Talks under way to replace Iraq PM
By HAMZA HENDAWI and QASSIM ABDUL-ZAHRA, Associated Press WritersSun Dec 10, 6:29 PM ET
Major partners in Iraq's governing coalition are in behind-the-scenes talks to oust Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki amid discontent over his failure to quell raging violence, according to lawmakers involved.

The talks are aimed at forming a new parliamentary bloc that would seek to replace the current government and that would likely exclude supporters of the radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, who is a vehement opponent of the U.S. military presence.

The new alliance would be led by senior Shiite politician Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim, who met with President Bush last week. Al-Hakim, however, was not expected to be the next prime minister because he prefers the role of powerbroker, staying above the grinding day-to-day running of the country.

A key figure in the proposed alliance, Vice President Tariq al-Hashemi, a Sunni Arab, left for Washington on Sunday for a meeting with Bush at least three weeks ahead of schedule.

"The failure of the government has forced us into this in the hope that it can provide a solution," said Omar Abdul-Sattar, a lawmaker from al-Hashemi's Iraqi Islamic Party. "The new alliance will form the new government."

The groups engaged in talks have yet to agree on a leader, said lawmaker Hameed Maalah, a senior official of al-Hakim's Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, or SCIRI.

One likely candidate for prime minister, however, was said to be Iraq's other vice president, Adil Abdul-Mahdi, a Shiite who was al-Hakim's choice for the prime minister's job before al-Maliki emerged as a compromise candidate and won.

News of the bid to oust al-Maliki, in office since May, came amid growing dissent over his government's performance among his Sunni and Shiite partners and the damaging fallout from a leaked White House memo questioning the prime minister's abilities.

Washington also has been unhappy with al-Maliki's reluctance to comply with its repeated demands to disband Shiite militias blamed for much of Iraq's sectarian bloodletting.

Bush publicly expressed his confidence in al-Maliki after talks in Jordan on Nov. 30. But the president told White House reporters four days later that he was not satisfied with the pace of efforts to stop Iraq's violence.

It was not immediately clear how much progress had been made in the effort to cobble together a new parliamentary alliance. But lawmakers loyal to al-Sadr who support al-Maliki were almost certainly not going to be a part of it. They had no word on al-Maliki's Dawa party.

They said al-Maliki was livid at the attempt to unseat him.

"We know what's going on and we will sabotage it," said a close al-Maliki aide who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivities involved. He did not elaborate.

A senior aide to al-Sadr, who insisted on anonymity for the same reason, said the proposed alliance was primarily designed to exclude the cleric's backers and they would resist.

Al-Sadr's Mahdi Army militiamen fought U.S. troops for much of 2004 in Baghdad and across central and southern Iraq. It is blamed for most of the sectarian violence raging in Iraq.

The cleric's supporters have been among al-Maliki's strongest backers, ensuring his election as prime minister. Relations have recently frayed, however, with the 30 Sadrist lawmakers and five Cabinet ministers boycotting the government and parliament to protest al-Maliki's meeting with Bush in Jordan.

The al-Sadr aide said recent contacts with the office of Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, spiritual leader of most Iraqi Shiites, indicated the Iranian-born al-Sistani was not averse to replacing al-Maliki. Al-Sistani issued an unusually harsh criticism of the government in July.

Al-Hakim's SCIRI, along with parliament's Kurdish bloc and al-Hashemi's Islamic party, are likely to be the major powers of the new alliance. Independent lawmakers are also expected to join, legislators said.

Al-Hashemi's Islamic party said Sunday it would not join any future government unless it had a real voice.

Mahmoud Othman, a prominent Kurdish lawmaker and a sharp government critic, said talks on a new parliamentary alliance were initiated early this year, abandoned and recently resumed.

"This government must offer a remedy for all the problems we have in Iraq or publicly announce that it's unable to do so," said Othman, who is close to the negotiations.

Al-Maliki's government, under the Iraqi constitution, could be ousted if a simple majority of parliament's 275 members opposed it in a vote of confidence. Parties in the talks expressed confidence they had enough votes.

"The question of confidence in this government must be reconsidered," Parliament Speaker Mahmoud al-Mashhadani, a Sunni Arab, told legislators Sunday. "Why should we continue to support it? For its failure?"

Copyright © 2006 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. The information contained in the AP News report may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without the prior written authority of The Associated Press.
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Backstory: To help Cambodians is Bernie's law

Whether it's red tape or red carpet, former Newsweek foreign correspondent Bernie Krisher will stomp on it to get his way.
By Tibor Krausz | Contributor to The Christian Science Monitor

PHNOM PENH, CAMBODIA
You start off a meeting with Bernard Krisher looking for his halo. The philanthropist's reputation is that glowing. But the only esoteric accessory this retired journalist - whose indoor pallor and slight stoop is testament to years spent hunched over scoops on his typewriter - turns out to have is the fleet feet of Mercury. If you want to keep pace with him, you better be a long-distance runner - and an early bird, too.

Back for two weeks recently in his adopted country - "adopted" as in him being a self-appointed foster parent - the former Newsweek foreign correspondent has the schedule of a visiting head of state: Tuesday, Mr. Krisher inaugurates a new school he's started for the children of illiterate rice farmers. Wednesday, he escorts King Norodom Sihamoni - shaded under a ceremonial royal umbrella - around a free hospital for Cambodia's desperately poor that Krisher launched a decade ago. Friday, he welcomes US Ambassador Joseph A. Mussomeli to the groundbreaking of a dormitory for gifted but destitute children. Monday and Thursday, he exhorts Minister of Education Kol Pheng for more textbooks for rural schools, and badgers foreign nongovernmental organizations for their support.

In between, he checks on his fundraising campaign for mosquito nets for villagers at risk from malaria. And he inquires about the sale of "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone," which he printed last year after persuading author J.K. Rowling's publisher to let him offer Cambodian kids the book in Khmer for 50 cents a copy.

At 6 a.m. one day, he's giving a pep talk to delivery boys outside the offices of The Cambodian Daily, a newsletter-style paper he's been publishing since 1993 by way of pioneering press freedom in Cambodia (the paper's first copy is displayed in the Krisher room of the US embassy here). By evening, he's headlining a gala for foreign donors at the city's fairytale-flamboyant Royal Palace.

Right now, though, Krisher has a few minutes to spare. Sort of. Between answering a reporter's questions and nibbling on a salad (he doesn't like greens, he warns a waiter in Phnom Penh's InterContinental Hotel, before reprimanding a concierge for letting a fellow guest smoke), Krisher pores over blueprints for one of his new pet projects - Bright Future Kids.

"The idea is, even for children living in extreme poverty, the sky is the limit if they're ambitious," explains Krisher, whose puckered features put you in mind of a Shar-Pei pup wearing spectacles.

His new program has just handpicked 25 bright sixth-graders from across this impoverished country to attend the capital's best high school starting in January. Staying in a new dormitory built by Krisher, they'll receive extra English and computer lessons from foreign volunteer teachers.

"For the poor, 90 percent of job opportunities are closed," Krisher explains. "But these kids are going to be movers, shakers, leaders, pushers."

Pushers, like Bernie Krisher. When informed by an assistant that the dormitory project is on hold pending municipal approval, Krisher will have none of it: "I'm not going through this nonsense of red tape; I'm gonna break the law [and build anyway] because there's a higher law - helping people. I'll call Sihanouk and Hun Sen if I must." He means, respectively, Cambodia's revered King Father, a close friend, and its strongman prime minister.

Such chutzpah is vintage Krisher. Already a precocious reporter wannabe at 14, he launched his own mimeographed newspaper in New York City, The Pocket Mirror (800 copies at 3 cents each). He then went about landing celebrity interviews: Frank Sinatra ("I went backstage after his show in the Paramount Theatre with all those girls screaming outside"); Babe Ruth ("I went to his house and knocked on the door"); Arturo Toscanini ("I lied to the security guards that I was his grandson").

Decades later, as a Newsweek correspondent, his exploits included scheming his way into the only exclusive interview ever granted by Emperor Hirohito (1975), and sneaking past burly security guards into the antiques shop of a Tokyo hotel to catch Indonesian President Sukarno haggling for a discount (1963). Sukarno took to the plucky reporter and introduced him to Cambodia's King Norodom Sihanouk, who would become a close friend - but not before Krisher first got himself declared persona non grata by the mercurial "god king" after some unflattering reporting about the royal family. In 1993, when King Sihanouk returned home from decides-long exile in Beijing, he asked Krisher for his help in rebuilding war-torn Cambodia.

***

So here he is today - Cambodia's most prominent philanthropist, grousing about being "a total amateur in this."

But he's not, says Walter Kotkowski, a representative of the American medical charity HOPE Worldwide. "Bernie is a class act. A one-man United Nations, I hear, they call him," saysMr. Kotkowski, who oversees procurement for the Sihanouk Hospital Center of HOPE, a state-of-the-art hospital for the poor launched by Krisher.

Krisher appreciates the compliment but even more so the T-shirt with a HOPE Worldwide logo he cadges off the charity's president, Robert Gempel, who's in town for the hospital's 10th anniversary. "The king might like one shirt, too," nudges Krisher, the indefatigable asker.

Asking for things - like money - is easy, because Krisher can, and does, boast that overhead for his many projects is just 5 percent of his annual $1 million budget, which he raises by relentlessly lobbying influential friends and strangers he meets while trolling hotel lobbies and airport lounges. He donates $30,000 himself (stock dividends). Meanwhile in Tokyo, where he lives, he drives a banged-up old jalopy. "I'm stingy," Krisher notes.

***

Despite his missionary zeal for improving lives, Krisher remains emotionally detached, seeing lachrymose sentiment as a barrier to good old pragmatism. "I look at the big picture [of poverty], not individual stories of want and need," he says.

Still, his charity plays out in individual lives. Take Toun Phala, a 14-year-old AIDS orphan. The girl and her grandmother eke out a living tending others' rice paddies and orchards in the village of Kirivon 80 miles southwest of Phnom Penh. Along the highway to the village, cartoonish notices caution human traffickers against luring naive teens with false promises into indentured service as maids or sex workers.

Girls like Phala are prime targets of those traffickers - and, as such, are a target of Krisher's Girls Be Ambitious project, which pays parents $10 a month to allow their daughters to study. Thanks to the program Phala is now back in fourth grade.

As for the big picture, Krisher is busy soliciting enough $120 yearly sponsorships from individual foreign donors to send as many as 50,000 girls back to school across the countryside, where annual per capita income often remains under $40. The returning students will feed into 313 schools already built throughout Cambodia since 1999 by Krisher's Put a Roof Over Their Head initiative.

He launched that project on an impulse following an upcountry visit where he saw kids studying under a banyan tree in a town with no schoolhouse. To cover the building costs of individual schools, he's been enlisting donations of $14,000 from private Japanese and American benefactors, whose giving is matched by the Asian Development Bank. More than 80 former residents of yet another Krisher-sponsored project - the Future Light Orphanage - teach at the schools. "Once they graduate from the orphanage, we have jobs waiting for them," Krisher says.

Last year, a group of psychiatric caregivers from Hawaii approached Krisher asking him for help in building a new school in the ancestral village of one of their patients, a Cambodian refugee. The school was completed in October. During its ribbon-cutting ceremony, Krisher addressed hundreds of villagers gathered for the occasion: "This new school now belongs to you," he says through an interpreter. "Let your children study - the girls, too, don't send them into the fields all day to work."

Then, in his signature curmudgeonly way, he adds: "But tell them not to touch the [whitewashed] walls and leave handprints all over them."

For Iraq's Sunnis, Conflict Closes In
Mixed Neighborhoods Unravel as Shiite Militiamen Expand Violence
By Sudarsan Raghavan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, December 11, 2006; A01

BAGHDAD, Dec. 10 -- A few blocks from Ali Farouk's three-story home, an empty house provides a glimpse of what he fears will be the future. Once owned by a Sunni Muslim, the paint is peeling, the windows are blown out. Two scarlet X's mark the pale blue front door.

To the door's right are the words: "Not for Sale. Wanted."

According to neighbors, "Wanted" refers to the former owner, who fled after crossing paths with the Mahdi Army, the Shiite militia of firebrand cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. The gunmen accused the owner of killing four of their own at a checkpoint. Then they took over his house.

To the door's left, the words: "This is vengeance for the other day."

Farouk, a Sunni Muslim, fears his home might be targeted next. In the past two months, Shiite militiamen have tightened their grip on his central Baghdad neighborhood of Tobji, purging dozens of Sunni families, by fear and by threats. His world has become even more precarious since a barrage of car bombs, mortar shells and missiles killed more than 200 on Nov. 23 in Sadr City, the Baghdad slum that is home to many of Sadr's loyalists.

So Farouk began preparing to do what neither his father nor his grandfather could have imagined in their Iraq: flee Tobji, an enclave where Shiites and Sunnis have coexisted for more than half a century. Farouk plans to join the more than 400,000 Iraqis who have fled their homes, an exodus that is reshaping the face of Baghdad into neighborhoods polarized along sectarian lines.

On Saturday, Farouk's mission grew more urgent. In the latest spasm of revenge attacks, gangs of Shiite gunmen stormed Hurriyah, a mixed neighborhood adjacent to Tobji, torching houses, killing at least two Sunni Arabs and driving out dozens of Sunni families. On Sunday, in interviews across Tobji, Sunni Arabs worried that their fate could soon mirror their brethren's.

"It is coming like a wave," said Khudir Mahmoud, 32, after his midday prayers. "If the government doesn't intervene, the wave will reach here. We are only one street away."

The unraveling of Tobji and Hurriyah is the latest setback for the nation's Sunni minority, which is still seeking a political foothold in Iraq in the fourth year of war. Sunnis were once part of the country's privileged class, with government jobs, but their days and nights are now filled with fear and dread unlike anything they felt since the toppling of President Saddam Hussein.

"We are stuck in a big hole waiting for Lucifer to take our souls," said Farouk, 46, a father of seven. "At any moment we can die."

Worry Despite Precautions
Rabiaa Street, a dusty, congested thoroughfare, flows through central Baghdad west of the Tigris River. Along one stretch, near a patch of machinery shops, Hurriyah and Tobji face each other across the street. In Arabic, Hurriyah means freedom. Tobji's official name is Salaam. It means peace.

On one side, the road streams into Hurriyah's core, past a Sunni mosque that was destroyed, past a satellite office of Sadr, where clusters of young men lingered, past signs that read "Long Live Shia."

On the other side of Rabiaa Street is a set of railroad tracks nestled on the edge of Tobji, a working-class community of Shiites, Sunni Arabs and Kurds. In recent months, bodies of both Shiites and Sunnis have been dumped along the tracks, residents said Sunday. The killings are evidence of how the war to control the capital is spreading and how Shiite militiamen are increasingly pushing into western Baghdad, where Sunnis dominate.

Farouk's house sits in the heart of Tobji, around the corner from walls with black markings that read "Long Live Sadr." He is burly, with a long, oval face and a thin gray mustache, one of three Sunnis who live on the block.

He met a journalist first on Nov. 30, a week after the Sadr City attacks, on the condition that his father's, grandfather's and tribe's names not be used. Farouk is his great-grandfather's name. He told his Shiite neighbors that he was receiving a visit from co-workers at the government ministry where he is employed.

Even with those precautions, he was worried. Fearful of attracting attention, he rushed his visitor to the second-floor living room of his house. At the top of the narrow staircase, a large poster of Imam Ali, the most revered Shiite saint, along with several other important Shiite figures, stared from a wall. Farouk said he put up the posters the day of the Sadr City attacks -- in case Shiite militiamen came that night. He has no plans to take them down, he said.

"I am scared. I am Sunni," he said that day.

A Showcase of Dangers
In the 1950s, Farouk's Sunni father moved to Tobji. Farouk's mother was a Shiite, and his first name, Ali, is given to both Shiites and Sunnis. He went to school with Shiites and had Shiite friends. Neither sect nor ethnicity defined his identity, even when Hussein, a Sunni, brutally oppressed the Shiite community after he took power.

The war didn't reach Tobji in full force until this year. In January, gunmen wearing police uniforms and driving police vehicles abducted 53 Sunnis. Most were never seen again. The next month, a Shiite shrine in the town of Samarra was bombed, triggering cycles of revenge killings.

Mixed neighborhoods across Baghdad, including this one, started to rip apart. Still, after each attack, Tobji managed to heal momentarily, because of a tribal leadership of Sunnis and Shiites that is struggling to preserve the bonds between their communities.

Today, the last mile to Farouk's house is a showcase of the danger that threatens to overtake their efforts. Around the corner from an Iraqi army checkpoint, young men wearing dark clothes and clutching AK-47 assault rifles stand guard, a testament to the fact that they, not the Iraqi soldiers, are in charge. Some clutch black two-way radios; others stare fixedly into cars. On Sunday, one man stood in the middle of the street with a small piece of white paper, checking the license plates of cars.

The affiliation of the men with guns can be discerned by looking at a nearby concrete barrier. Scrawled in red paint are words boldly expressed in Arabic: "Yes for the Mahdi Army."

Women in black, head-to-toe abayas float like shadows in the sun here. A few blocks away, residents walk past the empty, disfigured house of the Sunni Arab without casting a glance. On a visit four weeks ago, Mahdi Army militiamen, including one who sat in a yellow plastic chair in the middle of the road, stopped cars and demanded:

"Why are you here? What is your tribe?"

A Shiite, Killed in Error
His tribal name didn't help Khelan Jassim Muhammed, 46, a grocer and father of six girls, from becoming a victim of the killing in Hurriyah.

Two weeks ago, he moved from Tobji to Hurriyah to occupy a house left empty by relatives who had moved to the United Arab Emirates. Muhammed, his relatives said, felt safe. He was a Shiite from the Ajaeli tribe.

Last Wednesday, he left his home in the morning and never returned. After a frantic search, his brothers found his body the next morning in the morgue. His corpse had been discovered in a trash dump in a Shiite neighborhood.

"He was handcuffed from the back and had two bullets holes in the back of his head," Khatan Jassim, 41, one of his brothers, said Sunday. As he finished the sentence, silence fell upon his family's spare, white-lit living room, where seven relatives were seated in a semicircle. Before they sat down on a large red carpet, they said a prayer, their palms facing upward in the Shiite tradition. They had lived all their lives in Tobji, just down the road from the empty Sunni Arab house.

Khatan Jassim, a taxi driver with a wide nose, thick neck and sun-leathered skin, said his brother's death bore the trademark of the Mahdi Army.

There are Sunnis and Shiites in the Ajaeli tribe, he explained. His brother, he added, was also carrying an identification card issued in Abu Ghraib, a Sunni area.

"There was a misunderstanding from the Sadr office," Jassim said. "They didn't know he was a Shia."

At the funeral, Sadr's representatives came to offer their condolences. Jassim confronted them. They denied any involvement.

"They gave us an excuse," Jassim recalled. "They said, 'Why would we kidnap him and dump his body in a dumpster? We control the neighborhood. We could have gone inside his house and killed him.' "

A Feeling of Siege
Across the street from the concrete barrier with the Mahdi Army proclamation, 25 Sunnis gathered Sunday at the Suhail Mosque for midday prayers. Young and old, they prayed solemnly, their hands at their side. Their small numbers spoke of their fears.

"This is half of what it used to be," said Khalid Mahmoud, 45, a mosque official and Khudir Mahmoud's brother. "People are staying home. They are worried about their security. Even if they come, their minds will be preoccupied."

"Most of the Sunnis here feel like they are under siege," he added.

As Mahmoud spoke, Abdul Wahad, 26, nodded in agreement. Dressed in a blue and orange Puma tracksuit jacket, he said he no longer hangs out on the streets. He has stopped pursuing his degree in economics because he's worried about getting killed.

"We don't trust the checkpoints," he said.

Added Khalid Mahmoud, "After the Sadr City bombings, none of us have left Tobji."

Ten days ago, three Sunnis were kidnapped, including the brother of the mosque's custodian. He still hasn't been found. On Sunday, Khudir Mahmoud sent a woman to the morgue to inquire whether his body had turned up. He was too afraid to go by himself because the Health Ministry is controlled by Shiites loyal to Sadr. The custodian now plans to quit and move his family to Samarra.

'I Am Like a Prisoner'
On the day Sadr City was attacked, a Shiite friend a few blocks away phoned Farouk to warn that Shiite militiamen were rumored to be roaming Tobji in search of Sunni men. He invited Farouk to stay at his house. Farouk and his two grown sons gratefully accepted. His wife and five smaller children stayed behind. The next day, Farouk and his sons returned. He loaded his AK-47 and kept it in his bedroom.

The day after a three-day curfew was lifted, Farouk went to work, switching taxis in case he was being followed. He was stopped at a checkpoint, he said. A Shiite policeman asked whether he was a Sunni or Shiite. Farouk replied that he was Iraqi, then flashed his government identification card. "You son of dogs," the policeman said but waved him through.

For the next three days, Farouk stayed inside his house. "I can't even walk to the main street," he said Nov. 30. "At 6 p.m., I lock my door and stay inside."

At night, the family slept together in the living room while Farouk kept watch for a possible attack. One night, a sound on the roof sent him rushing up with his gun. It was water dropping into a tank. "I am like a prisoner," he said.

In the living room that day, Farouk was expressing anger at the United States for invading Iraq, for disenfranchising the Sunnis. Listening in was his nephew, Ihab Bashir, 30. Farouk framed his plight in political terms, blaming the Shiite-led government for settling scores from the past. "There is no democracy," Farouk said, shaking his head in dismay.

Farouk's 10-year-old son, Omar, entered the living room. Thin with an angular face, he wore jeans and a yellow shirt. When asked his name, he replied in a voice not much louder than a whisper: "Amar."

Amar is a common Shiite name. Farouk had instructed him to lie about his name to strangers. Why didn't he use his real name?

"Because of those people, the Mahdi Army," Omar said.

Why is his father still staying at home?

Omar paused. "Perhaps the Mahdi Army will come and raid the Sunni homes and kill him."

Seven video compact disc recordings of Sadr's sermons, his stern, bearded visage splashed on every cover, sat on the brown sofa. Farouk's 15-year-old son had bought them the day after the curfew. When he came home, he slipped one of the discs into the VCD player and turned up the volume so all the family's Shiite neighbors could hear.

Omar pointed at them and said, "We have those VCDs for the Mahdi Army not to hurt us."

Inviting the Neighbors Over
Farouk's plan is to flee to Baqubah, the capital of Diyala province, one of the most violent places in Iraq. He said he does not care about the danger. His sect is the majority there. Just as the Shiites turn to the militias for protection, he now views the Sunni Arab insurgents as his family's guardians.

"The mujaheddin will protect us," Farouk said. "We heard they are helping Sunnis who move there with cooking oil, rice, sugar and fuel."

In the interim, he's decided that the best protection is to rekindle his ties to his Shiite neighbors. In recent days, he has invited some of them to have soda or tea inside his house. He hopes they will notice the poster of Imam Ali. He hopes they will vouch for him if the Mahdi Army attacks.

"I tell everyone that my mother is a Shiite," Farouk said. "I am trying to get closer to them. It's about saving my life."

On Sunday, Farouk was still bracing for a Shiite attack. Two days ago, he bought another poster of Imam Ali and other revered Shiite saints for the living room.

December 10, 2006
Taliban Kills 2 Sisters for Crime of Teaching

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
GHWANDO, Afghanistan, Dec. 9 (AP) — Following up on a death threat, Taliban militants broke into a house and fatally shot two teachers and three other family members, bringing to 20 the number of educators killed in attacks this year, officials and a relative said Saturday.

A NATO spokesman, meanwhile, said an investigation had begun into allegations that British troops fired at civilians, killing one and wounding six, after a suicide-bomb attack on their convoy last weekend.

The Taliban attack on two teachers, who were sisters living in the same house, happened overnight in a village in the Narang district of eastern Kunar Province. After climbing over the home’s outer wall with a ladder, gunmen killed the two teachers, their mother and grandmother and a 20-year-old male relative and wounded a younger male relative, said Dr. Ghaleb, a family relative who, like many Afghans, goes by one name.

The sisters had been warned in a letter from the Taliban to quit teaching, said Gulam Ullah Wekar, the provincial education director. It said their work went against Islam, and if they continued they would “end up facing the penalty.”

Soldier Asks Rumsfeld Where U.S. Solidarity Has Gone
By Jim Garamone
American Forces Press Service
MOSUL, Iraq, Dec. 10, 2006 – A soldier in Mosul told Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld he was worried because the American people seemed to have lost the combined will they had immediately following the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

The secretary, who visited Iraq to thank the troops before he steps down from office, allowed that this is true. "In the immediate aftermath of Sept. 11, the American people came together and were united in their concern about our country," he said.

But in the years since, there have been no big land, sea or air battles that grab the attention of the American people, Rumsfeld said. The battle against a shadowy enemy is much more complex and less familiar than any conflict America has been involved with before, he explained.

He said the United States has also been fortunate that there hasn't been another attack on the scale of Sept. 11 in the country. The farther removed some people get from the events of Sept. 11, the more the cohesion and solidarity the American people felt during that period dissipates, Rumsfeld said.

Part of the reason this feeling has dissipated is because there have been no more attacks in the United States. There have been terror attacks in other parts of the world - Madrid, London, Bali and Russia, to name just a few.

The war on terror, Rumsfeld said, is like the Cold War. During the Cold War, public opinion ebbed and flowed. "Millions of people demonstrated against the United States, not against the Soviet Union," he said. "They acted as if the Soviet Union wasn't one of the most repressive regimes in history. People were granting moral equivalence to the Soviet Union - a vicious dictatorship - in the free countries of Western Europe and the United States. People can drift off."

The same is true today, Rumsfeld said. There are many who believe that governments can negotiate with terrorists or who believe if just left alone, they will somehow leave freedom-loving people alone. But that is not possible, Rumsfeld said. "The dangers today, the lethality of the weapons today, the risks to our country, are real," he said.

A tabletop exercise a few years ago posited a release of smallpox in two airports in the United States. The simulation showed that inside of a year, almost 1 million people would die, Rumsfeld said.

"There are dangers, there are real people out there - as you well know - who will put in place a small number of clerics that will tell everyone how they will live and how they will behave," he said. "And that's not what we're about."

But overall, the United States and its allies weathered the Cold War. The countries stuck together and today the Soviet Union is no more. "Our country would not be here if we didn't have the ability to ride through some ups and downs in respect to opinion and come out the other end having made some right decisions," Rumsfeld said. "I expect the same today."