A Thousand Pardons

If you've come to the site using IE at a resolution of 800 x 600 the left hand column doesn't display properly(scroll down to see what it looks like and contains).

IE using 1024 x 768 doesn't have this issue..Higher resolutions are also okay. When I developed the CSS, it did render properly in IE at 800 x 600. I made a couple of adjustments..Minor, I swear, and now it's just bad.

Gecko engined browsers, Mozilla Firefox, Netscape 6 and newer render it properly at 800 x 600.

I'm terribly sorry for this inconvenience, and will have it rectified by 7/8 early in the PM. I'd work on it now, but due to my working late at night, I must get some shut-eye.

Again, I'm dreadfully sorry.

Todd

Krugman

Today's Krugman piece is pretty good. While it is his opinion of course, there are facts presented to support his(Krugman's) position.

I have held that this 'recovery' has largely passed the vast majority of Americans by. My measure of the robustness of any recovery after a contraction is how does wage growth compare against inflation?

As is likely to become the norm, while corporate profits boom, wages for working people have lost ground to inflation. This is, in no small part due to neo-liberal trade policies. This is commonly referred to as globalization.

No matter who is elected in November, this issue is going to prove to be amongst the toughest economic challenges.

Of course, regular readers of pure bs know that everything is temporal except for the damn environment! This is the one issue that needs to take center stage and stay there until we reach a global environmental homeostasis...Or all die trying. Damn it! Why can't anybody in either of the major political even begin to talk about the one issue that may cause the extinction of the human race if left unchecked? Is this not an important enough issue?

Sorry for the digression.

The best series I have heard on how the money really works, is Smithy's Wizards of Money. It is terrific. The website is new, so it doesn't have all the information about all the episodes. There are 22 episodes, each one indispensable, and often drawing on the subsequent episodes..So, it makes sense to listen to them in order. The old website's URL is: http://www.wizardsofmoney.org/indexold.html, and all the episodes are available for download from the A-infos page here. The A-infos project has a tremendous amount of 'not on CNN' news and programming, but the site is a bit awkward to navigate.

The series starts out with basic money tidbits about how money is created, and progresses all the way to how money interplays with environmental issues such as oil, and why the Hell we haven't signed on to Kyoto, to the future use of our national public lands and how Disney is looking at getting in on the 'eco-tainment' industry.

It's intelligent programming that everyone should be required to have exposure to..Try it. If you don't think it's the best economic series you've ever experienced, I'll give you a full refund!

Important tip: As A-infos is a bit bandwidth choked, it helps the download process tremendously if you use a download manger that splits the files into segments, and then combines them. Justin, at a developer's tale recommends the excellent Internet Download Manager. You'll want this utility even if you have broadband. Pure bs is on a 3mb/sec. connection, and the IDM really helps.

Now, before an astute reader informs me that even the Earth itself is temporal on a 'deep time' scale, I am aware of this fact :)

CSS Loaded - New bs

Tell me what you think?

New CSS stuff in the rh and lh columns..and less clutter.

This begins my crusade for 10 new link exchanges.

If you want to swap links, my email is listed in the lh column under the 'contact' sub-header.

Blogger Still Wonky

Okay. I have tried to update pure bs to v0.5, but Blogger won't allow me to publish my new template today. In preview mode, it looks to be quite an improvement.

Meanwhile, in 'free Iraq' it's still deadly, Mr. al-Sadr may get amnesty from Allawi, while he(al-Sadr) vows to fight on.

Illustrating just how quickly things evolve in 'free Iraq,' The Guardian is reporting that any amnesty announcement has been delayed. Jack Straw, the UK foreign secretary reportedly indicated British support for amnesty..No doubt waiting until after calling across the pond and getting the nod from Washington to make such an announcement.

It's a whacky world.

CSS Complete!

Well, the CSS for the blog is complete and renders properly in IE, Mozilla FireFox, Netscape 6, and the little browser that's bundled with Homesite v5.5

I'd try and publish it today, but a combination of too much sun, beer and the weird behavior of Blogger have lead me to postpone publishing until sobriety and Blogger are once again in harmony.

Once published, I'm going on a link exchange drive. My goal is for ten new links. I think that's readily attainable(I am almost always successful because I set the expectations bar low :).

More Site News and a Post

The new CSS is nearly done, and I'll be plugging it in tomorrow.

*****************************************

Brad DeLong was cited on Salon.com yesterday. Part of his post here was picked up by Salon.

"Is George W. Bush responsible for the fact that the employment situation is lousy? No. The economy is an ocean liner, but the president is not its captain. Presidents influence the economy. They don't control it."

"But are he and his administration responsible for the fact that the employment situation is as lousy as it is? Yes. He sold his tax cuts as employment-generating stimulus programs, while in fact they got only about half as much employment bang for the deficit buck as a reasonable program would have. Think of it this way: Suppose your insurance agent tells you you ought to get homeowner's insurance. You give your insurance agent $4,000 to buy homeowner's insurance. You then have a small fire. And your insurance agent then tells you that you're only getting half of the damage covered--that he only used half the money to buy insurance, and spent the rest buying his friends large flat-screen TVs. That's the situation were in: sold as jobs programs, the Bush tax cuts got us only about half as much insurance against a lousy labor market as a real job-promoting stimulus that cost the same in deficit terms would have generated."

That's how it's now shaping up - the 'recovery' has been great for corporate profits, while creating far fewer jobs than other 'recoveries,' and wages are losing ground to inflation.

The wage issue isn't likely to go away. Corporate America has but one goal: to increase shareholder value. All the rest is way down the list.

When the Fortune 500 can dangle the carrot of jobs here at third-world wages versus the stick of moving those jobs to an already third-world country, you bite the bullet. Neither prospect is palatable. It's almost a stick and stick approach. And that's if you're even given the option.

Then, once your job is 'outsourced' the same unaccountable corporate power will use the same techniques to further their profits and produce a whole series of labor forces vying for ever depressed wages.

Here's a snippet from the linked article:

It's unlikely that employees will get raises that outpace inflation over the next five to 10 years, said William A. Niskanen, former acting chairman of the President's Council of Economic Advisors during the Ronald Reagan administration.

"I don't see any substantial increase in average real wages for some time," said Niskanen, who is now chairman of the Cato Institute, a Washington research group. Niskanen and other economists cite global competition, which forces companies to keep costs down, shrinking union clout and continuing slack in a labor market with an unemployment rate of 5.6 percent, up from 4.2 percent when the last recession began in March 2001.

The disparity between pay and prices may keep President Bush from fully capitalizing on the economy's addition of 1.2 million jobs this year, the best five months of job growth since 2000, as he runs for re-election, said political analysts including Thomas Mann of the Brookings Institution in Washington.

"The stagnation in wages leaves open a big target" for Democratic challenger John Kerry, Mann said. In terms of pay, "a lot of Americans have been left behind," he said. "Kerry now has an opportunity to ask, 'Are you better off now than you were four years ago?' "

After accounting for inflation, wages and salaries have been growing less than a third as fast as they did after previous recessions, Stephen Roach, chief economist for Morgan Stanley & Co. in New York, said in a note to clients this week. The rise in pay this time is "far short of the nearly 10 percent gains that occurred in the first 29 months of the preceding six cyclical recoveries," Roach wrote. "This translates into a shortfall of $280 billion in 'missing' real personal income."

If you want to find out what's really going on, read the business press(that was from a Bloomberg piece).

Sure, there are cheerleaders in the business press, but you're far more likely to get at least some reporters with integrity. Remember, their constituency is doing very, very well.

Krugman on Pundits, Moore

I haven't been reading Paul Krugman lately.

In today's NYT, he states the obvious about the Punditocracy's fawning over Bush, and the other standard used to criticize Moore over his latest.

...There has been much tut-tutting by pundits who complain that the movie, though it has yet to be caught in any major factual errors, uses association and innuendo to create false impressions. Many of these same pundits consider it bad form to make a big fuss about the Bush administration's use of association and innuendo to link the Iraq war to 9/11. Why hold a self-proclaimed polemicist to a higher standard than you hold the president of the United States?...

Why indeed? It's abundantly clear that the pundits are echoing the sentiments of their paymasters.

The various sets of standards that pundits ascribe to their wide range of interests simply add more credence to the now all too obvious fact that the 'liberal media' is at best a myth. Pundits are - with a few notable exceptions - owned wholly by corporate giants. Thus, we consumers of media are fed a steady diet of opinion ranging from far-right to a sort of chewy-centered, smarmy moderate-right that is supposed to represent the loyal opposition.

I should point out that I'm not a fan of Michael Moore's. I am however, less a fan of those applying differing standards if 'circumstances' dictate.

Poland Claims WMD Buy Thwarted

Oddly, the U.S. claims the warheads impotent.

Not every U.S. citizen makes shit up to justify their actions after the fact.

..."the US military said that while two of the rockets tested positive for sarin, traces of the agent were so small and deteriorated as to be virtually harmless."

The U.S. military gets the pure bs Truthteller of the Day award.

Site stuff

Copygodd left a comment about "peak oil" after reading this entry.

His comment has moved me to make what is turning into a long entry. An expanded version of the linked-to-entry will be up either tomorrow or Sunday.

In addition, I am reworking the site's CSS. I have the right hand column finished, and am working on the LH column.

Again, expect that to be posted by no later than Sunday.

If you have any ideas as to how to make the site more user friendly, leave a comment.

New GYWO

*SPECIAL* Post-Sovereignty Edition!

Iraq, and The Cost of War

What are the two metrics that people traditionally use to tally the cost of war?

They're axiomatic, I think.

1) Casualties - the military's euphemism for deaths.

2) Raw dollars - at least here in the U.S. where the masses worship at the temple of the greenback(I am amongst the masses, although I'd like to believe that I am not so inured to the amassing of wealth - evidence supporting this belief are few indeed).

The Washington based Institute for Policy Studies along with Foreign Policy In Focus, a joint project of IPS and the Interhemispheric Resource Center have compiled a more realistic picture of the true costs of the Iraq war. The IPS has been called a 'liberal' think tank by the corporatist press corps elites. I have yet to see anyone refute their conclusions, and a web search turns up nothing substantive.

Paying the Price: The Mounting Costs of the Iraq War

Key findings:

I. Costs to the United States

A. Human Costs

U.S. Military Deaths: Between the start of war on March 19, 2003 and June 16, 2004, 952 coalition forces were killed, including 836 U.S. military. Of the total, 693 were killed after President Bush declared the end of combat operations on May 1, 2003. Over 5,134 U.S. troops have been wounded since the war began, including 4,593 since May 1, 2003.

Contractor Deaths: Estimates range from 50 to 90 civilian contractors, missionaries, and civilian worker deaths. Of these, 36 were identified as Americans.

Journalist Deaths: Thirty international media workers have been killed in Iraq, including 21 since President Bush declared the end of combat operations. Eight of the dead worked for U.S. companies.

B. Security Costs

Terrorist Recruitment and Action: According to the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies, al Qaeda's membership is now at 18,000, with 1,000 active in Iraq. A former CIA analyst and State Department official has documented 390 deaths and 1,892 injuries due to terrorist attacks in 2003. In addition, there were 98 suicide attacks around the world in 2003, more than any year in contemporary history.

Low U.S. Credibility: Polls reveal that the war has damaged the U.S. government's standing and credibility in the world. Surveys in eight European and Arab countries demonstrated broad public agreement that the war has hurt, rather than helped, the war on terrorism. At home, 54 percent of Americans polled by the Annenberg Election Survey felt that the "the situation in Iraq was not worth going to war over."

Military Mistakes: A number of former military officials have criticized the war, including retired Marine General Anthony Zinni, former commander of the U.S. Central Command, who has charged that by manufacturing a false rationale for war, abandoning traditional allies, propping up and trusting Iraqi exiles, and failing to plan for post-war Iraq, the Bush Administration made the United States less secure.

Low Troop Morale and Lack of Equipment: A March 2004 army survey found 52 percent of soldiers reporting low morale, and three-fourths reporting they were poorly led by their officers. Lack of equipment has been an ongoing problem. The Army did not fully equip soldiers with bullet-proof vests until June 2004, forcing many families to purchase them out of their own pockets.

Loss of First Responders: National Guard troops make up almost one-third of the U.S. Army troops now in Iraq. Their deployment puts a particularly heavy burden on their home communities because many are "first responders," including police, firefighters, and emergency medical personnel. For example, 44 percent of the country's police forces have lost officers to Iraq. In some states, the absence of so many Guard troops has raised concerns about the ability to handle natural disasters.

Use of Private Contractors: An estimated 20,000 private contractors are carrying out work in Iraq traditionally done by the military, despite the fact that they often lack sufficient training and are not accountable to the same guidelines and reviews as military personnel.

C. Economic Costs

The Bill So Far: Congress has already approved of $126.1 billion for Iraq and an additional $25 billion is heading towards Congressional approval, for a total of $151.1 billion through this year. Congressional leaders have promised an additional supplemental appropriation after the election.

Long-term Impact on U.S. Economy: Economist Doug Henwood has estimated that the war bill will add up to an average of at least $3,415 for every U.S. household. Another economist, James Galbraith of the University of Texas, predicts that while war spending may boost the economy initially, over the long term it is likely to bring a decade of economic troubles, including an expanded trade deficit and high inflation.

Oil Prices: Gas prices topped $2 a gallon in May 2004, a development that most analysts attribute at least in part to the deteriorating situation in Iraq. According to a mid-May CBS survey, 85 percent of Americans said they had been affected measurably by higher gas prices. According to one estimate, if crude oil prices stay around $40 a barrel for a year, U.S. gross domestic product will decline by more than $50 billion.

Economic Impact on Military Families: Since the beginning of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, 364,000 reserve troops and National Guard soldiers have been called for military service, serving tours of duty that often last 20 months. Studies show that between 30 and 40 percent of reservists and National Guard members earn a lower salary when they leave civilian employment for military deployment. Army Emergency Relief has reported that requests from military families for food stamps and subsidized meals increased "several hundred percent" between 2002 and 2003.

D. Social Costs

U.S. Budget and Social Programs: The Bush administration's combination of massive spending on the war and tax cuts for the wealthy means less money for social spending. The $151.1 billion expenditure for the war through this year could have paid for: close to 23 million housing vouchers; health care for over 27 million uninsured Americans; salaries for nearly 3 million elementary school teachers; 678,200 new fire engines; over 20 million Head Start slots for children; or health care coverage for 82 million children. Instead, the administration's FY 2005 budget request proposes deep cuts in critical domestic programs and virtually freezes funding for domestic discretionary programs other than homeland security. Federal spending cuts will deepen the budget crises for local and state governments, which are expected to suffer a $6 billion shortfall in 2005.

Social Costs to the Military: Thus far, the Army has extended the tours of duty of 20,000 soldiers. These extensions have been particularly difficult for reservists, many of whom never expected to face such long separations from their jobs and families. According to military policy, reservists are not supposed to be on assignment for more than 12 months every 5-6 years. To date, the average tour of duty for all soldiers in Iraq has been 320 days. A recent Army survey revealed that more than half of soldiers said they would not re-enlist.

Costs to Veteran Health Care: About 64 percent of the more than 5,000 U.S. soldiers injured in Iraq received wounds that prevented them from returning to duty. One trend has been an increase in amputees, the result of improved body armor that protects vital organs but not extremities. As in previous wars, many soldiers are likely to have received ailments that will not be detected for years to come. The Veterans Administration healthcare system is not prepared for the swelling number of claims. In May, the House of Representatives approved funding for FY 2005 that is $2.6 billion less than needed, according to veterans' groups.

Mental Health Costs: A December 2003 Army report was sharply critical of the military's handling of mental health issues. It found that more than 15 percent of soldiers in Iraq screened positive for traumatic stress, 7.3 percent for anxiety, and 6.9 percent for depression. The suicide rate among soldiers increased from an eight-year average of 11.9 per 100,000 to 15.6 per 100,000 in 2003. Almost half of soldiers surveyed reported not knowing how to obtain mental health services.

II. Costs to Iraq

A. Human Costs

Iraqi Deaths and Injuries: As of June 16, 2004, between 9,436 and 11,317 Iraqi civilians have been killed as a result of the U.S. invasion and ensuing occupation, while an estimated 40,000 Iraqis have been injured. During "major combat" operations, between 4,895 and 6,370 Iraqi soldiers and insurgents were killed.

Effects of Depleted Uranium: The health impacts of the use of depleted uranium weaponry in Iraq are yet to be known. The Pentagon estimates that U.S. and British forces used 1,100 to 2,200 tons of weaponry made from the toxic and radioactive metal during the March 2003 bombing campaign. Many scientists blame the far smaller amount of DU weapons used in the Persian Gulf War for illnesses among U.S. soldiers, as well as a sevenfold increase in child birth defects in Basra in Southern Iraq.

B. Security Costs

Rise in Crime: Murder, rape, and kidnapping have skyrocketed since March 2003, forcing Iraqi children to stay home from school and women to stay off the streets at night. Violent deaths rose from an average of 14 per month in 2002 to 357 per month in 2003.

Psychological Impact: Living under occupation without the most basic security has devastated the Iraqi population. A poll by the U.S. Coalition Provisional Authority in May 2004 found that 80 percent of Iraqis say they have "no confidence" in either the U.S. civilian authorities or in the coalition forces, and 55 percent would feel safer if U.S. and other foreign troops left the country immediately.

C. The Economic Costs

Unemployment: Iraqi joblessness doubled from 30 percent before the war to 60 percent in the summer of 2003. While the Bush administration now claims that unemployment has dropped, only 1 percent of Iraq's workforce of 7 million is involved in reconstruction projects.

Corporate War Profiteering: Most of Iraq's reconstruction has been contracted out to U.S. companies, rather than experienced Iraqi firms. Top contractor Halliburton is being investigated for charging $160 million for meals that were never served to troops and $61 million in cost overruns on fuel deliveries. Halliburton employees also took $6 million in kickbacks from subcontractors, while other employees have reported extensive waste, including the abandonment of $85,000 trucks because they had flat tires.

Iraq's Oil Economy: Anti-occupation violence has prevented Iraq from capitalizing on its oil assets. There have been an estimated 130 attacks on Iraq's oil infrastructure. In 2003, Iraq's oil production dropped to 1.33 million barrels per day, down from 2.04 million in 2002.

Health Infrastructure: After more than a decade of crippling sanctions, Iraq's health facilities were further damaged during the war and post-invasion looting. Iraq's hospitals continue to suffer from lack of supplies and an overwhelming number of patients.

Education: UNICEF estimates that more than 200 schools were destroyed in the conflict and thousands more were looted in the chaos following the fall of Saddam Hussein. Largely because of security concerns, school attendance in April 2004 was well below pre-war levels.

Environment: The U.S-led attack damaged water and sewage systems and the country's fragile desert ecosystem. It also resulted in oil well fires that spewed smoke across the country and left unexposed ordnance that continues to endanger the Iraqi people and environment. Mines and unexploded ordnance cause an estimated 20 casualties per month.

Human Rights Costs: Even with Saddam Hussein overthrown, Iraqis continue to face human rights violations from occupying forces. In addition to the widely publicized humiliation and abuse of prisoners, the U.S. military is investigating the deaths of 34 detainees as a result of interrogation techniques.

Sovereignty Costs: Despite the proclaimed "transfer of sovereignty" to Iraq, the country will continue to be occupied by U.S. and coalition troops and have severely limited political and economic independence. The interim government will not have the authority to reverse the nearly 100 orders by CPA head Paul Bremer that, among other things, allow for the privatization of Iraq's state-owned enterprises and prohibit preferences for domestic firms in reconstruction.

III. Costs to the World

Human Costs: While Americans make up the vast majority of military and contractor personnel in Iraq, other U.S.-allied "coalition" troops have suffered 116 war casualties in Iraq. In addition, the focus on Iraq has diverted international resources and attention away from humanitarian crises such as in Sudan.

International Law: The unilateral U.S. decision to go to war in Iraq violated the United Nations Charter, setting a dangerous precedent for other countries to seize any opportunity to respond militarily to claimed threats, whether real or contrived, that must be "pre-empted." The U.S. military has also violated the Geneva Convention, making it more likely that in the future, other nations will ignore these protections in their treatment of civilian populations and detainees.

The United Nations: At every turn, the Bush administration has attacked the legitimacy and credibility of the UN, undermining the institution's capacity to act in the future as the centerpiece of global disarmament and conflict resolution. The recent efforts of the Bush administration to gain UN acceptance of an Iraqi government that was not elected but rather installed by occupying forces undermines the entire notion of national sovereignty as the basis for the UN Charter.

Coalitions: Faced with opposition in the UN Security Council, the U.S. government attempted to create the illusion of multilateral support for the war by pressuring other governments to join a so-called "Coalition of the Willing." This not only circumvented UN authority, but also undermined democracy in many coalition countries, where public opposition to the war was as high as 90 percent.

Global Economy: The $151.1 billion spent by the U.S. government on the war could have cut world hunger in half and covered HIV/AIDS medicine, childhood immunization and clean water and sanitation needs of the developing world for more than two years. As a factor in the oil price hike, the war has created concerns of a return to the "stagflation" of the 1970s. Already, the world's major airlines are expecting an increase in costs of $1 billion or more per month.

Global Security: The U.S.-led war and occupation have galvanized international terrorist organizations, placing people not only in Iraq but around the world at greater risk of attack. The State Department's annual report on international terrorism reported that in 2003 there was the highest level of terror-related incidents deemed "significant" than at any time since the U.S. began issuing these figures.

Global Environment: U.S.-fired depleted uranium weapons have contributed to pollution of Iraq's land and water, with inevitable spillover effects in other countries. The heavily polluted Tigris River, for example, flows through Iraq, Iran and Kuwait.

Human Rights: The Justice Department memo assuring the White House that torture was legal stands in stark violation of the International Convention Against Torture (of which the United States is a signatory). This, combined with the widely publicized mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners by U.S. intelligence officials, gave new license for torture and mistreatment by governments around the world.

Well, there you have it.

Additionally, Phyllis Bennis of the IPS moderated a discussion with WaPo readers on 29 June 2004.

How accurate is this portrayal of the "mounting costs of the Iraq War?" I do not know. I do know that the Bush Administration and the Pentagon don't seem willing to address the cost issue. "Too many unknowns". True enough, but not even providing the citizenry with a broad range of cost estimates is disingenuous.

I think that the above cost picture is pretty accurate at this juncture. There is no way to know with certainty where the costs will go from here, but 'up' is historically the good bet during wartime.

Saddam in Court

List of Major Charges:

• Killing of religious figures in 1974.


• Killing the Kurdish Barzani clan in 1983.


• Gassing of Kurds in Halabja in 1988.


• Killing members of political parties over the last 30 years.


• The 1986-1988 "Anfal" campaign of displacing Kurds.


• The 1990 invasion of Kuwait.


• The suppression of the 1991 uprisings by Kurds and Shiites.

More specific charges to be filed later.

Let's see..How many of these actions did the U.S. offer tacit or direct support for, or turn a blind eye toward? A case can be made for all of them. Yes. Even Kuwait¹.

"This is a theater, the real criminal is Bush." - S. Hussein 7-1-2004

Saddam was, and is, a very bad guy. He is also largely a U.S. creation.

Let's not create any more monsters.

¹April Glaspie of the U.S. State Department told Saddam Hussein, "I have a direct instruction from the President to seek better relations with Iraq.. But we have no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border disagreement with Kuwait."

Source: http://www.chss.montclair.edu/english/furr/glaspie.html

Anonymous/Moneyed Arabs

Well, the anonymous author of Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror is anonymous no longer.

The Phoenix is reporting that Anonymous is one Michael Scheuer - an overt CIA employee. Scheuer is reportedly 'a 22-year CIA veteran who ran the Counterterrorist Center’s bin Laden station (code-named "Alec") from 1996 to 1999.'

A snippet from The Phoenix piece:

Public interest in the book itself isn't at all hard to understand: it's not every day that an active US intelligence officer publishes a work that disputes the Bush administration's assertions, holding that, among other things, bin Laden is not on the run; the invasion of Iraq has not made the United States safer; and that Islamists are in a campaign of insurgency, not terrorism, against the US because of US policies, not out of hatred for American values.

The book confirms the findings of a survey of "moneyed Arabs" conducted by the Wall Street Journal in the days following 11 Sept. 2001.

Immediately after the attacks, the WSJ had correspondents ask these "moneyed Arabs" - the WSJ's essentially two questions.

The first was, "do you have a favorable or unfavorable view of the U.S.?

Now remember, these aren't destitute, militant religious fundamentalists, these are the WSJ's constituency - people with lots of wealth. Approximately 70% of respondents had an unfavorable view of the U.S.

The other question was a follow-up. Why do you harbor animosity towards the U.S. The answers were essentially three, and widely held by those harboring 'unfavorable views' of the U.S.

The Arabs were most troubled that the U.S. supported repressive, undemocratic regimes in the middle-east.

They were also angry about the difference of policies regarding the Israelis and Palestinians. They were also frustrated that the U.S. wasn't able to help solve the Israeli/Palestinian issue.

Lastly, they were angry over the decade of sanctions against Iraq which resulted in hundreds of thousands of Iraqi deaths(remember, this was well before the Gulf War redux).

These were most often cited reasons for their unfavorable views of the U.S.

This is almost 'line and verse' the steady message bin Laden has broadcasting over the years.

There is no link, as this was only in the print version, and I can find no mention of the piece online. I have some audio that makes reference to the survey, but I cannot find it at the moment(I have over 800 hours of talks on disk, but I have it indexed rather poorly). You can trust me on this. The numbers and reasons for Arab concern are accurate. If I can find the audio, I'll upload it, and link to it.

Go ahead and read The Phoenix article. There is a lot of factual material that isn't widely distributed, as well as speculation about motives.

'They' don't hate us because of our freedoms. 'They' hate our foreign policy positions.

Update: I'm sorry that I didn't refer to "The Phoenix" as "The Boston Phoenix." It's a habit.