www.theaustralian.news.com.au By Washington correspondent Roy Eccleston March 10, 2003

GQ magazine once called him the "flack out of hell", and The New Republic magazine called him a fibber. Cartoonist Garry Trudeau draws him as a slightly sinister silhouette in his Doonesbury strip and just calls him Ari.

As George W. Bush's chief spokesman, Lawrence Ari Fleischer was always going to be a high-profile sort of guy. But the controversial manner of Bush's election, the September 11 terrorist attacks and the war on Afghanistan have given the 42-year-old spin doctor an international face.

Now, with war on Iraq looming, it is Fleischer's job to keep the press convinced that Saddam Hussein is on the way out, that the White House strategy is working as planned, that any obstacle was anticipated, and most importantly, that Bush is always right and always in control.

Sometimes that means not answering the question – perhaps on the basis it's "hypothetical". Sometimes the question has to be deflected – to the State Department, the Pentagon, or the governments of any one of 150 countries.

And sometimes, he must be able to look reporters in the face and convincingly declare black is white, or at least grey.

It's a job Fleischer does pretty well. Balding, bespectacled, his public performances are smooth, polished, a little bland. He smiles, cracks little jokes, and is neither snide nor over-familiar with reporters, in public at least. Fleischer also has that important weapon in a mouthpiece's armoury: a very good memory for detail.

Behind the scenes, says one White House reporter for a big US newspaper, he's "nice". The Economist magazine's reporters have had a different experience, calling the Bush team masters of bullying and bamboozling. Ask Fleischer what his boss had for dinner "and you will be subjected to an evasive burble; ask a question about the administration's connections with Enron (the failed energy giant) and you may suddenly find it hard to gain entry into the White House", the magazine said.

Fleischer hails from New York and a family of Jewish Democrats. But he found Ronald Reagan more appealing than Jimmy Carter, and for more than 20 years now has made his career representing Republicans.

Along the way, he gathered a reputation as being good at his job. Jonathan Chait, a senior editor at the New Republic magazine, last year wrote a long article describing the "peculiar duplicity" of Fleischer, whom he said "has a way of blindsiding you, leaving you disoriented and awestruck".

"Fleischer has broken new ground in the dark art of flackdom," wrote Chait. "Rather than respond tendentiously to questions, he negates them altogether."

Professionally, though, he almost never seems at a loss for an answer – even if it is not the answer being sought. Fleischer is doggedly loyal to the President and a devotee to his boss's guiding principle of secrecy.

And he rarely backs down. Take this exchange at last Tuesday's regular daily briefing, when Fleischer seemed to offer a different line than he had put out that morning when TV cameras were not present.

Would the US be seeking a vote on a second resolution at the UN Security Council, a reporter wanted to know.

"Well," began Fleischer, "what the President has said is that he believes that a vote is desirable; it is not mandatory."

The White House correspondents smelled a rat. "But there will be a vote?" demanded one. "You're backing off," said another to a chorus of agreement. "You're backing off. Yeah, that's different than what you said this morning. And what you said last week."

Fleischer wasn't really reflecting what Bush had said, as one reporter pointed out. Bush had always said a new resolution – not a vote – was desirable but not mandatory.

"You, from that podium, both this morning and last week, said there will be a vote, regardless of what the outcome was going to be," insisted one correspondent.

Fleischer responded smoothly: "Do not interpret this as any change in position."

The next day came news that should have floored the most ardent advocate for Bush: France and Russia, both with veto rights at the Security Council, were vowing not to allow any resolution that authorised force against Iraq.

That seemed to derail the Bush-Blair bid to win UN backing for war. Absolutely not, insisted Fleischer, who took an optimistic view: "I think it's not accurate to leap to any conclusions about how these nations will actually vote."

But even as skilled a hand as Fleischer occasionally gets caught out.

The Washington Post reported how the Bush mouthpiece recently refused to stay on the record in an interview with reporters who wanted to talk about political polls. Instead, he insisted on being an unnamed "senior administration official".

Funny, that. The paper reported that last year, when an "unnamed official" suggested the administration might support a coup in Venezuela, Fleischer challenged the assertion on the basis it was anonymous. "The person obviously doesn't have enough confidence in what he said to say it on the record," Fleischer said.

His only serious missteps came after the September 11 attacks. First, Fleischer claimed Bush's delay in returning to Washington was because Air Force One was a terrorist target. Later it turned out there was never a real threat.

More troubling was his response to Bill Maher, then host of a talk show Politically Incorrect, who said Americans had been cowardly by firing long-distance cruise missiles at Afghanistan. Americans, said Fleischer from the White House podium, "need to watch what they say".

The feisty UPI correspondent Helen Thomas who has covered every president since John F. Kennedy, told The New York Times in 2001 that Fleischer was kept "on a very short leash". So far, though, it's been long enough to protect his boss's back.

www.manilatimes.net Wednesday, March 5, 2003 By Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, (IPS)—Increasing disillusionment in Latin America with democracy, market-centered economies and constructive ties to the United States should prompt Washington to pay much closer attention to the continent, says a new report by the Inter-American Dialogue (IAD), a Washington-based think tank.

Only on the trade front has the administration of President George W. Bush acted to promote stronger relations with Latin America, particularly since the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on New York and the Pentagon, according to the 41-page report, ‘The Troubled Americas’, released Friday.

But in other areas, US policy has been characterized by ‘’a very high degree of neglect,’’ says Peter Hakim, the Dialoúgue’s president. ‘’It used to be said that the US only pays attention to Latin America when there’s a crisis, but now there’s a crisis in half a dozen countries, and we’re still seeing neglect.”

“We applaud the (President George W.) Bush administration’s leadership in advancing US-Latin American trade ties,” says the new report’s introduction by Hakim, US co-chair Peter Bell, and Latin American co-chair and former Brazilian President Fernando Henrique Cardoso, who was also on hand for the report’s release.

“We express concern, however, that Washington is not as decisively engaged with other hemispheric challenges - at a time that America needs US cooperation and support to deal with a set of particularly difficult problems.”

Continued neglect of crises like those in Argentina, Venezuela, Haiti and most recently Bolivia, will inevitably undermine Washington’s trade agenda in the region, added Hakim.

For his part, Cardoso, who handed over power after eight years in office to his successor, Luis Inacio Lula da Silva, just last month, stressed that the entire hemisphere must address how consútraints on the budgets and abilities of Latin American governments to tackle serious problems in their countries is undermining or damaging new democraúcies throughout the region.

While democratic institutions in the continent are today ‘’much stronger than 10 or 20 years ago,’’ they are also being tested by their inability to better the lives of their people, he said. “As income statistics make clear, the majority of citizens (in Latin America) are no better off today than they were one or two decades back,’’ adds the report, the latest in a series of assessments published every two years by the Dialogue.

Cardoso also warned that the international situation, particularly the behavior of the United States, is likely to have a major impact on the health of democratic institutions and the rule of law in Latin America.

The 20-year-old Dialogue consists of 100 prominent figures in politics, government, academia, business, media, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) divided equally between the United States and Canada on one hand, and Latin America and the Caribbean on the other.

The latest report offers some bright news, noting overall progress in political and economic reform in the region over the past 20 years. Three ‘’powerful ideas’’, the report says, have gained widespread support over the period. These include the notion that democracy and elections are the only acceptable way to gain and exercise political power; that the region’s economies should be re-organized along market lines and opened to international trade and investment; and the view that Latin American nations needed to build constructive relationships with Washington in order to succeed economically.

“These ideas continue to hold sway in nearly every country of the region,’’ the report concluded, ‘’but their credibility has diminished because of Latin America’s economic and political shortfalls in recent years, coupled with a disappointing lack of commitment from Washington’’.

While scepticism about each of these notions has grown steadily - the Dialogue first began warning about the trend six years ago - ‘’no one has come up with better or more powerful alternatives to replace these ideas. The central challenge is still to make them work in practice’’.

The reports points to Mexico and Chile as bright spots for having avoided social and political unrest, while Costa Rica, Chile, Uruguay, and Brazil have all become ‘’vibrant democracies’’ with strong parties and active civil societies.

In addition, Bush’s success in gaining fast-track trade negotiating authority from Congress has also given new impetus for rapidly growing ties between the United States and Latin America. ‘’The successful negotiation of a strong (Free Trade Area of the Americas) would be a giant step forward for inter-American relations,’’ the report says, noting however that a final FTAA agreement by the 2005 target date ‘’will not be easy’’.

But major challenges also loom. ‘’Argentina’s economic and political turmoil is a collective problem for every nation of the hemisphere,’’ it says, urging Washington ‘’not (to) wait on the sidelines for the new Argentina government to struggle on its own’’.

Ongoing political crises in Venezuela and Haiti, in which the Organization of American States (OAS) has tried to mediate, should also be considered ‘’shared problems for the entire hemisphere’’, while Colombia’s national security problems are ‘’far and away the most dangerous in the hemisphere’’, and President Alvaro Uribe’s military build-up not only may put the country’s ‘’economy in peril’’, but also raise ‘’the prospects for a wider and dirtier war’’ that may create more refugees and disruption and make peace negotiations more difficult.

Perhaps the key country, according to the report, will be Cardoso’s Brazil and the ability of Lula to transform his ‘’enormous political support and good will’’ to make good on his campaign promises to reactivate economic growth, attack poverty, hunger and race discrimination and push the social agenda faster and harder than his predecessors.

“If Lula succeeds, even modestly, not only would the prospects of economic recovery improve throughout Latin America, but the region’s otherwise dispirited politics would also receive a substantial boost” the report concludes.

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www.vheadline.com Posted: Sunday, March 02, 2003 By: W. E. Gutman

Date: Fri, 28 Feb 2003 20:03:01 EST From: W. E. Gutman WEGUTMAN@cs.com To: Editor@VHeadline.com Subject: Re: US 'intelligence' fails again... it was KARACHI and not CARACAS

Dear Editor: Most Americans are geographically challenged ... if not retarded. To wit the following anecdotes:

1. A man told me he had spent a couple of days in Athens and said ... Turkey is a very interesting country.

2. Overheard on line at a foreign currency exchange booth at JFK airport in New York: "I'm going to Puerto Rico. I need some Puerto Rican dollars..."

3. I told someone I was born in Paris. "Texas?" he asked. "No, Paris, France." "Oh, where's that?"

4. Most high school seniors believe that the Peloponesian Wars were fought on horseback by two opposing Polo teams...

5. Four out five people in Los Angeles have never heard of Connecticut.

6. I argued with a local school administrator that the elusive "smoking gun" can be found north of the 38th parallel, in Pyongyang, not Baghdad. "Pyong what?" he said.

7. The clincher: American babbitry can best be exemplified by a nice pink-haired old lady from Akron, Ohio, who observed that Italy must be a very poor country. "After all, they've had 2,000 years to repair the Coliseum and, look at it, it's still in ruins...'"

It should come as no surprise that in a nation where one out of ten people don't know who was the first president of the US, can't tell for sure whether Canada is north or south of the US, can't tell the difference between Austria and Australia, and couldn't find Madagascar on a world map if their lives depended on it -- that Caracas and Karachi would be confused.

After all, the first two syllables sound the same...

W. E. Gutman WEGUTMAN@cs.com

www.vheadline.com Posted: Sunday, March 02, 2003 By: W. E. Gutman

Date: Fri, 28 Feb 2003 20:03:01 EST From: W. E. Gutman WEGUTMAN@cs.com To: Editor@VHeadline.com Subject: Re: US 'intelligence' fails again... it was KARACHI and not CARACAS

Dear Editor: Most Americans are geographically challenged ... if not retarded. To wit the following anecdotes:

1. A man told me he had spent a couple of days in Athens and said ... Turkey is a very interesting country.

2. Overheard on line at a foreign currency exchange booth at JFK airport in New York: "I'm going to Puerto Rico. I need some Puerto Rican dollars..."

3. I told someone I was born in Paris. "Texas?" he asked. "No, Paris, France." "Oh, where's that?"

4. Most high school seniors believe that the Peloponesian Wars were fought on horseback by two opposing Polo teams...

5. Four out five people in Los Angeles have never heard of Connecticut.

6. I argued with a local school administrator that the elusive "smoking gun" can be found north of the 38th parallel, in Pyongyang, not Baghdad. "Pyong what?" he said.

7. The clincher: American babbitry can best be exemplified by a nice pink-haired old lady from Akron, Ohio, who observed that Italy must be a very poor country. "After all, they've had 2,000 years to repair the Coliseum and, look at it, it's still in ruins...'"

It should come as no surprise that in a nation where one out of ten people don't know who was the first president of the US, can't tell for sure whether Canada is north or south of the US, can't tell the difference between Austria and Australia, and couldn't find Madagascar on a world map if their lives depended on it -- that Caracas and Karachi would be confused.

After all, the first two syllables sound the same...

W. E. Gutman WEGUTMAN@cs.com

thresher.rice.edu by David Berry Thresher Staff

Although the present focus of the United States' foreign policy lies in the Middle East, the United States should continue to build strong relations with Latin America, James Derham said Tuesday at a James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy roundtable luncheon.

Derham, a deputy assistant secretary of state in the Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs, said he wants to debunk three myths about American involvement in the region.

Contrary to popular opinion, Derham argued, democracy is not faltering in Latin America.

"Every country in the region has made a commitment to free elections," he said, pointing specifically to recent election successes in Mexico, Argentina and Venezuela.

In Mexico, the election of Vicente Fox in 2000 marked the end of a 70-year dominance by the Partido Revolucionario Institucional, and Derham called it the first fair election in modern Mexican history. Although recent elections in Argentina and Venezuela have not necessarily yielded candidates preferred by the United States, they have affirmed the place of democracy, Derham said.

Second, recent economic freefall in Argentina is not indicative of the economic health of Latin America, Derham said. Free-market reforms have promoted growth elsewhere in Latin America, particularly in Chile and Mexico.

Blame for Argentina's depression should not lie with international financial institutions like the IMF and World Bank but with the incomplete reforms.

"This is not something that works if you do it halfway," he said.

Finally, Derham said United States-Latin America relations are not in a state of neglect, as some in the media have recently argued. The Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks have engendered a profound reorientation in the focus of United States-Latin America relations, he said, but he denied that this reorientation has led to diminished attention to problems in the region.

The United States and Mexico have their disagreements, Derham said. For example, Mexico refused to completely support U.S. efforts to pass a second resolution on Iraq, and the United States will continue to deny Fox's request for amnesty for illegal Mexican immigrants.

However, the possibility of future cooperation on border issues is strong. The United States-Mexico bilateral relationship is among the most important in the world, Derham said.

Although Luis Inacio Lula da Silva is hardly the man the United States would have chosen to lead Brazil, the peaceful, well-conducted elections of 2002 marked yet another affirmation of democracy in the region, Derham said. Lula is the candidate of the leftist Workers' Party, but Derham said he is not as antagonistic to free markets as his background might suggest.

"We try to look not at what he said last week, or even two days ago, but at what he is actually doing," Derham said.

Venezuela is a country that is currently highly politically polarized between supporters and enemies of President Hugo Chavez, he said.

"One of the reasons that Chavez came to power is because despite a fairly strong democratic tradition, there was a feeling that the parties were somehow corrupt," Derham said.

Chavez, elected in a 1998 landslide victory, is an avowed opponent of globalization and an admirer of Fidel Castro.

Persistent strikes among workers in Venezuela's nationalized oil company, Petroleos de Venezuela S.A, have crippled the economy. Derham said a diversified economy is the only long-term solution.

Derham did not comment on rumors in the international media that the United States supports an April 12 coup to topple Chavez and privatize the oil industries.

Derham closed by taking several questions from the audience.

Christophe Venghiattis, a French rice farmer who owns land in Nicaragua, argued that the United States' insistence that Latin America eliminate tariffs is unfair, given U.S. maintenance of high agriculture tariffs.

Derham responded that if the United States dropped subsidies but Europe continued them, European farmers could undersell both American and Latin American agriculture.

"We have been ready to lift the tariffs, but Europe isn't," he said. "You have to understand that it is a world market."

Baker College junior Chris Coffman asked how Cuba fits into Derham's portrait of a hemisphere where democracy and free markets are predominant.

Normalization of relations with Cuba will not proceed until the Cuban government complies with some of the conditions laid out by President Bush in a May 2002 speech, including democratic and market reforms, Derham said.

Hanszen College senior Garrick Malone said he found Derham's talk informative and helpful.

"I liked that he would always use examples exploring specific countries, often ones like Brazil that I know little about," he said.

The event was co-sponsored by the Baker Institute Student Forum and the Baker Institute for Public Policy.