WASHINGTON - On Dec. 1, Knight Ridder's Washington bureau sent a story analyzing the record of Judge Samuel Alito to our 32 daily newspapers and to the more than 300 papers that subscribe to the Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service. Written by Stephen Henderson, Knight Ridder's Supreme Court correspondent, and Howard Mintz of the San Jose Mercury News, the story began:

``During his 15 years on the federal bench, Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito has worked quietly but resolutely to weave a conservative legal agenda into the fabric of the nation's laws.''

Assisted by Washington bureau researcher Tish Wells, Henderson and Mintz spent nearly a month reading all of Alito's 311 published opinions, which are available in a commercial database or in the archives of the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia, where Alito has sat for 15 years.

Henderson and Mintz cataloged the cases by category -- employment discrimination, criminal justice, immigration and so on -- and analyzed each one with help from attorneys who participated on both sides of the cases and experts in those fields of law. They interviewed legal scholars and other judges, many of them admirers of Alito.

In the article, which the Mercury News ran on Dec. 2, they concluded that, ``although Alito's opinions are rarely written with obvious ideology, he's seldom sided with a criminal defendant, a foreign national facing deportation, an employee alleging discrimination or consumers suing big business.''

You might find this neither surprising nor controversial. Alito, after all, was nominated by a president who said that his ideal Supreme Court justices were Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, the high court's most reliably conservative members.

You'd be wrong.

Within days, the Senate Republican Conference circulated a lengthy memo headlined, ``Knight Ridder misrepresents Judge Alito's 15-year record.'' Republican Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, a leader in the Alito confirmation process, sent a letter to the editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer, a Knight Ridder paper, denouncing the story as ``neither objective nor accurate.'' The Inquirer published it on Dec. 7.

Responses distributed

The White House offered an opinion piece by Jeffrey N. Wasserstein, a former Alito law clerk who identified himself as a Democrat and said his former boss ``is capable of setting aside any personal biases he may have when he judges.'' Knight Ridder/Tribune distributed it to all of our papers and its subscribers on Dec. 11.

A conservative columnist, whose glowing tribute to Alito is now featured in television advertisements supporting the nominee, declared the Knight Ridder story ``illiterate.''

We responded to some of the criticism at the time. For example, some critics cited Alito's votes in cases in which he voted without explanation with other judges for the plaintiffs in employment discrimination cases or with criminal defendants.

Knight Ridder's story analyzed only Alito's published opinions because what a judge writes from the bench is the best window into his or her legal reasoning. A judge's unexplained votes are often on procedural grounds that have nothing to do with legal philosophy. And the Knight Ridder story didn't say that Alito never sided with plaintiffs who alleged employment discrimination, criminal defendants or consumers suing businesses. It reported accurately that he seldom did, and that the pattern of his written opinions was unmistakable.

The controversy erupted again this week at Alito's confirmation hearings. After Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., referred to the Knight Ridder story, Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., introduced a critique of the story by the Republican staff of the Judiciary Committee into the record of the hearings. Kyl said the story ``has, to my understanding, been rather completely discredited.'' The first paragraph of the Republican critique, however, said the story was based on ``dozens'' of Alito's opinions, creating the false impression that Henderson and Mintz didn't examine the judge's entire body of published work.

The Republican National Committee circulated a blistering personal attack on Henderson to some reporters, taking quotes out of context in an attempt to portray him as biased.

Subtle innuendo

The RNC said Henderson ``admitted he was previously an editorial writer,'' as though that very public part of a distinguished reporter's career was a secret that he'd been trying to hide. The RNC statement then linked Henderson to editorials he didn't write.

This hysteria over a carefully researched article that documents the obvious -- that Samuel Alito is a judicial conservative -- is the latest example of a disturbing trend of attacking the messenger instead of debating difficult issues.

Fact-based reporting is the lifeblood of a democracy. It gives people shared information on which to make political choices. But fact-based reporting is under more relentless assault than at any time in my more than 40 years in Washington.

I invite you to reach your own conclusion about Knight Ridder's Alito story. You can read it -- and some of the Republican critiques -- on our Web site, www.krwashington.com, by clicking on ``Alito: Knight Ridder Washington's coverage'' on the right side of the page.

``Bring 'em on.''

-- President Bush on Iraqi insurgents, summer 2003

The insurgency is ``in its last throes.''

-- Vice President Dick Cheney, summer 2005

``There are only two options before our country: victory or defeat.''

-- President Bush, Christmas 2005

The administration's rhetorical devolution speaks for itself. Yet, with some luck and with a more open decision-making process in the White House, greater political courage on the part of Democratic leaders and even some encouragement from authentic Iraqi leaders, the U.S. war in Iraq could (and should) come to an end within a year.

``Victory or defeat'' is, in fact, a false strategic choice. In using this formulation, the president would have the American people believe that their only options are either ``hang in and win'' or ``quit and lose.'' But the real, practical choice is this: ``persist but not win'' or ``desist but not lose.''

Bush's notion of victory unlikely

Victory, as defined by the administration and its supporters -- i.e., a stable and secular democracy in a unified Iraqi state, with the insurgency crushed by the American military assisted by a disciplined, U.S.-trained Iraqi national army -- is unlikely. The U.S. force required to achieve it would have to be significantly larger than the present one, and the Iraqi support for a U.S.-led counterinsurgency would have to be more motivated. The current U.S. forces (soon to be reduced) are not large enough to crush the anti-American insurgency or stop the sectarian Sunni-Shiite strife. Both problems continue to percolate under an inconclusive but increasingly hated foreign occupation.

Moreover, neither the Shiites nor the Kurds are likely to subordinate their specific interests to a unified Iraq with a genuine, single national army. As the haggling over the new government has already shown, the two dominant forces in Iraq -- the religious Shiite alliance and the separatist Kurds -- share an interest in preventing restoration of Sunni domination, with each determined to retain a separate military capacity for asserting its own specific interests, largely at the cost of the Sunnis.

A truly national army in that context is a delusion. Continuing doggedly to seek ``a victory'' in that fashion dooms America to rising costs in blood and money, not to mention the intensifying Muslim hostility and massive erosion of America's international legitimacy, credibility and moral reputation.

The administration's definition of ``defeat'' is similarly misleading. Official and unofficial representatives often speak in terms that recall the apocalyptic predictions made earlier regarding the consequences of American failure to win in Vietnam: dominoes falling, the region exploding and U.S. power discredited. An added touch is the notion that the Iraqi insurgents will then navigate the Atlantic and wage terrorism on the American homeland.

The real choice that needs to be faced is between:

• An acceptance of the complex post-Saddam Iraqi realities through a relatively prompt military disengagement -- which would include a period of transitional and initially even intensified political strife as the dust settled and as authentic Iraqi majorities fashioned their own political arrangements.

• An inconclusive but prolonged military occupation lasting for years while an elusive goal is pursued.

It is doubtful, to say the least, that America's domestic political support for such a futile effort could long be sustained by slogans about Iraq's being ``the central front in the global war on terrorism.'' In contrast, a military disengagement by the end of 2006, derived from a more realistic definition of an adequate outcome, could ensure that desisting is not tantamount to losing.

In an Iraq dominated by the Shiites and the Kurds -- who together account for close to 75 percent of the population -- the two peoples would have a common interest in Iraq's independence as a state. The Kurds, with their autonomy already amounting in effect to quasi-sovereignty, would otherwise be threatened by the Turks. And the Iraqi Shiites are first of all Arabs; they have no desire to be Iran's satellites.

Some Sunnis, once they were aware that the U.S. occupation was drawing to a close and that soon they would be facing an overwhelming Shiite-Kurdish coalition, would be more inclined to accommodate the new political realities, especially when deprived of the rallying cry of resistance to a foreign occupier.

Bush needs credible advice

The requisite first step is for the president to break out of his political cocoon. His policy-making and his speeches are the products of the true believers around him who are largely responsible for the mess in Iraq. They have a special stake in their definition of victory, and they reinforce his convictions instead of refining his judgments.

The president badly needs to widen his circle of advisers. Why not consult some esteemed Republicans and Democrats not seeking public office -- say, Warren Rudman or Colin Powell or Lee Hamilton or George Mitchell -- regarding the definition of an attainable yet tolerable outcome in Iraq?

Finally, Democratic leaders should stop equivocating while carping. Those who want to lead in 2008 are particularly unwilling to state clearly that ending the war soon is both desirable and feasible. They fear being labeled as unpatriotic. Yet defining a practical alternative would provide a politically effective rebuttal to those who mindlessly seek an unattainable ``victory.'' America needs a real choice regarding its tragic misadventure in Iraq.

Congressional Republicans made a self-satisfied gesture of fiscal constraint before heading home to hornswoggle voters into believing they're really worried about the federal deficit.

The $40 billion in spending cuts, spread over five years, was barely a pinprick -- about a third of 1 percent of the federal budget. This year's budget deficit alone is $319 billion. The spending cuts will soon be swamped by $56 billion in extended tax cuts that Congress is poised to pass early next year, along with $27 billion in additional tax write-offs for the wealthy that took effect Jan. 1.

In fact, $40 billion in cuts would be barely worth mentioning were it not so irresponsible. Bearing the brunt will be the federal college loan program, which Congress instead should be increasing in light of soaring higher education costs and the fact that American industry is clamoring for a better educated workforce.

Because of the cuts, students will be piling up several thousand dollars of additional debt and parents will be paying higher interest on loans -- up to 8.5 percent. Lenders will no longer be able to subsidize new loans from the money they make. And, despite promises to raise Pell Grants -- the foundation of federal student aid -- by $1,000 to keep up with rising costs, the grants will remain capped at $4,000. (The 650,000 students attending California's public colleges at least got some good news last week, with the announcement that Gov. Schwarzenegger's budget will rescind the increase in student fees -- $492 for UC schools, $204 for CSU campuses -- that were to go into effect next year.)

The $22 billion in cuts and restructuring will be partially offset by $3.75 billion in new grants for students studying foreign languages, math and science, plus $2 billion to forgive loans of special-education teachers and students who enlist in the military after college. But the net $13 billion cut marks the biggest hit in the history of the program.

The House version passed narrowly with no Democratic support. It took Vice President Cheney, rushing back from the Mideast, to break a 50-50 tie vote in the Senate.

Describing the vote as the only chance this year to ``actually do something about deficit spending,'' Senate Budget Committee chair Judd Gregg of New Hampshire told senators, ``This is our responsibility to our children.''

Actually, Congress and the Bush administration have socked it to them. They have piled on a mountain of federal debt with an unbudgeted war in Iraq and a drug program for kids' grandparents. And now they have compounded this by pinching on college aid. Some high school grads will give up altogether on pursuing a degree, to the detriment of the U.S. economy in the future.

The next generation is paying a big price for Congress' lip service to austerity.

BAGHDAD, Iraq - Muqtada al-Sadr, the firebrand Shiite Muslim cleric who just a year ago encouraged his followers to kill U.S. soldiers, has successfully transformed his ragtag followers into a political force that could significantly reshape the next parliament.

Preliminary results show Sadr supporters holding as many as 31 seats in the 275-seat parliament, a number, if it holds, that would make Sadrists the single largest group in Iraq's first democratically elected permanent parliament. The Independent Electoral Commission of Iraq will release official election results as early as next week.

Sadr's emergence as a potent political figure has prompted worries that the mercurial leader could bring a hard-line Islamist slant to Iraq's new parliament, thwarting any remaining hopes that Iraqis can form a centrist, stabilizing government.

``He is a real spoiler,'' said Judith Yaphe, a former CIA analyst and Iraq specialist at the National Defense University in Washington.

Some fear that Sadr will employ violence along with political process, keeping his Mahdi Army militia active while other supporters participate in parliament. Others hope that his supporters' rise to parliament will wean him off violence as he gains clout over the government. Some even think that he could provide a bridge to the disaffected Sunni minority, with whom he shares a strong anti-American sentiment. Many Sunnis, however, think of Shiites such as Sadr as heretics.

Sadr sent his supporters to run for parliament, but did not run himself.

``I think they will be the opposition leaders in the new parliament,'' said Ali Abdul Jaleel, a 42-year-old Shiite Muslim from Baghdad. ``They are going to make a lot of noise.''

The Sadrists' put together their winning bloc in the Dec. 15 election by joining the Shiite-dominated United Iraqi Alliance slate for the election and also running on a separate slate, the Messengers. Through the United Iraqi Alliance, they won 30 seats. The separate Messengers slate won one additional seat, according to various political parties tracking those numbers.

On the strength of those numbers, Sadrists are demanding a say in who should be prime minister and leadership positions in several ministries. They also are demanding that their militia, which fought U.S. and Iraqi forces last year, should become part of the government's security forces.

Already, they are suggesting that if they don't get what they want, they would be willing to break with the United Iraqi Alliance, which would eliminate any hope of a unified government.

``We don't have a permanent alliance. We have a permanent goal, which is to serve Iraq,'' said Salam al-Maliki, the minister of transport and a high-ranking Sadrist in the current government.

Sadr has presented himself as a voice for downtrodden Iraqi Shiites who suffered some of the worst oppression during Saddam Hussein's rule. In the Baghdad slum of Sadr City, named in honor of his father, a senior Shiite spiritual leader slain by Saddam, Sadr has a following of nearly 2.5 million people, nearly half the capital's population. In addition, he has millions of supporters in mostly Shiite southern Iraq.

Last year, he rejected the political process and encouraged his followers to take up arms against U.S. soldiers. His Mahdi Army fought against the U.S. military for control of four Iraqi cities, killing scores of soldiers. Some have accused him of encouraging his followers to assassinate those who support coalition forces.

Sadrists are now saying that they want the military and police to employ members of the Mahdi Army, pointing out that members of other militias, such as the Kurdish peshmerga and the Shiite Badr Brigade, already have joined the security forces. They said their followers need jobs to walk away from violence. Other parties in the United Iraqi Alliance slate said they support that idea.

But others say there are important differences between the Badr and peshmerga militias and the Mahdi Army. The peshmerga and Badr forces have not fought U.S. forces. The Mahdi Army is also less well organized and more volatile than those militias.

``Perhaps it will be difficult to control them,'' said Mahmoud al-Mashadani, a member of the Iraqi Accord, a top Sunni slate.

Although Sadr did not support the process in January, when Iraqis elected a temporary National Assembly, Sadrists won 17 seats and lead two ministries, Transport and Health.

This year, Sadrist candidates promised to improve Iraq's infrastructure, and many Sadrists said they are vying to lead ministries that provide services to keep that campaign promise. Because of their strong showing, they could lead up to six ministries.

Despite fears of radicalism and instability, Sadrists could be a force for unity. They appeal to Sunni Muslims because, like them, they oppose U.S. forces. Both support a more explicitly Islamic state, although their interpretations of Islam are very different and there is a long history of hostility between them.

Those shared interests could allow Sadrists to build a bridge between Sunnis and other Shiites in the parliament.

``They are the original Iraqi Arab movement. They are against the American presence so they can open the door for cooperation with the Sunnis more than any other faction,'' said Mashadani.

Hassan Bazzaz, a professor of political science and international affairs at Baghdad University, said Sadr cannot straddle the line between supporting the militia and accepting the U.S.-backed political process much longer.

``I think he will reach a point when he will have to choose his position on all these things,'' Bazzaz said. ``He will have to come up with his own way.''

If there was a valid reason for President Bush to authorize government spying on American citizens without court oversight, the administration has yet to articulate it. The claim that it was necessary to save American lives -- a favorite of Bush to justify all sorts of dubious practices -- just won't cut it.

Three decades ago, Congress passed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, which created a special secret court that acts very quickly when the government requests a wiretap in the name of national security. If very quickly is not quick enough -- say, when the government suspects a telephone conversation may reveal an imminent terrorist plot -- the government can initiate a wiretap and seek later approval by the same court.

In light of such flexibility, the statement by President Bush that he had to choose between following the law and keeping Americans safe from terrorists rings hollow. It won't satisfy the American people. And clearly it won't satisfy the FISA court, which has requested a briefing from the administration on why it allowed the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on Americans without its oversight. One of the FISA judges, upset over this abuse of presidential power, has already resigned from the court.

When it returns in the new year, Congress should demand a similar accounting from the administration. After all, why waste time debating government powers allowed under the Patriot Act if the administration is going to do what it feels like anyway? And for that matter, why have a Bill of Rights if the president is going to treat it like a pesky nuisance?

The secret eavesdropping program, whose full scale and scope are not yet known, joins a long list of troubling Bush administration initiatives that includes the indefinite detention of those it labels ``enemy combatants.'' Even more disturbing is the disappearance of detainees into secret CIA prisons and their subsequent ``rendition'' to countries where torture is commonplace.

These practices all have something in common: They are unilateral decisions by the executive branch to circumvent the judicial and legislative branches and redefine what is legal. That's the kind of presidential overreach that the Constitution's elaborate checks and balances are meant specifically to prevent, for it subverts the most basic principles of democratic government.

My waking thought on Christmas Day was that George Orwell's vision of Big Brother was no longer a hypothetical possibility but an actual near-term threat. That realization was synthesized from two news events, one here and one in Britain.

In Britain, the government recently decided to deploy global positioning system (GPS) technology to track every vehicle in the U.K. every minute of the day. Just as GPS sensors are mandated for use in every cell phone in the near future in the United States (for our safety, of course), Britain will mandate the use of a GPS sensor in every car. ``Has Reginald White arrived at the grocery store yet?'' will become a question answerable by the security division of Britain's DMV.

The British government promises safeguards to prevent spying on ordinary citizens, but who will follow up on those promises?

In the United States, President Bush is acting under apparently self-granted powers to ``authorize'' the National Security Agency (NSA) to spy on Americans -- of course, only on Americans threatening terrorist acts.

In an act of high integrity, one of the judges of the secret court that grants Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act search warrants resigned, citing the fact that Bush was now bypassing even that minimal civil rights guarantee by directly authorizing NSA spying on U.S. citizens. One can only imagine that this troublesome judge will be replaced with one more friendly to the administration.

With only the need to combine two real-world technologies for spying and tracking, the vision of 1984 -- once just a dark philosophical concept -- becomes an engineering project.

The president and those to whom he delegates his authority can now authorize government spooks to listen to us in our homes and on our cell phones. When we are not home, they can track us in our automobiles. The system could be airtight and could be used to control our actions.

It's simple enough for most Silicon Valley companies to create a chip to detect a valid GPS signal and disable an automobile's ignition system to prevent citizens from the ``unauthorized use'' of their own vehicles.

The final move into the totality of 1984 requires only a bit of philosophical drift, as exemplified by J. Edgar Hoover's directive to spy on the Rev. Martin Luther King because he was a subversive. If Bush's latest acts are left unchallenged, the government will become bolder at spying on whomever it wants and secretly jailing those it deems a threat to national security -- all with no troublesome warrants or messy public trials.

In this environment, acts other than terrorism will certainly be put on the subversive activities list, all in the name of protecting our freedom.

Why should law-abiding citizens fear these trends? Because the government cannot be trusted. I don't trust President Bush to honor my rights, nor did I trust President Clinton, who was caught with secret FBI files on his political enemies.

It's not that I'm unpatriotic. The founders of our country did not trust any government -- either that of George III or an uncontrolled democracy. That's why we have the Bill of Rights to protect American citizens from their own government -- by demanding, for example, that ``Congress shall make no law abridging the right of free speech.''

Our property is also protected from illegal search and seizure, and we are not to be put in jail without knowing the charges against us or having the right to confront our accusers in a public trial. Secret courts are inconsistent with the Bill of Rights, the defining document of American freedom.

What's the worst thing that Al-Qaida can do to America? We have probably already seen it. Of course, the government can talk about bigger things, like the use of weapons of mass destruction, to justify its use of totalitarian tactics.

I would much rather live as a free man under the highly improbable threat of another significant Al-Qaida attack than I would as a serf, spied on by an oppressive government that can jail me secretly, without charges. If the Patriot Act defines the term ``patriot,'' then I am certainly not one.

By far, our own government is a bigger threat to our freedom than any possible menace posed by Al-Qaida.

T.J. Rodgers is the CEO of Cypress Semiconductor in San Jose. He wrote this article for the Mercury News.

KIRKUK, Iraq - Kurdish leaders, by filling regular Iraqi army units with thousands of loyal militia members, have laid the groundwork to seize a large swath of northern Iraq and establish an independent Kurdistan, if -- as they expect -- the fragile threads now holding the nation together disintegrate.

With 10,000 former militia members in army divisions in the north, those leaders are prepared to send them south to take the oil-rich city of Kirkuk and possibly half of Mosul, Iraq's third-largest city.

Five days of interviews with Kurdish leaders and troops in the region -- arranged independently and without a customary U.S. military escort -- suggest that U.S. plans to bring unity to Iraq by training and equipping a national army aren't working. Instead, some troops formally under U.S. and Iraqi national command are preparing to protect territory and ethnic and religious interests in the event of Iraq's fragmentation, which many of them think is inevitable.

Their strategy mirrors that of Shiite Muslim parties in southern Iraq, which have stocked Iraqi army and police units with members of their own militias and have maintained a separate militia presence throughout Iraq's central and southern provinces. The militias now are illegal under Iraqi law but operate openly in many areas. Kurdish militia leaders say they expect the Shiites to eventually create an independent state in the south, as they would do in the north.

The Kurdish soldiers in the north said that while they wore Iraqi army uniforms they still considered themselves members of the peshmerga -- the Kurdish militia -- and were awaiting orders from Kurdish leaders to break ranks. Many said they wouldn't hesitate to kill their Iraqi army comrades, especially Arabs, if a fight for an independent Kurdistan erupted.

``It doesn't matter if we have to fight the Arabs in our own battalion,'' said Gabriel Mohammed, a Kurdish soldier in the Iraqi army who was escorting a Knight Ridder reporter through Kirkuk. ``Kirkuk will be ours.''

The Kurds have readied their troops not only because they have long yearned to establish an independent state but also because their leaders expect Iraq to disintegrate, senior leaders in the peshmerga -- literally, ``those who face death'' -- told Knight Ridder. The Kurds are mostly secular Sunni Muslims, and are ethnically distinct from Arabs.

The Bush administration -- and Iraq's neighbors -- oppose the nation's fragmentation, fearing that it could lead to regional collapse. To keep Iraq together, U.S. plans to withdraw significant numbers of U.S. soldiers in 2006 will depend on turning U.S.-trained Kurdish and Shiite militia members into a national army.

The interviews with Kurdish troops, however, suggested that as the U.S. military transfers more bases and areas of control to Iraqi units, it may be handing the nation to militias that are bent more on advancing ethnic and religious interests than on defeating the insurgency and preserving national unity.

A U.S. military officer in Baghdad with knowledge of Iraqi army operations said he was frustrated to hear of the Iraqi soldiers' comments, but that he had seen no reports suggesting that they had acted improperly in the field.

``There's talk and there's acts, and their actions are that they follow the orders of the Iraqi chain of command and they secure their sectors well,'' said the officer, who refused to be identified because he was not authorized to speak on the subject.

U.S. military officials have said they are trying to get a broader mix of sects in the Iraqi units.

However, Col. Talib Naji, a Kurd serving in the Iraqi army on the edge of Kirkuk, said he would resist any attempts to dilute the Kurdish presence in his brigade.

``The Ministry of Defense recently sent me 150 Arab soldiers from the south,'' Naji said. ``After two weeks of service, we sent them away. We did not accept them. We will not let them carry through with their plans to bring more Arab soldiers here.''

One key to the Kurds' plan for independence is securing control of Kirkuk, the seat of a province that holds some of Iraq's largest oil fields. Should the Kurds push for independence, Kirkuk and its oil would be a key economic engine.

The city's Kurdish population was driven out by former Sunni Arab dictator Saddam Hussein, whose ``Arabization'' program paid thousands of Arab families to move there and replace recently deported or murdered Kurds.

``Kirkuk is Kurdistan; it does not belong to the Arabs,'' Hamid Afandi, the minister of peshmerga for the Kurdistan Democratic Party, one of the two major Kurdish groups, said in an interview at his office in the Kurdish city of Irbil. ``If we can resolve this by talking, fine, but if not, then we will resolve it by fighting.''

In addition to putting former peshmerga in the Iraqi army, the Kurds have deployed small peshmerga units in buildings and compounds throughout northern Iraq, according to militia leaders. While it's hard to calculate the number of these active peshmerga fighters, interviews with militia members suggest that it's well in excess of 10,000.

Afandi said his group had sent at least 10,000 peshmerga to the Iraqi army in northern Iraq, a figure substantiated in interviews with officers in two Iraqi army divisions in the region.

``All of them belong to the central government, but inside they are Kurds. . . . All peshmerga are under the orders of our leadership,'' Afandi said.

Jafar Mustafir, a close adviser to Iraq's Kurdish interim president, Jalal Talabani, and the deputy head of peshmerga for the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, a longtime rival of the Kurdistan Democratic Party, echoed that.

``We will do our best diplomatically, and if that fails we will use force'' to secure borders for an independent Kurdistan, Mustafir said. ``The government in Baghdad will be too weak to use force against the will of the Kurdish people.''