What started as a mildly annoying encounter on Oct. 18 between a porter and a man who claimed to be a senior official in Wanzhou, in central China, turned into a full-scale riot, fed by resentment among poorer residents.

THE GREAT DIVIDE | TALKING BACK TO POWER

By JOSEPH KAHN

Elizabeth Farnsworth reports on the indictment of former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet on charges of human rights violations in part one of a two-part series.

In part two of a two-part series, Elizabeth Farnsworth reports on the indictment of former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet for kidnapping and murder.

JIM LEHRER: Now, the Chile story. Today attorneys for former President Pinochet told an appeals court he is too ill to stand trial for kidnapping and murder.

Elizabeth Farnsworth has been following his case for an independent documentary. Here is part two of her report for us.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Chilean Juan Guzman's indictment of former dictator Augusto Pinochet Monday was the latest in a series of dramatic breakthroughs in that country's pursuit of justice for past crimes.

In September, Guzman and police detectives watched from a boat as divers brought up pieces of iron rails from under the Pacific Ocean just off Chile's central coast.

Judges here investigate and prosecute, as well as try cases. Guzman had evidence that the rails were tied to bodies of political prisoners tortured and killed in the 1970s and then dropped from helicopters into the sea.

It's one of many crimes Guzman has been investigating since 1998, when he was assigned the first criminal case against Pinochet.

The discovery of the rails, which was front-page news, was deeply upsetting to these women, who are plaintiffs in one of Judge Guzman's cases.

Their children are part of a group known in Chile as "The Disappeared," the nearly 1,000 victims of the Pinochet years whose bodies have never been found.

Edita Salvadores de Castro was arrested with her husband in 1974 by security officials looking for her daughter and son-in-law.

They had been members of a far-left group called the Movement of the Revolutionary Left, or MIR.

EDITA SALVADORES DE CASTRO (Translated): They threatened me, saying that if we didn't tell them where my daughter, Chechi, and Juan Carlos were -- Chechi is what we called my daughter-- they would kill my 22-month-old granddaughter.

She was staying with us that night. We knew that they had the MIR surrounded, and we had to save the little girl.

If we didn't, Chechi would never forgive us for as long as she lived because she had told me, "Mama, my daughter is for you.You raise her if something happens to me and Carlos."

So we took the police to where my daughter was, and they detained Carlos and Chechi right in front of us.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Edita never saw either one of them again.

The most recent evidence indicates they were among those tied to rails and dropped into the sea.

Other investigative breakthroughs have come from an official commission on torture which established offices around the country to collect information from all those who survived imprisonment and torture under Pinochet.

Many of the people who came to testify had never told their stories before.

NINA REYES GUZMAN (Translated): In prison they always mistreated us, beat us. They would move us from one place to another and ask about what we were doing.

I lost all the hearing in this ear, and they used electric current on me. I was pregnant at that time.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Last month, the torture commission presented its report to Chilean President Ricardo Lagos.

Nearly 36,000 people testified, and of those, 28,000 were determined to have been tortured by security forces in methods ranging from asphyxiation to burns.

In a prologue to the torture commission report, President Lagos wrote: "How can we explain such horror? What could provoke human conduct like that described here…How can we explain that 94 percent of people who were taken prisoner suffered torture? How can we explain that of the 3,400 women who testified, almost all were raped?"

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Also last month, Chilean Army Commander Juan Emilio Cheyre acknowledged in a statement that the army bears responsibility as an institution for what he called the "punishable and morally unacceptable acts of the past."

The divisions of the Cold War did not justify what was done, he said, because "there can never be ethical justifications for the violations of anyone's human rights."

President Ricardo Lagos said he is proud of how far Chile has gone.

PRESIDENT RICARDO LAGOS (Translated): How many countries have dared to look into their history so deeply? We are a solid country, stable, and we can do it.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Augusto Pinochet, who turned 89 last month, continues to claim he didn't know about torture and killings during his rule.

But human rights attorney Jose Zalaquett says the avalanche of new information from the past has left the former dictator increasingly isolated.

JOSE ZALAQUETT: The new generation of military people, they still go to see him to the hospital, and they look respectful enough, but they are not going to really put a strong defense of him or threaten anything.

And his political supporters, except for a few, they are not going either to make a big stance in favor of him. So he is all by himself, except for a cadre of the faithful.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: This isolation has been exacerbated, Zalaquett says, by recent revelations in the New York Times and elsewhere about accounts worth millions of dollars hidden by Pinochet with the alleged connivance of the Washington DC-based Riggs Bank.

The information has been surfacing for months as part of a U.S. investigation into money laundering by the bank.

JOSE ZALAQUETT: For some people it is worse that he stole money than that he killed people.

Because they see that, well, if you are in a war, maybe you have to do unsavory things to save the country. But to steal money, that's outright dishonest.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: These files in a Catholic Church library in Santiago offer one explanation for why Chile has gotten so far in its pursuit of justice.

Compiled after the 1973 coup by courageous lawyers, journalists and relatives of those taken prisoner, the files hold a record of each of the more than 3,000 people killed during Pinochet's rule.

American journalist John Dinges reported from Chile for the Washington Post in that period.

JOHN DINGES: You have a system in Chile that I don't believe ever existed in any other country where while the dictatorship was in its strongest period, there were people putting together files.

If you've looked at those files, they are amazingly complete, including a classification system so that they can reveal parts of the information without compromising the sources.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: The files include testimony from eyewitnesses, habeas corpus petitions, almost always turned down by the courts, and other important documents that assure that current trials have contemporaneous evidence and don't rely only on faulty memories.

John Dinges was in Chile last month for the publication of the Spanish edition of his book about Judge Guzman's Condor case.

Dinges calls the people who compiled the files and pursued multiple investigations "pursuers."

JOHN DINGES: They were pursuing the human rights criminals even during the time when it was impossible to do anything about it.

They were building the edifice that now will become the prison for the generals.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: So far about 322 agents of the Pinochet-era security forces have been charged with crimes related to the repression.

Around 40 are in prison, some of them here at Punta Peuco, which is being expanded to receive the hundred or more expected to be sentenced soon.

Nelson Caucoto, who as a young lawyer helped compile the important case files, is proud of what has been accomplished over the years.

NELSON CAUCOTO (Translated): I simply have to be proud of my country. We're opening a way to resolve in a civilized fashion problems that other countries haven't been able to resolve.

We are beginning to be like countries in the developed world, where law is the only way to close old wounds, and we are doing it well.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: But not well enough for mothers whose children may never be found.

MAGDALENA NAVARETTE (Translated): We'll never know where our children are, even though they found the rails and it's known that people were tied to them and thrown into the sea, there's no trace left of our children.

It's a profound sorrow not to have a place where we can in some way be reunited with them.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Last weekend the rails brought up from the ocean were in the news again.

Chilean reporter Jorge Escalante revealed that experts working with Judge Guzman found tiny pieces of material and a button affixed to one of the rails.

Judge Guzman believes about 500 people disappeared this way.

Everything we have now is the result of those who came before us, and those who follow us will need the same things we have found here. They would like the earth to be as it is now, or a little better.

This American Indian philosophy is often called the Seventh Generation, as it cautions that all decisions should be made based on whether or not that decision would be helpful or hurtful for the seven generations who will follow. All Americans might do well to study this philosophy as we weigh the short-term benefits against the long-term impacts of local, state and federal budget decisions.

$7 trillion debt

When is it appropriate to ask the next generation to pay bills we incur today? The federal debt currently stands at more than $7 trillion. The deficit according to the Congressional Budget Office is projected to be in the neighborhood of $422 billion. With spending amounting to $2.3 trillion, this would require the government to borrow one of every five dollars it spends.

In California alone, the budget deficit has risen to $6.7 billion, and the state's legislative analyst, Elizabeth Hill, has projected that as the deadline for debt payments approaches and the one-time fixes crafted last year expire, the gap between revenue and spending will balloon to $10 billion.

``We still have a lot of hard work to do,'' Hill said, predicting that even with the economy turning around, ``the state could not grow its way out of the problem.'' She is urging the Legislature to resist the temptation to borrow even more money, as the cost for current borrowing is upward of $4 billion annually.

The problem is not confined to our legislators. In California, the voters themselves frequently mandate, through the initiative process, programs that must be paid for by the next generation. In the most recent election, for example, initiatives on children's hospitals and mental health services -- undoubtedly worthy projects -- lock the state into spending for many years to come.

These initiatives, especially those pertaining to public education and transportation infrastructure, are often couched in terms of ``investing in the future.'' But too often, our commitments dictate how many tax dollars will be left for future generations to respond to changing needs. One example is the BART extension, a 30-year project that looked essential during boom times but is now threatening to drain public coffers of funds that might better be spent on bus lines or other forms of transportation.

Cost of services

In general, the recent downturn in the economy has not been met with commensurate cuts in services. The public has grown accustomed to the best in police and fire protection, library services and parks, without paying the actual costs of such services. And few legislators are willing to suggest either a reduction in services or increased taxes or fees.

Optimism may be the driving force in this practice of spending and developing -- optimism that in the future, the economy will turn around, that we'll develop new, better, cheaper ways to provide necessary services.

But along with that optimism, we should be engaging in serious discussions about our decisions, and how they will affect the next generation, or two, or seven.

JUDY NADLER is a senior fellow in government ethics at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University. This is one of six subjects the Ethics Center suggests should be on the national ethics agenda. For more, go to www.scu.edu/ethics.

Essayist Roger Rosenblatt looks at the legacy of the founders of New York.

ROGER ROSENBLATT: The Dutch are cursed with cuteness. Their wooden shoes are cute. Their windmills are cute. Their tulips, hats, canals and-- I assume-- their treats are cute. Even the name, while not exactly cute, is neither here nor there: The Netherlands. And in 1609, when they sailed over to create America-- specifically New York-- all that, in hindsight, has been regarded as cute, as well.

Cute Peter Stuyvesant with his peg of a leg, though his bigotries certainly were not cute. Cute Knickerbocker Holiday with Walter Houston sadly singing "September Song." Cute $24 for the sale of Manhattan. All in all, an astonishingly significant history mired in cuteness, down to the Knickerbocker pants we used to wear and the New York Knicks, who, while hardly cute, steadfastly have remained insignificant.

The truth, as exhibited in the museum of the city of New York, is that the Dutch, cute or not cute, happened to transport an entire civilization from one continent to another when they created New Amsterdam. And they also transported the two main features that created America: Pluralism and the very free spirit.

Last spring, a book came out that goes a long way toward explaining how this happened. The book is "The Island at the Center of the World" by Russell Shorto, based on the research of Charles Gehring. In a way, it tells of a portable renaissance. New Amsterdam was both a world in itself and a world to come. The Africans, Norwegians, Italians, Germans, Jews and others who populated the settlement became the Dominicans, Haitians, Koreans, Russians and others of today.

A whole mess of people found safety and encouragement principally in being a whole mess of people. 350 years ago, in 1654, the last governor of New Amsterdam, Peter Stuyvesant, buried right here at the church of St. Marks in the bowery, sought to block Jews from living in New Amsterdam. But a man named Adrian Van Der Donck opposed him, and the Dutch colonial administration did, too. This island, said the Dutch, was to be for everyone-- tolerant, liberal, hopeful, multicultural and upwardly mobile.

Sound familiar? More unusual was that feeling of belonging to a renaissance, a rollicking time of creative rebirth. At the time that a motley crew of pirates, smugglers, prostitutes and explorers were roving around this island, Europe was ablaze with the likes of Shakespeare, Galileo, Descartes, not to mention the Dutch's own Rembrandt. In the crude, faraway land of mudflats, waterfalls and cormorants, a new world renaissance was driving pilings. What the Dutch created, created us.

When I was a kid in this neighborhood, they told us that one could hear the ghost of peg- leg Peter Stuyvesant stomping around the church at night. It was all that a Jewish kid needed, an anti-Semitic ghost. But in a way the ghost was real if one thinks of the stomping as the incessant beat, sometimes rhapsodic, sometimes just loud, of the city.

Henry Hudson and company brought over the renaissance, not the arid plains of the far west, not the dry, high-starched collars of Puritan New England. The Dutch brought and protected art, noise, life. This is how America got started, lusty as a New York street. The first Manhattanites shipped over the spirit that the latest Manhattanites gladly inherit, a spirit shown in the recent renaissance at the site of the World Trade Center, and shown perpetually in the undying relentless renaissance of the citizens.

America is insistently various, open, grand in its vision if not always in execution, sloppily and beautifully alive. People outside this city sometimes say that America is not New York. They're right. It's New Amsterdam.

I'm Roger Rosenblatt.

Russian oil company Yukos lost its most valuable oil production subsidiary to a state-owned firm Wednesday. Correspondent Jeffrey Brown looks at the re-nationalization of the company with Marshall Goldman, economist and associate director of the Davis Center for Russian studies at Harvard University, and J. Robinson West, founder of PFC Energy, a consulting group.

Background


Discussion

JEFFREY BROWN: It's a story of oil, power, and intrigue; the high drama included the arrest at gunpoint of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the billionaire head of Yukos Oil.

He'd built Yukos into a major international business, but he had also emerged as a very public political opponent of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

In October 2003, Khodorkovsky was charged with tax evasion and fraud; he's been in jail ever since. His company was levied with a $27 billion bill for alleged tax evasion, and spun toward financial ruin.

Last Sunday, the company's most valuable asset, a subsidiary called Yuganskneftegas, which produces a million barrels of oil a day, was auctioned off by the Russian government.

A winning bid of $9.35 billion, considered only half its value, was submitted by the previously unknown Baikal Finans group.

Then yesterday, the mysterious Baikal was itself purchased by a prominent state-run oil concern called Rosneft. To add to the intrigue, Rosneft has plans to merge next month with Gazprom, an even bigger, government-controlled energy conglomerate.

The apparent impact: Yukos, once a leader of the move towards privatization in Russia, has now been renationalized. At a Moscow press conference today, President Putin said the outcome is completely legitimate.

The arrest of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Russia's top entrepreneur and a government critic, has rocked the country's financial markets and fueled criticism of President Putin for being anti-democratic.

Background

Discussion

MARGARET WARNER: Russia's stock market recovered slightly today, after yesterday's dramatic 14 percent plunge. The financial turmoil was triggered by the arrest of the country's top entrepreneur Saturday on charges of tax evasion and fraud.

Forty-year-old Mikhail Khodorkovsky heads Yukos, one of the world's largest oil companies. A former fuel and energy minister under Boris Yeltsin, he's today considered Russia's richest man, with a reported net worth of $8 billion. And he's used some of that money to fund opposition parties in the run-up to the December 7 parliamentary elections. He's also been openly critical of Russian President Vladimir Putin and his government.

Khodorkovsky's arrest added new fuel to growing charges in the west that Putin is becoming increasingly antidemocratic. Two weeks ago, the "Economist" editorialized that the Kremlin's targeting of Khodorkovsky showed "in Russia, the rule of law is that those who rule are the law."

Trying to calm the markets yesterday, Putin denied any political motives, and urged an end to what he called "all the speculation and hysteria about this."

PRESIDENT VLADIMIR PUTIN (Translated): Everyone must be equal in the eyes of the law; a modest clerk, a civil servant, even one of the highest rank, as has now happened to a well-known former federal government minister. Everyone must be equal, no matter how many billions he has in his private accounts.

MARGARET WARNER: Khodorkovsky is currently being held in a high- security prison in Moscow.

MARGARET WARNER: For more on what Khodorkovsky's arrest says about Putin's Russia, we turn to two men who've written widely about Russia. Marshall Goldman is professor of economics, and associate director of the Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard and Dmitri Simes is president of the Nixon Center. Welcome to you both.

Professor Goldman, explain to us why would the arrest of this one man trigger such a plunge in the Russian stock market?

MARSHALL GOLDMAN: Well, because he heads this company that American firms, among others, are very much interested in. Putin has been trying very hard to establish a certain order of stability. He talks about becoming part of the west. Suddenly to see this attack on a man who has been put in jail for at least about two months does suggest that there is something going on here particularly since Khodorkovky has been giving money to other political parties and is viewed as somebody who has been trying to make this company very much transparent, something that he did not do in previous years.

MARGARET WARNER: Do you agree with that, Dmitri Simes, that this made foreign investors nervous?

DIMITRI SIMES: It made foreign investors nervous because Khodorkovky is the richest man in Russia. He's in charge of the most productive and I should say most transparent Russian company. When the investors see that, to put it mildly they are confused. How long their confusion is going to last depends upon what happens to Khodorkovky and depends whether there will be an attack on other Russian oligarchs and whether there be an attempt to re-nationalize major Russian companies.

MARGARET WARNER: Professor Goldman, tell me a little bit more about how investors see this. Does it make them worry that the rule of law is not really being applied here? What is it they're really concerned about?

MARSHALL GOLDMAN: Well, everyone of the oligarchs has a black mark after their name. They have all been engaged in procedures and policies that were questionable. Some of them have said you could not operate legally in that era. So there's the whole issue that anyone can be picked up by Putin or Putin's successor because the reforms that were introduced were so flawed. And that creates... enormous uncertainty. How can you invest when you just don't know what's going to happen? Now, the likelihood is that-- and Dmitri suggested something along these lines-- that future investors will say we don't want to go there unless you want to look for oil because Russia has enormous oil reserves and there aren't many other places they can go but manufacturers may indeed have other questions about going there when they can go to China or Poland.

MARGARET WARNER: Dmitri Simes, as you know Kremlin critics say this arrest was about a lot more than Khodorkovsky's financial dealings and that it was a sort of reflected what former CIA Director Jim Woolsey wrote about a month ago. He described it as Putin's authoritarian drift. Is there something to that?

DIMITRI SIMES: No. In order to have an authoritarian drift you presume democracy. In Russia we have a horrible system of corrupt capitalism and this system since Putin took over was raised on two columns....

MARGARET WARNER: Was what?

DIMITRI SIMES: Was raised on two pillars. One security people close to Putin, people from the former KGB and another group the oligarchs. Neither of them was really committed to democracy. What you see today is these two groups are going after each other and Putin increasingly attacking the oligarchs. One point: The Russian press, the Russian TV have described what has happened to Khodorkovky rather fully. There is certain freedom of the press in Russia at least so far.

MARGARET WARNER: What do you think about that, Professor Goldman, does this disclose his authoritarian bent?

MARSHALL GOLDMAN: I would say he's got the authoritarian bent. I'm a little nervous about it. Actually I would take issue with Dmitri about this. The Russian state television on Saturday really almost hid the fact that Khodorkovky had been arrested. The state channels show almost nothing but Putin on the news programs and later on get into some of these other issues. He's recently in this connection with the attack on Khodorkovky, they raided the offices and seized documents from one of the opposition political parties. There is gradually encroachment on these things. It's not that... here I would agree with Dmitri that Russia was really never a full blossoming democracy but the oligarchs have learned that if they attack Putin, they are indeed in trouble and two of them have already been sent overseas and if you look at the other members of the associates of Khodorkovky, two or three of them have already fled and the rest are trying to become members of the Dumas so they'll have political immunity.

MARGARET WARNER: But you're suggesting that it's more than the oligarchs who have to be worried here.

MARSHALL GOLDMAN: Oh, absolutely. For example, the police, the KGB or the FSB, their successor, visited the school that Khodorkovky's daughter was attending and wanted the names of the other students and that has to be intimidating.

DIMITRI SIMES: It's not a pretty picture. The only point I was making was that people were arrested under Yeltsin. The parliament was shelled by tanks under Yeltsin. Under Yeltsin, the oligarchs were given control over media empires at that time to protect Yeltsin. There was no democracy under Yeltsin. There is no democracy today under Putin. We should have no illusions. We were I think too benign in thinking about Yeltsin. We should not exaggerate how harsh is Putin in terms of democracy but to describe Putin as a democrat, I think Mr. Putin himself would probably laugh.

MARGARET WARNER: Professor Goldman, your view on that?

MARSHALL GOLDMAN: Well, you know, when he spoke at Columbia university when he was visiting this country a few weeks ago he was asked, how do you feel about destroying freedom of the press? He said well we never had it. I think that's too strong a statement. They never really did have complete freedom of the press. But in those days, the other oligarchs did attack Yeltsin over Chechnya.

They did try to attack Putin over Chechnya. When they attacked Putin that's when their properties were seized so there's much less willingness today to attack Putin or do anything which would make him unhappy whereas it's true, the Yeltsin arrested some of these people and shelled the parliament and I think that we should have been much more critical of that but I think the people felt a little freer in the days of Yeltsin. One of my friends said under Putin fear has returned. I think that's the best marker of where we stand now.

MARGARET WARNER: Mr. Simes, critics also point to, for instance, what they say were rigged elections in Chechnya, sort of questionable elections for the governorship of St. Petersburg -- even meddling, they say, in the upcoming parliamentary elections.

DIMITRI SIMES: Elections in Russia are rigged all the time. They were rigged under Yeltsin, they were rigged under Putin. Elections in Chechnya are laughable. Everything is for sale including political positions. Mr. Khodorkovky sometimes was the beneficiary of that. One reason they think he was arrested because he was asking several political parties, including a certain party, incidentally, to sell positions on their abilities, and he was trying to create his place in the Duma.

MARGARET WARNER: Do you want to comment on that?

MARSHALL GOLDMAN: I think Dmitri is absolutely right. Indeed the irony is that the Yukos officials have managed to put two people from Yukos on the communist party list. I mean it is an unusual form of democracy there.

MARGARET WARNER: Let me follow up then with a question about what President Bush had to say at Camp David last month because some newspaper columnists criticized him for this. When he was meeting with Putin, he said that Russia was a country or, quote, "a country in which democracy and freedom and rule of law thrive." Is he giving Putin too much leeway?

MARSHALL GOLDMAN: Oh, I think so. Thriving, if that's-- I hope that's not the image that President Bush wants to see in the United States. You know, there are some of us who worry about homeland security becoming more like Russia. In that sense you may say it's thriving but by my standards it certainly is not. I say I have a lot of friends who are really quite intimidated now who were not a few years ago under Yeltsin and indeed in the last days of Gorbachev.

MARGARET WARNER: But are you saying that the president of the United States should somehow comment publicly on this? Should make different views known than he has?

MARSHALL GOLDMAN: I wish he would. The only thing I think that Putin might then very well say, look, some of the things you're criticizing me about you have going on in your own country, asking librarians to come up with the names of people who have looked in books. I would hope that President Bush would do it, and I'm a little nervous that the two of them have formed this relationship which is very much involved with Russian support for what we're doing in Iraq and in Afghanistan and I have a feeling President Bush is very nervous about doing anything to disrupt that, plus the fact that again we have our own problems with civil rights here now.

MARGARET WARNER: What's your view of President Bush's remark?

DIMITRI SIMES: Well, unfortunate. I kind of disagree with marshal that President Bush at this point should criticize Putin publicly. It is too early. I think that we have other priorities vis-à-vis Russia including terrorism, non-proliferation. You don't attack somebody like Putin today and expect full cooperation from him tomorrow. But to white wash Putin publicly, to praise him as being a democrat which he clearly is not and in my view does not pretend to be, I think it's going far to far.

MARGARET WARNER: Dmitri Simes, Marshal Goldman, thank you both.

MARSHALL GOLDMAN: Sure, thank you.

In the aftermath of the suicide bombing of the Mosul mess hall, we are being admonished anew we must stay the course in Iraq. But ``Stay the course!'' is no longer enough.

President Bush needs to go on national television and tell us the unvarnished truth. Why are we still there? For some of Bush's countrymen, there is a sense of having been had, of having been made victim to one of the great bait-and-switches in the history of warfare.

The president, his war Cabinet and the neocon punditocracy sold us on this war by implying Saddam Hussein was implicated in Sept. 11, that he had a vast arsenal of chemical and biological weapons, that he was working on an atom bomb, that he would transfer his terror weapons to Al-Qaida. We had to invade, destroy and disarm his axis-of-evil regime. Only thus could we be secure.

None of this was true. But the president won that debate and was given a free hand to invade Iraq. He did so, and overthrew Saddam's regime in three weeks. ``Mission accomplished!''

That was 20 months ago. What is our mission now? When did it change? With 1,300 dead and nearly 10,000 wounded, why are we still at war with these people?

The president says the enemy is ``terrorism'' and ``evil,'' and we fight for ``democracy'' and ``freedom,'' which is ``God's gift to humanity.'' All very noble.

But why should Americans have to die for democracy in a nation that has never known it? Democracy in the Middle East is not vital to our national security. For though the Middle East has never been democratic, no Middle East nation has ever attacked us. And should we catch a nation that is supporting terror against us, we have the weapons to make them pay a hellish price, without invading and occupying their country.

The only nation in the 20th century to attack us was Japan. And Japan lashed out, insanely, in desperation, because we had cut off its oil and convinced the British and Dutch to cut off the vital commodities it needed to avoid imperial defeat in China. We were choking the Japanese empire to death.

We might all prefer that Arab nations be democratic. But that is not vital to us. If they remain despotic, that is their problem, so long as they do not threaten or attack us. But to invade an Islamic country to force it to adopt democratic reforms is democratic imperialism. If we practice it, we must expect that some of those we are reforming will resort to the time-honored weapon of anti-imperialists, terrorism -- the one effective weapon the weak have against the strong.

To us, democracy may mean New England town meetings. To the Sunnis, democracy means a one-man, one-vote path to power for the Shiites, 60 percent of Iraq's population, who will dispossess them of the power and place they have held since Ottoman times. Why should people to whom politics is about power not fight that? And why should we fight and die for a Shiite-dominated Iraq?

Before addressing his countrymen, the president needs to ask and answer for himself some hard questions. Who told him this would be a ``cakewalk''? Who misled him to believe we would be welcomed as liberators with bouquets of flowers? Who led him into a situation where his choice appears to be between a seemingly endless guerrilla war that could destroy his presidency, and walking away from Iraq and watching it collapse in mayhem and massacre of those who cast their lot with us? Why have these fools not been fired, like the CIA geniuses who sold JFK on the Bay of Pigs?

The president needs to know that if he intends to use U.S. military power to democratize the Middle East, Americans -- 56 percent of whom now believe Iraq was a mistake -- will not follow him.

Finally, the president must answer in his heart this question: Exactly how much more blood and money is he willing to plunge into a war for democracy in Iraq, and at what point must he decide -- as LBJ and Nixon did in Vietnam -- that the cost to America is so great that we must get out and risk the awful consequences of a mistaken war that we should never have launched?

PATRICK J. BUCHANAN is a syndicated columnist.