Unleashing CSIS
National Post
Monday, February 02, 2004
For years, security and spy agencies, including the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service (CSIS), have claimed they were unable to locate the family of Ahmed Said Khadr, a suspected senior al-Qaeda member known in international intelligence circles simply as "al-Kanadi," the Canadian. After being in Pakistan only a matter of days, however, the National Post's own Stewart Bell recently managed to track down the female members of the Khadr clan and arranged a candid interview with them.

So why couldn't CSIS do the same? Because Canada's timid political leaders refuse to permit its agents to deploy much beyond our own borders (or to carry guns and participate in high-speed chases for that matter).
International terrorists operate within Canada in large numbers -- representing perhaps 50 terrorist organizations. These terrorists have no respect for our borders. Yet our politically correct leaders refuse to unleash many Canadian spies into the world's hot spots to collect information that might foil attacks here at home for fear of offending other countries' sovereignty, even though those countries themselves are often state sponsors of terrorism.
The Khadrs might be called Canada's First Family of Terrorism, and it is something of an embarrassment that CSIS has not been able to do more to track down its members. "Al-Kanadi," whom Pakistani security forces are certain they killed during a raid on an al-Qaeda compound last October, was a terror suspect long before 9/11. Mr. Khadr emigrated to Canada from Egypt in the 1970s, where he is believed to have been a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, a radical fundamentalist group that was the precursor to al-Jihad, the Egyptian wing of al-Qaeda. He studied computer engineering at the University of Ottawa and worked for Bell Northern Research before moving to Pakistan to raise money for refugees of the Soviet-Afghan war and, many suspect, al-Qaeda.
In 1995, Mr. Khadr was arrested in Pakistan on suspicion of financing the bombing of the Egyptian embassy in Islamabad by al-Jihad. But he was released when then-prime minister Jean Chretien intervened on his behalf with Pakistan's government -- another less-than-proud moment in the history of Canadian counter-terrorism policy.
During Mr. Bell's interviews in Islamabad, Mr. Khadr's daughter Zaynab admitted that her family and Osama bin Laden's were fast friends, often socializing together and inviting each to the other's family celebrations. She also freely admitted that her father, accompanied by bin Laden, frequently took large sums of money into Afghanistan from his relief agency in Pakistan during the 1980s, a practice the Khadrs had previously denied.
Zaynab's 20-year-old brother Abdurahman returned to Canada in December from the American terrorist detention camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where he had been held since being captured in November, 2001, during the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan.

He had been taken while allegedly fighting for al-Qaeda on behalf of the Taliban. Seventeen-year-old brother Omar remains at Guantanamo and is accused of using a grenade to kill a U.S. army medic in Afghanistan in July, 2002, long after the war had ended. Fourteen-year-old Abdul, another brother, was captured by Pakistani forces in the same gunfight in which his father died. Only the eldest Khadr son, Abdullah, who is believed to have run an al-Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan, remains at large. To our knowledge, CSIS has played little, if any, role in the effort to kill or capture any of these men (though, given the secretive nature of their operations, it is impossible to say so with certainty).
Last October, in a speech to a security conference in Vancouver, Ward Elcock, director of CSIS, admitted more forthrightly than ever before that "events have increasingly required us ... to operate abroad." He further admitted CSIS "has been conducting operations abroad for many years," even covert operations. Unfortunately, the practice of overseas spying has long been frowned upon by successive Liberal solicitors-general and Cabinet officials, who prefer to think of this country as the international nice guy, the honest broker, the consensus builder. The agency's budget and staff were cut by more than one-quarter during the tenure of the Chretien government. So no matter how long CSIS has been conducting overseas operations, they cannot have been extensive: The service has neither the money nor manpower for foreign intelligence gathering and must rely on the Americans and the British for many of its facts and warnings.
It is not CSIS's fault that Stewart Bell could locate the Khadrs when it could not. By all accounts -- including Mr. Bell's -- the agency is full of bright, capable people. Given sufficient official encouragement and enough resources, there is no doubt CSIS would build a fine international intelligence network, one which would both do Canada proud with its professionalism and gather valuable information for preserving our national security here at home. All that is lacking is the political will. Paul Martin, it is time to give this country the intelligence service it deserves.
? National Post 2004

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
SISTANI'S WAY
Part 2: The marja and the proconsul
By Pepe Escobar

Part 1:Democracy, colonial-style

An extremely discreet and reclusive man, rarely seen in public, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, born in Iran's holy city of Mashhad, is the primus inter pares of four great marjas who lead the roughly 150 million Shi'ites spread around the world - including Iraq, Iran, India, Pakistan, the Saudi peninsula and Europe - through the Hawza, the so-called "Shi'ite Vatican" in Najaf, Iraq. A great marja - deemed to be infallible - is the equivalent to a pope: a "source of imitation" - not only as an interpreter of sacred words, but because of his intelligence and his knowledge, ranging from philosophy to the exact sciences.

Sistani rarely travels and spends most of his time reading, studying and receiving endless religious delegations in his small, Spartan study in central Najaf. His organization controls millions of dollars in donations, but the marja himself lives like an ascetic. He controls no army. He leads no political party and he harbors no political ambitions. Unlike other spiritual leaders, he never gives major speeches. He never holds press conferences and he never meets journalists - as Asia Times Online has found out in Najaf on many occasions. But any serious observer knows that all it takes is one word from Sistani for the Shi'ites to embark on a jihad against the Americans and forever bury the United States Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz-concocted scenario of a new era of American supremacy in the Middle East.

Like Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini - the now-deceased leader of the Iranian Islamic Revolution of 1979 - Sistani spent many years studying in Qom, as crucial in Iran as a holy city as Najaf is in Iraq. The Sistani seminary in Qom is still one of the most important in the Shi'ite world. According to insiders in Najaf, when Sistani speaks in Arabic, he still retains "a vague Persian accent". Khomeini spent 13 years exiled in Najaf and held a status similar to that of Sistani. But Khomeini never became a marja - because no living marja at the time appointed him as such. Another striking difference is that Khomeini was heavily supportive of Velayat-e-Faqih - or the primacy of religion over everything, including politics. Sistani flavors total separation between mosque and state - because he fears politics may pollute spiritual matters.

This leads to the crucial point: Sistani is not in favor of an Islamic republic in Iraq, a development that although an anathema in Washington, at the same time would immensely please the ayatollahs in Tehran. What Sistani wants is an Iraqi constitution written with no foreign interference, with no articles contrary to Islam. And he wants a secular government, but composed of good Muslims who respect Islamic principles. French expert on Shi'ism, Pierre-Jean Luizard, explains that Sistani essentially wants religion to be protected from politics. But in an occupied Iraq subjected to such extreme volatility, he cannot but express a political position - because his is the supreme word.

It may be pure malice to juxtapose a sayyed (descendant of Prophet Mohammed) like Sistani with a blunt, unsophisticated, alleged former counter-terrorism expert like L Paul Bremer, the US administrator in Iraq. But whatever the marja says in his small Najaf studio invariably drives the proconsul - working in a luxurious Baghdad palace formerly occupied by Saddam Hussein - crazy. Sistani's fatwas (religious edicts) are implacable: short and straight to the point. The marja has qualified the American "democratization" plans that Bremer seeks to impose as "not democratic enough", or worse still, "fundamentally unacceptable".

Sistani had no reason to support Saddam - who for three decades systematically persecuted and killed Iraqi Shi'ites. During the war in 2003, Washington interpreted Sistani's call for the Shi'ites not to oppose the American army as an endorsement.

But since April 9, 2003 another story has emerged: what most of Iraq's 15 million Shi'ites see is the military occupation of holy Islamic lands by an army of infidels. Sistani's fatwas are the succinct expression of their outrage.

Sistani may have been crucial in forcing the Americans to get United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan back in the game.

However, Annan did not react as the marja expected. Annan started by basically repeating the usual American excuses: there had been no census in Iraq in the past 45 years and all electoral lists disappeared during the war. Sistani stood his way, and Annan was forced to send in an UN exploratory mission to Baghdad. But Annan's priority remains the end of the occupation - and organizing "free, just and credible" elections only when security allows.

Last week at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Iranian President Mohammed Khatami expressed what hundreds of millions of Muslims are feeling all over the world: "The American administration invaded Afghanistan to find [Osama] bin Laden, where is bin Laden? The Americans occupied Iraq under the pretext of installing democracy and finding weapons of mass destruction. Where are these weapons and where is democracy?" Khatami also revealed how Iran is closely monitoring the confrontation between the proconsul and the marja: "Ayatollah Sistani demanded direct democracy, and the Americans refuse it.

That's what we have always proposed, one man, one vote." Also in Davos, John Ruggie, professor of international affairs at Harvard and an adviser to Annan, has been far from enthusiastic: "The Bush administration has not changed. The Americans' attitude does not incite anybody to cooperate with them."

One of Sistani's sons has already recognized that "the marja cannot resist the anti-American popular pressure forever". Ali Hakim al-Safi, one of Sistani's spokesmen in southern Iraq, clarified that "we don't want any violence. But if there is obstruction, the people will take its responsibilities". Asia Times Online has had credible information since late 2003 that Shi'ites of all factions are building a "secret army" to engage the Americans in case their democratic aspirations are not met.

Even with all its military might, the US has never looked so fragile and discredited in Iraq. An occupying power which refuses democratic elections using all manners of excuses is being judged by the Islamic world - and the international community - for what it is: a neo-colonial power. It has now been proved there were never any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq - much less the means to deliver them. It is now being proved the invasion of Iraq had nothing to do with introducing democracy to the Middle East.

The UN mission - "driving under the [Washington] influence" - may estimate that direct elections are impossible before the American-imposed deadline of July 1. US President George W Bush will then be left with two extremely unsavory options. The caucuses will proceed in Iraq's 18 provinces, and 15 million Shi'ites will smash - by any means necessary - the legitimacy of any government that might emerge. Or the Americans may hold direct elections - and in this case Sunnis, not only in the Sunni triangle - will upgrade their already ferocious guerrilla war to code red, because they will never accept losing power to Shi'ites. Jihad or civil war: these are the options ahead.

(Copyright 2004 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com for information on our sales and syndication policies.)

SISTANI'S WAY
Part 1: Democracy, colonial-style
By Pepe Escobar

Much more than George W Bush vs the-yet-unknown-Democrat-who-would-be-king, this is the ultimate confrontation of 2004. In one corner, the military might of United States power. In the other, the white-bearded, black-turbaned Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, 74, three wives, three sons and spiritual leader of 15 million Iraqi Shi'ites.

As things stand, the Bush re-election scenario for Iraq goes like this: the Medusa - Saddam Hussein - has been decapitated by Perseus - Bush - the war hero. On July 1 there will be a transfer of sovereignty to some sort of Iraqi authority. This would mark the official, theoretical end of the American occupation of Iraq. The stage will then be set for the first round of American troops to be sent back home. And as Bush's economic policy consists of little else than a successful Iraqi policy, non-stop spinning and propaganda will be enough to secure a second term in the White House.

The Sistani scenario does not involve campaigning, spinning or propaganda. Its political agenda is monothematic: free, direct, one-man, one-vote elections in Iraq as soon as possible. In case free, direct elections are deemed to be impossible - both by the occupying power and a mission to be sent in by the United Nations - "this does not mean that we will accept the principle of designation" of members of the future Iraqi provisional National Assembly, as Sheikh Abdel Mehdi al-Karbalai, one of Ayatollah Sistani's spokesmen, made it clear in Najaf over the weekend.

Things are changing fast in Mesopotamia. On April 9, 2003 Saddam Hussein's statue on Paradise Square in Baghdad was toppled. It was replaced by a monument which is now topped by a yellow flag inscribed with a Shi'ite slogan.

Time is running out - and the calendar is littered with pitfalls. By the end of February, the 25 members of the current Iraqi Governing Council (IGC) will have to adopt a law which will define the boundaries of the next transitional government, as well as the procedures to elect the delegates of the convention which will appoint the provisional national assembly. This law will be enforced until late 2005. By the end of March, another law will deal with the all-important issue of security.

And before May 31, the transitional national assembly must be designated.

This is the crucial issue. In each of Iraq's 18 provinces, the Americans want to impose an "organizing committee" of 15 members: five designated by the IGC, five named by provincial councils and five named by municipal councils of the five largest cities. These 250 indirectly-appointed people will then select the candidates for the national assembly, according to fuzzy criteria which have not been made public. And the new assembly will then name a new Iraqi government. It's fair to estimate that by applying this criteria, the Americans will be able to choose at least two-thirds of the members of the new assembly.

Shi'ites have seen through the scheme - and have been denouncing it with all their power. Street slogans in a series of demonstrations are clear: "We want a constitution written by Iraqi hands, not by the occupying powers or the IGC." Shi'ites also cannot accept that general elections would only happen around December 31, 2005.

It's no wonder the occupying power privileges a system of 18 regional caucuses to form the provisional national assembly. The whole process - and practically all the participants - are controlled by the Americans and by American-appointed Iraqi officials and formerly exiled politicians with absolutely no popular respect or support inside Iraq. The IGC was appointed by the Americans, and includes people like Ahmad Chalabi, a convicted fraudster in Jordan. Many Iraqis - Sunni and Shi'ite alike - call the IGC "the imported government". Heads of provincial and municipal councils were also American-appointed.

On January 12, Sistani said: "We want free and popular elections, not nominations." On January 16, he reiterated that "it's possible to have elections in the next few months with an acceptable level of transparence and credibility". Sistani even proposed as electoral identities the rationing cards held by practically all Iraqi families for the duration ofthe UN oil-for-food program.

The official American excuse for not holding direct elections - as expressed by Iraqi proconsul L Paul Bremer's minions in Baghdad - is lack of time. No wonder. The occupying power has not taken a single measure since last April to even give the impression it was interested in organizing direct elections. The July 1 deadline cannot be postponed because it falls four months before the American presidential election - and Bush and the neo-cons must as soon as possible, according to the ideal scenario, furnish proof to the electorate that the American military adventure in Iraq may be over soon.

Why is this 74-year-old ayatollah, an Iraqi born in Iran, so dangerous? He is dangerous because he has destabilized the three-way pillar supposed to assure an easily-pliable and controlled post-occupation Iraq: the provisional constitution, the electoral system and the security agreements through which the Americans wanted to permanently install, before the end of March, their military bases - all of this before handing over power to the new Iraqi government, an unknown entity.

Sistani could not have been more straight to the point. He bound 15 million Iraqi Shi'ites to his word when he said he is against any agreement which authorizes the presence of foreign troops in Iraq after July 1, 2004. So much for the neo-cons' dream of a "democratic" oil colony under an American military umbrella.

Now it's UN Secretary General Kofi Annan's call - and it was Sistani who put him on the spot. Sistani never agreed to as much as be in the same room with Bremer - although he met the UN's former special envoy Sergio Vieira de Mello. Sistani will only agree to a modified version of the the American plan if UN experts confirm the impossibility of organizing the elections.

Kurds and Sunnis favor the Americans in this case. The Kurds have made it clear they will not tolerate concessions to the Shi'ites unless they are able to preserve their autonomy. Sunnis are afraid at the prospect of losing the power they have exercised in Iraq since the 1920s.

There are 13 Shi'ites in the IGC. Already despised by the majority of the Iraqi population, the IGC may well implode as it is squeezed between Bremer's agenda and Sistani's free election calls. The IGC is now betting everything on Annan's mediation.

More interesting is the Shi'ite reaction outside the IGC - reflecting the opinion of the poorest of the poor in Iraq. Popular firebrand mullah Muqtada al-Sadr - Sistani's young rival - says he is against any UN role because "the UN is a servant of the United States".

Bush and his neo-conservative entourage did everything in their power to bypass the UN to get inside Iraq. Now they need the UN to get out. But it's not the UN that holds the magic key. It is Grand Ayatollah Sistani. If he issues a fatwa (religious edict) condemning the caucuses and the future, indirectly-appointed national assembly, 15 million Shi'ites will follow - and whatever government chosen indirectly will be considered a fake. Sistani has also made it very clear that only a government chosen by free, direct elections will have the legitimacy to negotiate the crucial issue with the Americans: when the occupying troops will actually leave.

But what do Sistani and the Shi'ites ultimately want? It is not a theocratic state modelled on Iran, where the principle of Velayat-e-Faqih - politics subordinated to religion - is paramount. They want a democracy, with Shi'ite politicians holding most of the levels of power - something consistent with the fact that Shi'ites make up 62 percent of the national population.

And crucially, they want no political involvement by Islamic clerics. But no one in Washington seems to be listening.


(Copyright 2004 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com for information on our sales and syndication policies.)


Pakistan loses ground in Afghanistan
By Syed Saleem Shahzad

ISLAMABAD - As the Taliban prepare for a crucial phase of their struggle against foreign troops in Afghanistan, a prelude for the final "spring offensive", the resistance movement has lost its support from Pakistan's establishment, under pressure from the United States.

The resistance, meanwhile, under a new commander, is regrouping in the remote Khyber Agency region of Pakistan, using the infrastructure of people and fortifications laid by Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda several years ago.

Asia Times Online has learned from insiders within the security administration of President General Pervez Musharraf in Islamabad that strategists have bowed to pressure from Washington, and will end all covert support for the resistance in Afghanistan.

Up to now, Pakistan has aided some commanders in Afghanistan belonging to the Hizb-i-Islami Afghanistan (HIA) of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the veteran mujahideen leader now largely responsible for orchestrating the Afghan resistance.

Pakistan's purpose was not so much to damage US interests, but to establish a counter-force to the growing pro-India presence along the Afghani border areas with Pakistan. Pakistan's support, though limited, did, nevertheless, work against the interests of the US. As a result, US intelligence tracked HIA recruiting offices in Pakistani cities such as Karachi and Peshawar, and pointed to various locations in Pakistan where HIA volunteers were being given training, money and arms. And for example, legendary Afghan commander Jalaluddin Haqqani ( who joined the Taliban and became a minister and who is now the main force behind the resistance in Khost and Paktia) visited Miran Shah in Pakistan several times, but authorities turned a blind eye.

Confronted with this, and coming at a time of revelations of some Pakistani scientists being accused of nuclear proliferation to Iran, among other countries, Islamabad had little option but to pledge to pull out all of its operators and their proxy networks from Afghanistan.

Musharraf, did, however, apparently manage to extract a concession from the US that coalition troops would increase their presence in Afghanistan in areas where warlords are hand-in-glove with the Indian establishment. For example, Pakistan wants more International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) troops in Jalalabad and Kandahar, where warlords associated with the anti-Pakistan former Shura-i-Nazaar and the Northern Alliance are active. The US leads a 12,000-person force in Afghanistan.

Carry on in the Khyber
These developments come as the Taliban step up their struggle to include more suicide attacks. Asia Times Online was first publication to report this strategy (Taliban raise the stakes - Oct 30, 2003). These attacks are the prelude to a broader struggle that will start in spring in which the Taliban will attempt to retake the major cities in Afghanistan that they held before being ousted by the US in late 2001.

One British soldier of the ISAF was killed on Wednesday morning and three of his comrades wounded in a car bomb attack on an eastern Kabul highway. The attack occurred just a day after a Canadian peacekeeper lost his life and three others were injured in a suicide bomb attack in southern Kabul area. About 10 civilians, including a French aid worker, were also wounded in the two attacks.

In the latest unrest, an explosion near an ammunition dump in southern Afghanistan on Thursday killed seven US soldiers and wounded three other soldiers and an interpreter. The US Army central command said that the soldiers were working near an arms cache in the southern province of Ghazni. The cause of the blast is unclear.

For some time the US has focused on South Waziristan Agency in Pakistan as a hotbed of the resistance, where guerrillas hide and receive support from the local population between raids in Afghanistan. As a result, at US instigation, the Pakistan army has undertaken a number of missions to the region, but to date without major success in tracking down resistance ringleaders.

Now, though, it emerges that the real center of resistance action is the remote Khyber Agency in North West Frontier Province. Two mountainous areas here, Tera and Moro, which lie on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, have no roads and the local population is almost 100 percent behind bin Laden and the Taliban. Some years ago, bin Laden had a network of tunnels and underground bunkers built here, which the resistance is now using as hideaways and for the storage of supplies and ammunition as a source of most supply lines into Afghanistan.

Obviously, this region is known to both the US and Pakistani authorities - the problem is dealing with it. Clearly, the US cannot utilize its massive air strength in Pakistan as it did in ousting the Taliban from Kabul. And due to the terrain - and the completely hostile population - the Pakistani army is in no position to make an offensive of any significance. The use of helicopters would also be hazardous as they would have to fly low in the valleys, opening themselves up for ground-to-air missile attacks. According to Taliban sources, the resistance for the spring offensive is now under the command of Mullah Sabir Momin of Orugzan province. The battle lines are drawn.
(Copyright 2004 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com for information on our sales and syndication policies.)

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

Time for the Change, Again - Focusing on North Korea.
By Roger D. Carstens
Last month Amnesty International released a report stating that North Korea had publicly executed its own starving citizens for the crime of stealing food. The report's release coincided with another issued by the International Institute for Strategic Studies, which claimed that North Korea could produce four to eight nuclear bombs in the coming year, eventually manufacturing up to thirteen bombs per year by 2010. Considering North Korea's massive human-rights violations, its production of WMDs, its untrustworthy national government, and its ties to states that sponsor terrorism, isn't it time for the United States to start thinking about what a postwar united Korea should look like? After all, if the same logic used to justify action against Iraq is applied to North Korea, there's actually a more solid case for regime change.
In terms of human-rights violations, a review of Amnesty International's report shows a regime that is unwilling to live up to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. By starving its citizens, jailing, torturing, and executing those who desire their fundamental human rights, and restricting access to independent human-rights monitors, Kim Jong Il's government shows that it has failed to carry out its most basic responsibility: taking care of its citizens.
Concerning WMDs: In 2002, North Korea removed itself from the 1994 Agreed Framework -- a treaty designed to freeze its proliferation efforts -- and announced that it intended to restart its mothballed nuclear program. Not long after, North Korea revealed that it had a secret nuclear-weapons program, one that had been in operation while the country was still under the obligations of the 1994 treaty. Then, in January of 2003, North Korea withdrew from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). Unlike Saddam, who spent years trying to thwart international efforts to determine the intent and extent of his weapons program, Kim Jong Il is taking great pains to make sure that we know about it. Add in North Korea's chemical and biological-weapons arsenal, and its burgeoning missile program (over 600 Scuds in its inventory, including Taepo Dong 2 missiles capable of reaching the United States), and it doesn't take a rocket scientist to see that we won't waste much time hunting for WMDs there, post-regime change.
Unfortunately, by violating the 1994 Agreed Framework and by engaging in a strategy of deception, North Korea has proved that further negotiations are meaningless, as any treaty signed by North Korea is not worth the paper it's written on. The North Koreans are simply allowing us to make diplomatic overtures while they continue to build up their WMD program.
But perhaps most disturbing are North Korea's ties to states that sponsor terror. Evidence suggests that North Korea has sold ballistic-missile technology to countries that the State Department lists as sponsors of terrorism, namely, Iran, Syria, and Libya. If North Korea is willing to sell missile technology to these states, what is to stop her from selling nuclear technologies to them as well? A cash-strapped North Korea might even consider cutting out the middleman and selling WMDs or related technology to the terrorists themselves.
Those who would argue against a regime change in North Korea cite the military capabilities of Kim Jong Il's forces, specifically the artillery pieces that can range Seoul and the nuclear weapons that may already be in Kim's possession. They might also argue that U.S. forces are stretched thin and are unable to force an invasion against such a foe.
These arguments are dealt with quite readily by former CIA Director James Woolsey and Lt. Gen. (Ret.) Thomas McInerney, who argue that massive air power -- using stealth and precision weapons -- could effectively neutralize North Korea's antiquated artillery and destroy its nuclear capability. Such a campaign -- combined with a U.S./South Korean ground offensive -- would likely result in rapid victory.
And unlike Iraq, we will not have to look far for troop contributions in support of a post-war strategy: South Korea would be well suited to lead these efforts.
As Vice President Cheney told a gathered crowd of world leaders at the World Economic Forum in Davos last weekend: "There

comes a time when deceit and defiance must be seen for what they are. At that point, a gathering danger must be directly confronted. At that point, we must show that beyond our resolutions is actual resolve."
It is time to show North Korea our resolve.
Roger D. Carstens is a member of the Council of Emerging National Security Affairs.
http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/carstens200402020903.asp
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------