The New Yorker

June 4, 2007

Letter from Washington: Party Unfaithful

The West Wing of the White House tends to have a funereal stillness, even in the best of times, which these are not. The President's aides walk the narrow corridors with pensive expressions and vigilantly modulated voices. By contrast, Karl Rove's office has an almost party atmosphere. Rove, the President's chief political adviser-the "architect," Bush has called him, of his 2004 victory over John Kerry-has been a man of constant troubles: Valerie Plame troubles, U.S. Attorney-firing troubles, and, most of all, collapse-of-the-Republican Party troubles. Yet his voice is suffused with bonhomie, his jokes are bad and frequent, his enthusiasm is communicable; he resembles an oversized leprechaun, although one with unconcealed resentments and a receding hairline.
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May 21, 2007

Letter from Washington: Woodward vs. Tenet

The former director of Central Intelligence George Tenet, who for the past two weeks has been the most comprehensively excoriated man in America, keeps an office at Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service. It is cramped and badly ventilated. He has had two offices at the school, where his title is distinguished professor in the practice of diplomacy. Tenet asked to be moved from the first after discovering that Douglas J. Feith, the former Under-Secretary of Defense for policy, who was one of the principal architects of the Iraq war, kept an office nearby. Feith, a neoconservative whose title at Georgetown is visiting professor and distinguished practitioner in national-security policy, has been a nemesis of Tenet's, and though Feith told me that he has tried to be friendly to Tenet-"I'm civil with everybody"-Tenet has shown no interest in reciprocating.
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April 23, 2007

The Talk of the Town: Pot Vs. Kettle Dept.

The new movie "The Hoax" concerns the activities of the literary grifter Clifford Irving, who perpetrated the most intrepid publishing fraud of the modern era when, in the early nineteen-seventies, he sold McGraw-Hill the "autobiography" of Howard Hughes, which he wrote without the assistance or the knowledge of Hughes. In the film, which was directed by Lasse Hallström, Richard Gere perpetrates a New York Jewish accent while portraying Irving as a comprehensively dislikable man whose motives were base, venal, and, worst of all-for Irving, at least-quotidian.
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March 19, 2007

The Talk of the Town: Wind on Capitol Hill

Hunan Dynasty, a few blocks from the Capitol, is not generally considered to be one of Washington's better Chinese restaurants, which is saying something, because, Chinese-food-wise, Washington is not New York, or, for that matter, Philadelphia. Even its devotees-for example, New York's senior senator, Charles Schumer-admit that the restaurant "always has the faint smell of disinfectant." Nor does Hunan Dynasty draw a notably powerful crowd. One night last week, as Schumer sat down for dinner, the only other diners were a group of out-of-town electric-company executives and Representative Dennis Kucinich, of Ohio, who is running for the Democratic Presidential nomination. "I believe I'm going to win New Hampshire," he said, adding, "The tofu here is very good."
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January 15, 2007

Letter from Washington: The Starting Gate

Evan Bayh was uncharacteristically dispirited when I met him in the Russell Senate Office Building on a quiet Wednesday before Christmas. For Bayh, who is fifty-one and was first elected to the Senate from Indiana in 1998, December will be recalled as a low moment in an otherwise high-achieving life. Less than two weeks earlier, he had the bad luck to visit New Hampshire on the same weekend that his junior colleague in the Senate Barack Obama, from Illinois, was also visiting. Bayh spoke to a hundred and fifty supporters in a Manchester restaurant; Obama swept through the state trailed by a hundred and fifty reporters. "We originally scheduled the Rolling Stones for this party," the governor, John Lynch, told fifteen hundred people who paid twenty-five dollars apiece to see Obama in a Manchester ballroom. "But we cancelled them when we realized Senator Obama would sell more tickets."
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November 20, 2006

Inner Office: The End of the Affair

Two months ago, Kenneth Adelman, the former director of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, received a call from the Pentagon: Donald Rumsfeld would like to see him as soon as possible. Adelman said he knew then that this meeting might be their last.
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September 11, 2006

Letter from Gaza: The Forgotten War

Four skittish and dishevelled members of a Hamas rocket team threaded their way down a pitted alley in Beit Hanoun, a destitute town in northernmost Gaza. They stayed close to the walls, searching the sky for the pilotless, missile-firing drones of the Israeli Air Force. It was late July, the fourth week of Israel's war against Hamas in Gaza, a conflict eclipsed by Israel's other war, against Hezbollah. The men came near the doorway of the vacant building in which I was hiding. A friend, a Palestinian who had arranged this meeting, stepped into the alley and waved them over. It was 3 A.M.
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May 29, 2006

Letter From Washington: Central Casting

An enduring predicament of the Democratic Party was revealed one day in August, 2004, when John Kerry, the Democratic nominee for President, and John Edwards, the nominee for Vice-President, visited a soybean-and-cattle farm outside Smithville, Missouri. The announced purpose was to speak about alternative energy sources (soybeans are an important source of biodiesel), but the goal was to express solidarity with rural white voters, who have been abandoning the Democratic Party in disquieting numbers. About a hundred and twenty-five people, mostly farmers, sat on hay bales in an orchard near the farmhouse. Claire McCaskill, the Missouri state auditor, was there, too; she was running for governor and was eager to appraise the two Senators, whose names would be on the ballot with hers.
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May 8, 2006

The Talk of the Town: Sprucing Up Nixon

The nine-acre campus of the Richard Nixon Library and Birthplace, in Yorba Linda, California, features the thirty-seventh President's boyhood home; his burial site; a gift shop that sells, for $9.95, the "Nixon surf logo beanie"; and a sleek museum that highlights the good and the bad, but mostly the good, of Nixon's sui-generis Presidency.

What is missing from the Nixon Library and Birthplace is an actual library.
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February 13, 2006

Letter From Washington: The Believer

The Judson Welliver Society is a bipartisan, sporadically serious, and generally impious club of ex-White House speechwriters. Its founder and president-for-life is the former Times columnist William Safire, who once wrote speeches for Spiro Agnew and Richard Nixon. Welliver, a former newspaperman, was the first "literary clerk" ever to be placed on the White House payroll; he wrote speeches for the subcompetent Warren G. Harding and the ineloquent Calvin Coolidge. The members of the society that carries his nearly forgotten name get together every year or so to remind one another of the maddening yet elating experience of watching the most powerful men on earth rewrite their otherwise perfect sentences.
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October 31, 2005

Letter From Washington: Breaking Ranks

At eight o'clock on the morning of August 2, 1990, President George H. W. Bush assembled his National Security Council in the Cabinet Room of the White House. Thirteen hours earlier, Saddam Hussein had sent his Army into Kuwait, and the Administration was searching for a response. Brent Scowcroft, the President's national-security adviser, has an unhappy memory of that first meeting. The tone, he says, was defeatist: "Much of the conversation in those early moments concerned the stability of the oil market. There was an air of resignation about the invasion."
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July 4, 2005

Letter From Washington: Real Insiders

Several years ago, I had dinner at Galileo, a Washington restaurant, with Steven Rosen, who was then the director of foreign-policy issues at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. The group, which is better known by its acronym, aipac, lobbies for Israel's financial and physical security. Like many lobbyists, Rosen cultivated reporters, hoping to influence their writing while keeping his name out of print. He is a voluble man, and liked to demonstrate his erudition and dispense aphorisms. One that he often repeated could serve as the credo of K Street, the Rodeo Drive of Washington's influence industry: "A lobby is like a night flower: it thrives in the dark and dies in the sun."

Lobbyists tend to believe that legislators are susceptible to persuasion in ways that executive-branch bureaucrats are not, and before Rosen came to aipac, in 1982 (he had been at the rand Corporation, the defense-oriented think tank), the group focussed mainly on Congress. But Rosen arrived brandishing a new idea: that the organization could influence the outcome of policy disputes within the executive branch-in particular, the Pentagon, the State Department, and the National Security Council.
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May 9, 2005

Letter From Washington: A Little Learning

Douglas J. Feith, who is the Under-Secretary of Defense for Policy, lives in one of the better Maryland suburbs, on a street of large and unhandsome Colonial homes. The interior of Feith's house has space and light, but it is furnished in a mostly expedient manner; Feith and his wife, Tatiana, have four children-ages eight to twenty-one-and the house feels very much theirs.

The exception is Feith's library. It is apparent that he has devoted considerable care and money to its design and, in particular, to its collection, which numbers at least five thousand volumes. The floors and shelves are dark oak, and the walls are covered in hunter-green wallpaper. The library is not in the style of the high-station Washington bureaucrat who wants to telegraph his indispensability; there are few photographs of Feith in the company of potentates and prime ministers and presidents. Instead, Feith has filled the room with images of figures who have earned his admiration. Busts of Washington and Lincoln sit on the shelves; Churchill scowls in the direction of Feith's desk. A black-and-white portrait of Theodore Herzl, the founder of Zionism, hangs over a green leather couch. In his collection, history has displaced nearly every other subject; fiction-his favorite is Nabokov-has been exiled to the basement. The library is weighted disproportionately to the history of the British Empire, and Feith has spent many hours schooling himself in the schemes and follies of the British on the playing fields of the Middle East.
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March 21, 2005

Letter From Washington: The Unbranding

Joseph Biden, the senior senator from Delaware, is the Democratic Party's main spokesman on international affairs; he is also a man who, on occasion, seems not to know, when sentences leave his mouth, where they are going or what they are meant to convey. Sometimes, when he thinks that he may shock or amuse his listener, he begins by stating, "I'm going to get in trouble if I say this," or, "This is a really outrageous thing to say, but . . . " And so when I asked Biden, as the ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and one of John Kerry's chief advisers on foreign policy during last year's Presidential campaign, what advice he gave Kerry on how to convince voters that he was tough, Biden laughed and said, "I wish I could tell you. I wish I could tell you." Then he told me.

At sixty-two, Biden has a cheerful vanity and an exuberant restlessness that make him seem far younger.
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January 17, 2005

The Talk of the Town: Visiting Preacher Killen

A sign on the narrow road that leads to Edgar Ray Killen's house, in the low hills southeast of Philadelphia, Mississippi, reads "If You Don't Believe in God, the Hellfire Awaits You." On the morning that I visited him, a few years ago, Killen, a reputed Ku Klux Klansman, was waiting for me, a shotgun in his sunburned arms. "I told you I ain't talking with you," he said, superfluously. Killen is known around Philadelphia as Preacher. He used to preside over a small church nearby, where he taught the inerrancy of the Bible and the superiority of the Caucasian race, but that day he was apparently caring for his weapons. "My gun's clean and ready," he said.

We had spoken by telephone earlier, and I had already come to his house once that day, but his dogs, their teeth bared, had surrounded my car. I returned an hour later with a bag of hamburgers from McDonald's.
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May 31, 2004

A Reporter At Large: Among The Settlers

THE ZEALOTS

On a late winter's day, a slight, blue-eyed boy rode a bicycle down an empty street in the militant Jewish ghetto of Hebron, in the West Bank. Clipped to the boy's hair was a green kipa, crocheted and oversized in the style of the settlers. A damp wind was blowing, and a bank of clouds hovered over the city, but the boy was jacketless. Scattered piles of rubble and garbage, flecked with broken glass, lined the road.

The buildings along what the Jews call King David Street and the Arabs call Martyrdom Street are tightly packed and decaying.
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April 14, 2003

Letter From Northern Iraq: Wartime Friendships

The American invasion of Iraq is a happy occasion for the country's five million Kurds, mainly because it foreshadows the removal of Saddam Hussein, who committed acts of genocide against them. But it is also welcomed because it has been accompanied by an invasion of foreign journalists-a rare sight in northern Iraq for more than a decade. For Kurdish leaders, the arrival of the world's press means that they will finally receive attention in proportion to their numbers. It has annoyed the Kurds that the dispute between the Palestinians and the Israelis, a conflict that encompasses roughly eleven million people, is a preoccupation of the media, while the Kurds, who number about twenty-five million (most Kurds live in Turkey and Iran), receive only occasional notice, usually when they are being starved or gassed. Now the Kurds have stumbled on their main chance, and are pleased to be able to share with the world their wish for equality within a democratic Iraq.
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April 7, 2003

Letter From Northern Iraq: Waiting At The Front

Last week, on a freezing night in a blacked-out bunker outside Halabja, a city in the mountains of northeastern Iraq, the officers of a Kurdish guerrilla unit drank tea and laid out in vivid detail what they would do to President Bush if he fell into their hands. "I would kiss him one thousand times," the company commander, Sheikh Fattah, said. "I would carry him on my shoulders and shout songs to him," another officer, Farouk Khaled, added. "I would sacrifice one thousand sheep and two thousand chickens for him," a third officer, Mam Siamand, said.

These salutes to Bush-very much unlike the sort of thing that is said about the President elsewhere in Iraq and in the rest of the world-went on for some time. The guerrillas fall under the command of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, or P.U.K., the enthusiastically pro-American party that controls most of the eastern sector of Kurdish Iraq, or Kurdistan. They are known as peshmerga, or "those who face death," and they were happy yet anxious; the night before, American cruise missiles had struck the positions of the two Islamist groups who control the territory a half mile to the east. It was midnight, and I was told by peshmerga leaders that a second round of missile attacks would begin in about three and a half hours.
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February 10, 2003

A Reporter At Large: The Unknown

In April of 1998, President Clinton sent his United Nations Ambassador, Bill Richardson, to South Asia. Richardson's stops included New Delhi, Islamabad, and, most unusually, Kabul, where he held the first (and, as it turned out, the last) Cabinet-level negotiations between the United States and the Taliban leaders of Afghanistan. Richardson, who is now the governor of New Mexico, is an effective diplomat. (He returned to international diplomacy briefly last month, when he met with two North Korean envoys in Santa Fe.) He is irreverent, and he is not timid, and his trip might have been a diplomatic success if it had not been an intelligence failure.

During the stop in New Delhi, Richardson met with officials of the new Hindu-nationalist government of the Bharatiya Janata Party. In one encounter, Richardson asked the defense minister, George Fernandes, if his country planned to explode any of its nuclear weapons. The Indians had not tested their bomb since 1974, but in early 1998 the newspapers in New Delhi-and in Islamabad, the Pakistani capital-were filled with speculation about the new government's intentions. The B.J.P. had stated in its election platform that it would "not be dictated to by anybody in matters of security and in the exercise of the nuclear option."
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October 28, 2002

A Reporter At Large: In The Party Of God (Part II)

The patrol boat, a Boston whaler, was worn at its edges, and it was pocked with bullet holes along its starboard side. It had a four-man crew, officers of the Brazilian Federal Police. They carried AK-47s and side arms, and they wore jeans, sunglasses, and bulletproof vests, which made them sweat. The patrol chief steered the boat into the middle of the Parana River-half a mile wide, muddy, and sluggish. He opened up the boat's two Suzuki engines, and as we moved north the outskirts of the Brazilian city of Foz do Iguacu came into view on the right; on the opposite side was the Paraguayan jungle, where smoke from cooking fires rose above the tree line. The chief, who was worried about snipers, kept the boat moving fast. He pointed to a series of chutes, dug out from the banks on the Paraguayan side, down which drug smugglers move bales of marijuana to the river.

A decaying iron bridge, the International Friendship Bridge, connects Foz do Iguacu to its Paraguayan sister city, Ciudad del Este, the City of the East. Ciudad del Este is at the heart of the zone known as the Triple Frontier, the point where Paraguay, Brazil, and Argentina meet, which has served for nearly thirty years as a hospitable base of operations for smugglers, counterfeiters, and tax dodgers. The Triple Frontier has earned its reputation as one of the most lawless places in the world. Now, it is believed, the Frontier is also the center of Middle Eastern terrorism in South America.
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October 14, 2002

A Reporter At Large: In The Party Of God (Part I)

I--The Meeting

The village of Ras al-Ein, which is situated in the Bekaa Valley of Lebanon, falls under the overlapping control of the Syrian Army, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, and the Shiite terrorist group Hezbollah, or Party of God. The village is seedy and brown, and is decorated with posters of martyrs and potentates-Ayatollah Khomeini is especially popular-and with billboards that celebrate bloodshed and sacrifice.

I visited Ras al-Ein this summer to interview the leader of a Hezbollah faction, a man named Hussayn al-Mussawi, who, twenty years ago, was involved in kidnapping Americans. Many of those kidnapped were held in Ras al-Ein; they were kept blindfolded, and chained to beds and radiators. It is thought that Ras al-Ein is where William Buckley, the Beirut station chief of the Central Intelligence Agency, was held for a time before he was killed by Hezbollah, in 1985.
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March 25, 2002

A Reporter at Large: The Great Terror

In the late morning of March 16, 1988, an Iraqi Air Force helicopter appeared over the city of Halabja, which is about fifteen miles from the border with Iran. The Iran-Iraq War was then in its eighth year, and Halabja was near the front lines. At the time, the city was home to roughly eighty thousand Kurds, who were well accustomed to the proximity of violence to ordinary life. Like most of Iraqi Kurdistan, Halabja was in perpetual revolt against the regime of Saddam Hussein, and its inhabitants were supporters of the peshmerga, the Kurdish fighters whose name means "those who face death."

A young woman named Nasreen Abdel Qadir Muhammad was outside her family's house, preparing food, when she saw the helicopter. The Iranians and the peshmerga had just attacked Iraqi military outposts around Halabja, forcing Saddam's soldiers to retreat. Iranian Revolutionary Guards then infiltrated the city, and the residents assumed that an Iraqi counterattack was imminent. Nasreen and her family expected to spend yet another day in their cellar, which was crude and dark but solid enough to withstand artillery shelling, and even napalm.
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October 8, 2001

Letter From Cairo: Behind Mubarak

The Mohandessin section of Cairo is a fashionable district on the west bank of the Nile that contains a number of embassies, boutiques, and American fast-food restaurants. It also houses the Mustafa Mahmoud Mosque, which is named after a physician and Islamic television personality who founded it, twenty years ago. On Friday, September 21st, I arrived at the mosque just as the first worshippers were making their way there, and the egalitarianism that is one of the great virtues of the Muslim prayer service was evident: they were dark-skinned and light, rich and poor; one man drove up in a blue Jaguar; others, wearing grease-stained galabiyas and crude sandals, came on foot, or by donkey cart. (Women, as is customary, prayed apart, in another, smaller hall.) I had arranged to meet the mosque's imam, Sheikh Nasser Abdelrazi. A slight, anxious man, he preemptively offered up the observation that "Muslims are gentle and Islam is peace."

Many in Cairo are on the defensive in the wake of the terror attacks on New York and the Pentagon. Greater Cairo, a city of sixteen million people, is the intellectual capital of the Arab world-home to its moviemakers, many of its great writers, and some of its most respected interpreters of Islam. Muslim leaders here are sensitive to the image of their faith-especially now, because Egyptians are among those allegedly involved in the attacks. Muhammad Atta, who is believed to have flown one of the hijacked planes into the World Trade Center, is the son of a middle-class Cairo lawyer. Ayman al-Zawahiri, a former leader of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, a fundamentalist group that sought to turn Egypt into an Islamic state, is said to be second-in-command to Osama bin Laden, the Saudi exile who is suspected of directing the attacks.
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July 9, 2001

Letter From Gaza: The Martyr Strategy

One day last month, I visited the terrorist Abdullah Shami at his home in the Shejaiya neighborhood of Gaza City. Shejaiya is said to be a stronghold of Islamic Jihad, a group that conducts suicide attacks against Israeli targets, and Shami is the group's leader in Gaza. He lives on the third floor of a concrete-and-plaster apartment house. Before I went upstairs, I met three of his sons in the sand-covered alleyway that leads to the building. The sun was boiling hot, and the building provided shade for the boys and their friends. They were playing a game called shuhada, which means martyrs. The youngest son, Ahmed, who is three, played the shaheed, the martyr, and charged a make-believe Jewish bunker. The other boys made the sound of rifles firing, and Ahmed dropped to the ground and pretended to be dead. His brothers Mahmoud, who is five, and Muhammad, who is six, then carried his limp body down the alleyway, and performed a mock funeral. The game ended when Ahmed rose from his imaginary grave, shouted "Allahu Akbar!" and giggled.

An Islamic Jihad official accompanied me to Shami's sitting room, which was furnished with huge red-and-gold couches. Framed photographs of the Dome of the Rock hung on the walls. Shami, a genial and open-faced man of forty-five, greeted me warmly. He is tall, and has smooth skin and a carefully trimmed beard. He was dressed in a white djellabah and a gray cape with a gold fringe.
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January 29, 2001

A Reporter at Large: Arafat's Gift

I--The Bulldozer

Sycamore Farm, which is said to be the largest private farm in Israel, comprises a thousand acres of citrus groves and grazing land near the desert town of Sederot. It is the home of Ariel (Arik) Sharon, the retired major general and, if the polls are to be trusted, Israel's next Prime Minister. One afternoon, he took me on a tour. We stepped out of the main house, a spare, white stucco building, and got into a dirt-smeared four-by-four. Sharon drove. A second truck followed, filled with plainclothesmen from the Shabak, Israel's internal security service, who carried Uzis. Sharon is Israel's most polarizing public figure; he goes nowhere unprotected, not even to the sheep pens downwind from his house.
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