Harold Ralphson's Mind

Sudan

2006-09-03T14:20:00.000-04:00

Latest News From Sudan At Sudan.Net

News Article by Gulf News/ Editorial posted on September 03, 2006 at 02:09:39: EST

Sudan's position incomprehensible

Gulf News
09/03/06

If the government of Sudan is serious about its desire to put an end to the deaths and displacement of people in Darfur, then it must adopt a different stance to the one it presently holds.

The United Nations has for long wanted to send a peacekeeping force into Darfur an area of south-eastern Sudan that is the size of France in the belief the Sudanese Government is not doing enough to help the people. In fact, there are some diplomats who allege that rather than trying to quell any rebellion and restore a sense of normality to that region; government troops are deliberately targeting those anti-government factions that did not sign up to the peace treaty in May.

The is massing of government forces in Darfur which are thought will be deployed once the 7,000-member African Union peacekeepers' mandate expires in October reinforces this.

On Thursday, the UN Security Council voted to send more peacekeepers to Darfur, not only to police the region but also to enable relief agencies to work in the area. With the escalation of violence again, aid agencies have been reluctant to help, and the Sudanese Government has not assisted in any way.

Unfortunately, the good intentions of the Security Council look like coming to nought, as the Sudan Government as rejected the vote as "illegal" because the government was not consulted. It also alleges it is "inappropriate" to pass a resolution before seeking its permission. Sudan has therefore stated any move to send in a peacekeeping force would be unwelcome and seen to be provocative.

It is difficult to reconcile the Sudan Government's position on Darfur. More than 200,000 people have died there, and more than two million displaced, yet there seems no attempt by the government to put an end to the suffering in Darfur.

Hope for Uganda

2006-09-03T14:18:00.000-04:00

- from http://www.myuganda.co.ug/discussion/

Uganda - Kony Peace Talks, Guns fall silent

GUNS fell silent and UPDF soldiers quietly returned to the barracks in northern Uganda as a landmark truce that could spell an end to the 20-year rebel insurgency in the north came into effect yesterday morning. Could this mark the end of the 20yr old insurgency?

Fri Sep 01, 2006 5:36 pm

Iraq and the USA Today

2006-09-03T10:44:00.000-04:00

The Sunnis want power back. The Shia want power and revenge. The Kurds want independence and more turf. The USA, both Republicans and Democrats, are powerless against these forces.

Saddam was bad but this seems worse.

About The Wilsons

2006-09-03T09:17:00.000-04:00

- from http://noquarter.typepad.com/

September, 2006

Smearing the Wilsons and Sliming America
by
Larry C Johnson

How low can they go? I refer of course to the latest vitriol directed at Valerie and Joe Wilson by the likes of Christopher Hitchens and Fred Hiatt of the Washington Post, who claim that Joe Wilson, not Bush Administration officials, is responsible for destroying his wife's cover and exposing her as a CIA operative. Hitchens battle with the bottle may account for his addled thinking, but what is Hiatt's excuse? Both men perform like Cirque du Soleil contortionists in dreaming up excuses for the nutty and destructive policies and actions of the Bush Administration. In watching their behavior we see a parallel with the devotees of Jim Jones who gathered in Guyana almost 30 years ago to drink poisoned kool aid.

Let's focus on the Post's Fred Hiatt. In today's Post editorial page, Hiatt writes:

Nevertheless, it now appears that the person most responsible for the end of Ms. Plame's CIA career is Mr. Wilson. Mr. Wilson chose to go public with an explosive charge, claiming -- falsely, as it turned out -- that he had debunked reports of Iraqi uranium-shopping in Niger and that his report had circulated to senior administration officials.

The claim that Joe Wilson’s op-ed from July of 2003 was a pack of lies and misrepresented the truth is an old rightiwng, White House canard. Here is what Joe Wilson said in the July 2003 op-ed:

Though I did not file a written report, there should be at least four documents in United States government archives confirming my mission. The documents should include the ambassador's report of my debriefing in Niamey, a separate report written by the embassy staff, a C.I.A. report summing up my trip, and a specific answer from the agency to the office of the vice president (this may have been delivered orally). While I have not seen any of these reports, I have spent enough time in government to know that this is standard operating procedure.

The question now is how that answer was or was not used by our political leadership. If my information was deemed inaccurate, I understand (though I would be very interested to know why). If, however, the information was ignored because it did not fit certain preconceptions about Iraq, then a legitimate argument can be made that we went to war under false pretenses.

False claim? False claim my ass! There were at least four reports. We now know that the National Intelligence officer for Africa in January 2003 briefed the White House that the Iraq/Niger claim was bunk. Even a partisan Senate Intelligence Committe report cites repeated efforts by the intelligence community to warn the President’s advisors that reports claiming Iraq was trying to buy uranium, including British reoirts, were not credible.

What is so bizarre is that the White House did admit that it was wrong to put the infamous 16 words into the State of the Union Address (of course, they blamed the CIA), just days after Wilson's op-ed appeared. If, as Hiatt claims, Wilson's op-ed was false, then why did the White House correct the record by confirming the substance of his claim?

Hiatt also portrays an astonishing ignorance of national security affairs. He offers up this goofiness referring to Joe Wilson's "culpability" for exposing his wife's job:

He ought to have expected that both those officials and journalists such as Mr. Novak would ask why a retired ambassador would have been sent on such a mission and that the answer would point to his wife.

Yes, why would the CIA send the former Director of Africa at the National Security Council, a former Ambassador to Gabon, and the last U.S. official to face down Saddam Hussein to Africa? Because Joe Wilson was uniquely qualified to do the job. Moreover, this is (or at least was) a common acitivity by the CIA. My former boss at State Department, Ambassador Morris D. Busby, made at least two trips I know of at the behest of the CIA after leaving government because of his experience in dealing with terrorism, narcotics, and Latin America. There are times when the CIA wants information and does not want to expose its own assets.

There was nothing on the public record or in any public document identifying Valerie Plame Wilson as a CIA operative. That information was classified. Sending Joe on a mission to Africa does not point the finger at her. Moreover, she did not make the decision to send him. That is another of Hiatt's lies and is routinely echoed by rightwing hacks. As Walter Pincus reported in the Washington Post in July 2005:

“They [the White House] said that his 2002 trip to Niger was a boondoggle arranged by his wife, but CIA officials say that is incorrect. One reason for the confusion about Plame's role is that she had arranged a trip for him to Niger three years earlier on an unrelated matter, CIA officials told The Washington Post.” (Washington Post, 27 July 2005)

Harlow, the former CIA spokesman, said in an interview yesterday that he testified last year before a grand jury about conversations he had with Novak at least three days before the column was published. He said he warned Novak, in the strongest terms he was permitted to use without revealing classified information, that Wilson's wife had not authorized the mission and that if he did write about it, her name should not be revealed. (Washington Post, 27 July 2005)

We are forced to revisit this nonsense because we have now learned that in addition to Libby and Rove, Richard Armitage also was shooting off his mouth about classified information. Regardless of Armitage’s role as an initial source for Novak, we are still left with the fact that Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, and Scooter Libby abused their power and were actively engaged in a coordinated effort to discredit Joe Wilson for his behind the scene efforts to alert the public to the falsehoods in the President’s State of the Union address.

While Richard Armitage may have had no malicious intent, the same cannot be said for Cheney, Libby and Rove. They knew exactly what they were doing. According to The Washington Post, during the week of July 6, 2003, “two top White House officials disclosed Plame’s identity to at least six Washington journalists.” Sometime after Novak’s column appeared, Rove called Chris Matthews, host of MSNBC’s “Hardball” and told him that Mr. Wilson’s wife was “fair game.”

And we have the document released by Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald in United States v. Libby, that provides a copy of notes Cheney had written in the margins of Mr. Wilson’s July 6 op-ed. In a court filing, Fitzgerald stated that the notes demonstrated that Cheney and Libby were “acutely focused” on the Wilson column and on rebutting his criticisms of the White House’s handling of the Niger intelligence. Those notes became the basis for Republican National Committee talking points circulated and repeated by Ken Mehlman and others.

Why is this relevant? Today the Bush Administration is once again trying to manufacture a case for war. They are calling critics of its policies on Iran and Iraq "appeasers" and decrying the lack of intelligence on Iran. It is deja vu all over again to quote Yogi Berra. They whine about a lack of intelligence on Iran but refuse to accept responsibility for their own role in destroying Valerie Plame's undercover work, which was focused on monitoring the flow of nuclear technology to Iran. They may not have fully understood what Val was doing because of her cover status. But that's the point. They don't think these things true. Their only goal is political survival.

Perhpas the new attention on the Plame affair will fuel public support for accountability in government. The gang of political thugs currently in the White House refuse to be held accountable for anything. With the help of enablers like Fred Hiatt and Christopher Hitchens and others in the main stream media, it is no wonder that Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld skate from disaster to disaster, oblivious to the field of debris left in their wake.

We must also remember that the Government sanctioned attack on the Wilsons is not an isolated event. Just ask former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill or National Security Advisor Richard Clarke. Add to this list the names of the two CIA Baghdad Chiefs of Station who were savaged for their prescient early warnings that Iraq was moving into a civil war. The Plame/Wilson affair stands as a stark reminder that President Bush and his minions prefer destroying those who call them to account for failed policies rather than admit error and take corrective measures that will serve the longterm interests of the United States. As we move towards a new war with Iran, we should not be surprised that people who know the truth are reluctant to come forward. If you choose to blow the whistle you are choosing career suicide and a full frontal assault on your character. In smearing the Wilsons, Bush and Cheney also are sliming America.

- and via Juan Cole:

Response to Wash Post Editorial of 9/1/06

Allegation: It is untrue that the WH orchestrated leak of Plame’s identity to ruin her career and punish Joe Wilson

• According to Washington Post article of 10/12/03: “two top White House officials disclosed Plame’s identity to at least six Washington journalists.” An administration source told the Post: “officials brought up Plame as part of their broader case against Wilson . . . It was unsolicited . . . They were pushing back. They used everything they had.”

• After Novak’s column appeared Rove called Chris Matthews and told him Mr. Wilson’s wife was “fair game” (Newsweek 7/11/05)

• Mr. Fitzgerald, who has long been aware of Mr. Armitage’s role, stated in court filing: “there is ample evidence that multiple officials in the White House discussed [Valerie Wilson’s] employment with reporters prior to (and after) July 14, “ and further that “it is hard to conceive of what evidence there could be that would disprove the existence of White House efforts to ‘punish’ [Mr.] Wilson.” (Washington Post 4/7/06)

Allegation: Mr. Wilson’s charge that he had debunked reports of Iraqi uranium-shopping in Niger is false

• The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) Report on the U.S. Intelligence Community’s Prewar Assessment of Iraq describes Mr. Wilson’s role:

• The CIA’s decision to send Mr. Wilson to Niger was part of an effort to obtain responses to questions from the Vice President’s Office and State and Defense on “the alleged Iraq-Niger uranium deal” (p. 39)

• Two CIA staffers debriefed Mr. Wilson upon his return from Niger and wrote a draft intelligence report that was sent to the CIA Director of Operations (“DO”) reports officer. (p. 43)

• The intelligence report based on Mr. Wilson’s trip was disseminated on March 8, 2002, and was “widely distributed.” It did not identify Mr. Wilson by name to protect him as a source, which the CIA had promised Mr. Wilson. (p. 43)

• According to the report, the CIA’s DO gave Mr. Wilson’s information a grade of “good” “which means it added to the IC’s body of understanding on the issue.” (p. 46)

• After Mr. Wilson’s July 6, 2003 New York Times op-ed, the Administration acted as if he had made a major revelation:

• The day after a spokesman for the President told The Washington Post: “the sixteen words [“The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa”] did not rise to the level of inclusion in the State of the Union.” (NY Times 7/8/03)

• On July 11, 2003, CIA Director George Tenet said “These 16 words should never have been included in the text written for the president.” (LA Times 7/12/03).

• According to a Washington Post article, the National Intelligence Council stated in a January 2003 memo that “the Niger story [that Iraq had been caught trying to buy uranium from Niger] was baseless and should be laid to rest.” (Washington Post 4/9/06)

• According to a Vanity Fair article of July 2006, there was a last-minute decision before the President’s State of the Union Address to attribute the Niger uranium deal to British intelligence even though “the CIA had told the White House again and again that it didn’t trust the British reports.”

• On March 7, 2003, Mohamed ElBaradei, the Director General of the IAEA, publicly disclosed that the Niger documents which formed the basis for reports of a Iraq-Niger uranium transaction were false. He stated that “the IAEA has concluded, with the concurrence of outside experts, that these documents . . . are in fact not authentic. We have therefore concluded that these specific allegations are unfounded.”

Allegation: Mr. Wilson “ought to have expected . . . that the answer [to why he was sent to Niger] would point to his wife.”

• A July 22, 2003 Newsday article cites a senior intelligence officer who confirmed that “she [Valerie Plame] did not recommend her husband to undertake the Niger assignment.”

• Joe Wilson’s July 15, 2005 letter to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence explains that Valerie Wilson was not at the meeting at which the subject of him traveling to Niger was raised for the first time and then only after a discussion of what the participants at the meeting did not did not know about Niger. This is confirmed by SSCI report at p. 40.

Melanie Sloan

Executive Director

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington

www. citizensforethics. org

Why I'm Skeptical of Terror Alerts

2006-09-03T08:59:00.000-04:00

FBI Role in Terror Probe Questioned
Lawyers Point to Fine Line Between Sting and Entrapment

By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, September 2, 2006

Standing in an empty Miami warehouse on May 24 with a man he believed had ties to Osama bin Laden, a dejected Narseal Batiste talked of the setbacks to their terrorist plot and then uttered the words that helped put him in a federal prison cell.

"I want to fight some jihad," he allegedly said. "That's all I live for."

What Batiste did not know was that the bin Laden representative was really an FBI informant. The warehouse in which they were meeting had been rented and wired for sound and video by bureau agents, who were monitoring his every word.

Within a month, Batiste, 32, and six of his compatriots were arrested and charged with conspiracy to aid a terrorist organization and bomb a federal building. On June 23, Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales held a news conference to announce the destruction of a terrorist cell inside the United States, hailing "our commitment to preventing terrorism through energetic law enforcement efforts aimed at detecting and thwarting terrorist acts."

But court records released since then suggest that what Gonzales described as a "deadly plot" was virtually the pipe dream of a few men with almost no ability to pull it off on their own. The suspects have raised questions in court about the FBI informants' role in keeping the plan alive.

Iran's Mohammed Khatami Said

2006-09-03T08:47:00.000-04:00

~85% of Iranians do not support the Mullahs that rule them. I support their struggle for freedom. Imagine being ruled by the likes of Robertson, Falwell, and Dobson.

- so with that in mind:

- from the Verizon home page:

News
09/03/2006 05:53:31 EST
Khatami: U.S. Policies Trigger Terrorism
By CARLA K. JOHNSON
Associated Press Writer

ROSEMONT, Ill. - Former Iranian President Mohammad Khatami said Saturday that U.S. foreign policy triggers terrorism and violence in the world, but American Muslims can play a key role in promoting peace and security.
In his first public appearances during a nearly two-week visit to the United States, Khatami spoke twice in the Chicago area. He is the most senior Iranian official to visit the United States since Islamic fundamentalists seized the U.S. Embassy in Tehran in 1979 and held Americans hostage for 444 days.

"As America claims to be fighting terrorism, it implements policies that cause the intensification of terrorism and institutionalized violence," Khatami said at the Islamic Society of North America's 43rd annual convention.

Speaking through a translator, Khatami told tens of thousands of Muslims at the meeting that there is a chronic misunderstanding between the West and the East that goes back to the Crusades and continues today.

He said American Muslims "through active participation in the social arena" can form lobbying groups and form a consensus with other Americans.

"Public opinion can be rescued from the grips of ignorance and blunder and the domination of arrogant, warmongering and violence-triggering policies will end," he said.

Khatami called the United States "a great nation" and said that as president of Iran he was among the first world leaders to condemn the Sept. 11 attacks as a barbaric act.

"I knew this inferno would only intensify extremism and one-sidedness and would have no outcome except to retard justice and intellect and sacrifice righteousness and humanity," he said.

He said Muslims must forge a new identity that embraces the modern world, tolerates other religions and works toward peace.

[I have to agree. - Harold]

China Upset with United States

2006-09-03T08:36:00.000-04:00

- from the NYTimes:

03 Sep 2006

The World According to China

By JAMES TRAUB

In Late July, as the United Nations Security Council argued long into the night over the wording of a so-called presidential statement castigating Israel for the bombing attack that killed four U.N. observers in southern Lebanon, Wang Guangya, the Chinese ambassador, blew his stack. This was almost unprecedented: Wang, a veteran diplomat, typically comports himself with unnerving calm. But one of the four fatalities had been Chinese, and Wang had grown increasingly frustrated with the refusal of the United States to condemn Israel outright for the bombing. Worse still, the United States was represented not by Ambassador John Bolton but by a junior diplomat, a breach of etiquette that Wang apparently took to be a calculated insult.

Without naming any countries — he lost his temper, not his grip — Wang lashed out at “a tyranny of the minority in the council” and vowed that there would be “implications for future discussions” on other subjects. Once the meeting ended, Wang planted himself before the U.N. beat reporters and engaged in 10 minutes of robust public diplomacy, complaining that the presidential statement had been “watered down,” observing in several different formulations that “we have to take into account the concerns of other countries” and predicting that the “frustration” his country felt “will affect working relations somewhat.”

[Bush is rude and arrogant and has done so much harm to our relations with others. - Harold]

Read the Daily Star

2006-09-03T08:23:00.000-04:00

It's a Lebanese newspaper well worth your time.

An Iranian Opinion

2006-09-03T08:09:00.000-04:00

~85% of Iranians do not support the Mullahs that rule them. I support their struggle for freedom. Imagine being ruled by the likes of Robertson, Falwell, and Dobson.

- so with that in mind:

- via the Tehran Times on-line Opinion Page:

Annan’s Tehran visit

By Hassan Hanizadeh

The United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan arrived in Tehran on Saturday for a two-day visit as part of his Middle East tour which began last Monday.

Annan discussed main regional issues with high-ranking Iranian officials. The talks ranged from Lebanon, Iran’s nuclear issue to developments in Iraq and the occupied territories.

The implementation of the Security Council Resolution 1701 on Lebanon features greatly in the mind of the UN top official.

There is not doubt that Mr. Annan is particularly worried about current crises in the Third World countries, but prior to being concerned about the security of the Zionist regime he should seriously address the dangers of Israel's nuclear arsenal to the Middle Eastern nations.

By possessing about 250 nuclear warheads Israel is threatening peace and security in the region and world, and all the 57 Islamic countries with over 1.5 billion population are worried about the stockpiles of nuclear and chemical weapons in Israel.

During its 33-day war against the Lebanese nation Israeli army used banned weapons including cluster bombs against civilian targets in Lebanon but the international organizations failed to issue a resolution or a statement condemning such inhumane acts due to the influence of great powers on such bodies.

Therefore, Mr. Annan, who is determined to fully implement the Resolution 1701, should find a logical answer to the reasonable concerns of the regional nations.

Without prohibiting the Zionist state from producing weapons of mass destruction no durable peace or security will ever be established in the Middle East.

The other issue featuring greatly in Mr. Annan’s talks with the high-ranking officials here was the issue of Iran’s nuclear program.

Unfortunately, due to the vicious attitudes of certain powers Iran’s peaceful nuclear program has been turned into a hot political issue.

However, it is expected that Annan as the chief international diplomat to take brave steps to settle the issue within the framework of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).

The Security Council’s interference in such a purely technical issue which should naturally be handled by the IAEA would undesirably push other countries to turn to underground nuclear activities. So if such double-standard policies persevere it would not last long that hundreds of underground nuclear laboratories will be constructed across the world.

Now, Mr. Annan – who is actually nearing the end of his term as the UN chief – should try to use his legal power to preserve the innate independence of the Security Council by a tight observation of the international law and regulations and remove Iran’s nuclear dossier from the agenda of the Security Council. Any failure to do so will greatly tarnish the image and principles behind the formation of the IAEA.

The other issues conferred by the secretary general and Iranian officials were Iraq and Palestine, which have greatly eclipsed security in the Middle East.

Presently, both Iraq and Palestine should move toward peace and stability; however, with regards to the presence of U.S. occupying troops in Iraq and the Zionist forces in parts of the Palestinian lands, there will be no hope of permanent security in these two countries.

So the secretary general should as well put the withdrawal of foreign forces from Iraq on top of his agenda because the presence of the occupying forces has brought misery rather than security and welfare to Iraqi nation.

[I'm all for non-proliferation. All nations should unilaterally destroy their nuclear, biological and chemical weapons. They should all be illegal. We can have them but you can't? Can't you see the hypocrisy? - Harold]

Katyushas Were Fired From Permanent Launch Pads

2006-09-03T08:01:00.000-04:00

- via Haaretz:

How the IDF blew chance to destroy short-range rockets

By Ze'ev Schiff

A large number of the short-range rockets fired at Israel from southern Lebanon were launched from permanent positions, the Israel Air Force discovered by chance toward the end of the war. The discovery was made after an air strike burned away vegetation, revealing a dug-in Katyusha position on a permanent launch pad. Additional permanent positions were subsequently discovered.

If the tactical intelligence of the Northern Command was unaware of the existence of hundreds of permanent short-range rocket launching positions in South Lebanon, then this is a major intelligence failure. If the Northern Command knew of them and did not pass on detailed information to the air force, then this is a serious failure in the management of the war.

Walid Jumblatt, Lebanese Druze Leader Said

2006-09-03T07:56:00.000-04:00

- via Haaretz:

Lebanon Druze leader says war destroyed hope in country's future

By Reuters

MUKHTARA, Lebanon - Hezbollah's war with Israel has plunged Lebanon into uncertainty, its fate once again tied to Middle Eastern conflicts most of its people would rather avoid, Lebanese Druze leader Walid Jumblatt said.

Jumblatt, speaking to reporters at his ancestral home in the Shouf mountains, linked Lebanon's long-term stability to the nuclear dispute with Iran and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

"If the Americans go ahead and press the Iranians with sanctions and if... they try to strike Iran, it will lead to troubles in Lebanon," he said Saturday.

Unless the Israelis learned that brute force could achieve nothing and instead struck a deal on a viable Palestinian state, he said, Lebanon would remain in a vicious cycle.

"Every two or three years we'll have a new round of fighting."

Ceasefire

2006-09-02T14:01:00.000-04:00

Total, for one year, the whole world over, every single conflict; and while we're all at it: no weapons' sales for a year.

Lebanon Now

2006-09-02T13:24:00.000-04:00

- via the Lebanese Political Journal @ lebop.blogspot.com:

Lebanon between Hell and Paradise

Now that Lebanon has entered into a period of stoppage of hostilities –not a real total cease fire though- and with the country witnessing unprecedented degrees of destruction, divides and ruins, the Lebanese interior is being importantly shaken due to the results of the war of external parties on Lebanese soil; a war that can be compared to a nightmare in which the country was plunged for more than a month.

The atrocious war destroyed all the civil facilities; it also killed, handicapped and displaced thousands of innocent civilians, without bringing clear positive results for Lebanon. The burden of the non-state weapons of Hezbollah and the Palestinian Militias is still heavily weighing on the shoulders of the Lebanese government, and the decisions of war and peace are still in the hands of a single group without the others; additionally, the commitment to causes that surpass the borders is still given priority over the commitment for the Lebanese cause.

The speech of Hezbollah’s General Secretary Hassan Nasrallah in the aftermath of the war constituted a source of fear for many Lebanese. He asked people to be careful while addressing the winner fighters, and he did not mind giving lessons of politeness for some Lebanese politicians who dared to discuss the issue of the Resistance’s weapons. Those aspects left room for Nasrallah’s speech to be perceived as a kind of threatening. However, such a speech is no more than a clear revelation that Hezbollah learned lessons from a war that weakened its military power and that obliged the “Islamic Resistance” to accept the UNSCR 1701, after it lost any possibilities of continuing the fights, with all the routes of illegal weapons’ exchanges with Syria having been cut. Hezbollah was forced to agree on sending the Lebanese Army to the South, after they had always refused the idea of transforming the national army into “guards” for the Israeli northern border. Hezbollah also accepted the increase in the number of UNIFIL soldiers in South Lebanon, despite the fact that some leaders of the Resistance used to consider that those soldiers take orders from the “American Enemy”. Those are clear indications that the victory that Nasrallah announced is only a virtual one, through which he tried to hide the forced change in positions that his party had to make after the war.

Lebanon will not live in a long-term sustainable peace without a series of compromises from all parties. After the initial compromise of Hezbollah, with the party accepting the full implementation of the UNSCR 1701; a new compromise is underway: it is related to the exchange of prisoners between both sides. Israel seems to be more ready day after day for such a compromise. And the list goes on. The series of compromises will lead at the end of the road to a complete implementation of the UNSCR 1559 with the disarmament of Hezbollah and the Palestinian Factions after finding a solution to the pretext of the Shebaa Farms.

The war weakened everyone; it gave lessons to everyone. All parties became ready for compromises after its end. Hezbollah acted wisely in the direct aftermath of the war as the influence of its extra-Lebanese masters decreased. The Resistance understood that it is impossible to fight and to win without a full Lebanese national support. Not all the Lebanese are concerned by the idea of “Islamic” Resistance and the exclusivity of Hezbollah’s decisions over the whole country’s destiny created strong refusal sentiments in many Lebanese circles.

When Hassan Nasrallah asked the “Moujahidin” to contribute to the reconstruction works, we hoped that his words were an introduction for the post-weapons era of Hezbollah. It was important for him to talk about strengths and victories in order to match the aspirations of his popular base on one hand, and to hide the compromises and the changes in positions on another hand. It would be morally much easier for “winners” to hand in their weapons.

The reasonable speech of Nasrallah was not well echoed by the discourse of Syrian president Bashar el Assad. Damascus went back to its old habits of seeking to divide the Lebanese interior in order to conquer it. But even Hezbollah, the constant ally of the Syrian regime, could not endorse Assad’s aggressive and divisive speech this time.

With the exception of General Michel Aoun whose political current is witnessing many internal problems mainly linked to the Christians’ criticism of his pro-Islamic Resistance positions, and with the exception of some Syrian Baathist tools inside Lebanon, the big majority of the Lebanese are supportive today of the government and of its decisions.

The big test and the big questions remain the following: will Hezbollah be synchronized with the international winds, giving priority for the Lebanese interests and actively contributing to the implementation of the International Community’s resolutions? Will Hassan Nasrallah listen to the advice of the President of the executive committee of the Lebanese Forces, Samir Geagea, who invited him to be inspired from his personal experience, and to decide to transform the armed Islamic militia into a Lebanese effective political party? Or will the Syrian intentions and the Iranian interests dominate Hezbollah’s decisions and actions again, opening the doors of hell for Lebanon?

posted by Cedar-Guardian at 7:54 AM

Incomes

2006-09-02T09:54:00.000-04:00

- via the washingtonmonthly.com:

September 1, 2006

THE REPUBLICAN PARTY OWES YOU $20,000....The Democratic Strategist has a roundtable discussion in its September issue that pretty neatly encapsulates my own inability to figure out what economic message will work for liberals. To start, the authors of the main article make an excellent point:

Part of the problem is that Democrats have been misled about the state of the middle class. Progressive economists typically peg median household income at about $45,000. But that includes households headed by 22-year olds (who are on their way up) and 76-year olds (who live on fixed incomes that may be small but are often comfortable since they have no dependents and limited work related expenses).

Among households headed by prime age Americans — adults between the ages of 26 and 59 — the median household income is about $63,000.

This is a badly underappreciated point: America is a very rich country. People still have economic worries, but the plain fact is that the vast majority of Americans are well enough off that their financial status is not the overwhelmingly most powerful fact of their lives. Like it or not, this means that for about 70-80% of the population, raw appeals to economic populism just don't have much salience.

But here's the problem: the two rebuttals that have been posted so far also make sense. John Halpin says: "The problem lies with a Democratic Party establishment that is unwilling or unable to call it like it is in a larger sense....explaining to Americans how the GOP-controlled system is rigged against the middle class on everything from taxation and social spending to corporate welfare and military service."

Hear hear. And Elizabeth Warren writes: "Today, a fully-employed, median-earning male makes about $800 less than his counterpart made back in 1972. But costs for many of the basics — housing, health insurance, transportation, college educations-continued to rise."

Halpin and Warren are right: Republicans have rigged the system to overwhelmingly favor the rich and the result has been stagnation and increasing insecurity for the middle class. But the reason Republicans been able to get away with this is that stagnation at a household income of $63,000 isn't all that bad.

So how do we get this point across? Here's the basic message:

In 1970, the median income for workers age 35-44 was $29,000 (in today's dollars).

Today, the median income for the same worker is $32,000.

During that time, total income (adjusted for population) has increased by about 80%. If that growth had been spread evenly instead of going predominantly to the already rich, the median income of a middle-aged worker today would be $52,000. That's a difference of 20 grand. (And no, counting healthcare benefits doesn't change this calculation very much.)

I dunno. Is that enough to get people pissed? If middle-class income had merely kept pace with economic growth, your $32,000 job would instead be paying you $52,000. But it's not. And the reason is that virtually all of the economic growth of the past three decades has been funneled into the pockets of the well-off, the rich, and the super-rich.

And yet, that $52,000 number is just airy theorizing. And $32,000 isn't so bad. And the Steelers are playing this weekend. So how do we get people to pay attention to this?

—Kevin Drum 2:32 PM

Hamas Official Says: "Anarchy, wanton killing, land steeling, thuggery … is the occupation responsible for all?"

2006-09-02T09:12:00.000-04:00

- via ynetnews.com:

PA gov't spokesman: People are to blame for situation

Palestinian government spokesperson and Hamas official criticizes chaos, violence in Gaza, says Israeli occupation couldn't be blamed for all; calls on Palestinians to admit to mistakes

by Ali Waked

Soul searching in Hamas. Dr Ghazi Hamad, the spokesperson of the Palestinian government, waged scathing criticism against the Palestinian public on Sunday, blaming the Palestinians for turning the Gaza Strip into a lawless and violent place.

"Have mercy on Gaza," he wrote in an op-ed published on Sunday.

"After the withdrawal from Gaza, we hoped for a bright future, we thought that this year we will reap the fruits of our sacrifices. But I ask myself today – why did the occupation return to Gaza. The occupation – wise men and commentators will say – is responsible. I am not defending the occupation, but I want to stop at our mistakes, which we are accustomed to blame on others."

"Anarchy, wanton killing, land steeling, thuggery … is the occupation responsible for all?," he asked, saying that the Palestinians should stop espousing conspiracy theories which "limit our thinking."

Hopes of economic prosperity and peace in the Gaza Strip after Israel withdrew settlers and troops from there have been systematically shattered as the Palestinian Authority failed to enforce law and order and provide basic services to 1.3 million Palestinians living in the tiny coastal strip.

Hundreds of dunams of agricultural land evacuated by Jewish settlers were expected to create as many as 4,000 jobs and generate millions of dollars in revenue. But corruption in the ranks of the company assigned the task of managing the land crippled the once rosy agriculture of Gush Katif and many of the land is now used as training bases by Palestinian groups.

'Let's admit we erred'

"We didn't succeed in preserving the victory of liberating Gaza. 500 people died in the Strip since the withdrawal, as opposed to 3-4 Israelis killed by rockets. The reality in Gaza today is one of neglect, sadness, and failure. When someone errs we are scared to criticize him to avoid being accused of being against the resistance," Hamad wrote.

"When efforts are made to open the Rafah border crossing to ease the humanitarian crisis, there is always someone who fires a rocket on the crossing. When we speak about a truce, there is always someone who fires another rocket."

Hamad appeals to leaders of Palestinian factions saying that resistance against Israel is worthless when "the land is full with anarchy, corruption, thuggery, and gang killings. Isn't building the homeland part of the resistance?"

He also criticized the phenomenon of kidnapping foreigners in Gaza. Two Fox News journalists kidnapped almost two weeks ago by Palestinian gunmen were released on Sunday.

Hamad said the phenomenon has become a "profitable business," charging that kidnappers of innocent foreigners apathetic to the harm their deeds cause to the Palestinian cause.

"Let's admit to our mistakes, let's do some logical soul searching and place the interest of our people before us and say honestly – We were right here and we erred there. Only then will we see that the faces of Gaza and the homeland changes," he concluded.

[Poverty. - Harold]

One Palestine, Complete

2006-09-01T11:50:00.000-04:00

I'm reading "One Palestine, Complete" by Tom Segev about the time when the British were ruling Palestine because of the League of Nations Mandate after WWI. I had never realized how much the British had to do with the Jews getting their "homeland". It wasn't that they all loved Jews. For the most part the British respected but feared the Jews and wanted them out of their hair, so a homeland for the Jews was a splendid idea. I never realized how much the "cultured" European Jews looked down their noses at the Palestinian, or native, Arabs and Jews at the time. It was Europe vs. the "Orient". The modern state of Israel was/is a European thing. The Zionists just had to have their way, no matter what. NO MATTER WHAT. Hence - alot of bad karma. The native (living in Palestine at the time), Jews didn't want it. The orthodox Jews at the time warned against it, saying it would only cause trouble.

Boy, were they ever right.

We reap what we sow.

Over time this thorn in the "Orient's" side has festered and swollen a large area around it. Hence Arab/Persian hatred of Israel.

Hopefully, once (if ever), the Israelis and the Palestinians can settle their land dispute, things will setle down.

Mr. Bush, Relax

2006-09-01T11:48:00.000-04:00

- from talkingpointsmemo.com:

(September 01, 2006 -- 09:10 AM EST // link)

"[Iran's] progress is far less than expected," said David Albright, a nuclear expert who is president of the Institute for Science and International Security. "Whether it's because of technical problems or self-restraint it's hard to gauge, but I don't think the U.S. can deliver on its promise to get hard sanctions when Iran is barely progressing."

There's still an issue here, a real one. The spread of nuclear weapons is against the interests of the United States and the creation of a viable global non-proliferation framework is very much in our interests. But there's no need for panic and paranoia, sentiments that are being fed in this country by a combination of GOP political needs and the fact that many of the Bush administration's leading lights just are panicky and paranoid in their approach to the world.

-- Matthew Yglesias

More Folks Without Health Insurance

2006-08-31T07:28:00.000-04:00

- from the Washington Post:

an Editorial

Health Care's Vicious Cycle

TUESDAY'S REPORT from the Census Bureau adds to the fear that the employer-based insurance system is in long-term decline. The share of people without medical insurance edged up from 15.6 percent in 2004 to 15.9 percent last year, bringing the number of uninsured to a record 46.6 million.

[Go read the rest. - Harold]

Two Lines From "Bring Em On" by John Hughes

2006-08-31T07:07:00.000-04:00

"Washington Deceit"

and

"How many lives to the gallon?"

@ http://www.johnhughes.ca/index2.html

Iran and Power

2006-08-30T23:13:00.000-04:00

~85% of Iranians do not support the Mullahs that rule them. I support their struggle for freedom. Imagine being ruled by the likes of Robertson, Falwell, and Dobson.

- so with that in mind:

- from tehrantimes.com:

August 31, 2006

Iran enjoys deterrent power

By B. Elmi

Iran’s access to some stronger power parameters will soon oblige the United States to share power with Iran and amend its expansionist policies.

On the threshold of the “Government Week” President Mahmud Ahmadinejad inaugurated the Arak heavy water nuclear plant in central Iran on August 26. This was another step forward in developing nuclear programs for civilian purposes in the country.

Access to the technology of producing heavy water automatically puts Iran on the list of the twelve countries which exclusively keep this technology at their own hand, and therefore weighs Iran’s position in the international power estimations.

[Go read the rest. - Harold]

Mr. Rumsfeld's and Ms. Rice's Moral and Intellectual Confusion

2006-08-30T06:55:00.000-04:00

- from the Washington Post:

Rumsfeld Assails Critics of War Policy

By Ann Scott Tyson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, August 30, 2006

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld warned yesterday that "moral and intellectual confusion" over the Iraq war and the broader anti-terrorism effort could sap American willpower and divide the country, and he urged renewed resolve to confront extremists waging "a new type of fascism."

Drawing parallels to efforts by some nations to appease Adolf Hitler before World War II, Rumsfeld said it would be "folly" for the United States to ignore the rising dangers posed by a new enemy that he called "serious, lethal and relentless."

In a pointed attack on the news media and critics of President Bush's war and national security policies, Rumsfeld declared: "Any kind of moral and intellectual confusion about who and what is right or wrong can severely weaken the ability of free societies to persevere."

Rumsfeld spoke at the American Legion's national convention in Salt Lake City as part of a coordinated defense of Bush leading up to the fifth anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Reviving images of the president's response to the strike on the World Trade Center in New York, Rumsfeld said, "He remains the same man who stood atop the rubble of Lower Manhattan, with a bullhorn, vowing to fight back."

With polls showing that a majority of Americans believe it was a mistake for the United States to invade Iraq and with many Democrats calling for a deadline for withdrawing U.S. troops, Rumsfeld called the Iraq war the "epicenter" of the struggle against terrorism. [Is it really? If it is, how did it get that way? The Sunni insurgents want power back. The shia are hell bent on revenge for what Saddam did to them. Kurdish rebels are fighting with the Turks and Iranians in the north. Most of the fighters are not foreigners, they are Iraqis. Iraqi's thank the USA for liberating them into the USA's war on terror. - Harold] Last week, Bush said that setting a timetable for a troop withdrawal would embolden the enemy and cause chaos in Iraq and throughout the region. [Our invasion didn't? - Harold]

Congressional Democrats angrily responded to Rumsfeld's remarks. "There is no confusion among military experts, bipartisan members of Congress and the overwhelming majority of the American people about the need to change course in Iraq," said Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.). "The only person confused about how to best protect this country is Don Rumsfeld, which is why he must go."

Jack Reed (D-R.I.), a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said he took exception to what he considered the implication that critics of the administration's military policies are unpatriotic. He noted that there are "scores of patriotic Americans of both parties who are highly critical" of Rumsfeld's handling of the Defense Department.

Rumsfeld obliquely acknowledged mistakes and setbacks in Iraq, quoting the French statesman Georges Clemenceau as calling all wars "a series of catastrophes that results in victory." Moreover, in a reference to recent charges of war crimes against U.S. troops in Iraq, Rumsfeld said that "in every army, there are occasionally bad actors -- the ones who dominate the headlines today -- who don't live up to the standards of their oath and of our country."

Rumsfeld stressed that it is misguided for Americans to fall into self-blame and to "return to the destructive view that America -- not the enemy -- is the real source of the world's trouble." He blamed the U.S. media for spreading "myths and distortions . . . about our troops and about our country."

He said a database search of U.S. newspapers produced 10 times as many mentions of a soldier punished for misconduct at Abu Ghraib prison than of Sgt. 1st Class Paul Ray Smith, a Medal of Honor recipient.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, addressing the same audience later, sounded similar themes. "The dream of some, that we could avoid this conflict, that we did not have to take sides in this battle in the Middle East, that dream was demolished on September the 11th," Rice said. [President Bush just said that Iraq had nothing to do with September the 11th. - Harold]

Rice said in a radio interview that "we cannot fall prey to pessimism about how this will all come out," adding that "the really devastating problem [As if the war in Iraq isn't "really" devastating already. - Harold] for the world would be if America loses its will."

© 2006 The Washington Post Company

Steady As She Goes

2006-08-27T12:48:00.000-04:00

by The Raconteurs

Find yourself a girl and settle down
Live a simple life in a quiet town

Steady as she goes (steady as she goes)
Steady as she goes (steady as she goes)

So steady as she goes

Your friends have shown a kink in the single life
You've had too much to think, now you need a wife

Steady as she goes (steady as she goes)
So steady as she goes (steady as she goes)

Well here we go again
You've found yourself a friend that knows you well
But no matter what you do
You'll always feel as though you tripped and fell

So steady as she goes

When you have completed what you thought you had to do
And your blood's depleted to the point of stable glue

Then you'll get along
Then you'll get along

Steady as she goes (steady as she goes)
So steady as she goes (steady as she goes)

Well here we go again
You've found yourself a friend that knows you well
But no matter what you do
You'll always feel as though you tripped and fell

So steady as she goes
Steady as she goes

Settle for a girl (settle for a girl), neither up or down (neither up or down)
Sell it to the crowd (sell it to the crowd) that is gathered round (that is gathered round)

Settle for a girl (settle for a girl), neither up or down (neither up or down)
Sell it to the crowd (sell it to the crowd) that is gathered round (that is gathered round)

So steady as she goes (steady as she goes)
Steady as she goes (steady as she goes)

Steady as she goes (steady as she goes)
So steady as she goes (steady as she goes)

Steady as she goes, are you steady now?
Steady as she goes, are you steady now?

Steady as she goes, are you steady now?
Steady as she goes, are you steady now?

Steady as she goes

[Good beat, and nice guitar work too - Harold]

Iran's Ahmadinejad and Khamenei Said

2006-08-27T12:08:00.000-04:00

~85% of Iranians do not support the Mullahs that rule them. I support their struggle for freedom. Imagine being ruled by the likes of Robertson, Falwell, and Dobson.

- so with that in mind:

- via Juan Cole's "Informed Comment" blog:

Ahmadinejad: "We are Not a Threat to Any Country, Including Israel."

Believe it, don't believe it, that's up to you. But at least we should know what exactly he said, which is not something our US newspapers will tell us about Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's speech on Saturday:

Kayhan reports that [Pres.] Ahmadinejad said, "Iran is not a threat to any country, and is not in any way a people of intimidation and aggression." He described Iranians as people of peace and civilization. He said that Iran does not even pose a threat to Israel, and wants to deal with the problem there peacefully, through elections:

"Weapons research is in no way part of Iran's program. Even with regard to the Zionist regime, our path to a solution is elections."

Ahmadinejad seems to be explaining what his calls for the Zionist regime to be effaced actually mean. He says he doesn't want violence against Israel, despite its own acts of enmity against Middle Eastern neighbors. I interpret his statement on Saturday to be an endorsement of the one-state solution, in which a government would be elected that all Palestinians and all Israelis would jointly vote for. The result would be a government about half made up of Israeli ministers and half of Palestinian ones. Whatever one wanted to call such an arrangement, it wouldn't exactly be a "Zionist state," which would thus have been dissolved.

The schlock Western pundits, journalists and politicians who keep maintaining that Ahmadinejad threatened "to wipe Israel off the map" when he never said those words will never, ever manage to choke out the words Ahmadinejad spoke on Saturday, much less repeat them as a tag line forever after.

Supreme Jurisprudent Khamenei's pledge of no first strike against any country by Iran with any kind of weapon, and his condemnation of nuclear bombs as un-Islamic and impossible for Iran to possess or use, was completely ignored by the Western press and is never referred to. Indeed, after all that talk of peace and no first strike and no nukes, Khamenei at the very end said that if Iran were attacked, it would defend itself. Karl Vicks of the Washington Post at the time ignored all the rest of the speech and made the headline, "Khamenei threatens reprisals against US." In other words, on Iran, the US public is being spoonfed agitprop, not news.

Although Iran's protestations of peaceful intentions are greeted cynically in the US and Israel, in fact Iran has not launched a war of aggression in over a century. The US and Israel have launched several during that period of time.

Ahmadinejad made the remarks in a speech inaugurating work on a heavy water nuclear reactor in Arak. I don't think that work is very advanced. The Iranians maintain that it is for peaceful energy generation.

Much of the electricity produced in France, South Korea and Japan is generated by nuclear plants.

posted by Juan @ 8/27/2006 06:36:00 AM

This Is Sad But True

2006-08-27T11:33:00.000-04:00

(for the most part)

I found this at talkingpointsmemo.com.

(August 26, 2006 -- 02:30 PM EST // link)

I have a friend, TPM Reader SC, who was is a former resident of New Orleans now living in Georgia. She lost her job, her apartment, and her cat to Katrina and the catastrophe that followed. I asked her what she most wanted people to understand about Katrina and its aftermath that they don't understand now:

"What to say about Katrina and the aftermath? I find I have a hard time saying anything, and I hope that doesn't sound overly dramatic.
I don't say much, because I just feel weighed down when I try, but I dream about it a lot. Every night so far this week, in fact. What I dream about is not my house or my job or anything like that, although my cat does show up sometimes because that guilt is alive and well. (And I really do miss that annoying little bastard.) I dream that I am leaving people.

You know, I really do have good memories of the Superdome and the convention center, almost all of them from college. Tulane football games down at the Dome; walking down the aisle of the convention center to get my diploma. But I don't understand how anyone can look at either of those two places ever again and not be shattered by the absolute abandonment of the poor by their government in the days after Katrina. Heck, who can look at the entire city and not think about that?

But I feel like the knowledge of that is slipping away somehow. I feel like people think oh, that's just in New Orleans, you know, that crazy banana republic down South. But you rip the lid off any major urban setting in this country the way the lid was ripped off N.O., and I think you get the same thing. But we aren't really talking about that. I think that Katrina proved that America has absolutely abandoned its underclass. We don't like poor people. And that serves up a big dollop of shame to go with my sorrow.

Yes, New Orleans was built in a f------up way in a f------up place. And yes, the local and state govt has done nothing at this point to get things -- anything -- going again. And yes, we need to knock some Corps of Engineers heads because of the levee situation (Congress never allocated the funds. - Harold) And yes, the insurance companies are screwing OLD PEOPLE every which way they can to get out of paying. And yes, Nagin is a jackass and Bush is a nincompoop.

I'm not saying we shouldn't talk about any of that. But sweet Jesus, how are we not talking about poverty and class? I can't watch that footage, I really can't. It tears me up.

I think individual Americans responded with amazing generosity after the storm; I think as an aggregate, though, we suck. Because, so far, we've been unwilling to look in the mirror of New Orleans and see what we have allowed to happen.

I hate this stupid anniversary."

-- TPM Reader DK

Think and Be Skeptical

2006-08-27T11:20:00.000-04:00

- via http://delong.typepad.com/ :

Media Matters - "Media Matters"; by Jamison Foser: Then head over to Philadelphia Inquirer reporter Dick Polman's blog. In June, Polman -- described by ABC News as "one of the finest political journalists of his generation" -- posted an explanation of what's wrong with [Weisman's] kind of journalism...

I don't feel that we should be content with passing along misinformation in "straight" stories. The reader deserves a full context, and that means politicians should be fact-checked -- a job that's relatively quick and easy to do, in the Google era. Providing accurate factual context is not "commentary." It's what "straight" reporting should be about.

It always helps to remember the lesson of Senator Joe McCarthy. The 1950s demagogue... was enabled at every step of the way by journalists who believed their job was to only report "what was said." McCarthy was a senator, therefore, if he said something (true or not), it was deemed news. When he made wild charges about 60 or 80 or 100 communists in the State Department, it was reported as news. The "fact" that he was making such charges was considered sufficient; as the New York Times wrote back then, after reviewing their own McCarthy coverage, "It is difficult, if not impossible, to ignore charges by Senator McCarthy just because they are usually proved false. The remedy lies with the reader."

Washington reporter Richard Rovere, in a book he wrote two years after the senator's death, complained about "the system that required (reporters) to publish 'news' they knew to be fraudulent but prohibited them from reporting their knowledge of its fradulence. [sic]"

In today's world, given the credibility problems that have plagued administrations of both parties, that "system" is not adequate. Nor was it then.

Power To The People!

2006-08-27T11:04:00.000-04:00

- from Brad Delong (talking about the House Republicans):

They didn't count on the fact that George W. Bush was such an idiot that he would make his presidency a failure in spite of 110% Republican support, and that the public would perceive the reality of the situation.

[Right On! - Harold]

Rep. Katherine Harris (R, Florida), Insane Christian

2006-08-27T10:30:00.000-04:00

She said, "If you are not electing Christians, tried and true, under public scrutiny and pressure, if you’re not electing Christians then in essence you are going to legislate sin. They can legislate sin. They can say that abortion is alright. They can vote to sustain gay marriage. And that will take western civilization, indeed other nations because people look to our country as one nation under God and whenever we legislate sin and we say abortion is permissible and we say gay unions are permissible, then average citizens who are not Christians, because they don’t know better, we are leading them astray and it’s wrong."

A Confused Israel

2006-08-27T10:16:00.000-04:00

- from Haaretz's opinion page:

Here is an excerpt from:

Fed up with the whiners
By Gideon Levy

"For the first time after many terrible years in which we killed and were killed for no reason, there are question marks hanging over the public discourse. That change should be welcomed. But those who examine the content of the new protest should not hold out great hopes. The arguments of the protesters come down to two main issues, both of them as narrow as the world of the reservist: the IDF wasn't prepared for the war, and the war was cut short.

On the first matter, many are responsible, and the second issue doesn't warrant protest. Much weightier and deeper questions hover in the air about why we even went to this war, how it could have been avoided, why is war our only language, what are the limits of power that can be used and where are we going now."

Did Hizbullah Capture Israeli Soldiers Inside Lebanon? - Part Two

2006-08-27T09:39:00.000-04:00

The militant group Hezbollah captured two Israeli soldiers during clashes Wednesday across the border in southern Lebanon, prompting a swift reaction from Israel, which sent ground forces into its neighbor to look for them. The forces were trying to keep the soldiers' captors from moving them deeper into Lebanon, Israeli government officials said on condition of anonymity. [Forbes 7/12/06]

The Lebanese Shiite Hezbollah movement announced on Wednesday that its guerrillas have captured two Israeli soldiers in southern Lebanon. "Implementing our promise to free Arab prisoners in Israeli jails, our strugglers have captured two Israeli soldiers in southern Lebanon," a statement by Hezbollah said. "The two soldiers have already been moved to a safe place," it added. The Lebanese police said that the two soldiers were captured as they "infiltrated" into the town of Aitaa al-Chaab inside the Lebanese border. [Hindustan Times 7/12/06]

The Lebanese Hezbollah movement announced Wednesday the arrest of two Israeli soldiers in southern Lebanon. Lebanese police said that the two soldiers were arrested as they entered the town of Aitaa al-Chaab inside the Lebanese border. Israeli aircraft were active in the air over southern Lebanon, police said, with jets bombing roads leading to the market town of Nabatiyeh, 60 kilometers south of Beirut. [Bahrain News Agency 7/12/06]

TRANSLATION: According to the Lebanese police force, the two soldiers were captured in Lebanese territory, in the area of Aïta Al-Chaab close to the border, whereas Israeli television indicated that they had been captured in Israeli territory. [fr.news.yahoo 7/12/06]

It all started on July 12 when Israel troops were ambushed on Lebanon's side of the border with Israel. Hezbollah, which commands the Lebanese south, immediately seized on their crossing. They arrested two Israeli soldiers, killed eight Israelis and wounded over 20 in attacks inside Israeli territory. [Asia Times 7/15/06]

[How many people know about the possibility that the Israeli soldiers were caught inside Lebanon? This seems to be a very important point that the MSM is overlooking. What is the true story? - Harold]

Even More So Today

2006-08-25T09:17:00.000-04:00

- from Shakespeare:

"What a piece of work is man! How noble in reason! how infinite in faculties! in form and moving, how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension, how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals!"

For What It's Worth

2006-08-25T08:44:00.000-04:00

- also from http://turcopolier.typepad.com/sic_semper_tyrannis/

"Lebanese Public Opinion"

"What do Lebanese want? Lebanese Public Opinion. Well, there is a new public opinion survey released by the Beirut Center Quite revealing. 72 % of Lebanese believe that the resistance (a reference to Hizbullah) came out victorious from this war (70.8% of Sunnis; 96.3% of Shi`ites; 62.8% of Druzes; and 59.7% of Christians. To the question "Was the Israeli war on Lebanon due to the capture of two Israeli soldiers or to a premeditated plan, 84.6% of Lebanese believed it was due to a premeditated plan (81% of Sunnis; 97.2% of Shi`ites; 76.7% of Druzes; and 79.7% of Christians). 25.5% of Lebanese believe in the possibility of "peace with Israel" (21.3% of Sunnis; 1.9% of Shi`ites; 32.6% of Druzes; and 41.9% of Christians.)"
----------------------------------------------------------------
I received the above polling data from the "Beirut Center" today through my friend Lubnani. Additional data on recent polling can be found at their website below. I have no particular insight into the validity of this poll.

Pat Lang

http://www.beirutcenter.info/default.asp?contentid=692&MenuID=46

23 August 2006

Invade Iran Anyone?

2006-08-25T08:40:00.000-04:00

- from Pat Lang at http://turcopolier.typepad.com/sic_semper_tyrannis/

Pete Hoekstra and a new Snow Job.

"The Washington Post said the House of Representatives' intelligence committee report backed the White House position that Tehran was developing a nuclear weapons program that posed a significant danger to the US, but it chided the intelligence community for not providing enough direct evidence to support that assertion.

"American intelligence agencies do not know nearly enough about Iran's nuclear weapons program" to help policy-makers at a critical time, the report said.

Information "regarding potential Iranian chemical weapons and biological weapons programs is neither voluminous nor conclusive", and little evidence had been gathered to tie Iran to al-Qa'ida and the fighting between Israel and Hezbollah, it said. The report warns the US intelligence community to avoid the mistakes made regarding weapons of mass destruction before the Iraq war, noting that Iran could easily be engaged in "a denial and deception campaign to exaggerate progress on its nuclear program as Saddam Hussein apparently did concerning his WMD programs". " Washpost

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Out of sight!

The last quotation is the best. "as Saddam Hussein apparently did concerning his WMD programs." Right!! SH sought to "deceive" the world by not admitting that he no longer had any such capability." Yup. He fooled the US government and made us believe he still had capabilities that he did not have. No? Where is the evidence that he had such capabilities? The pitiful 20 year old stocks of artillery shells that someone has dug up and that the desperate (like Santorum) want you to believe were a threat to the US armed forces or the United States itself. By the way, I think Santorum is probably going to be elected, a commentary on Pennsylvania.

This 29 page retort from the House Intelligence Committee is so obvious a "stage setter" for another attack on the credibility of the Intelligence Community that this is just absurd.

The intelligence products that were used to justify the Iraq War were truly an intelligence failure as were the failed policy decisions and pressure that led to those documents.

What went wrong in the Intelligence Community?

1-Rotten leadership at the top that was both political and self-serving. (Tenet and Jacoby)

2-Unremitting neocon pressure on analysts and intelligence managers to "support policy" by finding evidence, however flimsy, to support PR campaigns against the American citizenry.

This kind of pressure against the analysts, which never demands a re-write, but always demands a re-consideration of unfavored views inevitably leads to the desired result if intelligence and policy leadership do not halt it.

By the way, the emphasis on "media management " and internal propaganda has continued unabated. Today, even formerly respectable military officers accept the concept of "information operations" directed at the American people. Such operations continue apace with the eager cooperation of the corporate media.

The various committees, boards, etc., who declared that no one had been pressured? Give me a break.. The Republicans like Roberts and those who wanted to curry favor were careful to interview officers in such a way as to make it clear that one could not entrust one's fate to such people. In some cases the witnesses had been reminded by senior leadership before their testimony that they had not been "pressured."

So, now it has come again, the "beast that walks." The principal author of this report was John Bolton's assistant in the State Department when the first "snow job" was underway. What new discoveries about Iran will be the product of such pressure?

Pat Lang

Judge Taylor's Opinion

2006-08-25T08:17:00.000-04:00

- from Intel Dump:

[J.D. Henderson, Wednesday August 23, 2006 at 11:08am EST]

Today's NYT's carries an editorial about how bad Judge Taylor's opinion was. It reads in part:

Immensely difficult matters of First and Fourth Amendment law, separation of powers, and the relationship between the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and the Authorization for Use of Military Force are disposed of in short sections that jump from assorted quotations of old cases to conclusory assertions of illegality. Orin S. Kerr, a law professor at George Washington, told The Times that the section on the Fourth Amendment is “just a few pages of general ruminations ... much of it incomplete and some of it simply incorrect.”

Sounds damning. Except... Immensely difficult matters of First and Fourth Amendment law, separation of powers, and the relationship between the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and the Authorization for Use of Military Force? Really? Immensely difficult?

No. Immensely SIMPLE matters, not difficult. That perhaps reveals why I am in the (very tiny) minority here that finds the opinion well-reasoned. This false argument that a president who admits to violating FISA on the grounds he has the inherent authority to ignore laws he doesn't like explains why so many find the opinion poorly reasoned. Judge Taylor made short shrift of the administration's ridiculous argument, and that upset many people who thought the issues were more complicated and that only lawyers like themselves could understand the nuances of this "complicated" issue.

But they were not difficult matters. They were as simple as I have just laid out. The president admits breaking the law, but says he can do so because of two reasons: 1) inherent powers, and 2) the AUMF. Judge Taylor said no to both. For this she is chastised for poor analytical ability because she did not find the question "immensely difficult?"

Did disposing of his monarchial claims of being above the law really require much at all? The editorial continues:
The potential for the president to abuse his power has nothing to do with kings and heredity. (How much power do hereditary kings have these days, anyway?) And, indeed, the president is not claiming he has powers outside of the Constitution. He isn’t arguing that he’s above the law. He’s making an aggressive argument about the scope of his power under the law.
Really? His claims of inherent executive power that trumps the 4th Amendment and a criminal statute passed by Congress do not have anything to do with kings? The mere potential of presidential abuse of power has nothing to do with the power of a king? Why the hell not? Weren't the checks on the executive branch designed precisely because of the tyranny of kings? And if he isn't arguing that he is above the law, what do we make of the claim that he can ignore FISA (A LAW) because of his "inherent" powers as president? Isn't that a claim that he is above the law? Isn't that the very argument he is making?

It is a serious argument, and judges need to take it seriously. If they do not, we ought to wonder why a court gets to decide what the law is and not the president.
No. Not really. I guess I should have hundreds of citations and pages of exhaustive analysis that support my radical idea that the president can not ignore laws because he doesn't like them. But I won't. Why? Because it is not a serious argument, and judges don't need to entertain nonsense or waste time on foolishness. That does not mean that Judge Taylor ignored the argument, she just found it very simple to dispose of, and did so quickly. That does not at all mean that the opinion was poorly reasoned, and those who buy this argument must assume it was more difficult to dispose of the administration's "immensely difficult" position.

Why would the administration want people to think their position might be right? After all, this same editorial pointed out

After all, the president has a sworn duty to uphold the Constitution; he has his advisers, and they’ve concluded that the program is legal. Why should the judicial view prevail over the president’s?

Because then the obvious lawbreaking can be attributed to a mere misunderstanding of immensenly difficult law, that is why. No need to impeach somebody for breaking a law that is immensely difficult to understand.

The biggest fear of this administration must be that the Supreme Court finds the administration's argument just as easy to dispose of - for then the claim of a simple misunderstanding of "immensely difficult" points of nuanced legalese becomes untenable. We would have instead just what Judge Taylor found: a simple law, a clear Constitutional command, and an obvious and blatant violation of both.

The author of the NTY editorial writes on her blog:

It's hard to understand why a judge writing an opinion in such a high-profile case, dealing with such difficult law, would not put immense effort into creating an outward appearance of heavy scholarly effort and pristine neutrality.
Perhaps because it was simply not difficult? Perhaps because "heavy scholarly effort" would distract from the real issue, a president attempting to justify law-breaking with claims of monarchial power?

Today it came out that the judge is part of a charitable group that donated money to the ACLU. The NYT said

But even some supporters of it took issue with the reasoning, and Republicans said political motives drove the judge, whom President Jimmy Carter had nominated to the federal bench.
Well, if Carter appointed her she must be partisan, right? But if she is partisan because she was appointed by Carter, does that mean the only "fair" judges could be Reagan or Bush I or II appointees? As far as her belonging to a charity that donated money to the ACLU, judges routinely work for civil and nonprofit groups, including many that may finance or have ties to parties that come before them in court. That does not create a conflict of interest, not even close. For instance, if a Bush apointee was hearing the case, shouldn't they recuse themselves? After all, they were politically connected enough with the administration and the republican party to get an appointment to the federal bench. Doesn't this mean that only Carter or Clinton appointees could hear the case? But the critics just said this judge was politically driven because she was appointed by Carter over a quarter-century ago. Hmmm....

Methinks the pundits doth protest too much.

The talk of poor reasoning or "difficult" legal issues is a smokescreen that attempts to make it seem reasonable that the president could have knowingly violated a criminal statute in violation of the Constitution - in short, the pundits and the administration want to convince you that if the president did commit a felony (he did), well, it was a simple mistake due to the immensely complicated law involved here. No need to fear tyranny or talk of impeachment if all that occurred was a violation of some immense, difficult-to-decipher law that few if any could understand. The president can shrug his shoulders and say "well, if I was wrong, I didn't know it at the time, and I wasn't going to stop fighting the war on terror just because some difficult law might be violated. We weren't sure, we discussed it, my lawyers said go ahead, and I did. NOW that I know it was not allowed, we will stop the program." And all America says "well, gee, that's understandable. I would have done the same thing."

That immensely complicated law was exceedingly simple. The law said get a warrant. The president said he did not have to follow that law. Judge Taylor said no way.

It didn't take a legal treatise to explain why Bush was wrong, and the arguments against this opinion are based on a flawed premise that this was a difficult decision that required heavy scholarly effort.

It did not.

Don't believe the blogosphere. This was a short and simple opinion on a very easy question, and to expect anything else means you think the president might have had a tenable position and the judge should have spent pages and pages analyzing his claims.

He is not a king, and thus his arguments are quickly disposed of, as they were in Judge Taylor's opinion - an opinion that was well-written despite what you hear from the critics.

Pluto

2006-08-25T06:56:00.000-04:00

The world's astronomers have now determined that Pluto is not a planet. They have reclassified it as a dwarf planet. There are now only eight planets in our solar system. Who says life is boring?

It's About Time

2006-08-25T06:49:00.000-04:00

- from the Washington Post:

FDA Approves Plan B's Over-the-Counter Sale

No Prescription Will Be Required for Women 18 or Older

By Rob Stein
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, August 25, 2006

By the end of the year, American women will be able to walk into any pharmacy and buy emergency contraceptive pills without a prescription as a result of a Food and Drug Administration decision announced yesterday.

The decision means women will not have to go to a doctor first as long as they can prove they are 18 or older to a pharmacist, who will keep the drugs behind a counter. Younger teenagers will still need a prescription, and the pills will not be sold at gas stations, convenience stores or other outlets that do not have pharmacists.

The approval marks the first time a hormonal contraceptive will be broadly available in the United States without a prescription. The pills, which will be sold as Plan B, will probably cost about $25 to $40 per dose, and men will also be able to buy them.

[Go read the rest. - Harold]

I Don't Think So Mr. President

2006-08-24T07:08:00.000-04:00

- from Abu Aardvark, 23 Aug 2006

"what the Iraqi people want"

In yesterday's press conference, President Bush insisted that there would be no withdrawal of American troops from Iraq as long as he was president. He gave a long, scattered list of reasons. Among them was a claim put forward in a number of different ways that boiled down to this: "it's what the Iraqi people want."

Really?

Mark Tessler and Mansoor Moaddel recently released some of the data from their latest survey of Iraqi public opinion. As reported in US News, this survey revealed that

The growing sense of insecurity affected all three of Iraq's major ethnic and religious groups. The number of Iraqis who "strongly agreed" that life is "unpredictable and dangerous" jumped from 41% to 48% of Shiites, from 67% to 79% of Sunnis, and from 16% to 50% of Kurds. The most recent survey, done in April this year, also asked for "the three main reasons for the U.S. invasion of Iraq." Less than 2% chose "to bring democracy to Iraq" as their first choice. The list was topped by "to control Iraqi oil" (76%), followed by "to build military bases" (41%) and "to help Israel" (32%).

The survey also asked a direct question about the presence of American troops in Iraq (which for some reason was not included either in Kaplan's story or in the University of Michigan press release). Tessler kindly provided me with a short write-up of the data, forthcoming in the TAARI Newsletter.

The bottom line: 91.7% of Iraqis oppose the presence of coalition troops in the country, up from 74.4% in 2004. 84.5% are "strongly opposed". Among Sunnis, opposition to the US presence went from 94.5% to 97.9% (97.2% "strongly opposed"). Among Shia, opposition to the US presence went from 81.2% to 94.6%, with "strongly opposed" going from 63.5% to 89.7%. Even among the Kurds, opposition went from 19.6% to 63.3%. In other words, it isn't just that Iraqis oppose the American presence - it's that their feelings are intense: only 7.2% "somewhat oppose" and 4.7% "somewhat support."

Maybe there are reasons for keeping American troops in Iraq, but "it's what the Iraqi people want" really doesn't seem to be one of them.

Posted on August 23, 2006 at 02:33 PM

[Believe the President? - Harold]

Excuses, Excuses

2006-08-23T06:41:00.000-04:00

-from the Washington Post:

Israel Shelves Plan to Pull Out Of Settlements In West Bank

By Doug Struck
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, August 23, 2006

JERUSALEM, Aug. 22 -- The Israeli government's plan to dismantle some Jewish settlements in the West Bank and redraw the country's borders is being shelved at least temporarily, a casualty of the war in Lebanon, government officials said.

[Go read the rest. - Harold]

Scott Ritter

2006-08-22T23:27:00.000-04:00

was right about Iraq.

Read his book "Endgame", and "War on Iraq: What Team Bush Doesn’t Want You To Know", mostly an interview between Scott Ritter and anti-war activist William Rivers Pitt. Pitt wrote the book.

- from "War on Iraq: What Team Bush Doesn't Want You to Know"

Ritter: "There’s no doubt Iraq hasn’t fully complied with its disarmament obligations as set forth by the Security Council in its resolution. But on the other hand, since 1998 Iraq has been fundamentally disarmed: 90-95% of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction capacity has been verifiably eliminated… We have to remember that this missing 5-10% doesn’t necessarily constitute a threat… It constitutes bits and pieces of a weapons program which in its totality doesn’t amount to much, but which is still prohibited… We can’t give Iraq a clean bill of health, therefore we can’t close the book on their weapons of mass destruction. But simultaneously, we can’t reasonably talk about Iraqi non-compliance as representing a de-facto retention of a prohibited capacity worthy of war.

We eliminated the nuclear program, and for Iraq to have reconstituted it would require undertaking activities that would have been eminently detectable by intelligence services.

If Iraq were producing [chemical] weapons today, we’d have proof, pure and simple.

[A]s of December 1998 we had no evidence Iraq had retained biological weapons, nor that they were working on any. In fact, we had a lot of evidence to suggest Iraq was in compliance."

Requiem For New Orleans

2006-08-22T23:17:00.000-04:00

I just got done watching parts' three and four of Spike Lee's requiem for New Orleans, "When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts". I watched parts' one and two last night. It's almost been one year since Katrina devastated the gulf coast. The flooding of New Orleans was a sad, terrible tragedy. It did not have to happen. I thought Spike was basically fair.

Congress does control the money though. "They knew it could happen. They let it happen." Congress never allocated the money to beef up the levees and flood walls so that they could withstand a category four or five hurricane. (still hasn't) I feel that if you give the US Army Corps of Engineers (partnering with private industry), enough funding they can build flood walls like the Netherlands has. But if Congress doesn't want to spend the money on it and the state doesn't have the money, nothing strong enough will get built.

Priorities.

When you can't use the roads for days due to flooding, it would be very helpful to have enough helicopters for water, food, ice, tents, medicine, and clothing (etc.), drops. (More boats too)

Interesting facts I learned:

1)Holes had been made in levees to keep the French Quarter dry in 1965 when Hurricane Betsy hit and for earlier storms too. (So it is not unreasonable for New Orleans' residents to think that that happened this time too.)

2)Louisiana gets no share of revenue from oil platforms that are more than three miles off their coast.

Another thing to remember is that Hurricane Katrina was powerful enough to lift numerous low-lying sections of the I-10 double span bridge, that crosses the east side of Lake Pontchartrain, off their pedestals and dump them in the water like so many playing cards.

Last, but not least: When you are told to evacuate, and you are able,

evacuate!

Unanticipated Tax Receipts

2006-08-22T16:07:00.000-04:00

Tax Receipts Reduce 2006 Deficit Forecast

By Jonathan Weisman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, August 18, 2006

A surge of unanticipated tax receipts will push this year's deficit down to $260 billion, a $58 billion improvement on last year's red ink. But the deficit will begin to rise again next year and will improve substantially only if President Bush's tax cuts are allowed to expire, the Congressional Budget Office said yesterday.

[Go read the rest. - Harold]

Impeach Bush Now

2006-08-19T10:41:00.000-04:00

-from UPI:

Judge rules NSA spying unconstitutional

DETROIT, Aug. 17 (UPI) -- The Bush administration said it would appeal a U.S. District judge's ruling that intercepting communications without a warrant was unconstitutional.

White House Press Secretary Tony Snow said the White House "couldn't disagree more" with the ruling by U.S. District Judge Anna Diggs Taylor and would seek an immediate stay of the order that would allow the National Security Agency program to continue while the appeal is litigated.

Both sides agreed to allow the program to hold off on enforcing the judge's ruling for the time being, so the warrantless eavesdropping will presumably continue.

Diggs, sitting in federal court in Detroit, ruled Thursday that the NSA's Terrorist Surveillance Program should be halted immediately. She said plaintiffs from the legal, academic and journalism field had proven that the program was harmful to them and violated the U.S. Constitution.

"The public interest is clear in this matter," she ruled. "It is the upholding of our Constitution."

Snow responded that the program was on firm legal ground and that the program was a vital weapon in the war on terrorism.

Stability and Democracy

2006-08-19T10:32:00.000-04:00

-from billmon.org's Whiskey Bar:

Stability

"The first reaction, of course, of Hezbollah and its supporters is, declare victory. I guess I would have done the same thing if I were them. But sometimes it takes people a while to come to the sober realization of what forces create stability and which don't. Hezbollah is a force of instability."

George W. Bush
Remarks to the Press
August 18, 2006

"For 60 years, my country, the United States, pursued stability at the expense of democracy in this region here in the Middle East -- and we achieved neither. Now, we are taking a different course."

Condoleezza Rice
Speech at the American University of Cairo
June 20, 2005

So instability is good, but Hizbullah is a force for instability, which is bad. But Hizbullah lost the war, which is good, so it can't be a force for instability any more, which could be bad or good, depending on what day of the week it is and whether or not Shrub has been hitting the sauce again.

So I guess it's a win/win situation.

"The bottom line, which an odd member of the punditburo might even reach one of these days, is that this is an administration that no longer makes any sense at all -- not even on the most formal, semiotic level."

Whiskey Bar
Facts on the Ground
August 15, 2006

Posted by billmon at 06:14 PM on 18 Aug 2006

Ceasefire?

2006-08-19T10:16:00.000-04:00

-from Reuters:

Israel raid in Lebanon tests U.N. truce
Sat Aug 19, 2006 05:51 AM ET

By Nadim Ladki

BEIRUT (Reuters) - Helicopter-borne Israeli commandos raided a Hizbollah bastion in eastern Lebanon on Saturday in the first major attack since a U.N.-backed truce halted Israel's 34-day war with the Shi'ite Muslim group.

Lebanese security sources said three Hizbollah guerillas were killed in a firefight. The Israeli army said it had suffered one dead and two wounded.

The security sources said commandos in two vehicles unloaded from helicopters were on their way to attack an office of senior Hizbollah official Sheikh Mohammed Yazbek in the village of Bodai when they were intercepted. After the gunbattle, the Israelis pulled out under cover of fierce air strikes.

Israel said the raid aimed to disrupt arms supplies to Hizbollah from Syria and Iran. Both deny arming the group.

"Special forces carried out an operation to disrupt terror actions against Israel with an emphasis on the transfer of munitions from Syria and Iran to Hizbollah," Israel's army said.

Bodai is 15 km (9miles) northwest of the ancient city of Baalbek and 26 km (16 miles) from the Syrian border.

The Israeli raid coincided with a Lebanese army drive to tighten its grip on the border with Syria. Thousands of troops deployed on the eastern border on Saturday, security sources said. Hundreds deployed on the northern frontier on Friday.

Nevertheless, the Israeli Foreign Ministry said continued Hizbollah arms shipments and the absence of Lebanese and international troops on the border had made the raid necessary.

"The ceasefire in Lebanon is based on U.N. Security Council resolution 1701 which calls for a total international arms embargo on Hizbollah," said Foreign Ministry spokesman Mark Regev.

"Israel reserves the right to act in order to enforce the spirit of the resolution."

LEBANESE COMPLAINT

Lebanese Foreign Minister Fawzi Salloukh said he had complained about the assault to U.N. envoys Terje Roed-Larsen and Vijay Nambiar during talks in Beirut about the truce.

"We asked them to convey a question to Israel: how is it going to stick by resolution 1701 while it is trying to breach it at any moment?" Salloukh told reporters.

The resolution adopted on August 11 ordered a "cessation of hostilities" that took effect on Monday, halting a war in which at least 1,183 people in Lebanon and 157 Israelis were killed.

It ordered Israel to end "all offensive military actions" and Hizbollah to end all attacks. It also called for an embargo on arms supplies not authorized by the Lebanese government and for the deployment of the Lebanese army in the south alongside a strengthened UNIFIL, the U.N. peacekeeping force in the area.

Fifty French military engineers arrived at UNIFIL's main base in Naqoura on the south Lebanese coast, the first contingent of reinforcements since the war.

The engineers were among 200 pledged by France, which has disappointed U.N. and U.S. hopes that it would form the backbone of the expanded U.N. force to supervise the truce, support the Lebanese army and monitor the withdrawal of Israeli troops.

The United States urged France on Friday to increase its contingent and the United Nations appealed for Europeans to contribute to the force to create a balance between Western and Muslim troops acceptable to Israel and Lebanon.

The United Nations wants to field an advance force of 3,500 troops by September 2 and the entire complement of 13,000 extra troops by November 4, as authorized by the U.N. resolution.

The Lebanese army began deploying in the south on Thursday. Hizbollah fighters have lain low, without relinquishing their weapons, including the rockets they rained on Israel in the war.

U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan urged Israel and Lebanon to make "painful compromises" to win the release of captured Israeli soldiers and settle the issue of Lebanese prisoners.

The war began after Hizbollah snatched two Israeli soldiers in a cross-border raid on July 12, saying it wanted to trade them for Lebanese and Arab prisoners held in Israel.

Last week's U.N. resolution called for the unconditional release of the two Israelis and urgently encouraged efforts at settling the issue of Lebanese prisoners in Israel.

In the occupied West Bank, Israel seized Palestinian Deputy Prime Minister Naser al-Shaer of the ruling Hamas militant group at his home on Saturday, his wife and two legislators said.

A Palestinian gunman shot dead an Israeli soldier in the West Bank on Saturday, the Israeli army said.

Israel has taken more than two dozen Hamas lawmakers and several other cabinet ministers into custody since late June, after it launched an offensive in response to the capture of a soldier in a cross-border raid from the Gaza Strip.

(Additional reporting by Jerusalem and U.N. bureaux)

-and from The Washington Post:

Israel Re-Enters Lebanon, Battles Hezbollah

By Edward Cody

Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, August 19, 2006; 9:58 AM

BEIRUT, Aug 19. -- Helicopter-borne Israeli commandos raided a Bekaa Valley stronghold of the Hezbollah militia early Saturday in the first major violation of a six-day-old cease-fire.

Hezbollah, which battled the Israeli military for 33 days until a truce took hold Aug. 14, said its fighters encountered the Israeli commandos near the town of Boudai and engaged them in a fierce gun battle, inflicting casualties and driving them off.

The Israeli military, confirming the raid, said its commandos carried out the operation as part of an effort to prevent resupply of Hezbollah with weapons and munitions from Iran and Syria. It said one Israeli officer was killed and two soldiers were wounded, one seriously.

There was no immediate reaction from Hezbollah. But Lebanese immediately worried that the militant Shiite Muslim movement would retaliate, risking a chain of cease-fire violations that could result in resumption of the devastating war that drove nearly a fourth of Lebanon's inhabitants from their homes and inflicted an estimated $3.6 billion in damage to bridges, roads and other infrastructure.

In accepting the cease-fire, the Hezbollah leader, Hasan Nasrallah, warned that Hezbollah reserved the right to attack Israelis as long as they remained on Lebanese soil. At the same time, the Israeli government declared it reserved the right to respond to attacks and prevent resupply of Hezbollah guerrilla units in the southern border hills until an international force is in place.

"Until proper monitoring bodies are established on the Lebanese border, such operations will continue," an Israeli military spokesman said.

"Whenever we have knowledge of weapons being transferred to Hezbollah, it's our duty to stop it," said another Israeli official, speaking on condition of anonymity. "Since no one was doing it we have the obligation to stop it. We have an obligation to defend our people."

The official said the raid was conducted after Israel received intelligence indicated arms were moving from Iran through Syria. "If we have knowledge that cargo is being distributed or supplied by Iran, we will continue to intercept it," he said.

The Lebanese prime minister, Fuad Siniora, described the raid as a "flagrant violation" of the U.N. cease-fire and his foreign minister, Fawzi Salloukh, registered a complaint with visiting U.N. officials in Beirut.

Boudai, which lies in the foothills of the Mt. Lebanon chain about 10 miles northwest of Baalbek and more than 60 miles north of the border, has long been known as a Hezbollah stronghold. Local officials speculated to local journalists that a senior Hezbollah leader, Sheik Mohammed Yazbek, may have been the commandos' target.

The Israeli special forces drove toward Boudai in two vehicles that apparently were transported into Lebanon in helicopters, they said. When challenged, the Israeli soldiers identified themselves as Lebanese army troops but the ruse failed and Hezbollah defenders opened fire, they added.

Hezbollah militia fighters found bloody bandages and syringes on the ground after the battle, leading them to conclude the Israelis suffered casualties. Hezbollah, on its Al Manar television, reported a number of Israeli casualties but did not say whether they were killed or wounded.

Lebanese security officials told the Reuters news agency that three Hezbollah fighters were killed and a half-dozen Israelis were killed or wounded, but Hezbollah did not confirm the toll.

Correspondent Doug Struck in Jerusalem contributed to this report.

© 2006 The Washington Post Company

Malcom X Said

2006-08-19T10:02:00.000-04:00

"You're not to be so blind with patriotism that you can't face reality. Wrong is wrong, no matter who does it or says it."

Dear George W. Bush,

2006-08-19T09:36:00.000-04:00

"Repetition does not transform a lie into a truth."

Franklin D. Roosevelt

Bush Still Wants to Phase Out Social Security

2006-08-18T18:50:00.000-04:00

from talkingpointsmemo.com again:

(August 17, 2006 -- 04:17 PM EST // link)
President Bush again pledges more action on phasing out Social Security.

From today's bill signing ...

"Now is the time to move; now is the time to do our duty. I'm going to continue to work with the Congress and call on the Congress to work with the administration to reform [Social Security and Medicare] so we can ensure a secure retirement for all Americans."

-- Josh Marshall

Easy, Easy

2006-08-18T18:01:00.000-04:00

This is from talkingpointsmemo.com.

(August 18, 2006 -- 01:15 AM EST // link)
As we've said so many times before, things can always get worse.

From The Guardian ...

"Turkey and Iran have dispatched tanks, artillery and thousands of troops to their frontiers with Iraq during the past few weeks in what appears to be a coordinated effort to disrupt the activities of Kurdish rebel bases.
Scores of Kurds have fled their homes in the northern frontier region after four days of shelling by the Iranian army. Local officials said Turkey had also fired a number of shells into Iraqi territory.
...

Frustrated by the reluctance of the US and the government in Baghdad to crack down on the PKK bases inside Iraq, Turkish generals have hinted they are considering a large-scale military operation across the border. They are said to be sharing intelligence about Kurdish rebel movements with their Iranian counterparts.

The Israelis have deep ties to the Kurds. And they'd probably like to help them tangle with the Iranians. But Israel also has a key alliance with Turkey. So that might present some problems. David Frum thinks we should withdraw to the Kurdish north and make our stand there too. So Kurdistan should be a lot of fun for everyone."

-- Josh Marshall

More On UK Terror Plot

2006-08-18T10:32:00.000-04:00

Via Kevin Drum @ the Washington Monthly:

So: just how easy is it to mix up those precursors and blow up a plane? The Register's Thomas Greene provides would-be terrorists with their marching orders:

"Don't forget to bring several frozen gel-packs (preferably in a Styrofoam chiller deceptively marked "perishable foods"), a thermometer, a large beaker, a stirring rod, and a medicine dropper. You're going to need them.

It's best to fly first class and order Champagne. The bucket full of ice water, which the airline ought to supply, might possibly be adequate — especially if you have those cold gel-packs handy to supplement the ice, and the Styrofoam chiller handy for insulation — to get you through the cookery without starting a fire in the lavvie.

Once the plane is over the ocean, very discreetly bring all of your gear into the toilet. You might need to make several trips to avoid drawing attention. Once your kit is in place, put a beaker containing the peroxide / acetone mixture into the ice water bath (Champagne bucket), and start adding the acid, drop by drop, while stirring constantly. Watch the reaction temperature carefully. The mixture will heat, and if it gets too hot, you'll end up with a weak explosive. In fact, if it gets really hot, you'll get a premature explosion possibly sufficient to kill you, but probably no one else.

After a few hours — assuming, by some miracle, that the fumes haven't overcome you or alerted passengers or the flight crew to your activities — you'll have a quantity of TATP with which to carry out your mission. Now all you need to do is dry it for an hour or two.

The genius of this scheme is that TATP is relatively easy to detonate. But you must make enough of it to crash the plane, and you must make it with care to assure potency. One needs quality stuff to commit "mass murder on an unimaginable scale," as Deputy Police Commissioner Paul Stephenson put it. While it's true that a slapdash concoction will explode, it's unlikely to do more than blow out a few windows. At best, an infidel or two might be killed by the blast, and one or two others by flying debris as the cabin suddenly depressurizes, but that's about all you're likely to manage under the most favorable conditions possible."

There's more at the link. The good news is that it will make you feel a little more confident about the safety of flying overseas. The bad news is that it will make you feel a little less confident about the terror announcements of our national governments. Caveat emptor.

Did Hizbullah Capture Israeli Soldiers Inside Lebanon?

2006-08-18T08:30:00.000-04:00

I found this at the Republic Broadcasting Network:

Initial news reports from international wire services, based on a Lebanese police report, however, clearly indicate that the two Israeli soldiers were not kidnapped at all, but captured - inside Lebanon - after having crossed the border and infiltrated the Lebanese village of Aitaa al-Chaab. Furthermore, these first reports have not been retracted or proven false.

Indeed, the story that the Israeli soldiers were captured in Lebanon was reported by a number of leading international press services, including the German news agency (DPA), AFP from France, AP and UPI. This version of events, however, is never mentioned by the Zionist-controlled mass media outlets in the U.S.

and at www.globalresearch.ca:

Who Really Started the War Against Lebanon?
A team of Israeli lawyers are suing the Lebanese government for starting the war

by Trish Schuh

August 15, 2006
GlobalResearch.ca

A team of Israeli lawyers are suing the Lebanese government for starting the war. The projected multi-million dollar case, to be filed in US civil court, will sue for compensation and war damages incurred by Israeli residents and businesses. Attorneys Yehudah Talmon, Yoram Dantziger and Nitzah Libai claim the Lebanese government violated international law because it didn't stop Hezbollah's casus belli cross-border raid into Israel.

The contested justification for Israel's 'self-defense' invasion, and the location of its original provocation will take on new legal significance in coming months. Who infiltrated who, and on what territory did the initial capture of the IDF soldiers occur? Differing press accounts that the capture occurred in Lebanon- not Israel- are now widely known: AFP, Hindustan Times, Deutsche Press Agentur, Asia Times, Bahrain News Agency and Voltairenet are a few. Others reflect changes of direction in the recording of basic facts.

Newsweek's Michael Hirsh of MSNBC.com on July 12 said: "As a result, things are blowing up so quickly it's difficult to know where to focus any longer. After the kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers by Hizbullah in Lebanon on Wednesday, which the hard-line group linked to a similar kidnapping by Hamas the week before, the mideast seemed to be closer to all-out war."

By July 13, the story out of MSNBC.com's Jerusalem bureau was different. In a piece titled "Crisis allows Israel to pursue strategic goals- Kidnappings give Israel excuse to neutralize Hamas, Hezbollah", Jerusalem bureau chief Steven Gutkin wrote: "Kidnappings changed everything: All that changed Wednesday, when Hezbollah guerillas crossed into Israel, seizing Goldwasser and Regev and killing eight other soldiers in the ensuing fighting."

AP also ran changed versions. On July 12, at 5:41AM Joseph Panossian wrote: "The militant group Hezbollah captured two Israeli soldiers during clashes Wednesday across the border in southern Lebanon, prompting a swift reaction from Israel, which sent ground forces into its neighbor to look for them."

At 7:09 AM, Associated Press Writer Joseph Panossian had altered his report: "The Hezbollah militant group captured two Israeli soldiers during clashes along the Lebanese border on Wednesday."

By late afternoon, at 4:13 PM, AP's Panossian had completely shifted location: "Hezbollah militants crossed into Israel on Wednesday and captured two Israeli soldiers. Israel responded in southern Lebanon with warplanes, tanks and gunboats, and said eight of its soldiers had been killed in the violence."

Israeli sources went almost unnoticed. Cybercast News Service (CNSNews.com) of July 12 said: "The abduction of two Israeli soldiers by Hizbullah militants in southern Lebanon was not a terrorist attack but an act of war, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said Wednesday."

Australia's ABC News (Reuters) on July 13 quoted the IDF: "The sources say the Israeli soldiers had been seized at around 9am local time across the border from Aita al Shaab, some 15 kilometers from the Mediterranean coast. The Israeli army confirmed that two Israeli soldiers had been captured on the Lebanese frontier. Israeli ground forces crossed into Lebanon to hunt for the missing soldiers, Israeli Army Radio said."

Voice of America, Jerusalem, on July 12 said: "Speaking to reporters outside the Israeli Foreign Ministry, spokesman Mark Regev says Hezbollah is responsible for the violence. "It appears we have an escalation in the North," he said. "It is very clear that the escalation started on the Lebanese side of the border, and Israel will respond appropriately."

In his article "Casus Belli", IDF Brigadier General Moshe Yaalon wrote: "The present crisis was initiated- in Gaza by Hamas and in southern Lebanon by Hezbollah- from lands that are not under Israeli occupation." New Republic, July 31

A quote by Hamas political bureau member Mohammad Nazzal in the July 13 edition of Haaretz said: "This is a heroic operation carried out against military targets and so it is a legitimate operation, especially as it took place in occupied Lebanese territory."

A Lebanese government official told this writer that the first information about the soldiers' capture in southern Lebanon came from the Lebanese Army Police, a source also quoted in many media accounts. "At the beginning the Lebanese Army said it was on the Lebanese side," the official told me. The verbatim Army communique' to the Lebanese government follows: " 'At 9:03 or 9:05am in the vicinity or in front of Ayt Al Shaab village the members of the resistance have abducted two soldiers. At 9:15am the resistance shelled the position of the enemy in the occupied territories. At 10:10am the Resistance and Israeli forces clashed with each other in the area of Naqoura,' on Lebanon's side of the border."

[I find this to be very interesting. I tried to check out all their sources first-hand, but was not able to. I don't have access to archives at UPI, AP, AFP, etc. - Harold]

UK Terror Plot, Not?

2006-08-16T15:15:00.000-04:00

This is from http://www.craigmurray.co.uk/archives/2006/08/the_uk_terror_p.html

Helena Cobban (justworldnews.com), says, "Craig Murray is the former British ambassador to Uzbekistan who lost his job over his refusal to go along with Blair/Bush plan to hide Uzbekistan's ghastly torture record."

August 14, 2006
The UK Terror plot: what's really going on?

I have been reading very carefully through all the Sunday newspapers to try and analyse the truth from all the scores of pages claiming to detail the so-called bomb plot. Unlike the great herd of so-called security experts doing the media analysis, I have the advantage of having had the very highest security clearances myself, having done a huge amount of professional intelligence analysis, and having been inside the spin machine.

So this, I believe, is the true story.

None of the alleged terrorists had made a bomb. None had bought a plane ticket. Many did not even have passports, which given the efficiency of the UK Passport Agency would mean they couldn't be a plane bomber for quite some time.

In the absence of bombs and airline tickets, and in many cases passports, it could be pretty difficult to convince a jury beyond reasonable doubt that individuals intended to go through with suicide bombings, whatever rash stuff they may have bragged in internet chat rooms.

What is more, many of those arrested had been under surveillance for over a year - like thousands of other British Muslims. And not just Muslims. Like me. Nothing from that surveillance had indicated the need for early arrests.

Then an interrogation in Pakistan revealed the details of this amazing plot to blow up multiple planes - which, rather extraordinarily, had not turned up in a year of surveillance. Of course, the interrogators of the Pakistani dictator have their ways of making people sing like canaries. As I witnessed in Uzbekistan, you can get the most extraordinary information this way. Trouble is it always tends to give the interrogators all they might want, and more, in a desperate effort to stop or avert torture. What it doesn't give is the truth.

The gentleman being "interrogated" had fled the UK after being wanted for questioning over the murder of his uncle some years ago. That might be felt to cast some doubt on his reliability. It might also be felt that factors other than political ones might be at play within these relationships. Much is also being made of large transfers of money outside the formal economy. Not in fact too unusual in the British Muslim community, but if this activity is criminal, there are many possibilities that have nothing to do with terrorism.

We then have the extraordinary question of Bush and Blair discussing the possible arrests over the weekend. Why? I think the answer to that is plain. Both in desperate domestic political trouble, they longed for "Another 9/11". The intelligence from Pakistan, however dodgy, gave them a new 9/11 they could sell to the media. The media has bought, wholesale, all the rubbish they have been shovelled.

We then have the appalling political propaganda of John Reid, Home Secretary, making a speech warning us all of the dreadful evil threatening us and complaining that "Some people don't get" the need to abandon all our traditional liberties. He then went on, according to his own propaganda machine, to stay up all night and minutely direct the arrests. There could be no clearer evidence that our Police are now just a political tool. Like all the best nasty regimes, the knock on the door came in the middle of the night, at 2.30am. Those arrested included a mother with a six week old baby.

For those who don't know, it is worth introducing Reid. A hardened Stalinist with a long term reputation for personal violence, at Stirling Univeristy he was the Communist Party's "Enforcer", (in days when the Communist Party ran Stirling University Students' Union, which it should not be forgotten was a business with a very substantial cash turnover). Reid was sent to beat up those who deviated from the Party line.

We will now never know if any of those arrested would have gone on to make a bomb or buy a plane ticket. Most of them do not fit the "Loner" profile you would expect - a tiny percentage of suicide bombers have happy marriages and young children. As they were all under surveillance, and certainly would have been on airport watch lists, there could have been little danger in letting them proceed closer to maturity - that is certainly what we would have done with the IRA.

In all of this, the one thing of which I am certain is that the timing is deeply political. This is more propaganda than plot. Of the over one thousand British Muslims arrested under anti-terrorist legislation, only twelve per cent are ever charged with anything. That is simply harrassment of Muslims on an appalling scale. Of those charged, 80% are acquitted. Most of the very few - just over two per cent of arrests - who are convicted, are not convicted of anything to do terrorism, but of some minor offence the Police happened upon while trawling through the wreck of the lives they had shattered.

Be sceptical. Be very, very sceptical.

[#@$%^&*!!!- Harold]

I'm Trying To Make Sense Of All This

2006-08-16T12:13:00.000-04:00

I found this at Juan Cole's "Informed Comment" weblog.

[Also, here are some good Lebanese blogs that you should check out.

http://lebop.blogspot.com/
http://www.bloggingbeirut.com/
http://blissstreetjournal.blogspot.com/

Abu Aardvark has some interesting info also @ http://abuaardvark.typepad.com/
- Harold]

Wednesday, August 16, 2006

Battle of the Speeches Breaks out in Wake of Lebanon War

Israel shot 5 Hizbullah fighters on Tuesday and Hizbullah fired ten rockets inside Lebanon at Israel troops. Emergency workers dug 38 bodies of civilians out of the rubble in Lebanon. But despite these provocations, the ceasefire more or less held. The Israelis were towing damaged armored vehicles out of Lebanon.

I suppose it is better for them to wage a war of words than one of bombs, though one tends to lead to the other. Since the United Nations resolution calling for a halt to hostilities, Prime Minister Olmert, President Bush, Secretary-General Nasrallah, President al-Asad and President Ahmadinejad have all been procliaming the war a personal victory.

I don't know why they would want to claim it.

It was such a stupid war. It was thick-as-two-blocks-of-wood strategy on all sides. It was moronic for the Israelis to plan it out last year. It was idiotic for Hizbullah to cross over into Israel, kill soldiers, and take two captive. It was brain dead for the Israeli officer corps and politicians to think they could get anything positive out of bombing Lebanon back to the stone age and making a million people homeless. It was dim-witted for Hasan Nasrallah to threaten Israelis with releasing poison gases from Haifa chemical plants on them. It was obtuse for the Israelis to confront a dug-in guerrilla movement with green conventional troops marching in straight lines. It was dull of Hizbullah to fire thousands of katyushas into open fields where they mainly damaged wild grass. The few times when the rockets managed to kill someone, it was often an Arab Israeli civilian. Stupid.

Israeli's armed forces chief, Lt. Gen. Dan Halutz, unwisely sold off $27,000 in stock when he heard that Hizbullah had captured 2 Israeli soldiers. That wasn't unwise economically, since when Israel went to war, its stock market fell 12% It is further proof that the war was planned well in advance, and that Halutz knew that the capture would trigger it. But what could he have saved or made from this transaction? A few thousand dollars? It was stupid for him to risk the public perception of impropriety for such a small sum. Unprofessional.

There have been professionally-fought wars in the Middle East. I mean, in 1973 both sides at least seemed to know what they were doing. The Egyptians used sophisticated technology to cross over to Sinai. They had the sense to stop and not actually invade Israel, so as to stay within the umbrella of their anti-aircraft batteries. The Israelis got caught flat-footed when the Egyptians crossed the canal, but they soon were able to riposte. The big powers came in and settled it. The Soviet Union insisted on a cease fire and the US decided it didn't want a confrontation over it. So Ariel Sharon did not get to take Cairo. In turn, that the Egyptians acquitted themselves decently allowed them to make peace with heads held high. War is horrible, but you came away feeling that everyone involved at a high level in that one was competent and rational (except for that moment of early panic when Golda Meir thought that it was the fall of the Third Kingdom and Wild and Crazy Guy Moshe Dayan wanted to nuke Cairo).

But this war was a keystone cops war. It was horribly destructive for Lebanon, but not to any purpose for anyone, including the Israelis. The Americans and Israelis seem to have thought that the small farmers and small shopkeepers of south Lebanon were a sinister wraith army of the ghost of Ayatollah Khomeini. In fact, they were . . . small farmers and shopkeepers. One of the reasons they are rushing back down south is to see to their small farms, even if the small farmhouse isn't there any more.

But there you have it. Everyone wants credit for this cornucopia of foolishness.

Bush came out and said that Hizbullah had been defeated, and tried to link Hizbullah to the Sunni Arab guerrillas who make his life hell in Iraq. But, George, Hizbullah is Shiite. It was your Shiite allies in Iraq who supported it. Bush underscored his permanent deer-in-the-headlights cluelessness when at a press conference he said this:

' QUESTION: How can the international force, or the United States if necessary, prevent Iran from resupplying Hezbollah?

BUSH: The first step is -- and part of the mandate in the U.N. resolution was to secure Syria's borders. Iran is able to ship weapons to Hezbollah through Syria.

Secondly is to deal -- is to help seal off the ports around Lebanon.

BUSH: In other words, part of the mandate and part of the mission of the troops, the UNIFIL troops, will be to seal off the Syrian border. '

Note that I can't even understand what he means by "the ports around Lebanon" being sealed. Does he mean Lebanon's ports? Note that you wouldn't want to seal off Lebanon's ports, since Lebanon will need to import things through them. That you could have such good port security in Lebanon that you could altogether screen out missile shipments is unlikely. Does he mean that Turkish, Syrian, and Israeli ports around Lebanon should be sealed. Just Syrian? Impractical.

Note also that the little blue strip at the bottom of Lebanon is generally where the UN peacekeeping troops will be. [The map didn't copy and paste. - Harold] They aren't in a position to "seal off" the Syrian border, which stretches far to their northeast, and can't be "sealed off" by anyone at all, being rugged and long. The blue helmets of the UN, being a land force, are not in a position to seal off Lebanon's ports, such as Tyre, Sidon, Beirut, Jounieh or Tripoli. Nor could they seal off the Syrian port of Latakiya, if that is what Bush meant.

In other words, Bush doesn't have the slightest idea what he is talking about and nothing he said on this subject makes any sense at all. Why does the US press always let him get away with this?

Now today Bashar al-Asad came out and made a fool of himself. Josh Landis discusses Bashar's speech. Robert Fisk is enthusiastic about Bashar's frank words on Bush as proponent of preemptive war and on Israel's land-grab in the Golan and the West Bank as key to the outbreak of violence. OK, but his comments on internal Lebanese politics were so unhelpful as to qualify as sinister.

Bashar just more or less openly declared war on the elected Lebanese government. It came to power in last year's elections in the wake of a popular movement that condemned the assassination of former prime minister Rafiq al-Hariri, which a majority of Lebanese blamed on Syria.

The Baath ruling elite in Damascus has been worried that the new Lebanese ruling group, including Saad al-Hariri and Walid Jumblatt, will try to use the UN, the US and Israel to unseat them. A string of assassinations or attempts against outspoken critics of Syria in Lebanon probably reflects that anxiety.

But Hariri and others had consistently denied that they wanted to overthrow al-Asad. And the reformers let Hizbullah into their government, determined to find a framework for a national unity government, despite Hizbullah's close alliance with Damascus.

The leading Lebanese politicians have in the past year been a class act, demonstrating a good deal of political maturity in how they dealt with the assassinations, with Hizbullah, with Bush, and with Syria. It hasn't been easy.

First, Olmert went on a rampage, destroying the infrastructure that made their little country run.

Now, al-Asad has decided to try to reinforce Hizbullah's power in the wake of its success in standing up to the Israelis, and seems to want to pit Hizbullah against the reformers. But that is exactly what the Israeli hardliners were hoping for, as well. Al-Asad is playing into Israel's hands. Syria can't regain its commanding position in Lebanon at this point, and trying to do so will just tear Lebanon apart. Syria would have been best served by a reinforcement of the government of national unity, such that Hizbullah could continue to represent a pro-Syrian point of view within the government. Asad recognizes this much. But a national unity government is no good if it is radically divided against itself, a division he seems to be promoting. Now, Asad has made it look as though when Hizbullah supports Syria, it is acting as nothing more than an agent of Damascus. Agent (`amil) is not a nice word in Arabic.

Syria under Asad is acting as though it is a regional power entitled to press its claims on Lebanon as a sphere of influence. In fact, the Lebanese public mobilized in the hundreds of thousands, and you simply cannot have an imperial role in a country if enough people refuse to cooperate. And, all of Asad's military equipment could be destroyed in about two or three days by Israeli warplanes. Israel could not hope to occupy Syria, but it could leave the country in shambles and defenseless. Syria is not a regional power any more. It is a second-tier power that had best avoid frontal confrontations. Bashar doesn't seem to appreciate this.

Ahmadinejad, a figure with relatively little power in the Iranian system, also weighed in.

I'm not saying that all these people are stupid, personally. I am saying that the politics of exclusion has made them act stupidly. And no end in sight.

posted by Juan @ 8/16/2006 06:30:00 AM 0 comments

Civil War Violence Reaches New Heights in Iraq
Religious Group Clashes with Police in Karbala
Bush Opposes Partition

Faith-based civil war violence killed 110 civilians each day in July, a new report shows, which is a new one-month record. The deaths come in the midst of a new security program and extra checkpoints pushed by Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki. It hasn't worked.

A car bomb in Mosul killed 9 and wounded 36 at the HQ of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan headed by Jalal Talabani. Mosul is a largely Arab city with a Kurdish minority, but Kurdish troops and security personnel have been used in the city by the United States, and many of its inhabitants are afraid that the Kurds will try to annex it to their Kurdistan regional federation.

Other civil war violence on Tuesday, including bombings in Samarra and Baquba.

In another worrisome sign of collapsing security in Iraq, Al-Zaman/ AFP report that all hell has broken loose in the Shiite shrine city of Karbala. The city has been closed to visiting pilgrims for three days and a curfew is in effect after a battle between municipal police and a Shiite sectarian movement.

The Iraqi security forces, probably dominated in Karbala by members of the Badr Corps (originally trained in Iran) came into conflict with with followers of Shaikh Mahmud al-Hasani al-Sarkhi. Al-Hasani is strongly opposed to the continued US presence in Iraq, but is also fanatically anti-Iranian. The violent clashes killed at least 6 persons, including 3 from the Iraqi security forces. Al-Hasani's office claimed that 25 of his followers were killed and 20 wounded. Some 200 of his men were arrested. (The local hospital reported receiving 6 corpses, but eyewitnesses said that bodies littered the streets and that the atmosphere was full of dread).

Al-Hasani also accused the Shiite religious authorities in the Iranian seminary city of Qom of cooperating with Iranian intelligence and some Iraqi parties now in power in Baghdad to get rid of him because he rejects a Shiite provincial confederacy in the south and insists on a united Iraq and opposes sectarian and ethnic politics. His office said that the attack on his followers was in furtherance of an Iranian plan to put the Iraqi Shiites under the authority of an Iranian ayatollah with big plans for the Middle East. (He is saying that his people were attacked by Badr Corpsmen infiltrated into local police and other state security arms. In turn, he is coding Badr as Iranian puppets. Badr is the paramilitary of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, a leading party in the Iraqi parliament and in provincial governments.)

An Iraqi official who chose to remain anonymous said that Iraqi security forces assaulted the main HQ of al-Hasani in Bab Turij in the center of Karbala and fought with his followers, taking about 200 into custody.

President Bush met with a handful of Middle East experts and expressed opposition to seeing Iraq break up. He also said that the US would be in Iraq as long as he was president.

Long time readers know that I am also opposed to seeing Iraq partitioned, and think it would only cause more problems. But wanting Iraq to stay together and arranging for it to do so are not the same things.

You have to ask yourself, what are the policies that would split it up and what are the policies that would keep it together? I maintain that Bush's policies have set in motion enormous pressures for partition, which did not exist in April, 2003. He has to change those policies if he is to maintain the country's integrity. Making the Marines an adjunct to Shiite sectarian policies of debaathification and suppression of the Sunnis is maybe not a winning strategy and should be rethought. Using the Kurdish Peshmergas to police Kirkuk and Ninevah provinces or to attack Turkmen in Tal Afar is also not wise from the point of view of ethnic politics. Kirkuk has Arabs and Turkmen who fear Kurdish dominance, and Ninevah is majority-Arab and knows that the Kurds covet Mosul, Iraq's third-largest city. If Bush hasn't been using ethnic divisions to divide and rule, then he has just been unwise about them.

I personally think that a huge 9-province regional confederacy of the sort Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, the clerical Shiite leader, wants to create, will break up Iraq. I also think that the Kirkuk issue should be settled now by negotiation rather than waiting a year and a half for the referendum to produce massive ethnic violence. Avoiding the break-up of Iraq now requires pro-active intervention and specific policy-making, not just mouthing pious hopes.

As for staying there until 2009 at least, that is also an aspiration on his part. It isn't clear he can pull it off. The Iraqis are more and more angry at us, most recently for actively encouraging the Israelis to turn the Shiite parts of Lebanon into debris and mass graves. Imperial powers have been forced out of countries in the past when they just could no longer get the cooperation of local elites. Likewise, Congress pays for the US to be in Iraq, and the new Congress after the November elections may not be willing to do so.

Personally, I think the US should draw down most of its ground troops. It isn't useful for our GIs to try to ride herd on Ramadi, and I think Ramadi will more likely turn out well in the medium term if they aren't there. As Gen. John Abizaid pointed out in spring of 2003, we are a pathogen in the Iraqi body politic, constantly attracting antibodies. (He got the biology backwards but this is what he meant and he was right.) Our press doesn't say much about it, but there is a a hot war going on in Ramadi; guerrillas hit a US base there with RPG fire on Tuesday and US troops engaged them. This fighting has been going on in Ramadi forever and whatever we are doing there is not causing it to subside.

The really worrisome thing is that Bush must recognize that he is in deep, deep trouble if he is meeting with bona fide academic Middle East experts like Vali Nasr and Eric Davis. I don't think he likes academics very much, nor used, at least, to value academic ways of analysis.

posted by Juan @ 8/16/2006 06:25:00 AM 0 comments

Close: The Building War on Iran

Ray Close, a retired CIA analyst of Arab affairs, writes:

' Despite vehement official assertions to the contrary, indications are increasing every day that the Bush Administration has already decided that conventional diplomacy will fail as a way to manage its confrontation with Iran, and that military action against the Teheran regime has therefore already reached the point of final countdown. This message is not an attempt to analyze all aspects of that highly complex and controversial question, all the pros and all the cons, which are numerous on both sides, but merely to toss a few small but perhaps significant considerations into the balance. Make your own judgments.

1. First, some military realities that have not yet been fully appreciated by the American public:

A. The Lebanon conflict substantiates pre-crisis intelligence that Iran has apparently provided sophisticated “strategic” rockets to Hizballah, such as the Fajr-5 (range: 75 km) and probably also the Zelzal (range: 150 km).

Possession of the Zelzal (or even the Fajr-5) would effectively negate much of the strategic value of attempting to protect Israel’s northern regions from attack simply by making the area south of the Litani River into a buffer zone without fully disarming Hizballah and ensuring that it cannot be resupplied --- a goal almost certainly beyond the capabilities of forces presently available. Because the competence of the Lebanese Army is greatly in doubt, and the military and political mandate of a U.N. peacekeeping force is likely to be both tenuous and impermanent, the long-term value of the recent Israeli action against Hizballah is very much in question.

(COMMENT: The tactical and strategic threat to Israel's security demonstrated by Hizballah's use of Iranian-supplied missiles is being underrated. The fact that after a full month of furious Israeli bombardment and infantry assault Hizballah was capable of launching 250 rockets into northern Israel in the last hours before the ceasefire proves that defense of Israel based on narrow buffer zones, multi-national peacekeepers and separation walls is an illiusion. We must remember that it was only the absence of a reliable guidance system that prevented massive killing of Israeli civilians by thousands of Katyusha rockets --- a technological gap that can and will be filled in a very short time, no doubt. This frightening reality, when it sinks in, will redouble the already heavy public pressure on the Bush Administration, strongly supported and encouraged by Israel and the pro-Israel lobby, to “do something decisive about Iran”. )

The only real defense against this new kind of threat available to Israel today is the total cessation of Iran's support for organizations like Hizballah and Hamas, and the denial to them of operational bases in Palestine, Lebanon or Syria. Only the long reach of American military power has any chance of achieving that objective on Israel's behalf. Undertaking that effort would be a strategic commitment that went very far beyond traditional American policy of sympathy and support. We are talking here about an historic new departure in American foreign and defense policy, the costs and risks of which the American people have not yet even begun to understand, much less aceept.

B. Hizballah’s successful use of the C-802/SACCADE anti-ship cruise missile against an Israeli corvette caught both the U.S. and Israel by surprise. The general consensus among defense intelligence analysts is that Iran’s small cadre of IRGC operatives attached to Hizballah (estimated to be about 100 men) helped arm this weapon and guide it to its target. Hizballah’s successful use of the C-802 also raises questions about the safety of U.S. warships in the Persian Gulf in the event of Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz in reaction to U.S. military action against the Teheran regime. Iran reportedly has “hundreds” of these missiles (C-802s) lining its shore of the Strait.

(COMMENT: Contrary to some press reports, the C-802 is not an adaptation of the Chinese Silkworm, but rather a Chinese improvement on the [originally French] Exocet that was used effectively by the Argentine navy in the Falklands war in 1982, and by Iraq against a U.S. Navy ship in the Gulf in 1987. This might be viewed as a deterrent to U.S. military action against Iran; on the contrary, however, it has become an added incentive to take urgent action to eliminate Iran’s capacity to interfere with the free movement of oil supplies in the Gulf --- a factor that the Bush Administration regards as a potential blackmail threat and an unacceptable limitation on its own capacity to control the actions of a regime that supports terrorism.)

2. Then there is what I must admit is basically an intuitive indicator of Bush Administration intentions to take aggressive action against Iran:

A. It is now indisputably true that during the build-up to the invasion of Iraq, the Bush Administration aggressively searched for, and then selectively highlighted, any intelligence that they believed would support and justify their already-firm determination to destroy the Saddam Hussein regime by military force. An important part of the rationale for attacking Iraq was to demonstrate, as an object lesson for the whole world to note, that America will “maintain the offensive against terrorism”, and will attack and destroy all who support or encourage terrorism anywhere in the world. President Bush deeply believes what he has said publicly on this subject, and nothing he has said or done recently has portrayed the slightest uncertainty on his part about the correctness of the underlying national strategy that made the invasion of Iraq such an urgent necessity in 2003.

B. If the Bush Administration has carefully weighed the risks and costs of launching a military attack against Iran, and decided (after three-plus years of absorbing the hard lessons of Iraq) that making war on seventy million angry Persians is not a sensible thing to do at this moment in history, (as most military experts would argue), then prudence and common sense would dictate that it serves no useful purpose for President Bush and his representatives to emphasize continually and bombastically, at every opportunity, that Iran (and to a lesser extent Syria) are guilty of acting in flagrant violation of the “red lines” clearly defined in U.S. national strategy. As we have repeatedly reminded ourselves, the first rule of diplomacy or war is never to declare objectives that one does not have the means or the will to achieve, and never issue threats that one has no intention of enforcing. At the moment, we seem to be doing both these things at the same time.

Today, the Washington Post reports:

As a U.N.-imposed truce seemed to be holding yesterday, Bush made clear that he blames Hizballah and its patrons, Iran and Syria, for igniting the conflict. “We recognize that the responsibility for this lies with Hizballah,” Bush said. “Responsibility lies also with Hizbollah's state sponsors, Iran and Syria.” Bush warned Tehran to stop backing militias in Lebanon and in Iraq, where U.S. officials have long accused Iran of feeding the sectarian violence that is threatening to erupt into a full-scale civil war. “In both these countries, Iran is backing armed groups in the hope of stopping democracy from taking hold,” Bush said. “The message of this administration is clear. America will stay on the offensive against al-Qaeda. Iran must stop its support for terror, and the leaders of these armed groups must make a choice. If they want to participate in the political life of their countries, they must disarm.”

(Note President Bush's familiar technique of implying a direct operational relationship between Iran and Hizballah, on the one hand, and Osama bin Ladin's al-Qaeda organization on the other --- a deliberate distortion of fact similar to the canards associating Saddam Hussein directly with al-Qaeda and hence with the 9-11 events. These subtle but very significant deceptions fly right over the heads of the vast majority of Americans, but they undermine the credibility of our president and hence our confidence in his decisions about matters like war and peace.)

And in today’s New York Times we read a dispatch from Baghdad::

“The American ambassador, Zalmay Khalilzad, said that Iran had been encouraging Shiite militias to attack American-led forces (in Iraq) in retaliation for American backing of Israel’s military campaign against Hizballah in Lebanon”

This gratuitous remark makes sense only if one is seeking some sort of legal license from the international community to take unilateral punitive action against Iran. However, at a time when the popularity of Hizballah, and corresponding hatred of Israel, are both at their zenith among the populations of Iraq and the rest of the Arab and Muslim worlds, it is nothing short of foolhardy and irresponsible for the American ambassador in Baghdad to be advertising Iran’s contribution to what that critically important constituency regards (correctly or not) as a humiliating failure of mighty Israel and its superpower ally America to defeat and disarm the valiant little "Party of God" in Lebanon.

Unless, of course, Bush and his advisers seriously expect that Iran will be intimidated into reversing its own policies. (Not bloody likely.)

Otherwise, Khalilzad is merely feeding the fears of Iraq's majority Shi'a population that the United States, probably in coordination with Israel, is moving purposefully toward war with Iran, and needs only to pump up its legal justification for taking that action. Not a good way to win the confidence and cooperation of the parties upon whom the success of our enterprise in Iraq critically depends.

This bombastic and posturing style of “diplomacy” is going to lead inescapably to one or the other of the following results:

1. War with Iran (with negative consequences beyond anyone's ability to imagine); or 2. Another humiliating demonstration of impotence. '

Ray Close

posted by Juan @ 8/16/2006 06:05:00 AM

Max Hastings On Bush's Views On Islamic Conspiracy

2006-08-16T05:52:00.000-04:00

Bush's belief in a worldwide Islamist conspiracy is foolish and dangerous

We can only see off the serious threat we face if we separate real Muslim grievances from al-Qaida's homicidal mania

Max Hastings
Monday August 14, 2006
The Guardian

George Bush sometimes sounds more like the Mahdi, preaching jihad against infidels, than the leader of a western democracy. In his regular radio address to the American people on Saturday he linked the British alleged aircraft plotters with Hizbullah in Lebanon, and these in turn with the insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan.
All, said the president of the world's most powerful nation, share a "totalitarian ideology", and a desire to "establish a safe haven from which to attack free nations". Bush's remarks put me in mind of a proverb attributed to Ali ibn Abu Talib: "He who has a thousand friends has not a friend to spare, and he who has one enemy will meet him everywhere."

In the United States a disturbingly large minority of people - polls suggest around 40% - remain willing to accept Bush's assertions that Americans and their allies, which chiefly means the British, are faced with a single global conspiracy by Islamic fundamentalists to destroy our societies.
In less credulous Britain one could nowadays fit into an old-fashioned telephone box those who believe anything Bush or Tony Blair says about foreign policy. Many of us are consumed with frustration. We know that we face a real threat from Muslim fundamentalists, and that we are unlikely to begin to defeat this until we see it for what it is: something infinitely more complex, diffuse and nuanced than the US president wishes to suppose.
There is indeed a common strand in the anger of Muslim radicals in many countries. They are frustrated by the cultural, economic and political dominance of the west, whose values they find abhorrent. In some, bitterness is increased by awareness of the relative failure of their own societies, which they blame on the west rather than their own shortcomings.
They turn to violence in the spirit that has inspired fringe groups of revolutionaries through the ages. It is essential for the western democracies to defend themselves vigorously against such people, whose values and purposes are nihilistic. We must never lose sight of the fact that al-Qaida's terrorists attacked the twin towers on 9/11 before Bush began his reckless crusade, before the coalition went into Afghanistan and Iraq, before Israel entered Lebanon.
In September 2001, most of the world clearly perceived that a monstrous crime had been committed against the United States, and that the defeat of al-Qaida was essential to global security. While many ordinary Muslims were by no means sorry to see American hubris punished, grassroots support for Osama bin Laden was still small, and remained so through the invasion of Afghanistan.
Today, of course, everything has changed. In the eyes of many Muslims, the actions of Bush and Blair have promoted and legitimised al-Qaida in a fashion even its founder could hardly have anticipated a decade ago.
Bush has chosen to lump together all violent Muslim opposition to what he perceives as western interests everywhere in the world, as part of a single conspiracy. He is indifferent to the huge variance of interests that drives the Taliban in Afghanistan, insurgents in Iraq, Hamas and Hizbullah fighting the Israelis. He simply identifies them as common enemies of the United States.
Almost three years ago he contemptuously challenged the Iraqi insurgents to defy American will: "My answer is - bring 'em on." Today he has widened this bold defiance to embrace a vastly more ambitious range of foes: "He who has one enemy will meet him everywhere."
Far from acknowledging that any successful strategy for addressing Muslim radicalism must include a just outcome for the Palestinians, he endorses Israel's attempt to crush them and their supporters by force of arms alone, together with Israeli expansion on the West Bank. The west faces the probable defeat of its efforts to stabilise Afghanistan, a worthy objective, because of the likely failure of its campaign in Iraq, which began on false pretexts.
There is no chance that the west will get anywhere with the Muslim world until the US government is willing to disassemble a spread of grievances in widely diverse societies, examine them as separate components, and treat each on its merits. America cannot prevail through the mere deployment of superior wealth and military power, the failure of which is manifest. Judicious and discriminatory political judgments are fundamental, and today quite lacking.
The madness of Bush's policy is that he has made a wilful choice to amalgamate the grossly irrational, totalitarian and homicidal objectives of al-Qaida with the just claims of Palestinians and grievances of Iraqis. His remarks on Saturday invite Muslims who sympathise with Hamas or reject Iraq's occupation or merely aspire to grow opium in Afghanistan to make common cause with Bin Laden.
If the United States insists upon regarding all Muslim opponents of its foreign policies as a homogeneous enemy then that is what they become. The Muslim radicals' "single narrative" portrays the entire course of history as a Christian and Jewish plot against Islam.
It is widely agreed among western governments and intelligence agencies that, in order to defeat the pernicious spread of such nonsense, a convincing counter-narrative is needed. Yet it becomes a trifle difficult to compose this when the US president promulgates his own single narrative, almost as ridiculous as that of al-Qaida.
Whatever the truth about last week's frustrated aircraft bomb plot, we cannot doubt that Britain faces a serious and ongoing threat from violent fanatics undeserving of the smallest sympathy. Yet we shall defeat them only when our Muslim community at large perceives that its interests are identified with Britain's polity.
This objective will remain elusive as long as the British government supports the United States in pursuing policies that many Muslims perceive as directed against their entire culture. You and I know that this is not so. We are as dismayed as they are by Bush and Blair's follies.
Yet, however eloquently we explain this, many Muslims respond by pointing to the spectacle of American, Israeli and British troops daily executing operations that the president declares to be in furtherance of his global jihad. It avails little that we know our boys in Afghanistan are pursuing infinitely more admirable purposes than the Israelis in Lebanon, when Bush is telling the world that the two conflicts are mere different fronts in a common struggle.
Tony Blair - "waist deep in the big muddy", as Pete Seeger used to sing about Lyndon Johnson in the Vietnam era - clings to a messianic conviction that he must continue to endorse American statements and policies to maintain his restraining influence on George Bush. This invites speculation about what the president might do if Tony was not at his elbow. Seize Mecca?
The west faces a threat from violent Muslim fundamentalists that would have existed even if a Lincoln had been presiding at the White House. As a citizen, I am willing to be resolute in the face of terrorism, which must be defeated. I become much less happy about the prospect of immolation, however, when Bush and Blair translate what should be an ironclad case for civilised values into an agenda of their own which I want no part of.

Controlling Inflation These Days

2006-08-12T09:45:00.000-04:00

More from delong.typepad.com .

The Thoughtful and Reliable Edmund Andrews on the Federal Reserve and a "Soft Landing"

He writes:

Economy Often Defies Soft Landing - New York Times: In the cool and quiet marble corridors of the Federal Reserve, the strategy for taming inflation sounds painless, even soothing: a “soft landing” for the economy after several years of flying high. As the central bank contended on Tuesday, when it decided to pause in its two-year effort to raise interest rates, inflation is “elevated” right now but will begin to decline because economic growth is poised for a modest slowdown. Many economists, though, warn that the soft landing may seem anything but soft, and suggest that the Fed is either too rosy about the looming slowdown or naïve about the difficulty of reaching its goal for inflation.

In practice, the Fed has achieved only one true soft landing — in 1994-95, when, under the leadership of Alan Greenspan, it was able to slow the economy enough to cool spending and ease inflation pressure but not so much as to cause a big jump in unemployment. But even Mr. Greenspan, whose ability to fine-tune policy made him famous, presided over two formal recessions, in 1991 and in 2001. This time, many analysts say that the Fed and its new chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, face considerably tougher challenges. Crude oil, at more than $70 a barrel, is selling at prices that would have been unthinkable in 1995. Productivity growth, which was accelerating in 1995, is slowing these days. The dollar, which was climbing against other major currencies in 1995, is declining against most of them now.

Analysts and other experts say that if Mr. Bernanke is serious about his goals for controlling inflation, at least two million more workers may have to lose their jobs over the next two years. “The economic slowdown has to be much more substantial than anybody in the Federal Reserve or on Wall Street is expecting,” said Robert J. Gordon, a professor of economics at Northwestern University, who has analyzed the trade-off between inflation and unemployment for the last several decades. Mr. Bernanke and other Fed officials say they want to keep core inflation, the main measure of retail prices excluding energy and food, below 2 percent a year. But core inflation is already 2.9 percent and almost certain to climb as the cost of oil pushes up prices for items as diverse as air fares and plastics.

Mr. Gordon said the last few decades had shown a grim but consistent trade-off: to reduce inflation by one percentage point, the unemployment rate has to rise by about two percentage points for a full year. To reduce inflation to the upper limits of what Mr. Bernanke and other Fed officials consider acceptable, more than three million jobs would be lost, a bigger drop than in the recession of 2001. And that is Mr. Gordon’s relatively upbeat hypothesis, which assumes no other shocks to the economy — no additional increases in energy prices, no collapse in the dollar’s value, no collapse in housing. “I think the Fed is facing an absolutely classic case of stagflation,” Mr. Gordon said, “a situation in which they cannot win.”

He is not alone. Many other economists contend that inflation is more entrenched and will be more painful to reverse than the Fed thinks. Others predict that inflation will indeed subside, but only because the economy will weaken much more than the Fed is expecting. The chief forecaster at Decision Economics, Allen Sinai, said unemployment would have to rise to at least 5.5 percent, from 4.8 percent today, putting a million more people out of work, before inflation begins to decline.

The chairman of Roubini Global Economics Monitor, Nouriel Roubini, predicted that the economy would fall into a recession early in 2007 as a result of high energy prices, higher interest rates and a housing collapse. “Either the Fed does not believe its own inflation forecast, which I don’t think is the case,” Mr. Roubini said, “or the slowdown is going to be greater than what they have been saying. They can’t have it both ways.” To be sure, economists differ on how weak the economy already is or how severe inflation pressure is. And skepticism abounds on the chances of achieving a true soft landing.

The very idea of such a thing is only about a decade old. It was conceived by Mr. Greenspan, then the Fed chairman, as a way to attack inflation before it started, by shrewdly using the levers of monetary policy to slow the economy just enough to keep it from overheating. Mr. Greenspan’s greatest success was in the mid-1990’s, when the economy had been expanding for nearly four years. Though inflation was declining and was lower than it is today, the Fed doubled short-term interest rates, to 6 percent from 3 percent, in just over a year. At the time, the result seemed neither soft nor smooth. Several financial institutions, caught by surprise, found themselves in big trouble. The economy slowed for a while, and unemployment edged up. But by 1996, the economy was rapidly growing again and the nation enjoyed several years of booming stock markets, falling unemployment and relatively low inflation.

The success, along with Mr. Greenspan’s growing aura as a wizard of monetary nimbleness, prompted the Fed to step in and help soften the blows of the Asian financial crisis of 1997-98, the stock market collapse of 2000, the recession of 2001 and the surge of unemployment that followed. He failed in preventing the 2001 recession, but the Fed cut interest rates so deeply that this started a boom in housing prices and home refinancing that kept consumers spending even as incomes stagnated and unemployment moved higher.

Laurence H. Meyer, a former Fed governor and now a chief forecaster at Macroeconomic Advisers, said Mr. Bernanke needed to do more than simply duplicate Mr. Greenspan’s one soft landing. Mr. Greenspan was not trying to reduce inflation, but merely to keep it from going up. Mr. Bernanke, by contrast, is trying to reduce it substantially. “Soft landings are much more frequent in forecasts than in real life,” Mr. Meyer said. “With a computer, I can give you a soft landing if you give me 10 or 20 runs. But in real life, you only have one run.”

Uncertainties and disagreement among experts about the economy’s direction are now unusually high. A big uncertainty is whether the nation is near full employment. Many economists contend that the country is essentially at full employment, meaning that additional demand for workers will tend to push up wages. Because wages account for more than three-quarters of total production costs, Fed officials view them as inflationary if they rise significantly faster than productivity. Specialists like Mr. Gordon at Northwestern and Mr. Meyer maintain that the labor market is already very tight and predict that wages will soon start to push up inflation. But others disagree, arguing that wages over the last five years have lagged behind increases in productivity and have barely kept up with inflation. The bigger risk, according to that school of thought, is to make the situation worse by driving up unemployment.

“We have no clue about labor market tightness right now,” said J. Bradford De Long, a professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley, who argues that workers still have little bargaining power. Depending on one’s perspective, Mr. De Long said, the Fed’s attempt at a soft landing is either a display of cool-headed technocracy or murky witchcraft. Right now, he said, “this is on the witchcraft side.”

Posted by Brad DeLong on August 10, 2006 at 09:36 PM

Some Good Points About Lebanon

2006-08-12T09:28:00.000-04:00

This is from delong.typepad.com .

Michael Young on The Party of "God"

Michael Young writes:

Hezbollah's Other War - New York Times: One evening earlier this summer, Lebanon’s most popular satire show, ‘‘Bas Mat Watan,’’ broadcast a sketch showing an ‘‘interview’’ with Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s leader and secretary general. ‘‘Nasrallah’’ was asked whether his party would surrender its weapons. He answered that it would, but first several conditions had to be met: there was that woman in Australia, whose land was being encroached upon by Jewish neighbors; then there was the baker in the United States, whose bakery the Jews wanted to take over. The joke was obvious: there were an infinite number of reasons why Hezbollah would never agree to lay down its weapons and become one political party among others.

B>ut it was the rapid reaction to the satiric sketch that sent the more disquieting message. That very night, angry supporters of Hezbollah closed the airport road with burning tires — a warning that they could block at will the main access point in and out of the country — and marched on mainly Sunni, Druse and Christian quarters in Beirut. In a Christian neighborhood, they clashed with the son of a former president and his comrades, and several youths were taken to hospital.

The leaders of Hezbollah defended these actions, explaining that they were the spontaneous emotional response to the mocking of a cleric. It is just as likely that they were a coordinated effort to intimidate critics. In any case, to me the event seemed an essential one, since it symbolized the duality that has defined Lebanon ever since its civil war came to an end in 1990. The duality was once neatly encapsulated by Walid Jumblatt, the leader of Lebanon’s Druse sect, when he asked, Would Lebanon choose to be Hanoi, circa 1970, or Hong Kong? That is, would it seek to become an international symbol of militancy and armed struggle, particularly against Israel, as represented by Hezbollah, or would it opt for the path laid out by Rafik Hariri, Lebanon’s late prime minister and billionaire developer, who sought to transform his country into a business entrepôt for the region, a bastion of liberal capitalism and ecumenical permissiveness?

In seeking to silence critics of their leader, in momentarily shutting down the airport, Hezbollah struck a blow against Lebanon’s tolerant, if always paradoxical, openness. Once again, it seemed, the Lebanese were suffering the consequences of failing to agree on a common destiny. At the time, the consequences seemed bearable. With the outbreak of the current conflict with Israel, they don’t seem bearable at all.

Lebanon today lies ravaged, its inhabitants suffering the consequences of Hezbollah’s hubris and Israel’s terrible, wanton retribution. Since July 12, when party militants abducted two Israeli soldiers and killed three on the Israeli side of the border, Lebanon has been under a virtually complete Israeli blockade. At the time of writing, nearly 1,000 people have been killed, mostly civilians. Predominantly Shiite areas in the south, Beirut’s southern suburbs and the northern Bekaa Valley have been turned into wastelands; Beirut seems empty. Businesses, when they do open, close early; store owners have cleared out their showrooms. The mood is one of ambient disintegration. Tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of refugees have moved into the capital, even as many of its residents have headed for the mountains. The economy, already precarious before the conflict started, lies in shambles, as does public confidence in the country’s future.

As attention focuses on Israel’s air war and troop movements, there has been less emphasis on the social impact of hundreds of thousands of traumatized Shiites moving into mainly non-Shiite areas. A month into the war, there have been laudable acts of cross-sectarian assistance, with Christian, Sunni and Druse organizations and parties helping refugees in schools and other facilities around the country. Yet there are signs of strain. In an effort to avoid conflicts between Shiite refugees and his own Druse supporters, Walid Jumblatt has allowed the refugees to put up Hezbollah flags and photographs of Nasrallah. The longer the fighting continues, however, the more likely it is that altercations will take place. Israel may have hoped to unite the Lebanese people against Hezbollah and force its government to extend its authority throughout the country. But such unity and such authority are hard to see on the horizon. As recriminations over the war spread, the delivery of aid across group lines will become more difficult, frustration will mount and the sectarian and political divide, already exacerbated by anxiety over Hezbollah's actions and intentions, will only grow.

How long it seems (and yet it is only a year) since the Lebanese were celebrating the Cedar Revolution — or what they always more revealingly called the Independence Intifada. Following the killing of Rafik Hariri in February 2005, it seemed that the Lebanese people were coming together to demand the end of Syrian dominance and the resurrection of their nation’s democracy. In that not so distant past, I had high hopes for the development of a liberal, even libertarian, Lebanon; after all, I reasoned, coexistence, freedom and entrepreneurial drive had been the natural state of the country between independence in 1943 and the start of the civil war in 1975 and even beyond.

Maybe I was biased in this regard. My late father was an American, my mother is a Maronite Christian and I spent the first decade of the war living in predominantly Muslim West Beirut, where I came to embrace multiple identities and distrust the exclusivist certitudes of many Lebanese. When I returned to Lebanon in 1992, after several years in the United States, my enduring memories from that earlier time were of a remarkably diverse society that could rebound from its worst calamities, seemingly effortlessly. Many of the clichés were true: a neighborhood firefight might break out between militias in the morning, but by the end of the day people would be repairing their damaged properties. The Lebanese could be infuriatingly anarchic, stupidly selfish, but they were also determined to take initiatives and embrace new departures. This I saw as the essence of the liberal ideal. When the Syrian Army left, I believed, that ideal could at last be fulfilled.

My understanding was a valid one, but in retrospect an incomplete one. The ideals of the Independence Intifada were largely the ideals of an urban middle class — politicians, professionals, journalists and students; mostly Christians and Sunnis but also some Druse — fed up with a vulgar, vampirical Syrian hegemony. But what about that sizable part of Lebanon that had no inclination to see Syria gone?

From the moment of Hariri’s assassination on Feb. 14, 2005, it was clear that the Shiite political parties, particularly Hezbollah, did not share in the national distress surrounding the former prime minister’s death. Certainly, party officials paid their respects to the Hariri family and condemned the crime, but when tens of thousands of Lebanese descended on Martyrs Square in Beirut to bury Hariri, the most obvious question was, Where are the Shiites? Given that Shiites represent perhaps 35 to 40 percent of the Lebanese population, this was no idle question...

The fear, of course, is that what Israel's bombing fit will do is to shift power in Lebanon from the urban, secular groups that look toward Europe to those who look toward Karbala and Tehran. This fear looks to be coming to pass.

Posted by Brad DeLong on August 11, 2006 at 12:40 PM

The Medicare Drug Benefit, Give The Republicans Credit

2006-08-12T09:11:00.000-04:00

This is from delong.typepad.com .

The Medicare Drug Benefit is Working According to Plan

The Medicare drug, no, the Pharmaceutical company benefit is working according to plan. Few things these days annoy me more than claims that Bush's Medicare drug benefit was "what the Democrats wanted to do."

Via Mark Thoma:

Economist's View: The Medicare Drug Benefit is Working According to Plan: No surprise here. The Medicare prescription drug plan is providing large benefits to the group targeted by the legislation - health insurance companies. It's unsurprising because the insurance companies played a large role in writing the new rules. However the other intended beneficiaries, legislators hoping to win votes, may not fare as well. And many seniors, especially the poor who are most in need of help, have seen their drug costs go up:

Inside Job How Humana and other insurance companies rigged the Medicare prescription drug plan, by Barbara T. Dreyfuss, American Prospect: Last week saw the news that Humana, one of the country's largest health insurance companies, experienced much better second-quarter earnings than had been expected. The announcement amounted to confirmation that the Medicare drug benefit is working exactly as planned -- not for the people enrolled in it, but for the insurers who drafted it.

Humana's profits jumped 10 percent, much better than Wall Street had anticipated, helped by a surge in seniors enrolling in Humana's Medicare drug and HMO plans.... Humana has also doubled its Medicare HMO membership in the past year...

Simply put, the Medicare drug program has been good news for Humana. But for seniors who had hoped that the Medicare drug plan, which began in January, would relieve them of worries about drug costs, things are not so rosy. About one- fifth of seniors in the Medicare program, concentrated especially among the poor who had been on Medicaid, report that they now pay more for their medicines than they had before. Since insurers can decide which drugs they cover and which they won't, many seniors are finding that new medicines they need are not paid for by their plan. And millions of enrollees are now approaching the level of total drug expenses that will provoke a cutoff from any further Medicare help with costs -- the now-infamous "donut hole"...

Posted by Brad DeLong on August 12, 2006 at 04:21 AM

Statement By Condoleeza Rice

2006-08-12T08:47:00.000-04:00

"What we're seeing here, in a sense, is the growing -- the birth pangs of a new Middle East."

Press Conference
July 21, 2006

[She obviously doesn't live there. Thosands displaced, thousands injured, thousands maimed, well over a thousand killed; has nothing to do with birth. - Harold]

A Better Way

2006-08-11T14:42:00.000-04:00

This is from Helena Cobban's justworldnews.com .

August 9, 2006 9:28 PM EST
Israel's attack force: woes and goals
posted by Helena Cobban

I know that in every war, the soldiers like to kvetch and complain. But it strikes me the complaining is notably loud, notably early among Israel's attack force going into Lebanon.

HaAretz's Roni Singer-Heruti writes in Thursday's paper:

"I feel like we've been thrown into the field and told to get along," Ram Dagan, who serves with a combat unit called up to the Lebanese border 10 days ago, said on his first leave. "I'm not talking about showers, not even about the food that's lacking, but about basic equipment to protect us. The helmets we've been issued are old-fashioned and hardly can be closed, and the body armor is 30 years old. It doesn't close on the sides or on the neck. We don't have a place to take shelter from rocket attack, and we are under fire all the time. We've been told that when we come under fire we should go into the APCs. But there are too many soldiers and not enough APCs. And anyway, they're not missile-proof," he said...

There's more.

This is yet more evidence to me that the current assault against Lebanon was not long pre-planned but is being conducted by the strategically illiterate Olmert and Peretz almost completely on-the-fly and day-to-day.

I've been trying to define what the IDF/IOF's actual war aims are as they conduct their horrendously lethal business in Lebanon. I think that, inasmuch as Olmert and Peretz are not merely acting out of childish pique and machismo (though let's not misunderestimate that portion of their motivation) they probably are determined to try to "re-establish the credibility of the Israeli deterrent". But they've already notably failed in doing so. The battering they gave Lebanon on July 12 did not cause Hizbullah to hold its fire on Juoly 13; and so on and on and on, every day since then.

Hizbullah, of course, is equally determined to to makes its point about not being deterred by Israel's much greater display and use of lethal might.

Personally, I think Hizbullah has amply made its point by now and could simply retire from the battlefield with good grace, having proven that it is not beaten and not cowed, and therefore that the fates of Israel and its Arab neighbors are indeed tied together in interdependence rather than the region being in a situation where Israel can exercize its colonial domination as it desires over all its neighbors, quite unchecked from any quarter.

Israel, I believe, has failed to make its point. But that uncomfortable fact likely won't stop Olmert and Peretz from proceeding and proceeding, digging themselves deeper into the mud of the Lebanese quagmire and the opprobrium of the civilized world with each week that passes.

There is a model for this, of course: the Bush administration "staying the course" on a road headed for a quite evident brick wall in Iraq.

Meanwhile, Hizbullah continues to say that it supports Fouad Siniora's very sensible seven-point peace plan. Siniora spelled out the plan-- once again-- for a Washington readership in today's WaPo.

Here's what he wrote:

The plan, which also received the full support of the 56 member states of the Organization of the Islamic Conference, included an immediate, unconditional and comprehensive cease-fire and called for:

* The release of Lebanese and Israeli prisoners and detainees through the International Committee of the Red Cross.

* The withdrawal of the Israeli army behind the "blue line."

* A commitment from the U.N. Security Council to place the Shebaa Farms and Kfar Shouba Hills areas under U.N. jurisdiction until border delineation and Lebanese sovereignty over them are fully settled. Further, Israel must surrender all maps of remaining land mines in southern Lebanon to the United Nations.

* Extension of the Lebanese government's authority over its territory through its legitimate armed forces, with no weapons or authority other than that of the Lebanese state, as stipulated in the Taif accord. We have indicated that the Lebanese armed forces are ready and able to deploy in southern Lebanon, alongside the U.N. forces there, the moment Israel pulls back to the international border.

* The supplementing of the U.N. international force operating in southern Lebanon and its enhancement in numbers, equipment, mandate and scope of operation, as needed, to undertake urgent humanitarian and relief work and guarantee stability and security in the south so that those who fled their homes can return.

* Action by the United Nations on the necessary measures to once again put into effect the 1949 armistice agreement signed by Lebanon and Israel and to ensure adherence to its provisions, as well as to explore possible amendments to or development of those provisions as necessary.

* The commitment of the international community to support Lebanon on all levels, including relief, reconstruction and development needs.

As part of this comprehensive plan, and empowered by strong domestic political support and the unanimous backing of the cabinet, the Lebanese government decided to deploy the Lebanese armed forces in southern Lebanon as the sole domestic military force in the area, alongside U.N. forces there, the moment Israel pulls back to the international border.

Israel responded by slaughtering more civilians in the biblical town of Qana. Such horrible scenes have been repeated daily for nearly four weeks and continue even as I write these words.

The resolution to this war must respect international law and U.N. resolutions, not just those selected by Israel, a state that deserves its reputation as a pariah because of its consistent disdain for and rejection of international law and the wishes of the international community for over half a century...

What on earth is there to object to in any of the seven points, or in the call for an "immediate, unconditional and comprehensive cease-fire"? I believe the Siniora plan and the Siniora government should receive strong and immediate backing from all who want the suffering-- on both sides of the international border-- to end.

(And then all those suffering Israeli soldiers can finally return to the comforts of their homes.... While the hundreds of thousands of Lebanese whose neighborhoods and infrastructure have been obliterated by the IDF/IOF soldiers' work get to return to-- what? Well, at least to an opportunity to rebuild their homes and their lives.)

Stay Alert

2006-08-11T07:17:00.000-04:00

President Remains Eager to Cut Entitlement Spending

By Michael Abramowitz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, August 11, 2006

The Bush administration has begun sounding out lawmakers and other key figures about mounting a new bipartisan effort to rein in the costs of Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security after the midterm elections, according to officials in the administration and on Capitol Hill.

No specific plan has been advanced, and administration officials are proceeding gingerly given the political debacle that beset the White House last year when President Bush promoted a plan to create private accounts in the Social Security program. But they have been sending strong signals in recent weeks that they want to try something again after the elections in November.

[Go read the rest. - Harold]
[Knowing how incompetent the Bush administration is I'm worried about them trying to "fix" anything. - Harold]

Via Angry Bear:

Angry Bear: Dean Baker continues to beat up on the Washington Post coverage of fiscal policy matters:

Yet again the Post reports on the threat posed by "entitlement" spending, referring to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. To quickly repeat myself, this is dishonest. There are modest and manageable increases in projected Social Security spending due to the aging of the population. There are unmanageable projected increases in Medicare and Medicaid expenditures due to a projected explosion in health care costs. If the projected explosion in health care costs proves accurate, then it will devastate the economy, and cause serious budget problems. Honest people respond to these projections by examining ways to prevent the explosion in health care costs. Less honest people talk about the need to cut entitlement spending, including Social Security... [precisely - Harold]

True

2006-08-10T07:28:00.000-04:00

I found this at Gush Shalom's website. Gush Shalom is an Israeli organization for peace.

So one general has been
Replaced by another.
So we shall reach
The Litani.
And then what?

Hizbullah
Will continue to exist.
The rockets
Will continue to fly.
The border
Will not be quiet.

There is only
A political solution.

There is no
Military solution.

Ad published in Haaretz, August 10, 2006

Help Me! Help Me!

2006-08-10T07:13:00.000-04:00

This is from the Washington Monthly's Political Animal blog.

A HIGHER POWER....Did you know that Bush family fixer James A. Baker III is busily beavering away on a task force to figure out what to do in Iraq? It's not exactly a secret (the New York Times wrote about it here), but I sure hadn't heard about it until I read "A Higher Power," featured in our current issue:

Since March, Baker, backed by a team of experienced national-security hands, has been busily at work trying to devise a fresh set of policies to help the president chart a new course in — or, perhaps, to get the hell out of — Iraq. But as with all things involving James Baker, there's a deeper political agenda at work as well. "Baker is primarily motivated by his desire to avoid a war at home — that things will fall apart not on the battlefield but at home. So he wants a ceasefire in American politics," a member of one of the commission's working groups told me.

Specifically, he said, if the Democrats win back one or both houses of Congress in November, they would unleash a series of investigative hearings on Iraq, the war on terrorism, and civil liberties that could fatally weaken the administration and remove the last props of political support for the war, setting the stage for a potential Republican electoral disaster in 2008. "I guess there are people in the [Republican] party, on the Hill and in the White House, who see a political train wreck coming, and they've called in Baker to try to reroute the train."

I guess if anyone can talk sense into W, maybe it's Baker. Still, this might be a tougher nut to crack than strongarming a few election monitors in Florida.

—Kevin Drum 1:58 AM

Likely Escalation of Hostilities in Lebanon

2006-08-10T06:53:00.000-04:00

Israelis Authorize Expansion Of Combat
Cabinet Bitterly Divided; Highest Toll Yet for Troops

By Molly Moore and Jonathan Finer
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, August 10, 2006

JERUSALEM, Aug. 9 -- On the deadliest day of fighting yet for Israeli soldiers in Lebanon, the Israeli security cabinet Wednesday authorized the military to expand ground combat operations to try to root out Hezbollah guerrillas who continued to mount fierce resistance.

The cabinet debated military options during an acrimonious six-hour meeting that occasionally dissolved into shouting matches among members torn between the public's growing anger over the military's failure to stop Hezbollah rocket attacks and concerns that enlarging an already treacherous battlefield will result in high numbers of combat casualties, according to participants.

Wednesday's toll drove home those fears -- 15 soldiers were killed and 25 wounded in Israel's worst day of battlefield deaths since the conflict began, according to Israeli military officials.

Hezbollah leader Hasan Nasrallah, in a defiant televised address Wednesday night, warned that expanded Israeli military operations in Lebanon would be repelled by the same fierce resistance that has prevented Israeli troops from controlling the terrain in the last 29 days of warfare.

"You can invade, you can land by air, by sea and take any hill, we will expel you with force and transform our land in the south to a graveyard for Zionist invaders," Nasrallah said. "We will kill your officers and soldiers and inflict a calamity on you in the battlefield."

Nasrallah also called on the Arab residents of Haifa to evacuate their neighborhoods. "To the Arabs of Haifa, a special message," he said. "I plead with you to leave that city."

Hezbollah lobbed more than 180 rockets across northern Israel Wednesday, but they caused no serious injuries.

Israeli jets pummeled an often-hit bridge at Akkar in northern Lebanon and hit other bridges and roads in the Bekaa Valley near the village of Mashghara. Local residents told Lebanon's Future Television that seven people from one family were killed in the raid. Israeli warplanes have repeatedly attacked roads and bridges in the eastern Lebanese valley, seeking to cut off the transport of Hezbollah munitions, funds and rockets from Syria.

Another air attack shook southern Beirut in the late afternoon, part of Israel's almost daily pounding of the Dahiya area where Hezbollah's leaders and followers were concentrated. When the blast reverberated across the city, the assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs, C. David Welch, was conferring with Prime Minister Fouad Siniora and other Lebanese officials on cease-fire negotiations underway at the United Nations. It was his second visit to Beirut in a week, as the Bush administration tries to narrow differences between Lebanon and Israel. But diplomatic efforts to ease the fighting continued to flounder.

Israeli planes dropped leaflets on the Dahiya suburbs overnight, blaming Nasrallah for the air raids that have hit the area almost daily for four weeks. "Nasrallah is playing with fire and Beirut is burning," said the leaflets, attributed to "the State of Israel."

Police in Lebanon said the death count from Monday evening's Israeli attack on the southern Beirut suburb of Al Shiyah had risen to 47 as bodies continued to be pulled out of the rubble, making it the single deadliest airstrike since the conflict began July 12.

Although the Israeli cabinet set no schedule for the escalation in ground combat because of ongoing international diplomacy, a buildup in Israeli ground forces was evident in the string of small Israeli towns that line the Lebanese border. In Zarit, dozens of tanks and artillery pieces stretched along a half-mile access road into the town. A military official said more than 1,000 soldiers were moving into Lebanon to augment the 10,000 troops already operating there. The official said as many as 5,000 more Israeli troops would soon join the operation.

[Go read the rest. - Harold]

Hooray!

2006-08-10T06:47:00.000-04:00

British Police Thwart Major Terror Plot
Britain and the U.S. Raise Security Threat Levels

By Fred Barbash and John Ward Anderson
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, August 10, 2006; 6:18 AM

British authorities said today they had disrupted a "major terrorist plot" to blow up passenger flights between the United Kingdom and the United States, prompting a security clampdown at British and U.S. international airports and a cascade of delays in trans-Atlantic flights generally.

London's Deputy Police Commissioner Paul Stephenson said 21 people had been arrested in London and in Birmingham England after a months-long investigation into what he said was a plan for "mass murder on an unimaginable scale." He did not say why the announcement was made today.

[Go read the rest. - Harold]

Mike Wallace Interview With Iranian President Ahmadinejad

2006-08-09T19:11:00.000-04:00

~85% of Iranians do not support the Mullahs that rule them. I support their struggle for freedom. Imagine being ruled by the likes of Robertson, Falwell, and Dobson.

- so with that in mind:

I found this on the verizon home page.

-- A portion of Wallace's interview, conducted Tuesday at a crucial time in the Mideast with Israel fighting the Iran-backed Hezbollah, will be shown Thursday on the "CBS Evening News." A fuller report will air on Sunday's "60 Minutes."

-- In the interview, Ahmadinejad said of the Bush administration, "see how they talk down to my nation."

-- Of Ahmadinejad, Wallace said, "He's an impressive fellow, this guy. He really is. He's obviously smart as hell."

-- Wallace said he was surprised to find that the Iranian president was still a college professor who taught a graduate-level course.

-- "You'll find him an interesting man," he said. "I expected more of a firebrand. I don't think he has the slightest doubt about how he feels ... about the American administration and the Zionist state. He comes across as more rational than I had expected."

Lamont Beats Lieberman in Connecticut Democratic Primary for US Senate

2006-08-09T11:54:00.000-04:00

I found this at talkingpointsmemo.com

August 09, 2006 -- 10:12 AM EST
Reid and Schumer on Lamont ...

“The Democratic voters of Connecticut have spoken and chosen Ned Lamont as their nominee. Both we and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC) fully support Mr. Lamont’s candidacy. Congratulations to Ned on his victory and on a race well run."

“Joe Lieberman has been an effective Democratic Senator for Connecticut and for America. But the perception was that he was too close to George Bush and this election was, in many respects, a referendum on the President more than anything else. The results bode well for Democratic victories in November and our efforts to take the country in a new direction.”

-- Josh Marshall

[very interesting - Harold]

Logical

2006-08-09T07:02:00.000-04:00

"In order to preserve democracy oppressive action will be taken." Camper Van Beethoven

George W. Bush on the Possibility of a Civil War in Iraq

2006-08-08T11:51:00.000-04:00

"You know, I hear people say, well, civil war this, civil war that. The Iraqi people decided against civil war when they went to the ballot box."
-- President Bush, 8/7/06

Careful, Please

2006-08-08T11:49:00.000-04:00

This is from the Center For American Progress.

Drilling in Alaska's North Slope has led to "4,532 spills between 1996 and 2004 totaling more than 1.9 million gallons of toxic substances, most commonly diesel, crude oil, and hydraulic oil."

artwork by M.Gaughan

2006-08-06T15:27:00.000-04:00

BEWARE!

2006-08-06T11:05:00.000-04:00

This is from talkingpointsmemo.com .

August 06, 2006 -- 10:11 AM EST // link)

There's no party more smarmily mendacious in the Social Security debate than the Washington Post editorial page. As long-time readers know, for several years the GOP has been trying to fool voters and protect vulnerable incumbents with unpopular positions by continually forcing changes in the name of their policy on Social Security. For literally decades they called their private account policy 'privatization'. But when support for the policy began to go south they insisted that the name for the policy was actually a slur. They even went so far as to say it was a name of denigration devised by Democrats.

Friday's Post editorial on Social Security actually went so far as to ape not only the 'it's not privatization' bamboozlement but even took the GOP's lead banning the phrase 'private accounts' in favor of the better poll-testing 'personal accounts'.

From the Post ...

"Yesterday an e-mail sent out on behalf of Nancy Pelosi, the House minority leader, dismissed Henry M. Paulson Jr.'s comments on "privatizing" Social Security, adding that this policy has been "soundly rejected by the American people."
The Social Security reform that President Bush pushed last year involved personal retirement accounts. But it did not involve "privatization": The accounts, which were to be optional, were to be designed and administered by the government, with no opportunities for Wall Street salesmen to foist enormous hidden fees on unsuspecting workers."

On one level, semantics is certainly not as important as the substance of the underlying policies words describe. In this case, 'privatization', by every relevant standard and criterion, is the appropriate word for the policy in question. But editorial pages are supposed to forums for forceful discussion and advocacy of policy unencumbered by either sides spin and bamboozlement, but especially by one side's intentional efforts to deceive voters. In this case the Post really is an arm of the RNC.

-- Josh Marshall

Expanded Uri Avnery

2006-08-06T10:32:00.000-04:00

Uri Avnery
5.8.06

Junkies of War

FOR ME it was a moment of shocking revelation.

I was listening to one of the daily speeches of our Prime Minister. He said: "We are a wonderful people!" He said: We have already won this war, it is the greatest victory in the history of our state. He said: We have changed the face of the Middle East. And more to that effect.

Well, I told myself, that's Olmert.

I have known him since he was 20-something. At that time, I was a member of the Knesset, and Olmert was the book-carrier (literally) of another member. Since then I have followed his career. He has never been anything but a party functionary, a small-time politician specializing in manipulations, a run-of-the-mill demagogue. On the way changed parties several times and served as a mayor with a grade of D minus, until he climbed on the bandwagon of Ariel Sharon. More or less by accident he was given the empty title of "Deputy Prime Minister", and when Sharon suffered his stroke, something happened that took Olmert too by surprise: he became Prime Minister.

Throughout his career he has remained a complete cynic, basically a right-winger but willing to pretend to be a liberal when faced with leftists.

So, I told myself, this is just another cynical speech. But suddenly a ghastly thought struck me: No, the man believes what he is saying!

Hard as it is to imagine, it seems that Olmert really believes that this is a successful war. That he is winning. That he has radically changed Israel's situation. That he is building a New Middle East. That he is a historic leader, far superior to Ariel Sharon (who, after all, was beaten in Lebanon and who allowed Hizbullah to build up its arsenal of rockets). That the longer he is allowed to go on with the war, the more his stature in history will grow.

Ehud Olmert has obviously cut himself off from reality. He lives in a bubble all by himself. His speeches show that he has a very real problem.

Of all the dangers facing Israel now, this is the most severe. Because this man is deciding, quite simply, the fate of millions: who will die, who will become a refugee, whose world will be shattered.

BUT OLMERT'S problem with megalomania is nothing compared to what has happened to Amir Peretz.

Exactly nine months ago, after his election as Labor Party chairman, Peretz made a speech in Tel-Aviv's Rabin Square in which he revealed his dream: that in the no-man's land between Israel and the Gaza Strip a football field will be built, and a match between the Israeli children of Sderot and the Palestinian children of nearby Bet-Hanoun will take place. An Israeli Martin Luther King.

Nine month's later, a monster has been born to us.

In the Knesset election campaign, Peretz appeared as a social revolutionary. He announced that he would change the face of Israeli society, set new national priorities, cut billions from the military budget and transfer them to education, welfare and measure to reduce the glaring gap between rich and poor. As a veteran peace-lover, he would, of course, achieve peace with the Palestinians and the entire Arab world.

This won him the votes of many citizens, including many who would normally never consider voting for the Labor Party.

What followed is history. He seduced himself, when Olmert offered him the Ministry of Defense. That was still Olmert the cynic. He knew, as we all did, that Peretz was walking into a trap, that as a rank civilian without serious military experience he would be easy prey for the generals. But Peretz did not shrink back. The supreme aim of his life is to become Prime Minister, and in order to become a credible candidate he believed that he must present himself as a security expert.

Since then, Peretz has become a rabid warmonger. Not only does he endorse all the demands of the generals, not only does he act as their spokesman - he has also helped to push Israel into war, and since then he has been demanding that it should continue, enlarge, widen, kill more, destroy more, occupy more. He himself declared, "Nasrallah will never forget the name Amir Peretz!" - like a spoilt child inscribing his name on a tourist attraction.

At the moment, he is trying to be more extreme even than Olmert. While the Prime Minister is afraid of continuing to advance, fearing that too many casualties from the rockets and the battle on the ground might cloud the brilliance of his victory, Peretz wants to reach the Litani River, whatever the cost. There's no other way - if one wants to become Prime Minister, one has to walk over dead bodies.

Thus a monster has been born to us. Rosemary's Baby.

TODAY, THE 25th day of the war, we can draw up an interim balance. What were the aims? What are the results?

0 "To destroy Hizbullah".

Who would have believed it, but on the 25th day Hizbullah is still standing and fighting. A few thousand fighters against the fifth strongest army in the world. Nobody speaks anymore about eliminating it. Not Olmert, not Peretz, not even Dan Halutz - the third corner of this unholy triangle.

0 "To weaken Hizbullah".

That is a watered down version of the first aim. It is more convenient, because it cannot be measured. After all, in any war both sides are weakened. People are killed and wounded, arms are destroyed, installations demolished. But while the Israeli army can mobilize another division and another one, and the Americans are rushing more bombs to us, can Hizbullah absorb such losses?

Nobody knows how many fighters the organization has lost. The Israeli army distributes estimates, without being able to prove them. The Lebanese speak about far smaller numbers, and do not have any proof either.

But that is not the main thing. An organization like Hizbullah has no problem in raising more and more volunteers for "holy war". Be their losses as they may, after the war the organization will train as many new fighters as necessary. Their arsenals will also be replenished with new weapons arriving from Iran and Syria. The border is long, it is impossible to seal it.

0 "To push Hizbullah away from the border".

That is the crumpled aim, after the two preceding ones were shown to be unattainable. It, too, has not been realized yet, and never will be, because it is also unattainable. Most Hizbullah fighters are local boys of the South Lebanese towns and villages. They will continue to be there, overtly or covertly. No international force can prevent that, and certainly not the Lebanese Army.

The rockets can be moved further away. How many kilometers? Ten? Twenty? That will not remove the threat from Nahariya, Haifa and Tel-Aviv - especially since the range of the missiles is bound to grow with time, when technologically more advanced types arrive.

0 "To kill Hassan Nasrallah".

For the time being, so it seems, the report of his death was an exaggeration, to quote Mark Twain. True, in a kind of parody of the Entebbe exploit, Nasrallah was pulled out of a hospital in Baalbek, but it was another Hassan Nasrallah. Oops.

In the meantime, the original Nasrallah is flourishing. Compared to the kitschy speeches of Olmert, with their endless clichés and the fist thumping on the table, the Hizbullah leader comes over as a sober speaker, measured and mostly quite credible.

0 "To return to the Israeli army the power of deterrence".

Nobody has any doubt that the Israeli army is a good, professional army, capable of defeating regular armies. But this war proves that it is not capable of achieving a military decision against an able guerilla organization with determined fighters. If Hizbullah is alive and kicking after 25 days, the deterrence power of the Israeli army has been weakened - whatever happens from now on.

From this point of view, the war has harmed the security of Israel. It has proved that the Israeli rear is exposed, that the Hizbullah fighters are not inferior to the Israeli soldiers, that there is no de-luxe war, that the Air Force cannot win without land forces. Not even in ideal circumstances, when the other side has no anti-air defense to speak of.

Some comfort themselves with the thought that "the Arabs have seen that we are crazy". We react to a small local provocation with an orgy of killing and destruction, destroying whole countries, a sort of national amok. But running amok is not a policy. It does not solve any problem. It is an uncontrollable reflex. It does not allow for straight thinking. It even allows the other side to manipulate us with premeditated provocations.

0 "Deploying an International Force along the border".

That is a kind of emergency exit, after all the other aims have gone up in smoke.

At the beginning of the war, Olmert himself strenuously objected to such a force, because it would restrict the freedom of action of the Israeli army. Clearly, no international force will dare to come, unless there is a cease-fire in place and an agreement with Hizbullah has been reached. Nobody wants to be exposed to cross-fire. Therefore, this force will also have to serve Hisbullah's interests, for fear of a guerilla war starting against it. Have all the sacrifices been made for this?

0 "We shall create a new situation in the Middle East".

This aim has indeed been achieved - but not the way Olmert told himself (and us).

The long-range results of the war are not immediately obvious. They belong to the category defined by Bismarck as "imponderables" - things that cannot be measured.

Every day on their TV screens tens of millions of Arabs and hundred of millions of Muslims see the atrocious pictures of crushed babies, the sights of the horrible destruction. These are deeply imprinted in the consciousness of the masses and will leave behind them an accumulation of anger and hatred that is far more dangerous than an arsenal of missiles. In these 25 days, thousands of new suicide bombers have been created. And as the stature of Nasrallah as the hero of the Arab world increases, so the respect for the "moderate" Arab regimes hit new lows - the very regimes that the US and Israel rely on for creating the New Middle East.

AFTER THE 25th day, the 26th will arrive, and so on and on. President Bush, who pushed us into this war to start with, is now pushing us to fight on ("Until the last Israeli soldier," as the saying goes.) Like Olmert, he lives in an imaginary world.

Bush, Olmert and their like can incite and draw the masses behind them, until the call of "the Emperor is naked" finds receptive ears.

One of the most sickening sights of the war is the picture of the international diplomats doing everything they can to enable Olmert & Co. to go on with the war. The UN has long since become an agent of the White House. Hypocrisy and sanctimoniousness are having a field day, while lives are being destroyed and the dead buried on both sides of the border.

Olmert wants to "gain" as many days as possible for continued fighting. What sort of gain is this? We are conquering South Lebanon as flies conquer fly-paper. Generals present maps with impressive arrows to show how Hizbullah is being pushed north. That might be convincing - if we were talking about a front-line in a war with a regular army, as taught in Staff College. But this is a different war altogether. In the conquered area, Hizbullah people remain, and our soldiers are exposed to attacks of the kind in which Hizbullah has excelled from its first day.

So we shall get to the Litani River. Beyond it, there is another river, and another one. Lebanon has an abundance of rivers we can get to.

Perhaps it would be worthwhile for these two junkies, Olmert and Peretz, to come down from their "high" and study the map.

Uri Avnery Said

2006-08-06T10:29:00.000-04:00

The veteran Israeli peace activist and former Member of Knesset Uri Avnery had it completely right when he wrote on August 5, "We are conquering South Lebanon as flies 'conquer' fly-paper."

George W. Bush's Grand Failure

2006-08-04T08:52:00.000-04:00

This is from washingtonmonthly.com's Kevin Drum.

So to summarize: The invasion of Iraq has failed to create a stable state, let alone a democracy. Instead, it has produced chaos and civil war, strengthened Iran, and endangered Israel. In turn, Israel's war in Lebanon has failed in its goal of significantly weakening Hezbollah. Instead, it has turned Hassan Nasrallah into a regional folk hero and is about to end in a rerun of the disastrous occupation that created Hezbollah in the first place.

Perhaps a different strategy is in order for the future?

[Do you think? - Harold]

Fair Is Fair

2006-08-02T12:02:00.000-04:00

This is from the Daily Star, a Lebanese newspaper.

At least 828 Lebanese, almost all of them civilians, have been killed and 3,200 wounded over the last three weeks, the Higher Relief Committee said on Tuesday. Fifty-one Israelis have also been killed, most of them soldiers.

War, What Is It Good For?

2006-08-02T06:40:00.000-04:00

This is billmon.org. It has become one of my favorite blogs.

War Crimes Galore
Like Pussy Galore, except with razor-sharp shrapnel. Ha'aretz:

Witnesses in Baalbek said they saw dozens of IAF helicopters hovering over the city. They said the hospital in Baalbek, filled with patients and wounded people, was bombed by IAF helicopters late Tuesday. Plumes of burning smoke billowed from the hospital after it was directly hit, they said.

So Hizbullah rockets them, Israel bombs them, the Iranians and the Americans supply the rockets and bombs.

Saddam: (wistfully) Gee, I wish I could get in on some of that action.

Posted by billmon at 11:29 PM

More From billmon.org

2006-08-01T07:05:00.000-04:00

For the Sake of the Children

"Today's actions in the Middle East remind us that the United States and friends and allies must work for a sustainable peace, particularly for the sake of children.”

George W. Bush
President Attends Tee Ball Game
July 30, 2006

All In The Castro Family

2006-08-01T06:57:00.000-04:00

Ailing Castro Transfers Powers
Cuban Leader Has Surgery, Cedes Interim Control to Brother

By Manuel Roig-Franzia
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, August 1, 2006; Page A14

Cuban President Fidel Castro, a nemesis of the U. S. government for more than four decades, temporarily relinquished power on Monday for the first time in his long reign, saying he had undergone intestinal surgery.

Castro, whose government said he was hospitalized in Havana because of stress-related gastrointestinal bleeding, appointed his brother, Raul Castro, as temporary president of Cuba, leader of the nation's military and head of the Communist Party. A Cuban government source said late Monday night that while Castro's condition is serious, he is expected to recuperate.

No Cease-fire

2006-08-01T06:51:00.000-04:00

"There is no cease-fire and there will not be any cease-fire in the coming days."
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of Israel.

A Deadly Morality Play

2006-07-29T05:29:00.000-04:00

w w w . h a a r e t z . c o m

Last update - 10:44 25/07/2006
Morality is not on our side
By Ze'ev Maoz

There's practically a holy consensus right now that the war in the North is a just war and that morality is on our side. The bitter truth must be said: this holy consensus is based on short-range selective memory, an introverted worldview, and double standards.

This war is not a just war. Israel is using excessive force without distinguishing between civilian population and enemy, whose sole purpose is extortion. That is not to say that morality and justice are on Hezbollah's side. Most certainly not. But the fact that Hezbollah "started it" when it kidnapped soldiers from across an international border does not even begin to tilt the scales of justice toward our side.

Let's start with a few facts. We invaded a sovereign state, and occupied its capital in 1982. In the process of this occupation, we dropped several tons of bombs from the air, ground and sea, while wounding and killing thousands of civilians. Approximately 14,000 civilians were killed between June and September of 1982, according to a conservative estimate. The majority of these civilians had nothing to do with the PLO, which provided the official pretext for the war.

In Operations Accountability and Grapes of Wrath, we caused the mass flight of about 500,000 refugees from southern Lebanon on each occasion. There are no exact data on the number of casualties in these operations, but one can recall that in Operation Grapes of Wrath, we bombed a shelter in the village of Kafr Kana which killed 103 civilians. The bombing may have been accidental, but that did not make the operation any more moral.

On July 28, 1989, we kidnapped Sheikh Obeid, and on May 12, 1994, we kidnapped Mustafa Dirani, who had captured Ron Arad. Israel held these two people and another 20-odd Lebanese detainees without trial, as "negotiating chips." That which is permissible to us is, of course, forbidden to Hezbollah.

Hezbollah crossed a border that is recognized by the international community. That is true. What we are forgetting is that ever since our withdrawal from Lebanon, the Israel Air Force has conducted photo-surveillance sorties on a daily basis in Lebanese airspace. While these flights caused no casualties, border violations are border violations. Here too, morality is not on our side.

So much for the history of morality. Now, let's consider current affairs. What exactly is the difference between launching Katyushas into civilian population centers in Israel and the Israel Air Force bombing population centers in south Beirut, Tyre, Sidon and Tripoli? The IDF has fired thousands of shells into south Lebanon villages, alleging that Hezbollah men are concealed among the civilian population. Approximately 25 Israeli civilians have been killed as a result of Katyusha missiles to date. The number of dead in Lebanon, the vast majority comprised of civilians who have nothing to do with Hezbollah, is more than 300.

Worse yet, bombing infrastructure targets such as power stations, bridges and other civil facilities turns the entire Lebanese civilian population into a victim and hostage, even if we are not physically harming civilians. The use of bombings to achieve a diplomatic goal - namely, coercing the Lebanese government into implementing UN Security Council Resolution 1559 - is an attempt at political blackmail, and no less than the kidnapping of IDF soldiers by Hezbollah is the aim of bringing about a prisoner exchange.

There is a propaganda aspect to this war, and it involves a competition as to who is more miserable. Each side tries to persuade the world that it is more miserable. As in every propaganda campaign, the use of information is selective, distorted and self-righteous. If we want to base our information (or shall we call it propaganda?) policy on the assumption that the international environment is going to buy the dubious merchandise that we are selling, be it out of ignorance or hypocrisy, then fine. But in terms of our own national soul searching, we owe ourselves to confront the bitter truth - maybe we will win this conflict on the military field, maybe we will make some diplomatic gains, but on the moral plane, we have no advantage, and we have no special status.

The writer is a professor of political science at Tel Aviv university.

NO MORE WAR!

2006-07-27T17:59:00.000-04:00

"War is always war against children", Howard Zinn said that. He probably still does.

War still is.

Imagine, you, a regular, normal, person, trying to raise your kids in a place where there is war.

Just, imagine...

Hopefully

2006-07-27T17:43:00.000-04:00

I've been posting some, but I haven't been writing anything but the titles of the posts and a few one liners here and there, lately. I hope to change that. Have more of my writng: hopefully...

The Earth Is Getting Warmer

2006-07-27T11:52:00.000-04:00

This is from today's NYTimes.

July 27, 2006
Op-Ed Contributor
Cold, Hard Facts
By PETER DORAN
Chicago

IN the debate on global warming, the data on the climate of Antarctica has been distorted, at different times, by both sides. As a polar researcher caught in the middle, I’d like to set the record straight.

In January 2002, a research paper about Antarctic temperatures, of which I was the lead author, appeared in the journal Nature. At the time, the Antarctic Peninsula was warming, and many people assumed that meant the climate on the entire continent was heating up, as the Arctic was. But the Antarctic Peninsula represents only about 15 percent of the continent’s land mass, so it could not tell the whole story of Antarctic climate. Our paper made the continental picture more clear.

My research colleagues and I found that from 1986 to 2000, one small, ice-free area of the Antarctic mainland had actually cooled. Our report also analyzed temperatures for the mainland in such a way as to remove the influence of the peninsula warming and found that, from 1966 to 2000, more of the continent had cooled than had warmed. Our summary statement pointed out how the cooling trend posed challenges to models of Antarctic climate and ecosystem change.

Newspaper and television reports focused on this part of the paper. And many news and opinion writers linked our study with another bit of polar research published that month, in Science, showing that part of Antarctica’s ice sheet had been thickening — and erroneously concluded that the earth was not warming at all. “Scientific findings run counter to theory of global warming,” said a headline on an editorial in The San Diego Union-Tribune. One conservative commentator wrote, “It’s ironic that two studies suggesting that a new Ice Age may be under way may end the global warming debate.”

In a rebuttal in The Providence Journal, in Rhode Island, the lead author of the Science paper and I explained that our studies offered no evidence that the earth was cooling. But the misinterpretation had already become legend, and in the four and half years since, it has only grown.

Our results have been misused as “evidence” against global warming by Michael Crichton in his novel “State of Fear” and by Ann Coulter in her latest book, “Godless: The Church of Liberalism.” Search my name on the Web, and you will find pages of links to everything from climate discussion groups to Senate policy committee documents — all citing my 2002 study as reason to doubt that the earth is warming. One recent Web column even put words in my mouth. I have never said that “the unexpected colder climate in Antarctica may possibly be signaling a lessening of the current global warming cycle.” I have never thought such a thing either.

Our study did find that 58 percent of Antarctica cooled from 1966 to 2000. But during that period, the rest of the continent was warming. And climate models created since our paper was published have suggested a link between the lack of significant warming in Antarctica and the ozone hole over that continent. These models, conspicuously missing from the warming-skeptic literature, suggest that as the ozone hole heals — thanks to worldwide bans on ozone-destroying chemicals — all of Antarctica is likely to warm with the rest of the planet. An inconvenient truth?

Also missing from the skeptics’ arguments is the debate over our conclusions. Another group of researchers who took a different approach found no clear cooling trend in Antarctica. We still stand by our results for the period we analyzed, but unbiased reporting would acknowledge differences of scientific opinion.

The disappointing thing is that we are even debating the direction of climate change on this globally important continent. And it may not end until we have more weather stations on Antarctica and longer-term data that demonstrate a clear trend.

In the meantime, I would like to remove my name from the list of scientists who dispute global warming. I know my coauthors would as well.

Peter Doran is an associate professor of earth and environmental sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

ABA Condemns Bush's Use of Signing Statements

2006-07-24T12:03:00.000-04:00

This is from the Center for American Progress.

AMERICAN BAR ASSOCIATION CONDEMNS BUSH'S USE OF SIGNING STATEMENTS: The nation's premier legal group has denounced President Bush's use of signing statements as "contrary to the rule of law and our constitutional system of separation of powers." To date, Bush has objected to more than 800 provisions of legislation in "signing statements," which allow the President to claim "the power to disregard selected provisions of bills that he signed." By contrast, all other presidents combined have had just 600 signing statements. In response, a bipartisan 11-member panel of the American Bar Association (ABA) released a report yesterday condemning this practice as an effective line-item veto which "improperly deprive[s] Congress of the opportunity to override the veto." The report called for an end to the practice and for more congressional oversight in the event that a signing statement is issued. However, the strongest rebuke came from ABA president Michael S. Greco: "If left unchecked, the president's practice does grave harm to the separation of powers doctrine, and the system of checks and balances that have sustained our democracy for more than two centuries." Many congressional leaders have also come out against Bush's use of signing statements; Sen. Arlen Specter (R-PA) called the practice "a challenge to the plain language of the Constitution."

The Brookings Institution on The Crisis in The Mideast

2006-07-22T09:40:00.000-04:00

I found this at the Brookings Institution's website.

U.S. Fails to Defend Interests in Mideast

Chicago Tribune, July 17, 2006

Muqtedar Khan, Nonresident Fellow, Saban Center for Middle East Policy
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

This opinion has also been published at alt.muslim, The Daily Times, The News Journal, and other news outlets

The crisis in the Middle East is rapidly reaching dangerous proportions. Unless a heavy dose of sanity is injected into the region's affairs immediately, it is likely to escalate into a wider conflict that will make Iraq look like a picnic. The only player perhaps capable of playing this role is the U.S. The U.S. has the most to lose if things get out of hand. Its key interests in the region--oil, Israel and liberalism--are all in jeopardy.

Oil is already at a record high, closing at $77.03 Friday on the New York Mercantile Exchange, due to fears of disruption in case of a wider war.

Israel has never been more insecure. Its two biggest enemies, Hamas and Hezbollah, are effectively in control in the north and south and are shooting rockets at Israel.

U.S. attempts to promote democracy and liberalism in the region had made both Hamas and Hezbollah legitimate political forces. Now its own ally, Israel, has undermined Palestinian democracy with its military campaign in Gaza, and by attacking Lebanon it is strengthening support for Hezbollah.

Israel easily could have engaged in a prisoner exchange with Hamas and Hezbollah, as it has done several times in the past, and the matter would have ended there. But Israel's overwhelming response to the capture of its soldiers, at a time when Iraq is on the brink of a civil war and the Iranian nuclear crisis is at its zenith, is undermining all the key pillars of American national interests in the region.

However, I do not blame Israel for this crisis. It is doing what it thinks it must to pursue its security and its interests. I am wondering whether the U.S. is doing everything it should to defend its interests.

All players in the region are pursuing self-interest.

The ability of Hamas and Hezbollah to attack the invincible military of Israel and score successes, killing and capturing soldiers and shooting rockets, must have sent a chill down Israel's spine. It is reacting with overwhelming force out of fear.

Israel's future depends on its military power, and it thinks that by punishing Palestinians and Lebanese civilians it can restore that fear and deter future attacks.

Hezbollah, under pressure from within Lebanon and the international community to demilitarize, has once again succeeded in presenting itself as the only defense that Lebanon has against Israel. Israel's killing of dozens of Lebanese civilians and bombing of Beirut will merely increase support for Hezbollah.

Iran, thanks to America's foolhardy adventure in Iraq, is rapidly emerging as a regional power. It is protecting itself from America's pressure on the nuclear issue by creating a dangerous diversion.

Meanwhile, Muslims across the world are watching a nuclear power supported, armed and funded by the U.S. bombard and kill dozens of civilians, destroy the economy and infrastructure of Palestine and Lebanon, kidnap dozens of elected Palestinian leaders, bomb their homes, and all the U.S. does is provide political cover for Israel in the UN Security Council and on the world stage. Al Qaeda must be running out of enrollment forms.

The escalation in the region is not in the interest of the U.S. It strengthens anti-Americanism worldwide and fuels radicalism in the Arab and Muslim world. It also reverses hard-earned gains in the region, such as fledgling democracies in Palestine and Lebanon. The U.S. does not have to abandon Israel to defend its other interests in the region. All it has to do is use its enormous leverage to ensure that Israel's policies are moderate and prudent and safeguard both Israeli and American interests.

© Copyright 2006, The Brookings Institution

The Hornet's Nest Has Been Cracked Wide Open

2006-07-21T11:04:00.000-04:00

More from billmon.org .

There is a passage in Kanan Makiya's book Republic of Fear that has haunted me ever since I read it. I've quoted it before to explain why I expected nothing but horror from the "liberation" of Iraq. It describes what happened in the summer of 1959 in the city of Mosul (a patchwork of ethnic, religious, tribal and class distinctions, then and now):

For four days and four nights Kurds and Yezdis stood against Arabs; Assyrian and Aramean Christians against Arab Moslems; the Arab tribe of Albu Mutaiwat against the Arab tribe of Shammar; the Kurdish tribe of al-Gargariyyah against Arab Albu Mutaiwat; the peasants of the Mosul country against their landlords; the soldiers of the Fifth Brigade against their officers; the periphery of the city of Mosul against the center; the plebians of the Arab quarters of Al-Makkawi and Wadi Hajar against the aristocrats of the Arab quarter of ad-Dawwash; and within the quarter of Bab al-Baid, the family of al-Rajabu aggainst its traditional rivals, the Aghawat. It seemed as if all social cement dissolved and all political authority vanished.

I think the same passage can be used to illustrate the dynamic currently at work across the Middle East -- not entirely as a result of the Iraq invasion and the botched occupation that followed, but certainly much the worse for it. Outside of Iraq the social and political cement hasn't dissolved yet (although the Palestinian territories are getting close and Lebanon is always vulnerable) but the strains are enormous and growing.

Is Hitchens Right?

2006-07-21T10:42:00.000-04:00

This is from slate.com .

fighting words: A wartime lexicon.

Wowie Zahawie

Sorry everyone, but Iraq did go uranium shopping in Niger.
By Christopher Hitchens

Posted Monday, April 10, 2006, at 4:43 PM ET

In the late 1980s, the Iraqi representative to the International Atomic Energy Agency—Iraq's senior public envoy for nuclear matters, in effect—was a man named Wissam al-Zahawie. After the Kuwait war in 1991, when Rolf Ekeus arrived in Baghdad to begin the inspection and disarmament work of UNSCOM, he was greeted by Zahawie, who told him in a bitter manner that "now that you have come to take away our assets," the two men could no longer be friends. (They had known each other in earlier incarnations at the United Nations in New York.)

At a later 1995 U.N. special session on the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, Zahawie was the Iraqi delegate and spoke heatedly about the urgent need to counterbalance Israel's nuclear capacity. At the time, most democratic countries did not have full diplomatic relations with Saddam's regime, and there were few fully accredited Iraqi ambassadors overseas, Iraq's interests often being represented by the genocidal Islamist government of Sudan (incidentally, yet another example of collusion between "secular" Baathists and the fundamentalists who were sheltering Osama Bin Laden). There was one exception—an Iraqi "window" into the world of open diplomacy—namely the mutual recognition between the Baathist regime and the Vatican. To this very important and sensitive post in Rome, Zahawie was appointed in 1997, holding the job of Saddam's ambassador to the Holy See until 2000. Those who knew him at that time remember a man much given to anti-Jewish tirades, with a standing ticket for Wagner performances at Bayreuth. (Actually, as a fan of Das Rheingold and Götterdämmerung in particular, I find I can live with this. Hitler secretly preferred sickly kitsch like Franz Lehar.)

In February 1999, Zahawie left his Vatican office for a few days and paid an official visit to Niger, a country known for absolutely nothing except its vast deposits of uranium ore. It was from Niger that Iraq had originally acquired uranium in 1981, as confirmed in the Duelfer Report. In order to take the Joseph Wilson view of this Baathist ambassadorial initiative, you have to be able to believe that Saddam Hussein's long-term main man on nuclear issues was in Niger to talk about something other than the obvious. Italian intelligence (which first noticed the Zahawie trip from Rome) found it difficult to take this view and alerted French intelligence (which has better contacts in West Africa and a stronger interest in nuclear questions). In due time, the French tipped off the British, who in their cousinly way conveyed the suggestive information to Washington. As everyone now knows, the disclosure appeared in watered-down and secondhand form in the president's State of the Union address in January 2003.

continue reading the rest at slate.com .

Friedman For Governor

2006-07-19T08:27:00.000-04:00

But Seriously, Folks
Heard the One About Kinky Friedman Running for Texas Governor?

By Peter Carlson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, July 18, 2006

FORT WORTH

Smoking an illegal substance, Kinky Friedman heads for the Flying Saucer.

Kinky -- nobody calls him Friedman -- is a comic country singer, mystery novelist and Texas humorist. The illegal substance is a fat, stinky Cuban cigar. The Flying Saucer is the Fort Worth bar where Kinky is about to deliver a speech in his campaign for governor.

But first he removes the cigar from his mouth and reveals the wisdom that his old friend, country icon Willie Nelson, imparted when Kinky began his campaign: "No pedophile jokes till after the election."

So far, Kinky has followed that advice, and it has served him well. The pols and the pundits said he was a clown who could never collect the 45,540 signatures necessary to get on the November ballot as an independent candidate. But Kinky showed them: He got 137,154 certified signatures.

He ambles down the sunny street, wearing his trademark outfit: black cowboy hat, black shirt, black leather vest, bluejeans and black cowboy boots. Those duds, along with the Frank Zappa facial hair and the Groucho Marx cigar, make Kinky look like the bad guy in a bad western. They also make him instantly recognizable all over Texas.

"Kinky!" yells a guy who recognizes him from across the street. He gives a thumbs-up sign. "I'm votin' for you!"

"May the God of your choice bless you," Kinky replies.

When Kinky steps into the Flying Saucer, the crowd erupts in cheers. The place is packed, with several hundred people sitting at tables and others filling the aisles. Nearly everybody is drinking beer, which is good preparation for any political speech, particularly one of Kinky's.

"Well, folks, it looks like the election is getting more and more interesting," he says. "The other three candidates seem to have humor bypasses. If you're a politically correct person, you should vote for one of them. You have to be politically correct to be a politician, and the three of them are. Me, I'm a compassionate redneck."

The crowd cheers, and the man President Bush once called "a Texas legend" launches into his stump speech, a zippy combination of Borscht Belt humor and populist politics.

"As you know, I'm 61 years old, which is too young for Medicare and too old for women to care," he says. "But I care about Texas and I want to fix what's wrong with it. We are probably the richest state in the country, but we got potholes in the roads, we can't pay our teachers, we can't provide health insurance for our kids and they're trying to sell off the state parks!"

Kinky promises big changes. He'll legalize casino gambling and use the proceeds to fund public schools -- "slots for tots." He's the only candidate in the race -- or maybe anywhere -- who supports both school prayer and gay marriage. ("They have a right to be as miserable as the rest of us," he explains.) He'll clamp down on illegal immigration. And he'll run the state's school buses on the biodiesel fuel that Willie Nelson uses to propel his tour bus.

"We can make Texas number one in renewable fuels -- which is a helluva lot better than being number one in executions, toll roads, property taxes and dropouts!"

The crowd cheers and Kinky tells them that he can win this race. In the 2002 gubernatorial election, he says, only 29 percent of the voters even bothered to show up.

"Last time, they spent $100 million just to drive 71 percent of us away from the polls," he says. "This time, that 71 percent is coming roarin' back -- with pitchforks ! -- to throw the money-changers out of the temple!"

After the speech, Kinky's supporters swarm the merchandise table to contribute to his campaign by purchasing posters, T-shirts and a $29.95 Kinky doll that utters a couple of dozen of his one-liners when you push a button on its back. "How hard can it be?" the doll says. And: "I can't screw things up any worse than they already have."

An hour later, Kinky is still autographing these items for a long line of fans. It's hot, and he's sweating in a shirt he's already worn for two days. He turns to Jeff Shelby, his childhood friend and campaign chauffeur, and whispers, "Man, I just smelled my shirt -- whew!"

Shelby laughs -- he had told Kinky to bring more shirts -- then Kinky sticks his cigar back into his mouth, lays his wilted black sleeves across the shoulders of two middle-age women and smiles for a cellphone picture.

A Four-Way Race

Kinky Friedman is just a part -- one-quarter, to be exact -- of what Texas Monthly recently called "The Weirdest Governor's Race of All Time."

The Republican candidate is the incumbent, Rick Perry, whose amazing anchorman coiffure inspired the nickname "Governor Good Hair." In 2002, Perry won election with 58 percent of the vote. Since then his popularity has plummeted, the victim of an unpopular school finance plan and a new business tax. Recently, 15 longtime Republican contributors expressed their displeasure over the business tax by writing him checks -- for a penny or two.

One anti-Perry Republican, state Comptroller Carole Keeton McClellan Rylander Strayhorn, is running for governor as an independent. She's a formidable candidate: In 2002, campaigning for comptroller on the slogan "One Tough Grandma," Strayhorn -- the mother of former Bush press secretary Scott McClellan -- won 246,000 more votes than Perry. But her name was Rylander then and her new name doesn't have the same recognition, so she asked to appear on this year's ballot as Carole Keeton "Grandma" Strayhorn. The elections folks declined that request, ruling that "Grandma" isn't a nickname, it's a slogan.

The Democrats, who haven't won a statewide race in Texas since 1994, nominated Chris Bell, an obscure former one-term congressman from Houston. Bell doesn't have a nickname, but he's frequently referred to as "What's-his-name, the Democrat."

And then there's Kinky, the author of 23 books and dozens of country songs as leader of the 1970s band Kinky Friedman and the Texas Jewboys. Kinky's repertoire included the classic anti-bigot anthem "They Ain't Makin' Jews Like Jesus Anymore," which not only contains nearly every ethnic slur imaginable, but also manages to rhyme "Aristotle Onassis" with "ethnocentric racist." (His sidekick, Shelby, played piano in the Jewboys under the nickname "Jewford," and he became semi-famous in Texas himself.)

The campaign is a bizarre, four-way slugfest that has, the Dallas Morning News recently noted, "transformed what probably would have been an easy run for incumbent Rick Perry into a wide-open race."

Some polls show Kinky running second to Perry. Does that mean the Kinkster might actually win ?

"I don't think there's any chance of that," says Jason Stanford, who is Bell's campaign manager.

"He'll come up woefully short," says Mike Baselice, Perry's pollster.

"He won't win," says Evan Smith, editor of the Texas Monthly, "but he'll affect who wins."

Kinky's campaign manager, Dean Barkley, the architect of Jesse Ventura's successful 1998 race for governor of Minnesota, is more optimistic. "If 40 percent of registered voters turn out," Barkley says, "Kinky will win."

Barkley figures Kinky's image as a straight-talking outsider will appeal to angry, alienated folks who seldom vote. Kinky's campaign has raised more than $3.4 million -- more than Bell but far less than Perry or Strayhorn -- while enlisting an army of volunteers who gathered the signatures that put him on the ballot. Now all Kinky has to do is get one more vote than anybody else: The election is winner-take-all, with no runoff.

"Kinky's gonna win," says John McCall, a hair-care products mogul who has donated $1 million to his old friend Kinky's campaign. "I have a business that deals with hairdressers. People talk to their hairdressers. And what I'm hearing is: Kinky's gonna win in a landslide."

Unconventional Wisdom

Kinky squats down to pat his two little pit bulls, Valerie and Penny, then he lets them out into the back yard of his funky little ranch house in Austin.

"We can learn a lot from animals," he says. "How to be loyal. How to be ready for fun. How to get over things quick."

Kinky is one of Texas's most famous animal lovers. He donates the proceeds of his line of salsa -- Kinky Friedman's Private Stock -- to the Utopia Animal Rescue Ranch, a central Texas facility for abandoned animals that's on land donated by Kinky's late father, Tom. (Laura Bush is on the board of directors.)

"We've saved more animals than Noah," Kinky says. "It's Gandhi-like work, and I'm a Gandhi-like figure. Meaning I don't do any of the real work, I just promote it."

He ambles into the living room, which houses a pool table, and shoots a quick game of nine-ball. Then he heads to the bedroom to pack his bags.

It's another long day on the campaign trail. He was up at dawn to address a convention of teachers at an Austin hotel. Then he held a quick news conference, revealing, among other things, that he prefers campaigning among Hispanics because "their food is better." Now he's heading to Houston, first stop on a four-day campaign swing.

Jewford stuffs their suitcases into the campaign's rented Chevy Trailblazer, then gets behind the wheel. Kinky rides shotgun and fires up a cigar.

For the next several hours, he keeps up a steady stream of jokes, gripes and stories. He calls Democrats and Republicans "the Crips and the Bloods." He grumbles that election law forbids campaigns to pay the candidate. "And my staffers," he adds, "are such officious, honest [bleeps] that I can't suck any bucks out of the campaign." And he complains about people who complain that his speeches are full of one-liners: "All politicians speak in one-liners and sound bites. They're just not as funny as mine."

He quotes Mark Twain. He quotes Oscar Wilde. He quotes a pig farmer he met while campaigning: "You ain't worth a damn," the farmer told Kinky, "but you're better than what we got."

He puffs on his cigar a while, then lets it go out and stuffs it into his pocket. A few minutes later he retrieves a different half-smoked cigar from his pocket and ignites it.

"Churchill said cigars are 'gamier when resurrected,' and he was right," he says.

Cruising into Houston on Interstate 10, the Trailblazer runs into a traffic jam. This makes Kinky cranky. He gripes about the traffic. He gripes about Houston. He calls his campaign headquarters to gripe about the next item on his schedule -- taping an ad for the Houston Comets, a women's professional basketball team.

"I don't like basketball and I don't like women's basketball," he grumbles into his cellphone. "If it was roller derby, it would be different."

He listens for a while, puffing away. "All right, I'll do it," he says, "and in September you'll have your candidate in a mental hospital."

He hangs up, then starts trying to figure out what to say in this ad. It's got to be something different, something funny, something . . . Kinky . He tries out a few jokes but rejects them. Then it comes to him -- the perfect line. He starts grinning mischievously.

The Trailblazer pulls into a parking garage beneath the Toyota Center, where the Comets play. A young woman leads Kinky into a TV studio and sits him down behind a fake anchorman desk. It's the Comets' 10th anniversary, she explains, and Texas celebrities are taping greetings that will be played at the arena during games.

The cameraman gives him the signal.

"Hi, folks, it's Kinky Friedman, here to wish the Houston Comets a happy tenth anniversary." He pauses, then leans forward and jabs his cigar at the camera. "Houston Comets basketball -- it's not just for lesbians anymore!"

The cameraman cracks up, then quickly stifles his laughter and asks Kinky to do something a bit more conventional. Kinky obliges, but he's not happy about it.

Back in the car, he starts grumbling again. "If those [bleeps] don't see that as the perfect slogan for them," he says, "they're crazy."

The Second Career

Kinky Friedman has lived a life that could, and soon might, inspire the world's most entertaining political attack ad.

"I've been stoned a lot of times," he says. "And I've been involved with a lot of beautiful women. And I don't regret any of it."

He was born Richard Friedman in 1945 in Chicago, but his parents soon moved to Texas. His mother was a speech therapist, his father a professor of educational psychology at the University of Texas. In 1952, they founded Echo Hill, a Jewish summer camp in the Texas Hill Country, where Kinky worked as a counselor and began performing with Jewford, singing old folk songs and a new one that Kinky wrote at age 11: " Old Ben Lucas, had a lot of mucus coming right out of his nose . . ."

"He was energetic, he was pushing the envelope and he was doing things to irritate people," Jewford recalls. "He was pretty much the same as he is now."

At the University of Texas, he was nicknamed Kinky -- a reference to his hair, not, alas, to anything more risque. After graduating in 1966, he joined the Peace Corps and was sent to Borneo, where, he says, "I was supposed to teach agriculture to people who had been farming successfully for 2,000 years."

Back home in the early '70s, he formed the Texas Jewboys. Kinky, who played guitar, wrote some soulful, sensitive ballads, but what inspired a cult following were his outrageous comic songs: among them, a satire of anti-feminists called "Get Your Biscuits in the Oven and Your Buns in Bed," and a parody of Merle Haggard's "Okie From Muskogee" called "[Lower End of the Intestinal Tract] From El Paso," which suggested that men from that Texas city were a tad too fond of sheep.

Kinky had some success -- he played the Grand Ole Opry, joined Bob Dylan's Rolling Thunder Revue and toured with Willie Nelson -- but by the early '80s, his career was tanking, his longtime girlfriend had died in a car crash and he was doing way too much dope.

"He was high on 27 different herbs and spices," says Jimmie "Ratso" Silman, a Washington TV cameraman who has played backup guitar for Kinky off and on since the '70s. "He was a different person back then, definitely fairly repellent as a human being."

"I quit doing cocaine," Kinky says, "when Bob Marley fell out of my left nostril."

Actually, he quit doing cocaine when he moved into a trailer on the grounds of his parents' camp and began a second career writing comic mystery novels. The novels -- he wrote 17 -- feature a country singer-turned-detective named Kinky Friedman, who smokes cigars, cracks a lot of jokes and occasionally solves a case.

"The point wasn't the mystery, it was the voice," says Evan Smith. "The guy has got one of the most extraordinary authorial voices."

When Smith became editor of Texas Monthly in 2000, he hired Kinky as a columnist. The column was funny and very popular, but editing the Kinkster wasn't always easy. Once he did a column about . . . well, we can't say what it was about, for the same reason that Smith wouldn't run it.

"Kinky is 60 going on 12," Smith says.

A few years ago, Kinky called Smith at 7 in the morning, grumbling that he couldn't think of an idea for a column. Smith blurted out a suggestion: "Why don't you run for something?"

So Kinky wrote a column about running for governor. Smith thought he was kidding. So did everybody else. But Kinky -- who, in his only other stab at elective office, ran unsuccessfully for justice of the peace back in the '80s -- decided to make a serious run.

"I said, 'If you're really serious, you can't write for us,' " Smith recalls. " 'When you announce officially, I'm going to have to fire you.' "

Early in 2005, Kinky announced his candidacy on the Don Imus radio show and Smith fired him. Now, Smith hopes Kinky will lose so he can start writing the column again. He's fond of Kinky. In fact, he's fond of both Kinkys.

"There's definitely the act and the person," he says. "The person is more insecure and more sweet. He is one of the most genuinely sweet-tempered people I've ever met. You see it when he's with children or animals. . . .

"There's a definite sadness about him. He's alone. His mother and father are dead -- he was very close to them -- and he's not married. In a way, this campaign is a way for him to be out with a lot of people."

Hitting the Jackpot

"I gotta go to Vegas," Kinky says.

He's eating lunch at a Mexican restaurant in Fort Worth and longing for a slot machine. His campaign promise to bring casinos to Texas is not mere wonkery: Kinky loves playing the $5 slots. "It's meditative," he says. His love was reciprocated last summer, when he won $45,000 playing $5 slots in Louisiana.

"God help the small child who steps between me and a slot machine," he says, smiling.

His lyrical ruminations on gambling are interrupted when a woman comes to the table to ask for his autograph. A few moments later, a couple stop by to pose for a picture with Kinky.

This happens all over Texas. The previous day, in Houston, a Republican geologist recognized Kinky on the sidewalk and pledged his support. A few hours later, at a Waffle House in rural Ennis, two elderly cowboys said they'll vote for Kinky, too. Later, a waitress in Fort Worth told Kinky that her coven had voted to endorse him.

Now, in the Mexican restaurant, Kinky's shaking hands and posing for pictures.

"He'll get my vote," says Ray Lopez, 32, an auto technician eating with his family. "I know it's a cliche, but I like the underdog. And I like the individualism he brings to the campaign."

Kinky wallows in the love. "I'm predicting landslide," he says on the way back to the hotel.

As he strolls into the lobby, Kinky is recognized by a retired autoworker named Billy Vann.

"I like your style," Vann says. "If you get in, it'll be because of your style."

Always the Maverick

Chowing down on eggs Benedict, Kinky grumbles about his shirt.

It's the morning after his speech at the Flying Saucer and he's wearing the same black shirt that he'd found a tad too fragrant last night. It's a problem: He packed only one black shirt, and he can't very well appear in public out of costume. They need to go to a drugstore, he tells Jewford, to buy some of that Febreze stuff that you spray on shirts to de-funkify them.

It's crucial to get Febreze today , Kinky says, because tomorrow he'll be addressing a Dallas convention of the National Association of the Blind.

"They're blind, " Kinky says. "That means they have a heightened sense of smell."

Maybe he's joking. But he looks serious.

Anyway, there's no time for shopping now. They've got to hustle down the highway to join Willie Nelson for a news conference on biodiesel fuels.

A couple of hours later, the news conference begins at Carl's Corner, a biodiesel gas station off Route 35. But Nelson is a no-show, and a panel of earnest environmentalists drones on about renewable resources.

"This is stupefyingly dull," Kinky says, watching from the back of the crowd.

But he's got exciting news: He just thought of a great new line to use in his stump speech. He pauses dramatically, then reveals it: "I'm not like them."

He's smiling. He loves this line. He whips out his notebook and writes it down in big block letters: "NOT LIKE THEM."

He's right about that. No matter who "them" is, Kinky's not like them. If Texans want to elect a certified non-them as governor, they'll know where to find him.

© 2006 The Washington Post Company

this is terrible; sad

2006-07-18T13:15:00.000-04:00

This is from Iraq Body Count.

Civilians reported killed by military intervention in Iraq.
Min, 39123
Max, 43575

Presidential Signing Statements

2006-07-16T09:01:00.000-04:00

This is from washingtonmonthly.com . (Kevin Drum's "Political Animal" blog.)

July 16, 2006
PRESIDENTIAL SIGNING STATEMENTS....Twenty years ago, as a lawyer in the Reagan administration, Samuel Alito pioneered the use of presidential signing statements as a way of expanding executive power at the expense of Congress. Since then, though, these statements have been largely ignored by the Supreme Court.

Today Samuel Alito is on the Supreme Court, and the Boston Globe's Charlie Savage points out that the dissent in the Hamdan case includes the following from Antonin Scalia:

"Of course in its discussion of legislative history the court wholly ignores the president's signing statement, which explicitly set forth his understanding that the [Detainee Treatment Act] ousted jurisdiction over pending cases," Scalia wrote.

In a footnote, Scalia also included the text of Bush's signing statement on the law. In the statement, Bush instructed government lawyers to file briefs arguing that the new law stripped courts of the power to hear "existing" detainee lawsuits, although the text of the law did not say it was meant to apply retroactively.

Alito and Clarence Thomas joined the dissent, and Chief Justice John Roberts probably would have as well if he hadn't recused himself from the case. The pioneer of the presidential signing statement is apparently busy lobbying his colleagues to give these statements the same weight they traditionally give to legislative history.

Of course, the whole point of legislative history is that it happens before a bill is passed, and is thus part of the compromise and debate that fashions the bill in the first place. Presidential signing statements, by contrast, are unilateral statements that are not debated — or even seen — by anyone before they pop out of the Oval Office like Athena from the forehead of Zeus.

So how does this play out? Currently, legislation is written as a compromise not just between legislators, but between legislators and the president. It's Congress that debates the bill, but the president influences its wording partly by appeals to fellow party members and partly by threats of a veto. That negotiation is all part of the bill's legislative history.

But if the Supreme Court decides that post-debate signing statements should also be routinely considered as part of a bill's legislative history, then surely Congress will start to insist on negotiating these statements before legislation is sent to the president for his signature. I'll bet John McCain wishes he had done that on the torture bill that George Bush so casually gutted after months of arduous negotiation.

—Kevin Drum 12:31 AM

Unfortunately, It Is Believable

2006-07-16T08:37:00.000-04:00

This is from Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal.

Why Oh Why Are We Ruled by This Moron?
Unbelievable. Greg Djerejian cannot believe this. Neither can I. Impeach George W. Bush. Impeach him now:

The Belgravia Dispatch: Putin To Bush: Thanks, But No Thanks: Well, this is just priceless:

During a joint news conference Saturday in St. Petersburg, Bush said he raised concerns about democracy in Russia during a frank discussion with the Russian leader. "I talked about my desire to promote institutional change in parts of the world, like Iraq where there's a free press and free religion, and I told him that a lot of people in our country would hope that Russia would do the same," Bush said. To that, Putin replied, "We certainly would not want to have the same kind of democracy that they have in Iraq, quite honestly."

[Transcript:

BUSH: I talked about my desire to promote institutional change in parts of the world, like Iraq, where there’s a free press and free religion. And I told him that a lot of people in our country would hope that Russia will do the same thing. I fully understand, however, that there will be a Russian-style democracy.

PUTIN: We certainly would not want to have same kind of democracy as they have in Iraq, quite honestly.

BUSH: Just wait.]

Djerejian:

This beats Putin's crack about Cheney's unsuccessful hunting shot, methinks. The fact that the President, even as Baghdad descends into ferocious sectarian conflict, would dare to describe Iraq as a model for anything just now (let alone religious freedom!) is flabbergasting (as in stupefying, jaw-dropping, certifiable, just staggering). Or Neroian, even, you might say. Perhaps he's getting all his news from fellow rapturists like my blog pal Hugh Hewitt, or something, but someone really needs to give POTUS a little reality check. But what Wise Men can mount the urgently needed intervention? There are so few left, and POTUS still appears to take Don Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney's word at face value. Crazy times, eh?

[Crazy times indeed. - Harold]

Hezbollah_Iran_?

2006-07-15T11:27:00.000-04:00

This is from washingtonmonthly.com.

July 15, 2006

IRAN'S ROLE REVISITED YET AGAIN....Over at the Prospect, Laura Rozen interviews Mark Perry, co-director of the Conflicts Forum, a group that has set up frequent discussions with Hezbollah over the past three years. Here's what he has to say about Iran's involvement with the recent attacks on Israel:

We’ve been hearing the theory that the timing of Hezbollah’s Tuesday kidnapping of the two Israeli Defense Force soldiers was planned well in advance and with coordination from Tehran or Damascus. Can you speak to that?

Oy vey. There are a lot of people in Washington trying to walk that story back right now, because it’s not true.

Hezbollah and Israel stand along this border every day observing each other through binoculars and waiting for an opportunity to kill each other. They are at war. They have been for 25 years, no one ever declared a cease-fire between them....They stand on the border every day and just wait for an opportunity. And on Tuesday morning there were two Humvees full of Israeli soldiers, not under observation from the Israeli side, not under covering fire, sitting out there all alone. The Hezbollah militia commander just couldn’t believe it — so he went and got them.

I think that's about the end of this discussion for me — at least for the time being. It's evident that the most knowledgeable people around have wildly different opinions about this, but also that those same people have no specific evidence one way or the other. Iran and Syria are sponsors of Hezbollah and Hamas and are obviously closely aligned with their actions, but whether they actively approved of the recent kidnappings appears to be unknown. And, for now anyway, unknowable.

—Kevin Drum 1:23 AM

Jump In Tax Revenues

2006-07-14T08:19:00.000-04:00

This is from the NYTimes.

Surprising Jump in Tax Revenues Is Curbing Deficit
By EDMUND L. ANDREWS

WASHINGTON, July 8 — An unexpectedly steep rise in tax revenues from corporations and the wealthy is driving down the projected budget deficit this year, even though spending has climbed sharply because of the war in Iraq and the cost of hurricane relief.

On Tuesday, White House officials are expected to announce that the tax receipts will be about $250 billion above last year's levels and that the deficit will be about $100 billion less than what they projected six months ago. The rising tide in tax payments has been building for months, but the increased scale is surprising even seasoned budget analysts and making it easier for both the administration and Congress to finesse the big run-up in spending over the past year.

Tax revenues are climbing twice as fast as the administration predicted in February, so fast that the budget deficit could actually decline this year.

The main reason is a big spike in corporate tax receipts, which have nearly tripled since 2003, as well as what appears to be a big increase in individual taxes on stock market profits and executive bonuses.

On Friday, the Congressional Budget Office reported that corporate tax receipts for the nine months ending in June hit $250 billion — nearly 26 percent higher than the same time last year — and that overall revenues were $206 billion higher than at this point in 2005.

Congressional analysts say the surprise windfall could shrink the deficit this year to $300 billion, from $318 billion in 2005 and an all-time high of $412 billion in 2004.

Republicans are already arguing that the revenue jump proves that their tax cuts, especially the 2003 tax cut on stock dividends, would spur the economy and ultimately increase revenues.

"The tax relief we delivered has helped unleash the entrepreneurial spirit of America and kept our economy the envy of the world," President Bush said in his weekly radio address on Saturday.

Democrats and many independent budget analysts note that overall revenues have barely climbed back to the levels reached in 2000, and that the government has borrowed trillions of dollars against Social Security surpluses just as the first of the nation's baby boomers are nearing retirement.

"The fact is that revenues are way below what the administration said they would be a few years ago," said Thomas S. Kahn, staff director for Democrats on the House Budget Committee. "The long-term prognosis is still very, very bleak, and the administration doesn't have any kind of long-term plan."

One reason the run-up in taxes looks good is because the past five years looked so bad. Revenues are up, but they have lagged well behind economic growth.

The surge could also evaporate as quickly as it appeared. Over the past decade, tax revenues have become much more volatile, alternately soaring and plunging in the wake of swings in the stock market and repeatedly defying government projections.

Nevertheless, the short-term change has been striking. At the beginning of the year, the Congressional Budget Office projected that this year's deficit would be $371 billion and the White House Office of Management and Budget put the figure at $423 billion.

Corporate tax payments are expected to exceed $300 billion, up from $131 billion three years ago. The other big increase is an extraordinary jump in individual taxes that were not withheld from paychecks, usually a reflection of taxes on investment income and executive bonuses.

The jump in receipts is providing Mr. Bush and Republicans in Congress with a new opportunity to assert that tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 are working and that Congress should make them permanent.

Pat Toomey, president of the Club for Growth, a conservative political fund-raising group, said: "The supply-siders were absolutely right. All the major sources of revenue have grown, especially in areas where we said they would."

But budget analysts, supporters and critics of Mr. Bush alike, cautioned that this year's windfall would do little to improve the government's long-term budget woes.

Government spending under Mr. Bush continued to climb rapidly this year, more than twice as fast as the economy. Spending on the war in Iraq has accelerated, to about $120 billion this year.

Far more ominously, the nation's oldest baby boomers will be eligible for Social Security benefits in just two years. Conservatives and liberals alike predict a huge escalation in costs of Social Security and Medicare over the next several decades.

"The long-term outlook is such a deep well of sorrow that I can't get much happiness out of this year," said Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a former director of the Congressional Budget Office and a former White House economist under President Bush.

Despite almost five years of economic growth, individual income taxes — the biggest component of federal tax revenues — have yet to reach the levels of 2000. Even with surging payments for investment profits and business income, individual tax payments in 2005 were only $972 billion — below the $1 trillion reached in 2000, even without adjusting for inflation.

Over all, individual and corporate taxes have lagged well behind the economy's growth over the past five years. Government spending, by contrast, mushroomed far faster than the economy.

And federal debt has ballooned to $8.3 trillion, up from $5.6 trillion when Mr. Bush took office. Republicans are trying to raise the authorized debt ceiling to $9.6 trillion.

War costs for Iraq and Afghanistan have totaled more than $300 billion since 2003, and the Bush administration has not included any war costs in its budget estimates beyond next year.

Domestic discretionary programs, like education and space exploration, have slowed their growth after climbing rapidly in Mr. Bush's first term. But entitlement programs, particularly Medicaid and Medicare, are climbing rapidly as a result of rising medical prices and Mr. Bush's prescription drug program.

Outlays for Medicare have climbed 15 percent this year and are expected to hit $300 billion. About half of that increase results from the new prescription drug program, which is expected to cost nearly $1 trillion over the next 10 years.

"Even if spending is not going up as fast as it was before, it's not coming down," said Robert L. Bixby, executive director of the Concord Coalition, a bipartisan group that advocates budget discipline.

Despite a public outcry this year over pork-barrel spending sought by individual lawmakers for local projects, Mr. Bixby said, the main causes of higher spending stem from the war in Iraq and entitlement programs.

Both supporters and critics of Mr. Bush cautioned against attributing much long-term significance to the recent fiscal improvement, in part because tax revenues have become more volatile.

In the late 1990's, revenues exceeded predictions by more than $100 billion a year. After the recession of 2001, revenues plunged about $100 billion below what could be explained by slower economic growth and higher unemployment.

One reason for the increased volatility may be that, contrary to a popular assumption, a disproportionate share of income taxes is paid by wealthy households, and their incomes are based much more on the swings of the stock market than on wages and salaries. About one-third of all income taxes are paid by households in the top 1 percent of income earners, who make more than about $300,000 a year. Because those households also earn the overwhelming share of taxable investment income and executive bonuses, both their incomes and their tax liabilities swing sharply in bull and bear markets.

"These people have incomes that fluctuate much more rapidly, so when the economy is doing well and the stock market is doing well, tax revenues will be up," said Brian Riedl, a budget analyst at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative research organization. "Rapidly fluctuating tax revenues will continue to be the norm for years to come."

Compared with the size of the economy, tax revenues are still below historical norms and far below what the administration predicted as recently as 2003.

Tax receipts amounted to about 17.5 percent of the nation's gross domestic product in 2005, far below the level five years ago and still slightly below the average of 18 percent since World War II. Spending, by contrast, is running at about 20 percent of gross domestic product .

"Spending has not been restrained," Mr. Riedl said. "One hundred percent of the reduced deficit is because taxpayers are sending more money to Washington."

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

Oy

2006-07-14T07:08:00.000-04:00

This is from billmon.org .
July 14, 2006

Failed States
He who fights terrorists for any period of time is likely to become one himself.
Israeli historian Martin van Creveld
The Transformation of War
1991

There is something qualitatively different about the latest cycle of violence in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, although I’m having trouble in my own mind hanging a label on it.

Maybe it’s the fact that the Israelis have more or less abandoned the pretense that they’re fighting specific “terrorist” groups like Hamas and Hezbollah, and are openly waging war on the Palestinian people (and now the Lebanese people) as a whole.

Maybe it’s because the proximate triggers for the current fighting – the Palestinian raid on an Israeli outpost on the Gaza frontier and Hezbollah’s ambush of an Israeli patrol just inside the Israeli border -- were both military attacks against legitimate military targets, instead of explicit acts of terrorism, like the 2000-2001 Palestinian suicide bomb offensive. This suggests a major change in both tactics and capabilities (although terrorism, in the form of rockets randomly shot into Israeli towns and cities, obviously remains a key part of the Hezbollah and Hamas arsenals)

Maybe it’s simply the speed and scale of the escalation, which has progressed from a limited incursion in the Gaza Strip to the wholesale dismantling of the Hamas government to a full-scale blockade of Lebanon in just two weeks. If the Israeli expectation was that an initial display of overwhelming force would send a message to the other side that there are red lines that must not be crossed, then the operation has already failed. Indeed, the other side has sent some surprising messages of its own – one of which landed yesterday in downtown Haifa.

If I had to pin it down, I would say the big difference between this crisis and similar past episodes is how completely off balance the Israelis seem to be – lurching from reaction to reaction without any clear plan or strategy. The Gaza incursion was thrown together, more or less on the fly, which led to some embarrassing public squabbling within the Israeli cabinet. The attempt to decapitate Hamas’s civilian leadership by arresting the entire Palestinian cabinet smacked of improvisation, and largely failed. Hezbollah’s intervention clearly took Jerusalem by surprise, which is probably why the response has been so disproportionate: the Israelis are rather desperately trying to regain the initiative.

What’s strange about this is that the Israelis started with the initiative, at least tactically. I’m told an incursion into Gaza was actually in the works before the Palestinian attack on the frontier post – although the original plan has been for a smaller search-and-destroy operation aimed at suppressing, or at least harassing, the Hamas rocketeers. Whether the Palestinians knew this and managed to get a jump, or were just lucky with the timing of their cross-border raid, the result is that the Israelis were left scrambling to come up with a response, and it showed.

Strategically, the Israelis appear to be at an even bigger disadvantage. The big Gaza invasion, like the little one originally planned, looks suspiciously like a political operation, not an effective military measure. Its primary aim appears to be to reassure the Israeli public that the Palestinians will not be allowed to attack with impunity. In military terms, the rockets out of Gaza may have been just pinpricks, but symbolically they were extremely damaging, because they revealed the total failure of Sharon’s grand strategy of unilateral disengagement. The skillful attack on the border post, and the successful capture of an Israeli soldier, only drove the point home.

The failure of Sharon’s master plan – which is also the raison d'etre for the current Israeli government – is ultimately what this crisis is about, as Juan Cole correctly pointed out in a Salon article last week. Except where Cole sees a deliberate Israeli attempt to create a “failed state” in the Palestinian territories, I see only an increasingly frantic search for a way to avoid the consequences of one, a search which is leading the Israelis to lash out in ways the rest of the world (save for the United States, which will always see the conflict through Israeli eyes) views as increasingly cruel and vindictive.

I'm not passing moral judgments here. I’ve never been able to turn a blind eye to the war crimes of one side or the other – rationalizing the suicide bomb that blows a bus full of Israeli civilians to bloody bits while crying tears of outrage over the destruction of a power plant that provides clean water to tens of thousands of Palestinian mothers and infants, or vice versa. To me, the conflict has long since come to resemble a war between lunatics, and one doesn’t pass moral judgments on the behavior of the insane, not even the criminally insane.

But it is clear to me that the Israelis, through their own actions (plus some help from their clueless allies in the Cheney administration) have put themselves in trap they can’t escape. They’ve reached a strategic dead end, one that doesn’t even leave them enough maneuvering room to turn and go back. A return to the pre-Oslo status quo – full military reoccupation of the territories – is out of the question. The peace process (a pointless squirrel wheel, but one that at least kept the squirrels, both Palestinian and Israeli, busy going through their paces) is dead. The Palestinian Authority is shattered; Fatah’s legitimacy and President Abbas’s credibility flushed down the toilet. And Hamas – the only viable alternative – has been officially defined as Public Enemy Number One by the Israelis, the Americans and the Europeans.

In an earlier era, pre-9/11, pre-Iraq invasion, widening the war to Lebanon might have provided some breathing room, or at least a temporary distraction. But now it’s only added another horn to the dilemma, and created risks that no one – the Israelis least of all – can fully foresee.

In a sense, the crisis has been coming down the pike since last year’s Palestinian elections unexpectedly put Hamas in charge of the PA. The Israelis never wanted the election, and only agreed to it because the Americans insisted. The Americans, in turn, relied on assurances from Abbas (underwritten by the Egyptians and the Jordanians) that the results were in the bag – or could be put there, if need be. Democracy boy, in other words, only embraced democracy for the Palestinians because he was sure the “right” guys would win, and I know what a shock that must be to the reader. But Fatah, being Fatah, couldn’t stop its candidates from running against each other and splitting the non-Hamas vote, while Hamas smartly ran on a platform of honest government instead of endless holy war. In the end, the fix could only deprive Hamas of the even bigger majority it was probably entitled to.

If the Israelis had fully thought things through, I have to believe they would have defied democracy boy and vetoed the election. Why didn’t they? In addition to the traditional desire to stay on the hegemon's good side, my guess is the Israelis in general and Prime Minister Omert in particular were still too captivated by the dream of unilateralism. The whole point of disengagement was that it was supposed to make the other side irrelevant. Israel would decide what land and settlements it wanted to keep, build fences around the rest and let the Palestinians stew in their own poverty and rage. With that as the plan, the risk of a Hamas victory, while undesirable, may not have seemed catastrophic.

The reality, however, is that the Palestinians will always matter, at least as long as more than 2 million of them are living in close proximity to Israel proper. Unilateral withdrawal was, in the end, a dangerous fantasy. The reality is that Israel can only disengage from its Palestinian Bantustans if there is a PA willing and able to play the role of puppet government – providing some minimal level of public services and guaranteeing some minimal level of security, which in this context means keeping the militiamen and the rocketeers under control.

Whether Hamas could eventually have been prodded and/or blackmailed into playing that same Quisling role is a hypothetical question I guess will never be answered. But the Israelis should have recognized from the first day after the election that simply pulling the PA’s financial feeding tubes out and allowing it to die was going to be a non starter.

Even now, allowing the West Bank and Gaza to starve is simply not acceptable, either to world opinion or to the Americans – even though it wouldn’t be all that much different from what we did to the Iraqis under sanctions. Unlike Saddam’s Iraq, there are too many cameras, too many people watching. (Which is why the Israelis have suddenly discovered the virtues of the U.N. Relief and Works Agency, after 30 years of denouncing it as a front for terrorism. Somebody has to feed the Palestinians, and better the U.N. than Hamas.)

Now a similar dynamic is also at work in Southern Lebanon. Israel’s 2000 withdrawal wasn’t really unilateral – it only worked as long as Hezbollah was willing to give its silent acquiesce, and that's now been withdrawn. Military reoccupation is out of the question, but so is absorbing scores of rocket strikes a day in Haifa and points north. What’s the “exit strategy”?

There isn’t one, can't be one, which seems to be why Israel has fully embraced the logic of collective punishment. The Palestinians and the Lebanese are to be battered and harassed until they turn on the fighters in their midst. I don’t know why the Israelis think this strategy will work for them when it has failed virtually every other place it has been tried. If the French, the Poles, the Norwegians and the Serbs could take the worse the Nazis could do, and still support their resistance movements, I don’t think the Palestinians and the Lebanese are going to throw in the towel just because their airport runways have been put out of commission or their electricity service has been cut to 10 hours a day. Beating them into submission would require far more force than I think the Israelis are willing or able to apply, if only for the reason already stated: too many eyes are watching.

At the same time, though, the Israelis are already suffering the internal and external damage any powerful state incurs when it wages – and is seen by the world to wage – war on the weak. As Martin van Creveld puts it:

Whatever the goals for which it is fought, and whatever the methods it employs, no war can be just that does not rest on a rough balance of forces between the belligerents . . . Failing this, the longer the struggle the more doubtful its morality and the greater the problems it causes.
One response, of course, is to try to shift the blame to “outside agitators” – Iran and Syria, in this case. The usual sources are spinning the usual conspiracy theories, and even journalists who should know better are seeing the Iranian devil lurking behind every fresh disaster. It’s not impossible, of course, that the Revolutionary Guards really are giving the Cheneyites a taste of what could be in store if the showdown over Iran’s nuclear program is pursued to the bitter end. Somebody certainly seems to have enhanced Hezbollah’s ballistic capabilities anyway. But imagining that the entire downward spiral of events (many of them initiated by the Americans or the Israelis) is the product of some secret plot by Damascus or Tehran is either the ultimate neocon job or an outbreak in Washington of the kind of hyperactive paranoia the Middle East is justly famous for.

Even if it were true, what, exactly, would Washington and Jerusalem be prepared to do about it – that wouldn’t make things infinitely worse? If oil prices continue to spiral higher and stock prices lower, how long will it be before an election-conscious U.S. administration steps up the pressure on Jerusalem to cool it?

Is there a way out for the Israelis? None that I can see. Humpty Dumpty can’t be put back together again. Fatah and Abbas can’t be restored to their pre-election positions – not without looking like complete Israeli stooges. Hamas (or at least its moderate wing) can’t be brought back in from the cold, not without a loss of Israeli face and credibility so enormous it would probably cause the Omert government to fall and bring the Likud back to power. The Israelis can’t afford to negotiate for the return of their captured soldiers and they can’t afford to forsake them. They can’t stay in Gaza and they can’t leave Gaza. They can’t invade Lebanon and they can’t not invade Lebanon.

In the past, no matter how bad things got in territories, Israeli governments always have had the option of backing off and leaving bad enough alone – relying on the Army or, post-Oslo, the PA to keep a lid on the situation. That was fine as long as the objective was to grow the settlements and quietly tighten Israel’s control over the land and all its resources. But now that the goal is essentially a second partition, Israeli politicians are finding out the hard way that they no longer have the luxury of malign neglect. After six years of pretending they don’t need a Palestinian negotiating partner, they’ve suddenly discovered, much to their horror, that they need one desperately – but have managed to eliminate all the possible candidates.

Posted by billmon at 12:49 AM

Be Careful What You Wish For

2006-07-13T06:59:00.000-04:00

"There are some who, uh, feel like that, you know, the conditions are such that they can attack us there. My answer is: Bring 'em on. We got the force necessary to deal with the security situation." - George W. Bush, July 2, 2003.

An Israeli Blames Israel For Their Problems With The Palestinians

2006-07-12T15:48:00.000-04:00

This is from,
w w w . h a a r e t z . c o m

Last update - 09:37 09/07/2006
Who started?
By Gideon Levy

"We left Gaza and they are firing Qassams" - there is no more precise a formulation of the prevailing view about the current round of the conflict. "They started," will be the routine response to anyone who tries to argue, for example, that a few hours before the first Qassam fell on the school in Ashkelon, causing no damage, Israel sowed destruction at the Islamic University in Gaza.

Israel is causing electricity blackouts, laying sieges, bombing and shelling, assassinating and imprisoning, killing and wounding civilians, including children and babies, in horrifying numbers, but "they started."

They are also "breaking the rules" laid down by Israel: We are allowed to bomb anything we want and they are not allowed to launch Qassams. When they fire a Qassam at Ashkelon, that's an "escalation of the conflict," and when we bomb a university and a school, it's perfectly alright. Why? Because they started. That's why the majority thinks that all the justice is on our side. Like in a schoolyard fight, the argument about who started is Israel's winning moral argument to justify every injustice.

So, who really did start? And have we "left Gaza?"

Israel left Gaza only partially, and in a distorted manner. The disengagement plan, which was labeled with fancy titles like "partition" and "an end to the occupation," did result in the dismantling of settlements and the Israel Defense Forces' departure from Gaza, but it did almost nothing to change the living conditions for the residents of the Strip. Gaza is still a prison and its inhabitants are still doomed to live in poverty and oppression. Israel closes them off from the sea, the air and land, except for a limited safety valve at the Rafah crossing. They cannot visit their relatives in the West Bank or look for work in Israel, upon which the Gazan economy has been dependent for some 40 years. Sometimes goods can be transported, sometimes not. Gaza has no chance of escaping its poverty under these conditions. Nobody will invest in it, nobody can develop it, nobody can feel free in it. Israel left the cage, threw away the keys and left the residents to their bitter fate. Now, less than a year after the disengagement, it is going back, with violence and force.

What could otherwise have been expected? That Israel would unilaterally withdraw, brutally and outrageously ignoring the Palestinians and their needs, and that they would silently bear their bitter fate and would not continue to fight for their liberty, livelihood and dignity? We promised a safe passage to the West Bank and didn't keep the promise. We promised to free prisoners and didn't keep the promise. We supported democratic elections and then boycotted the legally elected leadership, confiscating funds that belong to it, and declaring war on it. We could have withdrawn from Gaza through negotiations and coordination, while strengthening the existing Palestinian leadership, but we refused to do so. And now, we complain about "a lack of leadership?" We did everything we could to undermine their society and leadership, making sure as much as possible that the disengagement would not be a new chapter in our relationship with the neighboring nation, and now we are amazed by the violence and hatred that we sowed with our own hands.

What would have happened if the Palestinians had not fired Qassams? Would Israel have lifted the economic siege that it imposed on Gaza? Would it open the border to Palestinian laborers? Free prisoners? Meet with the elected leadership and conduct negotiations? Encourage investment in Gaza? Nonsense. If the Gazans were sitting quietly, as Israel expects them to do, their case would disappear from the agenda - here and around the world. Israel would continue with the convergence, which is solely meant to serve its goals, ignoring their needs. Nobody would have given any thought to the fate of the people of Gaza if they did not behave violently. That is a very bitter truth, but the first 20 years of the occupation passed quietly and we did not lift a finger to end it.

Instead, under cover of the quiet, we built the enormous, criminal settlement enterprise. With our own hands, we are now once again pushing the Palestinians into using the petty arms they have; and in response, we employ nearly the entire enormous arsenal at our disposal, and continue to complain that "they started."

We started. We started with the occupation, and we are duty-bound to end it, a real and complete ending. We started with the violence. There is no violence worse than the violence of the occupier, using force on an entire nation, so the question about who fired first is therefore an evasion meant to distort the picture. After Oslo, too, there were those who claimed that "we left the territories," in a similar mixture of blindness and lies.

Gaza is in serious trouble, ruled by death, horror and daily difficulties, far from the eyes and hearts of Israelis. We are only shown the Qassams. We only see the Qassams. The West Bank is still under the boot of occupation, the settlements are flourishing, and every limply extended hand for an agreement, including that of Ismail Haniyeh, is immediately rejected. And after all this, if someone still has second thoughts, the winning answer is promptly delivered: "They started." They started and justice is on our side, while the fact is that they did not start and justice is not with us.

Baghdad Today, What A Mess!

2006-07-12T12:22:00.000-04:00

[America, what have we done? - Harold]

This is from Baghdad Burning, an Iraqi girl's weblog.

Tuesday, July 11, 2006

Atrocities...

It promises to be a long summer. We're almost at the mid-way point, but it feels like the days are just crawling by. It's a combination of the heat, the flies, the hours upon hours of no electricity and the corpses which keep appearing everywhere.

The day before yesterday was catastrophic. The day began with news of the killings in Jihad Quarter. According to people who live there, black-clad militiamen drove in mid-morning and opened fire on people in the streets and even in houses. They began pulling people off the street and checking their ID cards to see if they had Sunni names or Shia names and then the Sunnis were driven away and killed. Some were executed right there in the area. The media is playing it down and claiming 37 dead but the people in the area say the number is nearer 60.

The horrific thing about the killings is that the area had been cut off for nearly two weeks by Ministry of Interior security forces and Americans. Last week, a car bomb was set off in front of a 'Sunni' mosque people in the area visit. The night before the massacre, a car bomb exploded in front of a Shia husseiniya in the same area. The next day was full of screaming and shooting and death for the people in the area. No one is quite sure why the Americans and the Ministry of Interior didn't respond immediately. They just sat by, on the outskirts of the area, and let the massacre happen.

At nearly 2 pm, we received some terrible news. We lost a good friend in the killings. T. was a 26-year-old civil engineer who worked with a group of friends in a consultancy bureau in Jadriya. The last time I saw him was a week ago. He had stopped by the house to tell us his sister was engaged and he'd brought along with him pictures of latest project he was working on- a half-collapsed school building outside of Baghdad.

He usually left the house at 7 am to avoid the morning traffic jams and the heat. Yesterday, he decided to stay at home because he'd promised his mother he would bring Abu Kamal by the house to fix the generator which had suddenly died on them the night before. His parents say that T. was making his way out of the area on foot when the attack occurred and he got two bullets to the head. His brother could only identify him by the blood-stained t-shirt he was wearing.

People are staying in their homes in the area and no one dares enter it so the wakes for the people who were massacred haven't begun yet. I haven't seen his family yet and I'm not sure I have the courage or the energy to give condolences. I feel like I've given the traditional words of condolences a thousand times these last few months, "Baqiya ib hayatkum… Akhir il ahzan…" or "May this be the last of your sorrows." Except they are empty words because even as we say them, we know that in today's Iraq any sorrow- no matter how great- will not be the last.

There was also an attack yesterday on Ghazaliya though we haven't heard what the casualties are. People are saying it's Sadr's militia, the Mahdi army, behind the killings. The news the world hears about Iraq and the situation in the country itself are wholly different. People are being driven out of their homes and areas by force and killed in the streets, and the Americans, Iranians and the Puppets talk of national conferences and progress.

It's like Baghdad is no longer one city, it's a dozen different smaller cities each infected with its own form of violence. It's gotten so that I dread sleeping because the morning always brings so much bad news. The television shows the images and the radio stations broadcast it. The newspapers show images of corpses and angry words jump out at you from their pages, "civil war… death… killing… bombing… rape…"

Rape. The latest of American atrocities. Though it's not really the latest- it's just the one that's being publicized the most. The poor girl Abeer was neither the first to be raped by American troops, nor will she be the last. The only reason this rape was brought to light and publicized is that her whole immediate family were killed along with her. Rape is a taboo subject in Iraq. Families don't report rapes here, they avenge them. We've been hearing whisperings about rapes in American-controlled prisons and during sieges of towns like Haditha and Samarra for the last three years. The naiveté of Americans who can't believe their 'heroes' are committing such atrocities is ridiculous. Who ever heard of an occupying army committing rape??? You raped the country, why not the people?

In the news they're estimating her age to be around 24, but Iraqis from the area say she was only 14. Fourteen. Imagine your 14-year-old sister or your 14-year-old daughter. Imagine her being gang-raped by a group of psychopaths and then the girl was killed and her body burned to cover up the rape. Finally, her parents and her five-year-old sister were also killed. Hail the American heroes... Raise your heads high supporters of the 'liberation' - your troops have made you proud today. I don't believe the troops should be tried in American courts. I believe they should be handed over to the people in the area and only then will justice be properly served. And our ass of a PM, Nouri Al-Maliki, is requesting an 'independent investigation', ensconced safely in his American guarded compound because it wasn't his daughter or sister who was raped, probably tortured and killed. His family is abroad safe from the hands of furious Iraqis and psychotic American troops.

It fills me with rage to hear about it and read about it. The pity I once had for foreign troops in Iraq is gone. It's been eradicated by the atrocities in Abu Ghraib, the deaths in Haditha and the latest news of rapes and killings. I look at them in their armored vehicles and to be honest- I can't bring myself to care whether they are 19 or 39. I can't bring myself to care if they make it back home alive. I can't bring myself to care anymore about the wife or parents or children they left behind. I can't bring myself to care because it's difficult to see beyond the horrors. I look at them and wonder just how many innocents they killed and how many more they'll kill before they go home. How many more young Iraqi girls will they rape?

Why don't the Americans just go home? They've done enough damage and we hear talk of how things will fall apart in Iraq if they 'cut and run', but the fact is that they aren't doing anything right now. How much worse can it get? People are being killed in the streets and in their own homes- what's being done about it? Nothing. It's convenient for them- Iraqis can kill each other and they can sit by and watch the bloodshed- unless they want to join in with murder and rape.

Buses, planes and taxis leaving the country for Syria and Jordan are booked solid until the end of the summer. People are picking up and leaving en masse and most of them are planning to remain outside of the country. Life here has become unbearable because it's no longer a 'life' like people live abroad. It's simply a matter of survival, making it from one day to the next in one piece and coping with the loss of loved ones and friends- friends like T.

It's difficult to believe T. is really gone… I was checking my email today and I saw three unopened emails from him in my inbox. For one wild, heart-stopping moment I thought he was alive. T. was alive and it was all some horrific mistake! I let myself ride the wave of giddy disbelief for a few precious seconds before I came crashing down as my eyes caught the date on the emails- he had sent them the night before he was killed. One email was a collection of jokes, the other was an assortment of cat pictures, and the third was a poem in Arabic about Iraq under American occupation. He had highlighted a few lines describing the beauty of Baghdad in spite of the war… And while I always thought Baghdad was one of the more marvelous cities in the world, I'm finding it very difficult this moment to see any beauty in a city stained with the blood of T. and so many other innocents…

- posted by river @ 11:43 PM

Like I've Been Saying

2006-07-11T12:03:00.000-04:00

This is from the Center for American Progress.

By virtually every measure, the Bush administration's North Korea policy is a failure. Diplomatic efforts have broken down, missiles are being test fired, and plutonium production has resumed. Yesterday, White House Press Secretary Tony Snow unveiled the administration's new strategy: bash Clinton. At the press conference, Snow accused the Clinton administration of going to North Korea with “flowers and chocolates” and "light water nuclear reactors." Snow said that the Clinton administration policy had "failed" and the Bush administration had "learned from that mistake." The reality is that the Bush administration is now scrambling to return to where the Clinton administration left off: meaningful diplomatic engagement that puts North Korea's nuclear program on ice.

THE CLINTON RECORD -- NORTH KOREA PRODUCES NO PLUTONIUM: In 1994, the United States almost went to war with North Korea to prevent the further development of their nuclear arsenal. (North Korea produced enough plutonium to create one or two nuclear weapons during the first Bush administration.) The conflict was narrowly avoided with the creation of the "Agreed Framework." Under the agreed framework, North Korea agreed to shut down its major nuclear reactor, stop construction of two nuclear power plants, and subject spent nuclear fuel to international inspection. In return, Japan and South Korea agreed to build two light-water reactors (far less of a proliferation concern) and the U.S. would supply North Korea with heavy oil to make up for the lost energy from its shuttered nuclear plants. Once the light-water reactors were completed, their existing nuclear reactors were to be dismantled. The deal wasn't perfect, but during the Clinton administration, North Korea didn't make any nuclear bombs. It was later discovered that the North Koreans, as early as 2000, were attempting to aquire technology for uranium enrichment which violated their agreements. It does not appear that this program advanced very far before the U.S. detected it and confronted North Korea with the evidence in 2002.

BIPARTISAN POLICY: The Clinton administration approach was a bipartisan effort. In order to fulfill its end of the bargain, Congress had to appropriate funds to finance the shipments of heavy oil. Congress, controlled at the time by staunch conservatives such as former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich (R-GA) and former Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-MS), approved the funds every year.

THE BUSH RECORD -- NORTH KOREA PRODUCES ENOUGH PLUTONIUM FOR AS MANY AS 10 NUKES: Upon taking office, the Bush administration rejected former Secretary of State Colin Powell's recommendation to "pick up where President Clinton and his administration left off." Instead, the Bush administration reversed Theodore Roosevelt's approach to foreign policy, speaking loudly but carrying no stick. The Bush administration ramped up the rhetoric. President Bush included North Korea in the "axis of evil" in his 2002 State of the Union address, and "the National Security Strategy Statement of the United States released in 2002 talked about the possible need to take preemptive military action" against North Korea. When North Korea responded by expelling international inspectors and unsealing its nuclear facilities, the Bush administration had no effective response. The result is that North Korea now has enough plutonium to produce as many as ten additional nuclear weapons. Peter Hayes of the Nautilus Institute writes, "The United States should stop huffing and puffing and threatening to blow down the North Koreans house. This will not work and simply makes America look like a big, bad wolf, albeit one who blew and blew but nothing happened."

Upton Sinclair Said:

2006-07-11T07:24:00.000-04:00

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it."

The Earth Says, "HELP!"

2006-07-06T11:38:00.000-04:00

Acid Oceans
Scientists identify another potentially devastating consequence of failing to control greenhouse gases.

Thursday, July 6, 2006

YOU'D THINK that the threat to the Earth's climate posed by greenhouse gas emissions would be enough to get policymakers to take seriously the need to reduce human use of fossil fuels. Rising sea levels, reduced polar ice and dramatic regional climate shifts represent serious dangers to the way of life of large swaths of the world's population. Now a new report by a group of federal scientists and university researchers highlights a different threat posed by carbon emissions, one with its own set of potentially devastating ecological consequences: the increasing acidity of the oceans.

Ocean water absorbs a huge amount of the carbon emitted by human energy use -- so much that it has long been seen as a kind of buffer mitigating global climate change, which is triggered by the presence of that carbon in the atmosphere. But it turns out that oceanic absorption of carbon is not an unqualified good. All that carbon seems to be making the waters more acidic, a trend researchers believe will continue as concentrations increase. This chemical change, in turn, inhibits the ability of animals that produce external shells-- particularly corals and certain planktons -- to grow them efficiently. As these animals are some of the basic life forms of ocean ecosystems, substantially reducing their productivity could have enormous impact on life in the seas, from devastating already-stressed coral reefs to interrupting the food chain for large fish and whales.

There's a tendency in discussing carbon emissions for policymakers to be paralyzed by the enormity of the problem. The hypothesized consequences to climate and the oceans are vast -- literally earth-changing -- and the cause is so inherent to the way industrialized societies live that the problem seems unsolvable. When combined with the inevitable scientific uncertainty associated with modeling the future of terribly complex systems, this leads some people to active denial and many others to resist responsible steps to begin getting carbon under control. Admittedly, these steps, even if taken aggressively, will not be sufficient to decrease atmospheric carbon but can only, for now, slow its rate of increase. But the paralysis has to end. While there still exist big questions surrounding climate change and carbon emissions, the best evidence all points in a single direction: that failing to reduce dependence on fossil fuels will have terrible consequences, and failing to start now will make the disruption later all the more painful.

© 2006 The Washington Post Company

billmon.org

2006-07-04T09:40:00.000-04:00

go there and read, enjoy