Tuesday, February 12, 2008
DILI (Reuters) - Australian troops began arriving in East Timor on Tuesday to help enforce a state of emergency after the tiny nation's president was critically wounded in a double assassination attempt and flown to Darwin for treatment.
An Australian warship also arrived off the Dili coast on Tuesday to support the first of 200 fast reaction troops sent to reinforce international security forces as doctors said President Jose Ramos-Horta would remain on life support until next week.
The United Nations said 11 people had been questioned over Monday's attack, in which a rebel soldier leader was also killed, and that international security forces had responded swiftly.
"Investigations will be extensive and ongoing but we are expecting to give the first progress report to the prosecutor-general this afternoon or tomorrow morning," Finn Reske-Nielsen, acting U.N. mission chief, told a news conference.
In the Australian city of Darwin, where Ramos-Horta was airlifted with gunshot wounds in the chest, back and stomach, doctors said they planned more surgery.
"His condition remains extremely serious, but, by the same token, stable," Royal Darwin Hospital general manager Len Notaras told reporters, adding the President would need more surgery in the next 24-36 hours.
"He will be in an induced coma until at least Thursday, intensive care until Sunday or Monday of next week," he said.
Two planes, carrying a total of 120 Australian soldiers and equipment, landed late on Tuesday afternoon.
In the capital Dili, East Timor's interim president Vicente Guterres declared a state of emergency and appealed for calm, after apparently coordinated attacks against the president and prime minister threw the young nation into a fresh crisis.
Around 1,600 U.N. police, backed by about 1,000 Australian soldiers, were patrolling Dili and other cities amid fears of fresh violence by rebel soldiers, whose leader Alfredo Reinado was killed in the surprise early morning assault.
"The government of East Timor is in firm control," said Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, ahead of a visit to the troubled nation later this week.
INTERNATIONAL FORCES CRITICISED
It's come down to this: Who can beat John McCain?
Winning that argument could allow Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton to reach beyond their respective demographic comfort zones. Only if one of them can build a clear majority will the party be saved from a descent into the mire of rules fights and backroom dealing. It will also take leadership to protect the Democratic village from chaos and recriminations.
For the moment, the world is moving Obama's way: He swept four states last weekend and is favored in today's primaries in the District of Columbia, Maryland and Virginia. Polling suggests that Obama can draw independents whom Clinton can't reach and can mobilize new and younger voters in a way Clinton never will.
Obama drove that perception by offering a brief against the politics of Clintonism: She "starts off with 47 percent of the country against her," he said in Alexandria on Sunday. Her husband presided over the Democrats' loss of Congress. It's hard to imagine that she can "break out of the politics of the past 15 years." The alternative: the antidepressant right there on the shelf in front of them. Its brand is Obama.
Yet there is another world in Democratic politics, a practical, mostly middle-aged and middle-class world that is immune to fervor and electricity. It is made up of people with long memories who are skeptical of fads and like their candidates tough, detail-oriented and -- to use a word Obama regularly mocks -- seasoned.
These are the Hillary people, and they gathered in Manassas last weekend in significant numbers at the Grace E. Metz Middle School, cozy schools being a preferred venue for a Clinton campaign aware that mammoth rallies are normally beyond its reach.
She does not lack for loyalists. Paulie Abeles of Derwood, Md., held aloft a hand-printed sign that did not mince words: "Talk Is Cheap. Mistakes Are Expensive."
Abeles explained that people who are being "swept along by the eloquence of Barack Obama's speeches" forget that at one time, George W. Bush was seen as "charming" and "inspirational." And electability was on her mind. If President Bush raised the terror alert level four days before the election ("I happen to be very cynical," she averred), the Democrats would want their most experienced candidate confronting McCain.
Clinton spoke directly to her audience's skepticism of good talkers -- ironic in light of her husband's oratorical gifts. "You're so specific," she quoted people as telling her. "Why don't you just come and . . . give us one of those great rhetorical flourishes and get everybody all whooped up?" The crowd actually whooped at that. But eloquence, she said, is not the point, since the election "is not about me, it's about us."
If Obama is passion, Clinton is bread and butter. If she needs more flourishes, he could afford to traffic a bit more in the staples.
Her speech is a well-crafted recitation of how government could ease the lives of those without health insurance, students burdened by college loans, homeowners facing foreclosure, veterans who have been abandoned, the working poor who deserve a hand up.
As she speaks, Doug Hattaway, one of her aides, notes that her practical litany is precisely what appeals to working-class and middle-class voters who respond to "tangible issues." They also rebel against the idea that they are not part of the cool, privileged masses for Obama. One of the signs at the Manassas rally defiantly touted "Well Educated High Earners for Hillary." This is a party divided not by ideology but by sensibility. Things have gotten very personal.
And that is why feelings would be so raw if this nomination were settled by something as grubby as a credentials fight over disputed delegates from Florida and Michigan. Two things are true. Delegations from those important states, currently in defiance of party rules, will eventually have to be seated. But if Clinton were to take the nomination because of her "victories" in primaries that all the candidates agreed not to contest, she would be seen by her adversaries as cheating.
The only solution is for the two states to agree to hold, before the process ends in early June, new rounds of voting that look as much like primaries as possible. Doing so would increase the chances that voters, not insiders, would pick the nominee. Democrats would not have to put up with invidious comparisons between their battle and the ugliness of Bush v. Gore. And one of these candidates might then actually be able to win in November.
A breakout, a fair deal or bedlam: Those are the Democrats' options.
