A Partisan Paradigm Shift?
by Will Wilkinson

Will Wilkinson is a policy analyst at the Cato Institute and author of "In Pursuit of Happiness Research: Is It Reliable? What Does It Imply for Policy?"



A New York Times/CBS News/MTV poll released at the end of June suggested that young Americans may be leaning "left" relative to the rest of the population. The 17- to 29-year-old group was especially inclined to support universal government health insurance, gay marriage and vote Democratic in 2008. Does this portend an overall leftward shift in America's political future?

This sort of question is perennially confusing, because in politics, "left" and "right" just won't stand still.

For example, before 1967, Jeb Bush, who served as a conservative Republican governor for eight years in Florida, would have been tempting legal action had he married his Latina wife Columba in their home state. Conservatives in 16 states, including Florida, kept bans on interracial marriage on the books until the landmark Loving v. Virginia decision ruled them illegal.

Today, no conservative would dare speak out against such unions. And while opposition to gay marriage is now a widespread conservative position, that opposition is eroding. In a generation or two, antagonism toward gay marriage may be no more a conservative position than opposition to interracial marriage is today. Over time, the term conservative has come to stand for an increasingly permissive set of views.

Similarly, while many liberals continue to push for government control of health care and for tax increases for the wealthy, mostly we have seen increasing, if grudging, acceptance of limited government, free markets and open trade.

No serious liberal politician today threatens to go back to the price controls, regulatory burden and 70 percent top marginal tax rates of the 1970s. Most liberal economic populists today are probably well to the "right" of Richard Nixon.

As my colleague Brink Lindsey argues in his new book, "The Age of Abundance," the shifting parameters of left and right in American politics amount to a trend toward a relatively libertarian center.

This doesn't mean that polarizing far-left and far-right politicians can't run winning campaigns, it just means that positions on the ideological continuum are now closer to both social and economic nonintervention than they used to be.

Increasing economic abundance is the key. As University of Michigan political scientist Ronald Inglehart has shown, drawing on the massive World Values Survey, people in societies around the globe become increasingly focused on the meaningfulness of work and consumption, and less preoccupied with basic material security as wealth becomes ever more assured.

This tends to breed a sense of open exploration and tolerance that are corrosive to traditional social norms, but also a distrust of established authorities, including government. Widespread wealth creates both a sense of psychological safety and an expectation that we should get what we want, creating a demand for personalized gospels heavier on salvation than self-denial, and a willingness to buck convention when it chafes.

Not only do 44 percent of young adults think gay couples ought to be able to marry, compared with just 28 percent of all adults, but, according to a recent poll by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, one in five 18- to 25-year-old individuals say they have no religious affiliation, are agnostic or are atheist -- twice that of the previous generation.

Can this same shift explain apparently increasing comfort with lower taxes and less-regulated markets? Maybe a little, but my best guess is that the experience and expectation of continuous economic growth creates such an aversion to stagnation that politicians who promote popular policies that slow growth are punished at the polls -- even by economically liberal voters.

This might explain why taxes stay low, despite plenty of "soak-the-rich" rhetoric, and why politicians provide fewer restrictions on free trade and immigration than voters often say they want.

In a dynamic world where roiling change is the rule, yesterday's ideological categories fit like a 3-year-old's clothes fit on a 4-year-old child. Politicians here and there may continue to win office by tacking hard right or hard left.

But as the limits of left and right are redefined by our experience of growth and change, a more consistently "socially liberal, economically conservative" politics may creep up on us largely unbidden.

This article appeared in Press-Enterprise on July 21, 2007.

Time for an Independent Counsel Alberto Gonzales's testimony before Congress: a criminal investigation is warranted
by Prof. Marjorie Cohn
Global Research, July 30, 2007

Email this article to a friend Print this article
Congressional leaders are calling for the appointment of a special counsel to investigate possible perjury charges against Alberto Gonzales. As we saw during the Watergate scandal, the executive branch cannot be counted on to investigate itself.

Watergate led to the enactment of the Ethics in Government Act. Three years after Richard Nixon resigned rather than face impeachment, President Jimmy Carter asked Congress to pass a law authorizing the appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate and prosecute unlawful acts by high government officials. The bill empowered the attorney general to conduct a preliminary 90-day investigation when serious allegations arose involving a high government official. President Carter, who signed the bill in 1978, declared, “I believe that this act will help to restore confidence in the integrity of our government.”



Under the act, the attorney general could drop the investigation if he determined it was unsupported by the evidence. But if he found some merit to the charges, he was required to apply to a three-judge panel of federal court judges who would appoint a special prosecutor to investigate, prosecute, and issue a report.



The referral clause of the independent counsel statute provided, "An independent counsel shall advise the House of Representatives of any substantial and credible information which such independent counsel receives, in carrying out the independent counsel’s responsibilities under this chapter, that may constitute grounds for an impeachment.” But Congress, reacting to Kenneth Starr's witch hunt which led to Bill Clinton's impeachment, allowed the independent counsel statute to expire by its own terms in 1999.



With the death of the independent counsel statute, the pendulum had swung back. By failing to renew the act, Congress returned the investigation of high government officials to pre-Watergate policies. Once again, the power to appoint an independent counsel would rest with the executive branch, that is, the attorney general. The Department of Justice drafted a set of regulations to guide future investigations.



Now the attorney general, not a three-judge panel, has the authority to appoint and remove special counsel to investigate top government officials. He exercises power over indictments and other prosecutorial actions, and the special counsel remains accountable to the attorney general. He can block “any investigative or prosecutorial step” he deems “inappropriate or unwarranted."



Justice Department regulations call for the appointment of an outside special counsel when (1) a criminal investigation of a person or matter is warranted, (2) the investigation or prosecution of that person or matter by a United States Attorney's Office or litigating division of the Department of Justice would present a conflict of interest for the Department, and (3) under the circumstances it would be in the public interest to appoint an outside Special Counsel to assume responsibility for the matter. When these three conditions are satisfied, the attorney general must select a special counsel from outside the government. (28 C.F.R. 600.1, 600.3 (2007).)



In light of material inconsistencies in Alberto Gonzales's testimony before Congress, a criminal investigation is warranted. Gonzales, who is suspected of committing perjury, has a conflict of interest. The public interest requires that the highest prosecutor in the land be brought to justice.



Congress should appoint a permanent special counsel to investigate and advise Congress about misconduct by high government officials, beginning with Alberto Gonzales. That procedure should lead the House Judiciary Committee to initiate impeachment proceedings against Gonzales.






http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?con...va&aid=6442

STATE DEPARTMENT SEEKS TO REACH OUT TO MUSLIMS - ALINA L. ROMANOWSKI, DEPUTY ASSISTANT SECRETARY, EDUCATIONAL AND CULTURAL AFFAIRS, U.S. DEPARTMENT OF STATE (LETTER TO THE EDITOR, WALL STREET JOURNAL, JULY 27): “The State Department is working aggressively to expand America's engagement with Muslim populations around the world. .... We believe that NGOs can play an important role in our outreach efforts, and we continually seek ways to engage and involve them.”
LINK
PAID SUBSCRIPTION

PAKISTAN'S FUTURE: BUILDING DEMOCRACY, OR FUELING EXTREMISM? R. NICHOLAS BURNS, UNDER SECRETARY FOR POLITICAL AFFAIRS, STATEMENT BEFORE THE SENATE COMMITTEE ON FOREIGN RELATIONS – (REPUBLICAN NATIONAL CONVENTION BLOG, JULY 26): Burns: “Our public diplomacy programs in Pakistan disseminate our message to the widest possible audience and expose influential people and institutions to U.S. policies, views, and values. ... But it is our concrete assistance to average Pakistanis that has been the best form of public diplomacy.”
LINK

RECONSTRUCTION TEAMS HELP IRAQIS CONNECT WITH CENTRAL GOVERNMENT - GERRY J. GILMORE (AMERICAN FORCES PRESS SERVICE, JULY 26): The 25 provincial reconstruction teams (PRT) operating across Iraq are showing local authorities how to work with the country's central government to obtain needed services. These organizations help establish stability in Iraq by building capacity in areas that include public diplomacy.
LINK

AFTER THE NEXT 9/11 - MARTY KAPLAN (HUFFINGTON POST, JULY 29): “I wish ... that jihadi malaise, or Obamian public diplomacy, or whatever other cure for global hatred you favor, could conquer the evil that George W. Bush pretends he can deliver us from. But ... an act of domestic terrorism is inevitable.”
LINK

CANDIDATE ‘SURROGATES’ TALK FOREIGN POLICY - MICHAEL FALCONE (NEW YORK TIMES, JULY 25): Adam Smith, a Democrat of Washington State, said Senator Barack Obama, when he stated that he would be willing to talk to leaders of nations hostile to the United States during his first term, “was saying was, we have to be confident in our diplomacy.” Smith added: “We’re afraid to talk to Hugo Chavez? What, we’re going to accidentally say, ‘Oh no, you’re right, we’re wrong, we’re sorry, we are a horrible country,’ if we get in a room with him? We’re that afraid of public diplomacy?”
LINK

WHY THE MUSLIM AND WESTERN CULTURES WILL CONTINUE TO CLASH [REVIEW OF “THE ENEMY AT HOME” BY DINESH D’SOUZA] - GARY ATER (AMERICAN CHRONICLE, JULY 26): After US Under Secretary of State Karen Hughes said in Saudia Arabia in 2005 that women should be “free and equal participants in society” and that being able to drive an automobile was “an important part of my freedom,” she was surprised her female audience didn’t feel oppressed by Saudi driving laws prohibiting them from driving an automobile. Like most well-to-do-women, they all had their own drivers. They didn’t understand, “Why we should want to learn to drive?” They also did not see “working outside the home” as being liberating. “What is the joy of going to work and being bossed around by your boss? Why not stay at home where you can boss around your own domestic servants?” All in all, they felt a declaration of freedom by not having to go to work.
LINK

MISSION IMPOSSIBLE: THE NEW PEACE ENVOY SUITS ISRAEL AND NOBODY ELSE - KHALED AMAYREH (AL-AHRAM, JULY 26 – AUGUST 1): Israel wants to use Tony Blair -- now a peace envoy to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict -- as another propaganda ambassador in the service of Israeli public diplomacy for the purpose of diverting attention from the real issue, namely the 40-year-old occupation.
LINK

INTELLIGENT INTELLIGENCE - ARNAUD DE BORCHGRAVE (WASHINGTON TIMES, JULY 29): At the end of World War II, there were 2,500 U.S. foreign correspondents; today, less than 250. The global Tower of Babel babble includes 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 by 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.
LINK

ARMY PRIVATE DISCLOSES HE IS NEW REPUBLIC'S BAGHDAD DIARIST - HOWARD KURTZ (WASHINGTON POST JULY 27): The New Republic's anonymous "Baghdad Diarist" identified himself yesterday as Scott Thomas Beauchamp, an Army private in Iraq, and disputed as "maddening" accusations that he had invented his accounts of cruelty by American soldiers.
LINK

MAYBERRY TESTIMONY ON KIDNAPPING OF WORKERS FOR US EMBASSY BAGHDAD – JUAN COLE (INFORMED COMMENT: THOUGHTS ON THE MIDDLE EAST, HISTORY, AND RELIGION, JULY 29): ”I mentioned story the other day briefly about allegations that the Kuwaiti contracting firm building the US embassy in Baghdad has Shanghaied workers, bringing them to the Middle East under false pretences and depriving them of their passports -- In essence, of kidnapping them. The video testimony below by medic Rory Mayberry is much more powerful than a newspaper report could be. He talks about a gun being used to silence protesting workers just told they are really going to Baghdad!”
LINK

THE FIRST VICTIMS OF AMERICA’S MEGA-EMBASSY – TRUTHDIG (JULY 27)
LINK

BUSH ADMINISTRATION UTTERLY CALLOUS TOWARD IRAQI REFUGEES - AMITABH PAL (PROGRESSIVE, JULY 28/COMMON DREAMS)
LINK

IRAQ FAILS TO TAKE OVER U.S. PROJECTS: RECONSTRUCTION EFFORTS AREN'T BEING ADEQUATELY FUNDED OR MAINTAINED, A WASHINGTON AUDIT FINDS - LESLIE HOFFECKER (LOS ANGELES TIMES, JULY 30)
LINK

INTERIOR MINISTRY MIRRORS CHAOS OF A FRACTURED IRAQ: THE NERVE CENTER OF THE NATION'S POLICE IS NOT SO MUCH A GOVERNMENT AGENCY AS AN 11-STORY POWDER KEG OF FACTIONS - NED PARKER (LOS ANGELES TIMES, JULY 30)
LINK

IRAQI GOVERNMENT IN DEEPEST CRISIS: US AND IRAQI OFFICIALS ARE TRYING TO PREVENT COMPLETE DISINTEGRATION - SAM DAGHER (CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR,
JULY 27)
LINK

ARM CHAIR GENERALS HELP SHAPE SURGE IN IRAQ - ROWAN SCARBOROUGH, (EXAMINER, JULY 25): When it comes to the troop surge in Iraq, a bunch of arm chair generals in Washington are influencing the Bush Administration as much as the Joint Chiefs or theater commanders. A group of military experts at the American Enterprise Institute, concerned that the U.S. was on the verge of a calamitous failure in Iraq, almost single handedly convinced the White House to change its strategy.
LINK

WHO REALLY TOOK OVER DURING THAT COLONOSCOPY - FRANK RICH (NEW YORK, JULY 29): General Petraeus may well be, as many say, the brightest and bravest we have. But that doesn’t account for why he has been invested by the White House and its last-ditch apologists with such singular power over the war.
LINK
PAID SUBSCRIPTION

A WAR WE JUST MIGHT WIN - BY MICHAEL E. O’HANLON AND KENNETH M. POLLACK (NEW YORK TIMES, JULY 30): Here is the most important thing Americans need to understand: We are finally getting somewhere in Iraq, at least in military terms. A surprise is how well the coalition’s new Embedded Provincial Reconstruction Teams are working.
LINK

POLITICAL EQUATIONS -- IRAQ MATH: FROM ONE, MAKE THREE - HELENE COOPER (NEW YORK TIMES, JULY 29): Senator Biden’s so-called soft-partition plan -- a variation of the blueprint dividing up Bosnia in 1995 -- calls for dividing Iraq into three semi-autonomous regions, held together by a central government. There would be a loose Kurdistan, a loose Shiastan and a loose Sunnistan, all under a big, if weak, Iraq umbrella.
LINK

IT'S HOW WE PULL BACK - DAVID IGNATIUS (WASHINGTON POST, JULY 29): The United States is on its way out of Iraq eventually, but it matters powerfully how we disengage.
LINK

IRAQ WITHDRAWAL: FIVE DIFFICULT QUESTIONS - BILL MARSH (NEW YORK TIMES, JULY 29): Getting out of a war requires as much planning as getting into one. After more than four years of buildup, the American footprint in Iraq is enormous. There are more than 75 major bases: Some have their own retail stores, with products from magazines to luxury goods like large-screen televisions for purchase by soldiers.
LINK

THE WITHDRAWAL FOLLIES: THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION PLANTS ITS FLAG IN THE FUTURE - TOM ENGELHARDT (TOMDISPATCH, JULY 26): It's time to bring not only the word, but the idea of withdrawal in from the cold.
LINK

BUSH'S TURKISH GAMBLE - ROBERT D. NOVAK (WASHINGTON POST, JULY 30): High-level U.S. officials are working with their Turkish counterparts on a joint military operation to suppress Kurdish guerrillas and capture their leaders. Through covert activity, their goal is to forestall Turkey from invading Iraq.
LINK

A TIMELY VICTORY IN TURKEY: RECEP TAYYIP ERDOGAN SHOWS THAT DEMOCRACY AND MODERATE ISLAM CAN BE A GOOD MIX – EDITORIAL (WASHINGTON POST, JULY 27): The causes of Middle East democracy and moderate Islam should get a badly needed boost from last weekend's parliamentary elections in Turkey. The ruling Justice and Development Party, or AK Party, which is led by the religious, liberal and pro-Western Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, won a convincing victory, dealing a rebuff not only to leftist and nationalist opponents but also to the Turkish military.
LINK

LIBERAL TURKEY? - SONER CAGAPTAY (WALL STREET JOURNAL, JULY 30): The new AKP government can prove its liberal credentials in its second turn in power by desisting from political illiberalism and anti-Westernism. This is a chance Turkey cannot afford to miss.
LINK
PAID SUBSCRIPTION

U.S. VS. IRAN: COLD WAR, TOO - ROBIN WRIGHT (WASHINGTON POST, JULY 29): In the new Cold War, the United States and Iran are using eerily familiar tools to undermine each other. Over the past 18 months, inter alia, Washington has allocated $75 million for this year and $108 million for next year to promote democracy in Iran, and reportedly begun covert operations that included disinformation campaigns and currency manipulation.
LINK

THE COLD WAR BETWEEN WASHINGTON AND TEHRAN - NOAM CHOMSKY (ZMAG.ORG, JULY 28/COMMON DREAMS): “Despite the saber-rattling, it is, I suspect, unlikely that the Bush administration will attack Iran.”
LINK

HOW TO MANAGE ASSAD - JON B. ALTERMAN (WASHINGTON POST, JULY 27): If the U.S. strategy were to "manage" Syrian actions with the confidence that comes from overwhelming U.S. strength, the possibilities to “fix” relations would be broad.
LINK

THE PAKISTAN DILEMMA: THE PERILS OF A PRECARIOUS ANTITERROR ALLY – HOT TOPIC (OPINION JOURNAL FROM THE WALL STREET JOURNAL EDITORIAL PAGE, JULY 28): What the U.S. can do is nudge Pakistan’s president Musharraf toward a compromise with his non-radical opposition that would restore genuine democracy while strengthening his ability to challenge the jihadists.
LINK

GETTING BIN LADEN UP A TREE: THE US CAN BETTER CORNER AL QAEDA IN PAKISTAN IF IT HELPS EASE THAT NATION'S RETURN TO DEMOCRACY - EDITORIAL (CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR, JULY 30)
LINK

MUSHARRAF'S BIG CHANCE – ED ROYCE (WASHINGTON TIMES, JULY 29): This recent upsurge in violence in Pakistan may finally force Mr. Musharraf to take a hard-line stance against radicals. His not doing so may precipitate a U.S. tactical intervention over the Afghan border to quell cross border raids on the Taliban. This is an eventuality neither Mr. Musharraf nor the U.S. would like to see. (Ed Royce, California Republican, is ranking member of the U.S. House of Representatives' Foreign Affairs Terrorism, Nonproliferation and Trade Subcommittee.)
LINK

BET ON INDIA: THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION PRESSES FORWARD WITH A NUCLEAR AGREEMENT -- AND HOPES FOR A STRATEGIC PARTNERSHIP – EDITORIAL (WASHINGTON POST, JULY 29): The Bush administration and New Delhi announced the principles by which the United States will resume sales of civilian nuclear fuel and technology to India, as promised by President Bush in July 2005.
LINK

KOSOVO REDUX: INDEPENDENCE FOR THE SERBIAN PROVINCE IS INEVITABLE, BUT RUSSIA HOPES TO MAKE IT A CRISIS FOR THE WEST – EDITORIAL (WASHINGTON POST, JULY 28): The consequences of a Western failure to recognize an independent Kosovo this year could be severe.
LINK

THE EROTIC UNDERTONES OF THE ADMINISTRATION'S WORDS ON ENHANCED INTERROGATIONS: WHY IS IT THE MORE THE WHITE HOUSE REFINES THE RULES, THE PERVIER THINGS GET? - A.S. HAMRAH (LOS ANGELES TIMES, JULY 30): Instead of just banning torture outright Bush's new executive order, which purports to be an "interpretation of the Geneva Convention Common Article 3," reduces torture to a series of deviant acts.
LINK

DARK POWERS, THE SEQUEL: THE PRESIDENT'S RECENT EXECUTIVE ORDER ALLOWS THE CIA TO DETAIN ANYONE THE AGENCY THINKS IS A TERRORIST -- OR A TERRORIST'S KID - ROSA BROOKS (LOS ANGELES TIMES, JULY 27)
LINK

WEST POINT PR: WHY THE PENTAGON'S GUANTÁNAMO STUDY IS A JOKE - ANDY WORTHINGTON (COUNTERPUNCH, JULY 26): On the one hand, the administration commissions its boys to come up with a report stating that 73 percent of the detainees were a "demonstrated threat," and 95 percent were a "potential threat," and on the other hand the administration itself has released, or cleared for release, 75 percent of the detainees because they were "not or no longer a threat" (and that's not counting the 201 detainees who were released before the tribunal process began). How are we supposed to take these clowns seriously?
LINK

GITMO AND AL QAEDA – REVIEW & OUTLOOK (WALL STREET JOURNAL, JULY 26): In his speech this week, Mr. Bush went on the political offense and made a strong case that al Qaeda in Iraq is part and parcel of the larger al Qaeda network. To leave Iraq too soon would hand bin Laden a victory. Mr. Bush can strengthen his argument -- and protect Americans -- by dispatching al Qaeda in Iraq captives to the Guantanamo prison for terrorist killers.
LINK

BUSH'S FOLLY: HIS FIXATION ON AL QAEDA'S ROLE IN IRAQ REVEALS THE SHALLOWNESS OF HIS THINKING -- AND OF THE U.S. STRATEGY ON FIGHTING TERRORISM – EDITORIAL (LOS ANGELES TIMES, JULY 30)
LINK

OH, HENRY! A HISTORIAN'S EXAMINATION OF KISSINGER'S REALPOLITIK WORLDVIEW REVIEW OF HENRY KISSINGER AND THE AMERICAN CENTURY BY JEREMI SURI] - DAVID GREENBERG (WASHINGTON POST, JULY 26): As Suri notes, Kissinger was so disdainful of democratic accountability that he came to think that effective statecraft "depended on an almost mythical grand master" -- a philosopher-king, a professor in a Superman uniform -- whose brilliance and personality could hold it all together. Regarding his own era, Kissinger left no doubt about whom he considered that grand master to be.
LINK

QUOTATIONS FOR THE DAY

"I don't want to be used for propaganda purposes."

--Senator Hillary Clinton, cited in E. J. Dionne Jr., “Defining Moment?” (Washington Post, July 27)
LINK


“[H]iring a block of bloggers to verbally attack a specific person or promote a specific message may be worth considering.”

--From a study published in June 2006 by the military's Joint Special Operations University; cited in “Tom Ricks's Inbox” (Washington Post, July 29)
LINK

Why Wolfensohn Quit
A Warning to Tony Blair

By URI AVNERY

Tel Aviv.

Last week, James Wolfensohn gave a long interview to Haaretz. He poured out his heart and summed up, with amazing openness, his months as special envoy of the US, Russia, the EU and the UN (the "Quartet") in this country - the same job entrusted now to Tony Blair. The interview could have been entitled "A Warning to Tony".Among other revelations, he disclosed that he was practically fired by the clique of Neo-cons, whose ideological leader is Paul Wolfowitz.

What Wolfensohn and Wolfowitz have in common is that both are Jews and have the same name: Son of Wolf, one in the German version and the other in the Russian one. Also, both are past chiefs of the World Bank.

But that's where the similarity ends. These two sons of the wolf are opposites in almost all respects. Wolfensohn is an attractive person, who radiates personal charm. Wolfowitz arouses almost automatic opposition. This was made clear when they served, successively, at the World Bank: Wolfensohn was very popular, Wolfowitz was hated. The term of the first was renewed, a rare accolade, the second was dumped at the earliest opportunity, ostensibly because of a corruption affair: he had arranged an astronomical salary for his girl friend.

Wolfensohn could be played by Peter Ustinov. He is a modern Renaissance man: successful businessman, generous philanthropist, former Olympic sportsman (fencing) and Air Force officer (Australia). In middle age he took up the cello (under the influence of Jacqueline du Pre). The role of Wolfowitz demands no more finesse than that of the average gunman in a western.

But beyond personal traits, there is a profound ideological chasm between them. To me, they personify the two opposite extremes of contemporary Jewish reality.

Wolfensohn belongs to the humanist, universal, optimistic, world-embracing trend in Judaism, a man of peace and compromise, an heir to the wisdom of generations. Wolfowitz, at the other end, belongs to the fanatical Judaism that has grown up in the State of Israel and the communities connected with it, a man of overbearing arrogance, hatred and intoxication of power. He is a radical nationalist, even if it is not quite clear whether it is American or Israeli nationalism, or if he even distinguishes between the two.

Wolfowitz is a standard-bearer of the neo-cons, most of them Jews, who pushed the US into the Iraqi morass, promote wars all over the Middle East, advise the Israeli Prime Minister not to give up anything and are ready to fight to the last Israeli soldier.

To avoid misunderstanding: I don't know either of the two personally. I have never seen Wolfowitz in person, and heard Wolfensohn only once, at a Jerusalem meeting of the Israeli Council for Foreign Relations. I admit that I liked him on sight.

Wolfensohn arrived in this country some months before the "separation plan" of Ariel Sharon. He says now that the separation would have succeeded "if the withdrawal had been accompanied by the second part of the separation, which, according to my understanding, would have created an independent entity that would become a Palestinian state." He believes (mistakenly, I think) that this was the intent of Sharon, whom, unlike his successor as Prime Minister, he respects.

Wolfensohn envisioned a blooming Gaza Strip, flourishing economically, open in all directions, a model to the West Bank and a basis for the new state. To this purpose he raised eight billion dollars. Unlike other idealists, he invested several millions of his own money in the greenhouses left behind by the settlers, hoping to turn them into the basis of the Palestinian economy.

He stood at Condoleezza Rice's side during the signing ceremony for the document that was to prepare the way to a brilliant future: the agreement for the opening of the border crossings. The crossings between the Strip and Israel were to be again wide open, Israel undertook to fulfill at long last the obligation it took upon itself in the Oslo agreement (and has violated ever since): to open the vital passage between Gaza and the West Bank. On the border between the Strip and Egypt, a European unit was already taking control.

And then the whole edifice collapsed. The passage between the Strip and the West Bank remained hermetically sealed. The other border crossings were closed more and more frequently. The products of the greenhouses (together with Wolfensohn's investment) went down the drain. The frail economy of the Strip disintegrated altogether, most of the 1.4 million inhabitants descended into misery, with 50 per cent and more unemployment. The inevitable result was the ascent of Hamas.

Wolfensohn's complaint stresses the immense importance of the border crossings. Their closure - ostensibly for security reasons - spelled death to the Gaza economy, and, by extension, to the hope for peaceful relations between Israel and the Palestinians. Before the Hamas victory, Wolfensohn saw with his own eyes the awful corruption that governed the crossings. Relations between Israelis and Palestinians there were openly based on bribery. The Palestinian products could not cross without payment being made to the people in control on both sides.

Wolfensohn lays at least some of the responsibility for the ascent of Hamas on the Palestinian Authority - meaning Fatah – which was infected by the cancer of corruption. The victory of Hamas in the democratic elections both in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip did not surprise him at all.

What caused this idealistic person to resign?

He puts the main blame on one person, who belongs to the clique of Wolfowiz: Elliott Abrams. Like Wolfowitz, Abrams is a Jew, a neo-con, a radical Zionist beloved by the Israeli Right. He was appointed by President Bush as deputy advisor for national security, responsible for the Middle East. With this appointment, Wolfensohn says, "all the elements of the agreement achieved by Condoleezza Rice were destroyed". The passages were closed, Hamas took over.

Wolfensohn accuses Abrams openly of undermining him, in order to get him out. True, the Quartet is not under the authority of Abrams, but a person in this position cannot function without solid American support. Abrams pushed him out in cooperation with Ehud Olmert and Dov Weisglass, Sharon's confidant, whose plans were menaced by Wolfensohn's activity. It was Weisglass, it will be remembered, who promised to "put the Palestinian issue in formaldehyde."

In the eyes of Wolfensohn, both sides are to blame for the current situation, but he clearly blames Israel more, since it is the stronger and more active party. No doubt, Israel is very important for him. He had a lot of sympathy for it (In World War I, his father was a soldier in the Jewish battalions which were set up by the British army and sent to Palestine.) He gave the interview to the Israeli paper in order to voice a severe warning: time is not working for us.

The demographic clock is ticking. Today, Israel is surrounded by some 350 million Arabs. In another 15 years, it will be surrounded by 700 million. "I don't see any argument that supports the idea the Israel's situation will get better."

As an expert on the global economy, with a world-wide perspective, Wolfensohn could also point out that the importance of the US in the world economy is gradually declining, with new giants like China and India rising.
We, the Israelis, like to think that we are the center of the world. Wolfensohn, a person with a world-wide outreach, sticks a pin into this egocentric balloon. Already now, he says, only the West considers the Israeli-Palestinian issue so important. Most of the world is indifferent. "I have visited more than 140 countries: you are not such a big deal there."

Even this limited interest will also evaporate. Wolfensohn rubs salt into the wound: "A moment will come when the Israelis and the Palestinians will be compelled to understand that they are a secondary performance … The Israelis and the Palestinians must get rid of the idea that they are a Broadway performance. They are only a play in the Village. Off-off-off-off-off Broadway." Knowing that this is the worst one can tell an Israeli, he adds: "I hope that I am not getting into trouble by saying this, but, what the hell, that's what I believe, and I am already 73 years old."

I do believe him - and I, what the hell, am already 83.
The metaphor from the world of theater looks to me even more apt that Wolfensohn himself imagines.

What is happening now to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is mostly theater, and not the best in town.

The actors drink from empty glasses, recite texts that nobody believes, put on false smiles and embrace heartily while loathing each other.

The best scene so far was the Gaza "separation". Contrary to Wolfensohn's belief, it was merely a performance, melodrama at its best, directed by Sharon and the chiefs of the settlers, the army and the police. Many tears, many embraces, many sham battles. This week the performance was again in the media, with a huge propaganda machine trying to show how immense was the pain, how the poor evacuees have remained without villas, how many more billions will still be needed. The intended conclusion: it is impossible to dismantle the settlements in the West Bank.

The new actor on the stage, Tony Blair, is exuding charm and joviality, embracing and kissing. We, the audience, know that his lot will be exactly like that of his predecessor. Like him, he is the "special envoy of the Quartet". His terms of reference are exactly the same as those of Wolfensohn before him: much of nothing. He is supposed to help the Palestinians to build "democratic institutions", after the US and Israel have systematically destroyed the democratic institutions that were set up after the last Palestinian elections.

He has embraced Olmert, kissed Tzipi Livni, smiled at Ehud Barak, and we know that all three of them will do their utmost to disrupt his mission before he reaches a position that would enable him to realize his real dream: to conduct peace negotiations, as he successfully did in Northern Ireland.

All that is happening now is theater. Olmert pretends that he really wants to "save Abu Mazen", while doing the opposite. At Bush's request, he allowed the transfer of a thousand rifles, with a lot of fanfare, from Jordan to Abbas, so he can fight Hamas - understanding full well that to an ordinary Palestinian this will look like collaboration with the occupier against the resistance. He enlarges the settlements, keeps the "illegal outposts" and closes his eyes while the army is helping the settlers to put up more outposts. That is a foolproof recipe for a Hamas takeover in the West Bank, too.

Everybody knows that there is only one way to strengthen Abu Mazen: immediately to start rapid and practical negotiations for the establishment of the State of Palestine in all the occupied territories, with its capital in East Jerusalem. Not more discussions about abstract ideas, as proposed by Olmert, not another plan (No. 1001), not a "peace process" that will lead to "new political horizons", and certainly not another hollow fantasy of that grand master of sanctimonious hypocrisy, President Shimon Peres.

The next scene of the play, for which all the actors are now learning their lines, is the "international meeting" this autumn, according to the screenplay by President Bush. Condoleezza will chair, and it is doubtful whether Tony, the new actor, will be allowed to take part. The playwrights are still deliberating.

If all the world is a stage, as Shakespeare wrote, and all the men and women merely players who have their exits and their entrances, that is true even more for Israel and Palestine. Sharon exited and Olmert entered, Wolfensohn exited and Blair entered, and everything is, as Sakespeare wrote in another play, "words, words, words."

Wolfensohn can view the next parts of the play with philosophical detachment. We, who are involved, cannot afford that, because our comedy is really a tragedy.

Uri Avnery is an Israeli writer and peace activist with Gush Shalom. He is one of the writers featured in The Other Israel: Voices of Dissent and Refusal. He is also a contributor to CounterPunch's hot new book The Politics of Anti-Semitism.

http://www.counterpunch.org/avnery07302007.html

Midsummer Market Meltdown: Is the End Near?
By Dean Baker
t r u t h o u t | Columnist

Monday 30 July 2007

Last week's stock market tailspin has many of the big-time money folks worried. They have suddenly discovered risk. It turns out leveraged buyouts are not always successful, and mortgages and other debts sometimes don't get paid off. Who could have known?

While some of the big rollers who helped propel the housing and debt bubbles of the last five years will lose substantial sums, the fact is most will still end up much richer as a result of their efforts. This is because most of the risk they take is with other people's money. The biggest risk these folks face is a smaller paycheck.

This is most obviously the case with the standard contract used to pay hedge fund managers. Typically, these contracts give managers a fee equal to 2 percent of the value of the funds being managed, plus 20 percent of earnings in excess of some benchmark. Under such a contract, if a hedge fund controls $4 billion, and manages to get a return that exceeds its benchmark by 5 percentage points, the manager walks away with $120 million. Of this sum, $80 million comes from the 2 percent flat fee and the other $40 million comes from the commission on the excess return.

Now suppose the genius fund manager managed to lose half the value of the fund's assets by speculating on bonds backed by subprime mortgages. The manager still gets the $80 million in fees, even though he lost the fund $2 billion. Perhaps the fund manager will get fired, but with $80 million in the bank (which gets the special low fund manager tax rate), he will be able to take his time looking for a new job. Many of the people most directly responsible for the subprime meltdown will also be in a similar boat. Some of the big issuers of subprime mortgages have already gone belly-up after they were unable to meet obligations on bad mortgages. While the people who hold the mortgages are out of luck, many of the top executives of these mortgage-lending companies will walk away with millions of dollars in profit.

When you see people making vast fortunes in this economy, it is usually a good start to ask what the government did to allow for their success. In the case of the fund managers, a substantial chunk of their business comes from pension funds. Some of these pensions involve government money in the form of public employee pension funds. Others carry a government guarantee; so, if the fund managers blow the wad, the government picks up the tab. In both cases, it would be a good first step if regulators let the pension fund trustees, who hand billions of dollars to fund managers, know that they will lose their jobs if these investments don't pay off as promised. Ripping-off the public to make the richest people in the country even richer is not funny, and pension fund trustees must understand this.

As far as the mortgage industry, this is a complete mess. The current regulatory system provides enormous opportunities for sharp operators to pilfer millions, while leaving investors out of luck and homebuyers out on the street. This will be a topic for future columns. But, it is long past time we hold the people who control the investment of public funds or publicly guaranteed funds more accountable. If they want to give the fund managers huge paychecks, then they should do it from their own pockets.



Dean Baker is the co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR). He is the author of The Conservative Nanny State: How the Wealthy Use the Government to Stay Rich and Get Richer (www.conservativenannystate.org). He also has a blog, "Beat the Press," where he discusses the media's coverage of economic issues. You can find it at the American Prospect's web site.

FORBES

7/27/07

U.S.-Saudi Tensions To Increase In 2008

Oxford Analytica

U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Defense Secretary Robert Gates will visit Saudi Arabia's capital Riyadh on July 31. As the United States looks to regional actors for support on Iraq, Iran and Israeli-Palestinian issues, it will find that Riyadh is not going to play its assigned role. While President George W. Bush's administration faces long odds on these issues already, the Saudi position makes the prospect for success even less likely.

On the major regional questions, the United States and Saudi Arabia are in agreement to a greater extent than at almost any time in their relationship. They each:

--worry about increasing Iranian regional influence and the Iranian nuclear program;

--see the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a wound that needs to be healed;

--worry about the spill-over effect of Iraqi violence; and

--vigorously oppose al-Qaida and its regional affiliates.

However, they have very different tactical approaches, which will become more salient as Washington puts forward new initiatives to move the Arab-Israeli peace process forward, salvage something from Iraq and isolate Iran.

Bush announced on July 16 a high-profile diplomatic effort to move Israel and the Fatah-led Palestinian National Authority (PNA) toward a political settlement. Saudi Arabia quickly voiced its support, but Washington and Riyadh have very different visions of how to approach the issue. The Bush administration seeks to isolate Hamas diplomatically and choke off the economy in Gaza. Meanwhile, it hopes to encourage economic growth and political progress in the Fatah-controlled West Bank, showing Palestinians that their best choice is to abandon Hamas and support PNA President Mahmoud Abbas. Riyadh is pushing for a renewal of Fatah-Hamas dialogue and a return to the Mecca Agreement on power-sharing, which the Saudis brokered earlier in the year.

In Iraq, the Bush administration needs to show tangible progress to fend off congressional pressures to begin troop withdrawals. To that end, it has opened direct (if low-level) talks with Iran and encouraged greater regional involvement to support the Iraqi government, symbolized by the May Sharm al-Sheikh summit. While Saudi Arabia attended that summit and agreed to forgive the bulk of Iraqi Saddam-era debt, it has made clear that it is not willing to take other steps to support the government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, which it sees as an extension of Iranian influence in Iraq.

Indeed, Saudi Arabia is supporting efforts by Maliki's opponents (including former prime minister Iyad Allawi, various Sunni political factions and Maliki's Shia opponents) to form a political front to challenge the government's parliamentary majority. Saudi King Abdallah also very publicly refused to receive Maliki on the latter's regional trip preceding the summit. With Riyadh facing the likelihood of a reduced U.S. role in Iraq, it is less likely to follow the U.S. lead there and more willing to forge its own alliances with Iraqi players and factions.

Both Washington and Riyadh want to limit Iranian regional influence and discourage Iranian nuclear plans. As long as the United States continues using diplomatic pressure, multilateral and United Nations sanctions and indirect military threats to push Iran away from the nuclear path, it will have Saudi support. However, if the Bush administration pursues a military option, this will change. The Saudi leadership is pursuing a subtle policy of both engaging and containing Iran. It does not want to return to the 1980s, when the two states were directly confronting each other and Tehran was actively encouraging domestic opposition to the Saudi regime. Moreover, it knows that it will be on the front line of any Iranian retaliation for a U.S. military strike.

Such tensions are a normal feature of the Saudi-U.S. relationship and do not necessarily herald a crisis in the making. However, while core relations will not be affected, they will add to the tensions likely to emerge between the countries on Middle East issues and make for an uncomfortable few months in bilateral relations in 2008.

Ex-CIA officer Slams US Allegations against Iran as Sham
US Creating False pretexts for Another War

Global Research, July 29, 2007
CASMII - 2007-07-28

In an alarming exposure of the acceleration and urgency of the American war party's push towards catastrophic war with Iran, Philip Giraldi, former CIA counter terrorism officer, in an interview [1] on 24th July with Anti War Radio debunked the NeoCons' repeated myth of Iran's support for AlQaeda as a pretext for war. Whilst acknowledging Iran's helpfulness in trying to establish security in both Afghanistan and Iraq, Giraldi spoke of the United States' hypocritical and illegal support for terrorist separatists groups inside Iran, and various plans and scenarios which have been drawn up to destroy Iran's military and economic infrastructure by massive bombardment, with the use of nuclear bombs a real and stated possibility.

Giraldi refuted the assumption that sharing hostilities towards the US, placed Iran and AlQaeda in the same camp and sharing similar agenda, arguing that Iran followed a very different agenda in its dealings with the US. He emphasised both the fact of Iranians' helpfulness in Iraq, in terms of pushing for greater stability, and also their help and cooperation in Afghanistan, as well as the reality of the deep hostilities between Shiia Iran and Sunni extremism of AlQaeda. Giraldi recalled the major attack against the Iranian consulate general in Afghanistan by the Taliban, a close ally of AlQaeda, in which 11 Iranian diplomats were killed, and the regular AlQaeda violent attacks against Shiia population in Iraq, and concluded that a Shiia Iranian-AlQaeda alliance was not a plausible possibility.

He described the recent New York Sun's allegation [2] that AlQaeda prisoners in Iran led terrorist operations inside Iraq under the advice of the Iranian government, as one of many propaganda pieces making a case for war. He said how in 2003, the Iranian government, through the Swiss embassy, had offered to hand over the six AlQaeda prisoners kept in Iran, which includes Osama Bin Laden's son, in exchange for the US ceasing its support for the MEK, and how this offer was rejected by the US. He said of the MEK that it was sheltered and armed by Saddam against Iran, and now supported and armed by Pentagon against Iran.

Highlighting what he called American "ultimate hypocrisy", Giraldi explained how the US government is supporting terrorist groups and ethnic division in Iran and charging the Iranians in Iraq for what the US was doing in Iran itself and with a lot more evidence. Giraldi talked of US's support for Jundollah which he described as a Sunni Baluchi separatist group in eastern Iran that has launched deadly terrorist attacks inside Iran. He also spoke of US support for separatists amongst the Arab minority which is closer to the border with Iraq.

Giraldi repeated the alarm call he first made in his revelations in the American Conservative Magazine in 2005 that Dick Cheney, who has no authority under the constitution, had ordered the air force to draw up plans for air strike against Iran that even included the use of nuclear weapons. He said he thought there was a lot of evidence since then to suggest that nuclear weapons are still very much on the table and named Republican Senators such as McCain, Gilliani and Romney who had not "flinched at all" in the debate about the prospect of using nuclear weapons against Iran.

He spoke of various war scenarios cooked up by the war party. One scenario was of the automatic use of the nuclear weapons in order to reach and destroy the Iranian nuclear sites buried under ground. Another scenario was to use the nuclear threat if the "Iranians continue to fight back after we staged our attack", the idea being "that's what the nukes are for, our nukes that everybody knows that we in fact do have, is to tell them, listen, you are going to sit there and take it while we bomb you for a week or two and you are not going to fight back and if you do fight back then we will use nuclear weapons on you", and he cited the example scenario of Iranians resisting by staging attack in the Strait of Hormouz or destabilising Afghanistan.

Setting out the horrifying context of the possibility of the US using nuclear strikes against Iran, under the pretext of destroying Iranian nuclear bombs which do not exist and Iran's cooperation with AlQaeda, another propaganda fabrication, Giraldi drew attention to the recent warning to Iran and the threat of war issued by AlQaeda for Iran's support for the Shiia government in Iraq, as well as AlQaeda's constant horrific attacks inside Iraq targeting Shiia population and mosques.

Prof. Abbas Edalat of CASMII said today: "Giraldi's revelations is consistent with and confirms the emergence of a shift in the dynamics of the American foreign policy decision making away from dialogue and in favour of war. The reality of the shared strategic interests between Iran and the US in stabilising Iraq and the possibility and great benefits for both countries in reaching a rapprochement in their bilateral relationship, based on mutual respect and cooperation rather than threat and coercion, is persistently obscured and sabotaged by the fanatical warmongers of Cheney camp and the Israeli lobby, who are relentlessly pushing for war".

It is incumbent upon the media and journalists to give active voice to informed and conscientious individuals like Giraldi who have well-established connections within the intelligence community and are warning the international community about the impending catastrophic war against Iran.

For more information please contact CASMII or visit http://www.campaigniran.org

Notes

[1] http://www.antiwar.com/blog/2007/07/24/philip-giraldi-5/
[2] http://www.nysun.com/article/58599

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?con...va&aid=6434

Cheney Favors Attack On Iran

Vice President Cheney has proposed a measure that would launch a very limited military strike at one or more known Iranian training centers whose forces are being deployed to Iraq. Cheney's proposal has gotten no approval, so far, say sources. Photo courtesy AFP.
by Claude Salhani
UPI International Editor
Washington DC (UPI) July 30, 2007
Diplomatic arm-wrestling between Iran and the West over the future of the Islamic republic's nuclear program has not prevented talk of the military option as a solution to the crisis, despite the tsunami-like reaction such a military adventure would generate in the Arab and Islamic world. Of late, there has been much speculation regarding the probability of U.S. and/or Israeli military strikes intended to destroy the Islamic republic's nuclear power sites before they become fully operational.

The Iranians say the plants are being built for peaceful purposes, but Western sources believe Iran's intention is to develop military-grade nuclear material.

In fact, President George W. Bush has reiterated on numerous occasions that "everything is still on the table" when it comes to discussing Iran's nuclear development and how to sanction Iran over its continuing refusal to abide by directives from the international community.

But a well-informed source tells United Press International that according to senior U.S. intelligence officials, President Bush has definitely decided not to strike any of Iran's alleged nuclear weapons production facilities this year.

The sources say the officials stressed the words "this year," meaning in 2007. That, however, does not rule out the possibility of military intervention in 2008, right until January 2009, when Bush's term in the White House comes to an end.

This information seems to back up a report published in the July 16 issue of the London Guardian that claims President Bush gave in to Vice President Dick Cheney, accepting to carry out military action against Iran before he leaves office.

According to the Guardian, a series of meetings held during June and July involving top White House, Pentagon and State Department officials was used by the vice president to stress the point that the diplomatic approach to solving the crisis had failed. The London newspaper went on to say that the vice president was able to convince the president by saying that no future U.S. administration would have the courage to act militarily against Tehran.

At the same time, sources familiar with the intelligence community report that there have been "a lot of stories about bunker buster bombs being moved to the region." The source says, however, that there is no basis for these reports, which, according to them, are being floated by Israeli intelligence.

"This is 'PSYOP' rubbish," a well-informed source told UPI. PSYOP stands for psychological operations; or in other words, playing mind games with the enemy.

The aim of PSYOP is to demoralize the enemy by inseminating doubt among his troops as well as the local population. Psychological operations play a vital role in military and political planning of most countries.

One prime example of PSYOPs was used during Operation Desert Storm in 1990-91, when the United States led an international coalition to oust Saddam Hussein from Kuwait, which he had occupied in August 1990. By placing a Marine expeditionary force aboard Navy vessels anchored off the coast, U.S. military planners had Saddam believe that the U.S. Marines would launch a seaborne assault on Kuwait, therefore tying down large numbers of Iraqi forces and building massive defenses along Kuwait's beachfront for an attack that never materialized. Instead, the major thrust came across the desert from Saudi Arabia, a move the Iraqi leader did not expect.

Part of the task performed by PSYOPs includes developing and employing propaganda in a convincing manner.

Instead of a direct attack on Iran's nuclear facilities, Vice President Cheney has proposed a measure that would launch a very limited military strike at one or more known Iranian training centers whose forces are being deployed to Iraq.

Cheney's proposal has gotten no approval, so far, say the sources.

Indeed, the Bush administration accuses Iran of supporting terrorism, primarily groups in Lebanon and in the Palestinian territories, groups Washington considers to engage in terrorist activities. A particular point of contention between Iran and the Bush administration are accusations from Washington over the nefarious role Iran continues to play in neighboring Iraq, while Iran accuses the United States of trying to implement regime change in Iran.

One of the primary culprits accused by the Bush administration of fomenting trouble in Iraq is Moqtada Sadr, the pro-Iranian firebrand young Shiite cleric, and his Mahdi Army. It is believed that Iran supplies Sadr and his fighters with logistic and financial support, as well as weapons and improvised explosive devices.

U.S. intelligence sources, however, say that the White House estimates of the assistance provided to the Iraqi Shiite community by Iran, as well as the amounts, "are exaggerated."

Launching a war against Iran in 2008 -- their last year in office -- the Bush administration would in fact be leaving a second war they started in the Middle East for the next administration to resolve.

earlier related report
Tough Sanctions May Tame Iran
by Megan Harris
Washington DC (UPI) July 27 - Strengthening existing sanctions against Iran and divesting state pension funds of Iran-connected assets may offer the best hope to change the regime's behavior. Recent outrage over the billions of dollars in U.S. state pensions that are invested in companies that do business with Iran -- inadvertently supporting terrorism and Iran's nuclear ambitions -- has triggered a divestiture movement in several states to rid pension funds of assets connected to Iran. Congress has also introduced a number of bills since last fall to strengthen sanctions.

Sanctions to date do appear to be working -- at least to slow Iran's nuclear activities, said Patrick Clawson, senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

Speaking Thursday during a conference on divestment from Iran at the American Enterprise Institute, Clawson pointed out that Iran has developed only a few more centrifuges than they had a few years ago.

"If we can slow down Iran's nuclear program, we can have some success," he said.

Even though sanctions may not have a detrimental impact, Clawson told United Press International that sanctions aim not to cripple Iran, but to convince the leaders to change their behavior.

Ian Bremmer, president of Eurasia Group, a global political consulting firm, agrees, but, he told UPI in a phone interview: "We need to recognize that we don't have a lot of leverage."

The Iran Sanctions Enabling Act of 2007, introduced in both the House and the Senate, would strengthen existing legislation by mandating a comprehensive federal list of companies that invest more than $20 million in Iran's energy sector, directing states to divest such company holdings, and protecting pension-fund managers from lawsuits if purified pension funds have poor returns.

The Iran Sanctions Act, first passed as the Iran-Libya Sanctions Act in 1996, forbids most business activity between American firms and Iran and threatens penalties for foreign firms that invest more than $20 million in one year in the energy sector. Enforcement has been weak, however, in part because the executive branch has utilized the waiver provision.

Foreign investment is critical for Iran's mismanaged economy and has totaled almost $100 billion since 1999. Clawson referred Thursday to the "stunningly poor" condition of Iran's economy in light of "the incredible opportunities of the last five years."

Oil revenues pay for social services and subsidies on imported gasoline, but experts predict Iran's declining oil exports may cease entirely by 2015. Otherwise, there's just a little industry and revenues from permitted exports: nuts, caviar and carpets.

Pension fund divestment could make a sizable dent in Iran's finances because the amount invested in Iran-invested companies is in the tens of billions of dollars. During the AEI conference, Missouri State Treasurer Sarah Steelman, a pioneer in state pension divestment, discounted the perceived lack of fiduciary responsibility, pointing to the high performance of Missouri's purified funds. Florida Democratic state senator Ted Deutsch emphasized that the outrage of pensioners outweighs the resistance of fund managers who'd rather not deal with divestment.

Several other states are close to passing divestment legislation.

Bremmer told UPI that state-driven pension divestment will be difficult to legislate since pension funds involve numerous companies and hedge funds.

"If that becomes more than a symbolic step by a couple of states, it's going to be hard."

Bremmer argues that sanctions overall are both unlikely to become very tough and unlikely to have the desired effects. Sanctions are a bad policy for nations on the left side of the J-curve, which means that they are highly authoritarian with very little openness, as his book "The J-Curve: A New Way to Understand Why Nations Rise and Fall" describes, because they rally support around the regime.

While Bremmer pointed to ISA's successes in limiting the availability of foreign management skills and technology in the Iranian energy sector, he noted that sanctions led to the rapid expansion of Iran's nuclear program because Iran saw that it would have a problem getting oil and gas and wanted more leverage.

He said Iran's recently imposed gas rationing is a bad sign.

"The fact that they took a politically unpopular step says to me clearly that they are not exactly planning on sitting down and moving toward a diplomatic resolution."

Bremmer noted that only an embargo on Iranian oil and gas, which is very unlikely, would seriously harm Iran's economy, so sanctions probably won't prevent a nuclear program. Moreover, the Iranians are in a better geopolitical position than three years ago, given the violence in Palestine, Lebanon and Iraq. And with high oil prices, they don't think they need to back down.

Another unlikely scenario that could hurt Iran is if oil prices fell to $30 per gallon -- through increased production in other countries, he said.

Short of these unlikely scenarios, more pressure is needed and that has worked, particularly to persuade German and Swiss banks to comply.

At the conference, Clawson also emphasized the use of carrots, including advanced technology and inclusion in the world economy, such as through membership in the World Trade Organization.

Source: United Press International
http://www.spacewar.com/reports/Cheney_Fav...n_Iran_999.html

Half Billion Dollar U.S. Embassy in Baghdad 'Not Big Enough'?
By Sharon Weinberger EmailJuly 24, 2007 | 8:32:04 AMCategories: War Update

Embassy The massive embassy rising in Baghdad's fortified green zone may not be big enough to house all the planned employees, the LA Times reports. "Despite its brash scale and nearly $600-million cost, the compound designed to accommodate more than 1,000 people is not big enough, and may not be safe enough if a major military pullout leaves the country engulfed in a heightened civil war, U.S. planners now say," the paper writes.

More problematic, however, is how the embassy appears to be viewed by Iraqis.

"It's all for them, all of Iraq's resources, water, electricity, security," said Raid Kadhim Kareem, who has watched the buildings go up at a floodlighted site bristling with construction cranes from his post guarding an abandoned home on the other side of the Tigris River. "It's as if it's their country, and we are guests staying here."

Stephen Biddle of the Council on Foreign Relations had a different way to describe the embassy, particularly in the even of an all out civil war: "If the government of Iraq collapses and becomes transparently just one party in a civil war, you've got Ft. Apache in the middle of Indian country, but the Indians have mortars now."

http://blog.wired.com/defense/2007/07/half-billion-do.html

July 31, 2007 Terrorists Are Everywhere
Philip Giraldi In an attempt to reverse plummeting approval ratings, the Bush administration is mounting an unprecedented, sustained campaign of disinformation on the terrorist threat confronting the United States. Even the mainstream media has noted how the White House has attempted falsely to tie al-Qaeda to the war in Iraq, with President Bush increasing the number of references to the group in speeches made during the month of July. On July 10, al-Qaeda was referred to 30 times in a Cleveland speech on the Iraq war. By July 25, the president referred to al-Qaeda no less than 95 times in a speech made before a group of airmen in Charleston, S.C.

The frantic attempts to fearmonger by linking the failed venture in Iraq to the other failed venture dubbed the "global war on terror" is pathetic, even by the standards of an administration that cannot tell right from wrong and that cannot, apparently, differentiate one terrorist group from another. One of the most troublesome aspects of the Bush agenda is the conflation of a whole basket of groups with the terrorism menace even if they pose no actual danger to the U.S. Buying into the Bush rhetoric, even to a small degree, makes it impossible to classify and confront the genuine terrorists that actually threaten the United States. It makes a confused and unfocused America weaker rather than stronger.

There should be no confusion about what constitutes the terrorist threat against the United States. There is only one terrorist group that is genuinely willing and able to attack the U.S., and that is al-Qaeda in Pakistan. Al-Qaeda in Pakistan has attacked the United States, has both the desire and capability to do so again, and has stated its intention to stage new attacks on a number of occasions. And the danger of even al-Qaeda in Pakistan should be put in some kind of perspective. The group is weaker than it was in 2001, having lost many of its leaders and funding mechanisms. It has decentralized and is largely dependent on unreliable local resources: witness the bungled planning and execution that went into the recent attempted attacks in Britain. There is no evidence whatsoever that al-Qaeda has anything like a weapon of mass destruction that could cause massive damage or fatalities, and there is no intelligence that suggests that al-Qaeda has any group or organization currently in place in the U.S. that might be capable of carrying out a major terrorist attack. Recent arrests of terrorism suspects in the United States suggest that while there are a number of disgruntled individuals who have made the transition into terrorism supporters, most of the groups have been infiltrated FBI informants and there would appear to be little danger that any of their frequently far-fetched plans might evolve into actual terrorist attacks.

Bush's increasingly strident rhetoric is supported by the unclassified summary of the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) of July 17 on the terrorist threat to the homeland. The NIE is a curious document, on one hand a frank admission of failure but in other ways surely one of the most dishonest and politically motivated documents to be seen since the Iraq estimate of October 2002. It is a sign, if one were needed, that the new chiefs of the intelligence community are willing to play politics, adopting the admittedly low standards for professional integrity established by former Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet. The document concedes that al-Qaeda has reconstituted itself in three out of four core areas – an admission that nearly six years of global counter-terrorism warfare at a cost of hundreds of billions of dollars has been a failure – but it then goes on to grossly over-hype the significance of the al-Qaeda affiliate in Iraq and place Hezbollah into the terrorism threat matrix in a bid to further blacken "axis of evil" state Iran.

Al-Qaeda affiliates in Iraq and North Africa do not threaten the United States. Such groups use the al-Qaeda trademark, but they are financed, organized, and recruited locally. They are operationally independent. Hezbollah and Hamas likewise do not threaten the United States and almost certainly have little to no capability to carry out an operation on this side of the Atlantic Ocean. The NIE's assertion that al-Qaeda in Iraq has stated its intention to attack the U.S. is reportedly based solely on a speech made by the group's leader, Abu Ayyub al-Masri, in which he threatened to "bomb the White House." Hezbollah and Hamas have no intention or ability to attack the U.S. They do indeed threaten Israel, though some in the White House and Congress appear to have some difficulty in separating the legitimate security concerns of Tel Aviv from American interests.

The White House argument that al-Qaeda in Iraq is controlled by al-Qaeda in Pakistan and will be directed to stage attacks against the United States is false and is not even supported by the NIE, which merely stated that the parent organization al-Qaeda might well try to use the Iraq affiliate as a resource for recruitment and fundraising. Al-Qaeda in Iraq is small, amounting to 5 percent or less of the broader insurgency and having only 1,000 to 2,000 activists. Most of its attacks have been directed against the Iraqi government and, most particularly, Shi'ite religious institutions, like the Samara mosque attack in February 2006 that almost produced open sectarian war. Most of the known leadership consists of foreign jihadists, but intelligence on the group is poor, and the makeup of the rank-and-file is not clear and might be mostly Iraqi. The group does not have a completely comfortable relationship with al-Qaeda in Pakistan, which has criticized it more than once for its killing of civilians. There is no indication whatsoever that the group is controlled from Pakistan or that it has any capability of carrying out operations outside of Iraq and its immediate neighborhood.

The real terrorism threat that persists in Pakistan's ungovernable tribal areas should be the focus of American efforts. Al-Qaeda could have been destroyed in late 2001 through early 2002, but the opportunity was wasted through the sheer incompetence of policymakers in Washington. Now, after six years of dithering, there are problems in developing any strategy for rooting out al-Qaeda that might be successful without destabilizing all of central Asia. The comments of the White House Homeland Security adviser Frances Fragos Townsend on July 22 were particularly maladroit, suggesting that it might be necessary to take military action against Pakistan to solve the al-Qaeda problem. Her comments suggest that she is unaware that the U.S. lacks the kind of tactical intelligence that would make such a strike effective. Nor were her comments coordinated with the Pentagon or the State Department, both of which have been taking pains to reassure Pakistan's President Pervez Musharraf that Washington will do nothing that will lead to his overthrow. Both Musharraf and some of the better-informed voices in the administration know that a U.S. invasion of the tribal areas would lead to an immediate change in government in Islamabad. The new government would almost certainly have to incorporate religious extremists and would be unlikely to continue to cooperate with the United States. Ironically, Pakistan is also under pressure from some of its American allies. It has been increasingly criticized by the U.S. Congress in spite of the fact that its security services have arrested and killed more al-Qaeda than the rest of the world's intelligence services combined. The U.S. would have no effective program against al-Qaeda without Pakistani assistance.

http://www.antiwar.com/orig/giraldi.php?articleid=11366

Outsourcing Intelligence: How Bush Gets His National Intelligence from Private Companies

By R.J. Hillhouse, The Nation. Posted July 31, 2007.

Private corporations are now a major staple of national intelligence and are heavily involved in producing the most important and most sensitive national security document -- the President's Daily Brief.


The unprecedented involvement of private corporations in the Iraq War has been well documented. Private soldiers working for Blackwater USA, Triple Canopy and others provide security services against military-level threats, and they regularly engage in combat.

But 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).

Over the past six years, a quiet revolution has occurred in the intelligence community toward wide-scale outsourcing to corporations and away from the long-established practice of keeping operations in US government hands, with only select outsourcing of certain jobs to independently contracted experts. Key functions of intelligence agencies are now run by private corporations. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) revealed in May that 70 percent of the intelligence budget goes to contractors.

For all practical purposes, effective control of the NSA is with private corporations, which run its support and management functions. As the Washington Post's Walter Pincus reported last year, more than 70 percent of the staff of the Pentagon's newest intelligence unit, CIFA (Counterintelligence Field Activity), is made up of corporate contractors.

Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) lawyers revealed at a conference in May that contractors make up 51 percent of the staff in DIA offices. At the CIA, the situation is similar. Between 50 and 60 percent of the workforce of the CIA's most important directorate, the National Clandestine Service (NCS), responsible for the gathering of human intelligence, is composed of employees of for-profit corporations.

Employees of private corporations -- "green badgers," in CIA parlance -- provide sensitive services ranging from covert CIA operations in Iraq to recruiting and running spies. They also gather human intelligence on behalf of the CIA and analyze it, creating intelligence products used by the intelligence community and also shared with other branches of government.

Corporate intelligence professionals from companies such as Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Booz Allen Hamilton, SAIC and others are thoroughly integrated into analytical divisions throughout the intelligence community, including the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. It is the ODNI that produces the final document of the President's Daily Brief.

The President's Daily Brief is an aggregate of the most critical analyses from the sixteen agencies that make up the intelligence community. Staff at the ODNI sift through reports to complete the PDB, which is presented to the President every day as the US government's most accurate and most current assessment of priority national security issues. It was the PDB that warned on August 6, 2001, "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US."

It's true that the government pays for and signs off on the assessment, but much of the analysis and even some of the underlying intelligence-gathering is corporate. Knowledgeable members of the intelligence community tell me that corporations have so penetrated the intelligence community that it's impossible to distinguish their work from the government's.

Although the President's Daily Brief has the seal of the ODNI, it is misleading. To be accurate, the PDB would look more like NASCAR with corporate logos plastered all over it.

Concerned members of the intelligence community have told me that if a corporation wanted to insert items favorable to itself or its clients into the PDB to influence the US national security agenda, at this time it would be virtually undetectable. These companies have analysts and often intelligence collectors spread throughout the system and have the access to introduce intelligence into the system.

To take an extreme example, a company frustrated with a government that's hampering its business or the business of one of its clients could introduce or spin intelligence on that government's suspected collaboration with terrorists in order to get the White House's attention and potentially shape national policy.

Or, more subtly, a private firm could introduce concerns about a particular government to put heat on that government to shape its energy policy in a favorable direction.

To get us into the Iraq War, intelligence regarding alleged weapons of mass destruction had to be very artfully manipulated to short-circuit a formidable bureaucracy designed to prevent just such warping of intelligence. Due to the shift toward wide-scale industrial outsourcing in the intelligence community, even that fallible safeguard has been eroded.

Sources like "Curveball," the Iraqi informant who wrongly asserted the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and upon whom the CIA relied, are no longer needed. This is particularly frightening when one considers that the "war on terror" is fought by a $100 billion-plus industry that has a vested interest in its continuation.

The tools needed to close this vulnerability are available, and they can be found in the private sector. Existing techniques could be applied to monitor the intelligence community for any suspicious activity to insure that no corporation could manipulate US government policy in this way.

Closing the gaps is simply a matter of the Director of National Intelligence acknowledging the problem, then finding the political will and leadership to implement a solution. Unfortunately, it will probably take a public outcry to make this happen.

http://www.alternet.org/story/57979/?page=2

Yahoo! News
The Saudi Connection

Stephen SchwartzMon Jul 30, 11:59 AM ET

ALMOST SIX YEARS after September 11, 2001, and more than four years since the beginning of the U.S.-led intervention in Iraq, the American government and media have begun to admit something every informed and honest Muslim in the world has known all along. That is: the "Sunni insurgency" in Iraq, as well as 9/11 and certain acts of extremist Sunni violence inside Iraq before then, are consequences of the official status of the ultra-fundamentalist Wahhabi sect in Saudi Arabia, Iraq's southern neighbor. Saudi Wahhabi clerics have preached and recruited for terror in Iraq; Saudi money has sustained it; the largest number of those who have carried out suicide bombings north of the Saudi-Iraqi border have been Saudi citizens.

Does this sound obvious and familiar? Perhaps to regular readers of THE WEEKLY STANDARD and THE DAILY STANDARD, which have reported frequently on the Saudi connection to terror in the Iraq war since the phenomenon first appeared. But the truth is finally seeping out elsewhere. On Friday, July 27, the Washington Post and the New York Times reported on the links between Saudi Arabia and the Wahhabi terror in Iraq, employing their usual cautious and polite language when dealing with the desert kingdom. The Post ran a Reuters rewrite of the Times reportage, casting the problem in terms of Saudi distrust for the Shia-led Iraqi administration of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, and the resulting difficulties facing Condoleezza Rice and Robert Gates as they visit the Saudis this week. Seven paragraphs down, the story quoted the Times about the real issue: "the Saudis had offered financial support to Sunni groups in Iraq and U.S. officials were increasingly concerned about its close Arab ally's 'counterproductive' role in Iraq."

"Counterproductive" is a euphemism for Saudi state subsidies to Wahhabi clerics who demand the genocide of Shia Muslims, urge young men to go north and sacrifice themselves to that end, and preach eulogies after their deaths. It is also a diplomatic way to describe the official Saudi policy of ignoring financial contributions by rich Saudi citizens to support Wahhabi terror in Iraq. Others might call such behavior acts of war rather than merely "counterproductive."

The Times itself, in an article by Helene Cooper, further noted, "Of an estimated 60 to 80 foreign fighters who enter Iraq each month, American military and intelligence officials say that nearly half are coming from Saudi Arabia and that the Saudis have not done enough to stem the flow." Administration officials, the paper reported "spoke on the condition of anonymity because they believed that openly criticizing Saudi Arabia would further alienate the Saudi royal family." Then came the bald truth: "the majority of suicide bombers in Iraq are from Saudi Arabia [and] about 40 percent of all foreign fighters are Saudi. Officials said that while most of the foreign fighters came to Iraq to become suicide bombers, others arrived as bomb makers, snipers, logisticians and financiers."

Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal has "revealed" information about the Al Rajhi Bank, one of the kingdom's main financiers of Wahhabism, most of which has been available in print for several years. The "fresh" disclosures include the role of the Al Rajhi Bank in facilitating Saudi extremist operations. But the Journal admits that the Al Rajhi name appeared on a document many Westerners were loath to take seriously, the "Golden Chain" roster of al Qaeda donors seized by Bosnian authorities in Sarajevo, and handed over to the U.S. government in 2002.

Yet even the Journal seems not to have noticed that the Al Rajhi financial system's Suleiman Abdul Al-Aziz Al Rajhi also created the SAAR Foundation, an object of the federal raid known as GreenQuest, which struck a nest of Islamist entities in Northern Virginia in 2002.

Why has there been so little media interest in the role of Saudi money and influence in Iraq and elsewhere? The best explanation is media cooperation with the official U.S. preference for the "quiet, behind-the-scenes influence" that one administration after another has defaulted to in dealing with Saudi problems, and which the Saudis exploit to continue their deceptive ways.

Saudis and Iraqis, even with own imperfect media, are much better informed. Here is what they have been reading.

* On July 25, the Saudi newspaper Al-Watan reported on 61 Saudis held in Iraqi jails. The inferred charge was terrorism.

* The day before, Al-Watan described an uproar over Saudi clerics advocating the destruction of Shia holy sites in Iraq. According to Iraqi sources, the Wahhabis have specifically called for the destruction of the shrines of Hussein, grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, in Karbala, and of Caliph Ali, the prophet's son-in-law, in Najaf--the two most sacred Shia sites. As also reported in Iraqi media, students at the Muhammad Ibn Saud Islamic University, located in Riyadh and known as the "terrorist factory," have organized activist groups and sent members streaming north to join the onslaught on Iraqi Shias.

* On July 17, the Grand Mufti or chief Islamic cleric of the Saudi kingdom, Abd al-Aziz Al Ash-Shaykh, cautioned Saudis not to go to Iraq to engage in terror, and said that "those who mislead young Muslims, calling them to jihad, refuse to send their own sons to participate in the same conflict."

* On July 16, the Saudi daily Al-Sharq Al-Awsat quoted the comment of Prince Nayef, the Saudi interior minister who wriggles like an eel on this issue, that Saudis lured to participate in the Iraq terror are "brainwashed teenagers." The same day, the Saudi daily Al-Hayat interviewed U.S. Treasury undersecretary Stuart Levey, who argued that financing terror in Iraq is no different from contributing to al Qaeda elsewhere.

* And the day before that, on July 15, the Wahhabi website Al-Sahat posted a list of Saudi terrorists recently killed in Iraq, with names, addresses, and dates and places of their demise.

This, too, is merely the beginning of a long inventory of such information reported in the Muslim world. Nobody can say the Saudis, Iraqis, and other Muslims do not know who organizes and supports the Wahhabi terror in Iraq.

None of the recent "revelations" should come as a suprise to anyone. In 2002, THE WEEKLY STANDARD reported on the Al Rajhi financial network and terrorism; in 2003 on the Saudi injection of Wahhabi radicals into Iraq, including Saudi media publicity about their deaths in defense of Saddam Hussein and on Saudi involvement in combat against the U.S.-led coalition at Falluja; in 2004 on general Saudi support for terror in Iraq, and yet more on the Saudi involvement in the fight for Falluja.

One question remains: How many more American and Coalition soldiers, as well as innocent Iraqis, will be killed before the Saudis are compelled to end their support for terrorism in Iraq?


Stephen Schwartz is a frequent contributor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD.

Copyright © 2007 Weekly Standard
Copyright © 2007 Yahoo! Inc. All rights reserved.

Getting bin Laden up a tree

Mon Jul 30, 4:00 AM ET

The Bush doctrine of expanding democracy to flush out Islamic terrorism has reached a critical test in Pakistan, where Al Qaeda leaders are in hiding. The nation's military ruler was forced last week to meet with the leading opposition figure. The move offers hope of a democracy restored.

Much more bargaining will likely be needed before President Pervez Musharraf gives up command of the military and allows a free election for a civilian prime minister, perhaps in a few months. Dictatorships don't usually go easily.

But it is to General Musharraf's credit that he appears ready to recognize his worsening political plight as well as the threat from Islamic radicals and seek a peaceful transition to civilian rule – if all sides can pull it off.

His secret meeting Friday in the Middle East with former prime minister Benazir Bhutto – who was forced into exile after Musharraf's 1999 coup and still leads the largest opposition party – comes after months of trauma to Pakistan: Musharraf's sacking of the chief justice, a military raid on Muslim militants holed up in the capital's Red Mosque, the Supreme Court's reinstatement of the chief justice, and then a report this month from all 16 US intelligence agencies that the central front in the war on Al Qaeda lies in the "comfort zone" in Pakistan's border areas with Afghanistan.

The report, known as the National Intelligence Estimate, has heightened concern that the US might soon step up military action inside Pakistan against Al Qaeda beyond the limited incursions that have been condoned so far by Musharraf. But violating another nation's sovereignty for the sake of an uncertain victory against Osama bin Laden could possibly lead to serious political backlash in Pakistan, and create an opening for Islamic parties to gain an upper hand. (In the 2002 parliamentary elections, Islamist parties did their best ever.)

The threshold for any preemptive US attacks needs to be extremely high if the US is not to "lose" Pakistan to anti-American leaders.

After eight years in power, Musharraf has done much to bolster Pakistan against Islamic radicalism, but not nearly enough. While the economy has grown at a healthy clip, it's likely that a civilian government – one that honors the rule of law and fights graft – could do better to meet both the US and Pakistani interests in curbing the jihadi training in the nation's largely lawless border areas. Only then can Mr. bin Laden be put on the run again, or captured.

The most difficult part in the expected political transition is to define the military's role in government. As a nationalist force, it sees itself as guardian of Pakistan's interests in tense relations with Afghanistan and India. If the US can help reduce those tensions, the better civilians can rule.

Musharraf took power because civilian rulers were wrecking the country. If he now hangs up his army uniform as part of a deal and remains as a civilian president, a delicate political balance must be maintained. The US can respond with greater assistance in trade, aid, and other areas.

As much President Bush says Iraq is the central battlefield with Al Qaeda, he now needs to focus on Pakistan in the coming days.

The battle can be won with ballots as much as with bullets.

Copyright © 2007 The Christian Science Monitor
Copyright © 2007 Yahoo! Inc. All rights reserved.

Russia leads race for North Pole oil


The Arctic's untapped resources include huge reserves of fuel and minerals. Now Moscow has raised tensions by dispatching an expedition to annex a vast expanse of the ocean.

Jamie Doward, Robin McKie and Tom Parfitt
Sunday July 29, 2007
The Observer

In the darkest depths of the Arctic Ocean a new Cold War is brewing. American and British nuclear submarines lurk in the shadows, preparing for company.

'Why has Britain been sending submarines into Arctic waters?' asked Rob Huebert, associate director of the Centre for Military and Strategic Studies in Calgary. 'Because it wants to retain its capability to deal with the Russian threat.'

Such talk is redolent of a Le Carré novel. But the battle between the West and Russia over who owns the Arctic has been building for years. Last week it entered a new phase when Russia announced it was sending a miniature submarine, equipped with a team of explorers, to claim a chunk of the Arctic Ocean the size of Western Europe.

The stakes are high. The ocean is home to vast oil and mineral reserves as well as massive shoals of fish and strategically important shipping lanes. 'It could get very ugly,' Huebert said. 'Nobody knows how much oil and gas is down there. Shell, for example, is quite pessimistic, but the likes of Exxon are quite gung-ho. I've seen some people make the case that up to 18 per cent of the world's oil reserves are there - that's getting into Saudi Arabia's league.'

To symbolise its claim, Russia will plant its flag on the sea bed before taking samples it believes will prove the Lomonosov Ridge, which runs underneath the Arctic Ocean, is an extension of the Siberian continental shelf and therefore Russian territory.

The expedition is led by Artur Chilingarov, Russia's most famous explorer. A sturdy 68-year-old with a sweeping salt-and-pepper beard, last week he could be seen pacing the decks of his ship, the Akademik Fyodorov, followed by a posse of state television journalists who filed breathless accounts of the groundbreaking voyage.

'The Arctic is Russian,' Chilingarov told the media scrum. 'We must prove the North Pole is an extension of the Russian coastal shelf. Of course, [the expedition] is important in terms of science, but also in terms of geopolitics as well.'

There has never been a manned journey to the sea bed of the North Pole. 'Who knows, we may even discover some as yet unknown organism,' said Valery Kuznetsov, head of the expedition's oceanography team.

In 2001, Russia made a similar claim to the Arctic Ocean but its evidence was disputed. An official panel of experts backed by the UN has been established to consider claims and Russia is determined to prove its case. A UN convention dictates that countries bordering the Arctic Ocean can exploit resources within a 200-nautical-mile economic zone of their territory. But this can be extended if a country can, as the Russians are attempting, prove the continental shelf beneath the ocean is connected to their land.

So far the US has refused to engage in the debate over extending exploitation rights, a policy throwback to the Eighties when the Reagan administration feared such an action would see large parts of the Arctic handed over to the Soviets.

Meanwhile, Canada and Denmark, through its sovereignty over Greenland, claim that the Lomonosov Ridge is connected to their territories and therefore the ocean is effectively their property. In a sign of how tense the situation is becoming, the Canadian government recently placed a C$7bn (£3.25bn) order for new naval patrol vessels, a move that Prime Minister Stephen Harper said was designed to 'defend its sovereignty over the Arctic'.

But the battle for the Arctic is fast becoming a global issue. Melting ice has meant the opening up of the North West Passage to commercial shipping is now possible in the summer months and, given rising temperatures, a possibility all year round in the future. The opening up of the passage can shorten the distance ships have to travel between Europe and Asia by up to 2,000 nautical miles over the established trade route through the Panama Canal.

Given the area's geopolitical importance, it is no surprise Britain is closely monitoring the situation as part of its commitment to Nato. 'Britain has been sending Trafalgar SSN-class submarines to the Arctic since 1986 because it wants to retain its under-ice capability,' said Huebert, who predicted it would not be long before their sonar registers the presence of an old foe. 'The Russians are rebuilding their navy,' Huebert said. 'They've just launched a submarine for the first time since 1987 and they've placed orders for three more.'

Soaring oil prices have created a new urgency among the countries competing to make their claim. When oil prices were low it was considered uneconomic to tap into the Arctic Ocean's reserves. But with China and India now desperate for energy, oil prices are spiralling. Experts say oil prices of around $70 a barrel makes drilling in the Arctic a viable proposition. In 2004, a joint Swedish and Russian venture proved it was possible to drill into the ocean's floor from a rig secured by three ships.

Nor is oil the only resource that is ripe for exploitation in the thawing north. There are also large mineral deposits and coal beds in the Arctic, for example. In addition, there is the prospect of opening up vast new fish reserves as ice cover disappears over the Arctic Ocean. For several years, British research vessels from Dunstaffnage Marine Research Station, near Oban, have been studying these stocks.

'There is strong evidence that there are still good reserves of fish such as cod and capelin in some regions of the Arctic,' said Prof Graham Shimmield, Dunstaffnage's director. 'However, these are probably the world's last refuges. We should restrain ourselves from catching them on an industrial scale until we learn more about how strong they are. It remains to be seen whether that will happen, however.'

The rush to exploit the Arctic worries other scientists. They point out that the region is important because the effects of climate change are more pronounced here, and arrive earlier, than in any other part of the world. When things go wrong, they are first noticed in the Arctic. But if oil companies and mining firms start pumping out carbon dioxide and other waste as they open up the region, the pristine conditions that have helped scientists make past observations will be destroyed, obscuring our view of our dangerously warming world.

This problem is already an issue in the archipelago of Svalbard where European scientists are studying glacier retreat, carbon emissions and other effects of pollution, but are having their work hampered by the emissions from coal mines dug by the Russians.

Tensions are already running high in the Arctic, it would seem. Nevertheless, hopes remain that a diplomatic conclusion can be achieved to resolve what has been dubbed the 'battle for the North Pole'.

'We must wake up to the fact that the Arctic is going to become a much busier area,' Huebert said. 'And try to produce a solution that will provide an equitable, fair and safe division of resources. We cannot just proceed with the old unilateral approach.'

Observers point to the Antarctic Treaty, which severely limits the exploitation of the land mass around the South Pole. No waste disposal, no mining, no introduction of animal species and no commercial work have been allowed on the continent for more than 40 years. Some diplomats have suggested that a similar set of rules could be agreed for the Arctic. Such a plan is unlikely to succeed, however. 'Countries agreed to the Antarctic Treaty as a way to save money,' said a senior UK official. 'The South Pole is an expensive place to exploit and it was realised that if everyone agreed not to touch it, they could all rest easy about pouring millions into the area. This is not the issue with the Arctic. It is becoming easier and easier to exploit. Nations aren't going to give up on these rich pickings.

Hence the Russian expedition - although this has not gone totally smoothly so far. Last week the Akademik Fyodorov was forced to send out a distress signal and then drifted for several hours because of an engine failure. It has since made good progress towards the pole and the first research dives from the ship are expected to take place tomorrow.

During its journey last week a mysterious aircraft appeared above the Akademik Fyodorov, causing a ripple of excitement among the journalists on board. Russian media widely reported the aircraft to be a Nato spy plane. It may have been paranoia but in the frozen waters around the North Pole one thing is certain: the days of the Cold War are back.

http://www.opednews.com/maxwrite/linkframe.php?linkid=39525

rense.com

Bush's EO - Ruling
By Executive Decree
From Joel Skousen
Editor - World Affairs Brief
7-28-7
http://www.rense.com/general77/dne.htm

The only major difference between the German experience with executive decree (Hitler's 1933 Enabling Act) and the Bush administration's continual use of executive orders to dictate policy is the speed of implementation. The German Bundestag gave Hitler all power in one bill. In the US, Congress is allowing Bush to take it one small step at a time. Both ways justify greater executive power on a continual state of national emergency. Both used deception and black operations to provoke fear of terror to keep the nation in a state of fear and war. The fact that these US emergency powers were enacted long ago and enhanced by both parties over time attests that this is not merely a Bush/Cheney phenomenon. We are simply seeing its long-intended implementation at a very accelerated pace. This week I'll analyze the two latest Bush Executive Orders.

Executive Order Blocking Property of Certain Persons Who Threaten Stabilization Efforts in Iraq
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/20.../20070717-3.htm

The President begins the EO by addressing his "constitutional" authority: "By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, including the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, as amended (50 U.S.C. 1701 et seq.)(IEEPA), the National Emergencies Act (50 U.S.C. 1601 et seq.)(NEA), and section 301 of title 3, United States Code... "

Interestingly, the National Emergencies Act of 1976 was passed to "stop open-ended states of national emergency and formalize Congressional checks and balances on Presidential emergency powers. The act sets a limit of two years on states of national emergency. It also imposes certain 'procedural formalities' on the President when invoking such powers, and provides a means for Congress to countermand a Presidential declaration of emergency and associated use of emergency powers.[source:Wikipedia]" It is clear that the president is not abiding by these restrictions and/or that Congress is complicit by not challenging the president on his continued use of emergency powers. Naturally, the 1976 law is full of loopholes that make it easy to extend the two year limit.

If you go to the trouble of reading these acts, you will see how just how totalitarian these powers are that are granted to the president in an emergency. Worse, there are no limitations on his power to declare such an emergency for almost any reason. These powers are not necessarily constitutional even though passed by Congress. The Constitution limits legislative powers to its enumerated functions. No such emergency powers were ever enumerated in the Constitution.

This EO essentially directs federal agencies to confiscate or block access to funds or property of any person (including US Citizens) without due process and without warning [direct violations of the constitution] who the administration determines "commit or pose a significant risk of committing [dangerously broad language], an act or acts of violence that have the purpose or effect of threatening the peace or stability of Iraq or the Government of Iraq,.. undermining efforts to promote economic reconstruction and political reform in Iraq."

Then the President boldly asserts, " I therefore determine that for these measures to be effective in addressing the national emergency declared in Executive Order 13303 [2003] and expanded in Executive Order 13315, [also 2003] there need be no prior notice of a listing or determination [meaning: no warning to the affected parties]."

At first glance, it appears as if these powers could be used directly against commentators and critics of US government policy. Certainly many of us could be viewed as "undermining efforts to promote economic reconstruction and political reform."

The singularly courageous Devvy Kidd recently criticized the Bush administration's lack of constitutional authority to spend billions of taxpayer dollars on behalf of Iraqi reconstruction. Is she guilty of "undermining Iraq reconstruction"? Your editor has criticized the phony puppet government of Iraq in all its various iterations. Am I guilty of "undermining efforts" for political reform? I'm sure some could construe it as such.

Steven Watson of Prisonplanet.com complained loudly, "President Bush's newest executive order states that any American citizen who threatens the peace and stability of Iraq and undermines efforts to promote reconstruction and reform there may have all their property and interests seized by the Treasury department without warning."

G. Edward Griffin and Aaron Russo agree when they claim, "President Bush signed an Executive order that authorized blocking the use of any property held by anyone he says is a threat to the 'stabilization' of Iraq. That means anyone who opposes his Middle East foreign policy now is subject to loss of home, automobiles, savings, investments, and anything else considered as property."

But as Devvy Kidd correctly notes: "I'm sorry, but this EO says no such thing." She's right, as usual. The specific language of the order limits its reach, "to deal with any unusual and extraordinary threat, which has its source in whole or substantial part outside the United States."

That said, there is another part of the order which is so broad that it can include innocent citizens who unknowingly are deemed in "support" of those whose property is blocked by the order: Under Sec B, the president also claims the power to include persons who "(ii) to have materially assisted, sponsored, or provided financial, material, logistical, or technical support for, or goods or services in support of... any person whose property and interests in property are blocked pursuant to this order;" "Materially assisted" is a very broad legal phrase that can include almost any form of financial dealing-even innocent and unknowing. Clearly due process is necessary for these persons since the line of "support" needs careful adjudication.

Thus, using one's first amendment right to criticize government action in Iraq does NOT fit under giving "material support." So, you won't find Devvy Kidd or me arrested for having accused the government of improperly funding Iraqi reconstruction or the current puppet political regime in Baghdad.

Nevertheless, I do have to agree with the critic's long term view that all of these incremental uses of executive power point to an eventual take down of American civil liberties. It is unwise, however, to declare each new thrust of this out-of-control administration as the coup d'grace of our rights. That will only discredit our voice of warning.

We must continue to warn about the overall threat about in imprecise language used to prosecute these kinds of policies. Bruce Fein, Justice Department official during the Reagan Administration commented, "Certainly it is highly constitutionally questionable to empower the government to destroy someone economically without giving notice. This is so sweeping it's staggering. I've never seen anything so broad that it expands beyond terrorism, beyond seeking to use violence or the threat of violence to cower or intimidate a population..." So, even though the reach of this EO is limited, it's use of broad legal language to cast a wide net is very dangerous to all in the long-term.

Next, let's consider the legal basis of Executive Orders. This particular president has gone beyond the customary use of Executive Orders. Basically, an EO is merely an instruction from the President to his own executive branch, directing them to do things that ultimately must find support in lawful statutes. In no case is it appropriate to create new laws or punishments applicable to citizens or other branches of government outside the Executive or where not specifically mentioned in the law.

Constitutional lawyer Larry Becraft pointed out to Devvy Kidd that we have examples in case law where the Supreme Court has overturned executive privilege. In YOUNGSTOWN CO. v. SAWYER, 343 U.S. 579 (1952) 343 U.S. 579, the Supreme Court wrote: "'The Founders of this Nation entrusted the lawmaking power to the Congress alone in both good and bad times. It would do no good to recall the historical events, the fears of power and the hopes for freedom that lay behind their choice. Such a review would but confirm our holding that this seizure order cannot stand.'"

The issue was President Truman's attempt to nationalize a US steel company under the guise of a national war and economic emergency. The court wasn't buying it. Nevertheless, one or two cases doesn't make an impenetrable barrier to executive or judicial mischief. Such decisions only establish a partial precedent in law-which the courts are free to disregard as they will. They are not bound by precedent. With the current proclivity of the Supreme Court to back this administration's "war on terror", I would not bet on this particular case protecting us against dangerous Executive Orders.

THE CIA EXECUTIVE ORDER: This EO purports to regulate and limit the CIA's ability to hold persons in secret prisons and torture them. In fact, it is only a ruse--a propaganda stunt to give the appearance of controlling CIA secret prisons and torture. The specific language carefully carves out unspoken exceptions and permits them.

As Marty Lederman explains: "The only truly important section of the E.O. is section 3((i)©, which defines the category of violence that will be deemed to violate Common Article 3 for purposes of determining whether a CIA interrogation program comports with CA3. In addition to torture as defined by the federal criminal statute, and the forms of violence that remain prohibited under the new WCA [War Crimes Act], that subsection of the E.O. prohibits only 'other acts of violence serious enough to be considered comparable to murder, torture, mutilation, and cruel or inhuman treatment, as defined in [the War Crimes Act].' In other words, if a form of violence is not already prohibited by federal criminal law, and is not 'comparable' to the forms of violence prohibited by the WCA, the CIA is not prohibited from using it."

I think it is obvious that this new EO does NOT prohibit "enhanced interrogation techniques" like water-boarding (near drowning by pouring water constantly over the head of an inclined prisoner), and the administration knows it. Every attempt to ask an administration official about water boarding was met with evasion.

As Joanne Mariner said in her aptly titled piece, "The Misinterpreter-in-Chief," ...The new order purports to determine that the CIA's secret prison program 'fully complies' with U.S. obligations under Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, so long as the CIA follows a series of requirements in carrying out the program.

"But even without John Yoo to write his legal opinions, President Bush still gets it wrong. The Geneva Conventions do not permit secret, incommunicado detention, and U.S. law makes no provision for the CIA to hold detainees. 'Reaffirming' the President's February 2002 Determination, the new order opens with a misstatement. It says that, in February 2002, the President determined that al Qaeda detainees were not entitled to prisoner of war status under the Geneva Conventions, and that the President is reaffirming that determination with the present order.

"This short description rewrites history and leaves out a key intervening event: the Supreme Court's landmark 2006 ruling in the case of Hamdan v. Rumsfeld. Back in February 2002, the President did not simply determine that al Qaeda suspects captured in Afghanistan had no right to prisoner of war status; what he said was that they were not protected by the Geneva Conventions at all. Those detainees, he asserted, had absolutely no legal claim to humane treatment: If the U.S. decided not to abuse them, it did so as a matter of policy. Unsurprisingly, this initial determination set the stage for much of the abusive treatment that followed.

"President Bush hates to admit he could be wrong, but the fact is that the Supreme Court, in Hamdan, expressly rejected his position. Ruling that al Qaeda detainees could claim minimum Geneva Convention protections, the court struck down the president's jury-rigged system of military commissions."

EXECUTIVE ORDERS NOT THE ONLY WAY OF EXPANDING PRESIDENTIAL POWER: As Lynn Stuter of NWV relayed, "Last week, like so many before it, was highlighted by more incidents of egregious abuse and over extension of power by the executive branch under George W Bush, by unlawfully withholding information from Congress and the public:

1) "Representative Peter DeFazio (D-OR), member of the Homeland Security Committee, was denied access to classified documents concerning continuity of government (how government will be conducted) during a terrorist attack. Speaking of his ordeal, DeFazio had this comment to make, 'Maybe the people who think there's a conspiracy out there are right'

2) "Senator Hillary Clinton (D-NY), member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, was denied a requested briefing on how the Pentagon planned to safely withdraw American troops from Iraq. In denying that request "Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Eric Edelman did not mince words. 'Premature and public discussion of the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq reinforces enemy propaganda that the United States will abandon its allies'" Say what? That discussion has been all over the news media for weeks, making it obvious that in making said statement the Pentagon has made no accommodation for the safe withdrawal of American troops from Iraq.

3) "Bush Administration officials unveiled a bold assertion of executive privilege in the dispute over the firing of nine U.S. attorneys; seeking to block contempt charges being sought by Congress [for thumbing their nose at a Congressional subpoena] against current and former Bush Administration officials in the hopes of prying loose information concerning the firings."

Perhaps the most egregious presumption of power for the Bush/Cheney regime comes with the expansions of war powers based upon the president standing as "Commander in Chief." Adam Cohen blows apart this argument [My comments in brackets]:

"The nation is heading toward a constitutional showdown over the Iraq war [and the coming Iran war]. Congress is moving closer to passing a bill to limit or end the war [not really, just going through the motions], but President Bush insists Congress doesn't have the power to do it. 'I don't think Congress ought to be running the war,' he said at a recent press conference. [They may not have power to "run" the war, but if they have the power to declare war, they have the power to un-declare war and de-fund it-which they are unwilling to do.]

"The Constitution does make the president 'commander in chief,' a title President Bush often invokes. But it does not have the sweeping meaning he suggests. The framers took it from the British military, which used it to denote the highest-ranking official in a theater of battle. Alexander Hamilton emphasized in Federalist No. 69 that the president would be 'nothing more' than 'first general and admiral,' responsible for 'command and direction' of military forces...

"The founders would have been astonished by President Bush's assertion that Congress should simply write him blank checks for war. They gave Congress the power of the purse so it would have leverage to force the president to execute their laws properly... The framers expected Congress to keep the president on an especially short leash on military matters. The Constitution authorizes Congress to appropriate money for an army, but prohibits appropriations for longer than two years."


World Affairs Brief, July 27, 2007. Commentary and Insights on a Troubled World.

Copyright Joel Skousen. Partial quotations with attribution permitted. Cite source as Joel Skousen's World Affairs Brief (<http://www.worldaffairsbrief.com> http://www.worldaffairsbrief.com )

Exclusive: ‘Possible Attack on the U.S. Within Ninety Days
FSM Editors

Author: The Editors
Source: The Family Security Foundation, Inc.
Date: July 30, 2007

Veteran Israeli Intelligence expert, Juval Aviv, said in recent media interviews that his sources on terror plots directed at the United States indicate that multiple attacks on our homeland are in the final stages of preparation. Read the details.

‘Possible Attack on the U.S. Within Ninety Days’

By FSM Editors

Counterterrorism expert Juval Aviv met recently with reporters at Fox News and revealed information, which he believes is accurate, concerning an imminent Al Qaeda attack on five to seven American cities simultaneously.

"I predict, based primarily on information that is floating in Europe and the Middle East, that an event is imminent and around the corner here in the United States. It could happen as soon as tomorrow, or it could happen in the next few months. Ninety days at the most,” said Mr. Aviv.

Mr. Aviv knows of that which he speaks. He is a former Israeli Counterterrorism Intelligence Officer and has also served as a special consultant to the U.S. Congress on issues of terrorism and security. He is best known as the source of the 1984 book, Vengeance: The True Story of an Israeli Counter-Terrorist Team by George Jonas, on which Steven Spielberg's film Munich was based. He is also the author of The Complete Terrorism Survival Guide: How to Travel, Work and Live in Safety (2003); and Staying Safe: The Complete Guide to Protecting Yourself, Your Family, and Your Business (2004).

Currently, Aviv is the president of Interfor, Inc., a corporate investigations firm in New York City.

So it is clear that Aviv has the background and experience in global terror and its operating methods to warrant taking his current warnings seriously. It would be foolish to ignore or minimize this counterterrorism veteran’s expert prognosis. Mr. Aviv told Fox that, from what his sources have been relating, sleeper cells that already have been placed inside the continental United States are on the verge of carrying out major attacks.

“What they’re going to do," he explained, "is hit six, seven or eight cities simultaneously to show sophistication and really hit the public. This time, which is the message of the day, it will not only be big cities. They’re going to try to hit rural America. They want to send a message to rural America: "You’re not protected. If you figured out that if you just move out of New York and move to Montana or to Pittsburgh, you’re not immune. We’re going [to] get you wherever we can and it’s easier there than in New York."

While this prediction leaves most Americans feeling helpless, fearful and frustrated, Juval Aviv recommends that we at least do what we can. He suggests that for the next few months, if we are traveling by public transportation, we should equip ourselves with a bottle of water, a hand towel and a flashlight. He reminds us that many fatalities in the London tube and Madrid train attacks occurred from victims who breathed in the lethal fumes from bomb components and burning gasoline. Had these people had wet towels to cover their mouths and noses, they would have had a much better chance of survival.

Mr. Aviv is a very strong proponent of “If you See Something – Say Something” school of preparedness. He stated that a great number of potentially lethal terror attacks in Israel have been – and still are – thwarted by the intelligent actions on the part of alert, aware and watchful citizens.

Americans must do the same, he advises. The global war on terror is not “somewhere over there in the Middle East.” It is here on our own soil. If ever there were a time to be especially vigilant, the time is now.

Let us hope and pray that these vicious enemies and their depraved plans against our citizens and our country, which come out of a wicked ideological brew, will be forestalled and prevented, and the perpetrators apprehended. So far, our law enforcement, military, counter-terrorism and intelligence personnel have done a stellar job. At the same time, and as we all know, we have to be lucky 100% of the time, and the terrorists have to be lucky only once.

So stay alert…stay away from crowds…and if you see something, say something! You could save hundreds, if not thousands, of lives.


� 2003-2007 FamilySecurityMatters.org All Rights Reserved

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/homeland.php?id=1193902

Martial Law Threat Is Real -
Lucky The Military
Is Breaking Down
By Dave Lindorff
7-30-7 The looming collapse of the US military in Iraq, of which a number of generals and former generals, including former Chief of Staff Colin Powell, have warned, is happening none too soon, as it may be the best hope for preventing military rule here at home. From the looks of things, the Bush/Cheney regime has been working assiduously to pave the way for a declaration of military rule, such that at this point it really lacks only the pretext to trigger a suspension of Constitutional government. They have done this with the active support of Democrats in Congress, though most of the heavy lifting was done by the last, Republican-led Congress. The first step, or course, was the first Authorization for Use of Military Force, passed in September 2001, which the president has subsequently used to claim-improperly, but so what? -that the whole world, including the US, is a battlefield in a so-called "War" on Terror, and that he has extra-Constitutional unitary executive powers to ignore laws passed by Congress. As constitutional scholar and former Reagan-era associate deputy attorney general Bruce Fein observes, that one claim, that the US is itself a battlefield, is enough to allow this or some future president to declare martial law, "since you can always declare martial law on a battlefield. All he'd need would be a pretext, like another terrorist attack inside the U.S." The 2001 AUMF was followed by the PATRIOT Act, passed in October 2001, which undermined much of the Bill of Rights. Around the same time, the president began a campaign of massive spying on Americans by the National Security Agency, conducted without any warrants or other judicial review. It was and remains a program that is clearly aimed at American dissidents and at the administration's political opponents, since the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court would never have raised no objections to spying on potential terrorists. (And it, and other government spying programs, have resulted in the government's having a list now of some 325,000 "suspected terrorists"!) The other thing we saw early on was the establishment of an underground government-within-a-government, though the activation, following 9-11, of the so-called "Continuity of Government" protocol, which saw heads of federal agencies moved secretly to an underground bunker where, working under the direction of Vice President Dick Cheney, the "government" functioned out of sight of Congress and the public for critical months. It was also during the first year following 9-11 that the Bush/Cheney regime began its programs of arrest and detention without charge-mostly of resident aliens, but also of American citizens-and of kidnapping and torture in a chain of gulag prisons overseas and at the Navy base at Guantanamo Bay. The following year, Attorney General John Ashcroft began his program to develop a mass network of tens of millions of citizen spies-Operation TIPS. That program, which had considerable support from key Democrats (notably Sen. Joe Lieberman), was curtailed by Congress when key conservatives got wind of the scale of the thing, but the concept survives without a name, and is reportedly being expanded today. Meanwhile, last October Bush and Cheney, with the help of a compliant Congress, put in place some key elements needed for a military putsch. There was the overturning of the venerable Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, which barred the use of active duty military inside the United States for police-type functions, and the revision of the Insurrection Act, so as to empower the president to take control of National Guard units in the 50 states even over the objections of the governors of those states. Put this together with the wholly secret construction now under way--courtesy of a $385-million grant by the US Army Corps of Engineers to Halliburton subsidiary KBR Inc--of detention camps reportedly capable of confining as many as 400,000 people, and a recent report that the Pentagon has a document, dated June 1, 2007, classified Top Secret, which declares there to be a developing "insurgency" within the U.S, and which lays out a whole martial law counterinsurgency campaign against legal dissent, and you have all the ingredients for a military takeover of the United States. As we go about our daily lives--our shopping, our escapist movie watching, and even our protesting and political organizing-we need to be aware that there is a real risk that it could all blow up, and that we could find ourselves facing armed, uniformed troops at our doors. Bruce Fein isn't an alarmist. He says he doesn't see martial law coming tomorrow. But he is also realistic. He says, "This is all sitting around like a loaded gun waiting to go off. I think the risk of martial law is trivial right now, but the minute there is a terrorist attack, then it is real. And it stays with us after Bush and Cheney are gone, because terrorism stays with us forever." (It may be significant that Hillary Clinton, the leading Democratic candidate for president, has called for the revocation of the 2002 Authorization for Use of Military Force against Iraq, but not of the earlier 2001 AUMF which Bush claims makes him commander in chief of a borderless, endless war on terror.) Indeed, the revised Insurrection Act (10. USC 331-335) approved by Congress and signed into law by Bush last October, specifically says that the president can federalize the National Guard to "suppress public disorder" in the event of "national disorder, epidemic, other serious public health emergency, terrorist attack or incident." That determination, the act states, is solely the president's to make. Congress is not involved. Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT), chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has added an amendment to the upcoming Defense bill, restoring the Insurrection Act to its former version-a move that has the endorsement of all 50 governors--but Fein argues that would not solve the problem, since Bush still claims that the U.S. is a battlefield. Besides, a Leahy aide concedes that Bush could sign the next Defense Appropriations bill and then use a signing statement to invalidate the Insurrection Act rider. Fein argues that the only real defense against the looming disaster of a martial law declaration would be for Congress to vote for a resolution determining that there is no "War" on terror. "But they are such cowards they will never do that," he says. That leaves us with the military. If ordered to turn their guns and bayonets on their fellow Americans, would our "heroes" in uniform follow their consciences, and their oaths to "uphold and defend" the Constitution of the United States? Or would they follow the orders of their Commander in Chief? It has to be a plus that National Guard and Reserve units are on their third and sometimes fourth deployments to Iraq, and are fuming at the abuse. It has to be a plus that active duty troops are refusing to re-enlist in droves-especially mid-level officers. If we are headed for martial law, better that it be with a broken military. Maybe if it's broken badly enough, the administration will be afraid to test the idea. ____________________________ Sidebar: Why US troops should question orders: Mounting evidence that football star Pat Tillman, who famously gave up a high-paying pro career to sign up as an Army Ranger and fight Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, may have been assassinated in a high-level conspiracy to prevent him from returning to the US as a prominent war critic should make even hardened military people question orders from their commander in chief, particularly if those orders involve arresting or shooting American citizens. Tillman, it is now known, had turned strongly against the war in Iraq as early as late 2003, and was telling his platoon to vote against Bush. There are reports too that he was contacting war critics like Noam Chomsky from Afghanistan about coming out as a war critic in 2004--a prospect which must have terrified the war-mongers in the White House and Pentagon. The military initially claimed Tillman had been killed in combat, then later claimed his death was from friendly fire. It is now known that an investigation at the time found no evidence of any enemy fire at all, and Tillman's death came from three close shots from an M-16 to the forehead, execution-style. Memos have been found from Pentagon lawyers congratulating each other for having buried a doctor's report on the possibility of murder. If this is what the government does to its critics, how can soldiers believe anything they are being told? Of course, the shabby treatment afforded to insured troops should also be having an effect on morale. Maybe the way to respond to a declaration of martial law is, like the Israelites on the first Passover, to prominently display a sign on one's front door saying, "Support the troops: Bring them home!" ___________________________ DAVE LINDORFF is a veteran, award-winning investigative reporter based in Philadelphia. His latest book, co-authored by Barbara Olshansky, is "The Case for Impeachment: The Legal Argument for Removing President George W. Bush from Office" (St. Martin's Press, 2006 and now available in paperback). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net
http://www.rense.com/general77/milt.htm

The death of this crackpot creed is nothing to mourn


The wider conflict now engulfing Iraq lays bare the absurdity of liberal interventionism - and the decline of US power

John Gray
Tuesday July 31, 2007
The Guardian

The era of liberal interventionism in international affairs is over. Invading Iraq was always in part an oil grab. A strategic objective of the Bush administration was control of Iraqi oil, which forms a key portion of the Gulf reserves that are the lifeblood of global capitalism. Yet success in this exercise in geopolitics depended on stability after Saddam was gone, and here American thinking was befogged by illusions. Both the neoconservatives who launched the war and the many liberals who endorsed it in the US and Britain took it for granted that Iraq would remain intact.

Article continues
As could be foreseen by anyone with a smattering of history, things have not turned out that way. The dissolution of Iraq is an unalterable fact, all too clear to those who have to cope on the ground, that is denied only in the White House and the fantasy world of the Green Zone. American-led regime change has created a failed state that no one has the power to rebuild. Yesterday's Oxfam report revealed that nearly one in three Iraqis is in need of emergency aid, and yet the anarchy that prevails prevents any such assistance.

Iraq now belongs in the history books, and Mesopotamia - the ancient region between the Tigris and Euphrates that includes parts of Turkey, Iran and Syria as well as the country that has been destroyed - is the site of an intensifying resource war. The Baghdad government is a battleground of sectarian forces while the Kurdish zone is independent in all but name. Utopian schemes for a federal state have been overtaken by an internal resource war fought out along sectarian lines.

Anarchy of this kind is a hideous condition in which to live, but its destructive impact reaches beyond the millions of Iraqis whose lives are already ruined. The surrounding states are being irresistibly drawn into the country's conflicts. Both Iran and Turkey have an interest in Iraq's oil wealth - Iran by virtue of having expanded its power and influence over the Shia majority, Turkey from fear that control of the oil-rich city of Kirkuk will pass into the hands of the Kurds. Such states can hardly avoid intervening and will not be deterred from acting to safeguard what they see as their vital national interests by threats from the Bush administration. Iraq is at risk of becoming the centre of a wider war, which the US can do very little to prevent - which shows up the lack of proportion in comparing the present conflict with Vietnam.

America was able to walk away from Vietnam because that country was peripheral in the world economy and the knock-on effects of US withdrawal were comparatively slight; Iraq, by contrast, is a key factor in global oil supplies, and if the US pulls out its ability to protect its allies in the region will be called into question. Another crucial difference is that Vietnam had an effective government in the north that could take over when the US exited. No such entity exists in Iraq. The feared domino effect in south-east Asia did not occur, but Iraq could be the scene of a domino effect in reverse in which the country's warring neighbours fall into the void left by the Americans' departure. By any standard, defeat in Iraq would be a more devastating blow to US power than Vietnam.

The most important - as well as most often neglected - feature of the conflict shaping up around Iraq is that the US no longer has the ability to mould events. Whatever it does, there will be decades of bloodshed in the region. Another large blunder - such as bombing Iran, as Dick Cheney seems to want, or launching military operations against Pakistan, as some in Washington appear to propose - would make matters even worse.

The chaos that has engulfed Iraq is only the start of a longer and larger upheaval, but it would be useful if we learned a few lessons from it. There is a stupefying cliche which says regime change went wrong because there was not enough thought about what to do after the invasion. The truth is that if there had been sufficient forethought the invasion would not have been launched. After the overthrow of Saddam - a secular despot in a European tradition that includes Lenin and Stalin - there was never any prospect of imposing a western type of government. Grotesque errors were made such as the disbanding of the Iraqi army, but they only accelerated a process of fragmentation that would have happened anyway. Forcible democratisation undid not only the regime but also the state.

Liberal interventionists who supported regime change as part of a global crusade for human rights overlooked the fact that the result of toppling tyranny in divided countries is usually civil war and ethnic cleansing. Equally they failed to perceive the rapidly dwindling leverage on events of the western powers that led the crusade. If anyone stands to gain long term it is Russia and China, which have stood patiently aside and now watch the upheaval with quiet satisfaction. Neoconservatives spurned stability in international relations and preached the virtues of creative destruction. Liberal internationalists declared history had entered a new stage in which pre-emptive war would be used to construct a new world order where democracy and peace thrived. The result of these delusions is what we see today: a world of rising authoritarian regimes and collapsed states no one knows how to govern.

Many will caution against throwing out the baby of humanitarian military intervention together with the neocon bathwater. No doubt the idea that western states can project their values by force of arms gives a sense of importance to those who believe it. It tells them they are still the chief actors on the world stage, the vanguard of human progress that embodies the meaning of history. But this liberal creed is a dangerous conceit if applied to today's intractable conflicts, where resource wars are entwined with wars of religion and western power is in retreat.

The liberal interventionism that took root in the aftermath of the cold war was never much more than a combination of post-imperial nostalgia with crackpot geopolitics. It was an absurd and repugnant mixture, and one whose passing there is no reason to regret. What the world needs from western governments is not another nonsensical crusade. It is a dose of realism and a little humility.

· John Gray is professor of European thought at the London School of Economics and the author of Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia

j.gray@lse.ac.uk
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,2138064,00.html

Top advocate of US-India nuke deal has yet to see text
Michael Roston
Published: Tuesday July 31, 2007

Staff for a top Democratic advocate of a US-India nuclear cooperation agreement admitted to RAW STORY on Tuesday morning that the Bush administration had not yet showed him the text of the deal it announced last Friday.

"The Congressman has not yet seen a copy of the text of the agreement," acknowledged Lynne Weil, spokesperson from Rep. Tom Lantos (D-CA), who chairs the House Committee on Foreign Affairs.

She added, "It is important to Rep. Lantos that the agreement will comport with the legal requirements of the Hyde Act."

Rep. Lantos was a co-sponsor of the United States-India Peaceful Atomic Energy Cooperation Promotion Act, which was honorarily named after Rep. Henry Hyde, the Illinois Republican who chaired the House International Relations Committee until his retirement at the end of the previous Congress.

While some nonproliferation advocates argue that the US-India nuclear cooperation scheme will undermine the global regime against the spread of nuclear weapons, champions of the deal like Rep. Lantos have argued that the Hyde Act allows the removal of a key irritant from broader US-India strategic cooperation while expanding international safeguards around the South Asian giant's civilian nuclear energy program.

A colleague of Lantos, Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA) slammed the Bush administration for hiding the text of the agreement last week.

"If they’re afraid of letting us read the document, then I can only surmise that it includes provisions they fear will raise the hackles of Congress," Markey said in a Friday statement, first reported on by RAW STORY on Saturday.

The State Department conducted a closed briefing for Members of Congress and their staffs last Thursday before the White House formally announced the agreement's conclusion. One congressional source who attended the briefing said that Congress will get to see the text later in August.

"We will see a text at some point, we don't have concerns about that," the source told RAW STORY. "They're still holding it back, it's a diplomatic nicety to make sure that they release it to the Congress and the Indian Parliament [which is currently not in session] simultaneously."

The Congressional staffer said that although President George W. Bush signed a presidential signing statement in December that took exception to parts of the Hyde Act, there was "no indication yet" that the Bush administration had flat out ignored any provisions of the legal restrictions Congress placed on the US-India nuclear deal.

Still, the source said that the President would have to tread carefully with its presentation of the deal.

"He's got to be careful," the Congressional staffer said about any appearance of the Bush administration invoking the presidential signing statement. "Congress has to have a vote up or down on the deal, and he's running the risk that it could impact subsequent Congressional consideration of the agreement."

As one example of an issue where Congress could object to the agreement reached by the US and India, the Congressional source pointed to India's insistence that the deal include a nuclear fuel reprocessing facility.

In last Fridays' public briefing on the US-India nuclear deal, Under Secretary of State Nicholas Burns acknowledged that the facility emerged in the course of negotiations and was not covered under the Hyde Act.

"There was no talk of a new reprocessing facility a year ago," Burns said on Friday. "It's just been in the last two months that this has materialized. We looked at it very carefully and decided ...that it was in our interest to go ahead."

The Congressional source said to RAW STORY that the new facility would get strict scrutiny from Capitol Hill.

"It's going to have to be pursued as a subsequent arrangement on Capitol Hill," the source said. "That's obviously one area that when we see the actual text, we'll have to go over it very carefully, and make sure there are no loopholes and that there's nothing that's subject to misinterpretation."

But the Congressional source suggested that it would be months at the very least before any of these issue were fully debated on Capitol Hill. Congress will not need to weigh in on the agreement until India negotiates a safeguards arrangement with the International Atomic Energy Agency and receives an exemption from the rules of the Nuclear Suppliers Group.

"We don't expect to see that for quite some time, for years potentially," the staffer said.
http://rawstory.com/news/2007/Top_advocate..._deal_0731.html

Russia To Conduct Strategic Wargames Above And Below Arctic Ocean

According to various sources the Russian Air Force currently deploys 141 Tu-22M3 bombers.
by Staff Writers
Moscow (RIA Novosti) Aug 01, 2007
The Russian strategic aviation will fly over the North Pole and conduct test launches of cruise missiles during a series of exercises in August, the Defense Ministry said on its website Tuesday. Units of the 37th Air Army of the Strategic Command will conduct a total of six tactical exercises in August as part of an annual training program, the ministry said in a statement. "During the exercises, strategic bombers will test launch cruise missiles, conduct simulated bombing raids, and fly over the North Pole, the Pacific and Atlantic oceans," the statement said.

The exercises will involve Tu-160 Blackjack and Tu-95MS Bear-H strategic bombers, and Tu-22M3 Backfire-C theater bombers - the mainstay of the air component of Russia's strategic nuclear triad.

According to various sources, the Russian Air Force currently deploys 141 Tu-22M3 bombers, 40 Tu-95MS bombers, and 14 Tu-160 planes.

Lieutenant General Igor Khvorov, the newly appointed chief of the Air Force Main Staff, said in March that Russia's strategic aviation had sufficient potential to suppress elements of a U.S. missile defense shield should it be deployed in Central Europe.

Source: RIA Novosti
http://www.spacewar.com/reports/Russia_To_..._Ocean_999.html

Paulson: US should boost debt limit : Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson on Monday said the United States may be unable to pay its bills this fall unless Congress raises the government's borrowing authority, now capped at $8.965 trillion.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070730/ap_on_...pe/debt_limit_3 === U.S. Foreclosure Filings Surge: "We could easily surpass 2 million foreclosure filings by the end of the year, which would represent a year-over-year increase of over 65 percent," said RealtyTrac CEO James J. Saccacio.
http://www.forbes.com/feeds/ap/2007/07/30/ap3968151.html === Study: More People Expected to Default on Mortgage: Subprime, "Alt-A", jumbo interest-only and option adjustable-rate mortgages account for about 25 percent of all outstanding mortgage debt - about $2.5 trillion. Of that amount, about $1.4 trillion is at serious risk of default, Zandi says.
http://www.realtor.org/RMODaily.nsf/pages/...02?OpenDocument

Russia Eyes Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty As Next Pullout

File image of a Pershing II missile.
By Jacob Quamme
UPI Outside View Commentator
Washington (UPI) July 30, 2007
As disagreements over NATO's eastward expansion, ballistic missile defense deployments in Eastern Europe, the status of Kosovo and others continue to strain NATO-Russian relations, Russia has shown an increasing willingness to re-examine its arms-control obligations with the alleged intent of guarding its national interests. Most recently, Russia has suspended participation in the Conventional Forces in Europe Treaty and has threatened to withdraw from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty as well -- an action that Russia has recently tied specifically to possible U.S. missile defense deployments in Eastern Europe.

A close look at Russia's 20-year relationship with the INF Treaty, however, indicates that withdrawal from the treaty may be less dependent on U.S. missile defense deployments than commonly thought.

The INF treaty came as the result of nearly a decade of negotiations between the United States and the Soviet Union. In 1977 the Soviets decided to deploy their newly developed intermediate-range RT-21M Pioneer missiles -- SS-20 Sabre by NATO classification -- in Eastern Europe as an alternative to larger, more expensive inter-continental ballistic missiles.

The move was designed to help maintain nuclear parity with the United States at a relatively low cost and to threaten Western European cities. Within two years, however, NATO responded by adopting its so-called Dual-Track Strategy, which called for arms-control negotiations while simultaneously deploying U.S. Pershing II missiles and BGM-109G ground-launched cruise missiles in Europe. In the end, the strategic balance remained unchanged, and Europe was left with less time to mitigate potential conflict.

The INF Treaty was signed in 1987, resulting in the destruction of 2,700 missiles with ranges between 300 miles and 3,300 miles along with their launchers and support systems.

The combined costs of designing, building, deploying and subsequently destroying these missiles have been estimated at roughly 6 billion rubles, unadjusted for inflation, dedicated to measures that yielded no significant military advantage.

Russia is not likely to have forgotten this lesson, so how can Russian hints at withdrawing from INF be justified? To answer this, we must look beyond the ballistic missile defense debate and the rhetoric surrounding it.

Russian officials have long lamented the loss of these missiles. In March 2005 media reports disclosed that former Minister of Defense Sergei Ivanov mentioned the possibility of Russia's withdrawal from the INF treaty during a January 2005 meeting with U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

An unnamed source close to the Defense Ministry leadership explained that Ivanov asked Rumsfeld how the United States might react to a hypothetical Russian withdrawal from the treaty. Rumsfeld is said to have not protested the idea.

At a later meeting, while discussing the possibility of placing conventional warheads on intercontinental missiles to counter terrorist threats, Ivanov is reported to have said, "One could even consider a theoretical possibility of using intermediate-range missiles, although the United States and Russia cannot have them, unlike many other countries, which already have such missiles."

Russian Army Chief of Staff Yuri Baluyevsky was also quoted in February 2007 as saying, "Many countries are developing and perfecting medium-range rockets. ... Unfortunately, by adhering to the INF Treaty, Russia lost many unique missile systems."

Indeed, it is worthy to note that the Russian military made extensive use of short-range ballistic missiles in Chechnya for missions that the United States or other powers would likely have used attack helicopters. This is due largely to training inadequacies, lack of spare parts and poor maintenance habits in the Russian military, which frequently made such options unavailable. Russian experts believe that maintaining conventionally armed ballistic missiles for these types of missions would be cheaper than restoring the combat ability of its air and ground forces.

While short-range ballistic missiles may have worked well during the Chechen war, however, future regional conflicts may require missiles capable of longer range in order to reach targets outside Russia's borders.

Why Russia wants more short-range missiles
Using intermediate-range missiles against NATO is unnecessary for Russia. Russian Gen. Yevgeny Buzhinsky said during a July 2007 interview, "As for the deployment of missiles of this class in the western part of Russia ... I don't see such necessity so far," adding, "The issue of withdrawal or non-withdrawal is a political decision."

Russian ICBMs do require minimum distances in order to be effective; however, Russia's growing fleet of road-mobile Topol-M missiles, rail-mobile systems and submarine-launched ballistic missiles can be positioned so as to put required targets within range relatively easily. Alternatively, air-launched cruise missiles are not restricted under the INF Treaty and could be used effectively in a hypothetical conflict.

Russia could target the 10 U.S. missile defense interceptors in Poland -- which are still theoretical at this point -- by deploying short-range Iskander-M conventionally armed ballistic missiles in Kaliningrad. Therefore, Russia would have very little military incentive to withdraw from the 1987 Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty if in fact its goal was to threaten NATO.

Redevelopment and redeployment of intermediate-range missiles for use against NATO also presents several logistical problems. Russia's primary ballistic missile assembly plant at Votkinsk is only capable of a historical peak production capacity of approximately 80 missiles per year.

Since the actual rate of production has been closer to the minimum rate -- 12-15 per year for more than a decade -- Votkinsk's optimal production capacity is likely to have fallen closer to 30 missiles per year as unused production lines have been shut down.

Numbers like these will not frighten NATO, and Russia knows it.

The media has been focusing on the possibility of Russian withdrawal from the INF Treaty only in terms of declining relations between Washington and Moscow, accelerated by the controversial missile-defense debate.

Russia's desire to restart production of intermediate-range missiles should not, however, be interpreted merely as a product of these developments. Russia's desire to abrogate the INF Treaty outdates the Polish/Czech missile-defense deployment debate.

A senior U.S. Defense Department official complained that Russia had privately told U.S. officials that Moscow wants medium-range missiles to counter Iran's missiles, yet publicly criticizes the United States and its plans to deploy missile interceptors designed to combat the same threat.

U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates made similar comments during an April 23 interview: "I have the impression that ... it has nothing to do with developments in Western Europe or the ballistic missile sites. There is a concern about the development of threats to the south of Russia."

Indeed, Russian Army Chief of Staff Gen. Yury Baluyevsky indicated that the decision to withdraw from the INF Treaty is dependent on whether the United States decides to deploy missile-defense components in Eastern Europe, during the same interview in which he complained that other nations were free to develop intermediate-range missiles while the United States and Russia were not.

U.S. missile-defense plans, while genuinely disliked by the Kremlin, are serving Russian military interests by providing grounds for withdrawing from the INF Treaty.

Baluyevsky's comments, combined with former Russian Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov's comments on the desirability of conventionally armed intermediate-range missiles, demonstrate Russia's desire to possess intermediate-range missiles.

If these weapons were intended to threaten the United States or NATO, however, Ivanov would not have solicited U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's opinion on the potential American reaction beforehand. Furthermore, Russia knows that threatening INF withdrawal will not, by itself, affect U.S. plans to deploy missile-defense components in Eastern Europe, in the same way that suspending the CFE Treaty has not.

Russia can play this hand as well as possible, however, and if the United States does back down, Russia wins. If the United States moves forward with missile-defense deployments anyway, Russia can claim it was "forced" to do what it has essentially asked for permission to do for several years, and withdraw from the INF Treaty.

earlier related report
CFE Arms Control Treaty Contradicts Reality Says Putin
Moscow (AFP) July 25 - Russian President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday brushed aside criticism of his decision to withdraw from a key European arms control treaty, saying the pact contradicted "reality" and was out of date.

The 1990 Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE) treaty "came from the time when there were two blocs, NATO and the Warsaw Pact. The situation has undergone a cardinal change," Putin was quoted by news agency RIA Novosti as saying.

The treaty "has clearly come to contradict reality," he said.

Putin's stand was in sharp contrast to that of the head of the NATO military alliance, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, who on Tuesday stressed the treaty's ongoing importance since its revision in 1999.

"Do not forget that the adapted treaty does not reflect the realities of the past, the era of large blocs facing off against each other, but those of a situation marked by cooperation in security in Europe," said De Hoop Scheffer.

Russia said on July 14 it would stop complying with the treaty, which limits the deployment of conventional arms in Europe.

It attributed its withdrawal to the failure of NATO members to ratify the revised 1999 version of the treaty, although Moscow has also been riled by US plans to deploy an anti-missile shield in central Europe. NATO members have refused to ratify the CFE treaty until Moscow pulls its peacekeepers out of former Soviet republics Georgia and Moldova.

The withdrawal from the treaty comes amid heightened tensions between Russia and the West that some commentators have likened to the 20th century Cold War.

earlier related report
Russia's retreat from CFE treaty 'chilling' to neighbors
Ottawa (AFP) July 25, 2007 Moscow's decision to freeze a key Soviet-era Russia-NATO arms pact must not sway upcoming elections in neighboring Ukraine, Canada's Foreign Affairs Minister Peter MacKay urged Wednesday.

"The withdrawal or suspension of the treaty has had a very chilling effect, particularly on the surrounding countries and those of the former Soviet Bloc," MacKay said.

He expressed "real concern and dismay at (this) ominous development," noting that officials he met with during a recent visit to Kiev "were similarly disturbed and full of trepidation about what this actually meant."

"This should not impact on the aspirations and the direction in which Ukraine has been headed, as far as their elections," he stressed.

"And it should not be allowed to intimidate people or cause them to fall under some false pretense that this is going to be retribution or in some way that this is going to destabilize their democratic hopes and aspirations for possible ascendancy to NATO and the EU," he said referring to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and European Union.

Russia said this month that it would suspend its application of the 1990 Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE) treaty within 150 days -- on December 12.

Russia attributed its freeze to the failure of NATO members to ratify a revised 1999 version of the treaty, but Moscow has also been riled by US plans to deploy an anti-missile shield in Poland and the Czech Republic, two former Soviet satellite states.

MacKay blasted Russia's "overreaction" to the anti-missile shield plan.

NATO countries have said they would only ratify the CFE treaty once Moscow has lived up to a pledge made in 1999 to pull its troops out of former Soviet republics Georgia and Moldova.

Meanwhile, early last month, pro-western President Viktor Yushchenko set parliamentary elections in an effort to end a two-month power struggle in Ukraine.

Yushchenko signed a presidential decree after hammering out a political agreement with his Moscow-backed rival Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych, who had previously defied presidential orders to hold early polls in the ex-Soviet republic.

MacKay said: "Canada and other countries must stand strong with Ukraine ... and must demonstrate clear support for Ukraine at this important time."

earlier related report
Russia Will Withdraw From Farcical Arms Agreement
Moscow (RIA Novosti) Jul 23 - International diplomacy has never been a particularly sane creature, but today it has clearly become even more unbalanced. President Putin has signed a decree suspending Russia's fulfillment of the Conventional Forces in Europe Treaty (CFE) and related international agreements. It will withdraw from the CFE 150 days after the signatory countries receive the official notifications, which are most likely already on their way.

The West immediately frowned and expressed its regret over Moscow's moves. The disappointment, I presume, was genuine - it is not too often in diplomatic practice that a group of countries can successfully pull the wool over the eyes of a treaty participant for decades. And when the deceived party finally sees the light, disappointment is natural.

But let us take a brief look back at the treaty's history. The Conventional Forces in Europe Treaty was signed in 1990 - a year before the breakup of the U.S.S.R. A modified version, taking into account new geopolitical realities, was inked in 1999 in Istanbul, but ratified only by Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine. The Baltics did not join it. Georgia and Moldova refused to ratify it, demanding that Russian troops be pulled out under the Istanbul agreements, which were signed together with the agreement adapting the CFE.

This is the pretext under which NATO countries have been blocking the entry into force of the adapted treaty. Considering that Russian troops have already pulled out of Georgia as stipulated by the Istanbul agreements and Transdnestr only has the minimum force needed to keep peace in that area, the excuse rings hollow. On the other hand, the West has done whatever it pleased over these past decades: it bombed and dismembered Yugoslavia, brought American and NATO bases closer to the Russian borders (in spite of having promised never to do so), armed the Baltic countries (because they do not formally belong to the CFE), grossly violated the UN Charter (in Iraq) and is now proposing to place an American missile defense shield under Russia's nose. One need not be a political expert to get the sense that something is not quite right here.

Nor is this sad conclusion altered by the idea that the CFE is actually a Potemkin treaty, although Europe often loftily refers to it as "the cornerstone of European security." Sergei Karaganov, one of the leading Russian experts on Europe, said: "I think the treaty is destined for the ash heap of history. Well, good riddance." In the view of the deputy director for research of the Institute of Europe at the Russian Academy of Sciences, "We will now have our hands free...The concern they are showing is hypocritical. But everybody knows that the treaty was a non-starter and was used to take advantage of Russia's weakness in the 1990s."

Theoretically, the 150-day moratorium granted by Moscow enables Western politicians to review their policy, but there is little chance the treaty will be revived - politics all too often succumbs to inertia. So it looks like the world has forgotten all about the bright future it imagined was in store for it during the heady days of the last century; its optimism, it seems, has faded almost as fast as the millennial fireworks. The fact that the 21st century has failed to live up to the hopes pinned on it is clear. The new generation of politicians has not grown smarter. It is unwilling to take its partners' interests into account and incapable of learning from past mistakes.

What good has come for the European Union from a build-up in the number of European bureaucrats deciding the lives of Europeans? None. They were unable to take advantage of the opportunities offered by the break-up of the U.S.S.R. They did not want to welcome Moscow into the fold by breaking down the Iron Curtain and building in its place a bridge of trust. Instead, they strengthened NATO, gave Russia the unfair CFE Treaty, brought military equipment nearer to Russian borders, allowed American missile facilities to be installed in the Czech Republic and Poland, and so on.

Blinded by its own hubris, Europe missed the most important thing. Now, taking a closer look, it has suddenly discovered that it is facing not a helpless Yeltsin-era Russia, but a Russia of Putin, gathering strength and full of ambition. As a result of major foreign policy blunders, Europe is likely to face very real Russian nuclear missiles, armor and heavy artillery instead of tranquil eastern borders.

It could not have been otherwise. Moscow is within its rights to protect its security as it sees fit. Not because it wants to arm itself once again, but because Condoleezza Rice, Javier Solana and the rest of the American-European political comrades-in-arms have left Russia no other options.

Every world crisis, like every rock slide, is set in motion by a single stone. In the case of Europe, there are three potential stones: missile defense, Kosovo and the CFE. All it will take is for someone to touch just one of them.

(Jacob Quamme is a research assistant at the Center for Defense Information, a liberal Washington think tank.)

The opinions expressed in this article are the author's and do not necessarily represent those of RIA Novosti.

(United Press International's "Outside View" commentaries are written by outside contributors who specialize in a variety of important issues. The views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of United Press International. In the interest of creating an open forum, original submissions are invited.)

Source: United Press International

Source: Agence France-Presse

Source: RIA Novosti

http://www.spacewar.com/reports/Russia_Eye...ullout_999.html

Original Content at http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_jo..._pearl_harb.htm

July 31, 2007

The Third Pearl Harbor

By John R Moffett

Speaking of the September 11th 2001 attacks Republican Senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska said, “This is the second Pearl Harbor. I don't think that I overstate it,".

The Bush administration and it’s supporters wanted Americans to be afraid, cooperative and compliant. That is still what they want.

There has been quite a bit of discussion lately about Bush and Cheney declaring martial law and canceling the 2008 election. I personally don’t think they could pull it off, but the bits and pieces of information that have come out certainly makes the suggestion seem to have some merit. Many of these have been outlined is a recent article by Harvey Wasserman & Bob Fitrakis.

Some of the evidence that points toward a non-electoral power grab:

1) Under “Unitary Executive theory”, Bush has issued many signing statements that preclude him and his administration from being bound by legislation passed by Congress.

2) One particularly worrisome directive is National Security Presidential Directive 51, which states in part: "Enduring Constitutional Government," or "ECG," means a cooperative effort among the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of the Federal Government, coordinated by the President… to execute constitutional responsibilities and provide for orderly succession, appropriate transition of leadership, and interoperability and support of the National Essential Functions during a catastrophic emergency”.

This clearly states that the President can declare an emergency, and then do what he deems necessary to “…provide for orderly succession, [and] appropriate transition of leadership…” That pertains directly to succession of power… for example, during elections.

3) The awarding of a $385 million contract over five years to Kellogg, Brown and Root (KBR), a subsidiary of defense contractor Halliburton, to build internment camps in the US to deal with a possible future “immigration emergency”, or in the case of a “national emergency” could be used to house “relief workers”.

4) The domestic spying program which bypasses the FISA court could most certainly be used to follow the activities of citizens who would try to organize to stop any Bush power grab.


5) The ability to declare almost anyone an “enemy combatant” which then precludes them from exercising their habeus corpus rights is also troubling in this regard.

There are many other facts that are also troubling, but there is one thing that is critical, which is missing from the proposed scenarios.

The Third “Pearl Harbor Type Event”.

I don’t see increased illegal immigration, or progressives protesting in the streets, or any of the normal things that happen in the country every day would provide the cover they would need to pull off a non-electoral power grab. That leaves another large terrorist attack, or other national emergency, to present itself at just the right time. Bush can’t count on bin Laden for this one.

Since Bush and FEMA apparently don’t consider a category 4 hurricane destroying a major US city as a national emergency, I think we can safely say it would have to be a massive “terrorist attack”, in order to be elevated to an election-canceling event.

Al Qaeda has no current incentive to attack the US, because it would give Bush more power and prestige. So if Bush and Cheney can’t count on terrorists to give them the excuse they need, they will have to come up with an excuse of their own.

I personally am not much of a conspiracy theorist. However, if you are then you need to round out this coup plot to make it believable and workable. You also need all the pieces of the puzzle in place if you are going to try and thwart the plan. As such, you will need to try to determine based on their actions and public statements what type of third Pearl Harbor event they might be planning.

Many possibilities come to my mind that could scare everybody to death without causing loss of life, including for example an explosion at an aging nuclear power plant. If done properly, the reactor could be shut down safely without loss of significant radiation, but if the incident were blamed on terrorists it would still provide the requisite emergency and public panic.

Any plausible theory that involves the implementation of presidential executive order 51 and the use of internment camps to deal with the rabble requires the so-called third Pearl Harbor type event. If such an event occurs in the next 15 months, I may be forced to join the ranks of the conspiracy theorists.





Authors Website: http://www.factinista.org/

Authors Bio: Dr. John Moffett is an active research neuroscientist in the Washington, DC area, who has published articles on the nervous and immune systems. Dr. Moffett is also the author and webmaster of the political opinion website www.Factinista.org.

Arms for Arab Authoritarians, as US Turns Back Clock
by Jim Lobe

Just 25 months after Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice denounced 60 years of U.S. support for authoritarian governments in Arab world, she and Pentagon chief Robert Gates are on their way to the Middle East bearing arms and an uncannily familiar strategic vision to the same regimes.

Under former President Ronald Reagan 25 years ago, it was called "strategic consensus" – the notion that you could coax the so-called "moderate" Arab states into a de facto coalition with Israel against the region's perceived Soviet clients and a revolutionary Iran by plying them with sophisticated weaponry and renewed Israeli-Palestinian peace efforts.

Under President George W. Bush, the strategic vision has still not been given a specific name, but, apart from the disappearance of the Soviet Union, the basic elements appear to be eerily similar, if not identical.

Heralding her trip and the proposed transfer of some $43 billion in new weaponry for Egypt, Jordan, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and other Gulf states, Rice asserted Monday, "This effort will bolster forces of moderation and support a broader strategy to counter the negative influences of al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, Syria, and Iran."

"Further modernizing the Egyptian and Saudi Arabian armed forces and increasing inter-operability will bolster our partners' resolve in confronting the threat of radicalism and cement their respective roles as regional leaders in the quest for Middle East peace and in ensuring Lebanon's freedom and independence," she added.

The trip follows last week's announcement by Bush that Rice will chair a regional conference some time this fall as part of a new diplomatic push for an eventual "two-state solution" of the Israel-Palestinian conflict. It will take both Gates and Rice to Egypt and Saudi Arabia, a particularly critical destination given the growing estrangement between Washington and Riyadh with respect to both Iraq and U.S. efforts to break up a Palestinian unity government forged by King Abdullah.

At that point, Rice will travel to Jerusalem and Ramallah to "continue discussions on the development of a political horizon with Israeli and Palestinian officials," while Gates heads for the smaller Gulf states with which he reportedly intends to seek new access rights to military bases and extend older ones, as well as pursue new arms-sales agreements.

Under the arms-for-allies plan, the U.S. would provide $13 billion in aid over 10 years – roughly the same amount that it has been getting for most of the past decade. While precise figures have not been released, State Department officials said Saudi Arabia and its allies in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) will be encouraged to buy some $20 billion in new arms, including satellite-guided bombs, missile defenses, and upgrades for its U.S.-made fighter-jets over the same period.

To dampen concerns by Israel and its supporters here, the administration is also proposing a 10-year, $30 billion package to preserve the Jewish state's military superiority – or "qualitative edge" – over its Arab neighbors. That would amount to a 25 percent increase in U.S. military assistance to Israel over current levels.

While several lawmakers close to the so-called "Israel Lobby" said this weekend they will try to block the proposed sale to Saudi Arabia, or at least condition it on a number of changes in Saudi policy, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert signaled his approval, noting, in particular, the importance of an Arab-Israeli coalition against Tehran.

"We understand the need of the United States to support the Arab moderates, and there is a need for a united front between the U.S. and us regarding Iran," he said.

The proposed arms sales and aid to the "moderate" Arab states mark yet another step toward its renewed embrace of the Sunni Arab authoritarian regimes that the Bush administration and its neoconservative backers had tried to distance themselves from in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks in 2001, and particularly after the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

"For 60 years, my country – the United States – pursued stability at the expense of democracy in this region, here in the Middle East," Rice declared in June 2005 at the American University in Cairo, in a widely noted speech that encouraged democracy activists across the region. "And we achieved neither. Now, we are taking a different course. We are supporting the democratic aspirations of all people."

But since the election victory of Hamas in parliamentary elections in the Palestinian territories seven months later and, particularly since last year's Israel-Hezbollah war, which the administration saw as evidence of Iran's expanding power, Washington has all but abandoned its democracy-promotion rhetoric – at least insofar as it applied to its regional allies – essentially returning to its 60-year-old preference for stability over democracy.

That it should now return to using large arms transfers as a major means of ensuring that stability highlights the degree to which the administration has abandoned its pro-democracy stance, according to critics.

"These exorbitant arms sales should be read as a last-ditch effort by the Bush administration to keep matters stable for the tyrannies of the region and to reward those who stood with him in his unending wars," said As'ad Abukhalil, an expert on Saudi Arabia based at California State University at Stanislaus.

What the administration wants from its Sunni allies, in exchange for these deals, according to Chris Toensing, editor of the Middle East Report, "is to build an anti-Iranian alliance [resembling] the early Reagan administration's attempt to find an anti-Soviet 'strategic consensus' among U.S. allied Arab states and Israel. Then, as now, the Arab states' price is some semblance of pressure on Israel to make a comprehensive peace."

"The Bush administration is betting that the Arab states' fear of Iran is greater than their sensitivities on the Palestine and Iraq questions combined," he added. "Indeed, the Bush administration, with all its talk of transforming the Middle East, is reverting to usual U.S. form: a patchwork policy of constant crisis management, all in the name of the 'stability' the neoconservatives professed to hate."

"The major difference going ahead is that, thanks to the Bush administration, there are now two 'intractable' Middle East conflicts to manage instead of one," Toensing said.

Indeed, that Washington is now trying to forge a new strategic alliance against Iran in the face of Tehran's emergence as a major regional threat to U.S. interests – largely because of the administration's own miscalculations in Iraq – struck analyst Gary Sick as a "marvelous example of political jiu-jitsu."

"Having inadvertently created a set of circumstances that ensured an increase in Iranian strength and bargaining power, that seriously frightened U.S. erstwhile Sunni allies in the region, and that undermined U.S. strength and credibility," according to Sick, a Columbia University professor who was President Jimmy Carter's top Iran aide, "the U.S. now proposes a new and improved regional political relationship to deal with the problem, and, incidentally, to distract attention from America's plight in Iraq while reviving America's position as the ultimate power in the region."

The major flaw in this strategy, according to Sick, however, may be the government of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki who is both supported by the U.S. but is seen by the Sunni neighbors, particularly Saudi Arabia, as a pawn of Tehran.

(Inter Press Service)
http://www.antiwar.com/lobe/?articleid=11374

It’s the West that’s starting this new Cold War
Russia’s belligerence is hardly surprising
Anatole Kaletsky

Know your enemy � a phrase coined by Sun Tzu, the Chinese military strategist, 2,000 years ago � is even more critical in diplomacy than it is in warfare. As the leaders of the world’s most powerful nations gathered in Germany last night for the annual G8 summit, the identity of the enemy was pretty clear.

He was not, as might have been expected, George W. Bush. Nobody can be bothered to talk to the White House any longer about Iraq and Iran, while on climate change Washington has successfully created a diversion and thwarted the German and British desire to make this the summit’s central issue. Best of all, an alternative villain has suddenly upstaged the hapless President Bush. Enter Vladimir Putin, the new global enemy No 1.

Casting Russia as the enemy suits everyone at this year’s summit. It distracts attention from President Bush’s contempt for Europeans on climate change and his geopolitical blunders. It helps Angela Merkel and Tony Blair to disguise the failure of their Atlanticist diplomacy while allowing Nicolas Sarkozy to sound tough, without being antiAmerican. It gives all the European leaders at the summit a chance to “show solidarity” with the EU’s newly admitted Eastern members without making any concessions on the discriminatory economic and labour policies that will keep these countries firmly in their place for decades ahead. And best of all, from every nation’s standpoint, the starring role of villain is one that President Putin himself craves.

Mr Putin faces a difficult transition from his present position as a wildly popular czarist-style absolute ruler to some kind of power behind the throne � a kingmaker or political puppeteer possibly modelled on Deng Xiaoping, of China, or Lee Kuan Yew, of Singapore, but with no real parallel in Russian history. In managing this unprecedented transition, nothing is more useful to Mr Putin than his image as the first national leader since Stalin who could stand up for Russia’s interests against an inherently hostile world. This is why all the EU’s complaints about neo-imperialist bullying of Poland and Estonia, all the lectures from President Bush about democracy and all the admonitions about human rights from Mrs Merkel are water off a duck’s back to President Putin.
It’s Grrrrr8 (honest)

As the G8 summit begins in Germany, Hugo Rifkind explains everything you need to know – and lots of stuff you don’t

Far from being intimidated, Mr Putin relishes and deliberately provokes such “insults”, as in his interview this week with Western media, in which he threatened to target his nuclear arsenal against Europe and simultaneously joked that he was the “purest” democratic politician since Mahatma Gandhi. Mr Putin must surely have expected the furious response these statements provoked from the other summit leaders and from Western public opinion, so it has to be assumed that he wanted to cast himself as Global Public Enemy No 1.

But if Mr Putin is consciously redefining himself as the West’s enemy � and if he is doing this with the enthusiastic acclaim of the Russian public � then we must try to know this enemy, in accordance with the advice of Sun Tzu.

Why is hostility to the West so popular in Russia? Let us try to look at the West through Russian eyes. Despite all the past sentimental rhetoric of Western politicians describing Russia as a friend and “strategic partner”, US and European behaviour has consistently treated Russia more as an enemy than an ally. Russia has been told it could never join Nato or the EU and Mr Putin’s invitation to G8 summits is scant consolation for the denial of WTO membership and the continuation of US trade sanctions dating back to the Cold War. On human rights and extrajudicial assassinations, Russia’s record may be deplorable, but its abuses pale in comparison with those of Western friends such as Saudi Arabia and China, not to mention President Bush’s “boil them in oil” ally, Uzbekistan.

But far more serious from the Russian standpoint than any diplomatic conflicts is what the West has done to their country’s territorial integrity. Ever since the first Bush Administration undermined Mikhail Gorbachev by denying him the financial assistance of the International Monetary Fund and then encouraged the dissolution of the Soviet Union under Boris Yeltsin, the West has appeared, at least from Moscow’s standpoint, to seize every opportunity to weaken, isolate and encircle Russia.

Not only has Russia lost its Eastern European satellites, but the homeland itself has been dismembered. No reasonable Russian could object to the independence of Poland, Hungary and even the Baltic states, which were forcibly annexed into the Soviet Union after the Second World War. But the loss of the Ukraine, Belarus, the Caucasus and central Asia are a different matter. These areas � or at least large swaths of them � were integral parts of the Russian “motherland” long before Texas and California belonged to the United States. For Russians, the separation with Ukraine and Belarus in particular is at least as emotionally wrenching as Welsh and Scottish independence would be to Britain or Catalonian and Basque secession would be to Spain.

While Westerners see Russian resentment about these territorial losses as a throwback to 19th-century imperialist thinking, consider how the process might look when viewed from the Russian side. What Russians see is a powerful and wealthy empire expanding steadily on their Western border and swallowing all the intervening countries, first into the EU’s economic and political arrangements and then into the Nato military structure. Consider from the Russian standpoint the EU’s explicit vocation to keep growing until it embraces every European country with the sole exception of Russia itself, and the almost automatic Nato membership now granted to EU countries. Is it so very unreasonable to view this EU-Nato juggernaut as the world’s last remaining expansionist empire, or even the natural successor to previous German and French expansions that were considerably less benign?

Western politicians may ridicule such fantasies as Russian nationalist paranoia. But why shouldn’t the Russians worry about Western armies and missiles on their borders, when these contribute to a process of territorial encroachment similar to what Napoleon and Hitler failed to achieve by cruder means?

America and Europe, regardless of their warm words about Russia, are treating it objectively as an enemy, taking every opportunity to cut it down to size. After 15 years of this experience, is it really surprising if the Russians, emboldened by their newfound oil wealth, now respond in kind? In other words, it is not Russia but America and Europe that have restarted the Cold War.

The West may well be right to treat Russia as a natural enemy � that is certainly the attitude in Estonia and Poland. But if we are going to treat the Russians as enemies, let us at least try to see the world from their point of view.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/c...icle1896029.ece

The New Turn
Washington's Orwellian foreign policy maneuver
by Justin Raimondo

To understand what is going on with the $60 billion arms deal with Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, and a number of small Gulf potentates – Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar and the UAE – we have to go back to Seymour Hersh's last piece in the New Yorker, "The Redirection," which revealed, among other things, that the U.S. is funding Sunni radical groups possibly linked to al-Qaeda in Lebanon and in the Eastern reaches of Iran. It's all part of a new turn in American foreign policy in the Middle East, toward the Sunni "mainstream" and away from our former Shi'ite allies-of-convenience in Iraq. Having smashed the Ba'athist regime and handed Mesopotamia over to the Iranians, the Americans are taking a U-turn and aligning with their former enemies in readiness for the next war of "liberation" on the neocon agenda: the battle for Iran.

If you want to know the meaning of a new policy initiative, especially one involving such substantial sums, ask yourself, cui bono? The first answer, in this case, is the American armaments industry: those U.S. "aid" dollars are poured into the coffers of major U.S. military contractors and a host of minor ones, and the money stream flows, in turn, in the direction of certain political candidates. Palms are greased, politicians are bought, and the military-industrial-neocon complex marches on. The War Party is always feeding itself: that's why we have the most bloated military establishment in the world, with "defense" expenditures exceeding the combined military budgets of the next 30 spenders.

With billions of dollars in sophisticated satellite-guided weaponry, the Saudis obviously benefit, but there is a downside to their latest acquisitions rooted in the traditional reluctance of Saudi monarchs to maintain much of a military. The fear of a coup, or at least a rival center of power, has kept the Saudi armed forces pretty much a perfunctory affair. What the Saudis are going to do with all their new equipment is a bit of a mystery: indeed, all those new toys are a liability in another important sense. The Saudi monarchy, after all, is under attack from al-Qaeda and other fundamentalist forces and is as brittle as it ever was: if those weapons should ever fall into the hands of bin Laden or his allies, we would face the first terrorist superpower in the Middle East.

The danger of blowback is even greater in the Gulf, where the legitimacy of the ruling sheiks and emirs is shakier and fundamentalist activity (Sunni variety) is on the rise. In the case of Egypt, which is already the second biggest recipient of U.S. foreign aid, we are rewarding President Hosni Mubarak's recent crackdown on dissent, including the jailing of opposition candidate Ayman Nour (for "election fraud") and blogger Abdel Karim Suleiman (for blasphemy!). So much for "exporting democracy" as the leitmotif of American foreign policy: the "global democratic revolution" has been betrayed.

Not that there was anything to betray to begin with – it was all a lot of malarkey, anyway. Our real goals in the region have little to do with "democracy" – which, if installed in the Middle East, would give us the victory of Hamas-like groups from the Nile to the Euphrates – and everything to do with exploiting the divisions in the Arab-Muslim world.

In the "long war" we are presently engaged in, the face of the enemy is constantly shifting: it started out with the long saturnine features of Osama bin Laden staring out at us haughtily, knowingly. Lurking somewhere in the wilds of Pakistan, or perhaps Central Asia, the Scarlet Pimpernel of the Muslim world mocked us with his continued elusiveness. Yet his face soon faded from the front pages, to be replaced [.pdf] by the visage of Saddam Hussein, the secular dictator of a Middle Eastern country that had long been in the War Party's sights. With the invasion and the subsequent demise of the Ba'athist regime, the face of the enemy changed yet again, to that of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Holocaust-denying bigmouth who doesn't actually control Iranian military and foreign policy and is increasingly unpopular in his own country.

Our current strategy in the Middle East is to forge the Sunni despots into a mighty defensive wall, a Maginot Line, against the rising Shi'ite tide – a tide, you'll recall, unleashed by the destruction of the Ba'athist regime and the creation of a power vacuum in Iraq that was quickly filled by the majority Shi'ite parties, which had been financed and succored by Tehran for many years. I wouldn't say this is an unintended consequence of the invasion, because it was so clearly foreseeable that it couldn't have been accidental: indeed, the principal exponent of "regime change" in Iraq, Ahmed Chalabi, was an Iranian agent, betraying U.S. secrets to Tehran and presumably keeping the mullahs apprised of his progress in gulling the Americans into going along with the war plan. After all, it served Iranian interests, as well as the War Party's: for a moment, the objectives of the Tehran's mullahs and Washington's neocons met and merged.

The strategic objective of uniting with Sunni "moderates" serves two ostensible objectives: it staves off the alleged Shi'ite menace and gives us Sunni allies in the fight against bin Laden's extremists. However, the corrupt Arab monarchs of the Kingdom, the Gulf states, Jordan, and Egypt (which is, for all intents and purposes, a monarchy) are the wrong sorts of allies. The effectiveness of bin Laden's propaganda is heavily dependent on our continued support for one of the last bastions of absolutism on earth. In a region of the world where the irresponsibility and outright decadence of the Sunni "moderate" elites is so ostentatious, it is suicidal to align ourselves with regimes that have little popular support.

Yet that is precisely what we are doing, and all in the name of fighting the latest enemy, the newest "Hitler," who – in reality – is not a credible military threat to us or anyone else in the region. Sure, the Iranians could take out Bahrain, or even Dubai, but the economic costs of such a move would far outweigh any possible benefits: the Iranians would much rather do business with Dubai than bomb it.

There is much talk of a new "cold war" with Iran. That's nonsensical, of course: to equate Shi'ism with international Communism is more than a stretch – it is utterly absurd. While Communism was a universalist creed, Shi'ism is a sectarian faith of limited appeal. While it's true that, say, a college student in the U.S. might take up Shi'ism, it is an unlikely preoccupation for a Westerner to embrace. Communism, on the other hand, presented us with a real ideological challenge, one capable of undermining us on the home front as well as abroad.

President Bush talks about winning the "ideological struggle," in Churchillian intonations, but the reality is that our actions make it all too easy for our real enemies – al-Qaeda and its allies – to garner support. This is one of al-Qaeda's chief selling points: that the U.S. is the power behind the depredations of native elites, propping up the notoriously corrupt and cruel Saudi kleptocracy and its mini-clones clustered around the Gulf and stealing the Ummah's oil wealth by selling at artificially low prices. The latest arms deal not only confirms what bin Laden has been saying – it also dramatizes Michael Scheuer's key point about our self-defeating foreign policy:

"As I complete this book, U.S., British, and other coalition forces are trying to govern apparently ungovernable postwar states in Afghanistan and Iraq, while simultaneously fighting growing Islamist insurgencies in each – a state of affairs our leaders call victory. In conducting these activities, and the conventional military campaigns preceding them, U.S. forces and policies are completing the radicalization of the Islamic world, something Osama bin Laden has been trying to do with substantial but incomplete success since the early 1990s. As a result, I think it fair to conclude that the United States of America remains bin Laden's only indispensable ally."

Cui bono? Who benefits from this new turn? The answer: everyone but the American taxpayers and the nation as a whole. Yes, even the Israelis, who – in spite of an effort to stop the sale by the Lobby's more radical partisans in Congress – fully support the arms package. That's not just because they're getting a 25-percent hike in the outrageous amount of aid they already suck out of the U.S. Treasury – the Israelis also have a strategic interest in splitting the Muslim world along sectarian lines.

The consequences of this new turn in American policy are not too hard to predict. The Bush administration is setting off a regional arms race that is practically forcing the Iranians to go the nuclear route. After all, the U.S. is not about to invade North Korea, and everyone knows the reason why. If a nuclear arsenal is what it takes to stave off the American wolf and its Sunni allies, then that is the course the Iranians will take. They tried to negotiate, remember, and were rebuffed – and the latest negotiations are likely to be sabotaged by Vice President Dick Cheney, just like last time.

The antiwar movement is focused exclusively on Iraq, but that Rubicon was crossed fours years ago: now we approach the River Styx, the demarcation line between the world of the living and Hades, the land of the dead. As we make the approach, ghosts and demons weep and wail, warning us away – yet we keep on going, walking blindly ahead, until we're standing at the edge of oblivion.

It won't take much to push us over – and it's a long way down.
http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=11379

US-India Nuke Deal May Spark Asian Arms Race
by Thalif Deen

UNITED NATIONS - The U.S. decision last week to proceed with a controversial civilian nuclear deal with India has triggered strong negative responses from peace activists, disarmament experts, and anti-nuclear groups.

"The development of a nuclear/strategic alliance between the United States and India may promote arms racing between India and Pakistan, and [between] India and China," says John Burroughs, executive director of the New York-based Lawyers' Committee on Nuclear Policy.

The deal, he told IPS, also undermines prospects for global agreements on nuclear restraint and disarmament.

An equally negative reaction came from former UN Under-Secretary-General for Disarmament Affairs Jayantha Dhanapala: "It has the dangerous potential of triggering a nuclear arms race among India, Pakistan, and China, with disastrous consequences for Asian peace and stability and Asia's emerging economic boom."

But the Indian government argues that the nuclear agreement would neither destabilize the region nor prompt an arms race.

Nor will it trigger a "copycat deal" between Pakistan and China, India's national security adviser N.K. Narayanan told reporters last week.

"This agreement was not an excuse to enhance our strategic capabilities," he told a press briefing in New Delhi.

Zia Mian of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University says the United States sees strategic and economic benefits in the nuclear deal with India.

"But the people of India and Pakistan will pay the price, since the nuclear deal will fuel the India-Pakistan nuclear arms race," he added.

The deal will allow India to increase its capacity to make nuclear weapons materiel, and Pakistan has already said it will do whatever it can to keep up with India.

"This means nuclear establishments in both countries will become more powerful, drain even greater resources away from social development, and increase the nuclear danger in South Asia," Mian told IPS.

Nicholas Burns, the U.S. undersecretary of state who led the negotiations, denied the deal was a clear example of political double standards by an administration which has been trying to punish Iran for its nuclear ambitions but gives its blessings to India.

"This agreement sends a message to outlaw regimes such as Iran that if you behave responsibly, you will not be penalized," he told reporters last week.

India – along with Pakistan and Israel – has refused to sign the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), but Iran has.

Called the "123 agreement," last week's nuclear deal will help create a civil nuclear enrichment facility in India, mostly with U.S.-made reactors and expertise.

Still, in a major speech in February 2004, U.S. President George W. Bush said that "enrichment and reprocessing are not necessary for nations seeking to harness nuclear energy for peaceful purposes."

"The details of the so-called '123 agreement' are still shrouded in secrecy but, on the basis of what has been disclosed, it is clear that the U.S.-India nuclear cooperation deal is an example of crude realpolitik trumping nuclear nonproliferation principles in total disregard of the NPT," Dhanapala told IPS.

He warned that it sends "a bad signal to the overwhelming majority of NPT parties who have faithfully abided by their treaty obligations."

Last week Burns told reporters that the deal would not act as an incentive for other countries to develop nuclear weapons outside the NPT.

Burroughs said that India made it clear when the NPT was negotiated that it could not accept a world divided into nuclear haves and nuclear have-nots and stayed out of the treaty.

"The problem with the deal is not that it acknowledges that India has nuclear weapons," Burroughs told IPS. "The problem is that both India and the United States are showing no signs of working towards the elimination of their arsenals together with other states possessing nuclear weapons."

Under the deal, neither country agrees to ratify the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (CTBT).

"And while India agrees to work with the United States towards a treaty banning production of fissile materials for nuclear weapons, India is not required to stop producing materials for weapons now or to refrain from building additional weapons from existing material," he added.

Nor does India assume the obligation the United States has under the NPT, to negotiate in good faith cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and the elimination of nuclear arsenals.

In short, the deal seems to certify India as a member of a permanent nuclear weapons club, Burroughs declared.

Mian of Princeton University pointed out that the deal is also a clear violation of UN Security Council Resolution 1172, adopted on June 6, 1998, which was passed unanimously, and called upon India and Pakistan "immediately to stop their nuclear weapon development programs, to refrain from weaponization or from the deployment of nuclear weapons, to cease development of ballistic missiles capable of delivering nuclear weapons and any further production of fissile material for nuclear weapons."

That resolution also encouraged all states to "prevent the export of equipment, materials, or technology that could in any way assist programs in India or Pakistan for nuclear weapons," said Mian who along with M. V. Ramana co-authored "Wrong Ends, Means, and Needs: Behind the U.S. Nuclear Deal With India" in the January/February 2006 issue of Arms Control Today.

(Inter Press Service)
http://www.antiwar.com/ips/deen.php?articleid=11380

Turkey and Iraq: Threat of war
Image: Serdar Kilic, Flickr Turkey is on the edge of an incursion into northern Iraq to attack Kurdish rebel bases, but in the post-election period, Prime Minister's Erdogan's intentions remain unclear.

By Ben Judah in Istanbul for ISN Security Watch (31/07/07)
The threat of war hangs over the Qandil Mountains that mark the final Eastern borders of Turkey and the beginnings of Iraq.

To the south, the mountains are filled with the bases and fortifications of over an estimated 4,000 Kurdish rebels, from the extremist, and to this day Marxist-Leninist, Kurdish Workers' Party (PKK). Declared a terrorist organization by the EU and the US, the PKK has waged a bloody war against the Turkish state since 1982 in a conflict that has killed over 30,000 people.

Pushed over the border, they have found a safe haven beyond the reach of Ankara in the Qandil Mountains, just within Iraqi Kurdistan in the border areas uncontrolled by the Kurdish Regional Government (KRG) in Irbil.

On the Turkish side, Ankara has been massing up to 200,000 troops overlooking the border regions. During the election campaign, which was in many ways a standoff between the powerful Turkish Army and civilian authority represented by the AKP, senior commanders made repeated calls to be allowed to stomp into the territory. Politicization of the issue and shelling followed.

A recent poll by the US-based Pew organization found that 72 percent of Turks thought terrorism to be their country's number one concern, placing heavy pressure on the government to act.

On 30 July, a Turkish soldier was killed and two others were injured in the border areas in clashes with the PKK. The day before, Egemen Bamis, a senior foreign policy advisor to Erdogan, warned of an incursion. "We are hoping we will not have to do it. We are hoping our allies will start doing something, but if they don't we don't have many options," he said in a statement, adding that Turkey would not "ask anyone permission."

PKK leader Murat Karaliyan recently said that the "date of the Turkish invasion draws near. And we are ready to defend ourselves."

The KRG, which controls the virtually independent Kurdish state that has emerged from the no-fly zones and the wreckage of Iraq, is adamant that it cannot control the PKK. Irbil Governor Nawzad Hadi Mawlood has been quoted as saying that "neither we nor they [the Turks] can evict the PKK of where they are in the mountains."

But there is much speculation in Turkey that Irbil is hoping to use the PKK as a bargaining chip for future negotiations. Turkish commentators and many nationalist and military political figures have gone as far as to say the KRG and the US have been arming the PKK.

The reality is unclear, apart from the fact that repeated Turkish and KRG attempts to dislodge the terrorist failed back in 1995 and 1997, and the PKK has undoubtedly reinforced itself since then.


The prospect of a powerful Iraqi Kurdistan
The causes behind what has brought Turkey and Iraqi Kurdistan to such a tense situation stretch right back to the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. Turkey's refusal to allow US troops to invade from its territory led the Bush administration to fight the war without time for consideration of Turkish interests. Ankara, which axiomatically views the emergence of an independent Iraqi Kurdistan as a fundamental threat to its national security and territorial integrity, is living with a restless 13 million-strong and rising Kurdish minority concentrated in the country's eastern half.

The situation has become increasingly unfavorable for Ankara, as the KRG has emerged as America's strongest ally in Iraq, and its peshmerga crack-troops are the backbone of the Iraq army. The US has been relying on these troops to fight the insurgency and support the surge policy.

Once believing itself to have a special place in the White House as a key NATO member and Muslim democracy, Turkey now feels shunned and let down by America. The opinion polls reflect this, with a catastrophic fall in approval ratings for the US from over 50 percent before the war to just 9 percent today. Many Turks now see the US as the primary threat to its national security - way above Iran, Russia or Syria.

Turkey's greatest fear is that the KRG will continue to press for independence as Iraq disintegrates and succeed in grabbing the huge oil fields around the strategic cities of Mosul and Kirkuk. This would provide an emerging Kurdish state with the capital to be untouchable.

Jaafar el-Ahmar, a senior reporter covering Iraq for the Arabic language al-Hayat newspaper, sees this as an increasing likelihood. "The recent conference on federalism held in Irbil was attended exclusively by Shia Arabs and Kurds. It was a re-cementing of the alliance we have seen in operation against the Sunni Arabs, and the likely trade off will be the Kurds will get Kirkuk if they continue in their support for the Shia drive to control Baghdad. The Kirkuk issue will come to a head by the end of the summer and this will bring Turkey in," he told ISN Security Watch.

With the virtual independence of northern Iraq likely to cement itself, an upsurge of PKK terrorism coupled with an increasingly nationalist environment in which the Kurds will comprise 50 percent of the Turkish population by mid-century, the Turkish establishment has plenty to be concerned about. However, politics in Turkey itself has brought about the threat of a more imminent border war.


War drums for the election
Alev Er, former editor of Hurriyet, one of Turkey's leading newspapers, and a columnist for the popular Milliyet daily, sees the recent slide towards war as part of the fraught election campaign.

"The military was using it to go, 'look we are tougher on terror than the AKP,' the nationalists where using it to go, 'we are tough on the Kurds,' and it became a big issue in the run-up to the vote. The question is how they are going to play now," he told ISN Security Watch.

The use of the "Iraqi PKK" card in the election campaign saw tensions on the border flare to unprecedented levels. Press reports began to fly of the Turkish army assembling over 140,000 troops on the border, more than the US presence in the country, and on 18 July - just days before the election - the army fired hundreds of shells into the areas surrounding Zakho.

Alper Gormus, former editor of the weekly Turkish magazine Nokta, which the army forced to shut down after exposing plans for a coup d’etat in April, told ISN Security Watch how he thought such tensions would play out after the result.

"The AKP has won nearly 50 percent of the vote. This is a startling victory for civilian power and a crushing defeat for the military. Their hopes for an incursion into Iraqi Kurdistan are out of their hands now. Now it is up to Erdogan, since they are so weak. I think this result means war is off for now. The armed forces are too weak to force it."

Erdogan made various hawkish statements during the election campaign, and it is unclear how he thinks the move would help or hinder politically. With so much political capital he may be tempted to show he can be stronger on PKK terror than the army.


Diplomatic efforts
It is unlikely that any moves toward an incursion will be launched in the run-up to the presidential election. The main actors in Ankara all have their various interests at the stake now and can each use the Iraq card to suit them.

The AKP, due to the representative system, won more votes this time around but won fewer seats in parliament as a third party, the far-right Nationalist Action Party (MHP), passed the 10 percent threshold.

The bellicose rhetoric of the CHP means that Erdogan, if he is to gain broad cross-party support, may well end up compromising. A foreign war could suit all parties.

Erdogan's other option is to rely on the 24 Kurdish independents who could try and force him not to intervene in exchange for their support. However, this could be damaging politically and easily exploited by the CHP and the MHP.

The military - down, battered but not quite out of the game - can be expected to push more vociferously for war once it has stopped licking its wounds. The pressure may be too much for the AKP to bear.

Erdogan's recent statements suggest that if the planned arrival of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki should fall through, the Turks may be forced to take the issues of the PKK, even Kirkuk and KRG independence in general, into their own hands.

Explosions on 2 July at PKK bases suggest Erdogan has not abandoned the issue in the post-election period. Hints that Tehran has been shelling Iraqi Kurdistan and is preparing for such an eventuality are ominous.

Facing this situation, the US should not continue to alienate its most important Muslim long-term strategic ally. Turkey matters, and will matter more in the future.



Ben Judah is writer and foreign policy analyst based between London and Paris. He has previously worked as a reporter covering race relations for the St Petersburg Times, Russia.

The views and opinions expressed herein are those of the author only, not the International Relations and Security Network (ISN).

http://www.isn.ethz.ch/news/sw/details.cfm?id=17925

Report: US planning attack against PKK
Wed, 01 Aug 2007 04:30:31
Source: Agencies A PKK militant in northern Iraq The Pentagon has confirmed that it is closely working with the Turkish government to stop Kurdish insurgents operating from bases in Iraq.

Officials refused to comment on a report that the US is planning a covert operation to send Special Forces into action to try to neutralize the leadership of the Kurdistan Workers party (PKK), which has been mounting attacks inside Turkey.

The US is trying to persuade the Turkish army not to launch an incursion into northern Iraq.

Eric Edelman, an undersecretary of defense and former ambassador to Turkey, told selected congressmen in private last week about the planned covert operation. The administration is required by law to inform Congress of any such operations. "US forces would behead the guerrilla organization by helping Turkey get rid of PKK leaders that they have targeted for years," he said.

The new reports come as PKK defectors have recently revealed that the US is arming the guerillas in northern Iraq.

JS/RE

Kurdish leader warns of 'civil war' over Kirkuk

Published: 07.31.07, 20:39 / Israel News

The leader of Iraq's Kurdish region warned Tuesday of a "real civil war" If the central government does not implement a constitutional clause on the future of Kirkuk, the oil-rich city claimed by the Kurds.

Control over the city and the surrounding oil wealth is in dispute. Kurds are trying to annex the region. Iraq's Arab majority and a Turkish minority that lives in Kirkuk oppose that move. Massoud Barzani, speaking in an interview with US-funded Alhurra television, complained that the Baghdad government was dragging its feet on holding a referendum that could put Kirkuk under control the autonomous Kurdish region in northern Iraq. (AP)

http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3432211,00.html

Copyright © 2007 The Daily Star

Wednesday, August 01, 2007
America's rudderless foreign policy takes another deadly turn
By The Daily Star
Editorial

Shortly before departing for a trip to the Middle East this week, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice confirmed that the American government plans to provide multi-billion-dollar military aid packages to its "moderate" Arab allies and Israel. Rice's announcement represents the latest twist in what has been a directionless and inconsistent US foreign policy in this region.

In the aftermath of the Iraq invasion, the US proclaimed itself the global champion of democracy, promising to promote freedom and the rule of law across the broader Middle East. Arabs and Muslims in the region initially greeted that policy with understandable doubts about America's true agenda, but that skepticism might have melted away had the US been consistent in the pursuit of these stated objectives. Instead, the Bush administration upheld these foreign policy goals when it seemed suitable, and ignored them when it was inconvenient, such as when Islamist parties proved to be the most democratically viable forces in Palestine and Egypt.

With Rice's announcement of the arms deals, it has become apparent that Washington's democracy agenda has more or less been abandoned. Instead, the US now seems to favor a policy constructed around a fictitious storyline that portrays the world as a battleground between the forces of "moderation" and "extremism." This narrative ignores the real-world events from which Arab and Muslim rage toward Israel and its American backer stems: the killing of civilians, the destruction of homes, the forceful eviction of people from their towns and villages, the annexation of land and the enforcement of a codified system of discrimination.

Extremism will continue to find swamps in which to thrive so long as US leaders continue to run roughshod over their nation's most sacred principles, including those embodied in the oath that American schoolchildren take each day when pledging allegiance to their nation's flag: "liberty and justice for all." The US would do better to channel its resources into the pursuit of a balanced peace process based on liberty and justice for all Israelis and Arabs, instead of enabling the perpetuation of injustice by flooding the region with arms, ensuring that more civilians will follow in the footsteps of those already slaughtered by American-made weapons. By arming this region to the teeth, the US might empower its allies win a few battles against what it calls "extremist" forces. But these minor victories will come at the price of a decisive defeat in the larger war for Arab and Muslim hearts and minds.


Copyright © 2007 The Daily Star
http://www.dailystar.com.lb/article.asp?ed...ticle_id=84228#

Iran-Turkey deal foils US plots
Tue, 31 Jul 2007 18:50:37
Iran sells gas to Turkey The Chairman of FACTS Global Energy group has said that the recent Iran-Turkey gas deal indicates US failure in exerting pressure on Iran.

Fars News Agency quoted Fereidoun Fesharaki as saying that the recently inked memorandum of understanding on sales of Iran's gas to Turkey is in Iran's economic and political interest.

"Given that gas prices in Turkey is equivalent to those in Europe, this country is a good market for Iran," he added.

"At present, every one million British thermal unit (BTU) of Iran's gas is sold to Turkey at $ 7, which is much higher than the proposed price to Pakistan. This accounts for Iran's preference to sell its gas to Turkey," noted the official.

Meanwhile, Fesharaki said that in view of the US pressures on its allies to break up their trade ties with Iran, the recent agreement is of great significance.

MPR/ HGH/RE

Sunni bloc quits as 73 killed in bombings

By Mariam Karouny and Paul Tait 35 minutes ago

The main Sunni Arab political bloc quit the Iraqi government on Wednesday in a blow to Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's shaky coalition as suicide bombers killed more than 70 people in three attacks across Baghdad.

The resignation move pushed the government into a new crisis undermining its efforts to reconcile Iraqis and end sectarian strife.

Fifty of Wednesday's dead were killed when a suicide bomber in a fuel truck packed with explosives targeted motorists at a petrol station.

The Sunni Accordance Front left Maliki's Shi'ite-led coalition over his failure to meet a list of about a dozen demands, including a greater say in security matters.

"The government was still ... closing the door on reforms which are needed to save Iraq," Accordance Front spokesman Rafei Issawi told a news conference, adding the government should have met its demands or "at least admit its failure."

Issawi said Deputy Prime Minister Salam al-Zobaie and five ministers would resign on Wednesday.

The Sunni Front's 44 members will remain in the 275-seat parliament. Its withdrawal will have little practical effect on the 15-month-old government, which is virtually paralyzed by infighting but needs only a simple majority to keep functioning.

Maliki's government has already been weakened by the withdrawal of fiery Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr's political bloc, one of the biggest in parliament, over his refusal to set a timetable for the withdrawal of U.S. troops.

The coalition is under pressure from the United States to end sectarian strife between Shi'ites and Sunni Arabs, which has killed tens of thousands. Washington is unhappy at the slow political progress in reconciling the warring sects.

DOOR STILL OPEN

Iraq Vice President Tareq al-Hashemi, a member of the Sunni bloc, said the Front was still open to negotiation.

"The doors are still open on all options, including returning to government, if they introduce reforms," Hashemi told reporters.

The Accordance Front is made up of three main Sunni Arab groups, including Hashemi's Islamic Party. Its list of demands included the disbanding of Shi'ite militias that have targeted Sunni Arabs.

Iraq's other deputy prime minister, Kurd Barham Salih, told Reuters the Sunni bloc's withdrawal was the most serious political crisis yet faced by Maliki's government.

He said preparations were continuing for a summit of the political leadership of Iraq's Kurdish, Shi'ite and Sunni Arab communities, which would take place in "the next few days."

"The crisis is grave and its implications should not be underestimated, but I hope it offers an opportunity to address the causes of political instability afflicting this country," Salih said of the meeting.

The Accordance Front, which last week suspended the work of its six ministers and gave Maliki a week to meet its demands, accused the government of failing to consult it on key issues.

The U.S. ambassador and the top general in Iraq are due to give a crucial progress report to Congress next month as U.S. President George W. Bush comes under growing pressure to show progress in the unpopular war or bring troops home.

In Baghdad's Mansour district, police said the suicide bomber had lured motorists queuing for petrol before exploding the fuel truck. Another 60 people were hurt.

Twenty people were killed when a suicide bomber blew up his vehicle near a popular ice cream parlor in a bustling commercial area of Baghdad's predominantly Shi'ite district of Karrada. Another bomber killed three in southern Doura district.

The U.S. military, which began a build-up of 30,000 extra troops this year in a bid to buy time for Maliki to meet his political targets, said three of its soldiers were killed by a roadside bomb in the east of the capital on Tuesday.

Another was killed by small arms fire in eastern Baghdad on the same day, taking the total killed in July to at least 78, the lowest monthly toll for the U.S. military in Iraq since last November and since the troop build-up began in February.

(Additional reporting by Ross Colvin, Aseel Kami and Peter Graff in Baghdad)

Copyright © 2007 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved. Republication or redistribution of Reuters content is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Reuters. Reuters shall not be liable for any errors or delays in the content, or for any actions taken in reliance thereon.

Copyright © 2007 Yahoo! Inc. All rights reserved.

The SWFs Are Coming!

Pat BuchananTue Jul 31, 3:00 AM ET

The Iraq war has probably killed the idea of using U.S. troops to intervene in the name of Mr. Bush's "world democratic revolution."

The Middle American revolt that killed amnesty for the 12 million illegal aliens has buried the idea of open-borders immigration.

Come now the SWFs, which may bring an end to America's folly in her unthinking embrace of global free trade.

What are SWFs? They are Sovereign Wealth Funds — huge capital funds controlled by regimes that are the big new boys on the block in the world of global finance.

How are SWFs created? Primarily from the mammoth trade deficits America has run up. In 2006, America had a merchandise trade deficit of $836 billion and a current account deficit of $857 billion, or 6.5 percent of our entire Gross Domestic Product.

Foreign nations have piled up huge cash reserves. China, at the end of March, had $1.2 trillion; Japan nearly $900 billion; Russia, with oil and gas revenue pouring in, something like $300 billion. The Arab Gulf states also have huge hoards of dollar reserves.

Rather than keep all this cash in U.S. Treasury bonds earning 5 percent a year, these nations are creating SWFs to go after higher rates of return and corporate assets to advance strategic interests.

The United Arab Emirates has $500 billion in SWFs; Norway $400 billion; Singapore and Saudi Arabia $200 billion; and China nearly $200 billion. Total SWF funds worldwide is $2.5 trillion, writes ex-Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, a figure that is expected to double to $5 trillion by 2010, and then double again to $12 trillion by 2015.

The problems these SWFs portend are enormous.

Since the Reagan-Thatcher era, privatization of publicly owned assets has been the trend in the free world. Airlines, railroads, mines, utilities, and telephone and telegraph companies have all been sold off by governments to private investors, who, to make them profitable, have made them efficient.

The SWFs reverse that trend. For these funds are all owned by or answerable to regimes, whose agents can direct these vast funds into assets not to produce maximum income, but maximum strategic benefit to the regime.

Suppose China, with its $1.2 trillion in reserves steadily rising from its soaring trade surpluses, begins to invest, through its SWF, in Boeing, Microsoft, IBM, GE and U.S. companies that build our strategic submarines, stealth bombers, satellites and missiles. Will the United States rope off the industries that build the weapons of our national defense from any ownership by SWFs?

If foreign investors can buy stock in these companies, why not foreign countries through SWFs?

Will we let China invest at all in such assets? What percent will Beijing be permitted to buy? Will SWFs be allowed to buy a controlling interest in a company responsible for weapons of national defense? Will they be allowed to buy controlling stakes in companies responsible for what remains of America's lead in high-tech? Will they be allowed to extract the technology? Who will decide what companies are vital national assets that foreigners, or at least some foreigners, will not be allowed to take over, or even to invest in?

Recall the firestorm over the Dubai Ports deal. Americans did not want Arab sheiks running American ports, but there was no such outcry when the idea of a British firm running them was broached.

The new corporate raiders are going to be a far tougher lot than the old, for this game is going to be about bigger stakes than where one ranks on the Forbes or Fortune list of billionaires.

As Summers writes: "In the last month we have seen government-controlled Chinese entities take the largest external stake ... in Blackstone, a big private equity group that indirectly, through its holdings, is one of the largest employers in the U.S. ... Gazprom, a Russian conglomerate in effect controlled by the Kremlin, has strategic interests in the energy sector of a number of countries, and even a stake in Airbus. Entities controlled by the governments of China and Singapore are offering to take a substantial stake in Barclays, giving it more heft in its effort to pull off the world's largest banking merger with ABN Amro."

Is it a good idea to give the boys in Beijing part ownership of Western banking institutions and the information they contain?

Should Rupert Murdoch retire, and his successors decide to divest some media properties, will China's Sovereign Wealth Fund be allowed to buy shares? One recalls the hysteria in Washington during the Reagan years when it was learned that South Africans might use a front group to buy the Washington Star.

Under free trade, we Americans have seen our jobs, technology, factories and wealth leave these shores for foreign lands. Now, our money is coming back to buy up our companies and our country.

Yes, indeed, we are witnessing how empires end.

To find out more about Patrick Buchanan, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate web page at www.creators.com.

COPYRIGHT 2007 CREATORS SYNDICATE INC.

Copyright © 2007 Yahoo! Inc. All rights reserved.

Peace in the Middle East Is the Will of the Anti-Christ, Not Jesus Christ!

by Bill Barnwell

While most people would consider the prospect of peace in the Middle East to be a good thing, there are many who find the idea of earthly peace between Jews and Arabs to be of evil origins. Who are the people that get immediately worried or suspicious upon hearing of peace treaties or proposals between Jews and Arabs? Are they members of a hate group of some sort? Violent organizations who promote international chaos? No, ironically enough, it is a large segment of Evangelical and Fundamentalist Christians known as "dispensationalists."

Dispensationalists will cry foul regarding the above statement. They will say that they regularly "pray for the peace of Jerusalem" (Psalm 122:6). They’ll respond that they abhor unnecessary violence and that they desire for all people to follow the "Prince of Peace" Jesus Christ. And on those points they are sincere. However, these sentiments aside, whether they know it or not, their theology makes it a Biblical mandate for there to be continuing bloodshed and violence in the Middle East until the time of the "anti-Christ." The only earthly peace that will be brought to the Middle East this side of the Second Coming will be a false peace from the Antichrist, who will later torture Jews and converted Christians during the "Great Tribulation."

Thus, "Bible prophecy" calls for this horrific scenario. There is no way around it. Any lasting or meaningful peace in the Middle East generally, and between Jews and Palestinians particularly, is folly and unbiblical. The only future Biblical peace between modern Israel and her enemies will be a false peace that is brought by the antichrist at the start of the supposed seven year "Tribulation" period that will precede Christ’s Second Coming. During the first 3.5 years, the antichrist will honor his treaty with Israel. But in the second 3.5-year period, he will break the covenant and desecrate the rebuilt Temple of the Jews and exalt himself as God.

(Dispensationalists further believe that for end-time events to accelerate, modern Jews must rebuild a Temple to perform animal sacrifices for the people’s sins. It is these sacrifices that the "Antichrist" will supposedly put an end to when he takes over the Temple. Furthermore, the Temple must be rebuilt on or near the location of Islam’s third holiest site, the Al-Aqsa Mosque. This alone would ignite a regional if not world war. And can you imagine the howling from animal rights activists if religious Jews began sacrificing animals again in mass numbers?)

The idea of a seven-year tribulation, brought on by an "Antichrist" who makes and breaks a covenant with the modern nation of Israel is supported by only one verse in the entire Bible: Daniel 9:27 (the book of Revelation never mentions a 7-year period. It mentions a 3.5-year period multiple times that if added up would yield a much longer period of duration). There is no other passage in Scripture that dispensationalists can point to that indicates the "Antichrist" is going to make or break a covenant with modern Israel. It all comes down to Daniel 9:27.

Unfortunately for dispensationalism, Daniel 9:27 is likely referencing events that have long since been fulfilled. According to dispensationalists this verse is totally disconnected from the verses that precede it. But to make this work, you have to insert a 2000+ year imaginary gap between verses 26 and 27. But there are plenty of problems with the "Left Behind" view of Dan. 9:27. Let's take a look at some of them.

According to the Dispensational View:

a. Verses 24–26 describe the coming of Jesus (The "Anointed One") 483 years after the rebuilding of Jerusalem. Jesus is the one "cut off" in verse 26, referring to his crucifixion.

b. The "people of the ruler" in vs. 26 are referring to those who came and destroyed Jerusalem and the Temple in 70AD. However, the Ruler (Antichrist) himself did not make an appearance then and doesn’t until the indefinite future, whenever verse 27 begins.

c. There is a massive gap of time between verses 26 and 27. God’s "prophetic time clock" has stopped now that we are in the "church age."

d. Verse 27 describes a future antichrist who will come on the world stage (soon!). The covenant is a covenant of the antichrist. The "many" whom he makes the covenant with are the Jewish people of modern Israel, which he will later break.

e. By the time verse 27 happens there will be a rebuilt temple in Jerusalem with resumed animal sacrifices. In the middle of the last "week" (seven-year period) the antichrist will desecrate the Temple, break his covenant with the Jewish people, and thus will begin the "Great Tribulation" which they correspond with Matthew 24, Mark 13, Luke 21, 2 Thessalonians 2, and Revelation 6–19.

There are so many problems with this interpretation that you almost need a small book to deal with each of them. I have, however, highlighted some of the major faults in the dispensational view of Daniel 9:27 here. In a nutshell, for all the talk from dispensationalists about how they interpret the Bible "literally," there is nothing literal about the above interpretation. For one, there’s nothing in the text implicitly or explicitly referring to a halting of "God’s prophetic time clock." There’s nothing that suggests a gap of over 2000 years between verses 26 and 27. There’s no reason to assume that the word "many" equals the modern nation state of Israel (though the New Testament does talk about Christ making a covenant with "many" and Christ putting an end to sacrifice and offerings). There’s nothing here or anywhere in the New Testament about "rebuilding the Temple."

Where the apostle Paul talks about the "man of sin" exalting himself in "God’s Temple" (2 Thess. 2:4) we have other issues to consider. First of all, in every other instance where Paul uses the word "temple" in his writings it’s never in reference to the literal brick and stone Temple where ancient Jews performed sacrifices and which was destroyed by the Romans in 70AD. Paul always uses the word "temple" metaphorically referring to such things as the body of individual Christians and the Church on a whole (and always uses the Greek word naos which allows for a figurative rendering of Temple. Jesus Himself uses it when He calls Himself the Temple in John 2:19). Traditionally, Christians from various traditions simply saw this verse referring to a heretical leader who tries to usurp God’s proper place and authority in the Church and society. It’s for this reason that many earlier Protestants believed that the Catholic Pope was the antichrist, since they saw him as trying to take the place of God inside the "temple" of Christendom. However, this view has also mostly and rightfully gone out of favor as it has many exegetical problems of its own.

Either way, it wasn’t until relatively recently in theological history that Christians believed that a new brick and mortar Temple needed to be built to satisfy 2 Thessalonians 2:4 and that this verse was cut and pasted next to Daniel 9:27.

Dispensationalists are unaware of the fact that traditionally Daniel 9:27 was seen as being historically exhausted either during the intertestamental era or at 70AD when the Temple was profaned and Jerusalem destroyed. Likewise, Jesus’ reference to the "abomination of desolation" in Matthew 24, Mark 13, and Luke 21, where he harkens back to Daniel 9:27, was also seen as being historically fulfilled in 70AD when the Temple and Jerusalem were destroyed. These events were fulfilled within a generation of the lifetime of His disciples (Matthew 24:34). Note: in every other instance in the gospels where Jesus uses the phrase "this generation," He is always referring to his contemporaries. This view also best fits the context of Matthew 24:15 and its cognate verses in Mark and Luke.

Today this view of prophetic events is making a comeback. It is called "partial preterism." Preterism basically means "fulfilled in the past." Partial preterists believe there are still future prophetic events that must transpire. But they also believe many prophetic events that dispensationalists believe are unfulfilled have in fact been fulfilled. This is not a "new teaching" as many dispensationalists are led to believe. They only think this because they’ve never been exposed to another view. It’s actually a much, much older teaching than anything they’ve been taught on subjects like Daniel 9:27.

The reality is that throughout church history, the vast majority of Church Fathers and commentators and expositors – from all branches of Christianity (including Protestantism) – were to varying degrees what we would anachronistically call "partial-preterists." The view of "full preterism" that all prophecy has been fulfilled (including the Second Coming and the resurrection!) has its adherents, but it, like dispensationalism is only a recent invention historically speaking. Dispensationalism, with its pre-tribulational rapture, rebuilt temple, two people’s of God, etc., only dates back to the 19th century.

As you read this, you have to ask yourself why dispensationalists have made complicated and isolated verses like Daniel 9:27 the interpretive framework for the entire book of Revelation and their end-time scenarios and charts! Therefore, much rests on these interpretive discussions since people’s very theology and political opinions are formed based upon them.

Hence the most important point to take home from this article: People’s beliefs about the future impact the way they live and think in the present. While many get frustrated with these discussions and just throw up their hands and say, "Look, all I know is that Jesus is coming again, that’s good enough for me!" such sentiments ignore what is at stake in the here and now because of these debates about the future. Because if dispensationalism is correct:

1. The only meaningful peace in the near-future for Jews and Arabs will be brought about by the "Antichrist," and this peace itself will turn out to be a sham peace. Any other peace not brought forth by the "Antichrist" is utterly doomed to fail since God has already decreed that the region must be marred by violence and that the "Antichrist" must bring his false peace. Therefore, if events transpired that did bring about an improvement in relations between Jews and Arabs that was not prompted by the "Antichrist" then that throws the entire prophetic system off and discredits dispensationalism. Thus, chaos must be the norm in Israel and the Middle East until the rise of the "Antichrist."

2. A literal brick and stone sacrificial Temple must be rebuilt. And it must be built where Islam’s third holiest site currently stands. It may be unfortunate that tearing down the Al-Aqsa mosque would cause mass bloodshed in the Middle East and result in global instability. Bible prophecy demands it.

3. Jews must go back to sacrificing animals in large numbers, even though this idea is completely foreign and contradictory to the entire New Testament, including all NT sections that address or mention those of ethnic Jewish descent.

4. Two thirds of Jews must perish in the "Great Tribulation" at the hands of the "Antichrist" (this view is wrongly supported from Zechariah 13:8–9. These verses also were traditionally seen as being fulfilled when 1,000,000 Jews actually did die when Jerusalem was destroyed in the first century. When you also take into account the 20th century holocaust, one must ask why so many fundamentalists and Evangelicals can say they "support" Israel when they believe most Jews will be exterminated in the future in an even worse and bloodier holocaust – supposedly ordained by God).

5. God (and by implication us) must desire the Middle East and world on a whole to deteriorate until He steps in to do anything about it. Thus, Christians are fighting a losing battle when they promote any kind of lasting peace between Jews and Palestinians.

Dispensationalists will rightly object that the world will never be perfect as long as man is in charge. That is correct. But just because that is the case it does not mean that we should actively promote the world falling into further disarray and chaos. Just because humanity on its own cannot bring a perfect and final peace does not mean it should promote perpetual war and bloodshed.

Sadly, whether they know it or not, many well-meaning fundamentalists and evangelical are doing just that. All in the name of "Bible prophecy." Thankfully Christians do not have to let this self-fulfilling prophecy become a reality. Peace need not be viewed as an antichristic notion. It is indeed a Godly notion.

August 1, 2007

Bill Barnwell [send him mail] is a pastor and writer from Michigan. He holds both a Master of Ministry degree and a Master of Arts in Theological Studies degree from Bethel College in Mishawaka, Indiana. Visit his blog. Bill is also a Mortgage Consultant and Loan Originator who can serve clients throughout the country.

Copyright © 2007 LewRockwell.com
http://www.lewrockwell.com/barnwell/barnwell83.html

l-Tawafuq withdrawal

The Sunni al-Tawafuq bloc has reportedly followed through on its threat to quit the Maliki government (but not withdraw from Parliament). They've threatened to withdraw so many times that it's tempting to wait and see if they really do it, but after the bitter arguments over the last week it would be hard for them to back down without completely losing credibility so they probably will. It won't cause Maliki's government to fall, since he doesn't need their votes. But it does matter, for two reasons.

First, the internal Sunni dimension. Sunni political parties which entered the political process have become increasingly desperate to show any fruits from their participation. They have been accused by their constituents of offering a Sunni fig leaf to a Shia sectarian government, of pursuing personal interests over national or Sunni interests, and of being played for suckers. The Iraqi Islamic Party of Tareq al-Hashemi used to be considered the representative of the Muslim Brotherhood, for instance, but now the insurgent group Hamas Iraq clearly claims that mantle (you can see it in how they are featured in the Ikhwan websites and forums). Even the much-hyped American Sunni tribal strategy can be seen as an end-run around the national Sunni political parties, working directly with tribal leaders at the local level rather than dealing with the politicians. Finally, the Sunni political parties are deeply threatened by the moves by the nationalist-oriented insurgency groups into the public political realm: the insurgency's claim to be the only authentic representatives of the Sunni community directly threatens the relevance of these political parties. Desperate to demonstrate their relevance, the Sunni bloc seems to have decided upon last week's direct challenge: either they would emerge with some clear gains to push back against these various political threats, or else they would pull out and reposition themselves as a political opposition. Neither is likely to work, but they don't have many cards to play.

Second, for the United States it is a blunt indicator that the "surge" has failed. War supporters want us to focus on the tactical level, which is what the shifts in Sunni strategy really amounts to (even if, as I've been arguing, those shifts are being consistently misinterpreted). But these tactical military indicators were never supposed to be the point. Back when the new policy was announced, administration officials and top military leaders clearly recognized the priority of the political process. I was told, like many others, that the point of the surge was to create a secure space to allow the chance for political reconciliation. Even General Petraeus used to be very clear about the fact that his military strategy had to be in the service of a national political strategy (though his more recent argument that the initiative had passed to the local level offered an implicitly damning assessment which should have received more critical attention). It has long been clear that this political process wasn't just not moving forward but was actually deteriorating. The Sunni bloc's withdrawal from the Maliki government - to say nothing of the cavalier response from Iraqi government spokesmen - just puts a capstone on this long-manifest reality. (It's worth asking how the US could possibly have so little influence over Maliki's government, which listens to all these American demands and appeals for political reconciliation but does nothing - could it be that Bush's refusal to consider a withdrawal leaves the US with no leverage or credibility?)

Nobody who follows Iraq really needs the recitation of failed political benchmarks, I suppose, but it's worth stating it bluntly: The Bush administration argued that its new strategy should be judged by the political process, not at the military level, and by its own standards it has clearly failed. Switching the focus back to tactical military developments may allow administration defenders to put forward signs of 'progress' - however ephemeral, dubious, or beside the point - but serious people shouldn't join in this shell game. The administration and its supporters sold the surge on the premise that it would pay its dividends at the level of national Iraqi politics. It hasn't. The Sunnis have left the government, none of the political benchmarks have been met, and they won't be since the Parliament has adjourned until September. No honest report from Ambassador Crocker - who is an honest man and a very good diplomat - will be able to portray any progress, or prospects for progress, on the national political front.

Posted on August 01, 2007 at 09:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

http://abuaardvark.typepad.com/

REPORTERS COULD BE PROSECUTED UNDER ESPIONAGE LAW, DOJ SAYS

The espionage statutes concerning classified information could be
employed against journalists who publish such information without
authorization, a Justice Department official told Congress recently,
elaborating on remarks made last year by Attorney General Gonzales.

Those statutes, "on their face, do not provide an exemption for any
particular profession or class of persons, including journalists,"
wrote Matthew W. Friedrich, DoJ Criminal Division Chief of Staff, in a
March 2007 response to questions from the Senate Judiciary Committee
that has been newly published.

He stressed that "the Justice Department's primary focus has been and
will continue to be investigating and prosecuting leakers, not members
of the press."

But he added that "it would be inappropriate to comment on whether the
Department is now considering the prosecution of journalists for
publishing classified information."

The congressional correspondence touched on several issues that are new
or rarely addressed.

"What about conduct that is incidental to a journalist publishing a
story," asked Senator Pat Leahy, "such as retaining classified
documents that may be used later in a story, or communicating such
information to a publisher or other reporters in the course of writing
a story?"

The legality of these activities would "depend on the particular facts
and circumstances," Mr. Friedrich replied. "It would be inappropriate
to offer an advisory opinion about the legality of such conduct."

Could improper or unnecessary classification be used as a defense
against prosecution? "We are aware of no case that affirmatively holds
that such a defense is available to defendants in Espionage Act cases,"
Mr. Friedrich wrote. And he cited one Ninth Circuit decision that said
that "under section 798 [one of the espionage statutes], the propriety
of the classification is irrelevant."

He disclosed that "over the past five years, the Department has
approved search warrants for materials related to the news gathering
process... in four cases." These were not specified.

Mr. Friedrich's answers to questions for the record from Senators
Specter and Leahy, transmitted March 1, 2007, are posted here:

http://www.fas.org/irp/congress/2006_hr/journalists-qfr.pdf

They were recently published in the record of a June 6, 2006 Senate
Judiciary Committee hearing entitled "Examining DOJ's Investigation of
Journalists Who Publish Classified Information: Lessons from the Jack
Anderson Case":

http://www.fas.org/irp/congress/2006_hr/journalists.html

It Ain't Easy Knowing Who You Can You Trust
News organizations? Bloggers? Citizen journalists? What's a news consumer to do?

By Steve Outing

NEW YORK (July 30, 2007) -- Ah, life was so easy when I was younger. The daily newspaper was my major source of news, supplemented by the occasional TV news program, a bit of radio news, maybe Time magazine for some weekly analysis. There was no doubt about the veracity of any of those sources.

But today, holy moly! I still read my daily newspaper (perhaps only because I'm middle age and it's a habit I can't break), but it's a tiny slice of my daily news and information diet. There are all the blogs, of course -- from guys and gals typing in their PJs from home, to "placebloggers" (covering their home communities independently), to niche bloggers trying to make a living from their expertise, to bloggers being paid by news or other organizations, to soldiers in Iraq blogging and spouses of soldiers, to politicians, to college students.

There are all the grassroots media (a.k.a., citizen journalism) sites, with content submitted by people who I have no idea of their competence or political bias. Community micro-news, once the purview of community weeklies, is now often provided by citizen journalists. Uber grassroots media sites like Associated Content publish content from a wide variety of amateur writers (as well as pros).


There are news and information websites published by non-profits and all sorts of organizations that I can't easily categorize or assess. And there are the many online-only media outlets that have sprung up over the last decade or so.

For consumers of news and searchers of information, these are heady times. Yet there's a huge downside to this abundance: How as consumers do we know if we can trust what we read? How do we know if it's balanced, or serving someone's narrow agenda? ... OK, you might figure that out after reading a source for a while, but it's not easy at a glance to know.

Most of us are adding new news sources to our information diet all the time. We discover a new blog that we think is great, and add it to our regular reading list. That blogger refers us to other bloggers and unusual news sources. ... We frequent news aggregators like Google News, Yahoo! News and Topix, often discovering new sources that we haven't visited before. We search Google and hit upon a new source covering a topic we care about.

The problem isn't just that of the consumer -- who does need to be a lot more savvy when filling him/herself from the fattened flow of information. It's also a problem that newspapers need to deal with, because increasingly they are adding alternative sources to their websites (and to a lesser extent, but still, to their print editions).

Many a newspaper site these days publishes local bloggers, citizen journalism, eyewitness reports, etc. Set within the context of the overall news online presentation, there's typically no or little guidance offered about the likely veracity of these people.

It's time, I'd like to suggest, for news publishers to get serious about rating and ranking the alternative sources that they now publish -- to give their readers a bit of help in assessing what they're reading.

Enter Newstrust

Help, it appears, is on the way. A non-profit initiative called Newstrust is developing a system for rating news from a very broad array of sources. And unlike previous efforts that employed teams of paid reviewers (a model that proved economically unviable), this one is a social network model which uses the intellect of the masses to rate all manner of news content and news sources.

In beta now and due out in early 2008, Newstrust will not only be a stand-alone site where consumers can come to find the best journalism as ranked by an army of volunteer media reviewers, but more importantly it will (we can hope) be deployed over all manner of online news sources so that readers will on any news-related website see an objective rating of that site's quality and of specific news content.

I've been thinking for some time that there needs to be some way devised to differentiate the various flavors of content on a typical news site. As a reader, I should be made aware when an article is authored by a professional journalist, vs. a story posted by a volunteer citizen journalist. Something I've advocated is making that clear in the byline. And a link off the author's name should go to a bio page, where we'll learn that the writer is either a staff pro journalist with a degree from Medill or a school teacher who enjoys gardening and writing.

But Newstrust, I think, goes further than that, and even in another direction. The promise that the Newstrust model presents is that wherever our news search and browsing takes us, we'll see aids that will help us determine the quality of an online news source and ratings of individual stories.

After all, what we as consumers most care about in our news is accuracy, quality and balance. If we can be informed about those, then perhaps it doesn't really matter whether you're reading a piece by a New York Times reporter or a blogger you've never heard of who writes just for fun but is really good.

The Nuts and Bolts

Newstrust is not a big-money endeavor at this point. According to executive director Fabrice Florin, the project has raised only about $150,000 to date, from foundations and interested parties, including Craigslist founder Craig Newmark. The project is further along than $150,000 will typically get you because of considerable volunteer time from others involved, and Florin himself.

I used the phrase "army of media reviewers" earlier, and that's accurate. Anyone can sign up to be a Newstrust reviewer, with nothing more than an e-mail address. That gets you the right to start reviewing news sources (websites, blogs, etc.) and individual articles.

Reviewers are asked to rate news sources using a simple 5-star selection. Each source gets an aggregate score. Ratings for individual stories are more interesting and deeper; story reviewers are asked a series of questions about the article (rate with 1-5 stars):

Is it a good story?
Do you trust this publication?
Is the story informative?
Is the story fair?
Is the story well sourced?
Does the story show the "big picture"?

The reviewer also can leave a text review, which will show up on Newstrust along with the story.

What's exciting about this is the thought of Newstrust ratings showing up on stories around the web -- on all manner of news sites, from NYTimes.com to your local blogger's. Any website can sign up to run a rating button on all its content; online users rate a story and the aggregated results show up on the site as well as within Newstrust.

This thing is going to have to take off in a big way for the ratings to be really useful to consumers, of course. What I want is to find ratings of obscure news sources -- ones that I don't have a sense yet of how much I can trust them. I already have an opinion of how much I can trust (or not) the Washingtonpost.com and Fox News, but not so for many of the little guys publishing online.

Of course, I don't know what to think of alternative sources within mainstream news websites -- like community bloggers published within a newspaper site. I hope Newstrust can help with that.

With the success of news recommendation social networks like Digg, there's reason for hope that Newstrust can become popular and widely used enough to get there.

The Bias Factor

If you look at Newstrust during its beta period, take the ratings with a grain of salt. Florin reports that the site's volunteer reviewers currently have a left tilt. It started out with far more self-described liberals, but as more people sign up to be reviewers, that's lessening and headed more toward balance. Ergo, Fox News is not going to do well on the ratings during the Newstrust beta. (Fox has an aggregate rating of 2.3 out of 5 currently -- the lowest rating of any national TV news program or network.)

Florin says that will even out in time, and the project is very much a non-partisan effort. Indeed, reviewers are instructed to rate sources and articles in an objective manner, and leave personal politics and bias out of it.

More importantly, Newstrust's developers are building bias filters into the algorithm that drives the site. Every member reviewer of Newstrust gets a "member rating," which is an assessment of their performance as a reviewer. When administrators notice a reviewer that consistently reviews sources and articles with a particular political bias, for example, that reviewer's member rating gets knocked down. While the biased member can continue rating things, his impact on the overall scores is neglible, and his written reviews are either placed where few will see them or not shown at all.

Administrators actively look for reviewers who are trying to game the system and influence ratings toward a particular point of view (e.g., a conservative reviewer who regularly gives 5 stars to opinion pieces on Fox News while ranking New York Times articles with 1 star). Such people are then sent an e-mail with a request to comply with the non-partisan spirit of Newstrust and start reviewing content and sources objectively.

The site also has tiers of reviewers. Everyone starts out as a Reviewer, but if you really get into this and perform in an objective manner, you can be promoted to a Host or even an Editor.

A future enhancement to the site will be bias-adjusted reviews -- that is, optional ratings based exclusively on reviews by Hosts and Editors. (That may be a paid premium service.)

Hope for theFuture

It's way too early to tell if Newstrust will make it, and if its usage will become widespread enough to be truly useful. I hope this initiative succeeds, because it addresses a sore cultural need.

The wealth of news and information now available freely on the Internet is both blessing and curse. That we have this much at our fingertips -- and so inexpensively -- is an amazing development of the last decade. But we're still in the information dark ages, in a way, because we don't yet have tools for consumers to assess what they're reading.

Let's hope that Newstrust and its inevitable coming competitors figure out how to solve this problem.
Steve Outing (letters@editorandpublisher.com) has been writing a column for E&P for most of the past decade.
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/co...t_id=1003618132

Congress, Bush and the Real Constitutional Crisis
By Glenn W. Smith
t r u t h o u t | Guest Contributor

Tuesday 31 July 2007

America is in the midst of an authentic constitutional crisis, as the Bush administration moves to reduce Congress to little more than an irrelevant focus group and achieve what no US president has ever achieved: a true above-the-law presidency.

These are the stakes: Will the United States save what is left of its constitutional democracy by restoring checks and balances among the three branches of government?

When the US Supreme Court appointed George W. Bush to the White House by calling off the Florida recount in 2000, many pundits applauded the action because it allegedly headed off a constitutional crisis. That phony rationalization disguised what is now apparent: the real post-Florida 2000 constitutional crisis is the Bush administration's unprecedented, Constitution-destroying lust for power.

The fight should not be measured against partisan positioning for the 2008 elections. Democratic and Republican political consultants will view the crisis that way because that is their job. Consultants are hired to win elections, not save the Constitution. Congressional Democrats must look past the PowerPoints of their consultants. So should Republicans, who are struggling to distance themselves from Bush's negatives without asking the White House for a divorce.

But, there is now no other choice. Bush's drive to place permanent barriers between the people and their government, to lift the presidency above all laws, must be stopped.

Earlier this week, I wrote about the dangerous cultural narrative that frames Congress as an inept community. Our hero myths often include an inept community that must be saved by the lone hero. This cultural narrative has led to a broadly held view that Congress is just such a community.

For those Democrats and Republicans in Congress who remain captive to consultant myopia, I offer this observation. Political experts criticize Senator John Kerry for failing to adequately counter-attack the Swift Boaters. Kerry's mistake, however, was that his campaign behavior undermined his own mythic narrative - the narrative of a courageous Vietnam War hero. Voters who rejected Kerry did so not because they believed the Swift Boaters and were suspicious of his Vietnam valor, but because of the apparent lack of valor that was happening right before their eyes.

Congress is now being Swift Boated by the Bush administration. Americans will judge the valor of Congress, not as presented in ads in 2008, but as witnessed in real time, right now. Polls are no doubt suggesting that voters want Congress to address health care reform and the deteriorating economy. A political fight with Bush over the constitutional balance of power will look like a distraction, like politics as usual, like so much partisan squabbling. Today, it seems that Congress is overcoming that fear and preparing for the fight. They are moving in the right direction with the subpoena of Karl Rove and the opening of a perjury investigation of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. We should applaud these actions, and pray for more.

The Bush gambit is to permanently derail progressive policy goals by building an impenetrable wall between the people and their government and by asserting ultimate and absolute presidential authority. These ambitions are made obvious by the administration's actions: Bush's unprecedented veto threats; the obvious "we-don't-really-care-what-you-think" attitude of Gonzales during his committee testimony; the administration questioning Senator Hillary Clinton's patriotism when she asked for details of Bush's Iraq plans; the refusal to disclose details of the administration's emergency government plan.

Even a temporary eviction from the White House beginning in 2009 would not deter the neoconservatives and their anti-democratic allies. A Democratic president will have her/his hands full cleaning up the Bush garbage. While a Democratic president would probably resist further steps along the above-the-law path, it's unlikely a president will willingly give up any power that has accrued to the presidency during the Bush reign. So, the right wing reasons, we'll just pick up in 2012 where we left off in 2008.

The federal courts, packed with conservative appointments, will also do what they can to establish permanent barriers between the American people and their government.

Congress has no choice but to destroy those barriers now. The crisis cannot be reduced to a messy or selfish partisan confrontation. Truth is, many Republicans are as interested as Democrats in saving our constitutional democracy. The further truth is, the stakes matter much, much more than any potential partisan consequences for either major party.

In the end, the battle for the future of America may make necessary the impeachment of a president who is very publicly moving to destroy our constitutional form of government. It may not seem the politically prudent thing to do. But this is a president who lied us into a war, who uses his pen to make laws (constitutionally reserved for Congress) through signing statements, who commutes the sentence of a convicted criminal to protect himself from scrutiny, who believes he has the right to declare anyone he wants an enemy combatant and then "disappear" that person the way we taught our tyrannical and thuggish client-state dictators to do during the Cold War. If these are not sufficient to justify a legal and constitutional challenge to the legitimacy of the Bush presidency, exactly what would a president have to do before we would impeach him?

Republicans and Democrats in Congress can look at our predicament and decide to save their own asses; Democrats running against Bush; Republicans running from Bush. That would be politics as usual.

Or, they can act fearlessly to save the country, and, despite what today's polls might tell them, earn the gratitude of voters who today might be wishing the nightmare will just come to an end. But the best way to end a nightmare is to wake up.

Congress can interrupt the narrative of its own ineptitude and restore the dignity and power of a people who are willing to govern themselves. But to do so, we must be awake to the real constitutional crisis that is at hand.

--------

Glenn W. Smith is a Senior Fellow with The Rockridge Institute.
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/073107E.shtml

The Liberator

By: Soraya Sepahpour-Ulrich

“He who lives by fighting with an enemy has an interest in the preservation of the enemy’s life.” - Friedrich Nietzsche

Holding a joint press conference with the new British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, George W. Bush called Iraq a ‘new democracy’; The gift of democracy from the Bush White House. It would seem appropriate that a statue of George W. Bush be erected where Saddam’s statue once stood – after all, he is the liberator. The momentous unveiling ought to be accompanied by the wailing of mothers rocking back and forth as they beat their chests holding corpses and shrieking in anguish. The ‘new democracy’ should have its orphaned children present, delivering their gratitude with growling stomachs and tears that are all they have to relieve their parched throats. The liberator’s statue would be adorned not with the promised flowers, but with stains left behind by the blood of the innocent buried in mass graves – the shame of women raped. Indeed, they were liberated from their dreams, their tomorrows, from their hopes.

And of so much more…

Perhaps the Iraqis should also thank the ‘liberator’ for unburdening them of their oil – it was the oil, and Saddam, that was a threat to them. Both are gone. While the Iraqis risk their lives standing in line for a can of gas, wondering what happened to their country’s riches, under the watchful eyes of soldiers, smugglers divert billions of dollars worth of crude onto tankers. This, thanks to the genius of Dick Cheney’s old company Halliburton (and Parsons) for the oil metering system that is supposed to monitor how much crude flows into and out of ABOT and KAAOT Southern oil terminals has not worked since the March 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq.[i] The oil simply gets stolen, Halliburton does not fix it, and the soldiers don’t stop it.

Let’s not forget Saddam’s threat to the dollar. It’s simple to understand why he had to be eliminated. As Congressman Ron Paul puts it, the 1944 Bretton Woods agreement solidified the dollar as the preeminent world reserve currency, replacing the British pound. Due to the American political and military strength, and due to its huge gold reserve, the world readily accepted the dollar (defined as 1/35th of an ounce of gold) as the world's reserve currency.


However, the U.S. printed more dollars for which there was no gold backing. But the world was content to accept those dollars for more than 25 years with little question--until the French and others in the late 1960s demanded it fulfill its promise to pay one ounce of gold for each $35 they delivered to the U.S. Treasury. This resulted in a huge gold drain that brought an end to a very poorly devised pseudo-gold standard. On August 15, 1971, Nixon closed the gold window and refused to pay out any of the remaining 280 million ounces of gold; but not without devising a new system for the dollar hegemony to spread.

An agreement was struck with OPEC to price oil in U.S. dollars exclusively for all worldwide transactions. This gave the dollar a special place among world currencies and in essence "backed" the dollar with oil. In return, the U.S. promised to protect the various oil-rich kingdoms in the Persian Gulf against threat of invasion or domestic coup. This arrangement gave the dollar artificial strength, with tremendous financial benefits for the United States. In November 2000 Saddam Hussein demanded Euros for his oil. It was his arrogance that was a threat -- to the dollar; his lack of any military might was never a threat. At the first cabinet meeting with the new administration in 2001, as reported by Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, the major topic was how to get rid of Saddam Hussein--[ii]

Saddam was linked to al Qaeda – sovereign Iraq was invaded –Joe Wilson’s honest report was dismissed, his wife, Valerie Plame’s identity was revealed – and so the rest of the story goes….

The ‘liberators’ fight hard for the ‘new democracy’. The ‘new democracy’ had become the place where arms dealers line their pockets. War is good for business. Boardrooms are filled with delighted stockholders. Profits are rolling in. The bin Laden owned Carlyle Group, not content with making money out of arms, proposes to use its connections to get in other deals. It wants ‘to help manage’ up to $1 billion of the funds collected from the reparations and other claims to create an entity, initially funded by $2 billion in Kuwaiti government money, that would take control of any funds collected from Iraq [iii].

Indeed, the bin Laden owned Carlyle group fares well when it comes to death and destruction. As the Bush administration was supplying Israel with munitions to massacre the Lebanese men, women, and children, and as the United Nations was ordered by the U.S. to allow the destruction of a nation to continue, the Carlyle Group was ready to invest in Lebanon’s ruins – another one of Mr. Bush’s ‘new democracies’.[iv]

Was it all ‘bad intelligence’? Today we have the weapons manufacturers supplying the intelligence. An ad taken out by Lockheed Martin last year looking for intelligence recruits read: "on substantive intelligence matters involving terrorist groups and networks . . . Centcom experience is a plus," [v]. Raytheon, the other large defense contractor, is also supplying intelligence – to the point that corporate America, the weapons manufacturers, are capable of taking us to war. And war they want. Their stocks have gone through the roof – though the Iraqis had their roofs taken away with bombs and poverty.

The next ‘threat’ on the list is Iran. In 1999 Iran had stated that it plans to sell its oil in Euro currency (Du Boff 1)[vi] as the sanctions had made it impossible for Iran to trade in dollar. (In 2001, Venezuela's ambassador to Russia spoke of Venezuela switching to the Euro for all their oil sales. Within a year there was a coup attempt against Chavez, reportedly with assistance from the CIA). Iran has started selling its oil in other currencies - Japan had to pay for its shipment in Yen. Iran has been the target of false allegations and ‘bad intelligence’ for the sole purpose of an attack which would profit corporate America, the military industrial complex, and their cohorts in the Middle East, with Lockheed Martin and Raytheon supplying intelligence[vii]. Even as the IAEA “inspectors have protested to the US government and a Congressional committee about a report on Iran's nuclear work, calling parts of it "outrageous and dishonest", and that Iran had not enriched uranium to weapons grade[viii], the warmongering media here continues to make accusations about Iran. Iran is being accused of killing Americans in Iraq, supplying weapons, and in short, of being the biggest threat to the U.S. No doubt many employees are being paid overtime to produce the right ‘intelligence’ reports on Iran to keep the war machines going and the profits coming in.

But why arm Arabs? The second volume of Henry Kissinger's memoirs of the Nixon era, “Years of Upheaval”, makes it clear that Kissinger made no decisions in the Middle East without Israel in mind. Kissinger used historic Persian-Arab antipathy, and the Shah's growing megalomania, to fashion the second half of a military pincer to squeeze the Arabs between a heavily-armed Israel and a similarly-armed Iran. Today, the Bush administration is scaremongering the Arabs into thinking that Iran’s civilian nuclear program poses a threat and that Iran has hegemonic ambitions. America is uniting the Arabs against Iran so that when Iran is attacked, fearing retaliation from Iran, as they have been made to believe, the Arab states armed with U.S. weapons, will be the foot soldiers that America lacks. Unwilling to enact the draft, and unable to enlist men to fight another illegal war, the United States is arming the Arabs – to be its foot soldiers in a battle with Iran. However, as they are being armed to the teeth, the U.S. is ensuring that the weapons they are sold are far inferior to those received by Israel, that they are only ‘good enough’ for killing other Arabs, and for killing Iranians.[ix]

I can’t be sure whether it is the loss of our dignity or our collective apathy, but we have reached the point of tolerating the intolerable. Accustomed to manipulation, we no longer even protest the abuse. What extraordinary power to subjugate a nation in the name of protection and freedom, lives bartered for power and wealth, and still no outrage.

Do you hear them?

Do not take the echo of your silence for the absence of their plea for help. Today, we could have spared a mother’s agony, a father’s frustration at watching his children go hungry – his wife getting raped. Instead, we allowed ourselves to become victims too. Tomorrow, there will be more losses. Let us not wait.

Soraya Sepahpour-Ulrich has lived and studied in Iran, the UK, France, Australia and the US. She obtained her Bachelors Degree in International Relations from the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, and she is currently pursuing a Masters Degree in Middle East Studies concentrating in Political Science. She has done extensive research on US foreign policy towards Iran and Iran’s nuclear program.

NOTES
[i] http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=14427
[ii] > http://www.house.gov/paul/congrec/congrec2006/cr021506.htm
[iii] http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A...anguage=printer
[iv] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...6081801027.html
[v] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...6050601088.html
[vi] Du Boff, Richard B. “U.S. Hegemony: Continuing Decline, Enduring Danger” Monthly Review. NY Dec. 2000. Vol 55:7:1
[vii] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...7070601993.html
[viii] http://www.makfax.com.mk/look/agencija/art...mp;NrSection=30
[ix] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/6923430.stm
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article18102.htm

Expect More Damage from US Kaleidoscopic Diplomacy
by Rami G. Khouri Released: 1 Aug 2007
BEIRUT -- The riddle of American foreign policy in the Middle East this week became even more puzzling, following the announcement of major new military aid and sales packages to Israel, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and smaller Arab countries. The totals will top $70 billion over the coming ten years. The United States justifies this as part of its policy of fighting radicalism and terrorism, supporting moderates, and promoting an Arab-Israeli peace process.

It might also help the Man on the Moon learn to make really fine New York-style cheesecake.

American foreign policy in the Middle East combines impressive persistence with wildly erratic swings. It changes with the season and the political climate:
• promote and then ignore Arab democratization;
• boycott and then speak with Syria and Iran;
• disregard then actively engage in Palestinian-Israeli peace negotiations.

Simultaneously, it adheres to sacred principles, such as:
• Israeli military superiority over all the Arabs;
• sure access to oil;
• protecting friendly Arab regimes.

Such diplomacy, which is at once consistent and kaleidoscopic, generates a mish-mash of contradictions that only reinforce the low-quality policies of Arabs, Israelis and Iranians. The combination has resulted in frightening trends in the Middle East in the past generation: continued militarization, polarization, radicalization, and frequent destabilization.

This week’s latest American approach to the Middle East perpetuates this legacy, which is closely linked to several new factors in recent years: the messy war in Iraq, the increased regional clout of a nuclear Iran, and the growing strength of Arab mainstream Islamist political movements. Also, the Middle East sees the vulnerability of some Arab governments to economic and political stresses, ethnic and religious challenges to centralized state identities, widespread Arab skepticism of “democracy promotion” attempts, and the continued expansion of small but violent terrorist groups broadly reflecting Al-Qaeda-like worldviews.

Each one of these trends is exacerbated, not diminished, by the pro-military, pro-Israel, and pro-Arab autocracy policies the United States now reaffirms and intensifies. As if to ensure that its policies backfire and promote popular Arab, Iranian and even Turkish resistance, rather than acquiescence, Washington also routinely lumps together very different movements and sentiments in the region: the most powerful and legitimate Islamist movements (Hamas, Hizbullah), two very different state leaderships (Syria and Iran), and the equally distinct extremist terrorist groups like Al-Qaeda. By seeing these forces as a common foe, and countering them with tens of billions of dollars of advanced weapons for Arab states, humiliatingly subjected to Israel’s approval, Washington guarantees another failed policy.

For such an approach combines three consistent, core American mistakes in the Middle East:
• wrong analysis of causes of popular and official sentiments,
• biased interventions in favor of Israel at the expense of Arab and Iranian rights, and
• using military tools to deal with political and socio-economic problems.

Back in the last century, this sort of thing was called “adding fuel to the fire”. Today Washington calls it “promoting moderate Sunni Arab regimes”, or, as US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Monday en route to the Middle East, “we are working with these states to give a chance to the forces of moderation and reform.”

Maybe the Man on the Moon would also like a recipe for hefty New York-style baked ribs, too.

Rice should counter this other-worldly dimension of her country’s policies by engaging with the realities of the Middle East, and focusing on the concerns and rights of all parties. If she could walk through any middle class neighborhood in the Arab world on her visit this week and touch the sentiments of ordinary men and women, she would discover important things. One would be that moderation and reform in the Middle East in the past generation have been retarded and even discredited -- not fostered -- by massive American military hardware and political bias. Another is that ordinary Arabs, Iranians and Turks want to have close, friendly ties with the United States, but to be treated as equals, not as fools.

Raising the intensity of American policies anchored in militarism, threats, sanctions and political bias will only make things worse. Trying to do this as a backhanded way of trying to stabilize Iraq, so that the US forces can leave, adds an element of shamelessness to a strong foundation of dysfunction. Couching this in terms of repelling Iranian ambitions may furthermore trigger two trends that the United States says it is trying to dampen: greater popular support for the Iranian regime, and that regime’s accelerated quest for serious defense capabilities, perhaps including nuclear arms.

The US-led “global war on terror” has played into the terrorists’ hands and expanded actual global terror networks and threats. This American plan to counter the influence of Iran, Syria and Arab Islamist and resistance groups is similarly likely to bolster their popular support, technical capabilities, political determination and policy coordination.


Rami G. Khouri is an internationally syndicated columnist, the director of the Issam Fares Institute at the American University of Beirut, editor-at-large of the Beirut-based Daily Star, and co-laureate of the 2006 Pax Christi International Peace Award.

Copyright ©2007 Rami G. Khouri / Agence Global

----------------
Released: 01 August 2007
Word Count: 797
----------------

For rights and permissions, contact:

rights@agenceglobal.com, 1.336.686.9002 or 1.212.731.0757

http://www.agenceglobal.com/Article.asp?Id=1331

Can Musharraf Survive?
by Immanuel WallersteinReleased: 1 Aug 2007Poor Pervez Musharraf! He is not very popular, and is under pressure from just about everybody. Yet he labors on, seeking to maintain his equilibrium, and his power, while sitting on top of a seething volcano. He has in fact done better than one might have thought possible.

To start the story at the beginning, we have to remember the origins of the state of Pakistan. The principal nationalist movement in colonial India was the Indian National Congress, led by Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru. Mohammed Ali Jinnah, a secular lawyer of Muslim origin, was an active member. But he increasingly came to feel that Muslims as a group (one might say as an ethnic group) were relegated to a second-class citizenship. He joined the Muslim League, a movement seeking autonomy/independence for a "Muslim" region. In 1934, Jinnah became its president, and in the final negotiations with the British for the independence of India, he succeeded in obtaining an independent and separate status for Pakistan.

On August 14, 1947, when Pakistan became an independent state, it consisted of several provinces in the northwest of colonial India and a Bengali province in the northeast, quite distant from the western sector. On August 11 of that year, Jinnah made an inaugural speech before the about-to-be legislative body of Pakistan, calling for an "inclusive and pluralist democracy," which would guarantee equal rights for all its citizens of whatever religion or ethnic group. Not only was the Muslim League essentially a modernist secular nationalist movement, but the armed forces that would be established drew its personnel from the old British military forces in India, and its officer corps was equally secular for the most part.

As we know, independence for India and Pakistan resulted immediately in terrible inter-group violence and, among other things, a struggle for the control of Kashmir. The net outcome of that initial struggle was not only a de facto (and to this day contested) partition of Kashmir but also a transfer of populations, such that Pakistan became overwhelmingly Muslim. In 2007, its population numbers 165 million, which makes Pakistan the sixth most populous state in the world, and one whose birthrate is among the highest. This population is today 97% Muslim, of which 20% are Shi'a.

The political history of Pakistan has been tumultuous. Its relations with its principal neighbor, India, have always been tenuous and conflictual. The eastern part of Pakistan seceded in 1971, with Indian encouragement, to become the state of Bangladesh. The first military coup occurred in 1958. Civilian rule, under a largely secular, urban party led by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, was restored in 1972, only to be overthrown again five years later. The coup was led by Gen. Zia ul-Haq who was a quite pious Muslim and installed sharia as the law of the land. He also had the country renamed the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. Civilian rule was restored years later under the aegis of Bhutto's daughter, Benazir Bhutto, who then ceded place to Nawaz Sharif. In 1999, Sharif sought to arrest his chief of staff, one Gen. Pervez Musharraf, who succeeded in having Sharif arrested instead and being himself placed at the head of the government. He was proclaimed president in 2001, and elected to that post in 2002.

To make sense of this back and forth, we have to identify the principal political actors inside Pakistan and its geopolitical alliances. To start with the latter, Pakistan's biggest concern has always been India, and therefore logically it sought the support of two states whose relations were reserved towards India throughout the Cold War -- the United States and China. These two states considered Indian foreign policy too close to that of the Soviet Union. The India-Pakistan military strains led both to refuse to sign the nuclear non-proliferation treaty and to develop nuclear weapons, much to the chagrin of the United States.

Internally, the situation in 2007 is quite different from that in 1947. Islamism as a political force has become extremely strong and permeates large sectors of the armed forces. Islamists are unhappy about Pakistan's links with the United States, especially during the last five years. The urban, secular forces would like to force out Musharraf (as well as the armed forces) from political power and have recently shown their strength in their successful support of the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court whom Musharraf had tried to fire. The armed forces, while Islamist, do not really want to cede their role to jihadist elements like al-Qaeda, and therefore attempt to play a bridge role -- appeasing but trying to contain the jihadist forces.

When the United States was supporting jihadists in Afghanistan in the 1980s, its strongest ally was Pakistan, and in particular the intelligence units of the armed forces, the ISI. In the 1990s, the ISI helped the Taliban come to power in Afghanistan. Hence, the ISI was quite unhappy when the United States overthrew the Taliban and has not been very cooperative with regard to Afghanistan, something about which Afghanistan's current president, Hamid Karzai, complains to this day.

It seems quite clear that, when Osama bin Laden launched the attack against the United States on September 11, 2001, one of his major objectives, if not his principal one, was to bring down the regimes in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. Why and how so? Bin Laden considered the regimes in both countries too accommodating to the United States behind their ambiguous language on Islamism. He expected the United States to put pressure on the Musharraf regime to engage his homegrown Islamists totally. Bin Laden's theory was that, if it did so, Musharraf's regime would fall.

Musharraf has resisted this pressure (as has Saudi Arabia), agreeing with bin Laden that it was politically suicidal to do what the United States wanted him to do. On the other hand, he had to keep the United States relatively happy lest Pakistan lose the crucial economic and military support of the United States. So, every once in a while, he throws a bone to the United States, as in the recent assault on the Red Mosque, a stronghold of Islamists. But he is careful not to go further.

And this contradiction is what brings us to where we are today. The jihadists are well installed in the so-called northwest frontier areas (which have always been de facto autonomous) and Musharraf does not dare to take real action against them. The jihadists denounce Musharraf for being too pro-American. The United States, on the other hand, considers him far too accommodating to the jihadists. The United States keeps mumbling about direct action. But the United States cannot really turn against Musharraf entirely, lest an even worse regime succeed his. Meanwhile, the urban secular classes are pressing a weakened Musharraf to step down and give way to a truly civilian regime.

Musharraf's key support, indeed sole support, remains the army. But as long as the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq continue, Islamist political strength continues to grow. And Pakistan has many nuclear weapons. Should the Islamists come to unrestrained power, this would pose a real geopolitical threat to the United States, unlike the invented one of Saddam Hussein.


Immanuel Wallerstein, Senior Research Scholar at Yale University, is the author of The Decline of American Power: The U.S. in a Chaotic World (New Press).

Copyright ©2007 Immanuel Wallerstein, distributed by Agence Global
----------------
Released: 01 August 2007
Word Count: 1,197
----------------
For rights and permissions, contact:

rights@agenceglobal.com, 1.336.686.9002 or 1.212.731.0757
http://www.agenceglobal.com/Article.asp?Id=1332

Uncle Cheney Liberates 50 Million People
Posted by Patrick Foy on August 01, 2007 I was visiting someone in the hospital last night, so I was forced to sit there and watch the Larry King interview with Richard Cheney. Normally, I don’t watch a speech or interview given by either Cheney or his marionette, G.W. First, it is infuriating. Second, it’s just a complete waste of time. These folks do not have an ounce of credibility left. Yet, they keep talking. They have to. Somewhere along the line, they must have concluded that the point of no return has been reached. They have nothing to lose now.

I still feel that G.W. had a slim but real chance to turn the ship around when former Secretary of State Jim Baker and Congressman Lee Hamilton delivered the ”Baker Report” on Iraq in December, 2006. That report was essentially a repudiation of our entire Iraq policy, and it advocated a new direction, and made specific recommendations to get us the hell out of there. Bush had a chance to face the fact that Cheney and his “neocon” charlatans had put the country on the wrong track. It seemed to me that G.W. could have asked Cheney to resign for health reasons. If Cheney didn’t, he could simply have been sidelined with no responsibilities. Under such circumstances, Cheney would have resigned to a world of duck shooting and fly fishing. Then G.W. could have brought Baker in to be Secretary of State, and let Baker carry out his own report. Why not? Nothing like that happened, of course, because Bush and Cheney have such colossal egos that they cannot stand to admit they are wrong. That is what this is all about now, ego and self-justification.

In the Larry King interview, here’s the White House transcript, Cheney is asked about the Administration’s credibility problem. Cheney answered: “...I think in the end, it will depend upon the results and what ultimately happens. I think history will judge us well, if we’re successful in achieving the objectives we’ve set. I think the President has made some crucial decisions, very important decisions, very difficult decisions. But I think what we’ve done in Afghanistan, for example, and in Iraq, which represents liberating 50 million people from two of the worst regimes in modern times, is a very significant achievement.” Give me a break. Listen, it’s not our job to liberate anybody. Those countries do not belong to us, and we understand nothing about them. Let’s get real. It is this essential misconception and wrong assumption which has made it possible for the “neocons” and their dupes to get us into this jam. Over and above all other considerations, is the simple fact that we will go bankrupt on our present course. Besides, a good chunk of Afghanistan is already back under Taliban control. As for Iraq, if that’s liberation, brother you can have it.

http://www.takimag.com/blogs/article/uncle..._million_people

Print This Volume 4, Issue 25 (July 31, 2007) | Download PDF Version

The Many Faces of the PKK

By Frank Hyland

Kurdish guerrillas have fought Turkish forces for almost a quarter of a century. Focusing attention solely on the approximately 5,500 Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) fighters, however, obscures the full dimension of the problems and threats faced by Turkey (Today's Zaman, June 28). An examination of the full scope of the Kurdish organizations behind the PKK provides a better picture of the situation. Covert terrorist wings, which provide at least a modicum of deniability to the political organizations that sponsor them, are a long-standing modus operandi in international relations. The Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades serve that purpose for Hamas; the Islamic Jihad Organization (IJO) for Lebanese Hezbollah and Iran; the Black September Organization (BSO) for the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO); and the Justice Commandos of the Armenian Genocide (JCAG) for the Armenian Revolutionary Federation. In addition to pursuing its own agenda, the PKK has performed this function—that of a "Cat's Paw"—for the countries that have helped sustain its operations. Over the years, the PKK has enjoyed safe haven and received regional intelligence information from Syria, the use of training camps in Lebanon, bases in northern Iraq and support of various kinds from Greece, the Soviet Union and Iran.

The fundamental foundation of the PKK is the Kurdish people, estimated to number approximately 25 million worldwide. In a culture still based largely on allegiance to family and tribe, without the support of local leaders throughout "Kurdistan" (present-day Turkey, Iraq, Iran, Syria, Azerbaijan and Armenia), recruitment of new guerrillas to replace their killed and wounded would be more difficult if not impossible. It is highly likely that, in addition to sending their children off to war, Kurdish families contribute other items needed by the PKK, including food, housing and small sums of money. As will be seen, however, monetary contributions from impoverished small farmers cannot begin to sustain an effort of the PKK's size and scope.

The Kurdish political organization in Western Europe is vocal and moderately effective, although this is in part because the "Kurdish Question" provides a reason for some European states to continue to reject Turkey's long-pending application for EU membership. Kurdish institutes, cultural centers and associations exist throughout Western Europe, including Paris, Stockholm, London, Brussels and Berlin. Analogs to those are present in both the United States and Canada. A 65-member Kurdish Parliament in Exile was formed at The Hague, Netherlands in 1995. In an effort to enhance its image, the PKK changed its name to the Kurdish Freedom and Democracy Congress (KADEK) in 2002. The use of that title and others, however, did not prevent the international community from continuing to list the organization as a terrorist group (U.S. Department of State, January 13, 2004).

The public relations apparatus is also outspoken and persuasive in presenting the Kurdish cause to the world, beginning with the rejection of the charge that PKK fighters are terrorists and the denial that PKK operations have resulted in civilian casualties (Christian Science Monitor, July 9). Newspapers, radio and television stations, magazines and up-to-date internet websites all carry messages sympathetic to the Kurdish cause. Kurdish-related news and culture are carried on outlets that range from state-controlled to private, varying by country. Within this media mix, a website can even be found devoted to news about imprisoned PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan and descriptions of the conditions of his prison accommodations on the island of Imrali, in the Sea of Marmara (http://www.abdullah-ocalan.com). As would be expected, Kurdish-related media outlets have flourished in northern Iraq within the self-proclaimed "Kurdistan" since the overthrow of the Saddam Hussein regime.

In addition to a continuing flow of recruits, the PKK, like any other military organization, requires frequent re-supply of its store of weapons and munitions. Terrorism Focus reported on June 26 that Kurdish representatives in Europe were gaining access to Italian- and Portuguese-manufactured weapons and munitions in developing states in Asia and Africa and from Russia and its affiliated former republics of the Commonwealth of Independent States (Today's Zaman, June 12). Recent investigations by Japanese authorities revealed the presence of PKK sympathizers in Asia among the 300-odd expatriate Kurdish community in Japan. Eight Turkish Kurds were arrested between November 2006 and April 2007 on suspicion of violating Japanese immigration laws. Among the incriminating evidence found during searches of the homes of the eight were several dozen books and photographs of imprisoned PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan and a PKK flag carrying Ocalan's portrait. Several suspects admitted during the investigation that they were supporters of the PKK; one individual was identified by others as being an actual member of the PKK. Among other subjects, Japanese police questioned the suspected PKK sympathizers about having collected funds for militant activities (Yomiuri Shimbun, June 28).

Along with receiving the aforementioned contributions from the Kurdish community and soliciting funds from members of the Kurdish diaspora, the PKK has engaged in a variety of criminal activities to raise funds for its political and military efforts. Among those deeds are said to be narcotics trafficking, arms smuggling, extortion, human smuggling, abduction of children and money laundering. As for the scale of PKK operations, British Security Services sources are quoted as saying that the PKK was responsible for 40% of the heroin sold in the European Union (Turkish Gazette, November 2, 2006).

The foregoing presents a picture of a multi-faceted organization with a near-worldwide presence and revenues, at least in past years, amounting to millions of dollars annually. While not differing from the characterization of the PKK as a terrorist group, this picture presents a fuller view of the overall architecture of Kurdish terrorism. More importantly, with continuing revenue flows, a relatively secure geographic base and a supportive population, the picture reveals a PKK capable of continuing operations for the foreseeable future. Most importantly, the picture carries with it the lesson that affecting a relatively small number of bank accounts or disrupting a number of arms deals could have a leveraged effect greater than attempting to deal with thousands of PKK guerrillas on the battlefield each spring. Find this article at:

http://jamestown.org/terrorism/news/article.php?articleid=2373585

Abu Yahya al-Libi: Al-Qaeda's Theological Enforcer - Part 1

By Michael Scheuer
In the rising generation of post-9/11 al-Qaeda leaders, Abu Yahya al-Libi seems to be assuming the unique position of insurgent-theologian. Since escaping from U.S. detention at Bagram air base in Afghanistan in July 2005—with three other al-Qaeda fighters, one of whom, Faruq al-Iraqi, has since died in combat in Iraq—al-Libi has become a frequent contributor to al-Qaeda journals and Islamist websites, and he has been the central figure in several lengthy videos produced by al-Qaeda's media production arm, as-Sahab [1]. Little information is available about al-Libi beyond his record as an insurgent, the fact that he was imprisoned by both Pakistani and U.S. authorities and his own claim to have studied Islamic law, history and jurisprudence "for years among excellent and great scholars" who were in the field with al-Qaeda and other Islamist insurgent groups [2].

In video presentations, al-Libi is never far from the weaponry of the mujahideen. In the background, there are often AK-47s, machine guns and RPG launchers, or footage of mujahideen training on shoulder-fired missiles or actually participating in combat [3]. Al-Libi's subject, not surprisingly, is the necessity for contemporary Muslims to wage a relentless jihad against the United States, Israel and apostate Arab regimes, particularly Saudi Arabia. Unlike al-Qaeda military commander Sayf al-Adl and Osama bin Laden himself, however, al-Libi offers no tactical military advice or instructions on how to stymie the U.S. military's use of airpower through dispersal and entrenching. Rather, al-Libi is something of an attack dog who engages those whom the Islamists deem to be enemies of the concept of jihad—especially those who are Muslim enemies—on the basis of theology and the expectations of God and the Prophet Mohammad.

To date, al-Libi's main targets have been Hamas; the worldwide Islamic clerical and scholarly establishment; the Shiites and their faith; and the government of Saudi Arabia. This article will discuss al-Libi's handling of the first two targets, and a subsequent piece will cover the latter two.

Al-Libi has used Hamas on several occasions to demonstrate that Western-style democratic elections are detrimental to Islam in two ways. First, the elections themselves are un-Islamic because they amount to the creation and subsequent worship of a secular "idol," which is the "polytheistic legislative council" in which the will of the people governs, rather than the word of God [4]. Second, after winning the Palestinian elections, the Hamas leaders began to speak in words that "sickened" the mujahideen and made "it hard for people to distinguish between [Hamas'] language and that of other non-Islamic Palestinian organizations such as Fatah and the Popular Front" [5]. Damning Hamas for abandoning "the methodology of jihad in the battlefields," al-Libi scathingly asked, "So, where is your religion, O leaders of Hamas, [you have gone] from the case of implementing the Sharia [to seeing] all the Sharia which you slaughtered with your own hands when you agreed to follow the infidel religion of democracy, which is founded on the basis of the rule and sovereignty of the people" [6]. Al-Libi also has made an effort to drive a wedge between Hamas and its military wing—the "pure young men" and "lions" of Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades—by claiming that its political leaders ensured that its "activities were frozen once…[they] walked into the legislative dome." Al-Libi urged Hamas fighters to ignore their leaders and continue military operations so as to "renew your glory and show us the enemy's towers collapsing" [7].

In the first half of 2007, Abu Yahya has focused his critiques on Islamic scholars who are lukewarm in supporting, or who fail to endorse, the al-Qaeda-led defensive jihad. Too many scholars, al-Libi claims, have "disowned the mujahideen, repudiated their actions and dedicated their pulpits and mouths to slandering the mujahideen." Al-Libi is direct in admitting that the mujahideen have made theological mistakes and errors in judgment on the battlefield, but adds that it is the scholars, not the insurgents, who are to blame because the former "are negligent and absent from [the mujahideen's] midst" [8]. He warns the scholars that they are at great risk of losing the respect, honor and obedience that they have historically received from believers by claiming that young Muslims have a "choice" about joining the jihad.

Joining the jihad is not optional but mandatory on all youth, al-Libi writes, and scholars "have degraded it by adding this ugly word to it and saying (and what a terrible thing they say) 'the choice of jihad' or the 'choice of resistance,' thus dirtying [the jihad's] face and fiddling with its meaning. Jihad is a prescribed, obligatory devotion made compulsory by the Lord, He who sent down the book from above the seven heavens" [9]. Seeking to shame the scholars whom bin Laden describes as the "clerics of the king," al-Libi insists that the scholars do what is essential for the success of the jihad: they must join it in the field. "So, rush and go forth to [the mujahideen]," Abu Yahya writes. "If you are remiss, who will lead the way…if you delay, who will step forward. O scholars of Islam: the battle awaits you, and the fields of jihad, preparation and strength await you and look forward to you. And by Allah, you will find nothing in them but respect, honor and pride from your devoted sons, the mujahideen" [10]. The scholar's model for action, al-Libi explains, should be the late-Taliban scholar-commander Mullah Dadullah, whose loss of a leg exempted him from mandatory participation in the jihad, but who died fighting the U.S.-led coalition because he was determined to "limp my way to heaven" [11].

Therefore, Abu Yahya is emerging as a more pointed and acerbic complement to the comments made by Ayman al-Zawahiri and Osama bin Laden; indeed, by seeking to divide Hamas leaders from their military wing, he has done something bin Laden and al-Zawahiri have not. While both of the latter have strongly criticized the un-Islamic tendencies of Hamas and many of the scholars who are in the pay of Arab governments, al-Libi has gone much farther and has been more scabrous in both his comments and his effective wielding of the hammer of shame, a tool which retains enormous influence in an Islamic civilization where the idea that a man must maintain his honor unbesmirched is still relevant. When al-Libi's commentary on Shiite Muslims and the Saudi regime is examined, it will be clear that on these two issues al-Libi again is much franker and more direct than bin Laden and al-Zawahiri, perhaps giving the West a better look at the core of al-Qaeda's beliefs on those issues.

Notes

1. Abu Yahya al-Libi, "Combat Not Compromise," http://www.mohajaroon.com, November 3, 2006.
2. "Interview with Abu Yahya al-Libi," http://www.tajdeed.org, June 21, 2006.
3. Each of these martial ingredients can be found in the video presentation, "Abu Yahya al-Libi Calling for Jihad," al-Meer Forums, July 28, 2006.
4. Abu Yahya al-Libi, "Hamas has Dug its Own Grave," Islamic Renewal Organization, February 1, 2007.
5. Ibid.
6. Abu Yahya al-Libi, "Palestine: Warning Call and Caution Cry," al-Fajr Media Center, April 30, 2007.
7. Abu Yahya al-Libi, "Hamas has Dug its Own Grave," Islamic Renewal Organization, February 1, 2007.
8. "Interview with Abu Yahya al-Libi," http://www.tajdeed.org, June 21, 2006.
9. Abu Yahya al-Libi, "To the Army of Difficulty in Somalia," as-Sahab Productions, February 2007.
10. Ibid.
11. Abu Yahya al-Libi, "Mullah Dadullah: I Pray I Limp My Way to Heaven," Global News Network, http://www.w-n-n.com, June 6, 2007.

http://jamestown.org/terrorism/news/articl...ticleid=2373586

The National Interest
Inside Track: More Surveillance, More Often
by Philip Giraldi

08.01.2007

During his July 28 radio address, President George W. Bush’s reference to the recent National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) was little more than a circular argument designed to reach a preordained conclusion. The NIE’s judgments on the state of Al-Qaeda and the threat it poses to the U.S. homeland are by no means universally accepted, though one hopes that the classified version makes some attempt to place its more dubious findings in context. Nonetheless, President Bush cited the NIE’s findings on Al-Qaeda in urging Congress to "modernize" the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) structure to permit U.S. intelligence agencies to monitor more communications by terrorists, including the internet and "disposable cell phones."

Bush claimed that the NIE confirmed that Al-Qaeda was using its presence in the Middle East—read Iraq—to communicate with its supporters and plot new attacks against the United States. But there is no consensus view in intelligence circles that Al-Qaeda in Pakistan is attempting to exploit its affiliate in Iraq to carry out strikes on the U.S. homeland, as the White House asserts. The NIE does not even say that, suggesting instead that Al-Qaeda might be trying to "leverage" its namesake in Iraq in an attempt to obtain recruits and money. The NIE’s judgments about Al-Qaeda in Iraq are questionable, delegitimizing the president’s advocacy of FISA reform.

No one could possibly object to intercepting terrorist communications, but there is a logical inconsistency in the FISA reform proposal and the evidence cited by President Bush to support it. The threat is described as "plotting" in the Middle East—again, read Iraq, which the White House has frequently described as the epicenter for the "Global War on Terror." But the assertion that Al-Qaeda in Iraq is a genuine danger to the United States is lacking in credibility and is little more than an administration attempt to create a straw man enemy where none really exists to bolster support for increasingly unpopular policies.

Most terrorism experts believe that Al-Qaeda in Iraq is not controlled by Osama bin Laden, that its operational agenda is focused on Iraq itself, and that it has no capability or desire to export its insurgency. It is undeniably convenient for the administration to imply that Al-Qaeda in Iraq is interchangeable with Al-Qaeda in Pakistan because that becomes, ipso facto, a justification for sustaining the surge.

On the domestic front, FISA only relates to communications involving U.S. residents. The president is clearly seeking open-ended authority to intercept communications without any due process, and he apparently intends to do so in the United States, not in Iraq and its neighboring countries where he already has that ability.

Whether America’s intelligence and security services are even demanding more freedom to tap phones and other communications to thwart terrorist attacks is unclear, but there is no evidence to suggest that any terrorist success anywhere has resulted from a lack of investigative tools in the hands of the authorities. It is possible that a case can be made for a change in the current policy, but the White House and its supporters in Congress have not made that case.

House Republican leader John Boehner (OH), citing 9/11, has described the White House proposal as a necessary step to "break down bureaucratic impediments to intelligence collection and analysis." It is not at all clear how unlimited access to currently protected personal information that is already accessible through an oversight procedure would do that. "Modernizing" FISA would enable the government to operate without any restraint. Is that what Boehner actually means?

It is not as if FISA is much of an impediment anyway. Administration assertions to the contrary, FISA, as currently constituted, already permits full access to suspected terrorist communications. The requests to initiate a teltap or other intrusion are almost always approved and they can be implemented on an ad hoc basis by law enforcement even without a formal ruling. The FISA court itself consists of judges who are widely considered to be automatically inclined to accept the government case, not to deny it on constitutional or probable cause grounds. Critics of the proposed changes note that the White House will apparently seek to grant telecommunications companies—hitherto reluctant to turn over their records or permit electronic intrusion into their networks without a court order—blanket immunity from criminal prosecution or civil liability. If that is so and the attempt to change the law is successful, it will mean that the government will be empowered to obtain the communications of any American at any time without any process involved to protect individual rights.

Philip Giraldi, a former CIA officer, is the Francis Walsingham Fellow for the American Conservative Defense Alliance.
Subscribe Now

Copyright © 2006 The National Interest All rights reserved. | Legal Terms
P: (800) 893-8944, Outside the U.S.: (914) 962-6297 | backissues@nationalinterest.org
P.O. Box 622 Shrub Oak NY 10588

The National Interest is published by The Nixon Center

The Nixon Center
1615 L Street, Suite 1250
Washington, DC 20036
www.nixoncenter.org

http://www.nationalinterest.org/PrinterFri...y.aspx?id=15082

Home > Congress > Why the surge might not be stopped Why the surge might not be stopped

By: Jim VandeHei
Aug 1, 2007 06:10 AM EST
Updated: August 1, 2007 08:45 AM EST


Congress has essentially hit pause on the war debate until next month, when Army Gen. David Petraeus delivers a detailed summary of progress. Photo by AP












Sens. Pete V. Domenici (R-N.M.) and Dick Lugar (R-Ind.) grabbed all the headlines last month when they called for change in Iraq war strategy. But conversations reveal that many more Republicans privately fear the war is lost -- both politically and on the ground.

This has created a widespread perception that President Bush will be forced to shift plans and begin bringing U.S. troops home in early 2008 after a military progress report is delivered to Congress next month. And that might happen.

Yet there are very good reasons to believe the prevailing conventional wisdom on Iraq might turn out to be wrong once again.

The reasons are simple: the power of the presidency, the anguished feelings of many congressional Republicans and math. In short, Bush is in no mood to yield.

House and Senate Republicans still don't appear prepared to force him to. And a loyal group of GOP senators are prepared to back a Bush veto if Democrats ever succeed in limiting or ending the U.S. mission in Iraq.

"At the end of the day, all of this hand-wringing needs to be understood (in the context) of how Congress works: There will always be 33 of us, as long as there is not a complete meltdown, to support a military strategy that is aggressive and is not based on needs of the next election," said Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.).

Congress has essentially hit pause on the war debate until next month, when Army Gen. David Petraeus, the commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, delivers a detailed summary of progress -- or lack thereof. Almost all the Republican members have said they will withhold judgment until they review the Petraeus report.

"Where everyone is at this juncture, it seems to me, is (waiting) to hear back in September about … where the generals believe we are in terms of conditions on the ground militarily, and at that point make determinations about what is necessary in our national security interest," said Ed Gillespie, a top Bush adviser.

In other words, Bush will not adjust the strategy if Petraeus says it is working. And there are growing indications Petraeus will report significant military progress tempered by continued political problems in Iraq, according to Republicans in close contact with Bush.

The clearest sign of Bush's September plan is that the White House has launched a new preemptive campaign to convince lawmakers the surge plan is working.

Significantly, GOP leaders are helping. This started with Bush pulling in GOP lawmakers and then leading conservative columnists last month to argue the war is going better than perceived -- and to spread the word he has no plans to retreat.

It worked: Conservative outlets from the National Review to the Weekly Standard have stepped up their defense of administration policy in Iraq.

Rep. Adam Putnam (R-Fla.), a top House GOP leader, said much more significant was an op-ed in Monday's New York Times by two Brookings Institution scholars, Michael E. O'Hanlon and Kenneth M. Pollack. The two Iraq experts contended that the surge is starting to work.

The White House blasted the op-ed to its allies within minutes of its publication -- and the National Review directed its readers to the piece shortly after.

Putnam said the op-ed was more significant than recent GOP defections on Iraq. "It has shifted momentum going into August recess," he said. "It transforms the debate from purely political calculations of how many votes to prevent a defunding of the war … into an intellectual discussion about whether the surge is working."

House Minority Leader John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) showed Tuesday morning how Republicans are still rallying to Bush's side. "Analysts and commanders on the ground report surge successes," read an alert the Boehner operation sent to reporters.

Guess who they cited? U.S. commanders -- and what he called the "liberal" Brookings Institution (O'Hanlon and Pollack).

A few hours later, Senate GOP leaders did the same: "Good news in Iraq is bad news for Democrats in Congress." Their releases cited the Brookings duo, too.

Republicans also pounced on South Carolina Democratic Rep. James Clyburn's statement to The Washington Post that an upbeat report by Petraeus would divide Democrats.

"I think there would be enough support in that group to want to stay the course, and if the Republicans were to stay united as they have been, then it would be a problem for us," Clyburn told the Post.

"We're hearing very positive reports from our commanders in the field, and by all accounts security is improving each day," Boehner said. "That's what the surge was intended to do: provide greater security to allow the political process the time it needs to work."

Support from GOP members of Congress in safe districts or who don't face reelection next year is one thing. But the emerging expectation holds that war opponents will reach critical mass when Republican senators up for reelection in 2008 finally break with Bush and demand that he start bringing home U.S. troops early next year.

Again, there are several practical problems with this prevailing theory.

First, most Republicans remain opposed to fixed timetables and any effort to curtail funding to force the president's hand -- which are essentially the only ways Congress can muscle Bush on the war.

A group of Republicans are pressing for a compromise solution that would avoid timelines by calling for a redefined military role stressing security and intelligence gathering instead of combat.

Democrats, however, have scant interest in middle-ground solutions that would not compel the war's end. And it is doubtful Bush would back such a plan, because he opposes any efforts by Congress to dictate strategy.

A top Senate GOP strategist said party leaders plan to instruct their members to spend all of August emphasizing the consequences of leaving Iraq, not the need for sweeping strategic changes.

This strategist, who requested anonymity to talk freely about internal discussions, said individual members are shaky but still very much open to continuing to support the status quo if conditions do not worsen this month. August, he said, "is the anything-can-happen month."

It is true Republicans are growing increasingly uneasy with the war. Yet even after the public defections of Domenici and Lugar, only four Republicans voted with Democrats on a bill calling for troop reductions next spring.

A similar bill in the House was supported by only four Republicans. That means only a tiny fraction of Republicans were willing to rebuke the Bush policy at a time when the politically popular thing to do would have been to turn on the president over the war.

My colleague John Bresnahan says his reporting has led him to the conclusion that the 21 Senate Republicans up for reelection in 2008 will demand a major change in September. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) -- one of those facing reelection -- has hinted as much of late.

Still, it is hard to imagine Larry Craig, Thad Cochran, Graham and other red-state Republican senators siding with Democrats on a bill mandating troop reductions or strategic shifts opposed by Bush. And remember, it would take 67 senators to override a Bush veto.

The only way Republicans will force the war's end is if voters -- especially conservative ones -- demand it. That is not happening as quickly or as forcefully as many Republicans anticipated a year ago. Polls show a majority of GOP voters still generally back the war.

This helps explain why the top-tier GOP presidential candidates remain similarly supportive of the war -- and is one of the main reasons that Iraq has not become a bigger political problem for Bush in Congress.

Maybe political pressure over the August recess will provoke enough defections to force a change. But it's not a slam-dunk.

http://www.ocregister.com/opinion/east-middle-asia-1792866-arf-economic Wednesday, August 1, 2007
Leon Hadar: U.S. on sidelines in Asia

Preoccupation with Middle East leaves a vacuum that China could fill
By LEON HADAR Cato Institute Foreign Policy Expert

A few days ago, I was chatting with an East Asian diplomat stationed in Washington who seemed surprised that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice would be skipping the Association of Southeast Asian Nations' Regional Forum meeting in Manila later this week.

The ARF brings together 27 foreign ministers representing the 10 Southeast Asian nations, and 17 other governments with security interests in the region. Rice instead will travel to the Middle East, where she will hold discussions on stabilizing Iraq in Egypt and Saudi Arabia and visit Israel and the West Bank. Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte will represent the U.S. in Manila.

State Department spokesman Sean McCormack expressed regret that Rice would not be in Manila, but said that she was "prioritizing" talks on Iraq and Middle East peace. "I don't think it has to do with the importance of the business necessarily, but of the timing," he said of the ARF meeting.

I reminded the East Asian diplomat that this was not the first time American officials in general, and Secretary Rice in particular, had been "prioritizing" the Middle East at the expense of East Asia. Rice cancelled a trip to the ARF meeting in 2005, the first time a U.S. secretary of state had skipped the talks since they were first held in 1994.

ARF is a high-level multilateral security group in a region that is becoming both a global economic powerhouse and a central strategic arena. The U.S. faces military challenges from China and Russia as it strengthens its alliances with Japan, Singapore and Australia and forms new security partnerships with India and Vietnam. And the ARF also includes Indonesia and Malaysia, two of the world's most-thriving Moslem democracies; North and South Korea; and India and Pakistan, the rival nuclear powers of South Asia.

To add insult to injury, the White House had announced last week that President Bush had postponed talks with leaders of the 10 ASEAN states – a historic summit scheduled in Singapore for September, which was supposed to celebrate the longtime strategic alliance and economic partnership between the U.S. and one of world's most economically dynamic regions. A region, one might add, where Americans don't have to oust regimes and invade countries in order to maintain their trade and military presence. But Bush would be preoccupied in September with dealing with the reports he is scheduled to receive from his military commanders in Iraq.

For much of the 1990s, with the end of the Cold War, globalization, and the rise of new Asian economic powers, it seemed as though Washington was starting to shift some of its focus from Europe and the Middle East to East Asia. The United States expanded its engagement in the Pacific – as American policymakers, lawmakers and the media began to pay more attention to Asian economic and strategic agendas.

Yes, "9/11 changed everything," and the U.S. war on global terrorism necessitated refocusing new diplomatic and military efforts in the broader Middle East, where there happens to be a lot of oil. And Washington is also under a lot of pressure to stabilize Iraq and bring peace to the Middle East.

But do we need to remind policymakers in Washington that East Asia's economies are making it possible for the Bush administration to finance the U.S. deficit, and indirectly, its military presence in the Middle East? That China is becoming one of the largest importers of Middle Eastern oil? That Indonesia and Malaysia are critical fronts in the war against terrorism?

Hence, even if the Bush administration disregards the obvious – that it should put the political, economic, and military developments in China, Japan, India, Korea and the rest of the ARF members at the top of its agenda – U.S. policymakers should understand that managing the problems in the Middle East will require the engagement and support of the rising powers in East Asia. And there is no reason why Washington cannot walk in the Middle East and chew gum in Asia at the same time.

In any case, if and when American officials start complaining, as they have in recent years, about China's efforts to assert its diplomatic and economic status in East Asia – which is after all, its strategic back yard – and supposedly to marginalize the U.S. in the region, they will need to be reminded that they themselves have slighted Asia. Is it possible that they've marginalized themselves there?

In fact, the worst-case scenario for Washington is that current policy will lead to U.S. marginalization in both East Asia and the Middle East, and that in both regions, China could emerge as the biggest power.

Our Un-American Government
By JOANNE MARINER
----
Wednesday, Aug. 01, 2007

What does it mean for something to be "un-American"?

The term is associated with Joe McCarthy, who, although he didn't actually serve on the House Un-American Activities Committee, was the public face of the extreme, demagogic anti-communism that the committee represented. To have been un-American during McCarthy's heyday was to have been linked to the Left: to have been a communist, socialist, subversive, or fellow traveler. Or to have known one. Or to have known someone who knew one.

Fast-forward 50 years, and with Bill O'Reilly, the public discovered a pernicious new form of the phenomenon: Al Franken's teasing. "It's vicious," O'Reilly said, "it's un-American, and it needs to stop."

Then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld at least wielded the term against a more deserving target: torture. When the Abu Ghraib scandal first broke in 2004, Rumsfeld said publicly that the abuses that were photographed there were exceptional, and in no way typical of U.S. soldiers' conduct. They were "certainly un-American," he explained.

But of course Rumsfeld himself had played a central role in creating the policies that resulted in the torture of detainees. He had publicly questioned the relevance of the Geneva Conventions, ordered detainees to be hid from the Red Cross, and authorized illegal interrogation methods such as the use of guard dogs to intimidate detainees.

Was Rumsfeld himself un-American?

What one considers un-American depends on what one views as characteristically American. Was slavery American or un-American? What was more American: the Civil Rights Movement or Jim Crow? Can anyone truly rank the following on a scale of American to un-American: the Marshall Plan, the Enola Gay, the massacre at Wounded Knee, and the First Amendment?

Given U.S. history and its vicissitudes, one has a choice: either recognize that the term is malleable and essentially meaningless, or use it to claim what is best in the country's heritage, and to firmly reject what is not.

The real questions are what do we want to be as Americans, and what do we want our country to represent?

A coalition of groups -- the Center for Constitutional Rights, Human Rights Watch, MoveOn.org, and others - have started a campaign that provides a hopeful answer to these questions. The American Freedom Campaign, launched yesterday, is an online and offline effort to build grassroots support to strengthen American democracy, restore constitutional checks and balances, and remedy abuses of power.

The central focus of the campaign is to reassert the notion that the United States is a nation of laws, and that even the President is not above the law. What this means, in its particulars, is that the campaign has ten basic goals, each addressing an abusive practice of the current administration. They include:

* Fully restore the right to challenge the legality of one's detention, or habeas corpus, and the right of detained suspects to be charged and brought to trial.

* Prohibit torture and all cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.

* Prohibit the use of secret evidence.

* Prohibit the detention of anyone, including U.S. citizens, as an "enemy combatant" outside the battlefield, and on the President's say-so alone.

* Prohibit the President from "disappearing" anyone and holding them in secret detention.

* Use the federal courts, or courts-martial, to charge and prosecute terrorism suspects, and close Guantanamo down.

The centerpiece of the campaign is the "American Freedom Pledge." The pledge, which more than 100,000 citizens have already signed -- and which the campaign will urge presidential candidates to sign -- takes an optimistic view of what it means to be an American:

We are Americans, and in our America we do not torture, we do not imprison people without charge or legal recourse, allow our phones and emails to be tapped without a court order, and above all we do not give any President unchecked power. I pledge to fight to protect and defend the Constitution from assault by any President.

The Constitution protects American freedom. With checks and balances, and basic legal rights, it has prevented tyranny and safeguarded our liberty. Yet today, under the pretense of the "war on terror," the White House is dismantling the Constitution, concentrating power in the President, and undermining the rule of law. THIS IS UN-AMERICAN.

http://writ.news.findlaw.com/mariner/20070801.html

Wikipedia and the Intelligence Services: Is the Net's popular encyclopedia marred by disinformation?

by Dr. Ludwig De Braeckeleer

Global Research, July 30, 2007

While researching my next article about the Lockerbie bombing, I witnessed an incident that made me wonder whether intelligence agents had infiltrated Wikipedia.

Anyone who knows the universal success of Wikipedia will immediately grasp the importance of the issue. The fact that most Internet search engines, such as Google, give Wikipedia articles top ranking only raises the stakes to a higher level.

The Incident

In the aftermath of the Lockerbie bombing in 1988, the finger of suspicion quickly pointed to a Syria-based Palestinian organization -- the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, General Command (PFLP-GC) -- hired by Iran. The terrorist group was created by a former Syrian army captain, Ahmed Jibril, who broke away from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) in 1968.

I had learned from a recently released U.S. National Archives file that Shin Bet, the Israeli Security Agency, had infiltrated the PFLP and helped the Entebbe hijackers (Israeli commandos rescued the hostages in Uganda in 1976), so I wanted to learn more about the link between the PFLP and the PFLP-GC. I also wanted to learn more about allegations made by David Colvin, the first secretary of the British Embassy in Paris, concerning the rather bizarre collaboration between the PFLP and the Shin Bet.

As I could not locate the article in which I had learned about the allegations, I consulted the article on the Entebbe Operation on Wikipedia, where I knew the story had been noted. To my surprise, I found that all references to the alleged collaboration between the PFLP and the Shin Bet had been suppressed. Moreover, it is no longer possible to edit the page.

A Long, Undistinguished History

Conducting false flag operations and planting disinformation in the mainstream media have long belonged to the craft of the spies. In the months preceding the 1953 overthrow of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh, U.S. and U.K. intelligence agencies used both techniques abundantly.

A copy of the CIA's secret history of the coup surfaced in 2000. Written in 1954 by the Princeton professor who oversaw the operation, the story reveals that agents from the CIA and SIS (the American and British intelligence services) "directed a campaign of bombings by Iranians posing as members of the Communist Party, and planted articles and editorial cartoons in newspapers."

The section of the report concerning the media speaks volumes: "The CIA was apparently able to use contacts at the Associated Press to put on the newswire a statement from Tehran about royal decrees that the CIA itself had written. But mostly, the agency relied on less direct means to exploit the media.

"The Iran desk of the State Department was able to place a CIA study in Newsweek, using the normal channel of desk officer to journalist. The article was one of several planted press reports that, when reprinted in Tehran, fed the war of nerves against Iran's prime minister, Mohammed Mossadegh," the document said.

Half a century later, the technique of disinformation is as important as ever to intelligence agencies. In the aftermath of the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the Pentagon set up the Defense Department's Office of Strategic Influence with a mission "to provide news items and false information directly to foreign journalists and others to bolster U.S. policy and the war on terrorism."

The new office attracted so much criticism that the Bush administration eventually shut it down in February 2002. Even defense officials publicly denounced the dangers of such a program, which could have left the department without a shred of credibility.

"We shouldn't be in that business. Leave the propaganda leaks to the CIA, the spooks [secret agents]," a defense official said.

Is Wikipedia Harboring a Secret Agent?

According to clues accumulated by ordinary citizens around the world, it could be that the CIA and other intelligence agencies are riding the information wave and planting disinformation on Wikipedia. If so, tens of thousands of innocent and unwitting citizens around the world are translating and propagating their lies, providing these agencies with a universal news network.

The Salinger Investigation of the Pan Am 103 Bombing

Pierre Salinger was White House press secretary to Presidents John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. Salinger also served as U.S. Senator from California and a campaign manager for Robert Kennedy.

But Salinger is also famous for his investigative journalism. Hired by ABC News as its Paris bureau chief in 1978, he became the network's chief European correspondent in 1983.

During his distinguished career, Salinger broke important stories, such as the secret negotiations by the U.S. government with Iran to free American hostages in 1979-80 and the last meeting between U.S. Ambassador April Glaspie and Saddam Hussein in 1990, during which she led the Iraqi president to believe that the U.S. would not react to an invasion of Kuwait.

Salinger, who was based in London, spent a considerable amount of time and energy investigating the bombing of Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie. He and his collaborator, John Cooley, hired a young graduate, Linda Mack, to help in the investigation.

"I know that these two Libyans had nothing to do with it. I know who did it and I know exactly why it was done," Salinger said during his testimony at the Zeist trial, where one of the Libyans was convicted of murdering the 270 victims.

"That's all? You're not letting me tell the truth. Wait a minute; I know exactly who did it. I know how it was done," Salinger replied to the trial judge, Lord Sutherland, who simply asked him to leave the witness box.

"If you wish to make a point you may do so elsewhere, but I'm afraid you may not do so in this court," Lord Sutherland interrupted.

Searching for the True Identity of 'Slim Virgin'

Slim Virgin had been voted the most abusive administrator of Wikipedia. She upset so many editors that some of them decided to team up to research her real life identity.

Attempts to track her through Internet technology failed. This is suspicious in itself as the location of normal Internet users can easily be tracked. According to a team member, Slim Virgin "knows her way around the Internet and covered her tracks with care."

Daniel Brandt of the Wikipedia Review and founder of Wikipedia-Watch.org patiently assembled tiny clues about Slim Virgin and posted them on these Web sites. Eventually, two readers identified her. Slim Virgin was no other than Linda Mack, the young graduate Salinger hired.

John K. Cooley, the collaborator of Salinger in the Lockerbie investigation, posted the following letter to Brandt on Wikipedia Review, which has been set up to discuss specific editors and editing patterns and general efforts by editors to influence or direct content in ways that might not be in keeping with Wikipedia policy:

She claimed to have lost a friend/lover on pan103 and so was anxious to clear up the mystery. ABC News paid for her travel and expenses as well as a salary'

Once the two Libyan suspects were indicted, she seemed to try to point the investigation in the direction of Qaddafi [Libyan President Col. Muammar al-Qaddafi], although there was plenty of evidence, both before and after the trials of Megrahi and Fhimah in the Netherlands, that others were involved, probably with Iran the commissioning power. [In 2001, Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi was convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison; Lamin Khalifah Fhimah was acquitted.]

Salinger came to believe that [first name redacted but known to be Linda] was working for [name of intelligence agency redacted but known to be Britain's MI5] and had been from the beginning; assigned genuinely to investigate Pan Am 103, but also to infiltrate and monitor us. Soon after Cooley wrote to Brandt, Linda Mack contacted him and asked him not to help Brandt in his efforts to expose her. All doubts about Slim Virgin's true identity had vanished. Today, Linda Mack is rumored to reside in Alberta, Canada, under the name of Sarah McEwan.

Ludwig Braeckeleer has a Ph.D. in nuclear sciences. He teaches physics and international humanitarian law. He blogs on The GaiaPost.

Global Research Articles by Ludwig De Braeckeleer

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?con...va&aid=6444