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These glacial soils, formed both underhand beyond the ice sheet, are to-day very important agriculturally, and their origin has greatly affected their properties. This subject, how- ever, is outside the scope of the present discussion. The action of running water in transporting all manner of rock detritus is a matter of common knowledge. Indeed water is usually considered the only translocating agent of much importance, and, while this conclusion is not justifiable, it is possible that a greater actual quantity of soil material and other detritus is moved by water than by any other one agent.

In addition, too, to its more extended and better known action as instanced by transfer in rivers, etc. It is probable that there is some tendency for the finer material of a soil to wash downward through the inter- spaces under the action of percolating rain water, and the lateral movement is seen in the wash of surface soil by rain storms. Every little rill carries its quota of soil particles and distributes them at lower levels.

The amounts concerned are small and may seem unim- portant, but every rain does its part, and the aggregate results are large. Exactly similar to the action of rain on the soil, though on a larger scale, is the wash occasioned by heavy storms in mountainous o See Hilgard— Soils, p.

However, some preliminary experiments as yet unpublished con- ducted several years ago at Cornell University by Mr. Shaw, under the direc- tion of Dr. Bonsteel, failed to show any tendency for the clay to accumulate in the lower layers of a soil through which over inches of water was percolated. Small-scale examples can be seen everywhere after a moderately heavy rain storm. The Brick Earth of southern England is an extensive deposit believed to have been formed by rain wash, and similar deposits occur in many other localities.

The transporting action of small streams is both more extended and more restricted than that of rills formed by the rain. Streams run all the time, but this apparent advantage is lost by their being confined to fixed channels. The rain, however, falls everywhere, and rain rills form over the whole of the uncovered surface, and hence have a much greater quantity of material exposed to their attack than can come under the action of permanent streams.

Streams, on the other hand, because of their permanency, can carry material to much greater distances. The rain-water rills carry part of the surface soil into the small streams and these in turn to the rivers. Enormous quantities of silt are constantly in suspension in most rivers and streams, 6 and in the larger rivers even greater quantities are pushed along the bottom by the current.

Delta lands, being composed of material derived from the whole drainage area of the river, are unusually heterogeneous, and when cultivation is possible remarkably fertile, as is indeed true of alluvial lands in general. By rain wash and stream action, alone and together, the aggregate of soil translocation performed by running water is very great indeed. Yet this agent is by no means of universal action. Close examination will show that its activity is narrowly limited in several ways, some of which it will be advisable to discuss.

All water transportation is limited by two conditions prescribed by the nature of the action itself: Geikie— Textbook of Geology, 4th ed.

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A barrier to the continuous fall of the water will effectually stop the progress of the suspended load, though the water itself, by backing up sufficiently, may be able to escape at a higher level. Lakes thus formed act as settling basins and the water escaping from them usually carries very little suspended matter, however much it may have borne on entrance. Of course, the material carried into a lake is laid down on its bottom and will if the supply be kept up ultimately suffice to fill it, so that the river will run through a flat plain where the lake once stood.

When this happens the detrital load of the stream will be carried on to the next lake or to the sea. The second limitation of water action is even more self-evident as applied to streams. It is obvious that running water can attack only the surface over which it runs, and equally obvious that it can deposit the material gained only on those surfaces which it is, at least occasionally, able to cover.

This second limitation has, how- ever, little force when applied to the action of rain water, for prac- tically the whole surface is exposed to the action of rain. But rain water, like all running water, can act only down hill, and its action is still further limited by several special considerations. In the first place, rain water becomes effective as an eroding and transporting agent only when the precipitation is sufficiently rapid to exceed the rate of absorption by the soil, and thus to cause water to run on the surface.

In most climates much of the annual rainfall comes in rains so gentle that the water is absorbed as fast as it falls, and very little, if any, runs over the surface outside of the fixed channels, natural and artificial. Such rains can have no great translocating action. Whether a particular rain storm will be sufficiently heavy to have any erosive action depends not alone on the actual rate of pre- cipitation but on the absorptive power of the soil, and, in the case of long-continued rains, on the efficiency of the soil drainage.

A rain which lasts long may finally bring the soil to a state approaching saturation, and then begin to have an erosive action, though it had none at first. At best, rain-water translocation is of intermittent action. Rain storms of sufficient violence to have any appreciable effect are of only occasional occurrence in ordinary climates, and in many climates they are very rare indeed. The proportion of time in the year during which rain water is actually running over the surface in the ordinary humid areas is certainly less than 5 per cent.

The heavy rains, which alone are active, are usually of short duration. Finally, rain- water translocation, as mentioned above, is essentially local. It may produce an effective mixing of the surface of any one field pro- vided conditions of slope are favorable but further than this it can not go unassisted. The sphere of river and stream action is in some ways even more limited, because, not alone must all action be down hill, but it must be on the relatively small surface actually reached by the water. The streams themselves can attack only their own beds, and were they dependent on their own resources for their supply of detrital mate- rial, it would be reduced to small fractions of that which they now carry.

The bed, when once established, is usually attacked relatively slowly and the supply of material on the banks would soon be ex- hausted were it not kept up by other agents. Of course, as a matter of fact, streams are not dependent on their own exertions for their supply of detritus. Loose material is continually washed into them by the rain; and, where the bordering slopes are steep, much material falls and creeps into them under the action of gravity. However, rain wash, as just pointed out, is intermittent in its action, and soil creep affects only the soil immediately adjacent to the stream, and materially affects that only when the slopes are steep.

Further, the access of detritus to the streams by either of these methods is in large measure prevented by a border of vegetation along the banks, and, owing to the plentiful supply of water which they furnish to the soil on their banks, all streams tend to produce such vegetal borders and thus themselves to limit the supply of detritus which reaches them.

Always, however, to limit it, and never to shut it off entirely, since some eroded material will find its way in, in spite of all vegetal or other obstacles. Some rivers and occasionally smaller streams are so situated that they are able to attack directly deposits of alluvial material which they themselves, or other rivers, have laid down in previous epochs. The lower Mississippi, the Ganges, the Yangtsekiang, and the Fo, are examples.

Such rivers are not limited to the action of rain water and of their smaller tributaries for their supply of suspended material, since they by their own action can obtain such material from their banks. Such a procedure, however, is but one step in the process of translocation. The alluvial material must have come from some- where. The river has simply juggled it a bit before passing it finally into the sea. Material derived from the banks would not last for- ever, and in general what is taken away at one time or one place is replaced at another. The ultimate source of the river load is farther back.

This is still true of the Chinese rivers, though the amount of alluvial material directly available is there so enormous that the river may be considered as having a practically inexhaustable supply of soil material always open to the attack of the stream itself. But the loess is not a primary material. It has already been subjected to much translocation, and the existence of this appar- o On the Chinese loess, see p. But, by rain wash and stream movement acting together, the surface waters have a reasonably large range of attack.

There are but few localities where the surface is not somewhat subject to the erosive action of water, and the suspended load of a river generally represents to some degree the soil of the whole of its drainage area; well enough at least to give river deposits all necessary heterogeneity. A much more serious limitation to the action of rivers and streams lies in their inability to deposit their load except where their waters actually flow.

However well charged be the river water with the various soil forming materials, no benefit will accrue to the land lying higher than the flood level, and in nearly all river basins these lands far exceed in area and value those which are occasionally subject to flood. The action of running water is limited,- therefore, in that the streams are restricted, both in attack and deposition, to the surface actually covered; and in that the main source of supply of extraneous material to the streams, namely, rain wash, is very intermittent in its action.

Larger soil areas may be found in which river deposition has played a part in the past, though it has long ceased to do so. Such are the alluvial lands in river bottoms, and on terraces, old flood plains, etc. When the product of large rivers, these are of course thoroughly mixed and very fertile, but they make up no large percentage of the available farm lands. Of the soils usually and rightly classed as alluvial, the larger proportion are the products of the present or past action of small streams, and the sediments of these streams, being derived from smaller and less diversified drainage areas, do not compare with river sediments in heterogeneity or fertilizing value.

It is not prob- able that any major proportion of the present arable soil is now receiving or has received river or stream sediments of sufficient diversity to be of material assistance in the maintenance or increase of heterogeneity. At the present day the one translocating action of water which is most important in the maintenance of heterogeneity and fertility is not the addition of new material to the soil, but the removal of old material from it. By the constant and normal removal of surficial soil through the streams into the lakes and oceans, the soil layer is pushed gradually into the underlying deposits, and secures therefrom fresh, unweathered, and unexhausted materials.

In this way water translocation is of great and indubitable importance, but in the sup- ply of new material by cross-surface translocation it must in all probability yield in importance to the action of the wind. These phenomena are naturally the ones which most attract attention, because in them the agency of the wind is easily discernible, but, though geologically important, they are less often agriculturally so, since they occur mostly in the more arid regions, where extended agriculture is impossible.

So much has attention been confined to these practically arid region phenomena that soil students in general consider the wind as specifically a desert agent and of little, if any, importance in the humid regions. This is by no means the case. Geikie — Textbook of geology, 4th ed. Hall— The soil, p. This constant drift of blown material has largely passed unnoticed, because it does not of itself attract attention; its results are slowly produced, and when complete are difficult to distinguish from the results of other agencies.

Where special conditions exist, special manifestations are developed; and these being unusual and striking, attract attention entirely out of proportion to their true importance. The wind must be considered as active everywhere. In a geological sense it is perhaps most active in arid regions, where the surface is dry and easily attacked and where protective vegeta- tion is absent; but, agriculturally considered, its activity in humid regions is of much greater importance on account of the greater pro- ductive value of the lands affected.

It is, of course, true that the arid-region manifestations of wind action may indirectly affect the humid regions, as, e. Neither are the special manifestations of wind action, such as sand dunes and dust storms, strictly confined to deserts, though most frequent therein. It should be noted that the wind is not subject to the factors which limit the action of water, as discussed in the last chapter p. The wind does not move that is, not directly under the action of gravitation, and therefore it may, and does, move either up or down hill, carrying its load with it.

The preponderance of translocation is naturally from higher to lower levels, but there is much in the oppo- site direction. It works on the areas upon which water does not, for water-covered areas are naturally not exposed to the wind. And since the areas covered by water are enormously less than those not so covered, the wind has greatly the advantage. With regard to areas of deposi- tion, the wind has no limits whatever. It can deposit anywhere. Then, too, the wind is constantly active, or nearly so, and thereby avoids the intermittence which is characteristic of much water action.

But if the wind escapes the limitations which are forced on water translocation, it has no less serious ones of its own. On account of the greater tenuity of air, the atmosphere has a specific transporting power much less than that possessed by water, and is much more closely limited in the size and weight of particles which it can handle.

Further, a surface is much more easily protected from the wind than from the action of running water. The erosive and translocating activity of either wind or water is determined by a balance of various factors, some of which are favoring and some opposing, and the actual activity in any individual case will depend on the relative values of these factors. Those favorable to wind erosion are not always the same as those favorable to erosion by water, and consequently what increases wind action may decrease water action, and vice versa, and whether wind or water is most active in any particular region depends again on a balance of the factors.

In an arid region wind has the advantage; in certain other places water action becomes much more important; while in still others, as, e. In order to show clearly the importance of wind action on soils, it is necessary to discuss the manner and manifestations of its action in more detail, paying particular attention to the importance of constant drift of soil, as mentioned above, but not neglecting the more unusual phenomena of dunes, sand storms, etc.

These need discus- sion not only for the sake of completeness and on account of their occasional agricultural importance, but also because in them the phenomena are usually simple and apparent, and are consequently easier of examination and interpretation.

Ansgar Warner

In order to be transported by the wind, material must first be lifted from the surface, and any discussion of the mechanics of wind trans- location must therefore be prefaced by some consideration of the means by which the air currents attack the surface and acquire their load of detrital material. Loose dust and sand can be directly at- tacked by the wind, but rocks and other more or less indurated materials must first be disintegrated or abraded. The term has already been applied to eolian action by Pasearge Naturw.

Rock corrasion by natural sand blast was first geologically described from the San Bernardino Pass, California, by Blake a in It has been many times observed in deserts, on seacoasts, and in all locali- ties where drifting sand is common. The process had been earlier noted in brief by several desert travelers, especially Wellsted loc. Arzte 73, II 1: Ball— Aswan Cataract, p. Nuovi Lincei 5 See Choffat — Comm. For this opinion see Braun — Verh. The now universal opinion is that they are formed by sand-blast corrasion, though the initial form of the pebble may have much to do with its final one.

There exists a kind of faceted or planed bowlders and pebbles of undoubted glacial origin, but these have only a very super- ficial resemblance to the ordinary faceted pebbles or Drei-KanUr. The facets on these glacial pebbles are produced by ice planation while the pebble is fixed in the bed over which the ice is passing and which it is planing down. See Blanford — Kept. For descriptions of occurrences of faceted pebbles and discussions of their eolian origin, see the works cited in the bibliography under the following authors: Andrews, Barron Topography between Cairo and Suez, p.

Gregory Dead Heart of Australia, p. Krause, Laufer, Lenz Timbouctou, vol 2, p. Gutbier 's articles are the first notices of occurrences and those of Travere and of Enys contain the first sugges- tions of eolian origin. Mugge and Milthers give good resumes of present knowledge. Occurrences in the western United States are described by Blake loc. Occurrences in New England are described in the articles by Stone and Woodworth, cited in the bibliography. The latter gives references to earlier New England literature.

Browne Materials other than rocks are also frequently attacked by blown sand. The telegraph wire along the Trans-Caspian Railway had to be removed after eleven years because in that time its diameter had diminished one-half because of sand blast corrasion. The material moved by the wind comes mainly a Trans.

Futterer has noticed the corra- sion of building stones in Heidelberg Castle — Mitth. For notices of the injury of Egyptian monuments see Petrie — Proc. On the effects of corrasion on the ruins of the ancient cities of east Turkestan see Hedin— Through Asia, vol. Exposed deposits of such material are rapidly attacked, the detached and blown grains acting as tools, to loosen and remove further material.

The soil is of course easily attacked in this way and is saved from complete removal only by the existence of certain agencies which tend to protect it. The chief of these natural protectors are vegetation and surface moisture, and nearly all lands share to some degree in the benefits they afford, though in few is the protection perfect enough entirely to prevent attack. The protective action of vegetation is due to its preventing the contact of moving air with the soil surface. The air in the layer next the ground is entangled in the stalks and leaves of the plants and either its motion is entirely prevented or its velocity is greatly reduced.

To act in this way the plants must of course be more or less closely matted, and isolated individuals are compara- tively useless, as the wind is able to reach the soil between them with little or no loss of velocity. That form of vegetation is most efficient which provides 1 plants spaced most closely and 2 plants reach- ing highest into the air. Thus grasses and trees are found in prac- tice to offer the best protection — the first because of the production of a close mat near the ground, and the second because of the height they attain. The real criterion of the protective action of any particular form of vegetation is naturally the ratio of the average height of the plants to the average distance between them.

The greater this ratio, the greater the protection. The protective action of vegetation is not, however, entirely due to the reduction of the wind velocity at the surface, for the roots of the plants also act as binders in holding the soil grains together and preventing erosion either by wind or water. Possibly much of the efficiency of the grasses in preventing erosion is due to the extensive interlaced root system which is developed near the surface. The layer of decaying vegetable matter which accumulates under an established vegetation is also an opponent of wind action.

It is usually pretty well held together by undecomposed stalks and branches and acts as a felted covering which is not readily broken by the wind. Its efficiency is, however, largely due to the fact that it tends to remain moist, for if its moisture be lost, much of the resist- ance to erosion is lost also, and the individual leaves, etc. For instance, a low bushy species will furnish more protection than a tall one with a single stem, though the distance between plants be the same in each case.

The actual efficiency of any particular vegetal cover in preventing wind erosion is rather difficult to estimate. The other forms' of vegetation decrease more and more in efficiency with decrease in the ratio of plant height to plant distance. At the lower end of the series stand the plants common in semiarid regions which grow singly or in isolated clumps, and whose action in preventing wind erosion is very slight.

Whether the natural vegetation of any piece of land will prevent its being acted upon by the wind depends largely on its water supply. If the land be kept sufficiently moist the vegetation is usually thick enough and high enough to form a mom or less perfect protection, while an arid soil has practically ne vegetation and therefore no protection.

All gradations between these two extremes are possible and are found in nature. Cul- tivated plants are usually spaced much more widely than wild ones and in many cases a large part of the area of the field is entirely bare of vegetation. These spaces between plants and between rows of plants are easily attacked by the wind, but more important is the fact that cultivated fields are during a part of each year bare of any vegetation whatever. The operations of plowing, harrowing, etc. In both ways wind erosion is assisted and it is therefore apparent that cultivation will, other things equal, tend to increase the amount of soil moved by the wind, so much so in some cases that the clearing of the natural vegetation preparatory to cultivation has led to serious loss of soil by blowing.

The presence of films of moisture between the soil particles sets up forces due to surface tension. These forces tend to hold the particles together. If, therefore, the surface of the soil be moist there will exist a force strongly opposing the action of the wind in detaching soil particles and in many cases competent entirely to prevent attack.

There are usually a few grains which are dry enough to lack the surrounding water films. These are blown a See Shaler— Ann. This drying effect of the wind and consequent blowing of even wet soil is well illustrated by phenomena observed on the sandy soils of Anne Arundel County, Md. These soils blow a great deal at all times, and especially when freshly plowed, but contrary to what might be expected they blow more when plowed wet than when plowed dry.

The fact that some blowing takes place on the wet soil is not difficult to understand. Owing to the sandy character of the soil, as shown by the mechanical analysis given in Table I, it is very permeable and well drained and the rain water, though rap- idly absorbed, is as rapidly drained.

For this reason a sandy soil always tends to blow more when wet than does a soil composed of finer particles, and consequently is less protected by moisture than is a loam or a This action has been noticed by Bernard in the Sahara — Compt. Another illustration is the observation that the sand of the Gape Town South Africa dunes blows badly when the wind is dry but hardly at all when it is wet, Braine — Proc.

See also the instances of damage by soil blowing cited on pp. Clay soils in particular hold on to their moisture so tena- ciously that they blow practically not at all when wet. That more blowing should be observed on the freshly plowed soil when moist than when dry is more difficult of explanation, but is probably due to a looser texture in the moist soil. It has been shown by Cameron and Gallagher that the structure of a soil is dependent on its water content and that for each soil there is a cer- tain "critical moisture content" which corresponds to the maximum of flocculation and looseness of texture.

This critical moisture con- tent is also that content at which water is most strongly held mechan- ically by the soil. Amounts of water above this content can be drained away quite readily, whereas below this point very little water can be mechanically removed, even by centrifuging at very high speeds.

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Hence the wet soil when stirred by plowing would take on the maximum openness of structure of which it was capable and would be most easily dried out superficially and blown away by the wind. The dry soil, on the other hand, when stirred by plowing would tend to pack more closely together and would hence be less open to attack. These phenomena are in accord with the observation of Wesseley e that dune sands are looser after having been moistened.

In deserts where there can be no protection by either vegetation or moisture another protective agent is developed — the '' desert pavement," recently well described by Tolman. The "critical moisture content" of Bulletin 50 and the " moisture equivalent" of Bulletin 45 mean the same thing see BuU. This same moisture content is identical with the so-called "optimum water content" for the growth of plants see BuU. For the ideas expressed in this paragraph I am largely indebted to suggestions received from Professor Tolman's papers and from him personally.

The surface concentration of stones and pebbles in desert regions had previously been observed by Blake— Kept. Its protective action seems, however, to have been first noted by Tolman loc. Of interest in this connection is the fact that the surface layers of desert sand are apt to be coarser than those below — an observation made in Sinai by Bolton Trans.

It is obvious that a pavement will be formed as soon as the wind has worked through a layer of heterogeneous mate- rial sufficiently thick to contain one layer of pebbles; the actual thickness depending upon the proportion of pebbles in the deposit. This thickness will therefore form the practiced limit to the wind ero- sion of that deposit, and in the heterogeneous deposits of ordinary deserts this limiting thickness will be comparatively small.

It is, of course, true that the desert pavement is not absolutely permanent. Its pebbles will yield slowly to corrosion and occasionally to fracture by temperature change, and loose material may be removed from underneath them during the rare periods of flowing water, or by the "creep" of soil.

The susceptibility of the pavement pebbles to removal and change is shown by the rarity of perfect pavements. There is almost always some uncovered space between the individual pebbles and there are frequently bare spots in which the pebbles are spaced more widely. Of many pavements examined by the writer only two 6 have at all closely approached perfection. This lack of perfection is, however, but a minor matter.

Even though it be far from a perfect one, a desert pavement is a most effective protection to fine material beneath, and it is certain that the formation of such pavements is a phenomenon of constant occurrence wherever heterogeneous material is exposed to wind attack, 6 and of far-reaching importance in limiting the eolian degradation of desert surfaces. They are, however, comparatively rare. For another occurrence, see H6gbom— Geol. This is the one shown in PI. Professor Tolman tells me that there is an extensive and still more perfect pavement north of the Chocolate Mountains, California.

There is a similar pavement of shell fragments covering a small area on Monterey Peninsula, California, though here the possible action of man, birds, or other animals can not be certainly excluded. Neither is it certain that the desert pavement is always or exclusively the product of wind action.

It is very probable , that under proper conditions flowing water can produce a practically identical forma- tion. The writer has examined pavements west of Hazen, Nev. THE LIFTING OF EXPOSED MATERIAL, 83 In addition to these pavements, there are two other protections against wind action which are of some importance in deserts; first, the salt crusts, which, possessing more cohesion, are less easily attacked than is the naked soil; and second, the surficial crusting and baking not only of clays and loams but of fairly sandy soils as well, the nature of which is not yet well understood, but the occur- rence of which is familiar to all who have been much in desert coun- tries.

The lifting of loose material lying exposed on the surface is largely the work of eddies and irregularities of movement in the wind. In the earlier discussions of fluid friction the moving fluid was consid- ered as flowing past the stationary surface with no deformation of its lines of flow, and all friction was assumed to take place at the solid-fluid surface "skin friction" or else between layers of fluid parallel to that surface.

The very thin layer immediately next the surface was assumed stationary or moving with a very low velocity. The next layer moves a little faster, the next a little faster still, etc. Did this sort of thing actually occur in flowing fluids bhere would be practically no lifting of material into the current. The lower layer might become somewhat charged with suspended material but prac- tically none would be able to rise to layers above. In nature, how- ever, this simple laminated flow does not exist. Whatever may be the true motion of flowing fluids it is undoubtedly very complex and there is much mixing of the hypothetical layers of flow.

If water flows in this way it is easy to see how material can be picked up from the bottom and carried along, the solid particles moving as is known to be a fact in a saltatory manner similar to that ascribed to the hypothetical water module. In any event it is certain that water flow is not laminar and that there are innumerable eddies and cross-currents which thoroughly mix the body of a stream and enable material to be lifted from the bottom and carried along in suspension and in saltation. Whether the phenomena of flowing water and of flowing air are perfectly analogous is perhaps open to question, and at any rate the air currents with which we are familiar are really but eddies in the bottom of an ocean of air and hardly comparable with currents in limited and confined masses of water like streams.

It is, however, certain, as has been shown by Langley, that the air currents are exceedingly variable and made up of many conflicting cross currents and eddies, and the hypothesis of laminar flow is just as inapplicable to air as to water. It is no matter whether these cross currents and eddies be considered a characteristic con- comitant of moving air as seems probable or whether they be deemed accidental variations due to the interference of terrestrial obstacles.

The fact remains that they exist and are of great import- ance in promoting the thorough mixing of the atmosphere and enabling it to lift fine material from the surface of the ground.

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The actual form of the eddies is unknown and is probably variable. Whirling eddies are known to be efficient, but dust can probably be lifted in many other ways. The preceding discussion relates to the way in which surface deposits are attacked and the material made available for the transporting activity of the wind.

The lifting of the finer material higher into the atmosphere is accomplished in the same general way. The atmosphere is in such general and constant circulation, vertical as well as horizontal, that material fine enough to remain in suspension for any appreciable time can be carried far above the surface simply by the normal movement of the air currents.

Material is also lifted by whirlwinds as described on pages and very fine dust is carried up by the rising of masses of air under changes of tempera- ture — the ordinary convectional circulation of the atmosphere. Of course under equivalent conditions the smaller particles are more easily moved by the wind, and consequently in attacking a heterogeneous deposit the wind tends to make a selection, removing the finer particles and leaving the coarser behind. There is no sharp separation between these various classes, and each grades into the next.

This sorting action of the wind depends not really on size but on the mutual relations of mass, surface area, and shape. The forces exerted by the wind against a suspended particle are due to the impact of the air against the particle and to friction along its surface, which forces vary with the size and shape of the particle, while the only opposing force is that of gravity which varies with its mass.

It is of course possible to consider the forces acting between the air and the particle as due entirely to impact; for, if gases be consid- ered as composed of free moving particles, all manifestations of gaseous "friction" are really due to the impact of particles of gas against the solid surface. It is convenient, however, to make a rough distinction between the "impact" forces due to the momentum of the air which directly impinges on the body and the "frictional" forces due to secondary impact and connected with the viscosity of the air and similar effects.

It is possible that this latter component may include effects other than purely mechanical impact, as perhaps electric or magnetic attractions, gravitational actions, etc. The forces due to direct impact will vary for any given wind velocity with the cross section of the particle in the plane perpen- dicular to the wind direction and with the angle or angles which the exposed surface makes with this direction; therefore, practically with the cross section of the particle, its shape, and its orientation relative to the wind.

The forces due to friction will vary with the area and configuration of the exposed surface. For particles of very irregular shape — as, for instance, mica flakes — these relations are far too complex for any analysis, except the general conclusion that ease of suspension will increase with increasing irregularity of shape, and of course with decrease of mass. With such regular particles decrease of size represented by the diameter means increase of this surface-mass ratio, and consequently small spherical particles are more easily carried than large ones.

Thus since most of the soil parti- cles, and especially those classed as sand, are likely to be approxi- mately spherical, their ease of transport is roughly dependent upon their diameter, and they are sorted by the wind pretty closely accord- ing to this dimension.

The more irregular particles are more easily carried and will be found among material which if regular in shape is of smaller linear dimensions. As a practical conclusion of general applicability it may be stated that the greater the surface-mass ratio of a particle the more easily will it be suspended. All this assumes that the particles under consideration have the same specific gravity. If the specific gravities vary, either because of difference of material or of internal cavities or inclusions, that particle with the highest value will have the greatest mass per unit surface and will consequently tend to fall most rapidly.

This is well illustrated by the fact that in showers of volcanic ash the heaviest minerals, as magnetite, augito, etc. The result of this air sorting of blown material is that practically all eolian deposits are remarkably uniform in grain, as has been pointed out by Udden. Mate- rial a little coarser is not moved at all and forms lag gravels, while material a little finer is blown clear away. Dust deposited from suspension in the air "dust- falls, 11 etc. The complete blowing away of fine dust, leaving sand and coarser material behind, is known as " deflation. By its means only is the wind able to lower a surface on which it works.

The finely disintegrated material is continually removed from the surface and the rocks and coarser fragments left exposed to the attack of the dis- integrating and abrading agents. It is because of this phase of wind action that the surfaces of deserts are so uniformly sandy or stony. Any dust which is produced by abrasion or other means and there is a great deal is at once blown away, leaving only the particles which are too coarse to be "deflated.

Rock disintegration and especially the largely mechanical disintegra- tion which obtains in deserts leads to the production, progressively, of stones, gravel, sand, and dust. If the dust be blown away, sand is left, and if the sand be disintegrated or be itself drifted away, gravel or bare rock is left. Or, if the floor of the desert be formed of already disintegrated heterogeneous material, the finer part will be removed, and the resulting surface will be sandy, gravelly, or rock-strewn, depending upon the relative amounts of the materials of various fine- ness in the original deposit and upon their relative rates of disinte- gration or removal.

For a discussion of the advisability of employing it, see Passarge — Naturw. From philological considerations "efflation" would probably be better, but "deflation' 1 has been so long and so generally used that it seems inadvisable to make the change. These spots are also usually places to which fine material is fre- quently supplied usually by water action , as, for example, the playaa. The presence or supply of much resistant gravel will cause the for- mation of a desert pavement gravelly desert ; the presence of much sand either original or as the result of disintegration of weakly resist- ant gravel or rock and the existence of conditions forbidding the escape of this sand by drifting along the surface, will cause a sandy desert, etc.

Of course in the analysis of the origin of desert surfaces 7 agents other than eolian must be assigned their share. The question 4 is one of too great detail and complexity to be fully discussed here. The process of eolian erosion and deflation of the d6bris has recently been suggested in explanation of the origin of the peculiar flat plains of the American deserts out of which rise isolated moun- tains or mountain ranges. It has always been believed that these plains were composed of immense thicknesses of rock d6bris rain- washed from the higher land.

The original valleys had been filled up, leaving the higher mountains projecting as islands from a solid sea of mountain waste. For- tieth Parallel, vol. West of th Merid. His Conclusions are more fully stated in his papers cited below. Tolman's conclusions are supported by well logs for certain of the bolsons, and the writer has seen logs and other evidence which point the same way in the case of a few others.

For these the hypothesis of eolian origin must be abandoned. This failure of the hypothesis to be everywhere applicable does not, however, entirely discredit it. Passarge's conclusions in the Kalahari have not been challenged, and it is quite possible that even in North America the same processes may have been determining in certain places, though in others they seem certainly to have played a minor r61e.

The question is one which can be settled only after the acquiring of more exact and accurate knowledge of the underground conditions in the areas affected. This controversy aside, there is little doubt of the reality of the process of eolian planation and of the activity of deflation as a gen- eral agent of removal. See also Tight— Amer. See also Knight and Slosson— Wyo. According to Petrie c at least 8 feet has been removed by deflation from part of the Nile Delta during the past 2, years.

Mention should also be made of the action of the prevailing wind in modifying the so-called law of von Baer relating to the asymmetric develop- ment of river valleys; which action includes not only direct erosion of the opposing bank, but also eolian deposition behind the wind- ward bank, sidewise blowing of the waters of the river with conse- quent asymmetric erosion , and the action of wind-driven rain. This tendency is, however, counter- acted by two others; first, the excess of corrasion to which elevated portions are exposed and which tends to wear them down to the com- mon level;' and, second, the action of rain wash sheetfloods in carrying loose material into depressions and tending to fill them up.

The results and interactions of the various factors have recently been well analyzed by Smolenski— Peterm. On sheetflood action, see McGee— Bull. Davis 6 rejects this hypothesis but it is favored by Cross' and by Tolman. If large quantities of fine dust are deflated from desert regions they must be deposited somewhere, and at least a part of the deposition will be on land surfaces. Dust so deposited may have not only a geological but an agricultural importance.

It will be shown later that a considerable quantity of dust blown from the Sahara has been deposited in Europe and that the process is still going on. Other regions show analogous phenomena. The actual size of the particles which can be transported, and consequently the limiting sizes of lag gravel, drifting sand, etc. On the eolian formation of cirques, see also Barron and Hume — Topog- raphy of the Eastern desert of Egypt, p.

The extension of the term to eolian transport is obvious. The forces which tend to place a particle in suspension and keep it there have been explained as due to the impact of the air against the particle and the "friction 11 of the air in passing it. This means that the wind velocity necessary to support a particle will vary as the square of the radius; or inversely, the radius of the particle which the wind can support the radius of competence will vary as the square root of the velocity. An increase in wind velocity will, according to this formula, produce a less than corresponding increase in competence.

Unfortunately this formula does not seem to be in very good agreement with the rather meager experimental data. Both observers find a discrepancy of about 50 per cent between theory and observation, but in opposite directions. Zeleny and McKeehan find that the observed values are less than the calculated, while Buller finds the reverse. Zeleny and McKeehan, however, in a preliminary announcement of later work d say that Stokes's formula has been found to hold for the fall of small spheres of wax, paraffin, and mercury.

His data are given in Table II. His later, more exact experiments are reported in the Compt. In the table the data of both articles are combined. The values from the earlier experiments are marked with an asterisk. Wind Wind Wind Wind Telocity. Diameter of quarts particles. Meten of quarts parttolee. Meters of quarts parades. Meters of quarts particles. Meters per aoconn second. The discrepancy between this result and the formula deduced from the Stokes equation is not easy to explain.

It is possible that the relations existing in a narrow tube are not similar to those for free motion in the open air. They do, however, lead to the interesting conclusion that the velocity of moving air relative to its surroundings has a marked effect on the rate of fall relative to the air of particles through it. It was found that particles aver- aging 0.

In all the above discussion the velocities mentioned are, of course, the velocities of the wind with reference to the particles or vice versa , and only the components of these velocities parallel and oppo- site to the force of gravity are of interest. The velocities of the wind itself or of the particle as referred to any point in space or to a point on the surface of the earth are of no direct interest in calcu- lating the supporting power.

However, the upward velocities of the momentary cross currents see p. Hygiene 68 x The size of the grains which can be rolled and drifted along the surface depends not alone on the wind velocity and the nature of the material, but obviously on the topography as well. Mechanical analyses of dune sands from different localities show the presence of material varying between fairly wide limits, but this, at county means little, as the history of the sand is usually not fulfcp: Winds of extraordinary strength may, of course, move larger fragments.

Pumpelly'saw stones 2 inches across blown along by a storm in Turkestan. In all such cases it is necessary to discriminate between material moved by the wind and material moved by gravity with the assist- ance of the wind. On sloping ground the wind is able to dislodge v and start off rock fragments far too large to be affected by it on the level. In any event the movement of occasional large stones is of interest only as a curiosity.

Of the particles moved to any distance, by far the larger number must lie well inside of Udden's limit of 0. I Carnegie Institution of Washington Pub. On pebbles moved by storms in the Alps see Theobald— Jahrb. Schweizer Alpenklubs 4i For purposes of reference some measurements of the size of undoubted wind-borne particles are given in Table III. Dwt from atorm at Irvlngton. In I , January M. Uafcb, IMD Blroooo h -. ItOI Sirocco -in -i i 1. Sirocco In i illenatCiamar, dennaoy. BlrocCO i- ii sit Hr. ISUS Sirocco dual fallen. Blrocco lusi tallpn on! It haa been eiamlned by Of. Complc" made by Prof.

FrMin a in- 1 1 ii-. The total amount of material which can be carried by the wind is a matter quite distinct from the question of the size of the particle which it can sustain. It is evident that water is able to carry particles much larger than can be supported by moving air, but in its relation to transport capacity this handicap is more than counterbalanced by the tremendously greater volume of the atmosphere and by the fre- quently greater velocities possessed by atmospheric currents.

The carrying capacity of the wind has been experimentally investigated by Udden, 8 who determined the amount of quartz flour of varying fineness which was kept suspended by air agitated with a velocity of about 5 miles per hour. His results are given in Table IV. No great accuracy is claimed, as the natural conditions are far too complicated to be susceptible to satisfactory reproduction in the laboratory.

Assuming this value and more or less well-known values for velocities and areas of current, he calculates that the transport capacity of the winds blowing over the basin of the Mississippi is one thousand times as large as the transport capacity of the river. This estimate is based on very conservative data and seems quite worthy of accept- ance. If anything it is probably too low. Of course because the transport capacity of the winds is one thou- sand times that of the river it does not follow that the actual amounts of material transported are in anything like the same ratio.

The atmosphere is usually loaded only to a very small fraction of its ca- pacity, and the river, having so much larger a proportion of its capacity actually utilized, possibly does remove more material from the Mississippi basin than does the atmosphere. What is the actual amount of atmospheric transportation out of the Mississippi basin, or from place to place within it, it is impossible even to estimate without extensive measurements of deposited dust and of dust in the air over long periods of time. The difficulty of making such meas- urements is very great and the value of the results obtained would probably be entirely incommensurate with the labor expended.

Some idea of the amount of atmospheric transport may be obtained from the various estimates of deposited dust, of deflation, etc. Some more or less direct measurements of the material carried by dust-storms are given on pages It will be evident that the amount of material moved by the atmosphere is probably very large, and that the maximum amount which could be moved is certainly much larger still.

It may be noted in passing that if these estimates of atmospheric transport can be established they will, to a considerable extent, vitiate the calculations of the rate of geologic denudation which are based on the amount of material carried off by seaward flowing waters. There is a small fraction of the air-borne dust which is fine enough to remain more or less permanently in suspension and the distance to which such material can be carried is limited only by the limits of the atmosphere.

But by far the larger part of the material car- ried by the wind remains in the lower layers of the atmosphere and moves in a series of comparatively short leaps in a manner quite analogous to the process of saltation described by McGee for the detritus of loaded streams and noted on page 33 above. The lengths of the leaps made by the individual particles depend on their size and shape, on the wind velocity, and to a certain extent on the topography of the country.

Very heavy particles, the coarsest of the drifting sand, are dislodged by some unusually heavy gust and carried forward a distance dependent largely upon the initial impulse and the force of gravity, the resistance or assistance of the air being relatively unimportant. Such a particle will describe a tra- jectory, which is sensibly a parabola.

In all actual cases the path described is affected by so many accidental variations that it loses all resemblance to any regular curve, but the motion is always saltatory in its general character and all eolian transportation ex- cluding that of truly suspended material is by a series of leaps. This manner of progression can be very easily and very beautifully observed in the motion of drifting sand under a moderate wind. With such sand the leaps are very short — a few inches or a few feet — but the finer material intermediate between that in saltation and that in true suspension may make leaps of much greater length, perhaps even of miles.

The particular sizes or surface-mass ratios which such material includes will vary with the velocity of the wind. A heavy storm may carry in what is practically permanent suspension matter which, by ordinary winds, would be moved only in saltation. There is really no intrinsic difference between saltation and suspen- sion. Particles carried in suspension are simply saltatory particles whose leaps are disproportionately in the limiting case infinitely long.

When one particle is dropped another is picked up, and the total load may remain practically constant, though the individual particles are changing. Neither does it mean than an individual particle can not travel far if sufficient time be allowed. Unless in some way permanently attached to the surface some of the particles dropped at any spot will be again picked up and started on another leap. The total distance of transport effected by even one storm may be very considerable for some few of the particles. Others will be left from place to place along the way and new ones picked up in their stead.

It is this constant interchange which takes place between the atmospheric load and the soil which gives to the process of wind translocation its importance in mixing soils and maintaining their heterogeneity. The arid region dust storms, described on page 77 and following, frequently carry material so fine that much of it remains in suspen- sion throughout the whole course of the storm, and the distances covered by such material are consequently very great, though well- a See the recent experiments of Olsson-Seffer on drifting coastal sands, Jour.

Of course, in nature this practically never occurs; and owing to eddies and velocity changes in the wind a particle of medium size may be successively in "suspension" and in "saltation" a score of times in the course of a single "leap. Examination of the dust itself usually fails to indicate the place of origin, and one must rely on indirect evidence, such as the existence of a probable source in the direction from which the wind was coming, meteorological data by which the path of the storm can be traced, etc.

A few instances of long- distance transport by dust storms are given on pages It occasionally happens that dust is raised into the upper air by violent storms, volcanic eruptions, etc. Observations on cloud move- ments a have shown the presence of rapid currents at heights of from 2 to 10 miles, and the recent observations of Trowbridge b on meteor trains indicate that velocities of over miles per hour are not infrequent at greater heights 40 to 65 miles.

The existence of cloud glows and similar optical effects due to dust shows that some dust is present at high altitudes, though perhaps not at the highest mentioned, and what dust is there will travel far and fast. The European dust storm of February, , seems to have traveled mainly in the higher strata and with a velocity of about 50 miles an hour.

A part of the dust of the storm of March, , also got into the higher strata above the zone of rain formation and was not precipitated with the rain of March Three days later it had sunk low enough to be caught by the rain of the 15th and carried down therewith. Most eolian trans- portation is by saltation in the air close to the surface.

Material carried either in suspension or in saltation is deposited primarily by decrease of wind velocity. They usually coincide with the morning mortar ritual of blasts hitting the so-called green zone. Now as I type this evening, a huge explosion rattles my walls. A gun battle with heavy automatic weapons kicks off down the street, and the usual wailing sirens of ambulances and Iraqi Police begin blaring across the city-streaming in this direction.

Tuesday, November 30, War News for November 30, http: Four Iraqis killed, nineteen, including two US soldiers, wounded in car bombing north of Baghdad. In a separate attack, an insurgent fired a rocket-propelled grenade at a U. Suicide bomber rams U. In August , ten suspicious deaths led to post-mortem examinations. In August , post-Saddam, murders were recorded in the city in a similar four-week period. But the staff also remember when hundreds of victims of mass execution were dumped by the Baathist authorities at the mortuary and relatives were too frightened to collect them.

Why did they disband the army and police last year and allow those weapons and munitions to pour into the hands of criminals in our streets? Why did they leave us for a year with no national army and police? Now we all suffer — them and us. In the most violent provinces, they say, the Iraqis are so intimidated that many are reluctant to show up and do not tell their families where they work; they have yet to receive adequate training or weapons, present a danger to American troops they fight alongside, and are unreliable because of corruption, desertion or infiltration.

Given the weak performance of Iraqi forces, any major withdrawal of American troops for at least a decade would invite chaos, a senior Interior Ministry official, whose name could not be used, said in an interview last week. By creating a climate of fear, the insurgents seem to hope Iraqis will be too scared to cast their votes and the election will lose its legitimacy. In that respect, the campaign of intimidation in Mosul may be a test case for the rest of Iraq. In all more than 50 bodies have been found since Nov. Around two dozen have been identified as members of the Iraqi National Guard or Iraqi army, while others are believed to be civilians who may have worked with U.

The overwhelming majority voice their objections to what they see as one-sided support in favor of Israel and against Palestinian rights, and the long-standing, even increasing, support for what Muslims collectively see as tyrannies, most notably Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Pakistan and the Gulf states. Thus, when American public diplomacy talks about bringing democracy to Islamic societies, this is seen as no more than self-serving hypocrisy. That war is rarely mentioned among the American troops in Iraq, many of whom were not yet born when the last American combat units withdrew from Vietnam more than 30 years ago.

A war that America did not win is considered a bad talisman among those men and women, who privately admit to fears that this war could be lost. The meeting, called after increasing attacks against Turkish citizens employed in Iraq, especially in the transportation sector. More than 60 Turks, the majority of them truck drivers, have been killed in Iraq, both in ambushes or executed by militants after being kidnapped.

Doctors from the group Medact conducted surveys with international aid groups and Iraqi health workers in September. They exposed poor sanitation in many hospitals, shortages of drugs and qualified staff and huge gaps in services for mothers and children. Most of the "we support our troops" signs have been taken down or are faded. Yellow ribbons have become faddish accessories to stick next to your George Bush sticker on your SUV. I want a reckoning, and I want my party to deliver.

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More and more of my friends and my soldiers get sent over there. A close friend got killed, and the funeral was tough. I began obsessing over Iraq and counter-insurgencies. I got involved in the election. I jump all over anything that has to do with Iraq, and I worry about making an ass out of myself. I want my story told. The French won the Battle of Algiers but were ultimately worn out by Algerian nationalist guerrillas.

We can grasp the individual act more easily than we can handle the institutional act; we can see the "face of evil" first-hand and pit ourselves against an actor on our own stage bill, not of the highest one. Sometimes these judgments are true, but very often they are not: Many times, these cases unfairly try the unrepresentative small fry while letting the big turkeys go And the still-nameless Marine in Fallujah?

A man afraid, with terror all around him, a terrible decision he will remember and regret all his life! But -- would it not be more effective to put on trial Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, Richard Perle, Dick Cheney, Elliott Abrams and all the other fanatic intellectual couch potatoes who sent that Marine out to fight an impossible war? Yet compare and contrast current national attitudes to what is happening in Iraq. A reverse image is apparent. The British people are very unhappy.

Many Americans think everything is going fine. In short, many Americans, including most of those in the armed forces, think that they are doing a great job in the war zone, and are winning - a sharp contrast with the British mood towards Iraq, which grows ever more fractious and cynical.

Every death provokes a spasm of anger, driven by disbelief in the value of the sacrifice. Tucson Marine is killed in Iraq Note to Readers: Please be patient as I relearn my Blogger skillz. As before, I rely on all of you dedicated readers and posters to keep things current in the comments. Should you need to contact me, my email is: For one thing, it says "On Monday, the military reported five new U. Two American soldiers from Task Force Baghdad were killed and three wounded in a roadside bomb explosion in northwestern Baghdad.

One American soldier died and two were injured in a vehicle accident 30 miles northwest of the town of Kut in eastern Iraq, the military said. In addition, two U. Marines were killed in a weekend bombing south of the capital. The military also reported 13 Marines were wounded Monday in a mortar attack south of Baghdad. And 5 deaths, though two of those were from the weekend, and one from a vehicle collision.

Indeed, November was the second-deadliest month for US troops since the invasion itself. Then the rest of the article talks about how inadequate has been the performance of the Iraqi police and national guards, who face intimidation, threats, and even murder at the hands of the guerrillas. Guerrillas used a car bomb to kill 7 or 8 national guards in Baghdadi, a small town west of the capital. One thing that leaped out at me was the small number of foreign fighters it reports.

The guerrillas in the city were mostly Iraqi. The big divide between liberals and conservatives in regard to Fallujah is that most liberals do not believe that force can be used to solve problems. They may believe that force is sometimes necessary. But they think it most often just causes new problems.

They tend to see the world as complex, not in black and white terms, so that an unalloyed "bad guy" is rare Bin Laden managed to make himself an exception. Liberals also see military force in the context of the whole society, so that they worry about what happens to children and grandmothers when it is deployed. It is liberals who remember that the Vietnam war killed 2 million Vietnamese peasants. And, they find US military deaths unacceptable. So from a liberal point of view, Fallujah was terrible. It involved displacing hundreds of thousands of people, subjecting civilians to bombardment and crossfire, and resulted in over deaths, including over 50 US troops.

The icon of Fallujah for the liberals was the little boy with the shard of grenade shrapnel lodged near his liver, or the old woman bewailing her dead relatives. Conservatives do believe that force can be used to solve problems. They think in terms of good guys and bad guys, and it seems obvious to them that if you kill the bad guys, then you have solved the problem. Getting at the bad guys may be disruptive to civilian populations, and may cause some collateral damage, and may incur some troop casualties, and all that is bad, but it is necessary and worth it.

Many bloggers are complaining from a liberal point of view about the downsides of the use of force. They are completely uninterested in the activities of the Baathist and radical Sunni guerrillas holed up in Fallujah. They are uninterested in whether these guerrillas terrorized the local population. All they can see is the vast destruction caused by the US assault, and the innocent lives damaged. From their point of view, the whole operation against the city is a form of collective punishment.

The US military powerpoint slides are classical conservatism. They identify the bad guys, who are the problem. They lay out their crimes. And they document the way the good guys went in to kill or capture them and so solve the problem. The US military seems strangely unaware of the realities of insurgencies. It seems to think there are a limited number of "bad guys," who can all be killed or captured. The possibility that virtually all able-bodied men in Fallujah supported the insurgency, and that many are weekend warriors, does not seem to occur to them.

In fact, as Mao noted, guerrillas swim in a sea of supportive civilians. The US military slides suggest that now that the bad guys have been taken care of, the civilians can be won over. That this outcome is highly unlikely does not seem to occur to them. Because they just assume the conservative view of the use of military force, they concentrate on the crimes of the guerrillas but do not successfully defend the need to deal with them by assaulting the whole city.

Whatever the military rights or wrongs, the political judgment on the Fallujah campaign is easy. It was supposed to make holding elections possible in the Sunni Arab heartland. Instead, it has certainly further alienated the Sunni Arabs and made it more likely that they will boycott the elections en masse. If the Sunni Arabs remain angry and sullen in this way, Fallujah will have been a political failure.

He suggests that European sympathy for Kurdish nationalism has correspondingly declined. He says that I oppose the creation of a Kurdistan and advocate keeping the current 18 provinces, which is a position that obviously angers him deeply. Salih took to be so dogmatic. It is true that I think multi-ethnic states with large numbers of provinces are more likely to remain stable than those with small numbers of provinces.

A five-province state where each province is organized by a different ethnic group is open to being torn apart by subnationalist feeling. So for a stable Iraq, I suspect the 18 provinces are a better solution. The old pre Pakistan is a case in point-- East Bengal seceded to form Bangladesh.

And India faced a separatist movement among the Sikhs of its east Punjab. Plus, the creation of a Kurdistan province would involve a good deal of ethnic cleansing. Substantial turmoil could wrack Kirkuk. Ethnic hatreds can rise suddenly and spin out of control, as we saw in Serbia and Bosnia. All that said, it is not as if I have a big stake in the issue. If the Iraqi parliament can be elected, and if it creates a Kurdistan and perhaps some other large provinces for Sunni Arabs and Shiites, so that the country had 5 or 6, it would be fine with me.

This plan was put forward by Muwaffaq al-Rubaie. I suspect the Turkmen will demand an Iraqi Turkmenistan, as well, for their , or so members. And maybe, like post Pakistan, an Iraq with 5 or 6 ethnic provinces could hold together. But it could also collapse, as Lebanon did, or as Nigeria did in the late s.

The attitudes of extreme grievance and nationalist demands typical of the Salih piece were much in evidence in the statements of participants. One lady seemed to me to be looking for big revenge on the Arabs for Halabja. There was absolute rage in the room. Some of it was coming from non-Kurdish ethnic groups who share the Iraqi north with them.

No one starts out to create a civil war; countries fall into them through inattention to key flashpoints. The Iraqi Kurds will not be well served by a large-scale outbreak of communal violence. As for the subtext here, which is that many expatriate Iraqi Kurds want an independent country of Kurdistan, I think that attempting to create such a thing will provoke big bloodbaths and heavy intervention by Turkey and Iran. Ich stelle diesem Link einen Auszug aus dem vorherigen Posting von Prof. Der ganze Artikel in dem vorherigen Posting an 2.

It seems to think there are a limited number of " bad guys," who can all be killed or captured. At least U. The worst month was April when died as the insurgence flared in Fallujah and elsewhere in the so-called Sunni Triangle where U. More than 50 U. From the viewpoint of the United States and Iraqis who are striving to restore stability, the casualty trend since the interim Iraqi government was put in power June 28 has been troubling. The monthly totals grew from 42 in June to 54 in July to 65 in August and to 80 in September. When the month began, the official death toll stood at 1, It was not clear whether the bombing deaths of two Marines south of Baghdad on Sunday were included in the overall count the Pentagon published Monday.

Combat injuries increased in November due to the fierce fighting in Fallujah. Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington reported Monday that it received 32 additional battle casualties from Iraq over the past two weeks. One was in critical condition. Some of the most severe injuries - and many of the deaths - among U. That compares with found throughout the country between July 1 and October The IEDs are rigged to detonate by remote control and often are hidden along roadways used by U.

More than half of the approximately mosques in Fallujah were used as fighting positions or weapon storage sites, Whitman said, citing a U. Rumsfeld told a Pentagon news conference last Tuesday that the kinds and amount of weapons found in Fallujah indicated the insurgents pose a serious and continuing threat. Whitman said other discoveries in Fallujah include: What do you think?

Copyright Associated Press. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. By Carla Rivera Times Staff Writer November 30, Quietly, Vera Flores described how her family of eight had been homeless for two months on skid row in downtown Los Angeles, sometimes sleeping on sidewalks before finding a bit more comfort in a mission parking lot. The county does not have enough emergency shelter beds. It has no single agency responsible for the welfare of the homeless. Poverty and high housing costs have been driving more and more onto the streets from Pacoima to Long Beach.

An estimated 34, family members — about the population of Beverly Hills — are homeless at any given time in the county, according a report from the Economic Roundtable, a group that researches social issues. A recent Long Beach count of homeless people found that families, including more than 2, children, were homeless on any given night. For families that suddenly find themselves without a home, the county has emergency shelter beds and has been hard-pressed by limited funds and high real estate costs to add more.

The result is a patchwork of charitable, religious and governmental efforts. Family Housing, which runs emergency shelters and permanent housing for single adults and families. The Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, an independent agency formed in to address homelessness on a regional basis, oversees an emergency shelter program through contracts with dozens of community groups.

However, the agency provides no direct services. Other large urban centers — especially those in colder climates where homeless people risk weather-related injuries or deaths — typically spend more per capita than Los Angeles County does and consolidate their services. In New York, for example, the city provides emergency and transitional housing for 9, families, including 16, children. Chicago runs nine service centers — including a hour facility — and shelters with 6, beds.

Boston families can go to a central facility or call a hotline. In Los Angeles County, more than half of families seeking emergency shelter are turned away, a study by the U. Conference of Mayors concluded, and families often must be split up to be housed. This is what often happened when Flores, her husband, five daughters and year-old son sought refuge downtown. Flores said the family had been evicted from its Westlake apartment when the manager complained there were too many of them living in the single room. While her husband, who did not want his name used, often slept on the streets, the rest of the family stayed on cots in the gated Midnight Mission parking lot on Los Angeles Street.

Originally intended for single adults, over the summer the lot became a haven for 10 or 11 families with 30 to 40 children. Last month, the families were moved inside. She and her three girls have been unable to find other affordable housing. Attorneys have been working to help Thomas and other families at the Midnight Mission obtain public benefits and find other shelter. Most families that fall into homelessness qualify for 16 consecutive nights of emergency shelter, but many have exhausted that aid.

The scarcity of affordable apartments and fewer vouchers for federally subsidized housing has also meant a huge backlog, said Tanya Tull, executive director of Beyond Shelter, which finds housing for the homeless. Of the 1, homeless families that are served each year through her organization, about eventually find shelter while the others wait, often in hotel rooms, she said. In September, advocates were dismayed when the nonprofit L.

Family Housing closed an East Los Angeles shelter that housed 19 families. The closing "puts tremendous strain on my agency and the entire system," he acknowledged. Mitchell Netburn, executive director of the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, said officials are working to address the crisis in family homelessness and move toward a seamless system. Los Angeles County, for example, is hoping to expand a pilot program that now provides emergency shelter and support services for 40 families.

The county wants to add four sites and families. Advocates said they also hope that Bring L. Home — a joint project with city, county, philanthropic, religious and business leaders that aims to eliminate homelessness in 10 years — will create a coordinated system. One idea is to establish eight access centers for getting people into emergency housing.

Copyright Los Angeles Times. It means, if the poll is accurate, that we are a nation of lascivious hypocrites. In fact, the lure of sin, as represented by Hollywood and the entertainment industry, is as tempting to Americans today as apples ever were to Adam and Eve. Whether in Utah, Georgia or New York, the TV ratings show that we are choosing the equivalent of fast-food entertainment over quality programming.

Sex and violence sell well everywhere; high culture does not. So the entertainment titans keep dishing up more of the same. The top two shows in the nation right now are a grisly crime serial and a cynical and sex-soaked demolition of life in the suburbs, and both are beloved in both red states and blue. In the Atlanta market, for example, "Desperate Housewives" is the No. In other words, we have met the enemy and it is us.

If anything is to blame for what appears on our screens it is the free market, a deregulated and hypercompetitive mediascape where a right-wing mega-capitalist like Rupert Murdoch can simultaneously make millions off satires like "Married With Children" and "The Simpsons" and a right-wing news channel that wraps itself in the very "God, country, family" tropes that those satires so crassly yet cleverly spoof.

Yet even some liberals have apparently bought the Big Lie, spewed with a vengeance throughout this election year, that a liberal, permissive, secular, coastal culture has perverted the otherwise pristine heartland of our nation. In reality, what we have here is Econ And guess what is winning. On rare occasions, the good triumphs. Religious censors, for example, would have killed D. Today, however, the admixture of greed and art allows "Desperate Housewives" to cash in on the same sex-with-a-hireling story line, with more cleavage and far less sincerity.

The bottom line of capitalism is that if somebody will buy it, somebody will make it. Worse, these national moralists — dominated these days by evangelical Christians — politicize the issue by blaming "liberal Hollywood" for what deregulation and the free market have wrought. Never mind that Arnold Schwarzenegger made all those violent movies, it is the Democrats and their ilk who are corrupting youth by promulgating our "relativistic" morality.

The real engine at work here, for better or worse, is the profit motive. If this patently obvious point is absent from the complaints of social conservatives, it is because the truth of the matter is inconvenient to their agenda. What would Jesus watch? My guess is PBS. November 30, The German federal police, the BKA, was once famous for its relentless, coolly efficient pursuit of terrorists.

Hundreds of BKA agents eliminated the first three generations of the Red Army Faction, a terror organization that killed scores of politicians and civilians in the s and s. Then the hunt was on for the fourth generation. Hundreds of millions of dollars were invested; again, legions of agents were dispatched. The experts had been hunting a phantom. Lone-wolf terrorists or isolated veterans had committed the few, random attacks that occurred. It was a striking example of how a police force — and a whole nation — fell for propaganda from the terrorists, which was pumped up by almost obsessive media hype.

Looking at the current reporting on Al Qaeda, the question is: Is history repeating itself? The main thing they have learned is that there is less than meets the eye. Yes, Al Qaeda was once centralized, structured and powerful, but that was before the U. In other words, this battle in the war on terror might already be over. It was said to work closely with organized crime, to have access to unlimited funds, to have hidden those funds in gold and diamonds, to be capable of moving its money with a sophisticated finance system to whatever country Osama bin Laden chose to attack next.

The media tended to believe the worst and amplify it. Most of the descriptions of Al Qaeda proved more legend than fact. In fact, analyzing the clusters of activists, he found that there were never large flows of external money financing any attack. In nearly a decade of searching, all Bruguiere was able to find was "micro-financing" activists raising the little money they needed to survive and commit their crimes through credit card or debit card fraud.

They turned out to be petty thieves, not grand gangsters. The terrorists did not need a lot of money to finance the attacks in Madrid, Bali and Tunisia. There is, according to Passas, no evidence that Al Qaeda ever invested in the gold market or in African diamonds. It never moved money around the world through the traditional and untraceable informal money transfer systems known as hawalas. It used Western Union. Meanwhile, authorities pay little or no attention to much simpler ways to transfer money globally.

PayPal, for example, which has become the de facto international bank of the Internet, is open to anyone with a credit card. All too often, investigators have fallen for myths — many times fed by the terrorists themselves. The BKA has constructed profiles of 60 radical Islamists.

The smaller the fish, the tighter the net needed to catch it. Knowing so little means they have few means to predict — or prevent — future acts. Standing on the spot where Jefferson Davis had declared an independent southern confederacy just over years before, he pledged: Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation for ever. A narrow margin of 1, votes out of 1. But with no accusations of electoral fraud or any other irregularities, nobody last night expected the result to change.

They include passages such as: So it was surprising that something so clear and symbolic would be even close. They were most incensed by efforts to remove the section that denied that Alabamians had "any right to education or training at public expense". Opponents claim education is a gift from the state of Alabama, not an entitlement.

Mr Giles said he would have been happy to see the racist language go so long as the issue of education rights remained. But many in Alabama believe the taxation argument was simply a ruse for white southerners to flex their muscles, even on a symbolic issue. After the US supreme court ordered the end of segregation 50 years ago, many white southerners simply moved their children from state schools to private academies, often referred to as "seg academies" because they effectively kept segregation intact. Since then Alabama has provided the backdrop for some of the ugliest scenes during the civil rights era, from the bombing of a church in Birmingham that killed four little girls at Sunday school to the beating of marchers on St Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma.

But in one of the most lightly taxed states in the nation the argument that the measure could raise the fiscal burden went a long way, some say. But racism by itself is far too simple an explanation. Her action prompted the Montgomery Bus Boycott and earned her the title "mother of the modern day civil rights movement". It was greeted with violence in Anniston and Birmingham. The Freedom Ride eventually resulted in the interstate commerce commission ruling against segregation in interstate travel. Governor Wallace makes a speech at the University of Alabama protesting against federally forced racial integration; Vivian Malone and James Hood register for classes as first African American students.

Four days later, outside the Alabama state capitol, King told 25, demonstrators: Canadian authorities arrest US president George W. Vice-President Dick Cheney has mobilized the American military and all border crossings between the two nations have closed. Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin has urged for calm in a short radio and television broadcast to the Canadian people immediately after the arrest. But, it was also a decision that was impossible not to make. This decision puts a grave strain upon both our nations, and I urge calm and restraint from our American neighbours, as well as from Canadians.

I have met with the cabinet, and with our colleagues in the House. This is a time of great crisis for us as a nation. But as people, we will survive this test. This is necessary to guarantee our domestic security. This is not a time for panic, for lawlessness, for anything other than a responsible and sobre focus on what lies immediately ahead. In the traditional orange prison overalls and shackles, Mr Bush seems to be glowering with anger. His name and intake identity number appear on the front of the jumpsuit. He is being treated in accordance with the Geneva Convention and he will be treated fairly.

Speculations on the American response run the The first photograph released since the arrest of the American President in Ottawa earlier. Whatever course of action is decided upon all experts are in agreement that the war in Iraq has so weakened the American military that it could be some days before the United States is ready to field a large scale military response. A Britney Spears concert which had been scheduled to occur this evening in Ottawa has been postponed. A spokesman for the entertainer said that Ms.

The spokesman also said that Ms. Spears would be praying for the president. President Bush had been due to attend an Ottawa luncheon when the arrest occurred. Witnesses at the scene said that utter havoc erupted as the arrest was carried out. Earlier in the day things seemed to be going smoothly on this first visit to Canada by President Bush.

Only a few protestors were on hand at the airport to welcome the President. Authorities had been expecting moderately sized protests in downtown Ottawa, but the fine weather and unseasonably warm temperature brought an estimated three hundred thousand demonstrators out on to the streets. The moment that President Bush stepped from his limousine a group of RCMP officers, who had been standing guard, grabbed the President and proceeded to place him under arrest. In the short exchange of gunfire two bystanders were killed and another three slightly wounded by flying debris.

The RCMP were able to quickly subdue the American agents, and they have been detained in a separate facility. Separate fire arms related charges are pending. According to Canadian Justice Department officials the President faces a lengthy list of offences. George Bush is being charged not only as the civilian head of government of the United States, but also as the commander in chief of the United States Armed Forces. This position could bring with it even more serious consequences, but he will not face the death penalty. Under both Canadian and International War Crimes law George Bush is being charged with genocide, torture, murder, and the most strong of all war crimes, the crime of war of aggression.

The United Nations position on the illegality of the Iraq invasion has been known for sometime, but sceptics believed that the UN would fail to be able to bring America to account. PKJ - pkj pkj. And because neither exists, he cannot win the war in Iraq. The lesser mandate, that of the American people, cannot be inferred from an election in which the fundamental choice was between the man whose chief virtue was that he was not Mr.

Bush and the man whose chief virtue was that he was not John Kerry. Whatever mandate there may be will last only until the bills come due. Nor can the greater mandate, that of the Iraqi people, be inferred, no matter how ardently the administration wishes it to be so.

Opinion polls and anecdotes mean nothing here. The one thing that would prove an Iraqi commitment to freedom is the one thing that the people of Iraq will not do. In the beginning, we were told, Iraqis would welcome us with tears of joy and roses strewn in our path. Then we were told that there was no resistance, only a few hundred jihadi, foreign adventurers, Baathist sociopaths, criminals and losers.

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Today, we face a complex insurgency with one classic feature: The insurgents live and move among the people. The locals know who they are, where they are, how they operate. Iraq is saturated with weaponry. The Iraqi people are armed, as I discovered during the three weeks I spent last summer in the Sunni Triangle, embedded with the Army and Marines.

They have the knowledge and the means to mount their own resistance, quietly going about the grim business of penetrating the insurgency and killing those who need killing, with or without Mr. But the Iraqi people have chosen to screen the insurgency with the silence of their weapons and the silence of their voices. They will neither defend themselves against those who would oppress them nor help us against other Muslims. The silence of the armed is the silence of consent. Urban combat generates death, especially when the enemy wears no uniform and routinely hazards his own people.

As casualties mount and fear and fatigue take their toll, empathy yields to hate. Things that are not accidents also happen. As the silence of the Iraqi people segues into hatred - hatred of us for the quality and duration of the violence we bring to bear upon them - this country that expects its wars to be quick and cheap and require no draft should not be surprised. But we will be. Pundits and spin doctors will feign outrage, demanding to know: How dare the Iraqi people turn down the freedom we offer?

How dare they prefer renewed oppression and possible civil war to America liberated Iraq from a monster. But the Iraqi people will not fight for their own freedom, and without their active participation, it matters less how many troops we deploy or how many operations we mount or how many half-trained Iraqi battalions we stand up or how many police academy graduations we stage. Or perhaps other things matter more. And in the end, conquerors pay terrible prices for their conquests.

For the sake of two nations, America should withdraw from Iraq. The two columns were immediately seized on by the Rupert Murdoch-owned FoxNews television channel, presumably to draw more attention to the issue. Safire, who has been writing for months about alleged U.

In the same vein, neo-conservatives and the extreme right continued to warn against giving the U. Charter, that the anti-U. Defense Secretary Casper Weinberger, while another, by the editorial staff, suggested the secretary-general might have been trying to divert attention from the U. In addition to the alleged corruption of U. Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker -- these articles have made much of various issues. The suggested remedies have been varied -- from leaving the U.

Washington currently is obliged to contribute 22 percent of U. Of course, right-wing hostility to the U. Neo-conservatives began moving against the United Nations after the Arab-Israeli war and accelerated that after the October war, when Israel found itself repeatedly isolated and assailed in the General Assembly and the Security Council by the Soviet bloc and the Third World countries in the Non-Aligned Movement. As a result, the US military has become "a faster [and] fiercer force against a faceless foe".

The effectiveness of network-centric warfare was proved in the US invasion of Iraq, even though in two wars prior to the latest one - the Gulf War of , which is referred to as Desert Storm, and the US military campaign in Afghanistan Operation Enduring Freedom - the technological superiority of the US military reached new heights. The chief basis of the popularity of network-centric warfare is that it is so natural to the age-old US cultural idiosyncrasy of viewing technology as a silver bullet to all contemporary problems and challenges, including winning wars.

With the development of ballistic missile technology in the s, both the US and the former Soviet Union invested enormous resources in unsuccessfully seeking technologies that could defend them from a potential ballistic missile attack from the other side. Failing in finding a solution, both sides agreed to sign the famous anti-ballistic missile treaty of , which limited the establishment of anti-ballistic defense systems for both superpowers.

The fact that such a technology was not yet available did not stop him from strongly exhorting American scientists to pursue its development. Despite the mirage nature of SDI technology, the idea of strategic defense against ballistic missile attacks on the US remained very much alive. The objective of developing network-centric warfare capabilities is an essential aspect of that commitment. As much as China focuses on mastering the escalated pace of the use of fighting technologies by the US armed forces, its chief source of concern is countering the highly innovative capabilities of the US military to develop original fighting strategies that are sui generis to a particular theater of operation.

For instance, the concept of the use of overwhelming force that Colin Powell, then serving as the chairman of joint chiefs of staff, used as the modus operandi for Desert Storm in was applied in a much different manner during the US military campaign against the Taliban in Afghanistan in In the latter campaign, US air power was used in conjunction with the use of Special Forces.

However, the brunt of ground war fighting was carried out by the Northern Alliance. The result was the collapse of the rag-tag forces of the Taliban. In the case of the US invasion of Iraq, the fighting strategy was focused on the use of US ground forces, but not an overwhelming force a la Desert Storm. That was also a campaign when network-centric warfare was utilized with considerable potency. However, despite its proven record in creating the so-called "shock and awe" in toppling Saddam Hussein, network-centric warfare is not without its critics, and Pentagon traditionalists never stopped questioning its value.

They call it "nothing more than an expensive fad", especially when it comes to fighting insurgents in Baghdad, Samarra and Fallujah. The traditionalists argue, with some merit, that in urban warfare, "fire power and armor still mean more than fiber optic cables and wireless connections" that are essential ingredients of network-centric warfare. There is little doubt that if US forces were to face a conventional adversary in a battlefield, network-centric warfare would serve as an awesome force multiplier. However, for the remainder of this and the next decade, the chief threat to the US comes from terrorists and insurgents who will fight the US everywhere they have an advantage.

Given what is emerging in the streets of Iraq and the battlefields of Afghanistan, the answer is far from a resounding yes. The future fighting capabilities of US forces also depend on acquiring actionable and just in-time intelligence. Also, consider reports that al-Qaeda has expressed high interest in smuggling dirty bombs to the US, or even gaining access to nuclear weapons. The alleged use of such weapons relies on smuggling them to the US, or to one of its allies. Then there are reports that al-Qaeda would be interested in acquiring and using chemical or biological weapons to carry out attacks on the US.

In the history of developing countermeasures against its conventional enemies, the Pentagon has relied heavily on devising high-tech-based strategies and plans. Copyright Asia Times Online Ltd. Please contact content atimes. But who are American Christians, where do they come from, and what do they want? Discontinuity makes American Christianity a baffling quantity to outsiders; only a small minority of American Protestants can point to a direct link to spiritual ancestors a century ago.

Little remains of the membership of the traditional Protestant denominations who formed what Samuel P Huntington calls "Anglo-Protestant culture" a century ago, and virtually nothing remains of their religious doctrines. Most of the descendants of the Puritans who colonized New England had become Unitarians by the turn of the 19th century, and the remnants of Puritan "Congregationalism" now find themselves in the vanguard of permissiveness.

More than any other people in the industrial world, Americans change denominations freely. This suggests an enormous rate of defection from the mainstream denominations, whose history dates back to the 16th century in the case of Episcopalians, Lutherans and Presbyterians or the 18th century in the case of Methodists , in favor of evangelical churches that existed in seed-crystal form at best at the beginning of the 20th century.

But he struggles to explain in his History of the American People why not a single traditional Christian can be found among the leading names of the American Revolution. Neither George Washington, nor John Adams, nor Thomas Jefferson, nor Benjamin Franklin, nor Alexander Hamilton professed traditional Christian belief, although most of them expressed an idiosyncratic personal faith of some sort.

The same applies to Abraham Lincoln, who attended no church, although his later speeches are hewn out of the same rock as the Scriptures. Despite the French Revolution, Harvard College became Unitarian in , and all but one major church in Boston had embraced Unitarianism, a quasi-Christian doctrine that denies the Christian Trinity. John Calvin had one of its founders, the Spanish physician and theologian Michael Servetus, burned at the stake in Geneva in The New England elite ceased for all practical purposes to be Christian.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, a Unitarian minister, abandoned the pulpit in for a career as a "Transcendentalist" philosopher, admixing Eastern religious and German philosophy with scripture. But a grassroots revival, the so-called "Second Great Awakening", made Methodism the largest American sect by Just as the First Great Awakening a century earlier gave impetus to the American Revolution, evangelicals led the movement to abolish slavery.

Different people than the original Puritans of the Massachusetts Bay Colony were swept up in the First Great Awakening, and yet another group of Americans, largely Westerners, joined the Second Great Awakening during the 19th century. If the rapid growth of born-again denominations constitutes yet another "Great Awakening", as some historians suppose, the United States is repeating a pattern of behavior that is all the more remarkable for its discontinuity. This sort of thing confounds the Europeans, whose clerics are conversant with centuries of doctrine.

They should be, for the state has paid them to be clerics, and the continuity of their confessions is of one flesh with the uninterrupted character of their subsidies. Americans leave a church when it suits them, build a new one when the whim strikes them, and reach into their own pockets to pay for it. Christianity, if I may be so bold, does not fare well as a doctrine for the elites. Original sin cannot be reconciled with free will, as Martin Luther famously instructed Desiderius Erasmus, which led the Protestant reformers to invent the doctrine of predestination, and their Unitarian opponents to abandon original sin.

The Catholic Church refused to admit the contradiction, which explains why philosophy became a virtual Protestant monopoly for the next four centuries. But one cannot expect the people to become philosophers or, for that matter, Jews. For that matter, observes one critic, there is no direct connection between the 14th-century English reformer and Bible translator John Wycliffe and the 16th-century Lutheran Bible translator John Tyndale - none, I would add, except for the Bible. Two combustible elements unite every century or so to re-create American Christianity from its ashes.

Americans leave their cultures behind on the pier when they make the decision to immigrate. The second is the quantity that unites Wycliffe with Tyndale, Tyndale with the pilgrim leader John Winthrop, and Winthrop with the leaders of the Great Awakenings - and that is the Bible itself. The startling assertion that the Creator of Heaven and Earth loves mankind and suffers with it, and hears the cry of innocent blood and the complaint of the poor and downtrodden, is a seed that falls upon prepared ground in the United States.

Within the European frame of reference, there is no such thing as American Christendom - no centuries-old schools of theology, no tithes, no livings, no Church taxes, no establishment - there is only Christianity, which revives itself with terrible force in unknowing re-enactment of the past. It does not resemble what Europeans refer to by the word "religion". Soren Kierkegaard, I think, would have been pleased.

Jetzt bekommen ihre Fans auch noch Finanzhilfe. Inzwischen fliegt er zwar wieder, aber nur widerwillig - und heimlich: Allerdings nicht in Afghanistan oder im Irak. Hat der Geheimdienst die Attentate inszeniert? Der muntere Kalifornier mit der grauen Haartolle, der sich als "Humanist, Christ und Buddhist" vorstellt, ist nach eigenen Angaben sieben Millionen Dollar schwer. Warum war das Loch im Pentagon kleiner als das Flugzeug, das es gerissen haben soll?

Deshalb hoffe ich, dass Spitzer das jetzt aufdeckt. Auf der Website seiner Gruppe "truth. Doch er will nicht locker lassen. Noch viel zu tun also: Basam Mohamed, dressed in a blue blazer and work boots, gazed out at the ruins of his native city. He had just heard a group of American civil affairs officers explain their plans to rebuild the clinic and install a huge water tank behind it until the water pipes - smashed by bombs - could be fixed. Mohamed, a Health Ministry official in the Iraqi interim government, had other worries. His parents are among the residents who fled Falluja just before the American military offensive here earlier this month, he said.

They are eager to return but have no idea how badly the fighting damaged the city. Mohamed said with a wince, as his American guides led him off to look at another ruined clinic. As military officials here prepare to start letting the first residents return to Falluja, possibly as soon as mid-December, they face an unusual challenge: Their task will be made harder by the need to deter returning insurgents, who will try to sabotage the reconstruction with attacks, commanders say. American officials say they cannot afford to let this former insurgent bastion become a microcosm of the broader struggle in Iraq - a rapid military victory followed by a lapse into violence and chaos.

Yet even some American officers here are skeptical about their ability to bring back safely more than a small number of residents in time for the national and provincial elections in January - a central goal of the offensive. American troops have found an unexpectedly large number of weapons storehouses, commanders say, and the need to dispose of them safely has delayed rebuilding efforts in those areas.

The full extent of the damage inflicted by American bombs, tanks and artillery is only now becoming apparent. The number of buildings destroyed in the fighting is far higher than , the figure released last week by the Iraqi prime minister, Ayad Allawi, engineers and commanders say. American planners also say it is essential that much of the actual rebuilding work be given to Iraqi contractors but acknowledge that those contractors will be subject to intimidation and that qualified Iraqi engineers may be hard to find.

It is still far from clear how the military will communicate its neat plan to repopulate the city sector by sector, or how the returnees will react once they arrive. Falluja, where resistance to the American occupation ran high, has a long history as a rebellious city. American officials say they fully understand the risks, and have been planning for them since last spring.

The American plan here involves a carefully phased renewal. The city will be opened to residents sequentially, starting in the north and moving southward as basic services are restored to 16 separate areas designated by American military planners, said Col. To prevent looting, the head of every household will be asked to wear an identification badge, Colonel Ballard said, and American and Iraqi troops will be given special rules of engagement to deal with theft.

No cars will be allowed in the city at first, to prevent car bombs. Instead, a bus system will provide free transportation. Badly damaged homes will be bulldozed and rebuilt, or owners will be compensated. In short, the Marines envision a huge effort of social and physical engineering, all intended to transform a bastion of militant anti-Americanism into a benevolent and functional metropolis. But if similar rebuilding efforts in Najaf and elsewhere are any guide, the project under way here - far more ambitious than anything yet tried in this country - will be more expensive and time-consuming than its planners think.

Reconstruction projects undertaken in Najaf since the fighting there in August, for instance, have been plagued by corruption, overpayment and shoddy work, relief officials said. After an American corporation there began rebuilding a wastewater treatment plant, they found a lack of local people with the training to operate it, said Lt. Michael Woltz, a member of the team of Navy Seabees helping rebuild Falluja. DeFrancisi, a Marine civil affairs officer. If they fail, as they did in April, the whole project could unravel. American and Iraqi forces will provide security for all the reconstruction projects, at least initially, Colonel Ballard said.

They will also form a cordon around the city, screening anyone who enters and checking for weapons. While some Iraqi companies have already been taken on, none wanted their names disclosed because of security concerns. Officials would not comment on whether any American contractors had been hired. So far, it is far from clear that the Americans can keep insurgents out of the city.

Some appear to be living there now, relying on the Americans for emergency food and water during the day and attacking them by night, according to both American commanders and Iraqis living in the area. All of them are young men, some with suspicious wounds, and all have the same story: Some even wear the distinctive black clothes and tennis shoes favored by the insurgents. Last week, Hamid Humood, a year-old cigarette seller who had stayed in the city during the battle, was one of those seeking American food and water at the Hadra mosque.

But most are waiting in small towns or rural areas outside the city, and they are growing impatient. Just east of Falluja, several hundred exiled residents are now living on the grounds of a cement plant. During a visit there on a day when the temperature was just above 40 degrees, many displaced residents were dressed in light summer clothing and complained that they had no blankets and had left their winter clothing in Falluja. Americans who brought them emergency food and water could only apologize and explain that they had no blankets.

Der Tag im Überblick

But when they return, they will suffer even more. The White House has repeatedly proclaimed its respect for the Geneva Conventions, international law and American statutes governing the treatment of prisoners. Lewis showed how hollow those assurances are. It found mistreatment similar to that at Abu Ghraib, including beatings, prolonged isolation, sexual humiliation and prolonged "stress positions" for prisoners.

The Red Cross reported the same level of abuse in the spring of By this June, it said, the regime was "more refined and repressive. Yesterday, Lawrence Di Rita, a spokesman for Mr. Rumsfeld, said the Red Cross had "their point of view," which was not shared by the Bush administration. The recent debate over prisoner abuse has not been brought to the courts, but the Supreme Court has ruled that Mr. Bush cannot suspend due process for prisoners of his choosing. The White House, the Pentagon and the Justice Department clearly have no intention of addressing the abuse.

But Republican leaders have ignored the issue. Senator John Kerry never even raised it during the campaign. During confirmation hearings, the Senate Judiciary Committee should press Mr. Gonzales about why he signed off on two legal opinions that justified torture and claimed that Mr. Bush could suspend the Geneva Conventions whenever he liked. They should ask what he intends to do about fixing the problem. Senator John Warner, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, should resume his valuable hearings on prisoner abuse.

Ideally, he would finally ask the Senate leadership to create a investigative committee with subpoena powers to impose accountability on high-ranking generals and civilian officials. Mein Freund schlug ihnen sanft vor, ihre Wahlaussage auf einen einzigen wesentlichen Punkt zu konzentrieren. Einen Moment zogen diese Leute die Augenbrauen hoch, dann kam die ebenso lapidare wie nonchalante Antwort: Ein regnerischer Morgen in Kiew. Im Hinblick auf die ehemaligen Sowjet- Republiken gilt Pseudo-Nationalismus jedoch als anti-russisch und daher als demokratisch. Sie erzeugt die Vorstellung, die Regierung versuche, Justschenko loszuwerden.

Dabei ist sein Revier, die West-Ukraine, wirtschaftliches Brachland. Janukowitsch andererseits wird als pro-russisch dargestellt, ein Statist. Unter Janukowitsch konnte die ukrainische Wirtschaft ein eindrucksvolles Wachstum verzeichnen. Neglect Follows Siege of Fallujah Dahr Jamail The Iraqi ministry of health is failing to provide enough support to hundreds of thousands who fled Fallujah, and doctors in Baghdad are perplexed. During the Najaf fighting it was not like this, said a Baghdad surgeon.

But for Fallujah they have done next to nothing. Doctors in Baghdad are perplexed why there has been little or no assistance from the health ministry to residents or refugees. Riad Hussein, a resident surgeon in Baghdad. Aisha Mohammed from Baghdad. Mohammed said she and several doctors from her hospital had struggled to get supplies from the ministry of health to refugees stranded in camps around Baghdad.

We are in a crisis. Musir Khasem Ali who heads the public relations department of the health ministry says there are more than , refugees from Fallujah.