[b]Iraq awards contracts to Iran and China: $1.1 billion in contracts to build a pair of enormous power plants[/b]

[b]Iraq insurgency leading to separate tribalism: Sectarian militancy has become the dominant element of violence in Iraq. This is drastically altering the map of Iraq[/b]

[b]Has the US Ceded Southern Iraq?[/b]

[b]Pentagon wants one single authority over the 10,000 contractors in Iraq[/b]

[b]Iraqi prime minister seeks quicker withdrawal of Blackwater USA[/b]

Norman Solomon:

The Pro-War Undertow of the Blackwater Scandal
A real hazard of preoccupations with Blackwater is that it will become a scapegoat for what is profoundly and fundamentally wrong with the U.S. effort and mission.

Days After Claiming U.S. Less Safe Due To Iraq War, Counterterrorism Chief Suddenly Resigns
Faiz Shakir: Retired Vice Admiral Scott Redd also acknowledged that the Iraq War is a "giant recruiting tool" for terrorists.

Bush Has the Nerve To Say He Found Inner Peace on Iraq

Mark Danner, The New York Review of Books and TomDispatch

War on Iraq: A recently published memo reveals the arrogance Bush employs toward diplomacy.

Iraq's Brutally Wounded (Photo Essay)

Nina Berman, AlterNet

War on Iraq: As Americans scramble for funding to try to help the many wounded veterans returning from war, many more thousands in Iraq have suffered equally horrific injuries, yet have virtually no way of receiving care.

Pakistan plans all-out war on militants

An all-out battle for control of Pakistan's restive North and South Waziristan is set to commence between the Pakistani military and the Taliban and al-Qaeda adherents who have made these tribal areas their own. If the operation succeeds, intelligence sources say, the back of the Afghan resistance will be broken and the Iraqi resistance will suffer a severe setback. The militants have little option but to stand and fight, and the battle will be the bloodiest yet seen in the tribal areas. - Syed Saleem Shahzad (Oct 18, '07)

Bush's faith run over by history
A recently published transcript of a discussion held in February 2003 - nearly a month before the Iraq war began - between US President George W Bush and Jose Maria Aznar, then prime minister of Spain, throws into sharp focus the attitudes and character of a president who was "at peace with himself". His "gift" then of confusing uplifting rhetoric and faith with reality remains undimmed today - he remains at peace with himself, we are told. - Mark Danner, courtesy of the New York Review of Books (Oct 18, '07)

Bush Warns Of World War III If Iran Goes Nuclear
( Published on Wednesday, October 17, 2007 )
US President George W. Bush said Wednesday that he had warned world leaders they must prevent Iran from getting nuclear weapons "if you're interested in avoiding World War III

The Cracks in Wall Street's Hall of Mirrors

Time for the Banks to Face the Hangman
By MIKE WHITNEY

"There is today an incredibly speculative financial sector hell bent on sustaining Credit and asset Bubbles and perfectly content to adulterate our functional system of "money" in the process. The Federal Reserve is perceived to condone the whole affair and is openly willing to employ all measures to avoid bursting Bubbles. And in a contemporary world of acutely fragile finance structures, this ensures that bust avoidance translates briskly to bubble perpetuation and speculator delight."

-- Doug Noland "Credit Bubble Bulletin"

"How can one defend a system that creates wealth by making the majority poor?"

--Henry C. K. Liu

Officials in the Treasury Dept--working with their colleagues at Citigroup, J.P. Morgan and Bank of America---have concocted a scheme to rescue the banks from their massive losses in mortgage-backed securities. The group is planning to set up a $100 billion emergency fund which will purchase non-performing assets for short term debt. In truth, the fund is a bailout which provides the financial giants with an excuse for not reporting their enormous losses from bad bets.

The story first appeared in Saturday's Wall Street Journal and was followed on Monday with a second headline piece:

"RESCUE READIED BY BANKS IS BET TO SPUR MARKET"

WSJ: "The high stakes plan to RESCUE BANKS FROM LOSSES on mortgage securities amounts to a big bet that a consortium of financial giants"AT THE PRODDING OF THE US GOVERNMENT"can PERSUADE INVESTORS TO POUR MORE MONEY INTO THE TROUBLED CREDIT MARKET."

That's right; the Treasury Dept is directly involved in a scam that saves the banks while trying to "persuade" investors to "pour more money" into toxic mortgage-backed sludge. Treasury Dept officials clearly have a different idea of "moral hazard" than the rest of us.

The banks are presently holding hundreds of billions of dollars in mortgage-backed securities (MBSs) that they cannot sell"because there are no buyers ---and don't want to take back on their balance sheets because they'll be forced to increase their capital reserves. So they've decided to launch a public relations campaign to promote some goofy-sounding fund, called the "Master-Liquidity Enhancement Conduit" or M-LEC, which will allow the banks to place their unwanted bonds in Limbo until some future date when the public appetite for garbage CDOs improves.

The WSJ does a good job of disguising the real motive behind the new "Super-Conduit" (aka the Bailout fund) but in the last paragraph, buried in Section C-3, they reveal the truth:

"The goal is to reassure investors and make them more willing to buy its short-term debt." So, the fund is really just a way of rearranging the marketplace until the next crop of gullible investors sprouts up and buys more mortgage-backed garbage.

Where are the regulators? The SEC and Treasury should be forcing the banks to be straightforward with the public and let them know about the hanky-panky they've been up to with their risky SIVs (structured investment vehicles) Citigroup alone has nearly $80 billion in off-balance sheets operations which are in distress. The bank accounts for "25% of the global SIV market. As of August, assets held by SIVs totaled $400 billion".

SIVs are set up as a way to make money without taking the risk onto their balance sheets. "They issue their own short-term debt, usually at relatively low rates ... then use the proceeds to buy higher yielding assets such as securities tied to mortgages." (WSJ)

Ever since Bear Stearns blew up in late July, investors have been steering clear of any securities connected to real estate, which means the SIVs are getting the Double Whammy---they can't sell their asset-backed commercial paper (because it's mortgage-backed) and they find buyers for their collateralized debt obligations. (CDOs) To a large extent, the market is still frozen despite the upbeat cheerleading on the business pages. Clearly, the worst is yet to come.

How bad is it?

An article in yesterday's Financial Times said that, "Only $9.9 billion of home equity loan securitizations have come to market since July 1---A 95% DECLINE FROM THE $200.9 BILLION IN THE FIRST HALF OF THIS YEAR AND A ROUGHLY 92% DECREASE FROM THE SAME PERIOD LAST YEAR."

The banks are in trouble. Big trouble. Main sources of revenue have dried up overnight and they're stuck with hundreds of billions of debt. That's why the papers broke the story on Saturday when there was NO chance of triggering a stock market crash.

Imagine the horror of investors around the world when they discover that the major investment banks are running these shabby "off-balance sheets" operations while concealing their real financial condition from their investors. Consider the disgust the public feels when they see Treasury officials bailing out the banks instead of ordering them to report their losses and get on with business.

Still, Wall Street nonchalantly leaps from one swindle to the next never considering the damage it's doing to the credibility of the market.

Susan Pulliam summed it up like this in the Oct 12 edition of The Wall Street Journal:

"Since the invention of the ticker tape 140 years ago, America has been able to boast of having the world's most transparent financial markets. The tape and its electronic descendants ensured that crystal-clear prices for stocks and many other securities were readily available to everyone, encouraging millions to entrust their money to the markets. These days, after a decade of frantic growth in mortgage-backed securities and other complex investments traded off exchanges, that clarity is gone. Large parts of American financial markets have become a hall of mirrors."

"Hall of mirrors" is an understatement. The system is thoroughly opaque and crooked as a ram's horn. The market's new architecture, "structured finance", is a dismal rip-off from start to finish. Consider the mentality of the hucksters who dreamed up "securitizing" subprime mortgages and selling them off as precious jewels in the secondary market. This was a blatant con-job. How can the liabilities of "borrowers with bad credit" be traded to foreign investors and pension funds like they were valuable assets? And where were the regulators while this scam was going on?

Isn't this sufficient evidence that the system is totally out of whack?

Wall Street avoids transparency like the plague. That is to be expected. But what about the government? It's the government's job to protect the investor and maintain the integrity of the system. Is that what Treasury Dept is doing or are they "LURING investors to buy debt issued by the rescue fund as part of the plan"? (quote from the Wall Street Journal)

"Luring"? Is that how Paulson sees it; like luring turkeys to the chopping block with a trail of bread crumbs?

The idea of protecting the little guy has never occurred to anyone in the Bush administration. Their job is to shift wealth from one class to the other via equity bubbles and government bailouts--anything that advances the corporate agenda.

Presently, the banks are sitting on $200 billion in non-performing mortgage-backed securities (MBSs) and collateralized debt obligations. (CDOs) They are also hold another $300 billion in collateralized loan obligations (CLOs) from mergers and acquisitions which stalled after the Bear Stearns meltdown. If the present bailout doesn't materialize, we're likely to see bank closures and a plummeting stock market.

Shouldn't the regulators have considered the probability of a crash before they allowed trillions of dollars of radioactive-bonds to flood the market when no one had any idea of their real value? Wouldn't that have been the prudent thing to do?

Now we know what they are worth. They're worth nothing. That's why the banks are running scared and refusing to put them up for auction. They'd rather sleaze them into a lofty-sounding superfund that masks their true value.

In the last 2 weeks the stock market soared on the news that the banks were reporting billions of dollars in losses. Investors were hoodwinked into believing the banks were being honest and had "come clean" about their financial condition. What a joke. In reality, the banks only reported roughly 5% of their potential losses; the rest were hidden in their off balance sheets operations.

Equities skyrocketed to new heights. Wall Street was euphoric.

Now we know the truth. It was all baloney.

The Wall Street Journal: "The new fund is designed to stave off what Citigroup and others see as a threat to the financial markets world-wide: the danger that dozens of huge bank-affiliated funds will be forced to unload billions of dollars in mortgage-backed securities and other assets, driving down their prices in a fire sale ... .The ultimate fear: If banks need to write down more assets or are forced to take assets onto their books, that could set off a broader credit crunch and hurt the economy. It could make it tough for homeowners and businesses to get loans."

It could "hurt the economy" and "make it tough for homeowners and businesses to get loans?"

Ahhh, yes. It's all clear now. The banks only cooked up this colossal bailout to make things better for us common people. How is it that we didn't notice that before? Our problem is that we don't see the magnanimity and altruism which drives the corporate agenda.

From the New York Times:

"The conduit (The bailout fund) is expected to start operating in 90 days and will stay in place for a few years until it has disposed of the assets it buys, according to people familiar with the negotiations.

To maintain its credibility with investors from whom it would raising money, the conduit will not buy any bonds that are tied to mortgages made to people with spotty, or subprime, credit histories. Rather, it will buy debt with the highest ratings " AAA and AA " and debt that is backed by other mortgages, credit card receipts and other assets."

We already know about the problems with the ratings agencies and how they are in bed with the investment banks. We also know that the whole purpose of the new fund is to off-load mortgage-backed tripe which is no longer sellable on the market. What we didn't know is that the New York Times eagerly provides the peppy public relations narrative to assist big business in dumping its failing assets.

NY Times: "The conduit will pay market prices for the securities it buys. But it remains unclear how officials will determine the price of some bonds that have not been actively traded since August, because the difference between what buyers are willing to pay and what sellers want has widened significantly."

Of course, they'll pay full price because they want to be "made whole" again. The truth is, however, that these derivatives will probably only fetch pennies on the dollar unless they get another Wall Street PR face-lift.

Christian Stracke, market analyst from the research firm CreditSights, said the effort appears to be "an attempt to soothe tense investors in the debt market, rather than to provide substantive relief to the worst-hit mortgage securities".

Stracke added, "For me, this is more of a P.R. blitz."

Bingo.

The announcement of the forthcoming Master-Liquidity Enhancement Conduit or M-LEC further underlines the gravity of the problems facing the banking system. The fund creates a "buyer of last resort" so that these dubious assets won't be sold on the market at fire-sale prices.

Citigroup appears to be the greatest beneficiary of the current plan. They have a number of Enron-type SIVs which could be at risk.

Again, the problems that are surfacing in the banking sector today are the direct result of Greenspan's loose monetary policies coupled with the dismantling of the regulatory regime that was created following the 1929 stock market crash. We are now back to Square 1. All of the various scams and swindles which permeated that hyper-inflated market are now back in full-force foreshadowing a steep decline in investor confidence, increased market manipulation, and an unavoidable economic calamity.

"Structured finance" has transformed US markets into a carnival sideshow. Productivity and real growth have been replaced with never-ending credit expansion and speculative abuses. Reckless monetary policies and the behemoth current account deficit have destabilized the global economy a set the stage for a fiscal Armageddon.

The subprime mortgage crisis and subsequent shrinking of asset-backed commercial paper (ABCP) has thrown a wrench in the funding of daily corporate operations. These are the harbingers of an impending recession. As mortgages continue to default at a record pace; the aftershocks will continue to rumble through the credit markets where subprime loans have been "securitized" into bonds and leveraged at maximum levels. It's just one domino knocking down the next.

The financial system is at greater risk now than any time in the last 80 years. Regrettably, the only remedies coming from the Fed are more currency-destroying rate cuts or hundreds of billions of dollars in repos to remove mortgage-backed bonds from the banks' balance sheets. Neither of these solutions addresses the critical issues; they do not stabilize the market, reinvigorate lending, or restore investor confidence. They are merely band aids on a sucking chest-wound. They won't stop the bleeding.

The Fed's monetary policies promote financial speculation which inevitably leads to equity bubbles. Under Greenspan's stewardship, the country has lurched from the 1990's bond bubble, to the dot.com bubble, to the subprime meltdown, to the liquidity crisis, to the credit crunch---all engineered at the Federal Reserve with ancillary assistance from the charlatans in the banking industry.

An article in China Worker, "Credit Crunch threatens Global Downturn" summarizes our present predicament it like this:

"Financial globalization has rebounded on the system. Capitalist leaders boasted that the near total integration of financial markets across the globe would provide lenders and borrowers everywhere with instant access to a completely liquid money market. New types of financial securities and sophisticated derivatives would spread the risk of borrowing so widely that it would eliminate risk entirely. While economies were growing and bubbles inflating, it appeared that---through derivatives trading--- losses would be widely diffused among speculators, reducing risk to very low levels. Not even the most astute financial analysts could predict what would happen in the event of recession. The unanswerable question was: Who would ultimately bear the risks arising from widespread defaults or bankruptcies? The veteran investor, Warren Buffet, warned that derivatives would prove to be 'weapons of mass destruction'.

The fantasy of financial alchemy transforming high risk gambling into low risk money-making has now been shattered."

The author is right. "Structured finance" is a fraud. Risk has not been eliminated. In fact, it has exploded and become a system-wide problem. The dead wood is everywhere.

The banks are being crushed by a debt-load they generated through "securitization". They need to accept responsibility for their poor judgment (or greed?) and report their losses. The Super-Conduit is just a dodge to put off the unavoidable day of reckoning.The whole wretched plan should be scrapped. No amount of financial chicanery will eradicate billions of dollars in bad bets. It's time for the banks to face the hangman.

Mike Whitney lives in Washington state. He can be reached at: fergiewhitney@msn.com

What Do Brazil, Mexico and the US Have in Common?

The New Billionaire-Criminal Class
By RUSSELL MOKHIBER

What do Brazil, Mexico, Russia and the USA have in common?

A rapidly expanding billionaire class.

Rampant poverty.

And a distressed middle class.

That's the take of Pulitzer prize-winning New York Times reporter David Cay Johnston in a soon to be released book--Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense (And Stick You with the Bill) (Portfolio, December 2007).

In it, Johnston seeks to afflict the comfortable top one tenth of one percent of Americans--the 300,000 men, women and children who last year made more money than the bottom 150 million Americans.

Yes, we all have the right to vote and change this unbalanced state of affairs.

But political power in the United States is exercised by this narrow, rich segment of the population.

Much of the wealth transfer upstairs has come at the hands of corporate welfare artists who have shifted billions from the middle class to the billionaire class.

Some politician could take the central political issue of Free Lunch--wealth inequality--and run on it to the White House in 2008.

But the current crop of corporate candidates will likely ignore it so as to not offend the funding class.

While Johnston focuses on the perfectly legal schemes that bloat the richest of the richest at the expense of the rest of us, much of the thievery he documents is the result of pure un-prosecuted or under-prosecuted corporate criminality.

"One of the new rules has been to make sure there are far too few cops on the beat on Wall Street to even write down all the legitimate complaints, much less pursue more than a handful of evildoers," Johnston writes.

"More importantly, the actions of Ken Lay and Bernie Ebbers and the others were just part of a massive shift in practices and policies that continue. The Wall Street scandals are not over. The conduct they reveled is just becoming institutionalized."

"Thousands of executives at hundreds of companies took money from shareholders through deliberate actions that distinguish them from bandits only because they wielded pens instead of pistols," Johnston writes. "The techniques are subtler and less overtly violent, but the results are worse, for they undermine the legitimacy of society in ways that street bandits do not. The rules allow this."

In the book, Johnston takes shots at the corporate criminal class that would never make it by his editors at the New York Times.

"Unlike the common thief or bandit, these executives have the best and the brightest lawyers to explain away misconduct or to obfuscate.," he writes in the book. "In the rare instances when indictments are handed up, the cheated shareholders sometimes end up paying to defend the thieves who robbed them. Added to this are the legions of publicists who are paid to report what their bosses want us to hear--the antithesis of journalism's call to pursue the facts without fear or favor. The ranks of these image shifters are growing, while across the country a quarter or more of journalists are being fired, reducing further the chances that inconvenient facts will become known."

"The checks and balances provided by oversight, inspection, investigation and in extreme cases, prosecution have all been gutted in the name of deregulation and shrinking the size of government," he writes. "When there is no policeman on the beat the greatest beneficiary is not the taxpayer who is relieved of the cost of maintaining the police officer, but the thief."

Johnston points out that we used to prosecute loan sharks. But then we got rid of usury laws and passed new laws that allow "Goldman Sachs and Lehman Brothers, MBNA and Citibank to exploit the poor, the unsophisticated and the foolish."

"These lenders, or their fronts, can now charge rates and impose penalties that were illegal, even criminal, a generation a go," he says.

"The result? In the last 25 years or so, one American family in seven has sought refuge in federal bankruptcy court. " We've turned vices into pastimes. Case in point-- gambling subsidized by money that was promised to "help the poor, the elderly and the sick."

"In this way does Donald Trump take from the least among us to burnish his image as a supposed billionaire," Johnston says.

In a different time, this book would climb the New York Times Best Sellers list and stay at the top for a long time. The bottom 150 million would read it and get angry.

And politics would go populist in 2008. But as of now, Clarence Thomas, Alan Greenspan, and Ann Coulter are one, two and three atop the Times non-fiction list. Johnston's book won't be in bookstores until December.

Time for a change.

Russell Mokhiber is the editor of the Corporate Crime Reporter.

"Weapons of Mass Financial Destruction"

The Credit Shock
By ALAN FARAGO

The New York Times reports that Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson will speak tomorrow about the intervention of the US government in crumbling credit markets. According to the Times, Mr. Paulson will say, "This is not about finger-pointing, it is about putting an aggressive plan together and moving forward."

What was the first plan? An ill-founded scheme to demonstrate how mercenaries supporting aspirants to the Junior Chamber of Commerce could secure a US beachhead in the Middle East? Or, how historic low interest rates set by the Federal Reserve coupled with the crippling of regulatory authority for land use and natural resource decisions could trigger vast societal benefits through a boom in housing markets?

In any case, we are nearing the end of the Bush presidency whose legacy is as described in a 2002 conversation between a senior administration official, probably Karl Rove, with Times' writer Ron Suskind: "We're history's actors and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."

Please, God, that we should be left only with that.

Three weeks ago major US banking institutions, represented by Citigroup Inc. and JPMorgan Chase & Co., began meeting with the former Goldman Sachs chief, now Treasury Secretary. The topic of conversation: a plan to revive the asset-backed commercial paper market.

In so far as the "reality-based community" is concerned, people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernable reality", investors aren't wasting time cogitating: they're well along the process of turning the US dollar into garden mulch.

In an exceedingly carefully phrased roll-out in major newspapers, details are beginning to emerge of the new discernable reality: its essential features are bribery papering over fraud.

The fraud, as defined by cratering secondary markets for mortgage backed securities, is exactly as Warren Buffett predicted of financial derivatives: they are proving to be "weapons of mass financial destruction."

The bribery appears to be in the creation of a new, multi hundred billion dollar fund--the result of the meeting between the big banks and the US Treasury-- for which fees will be paid to Wall Street executives and lawyers in order to dispose in "an orderly way" off-book assets that are worth far less than banks have told their investors.

Cynics, gather 'round: it's nearly fascinating as watching the Greenland ice sheet melt. Both are happening slowly but with a fair degree of certainty that the end of the day is a big stinking mess we lack tools to clean up. The reality-based community of investors are not going to take this well.

This is not how disaster capitalism is supposed to work (read Naomi Klein's, 'Shock Doctrine, the rise of disaster capitalism'), but it does appear to be the new Manifest Destiny.

In so far as immediate finger pointing is concerned, this past July Wall Street executives told the public that problem in debt markets were contained to the subprime sector for mortgage backed securities. In other words, poor homeowners in Dearborn and Detroit. That little fiction didn't sell through.

Throughout the late summer and fall, banking committees in Congress have been spinning themselves into a fine fettle, mixing Democrats and Republican indistinguishably, seeking solutions to the millions of homeowners at risk of foreclosure. The main event appears to be simply loosening the bridle that had been put on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac for financial misdeeds.

Let them loan more. Let them loan more freely. Having finished, apparently, the finger pointing at the greed that had marred Fannie Mae and its quasi-public mission only a few years ago.

As much as network news likes to feature stories of foreclosed homeowners, the real meat is Wall Street whose executives became addicted to the profits from financial derivatives.

Now, the banks themselves have to be rescued to restore "free markets" to normal operation. In 1998, it only took four billion and the cooperation of the Treasury Department with the big banks to bail out the private hedge fund, Long Term Capital Management.

Today the mainstream media shies from reporting the extent of what is unfolding: a few hundred billion is a drop in the bucket compared to the total market for of asset backed securities at risk that underwrote the late, great building boom.

There are two reasons the mainstream media has lagged behind the story.

First, the blizzard of profits from the housing boom obliterated depth perception as it might be applied by a critical analysis of how corporate America and government is organized: to keep consumers passive, dumb, and happy.

Second, the proliferation of financial derivatives-intended to diversify risk-has the collateral benefit of distributing the fantasy of asset values in slow motion.

Trillions of asset-backed securities are floating around the globe on digital pulses through fiber optic cables, but no major financial institution wants to be the first to re-price assets to market.

They will hold these on the books or off the books as long as possible, at inflated values that don't connect in any appreciable way to reality.

How odd that Wall Street lives and dies by quarterly profit reports from publicly traded corporations yet have been sitting on a toxic financial dump in credit markets for years with not even a whisper of complaint.

In the New York Times, Paulson's efforts are described as "a delicate balancing act between two very different goals." Those goals are: maintaining the confidence in financial markets and also, keep the game going for the housing industry and mortgage bankers who chafe at the notion of additional regulation.

Today, there is no will on the part of Congress to put the regulatory harnesses to a source of campaign cash that derives from a market that is essentially unregulated: financial derivatives.

Wall Street doesn't want it. The home builders don't want it. Why tamper with what your biggest campaign donors want? On the other hand, the version of disaster capitalism that is emerging is what only the short-sellers want.

The creators of asset backed mortgages take ordinary mortgages and package them into pools. The derivatives created from these packages of mortgages are sold to investors: they are sliced, diced, and reformulated in many different ways-but each time they are slightly changed, they create a rain of bonuses, fees, and commissions.

In recent years, mortgage backed sercurities were generated in the hundreds of billions by persuading consumers to take on more debt than they could reasonably afford. It was almost like spontaneous generation.

Take your ordinary suburban tract housing in Florida, for instance. In the past decade, production home building on cheap outlying land metastasized throughout the state of Florida.

During this time, environmentalists chewed mostly on each other over compromises to slow the pace of housing and commercial development in former wetlands and wildlife habitat. While most environmental organizations were distracted by divide and conquer and diversionary tactics, the building lobby converted the purposes of local government to zoning and permitting-doing battle with local regulations against the nation's premier environmental laws meant to protect the air and water and natural resources we share.

In some cases, these were outright assaults that ended up in federal court challenges. But the worst damage, during this time of ascendancy in real estate speculation, was the domination of and appointment by local elected officials of lobbyists to local boards charged with "protecting the environment".

In Florida, for instance, these environmental review boards worked with state agencies, like the Florida Department of Environmental Protection, to control water quality issues that had been abandoned by the federal EPA under duress of scientists. The legal term is "delegation".

Once upon a time, suburban sprawl and all its accoutrements-from hollowed out urban cores to scary strip mall culture-were sold to the public as what the market wants. Every single day, that myth is played out in the halls of local government as though the crisis in the greater world of debt has no bearing whatsoever on reality.

The very nature of derivatives is meant to disperse risk: what they really disperse is accountability. The delegation of accountability so that it disappears is an essential feature of disaster capitalism.

Its manifest destiny has defined the problem as government itself-leading in the direction of divesting authority from federal to state, and from state to locally elected officials who live, virtually, in the pocket of the growth machine. Its result is exactly the sprawl-ridden, unsustainable landscape of Florida.

Today owners of asset backed securities are in the dark about the value of their investments. It is so distressing that hundreds of billions of asset backed securities cannot find buyers in the secondary markets, or, only at distressed prices.

That is what happens to junk when it is fairly valued.

Bloomberg reports, "Nothing in free-market theology says markets always work properly,'' said J.D. Foster, a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation in Washington and former Bush administration official. ``If there's something that can be done of a temporary nature to help markets, then that seems perfectly appropriate.''

What nonsense: a fairy tale from the party of "fiscal conservatives."

Mispricing the true costs and accounting for growth is another way that asset back mortgages were able to deliver higher rates of return than baseline government debt.

To be purposeful and clear, means having a vision to protect and conserve-using regulations as a way to guide investment. It means wringing the speculators from the housing markets and from land development.

The solution is reformulating the system of packaging mortgages and their ratings. The new formula needs to be based on a clear and rational way to allocate development rights at the local level; in other words, integrating community design with long-term financing from private investors.

Intrusive? No more intrusive than disaster capitalism as it now exists for Americans, who appear to live on a giant set of a colossal Budweiser TV commercial, from sea to shining sea filled with intelligent Clydesdale horses, talking frogs and happy dumb us.

Alan Farago of Coral Gables, who writes about the environment and the politics of South Florida, can be reached at alanfarago@yahoo.com.

The Marines' Plan for Trading Iraq for Afghanistan

Out of the Frying Pan
By WILLIAM S. LIND

The Pentagon last week floated a trial balloon suggesting that all U.S. Marines might pullout of Iraq and head to Afghanistan, while the Army would do the opposite and concentrate on Iraq. The rationale was mere administrative efficiency or neatness, which hardly justifies the turmoil the proposal would cause. I would personally be happy to see my Marine friends leave Iraq before the roof there falls in, but trading Iraq for Afghanistan is little more than a jump out of the frying pan into the fire.

If, however, a Marine Corps takeover of the war in Afghanistan were used as an opportunity to change the way we are waging that war, then it would be more than justified. What would meaningful change entail?

First, we would have to adopt a realistic strategic goal, one that might be attainable. The present strategic goal of turning Afghanistan into a modern, secular, capitalist state with "equal rights for women" and similar claptrap lies in the in realm of fantasy. The most Afghanistan can become is Afghanistan in its better periods, which is to say a country with a weak central government, strong local warlords, endemic tribal civil war, a drug-based economy and a traditional Islamic society and culture. The dominant tribe, controlling the central government in Kabul, will be the Pashtun, because it always has been.

There are two possible strategies for attaining this goal, neither of which guarantees success, but both of which have a potential for success, unlike what we and NATO are doing now. The first is to split the Pashtun from the Taliban, making the Pashtun our allies instead of our enemies. Since the Pashtun always win in the end, we must be allied with them if we are not to lose.

The second possible strategy is to split the Taliban from al-Qaeda and similar ethnically Arab 4GW entities and make a deal with them in which they would again get Kabul and the government. That central government will, as always in Afghan history, be weak, so we are not giving up all that much. This strategy has the advantage that it would reduce the pressure on Pakistan, which remains a de facto ally of the Taliban. If Pakistan goes, and it is going, our position in the region collapses overnight.

Of the two strategic options, I think the second is more likely to work. It gives us a central authority to make a deal with; other than the Taliban, who can deliver the Pashtun to the alliance we need? The same lack of an alternate legitimate authority -- the Karzai government is not one -- makes splitting the Pashtun from the Taliban a tall order. Most probably, attempting to do so will leave us enmeshed in endless local politics we can neither understand nor bring to any sort of useful conclusion. While we would have to swallow some of our (overweening) pride to give Kabul back to the Taliban, the Taliban is not in and of itself any threat to America, so long as it is not in bed with al-Qaeda.

Both strategic options require a radical change in American tactics, from "winning battles" defined by "kills" to the tactics of de-escalation. The FMFM-IA lays out in detail what a tactics of de-escalation means. Suffice it here to say here that it includes an end to airstrikes, trying to capture rather than kill those Pashtun we have to fight (and treating prisoners very well, as future allies), and replacing the American addiction to firepower with good light infantry tactics.

If the Bush administration is able to adopt these strategic recommendations, then handing Afghanistan over to the Marine Corps makes sense. The Marine Corps has generals who can think in strategic terms (if the Army has any, it has not sent them to Afghanistan). It is perhaps slightly less addicted to firepower than the Army, though Marine aviation may be a problem. While Marine infantry tactics are little if any better than the Army's, it would be easier to retrain Marine infantry in true light infantry tactics, if only because the Marine Corps is smaller. Perhaps most importantly, Marines have learned something of the tactics of de-escalation in Anbar province in Iraq. Had they not done so, Anbar would still be an al-Qaeda stronghold.

The choke point, as always, is the Bush administration. The Marine Corps on its own cannot change our strategy in Afghanistan. It can advocate a change. Perhaps it can line up DOD and the State Department behind such a change. But in the end, only the White House can make the change. Will it? Only if it learns from experience, which so far is has shown no ability to do.

William S. Lind, expressing his own personal opinion, is Director for the Center for Cultural Conservatism for the Free Congress Foundation.

The Jihadist Fragmentation

By Douglas Farah


My colleague Evan Kohlmann has pointed out the dramatic infighting among the Islamist groups in Iraq. The significance of this willingness to publicly denounce each other and turn on each other is great, and the ability to exploit the current situation will be a major determinant in whether U.S. forces make significant strides in Iraq in coming months.

As my friend James Gordon Meek points out, it is likely much too early to declare victory. The threat remains and these groups have shown a remarkable resilience in the past. The Washington Post looks at the disagreement in the military over what to say about the recent developments.

My experience in dealing with armed groups (mostly Marxist at the time) is that there is almost always a radical core that is unwilling to compromise on anything. This has clearly happened before in Islamist groups, as Kohlmann has documented. My full blog is here.


October 17, 2007 03:07 PM Link TrackBack (0) Print

An Argument for Pragmatism

By Christopher Heffelfinger




The only way democracy or civil society can take root in Iraq, devastated by military, sectarian and political strife, is for the United States to withdraw its military presence. But more than that, we need to rethink the effectiveness of our actions in this region, and against the militant Salafi movement in particular.

This does not mean the most responsible decision is to remove American forces immediately, but we must ultimately face the reality that our presence only puts a target on our backs—in Iraq and to jihadis across the globe. We undeniably alter the climate of local, national and regional politics in the favor of our enemies, who prey on the widespread anger held by many toward Western and Arab government.

And for the mujahidin fighting in Iraq, we only continue to provide a fertile environment for swelling their ranks.

But what is the tie between terrorism in Iraq today and our future security at home? The answer lies in the ideology of the Salafi movement, and its aims as a political and social force for the region. Because no other outlets for political expression exist in the stagnant autocracies of the Middle East, the popularity of Islamism, sometimes in its militant forms, has only increased in the region since September 11.

By choosing not to address the cause of that ailment, we have added further fuel to one of the jihadis' primary recruiting techniques: their resistance to the widely perceived tyranny and oppression of Western governments.

Without doubt, our security at home is connected to Iraq's future. One can observe radicalized youth from across the region entering Iraq--along with a robust information effort by al-Qaeda and allied militant groups to attract recruits to that front. This serves as an urban training ground for this generation of militants, successors of the Afghan jihad against the Soviets. These mujahidin will most likely also plan future operations, as their predecessors did from Afghanistan—but our prolonged presence in Iraq will not deter this.

Rather than attempt to understand theirs as a nihilistic faith that drives them to terror, it is more accurately a political and social movement bound together by Islamic identity. Perhaps Islamic nationalism best describes this phenomenon.

Militant Salafis' attitudes toward geography and nomenclature further illustrate this point. Rejecting the authority of nations established following colonial withdrawal (which implemented European systems of law in the Arab countries they demarcated), the mujahidin recall names echoing with Islamic tradition and the days of khalifal power: al-Qaeda in the Land of Two Rivers, al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, al-Qaeda in the Land of the Two Holy Shrines, etc.

The doctrine of this movement, regardless of what we call it, has also transcended the nation-state. There is no doubt it has been the inspiration of recent terrorist plots in North America, not to mention in the United Kingdom, or Spain before that.

When we look at the foiled plot in Ontario last summer to kill Canadian civilians, storm Parliament and behead the prime minister, or the uncovered plot in New Jersey last May to storm Fort Dix and open fire on US military personnel, the suspects were all moved by this same movement and its ideology.

In both cases, the would-be jihadi groups were strewn together from various ethnic, national and linguistic backgrounds. Quite clearly their common identity was militant Salafi ideology. They were informal networks who shared the same beliefs and worldview, determined to affect change through violent, murderous means.

But these are still, in the end, tied to a broader political and social struggle in the Arab and Muslim world in which Islamists are attempting first and foremost to win the support of Muslim populations; to spark an Islamic awakening.

And in many countries where this internal conflict is unfolding, the most visible alternative to autocratic rule is the Islamist resistance.

Islamist political parties in countries like Lebanon and Egypt have demonstrated their appeal as alternatives to corrupt leadership, with the respective popularity of Hezbollah and the Muslim Brotherhood. Meanwhile, underground Islamist resistance movements in Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Central Asian republics have similarly demonstrated this trend.

By withdrawing our support for autocracies like Mubarak's Egypt, the House of Sa`ud, and the Jordanian monarchy, we will allow these governments to stand or fall on their own, and force the Salafi-jihadi movement comprised of al-Qaeda, its scholars, strategists and ideologues, to find popular support in an environment open to much more promising political and social alternatives.

We should encourage a culture of openness in all Arab and Muslim states. Moderate voices will be heard, and some will seek pragmatic solutions. With that, groups like al-Qaeda, who depend entirely on willing recruits to carry out attacks, will have much weaker ground to stand on.

In Iraq, and neighboring Arab countries, our military ventures are widely perceived as hostile and imperialistic. Insisting upon military action over any other means, we put our worst foot forward with Muslim and Arab populations since 9/11; a recruiting dream for the jihad. It is time we redirect our efforts.

These views are those of the author and do not represent the United States Army or Department of Defense.

October 17, 2007 11:29 AM Link

The Forgotten Victims of the U.S. War on Iraq
More Refugees than Darfur

by Lee Sustar / October 18th, 2007

The U.S. government has so far allowed fewer than 2,000 Iraqi refugees to settle in the U.S.

At least 2,000 Iraqis are displaced every day, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). That’s more than 80 people per hour, around the clock–forced to flee their homes because of U.S. military activities, sectarian attacks and threats, and sheer desperation caused by the shattered Iraqi economy. (Full article …)

Academic Freedom at Risk on Campus
Daring to Speak Truth to Israeli Power

by Saree Makdisi / October 18th, 2007

“Academic colleagues, get used to it,” warned the pro-Israel activist Martin Kramer in March 2004. “Yes, you are being watched. Those obscure articles in campus newspapers are now available on the Internet, and they will be harvested. Your syllabi, which you’ve also posted, will be scrutinized. Your Web sites will be visited late at night.” (Full article …)

An Anti-Imperialist Case Against Iran’s Nuclear Program
by Reza Fiyouzat / October 18th, 2007

The U.S. military capabilities, personnel and hardware alike, having reached a stalemate in Iraq, are said to be increasingly more likely to be sent on more insane and murderous missions in the region. There have been a growing number of reports of intended attacks on Iranian military forces carried out by the U.S. armed forces, up to and including ‘imminently’, based on two official accusations: the Iranian nuclear ambitions and the Iranian regime’s use of their influence in Iraq. (Full article …)

ornberger’s Blog
Wednesday, October 17, 2007

Turkey, Iraq, and Imperial Gall
by Jacob G. Hornberger

U.S. Empire gall is manifesting itself once again in Iraq. President Bush is telling Turkish officials to “show restraint.” Turkey is threatening to send troops into northern Iraq to suppress cross-border raids that Iraqi Kurds have been inflicting on Turkey.

“Show restraint?” These people are something else. Exactly how much restraint did the U.S. Empire exercise before it invaded and occupied a country that had never attacked the United States, killing and maiming hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, none of whom had anything to do with the 9/11 attacks? Indeed, how much restraint did the U.S. Empire exercise when it contributed to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children as a result of the brutal sanctions that the Empire enforced against Iraq for more than 10 years? How much restraint was exercised when the Empire’s ambassador to the UN said that the deaths of half a million Iraqi children had been “worth it”?

Moreover, let’s not forget that the U.S. Empire is now threatening to attack Iran, supposedly because Iran is furnishing armaments to Iraqi insurgents who are trying to oust the U.S. Empire from Iraq. Never mind that the U.S. Empire did the same thing when it was furnishing armaments to Osama bin Laden and other insurgents when they were trying to oust the Soviet Empire from Afghanistan.

White House spokesman Gordon Johndroe told the Iraqis that “we all have an interest in a stable Iraq.”

“Stable?”

Yeah, we wouldn’t want Turkey interfering with all that stability that the U.S. invasion and occupation have brought to Iraq in the hope of installing a pro-U.S. regime in a country with the world’s third-largest oil reserves.

Oh well, at least Empire officials are no longer speaking that “democracy-spreading” or “liberation” claptrap as a rationale for invading and occupying a country that never attacked the United States.

Pardon me for asking an indelicate question, but wasn’t Iraq “stable” under Saddam Hussein?

Mr. Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation.

Freedom's Watch targeting Iran- by Bill Berkowitz - 2007-10-17

Former US commander blames “partisan” politics and “agenda-driven” media for Iraq debacle- by Barry Grey - 2007-10-17

New Cold War: Simultaneously, Russia and America Conduct Major War Games - by Michel Chossudovsky - 2007-10-16

“Peace” Train Going Off Track
By: P. David Hornik
Arab threats intensify as the conference draws nearer. More>

Maureen Dowd on "Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week" in The New York Times
By: Maureen Dowd
Breaking through the barrier of politically correct doublespeak that prevails on American campuses. . . . More>

<h3 class="post-title"> Putin & Ahmadinejad Pledge Cooperation </h3>

Farideh Farhi weighs in on the significance of Russian President Vladimir Putin's visit to Iran, and the frustrations his olive branch to Tehran produced in Bush (who went a little crazy, talking about World War III if Iran gained the knowledge of how to produce a nuclear weapon.)

The USG Open Source Center translates from Russian the joint statement of President Putin and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Highlights include a joint call for a timetable to be set for the withdrawal of US troops from Iraq; Russian investment in the Iranian energy sector (which the US opposes and says it would punish by boycotts); further consultations between Iran and the Shanghai Cooperation Council; and a peaceable resolution of the dispute over Iran's nuclear energy research program.

'Russian and Iranian presidents' joint statement
ITAR-TASS
Wednesday, October 17, 2007
Document Type: OSC Translated Text

Russian and Iranian presidents' joint statement

Text of report by Russian state news agency ITAR-TASS

Tehran, 16 October: A joint statement has been signed following today's talks in Tehran between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinezhad. Here is its full text.

On 16 October 2007, which corresponds to 24 Mehr 1386 in the Iranian calendar, Russian President Vladimir Putin, at the head of a high-ranking delegation, paid a working visit to the Islamic Republic of Iran on the invitation of President of the Islamic Republic of Iran Mahmud Ahmadinezhad. This was the first visit to Iran by a Russian head of state in the whole history of relations between the two countries.

During his stay in Tehran, Russian President Vladimir Putin took part in the Second Caspian Summit, met and held talks with Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamene'i and President of the Islamic Republic of Iran Mahmud Ahmadinezhad.
During the talks, which were held in the atmosphere of trust and mutual understanding, the sides discussed key aspects of Russian-Iranian relations and cooperation in various areas, exchanged views on important regional and international issues and reached the following agreements.

1. The sides confirmed that mutually beneficial cooperation in the political, economic, cultural and other areas, as well as cooperation on the international stage, meet the national interests of the two sides and play an important role in supporting peace and stability in the region and beyond.

2. The sides expressed their determination to further contribute to the steady development of multifaceted Russian-Iranian relations, keeping with the spirit and the letter of the Treaty on the Fundamentals of Relations and Principles of Cooperation, which was signed in Moscow on 12 March 2001.

3. On issues of trade and economic cooperation between Russia and Iran, the sides spoke in favour of increasing efforts to further expand economic ties between the two countries, especially in areas like the oil and gas, nuclear power, electricity, processing and aircraft-building industries, banking and transport. Both sides are convinced that the Permanent Russian-Iranian Commission for Trade and Economic Cooperation will make a valuable contribution to this work.

4. Special attention was paid to cooperation in the extraction and transportation of energy resources. The sides agreed to develop direct contacts between the two countries' oil and gas companies in order to sign concrete, mutually beneficial commercial agreements on joint work in all segments of the oil and gas sectors.

5. The sides confirmed their interest in coordinating marketing policies in oil and gas exports, attracting Russian companies to the development of oil and gas fields in Iran, including the Southern Pars gas field, and creating in Iran industrial facilities to produce, store and export natural gas.

6. Both sides confirmed their interest in continuing cooperation in the energy sector, including the modernization of thermal and hydro-electric power plants built with Russia's help and the construction of new ones, including the Tabas coal thermal power plant in Iran.

7. The sides noted bilateral cooperation in the area of peaceful nuclear energy and confirmed that it will continue in full compliance with the requirements of the Treaty on the Non-proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. In this regard they also noted that the construction and launch of the Bushehr nuclear power plant will be carried out in accordance with the agreed timetable.

8. The sides noted with satisfaction the signing of a contract to supply Iran with five Tu-204-100 aircraft. In this regard they expressed interest in deepening cooperation in the area of aviation industry further. The sides support the on-going talks between the relevant organizations of the two countries on the supply to Iran and the production in this country of Tu-334 and Tu-214 commercial aircraft and Kamov civilian helicopters. They also expressed their support for a speedy preparation and signing of contracts on these projects.

9. During their meeting the presidents deemed it necessary to continue work on the creation of favourable legal, economic and financial conditions for joint investment in Russia and Iran. In this context the sides noted the need to sign as soon as possible a memorandum between the government of the Russian Federation and the government of the Islamic Republic of Iran on the development of long-term trade and economic, industrial and scientific and technical cooperation and an agreement on facilitating and protecting capital investment.

10. The sides agreed to continue work on the development of the north-south international transport corridor, including its automobile, rail and maritime components, in the interest of further strengthening trade and economic ties between Russia and Iran, as well as other countries of the region.
In this regard the sides agreed to speed up the consideration of the issue of resumption of road transport communication between the Russian Federation and the Islamic Republic of Iran through the territory of (Russia's) Republic of Dagestan.

11. The sides expressed their satisfaction with the steady development of regional cooperation between the Russian Federation's constituent parts and provinces of the Islamic Republic of Iran. In this regard they expressed confidence that the resumption of operations in the city of Rasht by the Russian Consulate General and the opening of Iran's Consulate General in the city of Kazan, Russia, will facilitate further strengthening of interregional ties between the two countries.

12. The sides discussed pressing regional problems, expressed interest in bilateral and multilateral cooperation in Central Asia and the Transcaucasus with the aim of strengthening stability and security in these regions, including by way of closer cooperation between the countries of the region on the basis of mutual respect and interest.

13. Russia and Iran advocate the development of equal and constructive cooperation between member and observer states of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization on matters of mutual interest.

14. The presidents of the Russian Federation and the Islamic Republic of Iran confirmed the two sides' aspiration to solve all the issues arising on the Caspian Sea solely by peaceful means, through cooperation on equal footing between the five Caspian littoral states. They agree that the relevant norms of the agreements of 1921 and 1940 between Iran and the former Soviet Union remain in force until there is a convention on the legal status of the Caspian Sea.

Taking into account the vulnerability of the environment of the Caspian Sea, the sides call on everyone to refrain from taking steps that could harm the environment, to maintain a reasonable balance between the efforts to develop energy resources and protect the marine environment of the Caspian Sea.

The sides invite the other Caspian littoral states to start talks, as soon as possible, on issues of cooperation in maintaining peace and strengthening security and stability on the Caspian. They advocate the exclusion from the Caspian of military presence of non-Caspian littoral states.

The Second Caspian Summit, which took place in Tehran on 16 October 2007 (24 Mehr 1386), and its declaration - the first political document adopted by the five countries - were assessed as highly significant. Satisfaction was expressed with the Caspian littoral states' positions on key issues of status, security and cooperation on the sea drawing closer to each other.

15. The sides confirmed the understanding of special responsibility of the littoral states for ensuring security on the Caspian Sea, including as regards countering new challenges and threats. In this regard the sides think that the implementation of the idea to create on the Caspian a naval group for operational cooperation (Casfor) would facilitate the elimination of the threat of terrorism and the proliferation of WMD, the fight against illegal trafficking of arms and narcotics and human trafficking and facilitate the protection of the Caspian littoral states' economic interests, the strengthening of stability and security in the region and the development of cooperation and interaction in addressing common tasks. They call on all the littoral states to actively join in this project and start talks on the parameters of their cooperation for this purpose as soon as possible.

16. The Russian and Iranian presidents noted the closeness of Russia's and Iran's approaches to the tackling of key issues of world politics and confirmed their readiness to expand cooperation with the aim of building a fairer and more democratic world order which would ensure global and regional security and create favourable conditions for stable development.

It was stressed that such a world order should be based on collective principles and the supremacy of international law with the United Nations Organization playing a central coordinating role, while any international and regional conflict and crises should be settled in strict compliance with the UN Charter and norms of international law, taking into account the legitimate interests of all the sides involved.

The sides confirmed their refusal to use force or threat of force to resolve contentious issues, and their respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity of the states.

17. The presidents stated that Russia and Iran resolutely condemn terrorism in all its forms and manifestations, confirmed the inadmissibility of equating terrorism with any nation, culture or religion.

The sides spoke in favour of strengthening the United Nations Organization's central coordinating role in the fight against international terrorism and other new challenges and threats. They will closely cooperate in implementing the UN's global antiterrorist strategy, ensuring strict observation of norms of universal antiterrorist conventions, as well as in promoting the soonest possible completion of the process of coordinating the Comprehensive Convention on International Terrorism.

Being concerned by the ideological expansion of terrorism, Russia and Iran pay attention to the need for a consistent implementation of all the UN Security Council resolutions which condemn terrorism and call for every possible development of global dialogue.

The sides continue their cooperation in the fight against terrorism and other new challenges and threats at the regional level, above all on the basis of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, laying prime emphasis on curbing terrorist and drugs threats emanating from the territory of Afghanistan and creating anti-drugs and financial security belts around it.

The presidents noted the importance of increasing bilateral cooperation between Russia and Iran in the fight against terrorism and spoke in favour of continuing the practice of exchanging views between the ministries of foreign affairs of the two countries on the subject of countering new challenges and threats, making contacts between relevant bodies more active and giving them practical content.

18. When discussing the situation in Afghanistan, the sides expressed their concern over the continued worsening of the situation in that country, an increase in terrorist threats on the part of Taliban and other extremist forces. The presidents confirmed Russia's and Iran's intention to continue to take part in the post-war reconstruction of Afghanistan and are interested in strengthening its statehood and the process of that country becoming a peaceful, democratic, independent and flourishing state.

19. The sides expressed their concern over the difficult humanitarian situation in the occupied Palestinian Territories, especially in connection with the effective isolation of Gaza Strip.
The presidents noted that the restoration of Palestinian-wide consensus and unity through dialogue is a necessary precondition for the implementation of national aspirations of the Palestinian people, including the creation of an independent and sovereign Palestinian state.
The Russian Federation and the Islamic Republic of Iran confirmed their adherence to reaching a just, comprehensive and lasting settlement of the Middle East conflict.

20. The sides noted the need