Fixing Intelligence–Larry Interviews Val
By George Kenney on October 23, 2007 at 6:00 AM in Plamegate, Current Affairs

With Electric Politics providing some technical assistance, Larry Johnson interviews his former CIA classmate Valerie Plame Wilson, author of Fair Game. Click the “Audio mp3″ icon to listen or download here. Total runtime thirty five minutes (and please use the link on this page to buy the book).

It’s a fascinating conversation between two seasoned intelligence professionals, highly regarded by their peers, full of insight and humor.

To pick up on a point that both Larry and Valerie make: Following WWII, politicization of the U.S. administrative branch of government has run in one direction: it just gets worse. It’s been a serious problem at the State Department for decades, where successive administrations place political appointees at increasingly lower levels. With increasingly stupid policy outcomes. At the Defense Department, costs of useless but politically valuable weapons systems are legendary — indeed, the only natural correction there may be national bankruptcy. Now, it seems, the intelligence community is headed down the same path. Particularly at CIA with Mike Hayden. What we tend to forget is that the people who organized or re-organized our national security institutions after WWII had the discipline to be able to impose certain constraints on political influence. And while the institutions can perpetuate that ethos, and have done, in and of themselves they can’t regenerate it. Stand-alone reforms ain’t the answer. The big picture strongly suggests the need for government-wide overhaul, and imaginative proposals salted with the wisdom of our experience.

http://noquarterusa.net/blog/2007/10/23/fixing-intelligence/

White House Denies Stoking Iran Nuclear Tensions
(Agence France-Presse)

Monday, October 22
The White House insisted Monday it was still committed to diplomacy with Iran, despite ominous comments from the US president and vice president attacking the Islamic republic's nuclear drive. Spokesman Tony Fratto said also that the replacement of Iran's chief nuclear negotiator did not alter President George W. Bush's determination for Iran to stop enriching uranium.

"I wouldn't call it stepping up the rhetoric," he told reporters after Bush said last week that a nuclear-equipped Iran evoked the threat of "World War III," and Vice President Dick Cheney warned of "serious consequences" for Iran.



Post Meeting UPA Govt Keeps Left N-guessing
(Sutirtho Patranobis, Hindustan Times)

Monday, October 22
The UPA did not give any assurance on Monday to the Left that the Indo-US civil nuclear deal has been indefinitely put on hold. It, however, agreed not to operationalise the pact till the political panel formed to resolve their differences finalised its report.

The next meeting of the UPA-Left panel will take place on November 16 — a week before the Board of Governors of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is slated to meet.



Raid Revelation
(Stanley Kurtz, National Review Online)

Tuesday, October 23
If people had known how close we came to World War III that day there would have been mass panic. That is how a very senior British ministerial source recently characterized Israel’s September raid on what was apparently a Syrian nuclear installation. Whether matters were quite that grave is an open question. Yet it does seem clear that the full story of the Israeli raid has not been told, nor its full significance recognized. Now two key members of Congress have raised an alarm about this event, thereby throwing our nuclear agreement with North Korea into question.

Peter Hoekstra and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, as senior Republicans on the House Intelligence and Foreign Affairs Committees, respectively, were among the mere handful of members of Congress briefed on the Israeli air strike. What they learned obviously dismayed them greatly, as is evident from “What Happened in Syria?” a Wall Street Journal opinion piece published by Hoekstra and Ros-Lehtinen this past Saturday.

STANLEY KURTZ: What are Iran and Syria up to? “Raid Revelation” 10/23 6:00 AM

AARON MANNES: It is a cold comfort that attributing a massive terror attack to the Islamist “usual suspects” is the least disturbing scenario. “The Bhutto Attacks” 10/23 9:50 AM

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: The United States has treated Turkey well. “Hardly Turkish Delight” 10/22 7:20 AM

JONATHAN FOREMAN: Time to get tough with Turkey? “Rethinking Relationships” 10/22 6:30 AM

Liberal Meltdownby Monica Crowley


Do All Democrats Agree With Congressman Pete Stark?by Newt Gingrich

Critical Clarity from Humanitarians by Rami G. Khouri
Karen Abuzayd, commissioner-general of the United Nations' agency that provides aid and services to Palestinian refugees, and Alvaro de Soto, the recently retired UN diplomat from Peru, offer their insights on the current situation of the Israeli-Palestinian crisis.
more...

Bush's Neo-Imperialist War
Our Iraqi occupation not only rejects American foreign policy since Wilson, it's a throwback to the great power imperialism that led to World War I.

John B. Judis | October 22, 2007

In 1882 the British occupied Egypt. Although they claimed they would withdraw their troops, the British remained, they said, at the request of the khedive, the ruler they had installed. The U.S. Army Area Handbook aptly describes the British decision to stay:

At the outset of the occupation, the British government declared its intention to withdraw its troops as soon as possible. This could not be done, however, until the authority of the khedive was restored. Eventually, the British realized that these two aims were incompatible because the military intervention, which Khedive Tawfiq supported and which prevented his overthrow, had undermined the authority of the ruler. Without the British presence, the khedival government would probably have collapsed.

The British would remain in Egypt for 70 years until Gamel Abdel Nasser's nationalist revolt tossed them out. They would grant Egypt nominal independence in 1922, but in order to maintain their hold over the Suez Canal, the gateway to British India and Asia, they would retain control over Egypt's finances and foreign policy.

On Sept. 13, 2007, George W. Bush issued his report to the nation on the progress of "the surge" in Iraq. Echoing the British in Egypt, he promised "a reduced American presence" in Iraq, but he added ominously that "Iraqi leaders from all communities … understand that their success will require U.S. political, economic, and security engagement that extends beyond my presidency. These Iraqi leaders have asked for an enduring relationship with America. And we are ready to begin building that relationship -- in a way that protects our interests in the region and requires many fewer American troops." (Emphasis mine.) In other words, Iraqi leaders who owe their positions to the U.S. occupation want the Americans to stay indefinitely, and Bush is ready to oblige them, albeit with a smaller force.

British Prime Minister William Gladstone insisted in 1882 that the British would not make Egypt a colony. He wanted, his private secretary recorded, "to give scope to Egypt for the Egyptians were this feasible and attainable without risk." But that appeared too risky, and Egypt quickly became part of the British Empire. Bush, too, has insisted that the United States is not engaged in imperialism. America is not "an imperial power," but a "liberating power," he has declared. But Bush's denial rings as hollow as Gladstone's. What Bush has done in Iraq, rather than what he says he has done, is to revive an imperialist foreign policy, reminiscent of the British and French in the Middle East, and of the kind that the United States practiced briefly under William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt.

Bush's foreign policy has been variously described as unilateralist, militarist, and hyper-nationalist. But the term that fits it best is imperialist. That's not because it is the most incendiary term, but because it is the most historically accurate. Bush's foreign policy was framed as an alternative to the liberal internationalist policies that Woodrow Wilson espoused and that presidents from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Bill Clinton tried to put into effect as an alternative to the imperialist strategies that helped cause two world wars and even the Cold War. Bush's foreign policy represents a return not to the simple unilateralism of 19th-century American foreign policy, but to the imperial strategy that the great powers of Europe -- and, for a brief period, America, too -- followed and that resulted in utter disaster.

There have been empires since the dawn of history, but the term "imperialism," and its modern practice, originated in the late 19th century. During that time, Britain and the major European powers struggled to carve up the less developed world into colonies, protectorates, and spheres of influence. The new empires spawned during this period didn't consist of "settler colonies" like the original American colonies or Australia, but indigenous possessions like British India or French Indochina. The United States got into the great game in 1898 when, after successfully ousting Spain from Cuba and the Pacific, the McKinley administration, prodded by Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Cabot Lodge, decided to annex the Philippines.

There were two kinds of imperial rule: direct, where the colonial power assigned an administrator -- a viceroy or proconsul -- who ran the country directly; and indirect, where the colonial power used its financial and military power to prop up a native administration that did its bidding and to prevent the rise of governments that did not. The latter kind of imperial rule was developed by the United States in Cuba in 1901 after Roosevelt's Secretary of War Elihu Root realized that direct rule could bring war and rebellion, as it had done, to the McKinley administration's surprise, in the Philippines. The British later adopted this kind of imperial rule in Egypt and Iraq.

The impetus for the growth of empires in the 19th century was economic. Britain and the imperial powers sought secure access to raw materials, including rubber, cotton, and foodstuffs -- oil would come later -- and to outlets for capital investment in railroads and other major projects. As their colonial investments grew, they tried to erect an international system of islands and port facilities and canals that could protect their trade routes. (The U.S. originally saw the Philippines as a stepping stone to the lucrative Chinese market.) But the impetus wasn't only economic. By the early 20th century, as the countries strove to divide up the globe, the acquisition of colonies became a source of national power and prestige, and acquired its own elaborate and malignant ideological justification. It gained a life of its own.

This growth of imperialism eventually created the conditions for its undoing. By encouraging not merely trade rivalry, but growing competition for national power -- epitomized in the pre–World War I naval arms race between Britain and Germany -- imperialism helped spawn wars among the great powers themselves. The rivalry between top dog England and challenger Germany, and between Germany and Austria, on the one hand, and France and Russia, on the other, contributed to the outbreak of World War I. The Second World War also represented, among other things, an attempt by the Axis powers, a subordinate group of capitalist nations, to redivide the world at the expense of the U.S., Great Britain, France, and the USSR. And the Cold War stemmed from the attempt by the Soviet Union, one of the most vocal critics of Western imperialism, to fulfill the imperial dreams of Czarist Russia by expanding westward and to the south.

In addition, the system of imperialism spawned nationalist and anti-imperialist movements in the colonies themselves. Some of these movements, particularly in the Middle East, had a religious coloration. Others took their ideology from Soviet or Chinese communism or from the Wilsonian vision of national self-determination. These movements made it difficult, and finally impossible, for the imperial powers to maintain their control.

In the United States, Woodrow Wilson came to realize the pitfalls of imperialism not only from the six-year war with the Filipino rebels and Wilson's own unsuccessful intervention in Mexico in 1914, but also from the outbreak of World War I, which Wilson privately blamed on imperial rivalry. After World War I, Wilson set out to create new international arrangements to replace those of imperialism. Wilson sought an agreement among the great powers through the League of Nations to prevent new conquests and wars over conquests. He wanted to phase out the existing imperialism through "mandates" that would put countries, and groups of countries, that had no vested interest in acquiring colonies in charge of assisting colonies in making the transition to self-government. And Wilson favored economic agreements to ease conflicts over access to markets and raw materials.

Wilson didn't think the United States should abandon the leadership role it acquired at the end of World War I. But he wanted the United States to exercise it through international institutions that could ensure a peaceful world in which the United States would not have to prepare perpetually for war and in which America's vaunted economic superiority could come to the fore. Wilson failed to win over his European counterparts and the Republicans at home. But during and after World War II, Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman attempted to put Wilson's liberal internationalism into practice. It was embodied not only in the U.N., but in the IMF, World Bank, and GATT agreements, and in America's multilateral approach to the Cold War.

Roosevelt had planned to force Britain and France to divest themselves of their empires -- the new U.N. had a "trusteeship" system for that purpose -- but American resolve was blunted by the onset of the Cold War. Faced with Soviet support for anti-imperialist movements in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, the United States sided with the former colonial powers. That policy came to a disastrous culmination in the Vietnam war, which was an outgrowth of American support for French colonialism. The American defeat in Vietnam dealt a fatal blow to U.S. attempts to prop up the Western imperialism. Subsequently, Portugal's colonies in Africa gained their independence. That left only the Soviet empire. When it collapsed in the early 1990s, the age of empire was over.

There were still colonies and quasi-colonies like Chechnya or Tibet, but they were contested extensions of the larger power itself. Some political scientists in the United States and Europe claimed that America remained an imperial power because of its worldwide system of military bases and its clout in international financial institutions, but while America was capable of influencing governments, it could no longer exercise a veto over critical regimes coming to power. The invasion of Panama in 1989 appeared to be the last gasp of America's indirect imperialism.

Indeed, the 1990s became a high water mark of liberal internationalism. George H.W. Bush's administration built a coalition through the U.N. to drive Iraq out of Kuwait. Acting through NATO, the Clinton administration built a coalition to end the wars in Bosnia and Kosovo and to oversee the transition to a peaceful breakup of former Yugoslavia. The United States also took leadership in the formation of the World Trade Organization -- which, whatever its imperfections, was designed to prevent the kind of rival trade blocs that could eventually lead to war. At Maastricht, Western Europe, once the center of imperial rivalry, became a model of post-imperial integration. And the world's nations seemed on the verge of agreeing to a new set of accords, including the Kyoto Protocol, that would address problems Wilson never dreamed of -- problems that could not be addressed except through international agreements.

When George W. Bush took office in January 2001, however, his foreign policy echoed not only that of neo-isolationist Republicans like former Majority Leader Dick Armey, but also that of America's foreign policy before we decided in 1898 that we had to get involved in the struggle for empire. That was an America that not only scorned empire but was oblivious to much of the outside world. Bush disdained international organizations. He withdrew the United States from the Kyoto climate treaty and whatever other international agreements had yet to be ratified. He was a unilateralist, but he was reluctant to use America's singular power to affect the governments of other countries. His highest defense priority was the erection of an anti-missile system, the purpose of which was not only to make the United States impregnable from foreign attack, but also to reduce the reliance of the U.S. on other countries for its security.

All that changed after September 11. Bush retained his unilateralism, but he now wedded it to an aggressive strategy for dealing with America's enemies.

In developing a response to September 11, Bush fell under the influence of neo-conservatives in his administration and in Washington policy circles. These neo-conservatives believed that the United States should use its superior military power to intimidate and overthrow the regimes of "rogue states" like Iraq that challenged American hegemony. (One typical slogan was "rogue state rollback.") The neocons didn't favor colonialism, but believed that by exerting its power the United States could produce regimes that did its bidding. After September 11, they spoke openly of creating a new American empire. "People are now coming out of the closet on the word ‘empire,'" Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer exulted.

The neo-conservatives found common cause with Bush officials, including Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who were concerned about protecting American access to foreign oil in a period of rising demand and stagnating supply. That made them particularly interested in ousting Saddam Hussein, whose government sat atop the third largest oil reserve in the world, and in installing a regime more friendly to the United States.

In the buildup to the war, and during the invasion and occupation, Bush officials, who were eager to advertise Iraq's nuclear threat, were reluctant to talk about oil, but in off-the-record interviews I conducted in December 2002, neo-conservatives waxed poetic about using Iraq's oil wealth to undermine OPEC. After he left office, former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill recounted National Security Council discussions about Iraqi oil. And in his recently published memoir, Alan Greenspan wrote, "I'm saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows -- the Iraq war is largely about oil."

Bush and other administration officials denied that the United States was trying to create a new empire. But they were less guarded in their private communications. When the White House offered former Sen. Bob Kerrey the job of head of the Provisional Authority in Iraq -- the job that eventually went to Paul Bremer -- officials asked him if he were interested in being "viceroy." Kerrey, taken aback, turned down the job.

The administration's actions also belied its denials. In March 2004, the Chicago Tribune reported that the U.S. Army was constructing what it called 14 "enduring bases" in Iraq. These would provide a continuing American military presence in Iraq. And the administration continues work on these bases, including a new one perched on the Iranian border, even as it professes to be committed to turning Iraq over to its government and army.

Though opposition to the American presence in Iraq has grown both there and in the U.S., Bush's televised address and Gen. David Petraeus' congressional testimony in September made clear that the administration has grown even more determined to remain there. As Spencer Ackerman points out, Bush's promise to stay in Iraq "as long as necessary, not one day longer" has given way to the promise of an "enduring relationship." And American projections of troop presence in Iraq now extend indefinitely into the future. If the administration's experience in Iraq does not parallel that of the British in Egypt, it won't be for lack of trying.

Indeed, this brand of imperialism, as practiced by the Bush administration, is remarkably similar to the older European variety. Its outward veneer is optimistic and even triumphalist, when articulated by a neo-conservative like Max Boot or William Kristol, and is usually accompanied by a vision of global moral-religious-social transformation. The British boasted of bringing Christianity and civilization to the heathens; America's neo-conservatives trumpet the virtues of free-market capitalism and democracy. And like the older imperialism, Bush's policy toward Iraq and the Middle East has been driven by a fear of losing out on scarce natural resources. Ultimately, his policy is as much a product of the relative decline of American power brought about by the increasingly fierce international competition for resources and markets as it is of America's "unipolar moment."

Bush and Cheney were hardly unique in worrying about the dwindling supply of oil. Bush's father and Bill Clinton also worried about it. But George H.W. Bush and Clinton acted on the premise that petroleum and natural gas were international commodities to which any purchaser should have access. Oil companies, which pressed for the removal of sanctions on Iraq and Iran, shared this view. When the elder Bush and Clinton sought to prevent Iraq from monopolizing the region's oil -- and using it as a political instrument -- they did so through the United Nations.

But George W. Bush has differed from his predecessors in both his concerns and his methods. Bush, prodded by Cheney, sought to win privileged access to Iraq's oil -- not necessarily for any particular company (although Cheney clearly wanted a role for Halliburton in building Iraq's oil infrastructure), but for American producers and consumers in general. That is similar to the strategy of the older imperial powers. And the method they employed was unilateral invasion -- oh yes, with the support of Britain, the former great imperial power in the region.

Bush's imperial strategy is sparking a new phase in oil diplomacy, where oil consumers like China are trying to lock up long-term deals with countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, and where the producers -- notably at this point Venezuela -- are beginning to use their oil wealth as a political weapon. The eventual outcome -- if this rivalry is not regulated through new international agreements -- could be the kind of tension that gave rise to World War I.

As the war in Iraq has turned into a quagmire, neo-conservatives who had goaded the president into action have blamed the war's failure on the administration's flawed strategy. They have propounded a series of "if only's": If only the administration had sent more troops, if only it had not disbanded the Ba'ath army, if only it had handed the leadership of Iraq over immediately to con man Ahmed Chalabi. Of these, only the addition of more troops might have quelled the insurgency, and then only temporarily. If there is any lesson from the 130-year history of imperialism, it is that the natives eventually grow restless. Since World War II, the peoples of the Middle East, Asia, and Africa have been throwing off rather than welcoming foreign control.

The Middle East, where Muslims still blanch at the Crusades and later British and French attempts to divide and rule, is particularly sensitive to outside attempts at domination. Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda didn't spring from Mecca but from the battlefield in Afghanistan, from resentment of American support for Israel and of American bases on Arab soil. Bush's policy in the region has reflected a profound ignorance of this history. Wrote former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski in January 2007, "America is acting like a colonial power in Iraq. But the age of colonialism is over. Waging a colonial war in the post-colonial age is self-defeating."

What, then, should the United States be doing in Iraq and elsewhere to repair the damage wrought by Bush's exercise in neo-imperialism? On one level, this is an enormously complicated question that is beyond my capacity to answer. But on a simple, much less specific level, the answer is obvious: A new administration has to repudiate Bush's policy of imperialism and reaffirm America's commitment to liberal internationalism. That will entail at least these three kinds of initiatives:

•  The new administration needs to repudiate Bush's strategy of preemptive regime change and reaffirm the United Nations charter, which allows nations to act unilaterally only in their own immediate self-defense. That would have an immediate effect on American policy toward Iran, whose regime the United States is now officially trying to overthrow.
•  The new administration needs to reaffirm the idea behind internationally sanctioned and administered "mandates" and "trusteeship" for countries and peoples going through a difficult transition toward independence and statehood. If countries intervene to prevent war or genocide, they must do so in a manner that assures the peoples targeted that their right of self-determination will be respected. If the United States, for instance, had tried to intervene in the Balkans by itself, it might still be fighting an insurgency there.
•  The new administration needs to reaffirm the importance of international action and agreements -- through the U.N. and other bodies -- to aid in the prevention of wars, pandemics, and environmental catastrophe, and to ease the struggle over scarce resources, including oil and water. That means at a minimum returning to the negotiations over global warming; and attempting to revive the Non-Proliferation Treaty, which the U.S. undermined in signing a nuclear deal with India.

But what about Iraq? Should the U.S. withdraw immediately? Should it leave a rump force in place to fight international terrorists? These questions -- now at the forefront of the debate in Washington -- are secondary to questions of diplomacy. A new administration should declare the invasion and occupation of Iraq a mistake and pledge to remove American troops from the country. It should not do so, however, with any hope of ending the civil war there, but rather of gaining international support for a "trusteeship" that would guide Iraq back toward genuine self-government and independence. The U.S. can contribute financially, but it will have to take a subordinate role in any international peace-keeping force that enters the country.

None of this will be easy. At this point, the Bush administration might have dug such a huge hole in the region that nothing the United States does will prevent more war and greater chaos. But it is certain that the Bush administration will not change course, and, equally, that a new administration will enjoy a honeymoon not only with American voters, but with the rest of the world in which it could advance a new foreign policy that breaks decisively with that of the Bush administration. If it doesn't do this -- if it equivocates and seeks half-measures, or if it tries (as some Republican candidates threaten) to reinforce the American occupation -- then its actions will not lead to an enduring relationship with the Iraqis and the peoples of the Middle East, but to an enduring nightmare.


John B. Judis, is a senior editor at The New Republic and a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He is author most recently of The Folly of Empire.

"We're Not There for the Figs" The True Cost of War for Oil By Bonnie Bricker and Aadil E. Shamoo "We have to decide, as a nation, whether our need for Middle Eastern oil is more important to our future than our conduct as a moral and ethical people." Which brave presidential candidate would lay it on the line so clearly? None yet. And that's the problem with the national debate on the war in Iraq, and possibly, our foray into Iran as well.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article18605.htm

The Iran Wedge
Between the GOP's wave of congressional retirements and its lackluster presidential candidates, the party's prospects are looking dim. But they have one cheerful possibility on the horizon: war with Iran.

Paul Starr | October 23, 2007

Now is the season of Republican lethargy and discontent. A wave of retirements is dimming GOP congressional prospects, while the Republican presidential candidates have generated so little excitement that they are running behind the Democrats in fundraising and in the opinion polls. But there is one cheerful possibility on the horizon, and that is war with Iran.

Until recently, I had thought that an attack on Iran, besides being strategically reckless for America, would be politically suicidal for the Republican Party. I am still convinced an attack would be reckless for the country, but I am beginning to see how it could work for the GOP.

That the Bush administration might launch an airstrike to destroy Iran's nuclear facilities has for some time been the subject of intense speculation. During recent months, however, the administration has increasingly emphasized the claim that Iran is arming insurgents in Iraq. In the Oct. 8 issue of The New Yorker, Seymour Hersh reports that instead of targeting nuclear sites, a strike would now focus on Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps, which is allegedly responsible for U.S. casualties in Iraq. The attack would then be justified not as counterproliferation, but as counterterrorism. According to Hersh's sources, the president has indicated that he supports such an attack but has yet to issue the order to carry it out.

Hersh's only reference to domestic political fallout assumes that an attack would hurt the GOP. He quotes an unnamed former intelligence official as saying that "Cheney et al." are so determined "to bring military action to Iran as soon as possible" that they are ignoring Republican electoral concerns: "Cheney doesn't give a rat's ass about the Republican worries, and neither does the president."

May I say a word in the vice president's defense? I believe that he does care a rat's ass. The whole idea of the attack makes more sense as an attempt to revive the political dynamics that worked so well for the Republicans in 2002 and 2004, when they turned public anxiety about Islamist terrorism to their advantage, while dividing the Democrats and throwing them on the defensive and off their own issues. An attack on Iran could do the same.

We can already see how the politics might play out. On Sept. 26, the Senate adopted a resolution presented by Joseph Lieberman and Jon Kyl declaring Iran's Revolutionary Guard to be a terrorist organization. The vote was 76-22, with Democrats splitting almost exactly down the middle (Hillary Clinton and Harry Reid were among the supporters). The resolution passed only because its sponsors took out two paragraphs approving a military response, but Democrats split over the suspicion that the resolution might be used to justify one.

The precipitating occasion for an initial strike against Iran might be a murky episode along the lines of the Tonkin Gulf incident in the Vietnam War. A U.S. attack on Revolutionary Guard facilities would almost certainly not go unanswered. Iran has the capacity to strike back against American targets not only in Iraq, but throughout the world. As Zbigniew Brzezinski told Hersh, "The name of our game seems to be to get the Iranians to overplay their hand."

In the wake of an Iranian response -- imagine a terrorist attack in an American city -- there would be a public clamor for U.S. retaliation. That clamor might then allow an all-out attack against Iran's nuclear sites, which is what I assume Bush and Cheney are really after.

Such a sequence of events, while not without political risks to the Republicans, could wreak havoc on the Democrats. If Iran's response took substantial American casualties, it would generate overwhelming pressure to support U.S. retaliation. The crisis might also accentuate public anxieties about a woman as president at a point when Sen. Clinton may have locked up the nomination. And if the GOP's cards really fall into place, a third-party anti-war presidential campaign might allow the Republican candidate to win in 2008 with only a plurality of the vote. Unless the Democratic nominee handles the crisis brilliantly, it could radically change prospects for the election.

To be sure, an American attack could boomerang. It might strengthen the Iranian regime by generating a nationalist reaction within the country, cast the regime in a heroic light throughout the Islamic world, unleash a wave of terrorism against the United States, aggravate our difficulties in Iraq, and entangle us in a regional war indefinitely. Some analysts think these risks to both the republic and the Republican Party are so great that George Bush will ultimately decline to order an attack. But the Republicans are playing a very weak hand, and this may be their best gamble to retain power.

http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=the_iran_wedge

As president taps into your line, courts and Congress play deaf

"We are currently in the throes of another national seizure of paranoia, resembling the hysteria which surrounded the Alien and Sedition Acts, the Palmer Raids, and the McCarthy era," the judge wrote. "Those who register dissent or who petition their governments for redress are subjected to scrutiny by grand juries, by the FBI, or even by the military. Their associates are interrogated. Their homes are bugged and their telephones are wiretapped. They are befriended by secret government informers. Their patriotism and loyalty are questioned. . . . More than our privacy is implicated. Also at stake is the reach of the Government's power to intimidate its critics."

The words could have been lifted out of a court opinion written yesterday. But that's assuming the federal bench hadn't been stacked with judges who, like the Supreme Court's latest two arrivals, play lapdogs to executive power. The words above were actually written by Justice William O. Douglas in a once-landmark 1972 case involving secret domestic wiretapping. The spying had been ordered by the unsurprising Richard Nixon. The court ruled 8-0 that Fourth Amendment freedoms against unreasonable searches and seizures "cannot properly be guaranteed if domestic surveillances may be conducted solely within the discretion of the executive branch." Half the court's judges were Nixon appointees, including Chief Justice Warren Burger and Justice Lewis Powell, the author of the decision and a member of the court for only six months. Nixon, still riding 62 percent approval at the time, couldn't muster a single vote out of his court.

Just before Nixon nominated him, Powell had written a newspaper article defending secret wiretapping and suggesting that the difference between wiretapping of foreign and domestic sources was "largely meaningless." But those were days when you couldn't quite predict Supreme Court outcomes by the rank partisanship of its members, when constitutional principle could still trump the ideological abuses of a presidency looking for a blank check. Times have indeed changed. Lewis had meant it, when questioned during his confirmation hearings about that wiretapping article, that he was keeping an open mind -- unlike John Roberts, the current chief justice, who gave senators a lesson in the importance of precedent during his hearings only to spend his first two years on the court playing IED to a slew of precedents.

This time around, besides a servile judiciary, the Bush administration is enjoying a groveling Congress, too -- neo-Democrats who think adopting Republicans' contempt for the Constitution is the only way to look tough on terrorists. Democrats had a chance to stop the Bush administration's domestic spying. Twice. In June they surrendered to a law that lets secret, warrantless spying continue, sidelining a special court's oversight role. They promised the measure would be temporary. But they're about to do it again, and let the blank check stand for six years, never once asking the question that disintegrates the administration's argument about needing that dictatorial authority: If the wiretapping of phone or internet communications targets only suspected al-Qaida operatives (as long as one of the parties is abroad, supposedly), and potentially millions of such communications are being targeted, is the administration suggesting that millions of Americans are having contact with suspected terrorists? In effect, yes. It's an absurd proposition. Don't expect Democrats to muster the capacity to shatter it.

We need a new "Crucible" -- a morality play that, like Arthur Miller's classic of 1953 that linked Cold War McCarthyism to the Salem witch trials, updates the genealogy to include the hysterical age of Sept. 11. During the Cold War we had an excuse with those 12,000 nuclear warheads pointing at American and Soviet cities. The only thing pointing this way today are the juvenile and weirdly bearded taunts of those two faded fugitives, Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri. They have less star power in the Islamic world, where they're either ridiculed or despised, than they enjoy among their enablers here -- the three, once-separate branches of government, united in service to al-Qaida.

Tristam is a News-Journal editorial writer. Reach him at ptristam@att.net or through his personal Web site at www.pierretristam.com .

http://www.news-journalonline.com/ColEssays.htm

Bush: Europe need for missile shield is 'urgent'
Washington (AFP) Oct 23, 2007 - President George W. Bush on Tuesday warned that Europe urgently needs a US missile defense system to blunt a growing threat from Iran, despite vocal opposition from Russia. In a speech to the US National Defense University, Bush said the world may have less than a decade before arch-foe Tehran possesses rockets able to reach the United States and strike any country in Europe, perhaps by 2015 ... more

EU's Solana, Iran's new nuclear pointman have 'constructive' talks
Rome (AFP) Oct 23, 2007 - EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana and Iran's new hardline nuclear pointman Saeed Jalili met for the first time on Tuesday for talks both sides described as "constructive." "There might be a (second) meeting before the end of November," Solana said after the talks with Jalili and his conservative but pragmatic predecessor, Ali Larijani. It was Solana's first sit-down with Jalili, whos ... more

Japan tells Russia no backing down on missiles
Tokyo (AFP) Oct 23, 2007 - Japan said Tuesday it would not back down on building missile defences with the United States, rejecting Russia's charges that the shield aimed to weaken Moscow's influence in Asia. Russia has been increasingly assertive in condemning US military plans and has warned of retaliation if Washington builds a separate missile defence shield in former Soviet bloc nations in Eastern Europe. Rus ... more

US acts to rein in Iraq security firms
Washington (AFP) Oct 23, 2007 - The US government Tuesday vowed to clamp down on Blackwater and other private security firms in Iraq, which stand accused of killing innocent civilians through gung-ho tactics. Officials said that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was adopting "immediately" the recommendations of a review panel that exposed a worrying legal impunity for security guards working in Iraq and Afghanistan. ... more

US may give Turkey intelligence: White House
Washington (AFP) Oct 23, 2007 - The United States may provide Turkey with information enabling its armed forces to strike Kurdish rebels based in Iraq, the White House said Tuesday, downplaying talk of joint military operations. Asked about the prospects for US-Turkish cooperation against the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) rebels, spokeswoman Dana Perino declined to comment directly but suggested Washington might ... more

US proposes Russian presence at Czech and Polish missile sites
Prague (AFP) Oct 23, 2007 - The United States has offered to accept a Russian presence at planned US anti-missile sites in Poland and the Czech Republic, so as to address Moscow's objections to the shield, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Tuesday. Gates told reporters in Prague that both he and US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had put the proposal to the Russians in a bid to increase the project's transparency ... more

Lukoil to continue in Iran despite sanctions problems
Moscow (AFP) Nov 17, 2006 - Lukoil, the biggest Russian oil company, said Tuesday it will continue to work in Iran despite the problems caused by US-inspired sanctions on Tehran over its nuclear development programme. The Anaran oil project "will continue, development is under way," Lukoil spokesman Vladimir Simakov told AFP in reponse to local press reports the operation could be suspended. While work at Anaran co ... more

Nuclear Power Worldwide: Status and Outlook
Washington DC (SPX) Oct 24, 2007 - Nuclear power´s prominence as a major energy source will continue over the next several decades, according to new projections made by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which has just published a new report, Energy, Electricity and Nuclear Power for the period up to 2030. The IAEA makes two annual projections concerning the growth of nuclear power, a low and a high. The low pro ... more

Outside View: Odessa-Gdansk pipeline grows
Moscow (UPI) Oct 22, 2007 - The success of the informal energy summit held by Azerbaijan, Georgia, Lithuania, Poland and Ukraine in Vilnius, Lithuania, last week will be judged later, when the agreements reached there become reality. But it was certainly an achievement, because it offered more cooperation possibilities for participants, who endorsed the extension of the Ukrainian-Polish Odessa-Brody pipeline to P ... more

Taiwan denies US may sell cruise missiles
Taipei (AFP) Oct 22, 2007 - The defence minister on Monday denied a report that the United States may sell Tomahawk cruise missiles to Taiwan in a bid to control arms development in the island. Taiwan Defence Minister Lee Tien-yu said he "has not heard of such a possible arms sale as reported," while replying to a query raised by an opposition lawmaker. A military source told the Taipei-based China Times that "Wash ... more

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

U.S.: Top Iranians direct Iraq missions By Paul Richter Forces that the Bush administration holds responsible for the deaths of troops act on orders of the Tehran leadership, an official says.

How Did We Get Here?
You have the "mainstream" media to thank for the Iraqi quagmire by Justin Raimondo We keep hearing about the "liberal," "antiwar" media, which is supposedly spinning the "success" of the administration's "surge" in Iraq into a defeat. The stab-in-the-back thesis is being run up the flagpole by the neocons, in the hopes that at least some of their base – the most deluded of the Kool-Aid drinkers – will swallow it. Yet it was this supposedly liberal media that led us down the primrose path to war and occupation and immersed us in what Gen. William E. Odom calls the biggest strategic disaster in American military history – and they did it by instilling fear.

The Saddam-has-nukes narrative was the overarching theme that administration spokespersons sounded whenever they got the chance: Condi Rice's now infamous "we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud" meme spread like a viral infection through a schoolyard and was echoed by the mainstream media ad nauseam. In order to sound convincing, however, and present this theme in a credible manner, the War Party had to find semi-credible sources: that is, they had to invent credible characters who would echo their themes. In Ahmed Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress (INC) they found an invaluable source of ready-made material.

Chalabi had set up shop during the Clinton years with the passage of the Iraq Liberation Act, which authorized "regime change" as official U.S. policy and poured millions into his coffers. In return, Chalabi and his cohorts produced a seemingly unending string of Iraqi "defectors" who simply did what any good storyteller does: they made it all up.

The role played by Judith Miller and the New York Times in legitimizing and spreading these tall tales has received much attention, and there is no underestimating how important this was: yet how do we explain the complete breakdown of the critical function in the vast army of reporters and editors who took Miller's sources on faith – virtually the entire English-speaking media? The Washington Post, USA Today, the New York Daily News, the New Yorker, 60 Minutes, and even sainted PBS, which did a Frontline documentary on the defectors a couple of months after 9/11 – all invested their journalistic integrity in Chalabi & Co. All wound up getting badly burned.

Some, like CBS's Leslie Stahl, have owned up to the temporary collapse of their critical faculties; others, like Vanity Fair's David Rose, are silent. It was Rose, after all, whose four-page spread in the glossy, perfumed pages of the magazine the elites love to display on their coffee tables made the most extreme claims about the imminent danger posed by Saddam: the Iraqis were feverishly working on a long-range missile project, which was perilously close to becoming operational. Not only that, but, according to Rose and his INC sources, the Iraqis had a "dirty bomb" in the works, as well as blueprints and the means to build chemical and biological warheads. The relentlessly visual Vanity Fair editors even included a map that purported to show where these various sites were located in Iraq, including a nuclear weapons development laboratory.

When none of this turned up in the aftermath of the invasion, did the editors of Vanity Fair cry "mea culpa"? Certainly not. Instead, they ran a piece, "The Path to War," that blamed "the media" for all that INC-generated misinformation – but failed to mention their own role in promoting it. The piece was written by Bryan Burrough, Evgenia Peretz, and – hold on to your seat – David Rose.

There were plenty of indications in the run-up to war that the intelligence being used to justify U.S. military action was bogus, and the most glaringly obvious one was the Niger uranium fiasco that played such a key part in the downfall of Scooter Libby. The president had claimed, in his 2003 State of the Union speech, that the Iraqis were seeking uranium in "an African country" and that this constituted significant evidence that Saddam was circumventing the sanctions and pushing forward with his nuclear program, yet it wasn't long afterward that the alleged documentary "evidence" for this was exposed as a crude forgery. Surely this would have suggested, to even the most uncritical mind, that someone was making the case for war in bad faith – that there was an organized effort, inside the government, to lie us into war. Yet this connection was made by very few in the media, who continued to pump out defector stories as we rushed to invade.

At that point, the media was so invested in the administration's war narrative that they could not afford to raise questions about the veracity of the "intelligence" they were reporting as fact. This is why they fell for Chalabi's song-and-dance so readily. As John Walcott, the Washington bureau chief of Knight-Ridder News Service, put it:

"What he did was reasonably clever but fairly obvious, which is he gave the same stuff to some reporters that, for one reason or another, he felt would simply report it. And then he gave the same stuff to people in the vice president's office and in the secretary of defense's office. And so, if the reporter called the Department of Defense or the vice president's office to check, they would've said, 'Oh, I think that's… you can go with that. We have that, too.' So, you create the appearance, or Chalabi created the appearance, that there were two sources, and that the information had been independently confirmed, when, in fact, there was only one source. And it hadn't been confirmed by anybody."

The al-Qaeda connection was a subset of the master narrative, which conjured a frightening vision of a nuclear apocalypse as the price we would pay for inaction in Iraq. The list of prominent pundits who signed on to the al-Qaeda-Iraq axis of terrorism sub-narrative is impressive: George Will, Jim Hoagland, William Safire, Charles Krauthammer – the Washington Post was a veritable fount of disinformation on this subject. As for the rest of the media, they deliberately soft-pedaled the tenuous nature of the Iraq-al-Qaeda connection. As Bob Simon of CBS told Bill Moyers, "I think we all felt from the beginning that to deal with a subject as explosive as this, we should keep it in a way almost light. If that doesn't seem ridiculous."

Ridiculous isn't quite the word that comes to mind: tragicomic, or perhaps even criminal, seems more appropriate. In his own defense, Simon avers that "a frontal attack on the administration's claims" would have been "premature," because, after all, "we did not know then that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. We only knew that the connection the administration was making between Saddam and al-Qaeda was very tenuous at best."

The main connecting thread between al-Qaeda and Iraq was reported as an alleged meeting between an Iraqi intelligence agent and Mohammed Atta that supposedly took place at the Prague airport. CBS News and numerous other mainstream media outlets reported this with a straight face. Simon's report, which presented the al-Qaeda connection in terms of a "marketing" technique, ran in December '02: yet the alleged Prague meeting had been debunked on Oct. 21, 2002, in the New York Times, which reported that Czech President Vaclav Havel "quietly told the White House he has concluded that there is no evidence to confirm earlier reports" of the alleged meeting.

The years of constantly repeating this theme – that Iraq planned and carried out the 9/11 terrorist attacks – either implicitly or explicitly took their toll on the truth: until very recently, substantial majorities believed Iraq had been behind the attacks. Forty-one percent, according to a Newsweek poll taken this past summer, still believe it. In spite of persistent debunkings by the reality-based community, the narrative that places Saddam at the epicenter of 9/11 survives to this day.

The "liberal," "antiwar" media? Give me a break! In reality, we are saddled with "mainstream" news outlets that live in constant fear of the administration, of the War Party, of advertisers, of corporate suits who insist on seeking out the "good news" in Iraq – even if there isn't any. The pattern was established after 9/11, when news anchors were wearing flag pins on their lapels and downplaying civilian casualties in Afghanistan (which have now become a major issue between the government of Hamid Karzai and the U.S.). The same coziness with government officials and leading neocons – who always get airtime to give voice to the opinions of a rapidly shrinking minority of American public opinion – is all too readily apparent.

The "antiwar" media? Pal, you're looking at it!

Bush Risks Falling Off Turkish-Kurd Tightrope
by Jim Lobe Spurred by the deployment of at least 100,000 troops along Turkey's border with Iraq, the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush is pressing its closest clients in Iraqi Kurdistan to crack down hard against the Kurdish Turkish Workers' Party (PKK), which Washington considers a terrorist organization.

Given the administration's refusal so far to back up that pressure with the military muscle, however, it remains unclear whether its efforts will translate into action by local Kurdish authorities, or prevent a cross-border offensive that could throw into chaos the one Iraqi region that has enjoyed stability since the 2003 U.S. invasion.

Indications so far are that U.S. pressure is having only a limited impact. The PKK's offer to observe a conditional cease-fire was dismissed both by Ankara and officials in Washington, who noted that such declarations had proved meaningless in the past.

And a declaration by the government of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki that it will close down all PKK offices throughout Iraq was also considered toothless, since Iraqi troops at least nominally under Maliki's control are not permitted to operate in Kurdistan where the peshmerga, the Kurdish militia forces, are charged with maintaining security.

"I understand there's this commitment to shut down offices," said State Department spokesman Sean McCormack. "Okay, but what you need to see are actual outputs from inputs that the Iraqi government might make."

"The outputs are that you need to stop terrorist attacks; there needs to be prevention of terrorist attacks, and you need to get to the root cause here, and that is to stop this terrorist organization from operating on Iraqi soil," he added.

Most analysts in Washington believe that neither Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan nor his military commanders are eager to send their forces into Iraq to deal with the estimated 3,000 PKK guerrillas who are thought to be based there and that diplomacy, which has intensified dramatically over the last several days, has at least several more days to play itself out.

Indeed, senior Turkish officials themselves have stressed that they prefer diplomatic, and, if that doesn't work, economic pressure to persuade Iraqi and regional authorities to move against the PKK. Kurdistan is landlocked, and its economy is heavily dependent on open borders with Turkey, as well as Iran and Syria, both of which, with large and restive Kurdish populations of their own, have expressed solidarity with Ankara in recent days.

But any major new attack by Iraq-based PKK guerrillas, who killed 12 Turkish soldiers and claimed to have taken prisoner eight more over the weekend, will likely force Erdogan to order his military to cross the border – initially with air strikes and commandos, according to analysts here – as authorized by the Turkish parliament late last week.

"If there is another event, Erdogan and the military, despite their reluctance to be drawn reflexively across that border, will probably have to do something, and the options aren't particularly good," according to a former U.S. ambassador to Ankara, Mark Parris.

"I have no doubt that [U.S. ambassador to Iraq] Ryan Crocker, [U.S. Iraq commander Gen. David] Petraeus, and people here are pounding on the Iraqi leadership to get this under control," Parris added in a teleconference on the crisis sponsored by the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations (CFR).

At the same time, however, the administration finds its influence over the key parties at a particularly low ebb.

Anti-U.S. sentiment in an increasingly democratic Turkey is at an all-time high, not least because of Washington's refusal to date to seriously address Ankara's concerns about the PKK, a refusal that has fed the perception that the U.S. has a secret agenda to break up Iraq and create an independent Kurdistan that will naturally act as an inspiration for Kurds in Turkey to seek independence.

"We have just not answered the mail on this," according to Ian Lesser, an expert at the German Marshall Fund and author of a new book on U.S.-Turkey relations, significantly entitled Beyond Suspicion.

"We're seeing the result of letting this issue lie for so long," according to Stephen Cook, a Turkey expert at CFR, who noted that the special U.S. envoy appointed by Bush last year to deal with Turkey's concerns resigned recently, reportedly out of frustration at the administration's neglect. "The Turks have very little trust in our ability to do anything on this issue."

At the same time, Ankara enjoys considerable leverage over the U.S. both as a key NATO partner that contributes 1,000 troops to the alliance's forces in Afghanistan and as the host of Incirlik air base, a major logistical hub for U.S. forces in Iraq.

Hints by Turkish officials that Ankara would restrict access to the base after a key congressional committee approved a non-binding resolution on the "genocide" of up to 1.5 million Armenians in the last days of the Ottoman Empire spurred an all-out lobbying effort by the administration and the Pentagon, in particular, to persuade lawmakers to drop the matter.

Washington similarly finds its leverage over the Iraqi Kurds limited, not least because it has all but ruled out deploying already-stretched U.S. troops from central and southern Iraq to the north's mountain redoubts where the PKK guerrillas are based, and because the PKK is believed to have strong popular support in Kurdistan.

"U.S. action against the PKK could be as destabilizing as a Turkish incursion," according to Parris, who also noted that U.S. strategy for building an Iraqi army capable of assuming much of the security burden that has been shouldered by U.S. troops has come to depend mainly on the supply of peshmerga recruits by the Kurdistan authorities, notably the province's governor, Mustafa Barzani.

"We are hamstrung by our relationship with Barzani," said Cook.

Barzani, in turn, may be seeking to exact a high price for cracking down on the PKK; namely, the holding of a referendum in oil-rich Kirkuk on its absorption by Kurdistan, a step that the Turks have long warned against and one that could provoke a broader military intervention.

On this issue, U.S. diplomacy until now has been somewhat more activist than on the PKK. It has successfully delayed the holding of such a referendum, which was mandated to take place this year by the 2005 constitution until at least next year. Washington is concerned that the referendum could spark major ethnic violence in the region, as well as intervention by Turkey.

(Inter Press Service)

Bush offers to bomb Kurds
THE Bush Administration is considering air strikes, including cruise missiles, against the Kurdish rebel group PKK in northern Iraq.

The move would be an attempt to stave off a Turkish invasion of that country to fight the rebels.

President George Bush spoke with Turkish President Abdullah Gul by phone yesterday in an effort to ease the crisis.

According to an official familiar with the conversation, Mr Bush assured the Turkish President that the US was seriously looking into options beyond diplomacy to stop the attacks coming from Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq.

"It's not 'Kumbaya' time any more - just talking about trilateral talks is not going to be enough," the official said.

"Something has to be done."

While the use of US soldiers on the ground to root out the PKK would be the last resort, the US would be willing to launch air strikes on PKK targets, the official said, and has discussed the use of cruise missiles.

But air strikes using manned aircraft may be an easier option because the US controls the air space over Iraq.

Another option would be to persuade the Kurdistan Regional Government, which runs that part of Iraq, to order its Peshmerga forces to form a cordon preventing the movement of the PKK beyond its mountain camps.

"In the past, there has been reluctance to engage in direct US military action against the PKK, either through air strikes or some kind of Special Forces action," said the official familiar with the Bush-Gul conversation, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

"But the red line was always, if the Turks were going to come over the border, it could be so destabilising that it might be less risky for us to do something ourselves.

"Now the Turks are at the end of their rope, and our risk calculus is changing."

Meanwhile, Iraq said today it would shut down the operations of Kurdish rebels based on its soil, hoping to head off the threatened invasion by Turkish troops massed on the border.

"The PKK is a terrorist organisation and we have taken a decision to shut down their offices and not allow them to operate on Iraqi soil," Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki said.

"We will also work on limiting their terrorist activities which are threatening Iraq and Turkey," Maliki said after crisis talks in Baghdad with Turkish Foreign Minister Ali Babacan.

He gave no details on how the rebels could be prevented from launching attacks from their remote mountain bases. Analysts say military action would have to involve US forces in Iraq.

Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan said Ankara was giving diplomacy a chance, but reminded Iraq that Turkey's parliament had given the go-ahead for a military incursion at any time.

And the publication of photographs said to show eight Turkish soldiers captured by the rebels increased pressure on Turkey's government to take swift action.

"Right now we are in a waiting stance but Iraq should know we can use the mandate for a cross-border operation at any time," Erdogan told a joint news conference in London after talks with British Prime Minister Gordon Brown.

He later ratcheted up pressure by telling an investors' conference that Turkey might impose sanctions on exports to Iraq. Turkish exports to Iraq were worth $US2.6 billion ($A2.94 billion) in 2006.

PKK separatists, operating from northern Iraq, killed a dozen Turkish soldiers in weekend fighting.

The PKK said it also captured eight soldiers, and a news agency with close links to the rebels published what it said were photographs of the captives today. Turkey had denied soldiers had been captured but acknowledged eight were missing.

"The pictures show their health condition is pretty good," said the Firat news agency, which is based in western Europe.

With feelings running high in Turkey, and anti-PKK protests in several towns, the broadcasting watchdog banned news reports on the deaths of the 12 soldiers.

Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, a Kurd, said PKK attacks on Turkey would not be tolerated.

"We have given the PKK the option to leave or disarm. We care for every drop of Turkish blood like we care for every drop of Iraqi blood," he said after talks with Babacan.

Washington has so far been reluctant to attack PKK rebels, fearing this could damage ties with Iraqi Kurds and destabilise the Kurdish region, the only area of Iraq to see relative stability and prosperity since Saddam Hussein was toppled.

Turkey estimates 3,000 PKK rebels are based in Iraq. Ankara believes US forces in Iraq have the capability of capturing PKK leaders hiding in the Qandil mountains, shutting down their camps and cutting off supply routes and logistical support.

Turkey's government says it will use all diplomatic options before launching any strike into northern Iraq against the PKK.

The easing in rhetoric has helped bring global oil prices down from record highs.

Turkey has deployed as many as 100,000 troops, backed by tanks, F-16 fighter jets and helicopter gunships along its border in preparation for a possible attack on rebel bases.

"If expected developments do not take place in the next few days, we will have to take care of our own situation," Erdogan said in Oxford, England, yesterday.

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Britain's visiting foreign secretary, David Miliband, said they had proposed a meeting in Istanbul next month of officials from the United States, Turkey and Iraq to discuss how to stop PKK attacks.

Iraq's Talabani said yesterday the PKK would announce a ceasefire. Later the guerrilla group said in a statement it was ready for peace if Ankara stopped its military offensive against Kurdish fighters. It made no mention of a ceasefire.

Babacan said any ceasefire offer would be meaningless as the PKK was a terrorist organisation, not a sovereign army.

An ambush over the weekend by 200 PKK guerrillas left 12 Turkish soldiers dead and eight missing.

The attack's sophistication and scope surprised not only the Turks but also the US and its Iraqi allies.

The US, with Iraqi help, also could squeeze the flow of supplies and funds for the PKK coming across the border, or through the airport in Irbil, the largest city in Iraqi Kurdistan.

Turkey yesterday said it would exhaust diplomatic channels before launching any military strike into northern Iraq.

- Agencies

Feeling sorry for Iraqis is not enough -- Saudi Minister
MIL-LD IRAQ-NEIGHBORS
Feeling sorry for Iraqis is not enough -- Saudi Minister
KUWAIT, Oct 23 (KUNA) -- Saudi Interior Minister Prince Nayef bin Abdul-Aziz stressed on Tuesday the importance of taking action to stop the sufferings of the Iraqi people who are facing killings and displacement.

Addressing the fourth meeting for the Iraq neighbors that opened in Kuwait earlier today, Prince Nayef said that the Iraqi people were "going through a bitter reality." "With this reality, it is not enough to feel how painful and bitter it is but we should, sincerely, do something, intensify efforts and invest capabilities to stop these sufferings and combat the powers that do not want the country to overcome its predicament," the Saudi Minister said.

Prince Nayef said, there were Iraqi people who, unfortunately, did not work for the good, security and stability of their country, due to either ignorance or being forced to do so.

"Those who think that the Iraq neighbors' meeting is only for the good of the neighbors and not for Iraq in the first place are mistaken.

"Our ties with Iraq are those of fraternity, belief and neighborliness that prompt us to take part in all efforts that contribute to reducing the sufferings of those people and help them," Prince Nayef said.

He also lashed out at the "terrorist" organizations hiding under an Islamic umbrella at the time when they cause too much harm to Islam and Muslims.

Meanwhile, other Iraq neighbors' Interior Ministers taking part in the meeting stressed the necessity of cooperating at the bilateral, regional and international levels to help Iraq restore its security and stability.

They also asserted the importance of supporting the construction efforts in the country taking all measures that are likely to realize national reconciliation and help all political parties take part in the political process.

During the opening session of the neighbors' meeting, Jordanian Interior Minister, Eid Al-Fayez, said that Iraq's stability was a common interest for all the neighbor countries.

He hoped the Kuwait meeting would be a good chance to exchange views and reach the best means of cooperation and coordination in that respect.

"Iraq's Security and Stability is the security and stability of our countries," Al-Fayez said adding that terrorism in Iraq extended to the neighbors.

For his part, Bahrain's Interior Minister Sheikh Rashid bin Abdallah bin Ahmad Al-Khalifa told the session that the security situation in Iraq needed to be "diagnosed and analyzed by the brothers in Iraq to help the neighbor countries identify the procedures to be taken." (pickup previous) yms.jy.

msa

KUNA 231740 Oct 07NNNN
http://www.kuna.net.kw/home/Story.aspx?Lan...mp;DSNO=1031684

Bush's Response to 9/11 Was Deadlier Than the Attacks Themselves

Chalmers Johnson, Tomdispatch.com

ForeignPolicy: A look at how and why the U.S. gravely failed in its response to 9/11.

A GUIDE FOR THE PERPLEXED
Intellectual fallacies of the 'war on terror'
Chalmers Johnson reviews The Matador's Cape: America's Reckless Response to Terror by Stephen Holmes, and finds it a "powerful and philosophically erudite survey of what we think we understand about the 9/11 attacks". Holmes has cleared away the underbrush and prepared the way for the public to address this more or less taboo subject. (Oct 23, '07)

Tehran flaunts new weapons
In recent weeks, Iran has opened a new air base and unveiled new domestically produced military hardware, including medium-range ballistic missiles and a one-ton smart bomb. (Oct 23, '07)

Sanctions on Iran a prelude to conflict?
At the heart of the strategy of the United States and its allies to pressure Iran over its nuclear program is the application of a third, stronger round of sanctions. Yet sanctions significantly increase the likelihood of militarized conflict rather than preventing it. - Prerna Mankad (Oct

Another trans-Caspian
pipe dream
A proposed trans-Caspian pipeline from Turkmenistan to Azerbaijan that would ultimately deliver gas to the world via Turkey has strong backing from the United States. Technically, bar some minor seismic activity, there's no problem. Politically, it's a veritable earthquake. - Robert M Cutler

Should the U.S. Attack Iran?
Annette Pölking of the Atlantic Initiative looks at both sides of the debate on military action against Iran. Is damaging Tehran’s nuclear progress worth the risk of increased Middle Eastern instability? Look at the arguments in the latest Pro & Con and participate in our poll.Read Article

General: Bush ordered 'torture' tactics himself
( Published on Tuesday, October 23, 2007 )
More than 100,000 pages of newly released government documents to demonstrate how US military interrogators "abused, tortured or killed" scores of prisoners rounded up since Sept. 11, 2001

The DREAM Act: Senate Could Soon Vote on 'Stealth' Amnesty Billby James J. Carafano


George W. Bush: 'The Evangelical President'by Ericka AndersenBill Sammon, Washington Examiner White House Correspondent, spoke with conservative bloggers today at The Heritage Foundation about his latest book -- and dished a little more.

Regime Change Redux
Posted by Patrick Foy on October 24, 2007

It is time to contemplate, post “Operation Iraqi Freedom”, the reality and the implications of “regime change” with respect to Iran. One fact has been made perfectly clear by the American reaction to the Iranian President’s recent visit to the UN and to Columbia University in New York. The de facto U.S. policy toward Iran is “regime change.” Nothing less. It has been th