J. Emilio Flores for The New York Times

Capt. Kelly D. Royer took photos of Humvees in which his men died. He was removed from command, accused of being “dictatorial.”

April 25, 2005
THE COMPANY | SIX MONTHS IN RAMADI
Bloodied Marines Sound Off About Want of Armor and Men
By MICHAEL MOSS

On May 29, 2004, a station wagon that Iraqi insurgents had packed with C-4 explosives blew up on a highway in Ramadi, killing four American marines who died for lack of a few inches of steel.

The four were returning to camp in an unarmored Humvee that their unit had rigged with scrap metal, but the makeshift shields rose only as high as their shoulders, photographs of the Humvee show, and the shrapnel from the bomb shot over the top.

“The steel was not high enough,” said Staff Sgt. Jose S. Valerio, their motor transport chief, who along with the unit’s commanding officers said the men would have lived had their vehicle been properly armored. “Most of the shrapnel wounds were to their heads.”

Among those killed were Rafael Reynosa, a 28-year-old lance corporal from Santa Ana, Calif., whose wife was expecting twins, and Cody S. Calavan, a 19-year-old private first class from Lake Stevens, Wash., who had the Marine Corps motto, Semper Fidelis, tattooed across his back.

They were not the only losses for Company E during its six-month stint last year in Ramadi. In all, more than one-third of the unit’s 185 troops were killed or wounded, the highest casualty rate of any company in the war, Marine Corps officials say.

In returning home, the leaders and Marine infantrymen have chosen to break an institutional code of silence and tell their story, one they say was punctuated not only by a lack of armor, but also by a shortage of men and planning that further hampered their efforts in battle, destroyed morale and ruined the careers of some of their fiercest warriors.

The saga of Company E, part of a lionized battalion nicknamed the Magnificent Bastards, is also one of fortitude and ingenuity. The marines, based at Camp Pendleton in southern California, had been asked to rid the provincial capital of one of the most persistent insurgencies, and in enduring 26 firefights, 90 mortar attacks and more than 90 homemade bombs, they shipped their dead home and powered on. Their tour has become legendary among other Marine units now serving in Iraq and facing some of the same problems.

“As marines, we are always taught that we do more with less,” said Sgt. James S. King, a platoon sergeant who lost his left leg when he was blown out of the Humvee that Saturday afternoon last May. “And get the job done no matter what it takes.”

The experiences of Company E’s marines, pieced together through interviews at Camp Pendleton and by phone, company records and dozens of photographs taken by the marines, show they often did just that. The unit had less than half the troops who are now doing its job in Ramadi, and resorted to making dummy marines from cardboard cutouts and camouflage shirts to place in observation posts on the highway when it ran out of men. During one of its deadliest firefights, it came up short on both vehicles and troops. Marines who were stranded at their camp tried in vain to hot-wire a dump truck to help rescue their falling brothers. That day, 10 men in the unit died.

Sergeant Valerio and others had to scrounge for metal scraps to strengthen the Humvees they inherited from the National Guard, which occupied Ramadi before the marines arrived. Among other problems, the armor the marines slapped together included heavier doors that could not be latched, so they “chicken winged it” by holding them shut with their arms as they traveled.

“We were sitting out in the open, an easy target for everybody,” Cpl. Toby G. Winn of Centerville, Tex., said of the shortages. “We complained about it every day, to anybody we could. They told us they were listening, but we didn’t see it.”

The company leaders say it is impossible to know how many lives may have been saved through better protection, since the insurgents became adept at overcoming improved defenses with more powerful weapons. Likewise, Pentagon officials say they do not know how many of the more than 1,500 American troops who have died in the war had insufficient protective gear.

But while most of Company E’s work in fighting insurgents was on foot, the biggest danger the men faced came in traveling to and from camp: 13 of the 21 men who were killed had been riding in Humvees that failed to deflect bullets or bombs.

Toward the end of their tour when half of their fleet had become factory-armored, the armor’s worth became starkly clear. A car bomb that the unit’s commander, Capt. Kelly D. Royer, said was at least as powerful as the one on May 29 showered a fully armored Humvee with shrapnel, photographs show. The marines inside were left nearly unscathed.

Captain Royer, from Orangevale, Calif., would not accompany his troops home. He was removed from his post six days before they began leaving Ramadi, accused by his superiors of being dictatorial, records show. His defenders counter that his commanding style was a necessary response to the extreme circumstances of his unit’s deployment.

Company E’s experiences still resonate today both in Iraq, where two more marines were killed last week in Ramadi by the continuing insurgency, and in Washington, where Congress is still struggling to solve the Humvee problem. Just on Thursday, the Senate voted to spend an extra $213 million to buy more fully armored Humvees. The Army’s procurement system, which also supplies the Marines, has come under fierce criticism for underperforming in the war, and to this day it has only one small contractor in Ohio armoring new Humvees.

Marine Corps officials disclosed last month in Congressional hearings that they were now going their own way and had undertaken a crash program to equip all of their more than 2,800 Humvees in Iraq with stronger armor. The effort went into production in November and is to be completed at the end of this year.

Defense Department officials acknowledged that Company E lacked enough equipment and men, but said that those were problems experienced by many troops when the insurgency intensified last year, and that vigorous efforts had been made to improve their circumstances.

Lt. Gen. James N. Mattis of Richland, Wash., who commanded the First Marine Division to which Company E belongs, said he had taken every possible step to support Company E. He added that they had received more factory-armored Humvees than any other unit in Iraq.

“We could not encase men in sufficiently strong armor to deny any enemy success,” General Mattis said. “The tragic loss of our men does not necessarily indicate failure – it is war.”

Trouble From the Start

Company E’s troubles began at Camp Pendleton when, just seven days before the unit left for Iraq, it lost its first commander. The captain who led them through training was relieved for reasons his supervisor declined to discuss.

“That was like losing your quarterback on game day,” said First Sgt. Curtis E. Winfree.

In Kuwait, where the unit stopped over, an 18-year-old private committed suicide in a chapel. Then en route to Ramadi, they lost the few armored plates they had earmarked for their vehicles when the steel was borrowed by another unit that failed to return it. Company E tracked the steel down and took it back.

Even at that, the armor was mostly just scrap and thin, and they needed more for the unarmored Humvees they inherited from the Florida National Guard.

“It was pitiful,” said Capt. Chae J. Han, a member of a Pentagon team that surveyed the Marine camps in Iraq last year to document their condition. “Everything was just slapped on armor, just homemade, not armor that was given to us through the normal logistical system.”

The report they produced was classified, but Captain Royer, who took over command of the unit, and other Company E marines say they had to build barriers at the camp – a former junkyard – to block suicide drivers, improve the fencing and move the toilets under a thick roof to avoid the insurgent shelling.

Even some maps they were given to plan raids were several years old, showing farmland where in fact there were homes, said a company intelligence expert, Cpl. Charles V. Lauersdorf, who later went to work for the Defense Intelligence Agency. There, he discovered up-to-date imagery that had not found its way to the front lines.

Ramadi had been quiet under the National Guard, but the Marines had orders to root out an insurgency that was using the provincial capital as a way station to Falluja and Baghdad, said Lt. Col. Paul J. Kennedy, who oversaw Company E as the commander of its Second Battalion, Fourth Marine Regiment.

Before the company’s first month was up, Lance Cpl. William J. Wiscowiche of Victorville, Calif., lay dead on the main highway as its first casualty. The Marine Corps issued a statement saying only that he had died in action. But for Company E, it was the first reality check on the constraints that would mark their tour.

Sweeping for Bombs

A British officer had taught them to sweep the roads for bombs by boxing off sections and fanning out troops into adjoining neighborhoods in hopes of scaring away insurgents poised to set off the bombs. “We didn’t have the time to do that,” said Sgt. Charles R. Sheldon of Solana Beach, Calif. “We had to clear this long section of highway, and it usually took us all day.”

Now and then a Humvee would speed through equipped with an electronic device intended to block detonation of makeshift bombs. The battalion, which had five companies in its fold, had only a handful of the devices, Colonel Kennedy said.

Company E had none, even though sweeping roads for bombs was one of its main duties. So many of the marines, like Corporal Wiscowiche, had to rely on their eyes. On duty on March 30, 2004, the 20-year-old lance corporal did not spot the telltale three-inch wires sticking out of the dust until he was a few feet away, the company’s leaders say. He died when the bomb was set off.

“We had just left the base,” Corporal Winn said. “He was walking in the middle of the road, and all I remember is hearing a big explosion and seeing a big cloud of smoke.”

The endless task of walking the highways for newly hidden I.E.D.’s, or improvised explosive devices, “was nerve wracking,” Corporal Winn said, and the company began using binoculars and the scopes on their rifles to spot the bombs after Corporal Wiscowiche was killed.

“Halfway through the deployment marines began getting good at spotting little things,” Sergeant Sheldon added. “We had marines riding down the road at 60 miles an hour, and they would spot a copper filament sticking out of a block of cement.”

General Mattis said troops in the area now have hundreds of the electronic devices to foil the I.E.D.’s.

In parceling out Ramadi, the Marine Corps leadership gave Company E more than 10 square miles to control, far more than the battalion’s other companies. Captain Royer said he had informally asked for an extra platoon, or 44 marines, and had been told the battalion was seeking an extra company. The battalion’s operations officer, Maj. John D. Harrill, said the battalion had received sporadic assistance from the Army and had given Company E extra help. General Mattis says he could not pull marines from another part of Iraq because “there were tough fights going on everywhere.”

Colonel Kennedy said Company E’s area was less dense, but the pressure it put on the marines came to a boil on April 6, 2004, when the company had to empty its camp – leaving the cooks to guard the gates – to deal with three firefights.

Ten of its troops were killed that day, including eight who died when the Humvee they were riding in was ambushed en route to assist other marines under fire. That Humvee lacked even the improvised steel on the back where most of the marines sat, Company E leaders say.

“All I saw was sandbags, blood and dead bodies,” Sergeant Valerio said. “There was no protection in the back.”

Captain Royer said more armor would not have even helped. The insurgents had a .50-caliber machine gun that punched huge holes through its windshield. Only a heavier combat vehicle could have withstood the barrage, he said, but the unit had none. Defense Department officials have said they favored Humvees over tanks in Iraq because they were less imposing to civilians.

The Humvee that trailed behind that day, which did have improvised armor, was hit with less powerful munitions, and the marines riding in it survived by hunkering down. “The rounds were pinging,” Sergeant Sheldon said. “Then in a lull they returned fire and got out.”

Captain Royer said that he photographed the Humvees in which his men died to show to any official who asked about the condition of their armor, but that no one ever did.

Sergeant Valerio redoubled his effort to fortify the Humvees by begging other branches of the military for scraps. “How am I going to leave those kids out there in those Humvees,” he recalled asking himself.

The company of 185 marines had only two Humvees and three trucks when it arrived, so just getting them into his shop was a logistical chore, Sergeant Valerio said. He also worried that the steel could come loose in a blast and become deadly shrapnel.

For the gunners who rode atop, Sergeant Valerio stitched together bulletproof shoulder pads into chaps to protect their legs.

“That guy was amazing,” First Sgt. Bernard Coleman said. “He was under a vehicle when a mortar landed, and he caught some in the leg. When the mortar fire stopped, he went right back to work.”

A Captain’s Fate

Lt. Sean J. Schickel remembers Captain Royer asking a high-ranking Marine Corps visitor whether the company would be getting more factory-armored Humvees. The official said they had not been requested and that there were production constraints, Lieutenant Schickel said.

Recalls Captain Royer: “I’m thinking we have our most precious resource engaged in combat, and certainly the wealth of our nation can provide young, selfless men with what they need to accomplish their mission. That’s an erudite way of putting it. I have a much more guttural response that I won’t give you.”

Captain Royer was later relieved of command. General Mattis and Colonel Kennedy declined to discuss the matter. His first fitness report, issued on May 31, 2004, after the company’s deadliest firefights, concluded, “He has single-handedly reshaped a company in sore need of a leader; succeeded in forming a cohesive fighting force that is battle-tested and worthy.”

The second, on Sept. 1, 2004, gave him opposite marks for leadership. “He has been described on numerous occasions as ‘dictatorial,’ ” it said. “There is no morale or motivation in his marines.” His defenders say he drove his troops as hard as he drove himself, but was wrongly blamed for problems like armor. “Captain Royer was a decent man that was used for a dirty job and thrown away by his chain of command,” Sergeant Sheldon said.

Today, Captain Royer is at Camp Pendleton contesting his fitness report, which could force him to retire. Company E is awaiting deployment to Okinawa, Japan. Some members have moved to other units, or are leaving the Marines altogether.

“I’m checking out,” Corporal Winn said. “When I started, I wanted to make it my career. I’ve had enough.”

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Matthew Staver/Bloomberg News

A new house goes up in Littleton, Colo. Sales of new homes rose by 12.2 percent in March and hit a record annual pace of 1.43 million
April 27, 2005
Consumers Are Wary, but Housing Remains Hot
By EDMUND L. ANDREWS

WASHINGTON, April 26 – Consumer confidence fell in April, but the nation’s housing market seems hotter than ever.

Confounding most forecasters, who had expected home sales to decline last month, the government reported on Tuesday that sales of new homes rose sharply by 12.2 percent in March and hit a record annual pace of 1.43 million.

The unexpected surge came despite slightly higher mortgage rates last month, worries about slowing growth and an escalating debate about a “housing bubble” in at least some regions that many specialists argue might be on the verge of bursting.

Analysts cautioned that the estimate of home sales might be revised down slightly as new data becomes available, and they noted that consumer confidence had been shaken since March by higher gasoline prices, sluggish employment growth and this month’s swoon in the stock markets.

But despite scattered signs pointing to slower growth, the strong pace of home-buying is expected to reinforce the Federal Reserve’s intention to keep raising interest rates until they have reached a level that no longer serves as a stimulus for growth. The central bank is expected to raise short-term rates by another quarter point next Tuesday, to 3 percent, which would be the eighth rate increase since last June.

The Conference Board reported on Tuesday that its index of consumer confidence dropped to 97.7 in April, from 103 in March, and expectations about the next six months dropped to their lowest level in nearly two years.

The decline, steeper than forecasters had predicted, comes on the heels of signs of sluggish retail sales.

“Looking ahead, consumers do not anticipate an improvement in economic growth nor in their incomes,” reported Lynn Franco, director of the Conference Board’s Consumer Research Center. And many people expect it to be harder to find a job over the summer months, he said.

But Fed officials have paid relatively little heed to recent data suggesting an economic slowdown, suggesting that they are more concerned about the danger of rising inflation.

Surveys of consumer confidence provide an erratic guide at best to consumer spending, because the surveys often reflect the bad news that people have already heard rather than what they actually plan to do in the months ahead.

By contrast, analysts said the startling rise in new-home sales suggested that the real estate market might continue its expansion despite price increases of 20 percent and more over the last year in many parts of California, Florida and along the East Coast.

“It still appears that it doesn’t take much to generate faster home sales,” said Peter E. Kretzmer, a senior economist at Bank of America. Indeed, Mr. Kretzmer predicted that the housing market might actually gain strength because long-term interest rates have edged down a bit since March.

The relentless rise of the housing market is a growing puzzle for central bankers. The Fed fueled a housing boom after 2001 by slashing interest rates to their lowest levels since the 1950′s, which caused prices to soar and allowed millions of people to cash out some of the new equity in their homes and spend it on everything from kitchens to cars.

But even though the Fed has been raising short-term rates steadily since last June, the long-term interest rates that determine mortgage rates are still about as low today as they were one year ago.

Alan Greenspan, the Fed’s chairman, told House lawmakers in February that the continued low level of long-term interest rates was a “conundrum” that he could not fully explain. Several economists have suggested that huge inflows of foreign savings into the government bond and mortgage markets have also played a significant role in keeping interest rates low.

And while Fed officials have argued that there is little danger of a national housing bubble, they have acknowledged concerns that low interest rates may have encouraged speculative buying by people who have unrealistic expectations about future price increases.

“Low interest rates, in turn, have been a major force driving the phenomenal run-up in residential real estate prices over the past few years,” Donald L. Kohn, a Fed governor, said in a speech last week. Though he discounted worries about a crash in real estate prices, Mr. Kohn said that prices had climbed high enough to “raise questions” about an increase in speculative buying and overvaluations.

Analysts said part of last month’s rush to buy homes probably reflected a race by people to complete deals before mortgage rates start to climb higher. But a growing number of Wall Street economists are convinced that a housing bubble is under way, at least in many parts of the country.

Housing starts declined precipitously last month, which may have reflected an expectation among builders that higher interest rates would stifle demand later in the year. But sales of existing homes climbed 1 percent in March and have climbed 4.9 percent over the last year, according to the National Association of Realtors.

“We think there is a bubble, and we think the risks are higher that it will burst,” said Sheryl King, a senior economist at Merrill Lynch. “Even if you adjust for population growth, you’re seeing numbers that are bigger than any we have seen at this point in any previous economic cycle.”

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Mark Perlstein for The New York Times

Tom Burbage, left, and Robert T. Elrod, executive vice presidents of Lockheed Martin in charge of the Joint Strike Fighter, in Fort Worth

April 27, 2005
ARSENAL OF THE FUTURE
A New Workhorse’s Heavy Load
By LESLIE WAYNE

FORT WORTH – The Joint Strike Fighter is to be a jet fighter for all people and all places.

For the Air Force, it will land on runways. A version for the Navy will be able to land on aircraft carriers. And the one for the Marines will land vertically to drop into global hot spots.

The program to build the next generation of supersonic stealth fighter is the most ambitious fighter program ever. At a cost of more than a quarter of a trillion dollars – $256.6 billion and counting – it is also the most expensive fighter jet program in history and the most complicated, with eight nations joining with the United States to build it.

But now soaring ambitions are confronting hard realities. What was started five years ago as a streamlined way to do business appears to be going the way of most other Pentagon weapon programs: over budget, behind schedule and with big cuts in the number to be produced. Just in the last three months of 2004, the program’s costs rose by $11.8 billion.

“By the scope of the work, this was to be the most important trans-Atlantic military program,” said Joel Johnson, vice president for international affairs at the Aerospace Industries Association, a trade group in Washington. “But everyone is looking over his shoulder right now.”

On paper, all the money is being poured into building a craft that would be the Chevrolet of the skies – affordable, dependable and ready to be sold in vast numbers. It is to replace the workhorse F-16 Fighting Falcon fighter jet, perhaps the most successful in aviation history. Production begins in 2007, with the Lockheed Martin Corporation as the prime contractor.

The F-16 is nearing the end of its life cycle after some 4,400 have been sold to the United States and air forces across the globe. Now, Lockheed’s F-16 production line here is winding down to make room for the Joint Strike Fighter, which is just beginning to move off the drawing board.

As the plane’s development continues, behind-the-scenes dramas are taking place. In 2002, the Pentagon estimated the entire program would cost $192.5 billion. In the most recent Selected Acquisition Report, an internal semiannual report by the Pentagon on the costs of major weapon systems, that number had risen to $256.6 billion.

Tough design issues relating to the airplane’s excessive weight have caused the program to fall two years behind schedule. Some of the international partners are becoming restless and have hinted they may not ultimately buy the plane. And a report last month, from the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, concluded that the program was so complicated as to be “unexecutable.”

While there is little doubt that the Pentagon, Congress and the international consortium are committed to going forward, questions are now arising as to whether the program can deliver on its original promise.

“No one fully understands the amount of resources that will be needed,” said Michael J. Sullivan, an acquisitions and sourcing management director at the G.A.O. who wrote the recent study. “Cost estimates are still risky, and they still don’t know for sure what the number will turn out to be.”

The G.A.O. report said the Joint Strike Fighter will need at least $10 billion a year for the next two decades, just as Congress will have to decide among other competing priorities in the military, in health care and other government programs.

More troubling, according to the G.A.O., is the ambition to begin Joint Strike Fighter production in early 2007 while many critical technological issues remain unresolved. Warning that this could lead to costly retrofits and delays in the years ahead, the office is recommending that the Pentagon and Lockheed slow the program’s fast pace. At the moment, it says, eight critical technologies, including radar and propulsion systems, are far behind schedule.

Robert J. Stevens, Lockheed’s chief executive, is far more confident. In a meeting with reporters in his office in Bethesda, Md., Mr. Stevens said, “I believe we can deliver it on budget,” according to Bloomberg News. “We have all the risks that we can project fully addressed in our program plan.”

The price of the craft has already increased, depending on the version, from an original estimate of $30 million to $40 million a plane, to $45 million to $60 million. In the meantime, the number of planes has been cut by at least 500. The Air Force has reduced its potential fleet to 2,443 planes, from 2,852, while the Navy and Marines have reduced theirs to 680, from 1,089.

None of the foreign countries participating in the program – Britain, the Netherlands, Italy, Canada, Denmark, Norway, Turkey and Australia – have committed themselves to ordering the craft yet. The deadline for a decision is December 2006.

To critics, the changing nature of warfare and a Pentagon budget strained by wartime costs raise questions about how many sophisticated fighter jets the United States actually needs, or can afford. Unmanned aerial vehicles are replacing pilots in the skies, and urban warfare, as in Iraq, needs more in the way of ground troops than aerial combatants.

“You may want to have some stealthy manned fighter aircraft like the Joint Strike Fighter, but it’s not clear that you need to build 3,000 of them,” said Michael E. O’Hanlan, a military expert at the Brookings Institution, a liberal research group in Washington.

Spirits in Fort Worth remain high despite these problems, which Lockheed executives say have been blown out of proportion.

“We flat-out disagree with the government and the G.A.O.,” said Tom Burbage, a Lockheed executive vice president and former Navy test pilot who is in charge of the project. “The development program is up and running and we are ready to bring it on line. We feel the plane is moving along to where it needs to be.”

Plans still call for at least 2,400 Joint Strike Fighters to be purchased by the Pentagon and the eight partner nations, which have contributed over $4 billion of the program’s $20 billion in initial development costs. Hundreds, perhaps even thousands more are supposed to be sold to countries that are not part of the group, with Israel and Singapore heading the list.

With so many different countries involved, clashes are inevitable. Promises by the United States that the eight partner nations would gain access to Pentagon technologies have fallen short, some countries say.

Britain, which has invested $1.8 billion in the program and is America’s closest ally, has expressed frustration at the red tape and bureaucratic barriers. Other countries have expressed concern that the United States will take nearly all the manufacturing jobs, leaving them with few.

Tom Fillingham, the Joint Strike Fighter manager for BAE Systems, the British aerospace company, said that while his company had ultimately received the technical information it needed to carry out its tasks, “we want to speed up the process.”

One political benefit of international partners is that it makes it more difficult for government budget cutters, whether in Washington or in Europe, to scale back the program. Should Congress try to cut it drastically, lawmakers would no doubt receive angry phone calls not only from Texas, but also from Rome, London and Oslo.

“The international aspect here is huge,” said Dov S. Zakheim, who was the Pentagon’s comptroller and chief financial officer until last May. “You have key members of the coalition who have now developed a vested interest in the program. Obviously that makes it more difficult to tinker with it. That helps ensure that there won’t be the kinds of cutbacks that would otherwise be the case.”

For all the international grumbling, Mr. Zakheim said he doubted that any partner would withdraw. “You hear noise, but I’d be surprised if any back away. They would certainly never have any hope of participating in this kind of project again.”

Still, some countries remain cautious. Erling H. Wang, defense policy counselor at the Norwegian Embassy in Washington, said his country, which invested $125 million, is “keeping all options open.” In the past, Norway said it was disappointed with the lack of work coming its way and might consider buying European-made fighter jets instead.

“I can’t see us or imagine Norway entering into the project unless there is a satisfactory level of industrial participation,” Mr. Wang said. “Everyone is working hard to make something positive happen on that front.”

On the technological side, one of the biggest challenges is weight. The Marine version, which is designed for short takeoffs and vertical landings, was overweight by at least 3,000 pounds. Trying to improve its performance caused an 18-month delay and added $5 billion to costs.

At the moment, Mr. Burbage said, the weight issue has been resolved by eliminating 2,800 pounds from the plane and adding 700 pounds of thrust. But the G.A.O. said it was impossible to determine if the weight reduction was adequate until the plane was manufactured and tested.

Mr. Burbage bristles at the thought that any of these problems might be insurmountable. “This plane is more complex than any in history,” he said. “We just want to make sure we get it right.”

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by Chris Jones

Las Vegas Gaming Wire

LAS VEGAS — From its semifunctional monorail to Comdex’s cancellation to the highly publicized walkout by members of Teamsters Local 631, Las Vegas‘ convention and trade show industry faced its share of significant challenges in 2004.

None were powerful enough to knock the city from its long-standing perch as the nation’s top business showplace, editors of a respected industry publication said this week.

Tradeshow Week, a Los Angeles-based magazine that monitors the global convention industry, each year compiles a list of the nation’s largest conventions and trade shows.

And in 2004, for the 11th consecutive year, Las Vegas ranked atop the magazine’s Tradeshow Week 200. The list was released with this week’s edition.

“I don’t want to be a booster for Vegas, but Vegas has a lot going for it, and people clearly see that,” Publisher Adam Schaffer said Thursday. “Like Los Angeles understands the film business, Las Vegas understands the exhibition industry.”

In 2004, Las Vegas hosted 38 of the nation’s 200 largest trade shows, the same number it hosted in 2003. Second-place Chicago hosted 18, down from 27 the prior year, while third-ranked Orlando, Fla., boosted its total to 18 from 17.

Ranked by exhibit space leased by the 200 largest shows, Las Vegas‘ 18.5 million square feet was also best in the nation and a 1.6 million square foot gain compared with 2003.

Chicago‘s 7.7. million square feet ranked second, though that total was down from 2003′s 8.8 million. Orlando also ranked third in this category with nearly 5.6 million square feet, up from 5.2 million the prior year.

“You have to take into the (cyclical nature) of the business, but what stood out is the fact that Vegas held in terms of number of shows and market share while Chicago decreased a little more than I expected,” Schaffer said.

Trade show rankings often fluctuate because shows may rotate from city to city from year to year; others may take place every second or third year.

Last year, Las Vegas hosted more than 5.7 million convention attendees who contributed approximately $6.86 billion in nongaming spending to the local economy, the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority reported.

The International Consumer Electronics Show, held at the Las Vegas Convention Center from Jan. 8-11, 2004, was the year’s largest trade show with 1.39 million square feet of net exhibition space, Tradeshow Week said.

Other high-ranking local events included the Specialty Equipment Market Association Show, which ranked fourth with more than 1 million square feet at the Las Vegas Convention Center; August’s World Shoe Association event at Mandalay Bay (No. 5 with 961,300 square feet); and August’s Men’s Apparel Guild in California trade show (No. 6 with 928,640 square feet).

Overall, Las Vegas hosted 10 of the year’s 20 largest shows.

Chris Meyer, convention sales director for the convention authority, said Thursday he’s confident the local convention industry was nowhere close to peaking in 2004 and will grow further in 2005.

“Comdex was a Tradeshow 200 show the prior year (2003) and it went bye-bye. If that had been there, we could have been even bigger” in 2004, Meyer said about the fall technology show that once ranked as this city’s largest convention but has since been twice canceled because of poor projected attendance.

Looking ahead, Meyer said the Mandalay Bay Convention Center and Sands Expo and Convention Center are poised to host more and larger shows this year. In addition, the Las Vegas Convention Center in March hosted the city’s largest trade show for the first time since 2002, the ConExpo-ConAgg construction equipment showcase, and will this summer welcome the Las Vegas debut of the Association of Woodworking & Furnishings Suppliers gathering. The biennial event’s most-recent occurrence in Anaheim, Calif., ranked 51st on the Tradeshow 200 in 2003.

Also, July’s debut of the World Market Center furniture mart in downtown Las Vegas will include approximately 1 million square feet of leased space at the Las Vegas Convention Center, Meyer said.

“I think we’ll jump,” Meyer said of next year’s square footage total.

About 50 employees of Lenovo, which is buying I.B.M.’s personal computer division, will move temporarily to this building in Purchase, N.Y. Permanent headquarters in Westchester County are planned.

April 27, 2005
REGIONAL MARKET / NEW YORK AREA
Chinese PC Giant Making Hurried Move to Westchester
By ELSA BRENNER

PURCHASE, N.Y., April 25 – Lenovo, the Chinese computer maker that is scheduled to complete its acquisition of I.B.M.’s personal computer division next month, has announced it will move its worldwide headquarters to Westchester County from Beijing this spring.

About 50 Lenovo employees are expected to move into temporary space in Purchase next month, with another 100 people working for the company in Westchester by 2008, said Steve Foley, a spokesman for the Chinese company.

Until Lenovo finds a permanent home in Westchester, it will sublease 40,000 square feet on the top floor of a four-story commercial office building in Purchase occupied until last year by R. H. Donnelley, the Yellow Pages publisher, which has moved to North Carolina.

“Lenovo needed something relatively quickly,” said Andrew D. Carney, an associate director for Grubb & Ellis in Stamford, Conn., the commercial real estate broker representing I.B.M., which is based in Armonk, and the Lenovo Group.

“Lenovo wanted to be close to I.B.M., but independent,” Mr. Carney said, explaining why the company is not moving into I.B.M. space, even though it will be working with I.B.M. offices in Yorktown and Armonk in Westchester and in Fishkill in Dutchess County.

Lenovo’s current headquarters in Beijing will be called Lenovo China after the transaction is completed, and the focus there will be on the personal computer market in Asia. Another division, Lenovo International, will be based in Raleigh, N.C., and will be responsible for marketing, research and development. I.B.M.’s research and development facilities in Yamato, Japan, and its design center in Raleigh will also become part of Lenovo.

Stephen M. Ward Jr., currently senior vice president and general manager for I.B.M.’s Personal Systems Group, will be chief executive of the Lenovo Group. Yuanqing Yang, currently vice chairman, president and chief executive of Lenovo, will be the chairman and will be based in Westchester.

Mr. Carney would not disclose how much Lenovo was paying for the 18-month lease at the Centre at Purchase, at 1 Manhattanville Road, but he said that comparable Class A office space in Westchester would rent for $28 to $30 a square foot a year.

Lenovo plans to spend about $5 million to equip the temporary quarters at the complex of four bluish-green glass buildings, according to information it filed with the Industrial Development Agency of Westchester.

In the long term, Lenovo will either build in Westchester or lease space in a large existing building, Mr. Carney said. He said that the company would consider moving into a building like the 523,000-square-foot office site formerly occupied by the Altria Group in Rye Brook, N.Y., which is being renovated for multiple tenants by the White Plains developer Robert P. Weisz.

Lenovo’s intention to move its headquarters to New York was announced when I.B.M. sold its personal computer business to the Chinese company last December. The factors influencing Lenovo’s decision to move to Westchester, Mr. Carney said, included its highway system and its airport, which has one of the largest fleets of corporate planes in the United States.

Competitive real estate prices were another factor. “Westchester tends to be less expensive than other places,” Mr. Carney said, noting that comparable Class A office space in Fairfield County, for example, sold for $40 to $75 a square foot a year.

Under its agreement with the Industrial Development Agency, Lenovo will receive several inducements, including exemptions from sales and use tax on the purchase, installation and maintenance of building materials, furniture, fixtures and equipment, as well as exemption from a mortgage recording tax on money borrowed for construction.

The value of the initial benefits for the temporary quarters was estimated at $40,000 by Teri Waivada, executive director of the agency. The agreement also says the incentives may be expanded to include the permanent headquarters site when that is selected.

The Lenovo transaction is one of several commercial real estate deals of about 50,000 square feet that are pending in Westchester, said Glenn P. Walsh, a senior director for Cushman & Wakefield. The office vacancy rate for the county, which has an inventory of more than 28.5 million square feet of commercial space, was 17 percent at the end of the first quarter of this year, up two percentage points in the last 15 months, according to figures compiled by the firm.

The acquisition agreement with I.B.M., which was announced in December, calls for Lenovo to pay $650 million in cash and $600 million in securities for the personal computer unit, as well as assuming $500 million in debt obligations.

Lenovo, which is listed on the Hong Kong stock exchange, was the first company to introduce home computers in China and since 1997 has been a leading brand of personal computers in Asia. It has annual revenue of about $3 billion.

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Robert Spencer for The New York Times

Mr. Mailer said his choice of the University of Texas drew on attachments from his wartime experiences

April 25, 2005
Mailer’s Miscellany
By DOUGLAS BRINKLEY

For more than five decades, Norman Mailer has been analyzing, prodding and assaulting American culture, not only in his many books, articles and screenplays but also in about 25,000 letters, all saved as carbon copies and on computer disks. And beginning in Mr. Mailer’s earliest years as a writer, his mother, Fannie, relentlessly squirreled away his notebooks, family photographs, canceled checks, sales receipts and even his dogs’ identification tags.

“She was formidable when it came to compiling scrapbooks,” Mr. Mailer’s authorized biographer, Dr. Robert Lucid, said in a phone interview. “Her view was anything that emanated from Norman had value.”

Always trust a mother’s instincts: on Thursday, Mr. Mailer will be in Austin, Tex., to announce the sale of his archives to the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas for $2.5 million. Stored in nearly 500 boxes weighing more than 20,000 pounds, the trove includes all manner of Mailerabilia dating back to his childhood and especially his early years at Harvard (class of ’43), where he majored in aeronautical engineering and wrote an unpublished novel, “No Percentage.”

When asked by e-mail how it felt to crate up his life, Mr. Mailer, now 82 and living in Provincetown, Mass., said: “I have nine children. It does remind one a bit of sending them off to college.”

Glenn Horowitz, a New York bookseller who brokered the sale, said: “The time has come to acknowledge Norman’s profound accomplishment. His papers need to be used by scholars. With the natural aging process the handoff was inevitable.”

Mr. Mailer cited several reasons for choosing the University of Texas, including a strong bond he forged with his fellow soldiers, many of them from Texas, in the South Pacific during World War II.

“I went overseas from a Ft. Bragg artillery training unit to Leyte, where I was assigned to the 112th Cavalry,” Mr. Mailer said in his e-mail. “They had been stripped of their horses, becoming, in effect, infantry. In that outfit, I learned a good bit about Texas and Texans, so that may have been a factor in choosing the University of Texas.

“However, despite a few sentimental and cultural attachments to the state, the largest part of my decision grew out of the fact that the Ransom Center at the University of Texas has one of the finest, if not the finest, collections of American literary archives in the world.”

The center, founded in 1957, recently acquired the papers of several prominent writers, including James Jones, Don DeLillo, Isaac Bashevis Singer and Leon Uris. And in 2003 the university acquired the Woodward-Bernstein Watergate papers for $5 million.

“Our goals are clear,” said Thomas F. Staley, director of the Ransom Center. “As we approach our 50th anniversary, we continue to keep acquiring the major writers of the 20th century like Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams in playwriting, and now Norman Mailer in everything.”

Back in 1968, Mr. Mailer’s mother, who died in 1985, aided by Dr. Lucid, then teaching at the University of Pennsylvania, rented space in a Midtown Manhattan high-rise to store her son’s ballooning archives.

“It was pretty stark,” Dr. Lucid said. “The facility was just a light bulb with a cage around it. Norman was writing like mad and it was a race just to keep up with him.”

Tucked away in the cartons are more than 100 combat letters Mr. Mailer wrote to his first wife, Beatrice Silverman, which formed the backbone of his first published novel, “The Naked and the Dead.”

Then there is intellectual jousting with Robert Lowell on Vietnam, Marshall McLuhan on the media, Joan Didion on literature and James Baldwin on civil rights.

But Mr. Mailer was also fond of engaging the public, battling with harsh critics and slavish admirers alike. “Norman treated fans like V.I.P.’s, challenging their assumptions or embracing their original ideas,” Dr. Lucid said. “He mixed it up equally with everybody.”

By the time Mr. Mailer wrote “The Executioner’s Song” (1979), generating 23 boxes worth of research materials about the convicted killer Gary Gilmore, he had outgrown his Manhattan storage space. In the early 1990′s the trunks were shipped to West Pittston, Pa., where Dr. Michael Lennon, an English professor at Wilkes University in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., began cataloging them.

“He and Dr. Robert Lucid convinced me of the need for an archive,” Mr. Mailer said. “If it weren’t for Mike Lennon and Bob Lucid, my papers would be moldering in cartons on a wet cellar floor.”

Dr. Lennon, a friend and executor of Mr. Mailer’s estate, called Mr. Mailer a “string-saver.” According to Dr. Lennon, the archive is brimming with literary oddities: a dozen finished screenplays, including one about the Civil War general Dan Sickles; French aviation scrapbooks; mail Mr. Mailer received during his stay at the Bellevue Hospital Center, where he had been committed for stabbing his second wife; observations on New York graffiti art; and copies of C.I.A. intelligence reports he used in researching his 1991 novel “Harlot’s Ghost.”

The archive also includes Mr. Mailer’s notes on the presidential campaigns of Henry Wallace, John F. Kennedy and George McGovern, among other candidates, and there are cartons of documents related to his run for mayor of New York in 1969. Mr. Mailer also kept thick files on icons like Muhammad Ali, Lee Harvey Oswald and Marilyn Monroe.

“Scholars writing on recent America will need to make a pilgrimage to Austin,” Mr. Horowitz, the bookseller, said. “You name the person – Neil Armstrong or Robert Kennedy or Pablo Picasso – and Mailer wrote about them.”

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Jim Wilson/The New York Times

Liberace modeled his outfits on styles associated with European royalty

April 25, 2005
CONNECTIONS
Shall I Compare Thee to the King’s Library?
By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN

LAS VEGAS – It might seem unfair to King George III, but recently, as I surveyed Liberace’s collection of vintage automobiles, fur coats, feathered capes and antique pianos in the Liberace Museum here, I thought of the King’s Library in the British Museum. In that great, neo-Classical hall – the oldest room in the world’s first national museum – sea shells, astrolabes, ancient coins and chronicles of exploration fill shelves built nearly two centuries ago to house the king’s 65,259 books.

Why compare such a magisterial accomplishment, which is still reflected in the hushed grandeur of these recently restored rooms, with a collection that is mostly kitsch, assembled by a gaudy pianist for the sake of fans and tax deductions and housed in a shopping mall in 1979? What do 18th-century collectors like the king, who spent about a fifth of his private income on his library, have to do with the highest-paid pianist of the 20th century, who thrilled his fans by outfitting a Volkswagen Beetle with a custom Rolls-Royce hood to carry his rhinestone-studded capes off stage?

In part, I confess, the comparison is a provocation. But it is just slightly more extreme than comparisons that have become commonplace in recent museum theory. The argument goes something like this: the “traditional museum” has extraordinary authority and prestige. But why should it? Its stature has been achieved primarily through the expenditure of money and the exercise of power. And such dominance must now end.

In one recent anthology, for example, “Reinventing the Museum,” the editor, Gail Anderson, presents a chart showing a “paradigm shift” between the “traditional museum” and the “reinvented museum.” The traditional is elitist; the reinvented, equitable. The traditional is ethnocentric; the reinvented, multicultural. In moving from one model to the other, “paternal” governance is replaced by “mutual respect,” a “voice of authority” is replaced by “multiple viewpoints,” and a “collection driven” museum is replaced by an “audience focused” one.

The British Museum may even be the archetypal “traditional museum,” opening in 1759 “for the improvement, knowledge and information of all persons.” Strangely enough, the Liberace Museum actually follows that model. It even adopts the traditional museum’s manners, paying homage to its patron and subject, presenting the Wisconsin-born virtuoso, Wladziu Valentino Liberace (1919-1987), as “the epitome of the American dream.” The capes and cars are displayed with more care than the antique pianos, but the aura of traditional reverence is intact.

Critics of the traditional museum, though, would see this emulation as a challenge to traditional claims. It is an ironic imitation: the Liberace Museum finally rejects the elitist “voice of authority” and is “audience focused.” In that sense, it is “reinvented.”

Its challenge may even be partly justified. After all, it is not as if the traditional museum is so sacred and otherworldly that it is untouched by vulgar concerns. Collections confer power and prestige. The British Museum grew out of private collections that reflect glory on the collectors. The king’s book collection, acquired by the museum in 1823, shed its splendor even on royalty.

In fact, the king’s books may have been as important to the royal reputation as Liberace’s 1972 Bradley GT painted with flecks of genuine gold was to his. Liberace even nurtured a kind of cartoon extravagance echoing the indulgences of royalty. “Why don’t I step out and get into something more spectacular?” he used to say as the crowds roared. Surely George III was not less aware of the benefits of public display.

Both also invoke past authorities to affirm their accomplishments. The King’s Library rooms, which opened in 1828 in the new home being built for the British Museum, were designed by Sir Robert Smirke to pay resplendent homage to Greek mythology and aesthetic ideals. They invoked the honored past to affirm the collection’s power in the present.

Liberace did the same. His kitschy outfits were based on styles associated with European royalty – more 18th-century French, perhaps, than 18th-century English. And he, too, had his pantheon: his trademark candelabrum was copied from Hollywood’s hokey 1945 biography of Chopin, “A Song to Remember.”

Moreover, neither the British nor the Liberace Museum is free from self-celebration. The Liberace Museum, one of the most popular tourist spots in Las Vegas, is a self-built monument to a pianist who was at once a talented musician and a tasteless sentimentalist. Liberace knew he was vulgar – that became his selling point – laughing, as he famously put it, all the way to the bank. His museum is a tribute to luxurious populism – Rolls-Royce hoods fitted atop Volkswagens.

As for the British Museum, it too had promotional presuppositions. It staked nationalist claims, the museum’s very existence testifying to the wealth and breadth of the British Empire. There was an explicit set of ideas governing its displays and reflected in the king’s collection as well. Though the books were relocated to a new home in the British Library in 1998, as if in recompense, the King’s Library rooms now host a permanent exhibition about those ideas: the 18th-century English Enlightenment.

But now we are brought up short. Regardless of how tempting it might be to spin out additional parallels that show the traditional museum to be as vulgar as Liberace’s and as worthy of being displaced from its superior position as the paradigm proclaimers suggests, the comparison falls apart. And this is something that polemics against the traditional museum have yet to address fully.

For the ideas of the Enlightenment were not just another set of beliefs that a small group of wealthy people decided to champion. These concepts gave birth to the very idea of the museum. The king’s collection was not just a set of volumes collected for amusement or prestige, but rather an attempt to assemble a resource of universal reach, to survey the scope of human knowledge. Samuel Johnson advised the king on his acquisitions. John Adams, one of the king’s colonial American nemeses, thought the collection was assembled “with perfect taste and judgment.”

And now its founding ideas are put on display. The Enlightenment exhibition shows how, in the 18th century, reason and exploration became founding principles of the new museum. Excavation and experimentation became the guiding methods; collections of coins and rocks and potsherds and fossils and texts were attempts to make sense of the world.

The exhibition points out – with few hints of defensiveness – how these ambitions were themselves colored by ideas of the time. But what it also implies is that the Enlightenment – the reasoned attempt to understand the world in all its multivariate complexity – defined the project of the museum itself.

Over time, of course, interpretations were transformed. Collections were reclassified or disbanded. But the fundamental motivation remained. This was not simply to showcase wealth, broadcast power or glorify the patron. It was to discover the foundational principles underlying nature and human complexity: to examine differences, explore multiple perspectives and communicate to a public. Multicultural. Varied. Communicative. Sounds a lot like the principles of the “reinvented museum.”

But contemporary “reinventions” often make the museum more narrow and restricted. And as the King’s Library shows, the traditional museum hardly needs reinvention. Within it, even Liberace can find a place.


Connections, a critic’s perspective on arts and ideas, appears every other Monday.

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Pool photo by David Blumenfeld

President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, just left of center, at Yad Vashem with Israelis including President Moshe Katsav, fifth from right.

April 29, 2005

Putin Visits Israel and Tries to Allay Its Security Worries
By GREG MYRE

JERUSALEM, April 28 – On the first visit by a Kremlin leader to Israel, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia on Thursday tried to allay fears that Israel’s security was threatened by Russia’s nuclear assistance to Iran and missile sales to Syria.

Israel gave Mr. Putin a red-carpet welcome, including separate meetings with President Moshe Katsav and Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and a somber visit to Israel’s Holocaust memorial, Yad Vashem. But Israeli leaders also made it clear that they viewed Russian help for Israel’s enemies as a serious danger.

Mr. Putin’s trip is a concrete sign of improved ties between Russia and Israel as they work to overcome a complicated and troubled relationship dating back decades. Yet their differences kept surfacing.

After the meeting with Mr. Katsav, Mr. Putin was asked about Russia’s plans to sell antiaircraft missiles to Syria.

“The missiles we are providing to Syria are short-range antiaircraft missiles that cannot reach Israeli territory,” Mr. Putin said. “To come within their range, you would have to attack Syria.” He said he had vetoed the sale of longer-range missiles to Syria, citing Israel’s security concerns.

Mr. Katsav, who has a largely ceremonial role and usually steers clear of political disputes, did not hesitate to spell out his concerns at a news conference with Mr. Putin.

“There is a difference of opinion between the Russian president and myself,” Mr. Katsav said. “Despite the steps the president has taken to reduce the danger, only in the last few days Syria has transferred additional missiles to Hezbollah,” the Lebanese armed faction that Israel and the United States call a terrorist group.

“Israel is forced to still fight terror, and the Russian missiles could reduce our capability,” Mr. Katsav added.

In addition, Israel contends that Russian help with building a nuclear power plant could help Iran develop nuclear weapons. Israel regards that prospect as the most serious threat it faces. Iran insists that its nuclear program is strictly for civilian use.

“We are working with Iran for peaceful nuclear purposes,” Mr. Putin said. “We certainly object to any Iranian plans for acquiring nuclear weapons.”

Iran is required to return spent nuclear fuel to Russia so it cannot be used for making atomic warheads, Mr. Putin noted. “I agree that these steps are not enough and we have to get Iran to agree to nuclear inspections,” he added.

Later Mr. Sharon, whose family came from Russia, greeted Mr. Putin warmly with a few words in Russian, and told him, “I want you to know that you are among friends.”

The two leaders held lengthy discussions that focused on security issues during a working lunch, and Mr. Putin described Russia as Israel’s “strategic ally,” a statement from Mr. Sharon’s office said.

Mr. Putin, who visited Egypt before Israel, is seeking to raise Russia’s profile and stake out a role as a mediator in a region where Moscow’s influence has waned considerably since the Soviet breakup. The Soviet Union was a leading supporter of Arab countries during the cold war.

Russia, along with the United States, the United Nations and the European Union, make up the so-called quartet that has co-sponsored the current Middle East peace plan, but the Russian role has been comparatively small.

In Egypt on Wednesday, Mr. Putin proposed an international conference on the Middle East in Russia this fall. But the United States and Israel responded coolly, saying Israel and the Palestinians need to make much more progress first.

The Russian foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, said that the proposal had been misunderstood and that the intention was to hold a gathering of experts, not leaders from the countries involved.

No Soviet or Russian leader had ever visited Israel before, though Boris N. Yeltsin toured Israel in January 2000, just days after he resigned as Russia’s president.

The Soviet Union quickly recognized Israel after it was established in 1948, but relations soured during the cold war. Moscow severed ties after the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, in which Israel defeated Soviet-equipped Arab armies. Full diplomatic ties were not restored for more than two decades, though relations improved significantly after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991.

Roughly a million Israeli citizens – more than 15 percent of the population – have come from the former Soviet Union in the last two decades, but Mr. Putin’s visit did not inspire an outpouring of warmth among immigrants. Roman Bronfman, a leftist member of Israel’s Parliament who came from Ukraine in 1980, said of the immigrants, “I think there are ambivalent feelings.”

Many immigrants have become more critical of Russia with Mr. Putin’s government in charge, Mr. Bronfman said, but he added that Mr. Putin’s visit and his expressions of concern for Israel’s security had probably improved his standing among immigrants.

Several Russian business tycoons who are wanted on criminal charges in Russia have taken refuge in Israel. Israeli officials have indicated that they do not intend to extradite the men, who are Jewish and received citizenship here. They include former partners of Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky, founder of the Yukos oil company, who is awaiting a verdict in his trial on tax evasion and fraud charges in Russia. Mr. Lavrov said the issue had not been raised.

The Palestinians on Thursday endorsed Mr. Putin’s call for an international conference on the Middle East. Mr. Putin is to meet Friday with the Palestinian leader, Mahmoud Abbas, in the West Bank city of Ramallah.

In a separate development, Mr. Abbas warned Wednesday in a speech to Palestinian police officers that he would use “an iron fist” against any Palestinians who violate the truce with Israel that was declared in February. The remarks were reported on Thursday by WAFA, the official Palestinian press agency.

The remarks were seen as the toughest that Mr. Abbas has directed toward Palestinian militants since his election as the Palestinian Authority president in January. “There is a national consensus regarding the calm, and whoever leaves this consensus will be struck by an iron fist,” he said.

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Alan Chin for The New York Times

The attacks in Iraq today sent a bloody reminder to the new government of the array of challenges it must tackle.

April 29, 2005
Rebels Respond to New Iraqi Coalition With Wave of Attacks
By RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr.
and ROBERT F. WORTH

BAGHDAD, Iraq, April 29 – Insurgents executed a devastating series of coordinated attacks on Iraqi forces today, just a day after the new Iraqi government was announced, detonating 10 cars bombs across greater Baghdad that killed at least 30 people, mostly members of the Iraqi security forces, and wounded 99 others.

The attacks, a direct challenge to Iraq’s new Shiite-dominated government, were aimed at Iraqi police officers and national guardsmen at their bases or traveling in convoys in northern and southern Baghdad and in Madaen, 15 miles southeast of the capital. They were followed by a car-bomb attack in Diyarah, in the restive western province of Anbar, that killed two American soldiers, and another near Taji, just north of Baghdad, where one American soldier was killed and two others were wounded.

The coordinated morning strikes came after a momentous and tumultuous day for the incoming Iraqi government.

After three months of delays that American officials have said gave new strength to the insurgency, the dominant Shiite alliance won approval for a new cabinet on Thursday – but not before angering Sunni political leaders who charged that they had been shortchanged. Sunni Arabs, who dominated Iraq’s Baathist government under Saddam Hussein, largely boycotted the January elections. They received 6 of the 32 cabinet appointments approved by the new National Assembly.

The Shiites also pledged a large-scale house cleaning of former Baathists from the government, a move sure to drive an even deeper wedge between the Shiites and the Sunnis, who make up most insurgent activity.

In the streets, insurgents used an increasingly common tactic today: multiple bombings designed to kill not only the victims of the initial blast but also security forces and bystanders who rushed to the aid of the wounded.

The attacks began just after 8 a.m. today, the weekly holy day for most Iraqis, with four car bombs in the Ahdamiya neighborhood, a heavily Sunni district in northern Baghdad that is home to many former Baathists and insurgent sympathizers. The attacks there killed 7 Iraqi national guardsmen, 2 policemen and 4 civilians and wounded 50 others, an Interior Ministry official said.

The first Adhamiya bomb went off next to a popular restaurant as an Iraqi convoy drove by, the police said. The blast propelled the crumpled remains of the bomber’s vehicle more than 100 feet, where police at the scene pointed to what they said were body parts of the suicide bomber lodged in the charred wreckage, including bony remnants of an arm. Several pools of blood surrounded an aqua blue minivan in front of the destroyed restaurant. A child’s stuffed animal, blackened from the blast, and two brands of women’s sandals were strewn about the bloody debris.

“It was terrible,” said Muhammad Kadham, a 27-year-old worker, who had rushed to the scene. “Human body parts were everywhere. Ambulances have been busy carrying away the injured” amid the shouting of anxious police officers and guardsmen who tried to keep people away, he said. “It was insane.”

A few hours later, a car bomb aimed at a passing convoy of Iraqi National Guard troops detonated in the Ghadeer district of southern Baghdad, and 15 minutes later a second car bomb exploded in the same spot, killing a civilian and wounding four troops and four civilians, an Interior Ministry official said.

In Madaen, a flashpoint town on the Tigris River that has seen insurgent activity and intense sectarian violence between Sunnis and Shiites, three car bombers struck in a coordinated attack that left 3 Iraqi police commandos, 4 Iraqi soldiers and 2 civilians dead and 38 others wounded, the Interior Ministry official said.

The violence, which the American military said was clearly aimed at discrediting the new Iraqi government, showed that even after a lull in attacks following the successful Jan. 30 elections, the insurgents continue to possess the resources and organizational structure to mount a disciplined strike across the capital.

“Terrorists have still proven they can execute or surge their capability to conduct limited attacks,” a statement issued by the United States military here said.

The network of Abu Musab al Zarqawi, Iraq’s most wanted man, took responsibility in an Internet statement for several of the Baghdad suicide bombings as well as for attacks elsewhere in Iraq. Altogether, the group said, it launched a dozen attacks today, dedicating them to the memory of Omar Hadeed, an insurgent leader killed fighting American forces in Falluja in November.

The group also made public an unusual 18-minute audiotape, said to be of Mr. Zarqawi, in which the speaker offered reassurances to resistance fighters, warned against efforts to negotiate a treaty and cited Pentagon data on shortfalls in American military recruiting.

The commander of United States troops in Baghdad, Maj. Gen. William G. Webster Jr. of the Third Infantry Division, described today’s attacks as “another desperate attempt to try to derail the emerging democratic government.”

“Today was just another spike that comes periodically,” General Webster said in an interview on CNN, adding that his “message back to Zarqawi is that he’s not going to win.”

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