www.weeklystandard.com 02/17/2003 12:00:00 AM Fred Barnes, executive editor

THERE WAS A TIME--the 1960s, 1970s--when the political left in America favored wars of national liberation in countries ruled by dictators, some of them fascist dictators. True, the left would have installed communist dictatorships in their place. But at least leftists targeted enemies who were corrupt, brutal abusers of human rights.

Now the left has flipped. The effect of its crusade against war in Iraq would be the survival--indeed, the strengthening--of Saddam Hussein's oppressive regime. The left has brushed aside the pleas of Iraqi exiles, Kurds, and Shiite Muslims who are seeking liberation from Saddam's cruelty. Instead, leftists have targeted those who would aid the Iraqi dissidents, particularly the Bush administration.

The corruption of the left has deepened in recent years. At no time was this more evident than last Saturday when large antiwar protests were staged in New York, San Francisco, and other cities in the United States and around the world, including London. Did the demonstrators march on the Iraqi consulate in New York to demand an end to Saddam's murderous practices? No. Did they spend time condemning him in their speeches and placards? Nope. Did they come to the defense of Saddam's victims? No. The left now gives fascist dictators a pass. Its enemy is the United States.

No one has explained this better than British prime minister Tony Blair in a speech Saturday. If he took the antiwar demonstrators advice, Blair said, "there would be no war, but there would still be Saddam. Many of the people marching will say they hate Saddam. But the consequences of taking their advice is he stays in charge of Iraq, ruling the Iraqi people . . . There will be no march for the victims of Saddam, no protests about the thousands of children that die needlessly every year under his rule, no righteous anger over the torture chamber which, if he is left in power, will be left in being."

In ignoring the 25 million Iraqis who suffer under Saddam's autocratic rule, the left has stripped any moral dimension from the antiwar cause. And its arguments for opposing a war of liberation in Iraq are either uninformed or merely stupid. Here are a few of those arguments:

(1) War will mean thousands of civilian casualties. If there's anything Saddam has produced in his nearly 25 years of rule in Iraq, it's civilian casualties. He ordered the gassing of thousands of innocent Kurds. He had thousands of Shiites murdered. His war against Iran caused tens of thousands of civilian casualties, and his invasion of Kuwait was marked by the killing of thousands of Kuwaiti civilians. Saddam has personally ordered the execution of thousands of Iraqis. He has allowed thousands of Iraqi children to die from starvation or lack of medicine.

Compare that with the few hundred civilians killed in Afghanistan by the U.S. military. In fact, the American intervention saved hundreds of thousands who would have starved to death otherwise. And in the 1991 Gulf War relatively few Iraqi civilians were killed. In truth, a war that deposes Saddam in Iraq will save civilian lives, thousands of them.

(2) It's a war for Iraqi oil. There's an easy way to get all the oil in Iraq that President Bush or anyone else might desire--and it's not war. No, the easy way is to lift sanctions on Iraq and make a deal with Saddam. He's eager to sell the oil and make money. And the United States doesn't need Iraqi oil anyway, what with Russian oil production coming on line. At the moment, America's problem is the cutoff of oil from Venezuela. A war for oil would oust President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela. Of course there is no such war planned, nor is there one to cut the price of oil. The price favored by Bush and the domestic oil industry--and producers like Saudi Arabia--will be restored when Venezuela is pumping fully again, probably soon.

(3) War in Iraq will stir a new wave of terrorism. We've heard this one before. The Gulf War, it was warned, would arouse the Arab street and subject Americans to a wave of attacks. That didn't happen. When the United States went into Afghanistan and, worse, bombed during Ramadan, it was supposed to prompt a worldwide uprising of Muslims, and Muslim terrorists in particular, against America. Again, that didn't happen. So when the Arab leader most hated by other Arab leaders--a leader who's far more secular than Muslim, is removed, it's highly unlikely to cause more terrorism. Most likely, the result will be less.

(4) Give the inspectors more time. This was a common cry at Saturday's antiwar demonstrations. But of course those cries were entirely disingenuous. By definition, the "stop the war" protesters don't want war, no matter what the United Nations inspectors in Iraq happen upon. The demonstrators are playing Saddam's delaying game: Let the inspections continue until support in the United States for military action in Iraq dissolves and war is averted. Then Saddam survives. The inspections ploy is further proof the left has given up wars of national liberation against oppressive dictators and is now in the business of saving oppressive dictators from wars of national liberation.

Fred Barnes is executive editor of The Weekly Standard.

www.newsday.com By Zubin Jelveh Staff Writer

The soft, golden-brown teddy bear sitting on the shelf brought a warm smile to Maria Clarkson's face last week at FAO Schwarz on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. The Westchester grandmother of three wanted to buy a birthday gift for her 6-year-old grandson.

"I had a whole room full of stuffed animals when I was a child,” Clarkson said.

Like many parents and grandparents nationwide, Clarkson buys into her memories of the toys of yesteryear. And as the Toy Fair celebrates its 100th anniversary this week, the Toy Industry Association is commemorating the 20th century's most memorable toys -- from Mr. Potato Head to Beanie Babies.

Despite the industry's fascination with the next big technology toys, a surprising number of 100-year-old playthings are still selling and sometimes well. Some experts say that with all the worries about terrorism and war, parents and grandparents may keep buying into nostalgia and buying Ouija boards, Chutes and Ladders, tiddlywinks and other old-time toys.

"There are certain categories that will last forever,” said Jim Silver, co-publisher at The Toy Book, a trade journal based in Manhattan. "Great board games are very simple, and yet every time you play them the outcome is different.”

Parcheesi, based on Pachisi, the ancient game of India dating from at least the fourth century, was introduced in the United States in 1867 and eventually went onto become Bay Shore-based Selchow & Righter Co.'s best seller for decades.

"Sales have been very steady every year. That in itself is an accomplishment,” said Mark Morris, spokesman for Hasbro, which owns the Parcheesi trademark. He declined to provide specifics on sales.

And like the little engine that could, Lionel trains also have been a mainstay. At the end of the 1890s, Lionel LLC founder Joshua Lionel Cohen invented a miniature engine and decided to use it to move merchandise in his store's window to attract customers. But shoppers found the little trains more amusing than the products carried, and in 1901 Lionel made his first train, the Electric Express.

While Lionel trains often are purchased by hobbyists, they experienced a spike in sales after, and some experts say because of, Sept.11, 2001, said Maria Weiskott, editor in chief of Playthings, a Manhattan-based trade journal. "They are reminiscent of the past and better times.”

Lionel spokeswoman Cara Orchard said sales have grown 40 percent since the terrorist attacks on the United States.

Crayola Crayons, celebrating its 100th anniversary this year, "brought affordable color to children and allowed them to enhanced their creativity,” Weiskott said. .Binney & Smith rang up $500 million in sales last year, with crayons its main product, spokeswoman Stacy Gabrielle said.

Generic games such as tiddlywinks have also stuck around, said Chris Byrne, an independent toy consultant. First popularized in English pubs, tiddlywinks made its way across the ocean and became a children's game in the United States by the dawn of the 20th century. It achieved another heyday in the 1950s and '60s, especially in academic centers such as Cornell and Harvard. Today, a dedicated core of players competes in tiddlywinks associations in the United States and the United Kingdom.

"It's a combination of chess and billiards. The strategy is comparably complex,” said Larry Kahn of Washington, D.C., the world's top ranked tiddlywinks player.

Probably the most famous of all old toys, the teddy bear, was introduced in the United States in 1902. Attesting to Clarkson's memories, Byrne said grownups recall the comfort and the emotional bond to their teddy bears and help companies such as Gund and Steiff stay in business.

"What makes a toy a classic, not exclusively, is that parents have fond memories of some toys and want their children to have the same good experience,” said Patricia Hogan, curator of toys and dolls at the Strong Museum in Rochester, which houses the Toy Hall of Fame.

Toy companies see them as a classic way to make a profit, since the old toys need little advertising or research and development. The Toy Book's Silver said, "It's like printing money.”

www.wtol.com

FINDALY -- The University of Findaly is getting a $1.5 million federal grant. The money will go to its Center for Terrorism Preparedness, which provides terrorism response training.

According to U.S. Rep. Michael Oxley, the grant money is included in the fiscal year 2003 budget bill passed by Congress last week. The only formality left is President Bush's signature on the bill.

The University of Findaly is one of the leading schools in the United States when it comes to training first responders. It began that teaching in 1986 with its environmental management program, focusing on handling biohazards. The Center for Terrorism Preparedness was established in 1999. It provides education, training and information services to the public health and medical community, city and county officials, and corporate safety and security personnel.

Last year it was designated as one of only 14 Centers for Public Health Preparedness for Bioterrorism and Emerging Health Threats by the Centers for Disease Control.

Posted 9:30 PM Saturday, February 15th vfiorello@wtol.com

www.usnews.com Nation & World 2/24/03 By Fouad Ajami

There can be no joy in the expedition: This increasingly inevitable war against the Iraqi regime shall be fought in the deeply anti-American lands of the Arab world. There shall be no takers in that congenitally anti-American world for assertions of American benevolence. We shall be seen as a mighty power blowing in from afar to subdue an Iraqi regime that has continued to hold out to other Arabs the false, ruinous promise of a center of Arab technological and military power. A handful of Arabs shall rally to America's banners. In the main, that world will split into those who will take the gift of American power--deliverance from Saddam Hussein--without undue enthusiasm for the country that gave that gift, and others who have seen this campaign all along through the prism of their deep animus toward the United States.

We have heard from the French and the Germans. They don't like American power, and they don't like their own irrelevance. We have also heard the more articulate, more sober assessments of the Iraqi threat from former communist lands--Albania, Romania, Estonia, Lithuania, and others--10 countries in all in eastern and central Europe that have expressed their unbending support for American goals.

The remarkable thing, amid the tumult, is the eerie silence in Arab lands. Save for Qatar and Kuwait, the dominant Arab response is a mix of anti-American belligerence and a sullen, resentful silence. To listen to the lands of Araby, the crisis at hand is the result of America's rampaging power and its greed for Arab oil, its heedless bid for imperial hegemony.

Cross hairs. There can be no reasoning with this kind of willful self-pity. The mufti of Saudi Arabia, its highest judge, spoke recently to the throngs that had come from across the Islamic world for the annual pilgrimage. A dark conspiracy, the jurist said, encircles and stalks the world of Islam. "The Islamic nation is in the cross hairs, threatened by its enemies in its morals and values." The "forces of evil," he added darkly, are at work, and the principal struggle is "at once economic and religious." A deep rot has settled on Arab lands while a "freedom deficit" leaves their inhabitants in the throes ofauthoritarian rule and their children prey to the recruiters of terror. About such troubles the jurist has nothing to offer--nothing save a dark message of enemies bent on Islam's ruin.

Whether the Arabs admit it or not, there is a deep fear across their lands of what a war of liberation in Iraq may trigger. There shall be an accounting between the Iraqi people, seared by sorrow and brutality as they have been, and an Arab street that forever averted its gaze from the crimes of Saddam Hussein. It shall be a moment of singular embarrassment when the throngs in Ramallah and Cairo take to the streets for the obligatory attacks against America while Iraqis greet the unseating of Saddam as a precious gift.

There are things the Arabs will never openly tell us about their world and its phobias. In Iraq, a victorious campaign against Saddam will overturn the rule of the Sunni Arab minority from which Saddam Hussein and his own clan hail. Greater power in a new Iraq shall come the way of the majority Shiite Arabs, and of the Kurds in the north. But neither the Shiites nor the Kurds are beloved by the Arab street. So the legend spreads that war will give Iraq over to the Kurds and the Shiites and render it vulnerable to the power of Iran and Turkey, two non-Arab neighbors. A war to disarm a terrible regime and to give its brutalized people a chance at a new beginning is thus seen as "imperial cartography"--an American exercise in redrawing the map of nation-states in the region.

America should discount this animus and the dark theories it spawns. An old order in the Arab world fights for its life and hegemony and worries that the foreigner's big guns and ideas of democracy and reform will sweep that order and its beneficiaries and its atavisms away. The Arabs eager to give Saddam Hussein an honorable way out, and the comfort of exile, do so for their own reasons. They yearn to be spared, worried that their entrenched rule will be challenged by the kind of political world emancipated Iraqis may manage to build in the shadow of American power.

We cannot still those fears, nor should we try. We should know the Arab world for what it is. We must decipher its ways and understand why the people in Lithuania and Latvia grasp the stakes in this war, while the crowds in Cairo and Ramallah continue to insist that American power is a greater threat than the brutal regime in Baghdad.

www.sundayherald.com By John Phelps

DIAGEO, Scotland's biggest whisky producer, is set to disclose a sharp drop in business in major export markets when chief executive Paul Walsh rolls out its latest figures on Thursday.

'Apart from the USA, Diageo can normally take comfort from the fact that it has about 14 other markets each capable of producing profits of more than £15 million,' said analyst Nigel Popham at Teather & Greenwood. 'That won't be the case this time round.

'The situation in Latin American has deteriorated -- sales in Venezuela will be dire -- while I am also expecting poor news on Spain and to a lesser extent on France and Japan.'

He is also braced for news of a significant downturn in the £100m-plus Taiwanese market after a spectacular own-goal when the company's advertising agency J Walter Thompson briefly ran an 'amusing' advert questioning the quality of Taiwanese goods.

Diageo employs 4000 people in Scotland where its 29 company-owned distilleries produce top-selling brands such as Johnnie Walker, Bell's, and Smirnoff. They are overseen by Allan Burns, Diageo Scotland director, who in December culminated a £25m investment programme with the opening of the world's fastest whisky bottling line in Shieldhall, Glasgow.

But more than 85% of Scotch whisky production is sent overseas and the current downturn in exports is likely to be shared by others in the industry.

The Scotch Whisky Association is still compiling its 2002 figures but said it expected to see a downturn on the £2.3 billion export sales achieved the previous year.

'We still hope to see sales above £2bn for the 10th successive year,' said a spokesman.

However, there are fears that this is unlikely unless the global economy improves. Diageo shares were testing new lows ahead of Thursday's announcement and slipped to 572p last week, down from 940.5p in the past year.

Analysts say the results will be clouded by a number of special factors following last year's acquisition of the Seagram business, which means that Diageo now owns 18 of the world's top 100 selling drinks brands which also include Captain Morgan, Guinness, Baileys and Tanqueray.

These exceptional items include a possible write-off of as much as £1bn following the disappointing price obtained for Burger King last December and analysts expect the company to also confirm its pension funds were in actuarial deficit to the tune of another £1bn at the end of last year.

But on a straight-trading basis analysts expect the group to announce half-year profits of around £1.25bn and have pencilled in an increase in full- year figures from £2.04bn to around £2.2bn following the Seagram acquisition.

These forecasts are dependent on no further deterioration in the global economy as a result of the Middle East situation and the relative stability in foreign exchange markets -- Diageo 'hedges' its exposure to the US dollar and other important currencies but it is understood that a number of these protective contracts come up for renewal in the summer.

Analysts will also be scrutinising the performance of the group's range of ready-to-drink products among signs that Smirnoff Ice has been feeling the heat of increasing competition from newcomers and adverse publicity in the USA.

RTDs are now an important aspect of Diageo's portfolio with sales jumping from £470m to £814m during the year to the end of last June but the company warned in October that growth had slowed.

The situation has been complicated in the USA where the group has avoided higher taxes by using a malt base for its RTDs rather than spirits.

This has led regulators to carry out a review to see whether consumers are being misled by the branding of Smirnoff Ice in the USA, where it contains no vodka .

Diageo insists it is relaxed because the alcohol content is the same as stated on the label, even though regulators could insist on changes that would lead to a relaunch or higher prices. Diageo had to withdraw its rum-flavouredCaptain Morgan Gold after poor sales, resulting in a £42m write-off.

The company last week undertook to market its products responsibly in meetings with the World Health Organisation in Geneva. Walsh said: 'We are proud of our brands. We want Diageo's promotional activities to be recognised as the best in the world. That means delivering great results for our brands in a way that sets the industry standards for responsible marketing.'

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