War Machine

Israel has told the United States that it does not want a solution to the Persian Gulf crisis that leaves Iraq's war machine intact, Deputy Foreign Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said yesterday. But Netanyahu played down press reports that Israel had warned Washington that it would take military action against Iraq if the United States failed to do so. In other developments, the Soviet Union indicated that it might compensate the Iraq government for allowing more than 3,000 Soviet workers to leave Iraq before their work contracts expired.

He may have won the Persian Gulf war, but President Bush is coming under political assault for, his detractors say, bungling relations with Iraq before the war and trying to cover up his blunder afterward. A batch of previously secret administration documents made public by a Democratic congressman creates an embarrassing portrait of a president who courted Saddam Hussein before the invasion of Kuwait and ignored multiple warnings that the policy was a big mistake. House Banking Committee Chairman Henry B. Gonzalez, a Texas Democrat, has been trying for nearly two years to publicize the controversy as the biggest scandal of Bush's presidency - "Iraqgate.

Down a long, dusty road inside this sprawling former Iraqi military base sit a huge concrete pad and some giant fuel tanks. Next to the pad are a couple of dingy metal trailers. Inside the trailers, the refuelers sit, waiting for the helicopters. When a pair of copters land, two soldiers don radio headsets and run out to fill their tanks. That's what these troops have been doing for the last 11 months, for 12 hours a day, every day - Christmas and New Year's included - with only the occasional day off. "It's been hard, but we keep each other going," said Sgt. Edouardo Thomas, 28, who was born in Haiti.

They call themselves, collectively, the Delaware County peace and social justice movement, though there is no formal organization by that name. They are the people who never stopped demonstrating as the '60s turned into the '70s, '80s and '90s, even as most people shied away from protest. In the last few months, those Delaware County activists, who have been acting separately in pursuit of a variety of goals - ending U.S. military aid to Central America, fighting for an end to homelessness, protesting military spending - have joined together to oppose the Bush administration's actions in the Persian Gulf.

The Treasury Department yesterday identified 52 businesses and 37 individuals throughout the world as front companies and agents who secretly helped President Saddam Hussein build Iraq's war machine. While most of the companies are based in the Middle East and London, two were in the United States: Bay Industries Inc. of Santa Monica, Calif., and Matrix Churchill Corp. of Cleveland, a subsidiary of a British firm. Both U.S. companies named reportedly are connected with Anees Mansour Wadi, an Iraqi national and Beverly Hills businessman who was expelled from Britain in September.

THE BUSH administration's proposed "pre-emptive attack" on Iraq is both immoral and illegal - just like the tragic events of Sept. 11. The American people are being bamboozled by a man who cheated his way into the White House via a fixed election. This proposed war isn't about national security - it's about oil, keeping the war machine running (remember Eisenhower's warning about the military-industrial complex?) and promoting the right-wing ideology of Bush and his henchmen. I hope it won't take thousands of our sons and daughters coming home in body bags to wake up the American public.

The Chestnut Hill estate known as Krisheim, said to be the largest family estate left in Philadelphia, slumbered through much of the 1960s, through all of the 1970s, through its old age. The spreading lawns and fields bordering the Wissahickon Valley reposed as quietly as a dignified dowager, its family gone, its visitors only an occasional few strangers. But when Stanley T. Woodward Jr. returned in 1981 to live in Philadelphia for the first time since 1937, he came back to the grounds of the Woodward family estate, which lies along both sides of McCallum Street near Mermaid Lane.

KANSAS CITY, Mo. - A damaged war machine, officially known as a Renault FT-17 tank and commonly used by American forces during World War I, rests in retirement on a museum floor, still nursing its permanent wound in the shape of a gaping hole. A posted marker indicates that a German 77mm artillery piece, like one on view, was responsible. Nearby, visitors walk through a man-made crater, standing where a French farmhouse would have been had it not been struck by a 17-inch howitzer shell.

British officials say that one reason the bombing phase of the Persian Gulf war is now entering a fifth week is that the allied command underestimated the scope and resilience of the Iraqi war machine. In discussions earlier this week in Washington on the decision to keep up the bombing, British Defense Secretary Tom King and his American counterpart, Dick Cheney, said they were "struck" by the size of the Iraqi military establishment. "The extent of their war machine is larger than we anticipated," one highly placed British official said, speaking on the condition that he not be identified.

President Bush has said the Soviet plan to end the war in the Persian Gulf "falls well short" of what is required. It's hard to judge, since the details are still secret. But, as a ground war seems ever more imminent, the Soviet proposal raises a difficult question: whether the administration would prefer at this point to fight and win on the ground, even if the alternative were an unconditional Iraqi pullout from Kuwait. A month ago, it would have seemed absurd to hesitate over such a choice: forcing Saddam Hussein to withdraw from Kuwait without having to send a single tank against his fortified front lines seemed too much to hope for. But, as the Iraqi regime seems increasingly weakened by the relentless bombing, the possibility of easy success on the ground appears more likely.

KANSAS CITY, Mo. - A damaged war machine, officially known as a Renault FT-17 tank and commonly used by American forces during World War I, rests in retirement on a museum floor, still nursing its permanent wound in the shape of a gaping hole. A posted marker indicates that a German 77mm artillery piece, like one on view, was responsible. Nearby, visitors walk through a man-made crater, standing where a French farmhouse would have been had it not been struck by a 17-inch howitzer shell.

If Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 failed to bridge the ideological chasm between red states and blue, essentially preaching to the choir in its indictment of the Bush administration, Eugene Jarecki's Why We Fight is a far more measured and profoundly scary film. It's impossible to imagine anyone, right-leaning or left, coming away from this hugely important documentary unshaken by its representation of the United States and its military establishment. Using President Dwight D. Eisenhower's famous 1961 farewell address as its centerpiece, Why We Fight is less an exercise in political finger-pointing - or activist filmmaking - than it is a sobering history lesson.

Down a long, dusty road inside this sprawling former Iraqi military base sit a huge concrete pad and some giant fuel tanks. Next to the pad are a couple of dingy metal trailers. Inside the trailers, the refuelers sit, waiting for the helicopters. When a pair of copters land, two soldiers don radio headsets and run out to fill their tanks. That's what these troops have been doing for the last 11 months, for 12 hours a day, every day - Christmas and New Year's included - with only the occasional day off. "It's been hard, but we keep each other going," said Sgt. Edouardo Thomas, 28, who was born in Haiti.

FIRST TIME I was offered an opportunity to go to war, it didn't seem like that good an idea to me. It was an honor to be asked. But with all the stuff that was vying for my attention at that time, combat experience fell quickly to the bottom of my to-do list. This was in 1965 in a recruiters' office near 52d and Market. Sgt. Brown's list of options included (A) crawling on my belly in a rice paddy 6,000 miles from home while people fired live ammunition at me or (B) being stationed in a Nike missile sight an hour's drive from home on West Chester Pike.

THE BUSH administration's proposed "pre-emptive attack" on Iraq is both immoral and illegal - just like the tragic events of Sept. 11. The American people are being bamboozled by a man who cheated his way into the White House via a fixed election. This proposed war isn't about national security - it's about oil, keeping the war machine running (remember Eisenhower's warning about the military-industrial complex?) and promoting the right-wing ideology of Bush and his henchmen. I hope it won't take thousands of our sons and daughters coming home in body bags to wake up the American public.

Continuing debate over U.S. attack on Iraq President Bush and members of his administration tell us that Iraq is about to do us great harm (Inquirer, Sept. 9), and that we must make war to protect ourselves. Society cannot set out to protect itself from what has not yet happened, or future dangers that cannot be measured. There is no end to the dangers we can imagine, thus there would be no end to the preparations. What's even more disturbing is that there is no end to the use those in power can make of our collective insecurity.

In a sweeping report on gold and other assets looted by Nazi Germany, the United States yesterday condemned neutral Switzerland for helping Germany bankroll its war machine. It also questioned whether the United States did enough to recover gold and other assets stolen from Holocaust victims and European banks. Some of the plundered gold included jewelry and dental fillings taken from Jews, Gypsies and other concentration-camp prisoners, the report said, and portions were included in assets administered by a commission set up by the Western Allies after World War II. Certain ingots, including dental gold from death-camp inmates, ended up in a pool distributed to European central banks, said the 211-page report, commissioned by President Clinton in October.

He may have won the Persian Gulf war, but President Bush is coming under political assault for, his detractors say, bungling relations with Iraq before the war and trying to cover up his blunder afterward. A batch of previously secret administration documents made public by a Democratic congressman creates an embarrassing portrait of a president who courted Saddam Hussein before the invasion of Kuwait and ignored multiple warnings that the policy was a big mistake. House Banking Committee Chairman Henry B. Gonzalez, a Texas Democrat, has been trying for nearly two years to publicize the controversy as the biggest scandal of Bush's presidency - "Iraqgate.

Is there a special set of rules for Saudi Arabia in the Middle East? The record would suggest as much. To paraphrase G.B. Shaw's own paraphrase of William Shakespeare, there was much a-adoodle-do about the recent so-called peace parley on the Middle East that was convened in Madrid. All the major players and at least one minor entry were there when the U.S. and the vestigial Soviet Union opened proceedings. Or were they? There sat representaives of Israel, Jordan, Egypt, Syria, Syrian-stooge Lebanon and a rump appendage of stateless Palestinians, as if agreement among those odd parties was all that was needed to forge peace and harmony in the Middle East.