What Mr. Bush Left Out

Wed Mar 19,10:13 PM ET Add Op/Ed - William F. Buckley to My Yahoo! By William F. Buckley Jr.

The finality of the long -- seemingly endless -- period of indecision, fractured alliances, ambivalent allies and fruitless diplomacy had an unusual touch. The president flew two-thirds of the way across the Atlantic to meet with the leaders of the diminished ranks of our allies.

The trip doesn't take much more air time than a flight to Denver, but there was operatic grace in seeking out a remote island, one of an archipelago as beautiful as any on Earth, and touching down with the prime ministers of Great Britain, Spain and Portugal, where the language spoken is foreign, and where an Atlantic U.S. Air Force base serves as a promontory of U.S. vigilance for the world Columbus left, to discover the new world.

The mother country of the Azores endured a left-wing coup in 1974. A few years later, the governor of the islands disclosed, with not much discretion, that if the military continued in power in Portugal, the Azores would declare their loyalty to Lisbon ended and make out for themselves. The Azores had been a colony for about 500 years.

We learn that the leave-taking of President Bush (news - web sites) was especially moving. He treated the natives who came to see him off in his majestic carrier, an airplane with more bodies on board than Columbus brought on his ship, to a special show of fraternity, not visibly different from his intensive exchanges with the firefighters in New York. And we know what he was thinking as, after nightfall, he boarded the plane with the honor guard, because the next day he would express himself. In New York, three days after Sept. 11, a fresh chapter opened for America; at the air base in Terceira, it moved forward to the next stage. We would be going to war.

We learned that on Air Force One there were two speechwriters there to help him craft the address he would give 24 hours later. Mr. Bush spoke the language of going to war so very different from such as was spoken during the first centuries of the Azores' sentient life on Earth. When the islands were discovered, there was no human life there. Before the colonizers settled down to being a metropolitan district of Portugal, they were fought for, and dominated intermittently, by the Spanish. When they went to war in those days, the missions were outspoken. The rulers wished for glory, foreign possessions and wealth.

Nothing of the kind preoccupied Mr. Bush in the missions he described on Monday night. Lenin preached to faithful Marxist ears that colonialism was the chief and vital enterprise of the bourgeois world, motivating policy and life. Revisionists have carefully argued, in recent years, that the overhead of colonialism often exceeded its fruits, challenging a central postulate of Marx-Lenin. It is not widely held that we are moving against Iraq (news - web sites) for material reasons, and it is plain that our motives are hardly material, unless one classifies as a material motive the determination to safeguard one's freedom and security.

In his speech the president was airborne with confidence in his mission and in the reasons for it. His exposure to the Azores might have made him more cautious when he spoke of the prospects for Iraq after liberation. Portugal, climbing out from monarchy soon after the turn of the century, moved toward an autocracy that lasted for 35 years, after which was the military coup, reaching an institutionalized democracy only in the late '70s.

President Bush spoke directly, using the personal pronoun, to the people whose country he would invade. The military campaign "will be directed against the lawless men who rule your country and not against you. As our coalition takes away their power, we will deliver the food and medicine you need. We will tear down the apparatus of terror."

And then? "We will help you to build a new Iraq that is prosperous and free." And at the close, "Unlike Saddam Hussein (news - web sites), we believe the Iraqi people are deserving and capable of human liberty. And when the dictator has departed, they can set an example to all the Middle East of a vital and peaceful and self-governing nation."

Mr. Bush would have done better to speak more modestly about expectations. Sitting down on vast oil reserves does not bring prosperity or freedom, as we are quickly reminded merely by citing Venezuela, Nigeria and Saudi Arabia. What Mr. Bush proposes to do is to unseat Saddam Hussein and to eliminate his investments in aggressive weaponry. We can devoutly hope that internecine tribal antagonisms will be subsumed in the fresh air of a despot removed, and that the restoration of freedom will be productive.

But these concomitant developments can't be either foreseen by the United States or implemented by us. What Mr. Bush can accomplish is the removal of a regime and its infrastructure. The Iraqi people will have to take it from there.

<a href=www.newsday.com>"Simply grassroots groups that are defending the "peaceful revolution"" By Bart Jones STAFF WRITER March 23, 2003

Their critics call them armed gangs of thugs who are terrorizing residents of well-to-do neighborhoods in Venezuela.

But Rodrigo Chaves says the Bolivarian Circles are simply grassroots groups that are defending the "peaceful revolution" of Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez and his campaign to clean up some of the worst political corruption in the world.

"What we are proposing is a profound transformation of society," Chaves, national coordinator of the Bolivarian Circles in Venezuela, said in an interview Monday.

Chaves came to New York City last week to defend the organizations, attend a rally in Manhattan, plot strategies with Chávez supporters from across the United States and proclaim that his president is not the monster some contend.

"It's the most democratic government and the one that has given the most freedom of speech" in Venezuela's history, Chaves, a surgeon, said in Spanish.

Since winning the presidency in 1998, Chávez has survived a firestorm of street protests, strikes and - in April - a coup. A two-month walkout at the huge state oil company Petróleos de Venezuela ended in February, but left the economy battered.

Chávez has split Venezuela between those who maintain he is a new Fidel Castro and those who see him as the first president in Venezuela's history to stand up for the impoverished masses and challenge a corrupted class of wealthy elites.

The bedrock of his support is the Bolivarian Circles. They have grown rapidly in the past two years, Chaves said, comprising 220,000 groups and 2.2 million people across the nation.

The groups, named after South American independence hero Simón Bolívar, study Venezuela's new constitution, repair schools, install sewage systems and even host chess tournaments, Chaves said. Critics say they have a more sinister purpose: to physically intimidate Chávez opponents. Miguel Hernández Andara, head of the Queens-based anti-Chávez group Civil Resistance of Venezuelans Overseas, said the circles are modeled after Castro's community groups created to defend the revolution. "They are a bunch of terrorists," Andara said in Spanish.

Chaves scoffed at that, and said it is the opposition that has engaged in violence. He alleged that opposition leaders placed snipers on top of hotels in downtown Caracas in April, ordered them to fire on their own marchers during a protest, and then blamed the deaths on Chávez. Dissident military officials quickly carried out a coup against Chávez, who regained power 48 hours later in a counter-coup.

Opposition leaders say Chávez and his supporters were responsible for the killings. At least 24 people died, including some Chávez backers. Many analysts agree snipers were on top of the hotels, but disagree on who put them there.

Chaves laughs at accusations that the president wants to impose a dictatorship. He said that hundreds of thousands of people regularly protest for and against Chávez, and that opponents often go on TV calling for another coup or the assassination of the president - and nothing happens to them.

"If someone went on TV [here] and said they should kill [President George W.] Bush," Chaves said, "they'd be in jail in a minute."

IAPA Says Restrictions Imposed on Media

Posted on Sat, Mar. 22, 2003 Associated Press

SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador - National security is being used as a pretext to clamp down on the media in the United States, the Inter-American Press Association said Saturday.

The association's president Rafael Molina said after the Sept. 11 terror attacks "restrictions were imposed on the press and there were official suggestions to the media about what to publish and what not to publish, using national security as a pretext."

Molina said among the most extreme cases was last month's expulsion of an Iraqi journalist from the United States who was dubbed "harmful" to the security of the country. Iraq in return expelled four U.S. journalists from Baghdad.

"It seems both cases were excessive," said Molina, who heads Ahora newspaper in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. "Journalists should not be treated as spies, and actions like this are a flagrant violation of the right of all people to transmit and receive information without distinction by nationality."

The association also expressed concern about violence against journalists in war-torn Colombia, where four journalists have been killed, nine kidnapped and 64 have been threatened in the past six months.

Intimidation and threats also are on the rise against journalists in Argentina, Guatemala, Honduras, Venezuela and Haiti, the association said.

The association is expected to wrap up its meeting Monday with a list of recommendations.

Oil Shipments Unaffected in the Gulf

Maher Chmaytelli, AFP

CAIRO, 23 March 2003 — Petroleum shipments from the Gulf were unaffected yesterday despite reports of blazing wells in Iraq’s southern oil fields, shipping sources said.

“From Kuwait to Suez, it’s smooth and steady,” said a London-based shipping executive. Officials in Gulf states reported terminals and refineries were functioning normally across the region, despite an Iraqi missile attack late Thursday that appeared to be aimed at Kuwait’s Shuaiba refinery.

The chief of the British armed forces, Admiral Sir Michael Boyce, said yesterday in London that nine oil wells were on fire and that most of Iraq’s oil and gas installations had been mined or booby-trapped.

Iraq, however, has denied torching its wells, and said trenches filled with oil had been set alight to reduce visibility and slow the advance of American and British troops.

“Anyway, it cannot be compared to the planned sabotaging of Kuwaiti fields in the 1991 Gulf war,” said a Gulf oil official.

Southern Iraq accounted for around half of the country’s oil exports until they were halted days before the onset of the war on Thursday.

The main fields around Basra are Zubair, Rumaila, Safwan and Nahr Umar, connected by pipeline to the terminals of Mina Al-Bakr and Khor Al-Amaya, off the Fao peninsula.

Although oil transit through the Strait of Hormuz continued undisturbed on the third day of military action and the Iraqi threat to shipping lanes has decreased, premiums on tankers remained high.

“The threat does not come from Iraq only, you can’t exclude possible terrorist acts,” said an insurer, recalling last year’s attack on a French tanker off the Yemeni coast.

War developments, however, continued to favor a bear market. Crude oil prices have lost more than $10 since they peaked last month over concerns about a war.

New York’s benchmark light sweet crude for May delivery skidded $1.21 to $26.91 a barrel Friday, marking a slump from last month’s peak of $39.99 to the lowest level this year. Despite the loss of 1.5 million to 2 million barrels per day of Iraqi crude, analysts say the market looks oversupplied because of lower seasonal demand in the northern hemisphere, and because production in Venezuela was nearing recovery.

Except for Saudi Arabia, oil exporters were all producing at maximum capacity ahead of the war to appease the market, and expert say global supply now overweighs total demand by around 300,000 barrels per day.

The oil situation is nevertheless still unstable. “War is not over yet, it can go nasty, and Nigeria is now posing a problem,” said an expert.

US oil giant ChevronTexaco said Friday it had suspended all production in the western Niger Delta because of a violent ethnic uprising, slashing output by 140,000 bpd.

Nigeria is Africa’s largest oil producer, with an OPEC production quota of 2.018 million barrels per day. The International Energy Agency lists it as the world’s sixth largest oil exporter.

Investor Q&A:

Naween A Mangi

Q: I read a column in Fortune Magazine this week which said a US company called Calpers had put Pakistan in its list of countries not to invest in. How does that jive with all the noises out of Islamabad and even from Karachi Stock Exchange officials that the KSE-100 is a superb investment? — Jahangeer N. --Karachi

A: Calpers, or California Public Employees’ Retirement System is a pension fund in the US with $133 billion in assets under management. It’s the country’s largest public pension fund and invests a small portion of its funds, about $1.6 billion in emerging markets. Last year, they had a company called Wiltshire Associates grade various countries around the world based on financial factors, transparency, political stability and labour practices. When the scoring was complete, Calpers pulled money out of Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and Thailand. And a bunch of countries including India, Jordan, Morocco, Sri Lanka, Colombia, China, Egypt, Pakistan, Russia and Venezuela were put on the no-list. Calpers had the survey repeated this year and Jordan was upgraded to acceptable. The Fortune columnist says that the economies of many countries on the prohibited list are in lousy shape. He also says he wouldn’t be surprised if these banned countries’ markets continue to outperform the markets Calpers likes. Now, there are several issues at hand. First, it is possible that Pakistan made it into the prohibited list based on political instability. The logic for that is obvious. However, as far as financial factors and transparency are concerned, the massive improvements in corporate governance over the past two years cannot go unnoticed. And corporate governance and transparency are supposedly issues very close to Calpers fund managers’ hearts. It is surely safe to say that corporate transparency and indeed corporate performance of companies listed in Pakistan are above par. Then, if Fortune Columnist Andy Serwer has included Pakistan in the list of lousy economies, (he hasn’t specified whether he has) he should do his homework. Sure, Pakistan is nowhere close to even having any sort of a definitive plan to become a middle income country, but lousy can no longer be used to describe this economy. A combination of good luck and reform has meant the economy has stabilized with external debt rescheduled, capital inflows coming in and the currency turning stable. Then, the data shows that the KSE has been the best performing market not just in 2002 but year-on-year in 2003 so far as well. To be sure Calpers missed out on the 2002 gain of 112 percent in the KSE-100 Index. Even still, the index offers an average dividend yield of 10.6 percent, which clearly beats returns elsewhere in the world. So the facts speak clearly for themselves. The economy is stable. And the market is a good buy. But Calpers decision may be based on other factors like political and regional stability. And obviously, it’s their decision to trade off high returns for what is perceived to be higher risk. But that doesn’t mean investors right here cannot cash in. Happy investing!

Q: For weeks before the war began, analysts were cautioning that once conflict breaks out, the market will see some fall, at least. Instead, the KSE-100 index has rallied more than 100 points since the war broke out. Isn’t war and uncertainty supposed to send markets tumbling? I’m utterly confused! —Hafiz Rizvi --Karachi A: You’re not the only one! A lot of market watchers’ jaws have dropped in the last two days of trade this past week as bombs fell and the market shot up. That’s why if you’ve seen analyst reports at the tail end of this week, they sound more like jumbled mumbles than concrete analysis. So the pros are probably pretty confounded too. However, it’s interesting to note that the Karachi market is not out of whack. This past week was the US Dow Jones Industrial Average’s best week since 1982 with a rise of 8.4 percent or 662 points. The logic on Wall Street is that US investors were simply betting on a swift victory in Iraq. So in share trade on Friday, every bit of pro-US news coming out of Iraq was sending investors scurrying to the buying counters. Despite President Bush’s warnings that it could be a prolonged conflict, share investors weren’t buying into that line of thought and placed their money on a short, swift war with a clear victory for Washington. Here at the KSE, there was a different dynamic at work. First, worries that the onset of a US, UK invasion would bring MMA supporters out onto the street resulting in city disruptions and violence, were quashed when life continued as normal in Pakistan. No street power of any significant magnitude was stirred up and the calm gave the market a real boost. Then, Pakistan’s seemingly neutral position also gave market players a feeling of security that aid flows would continue uninterrupted. So in a sense the presence of positive factors stirred to life the market which had turned somewhat depressed since the badla crisis of Jan 15. But individual investors must tread with special caution at this time. Indeed, uncertainty and war turns markets volatile at the very least, even if it doesn’t send them tumbling. If the market consolidates early in the week, then things should remain steady. But if this bullish fever persists, the badla rates could begin to snake up once more and that could spell trouble for the market. So far, it appears the buying has been mostly speculative. But if it continues and retail investors start pouring in, the badla market could begin to show signs of strain. Already, badla rates which were at record lows of around 5 percent prior to this week, edged up to 8 percent by Friday. So that’s something to watch out for.

Do you have a question about how to invest your money? Or do you wonder how economic events affect your savings? Write to us at naween@dailytimes.com.pk or fax us at 021-5657362. Please include your name and address.