Buffett says Clinton, Obama could run a business
Mon Mar 3, 2008 8:08am EST
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Warren Buffett said on Monday that he would be comfortable putting Democratic presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama in charge of running a business, though not his Berkshire Hathaway Inc insurance and investment company.

Buffett has said he plans to support the Democratic Party in the 2008 elections, as it seeks to retake the White House.

He has not endorsed Clinton or Obama for the presidency, but said on CNBC television: "I would put either one of them in charge of a business."

Separately, Buffett identified Walt Disney Co's Bob Iger as among chief executives who are doing a good job and who run a company in which Berkshire does not invest. Earlier on CNBC, Buffett put the CEOs of warehouse club operator Costco Wholesale Corp and nuts and bolts distributor Fastenal Co in that group.

(Reporting by Jonathan Stempel; Editing by Lisa Von Ahn)

Network; Claims It Is 'Telling Us What to Think'
TWC founder and global warming skeptic advocates suing Al Gore to expose 'the fraud of global warming.'

By Jeff Poor
Business & Media Institute
3/3/2008 6:11:04 PM

The Weather Channel has lost its way, according to John Coleman, who founded the channel in 1982.

Coleman told an audience at the 2008 International Conference on Climate Change on March 3 in New York that he is highly critical of global warming alarmism.

“The Weather Channel had great promise, and that’s all gone now because they’ve made every mistake in the book on what they’ve done and how they’ve done it and it’s very sad,” Coleman said. “It’s now for sale and there’s a new owner of The Weather Channel will be announced – several billion dollars having changed hands in the near future. Let’s hope the new owners can recapture the vision and stop reporting the traffic, telling us what to think and start giving us useful weather information.”


The Weather Channel has been an outlet for global warming alarmism. In December 2006, The Weather Channel’s Heidi Cullen argued on her blog that weathercasters who had doubts about human influence on global warming should be punished with decertification by the American Meteorological Society.

Coleman also told the audience his strategy for exposing what he called “the fraud of global warming.” He advocated suing those who sell carbon credits, which would force global warming alarmists to give a more honest account of the policies they propose.

“[I] have a feeling this is the opening,” Coleman said. “If the lawyers will take the case – sue the people who sell carbon credits. That includes Al Gore. That lawsuit would get so much publicity, so much media attention. And as the experts went to the media stand to testify, I feel like that could become the vehicle to finally put some light on the fraud of global warming.”

Earlier at the conference Lord Christopher Monckton, a policy adviser to former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, told an audience that the science will eventually prevail and the “scare” of global warming will go away. He also said the courts were a good avenue to show the science.

March 4, 2008
Violence Leaves Young Iraqis Doubting Clerics

By SABRINA TAVERNISE
BAGHDAD — After almost five years of war, many young people in Iraq, exhausted by constant firsthand exposure to the violence of religious extremism, say they have grown disillusioned with religious leaders and skeptical of the faith that they preach.

In two months of interviews with 40 young people in five Iraqi cities, a pattern of disenchantment emerged, in which young Iraqis, both poor and middle class, blamed clerics for the violence and the restrictions that have narrowed their lives.

“I hate Islam and all the clerics because they limit our freedom every day and their instruction became heavy over us,” said Sara, a high school student in Basra. “Most of the girls in my high school hate that Islamic people control the authority because they don’t deserve to be rulers.”

Atheer, a 19-year-old from a poor, heavily Shiite neighborhood in southern Baghdad, said: “The religion men are liars. Young people don’t believe them. Guys my age are not interested in religion anymore.”

The shift in Iraq runs counter to trends of rising religious practice among young people across much of the Middle East, where religion has replaced nationalism as a unifying ideology.

While religious extremists are admired by a number of young people in other parts of the Arab world, Iraq offers a test case of what could happen when extremist theories are applied. Fingers caught in the act of smoking were broken. Long hair was cut and force-fed to its wearer. In that laboratory, disillusionment with Islamic leaders took hold.

It is far from clear whether the shift means a wholesale turn away from religion. A tremendous piety still predominates in the private lives of young Iraqis, and religious leaders, despite the increased skepticism, still wield tremendous power. Measuring religious adherence, furthermore, is a tricky business in Iraq, where access to cities and towns far from Baghdad is limited.

But a shift seems to be registering, at least anecdotally, in the choices some young Iraqis are making.

Professors reported difficulty in recruiting graduate students for religion classes. Attendance at weekly prayers appears to be down, even in areas where the violence has largely subsided, according to worshipers and imams in Baghdad and Falluja. In two visits to the weekly prayer session in Baghdad of the followers of the militant Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr this fall, vastly smaller crowds attended than had in 2004 or 2005.

Such patterns, if lasting, could lead to a weakening of the political power of religious leaders in Iraq. In a nod to those changing tastes, political parties are dropping overt references to religion.

‘You Cost Us This’

“In the beginning, they gave their eyes and minds to the clerics; they trusted them,” said Abu Mahmoud, a moderate Sunni cleric in Baghdad, who now works deprogramming religious extremists in American detention. “It’s painful to admit, but it’s changed. People have lost too much. They say to the clerics and the parties: You cost us this.”

“When they behead someone, they say ‘Allahu akbar,’ they read Koranic verse,” said a moderate Shiite sheik from Baghdad, using the phrase for “God is great.”

“The young people, they think that is Islam,” he said. “So Islam is a failure, not only in the students’ minds, but also in the community.”

A professor at Baghdad University’s School of Law, who identified herself only as Bushra, said of her students: “They have changed their views about religion. They started to hate religious men. They make jokes about them because they feel disgusted by them.”

That was not always the case. Saddam Hussein encouraged religion in Iraqi society in his later years, building Sunni mosques and injecting more religion into the public school curriculum, but always made sure it served his authoritarian needs.

Shiites, considered to be an opposing political force and a threat to Mr. Hussein’s power, were kept under close watch. Young Shiites who worshiped were seen as political subversives and risked attracting the attention of the police.

For that reason, the American liberation tasted sweetest to the Shiites, who for the first time were able to worship freely. They soon became a potent political force, as religious political leaders appealed to their shared and painful past and their respect for the Shiite religious hierarchy.

“After 2003, you couldn’t put your foot into the husseiniya, it was so crowded with worshipers,” said Sayeed Sabah, a Shiite religious leader from Baghdad, referring to a Shiite place of prayer.

Religion had moved abruptly into the Shiite public space, but often in ways that made educated, religious Iraqis uncomfortable. Militias were offering Koran courses. Titles came cheaply. In Mr. Mahmoud’s neighborhood, a butcher with no knowledge of Islam became the leader of a mosque.

A moderate Shiite cleric, Sheik Qasim, recalled watching in amazement as a former student, who never earned more than mediocre marks, whizzed by stalled traffic in a long convoy of sport utility vehicles in central Baghdad. He had become a religious leader.

“I thought I would get out of the car, grab him and slap him!” said the sheik. “These people don’t deserve their positions.”

An official for the Ministry of Education in Baghdad, a secular Shiite, described the newfound faith like this: “It was like they wanted to put on a new, stylish outfit.”

Religious Sunnis, for their part, also experienced a heady swell in mosque attendance, but soon became the hosts for groups of religious extremists, foreign and Iraqi, who were preparing to fight the United States.

Zane Mohammed, a gangly 19-year-old with an earnest face, watched with curiosity as the first Islamists in his Baghdad neighborhood came to barbershops, tea parlors and carpentry stores before taking over the mosques. They were neither uneducated nor poor, he said, though they focused on those who were.

Then, one morning while waiting for a bus to school, he watched a man walk up to a neighbor, a college professor whose sect Mr. Mohammed did not know, shoot the neighbor at point blank range three times, and walk back to his car as calmly “as if he was leaving a grocery store.”

“Nobody is thinking,” Mr. Mohammed said in an interview in October. “We use our minds just to know what to eat. This is something I am very sad about. We hear things and just believe them.”

Weary of Bloodshed

By 2006, even those who had initially taken part in the violence were growing weary. Haidar, a grade-school dropout, was proud to tell his family he was following a Shiite cleric in a fight against American soldiers in the summer of 2004. Two years later, however, he found himself in the company of gangsters.

Young militia members were abusing drugs. Gift mopeds had become gift guns. In three years, Haidar saw five killings, mostly of Sunnis, including that of a Sunni cab driver shot for his car.

It was just as bad, if not worse, for young Sunnis. Rubbed raw by Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, a homegrown Sunni insurgent group that American intelligence says is led by foreigners, they found themselves stranded in neighborhoods that were governed by seventh-century rules. During an interview with a dozen Sunni teenage boys in a Baghdad detention facility on several sticky days in September, several of them expressed relief at being in jail, so they could wear shorts, a form of dress they would have been punished for in their neighborhoods.

Some Iraqis argue that the religious-based politics was much more about identity than faith. When Shiites voted for religious parties in large numbers in an election in 2005, it was more an effort to show their numbers, than a victory of the religious over the secular.

“It was a fight to prove our existence,” said a young Shiite journalist from Sadr City. “We were embracing our existence, not religion.”

The war dragged on, and young people from both the Shiite and Sunni sects became more broadly involved. Criminals had begun using teenagers and younger boys to carry out killings. The number of Iraqi juveniles in American detention was up more than sevenfold in November from April last year, and Iraq’s main prison for youth, situated in Baghdad, has triple the prewar population.

Different Motivations

But while younger people were taking a more active role in the violence, their motivation was less likely than that of the adults to be religion-driven. Of the 900 juvenile detainees in American custody in November, fewer than 10 percent claimed to be fighting a holy war, according to the American military. About one-third of adults said they were.

A worker in the American detention system said that by her estimate, only about a third of the adult detainee population, which is overwhelmingly Sunni, prayed.

“As a group, they are not religious,” said Maj. Gen. Douglas Stone, the head of detainee operations for the American military. “When we ask if they are doing it for jihad, the answer is no.”

Muath, a slender, 19-year-old Sunni with distant eyes and hollow cheeks, is typical. He was selling cellphone credits and plastic flowers, struggling to keep his mother and five young siblings afloat, when an insurgent recruiter in western Baghdad, a man in his 30s who is a regular customer, offered him cash last spring to be part of an insurgent group whose motivations were a mix of money and sect.

Muath, the only wage earner in his family, agreed. Suddenly his family could afford to eat meat again, he said in an interview last September.

Indeed, at least part of the religious violence in Baghdad had money at its heart. An officer at the Kadhimiya detention center, where Muath was being held last fall, said recordings of beheadings fetched much higher prices than those of shooting executions in the CD markets, which explains why even nonreligious kidnappers will behead hostages.

“The terrorist loves the money,” said Capt. Omar, a prison worker who did not want to be identified by his full name. “The money has big magic. I give him $10,000 to do small thing. You think he refuse?”

When Muath was arrested last year, the police found two hostages, Shiite brothers, in a safe house that Muath told them about. Photographs showed the men looking wide-eyed into the camera; dark welts covered their bodies.

Violent struggle against the United States was easy to romanticize at a distance.

“I used to love Osama bin Laden,” proclaimed a 24-year-old Iraqi college student. She was referring to how she felt before the war took hold in her native Baghdad. The Sept. 11, 2001, strike at American supremacy was satisfying, and the deaths abstract.

Now, the student recites the familiar complaints: Her college has segregated the security checks; guards told her to stop wearing a revealing skirt; she covers her head for safety.

“Now I hate Islam,” she said, sitting in her family’s unadorned living room in central Baghdad. “Al Qaeda and the Mahdi Army are spreading hatred. People are being killed for nothing.”

Worried Parents

Parents have taken new precautions to keep their children out of trouble. Abu Tahsin, a Shiite from northern Baghdad, said that when his extended family had built a Shiite mosque, they did not register it with the religious authorities, even though it would have brought privileges, because they did not want to become entangled with any of the main religious Shiite groups that control Baghdad.

In Falluja, a Sunni city west of Baghdad that had been overrun by Al Qaeda, Sheik Khalid al-Mahamedie, a moderate cleric, said fathers now came with their sons to mosques to meet the instructors of Koran courses. Families used to worry most about their daughters in adolescence, but now, the sheik said, they worry more about their sons.

“Before, parents warned their sons not to smoke or drink,” said Mohammed Ali al-Jumaili, a Falluja father with a 20-year-old son. “Now all their energy is concentrated on not letting them be involved with terrorism.”

Recruiters are relentless, and, as it turns out, clever, peddling things their young targets need. General Stone compares it to as a sales pitch a pimp gives to a prospective prostitute. American military officers at the American detention center said it was the Qaeda detainees who were best prepared for group sessions and asked the most questions.

A Qaeda recruiter approached Mr. Mohammed, the 19-year-old, on a college campus with the offer of English lessons. Though lessons had been a personal ambition of Mr. Mohammed’s for months, once he knew what the man was after, he politely avoided him.

“When you talk with them, you find them very modern, very smart,” said Mr. Mohammed, a non-religious Shiite, who recalled feigning disdain for his own sect to avoid suspicion.

The population they focused on, however, was poor and uneducated. About 60 percent of the American adult detainee population is illiterate, and is unable to even read the Koran that religious recruiters are preaching.

That leads to strange twists. One young detainee, a client of Abu Mahmoud, the moderate Sunni cleric, was convinced that he had to kill his parents when he was released, because they were married in an insufficiently Islamic way. General Stone is trying to rectify the problem by offering religion classes taught by moderates.

There is a new favorite game in the lively household of the young Baghdad journalist. When they see a man with a turban on television, they yell and crack jokes. In one joke, people are warned not to give their cellphone numbers to a religious man.

“If he knows the number, he’ll steal the phone’s credit,” the journalist said. “The sheiks are making a society of nonbelievers.”

Kareem Hilmi, Ahmad Fadam, and Qais Mizher contributed reporting

“Muslim Weekly” Apologizes to Daniel Pipes

Press Release
March 3, 2008
http://www.meforum.org/press/1866

PHILADELPHIA – The Muslim Weekly, a London-based publication, issued an apology today to Daniel Pipes, director of the Middle East Forum, concerning a defamatory article it published in February 2007.

That article repeated a false allegation made by Tariq Ramadan that Daniel Pipes had lied to a conference hosted by London mayor Ken Livingstone in January 2007. (For details of what did occur, see the article by Mr. Pipes, "Is Tariq Ramadan Lying [about Magdi Allam]?")

Upon receipt of a libel complaint from Mr. Pipes, the Muslim Weekly accepted that Mr. Pipes spoke accurately at the conference and that he did not lie. The Muslim Weekly apologized to Mr. Pipes for the distress caused by the article. The Muslim Weekly's retraction, published both in print and online in the Feb. 29, 2008 issue, reads in full as follows:

On February 9, 2007, the Muslim Weekly published an article, "World civilisation conference: Professor Tariq Ramadan on Islamic Threat," under the byline of Dr. Mozammel Haque, concerning a speech given by Professor Ramadan on 20 January 2007. We reported that he accused Professor Daniel Pipes, an American specialist on the Middle East, of lying in his speech to the same conference about the religion of an Egyptian Muslim. We now understand that Professor Pipes spoke accurately and that he did not lie. We retract what we wrote about him and apologise to Professor Pipes for any distress caused by our article.

Reacting to this apology, Mr. Pipes said: "I am delighted that Muslim Weekly recognizes there is no truth whatsoever in Tariq Ramadan's allegations concerning my statement at the World Civilization Conference, and that it has forthrightly set the record straight."

Immediate release

For more information, contact Amy Shargel at
215-546-5406, ex. 22
Shargel@MEForum.org

The Rejected
This is the first in a series of posts by a CJR reporter embedded with American forces in Iraq
By Paul McLeary
Mon 3 Mar 2008 01:15 PM
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This month marks the fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq. For many of the journalists who have covered it, it has been the story of their lifetime, but we’ve nevertheless seen coverage of the war slip off the front pages over the last few months. While there are still plenty of reporters risking their lives doing great work in Iraq, much of the political, social, and economic complexity of today’s war seems to be getting lost in the election-year crush, even as the war continues to be a major issue in the campaign. This series is CJR’s attempt to add a little bit of context to the whole, while digging into stories that don’t always make it into our morning newspapers.

The Rejected

“They’re gonna see us going out, and know that we have to come back this way,” Captain Glenn Helberg cautioned his men. We were walking out of combat outpost Courage, northwest of Baghdad, just before nightfall. The message was simple: the enemy studies habits, trends, and patterns just as any other military outfit does; so as the platoon left the base, Helberg wanted to make sure that his men were not complacent on the way back in.

It was a hell of a way to walk to a neighbor’s house for dinner, but that was just what we were doing on this cold, clear January night. Sheik Munder, a prominent Shia in the area, had invited the captain over for dinner, and despite the fact that his house was less than a mile from the patrol base, we would be walking across open road, with flat, open land on either side, so every precaution would be taken. This rural area had been an al Qaeda stronghold until just a few months ago, before the Sons of Iraq—groups of local men paid $300 a month to man checkpoints and keep security in their area—came out in force. Given that some of these men are the same ones who were planting IEDs last year, American commanders are taking nothing for granted.

There is still plenty of daily combat going on—especially in the major remaining al Qaeda strongholds up north near Mosul, in the central “breadbasket” of Diyala, and south of Baghdad in Arab Jabour—but peaceful meetings like this are just as common. Counterinsurgency strategy places a premium on what has been called the “strategic corporal,” soldiers who have to think like an infantryman, act like a diplomat, and be able to change from one to the other on the fly. This is how the game is being played in the new, relative quiet of Iraq—especially in areas where despite the lull in daily violence, the war is still far from over.

In 1999, Marine General Charles C. Krulak wrote of the “three-block war” where soldiers in irregular conflicts “will be confronted by the entire spectrum of tactical challenges in the span of a few hours and, potentially, within the space of three contiguous city blocks.” In regions like the area around Courage, where the Iraqi national government is little more than a rumor, Krulak’s words ring true: “The individual [American service member] will be the most conspicuous symbol of American foreign policy. His or her actions may not only influence the immediate tactical situation, but have operational and strategic implications as well.”

At heart, much of this work is done by cultivating relationships—trying to show the Iraqis that American soldiers are strong but fair, an honest broker in a country rife with corruption and double-dealing, and under a government seen by most Sunnis as being sectarian at best, a tool of Shia Iran bent on violently subjugating the Sunni minority at worst.

Part of this relationship-building is figuring out who the power players are in any given region. The term “sheik,” I discovered, has become one of the more overused terms in Iraq. Once the Awakening movement (the original name for the Sons of Iraq) started in Anbar in 2006, and then moved through different parts of the country in 2007, Iraqis began popping up, assuring the Americans that they were sheiks who wielded power in their respective regions. The soldiers at Courage, (Charlie company of the 1st Battalion, 21st Regiment, 25th Infantry Division, part of the 2nd Stryker Brigade Combat Team) are new to the area, and “a lot of guys are coming out of the woodwork trying to assert themselves saying, ‘hey I’m a sheik, I’m in charge of this whole town,’ so you have to weigh that with what the old units told us about that guy operates,” Helberg told me as we walked to Munder’s house in the thickening darkness. Apparently, sheik Munder made the cut.

Not long after walking out of the T-walls protecting the 180 men at Courage, having been accompanied part of the way by two stray dogs that always follow patrols out of the gate, we stopped at a modest structure with a few cars out front. While the platoon pulled guard around the house, Helberg, his interpreter, and radio operator Timothy Wascher and I went inside. The typical rural Iraqi home is dark, dirty, and bare, with exposed brick walls and little in the way of furniture, but the sheik’s house was a small step up. He had two worn couches in the living room, a computer, and a few cushioned chairs shoved into corners. The walls were a smoke-stained blue, offset by a thick, gold curtain over the front window, and a few portraits and dusty prints clung to the walls. The front door was thrown open to the January chill. A few children ran around barefoot, and women were hidden away back in the kitchen.

No sooner had Munder passed out cigarettes and served few trays of chai tea then the lights went out. For a few minutes, the room was so dark that the only discernable objects were the cherries of five lit cigarettes moving up and down, gesturing to the invisible conversation. Power failures are so common that the sheik just kept talking; mostly about the dark days just a few months ago when al Qaeda ran the area, of the family members killed, how his sons had to drop out of school. He joked that he was thinking of renaming his tribe “The Rejected,” since that’s what al Qaeda used to call Shia.

Once the lights flicked back on, the food came out—platters of chicken, fish, rice, cucumber, tomato, and hot peppers, with stacks of flatbread. In typical gracious Arab fashion, Munder insisted that Helberg’s jundi (soldiers) come in a few at a time to share the meal.

But there was also business to discuss. The sheik complained about the shoddy nature of the local bridges. Helberg told him that he was having some engineers come up to check them out, and also to scout locations for a new road through the area. When the talk turned to infrastructure improvements, Helberg made sure to mention that he wanted the Iraqis to start going though the government to address their concerns, and not come to him with all their complaints. With the American military pushed out into the neighborhoods, American officers have become the go-to guys for everything that needs doing. Need power? Ask the Americans. Have complaints about the water quality? Tell the Americans. Want something built or repaired? The Americans. While this either means that the Americans are seen as the honest broker in the area or just have the deepest pockets, it overwhelms company commanders who need to funnel these requests up the chain of the Iraqi government, which requires dozens of signatures from technocrats all the way up the food chain for anything to get done. And in the weeks it takes to do this, the commanders are constantly pestered. The plan, now that security has been increased, is to get the Iraqis to start seeing the government as an institution that they can utilize for themselves, and stop using the Americans as the first point of contact. At this point, the idea doesn’t seem to be taking so well, so wide is the chasm between the locals and the national government.

One of the topics of discussion was a little local drama that had unfolded the morning before. Helberg had called a meeting of all the local Sunni and Shia sheiks to air their concerns, but some maneuvering by the Iraq Army’s Muthana Brigade, stationed nearby, threw a wrench into the plans. (The fierce Muthana Brigade is comprised of mostly Shia soldiers, and the residents of this area are mostly Sunni, who don’t trust the Shia-dominated Iraqi government or their Shia-majority Army.) The morning of the meeting, the commander of the brigade, General Nasser, held a rally to celebrate and publicize the fact that elements of the brigade had taken over a few checkpoints in the area. Many Shia happily attended, and there was a big show for the television cameras.

Having heard about the rally beforehand, the Sunni sheiks protested by staying home from the meeting, thinking that they were showing their displeasure with the Shia sheiks. Helberg was infuriated by the Sunni refusal to show, and refused to meet with the leaders of only one sect. It was no small problem, and one Helberg would seek to rectify the next day at a highly contentious meeting with Colonel Ehssan, the Sunni leader of the Sons of Iraq in the area, and some local Sunni sheiks. But for tonight, it was cigarettes, chai and plenty of food. Nothing of importance was decided, but some fragile bonds were established between the newly arrived American unit and a local who wields some clout. The walk home was cold and, save for the barking of dogs, quiet.