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Catastrophic visions forged in Dresden

Admire Kurt Vonnegut – but forget his politics

Kurt Vonnegut anticipated his death in an article in 1972: “I don’t console myself with the idea that my descendants and my books and all that will live on. Anybody with any sense knows that the whole solar system will go up like a celluloid collar.” His talent as a novelist was to tell of bleakness with mordant humour.

He expressed the sensibilities of a generation in a style that, in economy of structure, alluded to popular art forms such as cinema and graphic novels. Throughout his life, he decried America’s social ills. “One wonders how many of the obituaries will note that he was a loudly self-proclaimed socialist?” wrote one commentator this week, describing Vonnegut as a “writer for our times”.

I am guessing but probably most of them. Aesthetic quality is independent of politics, and it is a vulgar error to suppose that a character necessarily speaks for the author. With Vonnegut, however, the authorial voice is hardly subtly disguised. “Everything is going to become unimaginably worse, and never get any better again,” he declared in 1970. The constant insinuation of catastrophe, leavened by dark humour, is present in much of his work. The inventiveness of the early novels will long retain their capacity to stimulate and surprise. But a writer for our times? No. He was a writer for a time that has been and gone. His appeal rested in large part on a view of history that deserves to be treated as a period curio.

Vonnegut experienced one of the great traumas of 20th-century history. As a prisoner of war in the Second World War, he lived through the bombing of Dresden. He survived through being incarcerated in an underground locker in an abattoir. When he emerged he found “135,000 Hansels and Gretels . . . baked like gingerbread men”. The event became a central theme of Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), and suffuses much of the rest of his work.

Another celebrated work, Cat’s Cradle (1963), concludes with the extinction of life on earth by the spilling of an imaginary substance that solidifies water. The memorable closing image is of the founder of the imaginary religion of Bokononism “lying on my back, grinning horribly, and thumbing my nose at You Know Who”. Bokononism is founded on what Vonnegut calls “foma” — lies that make us happy. In Vonnegut’s scheme, the universe is indifferent to our concerns. His play Happy Birthday, Wanda June (1970) imagines the afterlives of two American pilots who dropped the A-bomb on Nagasaki. Deadeye Dick (1982) depicts the accidental destruction of an Ohio town by a neutron bomb — a US one, so it was no big news story as it did not start WWIII.

The novel’s closing words are: “You want to know something? We are still in the Dark Ages. The Dark Ages — they haven’t ended yet.” To coin a Vonnegut-ism: so it goes. But ultimately the simplicity is not deceptive. Vonnegut’s philosophy and history are simplistic. Dresden was hellish — but there were not 135,000 deaths. The true figure was probably no more than a fifth of that. Vonnegut’s number came directly from the now discredited work of the Holocaust denier David Irving. (In Slaughterhouse-Five, Irving is cited by name, and a long passage, by a retired air marshal, from the foreword to Irving’s book The Destruction of Dresden is reproduced.) To a PoW digging up cadavers, accurate numbers will ever after seem pedantic. But the issue is important to historical truth and also to the ideas that Vonnegut dramatised.

Dresden, whose beauty Vonnegut likened to Oz, became a sacrificial myth in a litany of Western crimes, unrelated to its industrial and political importance to the Nazis. In arguing in 2003 that “people are lying all the time as to what a murderous nation we are”, Vonnegut cited Nagasaki as “the most racist, nastiest act by this country, after human slavery”. Yet, as an outstanding new book, Hiroshima in History, demonstrates, contemporary Japanese government records and memoirs confirm that the dropping of both A-bombs, Nagasaki as well as Hiroshima, was crucial to Japan’s decision to surrender.

These were catastrophic acts committed under the necessity of defeating barbarism. But man is not equally culpable, and history not a record of symmetry in brutality. It merely seemed that way to a particular generation at a historical moment: the Vietnam War. The critic Robert Alter in 1975 presciently attributed Vonnegut’s popularity to “the need of many readers over the past decade for a novelist who could write away history while seeming to write about it”.

In his great work Vonnegut depicted the sombreness and absurdity of human existence. Beyond that work came a coarsening of his art into caricature. The line dividing bleakness from cynicism is thin. Unfortunately, Vonnegut never made the return journey.

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Emigration from Israel exceeds immigration

Tel Aviv – In Israel, the number of emigrants exceeded the number of immigrants for the first time in 20 years, the Israeli daily Yediot Ahronot reported Friday.

Many emigrants were recent arrivals who wanted to leave Israel again, the report said. In 2007, 14,400 immigrants are expected in Israel while 20,000 people are expected to leave the country, according to the report based on figures for the first months of 2007.

The last time emigration exceeded immigration was in the aftermath of the 1973 Yom Kippur War and in 1983 and 1984 when inflation was high.

Meanwhile the Maariv newspaper reported that approximately a quarter of the Israeli population was considering emigration.

Almost half of the country’s young people were thinking of leaving the country, the report said. Their reasons included dissatisfaction with the government, the education system, a lack of confidence in the political ruling class and concern over the security situation.

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‘Are we beasts?’

‘Are we beasts?’ asked Winston Churchill one night in 1943 after watching a film of the bomb damage done to Germany. The question was probably rhetorical: Churchill had authorised the bombing campaign from its puny beginnings in 1940 to the massive Combined Offensive launched with the American air forces in the last two years of war. His language was always intemperate and flowery – ‘extermination’, ‘annihilation’ and so on. Did he mean it? Did the British military machine set out deliberately in the Second World War on a path to the genocide of the German people?

This issue lies at the heart of Jörg Friedrich’s searing account of the bombing of around 150 German cities between 1940 and 1945. In Germany his book sold half-a-million copies. He is the first German historian to expose in remorseless, almost unreadable detail just what the millions of tons of high explosive and incendiary bombs did to Germany’s people and its cultural heritage. Most British readers will be familiar with Dresden, which has come to symbolise the awful horror of a ruthless total war. What they will not know is the fate of a host of other small cities – Kassel, Paderborn, Aachen, Swinemünde, and many more – which were all but obliterated by the bombing, or of the many large cities such as Cologne or Essen which experienced more than 250 raids each, so many that at the end the bombers were simply turning ruins into ruins.

Friedrich never quite says that this campaign was genocidal, but his language, too, is immoderate and reproachful. These are massacres, the cellars in which ordinary Germans were roasted to death become ‘crematoria’, and the bomber crews are exterminating the enemy, not simply destroying his will to resist. He places blame for this squarely on Winston Churchill, whose ‘bloody will’, as he calls it, drove on the campaign, and whose occasional second thoughts were always suppressed in favour of doing more of the same until the famous point just after Dresden when he finally, and far too late, told Bomber Command not to bomb just for the sake of pure terror. He finds reasons for Churchill’s attitude: Britain’s ineffectual war effort could do little else for three years after expulsion from France in 1940; the radicalisation of bombing policy reflected the limitations of the air weapon; the necessity of showing Stalin that Britain meant business compelled a raising of the stakes of horror for the political effect it might have. But killing as many German civilians as possible in ways that became progressively more grotesque was Britain’s strategy from 1940 to the last attacks in April 1945.

This is a point of view that will probably not go down well with the British public and this is all to the good. For too long the obsession with the Second World War has sustained cosy myths about the Blitz spirit. Schoolchildren are invited to share the Blitz experience or imagine themselves as wistful evacuees. Friedrich’s book should explode this domesticated bombing culture once and for all. Bombing was horrific above everything that civilians had to endure from warfare; Friedrich’s book is a raw account of how it was under the bombs for five years. The more remarkable thing is just how the German population endured it without the ‘collapse of morale’ that the Allied planners sought. Friedrich has little explanation of how or why; his intention is to restore a lost narrative of the war and to remind the British public that it was their grandparents’ generation who did this.

Friedrich does not, however, tell it just as it was, and this is a pity. The central claims in the book scarcely stand up to historical scrutiny. It was not just Bomber Command that was responsible for the estimated 450,000 dead; the US air forces soon abandoned any pretence that they could bomb with precision, and two-thirds of their bombs were dropped blind through cloud and smog. A staggering 87 per cent of all bombs missed their target. American planes also killed tens of thousands of civilians. Nor was Bomber Command ever ordered exclusively to murder the German population. The directive for ‘area attacks’ of 14 February 1942 contained a long appendix, not mentioned by Friedrich, which listed more precise military and economic target systems, while limiting attacks on cities to those with large industrial areas and extensive workers’ housing. For much of the last year of war, Bomber Command was ordered to attack transport, oil and other military targets linked with the war on land as it rolled across the German homeland in 1945. Of course all these attacks, British and American, resulted in massive civilian casualty and the destruction of city centres, but it is important to get the history right before trying to argue that Bomber Command alone undertook deliberate and sustained campaigns to annihilate the civil population. In any assessment of crime, motive must be properly established.

The bomber was a terribly blunt instrument in the Second World War. Even with smart bombs in today’s wars, civilians suffer all the time. Recognising that, the British and Americans ought to have abandoned the attack on the home front since it clearly violated the agreed rules of engagement in war, even if it did not formally violate international law. Neville Chamberlain in September 1939 ordered Bomber Command to avoid any attacks that ran the risk of killing a single civilian; Churchill, his successor early in May 1940, ordered bombing to begin at once. Friedrich is right to see Churchill as the driving force behind the campaign, and to recognise that his ruthless bellicosity might even have embraced gas or germ warfare if there had been sufficient threat from the enemy. The important thing to learn from this is just why the two major democracies engaged in the end in forms of total war that abandoned altogether the moral high ground they had tried to occupy in the 1930s. Even Truman, no flamboyant warrior like Churchill, authorised the dropping of the atomic bombs. This is a question Friedrich makes little attempt to answer beyond asserting that killing civilians was Britain’s soft option.

There was something almost biblical about the bombing campaign, with its vocabulary of retribution and destruction. It is therefore not so surprising that the plan to destroy Hamburg in 1943 was code-named Operation Gomorrah, Harris’s version of ‘Shock and Awe’. Keith Lowe’s Inferno tells a story that is well-known in outline, if less familiar in the detail. He has searched German sources well and, like Friedrich, focuses on the story on the ground. His tone is matter-of-fact rather than literary, but the history is scrupulous. Hamburg endured the first firestorm, losing perhaps 45,000 people. This had not been planned, but a combination of bomb density and meteorological conditions made it possible. Hamburg had been an Anglophile city, with strong liberal and, more recently, social-democrat and communist politics. Yet the working-class, anti-Nazi districts were the ones to be destroyed. Lowe’s account is sensitive to all the paradoxes of the bombing war and in a no-nonsense conclusion he reminds readers that at least the bombing finally knocked militarism out of the German people. A point of view, perhaps, but not one that Friedrich would much care for.

There is no doubt that The Fire will create a stir. Reading it more than sixty years after the event, it seems hard to believe that the countries of the Western world battered each other’s cities and killed in excess of 650,000 people to save their particular versions of civilisation. The real merit of both these books may be the realisation once and for all among those Western democratic publics that bombing should be confined to history.

Russia Plans World’s Longest Tunnel

Russia plans to build the world’s longest tunnel, a transport and pipeline link under the Bering Strait to Alaska, as part of a $65 billion project to supply the U.S. with oil, natural gas and electricity from Siberia.

The project, which Russia is coordinating with the U.S. and Canada, would take 10 to 15 years to complete, Viktor Razbegin, deputy head of industrial research at the Russian Economy Ministry, told reporters in Moscow today. State organizations and private companies in partnership would build and control the route, known as TKM-World Link, he said.

A 6,000-kilometer (3,700-mile) transport corridor from Siberia into the U.S. will feed into the tunnel, which at 64 miles will be more than twice as long as the underwater section of the Channel Tunnel between the U.K. and France, according to the plan. The tunnel would run in three sections to link the two islands in the Bering Strait between Russia and the U.S.

“This will be a business project, not a political one,” Maxim Bystrov, deputy head of Russia’s agency for special economic zones, said at the media briefing. Russian officials will formally present the plan to the U.S. and Canadian governments next week, Razbegin said.

The Bering Strait tunnel will cost $10 billion to $12 billion, and the rest of the investment will be spent on the entire transport corridor, the plan estimates.

“The project is a monster,” Yevgeny Nadorshin, chief economist with Trust Investment Bank in Moscow, said in an interview. “The Chinese are crying out for our commodities and willing to finance the transport links, and we’re sending oil to Alaska.”

In Alaska, a supporter of the project is former Governor Walter Joseph Hickel, who plans to co-chair a conference on the subject in Moscow next week.

“Governor Hickel has long supported this concept, and he talks about it and writes about it,” said Malcolm Roberts, a senior fellow at the Anchorage-based Institute of the North, a research policy group focused on Arctic issues. Hickel governed Alaska from 1966 to 1969 as a Republican and then from 1990 to 1994 as a member of the Independence Party.

Alaska’s current officials, however, are preoccupied with other issues, including a plan to develop a pipeline to transport natural gas from the North Slope to the lower 48 U.S. states, Roberts said.

The U.S. government’s Federal Railroad Administration isn’t directly involved in talks about the link, agency spokesman Warren Flatau said today.

Tsar Nicholas II, Russia’s last emperor, was the first Russian leader to approve a plan for a tunnel under the Bering Strait, in 1905, 38 years after his grandfather sold Alaska to America for $7.2 million. World War I ended the project.

The planned undersea tunnel would contain a high-speed railway, highway and pipelines, as well as power and fiber-optic cables, according to TKM-World Link. Investors in the so-called public-private partnership include OAO Russian Railways, national utility OAO Unified Energy System and pipeline operator OAO Transneft, according to a press release which was handed out at the media briefing and bore the companies’ logos.

Russia and the U.S. may each eventually take 25 percent stakes, with private investors and international finance agencies as other shareholders, Razbegin said. “The governments will act as guarantors for private money,” he said.

The World Link will save North America and Far East Russia $20 billion a year on electricity costs, said Vasily Zubakin, deputy chief executive officer of OAO Hydro OGK, Unified Energy’s hydropower unit and a potential investor.

“It’s cheaper to transport electricity east, and with our unique tidal resources, the potential is real,” Zubakin said. Hydro OGK plans by 2020 to build the Tugurskaya and Pendzhinskaya tidal plants, each with capacity of as much as 10 gigawatts, in the Okhotsk Sea, close to Sakhalin Island.

The project envisions building high-voltage power lines with a capacity of up to 15 gigawatts to supply the new rail links and also export to North America.

Russian Railways is working on the rail route from Pravaya Lena, south of Yakutsk in the Sakha republic, to Uelen on the Bering Strait, a 3,500 kilometer stretch. The link could carry commodities from eastern Siberia and Sakha to North American export markets, said Artur Alexeyev, Sakha’s vice president.

The two regions hold most of Russia’s metal and mineral reserves “and yet only 1.5 percent of it is developed due to lack of infrastructure and tough conditions,” Alexeyev said.

Cluster Projects

Rail links in Russia and the U.S., where an almost 2,000- kilometer stretch from Angora to Fort Nelson in Canada would continue the route, would cost up to $15 billion, Razbegin said. With cargo traffic of as much as 100 million tons annually expected on the World Link, the investments in the rail section could be repaid in 20 years, he said.

“The transit link is that string on which all our industrial cluster projects could hang,” Zubakin said.

Japan, China and Korea have expressed interest in the project, with Japanese companies offering to burrow the tunnel under the Bering Strait for $60 million a kilometer, half the price set down in the project, Razbegin said.

“This will certainly help to develop Siberia and the Far East, but better port infrastructure would do that too and not cost $65 billion,” Trust’s Nadorshin said. “For all we know, the U.S. doesn’t want to make Alaska a transport hub.”

The figures for the project come from a preliminary feasibility study. A full study could be funded from Russia’s investment fund, set aside for large infrastructure projects, Bystrov said.

US under fire for anti-Iran tactics

The Bush administration faces a growing dilemma over the pressure it is placing on European companies to suspend investment in Iran, with some US lawmakers dissatisfied with the effort and European allies worried about its tactics.

The US Treasury and State Department have sent officials across Europe, stepping up pressure on international oil and gas companies in particular not to go ahead with investment plans in Iran. They are seeking to turn the economic screws on Tehran over its nuclear programme, which has already attracted limited United Nations sanctions.

Bush administration officials testifying about Iran on Wednesday at a congressional hearing were given a roasting by Brad Sherman, the Democratic chair of a House subcommittee on terrorism and non-proliferation.

Mr Sherman repeatedly cut short Paul Simons, a State Department official, for refusing to answer “yes or no” to the question whether any foreign company had invested more than $20m (€15m, £10m) in Iran’s oil and gas industries and would thus be open to unilateral US sanctions. He also ridiculed the administration for allowing imports of Iranian caviar and carpets, and letting the World Bank lend more than $1bn to Iran.

US officials have previously said they have spoken to the chief executives and senior financial officers of several big companies, including Royal Dutch Shell, Repsol of Spain, and companies from China and Malaysia to encourage them to stop investments.

John Bruton, the European Union ambassador to Washington, expressed concern on Thursday that Treasury officials touring Europe might be threatening European companies with application of extra-territorial US legislation. The EU would “question the wisdom” of the US seeking to impose such sanctions, either retroactively or in the future. The EU-US summit to be held in Washington on April 30 would include discussions on Iran policy, he told reporters.

Stuart Levey, US undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence, said in an interview in London that “a number” of non-financial companies had indicated their intentions to postpone investment decisions while others had said they would not take any such decisions for some time.

“I think that’s a good thing. They are obviously grappling with the issue of whether they want to invest in Iran under the circumstances and a lot of them are saying, ‘well no, not under the circumstances’. Perhaps they are hoping that the circumstances will change.” He declined to name the groups.

Mr Levey noted strong interest in Congress to take action against companies investing in Iran. But he said the administration believed such actions had “the tendency to drive wedges between the US and the third countries that we’re trying to work with to put pressure on Iran. We’re hoping to proceed in a different way.”

In a move some analysts saw as a sign of investment hesitation, Iran last week said it had extended by up to four months a deadline for Total, the French energy group, to decide whether to invest in the $10bn South Pars natural gas development. The original deadline expired at the end of March.

Shell and Repsol signed an agreement in January with Iran over a $4.3bn project that constitutes a later phase of the South Pars development. A final decision is not expected before the first quarter of next year. A Shell spokesman said the company was a year or more away from any investment decision on the project and current work in Iran was to establish its “engineering and economic feasibility”. Repsol was not available for comment.

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India firm on gas pipe from Iran

A DISPUTE between Washington and its two major South Asian allies is intensifying as India and Pakistan dig in their heels over building a highly strategic, $10 billion gas pipeline stretching 2600km from Iran.

Despite pressure from the US, which has linked the pipeline to Iran’s nuclear ambitions, New Delhi and Islamabad are thumbing their noses at Washington. Together, they are about to put the finishing touches to their deal with Tehran, with potentially far-reaching political and security implications.

Many South Asian analysts see this as a telling comment on Washington’s failure to line up enthusiasm outside the industrialised and developed world for its attempts to isolate Iran.

Though India has voted against Iran’s nuclear plans in global meetings, South Asian nations have generally paid little heed to calls for the country’s isolation.

Tehran won a significant victory at this month’s eight-nation South Asia Association for Regional Co-operation summit in New Delhi when, despite strenuous US lobbying, it was recommended for observer status within the organisation as a forerunner to full membership in the future.

Indian and Pakistani officials have been meeting to finalise the Iran-Pakistan-Indian pipeline (IPI) deal, with final approval expected within weeks and construction to start almost immediately.

This is despite the US dropping all pretence at politeness in its efforts to dissuade India from building the pipeline, with Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman, on a visit to New Delhi, insisting that the plans amount to New Delhi helping Iran’s nuclear program.

"We believe that Iran is seeking to develop nuclear weapons and anything that will support that endeavour (such as the IPI) is something that we oppose," Mr Bodman said.

He reminded the Indian Government of its need for US co-operation in developing a civilian nuclear energy industry. Yet within days Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and his Pakistani counterpart, Shaukat Aziz, had pledged to "sincerely and seriously pursue the project to its successful completion".

Mr Aziz said the IPI project would create "linkages and interdependencies" within the peace process between the two nuclear-armed South Asian rivals that have gone to war three times since independence 60 years ago.

Officials in energy-starved India, which produces only half of the natural gas it needs to serve its population of more than 1.3 billion, and whose requirements will double over the next 15 years, are adamant they will go ahead with the IPI project.

India has been suffering massive mid-summer power shortages that are affecting industrial output and there is now an "acute" shortage of natural gas, with 43 power plants not receiving the gas supplies they need to generate power at full capacity.

If the deal is signed on schedule in the next few weeks, the first supplies of Iranian gas will reach India in 2011.

Pakistan’s role will be in allowing transit of the gas across its territory — through the heart of the rebellious province of Balochistan.

Pakistan will be paid for all the Iranian gas that passes through the country. But Baloch nationalists want to be paid too, and analysts say this could threaten the pipeline’s security.

Adding to American angst is Pakistan’s repeated assertion that it will do nothing to help the US if it decides to attack Iran.

Pakistan has its own problems with Iran, which has accused it of harbouring anti-Iranian insurgents in Balochistan, possibly with links to the US.

These insurgents have launched several cross-border attacks against targets in Iran, and Tehran has severely rebuked Islamabad.

Analysts say the last thing Pakistan’s beleaguered President, Pervez Musharraf, needs is a hostile neighbour across the Iranian border.

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Officer helps wrestle law school gunman to ground

It wasn’t until Tracy Bridges saw his fellow students grieving at the tiny law school in Virginia that he stopped being a cop and became one of the victims.

"After all that had happened, we went outside and I saw the students in the lobby," he said. "I knew their faces. It kind of kicked in that I’m just a student here as well."

Bridges is a reserve Buncombe County sheriff’s deputy and a third-year law student at the Appalachian School of Law in Grundy, Va., where Peter Odighizuwa was accused of killing three people and wounding three others on Wednesday, just moments after he was dismissed from the school for failing grades.

The day started like any other for the 25-year-old Marshall native, including having lunch with friend Ted Besen of Wilmington. Both cops and North Carolina residents, the men quickly developed a close friendship during their time at the school. They met for lunch that day then had to rush to make their 1:30 p.m. class. Bridges, anxious to be on time, parked his truck in a faculty spot in front of the building. He had just opened his book in class when he heard three muffled pops. Several more pops echoed down the hall, closer this time. Then Bridges heard a scream. Bridges and Besen ran into the hallway and saw a professor. "Peter’s in the building shooting," the professor shouted. Bridges ran back into the classroom. "Get out," he ordered the students. The two men shepherded the students away from danger, down a back stairwell and out of the building. Bridges and Besen then ran around to the front of the building. They saw Peter Odighizuwa, 43, clutching a handgun. Bridges instantly recognized his classmate, a troubled former student who had flunked out of the 230-student law school. Bridges remembered the handgun in his truck, parked nearby. He reached inside and grabbed his weapon. He pointed the handgun at Odighizuwa.

"We continued to approach Peter and he turned and faced us," Bridges said. The Marshall native shouted at Odighizuwa to drop his gun. The man did as he was ordered.

"Ted was the first one to get to him," Bridges said. "There was a short altercation. He hit Ted in the jaw and Ted backed up and pushed him off-balance."

The men wrestled the suspect to the ground and handcuffed him.

Bridges, a Western Carolina University graduate, downplays his life-saving actions. He credits stopping the gunman to teamwork.

"It was me and Ted both," he said. "We were trained under the North Carolina law enforcement institution and so we kind of have an unspoken communication between each other. And we were able to work together."

January 19, 2002

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Orrin Hatch introduces oil shale bill

Washington – Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) today introduced legislation that would encourage development of fuel from a vast untapped domestic oil reserve in tar sands and oil shale.

“I think it’s outrageous that Utah imports about one-fourth of its oil from Canadian tar sands, even though we have a very large resource in our own state sitting undeveloped,” Hatch said. “It’s clear that we need to increase domestic production, and we have a vast, untapped oil resource right here in the West that could produce more oil than the Middle East.”

Utah’s Congressional delegation and Sen. Wayne Allard (R-Colo.) joined Hatch to voice their support for the Oil Shale and Tar Sands Development Act of 2005, which will make developing this unconventional oil reserve economically viable for our country.

“We have seen a policy shift by the government of Alberta, Canada, that provides a good model for what could occur in the U.S,” Hatch said. “Alberta recognized the potential of its own tar sands deposits and has set forth a policy promote their development. Now, Canada has increased its oil reserves by more than a factor of 10, going from a reserve of about 14 billion barrels to its current reserve of 176 billion barrels in only a few years.”

This gigantic resource of our nation’s oil shale and tar sands reserves is well known by geologists and energy experts, but it has not been counted among our nation’s oil reserve because it is not yet being developed commercially. That is largely because efforts to develop oil shale in western Colorado during the 1970s went bust after a very large slump in gas prices. Hatch noted that today’s economics and advances in technology have combined to provide the right scenario to begin the development of the world’s largest untapped oil resource.

“The size of our nation’s energy challenge is enormous, but in Utah, Colorado, and Wyoming we have an answer that more than meets the challenge,” Hatch said. “This bill moves us down that path.”

Hatch’s oil shale and tar sands bill only one part of his three-prong energy strategy designed to encourage more affordable sources of energy and greater energy security. Earlier, Hatch introduced the CLEAR ACT of 2005 (Clean Efficient Vehicles Resulting from Advanced Car Technologies), which would provide strong tax incentives for the purchase of alternative and hybrid vehicles, for new alternative fuel infrastructure, and for the retail sale of alternative fuels. He has also introduced legislation to provide tax incentives to increase the nation’s oil refining capacity, providing for accelerated depreciation for new refineries or for refineries that are increasing their capacity.

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The Establishment Rethinks Globalization

The church of global free trade, which rules American politics with infallible pretensions, may have finally met its Martin Luther. An unlikely dissenter has come forward with a revised understanding of globalization that argues for thorough reformation. This man knows the global trading system from the inside because he is a respected veteran of multinational business. His ideas contain an explosive message: that what established authorities teach Americans about global trade is simply wrong–disastrously wrong for the United States.

Martin Luther was a rebellious priest challenging the dictates of a corrupt church hierarchy. Ralph Gomory, on the other hand, is a gentle-spoken technologist, trained as a mathematician and largely apolitical. He does not set out to overthrow the establishment but to correct its deeper fallacies. For many years Gomory was a senior vice president at IBM. He helped manage IBM’s expanding global presence as jobs and high-tech production were being dispersed around the world.

The experience still haunts him. He decided, in retirement, that he would dig deeper into the contradictions. Now president of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, he knew something was missing in the "pure trade theory" taught by economists. If free trade is a win-win proposition, Gomory asked himself, then why did America keep losing?

The explanations he has developed sound like pure heresy to devout free traders. But oddly enough, Gomory’s analysis is a good fit with what many ordinary workers and uncredentialed critics (myself included) have been arguing for some years. An important difference is that Gomory’s critique is thoroughly grounded in the orthodox terms and logic of conventional economics. That makes it much harder to dismiss. Given his career at IBM, nobody is going to call Ralph Gomory a "protectionist."

He did not nail his "theses" to the door of the Harvard economics department. Instead, he wrote a slender book–Global Trade and Conflicting National Interests–in collaboration with respected economist William Baumol, former president of the American Economic Association. Published seven years ago, the book languished in academic obscurity and until recently was ignored by Washington policy circles.

I asked Gomory if his former colleagues from the corporate world quarrel with his provocative message. "Most of them have never heard it," he said. "It’s a pretty new message." He has discussed his reform ideas with some CEOs, "who said, Well, maybe we could do that. Others couldn’t have disagreed more strongly."

Now Gomory is attempting to re-educate the politicians in Congress. He has gained greater visibility lately because he has been joined by a group of similarly concerned corporate executives called the Horizon Project. Its leader, Leo Hindery, former CEO of the largest US cable company and a player in Democratic politics, shares Gomory’s foreboding about the destructive impact of globalization on American prosperity. Huge losses are ahead–10 million jobs or more–and Hindery fears time is running out on reform.

"We want to be a counter to the Hamilton Project," Hindery explains. "They have a sense of stasis that is more benign than I have. I don’t think this is all going to work out." The Hamilton policy group was launched last year by former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin to make sure the laissez-faire trade doctrine known as Rubinomics continues to dominate the Democratic Party. "We’re never going to have the status of Bob Rubin," Hindery concedes. "But we’re not chopped liver either. We have respectable business careers. You can’t tell Ralph Gomory that he is ‘smoke and mirrors,’ because he wrote the book."

Gomory’s critique has great political potential because it provides what the opponents of corporate-led globalization have generally lacked: a comprehensive intellectual platform for arguing that the US approach to globalization must be transformed to defend the national interest. Still, it will take politicians of courage to embrace his ideas and act on them. Gomory’s political solutions are as heretical as his economic analysis.

At IBM back in the 1980s, Gomory watched in awe as Japan and other Asian nations captured high-tech industrial sectors in which US companies held commanding advantage. IBM invented the disk drive, then dropped out of the disk-drive business, unable to compete profitably. Gomory marveled at Singapore, a tiny city-state, as it lured American manufacturers with low-wage labor, capital subsidies and tax breaks. The US companies turned Singapore into a global center for semiconductor production.

"It was an unforgettable transformation," Gomory remembers. "And it was pretty frightening.

"The offer that many Asian countries will give to American companies is essentially this: ‘Come over here and enhance our GDP. If you are here our people will be building disk drives, for example, instead of something less productive. In return, we’ll help you with the investment, with taxes, maybe even with wages. We’ll make sure you make a profit.’ This works for both sides: the American company gets profits, the host country gets GDP. However, there is another effect beyond the benefits for those two parties–high-value-added jobs leave the U.S."

China and India, he observes, are now doing this on a large scale. Microsoft and Google opened rival research centers in Beijing. Intel announced a new, $2.5 billion semiconductor plant that will make it one of China’s largest foreign investors. China’s industrial transformation is no longer about making shirts and shoes, as some free-trade cheerleaders still seem to believe. It is about capturing the most advanced processes and products.

The multinationals’ overseas deployment of capital and technology, Gomory explains, is the core of how some very poor developing nations are able to ratchet up their technological prowess, take over advanced industrial sectors and rapidly expand their share in global trade–all with the help of US companies and finance, as they roam the world in search of better returns.

The Gomory-Baumol book describes this as "a divergence of interests" between multinational firms and their home country. "This overseas investment decision may then prove to be very good for that multinational firm," they write. "But there remains the question: Is the decision good for its own country?" In many cases, yes. If the firm is locating low-skilled industrial production in a very poor country, Americans get cheaper goods, trade expands for both sides and the result is "mutual gain." But the trading partners enter a "zone of conflict" if the poor nation develops greater capabilities and assumes the production of more advanced goods. Then, the authors explain, "the newly developing partner becomes harmful to the more industrialized country." The firm’s self-interested success "can constitute an actual loss of national income for the company’s home country."

American multinationals, as principal actors in this transfer of wealth-generating productive capacity, are distinctively free to make the decisions for themselves without interference from government. They want profit and future consumer markets. Their home country wants to maintain a highly productive high-wage economy. Without recognizing it, the two are pulling in opposite directions–the "divergence of interests" most US politicians ignore, evidently believing church doctrine over visible reality.

The Gomory-Baumol book explains the dynamics with charts and equations for economists to study. For the rest of us, it is easier to follow Gomory’s personal explanation of changing fortunes among trading nations. "What made America much wealthier than the Asian nations in the first place?" Gomory asks. "We invested alongside our workers. Our workers dug ditches with backhoes. The workers in underdeveloped countries dug ditches with shovels. We had great big plants with a few people in them, which is the same thing. We knew how, through technology and investment, to make our workers highly productive. It wasn’t that they went to better schools, then or now, and I don’t know how much schooling it takes to run a backhoe.

"The situation today is that the companies have discovered that using modern technology they can do all that overseas and pay less for labor and then import product and services back into the United States. So what we’re doing now is competing shovel to shovel. The people in many countries are being equipped with as good a shovel or backhoe as our people have. Very often we are helping them make the transition. We’re making it person-to-person competition, which it never was before and which we cannot win. Because their people will be paid a third, a quarter of what our people are paid. And it’s unreasonable to think you can educate our people so well that they can produce four times as much in the United States."

As this shift of productive assets progresses, the downward pressure on US wages will thus continue and intensify. Free-trade believers insist US workers can defend themselves by getting better educated, but Gomory suggests these believers simply don’t understand the economics. "Better education can only help," he explains. "The question is where do you put your technology and knowledge and investment? These other countries understand that. They have understood the following divergence: What countries want and what companies want are different."

The implication is this: If nothing changes in how globalization currently works, Americans will be increasingly exposed to downward pressure on incomes and living standards. "Yes," says Gomory. "There are many ways to look at it, all of which reach the same conclusion."

I ask Gomory what he would say to those who believe this is a just outcome: Americans become less rich, others in the world become less poor. That might be "a reasonable personal choice," he agrees. "But that isn’t what the people in this country are being told. No one has said to us: ‘You’re probably a little too rich and these other folks are a little too poor. Why don’t we even it out?’ Instead, what we usually hear is: ‘It’s going to be good for everyone. In the long run we’re going to get richer with globalization.’"

Gomory and Baumol are elaborating a fundamental point sure to make many economists (and political leaders) sputter and choke. Contrary to dogma, the losses from trade are not confined to the "localized pain" felt by displaced workers who lose jobs and wages. In time, the accumulating loss of a country’s productive base can injure the broader national interest–that is, everyone’s economic well-being.

"Our objective," Baumol told a policy conference last summer, "is to show how outsourcing can indeed reduce the share of benefits of trade, not only for those who lose their jobs and suffer a direct reduction in wages but can wind up making the average American worse off than he or she would have been."

The conventional win-win assurances, they explain, are facile generalizations that ignore the complexity of the trading system–the myriad differences in country-to-country relationships and the vast realm of government actions and policy interventions designed to shape the outcomes. "Many of our ‘dismal science’ colleagues speak unguardedly as though they believe free trade cannot fail, no matter what," Baumol said.

Some nations, in other words, do indeed become "losers." Gomory fears the United States is now one of them–starting to go downhill. When he and Baumol wrote their book, they figured US trade relations with China and India produced "mutual gain" for both ends. The United States got cheaper goods, China and India got jobs and a start at industrialization. But the rapid improvements in those two nations during the past decade, Gomory thinks, are putting the United States in the bind where their gain becomes our loss.

Essentially, the terms of trade have changed as more and more value-added production has shifted from the United States to its poorer trading partners. America, he explains, becomes increasingly dependent, buying from abroad more and more of what its citizens consume and producing relatively less at home. US incomes stagnate as the high-wage jobs disappear and US exports become a smaller share of the world total.

The persistent offshoring of domestic production is leading to a perverse consequence: The United States finds itself paying more for imports. The production that originally moved offshore to get low-wage labor and cheaper goods is now claiming a larger and larger share of national income, as the growing trade deficits literally subtract from US domestic growth. "All the stuff you were already importing from them becomes more expensive," Gomory explains. "That’s why you can start going downhill–because you pay more for what you were previously getting." Put another way, one hour of US work no longer buys as many hours of Chinese work as it once did. China can suppress its domestic wages to keep selling more of its stuff, but that does not alter the fundamental imbalance in productive strength.

The US predicament is vividly reflected in the nation’s swollen trade deficits, now running at nearly 7 percent of GDP every year. The country consumes more than it produces. It borrows heavily from trading partners, led by China, to pay for its "excess" consumption. This allows America to dodge–temporarily–a reckoning with its weakened condition, that is, falling living standards. But that will eventually occur, when Americans are compelled to reduce their consumption and pay off the overdue bills. Postponement will deepen the ultimate injury because, meanwhile, the trading partners will gain greater industrial capabilities, while US productive strength weakens further.

Americans can choose to blame China or disloyal multinationals, but the problem is grounded in US politics. The solution can be found only in Washington. China and other developing nations are pursuing national self-interest and doing what the system allows. In a way, so are the US multinationals. "I want to stress it’s a system problem," Gomory says. "The directors are doing the job they’re sworn to do. It’s a system that says the companies have to have a sole focus on maximizing profit."

Gomory’s proposed solution would change two big things (and many lesser ones). First, the US government must intervene unilaterally to cap the nation’s swollen trade deficit and force it to shrink until balanced trade is achieved with our trading partners. The mechanics for doing this are allowed under WTO rules, though the emergency action has never been invoked by a wealthy nation, much less the global system’s putative leader. Capping US trade deficits would have wrenching consequences at home and abroad but could force other nations to consider reforms in how the trading system now functions. That could include international rights for workers, which Gomory favors.

Second, government must impose national policy direction on the behavior of US multinationals, directly influencing their investment decisions. Gomory thinks this can be done most effectively through the tax code. A reformed corporate income tax would penalize those firms that keep moving high-wage jobs and value-added production offshore while rewarding those that are investing in redeveloping the home country’s economy.

US companies are not only free of national supervision but actively encouraged to offshore production by government policy and tax breaks. Other advanced economies have sophisticated national industrial policies, plus political and cultural pressures, that guide and discipline their multinationals, forcing them to adhere more closely to the national interest.

Neither of Gomory’s fundamental policy reforms–balancing trade or imposing discipline on US multinationals–can work without the other. Both have to be done more or less at once. If the government taxed US multinational behavior without also capping imports, the firms would just head out the door. "That won’t work," Gomory explains, "because you will say to the companies, ‘This is how we’re going to measure you.’ And the corporations will say, ‘Oh, no, you’re not. I’m going overseas. I’m going to make my product over there and I’ll send it back into the United States.’ But if you insist on balanced trade, then the amount that’s shipped in has to equal the amount that’s shipped out by companies. If no companies do that, then nothing can be shipped in either. If you balance trade, you are going to develop internal companies that work the way you want." Public investment in new technologies and industries, I would add, may not achieve much either, if there is no guarantee that the companies will locate their new production in the United States.

Essentially, Gomory proposes to alter the profit incentives of US multinationals. If the government adds rules of behavior and enforces them through the tax code, companies will be compelled to seek profit in a different way–by adhering to the national interest and terms set by the US government. Other nations do this in various ways. Only the United States imagines the national interest doesn’t require it.

In recent months Gomory and Leo Hindery of the Horizon Project have been calling on Congress with these big ideas and getting respectful audiences. The two met with some thirty Democratic senators and Congressional staffers from both parties. Senator Byron Dorgan, with co-sponsors like Sherrod Brown, Russell Feingold and even Hillary Clinton, has introduced several bills to confront the trade deficits.

Gomory’s concept for multinational taxation is a tougher sell amid Washington lobbyists because it goes right to the bottom line of major US corporations. On the other hand, this proposal has stronger intuitive appeal for citizens, who reasonably ask why multinationals are allowed to undercut the national interest when they enjoy all the benefits of being "American" companies.

Hindery’s group is advocating Congressional action to arrange a "national summit" on trade, where all these questions can be thrashed out. The political system has never really had an honest, open debate on globalization in the past thirty years. The dogmatic church of free trade–"free trade good, no trade bad"–wouldn’t allow it. As more politicians grasp the meaning of Gomory’s analysis, they should start demanding equal time for the heretics.

Gomory’s vision of reformation actually goes beyond the trading system and America’s economic deterioration. He wants to re-create an understanding of the corporation’s obligations to society, the social perspective that flourished for a time in the last century but is now nearly extinct. The old idea was that the corporation is a trust, not only for shareholders but for the benefit of the country, the employees and the people who use the product. "That attitude was the attitude I grew up on in IBM," Gomory explains. "That’s the way we thought–good for the country, good for the people, good for the shareholders–and I hope we will get back to it…. We should measure corporations by their impact on all their constituencies.

"So in my utopian dream, we decide what we want from the corporations and that’s how they make a profit–by doing those things. Failing that, I would settle for the general realization of this divergence and let people argue it out."

Some older CEOs and board members at least listen to him sympathetically. "They have grandchildren," he says. "They wonder too what’s going to happen to our grandchildren. You can’t get a vote around the corporate board table about, Is this good for the grandchildren? But you can talk to them and they’ll worry about it and say, Well, maybe we need to do something."

Александр Фильчаков

Pentagon opens civilian claim files against military

Chilling accounts of hundreds of fatal encounters between the US military and civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan, providing a rare glimpse of the confusion and chaos of daily life in the conflict zones, were released by the Pentagon yesterday under the freedom of information act.

Four hundred and ninety-six files deal with Iraqi claims for compensation for family members killed by US forces between 2003 and 2006 and 17 from Afghanistan. The files, including handwritten notes from some of the soldiers involved, record the deaths of civilians killed mainly at checkpoints, or in their homes, or when US forces sprayed roads with gunfire to protect convoys.

Many of the deaths result from a failure of communication between US forces, most of whom do not speak Arabic, and civilians. Among the files is one relating to a mother shot dead and her two children wounded when the taxi they were in went through a checkpoint at Baqubah, north of Baghdad, in February last year.

The US defence department file said: "While the matter is still under investigation, there is evidence to suggest that the warning cones and printed checkpoint signs had not yet been displayed in front of the checkpoint, which may be the reason why the driver of the taxi did not believe he was required to stop." The case has since been resolved and the US military has paid out $7,500 (£3,750).

Another file, from the 101st Airborne Division, deals with a claim for $4,800 from a father whose son was shot dead in a car at a checkpoint between Baghdad and Kirkuk in 2005. A sergeant dealing with it writes: "How was he supposed to know to get out of the vehicle when they fired warning shots? If I was in his place I would have stayed put too." In spite of his comments, the claim was turned down.

The defence department paid out $2,500 in another case, near Tuz in eastern Iraq, in which four family members were killed at their home in March 2004. The file records that more than 100 rounds were fired, so indiscriminate that 32 sheep and a cow were also killed.

The files were released after a request by the American Civil Liberties Union and amount to only a fraction of civilian deaths at the hands of US troops and the compensation claims lodged. Of the 496 Iraq claims released yesterday, cash payments were made in 164 cases.

Marc Garlasco, a spokesman for Human Rights Watch, said what he found shocking was the lack of consistency in deciding who was entitled to compensation.

Фильчаков Харьков

‘The German Chair’

In Beirut last month, I met a Lebanese man who had been savagely tortured over the course of a 12-year odyssey in Syrian prisons. Among the things he had endured were electrocutions, beatings with electric cables, and being hanged from ropes by his ankles.

And then there was "the German chair."

The German chair, as he described it, was something akin to a medieval rack, in which progressively greater doses of pain are administered an inch at a time. Yet why was it known as the German chair? It’s a question I neglected to ask. But I found my answer several weeks later, in New York.

What occasioned this discovery was meeting a relatively senior German diplomat posted to the New York consulate. My wife–also German–knows his wife socially.

[…]

I made the normal chitchat of first encounters: praise for the unobstructed (and million-dollar) views of the Hudson River; a query about what he did at the consulate.

But the diplomat had no patience for my small talk. Apropos of nothing, he said he had recently made a study of U.S. tax laws and concluded that practices here were inferior to those in Germany. Given recent rates of German economic growth, I found this comment odd. But I offered no rejoinder. I was, after all, a guest in his home.

The diplomat, however, was just getting started. Bad as U.S. economic policy was, it was as nothing next to our human-rights record. Had I read the recent Amnesty International report on Guantanamo? "You mean the one that compared it to the Soviet gulag?" Yes, that one. My host disagreed with it: The gulag was better than Gitmo, since at least the Stalinist system offered its victims a trial of sorts.

Nor was that all. Civil rights in the U.S., he said, were on a par with those of North Korea and rather behind what they had been in Europe in the Middle Ages. When I offered that, as a journalist, I had encountered no restrictions on press freedom, he cut me off. "That’s because The Wall Street Journal takes its orders from the government."

By then we had sat down at the formal dining table, with our backs to Ground Zero a half-mile away and our eyes on the boats on the river below us. My wife and I made abortive attempts at ordinary conversation. We were met with non sequiturs: "The only people who appreciate American foreign policy are poodles." After further bizarre pronouncements, including a lecture on the illegality of the Holocaust under Nazi law, my wife said that she felt unwell. We gathered our things and left.

For days now, I’ve been asking myself why I didn’t answer the diplomat in the way he deserved. Partly it had to do with my wish not to spoil the friendship between our wives. Partly, too, his assault was so discombobulating I didn’t trust myself to respond coherently. But the main reason is that, as his guest, I was restrained by an innate sense of propriety, a sense the diplomat did not share. And herein lies the essence of the torturer’s art.

To inflict harm on a defenseless person–whoever he may be, whatever he has done–goes against the human grain. It is one thing to strike out at somebody who has just hit you. It’s another thing entirely to abuse someone who, whether as prisoner or as guest, is in your power.

Long ago the Greeks understood that nothing is so barbarous as inhospitality. And according to popular exegesis, God did not destroy Sodom and Gomorrah because of its citizens’ sexual crimes but because of their crimes against hospitality–the rape of strangers.

Torturers, however, are those rare people who can inflict injury on the defenseless, work which is made easier for them because they know most people are unable to respond in kind. Thus it was with the German diplomat. Seated at his table, I submitted to his rules. But rather than oblige my submission with courtesy, he took the opportunity to inflict his insults–insults to which I, as a guest, was bound not to resist. I was, so to speak, in his German chair.

I am tempted to violate journalistic standards here by revealing the diplomat’s name. Of course I won’t: That’s not the sort of man I am. The trouble is, that’s one big reason why he is the man he is. German readers especially may recall the words of Brecht: The womb is fertile still, which bore this fruit.

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Turkish general calls for intervention

Turkey’s top general called for a military intervention in northern Iraq in comments certain to increase regional tensions, already high after a series of verbal exchanges between Turkish and Kurdish leaders.

General Yasar Buyukanit, Turkey’s powerful chief of staff, said on Thursday he believed Turkish troops had to move across the border to combat rebels from the Kurdish Workers party (PKK), which Ankara accuses the Kurdish regional government of Northern Iraq of harbouring – an allegation the regional government denies.

“From the military point of view, a [military] operation in northern Iraq must be made,” Gen Buyukanit said.

But he added that he had not yet submitted a request to parliament and that “no political decision has been made yet”.

[…]

The Bush administration has repeatedly told Ankara that such a move would not be productive. While Washington believes some of the rhetoric from the Turkish military is tied up with internal Turkish politics ahead of the presidential election, US officials also assess there is a chance that Turkey will move into northern Iraq, but not imminently.

The EU, which has reduced clout over Ankara because of the troubles of Turkey’s membership negotiations, has also made clear it does not want a Turkish incursion into northern Iraq.

But tensions have recently mounted, partly because of the PKK’s continued operations in Turkey and partly because of the debate in Iraq over the division of power between the country’s regional governments.

The general’s statement followed a warning by Massoud Barzani, leader of the Kurdish autonomous region, to “interfere” in Turkey’s south-east if Turkey “interfered” in his Kurdish area. The Turkish armed forces also sent a note of protest to the national government in Baghdad this week requesting action against the Kurdish rebels.

A US official in Washington on Thursday told the Financial Times that recent comments by Mr Barzani were “dangerous, provocative and unhelpful”.

Turkish officials complain that their main concern, the establishment of an independent Kurdish state, was coming closer day by day despite the US’s public commitment to preserve the territorial integrity of Iraq.

The general made veiled references to the US as the party that had let the Kurds in northern Iraq become “spoiled” to such an extent that their leader could threaten Turkey.

When asked by a local reporter about Mr Barzani and Turkey’s alliance with the US, the general said: “He [Mr Barzani] is at a very low level and I look to the one who enables him to speak so, who enables the division of Iraq, which is the greatest threat to the region.”

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Report: Iraq situation is worsening

The situation for civilians in Iraq is "ever-worsening," even though security in some places has improved as a result of stepped-up efforts by U.S.-led multinational forces, the international Red Cross said Wednesday.

Thousands of bodies lie unclaimed in mortuaries, with family members either unaware that they are there or too afraid to go to recover them, according to a key official with the neutral agency. Medical professionals also have been fleeing the country after cases where their colleagues were killed or abducted, the group said.

"Whatever operation that is today underway, and that may be taken tomorrow and in the weeks after, to improve the security of civilians on the ground may have an effect in the medium term," said Pierre Kraehenbuehl, director of operations of the International Committee of the Red Cross, or ICRC.

"We’re certainly not seeing an immediate effect in terms of stabilization for civilians currently. That is not our reading," he said.

Kraehenbuehl spoke in releasing a new ICRC report titled "Civilians Without Protection: The Ever-worsening Humanitarian Crisis in Iraq."

"It is clear that the security situation has improved in certain instances," especially in southern Iraq, he said. But the central region, including Baghdad, remains greatly affected, despite American efforts to secure the capital, he added.

Kraehenbuehl said it was so dangerous for Red Cross workers to move around in Baghdad that "we don’t have on a day-to-day basis a full picture of absolutely every situation."

The ICRC continues to operate in Iraq even though it has cut back operations since attacks on its staff and Baghdad headquarters in 2003. It has 415 Iraqis working for it in the country and has an additional 57 international staff based in Iraq and Amman, Jordan, but relies on the affiliated Iraqi Red Crescent for much of its information.

Based on the Iraqi society’s count, some 600,000 Iraqis have fled their homes since the upsurge in sectarian violence in February 2006, Kraehenbuehl said.

"Hospitals and other key services are desperately short of staff," Kraehenbuehl said. "According to the Iraqi Ministry of Health, more than half the doctors are said to have already left the country."

One of the key jobs of the ICRC is to visit detainees, and the number in custody has been growing as well, Kraehenbuehl said.

"The number of people arrested or interned by the multinational forces has increased by 40% since early 2006. The number of people held by the Iraqi authorities has also increased significantly."

The ICRC regularly visits people held by the multinational forces, and has seen 16,500 since January. Last year some 32,000 detainees were visited by the neutral agency, which also has access to those held by the Kurdish regional government. The ICRC has yet to reach agreement with the Iraqi authorities on visiting their detainees.

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Limits Loom for Hybrid Aircraft

The Marine Corps said yesterday that the V-22 Osprey, a hybrid aircraft with a troubled past, will be sent to Iraq this September, where it will see combat for the first time.

But because of a checkered safety record in test flights, the V-22 will be kept on a short leash.

The Pentagon has placed so many restrictions on how it can be used in combat that the plane — which is able to drop troops into battle like a helicopter and then speed away from danger like an airplane — could have difficulty fulfilling the Marines’ longstanding mission for it.

In Iraq, the V-22 will begin to replace the Vietnam-era helicopters that are increasingly facing enemy fire. The limitations on the V-22, which cost $80 million apiece, mean it cannot evade enemy fire with the same maneuvers and sharp turns used by helicopter pilots.

As a result, the craft could be more vulnerable to attack, and may result in the Marines keeping it out of the thick of battle, using it instead for less dangerous tasks.

“They will plan their missions in Iraq to avoid it getting into areas where there are serious threats,” said Thomas Christie, the Pentagon’s director of operations, test and evaluation from 2001 to 2005, who is now retired. The V-22’s debut in combatends a remarkable 25-year struggle for the Marines to build a craft they could call their own.

In announcing the Iraq deployment yesterday, Gen. James T. Conway, the Marine Corps’ commandant, referred to those efforts as “a road marked by some setbacks, lots of sacrifices and the success of these Marines standing before you.”

The V-22 has been the Marines’ top priority — the Pentagon has spent $20 billion so far and has budgeted $54.6 billion for it. The money has bought a craft that is half-helicopter, half-airplane and whose speed, say the Marines, will save lives.

But the V-22 has also suffered some of the deadliest test crashes in Marine history. It has claimed 30 lives, 26 of them marines, in three test flight crashes. A fourth V-22 crashed, but there were no deaths then. Many more have been damaged in lesser incidents involving fires, stalled engines and software glitches.

Critics say the V-22’s unusual design can create deadly problems that the Marines have minimized in their single-minded pursuit of the craft.

“It’s like a bad poker hand, and the Marines have been investing in it for 20 years,” said Philip Coyle, the Pentagon’s top weapons tester from 1994 to 2001. “They might have been better if they invested in brand new helicopters.”

The plane’s most widely cited design problem is that one of its propellers can get caught in its own turbulence as it comes in for a landing, and that can cause the V-22 to roll over and head into the ground.

For that reason, V-22 pilots are trained to steer clear of their own turbulence by rules prohibiting them from making the quick maneuvers used by helicopters to evade enemy fire. Instead, the V-22 must land at speeds as slow as nine miles an hour and in a fairly straight line.

A 2005 Pentagon report said these limitations “may prove insufficient” in protecting the V-22 from ground fire. As a result, that Pentagon evaluation said the V-22 was suited only for low- and medium-threat environments, and is not “operationally effective” in high-threat environments.

Some critics say that in the heat of battle, V-22 pilots could forget these restrictions and move in ways that could bring the craft down.

“The V-22 cannot do radical evasive maneuvers” said Lee Gaillard, author of a report critical of the V-22, “Wonder Weapon or Widow Maker” for the Center for Defense Information, which studies weapons programs. “But that’s what it will need for combat.”

The Marines defend the V-22 by saying it provides a margin of safety a helicopter cannot because it can fly faster, farther and higher.

They say it can get to wounded troops quicker and speed them to medical care in what is called the “golden hour” when life can hang in the balance. Because the V-22 flies with a lower “acoustical signature,” it can enter a battlefield less noisily than a helicopter.

Officials add that the Osprey can do more evasive maneuvers than currently permitted — and further testing will prove that.

“It flies twice as fast as the CH-46 that it is replacing,” said Lt. Gen. John Castellaw, head of the Marine aviation program. “It carries three times the payload; it goes five times as far; it’s six times as survivable. So what you’re deploying is an asset that increases the combat capability of the Marines.”

“That’s what you want to do,” added General Castellaw. “Give them the best you can.”

Col. Mathew Mulhern, the Pentagon’s V-22 program officer, whose Patuxent River office has an “Osprey Country” sign, says marines cannot wait to get on board.

“Every marine who sees one, when they do, a light bulb comes on,” said Colonel Mulhern. “They say, ‘my God.’ ”

Each V-22 costs about three times the price of a modern helicopter and nearly the same as a fighter jet. The Marines will get 360 Ospreys, Air Force Special Forces will get 50 and there will be 48 for the Navy.

The program’s high cost and uncertain technology led Vice President Cheney when he was secretary of defense under President George H. W. Bush to try four times to cancel the program.

But, from 1989 to 1992, Mr. Cheney was beaten back by Congress. Work on the project — the Boeing Company and Bell Helicopter Textron are the main contractors — is spread across 40 states and 2,000 subcontractors, giving the V-22 broad support. More than 100 members of Congress even formed a Tiltrotor Technology Coalition to protect it.

“We have proven conclusively that this is an extraordinarily fine craft,” said Robert Leder, a spokesman for the Bell-Boeing V-22 program. “It is a very safe craft and will be of tremendous service. ‘’

All new weapons have problems in testing. But critics say the V-22 is plagued with basic design problems.

Should the V-22 lose power, it can not “autorotate” like a helicopter and allow the updraft of air to rotate its propellers for a hard, but survivable, landing. Because of this, according to the 2005 Pentagon report, emergency V-22 landings without power at altitudes below 1,600 feet “are not likely to be survivable.”

“If you lose power on a V-22, you just burn and crash,” said one Pentagon official involved in testing the craft but who was not authorized to speak publicly. “There is no way to survive. ”

The cabin is not pressurized, even though the craft can fly at altitudes of 10,000 feet and above, where breathing is difficult and it is not climate-controlled.

Pentagon reports also say the V-22 is too cramped for the 24 marines it can carry. The marines are so packed into the windowless cabin that they can become airsick, their legs can grow numb and leaving the plane quickly is difficult.

There is no bathroom on board and marines have criticized the “piddle packs” they are to use as insufficient. And, there is no place on board to store them once they are full.

V-22 downdraft is so strong, and moves in so many directions that it can create “brownout” conditions, making it difficult for pilots to see and potentially knocking down marines on the ground.

As a result, when rope ladders are used, the V-22 must hover at higher altitudes, making marines more vulnerable to fire.

“Safety is a big issue,” wrote one V-22 crew chief, in a questionnaire filled out for the Pentagon’s 2005 operational evaluation. “If we had went down in the water we would have most likely lost at least 24 troops because of restricted egress. I felt like I was in a coffin.”

These are more than theoretical concerns. On April 8, 2000, 19 marines were killed in a training exercise when a V-22 descended too fast and crashed near Tucson. It was the third V-22 to crash — seven people were killed in two previous crashes.

In December 2000, four more marines, including the program’s most experienced pilot, were killed in a crash caused by a burst hydraulic line and software problems.

These accidents led to program delays to make design changes. But as tests resumed, so have the problems.

Three engine fires occurred recently because of problems related to hydraulic lines. In March 2006, a computer problem led an idling V-22 to suddenly take off on its own. It then slammed into the ground, breaking off its right wing. All 54 V-22’s were grounded for weeks in February because of a faulty computer chip.

In preparation for deployment, the Pentagon ran tests last year in the New Mexico desert, similar to the climate of Iraq. In January, the Pentagon wrote about frequent failures with various parts and systems. The reason: “Extended exposure to the desert operating environment.”

Because of these problems, Mr. Coyle, the former Pentagon weapons tester, predicted the Marines will use the V-22 to ferry troops from one relatively safe spot to another, like a flying truck.

“They don’t want to have a ‘Black Hawk down,’ ” he said. “That would kill the program. Of course, it was not designed to be a truck. It was designed to be used in combat.”

The Marines say the V-22 will prove the critics wrong.

“Ask all the naysayers how many hours they have flown,” said Colonel Mulhern, the V-22 program manger.

“They are just sitting around a desk and crunching numbers,” he added. “Go talk to the Marines. The V-22 has come of age. The first marine it saves makes it worth what we paid for it. And I have real confidence that the V-22 will do it.”

Fans include General Castellaw, a Vietnam helicopter pilot, who has flown the V-22.

“I came in at a high altitude and then did a tactical ingress,” said General Castellaw. “Yankin’ and bankin’ to avoid simulated fire, came in low, streaked into the zone. The aircraft is nimble, agile. You can yank and bank with the best of them.

“I believe absolutely that this is the most survivable craft for the Marine Corps’ most precious assets,” he added. “ If I did not believe that, I would not deploy it. I have absolute faith in the craft to do the mission.”