F1 > British GP, 2005-07-10 (Silverstone): Sunday race
Month: July 2005
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Max Mosley and Flavio Briatore
F1 > British GP, 2005-07-10 (Silverstone): Sunday pre-race
Briatore talks politics
Racing series F1
Date 2005-07-12
Flavio Briatore, the Renault F1 Team’s Managing Director, discusses the current politics of Formula One.
Q: Mr Briatore, how important is the world title for you?
Flavio Briatore: It is first and foremost important for Renault. The company must get a return on its investment. For me, it would be a proof that the titles I won with Benetton were no fluke.
Q: Who do you think will win the championship?
FB: If we slip up again and Kimi scores heavily, then it could get close. But I think the whole situation is great. It is exciting, and good for Formula 1.
Q: Since Indianapolis, the teams have been pitted against Max Mosley. What is your view?
FB: Max Mosley has done a very good job in recent years. He is an intelligent, capable man who has good ideas. That doesn’t mean that everything he suggests is perfect but I am in agreement with his most important points.
Q: What do you mean exactly?
FB: The spectators are the people who matter most, and we must improve Formula 1 to make it safer and more entertaining. To do that, we need a strong FIA President like Mosley as a regulator. But for the unity and the attractiveness of the show, we need Ferrari too.
Q: But Ferrari are already doing their own thing with the FIA and Ecclestone, rather than your planned manufacturer series.
FB: And so what? If Ferrari sees the new series working, then I am sure that will get rid of their doubts and they will join it.
Q: How should that happen?
FB: All the people involved in Formula 1 should get together around a table like adults, and start talking to each other and working together as soon as possible.
Q: Is that some kind of peace offering?
FB: No, because there is no war in Formula 1 and there won’t be. We all know what Formula 1 needs. We need unity, a strong FIA that supervises everybody, but also more money for the teams and manufacturers than we have at the moment. The FIA has nothing to do with that, it is Bernie Ecclestone, but he only has 25% of the shares. The rest belongs to the banks.
Q: And how can a solution be found to the problem?
FB: The manufacturers develop a system with the FIA and Bernie Ecclestone, to which everybody is bound under new terms — including Ferrari. Then everybody will be going in the same direction for 2008.
Q: Without the banks, but with Ecclestone and the FIA?
FB: Yes, because the agreement between the teams (Concorde Agreement) and FOM (Formula One Management) expires in 2007. FOM is currently owned by the banks, and its chief executive is Bernie Ecclestone. In 2008, it is possible to create a brand new Formula 1 series that includes the teams, Bernie Ecclestone and with the FIA as a regulator, without the banks.
Q: Does that mean that Mosley’s latest rule proposals that severely limit engine, electronic and aerodynamic technology as well as restricting tyres, would be accepted by the manufacturers?
FB: If I have understood Mosley correctly, the proposed rules from 2008 are a basis for discussion. However, these proposals must be confirmed by the end of the year, otherwise they will inevitably become the rules after being imposed by the FIA.
Q: Do your counterparts share your opinion?
FB: We are looking for a compromise with the FIA and Ecclestone. We accept both positions. We don’t have a problem with Bernie nor with Max or the FIA. We simply need to restructure everything in a sensible fashion.
Q: Could the manufacturers carry out their threat to set up their own championship?
FB: That is not the issue. The real question is, what will ultimately help all the stakeholders? That is the only thing that matters.
This interview originally appeared in the 10 July edition of Welt am Sonntag.
-renault -
Paul Sahre
July 10, 2005
The Half-Life of Anxiety
By BENEDICT CAREY
FOR all their murderous power, the four terrorist bombs detonated in London on Thursday morning have not created anything close to mass panic. It’s possible to imagine a scene straight out of the movie “War of the Worlds,” an unraveling of society, with people disoriented, afraid for their lives, holing up in their basements or fleeing the city.
Instead, on Friday morning, a day after the bombing, Londoners were beginning to return to daily routines, some even riding the buses and subway trains.
Although real terrorism is life-shattering to those directly affected and may help attackers achieve political goals – last year’s bombing in Madrid, for example, may have helped lead to the withdrawal of Spanish troops from Iraq – the attacks almost never sow the kind of lasting confusion and mass anxiety that the perpetrators presumably want.
In Israel, the damage from cafe and bus bombings is typically cleared within hours. In Lower Manhattan, real estate prices have only spiraled upward since the Sept. 11 attacks; the average sale in TriBeCa last year was almost $1.7 million, 16 percent higher than in 2003. And a recent report found that tourism had increased in Madrid since the bombings.
“It says something that it is hard to think of any attack that truly caused a city to cease to function, except perhaps Dresden, Hiroshima or Nagasaki,” said Dr. Lynn Eden, a senior research scholar at Stanford University’s Institute for International Studies and author of the book, “Whole World on Fire,” an analysis of military bombing and damage predictions.
Are Western cities themselves so resourceful and structurally sound that they can absorb just about any blow? Are people adaptable enough that they can live with almost any threat? Or, can certain kinds of threats deeply unsettle a worldly population?
Strangely enough, the answer to all three questions is yes. Certainly, an attack of the magnitude of last week’s in London creates a climate of fear, and no one in England is likely to forget the carnage; July 7 is certain to carry in the English consciousness some of the same resonance as Sept. 11 does in this country.
But terror groups like Al Qaeda are widely thought to be after bigger game – the psychological unraveling, or loss of confidence, in Western society. And high explosives have not done the trick.
People understand bombs, for one thing; they know what the weapons can do, and why certain targets are chosen. This allows residents to feel that they have some control over the situation: They can decide not to take trains at rush hour, avoid buses or drive a car, psychologists say.
“Unfortunately, and I think people sensed this in watching the coverage in London, bombings have become familiar,” and, as such, less frightening to those not directly affected, said George Loewenstein, a professor of psychology and economics at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.
And for all their flaws, Western governments typically respond immediately to terror, which is far more psychologically soothing than many people admit. It’s the reason Prime Minister Tony Blair flew back to London from the Group of 8 conference in Gleneagles, Scotland. And it’s the reason both Rudolph Giuliani and Winston Churchill became national heroes.
All the same, it’s clear that people in much of the West believe that their societies are fragile, and capable of breaking down. Indeed, as the new millennium approached, there were fears that a large-scale computer meltdown would paralyze hospitals, police and other basic services. And the most unsettling thing about the current brand of extremist Muslim terror is the certainty that the enemy will try anything – including using weapons whose psychological effects are entirely unknown.
Even small changes in weaponry can be deeply unnerving. In her history of London during World War II, “London 1945,” Maureen Waller describes how Londoners, long accustomed to take cover from the roar of bombers overhead, plunged into confusion when first hit with Hitler’s missiles, the V-1 buzz bomb and the V-2 rocket.
“By some acoustic quirk, those in its direct path barely heard a V-2,” she writes. “If you did hear it, it had missed you. But that knowledge did nothing to quell the primeval fear each time one exploded.” The missiles were far more terrifying than the conventional bombardments, Ms. Waller adds. “Life was uncertain again.”
Bioterror scenarios are the most obvious modern-day example of such terrifying ambiguity. Despite only a handful of deaths, the anthrax poisonings in 2001 created a rip current of anxiety for millions anytime they opened their mailboxes. Studies find that this kind of free-floating concern, when written across neighbors’ or colleagues’ faces, is contagious, Dr. Loewenstein said.
A similarly frightening mystique might surround the so-called dirty bomb, a conventional explosive containing some radioactive material. A dirty bomb is not a nuclear bomb, as many people assume, and can inflict nowhere near the amount of damage or radioactive contamination, said Dr. Irwin Redlener, director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness and a professor at Columbia University.
While a nuclear bomb could devastate much of the city with its blast and radiation wave, a dirty bomb is a local device – a car bomb, say, that could contaminate a specific area, like Times Square.
“There is a whole lot of mythology associated with any nuclear device, and a tendency for people to confuse a dirty bomb with a nuclear bomb, and we just don’t know how people will react,” Dr. Redlener said. “For instance, would people decide to come back to work and live in an area hit by a dirty bomb?”
The widespread revulsion to any hint of radiation, he said, lends the dirty bomb both an ominous novelty and mystery that are much more likely to induce life-altering psychological anxiety than a conventional bomb would.
Although such sustained and uncertain threats may fall short of bringing a city to a standstill, they could shatter social networks and slow an economy, experts say. People may still ride the buses, take their children to school and go to work, but a community under continuous assault often turns on itself, with neighbors distrusting one another, research suggests.
In studies of Alaskan communities that were affected by the oil spill from the tanker Exxon Valdez in 1989, and of towns dealing with water contamination in New Jersey and New York, sociologists have found what they call social corrosion. Sustained anxiety breaks down social groups and leads to an increase in mental health problems and potentially to economic downturn, said Lee Clarke, a sociology professor at Rutgers University and author of the forthcoming book, “Worst Cases,” an analysis of responses to disaster.
Beyond the unknown, many people wonder whether city residents would stick around if terrorists successfully staged not one bombing but a series of major attacks in a short period of time. Certainly after Sept. 11, many people openly wondered whether another big attack – a double or triple hit – might be just enough to cause a kind of collective mental breakdown, an exodus.
Maybe. But in the absence of new species of horror, the histories of Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Belfast and London still suggest otherwise.
“Even if we hypothesize attacks like this for a week, what would happen?” said Dr. Eden. “They would shut down the subway, let’s say, and my guess is that there would be a run on bicycles. There would be a difficult adjustment period, there would be some economic ramifications, but people would learn to function.”
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Toby Mason/Polaris
The scene at Tavistock Square, where a double-decker bus that was destroyed by a bomb looked as if it had been peeled open. Thirteen people were killed in the blast on Thursday.
July 9, 2005
Overslept? You Lived. Caught the Bus? You Died.
By SARAH LYALL
LONDON, July 8 – Paul Dadge overslept. That meant he reached the subway late, boarded a train at King’s Cross late, and ended up two trains behind -instead of possibly inside – the one ripped apart by a bomb deep in the tunnel outside the Edgware Road station at 9:17 a.m.
Above ground, half an hour later, Stuart Nield was riding his motorcycle near Tavistock Square a little way behind a No. 30 bus, poised to speed up and overtake it. Suddenly, a fire engine backed out onto the street, forcing him to stop and wait while the bus moved ahead. A moment later, the bus blew up.
On any other day, they might have been the trivial details of an early-morning trip to work. Should you hit the snooze button and buy a few extra moments of sleep? Should you brazen your way onto a packed subway car, or wait for the next one? But on Thursday morning, they made all the difference.
“It’s quite shocking to think about, that you could have been within 10 seconds of being another statistic,” Mr. Nield, 36, a trademark lawyer, said in an interview. “One minute you’re on the way to work, and the next second people are being blown out of the windows of a bus by somebody’s bomb.”
London took stock of itself on Friday, counting its dead, surveying its damage, trying its best to restore itself to normal after a day that was anything but. All the main train stations were open, bringing commuters in and out of London. Buses were running. And even more surprisingly, service was restored on much of the subway system, although there were some obvious gaps on the lines where the bombs went off. It was not clear when the damage to those would be repaired, or even when all the bodies still lying underground would be removed and identified.
But as they made their way to and from work on Friday, many people in London betrayed a fatalistic streak formed and hardened by years of experience with terrorist attacks. As 59-year-old Colin Hindmarch said, “It could happen to anyone.”
Mr. Hindmarch, a biologist, said in an interview that he was at King’s Cross station on Thursday morning, having just traveled down from Newcastle, when the order came to evacuate. At that point, emergency service workers were still referring to what had happened as an “incident,” and it would be some time before he and his fellow commuters realized that a bomb had gone off on a train 70 feet below them at 8:56 a.m., killing at least 21 people and hurting scores.
“Well, think yourself lucky,” an emergency service worker told him, before sending him on the long trek on foot to Kensington for a meeting that was later canceled. “You’re out, and you’re safe.”
Mr. Hindmarch said he was “utterly impressed” with the way the emergency services, who have long braced themselves for such an attack, took charge of the situation. “They knew what to do,” he said. “There was no alarm, no panic.”
The No. 30 bus that exploded not far from Mr. Nield on Thursday had been diverted slightly off its normal path to escape the stream of passengers evacuating King’s Cross station, George Psaradakis, the driver, said in a statement on Friday.
“Suddenly, there was a bang, then carnage,” said Mr. Psaradakis, 49, who suffered just minor injuries. “Everything seemed to happen behind me. I tried to help the poor people.” Thirteen passengers were killed in the blast.
A day later, the red double-decker buses on the same route filled up rapidly during the evening rush, with passengers as varied as the neighborhoods though which they run.
Women in head scarves were seated near Nigerian men in baseball caps and jean jackets. Portly British men shared benches with Asian teenagers wearing gold chains.
Most readily admitted to having some jitters, but said they were determined to carry on the way they always did. Many were reading copies of newspapers carrying full-page photographs of the destroyed bus, which was surrounded by rubble and looked as if it had been peeled open.
For Harvey Deaton, a manager for British Telecom who comes from Leeds and works in London three days a week, luck came in the form of a decision to arrive in the city on Wednesday, not Thursday, and a further decision not to take the subway Thursday morning. His usual route takes him along the Piccadilly Line, between King’s Cross and Russell Square, the site of the most serious attack. “You just think, ‘There for the more grace of God…’ ” he said.
Mr. Deaton said he was undaunted by the terrorist attacks and – like many others interviewed as they waited for trains at King’s Cross on Thursday – said he was not afraid to take either the train or the subway. “Obviously, things have happened before,” he said, mentioning, for instance, a fire at King’s Cross station in 1987 that killed 31 people. “If your number’s up, your number’s up.”
Robin Bulow, 44, reading a magazine as he traveled westbound on a District Line train on Friday afternoon, said he, too, would continue riding the subway, even though many of his friends had been caught up in the attack. “It could happen to anyone, on any bus or train,” he said.
Mr. Dadge, the man who overslept only to miss the early train that might have killed him, found himself something of a celebrity on Friday. A photograph of him helping a burn victim from the Edgware Road explosion whose face was covered with a white dressing was published in many newspapers, including this one. He said he hoped his decision to continue taking public transportation would send a message of sorts to the terrorists that Londoners would not be cowed. “We always knew there was going to be an explosion in London,” said Mr. Dadge, 28, who works for America Online. “It’s a question of when, not if. It’s pure coincidence that I was there then.”
Inside King’s Cross, Kevin Bye, a 52-year-old train driver, said he rode past King’s Cross early on Thursday, missing the explosion by about 15 minutes. That is why he was standing in the station on Friday afternoon, ready to head home to his family in Peterborough, and not lying in a hospital somewhere.
“Whether you were 10 minutes away or 10 hours away,” he said, “you still missed it.”
Heather Timmons, Jonathan Allen and Karla Adam contributed reporting for this article.
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Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times
July 10, 2005
‘The Prince of the City’: Cut Out for the Job
By JAMES TRAUB
A SWEDISH diplomat recently announced that he was nominating Rudy Giuliani, New York’s famously bellicose former mayor, for the Nobel Peace Prize. My first thought was: He won’t accept! But then, even better: If he wins, he could use his speech to denounce peace. Or Swedes. Or New York liberals.
We miss Rudy; even some of the people who could barely stand him at the time miss him. The administration of the current mayor, Michael Bloomberg, has turned out to be, as Fred Siegel puts it in this very insightful and very argumentative book, a ”moderately competent muddle.” The Giuliani years were neither moderate nor muddled.
Giuliani was the rare politician who actively sought confrontation, both because he believed that the unexamined opinions and entrenched interests he was taking on needed to be publicly exposed and because nature made him that way. Viewed strictly as blood sport, the Giuliani administration had no peer.
Siegel, a professor of history at the Cooper Union in New York, not only shared Giuliani’s views but, as a vinegary polemicist writing for the conservative quarterly City Journal, helped prepare the way for the Giuliani Reformation. Two biographies of Giuliani appeared during his tenure, but in ”The Prince of the City: Giuliani, New York and the Genius of American Life,” Siegel has produced the first book-length reckoning with Giuliani’s philosophy, achievements and legacy. The title is meant to evoke not only the movie of the same name, which featured a remorseless prosecutor based on Giuliani, then United States attorney for the Southern District of New York, but Machiavelli’s hero, who rescues the republic from chaos through calculated acts of cruelty. Siegel even quotes Giuliani saying, Machiavelli-like, ”I’d rather be respected than loved.”
The republic, in this case, was menaced not by political rivals but by its own ruinous choices. Siegel traces New York’s devout faith in big-government paternalism to the sainted Fiorello La Guardia, who, he says, ”left the city with uncontrollable costs.” He is withering on John Lindsay’s capitulation to racial blackmailers and to the ideology of ”welfare rights,” a bit less so on Ed Koch’s abandonment of his own conservative impulses. Siegel strives to be fair-minded about David Dinkins, New York’s first black mayor and a supremely decent man, but he acidly observes that Dinkins was ”every kind of liberal” — a friend of labor and of Wall Street, an integrationist and a multiculturalist. As crime rose and the city’s finances collapsed, Dinkins seemed at sea. The one idea to which he clung, Siegel notes, was that New York was, in the liberal rhetoric of the era, ”a victim of circumstances beyond its control” — federal spending policies, inner-city poverty, the decline of manufacturing and so on. This sense of despair, by Dinkins’s time, had become accepted wisdom.
The combination of liberal consensus and helplessness made serious policy debate seem irrelevant. City politics, on the other hand, was a Runyonesque carnival of wiseacres, bosses, bagmen, racial arsonists, ”poverty pimps” (Ed Koch’s toothsome phrase) and the like; that’s what most journalists wrote about. And so they missed the first stirrings of an alternative conception of urban policy, most of it promulgated not by conservatives but by disillusioned liberals like our author. Siegel is very effective, if sometimes a bit breathless, in tracing the widening ripples of influence, first, of David Osborne and Ted Gaebler’s seminal New Democrat tract, ”Reinventing Government,” and then of his own City Journal. It was in City Journal that the ”broken windows” theory of policing was frequently aired, as well as essential articles on welfare reform, budgeting and (by Siegel himself) ”the slow subversion of civility in New York’s public places.”
Giuliani was possibly the first serious mayoral candidate in a generation who was not steeped in the liberal consensus. Quite the contrary: his uncompromising ethos of self-reliance and self-discipline made him intuitively hostile to a philosophy Siegel characterizes as ”dependent individualism.” Giuliani once described ”freedom” as ”the willingness of every single human being to cede to lawful authority a great deal of discretion about what you do and how you do it.” The fact that New Yorkers elected so alien a figure is vivid proof of how disgusted many had become with the status quo — something like Peruvians choosing Alberto Fujimori as president on the grounds that only a Japanese could teach them how to behave properly.
Siegel shows how Giuliani, starting with deep convictions but almost no knowledge of urban issues, absorbed the new paradigm and systematically applied it to governance. Even Giuliani’s harshest critics — all but the diehards, anyway — acknowledge that the aggressive policing tactics he and Commissioner William Bratton introduced in the face of doomsaying from civil libertarians and some minority spokesmen drove down crime and transformed the daily experience of city life. But Siegel also glowingly recounts how Giuliani reversed the long trend toward the expansion of city government, substituted ”workfare” for welfare and imposed higher admissions standards at City University. A less ideological referee, it’s true, might score several of these fights differently. I would say, for example, that Giuliani’s wrathful assault on his schools chancellor, Ramon Cortines, who failed to slash his budget deeply enough to satisfy the mayor, was not only meanspirited but foolish, for Cortines understood what a Rudy Giuliani school system would look like better than did the mayor himself. The wise prince, Machiavelli said, commits only necessary cruelties.
But Giuliani’s legacy lies as much in the realm of psychology as of policy. He once stupefied state legislators in Albany by refusing to ask for more money for the schools. ”The new urban agenda,” he said, ”should declare that we can solve our own problems.” That was hyperbole; but it was, at the time, indispensable hyperbole. Giuliani showed, both in word and deed, that New York was governable, even if the city required the psychic equivalent of a 12-step program in order to regain its willpower. Siegel compares Giuliani in this regard to Churchill; the mind reels at the thought, though one can see his point.
But Siegel will not be mistaken for Martin Gilbert, Churchill’s magisterial biographer; ”The Prince of the City” does not delve very deeply into its subject’s nature. Siegel is at such pains to demonstrate that Giuliani proceeded according to deeply considered principles that he loses sight of the man’s ferocity, his excess, his weirdness; he dismisses many of Giuliani’s vindictive crusades as temporary lapses of judgment. In fact, Giuliani often seemed blinded by his own sense of righteousness. As United States attorney, he was a serial overreacher, who saw many of his most glorious courtroom victories overturned on appeal. Accustomed to worship, he went into orbit at public criticism of any kind, interpreting dissent as disloyalty. When I first wrote about him, in 1994, he refused to speak to me — and the members of his inner circle took the hint — because I had written too sympathetically about Cortines. I had, apparently, placed myself beyond the pale. There was more of Cromwell than of Churchill in Giuliani; more still of Bobby Kennedy, circa 1962.
The rationalist, policy-wonk image of Giuliani tends to blur not only his worst moments in office but his greatest moment of all — the response to the terrorist attacks of 9/11. Siegel is very good in describing how Giuliani, mocked as always, prepared the city’s uniformed officers for the possibility of terrorist assault. But his narrative of those terrible days, though faithful and fair, is not quite up to the revelatory quality of the moment, when the mayor, under supreme duress, conducted himself with a matchless combination of composure, tenderness and moral outrage. It was as if, until then, he had been lavishing his vast energies and heroic sense of destiny on too small an object — as if life had finally assigned him the starring role in one of the thundering and calamitous Verdi operas he adored.
What next for this restless spirit? Siegel welcomes the prospect of a Giuliani presidency. But I don’t think that the Republic is sufficiently terrified — not yet, anyway — to turn to this prince on horseback.
James Traub is a contributing writer for The Times Magazine.
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Toby Melville/Reuters
Abu Hamza al-Masri preached violence until his arrest in 2004.
July 10, 2005
For a Decade, London Thrived as a Busy Crossroads of Terror
By ELAINE SCIOLINO
and DON VAN NATTA Jr.
LONDON, July 9 – Long before bombings ripped through London on Thursday, Britain had become a breeding ground for hate, fed by a militant version of Islam.
For two years, extremists like Sheik Omar Bakri Mohammed, a 47-year-old Syrian-born cleric, have played to ever-larger crowds, calling for holy war against Britain and exhorting young Muslim men to join the insurgency in Iraq. In a newspaper interview in April 2004, he warned that “a very well-organized” London-based group, Al Qaeda Europe, was “on the verge of launching a big operation” here.
In a sermon attended by more than 500 people in a central London meeting hall last December, Sheik Omar vowed that if Western governments did not change their policies, Muslims would give them “a 9/11, day after day after day.”
If London became a magnet for fiery preachers, it also became a destination for men willing to carry out their threats. For a decade, the city has been a crossroads for would-be terrorists who used it as a home base, where they could raise money, recruit members and draw inspiration from the militant messages.
Among them were terrorists involved in attacks in Madrid, Casablanca, Saudi Arabia, Israel and in the Sept. 11 plot. Zacarias Moussaoui, the only man charged in the United States in the 9/11 attacks, and Richard C. Reid, the convicted shoe-bomber, both prayed at the Finsbury Park mosque in north London. The mosque’s former leader, Abu Hamza al-Masri openly preached violence for years before the authorities arrested him in April 2004.
Although Britain has passed a series of antiterrorist and immigration laws and made nearly 800 arrests since Sept. 11, 2001, critics have charged that its deep tradition of civil liberties and protection of political activists have made the country a haven for terrorists. The British government has drawn particular criticism from other countries over its refusal to extradite terrorism suspects.
For years, there was a widely held belief that Britain’s tolerance helped stave off any Islamic attacks at home. But the anger of London’s militant clerics turned on Britain after it offered unwavering support for the American-led invasion of Iraq. On Thursday morning, an attack long foreseen by worried counterterrorism officials became a reality.
“The terrorists have come home,” said a senior intelligence official based in Europe, who works often with British officials. “It is payback time for a policy that was, in my opinion, an irresponsible policy of the British government to allow these networks to flourish inside Britain.”
Those policies have been a matter of intense debate within the government, with the courts, the Blair government and members of Parliament frequently opposing one another.
For example, when the Parliament considered a bill in March that would have allowed the government to impose tough controls on terror suspects – like house arrests, curfews and electronic tagging – some legislators objected, saying it would erode civil liberties. “It does not secure the nation,” William Cash, of the House of Commons, said of the bill. “It is liable to create further trouble and dissension among those whom we are seeking to control – the terrorists.” The measure is still pending.
Investigators examining Thursday’s attacks, which left at least 49 dead and 700 injured, are pursuing a theory that the bombers were part of a homegrown sleeper cell, which may or may not have had foreign support for the bomb-making phase of the operation.
If that theory proves true, it would reflect the transformation of the terror threat around Europe. With much of Al Qaeda’s hierarchy either captured or killed, a new, more nimble terrorist force has emerged on the continent, comprising mostly semiautonomous, Qaeda-inspired local groups that are believed to be operating in France, Switzerland, Spain, Italy and other countries.
“Terrorists are not strangers, foreigners,” said Bruno Lemaire, adviser to Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin of France. “They’re insiders, well integrated inside the country.”
Another senior intelligence official based in Europe said the fear was that there would be additional attacks in other European cities by homegrown sleeper cells inspired by Al Qaeda and by the attacks in Casablanca, Madrid and now London.
“This is exactly what we are going to witness in Europe: most of the attacks will be carried out by local groups, the people who have been here for a long time, well integrated into the fabric of society,” the official said.
Well before Thursday’s bombings, British officials predicted a terrorist attack in their country. In a speech in October 2003, Eliza Manningham-Buller, the director general of MI5, Britain’s domestic intelligence agency, said she saw “no prospect of a significant reduction in the threat posed to the U.K. and its interests from Islamist terrorism over the next five years, and I fear for a considerable number of years thereafter.”
Britain’s challenge to detect militants on its soil is particularly difficult.
Counterterrorism officials estimate that 10,000 to 15,000 Muslims living in Britain are supporters of Al Qaeda. Among that number, officials believe that as many as 600 men were trained in camps connected with Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and elsewhere.
British investigators say that identifying Islamic militants among the two million Muslims living here, about 4 percent of the population, is especially hard. The Muslim community here is the most diverse of any in Europe in terms of ethnic origins, culture, history, language, politics and class. More than 60 percent of the community comes not from North African or Gulf Arab countries, but from countries like Pakistan, India and Bangladesh.
Before Sept. 11, 2001, British officials monitored radical Islamists but generally stopped short of arresting or extraditing them. After Sept. 11, the government passed legislation that allowed indefinite detention of terrorism suspects. But last year, it was overturned by Britain’s highest court, the Law Lords, as a violation of human rights law.
Complicating Britain’s antiterrorism strategy is its refusal or delays of requests for extradition of suspects by some allies, including the United States, France, Spain and Morocco.
Moroccan authorities, for example, are seeking the return of Mohammed el-Guerbozi, a battle-hardened veteran of Afghanistan who they say planned the May 2003 attacks in Casablanca, which killed 45 people. He has also been identified as a founder of the Moroccan Combatant Islamic Group, cited by the United Nations as a terrorist network connected to Al Qaeda. An operative in that group, Noureddine Nifa, told investigators that the organization had sleeper cells prepared to mount synchronized bombings in Britain, France, Italy, Belgium and Canada. In an interview last year, Gen. Hamidou Laanigri, Morocco’s chief of security, said Osama bin Laden authorized Mr. Guerbozi to open a training camp for Moroccans in Afghanistan in the beginning of 2001. Last December, Mr. Guerbozi was convicted in absentia in Morocco for his involvement in the Casablanca attacks and sentenced to 20 years.
But the British government has no extradition treaty with Morocco and has refused to extradite Mr. Guerbozi, a father of six who lives in a rundown apartment in north London. British officials say there is not enough evidence to arrest him, General Laanigri said.
Similarly, Baltasar Garzón, a Spanish investigating magistrate, has requested extradition of Abu Qatada, a radical Muslim cleric living in Britain who received political refugee status in the early 1990′s. A Palestinian with Jordanian nationality, Mr. Qatada is described in court documents as the spiritual leader of Al Qaeda in Europe. Although Mr. Qatada was put under house arrest in 2002 and then arrested, he was freed in March and put into an observation program.
He is also wanted in Jordan, where he has been given a 15-year prison sentence in absentia for his connection to bomb attacks during 1998.
For 10 years, France has been fighting for the extradition of Rachid Ramda, a 35-year-old Algerian, over his suspected role in a bombing in Paris in 1995 staged by Algeria’s militant Armed Islamic Group. Much to the irritation of the French, three years ago, Britain’s High Court blocked a Home Office order to hand him over, citing allegations that his co-defendants gave testimony under torture by the French.
Last week, Mr. Clarke, the home secretary, approved the extradition order, but Mr. Ramda is appealing.
Another prime terrorism suspect who operated in London for years is Mustafa Setmarian Nasar, the suspected mastermind of the Madrid bombings. Although the authorities now cannot find him, he is believed to have visited Britain often and lived here openly from 1995 to 1998.
Officials believe he tried to organize his own extremist group before Sept. 11, but afterward officials say he pledged loyalty to Osama bin Laden. He lived in north London and was the editor of a militant Islamist magazine, Al Ansar, which is published here, distributed at some mosques in Western Europe and closely monitored by British security officials.
Across Britain since Sept. 11, 2001, nearly 800 people have been arrested under the Terrorism Act of 2000, according to recent police records. Of that number, 121 were charged with terrorism related crimes, but only 21 people have been convicted.
In one of the biggest antiterrorism cases made here, Scotland Yard arrested 12 men and charged them with making traces of the poison ricin inside an apartment in Wood Green, in north London, in January 2003. But 11 of the 12 men were acquitted without trial based on a lack of evidence.
Since Thursday’s attacks, there have been calls for a crackdown on radical Muslims, including some from Britain’s Muslim leaders.
“As far as I am concerned these people are not British,” said Lord Nizar Ahmed, one of the few Muslims in the House of Lords. “They are foreign ideological preachers of hate who have been threatening our national security and encouraging young people into militancy. They should be put away and sent back to their countries.”
He added, “They created a whole new breeding ground for recruitment to radicalism.”
Even last week’s bombings did little to curtail the rhetoric of some of the most radical leaders, who criticized Prime Minister Tony Blair for saying that the bombings appeared to be the work of Islamic terrorists.
“This shows me that he is an enemy of Islam,” Abu Abdullah, a self-appointed preacher and the spokesman for the radical group Supporters of Shariah, said in an interview on Friday, adding, “Sometimes when you see how people speak, it shows you who your enemies are.”
Mr. Abdullah declared that those British citizens who re-elected Mr. Blair “have blood on their hands” because British soldiers are killing Muslims. He also said that the British government, not Muslims, “have their hands” in the bombings, explaining, “They want to go on with their fight against Islam.”
Imran Waheed, a spokesman for a radical British-based group, Hizb ut Tahrir, which is allowed to function here but is banned in Germany and much of the Muslim world, said: “When Westerners get killed, the world cries. But if Muslims get killed in Iraq or Afghanistan, it’s the smallest of news. I will condemn what happened in London only after there is the promise from Western leaders to condemn what they have done in Falluja and other parts of Iraq and in Afghanistan.”
So far, there appears to be little effort to restrain outspoken clerics, including prominent extremists like Sheik Omar, who has reportedly been under investigation by Scotland Yard.
Sheik Omar, who remains free, is an example of the double-edged policies in Britain. He is a political refugee who was given asylum 19 years ago and is supported by public assistance. Asked in an interview in May how he felt about being barred from obtaining British citizenship, he replied, “I don’t want to become a citizen of hell.”
Information Sought on British Man
By The New York Times
LONDON, July 8 – British law enforcement officials investigating the terrorist attacks here asked their counterparts in Germany and Belgium for information about a London man who is accused by the Moroccan government of engineering the May 2003 terrorist attacks in Casablanca, two officials said Saturday.
The man, Mohammed el-Guerbozi, 48, a British citizen who was born in Morocco, has lived in London for nearly two decades.
At a news conference, Scotland Yard officials denied that Mr. Guerbozi was a suspect in the bombing attacks on Thursday. But on Saturday night, senior British officials said that for caution’s sake, they had asked several countries in Europe for information about Mr. Guerbozi and his contacts.
Several news organizations in recent days reported that Mr. Guerbozi had fled London on Thursday. But in a telephone interview Saturday night, he said he was still in London and denied any involvement in the London bombings.
“Nothing is true,” said Mr. Guerbozi. “What they said about me after the Madrid bombings, they are saying it again and the media are writing the same things. It is not true. Now they say that I fled from London, but this is not true. I’m here.”
Mr. Guerbozi said he offered to speak with the British police, but they did not accept his offer. “I’m not in the mountains and I’m not in the forest,” he said. “I’m in hiding and the intelligence service and the police know where I am.”
Souad Mekhennet contributed reporting from London for this article, and Tim Golden from New York.
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Illustration by Lou Beach
SQUANDERED VICTORY
The American Occupation and the Bungled Effort to Bring Democracy to Iraq.
By Larry Diamond.
369 pp. Times Books. $25.
LOSING IRAQ
Inside the Postwar Reconstruction Fiasco.
By David L. Phillips.
292 pp. Westview Press. $25
July 10, 2005
‘Squandered Victory’ and ‘Losing Iraq’: Now What?
By REUEL MARC GERECHT
COULD the administration have chosen a different course in Iraq that would today have the country farther down the road to popular government and cost fewer lives? Two new books — among the first ”insider” accounts by former Iraq advisers — find the White House guilty of an incompetent occupation. Representative government may, just possibly, still take hold in Mesopotamia, but neither Larry Diamond, a researcher at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University who was called by the national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, to temporary service in Baghdad in early 2004, nor David L. Phillips, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations who served as an adviser to the State Department before and after the fall of Saddam Hussein, are at all optimistic.
Though thematically similar, Diamond’s ”Squandered Victory” and Phillips’s ”Losing Iraq” are distinctly different books. The former is essentially a memoir of three months in Iraq: January through March 2004, the period when Diamond served in the Coalition Provisional Authority, the occupation brain center run by L. Paul Bremer III and the American military. Phillips’s book is a recollection of a year’s work on the Future of Iraq Project, the State Department’s much-praised but little-used prewar planning document. ”Squandered Victory” is a serious volume; ”Losing Iraq” is not.
Two months after Rice summoned him to public service, Diamond arrives in Baghdad. He doesn’t really have a firm idea of what he will do — a common fate at the C.P.A., especially among American civilians on temporary duty. A scholar who made his reputation writing about young democracies, Diamond is annoyed by the ad hoc nature of occupation decision making; he is also often deeply impressed by the commitment, and sometimes even the planning, of the Americans and Iraqis he works with. He finds the C.P.A.’s plan for building democracy in Iraq ”conceptually impressive and exciting,” and throws himself into his job, which more or less develops into giving tutorials to Iraqis and serving as a scholar-in-residence for Americans.
The two roles come together as Iraq’s Transitional Administrative Law — the interim constitution — is being written and rewritten by Iraqi drafters and their alternately intrusive and reticent American proctors. After the signing of the constitution on March 8, 2004, Diamond started ”to sell it” to Iraqi audiences who ”wanted very much to learn about the document and discuss it — not simply to accept it and praise it but to dissect it, question it, debate it and curse it.” Diamond becomes a sounding board for Iraqi opinion among the increasingly isolated and very young Americans who dominate the C.P.A. Although he has minimal knowledge of Iraq, doesn’t speak Arabic and is reluctant to travel outside the American compound in Baghdad without substantial security, he tries to convey local sentiments and the weaknesses of American policy to his inner-circle colleagues (who appear to travel even less than he does).
Conscious of his own limitations, Diamond generously shares the limelight. He underscores, in particular, the prodigious pro-democracy efforts of Michael Gfoeller, a scholarly but streetwise Arabic-speaking foreign service officer who almost single-handedly runs the American show in the critical Shiite lands south of Baghdad, reaching out to Shiite tribal sheiks, clerics and local notables. Gfoeller is one of the real heroes of the American occupation, and Diamond’s awe of his talents and accomplishments speaks well of his own fair-mindedness toward his compatriots in Iraq.
Unfortunately, the character sketches in ”Squandered Victory” usually aren’t strong. Iraqis and Americans come and go, and some keep reappearing, but Diamond rarely gives you a strong sense of who these people really are. Quoting a colleague, he touches upon a problem for the occupation: ”The core of the process in Iraq is democratization. But the people at Usaid and in local governance just didn’t sufficiently buy into this. There was no strong consensus on democracy building.” Diamond drops this bombshell without once providing any detail on colleagues who hadn’t bought in. His reticence about probing their doubts, hopes and frustrations makes the book feel at times like a characterless white paper for a Washington think tank.
Even more regrettable is Diamond’s failure to supply insightful commentary on the major Iraqi players. His discussion of Ahmad Chalabi, the notorious head of the Iraqi National Congress, is especially weak. Even if Chalabi is ”voraciously ambitious” and a ”darling of American neoconservatives,” we aren’t helped to understand the events and historical forces that elevated him to his leadership position among the Iraqi exiles, or why, despite the best efforts of the C.I.A., the State Department and the National Security Council, he has become more influential, not less, as Iraqis have gained more sovereignty.
Chalabi, who was supposedly a Svengali on the Potomac but a dud on the Tigris, was the driving force behind the creation of the United Iraqi Alliance, which won the most votes in the Jan. 30 national elections; he is now a deputy prime minister and the de facto head of the oil ministry. Diamond’s suggestion that the Pentagon just wanted to pass Iraq to Chalabi (and hence engaged in no serious prewar planning) exaggerates Chalabi’s influence — even as it minimizes the impact of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s desire to transform American war-fighting (smaller is better), along with the preferences of Vietnam-scarred senior officers who, it appears, were reluctant to think about another ugly counterinsurgency campaign in another Asian country.
Diamond chastises American officials for underestimating the power of Iraqi nationalism. He quotes Gen. John Abizaid, an important senior officer involved in planning for Iraq, as saying: ”We must in all things be modest. We are an antibody in their culture.” This is a commendable attitude for a cultural anthropologist. It is less so for a military officer responsible for the lives of Iraqi civilians who were being robbed, shot, butchered and blown up at an ever-increasing rate. Diamond nails Rumsfeld, correctly in my view, for his decision to occupy Iraq with too few soldiers. Of course, it’s impossible to know whether more infantrymen could have nipped the insurgency in the bud, but certainly a larger force would have had a better chance of making the roads more secure and the insurgents less so.
Diamond favors more Iraqi input and control over their governance. Yet he holds firm to a belief — not unlike his boss Bremer’s — that national elections must come gradually, ideally after an incubation period of a few years, after security and important national institutions had been restored, and after all parties, but especially Sunni Arabs and secular liberal democrats, had had a chance to organize.
In a perfect world, this makes sense. But in Iraq, people don’t like occupation and many, especially the Shiites’ pre-eminent cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, had caught the democratic bug. Had Diamond’s prescriptions been followed, the entire country might have flared into rebellion. His call for a postponement of national elections — he made it in The New York Times in January 2005 — might have arrayed the entire Shiite community against us and supercharged the spirits of the Sunni-Arab rejectionist camp. For most Iraqis, and for others in the Middle East, Jan. 30, the day of the national elections, remains an inspiring and hopeful moment.
Still, ”Squandered Victory” is required reading because of what the author reveals about himself. A deeply conflicted liberal, Diamond was decidedly ambivalent about the war but nonetheless went to work for George W. Bush’s democracy project in Iraq. Indeed, the book often seems like vengeful therapy, a way for him to disassociate himself from the president’s men and their failure. This is odd, since Diamond’s picture of his own work and others’ presents an enterprise that, for all its serious mistakes, is probably as thoughtful and adaptive as any earlier American occupation of a foreign land. ”Arrogance, ignorance and isolation . . . plunged America into the war in the first place,” Diamond writes. The invasion was, as one diplomat told him, an ”original sin,” from which more mistakes ineluctably followed. Yet before the invasion he had written that ”Saddam Hussein clearly has no intention of complying with the U.N. resolutions” and ”unless Saddam is toppled from within or goes into exile, war with Iraq is inevitable, sooner or later.” Like President Bush, Diamond wanted to prevent ”a cruel, reckless and megalomaniacal dictator from having the ultimate weapon of mass destruction.” Bush’s ”original sin,” then, is really one of process: He just didn’t try hard enough to convince the ”international community”it should go to war.
Diamond’s ambivalence makes him representative of an important strain in American liberalism. It will be interesting to see whether he continues to believe, as he did in February 2004, that ”nothing in this decade will so test our purpose and fiber as a nation, and our ability to change the world for the better, as our willingness to stand with the people of Iraq over the long haul as they build a free country.”
David L. Phillips, by contrast, is free of all such self-contradictions. ”If the idea was to create a model democracy in the heart of the Arab world, Iraq was not the place to start,” he writes. ”Iraqis lack a sense of national identity. . . . There is no tradition of participation in politics. Leadership has always been about power and force.”
”Losing Iraq” seeks to set the record straight by arguing that the Bush administration’s failure to appreciate the State Department’s Future of Iraq Project, which brought together nearly 250 Iraqis, severely weakened the American presence in Iraq. Phillips doesn’t really make the case that the project would have saved us, but his job at State was to monitor the Iraqi exiles in the project’s democratic principles working group, and he’s angry that his handiwork was ignored. He resigned from his job at Foggy Bottom in September 2003, he tells us, when he realized the administration was ignoring the 13 volumes (over 2,000 pages) of Iraqi deliberations begun under the project’s auspices.
Many critics of the Bush administration’s handling of Iraq (including Diamond) have cited this project as an enormous opportunity lost, because of turf battles between the State Department and the Pentagon. By this account, Foggy Bottom had planned for a post-Saddam Iraq, anticipating many of the awful things that could go wrong.
There is only one problem with this version of events: for the most part, it’s not true. The Future of Iraq Project was not a serious post-Saddam planning exercise for a department readying itself for war. According to the Iraqi writer Kanan Makiya, who was perhaps the most influential voice within the democratic principles working group, it was mostly busywork for Iraqi exiles whom State wanted to guide and control. For exiles like Makiya — and some neoconservatives in Washington like me, who would have welcomed serious postwar planning in any quarter — it was clear that the Near Eastern bureau at State, which oversaw the project, did not want to engage in any planning that might make the path to war easier.
In fact, Makiya (who had a tense relationship with Phillips) told me, State stubbornly refused initially to have any democracy-planning component inside the project because it could turn into a platform for a vocal band of Iraqis with ideas that might well run counter to what State envisioned. Congressional pressure and protesting e-mail messages sent by Iraqis inside the project to a variety of senior administration officials, Makiya says, eventually persuaded department officials to allow for a more unrestricted discussion of Iraq’s political future. And what most Iraqis involved in the project saw as a first principle of post-Saddam politics — a provisional government established before an American invasion — was rejected by State and by virtually everyone else in Washington. According to the final report, all other political ideas and planning flowed from the early establishment of Iraqi sovereignty. Yet Phillips never accurately describes the birth of the democratic principles working group.
Beyond this, much of ”Losing Iraq” is given over to armchair geostrategic assertions (the Bush administration alienated Tehran’s democracy-crushing ruling clerics, who would’ve helped America in Iraq), to Chalabi-bashing, to comparing President Bush’s rhetoric to Osama bin Laden’s and to detailed reporting on all the dismal things that have happened in post-Saddam Iraq. In rendering this version of events, Phillips relies on other sources, since it appears that he himself didn’t visit postwar Iraq. Which raises a question. Why read Phillips’s book when you can read journalists and Iraqi bloggers who have themselves seen the tragedies, and the triumphs?
Reuel Marc Gerecht, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, is the author most recently of ”The Islamic Paradox.”
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