The shift

[Frank S.]

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/EL16Aa02.html

Baker's return spells Cheney's heartburn
By Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON - It may take four or five months to take shape, but a new scenario could be unfolding, a shifting balance of power within the Bush administration, a reconfiguration in the interests of realism - and aimed at a Bush re-election victory:

"Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz will have heard the siren song of academia and returned to teach in ivy-covered halls somewhere;
His deputy, Under Secretary for Policy Douglas Feith, will have decided he can't really afford to put his young kids through school on a government salary, and that it's time to return to a lucrative law practice;
John Bolton, Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security, will have been advised that the sustained excitement of defending US national sovereignty against all comers - from al-Qaeda, to the French, to Amnesty International - was simply too much for his nervous system, and that it was time to take a long vacation;
And finally, Vice President Dick Cheney will have been sternly warned by his doctors that his chronic heart problems make his participation in a rigorous re-election battle simply out of the question and that he will have to take himself off the ticket for the sake of his own survival, if not for that of his deeply concerned family members.

Fantasy? Mindless speculation? Wishful thinking? Desperation?

Perhaps, but that doesn't change the fact that such scenarios suddenly appeared far more real when former secretary of state James A Baker returned last week to take up his new office in the White House close to the Oval Office, as President George W Bush's personal envoy for persuading other countries to forgive tens of billions of dollars in Iraq's debt.

The return of Baker - long-time consiglieri to the Bush family whose last mission was to secure all of Florida's electoral votes for George W in 2000 regardless of the state's actual voting laws or how people actually voted - made an already bad week for administration hawks much, much worse.

One unnamed "senior administration official", quoted by The New York Times noted that Baker wields vastly greater influence over the Bushes than Secretary of State Colin Powell, his fellow-realist, could ever hope to have. "Baker is Bush,"the official said. "Other countries know that Powell doesn't win all the [intra-administration] battles. If you deal with Baker, you know you're going to get what you need," said the official source in a line that must have sent chills down the spines of the neo-conservatives and their right-wing fellow-travelers, most notably Cheney himself.

Of course, it is not yet known how much Baker, the master diplomatic puppeteer of the first Gulf War in 1991 and Ronald Reagan's former White House chief of staff and treasury secretary, intends to weigh in on policy decisions that go beyond his specific brief.

But the fact that he is now in the White House and dealing directly with all of Washington's major allies in Europe, Asia and the Middle East on the future of Iraq, if not the entire region, places him in the thick of the administration's foreign policy, to put it mildly. From now on, very little is likely to be decided on anything that affects Iraq or US alliances without his "input".

And one can only imagine Baker's input to Bush on Wolfowitz's incredibly ill-timed decision, making Baker's task far more difficult and expensive, to announce that the allies that are owed most of Iraq's debt will not be permitted to bid on some US$18.6 billion in reconstruction contracts.

If Baker interprets Wolfowitz's move as a deliberate effort to sabotage his mission ab initio (as did New York Times columnist Paul Krugman on Friday), the consequences could be severe for the former dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, whose hopes of becoming secretary of state in a second Bush term were already on the wane.

But the threats posed by Baker's presence to the hawks, especially the neo-conservatives both in and out of the administration, go far beyond personal score-settling in which Baker has historically shown little interest: they are strategic. By all accounts, Baker believes the neo-con domination of US foreign policy since September 11, 2001, especially the Iraq invasion, has been disastrous for the country and, perhaps more important, for Bush Jr's re-election chances.

Before the Iraq invasion, Baker made no secret of his opposition to the US waging unilateral war, although he was more discreet about his dismay than Bush I's national security adviser, Brent Scowcroft, to whom Baker remains close.

Baker, like other realists, has also been deeply skeptical, not to say incredulous, of neo-conservative ambitions to "remake the face of the Middle East" by exporting democracy. Long associated with "big oil", Baker would find the kind of radical regional change promoted by the neo-cons to be unacceptably risky and destabilizing.

Moreover, Baker has always disdained Israel's right-wing Likud Party. It was he who threatened to cut off housing guarantees if then-prime minister Yitzhak Shamir did not take part in the 1991 Madrid peace talks that led eventually to the Oslo peace process. This caused great public dismay and anger among neo-conservatives like Feith, the powerful former chairman of the Defense Policy Board, Richard Perle and Elliott Abrams, the current Middle East director on the National Security Council.

And he has also sided consistently with those, like Powell and Bush's father, who have favored consistently constructive relations with Beijing, a position which Bush Jr has clearly come to share, as he demonstrated last week during the visit of Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao. Indeed, the younger Bush tilted so far, at least rhetorically, in China's direction at the expense of Taiwan that top neo-cons outside the administration claimed for the first time since he took office that Bush himself was guilty of "appeasement", a charge highly unlikely to generate warm feelings in the White House.

Finally, as secretary of state, Baker gave top priority to close ties to traditional European allies, including Germany and France, or what the neo-cons and Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld have referred to disdainfully as "Old Europe". In that respect, Wolfowitz's directive banning German and French contractors from bidding on reconstruction contracts at this time not only has made Baker's job more difficult and more costly for the US taxpayer, but also has confirmed that the hawks have their priorities upside down.

But Baker, Scowcroft, Powell and their fellow realists had already reached that conclusion 12 years ago when some of the neo-cons, like Wolfowitz and Perle, were furious that the Gulf War ended without the US army marching on Baghdad.

Similarly, it was Wolfowitz and his boss at the time, then-secretary of defense Cheney, who kept up a stream of strident warnings that Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev remained a committed communist whose designs for global conquest were no different from his predecessors' right up until ... well, right up until the Soviet Union collapsed. Even then, they thought it might be a trick.

And of course it was Wolfowitz and his top deputy, I Lewis Libby - now Cheney's powerful chief of staff - who prepared the 1992 Defense Planning Guidance draft calling for the US to pursue a strategy of global domination and pre-emption, nuclear if necessary, against rogue states and possibly emerging rivals.

Baker, Scowcroft, and then-armed forces chief of staff Powell, not to mention Bush Sr, were so alarmed - as were senior lawmakers and European allies after parts of it leaked to The New York Times - that only Cheney's promises to overhaul the text saved the jobs of its two main authors. Still, the radical proposals of Wolfowitz and Libby would endure and guide US policy after the September 11 attacks a decade later.

In many ways, therefore, the hawks themselves already see Baker as their nemesis, but they have been steadily losing power over the past several months in any case.

Bush's harsh words for Taiwan's leader this week, and the readiness with which neo-cons like Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol accuse him of appeasement, attest to the very serious strains between the White House and the neo-con network. Until now that network has assiduously avoided attacking the president himself for any disagreements it has had with the administration.

In addition, the balance now appears to be tilting away from the hawks, who held sway since the Iraq war, and toward the realists in the intra-administration fights over Iran, Syria and North Korea. The decision last week by the Iraqi Governing Council, for example, to disarm and deport the Iranian Mujahideen-e-Khalq marked a signal defeat for Cheney and the neo-conservatives, who have wanted to use those Iranian resistance fighters against the Islamic Republic. Similarly, the acceleration of "Iraqification" in neighboring Iraq without a thoroughgoing "de-Ba'athification" marks a triumph of the realists.

Indeed, Baker's arrival in some ways may crown the successful development of a effective "counter-network" within the administration that has gradually eroded the hawks' authority since September. Aside from Powell and senior officers in the uniformed military and the intelligence community who were always dubious of the hawks, key members of this group include the National Security Council's coordinator for strategic planning, ambassador Robert Blackwill, who came on board in September, and the chief of Iraq's Coalition Provisional Authority, ambassador L Paul Bremer, in Baghdad.

Both are former foreign service officers who are conservative but not ideologues, Bremer and Blackwill have known each other since they both worked for arch-realist Henry Kissinger in the early 1970s. Blackwill is particularly interesting, both because he was Condoleezza Rice's boss as National Security Council director of European and Soviet Affairs under Scowcroft in the first Bush administration. In that capacity Blackwill clashed with Wolfowitz and Cheney over Gorbachev. He reportedly met Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon as a political officer in the US embassy in Tel Aviv and has remained on good terms, although he disdains neo-conservatives.

When hired by Rice, former ambassador to India Blackwill's job was to assert firm White House control over Iraq policy, which had been seen increasingly between August and October as having been botched by the Pentagon, especially Feith's office. By most accounts, he has made so much progress in that regard that he also has begun weighing in on overall Middle East policy, possibly at Abrams' and the neo-conservatives' expense.

Of course, the situation in Iraq is the most important single factor in the changing the balance of power within the administration. But Blackwill was also brought in to ensure that the National Security Council enforces discipline - something which Rice on her own was unwilling or unable to do - over all the policy agencies, particularly the Pentagon. Under Cheney's protection, the Pentagon has often appeared to act on its own. Bush's top political adviser, Karl Rove, who warned several months ago that there should be "no more wars" before the November election, also has weighed in to support these changes.

Indeed, some analysts believe that Baker's return was promoted by Rove as part of a discreet "dump-Cheney" campaign. Philip Giraldi, a former Central Intelligence Agency officer and political columnist for The American Conservative, wrote last week that Baker and Scowcroft are "orchestrating" a Rove-backed campaign to blame Cheney and the neo-conservatives around him and in the Pentagon for botching Iraq and, with it, Bush's re-election chances.

But the larger, foreign policy impact of the resurgence of the realists - capped by Baker's return - may already be tangible.

While Israel's Sharon clearly is under growing domestic pressure to reinvigorate peace negotiations with the Palestinians, his recent moves - as well as Deputy Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's unexpectedly far-reaching proposals for territorial compromise - suggest that the Israelis themselves perceive a shift in the US administration's internal balance of power that needs to be accommodated.

In this context of shifting balance, added significance may well be ascribed to Powell's recent meetings with Israeli and Palestinian peace activists and the cosponsorship of Baker's Houston-based institute of a poll showing majority support among both Israelis and Palestinians for the recently proposed Geneva Accord.

If Baker's European interlocutors suggest this week that real pressure by Washington on Israel - perhaps of the kind Baker exerted back in 1991 - could make them more amenable to reducing Iraq's official debt, then the larger implications of Baker's appointment become more tangible. In any event, Wolfowitz's timing in barring some allies from Iraq's rebuilding contracts has clearly given Mssrs Jacques Chirac, Gerhard Schroeder, Vladimir Putin and other European leaders more leverage to raise issues of this kind.

And for the hawks, even the recognition that the Europeans enjoy significant leverage over US foreign policy is very bad news indeed."

How significant is this? Well there's this:

France says it may forgive part of Iraq's debt

PARIS (AFP) - France said it may write off part of Iraq (news - web sites)'s debt if other creditor nations agree, in a move that could significantly smooth prickly relations with the United States.


"France believes an agreement could take effect from 2004, if the conditions are right, within the framework of the Paris Club and in liaison with other creditors," Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin told journalists.


"France could then envisage debt cancellations that are appropriate and compatible with Iraq's financing capability," he said Monday.


De Villepin was speaking one day after US forces in Iraq confirmed they had arrested deposed president Saddam Hussein (news - web sites) and just minutes after a meeting in Paris with members of the US-installed interim Iraqi Governing Council.


The suggestion from France also came just one day before President Jacques Chirac was to meet special US envoy James Baker, who is tasked with urging European nations to forgive Iraq's debt, which is estimated at 120 billion dollars (about 100 billion euros).


Baker, a close friend to US President George W. Bush (news - web sites)'s family and a former US secretary of state, was dispatched to also try to explain a Pentagon (news - web sites) directive that excludes France and other anti-war nations from winning US-funded reconstruction contracts in Iraq.

[Sisyphus]

We await developments with bated breath

[Frank S.]

Germany announced it too was agreeable to restructuring Iraq's debt, which would include forgiving a substantial part of it.

This has got to bolster Baker's influence and worry the Cheney camp, which includes Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Perle.
Bear in mind that Baker's not fond of the Likud party and its US-based supporters.

This is getting interesting...

Are we going to see a Bush-Baker ticket for 2004? That's getting ahead of myself, here. But it shows promise in returning some form of sanity to the administration.

[Whitey]

Although I'm happy with recent events, it appears that all of this past and present since 9-11 has been carefully orchestrated. I still think the play isn't over.

[nbforrest]

Perhaps Baker told the French, "Look, here's the deal George W. is not a socialist, N.W.O., U.N. lapdog like that deviant Clinton. He's already told you that you will make no money rebuilding Iraq since you didn't help in the fight. If you ever want the French tongue to be spoken in Iraq for anything other than amusement, you will back off until these people get on their feet. If you ever want to see even a dime or whatever the frogs use for $, you will cooperate. If you screw with us we'll drown you in your own sparkly bottled water.

Time will, I believe, prove that teh French were violating U.N. sanctions and helping the Iraqi's with a nuclear weapons program, under the quise of building nuclear power plants. Same with the Germans.

[Frank S.]

nb, the French announced they would reduce Iraq's debt and forgive part of it before Baker arrived in Paris.

As to evidence that they supported Saddam's nuclear program up until the second Gulf War and continued to supply him with arms, it has been often alledged.
But.
The Roland missiles discovered by Polish troops a couple months ago was no smoking gun. The last variation of the missile was decommissioned in 1992-93 and the missiles found in Iraq were of a previous configuration/model, probably sold in the 80s.
The report of a French commercial ship transporting military equipment to Iraq about a month before the war was also interesting: it turns out the materiel was US materiel and actually destined for US troops in Turkey. The company is a private French company which was contracted by the Pentagon, in violation of French governmental directives. But somehow, the 'rumor' was disseminated that the ship was headed for Iraq.
At roughly the same time, possibly before that, French tanker ships (two of them) were reported to be loading fuel at an Iraqi port. But a subsequent report identified two cargo ships (the same or two different tankers? Unknown) in that same port at the same time. Those tankers belong to a Connecticut shipping company.
When this came out, another 'rumor' was floated around (pardon the pun) to the effect that those US tanker ships were there to monitor the embargo. Civilian tanker ships?!?

The list of rumors and falsehoods is very extensive.
Now it may be that French and German involvement with Saddam existed up to the beginning of the invasion. It may also be that there was no such involvement in fact.

But while those allegations do not quite amount to a casus belli with the EU, they certainly serve to expand the rift between the US and the EU. And who is attempting to create and augment this rift?
Who wants to 'go it alone' and why?

It is very interesting to come across comments by US military commanders operating closely with French and other European troops, as they do in Afghanistan and Aden, for instance. Interesting because such comments are hard to come by.

Example:
"We still have French fries here," not freedom fries, says Lt. Col. Kevin McDonnell, an American Special Forces officer who heads the Kabul Military Training Center, set up last year to train a new Afghan army.
* * *
The limits of America's freedom to reorder alliances and of its military muscle are starkly evident in Afghanistan. America's most important partners in the international effort to restore some order and prevent Afghanistan from again becoming a haven for terrorists are Germany and France, two vociferous opponents of the Iraq war.

Col. McDonnell says that when he first arrived from Fort Bragg, N.C., he had no money to pay the salaries of Afghan recruits. France, responsible for officer training at the center, stepped in to cover a monthly payroll of around $22,000. [...] In a speech last week on security cooperation, Mr. Rumsfeld made no mention of the German or French roles, hailing instead a modest Afghanistan deployment by Romania. Former communist states of "new Europe" make only a token contribution to Kabul peacekeeping: Ten countries from Albania to Estonia have rustled up a total of around 170 men."

This from a WSJ piece extracted and posted on:
http://philcarter.blogspot.com/2003_06_ ... chive.html

Early in 2002, Canadian and French troops stormed and secured a school for Westerners' children in Afghanistan (near Kabul I believe), which had been taken over by the Taliban. US troops then evacuated the children, but the credit for the operation went solely to the US.
This, also in 2002 from the Ivory Coast:
"French troops on Wednesday evacuated 191 Westerners at the International Christian Academy in Bouake — 148 Americans, including 98 children, and 43 others, including French and Canadians.

Some of the children were waving American flags and shouting, "Vive la France," or "Long live France," after a week pinned down by sporadic gunfire around the grounds of the school on the eastern edge of Bouake, the West African nation's second city.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/09/ ... 3487.shtml

This, from 2003 in Liberia:
"While taking the westerners out of Monrovia, heavily armed French troops emerged from the helicopters as they landed at the European Union compound in Monrovia, before taking westerners to a French ship waiting off the coast.

Some 91 foreigners, including aid workers and Lebanese traders, were evacuated, said David Parker, acting head of the EU mission in Liberia.

The helicopters then started to airlift about 100 US citizens, who had gathered overnight at their embassy, next door to the EU compound.

[...]

They are being taken to the French military ship "Orage", which will take them to neighbouring Ivory Coast."

http://www.thisdayonline.com/archive/20 ... ews03.html

Close military cooperation still exists between the US and EU, but politicians are doing their damnedest to torpedo each other.

[Whitey]

This whole war if you put the tear jerking emotional B/S aside is about power grab, money and empire expansion. A rush, a push, and a shove and the land is ours.

The guys that run the show are doing to the rest of the world today what they did to the South yeasterday. Problem is, fighting and civilizing determined savages ain't a PS2 game. You got one life to live and one to give in this game, I'm not playing this one.

[Frank S.]

Time will, I believe, prove that teh French were violating U.N. sanctions and helping the Iraqi's with a nuclear weapons program, under the quise of building nuclear power plants. Same with the Germans.

As I said, I don't know about French and German companies violating sanctions, but there is this (it's worth reading in its entirety):

http://www.ipsnews.net/interna.asp?idnews=21659

IRAQ:
U.S. Firm Bechtel Planned to Evade 1988 Sanctions - Document

Emad Mekay


WASHINGTON, Dec 19 (IPS) - U.S. construction giant Bechtel, a firm with a major contract to help rebuild Iraq, planned to hire ”non-U.S. suppliers of technology” so it could evade economic sanctions imposed by Washington after Saddam Hussein used poison gas against Iraq's Kurdish minority, according to a newly declassified document.

In April 2003 Bechtel was awarded one of the largest contracts to date by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) for infrastructure repair work in U.S.-occupied Iraq. The deal is worth an initial payment of 34.6 million dollars and up to 680 million dollars in total.

Bechtel maintains that it has always respected and complied with U.S. government prohibitions in Iraq, but the uncovered document shows how its officials were prepared to challenge even its Washington allies to retain its business.

According to a 1988 confidential State Department cable, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by the non-profit National Security Archive (NSA), U.S. Ambassador to Iraq April Glaspie wrote that Bechtel officials threatened to bypass the sanctions, passed by the Senate in 1988.

”Bechtel representatives said that if economic sanctions contained in the Senate act are signed into law, Bechtel will turn to non-U.S. suppliers of technology and continue to do business in Iraq,” the cable said.

The document also shows further behind-the-scenes particulars of how the U.S. corporation, now part of President George W. Bush's project to bring democracy to post-Saddam Iraq, courted the dictatorial regime with full knowledge of Saddam's use of chemical weapons against Iranian troops and the Kurds -- with the approval of U.S. diplomats.

”They (Bechtel) were certainly well aware of what was going on in Iraq and had no qualms about making a buck there,” said Jim Vallette, research director at the Washington-based Sustainable Energy and Economy Network.

”So they had no concerns over what Saddam was doing to his own people.”

NSA Executive Director Tom Blanton said his organisation is trying to shed light on the context of the current U.S. occupation of Iraq by looking at the history of the relationship between the nations.

”What we are doing with these documents is to try to provide some missing context to current political decisions and current contracting decisions,” Blanton said.

Washington has been accused of cronyism after USAID awarded contracts to U.S. corporations to help rebuild Iraq after the U.S.-led invasion -- some with close ties to the Bush administration -- on a no-bid basis.

U.S. allies like France, Germany and Russia, have also complained about Washington's recent decision to allow only countries that backed the war in Iraq to bid for the lucrative contracts.

Another high-profile firm -- Halliburton, once run by Vice President Dick Cheney -- is being accused by Pentagon auditors of refusing to hand over internal documents that could shed light on accounting problems related to an Iraq fuel contract that has allegedly overcharged U.S. taxpayers by as much as 61 million dollars.

In the 1980s Bechtel signed a technical services contract to manage the implementation of Iraq's two-billion-dollar petrochemical project II. U.S. firms, including Bechtel, won 300 million dollars in contracts to build the plant.

But the deal was jeopardised when the U.S. Senate wanted to penalise Baghdad for using chemical weapons against the Kurds, although it was well documented that Saddam had employed such weapons against Iran for at least four years before he used them on the Kurds.

The Senate initiative came on the heels of a series of Iraqi chemical weapons assaults against Kurds -- most notably in Halabja in March 1988 -- and called for strict economic sanctions against Baghdad, including blocking all international loans, credits and other types of assistance.

The government's then minister of industry, and Saddam's son-in-law, Husayn Kamil, told Bechtel officials he was angry the Senate passed the 'Prevention of Genocide Act of 1988', according to the cable.

It says Kamil ”vented his spleen for one and a half hours”, saying the move ”caught his government completely by surprise” because it came at a time of ”improving relations with the U.S.”

Kamil, the report says, insisted Washington would wrongly ”mix politics with business”.

Glaspie noted that as ”one of Saddam Hussein's closest advisors, some say his closest ... we take Kamil's angry reaction ... to be an accurate reflection of Saddam's own reaction”.

Two days later, representatives of Bechtel met with Glaspie to describe Kamil's eruption, a meeting she described in the cable.

Fearing to lose the contract, Bechtel officials threatened then to use non-U.S. suppliers and technology to keep the lucrative deal, in spite of the Senate's decision.

The incident, says Vallette, clearly shows how the company bordered on blackmailing Washington, even on the rare occasion when corporate profit conflicted with a decision of Congress.

”The cable uncovered by NSA certainly shows that Bechtel's true practice is to go foreign policy shopping, shifting business overseas when Washington does not cooperate,” he said.

”That's the stick that the companies wield against Washington if Washington acts against their bottom line,” he added.

Blanton described the document as evidence of the complexity of the relationship between the Saddam Hussein regime and the United States.

”The whole war in Iraq is being presented in very stark moralistic black and white terms. But the reality of history, the reality of the relationship between the U.S. and Iraq, has never been in black and white terms,” he said.

”It's been very realpolitik, and concerns about Iraq's chemical weapons are later bloomers in the list of U.S. worries related to Iraq.”

Vallette said the document also brings into question whether Bechtel, a company that chose to do business with Saddam despite well-documented evidence he was using banned weapons, should be allowed to continue to profit from rebuilding Iraq.

”I think any company that profits from dictators' brutalities should not be in charge of allegedly helping build a democracy in Iraq or anywhere else,” Vallette said. (END/2003)

[Frank S.]

If you click the link I posted above and scroll down to the end of the article, you will see a hyperlink to 'NSA documents'.
They are PDF and lengthy but enlightening reading.

[Sisyphus]

Frank

It pretty much reinforces my belief that national governments are becoming less and less important. Big companies and global corporations are the ones who'll 'rule the world' in the years ahead.

As for France, Germany and Russia. They really do have brass-necked cheek to think they could walk in a make a profit without having lifted a finger to help get rid of Hussein!

Quite the opposite, in fact. If it was up to them he'd still be there.

[Frank S.]

Yes, it does look at times... Well, more and more, like the kind of world William Gibson writes about in his sci-fi books. Are you familiar with those?

But on the subject of those countries that sat out the war, well, it's kind of difficult for me to 'personalize' them as even top politicos seem to do when they speak of 'our friends'.
Nations don't have friends, they have 'allies'. Individuals have friends. And alliances are always subject to negotiation.
If we postulate that the German and French governments and companies have really nothing of value to contribute to the reconstruction, it follows that they can be left out of it.
If on the other hand, they do have services which are of quality and competitive compared to other bidding nations, they should be let in.

In truth, I believe Iraqi companies themselves should be given priority when possible. But as it stands, they can only bid on 1% of the contracts, so effectively, they may be even more shut out than Europe is..!

This is moot, in any case: the US planners have to keep the EU at bay in Iraq, because the EU and France in particular, are deeply engaged in Pakistan.
Yet another future point of contention...

[Sisyphus]

the kind of world William Gibson writes about in his sci-fi books. Are you familiar with those?

But as it stands, they can only bid on 1% of the contracts, so effectively, they may be even more shut out than Europe is..!

Frank

Not come across Gibson. Did he write the Matrix??? Any particular title you can recommend? Mind you, the N.A. input is overloading my reading list! Currently reading up on Wm. Clarke Quantrill!! Interesting, but a lengthy book!

I'm (sort of) surprised the Iraqis can bid for even 1% of the contracts. If it's anything like Saudi [and I suspect it's rather less 'sophisticated'] they rely almost entirely on expat technical expertise to get things done.

[Frank S.]

Gibson wrote books such as:
Neuromancer
Count Zero
Mona Lisa overdrive
Pattern recognition
Johnny Mnemonic (short story)
screenplay for Aliens 3.

His themes are virtual reality (sometimes called the matrix) and a real world ruled by multi-national corporations which employ mercenary armies at the edge of competition. His themes and style are called 'cyberpunk'.

[judy29]

frank s , you must be one hell of a typer!!!!!!!!!

[Frank S.]

I still use the two fingers method...
Joking aside, I 'killed' my home PC last week and just finally fixed it with a bunch of new parts. Besides, most of my post on that topic were 'cut and paste'.

Damn it's good to be back....