Incursion Aims to Show Residents That U.S. Can Attack at Will

Incursion Aims to Show Residents That U.S. Can Attack at Will
By PATRICK E. TYLER
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/05/international/worldspecial/05CND-MILI.html

KUWAIT, April 5 — An armored force of 60 American tanks and other vehicles wheeled suddenly into the center of Baghdad today, taking the city's defenders by surprise and triggering a rolling firefight along boulevards lined with some people waving, and others shooting.

The demonstration of American force left at least hundreds of Iraqi fighters dead and was intended, United States military officials said, to show the 4.5 million residents of Baghdad that the Army and Marines now encamped at the city's edges could attack at will.

"We just wanted to let them know that we're here," said Maj. Gen. Buford C. Blount III, commander of the Third Infantry.

As such, the goal of the raid appeared more psychological than military as Washington and London debate whether to challenge Saddam Hussein's political grip on Iraq by naming an interim government.

It also seemed possible that coalition commanders decided to respond to Friday's dramatic appearance of Mr. Hussein on the streets of Baghdad amid a cheering crowd of supporters. The adulation for the Iraqi leader, no matter how carefully staged or taped in advance, was beamed out on Iraqi and Arab satellite television as a measure of proof that he had survived all allied attempts to kill or silence him.

A grisly discovery reported by British military officials today of what were said to be the remains of hundreds of people at an abandoned military compound on the outskirts of Zubayr, in southern Iraq, served to remind allied forces and the world of other aspects of Mr. Hussein's rule. The remains were packed in bundles that contained shreds of military uniforms, the British officials said, but it could not be determined how old they were, or how they got there.

Between 600 and 1,500 Iraqi gunmen battled the Americans as they rolled through Baghdad streets today, killing one American tank driver and wounding six other American soldiers. American commanders on the scene estimated that more than 1,000 were killed. Later, officers at Central Command in Doha, Qatar, put the number much higher — 2,000 to 3,000 — and there was no explanation for the variance.

As the incursion was happening, Iraqi officials denied that American forces were in the city. Iraq's information minister, Mohamed Saeed al-Sahhaf claimed further that Iraqi forces had retaken the international airport to the west of the city, where the tanks that rumbled through Baghdad's streets later met the Third Infantry Division's First Brigade.

"The Republican Guard is in full control," Mr. al-Sahhaf said. "We have defeated them, in fact we have crushed them. We have pushed them outside the whole area of the airport."

The Iraqi official insisted that the "whole trend" of the military campaign had changed in Baghdad's favor.

However, the tank battalion, the 64th Armored Regiment of the Third Infantry Division's Second Brigade, returned later to its staging area on the southern perimeter of Baghdad via a different, more secure route that avoided the city center entirely. No hostilities were reported on that journey.

The British soldiers who investigated the Zubayr military base found 200 makeshift coffins bearing seriously decayed corpses, perhaps a year or a number of years old.

Soldiers of the Royal Horse Artillery also found Arabic documents and photographs of men bearing head wounds and showing signs of torture or disfigurement in the warehouse.

"I wouldn't want to speculate, but the bones inside are obviously years old," Capt. Jack Kemp told British reporters at the scene.

Also today, the 101st Airborne staged a rapid deployment to the outskirts of Karbala, which like neighboring Najaf, is the site of one of the holiest shrines in Shia Islam. Najaf has become increasingly pacified by the Army's entry into the city last week that United States military officials have said was welcomed by an edict, or fatwa, from the grand ayatollah there, Ali al-Sistani.

Karbala, however, was bypassed by coalition forces as they first feigned an attack on its defenders, and then dashed around it through the Karbala Gap to reach Baghdad and seize the airport.

"Basically, they are on the ground to go through and secure the highways and supply routes, and also they are looking to squelch any paramilitary threat in the area," Maj. Mike Slocum told reporters traveling with the formation in Karbala.

To the east, at Aziziyah, Marines responded to battlefield intelligence gleaned from an Iraqi special forces prisoner and rushed to a girls' school where the prisoner said groups of Iraqi men had knocked down a wall to hide something in the courtyard and then laid fresh concrete over it in three nights' time.

The intelligence report raised the immediate suspicion that chemical or biological weapons might have been hidden under the concrete, Marine officers said.

"We don't have a clue, but we are going to dig it up and see," said Maj. Gen. James N. Mattis, the Marine commander in charge of the area.

In recent days, American forces in the field have been reported following such leads, which would prove that the Iraqi government possesses weapons of mass destruction that were never declared.

In Baghdad, a statement said to have come from President Hussein claimed that "the enemy's grip" on Iraq "has weakened."

The statement suggested that by setting the military objective at Baghdad, causing supply lines to be strung across broad expanses of desert, was a strategic mistake, and exhorted Iraqis to attack at these weak points.

"You must inflict more wounds on this enemy and fight it and deprive it of the victories it has achieved," he said. "You must rattle their joints and terrify them and speedily defeat them in and around Baghdad."

But coalition commanders said, if anything, Iraqi forces seemed more and more disorganized, making possible today's bold dash into Baghdad.

"American armored combat formations have moved through the heart of Baghdad, defeating the Iraqi troops we have encountered," Navy Capt. Frank Thorp told reporters at the United States Central Command headquarters in Qatar.

"This was a clear statement of the ability of coalition forces to move into Baghdad at times and places of their choosing and to establish their presence really wherever they need to in the city," Maj. Gen. Victor Renuart said at a news conference in Qatar. He declined to say whether any troops had stayed behind, but military officials who were part of the raid indicated that the entire force had exited the city, with the exception of one destroyed, and abandoned, tank.

Although soldiers in the convoy and a cameraman who rode along described harrowing scenes and at least two camera crews recorded the foray, a number of journalists based in the city were unable to find evidence that the column had passed through.

General Renuart described the path by saying the column entered from due south on the main highway that skirts the tight bend in the Tigris River that forms the Karada district of the city. The highway continues toward "what I would call pretty near the center of Baghdad and then turns out to the West," he said.

Though Baghdadis might argue that one has not been to the center of Baghdad unless reaching Liberation Square and the old city along the Tigris in that district, General Renuart nonetheless insisted, "It's about as close to the center as I know how to define."

"This isn't about taking or holding ground," Captain Thorp said. "At this point, that was not an objective to hold any territory in Baghdad. This was an opportunity that the ground force commander saw to move troops through a major area of Baghdad, and jumped on it."

Although the tanks were gone by midafternoon, military officials said United States special operations forces are operating in and around Baghdad, seeking to develop targeting information and political intelligence on the whereabouts of key leaders.

Britain today termed the defeat of the Iraqi army and much of the Republican Guard "comprehensive."

"It is clear that elements of the Republican Guard have suffered a comprehensive defeat with very heavy losses and a number of desertions," a spokesman for Prime Minister Tony Blair said.

Submit a question for Patrick E. Tyler: The Times's bureau chief in Kuwait City will answer a selection of readers' questions every day.

Viewing the War as a Lesson to the World

Viewing the War as a Lesson to the World
By DAVID E. SANGER
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/06/international/worldspecial/06POLI.html

WASHINGTON, April 5 — Shortly after Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld issued a stark warning to Iran and Syria last week, declaring that any "hostile acts" they committed on behalf of Iraq might prompt severe consequences, one of President Bush's closest aides stepped into the Oval Office to warn him that his unpredictable defense secretary had just raised the specter of a broader confrontation.

Mr. Bush smiled a moment at the latest example of Mr. Rumsfeld's brazenness, recalled the aide. Then he said one word — "Good" — and went back to work.

It was a small but telling moment on the sidelines of the war. For a year now, the president and many in his team have privately described the confrontation with Saddam Hussein as something of a demonstration conflict, an experiment in forcible disarmament. It is also the first war conducted under a new national security strategy, which explicitly calls for intervening before a potential enemy can strike.

Mr. Bush's aides insist they have no intention of making Iraq the first of a series of preventive wars. Diplomacy, they argue, can persuade North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons programs. Intensive inspections can flush out a similar nuclear program in Iran. Threats and incentives can prevent Syria from sponsoring terrorism or fueling a guerrilla movement in Iraq.

Yet this week, as images of American forces closing in on Baghdad played on television screens, some of Mr. Bush's top aides insisted they were seeing evidence that leaders in North Korea and Iran, but not Syria, might be getting their point.

"Iraq is not just about Iraq," a senior administration official who played a crucial role in putting the strategy together said in an interview last week. It was "a unique case," the official said. But in Mr. Bush's mind, the official added, "It is of a type."

In fact, some administration officials are talking about the lessons Mr. Bush expects the world to take from this conflict, and they are debating about where he may decide to focus when it is over.

The president seemed to allude to those lessons in his radio address this morning, saying his decision to oust Mr. Hussein was part of his plan to "not sit and wait, leaving enemies free to plot another Sept. 11 — this time, perhaps, with chemical, biological or nuclear terror."

But how to turn that broad principle into policy is already emerging as the next fault line in the administration, as well as in its relationships with the nations it alienated on the way to the Iraq conflict.

Some hawks inside the administration are convinced that Iraq will serve as a cautionary example of what can happen to other states that refuse to abandon their programs to build weapons of mass destruction, an argument that John R. Bolton, the under secretary of state for arms control and international security, has made several times in recent speeches.

The administration's more pragmatic wing fears that the war's lesson will be just the opposite: that the best way to avoid American military action is to build a fearsome arsenal quickly and make the cost of conflict too high for Washington.

Secretary of State Colin L. Powell has been the most vocal in insisting that Iraq is about Iraq and nothing more. "I think it's a bit of an overstatement to say that now this one's pocketed, on to the next place," he said as the war began.

But Mr. Powell was taken aback — not for the first time — by Mr. Rumsfeld's comments about Iran and Syria. A senior aide said Mr. Powell had cautioned the administration against any public talk of a "domino effect," fearing it would further inflame Arab governments and fuel North Korea's considerable insecurities.

"His view is that we've made enough enemies in the past five months, and we don't need to go looking for another fight," one of his senior advisers said.

In fact, only Mr. Rumsfeld seems willing to name potential adversaries these days. But several senior administration officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said they saw signs that some countries were reconsidering their behavior.

Their newest is North Korea, which Gary Samore, the nonproliferation specialist in the Clinton White House, recently called "the dog that hasn't barked."

North Korea's diplomatic broadsides at the United States have been toned down in recent days. No one has seen Kim Jong Il, the country's reclusive leader, in months, and some experts say they believe he may be staying out of sight for fear of his own personal security. So far, at least, the country has not made good on its threat to restart a plutonium reprocessing facility that has the capacity to to produce fuel for a half-dozen nuclear bombs this year. American intelligence agencies had expected him to do so by now.

"He may have simply encountered technical troubles," said one North Korea expert in the administration. "But he may also be looking at CNN and considering the wisdom of his next move. The fact is, We don't know."

Another possible factor, Mr. Bush's aides say, is that China, which is North Korea's main supplier of oil, has finally begun to deliver tough messages to Mr. Kim's government.

Iran may also be newly cautious, the administration argues. After Mr. Rumsfeld issued his warning on March 28 that the United States would not tolerate the entry into Iraq of the Badr Corps — which he said was "trained, equipped and directed by Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard" — the incursion was apparently cut off.

Syria is a very different case. In an interview published this week in a pro-Syrian Lebanese newspaper, Bashar al-Assad, Syria's 36-year old president, who inherited the post from his father three years ago, said the war only proved that Mr. Bush "wanted oil and wanted to redraw the map of the region in accordance with the Israeli interests." He urged Arabs to learn from Lebanon's history of "resistance."

Stephen P. Cohen, the Middle East specialist at Institute for Middle East Peace and Development in New York, said: "The Arabs understand that this war is happening at two levels — on the ground in Iraq, and then an ideological war once the ground war is over. They know how the first one is going to turn out, and they are debating how to wage the second."

Mr. Assad seemed to suggest in his interview that Syria would be a new target for Mr. Bush, because it "is the heart of Arabism."

Mr. Bush's national security advisor, Condoleezza Rice, not surprisingly, describes the agenda very differently. "You don't treat every case with the identical remedy," she said today. Even when the problem appears the same — weapons of mass destruction that could be passed to rogue states or terrorists — "there are lots of ways" to accomplish the president's goals, she said

"In North Korea, we're dealing with the issue in one particular way; with Iran, we're dealing with it in other ways," she added. But she also noted the president's belief that there is "a positive agenda for moving forward that could be catalyzed by Iraq."

Several of the hawks outside the administration who pressed for war with Iraq are already moving on to the next step, and perhaps further than the president is ready to go. R. James Woolsey, the former director of central intelligence, said on Wednesday that Iraq was the opening of a "fourth world war," and that America's enemies included the religious rulers in Iran, states like Syria and Islamic extremist terrorist groups.

The Dia Generation

The Dia Generation
By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/06/magazine/06DIA.html

Next month, a former factory in a small town an hour north of New York will become the first museum dedicated to the greatest generation of American artists. Not Pollock, Rothko and de Kooning. The next generation, the one that came of age during the 1960's and 70's, the one that includes Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, Walter De Maria, Michael Heizer, Robert Smithson, Sol LeWitt, Andy Warhol, Robert Ryman, Agnes Martin, Bruce Nauman and Richard Serra. The history of American art is going to need a little rewriting.

They are men mostly, with big egos and big ideas. They were the first Americans to influence Europeans. The work these artists made changed, or at least questioned, the nature of art: what it looked like, its size, its materials, its attitude toward the places where it was shown, its relation to architecture, light and space and to the land. The artists even questioned whether art needed to be a tangible object. Minimalism, Post-Minimalism, Earth art, video art, Conceptualism -- suddenly art could be nothing more than an idea, a thought on a piece of paper that played in your head. It could be ephemeral or atmospheric, like the experience of a room illuminated by colored fluorescent tubes.

The work found itself at home, as the artists did, in the lofts of abandoned industrial buildings in Lower Manhattan, converted into studios and white-box galleries. But much of the art was too big for a gallery. Robert Smithson's ''Spiral Jetty'' was 6,650 tons of black basalt and earth in the shape of a gigantic coil, 1,500 feet long, projecting into the remote shallows of the Great Salt Lake in Utah.

The artists demanded space in tune with their aesthetic. Now along comes Dia:Beacon, set to open on May 18. Housed in a factory in Beacon, N.Y., that was built in 1929 to print boxes for Nabisco crackers, it will be the biggest museum of contemporary art in the world. With nearly a quarter of a million square feet of exhibition space, it dwarfs Frank Gehry's Guggenheim in Bilbao, Spain: it is reused raw space adapted by artists to suit themselves, with no star architect but huge rooms, some as long as football fields, for paintings and sculptures that have never felt truly at home.

Before he died in 1994, Donald Judd complained that his sculptures were crammed in with other art in most museums and that the objects were denied what he considered their rightful independence and integrity. ''So much money spent on architecture in the name of art, much more than goes to art, is wrong,'' he barked about new museums. ''Even if the architecture were good, but it's bad.'' Dia:Beacon was built to let people see art the way Judd would have wanted.

Conceived by a charismatic German art dealer, Heiner Friedrich, and his wife, Philippa de Menil, in 1974, Dia was not meant to be a traditional museum. The opposite, in fact. For a while, Dia spent millions and millions of dollars financing projects like Walter De Maria's ''Lightning Field,'' for which huge steel poles were planted in a remote stretch of New Mexico. It poured $4 million into ''Dream House,'' by La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela: a building on Harrison Street in Lower Manhattan that housed Zazeela's light projections and where Young's electronic music played 24 hours a day. ''Dream House'' had its own guru in residence, Pandit Pran Nath, the Indian singer and teacher, and a staff that recorded every note of music and word of conversation and photographed and logged every meal eaten there.

Dia bought Fort Russell, a former Army post on 340 acres of scrubland in Marfa, Tex., for Judd to create a private museum for his work and the work of the few chosen artists he admired. The project epitomized the crazy scale and wild ambition of the art of his generation. Marfa, an isolated clutch of adobe and wood-frame houses on streets that peter out into no man's land, languished several drowsy hours from civilization. Its fort was a cavalry post for patrolling the Mexican border and later a camp for German prisoners in World War II, before it was decommissioned. Judd converted abandoned barracks into exhibition spaces.

At the center of the fort was Judd's crowning achievement and Minimalism's great shrine: 100 milled-aluminum boxes installed in two converted artillery sheds, twin cathedrals with giant Quonset hut roofs. Judd replaced the sheds' garage doors with big windows, letting sun play against the boxes, deflecting any preconceptions that the sculptures might be forbidding or monotonous.

The work exemplified Minimalism's paradoxical nature: Puritanism offset by a sensual embrace of optical surprise and ravishing detail. Time, light, form: Judd forcibly focused viewers' attention on these basics of human experience via simple shapes presented exquisitely, for slow study in rarefied isolation. At a time when museums were becoming malls and art seemed cheapened by commerce and mass reproduction (so felt 60's artists like Judd, inflamed by the antibourgeois politics of the time), Marfa was conceived to restore innate dignity to art and to the experience of looking. ''A shape, a volume, a color, a surface is something itself,'' Judd declared. ''It shouldn't be concealed as part of a fairly different whole.'' While Judd rejected metaphors of bodies for his boxes and other abstract sculptures, the utopian -- which is to say, human -- implications of what he had in mind were obvious.

To lump Judd with Nauman and Serra and Warhol as a ''generation'' is obviously to put together people of different ages and styles, not to mention temperaments, who nevertheless all first made their marks during the 60's and 70's, when wild experimentation tested the definition and limits of every kind of art. Art has not been the same since.

Andy Warhola, as he was born, made Andy Warhol his masterpiece, forever blurring the line between art and life. Nauman made movies of himself neurotically pacing in circles and helped to open up a whole world of video and performance art. Dan Flavin used colored industrial fluorescent tubes to make Minimal sculptures whose ambience was as much the subject as the abstract arrangement of the lights, establishing the basics of installation art before anybody ever thought to call it that.

Partly inspired by Flavin, LeWitt decided to start ''from Square 1,'' he said, with sculptures in the shapes of squares and cubes. Linguistic theorists at the time talked about words and mental concepts as signs and signifiers. LeWitt moved between his syntax of geometric sculptures and mental propositions for images: concepts he wrote on paper that could be realized by him or someone else or not at all. Physical things are perishable. Ideas need not be. LeWitt wasn't interested in precious one-of-a-kind baubles. ''Art has been veritably invaded by life, if life means flux, change, chance, time, unpredictability,'' the sculptor Scott Burton observed around then. ''Sometimes the difference between the two is sheer consciousness, the awareness that what seemed to be a stain on the wall is in fact a work of art.'' LeWitt's conceptual work pushed the point to an extreme: his art was the equivalent of the stain painted over, leaving only consciousness.

Meanwhile, painters like Martin, Ryman and Frank Stella were pushing at their own limits, making works that were just stripes or white on white. They were partly inspired by Pollock, but they rejected the 50's cult of expressionism that he exemplified. Pollock had revolutionized abstract art by pouring and dripping, but in the 60's his impact was as much on sculptors as it was on painters. Serra, tossing hot lead, echoed Pollock's physical performance and liquid vocabulary, moving sculpture off the pedestal and onto the floor.

Out west, Heizer, De Maria and Smithson were simultaneously moving art into the great outdoors. Heizer drove his motorcycle across a dry lake bed in the Nevada desert, making immense drawings with his tire tracks; then he made ''Double Negative,'' a 1,500-foot-long, 50-foot-deep, 30-foot-wide gash cut onto facing slopes of an obscure mesa in Nevada, a project that required blasting 240,000 tons of rock.

Visiting Chichen Itza, the Mayan city, he devised ''City'' next: a suite of giant, variously shaped abstract sculptures over an area that covered more than a mile end to end -- modern art turned into monumental abstract architecture, with ancient ruins as the model. Heizer imagined ''complexes,'' immense mastabas, some a quarter of a mile long, with 70-foot slabs weighing thousands of pounds. He acquired several square miles of remote property, surrounded by public land, two hours into the Nevada desert from the nearest paved road, and he lived for years in a trailer, locked in for half the winter and once going for months seeing only a couple of sheep trailers and a passing pickup truck. Art didn't get much more extreme than that.

Heiner Friedrich, who was born in Germany in 1938, liked to describe how seeing the destruction during the Nazi years inspired him to want to create things that would last forever. One recent morning, at the Mercer Hotel in SoHo, he told me that ''living in the countryside after the war in purest relation to nature, in great peace, made a huge impression on me -- seeing the manifestation of the divine.'' Bespectacled, dressed in a black suit and black shirt, a large, sturdy man with a lined face, Friedrich today looks more forbidding than he is. He is a dreamer, prone to verbal flights of near-spiritual reverie.

A son of the founder of Alzmetall, a manufacturer of industrial equipment, his life was changed by visiting Matisse's chapel in Vence, France, and on trips to Greece and Italy, ''where I saw art and architecture, each in its own place.'' Giotto's Arena Chapel in Padua ''became for me the true insight for the unfolding and development of Dia.'' The chapel was the work of a single artist: a singular site, complex, revolutionary, preserved in perpetuity, a pilgrimage destination both cultural and spiritual.

Friedrich started a gallery in Munich in 1963 and then opened a second one in Cologne, representing artists like Beuys, Sigmar Polke, Gerhard Richter, Judd, Heizer, Cy Twombly, De Maria and Warhol. But Friedrich grew depressed by the endless cycle of short exhibitions and sales. At the same time, he noted how artists like Judd, De Maria, Smithson and Heizer were gravitating toward a kind of art that museums and galleries simply couldn't accommodate.

Fed up with struggling to raise public money for big art projects in Germany, Friedrich moved to SoHo in 1971. For a while, his gallery at 141 Wooster Street became a salon where artists like De Maria and Blinky Palermo would hang out. Young and Zazeela staged performances. Judd exhibited sculpture. The gallery commissioned art on a large scale. Soon Friedrich met and fell in love with Philippa de Menil, an heiress to the Schlumberger oil fortune and the child of Dominique and John de Menil, low-profile, high-class art collectors who had commissioned the Rothko Chapel in Houston and whose Menil Collection, a cypress-clapboard-and-glass masterpiece by the architect Renzo Piano, exemplified the family's taste for fabulous, expensive simplicity.

Who knows how much of Dia can be attributed to Friedrich's vision or to the influence of the Menils or to the contribution of Dia's other founder, Helen Winkler, who worked for the Menils and became Dia's link with many artists. Winkler and her husband oversaw the construction of De Maria's ''Lightning Field'' in New Mexico. ''She held things together,'' Friedrich says. ''She was indispensable.'' Much of Dia clearly also came from the artists themselves, like Judd, who knew how and when to capitalize on a golden opportunity.

The general idea as it gradually emerged was pure and beautiful -- that is, if you accepted the premise that it was worth spending millions of dollars on difficult, brainy abstract art few people appreciated at the time. Then again, time itself was a relative concept for Dia. This was one of its distinguishing philosophies. Projects like ''Lightning Field,'' for instance, were expected to last for eons. If you calculated attendance in decades or centuries rather than weeks or months, then a handful of devotees trekking to the New Mexican desert year after year added up to a blockbuster crowd.

Friedrich explained that dia was a Greek word meaning ''through,'' as in conduit. A dozen or so artists, Friedrich's chosen ones, would be freed of all constraints and allowed to pursue work as they envisioned it. Naturally, this fueled deep suspicion and jealousy in the art world, but Friedrich compared what he was doing -- now with his wife's fortune -- to the Medicis. ''Dia didn't tap something new; it tapped something old,'' he said at the time. ''Our values are as powerful as those in the Renaissance.'' For emphasis, he added that Dan Flavin ''is as important as Michelangelo.''

Dia's artists were certainly devising plans that made Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel look like a minor interior-decorating job. In 1977, Friedrich's SoHo gallery became a permanent locale for De Maria's ''The New York Earth Room'': 280,000 pounds of dirt trucked in and spread 22 inches deep across 3,600 square feet. The room had to be regularly hosed and raked and cleared of mushrooms. Employees were assigned to watch silently over it -- no reading was allowed on the job, lest their distraction disrupt the aura of aesthetic contemplation. De Maria's ''Vertical Earth Kilometer'' was completed that same year: a slender 18-ton rod sunk into a 1,000-meter hole drilled in Kassel, Germany, leaving only the tiny circle of one end visible in the ground. The cost: $419,000, and $2,500 a year to maintain.

The first big outdoor project completed in America was De Maria's ''Lightning Field'': 400 stainless-steel poles, 2 inches thick and up to 20 feet tall, installed as a grid in a one-mile-long and one-kilometer-wide stretch of extremely remote New Mexico. Visitors were required to spend 24 hours in a rustic cabin beside the poles, contemplating the way light changed as day passed to night and back again. Dia bought the land near Quemado, N.M., in 1975, and local high-school students helped install the poles. Cost for the project: $1 million.

What was incalculable, as at Marfa, was its artistic value. The work required a journey, a pilgrimage, the sacrifice and effort being part of the philosophy of immersion in the art. There was something manipulative, even prescriptive, about that idea, but also something deeply liberating about the experience. On extremely rare occasions, a bolt of lightning actually struck one of the poles. Otherwise, the art entailed psychic intangibles: taking in the silent, peaceable, solitary passage of time in the high desert and the vastness of space -- and noticing how subtly different the poles looked as the sun moved across the sky, shifting from shiny slivers at sunrise to ghosts at noon, when they're nearly obscured by the high sun and surrounding mountains, then burning like fireworks just before sunset. The work meditated on a man-made forest of industrial materials and perfect geometry playing off against the wilderness and the stars. It celebrated America and the Western landscape, incorporating it, which was something fresh that De Maria's generation brought to art.

By 1979, Dia's staff had expanded from half a dozen to 80, and its annual payroll topped $800,000. Heiner Friedrich and Philippa de Menil were now putting together a vast collection, but their resources were being stretched thinner. They had met Sheikh Muzaffar Ozak, a Sufi master of the Halveti-Jerrahi Order of dervishes, and Dia started pouring money into a Sufi mosque on Mercer Street as well as supporting various Islamic publishing projects. At the same time, Dia was buying real estate for one-man museums. In addition to La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela's ''Dream House'' and Judd's spread at Marfa, it bought a former bank in Winchendon, Mass., for Fred Sandback in 1981 and converted it into a kind of open studio/private museum. Sandback's sculptures entailed thin colored strings attached to walls outlining geometric shapes, like triangles and rectangles. Viewed from certain angles, they created the illusion of solid glass, but from other angles, they disappeared from sight. Dia supported the museum for years until, by more or less mutual consent, the building was sold.

''People would scratch their heads and ask, 'What's going on here?''' Sandback, now white-bearded and ruddy-faced, looking like a monk with a ponytail, told me one recent afternoon. ''I think the skepticism hurt Heiner very much. It implied his motives were not correct. He may have gone overboard. But he wanted nothing more than to give LaMonte what he needed and Don what he needed to proceed unencumbered. Say what you will, I think the motivation was simple.''

Unfortunately, as Dia's costs skyrocketed, Schlumberger plummeted from around $87 a share in 1980 to around $30 in early 1982. Philippa de Menil had to sell off more and more stock for Dia. Plans were initiated to turn over some of the artists' projects, like Turrell's ''Roden Crater,'' to independent foundations, which would now need to find their own source of support.

Artists Dia had supported were apoplectic, especially Judd, congenitally angry anyway. Dia had spent more than $5 million and lavished a monthly stipend of $17,500 on him. Now Judd fumed about Friedrich: ''I distrusted him from the beginning. The only problem is that I didn't distrust him enough.''

Sandback says: ''When someone is so very protective and generous, it becomes the norm, which it isn't. This was a new paradigm for patronage, and I myself am ungodly lucky to have had such support and freedom in my life. It's too bad that some artists became so upset when it stopped. I didn't regard it as my due to have my work purchased. But other artists had reason to scream bloody murder, I suppose, because they were left high and dry in terms of what they really wanted, and had expected, to do. Remember, Don's commitment to Marfa was just as strong and intense as Heiner's was to Dia. That made the conflict inevitable. It's what made both of them exceptional.''

By 1983, Schlumberger stock had fallen further, and Dia had to take out a $3.87 million loan. Dominique de Menil, Philippa's mother and the family matriarch, now stepped in. Philippa's money was put in trust controlled by her brothers. Dozens of employees were fired. Much of the Manhattan real estate that had been acquired for one-man museums was put on the market. Young and Zazeela's ''Dream House'' on Harrison Street was sold.

Dia had spent $40 million amassing 1,000 works, creating or laying the groundwork for some of the most ambitious art in modern history. But now it had no income, and many of these projects were still far from completion.

Dia auctioned off 18 works at Sotheby's: a Twombly went for a record $418,000; a Warhol, for $165,000. The sale raised $1.3 million, but this was $700,000 less than Dia had hoped to raise. A low point for Friedrich was when Dia sold two of its three Barnett Newmans. ''That was crushing,'' he told me. ''I had talked about a Newman museum with Newman.'' Judd, threatening a lawsuit, won custody of his art (and another $2 million) in an out-of-court settlement.

''It was not run the way money people normally treat money'' is how Friedrich responds to critics who say he was irresponsible with Dia. Dominique, his mother-in-law, was one. She forced him to resign. A blue-blood board replaced him. Ashton Hawkins, longtime counsel to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, became chairman. Lois de Menil, Philippa's sister-in-law, became vice chairman. Stephen Breyer, the future Supreme Court associate justice, joined the board.

The foundation stopped collecting art. Dia's grand experiment seemed officially over -- like the era that produced it.

Charles Wright, a lawyer from Seattle, son of an art collector, was hired as the new director. Wright admired artists like Judd and De Maria and became increasingly enamored of Friedrich's ideas, but the new board had its own plans. By the end of 1987, real estate and art sales had raised $17 million, and Dia was pointed in a new direction. Dia donated more than 150 Warhols to help establish the Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. It gave six Twomblys to Dominique de Menil's Cy Twombly Gallery. Friedrich had said Dia was a conduit. Now Dia's collection became the conduit for one-man museums that other people ran.

Dia did keep a warehouse on West 22nd Street in Manhattan, with 38,000 square feet that was converted into spare, white exhibition space. In October 1987, it opened with a show of Joseph Beuys, Blinky Palermo and Imi Knoebel. Dia now would present changing exhibitions -- the opposite of what Friedrich had conceived Dia to do -- but at least the exhibitions would be kept on view for up to a year or more, unlike shows at other museums, which were stuck in the entertainment cycle of rapid change that Friedrich despised.

Meanwhile, the climate of the art world was changing. First the glamour of the 80's, with its marquee stars like Schnabel and Salle, made the asceticism of artists like Judd and De Maria seem fusty. After the art-market boom went bust by the early 90's, Dia's traditional stress on solitary geniuses, great men removed from everyday circulation and freed to pursue big dreams, seemed equally out of sync in a cultural atmosphere that prized egalitarianism and social engagement. Wright, now 48, keeping up with the times then and wanting to endorse the new spirit, explained that ''people of my generation are looking for ways that the artist can come back down and plug directly into the social context . . . to make art more a part of a whole way of life and less of a removed, ivory-tower activity.'' He bemoaned the ''cult of the individualism of the artist,'' and with Gary Garrels, then Lynne Cooke, Dia's curators, he programmed heavyweight symposiums and exhibitions by politically conscious artists like Jenny Holzer, Tim Rollins, Robert Gober and Group Material. Dia established itself as a serious and chic gallery, although attendance was dismal.

People looking back on Friedrich's days now talked about what had gone wrong. But plenty had gone right. Dia still had ''Lightning Field,'' ''Broken Kilometer,'' ''Earth Room'' and a collection in storage deep in certain artists -- dozens of sculptures by John Chamberlain, the 102 ''Shadow'' paintings by Warhol and many works by Flavin, Beuys, Palermo and Twombly. ''The basic intent remained intact,'' Friedrich says. The original Dia had simply gone into hibernation.

What revived it -- and what led to the creation of Dia:Beacon -- was another bloody board shakeup. Having saved Dia from collapse, trustees seemed to have little energy left to raise more money, and Dia was still being kept afloat by selling property and art, which was self-cannibalism. After a decade as director, Wright resigned in June 1994, but stayed on the board to help pick Michael Govan as his successor and to support a new agenda.

Govan, 39, is a dark, lanky, quietly ebullient man disposed to cowboy boots and black shirts. In keeping with Dia's artists and founder, he is a kind of megalomaniac, despite his aw-shucks manner. He came from the Guggenheim Museum, where he had been the smiling, calm, long-suffering front man who had to explain the museum's slippery finances and unconventional strategies. He first met Thomas Krens, the Guggenheim's notoriously audacious director, at Williams College, where Krens was director of the Williams College Museum of Art when Govan was an undergraduate. The two shared ambition and a passion for 60's and 70's art; after he graduated in 1985, Govan became acting head of exhibitions at Williams. Along with Krens and another Krens protege, Joseph Thompson, Govan helped to dream up the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, Mass MoCA, a gigantic museum in a complex of abandoned factory buildings in the depressed town of North Adams.

Then Krens left to take over the Guggenheim, and Govan took off to become a conceptual artist -- studying in California with 60's and 70's art icons like Allan Kaprow, David and Eleanor Antin and Helen and Newton Harrison. The experience was ''formative,'' he says. Even so, when Krens called, Govan moved to New York. He was 25.

He seemed like a baby technocrat, only more easygoing and personable than his boss. He would look pained while defending the museum for cutting staff or closing the library, but he also spoke Krens's business-school jargon.

Sometimes he, not Krens, seemed actually to be running the place. Besides helping to get Bilbao off the ground, Govan organized exhibitions, including a Dan Flavin show, and negotiated the purchase of Count Giuseppe Panza di Biumo's collection of Minimal and Post-Minimal art (a collection Friedrich helped to put together years before). The Panza purchase, which caused a public firestorm because the Guggenheim sold valuable paintings to make it, was the sort of risky venture and large-scale commitment to the art of the 60's and 70's that, in retrospect, made Govan a logical choice to take over Dia.

Despite the seeming symbiosis, in retrospect Govan had big differences with Krens that weren't apparent. Both were deal makers, but Govan's interests were more in art and artists than in fancy new architecture. He now speaks respectfully of his former mentor, who was hurt when he quit for Dia. ''It was thrilling at the Guggenheim,'' Govan told me when I met with him recently at Beacon. Krens, he said, had lately arrived unannounced on his motorcycle, with the actor Jeremy Irons. Govan laughed. ''On a day-to-day level,'' he added about his time at the Guggenheim, ''nothing could possibly be as exciting as working for Tom.''

When he was appointed as Dia's director, Govan made pilgrimages to Marfa and to Arizona to see Turrell's crater. Lynne Cooke, Dia's curator, introduced him to Michael Heizer, and he visited ''City.'' He reached out to Friedrich. He became the good son to several difficult fathers, like Heizer and De Maria, patiently giving them the sort of attention no one else did for years. Dia's board, lately expanded, now included Mimi Haas, heir to the Levi's jeans fortune; Ann Tenenbaum, whose husband is the venture capitalist Thomas Lee; Fred Henry, whose money came from publishing; and Anne Lannan. Her husband, Patrick, ran a $150 million foundation then supporting cutting-edge art.

Govan undertook a $12 million fund-raising campaign, which included a matching grant from the Mellon Foundation, $1 million if Dia could raise $5 million, a feat not even Mellon seemed to think Dia could pull off at the time. A rift opened on the board. To raise money, some trustees wanted to sell more property. They proposed unloading the building housing ''Broken Kilometer.'' Govan threatened to quit. Wright, Haas, Henry and Tenenbaum supported him. They called for restructuring the board. Hawkins resigned. Others followed.

The brouhaha dragged on for months as disgruntled former Dia trustees now lashed out in the media. They accused Govan's supporters of being social climbers, a curious accusation considering how marginal Dia remained in social spheres, notwithstanding that its annual gala had become fashionable. Meanwhile, Dominique de Menil, Friedrich's adversary in the first coup, joined the board. Wright became chairman. And, significantly, Leonard Riggio, chairman of Barnes & Noble, became a trustee.

Modern art's big patrons, if not arrivistes, are often newcomers, attracted by its argot and milieu. Dealers, artists and museum directors are happy to take advantage of their largess. Riggio, a rough-edged mass-market businessman, may seem the most unlikely devotee of cerebral and rarefied art -- until you recall that Judd, Serra, Turrell and Heizer are rough-edged in their own rights. In his office on lower Fifth Avenue, Riggio, now Dia's chairman, talked reverently one day about what he calls his ''conversion'': ''When Jay Chiat asked me to join the board, I asked the question everybody asks: 'What is Dia?' He told me it had great parties. My epiphany came when I saw Serra's 'Torqued Ellipses.' I immediately got the idea of the single artist space, seeing art in its own environment. I just got the concept of Judd, Flavin and all the others without even seeing their work yet.''

Riggio bought the Serras for Dia. ''My real intellectual awakening had come in the 60's,'' he told me. ''The big concept then was the integrity of the individual, the potential of every human being. When I built my business, I was thinking about bookstores for average citizens, for the whole of society. Then I went to Marfa and Roden Crater and visited Heizer in Nevada, and I thought these artists recognized the genius of the average American. Judd built his museum in a little Texas town. Turrell was hiring Native Americans from the area. Heizer was working with local people.''

Meanwhile, Patrick Lannan, Dia's other big patron, spent millions to revive projects like ''City,'' which until then seemed as if it might remain the most immense private folly ever conceived. Thanks to the injection of cash, after 30 years Heizer completed the first phase: huge dirt complexes rimming a vast, empty courtyard, in turn rimmed by massive mountains, whose silhouettes alert a visitor to the silhouettes of the massive structures Heizer erected. Then Heizer launched into the rest of ''City.''

Heizer's project, Riggio says, ''represents humankind's highest aspirations, spending a lifetime on a single project, pouring every ounce of energy, his entire soul, whatever money he makes into it. One man building his own equivalent of the pyramids. It's incredibly beautiful. After all, what is art? That's the big question.

''It exists at the intersection between the work and the viewer. Most museums are on an endless acquisitions binge. Their identity is defined by their architecture, and artists have to fit into the galleries. Dia has little institutional identity outside the projects we fund, and no objective except to sustain art on its terms.''

That's the point of Beacon, he adds, which was, in fact, Govan's last alternative for a home for Dia's collection, still slumbering in storage. His first thought was to exhibit the art at Mass MoCA, the place he, Krens and Thompson concocted. Thompson ran it. But putting the collection there meant turning it over to another institution. Govan then looked into a building in Chelsea and also asked New York State about leasing a pier on the Hudson. The building fell through. Dia was told it might take a decade to get approval for the pier.

At that point, Govan recalled piloting a small rented plane up the Hudson in 1998, accompanied by Lynne Cooke and the architect Richard Gluckman. They happened over the derelict Nabisco factory. ''Michael, that's the building you want,'' Gluckman said.

The factory sprawled beside railroad tracks that take passenger trains up from New York City. A long, low building on 31 acres with ''Nabisco'' in faded letters still visible from a passing train as a kind of pentimento just below the roofline, it turned out to require $1 million in environmental cleanup but had good bones. Riggio and Govan brokered a deal with International Paper, the owner, then got the state to contribute $2.7 million. (Beacon is Gov. George Pataki's neighborhood.) The acquisition and renovation took four years.

Now opportunistic developers, New York art dealers and a few public art projects, seeing how Dia became an anchor for cultural development in Chelsea, are already anticipating that people will make the hourlong pilgrimage upriver from the city, and they have been buying property, opening galleries and turning Beacon into an artistic boom town.

Govan gives me a tour of the factory in late winter, when the place is still mostly empty. He starts outside, pointing to where Robert Irwin, the artist, has planted rows of trees -- hawthorns, hornbeams and crab apples, still barren -- in front of the building to soften the mass of the facade. Irwin has also designed a formal garden on the side facing the river, mixing weeping hemlocks, cherry trees and Japanese barberries. Everything is simple and discreet. The focus is on the art.

An entrance to the building, also by Irwin, is a kind of Frank Lloyd Wright touch, akin to the entrance at the Guggenheim in Manhattan: a tight vestibule like a small compression chamber through which the galleries beyond look even more gigantic than they are. Inside, electricians and painters are puttering. Govan notices fluorescent lights overhead and fumbles with a light box before asking one of the workers to help turn them off. ''They're just for emergencies,'' he says. ''The natural light is plenty year round.'' With the overhead lights off, sun, pouring through row upon row of skylights, bathes the space and bounces off the maple floors. Most of the skylights are saw-toothed windows, some 25,000 square feet of them, facing north. Although austere, thanks to the light the building feels serene and comfortable. Riggio had told me: ''When I saw what other people would describe as a wreck of a factory, I was blown away by the ribbons of north light. It's genius. The people who designed it may have wanted to cool the place in summer or light it for the printers, but I've dabbled in industrial psychology. This is a place that makes humans feel better for being there.''

Govan points to empty rooms. Here will go the Agnes Martins, he says, there the Warhols, there the Gerhard Richters, there the Darbovens and the Joseph Beuyses. (It is not just Americans at Beacon.) The choice of artists, as always at Dia, is idiosyncratic. Cooke, Govan's collaborator in installing Beacon, argued passionately for, among others, Louise Bourgeois, whose work will now occupy the attic, and for artists like Darboven, On Kawara and Robert Smithson. Several different-size galleries survey the paintings of Robert Ryman. The Warhol room alone is nearly as large as a floor of Dia's Chelsea gallery. The building is so big that its scale is deceptive. A passage between two huge galleries looks from a distance only slightly larger than a normal doorway, but up close it's clear you could drive a Hummer through it.

Next Govan shows me the room for Kawara's identical gray canvases with a different date printed in block letters on each one. Kawara, like other artists, was invited to design his own space at Beacon, so he had the doorways at either end lowered and moved slightly off center and all the floorboards taken up so that a layer of ceramicized red-oak branches could be put underneath them. Govan tells me this is to ionize and purify the air in the room, ''a traditional Japanese construction technique,'' he says.

Serra's immense ''Torqued Ellipses,'' cottage-size, walk-in steel sculptures weighing hundreds of tons already occupy what used to be the factory's train depot, which opens onto the formal garden. Wedged into a passageway nearby, if a space the size of a gynmasium counts as a passageway, Serra's ''Union of the Torus and Sphere'' resembles the warped steel hull of a beached ship, an ungainly, enigmatic container that cannot be entered, only circumnavigated. The placement in tight quarters stresses the work's mass.

And Heizer's ''North, East, South, West'' is embedded in a 150-foot-by-40-foot concrete floor on the opposite side of the building. The Heizer, a variation on a groundbreaking work he did in 1967 in the Sierra Nevada, consists of vertigo-inducing geometric holes cut into the concrete floor, made of Cor-Ten steel, in the shapes of a double square, a cone, a partial upside-down cone and a wedge. The holes are up to 20 feet deep. A glass rail will cordon off the work and limit visitors to a few at a time. But no barriers immediately surround the holes. To stare down into them requires walking right up to the unprotected edges and leaning over. It is thrilling and deeply alarming -- a little like standing on the edge of the Grand Canyon, I realize, which people also want to do for the view despite the danger, or maybe because of it. This kind of art, typical of Heizer's generation, aspires to a similar condition: call it extreme wonderment. To the inevitable question, How will he prevent people from falling in, Govan responds with a sheepish smile. Maybe bungee cords tethered to the walls, he says. He's not kidding.

Renovation costs for Dia ultimately exceeded $30 million, a hefty sum for a marginal nonprofit art foundation, which next will have to figure out how to pay for renovating its aging Chelsea site. Riggio and Lannan reached deep into their pockets, also coming up with millions for more art to put in Beacon. Counting the cost of Irwin's landscaping, Beacon came to under $100 a square foot. Bilbao topped four times that. Beacon is the anti-Bilbao: cheaper, a renovation to an old industrial building, not brand new; shaped by artists, not an architect; a harbinger, perhaps, of a straitened new century. Frank Gehry's spectacular building, the product of a booming economy, exemplified the go-go 1990's and inspired museums elsewhere desperate to mimic its novelty and civic attraction. Tom Krens's grand plan for the Guggenheim empire has been to open signature buildings around the globe, shuttling the same shows through them: Guggenheim branches functioning as spectacular shells, fancy containers sharing the same products. Another one, designed by Jean Nouvel, is slated for Brazil.

Dia:Beacon, although also grandiose, is the reverse: a permanent display of art in a space consonant with it. You could say the same thing about the affiliated projects around Dia, including ''Roden Crater,'' Smithson's ''Spiral Jetty,'' Heizer's ''City'' and De Maria's ''Lightning Field.''

Touring Beacon with Govan, I notice De Maria in the twin main galleries, the first, cavernous rooms past Irwin's vestibule, each 100 yards long and about 13 yards wide. A virtual recluse for so many years that many people think he is dead, De Maria keeps to himself, as usual, declining to talk, instead arranging large circles and squares of cardboard on the floor, mock-ups of flat, polished stainless-steel sculptures. For weeks, De Maria has apparently been pondering minute changes in the placement of the sculptures in these vast rooms, shifting them an inch or less this way or that, his fixation with detail being the obsessive essence of Minimalism's paradoxically immense ambition.

The only color in the building at this point comes from a couple of John Chamberlain's crushed-car sculptures. But a crew is now starting to unpack crates of Warhol's ''Shadow'' paintings: near-abstract variations on the same obscure image, many in Day-Glo hues. Govan, snowblind after staring at the same white walls for so many months, is elated. ''I've been waiting for years for this,'' he says.

I nod. Even so, the large empty rooms, the light and glass and peace and quiet, make the paintings seem almost like an intrusion. To get acclimated to Beacon is to become attuned to an aesthetic of plainspoken industrial spaces, simple forms and a kind of meditative silence that is the antithesis of the usual museum experience. It is a somewhat peculiar reaction to have to a museum. But then Dia has always been a most peculiar kind of museum.

Michael Kimmelman is the chief art critic of The New York Times.

Prejudice still haunts mixed-race couples

Prejudice still haunts mixed-race couples
By Vanessa Hua Friday, April 4, 2003
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2003/04/04/DD185038.DTL

We were strolling one night toward a French bistro in San Francisco.

"Chink lover," spat out a man who passed by us.

I didn't hear what he said, but my boyfriend, Marc -- now my fiance -- told me. I flushed and turned around, enraged. By then, the man had crossed the street and was on the next block. Still, I yelled after him, screaming that he was the one alone and a loser.

I could have laughed it off, made jokes about how exhausted he must be, insulting the legions of mixed-race couples living in the Bay Area. He was just a drunk in gym shorts.

Instead, I was embarrassed. Although he was rude, I felt as if I had committed the transgression. His insult wasn't even aimed at me but at Marc, who was tainted by his association with an Asian woman.

The remark left us uneasy. Marc said it was unfair that I was angry at him for not defending me. The drunk wasn't worth the effort. I worried that he didn't understand what it meant to be a minority. But if we stayed upset, we would have let the name-caller succeed -- so we made up.

But why did our relationship enflame the man on the street? What did a white man with an Asian woman symbolize?

A few months later, on a trip to Thailand, we made a game of spotting what we dubbed "odd couples": tall, gangly foreigners with tiny Thai women. They held hands, dined together at open-air cafes and snuggled on the beach.

In private, I wavered from anger -- "that's exploitation" -- to moral relativism -- "she's doing what she needs to survive, and he's finding comfort the only way he can."

In public, I spoke loudly in English and wore my Tevas and other backpacking garb in an attempt to appear American and not as someone's paid consort.

It didn't work. Even Thais mistook me for one of them, pitching me deals in their language as we walked by restaurants or the airport.

I didn't want to be lumped together with the prostitutes and the girlfriends who came with a fee.

Maybe that's what bothered me so much about the jerk on the street -- his implication that all Asian women were somehow lower than white men. That only women with desperate financial need and lonely men would cross the color line.

When my fiance asked for my father's blessing before he proposed, Dad warned that my career was important to me. Marc replied that my ambition was part of what he loved about me.

The two of us met in Spanish class and practiced what we learned in Peru, Panama, Mexico and in the Mission District.

Last fall, on a trip to the North Carolina's Outer Banks, a friend predicted that Marc and I would last. I drove and he navigated so well together -- proof, she said, that we were meant to be.

In the Bay Area, every few months, the debate over Asian women/white men flares up on the online site Craigslist. The arguments always tread the same ground: Asian women steal white men from white women, wimpy whites seek subservient Asians, Asians try to social-climb out of their race.

The common explanation: "I know this is true because it happened to me."

What irks me is their belief that personal experience makes someone an authority. Behind their arguments is the assumption that all interracial relationships are the same, and by corollary, so are the people in them.

There is a long history of white male domination in Asia, with its women among the spoils of war. I don't deny that patterns emerge from cumulative experience. But I don't want to be grouped with other people who look like me, just as other individuals do not want to be confused with me.

I can speak only for myself.

E-mail Vanessa Hua at vahua@sfchronicle.com. Jon Carroll is on vacation.

Restaurants On the Fringe, And Thriving

Restaurants On the Fringe, And Thriving
By JANELLE BROWN
http://query.nytimes.com/search/article-printpage.html?res=9C00EFD9143EF931A25750C0A9659C8B63

IT was 9 o'clock on a Friday night at Mamasan's Bistro in the Mission District and the food was running a little late, but no one seemed to mind. Two dozen diners perched on folding chairs, listening to a hip-hop D.J. spin classic De La Soul in the glow of the Christmas lights dangling overhead. The restaurant's proprietor, a willowy 37-year-old woman who would reveal only her first name, Lynette, was in the kitchen placidly doctoring coconut yams on her crowded four-burner stove.

''This place has become my second home,'' said Carlos Castille, an artist, as he sipped a coconut-mango cocktail. ''There's a comfort to it. It's so mellow. I've brought all my friends.''

But securing a seat at Mamasan's is not easy. The restaurant, which also happens to be Lynette's apartment, has no sign, and the only way you will ever find it is if someone tells you where it is (a quiet street, a hidden door, up a dark stairwell to the top apartment).

Even then, you can't just show up: you must have an invitation. To get one you need an introduction from a previous guest. This may seem as if it's a complicated way to get a plate of grilled salmon, but Mamasan's Bistro is not a legal endeavor. Its kitchen lacks the certificates, permits and inspections required by the city of San Francisco. And although the coconut-mango cocktails flowed, Lynette does not have a liquor license.

Mamasan's is not, however, an anomaly. Restaurants of dubious legality, where food is cooked in apartments and backyards, abound across the United States. These underground restaurants range from upscale to gritty, and are born from youthful idealism, ethnic tradition or economic necessity. They lack certification from any government agency and are, strictly speaking, against the law. You dine in them at your own risk. If you can find them.

Over the last four years, Lynette said, more than a thousand customers have come through her doors to eat pungent Chamorran dishes from Guam, where she was raised in the local Chamorro culture. She cooks them with her 61-year-old mother, the Mamasan of the restaurant's name.

''I've worked at restaurants for years, and dealing with the public is a beast,'' Lynette said. ''You don't get to edit who comes into your space, and it becomes a very sterile exchange of goods. I like knowing who is coming, and whether they understand what I'm doing.''

Lynette describes her restaurant as a kind of ''party'' -- albeit one that comes with a bill -- and many underground restaurateurs harbor similar visions. Most chefs, after all, cook because they want to feed people great meals, but in the end, the compliments of satisfied diners are not always compensation for the headaches of running a business.

Club Azteca, in a private home in San Pablo, Calif., is open only on Saturday mornings. Customers sometimes drive hours for its menudo and lamb birria. Azteca, which starts serving at 6 a.m., is about eight months old.

''My parents used to run a restaurant before, but it was never as much fun as this,'' said Erika Carravieri, 30, who helps her parents operate the place. ''Everyone drinks and sings, and at 6 o'clock in the morning! When they were running a restaurant, my mom aged so much in a year.''

Gray hair is exactly what Michael Hebbe and Naomi Pomeroy hoped to avoid when they started Ripe in Portland, Ore. The young couple had cooked at a number of the city's better-known restaurants and knew, they said, how deflating and impersonal the professional cooking experience could be.

''The kitchen is demeaning,'' Mr. Hebbe said. ''You cook for people you don't see. All you hear from guests is, 'This is undercooked' or 'This needs to be redone.' That environment doesn't seem sustainable or healthy, which is why the staff turnover at restaurants is so incredible.''

Ripe, in contrast, was conceived three years ago as a twice-a-month supper club for a select group of guests. Their first night, Mr. Hebbe and Ms. Pomeroy served 22 people in their living-room-turned-dining room. Within months they had an online mailing list in the thousands and a bustling catering business.

Ripe recently moved into a tiny licensed commercial kitchen in the back of a downtown office building and is now, Mr. Hebbe said, ''fairly legal.'' Guests pay $20 (not including wine and dessert) to eat cassoulet or risotto served out of communal bowls.

After only two years of business, Mr. Hebbe says that Ripe is also profitable, which is more than most new restaurants can say. Mr. Hebbe attributes this to Ripe's underground roots. After all, he did not have to make an initial investment in a building or lay out a bundle for licenses, or insurance, or marketing, or staff. Starting a restaurant from scratch, depending on ambition and location, can cost hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars.

''The startup cost of most operations is astronomical,'' Mr. Hebbe said. ''It's impossible to do it by the book and make money in your first three to five years.''

Working underground can also be a way for a would-be restaurateur to test the waters of professional cooking. Joseph DeSalazar, 27, an advertising executive, runs a sporadically open restaurant called Foodies, serving dinner in various rented lofts in New York City. He ventured into his floating concern after spending his weekends volunteering in the kitchens at Café Boulud and 11 Madison Park. ''With Foodies, I didn't feel like I was making a lifelong commitment,'' he said. ''It isn't a fixed location, I don't have any expectations to live up to, and it can change every time.''

Many underground concerns are born of neighborhood necessity. According to Jim Leff, a food critic who founded the Web site Chowhound.com, apartment-based restaurants are common among Brazilian and African families who live in immigrant communities in Queens. One family, he said, might make it its business to prepare cheap takeout meals for an entire apartment building.

''They are filling a niche that isn't filled by restaurants,'' Mr. Leff said, ''doing it in areas where there are no restaurants, doing it at lower price points, or serving traditional dishes that restaurants are afraid to serve because they are too unusual.''

Most underground restaurants are a simple matter of economic necessity. Mr. Leff's favorite, he said, is the domain of a ''genius'' cook who once ran the ''best Venezuelan restaurant in New York.'' After that restaurant closed in a dispute between business partners, the cook could not afford to open her own establishment, so she began cooking out of the basement of her house in Queens.

''I've eaten there on card tables,'' Mr. Leff said. ''She is basically a homeless chef. Housing is not the only thing that's being priced out of the league of real people.''

The downside of running an underground restaurant is, of course, the chance of getting caught by the licensing authorities. Laws vary from state to state; in California, a dining establishment must comply with local zoning restrictions and be inspected by the fire department, the liquor authority and the health department. In addition, a state-certified ''food handler'' must be on staff at all times. New York has comparable requirements.

''It's all about how to avoid making people sick,'' said Jack Breslin, director of the consumer protection program at the San Francisco health department. ''If no one is looking over my shoulder to see how I'm storing, processing and serving my food, the greater the risk of something bad happening.''

And although the health department, at least in San Francisco, probably will not throw underground restaurateurs in jail, it will shut them down if it sniffs them out, which is one reason most advertise only by word of mouth. (Mr. Leff recommends asking taxi drivers.) On Internet sites like Chowhound.com, diners often lament the passing of beloved underground boîtes, like the Blue Tarp Thai restaurant in West Philadelphia, where until this summer, students and professors from the University of Pennsylvania ate green papaya salad at tables in the backyard of the Phanthavong family's row house.

Sunny Phanthavong, 18, said the family knew their restaurant was illegal, ''but thought we were doing something positive for the community.'' After several years in business, they were discovered by an observant police officer. ''He was writing a ticket for someone who was eating outside while parked illegally, and saw through the gate,'' Ms. Phanthavong explained.

In November, after receiving a loan from a community-oriented university program, the family reopened legally as the Vientiane Cafe, but it is not the same, Ms. Phanthavong said. ''I miss the old days of the backyard,'' she said.

Another drawback to the business of running an underground restaurant is the simple wear and tear that occurs when strangers troop through your home. Over the years, Lynette of Mamasan's Bistro has lost, she said, ''pretty much every good CD'' she has owned to light-fingered guests. And one reason Mr. Hebbe in Portland decided to move Ripe into a licensed kitchen was concern about his white carpets. ''Every two weeks our living room got ripped out to make space for tables,'' he said, ''and then we had to tear it down and clean up, and then two weeks later do it again. And we had to wash every single dish by hand.''

He may someday look back on those days of constant furniture rearranging and dish-water hands with fondness. Veva Edelson began her career running an illegal cafe in her home in Arcata, Calif., cooking vegetarian cuisine at bargain-basement prices. Today, although a co-owner of Firefly, a well-reviewed, popular and quite legal restaurant in San Francisco, she is sometimes nostalgic for its predecessor. ''I have dreams that I'm moving Firefly into my mother's living room and that it's now a one-night-a-week restaurant, off the books and cash only, where people just come and enjoy themselves,'' she said. ''There's so much less expectation when something is amateur.''

Up in her crowded apartment, Lynette occasionally thinks about making Mamasan's legitimate. Last year, she looked into a restaurant space, but became discouraged when she realized that it would cost $250,000 to renovate it and bring it up to code. So Mamasan's continues as a part-time restaurant that, while barely taking in enough money to cover the rent, has the virtue of retaining its personal touch.

''I do it for the love, mostly,'' she said. ''I don't exactly want to boast that I have an illegal establishment in my house, but this is how artists survive.''

Iraq's Not Vietnam

[all this light resistence is just too eerie. i hope our forces are not walking right into a trap.]

Iraq's Not Vietnam
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/04/opinion/04KRIS.html

UMM QASR, Iraq — Let's be clear: Iraq will not turn into another Vietnam.

I keep getting doleful e-mail from Vietnam vets drawing the comparison, but it's false. Sure, bloody street fighting in Baghdad may lie ahead, even after a couple of days of breathtaking coalition advances. But the U.S. will easily win this war — expeditiously by historical standards (remember that just four years ago, President Clinton required 78 days of airstrikes to subdue the Serbs and protect Kosovo).

Yet if this isn't Vietnam, neither is it the Afghanistan campaign, where we were hailed as liberators. I was in Afghanistan during that war, and the difference is manifest. Afghans were giddy and jubilant, while Iraqis now are typically sullen and distrustful — and thirsty.

And that's our biggest long-term problem. For all the talk about our forces being short of armored divisions, or our supply lines being stretched so taut that marines were down to one meal a day, those are tactical issues that will be forgotten six months from now. The fundamental and strategic challenge is that so far many ordinary Iraqis regard us, as best I can tell, as conquerors rather than liberators.

Vice President Dick Cheney said on "Meet the Press" on March 16 that "we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators." And Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz said of the Iraqis in a speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars on March 11: "Like the people of France in the 1940's, they view us as their hoped-for liberator. They know that America will not come as a conqueror."

It's too early to know definitively what Iraqis think, and for now, the signals are mixed, with jubilation in Najaf and anger in many other areas. Iraq these days is almost as varied, tribal and polarized a society as the U.S. (a California bumper sticker declares, "Regime change starts at home"). All in all, most Iraqis seem watchful and ambivalent, as reflected in this conversation I had near Safwan with a Shiite farmer in his 40's.

"Money was O.K. under Saddam," he said. "Freedom was not so good. As a people, we were doing O.K. before the invasion. But the war upsets our lives. It brings destruction."

"Do you think the aftermath of the war will bring improvements?" I asked.

He shrugged. "Only God knows."

"So do you think Saddam is a good president or a bad president?"

"Saddam is a good president." Long pause. "Well, maybe not good. So-so."

Fear of Saddam explains some of the reticence (half the Iraqis I've asked have said Saddam will win the war), but you also see nationalism fermenting in Iraqis who proclaim that they will fight U.S. occupation the way Palestinians fight Israeli occupation. The risk is not that America will lose the war, but that it will never fully establish a peace. Already the coalition-controlled south is, particularly after dusk, a Hobbesian world of banditry and anarchy. One Arab expert dourly suggested to me that Iraq could emerge as "another Lebanon."

Yet even if many Iraqis are suspicious now, there's hope of bringing them around. Consider Germany and Japan in 1945, when initial attitudes toward Americans were ferocious. One of my best Japanese friends was born in 1945, and his father wrote from the field to instruct his mother to kill the baby if the American brutes landed in Japan. As for Germany, the first significant German city occupied by the Americans was Aachen, and there the U.S. troops initially could not find a single German sympathetic to the Allies.

Sensitivity and diplomacy managed to turn around public opinion in Japan and Germany, and it's reassuring that the coalition has shown such sensitivity in its march on Baghdad and its patient siege of Basra, which could be a model for the siege of Baghdad. But this administration wages war better than it wages diplomacy, and the Pentagon's apparent plan to make an Iraqi leader out of Ahmad Chalabi, whose support lies along the Potomac rather than the Tigris or Euphrates, is emblematic of the administration's Attila-the-Hun brand of diplomacy, which risks antagonizing the world and alienating the Iraqi people themselves.

So today the paramount question is not whether we will win this war, but whether we can persuade ordinary Iraqis to accept our victory. The Iraqi jury is still out. The danger is not that Iraq will turn into another Vietnam but that after our victory, it could turn into another Lebanon or Gaza.

Both the Starkly New and Routinely Old Shape Daily Life

Both the Starkly New and Routinely Old Shape Daily Life
By JOHN F. BURNS
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/04/international/worldspecial/04BAGH.html

BAGHDAD, Iraq, April 3 - For one motorcycle patrolman here today, it seemed to matter little that columns of American troops were as close as the airport, or that the drivers still on the roads might have reasons to hasten in a city under heavy bombing, or even that the government whose laws he enforces might not be quite so solid as its ceaseless announcements of battlefield triumphs have implied.

Idling on the embankment beside the Tigris on a perfect spring day, the leather-jacketed patrolman spotted a car careering though a red light, and gave chase.

From an 11th-floor balcony of the Palestine Hotel, it was not possible to hear what the driver of the red Mercedes said when he was pulled over halfway down the block, but his gestures conveyed the essence powerfully enough. "Get real," the driver seemed to be saying. "Look at the sky. Look across the river. The old is giving way to the new."

Across the river, in plain view not 1,000 yards away, lay Saddam Hussein's principal palace complex, and within it the burned-out, blackened ruins of the old seats of power. Above, through much of the day, were the vapor trails of American bombers. Some were visible through field glasses as B-52's that arrowed in needle-straight from the northwest.

Untroubled by antiaircraft fire, they curved southward toward the front lines where American troops were pushing through the battered lines of the Republican Guard, or banked to the east to home in on targets in the heart of Baghdad.

Since the war began two weeks ago, the people of Baghdad have been exposed to a reality so stark, so astonishing, so overwhelming, that those who have witnessed it have struggled to find words adequate to express what they have seen.

To have been in Berlin or Dresden or Hamburg in the last months of World War II would surely have been more ghastly, for the sheer numbers of casualties caused by the Allies' bombing.

But American air power, as the 21st century begins, is a terrible swift sword that strikes with a suddenness, a devastation and a precision, in most cases, that moves even agnostics to reach for words associated with the power of gods.

Along with this, life under the bombing has continued to roll forward with an everyday nonchalance that, in its own way, has been as hard to adjust to as the bombing.

On the same street where the driver was pulled over this morning, a man who owns a boutique selling expensive perfumes to the Iraqi elite - a man dependent on the custom of people grown rich and powerful under the nearly 24-year-old rule of Mr. Hussein, and thus a man whose fortunes could be about to tank - was busy washing his open-top Japanese jeep, with red flashes on the side to mark him as a man with zip. Car washed, he took the hose to the plants flanking his boutique's doorway.

If there was any doubt that Iraqis in the neighborhood had some idea of what was going on just beyond the horizon, it disappeared at another sight on the same street, of policemen at a precinct house gathering on the sidewalk, six or seven at a time, to gaze down the Tigris past the point where the muddy green river turns from its southbound course through the city's heart to curve southwest.

For days, those gazing across the river have been measuring the devastation wrought by the bombing on the Republican Palace compound that is enfolded by the river's curve, but today the policemen's arms were pointing past the palace grounds, down the river, to an invisible point 10 or 20 miles away where the American Third Infantry Division was rapidly moving north.

The officer chasing the motorist, the perfume man washing his car, the policemen standing in the street: All were testaments, in the way they ignored today's bombing raids, to how little threatened, individually, most people in Baghdad seem to have felt by the air attacks.

The news this morning that American troops were nearing Saddam International Airport, 10 miles from the city center to the southwest, and had taken control of the highway leading west to Jordan at Abu Ghraib, 15 miles from the capital's heart, caused many families who had sat out the bombing to leave the city, many to the north where there has been no massed American advance, others to the east toward Iran, some even southward toward the American front lines.

The fear driving the exodus, by car, bus and truck, was of street-to-street fighting, revenge killings, a last-minute paroxysm of violence by the enforcers of the terror that has bludgeoned Iraq for three decades. For many Iraqis, this has been the nightmare all along, the least calculable part of the "price" they tell Westerners they have known would come with any American invasion to topple Mr. Hussein.

The implication in these whispered conversations has been that there has been a price, in limited casualties, that many, perhaps even most, Iraqis would be prepared to pay for their freedom, but that equally there was a price that would be too high.

With the battle for Baghdad about to be joined, that price will now be set, and with it, an outsider can imagine, the estimate many Iraqis will ultimately make of the war. But many people in Baghdad seem to have made their judgment about the air campaign already.

After the first few days, life in the city's streets gradually began reviving as confidence grew that there was not going to be widespread carnage, with American bombs and missiles striking wildly at civilians. Today, as for many days past, city-center gathering spots like Liberation Square, site of the lamppost hangings of nine Iraqi Jews condemned for spying in 1969, were busy with fruit and vegetable sellers, and hawkers doing brisk trade in the water canisters and buckets, duct tape and canned food, sacks of flour and candles, that have been the biggest sellers in recent weeks.

That American bombs and missiles have gone astray is beyond challenge. Pentagon officials acknowledged before the war that even with the advances in satellite-guided targeting systems since the Persian Gulf war in 1991, no technology was foolproof, and mistakes would be made. How many there have been in this war will be clearer when the fighting ends, but the impression gained from living the war in the center of Baghdad has been that many of the strikes that have been visible - either from the grandstand view afforded by the Palestine Hotel's balconies, or from the guided bus tours of bomb sites around the city organized by Iraqi Information Ministry officials - have been astonishingly accurate.

On visits to neighborhoods around the city, reporters have seen homes, workshops and sidewalks where airstrikes have killed dozens of civilians and wounded many more. In some cases, the huge size of the craters, the proximity to military installations and witnesses' accounts have lent credibility to the Iraqi claims that the strikes were responsible.

In others, including the marketplace bombing that Iraq said killed 62 people in the Shula district of western Baghdad on Friday, there have been more questions than answers. Often, as in Shula, officials have delayed taking reporters to the site for hours, and have met with evasions the inquiries about the unusually small crater at the marketplace, and the fact that most victims appeared to have died from shrapnel wounds and not from the kind of blast associated with high-energy bombs and missiles.

Iraqi officials asserted today that their toll for civilian casualties from all forms of American arms was 677 killed and 5,062 wounded, of whom about one third have been in Baghdad.

The information minister, Muhammad Said al-Sahhaf, said at a news conference at noon that the civilian toll from the bombing in the capital in the previous 24 hours alone was 27 dead and 193 wounded. But he gave no incident-by-incident breakdown, and, as has often been the case, Western reporters and photographers dependent on Iraqi permission to visit bombing sites were given no opportunity to judge for themselves.

For many journalists who have witnessed it, the most powerful image of the bombing, apart from visits to sites where significant numbers of Iraqis died, has been of target after target that has been struck with the precision of a sniper's bullet.

Over a few days in the last week, at least six inner-city telephone exchanges were destroyed, apparently to disrupt the Iraqi leadership's ability to conduct the war from the safety of underground bunkers and other hideouts. In almost every case, the missiles or bombs used appeared to have struck bulls-eyes in the roofs, plunging downward into the buildings' hearts before exploding with a force that left nothing but dangling wires, shattered concrete and twisted steel. At two exchanges, hours later, a lone beeper continued to wail in the wreckage, like a bell tolling for the departed.

But the striking thing, in these cases, was that even Iraqi officials made no claims of deaths. The neighborhoods where the exchanges and other probable targets are situated were mostly abandoned days ahead of the strikes, as were the targets.

The Information Ministry, struck three times by cruise missiles in as many days, emptied out after the Pentagon gave what turned out to be 48 hours' notice that it would be attacked. Iraqi officials said only one man had been wounded.

One destroyed telephone exchange, in the Salhiya district near the Baghdad railway station, was obliterated, with no visible damage apart from debris falling in the garden to the adjacent compound, 100 feet away, that houses the Saddam Center for Cardiac Surgery.

Putting together the American war in Iraq as told by Americans, and Iraq's war with America as told by Iraqis, has been one of the more bizarre aspects of the conflict as experienced from Baghdad.

To hear the Iraqi ministers tell it, American and British forces have suffered defeat after humiliating defeat.

Today, Mr. Sahhaf, the information minister, bounced into the daily briefings, a short, stocky, burnished man in green uniform and black beret, ever ready to rock back with laughter at the felicity of his Soviet-style phrase-making about the "criminals" and "villains" and "mercenaries" and "lackeys" who have invaded Iraq.

Unfailingly courteous, he could almost be called a jolly fellow, save for the pistol he wears at his hip, a reminder that the government he serves has rarely stinted to resort to more persuasive forms of argumentation when discourse has run its course.

By early this afternoon, American reports from the battlefront suggested that Iraqi defenses around Baghdad, as well as at Basra, Nasiriya, Najaf and Kut, were taking a pounding. But Mr. Sahhaf was as bullish as ever. At Kut, he said, the Americans had been "bitterly defeated." At Hilla, too.

"We're giving them a real lesson today," he burbled. "'Heavy' doesn't accurately describe the level of casualties we have inflicted."

As for reports that American troops were nearing the airport at Baghdad, he chuckled. "The Americans aren't even 100 miles from Baghdad," he said.

At Airport, Bombs Provide the Only Light

At Airport, Bombs Provide the Only Light
By STEVEN LEE MYERS
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/04/international/worldspecial/04INFA.html

SADDAM INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT, Iraq, April 3 — Iraq's international airport was dark tonight and strangely quiet. Baghdad itself lay shrouded in darkness for the first time since the war began, lighted only by the intermittent white flash of American bombs and the red streaks of anti-aircraft fire rising into the night like feeble fireworks.

The first tanks of the Army's Third Infantry Division arrived at 7:30 p.m., punching through the outer wall of the sprawling airport, a strategic prize that American commanders consider a potent symbol of President Saddam Hussein's 24-year rule and now, with its apparent capture, of his looming downfall.

"This is weird," said Col. William F. Grimsley, commander of the division's First Brigade, whose troops led the assault on the airport, about 10 miles from the heart of Baghdad. "It's like spooky weird." His forces had faced only light resistance at dusk and then later virtually no resistance at all.

Only hours after the brigade's officers met beside an armored command post along the eastern shore of the Euphrates River and grimly reviewed intelligence reports warning of fortified strongholds of Iraq's most elite forces, the American division's armored forces cut off Baghdad from the south and southwest, forming the start of a ring that commanders have said will ultimately circle the city.

After crossing the Euphrates at Yasin al-Khudayr, about 25 miles south of Baghdad, during a brief but intense battle on Tuesday, the First Brigade occupied the southern part of this airport and by tonight had begun to press northward as more columns of tanks and armored vehicles rumbled through the breaches in the airport's walls.

Other parts of the airport — including the passenger terminal — were not under the control of American forces tonight, though it was not clear whether they were under Iraqi control either.

Tonight Air Force jets dropped three satellite-guided bombs that reverberated with thunderous claps as they struck barracks and hangars on the airport's northern side, briefly casting an orange glow that quickly subsided.

The airport — rather than Baghdad itself — was the division's ultimate objective when it crossed the border from Kuwait on March 20. The absence, so far, of sustained resistance from Iraq's most vaunted and feared forces — the Republican Guard and Special Republican Guard — baffled soldiers and officers, who had girded themselves for a final battle on the outskirts of Baghdad.

Colonel Grimsley and other officers speculated that the division's soldiers had deserted or had died after more than two weeks of aerial bombardment, including intense strikes on the airport itself in the last 48 hours. Others were at a loss. "I'm flabbergasted," said Capt. Michael J. MacKinnon, a staff officer with the brigade's tactical command post.

In at least one case it created an acute edginess. "They're there," Sgt. Maj. Gary J. Coker, an engineer, said as he arrived tonight, gesturing into the blackness. "They're out there right now."

As if in response, six Iraqi anti-aircraft rockets soared across the airport, exploding to the south, beyond the troops massing here. Just as quickly as they shuddered across the sky, all was silent again.

Today's assault began when the division's Second Brigade swept eastward from the bridgehead at the Euphrates and seized a crucial intersection at Routes 1 and 8, less than 20 miles south of the capital, severing the main north-south road into Baghdad from the south.

Maj. Gen. Buford C. Blount III, the division's commander, said in an interview at midday that the Second Brigade had encountered resistance from Iraqi forces that he estimated to number "several thousand," including parts of the Republican Guard's Medina and Hammarabi divisions.

At least one M1A1 tank was destroyed when a rocket-propelled grenade struck it, but the crew escaped, he said. Two soldiers were killed and four were wounded on the western side of the Euphrates when grenades struck their Humvees early today, he said.

After seizing the bridge on Tuesday, the First Brigade's main armored force, the Third Battalion of the 69th Armored, fought early this morning against at least a company of Republican Guard soldiers around the bridgehead. According to unconfirmed reports, more than 550 Iraqis died, including one believed to be the commander of the Medina Division's 10th Armored Brigade.

As swiftly as it progressed, today's advance from the bridge to Baghdad — fewer than 20 miles — was hardly a victory march.

The land between the Euphrates and Baghdad is a patchwork of lush fields and palm groves, interlaced by canals, levees and berms. The burned carcasses of Iraqi military vehicles — including at least two small tanks — lined the roads. Iraqi troops dug revetments in many of the canal banks, and many died in them.

Along the road into one village, Yusufiya, Iraqi civilians mingled on the roadside. Some waved and cheered, holding leaflets that have been dropped by the millions over Iraq. Children, especially, ran beside the armored columns, collecting rations or sweets that soldiers tossed out.

Most, however, glared — whether in awe or anger, it was hard to say. Not long after the First Brigade's mobile command post passed the village's shops, schools and mosque, someone opened fire on an artillery unit from a grove of trees.

"I expect some of them were wearing uniforms a couple of days ago," Lt. Col. James E. Lackey, the brigade's artillery commander, said of those on the roadside.

By the time American forces reached Route 1, parts of the six-lane highway that approaches the airport were full of fire and smoke. Several Iraqi military vehicles and what appeared to be a cache of mortar or artillery rounds burned as dusk fell.

At least two American scouts were injured by artillery blasts along the highway and had to be evacuated by helicopter. Two other soldiers were gravely injured after their Humvee rolled into a canal. They were also evacuated by helicopter.

By the time the lead forces arrived, the airport had already come under heavy air and artillery attack. More than 500 artillery shells and 90 rockets were fired in the area, Colonel Lackey said. Four 2,000-pound bombs were dropped on the headquarters of the Special Republican Guard on the airport's east side, closest to Baghdad.

As the first tanks rolled into the airport, an officer of the Third Battalion of the 69th Armored, reported seeing a commercial airliner on a taxiway.

"It's not attempting to take off, is it?" Colonel Grimsley radioed in response.

"Negative."

"Do not engage it unless it is attempting to take off," the colonel said.

It stayed where it was in the dark, and nobody fired.

U.S. Troops Seize Parts of Baghdad's Main Airport

U.S. Troops Seize Parts of Baghdad's Main Airport
By PATRICK E. TYLER
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/04/international/worldspecial/04MILI.html

KUWAIT, April 3 — United States armed forces rolled out of the desert to the western outskirts of Baghdad today as government officials in the city of 4.5 million insisted that the American approach was "an illusion."

The thud of artillery marked the arrival near the city of the first foreign army since British forces occupied Iraq in 1941. Allied forces entered Saddam International Airport, 10 miles from the center of the city.

"Coalition forces are on the outskirts of Baghdad," Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, announced at the Pentagon this afternoon.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld cautioned from Washington that while the army of Saddam Hussein — parts of which have been routed or scattered during a 15-day armored thrust across 350 miles of desert — was "weakened," it was "still lethal."

"And it may prove to be more lethal in the final moments before it ends," he said.

His comments appeared to reflect the fact that the exact fate of the best-trained forces thought to be most committed to the defense of Mr. Hussein remained unclear. Some Republican Guard units have been routed, but others may have pulled back into the shelter of city streets, darkened tonight by a blackout. [Map, Page B4.]

Whether allied forces would seek to press into the city immediately or wait for the government to implode under the growing pressure was an open question tonight. General Myers suggested that American forces would proceed with deliberation. He made it clear that the allied forces intended to isolate Mr. Hussein and avoid street-to-street fighting, if possible. "Whatever remnants are left would not be in charge of anything except their own defense," he said.

The decision of American commanders not to throw a third division-size force at Baghdad from the north may now be tested. Plans to open an equally muscular northern front were aborted when Turkey refused passage of the Fourth Infantry Division across its territory. The division was hurriedly unloading its armor today in Kuwait's main port in the hope of getting into the fight.

The tank battalions of the Army's Third Infantry Division were the vanguard of a two-pronged assault on the capital today from the southwest and southeast. The First Marine Division pressed toward Baghdad's suburbs on the southeastern approach along the Tigris River.

In all, there were two, division-size forces moving roughly in tandem to the edge of the capital. American commanders said more than 2,000 Iraqi troops were killed during the advance north. The Marines were still 25 miles from the outskirts tonight, and their columns passed Iraqi civilians streaming out of the city. From his red pickup truck, one Iraqi man shouted, "You have saved us."

In North Carolina, President Bush told marines at Camp Lejeune that "a vise is closing."

"Our destination is Baghdad," the president said, "and we will accept nothing less than complete and final victory."

United States military officials said they believed that they were not responsible for the blackout in Baghdad, which raised the question of whether it was a deliberate tactic of the city's defenders. The blackout occurred shortly after Mr. Hussein's image appeared on state television in what was described as a meeting today, but it was also possible that it was taped in advance.

"We remain cautiously optimistic," Brig. Gen. Vincent K. Brooks told reporters at the headquarters of the United Central Command in Qatar. "There are still options available to the regime, including the use of weapons of mass destruction."

He said Gen. Tommy R. Franks, the regional commander, would decide the next steps on whether to press the assault into the city. "We can't predict entirely what will occur next and how that fighting will unfold," but he said American forces remained alert for "opportunities as they develop."

As televised evidence mounted that American armored units had reached the western outskirts of Baghdad, Iraq's minister of information, Muhammad Said al-Sahhaf scoffed at the reports. "They are not any place," he said. "They are on the move everywhere. They are a snake moving in the desert. They hold no place in Iraq. This is an illusion."

During the day, the ministry organized a trip to the airport for reporters in the capital, and they filmed the empty runways and terminals. Yet within hours, artillery and rocket fire erupted and military officials said an assault on Saddam International Airport had begun.

Iraqi officials said that stray rockets landed on a civilian village on the eastern side of the airport, killing or wounding nearly 100 people, but witnesses said most of the casualties appeared to be military.

A member of the First Marine Division was killed on Wednesday near Kut, officials said, when his rifle discharged into his chest while he was sleeping next to it.

Military officials said today they were investigating the downing of a Navy F/A-18C Hornet fighter on Wednesday amid new reports that it might have been shot down by an American Patriot missile battery. Search operations were still under way for the Navy pilot.

Also under investigation was the crash of a Black Hawk helicopter on Wednesday that killed six troops. Earlier reports had said seven had been killed. Both incidents occurred near Karbala.

American officials said today they were examining a "possible friendly fire incident" involving an F-15E Strike Eagle that struck at ground forces, killing one soldier and wounding several others.

During today's advance by the Third Infantry, two other soldiers were killed and four wounded on the western side of the Euphrates when grenades struck their Humvees, officials said. One M1A1 Abrams tank was destroyed by a rocket-propelled grenade, but the crew escaped.

Total American deaths in two weeks of fighting was 53, with 7 captured and 16 missing. British forces reported 27 dead.
Commandos raided Mr. Hussein's Thathar palace 60 miles northwest of Baghdad before dawn but did not find any members of Mr. Hussein's family or his government hiding there.

Other Special Operations forces holding a dam on the Euphrates near Karbala were fighting a running battle with Iraqis to hold the facility and prevent any attempt to blow the dam, which would flood and cut the Army's main supply route wheeling into position around the capital 50 miles to the north.

"If we have indications that there are regime leaders" hiding in palaces or bunkers, "we'll try to attack them while they're in there to ensure that the people as well as the physical structures are rendered incapable of command and control," General Brooks said.

In the rear, where the coalition was fighting for the allegiance of millions of Iraq's Shiite Muslim majority, one of Iraq's most prominent Shiite clerics, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, issued a fatwa, or edict, instructing Muslims to remain calm and not to interfere with allied forces seeking to defeat irregular troops loyal to Baghdad.

From New York, Sheik Fadhel al-Sahlani, who is the grand ayatollah's representative in the United States, said by telephone that he had not received a copy of the fatwa. But he said "the essence of such a fatwa is to protect the people from any fighting and war casualties."

"They cannot stand as if they are supporting Saddam and be the coalition's target," he said.

The fatwa seemed to be a reversal in tone. On March 27, the grand ayatollah, who may have been under pressure from Baghdad, issued a fatwa forbidding any cooperation with invading forces.

Asked if the United States had requested a new statement from him, General Brooks said, "We believe that the grand ayatollah's statement was his statement, and it has been pushed out to the Iraqi population. We think it was a courageous statement, also, because we know that he has certainly been under threat by this regime for a considerable period of time."

Allied forces had expected a more enthusiastic reception from the Shiite population of southern Iraq, which has often suffered at the hands of Mr. Hussein, a Sunni Muslim.

In northern Iraq today, a senior Iraqi Kurdish leader said its forces would not attempt to take the strategic oil center at Kirkuk, a step that would inflame tensions with Turkey, which fears that the Kurds want the city and its oil wealth to declare an independent state.

"Should a decision be taken to move" against Kirkuk, said Barham Salih, prime minister of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, "it will be done as Iraqi opposition and in tandem with the coalition."

He added, "We do not want to do anything that will undermine the mission, which is Baghdad."

Meanwhile, British forces pushed into Basra's suburbs from the south. One compound stormed by British troops today was that of Ali Hassan al-Majid, the commander of Mr. Hussein's forces in the south and known as Chemical Ali for his role in using chemical weapons against the Kurdish minority in northern Iraq. But the compound was empty. Left behind was a portrait of Mr. al-Majid standing behind the Iraqi leader.

Hong Kong Battles Fresh Outbreak of Virus

Hong Kong Battles Fresh Outbreak of Virus
By REUTERS Filed at 0:58 a.m. ET
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-health-pneumonia.html

HONG KONG (Reuters) - Hong Kong battled on Friday to stop a new hospital outbreak of a highly infectious global virus, while World Health Organization (WHO) experts in southern China tried to nail down the source of the disease.

More than 10 staff at Hong Kong's United Christian hospital have fallen ill with the disease in the last few days, raising fears a new wave of infections was just beginning and the epidemic in the territory was far from being contained.

``It's worrying,'' Hong Kong Hospital Authority director Ko Wing-man said of the new outbreak at the hospital, which is treating more than 100 other victims of the disease.

Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), which has killed 81 people and infected nearly 2,400 worldwide after first showing up in China's southern province of Guangdong, has triggered precautionary moves in a growing number of countries.

Israel is the latest country to allow family members of its consulate staff to leave Hong Kong, a spokeswoman at the consulate told Reuters. It was not clear how many had left.

The United States moved on Thursday to offer non-emergency staff and all dependents at its embassy and five consulates in China free flights out on a voluntary basis.

Washington had confined such a move only to diplomatic staff in Hong Kong and the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou on Tuesday, but extended that decision to all of China on Thursday.

Late on Thursday, Canada announced it would cancel a big medical convention by the American Association for Cancer Research because some doctors, especially those who were caring for SARS patients, feared they could spread the disease.

SOURCE ELUSIVE SO FAR

A team from the WHO, which first warned against travel to southern China and Hong Kong because of the disease, is hunting for clues to the source of the virus in Guangdong.

Hong Kong's Cable Television reported on Friday that the Guangdong Disease Control Center now had data showing patients in the early stage of the outbreak were cooks and bird vendors, and that it suspected the virus was linked to animals.

Still little is known about SARS. In Hong Kong, scientists are tracing how the latest batch of medical staff got infected, and also the source of a sudden explosion of SARS in one housing estate, where more than 200 residents were infected last week.

``We have been briefing staff to take very serious precautions,'' said a spokeswoman for the Hospital Authority.

Police are also hunting for at least 200 people who had been exposed to the disease but who escaped a quarantine order earlier this week. Officials fear a new outbreak anytime from these people, as a two-to-seven day incubation is now passing.

In Australia, three Canadian children were isolated in a hospital with one diagnosed as probably having the disease.

CHINA UNDER PRESSURE

The epidemic led to a diplomatic spat between China and New Zealand. Foreign Minister Phil Goff tried to smooth it over, saying the decision to exclude 43 Chinese officials, after they arrived on Wednesday for a conference, was driven by uninformed fears about the virus.

Economists are counting the large costs to countries affected by the epidemic. Hong Kong markets remain depressed, and SARS is hitting stocks worldwide in airlines and tourism.

Patients brought down by the virus quickly end up in intensive care, and the sheer numbers plus the infectious risk to key medical staff can put an enormous strain on hospitals.

In Hong Kong, once-bustling shopping areas are nearly deserted, and expatriates have been leaving, taking their families with them on home leave.

Moody's Investors Service said on Friday the Hong Kong government would miss its 2003/04 budget deficit forecasts because of reduced public consumption due to the outbreak.

The death rate from the disease so far has been between three and four percent, but patients in areas without good medical facilities face a much higher mortality risk, doctors say.

Squeezed, a Jewelry Designer Closes Shop

Squeezed, a Jewelry Designer Closes Shop
By TRACIE ROZHON
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/04/business/04GEMS.html