The Russian Roulette




The fatal poisoning of an outspoken former KGB agent adds to the chill of Vladimir Putin's Russia.

The former spy lay dying in a London hospital--of what he didn't know. (It wasn't until after his death that Scotland Yard realized that the rare compound killing Alexander Litvinenko, 43, had left traces of radioactivity nearly everywhere he had been on Nov. 1.) But Litvinenko wanted the world to know who killed him, not how it was done or where. In a statement released after he died last week, the fierce critic of Russia's government directly addressed the man he said was responsible for his death: "You may succeed in silencing one man, but the howl of protest from around the world will reverberate, Mr. Putin, in your ears for the rest of your life."

Whoever did kill Litvinenko wasn't an amateur. British authorities announced last Friday that he had ingested a radioactive toxin, polonium 210, and that police had found traces of it in three locations: a sushi bar where Litvinenko had eaten lunch, a hotel he had visited on the same day and his home. Polonium 210 is so rare and volatile that the assassin would have needed access to a high-security nuclear laboratory to obtain it. Moscow denies that it had anything to do with the death. At a meeting with European officials in Helsinki, Vladimir Putin called the death a tragedy but also questioned the authenticity of Litvinenko's deathbed accusation and stated bluntly, "There is no issue to discuss."

Whether or not anyone in the Kremlin had targeted Litvinenko, his death, coming just weeks after the murder of investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya in her Moscow apartment block, has sent a subzero chill over Russia's already frosty civil society. Human-rights campaigners and other Putin critics see the killing as the latest blow to democracy and free speech, part of a steady erosion of civil liberties. Russian democracy was chaotically vibrant just a decade ago, after the collapse of communism in 1991. But these days it is looking fragile. New legislation annuls independent candidates for the Duma (parliament's lower house), and no political party can exist without the Kremlin's approval. Regional governors and members of the upper house of parliament are no longer elected but appointed. Most key national media are in the hands of state or state-controlled corporations, and Russian activists live in fear of the consequences when they openly criticize Putin. "There may no longer be shortages of groceries and long lines at every street corner," says Ludmilla Alexeyeva, the doyen of human-rights activists in Moscow, "but Russia today is still a place where human rights and freedom are in short supply."

Litvinenko, for one, was unafraid to speak out. A former lieutenant colonel in the Russian federal security service (FSB), the successor agency to the KGB, Litvinenko gained notoriety in the 1990s for claiming to have refused a Kremlin order to assassinate the Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky. He had long accused Putin of backtracking on democracy and, in a 2001 book he co-wrote, went so far as to allege that Russian security services organized apartment-block bombings in 1999 that stoked support for a resurgence of the war in Chechnya. He had most recently made public statements tying the Kremlin to the murder of Politkovskaya. Litvinenko was reportedly meeting contacts in London in the hope of gaining information on the case when he was poisoned. "The bastards got me, but they won't get everybody," he told his friend Andrei Nekrasov shortly before his death.

The Litvinenko case revived memories of perhaps the most notorious assassination carried out during the cold war, the 1978 murder in London of Georgi Markov, a Bulgarian dissident who was working for the BBC. He was killed with a ricin-tipped umbrella while waiting for a bus, in a case that has never been solved. Just like the Markov murder, the death of Litvinenko has already given rise to a flurry of conspiracy theories, including speculation among defenders of the government that the poisoning was arranged by Russian émigrés or Western intelligence agencies to discredit Moscow. But for many Russian élites, the whole macabre spectacle has heightened anxieties about the Putin government's backsliding into communist-era intrigue and repression. "People who question the policies of our government are increasingly targeted. People who work for human rights are increasingly under attack," says Alexeyeva. "And even people who support this work are potentially in danger of being singled out by the government. So are we in Russia? Are we back in the U.S.S.R.?" It's becoming harder to tell the difference.

With reporting by Reported by Yuri Zarakhovich/Moscow

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Why We Need to Talk to Iran


Iran last week decided to play power broker. It invited Iraq's President to visit Tehran to discuss regional stability, and it sought to bring Syria into the process as well. This was not greeted with glee in Washington. But it should have been. One of America's top strategic interests is to get Iran to behave less like a revolutionary cauldron and more like a traditional nation-state. For the mullahs and their mad President to express a desire for a stable neighborhood is a good first step.

Step two should involve the U.S. talking, directly and seriously, to Iran. Our current conceit, which is that Iran should be denied the honor of our direct discourse until it suspends its nuclear-enrichment programs, hurts us more than it hurts Iran. For 27 years we have relied on unilateral sanctions and diplomatic chilliness to persuade Iran to moderate its behavior and forsake its nuclear ambitions. That hasn't exactly worked.

Direct talks with Iran will not persuade it to abandon its nuclear dreams right away. Even the slightly saner predecessors of President Ahmadinejad surreptitiously proceeded down the nuclear path despite pledges to do otherwise. Given Persia's precarious location and imperial impulses, I dare say that even our late unlamented friend the Shah was and would be doing the same.

When a problem is for the moment unsolvable, then enlarge it. (O.K., this is a Donald Rumsfeld maxim, but that doesn't make it inoperative.) One precedent is the opening to China negotiated by Henry Kissinger, which did not try to settle such intractable issues as the status of Taiwan but instead created a framework for a realistic long-term relationship involving both cooperation and contention.

Talks with Tehran should begin, without preconditions, by discussing such a framework while getting Iran involved in keeping the chaos in Iraq from ripping apart the region, just as Iran helped stabilize Afghanistan after the defeat of our mutual enemy the Taliban. We should then permit commercial deals with Iran's small private sector, which could build a middle-class constituency for stability and greater integration into the world economy. Who knows? Perhaps this could even lead to accession talks with the World Trade Organization. In the process, Iranians will see more clearly the benefits of being treated as a responsible global player. Only then might we have enough leverage to convince the nation's leaders that there's a downside to flouting the world on the nuclear issue.

President Ahmadinejad has the advantage of looking like a poet, sounding like a lunatic and not caring whether the West likes him. But Iran has multiple power centers. There's an election next month, for example, in which a reformist former President is challenging a fundamentalist cleric to join the Assembly of Experts that oversees Supreme Leader Ayatullah Ali Khamenei. About 70% of the population is under 30, and there are at least 70,000 active blogs expressing all sorts of aspirations of a diverse people, including ones by the President (ahmadinejad.ir) and Supreme Leader (khamenei.ir).

That is why, in addition to government talks, it's useful to have informal contacts with the Iranian people. I was with President Bush in New Orleans a month ago, and he got to talking about the ravings of Ahmadinejad, but he knows not to personify relations the way he once did with Russia's Vladimir Putin. That is why he has called for, and Congress has funded, citizen exchanges with Iran. A delegation of health experts from Iran, whose AIDS program is one of the best in the region, will soon visit the U.S. under the auspices of the State Department's international visitors program and the Aspen Institute, where I work.

Engagement with Iran should be done in partnership with our allies in the region, namely Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia. They can help keep the Iranians (and Syrians) in check and look after Sunni interests. That requires one other ingredient: reigniting efforts to reach an Israeli-Palestinian peace, if and when the Palestinians form a new government willing to deal with Israel. The Israelis understand this; Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has informally talked to the Saudis about relaunching their Arab peace plan.

Who best to choreograph all this? Jim Baker. The Iraq Study Group, which he chairs with Lee Hamilton, plans to recommend a process along these lines, and his associates say that Baker would be willing to help implement it as a special envoy if the President offers him enough authority. That might be resisted by Elliott Abrams, the National Security Council staffer who coordinates Middle East policy, and Baker would not accept the job unless this is resolved. But Condoleezza Rice, who has pushed for a comprehensive diplomatic approach to the region, might be supportive, even enthusiastic. She knows that the Administration needs to salvage a foreign policy legacy beyond the botched war in Iraq.

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Why We Worry About The Things We Shouldn't... ...And Ignore The Things We Should.


It would be a lot easier to enjoy your life if there weren't so many things trying to kill you every day. The problems start even before you're fully awake. There's the fall out of bed that kills 600 Americans each year. There's the early-morning heart attack, which is 40% more common than those that strike later in the day. There's the fatal plunge down the stairs, the bite of sausage that gets lodged in your throat, the tumble on the slippery sidewalk as you leave the house, the high-speed automotive pinball game that is your daily commute.

Other dangers stalk you all day long. Will a cabbie's brakes fail when you're in the crosswalk? Will you have a violent reaction to bad food? And what about the risks you carry with you all your life? The father and grandfather who died of coronaries in their 50s probably passed the same cardiac weakness on to you. The tendency to take chances on the highway that has twice landed you in traffic court could just as easily land you in the morgue.

Shadowed by peril as we are, you would think we'd get pretty good at distinguishing the risks likeliest to do us in from the ones that are statistical long shots. But you would be wrong. We agonize over avian flu, which to date has killed precisely no one in the U.S., but have to be cajoled into getting vaccinated for the common flu, which contributes to the deaths of 36,000 Americans each year. We wring our hands over the mad cow pathogen that might be (but almost certainly isn't) in our hamburger and worry far less about the cholesterol that contributes to the heart disease that kills 700,000 of us annually.

We pride ourselves on being the only species that understands the concept of risk, yet we have a confounding habit of worrying about mere possibilities while ignoring probabilities, building barricades against perceived dangers while leaving ourselves exposed to real ones. Six Muslims traveling from a religious conference were thrown off a plane last week in Minneapolis, Minn., even as unscreened cargo continues to stream into ports on both coasts. Shoppers still look askance at a bag of spinach for fear of E. coli bacteria while filling their carts with fat-sodden French fries and salt-crusted nachos. We put filters on faucets, install air ionizers in our homes and lather ourselves with antibacterial soap. "We used to measure contaminants down to the parts per million," says Dan McGinn, a former Capitol Hill staff member and now a private risk consultant. "Now it's parts per billion."

At the same time, 20% of all adults still smoke; nearly 20% of drivers and more than 30% of backseat passengers don't use seat belts; two-thirds of us are overweight or obese. We dash across the street against the light and build our homes in hurricane-prone areas--and when they're demolished by a storm, we rebuild in the same spot. Sensible calculation of real-world risks is a multidimensional math problem that sometimes seems entirely beyond us. And while it may be true that it's something we'll never do exceptionally well, it's almost certainly something we can learn to do better.

AN OLD BRAIN IN A NEW WORLD

Part of the problem we have with evaluating risk, scientists say, is that we're moving through the modern world with what is, in many respects, a prehistoric brain. We may think we've grown accustomed to living in a predator-free environment in which most of the dangers of the wild have been driven away or fenced off, but our central nervous system--evolving at a glacial pace--hasn't got the message.

To probe the risk-assessment mechanisms of the human mind, Joseph LeDoux, a professor of neuroscience at New York University and the author of The Emotional Brain, studies fear pathways in laboratory animals. He explains that the jumpiest part of the brain--of mouse and man--is the amygdala, a primitive, almond-shaped clump of tissue that sits just above the brainstem. When you spot potential danger--a stick in the grass that may be a snake, a shadow around a corner that could be a mugger--it's the amygdala that reacts the most dramatically, triggering the fight-or-flight reaction that pumps adrenaline and other hormones into your bloodstream.

It's not until a fraction of a second later that the higher regions of the brain get the signal and begin to sort out whether the danger is real. But that fraction of a second causes us to experience the fear far more vividly than we do the rational response--an advantage that doesn't disappear with time. The brain is wired in such a way that nerve signals travel more readily from the amygdala to the upper regions than from the upper regions back down. Setting off your internal alarm is quite easy, but shutting it down takes some doing.

"There are two systems for analyzing risk: an automatic, intuitive system and a more thoughtful analysis," says Paul Slovic, professor of psychology at the University of Oregon. "Our perception of risk lives largely in our feelings, so most of the time we're operating on system No. 1."

There's clearly an evolutionary advantage to this natural timorousness. If we're mindful of real dangers and flee when they arise, we're more likely to live long enough to pass on our genes. But evolutionary rewards also come to those who stand and fight, those willing to take risks--and even suffer injury--in pursuit of prey or a mate. Our ancestors hunted mastodons and stampeded buffalo, risking getting trampled for the possible payoff of meat and pelt. Males advertised their reproductive fitness by fighting other males, willingly engaging in a contest that could mean death for one and offspring for the other.

These two impulses--to engage danger or run from it--are constantly at war and have left us with a well-tuned ability to evaluate the costs and payoffs of short-term risk, say Slovic and others. That, however, is not the kind we tend to face in contemporary society, where threats don't necessarily spring from behind a bush. They're much more likely to come to us in the form of rumors or news broadcasts or an escalation of the federal terrorism-threat level from orange to red. It's when the risk and the consequences of our response unfold more slowly, experts say, that our analytic system kicks in. This gives us plenty of opportunity to overthink--or underthink--the problem, and this is where we start to bollix things up.

WHY WE GUESS WRONG

Which risks get excessive attention and which get overlooked depends on a hierarchy of factors. Perhaps the most important is dread. For most creatures, all death is created pretty much equal. Whether you're eaten by a lion or drowned in a river, your time on the savanna is over. That's not the way humans see things. The more pain or suffering something causes, the more we tend to fear it; the cleaner or at least quicker the death, the less it troubles us. "We dread anything that poses a greater risk for cancer more than the things that injure us in a traditional way, like an auto crash," says Slovic. "That's the dread factor." In other words, the more we dread, the more anxious we get, and the more anxious we get, the less precisely we calculate the odds of the thing actually happening. "It's called probability neglect," says Cass Sunstein, a University of Chicago professor of law specializing in risk regulation.

The same is true for, say, AIDS, which takes you slowly, compared with a heart attack, which can kill you in seconds, despite the fact that heart disease claims nearly 50 times as many Americans than AIDS each year. We also dread catastrophic risks, those that cause the deaths of a lot of people in a single stroke, as opposed to those that kill in a chronic, distributed way. "Terrorism lends itself to excessive reactions because it's vivid and there's an available incident," says Sunstein. "Compare that to climate change, which is gradual and abstract."

Unfamiliar threats are similarly scarier than familiar ones. The next E. coli outbreak is unlikely to shake you up as much as the previous one, and any that follow will trouble you even less. In some respects, this is a good thing, particularly if the initial reaction was excessive. But it's also unavoidable given our tendency to habituate to any unpleasant stimulus, from pain and sorrow to a persistent car alarm.

The problem with habituation is that it can also lead us to go to the other extreme, worrying not too much but too little. Sept. 11 and Hurricane Katrina brought calls to build impregnable walls against such tragedies ever occurring again. But despite the vows, both New Orleans and the nation's security apparatus remain dangerously leaky. "People call these crises wake-up calls," says Dr. Irwin Redlener, associate dean of the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University and director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness. "But they're more like snooze alarms. We get agitated for a while, and then we don't follow through."

THE COMFORT OF CONTROL

We similarly misjudge risk if we feel we have some control over it, even if it's an illusory sense. The decision to drive instead of fly is the most commonly cited example, probably because it's such a good one. Behind the wheel, we're in charge; in the passenger seat of a crowded airline, we might as well be cargo. So white-knuckle flyers routinely choose the car, heedless of the fact that at most a few hundred people die in U.S. commercial airline crashes in a year, compared with 44,000 killed in motor-vehicle wrecks. The most white-knuckle time of all was post--Sept. 11, when even confident flyers took to the roads. Not surprisingly, from October through December 2001 there were 1,000 more highway fatalities than in the same period the year before, in part because there were simply more cars around. "It was called the '9/11 effect.' It produced a third again as many fatalities as the terrorist attacks," says David Ropeik, an independent risk consultant and a former professor at the Harvard School of Public Health.

Then too there's what Ropeik and others call "optimism bias," the thing that makes us glower when we see someone driving erratically while talking on a cell phone, even if we've done the very same thing, perhaps on the very same day. We tell ourselves we're different, because our call was shorter or our business was urgent or we were able to pay attention to the road even as we talked. What optimism bias comes down to, however, is the convenient belief that risks that apply to other people don't apply to us.

Finally, and for many of us irresistibly, there's the irrational way we react to risky behavior that also confers some benefit. It would be a lot easier to acknowledge the perils of smoking cigarettes or eating too much ice cream if they weren't such pleasures. Drinking too much confers certain benefits too, as do risky sex, recreational drugs and uncounted other indulgences. This is especially true since, in most cases, the gratification is immediate and the penalty, if it comes at all, comes later. With enough time and enough temptation, we can talk ourselves into ignoring almost any long-term costs. "These things are fun or hip, even if they can be lethal," says Ropeik. "And that pleasure is a benefit we weigh."

If these reactions are true for all of us--and they are--then you might think that all of us would react to risk in the same way. But that's clearly not the case. Some people enjoy roller coasters; others won't go near them. Some skydive; others can't imagine it. Not only are thrill seekers not put off by risk, but they're drawn to it, seduced by the mortal frisson that would leave many of us cold. "There's an internal thermostat that seems to control this," says risk expert John Adams of University College London. "That set point varies from person to person and circumstance to circumstance."

No one knows how such a set point gets calibrated, but evidence suggests that it is a mix of genetic and environmental variables. In a study at the University of Delaware in 2000, researchers used personality surveys to evaluate the risk-taking behavior of 260 college students and correlated it with existing research on the brain and blood chemistry of people with thrill-seeking personalities or certain emotional disorders. Their findings support the estimate that about 40% of the high-thrill temperament is learned and 60% inherited, with telltale differences in such relevant brain chemicals as serotonin, which helps inhibit impulsive behavior and may be in short supply in people with high-wire personalities.

CAN WE DO BETTER?

Given these idiosyncratic reactions, is it possible to have a rational response to risk? If we can't agree on whether something is dangerous or not or, if it is, whether it's a risk worth taking, how can we come up with policies that keep all of us reasonably safe?

One way to start would to be to look at the numbers. Anyone can agree that a 1-in-1 million risk is better than 1 in 10, and 1 in 10 is better than 50-50. But things are almost always more complicated than that, a fact that corporations, politicians and other folks with agendas to push often deftly exploit.

Take the lure of the comforting percentage. In one study, Slovic found that people were more likely to approve of airline safety-equipment purchases if they were told that it could "potentially save 98% of 150 people" than if they were told it could "potentially save 150 people." On its face this reaction makes no sense, since 98% of 150 people is only 147. But there was something about the specificity of the number that the respondents found appealing. "Experts tend to use very analytic, mathematical tools to calculate risk," Slovic says. "The public tends to go more on their feelings."

There's also the art of the flawed comparison. Officials are fond of reassuring the public that they run a greater risk from, for example, drowning in the bathtub, which kills 320 Americans a year, than from a new peril like mad cow disease, which has so far killed no one in the U.S. That's pretty reassuring--and very misleading. The fact is that anyone over 6 and under 80--which is to say, the overwhelming majority of the U.S. population--faces almost no risk of perishing in the tub. For most of us, the apples of drowning and the oranges of mad cow disease don't line up in any useful way.

But such statistical straw men get trotted out all the time. People defending the safety of pesticides and other toxins often argue that you stand a greater risk of being hit by a falling airplane (about 1 in 250,000 over the course of your entire life) than you do of being harmed by this or that contaminant. If you live near an airport, however, the risk of getting beaned is about 1 in 10,000. Two very different probabilities are being conflated into one flawed forecast. "My favorite is the one that says you stand a greater risk from dying while skydiving than you do from some pesticide," says Susan Egan Keane of the Natural Resources Defense Council. "Well, I don't skydive, so my risk is zero."

Risk figures can be twisted in more disastrous ways too. Last year's political best seller, The One Percent Doctrine, by journalist Ron Suskind, pleased or enraged you, depending on how you felt about war in Iraq, but it hit risk analysts where they live. The title of the book is drawn from a White House determination that if the risk of a terrorist attack in the U.S. was even 1%, it would be treated as if it were a 100% certainty. Critics of Administration policy argue that that 1% possibility was never properly balanced against the 100% certainty of the tens of thousands of casualties that would accompany a war. That's a position that may be easier to take in 2006, with Baghdad in flames and the war grinding on, but it's still true that a 1% danger that something will happen is the same as a 99% likelihood that it won't.

REAL AND PERCEIVED RISK

It's not impossible for us to become sharper risk handicappers. For one thing, we can take the time to learn more about the real odds. Baruch Fischhoff, professor of social and decision sciences at Carnegie Mellon University, recently asked a panel of 20 communications and finance experts what they thought the likelihood of human-to-human transmission of avian flu would be in the next three years. They put the figure at 60%. He then asked a panel of 20 medical experts the same question. Their answer: 10%. "There's reason to be critical of experts," Fischhoff says, "but not to replace their judgment with laypeople's opinions."

The government must also play a role in this, finding ways to frame warnings so that people understand them. John Graham, formerly the administrator of the federal Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, says risk analysts suffer no end of headaches trying to get Americans to understand that while nuclear power plants do pose dangers, the more imminent peril to both people and the planet comes from the toxins produced by coal-fired plants. Similarly, pollutants in fish can be dangerous, but for most people--with the possible exception of small children and women of childbearing age--the cardiac benefits of fish easily outweigh the risks. "If you can get people to compare," he says, "then you're in a situation where you can get them to make reasoned choices."

Just as important is to remember to pay proper mind to the dangers that, as the risk experts put it, are hiding in plain sight. Most people no longer doubt that global warming is happening, yet we live and work in air-conditioned buildings and drive gas-guzzling cars. Most people would be far likelier to participate in a protest at a nuclear power plant than at a tobacco company, but it's smoking, not nukes, that kills an average of 1,200 Americans every single day.

We can do better, however, and leaders in government and industry can help. The residual parts of our primitive brains may not give us any choice beyond fighting or fleeing. But the higher reasoning we've developed over millions of years gives us far greater--and far more nuanced--options. Officials who provide hard, honest numbers and a citizenry that takes the time to understand them would not only mean a smarter nation, but a safer one. [This article contains a complex diagram. Please see hardcopy or pdf.] TOTAL ANNUAL DEATHS 2.5 MILLION Homicide 17,732 Suicide 31,484

Terrified of bees, snakes and swimming pools? ACCIDENTS 109,277 Maybe you should worry more about your heart DISEASES 2.3 million Other diseases 681,150 Diabetes 74,219 Chronic lower-respiratory disease 126,382 Stroke 157,689 Cancer 556,902 Heart disease 685,089 All other deaths 8,364 Sources: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; National Transportation Safety Board

With reporting by With reporting by David Bjerklie/New York, Dan Cray/Los Angeles

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Both Sides Blame the U.S. as Violence Escalates in Iraq




Shi'ites and Sunnis accuse the U.S. of deliberately failing to protect them from each other, as raging violence mocks the idea that Iraqis are almost ready handle their own security.

Damned if they do, damned if they don't: Last weekend's escalation in violence was a reminder of the predicament in which U.S. forces find themselves in Iraq. U.S.-led security operations have recently come in for heavy criticism by Iraqis, especially Shi'ites. But when the security situation deteriorates, many Iraqis blame the only credible military presence in the country — the U.S. military. Lt. Gen. Peter W. Chiarelli, the commanding general of the Multinational Corps in Iraq, told TIME last week that it was unreasonable to expect the U.S. forces to win hearts and minds in Iraq, but that "it's all about winning their trust and confidence."

Even that goal can sometimes seem beyond reach. In the aftermath of the Thanksgiving Day suicide bombings in Sadr City, many residents were asking why the U.S. forces had failed to stop the bombers, generally believed to be Sunni jihadis. After all, American soldiers had recently been raiding the giant Baghdad slum, attacking Shi'ite militias that enjoy a great deal of popular support there. Inevitably, some Shi'ites put two and two together — and got 22: On Saturday a cleric representing Moqtada al-Sadr, who enjoys demigod status in Sadr City, accused the U.S. of ganging up with Sunni insurgents and jihadis against the Shi'ites.

On the other hand, some Sunnis were accusing the U.S. of siding with the Shi'ite-led government to allow, even encourage, the militias to run amok in the wake of the Sadr City bombings. Harith al-Dari, who heads the largest Sunni clerical group, declared: "The government and the occupation forces are preparing the suitable environments to the militias and killing gangs to attack our people."

The overheated rhetoric aside, this much is clear: The Sadr City bombings and their grim fallout again exposed the limitations of the joint U.S.-Iraqi Baghdad security plan, dubbed Operation Forward Together, that began last summer. The plan brought more than 7,200 additional U.S. troops into the Iraqi capital, but it has failed to slow the sectarian killings and kidnappings that are threatening to drag Iraq into a civil war. In the past two weeks alone, Baghdad has seen the most audacious kidnapping (150 men taken captive from a government office in broad daylight) and the deadliest bombing (more than 210 killed in Sadr City) since the fall of Saddam Hussein.

It is hard, now, to escape from the conclusion that Forward Together is a misnomer. But the main reason it's not going 'Forward' is that there's very little 'Together' about it — the Iraqi military is not keeping its end of the bargain. Although there are tens of thousands of Iraqi soldiers in the city (in addition to the tens of thousands of police) they have, with remarkable consistency managed not to be where they are needed most. Despite the weekend-long curfew, supposedly enforced by the Iraqi forces, there seemed little by way of security force activity restricting the movement of Shi'ite mobs seeking vengeance for the Sadr City bombings.

The Iraqi Army was conspicuously absent, for example, in the Hurriya neighborhood, where rampaging Shi'ite militias damaged Sunni mosques and allegedly immolated worshippers. In Hurriya and elsewhere, many Iraqis reported that the Iraqi soldiers either melted away when the militias arrived — or worse, stood by and watched as they attacked Sunnis. The Shi'ite-majority Iraqi police are frequently accused of joining in the killing of Sunnis.

Forward Together had been meant to demonstrate how Iraqi forces can take the lead in important security operations. Privately, many American commanders say the Iraqi forces are nowhere near ready to take responsibility for security. This seems beyond the grasp of policy makers in Washington, where some legislators continue to demand that more responsibility be handed over to the Iraqis - so U.S. troops can be withdrawn. Few in Baghdad harbor such fantasies. They know that it will be a long time before their forces are up to the job. Until then, they want the Americans around for protection — and to blame.

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Why Turks Are Not Pleased to See the Pope





For many in Turkey, the visiting pontiff personifies the mounting hostility they feel from Europe.

It took a 12 hour bus ride for Hafize Kucuk and Sevgi Ozen, 21-year-old university students, to get from the northern Turkish city of Samsun to an Istanbul rally Sunday protesting Pope Benedict XVI's visit to Turkey this week. But they thought little of the inconvenience. "This is a man who insulted our Prophet [Muhammad] and didn't even apologize properly," said Kucuk. "Now he's coming to our country, a Muslim country. This is unacceptable. We came to make our voices heard."

The rally, attended by some 15,000 Islamist protestors, was a colorful affair. Huge, lurid posters linking Benedict to Crusader knights. Hundreds of young men, wearing white headbands inscribed with the message "We don't want this sly Pope in Turkey", chanted angry slogans.

Militant protestors are a minority, but many Turks are deeply skeptical about a visit they view as part of a Western design against Turkey, which is mostly Muslim but officially secular.

The Pope could not have arrived at a more sensitive time: Turkey and the European Union appear on a collision course over whether the bloc will admit Turkey and its 70 million citizens. Support in Turkey for the EU has plummeted — a poll last week showed 60 percent in favor of suspending membership talks. And for many Turks, Benedict, who once warned that letting Turkey into the EU would be "a grave error against the tide of history," personifies European hostility towards them.

"At this point most Turks are deeply suspicious of the West," says Cengiz Aktar, political science professor at Galatasaray University. "They see this visit as yet another development to be suspicious of."

The protests have made strange bedfellows of the far left and the nationalist right. Their chief grievance concerns the Pope's scheduled talks with Patriarch Bartholomew I, the Istanbul-based spiritual head of the world's Orthodox Christians. The talks, many Turks believe, are aimed not just at healing the centuries-old schism between the two churches, but at paving the way for creating in Turkey a Vatican-like entity for the Orthodox.

Every detail on the Pope's four-day itinerary is fraught with complications, including a planned visit to Hagia Sophia, a sixth century Byzantine church which was converted to a mosque in 1453 when the Ottomans conquered Istanbul. It was transformed into a museum in 1935.

Nationalists believe the Pope's visit to Hagia Sophia, a major tourist attraction, is a sign of Christian desire to reclaim it as a church. Newspapers have speculated feverishly over whether he will pray while inside.

"Its not that we have anything personal against the Pope," says Zafer Emanetoglu, head of the youth branch of the Islamist party which organized Sunday's rally. "But we know that he is here as part of a greater plan against Turkey, and to unite Christians against Muslims."

The Pope's visit has also put the moderate, Islamist-rooted government in a tight spot. With elections slated for next year, Turkish newspapers have speculated that being photographed with the Pope could alienate constituents of the ruling party — Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has used his attendance at a NATO summit in Latvia to excuse himself from meeting with the pontiff.

To prevent any protests turning violent, a tight security plan — similar to that used for U.S. President George W. Bush on a recent visit — will be in place. Thousands of policemen, including snipers on rooftops, are on duty in Istanbul, and the papal entourage will feature hi-tech scrambling devices and decoy cars.

"Every security precaution has been taken," said a Turkish foreign ministry official. "Turks are a tolerant people, I don't imagine there will be any problems." Still, Ankara will be holding its breath until Friday, when the Pope flies home.

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Can a Mormon be President?




Why Mitt Romney will have to explain a faith that remains mysterious to many.

A mormon church official and a public relations executive shuttled recently from the Fox News Washington bureau to the Washington Post to the online political digest the Hotline. The two were engaging in a little pre-emptive rearguard action, gearing up for the impending Republican presidential campaign of Massachusetts Governor (Willard) Mitt Romney, 59, whose family has long been part of the church's élite.

Like other minorities--ethnic or religious--Mormons are proud of those among them who make it big. When Steve Young, a descendant of church leader Brigham Young and a quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers, was taking snaps on Monday Night Football in the 1990s, his fellow Mormons took to calling Family Home Evening, their weekly togetherness meeting, Family Home Halftime instead.

But church officials are wary of the impact Romney's candidacy could have on them--and on the portrayal of their faith. Yes, his campaign will bring attention and credibility to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS), as the Mormons are formally known, and give them a chance to demystify their theology and customs. But church officials also calculate that Romney's bid to succeed George W. Bush could remind some mainstream Christians just how different Mormonism is from their faith and perhaps expose their flock to more of the sort of discrimination that drove their founders west by handcart and covered wagon into the Great Salt Lake Valley.

Although Mormons are known for family centeredness, hard work and clean living, many Americans remain suspicious of them, maybe because so many aspects of their faith remain mysterious. A poll conducted in June by the Los Angeles Times and Bloomberg found that 35% of registered voters said they would not consider voting for a Mormon for President. Only Islam would be a more damaging faith for a candidate, the poll found. That's why Michael Otterson, a Mormon convert who is now the church's director of media relations, was calling on political reporters when he visited Washington from Utah in October. He wants them to know that in its 176-year history, the church has never endorsed a presidential candidate and that much of the folklore surrounding its beliefs just isn't true. "The message in a nutshell is, Remember that we're politically neutral as an institution," he says. "The church is about preaching the gospel of Jesus Christ. Anything else is a distraction." Otterson says he has a "no dumb questions" policy and urges journalists to call his cell phone, day or night.

The church used a similar strategy successfully when Romney, who became wealthy building a venture-capital firm in Boston, was brought in as president of the Salt Lake Organizing Committee when it needed to rescue the 2002 Winter Olympics from a bribery scandal. Some critics wondered if the games would become the "Molympics," and Otterson says he met with a stream of sports reporters to try to "put some of the myths to rest--polygamy being the most enduring."

That task is never done. Even though the church has not allowed members to have multiple wives since 1890, that's not how it comes across on TV, in books or even in the courts. The popular HBO series Big Love shows a Utah family trying to "live the principle" of plural marriage; at the end of every episode, the network's defensive disclaimer informs the audience that the Mormon church, in fact, rejects polygamy. Similarly, the nonfiction best seller Under the Banner of Heaven by Jon Krakauer chronicles shocking murders within a Mormon splinter group, though it was probably lost on many readers that the sect has no connection to the church. More recently, the 50-year-old leader of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, a sect that has been disavowed by the LDS, has been on trial on two first-degree felony counts of rape. He is accused of helping arrange the marriage of a 14-year-old girl and her 19-year-old cousin in 2001.

Even if the church succeeds in its public relations offensive, Romney still has some explaining of his own to do, particularly to the Republican evangelical base, which now makes up nearly a third of the party's electorate and can wield huge power in primary states, most notably South Carolina. That's because some Evangelicals hold the view that Mormonism is not a Christian faith. Because Mormons acknowledge works of Scripture that are not in the Bible, believe that their prophets have received revelations directly from God and teach that God has a physical body, Evangelicals consider them heretics. The Southern Baptist Convention lists the LDS church under Cults and Sects, along with Scientology. In late October, Romney and his wife Ann, balancing lunch trays on their laps in the den of their Belmont, Mass., home, met with about 15 evangelical leaders from as far away as Alaska, including Jerry Falwell, Franklin Graham and Southern Baptist leader Richard Land. The three-hour meeting was set up by Mark DeMoss, a p.r. consultant who specializes in Evangelicals. Charles Colson, the former Nixon official and convicted Watergate conspirator who founded a prison ministry and now hosts a popular evangelical radio show, told TIME that Romney's faith should not disqualify him. "You wouldn't vote for a man just because he is a Christian, nor would you vote against a man just because he was a Mormon," Colson says.

Still, when it comes to managing the message about Romney's relationship with his church, his team has already shown vulnerability. The Boston Globe reported in October that Jeffrey R. Holland, one of the church's 12 apostles, had discussed the campaign at church headquarters with one of Romney's sons as well as with a key Romney donor and a paid consultant to his political action committee. The church says it was just a courtesy call, one of many such meetings Holland holds. But the Globe also described e-mails from two administrators of the business school at Brigham Young University, the Mormon school that is Romney's alma mater, who used office computers to solicit support for the campaign. The two were told by B.Y.U.'s counsel to knock it off, although Romney later said it made sense to raise money from people he knows, including alumni.

Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid rarely gets questions about his Mormonism, and Romney has tried deflect them by focusing on the broad principles of his faith, as well as family values and traditional marriage. A writer for the Atlantic Monthly asked Romney last year if he wears Temple Garments--white underclothing, with the "Marks of the Holy Priesthood" sewn in, donned with reverence by the most faithful Mormons. "I'll just say those sorts of things I'll keep private," he sensibly replied. Will that dodge work for other theological questions? Calling himself "a religious person," Romney in June used the Charlie Rose Show on PBS to test-drive an answer that keeps him from getting into the nitty-gritty of his religious heritage. "I believe that Jesus Christ is my savior," he said. "But then as you get into the details of doctrines, I'd probably say, 'Look, time out. Let's focus on the values that we share.'" That kind of high-mindedness proved effective during Romney's unsuccessful challenge to Senator Edward Kennedy in 1994 after Kennedy tried to make an issue of the Mormon's attitude toward blacks and women. Romney said he was not running "to be a spokesman for my church," and Kennedy backed off.

Romney advisers are debating whether he will need to give a big speech in the tradition of John F. Kennedy, who told Protestant church leaders in Houston 46 years ago that he was "not the Catholic candidate for President" but instead was "the Democratic Party's candidate for President, who happens also to be Catholic." After the G.O.P.'s defeat in the midterms, that may be a speech Republicans are prepared to hear. A big tent, even one stretching all the way to Salt Lake City, could be what gets them back into power in Washington two years from now.

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When the Democrats Take Back K Street

Democratic lobbyists are enjoying a comeback after 12 years of exile. Never mind those promised reforms.

The reception thrown by Nancy Pelosi at the Capitol a week after the Democrats prevailed in congressional elections was a party some power players had been waiting more than a decade to attend. The fête was for newly elected freshmen lawmakers, but Pelosi's invited guests included big-name Democratic lobbyists like Jack Quinn, Tony Podesta and Steve Elmendorf. Said a partygoer: "I thought to myself, they're all back, all the same old faces. It was just like old times."

For 12 years, Democratic lobbyists lost influence--and money--as Republicans tightened their hold on power. G.O.P. leaders amplified the effect by launching an overt effort to push Democrats out of trade associations and lobbying firms, with the aim of increasing the G.O.P.'s share of campaign contributions from the groups' clients. G.O.P. leaders also punished firms that were too Democrat-friendly by excluding them from meetings on the Hill. The combined effect of power and persuasion added up to a decade of Republican domination in the business of influence peddling.

But the Democrats are making their comeback on K Street, the metonymic home of Washington's $2.36 billion lobbying business. A gold rush is under way for lobbyists who have an in with the winning team. Firms are hiring away key Democratic congressional staff members and bidding up the salaries of Democrats already in the business. And companies that tilt Democratic are signing clients from industries that previously relied on Republican outfits.

There's one hitch. It's not supposed to be like old times. In an election in which exit polls identified corruption as the No. 1 voting issue and Washington's biggest corruption scandal involved lobbying, Democrats won in part by promising to curtail K Street's excesses. Pelosi has said her first act as Speaker of the House in January will be to pass new rules limiting contact between lobbyists and lawmakers. Later in 2007, Pelosi plans to rewrite the laws on pork-barrel spending. She promises that the overall effect of her reforms will be "to break the link between lobbyists and legislation" in Washington.

Who will win the coming battle between reformers and revanchists? The market is betting against reform. Demand for anyone with access to powerful Democrats on the Hill is soaring. Lobbyists who couldn't get a meeting are suddenly a hot commodity. "I've gotten a lot of calls from headhunters in the last two months," says Florence Prioleau, a lobbyist who has maintained close ties with her former boss, New York's Charles Rangel, incoming chairman of the Ways and Means Committee. Pelosi's former chief of staff, George Crawford, has just been hired by Amgen, a biotech company, to represent its interests with the new Congress. Toby Moffett, a former Democratic Congressman from Connecticut now with the Livingston Group, says he recently told a Republican lobbyist desperate to hire Democrats that he had two options: "One is to go after [congressional] staff members who are thinking of leaving, maybe someone with tuitions to pay. The second is to overpay for people who weren't thinking of leaving."

Lobbying firms can gross multimillions-- Livingston takes in some $10.9 million a year--by winning annual contracts worth $180,000 to $600,000 from businesses, individuals, churches, universities, states and municipalities. Those clients are willing to pay because of the large sums of money that lobbyists can help them obtain from Congress. Earmarks, the targeted handouts that have dramatically expanded over the past decade, now total in the tens of billions a year. And everyone wants a piece. "The key thing for me," says a Democratic lobbyist at a top K Street firm, "is don't miss the moment. It's a big opportunity here."

All that money will be working against Pelosi's link-breaking efforts. The Speaker's proposed rule changes would ban lobbyist-paid meals, gifts and travel for lawmakers of the sort that made superlobbyist Jack Abramoff a household name. She also proposes to double to two years the cooling-off period during which former staff members are barred from lobbying their ex-bosses. And Pelosi has pledged to open the earmarking process to public scrutiny so that tax money could no longer be funneled secretly to special interests. Reform-minded Republican Representative Jeff Flake of Arizona says the Democrats' plans, if fully implemented, would in fact be "definitive" and "preferable" to the changes the G.O.P. pushed through Congress in the wake of the Abramoff scandal.

But even if Pelosi delivers the particulars of what she has so far pledged, it's not exactly a revolution she's offering. The gifts, free meals and travel she proposes to ban are largely symbolic perks to lawmakers. Serious oversight, of the kind proposed by some reformers, would include a new office of public integrity and an independent investigator to shine a light on greedy congressional rule breakers. And Pelosi's promised transparency on earmarks is a step down from Democratic campaign vows to ban earmarks sponsored by a lawmaker if the spending benefits the member, his or her spouse, relatives or firms that employ any of them. What's more, Pelosi has tapped Wisconsin's David Obey, a 37-year veteran of the House who is the top Democratic appropriator, with drafting the actual earmark reforms, a troubling choice given that Obey was responsible for approximately 40% of the past earmarks under an informal system established by both parties, according to Scott Lilly, Obey's former chief of staff.

Some Democrats have openly resisted even mild reform. Representative Jim Moran of Virginia announced at a campaign stop in June that he would "earmark the [expletive]" out of spending bills if he got the chance. John Murtha, a Pelosi confidant, told centrist lawmakers the week after the election that he thought her reform measures were "total crap." Democratic lobbyists are doing what they can to fuel the naysaying. "Republican lobbyists have been writing legislation that needs to be reformed, so are we just going to cut off lobbying completely now that we have the chance to fix things?" asks a top Democratic lobbyist.

But the biggest obstacle to lobbying reform may be that in an electoral system almost entirely dependent on campaign donations, lawmakers and wealthy interests will always find a way to connect. Members of Congress know their job security depends on the money they raise before each election, and much of that comes from K Street. "The dirty little secret is that the biggest lobby in town is members of Congress lobbying us," says the Livingston Group's Moffett. Moffett says he bumped into a powerful Senator last spring. They sat on a bench overlooking the city and talked about Moffett's clients. After a few minutes, Moffett gave the Senator his card. By the time the lobbyist got back to his office, the Senator's campaign staff had sent him an invitation to a $1,000-a-plate fund raiser. "When you're holding the chum," says Flake, the Arizona Representative seeking reform, "you can't complain about the sharks."

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Mr. Gates' Options

With Iraq sliding into civil war, TIME looks at the tough choices facing the Pentagon's new man--and why finding a way out may require him to send more troops in.

Bob Gates is all things to all people in Washington these days. To the hard-liners who want to preserve what's left of George W. Bush's policy in Iraq, Gates is an ardent patriot, a determined anticommunist who thought the Soviet Union was an evil empire, who backed aggressive measures against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua in the early 1980s--and who during the first Bush Administration sided most often with a Defense Secretary named Dick Cheney.

To the new realists, who want to tear up this Administration's failing bid to bring democracy to Iraq and replace it with a strategy for an exit, Gates is a secret ally, an agent of change who rocked the CIA he grew up in by shifting it out of covert action and into open-source programs at the cold war's end--and then became a reformist president of Texas A&M, tossing a beloved football coach and reducing admissions.

If Gates had been talking to reporters instead of preparing for his confirmation hearings next week to become Secretary of Defense, he would have found all this amusing, if not absurd. The man with the Kansas-flat voice and a weakness for hiking, hayrides and roller coasters would have got a kick out of saying that both sides are right--and that absolutely none of it matters.

That would be the analyst in Gates talking, the man who developed a reputation during more than 25 years at the CIA and White House for making cold calculations not only about the intelligence he was poring over but also about how to choose his allies as he zipped to the top ranks of the CIA in record time. Now in a late-inning gig that no one expected--least of all Gates--he is about to take over the Pentagon and the day-to-day responsibilities for a war gone bad. He brings to the task one advantage: he was a key member of the special commission headed by former Secretary of State James Baker and former Indiana Representative Lee Hamilton that has been cooking up options for what to do next. Gates was involved in the military end of the commission's work--which means, says a colleague, that "not only will he understand the proposals, he will know the origins of them."

The problem facing Gates is that the options being considered may already be obsolete. The conditions on the ground in Iraq are deteriorating so rapidly that even the Baker commission is struggling to keep up, several well-placed national-security sources told TIME. October was the deadliest month yet for Iraqi civilians since the start of the war, and November seems destined to surpass it. A Thanksgiving Day onslaught by Sunni militants killed more than 200 Iraqis, wounded hundreds and spurred a round of Shi'ite reprisals. As the Iraqi capital erupted in another frenzy of sectarian violence, the U.S. lost eight service members in a span of six days, bringing its death toll to nearly 2,900.

Although Baker has said the commission will develop its proposals by consensus, there were signs last week that the group had hit some speed bumps. Sources say renewed pressure from both political flanks in the U.S. is making it difficult for the commission's center to hold. Emboldened by their takeover of Congress, Democrats have sent unmistakable signals that they favor some movement, if not reduction, of forces at the earliest possible date. Meanwhile, present and former government officials say Vice President Cheney intends to oppose any proposal that would make regional talks with Iran or Syria a key part of the U.S.'s Iraq strategy, even though Baker favors such an opening. As the commission broke for Thanksgiving, the partisan pincer movement was beginning to provoke some talk of stalemate. "The impulse toward consensus has diminished somewhat," a close panel observer told TIME. "Everything that is happening--the election, the postelection, the situation in Baghdad--makes it more difficult."

Baker and Hamilton held dozens of listening sessions this summer and fall, but members for the most part were careful not to stake out their positions. With a tentative mid-December deadline just a couple of weeks away, the decision-making process is just beginning. Commission members, said a close adviser, "are just now trying to make sense of what they heard, what the choices are and who stands where on those choices." While a Baker-led deal is still a good bet, several sources said, the odds that the commission will be unable to provide a clear user's guide for cleaning up Iraq are narrowing. And that means Gates may need to sort out the options on his own.

So, what are they? No matter who is running the tabletop exercise, the choices are almost always the same. And practically the only thing everyone agrees on is that none are great. Here are the big four:

Get out fast. This option is the most tantalizing--and least likely--of all those under consideration by the armies of experts trying pick the Iraqi lock. While some Democrats, like Senator Barack Obama, have called on Bush to begin troop withdrawals within four to six months, there is almost no support for the idea within the Administration. The biggest problem is that the Iraqi army isn't ready to take over. U.S. Central Command boss John Abizaid told Congress two weeks ago that none of the Iraqi combat units are ready to operate independently of U.S. forces, and he says it will be a year to 18 months before the army is fully operational.

Without an army to keep the peace, a quick withdrawal would doom the country to chaos at best, and several years of violent civil war at worst. The balance of power inside Iraq is such that a withdrawal in the short term would strengthen the Administration's other nemesis in the region, Iran, at a time when Tehran is ignoring the world's objections and is suspected of steaming ahead with plans to build a nuclear bomb. "If the U.S. withdraws, Iran takes over," says Medhi al-Hafedh, one of Iraq's most respected politicians. "The Americans have to ask themselves if such an outcome is acceptable to them." So far, at least, the answer is no.

Surge forward. Among some active and retired generals, as well as some officers inside Baghdad's Green Zone, there is support for the idea of a temporary surge--boosting U.S. troops levels by 20,000 to 30,000 to stabilize the country. Under this plan, the extra U.S. forces would be deployed to try to quell the sectarian slaughter in Baghdad as well as subdue the jihadists of Anbar province. It is a step that, almost everyone agrees, should have been taken years ago.

The question is whether it is simply too late. There is, for starters, the zero-sum problem. Yes, the more troops we send, the more stability we can buy. But when the troops are withdrawn, instability will return. The second problem is logistics. The U.S. does not have the kinds of reserves that would allow it to beef up its Iraq forces for very long without a further decline in readiness, morale and troop retention. The Army's brigade combat teams are already ragged from fighting two wars; speeding their rotations back into battle would put some units at unacceptable risk. The new Marine Corps commandant said in effect last week he could not maintain the current "operating tempo" without increasing the corps' size--something the Bush Administration has opposed.

Even if the troops were available, there are formidable political barriers to sending them. The Democrats have made it clear that the idea is a nonstarter. While that sentiment could change if Baker and Hamilton support a surge, Abizaid has said he opposes more troops because it would discourage Iraqis from taking responsibility for their own security. "Iraqis will decide Iraq's future," says Major General William Caldwell, the top Army spokesman in Iraq. "Additional coalition troops may produce short-term effects, and we may execute that option, but they are not a long-term solution."

Train and retreat. Quietly gaining favor in military circles, this approach is designed to balance the need for more U.S. forces with a desire to decrease the rate of U.S. casualties. Here's how it would work in theory. First, Washington would boost the number of troops in Iraq and, more specifically, increase the number of G.I.s on military-training teams. The goal is to get the Iraqi army--which is beset by a weak officer corps, weapon shortages and an almost total inability to move around--ready to take over the country as the Americans start to pull out.

If all goes as planned, the U.S. could reduce troops levels as much as 60% within a year. Even if that were possible, "train and retreat" still envisions leaving some 50,000 U.S. troops in Iraq for years. These forces would be dispersed into four or five large garrisons or cantonment zones, far from urban areas. While U.S. troops patrolled the perimeter and guarded against mortar attacks from outside, Iraqi recruits would be trained inside. "You train 'em up and push 'em out," says a well-placed Baker-commission source. "That's what's happening."

No one knows whether, with all the military trainers in the world, the Iraqis will ever be ready to take on the militias. But the plan has political advantages. It relieves some of the pressure for withdrawals but boosts the overall footprint temporarily. Abizaid told lawmakers he is considering the "repositioning of forces in different ways," something Bush has hinted at as well. "It's a face-saver," says a foreign policy expert who has been involved in the Baker commission from the start. "It says, Let's go in hard, and if we can't solve Baghdad, we're going in the other direction."

Dig in. Although the military and political establishments are desperate for a new approach in Iraq, it's also possible that little will change. If the Baker commission falters or political stalemate ensues after the group reports, the U.S. may well keep troop levels the same, continue training Iraqis--and hope for the best. Sticking it out is the preferred course not just of the Commander in Chief but also of many of the top generals who report to him. To them, Iraq remains a fight that can be won--as long as political support for the enterprise doesn't bottom out completely. "I believe in the mission," says Lieut. General Peter Chiarelli, commander of the coalition forces, who ends his second tour of duty in Iraq this month. "It is what it is, and it's not going to lend itself to a timetable."

It is difficult to say where Gates will come down among these options. His years working for Bush's father can be read two ways. Gates often took the hardest line in internal debates about how to manage the end of the cold war, pushing for radical change when the President; his top adviser, Brent Scowcroft; and Baker, then Secretary of State, favored more moderate steps. As the U.S.S.R. teetered on the brink of collapse, Gates (along with Cheney) usually argued for the fastest route to bring it about. They almost always lost out to Baker and Scowcroft, who argued that the Gates-Cheney approach was bad policy and worse politics. Gates can be bold, but bold isn't always wise.

That instinct helps explain why Gates thinks of himself as a transformational leader. After the CIA missed the fall of the Soviet Union, Gates launched reforms of 14 parts of the agency's operations, from analysis to satellite imagery to language study. Although not all these reforms bore fruit, CIA spending on Soviet collection and analysis shrank from 60% of its budget to less than 15%. Gates tried the same thing at Texas A&M, a school with an almost stubborn resistance to change--ending admissions preference for children of alumni, hiring hundreds of new faculty members and firing veteran football coach R.C. Slocum.

Still, compared with what waits for Gates, those challenges were small. He will probably follow Baker's lead in emphasizing regional diplomacy and will support any commission proposal to open direct talks with Damascus and Tehran. But that will immediately put him at odds with Cheney. One who has worked at Gates' side says the old analyst in Gates will overrule the old ideologue. "He knows that you cannot solve this problem within the four corners of the country," said this former hand. "It's going to take a regional approach. I don't think he's going to look for the most graceful way to exit. That won't be his approach."

The last time Gates faced a confirmation hearing, he took his son Brad to the Blue Ridge Mountains for a weekend of camping. He said later that was "better preparation for the battle that was about to begin" than anything else he could have done. But the battles he faces now are more likely to be with his new bosses at the White House--and perhaps with his own instincts. The Bush team has only a limited amount of time to decide what to do about Iraq. Sooner rather than later, Bob Gates will cease being all things to all people.

With reporting by With reporting by Mike Allen, SALLY B. DONNELLY, Elaine Shannon, MARK THOMPSON, Douglas Waller / Washington, Aparisim Ghosh, Mark Kukis / Baghdad

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Today in history - Nov. 27

The Associated Press

Today is Monday, Nov. 27, the 331st day of 2006. There are 34 days left in the year.

Today's Highlight in History:

On Nov. 27, 1978, San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and City Supervisor Harvey Milk, a gay-rights activist, were shot to death inside City Hall by former supervisor Dan White.

On this date:

In 1701, astronomer Anders Celsius, inventor of the Celsius temperature scale, was born in Uppsala, Sweden.

In 1901, the U.S. Army War College was established in Washington.

In 1910, the Pennsylvania Railroad began service at New York's Pennsylvania Station.

In 1942, during World War II, the French navy at Toulon scuttled its ships and submarines to keep them out of the hands of the Nazis.

In 1945, Gen. George C. Marshall was named special U.S. envoy to China to try to end hostilities between the Nationalists and the Communists.

In 1953, playwright Eugene O'Neill died in Boston at age 65.

In 1970, Pope Paul VI, visiting the Philippines, was slightly wounded at the Manila airport by a dagger-wielding Bolivian painter disguised as a priest.

In 1973, the Senate voted 92-3 to confirm Gerald R. Ford as vice president, succeeding Spiro T. Agnew, who'd resigned.

In 1983, 183 people were killed when a Colombian Avianca Airlines Boeing 747 crashed near Madrid's Barajas airport.

In 1989, 107 people were killed when a bomb blamed by police on drug traffickers destroyed a Colombian jetliner.

Ten years ago: A federal judge blocked enforcement of a California initiative to dismantle affirmative action, saying civil rights groups had a "strong probability" of proving it unconstitutional. Evan C. Hunziker, an American jailed by North Korea on spy charges, was set free, ending a three-month ordeal.

Five years ago: Afghan factions opened power-sharing talks outside Bonn, Germany.

One year ago: Doctors in France performed the world's first partial face transplant on a woman disfigured by a dog bite; Isabelle Dinoire received the lips, nose and chin of a brain-dead woman in a 15-hour operation. Actress Jocelyn Brando, older sister of Marlon Brando, died in Santa Monica, Calif., at age 86. Joe Jones, who sang the 1961 hit "You Talk Too Much," died in Los Angeles at age 79.

Today's Birthdays: Actor James Avery is 58. TV host Bill Nye ("Bill Nye, the Science Guy") is 51. Actor William Fichtner is 50. Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg is 49. Rock musician Charlie Burchill (Simple Minds) is 47. Rock musician Charlie Benante (Anthrax) is 44. Rock musician Mike Bordin (Faith No More) is 44. Actor Fisher Stevens is 43. Actress Robin Givens is 42. Actor Michael Vartan is 38. Rapper Skoob (DAS EFX) is 36. Rapper Twista is 34. Actor Jaleel White is 30.

Thought for Today: "Nothing is more despicable than a professional talker who uses his words as a quack uses his remedies." — Francois Fenelon, French theologian (1651-1715).

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