Revealed: US dirty tricks to win vote on Iraq war
Secret document details American plan to bug phones and emails of key Security Council members

by Martin Bright, Ed Vulliamy in New York and Peter Beaumont

The United States is conducting a secret 'dirty tricks' campaign against UN Security Council delegations in
New York as part of its battle to win votes in favour of war against Iraq.
    Details of the aggressive surveillance operation, which involves interception of the home and office
telephones and the emails of UN delegates in New York, are revealed in a document leaked to The Observer.
    The disclosures were made in a memorandum written by a top official at the National Security Agency - the
US body which intercepts communications around the world - and circulated to both senior agents in his
organisation and to a friendly foreign intelligence agency asking for its input.
    The memo describes orders to staff at the agency, whose work is clouded in secrecy, to step up its
surveillance operations 'particularly directed at... UN Security Council Members (minus US and GBR, of
course)' to provide up-to-the-minute intelligence for Bush officials on the voting intentions of UN members
regarding the issue of Iraq.
    The leaked memorandum makes clear that the target of the heightened surveillance efforts are the
delegations from Angola, Cameroon, Chile, Mexico, Guinea and Pakistan at the UN headquarters in New York
- the so-called 'Middle Six' delegations whose votes are being fought over by the pro-war party, led by the
US and Britain, and the party arguing for more time for UN inspections, led by France, China and Russia.
    The memo is directed at senior NSA officials and advises them that the agency is 'mounting a surge' aimed
at gleaning information not only on how delegations on the Security Council will vote on any second
resolution on Iraq, but also 'policies', 'negotiating positions', 'alliances' and 'dependencies' - the 'whole
gamut of information that could give US policymakers an edge in obtaining results favourable to US goals or
to head off surprises'.
    Dated 31 January 2003, the memo was circulated four days after the UN's chief weapons inspector Hans
Blix produced his interim report on Iraqi compliance with UN resolution 1441.
    It was sent by Frank Koza, chief of staff in the 'Regional Targets' section of the NSA, which spies on
countries that are viewed as strategically important for United States interests.
    Koza specifies that the information will be used for the US's 'QRC' - Quick Response Capability - 'against'
the key delegations.
    Suggesting the levels of surveillance of both the office and home phones of UN delegation members, Koza
also asks regional managers to make sure that their staff also 'pay attention to existing non-UN Security
Council Member UN-related and domestic comms [office and home telephones] for anything useful related
to Security Council deliberations'.
    Koza also addresses himself to the foreign agency, saying: 'We'd appreciate your support in getting the
word to your analysts who might have similar more indirect access to valuable information from accesses in
your product lines [ie, intelligence sources].' Koza makes clear it is an informal request at this juncture, but
adds: 'I suspect that you'll be hearing more along these lines in formal channels.'
    Disclosure of the US operation comes in the week that Blix will make what many expect to be his final report
to the Security Council.
    It also comes amid increasingly threatening noises from the US towards undecided countries on the
Security Council who have been warned of the unpleasant economic consequences of standing up to the
US.
    Sources in Washington familiar with the operation said last week that there had been a division among Bush
administration officials over whether to pursue such a high-intensity surveillance campaign with some
warning of the serious consequences of discovery.
    The existence of the surveillance operation, understood to have been requested by President Bush's
National Security Adviser, Condoleezza Rice, is deeply embarrassing to the Americans in the middle of their
efforts to win over the undecided delegations.
    The language and content of the memo were judged to be authentic by three former intelligence operatives
shown it by The Observer. We were also able to establish that Frank Koza does work for the NSA and could
confirm his senior post in the Regional Targets section of the organisation.
    The NSA main switchboard put The Observer through to extension 6727 at the agency which was answered
by an assistant, who confirmed it was Koza's office. However, when The Observer asked to talk to Koza
about the surveillance of diplomatic missions at the United Nations, it was then told 'You have reached the
wrong number'.
    On protesting that the assistant had just said this was Koza's extension, the assistant repeated that it was
an erroneous extension, and hung up.
    While many diplomats at the UN assume they are being bugged, the memo reveals for the first time the
scope and scale of US communications intercepts targeted against the New York-based missions.
    The disclosure comes at a time when diplomats from the countries have been complaining about the
outright 'hostility' of US tactics in recent days to persuade then to fall in line, including threats to economic
and aid packages.
    The operation appears to have been spotted by rival organisations in Europe. 'The Americans are being very
purposeful about this,' said a source at a European intelligence agency when asked about the US
surveillance efforts.

COURTESY JOHN COULTHART!

Diplomat Resigns, Protesting 'Our Fervent Pursuit of War'
By FELICITY BARRINGER

UNITED NATIONS, Feb. 26 — A career diplomat who has served in United States embassies from Tel Aviv to Casablanca to Yerevan resigned this week in protest against the country's policies on Iraq.
    The diplomat, John Brady Kiesling, the political counselor at the United States Embassy in Athens, said in his resignation letter, "Our fervent pursuit of war with Iraq is driving us to squander the international legitimacy that has been America's most potent weapon of both offense and defense since the days of Woodrow Wilson."
    Mr. Kiesling, 45, who has been a diplomat for about 20 years, said in a telephone interview tonight that he faxed the letter to Secretary of State Colin L, Powell on Monday after informing Thomas Miller, the ambassador in Athens, of his decision.
    He said he had acted alone, but "I've been comforted by the expressions of support I've gotten afterward" from colleagues.
    "No one has any illusions that the policy will be changed," he said. "Too much has been invested in the war."
    Louis Fintor, a State Department spokesman, said he had no information on Mr. Kiesling's decision and it was department policy not to comment on personnel matters.
    In his letter, a copy of which was provided to The New York Times by a friend of Mr. Kiesling's, the diplomat wrote Mr. Powell: "We should ask ourselves why we have failed to persuade more of the world that a war with Iraq is necessary. We have over the past two years done too much to assert to our world partners that narrow and mercenary U.S. interests override the cherished values of our partners."
    His letter continued: "Even where our aims were not in question, our consistency is at issue. The model of Afghanistan is little comfort to allies wondering on what basis we plan to rebuild the Middle East, and in whose image and interests."
    It is rare but not unheard-of for a diplomat, immersed in the State Department's culture of public support for policy, regardless of private feelings, to resign with this kind of public blast. From 1992 to 1994, five State Department officials quit out of frustration with the Clinton administration's Balkans policy.
    Asked if his views were widely shared among his diplomatic colleagues, Mr. Kiesling said: "No one of my colleagues is comfortable with our policy. Everyone is moving ahead with it as good and loyal. The State Department is loaded with people who want to play the team game — we have a very strong premium on loyalty."
 

Following is the text of John Brady Kiesling's letter of resignation to Secretary of State Colin L. Powell.

Dear Mr. Secretary:

I am writing you to submit my resignation from the Foreign Service of the United States and from my position as Political Counselor in U.S. Embassy Athens, effective March 7. I do so with a heavy heart. The baggage of my upbringing included a felt obligation to give something back to my country. Service as a U.S. diplomat was a dream job. I was paid to understand foreign languages and cultures, to seek out diplomats, politicians, scholars and journalists, and to persuade them that U.S. interests and theirs fundamentally coincided. My faith in my country and its values was the most powerful weapon in my diplomatic arsenal.
    It is inevitable that during twenty years with the State Department I would become more sophisticated and cynical about the narrow and selfish bureaucratic motives that sometimes shaped our policies. Human nature is what it is, and I was rewarded and promoted for understanding human nature. But until this Administration it had been possible to believe that by upholding the policies of my president I was also upholding the interests of the American people and the world. I believe it no longer.
    The policies we are now asked to advance are incompatible not only with American values but also with American interests. Our fervent pursuit of war with Iraq is driving us to squander the international legitimacy that has been America’s most potent weapon of both offense and defense since the days of Woodrow Wilson. We have begun to dismantle the largest and most effective web of international relationships the world has ever known. Our current course will bring instability and danger, not security.
    The sacrifice of global interests to domestic politics and to bureaucratic self-interest is nothing new, and it is certainly not a uniquely American problem. Still, we have not seen such systematic distortion of intelligence, such systematic manipulation of American opinion, since the war in Vietnam. The September 11 tragedy left us stronger than before, rallying around us a vast international coalition to cooperate for the first time in a systematic way against the threat of terrorism. But rather than take credit for those successes and build on them, this Administration has chosen to make terrorism a domestic political tool, enlisting a scattered and largely defeated Al Qaeda as its bureaucratic ally. We spread disproportionate terror and confusion in the public mind, arbitrarily linking the unrelated problems of terrorism and Iraq. The result, and perhaps the motive, is to justify a vast misallocation of shrinking public wealth to the military and to weaken the safeguards that protect American citizens from the heavy hand of government. September 11 did not do as much damage to the fabric of American society as we seem determined to so to ourselves. Is the Russia of the late Romanovs really our model, a selfish, superstitious empire thrashing toward self-destruction in the name of a doomed status quo?
    We should ask ourselves why we have failed to persuade more of the world that a war with Iraq is necessary. We have over the past two years done too much to assert to our world partners that narrow and mercenary U.S. interests override the cherished values of our partners. Even where our aims were not in question, our consistency is at issue. The model of Afghanistan is little comfort to allies wondering on what basis we plan to rebuild the Middle East, and in whose image and interests. Have we indeed become blind, as Russia is blind in Chechnya, as Israel is blind in the Occupied Territories, to our own advice, that overwhelming military power is not the answer to terrorism? After the shambles of post-war Iraq joins the shambles in Grozny and Ramallah, it will be a brave foreigner who forms ranks with Micronesia to follow where we lead.
    We have a coalition still, a good one. The loyalty of many of our friends is impressive, a tribute to American moral capital built up over a century. But our closest allies are persuaded less that war is justified than that it would be perilous to allow the U.S. to drift into complete solipsism. Loyalty should be reciprocal. Why does our President condone the swaggering and contemptuous approach to our friends and allies this Administration is fostering, including among its most senior officials. Has “oderint dum metuant” really become our motto?
    I urge you to listen to America’s friends around the world. Even here in Greece, purported hotbed of European anti-Americanism, we have more and closer friends than the American newspaper reader can possibly imagine. Even when they complain about American arrogance, Greeks know that the world is a difficult and dangerous place, and they want a strong international system, with the U.S. and EU in close partnership. When our friends are afraid of us rather than for us, it is time to worry. And now they are afraid. Who will tell them convincingly that the United States is as it was, a beacon of liberty, security, and justice for the planet?
    Mr. Secretary, I have enormous respect for your character and ability. You have preserved more international credibility for us than our policy deserves, and salvaged something positive from the excesses of an ideological and self-serving Administration. But your loyalty to the President goes too far. We are straining beyond its limits an international system we built with such toil and treasure, a web of laws, treaties, organizations, and shared values that sets limits on our foes far more effectively than it ever constrained America’s ability to defend its interests.
    I am resigning because I have tried and failed to reconcile my conscience with my ability to represent the current U.S. Administration. I have confidence that our democratic process is ultimately self-correcting, and hope that in a small way I can contribute from outside to shaping policies that better serve the security and prosperity of the American people and the world we share.

Crazy Like a Genius, a Weird, Foxy One
By ROBERTA SMITH

With the stunning retrospective of the work of the artist-composer-poet Adolf Wölfli at the American Folk Art Museum, the distinction between insider and outsider art should finally be declared null and void. May it rest undisturbed.
    Wölfli, who died in 1930 at the age of 66, spent the last 35 years of his life and his entire artistic career at Waldau, a mental asylum in Bern, Switzerland. There he created an enormous body of ornate, densely patterned drawings whose incantatory power, formal scope and cultural richness defy category.
    Carefully numbered, dated and assembled into big handbound books, these drawings are embedded with images, written texts, mathematical calculations, musical scores and geometric symbols. They are pocked with round, repeating faces — male, female, haloed, horned, masked or completely darkened with Al Jolson black face — that survey, witness or oversee the unfolding dramas of the drawings, or simply stare out at us, demonstrating the attention their world demands.
    Wölfli's creations treat the eye to a roller-coaster ride through a terrain bounded by Piranesi, biblical myth, illuminated manuscripts, tantric mandalas and Swiss cuckoo clocks — in other words, a dizzying multi-cultural universe. Evocations of peasant furniture decoration as well as embroidery and appliqué (so many stitchlike dotted lines), the Alps and Bern's cityscape jostle with intimations of Japanese maps, Islamic tile work and religious architecture of all denominations. The mix verifies both Wölfli's carefully observed surroundings and Jung's theory of the collective unconscious.
    Wölfli's achievement belongs to a worldwide tradition of multidimensional art merging reading and looking; it spans Chinese scrolls, Persian calligraphy, William Blake, Cubism, Russian Constructivism, Conceptual Art and, now, a host of young multimedia artists and poets.
    "Manifold journeys, adventures, ac-ci-dents, hunts and other experiences of someone lost, on and around the whole globe," was one of the many ways the artist put it in his autobiography, "From the Cradle to the Grave," which numbers nearly 3,000 lavishly illustrated pages.
    In other ways, Wölfli seems to have been the paradigmatic modern artist from hell and, strangely, his artistic persona may equal in importance his mind-boggling creative outpouring. By approximating the tiresome Western ideal of the alpha-male genius, he inadvertently obliterates the even more tiresome distinction between the uncontaminated outsider artist driven by inner necessity and the self-conscious if not calculating insider.
    Barrel-chested, with meaty forearms and an upright carriage, Wölfli was as self-absorbed, manipulative and grandiose as the best of them. It is hardly surprising that he glares forth from photographs with an imperiousness worthy of Picasso and Gauguin, both of whom he resembled. He hated to part with work, but willingly made smaller pieces, which he called bread drawings, specifically for sale or trade, and continued making them when newer styles proved less popular.
    He fervently believed in capital and incremental increases in wealth. "Calculation of Interest," a large drawing on the middle level of the three-floor exhibition at the American Folk Art Museum, consists of several columns of figures partitioned by a large plain cross, whose center is a diamond-shaped medallion showing a vivid little face behind bars.
    If Wölfli was certifiably crazy — diagnosed with delusional schizophrenia — it is hard not to think that he was also crazy like a fox. His life conforms rather closely to those modern masters who withdrew into a sanctuary, their every need taken care of, insulated partly by wealth and fame, but mostly by a mixture of ego, paranoia and, very often, poor interpersonal skills. Picasso, Balthus, Dalí and Donald Judd come to mind. Wölfli may have suspected that he had it good. As time passed he became fearful that his doctors might find him fit enough to be released, and he began to claim repeatedly that he was, by far, the sickest patient at Waldau.
    But while his life ended with optimal artistic working conditions, it began with enough trauma to render one either creative or catatonic. Orphaned at the age of 8, Wölfli spent his childhood in dire poverty, working as a hireling on farms, with little contact with eight older siblings. He excelled at school, which he completed when he was 15, and supported himself as a day laborer. His life began to unravel in 1882 when the parents of the woman he loved refused to let them marry, a heartbreaking experience that scarred him permanently. In 1895 he was sent to Waldau, after his third unsuccessful attempt to molest a young girl.
    During his first years at Waldau, Wölfli was prone to fits of rage and physical violence. But in 1899 he took up drawing and his outbursts gradually ceased. He began to expand his personal trauma into cosmology only somewhat more blatantly autobiographical and self-glorifying than many artistic statements. Starring himself — St. Adolf-Giant-Creation, Emperor Adolf, or Adolf II — it presents a universe of dense fretwork that is regularly punctuated by literal, heavily framed cameo appearances by regal, godlike personages, folksy couples and jaunty young women. The last can be depicted as saints, countesses or herdswomen, who lift their skirts to reveal round calves, dainty boots and sometimes more.
    There are Roman arches, Gothic spires and windows — sometimes barred — through which one can glimpse his raucous cast of characters and masks galore. Wölfli seems never to have met a corner of paper that couldn't accommodate a mouth and eyes.
    In 1904, Wölfli's doctors began to save and study his drawings, which eventually attracted the interest of Jung and other psychiatrists, as well as artists like André Breton, Meret Oppenheim and Jean Dubuffet. After his death, Wölfli's work figured prominently in Dubuffet's Art Brut manifesto and collection, but otherwise received little attention until 1972, when the Swiss curator Harald Szeemann, working with Theodor Spoerri, a young doctor at Waldau, presented a selection of the bread drawings at Documenta 5 in Kassel, Germany.
    In 1973, after the Documenta success and Spoerri's death, Wölfli's books and drawings and some cabinets he had been commissioned to decorate were transferred from Waldau to Bern's Museum of Fine Arts. There, his achievement was tended by Spoerri's widow, Elke, an art historian of 20th-century work who devoted her life to cataloging, decoding and interpreting it. With Dieter Schwarz, she edited "From the Cradle to the Grave," whose publication, in German in 1986, brought Wölfli's literary achievement to light. Mrs. Spoerri died last year, just as she and Daniel Baumann, her successor as head of the Wölfli Foundation at the Bern museum, finished organizing this exhibition. It is accompanied by a detailed catalog with essays by Mrs. Spoerri, Mr. Baumann and Edward M. Gomez.
    Countering the myth that outsider artists obsessively repeat a limited set of motifs and do not develop, the 105 works in "St. Adolf-Giant-Creation: The Art of Adolf Wölfli" at the American Folk Art Museum present Wölfli's art as a fairly constant surge of change and variation from 1904 to the late 1920's. It is a tale of dense, almost claustrophobic, ornamentation giving way to freer compositions and finally to pages of flowing script where the cameos are supplied by collaged images cut from magazines at the asylum.
    At the same time, it moves from exquisitely shaded renderings in the grisaille of graphite to works in colored pencil and crayon, whose bright tones often seem lighted from within, like the yellow-to-red bird motifs in "The San Salvador," the largest work in the exhibition. Somehow it seems fitting that Wölfli's tighter compositions, like "Pandulen Waterfall" have concentric curves and tubular elements that can bring to mind big, old-fashioned juke boxes, and that his freer ones, "The Southern Third of the Kingdom of Spain," for example, often jut this way and that like the ground plan of a pinball machine.
    But in all of Wölfli's works the eye and mind bounce back and forth between the real and the imagined, between the twin clocks on the tower in Bern's marketplace and the coiling ornamentation on the structure that, followed upward, turns into a serpent, chewing on the foot of one of Wölfli's heroes. And yet, at the core, it is reality, both psychic and physical, that prevails.
    Ultimately, it seems that the central subject, and form, of Wölfli's art is the tension between containment and freedom, between the exuberant but closed patterns and the limited glimpses of the world beyond, whether remembered or imagined. In the end, it was the structure, the compartmentalization, that enabled Wölfli to master so many different forms of communication, to allow them all to speak at once, and yet be heard.
    In many ways, the single most important motif in Wölfli's art is the malleable semi-abstract bird shape found everywhere: along the borders, at the centers, in the hands of his figures or curling around their heads, filling the interstices between house gables — a constant, cushioning, comforting presence. Rendered as a sinuous tube shape, with front feet, an eye, a simple point for a beak and a second hole that may be an ear, this animal seems as furry as it is feathered and bears a touching resemblance to a guinea pig. But it symbolizes a creature sharp of eye and filled with song, who can journey everywhere and see everything, which is exactly what Wölfli, reaching out to the world from Waldau, seemed to do.

From today's New York Times

A Call to Guitars as War Looms
By NEIL STRAUSS

The first time Barbara Dane recalls performing was at a demonstration outside a
segregated restaurant in Detroit, her hometown, in the 1940's. In the 50's she
sang for civil rights and workers' rights. In the 60's she sang in North and
South Vietnam during the war, was one of the first American musicians to tour
post-revolutionary Cuba and performed at clandestine meetings of soldiers
resisting the war.
    Wherever history was unfolding, Ms. Dane seemed to be there. Along the way, she
accumulated fans like Louis Armstrong, Jack Teagarden, Jane Fonda (naturally)
and Lightnin' Hopkins, with whom she recorded.
    "Music doesn't desert you, and musicians don't desert music," she said
yesterday, speaking by telephone. "It will take you through your whole life in
fine style."
    Now as a war with Iraq looms, Ms. Dane, at 75, is being called into action
again. On Saturday evening at Joe's Pub at the Joseph Papp Public Theater in
Manhattan, she and other musicians are scheduled to play songs from "The Vietnam
Songbook," a collection of protest music she compiled in 1969 with her husband,
Irwin Silber, who edited the influential folk magazine Sing Out! The songbook
collected compositions from all over the world, making the case that the protest
movement was universal.
    Ms. Dane recalled performing songs like the "Ballad of Ho Chi Minh," Ewan
MacColl's sympathetic ode to the president of North Vietnam, to soldiers who had
just returned from the war. "They'd be a bit stunned, but they'd just sing
along," she said. "In those days I had strategies for introducing their own
history to them. Most of them were 18-to-20-year-old guys who didn't know that
we had a history of struggle and songs that go with that. So you would have to
get them to see that nothing is new. You have to stand up for what you believe
in. If you don't, what are you?"
    The tribute at Joe's Pub is Ms. Dane's first performance in Manhattan since the
70's. The event was organized by two New York musicians and producers, Kim
Rancourt and Don Fleming, both in their late 40's. Though both were obsessive
music fans, neither was very familiar with Ms. Dane or her work. This is partly
because Ms. Dane rejected the path to stardom. Long before she made records with
titles like "I Hate Capitalism" she was courted by the rock manager Albert
Grossman. In 1960, before he represented Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin or Peter, Paul
and Mary, he came to Ms. Dane.
    "There are moments when you're making a choice that you know is going to
influence the future," she said. "One of those moments was when Albert Grossman
asked me to join his stable."
    At the time Ms. Dane's priorities were politics, music and her children, not
necessarily business and career. "He said, `Call me when you get your priorities
straight,' " she remembered. "I said that I had them straight. When you reach
age 75 and you look back, I don't have a regret in the world. Every time I made
one of those moves, it made me feel stronger and more committed to what I was
doing."
    So now, four decades later, Mr. Fleming was working at the archives of the
folklorist Alan Lomax in Manhattan when Mr. Rancourt came by. On the shelf, he
pulled out "The Vietnam Songbook."
    "It was terrific, but I had never seen it before," Mr. Rancourt recalled. "I
thought that reviving it would make a wonderful project because not only did it
collect traditional, classic American protest songs, but it was also from the
North Vietnamese point of view. And that led me to my study of Barbara Dane.
Though I was from Detroit and thought I knew a lot about music in general, I
knew little about her. I wanted to bring her to New York and show everybody what
a marvelous career she has had."
    Beyond the protest music, Ms. Dane is an accomplished jazz and blues singer,
though she has also sung everything from gospel to Greek music to Yiddish songs.
The number of figures she worked or performed with is staggering: Muddy Waters,
Clara Ward, Earl Hines and Lenny Bruce, for starters.
    "People have asked me so often over the years: `Are you a folk singer? Are you a
blues singer? What are you?' " said Ms. Dane, who lives in Berkeley. "The point
is, you don't have to choose. Any form you have to communicate with in a given
situation is legitimate. So I'll just pick up whatever it is and use it. I'm not
going to be labeled and I'm not going to be boxed."
    One example of her versatility is "Insubordination," a call-and-response song
she considers perfect for rallies. "I used it a lot because I could do it with
clapping, or if I happened to have a tambourine," she said. "I didn't need a
guitar. So if they started pushing the crowd, I could run away. I didn't have to
worry about my instrument getting broken or anything."
    Ms. Dane plans to perform "Insubordination" at Joe's Pub along with other songs
that she says still apply: "Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?," from the
Depression, and "What Are You Gonna Do When There Ain't No Jazz," about
Prohibition. Also performing on the bill are other voices of the 60's, like Tuli
Kupferberg of the Fugs, Vietnam veterans like Watermelon Slim and Joe Bangert
and younger musicians like Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth, Dean Wareham of Luna,
Jenni Muldaur, Lenny Kaye and Stephan Smith.
    With the American war machine gearing up again over the voices of protesters
around the world, Ms. Dane does not feel her previous work has been in vain. She
remains committed and eloquent.
    "We're probably not going to live to see the solutions to the problems that we
have to sing about or combat," she said. "We're not going to see a ready-made
answer or things fall into place. The world doesn't work that way. But it's so
much more fulfilling to be part of the side that expresses life."

COURTESY SHAWN M.!

This is the end of a beautiful friendship

Alan Little
Tuesday February 25, 2003
The Guardian

Lyndon Johnson is not normally a poster boy for the American right. But Washington has become fond of repeating one of his rare quips. In 1966, when De Gaulle kicked Nato out of France, he called Johnson on the telephone and told him that he wanted all US soldiers removed from French soil. Johnson replied: "Does that include those buried in it?"
    America is feeling very superior about the 20th century and - to paraphrase Churchill - it has a lot to feel superior about. These days you can taste the disdain in the clean, cold DC air. The dominant national narrative is simple and appealing: "We bailed you out twice, selflessly, and now, in our hour of need, you don't have the guts to come to our aid. Fine. See if we care."
    The long, dark months between September 1939 (Nazi invasion of Poland) and December 1941 (Pearl Harbour) have disappeared from this narrative. There is no mention of the plain fact that when Czechoslovakia, Poland, Belgium, Holland, France and the Balkan peninsula fell like dominoes to the Nazi juggernaut, American public opinion was uniformly hostile to US involvement in a "European civil war".
    No mention of the summer of 1940, when it seemed that even Britain would succumb. No mention that Churchill begged the US to come off the fence. No mention that he even stated it in terms of America's own security interests: if the Nazis invade Britain and get hold of the British naval fleet, he told Washington, then the US itself would be no match for the combined might of the Axis powers. No mention that the US ambassador in London, Joseph Kennedy, repeatedly warned the British that continued resistance was futile, repeatedly urged Churchill to reach a deal with Hitler, repeatedly told the White House that the British prime minister was a drunk and a dangerous fantasist.
    No mention that when Franklin Roosevelt laid the foundations for what would in 1942 become a decisive US intervention in the fate of Europe - the rebuilding of the US armed forces, the lend-lease deal - he had to do so almost covertly, disguising what he was doing from a hostile public, swimming, just as Tony Blair is now, against the tide of opinion at home. No mention that in November 1940 Churchill sat alone in the cabinet war rooms waiting for the result of the US presidential election, and finally greeting the news of Roosevelt's re-election with what he called "indescribable relief".
    Churchill placed his faith in the eventual engagement of the US in the security of Europe, and in the end it paid off. America, he famously said, can be relied upon to do the right thing - but only after exhausting all other available options.
    The dominant US narrative simplifies and misconstrues the transatlantic relationship. There is wilful misrepresentation. It worries a lot of old cold warriors - men such Laurence Eagleburger, who was briefly secretary of state to George Bush Sr. He is no dove but he doesn't like this new mood. "I want the United States to be amenable to the wisdom of, say, the foreign minister of the Czech Republic," he told me a couple of weeks ago. "But it's just not going to happen any more."
    The mood is a reflection of what is happening militarily. Donald Rumsfeld came to the department of defence promising not reform, not expansion, but something much more radical than all of these: "transformation". In defence circles the buzz word is "integration". The four traditional wings of the US armed forces - army, navy, air force and Marines - will stop the infighting to which they have been so attached. Their equipment will be integrated. Their command and control structures will be integrated. They will be hi-tech. Their planes will be unmanned - aircraft bombing targets in the Gulf will be piloted by a man sitting in the Pentagon, working shifts and going home to his wife and kids at the end of his day. Everyone talks about US "power projection" - and it will be awesome. "The only thing I regret about this coming war" one defence adviser to the Pentagon told me this month, "is that we're fighting it two or three years too early. By 2006/2007 we could really show them".
    Be under no illusion. This brave new world is already in the making. And no matter how desirable allies may be politically, there is no role for them militarily. The rest of us cannot keep pace with this transformation. We will not commit the money. We lack the vision. Our armed forces, no matter how willing to engage, will simply not be up to it. We will not be "integrated". One former aide to Rumsfeld put it like this: "There will come a time soon when the allies presence on the battlefield will not just be useless, but positively dangerous. They'll be in the way." And then he added "There is of course one exception to this. Israel."
    So get ready for what could be the last war of the post-1945 way of doing things. The last one we get to take part in. And be aware that as the post-1945 military alliance slips away, so too might a partnership that transformed our world half a century ago.
    For we Europeans are misconstruing - wilfully misinterpreting - the Americans too. Bush is a gun-slinging Texan surrounded by "stupid white men". Not true. Emphatically, manifestly, demonstrably not true. "Don't misread the language our leaders use," Eagleburger implored me. "We are not good at nuance. Maybe we are not a nuanced people."
    I don't hear much nuance in Europe either. For just as George Bush's wild-west allusions offend European ears, the tone of effortless superiority, dripping as it is with self-righteous disdain, that crosses the Atlantic in the opposite direction, bewilders and alienates America. Where, thoughtful, progressive, decent America would like to know, is Europe's memory? Not of how we bailed you out militarily, but of how we stuck with you through the dismal years of postwar austerity?
    For what is happening now in Germany - a nation emerging from the decades of enforced division and enforced silence on international and military affairs - is the latest phase in the long, post-1945 normalisation of Germany, the Europeanisation of Germany. And it is substantially an American achievement. It was Washington that underwrote early progress toward European integration. When six European nations formed the European Coal and Steel Community - the forerunner of the EU - prime minister Clement Atlee described them as "six countries, four of whom we had to rescue from the other two."
    The rebuilding of Europe - militarily, politically, economically, culturally - was underwritten by a US that was engaged in nothing less than our deliverance. Its creator, George C Marshall, whom Churchill described as the architect of the allied victory and the salvation of Europe, is largely forgotten. His life's achievement is enormous. It transformed our world. But in this country there is no biography of him in print. There ought to be a statue in Trafalgar Square. He ought to be in the national curriculum.
    The transatlantic dialogue - a dialogue of mutual disdain and despair - is going to change our world. These are the dog days of the Atlantic partnership. Get ready, in the deserts of Iraq, for its last huzzah.

·Allan Little is a BBC presenter and reporter.

COURTESY JOHN P.

Last gasp for the American dream

JG Ballard on Mike Davis's vivid indictment of the social and environmental chaos enveloping urban America,
Dead Cities

Saturday February 22, 2003
The Guardian

Dead Cities
by Mike Davis
432pp, The New Press, £16.95

Is the era of American influence drawing to a close, despite the nation's vast military and economic power?
Reading Dead Cities, one feels that a moral blow was struck at the United States on September 11, a deep
thrust to its dream of itself. Still trapped in the 20th century, when carrier fleets and nuclear weapons
cowed entire hemispheres, America now seems to be lashing out in desperation, threatening Iraq, North
Korea and perhaps in due course, old Europe. To appease the gods of the smart bomb, gorge yourself on a
Big Mac and a Schwarzenegger video...
    If America is over, the prose laureate of its decline is Mike Davis. His apocalyptic take on the country's
soured hopes has glimmered through a long series of books since City of Quartz, his brilliant elegy for a Los
Angeles destroyed by corporate greed and short-term civic thinking. Anyone who finds today's America
brusque and overbearing should read this unflinching indictment.
    The end-of-the-world yarn has long been the mainstay of English writers. Americans have always seen the
disaster story as a peculiarly British form, a mix of anger and frustration that afflicts a depressed island
people trapped on their bleak outcrop. By contrast, America was too big, too confident and too full of
possibility to visualise its own destruction. Only in the past 10 years, as in the deeply paranoid X Files and
Independence Day, have Americans begun to accept the notion of their own extinction. Meanwhile, there
was always the nearest interstate highway and the westward road to the enduring redemption fantasy of
California.
    But Davis was there before them, and is now sitting on the beach with his back to the Pacific, hoisting his
storm flag. Dead Cities warns that not only is the sea too polluted to swim in, but the whole of California,
Nevada and Utah is a poisoned reef of social and environmental disaster.
    For Davis, I suspect, the ideal American west is a pristine terrain untouched by tyre or footprint, where no
river is ever tapped to irrigate an orange grove or sewage farm, and a developer's show-house is an
incubator of ecological death. In the expanding suburbs of Las Vegas he finds the innermost circle of hell -
a gated community of high-priced houses inside a larger gated community. Grim, no doubt, and socially
divisive, but it reminds me of the Surrey where I live, down to the housewives in their four wheel drive
vehicles and the eventless shopping malls.
    Davis makes graphically clear the destruction wrought in Nevada by the atomic testing of the cold war era.
He estimates that at least half a million people were exposed to the radiation from nuclear detonations,
whose effects were concealed by Washington. By a nasty irony, the population most directly affected by the
tests were a "Norman Rockwell tapestry" of ultraloyal nuclear-site workers, Nevada cowboys and
freckle-faced schoolchildren.
    Davis regards Nevada as an ecological and social wasteland, but his deepest hostility is reserved for the
state that made him famous and most embodies the American dream. A sharp-eyed urban
environmentalist, Davis tracks down every crime committed by the immigrants to California. The needs of an
exploding population are geomorphically equivalent, he writes, to sea-floor spreading and mountain erosion.
"Even more alarmingly" - a phrase dear to Davis - the weather is under threat. Goodbye smog and electric
sunsets.
    Los Angeles devours imported water and energy, and exports pollution, solid waste and weekend recreation
- what the rest of us call family picnics. Like Las Vegas, it displays all the sins of irresponsible urban
development: local government subordinated to greedy private corporations, the dictatorship of the
automobile, and the relentless growth of social and racial inequalities.
    All the same, Los Angeles does have its charms, in part those of the third-world capital it has become. LA
was a film set before it became a city, and no one expects it to be as docile and well run as Geneva or
Adelaide. For all his social conscience, Davis may be as elitist as any chateau owner who spots a washing
line on the horizon. What he most objects to, after all, is other people, their cars and supermarkets, theme
parks and affordable housing.
    Some years ago, on my one free day in Los Angeles during a promotional tour, I hired a car at my Beverly
Hills hotel, a more difficult task than I expected, given that I wanted a Chevrolet. "Sir, we have Mercedes, we
have BMW...." "Thanks, but I'd like a chevvy." "Sir? We have Porsche, we have Jag-u-ar."
    "No. Chevrolet."
    I got a Chevvy in the end, probably smuggled in from a blue-collar suburb, and spent the day exploring a
familiar universe of palm trees, car lots and pleasant middle-class housing, a tribute to the enduring
qualities of painted glue. Later, describing to my hosts an immense drive from Venice Beach to Silver Lake, I
met an appalled response. "My God! You were in the ghetto." Bearing in mind that Beverly Hills is a tiny
enclave on the rim of the vast metropolis I had criss-crossed, I wondered who was in the ghetto and who
was outside it.
    LA was always a social laboratory, the city that the rest of the world would follow, the clearest blueprint of
our shared American tomorrow. Davis's despair at what it has become, along with California and the west,
may well reflect a larger despair at America as a whole. Surprisingly, he quotes the Egyptian poet Sayyid
Qutb, described by the New York Times as "the intellectual grandfather to Osama bin Laden and his fellow
terrorists". Qutb sent a postcard from New York with the comment: "If all the world became America it
would undoubtedly be the disaster of humanity."
    It may be that Davis has glimpsed this apocalyptic prospect. Perhaps what he perceives and describes so
passionately is not just the demise of Los Angeles but of the American dream and, beyond that, the death
of the dreamer.

COURTESY JOHN COULTHART!.

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