HAS EGGERS STAGGERED? Dave Eggers -- the once-mighty creative genius of Might Magazine and the memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius -- emerges again in the pages of New Orleans' Gambit Weekly as his latest book hits the streets in paperback.

In You Shall Know Our Velocity!, art imitates life, or at least its ironies. Will, the novel's narrator, is a 27-year-old college drop-out with $80,000, which he feels is undeserved. He decides to go around the world in a week and give away $32,000 to the impoverished. Accompanying Will is Hand, one of his two best friends. (The other friend is Jack, who died six months earlier and was always the sensible one of the trio -- he was killed in a car accident partially due to obeying the speed limit.) Will's head is described as a "condemned church with a ceiling of bats," and his journey around the world is an attempt to leave his head behind.

The work invites comparisons to Jack Kerouac's epochal On the Road. But in Kerouac's book, Sal and Dean are hard-traveling observers communing with like-minded spirits on the highways and byways of post-war America. Eggers' characters, particularly Will, are consumed with guilt and alienation. Even when giving money to the poor, Will can't help but think, "When you give them the bills, Hand, you feel so filthy."

THE THIRD TIME IS THE CHARM Are we drifting toward war in North Korea? Former Secretary of Defense William Perry thinks so.

Perry is the most prominent member of a growing number of national security experts and Korea specialists who are expressing deep concern about the direction of U.S. policy toward Pyongyang. As President Bill Clinton's defense secretary, he oversaw preparation for airstrikes on North Korean nuclear facilities in 1994, an attack that was never carried out. He has remained deeply involved in Korean policy issues and is widely respected in national security circles, especially among senior military officers. They credit him with playing a key role in developing the U.S. high-tech arsenal of cruise missiles and stealth aircraft and also with righting the Pentagon after the short, turbulent term of Les Aspin, Clinton's first defense chief.

Only last winter Perry publicly argued that the North Korea problem was controllable. Now, he said, he has grown to doubt that. "It was manageable six months ago if we did the right things," he said. "But we haven't done the right things."

He added: "I have held off public criticism to this point because I had hoped that the administration was going to act on this problem, and that public criticism might be counterproductive. But time is running out, and each month the problem gets more dangerous."

LIES, LIES AND MORE DAMNED LIES Have I noted that Bush seems less Reagan-esque and more like Nixon with every passing distortion? Whether it is Iraq, the environment, the economy or civil liberties, this administration's track record for playing straight is just pathetic. The ACLU has issued a report on how the Justice Department continues to distort the USA Patriot Act to the detriment of the civil liberties of the American public. We could stand a little more democracy building here at home.

The Justice Department’s repeated assertion that the USA PATRIOT Act’s surveillance provisions cannot be used against U.S. citizens.  In fact, the surveillance provisions are applicable to citizens and non-citizens alike.  Some of the surveillance provisions can be used even against citizens who are not suspected of espionage, terrorism, or crime of any kind.

The Justice Department’s repeated assertion that Section 215 of the Patriot Act, which permits the government to demand that any organization – including a library, bookstore, or hospital – turn its records over to the FBI, cannot be invoked unless the government can show “probable cause.”  In fact, the law contains no such restriction.  Section 215 requires only that the government declare that the records are “sought for” an ongoing investigation.  The “sought for” standard is an extremely lenient one, and it bears no resemblance to “probable cause.”  That the standard is so low is especially troubling in light of the Attorney General’s recent acknowledgement (at a June 2003 Congressional hearing) that the FBI could use Section 215 to obtain not only library and bookstore records but also computer files, educational records, and even genetic information.

AN IRAQI WISH LIST Salam Pax posted a letter from someone in Baghdad in lieu of his own post this week.

Dear friends, If you wonder why I haven't sent you anything lately; well, I started writing a long letter a week ago but while describing the extremely bad situation we were in last week (All Baghdad stayed without electricity for more than 3 days with very weak water or none in some places, plus a big fuel shortage for generators and cars), I was listening to the coalition broadcasting for the Iraqi people. They ware talking about all low priority stuff like printing "New passports" for Iraqis, Mr. Bremer attending a Symphony for the Iraqi Symphony group, and such stuff, without any mentioning of the fact that about 5 million people were living under a temperature of 47 degrees and without electricity and water for three days :-/

You know, I reviewed my "dream list" back then; there was no "New passports" in it. It just contained three simple wishes: Electricity, Water, and Security. (This will make a nice motto instead of the old famous "Unity, Freedom, and Socialism", I might as well start a party of my own with this motto. It will sure make me very popular).

Are such wishes to much to ask in the new millennium, and when you are under the occupation of the greatest power in the world?

BRING US THE HEAD OF VICE-PRESIDENT CHENEY Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity has issued a call for the resignation of Vice-President Dick Cheney -- among other things -- as a way to begin to restore credibility to American foreign policy and intelligence. Cheney was involved both in the creation of pre-war rationales for attacking Iraq and in ratcheting up the volume of the administration's drumbeats on the issue.

The resignation of Cheney solves nothing, but it is an interesting -- and strong -- position for this group of retired intel professionals to take. Their lengthy "memo" to President Bush in Counterpunch is worth reading if only for the timeline of distortions and missteps they map out concerning the build-up for war.

Joseph Wilson, the former US ambassador who visited Niger at Cheney's request, enjoys wide respect (including, like several VIPS members, warm encomia from your father). He is the consummate diplomat. So highly disturbed is he, however, at the chicanery he has witnessed that he allowed himself a very undiplomatic comment to a reporter last week, wondering aloud "what else they are lying about." Clearly, Wilson has concluded that the time for diplomatic language has passed. It is clear that lies were told. Sad to say, it is equally clear that your vice president led this campaign of deceit.

This was no case of petty corruption of the kind that forced Vice President Spiro Agnew's resignation. This was a matter of war and peace. Thousands have died. There is no end in sight.

THE STRATEGIC MISTAKE Reuel Marc Gerecht, one of a handful of analysts who was on the Middle Eastern bandwagon before the war in Iraq, makes several astute assessments in this Weekly Standard article, though I'm disappointed that he appears to have given the Bush administration a pass on the whole affair. Gerecht argues, rightly, that the situation in Iraq -- especially in southern Shiite-controlled Iraq -- is not nearly as dire as media accounts would make it. The real threat to stability is not found throughout Iraq, but rather in the Sunni quadrant running north and west of Baghdad. It was here that the Bush team made their first significant military mistake. It's a mistake that could bring a political house of cards to the ground, if it isn't rectified.

If the Bush administration has made one giant strategic error so far in Iraq, it was the decision by the Pentagon to ease up on the Sunni backbone of Saddam Hussein's regime once Baghdad fell in early April. (Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's decision to reduce the number of military police was unquestionably a serious mistake, but it is of much less significance than the Pentagon's failure to treat the Arab Sunni regions as hostile territory that needed to be thoroughly pacified by combat troops.)

Saddam's triangle--the Sunni Arab zone stretching from Baghdad west to Ramadi and north to Mosul--was not methodically invaded once Saddam's loyalists gave up and faded away in Baghdad. No serious attempt was made to march through the area, town by town, searching for Baathists and senior military, security, and intelligence officers. Having unwisely chosen not to equip the American military with a larger number of Iraqi auxiliaries--the Iraqi National Congress, among other exile groups, was urging this approach months before the invasion--the U.S. military didn't have the eyes and ears to move quickly and forcefully against the remnants of the regime. It also appears to have believed it just didn't need to. Baghdad fell with a whimper. The ruling Sunni cliques appeared to be exhausted. Contrary to so many left-wing and European depictions of the United States under George W. Bush, Americans in general, and military officers in particular, don't like using their power. Americans just don't like to thump on foreigners, even when they are palpably of the worst order. The Shiites, particularly Najaf's clerics, have been watching America's actions vis-à-vis the Sunnis closely. They emphatically understand that unless the old Sunni power structure is completely emasculated, the survivors from the ancien régime will inevitably try to kill their way back to power, leaving dead Shiites, as well as dead American soldiers, in their wake. The credibility of American power in the eyes of the Shiites hinges first and foremost on whether Washington is willing to sustain the causalities for as long as it takes to reduce the violent Sunni opposition to Washington's new order.

IN IRAN, THE KIDS AREN'T ALRIGHT With nearly 70% of its population under the age of 30, Iran is ripe for change. It's a process the clerics have attempted to manage in recent years in the guise of open elections, where less conservative leaders (approved by the clerical council) can run as reformers, and where censorship rules have been eased until a newspaper steps over arbitrary lines. Despite the attempt at managed reform, the government in Iran may yet be swept away by cultural changes.

But the generation that experienced the pre-reform era believes young Iranians simply do not know how lucky they are.

"It was an awful and closed society," says Surreya, explaining that the first years of the revolution saw debate as to whether women could even work.

Surreya is a gym instructor and says inspectors used to come and check what music they were playing.

"If we used this kind of rock and pop they didn't like it - they suggested we use monotone music without lyrics. But nowadays I don't see them around... we are free to do whatever we want," she says.

Women in their 30s describe going to weddings shrouded from head to toe and without any make-up or nail polish for fear of being stopped at a checkpoint and scrutinised.

"When you compare the young people now with us they have all this freedom and they're so ungrateful and don't appreciate what they've got," says 34-year-old Nassim.

"For us life now is like heaven, but the young think it's hell and they constantly moan and groan about everything," she says, pointing out that in the early years of the revolution there was no music at all but now there are Iranian rock bands who give concerts.

The dilemma for the reformists is whether giving concessions to young people allows them more room for expression and thus protects the Islamic system of government - or whether it just whets their appetites for more freedoms that may ultimately undermine the system.

HEN PECKED The changing tastes of America's younger consumers is apparently having an impact on the business practices of the fast food industry, which processes (or kills, or slaughters) some 8 billion animals a year to satisfy our fast food nation.

BUENO VISTA ADIEU Australia Broadcasting's The World Today ran a brief, but lovely, tribute to Compay Segundo, who died yesterday in his native Cuba.

HAMISH ROBERTSON: The veteran Cuban guitarist, Compay Segundo, who won fame late in life as the front man for the Buena Vista Social Club has died at the age of 95. The group of ageing musicians were the subject of a film by German director Wim Wenders, and they toured Australia back in early 2001 to great acclaim...

With his trademark white Panama hat and cigar, Segundo was playing live until earlier this year, and became a symbol of how music can embody values beyond fashion and fad. He himself recently told the BBC, the secret to his long life was cigars and just enough sex, but not too much.

"The flowers of life come to everyone. One has to be ready not to miss them. Mine arrived after I was 90," the cigar-smoking musician said in a recent interview.

"Compay is to Cuban music what the Cuban flag is to the Cuban people," a saddened fellow Buena Vista singer, Omara Portuondo, said at a Havana funeral parlor where she and members of his band paid their last respects.

"He made it to the world stage without ever making any concessions and kept his authenticity as a great figure of Cuban popular music," said Cuban culture minister Abel Prieto.

Compay began composing music in his teens and playing in groups with the "armonico," a seven-string guitar he developed to increase the harmony of the Cuban "son," a traditional musical form which was a forerunner of today's salsa.

A CRACK APPEARS David Broder has been observing Washington for half a century, and as he surveys the current presidential landscape he sees a chink appearing in the once-impervious armor of George Bush. "If President Bush is not reelected, we may look back on last Thursday, July 10, 2003, as the day the shadow of defeat first crossed his political horizon," Broder writes.

July 10 is the day when the three network evening news programs led with the news that President Bush either misled, misinformed or outright lied to the American public about the immediacy of dangers posed by Saddam Hussein's regime. It is the day when polls began to show that more Americans were concerned that we weren't putting our best foot forward in the Iraqi rebuilding efforts. And it is the day when CBS News reported that food lines in America are growing in areas of the country where people used to wait in line for a table, not a handout.

ASTERIX E' OBELIX Last year, I sat alone in a small cinema in Apt, France, to watch the new French film, "Asterix and Obelix meet Cleopatra." I spoke no French, and winced periodically at the live action interpretation of my one of my favorite childhood comics, but it was worth it. More recently, I stumbled upon the official Asterix and Obelix site, which is as cleverly done as the original books.

GETTING HOT I missed Canuck rockers Hot Hot Heat last week, but picked up their not-so-new CD "Make Up the Breakdown" over the weekend and found myself liking their up-tempo, off-tune, late-70s Brit-punk sound.

Hot Hot Heat don't like to reveal what their songs are about, but they will share other details about their second single, "No, Not Now" — solicited or not.

"It's got a [beats-per-minute rate] of 174," bassist Dustin Hawthorne threw out during a recent interview, surprising even his bandmates.

"That's, like, insanely fast," singer and pianist Steve Bays commented.

"I think the Sex Pistols hovered at about 150," Hawthorne added.

Not that the Victoria, British Columbia, rock band wants you to care. They just want you to boogie. "It's kind of like one of our dancier songs," Bays said of the tune, which follows the breakthrough "Bandages."

25TH HOUR I finally saw Spike Lee's "25th Hour" this weekend, and rewound the tape with a newfound respect for a director who generally has never clicked with me. As SFGate's Mike LaSalle notes in his recap of the best films of the first half of 2003, this is Lee's "smartest and most heartfelt film." Even the stretched out ending with its overdrawn homage to America as the land of new identity manages to feel sincere.

"25th Hour": Spike Lee's smartest and most heartfelt film, released in New York and Los Angeles in December, was technically a 2002 release. But we didn't see it here until January. Hands down, it's the best film to have been released in the Bay Area in 2003. Lee used the story of a drug dealer's last night of freedom as the occasion for a meditation on New York and America in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, tragedy. He crystallized his historical moment in art, with the right mix of passion and restraint, ending the film on a note of pure poetry. It's a warming thing to know somebody can still make a movie this beautiful.

WESLEY CLARK ON AMERICAN POWER As a nation, we periodically forget that the strength of America is not only vast, but it is multifaceted. Or, as poet Archibald MacLeish wrote, "America is ideas." General Wesley Clark continues to dip his toe in the waters of the 2004 Presidential campaign, and speaks with Newsweek about what's going right -- and what's going wrong -- with America.

A strong America is not strong only because of its military. Our strength comes from a robust, diverse economy and an engaged citizenry, and values, and a structure that other nations admire and emulate. The military is just one component of U.S. power.

EDEN DEVOURED The marshes of Southern Iraq were once a paradise, and some Biblical scholars say they were the site of the Garden of Eden. They are a garden no more, and environmental organizations say that time is running out for those interested in saving what remains of them. The marshes -- and their inhabitants -- were virtually destroyed by Saddam Hussein in the 1990s, and the loss has been felt throughout the region.

A decade ago, the lush marshlands of southern Iraq covered nearly 20,000 square kilometers near the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. They hosted hundreds of species of rare birds, mammals and fish. Some Biblical scholars say the marshes were the site of the Garden of Eden. Years of hostilities, though, have turned most of the marshes into desert. This week experts led by the U.S. Agency for International Development will convene in Iraq to study the problem. The stakes are high. Environmental experts say that if a big rehabilitation effort isn’t begun soon, the marshes may be irretrievably lost. “A huge part of the marsh has been desertified,” says geologist Suzie Alwash, cofounder of Eden Again, an environmental NGO based in Washington, D.C.

The marshlands used to be the largest wetlands in the Middle East. They supplied two thirds of the fish in Iraqi markets and 40 percent of the shrimp caught off the coast of Kuwait. Millions of birds migrating between the rivers of western Siberia and northeast Africa also wintered there.

CRIMINAL DEFENSE The Economist comes out swinging on the issue of military tribunals for suspected al Quaeda and Taliban members, and notes that the system put in place by the United States is as disheartening as the way the British dealt with IRA sympathizers, or (more recently) Israel dealt with the families of suicide bombers. Setting aside balance is no way to pursue justice, and the Bush administration's strong avoidance of the American court system sets a poor example -- both at home, and abroad.

You are taken prisoner in Afghanistan, bound and gagged, flown to the other side of the world and then imprisoned for months in solitary confinement punctuated by interrogations during which you have no legal advice. Finally, you are told what is to be your fate: a trial before a panel of military officers. Your defence lawyer will also be a military officer, and anything you say to him can be recorded. Your trial might be held in secret. You might not be told all the evidence against you. You might be sentenced to death. If you are convicted, you can appeal, but only to yet another panel of military officers. Your ultimate right of appeal is not to a judge but to politicians who have already called everyone in the prison where you are held “killers” and the “worst of the worst”. Even if you are acquitted, or if your appeal against conviction succeeds, you might not go free. Instead you could be returned to your cell and held indefinitely as an “enemy combatant”.

ECONOMIC CLAMPDOWN The Bush administration has made an art of hiding information -- witness Dick Cheney's continued legal battle to hide minutes from policy setting meetings with oil executives, or the stonewalling encountered by the 9-11 Commission, or the current running debate over the causus belli in Iraq. Or, as Slate's Russ Baker has done, look at the economy, stupid. In the past two years, the administration has muzzled a Bureau of Labor Statistic report that painted a less than happy picture; buried a Social Securiity study commissioned by its own Treasury Secretary; and squelched top economic advisor Larry Lindsey's comments that the war in Iraq could top $200 million. Government web sites have been expunged of economic data. It used to be that purges involved prisons and work camps.

THE BLIND LEADING Turi Munthe ends his week of posting at Slate with a visit to a leading Sheikh in Baghdad. His brief conversation is a startling reminder that there is no shortage of people in the world whose faith in their beliefs (religious or otherwise) allow them to dismiss the reality that surrounds them. And a compelling explanation for why Iraq's secular (and non-Shiite) population worries about its future.

A deaf and dumb man swinging a Kalashnikov takes me to meet Sheikh Abd al-Jabbar al-Qaissy, the Imam's No. 2. It's nearing afternoon prayer time, and he's waking from his nap. He must be over 70. He is very toothless, very turbaned, and very friendly. And not very clever. Every Islamic party in Iraq has been bending over backward to present themselves as the democratic face of Islam. Abd al-Jabbar knows to be wary of inquiries but doesn't know how. The biggest religious party in Iraq is Shiite and led by Muhammad Baqer al-Hakim. Would Abd al-Jabbar welcome a Shiite al-Hakim as president? "I've never heard of him," he claims. What does he think of the Iranian governmental model? "I haven't been there." And Saudi Arabia? "Saudi Arabia is the land of Islam; I have been on the Hajj to Mecca four times." But he does tell me that Iraq has never been worse off; that she needs Islam, not politics; that only Islam can govern her; that Iraq will only find peace in God. "We have had 35 years of war here because Iraq abandoned God." How was life for him under Saddam? "Fine, I stayed away from politics." Has he heard of mass graves? "Not until the U.S. began talking about them." Doesn't he think a man in his position should know about such things? "No, I am a man of God."

BASRA CALLING There's a new weblog being posted from Basra, Iraq, by a woman calling herself Ishtar. If you are fortunate (or crazy enough) to have Arabic script loaded onto your computer, you can read her in Arabic -- otherwise, Salam Pax has graciously translated her posts (the translations are just below the Arabic portions). Another glimpse into the struggles and perspectives of the people of Iraq.