www.grandforks.com Posted on Wed, Mar. 05, 2003 Associated Press

With certain exceptions - Excerpts from recent editorials in newspapers in the United States and abroad:

Feb. 27

Anderson (S.C.) Independent-Mail, on Mister Rogers:

Children's programming is more flash and sizzle than substance these days, with singing dinosaurs and Power Puff Girls and mutated superheroes who blast and scorch and send chills of fear down the spine. ...

But children also love Mister Rogers, alias Fred Rogers, who on each show invited children into a shabby and comfortable living room where they would be warm and cozy, slipped on a sweater and into sneakers and sang about a beautiful day in the neighborhood. ...

From a living room set, he welcomed the mailman and puppets and people who would show how they did their jobs or how something was made, the host a comfortable and comforting mentor who actually taught children something.

But it wasn't just the practicalities of learning in which Rogers specialized. Manners were important, and speaking softly instead of raising one's voice, unless the voice is raised in laughter. He believed in simple pleasures and assumed that everyone was essentially good if given the chance to be good. ...

Mister Rogers would by no stretch ... be called reality programming, that genre that has inexplicably become so popular these days.

But oh, what a world it would be if he were.

Feb. 27

South Florida Sun-Sentinel, Fort Lauderdale, on the gift of life:

The rare dangers, mistakes and failures linked to organ donations got a lot of publicity lately. It was front-page news when a surgeon botched a teenage girl's heart-lung transplant, by failing to check for an incompatible blood type, and when the same girl got a second transplant that didn't save her life. ...

Jesica Santilian was only 17 when she died. ...

In an ironic twist, Jesica's parents refused to allow her organs to be donated to help someone else.

The United Network for Organ Sharing says there are only two other cases on record nationwide of mismatched organs being transplanted.

More than 80,400 patients now are on waiting lists for organ transplants, about 750 from South Florida. More than 6,300 patients die each year because a transplant is not available. Nearly 23,000 transplant operations were performed last year, but fewer than 12,000 people donated organs. ...

The organ donation system is a means to mitigate human tragedy, fight illness and ease the feelings of permanent loss after death. Organ donations save 55 lives each day.

Give the gift of life; become an organ donor.

March 3

Journal Star, Peoria, Ill., on executing Saddam Hussein:

... No doubt, it would be simpler if some sharpshooter was able to take out Saddam Hussein. If the choice is between surgically assassinating the Iraqi leader and a potentially deadly war that puts 200,000 American soldiers at risk, it's one many Americans would have little trouble making.

Yet we admit to an uneasy feeling upon hearing U.S. Sen. Peter Fitzgerald say President Bush would authorize Saddam's assassination "if we had a clear shot." This wasn't some off-the-cuff remark by Fitzgerald. He had details about his conversation with the president, presumably while aboard Air Force One in January. He said Bush has already thought about repealing an executive order forbidding assassinations of foreign leaders. ...

Indeed, it is difficult for the United States to hold itself as a beacon of democracy and governmental self-determination while planning coups in other countries. There is a moral dimension to endorsing or facilitating murder, no matter how evil some of our opponents are. ...

In the long run, assassination is a lousy tool of foreign policy that can be counterproductive to U.S. security.

In the case of war, however, the rules change. Saddam could be a target in the U.S. effort to disrupt Iraq's command and control structure and save American lives. We've not convinced it must come to that, but neither Saddam nor President Bush seem willing to find another way.

March 5

Los Angeles Times, on Ashcroft's Russian roulette:

Last year, Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft tried but failed to get the U.S. Supreme Court to buy his theory that the 2nd Amendment allows pretty much anyone to buy pretty much any gun, a view the court has consistently if infrequently rejected.

Now Ashcroft has threatened California's top firearms control official with criminal charges if the state continues to use a federal databank to hunt down those making illegal gun purchases, as it has done for years.

Ashcroft's latest decree is reckless and could emasculate this nation's gun laws, hamstring police and put the public at risk. Since 1998, firearms dealers across the country have used the Department of Justice's National Instant Criminal Background Check System, or NICS, to check, supposedly within 30 seconds, whether a customer is prohibited from owning a gun because of, for example, a felony or a history of mental illness. ...

Ashcroft wants to stop such practices, believing that a gun owner's right to privacy trumps public safety. The federal Brady law, requiring the background check for handgun buyers, requires gun dealers to take one peek at an individual's criminal record. A buyer with a clean record takes the gun home. But if that same individual later commits a crime, is slapped with a restraining order or becomes mentally unstable, Ashcroft has decreed no one should know.

Ashcroft would force California law enforcement officials to play Russian roulette 7,000 times a year when they release a suspect for lack of evidence, spring a parolee from prison or discover that a judge has put a restraining order on a wife beater who has a firearm. Only, in this game, the bullets will be aimed at law-abiding citizens. ...

A large part of Ashcroft's responsibility is protecting the public, not undercutting laws that would help him do that job.

March 3

Dayton (Ohio) Daily News, on politicians and war:

such as street demonstrations and talk radio - the American debate about the war has been reasonably civil. The politicians have been restrained.

Now Republican hit man, House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, of Texas, wants to change the tone. In search of a Democrat to bash, he recently settled on presidential candidate Howard Dean, former governor of Vermont. ...

The candidate insists that many options short of war remain. And he insists that Saddam Hussein is a lesser danger by far than North Korea and al-Qaida.

Rep. DeLay calls this posture "appeasement." That term is being heard more and more about opponents of the war. It makes no sense.

"Appeasement" entered the political lexicon in the days before World War II, when some people wanted to (and did) accede to Adolph Hitler's demands for new territory, in the hope that that would mollify Hitler. But Saddam isn't demanding anything.

Appeasement is simply an irrelevant and hyperbolic concept.

At any rate, until the leading doves start calling President Bush bloodthirsty or a warmonger, the hawks ought to refrain from their own name-calling. Let there be no race to the bottom of political oratory.

March 3

Albuquerque (N.M.) Journal, on new airport security measurers:

When passengers book a flight and check their bags, are they also checking their civil rights?

The government's latest action in the name of national security could be seen that way. Its new risk-detection system, called CAPPS II, assigns a "threat level" to everyone booking a commercial flight.

Transportation officials have been short on details about the computer prescreening system - how the information will be gathered and how long it will be kept - which in itself attracts concern. Ordered by Congress after the Sept. 11 attacks, the system will be piloted by Delta Air Lines for three months and could be comprehensively in place by the end of the year.

The system carries out instantaneous background checks on passengers, checking credit reports and bank account activity, and compares passenger names with those on government watch lists.

A long list of law enforcement and intelligence agencies would have access to the information. ...

But authorities should have this kind of information before the passenger books a flight. When the routine buying habits of Americans become part of a national database, citizens should be concerned.

Citizen concern conceivably could translate into another disincentive for choosing to fly - at the worst financial time in aviation history. United Airlines and US Airways are in bankruptcy; American Airlines appears headed that way. Eastern and Pan Am are already names of the past.

Conceivably, the Computer Assisted Passenger Prescreening System could be helping to place Delta on that at-risk list.

March 2

The Orange County Register, Santa Ana, Calif., on oil markets:

Are oil companies gouging us? Across Orange County, drivers now are paying above $2 a gallon for 91 octane and nearly $2 even for 87 octane. It was only 18 months ago that we were paying about $1.41 a gallon. Home heating oil and natural gas prices have increased just as fast.

Unfortunately, some politicians are taking advantage of the problem. "It is imperative that the Department (of Energy) and the (Bush) administration assure the American people, now and in the future, that the prices that they are paying at the gas pump and for their fuel oil are not the result of price manipulation or gouging," Sen. Joseph Lieberman, D-Conn., wrote on Feb. 24 to Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham. ...

The volatility, of course, stems from the potential invasion of Iraq, which would disrupt world oil supplies, and the civil turmoil in Venezuela, which has shut down oil production there.

There's no "price manipulation or gouging," only market responses. ...

Markets should not take the rap for problems caused by political turmoil. As happened with the 1991 gulf war, once the political turmoil is over with, prices will drop.

March 3

Mobile (Ala.) Register, on the capture of an al-Qaida terrorist:

The capture of al-Qaida leader Khalid Shaikh Mohammed is both a huge blow for freedom and a strong rebuke for critics of the Bush administration.

Consider the latter issue first. For at least half a year, naysayers and political opportunists among Democrats in Congress have argued that President George W. Bush's focus on Iraq was hobbling efforts to fight the al-Qaida terrorist network.

The worst offenders charged that the administration, by supposedly doing little more than grubbing for oil in Iraq, was negligently leaving the United States vulnerable to more al-Qaida attacks of the 9-11 variety.

One prominent senator and now-presidential candidate, Bob Graham of Florida, voted no on last fall's congressional resolution authorizing military force against Saddam Hussein specifically for that reason. Sen. Graham said, in effect, that the United States couldn't fight Iraq and al-Qaida at the same time.

Mr. Graham himself is no cheap-shot artist. His positions at least have had the courage of consistency. But others in his party in recent months have picked up that same drumbeat without his level of knowledge or nuance. ...

Khalid Shaikh Mohammed's arrest is the most important counterterrorist arrest, ever. ...

This is big stuff. The world is safer as a result. Next up for the cause of freedom: Take out Saddam Hussein. Because when it comes to fighting terrorists, the United States can indeed walk the walk against some and chew Saddam at the same time.

March 3

The Independent, London, on the potential war against Iraq:

On the one hand, the British Prime Minister conveys to readers of this newspaper his deeply held belief that the threat of war against Iraq is both morally right and necessary. On the other hand, the Iraqi tyrant plays a wily game, offering, partially, to disarm. It is a compelling contrast. ...

Whatever the motives of Saddam, the U.N. weapons inspectors are making some progress. Here is a moment to build on, a hint of an alternative course to war. It would be an act of willful recklessness to rush into a conflict at this point. Let us briefly rehearse the consequences. If there is war, innocent Iraqis will be killed. The terrorists will hail a recruiting agent of their dreams. The future of postwar Iraq - let alone the surrounding region - is still far from clear.

This is a moment when Mr. Blair should bend a little in order to avoid a war. He has done so before. ... In Northern Ireland he has shown considerable political courage by being flexible, patient and tolerant to preserve the peace process. Sometimes it is much bolder to be adaptable. His pragmatism has kept the peace process alive.

There is, of course, a significant difference between Northern Ireland and Iraq. When it comes to dealing with Saddam, President Bush will decide whether or not there is war. Already the president has made clear that he will go to war if there is a second U.N. resolution. The Northern Ireland precedent is of no interest to him. Sadly it appears to be of no interest to Mr. Blair either.

We are in the midst of an appalling tragedy. War over the next few weeks could be avoided, but President Bush and Mr. Blair have made up their minds and they do not seem willing to move for the sake of peace.

March 4

The Guardian, London, on the U.N. and Iraq:

The diplomatic tug-of-war over a second U.N. resolution on Iraq is turning into a charade. Three times in the past five days, George Bush has made plain his intention to overthrow the Iraqi regime, whatever the U.N. says. His aim, he said last week, was "a liberated Iraq. ... America's interest in security and America's belief in liberty both lead in the same direction." At the weekend, Mr. Bush again sketched out plans for a bright new future entirely predicated on Saddam Hussein's downfall. The U.S. president's candid although still very blurry focus on a post-Saddam settlement, rather than on disarmament, makes it clear that nothing less than physical as opposed to behavioral regime change will now suffice. U.S. determination to impose its will by force renders the U.N. debate redundant in terms of practical outcomes. It makes a mockery of the Security Council. ...

March 5

Le Monde, Paris, on the North Korean challenge:

Iraq masks a second emerging crisis, no less dangerous, perhaps even more: North Korea. The recent interception of an American spy plane in international airspace by four North Korean fighter jets over the Sea of Japan, Sunday March 2, ... gives the impression that the Korean Peninsula is skidding.

Wrong or right, North Korea feels it is the next target of Washington after Iraq; it intends to show it is not intimidated by the United States. ...

Washington insists it does not want war with North Korea and is favorable to negotiating a solution to the crisis started by the nuclear ambitions of Pyongyang.

But the more the Americans delay restarting dialogue with Pyongyang, the more the process of reactivating a (nuclear) reprocessing facility in Yongbyon, capable of producing plutonium, becomes inescapable.

Feb. 28

Asahi Shimbun, Tokyo, on North Korea and the United States:

North Korea, out of its growing sense of isolation, might well take such outrageous actions as test-launching ballistic missiles and starting nuclear reprocessing facilities. The Bush administration says it has no intention of attacking North Korea. But it also believes North Korea already has nuclear weapons. The United States might not hesitate to use force if it believes North Korea has the capability to conduct a nuclear attack on the U.S. mainland.

North Korea would then retaliate, throwing the Korean Peninsula into chaos. This scenario would be the worst-case nightmare for Japan as well. The danger of brinkmanship is that the perpetrator can go over the brink without even realizing it, and fall into that void itself. The United States should open direct talks with North Korea before the circumstances develop into such a stage. Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi should be more emphatic in urging the United States to do so. It is one thing to discuss with the other country how to end its nuclear development program and quite another to give in to nuclear blackmail.

South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun's administration has placed the highest priority for now on a policy to advance toward resolution of North Korea's nuclear development. Cooperation between Japan and South Korea has become even more important, not only regarding North Korea, but toward the United States as well.

March 4

Egyptian Gazette, Cairo, on prospects for a U.S. attack on Iraq:

It may be weeks, if not days, before the U.S. goes to war with or without U.N. endorsement. Of course, it would be useful for Washington in political and financial terms if it wrested UN blessing.

With their massive troops and firepower already in place in the Gulf, the U.S. and its unswerving ally Britain are fighting tooth and nail to win a diplomatic battle now raging at the U.N. Security Council. The diplomatic battle may be harder than the war the U.S. is poised to wage against Iraq.

A decisive victory at the U.N. will dispel lingering doubts about the U.S. as an unchallenged diplomatic, economic and military power of the world. A vociferous opposition by France, Germany and Russia against U.S. rush into war against Iraq underlines their own frown about the American plan to be the policeman of the world.

All opponents agree with the U.S. that Iraq must comply with U.N. resolutions about disarmament. However, they realize that what makes the U.S. tack is not Iraq's purported possession of proscribed weaponry, but a consuming desire to foist its agenda on the rest of the world in this unipolar era.

March 4

Dagens Nyheter, Stockholm, Sweden, on US-Iraq:

When the Baghdad regime is brought up for discussion, the sensitivity and delicacy that the Bush administration showed after Sept. 11, has turned into war drums and ultimatums.

The members of the U.N. Security Council belong to those who have been presented with a fait accompli: either you support us or we act on our own.

We've seen the result. The Turkish parliament's "no" to the stationing of U.S. troops in the country is only the latest example.

There's much at stake. The day the United States attacks Iraq on its own (or possibly with the support of Great Britain and other states), not only will the already-fragmented coalition that is needed in Iraq fall apart, but there is also the risk that the international coalition against terrorism could do the same.

And what that could lead to is best not to even think about.

March 5

Straits Times, Singapore, on the U.S. and Iraq:

Unless global sentiment changes suddenly within the next few weeks, Washington will be launching its invasion of Iraq with less support than it has ever had in its entire history. Will it matter?

In a word - yes! The problem is not winning the war - that the U.S. can do alone. Turkey's refusal to cooperate will make things difficult for the U.S., but not impossible. The problem is winning the peace - and that the U.S. cannot do alone.

For one thing, the cost of Iraqi reconstruction is likely to be prohibitively high. With the 2003-2004 U.S. budget deficit already projected to exceed US$300 billion without factoring in the cost of the Iraqi war, Washington will need all the help it can get to put a post-Saddam Iraq back on its feet.

Having raised the stakes so high - nothing less than the transformation of the entire Middle East - how is Mr Bush going to accomplish such a colossal task without the support of his key allies, let alone regional powers like Turkey?

A diplomatic strategy that ignores the doubts of many, that keeps changing the goalposts, that is endlessly flexible in the justification it offers for war - disarmament, terrorism, 'regime change,' regional transformation - is not calculated to win the confidence of the global community.

Washington has no more than two weeks to win the legitimacy that only a Security Council resolution can provide it. If it fails in this effort, it will still win the war, but its winning the peace will be in serious doubt.

March 5

La Repubblica, Rome, Italy, on war and the pope:

Can a fast stop the spiral toward war, which quickens more every day? Can a fast save peace?

To a believer, the purpose of a fast, as of a prayer, is linked to the promise and mystery of God. But for all of us, believers or not, this gesture proposed by the pope is a challenge to logic of interests, of force and of violence.

It is a political act in the highest sense of the term, because it concerns the most profound reasons of human coexistence. To fast as a personal choice, when a large part of the world risks starvation, means committing oneself to a cause and defining oneself as responsible.

It would be wrong to consider the pope's call anti-American, or as an answer to Bush's refusal of his overtures for peace. It is much more. The pope condemns terrorism along with war, refusing violence from all sides. He denies the pretenses of men and states to judge over good and bad, condemning all holy wars.

The pope's call for a fast has a strong religious meaning, coinciding with Ash Wednesday. But it is also a historical, powerful and tangible contribution to the difficult road of peace in the Iraq crisis.

www.theatlantic.com D.C. Dispatch | March 4, 2003

Some of our allies act like spoiled teenagers who badmouth their parents while they're living off of them by Stuart Taylor Jr. .... Imagine President Bush responding as follows to the latest rebuffs from France, Germany, South Korea, and others and to the stunning surge of anti-Americanism around the world: "Enough. The American people are weary of holding the world's rogue regimes and barbarians at bay in the face of sneers and obstructionism from faithless 'allies' such as France, Germany, and South Korea, who owe their freedom to America. So I have decided, with a heavy heart, to acquiesce in the profoundly misguided but implacable demands of world opinion and to end our efforts to disarm Iraq and liberate its oppressed people. From this point forward, my policy will be to defend the United States and our true friends. We will pull our troops out of Germany, the Persian Gulf, and South Korea. We will disengage from NATO and the United Nations. I will urge Congress to invest the savings in airtight border controls and missile defense. And I will begin a crash program to end U.S. reliance on Persian Gulf oil. "We will leave our critics to deal as best they can with nuclear-armed North Korea; with soon-to-be-nuclear-armed Iraq, Iran, and maybe Libya, Syria, and Indonesia; and with the nascent black market in doomsday weapons for terrorists. It has become clear that the United States and our friends cannot long prevent the spread of such weapons while nations such as France and Germany undermine our efforts and trade with our enemies." How would the French, Germans, Arabs, South Koreans, Chinese, and other America-bashers like that? It would be only a matter of time until Iraq or Iran, or both, took over the entire Persian Gulf region. That would send oil prices to unprecedented levels and drag European, Arab, African, and Asian economies into recession or depression—and it would mean the bloody subjugation of the region's Arab peoples. Islamist terrorists, bent on destroying Western civilization, would find it far easier to attack targets in Europe than in the newly fortified United States. With North Korea's million-man army poised to sweep through Seoul and beyond, South Korea would face blackmail to unite on terms dictated by the North's Stalinist regime. China would soon find itself facing two nearby nuclear threats, as Japan would rapidly go nuclear to defend itself against North Korea. The point of this exercise is not to suggest that the time for such a lurch into isolationism has arrived. Not yet, at least. Pique is not a policy. And an unpoliced, anarchic world would be an economic and national security disaster for the United States as well as others. The point is to underscore how the Europeans, South Koreans, and others who have become so anti-American depend on American power—unthinkingly, ungratefully, and completely—for their well-being. Abdicating their own responsibilities to help maintain world order, they are free riding, as my colleague Clive Crook noted last week, on the same U.S. polices that they publicly denounce. Like a spoiled teenager who expects her parents to support her even though she refuses to do any work around the house and constantly mouths off to them, these nations enjoy the benefits of U.S. global policing while refusing to share in the costs and trashing the policeman. Take the views of many anti-war Europeans that Iraq should not be invaded but "contained." By whom? France? Germany? Belgium? They could not contain the two-bit Serbian tyrant, Slobodan Milosevic. And they have been no help—indeed, they have been a great hindrance—in containing Iraq. They want the U.S. to do it, through a costly, draining, long-term commitment of American forces. At the same time, they bash the U.S. for the military pressure and economic sanctions—"starving Iraqi babies"—that undergird containment. The ignorance and hypocrisy of the European free-riders is perhaps best illustrated by their clamoring that Bush is bent on a greed-driven "war for oil." But Bush could get a lot more cheap oil, a lot sooner, by joining the long-standing French-Russian push to lift the sanctions on Iraqi exports than by spending vast sums and betting his presidency on an invasion and occupation of Iraq. No American leader would dream of invading but for Saddam's persistence in seeking weapons of mass destruction. If Bush's goal were to grab an oil-rich colony for his corporate buddies, Venezuela would be a much easier target. It's true that the vast oil reserves in and near Iraq help drive U.S. policy—but not in a way that justifies European or Arab sneers. It is oil that brings Saddam enough money to buy and build weapons of mass destruction. And the regional hegemony he seeks would enable him to raise prices to extortionate levels. Every other nation in the world has at least as strong an interest as the United States does in denying Saddam such a stranglehold on the global economy. The tidal wave of anti-Americanism has multiple wellsprings, of course. Critics are understandably resentful of the Bush administration's arrogant demeanor; its disdain for international institutions, agreements, and diplomatic niceties; and its unqualified support of Israel's Ariel Sharon and his expansionist settlement polices. And they're understandably attached to a U.N.-centered vision of international law that has worked well enough in Western Europe—ever since America liberated and rebuilt the place—but is useless against terrorists and rogue regimes with weapons of mass destruction. Mix in German pacifism; Russian insecurity; French ego and cynicism; Arab self-pity, paranoia, and envy; and near-universal resentment of the world's only superpower. But underlying them all is the implicit calculation that the safest course for European nations (and others) is to obstruct American policies while free riding on American power. This calculation rests on two assumptions that may prove to be catastrophically wrong. The first is that as long as Paris and Berlin appease the Arab world and Europe's own militant Muslims, it will be New York and Washington—not Paris or Berlin—that are targeted for destruction by any weapons of mass destruction that jihadists obtain from Iraq or other rogue regimes. The second is that Europe need not share in the costs and risks of keeping rogue regimes in check, because Uncle Sam will do it for them. Similarly, most South Koreans have lulled themselves into assuming that the North will not attack them and that its nuclear buildup is America's problem. They seem to have forgotten that the main reason they are not under the boot of the Stalinist North already is that the United States rescued them 50 years ago and still protects them with 37,000 troops and the nuclear umbrella. Or perhaps they assume the U.S. will protect them no matter how much they spit on us. This assumption may be correct in the short run. Viscerally satisfying as it might be for the United States to offer North Korea a trade—you abandon nukes, we abandon South Korea—the North would no doubt sign the deal, do its best to take over South Korea, and then resume its nuclear buildup. All of this is somewhat analogous to the American public's isolationism while Hitler's armies were marching through Europe. Not our problem, Americans thought. Let England and the Soviet Union fight Germany. That seemed the best way to stay out of the war. But only in the short term. As President Franklin Roosevelt understood long before Pearl Harbor, German (and Japanese) aggression would eventually threaten America too. So FDR did all he could to change public opinion and help Britain fight the war. European or South Korean leaders with a long view would likewise see their own nations' interest in standing with America against the rogue states and barbarians. The reason is that even the American "hyperpower" probably lacks the will or the strength to carry the burden of world security for much longer, with little help from anyone but Britain, and in the face of increasingly widespread anti-Americanism. And unless someone stops the spread of doomsday weapons, anti-Western jihadists are probably within five to 15 years of obtaining enough of them—from Iraq, North Korea, or elsewhere—to endanger civilization as we know it. Jacques Chirac and Gerhard Schroeder should ask themselves: After New York and Washington and London have been destroyed or depopulated, how long before Paris and Berlin meet similar fates? It may be too much to expect the European and Arab publics, who are fed grotesque caricatures of Bush and America by their media and intelligentsia, to grasp their own interests in helping the United States defang Iraq. But wise leadership is about seeing one's national interest in the long term, and educating public opinion instead of pandering to it. The superficially clever Chirac and Schroeder are not wise leaders. They are fools. And they are helping to bring the world closer to a dark era of nuclear anarchy.

sg.biz.yahoo.com Monday March 3, 5:19 PM

With Turkey's parliament rejecting a proposal to admit U.S. troops into the country as part of a possible war with Iraq, and Iraq destroying some of its missiles, the possibility of a war in the near term has been reduced, traders said.

The Straits Times index added 5.35 points, or 0.4%, to 1279.20, off an intraday high of 1291.75.

Gainers outnumbered losers 129 to 82, while 356 stocks were unchanged or untraded. Volume fell to 228.6 million shares from 246 million shares Friday.

CapitaLand was among the big gainers as Singapore's biggest property developer by assets said it expects its overseas operations to contribute to over 50% of earnings this year, from 45% last year - with China underpinning that rise.

CapitaLand shares ended up 2.9%, or S$0.03, at S$1.06 (US$1=S$1.7372).

Neptune Orient Line shares gained 1.7%, or S$0.015, to S$0.905, after its U.S.-based oil transporting unit, American Eagle Tankers, said it has received a US$220-million contract to transport fuel from Venezuela to Asia.

www.motherjones.com By Robert Dreyfuss March/April 2003 Issue

If you were to spin the globe and look for real estate critical to building an American empire, your first stop would have to be the Persian Gulf. The desert sands of this region hold two of every three barrels of oil in the world -- Iraq's reserves alone are equal, by some estimates, to those of Russia, the United States, China, and Mexico combined. For the past 30 years, the Gulf has been in the crosshairs of an influential group of Washington foreign-policy strategists, who believe that in order to ensure its global dominance, the United States must seize control of the region and its oil. Born during the energy crisis of the 1970s and refined since then by a generation of policymakers, this approach is finding its boldest expression yet in the Bush administration -- which, with its plan to invade Iraq and install a regime beholden to Washington, has moved closer than any of its predecessors to transforming the Gulf into an American protectorate.

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· The Betrayal of Basra · Clinton's Other War · Pin-Pointless Bombing

· "The Future of Post-Saddam Iraq", a report from The Heritage Foundation

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In the geopolitical vision driving current U.S. policy toward Iraq, the key to national security is global hegemony -- dominance over any and all potential rivals. To that end, the United States must not only be able to project its military forces anywhere, at any time. It must also control key resources, chief among them oil -- and especially Gulf oil. To the hawks who now set the tone at the White House and the Pentagon, the region is crucial not simply for its share of the U.S. oil supply (other sources have become more important over the years), but because it would allow the United States to maintain a lock on the world's energy lifeline and potentially deny access to its global competitors. The administration "believes you have to control resources in order to have access to them," says Chas Freeman, who served as U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia under the first President Bush. "They are taken with the idea that the end of the Cold War left the United States able to impose its will globally -- and that those who have the ability to shape events with power have the duty to do so. It's ideology."

Iraq, in this view, is a strategic prize of unparalleled importance. Unlike the oil beneath Alaska's frozen tundra, locked away in the steppes of central Asia, or buried under stormy seas, Iraq's crude is readily accessible and, at less than $1.50 a barrel, some of the cheapest in the world to produce. Already, over the past several months, Western companies have been meeting with Iraqi exiles to try to stake a claim to that bonanza.

But while the companies hope to cash in on an American-controlled Iraq, the push to remove Saddam Hussein hasn't been driven by oil executives, many of whom are worried about the consequences of war. Nor are Vice President Cheney and President Bush, both former oilmen, looking at the Gulf simply for the profits that can be earned there. The administration is thinking bigger, much bigger, than that.

"Controlling Iraq is about oil as power, rather than oil as fuel," says Michael Klare, professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College and author of Resource Wars. "Control over the Persian Gulf translates into control over Europe, Japan, and China. It's having our hand on the spigot."

Ever since the oil shocks of the 1970s, the United States has steadily been accumulating military muscle in the Gulf by building bases, selling weaponry, and forging military partnerships. Now, it is poised to consolidate its might in a place that will be a fulcrum of the world's balance of power for decades to come. At a stroke, by taking control of Iraq, the Bush administration can solidify a long-running strategic design. "It's the Kissinger plan," says James Akins, a former U.S. diplomat. "I thought it had been killed, but it's back."

Akins learned a hard lesson about the politics of oil when he served as a U.S. envoy in Kuwait and Iraq, and ultimately as ambassador to Saudi Arabia during the oil crisis of 1973 and '74. At his home in Washington, D.C., shelves filled with Middle Eastern pottery and other memorabilia cover the walls, souvenirs of his years in the Foreign Service. Nearly three decades later, he still gets worked up while recalling his first encounter with the idea that the United States should be prepared to occupy Arab oil-producing countries.

In 1975, while Akins was ambassador in Saudi Arabia, an article headlined "Seizing Arab Oil" appeared in Harper's. The author, who used the pseudonym Miles Ignotus, was identified as "a Washington-based professor and defense consultant with intimate links to high-level U.S. policymakers." The article outlined, as Akins puts it, "how we could solve all our economic and political problems by taking over the Arab oil fields [and] bringing in Texans and Oklahomans to operate them." Simultaneously, a rash of similar stories appeared in other magazines and newspapers. "I knew that it had to have been the result of a deep background briefing," Akins says. "You don't have eight people coming up with the same screwy idea at the same time, independently.

"Then I made a fatal mistake," Akins continues. "I said on television that anyone who would propose that is either a madman, a criminal, or an agent of the Soviet Union." Soon afterward, he says, he learned that the background briefing had been conducted by his boss, then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. Akins was fired later that year.

Kissinger has never acknowledged having planted the seeds for the article. But in an interview with Business Week that same year, he delivered a thinly veiled threat to the Saudis, musing about bringing oil prices down through "massive political warfare against countries like Saudi Arabia and Iran to make them risk their political stability and maybe their security if they did not cooperate."

In the 1970s, America's military presence in the Gulf was virtually nil, so the idea of seizing control of its oil was a pipe dream. Still, starting with the Miles Ignotus article, and a parallel one by conservative strategist and Johns Hopkins University professor Robert W. Tucker in Commentary, the idea began to gain favor among a feisty group of hardline, pro-Israeli thinkers, especially the hawkish circle aligned with Democratic senators Henry Jackson of Washington and Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York.

Eventually, this amalgam of strategists came to be known as "neoconservatives," and they played important roles in President Reagan's Defense Department and at think tanks and academic policy centers in the 1980s. Led by Richard Perle, chairman of the Pentagon's influential Defense Policy Board, and Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, they now occupy several dozen key posts in the White House, the Pentagon, and the State Department. At the top, they are closest to Vice President Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who have been closely aligned since both men served in the White House under President Ford in the mid-1970s. They also clustered around Cheney when he served as secretary of defense during the Gulf War in 1991.

Throughout those years, and especially after the Gulf War, U.S. forces have steadily encroached on the Gulf and the surrounding region, from the Horn of Africa to Central Asia. In preparing for an invasion and occupation of Iraq, the administration has been building on the steps taken by military and policy planners over the past quarter century.

Step one: The Rapid Deployment Force In 1973 and '74, and again in 1979, political upheavals in the Middle East led to huge spikes in oil prices, which rose fifteenfold over the decade and focused new attention on the Persian Gulf. In January 1980, President Carter effectively declared the Gulf a zone of U.S. influence, especially against encroachment from the Soviet Union. "Let our position be absolutely clear," he said, announcing what came to be known as the Carter Doctrine. "An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force." To back up this doctrine, Carter created the Rapid Deployment Force, an "over-the-horizon" military unit capable of rushing several thousand U.S. troops to the Gulf in a crisis.

Step two: The Central Command In the 1980s, under President Reagan, the United States began pressing countries in the Gulf for access to bases and support facilities. The Rapid Deployment Force was transformed into the Central Command, a new U.S. military command authority with responsibility for the Gulf and the surrounding region from eastern Africa to Afghanistan. Reagan tried to organize a "strategic consensus" of anti-Soviet allies, including Turkey, Israel, and Saudi Arabia. The United States sold billions of dollars' worth of arms to the Saudis in the early '80s, from AWACS surveillance aircraft to F-15 fighters. And in 1987, at the height of the war between Iraq and Iran, the U.S. Navy created the Joint Task Force-Middle East to protect oil tankers plying the waters of the Gulf, thus expanding a U.S. naval presence of just three or four warships into a flotilla of 40-plus aircraft carriers, battleships, and cruisers.

Step three: The Gulf War Until 1991, the United States was unable to persuade the Arab Gulf states to allow a permanent American presence on their soil. Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia, while maintaining its close relationship with the United States, began to diversify its commercial and military ties; by the time U.S. Ambassador Chas Freeman arrived there in the late Ô80s, the United States had fallen to fourth place among arms suppliers to the kingdom. "The United States was being supplanted even in commercial terms by the British, the French, even the Chinese," Freeman notes.

All that changed with the Gulf War. Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states no longer opposed a direct U.S. military presence, and American troops, construction squads, arms salesmen, and military assistance teams rushed in. "The Gulf War put Saudi Arabia back on the map and revived a relationship that had been severely attrited," says Freeman.

In the decade after the war, the United States sold more than $43 billion worth of weapons, equipment, and military construction projects to Saudi Arabia, and $16 billion more to Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates, according to data compiled by the Federation of American Scientists. Before Operation Desert Storm, the U.S. military enjoyed the right to stockpile, or "pre-position," military supplies only in the comparatively remote Gulf state of Oman on the Indian Ocean. After the war, nearly every country in the region began conducting joint military exercises, hosting U.S. naval units and Air Force squadrons, and granting the United States pre-positioning rights. "Our military presence in the Middle East has increased dramatically," then-Defense Secretary William Cohen boasted in 1995.

Another boost to the U.S. presence was the unilateral imposition, in 1991, of no-fly zones in northern and southern Iraq, enforced mostly by U.S. aircraft from bases in Turkey and Saudi Arabia. "There was a massive buildup, especially around Incirlik in Turkey, to police the northern no-fly zone, and around [the Saudi capital of] Riyadh, to police the southern no-fly zone," says Colin Robinson of the Center for Defense Information, a Washington think tank. A billion-dollar, high-tech command center was built by Saudi Arabia near Riyadh, and over the past two years the United States has secretly been completing another one in Qatar. The Saudi facilities "were built with capacities far beyond the ability of Saudi Arabia to use them," Robinson says. "And that's exactly what Qatar is doing now."

Step four: Afghanistan The war in Afghanistan -- and the open-ended war on terrorism, which has led to U.S strikes in Yemen, Pakistan, and elsewhere -- further boosted America's strength in the region. The administration has won large increases in the defense budget -- which now stands at about $400 billion, up from just over $300 billion in 2000 -- and a huge chunk of that budget, perhaps as much as $60 billion, is slated to support U.S. forces in and around the Persian Gulf. Military facilities on the perimeter of the Gulf, from Djibouti in the Horn of Africa to the island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, have been expanded, and a web of bases and training missions has extended the U.S. presence deep into central Asia. From Afghanistan to the landlocked former Soviet republics of Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, U.S. forces have established themselves in an area that had long been in Russia's sphere of influence. Oil-rich in its own right, and strategically vital, central Asia is now the eastern link in a nearly continuous chain of U.S. bases, facilities, and allies stretching from the Mediterranean and the Red Sea far into the Asian hinterland.

Step five: Iraq Removing Saddam Hussein could be the final piece of the puzzle, cementing an American imperial presence. It is "highly possible" that the United States will maintain military bases in Iraq, Robert Kagan, a leading neoconservative strategist, recently told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. "We will probably need a major concentration of forces in the Middle East over a long period of time," he said. "When we have economic problems, it's been caused by disruptions in our oil supply. If we have a force in Iraq, there will be no disruption in oil supplies."

Kagan, along with William Kristol of the Weekly Standard, is a founder of the think tank Project for the New American Century, an assembly of foreign-policy hawks whose supporters include the Pentagon's Perle, New Republic publisher Martin Peretz, and former Central Intelligence Agency director James Woolsey. Among the group's affiliates in the Bush administration are Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz; I. Lewis Libby, the vice president's chief of staff; Elliott Abrams, the Middle East director at the National Security Council; and Zalmay Khalilzad, the White House liaison to the Iraqi opposition groups. Kagan's group, tied to a web of similar neoconservative, pro-Israeli organizations, represents the constellation of thinkers whose ideological affinity was forged in the Nixon and Ford administrations.

To Akins, who has just returned from Saudi Arabia, it's a team that looks all too familiar, seeking to implement the plan first outlined back in 1975. "It'll be easier once we have Iraq," he says. "Kuwait, we already have. Qatar and Bahrain, too. So it's only Saudi Arabia we're talking about, and the United Arab Emirates falls into place."

LAST SUMMER, Perle provided a brief glimpse into his circle's thinking when he invited rand Corporation strategist Laurent Murawiec to make a presentation to his Defense Policy Board, a committee of former senior officials and generals that advises the Pentagon on big-picture policy ideas. Murawiec's closed-door briefing provoked a storm of criticism when it was leaked to the media; he described Saudi Arabia as the "kernel of evil," suggested that the Saudi royal family should be replaced or overthrown, and raised the idea of a U.S. occupation of Saudi oil fields. He ultimately lost his job when rand decided he was too controversial.

Murawiec is part of a Washington school of thought that views virtually all of the nations in the Gulf as unstable "failed states" and maintains that only the United States has the power to forcibly reorganize and rebuild them. In this view, the arms systems and bases that were put in place to defend the region also provide a ready-made infrastructure for taking over countries and their oil fields in the event of a crisis.

The Defense Department likely has contingency plans to occupy Saudi Arabia, says Robert E. Ebel, director of the energy program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a Washington think tank whose advisers include Kissinger; former Defense Secretary and CIA director James Schlesinger; and Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter's national security adviser. "If something happens in Saudi Arabia," Ebel says, "if the ruling family is ousted, if they decide to shut off the oil supply, we have to go in."

Two years ago, Ebel, a former mid-level CIA official, oversaw a CSIS task force that included several members of Congress as well as representatives from industry including ExxonMobil, Arco, BP, Shell, Texaco, and the American Petroleum Institute. Its report, "The Geopolitics of Energy Into the 21st Century," concluded that the world will find itself dependent for many years on unstable oil-producing nations, around which conflicts and wars are bound to swirl. "Oil is high-profile stuff," Ebel says. "Oil fuels military power, national treasuries, and international politics. It is no longer a commodity to be bought and sold within the confines of traditional energy supply and demand balances. Rather, it has been transformed into a determinant of well-being, of national security, and of international power."

As vital as the Persian Gulf is now, its strategic importance is likely to grow exponentially in the next 20 years. Nearly one out of every three barrels of oil reserves in the world lie under just two countries: Saudi Arabia (with 259 billion barrels of proven reserves) and Iraq (112 billion). Those figures may understate Iraq's largely unexplored reserves, which according to U.S. government estimates may hold as many as 432 billion barrels.

With supplies in many other regions, especially the United States and the North Sea, nearly exhausted, oil from Saudi Arabia and Iraq is becoming ever more critical -- a fact duly noted in the administration's National Energy Policy, released in 2001 by a White House task force. By 2020, the Gulf will supply between 54 percent and 67 percent of the world's crude, the document said, making the region "vital to U.S. interests." According to G. Daniel Butler, an oil-markets analyst at the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), Saudi Arabia's production capacity will rise from its current 9.4 million barrels a day to 22.1 million over the next 17 years. Iraq, which in 2002 produced a mere 2 million barrels a day, "could easily be a double-digit producer by 2020," says Butler.

U.S. strategists aren't worried primarily about America's own oil supplies; for decades, the United States has worked to diversify its sources of oil, with Venezuela, Nigeria, Mexico, and other countries growing in importance. But for Western Europe and Japan, as well as the developing industrial powers of eastern Asia, the Gulf is all-important. Whoever controls it will maintain crucial global leverage for decades to come.

Today, notes the EIA's Butler, two-thirds of Gulf oil goes to Western industrial nations. By 2015, according to a study by the CIA's National Intelligence Council, three-quarters of the Gulf's oil will go to Asia, chiefly to China. China's growing dependence on the Gulf could cause it to develop closer military and political ties with countries such as Iran and Iraq, according to the report produced by Ebel's CSIS task force. "They have different political interests in the Gulf than we do," Ebel says. "Is it to our advantage to have another competitor for oil in the Persian Gulf?"

David Long, who served as a U.S. diplomat in Saudi Arabia and as chief of the Near East division in the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research during the Reagan administration, likens the Bush administration's approach to the philosophy of Admiral Mahan, the 19th-century military strategist who advocated the use of naval power to create a global American empire. "They want to be the world's enforcer," he says. "It's a worldview, a geopolitical position. They say, 'We need hegemony in the region.'"

UNTIL THE 1970s, the face of American power in the Gulf was the U.S. oil industry, led by Exxon, Mobil, Chevron, Texaco, and Gulf, all of whom competed fiercely with Britain's BP and Anglo-Dutch Shell. But in the early '70s, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and the other Gulf states nationalized their oil industries, setting up state-run companies to run wells, pipelines, and production facilities. Not only did that enhance the power of opec, enabling that organization to force a series of sharp price increases, but it alarmed U.S. policymakers.

Today, a growing number of Washington strategists are advocating a direct U.S. challenge to state-owned petroleum industries in oil-producing countries, especially the Persian Gulf. Think tanks such as the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, and CSIS are conducting discussions about privatizing Iraq's oil industry. Some of them have put forward detailed plans outlining how Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and other nations could be forced to open up their oil and gas industries to foreign investment. The Bush administration itself has been careful not to say much about what might happen to Iraq's oil. But State Department officials have had preliminary talks about the oil industry with Iraqi exiles, and there have been reports that the U.S. military wants to use at least part of the country's oil revenue to pay for the cost of military occupation.

"One of the major problems with the Persian Gulf is that the means of production are in the hands of the state," Rob Sobhani, an oil-industry consultant, told an American Enterprise Institute conference last fall in Washington. Already, he noted, several U.S. oil companies are studying the possibility of privatization in the Gulf. Dismantling government-owned oil companies, Sobhani argued, could also force political changes in the region. "The beginning of liberal democracy can be achieved if you take the means of production out of the hands of the state," he said, acknowledging that Arabs would resist that idea. "It's going to take a lot of selling, a lot of marketing," he concluded.

Just which companies would get to claim Iraq's oil has been a subject of much debate. After a war, the contracts that Iraq's state-owned oil company has signed with European, Russian, and Chinese oil firms might well be abrogated, leaving the field to U.S. oil companies. "What they have in mind is denationalization, and then parceling Iraqi oil out to American oil companies," says Akins. "The American oil companies are going to be the main beneficiaries of this war."

The would-be rulers of a post-Saddam Iraq have been thinking along the same lines. "American oil companies will have a big shot at Iraqi oil," says Ahmad Chalabi, leader of the Iraqi National Congress, a group of aristocrats and wealthy Iraqis who fled the country when its repressive monarchy was overthrown in 1958. During a visit to Washington last fall, Chalabi held meetings with at least three major U.S. oil companies, trying to enlist their support. Similar meetings between Iraqi exiles and U.S. companies have also been taking place in Europe.

"Iraqi exiles have approached us, saying, 'You can have our oil if we can get back in there,'" says R. Gerald Bailey, who headed Exxon's Middle East operations until 1997. "All the major American companies have met with them in Paris, London, Brussels, all over. They're all jockeying for position. You can't ignore it, but you've got to do it on the QT. And you can't wait till it gets too far along."

But the companies are also anxious about the consequences of war, according to many experts, oil-company executives, and former State Department officials. "The oil companies are caught in the middle," says Bailey. Executives fear that war could create havoc in the region, turning Arab states against the United States and Western oil companies. On the other hand, should a U.S. invasion of Iraq be successful, they want to be there when the oil is divvied up. Says David Long, the former U.S. diplomat, "It's greed versus fear."

Ibrahim Oweiss, a Middle East specialist at Georgetown University who coined the term "petrodollar" and has also been a consultant to Occidental and BP, has been closely watching the cautious maneuvering by the companies. "I know that the oil companies are scared about the outcome of this," he says. "They are not at all sure this is in the best interests of the oil industry."

Anne Joyce, an editor at the Washington-based Middle East Policy Council who has spoken privately to top Exxon officials, says it's clear that most oil-industry executives "are afraid" of what a war in the Persian Gulf could mean in the long term -- especially if tensions in the region spiral out of control. "They see it as much too risky, and they are risk averse," she says. "They think it has 'fiasco' written all over it." What do you think?

A Mother Jones contributing writer, Robert Dreyfuss was named one of the "best unsung investigative journalists working in print" last year by the Columbia Journalism Review.

www.dailynews.com209541216373,00.html Article Last Updated: Sunday, March 02, 2003 - 7:11:44 PM PST By Mariel Garza Staff Writer

When historians write this chapter in Los Angeles history, William Bratton may be remembered as the the city's most travelin' police chief.

In the few months since he took over as head of the Los Angeles Police Department, Bratton has jetted around the country to lobby in the nation's capital, spend weekends in New York City with his wife and attend conferences to schmooze with other police chiefs. Six weeks after he took the post, Bratton left the country entirely for a private speaking engagement to security officials in Israel.

Bratton said he has no intention ever to be a stay-at-home chief, even after he and his wife, Court TV broadcaster Rikki Klieman, complete their cross-country move this summer.

"I will continue to travel a lot," Bratton said after returning from a week of travel to Phoenix for one of three conferences held each year by the Major Cities Chiefs' Association and to Florida for a speaking engagement for The Quest Education Foundation.

Bratton said both private speaking engagements -- in Israel and in Florida -- were arranged before he accepted the LAPD job. Mayor James Hahn's spokesman confirmed those trips were approved by the mayor.

"It's the nature of the job," said Bratton, calling it essential to meet regularly with other law enforcement movers and shakers -- to keep up with what they're doing -- and to get face-to-face time with federal officials to keep the city's place in the queue for homeland security money.

So far, Bratton has taken six of his 20 annual vacation days, according to his scheduler. He has spent at least three work weeks of his four months out of town, and he plans to hop a plane again in coming weeks for conferences in Philadelphia, New York and Washington, D.C.

Bratton said he intends to put together a meeting with other police chiefs in Chicago this month to discuss antiterrorism issues.

Bratton's bosses say they aren't bothered.

"We are in constant communication," Hahn said. "He has done so much in a short time. His attention is very much on what's going on in Los Angeles."

"As long as the department is doing as good as it can, that's all that matters," said City Council President Alex Padilla, who joined Hahn in interviewing Bratton for the job.

Los Angeles taxpayers finance travel for the chief or for his people on behalf of the city. According to the department's fiscal support staff, the LAPD has $607,000 in this year's budget for travel. Most of that -- about $575,000 -- is spent for officers to travel for extraditions and investigations. The rest can go for conference and meeting travel for anyone in the department. In addition, for the last few years, the department has allocated $30,000 per year from its asset-forfeiture funds especially for the chief's travel.

There was a time when city officials caught a lot of flak for traveling out of town -- even for business. Just a decade ago, in 1993, then-Mayor Tom Bradley's travels with city officials to Europe, Japan and other locales were sharply criticized by the City Council, which later voted to put limits on officials' travels.

Richard Katz, then an assemblyman, was one of the critics of the trips, saying the mayor ought to be close to home at a time of crisis -- as during the second trial of LAPD officers in the Rodney King case. After the first trial, the city had erupted in the 1992 riots.

Today, Katz said Bratton's case doesn't raise the same concerns.

For one thing, there was a sense at the time -- before he was termed-out of the Assembly -- that those city officials weren't looking out for the city's best interests in general, Katz said. Secondly, although the city is again in a time of crisis -- still reeling from a year as the nation's leader in murders and gang violence -- city officials' jobs include reaching beyond the city boundaries for help.

"Times have changed. The emphasis is on homeland security money out of Washington and the new (terrorism) threat," Katz said. "The job of chief has also changed. I think Bratton is well-positioned to be the right chief at the right time."

In choosing a celebrity cop who still gets regular play in New York gossip columns, city officials knew exactly what they were getting, observers say. The day that the Police Commission announced the three candidates for the LAPD job, Bratton received reporters' calls on his cell phone at a dinner with the mayor of Caracas, Venezuela.

"The city made a decision to get a big-time outsider with an international reputation," said Raphael Sonenshein, a political science professor at California State University, Fullerton, and a long-time observer of city government. "The idea was to get the best (worldwide) thinking ... possible."

Bratton's traveling came as part of the package, he said. "It would be a lot different if they hired a local guy who suddenly got the bug to see the world."

Bratton's predecessor, Bernard C. Parks, took four or five official police-business trips per year to represent the city, police officials said. But, unlike Bratton, Parks didn't have a family and a household to move from thousands of miles away when he was named chief. Parks already had been an LAPD man for 32 years.

Parks didn't even go far when he took personal vacations, and he was known for showing up at Parker Center even on his days off.

Councilman Nate Holden, a Parks supporter who started criticizing Bratton when the former New Yorker became a finalist for the job, questioned whether it is good for the city to have a traveling chief.

"Is it necessary to be out of town this much?" Holden asked. "After all, the crime rate is not dipping. It's going up. And for the public to learn of his absence -- it doesn't make them feel confident."

That was highlighted to the public, Holden said, when city officials held a new conference on Feb. 7 to announce that the city was raising its security level to match the country's high alert level. Bratton -- in Florida at a speaking engagement -- was absent. Assistant Chief Jim McDonnell appeared in his place.

"(Angelenos) want him here until he gets things under control," Holden said.

Bratton doesn't apologize.

"No organization is one person," Bratton said. "And I've got a very capable and talented staff." Also, he said, he's always only a phone call away.

Having a jet-setting celebrity chief is a nonissue for some residents, who care only about how the chief's tenure affects police service.

"It doesn't mean anything to me," said Janette Capaldi of Reseda, who's been involved in community policing for the West Valley for about four years. "I just like the way he's come in and reorganized."

Hahn likes Bratton's being a celebrity.

'I know people don't believe me when I say it, but I like him being in the spotlight," Hahn said during a recent appearance on KFWB's "Ask the Mayor" call-in program. "That means he has to deliver. It's important for him to succeed if Los Angeles is to succeed as a city."

"I think it's necessary for the chief to go to conferences and network with other law enforcement agencies about what's going on," said Councilman Dennis Zine, a 33-year veteran of the LAPD.

As for the frequent bicoastal jaunts? "The man has a life; we've got to let him have a life," Zahn said.

Staff Writers James Nash and Rick Orlov contributed to this report.