What U.S. newspapers are saying

New York Times

As it is required to do under international treaty, the Bush administration has sent to the United Nations a report on global warming that is much more pessimistic than its earlier calculations about the environmental damage that unchecked warming could cause. A White House spokesman, Scott McClellan, said the report is reason "to move forward on the president's strategies for addressing the challenge of climate change." There is only one thing wrong with this picture. President Bush has no serious strategies for climate change.

Indeed, Mr. Bush has essentially withdrawn from the field. He rejected the Kyoto accord on climate change and repudiated a campaign pledge to seek firm limits on carbon dioxide, the main contributor to the warming of the earth's atmosphere. He then proposed a voluntary scheme. It appears from the U.N. report to consist largely of finding ways to adapt to warming instead of preventing it. Congress has done no better.

The only encouraging news is on the state level. Massachusetts and New Hampshire have approved bills aimed at cutting power plant emissions of carbon dioxide. In New York, a commission appointed by Gov. George Pataki will shortly give him a set of aggressive recommendations to help the state reduce its emissions of greenhouse gases.

Encouraging as the state actions are, global warming requires a national response. There is one last chance to get the ball rolling in Congress this term and to send a positive signal to other countries. The Senate Environment and Public Works Committee will soon begin writing a comprehensive air pollution bill. ...

The Senate may be as far as any bill goes -- the House has not been hospitable to imaginative thinking on energy and the environment. But it's important to get a good plan on the table before the fall elections, and to start moving the country along the right path. The choices could not be clearer. One is to continue to rely on older technologies that condemn us to a future of polluted cities and further warming. The other is to redesign our energy system so as to reduce America's dependence on carbon-based fuels and send a signal to the rest of the world that we are finally getting serious about climate change.

Chicago Tribune

The admission of Russia into a close, if incomplete, partnership with NATO has raised an obvious question about the Western alliance. If NATO was founded 53 years ago to contain the Kremlin, what's it good for now, when the West and the Russians have decided (in Winston Churchill's phrase) to jaw-jaw instead of war-war? If old enemies become new friends, who needs old friends? In an era when the United States can act alone militarily, does an alliance have any meaning?

Many of NATO's critics say no. NATO was an alliance for one season, they say, and that season is ended. A military bloc focused on the Soviet Union lost its raison d'etre in 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed. In an undivided Europe, an alliance formed to defend the Western half of Europe is pointless. Europe and the United States still can cooperate, they say, but NATO is all but dead and should be replaced by some looser, all-European security system, devoted to political cooperation but stripped of a military role that is no longer needed.

This argument misses the point. NATO is as necessary now as it was in 1949, when it was founded, and performs a service that no new organization could. ...

The Americans, Canadians and West Europeans are each other's closest allies, but there is only one multinational treaty that embodies this alliance. NATO is the sole institutional bridge across the Atlantic, the tangible expression of a special kinship.

Therefore, when the North Americans and the Europeans want to talk, NATO is where they do it. ...

Bush administration officials have been quoted as calling NATO a "myth." This isn't true. The end of communism did not end the mutual problems that the allies can solve together. Some are military. Most aren't. But NATO, as much now as ever, has become the place where these problems get solved and where the deep ties between America and Europe are nurtured day by day.

Los Angeles Times

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization has a fine history: It deterred a Soviet attack on Western Europe for half a century. It has separated warring armies and maintained the peace. More lately, one war fought, one war won. Now, NATO is changing so fast that the question is not what it will do but what it is.

At its inception, NATO had 12 members. Last week there were 19, plus a new junior partner, Russia.

Though planned for years, the partnership with Russia still turns NATO upside down. NATO's reason for being was collective security, and that meant readiness to confront one enemy, the Soviet Union, using nuclear weapons if necessary. Now NATO has accepted former communist states such as Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic and is about to admit up to seven more countries, including former Soviet republics such as Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia. That expansion raises the likelihood of the alliance becoming more political than military. That could leave Washington without a partner to rely on in the event of threats to transatlantic security.

En route to the summit where Russia's partnership with NATO was formalized, President Bush told the German Bundestag that the creation of the NATO-Russia Council provided an opportunity to build "common security against common threats." These days that means terrorism. In that fight, using more NATO forces earlier in Afghanistan would have done a better job of disrupting the flight of Taliban and al Qaeda fighters into Pakistan.

NATO also can play a major role in the world peacekeeping business -- if that is clarified as its job. Bush, in Germany, stated that NATO's core mission was unchanged. Unfortunately, that core role has not been satisfactorily redefined for a new membership since the days when NATO tanks stood guard at West Germany's Fulda Gap, waiting for Soviet troops to mass for an attack.

Omaha World-Herald

Nuclear terrorism against the United States could take several forms, all calamitous: A detonation using a stolen warhead or bootlegged nuclear bomb. An attack on a U.S. nuclear power plant. Or a "dirty bomb," meaning a conventional explosion that would scatter radioactive material over a large area.

The chances for each of those scenarios vary considerably, however. A recent New York Times Magazine article provided information useful in weighing the probabilities and also in setting priorities for prevention.

If terrorists do attempt a nuclear attack, experts say, the most likely weapon would be a dirty bomb. Such a device would be far easier to make than a nuclear bomb and would use non-weapons-grade radioactive material found in hospitals, research laboratories or nuclear plants around the world.

How to counter such a threat? One fundamental defense is to attack the al Qaeda network directly to keep it off-balance. Another is stepped-up use of radiation-detection devices that might catch dirty-bomb materials in transit (as in large shipping containers, for instance, arriving at U.S. ports).

The least likely threat seems to be the theft and use of strategic nuclear warheads. Such devices are generally well protected both here and in Russia. Detonating them is very difficult without access to highly complex safety codes.

More problematic are the thousands of short-range and battlefield nuclear weapons, which have less daunting safety protections and aren't as closely guarded as strategic warheads. Intensified U.S.-Russian cooperation is by all means needed on this score. ...

There are no guarantees of safety. But reasonable measures for reducing the odds of a nuclear attack by terrorists do lie within the nation's grasp.

Implementing these protections should be among America's highest priorities.

Washington Post

It will be 13 years tomorrow since China's Communist rulers squelched a movement toward freedom and democracy by sending tanks and troops to Tiananmen Square. No doubt the date will resonate with Xu Wenli, and not just because he happens to be serving a 13-year term in the Chinese gulag. Mr. Xu is one of China's bravest, most eloquent and also most measured advocates of democracy. The sad fact that he is behind bars, despite being gravely ill from hepatitis contracted in prison, gives a pretty fair reading of the morality and political legitimacy of the men who are running his country. ...

By some measures, China has come a long way since 1989. Its economy has grown rapidly, millions of people have been lifted out of poverty, the World Trade Organization has embraced it as a member. But the Communist Party's effort to create a market economy inside a repressive one-party state also has led to severe strains: rampant lawlessness in much of the countryside, corruption, and violent labor protests against unemployment and abusive working conditions.

The people who tried, unsuccessfully so far, to push China toward democracy have argued that the transition to free enterprise can work only if accompanied by official accountability and the opportunity for free expression. Mr. Xu is a patriot who is willing to stake everything on his belief in freedom. He served 12 years in prison, was released in 1993 and then, knowing the dangers, nevertheless resumed his peaceful advocacy for democratic change. He was 55 in December 1998 when he was sentenced again. In the struggle for the values that matter most, Mr. Xu and his compatriots, not their captors, should be recognized as America's true partners.

Washington Times

In a speech to graduating cadets at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y., on Saturday, President Bush forcefully emphasized the need for America to take "pre-emptive" military action against countries or organizations which threaten the United States. Mr. Bush told the 1,000 members of the class of 2002 that the U.S. "must take its battle to the enemy, disrupt its plans and confront the worst threats before they emerge." The president declared that "unbalanced dictators," apparently a reference to Iraqi ruler Saddam Hussein, must be prevented from acquiring more weapons of mass destruction or providing them to terrorist groups.

The president's clear signal to the enemies of freedom -- be they terrorist groups like Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda or Hezbollah or states that support them, like Iran, Iraq, Syria and North Korea -- that the United States will not sit passively while awaiting future attacks is especially welcome because lately the war on terrorism had seemed to lose momentum. "The war on terror cannot be won on the defensive. We must take the battle to the enemy, disrupt its plans and confront the worst threats before they emerge," Mr. Bush declared. "If we wait for threats to materialize, we will have waited too long." ...

One day before Mr. Bush's West Point speech, Bill Gertz of The Washington Times reported that the terrorist threat to the United States has taken a deadly new form: The U.S. government has alerted airlines and law enforcement agencies that Islamic terrorists have smuggled shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles into the United States which could be used to bring down an airliner. The alerts follow the discovery of an empty SA-7 launcher near a desert base used by U.S. air force jets in Saudi Arabia. Clearly, America's new war on terrorism has only just begun. The president's speech at West Point suggests that we will soon see something more than more rhetoric.

(Compiled by United Press International)