This Steer's Life

The highly unnatural journey of No. 534, from calf to steak



Michael Pollan writes:

Garden City, Kan., missed out on the suburban building boom of the postwar years. What it got instead were sprawling subdivisions of cattle. These feedlots -- the nation's first -- began rising on the high plains of western Kansas in the 50's, and by now developments catering to cows are far more common here than developments catering to people.

You'll be speeding down one of Finney County's ramrod roads when the empty, dun-colored prairie suddenly turns black and geometric, an urban grid of steel-fenced rectangles as far as the eye can see -- which in Kansas is really far. I say ''suddenly,'' but in fact a swiftly intensifying odor (an aroma whose Proustian echoes are more bus-station-men's-room than cow-in-the-country) heralds the approach of a feedlot for more than a mile. Then it's upon you: Poky Feeders, population 37,000. Cattle pens stretch to the horizon, each one home to 150 animals standing dully or lying around in a grayish mud that it eventually dawns on you isn't mud at all. The pens line a network of unpaved roads that loop around vast waste lagoons on their way to the feedlot's beating heart: a chugging, silvery feed mill that soars like an industrial cathedral over this teeming metropolis of meat.

I traveled to Poky early in January with the slightly improbable notion of visiting one particular resident: a young black steer that I'd met in the fall on a ranch in Vale, S.D. The steer, in fact, belonged to me. I'd purchased him as an 8-month-old calf from the Blair brothers, Ed and Rich, for $598. I was paying Poky Feeders $1.60 a day for his room, board and meds and hoped to sell him at a profit after he was fattened.

My interest in the steer was not strictly financial, however, or even gustatory, though I plan to retrieve some steaks from the Kansas packing plant where No. 534, as he is known, has an appointment with the stunner in June. No, my primary interest in this animal was educational. I wanted to find out how a modern, industrial steak is produced in America these days, from insemination to slaughter.

Eating meat, something I have always enjoyed doing, has become problematic in recent years. Though beef consumption spiked upward during the flush 90's, the longer-term trend is down, and many people will tell you they no longer eat the stuff. Inevitably they'll bring up mad-cow disease (and the accompanying revelation that industrial agriculture has transformed these ruminants into carnivores -- indeed, into cannibals). They might mention their concerns about E. coli contamination or antibiotics in the feed. Then there are the many environmental problems, like groundwater pollution, associated with ''Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations.'' (The word ''farm'' no longer applies.) And of course there are questions of animal welfare. How are we treating the animals we eat while they're alive, and then how humanely are we ''dispatching'' them, to borrow an industry euphemism?

Meat-eating has always been a messy business, shadowed by the shame of killing and, since Upton Sinclair's writing of ''The Jungle,'' by questions about what we're really eating when we eat meat. Forgetting, or willed ignorance, is the preferred strategy of many beef eaters, a strategy abetted by the industry. (What grocery-store item is more silent about its origins than a shrink-wrapped steak?) Yet I recently began to feel that ignorance was no longer tenable. If I was going to continue to eat red meat, then I owed it to myself, as well as to the animals, to take more responsibility for the invisible but crucial transaction between ourselves and the animals we eat. I'd try to own it, in other words.

So this is the biography of my cow.
The Blair brothers ranch occupies 11,500 acres of short-grass prairie a few miles outside Sturgis, S.D., directly in the shadow of Bear Butte. In November, when I visited, the turf forms a luxuriant pelt of grass oscillating yellow and gold in the constant wind and sprinkled with perambulating black dots: Angus cows and calves grazing.

Ed and Rich Blair run what's called a ''cow-calf'' operation, the first stage of beef production, and the stage least changed by the modern industrialization of meat. While the pork and chicken industries have consolidated the entire life cycles of those animals under a single roof, beef cattle are still born on thousands of independently owned ranches. Although four giant meatpacking companies (Tyson's subsidiary IBP, Monfort, Excel and National) now slaughter and market more than 80 percent of the beef cattle born in this country, that concentration represents the narrow end of a funnel that starts out as wide as the great plains.

The Blairs have been in the cattle business for four generations. Although there are new wrinkles to the process -- artificial insemination to improve genetics, for example -- producing beef calves goes pretty much as it always has, just faster. Calving season begins in late winter, a succession of subzero nights spent yanking breeched babies out of their bellowing mothers. In April comes the first spring roundup to work the newborn calves (branding, vaccination, castration); then more roundups in early summer to inseminate the cows ($15 mail-order straws of elite bull semen have pretty much put the resident stud out of work); and weaning in the fall. If all goes well, your herd of 850 cattle has increased to 1,600 by the end of the year.

My steer spent his first six months in these lush pastures alongside his mother, No. 9,534. His father was a registered Angus named GAR Precision 1,680, a bull distinguished by the size and marbling of his offspring's rib-eye steaks. Born last March 13 in a birthing shed across the road, No. 534 was turned out on pasture with his mother as soon as the 80-pound calf stood up and began nursing. After a few weeks, the calf began supplementing his mother's milk by nibbling on a salad bar of mostly native grasses: western wheatgrass, little bluestem, green needlegrass.

Apart from the trauma of the April day when he was branded and castrated, you could easily imagine No. 534 looking back on those six months grazing at his mother's side as the good old days -- if, that is, cows do look back. (''They do not know what is meant by yesterday or today,'' Friedrich Nietzsche wrote, with a note of envy, of grazing cattle, ''fettered to the moment and its pleasure or displeasure, and thus neither melancholy or bored.'' Nietzsche clearly had never seen a feedlot.) It may be foolish to presume to know what a cow experiences, yet we can say that a cow grazing on grass is at least doing what he has been splendidly molded by evolution to do. Which isn't a bad definition of animal happiness. Eating grass, however, is something that, after October, my steer would never do again.

Although the modern cattle industry all but ignores it, the reciprocal relationship between cows and grass is one of nature's underappreciated wonders. For the grasses, the cow maintains their habitat by preventing trees and shrubs from gaining a foothold; the animal also spreads grass seed, planting it with its hoofs and fertilizing it. In exchange for these services, the grasses offer the ruminants a plentiful, exclusive meal. For cows, sheep and other grazers have the unique ability to convert grass -- which single-stomached creatures like us can't digest -- into high-quality protein. They can do this because they possess a rumen, a 45-gallon fermentation tank in which a resident population of bacteria turns grass into metabolically useful organic acids and protein.

This is an excellent system for all concerned: for the grasses, for the animals and for us. What's more, growing meat on grass can make superb ecological sense: so long as the rancher practices rotational grazing, it is a sustainable, solar-powered system for producing food on land too arid or hilly to grow anything else.

So if this system is so ideal, why is it that my cow hasn't tasted a blade of grass since October? Speed, in a word. Cows raised on grass simply take longer to reach slaughter weight than cows raised on a richer diet, and the modern meat industry has devoted itself to shortening a beef calf's allotted time on earth. ''In my grandfather's day, steers were 4 or 5 years old at slaughter,'' explained Rich Blair, who, at 45, is the younger of the brothers by four years. ''In the 50's, when my father was ranching, it was 2 or 3. Now we get there at 14 to 16 months.'' Fast food indeed. What gets a beef calf from 80 to 1,200 pounds in 14 months are enormous quantities of corn, protein supplements -- and drugs, including growth hormones. These ''efficiencies,'' all of which come at a price, have transformed raising cattle into a high-volume, low-margin business. Not everybody is convinced that this is progress. ''Hell,'' Ed Blair told me, ''my dad made more money on 250 head than we do on 850.''

Weaning marks the fateful moment when the natural, evolutionary logic represented by a ruminant grazing on grass bumps up against the industrial logic that, with stunning speed, turns that animal into a box of beef. This industrial logic is rational and even irresistible -- after all, it has succeeded in transforming beef from a luxury item into everyday fare for millions of people. And yet the further you follow it, the more likely you are to wonder if that rational logic might not also be completely insane.

In early October, a few weeks before I met him, No. 534 was weaned from his mother. Weaning is perhaps the most traumatic time on a ranch for animals and ranchers alike; cows separated from their calves will mope and bellow for days, and the calves themselves, stressed by the change in circumstance and diet, are prone to get sick.

On many ranches, weaned calves go directly from the pasture to the sale barn, where they're sold at auction, by the pound, to feedlots. The Blairs prefer to own their steers straight through to slaughter and to keep them on the ranch for a couple of months of ''backgrounding'' before sending them on the 500-mile trip to Poky Feeders. Think of backgrounding as prep school for feedlot life: the animals are confined in a pen, ''bunk broken'' -- taught to eat from a trough -- and gradually accustomed to eating a new, unnatural diet of grain. (Grazing cows encounter only tiny amounts of grain, in the form of grass seeds.)

It was in the backgrounding pen that I first met No. 534 on an unseasonably warm afternoon in November. I'd told the Blairs I wanted to follow one of their steers through the life cycle; Ed, 49, suggested I might as well buy a steer, as a way to really understand the daunting economics of modern ranching. Ed and Rich told me what to look for: a broad, straight back and thick hindquarters. Basically, you want a strong frame on which to hang a lot of meat. I was also looking for a memorable face in this Black Angus sea, one that would stand out in the feedlot crowd. Almost as soon as I started surveying the 90 or so steers in the pen, No. 534 moseyed up to the railing and made eye contact. He had a wide, stout frame and was brockle- faced -- he had three distinctive white blazes. If not for those markings, Ed said, No. 534 might have been spared castration and sold as a bull; he was that good-looking. But the white blazes indicate the presence of Hereford blood, rendering him ineligible for life as an Angus stud. Tough break.

Rich said he would calculate the total amount I owed the next time No. 534 got weighed but that the price would be $98 a hundredweight for an animal of this quality. He would then bill me for all expenses (feed, shots, et cetera) and, beginning in January, start passing on the weekly ''hotel charges'' from Poky Feeders. In June we'd find out from the packing plant how well my investment had panned out: I would receive a payment for No. 534 based on his carcass weight, plus a premium if he earned a U.S.D.A. grade of choice or prime. ''And if you're worried about the cattle market,'' Rich said jokingly, referring to its post-Sept. 11 slide, ''I can sell you an option too.'' Option insurance has become increasingly popular among cattlemen in the wake of mad-cow and foot-and-mouth disease.

Rich handles the marketing end of the business out of an office in Sturgis, where he also trades commodities. In fact you'd never guess from Rich's unlined, indoorsy face and golfish attire that he was a rancher. Ed, by contrast, spends his days on the ranch and better looks the part, with his well-creased visage, crinkly cowboy eyes and ever-present plug of tobacco. His cap carries the same prairie-flat slogan I'd spotted on the ranch's roadside sign: ''Beef: It's What's for Dinner.''

My second morning on the ranch, I helped Troy Hadrick, Ed's son-in-law and a ranch hand, feed the steers in the backgrounding pen. A thickly muscled post of a man, Hadrick is 25 and wears a tall black cowboy hat perpetually crowned by a pair of mirrored Oakley sunglasses. He studied animal science at South Dakota State and is up on the latest university thinking on cattle nutrition, reproduction and medicine. Hadrick seems to relish everything to do with ranching, from calving to wielding the artificial-insemination syringe.

Hadrick and I squeezed into the heated cab of a huge swivel-hipped tractor hooked up to a feed mixer: basically, a dump truck with a giant screw through the middle to blend ingredients. First stop was a hopper filled with Rumensin, a powerful antibiotic that No. 534 will consume with his feed every day for the rest of his life. Calves have no need of regular medication while on grass, but as soon as they're placed in the backgrounding pen, they're apt to get sick. Why? The stress of weaning is a factor, but the main culprit is the feed. The shift to a ''hot ration'' of grain can so disturb the cow's digestive process -- its rumen, in particular -- that it can kill the animal if not managed carefully and accompanied by antibiotics.

After we'd scooped the ingredients into the hopper and turned on the mixer, Hadrick deftly sidled the tractor alongside the pen and flipped a switch to release a dusty tan stream of feed in a long, even line. No. 534 was one of the first animals to belly up to the rail for breakfast. He was heftier than his pen mates and, I decided, sparkier too. That morning, Hadrick and I gave each calf six pounds of corn mixed with seven pounds of ground alfalfa hay and a quarter-pound of Rumensin. Soon after my visit, this ration would be cranked up to 14 pounds of corn and 6 pounds of hay -- and added two and a half pounds every day to No. 534.

While I was on the ranch, I didn't talk to No. 534, pet him or otherwise try to form a connection. I also decided not to give him a name, even though my son proposed a pretty good one after seeing a snapshot. (''Night.'') My intention, after all, is to send this animal to slaughter and then eat some of him. No. 534 is not a pet, and I certainly don't want to end up with an ox in my backyard because I suddenly got sentimental.

As fall turned into winter, Hadrick sent me regular e-mail messages apprising me of my steer's progress. On Nov. 13 he weighed 650 pounds; by Christmas he was up to 798, making him the seventh-heaviest steer in his pen, an achievement in which I, idiotically, took a measure of pride. Between Nov. 13 and Jan. 4, the day he boarded the truck for Kansas, No. 534 put away 706 pounds of corn and 336 pounds of alfalfa hay, bringing his total living expenses for that period to $61.13. I was into this deal now for $659.

Hadrick's e-mail updates grew chattier as time went on, cracking a window on the rancher's life and outlook. I was especially struck by his relationship to the animals, how it manages to be at once intimate and unsentimental. One day Hadrick is tenderly nursing a newborn at 3 a.m., the next he's ''having a big prairie oyster feed'' after castrating a pen of bull calves.

Hadrick wrote empathetically about weaning (''It's like packing up and leaving the house when you are 18 and knowing you will never see your parents again'') and with restrained indignation about ''animal activists and city people'' who don't understand the first thing about a rancher's relationship to his cattle. Which, as Hadrick put it, is simply this: ''If we don't take care of these animals, they won't take care of us.''

''Everyone hears about the bad stuff,'' Hadrick wrote, ''but they don't ever see you give C.P.R. to a newborn calf that was born backward or bringing them into your house and trying to warm them up on your kitchen floor because they were born on a minus-20-degree night. Those are the kinds of things ranchers will do for their livestock. They take precedence over most everything in your life. Sorry for the sermon.''

o travel from the ranch to the feedlot, as No. 534 and I both did (in separate vehicles) the first week in January, feels a lot like going from the country to the big city. Indeed, a cattle feedlot is a kind of city, populated by as many as 100,000 animals. It is very much a premodern city, however -- crowded, filthy and stinking, with open sewers, unpaved roads and choking air.

The urbanization of the world's livestock is a fairly recent historical development, so it makes a certain sense that cow towns like Poky Feeders would recall human cities several centuries ago. As in 14th-century London, the metropolitan digestion remains vividly on display: the foodstuffs coming in, the waste streaming out. Similarly, there is the crowding together of recent arrivals from who knows where, combined with a lack of modern sanitation. This combination has always been a recipe for disease; the only reason contemporary animal cities aren't as plague-ridden as their medieval counterparts is a single historical anomaly: the modern antibiotic.

I spent the better part of a day walking around Poky Feeders, trying to understand how its various parts fit together. In any city, it's easy to lose track of nature -- of the connections between various species and the land on which everything ultimately depends. The feedlot's ecosystem, I could see, revolves around corn. But its food chain doesn't end there, because the corn itself grows somewhere else, where it is implicated in a whole other set of ecological relationships. Growing the vast quantities of corn used to feed livestock in this country takes vast quantities of chemical fertilizer, which in turn takes vast quantities of oil -- 1.2 gallons for every bushel. So the modern feedlot is really a city floating on a sea of oil.

I started my tour at the feed mill, the yard's thundering hub, where three meals a day for 37,000 animals are designed and mixed by computer. A million pounds of feed passes through the mill each day. Every hour of every day, a tractor-trailer pulls up to disgorge another 25 tons of corn. Around the other side of the mill, tanker trucks back up to silo-shaped tanks, into which they pump thousands of gallons of liquefied fat and protein supplement. In a shed attached to the mill sit vats of liquid vitamins and synthetic estrogen; next to these are pallets stacked with 50-pound sacks of Rumensin and tylosin, another antibiotic. Along with alfalfa hay and corn silage for roughage, all these ingredients are blended and then piped into the dump trucks that keep Poky's eight and a half miles of trough filled.

The feed mill's great din is made by two giant steel rollers turning against each other 12 hours a day, crushing steamed corn kernels into flakes. This was the only feed ingredient I tasted, and it wasn't half bad; not as crisp as Kellogg's, but with a cornier flavor. I passed, however, on the protein supplement, a sticky brown goop consisting of molasses and urea.

Corn is a mainstay of livestock diets because there is no other feed quite as cheap or plentiful: thanks to federal subsidies and ever-growing surpluses, the price of corn ($2.25 a bushel) is 50 cents less than the cost of growing it. The rise of the modern factory farm is a direct result of these surpluses, which soared in the years following World War II, when petrochemical fertilizers came into widespread use. Ever since, the U.S.D.A.'s policy has been to help farmers dispose of surplus corn by passing as much of it as possible through the digestive tracts of food animals, converting it into protein. Compared with grass or hay, corn is a compact and portable foodstuff, making it possible to feed tens of thousands of animals on small plots of land. Without cheap corn, the modern urbanization of livestock would probably never have occurred.

We have come to think of ''cornfed'' as some kind of old-fashioned virtue; we shouldn't. Granted, a cornfed cow develops well-marbled flesh, giving it a taste and texture American consumers have learned to like. Yet this meat is demonstrably less healthy to eat, since it contains more saturated fat. A recent study in The European Journal of Clinical Nutrition found that the meat of grass-fed livestock not only had substantially less fat than grain-fed meat but that the type of fats found in grass-fed meat were much healthier. (Grass-fed meat has more omega 3 fatty acids and fewer omega 6, which is believed to promote heart disease; it also contains betacarotine and CLA, another ''good'' fat.) A growing body of research suggests that many of the health problems associated with eating beef are really problems with cornfed beef. In the same way ruminants have not evolved to eat grain, humans may not be well adapted to eating grain-fed animals. Yet the U.S.D.A.'s grading system continues to reward marbling -- that is, intermuscular fat -- and thus the feeding of corn to cows.

The economic logic behind corn is unassailable, and on a factory farm, there is no other kind. Calories are calories, and corn is the cheapest, most convenient source of calories. Of course the identical industrial logic -- protein is protein -- led to the feeding of rendered cow parts back to cows, a practice the F.D.A. banned in 1997 after scientists realized it was spreading mad-cow disease.

Make that mostly banned. The F.D.A.'s rules against feeding ruminant protein to ruminants make exceptions for ''blood products'' (even though they contain protein) and fat. Indeed, my steer has probably dined on beef tallow recycled from the very slaughterhouse he's heading to in June. ''Fat is fat,'' the feedlot manager shrugged when I raised an eyebrow.

F.D.A. rules still permit feedlots to feed nonruminant animal protein to cows. (Feather meal is an accepted cattle feed, as are pig and fish protein and chicken manure.) Some public-health advocates worry that since the bovine meat and bone meal that cows used to eat is now being fed to chickens, pigs and fish, infectious prions could find their way back into cattle when they eat the protein of the animals that have been eating them. To close this biological loophole, the F.D.A. is now considering tightening its feed rules.

Until mad-cow disease, remarkably few people in the cattle business, let alone the general public, comprehended the strange semicircular food chain that industrial agriculture had devised for cattle (and, in turn, for us). When I mentioned to Rich Blair that I'd been surprised to learn that cows were eating cows, he said, ''To tell the truth, it was kind of a shock to me too.'' Yet even today, ranchers don't ask many questions about feedlot menus. Not that the answers are so easy to come by. When I asked Poky's feedlot manager what exactly was in the protein supplement, he couldn't say. ''When we buy supplement, the supplier says it's 40 percent protein, but they don't specify beyond that.'' When I called the supplier, it wouldn't divulge all its ''proprietary ingredients'' but promised that animal parts weren't among them. Protein is pretty much still protein.

Compared with ground-up cow bones, corn seems positively wholesome. Yet it wreaks considerable havoc on bovine digestion. During my day at Poky, I spent an hour or two driving around the yard with Dr. Mel Metzen, the staff veterinarian. Metzen, a 1997 graduate of Kansas State's vet school, oversees a team of eight cowboys who spend their days riding the yard, spotting sick cows and bringing them in for treatment. A great many of their health problems can be traced to their diet. ''They're made to eat forage,'' Metzen said, ''and we're making them eat grain.''

Perhaps the most serious thing that can go wrong with a ruminant on corn is feedlot bloat. The rumen is always producing copious amounts of gas, which is normally expelled by belching during rumination. But when the diet contains too much starch and too little roughage, rumination all but stops, and a layer of foamy slime that can trap gas forms in the rumen. The rumen inflates like a balloon, pressing against the animal's lungs. Unless action is promptly taken to relieve the pressure (usually by forcing a hose down the animal's esophagus), the cow suffocates.

A corn diet can also give a cow acidosis. Unlike that in our own highly acidic stomachs, the normal pH of a rumen is neutral. Corn makes it unnaturally acidic, however, causing a kind of bovine heartburn, which in some cases can kill the animal but usually just makes it sick. Acidotic animals go off their feed, pant and salivate excessively, paw at their bellies and eat dirt. The condition can lead to diarrhea, ulcers, bloat, liver disease and a general weakening of the immune system that leaves the animal vulnerable to everything from pneumonia to feedlot polio.

Cows rarely live on feedlot diets for more than six months, which might be about as much as their digestive systems can tolerate. ''I don't know how long you could feed this ration before you'd see problems,'' Metzen said; another vet said that a sustained feedlot diet would eventually ''blow out their livers'' and kill them. As the acids eat away at the rumen wall, bacteria enter the bloodstream and collect in the liver. More than 13 percent of feedlot cattle are found at slaughter to have abscessed livers.

What keeps a feedlot animal healthy -- or healthy enough -- are antibiotics. Rumensin inhibits gas production in the rumen, helping to prevent bloat; tylosin reduces the incidence of liver infection. Most of the antibiotics sold in America end up in animal feed -- a practice that, it is now generally acknowledged, leads directly to the evolution of new antibiotic-resistant ''superbugs.'' In the debate over the use of antibiotics in agriculture, a distinction is usually made between clinical and nonclinical uses. Public-health advocates don't object to treating sick animals with antibiotics; they just don't want to see the drugs lose their efficacy because factory farms are feeding them to healthy animals to promote growth. But the use of antibiotics in feedlot cattle confounds this distinction. Here the drugs are plainly being used to treat sick animals, yet the animals probably wouldn't be sick if not for what we feed them.

I asked Metzen what would happen if antibiotics were banned from cattle feed. ''We just couldn't feed them as hard,'' he said. ''Or we'd have a higher death loss.'' (Less than 3 percent of cattle die on the feedlot.) The price of beef would rise, he said, since the whole system would have to slow down.

''Hell, if you gave them lots of grass and space,'' he concluded dryly, ''I wouldn't have a job.''

Before heading over to Pen 43 for my reunion with No. 534, I stopped by the shed where recent arrivals receive their hormone implants. The calves are funneled into a chute, herded along by a ranch hand wielding an electric prod, then clutched in a restrainer just long enough for another hand to inject a slow-release pellet of Revlar, a synthetic estrogen, in the back of the ear. The Blairs' pen had not yet been implanted, and I was still struggling with the decision of whether to forgo what is virtually a universal practice in the cattle industry in the United States. (It has been banned in the European Union.)

American regulators permit hormone implants on the grounds that no risk to human health has been proved, even though measurable hormone residues do turn up in the meat we eat. These contribute to the buildup of estrogenic compounds in the environment, which some scientists believe may explain falling sperm counts and premature maturation in girls. Recent studies have also found elevated levels of synthetic growth hormones in feedlot wastes; these persistent chemicals eventually wind up in the waterways downstream of feedlots, where scientists have found fish exhibiting abnormal sex characteristics.

The F.D.A. is opening an inquiry into the problem, but for now, implanting hormones in beef cattle is legal and financially irresistible: an implant costs $1.50 and adds between 40 and 50 pounds to the weight of a steer at slaughter, for a return of at least $25. That could easily make the difference between profit and loss on my investment in No. 534. Thinking like a parent, I like the idea of feeding my son hamburgers free of synthetic hormones. But thinking like a cattleman, there was really no decision to make.

I asked Rich Blair what he thought. ''I'd love to give up hormones,'' he said. ''If the consumer said, We don't want hormones, we'd stop in a second. The cattle could get along better without them. But the market signal's not there, and as long as my competitor's doing it, I've got to do it, too.''

Around lunch time, Metzen and I finally arrived at No. 534's pen. My first impression was that my steer had landed himself a decent piece of real estate. The pen is far enough from the feed mill to be fairly quiet, and it has a water view -- of what I initially thought was a reservoir, until I noticed the brown scum. The pen itself is surprisingly spacious, slightly bigger than a basketball court, with a concrete feed bunk out front and a freshwater trough in the back. I climbed over the railing and joined the 90 steers, which, en masse, retreated a few steps, then paused.

I had on the same carrot-colored sweater I'd worn to the ranch in South Dakota, hoping to jog my steer's memory. Way off in the back, I spotted him -- those three white blazes. As I gingerly stepped toward him, the quietly shuffling mass of black cowhide between us parted, and there No. 534 and I stood, staring dumbly at each other. Glint of recognition? None whatsoever. I told myself not to take it personally. No. 534 had been bred for his marbling, after all, not his intellect.

I don't know enough about the emotional life of cows to say with any confidence if No. 534 was miserable, bored or melancholy, but I would not say he looked happy. I noticed that his eyes looked a little bloodshot. Some animals are irritated by the fecal dust that floats in the feedlot air; maybe that explained the sullen gaze with which he fixed me. Unhappy or not, though, No. 534 had clearly been eating well. My animal had put on a couple hundred pounds since we'd last met, and he looked it: thicker across the shoulders and round as a barrel through the middle. He carried himself more like a steer now than a calf, even though he was still less than a year old. Metzen complimented me on his size and conformation. ''That's a handsome looking beef you've got there.'' (Aw, shucks.)

Staring at No. 534, I could picture the white lines of the butcher's chart dissecting his black hide: rump roast, flank steak, standing rib, brisket. One way of looking at No. 534 -- the industrial way -- was as an efficient machine for turning feed corn into beef. Every day between now and his slaughter date in June, No. 534 will convert 32 pounds of feed (25 of them corn) into another three and a half pounds of flesh. Poky is indeed a factory, transforming cheap raw materials into a less-cheap finished product, as fast as bovinely possible.

Yet the factory metaphor obscures as much as it reveals about the creature that stood before me. For this steer was not a machine in a factory but an animal in a web of relationships that link him to certain other animals, plants and microbes, as well as to the earth. And one of those other animals is us. The unnaturally rich diet of corn that has compromised No. 534's health is fattening his flesh in a way that in turn may compromise the health of the humans who will eat him. The antibiotics he's consuming with his corn were at that very moment selecting, in his gut and wherever else in the environment they wind up, for bacteria that could someday infect us and resist the drugs we depend on. We inhabit the same microbial ecosystem as the animals we eat, and whatever happens to it also happens to us.

I thought about the deep pile of manure that No. 534 and I were standing in. We don't know much about the hormones in it -- where they will end up or what they might do once they get there -- but we do know something about the bacteria. One particularly lethal bug most probably resided in the manure beneath my feet. Escherichia coli 0157 is a relatively new strain of a common intestinal bacteria (it was first isolated in the 1980's) that is common in feedlot cattle, more than half of whom carry it in their guts. Ingesting as few as 10 of these microbes can cause a fatal infection.

Most of the microbes that reside in the gut of a cow and find their way into our food get killed off by the acids in our stomachs, since they originally adapted to live in a neutral-pH environment. But the digestive tract of the modern feedlot cow is closer in acidity to our own, and in this new, manmade environment acid-resistant strains of E. coli have developed that can survive our stomach acids -- and go on to kill us. By acidifying a cow's gut with corn, we have broken down one of our food chain's barriers to infection. Yet this process can be reversed: James Russell, a U.S.D.A. microbiologist, has discovered that switching a cow's diet from corn to hay in the final days before slaughter reduces the population of E. coli 0157 in its manure by as much as 70 percent. Such a change, however, is considered wildly impractical by the cattle industry.

So much comes back to corn, this cheap feed that turns out in so many ways to be not cheap at all. While I stood in No. 534's pen, a dump truck pulled up alongside the feed bunk and released a golden stream of feed. The animals stepped up to the bunk for their lunch. The $1.60 a day I'm paying for three giant meals is a bargain only by the narrowest of calculations. It doesn't take into account, for example, the cost to the public health of antibiotic resistance or food poisoning by E. coli or all the environmental costs associated with industrial corn.

For if you follow the corn from this bunk back to the fields where it grows, you will find an 80-million-acre monoculture that consumes more chemical herbicide and fertilizer than any other crop. Keep going and you can trace the nitrogen runoff from that crop all the way down the Mississippi into the Gulf of Mexico, where it has created (if that is the right word) a 12,000-square-mile ''dead zone.''

But you can go farther still, and follow the fertilizer needed to grow that corn all the way to the oil fields of the Persian Gulf. No. 534 started life as part of a food chain that derived all its energy from the sun; now that corn constitutes such an important link in his food chain, he is the product of an industrial system powered by fossil fuel. (And in turn, defended by the military -- another uncounted cost of ''cheap'' food.) I asked David Pimentel, a Cornell ecologist who specializes in agriculture and energy, if it might be possible to calculate precisely how much oil it will take to grow my steer to slaughter weight. Assuming No. 534 continues to eat 25 pounds of corn a day and reaches a weight of 1,250 pounds, he will have consumed in his lifetime roughly 284 gallons of oil. We have succeeded in industrializing the beef calf, transforming what was once a solar-powered ruminant into the very last thing we need: another fossil-fuel machine.

Sometime in June, No. 534 will be ready for slaughter. Though only 14 months old, my steer will weigh more than 1,200 pounds and will move with the lumbering deliberateness of the obese. One morning, a cattle trailer from the National Beef plant in Liberal, Kan., will pull in to Poky Feeders, drop a ramp and load No. 534 along with 35 of his pen mates.

The 100-mile trip south to Liberal is a straight shot on Route 83, a two-lane highway on which most of the traffic consists of speeding tractor-trailers carrying either cattle or corn. The National Beef plant is a sprawling gray-and-white complex in a neighborhood of trailer homes and tiny houses a notch up from shanty. These are, presumably, the homes of the Mexican and Asian immigrants who make up a large portion of the plant's work force. The meat business has made southwestern Kansas an unexpectedly diverse corner of the country.

A few hours after their arrival in the holding pens outside the factory, a plant worker will open a gate and herd No. 534 and his pen mates into an alley that makes a couple of turns before narrowing down to a single-file chute. The chute becomes a ramp that leads the animals up to a second-story platform and then disappears through a blue door.

That door is as close to the kill floor as the plant managers were prepared to let me go. I could see whatever I wanted to farther on -- the cold room where carcasses are graded, the food-safety lab, the fabrication room where the carcasses are broken down into cuts -- on the condition that I didn't take pictures or talk to employees. But the stunning, bleeding and evisceration process was off limits to a journalist, even a cattleman-journalist like myself.

What I know about what happens on the far side of the blue door comes mostly from Temple Grandin, who has been on the other side and, in fact, helped to design it. Grandin, an assistant professor of animal science at Colorado State, is one of the most influential people in the United States cattle industry. She has devoted herself to making cattle slaughter less stressful and therefore more humane by designing an ingenious series of cattle restraints, chutes, ramps and stunning systems. Grandin is autistic, a condition she says has allowed her to see the world from the cow's point of view. The industry has embraced Grandin's work because animals under stress are not only more difficult to handle but also less valuable: panicked cows produce a surge of adrenaline that turns their meat dark and unappetizing. ''Dark cutters,'' as they're called, sell at a deep discount.

Grandin designed the double-rail conveyor system in use at the National Beef plant; she has also audited the plant's killing process for McDonald's. Stories about cattle ''waking up'' after stunning only to be skinned alive prompted McDonald's to audit its suppliers in a program that is credited with substantial improvements since its inception in 1999. Grandin says that in cattle slaughter ''there is the pre-McDonald's era and the post-McDonald's era -- it's night and day.''

Grandin recently described to me what will happen to No. 534 after he passes through the blue door. ''The animal goes into the chute single file,'' she began. ''The sides are high enough so all he sees is the butt of the animal in front of him. As he walks through the chute, he passes over a metal bar, with his feet on either side. While he's straddling the bar, the ramp begins to decline at a 25-degree angle, and before he knows it, his feet are off the ground and he's being carried along on a conveyor belt. We put in a false floor so he can't look down and see he's off the ground. That would panic him.''

Listening to Grandin's rather clinical account, I couldn't help wondering what No. 534 would be feeling as he approached his end. Would he have any inkling -- a scent of blood, a sound of terror from up the line -- that this was no ordinary day?

Grandin anticipated my question: ''Does the animal know it's going to get slaughtered? I used to wonder that. So I watched them, going into the squeeze chute on the feedlot, getting their shots and going up the ramp at a slaughter plant. No difference. If they knew they were going to die, you'd see much more agitated behavior.

''Anyway, the conveyor is moving along at roughly the speed of a moving sidewalk. On a catwalk above stands the stunner. The stunner has a pneumatic-powered 'gun' that fires a steel bolt about seven inches long and the diameter of a fat pencil. He leans over and puts it smack in the middle of the forehead. When it's done correctly, it will kill the animal on the first shot.''

For a plant to pass a McDonald's audit, the stunner needs to render animals ''insensible'' on the first shot 95 percent of the time. A second shot is allowed, but should that one fail, the plant flunks. At the line speeds at which meatpacking plants in the United States operate -- 390 animals are slaughtered every hour at National, which is not unusual -- mistakes would seem inevitable, but Grandin insists that only rarely does the process break down.

''After the animal is shot while he's riding along, a worker wraps a chain around his foot and hooks it to an overhead trolley. Hanging upside down by one leg, he's carried by the trolley into the bleeding area, where the bleeder cuts his throat. Animal rights people say they're cutting live animals, but that's because there's a lot of reflex kicking.'' This is one of the reasons a job at a slaughter plant is the most dangerous in America. ''What I look for is, Is the head dead? It should be flopping like a rag, with the tongue hanging out. He'd better not be trying to hold it up -- then you've got a live one on the rail.'' Just in case, Grandin said, ''they have another hand stunner in the bleed area.''

Much of what happens next -- the de-hiding of the animal, the tying off of its rectum before evisceration -- is designed to keep the animal's feces from coming into contact with its meat. This is by no means easy to do, not when the animals enter the kill floor smeared with manure and 390 of them are eviscerated every hour. (Partly for this reason, European plants operate at much slower line speeds.) But since that manure is apt to contain lethal pathogens like E. coli 0157, and since the process of grinding together hamburger from hundreds of different carcasses can easily spread those pathogens across millions of burgers, packing plants now spend millions on ''food safety'' -- which is to say, on the problem of manure in meat.

Most of these efforts are reactive: it's accepted that the animals will enter the kill floor caked with feedlot manure that has been rendered lethal by the feedlot diet. Rather than try to alter that diet or keep the animals from living in their waste or slow the line speed -- all changes regarded as impractical -- the industry focuses on disinfecting the manure that will inevitably find its way into the meat. This is the purpose of irradiation (which the industry prefers to call ''cold pasteurization''). It is also the reason that carcasses pass through a hot steam cabinet and get sprayed with an antimicrobial solution before being hung in the cooler at the National Beef plant.

It wasn't until after the carcasses emerged from the cooler, 36 hours later, that I was allowed to catch up with them, in the grading room. I entered a huge arctic space resembling a monstrous dry cleaner's, with a seemingly endless overhead track conveying thousands of red-and-white carcasses. I quickly learned that you had to move smartly through this room or else be tackled by a 350-pound side of beef. The carcasses felt cool to the touch, no longer animals but meat.

Two by two, the sides of beef traveled swiftly down the rails, six pairs every minute, to a station where two workers -- one wielding a small power saw, the other a long knife -- made a single six-inch cut between the 12th and 13th ribs, opening a window on the meat inside. The carcasses continued on to another station, where a U.S.D.A. inspector holding a round blue stamp glanced at the exposed rib eye and stamped the carcass's creamy white fat once, twice or -- very rarely -- three times: select, choice, prime.

For the Blair brothers, and for me, this is the moment of truth, for that stamp will determine exactly how much the packing plant will pay for each animal and whether the 14 months of effort and expense will yield a profit.

Unless the cattle market collapses between now and June (always a worry these days), I stand to make a modest profit on No. 534. In February, the feedlot took a sonogram of his rib eye and ran the data through a computer program. The projections are encouraging: a live slaughter weight of 1,250, a carcass weight of 787 pounds and a grade at the upper end of choice, making him eligible to be sold at a premium as Certified Angus Beef. Based on the June futures price, No. 534 should be worth $944. (Should he grade prime, that would add another $75.)

I paid $598 for No. 534 in November; his living expenses since then come to $61 on the ranch and $258 for 160 days at the feedlot (including implant), for a total investment of $917, leaving a profit of $27. It's a razor-thin margin, and it could easily vanish should the price of corn rise or No. 534 fail to make the predicted weight or grade -- say, if he gets sick and goes off his feed. Without the corn, without the antibiotics, without the hormone implant, my brief career as a cattleman would end in failure.

The Blairs and I are doing better than most. According to Cattle-Fax, a market-research firm, the return on an animal coming out of a feedlot has averaged just $3 per head over the last 20 years.

''Some pens you make money, some pens you lose,'' Rich Blair said when I called to commiserate. ''You try to average it out over time, limit the losses and hopefully make a little profit.'' He reminded me that a lot of ranchers are in the business ''for emotional reasons -- you can't be in it just for the money.''

Now you tell me.

The manager of the packing plant has offered to pull a box of steaks from No. 534 before his carcass disappears into the trackless stream of commodity beef fanning out to America's supermarkets and restaurants this June. From what I can see, the Blair brothers, with the help of Poky Feeders, are producing meat as good as any you can find in an American supermarket. And yet there's no reason to think this steak will taste any different from the other high-end industrial meat I've ever eaten.

While waiting for my box of meat to arrive from Kansas, I've explored some alternatives to the industrial product. Nowadays you can find hormone- and antibiotic-free beef as well as organic beef, fed only grain grown without chemicals. This meat, which is often quite good, is typically produced using more grass and less grain (and so makes for healthier animals). Yet it doesn't fundamentally challenge the corn-feedlot system, and I'm not sure that an ''organic feedlot'' isn't, ecologically speaking, an oxymoron. What I really wanted to taste is the sort of preindustrial beef my grandparents ate -- from animals that have lived most of their full-length lives on grass.

Eventually I found a farmer in the Hudson Valley who sold me a quarter of a grass-fed Angus steer that is now occupying most of my freezer. I also found ranchers selling grass-fed beef on the Web; Eatwild.com is a clearinghouse of information on grass-fed livestock, which is emerging as one of the livelier movements in sustainable agriculture.

I discovered that grass-fed meat is more expensive than supermarket beef. Whatever else you can say about industrial beef, it is remarkably cheap, and any argument for changing the system runs smack into the industry's populist arguments. Put the animals back on grass, it is said, and prices will soar; it takes too long to raise beef on grass, and there's not enough grass to raise them on, since the Western range lands aren't big enough to sustain America's 100 million head of cattle. And besides, Americans have learned to love cornfed beef. Feedlot meat is also more consistent in both taste and supply and can be harvested 12 months a year. (Grass-fed cattle tend to be harvested in the fall, since they stop gaining weight over the winter, when the grasses go dormant.)

All of this is true. The economic logic behind the feedlot system is hard to refute. And yet so is the ecological logic behind a ruminant grazing on grass. Think what would happen if we restored a portion of the Corn Belt to the tall grass prairie it once was and grazed cattle on it. No more petrochemical fertilizer, no more herbicide, no more nitrogen runoff. Yes, beef would probably be more expensive than it is now, but would that necessarily be a bad thing? Eating beef every day might not be such a smart idea anyway - for our health, for the envoronment. And how cheap, really, is cheap feed-lot beef? Not cheap at all, when you add in the invisible costs: of antibiotic resistance, environmental degradation, heart disease, E.Coli poisoning, corn subsidies, imported oil and so on. All these are costs that grass-fed beef dow not incur.

So how does grass-fed beef taste? Uneven, just as you might expect the meat of a nonindustrial animal to taste. One grass-fed tenderloin from Argentina that I sampled turned out to be the best steak I've ever eaten. But unless the meat is carefully aged, grass-fed beef can be tougher than feedlot beef - not surprisingly, since a grazing animal, which moves around in search of its food, developes more muscle and less fat. Yet even when the meat was tougher, its flavor, to my mind, was much more interesting. And specific, for the taste of every grass-fed animal is inflected by the place where it lived. Maybe it's just my imagination, but nowadays when I eat a feedlot steak, I can taste the corn and the fat, and I can see the view from No. 534's pen. I can't taste the oil, obviously, or the drugs, yet now I know they're there.

A considerably different picture comes to mind while chewing (and, O.K, chewing) a grass-fed steak; a picture of a cow outside in a pasture eating the grass that has eaten the sunlight. Meat-eating may have become an act riddled with moral and ethical ambiguities, but eating a steak at the end of a short, primodial food chain comprising nothing more than ruminants and grass and light is somethinhg I'm happy to do and defend. We are what we eat, it is often said, but of course that's only part of the story. We are what what we eat eats too.

Reprinted from the New York Times Magazine

Shadow Government Is At Work In Secret

The Washington Post reports:

President Bush has dispatched a shadow government of about 100 senior civilian managers to live and work secretly outside Washington, activating for the first time long-standing plans to ensure survival of federal rule after catastrophic attack on the nation's capital.

Execution of the classified "Continuity of Operations Plan" resulted not from the Cold War threat of intercontinental missiles, the scenario rehearsed for decades, but from heightened fears that the al Qaeda terrorist network might somehow obtain a portable nuclear weapon, according to three officials with firsthand knowledge. U.S. intelligence has no specific knowledge of such a weapon, they said, but the risk is thought great enough to justify the shadow government's disruption and expense.

Deployed "on the fly" in the first hours of turmoil on Sept. 11, one participant said, the shadow government has evolved into an indefinite precaution. For that reason, the high-ranking officials representing their departments have begun rotating in and out of the assignment at one of two fortified locations along the East Coast. Rotation is among several changes made in late October or early November, sources said, to the standing directive Bush inherited from a line of presidents reaching back to Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Officials who are activated for what some of them call "bunker duty" live and work underground 24 hours a day, away from their families. As it settles in for the long haul, the shadow government has sent home most of the first wave of deployed personnel, replacing them most commonly at 90-day intervals.

The civilian cadre present in the bunkers usually numbers 70 to 150, and "fluctuates based on intelligence" about terrorist threats, according to a senior official involved in managing the program. It draws from every Cabinet department and some independent agencies. Its first mission, in the event of a disabling blow to Washington, would be to prevent collapse of essential government functions.

Assuming command of regional federal offices, officials said, the underground government would try to contain disruptions of the nation's food and water supplies, transportation links, energy and telecommunications networks, public health and civil order. Later it would begin to reconstitute the government.

Known internally as the COG, for "continuity of government," the administration-in-waiting is an unannounced complement to the acknowledged absence of Vice President Cheney from Washington for much of the pastfive months. Cheney's survival ensures constitutional succession, one official said, but "he can't run the country by himself." With a core group of federal managers alongside him, Cheney -- or President Bush, if available -- has the means to give effect to his orders.

While the damage of other terrorist weapons is potentially horrific, officials said, only an atomic device could threaten the nation's fundamental capacity to govern itself. Without an invulnerable backup command structure outside Washington, one official said, a nuclear detonation in the capital "would be 'game over.' "

"We take this issue extraordinarily seriously, and are committed to doing as thorough a job as possible to ensure the ongoing operations of the federal government," said Joseph W. Hagin, White House deputy chief of staff, who declined to discuss details. "In the case of the use of a weapon of mass destruction, the federal government would be able to do its job and continue to provide key services and respond."

The Washington Post agreed to a White House request not to name any of those deployed or identify the two principal locations of the shadow government.

Only the executive branch is represented in the full-time shadow administration. The other branches of constitutional government, Congress and the judiciary, have separate continuity plans but do not maintain a 24-hour presence in fortified facilities.

The military chain of command has long maintained redundant centers of communication and control, hardened against thermonuclear blast and operating around the clock. The headquarters of U.S. Space Command, for example, is burrowed into Cheyenne Mountain near Colorado Springs, Colo., and the U.S. Strategic Command staffs a comparable facility under Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska.

Civilian departments have had parallel continuity-of-government plans since the dawn of the nuclear age. But they never operated routinely, seldom exercised, and were permitted to atrophy with the end of the Cold War. Sept. 11 marked the first time, according to Bush administration officials, that the government activated such a plan.

Within hours of the synchronized attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center, Military District of Washington helicopters lifted off with the first wave of evacuated officials.

Witnesses near one of the two evacuation sites reported an influx of single- and twin-rotor transport helicopters, escorted by F-16 fighters, and followed not long afterward by government buses.

According to officials with first-hand knowledge, the Bush administration conceived the move that morning as a temporary precaution, likely to last only days. But further assessment of terrorist risks persuaded the White House to remake the program as a permanent feature of "the new reality, based on what the threat looks like," a senior decisionmaker said.

Few Cabinet-rank principals or their immediate deputies left Washington on Sept. 11, and none remained at the bunkers. Those who form the backup government come generally from the top career ranks, from GS-14 and GS-15 to members of the Senior Executive Service. The White House is represented by a "senior-level presence," one official said, but well below such Cabinet-ranked advisers as Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr. and national security adviser Condoleezza Rice.

Many departments, including Justice and Treasury, have completed plans to delegate statutory powers to officials who would not normally exercise them. Others do not need to make such legal transfers, or are holding them in reserve.

Deployed civilians are not permitted to take their families, and under penalty of prosecution they may not tell anyone where they are going or why. "They're on a 'business trip,' that's all," said one official involved in the effort.

The two sites of the shadow government make use of local geological features to render them highly secure. They are well stocked with food, water, medicine and other consumable supplies, and are capable of generating their own power.

But with their first significant operational use, the facilities are showing their age. Top managers arrived at one of them to find computers "several generations" behind those now in use, incapable of connecting to current government databases. There were far too few phone lines. Not many work areas had secure audio and video links to the rest of government. Officials said Card, who runs the program from the White House, has been obliged to order substantial upgrades.

The modern era of continuity planning began under President Ronald Reagan.

On Sept. 16, 1985, Reagan signed National Security Decision Directive 188, "Government Coordination for National Security Emergency Preparedness," which assigned responsibility for continuity planning to an interagency panel from Defense, Treasury, Justice and the Office of Management and Budget. He signed additional directives, including Executive Order 12472, for more detailed aspects of the planning.

In Executive Order 12656, signed Nov. 18, 1988, Reagan ordered every Cabinet department to define in detail the "defense and civilian needs" that would be "essential to our national survival" in case of a nuclear attack on Washington. Included among them were legal instruments for "succession to office and emergency delegation of authority."

The military services put these directives in place long before their civilian counterparts. The Air Force, for example, relies on Air Force Instruction 10-208, revised most recently in September 2000.

Civilian agencies gradually developed contingency plans in comparable detail. The Agriculture Department, for example, has plans to ensure continued farm production, food processing, storage and distribution; emergency provision of seed, feed, water, fertilizer and equipment to farmers; and use of Commodity Credit Corp. inventories of food and fiber resources.

What was missing, until Sept. 11, was an invulnerable group of managers with the expertise and resources to administer these programs in a national emergency.

Last Oct. 8, the day after bombing began in Afghanistan, Bush created the Office of Homeland Security with Executive Order 13228. Among the responsibilities he gave its first director, former Pennsylvania governor Tom Ridge, was to "review plans and preparations for ensuring the continuity of the Federal Government in the event of a terrorist attack that threatens the safety and security of the United States Government or its leadership."

Powell Urges POW Status

The Washington Times reports:

Secretary of State Colin Powell has asked President Bush to reverse the
president's position on al Qaeda and Taliban detainees and declare them
prisoners of war under the Geneva Convention.

A four-page internal White House memorandum obtained yesterday by The
Washington Times shows that Mr. Powell made the request and that the
president's National Security Council plans to meet on the matter Monday
morning.

"The secretary of state has requested that you reconsider that decision,"
White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales wrote yesterday in a memo to Mr.
Bush. "Specifically, he has asked that you conclude that GPW [Geneva Convention
II on the Treatment of Prisoners of War] does apply to both al Qaeda and the
Taliban. I understand, however, that he would agree that al Qaeda and Taliban
fighters could be determined not to be prisoners of war (POWs) but only on a
case-by-case basis following individual hearings before a military board."
The memo provides a rare glimpse of a major dispute inside the Bush White
House on what has become one of the most contentious issues in the war in
Afghanistan. Mr. Powell wants the president to reverse his position. But Mr.
Gonzales and most, if not all, members of the president's national security
team are urging him not to retreat, according to the memo.

Mr. Bush decided Jan. 18 that hundreds of Taliban and members of Osama bin
Laden's al Qaeda army are detainees, not prisoners of war, and thus not subject
to rights in the Geneva Convention. Human rights groups and some European
politicians have protested the decision and have been especially critical of
the living conditions for 158 detainees at the U.S. Naval Base in Guantanamo
Bay, Cuba.

Administration sources last night expressed anger at Mr. Powell, whom they
accused of bowing to pressure from the political left. They said that if Mr.
Bush heeds his secretary of state's advice, the U.S. will have to provide
detained terrorists with all sorts of amenities, including exercise rooms and
canteens.

The four-page Gonzales memo to Mr. Bush comes with a signed cover sheet
from Condoleezza Rice, the president's national security adviser. The cover
page asks Vice President Richard Cheney; Mr. Powell; Defense Secretary Donald
H. Rumsfeld; Attorney General John Ashcroft; CIA Director George Tenet; and
Gen. Richard Myers, Joint Chiefs Chairman, to read Mr. Gonzales' memo and have
responses to her by today at 11 a.m.

"After receiving your comments, we will prepare a final memorandum for
presentation to the president Saturday afternoon," Miss Rice writes.

In his memo to the president, Mr. Gonzales lays out his and the Justice
Department's reasons for recommending that Taliban and al Qaeda are not Geneva
Convention prisoners of war. The White House counsel then lists what appear to
be the State Department's arguments for reversal.

Mr. Gonzales then writes, "On balance, I believe that the arguments for
reconsideration and reversal are unpersuasive."

The memo shows that Mr. Powell is not only running up against opposition
at the White house, but also at the Justice Department.

Mr. Gonzales writes that the department's Office of Legal Counsel "has
opined that, as a matter of international law and domestic law, GPW does not
apply to the conflict with Al Qaeda. OLC has further opined that you have the
authority to determine that GPW does not apply to the Taliban. As I discussed
with you, the grounds for such a determination may include ... a determination
that the Taliban and its forces were, in fact, not a government, but a
militant, terrorist-like group."

The White House counsel adds, "OLC's interpretation of this legal issue is
definitive. ... Nevertheless, you should be aware that the legal adviser to the
secretary of state has expressed a different view."

In addition to Mr. Gonzales and Justice, Mr. Powell is likely to run into
opposition from Mr. Rumsfeld. The defense secretary has vigorously defended the
treatment of captives in Guantanamo and the decision not to place them under
protection of the Geneva Convention. Mr. Rumsfeld often points out that the
detainees are willing to commit suicide in order to kill Americans.

"It should be noted that your policy of providing humane treatment to
enemy detainees gives us the credibility to insist on like treatment for our
soldiers," Mr. Gonzales wrote. "Moreover, even if GPW is not applicable we can
still bring war crimes charges against anyone who mistreats U.S. personnel.

Finally, I note that our adversaries in several recent conflicts have not been
deterred by GPW in their mistreatment of captured U.S. personnel, and
terrorists will not follow GPW rules in any event."

Mr. Gonzales also argues that invoking the Geneva Convention would make it
easier for adversaries to try to charge American servicemen with war crimes.

Noting that the president has called the war on terrorism "a new kind of
war," Mr. Gonzales wrote, "In my judgment, this new paradigm renders obsolete
Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders
quaint some of its provisions requiring that captured enemy be afforded such
things as commissary privileges, script (i.e., advances of monthly pay),
athletic uniforms, and scientific instruments."

Placing the detainees under the Geneva Convention would give them legal
protections and new creature comforts. The United States would be restricted
from conducting open-ended interrogations, for example, some of which have
given the FBI new insights into how the al Qaeda terror network operates.

Yesterday at Guantanamo, Republican Sen. James M. Inhofe of Oklahoma said
many of the detainees held there are likely to be returned to their homelands
after investigators complete interrogations that began Wednesday.

Officials would not say how long the interrogations of the al Qaeda and
Taliban fighters might last. It also was not clear whether the United States
would demand that detainees be returned on the condition they be put on trial
at home.

"I believe after the interrogation process there's going to be a
distinction made as to whether, No. 1, these people should be sent to their
country and, No. 2, be subjected to a military tribunal [at home] and, No. 3,
whether there should be U.S. military justice or, in some rare occasions, the
same as in what John Walker [Lindh] is receiving," Mr. Inhofe told the
Associated Press.

Lindh, a U.S. citizen, will be tried in federal court on charges of
helping the Taliban and al Qaeda target American civilians.

Mr. Inhofe was part of a delegation of eight representatives and three
senators who visited the detention center yesterday. U.S. lawmakers have said
they consider the detained fighters a danger to society who would kill again if
set free.

Meanwhile in Afghanistan, U.S. Special Forces troops uncovered a large
cache of Taliban weapons at a compound about 40 miles north of Kandahar after a
battle with holdout Taliban fighters, the Pentagon said yesterday.

Military interrogators are questioning 27 Taliban fighters captured in
Thursday's raid in Hazar Kadamon. Defense officials said at least 15 Taliban
were killed in the operation and that one U.S. Special Forces soldier was
wounded on the ankle.

The weapons were stored at several locations in the compound, which was
located in a remote part of Afghanistan, he said. The compound had three sets
of buildings, one of which had a fence around it.

Rear Adm. John Stufflebeem, deputy director of operations for the Joint
Staff, said the total number of detainees from Afghanistan is now 460 — 302 in
Afghanistan and 158 in Cuba.

Frontline Interviews Richard Perle

Richard Perle is the chairman of the Defense Policy Board, an advisory panel to the Pentagon made up of leading figures in national security and defense which backs laying the groundwork for overthrowing Saddam through military means. He previously served as assistant secretary of defense for international security policy in the Reagan Administration. In this interview Perle says, "There can be no victory in the war against terrorism if at the end of it Saddam Hussein is still in power." He argues that the second phase of the war against terrorism should consist of U.S. political and military support for the Iraqi opposition's efforts to overthrow Saddam Hussein. He was interviewed in mid-October 2001.

PBS interviews Richard Perle:
What must one understand about Saddam Hussein and Saddam Hussein's Iraq, even before entering the debate on how we should deal with Iraq?

Well, about Saddam Hussein, the essential point is that he's a thug who has been willing to murder some of the people closest to him, who has used chemical weapons against his own people, who has invaded his neighbors. He is probably the most dangerous individual in the world today.

Capable of?

Capable of anything. Capable of using weapons of mass destruction against the United States, capable of launching other military maneuvers as soon as he thinks he can get away with it.

You have stated in the past that this is not a fringe issue. What do you mean by that?

The question of Saddam Hussein is at the very core of the war against terrorism. There can be no victory in the war against terrorism if, at the end of it, Saddam Hussein is still in power -- not only because he supports terrorism, not only because he trains terrorists [Editor's Note: see the interview with a defector on Iraq's alleged terrorist training camp.] and gives them refuge -- but because he is the symbol of defiance of all Western values. He succeeded in throwing the United Nations out. He's violated all of the undertakings that followed the end of the Gulf War. As long as he is there, we are in danger, and we are in danger from terrorist activity.

We haven't dealt with this threat. This threat has been there for quite a while. What are some of the reasons why?

We made a fundamental mistake at the end of Desert Storm: we didn't finish the job. Finishing the job would have meant the destruction of Saddam Hussein's military power, which, in turn, would have led to the destruction of his regime. The people who made that mistake were loath to admit it, so they described the situation in unjustifiably sanguine terms. He was, to use the phrase they adopted, in a box, and safely in a box, and we need not be concerned about him. I think that was wrong. It's been wrong all along, and it is demonstrably wrong today.

Why is it wrong?

It's wrong because he has weapons of mass destruction, because he has expelled U.N. inspectors. He has violated all of the terms and conditions of the U.N. resolutions that had been allowed to fall into disuse. He is winning. Because he is winning, and because he has awesome capabilities, he poses a continuing threat to us and to others.

Have we not only ignored the situation, but in fact had several chances that we didn't do the job?

We didn't do the job, in part because we didn't understand the dangers. I think after Sept. 11 those dangers are now much better understood. But we have passed up one opportunity after another to take action against Saddam, even action that would have been led by his own Iraqi opposition.

Saddam Hussein is hated throughout Iraq. There is a small group of people who benefit from his regime, but the vast majority of Iraqis suffer terribly under his regime. There is an opposition. The opposition is eager to take action against him. Instead of supporting that opposition, we have held them back.

There seems to be a bit of a schizophrenic attitude toward the Iraqi National Congress in Washington. Can you define that for us and what it means?

Yes. The INC is highly regarded on Capitol Hill, and I believe highly regarded by a number of people who know the INC leadership well. It is not held in high regard by the Department of State and the Central Intelligence Agency, who are, together, the architects of the failed Iraq policy, including the mistakes of 1991 and repeated failures to deal with Saddam since then.

So how has that translated into the debate that is ongoing in Washington right now over future moves?

It's very clear that the CIA and the State Department are energetic opponents of support to the Iraqi opposition, partly because they believe that we are safe. That's going to get serious reconsideration when we examine the prospect that Saddam Hussein could -- and very possibly will -- transfer weapons of mass destruction to anonymous terrorists, and thereby escape the retaliatory capabilities that have always been the basis for the theory that he's in a box and can't get out.

What is the threshold that needs to be reached before that is believable, or before that action might actually be taken?

I think sensible people looking at the dangers to the United States, recognizing how we failed adequately to contain terrorism before Sept. 11, will conclude that with [Saddam Hussein's] hatred of the United States, with his blood feud with former President Bush -- [which] could extend to George W. Bush as well -- to leave him in place and wait for him to take action against us is simply too dangerous.

So in very practical terms, what does that mean for our policy as of today?

I think we will need a new policy toward Iraq, because the current policy is to leave Saddam Hussein alone, to subject Iraq to sanctions which are ineffective. They're increasingly being violated by other countries. They're certainly not going to change Saddam's policy, and yet that is the policy of the last administration and, I'm sorry to say, has been the policy of this administration.

But the president has already stated that we're in a war against terrorism. We will not end until we weed it out, which include states that sponsor or help terrorists. So help a non-Washington audience; translate that for us.

If the president means what he says -- and I believe he does -- and if he has a disciplined administration support him -- a Department of State, a Central Intelligence Agency, a Department of Defense, a National Security Council -- who consider that it is their responsibility to implement his policies, then they will design a much more aggressive policy toward Iraq and we will no longer leave Saddam Hussein unencumbered. We'll take action against him.

As far as this war on terrorism, if you were designing it or advising the administration, would you do it differently? Is the war somewhat flawed at this point?

Well, we're conducting this war now in phases. Always bet on phase one, because phase one always happens. Phase two sometimes happens and sometimes it doesn't. I would have gone about this differently. I would have gone after Iraq immediately. I would not have relegated it to some subsequent phase. But it's all right, as long as we get to phase two. Phase two should be overwhelming support for the Iraqi opposition. They're eager, they're ready to go. I believe they can do it. We haven't done that until now, and the State Department opposes doing it.

[This should be] coupled with plans that could involve the direct application of American military power in support of the Iraqi opposition. Bombing targets in Iraq without any connection to a strategy seems to me unwise and ineffective. ...

I think the regime of Saddam Hussein is far weaker than most people believe, and what it would take to topple it is a tiny fraction of what was necessary to expel Iraq from Kuwait in 1991.

Some people will argue, I suppose, that it's not that simple, that it's another quagmire, the INC is not as easy to rely on, and democracy is not an easy thing that you set up quickly. What is your response to that opinion?

It's certainly true it's not easy. It's not simple. On the other hand, simply waiting until biological weapons show up in this country because we didn't take action against Saddam when we had the opportunity would be foolish and shortsighted, just as it was foolish and shortsighted to not act with vigor against terrorism in the period in which Al Qaeda was developing into the organization it became. Ten years ago, Al Qaeda was nothing. We watched it grow, because after each terrorist act, it was stronger than before. We never challenged it. We never took significant action against it. And these acts of terror were regarded as great triumphs and the basis upon which Al Qaeda became a magnet for people who want to destroy us....

Jim Woolsey told us basically he considers that the last decade of actions, in regards specifically to Iraq, has been feckless. What's your opinion about the policies they developed and why they developed in the way they have?

Jim's certainly right that the policies were feckless. Saddam Hussein plots the assassination of a former American president. The American response: a cruise missile, in an unoccupied intelligence headquarters. And before the dust had cleared from that missile attack, American officials were at great pains to explain that we had deliberately chosen the middle of the night so nobody would be hurt. We looked ridiculous; we looked ineffective; we looked weak. Saddam must have enjoyed that night.

And the other occasions were similar -- a few missiles here or there. We said we would take action to keep the inspectors in Iraq. We didn't. We didn't take effective action. Even Desert Fox, which was a slightly more aggressive bombing of Iraq, which was intended to restore the inspection regime, ended without ever restoring the inspection regime. One encounter after the other, and the winner in each round was Saddam Hussein. I don't think there's any doubt about that.

What's your opinion on the use of courts to deal with terrorism?

I don't think you can use the courts against sovereign states. You certainly can't use them against thugs like Saddam Hussein. If you manage to get your hands on an individual terrorist, I suppose you could try it. But these fellows are not working for themselves; they're working for governments like Saddam Hussein's Iraq. To focus our attention on the individuals who are hired to commit murder rather than the people who hire them is a great mistake....

The secretary of state's policies seem to be, to some extent, based on the fact that you need the coalition, and the coalition is endangered if one, for instance, goes after Iraq. What is correct or wrong about that belief?

First of all, I have serious doubts about the extent to which we need a coalition. I don't know what this coalition is, who's in it, who's out of it, where you get your membership card. Can you be expelled if you're not doing certain minimum things? Are the Saudis in it? Are they out of it? The Syrians support terror -- are they in, are they out? It's a very vague concept, and an insubstantial one.

Under the best of circumstances, a coalition is a means to an end. If we confuse means and ends and the coalition becomes an end in itself, then we won't win the war on terror, because a broad coalition is not dedicated to winning the war on terror.

So why does Colin Powell believe this?

I think Colin Powell is simply wrong about this, just as I think he was wrong about the end of the Gulf War. He was in favor of leaving Saddam standing, and we now know that that was a very costly mistake. Tens of thousands of people have died since, and Americans are exposed to an unprecedented danger. I think he's wrong now in believing that the coalition is more important than effectively going after those states that sponsor terrorism. If the coalition is going to protect a terrorist state like Saddam, then to hell with the coalition.

Some will say that a coalition is necessary for intelligence reasons, for financial closing down of systems....

All of these claims about the benefits of coalition are subject to detailed analysis. Are we getting intelligence that we can rely on that we would not get if it were our policy to go after Iraq? I haven't seen anyone demonstrate that any country is giving us valuable intelligence that would be withheld if it were our policy to replace Saddam Hussein. Indeed, some of the intelligence that we're getting is coming from countries who would be delighted if we went after Saddam Hussein.

In terms of the financial, the effort to control funds going to terrorists, I have not heard anyone identify a country that would be unwilling to cooperate in that regard, but is doing so today, if we were go after Saddam Hussein.

The INC maintains that, to some extent, the coalition of Arab nations -- friends of the United States, Saudi Arabia, for instance -- would not be very interested in seeing help to the INC, because you end up, perhaps, with then a democratic Iraq, [which might be detrimental to their own regimes]. Do you believe that that is part of what's going on here?

There may be an element of that. The Saudis certainly do not want to see the dominoes falling where the dominoes are leaders who use intimidation to stay in power, and [who] live very well at the expense of their own country. That's a fair description of the Saudis, in my opinion.

But I also think the Saudis realize that they are threatened by Saddam. If Saddam had not made the mistake in 1991 of stopping too soon, he would have overwhelmed Saudi Arabia too, and the Saudis knew that, which is why they were our coalition partners. So they want to see him out of the way.

What the Saudis fear, and what others in the region fear, is an insubstantial, ineffective, halfhearted effort against Saddam, because they are left in a dangerous neighborhood with Saddam still there, after having provoked him fecklessly. So it's the fecklessness of American policy that stands in the way of unifying the Gulf states against Saddam. ...

What would need to happen, in your viewpoint, for the administration to turn towards Iraq?

I think we're going to turn towards Iraq, because it's impossible to claim victory in the war against terrorism when a man who supports terror continues to occupy power in Iraq. But the important change came with the discovery that anthrax, a lethal biological weapon, can be delivered anonymously to Americans. It was done on a small scale, by posting letters with anthrax in them. But surely the lesson of that is that we can be attacked anonymously with biological weapons.

So the argument on which those prepared to accept Saddam Hussein forever have based their case -- which is that we can retaliate and punish him so severely that he won't attempt to use his weapons of mass destruction -- that argument is out the window, because it is now clear that he has the option of providing weapons of mass destruction to anonymous terrorists. That is a threat that this country would be foolish to accept.

But doesn't it then have to be proven that the anthrax in the hands of the terrorists in the United States that are sending it to our news media and to our government officials is Iraqi anthrax?

No, not at all. In fact, I rather doubt that it's Iraqi anthrax. But what the delivery of anthrax through the mail forces us to consider is a range of options available to Saddam Hussein that we didn't consider before. Because the argument that we could deter Saddam by threatening to destroy him if he used weapons of mass destruction against us is no longer relevant, if you allow the possibility that he could deliver weapons of mass destruction through anonymous third parties. And there's no question he has the capacity to do that....

Let me put it this way: Iraq's time will come. Either that, or we will end the war against terrorism without a victory, as we ended the war against Saddam Hussein in 1991 without a victory....

Does that mean that, once you've done with Iraq, you need to turn your attention to Iran and to Syria?

There are a number of countries that have been supporting terrorism. Many of them get very little benefit out of it. On the other hand, there's been no cost. So as they look at the costs and benefits of offering hospitality, safe haven to terrorists, they have concluded that on balance it's a good thing for them to do. If now we impose serious costs, if we say to them, "If you support terrorism, you're going to be at war with the United States, and you may be destroyed in the process," I think several of these governments will simply get out of the support of terrorism business. It will be too costly, the risks will be too great, and they will exercise some rational judgment and decide they're not going to do that anymore.

But isn't there an example of basically going after another terrorist state? The attacks on Libya during the Reagan administration didn't seem to dissuade other terrorist states.

It is true that when the Reagan administration went after Libya, it succeeded only in repressing Libyan terrorism. It wasn't followed up when terrorism began to show up elsewhere, and that was the mistake. Because we didn't say when we went after [Qaddafi] [that] we will go after anyone else who supports terrorism. The ball was dropped at that point, particularly during the long period of the Clinton administration.

...What's your opinion of what the evidence is out there [against Iraq], and why is it relevant?

There's a great deal of circumstantial evidence that Iraq was involved in the 1993 attempt on the World Trade Center. Ramzi Yousef, who sits in jail now, was traveling on an Iraqi passport. There were lots of communications back to Iraq that suggest there were people in Iraq who were at least cognizant of the operation and possibly even directing it. Laurie Mylroie has done some serious work on this, and it's very convincing. It's not conclusive at this stage. It was the view of the chief FBI officer who dealt with the case, who passed away, that Iraq was involved. We may never be able to prove conclusively whether Iraq was involved or not, but there's strong circumstantial evidence that suggests Iraq was indeed involved.

Why is that relevant to the decisions being made today?

I don't think it is relevant to the decisions being made today. What is relevant to the decisions being made today is one simple question: Does Saddam Hussein, in power in Iraq, in possession of weapons of mass destruction, pose a threat to the United States that is of such a magnitude that we had better take action before he takes action against us? That's the issue. It has little to do with the past history.

But we do know that he has connections with terrorist networks, that he has training facilities for terrorists. At Salman Pak, there's a facility that has mock-ups of a variety of aircraft so that hijackers can be trained. We know that he has motive; we know he has capability. It's a question of whether we wait and hope for the best.

We talked to a refugee from Iraq who INC has been working with, a gentleman who knows what's been happening at Salman Pak. How believable is the evidence that is out there? What we're told is that terrorists are being trained from many Arab nations, some fundamentalists. They're being trained in how to take over planes with knives and/or pens, and how to use them as a terrorist act. Is it believable? Is it relevant? Why is it important?

I think it's believable. Look. I don't believe that we will again experience an attack exactly like that of Sept. 11. For one thing, we now know that you never yield control of the aircraft. Instructions to pilots were exactly the opposite, before Sept. 11. So it isn't going to be a repetition.

We're always fighting the last war. I can't tell you what form a new terrorist attack will take. The one that troubles me the most is the use of biological weapons, disseminated not by Iraqi intelligence officials, but by terrorists who are prepared to commit suicide, who would cheerfully kill millions of Americans, if they could do it. All that remains is to organize their entry into the United States together with those biological agents. And that is something that Saddam Hussein and his intelligence apparatus is in a position to do.

So we can either hope he doesn't do what we know he can do, and wait, or we can consider that the threat is large enough to justify action today.

But is the threat alone enough? Doesn't evidence need to be compiled so that one understands that there is a tie to Iraq and terrorist acts, before making a move to include them this war on terrorism?

No. I don't know why we would say to ourselves, "Saddam Hussein has biological weapons. He has a well-known hatred of the United States. He spoke approvingly of the attacks on Sept. 11. But despite all of that, we will not take any action against him until we find evidence that he did what." This is a question of protecting ourselves, and we are in a situation where the only credible defense has to include a strong offense. It is too easy to get into the United States. It is too easy to recruit suicide bombers. It is too easy to disseminate weapons of mass destruction. So either we take this to the enemy, or we wait, and hope the enemy chooses not to take it to us. But if we wait, it will be his choice, and not ours.

There has been some reporting on the meetings of the Defense Policy Board and the importance of this very influential group of former and present day policy makers. You're still the chair, right?

Yes....

Can you in any way define the importance of the board, in general terms?

Well, I think the importance of the board is really the importance of the individuals who serve on it. When you have people like Henry Kissinger and James Schlesinger and Harold Brown and Newt Gingrich and Tom Foley and others applying their considerable intelligence and experience to a difficult issue, that counts for something. And they have done that, and they can all speak for themselves about their own views.

What is the relevance that there are representatives of the INC there, giving testimony to this influential group?

I wouldn't characterize that part of the deliberation in that way. We thought it was useful for them to meet some of the opposition, so that they would understand who among the opponents of Saddam might be available to help rid the world of Saddam.

Are we still basically at war with Iraq after ten years? We've been bombing them time and time again, here and there; we assume Iraq is back in the business of biological, chemical and nuclear, probably. Is this a war that's continuing? Or do we not understand, really, the reality of what's going on here?

What has happened is that, after the defeat of Saddam's forces in Kuwait in 1991, and the imposition of a number of U.N. resolutions aimed at protecting the world against his weapons of mass destruction, we have lost one engagement after another. The result is that those U.N. resolutions are now in the trash can. He's simply defied them, and gotten away with it. There are no inspectors in Iraq today, so we don't know what he is doing. But there's every reason to believe that he continues aggressively to pursue the acquisition of weapons of mass destruction.

So he's no longer in Kuwait. But he's very much in power in Iraq, because he is unchallenged in Iraq. It seems to me foolish in the extreme not to challenge his power and authority in Iraq, since so many Iraqis would gladly join in the effort to do that.

Why is it that we still haven't released the $90 million promised to them? Can you shed any light on that?

The money that was promised to the Iraqi opposition was never spent by the Clinton administration, because they were basically opposed to the policy. So far, that has been the attitude of the Department of State even in this administration, despite a very strong declaration in the platform on which President Bush ran, and despite, I think, the president's own instincts. So it's going to take a while before some parts of this government come to the inevitable conclusion that, as long as Saddam is in the position he's in, with the weapons he possesses, we are in danger. And I have no doubt that eventually even my friends at the State Department will come to that conclusion....

The attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the anthrax attacks that are taking place now ... in some ways, were these inevitable?

... An attack on this scale was inevitable, because we failed to respond to lesser attacks, and the terrorists were emboldened by their successes. And make no mistake about it: every time they killed Americans or carried out an attack against American property abroad, they considered that they had achieved a victory. They determined to go from victory to victory, and we did not interfere with that....

Is there any point about Iraq one must understand so that an educated view can be made?

It's important to recognize that Iraq is a country with an enormously talented people, and that is well understood by the rest of the Arab world. So there is real concern when the rest of the Arab world observes suffering in Iraq, which is now widely attributed, I think wrongly, to the embargo that's been in effect for many years. That is very different from believing that the Arab world supports Saddam Hussein, or that it would not welcome the elimination of Saddam Hussein's regime. I think there would be dancing in the streets if Saddam were removed from power, and that reaction of the Iraqi people would be reflected in the attitude of the Arab world, generally. So the notion that if we go after Iraq we are somehow going to advance in the direction of a war against Islam that will turn out to be far worse for us, I think is really quite mistaken....

The common belief is that our soldiers are not welcomed very easily in any Arab nation today, even when there is no battle going on. It's hard for an American public to believe that the Arab allies will indeed welcome us with open arms in any endeavor against any other Arab nation. Is that a mistaken a view?

Yes, I think it's a mistaken view. This idea of Arab solidarity is complete nonsense. It's been nonsense for as long as I can remember. They're at each other's throats all the time. Saddam invades Kuwait. You have a war between Iraq and Iran. Although Iran is not an Arab nation, it's a Muslim nation. You have Jordan fighting Syria in the 1970s. It's just nonsense to suggest that there's solidarity. There is no solidarity there....

If we go into Iraq and we take down Hussein?

Then I think it's over for the terrorists.

Why so optimistic?

Because having destroyed the Taliban, having destroyed Saddam's regime, the message to the others is, "You're next." Two words. Very efficient diplomacy. " You're next, and if you don't shut down the terrorist networks on your territory, we'll take you down, too. Is it worth it?" Of course it isn't worth it. It isn't worth it for any of them.

The nightmare scenario is that we get bogged down in Afghanistan, we can't find bin Laden in some cave. We go into Iraq, we have problems, we're hit back at home with biological weapons or whatever; we lose the public, or start losing the public. Things start getting rattled. It's not clean. It's difficult. What happens?

...I think we will be vulnerable in a way that this country has never been vulnerable before. And this is not a war we cannot afford to lose.

So we have to win this war?

We have to win this war, which is why I'm confident that we will not seek to win it in the cheapest and easiest of all ways, which is to define it so that it is already won. There was that old line about Vietnam: that we should declare victory and go home. You can't do that in this war. Declare victory; but if you haven't won victory, you're as vulnerable as before you made the declaration. So that isn't an option.

Does Washington understand that?

I think the president understands that. I think the secretary of defense understands it. I think the vice president understands it, and I hope others understand it.

Does the State Department get won over, or does the State Department at some point argue their case to the death?

There are some very intelligent and talented people at the Department of State, and the secretary himself is immensely talented. They'll come to the right conclusion at the end. But they're going to have to work through a lot of historical beliefs before they get there.