Before she arrived in Beirut, Rice had downplayed the diplomatic estrangement between the U.S. and Damascus. "The problem isn't that people haven't talked to the Syrians," Rice told the Associated Press. "I think this is simply just a kind of false hobby horse that somehow it's because we don't talk to the Syrians.

"It's not as if we don't have diplomatic relations," she insisted. "We do."

But other reports said that rather than hold direct talks between Washington and Damascus, the Bush administration was leaning on Saudi Arabia to negotiate with Syria, with the aim of trying to drive a wedge between Damascus and Tehran, both supporters of Hezbollah. Rice also met with Lebanese Parliament speaker Nabih Berri, widely understood to be an unofficial liaison with Hezbollah. In both cases, the Bush team preferred proxies to direct conversation.

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But even as Milosevic berates the war crimes tribunal, the dozens of people who have struggled for years to bring a measure of justice and peace to the victims of the Balkans wars feel a profound satisfaction -- tinged with disbelief -- that they have lived to finally see the former Serb strongman sitting in the dock. And they hope that the trial, although painful, will allow Milosevic's fellow Serbs to come to terms with what was done in their name.

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"I challenge the very legality of this tribunal," Milosevic said, speaking from his bulletproof glass-enclosed trial chamber, flanked by two policemen. "This tribunal does not have the competence to try me. My extradition violated the constitution of Serbia and Yugoslavia."

"You have failed to take this into account," Milosevic told the presiding judge, Richard May, referring to his extradition here by Belgrade authorities on June 28 of last year. "You are duty bound to call hearings into my unlawful arrest. I was brought here on the basis of a crime being committed."

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"We should just pause to recall the daily scenes of grief and suffering that came to define armed conflict in the former Yugoslavia," Carla Del Ponte, the chief prosecutor of the U.N. International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), told the trial chamber. "The events themselves were notorious, and a new term, 'ethnic cleansing,' came into common use in our language. Some of the incidents revealed almost medieval savagery and a calculated cruelty that went far beyond the bounds of legitimate warfare.

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"There was nothing there except spores," he told Salon. "Normally, if you take a crude preparation of anthrax spores, you see parts of degenerated bacteria. But this stuff was highly refined."

Another former Army lab scientist characterized the sample as "very, very good."

"Only a very small group of people could have made this," said David Franz, a former U.N. weapons inspector in Iraq and biodefense scientist at USAMRIID, who now works for the Southern Research Institute, a defense contractor. "If you look at the sample from the standpoint of biology, it tells me this person [who made the anthrax] was very good at what they do. And this wasn't the first batch they've made. They've done this for years. The concentration was a trillion spores [on anthrax] per gram. That's incredibly concentrated."

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The day after hearing from the FBI, Assaad met with special agents J. Gregory Lelyegian and Mark Buie in the FBI's Washington field office, along with Assaad's attorney, Rosemary McDermott. They showed Assaad a detailed, unsigned, computer-typed letter with a startling accusation: that the 53-year-old Assaad, an Environmental Protection Agency scientist who filed an age discrimination suit against the U.S. Army for dismissing him from a biowarfare lab, might be a bioterrorist.

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"It's the regime, stupid," Woolsey told his audience at the Nixon Center, a national-security-focused Washington think tank affiliated with the Nixon Library. "We should start with the mission: remove the Ba'athist regime of Saddam Hussein. Both of Saddam's sons kill people for fun. We need to get rid of the entire regime. Then we should go to our allies in the region and say, 'We're going to destroy Saddam's Baathist regime. Is there something you can do to help?'"

Woolsey, a former arms control negotiator who served unhappily in the first Clinton administration as CIA director until he resigned in 1995, has been making this case since he left public office, but suddenly he has new influence. With the election of President Bush, a half-dozen like-minded Iraq hard-liners who during Clinton's reign took to the op-ed pages, think tank panels and academia assumed key positions in the Pentagon, National Security Council and State Department, where they have managed to catapult Iraq to the top of the foreign policy agenda, in the midst of the war on terrorism.

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"In Afghanistan, hundreds of thousands of people will be helplessly exposed to the elements this winter, no matter which authority sits in Kabul," said Carol Bellamy, the executive director of the United Nations Children's fund, UNICEF, on Wednesday. "We are moving supplies every day, but we still face a very tough road ahead."

The statement echoed earlier warnings by humanitarian groups that the U.S. bombing was disrupting their efforts to truck in and distribute aid in the few short weeks before winter arrived.

"We just don't know how many people may die if the bombing is not suspended and the aid effort assured," said Oxfam's Barbara Stocking in an Oct. 17 press release calling for a U.S. bombing pause, signed by Oxfam, Islamic Relief, Christian Aid, Tearfund and ActionAid.

But aid experts say that the agencies' repeated alarms about the impact of the U.S. military campaign against the Taliban on relief efforts have ignored the fact that more food has been reaching Afghanistan since the U.S. bombing began than was before -- a lot more.

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Anthrax vaccine shipments from BioPort have been suspended by the FDA since 1998 because of questions about the facility's quality control, forcing the Pentagon to dramatically reduce its program to vaccinate all 2.4 million U.S. soldiers and reservists against anthrax. Now the lack of the vaccine threatens to become a scandal, as the U.S. is sending thousands of soldiers overseas and calling up reserves, and as the public is clamoring for access to protection from the deadly bacterium.

After three years of getting bailed out by the Defense Department, BioPort could be poised to make a fortune -- as its CEO Fuad El-Hibri did working with the British seller of anthrax vaccine, Porton International, during the Gulf War a decade ago. But only if the FDA approves the company's renovated plant, as expected, sometime in the next week. The decision could open the door for BioPort to market the drug to a worried public, as new anthrax scares are reported daily.

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The author of seven books, including "Balkan Ghosts" and "The Coming Anarchy," Kaplan has scanned the post-Cold War landscape from Pakistan's border with Afghanistan, to Ft. Bragg, N.C., which inspired his thinking about the future importance of intelligence and special forces. Known for his sober judgment and frequent pessimism, Kaplan was uncharacteristically optimistic about the U.S.'s capacity to recover from last week's terror and its aftermath. Salon interviewed Kaplan Wednesday by telephone at his home in western Massachusetts.

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Unannounced until the operation was already well underway, Serbian authorities turned over custody of Milosevic to investigators from the International War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague on Thursday. Milosevic has been held in Belgrade's Central Prison since April 1 when he was arrested on local charges ranging from corruption to abuse of his authority. By nightfall Thursday, Milosevic was reported to have been transported on a British Royal Air transport plane to The Hague, where he faces charges of crimes against humanity. Those charges stem from events in Kosovo in 1998-1999, which include his alleged ordering of the killing of several hundred people and the expulsion of over 700,000.

The extradition is not uncontroversial here -- some Serbs strongly believe it would be best for the country for their former leader to be tried in Belgrade. But in a sign of how much has changed since Milosevic fell from power nine months ago, polls show a majority of Serbs now support the move.

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Through his writing, Kaplan, 48, evokes a place, and documents the experience of a journey -- though he's not a traditional travel writer. His is a journey to prove ideas. He wants the landscape of his travel map to affirm a larger truth. A kind of idée fixe that threads through his books and articles is that the nation-state doesn't hold, that the way we understand the world to be organized is dissolving, that we are missing the most important trends that determine and portend our own future.

"Forget the map," Kaplan writes. And then he takes us on a journey to a world in which national borders are increasingly meaningless, where driving events are not the usual protagonists of news reporting -- presidents, parliaments, police -- but the forces dissolving the nation-state and the Westphalian world order built upon it: growing ethnic consciousness that conflicts with "artificially" drawn nation-state borders, explosive population growth, disease, crime, environmental degradation, water shortages and the people mobilized by these changes.

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Though Powell praised the Macedonian government's restraint in using military force to combat the rebels known as the National Liberation Army (NLA), he also stressed that Macedonia must intensify efforts to bring its minority Albanian population more fully into the country's political and economic life.

"Multi-ethnicity need not be a source of conflict," Powell told a press conference in the Macedonian parliament after an evening meeting with foreign ministers from the region. "Diversity can be made into a strength, if channels are opened for all to be made part of the democratic and political process."

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Then, there was the fact that this bombing -- coming just one month into Bush's presidency -- was the first of its kind since December 1998, when U.S. and British planes bombed Iraq for four days outside the southern no-fly zone.

Plus, there was the constant speculation -- among hawks and doves and every animal in between -- that the new president would seek vengeance against Saddam Hussein, who has defiantly remained in power a decade after the war ended, and seven years after Saddam hatched a plot to have the older Bush assassinated. George W. Bush's constant references to "Saddam" during his election campaign suggested as much.

Retaliation speculation had even grown in the last 24 hours, when Bush officially nominated Paul D. Wolfowitz, a dean of advanced international studies at Johns Hopkins University, to be deputy Secretary of Defense. Wolfowitz, as writer Nicholas Lemann pointed out in a January New Yorker, is the "most prominent proponent of the argument that we should oust Saddam Hussein."

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After a blood-soaked decade in power, Yugoslavia's Slobodan Milosevic was toppled in October, in a revolution triggered by his landslide defeat in elections. A few weeks later, Peru's Alberto Fujimori tendered his resignation, in the humiliating wake of a televised videotape of his spy chief Vladimiro Montesinos bribing a congressman. This past summer, Mexico's Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) was voted out after 71 years of virtual one-party rule. A year earlier, public protests forced Nigeria's military rulers to submit to elections, bringing civilian rule to Africa's most populous country for the first time in 15 years.

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The science says probably not. But a wave of panic in Europe over the deaths -- the latest, of an Italian peacekeeper who served in Bosnia, occurred last week -- has given psychological credence to what Europeans newspapers are calling "Balkans syndrome."

Like its Gulf War precedent, "Balkans syndrome" is the catchall phrase Europeans use for the unexplained illnesses and cancers that about a dozen NATO peacekeepers serving in Bosnia and Kosovo have been stricken with. As occurred after the 1991 Persian Gulf War, some blame the illnesses on exposure to depleted-uranium-tipped munitions. The United States used the special armor-piercing weapons for the first time in the Gulf War, and then again in Bosnia and Kosovo.

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The growing guerrilla unrest alarms many because it was a similar situation in Kosovo between 1998 and 1999 -- when ethnic Albanian rebels routinely attacked Serb police patrols -- that triggered the massive Serbian military retaliation against Kosovo villages that were suspected of harboring rebels. Brutal Serbian military retaliation, including massacres of civilians, launched the mass exodus of close to a million ethnic Albanian refugees and, ultimately, the NATO bombing campaign.

The simmering crisis may also present the first major test of President-elect George W. Bush's foreign policy. Bush and the leaders of his foreign policy team have roundly criticized the deployment of American peacekeeping troops on post-conflict missions such as those in Bosnia and Kosovo as a drain on U.S. military readiness. Currently, some 6,000 troops are posted in Kosovo and another 4,250 in Bosnia.

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At 4:58, the secret police who were tailing Curuvija -- and from whose files the above information was taken -- were urgently ordered to withdraw. Two minutes later, Curuvija was assassinated by three men with sub-automatic machine guns, who fled in a white Volkswagen Golf-3. He died in his wife's arms on the sidewalk in front of their apartment building. It was Orthodox Easter Sunday.

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With all their troubles over the years, money worries and the seemingly endless looming threat of conflict, Lidija and Vladan always managed to make the best of things for themselves, their children and their friends. They long dreamed of the time Slobodan Milosevic would fall and Serbia would rejoin the world. Now it had finally happened.

So it was strange over dinner the other night to see them down. The pall in Belgrade has visibly lifted, people were smiling, Serbia was being welcomed into Europe and the world again. What could be wrong?

"You know, we have spent these past 13 years just trying to survive. And just realizing now all that we have lived through, it is so painful," Lidija said.

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Coming five days after Milosevic formally announced his defeat to Kostunica, the confrontation reveals how close Serbia is to unrest as the political tug-of-war escalates between supporters of Kostunica's plans for sweeping democratic reform and those who still have a stake in the old regime.

Opposition leaders went into crisis meetings with Kostunica after a leader of Milosevic's Socialist Party of Serbia (SPS) claimed that a Milosevic ally, Serbian Prime Minister Mirko Marjanovic, has assumed control of the 100,000-man strong Serbian police -- a high-tech force with armored vehicles that bears a closer resemblance to a paramilitary squad than a law enforcement agency. The announcement is one of several recent clues that Milosevic is fighting to retain control over key institutions in Serbia.

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