CHRONOLOGY: Iran's nuclear program
Reuters - Oct 20, 2007
(Reuters) - Chief nuclear negotiator Ali Larijani, Iran's main contact with the West over Tehran's atomic program, has resigned, the government said on ...

SECRECY NEWS
from the FAS Project on Government Secrecy
Volume 2007, Issue No. 104
October 22, 2007

Secrecy News Blog: http://www.fas.org/blog/secrecy/

Support Secrecy News:
http://www.fas.org/static/contrib_sec.jsp


** INTELLIGENCE BUDGET WILL BE DISCLOSED, ODNI SAYS
** TREATMENT OF CHEMICAL WEAPONS CASUALTIES


INTELLIGENCE BUDGET WILL BE DISCLOSED, ODNI SAYS

Within a week, the Director of National Intelligence will formally
disclose the size of the National Intelligence Program budget for
fiscal year 2007, an ODNI spokeswoman said.

The anticipated disclosure marks the culmination of decades of
advocacy, debate and litigation.

Last July Congress enacted an intelligence budget disclosure
requirement over White House objections as part of a bill to implement
the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission.

"The Administration strongly opposes the requirement in the bill to
publicly disclose sensitive information about the intelligence budget,"
according to a February 28 statement of administration policy.

But on August 3 President Bush nevertheless signed the final bill,
which allows the (next) President to waive the disclosure requirement
on national security grounds, if necessary, starting in 2009.

The disclosure requirement states (in section 601 of H.R. 1):

"Not later than 30 days after the end of each fiscal year beginning
with fiscal year 2007, the Director of National Intelligence shall
disclose to the public the aggregate amount of funds appropriated by
Congress for the National Intelligence Program for such fiscal year."

Since fiscal year 2007 ended on September 30, the legal deadline for
budget disclosure is October 30.

Will the DNI comply?

"That's what the law requires," said Vanee Vines of the ODNI public
affairs office today, "and we're going to follow the law."

The aggregate intelligence budget (a broad term which included
"tactical" as well as "national" intelligence spending) was first
officially disclosed ten years ago, in October 1997, in response to a
Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the Federation of American
Scientists. At that time, the (FY 1997) budget figure was $26.6
billion. The last officially authorized disclosure was in March 1998,
when the budget was $26.7 billion.


TREATMENT OF CHEMICAL WEAPONS CASUALTIES

The treatment of injuries caused by chemical weapons and other chemical
agents is addressed in a new military field manual.

The manual, issued jointly by the Army, Navy, Marines and Air Force,
characterizes the threat from chemical weapons, describes the diagnosis
of chemical injuries and outlines preventive and remedial measures.

See "Multiservice Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures for Treatment of
Chemical Agent Casualties and Conventional Military Chemical Injuries,"
FM 4-02.285, September 2007:

http://www.fas.org/irp/doddir/army/fm4-02-285.pdf

Last week, President Bush issued Homeland Security Presidential
Directive 21 on "Public Health and Medical Preparedness," which is
intended to advance "preparedness for all potential catastrophic health
events."

http://www.fas.org/irp/offdocs/nspd/hspd-21.htm

Terrorism Awareness Indeed
by Danny Postel
Right-wingers in the witch hunt for violent Islamic groups quietly support a Stalinist Islamic organization on the U.S. terror list.

U.S. Should Condemn All of Government Atrocities, Eland Argues

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has denied the historical fact of the Jewish holocaust at the hands of the Nazis. This rightly makes many people nervous. Yet some of these same people seem comfortable with other denials of government-sanctioned atrocities.

U.S. leaders have done little to challenge, for example, the Japanese government’s denial of the conscription of Chinese and Korean women as sex slaves during World War II. Similarly, although the Turkish mass slaughter of Armenians during World War I is a matter of historical record (some put the death toll at 1.5 million), the Bush administration failed to support a recent House resolution calling the slaughter “genocide.” Although Turkey and Japan are now democratic allies of the U.S. and Iran is not, Ivan Eland, director of the Independent Institute’s Center on Peace & Liberty, challenges the wisdom of this double standard.

“If the United States were to have the same standard for all countries—both friend and foe—and join the international community in identifying and strongly condemning all documented cases of genocide, other war crimes, and repressive behavior by al countries, then perhaps there would be a chance that history might not be repeated,” Eland writes in his latest op-ed. “If the United States is going to criticize other countries’ behavior, both historical and current,” he continues, “it should eliminate the double standard at home and abroad, and clean up its own act first.”

“United States Has Double Standard at Home and Abroad,” by Ivan Eland (10/19/07)

Bolton Book Cites Effort to Halt Powell's Iran Initiative
By Glenn Kessler
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, October 22, 2007; A07


On the eve of the 2004 presidential elections, then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell secretly attempted to shift U.S. policy on Iran by telling key allies he wanted to offer "carrots" to the Islamic Republic to halt its nuclear ambitions, former U.N. ambassador John R. Bolton writes in his soon-to-be-published memoir.

Bolton, then undersecretary of state, says that he worked hard to thwart Powell's plans -- only to discover, to his dismay, that Powell's replacement, Condoleezza Rice, would pursue the same approach in President Bush's second term.

Bolton's book, "Surrender Is Not an Option: Defending America at the United Nations and Abroad," will be published next month by Threshold Editions. It provides a detailed look at key administration policy battles during the first six years of the Bush administration.

Bolton reveals many private conversations and internal debates as the administration struggled to deal with such issues as the North Korean and Iranian nuclear threats, the tragedy in Sudan's Darfur region, the Israeli-Hezbollah war and deteriorating relations with Russia.

Bolton's recounting of these episodes adds to the growing body of insider accounts about the inner workings of the Bush administration, though this is one of the first by a leading conservative figure. It will likely cause angst at the State Department and in some foreign capitals, including London, because of Bolton's depiction of the diplomatic exchanges. In typically pugnacious style, Bolton lashes out at his opponents in the administration and overseas, repeatedly referring to European Union diplomats as "EUroids" and foes in State's East Asia and Pacific Affairs Bureau as "EAPeasers."

Bolton in particular criticizes Rice and one of her top aides, Undersecretary R. Nicholas Burns, for what he considers poor diplomacy. He recounts his anger -- and that of other administration conservatives -- at many of her decisions, especially her handling of North Korea, Iran and the Israeli war, arguing that Rice was too willing to make unnecessary concessions in pursuit of ineffectual achievements.

During a meeting on Hamas's participation in Palestinian elections at the United Nations, for instance, Bolton says he watched Rice make a series of "unforced errors" because she was too eager to be accommodating.

Though Bolton often clashed with Powell, he expresses respect for Powell's skill at bureaucratic infighting. Bolton does not directly criticize the president, but he concludes: "Administration foreign policy [is] in something of a free fall."

After a bitter fight, the Senate never confirmed Bolton's nomination as U.N. ambassador, and he stepped down in December when his recess appointment expired. He is currently a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

Bolton attributes Powell's 2004 gambit on Iran to what he caustically calls the "George C. Marshall Legacy Project," which he said involved "distancing Powell from Bush." Bolton, as the administration's chief arms control official, was critical of efforts by Britain, France and Germany (the "EU-3") to forge a deal with Iran.

He believed that Tehran used the talks only to build up its nuclear capability. The administration was also openly skeptical, so he says he was shocked to learn that Powell, at a Sept. 22, 2004, dinner with "Group of Eight" foreign ministers, agreed that Iran should be given a package of "carrots."

Bolton says he got a vague response from Powell when he asked about it, but he soon saw a European reporting cable on the meal and a Canadian letter that confirmed Powell's proposal. In what Bolton described as the most difficult three weeks of his tenure in the administration, he says he used every possible bureaucratic and diplomatic maneuver to kill Powell's plan.

"Powell had violated our long-standing Iran policy, colluded with the EU-3 against it and come out nearly endorsing [Sen. John F.] Kerry's position only weeks before our election," Bolton writes. "Along with others, I had foiled Powell's legacy gambit. I knew it, and he knew I knew it."

But then to Bolton's shock, Rice adopted the same approach when she became secretary. He says he began thinking of leaving the administration when Rice gave him the news over dinner in 2006. A depressed Bolton pointedly ordered carrot soup with the meal.

Khamenei vs. Ahmadinejad?
By Steve Clemons | bio Ali Larijani has essentially been fired by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, but the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei is not letting Larijani leave the negotiating scene yet.

Despite Larijani's blurry status, Iran has announced the "joint will" of Ahmadinejad and Khamenei that Iran's top nuclear negotiator attend talks on Tuesday in Rome with Javier Solana.

Larijani, who has tried to resign on several occasions (one of which after the kidnapping and detainment by the IRGC of fifteen British sailors), reportedly cannot stand working with the reckless Ahmadinejad -- though is on very good terms with Khamenei.

But with the firing, which Larijani learned through news reports rather than directly, Ahmadinejad is challenging Khamenei's authority over Iranian state matters. Ahmadinejad knows that Larijani is an agent of those who actually want to resolve Iran's nuclear situation in a constructive way while Ahmadinejad benefits from the crisis and tension with the US and Europe.



There has been a lot of movement in recent days on Iran's nuclear program. Days after Defense Secretary Bob Gates met with Vladimir Putin, Putin is in Tehran meeting with Khamenei. And in the midst of these meetings, Gates states that a new course in Iran's nuclear plans that might move its nuclear reprocessing requirements into Russia would curtail the need, possibly, for the US to deploy intermediate range missiles is Europe.

There has been fragile but real deal making going on -- and it is progress on this front that Larijani wanted to have the government announce -- but Ahmadinejad refused.

More on this soap opera later -- but the big story here is that Ahmadinejad is challenging Khamenei directly and openly with Ali Larijani's firing. It will be interesting to see if Khamenei turns the other cheek or further undermines the "Dick Cheney of Iran" Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.


-- Steve Clemons is Senior Fellow and Director of the American Strategy Program at the New America Foundatihttp://www.tpmcafe.com/blog/coffeehouse/2007/oct/22/khamenei_vs_ahmadinejadon and publishes the popular political blog, The Washington Note

<h3 class="post-title entry-title"> On the Eve of Destruction </h3> On the Eve of Destruction

By Scott Ritter

Don’t worry, the White House is telling us. The world’s most powerful leader was simply making a rhetorical point. At a White House press conference last week, just in case you haven’t heard, President Bush informed the American people that he had told world leaders “if you’re interested in avoiding World War III, it seems like you ought to be interested in preventing [Iran] from having the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon.” World War III. That is certainly some rhetorical point, especially coming from the man singularly most capable of making such an event reality.

Pundits have raised their eyebrows and comics are busy writing jokes, but the president’s reference to Armageddon, no matter how cavalierly uttered and subsequently brushed away, suggests an alarming context. Some might note that the comment was simply an offhand response to a reporter’s question, the kind of free-thinking scenario that baffles Bush so. In a way, this makes what the president said even more disturbing, since we now have an insight into the vision, and related terminology, which hovers just below the horizon in the brain of George W. Bush.
About the Author

Scott Ritter
A former Marine Corps intelligence officer, Scott Ritter was a chief inspector for the United Nations Special Commission in Iraq from 1991 until 1998. He is the author of several books; “Target Iran,” with a new afterword by the author, was recently released in paperback by Nation Books.
For more on Scott Ritter, including his previous Truthdig columns, click here.


When I was a weapons inspector with the United Nations, there was a jostling that took place at the end of each day, when decisions needed to be made and authorization documents needed to be signed. In an environment of competing agendas, each of us who championed a position sought to be the “last man in,” namely the person who got to imprint the executive chairman (our decision maker) with the final point of view for the day. Failure to do so could find an inspection or point of investigation sidetracked for days or weeks after the executive chairman became distracted by a competing vision. I understand the concept of “imprinting,” and have seen it in action. What is clear from the president’s remarks is that, far from an innocent rhetorical fumble, his words, and the context in which he employed them, are a clear indication of the imprinting which is taking place behind the scenes at the White House. If the president mentions World War III in the context of Iran’s nuclear program, one can be certain that this is the very sort of discussion that is taking place in the Oval Office.

A critical question, therefore, is who was the last person to “imprint” the president prior to his public allusion to World War III? During his press conference, Bush noted that he awaited the opportunity to confer with his defense secretary, Robert Gates, and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice following their recent meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin. So clearly the president hadn’t been imprinted recently by either of the principle players in the formulation of defense and foreign policy. The suspects, then, are quickly whittled down to three: National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley, Vice President Dick Cheney, and God.

Hadley is a long-established neoconservative thinker who has for the most part operated “in the shadows” when it comes to the formulation of Iran policy in the Bush administration. In 2001, following the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the United States, Hadley (then the deputy national security adviser) instituted what has been referred to as the “Hadley Rules,” a corollary of which is that no move will be made which alters the ideological positioning of Iran as a mortal enemy of the United States. These “rules” shut down every effort undertaken by Iran to seek a moderation of relations between it and the United States, and prohibited American policymakers from responding favorably to Iranian offers to assist with the fight against al-Qaida; they also blocked the grand offer of May 2003 in which Iran outlined a dramatic diplomatic initiative, including a normalization of relations with Israel. The Hadley Rules are at play today, in an even more nefarious manner, with the National Security Council becoming involved in the muzzling of former Bush administration officials who are speaking out on the issue of Iran. Hadley is blocking Flynt Leverett, formerly of the National Security Council, from publishing an Op-Ed piece critical of the Bush administration on the grounds that any insight into the machinations of policymaking (or lack thereof) somehow strengthens Iran’s hand. Leverett’s article would simply underscore the fact that the Bush administration has spurned every opportunity to improve relations with Iran while deliberately exaggerating the threat to U.S. interests posed by the Iranian theocracy.

The silencing of informed critics is in keeping with Hadley’s deliberate policy obfuscation. There is still no official policy in place within the administration concerning Iran. While a more sober-minded national security bureaucracy works to marginalize the hawkish posturing of the neocons, the administration has decided that the best policy is in fact no policy, which is a policy decision in its own right. Hadley has forgone the normal procedures of governance, in which decisions impacting the nation are written down, using official channels, and made subject to review and oversight by those legally and constitutionally mandated and obligated to do so. A policy of no policy results in secret policy, which means, according to Hadley himself, the Bush administration simply does whatever it wants to, regardless. In the case of Iran, this means pushing for regime change in Tehran at any cost, even if it means World War III.

But Hadley is simply a facilitator, bureaucratic “grease” to ease policy formulated elsewhere down the gullet of a national security infrastructure increasingly kept in the dark about the true intent of the Bush administration when it comes to Iran. With the Department of State and the Pentagon now considered unfriendly ground by the remaining hard-core neoconservative thinkers still in power, policy formulation is more and more concentrated in the person of Vice President Cheney and the constitutionally nebulous “Office of the Vice President.”

Cheney and his cohorts have constructed a never-never land of oversight deniability, claiming immunity from both executive and legislative checks and balances. With an unchallenged ability to classify anything and everything as secret, and then claim that there is no authority inherent in government to oversee that which has been thus classified, the Office of the Vice President has transformed itself into a free republic’s worst nightmare, assuming Caesar-like dictatorial authority over almost every aspect of American national security policy at home and abroad. From torture to illegal wiretapping, to arms control (or lack of it) to Iran, Dick Cheney is the undisputed center of policy power in America today. While there are some who will claim that in this time of post-9/11 crisis such a process of bureaucratic streamlining is essential for the common good, the reality is far different.



It is said that absolute power corrupts absolutely, and this has never been truer than in the case of Cheney. What Cheney is doing behind his shield of secrecy can be simply defined: planning and implementing a preemptive war of aggression. During the Nuremberg tribunal in the aftermath of World War II, the chief American prosecutor, Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson, stated, “To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.” Today, we have a vice president who articulates publicly about global conflict, and who speaks in not-so-veiled language about a looming Armageddon. If there is such a future for America and the world, let one thing be certain; World War III, as postulated by Dick Cheney, would be an elective war, and not a conflict of tragic necessity. This makes the crime even greater.

Sadly, Judge Jackson’s words are but an empty shell. The global community lacks a legally binding definition of what constitutes a war of aggression, or even an act of aggression. But that isn’t the point. America should never find itself in a position where it is being judged by the global community regarding the legality of its actions. Judge Jackson established a precedent of jurisprudence concerning aggression based upon American principles and values, something the international community endorsed. The fact that current American indifference to the rule of law prevents the international community from certifying a definition of criminality when it comes to aggression, whether it be parsed as “war” or simply an “act,” does not change the fact that the Bush administration, in the person of Dick Cheney, is actively engaged in the committing of the “supreme [war] crime,” which makes Cheney the supreme war criminal. If the world is not empowered to judge him as such, then let the mantle of judgment fall to the American people. Through their elected representatives in Congress, they should not only bring this reign of unrestrained abuse of power to an end, but ensure that such abuse never again is attempted by an American official by holding to account, to the full extent of the law, those who have trampled on the Constitution of the United States and the ideals and principles it enshrines.
About the Author

Scott Ritter
A former Marine Corps intelligence officer, Scott Ritter was a chief inspector for the United Nations Special Commission in Iraq from 1991 until 1998. He is the author of several books; “Target Iran,” with a new afterword by the author, was recently released in paperback by Nation Books.
For more on Scott Ritter, including his previous Truthdig columns, click here.

But what use is the rule of law, even if fairly and properly implemented, if in the end he who is entrusted with executive power takes his instructions from an even higher authority? President Bush’s relationship with “God” (or that which he refers to as God) is a matter of public record. The president himself has stated that “God speaks through me” (he acknowledged this before a group of Amish in Pennsylvania in the summer of 2004). Exactly how God speaks through him, and what precisely God says, is not a matter of speculation. According to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, President Bush told him and others that “God told me to strike at al-Qaida and I struck them, and then he instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did.” As such, at least in the president’s mind, God has ordered Bush to transform himself into a modern incarnation of St. Michael, smiting all that is evil before him. “We are in a conflict between good and evil. And America will call evil by its name,” the president told West Point cadets in a speech in 2002.

The matter of how and when an individual chooses to practice his faith, or lack thereof, is a deeply personal matter, one which should be kept from public discourse. For a president to so openly impose his personal religious beliefs, as Bush has done, on American policy formulation and implementation represents a fundamental departure from not only constitutional intent concerning the separation of church and state but also constitutional mandate concerning the imposition of checks and balances required by the American system of governance. The increasing embrace by this president of the notion of a unitary executive takes on an even more sinister aspect when one realizes that not only does the Bush administration seek to nullify the will of the people through the shackling of the people’s representatives in Congress, but that the president has forgone even the appearance of constitutional constraint by evoking the word of his personal deity, as expressed through his person, as the highest form of consultation on a matter as serious as war. As such, the president has made his faith, and how he practices it, a subject not only of public curiosity but of national survival.

That George W. Bush is a born-again Christian is not a national secret. Neither is the fact that his brand of Christianity, evangelicalism, embraces the notion of the “end of days,” the coming of the Apocalypse as foretold (so they say) in the Book of Revelations and elsewhere in the Bible. President Bush’s frequent reference to “the evil one” suggests that he not only believes in the Antichrist but actively proselytizes on the Antichrist’s physical presence on Earth at this time. If one takes in the writing and speeches of those in the evangelical community today concerning the “rapture,” the numerous references to the current situation in the Middle East, especially on the events unfolding around Iran and its nuclear program, make it very clear that, at least in the minds of these evangelicals, there is a clear link between the “end of days” prophesy and U.S.-Iran policy. That James Dobson, one of the most powerful and influential evangelical voices in America today, would be invited to the White House with like-minded clergy to discuss President Bush’s Iran policy is absurd unless one makes the link between Bush’s personal faith, the extreme religious beliefs of Dobson and the potential of Armageddon-like conflict (World War III). At this point, the absurd becomes unthinkable, except it is all too real.

Thomas Jefferson, one of our nation’s greatest founders, made the separation of church and state an underlying principle upon which the United States was built. This separation was all-inclusive, meaning that not only should government stay out of religion, but likewise religion should be excluded from government. “I never submitted the whole system of my opinions to the creed of any party of men whatever in religion, in philosophy, in politics, or in anything else where I was capable of thinking for myself,” Jefferson wrote in a letter to Francis Hopkinson in 1789. “Such an addiction is the last degradation of a free and moral agent.” If only President Bush would abide by such wisdom, avoiding the addictive narcotic of religious fervor when carrying out the people’s business. Instead, he chooses as his drug one which threatens to destroy us all in a conflagration derived not from celestial intervention but individual ignorance and arrogance. Again Jefferson, in a letter written in 1825: “It is between fifty and sixty years since I read it [the Apocalypse], and I then considered it merely the ravings of a maniac, no more worthy nor capable of explanation than the incoherences of our own nightly dreams.”
About the Author

Scott Ritter
A former Marine Corps intelligence officer, Scott Ritter was a chief inspector for the United Nations Special Commission in Iraq from 1991 until 1998. He is the author of several books; “Target Iran,” with a new afterword by the author, was recently released in paperback by Nation Books.
For more on Scott Ritter, including his previous Truthdig columns, click here.

Nightmares, more aptly, unless something can be done to change the direction Bush and Dobson are taking us. The problem is that far too many Americans openly espouse not only the faith of George W. Bush but also the underlying philosophy which permits this faith to be intertwined with the governance of the land. “God bless America” has become a rallying cry for this crowd, and those too ignorant and/or afraid to speak out in opposition. If this statement has merit, what does it say for the 6.8 billion others in the world today who are not Americans? That God condemns them? The American embrace of divine destiny is not unique in history (one only has to recall that the belt buckles of the German army during World War II read “God is with us"). But for a nation born of the age of reason to collectively fall victim to the most base of fear-induced theology is a clear indication that America currently fails to live up to its founding principles. Rather than turning to Dobson and his ilk for guidance in these troubled times, Americans would be well served to reflect on President Abraham Lincoln’s second inaugural address, delivered in the middle of a horrific civil war which makes all of the conflict America finds itself in today pale in comparison:

“Both [North and South] read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. ... The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes. ... [T]hat He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him?”

God is not on our side, or the side of any single nation or people. To believe such is the ultimate expression of national hubris. To invoke such, if one is a true believer, is to embrace sacrilege and heresy. This, of course, is an individual right, granted as an extension of religious freedom. But it is not a collective right, nor is it a right born of governance, especially in a land protected by the separation of church and state.

The issue of Iran is a national problem which requires a collective debate, discussion and dialogue inclusive of all the facts, and stripped of all ideology and theocracy which would seek to deny reasoned thought conducted within a framework of accepted laws and ideals. It is grossly irresponsible of an American president to invoke the imagery of World War III without first sharing with the American people the framework of thought that produced such a comparison. Such openness will not be forthcoming from this administration or president. Not in the form of Stephen Hadley’s policy of no policy, designed with intent to avoid and subvert both bureaucratic and legislative process and oversight, or Dick Cheney’s secret government within a government, operating above and beyond the law and in a manner which violates both legal and moral norms and values, and certainly not in the president’s own private conversations with “God,” either directly or through the medium of lunatic evangelicals who embrace the termination of all we stand for, and especially the future of our next generation, in a fiery holocaust born from the fraudulent writings of centuries past. The processes which compelled George W. Bush to speak of a World War III are intentionally not transparent to the American people. The president has much to explain, and it would be incumbent upon every venue of civic and public pressure to demand that such an explanation be forthcoming in the near future. The stakes regarding Iran have always been high, but never more so than when a nation’s leader invokes the end of days as a solution.

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/200710...of_destruction/

Analysis: A possible new Iraq war
Washington (UPI) Oct 22, 2007 - A Turkish invasion of Iraq over the Kurdish separatist group based in the northern Iraq mountains highlights -- and risks escalating -- the tension between Washington and allies Turkey, Iraq and Iraq's Kurds. Turkey is mad at the United States for what it sees as the selective prosecution of the war on terrorism, among other reasons, and blames Iraq's national government and the Kurdist ... more

Bombing Targets Anti-terrorist Group; One Terrorist Killed, Four Detained
Washington DC (SPX) Oct 23, 2007 - The headquarters of a political organization opposed to al Qaeda and other terrorist groups was bombed last night in the Adhamiyah neighborhood on the Iraqi capital's east side, officials reported. An improvised explosive device made with about 35 pounds of homemade explosives was detonated outside the headquarters building of the Adhamiyah Islamic Party in Baghdad. The blast caused no injuries ... more

Defense Focus: Israel's fence -- Part 1
Washington (UPI) Oct 22, 2007 - Flying by helicopter along the entire northern half of Israel's security barrier sealing off most of the West Bank to lock out Palestinian suicide bombers brings home clearly a simple truth almost never mentioned in the U.S. and European media -- the security barrier is a fence, not a wall. Flying over the entire length of the barrier, or fence, from Tel Aviv east to Jerusalem then nort ... more

Military Matters: Marine way in Kabul
Washington (UPI) Oct 22, 2007 - The Pentagon earlier this month floated a trial balloon suggesting that all U.S. Marines might pull out of Iraq and head to Afghanistan, while the U.S. 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 Ira ... more

New Iran negotiator to hold first nuclear talks
Tehran (AFP) Oct 22, 2007 - Iran's new nuclear negotiator will meet EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana in Rome on Tuesday for his first talks on the atomic crisis with the West amid little expectation of any breakthrough. Saeed Jalili has taken over from Ali Larijani, who held the post for over two years but resigned on Saturday after falling out with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad over the handling of Iran's nuclea ... more

Putin, Bush talk amid discord on missile defence
Moscow (AFP) Oct 22, 2007 - The leaders of Russia and the United States Monday stressed the need to "reinforce their cooperation", the Kremlin said, amid disagreement about Washington's missile defence plans in Europe. US President George W. Bush had telephoned his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin. "The two presidents underscored the need to conserve and reinforce cooperation mechanisms to guarantee perspectiv ... more

Bear Stearns, China's CITIC Securities forge alliance
New York (AFP) Oct 22, 2007 - US investment bank and brokerage Bear Stearns and China's CITIC Securities Co. Ltd announced a strategic alliance Monday in a deal involving investments of at least two billion dollars. Under its terms, the two securities firms will seek new business opportunities in China's rapidly-growing economy while forging a joint venture company to combine their existing businesses operations across A ... more

Energy poses major 21st century crisis: scientists
Paris (AFP) Oct 22, 2007 - Energy poses one of the greatest threats facing humanity this century, the world's leading academies of science warned Monday, highlighting the peril of oil wars and climate change driven by addiction to fossil fuels. Nations must provide power for the 1.6 billion people who live without electricity and wean themselves off energy sources that stoke global warming and geopolitical conflict, t ... more

US sanctions Against Iran Could Threaten LUKoil Project
Moscow (RIA Novosti) Oct 23, 2007 - Russia's largest independent crude producer LUKoil said on Monday that possible U.S. sanctions against Iran could threaten the company's Anaran oil project in the Islamic Republic. The Anaran project is a joint undertaking involving Norwegian Norsk Hydro (75%) and LUKoil Overseas (25%). The Anaran oil block has oil reserves of 2 billion barrels. LUKoil said that as its investments in the p ... more

Gates meets Turkey's defence chief amid Iraq incursion fears
Kiev (AFP) Oct 21, 2007 - US Defence Secretary Robert Gates met here Sunday with his Turkish counterpart amid tensions over Ankara's plans for possible strikes on Kurdish rebels in northern Iraq, though no action appeared imminent. Gates urged Turkey to use restraint -- "not to be confused with weakness" -- before launching a cross-border operation to hit the bases of the separatist Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK). ... more

New Iran negotiator to hold first nuclear talks
Tehran (AFP) Oct 22, 2007 - Iran's new nuclear negotiator will hold Tuesday his first talks with EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana on the atomic crisis with the West, amid fresh US threats over the dangers of Tehran's defiance. Saeed Jalili, who will meet Solana in Rome, is a close ally of hardline President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and is not expected to offer any concessions to break the deadlock in the four-year stan ... more

China blocks US request for WTO panel on film, music imports
Geneva (AFP) Oct 22, 2007 - China on Monday blocked a US request for the World Trade Organisation (WTO) to rule on a complaint that Beijing restricts the import of cultural goods such as books, music and DVDs. The US asked that the complaint be investigated by the WTO's Dispute Settlement Body but China blocked the move, as it is allowed to do under the global trade body's rules. However, should the US renew its re ... more

Beijing's population to hit 20 million by 2020: report
Beijing (AFP) Oct 22, 2007 - Beijing's population will hit the 20 million mark by 2020 as millions of migrants looking for work flood into the capital, an academic report said Monday. The increase is entirely down to people moving here from rural areas because growth due to birth rate has stood at zero for the past five years, according to the study by Peking University's Institute of Population Research. Beijing's ... more

HOW TO UNDERSTAND JIHAD. . . . OH, AND, UM, EVANGELICAL PROTESTANTS - DAVID BENFELL (LIVE JOURNAL, OCTOBER 22): .
http://benfell.livejournal.com/133711.html
NATO TO BATTLE TALIBAN ON YOUTUBE: AFGHAN MISSION FINALLY READY TO PULL PLUG ON COLD WAR CAUTION AND STONE AGE METHODS - MITCH POTTER (STAR.COM, OCTOBER 21): http://www.thestar.com/News/article/268897

IRAN ROCKS ITS NUCLEAR BOAT - KAVEH L AFRASIABI (ASIA TIMES, OCTOBER 22): Iranians are coming to terms with the sudden resignation of their chief nuclear negotiator, Ali Larijani, and his replacement with Saeed Jalili, a deputy foreign minister and close ally of President Mahmud Ahmadinejad. While it is too early to draw any comprehensive review of Larijani's performance as negotiator, it appears that his distinct contribution was in the area of tactical maneuvers, quiet diplomacy, and less in terms of public diplomacy. http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/IJ23Ak03.html
THE COMING U.S.-RUSSIAN TRAIN WRECK -- IS ISRAEL CAUGHT IN THE MIDDLE? - ARIEL COHEN (JERUSALEM FOR PUBLIC AFFAIRS, OCTOBER 23): Arms sales are but one item in Moscow's full array of modern international relations tools: from public diplomacy, to weapons sales backed up by the ample credit lines of an energy superpower; from putting former and possibly current political leaders on the petrodollar payroll, to strategic information operations (SIOs) aimed at depicting America as an out-of-control hyper-power and a threat to the international community, to coddling terrorist organizations. In the words of one incisive observer, "Russia has left the West."
http://www.jcpa.org/JCPA/Templates/ShowPag...t_in_the_Middle
INDIA PRESSED TO TAKE A MORE PUBLIC ROLE IN PRESSURING MYANMAR JUNTA ASSOCIATED PRESS (INTERNATIONAL HERALD TRIBUNE, OCTOBER 22): 'As a democracy one expects more from India," said Brad Adams, the Asia director at the New York-based Human Rights Watch. "We would like India to speak publicly. They do their diplomacy in private but there is no doubt that public diplomacy is necessary" said Adams, adding that India needs to make it clear to the Myanmar junta that there will be consequences for its actions.' http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2007/10/22/...ilent-India.php
ABUSE OF SKILLED-WORKER VISAS: THE TECHNOLOGY INDUSTRY WANTS MORE GUEST-WORKER VISAS. THE PROGRAM NEEDS CLEANING UP FIRST EDITORIAL (CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR, OCTOBER 22): But even with reforms, demand for more temporary visas should meet with skepticism. The better effort would be to adjust salaries, which have been flat or falling, and encourage science and math studies, so that Americans can again restock the pipeline.
http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/1022/p08s01-comv.html
WHAT TO DO ABOUT PIXELS OF HATE - MICHAEL MOSS (NEW YORK TIMES, OCTOBER 21): One by one, starting a few weeks ago, 40 militant Islamist Web sites got knocked off the Internet. Happily claiming credit for the jihadi blackout is a Christian-Lebanese engineer named Joseph G. Shahda, who is waging a private, and passionate, war on terrorism from his home near Boston. Most of the 40 sites he brought down eventually came back online by switching to new Internet providers.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/21/weekinre...agewanted=print
STATE DEPARTMENT STRUGGLES TO OVERSEE PRIVATE ARMY: THE STATE DEPARTMENT TURNED TO CONTRACTORS SUCH AS BLACKWATER AMID A FIGHT WITH THE PENTAGON OVER PERSONAL SECURITY IN IRAQ - KAREN DEYOUNG (WASHINGTON POST, OCTOBER 21): Many at State acknowledged the Pentagon's point that soldiers were not trained as personal protectors. Others worried that surrounding civilian officials with helmets and Humvees would undermine the message of friendly democracy they were trying to instill in Iraq.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...2001325_pf.html
2 REPORTS ASSAIL STATE DEPT. ROLE IN IRAQ SECURITY - ERIC SCHMITT AND DAVID ROHDE (NEW YORK TIMES, OCTOBER 23)
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/23/washingt...agewanted=print
IRAQI INTERPRETERS WALK THE TALK: THEY GO ON PATROL WITH U.S. TROOPS, WITHOUT WEAPONS, AND LEAD SECRET LIVES IN FEAR OF INSURGENTS - TINA SUSMAN (LOS ANGELES TIMES, OCTOBER 21)
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/wo...1,2398785.story
SUICIDE IS NOT PAINLESS - FRANK RICH (NEW YORK TIMES, OCTOBER 21): America has routinely betrayed the very values of democratic governance that it hoped to export to Iraq. The culture of corruption, Iraq war division, remains firmly entrenched.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/21/opinion/...agewanted=print
NEXT CHALLENGE IN IRAQ - DAVID IGNATIUS (WASHINGTON POST, OCTOBER 21): The one certainty about Iraq is that a large US troop presence isn't acceptable over the long run, for Iraqis or Americans. So US military commanders are wise to examine how to use the remarkable success of recent months to create alternatives that rely less on US firepower.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...7101902274.html
WHO'S AFRAID OF GEN. PETRAEUS? - JOHN TAYLOR (ANTIWAR.COM, OCTOBER 22): As Bush uses Petraeus to prolong the agony in Iraq, the military becomes the administration's water-carrier as well as its spear-thrower.
http://www.antiwar.com/orig/jtaylor.php?articleid=11793
NEW PIECES CHANGING THE IRAQ PUZZLE ? IRA CHERNUS (COMMON DREAMS, OCTOBER 22): All we know for sure is that hundreds of billions of our tax dollars are paying for daily slaughter, and whatever aims our government may have now, they have nothing to do with the best interests of the people of Iraq.
http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/10/22/4726/
DEPLOYING FOR 'THE NEW NORMAL' - JIM HOAGLAND (WASHINGTON POST, OCTOBER 21): A fatal flaw in the U.S. occupation of Iraq has been to insist too long on an illusory national unity enforced from Baghdad and to refuse to let Iraqis find their own messy, at times violent, ways of resolving their internal conflicts.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...1902275_pf.html
CAUSE OF IRAQ'S CHAOS: BAD BORDERS: PEOPLE, INCLUDING IRAQIS, LIKE TO LIVE AMONG THEIR OWN. SO LET THEM - O'BRIEN BROWNE (CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR, OCTOBER 22): Iraq should be allowed to separate into three distinct nations -- one Sunni, one Kurd, and one Shiite. Moreover, none of these entities should even go by the name of "Iraq," which is little more than a colonial sobriquet.
http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/1022/p09s02-coop.html
MAKE WALLS, NOT WAR - PETER W. GALBRAITH (NEW YORK TIMES, OCTOBER 23): Partition is a better outcome than a Sunni-Shiite civil war. There is, in any event, little alternative to partition. Iraq cannot be reconstructed as a unitary state, and the sooner we face up to this reality, the better.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/23/opinion/...agewanted=print
POST-U.S. SCENARIOS: THE BAD, THE WORSE, AND THE UGLY: SCENARIOS FOR A POST-OCCUPATION IRAQ - ROBERT DREYFUSS (MOTHER JONES, OCTOBER 18)
http://www.motherjones.com/cgi-bin/print_a...-scenarios.html
DIAGNOSING BUSH'S FAILURE IN IRAQ; STAGECRAFT, NOT STATECRAFT - DENNIS ROSS (NEW REPUBLIC, OCTOBER 22)
http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=...30-d928b3403a78
THE ROADS NOT TAKEN: HOW WE NARROWLY AVOIDED DEFEAT IN IRAQ - FRED BARNES (WEEKLY STANDARD, OCTOBER 29): The war is winnable and indeed now is being won, thanks to the surge.
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Publ...14/249bigft.asp
DEADLY EMBRACE: HOW MUCH OF THE WAR ON TERROR IS BLOWBACK FROM U.S. POLICIES? - FAWAZ A. GERGES (WASHINGTON POST, OCTOBER 21): As Americans contemplate the morass in Iraq, one of the saddest questions is whether it is partly "blowback" -- intelligence jargon for what goes around, comes around.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...1801921_pf.html
THE 'KURDISH PROBLEM' IS OUR PROBLEM: TURKEY HAS A LEGITIMATE COMPLAINT AGAINST THE U.S. FOR NOT DOING MORE TO STOP KURDISH TERRORISTS IN IRAQ (LOS ANGELES TIMES, OCTOBER 22)
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-ed-...pinion-leftrail
EVEN CLOSER TO THE BRINK - EDITORIAL (NEW YORK TIMES, OCTOBER 23): The news out of Iraq just keeps getting worse. Now Turkey is threatening to send troops across the border to wipe out Kurdish rebel bases, after guerrillas killed at least a dozen Turkish soldiers. This latest crisis should have come as no surprise. But it is one more widely predicted problem the Bush administration failed to plan for before its misguided invasion -- and one more problem it urgently needs to deal with as part of a swift and orderly exit from Iraq.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/23/opinion/...agewanted=print
TURKEY'S WISE HESITATION: AN INVASION OF NORTHERN IRAQ WOULD BENEFIT NO ONE BUT KURDISH EXTREMISTS EDITORIAL (WASHINGTON POST, OCTOBER 23)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...7102201672.html
THE TURKISH FRONT: THE PATH TO A BETTER MIDDLE EAST GOES THROUGH ANKARA (OPINION JOURNAL FROM THE WALL STREET JOURNAL EDITORIAL PAGE, OCTOBER 20): Turkey wants a unitary, stable and prosperous Iraq, and should know that any wrong moves in the north could jeopardize that. The Turks unabashedly support Israel's right to exist and can't abide a nuclear Iran. On these and other issues, Ankara is an indispensable partner for America.
http://www.opinionjournal.com/weekend/hottopic/?id=110010760
HERE'S HOPING PELOSI PEEVES THE TURKS CHARLEY REESE (ANTIWAR.COM, OCTOBER 22): Given President Bush's determination to keep American troops in Iraq apparently forever, if the Turks made it harder to do that, they would be doing us a favor.
http://www.antiwar.com/reese/?articleid=11795
RETHINKING RELATIONSHIPS: TIME TO GET TOUGH WITH TURKEY? - JONATHAN FOREMAN (NATIONAL REVIEW, OCTOBER 22): The United States should radically rethink its relationship with Turkey. For the sad fact is that Ankara no longer seems to be an ally worthy of the name -- indeed its threatened invasion of Iraq would be the act of an outright enemy. Nor has Turkey behaved like a genuine ally for more than four years.
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=ZmI0M...ZjRjMWZjOTA4MWI=
ARMENIAN GENOCIDE MEASURE IS MISGUIDED: PASSING JUDGMENT ON TURKEY WITHOUT ALL OF THE FACTS WOULD BE A TRAVESTY OF JUSTICE - BRUCE FEIN (SF GATE.COM OCTOBER 21)
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?...;type=printable
LET'S LET THE ARMENIANS REST - WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY JR. (NATIONAL REVIEW, OCTOBER 22): On the moral point, there is no way in which Turkey can advance its credentials by trivializing what in fact was done to the Armenians, more than 1 million of them having been killed, allowed to starve, or exiled. But this ought not to be a quarrel that affects contemporary points of contention in Iraq.
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=MDQ4O...MWEwZDY5ODgzNWI=
THE U.S. AND TURKEY: HONESTY IS THE BEST POLICY - SAMANTHA POWER (TIME, OCTOBER 20): While Turkey may invoke the genocide resolution as grounds for ignoring US wishes, it has a longer history of snubbing Washington when it wants to.
http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,1672790,00.html
US DENIAL OF THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE - STEPHEN ZUNES (FOREIGN POLICY IN FOCUS, OCTOBER 22/COMMON DREAMS): Dozens of other governments -- including Canada, France, Italy, and Russia -- and several UN bodies have formally recognized the Armenian genocide, as have the governments of 40 US states. Neither the Bush administration nor Congress appears willing to do so, however. Failure to pass a resolution calling on President Bush to acknowledge the genocide, then, amounts to an acceptance of his genocide denial.
http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/10/22/4735/
THE POLITICS OF "APPEEVEMENT: IS THERE A METHOD TO BUSH'S MIDDLE EAST MADNESS? - RANNIE AMIRI (COUNTERPUNCH, OCTOBER 22): In a matter of weeks, the United States quite intentionally miffed the Russians, Chinese and Turks under the guise of defending Europe, upholding human rights and suddenly decrying an historical tragedy. This assures their cooperation on Iran will be made all the more difficult and gives the United States the pretext it needs to act unilaterally and likely, militarily. An ingenious, yet diabolical, plan.
http://www.counterpunch.org/amiri10222007.html
FORGOTTEN FACES OF WAR - JAMES CARROLL (BOSTON GLOBE, OCTOBER 22): Iraqi civil war, conflict with Iran, Turkish-Kurdish violence, chaos throughout the Middle East -- and now President Bush tells us that, if we don't defuse the regional body vest carefully, World War III will start. There it is. Bush himself acknowledging at last what, under his leadership, the United States has done. We have put an explosive vest on Earth itself.
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial..._of_war?mode=PF
AVOIDING WWIII: THREATENING IRAN IS POOR STRATEGY EDITORIAL (LOS ANGELES TIMES, OCTOBER 20): Bush should be discouraged from threatening Iran -- either directly or via leaks about Cheney's alleged enthusiasm for bombing -- because Americans cannot be sure that he is just bluffing.
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-ed-...pinion-leftrail
FALLOUT: NO, IT?S NOT REALLY WORLD WAR III - DAVID STOUT (NEW YORK TIMES, OCTOBER 21): President Bush did not complain about the news coverage when he suggested that an Iran with nuclear weapons could set off World War III, but his remark cries out for context nonetheless. Mr. Bush and top administration officials are known to believe that to renounce force unequivocally beforehand -- as a general diplomatic rule, not just in dealing with Iran -- would render the United States powerless diplomatically.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/21/weekinre...agewanted=print
WWIII ? BRING IT ON - GORDON PRATHER (ANTIWAR.COM, OCTOBER 20): If Bush is to be believed, he's recently told Putin that he is willing to start World War III, not because Iran allegedly has nukes with which to allegedly attack Israel, or not because Iran has the capability of making the material to make nukes with which to allegedly attack Israel, or not even because Iran allegedly wants to make nukes with which to allegedly attack Israel. Now all it takes to start WWIII is some Iranians knowing how to make a nuke.
http://www.antiwar.com/prather/?articleid=11786
ON THE EVE OF DESTRUCTION - SCOTT RITTER (TRUTHDIG, OCTOBER 22): The issue of Iran is a national problem which requires a collective debate, discussion and dialogue inclusive of all the facts, and stripped of all ideology and theocracy which would seek to deny reasoned thought conducted within a framework of accepted laws and ideals. It is grossly irresponsible of an American president to invoke the imagery of World War III without first sharing with the American people the framework of thought that produced such a comparison.
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/200710...of_destruction/
STALIN, MAO AND ... AHMADINEJAD? CONSERVATIVES HAVE BECOME SURPRISINGLY CHARITABLE ABOUT TWO OF HISTORY'S GREATEST MASS MURDERERS - FAREED ZAKARIA (NEWSWEEK, OCTOBER 20): The American discussion about Iran has lost all connection to reality.
http://www.newsweek.com/id/57346/output/print
WHY DID LARIJANI RESIGN? IRAN BUYS MORE TIME - MICHAEL LEDEEN (NATIONAL REVIEW, OCTOBER 22): The main point is that we still have no Iran policy.
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=MTA3M...YzE0ZDBjNDAzZWM=
ONE STRIKE, IRAN COULD BE OUT - NIALL FERGUSON (LOS ANGELES TIMES, OCTOBER 22): Bush?s statement that "if you're interested in avoiding World War III, it seems like you ought to be interested in preventing them [the Iranians] from having the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon" would seem to suggest that he is ready to use military force against Iran if he sees the alternative as mere appeasement. http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-...inion-rightrail

CHENEY: US WILL NOT LET IRAN GO NUCLEAR - MATTHEW BARAKAT, ASSOCIATED PRESS (WASHINGTON POST, OCTOBER 22)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...2200198_pf.html
IS IRAN'S MILITARY 'TERRORIST'? CONGRESS WANTS THE ADMINISTRATION TO OFFICIALLY DEEM IRAN'S REVOLUTIONARY GUARD TERRORISTS ? EDITORIAL (LOS ANGELES TIMES, OCTOBER 20): President Bush isn't the only one shaking his fist at Iran these days. Getting tough with Tehran is an increasingly popular bipartisan sport in Washington.
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-ed-...pinion-leftrail
THE DEAL ON THE TABLE - JACKSON DIEHL (WASHINGTON POST, OCTOBER 22): Rice's diplomacy has already produced one significant result: It has proved that the past seven years -- during which both Israelis and Palestinians did their best to change the terms of the available two-state peace settlement, while the Bush administration mostly refused to intervene -- were a tragic waste of time.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...2101370_pf.html
UPGRADING AUTHORITARIANISM IN THE ARAB WORLD - STEVEN HEYDEMANN (BROOLKINGS, OCTOBER 22): After twenty years, Arab regimes have become proficient at containing and disarming democracy pro¬motion -- if not exploiting it for their own purposes. Strategies that take advantage of the openings offered by authoritarian upgrading are more likely to advance democratic change in the Middle East than the continuation of policies that do not take into account how governance in the Arab world is being transformed.
http://www.brookings.edu/papers/2007/10arabworld.aspx?p=1 VIA
http://abuaardvark.typepad.com/abuaardvark...mann-upgra.html
TROUBLING TIMES IN PAKISTAN EDITORIAL (WASHINGTON TIMES, OCTOBER 22): The extensive penetration of Pakistan's powerful Inter-Services Intelligence agency by radical Islamists, including al Qaeda sympathizers, remains a huge problem. It continues to be a huge obstacle to Islamabad's full-fledged cooperation with Washington in fighting terrorism. But public opinion does give some signs of a trend toward moderation.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/apps/pbcs.d...mplate=printart
WHILE PAKISTAN BURNS: AL QAEDA REGROUPS IN THE TRIBAL AREAS, THE GOVERNMENT FALTERS. WHAT IS TO BE DONE? - DAVEED GARTENSTEIN-ROSS (WEEKLY STANDARD, OCTOBER 29): We are not doomed to remain on our present course -- supporting Musharraf no matter what he does and bombing targets of opportunity, with no plan for destroying al Qaeda's new safe haven. That course is plainly ineffective.
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Publ...14/253vpget.asp
PUTIN THE PUPPET MASTER - OLIVER NORTH (WASHINGTON TIMES, OCTOBER 21): Moscow and Tehran share a strategic interest in bad outcomes for the United States in Iraq. An American collapse in Mesopotamia gives Iran the kind of regional hegemony Persians have sought for centuries. And a precipitous U.S. withdrawal from Iraq would confirm Moscow's assertion that the U.S. is an unreliable partner -- thus undermining NATO's eastward expansion.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/apps/pbcs.d...mplate=printart
MARCHING IN PLACE: CHINA'S COMMUNIST LEADER PLANS ANOTHER FIVE YEARS WITHOUT POLITICAL REFORM ? EDITORIAL (WASHINGTON POST, OCTOBER 20): The Chinese party congress itself symbolized the leadership's continued commitment to the hermetic and hidebound practices of the past. Secrecy and wooden orchestration marked the proceedings; political dissidents were swept up before the congress began. Newspapers were ordered to report only good news for weeks in advance. For that reason, we suspect many ordinary Chinese must have appreciated the decision by the U.S. Congress and President Bush to honor the Dalai Lama, Tibet's spiritual leader.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...1902197_pf.html
BIG RED CHECKBOOK - JOHN FEFFER (NATION, NOVEMBER 5 ISSUE): When it comes to US-China relations, Washington's mandarin class is worried less about soft-power competition at the margins than military confrontation over Taiwan, head-to-head economic competition and the potential of China to implode politically.
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20071105/feffer
CHINA'S PROPAGANDA TSAR ENJOYED METEORIC RISE REUTERS (OCTOBER 22): Technocrat turned ideology tsar Li Changchun enjoyed a meteoric rise through the bruising arena of Chinese politics through skilful patronage and despite a provincial scandal involving massive AIDS infections.
http://www.reuters.com/articlePrint?articl...EK1254020071022
US-INDIA FALLOUT EDITORIAL COMMENT (FINANCIAL TIMES, OCTOBER 22): It is in the interests of all nations -- in the end, including India and the US -- that the hard-won non-proliferation rules are affirmed and upheld.
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/fa63a0c2-8003-11...?nclick_check=1
GETTING SERIOUS ABOUT 'TORTURE' - DAVID B. RIVKIN JR. AND LEE A. CASEY (WALL STREET JOURNAL, OCTOBER 22): Coercive interrogations have been key in preventing post-9/11 attacks on American soil. To preempt future attacks the intelligence agencies must continue to have information that can often be obtained only from captured terrorists.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1193017911...in_commentaries PAID SUBSCRIPTION

AMERICA MUST ACT NOW - ZACH WAMP (WASHINGTON TIMES, OCTOBER 22): We need to offer opportunities that allow peaceloving, moderate Muslims to condemn terrorism and encourage them with resolutions of support promoting peace between all three "Abrahamic" religions. The big picture means we must dramatically improve our foreign policy in the Arab world and throughout our allied countries because we should not have to kill hundreds of thousands of people to defend our way of life and extend freedom to future generations. (Rep. Zach Wamp is ranking member on the House Appropriations Subcommittee on the Legislative Branch.)
http://www.washingtontimes.com/apps/pbcs.d...mplate=printart
THE CINEMA OF TERROR - CHRISTINE SMALLWOOD (NATION, OCTOBER 22): Three new films -- Rendition, The Kingdom and Redacted -- take on the clash of civilizations. How does the "war on terror" look on the big screen?
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20071105/smallwood
HOW TO UNDERSTAND ISLAM - MALISE RUTHVEN (NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS, NOVEMBER 8): So long as there remains a generation of European Muslims who feel alienated from their parents' traditions yet rejected by the wider society, the style of religiosity supported from Arabia will remain a powerful "ultramontane" force.
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/20800
DEFENDING ISLAMOFASCISM: IT'S A VALID TERM. HERE'S WHY - CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS (SLATE, OCTOBER 22): As to the nation-state, al-Qaida's demand is that countries like Iraq and Saudi Arabia be dissolved into one great revived caliphate, but doesn't this have points of resemblance with the mad scheme of a "Greater Germany" or with Mussolini's fantasy of a revived Roman empire?
http://www.slate.com/id/2176389/
FORGET HALLOWEEN: IT'S ISLAMO-FASCISM AWARENESS WEEK - BARBARA EHRENREICH (NATION, OCTOBER 22): Halloween is a piece of pumpkin cake compared to Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week, which commences today. In this special week, organized by conservative pundit David Horowitz, we have a veritable witches' brew of Cheney-style anti-jihadism mixed in with old-fashioned, right-wing anti-feminism and a sour dash of anti-Semitism.
http://www.thenation.com/docprint.mhtml?i=...mp;s=ehrenreich
ON PROPAGANDA AND ISLAMOPHOBIA - ABUKAR ARMAN (ONLINE JOURNAL, OCTOBER 22): In this age of Reality TV where the real, the unreal, and the surreal are deeply entangled, few have the ability to decipher the disinformation or propaganda for what it truly is. Few would question: Is stereotyping a major religion in its entirety ethical or even prudent? Is there any historical or a current trend supporting the so-called 'Islamofascism' propagated by certain vociferous political and religious provocateurs?
http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_2556.shtml
TOMGRAM: CHALMERS JOHNSON, 12 BOOKS IN SEARCH OF A POLICY ? (TOM DISPATCH, OCTOBER 22): The American people must make the decision to dismantle both the empire that has been created in their name and the huge, still growing military establishment that undergirds it. It is a task at least comparable to that undertaken by the British government when, after World War II, it liquidated the British Empire.
http://tomdispatch.com/post/print/174852/T...520a%2520Policy
UNDERMINING U.S. ABROAD - VICTOR DAVIS HANSON (WASHINGTON TIMES, OCTOBER 20): Recently hundreds in Congress have decided they're better suited to handle international affairs than the State Department.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/apps/pbcs.d...mplate=printart

October 23, 2007 12 Books in Search of a Policy
by Chalmers Johnson and Tom Engelhardt
TomDispatch They came in as unreformed Cold Warriors, only lacking a cold war – and looking for an enemy: a Russia to roll back even further, rogue states like Saddam's rickety dictatorship to smash. They were still in the old fight, eager to make sure that the "Evil Empire," already long down for the count, would remain prostrate forever; eager to ensure that any new evil empire like, say, China's would never be able to stand tall enough to be a challenge. They saw opportunities to move into areas previously beyond the reach of American imperial power like the former SSRs of the Soviet Union in Central Asia, which just happened to be sitting on potentially fabulous undeveloped energy fields; or farther into the even more fabulously energy-rich Middle East, where Saddam's Iraq, planted atop the planet's third largest reserves of petroleum, seemed so ready for a fall – with other states in the region visibly not far behind.

It looked like it would be a coming-out party for one – the debutante ball of the season. It would be, in fact, like the Cold War without the Soviet Union. What a blast! And they could still put their energies into their fabulously expensive, ever-misfiring anti-missile system, a subject they regularly focused on from January 2000 until Sept. 10, 2001.

They were Cold Warriors in search of an enemy – just not the one they got. When the Clintonistas, on their way out of the White House, warned them about al-Qaeda, they paid next to no attention. Non-state actors were for wusses. When the CIA carefully presented the president with a one-page, knock-your-socks-off warning on Aug. 6, 2001, that had the screaming headline, "Bin Laden determined to strike in U.S.," they ignored it. Bush and his top officials were, as it happened, strangely adrift until Sept. 11, 2001; then, they were panicked and terrified – until they realized that their moment had come to hijack the plane of state; so they clambered aboard, and like the Cold Warriors they were, went after Saddam.

Chalmers Johnson was himself once a Cold Warrior. Unlike the top officials of the Bush administration, however, he retained a remarkably flexible mind. He also had a striking ability to see the world as it actually was – and a prescient vision of what was to come. He wrote the near-prophetic and now-classic book, Blowback, published well before the attacks of 9/11, and then followed it up with an anatomy of the U.S. military's empire of bases, The Sorrows of Empire, and finally, to end his Blowback Trilogy, a vivid recipe for American catastrophe, Nemesis: The Fall of the American Republic. All three are simply indispensable volumes in any reasonable post-9/11 library. Here is his latest consideration of that disastrous moment and its consequences as part of a series of book reviews he is periodically writing for TomDispatch. Tom

A Guide for the Perplexed

Intellectual fallacies of the War on Terror
by Chalmers Johnson

[This essay is a review of The Matador's Cape, America's Reckless Response to Terror by Stephen Holmes (Cambridge University Press, 367 pp., $30).]

There are many books entitled "A Guide for the Perplexed," including Moses Maimonides' 12th-century treatise on Jewish law and E. F. Schumacher's 1977 book on how to think about science. Book titles cannot be copyrighted. A Guide for the Perplexed might therefore be a better title for Stephen Holmes' new book than the one he chose, The Matador's Cape: America's Reckless Response to Terror. In his perhaps overly clever conception, the matador is the terrorist leadership of al-Qaeda, taunting a maddened United States into an ultimately fatal reaction. But do not let the title stop you from reading the book. Holmes has written a powerful and philosophically erudite survey of what we think we understand about the 9/11 attacks – and how and why the United States has magnified many times over the initial damage caused by the terrorists.

Stephen Holmes is a law professor at New York University. In The Matador's Cape, he sets out to forge an understanding – in an intellectual and historical sense, not as a matter of journalism or of partisan politics – of the Iraq war, which he calls "one of the worst (and least comprehensible) blunders in the history of American foreign policy" (p. 230). His modus operandi is to survey in depth approximately a dozen influential books on post-Cold War international politics to see what light they shed on America's missteps. I will touch briefly on the books he chooses for dissection, highlighting his essential thoughts on each of them.

Holmes' choice of books is interesting. Many of the authors he focuses on are American conservatives or neoconservatives, which is reasonable since they are the ones who caused the debacle. He avoids progressive or left-wing writers, and none of his choices are from Metropolitan Books' American Empire Project. (Disclosure: This review was written before I read Holmes' review of my own book Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic in the Oct. 29 issue of The Nation.)

He concludes: "Despite a slew of carefully researched and insightful books on the subject, the reason why the United States responded to the al-Qaeda attack by invading Iraq remains to some extent an enigma" (p. 3). Nonetheless, his critiques of the books he has chosen are so well done and fair that they constitute one of the best introductions to the subject. They also have the advantage in several cases of making it unnecessary to read the original.

Holmes interrogates his subjects cleverly. His main questions and the key books he dissects for each of them are:

Did Islamic religious extremism cause 9/11? Here he supplies his own independent analysis and conclusion (to which I turn below).

<li> Why did American military preeminence breed delusions of omnipotence, as exemplified in Robert Kagan's Of Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order (Knopf, 2003)? While not persuaded by Kagan's portrayal of the United States as "Mars" and Europe as "Venus," Holmes takes Kagan's book as illustrative of neoconservative thought on the use of force in international politics: "Far from guaranteeing an unbiased and clear-eyed view of the terrorist threat, as Kagan contends, American military superiority has irredeemably skewed the country's view of the enemy on the horizon, drawing the United States, with appalling consequences, into a gratuitous, cruel, and unwinnable conflict in the Middle East" (p. 72).

<li> How was the war lost, as analyzed in Cobra II: The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq by Michael Gordon and Bernard Trainor (Pantheon, 2006)? Holmes regards this book by Gordon, the military correspondent of the New York Times, and Trainor, a retired Marine Corps lieutenant general, as the best treatment of the military aspects of the disaster, down to and including U.S. envoy L. Paul Bremer's disbanding of the Iraqi military. I would argue that Fiasco (Penguin 2006) by the Washington Post's Thomas Ricks is more comprehensive, clearer-eyed, and more critical.

<li> How did a tiny group of individuals, with eccentric theories and reflexes, recklessly compound the country's post-9/11 security nightmare? Here Holmes considers James Mann's Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush's War Cabinet (Viking, 2004). One of Mann's more original insights is that the neocons in the Bush administration were so bewitched by Cold War thinking that they were simply incapable of grasping the new realities of the post-Cold War world. "In Iraq, alas, the lack of a major military rival excited some aging hard-liners into toppling a regime that they did not have the slightest clue how to replace…. We have only begun to witness the long-term consequences of their ghastly misuse of unaccountable power" (p. 106).

<li> What roles did Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld play in the Bush administration, as captured in Michael Mann's Incoherent Empire (Verso, 2003)? According to Holmes, Mann's work "repays close study, even by readers who will not find its perspective altogether congenial or convincing." He argues that perhaps Mann's most important contribution, even if somewhat mechanically put, is to stress the element of bureaucratic politics in Cheney's and Rumsfeld's manipulation of the neophyte Bush: "The outcome of inter- and intra-agency battles in Washington, D.C., allotted disproportionate influence to the fatally blurred understanding of the terrorist threat shared by a few highly placed and shrewd bureaucratic infighters. Rumsfeld and Cheney controlled the military; and when they were given the opportunity to rank the country's priorities in the war on terror, they assigned paramount importance to those specific threats that could be countered effectively only by the government agency over which they happened to preside" (p. 107).

<li> Why did the U.S. decide to search for a new enemy after the Cold War, as argued by an old Cold Warrior, Samuel Huntington, in The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (Simon and Schuster, 1996)? It is not clear why Holmes included Huntington's 11-year-old treatise on "Allah made them do it" in his collection of books on post-Cold War international politics except as an act of obeisance to establishmentarian – and especially Council-on-Foreign-Relations – thinking. Holmes regards Huntington's work as a "false template" and calls it misleading. Well before 9/11, many critics of Huntington's concept of "civilization" had pointed out that there is insufficient homogeneity in Christianity, Islam, or the other great religions for any of them to replace the position vacated by the Soviet Union. As Holmes remarks, Huntington "finds homogeneity because he is looking for homogeneity" (p. 136).

<li> What role did left-wing ideology play in legitimating the war on terror, as seen by Samantha Power in "A Problem from Hell": America and the Age of Genocide (Basic, 2002). As Holmes acknowledges, "The humanitarian interventionists rose to a superficial prominence in the 1990s largely because of a vacuum in U.S. foreign-policy thinking after the end of the Cold War…. Their influence was small, however, and after 9/11, that influence vanished altogether." He nonetheless takes up the anti-genocide activists because he suspects that, by making a rhetorically powerful case for casting aside existing decision-making rules and protocols, they may have emboldened the Bush administration to follow suit and fight the "evil" of terrorism outside the Constitution and the law. The idea that Power was an influence on Cheney and Rumsfeld may seem a stretch – they were, after all, doing what they had always wanted to do – but Holmes' argument that "a savvy pro-war party may successfully employ humanitarian talk both to gull the wider public and to silence potential critics on the liberal side" (p. 157) is worth considering.

<li> How did pro-war liberals help stifle national debate on the wisdom of the Iraq war, as illustrated by Paul Berman in Power and the Idealists (Soft Skull Press, 2005)? Wildly overstating his influence, Holmes writes, Berman, a regular columnist for The New Republic, "first tried to convince us that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, far from being a tribal war over scarce land and water, is part of the wider spiritual war between liberalism and apocalyptic irrationalism, not worth distinguishing too sharply from the conflict between America and al-Qaeda. He then attempted to show that Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden represented two 'branches' of an essentially homogeneous extremism" (p. 181). Berman, Holmes points out, conflated anti-terrorism with anti-fascism in order to provide a foundation for the neologism "Islamofascism." His chief reason for including Berman is that Holmes wants to address the views of religious fundamentalists in their support of the war on terrorism.

<li> How did democratization at the point of an assault rifle become America's mission in the world, as seen by the apostate neoconservative Francis Fukuyama in America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy (Yale University Press, 2006)? Holmes is interested in Fukuyama, the neoconservatives' perennial sophomore, because he offers an insider's insights into the chimerical neocon "democratization" project for the Middle East.
Fukuyama argues that democracy is the most effective antidote to the kind of Islamic radicalism that hit the United States on Sept. 11, 2001. He contends that the root of Islamic rebellion is to be found in the savage and effective repression of protesters – many of whom have been driven into exile – in places like Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan. Terrorism is not the enemy, merely a tactic Islamic radicals have found exceptionally effective. Holmes writes of Fukuyama's argument, "[T]o recognize that America's fundamental problem is Islamic radicalism, and that terrorism is only a symptom, is to invite a political solution. Promoting democracy is just such a political solution" (p. 209).

The problem, of course, is that not even the neocons are united on promoting democracy; and, even if they were, they do not know how to go about it. Fukuyama himself pleads for "a dramatic demilitarization of American foreign policy and a re-emphasis on other types of policy instruments." The Pentagon, in addition to its other deficiencies, is poorly positioned and incorrectly staffed to foster democratic transitions.

<li> Why is the contemporary American antiwar movement so anemic, as seen through the lens of history by Geoffrey Stone in Perilous Times: Free Speech in Wartime from the Sedition Act of 1798 to the War on Terrorism (W. W. Norton, 2004)? Holmes has nothing but praise for Stone's history of expanded executive discretion in wartime. A key question raised by Stone is why the American public has not been more concerned with what happened in Iraq at Abu Ghraib prison and in the wholesale destruction of the Sunni city of Fallujah. As Holmes sees it, the Bush administration, at least in this one area, was adept at subverting public protest. Among the more important lessons George Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Karl Rove, and others learned from the Vietnam conflict, he writes, was that if you want to suppress domestic questioning of foreign military adventures, then eliminate the draft, create an all-volunteer force, reduce domestic taxes, and maintain a false prosperity based on foreign borrowing.

<li> How did the embracing of American unilateralism elevate the Office of the Secretary of Defense over the Department of State, as put into perspective by John Ikenberry in After Victory: Institutions, Strategic Restraint, and the Rebuilding of Order After Major Wars (Princeton University Press, 2001)? This book is Holmes' oddest choice – a dated history from an establishment point of view of the international institutions created by the United States after World War II, including the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and NATO, all of which Ikenberry, a prominent academic specialist in international relations, applauds. Holmes agrees that, during the Cold War, the United States ruled largely through indirection, using seemingly impartial international institutions, and eliciting the cooperation of other nations. He laments the failure to follow this proven formula in the post-9/11 era, which led to the eclipse of the State Department by the Defense Department, an institution hopelessly ill-suited for diplomatic and nation-building missions.

<li> Why do we battle lawlessness with lawlessness (for example, by torturing prisoners) and concentrate extra-constitutional authority in the hands of the president, as expounded by John Yoo in The Powers of War and Peace: The Constitution and Foreign Affairs After 9/11 (University of Chicago Press, 2005)? In this final section, Holmes puts on his hat as the law professor he is and takes on George Bush's and Alberto Gonzales' in-house legal counsel, the University of California, Berkeley law professor John Yoo, who authored the "torture memos" for them, denied the legality of the Geneva Conventions, and elaborated a grandiose view of the president's war-making power. Holmes wonders, "Why would an aspiring legal scholar labor for years to develop and defend a historical thesis that is manifestly untrue? What is the point and what is the payoff? That is the principal mystery of Yoo's singular book. Characteristic of The Powers of War and Peace is the anemic relations between the evidence adduced and the inferences drawn" (p. 291).
Holmes then points out that Yoo is a prominent member of the Federalist Society, an association of conservative Republican lawyers who claim to be committed to recovering the original understanding of the Constitution and which includes several Republican appointees to the current Supreme Court. His conclusion on Yoo and his fellow neocons is devastating: "f the misbegotten Iraq war proves anything, it is the foolhardiness of allowing an autistic clique that reads its own newspapers and watches its own cable news channel to decide, without outsider input, where to expend American blood and treasure – that is, to decide which looming threats to stress and which to downplay or ignore" (p. 301).

Is Islam the Culprit or Merely a Distraction?

In addition to these broad themes, Holmes investigates hidden agendas and their distorting effects on rational policy-making. Some of these are: Cheney's desire to expand executive power and weaken congressional oversight; Rumsfeld's schemes to field-test his theory that in modern warfare speed is more important than mass; the plans by some of Cheney's and Rumsfeld's advisers to improve the security situation of Israel; the administration's desire to create a new set of permanent U.S. military bases in the Middle East to protect the U.S. oil supply in case of a collapse of the Saudi monarchy; and the desire to invade Iraq and thereby avoid putting all the blame for 9/11 on al-Qaeda – because to do so would have involved admitting administration negligence and incompetence during the first nine months of 2001 and, even worse, that Clinton was right in warning Bush and his top officials that the main security threat to the United States was a potential al-Qaeda attack or attacks.

This is not the place to attempt a comprehensive review of Holmes' detailed critiques. For that, one should buy and read his book. Let me instead dwell on three themes that I think illustrate his insight and originality.

Holmes rejects any direct connection between Islamic religious extremism and the 9/11 attacks, although he recognizes that Islamic vilification of the United States and other Western powers is often expressed in apocalyptically religious language. "Emphasizing religious extremism as the motivation for the [9/11] plot, whatever it reveals," he argues, "… terminates inquiry prematurely, encouraging us to view the attack ahistorically as an expression of 'radical Salafism,' a fundamentalist movement within Islam that allegedly drives its adherents to homicidal violence against infidels" (p. 2). This approach, he points out, is distinctly tautological: "Appeals to social norms or a culture of martyrdom are not very helpful…. They are tantamount to saying that suicidal terrorism is caused by a proclivity to suicidal terrorism" (p. 20).

Instead, he suggests, "The mobilizing ideology behind 9/11 was not Islam, or even Islamic fundamentalism, but rather a specific narrative of blame" (p. 63). He insists on putting the focus on the actual perpetrators, the 19 men who executed the attacks in New York and Washington – 15 Saudi Arabians, two citizens of the United Arab Emirates, one Egyptian, and one Lebanese. None of them was particularly religious. Three were living together in Hamburg, Germany, where they did appear to have become more interested in Islam than they had been in their home countries. Mohamed Atta, the leader of the group, age 33 on 9/11, had Egyptian and German degrees in architecture and city planning and became highly politicized in favor of the Palestinian cause against Zionism only after he went abroad.

Holmes notes, "According to the classic study of resentment, [Friedrich Nietzsche's [i]On the Genealogy of Morals (1887)] 'every sufferer instinctively seeks a cause for his suffering; more specifically, an agent, a "guilty" agent who is susceptible of pain – in short, some living being or other on whom he can vent his feelings directly or in effigy, under some pretext or other.' If suffering is seen as natural or uncaused it will be coded as misfortune instead of injustice, and it will produce resignation rather than rebellion. The most efficient way to incite, therefore, is to indict" (p. 64).

The role of bin Laden was, and remains, to provide such a hyperbolic indictment – one that men like Atta would never have heard back in authoritarian Egypt but that came through loud and clear in their German exile. Bin Laden demonized the United States, accusing it of genocide against Muslims and repeatedly contending that the presence of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia ever since the first Gulf War in 1991 was a far graver offense than the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, even though that had led to the death of 1 million Afghans and had sent 5 million more into exile.

The fact that the 9/11 plot involved the attackers' own self-destruction suggests possible irrationality on their part, but Holmes argues that this was actually part of the specific narrative of blame. Americans feel contempt for Muslims and ascribe little or no value to Muslim lives. Therefore, to be captured after a terrorist attack involved a high likelihood that the Americans would torture the perpetrator. Suicide took care of that worry (and provided several other advantages discussed below).

The United States as "Sole Remaining Superpower"

Another subject about which Holmes is strikingly original is the subtle way in which the collapse of the former Soviet Union and the United States' self-promotion as the sole remaining superpower clouded our vision and virtually guaranteed the catastrophe that ensued in Iraq. "Because Americans … have sunk so much of their national treasure into a military establishment fit to deter and perhaps fight an enemy that has now disappeared," he argues, "they have an almost irresistible inclination to exaggerate the centrality of rogue states, excellent targets for military destruction, [above] the overall terrorist threat. They overestimate war (which never unfolds as expected) and underestimate diplomacy and persuasion as instruments of American power" (pp. 71-72).

Holmes draws several interesting implications from this American overinvestment in Cold-War-type military power. One is that the very nature of the 9/11 attacks undermined crucial axioms of American national security doctrine. In a much more significant way than in the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center, a non-state actor on the international stage successfully attacked the United States, contrary to a well-established belief in Pentagon circles that only states have the capability of menacing us militarily. Equally alarming, by employing a strategy requiring their own deaths, the terrorists ensured that deterrence no longer held sway. Overwhelming military might cannot deter non-state actors who accept that they will die in their attacks on others. The day after 9/11, American leaders in Washington, D.C., suddenly felt unprotected and defenseless against a new threat they only imperfectly understood. They responded in various ways.

One was to recast what had happened in terms of Cold War thinking. "To repress feelings of defenselessness associated with an unfamiliar threat, the decision makers' gaze slid uncontrollably away from al-Qaeda and fixated on a recognizable threat that was unquestionably susceptible to being broken into bits" (p.312). Holmes calls this fusion of bin Laden and Saddam Hussein a "mental alchemy, the 'reconceiving' of an impalpable enemy as a palpable enemy." He endorses James Mann's thesis that Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and others did not change the underlying principles guiding American foreign policy in response to the 9/11 attacks; that, in fact, they did the exact opposite: "[T]he Bush administration has managed foreign affairs so ineptly because it has been reflexively implementing out-of-date formulas in a radically changed security environment" (p. 106).

Unintended consequences also played a role, Holmes argues: "If conservative congressmen had not blocked [Pennsylvania Governor] Tom Ridge's nomination as Defense Secretary [in 2000] for the ludicrously immaterial reason that he was wobbly on abortion, then the Cheney-Rumsfeld group, including Wolfowitz and [Douglas] F