The Daily Kos is one of the more succesful blogs,but there are signs its founder Markos Moulitsas is growing weary of the nasty tone of the political discourse the blog fosters. Moulitsas says things are getting "damn ugly" .

"With us or against us"

by kos
Mon Jul 23, 2007 at 10:30:19 AM PDT

There has lately been an alarming rise in diaries and comments that seek to impugn (without evidence) the motives of those they disagree with on various issues.

Yes, there's the impeachment stuff, but this nasty rhetoric is also rampant in the primary war diaries.

This points to a serious breakdown not just on civility, but in the ability of people to properly debate various issues. As such, it presents a serious threat to the integrity of this site.

I much prefer it when the community moderates itself, and for the most part it does a good job of this. The libertarian in me prefers it that way. But sometimes, self-moderation isn't enough. I'll act swiftly and mercilessly when I'm pushed into defending the effectiveness of this site. And at this moment, my patience is wearing thin.

Reasonable people, including progressives, can disagree on many of the big issues we face today -- from which candidate to support in the primary, to whether impeachment is the best way to hold this administration accountable, to the merit of gun control or free trade agreements, to how to handle immigration, to whatever else faces our nation. As a site, we strive to provide a safe haven for debate on these matters without it getting -- as has happened of late -- so damn ugly.

This is my one and only warning on the matter. I'll try to be an optimist and hope that this is the last time I'll have to address it. I won't let this site become as nasty as your typical usenet forum, and those who encourage that sort of environment should consider themselves duly warned.

Update: And no, Bush won't cancel the next round of elections to remain in power. That's about the most ridiculous conspiracy theory I've seen in a long time. Some people on our side can be just as "out there" as the "black helicopter" crowd.

Nuclear News:

•"Shimon Peres: Veteran," Judith Miller, Wall Street Journal - Commentary
•"Iran, IAEA Holding Nuclear Talks in Vienna," Voice of America
•"How the U.S. Talks to Iran." James Dobbins, Korea Herald - Opinion
•"Iran Denies Arms Deal With Syria," Ramin Mostaghim, Los Angeles Times
•"‘Breakthrough’ in Nuclear Deal," Hindu
•"Pakistan Ready to Accept IAEA Safeguards for Civilian Nuke Plants," New Kerala
•"Satellite View of North Korea Nuclear Site," BBC News
•"U.S. Owes A-Bomb Apology," Kiroku Hanai, Japan Times - Opinion

Theocrats Deny 'End Times' Theology Is Cause of Their Push for War With Iran

By Sarah Posner, AlterNet. Posted July 23, 2007.

At the Christians United for Israel Summit, Joe Lieberman embraces the Christian nation, Jewish journalists get expelled, and attendees fret about the Iranian president's "12th Imam."

Here's a news flash from the recent Christians United for Israel (CUFI) Summit in Washington: It really isn't about Armageddon.

Or at least that's what John Hagee, who runs CUFI, and CUFI's executive board tried to convince a group of reporters at a press conference this week. Journalists (including this one) had questions about Hagee's writings and sermons. Does his discussion of God's punishment of Jews suggest his own anti-Semitism? What about the Second Coming, when everyone will either accept Christ as their savior or perish? What, exactly, does Hagee think is going to happen at the end of days?

The reaction of Hagee and his board -- former Reagan administration official and Republican presidential candidate Gary Bauer, former Promise Keepers chair George Morrison, self-described "Christocrat" Rod Parsley, former Republican Senate candidate Bishop Keith Butler and Mac Hammond, a close friend of Rep. Michelle Bachmann (R-Fool for Christ) -- ranged from mock outrage to patronizing amusement. Hagee insisted that "our support of Israel has absolutely nothing to do with end times prophecy. It has absolutely nothing to do with eschatology." Hammond maintained that we were getting "distracted" by the discussion. Followup questions were cut off. They sighed in exasperation at questions about the end times, which they insist are near. When a reporter from the Associated Baptist Press asked the group if they considered themselves premillenial dispensationalists -- people who believe that we are fast approaching a final showdown between Christ and the Antichrist at Armageddon -- they smirked and looked at each other as if to say, "What was that big word?"

Their where-in-the-world-did-you-get-that-idea method of deflecting questions was straight from White House press flack Tony Snow's playbook.

They insisted that they came to Washington to talk politics, not eschatology. But when someone asked about CUFI's position on the proposal Bush had laid out the day before to restart the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, they were stumped -- it turned out that they had not yet reviewed a major presidential announcement on their raison d'etre. A few hours later, Hagee told his minions that CUFI was "deeply disappointed" by Bush's speech, particularly by his use of the term "occupation." (Specifically, Bush said -- heretically to their cause -- that "Palestinians should not have to live in poverty and occupation.") Almost simultaneously with Hagee's announcement, Tony Snow played down Bush's statement, telling reporters, "even though I know I used the term 'conference' this morning, this is a meeting ... I think a lot of people are inclined to try to treat this as a big peace conference. It's not."

Just as it had been during Hagee's appearance at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) last spring, every effort was made to whitewash his apocalyptic religious beliefs (which include enforced Christianity for his Jewish allies at the end) and present him as a good friend of Israel and Jews. But Hagee's most recent book, Jerusalem Countdown, reissued with new material earlier this year, is all about the end of days and how nuclear war with Iran will ignite it. Hagee frequently talks about how Jesus Christ will rule the world from a throne on the Temple Mount after the battle at Armageddon. Hagee admits he has "written extensively about why I believe that the generation that is alive today will see the mass ingathering of believers commonly called the Rapture." He has claimed that "when you see what's happening in America and the world it doesn't take long to realize that God is proclaiming through the voice of nature that we are approaching the coming of Jesus Christ in the clouds of heaven." In September Hagee preached that "World War III has begun" and released a sermon series that purported to "show the historical and Biblical foundations that explain the war we are in now and point us to Armageddon." In January he wrote about the Book of Revelation and its prediction that "Jesus Christ rules the world with a rod of iron from the city of Jerusalem." And in March, he sermonized about "the edge of time ... the final countdown has begun."


At the CUFI conference, there was a lot of fretting about Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's "12th Imam" -- the Messiah of dispensationalist Islam -- but questions about the Christian version were brushed off as silly and inconsequential.

After the press conference ended, reporters were talking outside the room. A representative of CUFI's public relations firm engaged a group of us in conversation. She insisted that Hagee wears two hats -- one as a pastor and one as a political activist -- and that the CUFI summit was about politics, not eschatology. We discussed whether it was possible for Hagee to separate his end times views from his political stance on Israel, based solely on the Bible, which Hagee describes as the "word of the living God ... the whole truth and nothing but the truth." Hagee's security personnel, along with hotel security guards, then escorted me, Max Blumenthal, and his accompanying camera man out of the building and off the premises. We were not, apparently, the right kind of Jews. (At the AIPAC conference, I had a similar discussion with one of its representatives, which attracted no attention. If Hagee is unfamiliar with the great Jewish tradition of debate, he can come to Shabbat dinner at my house.)

Following a phone call, CUFI's public relations firm realized that this wasn't ... well, kosher, and came outside to assure us that we were indeed welcome at the conference even though we had declined to be stenographers for demagoguery. Hagee, I was told, was "not pleased" with my coverage of him.

No doubt it was difficult for Hagee to be questioned, given that speaker after speaker at the conference, including members of Congress, all extolled his divine mandate. House Minority Leader Roy Blunt pointed to AIPAC board members and quipped that Hagee could be that organization's president, too. CUFI, Blunt added, is "part of God's plan." Joe Lieberman echoed that sentiment, calling CUFI "miraculous" and claiming to "see God's hand" working in it. Lieberman compared Hagee to Moses -- a "man of God" -- who has become a "leader of a mighty multitude." John McCain thanked Hagee for spiritual guidance, because "it's hard to do the Lord's work in the city of Satan." David Brog, CUFI's executive director (who is Jewish) maintained that just like God placed Harry Truman in his mother's womb at a juncture in history when his support of Israel was needed, God placed Hagee in his mother's womb as well.

Portrayed as a prophet, Hagee is leading thousands of CUFI delegates to Capitol Hill as I write this, undoubtedly emboldened by the successful Republican filibuster of the Democrats' plan for ending the Iraq war. They seem to think that their input as "Bible-believing Christians" on issues relating to Israel, Palestine, Iraq and Iran, should be given greater weight than that of other citizens. "God deals with nations, churches and people as they deal with Israel and the Jewish people," Hagee warned ominously at the "Night to Honor Israel." Hagee laid out a list of enemies: at the top were Jimmy Carter, the "blame Israel crowd," the U.N. (a "brothel"), advocates for ending the Iraq war and promoters of "appeasement" toward Iran and the Palestinians. He put the nearly 5,000 people in the audience on notice: "There are two ways to live. The Torah way or the wrong way."

Will members of Congress want to demonstrate to this vocal constituency that they, too, are motivated by God when shaping American foreign policy? Lieberman gave a big clue to his position at a gathering of CUFI major donors Monday night. "America is a faith-based initiative," said the former Democrat. "We are not endowed by the great thinkers of the Enlightenment but endowed by our Creator ... Anyone who tries to separate American government from faith," he added, "is doing something profoundly unnatural."


Sarah Posner has covered the religious right for the American Prospect, The Gadflyer and AlterNet. Her book God's Profits: Faith, Fraud, and the Republican Crusade for Values Voters will be published by PoliPoint Press next year.

Europe’s Fascist Future?
Posted by A. Millar on July 24, 2007 A united Europe has long been an aspiration spanning the political spectrum. The leader of the pre-Second World War Fascists, Sir Oswald Mosley, called for “Europe a Nation,” while, only slightly later, the British Independent Labor Party worked toward a “United Socialist States of Europe.” Again, in 1945 Prime Minister Winston Churchill called for a “United States of Europe,” though he believed that Britain should not be part of it, apparently because of its “insular” quality.
Britain, it is probably true to say, has long had a difficult relationship with the European nations, and with the idea of being a part of Europe, having thought of itself as an island protected by sea, with a “special relationship” with the U.S. When a rail tunnel was built, joining Britain and France a decade or so ago, many British people protested that the country’s natural defenses had been breached.

Now, it would seem, even the many of the once-ardent supporters of a united Europe have turned Euro-skeptic. In 2005 France – which had once been one of its main promoters – defeated the European constitution, as did the Netherlands. Perhaps most surprising of all, nationalist political parties have recently made significant inroads in Euro-politics (especially since the introduction of several Eastern European countries), with several having banded together to for the European National Front. Ironically, with few exceptions these parties do not appear to be calling for “Europe a Nation,” or promoting the sort of all-encompassing political and cultural hegemony that is typically associated with at least earlier far-Right parties, but rather are promoting the idea that individual nations to retain their own historical characteristics, while forming some sort of working relationship.

Notably, Nick Griffin of the British National Party (not a member of the E.N.F.) has commented in this regard, that, “Unless the nationalists of Europe cooperate, the internationalists of Europe - the Eurocrats - will destroy all our national freedoms and identities separately.” Though the B.N.P. remains a party on the margins of British politics, Britain’s fourth largest political party is The United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), which, ironically, has ten members in the European Parliament. According to its mission statement their aim is to, “expose the true nature of the EU and… campaign for British withdrawal [from it].” Although they are usually denounced as “fascists” by their opponents the B.N.P. and other far-Right political parties in Europe do not echo, then, the historically fascist aspirations for national expansion and homogenization of occupied territories. The undoubted irony of Europe’s political dynamics is that the far-Right now consciously stand for the opposite, while secular Eurocrats seem intent on homogenizing the nations of Europe, even though this against the historical and cultural reality on the ground.

Europe is increasingly “a Nation” rather than a “United States,” such as Churchill called for. Despite any diversity that may appear within it, a nation is one, standardized, uniform in manner, customs, monarch or prime minister, weights and measures, etc. Churchill was American on his mother’s side (though his mother’s family was of English descent), and he made much of his American background when he promoted himself and the cause of liberty to the people of the U.S., prior to the latter’s involvement in the Second World War. Churchill understood what it was to be American, and her knew what a “United States” meant.

The U.S.A. contrasts sharply with the European Union precisely because it is so self consciously a union of states, each of which has not only a very distinct culture, but, often, distinct laws regarding the drinking of alcohol, sex, assisted suicide, etc. Some counties are “dry” because the sale of alcohol is illegal, due to long held religious sensibilities, while cities in other states, such as Las Vegas, thrive on gambling, drinking, and other sorts of nightlife. You would think that as the U.S.A. is so diverse, the European Union would embrace the historical and cultural diversity of its member nations, yet individual cultural identity has long been undermined by the legislators of Brussels, and continues to be, much to the chagrin of Europe’s people.

The first opposition to the E.U.’s encroachment upon British independence came in the form of tabloid headlines proclaiming that the Eurocrats were intent on denying the status of our “prawn cocktail flavour” crisps (or what Americans call “chips”). Later, ironically, the French wanted us to refer to our chocolate as “chocolate flavour.” Regulations banning the use of the term, “prawn cocktail flavour” or some such thing, seems a trivial matter to me, and a sacrifice worth making for a real United States of Europe. Yet, E.U. regulations have continued to damp down British traditions, as well as the traditions of some of its other member nations. Recently, for example, regulations pertaining to the measurements of pints of beer have threatened the use of the British crown within Britain, which has appeared on pint glasses as a marker of correct measure since the late 17th century. In response nine different breweries complained to the then prime minister, Tony Blair. There is no good reason why a real, and long-standing tradition such as this should be eradicated by the European Union. Indeed, its function should be to protect the cultures of different European countries, or at least to allow them, by law, to keep their traditions, such as we find in the U.S.

Unfortunately Europe is uniting at a point in time when tradition, religion, and national sovereignty are concepts that are anathema to its prevailing intellectual culture and the bourgeois of several of its nations – perhaps especially Britain – and this can only affect any E.U. treaty. In 2006 Liberal Democratic Euro-M.P., Baroness Sarah Ludford condemned Poland’s stance on rights for homosexuals, which are exceedingly limited in comparison to other E.U. member countries, in part because of the country’s Roman Catholic heritage. Regardless of the merits of her position, Baroness Ludford commented that it was not a matter of Poland’s culture, clarifying a moment later, suggesting that it would not affect the nation’s language, food, music, etc. That these are held up as a nation’s culture, while its religion and moral foundation are designated, by implication, as ‘not culture’ is problematic to say the least in countries where tradition is still so alive. Would we apply this absurd notion to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict? Unsurprisingly, Poland seems to consider the E.U. a threat to its traditional, Christian way of life, and as attempting to impose liberal secularism upon its people. Against the trend, in 2003 Poland led a campaign to have the Judaeo-Christian roots noted in the E.U. Constitution.

If traditional, national culture has been undermined, complaints have also arisen, regarding more practical matter. Leader of the Conservative Party, David Cameron has noted that Britain was influential in the wording of the European Convention of Human Rights (ECHR), which guarantee among other things, “freedom of thought, conscience and religion; freedom of expression.” Yet, these rights, Cameron has also pointed out, have been increasingly undermined under Labour. Sometimes, the erosion of basic rights has come from the government and at other times by the modern brand of Liberal-intolerance that the government’s followers have created (and which certainly does not deserve the name “liberal”).

In regard to freedom of thought, in 2005 the Labour government proposed the Religious Hatred Law, making it illegal to condemn, criticize, or ridicule any religion – thus effectively making free speech, or “freedom of expression” illegal. The law was voted down in its original form, though it was instituted in an amended form making it illegal to use threatening language in regard to any religion. Personally, I do not want to see religion attacked, though I do not want to find myself in a country where I risk imprisonment if I dare to condemn terrorist acts, for example, carried out in the name of a religion. Liberal intolerance has, of course, a trickle-down effect, and we are constantly affronted by an extreme though vocal minority, who promote turning freedom of speech into their own brand of politically approved form of speech under the banner of liberalism. Recently, then, we have seen people revealed as members of the B.N.P. by the press with – if it had any foresight whatsoever – the clear knowledge that they would be (and later were) attacked, with unions, demonstrators, etc., calling for them to be fired from their job, prosecuted, etc., even though they had not even promoted the party or spoken of their membership or political views – whatever they may be. (It is a cliché, I know, but the exposure of political opponents by newspapers became a part of the zeitgeist and semi-official policy of the early years of Germany’s Nazi Party.)

The harassment campaign against ballerina Simone Clarke for her membership of the B.N.P. is well known. A similar situation had occurred even before this, however, when architect Peter Phillips ran for presidency of the Royal Institute of British Architects in 2006, and won 60 votes, Sumita Sinha, founder of the equal opportunities campaign Architects for Change, called for him to be expelled from the organization and for those who had voted for him to be named. Calls for people to be fired because they support a legal political party, or for overturning secret ballots, are entirely undemocratic, and un-British. Place them in an earlier time, and we would call them fascist. Such tactics will also ultimately backfire. Note for example Rod Liddle’s confession in the Times that he laughed at a “mildly racist joke.” “I used to find racist jokes dismally unfunny,” he notes, “ but these days, because I’m not allowed to find them funny and might even be visited by the police for committing a hate crime if I did, they’ve taken on a samizdat quality.” Such an editorial would not have been published if it did not speak to its readers, and it probably would not have ten years ago.

When trade minister Margaret Hodge dared to say that British families had a “legitimate sense of entitlement” over immigrants to government-provided housing she was denounced as “using the language of the BNP,” which is usually code for “racist.” The Left-wing Guardian newspaper may write of fears of the rise of the far-Right, but when centrist politicians (or even those on the Left, such as Hodge) and parties cannot raise the concerns of their constituents (as Hodge claims she was doing) it is quite obvious that ordinary people will eventually vote for whatever party is addressing their concerns. Indeed, it is fairly frequently remarked that Britain’s main political parties, though ostensibly Left and Right, have effectively the same policies on nearly everything, and disagree usually only on minor details, so sanitized has the country’s politics become.

With increasing intolerance toward political dissent, and the harassment of the dissenter, it is becoming increasingly clear that Britain needs a Constitution, like that of the U.S. Constitution, to guarantee its citizens such human rights as we once took for granted, e.g., free speech. Notably, while the government has been criticized for giving away to much power by signing the new E.U. treaty (designed to replace the defunct Constitution), it has attempted to moderate this opposition by amending the treaty before signing, and obtaining “an opt-out on a charter of human and social rights.” In Britain the Magna Carta is not a historical document enshrining Habeas Corpus, it is merely history – forgotten history, at that. Law, it would seem, is something that depend very much on the whims of the day, and that is a very dangerous situation for the British.

Unsurprisingly, perhaps, calls for a formal British Constitution have begun to surface. The minor political party, the English Democrats, has called for “a modern and wide-ranging Bill of Rights founded on traditional English civil liberties,” for England, and Cameron has taken the initiative to charge the Conservative Party with producing a Modern British Bill of Rights, which, he has said, “needs to define the core values which give us our identity as a free nation.” He goes on to say:

It should spell out the fundamental duties and responsibilities of people living in this country both as citizens and foreign nationals.

And it should guide the judiciary and the Government in applying human rights law when the lack of responsibility of some individuals threatens the rights of others.

It should enshrine and protect fundamental liberties such as jury trial, equality under the law and civil rights.

And it should protect the fundamental rights set out in the European Convention on Human Rights in clearer and more precise terms.

Greater clarity and precision would allow those rights to be enforced more easily and effectively in circumstances where they ought to be protected but it would become harder to extend them inappropriately as under the present law.

Greater clarity and precision in the law, as opposed to vague general principles, which can be interpreted in many different ways, is more in accordance with this country’s legal tradition.

Of course, a Constitution is only as strong as the political will of the governing class to respect it. The Iraqi government has recently written its Constitution, as has a military-backed commission in Thailand – after the elected government was ousted in a coup nearly a year ago. It seems that every emerging nation writes one. I am always struck by the thought that this represents an ersatz political tradition, that there is in effect a “beginning again,” a year zero. There is something socialist about it. Frequently they fail, either by vote or in practice, because their contents are often artificial, creating an ideal nation on paper rather than presenting a conscious of the nation’s historical culture while establishing equal human rights. (Thailand has had no fewer than 17 Constitutions in the last 75 years.)

At the very root of the various nations we find the idea of its sacredness (expressed, for example, in such myths as that of Romulus, the mythical founder of Rome, in (traditional) monarchy, etc.), and the Constitution must be an affirmation of the sacred nature of both the nation or states and citizenship within it. Such a document could only be produced by those who are conscious of history, cultured (in a traditional sense) and learned – wise, even. It remains to be seen whether an authentic British Constitution can be written in the modern age by professional politicians with one eye on their career and the other on the clubs wielded by various pressure groups.

Article URL: http://www.takimag.com/site/article/europes_fascist_future/

July 30, 2007 Issue
Copyright © 2007 The American Conservative



How to Win in Iraq

A stable Iraqi state would constitute a strategic victory—and the only one still possible.

by William S. Lind

Among the bits of lore of the United States Senate is a story that dates back to before I arrived there in 1973 as a staffer to Sen. Robert Taft Jr. of Ohio. A senator—from New York, perhaps—known for depending wholly on his staff while treating it with contempt, told his assistant for foreign policy, “I want to give a major speech on the Vietnam War tomorrow morning. Stay here all night and write it.” With that, the senator headed out for a Capitol Hill reception rich with giant shrimp and large checks.

The staffer did as he was bidden, despite the fact that it was his anniversary, and his wife had made grand plans. The next morning, the senator found the text of the speech in his inbox. Snatching it eagerly, he proceeded directly to the floor of the Senate. His voice booming, he laid out a brilliant and incisive analysis of the war. At the bottom of the seventh page, he proclaimed, “I will now lay out my plan for winning the Vietnam War.” Page eight began with the words, “Now you’re on your own, you S.O.B. I quit.”

At the risk of finding myself in the same situation, I offer my plan for winning in Iraq.

The starting point, despite the disastrous course of the war to date, is to realize that the only possibilities for victory lie at the strategic level, not the tactical level. In part this is because we have botched the tactical level beyond redemption. While the efforts of General Petraeus and the Marines in Anbar province to apply classic counter-insurgency doctrine and protect the population instead of brutalizing it are laudatory, they come too late.

In larger part, we cannot win at the tactical level because this kind of war is not additive. You cannot win at the strategic level simply by accumulating tactical successes, as our Second-Generation, firepower/attrition-oriented military automatically assumes. The strategic level follows its own logic, and strategic victory requires a sound strategy. When, as is currently the case, we have no strategy, this fact works against us. If, however, we adopt a prudent strategy, it can work for us. Because a higher level of war trumps a lower, we can yet redeem our many tactical failures at the strategic level. In other words, we can still win.

To devise a successful strategy, we must begin by defining what we mean by winning. The Bush administration, consistent with its record of military incompetence, continues to pursue the folly of maximalist objectives. It still defines victory as it did at the war’s outset: an Iraq that is an American satellite, friendly to Israel, happy to provide the U.S. with a limitless supply of oil and vast military bases from which American forces can dominate the region. None of these objectives are now attainable. None were ever attainable, no matter what our troops did. And as long as those objectives define victory, we are doomed to defeat.

Fortunately, another objective, the one that actually matters most, may, with luck and skill, still be achieved. That objective—restoring a state in what is now the stateless region of Mesopotamia—must become our new definition of victory.

This definition is not arbitrary. On the contrary, it reflects a correct, Fourth-Generation understanding of the threat. The serious threat to America, in the Middle East and elsewhere, is not any state. Rather, it is posed by a growing congeries of non-state organizations, which we label “terrorists.”

Non-state forces win when states are destroyed and are replaced by stateless regions. Even the long-term objective of al-Qaeda is not a state but a restored caliphate, a type of social organization that precedes the state by centuries. In the meantime, stateless chaos will serve very well, thank you.

And thank us they do because our initial invasion of Iraq and subsequent blunders, such as sending home the Iraqi army and civil service, destroyed the Iraqi state. It has not been rebuilt. We created the illusion of an Iraqi government in Baghdad’s Green Zone, but it is a government without a state, which is to say a Potemkin parliament. As long as Iraq remains stateless, our non-state enemies win.

The other side of the same coin, however, offers us a chance for victory. If a real state can be restored in Iraq, al-Qaeda and the other Islamic non-state forces lose. That is true regardless of the nature of a restored Iraqi state. States dislike competition, and the definition of a state says that it must have a monopoly of violence within its borders. If that suggests something about the state of the state—in Europe, the United States, and elsewhere—well, it should.

Winning the war in Iraq therefore means seeing the re-creation of an Iraqi state. I say “seeing,” not “re-creating,” because our strategy, if it is to have a chance of success, must proceed from a realistic understanding of the situation in Iraq. We do not now have the power to re-create a state in Iraq, if we ever did. That is due in part to military failure, but it has more to do with a problem of legitimacy. As a foreign, Christian invader and occupier, we cannot create any legitimate institutions in Iraq. Quite the contrary: we have the reverse Midas touch. Any institution we create, or merely approve of and support, loses its legitimacy.

That means our new strategy must employ what the British military theorist Basil Liddell-Hart called an “indirect approach.” This is chancy. So is war itself. You cannot guarantee events; you try instead to influence them. Again, this reflects a realistic appreciation of the situation in Iraq. Our vaunted “boots on the ground” have been fought to a stalemate by flip flops in the alleys. In this kind of war, a stalemate means we have lost tactically. A combination of good strategy and some luck may yet enable us to pull our chestnuts out of the fire, but we are in no position to dictate events. We must try, instead, to shape and ride them.

An indirect approach to winning the war in Iraq on the strategic level has three central elements. The first is the lesson of Nixon’s trip to China.

That brilliant diplomatic move of establishing a rapprochement with China in effect won the Vietnam War for the United States. The threat that drew us into a major war was not North Vietnam, a power of purely local significance. Rather, it was Mao’s doctrine of exporting wars of national liberation. (The phrase at the time was “Two, three, many Vietnams.”) The new relationship Nixon established with China ended that threat, rendering our defeat on the ground in Vietnam irrelevant.

In the case of the war in Iraq, Iran is China, and the first component of a strategy to win in Iraq is to establish a rapprochement with Iran. That is, a general settlement of differences. The Iranians have offered us such a settlement—including a compromise on the nuclear issue—on generous terms. But the Bush administration, true to its hubris, refused to consider it, going so far as to upbraid the Swiss for daring to forward the overture to us. It seems, however, to remain on the table.

The reason a strategy to win in Iraq must begin with a rapprochement with Iran is that any real Iraqi state is likely to be allied to Iran. Even the quisling al-Maliki government cowering in the Green Zone is close to Iran. A legitimate Iraqi government, which is virtually certain to be dominated by Iraq’s Shi’ites, will probably be much closer.

A restored Iraqi state that is allied with Iran will quickly roll up al-Qaeda and other non-state forces in Iraq, which is the victory we most require. But the world’s perception will still be that the United States was defeated because its main regional rival, Iran, will emerge much strengthened. If Iran and America are no longer enemies, that issue becomes moot.

A rapprochement with Iran may encourage Tehran to use its influence in Iraq to promote the revival of a state, but that is in Iran’s interest in any case once it is clear American troops are withdrawing. Conversely, until it is clear that America has given up its ambitions for large, permanent military bases in Iraq, Iran must continue to promote instability in its neighbor.

Once it becomes possible for both the U.S. and Iran to win in Iraq, we must move to the second element of our new strategy: allowing any elements that may hold the potential of restoring an Iraqi state to rise within Iraq. Consistent with an indirect approach, this means letting go.

At present, the United States works to suppress any elements that challenge the al-Maliki government. We teeter on the verge of open war with the most prominent of those elements, Muqtada al-Sadr and his Mahdi Army. On the ground, al-Sadr is the leader most likely to restore an Iraqi state, and thanks to his steadfast opposition to the American occupation, he has legitimacy. While he may not have the support of a majority of Iraq’s Shi’ites, majorities do not make history. He is the leader of the Shi’ites who count, which is to say the young men willing to fight. Nor is al-Sadr merely a Shi’ite leader; he has kept open channels of communication to at least some of the Sunni insurgent groups—and perhaps channels not of communication only. Some of the Sunni insurgents clearly have benefited from Iranian support, which may have come through al-Sadr. Of late, al-Sadr has taken care to restrain his followers from revenge attacks against Sunnis, stressing Shi’ite-Sunni unity against the foreign occupier. He has had his eye on the brass ring, the supreme leadership position in a restored Iraqi state, from the beginning. Now he may see it as within reach.

Our new strategy would let him grab it. Under his leadership, or that of anyone else in Iraq with a shred of legitimacy, a restored Iraqi state will not be a friend of America. Given what we have done to that country, we can hardly expect it to be. But our new strategy has no such unattainable objective. Its objective is solely the restoration of a real state, and that al-Sadr may be able to accomplish. If he can, we will have little to complain about in terms of his toleration of al-Qaeda or other Fourth Generation elements. Nor will his close relationship with Iran be a problem, given that we will no longer regard Iran as an enemy.

There is, of course, no guarantee that al-Sadr or anyone else in Iraq can restore a state. The only sure thing is that we cannot do so, as four years of failure have amply demonstrated. The one chance of victory we have left is to get out of the way of al-Sadr and anyone else in Iraq who might be able to re-create an Iraqi state, praying fervently that they succeed. Having failed in our own efforts, it is time to give the Iraqis and Dame Fortune our place at the gaming table.

Some may object that a rapprochement with Iran coupled with allowing al-Sadr or someone like him to become the leader of a restored Iraqi state will upset the Sunni regimes in the Middle East. Indeed it may, but that is not our problem. There is little the Sunni states can do about it, given the regions’s geography. Syria is in a position to support a continued insurgency by Iraqi Sunnis, but Syria is ruled by an Alawite clique, and the Alawites are offshoots of Shi’ism. The Saudis will be both angry and terrified, but beyond supplying Iraq’s Sunni insurgents with money and volunteers, which they are already doing, they cannot intervene. Saudi Arabia’s armed forces are a joke, and overt Saudi military intervention in Iraq would quickly fail. All the other Sunni states are too far away to do anything effective.

Moreover, by accentuating the Sunni-Shi’ite rivalry within Islam, we may help fold Islamic expansionism back on itself, an essential quality of any indirect approach. As James Kurth wrote in a September 2005 article in this magazine entitled “Splitting Islam”:

If the Sunni-Shi’ite conflict became not only intense and widespread but also prolonged, perhaps as much so as the Sino-Soviet conflict during the last three decades of the Cold War, the global Islamist movement might have almost no meaning or attraction at all. In the Muslim world there might be Sunni Islamists and Shi’ite Islamists, but each might consider their greatest enemy to be not the United States, but each other.

The third and final element of a strategy for winning in Iraq is to withdraw all American forces as rapidly as possible, which means within 12-18 months. That is the only way we can create the space necessary for al-Sadr or someone else to re-create an Iraqi state. If we remain and work against him, a dicey task becomes that much harder, undermining both him and our strategic goal. And if we work for him, he loses legitimacy, the sine qua non for re-creating a state in Iraq.

In this strategy, our withdrawal is not that of a defeated army. It is a strategic withdrawal—a necessary part of our strategy. That distinction is a critical for our prestige in the world, for the future health of America’s Armed Forces, and for our domestic politics, which could be roiled beyond what any conservative would desire by a vast military defeat.

If our new strategy works and our withdrawal is followed by the restoration of a real Iraqi state, we will have learned our lesson about wars of choice, but avoided a catastrophe. If it fails and Mesopotamia remains a stateless region, Iraq is no worse off than it is now, and our troops will be safely out of the mess.

There is no chance the Bush administration, locked in a Totentanz with its dreams of world empire, will adopt this strategy. But the presidential debate season has already begun, and a bevy of candidates in both parties are looking around for something, anything that might get us out of the Iraqi morass without accepting defeat. If just one of them picks up on it, those yawningly dull debates might get a lot more interesting.
____________________________________________

William S. Lind is director of the Center for Cultural Conservatism at the Free Congress Foundation in Washington, D.C.

July 30, 2007 Issue

Democratic Debate Recap When I first tuned into the Democratic debate tonight, I started taking copious notes on who was saying what. Then I stopped. Most Americans will be going more on general impressions than word-by-word analysis, so I should too.

On policy, the most important takeaway, for me, anyway, is Gov. Richardson's support for a permanent UN peacekeeping force. That bodes extremely well for a better thought out and more politically viable proposal to establish the UN Emergency Peace Service, that I've been working hard to build momentum for over the past few months. This is an idea that's going from zero to 60 and is all of a sudden squarely in the policy mainstream.

Tonight's debate is the first Democratic debate that I've recapped. I was disappointed that few if any of the questions touched on America's declining influence in the world or the importance of cooperating with others in an interconnected world.

On the flip side, I'm very happy with the Democratic slate of candidates. Nearly all of them would make fine Presidents and most of them are solid candidates, too.

Without further ado, my impressions:

Hillary Clinton: Clearly the most polished and effective debater, Clinton came off extremely well tonight. Her message is tight, her knowledge of policy is deep, and she played to her strengths at every turn. Still, primary voters wondering how committed she is to ending the conflict in Iraq will come away unsatisfied. And more importantly, half a year into the campaign, I'm still not sure what her campaign is fundamentally about. Clinton's rhetoric is very safe and generic, highlighting the "need for change," for example. She still hasn't communicated clearly what's fueling her desire to be President. Until she does, she'll remain vulnerable to allegations that she's driven by raw ambition and puts politics ahead of principle. All that notwithstanding, Clinton's effort tonight substantially helped her cause.

Barack Obama: A mixed performance. Obama's cerebral disposition, careful use of language to highlight nuance, and ability to connect hot-button issues with more fundamental questions has made him a talk-show darling, but it's not winning him points in a debate. Interesting to note: Obama has started lashing out at those ubiquitous special interests. I haven't heard him do it before. My guess is that someone advised him that if you're not going to bash Republicans, you've got to find another villain. Generally, Obama is going to need to answer questions more directly; I think his reluctance to say Americans in Iraq have not died in vain could leave potential voters with a bad taste in their mouths. That said, Obama started hitting the mark in the second half of the debate and by the end of the night, his responses were extremely compelling.

John Edwards: I think Edwards gained ground tonight. He clearly came off as an action-oriented candidate on poverty, health care, Iraq, and stuck to his populist, anti-special interests message. He was put on defense more than most other candidates and did reasonably well. The one question that put a chink in John's armor, I think, was whether or not he stands by Elizabeth's contention that he'd be a better President for women than Clinton. Then again, that's not an easy one to parry. Edwards's supporters will be happy with his performance on the whole.

Bill Richardson: Since he stated his support for something like UNEPS (but even more bold), I would love to say Richardson made gains. I really would. But Richardson seemed a bit scatterbrained tonight. He showcased his accomplishments and depth of knowledge effectively. But Richardson didn't get to answer questions in his strongest areas, energy and diplomacy. And his comments were chock full of wonk-speak. He's going to have to remember how to explain complex issues to voters on their terms. I should also note that Richardson's YouTube ad (all candidates were asked to submit one), a reprise of one of his Presidential job search spot, is the winner in my book:



Chris Dodd: Dodd didn't have many memorable moments tonight, good or bad. His understanding of complex issues, his boldness on energy policy, and his views - especially on diplomacy and foreign policy - are second to none. But Dodd comes off as a New England intellectual. He's not as boring as Gore in 2000 or as wooden as Kerry in '04, but so far, he's no more accessible than either. My guess is he gains ground in the Northeast and in university communities but loses ground elsewhere.

Joe Biden: Biden's trying to emerge as the straight-talk candidate for the Dems, and for the most part, it's working. He's avoided longwinded answers and stayed on message. His understanding of how a withdrawal from Iraq would work - coupled with his plan for federalism there - was impressive, whether or not one agrees with him on the merits of his argument (I'm sure that some who are itching for a quicker withdrawal would take issue with his position). But Biden lost big time points with me by suggesting that we need to send American troops to Darfur and, more importantly, that those who favor other options were being soft and tolerant of genocide. As Clinton, Gravel, and Richardson pointed out, there's no way American troops could perform a peace operation as well as a robust UN force could in Darfur. American forces aren't trained primarily for peace enforcement and nation-building and they're stretched thin as is, thanks to deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan. Moreover, people in the region are very wary of American intervention - even the good guys who are pushing hard to end the atrocities in Darfur, Chad, and the Central African Republic. They don't want American personnel on the ground; they want American diplomacy and logistical support to pave the way for African and Muslim personnel to successfully intervene through a UN mission. Biden knows better.

Dennis Kucinich: This was hands down the best debate performance I've seen from Kucinich. He was articulate, on point, and activist in the best possible way. He also showed a lot of discipline and foresight by articulating and repeating a message point that concisely explains his world view: "Strength Through Peace." It's a good one, and it will help Americans figure out what he's about. Kucinich explained well the need for international cooperation, and his indictment of Congress's failure to de-fund the war is clearly making the frontrunners uncomfortable. On the negative side, there were a few eyeball rollers, most notably his unconvincing effort to connect Iraq, Iran, and energy. The connection is there, but it can't be explained in 100 words or less and isn't as simple as Kucinich would have voters believe.

Mike Gravel: Gravel had trouble putting together coherent ideas. I often had a tough time understanding the basic gist of his arguments. His brand of righteous anger is getting old.

Anderson Cooper: Didn't talk much - so good job.

I'm looking forward to seeing how this shakes out tomorrow.

-- Scott Paul

01:08 AM | Permalink

http://www.secretsofsurvival.com/survival/...e_scenario.html

The Bible Scenario —
Is the United States in the Bible?
Cheney: Nuclear attack on U.S. cities 'very real' — is this Biblical?
– by Mark Lawrence - May, 2007 - SecretsofSurvival.com –


With nuclear attacks on U.S. cities by radical Islam (Al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, etc.) now considered a 'daily threat' by Homeland Security, that's what a lot of people nowadays want to know.

Bin Laden's plan for "American Hiroshima" calls for the death of millions of people, including children, and involves multiple nukes in multiple cities.

That was in 2005. It's now 2007 and news reports point to Bin Laden being very close to actually pulling this off.

CHICAGO TRIBUNE: Cheney: Nuclear attack on U.S cities 'very real'

N.Y. TIMES: Time to make plans for 'day after' nuclear blast

L.A. TIMES: Bush orders contingency plans for nuclear attack on U.S.

By now it's pretty clear. One or more U.S. cities will most likely be attacked by terrorists with nuclear weapons.

If you find this hard to believe, consider that FBI Director Robert Mueller recently confirmed the claims made in FBI consultant Paul Williams' book, titled The Day of Islam, where he says Al Qaida is planning nuclear attacks on 7 U.S. cities.

Coincidentally, these attacks appears to be prophecied in multiple books of the Bible.


Cheney: Nuclear attack on U.S. cities 'very real'

With the last chapter in the Bible written almost two thousand years ago by the apostle John, it's surprising that anyone alive at that time could envision the political and economic world as it would exist two thousand years later and then write about it.

John of course had the assistance of an angel, who gave him a series of terrifying visions, which he was told to write down exactly as they were shown to him.

Fast forward to the present day; the United States should be worried about some of the visions John was told to write down.

The United States fits the description of Mystery Babylon the Great, a 'city' described in Revelation (last chapter of the Bible) that sits on many waters, and has many peoples and languages, and where sexual immorality and false religions are rampant.

Revelation goes on to describe what many Bible scholars and evangelists believe to be a direct analogy to the United States, or what may be New York City, or what may be multiple U.S. cities.

In 'one day and one hour' it is destroyed by its enemies; the apostle John writes that God lets this destruction happen to bring about his wrath.

Revelation 17:15 - "...the waters you saw, where the prostitute [Mystery Babylon the Great] was seated are peoples, multitudes, nations, and languages. The 10 horns you saw, and the beast, will hate the prostitute. They will make her desolate and naked, devour her flesh, and burn her up with fire. For God has put it into their hearts to carry out His plan by having one purpose, and to give their kingdom to the beast until God's words are accomplished. And the woman you saw is the great city that has an empire over the kings of the earth."

Go to link for rest of article

July 24, 2007
U.S. Is Seen in Iraq Until at Least '09
By MICHAEL R. GORDON BAGHDAD, July 23 — While Washington is mired in political debate over the future of Iraq, the American command here has prepared a detailed plan that foresees a significant American role for the next two years.

The classified plan, which represents the coordinated strategy of the top American commander and the American ambassador, calls for restoring security in local areas, including Baghdad, by the summer of 2008. "Sustainable security" is to be established on a nationwide basis by the summer of 2009, according to American officials familiar with the document.

The detailed document, known as the Joint Campaign Plan, is an elaboration of the new strategy President Bush signaled in January when he decided to send five additional American combat brigades and other units to Iraq. That signaled a shift from the previous strategy, which emphasized transferring to Iraqis the responsibility for safeguarding their security.

That new approach put a premium on protecting the Iraqi population in Baghdad, on the theory that improved security would provide Iraqi political leaders with the breathing space they needed to try political reconciliation.

The latest plan, which covers a two-year period, does not explicitly address troop levels or withdrawal schedules. It anticipates a decline in American forces as the "surge" in troops runs its course later this year or in early 2008. But it nonetheless assumes continued American involvement to train soldiers, act as partners with Iraqi forces and fight terrorist groups in Iraq, American officials said.

The goals in the document appear ambitious, given the immensity of the challenge of dealing with die-hard Sunni insurgents, renegade Shiite militias, Iraqi leaders who have made only fitful progress toward political reconciliation, as well as Iranian and Syrian neighbors who have not hesitated to interfere in Iraq's affairs. And the White House's interim assessment of progress, issued on July 12, is mixed.

But at a time when critics at home are defining patience in terms of weeks, the strategy may run into the expectations of many lawmakers for an early end to the American mission here.

The plan, developed by Gen. David H. Petraeus, the senior American commander, and Ryan C. Crocker, the American ambassador, has been briefed to Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and Adm. William J. Fallon, the head of the Central Command. It is expected to be formally issued to officials here this week.

The plan envisions two phases. The "near-term" goal is to achieve "localized security" in Baghdad and other areas no later than June 2008. It envisions encouraging political accommodations at the local level, including with former insurgents, while pressing Iraq's leaders to make headway on their program of national reconciliation.

The "intermediate" goal is to stitch together such local arrangements to establish a broader sense of security on a nationwide basis no later than June 2009.

"The coalition, in partnership with the government of Iraq, employs integrated political, security, economic and diplomatic means, to help the people of Iraq achieve sustainable security by the summer of 2009," a summary of the campaign plan states.

Military officials here have been careful not to guarantee success, and recognized they may need to revise the plan if some assumptions were not met.

"The idea behind the surge was to bring stability and security to the Iraqi people, primarily in Baghdad because it is the political heart of the country, and by so doing give the Iraqis the time and space needed to come to grips with the tough issues they face and enable reconciliation to take place," said Col. Peter Mansoor, the executive officer to General Petraeus.

"If eventually the Iraqi government and the various sects and groups do not come to some sort of agreement on how to share power, on how to divide resources and on how to reconcile and stop the violence, then the assumption on which the surge strategy was based is invalid, and we would have to re-look the strategy," Colonel Mansoor added.

General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker will provide an assessment in September on trends in Iraq and whether the strategy is viable or needs to be changed.

The previous plan, developed by Gen. George W. Casey Jr., who served as General Petraeus's predecessor before being appointed as chief of staff of the Army, was aimed at prompting the Iraqis to take more responsibility for security by reducing American forces.

That approach faltered when the Iraqi security forces showed themselves unprepared to carry out their expanded duties, and sectarian killings soared.

In contrast, the new approach reflects the counterinsurgency precept that protection of the population is best way to isolate insurgents, encourage political accommodations and gain intelligence on numerous threats. A core assumption of the plan is that American troops cannot impose a military solution, but that the United States can use force to create the conditions in which political reconciliation is possible.

To develop the plan, General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker assembled a Joint Strategic Assessment Team, which sought to define the conflict and outline the elements of a new strategy. It included officers like Col. H. R. McMaster, the field commander who carried out the successful "clear, hold and build" operation in Tal Afar and who wrote a critical account of the Joint Chiefs of Staff role during the Vietnam War; Col. John R. Martin, who teaches at the Army War College and was a West Point classmate of General Petraeus; and David Kilcullen, an Australian counterinsurgency expert who has a degree in anthropology.

State Department officials, including Robert Ford, an Arab expert and the American ambassador to Algeria, were also involved. So were a British officer and experts outside government like Stephen D. Biddle, a military expert at the Council on Foreign Relations.

The team determined that Iraq was in a "communal struggle for power," in the words of one senior officer who participated in the effort. Adding to the problem, the new Iraqi government was struggling to unite its disparate factions and to develop the capability to deliver basic services and provide security.

Extremists were fueling the violence, as were nations like Iran, which they concluded was arming and equipping Shiite militant groups, and Syria, which was allowing suicide bombers to cross into Iraq.

Like the Baker-Hamilton commission, which issued its report last year, the team believed that political, military and economic efforts were needed, including diplomatic discussions with Iran, officials said. There were different views about how aggressive to be in pressing for the removal of overtly sectarian officials, and several officials said that theme was toned down somewhat in the final plan.

The plan itself was written by the Joint Campaign Redesign Team, an allusion to the fact that the plan inherited from General Casey was being reworked. Much of the redesign has already been put into effect, including the decision to move troops out of large bases and to act as partners more fully with the Iraqi security forces.

The overarching goal, an American official said, is to advance political accommodation and avoid undercutting the authority of the Iraqi prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki. While the plan seeks to achieve stability, several officials said it anticipates that less will be accomplished in terms of national reconciliation by the end of 2009 than did the plan developed by General Casey.

The plan also emphasizes encouraging political accommodation at the local level. The command has established a team to oversee efforts to reach out to former insurgents and tribal leaders. It is dubbed the Force Strategic Engagement Cell, and is overseen by a British general. In the terminology of the plan, the aim is to identify potentially "reconcilable" groups and encourage them to move away from violence.

However, groups like Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, a Sunni Arab extremist group that American intelligence officials say has foreign leadership, and cells backed by Iran are seen as implacable foes.

"You are not out there trying to defeat your enemies wholesale," said one military official who is knowledgeable about the plan. "You are out there trying to draw them into a negotiated power-sharing agreement where they decide to quit fighting you. They don't decide that their conflict is over. The reasons for conflict remain, but they quit trying to address it through violence. In the end, we hope that that alliance of convenience to fight with Al Qaeda becomes a connection to the central government as well."

The hope is that sufficient progress might be made at the local level to encourage accommodation at the national level, and vice versa. The plan also calls for efforts to encourage the rule of law, such as the establishment of secure zones in Baghdad and other cities to promote criminal trials and process detainee cases.

To help measure progress in tamping down civil strife, Col. William Rapp, a senior aide to General Petraeus, oversaw an effort to develop a standardized measure of sectarian violence. One result was a method that went beyond the attacks noted in American military reports and which incorporated Iraqi data.

"We are going to try a dozen different things," said one senior officer. "Maybe one of them will flatline. One of them will do this much. One of them will do this much more. After a while, we believe there is chance you will head into success. I am not saying that we are absolutely headed for success."

uly 24, 2007
Op-Ed Contributor
A War the Pentagon Can’t Win
By DANIEL BENJAMIN and STEVEN SIMON
NEW YORK TIMES

AS the National Intelligence Estimate issued last week confirms, a terrorist haven has emerged in Pakistan’s tribal belt. And as recent revelations about an aborted 2005 operation in the region demonstrate, our Defense Department is chronically unable to conduct the sort of missions that would disrupt terrorist activity there and in similarly ungoverned places.

These are perhaps the most important kind of counterterrorism missions. Because the Pentagon has shown that it cannot carry them out, the Central Intelligence Agency should be given the chance to perform them.

The story of the scrubbed 2005 operation illustrates why the Pentagon is incapable of doing what needs to be done. The preparations for the mission to capture or kill Al Qaeda’s No. 2 leader, Ayman al-Zawahri, appear to have unfolded like others before it. Intelligence was received about a high-level Qaeda meeting. A small snatch or kill operation was to be carried out by Special Operations. But military brass added large numbers of troops to conduct additional intelligence, force protection, communications and extraction work.

At that point, as one senior intelligence official told this newspaper, “The whole thing turned into the invasion of Pakistan,” and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld pulled the plug.

To those of us who worked in counterterrorism in the 1990s, this sequence of events feels like the movie “Groundhog Day.” Similar decision-making led to the failure to mount critical operations on at least three occasions during the Clinton administration. The most notable was the effort to get the Pentagon to conduct a ground operation against the Qaeda leadership in Afghanistan beginning in late 1998.

The Clinton White House repeatedly requested options involving ground forces that could hunt and destroy terrorists in Afghanistan. Repeatedly, senior military officials declared such a mission “would be Desert One,” referring to the disastrous 1980 effort to free American hostages in Iran. When the Pentagon finally delivered a plan, the deployment envisioned would have been sufficient to take and hold Kabul but not to surprise and pin down a handful of terrorists.

But the Zawahri stand-down is even more telling. It occurred four years into the global war on terrorism, when the basic questions about the nature of the Qaeda threat had been settled and the nation, in the oft-intoned phrase of the Bush administration, was said to be always “on the offensive.” Moreover, it happened on the watch of Donald Rumsfeld, the most dominating secretary of defense in memory, who overruled military planners routinely as he micromanaged the deployment to Iraq. Perhaps his attention was focused on the growing mess in that country, but even Mr. Rumsfeld, who viewed special forces as the keystone of a transformed 21st-century American military, could not keep on track a mission that would have stunned Al Qaeda.

Highly mobile, highly lethal counterterrorism operations are clearly possible. Israel scored victories with raids in Entebbe, Uganda; Tunis; and Beirut, Lebanon, in the 1970s and 1980s. Other countries, like Germany, have carried out similar operations, like the Mogadishu raid of 1977 that freed passengers on a Lufthansa plane hijacked to Somalia by the Baader-Meinhof gang. An operation in Pakistan’s tribal areas — setting aside the issue of whether this could politically upend President Pervez Musharraf — would be extremely difficult. But it is hard to believe it is impossible.

Since the Desert One debacle, the United States has poured vast resources into its special forces. The Special Operations Command budget has nearly doubled since 2001, and it is expected to grow 150 percent over five years. The command includes more than 50,000 troops, the equivalent of three or four infantry divisions. The best of them — Delta Force and the Navy Seals — have developed into highly skilled unconventional forces.

Yet fear of failure and casualties has meant they are seldom, if ever, deployed for such counterterrorism operations. In theory, the best place in the government for small-scale missions to be planned and executed is the Pentagon, because snatch or kill teams should be plugged into a larger military support team. The reality, unfortunately, is that they can’t be plugged in without being bogged down.

Senior officers, trained to understand the American way of war to mean overwhelming force and superior firepower, view special ops outside a war zone as something to be avoided at all cost. This has been true even in lower-risk efforts to capture war criminals in the Balkans. The record demonstrates that our military is simply incapable of adapting its culture to embrace such operations. The Pentagon should just stop planning for missions it won’t launch.

While the C.I.A. doesn’t have an unblemished record, its counterterrorism operations have shown more promise than the Pentagon’s. The agency has already had some successes operating in ungoverned spaces. In the first reported attack in such a region, a C.I.A.-operated Predator drone launched a missile that killed a Qaeda lieutenant in Yemen in 2002. Since then the Predator has been used to strike Al Qaeda at least eight times, although with limited success. At least initially, the trigger in these attacks was pulled by C.I.A. operatives, not soldiers.

The record of a small, vulnerable C.I.A. paramilitary force in Afghanistan in 2001 was more impressive. The group’s audacious reconnaissance work and direction of local warlords in action against the Taliban provided the most significant battlefield success of the post-9/11 period. Without this risky, cold-start intervention, the American troops that followed the agency into Afghanistan would have gone in blind and worried more about their flanks than about Al Qaeda.

The agency’s history of ill-conceived covert political operations from the 1950s through the 1970s may cause some to worry. That agency, however, no longer exists. Congressional hearings and legislation, as well as fear of casualties, have given the clandestine service its own case of risk aversion, though it seems less severe than the Pentagon’s.

We have failed in Pakistan, and are failing in Iraq, to achieve a primary aim of our counterterrorism policy: preventing Al Qaeda from acquiring safe havens. Our military has shown itself to be a poor instrument for fighting terrorism, and there are now thousands of jihadists who weren’t in Iraq at the time of the 2003 invasion. When the inevitable American drawdown occurs, we will need a way to keep the terrorists off balance in Iraq and to disrupt the conveyor belt that is already moving fighters to places like Lebanon, North Africa and Europe.

With new leadership at both the C.I.A. and the Defense Department, the Bush administration has a chance to fix this problem. The missing ingredient for success with the most important kind of counterterrorism missions is not courage or technical capacity — our uniformed personnel are unsurpassed — but organizational culture. With a small fraction of the resources that Pentagon has for special operations, the C.I.A. could develop the paramilitary capacity we profoundly need.

Daniel Benjamin, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and Steven Simon, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, were members of the National Security Council staff from 1994 to 1999.

BUSH LAUNCHES A NEW MIDDLE EAST INITIATIVE.
MIDDLE EAST PEACE IS AT HAND. AGAIN.
By Phyllis Bennis

23 July 2007

Pretty much no one is taking it seriously. Even mainstream analysts usually willing to take Bush administration Middle East initiatives at face value are rolling their collective eyes. The New York Times' senior correspondent Steven Erlanger immediately acknowledged that Bush's latest "vision," a U.S.-Israeli-Fatah alliance creating a model Palestine in the West Bank designed to snub the isolated "Hamastan" in Gaza, is not a "vision shared by other American allies or other members of the so-called quartet - Russia, the European Union and the United Nations." (Yes even the Times said "so-called" quartet.) It is also "doubtful that the Saudis share Mr. Bush's analysis, since they have been urging Hamas and Fatah to get back together again?" A different Times article included a succinct headline identifying the real reason for the latest initiative: "Mired in Iraq, U.S. Seeks to Begin Building a Palestinian State."

The "plan," such as it is, is painfully familiar, only narrower and more constrained than ever before. The centerpiece is a call for a new regional peace conference in the fall, to be led not by Bush himself but by his secretary of state. Bush says it will include Israel, the Palestinians, and "their neighbors in the region." But the only Palestinians allowed to participate will be the Abbas-led Fatah-controlled sector of the Palestinian Authority operating in the West Bank; the democratically elected Hamas-led Palestinian parliament and its government in Gaza will be excluded. It may include some neighboring governments, but only those who recognize Israel's "right to exist." Regional powers like Syria and Iran would of course be excluded, but it is not clear that even Jordan and Egypt, which maintain official diplomatic ties with Israel, let alone Saudi Arabia which doesn't, would publicly accept Israel's "right" to have expelled Palestinians to create an exclusive Jewish state. Overall, it's not likely to be much of a conference.

Another part of Bush's plan involves renewed U.S. aid to the Palestinians. Following eighteen months of a crippling U.S.-orchestrated international economic boycott of the Palestinian territories, Bush announced that "immediately after President Abbas expelled Hamas from the Palestinian government, the United States lifted financial restrictions on the Palestinian Authority." Bush referred to the emergency government appointed by Abbas, led by his replacement Prime Minister Salam Fayyad. A key component of this aid is an $80 million grant in military aid to Abbas's Fatah-controlled security agencies now operating with the support of U.S. General Keith Dayton.

And Bush said he will push Israel to release Palestinian tax revenues - which Israel had illegally withheld since February 2006 - as if that was a major concession. Regarding settlements, he called only for ending settlement "expansion" and removing the 2,000 or so settlers of the "unauthorized" outposts ("unauthorized" by the Israeli government that is; all settlements are illegal under international law). Any future territorial agreement, Bush said, would have to take into account "current realities" - meaning the existing huge Israeli settlement-cities and most of the 480,000 West Bank and East Jerusalem settlers will remain. The latest U.S. embrace of Abbas and calls for a Palestinian state are emerging just as realistic hopes of a viable two-state solution are fading.
Islamism, Islamic Nationalism and George Bush
However inevitable the failure of Bush's latest plan, it is important to recognize how it fits into broader U.S. strategy in the Middle East. The most recent iteration of the ideological framework for Bush's "new" Middle East describes an existential conflict between "moderates" and "extremists" being fought out in the so-called "Global War on Terror." But of course those Manichean categories simply don't exist beyond the limited vision of Washington and Tel Aviv. The Palestinian struggle against U.S.-backed Israeli military occupation didn't start with Bush's GWOT - although the false claim of "global terrorism" in Palestine has become a key pretext in U.S. efforts to justify its uncritical support for Israeli occupation and apartheid. The black-and-white notion of "good Fatah, good Abbas" vs. "bad Hamas, bad Haniyeh" has no resonance among Palestinians themselves (nor anywhere else in the region).

Bush tried to equate the Islamic nationalism of Hamas with the anti-state obscurantist extremism of al-Qaeda, claiming (as Abbas did as well) that Hamas had welcomed al Qaeda to Gaza. The claim sparked particular outrage among Palestinians. But it is consistent with the White House's regional strategic approach of equating, isolating, and attempting to eliminate all Islamic-identified forces that resist U.S. hegemony in the region. Part of the U.S. strategy includes efforts to establish or prop up governments in the region whose main job is to stand against various kinds of Islamist resistance - think Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, to some degree even Lebanon.

Hamas has no known ties to al Qaeda, which actually condemned Hamas when the Palestinian organization decided to participate in elections. Like Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas uses an Islamic framework rather than secular nationalism to fight a traditional struggle against occupation and for national political power (what would be state power if Palestine were a state). They provide social and economic support as well as popular resistance to gain influence and electoral support (in elections deemed free and fair by former President Jimmy Carter and a host of U.S. and European monitors).
Fatah's dwindling credibility also reflects global and regional shifts. This is a moment when Islamic nationalism is on the ascendancy throughout the region, when anti-imperialism in the Middle East is defined more and more by Islamist forces while secular Palestinian nationalism, Arab nationalism, Arab socialism have all lost ground. So it is crucial to understand the distinctions between the various strands of Islamist strategy. Groups such as al Qaeda, the Taliban, some in Pakistan, want U.S. troops out of the region and existing governments destroyed in order to impose a rigid theocracy enforcing the most extreme and reactionary interpretations of Islamic law in a broad region in which national borders and national identities are wiped out. Islamic nationalist forces, such as Hamas, Hezbollah, some Iraqi parties define their goal as the end of foreign military occupation and an Islamic-identified but largely inclusive (thought not secular) government within nation-states.

A key difference, of course, is the state-based focus of these organizations. Unlike al Qaeda and others trying to destroy state governments and create a new "caliphate" across the Muslim world, the Islamic nationalists operate and struggle for power within existing (and anticipated) nation-state structures. Since their election in January 2006, Hamas leaders have stated clearly that their operative goal is a long-term truce with Israel, the right of return, and creation of a Palestinian state in the 1967-occupied territories, which they would govern in coalition with the secular Fatah and other factions.


Fatah and Hamas
Many Palestinians still view Fatah, long the centerpiece of Palestinian national politics, as their political home. But the near-collapse of the PLO, and the rise of the Oslo-created and U.S.-backed Palestinian Authority (PA) led to more criticism of Fatah's strategic failures and corruption, and more recently new censure has arisen regarding the Fatah leadership's close ties to the U.S. As a result, many Palestinians have distanced themselves from the organization. Human rights, social welfare and other civil society organizations have been particularly concerned about Abbas's recent decree replacing the existing law mandating registration of NGOs and other associations, with a new order requiring organizations to apply for a license from the Palestinian Ministry of the Interior - and giving the ministry the right to deny any group a license to operate.

At the same time, many Palestinians in Gaza as well as the West Bank view with unease the Islamic tilt of Hamas politics. So far the social agenda they have implemented, particularly regarding women has been, in the Palestinian context, conservative but not extremist. Whether Hamas is telling the truth or not about their longer-term intentions, political conditions on the ground, particularly the still powerful secular forces within Palestinian society, will make imposition of the most coercive forms of Islamic law unlikely. Many also strongly oppose Hamas' brutal military attacks against Fatah in Gaza. But its legitimacy remains; Hamas did win Palestinian elections with an clear majority. A recent July 4^th poll by the Fatah-oriented al-Quds newspaper reported 41% support for Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, with Fatah's 25% divided between 13% for Abbas and 12% for Marwan Barghouti, the imprisoned leader of Fatah's younger and less compromised generation. (In that same poll Abbas's U.S.-backed Prime Minister, Salam Fayyad, received only 5% of the vote.)


The U.S. Role
The violence of the internal Palestinian struggle in recent months reflects a deep and longstanding crisis within the Palestinian national movement. Neither the U.S.-allied secular nationalism of Fatah's leadership, nor the still untested Islamist nationalism of Hamas, have so far been able to provide the Palestinians with the kind of new strategic vision required to strengthen the weakened PLO and rebuild the now fragile movement it once so powerfully represented.

But even beyond the human catastrophe of the fighting, the tragedy is that in this horrific struggle among the Palestinians, both sides are really fighting over the leftover crumbs of power. The full loaf of power - and the main responsibility for the violence - belongs to the Israeli occupation and its U.S. backers. In the 16 months from the Palestinian elections in January 2006 through April 2007, Israeli troops killed 712 Palestinians, almost half of them children. During that same period, much of which included Hamas' unilateral ceasefire, Palestinians killed 29 Israelis, including soldiers and civilians.

And there is no question that U.S.-Israeli hands lay behind the escalating tensions and eventual violence of the Fatah-Hamas split. In his leaked confidential report written by former UN representative to the so-called Quartet, Peruvian diplomat Alvaro de Soto acknowledged that "the U.S. clearly pushed for a confrontation between Fatah and Hamas - so much so that, a week before Mecca [the Saudi-brokered unity agreement between the two factions], the U.S. envoy declared twice in an envoys meeting in Washington how much 'I like this violence,' referring to the near-civil war that was erupting in Gaza in which civilians were being regularly killed and injured, because 'it means that other Palestinians are resisting Hamas'."
Blair to the Rescue?
To try and achieve some level of international legitimacy for a "diplomacy surge" in the Middle East that might divert attention away his catastrophic war in Iraq, Bush orchestrated the appointment of his once-and-future strongest ally, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, as representative of the "Quartet." But even now, despite Blair having largely sacrificed his own political career and legacy at the altar of the U.S. war in Iraq, the Bush administration continues to insult and disrespect him. In his last appearance before the British Parliament, Blair said proudly that his "absolute priority" in his new role was to "prepare the ground for a negotiated settlement" between Israel and the Palestinians. Only two days later, State Department spokesman Tom Casey flatly contradicted him. "There's certainly no envisioning that this individual would be a negotiator between the Israelis and Palestinians," he said.
That was more consistent with Blair's earlier recognition of the limitations of his own role. Talking candidly with Bush last summer on microphones they thought were turned off, Blair offered to do whatever the U.S. wanted, apparently regardless of what that was, while recognizing that what he did had little significance. Speaking of the secretary of state traveling to the Middle East, Blair told Bush that "obviously, if she goes out she's got to succeed, as it were, whereas I can go out and just talk." Given the limitations of Bush's so-called new diplomatic effort, it appears that talking will be all that Blair -or Rice herself - will be allowed to do.


So What Do We Do?
The divide within the Palestinian movement - especially the violence of recent weeks - has confused and demoralized many supporters of Palestinian human rights and the movement to end Israeli occupation. But neither the splits nor the violence change the overall obligation of international supporters of a just, comprehensive, human rights-based peace.

When the Palestinian elections resulted in an outcome challenging the Bush administration's expectations, the U.S. responded with a complete economic boycott of the entire Palestinian population of the occupied territories. Somehow the legitimacy of such a collective punishment was never considered an appropriate question in the mainstream U.S. media - while even talking of boycotts against the Israeli occupation engenders immediate accusations of discrimination, support for terrorism, even anti-Semitism.

In fact the global call for boycotts, divestment, and sanctions -BDS - represents the most promising non-violent economic pressure campaign to force an end to Israel's violations of UN resolutions and international law. The BDS call was launched in 2005 by Palestinian civil society organizations and the UN-based International Coordinating Network on Palestine. Applying the lessons and adopting some of the techniques of the powerful global movement against South African apartheid in the 1980s, the BDS campaign includes diverse supporters using a broad array of tactics. It includes the "socially responsible investment" of the Presbyterian and other Christian churches committed to investigating and reversing corporate support for occupation, and the stockholder campaigns against Caterpillar's sales of bulldozers used illegally as Israeli military weapons in the occupied territories. The U.S. Campaign to End Israeli Occupation will soon decide on a corporate target for national boycott and divestment campaigns throughout the U.S.


Globally there are important successes already. While the humanitarian and political situation inside the occupied territories continues to deteriorate as Israel escalates its divide-and-conquer tactics of occupation and dispossession, BDS pressures are on the rise in direct defiance. Two of Britain's largest trade union federations recently passed boycott resolutions. The powerful Canadian Union of Public Employees voted to support BDS campaigns. And in South Africa, home of the first anti-apartheid campaign, influential government officials and key backers of the ruling ANC - the ANC women's federation, its youth league, the Communist Party, the COSATU trade union federation - all have come out for sanctions to force Israeli compliance with international law.

The U.S. and global peace mobilizations cannot rebuild the Palestinian national movement from outside, and it is rarely useful for us to take sides in the internal conflict, beyond supporting unity efforts and working to defend Palestinian civil society organizations. The best answer to U.S. support for Israeli occupation and apartheid, and to U.S. divide-and-conquer tactics against the Palestinians, will be the consolidation of a broad popular movement saying no, joining the rising global movement for BDS as a powerful non-violent tool that challenges that U.S. support and demands an entirely new foreign policy based not on power but on justice and equal rights for all.

_______________________

Phyllis Bennis is a Fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies. Her newest book is Understanding the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict: A Primer.


_______________________________________________
Salon mailing list
http://mailman.listserve.com/listmanager/listinfo/salon

<h2 style="margin: 0in 0in 6pt;">SALON</h2> <h2 style="margin: 0in 0in 6pt;">7/24/07</h2> <h2 style="margin: 0in 0in 6pt;">Bush's incompetence gives al-Qaida new life</h2> The White House hints at military action as the terror organization regroups in northern Pakistan and the Musharraf government begins to wobble.

Juan Cole

In the past week, worrying signs of a resurgence of al-Qaida surfaced in cyberspace, in Pakistan and in Washington, D.C. The Pakistani military's invasion of a major mosque and seminary complex in the country's capital set off an unprecedented, violent wave of protests and car bombings in the north of the country. A new National Intelligence Estimate warned that al-Qaida was reconstituting itself in those very areas of northern Pakistan. A U.S. threat to send Special Forces into Pakistan in search of al-Qaida roiled relations with the weakened Pakistani president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf. And a new videotape of Osama bin Laden surfaced.

In a videotape that CNN characterized as having been "intercepted," excerpts of which appeared on an anti-terrorist Web site last week, a grayer bin Laden appears in fatigues against a mountainous backdrop, arguing that the Prophet Mohammed himself wished for martyrdom. In reality, though the Prophet had been prepared to sacrifice his life to defend the early Muslim community, he forbade suicide. Before the 1980s, there had never been a suicide bombing in the Muslim world; the technique was pioneered by the Marxist (and largely Hindu) Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka. Bin Laden's little sermon was intended to hijack the Prophet and Islam for the purposes of al-Qaida.

But the very fact that bin Laden could still deliver his poisonous message to the Muslim world six years after his attack on New York and Washington killed some 3,000 people is first and foremost a remarkable testament to the incompetence and fecklessness of the Bush administration. The tape, the new NIE and events in Pakistan and Afghanistan all suggest that, shockingly, al-Qaida is more deadly now than at any time during the past half-decade.

The new National Intelligence Estimate, released early last week, said that al-Qaida "has protected or regenerated key elements of its Homeland attack capability" inasmuch as it had once again set up a safe haven in northern Pakistan and was reassembling its top leadership. The Iraq war and the success of Salafi jihadis in fighting the U.S. there have, moreover, allowed bin Laden's organization "to recruit and indoctrinate operatives, including for Homeland attacks."

Meanwhile, events in Pakistan show a pro-American dictatorship shaken by demonstrations of fundamentalist Islamic power. President Musharraf has long been a linchpin of the Bush administration's "war on terror."

Musharraf had made a truce with the tribes of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas in Pakistan's northwestern region, where al-Qaida remnants are thought to be hiding out. These vast, rugged regions along the Afghan border have defied central government control throughout history. Even the British Empire at its height never subdued them.

The truce came after the Pakistani military had suffered significant casualties in fighting in the region. Emboldened by Musharraf's seeming retreat, militants of the neo-Deobandi school of radical theology came from the north and established themselves in the Red Mosque and seminary of the capital, Islamabad, seeking to impose themselves as a sort of local Taliban-style morals police. They eventually turned violent, capturing police on May 19, and then taking Chinese acupuncture workers captive on June 23, forcing Musharraf's hand. The subsequent invasion of the mosque and seminary on July 10, which left over 100 dead, outraged other Deobandis in the Pashtun areas of the north, provoking thousands to demonstrate in the North-West Frontier province.

Since the government's seizure of the mosque, dozens of people in the north have been killed by suicide bombers targeting Pakistani security forces. Angered by the government invasion of the mosque and military crackdown in the north, Waziristan tribal leaders canceled their truce with Islamabad on July 15. On Monday, the Pakistani military said it had killed 35 militants near the Afghanistan border in renewed clashes that also left two Pakistani soldiers dead.

And now the U.S. seems to be thinking about operating in the same area. Mike McConnell, U.S. director of national intelligence, said Sunday on NBC television of bin Laden, "My personal view is that he's alive, but we don't know because we can't confirm it for over a year ... I believe he is in the tribal region of Pakistan." Pakistani authorities angrily denied the assertion.

McConnell's comments came in the wake of earlier remarks by Frances Townsend, Bush's homeland security advisor, who, when asked if U.S. Special Forces might go into Waziristan in search of Bin Laden, replied, "There are no tools off the table, and we use all our instruments of national power to be effective."

In the best of times, hunting down an individual in Pakistan's tribal areas would be rather like trying to find a person moving among safe houses in Wyoming, Colorado and Nevada. The current unrest would only make the job of any U.S. Special Forces operating in the region that much harder. But the de facto American threat to invade Pakistan also brought an alarmed reaction from the Musharraf regime. On CNN, Foreign Minister Khurshid Mehmood Kasuri angrily pointed out that Pakistan had sacrificed 700 troops to the fight against extremists in the tribal areas. He warned that any U.S. incursion would enrage the Pakistani public and defeat any hope of Washington winning local hearts and minds.

The Musharraf military regime was rattled by public distaste for the invasion of the Red Mosque and seminary, and further weakened by a Supreme Court ruling on July 20 reinstating the chief justice, whom Musharraf had high-handedly attempted to dismiss. The Islamabad government fears that if the Americans abandon it now, or act precipitately, instability will ensue.

In addition, not only has al-Qaida reconstituted itself in the tribal areas of northern Pakistan, and not only did a sort of Pakistani Taliban make a play for control of some of the country's capital, but the Taliban allies of al-Qaida are resurgent in southern Afghanistan. In recent weeks they have pulled off destructive suicide bombings against NATO troops and Afghan civilians. On Monday, Taliban forces killed six NATO troops, four in a roadside bombing. On July 18 and July 19, they had kidnapped two Germans and 23 Koreans. One of the German hostages was found shot on Saturday. The presence of NATO forces and more than 20,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan has not stopped the Taliban from attempting to regain control of the Pashtun regions.

The resurgence of al-Qaida, and the usefulness of Bush's Iraq war as a recruiting tool, were further demonstrated by events in Europe. On July 21, Italian authorities announced the arrest of three Moroccans, whom they charged with running a terror-training program from a mosque and of being linked to al-Qaida. It is believed that their trainees were placed throughout the world, including in Iraq.

In an ideal world the United States could deal with such a threat by close cooperation with Italian counterterrorism officials. But the 2003 kidnapping of an Egyptian terror suspect named Abu Omar in Italy by Central Intelligence Agency operatives without Italian permission has roiled relations between the two countries.

In February an Italian court indicted 25 CIA employees in connection with the "extraordinary rendition," and Italy has demanded their extradition, saying that Italian authorities had the suspect under surveillance and precipitate U.S. action derailed their efforts to trace his network. The CIA delivered Abu Omar to Egypt, where he was imprisoned and says he was tortured, and he has now been released. In view of this fiasco, how likely are Italian authorities to share all their information on the new Moroccan cell and its links to al-Qaida with Washington? The Bush administration, having failed to learn its lesson in Italy, is now talking about intervening unilaterally in Pakistan.

The Iraq war grabs the headlines, though increasingly it, too, is seen through the prism of the American political campaign for 2008, which is already in full swing. The U.S. public seemed little interested in the bin Laden videotape praising al-Qaida martyrs, the first to appear since October 2004. The Italian arrests barely registered on public consciousness. The connection of the Red Mosque events and the subsequent turmoil in Waziristan to the revitalized al-Qaida presence in Pakistan was seldom recognized by the U.S. press.

Astonishingly, al-Qaida may be back, and the signs of its resurgence are everywhere, but there is little reaction from an American public that has everything to fear from the group. War-weary, bogged down in a fruitless guerrilla war in Iraq, disillusioned with the Bush team (which has lied to it assiduously), the public appears to be taking its eye off al-Qaida. If so, it would be making the same mistake as Bush, who is obsessed with Iraq to the detriment of urgent counterterrorism measures. Those efforts, to be successful, will require international cooperation rather than unilateral grandstanding, not something in which this administration has proved adept.

On any of the rationales for why the US decided to go into Iraq and continues to stay in Iraq, we must remember that we continue to be spoonfed revisionist history by the media.
Lets Not Forget Bush Planned Iraq 'Regime Change' Before Becoming President By Neil Mackay A
SECRET blueprint for US global domination reveals that President Bush
and his cabinet were planning a premeditated attack on Iraq to secure
'regime change' even before he took power in January 2001.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article1221.htm

In case you missed it The President's Real Goal In Iraq By Jay Bookman The official story on Iraq has never made sense. The connection that the Bush administration has tried to draw between Iraq and al-Qaida has always seemed contrived and artificial. In fact, it was hard to believe that smart people in the Bush administration would start a major war based on such flimsy evidence. The pieces just didn't fit. Something else had to be going on; something was missing.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article2319.htm

The Project for the New American Century By William Rivers Pitt The People versus the Powerful is the oldest story in human history. At no point in history have the Powerful wielded so much control. At no point in history has the active and informed involvement of the People, all of them, been more absolutely required.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article1665.htm

Dick Cheney's Song of America By David Armstrong The Plan is for the United States to rule the world. The overt theme is unilateralism, but it is ultimately a story of domination. It calls for the United States to maintain its overwhelming military superiority and prevent new rivals from rising up to challenge it on the world stage. It calls for dominion over friends and enemies alike. It says not that the United States must be more powerful, or most powerful, but that it must be absolutely powerful.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article1544.htm

How to Get Out of Iraq
Rapprochement with Iran, hands off Iraqi politics, and let the chips fall where they may
by Justin Raimondo

The debate over how – or whether – to withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq is stuck in a quagmire, bogged down on the question of what happens when we leave. What happens to those we supported in their quest to bring democracy and liberalism to a region that has known neither? What happens to the Kurds, long oppressed under Saddam Hussein, and to the minority Sunnis, who were initially described by U.S. officials as "dead-enders" and hard-core Ba'athists, and are now the objects of American affection? What happens to Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's government, which is propped up only by the presence of U.S. troops? What, indeed, happens to Iraq, as a nation – does it dissolve into its constituent parts?

This is the big argument offered by proponents of continuing the war: whatever lies were told to goad us into attacking Iraq in the first place are now irrelevant, they say. We're there, and we must stay there, or else a humanitarian catastrophe will take place that we'll be responsible for, and our interests in the region will be fatally damaged. This can only be avoided if our soldiers stay. It may be true, as war critics aver, that Saddam's links to al-Qaeda were overblown, or even totally nonexistent, but "the terrorists" are there now. We cannot abandon Iraq to their not-so-tender mercies, or else we risk creating a terrorist state, one that will provide al-Qaeda with a base from which to attack U.S. interests in the region, or even the American homeland itself.

This is, quite simply, nonsense, yet many otherwise well-meaning people have fallen for it. It would, they claim, be "irresponsible" to just pack up and leave: the consequences, they say, would be horrific. But would they?

Our efforts in Iraq have aimed at propping up the Maliki government, while sidelining – or seeking to sideline – the only authentically nationalist movement in the country with any degree of strength and legitimacy, and those are the followers of Moqtada al-Sadr, fourth son of a famous Shi'ite cleric and the leader of a movement that opposes both the U.S. occupation and efforts to divide the country into its sectarian-ethnic constituent parts. Yet Maliki and his supporters are weak: they have no chance of defeating the Sadrists or the Sunni-led insurgency. The Maliki government has neither legitimacy nor the armed forces required to establish control over the whole country. This is the conundrum faced by U.S. policymakers, who have responded to the prospect of defeat by employing the same failed strategy that brought them to this point in the first place.

This piece by William Lind in The American Conservative gives a good indication of what is wrong with our present strategy, and how to correct it. The idea of "victory," in the terms presented by the Bush administration, is here completely redefined to mean not the creation of an American client state in the middle of Mesopotamia, but the recreation of a viable Iraqi state that will deny al-Qaeda in Iraq a safe haven. Lind writes: "A restored Iraqi state that is allied with Iran will quickly roll up al-Qaeda and other non-state forces in Iraq, which is the victory we most require."

The key, however, is a rapprochement with Iran, and as unlikely as that seems, perhaps it's not completely unrealistic. The U.S.-Iranian negotiations over the situation in Iraq are a hopeful sign, as is the establishment of a joint body set up to monitor security in Iraq: this could be the framework of a more comprehensive agreement that will permit the Iranians to exert their natural influence without subverting Iraqi independence.

It is absurd for the Americans to insist that there be no Iranian influence in Iraq: it is as if Vladimir Putin insisted on ending American influence in, say, Mexico or Canada. Geography, economics, and culture militate against it. Aside from these objective factors, the elected government in Baghdad is very close to Tehran, as the leaders of the Shi'ite resistance to Saddam were headquartered in Iran and given support by the Iranians prior to the U.S. invasion. Iraq's Shi'ite spiritual leader, the Ayatollah Sistani, was born in Iran, and there is no way Tehran's gravitational pull will be neutralized by U.S. actions.

However, we can use Iranian influence to eradicate our real enemies in Iraq, by encouraging the Iranians and their Iraqi supporters to take on al-Qaeda. Bin Laden's Iraqi franchise recently issued a warning to the Iranians to stay out of Iraq: might we not use what amounts to a veritable declaration of war on Tehran by Osama's Iraqi minions to our advantage – or is that too subtle for our Washington policymakers?

The Shi'ites, unleashed, would make short work of al-Qaeda. And once that occurs, our problems are essentially over. After all, Bush keeps telling us that our enemy in Iraq is the very same enemy that took down the World Trade Center and bombed the Pentagon. With those snakes crushed underfoot, the way is cleared to getting out.

Sure, there will be a bloody interregnum, innocents will die, and it could well be that the regime emerging from the chaos will hardly resemble a Jeffersonian republic. Yet these results will be better than the alternative – the present chaos made possible by a weak Iraqi central government, with U.S. troops caught in the middle of the Mad Max movie that is the Iraqi civil war.

If the U.S. left Iraq tomorrow, the Kurds would have nothing to worry about, since they have one of the biggest and most well-trained-and-armed military forces in the region. Nor would the southern, Shi'ite part of the country be in any danger from enemies at home or abroad: the Shi'ite militias are pretty firmly in control of the south, and this is not likely to change in the absence of U.S. forces. The Sunni triangle is another matter altogether, but, then again, this area has never been controllable, and the conflict there isn't likely to end unless there is some kind of political solution or an Iraqi strongman arises – someone like Sadr – who will take the sort of measures Americans would prefer not to engage in so openly.

Supporters of continuing the war would say, at this point, that this is precisely what we have a moral obligation to prevent. Yet it is not preventable, under any circumstances, whether we stay or leave – and the risks of staying include the likelihood of war with Iran, a conflict that would result in many more deaths and would soon make the horrors of the Iraq war pale in comparison.

The calculus of mass death yields this inevitable equation: as long as we stay, the killing continues, but U.S. withdrawal will not halt the current orgy of murder and mayhem, which may even accelerate, if only for a brief period. At some point, however, one side – the majority Shi'ite side – will win, and the upsurge of violence will peter out, like a geyser that's out of steam.

This scenario could work, but it lacks one essential ingredient: an administration that has given up its original project of regional "regime change." The Iraq war was never intended as a stand-alone experiment in "nation-building," but as the first in a series of wars launched to "liberate" the entire Middle East and implant our version of "democracy." The only use this administration has for Iraq is as a launching pad for the next war – the one against Iran, Syria, and Hezbollah in Lebanon. The U.S. isn't massing its naval might in the Persian Gulf for nothing, nor are the daily rhetorical broadsides aimed at Iran just boilerplate. Tehran has been the target from the beginning.

The clock is ticking. It is just a matter of time before an incident on the Iran-Iraq border ignites the coming conflict. That's why the administration is desperately trying to buy time and put off congressional demands that we start withdrawing from Iraq. Meanwhile, they're busy ramping up the war of words with the Iranians.

What's ominous about all this is the lack of opposition coming from the "antiwar" Democrats, who have yet to make any unified, definitive statement on the prospect of war with Iran. Indeed, all the major Democratic presidential candidates are eager to prove their hawkishness by averring that nothing is "off the table" when dealing with Iranian aspirations to join the nuclear club. On the other side of the aisle, only Republican presidential hopeful Ron Paul sees the danger – while the rest of the GOP presidential wannabes eagerly anticipate nuking Iran.

Once we're stuck in the Iranian quagmire, one can easily imagine the objections to a U.S. withdrawal: just re-run the arguments made by this administration and its supporters in regard to Iraq. At that point the American people may wake up and realize that we're on an endless treadmill of "regime change" and occupation. Unfortunately, it will be too late to do any good.
http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=11344

Bush ties Al Qaeda in Iraq to Sept. 11
By Josh Meyer, James Gerstenzang and Greg Miller
In a speech, he cites newly declassified intelligence in linking the group to
global terrorism. Some experts challenge his assertions.
http://email.latimes.com/cgi-bin1/DM/y/eBU...Io30G2B0ImlU0Ek

The FBI STAR Terrorist Risk Assessment Program Should Raise Renewed Concerns about Private Sector Data Mining
By ANITA RAMASASTRY
----
Tuesday, Jul. 24, 2007

The Justice Department recently submitted a report to Congress, setting forth a series of data-mining initiatives it is undertaking. Data-mining, as readers may be aware, involves sorting through large sets of data to discover patterns. This can be done with the aid of computers and special algorithms.

The FBI says its data mining efforts simply automate investigations that were previously conducted by agents involved in labor-intensive research. And many of the FBI's initiatives seem potentially laudable - in that they are directed toward stamping out various types of crime, including identity theft and Medicare fraud. There is one initiative, however, that should give the public a little more concern:
Click here to find out more!

The FBI is also developing a computer-profiling system that would enable agents to better investigate possible terror suspects.

The System to Assess Risk ( STAR) will assign so-called "persons of interest" a score that, according to the FBI, will signify the likelihood that each is a terrorist threat, and indicate whether each deserves further investigation. In this column, I will briefly outline the basics of STAR. I will also argue that Congress should ask the FBI for more details about the nature of the commercial data that will be used, and what sort of measures will be taken to ensure such data is accurate or, if erroneous, capable of being corrected.

How STAR Will Work: Assigning a Risk Score to Foreign, But Also Possibly U.S. Persons

Using STAR, the FBI will identify possible suspects by running the names of persons it believes may pose a terrorist threat through a large database. Based on the information in the database, STAR's computer will generate a risk score for each person, using certain algorithms that incorporate up to thirty-five risk factors. STAR is meant to focus primarily on foreign suspects, and will be spearheaded by the FBI's Foreign Terrorism Tracking Task Force (FTTTF). Country of origin might be weighed in the process of assigning a person's score, as might a name's presence on a terrorist watch list.

However, because foreign suspects may have U.S. associates, American citizens and residents could also be included. Accordingly, the FBI has not promised not to run Americans through the database. It has, however, promised that access to STAR will be limited to trained users; that data will be obtained lawfully; and that results would be kept within the FBI's Terrorism Tracking Task Force.

The Sources of the Data that Will Result in the Risk Score

In assigning the score, STAR would draw upon a variety of information from many sources, using a process similar to consumer credit scoring. Rather than predicting whether someone is a poor credit risk, however, the STAR score will identify whether someone is likely to be a terrorist.

While the FBI's report is a bit vague as to how STAR, when created, will operate, it is clear that STAR will use data from both public and private databases, compiled into a large data warehouse referred to as the FTTTF Data Mart. For example, the report says that STAR will rely on data aggregator Choice Point. The Data Mart will also include, for example, airline records, records relating to driver's and pilot's licenses, employment histories, and records of present and past addresses.

As I have written before, because government searches of data like this are not deemed to fall within the Fourth Amendment, no search warrant in necessary. Such information is no longer considered legally private, and thus constitutionally protected, when individuals have disclosed it to third parties such as magazine subscription services, airlines, and other businesses. Nor does the federal Privacy Act apply.

Potential Problems with STAR: Accuracy and Privacy

Some lawmakers have already expressed the view that the FBI report raises new questions about the government's power to use personal information and intelligence without accountability. Privacy experts have called this use of private sector data the "industrial surveillance complex," charging that the government, by employing commercial data, is conducting surveillance via an end-run around the Fourth Amendment.

As well as privacy concerns, accuracy concerns have also been raised. One particular worry is that flawed data (from either the government or private companies) might make its way into the STAR assessment, leading individuals to unjustly find themselves under suspicion. It is unclear whether individuals assigned risk scores will have any way of seeing the data on them that is contained in FTTTF Data Mart, so that they can correct it if it is erroneous.

That's disturbing, because there is little statistical evidence about the accuracy of such data. What evidence exists, in addition, is not encouraging: Some studies of consumer credit reports indicate that many consumers have errors on their credit records; identity theft is a growing problem; and many mistakes on the no-fly and selectee lists have been identified when innocent persons are wrongly flagged.

There is one cause for hope, however: The STAR system would be subject to a privacy-impact assessment before being launched in final form. That may address some privacy concerns, but accuracy, too, is an important priority. Thus, Congress needs to press the FBI for further information about the sources of the data it will be using, whether such data contains errors, and if it does, how those errors may be corrected.

Anita Ramasastry is an Associate Professor of Law at the University of Washington School of Law in Seattle and a Director of the Shidler Center for Law, Commerce & Technology. She has previously written on business law, cyberlaw, computer data security issues, and other legal issues for this site, which contains an archive of her columns.

Original Content at http://www.opednews.com/maxwrite/diarypage.php?did=4037

July 24, 2007

Hillary Clinton and the Big Money

By Alfred McGuire

Follow the money and get nervous about Hillary.

I watched the CNN U-Tube Democratic debate last evening. This morning I was trying to remember what exactly Hillary Clinton’s position is on anything whatsoever. I didn’t succeed except to recall that she described herself as a “modern Progressive” or something. What is a modern Progressive- one who subscribes to the goals of the Trilateral Commission, the New World Order and the disestablishment of the United States as a sovereign entity in favor of a North American Union of the USA, Canada and Mexico- created without act of Congress and without the consent of the American people and to further the greed and lust for power of a number of banks and mega-corporations which are dead set on ruling the world? You can bet that that’s indeed what “modern Progressive” means to Her Nibs. And that’s what her hubby- and coach- means by it. They both have gotten a big taste of power- and money- and they like it. All the rest is cover.

We have to get it through our thick skulls (and I most definitely include myself) that the whole ball game has changed. It no longer matters what political party a politician claims to belong to. What really matters is what they’re up to and with whom they associate when they take off their “public-servant” hat and get down to the real business.

And the fact is that - “after hours” so to speak- Bill and Hillary hang out with the global financial elite. Bill has long been a member of the Trilateral Commission. Fellow members are people like Dick Cheney, George H.W. Bush, Dianne Feinstein, top officers of banks like Wells Fargo and Chase Manhattan and corporations like Coca Cola- and so forth. And what are they up to- nothing less than the feudalization of this nation and the world in order to vastly increase their profits and consolidate their world power. Politically and financially these people are extremely intelligent and supremely adept at manipulating the media and public opinion. They are masters of image and know to a tee how to appear good and benign and public-spirited. But it’s a show.

Their game is to throw the public a few crumbs to shut them up but keep them in enough fear and debt to keep them working like slaves and not asking a lot of questions. But they’re not even bothering to throw crumbs anymore. Americans elected Democrats to Congress to end the war in Iraq. Have they done it? No, they play games and make excuses and give slumber parties. Why? Because the banks and the war industry haven’t made enough billions yet. For that matter why did they vote for the war in the first place? Hillary won’t apologize for it. Why should she? And she’ll give no real indication of when she would end the war if she were in a position to do so. She won’t end the war unless the elite really want it ended. What the public wants means absolutely nothing to these bastards. They know how to control the public and keep it at bay. About 80% of the public want the borders well protected. Has Hillary or her ilk fought for that? Of course not. Bill’s fellow members want a perpetual flow of cheap labor and that’s what they’ll get. You can provide your own additional examples. They are legion.

At present there is no effective countervailing force to the Clintons and the Bushes and their corporate, banking, media and academic confreres. But there are enough ethical and public-spirited corporations, enough moral and highly intelligent political minds, enough aware and disgusted Americans left in this country who want to be citizens and not subjects to put the brakes on this very dangerous element that has taken control of our land. They will not stop. They have to be stopped. Let’s do what we have to to retire the Bushes, the Clintons, the Cheneys and their ilk. We either get our country back or it is gone forever along with our hopes and dreams.

Postscript:

I almost forgot: Ask Hillary why she voted for the Bankruptcy Reform Act of 2005. For 200 years Americans had the right to secure full discharge of debts if they got into hopeless insolvency. Specified assets were still subject to creditors claims but debtors could get relief. In 2005 the banks and credit-card companies wrote legislation which effectively cancelled this federally granted right; and Hillary Clinton and a good number of other sell-out Democrats- along with the Republicans- obligingly voted it in. At present the major cause of bankruptcy is that Americans- even insured Americans- are being bled dry by the medical industry. A couple of days in the hospital can leave a family with $100,000 or more in debts. But thanks to the likes of Hillary they can no longer get full discharge; but are liable to repay for years thereafter if they acquire any appreciable cash. They stay in debt. So that's what a "progressive" is according to Clinton? Progress for whom? Not for the American people for sure.




Authors Website: http://theopendimension.blogspot.com

Authors Bio: I am a semi-retired psychtherapist/psychiatric social worker. Originally a practicing attorney, I changed careers during the 1980's. My interests include history, constitutional law, Indian classical music, yoga, meditation and spirituality.

from Laura Mansfield's web site:

March 17, 2006: Documents confirm Saddam Hussein government knew Zarqawi headed Al Qaeda cell in Iraq in August 2002

On March 17, 2006, subscribers to Strategic Translations were notified of a document that was found in the at the time newly released Iraqi Freedom documents confirming the presence of Abu Mus'ab al Zarqawi in Iraq as early as 2002.

In light of President Bush's comments yesterday, this "old" news story is worth revisiting.

It is indisputed that Zarqawi was a member of Al Qaeda at the time. In fact, for a time he ran an Al Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan.

The link to the original document referenced in this update is no longer working; however, a copy can be found on the web at: http://www.blackvault.com/documents/captur...2004-019920.pdf.

The description accompanying the document said:

2002 Iraqi Intelligence Correspondence concerning the presence of al-Qaida Members in Iraq. Correspondence between IRS members on a suspicion, later confirmed, of the presence of an Al-Qaeda terrorist group. Moreover, it includes photos and names.

The document even includes several photos of Zarqawi.

From: Laura Mansfield
Sent: Friday, March 17, 2006 8:25 AM
To: strategictranslations@lauramansfield.com>
Subject: March 17, 2006: Documents confirm Saddam Hussein government knew Zarqawi headed Al Qaeda cell in Iraq in August 2002

March 17, 2006: Documents confirm Saddam Hussein government knew Zarqawi headed Al Qaeda cell in Iraq in August 2002

Documents released Thursday by the US government show that less than a year after the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States, Saddam Hussein's government had identified at least one active Al Qaeda cell in his country.

Among the Iraqi documents collected by U.S. intelligence during the Iraq war amd released Thursday is a document, released only in Arabic, which the US government describes as follows:

2002 Iraqi Intelligence Correspondence concerning the presence of al-Qaida Members in Iraq. Correspondence between IRS members on a suspicion, later confirmed, of the presence of an Al-Qaeda terrorist group. Moreover, it includes photos and names.

A translation of the document shows that the Al Qaeda terrorist that Saddam Hussein's government had identified was none other than Abu Mus'ab al Zarqawi, who emerged as one of the leading terrorists in post-Saddam Hussein Iraq.

The document, dated August 17, 2002, identifies the Al Qaeda member as Ahmed Fadil Nizal Al Khalaylah, the real name of Zarqawi, and includes a series of photos of Zarqawi. (See link at http://fmso.leavenworth.army.mil/documents...004-019920.pdf)

A memo within the document shows that as early August 8, 2002, Zarqawi was identified as a member of "Tanzeem al Qaeda", or the "Al Qaeda Organization".

This document provides startling documentation that at the very least that Saddam Hussein's government knew that Al Qaeda was active and functioning in Iraq.

Although the document goes on to outline activities of the group, there is no indication that the Iraqi government took any steps to stop Al Qaeda from operating within Iraq, in clear defiance of international law.

CRS VIEWS CONGRESS'S CONTEMPT POWER

A major new report from the Congressional Research Service provides a
detailed account of Congress's contempt power, including the use of
contempt proceedings to coerce compliance with congressional demands
for information or testimony and to punish non-compliance.

"This report examines the source of the contempt power, reviews the
historical development of the early case law, outlines the statutory
and common law basis for Congress's contempt power, and analyzes the
procedures associated with each of the three different types of
contempt proceedings. In addition, the report discusses limitations
both nonconstitutional and constitutionally based on the power."

The 68-page report also examines the Justice Department position that
"Congress cannot, as a matter of statutory or constitutional law,
invoke either its inherent contempt authority or the criminal contempt
of Congress procedures against an executive branch official acting on
instructions by the President to assert executive privilege in response
to a congressional subpoena."

See "Congress's Contempt Power: Law, History, Practice, and Procedure,"
July 24, 2007:

http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/RL34097.pdf

Ron Paul + Dennis Kucinich Put Out A Bill To Stop Iraq War

25-Jul-2007
Ron Paul has surfaced again. This time he appeared on MSNBC. A presidential candidate Ron Paul is teaming up with another presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich to come up with a bill to put a stop to Bush's Iraq war within the next 6 months. The irony is that Ron Paul is a republican, and yet he is opposing the war even more passionately than the Democrat members. Not too many republican members were fond with the idea of the bringing the troops back home. Based on CNN, president Bush is slowly loosing the supports from the Republicans. Maybe Ron Paul will be able to convince many many Republicans to support his current bill eventually. If you want to know more about Ron Paul, you can always go to YouTube and type into the search box with the keywords Ron Paul. Ron Paul is very popular on the Internet. If the one person that I want to win for the Republican's primary, I say Ron Paul is the man for that. I can't wait to watch the upcoming Republican CNN + YouTube Debate in September 17th. A video of Ron Paul on MSNBC.

Chronic Arrogance

Editorial, Arab News, July 25, 2007

In just one irresponsible, thoughtless sentence in reply to a question on whether the US would take action against Al-Qaeda leaders who, it believes, are hiding in Pakistan, the Bush administration has managed to embarrass to the point of humiliation one of its main allies in the war on terror.

What is so depressing about the refusal by the White House homeland security adviser to rule out military action in Pakistan against Al-Qaeda is that this was not mere careless talk. It was yet one more instance of a chronic arrogance on the part of the Bush administration toward its friends and allies in the war against Al-Qaeda.

The government of President Musharraf is a vital element in that war. It has enough problems as it is, with militants trying to destabilize and topple it. Washington should be trying to bolster it — not rubbing its nose in the dirt. The message it sends to Pakistanis is that it will do whatever it wants, where it wants, when it wants; and if they do not like it, then tough. What makes the message immeasurably more insulting is that Washington would not dare threaten military action in Russia or China if it thought that there might be Al-Qaeda forces there (which, in the case of the Russian Caucasus, there almost certainly are). It would not say it to India or to Brazil, let alone any of its Western allies. It divides the world into two — those it can dictate to and those it cannot. Pakistan is clearly in the first category.

This arrogance does not help the US. It antagonizes and alienates. It is the principal reason why so many in the world have, since 9/11, come to see it as the villain not the victim.

Ironically, on the same day as this row broke out, the new British Prime Minister Gordon Brown made the same error, refusing to rule out military action against Iran over its disputed nuclear plans. The big difference is that everyone knows that the UK is not going to act on its own. But we can all envisage US fighter planes striking targets in Pakistan if Bush gives the go ahead.

The Bush administration needs to show a little humility and a lot less arrogance if it is to gain the world's respect again. It also needs to train its spokesmen to engage their brains before opening their mouths. In these days, every word coming out of the White House is scrutinized the world over for hidden meaning and nuance. Tact and diplomacy, not shooting from the lip, should be the rule in future. In this particular case, it would help calm troubled waters if Bush ordered the offending official to be reassigned to other duties.

Anyone as insensitive as he has been should not be allowed near the media. Sadly, there is little chance of that. The White House, supremely confident of the moral superiority of its policies, is incapable of seeing this row as another battle lost in the struggle for hearts and minds.

The Democracy Crusade Myth E-mail
Print
By Thomas Carothers The National Interest, July/August 2007 Full PDF Text function largePhoto(photo_id,tableName) { urlString = ('/index.cfm?fa=show_photo&photo_id=' + photo_id +'&tableName=' + tableName); winStats='toolbar=no,location=no,directories=no,menubar=no,resizable=yes,' winStats+='scrollbars=yes,width=600,height=400' if (navigator.appName.indexOf("Microsoft")>=0) { winStats+=',left=100,top=10' }else{ winStats+=',screenX=100,screenY=10' } aWindow=window.open(urlString,"thewindow",winStats) }
AS ATTENTION in Washington begins to turn to the likely or desired shape of a post-Bush foreign policy, calls for a return to realism are increasingly heard. A common theme is that the United States should back away from what is often characterized as a reckless Bush crusade to promote democracy around the world. Although it is certainly true that U.S. foreign policy is due for a serious recalibration, the notion that democracy promotion plays a dominant role in Bush policy is a myth. Certainly, President Bush has built a gleaming rhetorical edifice around democracy promotion through invocations of a universalist freedom agenda. And many people within the administration have given serious attention to how the United States can do more to advance democracy in the world. Overall, however, the traditional imperatives of U.S. economic and security interests that have long constrained U.S. pro-democratic impulses have persisted. The main lines of Bush policy, with the singular exception of the Iraq intervention, have turned out to be largely realist in practice, with democracy and human rights generally relegated to minor corners.

Click on PDF icon above to read full article

Money Talks: John McCain’s Floundering Presidential Campaign E-mail
Print
By John Judis The New Republic, July 6, 2007 function largePhoto(photo_id,tableName) { urlString = ('/index.cfm?fa=show_photo&photo_id=' + photo_id +'&tableName=' + tableName); winStats='toolbar=no,location=no,directories=no,menubar=no,resizable=yes,' winStats+='scrollbars=yes,width=600,height=400' if (navigator.appName.indexOf("Microsoft")>=0) { winStats+=',left=100,top=10' }else{ winStats+=',screenX=100,screenY=10' } aWindow=window.open(urlString,"thewindow",winStats) } The release of the second-quarter fundraising totals spells trouble for two presidential candidates: Democrat John Edwards and Republican John McCain. Edwards has always been a long-shot for the nomination, but McCain was once the Republican frontrunner and expected (by me, among others) to have an easy path to the nomination. His candidacy is in now a shambles--and for more reasons than money.

Then former Senator Phil Gramm was running for the Republican presidential nomination in 1996, he used to cite "Huckaby's Law," named after political consultant and fundraising expert Stan Huckaby. Huckaby's Law said that the presidential candidate who raised the most money by January 1 of election year would inevitably win the nomination. John Connally had defied the law in 1980, but that was before public financing kicked in.

Gramm ended up confirming Huckaby's Law. Bob Dole beat him by $4 million and then won the nomination. In 2004, however, Senator John Kerry overturned Huckaby's Law by losing the fundraising primary to Howard Dean (Dean raised $47 million to $32 million for Kerry by January 31, 2004) but still won the nomination.

What about 2008? There is no reason to accept Huckaby's Law as an immutable law of physics. If two candidates can raise roughly the same amounts--let's say $110 million to $100 million--then, all other things being equal, they should be able to compete equally for the nomination. But if the margin is any larger--if it is comparable to Dean's five-to-three edge over Kerry in 2004--then the candidate raising less money will be at a significant disadvantage--more so than in any previous election. That's because of the changes in the primary schedule.

In the past, the early phase of the presidential race--lasting into March--was concentrated in several relatively low-cost caucuses and primaries in Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina. If a candidate did well in two of these, as Kerry did in 2004, he could make up an edge in fundraising before the big primary week of Super Tuesday a month later, when the number of primaries and the size of the collective electorate put a premium on paid advertising. But this year, Iowa and New Hampshire will be followed on January 19 by Nevada, then on January 29 by Florida, which will occur the same Tuesday as South Carolina, which will be followed the next week by some 23 primaries and caucuses, including California, New York, Texas, New Jersey, Georgia, and Michigan. Candidates who trail significantly in the money race on January 1 will not have time to raise enough money to compete in Florida on January 29 and in 23 states on February 5.

Among the Democrats this year, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are both going to have enough money to compete. But John Edwards, who raised only $9 million in the last quarter, compared to $32.5 million for Obama and $27 million for Clinton, looks like he is going to fall by the wayside. The problem is a practical one. Edwards is hoping that a victory in the Iowa Caucuses on January 14 will boost his chances, but, given the condensed primary schedule, a victory probably won't help him enough if he doesn't already have the money to pay for advertising in the big states. Of course, Edwards could follow Steve Forbes's precedent and make a huge loan to his campaign.

Among the Republicans, John McCain also faces money problems. In the second quarter, he raised $11 million compared to $17 million for Rudy Giuliani and $14 million for Mitt Romney. By itself, Giuliani and Romney's edge over McCain isn't decisive, but what is significant is that Giuliani's totals increased $2 million from the last quarter while McCain's declined by $2 million. McCain also has much less money in the bank than his rivals, and he has had to lay off staff. His difficulties in fundraising, combined with his slide in opinion polls (which makes it still more difficult to raise money) suggests that his campaign is in serious trouble.

If Edwards's lackluster fund-raising is simply the result of being overshadowed by his Democratic rivals, McCain's decline reflects a flawed campaign strategy. He set out to become the "Republican establishment" candidate. In doing so, he was relying on a law of his own--the Republican propensity to nominate former runner-ups for president: George H.W. Bush in 1988, Bob Dole in 1996. Once a fierce foe of George W. Bush, McCain tied his candidacy to the president this time around. He eagerly defended Bush's prosecution of the Iraq war --"We elected him, we need him, he needs to do well and the country needs him," McCain declared in March 2006--and he hired the president's former operatives, including Terry Nelson, Bush's former political director, who became McCain's campaign manager.

His strategy relied on rerunning the 2000 campaign, but with one important difference: McCain would play himself and Bush. McCain hoped to retain the loyalty of the self-described independents and moderates who helped him win states like New Hampshire and Michigan in 2000, while winning over enough conservatives to defeat a challenger from the right like former Senators George Allen or Rick Santorum. He focused his efforts heavily on South Carolina, where Bush had upended him in 2000. McCain won endorsements from many of the same South Carolinians who had backed Bush's vicious attacks against him. He hoped to wrap up the nomination early by winning New Hampshire and South Carolina.

McCain also tried to alter his political image sufficiently to attract diehard conservative Republicans as well as moderates and independents. To appease the religious right, he now claimed to favor the reversal of Roe v. Wade. To appease anti-taxers annoyed by his opposition to the Bush tax cuts, he now backed a continuation of those cuts. And he trumpeted his ability to win the war on terrorism and the war in Iraq.

As his poll and fund-raising numbers illustrate, this strategy appears to have failed. McCain has not been able to alter his image sufficiently to attract conservative donors or voters. Unlike, say, Mitt Romney, McCain has not been able to perform an ideological makeover. His apostasy in 2000 and during Bush's first term is too well known to conservatives. Indeed, his standing among Republican conservatives has declined still further in the last two months because of his support for allowing 12 million illegal immigrants to remain in the United States. For Republican conservatives, opposition to illegal immigration has replaced opposition to abortion as the dividing line between who they will and won't support. And McCain falls on the wrong side of the line.

McCain hoped his stand in favor of the war in Iraq, and most recently of the administration's "surge" strategy, would help him among Republican conservatives. But perhaps because of his stand against the administration's treatment of enemy combatants, Republicans have failed to acknowledge his support for the war. In a Pew poll last month, Republican voters who rate Iraq as a "very important" issue favor Giuliani, former Senator Fred Thompson, and Romney over McCain. Only 20 percent favor McCain in comparison to 39 percent for Giuliani even though the former New York mayor has no foreign policy experience and has displayed a tenuous grasp of Iraq's political and ethnic divisions.

The absence of conservative support has left McCain as the candidate of independents and moderates, as he was in 2000. But McCain has had to divide this vote with Giuliani and, in the Northeast, with Romney. Most revealing is a Survey USA poll last month of California Republicans, where McCain trailed Giuliani by 32 to 19 percent, Thompson also at 19 percent. McCain bested his 19 percent share among voters who identified themselves as moderate or liberal, were pro-choice, were convinced that the threat of global warming was real, supported same-sex marriage, favored stem-cell research, and didn't own a gun. Oh yes, he was also favored by 24 percent of Republicans who had voted for Kerry in 2004. Unfortunately, Giuliani did somewhat better among these voters, while he and Thompson did much better than McCain among the more conservative voters.

McCain's geographical strategy has also hit the skids. Romney has steadily climbed ahead of McCain in New Hampshire polls, and McCain is now running behind Giuliani in South Carolina, where Republican voters are so up in arms over "amnesty for illegal aliens" that Senator Lindsay Graham, McCain's main backer in the state, may be in political trouble. But in any case, the South Carolina primary has been completely overshadowed by Florida, where McCain is running far behind Giuliani and Thompson.

McCain could bounce back. He is being hurt partly because his heretical past is so well known to Republican voters, and his prospects could improve if more people learn, for instance, that Giuliani is pro-choice and in favor of gun control. But McCain's lag in fundraising hurts his prospects for recovery. And it should continue. Without a conservative grassroots following in the Republican Party, McCain has been more dependent on large donors than his rival candidates. And large contributors want to back a winner.

Now the McCain campaign is talking about taking public financing. But public money won't get him through January. In 2004, the limit on a candidate's spending in the primaries was $40.89 million. It'll be higher this year, but not high enough to compete with McCain's privately financed rivals, who should each raise twice that much before the year is out. Whether one heeds Huckaby's Law or looks at opinion polls in states like Florida and California, McCain's prospects are looking grim.

Correction: This article orginally stated that John Connally ran for president in 1976. He ran in 1980. We regret the error.

John B. Judis is a senior editor at The New Republic and a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Iraq Four Years after the U.S.-Led Invasion: Assessing the Crisis and Searching for a Way Forward E-mail
Print
By Faleh Jabar Publisher: Carnegie Endowment Policy Outlook No. 37, July 2007 Full Text (PDF) function largePhoto(photo_id,tableName) { urlString = ('/index.cfm?fa=show_photo&photo_id=' + photo_id +'&tableName=' + tableName); winStats='toolbar=no,location=no,directories=no,menubar=no,resizable=yes,' winStats+='scrollbars=yes,width=600,height=400' if (navigator.appName.indexOf("Microsoft")>=0) { winStats+=',left=100,top=10' }else{ winStats+=',screenX=100,screenY=10' } aWindow=window.open(urlString,"thewindow",winStats) } As the U.S. “surge” in Iraq enters its sixth month, a new Carnegie Policy Outlook reflects on the full history of the Iraq war and examines the viability of the current strategy.

The invasion and occupation of Iraq constituted the greatest nation-building challenge the United States has faced since World War II. As has become painfully clear, however, the realities of Iraq proved far more challenging than military planners had expected. Wars and sanctions only served to exacerbate stresses and tensions inherent under Saddam Hussein—there were no social forces to act as agents of change and no regional environment supportive of such change. The announcement of the surge in January 2007 revealed a sober recognition of how far U.S. strategy was removed from hard realities.

While this new U.S. strategy may have seemed plausible, it suffers from the same flawed assumptions and challenges that have plagued the entire war. The resolution of the Iraqi crisis can only come about through the construction of an inclusive, pluralistic, and federal polity with broad participation and strong political and security institutions. The Iraqi government must wean itself from U.S. military support, reinforce its own institutional and law-enforcement capacities, and take seriously the need for inclusive representational and decision-making institutions.

Click on the link above for the full text of this Carnegie publication.

This is a web-only publication.

About the Author
Faleh A. Jabar is the Director of the Iraq Institute for Strategic Studies (IIST) in Beirut,
Lebanon.

Bush Speechwriter Calls for Attack on Syria By Gary Leupp Neocon officials in the Defense Department call them "low-hanging fruit"--- as though countries were produce ripe for picking and eating. The term refers to nations targeted for regime change that might be achieved with minimal strain, at least when compared with the effort needed to topple the regime in Iran.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article18069.htm

Is the US Preparing To Attack Pakistan? By Eric Margolis The Bush Administration may be preparing to lash out at old ally Pakistan, which Washington now blames for its humiliating failures to crush al-Qaida, capture its elusive leaders, or defeat Taliban resistance forces in Afghanistan. One is immediately reminded of the Vietnam War when the Pentagon, unable to defeat North Vietnamese Army and Viet Cong forces, urged invasion of Cambodia.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article18070.htm

US House votes to bar permanent Iraq bases: The US House of Representatives on Wednesday voted overwhelmingly to bar permanent US military bases in Iraq, in the latest bid by Democrats to trim White House options on the war.
http://www.turkishpress.com/news.asp?id=187014

Gonzales Stumped Over Authority Granted to Cheney to Intervene in Justice Probes

By Michael Roston, Raw Story. Posted July 25, 2007.

Why is it that Cheney, his chief of staff and counsel, have been granted authority parallel with the president on intervening in pending matters at the Justice Department? Even Gonzales isn't sure.


During Tuesday's Senate Judiciary Committee oversight hearing, a freshman Democratic Senator stumped Attorney General Alberto Gonzales on how Vice President Dick Cheney, his chief of staff, and counsel, had been granted authority parallel with the President on intervening in pending matters at the Justice Department.

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) questioned the Attorney General about the independence of the Justice Department and communications with the White House on pending cases or investigations.

He then pointed to a May 4, 2006 memorandum signed by Gonzales which showed that the Office of the Vice President had been granted parallel privileges with the Executive Office of the President on communicating directly with the Justice Department's staff on criminal and civil matters.

"What -- on earth -- business does the Office of the Vice President have in the internal workings of the Department of Justice with respect to criminal investigations, civil investigations, and ongoing matters?" the Senator asked.

Gonzales was stumped, "As a general matter, I would say that's a good question."

Whitehouse then pointed out that in the same memo, the Chief of Staff and Counsel of the Vice President were also explicitly granted the same authority.

"On its face -- I must say -- sitting here, I'm troubled by this," Gonzales added.

A spokesperson for the Office of the Vice President said it was not possible to comment without first seeing a transcript of the proceedings.

Senator Whitehouse's office provided a copy of the Gonzales memo to RAW STORY.

Whitehouse discussed the Gonzales memo as it relates to the so-called 'Ashcroft memo,' also provided by Senator Whitehouse's office, which allowed various Executive Office of the President staff to communicate with the Justice Department.

He contrasted both memos to a 1994 letter written by Clinton Attorney General Janet Reno that limited communications on pending cases to conversations between the White House Counsel or Deputy Counsel, the President or Vice President, and Attorney General or Deputy or Associate Attorney General.

Whitehouse noted that there was a difference between seven senior administration members and 'hundreds' of people being able to discuss Justice Department matters.

In addition to granting the staff of the Office of the Vice President the ability to communicate with the Justice Department on civil and criminal matters, Gonzales' May 2006 memo gave Cheney's staff the ability to raise another issue with the Justice Department: 'Presidential Clemency Matters.'

Whether or not Cheney's office has intervened in discussions relating to presidential clemency has been of interest to Congress in recent weeks.

Before the White House commuted the sentence of former Cheney Chief of Staff I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Reps. John Conyers (D-MI) and Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) of the House Judiciary Committee asked Cheney to recuse himself from internal White House deliberations on the subject.

White House spokesman Tony Snow did not rule out Cheney's engagement in the discussions on Libby when he discussed Bush's decision earlier in the month.

Arab emissaries extend 'hand of peace' to Israel
Envoys call for rapid timetable for talks

Compiled by Daily Star staff
Thursday, July 26, 2007

Arab emissaries extend 'hand of peace' to Israel

Arab envoys on a landmark visit to Israel presented its leaders with a regional land-for-peace plan on Wednesday extending "a hand of peace" and called for a rapid timetable for talks with the Palestinians over statehood. For his part, Israeli Premier Ehud Olmert sent the clearest signal yet that he would try to restart talks on the final status of a Palestinian state with President Mahmoud Abbas, whose Fatah movement lost control of Gaza to Hamas last month.

Israel described the one-day visit by the Jordanian and Egyptian foreign ministers as a "historic" move on the part of the 22-nation Arab League. But it stopped short of embracing their initiative.

"We are extending a hand of peace on behalf of the whole region to you, and we hope we will be able to create the momentum needed to resume fruitful and productive negotiations" between Israel and the Palestinians and the rest of the Arab world, Jordan's foreign minister, Abdel-Ilah Khatib, said at a news conference with Israeli President Shimon Peres.

Egypt's Foreign Minister Ahmad Abu al-Gheit urged Israel to consider the plan seriously.

"We hope that upon our return, we would also convey to the Arab League ... the responses of Israel and I hope that such responses will be positive," he said.

The envoys are expected to discuss the visit with their Arab League next Monday - part of a flurry of diplomatic efforts meant to restart peace talks after a seven-year lull.

"We need a precise timetable, a quick timetable and we urge Israel not to waste this historic opportunity. Time is not on our side," Khatib said.

Abu al-Gheit said it was not sufficient for Israel to limit talk to what diplomats call a "political horizon" - defined by Olmert's aides as the legal, economic and governmental structures of a future Palestinian state. "I don't see [that] as enough because the horizon, often if not frequently, is never reached," he said.

Olmert said he has discussed steps toward establishing a Palestinian state with Abbas.

"We have started very seriously to talk with Mr. Abbas on a peace process and questions which can allow a Palestinian state to be established," he said following a meeting with President Shimon Peres.

But Olmert said there were "no precise timetables or stages established yet" for getting to discussions about permanent borders and the future of Occupied Jerusalem and Palestinian refugees, all divisive issues in the Jewish state.

Abbas said in Ramallah that he hoped Olmert would become a "partner to a final settlement that will lead to an independent viable Palestinian state."

Israel's Haaretz newspaper reported earlier that Olmert was offering to hold talks to agree principles to establish a Palestinian state with Occupied Jerusalem as its capital before more sensitive diplomatic issues are tackled.
http://www.dailystar.com.lb

He would be likely to offer establishing a Palestinian state in Gaza, and about 90 percent of the occupied West Bank, with territorial compensation in exchange for retaining large Jewish settlement blocs, Haaretz said.

Wednesday's visit was the first by Arab League representatives to promote their peace plan, which offers Israel normal ties with all Arab states in return for a full withdrawal from the lands it seized in the 1967 Middle East war, creation of a Palestinian state and a "just solution" for refugees.

Israeli officials and the Arab envoys stressed that the Arab initiative was supposed to complement, rather than replace, direct negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians.

"Israel is looking forward to discussing the Arab peace initiative and I will be more than happy that the next time you come, you bring with you ministers from more Arab countries" that back the plan, Olmert told the envoys.

Without going into specifics, Livni hailed what she called an "historic opportunity" for Arab-Israeli relations, saying the Jewish state was determined to make progress in the peace process with the Palestinians.

"What we don't want to do today is bring forward all our differences between the two sides," she told the news conference.

"I believe that right now we can find the common denominator [among Israel, the Palestinians and Arab states] and put it together to find the best process that we can promote and support," she added.

Olmert has said the Arab plan has positive elements. But citing demographic and security concerns, he made clear Israel opposed the return of Palestinian refugees to their former homes in what is now the Jewish state and wanted to hold on to major settlement blocs in the West Bank.

Neither Israel nor the visiting Arab envoys spelled out how significant progress could be made towards statehood with the Palestinian territories divided between Hamas-run Gaza and the Israeli-occupied West Bank, where Fatah holds sway.

Hamas spokesman Fawzi Barhoum said Olmert's comments were a diversion meant to "throw dust in the eyes" of the world.

Israel sought to cast the envoys' visit as a potential turning point in relations with the Arab League. But Arab diplomats played down the gesture, and the head of the Arab League told the BBC that the Egyptian and Jordanian diplomats were not acting on behalf of the organization. - Agencies

Intelligent Intelligence

There are now 26,000 individual newspapers in the world that have to be monitored because one or two of them might contain a piece or two of a global terrorist puzzle. To complete the global Tower of Babel babble, there are 26,000 radio stations; 21,000 TV stations; 108 million Web sites; 75 million blogs; 56 million MySpace squatters; 100 million hits a day on YouTube; 8,000 news and information portals; 200 million photos on flickr.com, increasing at the rate of 5,000 per minute; 45,000 daily podcasts; and 2.5 million Web-enabled devices. Photo courtesy AFP.

by Arnaud De Borchgrave
UPI Editor at Large
Washington DC (UPI) Jul 25, 2007

President John F. Kennedy once said he got "far more out of the New York Times than the CIA." Those were the days when major U.S. newspapers and the three networks maintained foreign bureaus staffed by prize-winning foreign correspondents all over the world. In those halcyon days, Open Source Intelligence, or OSINT in the espionage vernacular, could be culled from highly knowledgeable foreign correspondents, many of them scholars who had written books about the history and culture of their wide-ranging beats.

No more. At the end of World War II there were 2,500 U.S. foreign correspondents; today there are fewer than 250.

Newspapers, magazines and networks -- victims of both a weak dollar and corporate bottom-line bean counters -- have cut back foreign news coverage to the point where it no longer qualifies as OSINT. ABC slashed its staff foreign correspondents from 37 in the 1970s to four, according to veteran newsman Ted Koppel. Once over lightly foreign reporting -- with the exception of major events like wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and 20-minute TV magazine pieces -- is not what the Intelligence Community sees as OSINT. Reporters are now increasingly "parachuted" into hot stories abroad for a few days and then home to avoid exorbitant hotels bills.

A recent two-day Washington conference on OSINT organized by Eliot Jardines, assistant deputy director of national intelligence for open source, brought 1,200 people together from 40 countries. It was a mix of media, academia, business and IC.

All facets of OSINT were discussed, notably the constant drama of constant trivia that has afflicted U.S. media since the end of the Cold War (e.g., almost two years of O.J. Simpson that kept America's collective eye off the international ball; infamous skater Tonya Harding, who got more airtime in a comparable news period than the fall of the Berlin Wall that collapsed the Soviet empire; Congressman Gary Condit, whose affair with a murdered staffer was dislodged by Osama Bin Laden and the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks; Paris Hilton, whose mind-numbing, one-hour interview on "Larry King Live" reminded the millions who watched that addle-brained celebrity has now displaced merit-based fame).

For obvious reasons, open source information is no longer the traditional collection from open sources. This aspect of the intelligence business has become infinitely more complex. There are now 26,000 individual newspapers in the world that have to be monitored because one or two of them might contain a piece or two of a global terrorist puzzle. To complete the global Tower of Babel babble, there are 26,000 radio stations; 21,000 TV stations; 108 million Web sites; 75 million blogs; 56 million MySpace squatters; 100 million hits a day on YouTube; 8,000 news and information portals; 200 million photos on flickr.com, increasing at the rate of 5,000 per minute; 45,000 daily podcasts; and 2.5 million Web-enabled devices.

The pipe input into the Internet doubles every six months. Daily some 627 petabytes crisscross the globe on the Internet (one petabyte equals 1,024 terabytes, or 2 to the 50th power, which comes out to 1,125,899,906,842,624). That's several thousand times the entire contents of the Library of Congress -- every day.

Cold War problems were a lead-pipe cinch next to today's counter-terrorism challenges. As Tom Fingar, deputy director of national intelligence for analysis, put it, "For almost half a century it was a question of what do we do to keep nations on our side and what we do to pry the others away." Now the IC has 15 minutes to supply answers to immediate questions. Decisions will be made whether IC can weigh in or not. The magnitude of the challenge can be gauged by the inexperience of many analysts hired since the Sept. 11 attacks. Half of some 45,000 analysts in 16 intelligence agencies (total personnel just under 100,000) have less than five years of experience. They were part of the explosive growth of the IC post-Sept. 11.

Now the IC needs to tell its political masters something critically important they didn't know, which is a lot more than Googling a profile for a living or checking a Wiki entry. OSINT supplies the deeper knowledge that provides real insight into why, for example, a 21-year-old French Muslim living in the Paris suburb of St. Denis, whose grandparents were born in Algeria, found his way to Iraq to fight Americans and returned to France to set up a terrorist cell. A French professor who specializes in Islam would have access to such a youngster now in prison in France, not the CIA station chief in Paris.

With OSINT, the IC wants to make accessibility a normal way of doing business. Too many things are stamped Top Secret, Secret or Classified that don't need to be. Even newspaper clippings sent from one Intel agency to another have wound up classified.

OSINT is now a matter of consulting the best experts available. A Cold War National Intelligence Estimate used to take 480 days to reach agreement among 16 agencies. It is now down to 80 days -- still far too long, says DNI Adm. Mike McConnell.

As Mary Margaret Graham, deputy DNI for collection, says, "Open Source is a discipline of collection, not intelligence per se, but an enabler of intelligence." The Center for Strategic and International Studies, where this reporter dwells as a senior adviser, has just published the findings of a one-year experiment in "Open Source as a Force Multiplier in Intelligence."

CSIS' Transnational Threats Project, which this writer directs, recruited 15 experts on Islamist extremism in Europe from the Middle East (including Israel), North Africa, Europe, the United States and Canada, and networked them 24/7 with a state-of-the-art, electronic collaborative software tool. They were known as TIN members -- for Trusted Information Network.

With a budget of less than half a million dollars, Tom Sanderson, who moderated the TIN, and his deputy Jacqueline Harned, proved such a network can produce material inaccessible to the IC. It can be used for myriad problems requiring expert illumination.

Commented Eliot Jardines, open source director for the Intelligence Community, "Why collect clandestinely what we can get from Open Source?" Why indeed. When Jardines came aboard ODNI in 2005, with his deputy Sabra Horne, senior adviser for outreach, they had a blank slate. They then decided to gather open source expertise from academia, media, corporations, the IC, the military and government. The Washington OS conference more than met everyone's expectations.

Source: United Press International

CIVIL NUCLEAR
US Lawmakers Question Secretive US-India Nuclear Pact

For the nuclear deal to be implemented, India should separate nuclear facilities for civilian and military use and set up a regime of international inspections to allay concerns that material and technology received are not diverted to boost its nuclear weapons arsenal.

by P. Parameswaran
Washington (AFP) July 25, 2007

US lawmakers have warned President George W. Bush of "inconsistencies" amid reports Washington has agreed in principle to allow India to reprocess spent nuclear fuel under a landmark deal. The warning came after US and Indian officials finalized last week the implementing agreement for Washington to provide nuclear technology and fuel to India under a deal agreed upon by Bush and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh two years ago to highlight ties between the world's two biggest democracies.

Details of the so-called "123 agreement" has been kept under wraps but unconfirmed reports say the United States has agreed in principle to New Delhi's proposal to reprocess spent fuel in a dedicated national facility under the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) safeguards.

But Washington reportedly is reluctant to provide such reprocessing technology to India, which has been under three decades of US sanctions for nuclear tests. Nor is India a member of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

US laws ban export of reprocessing technology as it can be used for military purposes but Washington has reportedly made exemptions for key Asian ally Japan, for example.

The letter from 23 members of the House of Representatives on Wednesday warned: "Any inconsistencies between the so-called 123 agreement and US laws would put final Congressional approval of the deal in doubt.

"If the 123 agreement has been intentionally negotiated to side-step or bypass the law and the will of Congress, final approval for this deal will be jeopardized," said Edward Markey, co-chairman of the House Bipartisan Task Force on Nonproliferation.

Based on details of the finalized implementing agreement that had been leaked, "three or four significant issues could be in conflict with US laws," Daryl Kimball, executive director of the US Arms Control Association, told AFP.

They pertain to reprocessing and safeguards, he said.

The Indian Cabinet approved Wednesday the controversial agreement.

"All concerns of India have been reflected and have been adequately addressed," Foreign Minister Pranab Mukherjee said after two cabinet committees both "approved the agreement."

The US State Department indicated that the Bush administration would consider the accord by the end of the week.

"I think the Indian government, based on discussions we had last week, are taking some positive steps," department spokesman Sean McCormack told reporters, without divulging details of the agreement.

But he vowed that the United States was "not going to agree to anything that is not in the United States' national interest.

"In terms of, quote, "needing agreements" we're certainly not going to do anything that we believe is harmful to either our national security or foreign policy interests," he said.

The critical aspects of the deal are India's request to reprocess spent nuclear fuel, which Kimball said could be risky as not all Indian nuclear facilities would come under international safeguards.

India also wants assurances that Washington will continue to supply fuel for its atomic plants in the event New Delhi conducts further nuclear weapons tests.

For the nuclear deal to be implemented, India should separate nuclear facilities for civilian and military use and set up a regime of international inspections to allay concerns that material and technology received are not diverted to boost its nuclear weapons arsenal.

McCormack said once the implementation agreement was adopted by the two governments, the Indians also needed to sign an additional IAEA protocol and win approval from the 45-nation Nuclear Suppliers Group.

"I think once we have all these elements in place, we will go to the Congress with the full spectrum of what we are doing," he said. "That said, we are consulting every step along the way here with Congress, which is an important part of the process," he explained.

The Congress already approved the nuclear deal in principle last year and a bill to that effect was signed into law by Bush.

earlier related report
India's Cabinet approves nuclear cooperation deal with U.S.
New Delhi, July 25 (RIA Novosti) - The Indian government has approved a deal on technical details of a widely-publicized civilian nuclear cooperation agreement with the United States, the foreign minister said Wednesday.

U.S. and Indian negotiators said last Friday they had made significant progress on the agreement after four days of intensive negotiations in Washington and sent the document for a final review by the respective governments.

Foreign Minister Pranab Mukherjee said after a government meeting that the agreement, which essentially puts an end to New Delhi's decade-long international isolation in the nuclear sphere, "takes into account all India's concerns."

The Cabinet now has to discuss the document details with left-wing and opposition parties before submitting it for parliament's approval.

Last year, U.S. Congress approved the Hyde Act, which allows the U.S. to supply civilian nuclear fuel to India, but talks to coordinate technical details on an overall cooperation plan have been dragging on for months without a breakthrough.

The two sides provided no details on the latest deal, but some media reports suggested that the U.S. promised uninterrupted supplies of fuel to 14 civilian nuclear plants in India, and accepted New Delhi's initiative to build a special storage for spent nuclear fuel in the country.

In exchange, India will allow experts from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the UN nuclear watchdog, to inspect its civilian nuclear facilities, although its military reactors would reportedly remain off-limits.

The U.S. has been previously reluctant to allow India, which is not officially recognized as a nuclear power and has not signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, to reprocess spent fuel using U.S. components, over concerns of its possible use for military purposes.

New Delhi conducted its first nuclear weapons test in 1998.

The deal, if it goes through, would give India access to U.S. nuclear fuel and reactors, but the two countries still have to obtain approval from the Nuclear Suppliers Group, a conglomerate of countries that export nuclear material.

India also must reach a non-proliferation safeguard agreement with the IAEA.

Source: Agence France-Presse

Those interested in this topic may find the remarks below of interest. (Text at: http://www.mepc.org/whats/catgrb.html )

China and the Global Resource Balance

Remarks to the Summer Roundtable of the Pacific Pension Institute
25 July 2007, Victoria, British Columbia
Ambassador Chas W. Freeman, Jr. (USFS, Ret.)

Next year will mark the thirtieth anniversary of Deng Xiaoping's liberation of the Chinese people. In 1978, he replaced bureaucratic central planning with the invisible hand of the market economy. This must be counted as one of the most momentous events in modern history. In terms of current prices, it has brought about a 58-fold increase in China's gross domestic product (GDP). GDP per capita in China is now 40 times what it was in 1978. The country has been transformed by this, and so has the world. China is rapidly acquiring a first-class infrastructure that provides a credible basis for further progress toward affluence.

Deng's revolution in economic affairs is now creating a lot of consumption as well as investment and industrial production. It seems much more likely that current trends will continue than that they will not, but there is nothing inevitable about this. Still, even if growth turns out to be much slower than most people now expect, the net effect will be to stretch out the impact of China's reemergence into wealth and power, not to halt it, and to reduce but not eliminate the implications of a growing Chinese economy for global commodities supplies, prices, investment opportunities, and the environment. Most of what I will have to say about China and its global impact refers to current realities, not projections into the future.

Energy is very much part of this picture, but there has been a lot said about it elsewhere, and it's not very relevant to private equity. I want to focus instead on other natural resource import requirements. Chinese industry is set to grow almost 17 percent this year and that generates a lot of demand for raw materials. Of course, much of what's happening with respect to these raw materials applies equally to oil and gas and to the ships and pipelines by which it is being siphoned up by the Chinese market. We can talk about that later, if you wish.

Rapid growth in industrial demand is, however, far from the only cause of the rapid rise in China's imports of commodities. In the first quarter of 2007, per person disposable income of urban Chinese rose by almost 17 per cent year-on-year in real terms, while average cash incomes in the countryside increased by more than 12 per cent. That's a lot of demand for basic consumer goods, furniture, home electronics, foodstuffs, recreation, personal products, and you-name-it.

There is also the phenomenon of China's emergence as the final assembly point in global supply chains and as a formidable processor of raw materials into products for export, like furniture. (The 50,000 furniture companies in China now have half the global market and, with logging having been banned in China, they are competing with each other to buy up the rest of the world's wood.)

Industrial production and consumption by newly affluent people in China are the twin forces now tightening supplies and driving prices in global commodity markets upward - not just minerals, metals, wood, and petrochemicals, but feedgrains, meat, dairy products, and a host of other things. Retailers report that in newly rich cities, like Beijing, the average apartment owner now spends $30,000 on infill and decor. In China's major metropolitan areas, 78 percent of the registered population own their own homes, up from zero two decades ago. (The comparable figure for home ownership in the United States is about 69 percent.)

Without many outsiders noticing, China has acquired a vast, property-owning middle class of around 300 million people - about as many as the total population of the United States. At nominal exchange rates - not converted for purchasing power parity, there are already about 50 million Chinese with incomes over $25,000 per year. (In China, that amount will buy five or six times what it will here, so these people are, by any standard, upper middle class.) By 2025, McKinsey projects that this Chinese upper middle class will have grown to about 520 million, even without appreciation of the Chinese currency in relation to the dollar - which seems virtually certain to occur. You don't have to believe that projection of current trends - though I think it's plausible - to grasp how China has become the fastest growing part of the global market served by North American business - and everyone else.

China's growth is throwing up huge requirements for domestic infrastructure - highways, railways, housing, offices, factories, power plants, pipelines, ports, airports, and so forth. The Chinese are currently spending over 9 percent of their GDP on modernizing their own infrastructure, not counting what they're spending on building infrastructure abroad with which to ship raw materials home. What China is building is big and it is efficient. It has a lot to do with the astonishing gains in productivity that the Chinese economy continues to register. (In the United States, we are spending less than one percent on developing or sustaining our infrastructure - and it shows.) Before I get to its long-term implications, let me cite a few examples of the speed with which development is unfolding in China.

China's first expressway opened seventeen years ago. There are now about 30,000 miles of expressways, many of them privately financed, built, and operated. (They say the only robbers allowed on these highways are in the toll booths.) By 2020, China expects to have 53,000 miles of superhighways, a high-speed road network 15 percent larger than the interstate highway system in the United States. China will build and pave about half a million miles of ordinary highways over the next five years alone, including, of course, the controversial road it is now building for tourists determined to drive up Mt. Everest rather than hike it. All these roads will get heavy use.

Twenty-five years ago, there were a handful of private cars in China. The country still has only about seven cars for every thousand people - a level of market penetration for the automobile that we achieved in North America in 1915. But the car is fast becoming as Chinese as the sampan. By 2009, income levels are forecast to have risen enough to allow most middle income Chinese families to buy cars. Auto sales are projected at 10 million by 2010 and 20 million by 2020. China will then, by a considerable margin, be the world's largest car market.

This has all sorts of implications beyond additional demand for petroleum products like asphalt, diesel, and gasoline, not to mention the output of exhaust fumes, used tires, and the like. China now accounts for only a tiny percentage of the world's cars and trucks but no one who's been there recently will be surprised to learn that it has over one-fifth of the world's traffic accidents. You can bet that some entrepreneur is already thinking about the huge opportunities in both health care and funeral services as more Chinese compatriots take to the roads! McDonald's has just partnered with Sinopec to add drive-in hamburger joints at filling stations throughout the country. Can the drive-in movie, backseat sexual acrobatics, and ambulance-chasing tort lawyers be far behind?

The economic boom has also generated soaring demand for rail transport. China has only 6 percent of the world's railway mileage. But last year Chinese railways handled 25 percent of the world's passengers and freight, carrying 662.2 billion passenger-kilometers - 2.7 times the figure for rail-dense Japan - and 2.87 billion tons of cargo, a billion tons more than the US, and 4.8 times as much as heavily rail-dependent India. China projects expansion of at least 35 percent in its rail network by 2020. It has just introduced the first intercity bullet trains, with more to come.

China's economy is increasingly powered by its domestic market rather than foreign trade but it is becoming heavily dependent on imports for continued growth. Over the coming five years, Chinese ports will add 42 percent to their current handling capacity, which is already the largest in the world. China has built seven of the world's twenty largest container ports, with major technological innovation and expansion underway to handle volumes of trade that could hardly have been imagined only a few years ago. The country is also the world's fastest growing aviation market. Air passenger traffic has been going up by about 15 percent and air cargo by 19 percent each year. Over the coming five years, China will build fifty new airports and double its inventory of commercial aircraft.

All this development is occurring apace with urbanization at a rate and on a scale unprecedented in human history. Over the past quarter century, China's urban population has doubled. Over the next twenty-five years, it is expected to double again as 500 million or more people move to China's cities. There are now more than one hundred Chinese cities with populations over one million. Each year, urban areas must find room for 20 million new arrivals from the countryside. Not surprisingly, China accounts for over half of world construction by area. It is building about 8 billion square feet (800 million square meters) of new housing annually.

One result of this is huge new requirements for minerals and metals. China makes 44 percent of the world's cement. More to the point, thanks to rapidly rising Chinese demand, the global mining industry has never been as hyperactive or as profitable as it is now. Mining revenue rose to $249 billion in 2006 from $181.5 billion in 2005. The industry's net profits skyrocketed 64 percent. New mining companies are swarming forth like mosquitoes in the rainy season. There is no end to the boom in sight.

This year, China will make about 500 million tons of steel, over two-fifths of the global total. This is six times as much as the United States produces. It is more than the entire world made ten years ago, and 23.5 percent more than China itself produced last year. To make this steel, China will import about 400 million tons of iron ore, supplementing the rapidly rising output of mines on its own territory. Chinese buyers dominate worldwide scrap markets. Already the largest producer of stainless steel, China managed to increase production last year by another 45 percent, setting off a boom in nickel and ferrochrome. To the delight of countries like Australia, Brazil, and India as well as shipbuilders everywhere, Chinese iron ore imports are expected to rise to at least 600 million tons by 2010.

Similar trends are evident in other minerals and metals. Chinese demand is driving major expansion in mining in Australia, Bolivia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Guyana, India, Indonesia, Laos, Peru, the Philippines, Russia, South Africa, and Tanzania, to name just a few of the countries where large China-connected projects are currently in progress. But China is not just an importer. It is the dominant factor in the production of many minerals and metals. It produces 96 percent of the world's rare earths, 87 percent of its tungsten, 86 percent of its antimony, 75 percent of its magnesium, half of its fluorspar, one-third of its tin and lead, one-fourth of its aluminum and zinc, and one-fifth of its molybdenum. Chinese domestic consumption of all these commodities is rising apace with industrial production, so exports of rare-earth elements, tin, and tungsten are declining even as domestic consumption of these and other commodities continues its dizzy rise.

How long can such growth in Chinese production and consumption be sustained? The answer appears to be that it can go on for a very long time, providing that new sources of raw materials are discovered, that the huge investments necessary to develop and transport them are made, and that new strategies to increase recycling, remanufacturing, and reuse are elaborated.

Take steel as an indicator. Steel is a capital good that, once produced, is constantly recycled. To date, China has produced a cumulative total of about 4 billion tons of steel, four-fifths the total produced by Japan and half that of the United States. The Chinese are well aware that to reach U.S. levels of per capita capital accumulation, they will have to make another 32 or 33 billion tons of steel. At current production rates, high as these already are, that will take another 65 or so years. For China to match Japan will take over a century. It is much more likely that Chinese production will speed up its rise than that it will slow down or decline.

That, plus the impact of other emerging economic great powers like India, will keep mineral supplies tight and prices high. It will make recycling more profitable and encourage the use of substitute materials. It will also keep profits in the global mining industry robust and stimulate major new investment in the economies of Africa, Latin America, Australia, Southeast and Central Asia, and Russia. China is already very aggressively seeking new natural resource supplies in all these regions.

In Africa, Chinese companies are now, by a wide margin, the largest foreign investors. They have strong financial backing from their government, which thinks the business of business is business, not the moral transformation of those with whom Chinese companies are doing it. This is, of course, intensely annoying to Western nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), who had become accustomed to having Africa to themselves as a sort of humanitarian theme park in which capitalists and their business interests seldom intruded.

In this connection, environmentalists are very concerned, and rightly so, by the implications for African rainforests of China's apparently insatiable demand for tropical hardwoods. The most farsighted NGOs are looking for ways to work with the Chinese government and to help it guide its companies toward environmentally responsible behavior. There is reason to hope this can may work. China was sufficiently concerned about the environment to double its own forest cover over the past fifty years - to 18 percent. It has recently put forward a "sustainable forests" initiative to govern its purchases of wood from abroad.

More to the point, there is no feasible alternative to working with China. The emergence of the Chinese economy as a driving factor in the global commodities trade has ended the West's ability to determine international policy with respect to global extractive industries, even as it has put an end to the efficacy of coercive sanctions not endorsed by the United Nations on behalf of the entire international community. The arrival of India as another huge consumer of imported resources will give the coup de gr�ce to the age of American and European tutelage of the Third World. 250 years ago the West began to dominate the globe. As the 21st Century proceeds, that dominance is fading away. To cite the example of energy: not so long ago, the 20 largest energy firms, ranked by market cap, were in the United States or Europe. Today, 35 percent originate in China, Brazil, Russia, and India. A similar pattern is rapidly emerging in the mining sector.

Chinese companies are not prepared to take on a "mission civilisatrice" - the task of implanting their or other foreign norms on African soil so as to transform it. They promise to make Africa and other places in which they invest or do business richer. Whether or not these places also become better is - in their view - for the people who live there, not outsiders, to work out. For their part, Africans want to do business on their own terms, not to depend on handouts dispensed on terms set by others claiming to be wiser and more moral than they. Now that Africans finally have a choice of international partners, they - not foreigners and certainly not Chinese - will decide how natural resources are exploited in Africa and by whom. Blaming China or India or someone else for this global paradigm shift is not just futile. It is counterproductive.

Quite aside from the politics of Sino-African relations, their new financial aspects are impressive. The loans China offered Africa in 2006 were three times total development aid from the rich countries that make up the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Since 2000 China has canceled more than $10 billion in debt for 31 African countries and given $5.5 billion in development aid, with a promise of a further $2.6 billion in 2007-08. In 2005, China committed $8 billion in lending to Nigeria, Angola, and Mozambique alone. In that same year the World Bank spent $2.3 billion in all of Africa. In 2007, lending by China's Import-Export Bank to Africa is expected to be about $17.5 billion. And so it goes.

In Latin America, some of the same trends are evident. Trade with China has grown from a couple of hundred million dollars in 1978 to over $70 billion last year. It is expected to rise to at least $100 billion by 2010. Argentina and Brazil have emerged as major suppliers of soybeans and other agricultural commodities to the China market. Unlike Africa, however - where Chinese direct investment is opening mines and building the roads, railroads, and ports necessary to export their output - in Latin America most of the investment in new production for export to China is locally chartered and financed or conducted by joint ventures with Chinese companies.

This pattern of interaction is one reason that direct investment from China in Latin America has appeared to be much lower than Chinese and Latin American officials had forecast. Frankly, Latin Americans - like North Americans - continue to misunderstand both the nature of the current Chinese economy and its relationship to the Chinese government. They imagine that China's economy consists of a few large state-owned corporations that officials can direct to invest where the Chinese state would like them for strategic reasons to invest. By and large, however, Chinese industry is much, much more highly fractured than in the West. It consists of hundreds or even thousands of companies that compete with each other for trade and investment opportunities and resources. Business has to be done with these companies, not Chinese ministries and their personnel.

Chinese companies do not believe that they are in the charity business; nor are they inclined to serve as disbursement agencies for altruistic Chinese government donations, which are - in any event - as hard to quantify as the Sasquatch population of British Columbia and the State of Washington. The Chinese government can, as it has in Africa, publicize opportunities and create financial incentives that favor the development of investment by Chinese companies but it cannot substitute its business judgment for theirs and, by and large, does not attempt to do so. A lot of credit arrangements proffered by Beijing for business development in Latin America remain underutilized.

Let me conclude with a cowardly act of preemptive capitulation. I completely agree that the phenomena I have described pose serious challenges on multiple fronts. Global commodity prices are more likely to climb than to decline, as they did for the past 200 years. There will be a premium on reusing some materials and substitutes will have to be found for still others we have taken for granted. There will be large environmental problems as Chinese and Indian demand for forest products and agricultural commodities rises and mining activities get under way in virgin areas. Western countries are indeed losing the privileged position of monopoly control they had over global extractive industries throughout the 20th century. There is a major shift in the global balance of economic power going on; it is already evident in American and European friction with China and other non Western countries over policies toward places like Iran, Myanmar, Sudan, Venezuela, and Zimbabwe. Non Western countries, not surprisingly, feel no obligation to impose Western values or policy objectives they do not share on their trading partners. Our frustration with their unwillingness to do what we say - even if it isn't what we ourselves had been up to for the past 120 years - will lead to still greater friction.

With these admissions out of the way, I'd like to spend a final few minutes looking at the opportunities the changes I have been describing present. How can outsiders profit from the rising appetite for natural resources of the Chinese dragon - or the Indian lion that is coming up behind it?

There are many ways that come to mind, but they break down into a few categories:

- * Investors can invest in companies that have the potential and intention to supply China with the energy, industrial minerals, metals, forestry, and agricultural products it needs. This suggests a hard look at natural resource companies operating in currently underdeveloped areas of Africa, Australia, Brazil, Canada, India, Indonesia, Papua-New Guinea, Russia, southern Africa, and the southern cone of South America - Argentina, Bolivia, and Chile - or at the many new companies being organized to do this for the Chinese and Indian markets.

- * Financiers can help Chinese investors leverage their capital with that of others to create companies and acquire properties at home or abroad. China has a very strong domestic mining industry but it has yet to develop the capability to structure its mining investments to maximum financial advantage. That's where Western financial expertise can come in. There is a lot more capital in China - and, for that matter, among overseas Chinese and in the Arab world - than there are people who know how to make it work most profitably for them.

- * Private equity investors can help new companies or pull together currently unrelated Chinese natural resource-related operations with a view to taking the resulting new companies public in Hong Kong, now the site of the largest number of IPOs in the world, or elsewhere - and eventually in equity markets in China itself. In the last six months, with not many people noticing, the price-earnings ratios of companies in the extractive industries have doubled on the Hong Kong exchange. Someone needs to help new companies establish themselves and existing companies to consolidate. Why not do these things in the most profitable way possible?

- * Fund managers can invest in the creation of new infrastructure in China: for example roads, logistics management facilities like port, airport, warehouse operations, and real estate. Investors in funds of funds can invest in some of the four hundred or so venture capital and private equity funds that have been established in China.

- * Individuals and groups of investors can buy shares in Chinese companies that extract oil, gas, minerals, or metals. Not a few such companies are strong performers with rich dividends. Many are listed in equity markets outside China. New companies are being formed constantly. They can be good investments in their own right but have the added advantage that, with their underlying assets denominated in Chinese yuan, their book value will rise along with the yuan exchange rate. Some will need help making IPOs.

And,

- * Entrepreneurs can invest in companies that are focused on improving energy and materials efficiency or the profitable recycling, remanufacturing, and reuse of industrial materials. As supplies tighten and prices rise, companies in this business will prosper proportionately.

A lot of these approaches are very well suited to private equity. Some may not be. But I trust I have made my point. Not so very long ago, Deng Xiaoping declared that "to get rich is glorious." His countrymen have taken him seriously. That's causing some problems. But China's demand for natural resources seems to me to represent some real opportunities for those in private equity who agree with the Chinese people that Deng knew what he was talking about and are prepared, like them, to take a risk or two to achieve the kind of glory he foresaw.

http://www.salon.com/opinion/blumenthal/20...eney/print.html


Operation Iraq betrayal In the absence of anything remotely resembling victory in Iraq, Bush and Cheney play the blame game -- including in a new, authorized biography of the vice president.

By Sidney Blumenthal

Jul. 26, 2007 | President Bush's political strategy at home is an implicit if unintended admission of the failure of his military strategy in Iraq and toward terrorism generally. Betrayal is his theme, delivered in his speeches, embroidered by his officials and trumpeted by the brass band of neoconservative publicists. The foundation for his stab-in-the-back theory was laid in the beginning.

"Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists," Bush said in his joint address to Congress nine days after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. And in the weeks that followed he repeated variations of his formula, reducing it to "for or against us in the war on terrorism." At the Charleston, S.C., Air Force Base on Tuesday, Bush resumed his repudiated habit of conflating threats, suggesting a connection between 9/11 and the Iraq war, and intensified his blaming of domestic critics for the shortcomings of his policy. His story line depends upon omitting his own part in the calamity. "The facts are," insisted Bush to his captive audience, "that al-Qaida terrorists killed Americans on 9/11, they're fighting us in Iraq and across the world, and they are plotting to kill Americans here at home again."

But how did it happen that al-Qaida in Iraq, sworn enemy of Saddam Hussein and his secularism, operating in isolation prior to 9/11, though almost certainly with the connivance and protection of Kurdish leader and current Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, has come to thrive under the U.S. occupation? And since AQI represents perhaps 1 percent or less of the insurgent strength, how can it be depicted as the main foe, capable of seizing state power? The other Sunni insurgent groups increasingly view it as an impediment to their own ambitions and have marked it for elimination. Rather than address these problematic complexities, Bush points the finger of blame at U.S. senators who dare to question his policy. "Those who justify withdrawing our troops from Iraq by denying the threat of al-Qaida in Iraq and its ties to Osama bin Laden ignore the clear consequences of such a retreat."

Bush's accusation of betrayal anticipates the September report of Gen. David Petraeus on the progress of the "surge" in Iraq. The absence of victory inspires a search for an enemy within. Bush's stab-in-the-back theory is the latest corollary to the old policy that military force will create political success. Bush is a vulgar Maoist: "Political power comes from the barrel of a gun," said Chairman Mao. But the surge is simply an endlessly repetitive reaction to the failure of the purely military. Somehow, in the political vacuum, additional U.S. troops are supposed to quell the civil war, compel the sects and factions to lie down like lambs, and destroy AQI. U.S. ambassador Ryan Crocker last week begged that the Iraqi government not be held accountable for meeting political benchmarks, none of which have been realized; and at the same time he requested exit visas for his Iraqi staff, who obviously have no confidence in the Bush policy and do not wish to leave via the embassy roof. Crocker's actions speak louder than his words -- and louder than Bush's.

Bush, however, clings to the rhetoric of conventional warfare, of "victory" and "retreat." The collapsed Iraqi state, proliferation of sectarian warfare and murderous strife even among Shiite militias bewilder him; clear-cut dichotomies are more comforting, producing deeper confusion. The friend of his enemy is his friend; the enemy of his enemy is not his friend. Meanwhile, Bush seeks to displace responsibility for the potentially dire consequences of his policy on others.

Neoconservative publicists spread the calumnies that critics of Bush's policy are against the troops and that these critics will be responsible for genocide if they and not Bush are followed. William Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard -- whose July 15 article in the Washington Post, "Why Bush Will Be a Winner," Bush has recommended to his White House staff -- has published a new piece in the latest issue of his magazine, "They Don't Really Support the Troops." "Having turned against a war that some of them supported, the left is now turning against the troops they claim still to support," he writes. His combination of nuance and crudity is ideologically deft. By pointing out that "some of them supported" the war at the start, his intention is not to draw distinctions but to lump all critics together as now undifferentiated and discreditable -- "the left." Then he ascribed a common motive: fear that Bush will succeed and a hatred of the soldiers. "They sense that history is progressing away from them -- that these soldiers, fighting courageously in a just cause, could still win the war, that they are proud of their service, and that they will be future leaders of this country." But this is not enough for Kristol. "The left slanders them. We support them. More than that, we admire them." Slander?

Jonah Goldberg, a columnist for the Los Angeles Times, writes in an article Tuesday that "liberals" are the ones responsible for a coming "genocide" in Iraq. "But if genocide unfolds in Iraq after American troops depart, it would be hard to argue that we weren't at least partly to blame. Yes, the mass murder would have more immediate authors than the United States of America, but we would undeniably be responsible, at least in part, for giving a green light to genocide." Having initially adopted a vague "we," he quickly dispenses with this rhetorical strategy, blaming "liberals" and one person in particular for "mass murder." Barack Obama "offers precisely that green light," he writes.

On July 16, the Associated Press reported on a letter from Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Eric Edelman to Sen. Hillary Clinton, condemning her for deigning to request in her capacity as a member of the Armed Services Committee information on Pentagon contingency plans for withdrawal. "Premature and public discussion of the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq reinforces enemy propaganda that the United States will abandon its allies in Iraq, much as we are perceived to have done in Vietnam, Lebanon and Somalia," Edelman replied. Even asking about such plans aids and abets the enemy, tantamount to treason. Edelman added the suggestion of a massacre if we "abandon" the "allies," and said its responsibility would fall on those who raised questions.

In response to a letter from Sen. Clinton, asking if Edelman's statement "accurately characterizes your views as Secretary of Defense," Robert Gates in effect repudiated it. "I have long been a staunch advocate of congressional oversight, first at the CIA and now at the Defense Department," he wrote on July 20. "I have said on several occasions in recent months that I believe that congressional debate on Iraq has been constructive and appropriate. I had not seen Senator Clinton's reply to Ambassador Edelman's letter until today."

Gates' note is extraordinary not only for its open acknowledgment of a breach with his undersecretary but also for its revelation that he was unaware of Edelman's vitriolic letter. Edelman is a longtime neoconservative with deep ties to Dick Cheney. Like John Bolton, who served as a counterintelligence agent for Cheney when he was undersecretary of state under Colin Powell, Edelman does not truly serve his immediate superior in the chain of command. His ultimate allegiance is pledged to an ideological network. Given the incendiary nature of his letter to a Democratic presidential candidate, which could only be conceived and interpreted as supremely political, it's hard to imagine that as seasoned an operator as Edelman would act entirely on his own. But if he did not brief and receive approval from Gates -- and Gates has gone out of his way to distance himself from any involvement -- then whom did Edelman discuss his letter with before he sent it?

Edelman is a rare Foreign Service officer long aligned with neoconservatives. As he explained in his letter of April 21 to Judge Reggie Walton requesting clemency in sentencing for I. Lewis Libby, Cheney's former chief of staff, he has known Libby, "a deeply dedicated public servant," for 26 years. Edelman first served with Libby, he wrote, during the Reagan administration, followed by service as Libby's deputy in the Defense Department during the elder Bush's administration, under Secretary of Defense Cheney, and most recently as Libby's deputy on Cheney's staff.

Edelman, in fact, was the first person on Cheney's staff to sound the alarm against former ambassador Joseph Wilson after reading the May 6, 2003, column by Nicholas Kristof in the New York Times that described Wilson but did not name him. Edelman urged Libby to leak information to rebut Wilson's disclosure that it was a request from the vice president's office that initiated his mission to Niger in search of the phantom yellowcake uranium Bush claimed Saddam was purchasing -- a major rationale for the Iraq war.

This year, Edelman leapt to the defense of the prewar disinformation campaign operated out of the Pentagon through a small unit called the Office of Special Plans and run by Edelman's predecessor in his current post, the neoconservative Douglas Feith. When the Defense Department's inspector general, Thomas Gimble, issued a report in February calling Feith's operation "inappropriate" and urging that new controls be established to prevent officials from conducting rogue "intelligence activities," Edelman countered with a heated 52-page memo calling the I.G. "egregious," charging that he "does not have special expertise" on an issue that is "fraught with policy and political dimensions." Edelman's blast succeeded in forcing the I.G. to drop his recommendations and, as Newsweek reported, "shows how current and former Cheney aides still wield their clout throughout the government."

The degree to which Edelman has been rewarded for his ideological affinities is apparent not only in his appointments but also in monetary emoluments. According to State Department records, in 2005 and 2006, he received Senior Foreign Service performance awards of $10,000 and $12,500, respectively, both standard for someone of his rank. However, in June of this year he received a Presidential Rank Award of $40,953, an amount described as "amazing" by a former senior State Department professional who has administered such awards. Indeed, the Office of Personnel Management cautions against granting Presidential Rank Awards for appointments requiring Senate confirmation and for those in their positions for less than three years. Gates signed off on this award, but Cheney loomed as Edelman's sponsor, having personally reviewed his performance evaluations from 2001 to 2003.

In addition to the accusations of betrayal involving aiding "enemy propaganda," stabbing our troops in the back just as they are about to succeed, and acting as the architects of genocide, neoconservatives also argue that if only their initial advice had been followed in installing their favorite exile, Ahmed Chalabi, as leader of Iraq, none of the subsequent problems would have occurred. Thus it would all have been a "cakewalk" as projected, if not for the occupation, for which they were not responsible. The only error the neoconservatives admit is not being vigilant against compromise and insisting on the seamless political correctness of their plan, such as it was.

The latest personage to take up this neoconservative argument is none other than Cheney himself. "I think we should have probably gone with the provisional government of Iraqis," he says. "I think the Coalition Provisional Authority was a mistake." The vice president's remark appears in a new, authorized biography, "Cheney: The Untold Story of America's Most Powerful and Controversial Vice President," by Stephen F. Hayes, the Weekly Standard writer best known for his effort to bolster the case for a link between al-Qaida and Saddam before the invasion of Iraq and for defending Cheney's pressure on the intelligence community to put its imprimatur on such views.

"I always felt that he was an ally," Hayes quotes an obviously perplexed L. Paul Bremer, who served as the head of the CPA. Bremer ought to have grounds for being confused by Cheney's odd comment. According to his 2005 memoir, "My Year in Iraq," he was first contacted to serve by Scooter Libby and Paul Wolfowitz, the neoconservative deputy secretary of defense. Cheney had already blocked State Department participation in the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance, the CPA's predecessor organization. The CIA had flown Chalabi, a principal source of the false intelligence used to justify the war, later a self-proclaimed "hero in error," from his base in Iran to Iraq with several hundred of his "Free Iraqi Fighting Forces." (Chalabi was long on the payroll of the Iranian intelligence service.) Chalabi and his forces eagerly led the looting of Iraqi ministries. His advice to disband the Iraqi army and fire Baath Party members that ran the government bureaucracies was accepted by Wolfowitz and Feith -- and ratified by Bremer.

In his account, Bremer writes that the Principals Committee meeting of the National Security Council that gave Bremer his marching orders decided that the Iraqi exiles were too weak and unrepresentative to establish authority in the country. Bremer cites his notes from that meeting: "Here's the vice president ... 'We're not at a point where representative Iraqi leaders can come forward. They're still too scared. We need a strategy on the ground for the postwar situation we actually have and not the one we wish we had.' This didn't sound like an open endorsement of the exiles."

Cheney's seeming confession of error is little more than belated historical revisionism to obscure his own part in the fiasco. It is his first step toward walking away from responsibility through self-denial, not least about the reality that the Iranians played him and the neoconservatives as stooges.

Cheney prides himself on his skill as a hidden-hand master manipulator of politics through control of bureaucracies. Hayes' hagiography is a shabby, tendentious work, of the sort that used to be produced in the Soviet Union, impossible to grasp without independent knowledge or access to samizdat. Nonetheless, there are a few shiny objects that can be retrieved from this dump.

Cheney granted Hayes a series of interviews that provide insight into the development of his cynical politics, his view of unaccountable executive power and his penchant for secrecy. One can almost hear Cheney chuckle as he tells his Boswell how the credulous Washington press corps got him wrong all these years, to his everlasting advantage. "The press never looked at my voting record" as a congressman, he says. "They thought I was all warm and fuzzy and they never looked to see."

Cheney also reveals how as President Gerald Ford's chief of staff he learned to undermine and destroy Vice President Nelson Rockefeller, the last unabashed moderate Republican in the White House. Cheney described how he would put "sand in the gears," claiming "we'll staff it out," to kill Rockefeller's projects. Cheney gloats over humiliating Rockefeller at the 1976 Republican Convention, where during Rockefeller's last moment on the public stage, giving the nomination speech for his successor, the microphone suddenly went dead. Cheney recalls that Rockefeller blamed him and that they had "shouting matches." Yet Cheney doesn't deny the accusation. Instead, he snickers. "You've got to watch vice presidents. They're a sinister crowd."

Hayes also recounts Cheney's confrontation with Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., on the floor of the Senate on June 21, 2004, when, having heard of Leahy's critical comments about Halliburton's contracts in Iraq, he told him, "Go fuck yourself." Hayes quotes a "fishing buddy" of Cheney's, Merritt Benson, recalling that afterward Cheney told him of his regret: "You never, ever let those people get to you. Or then they win." Of course, Cheney was paraphrasing Richard Nixon, the first president he served, who said on the day he resigned his office, "Always remember that others may hate you, but those who hate you don't win unless you hate them. And then you destroy yourself."

But that Nixon citation is not the end of Cheney's reflections on what he calls "the F-bomb." "It was out of character from my standpoint, I suppose," he confesses. "But what can you say ... It was heartfelt." Cheney unleashed is Nixon without regrets. If it feels good, do it -- and it feels so good to drop the bomb.

Al Qaeda in South Asia called top threat
By Greg Miller
Undercutting Bush's stance, a U.S. official says most of the network's Iraq
affiliate are homegrown.
http://email.latimes.com/cgi-bin1/DM/y/eBU...Io30G2B0Imw40EE

Foreign Policy News Commentary Update July 27, 2007

THE WAR IN IRAQ: ANSWERS TO FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS - JAMES PHILLIPS
(HERITAGE FOUNDATION, WEBMEMO #1565, JULY 24): Washington should launch a public
diplomacy campaign to explain to the governments and peoples of other countries
that American efforts to stabilize Iraq are essential to protecting the Iraqi
people from ruthless terrorists who seek to export revolution and suicide
bombings far beyond Iraq's borders.
http://www.heritage.org/Research/MiddleEast/wm1565.cfm

'ISLAMOPHOBIC' OR INFORMED? - ROBERT SPENCER (FRONTPAGEMAGAZINE.COM, JULY
24): Newsweek asserted that Muslims in America are 'vulnerable as never before.'
That story began with an account of a Muslim in Cleveland asking George W. Bush:
'What are we doing with public diplomacy to change the hearts and minds of a
billion and a half Muslims around the world?' The unspoken assumption behind
this question is that Muslim fury at the West stems entirely from the actions of
the United States and other Western countries, and not from anything within the
Islamic world itself.
http://frontpagemagazine.com/Articles/Read...le.asp?ID=29265

AL QAEDA'S BEST PUBLICIST - DAN FROOMKIN (WASHINGTONPOST.COM, JULY 25): Like
any terrorist organization, al-Qaeda wants attention. It wants to be perceived
as powerful. And it particularly wants Americans to live in fear. Could al-Qaeda
possibly have found a better publicist than President Bush?
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...2501313_pf.html

TERROR SUPPORT FALLS IN MUSLIM COUNTRIES - EDWARD LUCE (FINANCIAL TIMES,
JULY 24): There has been a striking decline in support for terrorism in Muslim
countries over the past five years, according to the annual take on world
opinion by the Pew Global Attitudes Project.
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/4ed6c870-3a1b-11dc...00779fd2ac.html

TURNING AGAINST TERROR: MUSLIM SUPPORT FOR SUICIDE BOMBING IS FALLING. THE
WEST SHOULD TAKE ADVANTAGE OF THIS HOPEFUL TREND EDITORIAL (JULY 25, LOS
ANGELES TIMES)
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/editor...ment-editorials

NEW U.S. EMBASSY RISES IN IRAQ: CONSPICUOUSLY HUGE AND SELF-CONTAINED BUT
DEEMED INADEQUATE FOR A DISASTER SCENARIO, THE COMPOUND IS ALREADY TAKING FIRE -
ALEXANDRA ZAVIS (LOS ANGELES TIMES, JULY 24): Huge, expensive and dogged by
controversy, the new U.S. Embassy compound nearing completion here epitomizes to
many Iraqis the worst of the U.S. tenure in Iraq.
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/wo...=la-home-center
http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/06/11/1803/
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0708-11.htm

IN IRAQ, LIBERALS FLIP ON GENOCIDE: IN THE 1990S, THEY ARGUED FOR
HUMANITARIAN FOREIGN INTERVENTION WHERE THERE WAS LITTLE U.S. INTEREST - JONAH
GOLDBERG (LOS ANGELES TIMES, JULY 24): If genocide unfolds in Iraq after
American troops depart, it would be hard to argue that we weren't at least
partly to blame.
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-...0,5797195.story

THE REGION: TOWARD A NEW STRATEGY IN IRAQ BARRY RUBIN (JERUSALEM POST,
JULY 23): What is needed is a US shift in strategy that includes withdrawing
most of the troops, minimizing a combat role, turning over the fighting to Iraqi
forces and using the remaining soldiers for training and logistics. Such a
strategy would involve neither surrender nor status quo; neither a humiliating
withdrawal nor a useless continuation of the status quo.http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid...icle%2FShowFull

IRAQ IS THE CENTRAL FRONT: THE DEMOCRATS ARE IN DENIAL ABOUT OUR STRUGGLE
AGAINST AL QAEDA - THOMAS JOSCELYN (WEEKLY STANDARD, JULY 30)
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Publ...13/900tybar.asp

ALL'S TROUBLE ON THE CENTRAL FRONT - H.D.S. GREENWAY (BOSTON GLOBE, JULY
24): Only by the most torturous magical thinking can the Iraq tragedy be
interpreted as anything other than a colossal mistake that has distracted from
the goal of defeating Islamic extremism and its attending terrorism.
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial..._central_front/

BUSH IN FREE FALL - ROBERT SCHEER (TRUTHDIG, JULY 24): There is simply no
plausible national security argument for the United States ongoing occupation
of Iraq. The harsh reality that the United States must now enlist the support of
Iran, the 'rogue nation' that Bush claims threatens us with nukes, which this
very week was once again accused by the U.S. ambassador of supplying arms to
Iraq's anti-American Shiite militias, underscores the folly of this disastrous
escapade. Yet, communication with Iran is a good thing.
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/200707...h_in_free_fall/

WHY WE MUST LEAVE IRAQ ASAP: IT'S THE ONLY WAY TO FIGHT OUR REAL ENEMY -
HANK EDSON (COMMON DREAMS, JULY 23): For the sake of the Iraqi people as well as
for the sake of American democracy, we need to pull our troops out of Iraq ASAP.
http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/07/23/2697/

US-IRAN ALLIANCE AGAINST SUNNI GUERRILLAS? - JUAN COLE (INFORMED COMMENT:
THOUGHTS ON THE MIDDLE EAST, HISTORY, AND RELIGION, JULY 25): 'If the US is
allying with Iran against the Sunni insurgents and al-Qaeda, this is a very
major development and much more important than some carping over Shiite
militias. (My guess is that 98% of American troops killed in Iraq have been
killed by Sunni Arab guerrillas). If the report is true and has legs, it will
send Saudi Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal ballistic. The Sunni Arab states do
not like 'al-Qaeda' in Iraq, but they are much more afraid of Iran than of the
Iraqi Sunni Arabs who are fighting against US military occupation.'
http://www.juancole.com/2007/07/us-iran-al...inst-sunni.html

HOW TO GET OUT OF IRAQ: RAPPROCHEMENT WITH IRAN, HANDS OFF IRAQI POLITICS,
AND LET THE CHIPS FALL WHERE THEY MAY JUSTIN RAIMONDO (ANTIWAR.COM, JULY 25):
We can use Iranian influence to eradicate our real enemies in Iraq, by
encouraging the Iranians and their Iraqi supporters to take on al-Qaeda.
http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=11344

A CHANCE FOR BUSH TO SALVAGE HIS FOREIGN POLICY - AN OPENING TO IRAN IS
WORTH A TRY - JEREMI SURI (BOSTON GLOBE, JULY 24)
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial..._policy?mode=PF

WHY ARE WE REWARDING IRAN? - JEFF JACOBY, (BOSTON GLOBE, JULY 25): Granted,
threats and gunboat diplomacy are not always wise. But there are times when they
are far more effective than "engagement," when faced with the enemy we face -- a
hostage-taking, nuke-pursuing, terrorist-sponsoring, apocalypse-invoking,
America-hating Iran.
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial...ng_iran?mode=PF

SETBACK IN TURKEY EDITORIAL (WASHINGTON TIMES, JULY 24): It's clear that
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan returns to office with an
unquestionably strong mandate. He has a history of mixing religion and politics,
and this election result is not an encouraging sign for the United States and
the West.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/article/200.../107240021/1013

TURKEY VOTES: THE AKP MAY NOT BE THE SAME AS HAMAS, BUT THEIR IDEOLOGY DOES
KILL INNOCENT PEOPLE - STEPHEN SCHWARTZ, WEEKLY STANDARD, JULY 24): Turkey?s
rellection of incumbent prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's AKP, or Justice
and Development Party, has reenergized the low-level debate in Washington about
foreign Islamic parties that claim to respect democracy and secularism. But for
the AKP -- no less than its rivals in the Turkish military and secular state
structures -- the positive element lacking in their outlook involves pluralism,
more than either politics or prayers.
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Publ...13/911zygqb.asp

TALKING TURKEY - TULIN DALOGLU (WASHINGTON TIMES, JULY 24):
http://www.washingtontimes.com/apps/pbcs.d...mplate=printart

ARABS JEALOUS OF TURKISH ELECTIONS MARC LYNCH (ABU AARDVARK, JULY 24): The
Turkish election and its aftermath will continue to reverberate in Arab
political discourse for a while. It's a good chance for the US and the West to
try to show that it isn't comprehensively hostile to Islamist parties -- an
uphill battle after it ignored the Egyptian government's repression of the
Muslim Brotherhood after it performed well in the Egyptian elections, and
boycotted and worked to undermine the Hamas government after it won the
Palestinian elections.
http://abuaardvark.typepad.com/abuaardvark...-jealous-o.html


TIME TO HEAL US-TURKEY WOUNDS: SUNDAY'S ELECTIONS GIVE A FRESH OPPORTUNITY
TO FIX A TERRIBLE COLLAPSE IN BILATERAL TIES - GRAHAM ALLISON (CHRISTIAN SCIENCE
MONITOR, JULY 24)
http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0724/p09s01-coop.html

A TRAP FOR FOOLS URI AVNERY (ANTIWAR.COM, JULY 23): We, the small group of
Israelis who raised the banner of the "two-state solution" more than 50 years
ago, now have to endure George Bush turning it into a rag to cover his
nakedness. In his mouth, it is an empty, deceitful, and mendacious slogan. Only
a fool will fall into this trap.
http://www.antiwar.com/avnery/?articleid=11332

SYRIA OCCUPIES LEBANON. AGAIN. A LAND GRAB PROPORTIONALLY EQUIVALENT TO A
FOREIGN POWER OCCUPYING ARIZONA - BRET STEPHENS (OPINION JOURNAL FROM THE WALL
STREET JOURNAL EDITORIAL PAGE, JULY 24): The only countries in a position to
help Lebanon are France and the U.S. They could strike a useful blow by closing
their embassies in Damascus until such time as Damascus opens an embassy--with
all that it implies -- in Beirut.
http://www.opinionjournal.com/columnists/b...s/?id=110010375

AMERICA'S PAKISTAN DILEMMA: THE US STRUGGLES TO INCREASE PRESSURE ON
TERRORISTS AND AVERT MUSHARRAF'S DOWNFALL - HOWARD LAFRANCHI (CHRISTIAN SCIENCE
MONITOR, JULY 23)
http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0723/p01s02-usfp.html

WILL BUSH INVADE PAKISTAN?: I WOULDN'T PUT IT PAST HIM OR HIS DEMOCRATIC
SUCCESSOR JUSTIN RAIMONDO (ANTIWAR.COM, JULY 23)
http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=11334

IF PAKISTAN PROSPERS, AL-QAEDA WILL NOT - PHILIP GORDON (FINANCIAL TIMES,
JULY 24): In the short run, the U.S. should encourage Pakistan to get serious
about fighting the militants within its borders and provide it with the support
to do so. In the longer run, however, helping the country overcome its vast
domestic challenges and giving its people a more hopeful future would do more
for the war on terror than any attempt to defeat extremism with military force
alone.

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/aced3b94-3a00-11dc...00779fd2ac.html
PAID SUBSCRIPTION

FIRST EXISTENTIALISM, NOW THIS EDITORIAL (BOSTON GLOBE, JULY 23): Despite
the parochialism of the French political elites, America's presidential
candidates could benefit by emulating Sarkozy, who has shrewdly confected a
government that transcends party affiliations
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial...ow_this?mode=PF

BUSH'S TORTURE BAN IS FULL OF LOOPHOLES: THE PRESIDENT HAS ISSUED AN
EXECUTIVE ORDER TO STOP THE CIA FROM USING TORTURE, BUT THE BAN IS UNENFORCEABLE
- DAVID COLE (SALON, JULY 23)
http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2007/07/23/torture/

THE TORTURE TWO-STEP: BUSH'S NEW TORTURE ORDER AND ITS LOOPHOLES - PHILLIP
CARTER (SLATE, JULY 23)
http://www.slate.com/id/2170983/

PUNT RETURN: CONGRESS NEEDS TO STOP PASSING THE BUCK ON ENEMY COMBATANTS -
BENJAMIN WITTES (NEW REPUBLIC, JULY 23): The administration is likely to get
thrashed in the next round of Supreme Court litigation over Guantánamo --
litigation the High Court has just agreed to hear next term. The only viable way
to avoid this fate, which could have real negative consequences for the
executive branch, is to create a realistic statutory legal framework for
handling detainees so that the courts have something to defer to.
http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=w072307&s=wittes072307

A WAR THE PENTAGON CAN'T WIN - DANIEL BENJAMIN AND STEVEN SIMON (NEW YORK
TIMES, JULY 24): While the C.I.A. doesn't have an unblemished record, its
counterterrorism operations have shown more promise than the Pentagon?s.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/24/opinion/...agewanted=print

BUSH'S INCOMPETENCE GIVES AL-QAIDA NEW LIFE: THE WHITE HOUSE HINTS AT
MILITARY ACTION AS THE TERROR ORGANIZATION REGROUPS IN NORTHERN PAKISTAN AND THE
MUSHARRAF GOVERNMENT BEGINS TO WOBBLE - JUAN COLE (SALON, JULY 24): War-weary,
bogged down in a fruitless guerrilla war in Iraq, disillusioned with the Bush
team (which has lied to it assiduously), the public appears to be taking its eye
off al-Qaida. If so, it would be making the same mistake as Bush, who is
obsessed with Iraq to the detriment of urgent counterterrorism measures. Those
efforts, to be successful, will require international cooperation rather than
unilateral grandstanding, not something in which this administration has proved
adept.
http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2007/...aida/print.html

OUTSOURCING INTELLIGENCE - R.J. HILLHOUSE (NATION, JULY 24): What is not
generally known is that the secret side of the Iraq War and the larger "war on
terror" is also conducted by private corporations, fielding private spies. The
reach of these corporations has extended into the Oval Office. Corporations are
heavily involved in creating the analytical products that underlie the nation's
most important and most sensitive national security document, the President's
Daily Brief (PDB).
http://www.thenation.com/docprint.mhtml?i=...amp;s=hillhouse

ANOTHER CHENEY-LINKED HAWK DOWN - ROBERT DREYFUSS (HUFFINGTON POST, JULY
24): VicePresident Cheney is losing a trusted aide: David Wurmser, Cheney's
chief adviser on Middle East affairs and perhaps the Bush administration's most
radical hawk. According to multiple sources, Wurmser will leave the office of
the vice president (OVP) in August for the private sector, where he will start a
risk-consulting business.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bob-dreyfuss...aw_b_57538.html

DIPLOMATS RECEIVED POLITICAL BRIEFINGS: BUSH AIDES LISTED ELECTION TARGETS -
PAUL KANE (WASHINGTONPOST.COM, JULY 24): White House aides have conducted at
least half a dozen political briefings for the Bush administration's top
diplomats, including a PowerPoint presentation for ambassadors with senior
adviser Karl Rove that named Democratic incumbents targeted for defeat in 2008
and a "general political briefing" at the Peace Corps headquarters after the
2002 midterm elections.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...ml?hpid=topnews

AL QAEDA'S BEST PUBLICIST - DAN FROOMKIN (WASHINGTONPOST.COM, JULY 25): Like

any terrorist organization, al-Qaeda wants attention. It wants to be perceived

as powerful. And it particularly wants Americans to live in fear. Could al-Qaeda

possibly have found a better publicist than President Bush?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...007/07/25/BL200

The Al Qaeda Threat: Myth vs. Reality or
Will the real Al Qaeda Please Stand Up

National Security Network. Posted July 25, 2007.

President Bush is misleading troops about who they are (and are not) fighting in Iraq.

President Bush makes fallacious connections between Al Qaeda in Iraq and the Al Qaeda who attacked the US on 9/11. "Some say that Iraq is not a part of the broader war on terror. They claim that the organization called al Qaeda in Iraq is an Iraqi phenomenon -- that it's independent of Osama bin Laden and it's not interested in attacking America. That would be news to Osama bin Laden. I presented intelligence that clearly establishes this connection. The facts are that al Qaeda terrorists killed Americans on 9/11, they're fighting us in Iraq and across the world, and they're plotting to kill Americans here at home again." [CNN, 7/24/07 ]

The nation's 16 intelligence agencies agree that Al Qaeda has regenerated its ability to strike at the United States through its bases on the Afghan-Pakistan Border. "We assess the group has protected or regenerated key elements of its Homeland attack capability, including: a safe haven in the Pakistan Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), operational lieutenants, and its top leadership." [National Intelligence Estimate, 7/07 ]

Former Secretary of State Colin Powell said that Al-Qaeda "was only 10% of the problem in Iraq and Nouri al-Maliki, its prime minister, lacked the political will to establish an effective government." He went on to say that even even if the military surge has been a partial success in areas such as Anbar province, where Sunni tribes have turned on Al-Qaeda, it has not been accompanied by the vital political and economic "surge" and reconciliation process promised by the Iraqi government. [The London Sunday Times, 7/8/07 ]

Al Qaeda in Iraq is not the same as Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. Some of the extremists in Iraq have chosen to call themselves "Al Qaeda in Iraq," and they are in fact inspired by Osama Bin Laden's extremist ideology. While there is some level of cooperation and exchange of information, these groups did not exist in Iraq prior to the invasion in 2003.

President Bush argues that "Al Qaeda is public enemy number one in Iraq. Al Qaeda is public enemy number one for the Iraqi people. Al Qaeda is public -- public enemy number one for the American people." [President Bush, 7/24/07 ]

Al Qaeda in Iraq accounts for 15% of the violence in Iraq. "Anthony Cordesman, a security analyst at the Center for Strategic and International studies says, the U.S. military estimates that al-Qaeda in Iraq, a group thought to number several thousand, accounts for only about 15% of the attacks in Iraq." [Time, 7/30/07 ]


Foreign Jihadist fighters make up less than 10% of the insurgency. Most intelligence estimates still state that the vast majority of Sunni insurgents are Iraqi. They are not driven by a pan-Islamic ideology of destroying the West and creating a caliphate. Instead, they are fighting either against American forces or against other ethnic groups in Iraq. [Center for American Progress, 6/25/07 ]

The Al Qaeda Threat: Myth vs. Reality

The National Intelligence Estimate reaffirmed that the Bush Administration has made Americans less secure by taking its focus off the real danger in Afghanistan and Pakistan and instead invading Iraq. Almost six years since 9/11, Al Qaeda has established a new safe haven on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border and has taken advantage of the operational space afforded by a poorly conceived truce between the Pakistani government and tribal leaders. Meanwhile the invasion of Iraq has fed the Al Qaeda narrative and created a new focal point for the recruitment, fundraising, training and indoctrination of Al Qaeda operatives. Unfortunately, the Administration's response to all of these problems is to continue to pour more troops and funds into Iraq, even as military strategists have concluded that sectarian violence and civil war - not Al Qaeda - are the greatest dangers in the war torn country.

Al Qaeda is Growing Stronger in Pakistan and Afghanistan

The nation's 16 intelligence agencies agree that Al Qaeda has regenerated its ability to strike at the United States through its bases on the Afghan-Pakistan Border. "We assess the group has protected or regenerated key elements of its Homeland attack capability, including: a safe haven in the Pakistan Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), operational lieutenants, and its top leadership." [National Intelligence Estimate, 7/07 ]

Al Qaeda took advantage of an ill-conceived truce with Pakistani tribal leaders to gain strength. The truce has now broken apart. In the fall of 2006, the Pakistani government brokered an agreement with tribal and Taliban leaders on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. The agreement allowed Al Qaeda and the Taliban to continue to operate freely as long as they did not spill over into Afghanistan or other parts of Pakistan. The deal was criticized at the time, and has given Al Qaeda and the Taliban a 10 month rest period to gather strength and increase the frequency of their attacks in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The agreement is now officially off. [Washington Post, 7/16/07 ]

John Kringen, who heads the CIA's analysis directorate, agrees that Al Qaeda has been getting stronger. "They seem to be fairly well settled into the safe haven and the ungoverned spaces of Pakistan," Kringen testified in front of the House Armed Services Committee. "We see more training. We see more money. We see more communications. We see that activity rising." [NPR, 7/15/07 ]


In its new safe haven, Al Qaeda has had more flexibility to train terrorists and produce propaganda videos. "While the northern area of Pakistan, much of which is controlled by local tribes, has always been a stronghold of the Taliban, it's now also home to a resurgent al Qaeda. New training camps have sprung up in the mountainous terrain, and the ease with which militants operate in the region even affords them time to produce the relatively high-quality training and propaganda videos frequently released by jihadist groups. Even the generals are fed up with the situation. "Even after five years of operations, what has been achieved? Osama bin Laden is still there, al Qaeda is still there, in fact it is spreading," Lt. General Ali Jan Mohammed Aurakzai (Ret.) said in February. Aurakzai is the governor of the Northwest Frontier Province. [CBS, 7/17/07 ]


Pakistan bombings raise fears of Taliban, al Qaeda resurgence. "A series of bombings in recent days in northwestern Pakistan have killed at least 79 people and are spreading fears that the Taliban and al Qaeda have made a comeback. Militants linked to the Taliban in the area near the Afghan border say a truce reached with the Pakistani government last September is off. That deal has been blamed for an increase in attacks on U.S. troops over the border in Afghanistan, as Taliban fighters were able to prepare, train, and reconstitute weapons supplies without interference from the Pakistani government. Tensions in the region had been simmering for months, and recent events at Islamabad's Red Mosque triggered the fresh wave of violence." [CNN, 7/16/07 ]

The Invasion of Iraq has Strengthened Al Qaeda's Hand


The invasion of Iraq has created a new focal point for recruitment, fundraising, training and indoctrination of terrorists. The Nation's 16 intelligence agencies agree: "We assess that al-Qa'ida will probably seek to leverage the contacts and capabilities of al-Qa'ida in Iraq (AQI), its most visible and capable affiliate and the only one known to have expressed a desire to attack the Homeland. In addition, we assess that its association with AQI helps al-Qa'ida to energize the broader Sunni extremist community, raise resources, and to recruit and indoctrinate operatives, including for Homeland attacks." [National Intelligence Estimate, 7/07 ]

Last year, the nation's 16 intelligence agencies concurred that Iraq is fueling global terrorism. "We assess that the Iraq jihad is shaping a new generation of terrorist leaders and operatives; perceived jihadist success there would inspire more fighters to continue the struggle elsewhere. The Iraq conflict has become the 'cause celebre' for jihadists, breeding a deep resentment of U.S. involvement in the Muslim world and cultivating supporters for the global jihadist movement. Should jihadists leaving Iraq perceive themselves, and be perceived, to have failed, we judge fewer fighters will be inspired to carry on the fight." [National Intelligence Estimate, 4/06 ]

Al Qaeda had no significant foothold in Iraq before the invasion. The US presence in Iraq has provided al Qaeda new base camps, new recruits and new prestige. Pentagon resources have been diverted from Afghanistan; where the military had a real chance to hunt down al Qaeda's leadership. It alienated essential allies in the war against terrorism and drained the strength and readiness of American troops. [NY Times, 7/8/07 ]


Iraq is a failing state, which is more likely to become a terrorist safe haven. Foreign Policy magazine ranked Iraq as the second most unstable country in the world in its recently released Failed State Index. Only Sudan is considered more unstable. [Foreign Policy, July/August 2007 ]

Terrorist attacks around the rest of the Middle East have risen significantly since the U.S. invasion of Iraq. As of September 2006 there had been 37 attacks in Arab countries outside of Iraq since the invasion, while there were only 3 in the period between 9/11 and March 2003. The rate of attacks in Arab countries jumped by 445 percent since the Iraq invasion, while the rate of killings rose by 783 percent. [Mother Jones ]


Al Qaeda in Iraq would likely be one of the biggest losers if American forces were drawn down. The majority of Iraqis have already turned against Al Qaeda in Iraq. The Shi'a are the most powerful group in the country and would undoubtedly attempt to wipe out an Al Qaeda presence that has been perpetrating violence against them. Moreover, many of Al Qaeda's Sunni allies have also turned against it and without an American presence in Iraq it will be much harder for Al Qaeda to continue recruiting foreign fighters. [Center for American Progress, 6/25/07 ]


The real problem in Iraq is not Al Qaeda but multiple civil wars. Shi'a are fighting Sunnis all over the country and in Baghdad. Shi'a are fighting each other in the South. Sunnis are fighting Sunnis in Anbar and Diyala. Sunnis are fighting Kurds in the North around Kirkuk and Mosul. [CSIS, 6/20/07 ]

Foundations of Betrayal: How the Super-Rich Undermine America
by John Gizzi

“It began as a favor to a friend, and ended as a labor of love.”

So said public television host and veteran journalist Llewellyn King about reading the novel "Point of Entry," by author Peter Schecter, whom King knew and liked very much. King began the novel (about political intrigue between Columbia and the U.S. in the near future) as a favor to his friend and completed it as an true fan.

That’s about where I am after reading "Foundations of Betrayal: How the Super-Rich Undermine America," by Phil Kent. A veteran public relations man and former editor of the Augusta (GA) Chronicle, Kent has also been a personal friend of mine for nearly 15 years. For me, then, reading "Foundations" began as a favor to a friend.

But very quickly, as each page of this eyebrow-raising work turned faster than the previous one, my reading of Kent’s provocative book became a labor of love. Meshing a rich cornucopia of facts, figures, and history (including the now-forgotten-but-still revealing congressional probe of foundations in the early 1950’s chaired by Tennessee Rep. B. Carroll Reece), the author vividly explains something that has, for generations, bewildered observers of business and major foundations they spawned: why they bankroll organizations ranging from the militantly environmentalist Greenpeace to the American Civil Liberties Union -- groups whose common denominator is sheer hatred of what is stood for by those writing the six-figure checks to them.

Why, the question screams, do “we often give our enemies the means of our own destruction,” to quote the fable writer Aesop.

“Good public relations,” answers Kent, and his study found, “donating to radical groups to protect themselves against future waves of costly, image-shattering litigation.” Here the author cites the example of Rev. Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow/PUSH Coalition, which came under fire in 2002 for “soliciting tax-deductible contributions from corporations against whom he promised to ‘campaign’ on alleged unemployment diversity issues.” A natural analogy, notes Kent, is that “[m]any radical environmental groups take the same approach to corporate blackmail.” He then goes to illustrate how -- and what stunning and never-anticipated dividends are received by those who write the big checks.

The Defenders of Wildlife, for example, was founded in 1947 and is ostensibly a conservation group. Among its backers are the David and Lucille Packard Foundation ( a creation of the co-founder of Hewlett-Packard). The DOW also opposes the U.S. war on terrorism and has been relentless in its opposition to any measure to thwart illegal immigration.

This is not an uncommon avenue for environmentalists to take, as Betrayal shows us. In 1998, the DOW, Audobon Society, and Sierra Club sued the Immigration and Naturalization Service to stop construction of fences and lighting along the Arizona border on the grounds that this would have stopped :”cross-border movement by jaguars, ocelots, and a host of other border species.” (Not surprisingly, Betrayal notes, the open borders Turner Foundation has given more than $1 million to DOW since 1997.)

Pew Charitable Trusts was once a reliable underwriter of conservative and pro-free market causes but is now under the management of a new (and liberal) generation. From 1991-2002, Pew gave $11 million to the National Resources Defense Council, which in the 1980’s launched a nationwide consumer panic about the preservative Alar in apples. Under the guidance of the far-left Fenton Communications public relations maestros, NRDC claimed that Alar in apples was a cause of cancer. A study by the EPA ended the panic, concluding “an individual would have to eat 50,000 Alar-tested apples a day over the course of a lifetime” to get cancer.

But NRDC thrives to this day, Betrayal notes, “with a shameful record of attacking and shaking down corporate America and a gullible public.”

Kent’s book also illustrates the increasingly provocative case of the latest target for seduction for big liberal dollars: religious organizations. That’s right: fueled by six-figure donations from the William and Flora Hewitt Foundation and similar sources, the National Council of Evangelicals now makes the case for global warming as much a cause as, say, the teaching of divine creationism as an alternative to evolution.

Since 1993, Betrayal concludes, “more evangelical converts have been singing from the foundation-funded ‘eco-justice’ hymnal.” Directed at 67,000 congregations of more than 100 million churchgoers and beginning with the National Council of Churches, Jewish Life, and the U.S. Catholic Conference (“wolves in clerical garb taking their 30 pieces of silver from foundation and their shills,” according to Kent), more than $5 million has been deployed in the last 14 years to make the environment part of their daily religious lives.

Shocking? Stunning? You bet it is. A recent Capital Research Center analysis of charitable donations showed that donations by the left to the Fortune 500 foundations totaled $59 million, compared to $4 million to the right. That’s a ratio of 14.5-to-1. There are Very similar, lopsided ratios in terms of liberal v. conservative donations to the “527” political groups we heard so much about last year.

Foundations of Betrayal explains why -- and in no uncertain terms.

Back to the Future?
The Mideast landscape.

By Victor Davis Hanson

If Gen. David Petraeus can’t stabilize Iraq by autumn — or if Americans decide to pull out of Iraq before he gets a fair chance — expect far worse chaos eventually to follow. We will see ethnic cleansing, mass murder of Iraqi reformers, Kurdistan threatened, emerging Turkish-, Iranian-, and Wahhabi-controlled rump states, and al Qaeda emboldened as American military prestige is ruined.

And then what new American Middle East policy would arise from the ashes of Iraq?

Past presidents and statesmen as diverse as Madeleine Albright, James Baker, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and Brent Scowcroft have weighed in with various remedies to our supposed blunders in the Middle East since September 11.

Apparently, Americans are supposed to forget these supposedly brilliant strategists’ dismal records of dealing with Middle East terrorism, Islamic radicalism, and murderous dictators. However, their three decades of bipartisan failure helped bring us to the present post-9/11 world.

So before the United States abandons its present policies in Iraq and Afghanistan, we should at least recall the past record — which may be best summed up as the ying of Democratic appeasement and the yang of Republican cynicism.

Jimmy Carter now writes books damning our present policies. He should keep quiet. When the Iranians stormed the American embassy in Tehran and inaugurated this era of Islamic terrorism, his U.N. ambassador, Andrew Young, announced that the murderous Ayatollah Khomeini was “a 20th-century saint.” Moralist Carter himself also tried to send hardcore leftist Ramsey Clark over to Tehran to beg the mullahs to release the hostages — in exchange for arms sales.

Next came Ronald Reagan, who, to put it kindly, was bewildered by Islamic extremism. He pulled out American troops from Lebanon after Hezbollah murdered 241 Marines and thereby helped to energize a new terrorist movement that has spread havoc ever since.

The Lebanon retreat was followed by the disgrace of the Iran-contra affair, when American agents sold the hostage-taking theocracy missiles and then used the receipts illegally to fund the Contras. Few now remember that Oliver North purportedly flew to Iran to seal the deal, bearing gifts for the ayatollah. No need to mention the intelligence the Reagan administration gave to Saddam Hussein during the savage Iran-Iraq war, or the way it continued Carter’s policy of arming jihadists in Afghanistan.

There were just as many cynical realists in George Bush Sr.’s foreign policy team. In the debate leading up to the first Gulf War, Secretary of State James Baker justified attacking oil-rich Saddam Hussein for the sake of “jobs, jobs, jobs.” And when our coalition partner, the even oil-richer House of Saud, objected to removing the murderous Hussein regime after its retreat from Kuwait, we complied — to the point of watching Saddam butcher thousands of Kurds and Shiites.

Bill Clinton also often weighs in with ideas on the Middle East. But during his two terms he passed up an offer from Sudan to hand over bin Laden. Shortly afterwards, the terrorist openly threatened us: “To kill the Americans and their allies — civilians and military — is an individual duty for every Muslim.”

The Clinton administration also didn’t do much about eight years of serial terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, American servicemen in Saudi Arabia, the East African embassies or the USS Cole. The $50 billion U.N. Oil-for-Food scandal did not reflect well on Clinton’s multilateral model of dealing with Saddam Hussein.

The point of reviewing prior American naivete and cynicism is not to excuse the real mistakes in stabilizing Iraq. Instead, these past blunders remind us that we have had few good choices in dealing with the terrorism, theocracy, and authoritarian madness of an oil-rich Middle East. And we have had none after the murder of 3,000 Americans on September 11.

After four years of effort in Iraq, Americans may well tire of that cost and bring Gen. Petraeus and the troops home. We can then go back to the shorter-term remedies of the past. Well and good.

But at least remember what that past policy was: Democratic appeasement of terrorists, interrupted by cynical Republican business with terrorist-sponsoring regimes.

Then came September 11, and we determined to get tougher than the Democrats by taking out the savage Taliban and Saddam Hussein — and more principled than the Republicans by staying on after our victories to foster something better.

The jihadists are now fighting a desperate war against the new stick of American military power and carrot of American-inspired political reform. They want us, in defeat, to go back to turning a blind eye to both terrorism and corrupt dictatorships.

That’s the only way they got power in the first place and now desperately count on keeping it.

© 2007 TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.

Bush Line Distorts Iran's Real Interest in Iraq
by Gareth Porter As US and Iranian diplomats met in Baghdad Tuesday for a second round of talks on Iraq, the domestic US political climate appears decidedly more supportive of an aggressive US posture toward Iran than just a few months ago, reflecting the apparent triumph of the George W. Bush administration's narrative on Iran's role in Iraq.

That new narrative threatens to obscure the bigger picture of Iranian policy toward Iraq, widely recognized by regional specialists. Iran's strategic interests in Iraq are far more compatible with those of the United States than those of the Sunni regimes in the region with which the United States has aligned itself.

Contrary to the official narrative, Iranian support for Shi'ites is not aimed at destabilizing the country but does serve a rational Iranian desire to maximize its alliances with Iraqi Shi'ite factions, in the view of specialists on Iranian policy and on the security of the Persian Gulf region.

Symptomatic of the toughening attitude in Congress toward Iran was the 97-0 vote in the Senate last week for a resolution drafted by its leading proponent of war against Iran, Sen. Joe Lieberman, stating that "the murder of members of the United States Armed Forces by a foreign government or its agents is an intolerable act of hostility against the United States." The resolution demanded that the government of Iran "take immediate action" to end all forms of support it is providing to Iraqi militias and insurgents.

That vote followed several months of intensive administration propaganda charging that Iran is arming Shi'ite militias in Iraq, and characterizing Iranian financial support and training for Shi'ite militias as an aggressive effort to target US troops and to destabilize Iraq.

But this administration line ignores the fact that Iran's primary ties in Iraq have always been with those groups who have supported the Nouri al Maliki government, including the SCIRI and Dawa parties and their paramilitary arm, the Badr Corps, rather than with anti-government militias. That indicates that Iran's fundamental interest is to see the government stabilize the situation in the country, according to Prof. Mohsen Milani of Florida International University, a specialist on Iran's national security policies.

Milani argues that Iran's interests are more closely aligned with those of the United States than any other state in the region. "I can't think of two other countries in the region who want the Iraqi government to succeed," says Milani.

He believes the Iranians are so upset with the efforts by the Saudis to undermine the Shi'ite-dominated government that they may try to use the talks with the United States on the security of Iraq to introduce intelligence they have gathered on Saudi support for al-Qaeda and Sunni insurgents.

Trita Parsi, author of a new book on Iranian-Israeli security relations, agrees that Iran's support for the Maliki government stands in contrast to the attitude of the leading US Sunni ally in Middle East, Saudi Arabia. "Look at what the Saudis are calling the Maliki government – a puppet government," he observes. "You're not hearing that from Iran."

Dr. James A. Russell, a lecturer in National Security Affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School and a specialist on security affairs in the Gulf region, agrees that the two countries do indeed share common strategic interests in Iraq, at least in terms of rational, realist definitions of strategic interest.

The problem, Russell says, is that the history of the relationship and domestic political constituencies pose serious obstacles to realizing those common interests. Two such obstacles are "the very powerful political constituency for attacking Iran" and support for Israel, says Russell.

James Dobbins, former US ambassador to Afghanistan and director of the Rand Corporation's International Security and Defense Policy Center, agrees that Iran is not trying to destabilize Iraq. "They have been supportive of the government and hope it prevails," he says. As for the chief source of instability in Iraq, the Sunni-Shi'ite conflict, Dobbins notes that "Iranians don't see anything to be gained by Sunni-Shi'ite conflict in Iraq."

Contrary to the impression conveyed by the Bush administration, Iran's ties to Shi'ite militias do not represent a new development. They have been a constant in Iranian policy since the overthrow of the Saddam Hussein regime opened the way for Shi'ite militias to return from Iran in 2003.

In August 2005 a Time magazine story reported that Iranians were providing support to what were then called "Shi'ite insurgents" but quoted Western diplomats as saying that they "appear to be acting defensively rather than offensively." Those sources noted that the Iranian assistance to Shi'ite militias was "dwarfed by the amount of money and materiel flowing in from Iraq's Arab neighbors to Sunni insurgents."

Iran specialists and regional analysts agree that Iran's ties with militias who attack US and British forces as well as government targets is essentially a way of ensuring that Iran will be on good terms with any future regime in Baghdad. "They're trying to hedge their bets," says Dobbins, "because they're not sure who's going to prevail."

Russell agrees that Iranian support for militias is not aimed at to destabilizing Iraq but to establish good relations with every Shi'ite faction. "This is a logical step to protect their interests," he says.

The US military presence is an obvious point of US-Iranian contention over Iraq. Iran has shown a relatively high level of tolerance for the US occupation in the past but has grown increasingly critical of that presence over the past year. Speaking at the World Economic Forum in May, Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki charged that the US military presence was a cause of instability rather than a solution for it.

"We believe that sooner or later they have to decide to withdraw their troops from Iraq because that is the cause for the continuation of terrorist activities," he said.

The changing Iranian posture toward the US presence may reflect the relative weakening of the al-Maliki government and the emergence of the fiercely nationalist Moqtada al-Sadr as a major political force. Sadr has brought the demand for a timetable for US withdrawal to the center of his political strategy in recent months.

Given the uncertain political future of the country and the growing demand by Shi'ite militias – including those which have been affiliated with Sadr's Mahdi Army – for support for armed activities against the occupation, Iran probably felt that it had little choice but to respond positively.

Although the spokesman for US command recently suggested that Iran has been supporting "rogue elements" fighting against coalition forces, last November US intelligence officials confirmed that Mahdi Army units were being trained by Iranian ally Hezbollah in Lebanon with Sadr's knowledge.

But Iran may also share the interest of the al-Maliki government in having continued US support for the development of Shi'ite security forces. "Tehran is not necessarily in favor of a complete pullout," says Russell.

The actual degree of convergence between US and Iranian interests on Iraq could still be a factor in the bilateral talks on the subject, despite the determination of the still powerful Vice President Dick Cheney to make sure they fail.

War Lies and the 2004 Election
by James Bovard, Posted July 23, 2007 Shortly after he was reelected, President Bush declared that American voters had had their “moment of accountability” regarding the Iraq war. Since he had gotten slightly more than 50 percent of the votes in the November 2004 election, that meant that they had ratified his policies and that Bush was free to do as he chose in the coming years.

Almost all of the Founding Fathers would have recognized Bush’s interpretation as dictatorial tripe. But it is also worthwhile to examine the war frauds by which Bush and Dick Cheney won a second term. This is especially relevant, since Bush and Cheney may use similar frauds to attack Iran.

Bush and Cheney were reelected in large part because they inoculated scores of millions of Americans against the evidence of the deceits and failures of the U.S. war in Iraq. They swayed tens of millions of Americans to take their beliefs from their rulers, not from the facts.

Americans may be more gullible on foreign policy in part because of their greater global ignorance. A 2002 survey for National Geographic found that “roughly 85 percent of young Americans [ages 18 to 24] could not find Afghanistan, Iraq, or Israel on a map.” Almost 30 percent of the young adults surveyed could not locate the Pacific Ocean and 56 percent were unable to locate India. As the old saying goes, “War is God’s way of teaching people geography.”

In the days after 9/11, when pollsters asked Americans who they thought had carried out the 9/11 attacks, only 3 percent of respondents suggested Iraq or Saddam Hussein as culprits. But Bush and Cheney strove to make Americans believe that Saddam was linked to 9/11 or closely associated with the terrorist group that carried out the attack. The Saddam–al-Qaeda link was the linchpin for exploiting 9/11 to justify preemptive attacks around the globe.

In his official notification of invasion sent to Congress on March 18, 2003, Bush declared that he was attacking Iraq “to take the necessary actions against international terrorists and terrorist organizations, including those nations, organizations, or persons who planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001.” Bush tied Saddam to 9/11 even though confidential briefings he received informed him that no evidence of any link had been found. In a speech to troops shortly after Baghdad fell, Bush characterized his attack on Iraq as “one victory in the war on terror that began September 11.”

Months of accusations and insinuations by the Bush administration profoundly affected Americans’ perceptions of Iraq and the war. A February 2003 poll found that 72 percent of Americans believed that Saddam was “personally involved in the September 11 attacks.” Shortly before the March 2003 invasion, almost half of all Americans believed that “most” or “some” of the 9/11 hijackers were Iraqi citizens. Only 17 percent of respondents knew that none of the hijackers was Iraqi.

Throughout 2004, the Saddam–al-Qaeda link was repeatedly officially debunked. A 9/11 Commission staff report on June 16 concluded that there was no evidence of a “collaborative relationship” between Saddam and al-Qaeda. The findings were trumpeted in headlines across the nation. Despite this broad coverage of the report, 55 percent of Bush supporters wrongly believed that the 9/11 Commission reported that “Iraq was providing substantial support to al-Qaeda,” according to a University of Maryland Program on International Policy Attitudes poll a few weeks later. A Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll asked Americans “whether you agree or disagree with [the 9/11 Commission] finding [that] Saddam Hussein and the Iraqi government did not collaborate with al-Qaeda in attacking the United States on 9/11.” Almost half of the respondents disagreed.

Any lingering doubts on this topic should have been quashed on July 9, 2004, when the Senate Intelligence Committee issued a 511-page report on the CIA and Iraq. The report concluded that the CIA “reasonably assessed ... that these contacts [between Saddam and al-Qaeda] did not add up to an established formal relationship.” The report also recognized that the CIA accurately concluded that “to date there was no evidence proving Iraqi complicity or assistance” in the 9/11 attacks. The report noted that the CIA’s accurate judgments on Saddam, al-Qaeda, and the non-link to 9/11 “were widely disseminated [prior to the U.S. invasion of Iraq], though an early version of a key CIA assessment was disseminated only to a limited list of Cabinet members and some sub-Cabinet officials in the administration.” Neither Bush nor Cheney permitted the facts to impede their rhetoric on Iraq.

Encouraging Americans to believe that Saddam was behind 9/11, and to see the Iraq war as vengeance for 9/11, made it far easier to justify an unprovoked attack on a nation that posed no threat to America. A September 2004 Newsweek poll found that 42 percent of Americans believed that Saddam was “directly involved in planning, financing, or carrying out the terrorist attacks.” As of mid October, “75 percent of Bush supporters continue to believe that Iraq was providing substantial support to al-Qaeda, and 63 percent believe that clear evidence of this support has been found,” according to a University of Maryland poll.

The Bush campaign’s portrayal of the invasion of Iraq as a necessary part of the war on terrorism saved the president. The 55 percent of voters who said that the war in Iraq is “part of the war on terrorism” went for Bush by a 4 to 1 margin. The 43 percent who said Iraq was not part of the war on terrorism voted for Kerry by an 8 to 1 margin.


Weapons of mass deception
The Bush team’s invocations of Saddam’s supposed vast arsenal of weapons of mass destruction convinced Americans that the United States could not afford to wait for the UN weapons inspection process to continue. In a March 17, 2003, speech giving Saddam 48 hours to abdicate power, Bush declared, “Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised.” Bush also justified the invasion of Iraq by appealing to UN resolutions that, he said, “authorized” the United States and other governments “to use force in ridding Iraq of weapons of mass destruction.”

The constant references to WMDs by Bush administration officials burned the issue into Americans’ minds. Several months later, almost a quarter of Americans wrongly believed that Iraq had actually used its weapons of mass destruction against American forces during the fighting in March and April 2003.

In the weeks and months after the fall of Baghdad, Bush repeatedly asserted that U.S. forces had discovered WMDs or that Saddam had weapons programs. “We found the weapons of mass destruction. We found biological laboratories,” Bush declared to journalists on May 29, 2003. Five weeks later, he again claimed vindication because “we found a biological lab” in a truck trailer. However, CIA investigators concluded that the trailer had nothing to do with an Iraqi WMD program.

On January 28, 2004, David Kay of the CIA testified to two Senate committees on the result of the almost-finished great WMD hunt. As CBS News noted, “Kay was chosen last year as the Iraq Survey Group leader in part because he was convinced weapons would be found.” Kay’s group included a thousand people and cost about a billion dollars (on top of the costs of the invasion supposedly motivated by WMDs). But Kay announced to the Senate Armed Services Committee that “we were almost all wrong” about Iraq’s possessing WMDs. Kay’s tell-tale “almost all wrong” phrase was hyped in front-page headlines across the nation and got massive airtime on television news and talk shows.

Despite the publicity that Kay’s comments received, a March 2004 poll by the University of Maryland found that “63 percent of Bush supporters thought, incorrectly, that [Kay] had concluded that Iraq had at least a major WMD program.”

On October 7, 2004, Americans heard from Charles Duelfer, also of the CIA and the chief U.S. weapons inspector chosen by Bush to go to Iraq and complete the work of the Iraq Survey Group. Duelfer’s team issued a thousand-page final report that offered literary analysis (speculating on how Hemingway’s short story “The Old Man and the Sea” appealed to Saddam Hussein) in lieu of any WMD discoveries. Duelfer’s report was widely seen as the final demolition of the Bush administration’s original casus belli. The report, coming out the day before the second presidential candidates’ debate, generated front-page headlines. Yet a University of Maryland poll taken after the report’s release found that 57 percent of Bush supporters incorrectly believed that Duelfer “concluded that Iraq did have either WMD (19 percent) or a major program for developing them (38 percent).”

WMD delusions persisted through Election Day. Another University of Maryland poll, shortly before the 2004 election, found that “72 percent of Bush supporters continue to believe that Iraq had actual WMD (47 percent) or a major program for developing them (25 percent).” Fifty-six percent assumed that most experts believed Iraq possessed WMDs at the time of the U.S. invasion. Bush supporters also wrongly believed that the invasion of Iraq was welcomed around the world.

Bush supporters’ approval of the war depended largely on their delusions. They were asked, “If, before the war, U.S. intelligence services had concluded that Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction and was not providing substantial support to al-Qaeda,” what should have been done? “Fifty-eight percent of Bush supporters said in that case the U.S. should not have gone to war. Furthermore, 61 percent express confidence that in that case the President would not have gone to war.”

The October 2004 University of Maryland report explained that Bush supporters “continue to hear the Bush administration confirming these beliefs. Among Bush supporters, an overwhelming 82 percent perceive the Bush administration as saying that Iraq had WMD (63 percent) or a major WMD program (19 percent).... Seventy-five percent of Bush supporters think the Bush administration is currently saying Iraq was providing substantial support to al-Qaeda (56 percent) or even that it was directly involved in 9/11 (19 percent).”

Stephen Kull, director of the University of Maryland’s Program on International Policy Attitudes, commented, “To support the president and to accept that he took the United States to war based on mistaken assumptions likely creates substantial cognitive dissonance, and leads Bush supporters to suppress awareness of unsettling information about prewar Iraq.” The more information about the war that people suppressed, the easier it became for them to support Bush and to view opponents of the war as unpatriotic, un-American, or otherwise possessed by demons.

George W. Bush has not yet had his “moment of accountability” for his war in Iraq. If there is justice, then there will be a full investigation of the lies by which the president and his team paved the way to attack.

In the meantime, Americans should remember the Iraq war frauds and radically discount any White House racketeering for the next war.

James Bovard is the author of Attention Deficit Democracy [2006] as well as The Bush Betrayal [2004], Lost Rights [1994] and Terrorism and Tyranny: Trampling Freedom, Justice and Peace to Rid the World of Evil (Palgrave-Macmillan, September 2003) and serves as a policy advisor for The Future of Freedom Foundation. Send him email.

Original Content at http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_al...o_absolute_.htm

July 26, 2007

30 days to absolute tyranny

By Alex Wallenwein

30 DAYS TO ABSOLUTE TYRANNY

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

30 DAYS TO ABSOLUTE TYRANNY
(Now 23 Days!)
Latest Bush Executive Order Outlaws Iraq War Dissent on Penalty of Full Asset Seizure
In an as yet un-numbered Executive Order (at least the number isn't published), president bush has decreed that your property - all of it - can be taken away at the sole discretion of the Secretary of the Treasury at the mere suspicion that you may commit a crime in the future. You can view and read this latest executive atrocity at the White House website.

An executive order only becomes law if Congress doesn’t overturn it within thirty days after it is published in the Federal Register.

If you own a business, this concerns you. Whether you own it as a sole proprietorship, as a sole shareholder, or even as a partial shareholder of a corporation, you stand to lose all of it if the Secretary thinks you may commit an "act of violence" that may disrupt the war (or peace) effort in Iraq. Naturally, "act of violence" is not defined anywhere in this order.

Once this becomes law, he has all the tools Hitler and Stalin had to keep their respective populations in utter subjection to their will.

The executive order states in Section 1(a) that “all property and interests in property” of “any person determined by the Secretary of the Treasury, in consultation with the Secretary of State and the Secretary of Defense, to have committed, or to pose a significant risk of committing, an act or acts of violence that have the purpose or effect of - blah, blah, blah (followed by a laundry list of “purposes or effects”).

This means that the triggering factor underlying any such blocking order is a mere “determination” by the Secretary of the Treasury that you pose a “significant risk” of committing an act of violence in the future that has any of the listed purposes or effects. All the Secretary then has to do is to “consult” with the secretaries of state and defense. There is not even a requirement that these two agree with the Treasury Secretary’s “determination”(!)

In other words, if the Secretary of the Treasury says that you “pose a significant risk” of committing an act of violence with the purpose or effect of “threatening the peace or stability of Iraq or the Government of Iraq; or undermining efforts to promote economic reconstruction and political reform in Iraq or to provide humanitarian assistance to the Iraqi people”, then the 'bushprez' can block you from accessing your bank account, retirement account, credit cards, or “any property or interest in property” that you may own.

That technically includes your house, whether owned or rented, your car or other means of transportation, whether owned or rented, your business, all the way down to your cell phone, toothpaste and underwear, as well as the twenty bucks you loaned your buddy that he hasn’t paid you back yet.

What is there to keep the Secretary of the Treasury from “determining” that you, because you oppose the war in Iraq, are probably one of those extremist hooligans who protested the WTO in Seattle a few years back, or that you are likely to act like one of them even though you haven’t even participated in those riots? War protesters do these things, don’t they? They are all the same, aren’t they?

If the Secretary “determines” that you probably are one of them and that you “pose a significant risk of committing” an act of violence intended to frustrate the war (or even the peace effort) in Iraq, all of your stuff can be taken away from you - or you can be “blocked” from accessing it, which pretty much amounts to the same thing.

You have no legal recourse under this order. No remedy at law. The order does not provide for compensation to you for the taking of your property. There is no due process requirement that will guarantee you a fair hearing in a court of law.

Unconstitutional? You bet!

But you can’t complain about it.

Why is that?

The president has declared a state of emergency back in 2003 (as he recites in this executive order at the end of the paragraph that starts with “I, GEORGE W. BUSH”). That state of emergency has not been rescinded, to this date.

In a state of emergency, the president has the power to do whatever he wants, and you can’t complain - or else.

This is the clear, logical consequence of Americans’ acquiescing to their government claiming the right to pursue the anti-Christian doctrine of preemptive war.

If the president can launch a war against another country in order to prevent a potential, as yet unrealized future attack, then he can also prosecute a potential criminal at home - or confiscate ALL of his property - for acts that the prez (or his Secretary) simply “determine” might be committed in the future.

We are talking about the imposition, by executive order, of absolute, unrestricted tyranny and despotism in the name of “national security.”

Does this mean he will take your property away from you?

Not necessarily.

But you just gave him (or any future president) the power to do so at any time in the future if he (or she) think it may be a good idea!

Yes, it is you who gave him that power - because you didn’t do anything about it.

No point in blaming anybody else. It’s you who is at fault. If you sit back and wait for somebody else to act on your behalf, you have just given up any legitimate claim to your own right to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness.

Are you going to act?

Better stand up.

If you are a Christian, stand up.

If you are a Democrat, stand up.

If you are a Republican, even a Neocon who thinks the president would never do such a thing -

STAND UP!!
This is no time for playing party politics. If continuing the war in Iraq is more important to you than even the very last shred of your own liberty, then what’s the point in fighting the Jihadists? You have already acquiesced to live exactly the way they want you to live - namely, without any rights, whatsoever.

The only difference is the rhetoric used as justification for your enslavement. Bush uses rhetoric that appeals to US right-wingers, while the Jihadists use rhetoric that appeals to fundamentalist Muslims.

The result is the same.

Now, who is the enemy?

They both are. Each uses the other as justification for imposing a tyrannical regime onto you and everybody else. If you are an American and you value your Liberty, I don’t care what side of the phony political spectrum you currently occupy.

STAND UP!!

An executive order only becomes law if Congress doesn’t overturn it within thirty days after it is published in the Federal Register.

You can still prevent this order from becoming law - and I mean YOU! Not the guy next to you, not your representative in Congress. YOU must act NOW - or it’s all too late.

Call your two Senators. Call your Congressman. RAISE HELL! - but for God’s sake, don’t go out into the streets and smash in store windows to vent your frustration. That would deliver the perfect excuse for Bush to take your stuff away from you, or to have you arrested as a “terrorist” under the Military Commissions Act.

It’s your last chance. If you let this one slip by you, it’s all over with freedom.

One last point that I can’t resist making: If you trust any candidate for president in 2008 to voluntarily rescind this order after he or she becomes president, you ought to have your head examined. They all love the power it gives them. Only Ron Paul will actually do it - and you know that is true!

Alex Wallenwein

Why Germans Supported Hitler
http://www.opednews.com/maxwrite/link.php?id=39229

by Jacob G. Hornberger

It has long intrigued me why the German people supported Adolf Hitler and his Nazi regime. After all, every schoolchild in America is taught that Hitler and his Nazi cohorts were the very epitome of evil. How could ordinary German citizens support people who were so obviously monstrous in nature?

Standing against the Nazi tide was a remarkable group of young people known as the White Rose. Led by Hans and Sophie Scholl, a German brother and sister who were students at the University of Munich, the White Rose consisted of college students and a college professor who risked their lives to circulate anti-government pamphlets in the midst of World War II. Their arrest and trial was depicted in the German movie Sophie Scholl: The Final Days, which was recently released on DVD in the United States.

Of all the essays on liberty I have written in the past 20 years, my favorite is “The White Rose: A Lesson in Dissent,” which I am pleased to say was later reprinted in Voices of the Holocaust, an anthology on the Holocaust for high-school students. The story of the White Rose is the most remarkable case of courage I have ever come across. It even inspired me to visit the University of Munich a few years ago, where portions of the White Rose pamphlets have been permanently enshrined on bricks laid into a plaza at the entrance to the school.

A contrast to the Scholl movie is another recent German movie, Downfall, which details Hitler’s final days in the bunker, where he committed suicide near the end of the war. Among the people around Hitler was 22-year-old Traudl Junge, who became his secretary in 1942 and who faithfully served him in that capacity until the end. For me, the most stunning part of the film occurred at the end, when the real Traudl Junge (that is, not the actress who portrays her in the film) says,

All these horrors I’ve heard of ... I assured myself with the thought of not being personally guilty. And that I didn’t know anything about the enormous scale of it. But one day I walked by a memorial plate of Sophie Scholl in the Franz-Joseph-Strasse.... And at that moment I actually realized ... that it might have been possible to get to know things.

So here were two separate roads taken by German citizens. Most Germans took the road that Traudl Junge took – supporting their government in time of deep crisis. A few Germans took the road that Hans and Sophie Scholl took – opposing their government despite the deep crisis facing their nation.

Why the difference? Why did some Germans support the Hitler regime while others opposed it?

Each American should first ask himself what he would have done if he had been a German citizen during the Hitler regime. Would you have supported your government or would you have opposed it, not only during the 1930s but also after the outbreak of World War II?

After all, it’s one thing to look at Nazi Germany retrospectively and from the vantage point of an outside citizen who has heard since childhood about the death camps and of Hitler’s monstrous nature. We look at those grainy films of Hitler delivering his bombastic speeches and our automatic reaction is that we would have never supported the man and his political party. But it’s quite another thing to place one’s self in the shoes of an ordinary German citizen and ask, “What would I have done?”

What we often forget is that many Germans did not support Hitler and the Nazis at the start of the 1930s. Keep in mind that in the 1932 presidential election, Hitler received only 30.1 percent of the national vote. In the subsequent run-off election, he received only 36.8 percent of the vote. It wasn’t until President Hindenburg appointed him as chancellor in 1933 that Hitler began consolidating power.

Among the major factors that motivated Germans to support Hitler during the 1930s was the tremendous economic crisis known as the Great Depression, which had struck Germany as hard as it had the United States and other parts of the world. What did many Germans do in response to the Great Depression? They did the same thing that many Americans did – they looked for a strong leader to get them out of the economic crisis.
Hitler and Franklin Roosevelt

In fact, there is a remarkable similarity between the economic policies that Hitler implemented and those that Franklin Roosevelt enacted. Keep in mind, first of all, that the German National Socialists were strong believers in Social Security, which Roosevelt introduced to the United States as part of his New Deal. Keep in mind also that the Nazis were strong believers in such other socialist schemes as public (i.e., government) schooling and national health care. In fact, my hunch is that very few Americans realize that Social Security, public schooling, Medicare, and Medicaid have their ideological roots in German socialism.

Hitler and Roosevelt also shared a common commitment to such programs as government-business partnerships. In fact, until the Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional, Roosevelt’s National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA), which cartelized American industry, along with his “Blue Eagle” propaganda campaign, was the type of economic fascism that Hitler himself was embracing in Germany (as fascist ruler Benito Mussolini was also doing in Italy).

As John Toland points out in his book Adolf Hitler, “Hitler had genuine admiration for the decisive manner in which the President had taken over the reins of government. ‘I have sympathy for Mr. Roosevelt,’ he told a correspondent of the New York Times two months later, ‘because he marches straight toward his objectives over Congress, lobbies and bureaucracy.’ Hitler went on to note that he was the sole leader in Europe who expressed ‘understanding of the methods and motives of President Roosevelt.’”

As Srdja Trifkovic, foreign-affairs editor for Chronicles magazine, stated in his article “FDR and Mussolini: A Tale of Two Fascists,” Roosevelt and his “Brain Trust,” the architects of the New Deal, were fascinated by Italy’s fascism – a term which was not pejorative at the time. In America, it was seen as a form of economic nationalism built around consensus planning by the established elites in government, business, and labor.

Both Hitler and Roosevelt also believed in massive injections of government spending in both the social-welfare sector and the military-industrial sector as a way to bring economic prosperity to their respective nations. As the famed economist John Kenneth Galbraith put it,

Hitler also anticipated modern economic policy ... by recognizing that a rapid approach to full employment was only possible if it was combined with wage and price controls. That a nation oppressed by economic fear would respond to Hitler as Americans did to F.D.R. is not surprising.

One of Hitler’s proudest accomplishments was the construction of the national autobahn system, a massive socialist public-works project that ultimately became the model for the interstate highway system in the United States.

By the latter part of the 1930s, many Germans had the same perception about Hitler that many Americans had about Roosevelt. They honestly believed that Hitler was bringing Germany out of the Depression. For the first time since the Treaty of Versailles, the treaty that had ended World War I with humiliating terms for Germany, the German people were regaining a sense of pride in themselves and in their nation, and they were giving the credit to Hitler’s strong leadership in time of deep national crisis.

Toland points out in his Hitler biography that Germans weren’t the only ones who admired Hitler during the 1930s:

Churchill had once paid a grudging compliment to the Führer in a letter to the Times: “I have always said that I hoped if Great Britain were beaten in a war we should find a Hitler who would lead us back to our rightful place among nations.”

Hitler was a strong believer in national service, especially for German young people. That was what the Hitler Youth was all about – inculcating in young people the notion that they owed a duty to devote at least part of their lives to society. It was an idea also resonating in the collectivist atmosphere that was permeating the United States during the 1930s.
Hitler and anti-Semitism

While U.S. officials today never cease to remind us that Hitler was evil incarnate, the question is: Was he so easily recognized as such during the 1930s, not only by German citizens but also by other people around the world, especially those who believed in the idea of a strong political leader in times of crisis? Keep in mind that while Hitler and his cohorts were harassing, abusing, and periodically arresting German Jews as the 1930s progressed, culminating in Kristallnacht, the “night of the broken glass,” when tens of thousands of Jews were beaten and taken to concentration camps, it was not exactly the type of thing that aroused major moral outrage among U.S. officials, many of whom themselves had a strong sense of anti-Semitism.

For example, when Hitler offered to let German Jews leave Germany, the U.S. government used immigration controls to keep them from immigrating here. In fact, as Arthur D. Morse pointed out in his book While Six Million Died: A Chronicle of American Apathy, five days after Kristallnacht, which occurred in November 1938, at a White House press conference, a reporter asked Roosevelt, “Would you recommend a relaxation of our immigration restrictions so that the Jewish refugees could be received in this country?” The president replied, “This is not in contemplation. We have the quota system.”

Let’s also not forget the infamous 1939 (i.e., after Kristallnacht) “voyage of the damned,” in which U.S. officials refused to permit German Jews to disembark at Miami Harbor from the German ship the SS St. Louis, knowing that they would be returned to Hitler’s clutches in Nazi Germany.

(The Holocaust Museum in Washington, to its credit, has an excellent exhibition on U.S. government indifference to the plight of the Jews under Hitler’s control, a dark period in American history to which all too many Americans are never exposed in their public-school training. See also my June 1991 Freedom Daily article “Locking Out the Immigrant.”)

Check out this interesting website, which details a very nice pictorial description of Hitler’s summer home in Bavaria published by a prominent English magazine named Home and Gardens in November 1938. Now, ask yourself: If it was so obvious that Hitler was evil incarnate during the 1930s, would a prominent English magazine have been risking its readership by publishing such a profile? And let’s also not forget that it was Hitler’s Germany that hosted the worldwide Olympics in 1936, games in which the United States, Great Britain, and many other countries participated. Ask yourself: Why would they have done that?

The Great Depression was not the only factor that was leading people to support Hitler. There was also the ever-present fear of communism among the German people. In fact, throughout the 1930s it could be said that Germany was facing the same type of Cold War against the Soviet Union that the United States faced from 1945 to 1989. Ever since the chaos of World War I had given rise to the Russian Revolution, Germany faced the distinct possibility of being taken over by the communists (a threat that materialized into reality for East Germans at the end of World War II). It was a threat that Hitler, like later American presidents, used as a justification for ever-increasing spending on the military-industrial complex. The ever-present danger of Soviet communism led many Germans to gravitate to the support of their government, just as it later moved many Americans to support big government and a strong military-industrial complex in their country throughout the Cold War.
Hitler’s war on terrorism

One of the most searing events in German history occurred soon after Hitler took office. On February 27, 1933, in what easily could be termed the 9/11 terrorist attack of that time, German terrorists fire-bombed the German parliament building. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that Adolf Hitler, one of the strongest political leaders in history, would declare war on terrorism and ask the German parliament (the Reichstag) to give him temporary emergency powers to fight the terrorists. Passionately claiming that such powers were necessary to protect the freedom and well-being of the German people, Hitler persuaded the German legislators to give him the emergency powers he needed to confront the terrorist crisis. What became known as the Enabling Act allowed Hitler to suspend civil liberties “temporarily,” that is, until the crisis had passed. Not surprisingly, however, the threat of terrorism never subsided and Hitler’s “temporary” emergency powers, which were periodically renewed by the Reichstag, were still in effect when he took his own life some 12 years later.

Is it so surprising that ordinary German citizens were willing to support their government’s suspension of civil liberties in response to the threat of terrorism, especially after the terrorist strike on the Reichstag?

During the 1930s, the United States faced the Great Depression, and many Americans were willing to accede to Roosevelt’s assumption of massive emergency powers, including the power to control economic activity and also to nationalize and confiscate people’s gold.

During the Cold War, the fear of communism induced Americans to permit their government to collect massive amounts of income taxes to fund the military-industrial complex and to let U.S. officials send more than 100,000 American soldiers to their deaths in undeclared wars in Korea and Vietnam.

Since the 9/11 attacks, Americans have been more than willing for their government to infringe on vital civil liberties, including habeas corpus, involve the nation in an undeclared and unprovoked war on Iraq, and spend ever-growing amounts of money on the military-industrial complex, all in the name of the “war on terrorism.”
Crises versus liberty

While the American people faced these three crises – the Great Depression, the communist threat, and the war on terrorism at three separate times, the German people during the Hitler regime faced the same three crises all within a short span of time. Given that, why would it surprise anyone that many Germans would gravitate toward the support of their government just as many Americans gravitated toward the support of their government during each of those crises?

Even Sophie Scholl and her brother Hans eagerly joined the Hitler Youth when they were in high school. In the ever-growing crisis environment of the 1930s, millions of other ordinary Germans also came to support their government, enthusiastically cheering their leaders, supporting their policies, and sending their children into national service and looking the other way when the government became abusive. Among the few who resisted were Robert and Magdalena Scholl, the parents of Hans and Sophie, who gradually opened the minds of their children to the truth.

The three major crises faced by Germany in the 1930s – economic depression, communism, and terrorism – pale to relative insignificance compared with the crisis that Germany faced during the 1940s – World War II, the crisis that threatened, at least in the minds of Hitler and his cohorts, the very existence of Germany. That Hans and Sophie Scholl and other German students began circulating leaflets calling on Germans to oppose their government in the midst of a major war, when German soldiers were dying on two fronts, makes the story of the White Rose even more remarkable and perhaps even a bit discomforting for some Americans.

The most remarkable part of the movie Sophie Scholl: The Final Days is the courtroom scene, which is based on recently discovered German archives. Sophie and her brother Hans, along with their friend Christoph Probst, stand before the infamous Roland Freisler, presiding judge of the People’s Court, whom Hitler had immediately sent to Munich after the Gestapo’s arrest of the Scholls and Probst.

The People’s Court had been established by Hitler as part of the government’s war on terrorism after the terrorist firebombing of the German parliament building. Displeased with the independence of the judiciary in the trials of the suspected Reichstag terrorists, Hitler had set up the People’s Court to ensure that terrorists and traitors would receive the “proper” verdict and punishment. Judicial proceedings were conducted in secret for reasons of national security, which is why Freisler threw Hans’s and Sophie’s parents out of the courtroom when they tried to enter.

At the trial, Freisler railed at the three young people before him, accusing them of being ungrateful traitors for having opposed their government in the midst of the war. His rant went to the core of why many Germans supported Hitler during World War II.

From the first grade in public (i.e., government) schools, it was ingrained in German children that, during times of war, it was the duty of every German to come to the support of his country, which, in the minds of the German officials, was synonymous with the German government. Once a war was under way, the time for discussion and debate was over, at least until the war was over. Opposition to the war would demoralize the troops, it was said, and, therefore, hurt the war effort. Opposing the government (and the troops) in wartime, therefore, was considered treasonous.

Keep in mind that at the time the Scholls were caught distributing their anti-war and anti-government leaflets – 1943 – Germany was fighting a war for its survival on two fronts: the Eastern front against the Soviet Union and the Western front against Britain and the United States. Thousands of German soldiers were dying on the battlefield, especially in the Soviet Union. Whether they agreed with the war effort or not, the German people were expected to support the troops, which meant supporting the war effort.
Lies and wars of aggression

One might object that, since Germany was the aggressor in the conflict, the German people should have refused to support the war. That objection, however, ignores an important point: that in the minds of many Germans, Germany was not the aggressor in World War II but rather the defending nation. After all, that’s what they had been told by their government officials.

An aggressor nation will inevitably try to manipulate events so as to appear to be the victimized nation – that is, the nation that is defending itself against aggression. In that way, government officials can tell the citizenry, “We are innocent! We were just minding our own business when our nation was attacked.” Naturally, the citizenry can then assume that there was nothing that could have been done to prevent the war and will be more willing to defend their nation against the attackers.

That is exactly what happened in Germany’s invasion of Poland, which precipitated World War II. After several weeks in which tensions between the two nations were heightened, German soldiers on the Polish-German border were attacked by Polish troops. Hitler followed the time-honored script by dramatically announcing that Germany had been attacked by Poland, requiring Germany to defend herself with a counterattack and an invasion of Poland.

There was one big problem, however – one that the German people were unaware of: the Polish troops who had done the attacking were actually German troops dressed up in Polish uniforms. In other words, German officials had lied about the cause of the war.

Now, some might argue that Germans should not have automatically believed Hitler, especially knowing that throughout history rulers had lied about matters relating to war. But Germans took the position that they had the right and the duty to place their trust in their government officials. After all, Germans felt, their government officials had access to information that the people did not have. Many Germans felt that their government would never lie to them about a matter as important as war.

Also, keep in mind that under the Nazi system Hitler had the sole prerogative of deciding whether to send the nation into war. While he might consult with the Reichstag or advise it of his plans, he did not need its consent to declare and wage war against another nation. He – and he alone – had the power to decide whether to go to war. Therefore, given that Hitler was not required to secure a declaration of war from the Reichstag before going to war against Poland, there was no real way to test whether his claims of a Polish attack were in fact true.

After the German “counterattack” against Poland, England and France declared war on Germany. (Oddly, neither country declared war on the Soviet Union, which also invaded Poland soon after Germany did.) Thus, in the minds of the German people, England and France were coming to the aid of the aggressor – Poland – necessitating Germany’s defending itself against all three nations.
Loyalty and obeying orders

German soldiers, of course, were also expected to do their duty and follow the orders of their commander in chief. Under Germany’s system, it was not up to the individual soldier to reach his own independent judgment about whether Germany was the aggressor in the conflict or whether Hitler had lied about the reasons for going to war. Thus, German soldiers, both Protestant and Catholic, understood that they could kill Polish soldiers with a clear conscience because, again, it was not up to the individual soldier to decide on the justice of the war. He could entrust that decision to his superior officers and political leaders and simply assume that the order to invade was morally and legally justified.

Once troops were committed to battle, most German civilians understood their duty – support the troops who were now fighting and dying on the battlefield for their country, for the fatherland. The time for debating and discussing the causes of the war would have to wait until the war’s end. What mattered, once the war was under way, was winning.

Hermann Goering, founder of the Gestapo, explained the strategy:

Why, of course, the people don’t want war.... Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally, the common people don’t want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship....

Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.


Recognizing and opposing evil

Some might argue that Germans, unlike people in other nations, should not have trusted and supported their government officials during the war because it was obvious that Hitler and his henchmen were evil. The problem with that argument, however, is that throughout the 1930s many Germans and many foreigners did not automatically come to the conclusion that Hitler was evil. On the contrary, as we saw in part one of this article, many of them saw Hitler as exercising the same kind of strong leadership that Franklin Roosevelt was exercising to bring the United States out of the Great Depression and, in fact, as implementing many of the same kinds of programs that Roosevelt was implementing in the United States. (For more on this point, see the excellent book published last year Three New Deals: Reflections on Roosevelt’s America, Mussolini’s Italy, and Hitler’s Germany, 1933–1939, by Wolfgang Schivelbusch.)

Moreover, while it’s true that throughout the 1930s Hitler was harassing, abusing, and mistreating German Jews, many people all over the world didn’t care, because anti-Semitism was not limited to Germany but instead extended to many parts of the globe.

Don’t forget, for example, about how the Roosevelt administration used immigration controls to prevent German Jews from immigrating to the United States.

Even as late as 1938 U.S. officials refused to let German Jews disembark at Miami Harbor from the SS St. Louis, knowing that they would have to be returned to Hitler’s Germany.

Even after the outbreak of the war, when the severity of the Nazi threat to Jews skyrocketed, the constantly shifting maze of U.S. immigration rules and regulations prevented Anne Frank and her family, along with lots of other Jewish families, from immigrating to the United States.

Some might say that the German people should have ceased supporting their government once the Holocaust began. There are two big problems with that argument, however. First, the German people didn’t know what was going on in the death camps and, second, they didn’t want to know. After all, the death camps and the Holocaust didn’t get established until after the war was well under way and when Hitler’s power over the German people was absolute – and brutal.

How was the average German supposed to know about what was going on inside the death camps? Suppose a German walked up to a concentration camp, knocked on the gates, and said, “I have heard that you are doing bad things to people inside this camp. I would like to come in and inspect the premises.” What do you think would have been the answer? Most likely, he would have been invited inside the compound, as a permanent guest with a very shortened life span.

After all, what government is going to permit its citizens to know its most secret operations, especially during times of war? Not even the U.S. government does that.

For example, what do you think would happen if an American citizen today discovered the location of one of the CIA’s secret overseas detention facilities and then knocked on the front door, saying, “I’ve heard rumors that you are torturing people here. I would like to come in and inspect the premises to see whether those rumors are true.”

Does anyone honestly think that the CIA would let the person inside those supersecret facilities? Now, imagine a situation in which the United States is fighting a major war for its survival against, say, China on one side, and an alliance of Middle East countries on the other. Suppose also that the United States is almost certain to lose the war and that foreign troops are slowly but surely closing in on the U.S. president and his cabinet. What are the chances that the CIA would permit an American citizen to inspect the insides of its prisoner facilities under those circumstances? Indeed, what are the chances that any American is going to make such a demand under those circumstances?

Most Germans did not want to know what was going on inside the concentration camps. If they knew that bad things were occurring, their consciences might start bothering them, which might motivate them to take action to bring the wrongdoing to a stop, which could be dangerous. It was easier – and safer – to look the other way and simply entrust such important matters to their government officials. In that way, it was believed, the government, rather than the individual citizen, would bear the legal and moral consequences for wrongful acts that the government was committing secretly.

Of course, government officials encouraged that mindset of conscious indifference. Don’t concern yourselves with such things, they suggested; just leave them to us – after all, we are at war and these are things that are best left to your government officials.

No doubt that by the time World War II was well under way some Germans were thinking that the time for protesting had been during the 1930s, when Germans were reaching out for a “strong leader” to get them out of “crises” and “emergencies,” and when protests against the government were much less dangerous.
Patriotism and courage

All this, obviously, places Hans and Sophie Scholl and the other members of the White Rose in a remarkable light, one that even many Americans might find discomforting. After all, it’s easy for an American to look at Nazi Germany from the perspective of an outsider and one who has the benefit of historical knowledge, especially about the Holocaust. The interesting question, however, is, What would Americans have done if they had been German citizens during World War II? Would they have opposed their government, as the members of the White Rose did, or would they have supported their government, especially knowing that the troops were fighting and dying on the battlefield?

In one of their leaflets, the members of the White Rose wrote, “We are your bad conscience.” They were asking Germans to rise above the old, degenerate concept of patriotism that entailed blindly supporting one’s government in time of war. They were asking German soldiers to rise above the old, degenerate concept of blind obedience to orders. They were asking Germans to confront openly the rumors of what German officials were doing to the Jews in the concentration camps. They were asking German citizens, both civilian and military, to make an independent judgment on both the Hitler regime and the war, to judge both the government and the war as immoral and illegitimate, and to take the necessary steps to put a stop to both.

They were asking Germans to embrace a different and higher concept of patriotism – one that involves a devotion to a set of moral principles and values rather than blind allegiance to one’s government in time of war. It was a type of patriotism that involved opposition to one’s own government, especially in time of war, when government is engaged in conduct that violates moral principles and values.

The story of the White Rose is one of the most remarkable stories of courage in history. At the trial, Christoph Probst asked Freisler to spare his life, an understandable request given that his wife had recently given birth to their third child. Neither Sophie nor her brother Hans flinched. Sophie bluntly told Freisler that the war was lost and that German soldiers were being sacrificed for nothing, a statement that, from the looks on the faces of the military brass attending the trial in the film, momentarily hit home. She said that one day Freisler and his ilk would be sitting in the dock being judged by others for their crimes. She bluntly told him, “Somebody, after all, had to make a start. What we wrote and said is also believed by many others. They just don’t dare express themselves as we did.”

Freisler quickly issued the preordained verdict – Guilty – and sentenced the defendants to death, a sentence that was carried out at the guillotine three days after they had been arrested. After all, as Freisler declared, Hans and Sophie Scholl and their friend Christoph Probst had opposed their government during time of war. In Freisler’s mind – indeed, in the minds of many Germans – what better evidence of treason than that?

July 19, 2007

Jacob Hornberger [send him mail] is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation.

Copyright © 2007 Future of Freedom Foundation

Original Content at http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_wa...the_country.htm

July 26, 2007

America: The Country That Spies Better on Itself Than Other Countries

By Wayne Madsen

July 25, 2007

On July 9, 2007, WMR reported that the March 10, 2004, hospital drama over then-White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales and Bush Chief of Staff Andrew Card showing up in ailing Attorney General John Ashcroft's hospital room to get his signature on what was reportedly a warrantless wiretapping program, a part of the Terrorist Surveillance Program, involved a different surveillance program. WMR reported, "After 9/11, the Bush White House used FEMA's [Federal Emergency Management Agency] secret and illegal database of American citizens, code-named Main Core, to target American citizens with electronic and other surveillance. FEMA's database had increased in size with the addition of raw telecommunications intercept data on American citizens obtained from the National Security Agency (NSA)."

Yesterday, Gonzales testified that the program he and Card were trying to get Ashcroft to approve had nothing to do with the Terrorist Surveillance Program. Gonzales stated, "The disagreement that occurred was about other intelligence activities, and the reason for the visit to the hospital was about other intelligence activities . . . It was not about the terrorist surveillance program that the president announced to the American people."

July 25, 2007 -- GOP runs nationwide espionage operation

WMR has learned that the Republican Party, under the aegis of Karl Rove and a network of political operatives serving in state Republican Party committees, various US Attorneys offices, and federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies, has established a nationwide surveillance and opposition research operation that targets opponents of the White House and the Republican Party.

Targets of the operation include Democratic office holders and candidates running against Republican incumbents; journalists whose writings are considered anti-Bush and anti-GOP; anti-war, civil liberties, and environmental groups; and government and private industry whistleblowers and leakers.

Targets are subjected to eavesdropping, surveillance, and harassment that is not limited to vandalism, bogus criminal and civil charges, and unfounded "whispering campaigns."

July 24, 2007 -- Another confirmation of Cheney personality change

The editor spoke to a long-time fixture in Washington politics who confirmed previous reports that Vice President Dick Cheney underwent a complete personality change after he became Vice President in January 2001.

Others who have reported the same personality change include former National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft and former Secretary of State Colin Powell, both of whom worked closely with Cheney when he was Secretary of Defense in the George H. W. Bush administration.

Our source also reports a culture in the George W. Bush White House of intimidation of its opponents. The intimidation goes as far as illegally tapping telephones and reading e-mail and regular mail.

WMR has previously reported that sudden personality change is a normal sign of an individual being blackmailed.





Authors Website: http://www.waynemadsenreport.com

Authors Bio: For more, visit Wayne Madsen Report, which its publisher, Wayne Madsen, keeps refreshed with more news than any one reporter has a right to.

Wayne Madsen is an investigative journalist, nationally distributed columnist, and author who has covered Washington, DC, politics, national security, and intelligence issues since 1994. He has written for The Village Voice, The Progressive, CAQ, Counterpunch, and the Intelligence Newsletter (based in Paris).

Look for his new book, Overthrow a Fascist Regime on $15 a Day: The Internet Irregulars vs. The Powers That Be!, in the fall.

<h1 align="center">Press Release
</h1> <h2 align="center">New CEPR Paper Looks At Venezuela's Economy During the Chávez Years
</h2>
For Immediate Release: July 26, 2007

Contact: Dan Beeton, 202-293-5380 x104

Washington, DC: A new paper from the Center for Economic and Policy Research looks at the Venezuelan economy during the last eight years and finds that it does not fit the mold of an "oil boom headed for a bust," as is commonly believed.

"There's no obvious end in sight for Venezuela's current economic expansion," said economist Mark Weisbrot, Co-Director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research and lead author of the paper "The Venezuelan Economy in the Chávez Years."

The paper notes that Venezuela's economy was wracked by political instability for the first four years of President Hugo Chávez's tenure, but has grown steadily and rapidly over the last four years, after political stability returned to the country following the oil strike of December 2002 to February 2003.

Since the bottom of that downturn in the first quarter of 2003, Venezuela's real GDP has grown by 76 percent.

Moreover, the private sector is still a larger share of the economy than it was before President Chávez took office.

In real (inflation-adjusted) terms, social spending per person has increased by 170 percent during the period 1998-2006. But this does not include the state oil company PDVSA's social spending, which was 7.3 percent of GDP in 2006. With this included, social spending was at least 314 percent more in 2006 than in 1998 (in terms of real social spending per person). This has brought about significant gains for the poor in health care, subsidized food, and access to education, some of which are detailed in the paper.

The official poverty rate, which measures only cash income and does not include such advances as increased access to health care and education, has dropped by 31 percent from 1998 to the end of 2006 - from 43.9 percent of households to 30.6 percent. Measured unemployment has dropped from 15 percent in June 1999 to 8.3 percent in June 2007.

The authors also look at fiscal, monetary, exchange rate and other government policies, as well as investment and the sustainability of the expansion. They note that the government faces significant challenges over the intermediate run in controlling inflation and bringing Venezuela's currency to a more competitive level. However, the country's declining public debt (as a percentage of GDP), large current account surplus, and the accumulation of reserves have given the government considerable insurance against a decline in oil prices. This favorable macroeconomic situation has also left the government with much flexibility in dealing with inflation and the related imbalance in the exchange rate. The authors therefore conclude that - contrary to popular belief -- there is no imminent threat to the country's current economic expansion.



Center for Economic and Policy Research, 1611 Connecticut Ave, NW, Suite 400, Washington, DC 20009
Phone: (202) 293-5380, Fax: (202) 588-1356, Home: www.cepr.net

Contempt of Congress
Showdown Over Executive Privilege
http://www.counterpunch.org/cohn07262007.html

By MARJORIE COHN

George W. Bush's presidential tenure has been marked by one cover-up after another. But the masterful spinning of Karl Rove and a compliant media enabled Bush to get away with it. Now that the Democrat-controlled Congress is investigating administration malfeasance, Bush's cover-ups have come cloaked in the guise of "executive privilege."

Bush has claimed executive privilege in resisting congressional subpoenas in the investigation of the U.S. Attorney firing scandal. U.S. Attorneys who weren't "loyal Bushies" were ousted in a mass purge. Bush instructed former White House political director Sara Taylor and former White House counsel Harriet Miers to refuse to testify about any "White House consideration, deliberations or communications" regarding the firings. He also instructed his chief of staff Joshua Bolten to withhold documents demanded by the House Judiciary Committee. Defying a congressional subpoena is a crime.

Taylor testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee, invoking the privilege selectively. Miers's and Bolten's situation is even more problematic. They refused to show-up at the House committee altogether. A witness must appear, be sworn, and then invoke the privilege. Miers and Bolten committed a crime when they failed to appear. They could be locked up for ignoring the subpoenas. Bush will claim the Executive is supreme and that his order to Miers and Bolten nullifies the subpoenas.

There are already signs that Bush will refuse to allow his Justice Department to enforce congressional contempt charges. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy responded angrily, saying, "By acting above the law, this President and Vice President seek to override the independence of law enforcement and manipulate our valued system of checks and balances," adding, "an independent review is probably in order." It remains to be seen whether Congress will match its rhetoric with its votes.

As it did after the Haditha massacre, the U.S. military covered up the real cause of Pat Tillman's death. After claiming he died in a heroic gun battle with the enemy, the administration was later compelled to admit Tillman died from "friendly-fire." When the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform subpoenaed "all documents received or generated by any official in the Executive Office of the President" relating to Tillman's death, Bush refused, claiming executive privilege. Again, a showdown is looming, this time over documents.

Chairman Henry Waxman and ranking Committee Republican Tom Davis wrote a letter to White House Counsel Fred Fielding, which said: "The Committee hearing [on Tillman's death]. . . raised questions about whether the administration has been providing accurate information to Congress and the American people about the ongoing war in Iraq and Afghanistan."

Congress has three options. First, if a majority of the judiciary committee and the full chamber agree, they can issue contempt citations and then certify them to the United States Attorney for the District of Columbia, "whose duty it shall be to bring the matter before the grand jury for its action," according to a federal statute. But in spite of that statute, the White House will reportedly forbid the Justice Department from pursuing contempt charges.

Second, Congress could invoke its own "inherent contempt" power, direct the Sergeant-at-Arms to arrest the recalcitrant witness, and imprison her in the Capitol basement. This power was last used in 1934.

Finally, Congress can hire counsel to enforce the subpoenas in civil court.

In the past, when the White House and Congress have clashed over claims of executive privilege, the President generally capitulated before criminal proceedings began. But Bush has consistently defied Congress and the courts with his secret spying program and his signing statements. He will likely hold firm, banking on favorable rulings in the increasingly conservative Supreme Court.

Perhaps Congress should subpoena Dick Cheney to shed light on these matters. Since Cheney denies belonging to the executive branch, he'd be hard pressed to assert executive privilege.

Marjorie Cohn is a professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law and president of the National Lawyers Guild. She is the author of Cowboy Republic: Six Ways the Bush Gang Has Defied the Law

Nuclear News Update:

•"Indian Cabinet Approves Technical Details of Civilian Nuclear Pact with U.S." International Herald Tribune
•"'123 Agreement Preserves India’s Right to Reprocess Spent Fuel..." Rajya Sabha and MP K. Kasturirangan, Indian Express - Opinion
•"Pakistani Nukes and Global Hazards." Alexander Koldobsky, RIA Novosti - Opinion
•"North Korea Wants Light-Water Reactors," Ohmy News
•"Russia Delays Iran Nuclear Plant to 2008: RIA," Reuters
•"Candidates See Iran Nuclear Threat," Reuters

The Village Voice
http://www.villagevoice.com/generic/show_p...W4maWQ9NTM1ODI=
The Jesus Landing Pad
Bush White House checked with rapture Christians before latest Israel move
by Rick Perlstein
May 18th, 2004 10:00 AM


It was an e-mail we weren't meant to see. Not for our eyes were the notes that showed White House staffers taking two-hour meetings with Christian fundamentalists, where they passed off bogus social science on gay marriage as if it were holy writ and issued fiery warnings that "the Presidents [sic] Administration and current Government is engaged in cultural, economical, and social struggle on every level"—this to a group whose representative in Israel believed herself to have been attacked by witchcraft unleashed by proximity to a volume of Harry Potter. Most of all, apparently, we're not supposed to know the National Security Council's top Middle East aide consults with apocalyptic Christians eager to ensure American policy on Israel conforms with their sectarian doomsday scenarios.

But now we know.

"Everything that you're discussing is information you're not supposed to have," barked Pentecostal minister Robert G. Upton when asked about the off-the-record briefing his delegation received on March 25. Details of that meeting appear in a confidential memo signed by Upton and obtained by the Voice.

The e-mailed meeting summary reveals NSC Near East and North African Affairs director Elliott Abrams sitting down with the Apostolic Congress and massaging their theological concerns. Claiming to be "the Christian Voice in the Nation's Capital," the members vociferously oppose the idea of a Palestinian state. They fear an Israeli withdrawal from Gaza might enable just that, and they object on the grounds that all of Old Testament Israel belongs to the Jews. Until Israel is intact and Solomon's temple rebuilt, they believe, Christ won't come back to earth.

Abrams attempted to assuage their concerns by stating that "the Gaza Strip had no significant Biblical influence such as Joseph's tomb or Rachel's tomb and therefore is a piece of land that can be sacrificed for the cause of peace."

Three weeks after the confab, President George W. Bush reversed long-standing U.S. policy, endorsing Israeli sovereignty over parts of the West Bank in exchange for Israel's disengagement from the Gaza Strip.

In an interview with the Voice, Upton denied having written the document, though it was sent out from an e-mail account of one of his staffers and bears the organization's seal, which is nearly identical to the Great Seal of the United States. Its idiosyncratic grammar and punctuation tics also closely match those of texts on the Apostolic Congress's website, and Upton verified key details it recounted, including the number of participants in the meeting ("45 ministers including wives") and its conclusion "with a heart-moving send-off of the President in his Presidential helicopter."

Upton refused to confirm further details.

Affiliated with the United Pentecostal Church, the Apostolic Congress is part of an important and disciplined political constituency courted by recent Republican administrations. As a subset of the broader Christian Zionist movement, it has a lengthy history of opposition to any proposal that will not result in what it calls a "one-state solution" in Israel.

The White House's association with the congress, which has just posted a new staffer in Israel who may be running afoul of Israel's strict anti-missionary laws, also raises diplomatic concerns.

The staffer, Kim Hadassah Johnson, wrote in a report obtained by the Voice, "We are establishing the Meet the Need Fund in Israel—'MNFI.' . . . The fund will be an Interest Free Loan Fund that will enable us to loan funds to new believers (others upon application) who need assistance. They will have the opportunity to repay the loan (although it will not be mandatory)." When that language was read to Moshe Fox, minister for public and interreligious affairs at the Israeli Embassy in Washington, he responded, "It sounds against the law which prohibits any kind of money or material [inducement] to make people convert to another religion. That's what it sounds like." (Fox's judgment was e-mailed to Johnson, who did not return a request for comment.)

The Apostolic Congress dates its origins to 1981, when, according to its website, "Brother Stan Wachtstetter was able to open the door to Apostolic Christians into the White House." Apostolics, a sect of Pentecostals, claim legitimacy as the heirs of the original church because they, as the 12 apostles supposedly did, baptize converts in the name of Jesus, not in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Ronald Reagan bore theological affinities with such Christians because of his belief that the world would end in a fiery Armageddon. Reagan himself referenced this belief explicitly a half-dozen times during his presidency.

While the language of apocalyptic Christianity is absent from George W. Bush's speeches, he has proven eager to work with apocalyptics—a point of pride for Upton. "We're in constant contact with the White House," he boasts. "I'm briefed at least once a week via telephone briefings. . . . I was there about two weeks ago . . . At that time we met with the president."

Last spring, after President Bush announced his Road Map plan for peace in the Middle East, the Apostolic Congress co-sponsored an effort with the Jewish group Americans for a Safe Israel that placed billboards in 23 cities with a quotation from Genesis ("Unto thy offspring will I give this land") and the message, "Pray that President Bush Honors God's Covenant with Israel. Call the White House with this message." It then provided the White House phone number and the Apostolic Congress's Web address.

In the interview with the Voice, Pastor Upton claimed personal responsibility for directing 50,000 postcards to the White House opposing the Road Map, which aims to create a Palestinian state. "I'm in total disagreement with any form of Palestinian state," Upton said. "Within a two-week period, getting 50,000 postcards saying the exact same thing from places all over the country, that resonated with the White House. That really caused [President Bush] to backpedal on the Road Map."

When I sought to confirm Upton's account of the meeting with the White House, I was directed to National Security Council spokesman Frederick Jones, whose initial response upon being read a list of the names of White House staffers present was a curt, "You know half the people you just mentioned are Jewish?"

When asked for comment on top White House staffers meeting with representatives of an organization that may be breaking Israeli law, Jones responded, "Why would the White House comment on that?"

When asked whose job it is in the administration to study the Bible to discern what parts of Israel were or weren't acceptable sacrifices for peace, Jones said that his previous statements had been off-the-record.

When Pastor Upton was asked to explain why the group's website describes the Apostolic Congress as "the Christian Voice in the nation's capital," instead of simply a Christian voice in the nation's capital, he responded, "There has been a real lack of leadership in having someone emerge as a Christian voice, someone who doesn't speak for the right, someone who doesn't speak for the left, but someone who speaks for the people, and someone who speaks from a theocratical perspective."

When his words were repeated back to him to make sure he had said a "theocratical" perspective, not a "theological" perspective, he said, "Exactly. Exactly. We want to know what God would have us say or what God would have us do in every issue."

The Middle East was not the only issue discussed at the March 25 meeting. James Wilkinson, deputy national security advisor for communications, spoke first and is characterized as stating that the 9-11 Commission "is portraying those who have given their all to protect this nation as 'weak on terrorism,' " that "99 percent of all the men and women protecting us in this fight against terrorism are career citizens," and offered the example of Frances Town-send, deputy national security adviser for combating terrorism, "who sacrificed Christmas to do a 'security video' conference."

Tim Goeglein, deputy director of public liaison and the White House's point man with evangelical Christians, moderated, and he also spoke on the issue of same-sex marriage. According to the memo, he asked the rhetorical questions: "What will happen to our country if that actually happens? What do those pushing such hope to gain?" His answer: "They want to change America." How so? He quoted the research of Hoover Institute senior fellow Stanley Kurtz, who holds that since gay marriage was legalized in Scandinavia, marriage itself has virtually ceased to exist. (In fact, since Sweden instituted a registered-partnership law for same-sex couples in the mid '90s, there has been no overall change in the marriage and divorce rates there.)

It is Matt Schlapp, White House political director and Karl Rove's chief lieutenant, who was paraphrased as stating "that the Presidents Administration and current Government is engaged in cultural, economical, and social struggle on every level."

Also present at the meeting was Kristen Silverberg, deputy assistant to the president for domestic policy. (None of the participants responded to interview requests.)

The meeting was closed by Goeglein, who was asked, "What can we do to assist in this fight for these issues and our nations [sic] foundation and values?" and who reportedly responded, "Pray, pray, pray, pray."

The Apostolic Congress's representative in Israel, Kim Johnson, is ethnically Jewish, keeps kosher, and holds herself to the sumptuary standards of Orthodox Jewish women, so as to better blend in to her surroundings.

In one letter home obtained by the Voice she notes that many of the Apostolic Christians she works with in Israel are Filipino women "married to Jewish men—who on occasion accompany their wives to meetings. We are planning to start a fellowship with this select group where we can meet for dinners and get to know one another. Please Pray for the timing and formation of such." Elsewhere she talks of a discussion with someone "on the pitfalls and aggravations of Christians who missionize Jews." She works often among the Jewish poor—the kind of people who might be interested in interest-free loans—and is thrilled to "meet the outcasts of this Land—how wonderful because they are in the in-casts for His Kingdom."

An ecstatic figure who from her own reports appears to operate at the edge of sanity ("Two of the three nights in my apartment I have been attacked by a hair raising spirit of fear," she writes, noting the sublet contained a Harry Potter book; "at this time I am associating it with witchcraft"), Johnson has also met with Knesset member Gila Gamliel. (Gamliel did not respond to interview requests.) She also boasted of an imminent meeting with a "Knesset leader."

"At this point and for all future mails it is important for me to note that this country has very stiff anti-missionary laws," she warns the followers back home. [D]iscretion is required in all mails. This is particularly important to understand when people write mails or ask about organization efforts regarding such."

Her boss, Pastor Upton, displays a photograph on the Apostolic Congress website of a meeting between himself and Beny Elon, Prime Minister Sharon's tourism minister, famous in Israel for his advocacy of the expulsion of Palestinians from Israeli-controlled lands.

His spokesman in the U.S., Ronn Torassian, affirmed that "Minister Elon knows Mr. Upton well," but when asked whether he is aware that Mr. Upton's staffer may be breaking Israel's anti-missionary laws, snapped: "It's not something he's interested in discussing with The Village Voice."

In addition to its work in Israel, the Apostolic Congress is part of the increasingly Christian public face of pro-Israel activities in the United States. Don Wagner, author of the book Anxious for Armageddon, has been studying Christian Zionism for 15 years, and believes that the current hard-line pro-Israel movement in the U.S. is "predominantly gentile." Often, devotees work in concert with Jewish groups like Americans for a Safe Israel, or AFSI, which set up a mostly Christian Committee for a One-State Solution as the sponsor of last year's billboard campaign. The committee's board included, in addition to Upton, such evangelical luminaries as Gary Bauer and E.E. "Ed" McAteer of the Religious Roundtable.

AFSI's executive director, Helen Freedman, confirms the increasingly Christian cast of her coalition. "We have many good Jews, of course," she says, "but they're in the minority." She adds, "The liberal Jew is unable to believe the Arab when he says his goal is to Islamize the West. . . . But I believe it. And evangelical Christians believe it."

Of Jews who might otherwise support her group's view of Jews' divine right to Israel, she laments, "They're embarrassed about quoting the Bible, about referring to the Covenant, about talking about the Promised Land."

Pastor Upton is not embarrassed, and Helen Freedman is proud of her association with him. She is wistful when asked if she, like Upton, has been able to finagle a meeting with the president. "Pastor Upton is the head of a whole Apostolic Congress," she laments. "It's a nationwide group of evangelicals."

Upton has something Freedman covets: a voting bloc.

She laughs off concerns that, for Christian Zionists, actual Jews living in Israel serve as mere props for their end-time scenario: "We have a different conception of what [the end of the world] will be like . . . Whoever is right will rejoice, and whoever was wrong will say, 'Whoops!' "

She's not worried, either, about evangelical anti-Semitism: "I don't think it exists," she says. She does say, however, that it would concern her if she learned the Apostolic Congress had a representative in Israel trying to win converts: "If we discovered that people were trying to convert Jews to Christianity, we would be very upset."

Kim Johnson doesn't call it converting Jews to Christianity. She calls it "Circumcision of the Heart"—a spiritual circumcision Jews must undergo because, she writes in paraphrase of Jeremiah, chapter 9, "God will destroy all the uncircumcised nations along with the House of Israel, because the House of Israel is uncircumcised in the heart . . . [I]t is through the Gospel . . . that men's hearts are circumcised."

Apostolics believe that only 144,000 Jews who have not, prior to the Second Coming of Christ, acknowledged Jesus as the Messiah will be saved in the end times. Though even for those who do not believe in this literal interpretation of the Bible—or for anyone who lives in Israel, or who cares about Israel, or whose security might be affected by a widespread conflagration in the Middle East, which is everyone—the scriptural prophecies of the Christian Zionists should be the least of their worries.

Instead, we should be worried about self-fulfilling prophecies. "Biblically," stated one South Carolina minister in support of the anti-Road Map billboard campaign, "there's always going to be a war."

Don Wagner, an evangelical, worries that in the Republican Party, people who believe this "are dominating the discourse now, in an election year." He calls the attempt to yoke Scripture to current events "a modern heresy, with cultish proportions.

"I mean, it's appalling," he rails on. "And it also shows how marginalized mainstream Christian thinking, and the majority of evangelical thought, have become."

It demonstrates, he says, "the absolute convergence of the neoconservatives with the Christian Zionists and the pro-Israel lobby, driving U.S. Mideast policy."

The problem is not that George W. Bush is discussing policy with people who press right-wing solutions to achieve peace in the Middle East, or with devout Christians. It is that he is discussing policy with Christians who might not care about peace at all—at least until the rapture.

The Jewish pro-Israel lobby, in the interests of peace for those living in the present, might want to consider a disengagement.