May 29, 2007

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  Preparing for graduation at West Point, where your first job is the front line. Intro to Warfare By Chris Smith   It takes all of about four minutes for 4,300 cadets to file into the West Point mess hall for breakfast. Meals are taken inside a graceful granite building whose arched ceilings, dark wooden walls, and low lighting give it the feel of a Gothic cathedral—one where the parishioners are dressed in gray or camouflage uniforms, and the saints, staring down from massive oil paintings lining the walls, are decorated generals. A rumbling chatter echoes as the cadets are seated, until a clear, forceful voice, coming from a balcony above the main dining-room floor, quiets the cavernous room. “Please give your attention to the first captain!” Then another voice, this one belonging to the top-ranked cadet. “I regret to inform you of the death of First Lieutenant Phillip Neel, class of 2005. First Lieutenant Neel died on 8 April 2007, in Balad, Iraq, when his unit came in contact with enemy forces using grenades. Please join me in observing a moment of silence for this fallen graduate.” Among the silent is cadet David del Cuadro-Zimmerman, 22, a son of Park Slope, who is in his final year at the United States Military Academy. Later that day, he nods solemnly; he remembers seeing Lieutenant Neel on campus not that long ago. “Those announcements seem to come more frequently now,” he says. Four years ago, as the war in Iraq began, del Cuadro-Zimmerman’s parents, both retired public-school teachers, had offered to pay for whatever college he chose—anywhere that would keep him from going to West Point. At the last minute, though, he picked Army over Boston College. Now he’s ready to start flight school and get to Iraq. Yet he can’t help wondering what his life would have been like had he taken up his parents on their offer. Nine hundred cadets will graduate from West Point on May 26. Five are from New York City. After taking in a commencement speech from Vice-President Dick Cheney, and after tossing their caps in the air in the football stadium, the Army’s newest officers will scatter for months of branch training. Perhaps before it ends, Congress will cut off money for the war and bring the troops home. Perhaps Nouri al-Maliki, the Iraqi prime minister, will prestidigitate a functioning government and police force. But the most likely scenario is that all but a handful of the 900 graduates will be in harm’s way by this time next year. They’ll face grim odds. West Point graduates are taking a larger share of casualties than at any time in recent American military history. Of the almost 3,800 military deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan, 49 have been USMA alumni. That’s three times the percentage of graduate deaths in Vietnam, six times higher than what befell former cadets in the Second World War, and thirteen times the proportion of those killed in the First World War. Suicide bombers, IEDs, snipers—it’s little wonder that more officers are doing the “five and fly,” the term for leaving uniform as soon as the required five years of active duty is finished. The Army is now suffering from a shortage of about 3,000 mid-level officers, which has caused President Bush to gradually increase the size of West Point’s entering classes, growing the student body from 4,000 to 4,300 cadets in the past four years. New York’s newest warriors are part of the first class to matriculate after the war in Iraq began. Some were pulled by patriotism; for others, joining the Army was a truly radical form of rebellion. All knew what they were signing up for—although they couldn’t have anticipated the questions that would arise about the weapons of mass destruction, or the country’s political sea change, or even that we’d still be there four years later. Somehow, they’ve held onto an inspiring, clear-eyed idealism. Or maybe it’s a self-preserving denial. “Everyone is optimistic about what lies ahead,” del Cuadro-Zimmerman says. “Dwelling on why the country went to war in the first place is a waste of time. It’s about making things right now, or at least doing right from here forward.” Marya Rosenberg had been in the Army for ten days, and she was starving. It was June 2003, the beginning of the introductory summer session for new cadets—and for many, the roughest stretch of their entire four years at West Point. Rosenberg is a naturally lean five foot seven, but she had melted from 134 pounds to 122. Running in the summer heat with a 25-pound pack on her back contributed to the drastic drop, but the real cause was even more basic—and more cruel. “They wouldn’t let me eat,” Rosenberg, 22, says of the senior cadets running the indoctrination. “I was screwing up everything at first—I couldn’t even march in step. So at meals, they put me at the haze table. They tell you anything you eat has to be small enough to swallow in three to five chews. This went on for two weeks, until my squad started volunteering to switch out with me because they thought I was dying.”   Rosenberg was 50 miles north of the city and a long way from home. She’d grown up on East 84th Street, between Madison and Fifth Avenues, in a cozy sixth-floor two-bedroom. She could lean over the railing of her apartment’s rooftop deck and see the Met. Rosenberg’s parents are both semi-retired corporate lawyers with refined literary tastes. She’d gone to Hunter, one of the city’s elite public high schools, and a place where a liberal political viewpoint is as assumed as the school building’s staying upright. By tenth grade, Rosenberg was feeling aimless. So when an unsolicited postcard from West Point arrived in her mailbox, along with dozens from conventional colleges thanks to her stellar PSAT scores, Rosenberg was curious, if unserious. “I thought it was hilarious,” she says. “It seemed so out of character in terms of everything I was doing. I said, ‘Well, I’m not making a commitment if I send in the card.’” Marya’s father, however, was more intrigued. To Richard Rosenberg, West Point seemed a strangely perfect fit. When Marya and her younger sister, Alexandra, were small, their father would read them nightly bedtime stories, selecting the books with care. “I happen to like knight stories,” says Richard. “So in the beginning, there was a version of King Arthur, by Sir James Knowles. The last thing I read Marya was Moby-Dick, which I would say is a weird, sad, modern knight story. The medieval romances are, of course, fantasies—but nothing just happens in those stories. Everything is intended to teach—specifically, the values of the warrior class.” Making the decision to go to West Point during a polarizing war is a bold choice for a high-school student living in one of the deepest-blue precincts of a staunchly antiwar city. “Everybody was all busy protesting the war at the time,” says Marya. “Hunter is really liberal, and I’m a liberal too. But I had one girl ask me what I was thinking about doing for college, and when I told her, she said, ‘How could you do something so immoral?’ They made fun of me in the yearbook.” She is regularly reminded that, apart from her parents’ place on East 84th, New York is not her home anymore. “There’s a graduate of West Point who endowed this great program that sends cadets to the opera,” she says. “A couple of years ago, we went to the Metropolitan Opera and The New Yorker wrote an article and they were dubious about the idea. There was a line in the story, something like ‘After all, Josef Mengele liked to listen to opera when he was torturing people.’ That made me so angry. Do you guys recall who stopped Josef Mengele? It was not reporters at The New Yorker, or people in New York City with correct moral principles. It was people in the Army.” Richard Rosenberg, sitting in his Upper East Side living room, becomes visibly distraught at the thought of his daughter’s choice going unappreciated. “I grew up in Liberty, New York, the Catskills,” he says. “When a child from Liberty gets into West Point”—his voice breaks—”they get their picture in the paper, you know? They make a big deal of it.” But the reaction Marya got from her Hunter teachers and classmates only confirmed her decision to join the Army. And her sister has followed in her footsteps. Alexandra is now a plebe, finishing up her freshman year at West Point. Richard glances up at his wife, who is slicing some coffee cake from Greenberg’s. “Kate was upset when Marya got interested in West Point,” he says. “I just knew it was going to happen,” she says quietly, adjusting her tortoiseshell glasses. “Like the fates had been arranged,” Richard says. The attackers have Mark Zambarda surrounded. They’re rushing in, fists flying—first one, then another pair, then a fourth, closing fast. Everyone is taller and heavier than Zambarda. But he doesn’t wait, or run away. He charges the nearest man, pins his arms, and uses him as a shield. Punches rock Zambarda’s head, but he doesn’t panic. He keeps moving, pivoting, warding off blows with the body of one of his enemies, sweat turning his fatigues a dark swampy green. The whistle blows after two minutes. Zambarda and his attackers—his classmates—suck wind. He’s exhausted, but he’s upright, staggering across the matted floor inside Arvin gym. “Most kids are crushed the first time,” says professor Jason Winkle. “They forget what they’re doing and end up cowering or becoming a punching bag. Mark was a natural. He was the aggressor, and he stayed under control. As far as heart, he’s one of the biggest kids in the world.” Zambarda, 21, grew up playing with GI Joes in a blue-collar section of Staten Island, the son of an narcotics detective in the NYPD. Family friends died responding to the attacks of September 11, and his father spent days vainly searching for survivors. “I thought I needed to consider doing something to give back to the country. Less than three-tenths of one percent of the population is serving in the military,” the cadet says. Zambarda knew that one of his father’s few regrets was not serving in Vietnam. “You’re 18 years old, you’re ready to grab the bull by the horns. Joining the military seemed like a cool thing to do. I still think it’s one of the coolest jobs a guy can have,” he says. “But the reality of going to war wasn’t really a consideration.” The reality of going to war has dramatically changed the experience of West Point. There are still the standard elements of a military education—Introduction to Warfighting, Tactical Leadership, Combined Arms Operations I and II—but the academy has adapted to meet the specific demands of battle in Iraq. The multiple-attacker exercise, which Winkle calls “the Gauntlet,” is part of a course called Advanced Close-Quarters Combat; Zambarda took it in the fall of his junior year. West Point hired Winkle as director of combatives in the days immediately following September 11, as one of the first steps in retooling a curriculum for an unpredictable and dangerous new period. He’d spent his career training Navy seals and Army Special Forces units. “West Point has changed almost everything it teaches about on-the-ground combat in the past five years,” says Winkle, who is now teaching at Indiana State. “In the Vietnam era, we were doing jungle warfare; in the first Gulf War, it was a lot of air strikes. Now we’ve moved into an era where urban warfare is predominant. I introduced military operations in urban terrain.” Nine instructors, most rotating through West Point after tours in Iraq, teach the tactics of asymmetric warfare. “When you have to hunt the bad guy in the streets in the middle of people trying to live and exist, you’ve got some major issues,” Winkle says. “People are shooting at us from mosques, but if we return fire, we’re the bad guy. It’s extremely tough. We do a lot of mind-set training on what it means to be a warrior: When you’re terrified and someone’s trying to hurt you, how do you not squeeze that trigger? It’s critical that we give them an ethical basis to fall back on.” Even as the churning of the leadership ranks has increased the pressure to produce greater numbers of field commanders, the academy has clung tenaciously to its mission—turning out well-rounded adults, not just battle-ready grunts. The debacle in Iraq has made that mission even more important. “The new lieutenants are coming out of four years at the academy, and they’re put in charge of guys who’ve done two or three tours already,” Winkle says. “They’re expected to show up and lead these soldiers. That’s a heck of a thing to hang over some young kid’s head.” Especially because Iraq is very much a platoon leader’s war. Fighting an insurgency means they’re out in front, commanding small units instead of working in larger formations directed by senior officials off the battlefield. The first lieutenants have unusual power to exercise independent judgment—but they’re also far more vulnerable than in other wars. West Point has tried to prepare the cadets more thoroughly by expanding its menu of ethics courses—partly as a response to embarrassments like Abu Ghraib, but primarily because its graduates are dropped into the middle of a world of shadowy allegiances and unending stress. The academy has also added courses on terrorism, a subject barely addressed in the curriculum before September 11. It was only in 2003 that the academy opened its Combating Terrorism Center. In classes like Terrorism: New Challenges, the school attempts to catch up with the modern threat. Inside Thayer Hall, sixteen cadets are riveted to a TV set, watching Dirty Kuffar, an infamous, somewhat goofy jihadist video made somewhere in England. On screen, a black-masked, gun-waving man dances and raps in front of a flag filled with Arabic slogans. The video cuts quickly to American soldiers being shot, to photos of President Bush shaking hands with Ariel Sharon, to a glimpse of a smiling Saddam Hussein. “We cover the roots of terrorism, how does an individual become involved with a violent organization, the strategic uses of violence,” says professor Lianne Kennedy-Boudali, one of five part-time instructors in the terrorism program. “And we want the cadets to have an understanding of how their role fits in a larger strategic picture, both for their own safety and because what they do on a daily basis has an effect on U.S. policy. The cadets are going to end up on the ground in a year, so this is pretty practical information. They need to understand the difference between a Sunni Baathist, what that person wants out of an act of violence, versus Al Qaeda in Iraq, and who each is trying to influence. What changes most is the part dealing with insurgency, about the relationship between counterterrorism and counterinsurgency.” Zambarda was one of Kennedy-Boudali’s best students. “Mark and the other cadets are smart; they don’t take a lot of things for granted,” she says. “And they’re kind of cynical, which is good, too.” When a West Point graduate is killed in Afghanistan or Iraq, word passes quickly. Marya Rosenberg had heard about Phil Neel the day before the announcement in the mess hall. “He was in my company two years ago,” she says. “And I was on a team with him in my second year here. I don’t want to jump on other people’s tragedies, because I didn’t know him that well. I’m really sorry this happened for his family. Some of my friends in the company are really devastated by his death. They were close to him, and that was upsetting, to see them upset. Two of my good friends from the class of ’05 are in Iraq right now, though thankfully they’ve been okay so far.” Rosenberg is acutely aware that her hometown believes Neel’s death, along with the thousands of others in Iraq, was in the service of a falsely entered, then mismanaged war. But she sticks to the cadet’s duty not to publicly criticize the chain of command. Whatever mission she’s sent on, she’ll fulfill. Still, she doesn’t necessarily disagree that the war in Iraq has been misguided. “I don’t want to get into criticizing the president or anything,” she says diplomatically. “But I have a lot of respect for the retired generals who have spoken out against things that are clearly wrong.” Sometimes, though, after taps is played each night at 11:30, talk in the barracks turns to who is to blame for the mess in Iraq. “People don’t attribute the mistakes to any one person in particular,” says one cadet. “Well, okay—Donald Rumsfeld. And there’s a disappointment with the civilian leadership overall.” Interestingly, though, the leaders who come in for the harshest critiques are the ones in uniform. “The generals haven’t spoken up as much as they should have,” says a New York cadet. “When you become a four-star general, the expectation is that you’re a politician as well as a military leader, and you can’t always hold your tongue. Sometimes you have to speak up, and a lot of people feel that hasn’t been done. The troops just aren’t getting what’s needed over there, or they’re getting it too late. That’s what makes people upset.” Another thing that makes cadets mad is the public’s indifference to their sacrifice. Joseph McCarthy, 21, who grew up in the Bronx, was in class at Stuyvesant when the planes hit. “Anyone who’s in support of the troops, I’d just like to say, let the troops know, you know?” says McCarthy, who is headed for an artillery unit. “Everyone has different opinions on the war, but at least let the soldiers know you’re there for them.” Zambarda loves a good argument; often playing devil’s advocate, he constantly turns issues over in his head. He reads the Times every day, and has been closely following the debate in Congress over setting a deadline for withdrawal. “As far as setting a deadline, it’s a step in the right direction,” he says. “It’s forcing the government to evaluate; what is the exit plan? As long as it doesn’t come to the point where we’re leaving the soldiers hanging out to dry.” Still, he says, “if I really wanted to make policy decisions, I should have been a politician. My job is to execute the orders, the lawful orders, of those above me.” At the end of the day, there’s simply not much point in debating something that is a fact of life. “The larger Army attitude doesn’t really change,” says one cadet. “We’ve all gone through stuff here we thought was pretty unpleasant. So if you stay the four years, you have that attitude: Maybe things suck, but you have to put your head down and keep going. And that characterizes people’s attitudes toward the war.” Rosenberg recently went back to Hunter, her old high school, to talk to students about what it’s like to be a cadet right now. Mostly the students were respectful; the faculty was another story. “One of the teachers, when I walked down the hall in my uniform, yelled, ‘No blood for oil!’” she says, her face reddening. “Um, I had nothing to do with that. Then I talked to my old art-history teacher, who’s a sweet guy, and I wanted to tell him I’m taking a bunch of art-history courses now. He was like, ‘Oh, so you’ll know what [the] buildings are before you drop bombs on them.’” Lately she’s racked up honors that even the liberals at Hunter can appreciate: Scribner chose one of her poems for The Best American Poetry2007. And in April, she was selected for a scholarship to pursue Asian studies, so she’ll spend the next year in Hawaii. She’s considering studying for a law degree after that, but the Army is making no promises. “To be honest, I don’t want to go to Iraq,” Rosenberg says. “I’ll go if my unit deploys, but I don’t want to go there, or to Afghanistan. Sometimes I feel kind of guilty about that, when other people are putting themselves in harm’s way.” She’s tried to dissuade a few of the cadets she cares about most from rushing into action. “I’m not as worried about myself as I am some of my friends,” she says. “A guy that I was dating for a while, that I’m still good friends with, wants to be a pilot, and he’s crazy to get into combat. He’s just worried that the war’s going to be over before he gets there. He was one of the people who was really upset when Lieutenant Neel died, and I said to him, ‘This is why I don’t want you to be so gung ho about going to combat. And he’s like, ‘Well, I’m invincible, so don’t worry about me.’ He’s kidding, but…” Rosenberg’s parents are thrilled she’ll be in the middle of the Pacific Ocean for the short term, but the anxiety is still there. One way Richard Rosenberg has tried to cope is by wearing his allegiance on his chest at nearly all times: His closet is full of shirts and jackets emblazoned with the United States Military Academy logo. (“I couldn’t quit West Point,” Marya says with a laugh. “My father wouldn’t have anything to wear.”) Still, he swings rapidly from pride at what his daughter has achieved to anguish about where the future will take her. “There’s nothing Marya could have done that I would have regarded with greater respect. But the dark side of that is the fear that something bad could happen.” He closes his eyes, and when he opens them again, tears seep from the corners. “I, I, um, what can one do? These things are worrisome. Fortunately, the Army doesn’t allow women in direct combat—artillery, infantry, armor. My own view is that women could do a great job, but I’m grateful for the policy. Because I don’t want my baby to get hurt.” Kate Rosenberg interrupts. She wants to make it clear she didn’t vote for George W. Bush, either time. Asked what she’d tell Cheney if she somehow got five minutes alone with him at graduation, she shakes her head slowly, biting her tongue so as not to cause any trouble for Marya. “They have heard much more powerful voices than ours and not listened,” Richard Rosenberg says. “So what could we say?” Perched high on a bluff overlooking the Hudson River, West Point seems to gleam in the spring sun. Its granite buildings loom like a beautiful fortress over the green grass and slate courtyards. On this April day, as I meet with Zambarda on campus, down in Washington, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates is announcing the extension of military tours from twelve to fifteen months. Lately, with his deployment looming, the possibility of being wounded occupies Zambarda less than the concern that he’ll need to shoot someone. “I just went to a class a week ago on the moral justification for killing,” he says. “No one wants to deal with, for the rest of their lives, having killed someone. That’s scary. Some people accept the idea, that it’s my job, I’m the Army. But for anyone who’s in the Judeo-Christian tradition, there’s a lot of ‘Thou shall not kill.’ How do you deal with that? It will plague you for the rest of your life. We went over a lot of theory. Whether it proved to me whether I should feel justified killing someone or not—that’s not as important as that it got me thinking.” This is Zambarda’s primary method for dealing with fear: He tries to think his way past it. He has immersed himself in tactics and practical preparation, and he’s majoring in Arabic. “It might give me five seconds to react—extra,” he says. “On the front lines, it could save my life, or more importantly, one of my soldiers’. The most potent weapon on the battlefield for me isn’t going to be my rifle. It’s going to be my brain.” He well knows, however, that Iraq is a place that defies logic. One of Zambarda’s best friends is First Lieutenant Daniel Sjursen, who also grew up on Staten Island and graduated from West Point two years ago. Sjursen is now in Baghdad; Zambarda e-mails him regularly, and is troubled by the changes he’s seeing in his pal, whom he considers one of the toughest, most competent officers he knows. “He’s in armor—that’s tanks—and he’s had one of the highest platoon attrition rates. He’s lost a lot of soldiers,” Zambarda says. “It’s sad. The kind of fight we’re in today, it’s not always about how good you are tactically. There’s a lot of randomness.” He tries to tamp down the uncertainty by thinking about the men he’ll soon be leading. “The thing with being a leader—you’re that beacon that all the soldiers underneath you are looking at,” Zambarda says, his words rushing out. “As much fear as I may have to deal with, I know that I’d be more afraid of my guys breaking down and everything going to hell.” He pauses and looks out the window, at the cadets striding through the sun on their way to class. “It’s hard to predict how I’ll react when the first bullet goes by my ear and I say, ‘Okay, what now?’ Everyone’s looking at me; I can’t be saying, ‘What now?’ I gotta be telling people what to do.” At times, he uses bravado to get past the worry—especially at home, when he knows he can get a rise out of his mother by saying he can’t wait to feel the adrenaline rush of combat. Zambarda’s father spent twenty years in the NYPD, and knows what it’s like to have a gun pointed at him. “I’ve only heard the sound of a bullet flying past my head once,” says Mark Sr., “and it’s not a good sound.” Mark’s mother, Nancy, an administrator at Merrill Lynch, absently clutches a large pillow to her chest as she talks about her son’s last chance to turn back. Midway through West Point, all cadets must make a decision: They can leave up to two years into their military education, but if they choose to stay, they commit to active duty. “I encouraged him to get out if he could,” she says. “As the reality of it started setting in, as a parent, I really got scared. I said, ‘If you have any doubt at all, get out.’ Many times. Many times.” Mark filled out an application to Cooper Union, where his best friend goes to school, just to remind himself he had options. He never submitted it. Mark’s next choice thrilled his mother even less: He wanted to “branch” infantry. Zambarda had excellent grades; why not, his mother suggested, apply to medical school? The Army needs doctors, and five more years in classes wouldn’t be such a bad thing. Or, his father said, how about artillery? At least that’s twenty miles from the front lines. Infantry, Mark insisted, and, as always, he backed it up with logic. “He sold it to us that, if you’re gonna be over there anyway, infantry guys are the best trained,” Nancy says. “And if you’re going to be career military, infantry is almost a requirement. He sold it to me. A little bit. I’m a little better with it now.” The Zambardas are inviting dozens of friends and relatives to celebrate Mark’s graduation. He’ll wear his class-of-2007 ring, with an engraved image of the Twin Towers and the class motto ALWAYS REMEMBER, NEVER SURRENDER. “This coming summer, I have 60 days of leave, and my best friend from back home, he asked me if I wanted to go on a trip with him to the Dominican Republic,” Zambarda says. “It’s basically seven days and seven nights of drinking and partying. The person I was before I came to West Point, that would have been the perfect trip. But it doesn’t interest me now.” Instead, he’ll use his leave this summer to backpack in Europe, one last spasm of being a regular kid. Lately, though, he spends a lot of time thinking about the day he departs for Iraq, and what he’ll say to his mother and father. “I will just tell them I’m going to do everything I can to come back alive, and bring every single soldier I have alive,” Zambarda says. “I’m gonna do my job. And if I die on duty, that I’m sure I died doing something I’m proud of.” He takes a deep breath. “I know that if I die, that doesn’t affect me so much. It’s more worrisome for me that my parents will live the rest of their lives questioning ever letting me apply here.”

  An old-fashioned diplomatic dispute plays out in cyberspace e-Stonia Under Attack An old-fashioned diplomatic dispute plays out in cyberspace. By Anne Applebaum Posted Tuesday, May 22, 2007, at 6:53 A.M. E.T. And now for a quick quiz: A European country—a member in good standing of NATO and the European Union—has recently suffered multiple hostile attacks on its institutions. Can you a) name the country; b) describe the attacks; and c) explain what NATO is doing about it? If you can’t, don’t worry: NATO itself doesn’t quite know what it is doing about it, despite the alliance’s treaty, which declares an armed attack on one of its members “an attack against them all.” For the country is Estonia—a very small, very new member of NATO—the attacks are taking place in cyberspace, and while the perpetrators aren’t exactly unknown, their existence can’t be proved, either. Which creates a dilemma—several, in fact: Is this an “armed attack”? Is the NATO alliance obliged to respond? And if so, how? None of these questions have clear answers: Welcome to the 21st century. And if you thought that terrorists headquartered in ungovernable bits of the undeveloped world were our worst problem, think again. To add an extra layer of complication to this story, it’s important to explain that its origins lie not in the high-tech cyberfuture but in a Cold War-era argument over the past. Several weeks ago, the Estonian government decided to move a bronze statue of a Soviet soldier from its place in the center of Tallinn, the capital, to a cemetery outside town, together with the remains of the Soviet soldiers who had been buried beneath it. That might not sound like a casus belli, but to the Russian minority in Estonia, most of whose families arrived in the country after the Red Army drove the Germans out in 1945, that statue had become a rallying point as well as a justification of their right to remain in Estonia. To the Estonians, one in 10 of whom was deported to Siberia after 1945, the statue had become a symbol of half a century’s worth of Soviet occupation and oppression. A riot ensued; a Russian protester was killed; hooligans attacked the Estonian ambassador in Moscow; and, a few days later, Estonian government, bank, and newspaper Web sites began to go down one by one. Elsewhere, this might not have mattered quite so much. A defense information specialist from another newish NATO member state told me, somewhat ruefully, that his country wouldn’t be vulnerable to a cyberattack because so little of its infrastructure is sophisticated enough to use the Internet. But Estonia—”e-Stonia” to its fans—practices forms of e-government advanced even by Western European standards. Estonians pay taxes online, vote online, bank online. Their national ID cards contain electronic chips. When the country’s Cabinet meets, everyone brings their laptop. When denial-of-service attacks start taking down Estonian Web sites, it matters. Of course, as is the way of these things, their precise origin cannot be determined: Unlike classic terrorism, the essence of modern cyberwarfare is its anonymity. Though some of the attacks did appear to come from PCs belonging to the Russian presidential administration, others came from as far afield as Brazil and Vietnam. As a result, even the Estonian government’s experts have backed away from directly accusing the Russian government. After all, angry hackers can organize a “botnet“—a group of computers that have been remotely hacked and forced, unwittingly, to send out spam or viruses—anywhere. Indeed, “patriotic” Chinese hackers have made a specialty out of this sort of thing, launching cyberattacks at moments of high tension against both Japanese and U.S. government Web sites, using computers based all over the world. Both the anonymity and the novelty may turn out to be part of the appeal, particularly if, as some in NATO now believe, the attacks are Russian “tests,” both of the West’s preparedness for cyberwarfare in general and of NATO’s commitment to its newest, weakest members in particular. Some believe the Russian government is now playing with different tactics, trying to see which forms of harassment work best: the verbal attacks on Estonia, the Russian oil pipeline to Lithuania that mysteriously turns out to need repairs, or the embargos on Polish meat products and Georgian wine. If that is the case, then surely the lesson of the last three weeks is that cyberwarfare has a lot going for it: It creates no uproar, results in no tit-for-tat economic sanctions, doesn’t seem like a “real” form of warfare, and doesn’t get anyone worried about Europe’s long-term energy needs. NATO did, in the end, quietly send a few specialists to Estonia, as (even more quietly) did the Pentagon. A few Europeans complained a bit at a summit over the weekend, too. But there the affair will end—until the attacked Estonian government in cyberspace comes back online, better armed for the next battle. Anne Applebaum is a Washington Post and Slate columnist. Her most recent book is Gulag: A History.

  Today’s Papers No Date By Daniel Politi Posted Wednesday, May 23, 2007, at 6:01 A.M. E.T. The New York Times and Washington Post lead, while the Wall Street Journal tops its world-wide newsbox, with Democrats giving up on their quest to include a timeline for the withdrawal of combat troops from Iraq in the war-spending bill. The decision came after President Bush repeatedly vowed to, once again, use his veto power on any bill that contained a timeline. The WP wastes no time, declaring in its lead sentence that this is a clear victory for Bush. The Los Angeles Times leads with news that the immigration bill passed its first major hurdle yesterday after senators voted against an amendment that would have removed the temporary-workers provision from the legislation. USA Today leads with a new survey that reveals Muslims in the United States have moderate political views and, for the most part, reject Islamic extremism. This is in contrast to Muslims in several Western European countries who are more likely to be sympathetic to suicide bombers. But the survey also found “pockets of sympathy for extremism” among younger Muslims. Instead of a schedule for withdrawal, Democrats agreed with Republicans to establish benchmarks for the Iraqi government, which would be tied to reconstruction aid. The LAT notes, though, that Bush would be allowed to waive these requirements. Many anti-war Democrats were angry about the compromise, and even House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said she’s “not likely to vote for something that doesn’t have a timetable.” To deal with all these unhappy lawmakers, Democratic leaders are planning to divide the war-spending bill into two separate votes. One, which many Democrats will probably oppose, would provide the war money, and the other would focus on the domestic-spending part of the bill. Then the House would combine the bills and send them to the Senate, with the hope that they will reach the White House before the Memorial Day recess. The immigration reform bill has a provision that would allow 400,000 (and as many as 600,000) temporary workers into the United States for two-year stints. Two Democrats, who say the program will decrease overall wages and create an underclass of workers, brought an amendment to remove the provision, which was defeated 64-31. Democratic lawmakers vowed to come back to the issue of temporary workers and are set to issue an amendment that would cut their number in half to 200,000, which many believe has a good chance of passing. The LAT, WP, and WSJ front news that British prosecutors accused a Russian millionaire businessman, Andrei Lugovoi, of murdering former KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko with radioactive poisoning. British authorities demanded that the Russian government extradite Lugovoi, himself a former KGB agent, so he can stand trial. Russian officials refused, saying that extradition is banned by the country’s constitution. It is widely known that the two former KGB agents met at a hotel bar in London before Litvinenko died. The day has finally arrived for lawmakers to hear the testimony of Monica Goodling, the former aide to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales who was the Justice Department’s liaison with the White House before she resigned in April. She agreed to talk about the firings of U.S. attorneys only after she was granted immunity. The LAT fronts, and the WP goes inside with, a look at Goodling, and they both paint a picture of a young and inexperienced aide who suddenly became a powerful figure in the Justice Department. She did not hesitate to use that power and by all accounts was a central figure in selecting which U.S. attorneys were going to be fired. Goodling also apparently used her position to try to prevent the hiring of career prosecutors she thought were too liberal. The LAT mentions how Goodling, along with Kyle Sampson, tried to select candidates for the job left by the resignation of the U.S. attorney in Los Angeles even though there was already a bipartisan commission in place to do just that. Both the NYT and LAT have good Page One stories that shine a light into the daily lives of U.S. troops in Iraq. The NYT‘s Damien Cave was traveling with the unit searching for three of their own who were captured Saturday when a bomb exploded and killed one of the soldiers. These types of homemade landmines have recently become more of a threat to soldiers who had gotten used to worrying about roadside bombs. The LAT‘s Garrett Therolf spent four days with a platoon in western Baghdad that is emblematic of the new security plan that has service members living in small outposts close to the communities they are trying to protect. Perhaps not surprisingly, the soldiers “now openly declare pessimism for the mission’s chances.” All the papers mention that thousands of Palestinian refugees escaped from the Nahr al-Bared refugee camp in northern Lebanon as soon as a cease-fire began. The NYT fronts, and the WP and LAT go inside with, a look at how Democratic leaders are having a tough time passing even watered-down ethics legislation. Many are opposed to a provision that would force lobbyists to disclose the contributions that they bundle together from different contributors. Meanwhile, Democrats voted against censuring one of their most powerful members, Rep. John Murtha, who faced claims that he violated the ethics rule that forbids trading votes for earmarks. The controversy began when Republican Rep. Mike Rogers questioned one of Murtha’s earmarks. Murtha then allegedly warned Rogers: “I hope you don’t have any earmarks in the defense appropriation bill, because they are gone and you will not get any earmarks now and forever.” Wouldn’t have been very good gossip … A correction from the LAT: “An article … about Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s tenure on the Wal-Mart board of directors said that in early 1992 she told two friends confidentially that her husband … was planning to run for president. The conversation took place in early fall 1991.” Daniel Politi writes “Today’s Papers” for Slate. He can be reached at todayspapers@slate.com. 10:14 AM – 0 Comments – 0 Kudos – Add Comment – Edit - Remove

  Sunday, May 20, 2007 Today’s Papers Cash Flow By Barbara Raab Posted Sunday, May 20, 2007, at 5:25 A.M E.T. With no obvious hard news lead this Sunday, the papers each go their own way with enterprise stories. The New York Times leads with news that the U.S. pays Pakistan roughly $1 billion every year to fight terrorists along the Afghan border, cash that continues to flow even as Pakistan cuts back on patrols in key al-Qaida and Taliban areas. It’s a good fit with the Los Angeles Times lead describing a secret CIA operation targeting Osama Bin Laden that, while not producing any fresh leads on his whereabouts, has resulted in important new intelligence about al-Qaida’s expanding presence in Pakistan. The Washington Post leads with a stomach-turning report on the vast amount of food coming into the U.S. from China that is unfit for human consumption. The little-known monthly support payments to Pakistan have totaled $5.6 billion since the Sept. 11 attacks. The Bush administration has no plans to cut off the cash or tie the payments to Pakistan’s performance, despite the resurgence of terrorists in the past year and growing evidence that the Pakistani military often looks the other way when Taliban fighters take refuge inside their country. Why? Unnamed officials tell the Times that Washington is fearful of further destabilizing President Pervez Musharraf. The withdrawal of tens of thousands of troops from the tribal areas along the Afghan border described by the New York Times is a major factor in al-Qaida’s resurgence in Pakistan’s tribal territories, described in today’s LAT lead. The U.S. learned a lot about those efforts from the CIA operation launched last year to hunt down Bin Laden, high-value target No. 1 or “HVT1.” The operation has also revealed an alarming increase in the amount of cash for al-Qaida that is coming into Pakistan from Iraq. As for HVT1, “any prediction on when we’re going to get him is just ridiculous.” For years, China has been flooding U.S. ports with tainted, toxic, and counterfeit foods, supplements and medicines. Government inspectors catch only a small fraction of these products—”filthy” juices and fruits, “poisonous” swordfish, prohibited products shipped in crates labeled “dried lily flower.” But change will be difficult, policy experts say, because tighter rules on Chinese imports could harm many American companies that rely on Chinese goods, and/or want a piece of the lucrative Chinese market for their own products. Both the WP and the NYT go front and center with heart-wrenchers. The Post‘s is a profile of Section 60 at Arlington National Cemetery, where 336 Americans killed in Iraq and Afghanistan are buried (check out the slideshow, too). The mother of one young soldier places iPod ear buds on her son’s grave and plays some of his favorite songs. The Times reports on elderly Americans bilked out of their life savings by telemarketing criminals (there are audio examples of actual phone calls) who trick them into revealing their banking information after buying their names from a consumer data-collection company called infoUSA. Regulators say infoUSA knows it is doing business with lawbreakers who prey upon millions of the vulnerable elderly. “I just chatted with this woman for a few minutes,” says a 92-year-old widower from Iowa, “and the next thing I knew, they took everything I had.” Last week’s revelations of that hospital room drama involving a seriously ill former Attorney General John Ashcroft and extraordinary bedside efforts by then-White House Counsel Alberto Gonzalez to get Ashcroft’s approval for an eavesdropping program he opposed, inspired the Post to front a piece that asserts “something of a reappraisal of Ashcroft by some on the left.” Despite the revelation that Ashcroft privately stood up to Cheney and Rumsfeld over the treatment of detainees at Gitmo, TP thinks that’s a stretch. Just because Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., Wonkette, and People for the American Way give Ashcroft props for holding the line from his hospital bed does not mean they have “reappraised” his pushing for the Patriot Act, authorizing detentions without charges after Sept. 11, defending interrogation techniques some call torture, and getting unprecedented authority to look at private records even in public libraries (not to mention covering up the bare-breasted “Spirit of Justice”). (And why does the WP place Andrew Sullivan on “the left”?) Also in the papers today: The top commander of U.S. forces in Iraq says military officials think they know who captured three missing soldiers, and that he believes at least two of them are still alive. The Green Zone was shelled during a surprise visit by British Prime Minister Tony Blair. The Post fronts what it calls a dramatic shift in tactics by Shiite cleric Moqtada Sadr, who is now wooing Sunnis and repositioning his “brand” as more moderate. Former President Carter called the Bush administration’s foreign relations “the worst in history.” He called Blair’s support for Bush and for the Iraq war “Abominable. Loyal. Blind. Apparently subservient … a major tragedy for the world.” Playing catch-up with the LAT, the NYT fronts a look at Hillary Clinton’s 6-year term as the only woman director of Wal-Mart in the 1980s, and her currently complex relationship with a company that has been harshly criticized for its health-care policies, anti-unionism, and treatment of its workers. The Times also fronts a crisis in Africa: The nation’s best universities are falling apart, creating a brain drain that could further devastate the world’s poorest continent. The LAT looks at the Zetas, a band of cruel, bold, and sometimes stupid hitmen in Mexico’s drug cartel wars. Finally: The high cost of teens and texting: OMG! (Duh!) The Summer of Love is making a big comeback. So is Pee-Wee Herman. And, not to be missed is the tribute in today’s LAT to “My Friend, Jerry Falwell.” The byline: Larry Flynt. Barbara Raab is a writer in New York City.

  Coal Man THE WEEKEND INTERVIEW There’s at least one CEO left who is not buying global warming hysteria. BY KIMBERLEY A. STRASSEL Saturday, May 19, 2007 12:01 a.m. EDT WASHINGTON–Every good party has its wet blanket. In the case of the energy industry’s merrymaking for a global warming program, the guy in the dripping bedspread is a 67-year-old, straight-talking coal-mine owner by the name of Robert E. Murray. You won’t hear many of Mr. Murray’s energy-biz colleagues mention him; they tend to avoid his name, much as nephews avoid talk of their crazy uncles. GE’s Jeffrey Immelt, Duke Energy’s Jim Rogers, Exelon’s John Rowe–these polished titans have been basking in an intense media glow, ever since they claimed to have seen the light on global warming and gotten behind a mandatory government program to cut C02 emissions. They’d rather not have any killjoys blowing the whistle on their real motives–which is to make a pile of cash off the taxpayers and consumers who’ll fund it. And yet here’s Mr. Murray, killjoy-in-chief at the global warming love-fest. “Some elitists in our country can’t, or won’t, tell fact from fiction, can’t understand what a draconian climate change program will do [to] the dreams of millions of working Americans and those on fixed incomes,” says the chairman and CEO of Murray Energy, one of the largest private coal concerns in the country. He’s incensed by his fellow energy CEOs’ “shameless” goal of fattening their bottom lines at the “expense of the broader economy.” So these past months he’s emerged from his quiet Cleveland office and jumped on the national stage, calling out the rest of his industry’s CO2 collaborationists. He’s testified in front of Congress; become a regular on television and radio programs; sat for profiles by journalists; and written letters to other energy companies exhorting them to think of the broader consequences. It seems unlikely his campaign will slow the runaway global-warming train now hurtling through Washington. But Mr. Murray is certainly making the ride less comfortable for some corporate players. “For me, global warming is a human issue, not just an environmental one,” he says in his slow, gravelly way, nursing a cup of coffee at a local shop here after recent congressional testimony. “The science of global warming is speculative. But there’s nothing speculative about the damage a C02 capture program will do to this country. I know the names of many of the thousands of people–American workers, their families–whose lives will be destroyed by what has become a deceitful and hysterical campaign, perpetrated by fear-mongers in our society and by corporate executives intent on their own profits or competitive advantage. I can’t stand by and watch.” Tough words, and unusually brash ones for a respected CEO, though Mr. Murray is uniquely situated to deliver them. Unlike other energy executives–at industrial firms such as GE that make millions on wind turbines, or utilities such as Duke or Exelon who are making big financial bets on “clean energy”–coal CEOs such as Mr. Murray are the bad boys on the global-warming scene, and will see zero upside in a global-warming program. While the industry has certainly made advances on the real pollution front (sulfur dioxide/nitrogen oxide), coal still accounts for the vast majority of all electricity-related C02 emissions. The only way to really cut carbon emissions would be to severely limit the use of coal-fired power plants and manufacturing facilities, which is exactly what environmentalists have wanted for years. “We’re one of the targets of this campaign,” says Mr. Murray. “Putting in place a global warming program is about putting limits on the coal business and low-cost energy.” The Ohio coal miner therefore has nothing to lose by speaking hard truths. He’s also well-qualified to speak them, hailing from a long line of coal miners proud of their roots and their industry. A no-nonsense guy, Mr. Murray became the family provider after his father was paralyzed in a coal-mining accident. By 16, he was mowing lawns every day after school, using a coal miner’s cap with a light on the front so he could continue to work past dark. He’d set his sights on a medical career when he was unexpectedly offered a chance at a scholarship to become a mining engineer. “I’m a fourth-generation miner, but it’s only by happenstance,” he chuckles. There followed 31 years at the North American Coal Corporation, where he rose to CEO and then left in 1987 after a disagreement. Striking out on his own, he mortgaged his home to buy his first mine. Today, Murray Energy operates 11 coal mines in Ohio, Illinois, Kentucky, Pennsylvania and Utah, producing 32 million tons of coal annually ($800 million in sales) for U.S. electric utilities. He employs about 3,000, although he estimates that if you look at all the secondary jobs created to provide goods and services for miners, his company has helped create some 36,000 jobs. Those jobs are top of Mr. Murray’s list of concerns, and he’s been determined to make people hear about them. At a recent speech to the New York Coal Trade Association, designed to whip some of his fellow coal industry friends into action, Mr. Murray recalled what happened in his region after the 1990 Clean Air Act, which imposed drastic reductions in coal production: “In Ohio alone, from 1990 to 2005, nearly 120 mines were shut down, costing more than 36,000 primary and secondary jobs. These impacted areas have spent years recovering, and some never will. Families broke up, many lost homes, and some were impoverished . . .” He finishes the thought by noting that a global warming program would make those prior coal cuts look like small potatoes. These speeches and TV appearances have become more frequent–and it’s a measure of just how big an irritant he’s become to global-warming politicians and their new buddies in the energy industry, that when Mr. Murray was invited to impart his wisdom to Congress at a hearing in March, Democrats tried to keep him from testifying. They later gave in, although Energy and Mineral Resources Subcommittee Chairman Jim Costa pointedly left the room when it was Mr. Murray’s turn to testify. Had Mr. Costa bothered to stay, he’d have heard a useful, and irrefutable, analysis of just what today’s legislative proposals for a global warming program would mean to the economy, including the nation’s many miners. “Some 52% of this country’s electricity is generated from coal,” Mr. Murray says. “Global warming legislation would place arbitrary limits on the use of coal, yet there’s nothing to replace it at the same cost. There’s nuclear, but the environmentalists killed it off and aren’t about to let it come back. There’s hydro, but we’re using that everywhere we can already. There’s natural gas, but supply and pipeline capacity is limited, and it’s three times the cost of coal. Politically correct–and subsidized ‘alternative energy’ is very limited in capability and also expensive. “So what you are really doing with a global warming program is getting rid of low-cost energy,” he says. The consequences? Americans have been fretting about losing jobs to places such as China or India, which already offer cheaper energy. “You hike the cost of energy here further, and you create a mass exodus of business out of this country.” Especially so, given that neither of those countries is about to hamstring its own economy in order to join a Kyoto-like accord. He points out that since 1990, U.S. greenhouse gas emissions have increased by 18%, while China’s have increased by 77%. Mr. Murray also notes that many countries that have joined Kyoto have already failed to meet their targets. Mr. Murray, like most honest participants in this debate, can reel off the names of the many respected scientists who still doubt that human activity is the cause of rising temperatures. But he tends to treat the scientific debate almost as a sideshow, an excuse for not talking about what comes next. “Even if the politicians believe 100% that man is causing global warming, they still have an obligation to discuss honestly just what damage they want to inflict on American jobs and workers and people on fixed incomes, in the here and now, with their programs.” This is where Mr. Murray really gets rolling, on his favorite subject of his fellow energy executives and the role they are playing in encouraging a mandatory C02 program. “There is this belief that since even some in the energy industry are now on board with a program, that it must be okay. No one is looking at these executives’ real motives.” To understand those motives, you’ve first got to understand how a cap-and-trade plan works. The government would first place a cap on CO2 emissions. Each company would then be given an “allowance” for emissions. If the company produced less CO2 than allowed, it could sell the excess credits to others. If a company wanted to produce more CO2 than its allowance, it would have to buy credits. “The strategy for these folks now is to go to Washington, help design the program to suit their companies, and snap up all the carbon emission allowances,” says Mr. Murray. “The more allowances they get, the more they’ll have to sell, and the more money they’ll make. . . . This has nothing to do with creating ‘regulatory certainty,’ which is how they like to sell their actions. This has to do with creating money, for their companies, off the back of an economy that will be paying more for its energy.” Mr. Murray reserves special criticism for those companies that have joined the high-profile U.S. Climate Action Partnership, a coalition pushing for mandatory controls on greenhouse gas emissions. “Some of them see profits–such as Caterpillar, General Electric, DuPont, Alcoa, General Motors, British Petroleum, Shell Oil, ConocoPhillips, Entergy–and all are just trying to look ‘green.’ But none of it is good for America.” He says that if these companies think the good times will last, they’ve been smoking their own products. “These CEOs were picked because they know how to work the political scene within their companies and are doing the same with the public on this issue. They are focused on short-term profits, and maybe it’s true that a cap-and-trade program will help them with their next earnings statement. What they won’t acknowledge is that, once a cap-and-trade program is in effect, the politicians will want to keep lowering, lowering, lowering the cap. That means fewer and fewer allowances. In the long term, this will starve American energy–though that isn’t something they are telling their shareholders.” Mr. Murray does business with many of these companies, and in February he sent strongly worded letters to their executives, pointing out the hazard of mandatory CO2 reductions to the nation. His letter to Duke Energy CEO Jim Rogers ended, “You are promoting the wrong policies for your company, for mine and my employees, and for the American people . . . Your company may well have some short-term benefits, but slowing down our economy–and with it the global economy–over the long term will not help anybody.” Mr. Rogers responded with a letter that said while he respected Mr. Murray’s views, he couldn’t help. “Legislation is coming. We can help shape it, or we can stand on the sidelines and let others do it,” he wrote. It seems some have already given up on this battle. Ms. Strassel is a Washington-based member of The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board.

  Saturday, May 19, 2007 Life in Israel, A Writer’s Story Photograph from David Grossman The author’s son Uri, who was killed last year in the Israel-Lebanon war.  David Armstrong David Grossman   May 13, 2007 Writing in the Dark By DAVID GROSSMAN “To our joy or to our misery, the contingencies of reality have a great influence on what we write,” says Natalia Ginzburg in her book “It’s Hard to Talk About Yourself,” in the chapter in which she discusses her life and her writing in the wake of personal disaster. It is hard to talk about yourself, and so before I describe my current writing experience, at this time in my life, I wish to make a few observations about the impact that a disaster, a traumatic situation, has on an entire society, an entire people. I immediately recall the words of the mouse in Kafka’s short story “A Little Fable.” The mouse who, as the trap closes on him, and the cat looms behind, says, “Alas . . . the world is growing narrower every day.” Indeed, after many years of living in the extreme and violent reality of a political, military and religious conflict, I can report, sadly, that Kafka’s mouse was right: the world is, indeed, growing increasingly narrow, increasingly diminished, with every day that goes by. And I can also tell you about the void that is growing ever so slowly between the individual human being and the external, violent and chaotic situation within which he lives. The situation that dictates his life to him in each and every aspect. And this void never remains empty. It is filled rapidly — with apathy, with cynicism and, more than anything else, with despair: the despair that fuels distorted situations, allowing them to persist on and on, in some cases even for generations. Despair of the possibility of ever changing the prevailing state of affairs, of ever being redeemed from it. And the despair that is deeper still — despair of what this distorted situation exposes, finally, in each and every one of us. And I feel the heavy toll that I, and the people I know and see around me, pay for this ongoing state of war. The shrinking of the “surface area” of the soul that comes in contact with the bloody and menacing world out there. The limiting of one’s ability and willingness to identify, even a little, with the pain of others; the suspension of moral judgment. The despair most of us experience of possibly understanding our own true thoughts in a state of affairs that is so terrifying and deceptive and complex, both morally and practically. Hence, you become convinced, I might be better off not thinking and opt not to know perhaps I’m better off leaving the task of thinking and doing and establishing moral norms in the hands of those who might “know better.” Most of all, I’m better off not feeling too much — at least until this shall pass. And if it doesn’t, at least I relieved my suffering somewhat, I developed a useful numbness, I protected myself as best I could with the help of a bit of indifference, a bit of sublimation, a bit of intended blindness and large doses of self-anesthetization. In other words: Because of the perpetual — and all-too-real — fear of being hurt, or of death, or of unbearable loss, or even of “mere” humiliation, each and every one of us, the conflict’s citizens, its prisoners, trim down our own vivacity, our internal mental and cognitive diapason, ever enveloping ourselves with protective layers, which end up suffocating us. Kafka’s mouse is right: when the predator is closing in on you, the world does indeed become increasingly narrow. So does the language that describes it. From my experience I can say that the language with which the citizens of a sustained conflict describe their predicament becomes progressively shallower the longer the conflict endures. Language gradually becomes a sequence of clichés and slogans. This begins with the language created by the institutions that manage the conflict directly — the army, the police, the different government ministries; it quickly filters down to the mass media that are reporting about the conflict, germinating an even more cunning language that aims to tell its target audience the story easiest for digestion; and this process ultimately seeps into the private, intimate language of the conflict’s citizens, even if they deny it. Actually, this process is all too understandable: after all, the natural riches of human language, and their ability to touch on the finest and most delicate nuances and strings of existence, can hurt deeply in such circumstances, because they remind us of the bountiful reality of which we are being robbed, of its true complexity, of its subtleties. And the more this state of affairs goes on, and as the language used to describe this state of affairs grows shallower, public discourse dwindles further. What remain are the fixed and banal mutual accusations among enemies, or among political adversaries within the same country. What remain are the clichés we use for describing our enemy and ourselves; the clichés that are, ultimately, a collection of superstitions and crude generalizations, in which we capture ourselves and entrap our enemies. The world is, indeed, growing increasingly narrow. My thoughts relate not only to the conflict in the Middle East. Across the world today, billions of people face a “predicament” of one type or other, in which personal existence and values, liberty and identity are under threat, to some extent. Almost all of us have a “predicament” of our own, a curse of our own. We all feel — or can intuit — how our special “predicament” can rapidly turn into a trap that would take away our freedom, the sense of home our country provides, our private language, our free will. In this reality we authors and poets write. In Israel and Palestine, Chechnya and Sudan, in New York and in Congo. Sometimes, during my workday, after several hours’ writing, I lift my head up and think — right now, at this very moment, another writer whom I don’t even know sits, in Damascus or Tehran, in Kigali or in Belfast, just like me, practicing this peculiar, Don-Quixote-like craft of creation, within a reality that contains so much violence and estrangement, indifference and diminution. Here, I have a distant ally who doesn’t even know me, but together we weave this intangible cobweb, which nevertheless has tremendous power, a world-changing and world-creating power, the power of making the dumb speak and the power of tikkun, or correction, in the deep sense it has in kabbalah. As for me, in recent years, in the fiction that I wrote, I almost intentionally turned my back on the immediate, fiery reality of my country, the reality of the latest news bulletin. I had written books about this reality before, and in articles and essays and interviews, I never stopped writing about it, and never stopped trying to understand it. I participated in dozens of protests, in international peace initiatives. I met my neighbors — some of whom were my enemies — at every opportunity that I deemed to offer a chance for dialogue. And yet, out of a conscious decision, and almost out of protest, I did not write about these disaster zones in my literature. Why? Because I wanted to write about other things, equally important, which do not enjoy people’s complete attentiveness as the nearly eternal war thunders. I wrote about the furious jealousy of a man for his wife, about homeless children on the streets of Jerusalem, about a man and a woman who establish a private, hermetic language of their own within a delusional bubble of love. I wrote about the solitude of Samson, the biblical hero, and about the intricate relations between women and their mothers, and, in general, between parents and their children. About four years ago, when my second-oldest son, Uri, was to join the army, I could no longer follow my recent ways. A sense of urgency and alarm washed over me, leaving me restless. I then began writing a novel that treats directly the bleak reality in which I live. A novel that depicts how external violence and the cruelty of the general political and military reality penetrate the tender and vulnerable tissue of a single family, ultimately tearing it asunder. “As soon as one writes,” Natalia Ginzburg says, “one miraculously ignores the current circumstances of one’s life, yet our happiness or misery leads us to write in a certain way. When we are happy, our imagination is more dominant. When miserable, the power of our memory takes over.” It is hard to talk about yourself. I will only say what I can at this point, and from the location where I sit. I write. In wake of the death of my son Uri last summer in the war between Israel and Lebanon, the awareness of what happened has sunk into every cell of mine. The power of memory is indeed enormous and heavy, and at times has a paralyzing quality to it. Nevertheless, the act of writing itself at this time creates for me a type of “space,” a mental territory that I’ve never experienced before, where death is not only the absolute and one-dimensional negation of life. Writers know that when we write, we feel the world move; it is flexible, crammed with possibilities. It certainly isn’t frozen. Wherever human existence permeates, there is no freezing and no paralysis, and actually, there is no status quo. Even if we sometimes err to think that there is a status quo; even if some are very keen to have us believe that a status quo exists. When I write, even now, the world is not closing in on me, and it does not grow ever so narrow: it also makes gestures of opening up toward a future prospect. I write. I imagine. The act of imagining in itself enlivens me. I am not frozen and paralyzed before the predator. I invent characters. At times I feel as if I am digging up people from the ice in which reality enshrouded them, but maybe, more than anything else, it is myself that I am now digging up. I write. I feel the wealth of possibilities inherent in any human situation. I sense my ability to choose between them. The sweetness of liberty, which I believed that I had already lost. I indulge in the richness of true, personal, intimate language. I recall the delight of natural, full breathing when I manage to escape the claustrophobia of slogan and cliché. Suddenly I begin to breathe with both lungs. I write, and I feel how the correct and precise use of words is sometimes like a remedy to an illness. Like a contraption for purifying the air, I breathe in and exhale the murkiness and manipulations of linguistic scoundrels and language rapists of all shades and colors. I write and I feel how the tenderness and intimacy I maintain with language, with its different layers, its eroticism and humor and soul, give me back the person I used to be, me, before my self became nationalized and confiscated by the conflict, by governments and armies, by despair and tragedy. I write. I relieve myself of one of the dubious and distinctive capacities created by the state of war in which I live — the capacity to be an enemy and an enemy only. I do my best not to shield myself from the just claims and sufferings of my enemy. Nor from the tragedy and entanglement of his own life. Nor from his errors or crimes or from the knowledge of what I myself am doing to him. Nor, finally, from the surprising similarities I find between him and me. All of a sudden I am not condemned to this absolute, fallacious and suffocating dichotomy — this inhumane choice to “be victim or aggressor,” without having any third, more humane alternative. When I write, I can be a human being whose parts have natural and vital passages between them; a human who is able to feel close to his enemies’ sufferings and to acknowledge his just claims without relinquishing a grain of his own identity. Sometimes when I write, I can recall what we all felt in Israel, for one singular moment, when the airplane of the Egyptian president Anwar Sadat landed in Tel Aviv 30 years ago, after decades of war between the two nations: then, all of a sudden, we discovered how heavy is the load we carry all our lives — the load of enmity and fear and suspicion. The load of permanent guard duty, the heavy burden of being an enemy, at all times. And what a delight it was, to remove for one moment the mighty armor of suspicion, hate and stereotype. It was a delight that was almost terrifying — to stand naked, pure almost, and witness a human face emerge from the one-dimensional vision with which we observed each other for years. I write. I give intimate private names to an external and foreign world. In a sense, I make it mine. In a sense, I return from feeling exiled and foreign to feeling at home. By doing so, I am already making a small change in what appeared to me earlier as unchangeable. Also, when I describe the impermeable arbitrariness that signs my destiny — arbitrariness at the hands of a human being, or arbitrariness at the hands of fate — I suddenly discover new nuances, subtleties. I discover that the mere act of writing about arbitrariness allows me to feel a freedom of movement in relation to it. That by merely facing up to arbitrariness I am granted freedom — maybe the only freedom a man may have against any arbitrariness: the freedom to put your tragedy into your own words. The freedom to express yourself differently, innovatively, before that which threatens to chain and bind one to arbitrariness and its limited, fossilizing definitions. And I write also about that which cannot be brought back. And about that which is inconsolable. Then, too, in a manner I still find inexplicable, the circumstances of my life do not close in on me in a way that would leave me paralyzed. Many times every day, as I sit at my desk, I touch on grief and loss like one touching electricity with his bare hands, and yet I do not die. I cannot grasp how this miracle works. Maybe once I finish writing this novel, I will try to understand. Not now. It is too early. And I write the life of my land, Israel. The land that is tortured, frantic, drugged by an overdose of history, excessive emotions that cannot be contained by any human capacity, extreme events and tragedies, enormous anxiety and paralyzing sobriety, too much memory, failed hopes and the circumstances of a fate unique among all nations: an existence that sometimes appears to be a story of mythical proportions, a story that is “larger than life” to the point that something seems to have gone wrong with the relation it bears to life itself. A country that has become tired of the possibility of ever leading the standard, normal life of a country among countries, a nation among nations. We writers go through times of despair and times of self-devaluation. Our work is in essence the work of deconstructing personality, of doing away with some of the most effective human-defense mechanisms. We treat, voluntarily, the harshest, ugliest and also rawest materials of the soul. Our work leads us time and again to acknowledge our shortcomings, as both humans and artists. And yet, and this is the great mystery and the alchemy of our actions: In a sense, as soon as we lay our hand on the pen, or the computer keyboard, we already cease to be the helpless victims of whatever it was that enslaved and diminished us before we began to write. Not the slaves of our predicament nor of our private anxieties; not of the “official narrative” of our country, nor of fate itself. We write. The world is not closing in on us. How fortunate we are. The world is not growing increasingly narrow. David Grossman is the author most recently of “Her Body Knows,” a collection of two novellas. This essay is adapted from the Arthur Miller Freedom to Write Lecture, which he delivered at PEN’s World Voices Festival on April 29, 2007. It was translated from the Hebrew by Orr Scharf.   Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

  Today’s Papers Contractor Killings By Ben Whitford Posted Saturday, May 19, 2007, at 5:52 A.M.E.T. The New York Times leads with news that 2007 is shaping up to be the bloodiest year to date for civilian contractors in Iraq, while the Wall Street Journal tops its world-wide newsbox with President Bush’s refusal to set even a flexible target date for the withdrawal of U.S. troops. The Washington Post leads with complaints by China that America’s trade policies are too aggressive. The Los Angeles Times leads local with the mayor’s decision not to try to gain direct control of the city schools. According to previously unpublished figures, casualties among private contractors in Iraq are now at record levels, with 146 civilians killed in the first quarter of this year, bringing the total killed since the war began to nearly 1,000. Some observers believe the surge is leading insurgents to seek out civilian targets. The White House rejected calls to set a loose target date for withdrawing U.S. troops as crucial negotiations with congressional Democrats over the war-spending measure ended in deadlock. Meanwhile, violence in Baghdad and Diyala province continues; the Post reports that five U.S. soldiers and two ABC journalists were killed in separate incidents. The WP reports that China’s Vice Premier Wu Yi may boycott this week’s trade talks in protest at America’s “bullying” attitude, particularly the lawsuits and import tariffs introduced by the U.S. in response to Chinese trade violations. The WSJ plays down the tension, noting several token concessions made by China, including a rare change to currency policy, in the buildup to the talks. Everyone fronts or teases the continuing tussle over the bipartisan immigration bill, which would allow people already in the U.S. to stay and eventually apply for citizenship. The WP off-leads with skepticism in the GOP ranks: Mitt Romney, Fred Thompson, and Newt Gingrich all blasted the bill, and even Rudy Giuliani didn’t have a kind word to say. The NYT goes inside with a look at the candidates’ soul-searching and fronts a slightly barbed look at President Bush’s newfound interest in political compromise. The WSJ breaks down the tug of war over the details of the plan but praises the bulk of the bill’s provisions in its editorial review. The LAT reefers the story. Everyone but the LAT fronts Microsoft’s $6 billion purchase of Internet advertiser aQuantive, with the WSJ arguing that the deal signals the rise of “an oligopoly of huge companies that sell and place the ads users see online”. The NYT suggests that the online ad market may have reached a tipping point, with the flow of dollars finally starting to reflect the amount of time people spend online. Below the fold, the WP ponders the rise of technology devoted to serving up online advertising that accurately reflects viewers’ interests. The LAT fronts an exclusive interview with sacked New Mexico U.S. Attorney David Iglesias, who says he believes he lost his job because he was slow to bring voter-fraud charges that would have helped Republican election chances. The WP reports that Alberto Gonzales came under heavy fire at a closed meeting with prosecutors this week; in the paper’s editorial pages Eugene Robinson continues to put the boot in. The WP fronts, and the NYT also reports, a tiff between Estonia and Russia that may have flared into cyber-warfare. The tiny Baltic country has recently been the victim of massive and coordinated attacks on official Wb sites, apparently originating from Russia. The NYT and the WSJ report on the harassment of opposition leaders by Russian police and a continuing state crackdown on journalists. In an editorial, the WP criticizes Condoleezza Rice for not taking a harder line on Russian excesses. France’s newly elected president, Nicolas Sarkozy, appointed his Cabinet Friday; the WP notes that nearly half his appointees are women, reflecting his pledge to diversify French political life. The WSJ reports that Sarkozy, a conservative, took pains to appoint ministers from across the political spectrum, but questions how long a leash they will be allowed. The NYT profiles Bernard Kouchner, the country’s flamboyant new foreign minister and the Cabinet’s single socialist. The NYT reports that the White House plans to move quickly to replace Paul Wolfowitz as head of the World Bank, but the WP notes that the Wolfowitz affair has led many international observers to question America’s traditional right to appoint the bank’s chief. Below the fold, the LAT casts an eye over Hillary Clinton’s record as a member of Wal-Mart’s board of directors. According to fellow board members, in her eight years as a director, the Democratic presidential hopeful helped promote workplace diversity and better environmental practices but did little to oppose the company’s anti-union strategies. The LAT, NYT, and WP all tease the discovery of a huge treasure trove by a Florida-based marine exploration company. The haul, consisting of about 17 tons of Colonial-era coins, may be the most valuable find to date; the site’s exact location is still under wraps. Continuing in a time-honored tradition of Manhattan media schadenfreude, the NYT takes prim pleasure in the New York Post‘s decision to dish the dirt on itself. In a juicy Page Six column intended to minimize the fallout from a dispute with a former freelancer, the New York tabloid spilled the beans Friday on everything from its editor’s visits to strip joints to allegations that Post owner Rupert Murdoch personally nixed gossip stories he thought might damage his business interests. Ben Whitford is a freelance journalist based in Princeton, NJ.

  Friday, May 18, 2007 Today’s Papers System Overhaul By Daniel Politi Posted Friday, May 18, 2007, at 5:57 A.M. E.T. The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and New York Times lead, while the Wall Street Journal tops it world-wide newsbox, with yesterday’s announcement that the White House and a bipartisan group of senators have come to an agreement on what amounts to the biggest changes in the country’s immigration laws in more than 20 years. The legislation would put in place a system to legalize the current 12 million illegal immigrants and would prioritize job skills and education over family ties for those who want to settle in the United States. The 380-page document is full of compromises and has already drawn criticism from both sides of the aisle. USA Today leads with an analysis of federal highway data showing that, for the first time in 26 years, drivers in America have started clocking “substantially fewer miles.” The price of gas is one reason, but there are also other factors, such as an aging population and a growing trend that has resulted in many people moving out of suburbs and into cities. If the immigration bill becomes law, it would provide a much-needed policy victory for President Bush, who has talked about changing the system since the beginning of his tenure. But all of the compromises mean the bill will face a steep challenge, particularly when the House takes up the issue in July, as even its supporters acknowledge the bill is not really what they wanted. “Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good,” Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein said. Part of this compromise is that fully legalizing illegal immigrants would not take place until more stringent border-security measures are implemented, along with new regulations to make sure employers check the immigration status of their workers. The immigration bill would also allow as many as 400,000 workers into the country on a temporary visa that would be good for only two years. Labor groups and some Democratic presidential candidates have expressed concern over this provision because they say it risks creating an underclass that could decrease wages. Democrats have also begun to raise questions over prioritizing job skills and education over family ties for new immigrants, which represents a major shift in current policy and has been a goal of Republicans for years. The NYT and WP off-lead, and everyone mentions, World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz resigning yesterday after weeks of controversy over a pay-and-promotion package he arranged for his companion when he became leader of the poverty-fighting institution. His resignation is effective June 30, a date many at the bank think is too far away for someone who has lost the trust of much of his staff. To get Wolfowitz to resign, the board agreed to issue a statement that said several people at the bank made mistakes and praised him for his years of service. President Bush is expected to name a successor soon. Both the WP and NYT front a look into Wolfowitz’s time at the bank, where he was the subject of much controversy long before the issue of his girlfriend’s pay-and-promotions package became public. Both papers quote people who wonder whether Wolfowitz’s tenure was, as the NYT puts it, “doomed from the outset.” Besides having the reputation of being a bad manager (he “couldn’t run a two-car funeral,” a former colleague tells the Post), he had little experience that could have prepared him for overseeing 10,000 employees, and he never seemed to grasp the importance of respecting the bank’s bureaucracy. As the factional fighting continues to rage in the Gaza Strip, the WP fronts word that, on Tuesday, Israel allowed the Fatah Party to bring in as many as 500 troops from Egypt who had been trained “under a U.S.-coordinated program.” This illustrates the way in which Israel and the United States are taking sides in the conflict and working to ensure Fatah forces have the necessary resources to fight Hamas. Meanwhile, as retaliation for the repeated rocket attacks, Israel intensified the number of airstrikes in the Gaza Strip and killed as many as nine people between Thursday and early Friday, reports the LAT. All the papers mention that Senate Democrats announced they plan to hold a no-confidence vote on Alberto Gonzales’ performance as attorney general. Also, Republican Sen. Arlen Specter predicted Gonzales would be stepping down soon and Sen. Norm Coleman became the sixth Republican to call for his resignation. (After suffering a nosedive earlier this week, Slate‘s Gonzo-Meter inched up a notch yesterday, increasing the chances of Gonzales leaving to 57 percent.) As controversy continues to grow over the safety of ingredients from China, two of the largest U.S. food manufacturers “quietly” announced this month that they don’t want any more of their supply to come from there, reports the LAT. Problem is, it’s “next to impossible” to comply with that request. In the past few years, the country has become such a dominant supplier of several common food ingredients that U.S. manufacturers may not even realize their products originated in China. The NYT reefers a look into the country’s problems with food safety and says several companies are pressuring the U.S. government to demand that China improve its quality control. Back to the bank … The WP‘s style section takes a look at the fashion accessory that quickly became a must-have in the grandiose halls of the World Bank’s headquarters these last few weeks: blue ribbons. Although the ribbons were first meant to show support for good governance, they quickly became a “symbol of anger, a silent demand for the big boss’s resignation.” Even Wolfowitz was seen wearing a blue ribbon, which he said was for malaria awareness. Yesterday, “the blue ribbons had become a new symbol–of victory.” Daniel Politi writes “Today’s Papers” for Slate. He can be reached at todayspapers@slate.com.

  To Remake the World   Something Earth-changing is afoot among civil society by Paul Hawken Published in the May/June 2007 issue of Orion magazine .. Photograph: Cathy Crawford Find a grassroots organization (and Orion Grassroots Network member) near you. I HAVE GIVEN NEARLY ONE THOUSAND TALKS ABOUT the environment in the past fifteen years, and after every speech a smaller crowd gathered to talk, ask questions, and exchange business cards. The people offering their cards were working on the most salient issues of our day: climate change, poverty, deforestation, peace, water, hunger, conservation, human rights, and more. They were from the nonprofit and nongovernmental world, also known as civil society. They looked after rivers and bays, educated consumers about sustainable agriculture, retrofitted houses with solar panels, lobbied state legislatures about pollution, fought against corporate-weighted trade policies, worked to green inner cities, or taught children about the environment. Quite simply, they were trying to safeguard nature and ensure justice. After being on the road for a week or two, I would return with a couple hundred cards stuffed into various pockets. I would lay them out on the table in my kitchen, read the names, look at the logos, envisage the missions, and marvel at what groups do on behalf of others. Later, I would put them into drawers or paper bags, keepsakes of the journey. I couldn’t throw them away. Over the years the cards mounted into the thousands, and whenever I glanced at the bags in my closet, I kept coming back to one question: did anyone know how many groups there were? At first, this was a matter of curiosity, but it slowly grew into a hunch that something larger was afoot, a significant social movement that was eluding the radar of mainstream culture. I began to count. I looked at government records for different countries and, using various methods to approximate the number of environmental and social justice groups from tax census data, I initially estimated that there were thirty thousand environmental organizations strung around the globe; when I added social justice and indigenous organizations, the number exceeded one hundred thousand. I then researched past social movements to see if there were any equal in scale and scope, but I couldn’t find anything. The more I probed, the more I unearthed, and the numbers continued to climb. In trying to pick up a stone, I found the exposed tip of a geological formation. I discovered lists, indexes, and small databases specific to certain sectors or geographic areas, but no set of data came close to describing the movement’s breadth. Extrapolating from the records being accessed, I realized that the initial estimate of a hundred thousand organizations was off by at least a factor of ten. I now believe there are over one million organizations working toward ecological sustainability and social justice. Maybe two. By conventional definition, this is not a movement. Movements have leaders and ideologies. You join movements, study tracts, and identify yourself with a group. You read the biography of the founder(s) or listen to them perorate on tape or in person. Movements have followers, but this movement doesn’t work that way. It is dispersed, inchoate, and fiercely independent. There is no manifesto or doctrine, no authority to check with. I sought a name for it, but there isn’t one. Historically, social movements have arisen primarily because of injustice, inequalities, and corruption. Those woes remain legion, but a new condition exists that has no precedent: the planet has a life-threatening disease that is marked by massive ecological degradation and rapid climate change. It crossed my mind that perhaps I was seeing something organic, if not biologic. Rather than a movement in the conventional sense, is it a collective response to threat? Is it splintered for reasons that are innate to its purpose? Or is it simply disorganized? More questions followed. How does it function? How fast is it growing? How is it connected? Why is it largely ignored? After spending years researching this phenomenon, including creating with my colleagues a global database of these organizations, I have come to these conclusions: this is the largest social movement in all of history, no one knows its scope, and how it functions is more mysterious than what meets the eye. What does meet the eye is compelling: tens of millions of ordinary and not-so-ordinary people willing to confront despair, power, and incalculable odds in order to restore some semblance of grace, justice, and beauty to this world. CLAYTON THOMAS-MÜLLER SPEAKS to a community gathering of the Cree nation about waste sites on their native land in Northern Alberta, toxic lakes so big you can see them from outer space. Shi Lihong, founder of Wild China Films, makes documentaries with her husband on migrants displaced by construction of large dams. Rosalina Tuyuc Velásquez, a member of the Maya-Kaqchikel people, fights for full accountability for tens of thousands of people killed by death squads in Guatemala. Rodrigo Baggio retrieves discarded computers from New York, London, and Toronto and installs them in the favelas of Brazil, where he and his staff teach computer skills to poor children. Biologist Janine Benyus speaks to twelve hundred executives at a business forum in Queensland about biologically inspired industrial development. Paul Sykes, a volunteer for the National Audubon Society, completes his fifty-second Christmas Bird Count in Little Creek, Virginia, joining fifty thousand other people who tally 70 million birds on one day. Sumita Dasgupta leads students, engineers, journalists, farmers, and Adivasis (tribal people) on a ten-day trek through Gujarat exploring the rebirth of ancient rainwater harvesting and catchment systems that bring life back to drought-prone areas of India. Silas Kpanan’Ayoung Siakor, who exposed links between the genocidal policies of former president Charles Taylor and illegal logging in Liberia, now creates certified, sustainable timber policies. These eight, who may never meet and know one another, are part of a coalescence comprising hundreds of thousands of organizations with no center, codified beliefs, or charismatic leader. The movement grows and spreads in every city and country. Virtually every tribe, culture, language, and religion is part of it, from Mongolians to Uzbeks to Tamils. It is comprised of families in India, students in Australia, farmers in France, the landless in Brazil, the bananeras of Honduras, the “poors” of Durban, villagers in Irian Jaya, indigenous tribes of Bolivia, and housewives in Japan. Its leaders are farmers, zoologists, shoemakers, and poets. The movement can’t be divided because it is atomized—small pieces loosely joined. It forms, gathers, and dissipates quickly. Many inside and out dismiss it as powerless, but it has been known to bring down governments, companies, and leaders through witnessing, informing, and massing. The movement has three basic roots: the environmental and social justice movements, and indigenous cultures’ resistance to globalization—all of which are intertwining. It arises spontaneously from different economic sectors, cultures, regions, and cohorts, resulting in a global, classless, diverse, and embedded movement, spreading worldwide without exception. In a world grown too complex for constrictive ideologies, the very word movement may be too small, for it is the largest coming together of citizens in history. There are research institutes, community development agencies, village- and citizen-based organizations, corporations, networks, faith-based groups, trusts, and foundations. They defend against corrupt politics and climate change, corporate predation and the death of the oceans, governmental indifference and pandemic poverty, industrial forestry and farming, depletion of soil and water. Describing the breadth of the movement is like trying to hold the ocean in your hand. It is that large. When a part rises above the waterline, the iceberg beneath usually remains unseen. When Wangari Maathai won the Nobel Peace Prize, the wire service stories didn’t mention the network of six thousand different women’s groups in Africa planting trees. When we hear about a chemical spill in a river, it is never mentioned that more than four thousand organizations in North America have adopted a river, creek, or stream. We read that organic agriculture is the fastest-growing sector of farming in America, Japan, Mexico, and Europe, but no connection is made to the more than three thousand organizations that educate farmers, customers, and legislators about sustainable agriculture. This is the first time in history that a large social movement is not bound together by an “ism.” What binds it together is ideas, not ideologies. This unnamed movement’s big contribution is the absence of one big idea; in its stead it offers thousands of practical and useful ideas. In place of isms are processes, concerns, and compassion. The movement demonstrates a pliable, resonant, and generous side of humanity. And it is impossible to pin down. Generalities are largely inaccurate. It is nonviolent, and grassroots; it has no bombs, armies, or helicopters. A charismatic male vertebrate is not in charge. The movement does not agree on everything nor will it ever, because that would be an ideology. But it shares a basic set of fundamental understandings about the Earth, how it functions, and the necessity of fairness and equity for all people partaking of the planet’s life-giving systems. The promise of this unnamed movement is to offer solutions to what appear to be insoluble dilemmas: poverty, global climate change, terrorism, ecological degradation, polarization of income, loss of culture. It is not burdened with a syndrome of trying to save the world; it is trying to remake the world. THERE IS FIERCENESS HERE. There is no other explanation for the raw courage and heart seen over and again in the people who march, speak, create, resist, and build. It is the fierceness of what it means to know we are human and want to survive. This movement is relentless and unafraid. It cannot be mollified, pacified, or suppressed. There can be no Berlin Wall moment, no treaty-signing, no morning to awaken when the superpowers agree to stand down. The movement will continue to take myriad forms. It will not rest. There will be no Marx, Alexander, or Kennedy. No book can explain it, no person can represent it, no words can encompass it, because the movement is the breathing, sentient testament of the living world. And I believe it will prevail. I don’t mean defeat, conquer, or cause harm to someone else. And I don’t tender the claim in an oracular sense. I mean the thinking that informs the movement’s goal—to create a just society conducive to life on Earth—will reign. It will soon suffuse and permeate most institutions. But before then, it will change a sufficient number of people so as to begin the reversal of centuries of frenzied self-destruction. Inspiration is not garnered from litanies of what is flawed; it resides in humanity’s willingness to restore, redress, reform, recover, reimagine, and reconsider. Healing the wounds of the Earth and its people does not require saintliness or a political party. It is not a liberal or conservative activity. It is a sacred act.  Find a grassroots organization (and Orion Grassroots Network member) near you. Paul Hawken is an entrepreneur and social activist living in California. His article in this issue is adapted from Blessed Unrest, to be published by Viking Press and used by permission.

  Wednesday, May 16, 2007 Free Music File Sharing, The Sound of Copy Restrictions Crashing By Rob Pegoraro Thursday, May 17, 2007; D01 The idea of ditching “digital rights management” for music downloads is rapidly changing from dream to business reality– and faster than anybody might have hoped. Amazon said yesterday that it would open an online store that only stocks MP3 music files without copying restrictions. That would be huge news, except that Amazon is only catching up with Apple, which announced in early April that it would offer DRM-free downloads by the end of this month. Both stores have the public backing of EMI, one of the four big record labels, which yesterday also said it would sell unrestricted music downloads at some European sites. This should delight customers, who will no longer have to worry about being able to listen to their song files on their next music player or their computer. But it must unsettle many music industry executives. Abandoning the copy-control systems meant to stop people from sharing a new digital purchase on the Internet– but which also keep buyers from listening to these downloads on unauthorized hardware or software– remains heresy in much of Hollywood. But when the biggest music download store, one of the biggest CD retailers and a Big Four record label think they should drop that approach, it means things have changed drastically. We are no longer talking about shovelfuls of dirt on the coffin of computer-enforced copying restrictions; that sound you hear is the beep-beep-beep of the dump truck backing up to the grave site. ITunes shoppers won’t have long to wait for this liberation from copying limits. Apple says the new downloads will be available by the end of this month at $1.29 a song (30 cents more than for the current, limited versions). Albums will cost the same with or without usage restrictions. These new downloads will also come at a higher bit rate, meaning they should sound better but will take up twice as much space on your iPod or computer. Amazon customers may face a longer delay, as the Seattle retailer won’t specify a launch date more specific than “later this year.” It also won’t talk about pricing or describe its inventory besides saying the store will carry the catalogues of EMI and “more than 12,000″ other labels. Amazon did, however, offer hints. Bill Carr, the site’s vice president of digital media, suggested that the download store would follow the same basic pattern as Amazon’s CD store: “A couple of our tried-and-true tenets are broad selection and great prices.” That suggests Amazon expects to sell music from all the major labels, not just EMI. The minor labels, many of which don’t share the majors’ fixation on copying restrictions, are probably already on board. A publicist for one Washington-area independent label confirmed yesterday that his employer’s catalogue would be carried on Amazon. He put the phone down to confirm the details of that arrangement, then picked it up and said with a laugh, “Apparently, we’ve signed a non-disclosure act. So I wasn’t even supposed to tell you that we’re one of those labels.” If Amazon’s download store mirrors the outlines of its CD store, you can also expect labels to compete on price — something Apple doesn’t like. Apple and Amazon should soon have company. In addition to the many sites that stock MP3s from smaller labels — for example, eMusic, Amie Street and Other Music — Yahoo has experimented with selling regular MP3s, and MySpace has revealed plans for its own MP3 store. When copy-restriction routines no longer lock songs to certain players or programs, a few other things will change. Music buyers can return to treating their purchases as their property — reselling as they see fit or passing them on to their heirs. They will also be free to choose digital-music formats, programs and players based on their price and quality, instead of being limited to those supported by one download store. Apple’s iPod — which dominated the market before the arrival of the iTunes Store — should still do well, as should the Advanced Audio Coding format Apple uses for iTunes downloads. But Microsoft’s Windows Media Audio format could be drifting onto the rocks; its biggest fans aren’t users but the stores that sell copy-controlled WMA files. Some of those users will still take music online without paying for it. DRM has yet to make a meaningful dent in that, but convenient, fairly priced and well-stocked download stores like iTunes have. As people get in the habit of enjoying downloads from various sites on all of their devices–not just some–more of them may wonder why their movies remain trapped inside the usage restrictions that once encumbered their music. Why, for example, should Apple’s iTunes or Amazon’s Unbox sell video downloads that can’t even be burned to DVD? Doesn’t the same logic apply to movies? How long until some enterprising studio makes the same decision as EMI and decides to give customers what they want? Living with technology, or trying to? E-mail Rob Pegoraro atrobp@washpost.com.

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