Mr. Bush also took issue with Mr. Kerry's argument, in an interview at the end of May with The New York Times, that the Bush administration's focus on Iraq had given North Korea the opportunity to significantly expand its nuclear capability. Showing none of the alarm about the North's growing arsenal that he once voiced regularly about Iraq, he opened his palms and shrugged when an interviewer noted that new intelligence reports indicate that the North may now have the fuel to produce six or eight nuclear weapons.

He said that in North Korea's case, and in Iran's, he would not be rushed to set deadlines for the countries to disarm, despite his past declaration that he would not "tolerate" nuclear capability in either nation. He declined to define what he meant by "tolerate."

"I don't think you give timelines to dictators," Mr. Bush said, speaking of North Korea's president, Kim Jong Il, and Iran's mullahs.

Among the 159 dead at the camp, 20 kilometres (12 miles) west of the Burundian capital Bujumbura and only four kilometres from the border were many women and children.

The attackers had shot, burned and hacked to death their victims, almost all of them Banyamulenge, Congolese Tutsis originally from Rwanda who had fled the Sud-Kivu region in the east of the DRC earlier this year during an uprising in the town of Bukavu.

Mr Annan said eyewitnesses had told UN peacekeepers that the attack on the Gatumba camp, in which 160 ethnic Tutsi refugees from DR Congo were murdered, had been carried out by Hutu extremists who had previously served in the Rwandan army and Mai Mai tribal fighters from DR Congo.

[edit]

There are concerns that the massacre has brought the central African region to the brink of war.

Q: What has been the biggest disappointment of your time in the White House?

A: I think the most disappointing thing has been that Washington is a harsh environment. It's very political, and it is very much dominated by special interests, much more so than I envisioned when I went to Washington. I pledged to work to change the tone in Washington, and I'll continue to pledge to work to change the tone in Washington. You know, when I think back on it, though, we've accomplished a lot even in a divided city.

Despite repeated government pledges to neutralize and disarm the Janjaweed, Human Rights Watch investigators in West and North Darfur were able to gather information on the militias’ extensive network of bases.

Sudan's minister for humanitarian affairs said Thursday his government has made "serious progress'' in improving security and humanitarian relief in the troubled region of Darfur, as a U.N. team prepared an assessment that could decide whether the African country would be penalized.

"The security situation has improved greatly. The delegation here has been enlightened with regard to the humanitarian effort,'' Ibrahim Hamid told The Associated Press after showing U.N. officials a dusty police outpost protecting some 43,000 people at the Abu Shouk camp.

"The delivery of relief assistance is now reaching those who need it by 100 percent. The police are now deployed in the areas ..."

The U.S. State Department is helping Sudan's embassy find a bank after its former bank closed its account and no other financial institution would open a new one, a department spokesman said on Thursday.

"We want to see the government of Sudan and the Sudanese Embassy be able to conduct their business here normally," State Department spokesman Adam Ereli said at a briefing. "And we're working on it."

President Bush welcomes the African Union's efforts to bring a lasting solution to the Darfur conflict by sponsoring political talks between the Government of Sudan and the Darfur rebels in Abuja, Nigeria. The Abuja talks began on August 23, and we understand that the parties to the conflict are participating at senior levels without preconditions. We strongly urge the participants to build on the cease-fire agreement to create a just resolution to the conflict that will ultimately allow the displaced to return to their homes safely and with dignity.

The President commends the African Union's deployment of cease-fire monitors and a protection force to Darfur. We welcome the deployment of 155 Rwandan troops to El-Fasher, Darfur and the commitment to deploy approximately 150 Nigerian troops by August 30. We hope this will help improve security and create conditions in which humanitarian assistance can be more effectively provided to the Sudanese people.

As the United States has said before, the Government of Sudan must halt all Jinjaweed violence and hold accountable those responsible for human rights violations. All parties, including the Darfur rebels, must respect the cease-fire and allow the free movement of humanitarian workers and supplies.

Melida Arredondo said her husband knew what was coming as three uniformed Marines approached their front door.

... when they told him Wednesday afternoon that his Marine son, Lance Cpl. Alexander Arredondo, had been killed in combat in Iraq, police say Carlos Arredondo simply snapped.
Arredondo climbed into the Marine Corps van parked outside his home and set it ablaze, suffering severe burns.

"This is his scream that his child is dead. The war needs to stop," Melida Arredondo, who had rushed home from work when she heard the news, said Thursday ...

... The father then walked into the garage, picking up a propane tank, a can of gasoline and a lighting device, police Capt. Tony Rode said. He smashed the van's window, got inside and set it ablaze, despite attempts by the Marines to stop him, Rode said.

Number of Vacation Days During Their 4-Year Term as President

(NOTE: Since Clinton and Reagan served two 4-year terms, their figure is an average of both terms)

Jimmy Carter (D) ............... 79 Days

Ronald Reagan (R) ............. 167 Days

George H. W. Bush (R) ....... 543 Days

Bill Clinton (D) .................. 152 days

George W. Bush (R) ........... 375 days*

* - vacation for the remainder of Bush's term is projected based on current trends; Bush II had taken 250 days of vacation as of August 2003

Albert Hakim [Richard Secord's partner in delivering weapons to Iran and the Contras] had ordered [William Zucker, who managed the Swiss bank accounts used by Hakim, Secord and Oliver North] in February 1986 to set up a trust fund for Oliver North's children. The purpose had been to quite Betsy North's complaints about her husband's long hours and low pay. If North had bowed to his wife and taken another job, Hakim and Secord would have lost their White House conduit into the lucrative arms trade and would not have been so well positioned if normal relations with Iran were restored.

Hakim had arranged for Zucker and Besty North to meet in Philadelphia in March 1986. After she described the educational needs of her children, Zucker made a series of transfers from the cluster of Swiss accounts to open a $200,000 investment in the name of "B. Button." The fund was calculated to provide, with accrued income, for the education of the Norths' four children. At Hakim's instruction, Zucker also attempted to persuade a Washington lawyer to arrange a real estate or other business arrangement that would allow Betsy North to receive commissions without having to do any work.

President Bush: "I'm George W. Bush and I approve this message."

Voiceover: In 1972, there were 40 democracies in the world. Today, 120.

Freedom is spreading throughout the world like a sunrise ....

Nearly 100 people have died -- 27 in a mortar attack on a mosque -- in the troubled cities of Kufa and Najaf during the past 24 hours, Iraqi officials said Thursday.

The mosque attack in Kufa also wounded 63 on Thursday and came just hours before the country's top Shiite cleric arrived in neighboring Najaf in an attempt to end three weeks of fighting.

Saboteurs have attacked about 20 oil pipelines in southern Iraq, reducing exports from the key oil producing region by at least one third ... The cluster of pipelines was attacked late Wednesday in Berjasiya ... The pipelines, which connect the Rumeila oil fields to Berjasiya, were still ablaze Thursday.

... Sekulow, ACLJ chief counsel, said the legislation is "well-crafted and legally sound, and we're confident that it will survive a constitutional challenge."

For starters, 254 swiftboat veterans say Kerry is a fraud; 14 say he's a hero. Partisan considerations aside, which would be more difficult to do: Get 14 liars to keep a secret, or get 254 liars to do so?

[edit]

[W]e're talking about 35-year-old memories here; 254 memories to 14 memories is what we used to call "evidence."

* reaffirmed GOP support to ban all abortions with no identified exceptions (such as rape or incest, or danger to the mother's life). The platform states that the GOP's "compassion" on this issue is demonstrated by the fact that the platform stops short of calling for the prosecution of all women who terminate a pregnancy.

* paid appropriate homage to the National Rifle Association and the "constitutional" right to bear arms (without bothering to explain why the Framers used the term "[a] well-regulated militia"), and fail to even mention the federal ban on assault weapons -- soon to expire and the president, who promised in 2000 to extend it, isn't lifting a finger to make good on that vow. (Annenberg Study: 64% of gun-owning hourseholds support the assault weapons ban.)

* opposed not only same-sex marriage, but civil unions that might provide gay couples with many of the economic benefits of marriage.

That's "open door" as in: "We've left the door open so it will be much easier for you to get the hell out of our party."

A preliminary State Department review of the violence waged in the Darfur region of Sudan has implicated government-backed militias in ‘‘a consistent and widespread pattern of atrocities,’’ including murder, torture, rape and ethnic humiliation.

The study, based on 257 interviews conducted in refugee settlements in Chad in the last two weeks of July, is part of the Bush administration’s investigation of whether the killing in Darfur amounts to genocide.

A displaced Sudanese woman holds her 17 months old malnourished child at a feeding center run by Action de Faime within Abu Shouk refugee camp in northern Darfur region of Sudan, August 25, 2004. REUTERS/Antony Njuguna

When Democratic National Chairman Terry McAuliffe accused President Bush this spring of being "AWOL," the Washington press corps saluted and started marching. ... The liberal press's message: Bush's military record is fair game. John Kerry's is not.

That...is turning into Kerry's "I-did-not-have-sexual-relations-with-that-woman" moment. The faux episode is not, as Kerry's how-dare-you bluster would have it, immune from analysis and judgment because to weigh it would somehow impugn his military service or his patriotism — in fact, it would do neither. It is not immune any more than President Clinton's infamously self-righteous declamation was, as his apologists maintained, beyond consideration because it was "just about sex." Christmas in Cambodia, like the 1971 testimony, is worthy of exploration because it is a barometer of basic honesty, raising the specter of a core lack of conviction and authenticity — one embedded in character, not developed over time.

Remember in the first debate, Al Gore said he had gone down to a disaster site in Texas with Federal Emergency Management Agency director James Lee Witt? Actually, it turned out that he had gone to that disaster with a deputy of James Lee Witt. As vice president, Gore had gone to seventeen other disasters with James Lee Witt, but not that one. The press jumped all over him. There were scores of stories written about how Gore had lied about James Lee Witt.

INTO THE HAMMOCK: With last week (in July) being the most trafficked in the history of this blog, it's a good time to take my annual month of August off. Thanks for being there ...

Now [anti-war sympathizer in 1968] Lew Koch senses déjà vu all over again in the loose talk among protesters of staging similar scenes at next week's Republican convention—talk that by putting the ugliness of the Bush regime on display, protesters thereby might end it. Koch's frustration is overwhelming. "What the protesters are saying is the same thing as the Weathermen: 'Bring the war home.' And you know what happens? You lose the war! They have guns. And they'll have the judges that Bush will appoint to the Supreme Court in the next four years."

It recalls the old philosopher's conundrum: When a tree falls in the forest, does it make a sound? If resistance against Bush actually plays into Bush's hands, is it really resistance?

A number of extremists with ties to the 1970s radical Weather Underground have recently been released from prison and are in New York preparing to wreak havoc during the Republican National Convention, The Post has learned.

A top-level source with extensive knowledge of police plans wouldn't disclose the names of the aging rabble-rousers but said a handful of them are already here and will play a behind-the-scenes role in attempting to disrupt the GOP gala.

"These people are trained in kidnapping techniques, bombmaking and building improvised munitions," the source said. "They've very bad people."

A top national security adviser to John F. Kerry today said that he made a mistake when he said the Democratic nominee probably would have launched a military invasion to oust Saddam Hussein if he had been president during the past four years.

On Aug. 7, Jamie Rubin told The Washington Post that "in all probability" a Kerry administration would have waged war against Iraq by now if the Massachusetts Democrat were president.

The Bush campaign, eager to portray Kerry as holding the same position as the president after the failure to find weapons of mass destruction, seized on Rubin's comments as evidence that the Republican and Democratic presidential candidates share similar views on the war, in retrospect.

I think the fact of the matter, of course, is that matter is regulated by the states. I think different states are likely to come to different conclusions and that's appropriate. I don't think there should necessarily be a federal policy in this area.

Vice President Dick Cheney, who argued during the 2000 presidential campaign that the issue of gay marriage is best left to the states, said Friday he would support a presidential push to ban same-sex marriage.

[edit]

"What I said in 2000 was that the question of whether or not some sort of status, legal status or sanction ought to be granted in the case of a relationship between two individuals of the same sex was historically a matter the states had decided and resolved, and that is the way I preferred it," Cheney said.

But "at this stage, obviously, the president is going to have to make a decision in terms of what administration policy is on this particular provision, and I will support whatever decision he makes."

With respect to the question of relationships, my general view is that freedom means freedom for everyone. People ought to be able to free -- ought to be free to enter into any kind of relationship they want to. The question that comes up with respect to the issue of marriage is what kind of official sanction, or approval is going to be granted by government, if you will, to particular relationships. Historically, that's been a relationship that has been handled by the states. The states have made that basic fundamental decision in terms of defining what constitutes a marriage. I made clear four years ago when I ran and this question came up in the debate I had with Joe Lieberman that my view was that that's appropriately a matter for the states to decide, that that's how it ought to best be handled.

Most of the questions from the crowd of 450 were supportive and respectful. But one woman sobbed as she told the vice president that her husband had been unemployed for several years after the pump factory where he worked closed with most of its jobs going abroad.

Lynne and I have a gay daughter, so it’s an issue our family is very familiar with. With the respect to the question of relationships, my general view is freedom means freedom for everyone. ... People ought to be free to enter into any kind of relationship they want to.

The question that comes up with the issue of marriage is what kind of official sanction or approval is going to be granted by government? Historically, that’s been a relationship that has been handled by the states. The states have made that fundamental decision of what constitutes a marriage.

Thousands have spoken out and talked about the human rights violations which have led to the human rights and humanitarian crisis in Darfur. But thousands feel fear of speaking out and scores of Sudanese, villagers and displaced, journalists, translators, lawyers and human rights activists, have been intimidated, harassed and even imprisoned. Sudanese journalists are muzzled while humanitarian organizations, journalists and missions allowed into Darfur battle against exhausting security restrictions. The clampdown on freedom of expression and information has prevented the majority of Sudanese from understanding what is happening in Darfur or debating solutions which might bring peace to the province.

Sudan's government agreed on Wednesday to allow more African Union troops into the Darfur region to confine rebel fighters to their bases, a possible precursor to disarmament, a top government negotiator said.

:: NOTICE FROM THE EMBASSY ::
This is to inform that the Embassy will be Closed starting from Monday, August 23rd, 2004 until further notice.

A woman holds her child as Sudanese child refugees receive treatment at the MSF hospital for malnutrition, August 24, 2004 in the Bredjine camp where about 30,000 refugees live. (Luc Gnago/Reuters)

Katie, from Washington, DC writes: Hi Kerri - What is like going from Olympic gold to the frantic world of Washington (especially the White House)? Were you able to carry any lessons you learned as a competitive athlete into politics?

Kerri Strug: It is so exciting living in Washington DC! I think it is essential for young people to work in DC for some period of time. There are so many things to do, see, and learn.

Alan, from Lubbock, Texas writes: Kerri--I feel like so many athletes end up not going to college to pursue their sport. Did you go to college and finish your education? If so--GREAT for you. Now you both are an Olympic Athlete and you have an advanced degree. did you do gymnastics in college if so?

Kerri Strug: I always thought I would compete gymnastics in college and kept my eligibility until after the Atlanta games. However, I decided to go professional after Atlanta and thus I could not except my scholarship from UCLA.

Allyson, from Westlake Village, CA writes: Hi Kerri Thank you for hosting "Ask the White House". I recently saw you on an episode of Trading Spaces. Did anything happen to your re-decorated room after the design team left? I often hear horror stories of rooms gone bad. Thank you.

Kerri Strug: Trading Spaces was quite an experience. I am very glad I got to do it with my close friend Olga. We were happy with the work that got done to our apartments and would do it all over again. However, it was a lot of work. It looks so easy on television!

I'm a minor shareholder in MoveOn.org. They're pretty liberal, I'm pretty liberal. They don't want Bush in the White House, I don't want him in the White House. They are often indecorous, I'm often indecorous. If this country had half as many political parties as there are major brands of refried beans, not every criticism of a politician would have to be seen as a tacit endorsement of the other. As you all know, I'm in an electorally impotent position and have already endorsed Libertarian sex machine Michael Badnarik.

John, a career Army officer I once met, was jumpmaster for his unit and was taking a few novices up for a drop. The flight was pretty rough, and, after a while, John called off the jump because of high winds. As the plane headed back to base and the pilot pulled off an unusually smooth landing, two of the neophytes got airsick. "How come you could take that rough flight but you couldn't handle the smooth landing?" John asked. "Well, sir," one trainee explained, "we've always jumped out of planes. We've never actually landed in one before." John just laughed that knowing laugh of a wise, professional soldier. To top it all off... fifty years later, they turned down John's application for VA benefits. Crazy world.

Senator Kerry carries shrapnel in his thigh [which is] distinct from President Bush who carries two fillings in his teeth from his service in the Alabama National Guard ...

Dividing along party lines, the four-member Board of State Canvassers fell short of the three votes needed to approve the petition from the group Citizens for the Protection of Marriage.

... The marriage group was denied a spot on the ballot despite collecting more than 460,000 signatures of registered voters, according to estimates by state elections officials. Only 318,000 signatures were needed.

Democratic Canvasser Doyle O'Connor said the board should not place an amendment before voters that would be "patently unlawful" ... To do so, he said, would violate other constitutional protections and "could never be enforced. We know the courts would set it aside."

Alan Keyes has upset the liberal game plan to crown law school lecturer Barack Obama as the new leader of blacks in America. Ted Kennedy and Hillary Clinton like Obama because he imitates their votes, but Americans like Keyes because he is straightforward about issues we care about.

John Kerry gave the enemy for free what I, and many of my, uh, comrades in North Vietnam, in the prison camps, uh, took torture to avoid saying. It demoralized us.

He dishonored his country, and, uh, more, more importantly the people he served with. He just sold them out.

29 percent of the registered voters in the nation -- more than 45 million people -- will find electronic touch-screen systems at their polling places...[Paper ballots] will only be available this year for the one-half of 1 percent of voters in Nevada. The rest of us will cast our electronic votes with a kind of leap of faith. We'll have no way of knowing what the machine has actually recorded, and we'll be forced to trust that the system (the officials, the voting company, the procedures, everyone and everything involved in the race) has done everything fairly. We have no choice, really, but to trust the system.

This is the worst humanitarian crisis this century. Failure to act will stain Bush's presidency, even as the failure to act in Rwanda has haunted Bill Clinton.

Eventually, we will have to deal with the reality of African immiseration, or failed states, plagues, and religious and racial wars will continue to make us less secure. But today, we are called to action by the dictates of humanity. How we respond to this crisis will be a measure of what kind of people we are and what kind of leaders we have.

When the janjaweed came, Abbas told me, her oldest child, a boy, had run ahead of her. She had carried her infant on her back, and she had taken one of her girls in each hand. This hadn’t left her with a free hand for either of her younger sons, five-year-old Adam Muhammed and seven-year-old Hassan Muhammed. They trailed behind as the Arab soldiers threw matches onto the roofs of the huts. An Arab militiaman suddenly grabbed the boys, and Abbas pleaded that they be released. The gunman warned her that if she didn’t shut up, all of her children would be killed. She backed away as instructed, but as she did so the man threw five-year-old Adam into the fire. “Mama, Mama!” he shouted, as the flames consumed him. Hassan, his older brother, briefly escaped his captor’s grasp, but as he ran toward his mother he was shot in the back twice and died instantly.

In a State Department press briefing of July 20, 2004, an official who refused to be identified by name declared, quite extraordinarily, that the only "firm US obligation" under the Genocide Convention would be to arrest a perpetrator of genocide who ventured onto US soil.

Do you wish your thing was 10 inches?

This can make your wish come true.

We're sure that you have no doubt who we'll be voting for in November. But you should also know that we would be voting for our Dad in this election even if he had not raised us, loved us, tutored us, coached us, and even listened to a few excuses from us for late curfews. We have been privileged to know our President personally and we know he is the right person to lead our country - especially when there are so many important issues at stake.

Our Dad has qualities that are needed in a good President - loyalty, humor (embarrassing as it sometimes may be), compassion, and, most importantly, integrity. We're not the only ones who see it. In fact, our friends - from varying political backgrounds - are supporting our Dad in November. Not only because of his decisions to liberate the women of Afghanistan or bring freedom to the people of Iraq, but because during the last ten years they met a man whose title was Governor or President, but who was always happy to be known as "our Dad." He made everyone feel welcome and comfortable in our house (except for the occasional boyfriend) and our friends got to know him as a really good guy.

We know that when you get to know his record as President, you too will feel compelled to participate in this year's election - and hopefully get involved in the campaign, too. We know it can be hard to find time to think about politics. We just graduated from college and are perfectly aware that schoolwork, parties, and extra-curricular activities keep students busy, away from campaigns and voting booths. In the last election, less than half of 18- to 24-year-olds were registered to vote, and only 32% of them actually did vote. Sadly, many Americans our age did not take advantage of their right to vote.

We are asking you to get involved with this campaign not only because it is the most critical election of our lifetime, but also because we have the ability to positively change our future. Please encourage your friends to sign up on the campaign's web site (www.GeorgeWBush.com) and register to vote online. At the web site you'll also find a lot of information about how to get involved in our Dad's re-election campaign. It's an easy process, and it's the best way to have a say in this year's election.

Thanks for taking a few minutes to think about some big issues. This is a really important election, and we know that with your help our Dad will win in November.

Jenna and Barbara Bush

North Korea lashed out Monday at U.S. President Bush for turning "a peaceful world into a pandemonium unprecedented in history," and reaffirmed the communist nation won't attend working meetings ahead of planned nuclear disarmament talks.

Last week, President Bush referred to North Korean leader Kim Jong Il as a "tyrant," and said he had embarked on six-nation talks to convince Kim to disarm because the United States couldn't do it alone.

Monday, the North Korean government fired back with its own volley of words, aimed directly at President Bush. Calling Mr. Bush "a political imbecile bereft of even elementary morality as a human being and a bad guy, much less being a politician," North Korea accused him of starting wars in Iraq and elsewhere "to commit genocide as he pleases."

"Bush is a tyrant that puts Hitler into the shade and his group of such tyrants is a typical gang of political gangsters," the statement said, adding that North Korea would increase its defense capabilities a "thousand times."

Being wrong about the war may have caused me mild embarrassment among some of my friends on the left, but it has most certainly not cost me entrée into the power salons of Washington ... the oddest outcome concerns not those who were wrong about Iraq, but those who were right. The political mainstream shuns them.

The Democratic nominee, you'll notice, is not Howard Dean, who opposed the Iraq invasion, but John Kerry, who favored it, and who now at least pretends to believe that his decision to support the invasion was sound. Walter Pincus, the skeptical hero of Howard Kurtz's admirably critical Aug. 12 examination of the Washington Post's Iraq blunders, is nonetheless described in that piece with condescension as a "white-haired curmudgeon" ...

... Patrick Buchanan, who editorialized against going to war in the American Conservative and elsewhere, remains a fringe figure even among conservatives.

The non-rehabilitation that seems most baffling and unjust is that of Scott Ritter, the former U.N. weapons inspector who argued until he was blue in the face that the United States would find no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Ritter's reputation was dealt a devastating blow by a November 2001 cover story in the Weekly Standard about his weird transformation from Iraq hawk to Iraq dove. Ritter's conversion remains a mystery (he's argued that his views never changed, despite a substantial paper trail to the contrary), and the Weekly Standard's Stephen F. Hayes offered it as exhibit A in his argument that Ritter could no longer be taken seriously.

But the article is a lot less persuasive today on this latter point than it seemed at the time. It began with Ritter saying, "Iraq today represents a threat to no one," which, Hayes opined, was an argument only Tariq Aziz would make. Three years later, of course, Ritter's assessment seems sound (assuming it did not include people then living inside Iraq), and Hayes' characterization seems idiotic.

... if those of us who thought Iraq possessed chemical and biological weapons are to escape censure, minimal fairness demands that those who said Iraq did not possess these weapons be accorded some belated respect. But with very few exceptions (the Boston Globe is one), the press in the United States continues to treat Ritter as either a leper or a clown.

We're in the middle of simultaneous wars against terrorism and insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the outcomes are anything but certain. To help fight these wars, Congress passed a gigantic $416 billion appropriations bill for the Department of Defense in July, which President Bush signed into law on Aug. 5. The measure, the president declared, ensures that "our armed forces have every tool they need to meet and defeat the threats of our time."

Well, not exactly.

[edit]

Legislators have amply demonstrated that what they're really interested in is raising and providing some home-state pork to impress voters in an election year. To that end, they have busied themselves with squeezing funds for war essentials such as training, weapons maintenance and spare parts -- things troops in combat need more, not less, of -- to send extra dollars their constituents' way.

[edit]

In parts of the bill that no one talked about, the Armed Services Committee raided the accounts that support combat readiness. Specifically, the committee cut Army depot weapons maintenance by $100 million (just when the repair backlog from the wars has grown to unmanageable proportions), and it removed $1.5 billion from the services' "working capital funds" for transportation and consumables (e.g. helicopter rotor blades, tank tracks, spare parts, fuel, food and much more). In one unseemly move, the committee also cut from one account $532 million for civilian repair technicians activated to support the deployed forces, claiming the money should have been credited elsewhere in the bill. But then it failed to add the money where it said it belonged.

In another feat of legislative trickery, the committee cut another $1.67 billion throughout the bill in anticipation of lower inflation in 2005 -- a pretense at a savings that OMB said in written comments to the committee "do[es] not exist."

[edit]

By the time Congress had finished with the appropriations measure on July 22, I counted $4.534 billion in reductions, mostly buried in the General Provisions section in the back of the bill. Ostensibly labeled as "unobligated balances," "general reductions," "excessive growth," "adjustments" and savings due to "management improvements," these were simply offsets to accommodate the $8.9 billion pork invoice the appropriators wrote. That more than $2.8 billion of these cuts came in military pay and the Operations and Maintenance budgets that support soldiers' salaries, training, spare parts, weapons maintenance and military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan shows where the committee's real priorities lay.

The sheikh accused by the United States of co-ordinating Janjaweed militiamen has admitted that he was "appointed" by Sudan's government to recruit Arab tribesmen to "defend their land".

The United Nations Security Council is unlikely to impose heavy sanctions on Sudan, even if Khartoum fails to meet the body's demands to rein in marauding militiamen in Darfur.

The frustration was audible in former White House official John Prendergast's voice as he blamed the United Nations for "compromising" efforts to stop the "slow motion ethnic cleansing" taking place in Darfur.

Prendergast, who is a special adviser to the Brussels-based International Crisis Group (ICG), worked as the National Security Council adviser for Africa in the Clinton White House. He spoke August 18 on a panel on the humanitarian crisis in Sudan sponsored by the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS).

Unfortunately, he told the panel, at the UN "high level officials from all over the world continue to talk very passionately but act very timidly, and the Darfurian people continue to perish. And we're going to see those numbers increase dramatically, principally, as has been predicted for months," with the arrival of the diseases borne on the flood waters from the seasonal rains.

No reasonable world order can tolerate a serially genocidal regime that rules only by virtue of ruthless survivalism. Yet this is what the United Nations appears prepared to do.

Europeans cannot criticize the United States for waging war in Iraq if they are unwilling to exhibit the moral fiber to stop genocide by acting collectively and with decisiveness. President Bush was wrong to go into Iraq unilaterally when Iraq posed no danger to the United States, but we were right to demand accountability from Saddam. We are also right to demand accountability in Sudan. Every day that goes by without meaningful sanctions and even military intervention in Sudan by African, European and if necessary U.N. forces is a day where hundreds of innocent civilians die and thousands are displaced from their land. Every day that goes by without action to stop the Sudan genocide is a day that the anti-Iraq war position so widely held in the rest of the world appears to be based less on principle and more on politics. And every day that goes by is a day in which George Bush's contempt for the international community, which I have denounced every day for two years, becomes more difficult to criticize.

Now is the time for the world community to act if they are serious about encouraging an enlightened leadership role for the United States. My challenge to the U.N. and Europe is simple: if you don't like American diplomacy under George Bush, then do something to show those of us in opposition here in the U.S. that you can behave in such a way that unilateralism is not necessary.