and stability of supplies from the Middle East,” said Loren Beard, fuel supplies specialist for automaker Chrysler Group in Auburn Hills, Mich.

“People in the industry that I regularly talk to tell me we will see prices at $60 a barrel and higher just as long as things remain unstable,” Beard said, referring to recent terrorist threats against Saudi Arabia, the world’s leading oil exporter.

Additionally, speculators “all are looking at the fourth quarter now, not at today’s situation,” Mueller said. “A cold winter could put real pressure on the market to meet demand” for heating oil, he said. That would keep crude prices high because a big jump in demand for heating oil would offset seasonal declines in the demand for gasoline.

Indeed, the federal Energy Information Administration, citing government forecasts released this week, said Wednesday that pump prices were expected to average above $2.10 a gallon nationwide at least through the end of next year, assuming oil — which accounts for half the price of a gallon of gas — stays above $55 a barrel.

In addition to the concerns over heating oil demand, the agency pointed out that the government was forecasting an active hurricane season this year, which could disrupt both oil production in the Gulf of Mexico and gasoline refining along the Gulf Coast.

“There’s just no reason to expect this market will put itself into reverse,” said Ben Brockwell, editor of the Oil Price Information Service.

For more than a year, a modest bungalow known as “Peace House,” located a few miles from President Bush’s ranch, has served as a headquarters for anti-war activists. It is lonely work, with little more than a skeleton crew on hand much of the time.

Then Cindy Sheehan hit town.

The 48-year old mother of Army Spc. Casey Sheehan, who was killed in an ambush in Baghdad, Iraq, last year, is consumed by the kind of grief that turns into a furious determination to do something — in her case, to confront the president and force him to explain why her son died.

Now, in the space of just a few days, what started out as a seemingly quixotic personal mission has become something of a phenomenon. Media are swarming around Sheehan; leading liberal and anti-war activists are parachuting in to try to make her their long-sought voice; and political experts in both parties are working to assess what role she may have in galvanizing the public’s gathering unhappiness with the increasing American casualties in Iraq.

Anti-war leaders hope that putting the spotlight on Sheehan will motivate Americans who oppose the war, creating a political force strong enough to compel the Bush administration to change course.

MoveOn.organd other liberal groups have rushed to provide support, offering media expertise and attempting to assemble a corps of others who have lost relatives in Iraq or have family members serving there.

Liberal voices have swung into action on the Internet as well. On Wednesday, Democratic media consultant Joe Trippi organized a conference call with Sheehan for bloggers, aiming to garner more publicity. By Wednesday afternoon, “Cindy Sheehan” was the top-ranked search term on Technorati.com, the search engine for blog postings.

The White House, meanwhile, has sought to cope with Sheehan’s vigil without abandoning its strategy for dealing with the families of troops who have died. On a number of occasions, Bush has met with bereaved relatives — including some who have challenged him sharply on the war — but he has done so privately, away from news cameras and reporters.

Sheehan, a Vacaville, Calif., resident who opposed the war even before her son’s death, was a member of one such group in June 2004.

Some of Sheehan’s critics claim she has changed her tune about Bush. The Drudge Report, citing a June 24, 2004, story in Sheehan’s hometown newspaper, wrote on Monday that Sheehan “dramatically changed her account about what happened when she met the commander in chief last summer!”

Sheehan was quoted as saying at the time: “I now know he’s sincere about wanting freedom for the Iraqis. I know he’s sorry and feels some pain for our loss. And I know he’s a man of faith.”

In response, Vacaville Reporter editor Diane Barney on Tuesday wrote an article that criticized the Drudge account, saying that it failed to note Sheehan’s stated reservations about the war before and after the meeting with Bush.

“Clearly, Cindy Sheehan’s outrage was festering even then,” Barney wrote.

As for Sheehan, the Institute for Public Accuracy issued a statement on Monday in which Sheehan was quoted as saying she was “still in shock” at the time.

“We had decided not to criticize the president then because during that meeting he assured us ‘this is not political.’ And I believed him,” Sheehan was quoted as saying.

“Then, during the Republican National Convention, he exploited those meetings to justify what he was doing.”

Sheehan, a co-founder of the anti-war group Gold Star Families for Peace, has said that she will remain in Crawford until she gets to see Bush face to face.

Until a sudden cloudburst forced her to move to Peace House early yesterday morning, Sheehan had been camping in a tent along a road about two miles from Bush’s Prairie Chapel Ranch. On Saturday, the day she arrived in Crawford, two senior White House aides — national-security adviser Stephen Hadley and deputy chief of staff Joe Hagin — left the ranch to meet with her on a dusty road.

That, she said, was not satisfactory.

By last night, Sheehan had given so many interviews that she was sucking on lozenges to soothe an inflamed throat. Her ears were sore from cradling a telephone. Her media adviser, newly arrived from San Francisco, said Sheehan had developed a fever.

None of that stopped her. Whether talking to newspaper reporters, People magazine or radio and television interviewers — some from as far away as Japan — she was relentlessly on message.

“I don’t believe his phony excuses for the war,” she said of Bush in an interview with a CBS reporter. “I want him to tell me why my son died.

“If he gave the real answer, people in this country would be outraged — if he told people it was to make his buddies rich, that it was about oil … “

Sheehan is certainly not the first to denounce the president over the war. From the beginning, activists have been outspoken in criticizing Bush’s policy and his stated reasons for sending U.S. troops into Iraq.

For the moment however, the personal nature of Sheehan’s protest — with its edge of raw emotion — and the concentration of news media staked out in Crawford, where Bush is spending much of August, have combined to raise her voice above the crowd.

Charlie Cook, an independent political analyst, said: “Anything that focuses media and public attention on Iraq war casualties day after day — particularly [something] that is a good visual for television, like a weeping Gold Star mother — is a really bad thing for President Bush and his administration.

“Americans get a little numb by the numbers of war casualties, but when faces, names and families are added, it has a much greater effect,” he said.

Republican strategist Kellyanne Conway, president of the Washington-based firm The Polling Company, said: “Cindy Sheehan has tapped into a latent but fervent feeling among some in this country who would prefer that we not engage our troops in Iraq. She can tap into what has been an astonishingly silent minority since the end of last year’s presidential contest. It will capture attention.”

David Boaz is executive vice president of the Cato Institute (www.cato.org) and author of Libertarianism: A Primer.

What does Sen. George Allen (R-Va.) have in common with James Madison? Madison’s home is in the congressional district that Allen has represented in the House and Senate. And that’s about all.

Madison, the principal author of the U.S. Constitution, sought to establish a limited federal government. In arguing for its ratification, he promised Americans, “The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined.” A few years later, faced with a bill appropriating $15,000 for the relief of French refugees, he rose on the floor of the House to say that he could not “undertake to lay [his] finger on that article in the Federal Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents.”

That’s a far cry from the philosophy of George Allen, who has introduced a bill in the United States Senate to require official approval of any TV ratings system. Indeed, if Madison’s spirit could visit the Commerce Committee hearing room where Allen’s bill was discussed, it would probably say with some severity, “I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article in the Federal Constitution which granted a right to Congress to regulate television ratings.”

Allen is hardly the only member of Congress who would be a great disappointment to the Founders. For years, Republicans argued that the Democratic majority in Congress was intruding the federal government into more and more matters best left to the states, the local communities, or the private sector. After 10 years in power, however, the Republicans have seen the Democrats’ intrusiveness and raised them. The Republicans have pushed the feds further into the local schools with the No Child Left Behind Act and tried to take marriage law away from the states with the Federal Marriage Amendment. They overruled a series of Florida courts in the Terri Schiavo case, imposing the massive power of the federal government on a tragic family matter.

But it’s not just these big-ticket items. Republicans have come down with a serious case of Potomac Fever. They believe that their every passing thought is a proper subject for federal legislation. They hold three-ring-circus hearings on steroids in baseball. They sharply increase the fines for alleged indecency on television. They hold hearings on whether college textbooks are too expensive. They threaten to punish Major League Baseball if the owners allow left-wing billionaire George Soros to be a part owner of the new team in Washington. They vote for a federal investigation of the video game “Grand Theft Auto.”

Many of these gambits do target real annoyances and even real problems. But in a free society citizens don’t turn to the national government to solve every problem. Indeed, a free society is measured by the amount of life that remains outside the control of government. We may all be tempted from time to time to say “There oughta be a law!” when we’re angry or frustrated. That’s why we write a Constitution — to protect us from our own temptations to turn our exasperation into laws, and to protect us from our fellow citizens yielding to the same temptation.

Republicans took control of Congress in 1994 by declaring that Democrats had given us “government that is too big, too intrusive, and too easy with the public’s money.” Now, intoxicated with their own power, they have forgotten those words. They too use the powers of the federal government to lavish money on favored constituents, summon us before congressional hearings to explain ourselves, and intrude into our most local and personal decisions.

When Major League Baseball owners suggested that Congress had no authority to investigate steroid use, committee chairman Tom Davis (R-Va.) and ranking Democrat Henry Waxman replied that the committee “may at any time conduct investigations of any matter.” So much for Madison’s promise that those powers “delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined.”

Armed men entered Baghdad’s municipal building during a blinding dust storm on Monday, deposed the city’s mayor and installed a member of Iraq’s most powerful Shiite militia.

In continuing violence, the United States military announced today that four American soldiers were killed on Tuesday and six others were wounded when insurgents attacked a patrol near Baiji in northern Iraq. Two Iraqi policemen and four civilians were killed in a suicide car bombing in western Baghdad, the Interior Ministry said.

The deposed mayor, Alaa al-Tamimi, who was not in his offices at the time, recounted the events in a telephone interview on Tuesday and called the move a municipal coup d’état. He added that he had gone into hiding for fear of his life.

“This is the new Iraq,” said Mr. Tamimi, a secular engineer with no party affiliation. “They use force to achieve their goal.”

The group that ousted him insisted that it had the authority to assume control of Iraq’s capital city and that Mr. Tamimi was in no danger. The man the group installed, Hussein al-Tahaan, is a member of the Badr Organization, the armed militia of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, known as Sciri.

The militia has been credited with keeping the peace in heavily Shiite areas in southern Iraq but also accused of abuses like forcing women to wear the veils demanded by conservative Shiite religious law.

“If we wanted to do something bad to him, we would have done that,” said Mazen A. Makkia, the elected city council chief who led the ouster on Monday and who had been in a lengthy and unresolved legal feud with Mr. Tamimi.

“We really want to establish the state of law for every citizen, and we did not threaten anyone,” Mr. Makkia said. “This is not a coup.”

Mr. Makkia confirmed that he had entered the building with armed men but said that they were bodyguards for him and several other council members who accompanied him. Witnesses estimated that the number of armed men ranged from 50 to 120. Mr. Makkia is a member of a Shiite political party that swept to victory during the across-the-board Shiite successes during January’s elections.

Mr. Tamimi, the deposed mayor, was appointed by the central government and held ministerial rank. He was originally put in place by L. Paul Bremer III, the top American administrator in the country until an Iraqi government took over in June 2004.

Baghdad is the only city in Iraq that is its own province, and the city council had previously appointed Mr. Tahaan as governor of Baghdad province, with some responsibilities parallel to Mr. Tamimi’s. But the mayor’s office was clearly the more powerful office, a fact that proved to be a painful thorn in the side of Mr. Makkia, who believed that the council, which he controls, should hold sway in Baghdad.

Mr. Makkia provided a phone number for Mr. Tahaan, but the phone did not appear to be turned on. A spokesman for the American Embassy in Baghdad said that he was aware of the developments but that he had no immediate comment.

When asked whether the Iraqi prime minister, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, a politician with another Shiite Islamic party, Dawa, was concerned about developments at the municipality, a spokesman, Laith Kubba, said, “My guess is, yes, he is.”

Mr. Kubba said he had not yet had a chance to talk with the prime minister about the issue. But gave clear indications that the prime minister would not stand in the way of the move.

Weeks ago, Mr. Tamimi had offered to resign or retire, saying that the budget he had been given was not adequate. For a city of six million people, the central government had given him a budget of $85 million; he had requested $1 billion.

As of Tuesday, the prime minister still had not formally accepted the offer, Mr. Kubba said. But he said the offer could be used to find a way to formally remove Mr. Tamimi.

“It’s more or less a fait accompli that he’s not going back to office,” Mr. Kubba said. He added that Mr. Tahaan would be considered an interim mayor until the prime minister settled on someone to take the post permanently.

Leaders of the country’s major political parties, meanwhile, resumed a summit meeting to break the deadlock over Iraq’s new constitution, which was delayed by the same sandstorm on Monday.

The deadline for the constitution is in five days and the parties have so far failed to resolve several crucial issues like the role of Islam in the government, the future of the ethnically mixed and oil-rich city of Kirkuk and the scope of self-rule for regions outside Iraqi Kurdistan.

After the meeting, the Iraqi president, Jalal Talabani, said discussion focused mainly on the issue of autonomy and the distribution of oil revenues. He expressed confidence that the group would complete the constitution on time, but added, “As the English people would say, the devil is in the details.”

The four American soldiers killed in northern Iraq on Tuesday were under the command of the 42nd Infantry Division of New York, the military said today. Six others were wounded in the attack.

The three Iraqi policemen were members of a group on patrol in the western Baghdad suburb of Ghazaliya, an Interior Ministry official said. A fourth officer was wounded.

Insurgents also fired a mortar round into Antar Square in the Adamiya neighborhood, killing a traffic policeman and wounding seven other people, the ministry official said.

In other violence on Tuesday, an American soldier was killed and two were wounded when a car bomb exploded as a patrol passed through a crowded square in central Baghdad, the military said. An official at the Interior Ministry said at least three civilians were killed and 54 wounded in the same blast. Mortars landed near a mosque in southern Baghdad, killing two civilians and wounding four, the official said.

At least nine security officials were killed in four separate shooting incidents around Baghdad on Tuesday. An American marine was killed by small-arms fire on Monday in Ramadi, west of Baghdad, the military said.

In Washington, Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld said Tuesday that Iran had become a conduit for weapons smuggled into Iraq and used by insurgents, and he criticized Tehran for not doing more to prevent the smuggling.

“Weapons clearly, unambiguously from Iran have been found in Iraq,” he said at a Pentagon briefing. He added: “It’s a big border. It’s notably unhelpful for the Iranians to allow weapons of those types to cross the border.”

Defense officials have said recently that components and fully manufactured bombs from Iran began appearing about two months ago and that a large shipment was captured last month in northeast Iraq after coming across the border.

Mr. Rumsfeld’s comments were the first confirmation by a senior American official that such smuggling was occurring. Mr. Rumsfeld said it was not clear who in Iran was responsible for the shipments, which some specialists have said could be the work of smugglers or splinter insurgent groups, rather than the government of Iran.

Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, also said at the briefing that Iraqi and American forces have made arrests in Haditha, where 20 marines were killed in two ambushes last week, after tips from Iraqis in the area. “The public came forward and said these are the folks,” General Myers said.

Mr. Tamimi, the ousted mayor, said he believed that Shiite political parties had forced the takeover in Baghdad in order to position themselves for the elections once a constitution is agreed upon.

For his part, he said, he had lost the sense of enthusiasm that had brought him back to Iraq after nearly a decade in exile.

“When I left in 1995, every day, it is years for me,” Mr. Tamimi said. “But now when I leave I don’t think I will be sorry. I leave because I cannot live in such conditions.”

Dexter Filkins, Khalid al-Ansary and Kirk Semple contributed reporting from Baghdad for this article, and David S. Cloud from Washington.

VIENNA, Austria — Nuclear diplomacy can be as delicate a business as trying to defuse a bomb. Press too hard, and a regime suspected of trying to build atomic weaponry may harden its resolve and move its operations deeper underground. Back off too far, and a suspect nation feels it has a free hand.

Unwilling to use their weapon of last resort against Iran — reporting it to the U.N. Security Council, which could slap Tehran with crippling economic and political sanctions — diplomats held out hope Wednesday of negotiating an end to the standoff.

But with the Islamic republic already having spurned a European offer of economic and political incentives it won’t be easy, despite an offer by new hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to return to the bargaining table.

“They have to think, they have to return to negotiating — the temperature has to be lowered,” European Union foreign policy chief Javier Solana told the Spanish newspaper El Pais.

Iran raised the stakes Wednesday by breaking U.N. seals on its uranium conversion plant at Isfahan, resuming full operations at the facility despite U.S. and European calls to maintain a suspension.

The International Atomic Energy Agency’s 35-nation board of governors postponed Wednesday’s tentative session of an emergency meeting on the Iran crisis so diplomats could confer on the best way to deal with Tehran.

“They need more time,” IAEA spokesman Peter Rickwood said. Delegates continued private talks, and a resolution on the matter was expected to be taken up at a board meeting Thursday.

Reporting Iran to the Security Council might seem like the easiest and most effective measure. But getting consensus from the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency’s board, which includes nations like Brazil and Argentina that don’t want to see their own nuclear programs subject to restrictions, would be difficult if not impossible.

Among the more influential IAEA board members is Russia, which has a $800 million contract to build a reactor in the southern Iranian port city of Bushehr. Russia also is a permanent member of the Security Council, and — along with China — almost certainly would veto any move to sanction Iran.

“I don’t think that it’s something which is going to happen in the near future,” Algeria’s U.N. ambassador, Abdallah Baali, said when asked about a possible referral to the Security Council.

“It simply won’t fly,” said a Security Council diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity because he had no authorization from his government. “If you have one or two veto-power countries say `no,’ how can you expect anything to happen?”

The best that could be expected from the Security Council would be a resolution using strong language, without threatening or imposing sanctions, the diplomat said.

With little real risk of sanctions, Tehran may be gambling that it hold onto its nuclear program — which Iran says is only aimed at producing electricity — as long as it continues going through the motions of engaging in dialogue.

Still, envoys remained hopeful that Iran would reconsider the EU offer presented by Britain, France and Germany.

“We think it is still possible to negotiate. We are still reaching out our hand,” said French Foreign Minister Philippe Douste-Blazy.

The German government “hopes Iran will still take the sensible path and look seriously and constructively at the offer from the EU3 and return to the so-called ‘status quo ante,'” said Bela Anda, a spokesman for Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder.

“Negotiations, in the view of the government, are the only constructive way to a solution of this question,” Anda said. “In this way, the international community can feel confident in Iran’s statements that its nuclear program serves only peaceful intentions.”

Ahmadinejad’s indication of a willingness to continue negotiations with the Europeans threw a twist into efforts to end the standoff. So did his appointment of Ali Larijani, one of the most hard-line elements in the Islamic government, to head the negotiations.

President Bush greeted the offer as a positive sign, though he cautioned that if Iran does not cooperate, U.N. sanctions are “a potential consequence.”

The choice, State Department spokesman Adam Ereli said, “is Iran’s to make.”

“There is a lot of rhetoric — the arrival of a new president has contributed as well,” Solana said. “National pride is being appealed to and it is very difficult to make the first decision giving way on the nuclear issue. We have to be firm … and make Iran see that it has taken the wrong decision.”

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Associated Press Writer Edith M. Lederer at the United Nations contributed to this report. William J. Kole is Vienna bureau chief for The Associated Press.