Original Content at http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_el...m_s_watch_p.htm

October 1, 2007

Is Freedom's Watch PNAC in Populist Drag?

By Elizabeth Ferrari

Is Freedom’s Watch PNAC in Populist Drag?



According to the Associated Press, Freedom’s Watch is new conservative group of “outsiders” who seek to influence a broad range of issues, unlike their close cousins, the Swiftboaters, who focused only on smearing John Kerry. But, the roster of PNACers involved in this project – L. Scooter Libby, Mary Maitlan, consultants from the so called “think tank” The American Enterprise Institute, as well as former White House officials Ari Fleisher and Bradley Blakeman, begs the question in what sense can this group be called “outsiders”. Outside of the West wing or, outside of the Bush Cabinet? Or, maybe only outside of public view?



This White House front group is dominated by people close to Dick Cheney, like Mel Sembler who also chaired the Libby defense fund and Kevin E. Moley who was a senior aide to Cheney’s 2000 campaign. It has been reported that the idea for the group resulted from a meeting of Florida Republicans where Cheney was the keynote speaker. The group was quickly welcomed to the conversation on Iraq by the neoconservative group Foundation for Defense of Democracies, led by Bill Kristol, Steve Forbes, Jeanne Kilpatrick, James Woolsey, Richard Perle, Charles Krauthammer -- indeed, the PNAC “A” team.



Freedom’s Watch has been selling itself as a grassroots organization although anyone who can read can determine very quickly that it isn’t. Their website exhibits none of the messiness of a working grassroots enterprise – in fact, it looks somewhat uninhabited. Their stated goals echo White House rhetoric, down to their favorite metaphor. As Glenn Greenwald has pointed out, our new enemy is Hitler, we are fighting another World War II and anyone who disagrees with their imperialism is Chamberlain. (They really need to come up with a new vehicle because this one is a dead giveaway.)



The group’s grassroots window dressing is being validated by the AP and also by the New York Times, who seem strangely unable to distinguish between real grassroots and neoconservative astroturf. Both outlets have compared Freedom’s Watch to MoveOn, a real grassroots group, repeatedly. Over this last weekend, AOL had a poll up comparing the two groups. The AP has referred to these two organizations as left and right “bookends” which is patently untrue. MoveOn has about 3.3 million members. It is unknown how many members Freedom’s Watch has besides the original 20 who could write million dollar checks.



The group’s first effort was an ad to rally support for Bush’s failed Iraq policy. The ad used the Administration’s strategy of conflating Iraq with 9/11. It deployed a veteran, (an amputee) as the mouthpiece for the message just as the Administration has from the outset used our service people as props for their public policy statements.



During the visit of the Iranian president, the group took out a big ad in the New York Times. The ad was a photograph of Ahmadinejad, the title was “TERRORIST!” and the ad ripped Columbia University. A complaint from Freedom’s Watch was also behind the Time’s apology for the MoveOn Petraeus ad. It’s ironic that the Times apologized for an ad critical of a general officer up to his chin in Bush propaganda but not for the ad that called out a visiting foreign head of state during an increasingly tense diplomatic moment.



Freedom’s Watch is planning a forum, in conjunction with AEI fellows, to develop a rationale and a PR campaign to sell a war on Iran. This is a private, not a public grassroots, gathering -- although there may be foie de gras and a few rounds of golf. If this isn’t PNAC in populist drag, we're looking at neocon twins separated at birth.

This is highly informative, very late, provocative, and all true.


Published on Monday, October 1, 2007 by
Truthdig.com<http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20071001_israels_toy_soldiers/>

Israel's Toy Soldiers**

by Chris Hedges

If you are a young Muslim American and head off to the Middle East for a
spell in a fundamentalist "madrassa," or religious school, Homeland Security
will probably greet you at the airport when you return. But if you are an
American Jew and you join hundreds of teenagers from Europe and Mexico for
an eight-week training course run by the Israel Defense Forces, you can post
your picture wearing an Israeli army uniform and holding an automatic weapon
on MySpace.

The Marva program, part summer camp part indoctrination, was launched in
Israel in 1981. It allows participants, who must be Jewish and between the
ages of 18 and 28, to fire weapons, live in military barracks in the
Negevdesert and saunter around in an Israeli military uniform saluting
and taking
long hikes with military packs. The Youth and Education Corps of the Israel
Defense Forces run four 120-strong training sessions a year.

"Upon arrival, the participants experience an abrupt change into army life:
wearing uniforms, accepting army discipline, and learning the programs and
lessons integral to the program," the Let Israelis Show You Israel Web site
<http://www.israelfree.com/marva.asp>reads. "The program includes military
content such as: navigation, field training, weapons training, shooting
ranges, marches and more, as well as educational content such as: Zionism,
Jewish Identity, history and knowledge of the land of Israel. All of this is
taught in Hebrew in an intensive eight weeks."

"The participants finish the program after completing a short, intensive,
exhilarating military experience that allows them to taste Israel in a way
that they never could before-as part of the Israel Defense Forces," the site
reads. "They leave the program with a feeling of belonging and a strong
connection to Israel, and many return to Israel to continue the connection
that was created in the framework of the Marva course."

There are, of course, gushing testimonials about the program.

"I spent the first few days of Marva doubting my decision, wondering why I
had come, wondering if there was any way out. With all of the running,
yelling orders, discipline and Hebrew, I felt horribly out of place," writes
Canadian David Roth of his summer. "It was a completely different world from
the one I was used to. All that changed, though, by the end of the first
week. We had our first 'Masa' (Hike). It was very hard, but at the end, we
all knew, our M16s were waiting for us at the 'tekes' (Ceremony). We got
through the 8 kilometers and had our 'tekes' and got our guns. It felt
amazing, and from that point on Marva was incredible."

How have we reacted when we discovered that American Muslims were being
taught in a foreign country to fire machine guns at paper figures and
simulate military maneuvers? And what about the summer schools in
Gazaorganized by Islamic Jihad designed to train young Palestinians in
the
basics of military life? These Gaza camps, uncovered in 2001, were widely
denounced by Israel as proof that the Palestinians were teaching their
children to hate and kill.

The argument in favor of camps in Israel, as opposed to camps in Pakistan,
is that these young men and women are not going to come back and use what
they have learned to harm Americans. They are not terrorists. Muslims,
however, have not cornered the market on terrorism and violence. Radical
Jews have also been involved in terrorist attacks in Israel and the United
States.

I discovered an American in Israel in 1989 named Robert Manning. A huge,
burly man, Manning was living in the West Bank Jewish settlement of Kiyrat
Arba. When I found him he was carrying a pistol, a large knife strapped to
his leg and an M-16 assault rifle. He was part of a Jewish terrorist group
called Committee for Protection and Safety of the Highways that set up ad
hoc roadblocks and pulled Palestinians from cars to beat and often shoot
them. He was a follower of Meir Kahane, the leader of the Jewish Defense
League, who was implicated in terrorist attacks in the United States and
Israel. Manning served as a reservist in the Israel Defense Forces in the West
Bank.

Manning was wanted in California for murder. He had been charged in a 1980
mail-bomb killing as part of his involvement in the Jewish Defense League.
The bomb was intended for the owner of a local computer firm, but the
package holding the device was opened by the firm's secretary, Patricia
Wilkerson, who was killed instantly by the blast.

Manning, full of bluster and a bitter racism toward Arabs, used as his
pseudonym the name of the FBI agent in charge of his case, a bit of humor
that backfired on him by confirming my suspicion of his identify. I obtained
the picture from his California driver's license and showed it to his
neighbors at Kiyrat Arba. They identified him from the photo. I wrote an
article affirming that Manning, heavily armed and an active member of the
Israeli army, was living in a Jewish settlement. The Israeli government,
until that moment, said it had no information about his location. He was
extradited in 1993 and sentenced the next year to life imprisonment without
the possibility of parole for 30 years. He is in a maximum-security prison
in Florence, Colo.

Those who go through the Marva summer program are indoctrinated as
thoroughly as Muslims who go overseas and are told they are part of a
greater jihad for Islam. The results, given Israel's close alliance with the
United States, may not be negative for those in power in the United States,
but it may be very negative for those Americans defined as the enemy,
especially Muslims, should we suffer another 9/11. The program inculcates
hatred and a belief in the efficacy of violence to solve the problems in the
Middle East. It identifies Israel with militarism. It feeds the idea that a
Jew born in Brooklyn has a birthright to settle in Israel that is denied to
an American of Palestinian descent.

Jerusalem, aside from being one of the most beautiful cities in the world,
is one of the most literate, creative and intellectual. Do these young men
and women really know the best of Israel by spending eight weeks playing
soldier and glorifying the military? Is the cause of Israel advanced by
mirroring the twisted militarism of Islamic fundamentalists?

Terrorists arise in all cultures, all nations and all religions. We have
produced more than our share. Ask the people of Vietnam or Iraq. The danger
of a military program such as these is that it solidifies a mind-set of us
and them. It romanticizes violence. It widens the divide that leads to
conflict. It makes dialogue impossible. There are great Israeli
institutions, from the newspaper Haaretz to the courageous Israeli human
rights organization B'Tselem <http://www.btselem.org/English/> to
Peace Now<http://www.peacenow.org.il/site/en/homepage.asp>.
A summer working for them, rather than wearing an army uniform, unleashing
bursts of automatic fire in the desert and singing Israeli patriotic songs,
might actually help.

*Chris Hedges, who graduated from Harvard Divinity School and was for nearly
two decades a foreign correspondent for The New York Times, is the author of
"American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on
America.<http://www.amazon.com/dp/0743284437?tag=commondreams-20/ref=nosim>
"*

© 2007 Truthdig, L.L.C.

URL to article: *http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/10/01/4223/*

October 8, 2007 Issue
Copyright © 2007 The American Conservative


Sycophant Savior
General Petraeus wins a battle in Washington—if not in Baghdad.
by Andrew J. Bacevich
In common parlance, the phrase “political general” is an epithet, the inverse of the warrior or frontline soldier. In any serious war, with big issues at stake, to assign command to a political general is to court disaster—so at least most Americans believe. But in fact, at the highest levels, successful command requires a sophisticated grasp of politics. At the summit, war and politics merge and become inextricably intertwined. A general in chief not fully attuned to the latter will not master the former.
George Washington, U.S. Grant, and Dwight D. Eisenhower were all “political generals” in the very best sense of the term. Their claims to immortality rest not on their battlefield exploits—Washington actually won few battles, and Grant achieved his victories through brute force rather than finesse, while Ike hardly qualifies as a field commander at all—but on the skill they demonstrated in translating military power into political advantage. Each of these three genuinely great soldiers possessed a sophisticated appreciation for war’s political dimension.
David Petraeus is a political general. Yet in presenting his recent assessment of the Iraq War and in describing the “way forward,” Petraeus demonstrated that he is a political general of the worst kind—one who indulges in the politics of accommodation that is Washington’s bread and butter but has thereby deferred a far more urgent political imperative, namely, bringing our military policies into harmony with our political purposes.
From the very beginning of the Iraq War, such harmony has been absent. The war’s military and political aspects have been badly out of synch. (In this regard, the hackneyed comparisons between Iraq and Vietnam are tragically apt.) The failure to plan for an occupation, the wildly inflated expectations of Iraq’s rapid transformation into a liberal democracy, Donald Rumsfeld’s stubborn refusal to acknowledge the insurgency’s existence until long after it had begun, the deeply flawed kick-down-the-door campaign that ensued once Rumsfeld could no longer deny reality: all of these meant that from the outset, the exertions of U.S. troops, however great, tended to be at odds with our stated political intentions. Our actions were counterproductive.
The Petraeus-Crocker hearings found Petraeus in a position to resolve that problem. Over the previous eight months, a discredited president had effectively abdicated responsibility for managing the war. “I trust David Petraeus” became George W. Bush’s mantra, suggesting an astonishing level of presidential deference. Sometime in early 2007, the task of formulating basic strategy for Iraq had effectively migrated from Washington to Baghdad, passing from the office of the commander in chief to the headquarters of the senior field commander. The president made it clear that he intended to takes his cues from his general. Military judgment would inform, even determine, political decisions.
The general has now made his call, and President Bush has endorsed it: the surge having succeeded (so at least we are assured), it will now be curtailed. The war will continue, albeit on a marginally smaller scale. As events develop, it just might become smaller still. Only time will tell.
Petraeus has chosen a middle course, carefully crafted to cause the least amount of consternation among various Washington constituencies he is eager to accommodate. This is the politics of give and take, of horse trading, of putting lipstick on a pig. Ultimately, it is the politics of avoidance.
A political general in the mold of Washington or Grant would have taken a different course, using his moment in the spotlight not to minimize consternation but to stir it up to the maximum extent. He would have capitalized on his status as man of the hour to oblige civilian leaders, both in Congress and in the executive branch, to do what they have not done since the Iraq War began—namely, their jobs. He would have insisted upon the president and the Congress making decisions that wartime summons them—and not military commanders—to make. Instead, Petraeus issued everyone a pass.

* * *

In testifying before House and Senate committees about the current situation in Iraq, Petraeus told no outright lies. He made no blustery promises about “victory,” a word notably absent from his testimony. The tone of the presentation was sober and measured. It contained the requisite references to complexity and challenge. Petraeus acknowledged miscalculation and disappointment. In contrast to his commander in chief, he did not claim that U.S. troops were “kicking ass.”
Yet the essence of his message was this: after four years of futile blundering, the United States has identified the makings of a successful strategy in Iraq. The new doctrine that Petraeus had devised and implemented—the concept of securing the population and thereby fostering conditions conducive to reconstruction and reconciliation—has produced limited but real progress. This gives Petraeus cause for hope that further efforts along these lines may yet enable the United States to create an Iraq that is stable, unified, and not a haven for terrorists. In so many words, Petraeus told Congress that senior U.S. commanders in Iraq had finally found the right roadmap. The way ahead may be long and difficult—indeed, it will be. But Petraeus and his key subordinates know where they are. They know where they need to go. And above all, at long last, they know how to get there.
Critics have questioned the data that Petraeus offered to substantiate his case. They charge him with relying on dubious statistics, with ignoring facts that he finds inconvenient, and with discovering trends where none exist. They question whether to credit the much-touted progress in Anbar province to American shrewdness or to the vagaries of Iraqi sectarian and tribal politics. They cite the pathetic performance of the corrupt and dysfunctional Iraqi government. They note the disparity between the Petraeus assessment and those offered by the intelligence community, by the Government Accountability Office, and by congressionally appointed blue-ribbon commissions. They point out that other highly qualified and well-informed senior military officers—notably, Gen. George Casey, the army chief of staff, and Adm. William Fallon, commander of United States Central Command—have publicly expressed views notably at odds with those of General Petraeus.
The critics make a good case. Yet let us ignore them. Let us assume instead that Petraeus genuinely believes that he has broken the code in Iraq and that things are improving. Let’s assume further that he is correct in that assessment.
What then should he have recommended to the Congress and the president? That is, if the commitment of a modest increment of additional forces —the 30,000 troops comprising the surge, now employed in accordance with sound counterinsurgency doctrine —has begun to turn things around, then what should the senior field commander be asking for next?
A single word suffices to answer that question: more. More time. More money. And above all, more troops.
It is one of the oldest principles of generalship: when you find an opportunity, exploit it. Where you gain success, reinforce it. When you have your opponent at a disadvantage, pile on. In a letter to the soldiers serving under his command, released just prior to the congressional hearings, Petraeus asserted that coalition forces had “achieved tactical momentum and wrestled the initiative from our enemies.” Does that reflect his actual view of the situation? If so, then surely the imperative of the moment is to redouble the current level of effort so as to preserve that initiative and to deny the enemy the slightest chance to adjust, adapt, or reconstitute.
Yet Petraeus has chosen to do just the opposite. Based on two or three months of (ostensibly) positive indicators, he has advised the president to ease the pressure, withdrawing the increment of troops that had (purportedly) enabled the coalition to seize the initiative in the first place.
This defies logic. It’s as if two weeks into the Wilderness Campaign, Grant had counseled Lincoln to reduce the size of the Army of the Potomac. Or as if once Allied forces had established the beachhead at Normandy, Eisenhower had started rotating divisions back stateside to ease the strain on the U.S. Army.
Petraeus likes to portray himself as a thinking soldier. Having devoted his
Ph.D. dissertation to the lessons of Vietnam, he qualifies as a serious student of counterinsurgencies. He knows that they require lots of troops—many more than the United States has in Iraq relative to the size of the population there. He knows, too, that they require lots of time—on average, nine or ten years by his own publicly expressed estimation. The counter-insurgency manual that Petraeus helped draft prior to taking up command in Baghdad makes these points explicitly.
If Petraeus actually believes that he can salvage something akin to success in Iraq and if he agrees with President Bush about the consequences of failure —genocidal violence, Iraq becoming a launching pad for terrorist attacks directed against the United States, the Middle East descending into chaos that consumes Israel, the oil-dependent global economy shattered beyond repair, all of this culminating in the emergence of a new Caliphate bent on destroying the West—then surely this moment of (supposed) promise is not a time for scrimping. Rather, now is the time to go all out—to insist upon a maximum effort.

* * *

There is only one plausible explanation for Petraeus’s terminating a surge that has (he says) enabled coalition forces, however tentatively, to gain the upper hand. That explanation is politics—of the wrong kind.
Given the current situation as Petraeus describes it, an incremental reduction in U.S. troop strength makes sense only in one regard: it serves to placate each of the various Washington constituencies that Petraeus has a political interest in pleasing.
A modest drawdown responds to the concerns of Petraeus’s fellow four stars, especially the Joint Chiefs, who view the stress being imposed on U.S. forces as intolerable. Ending the surge provides the Army and the Marine Corps with a modicum of relief.
A modest drawdown also comes as welcome news for moderate Republicans in Congress. Nervously eyeing the forthcoming elections, they have wanted to go before the electorate with something to offer other than being identified with Bush’s disastrous war. Now they can point to signs of change—indeed, Petraeus’s proposed withdrawal of one brigade before Christmas coincides precisely with a suggestion made just weeks ago by Sen. John Warner, the influential Republican from Virginia.
Although they won’t say so openly, a modest drawdown comes as good news to Democrats as well. Accused with considerable justification of having done nothing to end the war since taking control of the Congress in January, they can now point to the drawdown as evidence that they are making headway. As Newsweek’s Michael Hirsch observed, Petraeus “delivered an early Christmas present” to congressional Democrats.
Above all, a modest drawdown pleases President Bush. It gives him breathing room to continue the conflict in which he has so much invested. It all but guarantees that Iraq will be the principal gift that Bush bestows upon his successor when he leaves office in January 2009. Bush’s war will outlive Bush: for reasons difficult to fathom, this has become an important goal for the president and his dwindling band of loyalists.
Granted, no one is completely happy. Yet neither does anyone go away empty-handed. The Petraeus plan offers a little something for everyone, not least of all for Petraeus himself, who takes back to Baghdad a smidgen of additional time (his next report is not due for another six months), lots more money (at least $3 billion per week), and assurances that his tenure in command has been extended.
This outcome reflects the handiwork of someone skilled in the ways of Washington. Yet the ultimate result is to allow the contradiction between our military efforts in Iraq and our professed political purposes there to persist.

* * *

Lt. Gen. Peter Chiarelli is one officer keen to confront rather than ignore that contradiction. In an article appearing in the current issue of the journal Military Review, General Chiarelli writes:

The U.S. as a Nation—and indeed most of the U.S. Government—has not gone to war since 9/11. Instead the departments of Defense and State (as much as their modern capabilities allow) and the Central Intelligence Agency are at war while the American people and most the other institutions of national power have largely gone about their normal business.

Chiarelli is correct. His statement goes directly to the heart of the matter. After the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, to sustained bipartisan applause, President Bush committed the United States to an open-ended global war on terror. Having made that fundamental decision, the president and Congress sent American soldiers off to fight that war while urging the American people to distract themselves with other pursuits. The American people have done as they were asked.
The result, six years later, is a massive and growing gap between the resources required to sustain that global war, in Iraq and elsewhere, and the resources actually available to do so. President Bush, with the Joint Chiefs of Staff serving as enablers, has papered over that gap by sending soldiers back for a third or fourth combat tour and, most recently, by extending the length of those tours. In a country with a population that exceeds 300 million, one-half of one percent of our fellow citizens bear the burden of this global war. The other 99.5 percent of us have decided to chill out.
The president has made no serious effort to mobilize the wherewithal that his wars in Iraq and Afghanistan require. The Congress, liberal Democrats voting aye, has made itself complicit in this shameful policy by obligingly appropriating whatever sums of money the president has requested, all, of course, in the name of “supporting the troops.”
Petraeus has now given this charade a further lease on life. In effect, he is allowing the president and the Congress to continue dodging the main issue, which comes down to this: if the civilian leadership wants to wage a global war on terror and if that war entails pacifying Iraq, then let’s get serious about providing what’s needed to complete the mission—starting with lots more soldiers. Rather than curtailing the ostensibly successful surge, Petraeus should broaden and deepen it. That means sending more troops to Iraq, not bringing them home. And that probably implies doubling or tripling the size of the United States Army on a crash basis.
If the civilian leadership is unwilling to provide what’s needed, then all of the talk about waging a global war on terror—talk heard not only from the president but from most of those jockeying to replace him—amounts to so much hot air. Critics who think the concept of the global war on terror is fundamentally flawed will see this as a positive development. Once we recognize the global war on terror for the fraudulent enterprise that it has become, then we can get serious about designing a strategy to address the threat that we actually face, which is not terrorism but violent Islamic radicalism. The antidote to Islamic radicalism, if there is one, won’t involve invading and occupying places like Iraq.
This defines Petraeus’s failure. Instead of obliging the president and the Congress to confront this fundamental contradiction—are we or are we not at war?—he chose instead to let them off the hook.
Of course, if he had done otherwise—if he had asked, say, to expand the surge by adding yet another 50,000 troops—he would have distressed just about everyone back in Washington. He might have paid a considerable price career-wise. Certainly, he would have angered the JCS, antiwar Democrats, and waffling Republicans who want the war to go away. Even the president, Petraeus’s number-one fan, would have been surprised and embarrassed by such a request.
Yet the anger and embarrassment would have been salutary. A great political general doesn’t tell his masters what they want to hear. He tells them what they need to hear, thereby nudging them to make decisions that must be made if the nation’s interests are to be served. In this instance, Petraeus provided cover for them to evade their responsibilities.
Politically, it qualifies as a brilliant maneuver. The general’s relationships with official Washington remain intact. Yet he has broken faith with the soldiers he commands and the Army to which he has devoted his life. He has failed his country. History will not judge him kindly.
__________________________________________
Andrew J. Bacevich is professor of history and international relations at Boston University.

P5+2 Statement on Iran
(George Perkovich, Carnegie Analysis)

Monday, October 1
The P5+2 statement reveals that the Iran/IAEA deal effectively neutralized the U.S., French, and U.K. efforts to tighten sanctions on Iran in response to Iran's ongoing refusal to accede to UN Security Council resolutions. The statement basically says the world should wait and hope that Iran gives the IAEA full answers and that somehow all the outstanding issues are indeed resolved . . . When President Ahmadinejad said last week that the Iran case is closed in the Security Council and the matter belongs with the IAEA, he was absolutely wrong from a legal standpoint. The UN Security Council Resolutions remain active and binding. But some members of the Security Council, following the lead of Director General ElBaradei, are showing that President Ahmadinejad is having his way, at least for now.

"Six-Party Talks in Breakthrough Nuclear Deal," Digital Chosunilbo

• "Split in Group Delays Vote on Sanctions Against Iran," By Helene Cooper, The New York Times

• "U.S.-Kyrgyz Republic Cooperation Program for Combating Nuclear Smuggling," U.S. Department of State

• "Nuclear Warhead Design Hits Snag," By Walter Pincus, The Washington Post

• "Some EU Officials Want to Resist Nuclear Power Renaissance," Deutsche Welle

• "First Floating Nuclear Power Plant to Come into Service in 2011," RIA Novosti

IForeign Policy News and Commentary Update October 2, 2007

ranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad definitely got the villain treatment during his recent US visit, but Mosaic asks whether it's Americans he's even talking to. After all, getting tough with Uncle Sam earns big points in the Middle East.
http://www.truthdig.com/avbooth/item/20070...jad_is_smiling/

WHY THEY DON'T LIKE US: WOULD YOU FOLLOW THE COUNTRY THAT BUNGLED IRAQ? - ANNE APPLEBAUM (WASHINGTON POST, OCTOBER 2): The U.S.?s closest friends really dislike is not our traditional pushiness, our violent movies or even our current president (though they don't like him much) but our incompetence. We've been bad at looking after our allies over the past five years, bad at thanking them or compensating them for military contributions to Iraq, bad at maintaining very basic aspects of public diplomacy, such as student-exchange programs.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...0101331_pf.html

CAN'T WIN WITH 'EM, CAN'T GO TO WAR WITHOUT 'EM: PRIVATE MILITARY CONTRACTORS AND COUNTERINSURGENCY - P. W. SINGER (POLICY PAPER, FOREIGN POLICY AT BROOKINGS, SEPTEMBER): 'The Blackwater episode resonated negatively not merely inside Iraq, but throughout the Muslim world. Every single media source led with the episode in the days that followed, focusing in on how the US could hire such '...arrogant trigger-happy guns for hire, mercenaries by any other name.' as UAE based Gulf News put it. ... Ironically, the incident occurred at the very same time that Secretary of State Rice was in the region at a conference, hoping to jump start the Arab-Israeli peace process, an effort that many think is key to sucking the poison out of U.S.-Muslim world relations. Instead of a public diplomacy coup for the U.S., the regional press instead focused on what the leading Arabic newspaper al Hayat titled as Blackwater... Black Conference.'
http://www3.brookings.edu/fp/research/singer200709.pdf
SEN OBAMA IRAQ SECURITY CONTRACTORS AMENDMENT WINS APPROVAL IN SENATE PRESS RELEASE (NH INSIDER, SEPTEMBER 28): Excerpt from a letter (September 28) from Senator Barack Obama to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice: 'I am concerned about the impact of this [Blackwater] incident, as well as others since the private contractor role at Abu Ghraib, on our overall effort to win the wider 'war of ideas' that is required to defeat terrorism. This recent incident and other incidents have been widely reported in the Muslim world, with negative implications for U.S. efforts. The result is that not only are the private contractors being blamed, but so is the U.S. government. Has the State Department conducted an analysis of the consequences of turning over such functions in a contingency operation zone to private contractors? Is this outsourcing actually hurting, rather than helping, our public diplomacy efforts, especially our efforts to win 'hearts and minds'?"
http://www.nhinsider.com/press-releases/se...-approval-.html
CHIEFS DECRY WAR IN PAKISTAN - WILLIS WITTER (WORLD AFFAIRS BOARD, OCTOBER 2): Pashtun tribal chiefs, who for centuries have held sway in the Hindu Kush mountain range along the border with Afghanistan, say they are being thrust into an Iraq-style war between violent Islamists and the Pakistani army. The views of chiefs underscore the difficulty of the State Department's effort to implement a key goal of public diplomacy -- to convince the Muslim world that the United States is not an enemy of Islam.
http://www.worldaffairsboard.com/political...r-pakistan.html

DIPLOMATS AND BUREAUCRATS IN THE BLOGOSPHERE - K. DANIEL GLOVER (BELTWAY BLOGROLL, NATIONAL JOURNAL, OCTOBER 2): When diplomats and federal procurement folks join the blogosphere, you can rest assured that blogging is no longer just a fad -- and that's exactly what happened last week. The State Department launched a blog called Dipnote in advance of a meeting of the U.N. General Assembly. "With Dipnote," wrote Sean McCormack, the assistant secretary of State for public affairs, "we are going to take you behind the scenes at the State Department and bring you closer to the personalities of the department. We are going to try and break through some of the jargon and talk about how we operate around the world." Other State Department officials who have posted entries are: Noel Clay, a press officer in the U.S. embassy in Baghdad and Under Secretary Karen Hughes.
http://beltwayblogroll.nationaljournal.com/archives/2007/10/

DECONSTRUCTING AHMADINEJAD?S VISIT: WHEN PUBLIC DIPLOMACY IS NOT PUBLIC DIPLOMACY E.C. NISBET (FRAMING CONFLICT: THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS, OCTOBER 1): http://framingconflict.blogspot.com/2007/1...visit-when.html


AGAINST MUSLIMS: NEOCONS USE CNN TO CONTINUE PSYOPS AGAINST AMERICAN MUSLIMS - (SUBUL AL-SALAM, OCTOBER 1): 'It should be noted that CNN is a branch of the 4th Army PSYOPS group staffed the National Security Council's Office of Public Diplomacy (OPD), 'a shadowy government propaganda agency that planted stories in the U.S. media supporting the Reagan Administration's Central America policies,' as Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting revealed way back in 2000.'
http://abdulhalimismail.blogspot.com/2007/...st-muslims.html

DOD APPROVED STRATEGIC COMMUNICATION PLAN FOR AFGHANISTAN (MOUNTAINRUNNER,SEPTEMBER 30): http://mountainrunner.us/2007/09/dod_appro...ic_communi.html
9/11 IS OVER - THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN (NEW YORK TIMES, SEPTEMBER 30): Before 9/11, the world thought America's slogan was: 'Where anything is possible for anybody.' But that is not our global brand anymore. Our government has been exporting fear, not hope: 'Give me your tired, your poor and your fingerprints.' Guantánamo Bay is the anti-Statue of Liberty.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/30/opinion/...agewanted=print

THE POLITICS OF CONFIDENCE - ROGER COHEN (NEW YORK TIMES, OCTOBER 1): The unpopularity of George W. Bush has led many to believe global America-hating will ebb once he leaves office on Jan. 20, 2009. That's a dangerous assumption. It's dangerous because the extent of American power will continue to invite resentment whoever is in the White House, and because America's perception of the terrorist threat will still differ from that of its Asian and European allies.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/01/opinion/...agewanted=print

COUNTING CIVILIAN DEATHS IN IRAQ MICHAEL DOBBS (WASHINGTON POST, OCTOBER 1): Without more information from Multi-National Force-Iraq (MNF-I) on the methods used to combine American and Iraqi data, it is impossible to tell whether Petraeus is "cooking the books," in the charged language of the recent MoveOn.org ad.
http://blog.washingtonpost.com/fact-checke...aths_in_ir.html

TRENDS IN IRAQ - MICHAEL O'HANLON (WASHINGTON TIMES, OCTOBER 1): The bottom line, that must not be forgotten amid all the competing reports and confusion and politics, is that U.S. government databases show clear and significant reductions in Iraqi civilian fatalities over the course of 2007.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/apps/pbcs.d...mplate=printart

OUR DISGRACEFUL REFUGEE SCORE CARD: WHY DOES THE U.S. TAKE IN FAR FEWER REFUGEES -- ESPECIALLY IRAQIS -- THAN IT SHOULD? - ANNA HUSARSKA (LOS ANGELES TIMES, SEPTEMBER 29): Whether on purpose or by lack of commitment, the Bush administration failed to meet its own minimal standard of offering a haven to a few thousand of the most vulnerable Iraqis. This is wrong. Such failure makes the U.S. lose hearts and minds across Iraq.
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commen...omment-opinions

IRAQ "BRAINS" DREAM OF STUDYING ABROAD - (ISLAMONLINE.NET & NEWS AGENCIES, OCTOBER 1): Troubled with the daily car bombs and threats of violence, Iraq's top-notched students want to escape the chaotic future of their war-ravaged nation.
http://www.islamonline.net/servlet/Satelli...-News/NWELayout

SUBCONTRACTING THE WAR EDITORIAL (NEW YORK TIMES, OCTOBER 1): Iraqis -- whose hearts and minds the Bush administration insists it is finally winning -- were infuriated by the reported killing at of least eight Iraqis, including an infant. killings, by guards from Blackwater USA, assigned to protect American diplomats. The fact that American diplomatic activity in Iraq nearly came to a halt when Blackwater was grounded for a few days shows how much American operations have come to depend on mercenaries.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/01/opinion/...agewanted=print

THE SHADOW ARMY - JANINE R. WEDEL (BOSTON N GLOBE, SEPTEMBER 30): The Iraq war has exposed the dangers of contracting out vital state functions to private actors.
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial...ow_army?mode=PF

THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE IRAQI: BLACKWATER AND PRIVATE MILITARY FIRMS IN IRAQ - WAJAHAT ALI (COUNTERPUNCH, SEPTEMBER 29/30): As of September 2007, Blackwater continues its convoy movements on the streets of Iraq. The black heart of American private military firms in Iraq has a strong, healthy pulse indeed.
http://www.counterpunch.org/ali09292007.html

BLACKWATER WAVES: THE PRIVATE SECURITY FIRM HAS MADE PLENTY OF ENEMIES IN IRAQ AND IN WASHINGTON ? EDITORIAL (WASHINGTON POST, OCTOBER 2): For some time to come, Blackwater or other security companies will be needed to protect senior U.S. diplomats and other personnel. The focus of the current reviews should be ensuring that they conform to the standards governing U.S. troops and can be held accountable when they commit excesses.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...7100101435.html

THE SOUNDS OF SILENCE - PETE HEGSETH (NATIONAL REVIEW, SEPTEMBER 30): The sounds of silent progress in Iraq will eventually overcome the steady drumbeat of defeat here at home.
http://tank.nationalreview.com/post/?q=ZDN...MTRkNDdjNDY5MDM=

YOU CAN'T WIN WITH CIVIL WARS: HISTORY TEACHES THAT CONFLICTS LIKE IRAQ DRAG ON AND RARELY PRODUCE PEACE DEALS - BARBARA F. WALTER (LOS ANGELES TIMES, OCTOBER 2): The sad irony of the civil war in Iraq is that by deposing Saddam Hussein, we've created a situation that is likely to remind us of why we supported him for so long in the first place.
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-...inion-rightrail

THE END OF BONAPARTISM AND THE WAR ON TERROR JUAN COLE (INFORMED COMMENT: THOUGHTS ON THE MIDDLE EAST, HISTORY, AND RELIGION, OCTOBER 1): For the 'globalized business' crowd, the Iraq war was not a sacred mission, as it was for the Neoconservatives, but rather just another lowering of barriers to investment and business (which might also have opened the Arab world up, which would have been all to the good).
http://www.juancole.com/2007/09/end-of-bon...-on-terror.html

HISTORY AND THE DRUMBEAT OF WAR - JAMES CARROLL (BOSTON GLOBE, OCTOBER 1); Fortunately the Bush administration's generic embrace of "preventive war" is discredited by Iraq, which is the main reason to hope no preemptive attack on Iran is coming.
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial..._of_war?mode=PF

A HEADLINE YOU'RE NOT READING: IRAN READY TO WORK WITH US ON IRAQ - ANTHONY KAUFMAN (HUFFINGTON POST, OCTOBER 1)
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/anthony-kauf...ea_b_66669.html

AN IRANIAN UNIVERSITY INVITES BUSH TO SPEAK - ROBIN WRIGHT (WASHINGTON POST OCTOBER 2)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...?hpid=sec-world

BUSH VS. IRAN: TO BOMB OR NOT TO BOMB? ? EDWARD M. GOMEZ (SFGATE.COM, OCTOBER 1)
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/sfgate...;entry_id=20758

BLOGGING AHMADINEJAD IN TEHRAN - TOM PARKER(NEW YORK TIMES, SEPTEMBER 30): Excerpts of what Iranian bloggers had to say about Mahmoud Ahmadinejad?s visit to Columbia University.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/30/opinion/...tml?ref=opinion

GUEST POST: THE INVENTION OF AN ANTI-CHRIST - JON STOKES (TOM PAINE, SEPTEMBER 28): The 'wingers need an Antichrist, the Bushies need a pretext, and the Israelies need protection... All of this makes Ahmadenijad the Most Dangerous Man Alive, and someone whose country must be invaded at all costs.
http://commonsense.ourfuture.org/guest_pos...nti_christ?tx=3

ANNALS OF NATIONAL SECURITY: SHIFTING TARGETS -- THE ADMINISTRATION?S PLAN FOR IRAN. - SEYMOUR M. HERSH (NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 8): http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/10...?printable=true

SHIFTING TARGETS - KATRINA VANDEN HEUVEL (NATION, OCTOBER 1): The Administration is intent on taking us into another military disaster -- which will destabilize the region and the world and make the US less secure.
http://www.thenation.com/blogs/edcut?pid=238617

SO WHAT ABOUT IRAN? HOW TO MAKE IRAQ LOOK LIKE WHIPPED CREAM - URI AVNERY (COUNTERPUNCH, SEPTEMBER 29/30): One thing I am ready to predict with confidence: whoever pushes for war against Iran will come to regret it. http://www.counterpunch.org/avnery09292007.html

THE REGION: AHMADINEJAD'S AGENDA BARRY RUBIN (JERUSALEM POST, OCTOBER 1): Ahmadinejad's goals are his control over Iran, Iran's control over the Persian Gulf area (especially Iraq), Israel's destruction, Iranian leadership of the Middle East, and even world domination, in roughly that order.
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid...ticle%2FPrinter

THE USUAL SUSPECT - JEFFREY GOLDBERG (NEW REPUBLIC, OCTOBER 1): The unmistakable message of The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy by John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) is that the destruction on September 11 was caused in significant measure by the Jews. Who really benefits from making anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism seem so indefensible?
http://www.tnr.com/docprint.mhtml?i=200710...=goldberg100807

ISRAEL'S TOY SOLDIERS - CHRIS HEDGES (TRUTHDIG, OCTOBER 1): .
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/200710...s_toy_soldiers/

BUSH, OIL AND MORAL BANKRUPTCY RAY MCGOVERN (TOMPAINE.COM, OCTOBER 1): So why the pressure for a wider war in the Middle East in which any victory will be Pyrrhic for Israel and for the U.S. The short answer is arrogant stupidity; the longer answer?what the Chinese used to call "great power chauvinism" and oil.
http://www.tompaine.com/articles/2007/10/0..._bankruptcy.php

A SMALL OUTBREAK OF MIDEAST HOPE - JIM HOAGLAND (WASHINGTON POST, SEPTEMBER 30): The belated U.S. mediation in the Middle East led by Condi Rice does illuminate three long-term changes that have to be taken into account in judging whether the secretary of state can wring agreement on principles from Olmert and Abbas.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...2801336_pf.html

WINNING UGLY: IRAQ DOESN?T NEED TO BE A KODAK MOMENT - VICTOR DAVIS HANSON (NATIONAL REVIEW, OCTOBER 1): The current orthodoxy that America is losing the war on terror inside and outside Iraq, while bereft of allies, is simply not true. Instead we are winning; it's ugly perhaps, but winning nonetheless.
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=Mjg0Y...NTliMTliMzQwMzQ=

A TERRORIST BILL OF RIGHTS? EDITORIAL (WASHINGTON TIMES, OCTOBER 1): This week, House Democrats say they plan to hold hearings on a misguided bill that would grant habeas corpus rights to terrorist detainees held at the Guantanamo Bay detention center. The proposal would allow terrorists to publicly challenge their status as detainees in the U.S. court system, fracturing the cohesive structure already in place to ensure that highly dangerous suspects are held and processed in a secure and timely fashion.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/apps/pbcs.d...mplate=printart

TERROR DATABASE GETS PLENTY OF HITS - SARA A. CARTER (WASHINGTON TIMES, OCTOBER 1): The Terrorist Screening Center has detected more than 40,000 people trying to gain entry into the U.S. who either associated with terrorist groups or were known terrorists themselves, and the database is only going to get better, says the agency's chief.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/apps/pbcs.d...mplate=printart

NOT A NATION AT WAR - DONALD H. HORNER JR. (BALTIMORE SUN, SEPTEMBER 28): The minuscule size of our armed forces relegates the "global war on terror" to the status of other out-of-sight, out-of-mind activities. We follow this war about as much as we pay attention to the daily operations of the Department of Agriculture.
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/opinion/o...0,3785168.story

U.S. IS TOP ARMS SELLER TO DEVELOPING WORLD - THOM SHANKER (NEW YORK TIMES, OCTOBER 1): The United States maintained its role as the leading supplier of weapons to the developing world in 2006, followed by Russia and Britain, according to a Congressional study to be released Monday. Pakistan, India and Saudi Arabia were the top buyers.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/01/us/01wea...agewanted=print

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

October 2, 2007

Can We Handle the Lesson of Ahmedinejad's U.S. Visit?

By Alan Hurwitz

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's visit to the United States caused a lot of political static. I see the encounter as a learning opportunity and test of strength for our own expressed democratic values. As such, I give us about a C-.

The "welcome" of Columbia President Lee Bollinger was outrageous – self-serving pandering to potential political fallout. The confrontive reaction of CNN to its own expert’s criticism of the statement (“a fontal assault”) made Fox News look wimpy by comparison.

What exactly was President Bollanger’s characterization? “Exhibiting qualities of a petty dictator”, and “Being dangerously uninformed about world events.” Etiquette aside, this sounds a little close to home. He was talking about the Iranian president, wasn’t he?

Can you imagine the probable reaction to President Bush being invited to speak at a major Iranian university, and being attacked and ridiculed by the university's president in the same way?

Walking off the stage would be quite understandable, as would other manifestations of umbrage at this breach of diplomatic standards. It’s difficult to predict. As we know, our president has trouble reacting quickly to unexpected news and events. He might have just kept reading whatever he was reading.

To his credit, President Bush’s words were on target. The Iranian president’s appearance was a testimony to confidence in our system and values. We don't fear ideas that are critical of our own. I'm glad the right speechwriter was on duty that day. Good going, Mr. President! I wish I could believe he wouldn’t have squashed the whole visit, could he have done so.

To be clear, the Iranian president is quite a piece of work. His government, if not he personally, have been responsible for much persecution and pain in his own country, and quite probably terrorist attacks as far away as Argentina. I’m personally offended and sometimes frightened by his ideas that the Holocaust didn't happen and Israel shouldn't exist. If he wasn’t one of the people that invaded our embassy and took our people hostage way back when, he certainly could have been, or perhaps would have liked to be.

Buddhists have a concept that people sometimes come into our lives to facilitate our learning. President Ahmadinejad's visit forces us to rise to our own rhetoric, with regard to free speech and also our willingness to take in uncomfortable views – perhaps to improve our understanding of our place in the today’s world.

Many of the Iranian president's views challenge assumptions that many Americans have come to see as just the way things are. How can one country tell another country it can’t develop nuclear energy? Some would question the right of countries to prohibit others from even developing nuclear weapons, at least without some agreement involving those earlier nuclear countries.

How can a country self-righteously berate another country for “interference” in an adjoining co-religionist country, when that country itself has more than 150,000 troops there, having overthrown the country’s government and destroyed its infrastructure? Oh yeah, the same country that sets up “no-fly zones” in other countries and calls it aggression when those countries resist.

Some assumptions that came to be accepted by the U.S. and others, and silently tolerated by a large part of the world, are now being questioned. The questioning may begin by obnoxious, “Who-do-they-think-they-are” kind of leaders that, mercifully for us, don’t have the elegance to do it more effectively.

The most dangerous lies and slander occur under the radar, like the belief that the U.S. government was behind the 9/11 attack. For many of the current generation, especially from other parts of the world, the Holocaust, as real as it is for us, is just another historical reference – in this day of omnipresent Internet news, much of it of questionable validity.

We should welcome arguments that challenge our world view, legitimate and otherwise, coming into public view, where we can shed light for others, and perhaps learn something for ourselves. In any case, people will most remember how we act more than what anyone says about us. We make our own credibility.

If we believe in the values of the free marketplace of ideas, we must be up to countering even outrageous arguments, from Iran or Fox News. Dismissing the ideas or their presenters as “evil” doesn't cut it anymore. There are too many in today’s flatter world that don't automatically share our assumptions of “good” and “evil”.

What used to be” obvious”, isn’t so obvious anymore, even if much of it is ultimately right. Thank you, Mr. Iranian President, for our opportunity to learn something and set some records straight.

© 2007 North Star Writers Group. May not be republished without permission.

http://www.defencetalk.com/forums/showthread.php?t=397

US dominates arms sales to Third World

WASHINGTON: The United States retained its dominance of the Third World arms market for the eighth year in a row in 2002, according to the latest in an annual series of reports produced by the Congressional Research Service (CRS).

Washington accounted for close to one-half of all new arms transfer agreements concluded during the year, as well as actual arms deliveries.

Altogether, arms sales from all sources to developing countries made up about two-thirds of arms sales worldwide during 2002, according to the report, which is based on the most comprehensive data compiled by the US government.

New arms agreements with developing nations totalled 17.7 billion dollars, a 10 per cent increase over new deals in 2001. Of that total, US sales came to 8.6 billion dollars, or almost 48 per cent of all arms transfers to Third World countries, up from 41 per cent the previous year.

Washington was followed by Russia, which sold 5.7 billion dollars worth of arms; Ukraine (1.6 billion dollars); Italy (1.5 billion dollars); and Germany and France (1.1 billion dollars each).

China was the leading recipient of conventional arms transfers in 2002, accounting for 3.6 billion dollars in purchases; followed by South Korea (1.9 billion dollars); India (1.4 billion dollars); and Oman (1.3 billion dollars).

Of the 10 top recipients, five were in the Middle East - Egypt, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Israel, in addition to Oman - and four in Asia, with Malaysia ranking eighth behind China, Korea and India.

Chile, which ranked tenth on the strength of a major purchase of advanced fighter jets from the United States, was the only country outside the other two regions, which have been the developing world's biggest customers for conventional arms for the past decade.

While the Middle East proved the bonanza market of the 1980s - particularly when warring Iran and Iraq, as well as Saudi Arabia, were making huge purchases - Asia, particularly China and India, was the big buyer of the last seven years, according to the report, 'Conventional Arms Transfers to Developing Nations, 1995-2002'.

In that period, China ranked number one, with 17.8 billion dollars worth of purchases; the United Arab Emirates (UAE) ranked second at 16.3 billion dollars; and India third at 14.1 billion dollars, suggesting the emergence of a new arms race between the world's two most populous nations that could dominate the marketfor some time, particularly if purchases in the Middle East continue to decline in relative terms.

The United States, which has sharply upgraded its military relationship with India in the last several years, particularly since the beginning of Washington's "war on terrorism", has made little secret of its hopes of integrating Delhi into a containment strategy against Beijing.

The 84-page report, whose graphs and tables are ritually pored over by intelligence analysts around the world to glean key trends and possible future military threats to their governments, tracks both actual deliveries of arms, as well as new agreements that will result in eventual deliveries.

The time between the signing of an agreement and actual delivery can stretch beyond a decade, depending on many factors.

In addition to covering the value of sales and deliveries each year and over periods as long as seven years, the report also tracks the transfer by various countries and categories of countries of specific weapons systems.

It found, for example, that a total of 60 surface-to-surface missile systems were transferred last year, none of which was supplied by the United States, Russia, China, the four major West European countries (France, Britain, Germany, and Italy) or "all other European countries".

Suppliers of the missiles were found in a category called "all others", which includes North Korea, South Africa, and Israel.

The report does not identify the individual suppliers in a category because that information remains classified.

In the introduction, Richard Grimmett, who has authored the report since it was first published some two decades ago, stressed that the overall trend in arms purchases by the developing world has been downward since the early 1990s, when countries that could afford them bought large quantities of advanced US weapons systems that were displayed during the 1991 Gulf War.

While arms transfers were up in 2002 compared to the previous year, the 17.7 billion dollars in new agreements was still the second lowest in the last seven years.

Grimmett stressed that it was still too soon to assess the impact, if any, of the "war on terrorism", including the ouster of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan and this year's war in Iraq.

Economic conditions in specific countries as well as the state of the world economy continued to be a major factor constraining arms buying, according to Grimmett. "Economic as well as military considerations have factored heavily in (developing country) arms purchasing decisions, a circumstance likely to continue for some time," he wrote.

This has benefited both wealthier developing countries vis-a- vis their rivals, as well as those arms suppliers that can provide credit or are willing to provide offset arrangements or joint-production ventures with buyer states in what has become a more competitive market.

The report noted that Russia, which has encountered strong competition for the number two spot on the arms suppliers' list since 1995, intends to offer more flexible credit and payment arrangements than it has in the past in order to secure its ranking.

While China has been the fourth biggest supplier over the same period, "its role is more as a consumer than a buyer", Grimmett told IPS, noting that over the past seven years, the combined sales of the big four European suppliers rival Russia's sales.

Indeed, as a group, the four countries claimed 12 per cent of total sales in 2002, up from 5 per cent in 2001.

Two major buyers of the past decade - Saudi Arabia and Taiwan - are fading as consumers in more recent years, the report says. Riyadh has faced financial constraints and, in fact, is still absorbing weapons systems worth some 64.5 billion dollars that it purchased in the early 1990s.

Taiwan, which ranked second to Saudi Arabia with respect to deliveries since 1995 (20 billion dollars) has dropped out of the top 10 in purchasers, much to the frustration of anti-China hawks in the Bush administration.

Different suppliers also penetrated different regional markets over the same seven-year period. Asia - particularly China, India, and Malaysia - accounted for 82 per cent of Russia's arms sales, or about one-half of all arms sold to the region.

US sales to Middle Eastern clients accounted for 76 per cent of its total arms sales since 1999 and about the same percentage of all sales to the region in that period. It also became the dominant supplier to Latin America in the last three years, primarily on the strength of the warplanes for Chile.

Germany (due to a big sale to South Africa) and Russia were the biggest single arms sellers to Africa in the last three years, at 16 per cent and 15 per cent, respectively. By contrast, Washington accounted for only one percent of sales to that continent.

On the other hand, "all other European" countries - mainly Central and Eastern Europe - accounted for a whopping 37 per cent of total weapons transfers to Africa, and a clue as to the source of small arms that are fuelling the region's many civil conflicts, according to Grimmett.-Dawn/The InterPress News Service.

The Anti-Empire Report
On Fascism, Imitation Anti-Semites and Burma

by William Blum / October 2nd, 2007

If not now, when? If not here, where? If not you, who?

I used to give thought to what historical time and place I would like to have lived in. Europe in the 1930s was usually my first choice. As the war clouds darkened, I’d be surrounded by intrigue, spies omnipresent, matters of life and death pressing down, the opportunity to be courageous and principled. I pictured myself helping desperate people escape to America. It was real Hollywood stuff; think “Casablanca”. And when the Spanish Republic fell to Franco and his fascist forces, aided by the German and Italian fascists (while the United States and Britain stood aside, when not actually aiding the fascists), everything in my imaginary scenario would have heightened — the fate of Europe hung in the balance. Then the Nazis marched into Austria, then Czechoslovakia, then Poland … one could have devoted one’s life to working against all this, trying to hold back the fascist tide; what could be more thrilling, more noble? (Full article …)

Ex-White House Lawyer Targets Spy Tactic
By PAMELA HESS, Associated Press Writer

Tuesday, October 2, 2007

sfgate_get_fprefs(); (10-02) 17:55 PDT WASHINGTON (AP) --

A former top lawyer for the Bush administration on Tuesday said that parts of the President Bush's much-criticized eavesdropping program were illegal.

There were aspects of the Terrorist Surveillance Program "that I could not find the legal support for," Jack Goldsmith, the former head of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, told the Senate Judiciary Committee.

But he would not say exactly what law or constitutional principle the surveillance violated. Goldsmith said the White House has forbidden him from saying anything about the legal analysis underpinning the program — key details long sought by majority Democrats and some Republicans.

As the Justice Department's top legal adviser to the White House from 2003 to 2004, Goldsmith was in charge of writing formal legal opinions and interpretations for the executive branch.

The legal rationale for the program is so secretive it initially was not even shared with top officials, including the general counsel of the National Security Agency, which conducted the surveillance.

Then-Deputy Attorney General James Comey also was not "read into," or advised about, the TSP program, despite his role in implementing the warrantless surveillance. As deputy, Comey would have been responsible for approving warrantless surveillance requests when the attorney general was not available.

Goldsmith said he assumes that the White House does not want the legality of the TSP program scrutinized, and he said "the extreme secrecy — not getting feedback from experts, not showing it to experts — led to a lot of mistakes."

The legal justification for the eavesdropping program has been a central point of a standoff between the White House and Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy. The Vermont Democrat has said he wants certain information about the administration's surveillance and interrogation methods before he will schedule confirmation hearings for Michael Mukasey, Bush's choice for attorney general.

Key to the debate is a March 2004 showdown at the hospital bedside of then-Attorney General John Ashcroft as he recovered from gall bladder surgery.

Goldsmith, who was in the room, confirmed Comey's earlier account that a physically weak Ashcroft rebuffed White House officials who were trying to get him to reauthorize the eavesdropping program. According to Goldsmith, Ashcroft said he believed the program was illegal.

Goldsmith also confirmed he was among Justice Department lawyers who threatened to resign after the hospital stand off because of the White House's attempt to get around the Justice Department's opinion of the program. The threat of a mass walkout ultimately convinced the White House to adjust the program.

In his testimony, Goldsmith also contradicted former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, who told the committee earlier this year there was no dissent in the administration about legality of the program.

Between 2001 and 2007, the U.S. government eavesdropped on an undisclosed number of people and entities in the United States without approval of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. That court was created 30 years ago to oversee surveillance activities inside the country after Congress learned the government had been secretly eavesdropping on Americans for decades, in some cases for political gain.

The FISA court is meant to balance the government's need to periodically collect intelligence inside the United States and the U.S. public's right to privacy. Secret FISA court orders can compel telecommunications companies to cooperate with government surveillance requests and indemnify them from lawsuits.

The Bush administration has asked Congress to grant retroactive immunity to telecommunications companies that cooperated. Around 40 lawsuits related to the surveillance are pending in federal courts. The administration has refused to give Congress details on the companies' involvement.

On Tuesday, the House Energy and Commerce Committee went to the companies themselves, asking AT&T, Verizon and Qwest for details on the government's secret surveillance program.

Of the three, reportedly only Qwest rebuffed the government, insisting on a FISA court order first.The law prohibits telecommunications companies from sharing customer records without a court order.

The committee asked in letters sent Tuesday whether the companies allowed government agencies to install equipment on telecommunications lines to copy private Internet traffic, whether they have provided information on customers' networks of associates to the FBI, and whether they have ever been offered legal indemnity or compensation for cooperating with surveillance requests.

Congress approves $1.2 billion worth of US-funded Israeli arms purchases, including 50 huge GBU-28 guided bunker busters

October 2, 2007, 10:30 PM (GMT+02:00)

American GBU-28 guided bunker buster sold to Israel

DEBKAfile’s military sources report the package, discussed by US Pentagon and Israel defense ministry officials, aims at replenishing the seriously depleted Israel Air Force stocks of missiles, bombs and fuel to their level prior to the 2006 Lebanon war, ready for any potential war contingency. Some of these items will be delivered shortly; others over a five-year period.

They include thousands of missiles, tens of thousands of new bombs worth $799 million and 132 gallons of jet fuel worth $308 million.


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Better basic services will ease Iraq violence: US commander
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Sydney (AFP) Oct 2, 2007 - Floods and droughts will become more frequent in Australia and cyclones more intense, as the world's driest inhabited continent heats up due to global warming, a new scientific report warned Tuesday. Sea levels are expected to rise and snow and rainfall to decrease as average temperatures in some areas rise by as much as five degrees Celsius within 70 years, according to the report by govern ... more

Japan may scale down naval mission for Afghanistan
Tokyo (AFP) Oct 3, 2007 - Japan said Wednesday it may scale down a naval mission supporting US-led forces in Afghanistan to try to resolve a row with the opposition that helped bring down the previous government. Lawmakers are to debate whether to halt the refuelling of foreign supply ships in the Indian Ocean so Japan is not seen to be providing indirect support for military activities outside of the Afghanistan the ... more

Blackwater gets a united defense
By Peter Spiegel
At a congressional hearing, the security firm and the State Department deny
accusations of disciplinary problems and seek to portray highly trained
contractors who shoot only when threatened.
http://email.latimes.com/cgi-bin1/DM/y/eBZ...Io30G2B0Izhf0Ev

U.S. to have say in power line siting
By Janet Wilson
In a boost for utilities, the Southland is deemed a key energy corridor,
allowing federal officials to overrule the state and condemn property.
http://email.latimes.com/cgi-bin1/DM/y/eBZ...Io30G2B0Izhi0Ey

Congressmen propose war tax
By Noam N. Levey
As the House passes a measure requiring more reports on Iraq, three Democrats
unveil a plan to spread the 'sacrifice.'
http://email.latimes.com/cgi-bin1/DM/y/eBZ...Io30G2B0Izho0E5

Britain to cut troop level in Iraq
By Alexandra Zavis
Prime Minister Gordon Brown says he plans to pull out 1,000 of his nation's
5,500-strong force by year's end.
http://email.latimes.com/cgi-bin1/DM/y/eBZ...Io30G2B0Izhp0E6

Israel lifts veil on airstrike against Syria
By Richard Boudreaux and Borzou Daragahi
The nation's media can now cite foreign news reports about last month's
operation but may not publish other data they uncover.
http://email.latimes.com/cgi-bin1/DM/y/eBZ...Io30G2B0Izhq0E7

Accept the Blackwater mercenaries
By Max Boot
Contractors are a fact of war, but they need stronger oversight.
http://email.latimes.com/cgi-bin1/DM/y/eBZ...Io30G2B0Izh70EA

Ahmadinejad finds it warmer in Latin America
By Daniel P. Erikson
Hugo Chavez and company are giving the Iranian president an entree into the U.S.
sphere of influence.
http://email.latimes.com/cgi-bin1/DM/y/eBZ...Io30G2B0Izh80EB

Israel says it bombed Syria, but why remains a mysteryBy Dion Nissenbaum | McClatchy Newspapers

• Posted on Tuesday, October 2, 2007

JERUSALEM — Nearly a month after a mysterious Israeli military airstrike in Syria generated political aftershocks from Washington to North Korea, the Israeli government lifted its official veil of secrecy Tuesday.

It didn't provide much new information about what took place on Sept. 6, however. While its government censor cleared the way for journalists here to report that the incident had taken place, rigid rules remained in effect that ban reporting what the target was, what troops were involved or why the strike was ordered.

Israel lifted its ban on reporting that the attack took place after Syrian President Bashar Assad told the British Broadcasting Corp. that Israeli jets had hit an "unused military building." But Israeli officials refused to say anything about the attack, and almost no one who'd be expected to know — from government officials to former intelligence officers — is talking.

Former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the head of the opposition Likud party, was widely criticized last week after giving a television interview in which he became the first elected leader to say that Israel had launched the attack.

The dearth of information has allowed fertile speculation: The strike was a dry run for an attack on Iran's nuclear facilities. The target was an Iranian missile cache bound for Hezbollah Islamic fighters in Lebanon. The attack hit a fledgling Syrian-North Korean nuclear weapons program. Or it was meant to thwart efforts to provide Hezbollah with a "dirty bomb" to use against Israel.

This being the Middle East, however, the simplest theories generally are discounted in favor of more convoluted explanations. One of the latest theories is that North Korea told the United States it had sold nuclear technology to Syria, which prompted the U.S. to tell Israel that North Korea had sold nuclear technology to Syria, which prompted Israel to attack the North Korean technology in Syria. Follow?

The problem of separating fact from fiction is compounded by the fact that all sides routinely leak distorted, exaggerated or downright bogus information to conceal the truth and wage psychological warfare on one another.

Assad's first public comments on the strike came the same weekend that the head of an agricultural research facility denied a claim by Syria's deputy president that the farm project had been the strike's target.

"Everything reported about the raid is wrong and is part of a psychological warfare that will not fool Syria," Deputy President Farouq Shara said in Damascus.

The Washington Post, meanwhile, reported that Israel had told the U.S. that Syria was working with North Korea on a nuclear weapons program. The Post reported that the strike came three days after a ship from North Korea arrived in Syria. The ship was said to be carrying cement, but unnamed officials told The Post that it was really military materiel sent to the site hit by the Israeli raid.

U.S. intelligence officials are skeptical of those claims. Syria, they argue, lacks the technical infrastructure and the money for a nuclear weapons program; its leaders may not be reckless enough to pursue one when their country is under constant surveillance and within range of Israel's military; and the North Koreans, who are as closely watched as Syria is, are unlikely partners for a secret program.

That skepticism has given rise to an even more convoluted theory, which in the Middle East has the advantage of suggesting that neither side is telling the truth: The Israelis hit a Syrian chemical-weapons facility, then leaked word that the target was nuclear in an attempt to convince Iran that its nuclear facilities are next.

The timing of the attack is equally curious. Israel staged it at a peak in tensions with Syria. For nearly a year, the Israeli media have been filled with ominous, thinly sourced claims that Syrian forces are preparing for war with Israel.

Israel, meanwhile, had staged major military exercises in the contested Golan Heights, which have generated alarm along the Syrian border.

Israeli leaders wavered between saying that Syria was preparing for war with Israel or was serious about launching peace talks.

Since Israel's war with Hezbollah last summer in Lebanon, Assad has offered to resume peace talks with Israel, which crumbled in 2000. But Israel, presumably with encouragement from the Bush administration, largely has rebuffed the entreaties.

The strike had the potential to sabotage next month's planned Bush administration Middle East peace conference. But the United States has made it clear that it still plans to invite Syria, even though that country is still officially at war with Israel.


McClatchy Newspapers 2007

Chuck Kennedy / MCT

Protestors march Oct. 1 in support of the children's insurance program.

<h2 class="ast_1">Spotlight</h2>
Bush veto strategy threatens Republicans
<h5 class="byline">By Steven Thomma and Tony Pugh | McClatchy Newspapers </h5> President Bush is putting his fellow Republicans on a collision course with the American people, forcing them to choose between guns and butter. He's asking Congress for $190 billion to keep financing the unpopular war in Iraq for another year and vowing to veto a bipartisan plan to spend an additional $35 billion over five years on health insurance for children. » read more

Beating the Drums for the Next War

BY Scott Horton
PUBLISHED October 1, 2007

Last week brought heads of state and senior diplomats in number to New York for the opening of the General Assembly of the United Nations. It also brought President Bush and President Ahmadinejad to the podium. For the larger audience in the world community, however, one of the most important questions of the day remains whether the verbal blows traded between these two pugnacious leaders will turn in the fullness of time into bullets and bombs. And the sense of the best-informed was clear: yes.

I spoke with a number of European diplomats who are keeping track of the issue, and I found a near uniform analysis. These diplomats believe that the United States will launch an air war on Iran, and that it will occur within the next six to eight months. I am therefore moving the hands of the Next War clock another minute closer to midnight and putting the likelihood of conflict at 70%. It’s still not certain, and it’s still avertable, but at this point it has to be seen as conventional wisdom to say that America is headed for another war in the Islamic world—it’s fourth since Bush became president, if we include the proxy war in Lebanon. And this time it will be a war against a nation with vastly greater military resources, as well as a demonstrated ability to wield terrorism as a tactic—Iran.

Let’s take quick stock of the further indicators from the last week or so.

Shifting Targets
On Sunday, Sy Hersh’s latest piece appeared, offering a good take on the Bush Administration’s changing plans for a war on Iran. The headline from the Hersh piece, called “Shifting Targets,” makes clear that the Pentagon has been tasked to redraft its plans for a war against Iran. The new plans are very close to what was reported in the London quality press a few weeks ago: an aerial war with a somewhat narrower focus on specific units of the elite Republican Guard. Hersh’s piece is full of color, and after reading it I immediately understood why the European diplomats were so convinced that the decision to bomb Iran was all-but-final. Here’s a key passage reflecting a series of discussions which give some flavor of the war spirit in the White House:

the President told [Crocker] that he was thinking of hitting Iranian targets across the border and that the British “were on board.” At that point, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice interjected that there was a need to proceed carefully, because of the ongoing diplomatic track. Bush ended by instructing Crocker to tell Iran to stop interfering in Iraq or it would face American retribution.

At a White House meeting with Cheney this summer, according to a former senior intelligence official, it was agreed that, if limited strikes on Iran were carried out, the Administration could fend off criticism by arguing that they were a defensive action to save soldiers in Iraq. If Democrats objected, the Administration could say, “Bill Clinton did the same thing; he conducted limited strikes in Afghanistan, the Sudan, and in Baghdad to protect American lives.” The former intelligence official added, “There is a desperate effort by Cheney et al. to bring military action to Iran as soon as possible. Meanwhile, the politicians are saying, ‘You can’t do it, because every Republican is going to be defeated, and we’re only one fact from going over the cliff in Iraq.’ But Cheney doesn’t give a rat’s ass about the Republican worries, and neither does the President.”

As we have noted before, the final order to proceed to hostilities has not issued. In all likelihood this would only happen in the immediate couple of days before bombing. However, the pace of preparations is quickening and the focus is becoming more and more apparent:

there has been a significant increase in the tempo of attack planning. In mid-August, senior officials told reporters that the Administration intended to declare Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps a foreign terrorist organization. And two former senior officials of the C.I.A. told me that, by late summer, the agency had increased the size and the authority of the Iranian Operations Group. (A spokesman for the agency said, “The C.I.A. does not, as a rule, publicly discuss the relative size of its operational components.”)

“They’re moving everybody to the Iran desk,” one recently retired C.I.A. official said. “They’re dragging in a lot of analysts and ramping up everything. It’s just like the fall of 2002”—the months before the invasion of Iraq, when the Iraqi Operations Group became the most important in the agency. He added, “The guys now running the Iranian program have limited direct experience with Iran. In the event of an attack, how will the Iranians react? They will react, and the Administration has not thought it all the way through.”

Hersh also finds a White House busily engaged in identifying the best casus belli: what precipitating event will best serve the Administration’s war effort? It’s been reported for some time that the White House has slowly reached a realization that the approach taken in the lead-up to the Iraq War will not work again. A National Intelligence Estimate dealing with the Iranian nuclear program has been all-but-final for some time; it has been held up. It would be reasonable conjecture at this point to say that it does not serve the interests of the war party. The alternative approach is simple: it is to say that Iranian weaponry and Iranian-trained terrorists are battling American soldiers in Iraq today. The death of some Americans in an attack involving a bomb linked to the Iranians could easily be taken as a pretext for war with Iran.

The testimony provided by General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker seems to have been laying further foundation for this effort. The same can be said for the resolution proposed by Senators Lieberman and Kyle which was a thinly veiled effort to authorize the use of military force against Iran. The Democratic leadership succeeded in watering down this measure to eliminate its use as legal authority for a new war against Iran.

A major question is whether Europeans will join America in a war against Iran? Comments from the Élysée Palace have suggested both that France expects the war, and that France is moving towards a position that is far more supportive of the Americans. That’s still far from a promise that French bombers would join the Americans. The graver speculation now focuses on Britain, and indeed, some Bush Administration insiders are claiming that British forces will join in the effort, notwithstanding Gordon Brown’s efforts to put some distance between himself and Bush on security issues. Hersh reports that the situation between the U.S. and U.K. remains testy, and he cites a very revealing incident:

Another recent incident, in Afghanistan, reflects the tension over intelligence. In July, the London Telegraph reported that what appeared to be an SA-7 shoulder-launched missile was fired at an American C-130 Hercules aircraft. The missile missed its mark. Months earlier, British commandos had intercepted a few truckloads of weapons, including one containing a working SA-7 missile, coming across the Iranian border. But there was no way of determining whether the missile fired at the C-130 had come from Iran—especially since SA-7s are available through black-market arms dealers.

Vincent Cannistraro, a retired C.I.A. officer who has worked closely with his counterparts in Britain, added to the story: “The Brits told me that they were afraid at first to tell us about the incident—in fear that Cheney would use it as a reason to attack Iran.” The intelligence subsequently was forwarded, he said.

The retired four-star general confirmed that British intelligence “was worried” about passing the information along. “The Brits don’t trust the Iranians,” the retired general said, “but they also don’t trust Bush and Cheney.”

Of course that describes the attitude of most Americans as well these days.

“I Hate All Iranians”
Two key Bush Administration figures are busy grabbing headlines in Britain this weekend. London’s Mail on Sunday reports:

British MPs visiting the Pentagon to discuss America’s stance on Iran and Iraq were shocked to be told by one of President Bush’s senior women officials: “I hate all Iranians.” And she also accused Britain of “dismantling” the Anglo-US-led coalition in Iraq by pulling troops out of Basra too soon. The all-party group of MPs say Debra Cagan, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Coalition Affairs to Defence Secretary Robert Gates, made the comments this month.

And the Guardian reports on remarks delivered by John Bolton, Bush’s former ambassador to the United Nations, at a group meeting held in connection with the Tory conference:

“I don’t think the use of military force is an attractive option, but I would tell you I don’t know what the alternative is. Because life is about choices, I think we have to consider the use of military force. I think we have to look at a limited strike against their nuclear facilities.”

He added that any strike should be followed by an attempt to remove the “source of the problem”, Mr Ahmadinejad. “If we were to strike Iran it should be accompanied by an effort at regime change … The US once had the capability to engineer the clandestine overthrow of governments. I wish we could get it back.”

The fact that intelligence about Iran’s nuclear activity was partial should not be used as an excuse not to act, Mr Bolton insisted. “Intelligence can be wrong in more than one direction.” He asked how the British government would respond if terrorists exploded a nuclear device at home. “‘It’s only Manchester?’ … Responding after they’re used is unacceptable.”

This all reflects just the sort of mature and sober analysis that Britons have come to expect from the key advisors of President Bush in the course of the last few years.

NPod Strikes
In the last week The Politico reported that Norman Podhoretz, a titan of the Neoconservative movement, had a secret, off-the-schedule meeting that he had with President Bush and Karl Rove at which he decried the ridiculousness of diplomatic negotiations with Iran. The idea of diplomatic talks with Iran, he said, brought Rove and Bush to laughter.

And today, Podhoretz announces that he thinks the decision has been made in concept to bomb Iran before Bush and Cheney exit Washington. In a CSPAN interview, Podhoretz states:

I believe President Bush is going to order airstrikes [on Iran] before he leaves office. Because he has several times said — at least twice to my knowledge — that if we allow Iranians to acquire nuclear capabilities, 50 years from now, people will look back at us the way we look back at Munich and say ‘how could they have let this happen?’

Freedom Watch Gets New Marching Orders
Millions of right-wing dollars have been pumped into a mysterious new overnight wonder organization called Freedom Watch. Former White House press secretary Ari Fleisher plays a key role running it, though when interviewed he didn’t even seem to know who the people in its very slick advertising were. But today we learn that Freedom Watch’s propaganda volleys are being retargeted. Previously they were concentrated to support the Bush Administration’s arguments for an extension of the Surge in Iraq. Now, it seems they’ll be advocating the Next War. The New York Times reports:

Although the group declined to identify the experts, several were invited from the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington research group with close ties to the White House. Some institute scholars have advocated a more confrontational policy to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, including keeping military action as an option. […]

“If Hitler’s warnings were heeded when he wrote ‘Mein Kampf,’ he could have been stopped,” said Bradley Blakeman, 49, the president of Freedom’s Watch and a former deputy assistant to Mr. Bush. “Ahmadinejad is giving all the same kind of warning signs to us, and the region — he wants the destruction of the United States and the destruction of Israel.”

The New Rollout
Back at the end of August, Barney Rubin told us of word he got from a source suggesting that a week after Labor Day, the office of Vice President Cheney would be pushing a new product roll-out. It would involve the usual suspects and it would be a test-marketing of an air war against Iran. We’re two weeks and a bit into that process. If you go back and sift through your newspapers, you’ll find that Rubin’s unnamed source clearly knew exactly what he was talking about. Indeed, what I’ve summarized here is the tiniest fragment of the total rollout effort (I didn’t even mention the ADL’s program, and they actually even called it a “rollout”). Not only is it underway, Cheney’s role as the coordinator has become increasingly transparent. As psy ops projects go, this one isn’t terribly sophisticated. But no matter: the American media is just as easily suckered by this project as it was the last time. Just look at how the war party spun the broadcast media during the Ahmadinejad visit last week. The old adage is “Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.” America is well into the process of being fooled twice.

Misunderestimating the Price of Iraq
Charles Peña Once upon a time, White House economic adviser Larry Lindsey estimated that the cost of going to war in Iraq might be as much as $200 billion. For daring to voice such an opinion, he was rebuked by Mitch Daniels – then director of the White House budget office – who called Lindsey's estimate "very, very high" and "the upper end of hypothetical." Lindsey resigned three months later. In contrast, former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld – citing Office of Management and Budget estimates – thought the Iraq war would cost "something under $50 billion." And let's not forget that former Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz believed that Iraqi oil revenues of $50-$100 billion, not U.S. taxpayer dollars, would pay for the occupation and reconstruction.

In other words, we were led to believe the Iraq war could be prosecuted on the cheap (or at least at a cost comparable to the first Gulf War, which was about $60 billion). But such claims were – like so much else about the Iraq war – wishful thinking.

The National Priorities Project, a nonpartisan research organization that analyzes and clarifies federal data so that people can understand and influence how their tax dollars are spent, estimates spending for the Iraq war as follows:

"FY2003 Supplemental: Operation Iraqi Freedom, made in March 2003, was for $74.8 billion. Passed within a month of the request, the final allocation amounted to $78.5 billion, at least $54.4 billion of which was for the war in Iraq.

"FY2004 Supplemental: Iraq and Afghanistan Ongoing Operations/Reconstruction, for $87 billion, was submitted in September 2003 and passed Congress in November 2003. The final allocation amounted to $87.5 billion, of which $70.6 billion was for Iraq.

"Budget Amendment: $25 Billion Emergency Reserve Fund (Department of Defense – Iraq Freedom Fund) was made in May 2004 and was passed by Congress as part of the Department of Defense appropriations bill in July 2004. Based on Iraq War spending, of the $25 billion appropriated, about $21.5 billion was for the war in Iraq.

"Emergency Supplemental (various agencies): Ongoing Military Operations in the War on Terror, Reconstruction Activities in Afghanistan, Tsunami Relief and Reconstruction, and Other Purposes was made in February 2005 and passed by Congress in April 2005. The final allocation amounted to $82 billion, of which about $58 billion was for the Iraq War.

"Department of Defense appropriations for fiscal year 2006 (i.e., war funding not initiated by a supplemental request) included $50 billion in a 'bridge fund' for war funding. Based on past Iraq War spending, approximately $40 billion of that can be counted for the Iraq War.

"FY2006 Emergency Supplemental (various agencies): Ongoing Military, Diplomatic, and Intelligence Operations in the Global War on Terror; Stabilization and Counter-Insurgency Activities in Iraq and Afghanistan; and Other Humanitarian Assistance in February 2006 was for $72.4 billion, of which about $60 billion war for the Iraq War.

"Defense appropriations for FY2007 includes $70 billion in war-related spending, most of which we estimated would be for the Iraq War, based on past spending patterns."

According to the National Priorities Project, the cost of the Iraq war is currently more than twice Lindsey's "upper end of hypothetical" estimate: $456 billion and counting, which includes nearly $100 billion in supplemental funding for fiscal year 2007, most of which is for the Iraq War, based on past spending patterns. (The NPP estimate was made before the recent 92-3 Senate vote to approve $150 billion for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.)

And there is no end in sight for how much the war will end up costing. In 2002, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that prosecuting a war in Iraq would cost $6-$9 billion a month. Since the three leading Democratic presidential hopefuls have all gone on record that, if elected, they could not guarantee withdrawing all U.S. troops from Iraq by the end of their first presidential term, we are potentially looking at another $360-$540 billion to pay for the war in Iraq for the next five years.

So the $1 trillion estimated by some economists is not out of the question (however, these estimates include both direct military and indirect economic costs – whereas the above figures are only direct military spending). But $1 trillion is a far cry from original White House estimates of $50-$60 billion.

If we were engaged in a war of national survival, the monetary cost of war would be a less relevant issue. For example, the United States is estimated to have spent $341 billion for World War II. But Iraq is hardly a war of national survival. Saddam Hussein was a phantom menace – neither a military threat (as evidenced by how quickly U.S. forces were able to defeat Iraq's military on the battlefield) nor a terrorist threat (Saddam was not in bed with bin Laden, and al-Qaeda in Iraq came into being as a direct result of the U.S. decision to depose Hussein).

And perhaps more importantly, the $456 billion already spent and the $1 trillion it may end up costing in Iraq will, ultimately, make us less safe. How Muslims around the world view the war in Iraq cannot be ignored – the United States attacked a Muslim country without military provocation, and the Bush administration's claims of WMDs and al-Qaeda links were false. And they see through the rhetoric of the United States seeking to establish democracy in Iraq while continuing to provide unqualified support for an autocratic and oppressive theocracy in neighboring Saudi Arabia. All of which is easy fodder for radical Islamists to convince other Muslims to target America.

eptember 24, 2007 Issue
Copyright © 2007 The American Conservative

Once More into the Breach

The neocon propaganda machine rolls toward Iran.

[b]by Justin Logan[/b]

Former White House chief of staff Andrew Card famously remarked that the reason the White House ramped up the case for the Iraq War in September was that “from a marketing point of view, you don’t introduce new products in August.” To judge from recent developments, Americans may look back on August 2007 as the month the country again turned toward war—with Iran.The same network of think-tank analysts, media outlets, and government officials who brayed for war in Iraq have set their sights increasingly on Iran. Savvy as ever, they remain focused on consolidating public opinion and seem to be monitoring anti-Iran sentiment closely. Weekly Standard Deputy Online Editor Michael Goldfarb darkly warned in July that opponents of another Mideast war “shouldn’t be too surprised when [the] 60 percent [of Americans] opposing a war with Iran starts to dwindle—it has dropped five points in just the last six months.”

In late August, NYU professor and Afghanistan expert Barnett Rubin related that a Washington source had told him that the same neoconservative institutions that urged the country into Iraq were preparing to “roll out a campaign for war with Iran” after Labor Day. According to Rubin’s informant, “evidently they don’t think they’ll ever get majority support for this—they want something like 35-40 percent support, which in their book is ‘plenty.’” Rubin later told the New Yorker’s George Packer that a source at a neoconservative institution in Washington had confirmed that account, noting, “I am a Republican. I am a conservative. But I am not a raging lunatic. This is lunatic.”

The purportedly perfidious role of Iran in Iraq sits at the center of the case for war. One can hardly open a newspaper or political magazine without reading table-pounding condemnations of Tehran. The Washington Post’s editorialists declare that Iran “is waging war against the United States and trying to kill as many American soldiers as possible,” and Reuel Marc Gerecht of the American Enterprise Institute warns Newsweek’s readers that the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps “have long given aid to a varied list of terrorists, including, quite possibly, al Qaeda.”

The curious thing about the case against Iran, however, is that hawks have created this perception without providing so much as a Powell-at-the-UN-style dossier of evidence. Although administration officials have parroted claims against Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) for months, the charges are wholly based on inferential and nonspecific evidence that pales in comparison even to the trumped-up charges leveled against Iraq in 2002 and 2003.

A report entitled “Iran’s Proxy War against the United States and the Iraqi Government” was just published by The Weekly Standard in conjunction with the Institute for the Study of War, an apparently one-person think tank consisting of Kimberly Kagan, the wife of surge architect Frederick Kagan. Her prior public profile consisted mostly of assessing the inevitable success of the surge for The Weekly Standard—even though she had been a participant in the group that planned the troop build-up in the first place.

The Weekly Standard report compiled nearly every press account of Iranian involvement in Iraq, gathered from dubious sources ranging from the terrorist group Mujahideen-e-Khalq to New York Times reporter and erstwhile Judith Miller accomplice Michael Gordon, as well as a variety of anonymous sources. The last lines of the report’s summary noted that “with [al-Qaeda in Iraq and the Sunni insurgency] increasingly under control, Iranian intervention is the next problem the Coalition must tackle.”

Emblematic of the selective reasoning in the Kagan report is one anecdote its author recounts. In describing a suspicious attack that killed five U.S. servicemen at an Iraqi base in Karbala in January, Kagan devotes two paragraphs to quoting a statement from Brig. Gen. Kevin Bergner that pointed out that the Iraqi suspects captured in connection with the attacks had implicated the Quds Force of the IRGC. What Kagan does not point out, although she cites the Time article that reported the information, is that the formal U.S. investigation into the attacks implicated the very Iraqi police with whom the American servicemen were embedded—not Tehran. According to Time, “the U.S.’s initial probe of the incident found no evidence of direct Iranian involvement. Instead, the picture that emerged cast suspicion chiefly on senior Iraqi officials known to the Americans, as well as local thugs and associates of [Moqtada] al-Sadr.”

This incident represents one of the two significant problems with the claims that Iran is the root of our troubles in Iraq—let alone “at war” with us. First, the Bush administration has offered precious little conclusive evidence of Iranian “warfare” against U.S. troops— nothing close to the frenzied commentaries regarding Iran’s role in Iraq. Second, to the extent that Iran is involved with various factions in Iraq, those with which it is most deeply involved are the very same factions that are supportive of the Maliki government, which the U.S. government also supports. Thus, one is left with the tortured logic that claims our goal of propping up the Iraqi government is being undermined by Iranian support for … the very same political factions that comprise the Iraqi government.

The most important claim being made against Iran is that it is supplying sophisticated “explosively formed penetrators” or EFPs to various groups in Iraq that are using them to kill our soldiers. The pattern is for a military official to make a bold claim and then for a second official to substantially walk back the claim. Take, as one example, Gen. Peter Pace’s Feb. 2 declaration that the military was in possession of serial numbers that proved Iranian involvement in providing the materiel for EFPs to Iraqi militias. Less than a week later, Defense Secretary Robert Gates clarified, “I think that there are some serial numbers. There may be some markings on some of the projectile fragments that we found. I’m just frankly not specifically certain myself of the details, but I understand there is pretty good evidence tying these EFPs to the Iranians.”

This form of argument—a bold but unsubstantiated claim followed by a softening or outright repudiation—is reminiscent of several of the nudge-nudge arguments offered by the administration in the run-up to war in Iraq. In the case of EFPs, Jane’s Intelligence Digest noted in June, “it is unclear … that ‘made in Iran’ equates to ‘made by Iran.’” There are a variety of ways that weaponry of Iranian origins could make its way into Iraq. Its mere presence no more implies direction from Tehran than the loss of 190,000 American small arms in Iraq implies direction from Washington.

In addition, Jane’s reported, “uncertainties in the intelligence assessments have made it difficult to convince domestic or foreign audiences … of the accuracy of these statements.” Foreign audiences, perhaps, but the Jane’s authors may want to flick on Fox News or open the Washington Post editorial page to determine what domestic audiences are thinking. The phrase “difficult to convince” doesn’t come to mind when describing these audiences.

The second problem with the Iran blame game is that by and large the factions that the Iranians are accused of supporting and arming are the very same factions that control the Iraqi government. Both major Shia parties that comprise the Iraqi government have close ties to Iran, having been organized in exile there in the 1980s. Current U.S. strategy in Iraq is ostensibly based on consolidating enough support in the Iraqi government that U.S. troops can eventually leave. At the same time, the Bush administration is blaming the Iraqi government’s number-one supporter in the region for not being supportive enough.

Such inconsistencies have led to friction between the governments in Baghdad and Washington. When U.S. forces captured two Iranian officials in December, they were at the home of Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, head of one of Iraq’s two major Shi’a parties who had just visited Bush at the White House the month before. The Iraqi government immediately demanded the Iranians’ release. Washington complied.

In January, U.S. troops scooped up another group of Iranians, the so-called “Irbil Five,” described by the Bush administration as members of the Quds Force wing of the IRGC. Tehran rebutted Washington’s accusation that the captured men were intelligence officials trying to wreak havoc in Iraq, stating flatly that Iran is “happy with the Iraqi government.” Once again, the Iraqi government took the side of the Iranians, dispatching Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari to CNN to demand that the men be released and to point out that they were in Iraq at the invitation of the Kurdistan Regional Government. U.S. forces are still detaining the men, reportedly on the advice of Vice President Cheney’s office, which argues that holding them sends a signal to Tehran.

At times, the desire to ratchet up pressure against Iran has led hawkish commentators to make fanciful claims that are swiftly refuted—only to be rewarded for their efforts with higher media profiles. In May 2006, Amir Taheri published an explosive story explaining that Iran’s legislature had passed a law requiring Jews, Zoroastrians, and Christians to wear colored badges, reminiscent of the reprehensible practice in Nazi Germany. The story proved to be entirely false, but Taheri’s utility as a demonizer of Iran must have impressed the hawkish editors of the Wall Street Journal’s op-ed page, which has run seven of his pieces since the badge story was debunked.

Perhaps the boldest and most swiftly refuted claim against the Iranians was another sensational story published by Eli Lake, a journalist and opinion writer at the neoconservative New York Sun. Lake rose to prominence after seeking former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke’s assessment of John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt’s London Review of Books essay, “The Israel Lobby.” Duke’s endorsement of the paper became a centerpiece of the propaganda campaign to demonize and dismiss Walt and Mearsheimer without addressing their arguments. Lake’s subsequent work has focused on painting Iran in the most dangerous light possible, but he overplayed his hand with a July story entitled “Iran Is Found To Be a Lair of Al Qaeda.”

In that piece, Lake published a claim purportedly leaked to him that the National Intelligence Estimate judged that one of two senior al-Qaeda leadership councils “meets regularly in eastern Iran.” Lake reported, “there is little disagreement that a branch of al Qaeda’s leadership operates in Iran, [but] the intelligence community diverges on the extent to which the hosting of the senior leaders represents a policy of the regime in Tehran or the rogue actions of Iran’s Quds Force, the terrorist support units that report directly to Iran’s supreme leader.”

Unfortunately for Mr. Lake, the story was tersely refuted by National Intelligence Officer for Transnational Threats Edward Gistaro. Asked at a National Press Club briefing whether the judgment Lake described was in the final draft report, Gistaro replied, “No, it is not. I don’t think it was ever in the draft. … I read [the Sun article] this morning, and I thought, ‘I don’t know where this comes from.’” The transcript of the conference describes “laughter” in the room after this revelation, but in the fevered minds of those angling for war with Iran, the mission was accomplished. Some 41 percent of Americans still believe Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11. Voters do not always update their beliefs as claims are substantiated or debunked.

It is impossible to discern the motivations of the administration in constructing a public case against Iran. Perhaps the more cynical actors believe that it will frighten Iran into suspending uranium enrichment, the Bush administration’s precondition for starting negotiations over the nuclear program. But whatever its intentions, the real risk is that the administration will talk itself into a corner. Then, if the Iranians do not accede to Washington’s precondition for negotiations, and the public becomes convinced that Iran is “at war” with the United States, the obvious question becomes, “What are you going to do about it?” In such a scenario, the administration could find itself in a crisis of credibility, where a lack of decisive action would potentially demonstrate American weakness.

The good news on this front, much as it has not penetrated the Beltway foreign-policy consensus, is that there is little reason to believe that questions of credibility cut so cleanly. In his 2005 book Calculating Credibility: How Leaders Assess Military Threats, Daryl G. Press of Dartmouth University wrote that after “five years of searching for links between backing down and diminished credibility,” he was surprised at his own conclusion: “leaders do not doubt the credibility of their enemies simply because they backed down in the past.”

Still, given the Beltway belief that backing down diminishes credibility, there is the very real danger that a combination of domestic politics and concern for showing weakness abroad could force a confrontation—even if that outcome is not one Washington is aiming for.

Of course, it is plausible that the Iranians could be causing trouble for American forces in Iraq by directly supplying or organizing Shia militias, much as they have cultivated Hezbollah as a proxy in Lebanon. The question that needs to be asked of those most forcefully pressing the case against Iran is what actual evidence we have that they are killing our troops. If there is one thing that should have been learned in the wake of the Iraq debacle, it is to view every piece of innuendo and inference offered by the government with a healthy skepticism. James Madison was right: “The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted.”

After all, we’ve been here before. Asked about Iranian activity in Iraq, spokeswoman Maj. Alayne Conway conceded that the U.S. military has not captured any agents, but “just because we’re not finding them doesn’t mean they’re not there.” She might have been reading from the script Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld used when he warned about Iraq’s phantom chemical and biological weapons: an absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
__________________________________

Justin Logan is a foreign-policy analyst at the Cato Institute and a member of the Coalition for a Realistic Foreign Policy.

Having a Carnage Party
by Tom Engelhardt
TomDispatch Counting to Three

At least Caesar was just commenting on reality when he wrote that "all Gaul is divided into three parts." Last week, Senate Foreign Relations Chairman Joe Biden attempted to create reality when an overwhelming majority of the U.S. Senate voted for his non-binding resolution to divide Iraq into three parts – Shi'ite, Sunni, and Kurdish autonomous zones. Shailagh Murray of the Washington Post reported that the 75-23 Senate vote was "a significant milestone … carving out common ground in a debate that has grown increasingly polarized and focused on military strategy." Murray added, "The [tripartite] structure is spelled out in Iraq's constitution, but Biden would initiate local and regional diplomatic efforts to hasten its evolution."

In Iraq, the plan was termed a "disaster" by Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki; a representative of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani called the Senate resolution "a step toward the breakup of Iraq." He added, according to Juan Cole's Informed Comment Web site, "It is a mistake to imagine that such a plan will lead to a reduction in chaos in Iraq; rather, on the contrary, it will lead to an increase in the butchery and a deepening of the crisis of this country, and the spreading of increased chaos, even to neighboring states." In the meantime, Sunni clerics and various political parties joined in the denunciations. Only the Kurds, eager for an independent state, evidently welcomed the plan.

Cole caught the essence of this latest stratagem perfectly: First, he pointed out, the Senate "messed up Iraq by authorizing Terrible George to blow it up, now they want to further mess it up by dividing it."

But here's the most curious thing in this strange exercise in counting to three – simply that it happened in the United States. Let's imagine, for a moment, that the Iraqi parliament had voted a non-binding resolution to grant congressional representation to Washington, D.C., or to allow California's electoral votes to be divided up by district. Or what if the Iranian parliament had just passed a non-binding resolution to divide the United States into semi-autonomous bio-regions?

Such acts would, of course, be considered not just outrageous and insulting, but quite mad and, on our one-way planet, they are indeed little short of unimaginable. But no one I noticed in the mainstream of political Washington or the media that covers it – whether agreeing with the proposal or not – seemed to find it even faintly odd for the U.S. Senate to count to three in support of a plan that, at best, would put an American stamp of approval on the continuing ethnic cleansing of Iraq.

No matter how meaningless Biden's resolution may turn out to be as policy, it has the benefit of taking us directly to bedrock Washington belief systems – specifically, that it is America's global duty to solve the crises of other nations (even the ones that we set off). We are, after all, the nation-building nation par excellence and, despite all evidence to the contrary in Iraq, it is still impossible for official Washington to imagine us as anything but part of the solution rather than part of the problem.

You can find this same thinking no less readily available in another counting exercise under way in Washington…

Counting to Five, to Ten, to Fifty

Right now, leading Democrats, as well as Republicans, are focused on counting to both five and 10, which turn out to be the same thing. In a recent debate among the Democratic candidates for the presidency, for instance, the top three (by media and polling agreement), Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and John Edwards refused to commit to having all American troops out of Iraq by 2013, the end of a first term in office – five years from now, and 10 years from the March 2003 launching of the invasion.

Like much else of recent vintage, this 10-year count may have started with our surge commander in Iraq, Gen. David Petraeus, who, for some time, has been telling just about anyone willing to listen that counter-insurgency operations in Iraq could take "up to a decade." ("In fact," he told Fox News in June, "typically, I think historically, counter-insurgency operations have gone at least nine or 10 years.") Now, it seems, his to-the-horizon-and-beyond Iraqi timetable has largely been subsumed into an inside-the-Beltway consensus that no one – not in this administration or the next, not a new president or a new Congress – will end our involvement in Iraq in the foreseeable future; that, in fact, we must stay in Iraq and that, the worse it gets, the more that becomes true – if only to protect the Iraqis (and our interests in the Middle East) from even worse.

Conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks put it this way on the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer: "[The Democrats in Congress are] not going to cut off funding, and we've seen and we saw in the debate this week, there are going to be probably U.S. troops in Iraq there 10 years, regardless who's elected. So they're not going to win on this." Liberal warhawk George Packer in the New Yorker recently wrote a long article, "Planning for Defeat," laying out many of the reasons why Iraq remains a disaster area and discussing various methods of withdrawal before plunking for a policy summed up in the suggestion of an anonymous Bush administration official, "Declare defeat and stay in." Packer concluded: "Whenever this country decides that the bloody experience in Iraq requires the departure of American troops, complete disengagement will be neither desirable nor possible. We might want to be rid of Iraq, but Iraq won't let it happen."

Retired Brig. Gen. Kevin Ryan, representing the military punditocracy, offered the following: "I don't see us getting out of Iraq for a decade." In fact, increasingly few in official Washington do. (An exception is presidential candidate Bill Richardson, who launched a Web video this week from a total withdrawal position that began: "George Bush says the surge is working. Gen. Petraeus says it will take more time. Republican presidential candidates say stay as long as it takes. No surprises there. But, you might be surprised to learn that Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and John Edwards would all leave tens of thousands of troops in Iraq…") Iraq is, of course, acknowledged to be the number-one issue in the upcoming presidential campaign; the ever growing unhappiness of Americans with our presence in that country is considered a fact of political life; and yet it's becoming ever harder to imagine just what the future Iraq debate among presidential candidates will actually be about, if everyone agrees that we have at least five years to go with no end in sight.

And let's remember that behind the five and 10 counts lurks a count to 50 and beyond; the number of years, that is, that American troops have been garrisoned in South Korea since the Korean War ended in stalemate in 1953. Visitors to the White House have long reported that President Bush was intrigued with the "Korea model." As David Sanger of the New York Times wrote recently: "Many times over the past six months, he has told visitors to the White House that he needs to get to the Korea model – a politically sustainable U.S. deployment to keep the lid on the Middle East." (Keep in mind, however, that, when the Bush administration rumbled into Baghdad on their tanks and Bradley Fighting Vehicles in April 2003, it was the Korea model they had in mind – though they weren't calling it that at the time.)

This is the model that Secretary of Defense Robert Gates also seems to have put his money on – a drawn-down American force garrisoned in giant, semi-permanent bases in a "stabilized" Iraq for eons to come. The Congressional Budget Office has already crunched numbers on what such a model would likely cost.

Behind all these counting exercises lies the belief that wherever we land and whatever we do, we are, in the end, the anointed bringers of something called "stability" and if we have to count to 50, 500, 50,000, or 500,000 and do it in the currency of corpses, sooner or later it will be so.

Counting Bodies

Everyone remembers when the Vietnam-era body count was banished from the Global War on Terror. Tommy Franks, the general who led American forces into Afghanistan (and later Iraq), bluntly stated: "We don't do body counts." And then, jumping ahead a few years, there was the President plaintively blurting out his pain to a coffee klatch of empathetic conservative journalists in October 2006: "We don't get to say that – a thousand of the enemy killed, or whatever the number was. It's happening. You just don't know it…. We have made a conscious effort not to be a body-count team."

Well, tell that to the troops on the ground. There, it's evidently been déjà vu all over again for a while.

The recent murder trial of an American sniper from an elite sniper scout platoon operating in Iskandariya, a Sunni area in the "Triangle of Death" south of Baghdad, has been filled with revelations. Among them, that the Pentagon has a program to put "bait" out like "detonation cords, plastic explosives, and ammunition" to draw unwary insurgents into sniper scopes; this, in a land with perhaps 50 percent unemployment, where anything salvageable will be scavenged by civilians. ("In a country that is awash in armaments and magazines and implements of war, if every time somebody picked up something that was potentially useful as a weapon, you might as well ask every Iraqi to walk around with a target on his back," comments Eugene Fidell of the National Institute of Military Justice.) As it turns out, the snipers seem to have misunderstood the use of these "bait" items – or to have understood all too well their real use – and instead placed them on unarmed Iraqis they had already killed in order to create instant "insurgent" bodies appropriate for the body count that wasn't supposed to be.

As Pvt. David C. Petta, told the court, according to the Washington Post, "he believed the classified items were for dropping on people the unit had killed, 'to enforce if we killed somebody that we knew was a bad guy but we didn't have the evidence to show for it.'" (The weaponizing of the dead was, by the way, a commonplace of the Vietnam War as well.) According to court testimony, the specialists from this sniper squad, "described how their teams were pushed beyond limits by battalion commanders eager to raise their kill ratio against a ruthless enemy. … During a separate hearing here in July, Sgt. Anthony G. Murphy said he and other First Battalion snipers felt 'an underlying tone' of disappointment from field commanders seeking higher enemy body counts. 'It just kind of felt like, "What are you guys doing wrong out there?"'")

And little wonder, given what was at stake. This was, of course, standard operating procedure in Vietnam too – and for the same reasons. Lt. Gen. Julian J. Ewell, for instance, had his own codified kill ratios of "allied to enemy dead" for his units in Vietnam. These ranged from 1:50, which qualified as "highly skilled U.S. unit" to 1:10, "historical U.S. average." And woe be to those who were just average. Units will be "pushed beyond limits" any time "victory" or "success" or "progress" becomes nothing but a body-counting game, as is happening again.

Once progress in a frustrating counter-guerrilla war is pegged to those endlessly toted up corpses, the counting process itself naturally becomes a crucial measure of success (in lieu of actual success), unit by unit – which means it also becomes a key measure of performance, and performance is, of course, the measure of military advancement. So, the pressure to be that "highly skilled unit" translates into pressure for more bodies to report as signs of success. Sooner or later, if you just report actual enemy killed, your stats sheet begins to look lousy – especially if others are inflating their figures, as they will do. And then the pressure only builds.

Every bit of this should ring a grim bell or two; but, as New Yorker journalist Seymour Hersh commented recently in an interview with the German magazine Der Spiegel, from Vietnam to today there's been "no learning curve." "You'd think," he said, "that in this country with so many smart people, that we can't possibly do the same dumb thing again … [but] everything is tabula rasa."

Counting Squads

Prepare not to be surprised: In Iraq, the military counted bodies from the beginning – counted, in fact, everything. They just weren't releasing the figures back in the days when the Bush administration was less desperate about Iraq and far more desperate not to appear to be back in the Vietnam era of endless stats and no victory. But the "metrics" (as they are called) were always something of an open secret. In March 2005, for instance, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld told an NPR reporter:

"We have a room here [in the Pentagon], the Iraq Room where we track a whole series of metrics. Some of them are inputs and some of them are outputs, results, and obviously the inputs are easier to do and less important, and the outputs are vastly more important and more difficult to do.

"We track, for example, the numbers of attacks by area. We track the types of attacks by area…. [W]e track a number of reports of intimidation, attempts at intimidation, or assassination of government officials, for example. We track the extent to which people are supplying intelligence to our people so that they can go in and actually track down and capture or kill insurgents. We try to desegregate the people we've captured and look at what they are. Are they foreign fighters, jihadist types? Are they criminals who were paid money to go do something like that? Are they former regime elements, Ba'athists? And we try to keep track of what those numbers are in terms of detainees and people that are processed in that way. … We probably look at 50, 60, 70 different types of metrics, and come away with them with an impression."

And as it happens, though he didn't mention it that day, the military was also assiduously counting corpses. We know that because last week they released figures to USA Today on how many insurgents U.S. forces have supposedly killed since the invasion of Iraq ended: 18,832 since June 2003; 4,882 "militants" so far in 2007 alone. That represents a leap of 25 percent in corpse-counting from the previous year. These previously derided body counts, according to American officials quoted in Stars and Stripes, now give the necessary "scale" and "context" to the fight in Iraq.

As the USA Today report points out, last year Centcom Commander John Abizaid had suggested that the forces of the Sunni insurgency numbered in the 10,000-20,000 range. If the released figures are accurate, nearly 25-50 percent of that number must have been killed this year. (Who knows how many were wounded.) Add in suspected Sunni insurgents and terrorists incarcerated in American prisons in Iraq only in the "surge" months of 2007 – another 8,000 or so – and it suddenly looks as if something close to the full insurgency has essentially been turned into a ghost resistance between January and September of this year.

(Again, Vietnam had its equivalents. After the nationwide Tet Offensive in February 1968, for instance, the U.S. military requested more troops from the Johnson administration. They also claimed that the Vietnamese had lost 45,000 dead. As historian Marilyn Young wrote in her book, The Vietnam Wars, "UN Ambassador Arthur Goldberg wanted to know what was enemy troop strength at the start of Tet. The answer: between 160,000 and 175,000. And the ratio of killed to wounded? Estimated at three and a half to one, answered the officer. 'Well, if that's true,' Goldberg calculated quickly, 'then they have no effective forces left in the field.' This certainly made additional American forces seem redundant.")

By now, it seems as if everyone on the American side is suddenly counting in public. In August, the president, for the first time, felt free to become the leader of a "body-count team" and proudly announced, in a televised speech to the American people, just how many insurgents U.S. forces were supposedly killing in each surge month (though the figures don't gibe with the ones released by the military last week): "Our troops have killed or captured an average of more than 1,500 al-Qaeda terrorists and other extremists every month since January of this year." Gen. Petraeus, of course, arrived in Washington to deliver his "progress report" to Congress with his own Vietnam-style multicolored charts and graphs to display; and the military, having sworn not to do body counts, is now releasing figures daily – often large ones – on kills in Afghanistan and Iraq that regularly make the headlines. And every day, it seems, new Pentagon databases and squads of number-crunchers are revealed. By now, it's a genuine carnage party.

Last week, Karen DeYoung of the Washington Post reported in far greater depth than we've seen before on the metrics squads run out of the Pentagon and the U.S. command in Baghdad. In the process, she found some interesting discrepancies between the findings of the Pentagon's data analysts and those working for Petraeus – "Civilian casualty numbers in the Pentagon's latest quarterly report on Iraq last week, for example, differ significantly from those presented by the top commander in Iraq…" – and this became the subject of much on-line analysis at sites like ThinkProgress.org and TalkingPointsMemo.com. But perhaps more interesting than these discrepancies was the size of the overall military counting operation.

DeYoung, for instance, interviewed Chief Warrant Officer 3 Dan Macomber, the "senior all-source intelligence analyst" in charge of a six-person team whose only task is "to compile [data] and track trends and analysis for Gen. Petraeus" personally. And that team, in turn, is but a small part of a larger crew "far from the battlefield" that, DeYoung reports, includes "platoons of soldiers in Iraq and at the Pentagon … assigned to crunch numbers – sectarian killings, roadside bombs, Iraqi forces trained, weapons caches discovered, and others – in a constant effort to gauge how the war is going."

Think of that for a moment. "Platoons" of military counters trying to count their way so high on a pile of Iraqi corpses and captured weapons that, someday, "progress" and even perhaps a glimmer of "success" might appear at the end of that dark, dark tunnel. That would be when, assumedly, the "stability" we represent would finally make its appearance. What Iraq would be by then is another matter entirely.

Counting to a Million and Beyond

Why would such "platoons" of counters be needed? One answer might be that the counting runs high indeed. On Monday, there was a revealing inside-the-fold piece in the New York Times on this subject. It was, on the surface, a modest good-news piece from a distinctly bad-news land. While the central government in Baghdad is now almost paralyzed, wrote James Glanz, its corrupt ministries unable to spend even small percentages of the oil moneys allotted to them for various reconstruction activities, local spending in some provinces may be significantly more effective (or, if you read the piece to the end, it may not). Here was the key passage:

"The capital budget for the entire country, including the provinces, was $6 billion in 2006 and $10 billion in 2007. But some national ministries spent as little as 15 percent of their share last year, citing problems such as a shortage of employees trained to write contracts, the flight of scientific and engineering expertise from the country and the danger from militias and the insurgency."

Think about that: "a shortage of employees trained to write contracts," "the flight of scientific and engineering expertise from the country." There's something worth counting, but you might be doing it for a long, long time. Significant parts of what was once a large Iraqi professional class have, since the occupation, become "bus people." They have fled the country in unknown numbers – though a recent Oxfam report indicates that, in Baghdad, some hospitals and universities have lost up to 80 percent of their staffs. These are part of a larger exodus of staggering dimensions. It is now estimated – nobody knows the real numbers – that there are at least 2.5 million Iraqis who have fled abroad since the Bush administration's invasion ended. Up to 2.2 million more Iraqis have been dislodged from their homes, largely by sectarian violence, and turned into internal refugees.

And then, of course, there were the Iraqis who couldn't flee – those corpses everyone is now so hot to count, so eager to measure progress upon. As in June 2006 with the door-to-door study that became the Lancet report, which suggested that 600,000 Iraqis might have died violently since the invasion of 2003, we have another survey of the dead. Again, it offers startling figures; and, once again, those figures, though produced by a reputable British survey outfit, ORB or Opinion Research Business, which has been polling in Iraq since 2005, were largely ignored in the mainstream media. As Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. wrote in a moving essay at his libertarian Web site, LewRockwell.com:

"How comfy we are all in the United States, as we engage in living-room debates about the US occupation of Iraq, whether 'we' are bringing them freedom and whether their freedom is really worth the sacrifice of so many of our men and women. We talk about whether war aims have really been achieved, how to exit gracefully, or whether we need a hyper-surge to finish this whole business once and for all. … But when 'we' cause the calamity, suddenly there is silence."

A sample of 1,499 Iraqis 18 years old and up were asked: "How many members of your household, if any, have died as a result of the conflict in Iraq since 2003 (i.e., as a result of violence rather than a natural death such as old age)? Please note that I mean those who were actually living under your roof." Nearly one of every two Baghdad households claimed to have lost a family member and the firm estimated that, overall, approximately 1.2 million Iraqis may have died violently since the invasion, which, if true, would put even the Rwandan genocide in the shade. Other estimates of Iraqi deaths are lower, but still staggering.

And that's just the dead. Not the wounded. Not the mentally damaged or the shell-shocked or the deranged. Not those thousands in northern Iraq who are now coming down with cholera, thanks to worsening sanitary conditions and the unavailability of potable water. There – in a country which may have lost 1.2 million people to violence in four-plus years – is where our leading presidential candidates, many pundits (liberal as well as conservative), and significant numbers of congressional representatives agree we must remain in some form beyond at least 2013, for reasons of "stability," lest a "genocide" occur.

If the polls are to be believed, here in this country only the American people disagree, and they obviously don't count for much.

So while we hunker into Iraq, the numbers-crunchers will undoubtedly redouble their efforts for the next "progress report," upcoming in March 2008, from Gen. Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker. They are undoubtedly already preparing their bar charts and multi-colored graphs. Out in the field, the pressure on the troops to provide the stats that will make those graphs reflect "progress," that will allow units to achieve "success" and commanders to advance, will only increase.

The lesson of these last metrics-filled surge months is already clear enough: We count, they don't.

Copyright 2007 Tom Engelhardt

New revelations in attack on American spy ship
Veterans, documents suggest U.S., Israel didn't tell full story of deadly '67 incident
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/nation/ba...al_tab01_layout

By John Crewdson | Tribune senior correspondent
October 2, 2007

Bryce Lockwood, Marine staff sergeant, Russian-language expert, recipient of the Silver Star for heroism, ordained Baptist minister, is shouting into the phone.

"I'm angry! I'm seething with anger! Forty years, and I'm seething with anger!"

Lockwood was aboard the USS Liberty, a super-secret spy ship on station in the eastern Mediterranean, when four Israeli fighter jets flew out of the afternoon sun to strafe and bomb the virtually defenseless vessel on June 8, 1967, the fourth day of what would become known as the Six-Day War.

For Lockwood and many other survivors, the anger is mixed with incredulity: that Israel would attack an important ally, then attribute the attack to a case of mistaken identity by Israeli pilots who had confused the U.S. Navy's most distinctive ship with an Egyptian horse-cavalry transport that was half its size and had a dissimilar profile. And they're also incredulous that, for years, their own government would reject their calls for a thorough investigation.

"They tried to lie their way out of it!" Lockwood shouts. "I don't believe that for a minute! You just don't shoot at a ship at sea without identifying it, making sure of your target!"

Four decades later, many of the more than two dozen Liberty survivors located and interviewed by the Tribune cannot talk about the attack without shouting or weeping.

Their anger has been stoked by the declassification of government documents and the recollections of former military personnel, including some quoted in this article for the first time, which strengthen doubts about the U.S. National Security Agency's position that it never intercepted the communications of the attacking Israeli pilots -- communications, according to those who remember seeing them, that showed the Israelis knew they were attacking an American naval vessel.

The documents also suggest that the U.S. government, anxious to spare Israel's reputation and preserve its alliance with the U.S., closed the case with what even some of its participants now say was a hasty and seriously flawed investigation.

In declassifying the most recent and largest batch of materials last June 8, the 40th anniversary of the attack, the NSA, this country's chief U.S. electronic-intelligence-gatherer and code-breaker, acknowledged that the attack had "become the center of considerable controversy and debate." It was not the agency's intention, it said, "to prove or disprove any one set of conclusions, many of which can be drawn from a thorough review of this material," available athttp://www.nsa.gov/liberty .

An Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman, Mark Regev, called the attack on the Liberty "a tragic and terrible accident, a case of mistaken identity, for which Israel has officially apologized." Israel also paid reparations of $6.7 million to the injured survivors and the families of those killed in the attack, and another $6 million for the loss of the Liberty itself.

But for those who lost their sons and husbands, neither the Israelis' apology nor the passing of time has lessened their grief.

One is Pat Blue, who still remembers having her lunch in Washington's Farragut Square park on "a beautiful June afternoon" when she was a 22-year-old secretary for a law firm.

Blue heard somebody's portable radio saying a U.S. Navy ship had been torpedoed in the eastern Mediterranean. A few weeks before, Blue's husband of two years, an Arab-language expert with the NSA, had been hurriedly dispatched overseas.

As she listened to the news report, "it just all came together." Soon afterward, the NSA confirmed that Allen Blue was among the missing.

"I never felt young again," she said.

Aircraft on the horizon

Beginning before dawn on June 8, Israeli aircraft regularly appeared on the horizon and circled the Liberty.

The Israeli Air Force had gained control of the skies on the first day of the war by destroying the Egyptian air force on the ground. America was Israel's ally, and the Israelis knew the Americans were there. The ship's mission was to monitor the communications of Israel's Arab enemies and their Soviet advisers, but not Israeli communications. The Liberty felt safe.

Then the jets started shooting at the officers and enlisted men stretched out on the deck for a lunch-hour sun bath. Theodore Arfsten, a quartermaster, remembered watching a Jewish officer cry when he saw the blue Star of David on the planes' fuselages. At first, crew members below decks had no idea whose planes were shooting at their ship.

Thirty-four died that day, including Blue, the only civilian casualty. An additional 171 were wounded in the air and sea assault by Israel, which was about to celebrate an overwhelming victory over the combined armies of Egypt, Syria, Jordan, and several other Arab states.

Go to link for rest of the article:
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/nation/ba...al_tab01_layout

Iran Slashes Oil Transactions in Dollars

Bush Weasels Out of Iranian Univ. Invitation With Lies, Propaganda

Australia: We Won't Follow US Into Iran

France Urges Sanction Moves to Pressure Iran

Jewish Groups Press German Officials for Anti-Iran Action

Venezuela Defends Iran, Blasts 'Hypocritical' US Policy on Terror

Israel Lifts Censorship on Airstrike in Syria

Syria Says Israel Wants to Make Excuses for War

Gag Order on Syria Raid Lifted Due to Netanyahu Interview

The Costs of Isolating Myanmar
by Leon Hadar President George W. Bush and First Lady Laura Bush, joined by Republican and Democratic lawmakers, the leading presidential candidates, human right activists, and Christian evangelists, have been condemning the violent crackdown on protesters led by Buddhist monks in Myanmar.

While they have called for taking more steps to diplomatically isolate the military regime there and impose more economic sanctions on it, they seem to have failed to recognize that one of the major reasons for the U.S.' inability to affect change in that embattled country has been the continuing American efforts to, well, diplomatically isolate the military regime of Myanmar and impose more economic sanctions on it.

"Reading the news coverage from Myanmar, I am sure I am not the only one struck by the numerous ironies of the current situation in Myanmar and the American response to it," observes Ambassador Chas Freeman, the former chief of mission in the U.S. embassies in Beijing and Bangkok, pointing to newspaper headlines reporting that the "U.S. urges China to help curb violence in Burma, prepare for transition" at the same time that the "U.S. bars Burmese military and government officials and their families from visiting the United States."

Indeed, Mr. Freeman and other realpolitik types in Washington are struck by the fact that the world's only remaining superpower had been left with no effective diplomatic channel to communicate with the members of the military junta in Myanmar. Thus, Washington has no choice but to plead with the Chinese government to "do something" about the chaos and violence in that country.

Hence, while the U.S. has a mission in Myanmar, American officials seem to have limited knowledge about events inside the country and depend, in large measure, on news reports and information from refugees, exiles, and others in neighboring countries.

While continuing to call on the United Nations to isolate Myanmar, Bush administration officials have been pressing Chinese officials in private conversations to use their leverage with authorities in Myanmar to limit the violence and help manage a transition to a new government.

After all, unlike Washington, China and the members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) do have extensive diplomatic and commercial interests in Myanmar, which explains why they communicate with and influence its military leaders.

"Once again, we have to turn to China, which does not share our perspectives or interests with respect to the issues at hand, because we have no credibility or influence with any of the players in an evolving situation," Mr. Freeman says. "Once again, our preferred means of exercising direct influence ourselves is a symbolic distancing of those players," he notes. As he sees it, this situation came about because officials and lawmakers in Washington sought to avoid the "moral contagion" of engagement with the government in Yangon and thus have no effective communication with them or their most likely successors, who probably do not include any candidates for office known to or favored by the West.

In fact, the Bush administration responded to the crisis in Myanmar by "symbolically deepening" U.S. inability to communicate directly with its government, Mr. Freeman stresses, thus empowering Beijing as America's preferred intermediary. If anything, this kind of American policy ends up achieving a result which runs contrary to U.S. interests – helping Beijing become the central diplomatic player in Asia.

In a way, the current U.S. response to the developments in Myanmar is just another chapter in a failed American policy, including the long-standing unilateral U.S. trade and investment sanctions against Myanmar.

Indeed, by forcing U.S. firms to disengage from that country, that policy has harmed American economic interests and done nothing to improve the living conditions or human rights of the people of Myanmar.

Sanctions have denied citizens there the benefits of increased investment by American multinational companies – investment that brings technology, better working conditions, and Western ideas.

Moreover, unilateral American sanctions have alienated U.S. allies in the region and strengthened the hand of China but achieved none of the stated foreign policy aims of weakening the military regime and promoting liberal political and economic reforms in Myanmar.

A self-perpetuating cycle of sanctions, with the inevitable refusal of the regime there to implement reform, strengthened by internal resistance to U.S. sanctions, ends up leading to new and harsher sanctions against Myanmar, which is exactly what the Bush administration is trying to do now.

"America has been seen in the region as more interested in posturing than in results, instructing those neighbors with the greatest influence in Myanmar, including China, Thailand, and India, as well as ASEAN collectively, to fall into line with our preferred policy, especially sanctions," Mr. Freeman argues.

Instead, Washington should have tried to engage with them in dialogue about what ends Americans might have in common with these neighbors, or the internal opposition they could work with to achieve these ends.

Moreover, as an alternative to the failed policy of sanctions, the United States could allow U.S. companies to freely trade with and invest in that country. Such a pro-business approach to engagement would more effectively promote political, civil, and economic freedom similar to the changes that have taken place in China and Vietnam. But politicians and activists in Washington seem to be more interested in "feeling good" by posturing unilaterally and appearing to punish Myanmar's leaders instead of trying to achieve gradual and imperfect changes there.

"Once again, we appear to have put ideology ahead of the interests of those closest to and most likely to be affected by instability in Myanmar," Mr. Freeman says. "And we are raising questions about our commitment to take into account the interests and priorities of regional allies and friends," he suggests.

An alternative policy would have been based on working in concert with ASEAN, India, Japan, and other allies in Asia who have an interest in seeing Myanmar return to stability.

"Having isolated ourselves, we do not know much about what is going on in Myanmar and must depend for our information on the very neighbors of Myanmar we have previously offended and now condemn for not following our lead in dealing with the situation," Mr. Freeman concludes.

The end result is that American policy would only stiffen the backs of the junta members and would not help the Chinese in their efforts to press the military leaders. At the same time, by promoting a central role for the Chinese in Myanmar, Washington may be igniting fears in India about Chinese intentions.

And let's not forget that while some Americans are pleading for Chinese assistance in Myanmar, other Americans are threatening to boycott the Beijing Olympics if the Chinese refuse to end their support for Myanmar.

"Sanctions and disengagement are the diplomatic equivalent of unilateral disarmament," Mr. Freeman explains. "We are ceding our global leadership to others by our chronic inability to distinguish between interests and values and our propensity to employ sanctions as a substitute for war in circumstances where, inasmuch as our interests are too peripheral to justify war, they end up as a substitute for diplomatic engagement."

Copyright © 2007 Singapore Press Holdings Ltd. All rights reserved.

http://www.atimes.com/

Iran terror label bites deep

The move to formally label the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps as terrorist is another victory for anti-Iran hawks, who know the important side-effects of this initiative in inching the US closer to war against Iran. Unfortunately, despite a persuasive case against the move, the hawks are right. - Kaveh L Afrasiabi

Pakistan's plan comes together

With President General Pervez Musharraf naming his successor as head of the army, the United States-backed stage is set for Musharraf to be re-elected as president on Saturday and for Pakistan to move towards a civilian-based consensus government. The army will not be left out, though. A select team of "war on terror" veterans will work closely with the US in its military and trade objectives in the region. - Syed Saleem Shahzad (Oct 3, '07)

Islamabad's grip on tribal areas is slipping
Taliban forces and their sympathizers are becoming entrenched in the seven tribal agencies in Pakistan's Federally Administered Tribal Areas. A lethal combination of President General Pervez Musharraf's declining public support, a significant rise in suicide attacks targeting the army, and the reluctance of soldiers in the area to engage tribal gangs militarily, further exacerbates the problem. (Oct 3, '07)

THE ROVING EYE
A divided Iraq just doesn't add up
Although the United States Senate's vote to split Iraq into a loose, three-region sectarian federation is non-binding, it reflects sentiment both in the US and in sections of Iraq about what might be in store. Yet it would be an unmitigated disaster, at best leading to partition, at worst to ethnic cleansing. - Pepe Escobar (Oct 3, '07)

The southern axis of evil
After Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad's frosty reception in New York, the red carpets were rolled out for him in Bolivia and Venezuela, Iran's key strategic allies in South America. The trade deals Ahmadinejad signed are significant, as is his realization of which way the winds are blowing in a new world order. - Pepe Escobar (Oct 2, '07)

Ibrahim Warde
Logical Lies About Bin Laden's Wealth

Gary Leupp
"I Hate All Iranians": Frank Talk from a Defense Dept. Official

Conn Hallinan
Religion and Foreign Policy

Gag order on Syria raid lifted due to Netanyahu interview

AP photo / Hadi Mizban
<h4 class="home_dig_blog_hed">The State Dept.’s Murderous Guardians</h4> By Robert Scheer — How did it come to be that the ostensibly best-educated and most refined representatives of the United States in Iraq are guarded by gun-toting mercenaries who kill innocent civilians? More urgently, why did State Department employees and their bosses in Washington tolerate—and pay to conceal—the wanton murder conducted on their watch?

Beating the Odds
By Bill Boyarsky — Maybe I’m crazy, but I’d bet on John McCain to win the Republican presidential nomination. And the Democrat with the best chance to beat him is John Edwards.

The Washington Post has it on good authority that Pakistan is losing its war against Taliban and al-Qaida forces operating within its borders, due in no small part to Gen. Pervez Musharraf’s tenuous hold on power.

Inside the Data Mine By Onnesha Roychoudhuri — The Bush administration's domestic spying program has depended on the willing participation of America's telecommunications giants, and all but one, Qwest, were willing to comply. Truthdig contributor Onnesha Roychoudhuri investigates the complex world of national security and regulation to find out whether Qwest's extraordinary bad luck in recent years has been more than a coincidence—and what it means for what's left of your privacy.

Our Little Monster

Justice for Sale?
The Supreme Court, arguably the most powerful institution in our democracy, manages to fly a bit under the radar. Take, for example, the $1.5-million advance Rupert Murdoch paid Clarence Thomas to write a book. Conflict of interest, perhaps? The Nation’s Jon Wiener thinks so.

Fear and Loathing in Tehran by Suzanne Maloney

08.29.2007


LIKE MOM and apple pie, supporting democracy in Iran has universal appeal in U.S. politics. So it is predictable that the February 2006 surprise request by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice for $75 million in supplemental funding to support the democratic aspirations of the Iranian people won ready bipartisan acclaim and the sort of unquestioningly adulatory U.S. media coverage that was all too rare for an administration mired in Iraq and increasingly on the defensive at home. The dramatic new initiative found favor with American pundits and policymakers because it offered something for everyone. It represented a low-cost, feel-good means of leveraging palpable dissatisfaction among Iran’s young population and intensifying pressure on the regime—all while bolstering the administration’s bona fides on its much-hyped "Freedom Agenda" and placating advocates of more aggressive action toward Tehran.

Rice’s democracy initiative signaled a subtle but important transformation in America’s approach—one that had long relied on isolation as the primary tool for containing the Islamic Republic. For the Bush Administration, the challenges posed by Iran were too urgent and its political trajectory too unpredictable to wait out its current leadership; moreover, even a more robust form of isolation failed to satisfy the administration’s ideological predilections for idealistic interventionism. And so even as Washington reluctantly proffered tactical engagement with Tehran on Iraq and the nuclear question, the underlying rationale for American policy shifted in favor of direct U.S. efforts to influence the nature of the regime and the structure of power in Iran. This has not entailed a full-fledged American embrace of regime change—which Rice has disavowed pointedly even as reports of U.S. covert programs have surfaced in the media—but an amateurish array of programs and tactics intended to splinter Iran’s political elite and strengthen its opponents. From the Iranian perspective, this may be a distinction without a difference.


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“Amerika Über Alles” — Our Nazi Nation
by Captain Eric H. May / October 3rd, 2007

Peter Guenther’s Prologue

The most persuasive anti-Nazi I ever knew was my mentor, Dr. Peter W. Guenther, who believed that Nazism was monstrous at every level. As a professor of humanities, he thought it was both inhumane and inhuman. As a professor of art history he thought its aesthetics were artless histrionics. He readily granted that his intellectual opinions were molded by his personal experiences. As a German veteran of World War II, he regretted the loss of his youth, the waste of his friends’ lives and the devastation that they had inflicted on others. He held Hitler accountable for all of this — after all, it was Hitler who had drafted them into the war. He had served from 1939 to 1945, from Poland to Norway to France to Russia. He once quipped that before every one of their invasions their leaders said they were fighting for national defense, but after the shooting started every soldier on every side believed that he was fighting for his own self-defense. (Full article …)

Egypt as Arab Riddle and Prize by Rami G. Khouri
Egypt is currently enjoying economic reform and expansion, while undergoing an increase in the repression of its authoritarian rule. Someday -- though not yet in Egypt -- the Arab world will have a country whose tax and trade reforms will be coupled with civil rights and political reform.
more...

Iraq and the U.S. Elections by Immanuel Wallerstein
Iraq will be the central issue in the approaching 2008 election. The election and Iraq will depend upon the rhetoric that determines the political "center" -- MoveOn.org or Dick Cheney.
more...

Transforming Weakness into Magnificence by Rami G. Khouri
Meaningful progress towards a permanent, comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace is possible, and should neither be dismissed nor allowed to pass without a serious attempt to make it succeed.
more...

The Wider Dilemma of Iraq by Rami G. Khouri
One effect of the US invasion of Iraq is the influence of powerful non-Arab nations -- the United States, Israel, Iran and Turkey -- in determining the future of the Arab world. A reaction from the Arab world would be natural.
more...

Europe Urges U.S. to Curb Fall of Dollar
October 3rd, 2007 Via: International Herald Tribune:
The chief political spokesman for the euro has added his voice to demands for the United States to make a greater effort to curb the dollar’s strong fall - presaging tense times at the Group of 7 meeting this month in Washington.
Jean-Claude Juncker, who heads the group of finance ministers from the […]


Catch a Falling Knife: Weak Dollar Prompts Record Foreign Buyouts of U.S. Companies
October 3rd, 2007 As long as greater fools keep showing up to the party, the band will play on.
Via: International Herald Tribune:
European, Asian and Canadian companies are taking advantage of the weaker dollar to buy their U.S. counterparts at a record pace, increasing investment in the United States but also raising fears about a potential loss of […]