Saturday, June 25, 2011

The Real War –vs– The Illusions, A community under siege in tribal Pakistan...



The Real War –vs– The Illusions, A community under siege in tribal Pakistan...


It is understandable that Parachinar is referred to as Pakistan's "Gaza Strip." It is also understandable that Pakistan would set-up the final confrontation with the West here, considering that it was here that the mission began under Zia's "Islamisation" program some thirty years ago (SEE: SHIA-SUNNI JIHAD IN KURRAM: IRAN BLAMED). The American "Taliban" under Mehsud vs the real Taliban under Haqqani will come to a head, with the accompanying Pakistani airstrikes on Mehsud's forces and American Predator strikes upon Haqqani's forces, with the innocent Shia, backed by Iran caught in the middle. Sure sounds like a formula for a great conflagration on Pakistani soil

Peter Chamberlin


In the complicated calculus of the men who would plan our destinies for us, if we would only let them, it is often hard to fathom which line of reasoning represents their dominant thinking on any strategic subject. In Afghanistan and in Pakistan, it is getting harder to distinguish between the minimum acceptable goals for the Empire and less-desirable, though ultimately acceptable conditions for ending the war. In particular, thinking of the “pipeline wars” (which American corporations seem to be losing, badly), if America is projected to fail miserably in its plans for Central and South Asia, then what secondary objectives is the Empire preparing for the region?

Could it be possible that the rationale for the US terror war is falling apart so quickly since the big production in Abbottabad, that the secondary objective of playing spoiler for the winners in the energy war is replacing the primary mission of Central Asian energy-looting as America’s military solution for economic salvation? The war itself is unsustainable, absent the collective will of the American people to wage this war without a valid reason, or foreseeable end, the 911 attacks having been replaced long ago with whatever excuse Obama wanted to use as justification. On top of this, the bin Laden psyop is having the unintended consequence of undermining support for continuing the war and increasing the public uproar to find an end to this war that now has no adversary, in the absence of a terrorist mastermind. It is slowly winding-down to total defeat for the United States, absent another earth-shattering unifying, “Pearl Harbor-like event” in the near future. What will the American administration do to sustain this unpopular war? How far will they go to keep the Afghan/Pakistan war going?

The NATO side is currently still pursuing a policy of faking negotiations with old acquaintances of Mullah Omar, like Tayyab Aga, allegedly discussing reconciliation efforts for harmless “Taliban” (those who are not veteran Taliban fighters). These fighters are expected to turn-in their weapons for cash, even though the actual Taliban spokesmen for Mullah Omar insist that there will be no negotiations as long as occupation forces remain in Afghanistan. The US has staked-out the position that those who fought against the coalition government cannot be “reconciled,” meaning that all those who have fought against the American occupation have no other choices but to keep fighting until they die in combat, or turn themselves in for arrest. The Taliban still insist that there is nothing to talk about as long as the occupation continues. Mullah Omar has issued hand-written warning notes to local mosques stating that those who negotiate with the Americans are marked for death. There is no room for compromise there for either side. So what good will it do for US/British negotiators to talk to second or third level Taliban who have no sway with high command? It is more than likely that all of this reconciliation talk is merely for public entertainment purposes, maintaining popular support for the war and Obama, by pretending that Obama is getting it right and peace may be just around the corner.

It is becoming clear to those who care to look for the truth about the war, that the US never intended to leave Afghanistan, it has always planned to use Afghanistan and Pakistan as a military beachhead into Central Asia (SEE: Neutral Afghanistan serves regional stability). Every American spokesperson who has publicly denied these now obvious facts, has been consciously lying to the world, in order to advance this mass deception as far as possible before the American people wake-up. Researchers and analysts are breaking through the carefully constructed wall of American deception to understand just how cynically American leaders have manipulated Pakistan and India, playing them off against one another in a dangerous game of brinkmanship designed to serve only Imperial ends.

Indian and Pakistani writers have to dig deeper to understand the psyops that are still playing-out along the Durand Line. They must ask: How deep does the American deception go, or is everything about this war a deception? Only then can it become apparent the defensive actions that each nation must take, perhaps in a united action against the Imperial designs.

Indian writer M K Bhadrakumar reports on American attempts to sideline both Afghan and Pakistani governments from any negotiations with the Afghan Taliban (SEE: CIA instigating mutiny in the Pakistani army), in order to buy time to force an American compromise. His article offers the following novel explanation of why American leaders would intentionally engineer a risky potential “colonel’s coup” to unseat Gen. Kayani:

“The only way is to set the army’s house on fire so that the generals get distracted by the fire-dousing and the massive repair work and housecleaning that they will be called upon to undertake as top priority for months if not years to come.”

In the opinion of this former Indian diplomat, Washington was actively destabilizing Islamabad, and it was endangering the entire region in order to do it. A destabilized nuclear sub-continent has always been the implied result of these American machinations. It is only logical to ask whether this has always been the plan, and for what conceivable reasons? Did they really believe that they could force both Afghans and Pakistanis to follow orders that would harm their own countrymen, or that their plans would succeed even if they got everything that they wanted from them? What could American leaders hope to get out of this planned conflagration that they probably could have achieved by less violent, more honorable means? There is nothing “honorable” about this ongoing thirty-year war. Our “upstanding” national leaders have always planned to use American military muscle to protect their great redistribution of wealth (the exact opposite of the Marxist concept, the rich get everything), as they looted, raped and plundered the entire world, even our allies. It is only now, in the end game, when these things are being made clear to all who care to see.

The plan has always been to use American military muscle to create for themselves the power to dictate a political/military solution to the wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan, by sidelining all the valid neighborhood players, even the Afghan “straw man” government itself, much as it has already done for itself in Iraq. They have even applied the same time-tested formula for destabilization which was used in Iraq, but without the same results. The US is no more in position to dictate terms to Afghanistan today than it was ten years ago. Unlike Iraq, where the “Anbar solution” of tribal militias was field-tested, there are no major differences between Afghans to exploit. Iraq is nothing like Afghanistan or Pakistan. Different solutions were required, even though Pentagon and CIA geniuses only knew the one song of divide and conquer. That is why they have failed so miserably in the Far Eastern war theater.

Since they had only one song and dance routine, the CIA and their ISI counterparts have kept playing on the same theme, in their little war games, intended to hold the attention of patriotic Americans and Pakistanis. In Afghanistan, Western powers have manipulated the tribal and national differences by developing the Northern Alliance coalition of Hamid Karzai, which is mostly comprised of Uzbeks, Tajiks and Hazara Shia, as a counterfoil to mostly Pashtun Taliban forces. The anti-Taliban coalition efforts of a massive nationwide propaganda effort, supplemented with an equally massive program of enormous pay-offs, backed-up by NATO firepower have failed to buy or intimidate loyalty from local warlords or join their forces to the Karzai/Northern Alliance government.

Since Karzai’s reelection, the Western media, politicians and generals have been steadily undermining the support Karzai did have, undercutting his efforts to create a High Peace Council, probably well on their way to grooming his replacement, someone like former Afghan spymaster, Amrullah Saleh, who is already a long-term CIA asset, besides being Karzai’s exact opposite. Saleh is one of those selected individuals, unfortunate enough to be native to a CIA-targeted country, who was sent to America before 2001, for specialized training by the CIA. As a top junior aid to legendary Northern Alliance leader Ahmad Shah Massoud, he was there in Takhar Province, serving as the CIA liason, when the “Lion of Panjshir” was assassinated on September 9, 2001. He has been a favorite of the spooks since then, especially after the FBI forced him on Karzai as his new spy chief in Feb. 2004, coincidentally, just one month before Pakistani Taliban founder Abdullah Mehsud was released from two and one-half years at Guantanamo “brainwashing academy” into his custody as Afghan intelligence chief. The story of the Tehreek e-Taliban Pakistan that he helped to inspire is a tale of grief and double-crossing. They are the “poison” that was introduced into the Pakistani soil, which Saleh so colorfully described.

The Americans are hedging their bets in Afghanistan, like always, fronting two streams of the Afghan political spectrum at once. The Karzai/Rabbani alliance is backing the reconciliation talks with the Taliban that could lead to the partitioning of Afghanistan, split between the Northern Alliance and the Taliban in control of the south, in order to facilitate pipeline and development plans for the north. This is the State Dept. best solution. This position is allegedly unacceptable to Northern Alliance candidate Saleh, who advocates carpet-bombing Pakistan and night-time Special Forces decapitation raids all the way from Balochistan to Bajaur. His position is that there can never be victory in the war against the Taliban until their support lines to the Pak Army are cut. He represents the most radical factions of the CIA, who advocate total war with Pakistan.

In order to dissuade the Pak Army from continuing to support the Afghan Taliban, the CIA master-plotters have created their own versions of “lashkars,” such as the fake Pakistani Taliban, to battle and terrorize the Army and the people of Pakistan. Since 2003, Musharraf’s generals have been helping him and his successor Gen. Kayani, to revive the defeated Taliban movement as a substitute for concerted, decisive military action against the remnants of “al-Qaeda” and the Afghan Taliban leadership, who had been all been allowed to regroup in Waziristan and Balochistan by both the ISI and the CIA. They originally relocated there from northern Afghanistan in the infamous “Kunduz airlift,” where they were spared from certain annihilation at the hands of Uzbek Gen. Dostum and the Northern Alliance forces. Once they were flown there, they began to reoccupy the old CIA/ISI training camps there which had formerly been vacated after they were used to drive-out the Soviets. The IMU terrorists of Tahir Yuldeshev, who were brought across the border with Abdullah Mehsud in his instant army of fake Taliban (composed of Northern Alliance fighters), ran the camps and shared their military expertise with the new Taliban recruits being readied to keep the Afghan conflict going.

Abdullah brought his Uzbek and Chechen fighters to Wana, where they joined-up with Nek Mohammed. This was long before the Pakistani Taliban began their waves of Pakistani terrorism, when they still had the trust of the real Afghan Taliban. Because of his trust for new militant leader Baitullah Mehsud, as well as his initial distrust of Abdullah Mehsud, because of the Guantanamo years, Mullah Omar sent his hand-picked emissary, celebrated veteran commander Mullah Dadullah, to bless the Pakistani Taliban union and name Baitullah as its head. Dadullah oversaw the effort in S. Waziristan, where he had been working closely with Nek Mohammed and his successors, Abdullah and Baitullah Mehsud to develop a formidable new Taliban army of 20,000 fighters or more, including a suicide-bomber academy. After Dadullah shepherded the Waziri Accord peace treaty between the Pakistani Taliban and the Army on orders from Mullah Omar himself, Dadullah was also targeted for drone assassination, just like Nek before him (even though British Special Forces claim the kill).

Under the command of Baitullah, the Pakistani Taliban (now called Tehreek e-Taliban Pakistan, TTP) unleashed a wave of terror upon tribal leaders, government forces and the mosques of the unbelievers. At first, this terror was blamed upon the IMU terrorists who had been given shelter by the Mehsud leadership, providing an opening for the Pak Army to introduce a counter-insurgency, in the form of aggressive tribal lashkars of their own.

Local Ahmadzai Wazir militant leader Maulvi Nazir created a lashkar army of 900 heavily armed men, who proceeded to run the IMU terrorists out of his territory around Wana, S. Waziristan. The Army then began to replicate the lashkar-building process in other towns, hoping to enlist the tribals in a massive show of force to evict the “bad Taliban” and those labeled as “al-Qaeda” from Pakistan. Nothing much came from the effort, except for a bunch of dead lashkar militiamen.

Needing a concrete strategy to counter US destabilization plans and demands for total war in the Tribal Regions, Pakistan has continued to sell the “good/bad Taliban” theme as a path to eventual “reconciliation,” putting distance between the two groups, so that heavy force could then be used to eliminate the criminal Taliban in successive operations. But each time that Pakistan made a little headway, lashkar leaders would be eliminated in car-bomb attacks, or by the occasional Predator drone.

Beginning with the massive drone assault in Bajaur, on October 30, 2006, which killed 80 religious students, drone attacks have become the favorite weapon for radicalizing locals and driving them into the eager arms of the Taliban. This is one of the reasons for believing that American leaders have always secretly supported the formation of militant armies, in order to have someone to fight and to provide valid-seeming reasons for prolonging the war. Everything they do creates more resistance.

The complex CIA schemes have forced Pakistan to develop its own ISI counter-schemes as a matter of self-defense against American demands to wreck the country and force the Pakistani people into open rebellion against their elected government. The ten-year deception in Pakistan has gone through many stages, fronted by many separate players, all of them having some stake in the Empire winning the contest. Today in Afghanistan we have an ongoing war, fueled by a series of major deceptions. The more obvious it becomes that the war is being lost, the more the deceptions will fall apart. At some point, the lies will fall apart faster than they can be reconstructed in a new form.

In Pakistan, we see at least ten times the number of major deceptions which we can see unwinding across the border. I guess that this is what they mean by an “intelligence driven war.” Every interested great power has a game at play now in Pakistan; every interested great power is double-gaming someone else, partners are being made to be cashed-in later, when it will bring the greatest advantage. Pakistan’s military, the “Establishment” and every one of the many “mafias” (land mafia, gas mafia, etc.) have their own separate games going on, all of them game off each other. Seeing daylight through this morass of webs of intrigue is almost an impossibility. It is not surprising that the game-players are having such a difficult time controlling the eventual outcome of this soon to be exploding psychological warfare experiment.

American mind-benders have playing their usual games and inventing a few new ones in their careful efforts to destabilize Pakistan without really upsetting the apple cart, losing control of the situation. It suits CIA and American military purposes to give the ISI enough rope to hang itself. This explains why they seem to go along with Pakistan’s generals, even when they are obviously lying or playing games to avoid causing a rupture in relations. In their international media campaign to embarrass the Pak Army and government, the media-masters are careful to go just so far in slandering them, but not far enough to force negative international reactions. US leaders understand the close relationship between the ISI and certain militant groups, but, until recently never charged the Army with supporting militants in public. Since open psychological war broke-out between the two sides in 2008 (SEE: US/Pakistan Showdown/Throwdown July12), they have maintained a love/hate relationship, creating difficult circumstances for fulfilling contracts and such. As far as the United States is concerned, Pakistan has a contractual obligation to help eliminate the “al-Qaeda” militants that the US and Pakistan have created together.

For these reasons, the CIA lets the ISI have its Lashkars and its “strategic depth” militants, preferring to seize the opportunity to use the controlled media to weave stories about the Wana battles into tales of “al-Qaeda,” the mythical international terrorist network. Beginning with the story about Mullah Nazir and his battle against the IMU terrorists of Abdullah and Baitullah Mehsud, CIA-sponsored Pakistani and Western reporters have invented stories of “good Taliban” turning against “al-Qaeda.” (The most reliable of these al-Qaeda story creators was Asia Times reporter Syed Saleem Shazad, the author of the Al-Qaeda/Taliban split story. Syed worked tirelessly, over several years to weave a tapestry out of whole cloth about the “al-Qaeda” monolith that stood astride the Durand Line, threatening the entire world with “Islamist terrorism.”).

Since its inception, the concept of “good Taliban vs bad Taliban has been fully implemented by both sides, although neither side could agree on whether the “bad Taliban” were those who attacked only Pakistan, or those who attacked only Afghan coalition targets. It seems that most of the time, there has been no Taliban who attacked both sides, except when the Pak Army gave in to American demands and turned its guns upon its friends. By cultivating peace treaties and non-aggression agreements with individual tribal groups, Pakistan had developed an equilibrium with the militants, and for short intervals, terror attacks seemed to have almost come to an end—until the Predator assassination campaign began, ultimately destroying any trust, driving tribal fighters by the thousands into the arms of the Taliban.

American drones have consistently targeted those militant leaders and outfits that the Pak Army has chosen to protect under the wing of its “strategic depth” concept. Both militant and lashkar leaders have fallen prey to drone missiles—the majority of them friends of the Army. The CIA has intensified the drone attacks as the administration upped the ante, demanding more and more that Pakistan dare not give, since national suicide is out of the question.

The big question then becomes then: Is Obama willing to accept a partial non-Haqqani offensive against the TTP, the mad dog killers of Col. Imam and Khalid Khawaja, in N. Waziristan, in place of an anti-Haqqani offensive? Of all the militant groups, the criminal gangs who have attached themselves to the psychopathic killer Hakeemullah Mehsud, heir to all that Baitullah stood for, are by far the most dangerous. The only explanation for such a grouping of monsters who have never attacked American or NATO troops, is that they consider them to be allies, or at least employers. If the US would support the elimination of these killers first, as a favor to our struggling ally, then perhaps Pakistan’s influence upon such “Taliban” as Haqqani can help bring the Afghan war to a resolution, if that is what Obama really wants.

If events follow the time-tested patterns of previous Pakistani offensives, then an operation in N. Waziristan would mean another flushing of refugees onto the roadways and trails of neighboring provinces (overwhelming limited social services wherever they come to rest, Pakistan already has more refugees than any other country). This will once again demonstrate Pakistan’s basic inability to carry-out the total war actions that the US is demanding from them. Pakistan doesn’t have either the manpower or the equipment needed to meet national disasters (just like most other nations), nor the capabilities required to eliminate an entrenched heavily armed insurgency. Will Obama accept this excuse for doing half of what he has demanded, just as Bush eventually did in the past?

The basis of the new great Show seems to be the “Waziristan Accords,” agreements between the Army and the Ahmadzai Wazirs of Mullah Nazir of the South and Uthmanzai Waziris in the North, led by Gul Bahadur. The agreement allegedly binds the tribes to police their own areas against Mehsuds or foreign terrorists. The antecedent to this Wazir option is the creation of multiple lashkars amongst the other tribes, even among the Mehsuds, if that is possible, considering the fate of the previous anti-Mehsud Mehsud leader, Qari Zainuddin Mehsud, that might prove to be impossible.

Pak plans to rope in tribals to take on al-Qaeda, according to the Indian press. If the plan really is to rebrand the Tehreek e-Taliban Pakistan as the new “al-Qaeda,” as the IMU Uzbeks once were, then this might put Pakistan’s generals and American generals on the same page. Once the offensive actually gets underway it will become obvious exactly who is on what page. Until then, we will have to get by on the delicious clues given us in Pakistan news leaks, or the latest militant attacks, to try to understand the mindset of the generals on both sides, who continue to run the show.

In light of recent events in S. Waziristan that are described below, it is possible to project the shape of the upcoming offensive: The Army goes after Hakeemullah Mehsud and the foreign terrorists under his protection, demanding from Haqqani lieutenant and local Wazir tribal leader Gul Bahadar that he fulfill his treaty commitments under the Waziristan Accords and actively suppress foreign terrorists, as well as the criminal Mehsuds, if they violate his territory, thus limiting the operating range of fleeing TTP militants (SEE: Pakistan Using Wazir Tribe of Mullah Nazir to Set-Up Next Psyop):

“The alleged 2007 agreement referred to in [that] report, between Nazir and the govt., allows the Army to wash its hands of the Wana region, making the tribes responsible for keeping-out Uzbeks, Mehsuds, Al-Qaeda and other foreign militants, an impossible task for the outgunned tribes.”

But this plan too, is being undermined by the government leaks that “telegraph” their next moves to the militants, raising lashkars for what is coming next, giving their friends there plenty of time to either prepare or relocate. It might be that the Army telegraphing its next moves gives Hakeemullah the same opportunity to flee the area before the battle, that it gives to Haqqani. It is here where the Army will rely upon the new Kurram Treaty to bring Haqqani into action against Hakeemullah in Kurram and perhaps in Hangu, Hakeemullah’s home turf, as well. We are already seeing an impending confrontation between the two groups over continued TTP attacks upon Shia, in spite of having signed the truce, thus endangering the fragile peace (SEE: Kurram Agency: Haqqani warns Hakimullah not to ‘sabotage’ peace deal):

“Things have now reached a very awkward point … Haqqani has said some very strong words to Hakimullah: ‘Stop it yourself or my men will make you stop it’.”

It may be that Haqqani also has a personal grudge to settle with Mehsud, over the murder of Col. Imam and Khalid Khawaja, who was highly respected by his father Jalaluddin and by all Afghan Taliban, since Mehsud refused to spare the old jihadi teacher’s life. If that is the case, then he may be more than willing to help-out the ISI clean-up the mess.

The timing of the events around Col. Tarar’s kidnapping and murder nearly one year later, help to confirm the “rogue” out of control status of Hakeemullah Mehsud, when compared to the Haqqanis. Ignoring all Haqqani, ISI, or Afghan Taliban pleas, Hakeemullah Mehsud gave the order to kill Col. Imam, which can be seen on YouTube.

(SEE: Taliban release video of killing of Col Imam).

Taliban release video of killing of Col Imam, posted with vodpod

His body was then dumped in the Danday Darpakhel area of Miramshah on January 23, 2011. This was clearly intended to serve as a challenge to Haqqani’s authority. On Jan. 27, CIA agent Raymond Davis shot two ISI agents dead in Lahore. The Haqqani-backed Kurram peace deal between the Turi tribe and Shia was struck ten days later, on February 3.

On Feb.7, 2010, top Taliban leaders were placed under protective custody (or arrest) in Pakistan, beginning with Taliban number two, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar. As far as can be ascertained, the Mullahs were arrested to stop the previous attempt to initiate secret American/Taliban negotiations—that time they were with Mullah Omar’s actual second in command.

On 2/26/2010, Khalid Khwaja petitioned the Lahore High Court to block US efforts to have the arrested Taliban extradited to Afghanistan and into US custody.

One month later, 03/25/2010, former ISI agent Khwaja was abducted, along with Col. Imam and the British journalist Asad Qureshi, in North Waziristan. They were allegedly in Waziristan at the insistence of retired generals Beg and Gul, trying to interview Sirajuddin Haqqani and Wali-ur Rahman Mehsud.

The Asian Tiger organization… offered to release them in exchange for three important Afghan Taliban figures — Mulla Abdul Ghani Biradar, Mulla Abdul Kabir and Mansoor Dadullah — presently ‘in the custody of the Pakistan government’. The group didn’t even know that Kabir wasn’t, in fact, in detention in Pakistan.”

Khalid Khwaja was found dead in Miranshah on April 30, 2010. Qureshi was ransomed.

The Murder of Col Imam was a turning point for several parties, in many areas of their relationships. The fact that Hakeemullah ignored pleas from fellow Islamist Sirahuddin Haqqani, as well as the ISI, confirms the split between the Pakistani Taliban group and the ISI-supported Afghan Taliban. Hakeemullah Mehsud and his TTP followers, especially the IMU Uzbeks and the just as radical Punjabi recruits of the Lashkar e-Jhangvi are a criminal/terrorist menace and must be eliminated from Pakistan. The US military has no intention of helping the Pak Army with this formidable task, such as focusing drone attacks first upon this criminal network, even though it would be a simple task, even considered as an obligation to help an ally and old friend. The American military is only interested in those fighters in Pakistan who wage war on NATO, not those who choose to fight against Pakistan. Reciprocity might be the better choice over issuing demands and making ultimatums to Pakistan’s generals.

Col Imam was a bitter critic of the United States which, he said, had left the Afghan mujahideen in the lurch after the defeat of the Soviet forces in the late 1980s. The CIA hated Imam and the Pakistani Taliban hated him. When he went to N. Waziristan he was carrying a list of 14 Taliban leaders who worked for India and probably the US. That list ended-up in Hakeemullah’s hands. His name was alleged at the top of the list. Perhaps that was why he had to die.

From the Pakistani press comes the claim that Col. Imam and Khalid Khawaja may have been killed by Ilyas Kashmiri, as revenge for his being tortured by the Army in 2003 for trying to kill Musharraf. Other elements of the national press claim that the pair were killed for calling the Afghan Taliban mujahedeen and the Pakistani Taliban criminals.

If that was the case then it would justify Pakistan setting Kashmiri up for a drone kill in Wana on June 3. Unlike the surreptitious drone whacking of Baitullah Mehsud (where ISI allegedly tricked the CIA into striking Baitullah), it appears that a potential joint effort to get Kashmiri may have been conceivable, considering Headley’s testimony about Kashmiri’s connections to the Mumbai attack, made Ilyas Kashmiri an embarrassment for both sides. Like always, in this tortuously slow dance between Pakistani and American leaders, that has been grinding-on for decades now, at times it is impossible to tell whether the two sides are in almost perfect step with each other, whether they are hopelessly out of sync, or even at times, whether they are moving at all. Judging by today’s deadly drone strike on Haqqani forces in Kurram, it seems like they might be at odds with each others plans. Recent reports have revealed that the US is attempting to draw Ibrahim Haqqani into negotiations, even though US drones continue to strike Haqqani targets in Kurram Agency.

Can the Obama team accept Pakistan’s revised game plan and spin it in an effective manner, so that it will fool the yokels back home, even after all the yelling that they have done over North Waziristan? Or is the great game suddenly no longer about maintaining the illusion? Has the American/NATO position deteriorated so far down that they must force a “game-changer” upon us all? Have run up against so many walls that we have given-up entirely upon the American vision for Afghanistan and Pakistan as the new international strategic corridor, the new “Silk Road” to Central Asia? Is the new intent to simply so destabilize the region that no one else can reap the economic rewards?

There are many good questions here that no one wants to touch, or to see answered. The questions will answer themselves in short order, whenever it becomes apparent whether Obama opts for Pakistan’s pacification or for its destabilization. Will he maintain and escalate the state of confrontation until it leads to widespread violence between two old allies, or will he choose to calm things down in Pakistan, even as he risks revealing the American hand and long-term plans for moving into Central Asia?

Perhaps the most important part of this whole new (recycled) psyop is that the Tehreek e-Taliban Pakistan will now play the role of “Al-CIAda” (SEE: The CIA/ISI Soap Opera In South Waziristan) for the remainder of this drama....



Wednesday, June 15, 2011

NATO Being Used by Washington In Libya to Hurt Chinese Interests?


NATO Being Used by Washington In Libya to Hurt Chinese Interests?

June 2011


As U.S. Secretary of Defense continues his victory lap around
U.S. foreign bases, scolding NATO allies along the way for failing to
pull their weight in the alliance, it is well worth noting that many
of the NATO member states committed only under intense U.S. pressure
to operations in Afghanistan, while Libya has generated even less
enthusiasm in European capitals.

One of the great advantages of the end of the cold War two decades
ago, coupled with the rise of the Internet is that readers worldwide
now have an open window into the Russian press and society. Of course,
there are ideological holdovers from the Soviet era, most notably
Russian paranoia about hostile military groupings on their frontiers,
most notably NATO, which Russia not unreasonably sees as dominated by
the U.S.

Nowhere is the ideological gulf still separating Moscow and Washington
more evident than in NATO's mission in Libya. A leading Russian
newspaper, Vedomosti, on 9 June published an editorial titled simply
"From the Editors: War With China".

Lest an oilprice reader think that this is some covert cryto-Commie
anti-Western screed, it might be noted that Vedomosti is owned by the
Finnish Independent Media Company; published jointly with The Wall
Street Journal and Financial Times.

After noting that congressmen questioning Libyan operations and their
attendant costs are being criticized by Obama administration officials
as "taking a non-constructive position," the editorial then moves on
to quote Paul Craig Roberts, who served as U.S. Assistant Secretary of
the Treasury under President Ronald Reagan, who wrote in the most
recent issue of Foreign Policy Journal, Roberts wrote and[sic] article
titled "Libya: The DC/NATO Agenda and the Next Great War" that
commented, "judging by all, the protests against Kaddafi were
organized by the CIA in the eastern part of Libya, where 80 percent of
the oil reserves are concentrated and there are considerable Chinese
investments into the energy sector."

Whatever Washington's ulterior motives, there is no doubt that NATO's
military operations in Libya are harming China's fiscal
interests. According to information from China's Ministry of Trade, by
March, when the military operation began, there were 75 major Chinese
companies operating in Libya, and they had concluded $18 billion in
contracts. Because of the NATO operations in Libya, the Chinese
companies are expecting gigantic losses.

It is beyond dispute that China has targeted Africa for major
investment, which trade figures bear out. While in 1995 China's trade
with Africa was $6 billion, in 2010 it exceeded $130
billion. According to estimates of the South African Standard Bank, by
2015 Chinese direct investments into African nations will reach $50
billion. China is today receiving 28 percent of its oil import from
Africa, a figure that will grow in the future.

China has also acquired great political weight in Africa, and it not
only is free of the colonialist baggage of the European powers, it
does not subject African political leadership to harangues about human
rights like Washington. On a grassroots level, again unlike the

U.S. and European nations, along with its business interests it is
building infrastructure, such as roads, railroads and schools, much
appreciated by the local populace. This presence gave the
International Monetary Fund, headquartered in and dominated by
Washington, a significant rebuff at the end of 2008, when, having
spent several years discussing a loan agreement with Angola's
government, immediately prior to its signing IMF officials learned
that Angola had already received a low interest $2 billion Chinese
long-term loan and subsequently no longer needed IMF money. Similar
things happened later in Chad, Nigeria, Sudan, Ethiopia, and Uganda.


So, is there any wonder that Moscow suspects Washington of using NATO
as its muscle to demonstrate in Africa that uppity leaders had better
take heed of American dictates and downgrade their business ties with
the Celestial Empire? It is notable that the Libyan operation is the
Pentagon's AFRICOM command's first outing. It is also of note that no
African nation has offered to host AFRICOM, leaving it to be run out
of a U.S. base in Stuggart. For reasons obvious to all but the most
diehard American chickenhawks, Africans (which of course includes
Libyans) apparently prefer Chinese goods and Chinese-built schools to
hectoring human rights lectures, loans with interest fees and
condition that would make a Mafia don blanch and a hail of bombs and
bullets. Russia, which has not deployed its military outside its
borders since the collapse of the USSR, is viewing events in North
Africa with more dispassion and insight than the chattering punditry
in Washington.

By John Daly
Women like Mansour give him another title: emancipator of women
is appended below.

Now we've just heard Mrs. Clinton spewing forth Orwellian speaks
everywhere. For example, according to this blurb from FT:

But Mrs. Clinton told the African diplomats that it was time to put
that behind them, at a meeting of the 53-member African Union in
the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa, as the first US secretary of
state to address the group. Over many years Mr. Gaddafi has played
a major role in providing financial support for many African
nations and institutions, including the African Union," she said.
"It has become clear by the day that he has lost his legitimacy to
rule and that we are long past the day when he can remain in power."

She continued,

"to act by telling the Libyan leader to leave the country, expelling
Libyan diplomats still loyal to Mr. Gaddafi's regime, and working
with the opposition National Transitional Council. Your words and
actions could make the difference in bringing this situation to a
close and allowing the people of Libya to get to work rebuilding
their country,"

And she rounded it out saying,

"The world needs the African Union to lead."

1) So Mrs. Clinton told the African countries: "The world needs the
African Union to lead." but she also pressed them to follow the
directive of western powers. And she put the second conjunctive first
and then told them "to lead". You take our instructions and go out
there and do an act that would make you look like you're leading and
keep us out of the picture. Ha, ha! (She followed up with threats of
a Libya 2.0 or 3.0 or 4.0 later if you don't take the instructions
like God's sacred words. It was in the same FT article where she
spelled it all out!)

1a) While the African Union was leading the effort to negotiate a
ceasefire from all parties and start the walk down the negotiated
settlement path, western powers consistently ignored that leadership
effort. So we can see immediately that the call for the AU to lead is
a farce, a self-serving edict.

(With a legal dispute to be decided in a US court, criminal or civil,
but especially in the latter, the judge always invariably frowns on
Mrs. Clinton's kind of lone ranger, uncompromising attitude. Even if
you had murdered someone but would now show contrition, your lawyer
can cite a list of "mitigating circumstances" to help the judge bring
things to a close. That is the much more desirable outcome from the
court's point of view because the society, does not need more rancor
or damages. Likewise, the world would be a much better place if we
don't have Mrs. Clinton's kind of attitude around.)

1b) Of course, when Mrs. Clinton talks about the world, she means the
US government and its lackeys.

We know that the world consists of South Africa which was heading the
ceasefire and negotiation effort.

We know that the world also consists of many countries which have been
looking at the NATO barbarism with gritted teeth, knowing not what
they can do to stop killing and terrorizing the civilians NATO claims
to be protecting by running those 4,000 air strikes so far.

We know that the world also consists of the camels which were burnt to
death, maimed or frightened by NATO bombs and missiles that targeted
their reserve habitat.

We know that the world also consists of the FIDA president Kirsan
Ilyumzhinov who was brave enough to pay a visit to Tripoli and played
a game of chess with Qaddafi, risking the merciless NATO bombs.

1c) Of course, Mrs. Clinton is eager to avoid a political defeat by
having this barbarous campaign drawn out.

There is a blip in the UK Guardian:

Top story: Prolonged Libya effort unsustainable, warns Navy chief

13 Jun 2011: First Sea Lord says that if crisis continues beyond
90-day extension, government will have to examine priorities

So, Mrs. Clinton was actually eager to get the Africans to turn
against their brothers and sisters. But she made it sound like it was
their obligations. Of course, these African countries would be the
next and next targets for NATO bombs. But that has to be done
sequentially. So, by helping Mrs. Clinton, those countries are in
fact accelerating their schedule to get bombed into oblivion.

2) Mrs. Clinton's telling you that you need to forsake the friends who
have been standing by your side through the years, through thick and
thin, and have given you the much needed cash and moral support when
you were in dire financial straits, on the first day she walks into
your house and talk to you. (Mrs. Clinton was the first US foreign
secretary to address the AU, according to FT.)

3) she said: "It has become clear by the day that he has lost his
legitimacy to rule and that we are long past the day when he can
remain in power."

Of course, Mrs. Clinton, just yesterday, BBC News reported that

Nato now says it has carried out more than 4,000 air strikes on
Libyan government forces.

The air strikes obviously have caused people to flee, even your
so-called friends whom you have been feeding them with fatted calf
everynight and showering them with gold and silver pieces.

But it's disingenuous for you to say that Qaddafi's government has
lost legitimacy to govern "by the day" because of its own action.

Rather it's the rapist who is telling you that your wife has lost her
legitimacy to be your wife because she has been raped by another man,
namely you, day after day.

And ultimately it is not just Qaddafi's own fate that is holding back
NATO's wet dream from coming true, it is all his followers who have
not forgotten the "good old days", the GMMR or the Great Man-Made
River, the careers they have been able to establish because of the
government's progressive social policy.

Does Mrs. Clinton dare to address the women in Libya who were able to
have a great career and social status because of Qaddafi and call him
women's emancipator?

Can she convince them that bringing back the old monarchy to Libya and
make the country a part of the Cameron-Clinton United Kingdom is what
they want? Can they choose?

========

1) Excerpt from FT:

But Mrs. Clinton told the African diplomats that it was time to put
that behind them, at a meeting of the 53-member African Union in the
Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa, as the first US secretary of state
to address the group. Over many years Mr. Gaddafi has played a major
role in providing financial support for many African nations and
institutions, including the African Union," she said. "It has become
clear by the day that he has lost his legitimacy to rule and that we
are long past the day when he can remain in power."

Mrs. Clinton urged them to act by telling the Libyan leader to leave
the country, expelling Libyan diplomats still loyal to Mr. Gaddafi's
regime, and working with the opposition National Transitional Council.
Your words and actions could make the difference in bringing this
situation to a close and allowing the people of Libya to get to work
rebuilding their country," Mrs. Clinton said. "The world needs the
African Union to lead."

. . .

Pulling no punches, Mrs. Clinton also warned African representatives
that the pro-democracy movement spreading through the Arab world could
soon extend to their countries unless they embarked on wide-ranging
political and economic reforms. "The status quo is broken and the old
ways of governing are no longer acceptable," Mrs. Clinton said.

She warned that many of the same conditions that caused the uprising
in the Arab world exist in African countries.

. . .

For the full story, please see

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/176ecd08-95fa-11e0-ba20-00144feab49a.html#axzz1PC2UuUzW

----------

2) From CBS News

Women like Mansour give him another title: emancipator of women.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2011/06/08/501364/main20070105.shtml?tag=contentMain;contentBody

"Muammar Qaddafi is the one who opened the opportunities for us to
advance. That's why we cling to him, that's why we love him," says
Mansour. "He gave us complete freedom as a woman to enter the police
force, work as engineers, pilots, judges, lawyers. Anything."

Among Qaddafi's most ardent loyalists are a core of Libyan women who
have risen to high-profile roles in the police, military and
government and credit Qaddafi with giving them greater career avenues
than many of their sisters elsewhere in the Arab world. They consider
any threat to his regime a threat to their own advancement.

Even as Qaddafi's regime has cracked down brutally on dissent, locking
up and torturing opponents, it has also long touted its policies of
breaking cultural taboos concerning women's work and status in the
deeply conservative nation. The most well known example is Qaddafi's
personal guard of female bodyguards, but women have also been elevated
to prominent positions in government ministries.

Qaddafi's policy was in part aimed at weakening traditional tribal and
religious powers so he could impose his own vision of society.

It was only somewhat successful. Women who have gained prominence are
a small minority in an otherwise strongly male-dominated Libya, far
from the popular regime myth of a society filled with revolutionary
fighting women. And, just as for men, advancement depends on total
adherence to Qaddafi's authoritarian rule.

Women were also at the forefront of the protests that launched the
anti-Qaddafi uprising in mid-February, demanding democracy for the and
country hope they better rights for themselves. Still, while they have
no rosy memories of their lives under Qaddafi, they say their struggle
for equality is ongoing. Women activists were dismayed when the rebels
appointed only one woman to the interim administration in their de
facto capital of Benghazi.

"We are very disappointed," said Enas Al-Dursy, a 23-year-old
activist. "We feel like we are being marginalized."

For policewoman Mansour, there is nothing a woman like herself can't
aspire to in Qaddafi's Libya.

"I've never felt that I was treated differently because I'm a
woman. Even when I'm picking up drunkards off the street, nobody ever
said: 'She can't do that, she's a woman,"' said Mansour, who is
charged with cracking down on drug addicts, drunkards and beggars in
the slums of Tripoli.

A woman hugged her as she patrolled the garbage-strewn alleyways of
the Hara Kabira slum in Tripoli's walled city old once the pretty,
brightly painted Jewish quarter, now a crumbling mess of homes filled
with impoverished Libyans and African migrant workers. A little girl
running by slapped Mansour's hand in greeting.

One man with a tattoo on his arm paused at the top of an alley.

"Troublemaker," Mansour said with a wink. He scurried away.

Throughout Qaddafi's Tripoli stronghold, soldiers female a rare sight
in most countries Arab patrol roadside checkpoints in khaki uniforms
and Muslim headscarves. They keep order at gas stations made rowdy by
severe shortages that cause days-long lines. Police women sporting
large sunglasses cruise by in cars.

Senior government officials in coifed hairstyles lunch at an upscale
hotel where reporters stay in Tripoli. Qaddafi's daughter, Aisha, is a
prominent lawyer.

Women are also involved in Qaddafi's mechanism of oppression against
his opponents. Women run their own interrogation center for suspected
female anti-Qaddafi activists, according to a resident who said she
was hauled into one in May.

One of the most hated figures among the Libyan rebels seeking to
overthrow Qaddafi is woman a the former Qaddafi-appointed mayor of
Benghazi, Huda Ben Amer, known as "the executioner." During a public
hanging of a regime opponent in 1984, Ben Amer pulled down on the
man's legs so he would die faster.

Early on, Qaddafi created a cadre of bodyguards female glamorously
made-up women in form-fitting military-style uniforms and high-heeled
boots known as "amazons." He pointed to them as evidence of his
commitment to promoting nontraditional roles for women.

Other hard-core supporters are known as Qaddafi's "nuns of the
revolution," mostly women who came of age during the early years of
Qaddafi's rule in the 1970s and devote themselves to his regime. Now
in their 50s and 60s, many run ministerial departments.

(CBS/AP)

About 27 percent of Libya's labor force were women 2006 in low by
world standards but high for the Arab world. Only Lebanon, Syria and
Tunisia had higher rates, and the increase in women's participation in
Libya over the past 20 years was by far the highest in the region,
rising from 14 percent in 1986, according to the U.N.'s International
Labor Organization.

"In part to boost its legitimacy, the regime promoted a more open,
expansive, and inclusive role for women," said Ronald Bruce St John,
who has written five books on Qaddafi's Libya.

Lisa Anderson, a Libya expert and president of the American University
in Cairo, agreed, noting that when Qaddafi seized power in 1969, few
women went to university. Now more than half of Libya's university
students are women.

"One of the career paths that opened up for women in the past 30 years
is the police, but general access to employment, education and the
sphere public as much as there is one women for dramatically increased
under Qaddafi," she said.

In her studio in an upscale Tripoli suburb, 25-year-old Radia al-Bodi,
a television anchor for Libyan state TV, said women like herself would
fight to defend Qaddafi's regime because of the promise it offered
women.

"This is all because of Father Moammar," said Ibtisam Saadeddin, a
35-year-old soldier who wore gold-edged pins of a smiling Qaddafi on
her khaki uniform and headscarf. "He is our air and sustenance. We
can't be without him."

It's been reported that rebels were within 20 kilometers of Tripoli
engaging in a battle to capture Zawiya, west of Tripoli while
thousands of Qaddafi loyalists were fighting the rebels west of
Misurata to the east of the capital city. The strategy of the
western-backed rebels is clearly that of applying the vise on the
current government. With NATO's infinite supply of mega-sized bombs
and missiles against them like cancer attacks a living organism, there
is no question government forces are growing weaker and weaker and
weaker.

Maybe Qaddafi's days are numbered. In view of the overwhelming forces
of NATO, the prediction is likely to come true.

Yet, there is the right and the wrong in this. Not everyone in the
world is rushing to embrace the wrong despite the overwhelming forces
which is backing the wrong.

So, the Libyan government has every reason to showcase the visit of
FIDE President Kirsan Ilyumzhinov who also played a game of chess with
Qaddafi and relayed the latter's vow not to leave Libya, the country
of his birth and the country to which he helped realizing the Great
Man Made River project.

And just as clear to anyone who can think independently and for him-
and herself is that despite all the fighting near the Libyan capital
that went on during the Russian's visit, Qaddafi wasn't directing any
battle in the field, much less being at the "command/control center to
kill the civilian population" as NATO has repeatedly insisted like a
programmed automaton.

And just as clear is that Qaddafi was telling the truth when he
insisted that he held no government offices and had no positions to
resign from. He couldn't have been able to play chess if ferocious
battles were going on near the capital at the time. We recall that
Dick Cheney who acted as the commander-in-chief in GW Bush's absence
was directing military operations from a war room in the White House
basement during the height of the 9/11 attacks in 2001. (In fact,
transportation secretary Norman Manetta had a visit with Dick Cheney
there and recalled an exchange between the VP and an underling asking
whether a certain order still stood which Manetta thought was related
to the NORAD stand-down. In any case, you don't play chess with a
foreign guest while you're busy commanding a couple of wars in the
battlefield at the same time. You just don't! Period.

I'm sure that David Cameron et al. who are still busy yelling "we must
get rid of Qaddafi" and "time is not on Qaddafi's side" know that
Qaddafi is not physically at the command/control center in the war
NATO wages against Libya. But David Cameron et al. want Qaddafi dead
all the same because he is the unifying force of those who have a
stake in the current Libyan government.

If you see other YouTube clips, you'll see that the people who are
waving the green flags of the government wouldn't be able to find
another name to chant about in conjunction with their support for the
current government if Qaddafi were suddenly killed. And that's why
Qaddafi was right in saying that he "lived in the hearts of millions"
of his followers and that it wouldn't make sense for him to leave
Libya.

This is very much like Mahamat Gandhi for the Indians who were
struggling to free themselves from the colonial rule of Britain.

Likewise, Jesus told his disciples somewhat cryptically that when the
shepherd was gone, the sheep would scatter.

Such is the paradox of a leadership without the requisite weapon for
self-defense.

In this light, we can see that just as Jesus was crucified because the
real powers-that-be wanted him dead (to save themselves), Qaddafi will
likely be killed, along with a lot of innocent Libyans. But the truth
will remain and what is right will remain with the truth.

Susan Raven from her Rome in Africa (1993):

Much of the history of north-west Africa is the history of
foreigners. Its civilizations have been imposed on its indigenous
people largely from outside, and it was usually conquered from
outside. Yet they have endured with considerable vigor.

But the most important fact is that we, meaning the people who only
hear about Libya, whether it is about Lockerbie or about the tall
tales of the rebels in the latest fight, know little about Libya.

Most of us have simply been spoon-fed by the media about Qaddafi's
"crimes", when after four decades of Qaddafi's "rule", we still
haven't seen a case proving his "crimes".

I can wager that none in these newsgroups who are talking Qaddafi
murdering his people have seen a single such act. Of course, there
were executions of people in any country where taking a human life is
legalized. Under George W Bush's leadership, Texas murdered scores,
if not more, of people, many of whom could have been wrongfully
accused. And under Bill Clinton's presidency, tens of Branch
Davidians, most of them were women and children, were burned to death
by the firebombs of government troops.

But the blood lust or greed in these people prevent them from waiting
for a trial, or giving the due process a chance, before we hang the
man.

They insisted that we had to kill the man first "before he killed us",
in contradiction to facts and all the revenues available.

Of course, these same people and their predecessors also insisted that
the German Kaiser's soldiers were killing babies, Saddam's soldiers
were snatching babies from their incubators in Kuwaiti hospitals, and
Qaddafi was "massacring" or "doing awful things to" his own people.

But just as the accusations against the German Kaiser and Iraq's
Saddam Hussein were massive hysteria designed to inflame the people's
emotion and were fabricated to secure the people's support for the
wars the former powers-that-be wanted to wage, the accusations against
Qaddafi remain just accusations.

They're not only unproven, they don't even sound plausible. For
example the Viagra charge.

The fact that so many Libyan women have chosen to remain the most
loyal supporters of Qaddafi's government and find their future and
their careers inextricably tied to Qaddafi's fate is a testimony to
Qaddafi's popularity due to the progressive policy he initiated for
the Libyan society: Libyan women's high level of education and their
career opportunities compared to the rest of the Arab world; the Great
Man Made River (GMMR) project; the 55,000 dollar interest-free loan
for any couple getting married for the first time, etc, etc - facts
which cannot be erased overnight, even with the barbarous explosions
that are ready to kill you and your children next time.

On top of the actual facts which are on the Libyan ground, we happen
to also know that the media and the governments in the west have the
propensity of manipulating the data to suit their war-oriented foreign
policy.

And the people in America are also hopelessly easy to be manipulated
when it comes to helping the warmongers to realize their greed or
blood lust.

This is why people who have a sense of self-respect and are thinking
individuals are unwilling to just take whatever misinformation the war
propaganda machines and their field operatives try to feed them. They
are saying: why don't you believe in the due process? Why do you want
to stoop so low to spill innocent people's blood, even if this Qaddafi
guy you accuse of are as bad as you claim? And when are you going to
stop killing the civilians in order to "protect" them?

I don't know whether the self-made millionaire Kirsan Ilyumzhinov who
was in Tripoli to play a game of chess with Qaddafi today had nothing
to live for to brave NATO's bombs to show solidarity with the Qaddafi
and his followers. Yet I know one thing: we have been fooled too many
times by the warmongers.

Let me tell you, warmongers carry a much greater burden of proof then
the people who are opposed to the wars because their action means the
obliteration of lives, from human to the animals which happened to be
there. In Qaddafi's case, the camels were unfortunately also victims
to NATO's bombs and missiles just as the residents of Libya. Those
camels were fortunate enough to be for a long time in the paradise -
in a Wildlife Reserves Libya has set up and maintained and to which
Qaddafi often took his visitors to show case Libya's own "Sierra Club"
credentials.

But the warmongers and their sycophants never are men or women enough
to shoulder their burden before they start shooting and calling for
someone's head. They just want to degrade the righteousness and the
general quality of the anti-war discussion. These warmongers and
their sycophants are of course not interested in any discussion except
to support the killing until the goal of seizing other people's assets
is finally accomplished.

We've been fooled too many times about how urgent we must kill in
order to protect ourselves or others. But, even as the case of the
Iraq war has been proven beyond the shadow of a doubt to be a war
waged on false pretenses, the war's destruction and its human costs
have yet to be addressed. After more than eight years of rape and
plunder of the land, our government still "asked" and "was granted" an
extension of stay of our tens of thousands of troops in the devastated
country, after such an all-around unpopular and unjustified war.

So, after our government has been proven to use false pretenses to go
to wars which have caused so much destruction and so much suffering to
others, what is the reason for us to believe it again so as to give it
the comfort to wage still another war, to wreak more destruction and
to cause still more suffering to others, when it's still in fact busy
fighting to pacify and killing the indigenous people who dare to
resist its brutal treatment of them and their countries?

========

1) Women like Mansour give him another title: emancipator of women.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2011/06/08/501364/main20070105.shtml?tag=contentMain;contentBody

"Muammar Qaddafi is the one who opened the opportunities for us to
advance. That's why we cling to him, that's why we love him," says
Mansour. "He gave us complete freedom as a woman to enter the police
force, work as engineers, pilots, judges, lawyers. Anything."

Among Qaddafi's most ardent loyalists are a core of Libyan women who
have risen to high-profile roles in the police, military and
government and credit Qaddafi with giving them greater career avenues
than many of their sisters elsewhere in the Arab world. They consider
any threat to his regime a threat to their own advancement.

Even as Qaddafi's regime has cracked down brutally on dissent, locking
up and torturing opponents, it has also long touted its policies of
breaking cultural taboos concerning women's work and status in the
deeply conservative nation. The most well known example is Qaddafi's
personal guard of female bodyguards, but women have also been elevated
to prominent positions in government ministries.

Qaddafi's policy was in part aimed at weakening traditional tribal and
religious powers so he could impose his own vision of society.

It was only somewhat successful. Women who have gained prominence are
a small minority in an otherwise strongly male-dominated Libya, far
from the popular regime myth of a society filled with revolutionary
fighting women. And, just as for men, advancement depends on total
adherence to Qaddafi's authoritarian rule.

Women were also at the forefront of the protests that launched the
anti-Qaddafi uprising in mid-February, demanding democracy for the and
country hope they better rights for themselves. Still, while they have
no rosy memories of their lives under Qaddafi, they say their struggle
for equality is ongoing. Women activists were dismayed when the rebels
appointed only one woman to the interim administration in their de
facto capital of Benghazi.

"We are very disappointed," said Enas Al-Dursy, a 23-year-old
activist. "We feel like we are being marginalized."

For policewoman Mansour, there is nothing a woman like herself can't
aspire to in Qaddafi's Libya.

"I've never felt that I was treated differently because I'm a
woman. Even when I'm picking up drunkards off the street, nobody ever
said: 'She can't do that, she's a woman,"' said Mansour, who is
charged with cracking down on drug addicts, drunkards and beggars in
the slums of Tripoli.

A woman hugged her as she patrolled the garbage-strewn alleyways of
the Hara Kabira slum in Tripoli's walled city old once the pretty,
brightly painted Jewish quarter, now a crumbling mess of homes filled
with impoverished Libyans and African migrant workers. A little girl
running by slapped Mansour's hand in greeting.

One man with a tattoo on his arm paused at the top of an alley.

"Troublemaker," Mansour said with a wink. He scurried away.

Throughout Qaddafi's Tripoli stronghold, soldiers female a rare sight
in most countries Arab patrol roadside checkpoints in khaki uniforms
and Muslim headscarves. They keep order at gas stations made rowdy by
severe shortages that cause days-long lines. Police women sporting
large sunglasses cruise by in cars.

Senior government officials in coifed hairstyles lunch at an upscale
hotel where reporters stay in Tripoli. Qaddafi's daughter, Aisha, is a
prominent lawyer.

Women are also involved in Qaddafi's mechanism of oppression against
his opponents. Women run their own interrogation center for suspected
female anti-Qaddafi activists, according to a resident who said she
was hauled into one in May.

One of the most hated figures among the Libyan rebels seeking to
overthrow Qaddafi is woman a the former Qaddafi-appointed mayor of
Benghazi, Huda Ben Amer, known as "the executioner." During a public
hanging of a regime opponent in 1984, Ben Amer pulled down on the
man's legs so he would die faster.

Early on, Qaddafi created a cadre of bodyguards female glamorously
made-up women in form-fitting military-style uniforms and high-heeled
boots known as "amazons." He pointed to them as evidence of his
commitment to promoting nontraditional roles for women.

Other hard-core supporters are known as Qaddafi's "nuns of the
revolution," mostly women who came of age during the early years of
Qaddafi's rule in the 1970s and devote themselves to his regime. Now
in their 50s and 60s, many run ministerial departments.

(CBS/AP)

About 27 percent of Libya's labor force were women 2006 in low by
world standards but high for the Arab world. Only Lebanon, Syria and
Tunisia had higher rates, and the increase in women's participation in
Libya over the past 20 years was by far the highest in the region,
rising from 14 percent in 1986, according to the U.N.'s International
Labor Organization.

"In part to boost its legitimacy, the regime promoted a more open,
expansive, and inclusive role for women," said Ronald Bruce St John,
who has written five books on Qaddafi's Libya.

Lisa Anderson, a Libya expert and president of the American University
in Cairo, agreed, noting that when Qaddafi seized power in 1969, few
women went to university. Now more than half of Libya's university
students are women.

"One of the career paths that opened up for women in the past 30 years
is the police, but general access to employment, education and the
sphere public as much as there is one women for dramatically increased
under Qaddafi," she said.

In her studio in an upscale Tripoli suburb, 25-year-old Radia al-Bodi,
a television anchor for Libyan state TV, said women like herself would
fight to defend Qaddafi's regime because of the promise it offered
women.

"This is all because of Father Moammar," said Ibtisam Saadeddin, a
35-year-old soldier who wore gold-edged pins of a smiling Qaddafi on
her khaki uniform and headscarf. "He is our air and sustenance. We
can't be without him."

2) Reuters wrap-up for 12/06/2011 in Libya

. . .

Australian Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd, in an interview with Reuters,
said there was a growing confidence that Gaddafi's "days are
numbered".

Libyan state television broadcast images of Gaddafi -- who has been
keeping a low profile since NATO began its air strikes -- meeting
Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, president of the international chess federation.

Ilyumzhinov, quoted by Russian news agencies, said he played a game of
chess in Tripoli with the Libyan leader, who told him he had no
intention of leaving his country.

. . .

NATO member states are keen for a quick resolution in Libya because
their voters do not want another long, costly conflict along the lines
of those in Iraq and Afghanistan.

(Additional reporting by Hamid Ould Ahmed in Algiers, Mussab
Al-Khairall in Tripoli, Matt Robinson in Misrata, Kate Kelland in
London, Andrew Hammond in Dubai and Jan Strupczewski in Brussels;
Writing by Michael Roddy; Editing by Sanjeev Miglani)

---

3) Libyan TV broadcast Gaddafi meeting with FIDE President Kirsan
Ilyumzhinov, Tripoli Jun 12 2011

Uploaded by OnToDenver on Jun 12, 2011

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ylpA3TSBtr8

Libyan state television on Sunday broadcast pictures of leader Muammar
Gaddafi meeting the president of the international chess federation
Kirsan Ilyumzhinov.

"The meeting lasted about two hours, we played chess with Gaddafi. The
meeting took place not in some bunker but in one of the administrative
buildings in the Libyan capital," - told Interfax he Ilyumzhinov, who
is on his trip to Africa.

"Gaddafi said he was not going to leave Libya, stressing that it is
his birthplace and the land where his children and grandchildren ware
killed. He also said that he does not know what position he should
leave." I'm not premier, not the president and not a king. I do not
occupy any post in Libya, and so I have no position that I must leave,
"- said Ilyumzhinov.

"I expressed my condolences to Gaddafi from his family in connection
with the death of his 20-year-old son, two grandchildren and
four-granddaughter. And then they showed me a house, which hit five
bombs and where relatives were killed Kaddafi," - said the president
of FIDE.

Ilyumzhinov also met with Foreign Ministers of Libya and the Ministry
of Education, as well as his eldest son Muhammad al-Gaddafi, who heads
the National Olympic Committee.

"We were also played chess and played the Sicilian Defense," - said
Ilyumzhinov.

---

4) Kalmykia (from Wiki)

The Republic of Kalmykia is a federal subject of Russia (a republic).

It is the only state in Europe where the dominant religion is
Buddhism.[11] It has also become well-known as an international chess
Mecca because its former President, Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, is the head of
the International Chess Federation (FIDE) [until October 2010].

[Kalmykia is by the Caspian Sea, traversed by the northeasterly line
of equal latitude and longitude. And the famous Volga River meets the
Caspian Sea through the southeast of the country.]

Kalmykia's natural resources include coal, oil, and natural gas.

The republic's wildlife includes the famous saga antelope, whose
habitat is protected in Cherny Zemli Nature Reserve.

Population: 292,410 (2002)

Average life expectancy:

* Male: 59.6 years (exceeding Russia's average of 59.0 years)
* Female: 72.4 years (exceeding Russia's average of 72.2 years)

* Ethnic groups

According to the 2002 Census, Kalmyks make up 53.3% of the republic's
population. Other groups include Russians (33.6%), Dargins (7,295, or
2.5%), Chechens (5,979, or 2.0%), Kazakhs (5,011, or 1.7%), Turks
(3,124, or 1.1%), Ukrainians (2,505, or 0.9%), Avars (2,305, or 0.8%),
ethnic Germans (1,643, or 0.6%), and a host of smaller groups, each
accounting for less than 0.5% of the total population.

The ancestors of the Kalmyks, the Oirats, migrated from the steppes of
southern Siberia on the banks of the Irtysh River to the Lower Volga
region. Various reasons have been given for the move, but the
generally accepted answer is that the Kalmyks sought abundant pastures
for their herds. Another motivation may have been to escape the
growing dominance of the neighboring Dzungar Mongol tribe.

---

5) Kirsan Ilyumzhinov (from Wiki)

On April 12, 1993, Kirsan Ilyumzhinov was elected as the first
president of the Republic of Kalmykia, and has been running the state
since then. This has allowed him to promote Kalmyk culture and music,
but more importantly, chess which has been his real passion. Soon
after his election, Ilyumzhinov introduced presidential rule,
concentrating power in his own hands. He called early elections on
October 15, 1995 and was unopposed re-electedthis time for a 7-year
term. He won re-election in 2002.

. . .

Ilyumzhinov has striven to become an "Asian values" authoritarian like
his Singaporean, Korean, and Chinese role models (even though his
republic is in the southern European portion of Russia). He has spent
millions of dollars on chess and supporting religion, building a
Catholic church at the instigation of the Pope John Paul II.[5][9] He
has also built a mosque, a synagogue, 22 Orthodox churches, and 30
Buddhist temples. Chess was made a compulsory subject in the first
three years of school elementarythe only place in the world where this
is the case. The region now has numerous champions.

The Dalai Lama has visited Kirsan Ilyumzhinov on many occasions and
has blessed a number of the temples in Elista, as well as Kalmyk
Buddhist temples overseas.

Ilyumzhinov denies persistent accusations of diverting the republic's
resources for his own use (in fact he does not draw a salary as
president) and of suppressing media freedom.

Visiting journalists and tourists who have come to Kalmykia have
spoken of the great reception they have received, Kirsan Ilyumzhinov
often meeting them in person. In 2004, police dispersed a small number
of demonstrators who demanded his resignation. When Australian
journalist Eric Campbell interviewed people in Elista about
Ilyumzhinov, he found that many were happy that he had managed to gain
widespread attention for Kalmykia through chess, although one was
slightly critical of the money invested in chess projects.

Ilyumzhinov is also famous for his nature-conservative activities. He
created the only reserve in Europe where it is possible to see relict
saga antelope. The year of 2010 in Kalmykia announced by Ilyumzhinov
as Year of Saiga.

---

6) The Saiga Antelope (from Wiki)

The saiga (Saiga tatarica) is a Critically Endangered antelope which
originally inhabited a vast area of the Eurasian steppe zone from the
foothills of the Carpathians and Caucasus into Dzungaria and
Mongolia. They also lived in North America during the
Pleistocene. Today the nominate subspecies (Saiga tatarica tatarica)
is only found in one location in Russia (steppes of the North-West
Precaspian region) and three areas in Kazakhstan (the Ural, Ustiurt
and Betpak-dala populations). A proportion of the Ustiurt population
migrates south to Uzbekistan and occasionally Turkmenistan in
winter. It is extinct in China and southwestern Mongolia. The
Mongolian subspecies (Saiga tatarica mongolica) is found only in
western Mongolia.




Monday, June 6, 2011

Wheeler-Dealers and Hired Guns in Washington, The City's 50 Top Lobbyists


Wheeler-Dealers and Hired Guns in Washington, The City's 50 Top Lobbyists...

By Kim Eisler

Their weapons now are BlackBerries and cell phones. But connections, savvy, and fundraising clout are still the keys to the influence wielded by the city’s 50 top lobbyists.

After a lucrative 12-year run on Capitol Hill, it hasn’t been the best of times for Washington lobbyists, especially Republicans.

One of the most prominent lobbyists, Jack Abramoff, now resides in Cumberland, Maryland, a guest of the Federal Bureau of Prisons. His prosecution on charges of giving illegal gifts and meals to lawmakers and defrauding clients cast a pall over a profession that, fairly or not, didn’t have the best reputation to begin with.

For Republicans who thought things couldn’t get worse, they did. Democrats won both houses of Congress in the 2006 elections, returning some old bulls—among them Barney Frank, Charles Rangel, John Conyers, John Dingell, and Henry Waxman—to power.

Twelve years earlier, new Republican majority leader Tom DeLay instituted the K Street Project, by which loyal friends of the 1994 Republican revolution were to be rewarded. Big business was none too subtly informed that friends and aides of the victors should reap the spoils.

Democratic powers like Thomas Hale Boggs Jr. began talking about retirement. Republican staffers and even members of Congress, eager to cash in, left the Hill and began recruiting clients who could benefit from their contacts and influence.

Abramoff was just one lobbyist who became a hot property. In 1998, when we last picked Washington’s 50 top lobbyists, Abramoff ranked 22nd. Shortly thereafter he was wooed away from one firm by another, whose revenues skyrocketed—and whose partners apparently didn’t look closely at how he operated.

The amount of money generated by people claiming to have influence that can affect legislation, appropriations, and agency decisions is big. Laws now require lobbyists to file financial-disclosure forms when they make contact with a legislator. Those forms reveal the minimum that lobbyists can make. Much more money still legally goes unreported—for organizing grassroots lobbying campaigns, advising clients on how they can lobby, making speeches, contacting regulatory agencies, and creating public-relations campaigns.

A major group of clients is public universities, hospitals, and municipalities, which spend hundreds of millions of dollars each year to win appropriations, often in the form of earmarks—language designating that funds go to a specific project or institution—that their elected representatives don’t have the time or power to get.

“Congressional staffs are extremely busy, and often there aren’t enough staffers to do everything,” says a lobbyist who specializes in representing cities. “Our job is to facilitate communication, package priorities, and make sure that requests for funding meet deadlines and get included in legislation.”

This has created an odd situation on Capitol Hill. Members of the House of Representatives make $165,200 a year. Former congressmen like Bill Paxon of New York and Bob Livingston of Louisiana make that much representing a single university, hospital, or water district. Livingston’s lobby group took in $16 million last year, much of it from government institutions in Louisiana that he formerly represented.

Two of the biggest lobby firms in Washington, Cassidy & Associates and Van Scoyoc Associates, specialize in earmarks. (Pakistan have hired Cassidy & Associates).

“Public institutions are starved for facilities,” says Stewart Van Scoyoc, who counts dozens of colleges among his clients. “They can’t go to their states because the legislatures claim they have no money, so they come to us.”

Depending on the size of the project and the target funding, lobbying fees can range from $700,000 to $1,000,000 a year, on the high side. There are no guarantees—lobbyists are not allowed to work on contingency. If the project is not included in an appropriations bill, there is nothing to do but try, try again the next year, perhaps with a more influential lobbyist.

Earmarks are profitable, but many lobbyists look down their noses at that practice area. Says tax lobbyist John Raffaelli, “We don’t play in that world. Our firm is more involved in creating strategies for policies that my clients are advocating.”

Crudely distilled into three words, practitioners say, the lobbying game boils down to “finding, grinding, and minding.”

You find a client with a need, and then you have to go into the system and find a way to get what the client wants done. That’s the grinding. The minding is making sure that your language or your earmark stays in the bill until it is signed by the President and isn’t axed, thanks to a rival lobbyist, at the last minute. The minding, lobbyists say, continues even after your legislation is passed.

In 2006 a mysterious last-minute provision that had the effect of prohibiting online poker made its way into a port-security bill. Martin Gold, the lobbyist responsible for making it happen, is with Covington & Burling, which represents the National Football League. The NFL was not really interested in poker, but many online gambling sites also allow betting on football games. The NFL wants to stamp out gambling on its games. It doesn’t like that online gambling sites make money off its product without paying the NFL for the privilege. Online poker got caught in the crossfire when Gold’s provision made it much more difficult to transfer cash from American banks to online casinos.

After the new Congress took power in 2007, House Finance Committee chair Barney Frank announced that he would revisit the ban on Internet gaming and hoped to rescind the measure the NFL paid for. That, lobbyists say, is where the minding comes in. Even after a bill is passed and signed, it is subject to reversal. The good lobbyist can’t let his or her guard down.

In the wake of the Abramoff scandal, questions were raised, as they periodically are, about the need for a layer of lobbyists between corporate America or municipal America and the United States Congress. Lobbyists, almost to a person, write Abramoff off as the bad apple in the barrel rather than acknowledging that the barrel itself might be the problem. A few lobby firms have appointed ethics officers; most say they aren’t needed. But even good ones sometimes work in the shadows. As one prominent lobbyist observes, “My greatest success every year is getting something done without having my fingerprints on it.”

On the surface, the lobbying industry seems to be highly competitive. Legal Times recently listed 50 firms with revenues of more than $7 million a year. The highest-grossing of the 50, the law firm Akin Gump, reported $76 million in lobbying fees last year.

Law firms, owned by their partners, are quite competitive. But in recent years private lobby shops, operating outside the strictures of bar-association codes, have proliferated. A little secret of Washington lobbying is that three large international advertising companies own most of the powerful lobby companies. They are Omnicom, based in New York, and two London corporations, WPP and Interpublic Group.

Vin Weber, a former Minnesota congressman now perceived as one of the most influential Republican lobbyists, works for a relatively obscure consulting firm called Clark & Weinstock. But Clark & Weinstock is owned by Omnicom. Omnicom also owns Ketchum, a large PR firm, which owns the Washington Group, whose CEO is former congresswoman Susan Molinari. Omnicom also owns the giant PR firm Fleishman-Hillard as well as the Washington lobby company Porter Novelli.

British-based WPP owns three giant PR companies—Ogilvy, Burson-Marsteller, and Hill & Knowlton. Within that framework, the British now own such powerful lobby firms as Quinn Gillespie & Associates, Timmons & Company, and Wexler & Walker. Interpublic is the owner of one of Washington’s biggest lobby shops, Cassidy & Associates.

Wayne Berman, whose homegrown Federalist Group turned into Ogilvy Government Relations, owned by WPP, is typical in claiming that the foreign ownership is no problem: “It gives us a larger canvas and offices all over the world.”

I asked another lobbyist how people would feel if a Chinese company rather than a British one owned five of the most influential lobbying firms in America with many former members of Congress on the payroll.

“I never thought of it that way,” he replied. “I guess that might be a problem.”

The most successful lobbyists do more than represent their clients’ interests. They also raise money from clients for the politicians whose favors they seek. And some of their millions of dollars in fees goes to the wining and dining of legislators, though much of the ostensible graft has been taken out of the system with restrictions on free meals, game tickets, and the like.

With Republican rule at an end for now and Democrats back on top in Congress, there naturally are changes in who’s on top in the lobby world. But Republicans are not completely out of luck. The 51–49 makeup of the Senate is tenuous. As one GOP-oriented lobbyist says, “We are down but not out. The Democrats can’t get anything done in the Senate without us.”

After culling the lobby disclosure reports and checking on who has gotten things done, who is likely to get things done in the next few years, and who has the best connections and influence, we present Washington’s 50 top lobbyists.

1. Thomas Hale Boggs, Patton Boggs. His father was Democratic House majority leader. His mother succeeded her husband in Congress after his death in a plane crash. His sister is a leading Washington journalist. Another sister was a New Jersey mayor. But this son of Washington power, never elected to political office, surpasses them all in influence.

It was thought, after Republicans took power in the 1990s, that Boggs’s influence would wane. He talked about retiring to his Eastern Shore farm, where he liked to take House committee chairmen on weekend hunting trips. Now, with close friends like John Dingell, Henry Waxman, and Barney Frank back on top, Boggs’s law firm, Patton Boggs, makes $70 million a year from more than 350 lobbying clients.

His biggest and best-known client, Mars, pays him $2 million a year. In return Boggs has for years made sure that every US serviceman and woman gets a Snickers bar or pack of M&Ms in his or her rations almost every day.

2. Robert Dole, Alston & Bird. The onetime presidential candidate and Republican Senate majority leader let it be known after leaving office that he was willing to promote anything from Viagra to Visa to Dunkin’ Donuts. Sure enough, of all the US senators turned lobbyists, Bob Dole is at the top.

When many people expressed outrage that the management of our vital seaports was being outsourced to an Arab-owned company, Dubai Ports World, Dole signed on to build public support for the takeover. Dole’s fee from Dubai was $320,000 in 2006. The Wall Street Journal reported in April that Dole had accepted a $560,000 fee to help a controversial Russian billionaire under suspicion in Russia for bribery obtain a visa to the United States. Dole, who says he doesn’t lobby his wife or other members of the Senate, persuaded the State Department to grant the visa.

At 83, Dole is described by colleagues as an unreconstructed workaholic who has never been happier—and certainly not more prosperous.

3. Tony Podesta, Podesta Group. A Chicago native who came to Washington in 1970 to work for Common Cause, Tony Podesta has a practice that’s changed in recent years. Once associated with high-tech and media clients, he recently was hired by British Petroleum, whose pipeline problems and refinery fires have created regulatory and public-relations issues. Podesta has quietly been guiding BP through congressional hearings.

He also represents Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics, trying to sell Congress and the Pentagon on another version of their Stryker troop-transport vehicle. During the Clinton administration, it didn’t hurt that brother John was White House chief of staff.

When Republicans came to power, the former Ted Kennedy aide deftly partnered with Republican strategist Dan Mattoon, a pal of then-Speaker Dennis Hastert’s. Mattoon hired Hastert’s son to work with him. With Nancy Pelosi now Speaker, Mattoon, the younger Hastert, and Podesta split up earlier this year. Podesta and his team of 23 lobbyists are said to collect $12 million to $15 million in annual billings.

4. Jack Quinn, Quinn Gillespie & Associates. A former White House counsel to President Clinton and confidant of Al Gore’s, Jack Quinn has jumped to the top of the heap of former Democratic bigwigs. His firm lists revenues of some $18 million a year and is growing at 15 percent a year. His client fees include $560,000 annually from the Alliance for Quality Nursing Home Care, and he pulls in millions more from public accountants, drug companies, banks, and telecommunications companies.

Quinn and his partner, Republican strategist Ed Gillespie, sold ownership of their business several years ago to London-based WPP. The sale no doubt netted Quinn millions. His greatest lobbying coup remains his most notorious—winning a presidential pardon for international financing fugitive Marc Rich as President Clinton was leaving the White House.

5. Vin Weber, Clark & Weinstock. The past 12 years have been good ones for Minnesota ex-congressman Vin Weber, once a neighbor of Newt Gingrich’s in Arlington. Rather than join the Gingrich revolution, Weber decided to take advantage of it. He became the Washington face of a once-obscure New York law firm and built it into a ten-person, $9-million lobbying practice.

Weber has received more than $2 million in recent years from BNP Paribas, a French bank involved in the controversial United Nations oil-for-food program under which Saddam Hussein is said to have pocketed some $10 billion. Weber steered bank executives through a gauntlet of congressional hearings and explanations to the White House and State Department, and BNP Paribas emerged from the scandal unscathed.

6. Linda Daschle, Baker Donelson, Bearman, Caldwell & Berkowitz. A lifelong airplane enthusiast who began working for the Federal Aviation Administration in her twenties, Daschle now brings in more than $1 million a year from clients such as American Airlines, Boeing, and Lockheed Martin.

When her husband, former Democratic Senate majority leader Tom Daschle, was in power, eyebrows often were raised about Linda Daschle’s success. But with her husband no longer in office, she has been more successful than ever, in part because she has dropped her self-imposed curb on lobbying the Senate. She has expanded her lobbying niche from air to rails, working for Norfolk Southern on rail-security legislation. She’s also working hard on behalf of American Airlines on FAA reauthorization—legislation that will set goals and priorities for air travel into the next decade.

7. Joel Jankowsky, Akin Gump. Washington’s most profitable lobbying group in 2006 is headed by this soft-spoken Oklahoman who is said never to have sent a press release touting his accomplishments. Jankowsky created the Akin Gump lobby practice more than 20 years ago for firm patriarch Robert Strauss, who at age 89 still comes into the office regularly but is not registered as a lobbyist. With a team of 45 and revenues over $76 million last year, according to Legal Times, Akin Gump’s lobby practice is one of the biggest in Washington.

One of Jankowsky’s most profitable endeavors, though ultimately unsuccessful, was attempting to deflate congressional opposition to China’s National Offshore Oil Company’s attempt to buy California-based Unocal. Stockholders’ eventual acceptance of a rival bid from Chevron had to have left the Chinese wondering if Jankowsky’s $2.2-million fee was worth it.

8. Edward Gillespie, Quinn Gillespie & Associates. The Democrats may have won Congress, but the White House is still in Republican hands, and this former RNC chair has turned his relationship with President Bush into an $18-million business. A onetime aide to Republican House majority leader Richard Armey, Gillespie helped draft the “Contract With America” that accompanied the GOP victory in 1994.

When the White House needed help pushing the Supreme Court nominations of John Roberts and Samuel Alito through Congress, Gillespie was happy to step in with free advice. Gillespie partners with Democratic powerhouse Jack Quinn to make sure all bases are covered. His blue-chip client list includes AT&T, Sony, and big drug companies. Some of his largest fees have come from Canadian lumber producers seeking access to US markets.

9. Gerald Cassidy, Cassidy & Associates. The subject of a recent series of stories by Washington Post reporter Robert Kaiser, Cassidy has built one of DC’s largest lobbying organizations. It was once considered the wealthiest lobby shop in town, but recent figures show Cassidy fourth in reported revenues behind Patton Boggs, Akin Gump, and Van Scoyoc Associates.

Still, $28 million in annual billings, while down 10 percent from 2005, is very good, and Cassidy continues to attract business with his expertise in getting federal funding for universities, local governments, and even municipal school systems. As Boggs has put candy bars in the hands of soldiers, Cassidy once did a deal to get Ocean Spray fruit juices into public-school systems.

10. Michael House, Hogan & Hartson. A former chief of staff to Alabama senator Howell Heflin, House has what is believed to be the second- or third-largest lobbying account in Washington—that of Japanese automaker Nissan North America. Nissan’s lobbying invoice, according to Congressional Quarterly, is more than $2 million a year and makes up more than 10 percent of Hogan & Hartson’s lobby billings.

House, who lives in McLean, leads an effort by a coalition of mortgage banks and private lenders to increase regulations and restrictions on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two federally chartered mortgage companies they compete with.

11. John Merrigan, DLA Piper. With $46 million in annual lobbying revenues and some 40 active lobbyists, DLA Piper—the product of law-firm mergers over the years—rivals Patton Boggs as the largest lobby practice in town. It boasts such prominent names as former House leaders Dick Armey and Dick Gephardt and is chaired by former Senate majority leader George Mitchell, whose efforts on everything from brokering peace in Ireland to investigating steroid abuse in Major League Baseball have put DLA Piper front and center. But Capitol Hill types say the brains behind the lobbying practice is longtime partner John Merrigan, a Democrat whose business is expected to soar with his friends back in charge of Congress.

Showing how the worm has turned, the government of Turkey, which formerly relied on Robert Livingston’s GOP-oriented company, has hired DLA Piper. Even before the switch, Merrigan was hired by the state of Florida to prevent its military bases from being closed; none was. Demurs Merrigan: “It didn’t hurt that the governor [then Jeb Bush] has his own access to the chain of command.”

12. Wayne Berman, Ogilvy Government Relations. Republican lobbyist Berman was said to be only half kidding when he told the New York Times that it was time to buy a fishing pole and take some yoga classes. Shortly thereafter, he was signed by the Poker Players Alliance to work on ending the ban on electronic money transfers into online gaming sites—a $540,000 deal for Berman, who clearly isn’t hanging up his spurs.

In the Chinese oil company’s bid to buy Unocal, it was Berman who stirred up the hornet’s nest that killed the deal and allowed his client, Chevron, to buy Unocal for $2 billion less than the Chinese had offered. Berman’s take? A modest $360,000—some $1.8 million less than Akin Gump got from the losing party.

13/14. Kenneth M. Duberstein and Michael Berman, the Duberstein Group. A prominent pairing of Republican and Democrat, the Duberstein Group models its practice after the company founded by William Timmons, Timmons & Company, of which Duberstein was vice president.

Duberstein, a top aide and final chief of staff to President Reagan, frequently helps the White House with judicial nominations and other appointments. Berman, a longtime organizer of Democratic national conventions, was a top aide to Senator and then Vice President Walter Mondale and a close adviser to Bill and Hillary Clinton.

Part of the in crowd at the Palm, Duberstein and Berman are fixtures in the lobby establishment, looking after the legislative and tax interests of BP, Comcast, General Motors, Time Warner, and more.

15. John Breaux, Patton Boggs. Former US senators tend not to have great reputations as lobbyists. Some say they lack the organizational skills to put together a complex lobbying plan; others think they’re just uncomfortable bowing before their colleagues. Louisiana’s John Breaux, who left the Senate honestly—saying he needed to make money—is the exception to that notion. Working on energy and health issues and getting reconstruction projects for his native state, Breaux is said to have added as much as $4 million to Patton Boggs’s bottom line—double the $2 million Breaux is making at the firm on a contract.

The firm is no doubt happy, even if some Louisianans aren’t, that Breaux has shelved plans to leave Washington and run for governor of the Bayou State.

16. Martin Gold, Covington & Burling. Gold won’t win any awards from the online poker-playing community. He is said to have been the strategist behind the measure to block Internet gaming that was thrown into the port-security bill at the last moment last year by then–majority leader Bill Frist. According to lobby disclosure forms, Gold and his group were paid some $700,000 by the National Football League, a longtime client of Covington & Burling.

Some of the money was for work on other NFL problems, such as congressional hearings on steroids, but sources say most of it was for antigambling work. With House Finance Committee chair Barney Frank vowing to undo the antigaming measure, Gold is in business for another session.

During Frist’s first year as leader, Gold was his counsel, a post Gold once held for Frist predecessor Howard Baker. The pro-poker forces, who have now hired former GOP senator Alfonse D’Amato to reverse the ban, never had a chance.

17. David Johnson, Johnson, Madigan, Peck, Boland & Stewart. One of the savviest Democratic lobbyists in Washington, Johnson is a former adviser to Maine Democrats Edmund Muskie and George Mitchell. With the Democrats in the wilderness the past decade, Johnson had the wiles to join forces with the Republican lobby shop Boland & Madigan.

Michael Boland, a former aide to then–majority leader Trent Lott, and Peter Madigan, a trade official in the first Bush administration, carried the company during the GOP years; now Johnson promises to do the heavy lifting while the Democrats rule. He has beefed up ties to Senate Democrats by hiring Jeff Peck, a former top aide on the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Johnson has signed up some 15 new clients, including major drug manufacturers, who constantly need help with drug approvals and expiring patents. Altria Group, the tobacco company formerly known as Philip Morris, also pays Johnson $320,000 a year for his services.

18. Elliott Portnoy, Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal. It is unusual that a Chicago law firm would choose a 40-year-old Washingtonian as chair of its executive committee—and even more unusual that he would be the head of its lobby practice. Lobbyists don’t often get that much respect. But Portnoy has built his firm’s lobby practice into a $20-million business in a few years.

He has been heavily involved in asbestos legislation, for which he receives fees of $600,000 a year. He is also known for the work that made him a 1999 Washingtonian of the Year—his leadership of Kids Enjoy Exercise Now, a nonprofit that provides sports opportunities to children with disabilities.

19. Stewart Van Scoyoc, Van Scoyoc Associates. The founder of the second-largest lobby shop in Washington, with nearly $30 million in annual revenue, started out as a chemical engineer at the DuPont plant across the Delaware Memorial Bridge. He attended law school, on DuPont’s dollar, at the University of Maryland, and ended up in Washington in 1974 challenging allegations that chemicals were depleting the ozone layer. After what he calls “a good run” at DuPont, he was hired by now-retired tax lobbyist Charles Walker and did work for Anheuser-Busch, Weyerhaeuser, and the University of Alabama.

In 1990 Von Scoyoc opened his own company with eight clients. Now he has hundreds, many of them universities looking for special appropriations. Van Scoyoc also handles the lobbying account for Pakistan, which receives lots of US aid. He was adept at securing relief funds after the 2005 earthquake that killed 75,000 people there.

20. Robert Livingston, the Livingston Group. Between House speakers Newt Gingrich and Dennis Hastert was supposed to be Speaker Robert Livingston. A scandal, a resignation, and voilà—Livingston is making millions in lobbying fees and exercising influence that his former colleagues can only envy.

His 20 years on the House Appropriations Committee turned into a gusher for clients seeking tax advantages or loopholes. Livingston made less than $200,000 as a congressman from Louisiana. Now from the state’s agencies, colleges, and hospitals alone he brings in more than $700,000.

21. J. Steven Hart, Williams & Jensen. With legendary Washington lobbyist J.D. Williams retired in Oklahoma, his mantle has passed to fellow Sooner J. Steven Hart. He came to DC with the Reagan administration and was hired by Williams in 1984. A CPA with a law degree from Georgetown, Hart is the man corporations call when they’re having trouble with labor unions.

Among his clients are Coca-Cola, Continental Airlines, Pfizer, and the International Speedway Corporation, which runs the Daytona 500. Once a confidant of former Republican House leader Tom DeLay’s, Hart and his practice stand to suffer more than most while the Democrats keep the House.

22. John D. Raffaelli, Capitol Counsel. In 20 years as head of the Washington Group, East Texas native Raffaelli established himself as one of DC’s premier tax lobbyists. He came here to work for the late congressman Wright Patman, then joined the staff of Senator Lloyd Bentsen. Raffaelli began his lobbying career in partnership with Democratic fundraiser and former party chair Terry McAuliffe.

When the Republicans captured the White House in 2000, Raffaelli says he figured a name change to a more generic title, the Washington Group, might be a good idea. With the Democrats back in charge of the legislative branch, Raffaelli is starting over again with Capitol Counsel. He was compelled by agreement to leave his clients with Susan Molinari, who now runs his old firm, but new clients are said to be calling faster than you can say, “The Democrats are back.”

23. Victor Schwartz, Shook, Hardy & Bacon. Clients of a lobbyist who takes them to lunch at Subway can be reasonably sure he isn’t wasting their fees. An engaging former law professor, Schwartz has devoted his professional life to winning relief for clients from cumbersome or frivolous lawsuits.

One of his most important triumphs was a bill protecting manufacturers of small airplanes from liability suits if pilots crash their planes. For a coalition of veterinarians and pet-medicine manufacturers, Schwartz has been fighting legislation proposed by animal-rights groups that would allow pet owners to claim damages for pain and suffering in the event of animal injury or death.

24/25. Larry Harlow and Richard Tarplin, Timmons & Company. With the retirement of lobbying legend Tom Korologos, who cofounded this firm with William Timmons in 1975, the city’s most venerable lobby shop is now run by Democrat Richard Tarplin and Republican Bryce Larimore Harlow, known as Larry.

When the firm began, it limited the number of its clients to ten and charged a flat annual fee of $100,000.Today the firm maintains a roster of 24 clients who generally pay $360,000 a year.

Harlow once ran the government-relations arm of the Grocery Manufacturers Association. Tarplin, a former staffer for Senator Chris Dodd, is involved in legislation to bring more generic drugs to market. Other clients are Anheuser-Busch, DaimlerChrysler, and the University of Miami. Last year AT&T, after its merger with BellSouth, severed its relationship with Timmons, leading to one of the first down years for the company in nearly a decade. The administration still taps the firm for help with presidential nominations, though not as often as when Korologos was there.

26/27. Lanny Griffith and Ed Rogers, Barbour Griffith & Rogers. It isn’t every lobby firm that carries the name of a popular sitting governor, and it can’t hurt. Lanny Griffith, the CEO of what was Mississippi governor Haley Barbour’s lobbying firm, is a former Barbour campaign manager. He and Alabaman Ed Rogers, who cofounded the firm with Barbour in 1991, are two of the premier Republican lobbyists. Griffith has strong ties to the Bush family and was assistant secretary of Education under the first President Bush.

Barbour’s political success helped get the firm some $28 million in billings in 2006, some of it from Mississippi companies like agricultural giant Delta & Pine Land. The firm’s foreign clients include a Russian telecommunications company that has paid Griffith some $2 million since 2002 to get licenses to operate in the United States. After the Democratic sweep of Congress last year, at least 16 clients dropped the firm, costing it its largest source of revenue, a $4.5-million deal to promote Taiwan. Griffith says he has replaced all the lost business. “We find that in a divided Congress, the combat gets bigger and the stakes higher, and from the business side we still do pretty well,” he says.

28. David M. Carmen, the Carmen Group. A onetime speechwriter for the Republican National Committee, Carmen founded his lobbying company in 1985, when half a dozen companies paid a mere $20,000 a year for his services. He now has more than 70 employees and $15 to $20 million in annual revenues. He recently helped New Orleans–based Dillard University get a $200,000 federally backed loan.

Carmen Group senior adviser Constance Berry Newman, assistant secretary of State for African affairs in 2004–05, recently nailed down a $1-million-a-year contract to help the Nigerian state of Bayelsa win more oil revenues for development projects from the Nigerian government.

29/30. Thomas Downey and Raymond McGrath, Downey McGrath Group. Both are former congressmen from New York state. Downey founded the company with Washington Republican Rod Chandler, who left in 2000 to join PR giant Fleishman-Hillard. McGrath headed the beer lobby for years before joining Downey.

Downey’s receipts have been more modest than those of former colleagues like Vin Weber. But in 2006 he pulled in $300,000 from Dubai Ports World to work with Bob Dole to quell the uproar over its contract to manage six US ports. Their efforts were unsuccessful, and Dubai Ports World eventually sold its port operations to American conglomerate AIG.

31. Paul Magliocchetti, the PMA Group. A former House Appropriations Committee staffer with strong ties to powerful Democrat John Murtha, Magliocchetti is something of a legend in lobby circles. You won’t find his picture or bio on his firm’s Web site, and he usually doesn’t return calls from reporters. When he’s mentioned in the press, it’s generally in regard to his connections to Murtha, who chairs the Appropriations defense subcommittee.

In 2006, according to the Wall Street Journal, Murtha received more than $300,000 in contributions from Magliocchetti and his clients, who in turn won government contracts worth $95 million. Among his blue-chip roster: Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, Boeing, and CACI International.

The Center for Public Integrity once listed PMA as the most successful defense-lobby shop in Virginia. Magliocchetti’s offices are near the Crystal City Metro station, not far from the Pentagon.

32. Bill Paxon, Akin Gump. A former congressman from Buffalo, Paxon was forced out of the Republican leadership by then-Speaker Newt Gingrich after a clumsy attempt to replace Gingrich. Paxon still has plenty of friends on Capitol Hill. The going rate for his services is about $600,000 a year, a sum currently paid by such clients as United Parcel Service and Boeing.

Paxon also represents Native American tribes, recording $800,000 from the Gila River community and $260,000 from the New York–based Seneca Nation. Public agencies in New York also sign on with him; the State University of New York system paid him $720,000 for help in getting federal funds. Paxon also represents the New York Yankees. He is married to congresswoman turned lobbyist Susan Molinari.

33. Nancy Taylor, Greenberg Traurig. Taylor is a onetime health-policy director on Senator Orrin Hatch’s Labor and Human Resources Committee, which had jurisdiction over much drug-patent legislation and food-and-drug laws. In 1993 Taylor took her expertise and connections to Greenberg Traurig, where she has built a $1-million-a-year-practice representing HMOs and other health organizations. Colleagues say as long as Hatch is in the Senate, Taylor will continue to bring in business.

34. Ronald Kaufman, Dutko Worldwide. A key operative in Ronald Reagan’s 1980 presidential campaign, Kaufman has close ties to the Bush family. In 1984 he was Vice President Bush’s national campaign director; in 1988 he ran President Bush’s New Hampshire primary campaign and was a key fundraiser.

Kaufman joined Dutko Worldwide in 1994 and is due much credit for its success. The firm reported more than $33 million in revenue in 2006.Kaufman represents the state of Utah, and he has emerged as a top K Street supporter and fundraiser for presidential candidate Mitt Romney, who has a lot of support there.

35. Robert Raben, the Raben Group. Raben, a former aide to Congressman Barney Frank, saw his fortunes turn upward when his old boss took over the House Financial Services Committee. Up until now Raben, who once worked at the law firm Arnold & Porter, had traveled an unconventional path in Washington lobbying, earning $2 million lobbying for such tightfisted liberal pillars as the Brennan Center, the Alliance for Justice, and the American Civil Liberties Union as well as for gay- and Hispanic-rights organizations. He showed his political dexterity by aligning himself with movement conservatives like former Georgia congressman Bob Barr who also oppose some far-reaching provisions of the Patriot Act.

In the new era, Raben’s client list is starting to show signs of corporate influence. General Electric, Home Depot, and Pfizer have come calling in recent weeks, and XM Satellite Radio has asked his help in getting its merger with Sirius approved.

36. Vic Fazio, Akin Gump. One of several former officeholders in the law firm built by Robert Strauss, Vic Fazio is regarded as one of DC’s smartest and most effective lobbyists. In Congress he worked on the Armed Services Committee and later on Appropriations. At Akin Gump he advises such clients as medical-manufacturing giant Johnson & Johnson and works with a former colleague from across the aisle, Bill Paxon, on the $760,000 account of the casino-owning Agua Caliente tribe.

37/38. Gerry Sikorski and Rich Gold, Holland & Knight. Sikorski is a former Democratic congressman from Minnesota; Gold worked for Texas senator Lloyd Bentsen and then moved to the Environmental Protection Agency. Gold represents railroads, water districts, and many cities and counties with environmental issues.

Sikorski is Bahrain’s man in Washington—he helped negotiate the first free-trade agreement ever signed by the US government with a Persian Gulf state. Sikorski is said to have handled most of the congressional outreach and helped construct a PR campaign that allowed the agreement to happen.

39. Rodney Slater, Patton Boggs. This former secretary of Transportation in the Clinton administration didn’t go home to Arkansas when President Clinton left office, and the prospect of a second Clinton presidency does nothing to dull the perception that he still has influence. Coming out of the shadows of nearly a decade of Republican rule, Slater has emerged as a go-to lobbyist, especially in the airline industry, where he represents groups of airline pilots as well as Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport.

40. Kenneth Kies, Clark Consulting Federal Policy Group. Probably the leading pure tax lobbyist in Washington, Kies once was chair of the tax practice at the Washington office of white-shoe law firm Baker & Hostetler. He is a former chief counsel of the House Ways and Means Committee and later was chief of staff for the House-Senate Joint Committee on Taxation.

He joined Illinois-based Clark Consulting in 2002. His blue-chip client list on tax issues there is the best in town. Caterpillar, Michelin, and Microsoft all count on Kies to keep their taxes low in a political atmosphere that could require all of Kies’s contacts and experience.

41. Howard Vine, Dickstein Shapiro. A graduate of American University and George Mason law school, Vine began lobbying with the National Association of Manufacturers three decades ago and eventually was hired by Miami-based Greenberg Traurig to open its Washington office. He left Greenberg Traurig in 2003 because of his discomfort over the lobbying of former partner Jack Abramoff, now in federal prison after pleading guilty to fraud. If every Washington scandal has a hero, Vine is a nominee.

In addition to a full plate of work on behalf of energy companies trying to get research appropriations and tax benefits for more-efficient energy projects, Vine does pro bono work for groups promoting gay marriage and for the proposed National Music Center at DC’s old Carnegie Library.

42. Susan Molinari, the Washington Group. This bubbly former congresswoman pursued several career paths, including a stint as anchor for CBS News Saturday Morning, before finding her calling as a lobbyist. Molinari has been tapped by the worldwide PR agency Ketchum to be the top person in Washington for its lobbying subsidiary, where she is half of a lobbying duo with former Tom Daschle aide Rita Lewis.

Molinari and Lewis helped land the $4.6-billion appropriation for Hurricane Katrina relief on behalf of the Louisiana Recovery Authority. Molinari also carries the flag of the Republic of Panama. With several projects in the works there, including the widening of the canal, she should have no shortage of work. She lives with her husband, Akin Gump lobbyist Bill Paxon—they have never worked on a project together—in Alexandria and is working on the presidential campaign of Rudolph Giuliani.

43. Charles Brain, Capitol Hill Strategies. A former aide to once-powerful congressman Dan Rostenkowski, Brain saw his lobbying career going down when his boss and mentor went up the river for fraud and embezzlement. Brain left lobbying and joined the Clinton administration as a congressional liaison. When George W. Bush became president, Brain went to work for New York congressman Charles Rangel, now chair of Rostenkowski’s old committee, Ways and Means.

Back in business as a lobbyist, Brain is once again sought by corporations that want to get a hearing with the chair. Citigroup, Wachovia Bank, and Prudential are just three that shelled out more than $100,000 each in 2006 for Brain’s help.

44. Florence Prioleau, Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman. Prioleau was an assistant for domestic policy in the Carter administration, but her cachet now, like that of Charles Brain, is her longstanding association with Ways and Means chair Charles Rangel. Prioleau worked with Rangel from 1975 to 1979. After 20 years at Patton Boggs, this year Prioleau is suddenly a hot property.

The Goucher College and George­town law grad is married to sports agent Bill Strickland, who guided the early career of Andre Agassi. As part of her practice representing cities, Prioleau helps coordinate appropriations requests from clients such as Atlanta and Cleveland.

45/46. Bruce Mehlman and David Castagnetti, Mehlman Vogel Castagnetti. University of Virginia law grad Bruce Mehlman was once telecommunications-policy counsel for Cisco Systems, the big high-tech company. He went to the Commerce Department after that, and now he is one of the undisputed experts on high-tech issues. With strong GOP connections in the House of Representatives, where he has also worked, Mehlman attracts $322,000 a year from IBM and $240,000 from Hewlett-Packard—just two of some 30 regular clients.

The change to a Democratic Congress shouldn’t slow this firm much: Mehlman’s principal partner, David Castagnetti, was chief of staff for Senator Max Baucus, now chair of the Finance Committee, which oversees Social Security and related health programs. His clients include drug and pharmaceutical companies.

47. Heather Podesta, Heather Podesta & Partners. A former aide to Democratic Senator Bill Bradley and a graduate of the University of Virginia Law School, Podesta is well known as a patron of the arts. She and lobbyist husband Tony Podesta collect contemporary art and keep a home in Venice, Italy. After several years lobbying with a Philadelphia law firm, Podesta is on her own.

To say she has panache is an understatement. A Wall Street Journal profile revealed that she once had four female chefs from Seattle flown in for a fundraiser for Washington senator Maria Cantwell. In her first week on the job, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was seen giving Podesta a hug and a kiss. Since then, Podesta has signed up more than $100,000 a month in business, and more is likely on the way.

48. J.C. Watts, J.C. Watts Companies. Twice the most valuable player in the Orange Bowl, the former Oklahoma Sooner quarterback has parlayed his leadership skills into a six-company organization. Elected to Congress in 1994, he left in 2002 to go into lobbying.

He received $120,000 from the Bowl Championship Series last year and the same amount to represent the NASCAR auto-racing circuit. Watts has been sought out by traditionally black colleges and universities including Grambling and Mississippi Valley State. His personality, high profile, and ability to get along with allies and opponents alike put him in good position to continue to do well no matter who is in power.

49. Steven Elmendorf, Elmendorf Strategies. For this veteran Democratic operative, his party’s return to power signals lots of work. Elmendorf was senior adviser to former Democratic House majority leader Richard Gephardt, and he maintains close links with most of the House leaders and committee chairs. In 2006 Elmendorf was registered for only about $60,000 worth of business, but he is said to have tripled his client roster this year. He’s now working on a pension-reform bill for Northwest Airlines.

50. John Edward Porter, Hogan & Hartson. An Illinois congressman for 21 years, Porter helped write many laws on Social Security and public-health issues. Today he is considered one of the most knowledgeable lobbyists for clients like the American Red Cross, from whom he receives $160,000 a year. Porter also represents several colleges and takes an $80,000 fee to help get funding for Chicago’s Lincoln Park Zoo.

http://www.washingtonian.com/print/articles/6/171/4264.html

Why the huge and much vilified lobbying industry will thrive, no matter who is in the White House.

I don't know what people are talking about when they say that Republicans and Democrats never get together for a drink after work anymore. Robert Kaiser's "So Damn Much Money" is filled with scenes of lobbyists and legislators of both parties meeting for dinner and drinks -- and trading favors. In fact, Mr. Kaiser, a Washington Post associate editor, begins his account in May 2005, on a rooftop overlooking the Capitol where hundreds of guests have gathered to celebrate the 30th anniversary of Democratic rainmaker Gerald Cassidy's lobbying firm.

[Bookshelf]

As the sun sets in the distance behind the Lincoln Memorial, waiters at the lavish event serve miniburgers, tempura and other cocktail fare. The guests include Democratic lawmakers Robert Byrd and Nancy Pelosi, of course. But Republicans Tom DeLay, Roy Blunt and Robert Michel are on hand as well. Influence peddling is a bipartisan affair.

A year before, Mr. Cassidy had briefly agreed to hire the infamous Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff, who was out of a job and under investigation for shady dealings with his Indian casino clients. The arrangement lasted all of four months. Mr. Cassidy went his own way, and Mr. Abramoff went to jail. What Mr. Kaiser attempts to do in "So Damn Much Money" is to tell the tale of how lobbying became such a huge and vilified industry and how a storied Beltway fixer like Gerald Cassidy could keep company with someone like Jack Abramoff.

It doesn't quite work. There are really two books here. One is a biography of Mr. Cassidy that traces his life from his humble beginnings in Red Hook, Brooklyn, to his success as a multimillionaire wheeler-and-dealer in the nation's capital. The other book-within-a-book is a shopworn jeremiad lamenting the current state of American politics. Over the past three decades, Mr. Kaiser argues, "the quality of governance in the United States" has "declined palpably." Two stock villains, money and Republicans, are to blame.

So Damn Much Money
By Robert G. Kaiser
(Knopf, 398 pages, $27.95)

The biography of Mr. Cassidy is a delight. The way Mr. Kaiser tells it, Mr. Cassidy is straight out of a Horatio Alger novel. He is the bright kid who overcomes a turbulent childhood, studies hard and earns a law degree (from Cornell), marries a vivacious Italian girl from Philadelphia, and moves to Florida to provide legal aid to migrant workers. There, in 1969, he meets Kenneth Schlossberg, his future business partner, and Sen. George McGovern, the South Dakota Democrat and chairman of the newly created Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs. Mr. McGovern hires Mr. Cassidy, who moves his family to Washington a few months later and spends six years working for the senator before he gets replaced by -- talk about a low blow -- Bob Shrum, who would go on to notoriety as the Grim Reaper of Democratic presidential-campaign consulting.

It's when Mr. Cassidy finds himself out of work that things get interesting. He and Mr. Schlossberg cook up an idea to help the companies participating in the federal school-lunch program navigate Congress and the Agriculture Department. The men would use the contacts they made while working on Mr. McGovern's committee to satisfy clients and line their own pockets. The cash started coming in -- just a few crumbs at first, but then, as the school-lunch program expanded, by the tray-full. Their client list grew to include Nabisco, Pillsbury and General Mills. Mr. Cassidy and Mr. Schlossberg were innovative. Like all successful lobbyists, they had discovered how to traverse an unexplored part of our labyrinthine government.

The twists and turns in Mr. Cassidy's career make for engrossing reading. But then comes 1994 and those darn Republicans show up, and the Cassidy story gets lost in a thicket of the author's grievances about the triumph of "special interests." Somehow special interests weren't a problem when they were lining up for subsidies under the school-lunch program.

Thus begins the other book. The problem with it is that Mr. Kaiser would like to have things both ways. He wants to argue that the influence of money and fat-cat conservatives have turned Washington into a place where "the players have ignored or avoided a great many grave national problems." But he also wants to pay tribute to a lost Washington, the city where legislators had an "appetite for taking on serious national problems, including many related to poverty and inequality" and where bureaucracies were staffed with "devoted public servants" who "marched to their own drummers" and "were not enticed by the new incentives to get rich."

But of course it was the exponential growth of government during Mr. Kaiser's lost empyrean age that created the opportunities for graft exploited by the likes of Jack Abramoff. On Monday a lobbyist might help Tufts University get federal money for a nutrition center. But on Tuesday, on behalf of another client, he is persuading the government to revoke a competitor's gaming license -- and then persuading the competitor to hire him to persuade the government to reinstate it.

The commonality that both days share is the power of the state and its ability to influence the marketplace for good and ill. Lobbying, and everything that goes with it, is the result of democratic government in a pluralistic society. The larger the government, the larger the influence of lobbyists. The "special interests" belong to both parties -- and aggressively pursue their own agendas no matter who is in power. Mr. Kaiser enlightens us when he shares the secrets behind a lobbyist's success. But he spends far too much time lamenting a lost Washington that never really was.