USA > History > 2010 > Politics > International (I)

A man steps carefully

through lifeless bodies piled outside the morgue

in Port-au-Prince on January 14, 2010,

following a devastating earthquake

that rocked Haiti on January 12.

Photograph: JUAN BARRETO/AFP/Getty Images

Boston Globe > Big Picture

Haiti 48 hours later        January 14, 2010

http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2010/01/haiti_48_hours_later.html

After Google’s Move,

a Shift in Search Terms

March 28, 2010
The New York Times
By JONATHAN STRAY and LILY LEE

HONG KONG — Chinese searches for politically delicate terms peaked the day Google stopped filtering its search results, but the government pressed on with a campaign to remove online praise of the company.

Searches for “Tiananmen,” “Falun Gong” and “corruption” increased by more than 10 times here on Tuesday, the day that Google began offering uncensored Chinese-language search results.

But searches for censored terms on Google’s uncensored Hong Kong search engine fell off quickly in the next few days in part because most Chinese did not rush to search for politically delicate material and also because the pages newly revealed by Google were still mostly blocked in China.

In tests over the weekend from several Chinese cities, users searching for “Tiananmen” or even the names of Chinese government leaders reliably found the site google.com.hk mysteriously inaccessible for a few minutes. The more frequently used Chinese search engine Baidu, which continues to censor its results, remained accessible no matter what users searched for.

“I heard that Google is leaving China. But I don’t care. Why should I? I’m fine with Baidu,” said Xiong Huan, 27, a software engineer in Shenyang. “And for now, there’s not much change on Google either, as long as you don’t search for sensitive info.”

Nonetheless, a significant number of people took advantage of Google’s newly unfiltered service on its first day of operation. There were about 2.5 million searches for phrases containing “Tiananmen” and about 4.7 million searches for the banned religious group “Falun Gong,” according to estimates based on data from the Google Trends and Google Keyword Tool Box.

But these are tiny numbers compared with almost 400 million Chinese Internet users, and search activity quickly returned to average levels over the next few days.

Searches for “Google” in English and Chinese were far more popular, totaling more than 20 million on Tuesday, suggesting that Google users were much more concerned about their continued access to Google’s search services than their ability to find politically delicate information.

Meanwhile, the Chinese government has begun a concerted campaign to eradicate pro-Google sentiments from the Internet.

Comments on social networking sites that are supportive of Google “will be deleted in a couple of seconds,” said Oiwan Lam, 38, an independent journalist and researcher who is an expert on Chinese independent media.

The China Digital Times reported that the Chinese State Council Information Office had ordered all news sites to “carefully manage the information in exchanges, comments and other interactive sessions” and “clean up text, images and sound and videos which support Google, dedicate flowers to Google, ask Google to stay, cheer for Google and others that have a different tune from government policy.”

China routinely directs news coverage of delicate topics, but the restrictions relating to Google are particularly severe.

Javen Yang, 27, webmaster of a Guangzhou travel site, said that site’s staff was told on Friday to remove all comments relating to Google. “We have been told to delete posts relating to ‘some American company leaving China’ by the general webmaster, who usually receive notices from the government,” he said.

The State Council Information Office could not be reached for comment.

With domestic chat closely controlled, the contrast between the sentiments on Chinese and foreign networks is striking. The popular Chinese discussion site Tianya.cn had only a few dozen posts mentioning Google on Saturday. All of them were negative or neutral opinions of the company, whereas Chinese Twitter users generally applauded Google’s decision to offer uncensored results. Twitter has been vocal in its opposition to censorship. It, like Facebook and YouTube, cannot be reached from mainland China without special software.

Over all, Google’s move will make little difference in the short run to the average citizen.

Even if the Chinese can reliably access Google’s newly unfiltered search, it will be difficult for them to read pages the government does not want them to see. Domestic Web sites are easily gagged; foreign sites are blocked by a sophisticated firewall.

“Even though Google has stopped censoring, people cannot get access to sensitive news” without firewall circumvention software, said Ms. Lam. “The Great Firewall is still there.”

The government has never admitted the existence of such a firewall, nor the censorship directives issued to news organizations and Web sites. Unlike other nations that filter Internet access, China never gives notice that sites have been blocked — connections just fail, as if there were problems with the network.

Ultimately, indifference may prove more effective than any firewall. “I don’t worry that Google will be blocked in China completely,” said Luo Peng, a Beijing salesman.

“Just like YouTube and Facebook, my life is fine without them. I can always use other similar services that are available.”

    After Google’s Move, a Shift in Search Terms, NYT, 28.3.2010,
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/29/technology/29googletrends.html

Editorial

Mr. Obama and Israel

March 27, 2010
The New York Times

After taking office last year, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel privately told many Americans and Europeans that he was committed to and capable of peacemaking, despite the hard-line positions that he had used to get elected for a second time. Trust me, he told them. We were skeptical when we first heard that, and we’re even more skeptical now.

All this week, the Obama administration had hoped Mr. Netanyahu would give it something to work with, a way to resolve the poisonous contretemps over Jerusalem and to finally restart Israeli-Palestinian peace talks. It would have been a relief if they had succeeded. Serious negotiations on a two-state solution are in all their interests. And the challenges the United States and Israel face — especially Iran’s nuclear program — are too great for the leaders not to have a close working relationship.

But after a cabinet meeting on Friday, Mr. Netanyahu and his right-wing government still insisted that they would not change their policy of building homes in the city, including East Jerusalem, which Palestinians hope to make the capital of an independent state.

President Obama made pursuing a peace deal a priority and has been understandably furious at Israel’s response. He correctly sees the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a factor in wider regional instability.

Mr. Netanyahu’s government provoked the controversy two weeks ago when it disclosed plans for 1,600 new housing units in an ultra-orthodox neighborhood in East Jerusalem just as Vice President Joseph Biden Jr. was on a fence-mending visit and Israeli-Palestinian “proximity talks” were to begin.

Last year, Mr. Netanyahu rejected Mr. Obama’s call for a freeze on all settlement building. On Tuesday — just before Mr. Obama hosted Mr. Netanyahu at the White House — Israeli officials revealed plans to build 20 units in the Shepherd Hotel compound of East Jerusalem.

Palestinians are justifiably worried that these projects nibble away at the land available for their future state. The disputes with Israel have made Mr. Obama look weak and have given Palestinians and Arab leaders an excuse to walk away from the proximity talks (in which Mr. Obama’s Middle East envoy, George Mitchell, would shuttle between Jerusalem and Ramallah) that Washington nurtured.

Mr. Obama was right to demand that Mr. Netanyahu repair the damage. Details of their deliberately low-key White House meeting (no photos, no press, not even a joint statement afterward) have not been revealed. We hope Israel is being pressed to at least temporarily halt building in East Jerusalem as a sign of good faith. Jerusalem’s future must be decided in negotiations.

The administration should also insist that proximity talks, once begun, grapple immediately with core issues like borders and security, not incidentals. And it must ensure that the talks evolve quickly to direct negotiations — the only realistic format for an enduring agreement.

Many Israelis find Mr. Obama’s willingness to challenge Israel unsettling. We find it refreshing that he has forced public debate on issues that must be debated publicly for a peace deal to happen. He must also press Palestinians and Arab leaders just as forcefully.

Questions from Israeli hard-liners and others about his commitment to Israel’s security are misplaced. The question is whether Mr. Netanyahu is able or willing to lead his country to a peace deal. He grudgingly endorsed the two-state solution. Does he intend to get there?

    Mr. Obama and Israel, NYT, 27.3.2010,
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/27/opinion/27sat1.html

Netanyahu Takes Hard Line

on Jerusalem Housing

March 22, 2010
The New York Times
By MARK LANDLER

WASHINGTON — Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, under extraordinary pressure from the Obama administration to curb the construction of Jewish housing in Jerusalem, served notice on Monday that his government would not yield easily to American demands.

In a speech to a pro-Israel lobbying group, Mr. Netanyahu reiterated that Israel had no plans to freeze housing in Jerusalem, the trigger for a recent dispute between Israel and the United States. He rejected the administration’s contention that Israel’s policies were impeding the peace process.

“The Jewish people were building Jerusalem 3,000 years, and the Jewish people are building Jerusalem today,” Mr. Netanyahu said to the group, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. “Jerusalem is not a settlement; It’s our capital.”

Earlier Monday, Mr. Netanyahu met for 75 minutes with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, in the first of a series of meetings expected to reveal whether the United States sticks to its hard line with Israel on settlements. He later met with Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., and he was scheduled to meet President Obama on Tuesday.

The flurry of meetings is designed to calm the waters after nearly two weeks of tension between the United States and Israel, amid a diplomatic row that both countries have portrayed as the gravest in years. But judging by Mr. Netanyahu’s comments, it is far from clear that he plans to satisfy the demands that Mrs. Clinton made of him in a phone call 10 days ago.

The State Department spokesman, Philip J. Crowley, said that Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Netanyahu had “had a further discussion of the specific actions that might be taken to improve the atmosphere.” He did not give details.

The prime minister’s remarks were a pointed bookend to an earlier address to the same group by Mrs. Clinton. She warned that the Obama administration would push back “unequivocally” when it disagreed with the Israeli government’s policies. But she reaffirmed that America’s support for Israel was “rock solid, unwavering, enduring and forever.”

Mrs. Clinton sought to build solidarity with Israel on one area where they clearly have common ground, the potential nuclear threat from Iran. In the most enthusiastically received part of her speech, she pledged to stop Iran from getting a nuclear weapon.

She said the Obama administration was seeking sanctions with “bite.” That characterization is a modest, but noticeable, retreat from the administration’s language from last year, when Mrs. Clinton said the United States was seeking “crippling sanctions.”

“There must be no gap between the United States and Israel on security,” she said to loud applause.

The crowd of 7,000 quieted down quickly when Mrs. Clinton bluntly warned that the status quo in the Middle East was unsustainable, and that Israel’s continued construction of Jewish housing was undermining the prospect for peace talks between Israelis and Palestinians.

Mrs. Clinton defended her rebuke of Mr. Netanyahu’s government over its announcement of 1,600 housing units in East Jerusalem during Mr. Biden’s visit. The move, she said, jeopardized indirect talks that the administration is trying to broker between Israelis and Palestinians.

“Our credibility in this process depends in part on our willingness to praise both sides when they are courageous, and when we don’t agree, to say so, and say so unequivocally,” she said.

In her call to Mr. Netanyahu, she demanded that Israel reverse the housing plan in the neighborhood of Ramat Shlomo; that the Israelis avoid further provocations in Jerusalem during planned peace talks; and that Mr. Netanyahu commit to substantive rather than procedural negotiations with the Palestinians, as Israel has said it would prefer.

Daniel C. Kurtzer, a former American ambassador to Israel, said that Mrs. Clinton’s speech had succeeded in reaffirming the strategic importance of the United States-Israel relationship while not backing down on settlements. But he said the administration had not laid out a broader proposal for what comes next.

“There’s a choice being made here that the U.S. doesn’t want to put forward its own views,” Mr. Kurtzer said.

Still, after a week in which many pro-Israel observers worried that their country and the United States were on the brink of a breakdown in relations, Mrs. Clinton’s speech to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee seemed reassuring for Israel. Despite predictions that she would be booed, the audience greeted her politely.

“I thought she was excellent,” said Hal Rosnick of Easton, Conn. “She wants the parties to get back to indirect negotiations.” But Diane Hornstein of Chicago, said, “I would like her to recognize that Jerusalem is not a settlement. There’s no evenhandedness in the demands made of Israel.”

On one topic — Iran — Mr. Netanyahu and Mrs. Clinton seemed largely in agreement. “Iran’s brazen bid to develop nuclear weapons is first and foremost a threat to my country, Israel,” the prime minister said, “but it is also a grave threat to the region and to the world.” The Israeli people, he said, “always reserve the right of self-defense.”

In making her own tough statements on Iran, Mrs. Clinton acknowledged that the process of building support for sanctions in the United Nations was taking longer than expected. “Our aim is not incremental sanctions, but sanctions that will bite,” she said.

Mrs. Clinton praised Mr. Netanyahu for his 10-month moratorium on the building of settlements on the West Bank, and noted that the future status of Jerusalem would be hashed out at the bargaining table.

Mrs. Clinton condemned those who incite violence against Israelis, including Palestinians who whipped up anger after Israel rededicated a synagogue in the Jewish quarter of Jerusalem.

But Mrs. Clinton also made clear that the dispute over Mr. Biden’s visit might not be an isolated incident. The administration, she said, will continue to speak out against decisions it views as jeopardizing the peace process.

“As Israel’s friend,” she said, “it is our responsibility to give credit when it is due and to tell the truth when it is needed.”

    Netanyahu Takes Hard Line on Jerusalem Housing, NYT, 23..3.2010,
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/23/world/middleeast/23diplo.html

Obama Offer Is Denounced

by Ayatollah

March 21, 2010
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

TEHRAN (AP) — Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, sharply denounced the United States on Sunday, accusing it of plotting to overthrow the clerical leadership in a chilly response to an overture by President Obama for better cultural ties.

Ayatollah Khamenei did not outright reject Mr. Obama’s offer, saying Iran would keep an eye on Washington’s intentions. But he said that so far Washington’s offers of engagement had been a deception.

In his message, released to coincide with the Iranian new year, Nowruz, Mr. Obama told the Iranian people that Americans want better cultural exchanges with Iran. He also criticized the Iranian leadership for “turning its back” on American overtures.

Ayatollah Khamenei, who has the final say on all political matters in Iran, lashed back in a nationally televised address in an annual provincial visit to his hometown, Mashhad, telling the Americans, “You cannot speak about peace and friendship while plotting to hit Iran.”

In particular, he denounced the American criticism of Iran’s own postelection crackdown. Iran has arrested thousands because of protests over President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s lopsided victory in June, which the opposition says is fraudulent.

The ayatollah said that in response to past American overtures, “We said that if they are extending a metal hand inside a velvet glove, we won’t accept. Unfortunately, what we had guessed took place.”

American support for the opposition proved that Mr. Obama’s claims to seek dialogue were a deception, the ayatollah said.

“The new U.S. administration said they are willing to normalize relations. But unfortunately in practice they did the opposite,” Ayatollah Khamenei told a crowd in Mashhad, who several times broke into chants of “death to America” and “death to Obama.”

In his message, Mr. Obama said that the American offer of diplomatic dialogue still stands, but that the Iranian government had chosen isolation.

    Obama Offer Is Denounced by Ayatollah, NYT, 22.3.2010,
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/22/world/middleeast/22iran.html

Clinton Calls Israel’s

Moves to Ease Tension ‘Useful’

March 19, 2010
The New York Times
By MARK LANDLER

MOSCOW — Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said Friday that proposals offered by the Israeli government to settle a diplomatic dispute with the United States were “useful and productive,” though it was not clear how close Israel had come to meeting American demands.

Neither side has characterized the steps Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu outlined in a call Thursday night to Mrs. Clinton, a week after she called him with a rebuke and specific requests. But Mrs. Clinton’s comments Friday signaled the United States was eager to get past the dispute, which erupted two weeks ago after Israel announced a housing plan for Jews in East Jerusalem during a visit by Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.

Mrs. Clinton, at an international meeting on the Middle East in Moscow, said the United States was intent on starting indirect talks between the Israelis and Palestinians, and was dispatching the special envoy, George J. Mitchell, to meet with Mr. Netanyahu about the housing dispute.

In a grueling 36 hours of diplomacy, devoted to two of America’s most delicate relationships, Mrs. Clinton found herself trying to reinforce a new start with an old adversary, Russia, while bridging a rift with an old friend, Israel.

At the Friday meeting, the international group that focuses on the Middle East — the United States, Russia, the United Nations, and the European Union — condemned Israel’s housing plan for the second time in a week. In a statement, the so-called quartet said it would “closely monitor developments in Jerusalem and to keep under consideration additional steps that may be required to address the situation on the ground.”

Later on Friday, Mrs. Clinton met with President Dmitri A. Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin. It was her first meeting as secretary of state with Mr. Putin, but in what was supposed to be a courtesy picture-taking session, he slouched in a chair and publicly ticked off a list of Russian economic grievances.

The United States, he said, should lift sanctions against Russian companies that do business in Iran. He urged the United States to help speed Russia’s entry into the World Trade Organization and to reduce barriers to Russian companies in the United States. “A message should be sent that they are welcomed in the economy of the United States,” Mr. Putin said.

Smiling stiffly, Mrs. Clinton acknowledged differences with Russia on trade, but said the United States was eager to solve them.

The quartet meeting came amid fresh fears about the security situation in the Middle East. On Thursday night, Israel carried out air strikes on six sites in the Gaza Strip in what it said was in retaliation for a rocket attack from Gaza on a southern Israeli town that killed a Thai worker. The launching was claimed by a group challenging Hamas, the militant group that controls Gaza.

Even before Israel’s housing announcement, the forecast for the indirect, or “proximity,” peace talks was cloudy. The Palestinians were focused on an agenda that included borders and security, the Israelis on creating a procedural path toward direct negotiations. Mrs. Clinton urged the two sides to move forward.

“We all condemned the announcement, and we all are expecting both parties to move toward the proximity talks and to help create an atmosphere in which those talks can be constructive,” she said.

By reaching Mrs. Clinton the night before this meeting, Mr. Netanyahu may have headed off an even sharper international condemnation. But given his defiant public statements about building in East Jerusalem, it was not clear he met the demands that Mrs. Clinton conveyed to him last week.

She asked him to reverse the housing plan, in the Ramat Shlomo neighborhood, and to freeze other building in East Jerusalem. She also asked him to pledge to enter into the substantive negotiations the Palestinians want. Israel has said it views the proximity talks as focusing only on procedural issues.

American and Israeli officials refused to detail Mr. Netanyahu’s offer, saying they want to negotiate in private.

The administration is setting off on a flurry of diplomatic activity. In addition to Mr. Mitchell’s Sunday meeting with Mr. Netanyahu, the prime minister is likely to see Mrs. Clinton and other top officials when he comes to Washington on Monday to address a meeting of a pro-Israel lobbying group, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. Mrs. Clinton is also speaking to the group.

After a week in which some worried that Israel and the United States were on the brink of a historic clash, Mrs. Clinton reaffirmed the underlying strength of the relationship. “Our relationship is ongoing,” she said. “It is deep and broad; it is strong and enduring.”

Israel, however, continued to face severe international pressure for its treatment of civilians in Gaza, where it has imposed a blockade on the delivery of virtually everything but humanitarian goods. “The quartet is deeply concerned by the continuing deterioration in Gaza,” its statement said.

The United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, said he planned to tour Gaza this weekend to gauge the problem.

For the first time, the quartet said it supported a plan by the Palestinian Authority to build a state within 24 months “as a demonstration of Palestinians’ serious commitment to an independent state that provides good governance, opportunity, and justice for the Palestinian people.”

Mrs. Clinton also met with President Dmitri A. Medvedev, hoping to push a long-delayed nuclear arms treaty across the finish line. She said it was close to completed, with all the major issues resolved.

But on another sensitive issue — Iran — Russian officials indicated they viewed the threat differently than the United States. The foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov said there was much less cause for alarm from Iran’s nuclear program than news reports in the West have suggested.

Referring to the International Atomic Energy Agency, Mr. Lavrov said, “Reports that the I.A.E.A. director general publishes on a regular basis contain very precise assessments that do not give reasons for any sort of alarm.” Mrs. Clinton cited the most recent report from the same agency as evidence that the world needed to confront Iran over its program now.

Mr. Lavrov did signal that Russia would support some form of additional United Nations sanctions against Iran, provided they did not paralyze the Iranian state or hurt the Iranian people.


Ethan Bronner contributed reporting from Jerusalem.

    Clinton Calls Israel’s Moves to Ease Tension ‘Useful’, NYT, 20.3.2010,
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/20/world/middleeast/20diplo.html

Letters

Israel and America:

A Time of Friction

March 19, 2010
The New York Times

To the Editor:

Regarding articles about the current tension between the Obama administration and the Israeli government:

President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton need to keep in mind that the Israeli people, in free and democratic elections, provided Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with the opportunity to form a government based on the Likud’s platform of a united and indivisible Jerusalem.

While the timing of the announcement regarding the construction of new housing in Jerusalem may have been unfortunate, such construction is the will of the Israeli people, which must be respected by the United States government.

Meir Mishkoff
Jamaica Estates, Queens
March 17, 2010

•

To the Editor:

Re “Bibi’s Tense Time Out,” by Maureen Dowd (column, March 17):

There is a world of difference between fully developed East Jerusalem neighborhoods like Ramat Shlomo in the heart of major Jewish population areas (areas where the majority Jewish population was forced out by the Jordanians in 1948) and the hilltop settlements constructed by activists who refuse to acknowledge Palestinian needs.

A basic understanding of history and demographics leaves little doubt that the former will remain in sovereign Israel and the latter will become part of a Palestinian state.

The building announcement was poorly timed, but Jewish homes in Ramat Shlomo are in no way immoral or obstacles for peace. So let’s maintain perspective and address the substantive issues that will actually take us forward, not blur distinctions to score political points.

Yishai Schwartz
Bronx, March 17, 2010

•

To the Editor:

Both Thomas L. Friedman (“Let’s Fight Over a Big Plan,” column, March 17) and Maureen Dowd address Israel’s insulting and irresponsible decision to expand West Bank settlements. The essential question is: How is Israel’s security a vital United States interest?

The reflexive response of every American administration has been to give unqualified support to Israel. Israel has clearly taken advantage of such a relationship. If a two-state solution is in the United States’ interest in the region (and I believe that it is), then perhaps it is time to take a genuine position of neutrality in the dispute.

Larry Hoffner
New York, March 17, 2010

•

To the Editor:

Thomas L. Friedman says that Israel faces a “dilemma” in trying to be both a Jewish state and a democratic one.

Israel can maintain its Jewish and democratic character without being forced to negotiate a two-state solution against its own terms. After almost 20 years of negotiations for a two-state solution since the Oslo Accords of 1993, the talks have led not anywhere but to increased bloodshed on both sides.

With the social, economic and political divisions between the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza as apparent as ever, it is time to reassess the viability and desirability of a two-state solution.

It is time that the moderate Arab nations of Jordan and Egypt are offered incentives by the international community to annex territories in the West Bank and Gaza, respectively, and to finally reach a sustainable status quo in the Middle East.

Yitzhak Bronstein
Far Rockaway, Queens, March 17, 2010

•

To the Editor:

“For Israel and America, a Disagreement, Not a Crisis,” by Michael B. Oren (Op-Ed, March 18):

While the Israeli government may want to minimize its culpability for the recent events involving Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and characterize the uproar as a disagreement among friends concerning building permits, the fact remains that the American people were insulted and the peace process was threatened by the timing of the announcement.

Nothing that Mr. Oren, Israel’s ambassador to the United States, has said in Israel’s defense has contradicted this or given us any hope that it understands what we are truly angry about.

Michael Scott
San Francisco, March 18, 2010

•

To the Editor:

Michael B. Oren notes that every Israeli prime minister since 1967 has supported “Israel’s policy on Jerusalem.” But he does not mention that two recent Israeli prime ministers, Ehud Barak and Ehud Olmert, also recognized that Israel would have to give Palestinians sovereignty in some of East Jerusalem as part of any peace deal.

As Mr. Olmert said in 2008, “Whoever talks seriously about security in Jerusalem ... must be willing to relinquish parts of Jerusalem.”

Jeremy Pressman
Sydney, Australia, March 18, 2010

    Israel and America: A Time of Friction, NYT, 19.3.2010,
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/19/opinion/l19mideast.html

Editorial

Will China Listen?

March 17, 2010
The New York Times

The drumbeat of complaints in Washington about China’s manipulation of its currency — and the deafening silence pretty much everywhere else — might lead one to think that this is just an American problem. It isn’t.

China’s decision to base its economic growth on exporting deliberately undervalued goods is threatening economies around the world. It is fueling huge trade deficits in the United States and Europe. Even worse, it is crowding out exports from other developing countries, threatening their hopes of recovery.

After treading lightly on the subject of China, President Obama vowed last month to “get much tougher” about China’s cheap currency. On Monday, 130 members of Congress sent a letter to Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, demanding that the Obama administration designate China as a currency manipulator in a report due to Congress next month. On Tuesday, a bipartisan group of senators introduced a bill aimed to force the administration’s hand. This would ease the way to imposing retaliatory trade barriers against Chinese goods.

So far, China has been defiant. On Sunday, after the close of the annual National People’s Congress, Prime Minister Wen Jiabao rejected American complaints as “a kind of trade protectionism” and made clear that he had no plan to do anything differently.

Since 2003, China’s central bank has been purchasing huge amounts of dollars to keep the value of its currency, the renminbi, artificially low against the dollar. China backed away somewhat in 2005, allowing its currency to appreciate slowly from 8.25 renminbi to the dollar to about 6.83 renminbi by 2008. As the global recession hit, China slammed on the brakes in order to protect its exports. The renminbi has remained at about 6.83 since then, and the pain has been felt in countries as far apart as Mexico and India.

Beijing’s intervention is a textbook example of the beggar-thy-neighbor competitive devaluation forbidden by the International Monetary Fund’s charter.

The challenge now is how to persuade China to at least moderate its strategy without unleashing something even more destructive. As the decibel level has risen in Washington, Chinese officials have implicitly warned that they could retaliate by dumping Treasury bills from their central bank’s $2.4 trillion cache.

This would be risky for both countries. The move would weaken the dollar and lessen the value of China’s holdings. The United States might weather a sell-off or even benefit from the drop in the dollar’s value, but any precipitous move could further disrupt the skittish financial markets. And Beijing has other potential weapons, like tariffs and quotas. There is no guarantee of rationality in these showdowns. The fallout from a trade war would be felt around the world.

It makes a lot more sense to address the problem in a multilateral setting, where China couldn’t portray itself as a weak, righteous fighter holding out against arbitrary American power. Retaliation, or even the threat, would carry more legitimacy if it were part of a multilateral agreement and done on a world stage.

One way would be to press the I.M.F. to officially pronounce on whether China is breaking the rules and manipulating its exchange rate. That is part of the fund’s job, though it has preferred not to pick the fight. China would find it far harder to reject an I.M.F. determination than any American criticism. It could open the door for other aggrieved trading nations to eventually seek legal redress at the World Trade Organization.

Even before that, it would help if some other countries — certainly those in the European Union, but perhaps aspiring players including India and South Korea — started publicly making the case that the cheap renminbi is hurting them, too.

The world’s battered economy is certainly in no shape to keep absorbing China’s exports, subsidized through a cheap currency policy. The more countries that say this, the more likely Beijing will consider changing course — and the less likely this disagreement will escalate into a fight that no one can win.

    Will China Listen?, NYT, 17.3.2010,
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/17/opinion/17wed1.html

Opportunity in a Fight With Israel

March 16, 2010
The New York Times
By MARK LANDLER

WASHINGTON — For President Obama, getting into a serious fight with Israel carries obvious domestic and foreign political risks. But it may offer the administration a payoff it sees as worthwhile: shoring up Mr. Obama’s credibility as a Middle East peacemaker by showing doubtful Israelis and Palestinians that he has the fortitude to push the two sides toward an agreement.

The risks at home were on display on Tuesday, as more than two dozen members of Congress, many of them Democrats, implored Mr. Obama to ease the tensions with the Israeli government after its announcement of a Jewish housing plan during a visit by Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.

The House Republican whip, Representative Eric Cantor of Virginia, called the White House chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, to complain that the administration had seized on a minor diplomatic contretemps to try to impose its views on a loyal friend. Sarah Palin, the former Republican vice presidential candidate, issued a statement urging the president to “push the reset button on our relations with our ally Israel.”

For all the angst coming from Capitol Hill, however, the Obama administration seemed generally unruffled. And there were tentative signs that it was taking steps to cool the temperature.

Mr. Biden and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel spoke by telephone on Tuesday evening, an administration official said. It was not clear what the two men talked about; aides to Mr. Biden did not return calls.

And earlier on Tuesday, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton reaffirmed the relationship between the United States and Israel, brushing aside talk of a crisis.

“Oh, I don’t buy that,” Mrs. Clinton said. “I’ve been around not that long, but a long time. We have an absolute commitment to Israel’s security. We have a close, unshakable bond between the United States and Israel and between the American and Israeli people.”

Mrs. Clinton did keep up the pressure on Mr. Netanyahu to demonstrate that he was committed to negotiations with the Palestinians

A senior administration official said the harsh rebuke of Mr. Netanyahu, delivered in a phone call last week by Mrs. Clinton, was important “to demonstrate we mean what we say when we enter these talks.” The announcement of a housing plan, the official said, undermined trust just as the United States was trying to open indirect talks between the Israelis and Palestinians.

“We felt we had to call that out,” he said, on the condition of anonymity because of the delicacy of the matter.

On the Israeli side, there were also efforts to calm the waters. Israel’s ambassador to Washington, Michael B. Oren, who had been widely quoted as saying that relations between Israel and the United States were facing a historic crisis, issued a statement saying he had been “flagrantly misquoted.”

“I am confident that we will overcome these differences shortly,” he said.

Taking a tough line with Israel helps the administration counter a perception that it folded last summer when Mr. Netanyahu rebuffed Mr. Obama’s demand that Israel freeze all construction of Jewish settlements. When Mr. Netanyahu countered with an offer of a 10-month partial freeze on the construction on the West Bank, Mrs. Clinton praised the offer as “unprecedented.”

That soured the Palestinians and left much of the Arab world wondering whether Mr. Obama would ever deliver on the promise in his speech in Cairo of a new approach to the Muslim world. American officials worried that this credibility gap could hinder their campaign to rally support from Persian Gulf countries for new sanctions against Iran over its nuclear program.

“For the nine months after the Cairo speech, people were saying, ‘Where’s the beef?’ ” said David J. Rothkopf, a former Clinton administration official who writes about foreign policy. “So far, engagement hasn’t worked anywhere. This might give them a chance to revitalize engagement.”

But Mr. Rothkopf, like others, sees as many risks as rewards. The harshness of the American response to Mr. Netanyahu, he said, could call into question the ability of the United States to manage its relationship with Israel. “The administration’s prestige in the region is damaged by its inability to manage the one relationship they are supposed to be able to manage,” he said.

Other analysts said the United States should not use a specific grievance over housing units to press a broad range of extremely difficult issues with Israel.

“I don’t think this issue should be like a Christmas tree, where you hang all these other ornaments on it,” said David Makovsky, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “The whole episode should end where it began: you had a problem with those units, so you figure out how to fix it.”

But even some of Israel’s staunchest supporters in Congress said the dispute might focus minds on the larger prize. “It’s a moment for the Obama administration to say to our Israeli partners and our Palestinian partners, ‘We need to see peace,’ ” said Representative Gary L. Ackerman, Democrat of New York. “It’s a never-let-a-crisis-go-to-waste moment, and this is a mini-crisis, if even that.”

That message was echoed by Gen. David H. Petraeus, the commander of the military’s Central Command, who told the Senate Armed Services Committee that the lack of progress in the Middle East was a large challenge to American interests.

“The conflict foments anti-American sentiment due to a perception of U.S. favoritism toward Israel,” he said.

    Opportunity in a Fight With Israel, NYT, 17.3.2010,
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/17/world/middleeast/17diplo.html

Israel Feeling Rising Anger

From the U.S.

March 15, 2010
The New York Times
By MARK LANDLER
and ETHAN BRONNER

WASHINGTON — An ill-timed municipal housing announcement in Jerusalem has mutated into one of the most serious conflicts between the United States and Israel in two decades, leaving a politically embarrassed Israeli government scrambling to respond to a tough list of demands by the Obama administration.

The Obama administration has put Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in a difficult political spot at home by insisting that the Israeli government halt a plan to build housing units in East Jerusalem. The administration also wants Mr. Netanyahu to commit to substantive negotiations with the Palestinians, after more than a year in which the peace process has been moribund.

With the administration’s special envoy, George J. Mitchell, suddenly delaying his planned trip to Israel, the administration was expecting a call from Mr. Netanyahu, after a tense exchange last week with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton.

On Monday, however, Mr. Netanyahu sounded a defiant note, telling the Israeli Parliament that construction of Jewish housing in Jerusalem was not a matter for negotiation.

He is struggling to balance an increasingly unhappy ally in Washington with the restive right wing of his coalition government.

The prospects for peace in the Middle East seemed murkier than ever, as a year’s worth of frustration on the part of President Obama and his aides seemed to boil over in its furious response to the housing announcement, which spoiled a visit to Israel by Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.

“What happened to the vice president in Israel was unprecedented,” said a senior administration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “Where it goes from here depends on the Israelis.”

But the diplomatic standoff also has repercussions for the Obama administration. Its blunt criticism of Israel — delivered publicly by Mrs. Clinton in two television interviews on Friday and reiterated Sunday by Mr. Obama’s political adviser, David Axelrod — has set off a storm in Washington, with pro-Israel groups and several prominent lawmakers criticizing the administration for unfairly singling out a staunch American ally.

“Let’s cut the family fighting,” said Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, independent of Connecticut. “It’s unnecessary; it’s destructive of our shared national interest. It’s time to lower voices, to get over the family feud between the U.S. and Israel. It just doesn’t serve anybody’s interests but our enemies’.”

Relations between Israel and the United States have been uneasy ever since Mr. Obama took office with a plan to rekindle the peace process by coupling a demand for a full freeze in Jewish settlement construction with reciprocal confidence-building gestures by Arab countries.

Neither happened, and Mr. Obama, who is not as popular in Israel as he is elsewhere around the world, was forced last September to make do with Mr. Netanyahu’s offer of a 10-month partial moratorium on settlements in the West Bank. But the president was outraged by the announcement of 1,600 housing units in an ultra-Orthodox neighborhood in East Jerusalem during Mr. Biden’s visit, administration officials said.

Mr. Obama was deeply involved in the strategy and planning for Mr. Biden’s visit and orchestrated the response from Mr. Biden and Mrs. Clinton after it went awry, these officials said.

The administration has used language intended to telegraph anger, defining the dispute not only in terms of the damage it could cause to the peace process but to the American relationship with Israel.

“That is a whole different order of magnitude of importance,” said Daniel Levy, a former peace negotiator who is senior fellow and head of the Middle East Initiative at the New America Foundation, a research group.

The last time relations between the United States and Israel became this strained, analysts said, was when James A. Baker, then secretary of state, clashed with the Israeli government in the early 1990s, also over settlement policy. The United States ended up withholding loan guarantees from Israel for a time.

Mr. Netanyahu said the announcement of the housing development had surprised even him, and he apologized for its timing. But Mr. Obama feels that Mr. Netanyahu should have been in clearer control of the construction process and that he should have done what was needed to stop it, according to officials in Jerusalem and Washington.

There is a feeling among officials in Washington that the Netanyahu government does not fully grasp how angry Obama officials have grown. But there are signs that it is sinking in.

The Israeli ambassador in Washington, Michael B. Oren, used the word “crisis” about his country’s relations with Washington for the first time since taking up his job last year, in a telephone briefing to colleagues over the weekend, according to an Israeli official.

Still, American and Israeli officials also made clear that the core security issues binding the two countries were not in jeopardy, and that what was happening was closer to a married couple having a bad fight rather than seeking a divorce.

In the murky vocabulary of diplomacy, the scheduled talks due to start under American supervision are viewed by the Israelis mostly as “proximity” discussions, in other words procedural talks rather than substantive negotiations. But the Palestinians want the discussions to be as substantive as possible, an approach Mrs. Clinton demanded in her call to Mr. Netanyahu on Friday.

The Israeli leader has said he is open to direct negotiations with the Palestinians. But the chief Palestinian negotiator, Saeb Erekat, said in an interview in his Ramallah office that the Palestinians and Israelis had exhausted direct negotiations and that it was time for America to take a more direct role. “We have a trust level below zero between the two sides,” he said.

The settlement episode has enabled the administration to turn the tables on Mr. Netanyahu, some analysts say. But the question is whether it will be able to extract more concessions from him now.

“The heart of the matter is whether the proximity talks are going to be productive, in the sense of opening a corridor to direct negotiations that will lead to a peace agreement,” said Martin Indyk, a former American ambassador to Israel.

The timing of the dispute could not be more awkward for the administration, coming a week before the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the most influential pro-Israel lobbying group, meets in Washington. Mr. Netanyahu and Mrs. Clinton are both scheduled to speak to the group, which has condemned the White House’s tough stance.

Mr. Biden may meet with Mr. Netanyahu while he is here, officials said. But there is no meeting planned between Mr. Obama and Mr. Netanyahu because the president will be traveling in Indonesia and Australia, a conflict which one official joked suits the administration well right now. “This may not be the best time for a face-to-face,” he said.


Mark Landler reported from Washington,

and Ethan Bronner from Jerusalem.

Helene Cooper contributed reporting from Washington.

    Israel Feeling Rising Anger From the U.S., NYT, 16.3.2010,
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/16/world/middleeast/16mideast.html

Officials: US Wants Israel

to Cancel Building Plan

March 15, 2010
Filed at 6:08 a.m. ET
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

JERUSALEM (AP) -- Israeli officials said Monday that the U.S. is pressing Israel to scrap a contentious east Jerusalem building project whose approval has touched off the most serious diplomatic feud with Washington in years.

Tensions in the city at the center of the spat were high, with police out in large numbers in Jerusalem's volatile Old City in expectation of renewed clashes.

Top U.S. officials have lined up in recent days to condemn the Israeli plan to build 1,600 apartments in east Jerusalem, the sector of the city that the Palestinians claim for their future capital.

The project was announced during Vice President Joe Biden's visit to the region last week, badly embarrassing the U.S. and complicating its efforts to restart Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking.

U.S. officials have not disclosed what steps they want Israel to take to defuse the crisis, and Israeli government spokesman Mark Regev refused to comment Monday. But Israeli officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because no official decision has been made public, said Washington wants the construction project canceled.

Although Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has apologized for the timing of the project's approval, he has not said he will cancel it.

Israel does not stand to benefit from antagonizing its most important ally, but Netanyahu has historically taken a hard line against territorial concessions to the Palestinians, and a curb on east Jerusalem construction would threaten to fracture his hawkish coalition.

The Israeli officials said the U.S. also wants Israel to make a significant confidence-building gesture toward the Palestinians, including possibly releasing hundreds of Palestinian prisoners or turning over additional areas of the West Bank to Palestinian control.

Washington, they added, also has demanded that Israel officially declare that talks with the Palestinians will deal with all the conflict's big issues, including final borders, the status of Jerusalem, and the fate of Palestinian refugees who lost their homes during the war around Israel's 1948 creation.

The unusually harsh U.S. criticism has undercut Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's efforts to suggest that the crisis had passed. Israeli newspapers reported Monday that Israel's ambassador to Washington, Michael Oren, told Israeli diplomats in a conference call Saturday night that their country's relations with the U.S. haven't been this tense in decades.

The Foreign Ministry had no immediate comment.

U.S. Mideast envoy George Mitchell is expected in the region this week to try to salvage peace efforts.

East Jerusalem has been perhaps the most intractable issue dividing Israelis and Palestinians. Israel annexed the territory after capturing it in the 1967 Mideast war, but the Palestinians and the international community have not recognized that move. The renewed settlement dispute has further fueled frictions in the city.

For a fourth straight day, Israel deployed hundreds of police around east Jerusalem's Old City, home to important Jewish, Muslim and Christian shrines, and restricted Palestinian access to the area in anticipation of possible unrest. Israel also maintained a closure that barred virtually all West Bank Palestinians from entering Israel.

Police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said access to the city's most sensitive holy site -- the compound known to Jews as the Temple Mount and to Muslims as the Noble Sanctuary -- was restricted because police ''have received clear indications that Palestinians are intending to cause disturbances.''

The compound is home to the Al-Aqsa Mosque, Israel's third-holiest shrine. It is Judaism's holiest site because two biblical Jewish temples once stood there.

Not far from the compound, inside the Old City's Jewish Quarter, Jewish residents were to rededicate a historic synagogue that had been destroyed twice, most recently in 1948 by the Jordanian army. The Palestinian Authority's minister of religious affairs, Jamal Bawatneh, condemned the synagogue rededication as ''an attack on the rights of Palestinians.''

    Officials: US Wants Israel to Cancel Building Plan, NYT, 16.3.2010,
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2010/03/15/world/AP-ML-Israel-Palestinians.html

Editorial

Diplomacy 102

March 11, 2010
The New York Times

Vice President Joseph Biden Jr. used rare and decidedly undiplomatic language on Tuesday to upbraid Israel after it announced plans to build 1,600 new housing units in a Jewish neighborhood of East Jerusalem. “I condemn the decision. ...,” he said in a statement.

The Obama administration is understandably furious. Mr. Biden was in Israel working to revive Israeli-Palestinian peace talks. The word came after he had spent the day vowing the United States’ “absolute, total and unvarnished commitment to Israel’s security.”

Aides say Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was blindsided by the announcement from Israel’s Interior Ministry, led by the leader of right-wing Shas Party. But he didn’t disavow the plan. And it is hard to see the timing as anything but a slap in the face to Washington.

There were conflicting reports on whether the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, would go ahead with “proximity talks” — in which George Mitchell, the Middle East envoy for the United States, is supposed to shuttle between Jerusalem and the West Bank in hopes of making enough progress to revive direct negotiations on a two-state solution. Mr. Abbas should stick with the talks.

President Obama seriously miscalculated last year when he insisted that Israel impose a full stop on all new settlement building, only to have Mr. Netanyahu refuse. The goal was — and is — just. The Palestinians are legitimately fearful that the more Israel builds in the West Bank or East Jerusalem the less likely it is to ever negotiate away any disputed territory. A settlement freeze could well have jump-started serious negotiations.

But one of the basic rules of diplomacy is that American presidents never publicly insist on something they aren’t sure of getting — at least not without a backup plan. By the time Mr. Netanyahu finally acceded to a 10-month partial halt that exempted Jerusalem, the Palestinians felt so burned that the peace effort collapsed.

It must be noted that Mr. Obama and Mr. Mitchell also failed to persuade Arab leaders to agree to make any gestures to Israel in return for a settlement freeze.

The Obama administration worked hard to get Mr. Abbas to agree to renewed talks, arguing that more stalemate was not in the Palestinians’ interest. And it made some rare headway with Arab leaders, persuading them to endorse the American proposal for talks — giving Mr. Abbas needed political cover. Suggestions that Arab leaders might now renege on that support are worrisome.

Mr. Mitchell will have to keep working all sides to move this ahead. He must continue to press Israel on the settlements issue. And if Israel is to make real concessions, it will need more than gestures from the Arab states.

Mr. Biden said on Wednesday that the administration would hold both Israelis and Palestinians “accountable for any statements or actions that inflame tensions or prejudice the outcome of talks.” That would be a very important start. We also hope that if progress lags, the administration will be ready to put forward its own proposals on the central issues of borders, refugees, security and the future of Jerusalem.

Mr. Obama has another chance to move the peace process forward. This time he has to get it right.

    Diplomacy 102, NYT, 11.3.2010,
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/11/opinion/11thu1.html

Iran and U.S. Trade Barbs

in Kabul Visit

March 10, 2010
The New York Times
By RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr.

and ABDUL WAHEED WAFA

KABUL, Afghanistan — The Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, shot back Wednesday at American allegations that Iran was providing support to Afghan insurgents, accusing the United States of playing its own “double game” in the country and warning that the occupation was doomed to fail.

Appearing at a press conference at the presidential palace here with the Afghan leader, Hamid Karzai, Mr. Ahmadinejad said the United States uses the excuse of fighting “terrorists that they themselves created, supported and financed” to maintain its occupation of Afghanistan.

During the Soviet occupation in the 1980s, the United States provided money and weapons to jihadi fighters, support critical to defeating the Soviet military. But in the aftermath of the Soviet withdrawal, the country plunged into a civil war that resulted in the Taliban ultimately taking over much of the country, whose leaders in many cases had been the beneficiaries of American support a decade earlier.

The United States ousted the Taliban government in a 2001 invasion following the Sept. 11 attacks.

Two days ago, Defense Secretary Robert Gates told reporters while traveling to Kabul for his own talks with Mr. Karzai that Iran was “playing a double game in Afghanistan.”

“They want to maintain a good relationship with the Afghan government, they also want to do everything they possibly to can to hurt us, or for us not to be successful,” Mr. Gates said. He said he believed that Iran was providing money and ”some low level of support” to the Taliban in Afghanistan.

Asked about those comments on Wednesday, Mr. Ahmadinejad responded: “What are you doing in this region? You are 12,000 kilometers away from here, your country is the other side of the world, what are you doing here? This is a serious question.”

Mr. Gates was still in Kabul, the Afghan capital, as Mr. Ahmadinejad held talks with Mr. Karzai.

Asked for his reaction to Mr. Ahmadinejad’s visit so close to his own, Mr. Gates at first said that “it’s clearly fodder for conspiratorialists.” The Pentagon press secretary, Geoff Morrell, said that Mr. Gates was reacting to bloggers who suggested that he and Mr. Ahmadinejad were in Kabul to make a secret three-way deal with Mr. Karzai.

Mr. Gates then said, “We think Afghanistan should have good relations with all of its neighbors, but we also want all of Afghanistan’s neighbors to play an upfront game in dealing with the government of Afghanistan.”


Elisabeth Bumiller contributed reporting.

    Iran and U.S. Trade Barbs in Kabul Visit, NYT, 11.3.2010,
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/11/world/asia/11afghan.html

With Biden in West Bank,

Settlements Cloud Talks

March 10, 2010
The New York Times
By ETHAN BRONNER

RAMALLAH, West Bank— Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. arrived here on Wednesday to meet with Palestinian leaders as the Palestinian prime minister, Salam Fayyad, expressed dismay at Israel’s announcement a day earlier that it planned to build 1,600 new housing units for Jews in East Jerusalem

“It is damaging, for sure,” Mr. Fayyad said. “This is a moment of challenge to the efforts led by the United States to get the peace process going again. We definitely appreciate the strong statements of condemnation by the administration vis-à-vis this action. This definitely undermines confidence in prospects of the political process which we are all working very hard on.”

Mr. Biden was due to see the president of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, afterward.

Hours after Mr. Biden vowed unyielding American support for Israel’s security here on Tuesday, he condemned the announcement of the new housing as “precisely the kind of step that undermines the trust we need right now.”

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was clearly embarrassed at the move by his interior minister, Eli Yishai, leader of the right-wing Shas Party, who has made Jewish settlement in East Jerusalem one of his central causes.

A statement issued in the name of the Interior Ministry but distributed by the prime minister’s office said that the housing plan was three years in the making and that its announcement was procedural and unrelated to Mr. Biden’s visit. It added that Mr. Netanyahu had just been informed of it himself.

Mr. Netanyahu supports Jewish settlement in East Jerusalem, yet wants to get new talks with the Palestinians going and to maintain strong relations with Washington. But when he formed his coalition a year ago he joined forces with several right-wing parties, and has since found it hard to keep them in line.

Mr. Biden came to Jerusalem largely to assure the Israelis of Washington’s commitment to its security and to restart peace talks with the Palestinians.

He began the day on a note of support, asserting the Obama administration’s “absolute, total, unvarnished commitment to Israel’s security.”

But by the end of the day, Mr. Biden’s tone had a very different quality. He issued a statement condemning “the substance and timing of the announcement” of the housing, and added, “Unilateral action taken by either party cannot prejudge the outcome of negotiations on permanent status issues.”

He said the announcement “runs counter to the constructive discussions that I’ve had here in Israel.”

On Monday, George J. Mitchell, the administration’s Middle East envoy, announced that Israel and the Palestinians had agreed to four months of indirect peace talks, the first such negotiations in more than a year.

Nabil Abu Rudeineh, a spokesman for the Palestinian government, called the new housing announcement “a dangerous decision that will torpedo the negotiations and sentence the American efforts to complete failure.”

Mr. Abu Rudeineh added that “it is now clear that the Israeli government is not interested in negotiating, nor is it interested in peace.”

“The American administration must respond to this provocation with actual measures, as it is no longer possible to just turn the other cheek,” he continued, “and massive American pressure is required in order to compel Israel to abandon its peace-destroying behavior.”

Last spring, the Obama administration tried to get Israel to stop all settlement building in order to restart peace talks and hoped Arab states would promise confidence-building measures in exchange. No such measures were forthcoming, and the Israelis rejected the freeze.

After much haggling, in November the Israelis announced a 10-month partial freeze on new settlement building in the West Bank. But they exempted Jerusalem from the moratorium because Israel has annexed East Jerusalem and considers it part of its united capital, a position the rest of the world rejects.

The new housing announced on Tuesday is for an ultra-Orthodox neighborhood, Ramat Shlomo. The Interior Ministry’s statement said the step on Tuesday was part of a long process that would continue for quite some time before the units were actually built.

The announcement followed a day in which Mr. Biden, who will stay in the region through Friday, had made a concerted and highly public show of American support for Israel.

“Progress occurs in the Middle East when everyone knows there is simply no space between the United States and Israel,” he said, standing next to Mr. Netanyahu at the prime minister’s residence. “There is no space between the United States and Israel when it comes to Israel’s security.”

Mr. Biden also said that, like Israel, the Obama administration was determined to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons and from supporting groups that threatened Israel. The United States is trying to build a consensus for international sanctions against Iran over its nuclear program. Israel has threatened to use military force, but is going along with the American approach for now. Part of the purpose of this trip is to cement that cooperation.

Mr. Biden expressed satisfaction at the agreement for the new talks with the Palestinians. They are being called “proximity talks” because Mr. Mitchell is expected to shuttle between the Israeli government in Jerusalem and the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah, in the West Bank, to bring the two sides toward direct negotiations.

In his public comments with Mr. Biden, Mr. Netanyahu focused on the need “to be persistent and purposeful in making sure we get to those direct negotiations that will enable us to resolve this conflict.”

The announcement on the housing expansion was not the first time that Mr. Netanyahu had been blindsided by one of his more nationalist or conservative ministers or their aides. Earlier this year, for example, Daniel Ayalon, the deputy to the nationalist foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, increased tensions with Turkey when he humiliated its ambassador to Israel in front of television cameras.

After his meetings on Tuesday morning with the Israeli president, Shimon Peres, and Mr. Netanyahu, Mr. Biden, accompanied by his wife, Jill, visited the grave site of Yitzhak Rabin, the Israeli prime minister who was assassinated in 1995 by a Jewish extremist opposed to reconciliation with the Palestinians.

Mr. Biden then toured Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum and center. After signing its guest book, he said: “The phrase ‘never again’ is used so often it almost has lost its meaning. But then again all you have to do is walk through Yad Vashem to understand how incredible the journey has been for world Jewry and why Israel is such a central part of its existence.”


Jack Healy contributed reporting from New York.

    With Biden in West Bank, Settlements Cloud Talks, NYT, 11.3.2010,
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/11/world/middleeast/11biden.html

Alexander Haig,

Ex-U.S. Secretary of State,

Dies at 85

February 21, 2010
The New York Times
By TIM WEINER

Alexander M. Haig Jr., the mercurial four-star general who served as a confrontational secretary of state under President Ronald Reagan and a commanding White House chief of staff as President Richard M. Nixon’s administration crumbled, died Saturday in Baltimore. He was 85.

He had been admitted to Johns Hopkins Hospital on Jan. 28, said Gary Stephenson, a hospital spokesman, and died there at approximately 1:30 a.m.

Mr. Haig was a rare American breed: a political general. His bids for the presidency quickly came undone. But his ambition to be president was thinly veiled, and that was his undoing. He knew, Reagan’s aide Lyn Nofziger once said, that “the third paragraph of his obit” would detail his conduct in the hours after President Reagan was shot, on March 30, 1981.

That day, Secretary of State Haig wrongly declared himself the acting president. “The helm is right here,” he told members of the Reagan cabinet in the White House Situation Room, “and that means right in this chair for now, constitutionally, until the vice president gets here.” His words were tape-recorded by Richard V. Allen, then the national security adviser. His colleagues knew better. “There were three others ahead of Haig in the constitutional succession,” Mr. Allen wrote in 2001. “But Haig’s demeanor signaled that he might be ready for a quarrel, and there was no point in provoking one.”

Mr. Haig then asked, “How do you get to the press room?” He raced upstairs and went directly to the lectern before a television audience of millions. His knuckles whitening, his arms shaking, his knees wobbling, Mr. Haig declared to the world, “I am in control here, in the White House.” He did not give that appearance.

Seven years before, Mr. Haig really had been in control. He was widely perceived as the acting president during the final months of the Nixon administration.

He kept the White House running as the distraught and despondent commander in chief was driven from power by the threat of impeachment in 1974. “He was the president toward the end,” William Saxbe, the United States attorney general in 1974, told the authors of “Nixon: An Oral History of His Presidency,” (HarperCollins, 1994). “He held that office together.”

Henry Kissinger, his mentor and master in the Nixon White House, also said the nation owed Mr. Haig its gratitude for steering the ship of state through dangerous waters in the final days of the Nixon era. “By sheer willpower, dedication and self-discipline, he held the government together,” Mr. Kissinger wrote in his memoir, “Years of Upheaval.”

He took pride in his cool handling of a constitutional crisis without precedent. “There were no tanks,” he said during his confirmation as secretary of state in 1981. “There were not any sandbags outside the White House.”

Serving the Nixon White House from 1969 to 1974, Mr. Haig went from colonel to four-star general without holding a major battlefield command, an extraordinary rise with few if any precedents in American military history. But the White House was its own battlefield in those years. He won his stars through his tireless service to the president and his national security adviser, Mr. Kissinger.

Mr. Haig never lost his will. But he frequently lost his composure as President Reagan’s secretary of state. As a consequence, he lost both his job and his standing in the American government.

Mr. Nixon had privately suggested to the Reagan transition team that Mr. Haig would make a great secretary of state. Upon his appointment, Mr. Haig declared himself “the vicar of foreign policy” — in the Roman Catholic Church, to which he belonged, the Pope is the “vicar of Christ” — but he soon became an apostate in the new administration. He alienated his affable commander-in-chief and Vice President George H. W. Bush, whose national security aide, Donald P. Gregg, described Mr. Haig as “a cobra among garter snakes.”

He served for 17 months before the president dismissed him with a one-page letter on June 24, 1982. Those months were marked by a largely covert paramilitary campaign against Central American leftists, a dramatic heightening of nuclear tensions with the Soviet Union, and dismay among American allies about the lurching course of American foreign policy. In the immediate aftermath of his departure came the deaths of 241 American soldiers in a terrorist bombing in Beirut and, two days later, the American invasion of Grenada.

“His tenure as secretary of state was very traumatic,” recalled John M. Poindexter, later President Reagan’s national security adviser, in the oral history book “Reagan: The Man and His Presidency” (Houghton Mifflin, 1998). “As a result of this constant tension that existed between the White House and the State Department about who was going to be responsible for national security and foreign policy, we got very little done.”

Mr. Haig said the president had assured him that “I would be the spokesman for the U.S. government.” But he came to believe — with reason — that the White House staff had banded against him. He blamed in particular the so-called troika of James A. Baker III, Edwin Meese, and Michael Deaver.

“Reagan was a cipher,” he said with evident bitterness. “These men were running the government.”

“Having been a White House chief of staff, and having lived in the White House under great tension, you know that the White House attracts extremely ambitious people,” he reflected. “Those who get to the top are usually prepared to go to extraordinary lengths to get there.”

Mr. Haig briefly considered running for president in 1980 — a committee to support him was formed, but it fizzled — and then began a full-fledged campaign for the Republican nomination. But he won next to no popular support. He would never make it to the top.

Alexander Meigs Haig Jr. was born in Philadelphia on Dec. 2, 1924, the son of a lawyer and a homemaker. At 22, he was graduated from West Point, ranking 214th of 310 members of the class of 1947. As a young lieutenant, he went to Japan to serve as an aide to Gen. Alonzo Fox, deputy chief of staff to Gen. Douglas MacArthur, the supreme allied commander and American viceroy of the Far East.

In 1950 he married Patricia Fox, the daughter of his superior, the general. They had three children, Alexander, Brian and Barbara, and eight grandchildren.

His first taste of war was brutal. In the first months of the Korean War he served on the staff of Maj. Gen. Edward Almond, chief of staff of the Far Eastern Command. Official Army histories depict General Almond as a terror to his underlings and one of General MacArthur’s most uncompromising disciples. Following orders, General Almond sent thousands of American soldiers north toward the Chinese border in November 1950. They met a ferocious surprise counterattack from a far larger Chinese force.

General Almond and First Lt. Haig flew to the forward outpost of an American task force on Nov. 28, where the general pinned a medal on a lieutenant colonel’s parka, told him the Chinese were only stragglers, and then flew off. Of that task force, once 2,500 strong, some 1,000 were killed, wounded, captured or left to die. In all, within a fortnight, American forces in Korea took 12,975 casualties. It was one of the worst routs in American military history.

After the Korean War the young soldier commanded desks for a decade, serving in the Pentagon and becoming a deputy special assistant to Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara. He served in Vietnam in 1966 and 1967 as a battalion and brigade commander of the First Infantry Division, and received the Distinguished Service Cross.

In 1969, Colonel Haig became a military assistant on Mr. Kissinger’s National Security Council staff. He distinguished himself as the hardest-working man among an ambitious and talented cohort. Soon he was a brigadier general and Mr. Kissinger’s deputy.

Vietnam consumed him. He made 14 trips to Southeast Asia between 1970 and 1973. He later said that Mr. Kissinger “got snookered” in negotiations with the enemy, and that he would have chosen to be more forceful. “That is how Eisenhower settled Korea,” he said. “He told them he was going to nuke them. In Vietnam, we didn’t have to use nuclear weapons; all we had to do was to act like a nation.”

Then Watergate consumed the White House. In 1973, after a brief stint as the Army’s vice chief of staff, General Haig was summoned back to serve his president. He replaced H. R. Haldeman, who later went to prison, as the White House chief of staff.

All this, in the course of a few weeks in the fall of 1973, fell on Mr. Haig’s head:

Vice President Spiro T. Agnew pleaded no contest to taking bribes. The next man in line under the Constitution, House Speaker Carl Albert, was being treated for alcoholism. The president, by some accounts, was drinking to excess. War broke out in the Middle East. When the president tried to fire the Watergate special prosecutor rather than surrender his secret White House tapes, the attorney general and his deputy resigned. Impeachment loomed.

What began with the arrest of White House aides breaking into Democratic headquarters at the Watergate Hotel in Washington in June 1972 had quickly poisoned the presidency. Days after the break-in, the president and his closest aides had discussed how to cover up their role and how to obtain hush money for the burglars. The discussions, secretly taped by the president, were evidence of obstruction of justice.

General Haig was one of the first people, if not the very first, to read transcripts of the tapes the president had withheld from the special prosecutor. “When I finished reading it,” he told the authors of “Nixon: An Oral History,” “I knew that Nixon would never survive — no way.”

On Aug. 1, 1974, the general went to Vice President Gerald R. Ford and discussed the possibility of a pardon for the president. Mr. Nixon left office a week later; the pardon came the next month. The outrage was so deep that Mr. Haig departed.

After leaving the White House in October 1974, he became Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, the overseer of NATO. In 1979, he resigned and retired from the Army.

A “Haig for President” committee was formed and dissolved in 1980. Mr. Haig made a full-fledged run for the Republican nomination in 1988. But he placed last among the six Republican candidates in Iowa, where he barely campaigned, and he withdrew before the New Hampshire primary. He campaigned hard but drew next to no support. He had been, he said, “the darkest of the dark horses.”

In his 80s, Mr. Haig ran Worldwide Associates, a firm offering “strategic advice” on global commerce. He also appeared on Fox News as a military and political analyst.

He had a unique way with words. In a 1981 “On Language” column, William Safire of The New York Times, a veteran of the Nixon White House, called it “haigravation.”

Nouns became verbs or adverbs: “I’ll have to caveat my response, Senator.” (Caveat is Latin for “let him beware.” In English, it means “warning.” In Mr. Haig’s lexicon, it meant to say something with a warning that it might or might not be so.)

Haigspeak could be subtle: “there are nuance-al differences between Henry Kissinger and me on that.” It could be dramatic: “Some sinister force” had erased one of President Nixon’s subpoenaed Watergate tapes, creating an 18½-minute gap. Sometimes it was an emblem of the never-ending battle between politics and the English language: “careful caution,” “epistemologically-wise,” “saddle myself with a statistical fence.”

But he could also speak with clarity and conviction about the presidents he served, and about his own role in government. President Nixon would always be remembered for Watergate, he said, “because the event had such major historic consequences for the country: a fundamental discrediting of respect for the office; a new skepticism about politics in general, which every American feels.”

President Reagan, he said, would be remembered for having had “the good fortune of having been president when the Evil Empire began to unravel.” But, he went on, “to consider that standing tall in Grenada, or building Star Wars, brought the Russians to their knees is a distortion of historic reality. The internal contradictions of Marxism brought it to its knees.”

He was brutally candid about his own run for office and his subsequent distaste for political life. “Not being a politician, I think I can say this: The life of a politician in America is sleaze,” he told the authors of “Nixon: An Oral History.”

“I didn’t realize it until I started to run for office,” he said. “But there is hardly a straight guy in the business. As Nixon always said to me — and he took great pride in it — ‘Al, I never took a dollar. I had somebody else do it.”

Alexander Haig, Ex-U.S. Secretary of State, Dies at 85, NYT, 20.2.2010,
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/21/us/politics/21haig.html

As Saudi Women Meet Clinton,

No Talk of Rights

February 17, 2010
The New York Times
By MARK LANDLER

JIDDA, Saudi Arabia — Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton spoke to young women at a Saudi women’s college here on Tuesday, the site of a spirited exchange five years ago with a female official of the Bush administration over the rights of women in Saudi Arabia.

But despite Mrs. Clinton’s invitation to raise the issue, none of the women in the audience asked her about it. The discussion, while lively, focused on the same foreign-policy and security themes that have dominated her visit to the Persian Gulf, notably Iran and the Middle East peace process.

Mrs. Clinton said she wanted to hear the views of the students on women’s rights, noting that “American media presents a very unidimensional portrayal of Saudi women,” focusing on the black veils most wear.

She called for women to get better access to education and to play a bigger role in society. But she avoided criticism of Saudi Arabia, instead praising King Abdullah for his support of coeducational and women’s-only institutions, like the one that played host to her visit, Dar al-Hekman College.

None of the students picked up on Mrs. Clinton’s observation about how the American media portrays Saudi women, which had been a point of contention when Karen Hughes, the under secretary of state for public diplomacy in Bush administration, visited this college in 2005.

In that session, Ms. Hughes raised the hackles of some in the audience when she said the image of Saudi Arabia in the United States had been tarnished by the country’s refusal to allow women to drive.

On Tuesday, the students responded enthusiastically to Mrs. Clinton, though afterward, some expressed confusion about why women’s rights did not come up, given Mrs. Clinton’s iconic status.

“Maybe because it was Hillary Clinton, people wanted to ask her about issues bigger than whether Saudi women can drive,” said Duaa Badr, 18, a freshman management student from Jidda. She noted that many young women wanted to ask questions, but did not get a chance. The college appeared to exert tight control over who was handed a microphone.

Among the questions asked was why the United States was putting so much pressure on Iran not to make a nuclear bomb when other countries in the region, like Israel, possess nuclear weapons.

Mrs. Clinton did not answer directly about Israel, which has never confirmed its nuclear-weapons status. But she repeated the sharp criticism of Iran she has voiced at every stop on this three-day trip, saying the Iranian government was the world’s largest supporter of terrorism and backed radical Islamic groups that threatened its neighbors, including Saudi Arabia.

A young woman asked Mrs. Clinton to explain the debate in the United States over reforming the health-care system. Mrs. Clinton offered a short tutorial about the political complexities, and expressed sympathy that President Obama and his White House advisors were still grappling with it.

The earnest tone of the gathering was broken somewhat when a young man asked Mrs. Clinton whether she was horrified by the prospect of Sarah Palin becoming president, and if she were elected, whether Mrs. Clinton would consider emigrating to Canada or Russia.

“The short answer is no, I will not be emigrating,” she said with a laugh, before ducking the rest of the question.

“I’m not going to speculate on who might or might not be nominated by the Republicans,” she said. “I am very proud to support Barack Obama and I will continue to support Barack Obama.”

    As Saudi Women Meet Clinton, No Talk of Rights, NYT, 17.2.2010,
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/17/world/middleeast/17clinton.html

As Clinton Presses Allies,

Sharp Words Traded With Iran

February 17, 2010
The New York Times
By MARK LANDLER and ALAN COWELL

JIDDA, Saudi Arabia — Locked in a sharpening confrontation with Iran over its nuclear program , Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton reiterated concerns about Tehran’s intentions on Tuesday, suggesting that evidence pointed to Iran seeking nuclear weapons.

Speaking in Jidda as she prepared to end a three-day regional visit, Mrs. Clinton said that it would create “quite dangerous” problems if Iran acquired a nuclear weapon, potentially setting off a nuclear arms race.

Mrs. Clinton offered a list of Iranian actions that, she said, contradicted its protestations of peaceful intent, including the disclosure last year of a hitherto secret nuclear facility near Qum.

“You have to ask yourself: why are they doing this?” Mrs. Clinton said. Referring to Iran’s insistence that it is not seeking nuclear weapons, she said, “The evidence doesn’t support that.”

Only last week, Iran said it had begun enriching uranium to a higher level, ostensibly to feed a medical reactor in Tehran.

At a news conference in Tehran on Tuesday, reports said, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad reiterated that Iran was ready to suspend enrichment if it could exchange its low-enriched uranium stockpile for processed fuel rods from abroad. But he said the swap should be “simultaneous” — a demand already dismissed by the United States and its allies.

“We are still ready for an exchange, even with America,” Mr. Ahmadinejad said, according to Reuters.

Mrs. Clinton’s comments seemed to amplify the verbal sparring that began Monday when she said Iran was drifting toward a military dictatorship with the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps gathering ever greater political, military and economic power.

By way of a response, the Iranian foreign minister, Manouchehr Mottaki, said Tuesday that America itself answered to the description of a military dictatorship.

And as the exchanges intensified on Tuesday, Russia also entered the debate about Washington’s campaign to secure stricter sanction against Iran, saying penalties could not be ruled out if Iran did not persuade world powers that its intentions were peaceful.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, visiting Moscow, on Monday urged Russia’s president, Dmitri A. Medvedev, to support stiffer sanctions against Iran, but Mr. Medvedev withheld public support.

On Tuesday, Natalya Timakova, Mr. Medvedev’s spokeswoman, said Russia’s position had not changed and the Kremlin believed Iran should have “broader and more active cooperation” with world powers on its nuclear program.

“The international community needs to be certain that Iran’s nuclear program is peaceful,” she said, “but no one can rule out the use of sanctions if these obligations are not fulfilled.”

Iran has reacted sharply to the latest American criticism.

Mr. Mottaki “raised questions about the United States military dictatorship in the region,” the English-language broadcaster Press TV said on Tuesday, and accused Washington of practicing “modern deceit,” using “fake words” to disguise its intentions in the Persian Gulf area.

“We are regretful that the U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton tries to conceal facts about the stance of the U.S. administration through fake words,” Press TV quoted him as saying.

Mr. Mottaki was speaking at a news conference alongside his visiting Turkish counterpart, Ahmet Davutoglu.

He also accused Washington of interfering in the internal affairs of other states by undermining their “scientific and technological achievements,” an apparent reference to Iran’s nuclear program which Iran says is for peaceful purposes permitted under international law.

“Those who have been the very symbol of military dictatorships over the past decades, since the Vietnam war until now, see everyone else in the same way,” The Associated Press quoted Mr. Mottaki as saying. Mrs. Clinton’s current visit to the region, he said, was “overflowing with contradictions and incorrect actions.”

On Monday, Mrs. Clinton encouraged Iran’s religious and political leaders to rise up against the Revolutionary Guards, coming as close as any senior administration official has to inviting political upheaval in the country. She chose to issue the call in Doha, Qatar, just across the waters of the Persian Gulf from Iran itself.

“We see that the government of Iran, the supreme leader, the president, the Parliament is being supplanted and that Iran is moving toward a military dictatorship,” Mrs. Clinton said.

Her visit was seen as part of the Obama administration’s attempt to shore up support for more stringent sanctions directed at the Revolutionary Guard Corps. But Mr. Mottaki urged Russia and China not to follow Washington’s lead, The A.P. said.

While China has offered steady resistance to the idea of stricter sanctions against Iran, which supplies oil to Beijing, Russia’s stance has seemed slightly more ambivalent. Russia has appeared in recent weeks to be edging closer to supporting stricter sanctions, but still seems to have reservations. Unlike other permanent members of the Security Council, Russia has a regional relationship with Iran that it does not want to inflame.

Mark Landler reported from Jidda, Saudi Arabia, and Alan Cowell from London. Clifford J. Levy contributed reporting from Moscow.

    As Clinton Presses Allies, Sharp Words Traded With Iran, NYT, 17.2.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/17/world/middleeast/17iran.html

Clinton Fears Iran Is Headed

for Military Dictatorship

February 16, 2010
The New York Times
By MARK LANDLER

DOHA, Qatar — Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said on Monday that the United States feared Iran was drifting toward a military dictatorship, with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps seizing key positions in Iran’s political, military, and economic establishment.

“That is how we see it,” Mrs. Clinton said on Monday to a televised town hall meeting with students at a university here. “We see that the government in Iran, the supreme leader, the president, the Parliament, is being supplanted and that Iran is moving towards a military dictatorship.”

The United States, she said, was aiming a new set of tougher United Nations sanctions at the Revolutionary Guard Corps, which controls Iran’s nuclear program, though she reiterated that the United States had no plans to carry out a military strike against the Iranian government.

Mrs. Clinton’s remarks about the role of the Revolutionary Guard Corps were remarkably blunt, given her audience here in Qatar, a Persian Gulf emirate that maintains close ties with Iran. She also made it clear that the United States would protect Gulf countries from Iranian aggression, echoing a reference she made last year to the United States extending a so-called “defense umbrella” around the Persian Gulf.

“We will always defend ourselves, and we will always defend our friends and allies and we will certainly defend the countries who are in the Gulf who face the greatest immediate nearby threat from Iran,” she said.

“We also are talking at length with a lot of our friends in the Gulf about what they need defensively in the event that Iran pursues its nuclear ambitions.”

Mrs. Clinton spoke before flying to Saudi Arabia for meetings with King Abdullah and the foreign minister, Prince Saud al-Faisal.

Her comments on Monday underscored the Obama administration’s determination to single out the elite corps as a way to curb Iran’s nuclear program.

Only last Wednesday, the Treasury Department imposed sanctions on a commander and four companies linked to the corps.

The Treasury said it froze the assets of four affiliates of a sprawling construction conglomerate owned by the Revolutionary Guards, as well as those of Gen. Rostam Qasemi, who oversees the companies, because they are accused of being involved in Iran’s effort to manufacture nuclear weapons.

The administration is also working on a series of sanctions that would publicly single out the corps’ vast array of companies, banks and other entities.

The latest designations, which come two and a half years after the United States first imposed sanctions on the corps, illustrate both the scope and limitations of the president’s pressure campaign.

Senior White House officials described what they said would be a “systematic” effort to drive a wedge between the Iranian population and the Revolutionary Guards, which the West says is responsible for running Iran’s nuclear program and also has a record of supporting militant Islamist organizations and cracking down on antigovernment protesters.

In putting together a United Nations Security Council resolution that names specific companies and the wide web of assets owned by the Guards — assets that include even the Tehran airport — the administration is hoping to substantially increase pressure on the organization, which one senior administration official described as a new “entitled class” in Iran.

“We have bent over backwards to say to the Islamic Republic of Iran that we are willing to have a constructive conversation about how they can align themselves with international norms and rules and re-enter as full members of the international community,” Mr. Obama said in a news conference last Tuesday. “They have made their choice so far.”

The United States, Mr. Obama said, will be working on “developing a significant regime of sanctions that will indicate to them how isolated they are from the international community as a whole.”

The goal would be to increase the cost for those who do business with Iran so much that they would cut off ties.

Previous resolutions have designated a handful of senior figures in the Iranian nuclear program, including the man believed to run much of the military research program for the Revolutionary Guards. But the administration’s latest push would name dozens, if not hundreds, of companies.

Mrs. Clinton arrived in Qatar on Sunday and conceded at a policy conference that the Obama administration had not yet delivered on some of its signature foreign-policy goals.

From the stalled Middle East peace process to the still-open prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, to the diplomatic deadlock with Iran over its nuclear program, Mrs. Clinton acknowledged a list of unfinished projects that she said had sowed suspicion that the American commitment was “insufficient or insincere.”

“I understand why people might be impatient,” Mrs. Clinton said in an address to the U.S.-Islamic World Forum, a conference jointly sponsored by the Qatari government and the Brookings Institution. “Building a stronger relationship cannot happen overnight or even in a year.”

But Mrs. Clinton threw some of the onus for improving the atmosphere back on Arab nations, saying they needed to assume more responsibility for helping jump-start peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians, and for standing up against Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

“President Obama’s vision was not one of a single country seeking to write a new chapter on its own,” Mrs. Clinton said of the president’s speech last June at Cairo University. “It was a call for all of us to take responsibility for retiring stereotypes and outdated views.”

Some of those stereotypes were plainly on view at this elite conference, an assembly of 300 Muslim and Western government officials, businesspeople, scholars and religious figures.

When Saad Eddin Ibrahim, an Egyptian social scientist and human rights advocate who was imprisoned from 2001 to 2003, rose to challenge Mrs. Clinton to take a tougher line with the Egyptian government over its repressive tactics, it bought a nervous chuckle from Qatar’s prime minister, Sheik Hamad bin Jassim al-Thani, who was sharing the stage with the secretary.

“You know, I have enough problems with your government,” the prime minister said to Mr. Ibrahim. He made a tongue-in-cheek show of disavowing Mr. Ibrahim’s comments, saying “the Americans could handle” the backlash from an unhappy Egypt, but not a little neighbor like Qatar.

Smiling, Mrs. Clinton said, “We will take responsibility.”

It was a lighthearted exchange in an otherwise solemn gathering that underscored how little has changed since Mr. Obama pledged to improve relations between the United States and the Muslim world. The Israelis and Palestinians have not moved toward talks, and after a year of overtures by Mr. Obama, Iran has not softened its position.

Mrs. Clinton said Mr. Obama had made extraordinary efforts, even sending messages to the Iranian leadership — an apparent confirmation of media reports last year that the president had written letters to Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, to which he did not reply.

While Mrs. Clinton did not make specific requests of Iran’s neighbors, she said they needed to take an active role in helping curb the Tehran government. Given that she was a guest in a neighboring country with close commercial ties to Iran, she used unusually blunt language about the Iranian nuclear program, which Tehran insists is for peaceful energy purposes.

She referred to Iran’s “pursuit of nuclear weapons” without any caveats, and said, “we welcome any meaningful engagement, but we don’t want to be engaging while they’re building their bomb.”

Qatar is one of four Persian Gulf countries, along with the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Kuwait, that have accepted missile-defense batteries, according to American military officials. The batteries are designed to shoot down short-range Iranian missiles.

    Clinton Fears Iran Is Headed for Military Dictatorship, NYT, 16.2.2010,
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/16/world/middleeast/16diplo.html

Editorial

The Challenge of China

February 11, 2010
The New York Times

Relations between the United States and China have turned chilly in recent months as the two countries wrangle over Taiwan, Tibet, Iran and China’s continued manipulation of its currency.

President Obama is right to press Beijing to behave more responsibly — toward its own people and internationally. China is certainly pushing its sense of grievance too far and underestimating the fear and resentment its growing power is provoking in Asia and the West.

There is little hope of progress — on the global economy, global warming or Iran’s nuclear ambitions — unless Washington and Beijing work harder to manage their differences.

President Obama’s decision last month to sell Taiwan $6.4 billion in helicopters, Patriot missiles and other defensive items elicited a particularly harsh reaction: Beijing has publicly threatened to punish American arms companies that sell to Taiwan, presumably by cutting off access to China’s huge market.

The sales could not have been a surprise to China’s leadership. Mr. Obama told President Hu Jintao of his intentions at their summit in November in Beijing. The arms were part of a package approved by former President George W. Bush, and Mr. Obama left out the most controversial items: F-16 jets and diesel submarines.

Rather than encouraging Taiwan’s independence, as Beijing claims, the arms sales will give Taiwan’s president, Ma Ying-jeou, the confidence to continue his efforts to improve relations with the mainland. It is absurd for China to think that any Taiwanese leader would not want to bolster his country’s defenses when Beijing is modernizing its arsenal and stationing more than 1,000 missiles across the Taiwan Strait.

Beijing’s threat to punish American companies is a dangerous game, especially at a time when criticism is rampant — around the world and on Capitol Hill — about China’s unfair trade practices.

Beijing is also complaining bitterly about President Obama’s planned meeting this month with the Dalai Lama, warning it would “damage trust and cooperation” between the two countries. American presidents have regularly met with the respected Tibetan religious leader. And China’s leaders would have more chance of calming tensions in Tibet if they sought serious compromise with the Dalai Lama, who has advocated greater autonomy for the region, not independence, as Beijing speciously claims.

China is alienating not only the United States but also France, Britain and Germany by resisting tougher United Nations Security Council sanctions on Iran. Beijing’s view is frustratingly shortsighted. Any conflict over Iran’s nuclear program would drive up oil prices and disrupt China’s purchases.

The Obama administration is smart to try to line up backup suppliers for China — talking to Saudi Arabia and others — as part of its bid to get Beijing to support tougher sanctions.

The administration also was smart not to overreact when Beijing declared that the Taiwan arms sales will “cause seriously negative effects” on contacts and cooperation between the two countries. Administration officials expect the Chinese to cancel some high-level meetings. But they say they are working to ensure that midlevel military exchanges continue and that this year’s summit in Washington with President Hu goes forward.

American officials say they see signs that Beijing doesn’t want to push things too hard. Outside experts worry that China may overplay its hand. That would not be in anyone’s interest.

    The Challenge of China, NYT, 11.2.2010,
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/11/opinion/11thu1.html

China Shows Little Patience

for U.S. Currency Pressure

February 5, 2010
The New York Times
By EDWARD WONG and MARK LANDLER

BEIJING — A senior Chinese official said on Thursday that China would not bow to pressure from the United States to revalue its currency, which President Obama says is kept at an artificially low level to give China an unfair advantage in selling its exports.

The official, Ma Zhaoxu, a Foreign Ministry spokesman, said at a regular news conference here that “wrongful accusations and pressure will not help solve this issue.”

Mr. Ma was reacting to remarks on trade that Mr. Obama made on Wednesday when he met with Democratic senators in Washington. Mr. Obama stopped short of saying China manipulates its currency, but his words on China’s economic policies were harsh — the United States, he said, had “to make sure our goods are not artificially inflated in price and their goods are not artificially deflated in price; that puts us at a huge competitive disadvantage.”

Economists agree with that assessment. They say that the Chinese currency, the renminbi, is undervalued by 25 to 40 percent compared to the dollar and other currencies. The gap is wider than at any time since July 2005, when the Chinese government, under pressure from the Bush administration, decided to the do away with the renminbi’s peg to the dollar and allow the currency to float in a narrow band against the dollar and other currencies.

The renminbi appreciated 21 percent, but since July 2008 it has remained at the same value — today, one dollar equals about 6.83 renminbi, also called the yuan.

“Judging from the international balance of payments and the currency market’s supply and demand, the value of the renminbi is getting to a reasonable and balanced level,” Mr. Ma said on Thursday.

The sharp exchange over China’s currency is only the latest symptom of rising tensions in American relations with China. Internet censorship, hacking attacks directed at American companies, arms sales to Taiwan and the pending visit of the Dalai Lama to Washington have all cropped up in the last month as points of conflict. China is exhibiting a brash sense of confidence as its economy continues to boom while much of the world remains mired in a recession.

On economics, Chinese officials now regularly lecture their American counterparts on the need to maintain the value of the American dollar. China, which has more than $2.4 trillion in foreign exchange reserves, is the largest holder of American debt. On Wednesday, Xinhua, the official state news agency, .the official state news agency said Chinese economists were concerned that the American government, suffering from a record budget deficit, could print more dollars and issue more bonds, eroding the value of the dollar.

The finger-wagging from the American side is almost certain to intensify too. With midterm elections this fall, Mr. Obama is under pressure to alleviate the high unemployment rate in the United States. Mr. Obama said last week in his State of the Union address that he hoped to double American exports within five years.

In China, the export industry is a large employer in the coastal regions and draws hordes of migrant workers from interior provinces. Exports have slowed considerably since the global financial crisis began, and Chinese leaders and economists have been saying that domestic consumption should become a larger part of the economy.

Last year, the Chinese economy grew by 8.7 percent, surpassing the 8 percent benchmark set by the government and indicating that China was managing to push through the global recession with little damage. A large driver of the growth was domestic spending — the Chinese government announced in November 2008 a stimulus package worth $585 billion.

But the spending, along with in-flows of foreign currency through private investments and speculation, what some economists call “hot money,” is fueling inflation. The consumer price index in the fourth quarter of 2009 rose 1.9 percent. Fears of an overheated economy could lead the Chinese government to revalue the renminbi later this year to help contain inflation.

In late January, Jim O’Neill, the chief economist at Goldman Sachs, told Bloomberg News that he expected the Chinese government to make a one-off revaluation of the renminbi, letting it appreciate by at least five percent before the end of 2010. He said the revaluation would happen suddenly, without any warning from Chinese leaders.

Reopening the battle with Beijing over its currency may pay political dividends for Mr. Obama at a time of double-digit unemployment and growing fears that China is stealing American jobs. But experts say the president will have even less leverage over Beijing than President George W. Bush did. Mr. Bush prodded China for years to adjust its exchange rate with little success.

China, they say, is determined to reignite its export machine after a global recession that sapped demand for Chinese goods. A cheap currency is vital to that goal. And as indicated by Mr. Ma’s statement on Thursday, China’s leaders have grown impatient with lectures on economic policy from their chief debtor, the United States.

“It will be like water off a duck’s back,” said Nicholas R. Lardy, a China expert at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. “They’re puzzled by the criticism. They think they should be praised for keeping their currency stable at a time of global turmoil.”

Criticizing China’s policy, however, is likely to worsen a relationship already frayed by irritants on both sides.

In two weeks, Mr. Obama is expected to meet with the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan spiritual leader, over the objections of the Chinese, who condemn him as a subversive. The administration forged ahead with sales of weapons to Taiwan, drawing an angry blast from Beijing, which regards Taiwan as a breakaway province. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton criticized China for censoring the Internet, in the wake of Google’s allegations about hacking.

For its part, the United States is frustrated that the Chinese will not back tougher sanctions against Iran over its nuclear program. And China has resisted American initiatives on climate change policy, turning the recent climate meeting in Copenhagen into a diplomatic drama.

The administration has struggled to prevent the ill will from any single issue from contaminating the broader relationship. “We can’t pick the timing of when an issue becomes important,” said a senior official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the delicacy of the matter.

Exchange rates are an arcane subject, harder to explain than a meeting with the Dalai Lama. But they influence easy-to-understand issues like the competitiveness of American exports and job security.

“The currency issue has the potential to become a very hot political issue,” said Kenneth G. Lieberthal, who worked on China policy in the Clinton White House. “We’re in significant danger of hitting a very rough patch in trade relations, in the latter part of this year.”

Edward Wong reported from Beijing, and Mark Landler from Washington.

    China Shows Little Patience for U.S. Currency Pressure, NYT, 5.2.2010,
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/05/world/asia/05diplo.html

China Warns U.S.

on Meeting With Dalai Lama

February 3, 2010
The New York Times
By EDWARD WONG

BEIJING — A senior Chinese official strongly warned President Obama on Tuesday against meeting with the Dalai Lama, the exiled spiritual leader of the Tibetans, saying it would damage relations between China and the United States.

The official, Zhu Weiqun, said any country would suffer consequences if its leaders met with the Dalai Lama, whom China considers to be a dangerous separatist. Mr. Zhu did not elaborate on what actions China could take.

But a White House spokesman said the president’s plans were unchanged. “The president told China’s leaders during his trip last year that he would meet with the Dalai Lama and he intends to do so,” said the spokesman, Bill Burton, speaking aboard Air Force One as it flew Mr. Obama to New Hampshire for an appearance.

Last autumn, when the Dalai Lama visited the United States, Mr. Obama declined to meet with him in order to avoid angering China before Mr. Obama’s first trip to Beijing, which took place in November.

Both Mr. Obama and the Dalai Lama are Nobel Peace prize laureates.

Mr. Zhu, who is the executive vice director of the United Front Work Department, the arm of the Chinese Communist Party that oversees ethnic policy, made his remarks at a morning news conference, according to Xinhua, the state news agency. The purpose of the conference was to give details on recent negotiations between the Chinese government and envoys of the Dalai Lama, in which China rejected demands for greater Tibetan autonomy.

Any move by United States leaders to meet the Dalai Lama will “harm others but bring no profit to itself, either,” Mr. Zhu said.

Despite Mr. Obama’s earlier overtures to Beijing, tensions between the United States and China have been on the rise.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton recently chastised China in a speech she gave in which she decried Internet censorship. Last Friday, the United States announced sales of $6.4 billion of arms to Taiwan, the self-governing, democratic island that China says is a rebel province. In response, China said it would break off military-to-military ties with the United States and bring sanctions against the American companies that make the arms.

China usually criticizes any prominent figure who meets with the Dalai Lama.

In 2007, despite furious objections from China, former President George W. Bush met privately with the Dalai Lama in Washington and was present at a ceremony in the Capitol Rotunda in which Congress awarded the exiled Tibetan leader its highest civilian honor. China called the event a farce.

A decade earlier, President Clinton informally greeted the Dalai Lama at the White House and said he would urge China to open talks with him, but the two leaders did not meet formally.

In late 2008 China protested a meeting between the Dalai Lama and President Nicolas Sarkozy of France. It hinted that it would bring economic sanctions against France, but those never materialized.

China considers sovereignty issues like the status of Tibet and Taiwan to be what officials call the nation’s “core interests.” Few things anger the Chinese government more than the perceived intervention of foreign countries in these issues. Tibet has always been a thorny foreign policy issue for the Communist Party but became even more so after an uprising exploded across Tibetan regions of western China in March 2008.

The Dalai Lama, 74, lives in India and says he wants only “genuine autonomy” for Tibet, not independence.

The latest meeting between his envoys and Chinese officials ended over the weekend. It was the ninth round of talks since 2002 between China and the Dalai Lama, and Chinese officials restated their rejection of the Dalai Lama’s call for greater autonomy for the Tibetans.

Mr. Zhu said at the news conference on Tuesday that the Dalai Lama was not a legal representative of the 6 million Tibetans in China and that China would discuss with the envoys only the status of the Dalai Lama, not the future of Tibet.

“They are only the Dalai Lama’s private representatives,” he said, “so they can only talk about the prospect of the Dalai Lama; at most, the prospects of a small party around him.”

Peter Baker contributed reporting from Nashua, New Hampshire.

    China Warns U.S. on Meeting With Dalai Lama, NYT, 3.2.2010,
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/03/world/asia/03tibet.html

U.S. Speeding Up Missile Defenses

in Persian Gulf

January 31, 2010
The New York Times
By DAVID E. SANGER and ERIC SCHMITT

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration is accelerating the deployment of new defenses against possible Iranian missile attacks in the Persian Gulf, placing special ships off the Iranian coast and antimissile systems in at least four Arab countries, according to administration and military officials.

The deployments come at a critical turning point in President Obama’s dealings with Iran. After months of unsuccessful diplomatic outreach, the administration is trying to win broad international consensus for sanctions against the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps, which Western nations say control a covert nuclear arms program.

Mr. Obama spoke of the shift in his State of the Union address, warning of “consequences” if Iran continued to defy United Nations demands to stop manufacturing nuclear fuel. And Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton publicly warned China on Friday that its opposition to sanctions was shortsighted.

The news that the United States is deploying antimissile defenses — including a rare public discussion of them by Gen. David H. Petraeus — appears to be part of a coordinated administration strategy to increase pressure on Iran.

The deployments are also partly intended to counter the impression that Iran is fast becoming the most powerful military force in the Middle East, to forestall any Iranian escalation of its confrontation with the West if new sanctions are imposed. In addition, the administration is trying to show Israel that there is no immediate need for military strikes against Iranian nuclear and missile facilities, according to administration officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

By highlighting the defensive nature of the buildup, the administration was hoping to avoid a sharp response from Tehran.

Military officials said that the countries that accepted the defense systems were Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Kuwait. They said the Kuwaitis had agreed to take the defensive weapons to supplement older, less capable models it has had for years. Saudi Arabia and Israel have long had similar equipment of their own.

General Petraeus has declined to say who was taking the American equipment, probably because many countries in the gulf region are hesitant to be publicly identified as accepting American military aid and the troops that come with it. In fact, the names of countries where the antimissile systems are deployed are classified, but many of them are an open secret.

The general spoke about the deployments at a conference at the Institute for the Study of War here on Jan. 22, saying that “Iran is clearly seen as a very serious threat by those on the other side of the gulf front.”

General Petraeus said that the acceleration of defensive systems — which began when President George W. Bush was in office — included “eight Patriot missile batteries, two in each of four countries.” Patriot missiles are capable of shooting down short-range offensive missiles.

He also described a first line of defense: He said the United States was now keeping Aegis cruisers on patrol in the Persian Gulf at all times. Those cruisers are equipped with advanced radar and antimissile systems designed to intercept medium-range missiles. Those systems would not be useful against Iran’s long-range missile, the Shahab 3, but intelligence agencies believe that it will be years before Iran can solve the problems of placing a nuclear warhead atop that missile.

Iran contends that it is not trying to develop nuclear weapons, and that its program is for energy production. The White House declined to comment on the deployments.

But administration officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity said the moves have several aims. “Our first goal is to deter the Iranians,” said one senior administration official. “A second is to reassure the Arab states, so they don’t feel they have to go nuclear themselves. But there is certainly an element of calming the Israelis as well.”

As Iran’s nuclear program proceeds — more slowly, American intelligence officials say, than the United States had once thought — Israel has hinted at various times that it might take military action against the country’s military facilities unless it is convinced that Mr. Obama and Western allies are succeeding in stopping the program.

Mr. Obama’s national security adviser, Gen. James L. Jones, took an unannounced trip to Israel this month, partly to take the temperature of the Israeli government and to review both economic and covert programs now under way against the Iranian program, according to officials familiar with the meeting.

American officials argue that the willingness of Arab states to take the American emplacements, which usually come with a small deployment of American soldiers to operate, maintain and protect the equipment, illustrates the region’s growing unease about Iran’s ambitions and abilities.

Gulf countries are also taking steps of their own to harden their defenses. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have bought more than $15 billion in American arms in the past two years, including missile defense systems. The United States is helping support a plan by Saudi Arabia to triple the size, to 30,000 people, of a Saudi force that protects the kingdom’s ports, oil facilities and water-desalinization plants, a senior military officer said. The Washington Post reported both steps on its Web site on Saturday.

One senior military officer said that General Petraeus had started talking openly about the Patriot deployments about a month ago, when it became increasingly clear that international efforts toward imposing sanctions against Iran faced hurdles, and the administration’s efforts to engage Iran were being rebuffed by the Tehran government. In October, the two countries reached an agreement in principle to move a significant portion of Iran’s nuclear fuel out of the country, but Iran backed away from the deal.

In discussing the Patriots and missile-shooting ships, General Petraeus’s main message has been to reassure allies in the gulf that the United States is committed to helping defend the region, said the military officer, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the delicate nature of the topic. But the general’s remarks were also a pointed reminder to the Iranians of American resolve, the officer said.

    U.S. Speeding Up Missile Defenses in Persian Gulf, NYT, 31.1.2010,
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/31/world/middleeast/31missile.html

China Warns of Sanctions

in Fallout Over Taiwan

January 31, 2010
The New York Times
By REUTERS

BEIJING (Reuters) — China threatened to impose sanctions on American arms contractors and cut cooperation with Washington unless it cancels a $6.4 billion arms sale to Taiwan, in an unprecedented move signaling Beijing’s growing global power.

China on Saturday bitterly denounced the Obama administration’s announcement a day earlier that it wanted to sell the package of weapons to Taiwan, the self-ruled island that Beijing views as an illegitimate breakaway state.

The dispute deepens the rifts between Beijing and Washington, already at odds over trade, currency, Tibet and the Internet.

Beijing said it would formally sanction American companies that sold arms to Taiwan, a break with past practice. Previously, China’s commercial reprisals have been informal.

“The United States will shoulder responsibility for the serious repercussions if it does not immediately reverse the mistaken decision to sell weapons to Taiwan,” Chinese Vice Foreign Minister He Yafei told the United States ambassador to China Jon Huntsman in comments reported on the Foreign Ministry’s Web site.

The dispute threatens to spill over into broader international diplomacy. Washington has sought China’s backing in pressuring Iran and North Korea, and is also preparing for a world summit on nuclear weapons in April.

“It will be unavoidable that cooperation between China and the United States over important international and regional issues will also be affected,” the Chinese foreign ministry said, without specifying any of those issues.

China’s defense ministry said military exchanges would be put on hold, and Beijing postponed vice ministerial-level talks on strategic security, arms control and non-proliferation.

“I think the price the United States pays will be heavier than the U.S. may have anticipated,” said Liu Jiangyong, professor of international security at Beijing’s Tsinghua University.

“The U.S. view that arms sales to Taiwan are just a momentary squall could be out-of-date,” he said. “Now longer-term cooperation could also be damaged.”

The Obama administration told the . Congress on Friday of the proposed sales, which include Black Hawk helicopters, Patriot “Advanced Capability-3” anti-missile missiles and two refurbished Osprey-class mine-hunting ships.

The Black Hawk, a tactical transport helicopter, is built by Sikorsky Aircraft, a unit of United Technologies. The Patriot missile is built by the Lockheed Martin Corporation, and the Raytheon Company is the system integrator.

“China will also impose corresponding sanctions on U.S. companies that engage in weapons sales to Taiwan,” the foreign ministry said, without naming any firms.

China Warns of Sanctions in Fallout Over Taiwan, NYT, 21.1.2010,
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/31/world/asia/31china.html

US Redefines Yemen Strategy

January 26, 2010
Filed at 2:13 p.m. ET
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The terror incubator in Yemen, birthplace of the Christmas Day airliner attack, is forcing the United States and allies to pour millions of dollars into a shaky government that officials suspect won't spend the money wisely and isn't fully committed to the battle against al-Qaida.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and other world leaders meet in London on Wednesday to hash out a plan. Efforts to stabilize the impoverished nation, where the government is battling al-Qaida strongholds with American help, are suddenly urgent after years of faltering.

''Clearly December 25th had an electrifying impact,'' said Daniel Benjamin, State Department coordinator for counterterrorism. The failed attempt to bring down the Detroit-bound airliner by a Nigerian tied to Yemen's radicals made ''many members of the international community think that this was a time to get past the excuses and get back to work.''

U.S. officials are uneasy, however, about Yemen's government. President Ali Abdullah Saleh's army has only sporadically pursued the growing al-Qaida threat in Yemen's vast tribal territory. The United States wants its aid to be closely monitored, and tied to economic and political reforms.

American worries about Yemen's commitment heightened last year after several Yemeni detainees who had been released from Guantanamo Bay prison resurfaced as leaders of the country's growing al-Qaida faction.

At the same time, the Yemeni government can be undermined by appearing too close to the Americans. The Yemeni people are virulently anti-Israel, and by extension anti-American. Sensitive to that concern, U.S. officials have played down the Pentagon's efforts to provide intelligence and other assistance to the Yemeni military.

The effort, Benjamin acknowledged, will have to overcome a history of failed commitments on all sides.

''The international community made a number of commitments to Yemen and they haven't always been delivered, and Yemenis, as we know, have also sometimes made commitments and haven't always followed through,'' he said. ''The important thing is that the (Yemeni) government's doing the right thing now.''

U.S. officials say they want to combine a deeper involvement with the Yemenis on the counterterrorism front with programs designed to alleviate poverty, illiteracy and rapid population growth.

A key U.S. complaint is that Yemen's pursuit of al-Qaida insurgents inside the country has been fitful at best. The low point was the deadly October 2000 al-Qaida attack on the Navy destroyer USS Cole in Yeman's Aden harbor that killed 17 American sailors.

The Yemeni government largely defeated al-Qaida forces in 2003, but the terror group was able to rebound more as the government turned its focus to flare-ups by other insurgents. Then, early last year, al-Qaida groups in Yemen and Saudi Arabia, Yemen's northern neighbor, merged, and turned their efforts toward Islamic jihad beyond those countries' borders.

In the wake of the Christmas attack, Yemen's military has struck repeatedly at al-Qaida sites. On Tuesday, a Yemeni security official said that 43 people, including several foreigners, are being interrogated there for links to the failed attempt to blow up the Detroit-bound airliner.

Last week, after a meeting in Washington with Clinton, Yemeni Foreign Minister Abu Bakr al-Qirbi stressed ''our commitment to continue the fight against terrorism and against radicalization.''

Clinton praised Yemen's recent military actions against the al-Qaida faction there but insisted that extremism could not be rooted out without a focus on economic development, something Saleh has yet to push to U.S. satisfaction.

''Our relationship cannot be just about the terrorists,'' she said. ''As critical as that is to our security and our future ... the best way to really get at some of these underlying problems that exist is through an effective development strategy.''

The Yemeni foreign minister praised the American effort, saying that ''with the new administration, we have seen a greater understanding to the challenges faced by Yemen and the willingness to help Yemen.''

The U.S. currently has a three-year, $121 million development and economic assistance program with Yemen. Separately, it is providing nearly $70 million in military aid this year.

Those numbers are likely to increase, but throughout the past decade, Washington's annual assistance to Yemen hovered in the low $20- to $25-million range.

''Yemen is often overlooked by U.S. policy makers,'' said Jeremy Sharp, author of a Congressional Research Service report on the country. He described the U.S.-Yemeni relationship as ''tepid'' with a lack of strong military-to-military ties, commerce and cross-cultural exchanges.

The push for closer ties are also tempered by concerns about Saleh's rule, which has been punctuated by severe disagreements over how Yemen has handled terror suspects, including several detainees implicated in the Cole bombing and detainees released from Guantanamo Bay.

Terrorists from both of those groups have reportedly become leaders of the new al-Qaida offshoot in Yemen.

But the Yemeni government's response to the terror threat was ''basically catch-and-release and that needs to change,'' said one U.S. official familiar with counterterrorism cooperation with Yemen. ''We need to have confidence that the bad guys are locked up.'' The official spoke on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the matter.

Al-Qirbi insisted last week that terrorists ''are apprehended and some of them have been prosecuted. Of course, there are some who are at large and these are being pursued by our security forces.''

Complicating matters is the fact that Yemeni officials have historically been adverse to any visible U.S. involvement there, as that could likely trigger greater anti-American sentiment among the religiously conservative population.

Some argue that the administration's approach should center on Yemen's Arab neighbors, notably Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, which have the cash and the proximity to help.

''An effective U.S. role would be a quiet one that helps stoke Arab leadership on this issue, frames problems and responses, and monitors compliance,'' Jon Alterman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies said.

''The United States needs to play a role directing Yemen's unfolding drama,'' he said, ''not starring in it.''

------

Associated Press writer Anne Flaherty contributed to this report.

    US Redefines Yemen Strategy, NYT, 26.1.2010,
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2010/01/26/us/politics/AP-US-US-Yemen.html

China Rebuffs Clinton

on Internet Warning

January 23, 2010
The New York Times
By EDWARD WONG

BEIJING — The Chinese Foreign Ministry lashed out Friday against criticism of China in a speech on Internet censorship made by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, calling on the United States government “to respect the truth and to stop using the so-called Internet freedom question to level baseless accusations.”

Ma Zhaoxu, a Foreign Ministry spokesman, said in a written statement posted Friday afternoon on the ministry’s Web site that the criticism leveled by Mrs. Clinton on Thursday was “harmful to Sino-American relations.”

“The Chinese Internet is open,” he said.

The statement by the Foreign Ministry, along with a scathing editorial in the English-language edition of The Global Times, a populist, patriotic newspaper, signaled that China was ready to wrestle politically with the United States in the debate over Internet censorship.

President Obama promised last year to start a more conciliatory era in United States-China relations, pushing human rights issues to the background, but the new criticism of China’s Internet censorship and rising tensions over currency valuation and Taiwan arms sales indicate that animus could flare in the months ahead.

Mrs. Clinton’s sweeping speech with its cold war undertones — likening the information curtain to the Iron Curtain — criticized several countries by name, including China, for Internet censorship. It was the first speech in which a top administration official offered a vision for making Internet freedom an integral part of foreign policy.

The debate over Internet censorship was brought to the fore in China last week when Google announced it might shut down its Chinese-language search engine, Google.cn, and curtail its other operations in mainland China if Chinese officials did not back down from requiring Google to censor search results.

Until now, the Chinese government had been trying to frame the dispute with Google as a commercial matter, perhaps because officials want to avoid having the dispute become a referendum on Internet censorship policies among Chinese liberals and foreign companies operating in China. On Thursday, He Yafei, a vice foreign minister, had said the Google dispute should not be “over-interpreted” or linked to the bilateral relationship with the United States, according to Xinhua, the official state news agency.

But in the aftermath of Mrs. Clinton’s speech, that attitude could be changing. Mrs. Clinton pointedly said that “a new information curtain is descending across much of the world” and identified China as one of a handful of countries that had stepped up Internet censorship in the past year. (Starting in late 2008, the Chinese government shut down thousands of Web sites under the pretext of an antipornography campaign.) She also praised American companies such as Google that are “making the issue of Internet and information freedom a greater consideration in their business decisions.”

The State Department had invited at least two prominent Chinese bloggers to travel to Washington for Mrs. Clinton’s speech, and on Friday the United States Embassy here invited bloggers, mostly liberals, to attend a briefing on Internet issues.

A White House spokesman, Bill Burton, said Friday that “all we are looking for from China are some answers.”

In its editorial, the English-language edition of The Global Times said Mrs. Clinton “had raised the stakes in Washington’s clash with Beijing over Internet freedom.”

The American demand for an unfettered Internet was a form of “information imperialism,” the newspaper said, because less developed nations cannot possibly compete with Western countries in the arena of information flow.

“The U.S. campaign for uncensored and free flow of information on an unrestricted Internet is a disguised attempt to impose its values on other cultures in the name of democracy,” the newspaper said, adding that the “U.S. government’s ideological imposition is unacceptable and, for that reason, will not be allowed to succeed.”

Articles on the Chinese-language Web site of The Global Times asserted that the United States employs the Internet as a weapon to achieve worldwide hegemony.

One big question is whether ordinary Chinese will, to any large degree, accept China’s arguments justifying Internet censorship. Although urban, middle-class Chinese often support government policies on sovereignty issues such as Tibet or Taiwan, they generally deride media censorship. That feeling is especially pronounced among those who call themselves netizens. China has the most Internet users of any country, some 384 million by official count, but also the most complex system of Internet censorship, nicknamed the Great Firewall.

Except in the western region of Xinjiang, which is only starting to restore Internet access after cutting service off entirely after ethnic riots in July, canny netizens across China use software to get over the Great Firewall while chafing at the controls.

Jonathan Ansfield and Xiyun Yang contributed reporting.

    China Rebuffs Clinton on Internet Warning, NYT, 23.1.2010,
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/23/world/asia/23diplo.html

Editorial

Pakistan Hesitates, Again

January 23, 2010
The New York Times

For years, Pakistan’s leaders denied that extremists — in Pakistan and neighboring Afghanistan — posed a mortal threat to their country. After the Pakistani Taliban got within 60 miles of Islamabad last April they decided that they had no choice but to fight back. They were right. Unfortunately, their understanding of self-interest seems to stop at a border that the Taliban certainly does not respect.

During his visit to Pakistan this week, Defense Secretary Robert Gates pressed Pakistan’s military leaders to open a new front against Afghan militants using Pakistani territory to stage attacks into Afghanistan — and was promptly rebuffed.

Displaying an alarming denial about the nature and urgency of the threat, an Army spokesman said there would be no offensive in the tribal region of North Waziristan — where the Afghan Taliban are based — for at least six months and perhaps as long as 12 months. Given the speed and virulence with which the extremists have spread their hatred and violence in the past year, that’s too long to wait.

To its credit, Pakistan’s Army has mounted big offensives against Pakistani Taliban factions in the Swat Valley and South Waziristan and paid a steep price: losing 2,000 soldiers in battle. It may need some time to solidify these gains and prepare a new assault. But that is almost certainly not the real reason behind the delay.

Pakistan’s Army and spy service helped create the Afghan Taliban, and even now they see the group as a proxy force to limit India’s influence in Afghanistan once the Americans leave. That is truly playing with fire.

Pakistan’s failure to pressure both Taliban groups could doom President Obama’s military and political offensive in Afghanistan — or force him to make good on his threat to go after militants in the Pakistan border region if Islamabad does not. This is not just America’s fight. As Mr. Gates warned this week, extremist groups on the border are interconnected and determined to destabilize the entire region.

Pakistan cannot afford to give the Afghan Taliban a pass, and Washington must make sure that Islamabad faces up to that reality. Mr. Gates tried to nudge Pakistan when he spoke publicly about how Islamabad cannot “ignore one part of this cancer and pretend it won’t have some impact closer to home.” We hope he was firmer in private.

Mr. Gates and other officials are working hard to persuade Islamabad that the United States will not repeat past mistakes and abandon Pakistan as it did after the Soviets withdrew 20 years ago.

The Obama administration’s decision this week to grant Pakistan’s longstanding request for aerial spy drones (unarmed, at Washington’s insistence) should help bridge the “trust deficit.” Washington must also do more to help lessen tensions between Pakistan and India. That may be the best chance of persuading Islamabad that it can and must focus more of its troops and attention on fighting all of the Taliban.

    Pakistan Hesitates, Again, NYT, 23.1.2010,
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/23/opinion/23sat1.html

A Parish Tested

Haiti’s Aftershocks

Felt at a School in New York
 

January 23, 2010
The New York Times
By ANNE BARNARD

To make sense of the earthquake, the eighth-grade science class analyzed plate tectonics, used computer animation to simulate tremors of different magnitudes, and browsed satellite images to zero in on their family villages in Haiti. Down the hall, a kindergarten teacher took a lower-tech approach: piling Legos on two cardboard squares and bumping them together until the toy buildings crashed down.

In the fourth grade, a skinny, bright-eyed boy, dressed up for his first day back at his old school in a sweater-vest, tie and jeweled cross, needed no simulation to visualize the catastrophe. Joshua Joseph, 10, was playing Twister at his aunt’s house in Port-au-Prince when the world shook, sending him on an odyssey — sleeping outside, riding through streets that reeked of corpses, flying on an Air Force plane — that brought him back to SS. Joachim and Anne, the parish school he left two years ago when his parents sent him to Haiti to get to know their home country.

Last week’s earthquake has devastated Haiti, and prompted a massive relief effort. In a smaller but almost equally intense way, the disaster has pervaded every part of the school day for the 510 students — 80 percent of them Haitian — at SS. Joachim and Anne, the Roman Catholic elementary school in Queens Village, Queens, a hub of New York’s Haitian community.

They pray. They scrounge up donations. The quake informs class discussions about politics, about helping the poor, about the afterlife. And when the children are not talking about it, their teachers suspect, they are thinking about it.

As classmates played with cubes on Wednesday, learning to add, Michael Constant, 6, squirmed in his seat. His mother had just left for Haiti that morning to bury his father.

As 250,000 Haitian-Americans in the New York area mourn, children bear their own burdens. Many feel as much at home in Haiti as in New York. They struggle to picture the houses where they spent summers now in rubble, grandparents and cousins dead, missing, homeless. For others, Haiti exists in tales parents tell — a place they long to visit and now wonder if they will ever see.

And, as three days this week at the school make clear, a subtle but evident role reversal is under way, as child after child feels responsibility to take care of parents bewildered by grief.

Sitting on kindergarten-size chairs in the library, one seventh grader told a counselor she felt “wrong inside” when, for the first time, she heard her mother cry. Another said that in a culture where mourning often means wailing, what most terrified her was her grandmother’s quiet, insistent prayer.

“We do the best we can to make them feel safe,” said Sal Violo, the counselor. But, he said, with aftershocks still hitting Haiti, he cannot promise them that nothing like the disaster will happen again.

SS. Joachim and Anne is an old-school school, with towering ceilings, school uniforms, an ancient public-address system, and a principal, Linda Freebes, who acts as a kind of air-traffic controller not just for the school but for the neighborhood.

On Tuesday, the sense of chaos was growing as more families got bad news; one boy said he lost 30 cousins. Mrs. Freebes’s toy Yorkie, Faith, trotted the hallways in a pink barrette, cheering people up. Outside the principal’s office sat James Augustin, a 12-year-old altar boy in trouble for talking back. “It’s very unlike James,” she said. His grandmother, who cooks him chicken and rice after school when not wintering in Haiti, was still missing.

Mrs. Freebes sent money to Michael Constant’s mother for the funeral trip; two alumni had already called wanting to help newly strained families pay the $3,400 tuition.

One was Brian Simon, 28, a Congressional aide with a Haitian mother. The other was Rich Winters, 58, whose wife, Cecilia, an economist, studies the roots of Haitian poverty. Both said the school fostered discipline, morality and lasting bonds. It is unchanged since his childhood, Mr. Winters said, “just now everyone’s a different color.”

The first Haitians to join the parish were political refugees, some leaving behind servants and mansions. Then came the “boat people,” desperately poor.

Wednesday morning, Mrs. Freebes assigned the daily sacrifice for Haiti: Say “Glory Be to the Father,” then do something special for your teacher. Then she had good news: James’s grandmother had been found.

In a kindergarten classroom plastered with cheerful posters — “L is for Lollipop” — Yariela Thomas talked through the disaster. “A lot of people died. But who is always taking care of people?” she asked. “God,” the children answered.

They drew pictures to comfort their parents. Sierra Griffin drew a house. Inside were three people, one of them lying down, with x’s for eyes. That one was dead.

Sniegouca Laconte drew her mother and baby brother. Visa problems have separated them for most of her life. She dictated a caption: “My mommy is in Haiti but she is O.K.”

Sniegouca’s cousins, Naila and Andy Zephyr, had had a stressful week. “My mom, she’s really dramatic,” said Naila, 12, and so is her little sister. “So me and my brother have to comfort both of them.”

Naila spoke dreamily of summers in Haiti, eating spicy seafood from street vendors, going to beaches that are “blue and clear and nice.” Now her mother’s best friend was dead. Naila remembered the woman, who sang a beautiful dirge at her grandfather’s funeral.

Now, she said, her mother screams that she cannot live without her.

“We tell her that she’s in a better place,” Naila said.

“And we bring her tea,” said Andy, 11.

In the science class, Rod Beauplan, 13, pointed the satellite map to his village, Belle Fontaine, relatively unscathed, where his relatives — except an uncle — had been.

“Have you heard from your uncle?” the teacher asked.

“He’s dead,” said Rod.

“How can you hear from him if he’s dead?” a classmate scoffed.

It was still eighth grade.

Joshua Joseph, just airlifted from Haiti, told his story in a rapid-fire patter, as though if he kept talking, he could ward off the experience. “My whole body was shaking,” he said. “My aunt was yelling, ‘Joshua, come!’ and she had a baby in her hands.”

They stood under an archway as a wall tumbled down. Downtown, buildings fell all around Joshua’s young cousin.

“He saw people die. He saw blood,” Joshua said. And, he believed, the cousin saw the hand of God: when a nearby house teetered, “God holded the house for him.”

Most of all, Joshua feared for his mother in Queens. The disaster was so enormous, he said, “I thought the earthquake was in New York too.”

Jano Tantongco contributed reporting.

    Haiti’s Aftershocks Felt at a School in New York, NYT, 23.1.2010,
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/23/nyregion/23nychaiti.html

53 Haitian Orphans

Are Airlifted to U.S.

January 20, 2010
The New York Times
By JAMES C. McKINLEY Jr. and SEAN D. HAMILL

MIAMI — A group of 53 Haitian orphans landed in Pittsburgh on Tuesday morning, the first wave to arrive after the United States loosened its policy on visa requirements to expedite Americans’ adoptions of parentless children living in the post-earthquake ruins.

But the new policy, announced late Monday, affects only 900 children whom the Haitian government had already identified as orphans, and whom adoption agencies had matched with couples in the United States.

Tens of thousands of children are believed to have been orphaned in the quake, and their fate remains unclear, aid groups and United Nations officials say.

Catholic leaders in Miami are pushing both governments to have children who appear to be orphaned airlifted to temporary group homes in South Florida. Several aid groups who focus on children, however, say every effort should be made to reunite them with relatives.

It normally takes three years to adopt a child from Haiti, because of a lengthy process required under Haitian law. The Haitian government has had reason to be cautious; there are about 200 orphanages in Haiti, but United Nations officials say not all are legitimate. Some are fronts for traffickers who buy children from their parents and sell them to couples in other countries. “In orphanages in Haiti there are an awful lot of children who are not orphans,” said Christopher de Bono, a Unicef spokesman.

Under the new policy, announced Monday night by the Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, the United States is waiving visa requirements on humanitarian grounds for Haitian children already in the pipeline for adoption. Some adoptions had already been approved by Haitian authorities, but the United States also agreed to let in other children who had been matched with American parents but had not gotten a final blessing from Haitian officials.

“The U.S. government has never done this in the past,” said Mary F. Robinson, president of the National Council for Adoption. “They are really going all out to expedite the process.”

Homeland Security Department officials said they were walking a fine line, trying to let in bona fide orphans without opening the floodgates to all children who have been separated from their parents.

“We remain focused on family unification and must be vigilant not to separate children from relatives in Haiti who are still alive but displaced, or to unknowingly assist criminals who traffic in children in such desperate times,” said Matthew Chandler, a spokesman for the department.

Gov. Edward G. Rendell of Pennsylvania played an instrumental role in bringing the first planeload of children out of Haiti, and the bureaucratic difficulties his team faced underscore the legal and moral complexities of transferring hundreds of children to a new country in the middle of a catastrophe that has crippled the Haitian government.

“There were many times we thought we were coming back with no one,” Mr. Rendell said Tuesday in Pittsburgh.

After an all-night journey on two planes, the children — some wrapped in blankets, some carried by nurses and doctors, some walking and waving — came off a donated jet at Pittsburgh International Airport just after 9 a.m. and were taken by bus to the Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh of U.P.M.C. with a police escort.

Some of their adoptive parents waited anxiously while doctors examined the children, most of whom are under the age of 4.

“We just kept expecting the worst-case scenario, that they wouldn’t survive, that they’d be looted, that they’d run out of water,” said Jill Lear of Watertown, S.D., who arrived with her husband, Bruce, to wait for two children they were to adopt.

Mr. Rendell and Representative Jason Altmire flew Monday to Haiti on a chartered plane carrying medical supplies and 20 doctors and nurses. The plan was to drop off the supplies and pick up children from an orphanage run by two sisters, Jamie and Alison McMutrie from a Pittsburgh suburb, Ben Avon, Pa..

The orphanage was so badly damaged that the McMutrie sisters and the children were living in a courtyard. With a borrowed cellphone, they sent out appeals for help, saying they had only enough provisions for a few days.

Having lobbied the White House for several days, the Pennsylvania delegation had obtained United States visas for the children and had expected to be on the ground one hour.

But Haitian officials would let only 28 of the 54 orphans the sisters had brought to the airport to leave; the rest had not cleared all the hurdles for adoption. Seven had yet to be matched with adoptive parents, the Haitians said.

Then the sisters dug in their heels. “They just said no, they wouldn’t leave without all of them,” Mr. Altmire said.

For five hours, the delegation worked furiously to get the Haitian government to agree to let all the children go. The governor’s wife, Judge Marjorie O. Rendell of the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, went to Port-au-Prince to meet with American diplomats. Mr. Rendell and Mr. Altmire lobbied the White House, which pressured Haitian officials.

The chartered plane was forced to return to Miami before a deal was reached, Mr. Rendell said, but the delegation stayed in Haiti. But at 11 p.m., the Haitian officials relented and the children were evacuated on a United States military cargo plane to Orlando, Fla., where they transferred to the jet to Pennsylvania. One child was found to be missing at the last minute in Haiti, and Jamie McMutrie stayed behind to find her. They were expected to arrive here Wednesday.

James C. McKinley Jr. reported from Miami,

and Sean D. Hamill from Pittsburgh.

    53 Haitian Orphans Are Airlifted to U.S., NYT, 20.1.2010,
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/20/world/americas/20orphans.html

U.S. Marines Land

in Villages on the Edge

January 20, 2010
The New York Times
By RAY RIVERA

LÉOGÂNE, Haiti — The Marine helicopters began landing just before noon on Tuesday in a cow pasture here in this heavily damaged farming town about nine miles south of Port-au-Prince, kicking up strong winds and drawing crowds of the curious and hopeful.

About 125 Marines eventually landed here and planned to stay about 24 hours to unload initial shipments of water and food. They expected to spend the night camped out in the pasture.

The relief effort was the United States military’s first significant mission outside Port-au-Prince, the devastated capital, where the needs remain daunting.

For some of the Marines, the work in Haiti is deeply personal.

Cpl. Clifford Sajous, 22, of Elmont, N.Y., grew up in Port-au-Prince, and some of his family, including his father, brother, a cousin and three young nephews, ages 10, 8 and 7, have been living in the city. None of them have been heard from.

Corporal Sajous, who is doubling as a translator on the mission here, said he has not let thoughts of his missing family members interfere with his work. But for the young corporal, who lived in Haiti until he was 13, the images he has seen on television while shipboard on the way from Norfolk have been wrenching.

“I really wanted to cry,” he said, “because that’s where I grew up. A lot of those places I recognize, and seeing all these people dead and people running out of food and water, that hurts me.”

“Even here,” he added, “we’re going to hand out some water and food and not everyone is going to get some.”

The Marines passed the food they brought to the United Nations, which sent it by truck to a nearby stadium to be distributed. Corporal Sajous and other company translators filtered into the crowd to explain where the aid was going. But the message wasn’t getting out to everyone.

“Yes, they are going to give it to us,” said Son Son Maurice, 25, as he stood waiting. Asked if he was sure, he said “Yes, I am sure.”

The Marines did not leave the cow pasture on Tuesday, and what they witnessed of the damage in the area they saw from the sky as their helicopters flew in.

The devastation here is immense, but harder to see quickly here than in the city of Port-au-Prince, where toppled buildings line the streets. Here in Léogâne, buildings are scattered amid sugar cane fields and banana trees, but it is easier to count the structures still standing than those that have collapsed.

People here believe about 5,000 people died in the town.

If there was any symbolic significance to Marines landing here after past United States interventions in this troubled country, few here seemed to care. Some in the crowd even joked with the Marines who were standing guard with rifles slung over their shoulders.

“You know we are in a bad situation, so I am glad they came to help us,” said Charlius Saint Louis, 45, who lost a 15-year-old daughter and 12-year-old son in the earthquake, as well as a girlfriend who was pregnant with his child.

On a drive to the town from Port-au-Prince, damage could be seen all along the route. Long fissures lined the two-lane paved road. One of the lanes was covered in many sections by boulders and soil from landslides.

At a village called Mona Bateau about two miles north of Léogâne, someone had dumped 24 bodies on the side of the road, most of them children, including a newborn infant and a toddler wearing a diaper and one white sandal. Her other foot was bare.

Next to the bodies was a freshly dug grave about 5 by 12 feet across and 6 feet deep. Villagers said the bodies appeared to be from somewhere other than this area, with some saying they believed they might be from Carrefour, the neighborhood of Port-au-Prince that is closest to here.

The villagers say that the United Nations came with a digger to make the grave, but that it was up to the local people to move the badly decomposed bodies into it. Covering their mouths and noses with lemon-soaked rags for the smell, they pulled the bodies onto a corrugated tin slab, then dragged the slab into the hole.

The same thing happened last Sunday, the villagers said, only then it was 18 bodies and the villagers had to dig the hole themselves.

“We want to get on a radio show and tell the people that the people of Carrefour dumped the bodies here and that is not fair,” said Margaret Estima, 38. “It’s hard on us because I’m a mother too,” she said. “We cried.”

The Marines will be witnessing more of Haiti’s sorrows as they continue to move out of the capital with heavy equipment to clear debris and take on other missions. Told about the dead children on the side of the road, Capt. Clark Carpenter, 34, of Princeton, Idaho, the unit’s public affairs officer, took a long pause.

“It’s a really horrible situation,” he said finally. “I’ve been watching this through the eyes of the media, but as we get out and see it, the true scope will become apparent.”

    U.S. Marines Land in Villages on the Edge, NYT, 20.1.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/20/world/americas/20marines.html

U.S. Troops Land With Aid

at Presidential Site in Haiti

January 20, 2010
The New York Times
By SIMON ROMERO and MARC LACEY

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — United States military helicopters carrying dozens of American troops landed on the lawn of Haiti’s destroyed presidential palace on Tuesday morning, a potent symbol of the escalating United States military presence in Haiti since the earthquake that struck a week ago.

With hundreds of Haitians watching and cheering from outside the white-and-green palace gates, troops in combat fatigues bounded out of the helicopters, carrying food rations, bottled water and other gear across the grass, according to photographs and news reports from the scene.

The troops, who appeared to be establishing a position at the palace, were among a contingent of some 10,000 United States military personnel on their way to Haiti, or already here. American troops took control of the airport in the immediate aftermath of the devastating earthquake, are distributing food and water, and are providing security for the relief effort.

Elsewhere in Haiti’s capital were the faintest signs that life in its most basic form was slowly clawing back amid the chaos and destruction.

The streets of Port-au-Prince contained scenes of commerce and activity Tuesday morning, instead of just devastation and death. Merchants sold fruits and vegetables amid the rubble of destroyed businesses. More cars were winding through the debris-strewn streets.

Helicopters buzzed overhead as foreign governments and aid groups tried to coordinate the piecemeal distribution of fresh water, food and medical help. The United States military said Monday that it had completed its first air drops of 14,000 prepackaged meals and 14,000 quarts of water.

The United Nations Security Councilagreed Tuesday to send an additional 3,500 peacekeeping troops into the country.

Still, people continued to stream out of the capital in an uncertain quest for shelter, fresh water and stability in the interior of the country, a testimony to the limited progress made so far in restoring basic services like electricity and running water in Port-au-Prince. Aid efforts continued to be hampered by bottlenecks and security fears.

There seemed to be no certainty on any front, not even on the death toll. Alain Le Roy, the United Nations peacekeeping chief, said he could not confirm estimates of as many as 200,000 dead.

He said that as far as he knew, the toll had not surpassed 50,000 dead. “I don’t think anybody knows, to be frank,” he told reporters in New York.

For many residents, one clear thing appeared to be the need to leave. Bus after bus lined up at gas stations throughout the city, hoping to fill up with fuel before beginning the long trek out of the earthquake-ravaged zone around the capital. Some people lugged overstuffed suitcases; others carried little more than the clothes they were wearing and enough money to pay the new, higher fares.

At one gas station, the messages on some buses, painted in bright colors above their windshields, evoked something more than hope: Christ Est la Réponse (Christ Is the Answer) and Courage Mon Frère (Courage, My Brother).

“I don’t know if I’m coming back,” said Marcelaine Calixte, 20, a student whose house and college had collapsed, sitting on a crowded bus Monday afternoon headed to Les Cayes, a southern town.

Lt. Cmdr. Christopher O’Neil said the Coast Guard had not spotted any boats Monday leaving Haiti with refugees.

“None, zero,” he said when asked about Haitians taking to the sea, “and no indication of anyone making preparations to do so.”

He said it was highly unlikely that migrants would try to make the journey with five cutters right off the coast, not to mention the presence of an aircraft carrier and other ships from the United States Navy. He said anyone caught leaving the island and heading toward Florida would be returned to Haiti.

Nevertheless, Janet Napolitano, the homeland security secretary, said the United States would permit orphaned children from Haiti to enter the country temporarily to make sure that they received necessary medical care. The policy will apply to children who are being adopted by American citizens or who have been identified as eligible for adoption in the United States.

For every person who found an option for shelter or food outside the capital, many more did not or could not.

“I would like for my family to escape the misery in this city, but I need painkillers for my child first,” said Manuel Lamy, 28, a plumber whose 5-year-old daughter, Yvenca, had lost her left hand. Mr. Lamy and his wife, Sagine Oscar, 30, took her to a triage center set up by Cuban doctors.

The displaced were streaming out of Port-au-Prince even as more relief, aid workers and American troops were arriving. Some hospitals along the border with the Dominican Republic were swamped with earthquake survivors.

The United Nations World Food Program said it planned to distribute 200 tons of food on Monday to 95,000 people at eight locations and appealed anew for public donations. Aid workers, mobile clinics and other supplies continued to be flown in to the airport and come overland from the Dominican Republic.

Rescue workers from around the world searched for any last survivors, sometimes clashing over which team ought to be in charge of what.

The United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, requested on Monday that the Security Council immediately approve an additional 3,500 security officers for Haiti, both to maintain public order and to guard deliveries as the aid effort gathers steam. He asked for 1,500 more police officers and 2,000 troops for at least six months to augment the 9,000 already here. The Council approved the request on Tuesday.

So far, violence has been scattered in Port-au-Prince, with the security situation over all fairly calm. But senior United Nations officials said it might boil over at any moment as the difficulties of living without water, food and shelter mount.

“We need to be very much careful and vigilant against any possibility,” Mr. Ban said in an interview. “When their patience level becomes thinner — that is when we have to be concerned.”

Many business owners have not opened their doors for fear of mobs ransacking their operations and stealing their merchandise. Those fears were stoked by pockets of looting in downtown commercial areas in recent days.

“I have 450 employees who I would like to get working again, but I’m afraid of being attacked when word on the street gets out that we have water,” said Roger Parisot, 48, an owner of Sotresa, a company in the Portail Léogâne district that sells purified water in small plastic pouches.

“We need American troops here to instill order immediately, or no bank, no company will reopen its doors,” Mr. Parisot said. “Right now there is no way we can get the things of life — food or water — to those who need them.”

Former President Bill Clinton, the United Nations special envoy to Haiti, arrived in Haiti Monday afternoon and toured the city’s general hospital. “It is astonishing what they’re accomplishing,” Mr. Clinton said afterward, adding that he had been told that the hospital was overwhelmed with patients. They filled its rooms and hallways, and even open areas in the yard outside. Mr. Clinton said he heard of vodka being used to sterilize and of operations performed without lights.

One of the patients outside, Vladamir Tanget, 24, lay on a mattress with a broken leg.

“The government is not doing anything,” he complained. “We need outsiders to come.”

More United Nations peacekeepers were visible on the streets of the capital on Monday morning after reports of a rash of lootings and shootings a day earlier.

As scavengers searched the rubble for scrap metal they might sell, rescue teams continued their search for survivors despite dwindling odds and rising estimates of the dead.

Thousands of American citizens, including many Haitian-Americans, rushed to the airport in recent days to be evacuated on military planes leaving for the United States.

Bus Terminal No. 1 has been busier than ever before, according to Dieumetra Sainmerita, who manages the station’s traffic. He said that the cost of bus tickets had risen 20 percent since last week, and that people were selling whatever they had left of value to buy them.

“First there were the people who lost their houses,” he said of the passengers. “Then there were people who lost relatives. Now the people I see, they are afraid of the thieves trying to steal from them in the night.”

Thieves were on the prowl at the station. Marceson Romen said two men tried to make off with his suitcase, but fled when they saw police officers.

Mr. Romen, a 27-year-old plumber, was on his way to his native Artibone region. He had left his hometown to make a good life for himself. But after pulling his three children out of the rubble that was once their home, he packed them up and now hoped to build them a place on the property once occupied by his parents.

“I thought one day I would go home a rich man,” he said, carrying one black suitcase and a bar of Irish Spring soap in his shirt pocket. “Instead, I am going back with nothing.”

Ginger Thompson and Ray Rivera contributed reporting from Port-au-Prince, James C. McKinley Jr. from Miami, and Neil MacFarquhar from the United Nations.

    U.S. Troops Land With Aid at Presidential Site in Haiti, NYT, 20.1.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/20/world/americas/20haiti.html

Homeless Haitians

Told Not to Flee to U.S.

January 19, 2010
The New York Times
By JAMES C. McKINLEY Jr.

MIAMI — America has a message for the millions of Haitians left homeless and destitute by last week’s earthquake: Do not try to come to the United States.

Every day, a United States Air Force cargo plane specially equipped with radio transmitters flies for five hours over the devastated country, broadcasting news and a recorded message from Raymond Joseph, Haiti’s ambassador in Washington.

“Listen, don’t rush on boats to leave the country,” Mr. Joseph says in Creole, according to a transcript released by the Pentagon. “If you do that, we’ll all have even worse problems. Because, I’ll be honest with you: If you think you will reach the U.S. and all the doors will be wide open to you, that’s not at all the case. And they will intercept you right on the water and send you back home where you came from.”

Homeland Security and Defense Department officials say they are taking a hard line to avert a mass exodus from the island that could lead to deaths at sea or a refugee crisis in South Florida. Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince, is about 700 miles from Miami.

So far, there has been no sign of Haitians trying to flee the island by boat, United States officials say. Nor has there been a mass exodus of Haitians into the neighboring Dominican Republic, except for about 3,000 injured people who are being treated at hospitals just over the Dominican border, officials there say.

But United States officials say they worry that in the coming weeks, worsening conditions in Haiti could spur an exodus. They have not only started a campaign to persuade Haitians to stay put, but they are also laying plans to scoop up any boats carrying illegal immigrants and send them to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

Department of Homeland Security officials have also transferred 200 illegal immigrants from the Krome Service Processing Center here — a federal jail for people awaiting deportation — to make room for a possible influx of Haitian migrants.

The State Department has also been denying many seriously injured people in Port-au-Prince visas to be transferred to Miami for surgery and treatment, said Dr. William O’Neill, the dean of the Miller School of Medicine at the University of Miami, which has erected a field hospital near the airport there.

“It’s beyond insane,” Dr. O’Neill said Saturday, having just returned to Miami from Haiti. “It’s bureaucracy at its worse.”

Customs officials have allowed a total of 23 Haitians into the United States on humanitarian grounds for medical treatment, said a spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security.

And late Monday, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said the United States would allow some orphaned children to enter the country temporarily on an individual basis.

A State Department spokesman, Noel Clay, said the United States had not suspended its visa requirements for Haitians trying to flee the disaster, even though the Department of Homeland Security has halted the deportations of Haitians already in the United States illegally.

“We urge Haitians in Haiti not to put their lives at additional risk by embarking on a dangerous sea voyage,” Mr. Clay said.

In the Dominican Republic, officials have adopted a similar stance. The secretary of foreign relations has ordered only Haitians with medical emergencies allowed into the country, and the Army has established checkpoints on roads leading from the border.

Sandra Severino, a spokeswoman for President Leonel Fernández, said there had not been a huge spike in illegal immigration on the border, and indeed many Haitians already in the Dominican Republic are returning to help their families.

Officials in the Bahamas, which has a large Haitian population, are also keeping a close watch on the seas, but have not noticed a surge in boats carrying refugees, said the deputy prime minister for foreign affairs, T. Brent Symonette. He added that the Bahamas would not repatriate immigrants arriving from Haiti immediately, given the severity of the humanitarian crisis.

Few experts on immigration expect droves of Haitians to take to the seas in flimsy boats right away, though they add that it is hard to predict what will happen in the coming weeks. Most earthquake victims are still struggling to find food and water; they are in no condition to plan and provision a sea voyage. In addition, the Coast Guard currently has five cutters patrolling Haitian waters.

Lt. Commander Chris O’Neil said the Coast Guard had not spotted any boats leaving Haiti with refugees on Monday. “None, zero,” he said, “and no indication of anyone making preparations to do so.” He said anyone caught leaving the island and heading toward Florida would be returned to Haiti.

Homeless Haitians Told Not to Flee to U.S., NYT, 19.1.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/19/us/19refugee.html

A man pulls the body of an earthquake victim from a coffin

in order to steal the coffin at the cemetery

in Port-au-Prince, Friday, Jan. 15, 2010.

AP Photo/Ramon Espinosa

Boston Globe > Big Picture > Haiti six days later

http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2010/01/haiti_six_days_later.html

News Analysis

U.S. Mulls Role in Haiti After the Crisis

January 18, 2010
The New York Times
By HELENE COOPER and MARK LANDLER

WASHINGTON — President Obama’s aggressive response to the deadly earthquake in Haiti has led to criticism from the far right that the United States is taking on too much, at a time when its foreign-policy plate is already full.

But the more relevant question, experts on the region say, is whether the United States will maintain a muscular role in the reconstruction of Haiti once the news cameras go home. The United States has a history of either political domination or neglect in its backyard, and administration officials acknowledge that for Mr. Obama, striking the right balance in Haiti will be crucial.

“The classic U.S. role in the whole hemisphere is either complete neglect, or we come in and run the show,” said Sarah Stephens, executive director for the Center for Democracy in the Americas. But with Haiti, a mere 700 miles from Miami, “there is a great opportunity for the United States to do this in a new way,” she said.

Mr. Obama has pledged that the United States is in Haiti for the long haul. On Sunday, he mobilized military reserves — particularly medical staff for hospital ships — signing an executive order that said it was necessary to back up active-duty troops “for the effective conduct of operational missions, including those involving humanitarian assistance, related to relief efforts in Haiti.”

American troops have taken control of the airport at Port-au-Prince, the Haitian capital, and are helping to provide security for the enormous international relief effort. A steady stream of administration officials have headed south, from Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton — who cut short a trip to the South Pacific, rushed home, and then flew to Haiti on Saturday — to one of Mr. Obama’s closest aides, Denis R. McDonough, the National Security Council’s chief of staff.

“We will be here today, tomorrow, and for the time ahead,” Mrs. Clinton said to Haitian journalists in Port-au-Prince, standing alongside President René Préval.

With so many others in the Haitian government missing or dead, the Obama administration is already facing questions of whether the United States is the only entity capable of bringing order to Port-au-Prince. Beyond that is the question of whether Mr. Obama can handle Haiti at a time when he is already grappling with wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“The short answer is yes,” said Rep. Jan Schakowsky, Democrat of Illinois and a frequent visitor to Haiti. “As challenging as it is, there is no question about it straining our capacities at home. This is a tiny country. It’s close, and it’s not going to be our job alone to rebuild.”

Mr. Obama has indicated that the amount the United States has pledged so far to Haiti, $100 million, is bound to go up significantly. Still, it is well below the $350 million that President Bush pledged in the early weeks of the Asian tsunami, which killed 226,000 people after it struck in December 2004.

And while Mr. Obama has increased the number of American troops in Afghanistan by 30,000 to just below 100,000, and promised ambitious efforts to stabilize Yemen and Pakistan, the number of American troops being sent to Haiti is of course smaller — some 10,000 Marines and soldiers by Monday, military officials said.

The bigger issue may be sustaining the effort. In 2009, much of the administration’s energy was focused on Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran, with little time on this hemisphere. The administration’s new point man for Latin America and the Caribbean — Arturo Valenzuela, the assistant secretary of state for the Western Hemisphere — was confirmed only in November.

In the past, American interest in Haiti has waxed and waned. President Clinton sent 20,000 troops there in 1994 to restore President Jean-Bertrand Aristide to power, an intervention still viewed today as producing, at best, mixed results.

If Haiti’s only problem were poverty, American officials discovered at the time, the job of building its economy would have been one thing. But endemic government corruption and a history of post-colonial abandonment left Haiti in shambles 10 years later, when Mr. Aristide was finally driven from power in 2004.

In the years since 1994, Haiti has resurfaced in the American conscience only during times of crisis: the Aristide meltdown; and after four devastating storms in 2008 that wiped out most of the country’s food crops and damaged irrigation systems, causing acute hunger for millions.

Some Haiti experts say that despite the criticism from conservative commentators — Glenn Beck complained that Mr. Obama spent more time reacting to the Haiti earthquake than he did to the attempted Christmas Day terrorist attack — the heart-rending tragedy in Haiti may make it impossible for the United States to ignore it once the news media attention goes away.

Mr. McDonough, the national security aide, spoke to that in a call with reporters on Sunday, saying that the administration was determined to do everything it could to alleviate the suffering in Haiti. “The more we hear criticism, the more we are intent on trying to improve the lot of the Haitian people,” he said.

What is more, the administration and the international community appear to be uniform in their belief that Mr. Préval, unlike Mr. Artistide, is someone with whom they can deal. They credit him with taking steps in recent years to develop the economy.

Mrs. Clinton said a major reason for her four-hour visit to Port-au-Prince was to buck up Mr. Préval. At one point on Saturday, the Haitian president walked through the makeshift American command center at the airport, appearing dazed by the clamor.

But he seemed comforted by the presence of Cheryl D. Mills, Mrs. Clinton’s chief of staff, who is in charge of the Haiti portfolio at the State Department and who has made multiple visits to Port-au-Prince over the last few months.

Administration officials say the White House can handle Haiti without neglecting its other concerns. They noted that Mr. Obama convened a National Security Council on meeting on Friday to discuss the implementation of his new Afghanistan policy.

“It’s only a problem if the whole government isn’t functioning properly,” a senior administration official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because he did not want to publicly discuss internal matters. “What you see here is a good example of the government functioning well.”

Helene Cooper reported from Washington, and Mark Landler from Port-au-Prince, Haiti.

    U.S. Mulls Role in Haiti After the Crisis, NYT, 18.1.2010,
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/18/world/americas/18policy.html

More Troops and Supplies Arrive in Haiti

January 19, 2010
The New York Times
By DAMIEN CAVE and DEBORAH SONTAG

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — As new waves of American troops prepared to land in this battered nation on Monday, rescue workers and military teams already on the ground worked to quicken the delivery of aid to hundreds of thousands of Haitians growing increasingly desperate for food and clean water.

The United Nations World Food Program said it planned to distribute 200 tons of food aid on Monday to 95,000 people at eight locations and appealed anew for public donations to the relief effort. The calls for more help came even as aid workers, mobile clinics and other supplies continued to arrive at the airport and overland from the Dominican Republic.

The United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-Moon, requested Monday that the Security Council immediately approve an additional 3,500 security officers for Haiti, both to maintain public order and to guard deliveries as the aid effort gathers steam.

Mr. Ban requested that the council dispatch an additional 1,500 police officers and 2,000 troops to Haiti for at least six months to augment the 9,000 already there. So far episodes of violence have been scattered, with the security situation overall fairly calm, but senior United Nations officials said it might boil over at any moment as the difficulties of living without water, food and shelter mount.

``We need to be very much careful and vigilant against any possibility,” Mr. Ban said in an interview. “When their patience level becomes thinner — that is when we have to be concerned.”

Former President Bill Clinton, the United Nations special envoy to Haiti, was also expected to arrive later in the day.

More United Nations peacekeepers were visible on the streets of the capital on Monday morning after reports of a rash of lootings and shootings a day earlier. Buses packed with refugees continued to stream out of the city as people gambled that they had a better chance of finding food and shelter in the countryside.

As scavengers searched the rubble for scrap metal they might sell, rescue teams continued their search for survivors despite dwindling odds and rising estimates of the dead. Haitian officials have discussed tens of thousands of people killed, but there is no certainty on any numbers so far.

A top American commander in Haiti said Sunday that “we are going to have to be prepared for the worst.”

In an interview with ABC’s “This Week,” the commander, Lt. Gen. P. K. Keen, was asked about estimates numbering the dead at 150,000 to 200,000. He called those figures a “start point,” but said there were still no exact casualty counts.

On Sunday, the mood managed to stay mostly calm, as residents carried leather-bound Bibles to pray outside their ruined churches. There were fewer bodies in the streets, though in some places residents began burning corpses left behind.

Ban Ki-moon, the United Nations secretary general, arrived to offer a promise of improvement from his organization, which was itself badly hit by the quake but was still heavily criticized for the slow pace of the emergency response.

“I am here with a message of hope that help is on the way,” Mr. Ban told a crowd of Haitians in front of the severely damaged National Palace.

On the fifth day after the earthquake, there were signs of improvement, possibly even hope that the worst was passing. Traffic at the airport continued to increase, and there were 27 rescue teams on the ground, with 1,500 people searching for survivors.

But the World Food Program said, “Aftershocks persist, which is a concern given the damaged infrastructure.”

The best news came in the form of a small voice from deep in a pile of rubble at the Caribbean Supermarket in the Delmas neighborhood, heard overnight late Saturday or early Sunday. As the odds of finding more survivors fell steeply, American and Turkish rescue workers were stunned to discover a small Haitian girl, who proudly told them that she made it through with hope and leathery fruit snacks.

She was the first of five people to be pulled from the wreckage during a search spanning the weekend, some of whom sent desperate text messages to let loved ones know they were trapped. She was deeply shaken, having been trapped for days in a small space in a devastated market, with death in every aisle. But she had not been pinned down by debris and was not hurt, according to Capt. Joseph Zahralban of the South Florida search and rescue team.

“If you have to be trapped in a collapsed building, a stocked supermarket is probably the best place to be,” Captain Zahralban said.

Among the rescuers at the store were members of a joint New York police and fire rescue team, who had arrived in Haiti on Saturday, Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly of New York said Sunday in a telephone interview. He said the team included 80 people and several rescue dogs.

There were several other reported rescues around the city, including a 2-month-old baby, CNN reported, and Jens Kristensen, a Danish civilian employee of the United Nations peacekeeping forces at the Christopher Hotel, the organization’s headquarters here, where perhaps 100 of its workers remained buried.

At the airport, American military officials said that waiting times for landing had declined, while traffic had increased. Each day, there are 100 slots for incoming planes — well exceeding the 30 to 35 flights that the airport handled before the earthquake. But in a sign of both Haiti’s needs and the response, even that is not close to handling the number of planes waiting to come in.

“There is certainly more demand than 100 a day,” said Maj. Matthew Jones of the Air Force, operations officer of the joint task force running the airport. “However, no one has been denied a slot, but there may be a delay. Sometimes if it’s not today, it’s tomorrow.”

The military has established a priority list for providing slots, Major Jones said. At the top are planes bringing in water. Next is equipment for distributing supplies, followed by food and then medical personnel and medicine.

In Port-au-Prince, the stepped-up effort appeared to be paying off and aid was finally reaching at least some of Haiti’s desperate, with varying degrees of order.

On Sunday morning, a United Nations truck appeared in the park near the presidential palace, where hundreds of families have been squatting since the earthquake. They handed out bags of water to a crowd mostly appreciative, with only a little shoving.

The World Food Program also sent at least three convoys to different locations badly affected by the earthquake, with a goal of delivering enough nourishment to last 65,000 people five days.

But the scene at one delivery site suggested that the food — rations of fortified biscuits, each one about the size of a graham cracker — would hardly last the ravenous victims one night. And the agency’s distribution methods nearly started a riot when throngs of people who had lost everything mobbed one of the trucks in the convoy.

“It’s not their fault,” said Guerrier Ernso, looking on at the mob. “They are hungry.”

Mr. Ernso, a 25-year-old linguistics student, introduced himself to a World Food Program official and suggested that it might have been more effective if the agency had called ahead to advise community leaders that it was coming. Then he and four other brawny young men dived into the mob and began pulling people apart. Within five minutes the people had been arranged in three neat lines. “They have to create another way to deliver food,” Mr. Ernso said of the World Food Program official, speaking in English. “The way they are doing it now, they will not help us out of our misery.”

Meanwhile, Col. Cormi Bartal, a doctor in the Israeli Army’s newly established field hospital here, pulled back the flap of a tent serving as the hospital’s pediatric section and pointed to a woman, Guerlande Jean Michel, 24. She identified a sleeping newborn on her cot, one of the first born in the city after the earthquake, and spoke in a halting voice. “This is my child,” said Ms. Jean Michel, a primary school teacher. “His name is Israel.”

Colonel Bartal said the hospital had carried out amputations on 10 people, treated patients with burns on 70 percent of their bodies, and saved two people with gunshot wounds. “There are the injuries from the earthquake, but those are subsiding,” he explained. “Now we’re treating those affected by the aftermath, not from the earthquake.”

Still, away from where aid trucks happened to appear — no one seemed to know where or when to expect them — pressure has been building, and with President René Préval still holed up in a police station, without having made a national address, frustration with the government was growing. He and his cabinet held a meeting on Sunday on plastic chairs outside the station.

Signs popping up across the city called for the return of Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the former president who was ousted in 2004, and even for the Duvaliers, who ruled the country brutally from the 1950s to the 1980s.

In the main market downtown, prices had skyrocketed. A small bottle of water cost $6. And residents have grown more desperate. “We need water,” said Joseph Jean René, a round man in a Hawaiian shirt standing near a scrum of money changers. “We are dying of thirst and hunger. Even the children are dying.”

Violence and looting, unheard of just after the earthquake, also seemed to be spreading. Several reports of the police catching thieves and shooting them on the spot moved across the city, though at times, what happened and why were difficult to divine.

At the national cemetery, three new bodies appeared just after lunch, with wet blood on at least one of their faces. A fourth young man wearing Adidas high tops lay in a fetal position a few yards away on the sidewalk. Vomit and blood spread out from his chest.

Witnesses said they were thieves. “The police brought them here and shot them,” said Andre Pierre, 25. He stood over the fourth man, with a growing crowd. “He tried to fight the police,” said Maxime Nerestant, 22, a tae kwon do teacher with a shaved head and a beard. “ ‘Help me, help me,’ he said, ‘I’m innocent.’ ”

Suddenly, the man who was believed to be dead lifted his right arm. People asked him what happened, and where he was from. “La Lou,” he said quietly. A truck from Doctors Without Borders drove by. The crowd of Haitians did not notice, nor did they try to help the young man in his final moments. “The police shouldn’t kill innocent people, but with what’s happening in Haiti right now, people shouldn’t be stealing,” Mr. Nerestant said.

The police at the local precinct in the market area said they knew nothing of the theft or the shooting, though it occurred less than a mile away. Twelve of the station’s 29 officers were missing.

An earlier version of this story misstated the date of arrival in Haiti of a joint New York police and fire rescue team. It was Saturday, not Friday.

Reporting was contributed by Ginger Thompson, Ray Rivera, Simon Romero, Marc Lacey and Neil MacFarquhar from Port-au-Prince and the United Nations, Michael S. Schmidt from New York, and Alan Cowell from Paris.

    More Troops and Supplies Arrive in Haiti, NYT, 19.1.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/19/world/americas/19haiti.html

Rescues Beat Dimming Odds in Haiti

January 18, 2010
The New York Times
By DAMIEN CAVE and DEBORAH SONTAG

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — Despite dimming odds, rescue workers pulled more people alive from the rubble — including a 7-year-old girl who survived more than four days eating dried fruit rolls in the supermarket that collapsed around her — as water and emergency aid deliveries improved on Sunday, though not nearly enough to meet Haiti’s desperate need.

The mood managed to stay mostly calm, as residents carried leather-bound Bibles to pray outside their ruined churches. But there were reports of more looting and shootings, including of four men who witnesses said were shot by the police on suspicion of looting. There were fewer bodies in the streets, though in some places residents began burning corpses left behind.

Ban Ki-moon, the United Nations secretary general, arrived to offer a promise of improvement from his organization, which was itself badly hit by the quake but was still heavily criticized for the slow pace of the emergency response.

“I am here with a message of hope that help is on the way,” Mr. Ban told a crowd of Haitians in front of the severely damaged National Palace.

On the fifth day after the earthquake, there were signs of improvement, possibly even hope that the worst was passing. Traffic at the airport continued to increase, and there were 27 rescue teams on the ground, with 1,500 people searching for survivors.

The best news came in the form of a small voice from deep in a pile of rubble at the Caribbean Supermarket in the Delmas neighborhood, heard overnight late Saturday or early Sunday. As the odds of finding more survivors fell steeply, American and Turkish rescue workers were stunned to discover a small Haitian girl, who proudly told them that she made it through with hope and leathery fruit snacks.

She was the first of five people to be pulled from the wreckage during a search spanning the weekend, some of whom sent desperate text messages to let loved ones know they were trapped. She was deeply shaken, having been trapped for days in a small space in a devastated market, with death in every aisle. But she had not been pinned down by debris and was not hurt, according to Capt. Joseph Zahralban of the South Florida search and rescue team.

“If you have to be trapped in a collapsed building, a stocked supermarket is probably the best place to be,” Captain Zahralban said.

Among the rescuers at the store were members of a joint New York police and fire rescue team, who had arrived in Haiti on Saturday, Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly of New York said Sunday in a telephone interview. He said the team included 80 people and several rescue dogs.

There were several other reported rescues around the city, including a 2-month-old baby, CNN reported, and Jens Kristensen, a Danish civilian employee of the United Nations peacekeeping forces at the Christopher Hotel, the organization’s headquarters here, where perhaps 100 of its workers remained buried.

At the airport, American military officials said that waiting times for landing had declined, while traffic had increased. Each day, there are 100 slots for incoming planes — well exceeding the 30 to 35 flights that the airport handled before the earthquake. But in a sign of both Haiti’s needs and the response, even that is not close to handling the number of planes waiting to come in.

“There is certainly more demand than 100 a day,” said Maj. Matthew Jones of the Air Force, operations officer of the joint task force running the airport. “However, no one has been denied a slot, but there may be a delay. Sometimes if it’s not today, it’s tomorrow.”

The military has established a priority list for providing slots, Major Jones said. At the top are planes bringing in water. Next is equipment for distributing supplies, followed by food and then medical personnel and medicine.

In Port-au-Prince, the stepped-up effort appeared to be paying off and aid was finally reaching at least some of Haiti’s desperate, with varying degrees of order.

On Sunday morning, a United Nations truck appeared in the park near the presidential palace, where hundreds of families have been squatting since the earthquake. They handed out bags of water to a crowd mostly appreciative, with only a little shoving.

The World Food Program also sent at least three convoys to different locations badly affected by the earthquake, with a goal of delivering enough nourishment to last 65,000 people five days.

But the scene at one delivery site suggested that the food — rations of fortified biscuits, each one about the size of a graham cracker — would hardly last the ravenous victims one night. And the agency’s distribution methods nearly started a riot when throngs of people who had lost everything mobbed one of the trucks in the convoy.

“It’s not their fault,” said Guerrier Ernso, looking on at the mob. “They are hungry.”

Mr. Ernso, a 25-year-old linguistics student, introduced himself to a World Food Program official and suggested that it might have been more effective if the agency had called ahead to advise community leaders that it was coming. Then he and four other brawny young men dived into the mob and began pulling people apart. Within five minutes the people had been arranged in three neat lines. “They have to create another way to deliver food,” Mr. Ernso said of the World Food Program official, speaking in English. “The way they are doing it now, they will not help us out of our misery.”

Meanwhile, Col. Cormi Bartal, a doctor in the Israeli Army’s newly established field hospital here, pulled back the flap of a tent serving as the hospital’s pediatric section and pointed to a woman, Guerlande Jean Michel, 24. She identified a sleeping newborn on her cot, one of the first born in the city after the earthquake, and spoke in a halting voice. “This is my child,” said Ms. Jean Michel, a primary school teacher. “His name is Israel.”

Colonel Bartal said the hospital had carried out amputations on 10 people, treated patients with burns on 70 percent of their bodies, and saved two people with gunshot wounds. “There are the injuries from the earthquake, but those are subsiding,” he explained. “Now we’re treating those affected by the aftermath, not from the earthquake.”

Still, away from where aid trucks happened to appear — no one seemed to know where or when to expect them — pressure has been building, and with President René Préval still holed up in a police station, without having made a national address, frustration with the government was growing. He and his cabinet held a meeting on Sunday on plastic chairs outside the station.

Signs popping up across the city called for the return of Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the former president who was ousted in 2004, and even for the Duvaliers, who ruled the country brutally from the 1950s to the 1980s.

In the main market downtown, prices had skyrocketed. A small bottle of water cost $6. And residents have grown more desperate. “We need water,” said Joseph Jean René, a round man in a Hawaiian shirt standing near a scrum of money changers. “We are dying of thirst and hunger. Even the children are dying.”

Just a few blocks away, nearly a hundred sweaty young men with empty gasoline cans bunched together and shouted for their share of diesel. The pump could barely be seen because it was covered with people. “He already got some,” one shouted. Said another, “Come on, we’ve been here for two hours.” A security guard, thick as a tree, walked back and forth with a shotgun swinging in his left hand. The back of his blue T-shirt said in Creole, “If we put our hands together, life could be better.”

Violence and looting, unheard of just after the earthquake, also seemed to be spreading. Several reports of the police catching thieves and shooting them on the spot moved across the city, though at times, what happened and why were difficult to divine.

At the national cemetery, three new bodies appeared just after lunch, with wet blood on at least one of their faces. A fourth young man wearing Adidas high tops lay in a fetal position a few yards away on the sidewalk. Vomit and blood spread out from his chest.

Witnesses said they were thieves. “The police brought them here and shot them,” said Andre Pierre, 25. He stood over the fourth man, with a growing crowd. “He tried to fight the police,” said Maxime Nerestant, 22, a tae kwon do teacher with a shaved head and a beard. “ ‘Help me, help me,’ he said, ‘I’m innocent.’ ”

Suddenly, the man who was believed to be dead lifted his right arm. People asked him what happened, and where he was from. “La Lou,” he said quietly. A truck from Doctors Without Borders drove by. The crowd of Haitians did not notice, nor did they try to help the young man in his final moments. “The police shouldn’t kill innocent people, but with what’s happening in Haiti right now, people shouldn’t be stealing,” Mr. Nerestant said.

The police at the local precinct in the market area said they knew nothing of the theft or the shooting, though it occurred less than a mile away. Twelve of the station’s 29 officers were missing.

Pierrot Givens wore a hat and a black collarless shirt shiny as satin. He said that if there was more violence, it was because criminals from the prison had escaped. “There are a lot more bad people out there,” he said. “A lot of craziness.”

Reporting was contributed by Ginger Thompson, Ray Rivera, Simon Romero, Marc Lacey and Neil MacFarquhar from Port-au-Prince, and Michael S. Schmidt from New York.

Correction: January 18, 2010

An earlier version of this story

misstated the date of arrival in Haiti of a joint New York police and fire rescue team.

It was Saturday, not Friday.

    Rescues Beat Dimming Odds in Haiti, NYT, 18.1.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/18/world/americas/18quake.html

Op-Ed Contributors

A Helping Hand for Haiti

January 17, 2010
The New York Times
By BILL CLINTON and GEORGE W. BUSH

This weekend, President Obama asked us to spearhead private-sector fund-raising efforts in the aftermath of the magnitude 7.0 earthquake that ravaged Haiti. We are pleased to answer his call.

Throughout both our careers in public service, we have witnessed firsthand the amazing generosity of the American people in the face of calamity. From the Oklahoma City bombings to 9/11, from the tsunami in South Asia to Hurricane Katrina, Americans have rallied to confront disaster — natural or man-made, domestic or abroad — with the determination, compassion and unity that have defined our nation since its founding.

After the tsunami, Americans gave more than $1 billion to help the people of South Asia. The recent earthquake in Haiti is estimated to have had an impact on nearly three million people — 30 percent of Haiti’s population. We know the American people will respond again. Just as any of us would reach out to a neighbor in need here at home, we will do everything we can to give aid, care and comfort to our neighbors in the Caribbean, now and in the months and years to come.

With advances in technology, giving to relief efforts is easier than ever before. Organizations like the Red Cross have been stunned at the amount of money pouring in through an innovative fund-raising effort that allows cellphone users to text a $10 donation that will be added to their cellphone bills. The State Department raised more than $1 million in the first 24 hours, with millions more coming in the days since the earthquake. This money is being channeled to reliable charities with long experience in disaster relief, ensuring that Americans’ contributions are put to effective use.

Our first priority will be to raise funds to meet the urgent needs of those who are hurt, homeless and hungry, and to ensure that the organizations and relief workers on the ground have the resources to do their jobs effectively. In the first two weeks, the needs are very simple: food, water, shelter, first aid supplies. Once relief workers have gone through all the rubble and every person — living and dead — has been recovered, once the streets have been cleared and communications and power restored, then Haiti is going to have to get back on its feet again.

It’s a long road to full recovery, but we will not leave the Haitian people to walk it alone. When the rebuilding begins, we will need even more support to make Haiti stronger than ever before: new, better schools; sturdier, more secure buildings that can withstand future natural disasters; solutions that address the inequalities in health care and education; new, diverse industries that create jobs and foster opportunities for greater trade; and development of clean energy.

There are great reasons to hope. For the first time in our lifetimes, Haiti’s government is committed to building a modern economy, and it has a comprehensive economic plan to create jobs. Haitian leaders have shown determination in confronting the challenges of AIDS, with strong support from private organizations and the Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief. Per capita, there are more nongovernmental organizations in Haiti than in any other country except India. The members of the Haitian diaspora, in Miami, New York, Toronto and other cities overseas, are involved in and committed to the future of their native country. And the world’s attention is focused on this tiny island nation that has been overlooked for too long.

Crises have the power to bring out the best in people, and we have seen many examples of this over the years, especially after the tsunami. Conflict in Aceh, Indonesia, was laid to rest while people focused on rebuilding together. In communities along the Indian coast, women who had lost their husbands learned marketable skills like arts and crafts and emerged better able to provide for themselves and their children than they were before the disaster.

We should never forget the damage done and the lives lost, but we have a chance to do things better than we once did; be a better neighbor than we once were; and help the Haitian people realize their dream for a stronger, more secure nation. But we need more than just support from governments — we need the innovation and resources of businesses; the skills and the knowledge of nongovernmental organizations, including faith-based groups; and the generosity and support of individuals to fill in the gaps. Visit www.clintonbushhaitifund.org  to make a donation and learn more about our efforts. It’s the least we can do, and the least the people of Haiti deserve. At our best, we can help Haiti become its best.

Bill Clinton was the 42nd president of the United States. George W. Bush was the 43rd president.

    A Helping Hand for Haiti, NYT, 17.1.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/17/opinion/17clinton.html

A Presidential Triple Plea for Haiti Fund

January 17, 2010
The New York Times
By HELENE COOPER

WASHINGTON — Former Presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton began a new venture on Saturday to raise money for the Haitian relief effort from corporations, foundations and ordinary Americans, as President Obama pledged to ramp up the American response to the devastating earthquake.

The three men, who have collectively occupied the White House for the past 17 years, stood side by side in the Rose Garden to announce the effort. “We just met in the Oval Office — an office they both know well,” Mr. Obama said.

Describing the phone calls he made to the two men in the aftermath of the earthquake, he said: “They each asked the same simple question: ‘How can I help?’ ”

As the death toll in Haiti grows, Mr. Obama said, the American response, both private and public, must grow with it.

“At this moment, we’re moving forward with one of the largest relief efforts in our history — to save lives and to deliver relief that averts an even larger catastrophe,” Mr. Obama said. He said that Mr. Bush and Mr. Clinton “will ensure that this is matched by a historic effort that extends beyond our government, because America has no greater resource than the strength and the compassion of the American people.”

The White House hopes that Mr. Bush and Mr. Clinton can use their stature and their contacts within the corporate and philanthropic worlds to raise the millions in cash that relief experts say the devastated Caribbean island will need to recover.

The news conference marked Mr. Bush’s first visit back to the White House since he left office. He stood next to Mr. Obama, the man who during the presidential campaign had criticized Mr. Bush’s response to Hurricane Katrina. And, standing on the other side of Mr. Obama was Mr. Clinton, whose relationship with the president remains complicated after the bruising Democratic primary campaign against Hillary Rodham Clinton, now secretary of state.

But the crisis in Haiti apparently gave the three a rallying point to express their deeply shared concern and a belief in the American spirit of giving.

“I know a lot of people want to send blankets or water,” Mr. Bush said. But he reiterated what the relief organizations have been saying for days. “Just send your cash.” He promised that he and Mr. Clinton would “make sure your money is spent wisely.”

Mr. Clinton, stepping to the lectern after Mr. Bush spoke, glanced at his fellow former president and said with a smile, “I’ve already figured out how I’m going to get him to do some things he hasn’t signed on for.”

All three men acknowledged the mammoth scope of the recovery effort in the weeks ahead as the full extent of Haiti’s difficulties becomes clearer. They repeated the address of the Web site that the public can visit to find out how to help: ClintonBushHaitiFund.org.

During a conference call on Saturday, White House officials acknowledged that so far, American search teams have been able to rescue only 15 survivors in Haiti — about half of them American and half of them Haitian. Mrs. Clinton flew to Haiti Saturday carrying relief supplies, and the Haitian government turned control of the main airport over to the United States.

White House officials said there were 26 international search and rescue teams in Haiti on Saturday, including teams from Fairfax County, Va., and Los Angeles. “Urban search and rescue will continue,” said Denis R. McDonough, the National Security Council chief of staff, who was on the ground in Haiti. “There is still a window, three and half days into the event. Thursday we saw a variety of people rescued; we saw people rescued yesterday.”

The joint venture of Mr. Clinton and Mr. Bush is like one that Mr. Clinton shared with the first President Bush, to help victims of the 2004 Asian tsunami, which killed 226,000 people. A letter on the new Web site, which went up on Saturday, asks for donations and promises to “channel the collective good will around the globe to help the people of Haiti rebuild their cities, their neighborhoods, and their families.”

John M. Broder contributed reporting.

    A Presidential Triple Plea for Haiti Fund, NYT, 17.1.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/17/world/americas/17prexy.html

In Show of Support, Clinton Goes to Haiti

January 17, 2010
The New York Times
By MARK LANDLER

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — Bearing soap, bottled water and other much-needed supplies, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton flew into this ruined capital on Saturday and told the Haitian people that the United States “will be here today, tomorrow and for the time ahead.”

As the United States struggles to organize a relief effort for a barely functioning Haitian government, Mrs. Clinton said she was here at the invitation of the country’s president and came in large part to hear his thoughts on what was needed.

Mrs. Clinton arrived shortly before 3 p.m. on a Coast Guard cargo plane that also carried American relief workers. She met for an hour with the Haitian president, René Préval, and with American officials managing an immense rescue effort that is racing against the clock to unearth any remaining survivors.

“We are here at the invitation of your government to help you,” she said to Haitian journalists outside a makeshift headquarters.

“I know of the great resilience and strength of the Haitian people,” said Mrs. Clinton, who in the past visited the country with her husband when they were newlyweds. “You have been severely tested, but I believe that Haiti can come back even stronger and better in the future.”

Mr. Préval, in shirtsleeves, his black shoes coated with dust, expressed gratitude to President Obama for his initial pledge of $100 million in American aid, as well as for organizing a national fund-raising campaign.

“Mrs. Clinton’s visit really warms our heart today,” Mr. Préval said over a din of helicopters landing on a nearby runway, “but especially to restate the priorities and the needs and the coordination that needs to be done.”

Though the visit is mainly intended as a show of American support for Haiti, Mrs. Clinton said there were a few tangible benefits. In addition to bringing in supplies, her C-130 plane evacuated 50 Haitian Americans who were stranded here — including a baby who was sleeping soundly in a crib before takeoff despite the roar of the aircraft engines.

She was also able to deliver some goods to American diplomats. The night before her flight, Mrs. Clinton’s senior staff members prowled the aisles of supermarkets and drug stores buying bulk supplies of toothpaste, mustard, even cigarettes.

Although Mrs. Clinton said that the relief effort was gaining traction, she cautioned that the security situation was growing troubling. She said she hoped the Haitian government would pass an emergency decree — something it did after storms devastated the island in 2008 — which would give it the legal power to impose curfews and other measures.

“The decree would give the government an enormous amount of authority, which in practice they would delegate to us,” Mrs. Clinton said.

Mrs. Clinton said she was concerned by a report on CNN that a group of Miami doctors at a makeshift hospital here had been forced to flee, leaving behind their patients, after gunshots were heard in the vicinity. With Haiti’s police force decimated and barely visible on the streets, 7,000 United Nations peacekeepers constitute the only genuine security presence.

“We are working to back them up, but not to supplant them,” she said. Up to 10,000 American troops are expected to be in place in Haiti, on shore and off, by Monday.

She said the peacekeepers “have been here for years; they have a command and control established.”

Mrs. Clinton also said she was sensitive to the suggestion that her visit could impede rescue efforts. She did not leave the airport during her four-hour stop, canceling a visit to United Nations peacekeeping headquarters.

The secretary of state was accompanied by Rajiv Shah, the new administrator of the United States Agency for International Development, who is coordinating the American relief effort, and Cheryl D. Mills, Mrs. Clinton’s chief of staff, who oversees Haiti issues at the State Department.

Herby Derenoncourt, a Haitian doctor with Catholic Relief Services who lives in the United States, was able to ride on the secretary of state’s plane. He came to help restore a damaged Catholic hospital here.

Dominic Crowley, the emergency director of the charity Concern Worldwide who was also on the flight, said he was going to check on his staff of 100 in Haiti, of whom 19 members were still missing. The group is handing out clothing, water and other goods. “Agencies with teams on the ground have been as traumatized as anyone else,” he said.

Some of the tasks the United States faces are particularly grim, like helping set up morgues. There are deep cultural issues about treatment of the dead, Mrs. Clinton said, which will complicate the task.

Mrs. Clinton said it would be some time before Haiti had a functioning central government; some government buildings are gone, and some officials are dead.

“We have to be realistic about it,” she said.

Mrs. Clinton last visited Haiti in April, pledging $300 million in United States aid and venturing into Cité Soleil, a once-lawless part of the capital that had been improving before the quake.

A few months ago, she noted, her husband, who is the United Nations special envoy to Haiti, held a successful conference in Port-au-Prince, attracting 500 foreign companies.

And then, she said, “This happens.”

Correction: January 17, 2010

An earlier version of this article misspelled the surname of Herby Derenoncourt.

    In Show of Support, Clinton Goes to Haiti, NYT, 17.1.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/17/world/americas/17diplo.html

Officials Strain to Distribute Aid to Haiti as Violence Rises

January 17, 2010
The New York Times
By GINGER THOMPSON and DAMIEN CAVE

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — As the focus on Saturday turned away from Haitians lost to those trying to survive, a sprawling assembly of international officials and aid workers struggled to fix a troubled relief effort after Tuesday’s devastating earthquake.

While countries and relief agencies showered aid on Haiti, only a small part of it was reaching increasingly desperate Haitians without food, water or shelter. “We see all the commotion, but we still have nothing to drink,” said Joel Querette, 23, a college student camped out in a park. “The trucks are going by.”

Hunger drove many to swarm places where food was being given out. Reports of isolated looting and violence intensified as night approached, and there were reports of Haitians streaming out of the capital.

Still, recovery and aid efforts were widening. And even the distribution problems in the country stemmed in part from good intentions, aid officials said: Countries around the world were responding to Haiti’s call for help as never before. And they are flooding the country with supplies and relief workers that its collapsed infrastructure and nonfunctioning government are in no position to handle.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton arrived in Port-au-Prince, met with President René Préval for an hour and assured Haitians that the United States “will be here today, tomorrow and for the time ahead.” And in Washington, President Obama stood with former Presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton, who will lead a national drive to raise money to help the survivors.

But with Haitian officials relying so heavily on the United States, the United Nations and many different aid groups, coordination was posing a critical challenge. An airport hobbled by only one runway, a ruined port whose main pier splintered into the ocean, roads blocked by rubble, widespread fuel shortages and a lack of drivers to move the aid into the city are compounding the problems.

About 1,700 people camped on the grass in front of the prime minister’s office compound in the Pétionville neighborhood, pleading for biscuits and water-purification tablets distributed by aid groups. A sign on one fallen building in Nazon, one of many hillside communities destroyed by the quake, read: “Welcome U.S. Marines. We need help. Dead Bodies Inside!”

Haitian officials said the bodies of tens of thousands of victims had already been recovered and that hundreds of thousands of people were living on the streets. A preliminary Red Cross estimate put the total number of affected people at 3.5 million.

The United Nations also confirmed the death of three of its most senior officials in the quake: the secretary general’s special representative for Haiti, Hédi Annabi; his deputy, Luiz Carlos da Costa; and the acting police commissioner for the peacekeeping force, Doug Coates of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. They were meeting with eight members of a Chinese police delegation in the agency’s headquarters, the Christopher Hotel, when it collapsed on Tuesday.

Even as the United States took a leading role in aid efforts, some aid officials were describing misplaced priorities, accusing United States officials of focusing their efforts on getting their people and troops installed and lifting their citizens out. Under agreement with Haiti, the United States is now managing air traffic control at the airport, helicopters are flying relief missions from warships off the coast and 9,000 to 10,000 troops are expected to arrive by Monday to help with the relief effort.

The World Food Program finally was able to land flights of food, medicine and water on Saturday, after failing on Thursday and Friday, an official with the agency said. Those flights had been diverted so that the United States could land troops and equipment, and lift Americans and other foreigners to safety.

“There are 200 flights going in and out every day, which is an incredible amount for a country like Haiti,” said Jarry Emmanuel, the air logistics officer for the agency’s Haiti effort. “But most of those flights are for the United States military.

He added: “Their priorities are to secure the country. Ours are to feed. We have got to get those priorities in sync.”

American officials said they were making substantial progress. Mrs. Clinton said the military was beginning to use a container port in Cap Haitien, in northern Haiti, which should increase the flow of aid.

The United States Agency for International Development was helping choose sites and clear roads for 14 centers for the distribution of food and water. Rajiv Shah, the agency’s administrator, said the United States had moved $48 million of food supplies from Texas since the quake and distributed 600,000 packaged meals. It has also installed three water-purification systems capable of purifying 100,000 liters a day.

Yet problems remain. American officials said that 180 tons of relief supplies had been delivered to the airport, but much was still waiting for delivery. While the military has cleared other landing sites for helicopters around the capital, they are thronged by people looking for help, making landings hazardous.

Fuel shortages were mounting. At several gas stations around Port-au-Prince, attendants or customers said that even though the stations had fuel left in their tanks, there was no electricity to work the pumps.

Some aid workers were critical of the United Nations, as well, arguing that the agency had the most on-the-ground experience in Haiti and should be directing efforts better.

But many United Nations employees were killed in the earthquake. And Stephanie Bunker, the spokeswoman for the United Nations humanitarian relief effort, said Saturday that a United Nations logistics team was trying to coordinate with other agencies, and that the peacekeeping forces were trying to clear roads.

Criticism of the United Nations “may reflect people’s frustrations with the entire effort because it is such a grueling effort,” she said. “It takes a long time for all this stuff to be cleared up and fixed.” She noted that all modes of transportation — air, road and sea — were still limited. A shortage of trucks remained a problem.

Michel Chancy, appointed by Mr. Préval to coordinate relief, said that much of the aid to Haiti was coming to a government that was itself under siege.

“The palace fell,” he said. “Ministries fell. And not only that, the homes of many ministers fell. The police were not coming to work. Relief agencies collapsed. The U.N. collapsed. It was hard to get ourselves in a place where we could help others.”

At the American Embassy in Port-au-Prince, American rescue teams continued to roll out of the gate. Most of their equipment had arrived, and at any given time, the teams were working on several different piles of rubble throughout the city.

“People need to get the message, we’re out, we’re doing stuff,” said Craig Luecke, a coordinator with the search and rescue team from Fairfax County, Va., who has been tracking American efforts in advance of Mrs. Clinton’s arrival here. “My Google Earth map is filled with American activity.”

Though the numbers are fluid, he said four American teams had helped pulled nearly two dozen survivors from the rubble. The State Department said 15 Americans were confirmed dead in the earthquake.

Some airplanes, after circling the capital’s airport, have been turning back or landing in Santo Domingo, in the neighboring Dominican Republic. Its airfield was growing ever more crowded with diverted flights.

“We’re all going crazy,” said Nan Buzard, senior director of international response and programs for the American Red Cross. “You don’t have any kind of orderly distributions of food, water, shelter, clothing. The planes are in the air, the materials are purchased. It remains a profoundly frustrating situation for everyone.”

Among the aid groups avoiding the logjam in Port-au-Prince by entering Haiti from the Dominican Republic was International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies.

A caravan of eight trucks from the federation was creeping toward the Haitian border on Saturday morning, carrying medical equipment and aid workers.

The group had originally planned to touch down in Haiti, but the delays at the airport forced them to divert to Santo Domingo, delaying their arrival in Haiti by about 12 hours, said Paul Conneally, a Red Cross spokesman who was traveling with the convoy.

“Every minute counts, I know that, but we cannot be on standby to land at Port-au-Prince because it may not be for two or three days,” he said. “It’s problematic to go across roads, but it’s a small price to pay.”

Mr. Préval, speaking at the airport, now the effective seat of the Haitian government, urged patience. He showed a map covered with red dots, indicating the worst-hit areas. When the earthquake struck, he said, “We in Haiti thought it was the end of the world.”

Mr. Préval said he was making food, water, medical supplies and the re-establishment of communication the priorities for his government. “We have a lot of work to do,” he said.

Reporting was contributed by Jack Healy from New York, Simon Romero, Marc Lacey

and Mark Landler from Port-au-Prince, and Neil MacFarquhar from the United Nations.

    Officials Strain to Distribute Aid to Haiti as Violence Rises, NYT, 17.1.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/17/world/americas/17haiti.html

Rescuers Race to Find Survivors in Haiti

as U.S. Troops Work to Speed Aid Flow

January 16, 2010
The New York Times
By MARC LACEY

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — Conditions in this earthquake-ravaged nation grew more dire on Friday morning as rescuers raced against time to find anyone still alive beneath mountains of rubble while aid workers struggled to deliver relief supplies to survivors increasingly desperate for food and clean water.

Scattered reports of looting at food warehouses told of the rising tension and frustration in the streets three days after an earthquake leveled wide sections of the capital and devastated Haiti’s government. Although Port-au-Prince, a volatile city in normal times, remained relatively calm, officials warned that residents were losing patience.

The first wave of American troops arrived overnight to begin handling security and cargo operations at Haiti’s main airport, and more soldiers and Marines were expected to fly into the country later on Friday.

Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that 9,000 to 10,000 Americans forces were expected onshore and off in Haiti by Monday, and that the Pentagon was poised to send more.

Speaking at a Pentagon news conference, Admiral Mullen said that about 5,000 would be ground forces and the rest would be on ships. He said an American aircraft carrier, the Carl Vinson, arrived in the waters off Haiti early Friday with 19 helicopters aboard, and that it would serve as a staging area for relief flights, purified water and supplies.

The United States reached an agreement with Cuba to allow American planes on medical-evacuation missions to pass through restricted Cuban airspace, a White House official said, reducing the flight time to Miami by 90 minutes.

Throughout the capital, search teams from around the world joined with Haitians to continue the painstaking task of picking through the precarious piles of hotels, houses and other buildings. Listening for the cries of survivors, they climbed through the wreckage and lifted away debris with their bare hands, trying to avoid getting trapped or crushed themselves.

“You can look at this structure and see that it’s extremely unstable,” said Mark Stone, a rescuer with a search and rescue team from Fairfax, Va. “The last thing we want to do is get our resources in a situation where they need to be rescued.”

Overnight, rescuers pulled eight survivors from the rubble of the Hotel Montana, a popular tourist destination, and on Friday morning, they pulled out a 60-year-old American man.

For rescuers and those buried, every hour that passed was an enemy.

“The time window is ever shrinking,” said Florian Westphal, a spokesman for the International Committee of the Red Cross in Geneva.

Residents interviewed through the city said that the cries that they heard emanating from many collapsed buildings in the initial hours after the quake had begun to soften, if not quiet completely.

“There’s no more life here,” said a grandmother Thursday, who nonetheless rapped a broom against concrete in hopes that her four missing relatives believed to be buried inside might somehow respond.

On Thursday, rescuers worried that they would be limited in how many people they could help because of a lack of heavy equipment.

“Where’s the response?” asked Eduardo A. Fierro, a structural engineer from California who had arrived Thursday to inspect quake-damaged buildings. “You can’t do anything about the dead bodies, but inside many of these buildings people may still be alive. And their time is running out.”

Those who are rescued often need immediate care to avoid death from the shock and kidney failure than can occur in people with crushed limbs as accumulated toxins in damaged tissue rush into the bloodstream.

Patients with crush injuries are often given saline and a drug called mannitol, both of which increase the flow of urine and flush out the kidneys, but medical supplies remained scarce in much of the capital. A 21-year-old student with a crushed foot was extracted from the rubble of a school, but it was not clear whether he would get the amputation or treatment he needed to live.

Two aftershocks of approximately 4.5 magnitude rumbled through the island at about 4 a.m. and 8:40 a.m. Friday, according to the United States Geological Survey, spreading fresh tremors of fear through the capital, where thousands spent another night outside or in temporarily shelters, still without electricity or reliable phone service.

The United Nations reported that one of its food warehouses in the capital had been looted but called the theft limited and said it had recovered most of its provisions.

But there were signs of resilience in the midst of the rubble and grief as many Haitians, long accustomed to privation and unreliable government services, went on with their lives. Hotels that survived the earthquake were still booking rooms, and taxi drivers were threading through the debris-covered streets.

Jean-Bertrand Aristide, Haiti’s former president who was ousted five years ago, wept Friday as he told The Associated Press in Johannesburg that he and his family wanted to return and “help rebuild the country.”

Relief agencies broadcast appeals and assembled their own aid teams; and Web sites were set up to connect people overseas with friends and family in Haiti.

But United Nations officials said that Haitians were growing hopeless — and beginning to run out of patience.

“They are slowly getting more angry,” said David Wimhurst, the spokesman for the United Nations mission in Haiti, speaking by video link from the Port-au-Prince airport. “We are all aware of the fact that the situation is getting more tense.”

As of Thursday, the Haitian National Police had virtually disappeared, Mr. Wimhurst and another senior United Nations official said, and no longer had a presence on the streets. But witnesses at the city’s already filled main morgue reported seeing police pickup trucks dropping off bodies collected from around the city.

The United Nations officials said that the 3,000 peacekeeping soldiers and police officers around the capital would probably be sufficient to handle any unrest, but that plans were being made to bring in reinforcements from the 6,000 others scattered around the country.

 

Reporting was contributed by Damien Cave and Ray Rivera from Port-au-Prince, Neil MacFarquhar from the United Nations, Donald G. McNeil Jr., Denise Grady and Jack Healy from New York, Ginger Thompson, Jeff Zeleny, Elisabeth Bumiller, Helene Cooper and Brian Knowlton from Washington, and Mark McDonald from Hong Kong.

    Rescuers Race to Find Survivors in Haiti as U.S. Troops Work to Speed Aid Flow, NYT, 16.1.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/16/world/americas/16haiti.html

Tensions Mount in Devastated Capital as Aid Starts Flooding Into Haiti

January 16, 2010
The New York Times
By MARC LACEY

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — The distance between life and death was narrowing in this flattened city on Friday, with survival after the huge earthquake struck depending increasingly on the luck of being freed from under rubble, on treating the thousands of wounded, and on speeding the halting flow of emergency food and water.

“Get me out!” came the haunting voice of a teenager, Jhon Verpre Markenley, from a dark crevice of the trade school that collapsed around him and fellow students when the earthquake hit late Tuesday afternoon.

Mr. Verpre’s father risked his own life to save his son’s, going deep into the hole with a blowtorch to try to cut away the metal that was pinning his son’s leg. Hours later, the young man was free. His mother danced.

By Thursday evening, the Haitian president, René Préval, said that 7,000 people had already been buried in a mass grave. Hundreds of corpses piled up outside the city’s morgue, next to a hospital. On street corners, people pulled their shirts up over their faces to filter out the thickening smell of the dead.

Such was the extent of the chaos and destruction that reliable estimates of the numbers of dead and injured were still impossible to make on Friday morning.

With reports of looting and scuffles over water and food, President Obama promised at least $100 million in aid.

“You will not be forsaken, you will not be forgotten,” Mr. Obama told the Haitian people in an emotional address at the White House on Thursday. “In this, your hour of greatest need, America stands with you.”

The first wave of American troops arrived Thursday to begin handling security and cargo operations at Haiti’s main airport, whose principal runway was intact.

“The main thing is to try to establish some order at the airport so we can start getting planes in and out,” said Col. Patrick Hollrah of the U.S. Air Force whose disaster-response team arrived Thursday night from New Jersey aboard a C-17 cargo plane.

In the cockpit of the plane, air traffic chatter could be heard through headsets, giving some sense of the barely controlled confusion in the skies. Planes were being forced to circle for two to three hours before landing.

Also Thursday night, the United States reached an agreement with Cuba to allow American planes on medical-evacuation missions to pass through restricted Cuban airspace, an official said, reducing the flight time to Miami by 90 minutes.

Meanwhile, doctors and search-and-rescue teams worked mostly with the few materials on hand and waited, frustrated, for more supplies, especially much needed heavy equipment.

“Where’s the response?” asked Eduardo A. Fierro, a structural engineer from California who had arrived Thursday to inspect quake-damaged buildings. “You can’t do anything about the dead bodies, but inside many of these buildings people may still be alive. And their time is running out.”

A number of nations pledged financial aid, deployed rescue teams and loaded cargo planes with food and supplies; relief agencies broadcast appeals and assembled their own aid teams; and Web sites were set up to connect people overseas with friends and family in Haiti. But United Nations officials said that Haitians were growing hopeless — and beginning to run out of patience.

“They are slowly getting more angry,” said David Winhurst, the spokesman for the United Nations mission in Haiti, speaking by video link from the Port-au-Prince airport. “We are all aware of the fact that the situation is getting more tense.”

“There have been a number of aftershocks and people remain anxious,” said Riccardo Conti, the Haiti director of the International Committee of the Red Cross. “All the houses around us have been vacated and people are literally living out in the open.”

The Haitian National Police had virtually disappeared, Mr. Winhurst and another senior United Nations official said, and no longer had a presence on the streets, though witnesses at the city’s already filled main morgue reported seeing police pickup trucks dropping off bodies collected from around the city.

The United Nations officials said that the 3,000 peacekeeping soldiers and police officers around the capital would probably be sufficient to handle any unrest, but that plans were being made to bring in reinforcements from the 6,000 others scattered around the country.

The struggle to survive intensified Thursday, in dramas that played out around this city that has already suffered more than most, from centuries of poverty, violence and natural disaster. Despite the strength of the magnitude 7.0 earthquake, the United Nations reported that the damage, in fact, appeared to be confined to the capital and a few outlying areas, with the rest of the country largely spared.

Ronald Jedna, covered in white dust atop a damaged building, had just been freed, after spending a day caught in a crevice of his apartment building with heavy beams pressing in tight against his chest.

He said he tried to cry out but his throat was too dry and he was too weak. Only a whisper would come out. Eventually, though, a neighbor peered through a tiny slit, discovered him and managed to pry him loose.

“A day felt like a year,” he said. “You’re buried alive. You can’t scream. You wonder if anyone will ever come.”

Mr. Jedna had a deep, untreated wound in his shin. He stood atop the rubble looking for others who might still be breathing.

The United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, described another “small miracle during a night which brought few other miracles.” An Estonian bodyguard named Tarmo Joveer was recovered, virtually unscathed, from beneath 13 feet of debris at the United Nations offices at the Christopher Hotel on Thursday morning, where 100 more of the organization’s workers remained buried inside. Rescuers found him with the help of electronic sensors and dogs brought in by the American, Chinese and French teams, and had helped keep him alive by piping him water through a tube.

But hope was fading for perhaps tens of thousands of others.

Residents interviewed through the city said that the cries that they heard emanating from many collapsed buildings in the initial hours after the quake had begun to soften, if not quiet completely.

“There’s no more life here,” said a grandmother, who nonetheless rapped a broom against concrete in hopes that her four missing relatives believed to be buried inside might somehow respond.

Pascale Valérie Lisnay, whose brother was buried in the collapsed trade school, said she longed to hear anything from him, a moan, a cry, anything to give her hope that he was still alive. Standing outside one of countless similarly horrible sites across Port-au-Prince, she dialed her brother’s cellphone number again and again, tears filling her eyes each time it failed to connect.

“He’s gone,” she said.

The United Nations said it had confirmed that 36 of its workers had been killed in the earthquake, 73 had been injured, and an additional 160 were still missing. The United Nations began an effort to send teams around to the homes of its more than 1,200 local staff members to see if they were still alive and what help they needed, the two officials said.

At the ruins of the Montana Hotel, where many United Nations workers stayed, a French rescue team had extracted three people alive and one corpse, said Mr. Winhurst, the United Nations spokesman. Once the machines come in to lift large blocks of concrete both there and around the city, the toll is expected to mount sharply.

Mr. Winhurst himself was inside the Christopher Hotel at the time the earthquake struck.

“It accelerated with extreme violence,” he said. The room was shaking so violently that he held on to avoid being thrown to the floor, praying that the pillar in his office would not topple over on him. After the shaking stopped, he navigated down three stories on a rickety ladder.

Kim Bolduc, the chief humanitarian coordinator for the mission, said she was sitting in her second-floor office in another United Nations building when the room shook violently and a huge crack opened in the wall in front of her. “I was just hoping it would stop,” she said.

The difficulties medical workers and rescue teams faced drew anguish far beyond Haiti’s borders. Dr. Irwin Redlener, a professor of pediatrics at Columbia University’s medical school who is also the director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness and the president of the Children’s Health Fund, said he feared for the children of Port-au-Prince.

“Something like 40 to 50 percent of the population of Port-au-Prince is kids,” he said. “Kids are much more fragile — a 30-pound block of a wall that would only seriously injure an adult will kill a child. They die much more rapidly of dehydration, of loss of blood, of shock. An infection will cause explosive diarrhea, which can kill a trapped child. Everything about this is devastatingly worse for kids than for adults.”

Reporting was contributed by Damien Cave and Ray Rivera from Port-au-Prince, Neil MacFarquhar from the United Nations, Donald G. McNeil Jr. from New York, Ginger Thompson, Jeff Zeleny, Elisabeth Bumiller, Helene Cooper and Brian Knowlton from Washington, and Mark McDonald from Hong Kong.

    Tensions Mount in Devastated Capital as Aid Starts Flooding Into Haiti, NYT, 16.1.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/16/world/americas/16haiti.html

Editorial

Help Haitians Help Haiti

January 15, 2010
The New York Times

President Obama made a promise to the people of Haiti on Thursday. “You will not be forsaken,” he said. “You will not be forgotten.” He said those words at the end of a short White House speech detailing the many ways the United States was rushing food, water, medicine and other aid to that stricken country.

We wish he had added that his administration had found the courage, in this emergency, to take a basic but politically difficult step — to grant temporary protected status to undocumented Haitians in the United States.

The Department of Homeland Security occasionally grants such status to immigrants stranded in this country by war, famine, earthquake or some other disaster back home. Protected immigrants are allowed to work legally and cannot be detained or deported. It’s a temporary amnesty, given in 18-month increments to those who qualify, and is currently available to citizens of El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Somalia and Sudan.

Earthquakes and hurricanes have routinely prompted the United States to grant and extend protected status to Central Americans. Similar pleas by Haitians have always been rebuffed, even after a devastating series of storms in 2008 left hundreds of thousands homeless.

Advocates for Haitian immigrants, whose diaspora is centered in Miami, have waged a long and fruitless campaign for protected status, arguing that remittances by Haitians in the United States are a vital source of aid — more than $1 billion each year. Now that Haiti has suffered its worst disaster in centuries, the argument for a temporary amnesty is overwhelming.

It was not enough for the administration to announce this week that the Department of Homeland Security would halt the pending deportations of the 30,000 or so undocumented Haitians. Burdening a collapsed country with destitute deportees would be a true crime. But all that does is leave the potential deportees in limbo, unable to work without fear.

Tuesday’s earthquake has caused a global outpouring of giving. But that will inevitably subside as fatigue sets in and new crises arise. What will help keep Haiti going for the long haul is Haitians helping Haitians. The Obama administration should give undocumented Haitians in the United States the simple thing they desperately want: not charity, but the chance to work.

    Help Haitians Help Haiti, NYT, 15.1.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/15/opinion/15fri2.html

Obama Pledges Sweeping Aid Effort as Haitians Dig and Search for the Missing

January 15, 2010
The New York Times
By HELENE COOPER and SIMON ROMERO

WASHINGTON —President Obama promised $100 million for the relief effort in Haiti on Thursday morning, vowing that the United States would stand with the impoverished nation as it counted what could be tens of thousands of dead and grappled with the devastation of the Tuesday earthquake.

In an emotional address from the White House Diplomatic Reception room, Mr. Obama promised that amount was only a first installment and that financial assistance would increase over the coming year. “I want to speak directly to the people of Haiti,” Mr. Obama said. He paused for a moment.

“You will not be forsaken, you will not be forgotten,” he said. “In this, your hour of greatest need, America stands with you.”

While Mr. Obama said that his first priority was to ensure the safety of Americans in Haiti, his address Thursday, coming as estimates of the death toll have become increasingly more grim, appeared intended to provide some measure of solace for Haitians.

“It’s important that everyone in Haiti understands this,” Mr. Obama said. “More American search-and-rescue teams are coming. More food, more water.”

Within Haiti and beyond, the driving urgency of the last 36 hours was only growing.

The main morgue in Port-au-Prince was completely full, and hundreds of bodies were piled up outside and abandoned. The dead included some people who had been waiting on the grounds of an adjacent hospital in vain attempts to get treatment. When they died, their bodies were simply dragged next door to the morgue.

Workers from several police pickup trucks — the first police vehicles seen on the streets of the capital for the first time since the quake — were busy picking up bodies. The Haitian Red Cross offered a cautious and rough estimate of the possible death toll. “No one knows with precision, no one can confirm a figure,” said Victor Jackson, an assistant national coordinator with Haiti’s Red Cross, according to Reuters. “Our organization thinks between 45,000 and 50,000 people have died.”

Foreign aid workers trying to deliver supplies faced a logistical nightmare. Power was still out and telecommunications rarely functioning. Most medical facilities had been severely damaged, if not leveled. Supplies of food and fresh water were dwindling.

Ships could not bring their cargos of supplies into Haiti’s damaged port; roads were blocked not only by debris but also by people with no safe shelter to retreat to.

Flights were severely limited at Port-au-Prince’s main airport. Still, airplanes loaded with rescuers and search teams, food and medical supplies were landing, and supplies were also filtering in from the Dominican Republic.

In interviews with American television stations, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said the United States was working as fast as possible to move aid to Haiti,

Mrs. Clinton told NBC’s “Today” program that three million people — about a third of Haiti’s population — had been affected by the quake and that “there will be tens of thousands of casualties — we don’t have any exact numbers.”

She said helping the country rebuild from the quake would be a “long-term effort.”

“We’re going to do everything we can with our resources,” she said. “We have a full-court press going on here.”

Haiti’s president, René Préval, called the death toll “unimaginable” as, in the first 24 hours of the quake, he surveyed the wreckage, which included his own residence, the presidential palace. Schools, hospitals and a prison collapsed.

The United Nations secretary-general, Ban Ki-Moon, said that peacekeepers were maintaining their rounds of patrols. Aside from scattered reports of looting, officials have said the capital seemed relatively peaceful in the face of widespread devastation.

“The overall security and public order is being maintained,” Mr. Ban said. “They continue to patrol, with a chief duty being to escort and assist in distributing humanitarian relief.”

As of Thursday, the United Nations had confirmed that 16 peacekeepers were dead and about 150 workers were missing, including the chief of its mission, Hédi Annabi. The archbishop of Port-au-Prince, Msgr. Joseph Serge Miot, was feared dead.

Most of the United Nations’ missing workers were believed to be trapped under the rubble of the Christopher Hotel.

In what Mr. Ban called “a small miracle during a night which brought few other miracles,” an Estonian bodyguard named Tarmo Joveer was recovered from underneath 13 feet of debris on Thursday morning. Rescuers had helped keep him alive by piping him water through a tube.

But scenes of hope were scarce.

“Please save my baby!” Jeudy Francia, a woman in her 20s, shrieked outside the St.-Esprit Hospital in the city on Wednesday. Her child, a girl about 4 years old, writhed in pain in the hospital’s chaotic courtyard, near where a handful of bodies lay under white blankets. “There is no one, nothing, no medicines, no explanations for why my daughter is going to die.”

The quake struck just before 5 p.m. Tuesday about 10 miles southwest of Port-au-Prince, ravaging the infrastructure of Haiti’s fragile government and destroying some of its most important cultural symbols.

“Parliament has collapsed,” Mr. Préval told The Miami Herald. “The tax office has collapsed. Schools have collapsed. Hospitals have collapsed. There are a lot of schools that have a lot of dead people in them.”

Aid agencies said they would open their storehouses of food and water in Haiti, and the World Food Program was flying in nearly 100 tons of ready-to-eat meals and high-energy biscuits from El Salvador. The United Nations said it was freeing up $10 million in emergency relief money, the European Union pledged $4.4 million, and groups like Doctors Without Borders were setting up clinics in tents and open-air triage centers to treat the injured.

Some aid groups with offices in Port-au-Prince were also busy searching for their own dead and missing.

The Brazilian Army said 11 of its soldiers had been killed. Paul McPhun, operations manager for Doctors Without Borders, described scenes of chaos.

When staff members tried to travel by car, “they were mobbed by crowds of people,” Mr. McPhun said. “They just want help, and anybody with a car is better off than they are.”

Contaminated drinking water is a longstanding problem in Haiti, causing high rates of illness that put many people in the hospital. Providing sanitation and clean water is one of the top priorities for aid organizations.

David Wald, a seismologist with the Geological Survey, said that an earthquake of this strength had not struck Haiti in more than 200 years, a fact apparently based on contemporaneous accounts. The most powerful one to strike the country in recent years took place in 1984, with a magnitude of 6.7.

Helene Cooper reported from Washington, and Simon Romero from Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Reporting was contributed by Marc Lacey from Port-au-Prince, Ginger Thompson and Brian Knowlton from Washington, Elisabeth Malkin from Mexico City, Neil MacFarquhar and Denise Grady from New York, and Mery Galanternick from Rio de Janeiro.

    Obama Pledges Sweeping Aid Effort as Haitians Dig and Search for the Missing, NYT, 15.1.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/15/world/americas/15haiti.html

China Cautions Internet Companies

January 15, 2010
The New York Times
By ANDREW JACOBS

BEIJING — After Google announced it would quit China unless the nation’s censors eased their grip, the government on Thursday offered an indirect but unambiguous response: Companies that do business in China must follow the laws of the land.

Beijing’s comments, offered by two officials on Thursday, suggested that China was unlikely to give in to Google’s demands that its search-engine results be unfiltered.

In announcing its decision Tuesday to possibly leave the world’s biggest Internet market, Google also cited a series of cyberattacks aimed at breaching the Gmail accounts of human rights advocates.

Several of those who say their e-mail accounts were hacked provided more details about those assaults on Thursday.

After a day of silence on the issue, the Foreign Ministry said China welcomed foreign Internet companies but those offering online services must do so “in accordance with the law.” Speaking at a regular news conference, Jiang Yu, a ministry spokeswoman, did not address Google’s complaints about censorship and cyberattacks, and she simply stated, “China’s Internet is open.”

The remarks, and those of a high-ranking propaganda official who called for even tighter Internet restrictions, may speed Google’s departure and increase frictions between Beijing and Washington. The Obama administration has said Internet freedom and online security are priorities.

“The recent cyberintrusion that Google attributes to China is troubling, and the federal government is looking into it,” Nicholas Shapiro, a White House spokesman, said Wednesday.

Beyond voicing concern, American officials have yet to say how they might respond. Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary, said Wednesday that the White House had been briefed by Google on the company’s decision. However, he declined to describe a course of action.

If the Chinese Foreign Ministry’s comments were vague, those of Wang Chen, the information director for the State Council, or cabinet, were more pointed.

In a transcript of an interview posted on the agency’s Web site on Thursday, Mr. Wang urged Internet companies to increase scrutiny of news or information that might threaten national stability and stressed the importance of “guiding” online public opinion.

“China’s Internet is entering an important stage of development, confronting both rare opportunities and severe challenges,” he said. “Internet media must always make nurturing positive, progressive mainstream opinion an important duty.”

    China Cautions Internet Companies, NYT, 15.1.2010,
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/15/world/asia/15beijing.html

U.S. Mobilizes to Send Assistance to Haiti

January 14, 2010
The New York Times
By HELENE COOPER and LIZ ROBBINS

WASHINGTON — President Obama, facing the first large-scale humanitarian crisis of his presidency, moved quickly to send help to Haiti, pledging Wednesday that the Haitians and their devastated island nation would have the “unwavering support” of the United States.

Within hours of Mr. Obama being informed of the quake in Haiti on Tuesday, United States officials were plotting a response that included ships, transport planes, helicopters and thousands of Marines. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton decided Wednesday night to cancel the rest of her Pacific trip and return to Washington.

Gen. Douglas Fraser, head of the United States Southern Command, said that one of the Navy’s large amphibious ships would probably be sent to Haiti, with a Marine expeditionary unit aboard, and that other American military forces were on alert, including a brigade of 3,500 troops. He said the Pentagon was “seriously looking” at sending thousands of Marines to help the disaster effort.

The Navy aircraft carrier Carl Vinson was deployed from Norfolk, Va.; military commanders said it should arrive in two days. In addition, White House officials said the military was looking into sending the Southern Command’s hospital ship, the Comfort, in light of reports that most of Haiti’s medical facilities were severely damaged if not destroyed. The Coast Guard also sent four cutters.

As the United States mobilized, other governments and aid agencies around the world began marshaling supplies and manpower, and overwhelmed rescue workers in Haiti scrambled to set up makeshift clinics. Medical workers from Doctors Without Borders, which had 800 people in Haiti before the quake, said they were mobbed everywhere they went by people who had suffered severe traumas and crushed limbs, and by others begging for help in rescuing trapped relatives.

France said that it would send three military transport planes, including one from nearby Fort-de-France, Martinique, with aid supplies, and that 100 troops based in the French West Indies would be sent, according to TF1, a French television network. Britain and Germany were sending governmental assessment teams, and Germany said it would make available 1.5 million euros, or about $2.2 million, for emergency assistance.

On Wednesday, relief organizations developed aid plans from their headquarters outside of Haiti and quickly raised millions of dollars through social networking sites and donations by cellphone. But they were still struggling to get workers and supplies into Haiti, where operations at the capital’s port were shut down and runways at the main airport were open only to limited traffic because the control tower had collapsed.

“We’re looking at private charter options, looking at getting people through the Dominican Republic,” said Paul McPhun, a director of the emergency management team for Doctors Without Borders. “We need to get people in, and get people fast. There’s not a shortage of getting people to go, but it’s how to get them there.”

Mr. Obama did not make a specific aid pledge, and administration officials said they were still trying to figure out what Haiti needed. But he urged Americans to dig into their pockets and to go to www.whitehouse.gov to learn ways to donate money.

“This is a time when we are reminded of the common humanity that we all share,” Mr. Obama said Wednesday, speaking in the White House diplomatic reception room with Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. at his side.

He described the reports of thousands buried under the rubble in the capital, Port-au-Prince, as “truly heart-wrenching,” a tragedy made more cruel by Haiti’s desperate poverty.

Robyn Fieser, the regional information officer for Catholic Relief Services, said, “All they heard last night was chanting and praying,” describing reports from some of her organization’s relief workers who were in Port-au-Prince on Tuesday night. “They did not hear any emergency vehicles or emergency efforts at all. All they saw was people doing rescue work on their own, with their bare hands.”

White House officials were clearly conscious that Mr. Obama’s response to the first major humanitarian disaster of his presidency would be closely watched. President George W. Bush learned that lesson the hard way, when his initial response to the December 2004 tsunami in Asia that killed 226,000 people was derided as paltry, and a year after that when his White House fumbled its response to Hurricane Katrina.

Mr. Obama canceled a trip to Lanham, Md., scheduled for Wednesday afternoon so he could make telephone calls to discuss the relief effort with staff members and foreign diplomats, White House aides said.

Mr. Obama was informed about the quake at 5:52 p.m. Tuesday by Denis McDonough, his national security chief of staff; he told aides that he wanted the United States to move “fast and aggressively,” one White House official said. By 6:22 p.m. the White House had issued a statement from the president that the United States was “closely monitoring the situation” and stood “ready to assist the people of Haiti.”

The Coast Guard cutter Forward was at the Guantánamo Bay naval base in Cuba when the earthquake hit on Tuesday, causing the 270-foot ship to rock back and forth even though it was more than 200 miles from the epicenter. The Forward arrived in Port-au-Prince early Wednesday morning, the first American military ship on the scene and the only large vessel in the harbor, Diane W. Durham, commander of the Forward, said in a telephone interview.

Commander Durham described extraordinary devastation, with collapsed buildings reaching from the port into the hills above, and said that Haitian officials had told her that half of the 80 Haitian coast guard staff members stationed at the port were killed in the earthquake.

The Department of Homeland Security said it was halting the deportations of Haitians back to the island “for the time being.” Refugee and immigration rights groups said the United States should grant temporary protective status that would allow Haitians who are now in the United States to stay here.

Helene Cooper reported from Washington,

and Liz Robbins from New York.

Eric Lipton contributed reporting from Washington.

    U.S. Mobilizes to Send Assistance to Haiti, NYT, 14.1.2010,
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/14/world/americas/14prexy.html

Op-Ed Contributor

Al Qaeda’s Shadowland

January 12, 2010
The New York Times
By EDMUND J. HULL

Washington

AMERICANS are scrambling to understand Yemen, where Al Qaeda has recently surged and the Christmas Day plot against Northwest Flight 253 was hatched. It’s not easy. Yemen has 5,000 years of history, complicated politics and daunting economic challenges. But we’ve made it more difficult to understand by allowing several myths to cloud our vision. Challenging these misconceptions is a first step toward comprehending and overcoming significant threats to American, Yemeni and international security.

Myth 1: The Yemeni government’s control does not extend much beyond the capital, Sana.

It’s true that the government of President Ali Abdullah Saleh faces several security problems. Al Qaeda has operated there since the early 1990s, with its strength waxing and waning depending on the effectiveness of the government’s counterterrorism efforts. Since 2004, the government has faced an insurrection in the north from a group called the Houthis, who would restore a religious ruler. There has also been growing separatist feeling in the southern regions that tried to secede in 1994. And many of the tribes in the north are well armed and operate largely outside the government structure.

None of this, however, means that the government is confined to ruling a city-state centered on Sana. The Yemeni Army and national police exert significant day-to-day control over most of the country, and almost everywhere else on an ad hoc basis. Yemen is much like the United States in the latter half of the 19th century, when the government faced a rebellious South and a Wild West, but was hardly powerless outside the East Coast.

Myth 2: Yemen is a Qaeda haven because it is the ancestral home of Osama bin Laden, who is supported by tribes in Hadhramaut Province.

Osama bin Laden’s father, Muhammad, was one of many Yemenis who achieved great success outside his native country. But the bin Ladens are not part of any politically significant tribe or clan, nor has the family sought to convert its wealth into power in Yemen. Osama bin Laden has some popularity, but no more so than elsewhere in the Islamic world. The Qaeda virus — which has been present in Yemen since 1992, when Qaeda members bombed a hotel in Aden where American troops had been staying on their way to Somalia — is the problem for Yemen, not Mr. bin Laden’s ancestral ties.

Myth 3: Yemen is torn by Sunni-Shiite divisions, much like Iraq.

The Houthi rebellion is often described as Shiite resistance against a Sunni establishment. In fact, both the Houthis and President Saleh are followers of the Zaidi sect of Shiite Islam. Generally, there is no clear divide between Sunnis and Shiites in Yemen, although the Shiites tend to live in the north and northwest while the Sunnis, mostly members of the moderate Shafii school, predominate in the south and southeast. In any case, one’s sect matters far less in Yemen than in countries like Lebanon or Iraq, and it’s not unknown for Yemenis to convert from Sunni to Shiite as a matter of convenience.

Myth 4: Yemeni tribes have an inherent affinity for Al Qaeda or terrorism.

In 2002, Abu Ali al-Harithi, then Al Qaeda’s leader in Yemen, was killed by an American drone in a strike that was coordinated with the Yemeni government. By tribal custom, any perceived illegitimate killing would have been grounds for a claim by the tribe against the government. No such claim was made. In fact, when receiving the body for burial, one of his kinsmen noted that “he had chosen his path, and it had led to his death.”

This was not an anomaly. In my experience, there is no deep-seeded affinity between Yemeni tribes and the Qaeda movement. Tribes tend to be opportunistic, not ideological, so the risk is that Al Qaeda will successfully exploit opportunities created by government neglect. There are also family affinities — cousins, linked to uncles, linked to brothers. These do matter. But what matters most is the “mujahedeen fraternity” — Yemenis with jihadist experience in Afghanistan, Iraq, Saudi Arabia or elsewhere. Finally, what would matter — and significantly — would be innocent casualties resulting from counterterrorism operations, which could well set off a tribal response.

•

Forging an effective American counterterrorism policy in Yemen will be as difficult as it is necessary. But misreading Yemeni history and society can only complicate its conception and jeopardize its execution.

 

Edmund J. Hull was the United States ambassador to Yemen from 2001 to 2004.

    Al Qaeda’s Shadowland, NYT, 12.1.2010,
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/12/opinion/12hull.html

News Analysis

With Defense Test,

China Shows Displeasure of U.S.

January 13, 2010
The New York Times
By ANDREW JACOBS

BEIJING — China said late Monday that it had successfully tested the nation’s first land-based missile defense system, announcing the news in a brief dispatch by Xinhua, the official news agency. “The test is defensive in nature and is not targeted at any country,” the item said.

Even if news accounts on Tuesday did not provide details about the test — and whether it destroyed its intended target — Chinese and Western analysts say there is no mistaking that the timing of the test, coming amid Beijing’s fury over American arms sales to Taiwan, was largely aimed at the White House.

In recent days, state media have been producing a torrent of articles condemning the sale of Patriot air defense equipment to Taiwan. China views the self-ruled island as a breakaway province, separated since the civil war of the 1940s, and sees arms sales as interference in an internal matter.

The Defense and Foreign Ministries have released a half-dozen warnings over the weapons deal, saying it would have grave consequences for United States-China relations. The state-run Global Times newspaper urged readers to come up with ways to retaliate against the United States.

Writing in the Study Times newspaper, Maj. Gen. Jun Yinan said China had the power to strike back. “We must take countermeasures to make the other side pay a corresponding price and suffering corresponding punishment,” wrote General Jun, a professor at China’s National Defense University.

Although most analysts doubt the Chinese will seek to punish the United States in a significant way — retaliatory measures over past arms sales have included the suspension of military talks — the especially vociferous response may herald rockier relations between the countries as they confront differences over monetary policy, trade issues, Iran and North Korea.

“For the Chinese, selling arms to Taiwan feels like a slap in the face,” said Shi Yinhong, a professor of United States-Chinese relations at People’s University in Beijing. “I think the government expected something different from Obama, especially so soon after his visit to China.”

The White House said it was simply fulfilling a deal that was negotiated during the Bush administration. It also pointed out that the sale, approved by the Pentagon last week, omits F-16 fighter jets and Black Hawk helicopters, a concession to Beijing.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, speaking in California on Monday, said she thought the strain in relations would be brief and mild. “It doesn’t go off the rails when we have differences of opinions,” she said of the relationship with China.

Relations may get bumpier in the coming weeks when President Obama meets with the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan spiritual leader whom China accuses of being a separatist, and President Ma Ying-jeou of Taiwan makes a brief visit to the United States. Overseas visits by Taiwanese officials invariably irk Beijing.

Arthur Ding, a research fellow at the Institute of International Relations in Taipei, the Taiwanese capital, said China might have thought its growing economic might and the improving cross-strait relations fostered by Mr. Ma during his 20 months in office might have persuaded the United States to put off any weapons deal.

“Perhaps Beijing has unrealistic expectations,” he said. “I think they imagined their influence is greater than it is.”

For all the saber-rattling over the arms sale, some analysts say the official invective and anti-missile demonstration may have been largely directed at domestic audiences, who increasingly expect their leaders to stand up to the West.

Zhu Feng, deputy director of the Center for Strategic and International Studies at Peking University, described China’s missile defense system as experimental and “not really meaningful” and said the test’s real purpose was an opportunity for the People’s Liberation Army to strut.

Despite China’s newfound confidence, he said the government was increasingly frustrated by its inability to influence the United States on an issue that had bedeviled Beijing for decades.

“China still lacks the leverage to force the White House to stop these sales,” he said. “So they feel like they must make a lot of noise.”

Jonathan Ansfield contributed reporting. Li Bibo contributed research.

    With Defense Test, China Shows Displeasure of U.S., NYT, 13.1.2010,
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/13/world/asia/13china.html

U.S. Embassy Reopens in Yemen

January 6, 2010
The New York Times
By JACK HEALY

The United States reopened its embassy in the Yemeni capital on Tuesday, a day after Yemeni security forces killed two suspected Qaeda militants linked to the threats against several diplomatic outposts.

The United States and Britain had closed their embassies in Sana, the capital, on Sunday, citing continuing threats against targets in the city. At the British Embassy, workers returned Tuesday, but the building was closed to visitors. The French, German, Czech and Japanese Embassies were also largely or entirely closed to the public, according to news reports.

A counterterrorism operation by Yemeni forces on Monday had “addressed a specific area of concern,” according to a statement posted on the American Embassy’s Web site. But the statement warned that “the threat of terrorist attacks against American interests remains high” and urged Americans in Yemen to be “vigilant and take prudent security measures.”

On Monday, Yemeni forces were tracking a suspected member of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, the group tied to the attempt to bring down an international flight into Detroit on Christmas Day, when they came under fire from militants in the town of Arbhab, officials said. Two bodyguards of the suspect, Nazi al-Hanq, were killed in the firefight; Mr. Hanq escaped.

The United States, which is ramping up aid to Yemen, praised the operation. Arhab was the site of one of several strikes made against militants on Dec. 17 that American officials said killed three men suspected of planning suicide attacks on Western targets in Sana.

A spokeswoman for the British Foreign Office, speaking under standard rules of anonymity, said that embassy employees were at work on Tuesday, but that the building was still closed to the public and was not providing visa services.

Yemen, long a roost for terrorist groups, has said it ramped up offensives against Al Qaeda in recent months, launching raids against militant hide-outs. On Tuesday, government officials quoted by Reuters said Yemen had sent “thousands” of troops to combat militants in the provinces of Shabwa, Marib and Abyan, thought to be havens for militants.

Last month, in Yemen’s broadest attack on Qaeda members in years, Yemeni authorities said that their security forces killed at least 34 suspected militants in raids on Qaeda hideouts in Sana, in the south and in the city of Arhab, which was the site of Monday’s firefight.

    U.S. Embassy Reopens in Yemen, NYT, 6.1.2010,
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/06/world/middleeast/06yemen.html

U.S. and U.K. Shut Embassies in Yemen

Over Qaeda Threats

January 4, 2010
The New York Times
By STEVEN ERLANGER

SANA, Yemen — The United States and Britain shut their embassies in the Yemen capital on Sunday, with the Americans citing unspecified but “ongoing threats by Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula,” the regional branch responsible for the failed Christmas Day effort to blow up a U.S. airliner headed to Detroit.

The closures came a day after a quiet visit to Yemen’s president by Gen. David H. Petraeus, the American regional commander, who delivered a message from President Obama of support for Yemen’s unity and counter-terrorism efforts.

In his weekly address on Saturday, Mr. Obama blamed the Al Qaeda branch for the bombing attempt and said that those responsible “will be held to account.”

Mr. Obama said he had made it “a priority to strengthen our partnership with the Yemeni government, training and equipping their security forces, sharing intelligence and working with them to strike Al Qaeda terrorists.”

John Brennan, Mr. Obama’s deputy national security adviser, asked on ABC’s “This Week” television program on Sunday whether there was a “live and active threat,” said, “There is. Al Qaeda has several hundred members, in fact, in Yemen, and they’ve grown in strength.”

“I spoke with our ambassador in Sana, Steve Seche, early this morning and last night, looked at the intelligence that is available as far as the plans for al Qaeda to carry out attacks in Sana, possibly against our embassy, possibly against U.S. personnel,” Mr. Brennan said. “We decided it was the prudent thing to do to shut the embassy.”

Appearing later on “Fox News Sunday,” Mr. Brennan said, “Until the Yemeni government gets on top of the situation with Al Qaeda, there is a risk of attacks. We know that there are a number of Al Qaeda operatives who are determined to carry out such attacks.”

The streets outside of the American Embassy looked normal on Sunday, a working day here, with no visible addition to the normal boundary security provided by the Yemeni military and police. Nor were the streets closed off near the embassy building, which is surrounded by a large wall and is set back some distance to prevent bomb damage.

Both American and British officials here said that a decision to reopen the embassies on Monday had yet to be made.

In September 2008, Al Qaeda attacked the U.S. Embassy with a car bomb, and 19 people were killed — including an 18-year-old American woman, Yemeni security forces and six militants. It was after that attack that the United States began to step up its military and security aid to Yemen, with some $67 million spent in fiscal 2009, a figure that General Petraeus said would more than double in 2010, to around $150 million, if Congress approved.

A statement on the U.S. Embassy Web site said that ”The U.S. Embassy in Sana is closed today, January 3, 2010, in response to ongoing threats by Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula to attack American interests in Yemen.”

An embassy official refused to comment further on the specific threat. On Thursday, the embassy sent a notice to American citizens in Yemen urging them to be vigilant and practice security awareness.

Last January, gunmen in a car exchanged fire with police at a checkpoint near the embassy, hours after the embassy received threats of a possible attack by Al Qaeda, according to The Associated Press. No one was injured. And in July, security was upgraded in Sana after intelligence reports warned of attacks planned against the embassy.

In December, the Yemen government said that it had attacked Al Qaeda meetings in which the group had been planning an attack on the British Embassy here.

On Saturday, Yemeni officials said they had sent several hundred more troops to fight Al Qaeda militants in the provinces of Abyan, Al Bayda and Shabwah.

Britain announced on Sunday that Prime Minister Gordon Brown and Mr. Obama had agreed to back a counterterrorism police unit in Yemen to tackle the rising terrorist threat. There is already significant counterterrorist training for the police and it was not immediately clear what Mr. Brown had in mind.

Britain is also to host a high-level international conference on Jan. 28, in parallel with a long-scheduled conference on Afghanistan, to discuss international strategy and aid to counter radicalization in Yemen, the poorest country in the Arab world.

 

Joseph Berger contributed reporting from New York.

    U.S. and U.K. Shut Embassies in Yemen Over Qaeda Threats, NYT, 4.1.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/04/world/middleeast/04yemen.html

US Embassy in Yemen Closes Over al-Qaida Threat

January 3, 2010
Filed at 4:21 a.m. ET
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

SAN'A, Yemen (AP) -- The U.S. Embassy in Yemen says it has closed in response to ongoing al-Qaida threats to attack American interests in the Arabian Peninsula country.

A statement posted on Sunday on the embassy Web site said it had closed but provided no further details.

The embassy sent a warden notice on Thursday to American citizens in Yemen urging them to be vigilant and practice security awareness.

An embassy spokesman reached on the phone would not comment if there was a specific threat.

The confrontation with al-Qaida's branch in Yemen has gained new urgency after the failed attempt on Christmas Day to bomb a U.S. airliner headed to Detroit.

    US Embassy in Yemen Closes Over al-Qaida Threat, NYT, 3.1.2010,
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2010/01/03/world/AP-ML-Yemen-Al-Qaida.html

Chaos in Yemen Aids Qaeda Cell’s Growth

January 3, 2010
The New York Times
By STEVEN ERLANGER

SANA, Yemen — Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula has rapidly evolved into an expanding and ambitious regional terrorist network thanks in part to a weakened, impoverished and distracted Yemeni government.

While Yemen has chased two homegrown rebellions, over the last year the Qaeda cell here has begun sharing resources across borders and has been spurred on to more ambitious attacks by a leadership strengthened by released Qaeda detainees and returning fighters from Iraq.

The priorities of the Yemeni government have been fighting a war in the north and combating secessionists across the south. In the interim, Al Qaeda has flourished in the large, lawless and rugged tribal territories of Yemen, creating training camps, attacking Western targets and receiving increasing popular sympathy.

Al Qaeda’s growing profile in Yemen became clear after a Nigerian man, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, 23, was able to overstay his visa here by several months, connect with Qaeda militants and leave this country with a bomb sewn into his underwear.

In his weekly address on Saturday, President Obama for the first time directly blamed Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula for the bombing attempt and said that fighting the group would be a priority. “In recent years, they have bombed Yemeni government facilities and Western hotels,” he said, adding, “So as president, I’ve made it a priority to strengthen our partnership with the Yemeni government.”

The core of the group here is still thought to be small, perhaps no more than 200 people. But it has the important advantage of being part of a larger, regional structure after it merged a year ago with the Saudi branch of Al Qaeda to form Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. And it has been able to originate fairly sophisticated operations here, in Saudi Arabia and now on an airliner headed for Detroit.

Though Yemen played an early role in Al Qaeda’s history — it is Osama bin Laden’s ancestral homeland, and it was the staging ground for the 2000 attack on the American destroyer Cole — the key chapters in the story of Al Qaeda’s rise here have been written recently by leaders who were released from detention at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, escaped from Yemeni prisons or were drawn to shelter here by common cause and ideology.

Those men have transformed and reoriented a weak local Qaeda cell that had made a kind of peace with the government after 2003. In the year since the Saudi and Yemeni branches merged, Al Qaeda has taken full advantage of the government’s preoccupation with the rebellions, building support from the tribal structures and traditions in Yemen’s poor and lawless territories.

One big moment came in February 2006, when 23 imprisoned men suspected of being members of Al Qaeda escaped from a high-security prison, reportedly with the aid of some Yemeni security forces. According to Yemeni and Western officials, one of the prisoners, Nasser al-Wuhayshi, became the leader of the group and moved to reorganize it, focusing it on attacks against nearby Western targets. Another, Qassim al-Raimi, became the military commander.

The next year, Mr. Wuhayshi found a deputy — and, perhaps, a rival for leadership: Said Ali al-Shihri, 36, a Saudi citizen. He was released from six years’ detention in Guantánamo Bay in December 2007 to a rehabilitation program run by the Saudis. He disappeared from Saudi Arabia and emerged in Yemen, and he is considered by many to be the rising star of the local movement. Mr. Shihri had traveled to Afghanistan in 2001 and was apparently wounded there, and he was captured crossing back into Pakistan in December of that year.

Another Guantánamo detainee, also captured in Pakistan in 2001 and later released to a Saudi rehabilitation program is Ibrahim Suleiman al-Rubaysh, 30, who also disappeared and is now described as the mufti, or theological guide, to Al Qaeda of the Arabian Peninsula.

Anwar al-Awlaki, an American-born, English-speaking Internet imam of Al Qaeda here, returned to Yemen, his family’s home, in 2004. He was arrested in 2006 on security charges and was released in December 2007, after 18 months in prison. He then went to Britain, and is believed to have returned to Yemen in the spring of 2009.

Mr. Awlaki, 38, is not thought to have a major operational role. Still, American and Yemeni officials say they believe he provided a crucial link to Mr. Abdulmutallab, first through the Internet and then meeting him in Yemen and helping to recruit him to the airliner bomb plot.

He also provides Qaeda operatives here with a crucial shield against the government: the protection of his powerful tribe, the Awlakis. As in Afghanistan and Pakistan, tribal codes require the protection of those who seek refuge and help — even more so for a clan member and his colleagues. Mr. Awlaki is also said to have helped negotiate deals with other tribal leaders.

Abdulelah Hider Shaea, a Yemeni journalist who studies Al Qaeda and knows Mr. Awlaki, denied in an interview that the imam was a member of Al Qaeda, saying instead that he served as an articulate window to jihadism for English speakers.

Yemeni officials, in two major strikes against Al Qaeda targets in December, first said that they had killed Mr. Awlaki, but he later spoke to Mr. Shaea to prove that he was alive, as other key leaders seem to be. But dozens of Qaeda family members and local residents were also killed, increasing antigovernment sentiment.

In recent years, Al Qaeda has had an increasingly rich recruiting pool.

Magnus Ranstorp, a terrorism expert at the Swedish National Defense College, said that many of the nearly 2,000 Yemenis who were believed to have fought in Iraqi insurgencies had returned to join the cause here. And many Yemenis who went to Saudi Arabia to seek work — like Mr. bin Laden’s own father — have had children who have been influenced by the more radical Islam of Saudi Arabia, bringing ideas of jihad home to an already conservative Islamic Yemen.

There has also been an influx to Yemen of at least 200,000 refugees from Somalia, according to official figures, and probably many more than that. Al Qaeda has also been very active in Somalia, seeking refuge and recruits among the Islamist groups there. And now that Yemen has proved to be a safe training ground for Al Qaeda, a link between the Yemeni and Somali contingents has strengthened.

“The Somalia problem is merging with the Yemeni issue,” Mr. Ranstorp said.

But Al Qaeda here also has problems, including a possible leadership struggle.

Although Mr. Wuhayshi is still widely believed to be in control, he is considered uncharismatic, and his leadership and the merger were not endorsed by Mr. bin Laden’s deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri, until spring 2009. But the airliner plot has brought praise from Al Qaeda-associated Web sites, as did a bold but unsuccessful effort to kill Saudi Arabia’s counterterrorism chief, Prince Muhammad bin Nayef, who was wounded last August by a suicide bomber equipped with the same explosive provided to Mr. Abdulmutallab.

Al Qaeda’s growth here has come as President Ali Abdullah Saleh, 67, has intensified the ongoing war in the north against Houthi rebels, who are Shiites with support from Iran, Yemeni officials and analysts say. Mr. Saleh’s second priority is a spreading secessionist movement in the south, which has been largely peaceful until now, but which further threatens his long hold on power, with his own succession unclear.

“President Saleh’s first priority is to stay in power,” said Abdullah al-Faqih, a political scientist at Sana University. “Two, at this point, is the war in the north. Three is the south. And sometimes Al Qaeda doesn’t even make the list at all — it drops from the agenda.”

The United States spent $70 million last year to help Yemen fight Al Qaeda, a figure that Gen. David H. Petraeus said on Friday would more than double this year. But American officials are finding an uncomfortable resemblance to their fight in Pakistan, where the Taliban and Qaeda leadership are given effective sanctuary while the government is preoccupied with its archrival, India, and threats to Kashmir.

The increased aid package and other American security efforts grew out of Al Qaeda’s car-bomb attack against the American Embassy here in 2008. American Special Forces troops have been training and equipping Yemeni forces, and the United States has been providing sophisticated satellite and communications intelligence to aid the fight against Al Qaeda.

Yemen is also the Arab world’s poorest country, with a major water shortage and 70 percent of the gross domestic product coming from oil that is expected to run out in seven years, and it is also deeply corrupt.

The new American focus — and money — have caught Mr. Saleh’s attention, Mr. Faqih said. “But right now we have the military in the north and the security services in the south,” he said. “Of course, we’re not ready to fight Al Qaeda. You’d have to reposition the government and the security forces, and it would take months.”

Still, Al Qaeda is also becoming more of a threat to Yemen. In November, Al Qaeda attacked government forces in the Kushum Al Ain area of Hadramawt Province. Three officials were killed. Later in November, near Marib, Al Qaeda executed a senior intelligence officer after holding him for months and then trying him, as if it were the real government of the area.

Al Qaeda has also declared support for the secessionist protests in the south and is thought to be strong in southern Abyan Province, which gives it access to the sea.

Despite the threat, “relations between the government and Al Qaeda are very tricky,” Mr. Faqih noted. “There is, as in Pakistan, some intertwining of politics, society and the security forces with Al Qaeda,” which has been skillful in making alliances of its own with important tribes in provinces like Hadramawt, Shabwah, Marib, where much of the oil is, and Abyan.

Some of that intertwining has happened because President Saleh has been encouraging a radical Sunni Islamist group to help fight the Shiite Houthi rebellion in the north. Some analysts say they believe that movement is also feeding the support for Al Qaeda. Mr. Saleh has also used global jihadis who fought in Afghanistan and Iraq against the Houthis as he used some of them to fight in the south during the country’s 1994 civil war.

With all of President Saleh’s enormous problems, a successful new fight against the revived Al Qaeda is going to require political progress to calm down the rebellions, Mr. Faqih and a senior Western diplomat here said. Mr. Saleh is afraid to make any concessions, Mr. Faqih said, but he believes that Washington must press Mr. Saleh to move toward a more tolerant federalism, while cutting down on civilian deaths.

Otherwise, there could be even more recruits for Al Qaeda. The war against the Houthis is pushing them toward some kind of alliance with Al Qaeda, despite religious differences, much as Shiite Iran backs the Sunni Hamas movement in Gaza, Mr. Faqih said.

“It can happen,” he said. “The enemy of my enemy is my friend, and you can turn it into the Kandahar of Yemen.”

Charlie Savage contributed reporting from Washington.

    Chaos in Yemen Aids Qaeda Cell’s Growth, NYT, 3.1.2010,
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/03/world/middleeast/03yemen.html

U.S. Sees Window to Pressure Iran on Nuclear Fuel

January 3, 2010
The New York Times
By DAVID E. SANGER and WILLIAM J. BROAD

WASHINGTON — As President Obama faces pressure to back up his year-end ultimatum for diplomatic progress with Iran, the administration says that domestic unrest and signs of unexpected trouble in Tehran’s nuclear program make its leaders particularly vulnerable to strong and immediate new sanctions.

The long-discussed sanctions would initiate the latest phase in a strategy to force Iran to comply with United Nations demands to halt production of nuclear fuel. It comes as the administration has completed a fresh review of Iran’s nuclear progress.

In interviews, Mr. Obama’s strategists said that while Iran’s top political and military leaders remained determined to develop nuclear weapons, they were distracted by turmoil in the streets and political infighting, and that the drive to produce nuclear fuel appeared to have faltered in recent months.

The White House wants to focus the new sanctions on the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, the military force believed to run the nuclear weapons effort. That force has also played a crucial role in the repression of antigovernment demonstrators since the disputed presidential election in June.

Although repeated rounds of sanctions over many years have not dissuaded Iran from pursuing nuclear technology, an administration official involved in the Iran policy said the hope was that the current troubles “give us a window to impose the first sanctions that may make the Iranians think the nuclear program isn’t worth the price tag.”

While outsiders have a limited view of Iran’s nuclear program, the Obama administration officials said they believed that the bomb-development effort was seriously derailed by the exposure three months ago of the country’s secret enrichment plant under construction near the holy city of Qum, which deprived Iran of its best chance of covertly producing the highly enriched uranium needed to make fuel for nuclear weapons.

In addition, international nuclear inspectors report that at Iran’s plant in Natanz, where thousands of centrifuges spin to enrich uranium for nuclear fuel, the number of the machines that are currently operating has dropped by 20 percent since the summer, a decline nuclear experts attribute to technical problems. Others, including some European officials, believe the problems may have been accentuated by a series of covert efforts by the West to undermine Iran’s program, including sabotage on its imported equipment and infrastructure.

These factors have led the administration’s policy makers to lengthen their estimate of how long it would take Iran to accomplish what nuclear experts call “covert breakout” — the ability to secretly produce a workable weapon. “For now, the Iranians don’t have a credible breakout option, and we don’t think they will have one for at least 18 months, maybe two or three years,” said one senior administration official at the center of the White House Iran strategy. The administration has told allies that the longer time frame would allow the sanctions to have an effect before Iran could develop its nuclear ability.

Another administration official said that Israeli officials, while still publicly hinting that they may take military action against Iran’s nuclear facilities, “now feel that what’s happening in Iran makes the country vulnerable to real sanctions,” and may give Mr. Obama more time to persuade China and Russia to go along. A senior Israeli diplomat in Washington said that in back-channel conversations “Obama has convinced us that it’s worth trying the sanctions, at least for a few months.”

Sanctions will be a difficult balancing act for the administration, since it acknowledges that three previous rounds of sanctions have failed to deter Iran, and it also wants to avoid angering Iranians protesting in the streets by depriving them of Western goods. That is why the administration is focusing on the Revolutionary Guards, who are increasingly detested by the protesters, and who have built up billions of dollars of business interests in telecommunications, oil and construction. The administration aims to get Arab and Asian nations to join Europe in cutting off financial transactions with Revolutionary Guard front companies.

China and Russia have been particularly reluctant and could seize on the Obama administration’s view of Iran’s nuclear troubles to resist Mr. Obama’s argument that new sanctions were needed now to punish Iran’s defiance of the United Nations Security Council mandate that it cease enriching uranium.

Iran’s insistence that its nuclear program is for civilian purposes only is roundly rejected by Western officials and, in internal reports, by international nuclear inspectors. Yet Washington’s assessments of how much progress Iran has made toward a weapon have varied greatly over the past two years, partly a reflection of how little is known about the inner workings of the country’s nuclear programs.

Mr. Obama’s top advisers say they no longer believe the key finding of a much disputed National Intelligence Estimate about Iran, published a year before President George W. Bush left office, which said that Iranian scientists ended all work on designing a nuclear warhead in late 2003.

After reviewing new documents that have leaked out of Iran and debriefing defectors lured to the West, Mr. Obama’s advisers say they believe the work on weapons design is continuing on a smaller scale — the same assessment reached by Britain, France, Germany and Israel.

In early September, the American ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency, Glyn Davies, warned that Iran had “possible breakout capacity.” Administration officials say that Mr. Davies’ assessment was technically accurate, yet the new evidence suggests that Iran is less likely to use its uranium stockpile to assemble one or two bombs, a move officials say would be likely to provoke an Israeli strike.

The administration’s current view of Iran’s nuclear program was provided by six senior administration officials advising Mr. Obama on his strategy, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the delicacy of the subject. The administration’s review of Iran’s program, which they said was based on intelligence reports, information from allies, and their own analysis, did not amount to a new formal intelligence assessment.

In interviews, those officials as well as European officials engaged in the Iran issue and private experts described Iran’s nuclear program as being in some disarray.

The biggest disruption came in late September when Mr. Obama, along with President Nicolas Sarkozy of France and Prime Minister Gordon Brown of Britain, publicly exposed Iran’s covert effort to build an enrichment plant near Qum.

Western intelligence agencies had been studying the underground plant from afar for nearly a year, and two European officials say that Iranian nuclear spies recruited by Europe and Israel provided some confirming evidence about the purpose of the plant.

International inspectors who were granted access to the underground site in October found that the plant was about a year away from operation and that it was designed for just 3,000 centrifuges — not enough to produce the large amounts of fuel needed for commercial reactors, but sufficient for the stealthy production of highly enriched bomb fuel. (By comparison, the Natanz plant, which is ostensibly for producing reactor fuel, is designed for 54,000 centrifuges.)

American officials say that the Qum plant is now useless to the Iranians. “They spent three years and tens of millions of dollars on a covert plant that they will probably never turn on,” said the senior official involved in the White House strategy.

The official added, “It would take Iran three to four years to build a duplicate of Qum,” although he acknowledged that Iran could have another secret facility that Western intelligence had missed.

Both administration officials and experts say that another factor slowing Iran’s nuclear development is that it is working with older centrifuge technology that keeps breaking down.

By the recent count of inspectors for the International Atomic Energy Agency, there were 3,936 centrifuges running at Iran’s enrichment plant in the desert at Natanz — down from a peak of 4,920 centrifuges in June.

Administration officials say Iran began producing almost all of its own centrifuge components after discovering that the United States and other Western countries had sabotaged some key imported parts, and they have made a series of manufacturing errors.

R. Scott Kemp, a Princeton University physicist, said that another factor was in the basic design of the centrifuges, obtained from Pakistan nearly two decades ago. “I suspect design problems,” Mr. Kemp said. “The machines run hot and have short lives. They’re terrible. It’s a really bad design.”

If Mr. Kemp and others are right, it suggests that Iran has a long way to go before it can make good on its recent vow to open 10 new enrichment plants. Iranian officials have said publicly that those plants will use a new version of the centrifuges. But Paul K. Kerr, a nuclear analyst at the Congressional Research Service, said research on the new generation of centrifuges had apparently proved “less successful” than the original, primitive design.

Another possible problem for Iran is the Western sabotage efforts. In January, The New York Times reported that President Bush had ordered a broad covert program against Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, including efforts to undermine electrical and computer systems that keep the nuclear program running. The Obama administration has been silent about the progress of that program, one of the most heavily classified of the United States government.

    U.S. Sees Window to Pressure Iran on Nuclear Fuel, NYT, 3.1.2010,
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/03/world/asia/03iran.html

Iran Gives West

One-Month ‘Ultimatum’

to Accept Nuclear Counterproposal

January 3, 2010
The New York Times
By MICHAEL SLACKMAN

CAIRO — Iran’s foreign minister warned the West on Saturday that it had one month to accept Iran’s counterproposal to a deal brokered by the United Nations aimed at slowing the Iranian nuclear program, or else Iran would begin further enriching its nuclear fuel stockpile on its own.

The comments by the foreign minister, Manouchehr Mottaki, were broadcast on state television and presented as an “ultimatum” to the West just two days after Iran missed a deadline set by the United States and its allies to accept a deal that was brokered in October in Geneva.

If the Iranian deadline is not met, Mr. Mottaki said, Iran will enrich its stockpile of low-enriched uranium to 20 percent, though it was unclear if it had the technical ability to accomplish the task. At the 20 percent level, Iran could, in theory, make an extremely crude nuclear weapon. The bigger threat would be that Iran’s enrichment could quickly accelerate from there to the much higher grade of fuel typically used in modern nuclear warheads.

Analysts on Iran have said that Iran’s intransigence on the nuclear deal might represent an attempt by its leaders to push a confrontation with the West and divert public attention from political and social troubles at home. The nuclear program has widespread support in Iran as a symbol of national pride.

Mr. Mottaki did not say exactly the terms of Iran’s counteroffer, but he has said in the past that Iran would accept a simultaneous uranium swap either on its own territory or in Turkey. Those terms had already been rejected by the West, because they would not delay Iran’s ability to produce a weapon, if it chose to do so.

Under the tentative deal with the West, Iran would ship much of its low-enriched uranium out of the country where it would be further enriched, but turned into a form that would be difficult to use for weapons. One important part of the deal, however, is that Iran would be without much of its nuclear fuel for a time, giving the West about a year to try to negotiate a more permanent solution on Iran’s program.

Iran has said its nuclear program is for energy generation, but the United States and many other countries doubt that.

Tehran has already made it clear that it would not abide by the earlier tentative agreement with the West. The Obama administration has responded by indicating that it would seek to impose harsh financial sanctions on Iran, perhaps singling out specific government officials or institutions to avoid imposing hardship on the general public. It is not clear whether China and Russia, which have resisted sanctions in the past, would go along.

Mike Hammer, a White House spokesman, said Iran should accept the tentative deal. “If getting access to fuel is Iran’s objective, then there is absolutely no reason why the existing proposal, which Iran accepted in principle at Geneva, is insufficient,” he said. “The Iranian government is standing in its own way.”

Iran’s defiant tone coincides with a political crisis that has smoldered since the contested election in June of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. At least eight people were killed, and hundreds arrested, during protests in cities around the nation last Sunday.

“I am sure that, in light of the recent events much more than in the past, the Revolutionary Guards and Ahmadinejad would love the new heightened tension with the U.S. and the West,” said an Iranian expert in Washington who asked not to be identified because he still does work in Iran.

He and other experts said that harsh sanctions over the nuclear program might actually be welcomed by some of Iran’s leaders as a device to help restore national unity. But they added that given the repressive response to the protests and political opposition, it was not at all clear that such a tactic would work.

Iranian officials continued to move aggressively against those who participated in the protests. The semiofficial ILNA news agency reported that seven people arrested last Sunday would be put on trial beginning Tuesday on charges of “desecrating the values of the Islamic Revolution.”

The newspaper Etemad also reported that more allies of Mehdi Karroubi, the cleric and opposition leader, have been arrested. Ali Hekmat, chief editor of the reformist newspaper Khordad, was arrested along with his daughter Mahsa Hekmat, who writes for Etemad. Mohammad-Reza Zahedi, editor of the reformist newspaper Arya, has also been arrested, as has Bahareh Hedayat, a top member of a reformist student organization.

But as officials have seen time and again since June, the arrests and threats have failed to bring about obedience. In Tehran, students from the Amirkabir University of Technology announced that they would not take part in classes or exams until the release of four classmates detained during street protests last Sunday.

“I expect the regime to try to further intimidate the people,” said Abbas Milani, a sharp critic of the government of Iran who is director of Iranian studies at Stanford University. “If the past is any measure, they will also try to divert attention by creating another international crisis — a new radical gesture of confrontation or even conciliation.”

    Iran Gives West One-Month ‘Ultimatum’ to Accept Nuclear Counterproposal, NYT, 3.1.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/03/world/middleeast/03tehran.html

Britain and U.S. to Finance Police Unit in Yemen

January 2, 2010
Filed at 11:19 p.m. ET
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

LONDON (AP) -- The British government said Sunday that Prime Minister Gordon Brown and U.S. President Barack Obama had agreed to fund a counterterrorism police unit in Yemen to tackle the rising terrorist threat from the country.

Brown's Downing Street Office said the United Kingdom and the United States had also agreed to increase support for Yemen's coast guard operation. Pirates operating in the waters between Somalia and Yemen have seized four ships in the last week.

Downing Street said Brown and Obama will push the U.N. Security Council to create a larger peacekeeping force for Somalia.

The British government unveiled its plans in the wake of the thwarted Christmas Day bombing of a passenger plane bound for Detroit.

Brown called last week for a high-level international meeting later this month to devise ways to counter radicalization in Yemen. He said an international approach is needed to combat the increasing influence of al-Qaida in Yemen. The terrorist group has claimed responsibility for the failed attack.

Downing Street said the government of Yemen had been consulted over the decision to boost the country's coast guard and police operations.

In Washington, a senior administration official said he's unaware of any new joint effort that is ready to be announced. The official, speaking on the condition of anonymity in order to discuss sensitive matters, said American and British forces currently provide the Yemeni police counterterrorism assistance.

The White House said Washington stands ready to work with allies to fight extremism. The official welcomed Brown's move earlier to lead an international conference on Jan. 28 to devise ways to counter radicalization in the country, the poorest in the Arab world.

The official also was unable to confirm any plans to push for a larger U.N. peacekeeping force for Somalia.

----------

Associated Press writer Philip Elliott in Honolulu

contributed to this report.

    Britain and U.S. to Finance Police Unit in Yemen; NYT, 2.1.2010,
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2010/01/02/world/AP-EU-Britain-Yemen.html

North Korea Calls for Better U.S. Ties

January 2, 2010
The New York Times
By CHOE SANG-HUN

SEOUL, South Korea — North Korea called on Friday for an end to “the hostile relationship” with the United States, issuing a New Year’s message that highlighted the reclusive country’s attempt to readjust the focus of six-party nuclear disarmament talks.

In an editorial carried by its major state media outlets, North Korea said that its consistent stand was “to establish a lasting peace system on the Korean Peninsula and make it nuclear-free through dialogue and negotiations.” The editorial added that “the fundamental task for ensuring peace and stability” was “to put an end to the hostile relationship” with the United States.

The sequence of easing tension with Washington, establishing a peace regime and then denuclearizing the Korean Peninsula has been shaping up as the North’s policy approach before it re-engages in talks about giving up its nuclear weapons, according to officials and analysts in Seoul.

The North’s new emphasis on that policy sequence proved to be a stumbling block when President Obama’s special envoy on North Korea policy, Stephen W. Bosworth, visited the North’s capital, Pyongyang, last month to try to persuade North Korea to return to the six-nation talks about its nuclear program.

The six-party format began in 2003, and the talks focused mainly on dismantling North Korea’s nuclear weapons facilities. The participants are the two Koreas, the United States, China, Russia and Japan. Washington and its allies have provided North Korea with food aid and other assistance while offering incentives such as security guarantees, normalized ties and a peace treaty.

The talks dragged on for years, but the North dismantled only some of its nuclear facilities. A missile test by North Korea in April 2009 led to a swift United Nations condemnation, whereupon the North quit the six-party talks, saying they were “useless.” The next month, North Korea conducted its second nuclear test, which led to a United Nations Security Council resolution and a further tightening of sanctions.

North Korea now insists on separate, bilateral talks with the United States as a way to defuse the hostile relations. During Mr. Bosworth’s visit, North Korea acknowledged a possible role for the six-nation talks but did not say when it would resume them.

The 1950-53 Korean War ended in a truce, not a formal peace treaty, leaving the peninsula technically in a state of war. North Korea says it has built nuclear weapons as a deterrent to an American invasion, although Washington has said it has no intention to attack.

Although they recognized the need for a permanent peace treaty to replace the truce, officials in Washington and Seoul fear that the North’s demand for peace talks may be a ploy to distract the focus on ending North Korea’s nuclear weapons programs. After having accumulated enough plutonium for several bombs, North Korea declared last year that it had embarked on an uranium-enrichment program that would give it a second route to atomic weapons.

If peace talks begin, North Korea will likely demand normalized ties, significant food and energy aid and even the pullout of American troops from South Korea as a precondition for a nuclear-free Korean peninsula, according to analysts in Seoul.

North Korea traditionally marks New Year’s Day with a joint editorial by the country’s three major newspapers representing its ruling party, the military and the youth militia. Politicians, scholars and diplomats from the outside world scrutinize the lengthy statement for clues to the regime’s policies for the coming year.

This year’s editorial softened the typically bellicose attacks against Washington and President Lee Myung-bak of South Korea.

“Unshakable is our stand that we will improve the North-South relations and open the way for national reunification,” it said, calling on Mr. Lee to honor his predecessors’ agreements to send aid to North Korea.

Mr. Lee, a conservative, maintains that no significant aid is possible until he sees progress in the ending of North Korea’s nuclear ambitions.

The impoverished North, apparently staggered by the United Nations sanctions that were tightened in May, also stressed the need to improve the people’s standard of living by accelerating the development of light industry while calling for efforts to boost foreign trade.

“The agricultural sector,” it added, “should sharply increase the grain output.”

    North Korea Calls for Better U.S. Ties, NYT, 2.1.2010,
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/02/world/asia/02korea.html