So intellectuals like Kanan Makiya, the prominent former exile and writer who strongly advocated for the American invasion, say they plan to move their research projects to the American University. Mr. Makiya founded the Iraq Memory Foundation, an organization based in the fortified Green Zone in Baghdad that is documenting Saddam Hussein’s atrocities.

January 3, 2007
Op-Ed Columnist
A Hanging and a Funeral

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Last Saturday was a strange day. It started with the hanging of Saddam Hussein. The more I read about the hasty, quasi-legal maneuvers used by Iraq’s Shiite leaders to rush Saddam to the gallows on a Muslim holiday, Id al-Adha, and the more I watched the grainy cellphone video of the event, in which a guard is heard taunting Saddam with chants of “Moktada! Moktada!” — the Shiite cleric whose death squads have killed hundreds of Sunnis — and the more I read of the insults Saddam spat back, the more it resembled a tribal revenge ritual rather than the culmination of a constitutional process in which America should be proud to have participated.

Bassam al-Husseini, an aide to Iraq’s Shiite prime minister, was quoted by the BBC as saying Saddam’s execution was “an Id gift to the Iraqi people.” Many Sunnis would not share that view. For his part, Saddam, a Sunni, used his last breaths to spew vitriol against “the traitors, the Americans, the spies and the Persians.” For Persians, read Shiites.

No wonder the BBC’s world affairs editor, John Simpson, reported from Baghdad: “Altogether, the execution as we now see it is shown to be an ugly, degrading business, which is more reminiscent of a public hanging in the 18th century than a considered act of 21st-century official justice. Under Saddam Hussein, prisoners were regularly taunted and mistreated in their last hours. The most disturbing thing about the new video of Saddam’s execution for crimes precisely like this is that it is all much too reminiscent of what used to happen here.”

But as I said, Saturday was a strange day. After watching Saddam’s hanging in the morning, I was sitting at my computer late in the afternoon and suddenly heard the strains of “My country ‘tis of thee, sweet land of liberty” being played on the TV in the next room. When I checked what was going on, I saw President Ford’s coffin being unloaded from Air Force One.

I have to admit I got a lump in my throat watching that scene and listening to that stirring melody. Saddam’s execution was a snapshot of a country divided. Gerald Ford’s funeral was a snapshot of a country united — political supporters and opponents alike paying tribute to a president, who was surrounded by an honor guard representing every color of the American rainbow and whose place in history was secured by an act of pardon and national healing.

How fortunate to live in a country where this is the political norm, built up over generations.

“Because of our basic unity, we can afford to be divided on specific issues,” said Michael Mandelbaum, author of “The Case for Goliath.” “Democracy is about differences and contesting them in the public sphere, and it only works when there is basic agreement about the fundamentals. We should feel fortunate that we have a democratic history and set of beliefs. Those beliefs can be imported by those who want them and don’t have them, but they can’t be exported. We can only create a context where others would want to import them.”

The raw tribal theatrics of Saddam’s hanging highlight just how few of these values Iraq has imported. We are to blame for not creating the security needed for those values to take hold. But not enough of our Iraqi allies have risen to the occasion, either. It was our closest Iraqi partners who oversaw Saddam’s tribal hanging. We have to look that in the eye.

Saddam deserved to die 100 deaths. But imagine if Iraq’s Shiite leaders had surprised everyone, declared that there had been enough killing in Iraq and commuted Saddam’s sentence to life in prison — sparing his life in hopes of uniting the country rather than executing him and dividing it further. I don’t know if it would have helped, but I do know Iraqis have rarely surprised us with gestures of reconciliation — only with new ways to kill each other.

Now President Bush wants a “surge” of more U.S. troops to Baghdad, in one last attempt to bring order. Whenever I hear this surge idea, I think of a couple who recently got married but the marriage was never very solid. Then one day they say to each other, “Hey, let’s have a baby, that will bring us together.” It never works.

If the underlying union is not there, adding a baby won’t help. And if the underlying willingness to share power and resources is not present among the major communities in Iraq, adding more U.S. troops won’t help either. Adding more troops makes sense only if it’s to buy more time for positive trends that have already begun to appear on the horizon. I don’t see them.

As Saddam’s hanging underscored, Iraqis are doing things their way. So maybe it’s time to get out of their way

Bob Parsons' 16 Rules to Live By
Get and stay out of your comfort zone. I believe that not much happens of any significance when we're in our comfort zone. I hear people say, "But I'm concerned about security." My response to that is simple: "Security is for cadavers."

Never give up. Almost nothing works the first time it's attempted. Just because what you're doing does not seem to be working doesn't mean it won't work. It just means that it might not work the way you're doing it. If it was easy, everyone would be doing it, and you wouldn't have an opportunity.

When you're ready to quit, you're closer than you think. There's an old Chinese saying that I just love, and I believe it is so true. It goes like this: "The temptation to quit will be greatest just before you are about to succeed."

With regard to whatever worries you, not only accept the worst thing that could happen, but make it a point to quantify what the worst thing could be. Very seldom will the worst consequence be anywhere near as bad as a cloud of "undefined consequences." My father would tell me early on, when I was struggling and losing my shirt trying to get Parsons Technology going, "Well, Robert, if it doesn't work, they can't eat you."

Focus on what you want to have happen. Remember that old saying, "As you think, so shall you be."

Take things a day at a time. No matter how difficult your situation is, you can get through it if you don't look too far into the future and focus on the present moment. You can get through anything one day at a time.

Always be moving forward. Never stop investing. Never stop improving. Never stop doing something new. The moment you stop improving your organization, it starts to die. Make it your goal to be better each and every day, in some small way. Remember the Japanese concept of Kaizen. Small daily improvements eventually result in huge advantages.

Be quick to decide. Remember what General George S. Patton said: "A good plan violently executed today is far and away better than a perfect plan tomorrow."

Measure everything of significance. I swear this is true. Anything that is measured and watched improves.

Anything that is not managed will deteriorate. If you want to uncover problems you don't know about, take a few moments and look closely at the areas you haven't examined for a while. I guarantee you problems will be there.

Pay attention to your competitors, but pay more attention to what you're doing. When you look at your competitors, remember that everything looks perfect at a distance. Even the planet Earth, if you get far enough into space, looks like a peaceful place.

Never let anybody push you around. In our society, with our laws and even playing field, you have just as much right to what you're doing as anyone else, provided that what you're doing is legal.

Never expect life to be fair. Life isn't fair. You make your own breaks. You'll be doing good if the only meaning fair has to you is something that you pay when you get on a bus (i.e., fare).

Solve your own problems. You'll find that by coming up with your own solutions, you'll develop a competitive edge. Masura Ibuka, the cofounder of Sony, said it best: "You never succeed in technology, business, or anything by following the others." There's also an old Asian saying that I remind myself of frequently. It goes like this: "A wise man keeps his own counsel."

Don't take yourself too seriously. Lighten up. Often, at least half of what we accomplish is due to luck. None of us are in control as much as we like to think we are.

There's always a reason to smile. Find it. After all, you're really lucky just to be alive. Life is short. More and more, I agree with my little brother. He always reminds me: "We're not here for a long time; we're here for a good time."

January 2, 2007
Teddy Kollek, Ex-Mayor of Jerusalem, Dies at 95

By STEVEN ERLANGER and MARILYN BERGER
JERUSALEM, Jan. 2 — Teddy Kollek, who as mayor of Jerusalem for nearly three decades did more to build and develop the city as Israel’s capital than any other figure while still seeking to meet the needs of its Arab residents, died today in Jerusalem. He was 95.

The Jerusalem Foundation, the fund-raising organization he established, announced his death, saying it was of natural causes.

Mr. Kollek, a former aide to David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s founding prime minister, became mayor of the small Jewish West Jerusalem in 1965 and nearly resigned after a difficult first year. But after Israel conquered the city’s eastern sector in the 1967 war, he threw himself into the project of a reunited Jerusalem and was re-elected five times before losing in 1993, at age 82, to Ehud Olmert, now Israel’s prime minister.

Mr. Olmert always chafed at Mr. Kollek’s reputation as an indefatigable fund-raiser, institution builder and preacher of coexistence, but he praised Mr. Kollek today, saying, “His name will always be an inseparable part of Jerusalem’s glory.”

The late Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin called Mr. Kollek the greatest builder of Jerusalem since Herod the Great. Mr. Kollek was a founder of significant markers of the modern city and state: the Israel Museum, the Jerusalem Foundation, the Jerusalem Theater, the Cinematheque, the Kahn Theater and other cultural institutions.

Uri Lupolianski, the current mayor, said today, “Teddy was Jerusalem and Jerusalem was Teddy” — a high compliment from a leader of the city’s ultra-Orthodox community, with whom Mr. Kollek sometimes fought.

Mr. Kollek was a man of will, charm and energy who loved being a friend of the rich and the famous, including Elizabeth Taylor and Frank Sinatra, tapping many of them for money for his beloved city.

He was above all a Labor Zionist who set about trying to unite the two halves of Jerusalem the best he could. “He’d say, ‘I’d love the city to be empty of Arabs, but since they are here, we need to serve them, because if we treat them badly they will hate us more,’ ” said Tom Segev, an Israeli historian who ran Mr. Kollek’s office for two years in the late 1970s.

Within hours of Israel’s conquering of East Jerusalem in 1967, Mr. Kollek went to the military commander and demanded milk for Arab children. “He was the symbol of the unification of Jerusalem and he was considered pro-Arab,” Mr. Segev said. “But he was simply pragmatic.”

But Mr. Kollek felt he should have done more for Arab residents, said Yisrael Kimche, an urban planner. "He himself said he did not do enough for East Jerusalem,” Mr. Kimche said. “He did not bring equality in city services between east and west. He tried, but not hard enough."

In 1967, Mr. Kimche said, “the gap between east and west was vast.”

“Three times a week there would be running water in the east,” he said. “Many neighborhoods there did not have sewage or phone lines. Eventually, needs were mostly met, but there was never a budget large enough to cope."

Meron Benvenisti, who worked closely with him, said Mr. Kollek saw Jerusalem “in terms of Vienna, a mosaic of different cultures where the tension is benign, invigorating, not threatening to destroy the city.” But what Mr. Kollek called heterogeneous others, like Mr. Benvenisti, called dangerously polarized.

Israel’s annexation of East Jerusalem has not been recognized internationally, and the 190,000 Jews who moved into it are considered illegal settlers by much of the world. The Palestinians want East Jerusalem as the capital of a future state.

In his 28 years as mayor, Mr. Kollek often worked 18-hour days, prowling the city and keeping his home telephone number in the public directory. He would often return home to a pile of little message slips taken by his wife, Tamar. Sometimes he would return those calls, even at 3 a.m., telling people that he would get their problems fixed.

Mr. Kollek was “someone who always wanted something to do,” Mr. Segev said.

“The worst thing that could happen to him was if a meeting were canceled,” Mr. Segev added, “and he’d wander around and pick up a paper from a desk and it became the most important thing in the city of Jerusalem for a moment.”

After 1993, Mr. Kollek devoted much of his time to the Israel Museum and to the Jerusalem Foundation, which he set up in 1966 to raise millions of dollars in private financing for city projects, including parks, sports facilities and the restoration of archeological treasures.

“He really forged the landscape of modern Jerusalem as we know it and he saw the museum as the jewel in that landscape,” said James Snyder, the museum’s director. “The idea of this modernist museum complex on the crest of Jerusalem was his, to build a great national museum for this new state.”

Mr. Kollek will be buried on Thursday in a state funeral in a section of Jerusalem’s Mount Herzl cemetery reserved for Israel’s leaders.

He was born Theodor Herzl Kollek on May 27, 1911, in a small village near Budapest. He was named after the Viennese founder of the Zionist movement. He grew up in Vienna, where his father was a director of the Rothschild bank.

“I came from a multiracial society,” Mr. Kollek once recalled in an interview.

By the age of 11 he was already a Zionist, and as the Nazis came to power, he organized an underground to smuggle refugees into Palestine. He emigrated to Palestine in 1935 and helped found the Ein Gev kibbutz. That first year, he contracted typhoid five times and suffered several bouts of malaria.

Still, Mr. Kollek remembered life at Ein Gev as paradise. “We came to an empty land, we started growing trees, fishing on the Galilee,” he said. “You saw your dreams materialize.”

In 1937, he married Tamar Schwartz, whom he had met in Vienna. They had two children, Amos, a filmmaker, and Osnat, an artist. His wife and children survive him, as do five grandchildren.

Mr. Kollek was sent to England in 1938 to work with a Zionist youth movement, but he spent most of his energy getting Jews out of Nazi-occupied countries. In 1939 he went to Vienna carrying British entry permits for Austrian Jews. There he met a Nazi who seemed like a minor clerk, and after 15 minutes the official agreed to release 3,000 Jewish children from concentration camps.

Mr. Kollek said he never saw the man again until 1961, when the “clerk” was brought to Israel to face the charge of crimes against humanity. It was Adolf Eichmann.

In England, Mr. Kollek met David Ben-Gurion, who became his mentor. During the war, Mr. Kollek said, it became clear that “a country of our own was an absolute necessity to save the Jewish people from extermination.”

Mr. Kollek made frequent trips to Cairo, where he met Jewish soldiers serving in the British Army and used his connections to smuggle British arms to Palestine, then under the control of Britain. He was later criticized for giving the British the names of 1,000 members of the Jewish underground whose terror tactics were meant to force the British out.

“I’m proud of it,” he said later. “I’d do it again. The Jewish Agency, our government at the time, was respectable and on the way to becoming a state. We had one large defense organization, the Haganah.

“There were splinter groups — Stern, Irgun — who killed, blew up the King David, hanged British sergeants,” he added, referring to the King David Hotel in Jerusalem.

After World War II, Mr. Kollek was sent to New York, where he worked partly out of a telephone booth and partly out of an office over the Copacabana nightclub to arm the Jewish state-to-be for an expected invasion by Arabs.

As Israel neared statehood in May 1948, he helped smuggle weapons. In one day, he raised a million dollars in Mexico City to buy airplanes. There was a ban on arms exports to Israel, so dismantled airplanes, for example, were shipped as prefabricated houses. Help came from unexpected quarters, like the Irish dockworkers who, he said, “saw us as comrades in arms against the British.”

When Israel became independent, Mr. Kollek headed the American desk in the Foreign Ministry, then went to Washington as minister in the Israeli Embassy.

Mr. Kollek was a founder of the modern Israeli foreign intelligence service. Throughout the 1950s he was a liaison between Israel and the fledgling Central Intelligence Agency. In 1956, he helped the C.I.A. obtain a copy of a secret speech that changed the course of the cold war. It was a denunciation of the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, then dead three years, by his successor, Nikita Khrushchev. A copy of the speech went from Poland to Israel to the director of central intelligence, Allen W. Dulles, who gave it to his brother, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, who leaked it to The New York Times. It was the first sign that Stalin’s reign of terror might be over.

In 1952 Ben-Gurion summoned Mr. Kollek to Jerusalem to become director general of the prime minister’s office. In 12 years, Mr. Kollek became involved in everything from broadcasting to the Dead Sea Scrolls, from aid programs to desalination.

When Ben-Gurion left office, Mr. Kollek transferred his energies to the Israel Museum. He had nursed the idea from the early 1950s, when most of Israel’s leaders considered a museum of art a luxury the young state could not afford. But he argued that if Israel needed to absorb immigrants and build its military power, “it also needs expressions of culture and civilization.”

Ben-Gurion, then in retirement, urged his protégé to seek the mayor’s office in Jerusalem. Mr. Kollek’s son offered no encouragement. “What will happen if you win?” he asked. “You’ll be in charge of the garbage?”

When a coalition on the city council elected him mayor in 1965, he went to Jerusalem’s best tailor and ordered smart olive-green uniforms for the sanitation inspectors.

“I got into this by accident,” he said. “I was bored. When the city was united, I saw this as an historic occasion. To take care of it and show better care than anyone else ever has is a full life purpose. I think Jerusalem is the one essential element in Jewish history. A body can live without an arm or a leg, not without the heart. This is the heart and soul of it.”

Mr. Kollek never spoke perfect Hebrew, or perfect German or perfect English, Mr. Segev recalled. “In some ways, he remained an alien. But Israel is a colorful mosaic, and there was also a place for a stone called Teddy Kollek.”

January 2, 2007
Editorial
Mr. Wolfowitz and the Bank

When Paul Wolfowitz speaks publicly these days, he is usually making good sense. The head of the World Bank (formerly No. 2 at the Pentagon) has criticized Chinese banks for ignoring environmental and human rights standards when they lend to Africa, told the White House it needs to do more to alleviate African poverty, and has vowed that corrupt officials won’t be allowed to siphon off money from projects that are supposed to benefit the poor.

So why do so many people at the bank mistrust him — including many of the leading shareholders? At last fall’s annual meeting, European ministers insisted that the bank’s board would oversee Mr. Wolfowitz’s anticorruption program, to ensure that no country was punished arbitrarily.

That is not a vote of confidence and not a healthy state of affairs. Mr. Wolfowitz needs to figure out how to earn more than just the Bush administration’s trust.

Some of his critics will never forgive him for championing the disastrous Iraq war. But he has compounded their suspicions, surrounding himself with a tight group of former Bush administration officials who — true to their roots — have little patience for explaining themselves and even less for criticism.

Mr. Wolfowitz and his aides did an especially poor job explaining their decisions to suspend or delay hundreds of millions of dollars in loans because of alleged corruption, feeding fears that they were settling scores. When Hilary Benn, Britain’s top aid official, publicly questioned bank policies, an unidentified senior bank official dismissed Mr. Benn to The Financial Times as “an ambitious political climber.” That’s no way to win friends or donors. Mr. Wolfowitz wrote to the paper to say that was not his view and has since visited London to patch things up, but relations remain cool.

Mr. Wolfowitz has yet to outline a broader vision for the bank, which might inspire his staff and rally international support. There are certainly a host of issues that need his leadership. The bank needs to give more of a voice to less wealthy and poor countries. It needs to find new ways to mobilize private sector financing. And it needs to get more deeply — and more systematically — involved in addressing global challenges like epidemics, sustainable energy and post-conflict reconstruction.

Mr. Wolfowitz deserves praise for championing debt relief for the world’s poorest countries. And he is right that the bank needs to do a lot more to fight corruption, which can cripple any development effort. To be heard on these subjects, Mr. Wolfowitz will have to work harder to earn the trust of his staff, his shareholders and everyone who cares about development. He needs a more inclusive management style and a more diplomatic inner circle, and to articulate broader goals beyond stopping corruption. That way he would have the credibility to fight the good fight.