Iraq ain’t no insurgency, say former Petraeus aides
By Noah Shachtman, Wired, June 17, 2008

Iraq cooled from a raging boil to a slow simmer, thanks mostly to tactics taken from the military’s counterinsurgency manual. Or, at least, that’s the accepted wisdom. But a group of military thinkers and Iraq veterans says the established narrative is all wrong. According to them, Iraq may not even be an insurgency at all.

In the classic insurgency scenario, you’ve got a group of guerrillas on one side, and an otherwise-legitimate “host government” on the other. It’s the job of a military like America’s to tip the balance towards stability and order, by keeping the insurgents from overthrowing that government.

But in Iraq, “the bulk” of what used to be the insurgents have “now realign[ed] themselves with the American forces” against “the nihilistic-Islamist terrorist Al Qaeda in Iraq,” Lt. Col. Douglass Ollivant notes in the latest edition of Perspectives on Politics, which is devoted to a critique of the now-famous counterinsurgency manual. “With the Sunni nationalists at least temporarily allied and AQI deprived of its sanctuary among the Sunni population, just who are the insurgents in Iraq against whom a counterinsurgency might be conducted?”

Instead, what seems to be going on in Iraq is a “competition among ethnic and sectarian communities for power and resources,” as General David Petraeus put it. Shi’ites are fighting Shi’ites; Sunnis are battling Sunnis; splinter groups from both sects are waging a low-level religious war; AQI and other jihadists are stirring chaos; and criminal gangs trying to profit from the mayhem. It’s an “extremely difficult and lethal problem,” observes Lt. Col. Ollivant, who, until recently, was the chief of planning for U.S. military operations in Baghdad. “But it “is not exactly an insurgency.

Israeli ministers mull plans for military strike against Iran
By Ralf Beste, Cordula Meyer and Christoph Schult, Der Spiegel, June 16, 2008

Dani Yatom, a member of the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, was invited to attend a NATO conference in Brussels last year. While reviewing the agenda, Yatom, a retired major general, was surprised to see that the meeting was titled “The Iranian Challenge” and not “The Iranian Threat.”

When a speaker with a French accent mentioned that a US military strike against Iranian nuclear facilities would be the most dangerous scenario of all, Yatom said, politely but firmly: “Sir, you are wrong. The worst scenario would be if Iran acquired an atom bomb.”

Yatom, 63, has spent most of his life in the military. He was a military adviser to former Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and, in the mid-1990s, was named head of Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency. Nevertheless, Yatom, a member of the Labor Party, is not some reckless hawk. Unlike most Knesset members, he flatly rejects, for example, a major Israeli offensive against the Islamist Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

But Yatom’s willingness to strike a compromise ends when he is asked what he considers to be the best response to the Iranian nuclear program. “We no longer believe in the effectiveness of sanctions,” says Yatom. “A military operation is needed if the world wants to stop Iran.”

When Israeli Transportation Minister Shaul Mofaz, a former defense minister, expressed similar sentiments 10 days ago, they were viewed, especially in Europe, as the isolated opinions of a card-carrying hardliner seeking to score points with the electorate in a bid to succeed Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. In truth, however, there is now a consensus within the Israeli government that an air strike against the Iranian nuclear facilities has become unavoidable. “Most members of the Israeli cabinet no longer believe that sanctions will convince President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to change course,” says Minister of Immigrant Absorption Yaakov Edri.

Deal, deal, deal with Iran
By Gareth Porter, Asia Times, June 17, 2008

The assumption that the United States should exploit its military dominance to exert pressure on adversaries has long dominated the thinking of the US national security and political elite. But this central tenet of conventional security doctrine was sharply rejected last week by a senior practitioner of crisis diplomacy at the debut of a major new centrist foreign policy think-tank.

At the first conference of the Center for a New American Security (CNAS), ambassador James Dobbins, who was former president Bill Clinton special envoy for Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia and Kosovo and the George W Bush administration’s first special envoy to Afghanistan, sharply rejected the well-established concept of coercive diplomacy.

Dobbins declared in a panel on Iran policy, “I reject the theory that the implicit threat of force is a necessary prerequisite to successful diplomacy.”

Israel seems to make progress in talks
By Isabel Kershner, New York Times, June 17, 2008

Israel appeared to be making diplomatic progress Monday on three fronts: a possible prisoner exchange with Hezbollah; a second round of indirect talks with Syrian representatives in Turkey; and a possible truce with Hamas in Gaza.

Israeli officials refused to comment about possible developments with the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah and said it would be premature to draw any conclusions about understandings with Syria or Hamas.

Some Israelis, meanwhile, have suggested that the current flurry of diplomatic activity is intended to distract attention from the political and legal troubles of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who the police say is suspected of receiving illicit funds.

Pipeline at end of tunnel
By Arik Bender, Ma’ariv, May 26, 2008

Although the bells of peace between Israel and Syria have only just started ringing again, new peace plans are already springing up throughout the Middle East, and are just waiting for the negotiating team to pluck them and offer them as a gift to the other side. One of these, which can be described as no less than grandiose, has recently been set before the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defence Committee. The plan proposes consolidating, institutionalizing, and strengthening the peace agreement being worked out between Israel and Syria by means of a “peace canal,” an international project for conveying water from Turkey via Syria and the Golan Heights, which could provide a solution for a many of the water problems affecting Syria, Israel, Jordan, and the PNA.

The plan, which is a kind of sister project to the “Red-Dead Canal” in the south, was dreamt up by Bo’az Wachtel, the former chairman of the Green Leaf party, in his role as a research associate at the US Freedom House Institute, which was founded by Eleanor Roosevelt, and which is involved in projects to advance peace and human rights in the world. And if you believe what Wachtel has to say, and the many elements who have heard about the plans and been impressed by them, water will soon be arriving at our taps direct from Turkey, perhaps after a stop in Damascus.

The plan is based on bringing 2-3 billion cubic meters of water per annum from two rivers in southern-central Turkey – the Seyhan and Ceyhan – in the area of the city of Adana. The rivers have a joint annual volume of some 14 billion cubic meters of water. Most of the water goes to waste and flows into the Mediterranean Sea uninterrupted. For comparison’s sake, the total joint water requirement of Israel and the Palestinians is “only” approximately 2 billion cubic meters annually.

Kandahar braces for Taliban battle
Al Jazeera, June 17, 2008

Afghan and Nato forces are redeploying troops around the southern city of Kandahar in preparation for a possible large-scale battle with the Taliban.

The soldiers have sealed off the Arghandab district just 30km north of Kandahar where the Taliban claims around 500 of its fighters are now in control of 10 villages.

Al Jazeera’s Hashem Ahelbarra, reporting from Kandahar, said the authorities had imposed a curfew and soldiers were building defensive lines, taking up positions on rooftops and patrolling just about everywhere as they await reinforcements for a counterattack on the areas taken by the Taliban.

Wrongly jailed detainees found militancy at Guantanamo
By Tom Lasseter, McClatchy, June 17, 2008

Mohammed Naim Farouq was a thug in the lawless Zormat district of eastern Afghanistan. He ran a kidnapping and extortion racket, and he controlled his turf with a band of gunmen who rode around in trucks with AK-47 rifles.

U.S. troops detained him in 2002, although he had no clear ties to the Taliban or al Qaida. By the time Farouq was released from Guantanamo the next year, however — after more than 12 months of what he described as abuse and humiliation at the hands of American soldiers — he’d made connections to high-level militants.

In fact, he’d become a Taliban leader. When the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency released a stack of 20 “most wanted” playing cards in 2006 identifying militants in Afghanistan and Pakistan — with Osama bin Laden at the top — Farouq was 16 cards into the deck.

Blackwater’s bright future
By Jeremy Scahill, Los Angeles Times, June 16, 2008

From California to Iraq, business has never been better for the controversial private security firm Blackwater Worldwide. Company President Gary Jackson recently boasted that Blackwater has “had two successive quarters of unprecedented growth.” Owner Erik Prince recently spun his company as the “FedEx” of the U.S. national security apparatus, describing Blackwater as a “robust temp agency.”

Such rhetoric may seem brazen, given Blackwater’s deadly record in Iraq and troubled reputation at home, but here is the cold, hard fact: Blackwater knows its future is bright no matter who next takes up residence at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

The company’s most infamous moment came last September, when Blackwater operatives were alleged to have gunned down 17 Iraqi civilians in Baghdad’s Nisour Square. A U.S. military investigation labeled the shootings a “criminal event,” and a federal grand jury in Washington is hearing evidence in the case.

Contempt of courts
By George Will, Washington Post, June 17, 2008

The day after the Supreme Court ruled that detainees imprisoned at Guantanamo are entitled to seek habeas corpus hearings, John McCain called it “one of the worst decisions in the history of this country.” Well.

Does it rank with Dred Scott v. Sanford (1857), which concocted a constitutional right, unmentioned in the document, to own slaves and held that black people have no rights that white people are bound to respect? With Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), which affirmed the constitutionality of legally enforced racial segregation? With Korematsu v. United States (1944), which affirmed the wartime right to sweep American citizens of Japanese ancestry into concentration camps?

Did McCain’s extravagant condemnation of the court’s habeas ruling result from his reading the 126 pages of opinions and dissents? More likely, some clever ignoramus convinced him that this decision could make the Supreme Court — meaning, which candidate would select the best judicial nominees — a campaign issue.

Can the US and France agree on a Post-Doha Lebanon Policy?
By Joshua Landis, Syria Comment, June 15, 2008

The US and France are struggling to find a common post-Doha policy on Hizbullah and Syria. France is exploiting the appointment of President Michel Suleiman to rehabilitate relations with Syria, which have been in the dumps since 2005. Washington is not happy with the Franco-Syrian honeymoon. This comes as little surprise, for it marks the failure of Washington’s Lebanon policy. President Bush wanted to wrest Lebanon from Syria’s sphere of influence as part of an over-arching effort to reform the Greater Middle East. It should be stated that Washington succeeded in driving Syria’s military out of Lebanon in 2005. But far from being able to accept this as a victory, President Bush stubbornly insisted on eradicating every expression of Syrian influence from its smaller and divided neighbor – a policy which seemed as unwise as it was unrealizable.

Differences between France and the US have came into sharp focus over the impending Bastille Day visit to Paris of President Bashar al-Assad. Although Syria’s diplomatic isolation has been crumbling over the last year, Assad’s trip to Paris will be a symbolic coming out party for the Syrian President. Washington has expressed dismay over France’s warming relations with Bashar. The foreign ministries of both countries have been working overtime to patch up their differences. Secretary of State Rice in a Saturday announcement says she is happy that France understands that Syria should not be completely rehabilitated. Kuchner responded to this with a soul searching announcement that he has misgivings about Assad’s visit to the epicenter of civilization, brotherhood, and liberty. All the same, he points out, Syria and France had a deal about the appointment of a Lebanese president. France is merely honoring this deal by inviting Assad to Paris. He assures America that Paris will not take undo pleasure in its renewed flirtation with Damascus.

Why is Bush helping Saudi Arabia build nukes?
By Edward J Markey, Wall Street Journal, June 10, 2008

Here’s a quick geopolitical quiz: What country is three times the size of Texas and has more than 300 days of blazing sun a year? What country has the world’s largest oil reserves resting below miles upon miles of sand? And what country is being given nuclear power, not solar, by President George W. Bush, even when the mere assumption of nuclear possession in its region has been known to provoke pre-emptive air strikes, even wars?

If you answered Saudi Arabia to all of these questions, you’re right.

Last month, while the American people were becoming the personal ATMs of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was in Saudi Arabia signing away an even more valuable gift: nuclear technology. In a ceremony little-noticed in this country, Ms. Rice volunteered the U.S. to assist Saudi Arabia in developing nuclear reactors, training nuclear engineers, and constructing nuclear infrastructure. While oil breaks records at $130 per barrel or more, the American consumer is footing the bill for Saudi Arabia’s nuclear ambitions.

Finally, the U.S. mega-bases in Iraq make the news
By Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch, June 15, 2008

It’s just a $5,812,353 contract — chump change for the Pentagon — and not even one of those notorious “no-bid” contracts either. Ninety-eight bids were solicited by the Army Corps of Engineers and 12 were received before the contract was awarded this May 28th to Wintara, Inc. of Fort Washington, Maryland, for “replacement facilities for Forward Operating Base Speicher, Iraq.” According to a Department of Defense press release, the work on those “facilities” to be replaced at the base near Saddam Hussein’s hometown, Tikrit, is expected to be completed by January 31, 2009, a mere 11 days after a new president enters the Oval Office. It is but one modest reminder that, when the next administration hits Washington, American bases in Iraq, large and small, will still be undergoing the sort of repair and upgrading that has been ongoing for years.

In fact, in the last five-plus years, untold billions of taxpayer dollars have been spent on the construction and upgrading of those bases. When asked back in the fall of 2003, only months after Baghdad fell to U.S. troops, Lt. Col. David Holt, the Army engineer then “tasked with facilities development” in Iraq, proudly indicated that “several billion dollars” had already been invested in those fast-rising bases. Even then, he was suitably amazed, commenting that “the numbers are staggering.” Imagine what he might have said, barely two and a half years later, when the U.S. reportedly had 106 bases, mega to micro, all across the country.

Soldiers blame lack of training, support for Bagram abuse
By Tom Lasseter, McClatchy, June 16, 2008

The guards at the U.S. detention center at Bagram Air Base didn’t know whether Habibullah had anything to do with terrorist attacks on America, but they knew that he was defiant.

On a cold December day in 2002, Spc. Brian Cammack tried to feed the Afghan clergyman in his late 20s a piece of bread by cramming it into his mouth. Habibullah’s hands were chained above his head, but he pushed the bread out of his mouth with his tongue and spit at Cammack.

Cammack lost his temper and kneed the chained prisoner in the leg, cursed at him, put a cloth sack back over his head and stormed out of his cell.

Later, when Cammack heard Habibullah “rustling around” in his chains, he thought nothing of it. When he finally went back in to check on the prisoner, Cammack said: “I took the sack off his head and his eyes looked strange.”

Soon after, Habibullah died of a pulmonary embolism, a blood clot dislodged by the beatings he’d received. He was one of two Afghan detainees known to have died of beatings at Bagram; the other was a man named Dilawar.

McCain takes Gitmo ruling personally
By Andrew Cohen, CBS, June 15, 2008

John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee, told a crowd of supporters in New Jersey Friday that the Supreme Court’s latest Guantanamo Bay ruling is “one of the worst decisions in the history of this country.”

Why would the normally stoic senator become so hyperbolic about a ruling that, at its essence, strengthens the vitality of the “Great Writ” of habeas corpus – a bedrock constitutional right?

There are several reasons. As a political matter, McCain clearly understands that in his quest to enchant the hard-right wing of the Grand Old Party, he must rail upon the Supreme Court whenever it happens to disagree with the Bush Administration on legal aspects of the war on terrorism.

This is why, just a few weeks ago, McCain delivered a speech that hammered the federal judiciary, sweeping away any lingering notion that he intends to govern as a moderate on legal policy and priorities.

Could Iraq surge success, paradoxically, benefit Obama?
By Charles Crain, World Politics Review, June 12, 2008

The policy in Iraq that McCain now takes credit for is far more nuanced than the rhetoric he employs. He has constantly praised the strategy and its architects, but what seems to animate his views on Iraq is a refusal to compromise. When the occupation turned sour in 2003 he advocated sending more troops; when others in Congress wanted to beat a retreat and turn to diplomacy he supported the troop surge; he’s spoken of a peaceful Iraq that the United States might have to garrison for 100 years.

This creates two problems for McCain. The first is substantive: Aggressive posturing and a refusal to compromise were the hallmarks of America’s utter failure early in the war. The successes of the surge — they are real, even if they may not be permanent — have not just involved sending more troops into Iraqi neighborhoods. There’s been a lot of nose-holding as well, as American diplomats, soldiers and Marines cut deals with ex-insurgents, seek accommodation with local Shiite militants, and negotiate off-and-on with Iran and its proxies in Iraq. Whether McCain is temperamentally suited to following through on that sort of strategy is an open question.

The second problem is purely political. Americans don’t want to lose in Iraq, but they also don’t want to stay forever. When McCain stuck his foot in his mouth speculating about a 100-year presence in Iraq, the problem wasn’t that he was envisioning endless war — he wasn’t. The problem is that he was imagining that the United States might have to stay in Iraq indefinitely for the sake of American national security. There aren’t many Americans left who are inspired by the prospect of a long nation-building mission in Iraq, or by the prospect of American troops sticking around forever in the hope that their presence can help avert another round of catastrophic violence.

Mismarriage of convenience
By Trita Parsi, Foreign Policy, June, 2008

Although Iran and Israel will not be signing any mutual defense pacts anytime soon, the two countries aren’t destined to be implacable foes. If anything, Israel could be a prime beneficiary of a rapprochement between Washington and Tehran.

It might sound inconceivable that Iran, whose leaders since 1979 have used the most venomous rhetoric against the “little Satan,” would ever moderate its stance toward Israel. Yet a careful review of the past three decades shows that Iran’s hostile rhetoric is more a product of opportunism than fanaticism. Iran and Israel have even been willing to work together quietly at times, despite their conflicting ideologies.

The reason is simple: When forced to choose, Tehran invariably chooses its geostrategic interests over its ideological impulses. In no other area is the decisiveness of the strategic dimension of Iran’s foreign policy clearer than when it comes to Israel. When these two pillars of Iranian foreign policy have clashed, as they did in the 1980s during the Iran-Iraq war, Iran’s geostrategic concerns have consistently prevailed. Tehran quietly sought Israel’s aid, and the Jewish state made many efforts to place Iran and the United States back on speaking terms. Faced with an invading Iraqi army and finding its U.S.-built weaponry starved of spare parts by a U.S. embargo, Tehran was in desperate need of help from Israel. Israel, in turn, was more than eager to avoid an Iraqi victory and to restore the traditional Israeli-Iranian clandestine security cooperation established under the shah, the mullahs’ fierce anti-Israeli rhetoric notwithstanding.

No rushing talks on pact with U.S., Iraqis say
By Alissa J Rubin and Suadad al-Salhy, New York Times, June 16, 2008

Discussions among Iraqi politicians on the country’s long-term security agreement with the United States were under way over the weekend, but it will take many weeks and more likely months before the agreement is completed, people close to the negotiations said.

American officials would like a deal by the end of July, before the Democratic and Republican national conventions. But for Iraqis, who have an election law to complete in the next month so they can prepare for an election of their own in the fall, that seems like a tight deadline.

“None of the articles have yet been agreed to,” said Fouad Massoun, a Kurd who is involved in the discussions. “The negotiations are in the primary stage.”

In Iraq’s south, a mission has dual aims
By Andrew E Kramer and Alissa J Rubin, New York Times, June 16, 2008

In an operation with military and political objectives, the Iraqi Army continued to assemble troops in and around the southern city of Amara on Sunday.

Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki offered an amnesty to militants in the city who were willing to surrender, and he also offered to buy back heavy weapons from militia fighters. Similar offers in the past few months have presaged military operations against Shiite or Sunni militias in Basra, the Sadr City neighborhood of Baghdad and the northern city of Mosul.

As in Basra and Sadr City, Amara is dominated by the movement of the rebel Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr. Mr. Maliki’s government has appeared eager to crush at least Mr. Sadr’s militia, if not his movement.

Sadr’s party says it won’t stand in elections
By Ned Parker and Raheem Salman, Los Angeles Times, June 16, 2008

Members of Shiite Muslim cleric Muqtada Sadr’s political bloc announced Sunday that the group would not compete as a party in coming local elections but would endorse candidates.

The decision appeared aimed at allowing the Sadr movement to play a role in the Iraqi elections despite a government threat to bar the bloc from fielding candidates if it did not first dissolve its militia.

The endorsements “will not be for Sadrists alone, but for individuals, chieftains, people with popularity and talents to serve and offer public services to the people,” said Sadr loyalist and parliament member Haidar Fakhrildeen. “We will support them, we will advise the people to vote for them.”

Karzai threatens to send soldiers Into Pakistan
By Carlotta Gall, New York Times, June 16, 2008

President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan threatened on Sunday to send soldiers into Pakistan to fight militant groups operating in the border areas to attack Afghanistan. His comments, made at a news conference in Kabul, Afghanistan, are likely to worsen tensions between the countries, just days after American forces in Afghanistan killed 11 Pakistani soldiers on the border while pursuing militants.

“If these people in Pakistan give themselves the right to come and fight in Afghanistan, as was continuing for the last 30 years, so Afghanistan has the right to cross the border and destroy terrorist nests, spying, extremism and killing, in order to defend itself, its schools, its peoples and its life,” Mr. Karzai said.

“When they cross the territory from Pakistan to come and kill Afghans and kill coalition troops, it exactly gives us the right to go back and do the same,” he said.

Pakistan protests to Afghan envoy
BBC News, June 16, 2008

Afghanistan’s ambassador to Pakistan has been summoned to the foreign ministry to receive a formal protest over remarks by President Hamid Karzai.

Mr Karzai said on Sunday that Afghanistan had the right to send troops across the border to chase militants taking shelter in Pakistan.

The Afghan ambassador in Islamabad was given a “strong protest” over the comments, Pakistan says.

Rice humbly petitions Israel to please not build more settlements
By Griff Witte, Washington Post, June, 2008

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on Sunday pressed Israeli officials to halt settlement expansion in the West Bank and East Jerusalem but failed to win any concessions as she continued to push for a Middle East peace deal by the end of the year.

Rice was making her sixth visit to the region since peace talks resumed in Annapolis last November. Despite her efforts, there have been few public signs of progress and, in certain respects, conditions have deteriorated on the ground.

Rice on Sunday singled out Israeli plans to build thousands of new homes in disputed areas currently under Israeli control but claimed by the Palestinians. Referring to those plans, Rice said, “I do believe, and the United States believes, that the actions and the announcements that are taking place are indeed having a negative effect on the atmosphere for the negotiation — and that is not what we want.”

Sadr recalibrates strategy
By Amit R. Paley and Saad Sarhan, Washington Post, June 15, 2008

The movement of anti-American cleric Moqtada al-Sadr said Saturday that it would not take part in provincial elections this year, one day after it formed a new paramilitary group to fight U.S. troops.

The back-to-back moves suggested that Sadr is trying to bolster his position as the chief opponent of both the American troops in the country and the Iraqi government, following a year in which he ordered his Mahdi Army militia to observe a cease-fire and moved deeper into the political process.

Sadr’s aides said he is recalibrating his strategy as the American military drawdown transforms the U.S. role in Iraq.

“We don’t want anybody to blame us or consider us part of this government while it is allowing the country to be under occupation,” said Liwa Smeisim, head of the Sadr movement’s political committee.

America’s great mistake was to make too much of al Qa’eda
By Tony Karon, The National, June 14, 2008

Following the manic preaching of Ayman Zawahiri from his far-off cave, it’s hard not to think of Leon Trotsky. It’s not just the beard and the granny glasses, or the feverish fantasies about the imminent collapse of his enemies and the “betrayals” by those in his own camp.

Trotsky, with his insistence on ideologically pure “world revolution” in contrast to the more nationally based communism adopted by Joseph Stalin, found himself holed up in Mexico City by the 1930s, frenetically firing off communiqués inconsequential to the actual unfolding of events. He had become irrelevant.

Like Trotsky, Zawahiri and Osama bin Laden have become irrelevant to the unfolding of events in the Middle East, even at a moment when US hegemony faces an unprecedented nationalist-Islamist challenge throughout the region. (That may be the reason Zawahiri reserves so much bile for the likes of Hamas, Hizbollah and the Muslim Brotherhood over their participation in democratic elections, and their willingness to consider truces with their enemies. Vintage Trotsky.)

A sober assessment of Afghanistan
By Ann Scott Tyson, Washington Post, June 15, 2008

The outgoing top U.S. military commander in Afghanistan said Friday that attacks increased 50 percent in April in the country’s eastern region, where U.S. troops primarily operate, as a spreading Taliban insurgency across the border in Pakistan fueled a surge in violence.

In a sober assessment, Gen. Dan K. McNeill, who departed June 3 after 16 months commanding NATO’s International Security Assistance Force, or ISAF, said that although record levels of foreign and Afghan troops have constrained repeated Taliban offensives, stabilizing Afghanistan will be impossible without a more robust military campaign against insurgent havens in Pakistan.

The Taliban is “resurgent in the region,” particularly in sanctuaries in Pakistan, and as a result “it’s going to be difficult to take on this insurgent group . . . in the broader sort of way,” McNeill said at a Pentagon news conference.

U.S. is uneasy as Pakistan bargains with militants
By Laura King, Los Angeles Times, June 15, 2008

The jirgas, or traditional tribal gatherings, continue late into the night.

And every few weeks, from some remote corner of Pakistan’s untamed frontier region, word filters out: Another truce has been struck between the government and a local warlord who commands a band of pro-Taliban fighters.

For nearly two months, Pakistan’s new government has been engaged in intensive negotiations with Islamic militants who use the rugged tribal areas along the border with Afghanistan as both a sanctuary and a springboard for attacks.

Get Osama Bin Laden before I leave office, orders George W Bush
By Sarah Baxter, The Sunday Times, June 15, 2008

President George W Bush has enlisted British special forces in a final attempt to capture Osama Bin Laden before he leaves the White House.

Defence and intelligence sources in Washington and London confirmed that a renewed hunt was on for the leader of the September 11 attacks. “If he [Bush] can say he has killed Saddam Hussein and captured Bin Laden, he can claim to have left the world a safer place,” said a US intelligence source.

Bush arrives in Britain today on the final leg of his eight-day farewell tour of Europe. He will have tea with the Queen and dinner with Gordon Brown and his wife Sarah before holding a private meeting with Brown at No 10 tomorrow and flying on to Northern Ireland.

The Special Boat Service (SBS) and the Special Reconnaissance Regiment have been taking part in the US-led operations to capture Bin Laden in the wild frontier region of northern Pakistan. It is the first time they have operated across the Afghan border on a regular basis.

A year reshapes Hamas and Gaza
By Ethan Bronner, New York Times, June 15, 2008

Many in the West and Israel would very much like to believe Hamas is in trouble. And it is easy to find people here who hate the government and its black-clad police, even among some who voted for Hamas in the January 2006 elections that gave it a majority in the Palestinian legislature and led to 18 months of tense power sharing before the takeover.

But those in Israel who watch most closely — Arabic speaking security officials — say that while the closure is pressing Hamas, it is not jeopardizing it.

“Gaza is totally under Hamas’s control,” said one of three such major officials, all of whom agreed to speak only if identified in this vague manner, and all of whose assessments were the same.

“What happened in Gaza a year ago was not really a coup,” a second official said. “Hamas’s takeover was a kind of natural process. Hamas was so strong, so deeply rooted in Palestinian society through its activities in the economy, education, culture and health care, and Fatah was so weak, so corrupt, that the takeover was like wind blowing over a moth-infested structure.”

For months before the takeover, life in Gaza, with its 1.5 million inhabitants, was deeply insecure as Fatah and Hamas gunmen fought for control of the streets and institutions. Hamas had a parliamentary majority but Fatah, through the presidency of Mahmoud Abbas, still officially controlled the security apparatuses and ministries.

Now, even many of those who detest Hamas say that security has returned to daily life as a result of its takeover.

“Hamas is strong and brutal but very good at governing,” observed Eyad Serraj, a British-trained psychiatrist who runs a group of mental health clinics and is a secular opponent of Hamas. “They are handing out coupons for gas. They have gotten people to pay for car registration. They are getting people to pay their electricity bills after years of everyone refusing to. The city and the hospitals are cleaner than in many years.”

Nuclear ring reportedly had advanced design
By David E Sanger, New York Times, June 15, 2008

American and international investigators say that they have found the electronic blueprints for an advanced nuclear weapon on computers that belonged to the nuclear smuggling network run by Abdul Qadeer Khan, the rogue Pakistani nuclear scientist, but that they have not been able to determine whether they were sold to Iran or the smuggling ring’s other customers.

The plans appear to closely resemble a nuclear weapon that was built by Pakistan and first tested exactly a decade ago. But when confronted with the design by officials of the International Atomic Energy Agency last year, Pakistani officials insisted that Dr. Khan, who has been lobbying in recent months to be released from the loose house arrest that he has been under since 2004, did not have access to Pakistan’s weapons designs.

In interviews in Vienna, Islamabad and Washington over the past year, officials have said that the weapons design was far more sophisticated than the blueprints discovered in Libya in 2003, when Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi gave up his country’s nuclear weapons program. Those blueprints were for a Chinese nuclear weapon that dated to the mid-1960s, and investigators found that Libya had obtained them from the Khan network.

Key Iraqi leaders deliver setbacks to U.S.
By Amit R. Paley and Karen DeYoung, Washington Post, June 14, 2008

The Bush administration’s Iraq policy suffered two major setbacks Friday when Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki publicly rejected key U.S. terms for an ongoing military presence and anti-American Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr called for a new militia offensive against U.S. forces.

During a visit to Jordan, Maliki said negotiations over initial U.S. proposals for bilateral political and military agreements had “reached a dead end.” While he said talks would continue, his comments fueled doubts that the pacts could be reached this year, before the Dec. 31 expiration of a United Nations mandate sanctioning the U.S. role in Iraq.

The moves by two of Iraq’s most powerful Shiite leaders underscore how the presence of U.S. troops has become a central issue for Iraqi politicians as they position themselves for provincial elections later this year. Iraqis across the political spectrum have grown intolerant of the U.S. presence, but the dominant Shiite parties — including Maliki’s Dawa party — are especially fearful of an electoral challenge from new, grass-roots groups.

Editor’s Comment — Here’s a definition of victory in Iraq that President Bush might want to consider: that Iraq has a government strong enough to defy the US. Think of it as the new Iraq’s coming of age.

The Bush administration thought it could strong-arm its client in Baghdad into an agreement, but as happens so often, the strong party mistook its counterpart’s weakness for stupidity.

Conducting the negotiations in secret has been utterly self-serving from the administration’s point of view and as soon as it became apparent to the Iraqis that it was to no advantage of theirs to keep the terms secret, they started spilling the beans. The effect has been that when Iraqi lawmakers come out and say the Americans want 58 permanent bases and Bush says this is “erroneous”, the whole world knows who’s lying.

Presumably the administration had two motives for wanting to maintain the secrecy. Firstly, they wanted to be able to cast the final agreement as an expression of mutual interest rather than it being seen as Iraq acceding to US demands. Secondly, if the US had to make concessions, they didn’t want to be seen as having done so.

The Americans’ underlying assumption is that the Iraqis would not dare say we can manage without you. That assumption is now looking like a gamble that could backfire spectacularly on Bush and the GOP. Imagine this as an October surprise: the Iraqi government asks the US to start organizing an orderly withdrawal of its forces. In that event, McCain might as well withdraw from the presidential race.

Iraqi cleric Sadr to demobilize most of his militia
By Ashraf Khalil, Los Angeles Times, June 14, 2008

Shiite Muslim cleric Muqtada Sadr appeared to move Friday toward reorganizing his Mahdi Army militia and shifting much of the movement’s focus toward peaceful social activities, though he said its military wing would reserve the right to attack U.S. forces.

Sadr, in a statement read after Friday prayers in his stronghold of Kufa, said a select number of Mahdi Army cadres would be allowed to bear arms and use them only with authorization.

His orders, read by a deputy, said the militia’s guns and mortars “will be directed only toward the occupiers and no one else. . . . Any further targets will not be allowed.”

Taliban free 1,200 in attack on Afghan prison
By Carlotta Gall, New York Times, June 14, 2008

In a brazen attack, Taliban fighters assaulted the main prison in the southern Afghan city of Kandahar on Friday night, blowing up the mud walls, killing 15 guards and freeing around 1,200 inmates. Among the escapees were about 350 Taliban members, including commanders, would-be suicide bombers and assassins, said Ahmed Wali Karzai, the head of Kandahar’s provincial council and a brother of President Hamid Karzai.

“It is very dangerous for security. They are the most experienced killers and they all managed to escape,” he said by telephone from Kandahar.

A Taliban spokesman, Qari Yousuf Ahmadi, said that the attack was carried out by 30 insurgents on motorbikes and two suicide bombers, and that they had freed about 400 Taliban members, The Associated Press reported.

Mammoth anti-Musharraf rally in Islamabad
By Sohail Khan & Khalid Iqbal, The News, June 14, 2008

Hundreds of thousands of anti-Musharraf marchers converged on federal capital early Saturday demanding reinstatement of the deposed judges in no time. The main long march rally led by lawyers’ leader Aitzaz Ahsan entered the Parade Ground at about 2:15 am while PML-N leader Nawaz Sharif reached the venue at 2:35 am.

As the lawyer and political leaders appeared on the stage, the participants of the long march cried “go Musharraf go” at the top of their voice. PML-N leader Nawaz Sharif began his speech at 3:00 am by paying glowing tributes to the participants of the march. He said this was the place where Musharraf claimed before a gathering in the wake of the Karachi killing that it was a demonstration of people’s power. He said those people were brought by paying money. He asked Musharraf to come and see the real demonstration of people’s power. He also asked Musharraf to listen to what the people were saying about him.

He said Musharraf had not accepted the decision the people delivered on Feb 18. He said now the people did not want only his ouster but his trial. He said Musharraf should remember the days when innocent girl students of Jamia Hafsa were demanding safe passage but he burnt them with fire bombs. He said now Musharraf cannot be given a safe passage.

A Setback for the State of Exception
By Scott Horton, Harper’s, June 13, 2008

For the dwindling but stout-hearted band of Bush loyalists, the creation of concentration camps and introduction of torture techniques never presented much of a problem—morally or legally. On the legal side, they reasoned, the president exercised commander-in-chief powers, and in wartime that let him do pretty much whatever he wanted. There were some limits, of course. One might be that his freedom of action had to be outside of the United States. Another that it couldn’t involve U.S. citizens. But with those two points resolved, Torquemada had better get out of the way.

For the critics, that was never right. The president was an actor in a constitutional system, they argued. He was constrained by the law, for that limitation—rule by law and not by a king—was the essence of the nation’s self-identification. In times of war, the constraints were certainly relaxed, but that didn’t mean there were no constraints.

Yesterday, the Supreme Court, in a 5-4 ruling, delivered a sweeping decision which rebukes the Bush Administration over its expansive views of wartime executive powers. In Boumediene and a series of companion cases, the Court was asked to decide whether the ultimate guarantor of the rule of law—the writ of habeas corpus–was available to persons in detention in Guantánamo. In the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 and the Military Commissions Act of 2006, Congress had stripped the Great Writ. Congress did not do so explicitly, through the specific mechanism envisioned in the Constitution. Rather, it took a backdoor approach, providing a highly qualified and limited right of appeal as a substitute for habeas corpus. The Supreme Court’s majority found this to be unconstitutional.

The ruling was a resounding defeat, the third in succession (after the rulings in Rasul and Hamdan) for the Bush Administration’s war powers claims.

Closing the law-free zone
By David Cole , The Guardian, June 13, 2008

In one sense, the decision in Boumediene v Bush is a limited one. It does not order the release of a single prisoner – indeed, no prisoner has been released by court order in the six years that men have been held at Guantanamo. Nor does it address the scope of the President’s authority to hold individuals as “enemy combatants,” what procedural protections they are owed, or how they should be treated. It simply opens the courthouse door. Six years after Guantanamo opened, detainees will finally get their day in court.

But in every other sense, Thursday’s decision was groundbreaking. For the first time in its history, the Supreme Court declared unconstitutional a federal law enacted by Congress and signed by the President on an issue of military policy in a time of armed conflict. The Supreme Court has historically deferred to the President during times of conflict, especially when the President has acted with Congressional assent. For the first time, the court extended constitutional protections to noncitizens held outside US territory during wartime. And for only the third time in its history, the court declared unconstitutional a federal law restricting its own jurisdiction.

McCain and Obama split on justices’ Guantánamo ruling
By Kate Zernike, New York Times, June 13, 2008

The presidential candidates took differing positions Thursday on the Supreme Court decision granting foreign terrorism suspects at Guantánamo Bay a right to challenge their detention in civilian courts. Senator John McCain expressed concern about the ruling, while Senator Barack Obama lauded it.

Obama’s appeal in the Muslim world
By Yasser Khalil, Christian Science Monitor, June 13, 2008

US Senator Barack Obama represents a phenomenon that has drawn global attention and captivated the minds of Muslims around the world as he wages a spirited campaign to become the next president of the United States.

In spite of the campaign’s heated debate and some controversial rhetoric regarding Islam, large segments of the Muslim population here remain fascinated with the election and have become big fans of Senator Obama.

This level of support for an American presidential candidate is unprecedented in the Muslim world. That it comes amid an almost unanimous feeling of indignation and rage toward US foreign policy – particularly in Iraq and the Palestinian territories – makes it even more noteworthy.

Poll: Many in world look to US election for change
By Alan Fram, AP, June 13, 2008

People around the globe widely expect the next American president to improve the country’s policies toward the rest of the world, especially if Barack Obama is elected, yet they retain a persistently poor image of the U.S., according to a poll released Thursday.

The survey of two dozen countries, conducted this spring by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center, also found a growing despondency over the international economy, with majorities in 18 nations calling domestic economic conditions poor. In more bad news for the U.S., people shared a widespread sense the American economy was hurting their countries, including large majorities in U.S. allies Britain, Germany, Australia, Turkey, France and Japan.

Fox forced to address Michelle Obama headline
By Jim Rutenberg, New York Times, June 12, 2008

For the third time in less than three weeks, Fox News Channel has had to acknowledge using poor judgment through inappropriate references to Senator Barack Obama.

The network has released a statement saying it should not have referred to Mr. Obama’s wife, Michelle, as “Obama’s Baby Mama,’’ as it did on Wednesday in an on-screen headline commonly called a “chyron.”

“A producer on the program exercised poor judgment in using this chyron during the segment,” Bill Shine, a Fox News senior vice president, said in a statement.

McCains report more than $100,000 in credit card debt
By Kevin Bogardus and Manu Raju, The Hill, June 13, 2008

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and his wife reported more than $100,000 of credit card liabilities, according to financial disclosure documents released Friday.

The presidential candidate and his wife Cindy reported piling up debt on a charge card between $10,000 and $15,000. His wife’s solo charge card has between $100,000 and $250,000 in debt to American Express.

‘Israel Lobby’ professors get hospitable greeting in Israel
Chronicle of Higher Education, June 12, 2008

The first appearance in Israel by Stephen M. Walt and John J. Mearsheimer since the publication of their controversial book, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, impressed a largely student audience at the Hebrew University, but left some faculty members wondering about their honesty.

A threatened boycott failed to have any effect, and the talk passed off with nothing more dramatic than some lively debate and repeated declarations from the pair that they are neither anti-Semitic nor Israel-haters.

Their presentation, “Is the ‘Israel lobby’ good for Israel?,” attracted 200 people. Mr. Walt told The Chronicle that they were visiting Israel at the invitation of the veteran left-wing campaigner Uri Avnery and decided to add a university appearance to their schedule.

‘India can bring balance to Middle East peace process’
Syrian President Bashar al-Assad interviewed by Siddharth Varadarajan, The Hindu, June 12, 2008

Indirect talks are going on between Syria and Israel through Turkey. Israel is occupying the Golan Heights — which is Syrian territory — and obviously Syria wants it back. But what can you give Israel in return?

Assad: First, as you said, Syrian land is occupied by Israel so they have to give it back. We don’t have something to give but we have something to achieve together, which is peace. So, if both sides achieve a certain treaty, including giving back the Golan Heights, this means achieving peace. The other thing besides the land is discussing normal relations, water, security arrangements and all these details that are related to the concept of peace. This is something we achieve together, but Israel has the land and should give it back.

But it is said Israel wants Syria to abandon its friends in the region – Hamas, Hizbollah and Iran.

The Israelis have been talking about negotiations without pre-conditions. They cannot ask for conditions and they have not either. Second, Hamas is related to the Palestinian track and we are not responsible for that track. Hizbollah is part of the Lebanese track and we are not in Lebanon today. We are only talking about the Syrian track.

What is the Israeli compulsion to talk peace with you at this time?

The Israelis used to think that with time they are going to be stronger and any opposition to their policies will be weaker, but actually what happened was the opposite. Now, the Israelis learned that without peace they cannot live safely and Israel cannot be safe. I think this is true especially after the war on Lebanon and because of the result of that war inside the Israeli society; this is the main incentive for the Israelis to move toward peace.

Iraq lawmakers reject draft pact
By Qassim Abdul-Zahra, AP, June 12, 2008

New U.S. proposals have failed to overcome Iraqi opposition to a proposed security pact, two lawmakers said Thursday, and a senior government official expressed doubt an agreement could be reached before the U.S. presidential election in November.

Iraqi reinforcements, meanwhile, arrived in the oil-producing southern city of Amarah on Thursday as the military geared up for another crackdown against Shiite militia fighters, officials said.

The security agreement would provide a legal basis for the presence of U.S. forces in Iraq after the U.N. mandate expires at the end of this year. Failure to strike a deal would leave the future of the American military presence here to the next administration.

Iraq war could cost taxpayers $2.7 trillion
By David Goldman, CNN, June 12, 2008
As the Iraq war continues with no clear end in sight, the cost to taxpayers may balloon to $2.7 trillion by the time the conflict comes to an end, according to Congressional testimony.

In a hearing held by the Joint Economic Committee Thursday, members of Congress heard testimony about the current costs of the war and the future economic fallout from returning soldiers.

At the beginning of the conflict in 2003, the Bush administration gave Congress a cost estimate of $60 billion to $100 billion for the entirety of the war. But the battle has been dragging on much longer than most in the government expected, and costs have ballooned to nearly ten times the original estimate.

U.S. releases video of Pakistan airstrike
By Mike Nizza, New York Times, June 12, 2008

The United States military today confronted the sharpest criticism of an airstrike that left 11 Pakistani paramilitary soldiers dead on Tuesday night by releasing what it says is a video of the incident. (For background, see this article by Carlotta Gall and Eric Schmitt).

Rather than it being a “completely unprovoked and cowardly act” — a charge from a Pakistani military officer that was later leavened by other officials — the Pentagon hoped the video would persuade the public that the American air attack was a legitimate act of self-defense.

While it generally confirms aspects of both the American and the Taliban accounts of the border clash on Wednesday, the released video shows only part of the operation — the striking of three bombs, out of a total of about 12 that were used, officials said.

Justices rule terror suspects can appeal in civilian courts
By David Stout, New York Times, June 13, 2008

Foreign terrorism suspects held at the Guantánamo Bay naval base in Cuba have constitutional rights to challenge their detention there in United States courts, the Supreme Court ruled, 5 to 4, on Thursday in a historic decision on the balance between personal liberties and national security.

“The laws and Constitution are designed to survive, and remain in force, in extraordinary times,” Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote for the court.

The ruling came in the latest battle between the executive branch, Congress and the courts over how to cope with dangers to the country in the post-9/11 world. Although there have been enough rulings addressing that issue to confuse all but the most diligent scholars, this latest decision, in Boumediene v. Bush, No. 06-1195, may be studied for years to come.

Editor’s Comment — This grammatical precision is hardly likely to catch on, but the NYT got it right: terrorism suspects.

Having arisen out of the muddy concept of terrorism, it was hardly surprising that Guantanamo would have ended up as a holding pen for men about whom the US government would be more emphatic about saying who they are – terrorists – than what they have done.

The argument that these men (and boys) present such an inordinate threat to the United States that they would have to be stripped of fundamental legal rights, is, and always was, inherently circular.

These terrorists were so dangerous we couldn’t take the risk of trying to legally establish whether they had committed, planned, or assisted in any acts of terrorism.

Supreme Court restores habeas corpus, strikes down key part of Military Commissions Act
By Glenn Greenwald, Salon, June 12, 2008

The Court’s ruling was grounded in its recognition that the guarantee of habeas corpus was so central to the Founding that it was one of the few individual rights included in the Constitution even before the Bill of Rights was enacted. As the Court put it: “the Framers viewed freedom from unlawful restraint as a fundamental precept of liberty, and they understood the writ of habeas corpus as a vital instrument to secure that freedom.” The Court noted that freedom from arbitrary or baseless imprisonment was one of the core rights established by the 13th Century Magna Carta, and it is the writ of habeas corpus which is the means for enforcing that right. Once habeas corpus is abolished — as the Military Commissions Act sought to do — then we return to the pre-Magna Carta days where the Government is free to imprison people with no recourse.

Scalia: Court’s decision restoring habeas ‘will almost certainly cause more Americans to be killed’
Think Progress, June 12, 2008

In Justice Scalia’s dissenting opinion, he devoted an entire section to “a description of the disastrous consequences of what the Court has done today,” a procedure “contrary to my usual practice,” he admitted. Scalia adopted extreme rhetoric about the impacts of the decision, calling it a “self-invited…incursion into military affairs” that would “almost certainly” kill Americans.

Editor’s Comment — Justice Scalia, as a man of conscience, should make clear the full measure of his outrage and do the right thing: resign from the court.

The reality is that Iraqi authority would be nominal
By Patrick Cockburn, The Independent, June 12, 2008

In practice, there is less to the American “concessions” than would first appear. The reaction in Iraq to the US demands for the long-term use of military bases and other rights has been so furious that Washington is now offering limited concessions in the negotiations. For example, the US is lowering the number of bases it wants from 58 to “the low dozens” and says it is willing to compromise on legal immunity for foreign contractors according to information leaked to The Independent.

George Bush is willing to modify some of the demands so the Iraqi government can declare “a significant climbdown” by the American side allowing Baghdad to sign the treaty by 31 July.

But the US currently only maintains about 30 large bases in Iraq, some the size of small cities; the rest are “forward operating bases”.

How Iran has Bush over a barrel
By Robert Baer, Time, June 12, 2008

If wasn’t clear before it should be now: the Bush Administration can’t afford to attack Iran. With gas already at $4 a gallon and rising almost every day, Iran figuratively and literally has the United States over a barrel. As much as the Administration is tempted, it is not about to test Iran’s promise to “explode” the Middle East if it is attacked.

The Iranians haven’t been shy about making clear what’s at stake. If the U.S. or Israel so much as drops a bomb on one of its reactors or its military training camps, Iran will shut down Gulf oil exports by launching a barrage of Chinese Silkworm missiles on tankers in the Strait of Hormuz and Arab oil facilities. In the worst case scenario, seventeen million barrels of oil would come off world markets.

One oil speculator told me that oil would hit $200 a barrel within minutes. But Iran’s official news agency, Fars, puts it at $300 a barrel. I asked him if Iran is right, what does that mean?

Strike on Iran nuclear sites under discussion again
By Dion Nissenbaum, McClatchy, June 11, 2008

Six months ago, after American intelligence agencies declared that Iran had shelved its nuclear-weapons program, the chances of a U.S. or Israeli military strike on Iran before President Bush left office seemed remote.

Now, thanks to persistent pressure from Israeli hawks and newly stated concerns by the International Atomic Energy Agency, the idea of a targeted strike meant to cripple Iran’s nuclear program is getting a new hearing.

As Bush travels across Europe to gain support for possible new sanctions against Iran, Israeli leaders have been working to lay the psychological foundation for a possible military strike if diplomacy falters.

Challenging the militarization of U.S. energy policy
By Michael T. Klare, TomDispatch, June 12, 2008

American policymakers have long viewed the protection of overseas oil supplies as an essential matter of “national security,” requiring the threat of — and sometimes the use of — military force. This is now an unquestioned part of American foreign policy.

On this basis, the first Bush administration fought a war against Iraq in 1990-1991 and the second Bush administration invaded Iraq in 2003. With global oil prices soaring and oil reserves expected to dwindle in the years ahead, military force is sure to be seen by whatever new administration enters Washington in January 2009 as the ultimate guarantor of our well-being in the oil heartlands of the planet. But with the costs of militarized oil operations — in both blood and dollars — rising precipitously isn’t it time to challenge such “wisdom”? Isn’t it time to ask whether the U.S. military has anything reasonable to do with American energy security, and whether a reliance on military force, when it comes to energy policy, is practical, affordable, or justifiable?

Interest grows for international Iran atom plant
By Farah Stockman, Boston Globe, June 10, 2008

A deeply controversial plan put forth by MIT scientists to end the standoff over Iran’s nuclear program is getting increased interest from senior members of both parties in Congress and nonproliferation specialists.

The plan, which was rejected three years ago by the Bush administration, argues for a dramatic shift in US policy: Rather than trying to halt Iran’s efforts to enrich uranium, the United States should help build an internationally run enrichment facility inside Iran to replace Iran’s current facilities.

Supporters argue that such a program would fulfill Iran’s insistence on enriching uranium on its own soil, while preventing the dangerous material from being diverted to weapons.

Three years ago, when the proposal was first advanced, it was widely considered unthinkable. Administration officials argued that tougher sanctions and the threat of military strikes would force Iran to stop its program to enrich uranium, a process that uses thousands of spinning centrifuges to create fuel out of rare uranium isotopes that can be used for nuclear power or weapons.

But now, as Iran appears on the verge of mastering enrichment technology, the call to try to internationalize Iran’s facilities is getting more attention on Capitol Hill and from nonproliferation specialists as a face-saving compromise.

Iranian officials proposed building an international enrichment plant inside Iran in a letter they submitted to the United Nations last month, but declined to say whether such a plant would be in addition to or a replacement for their own facilities.

In an interview last month, Iran’s ambassador to the UN, Mohammad Khazaee, said the details should be negotiated.

Thomas Pickering, the US ambassador to the United Nations under President George H.W. Bush, endorsed the idea in a March article in the New York Review of Books that was co-authored by Jim Walsh, a nonproliferation specialist at MIT, and William Luers, president of the United Nations Association, which organizes meetings with Iranian officials. The three have spent more than a year in informal talks with officials from Iran’s foreign ministry and Atomic Energy Organization.

John Thomson, a former British ambassador to the United Nations who is now at MIT, and Geoffrey Forden, an MIT physicist and former weapons inspector in Iraq, have spent more than two years on separate research into the technology needed to safeguard such an international facility, including equipment that would prevent Iranian scientists from taking control of it or learning how it works.

Iraq, perceived hypocrisy fuel record anti-Americanism: report
By Alice Ritchie, AFP, June 11, 2008

Anti-Americanism is at record levels thanks to US policies such as the war in Iraq, and Washington’s perceived hypocrisy in abiding by its own democratic values, US lawmakers said Wednesday.

A House of Representatives committee report [PDF] based on expert testimony and polling data reveals US approval ratings have fallen to record lows across the world since 2002, particularly in Muslim countries and Latin America.

It says the problem arises not from a rejection of US culture, values and power but primarily from its policies, such as backing authoritarian regimes while promoting democracy, human rights and the rule of law.

“Our physical strength has come to be seen not as a solace but as a threat, not as a guarantee of stability and order but as a source of intimidation, violence and torture,” said Bill Delahunt, chairman of the subcommittee on international organizations, human rights and oversight.

America and the emerging Iraqi reality: New goals, no illusions [PDF]
By Ellen Laipson, The Century Foundation, June 9, 2008

It is time for a new policy in Iraq, to recalibrate America’s equities and engagement there. The current administration is tied to its policy, knowing that the president’s historic legacy will be based on the outcome in Iraq, and hoping that current positive trends can be turned into more permanent con­ditions. But the American people and their political leaders need to be thinking more boldly about a new horizon: Where do we want U.S.-Iraq relations to be in five years? Can the United States and Iraq enjoy a friendly relationship without such a deep commitment of American forces and resources? Where does Iraq fit in America’s strategic interests and agenda?

Many believe that such an exercise is difficult because it depends too much on what the Iraqis do, and their behavior seems increasingly to be beyond American control or influence. Iraq’s profound uncertainties, according to this view, make it too hard to conduct such a policy-planning exercise. But this report argues that the United States has to set its strategic goals in the region independently of how Iraq’s political dramas play out. The time for social engi­neering is over; events in Iraq will be determined by powerful currents within Iraqi society and politics that are less and less susceptible to outside manipula­tion or influence. So the United States needs to set its own course, and no longer pin its policy on the ability of the Iraqis to play a part Americans have written for them.

Iraq remains of great significance for the Middle East region and for America’s interests there. Iraq is intrinsically important, because of its location as a bridge between Iran and the Arab world, its oil wealth, and the potential of its people to be powerful regional players. The United States will continue to care about Iraq’s fortunes, its ability to achieve greater stability and prosperity for its people, and its relations with its neighbors. But the time is right for fresh thinking about a transition from a period of exceptional engagement to a new state of affairs.

The rise of the Obamacons
By Bruce Bartlett, The New Republic, June 25, 2008

The New Yorker is hardly the optimal vehicle for reaching the conservative intelligentsia. But, last year, Barack Obama cooperated with a profile for that magazine where he seemed to be speaking directly to the right. Because he paid obeisance to the virtues of stability and continuity, his interlocutor, Larissa MacFarquhar, came away with the impression that the Illinois senator was an adherent of Edmund Burke: “In his view of history, in his respect for tradition, in his skepticism that the world can be changed any way but very, very slowly, Obama is deeply conservative.”

As The New Yorker‘s assessment shot across blogs, many conservatives listened eagerly. A broad swath of the movement has been in open revolt against George W. Bush–and the Republican Party establishment–for some time. They don’t much care for the Iraq war or the federal government’s vast expansion over the last seven-and-a-half years. And, in the eyes of these discontents, the nomination of John McCain only confirmed the continuation of the worst of the Bush-era deviations from first principles.

Mister Maverick, meet da machine
By Thomas Frank, Wall Street Journal, June 11, 2008

I always knew that the 2008 election would become another battle in the culture wars; the only mystery was the particular form the conflict would take this time around.

The answer surprises even cynical me: Barack Obama’s neighborhood. Republicans are preparing to court the blue-collar vote by casting the election as a referendum on Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood, which Mr. Obama represented in the Illinois Senate and where the prestigious University of Chicago is situated.

The news came in last Friday’s Washington Post, in which it was announced that “Republicans plan to describe Obama as an elitist” – mmm, novel word, that – “from the Hyde Park section of Chicago, where liberal professors mingle in an academic world that is alien to most working-class voters.” Then, like clockwork, out slid the new issue of The Weekly Standard, which lambastes Mr. Obama’s neighborhood as an island of upper-class daffiness – a neat trick, considering that Hyde Park’s median household income is substantially lower than both the national and the Chicago median.

Obama might change things, but we will have to persuade him first
By Ayman Safadi, The National, June 10, 2008

The Arabs have historically failed at selling their case to American policymakers and public opinion. Blaming America for every wrong has become an integral part of the Arab collective culture. What we haven’t done is make any meaningful effort at communicating with the US, despite the enormous impact its policy decisions have had here. It is as if the assumption is that “we are right” and America has to see that on its own. Such passive attitude did not work in the past. It will not work now.

The sad reality is that there are no indications the Arabs have learnt much from the lessons of the past decades. America is probably second only to Israel in the amount of bashing it receives, in the Arabic press and public discussions. But it has not been the target of any substantial communication from Arab governments or non governmental organisations. Consequently, America’s perceptions of the region and its positions on it have been formed with little or no influence from Arabs (except for terrorist attacks by peripheral groups that enforce negative stereotypes).

Nothing on the horizon justifies any hope that Arab apathy towards engaging American public opinion will end. It is safe to conclude, therefore, that an Obama White House will not meet the unrealistic expectations of many in the Arab world.

Which means that the Obama “myth” that has developed here will not take long to collapse. The change he is expected to bring to American politics will not be in the direction the Arabs want. And soon after he assumes office, if he does, things will be back to square one: the US will follow policies the Arabs see, and often rightly so, as detrimental to their interests. Yet Obama will not be the only one to blame. Arab inactivism and failure to state its case must also carry a great deal of the blame.

Changing Iran: An interview with Akbar Ganji
Boston Review, June, 2008

What is the status today of the reform movement in Iran? Are you optimistic about its prospects?

The confrontation between Iran and the Unites States over nuclear power, terrorism, politics in the Middle East, and Iran’s increasing influence in the region, has greatly overshadowed internal opposition activity. The specter of war, together with the regime’s repressiveness, has pushed aside the struggle for democracy and human rights. Moreover, the regime in Iran uses the pretext of an “impending war” to crack down more severely on its opponents. Resistance under such circumstances is very difficult.

In this way the government of the United States has harmed reformist forces in Iran. When President Bush says that Iranian reformists do not have a better friend than he, his words are both factually inaccurate and practically useless to the reform movement. But they provide a convenient excuse to Iran’s fundamentalist rulers to paint their opponents as “American agents,” and, under the pretext of fighting American intervention, proceed to crush them.

Given such circumstances, many of the reformist groups have placed their hopes on formal periodic elections in the Islamic Republic of Iran. What these reformists do not realize is that democracy and human rights will never emerge from the ballot box of the Islamic Republic. Other political activists have shifted their focus to civil society. This is the only way forward for us. Discontent is widespread, but people are not organized, and an effective leadership supported by a broad consensus does not exist at the moment.

U.S. security talks with Iraq in trouble in Baghdad and D.C.
By Leila Fadel and Warren P. Strobel, McClatchy, June 10, 2008
A proposed U.S.-Iraqi security agreement that would set the conditions for a defense alliance and long-term U.S. troop presence appears increasingly in trouble, facing growing resistance from the Iraqi government, bipartisan opposition in Congress and strong questioning from Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama.

President Bush is trying to finish the agreement before he leaves office, and senior U.S. officials insist publicly that the negotiations can be completed by a July 31 target date. The U.S. is apparently scaling back some of its demands, including backing off one that particularly incenses Iraqis, blanket immunity for private security contractors.

But meeting the July 31 deadline seems increasing doubtful, and in Baghdad and Washington there is growing speculation that a United Nations mandate for U.S.-led military operations in Iraq may have to be renewed after it expires at the end of 2008.

President Bush regrets his legacy as man who wanted war
By Tom Baldwin and Gerard Baker, The Times, June 11, 2008
President Bush has admitted to The Times that his gun-slinging rhetoric made the world believe that he was a “guy really anxious for war” in Iraq. He said that his aim now was to leave his successor a legacy of international diplomacy for tackling Iran.

In an exclusive interview, he expressed regret at the bitter divisions over the war and said that he was troubled about how his country had been misunderstood. “I think that in retrospect I could have used a different tone, a different rhetoric.”

Editor’s Comment — In the twilight of his presidency, George Bush has a focus that’s easy to miss. At a point when he has virtually become a pariah, it hardly seems worth paying attention to anything he says. Even so, what he said to The Times echoes what he recently said to The Jerusalem Post. A mid-May editorial said: “The president told The Jerusalem Post yesterday that before leaving office he wants a structure in place for dealing with Iran.” The Times reiterates: “He said that his aim now was to leave his successor a legacy of international diplomacy for tackling Iran… The President was keen to bind his successor into a continued military presence in Afghanistan and Iraq.”

All of which points to the central importance, in Bush’s mind, of securing signatures on long-term defense agreements with Iraq – agreements that the administration refuses to acknowledge as legal treaties, so that it can circumvent the need for Congressional approval. This — not plans to attack Iran — seems to be what’s on Bush’s mind as he contemplates his legacy.

The neonconservative fantasist, Daniel Pipes, has suggested that “should the Democratic nominee win in November, President Bush will do something. And should it be Mr McCain that wins, he’ll punt, and let McCain decide what to do.”

The idea that while a transition between administrations is already in process, Bush is going to start a last minute war, is frankly absurd. What is far from fanciful is what Bush is actually saying – that he is keen to bind his successor.

If there’s a trend that has run unbroken throughout George Bush’s two terms in office, it is his consistent ability to empower his adversaries. The Maliki government is only nominally a US ally, and at this juncture it seems well-placed to take advantage of the pressure being applied by Washington. Time is on Baghdad’s side. Indeed, if Maliki can hang on long enough to welcome the arrival of an Obama administration, he might also be able to step into a unique strategic position: as a mediator between Washington and Tehran.

Relax, liberals. You’ve already won
By Michael Lind, Salon, June 10, 2008
Now that Hillary Clinton has conceded the Democratic nomination to Barack Obama, the primaries are over and the general election campaign for the White House has begun. On the Republican side, however, the general election campaign began months ago — and presumptive nominee John McCain has spent much of that time tacking toward the center. He praised multilateralism in a March 26 speech in Los Angeles and in general is trying to appear more like an Eisenhower Republican than a Reagan Republican. True, every four years all major-party presidential candidates race toward the center. But in the last decade, even during the seven-plus years of the Bush presidency, the center of American politics has moved considerably to the left. Whether Obama or McCain wins the White House, liberalism has already won the national debate about the future of the country.

For 40 years, the radical right tried to destroy the domestic and international order that American liberals created in the central decades of the 20th century. The people who are known today as “conservatives” are better described as “counterrevolutionaries.” The goal of Barry Goldwater and the intellectuals clustered around William F. Buckley Jr.’s National Review was not a slightly more conservative version of the New Deal or the U.N. system. They were reactionary radicals who dreamed of a counterrevolution. They didn’t just want to stop the clock. They wanted to turn it back.

Three great accomplishments defined midcentury American liberalism: liberal internationalism, middle-class entitlements like Social Security and Medicare, and liberal individualism in civil rights and the culture at large. For four decades, from 1968 to 2008, the counterrevolutionaries of the right waged war against the New Deal, liberal internationalism, and moral and cultural liberalism. They sought to abolish middle-class entitlements like Social Security and Medicare, to replace treaties and collective security with scorn for international law and U.S. global hegemony, and to reverse the trends toward individualism, secularism and pluralism in American culture.

These objects of contempt are now our best chance of feeding the world
By George Monbiot, The Guardian, June 10, 2008
I suggest you sit down before you read this. Robert Mugabe is right. At last week’s global food summit he was the only leader to speak of “the importance of land in agricultural production and food security”. Countries should follow Zimbabwe’s lead, he said, in democratising ownership.

Of course the old bastard has done just the opposite. He has evicted his opponents and given land to his supporters. He has failed to support the new settlements with credit or expertise, with the result that farming in Zimbabwe has collapsed. The country was in desperate need of land reform when Mugabe became president. It remains in desperate need of land reform today.

But he is right in theory. Though the rich world’s governments won’t hear it, the issue of whether or not the world will be fed is partly a function of ownership. This reflects an unexpected discovery. It was first made in 1962 by the Nobel economist Amartya Sen, and has since been confirmed by dozens of studies. There is an inverse relationship between the size of farms and the amount of crops they produce per hectare. The smaller they are, the greater the yield.

One man’s online journey through Bush’s alphabet soup
By Tom Englehardt, TomDispatch, June 10, 2008
TomDispatch is — as I often write inquisitive readers — the sideline that ate my life. Being in my late fifties and remarkably ignorant of the Internet world when it began, I brought some older print habits online with me. These included a liking for the well-made, well-edited essay, an aversion to the endless yak and insult that seemed to fill whole realms of cyberspace, and a willingness to go against, or beyond, every byte-sized truth of the online world where, it was believed, brevity was all and attention spans virtually nonexistent. TomDispatch pieces invariably ran long. They were, after all, meant to reframe a familiar, if shook-up, world that was being presented in a particularly limited way by the mainstream media.

Finding myself on a mad, unipolar imperial planet, I simply took the plunge into an alphabet soup of mayhem and chaos. Let me try, now, to offer you my shorthand version of the world according to TomDispatch.

In Iran, things can always get worse
By Justin Logan, The American Prospect, June 10, 2008
On May 28, Ali Larijani, former nuclear negotiator and close confidant of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamene’i, won the position of speaker of the Majlis, Iran’s parliament. Larijani is a member of the mainline conservative faction in Iran — which is different from the more radical faction led by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. (Iranian political observers have aptly borrowed the American term “neoconservative” to refer to the Ahmadinejad faction.)

Larijani’s rise was the first of a series of political changes in Iran. At about this time next year, Iran will hold a presidential election. Its outcome could depend, in part, on the outcome of the 2008 elections here in the United States. Given the serious disputes between the two countries and the prospect of another war in the Middle East, Americans — and American presidential candidates — should take a moment to think about how our election could influence Iran’s.

U.S. seeking 58 bases in Iraq, Shiite lawmakers say
By Leila Fadel, McClatchy, June 9, 2008
Iraqi lawmakers say the United States is demanding 58 bases as part of a proposed “status of forces” agreement that will allow U.S. troops to remain in the country indefinitely.

Leading members of the two ruling Shiite parties said in a series of interviews the Iraqi government rejected this proposal along with another U.S. demand that would have effectively handed over to the United States the power to determine if a hostile act from another country is aggression against Iraq. Lawmakers said they fear this power would drag Iraq into a war between the United States and Iran.

“The points that were put forth by the Americans were more abominable than the occupation,” said Jalal al Din al Saghir, a leading lawmaker from the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq. “We were occupied by order of the Security Council,” he said, referring to the 2004 Resolution mandating a U.S. military occupation in Iraq at the head of an international coalition. “But now we are being asked to sign for our own occupation. That is why we have absolutely refused all that we have seen so far.”

The Jim Webb story
By Elizabeth Drew, New York Review of Books, June 26, 2008
Jim Webb, the junior senator from Virginia, who defeated the incumbent Republican George Allen in 2006, is or has been: a best-selling author; a screenwriter (Rules of Engagement, and another in the works); an Emmy-winning documentary producer; the author of a large number of articles and book reviews; an Annapolis graduate; a boxer (he lost a legendary and controversial championship match at Annapolis against Oliver North[1] ); an autodidact who grew up a military man’s son and indifferent student but on his own became a passionate reader of history; a first lieutenant and Marine rifle platoon commander with Delta Company in Vietnam, where he won the Navy Cross for heroism (the second-highest award in the Navy and the Marines), the Silver Star, two Bronze Stars, and two Purple Hearts; a graduate of Georgetown Law School who then worked on the staff of the House Veterans Affairs Committee; a teacher of English literature at the Naval Academy; and an assistant secretary of defense and then secretary of the Navy during the Reagan administration. Webb resigned from that position after losing a long battle to block a reduction in the size of the Navy at a time when the Pentagon was under orders to cut its budget. In The Reagan Diaries, the former president wrote, “I don’t think Navy was sorry to see him go.”

Webb is a serious writer, not a politician who writes books on the side. His first book, Fields of Fire, published in 1978, when Webb was thirty-two, is a sweeping, unflinching novel about Vietnam featuring two of life’s losers who signed up for lack of anything else to do. It conveys with stark vividness, and also a touch of farce, the stench, the filth, the fear, and the bewildering unexpectedness of fighting an elusive enemy in a jungle. Fields of Fire has often been called the best book about Vietnam and likened to the war writing of Norman Mailer and Stephen Crane.

Mad skills
By Eve Fairbanks, The New Republic, June 25, 2008
In the spring of 2006, Jim Webb was not yet a rising superstar. In fact, he was late getting started and low on cash in his effort to win the Virginia Democratic primary, so an admiring Roanoke circuit clerk named Steve McGraw took pity on him and agreed to put him up when he came to southwestern Virginia to campaign. Webb quickly established himself as the model houseguest, washing everybody’s chili bowls and shooting pool with McGraw over a bottle of Maker’s Mark bourbon. But a worry gnawed at McGraw: The rumor about Webb was that behind the noble-war-hero facade lay a man who harbored a volatile, prideful, and possibly unmanageable anger. “I kept looking for it,” confides McGraw. “He started late, with no money. He told me that during the campaign he was sleeping about four hours a night for five months, and he said, ‘I just can’t turn my brain off.’ … I kept saying, ‘Sooner or later, something’s gonna happen.'”

McGraw isn’t the only person who’s kept vigil waiting for Jim Webb to blow. Webb the hair-triggered hothead has become something of a legend here in Washington. Reporters pepper their Webb stories with colorful adjectives like “irascible” and “enraged,” and, throughout town, he’s often whispered of as though he were a mysterious specimen from a foreign and bellicose tribe. As evidence of Webb’s hot streak, Washington social anthropologists point out that he switched party loyalties; that he’s fond of hyperbole (he once called the Naval Academy a “horny woman’s dream”); that he angrily quit his post as Reagan’s Navy secretary; that he snapped at President Bush for asking after his soldier son Jimmy at a November 2006 White House party; and that his legislative aide tried to bring his loaded gun into the Capitol last spring, prompting Webb to explain cryptically that it was important “for a lot of people in the situation that I am in to be able to defend myself and my family. ” (What “situation”? Does he shoot his political enemies?)

The interesting thing about the angry-Webb mythology, though, is that it fascinates just as much as it frightens. Fellow Democratic Senator Claire McCaskill adoringly described Webb as a “street brawler,” capturing the way some Democrats–call them the Jim Webb Orientalists–romanticize Webb’s aggressive, exotically redneck roots and, by extension, his capacity to hormonally invigorate a party sick of its effete, wine-sipping image. Why promote aristocratic Democrats like Al Gore or John Kerry when there’s Webb, who hangs out not with actresses or New York bankers but with the likes of his friend “Mac” McGarvey, a rough-hewn, ex-Marine honky-tonk manager with a nipple ring and only one arm?

Dialogue with dictators? (Video)
NOW, PBS, June 6, 2008
NOW’s David Brancaccio talks with the former head of U.S. Central Command, Admiral William J. Fallon, who resigned in March after a year of duty. Fallon was considered to be at odds with the Bush Administration’s Middle East policy toward Iran. The former commander of U.S. military forces in the Middle East and Central Asia, Fallon was portrayed in Esquire magazine as the man in the military preventing the administration from going to war with Iran. Fallon thought his profile was twisted into a personal attack on President Bush. Esquire stood by the story.

‘Bush damaged America’s image around the world’
Der Spiegel, June 9, 2008
German politicians from both the ruling coalition and the opposition are taking aim at outgoing US President George W. Bush ahead of his week-long farewell trip to Europe. The Iraq war, Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib have damaged America’s reputation, they say.

Visits by US presidents to Germany are usually surrounded by an air of history. But the program for George W. Bush’s visit on Tuesday and Wednesday reads as if he’s already left office. There won’t be any grand speeches or symbolic gestures at historic sites.

Instead he’s being put up in an official residence in Brandenburg, about 70 kilometers north of the German capital. It’s a clear sign that Bush is the lame duck of US politics in the remaining months of his deeply controversial eight-year presidency.

McClellan to testify before judiciary committee
By Sam Stein, Huffington Post, June 9, 2008
Former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan, whose scathing memoir about his time in the Bush administration sent waves through Washington D.C., has agreed to testify before the House Judiciary Committee, a senior committee official told The Huffington Post.

McClellan’s book “What Happened” detailed the “propaganda campaign” that led up to the Iraq war. His hearing is expected to focus heavily on the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame, an episode that McClellan has said was driven by political motivations from within the Oval Office. But the committee could press the former press secretary on other matters within its jurisdiction, including the possible authorization of torture by administration officials (though it remains to be seen how much knowledge McClellan has of that topic).

One historic night, two Americas
By Frank Rich, New York Times, June 8, 2008
When Barack Obama achieved his historic victory on Tuesday night, the battle was joined between two Americas. Not John Edwards’s two Americas, divided between rich and poor. Not the Americas split by race, gender, party or ideology. What looms instead is an epic showdown between two wildly different visions of the country, from the ground up.

On one side stands Mr. Obama’s resolutely cheerful embrace of the future. His vision is inseparable from his identity, both as a rookie with a slim Washington résumé and as a black American whose triumph was regarded as improbable by voters of all races only months ago. On the other is John McCain’s promise of a wise warrior’s vigilant conservation of the past. His vision, too, is inseparable from his identity — as a government lifer who has spent his entire career in service, whether in the Navy or Washington.

Given the dividing line separating the two Americas of 2008, a ticket uniting Mr. McCain and Hillary Clinton might actually be a better fit than the Obama-Clinton “dream ticket,” despite their differences on the issues. Never was this more evident than Tuesday night, when Mrs. Clinton and Mr. McCain both completely misread a one-of-a-kind historical moment as they tried to cling to the prerogatives of the 20th century’s old guard.

Obama maps a nationwide push in GOP strongholds
By Adam Nagourney and Jeff Zeleny, New York Times, June 8, 2008
Senator Barack Obama’s general election plan calls for broadening the electoral map by challenging Senator John McCain in typically Republican states — from North Carolina to Missouri to Montana — as Mr. Obama seeks to take advantage of voter turnout operations built in nearly 50 states in the long Democratic nomination battle, aides said.

On Monday, Mr. Obama will travel to North Carolina — a state that has not voted for a Democratic presidential candidate in 32 years — to start a two-week tour of speeches, town hall forums and other appearances intended to highlight differences with Mr. McCain on the economy. From there, he heads to Missouri, which last voted for a Democrat in 1996. His first campaign swing after securing the Democratic presidential nomination last week was to Virginia, which last voted Democratic in 1964.

With Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton now having formally bowed out of the race and thrown her backing to him, Mr. Obama wants to define the faltering economy as the paramount issue facing the country, a task probably made easier by ever-rising gasoline prices and the sharp rise in unemployment the government reported on Friday. Mr. McCain, by contrast, has been emphasizing national security more than any other issue and has made clear that he would like to fight the election primarily on that ground.

Bush’s last-ditch bid to make Iraq a protectorate isn’t fooling anyone
Editorial, Daily Star, June 9, 2008
George W. Bush’s efforts to salvage something from the defining project of his presidency, the cynical and disastrous war in Iraq, say much about his motivations in having started it. The lies about weapons of mass destruction have long since been exposed, as have those about the White House wanting “democracy” in the Arab world. Even before the invasion was launched in defiance of the United Nations Security Council in 2003, it was widely argued that what the Bush administration really wanted was fuller access to cheap oil and a new base from which to dominate the Middle East. Now that Washington is in the process of negotiating a “Status Of Forces Agreement” with Baghdad to regulate the US military presence in Iraq, it is becoming clearer than ever that these last two goals have topped the agenda all along and that they might be the only “achievements” (in the imperial sense) still within America’s grasp.

The US must face up to the reality that it has very few friends in Iraq
By Tony Karon, The National, June 8, 2008
The conclusion of Iraq’s story is, of course, unwritten, but now that the US has declared that it’s time to write the next chapter – the one that determines the future of the American troop presence there – Washington is finding that it’s own ideas are substantially at odds with those of even key Iraqi allies.

Efforts to negotiate an agreement on the future of US troops in Iraq once the UN mandate for their presence expires at the end of 2008 appear to be floundering, as Iraqi government sources indicate that they see the US proposals as infringing on Iraqi sovereignty.

Although the government of Nouri al-Maliki relies on the US military for its own security, the overwhelming majority of Iraqis support demands that the Americans set a withdrawal date. Maliki finds himself under pressure from quarters as diverse as the radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr and the moderate Shiite eminence Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, some key Sunni political factions and, indeed, a majority of Iraqi parliamentarians – and, of course, Iran, which has made no secret of its objection to a long-term US presence. Iraqi lawmakers have made clear in a letter to their US counterparts that no deal will pass that does not contain a clear signal of intent to depart Iraq.

Iraq’s Grand Ayatollah warns from uprising against US security pact
DPA, June 8, 2008
Iraq’s senior Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Mohamed al-Modaresy, warned on Sunday that the US-Iraq security pact might cause an uprising in Iraq. Al-Modaresy described the long-term treaty with the US as a “sword directed over the Iraqis necks,” during a meeting with reporters.

“The security pact that should be signed between Iraq and the US requires a deep and a comprehensive vision to the general situation in Iraq,” al-Modaresy told reporters.

He added: “It will deem to failure if kept as it is.”

Where is Raed now?
By Jonathan Schwarz, Mother Jones, May/June, 2008
In 1998, 20-year-old Raed Jarrar watched from the roof of his family’s home in Baghdad as American Tomahawk cruise missiles struck government buildings close by, blowing out the windows and sending him scrambling for cover. Five years later, during Operation Iraqi Freedom, coalition planes targeted the same buildings, as well as the nearby airport and Saddam Hussein’s palace, killing and wounding dozens of people from Jarrar’s middle-class neighborhood.

This year, Jarrar quietly celebrated his 30th birthday outside Pasadena at a retreat he was attending for his job as a consultant for the American Friends Service Committee. He now lives in Washington, D.C., a short metro ride away from the White House, the Pentagon, and the various think tanks where his country’s future has been decided for much of his life. Yet Jarrar’s become something the war’s planners did not anticipate: an Iraqi who’s thwarted their efforts by using the tools of American democracy. Through a peculiar roll of history’s dice, the young exile has helped throw a monkey wrench in the Bush administration’s attempts to lay the groundwork for a permanent American presence in Iraq. “I’m just another small example of how Iraqis would rather end the occupation through talking to U.S. legislators and the public,” Jarrar explains.

What it really means when America goes to war
By Chris Hedges, TomDispatch, June 3, 2008
Troops, when they battle insurgent forces, as in Iraq, or Gaza or Vietnam, are placed in “atrocity producing situations.” Being surrounded by a hostile population makes simple acts, such as going to a store to buy a can of Coke, dangerous. The fear and stress push troops to view everyone around them as the enemy. The hostility is compounded when the enemy, as in Iraq, is elusive, shadowy and hard to find. The rage soldiers feel after a roadside bomb explodes, killing or maiming their comrades, is one that is easily directed, over time, to innocent civilians who are seen to support the insurgents.

Civilians and combatants, in the eyes of the beleaguered troops, merge into one entity. These civilians, who rarely interact with soldiers or Marines, are to most of the occupation troops in Iraq nameless, faceless, and easily turned into abstractions of hate. They are dismissed as less than human. It is a short psychological leap, but a massive moral leap. It is a leap from killing — the shooting of someone who has the capacity to do you harm — to murder — the deadly assault against someone who cannot harm you.

The homegrown young radicals of next-gen jihad
By Marc Sageman, Washington Post, June 8, 2008
We are fighting the wrong foe. Over the past six years, the nature of the international Islamist terrorist threat to the West has changed dramatically, but Western governments are still fighting the last war — set up to fight an old al-Qaeda that is now largely contained. Unless we understand this sea change, we will not be able to ward off the new menace.

The version of al-Qaeda that Osama bin Laden founded is a fading force. After a week in which five detainees who allegedly planned the Sept. 11, 2001, atrocities were arraigned before a U.S. military tribunal at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, it’s worth remembering that the terrorists behind 9/11 were mostly young, well-educated middle-class expatriates from Muslim countries who had become radicalized abroad, especially in the West. Such key 9/11 plotters as Mohamed Atta, Ramzi Binalshibh, Ziad Jarrah and Marwan al-Shehhi met and became radicalized as students in Hamburg, then went to Afghanistan looking for al-Qaeda. But over the past six years, most of the professional terrorists who fit this profile have been eliminated during the U.S.-led manhunt for “high-value targets.” The few that remain are huddled in the Afghan-Pakistani border area, struggling to extend their reach beyond Pakistan.

Losing Latin America
By Greg Grandin, TomDispatch, June , 2008
Google “neglect,” “Washington,” and “Latin America,” and you will be led to thousands of hand-wringing calls from politicians and pundits for Washington to “pay more attention” to the region. True, Richard Nixon once said that “people don’t give one shit” about the place. And his National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger quipped that Latin America is a “dagger pointed at the heart of Antarctica.” But Kissinger also made that same joke about Chile, Argentina, and New Zealand — and, of the three countries, only the latter didn’t suffer widespread political murder as a result of his policies, a high price to pay for such a reportedly inconsequential place.

Latin America, in fact, has been indispensable in the evolution of U.S. diplomacy. The region is often referred to as America’s “backyard,” but a better metaphor might be Washington’s “strategic reserve,” the place where ascendant foreign-policy coalitions regroup and redraw the outlines of U.S. power, following moments of global crisis.

Israel threatens Iran
By Paul Woodward, The National, June 8, 2008
“Israel ‘will attack’ Iran if it continues to develop nuclear weapons, one of prime minister Ehud Olmert’s deputies warned. Shaul Mofaz, a former defence minister and a contender to replace the scandal-battered Olmert, said military action would be ‘unavoidable’ if Tehran proved able to acquire the technology to manufacture atomic bombs,” The Guardian reported.

“Mofaz is Israel’s transport minister, but he is also a former chief of staff, privy to secret defence planning as a member of the security cabinet and leads regular strategic talks with the US. He implied that any attack on Iran would be co-ordinated with Washington. ‘If Iran continues with its programme for developing nuclear weapons, we will attack it,’ he told the Hebrew daily Yediot Aharonot. ‘The UN sanctions are ineffective.'”

Israelis round on Mofaz’s “political” Iran threat
Reuters, June 8, 2008
Israeli defense officials and political pundits rounded on Deputy Prime Minister Shaul Mofaz on Sunday after he threatened attacks against Iran, accusing him of exploiting war jitters to advance his personal ambitions.

Mofaz, a former armed forces chief and likely challenger to the Prime Minister Ehud Olmert in their Kadima party, said in a newspaper interview last week that Israeli strikes on Iran looked “unavoidable” given progress in its nuclear plans.

The remarks helped drive up oil prices by nearly 9 percent to a record $139 a barrel on Friday and drew a circumspect response from Washington, which has championed U.N. sanctions against Iran and only hinted force could also be a last resort.

Clarke on Iraq war architects: ‘We shouldn’t let these people back into polite society’
Think Progress, June 6, 2008
Noting that “prominent Democrats” had ruled out impeachment, MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann asked former counterterrorism adviser Richard Clarke on his show last night, what “remedy” there could be for the lies and misinformation highlighted in the new Senate Intelligence Committee reports on the Bush administration’s misuse of pre-war Iraq intelligence.

“Someone should have to pay in some way for the decisions that they made to mislead the American people,” said Clarke. He suggested that “some sort of truth and reconciliation commission” might be appropriate because, he said, we can’t “let these people back into polite society”

The wild card
Review of Muqtada: Muqtada Al-Sadr, the Shia Revival, and the Struggle for Iraq, by Patrick Cockburn, reviewer Dexter Filkins, The New Republic, June 11, 2008
Muqtada al-Sadr stands for everything in Iraq that we do not understand. The exiles we imported to run the country following Saddam’s fall are suave and well-dressed; Muqtada is glowering and elusive. The exiles parade before the cameras in the Green Zone; Muqtada stays in the streets, in the shadows, surfacing occasionally to give a wild sermon about the return of the hidden twelfth imam. The Americans proclaim Muqtada irrelevant; his face adorns the walls of every teashop in Shiite Iraq. The Americans attack; Muqtada disappears. The Americans offer a deal, and Muqtada responds: only after you leave.

Who is Muqtada al-Sadr? What does he want? And how many divisions does he have? That we know so little so late about someone so central to the fate of Iraq is an indictment of anyone associated with the American endeavor there. But it is also a measure of Iraq itself: of its complexity, its mutability, its true nature as an always-spinning kaleidoscope of alliances, deals, and double- crosses. Muqtada al-Sadr is not merely a mirror of our ignorance, he is also a window onto the unforgiving land where we have seen so many of our fortunes disappear.

Patrick Cockburn has tried to get at the mystery of Muqtada al-Sadr. I think he misses in a few places, but it is hard to imagine anyone, I mean any other Westerner, getting a clearer take on this slippery and moody character.

DC Awakening
By Marc Lynch, Abu Aardvark, June 5, 2008
I spent this morning in a very small meeting with a visiting delegation of about a dozen tribal leaders from Iraq, including a number of well-known leaders of the Awakening movement. It was a fascinating meeting, in many ways, if somewhat frustrating. My long-standing skepticism about the Awakenings is no secret. Nor is my more recent advocacy that at this point they need to get integrated into the Iraqi military. So I was quite keen to hear what they had to say on this trip to Washington DC – their second, from what I was told, including a visit with President Bush – and to probe their current thinking.

Afghanistan: Teen describes madrasah effort to make him a suicide bomber
RFE/RL, June 6, 2008
Ever since he was caught three months ago in Afghanistan’s Khost Province trying to carry out a suicide attack, 14-year-old Shakirullah has been pondering how he went from childhood in Pakistan to imprisonment in Kabul as an international terrorist.

Just one year ago, Shakirullah was living with his family in his native tribal region of South Waziristan, in Pakistan. The world Shakirullah knew in his village of Jandul revolved around his father, Noor Ali Khan, his mother, and three older brothers.

But Shakirullah’s childhood in the rugged mountain region near the Afghan border came to a dramatic end last fall when his family sent him to a religious boarding school — the nearby Salib madrasah in South Waziristan — to receive instruction from conservative Islamist clerics.

The boy says teachers had taught him the Koran for half a year, then gave him an explosives-packed suicide vest and took him across the border into Afghanistan.

To cope with oil shock, emulate Japan
By Dilip Hiro, Yales Global, June 2, 2008
With the price of oil rocketing to the unprecedented level of $130 a barrel, there is a talk of another oil shock. Unfortunately, unlike past instances, this one is unlikely to subside, and may indeed keep intensifying. The only way out is for Western nations, the gluttonous users of petroleum, to cut their consumption and emulate Japan in its consistent drive for energy efficiency and alternate sources.

US world’s leading jailer – rights watchdog
News.com.au, June 7, 2008
The US has 2.3 million people behind bars, more than any other country in the world and more than ever before in its history, Human Rights Watch says.

The number represented an incarceration rate of 762 per 100,000 residents, compared to 152 per 100,000 in Britain, 108 in Canada, and 91 in France, HRW said in a statement commenting on Justice Department figures released overnight.

“The new incarceration figures confirm the United States as the world’s leading jailer,” said David Fahti, HRW’s US program director.

An Israel-Syria deal is strategically vital for both
By Shlomo Ben-Ami, Daily Star, June 6, 2008
The resumption of peace talks between Israel and Syria after eight years of saber-rattling is not a diversion from the political troubles of Israel’s lame-duck prime minister. Nor are the talks a Syrian ploy to avoid facing a Lebanese-international tribunal on the assassination of Lebanon’s former prime minister, Rafik Hariri. An Israeli-Syrian peace deal is strategically vital for both sides, and both sides know it.

The two major formative experiences of Syria’s Baath regime have been Hafez Assad’s loss of the Golan Heights in the 1967 war with Israel, and the loss of Lebanon by his son, Bashar, who was forced to withdraw his army under irresistible American-led international pressure. Recovering the Golan and protecting Syria’s vital interests in Lebanon are not only major strategic concerns for Syria’s president; they are also crucial to the regime’s drive for national legitimacy, and to Assad’s assertion of his own leadership.

Martyrs in the making at Guantanamo
By Tim Rutten, Los Angeles Times, June 7, 2008
Thursday’s arraignment before a military tribunal of five Al Qaeda members accused of planning and assisting the 9/11 terrorist atrocities seemed custom-made to assist the loathsome defendants in achieving exactly what they desire — an aura of martyrdom.

The prisoners, including the plot’s apparent mastermind, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, were called to answer before a military tribunal at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, on murder, conspiracy and terrorism charges arising from the deaths of 2,973 people at New York’s World Trade Center, at the Pentagon and in the Pennsylvania field where one of the airliners hijacked that day crashed.

It’s a sad but salutary thing to recall that number and that terrible day. The consolations of legal justice never can be complete, but they’re all we as a society have to offer the injured and the grieving. That’s why, when it comes to the handling of these cases, the Bush administration’s willful overreaching, contempt for fundamental American values and defiance of basic American notions of due process have set the stage for travesty and further tragedy.

Questions remain on Med Union a month before launch
Reuters, June 6, 2008
Mediterranean countries due to launch a regional union next month have yet to agree an overall vision for the project and questions remain over Israel’s role, Algeria’s foreign minister said.

France proposed a Union for the Mediterranean last year to boost ties with the European Union’s southern neighbours and improve cooperation on trade, security and migration. The project is due to be unveiled in Paris on July 13.

Arab states are worried that joining with Israel in the union would imply a normalisation of ties with the Jewish state.

The unraveling
By Peter Bergen and Paul Cruickshank, New Republic, June 11, 2008

[The leader of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, Noman] Benotman surprised his hosts [in Kandahar in the summer of 2000 at a conference of jihadists from around the Arab world] with a bleak assessment of their prospects. “I told them that the jihadist movement had failed. That we had gone from one disaster to another, like in Algeria, because we had not mobilized the people,” recalls Benotman, referring to the Algerian civil war launched by jihadists in the ’90s that left more than 100,000 dead and destroyed whatever local support the militants had once enjoyed. Benotman also told bin Laden that the Al Qaeda leader’s decision to target the United States would only sabotage attempts by groups like Benotman’s to overthrow the secular dictatorships in the Arab world. “We made a clear-cut request for him to stop his campaign against the United States because it was going to lead to nowhere,” Benotman recalls, “but they laughed when I told them that America would attack the whole region if they launched another attack against it.”

Benotman says that bin Laden tried to placate him with a promise: “I have one more operation, and after that I will quit”–an apparent reference to September 11. “I can’t call this one back because that would demoralize the whole organization,” Benotman remembers bin Laden saying.

After the attacks, Benotman, now living in London, resigned from the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, realizing that the United States, in its war on terrorism, would differentiate little between Al Qaeda and his organization.

Benotman, however, did more than just retire. In January 2007, under a veil of secrecy, he flew to Tripoli in a private jet chartered by the Libyan government to try to persuade the imprisoned senior leadership of his former group to enter into peace negotiations with the regime. He was successful. This May, Benotman told us that the two parties could be as little as three months away from an agreement that would see the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group formally end its operations in Libya and denounce Al Qaeda’s global jihad. At that point, the group would also publicly refute recent claims by Al Qaeda that the two organizations had joined forces.

This past November, Benotman went public with his own criticism of Al Qaeda in an open letter to Zawahiri, absorbed and well-received, he says, by the jihadist leaders in Tripoli. In the letter, Benotman recalled his Kandahar warnings and called on Al Qaeda to end all operations in Arab countries and in the West. The citizens of Western countries were blameless and should not be the target of terrorist attacks, argued Benotman, his refined English accent, smart suit, trimmed beard, and easygoing demeanor making it hard to imagine that he was once on the front lines in Afghanistan.

Although Benotman’s public rebuke of Al Qaeda went unnoticed in the United States, it received wide attention in the Arabic press. In repudiating Al Qaeda, Benotman was adding his voice to a rising tide of anger in the Islamic world toward Al Qaeda and its affiliates, whose victims since September 11 have mostly been fellow Muslims. Significantly, he was also joining a larger group of religious scholars, former fighters, and militants who had once had great influence over Al Qaeda’s leaders, and who–alarmed by the targeting of civilians in the West, the senseless killings in Muslim countries, and Al Qaeda’s barbaric tactics in Iraq–have turned against the organization, many just in the past year.

Can Qatar do it again?
By Khaled Amayreh, Al-Ahram Weekly, June 5, 2008
Having succeeded in getting erstwhile warring Lebanese factions to get their act together, Qatar is now exploring the prospects of mediating between Fatah and Hamas in the hope of restoring Palestinian national unity.

However, Qatari Emir Sheikh Hamed Bin Khalifa Al-Thani and his influential premier and foreign minister, Sheikh Hamad Bin Jasem, seem to be treading cautiously (some say too cautiously) in the more complicated “Palestinian minefield”.

According to reliable Palestinian sources, Qatar has voiced its “initial willingness” to help “the Palestinian brothers” overcome their differences and re-establish national unity. The same sources were careful, however, to add that Qatari officials — especially Bin Jasem — wouldn’t be in a position to help the Palestinians if they were not willing to help themselves.

U.S. calls a straw poll in Iraq: It may not like the result
By Tony Karon, Rootless Cosmopolitan, June 5, 2008
In the TV gameshow bubble that substitutes for foreign policy discussion on the U.S. presidential campaign trial, there’s a lot of talk these days about how the U.S. is “winning” in Iraq. The evidence to back this claim is a comparative lull in the death rate in recent months, and the fact that Iraqi government forces are taking more casualties than the Americans. Those proclaiming “victory,” of course, are invariably the same crowd that enthusiastically backed the invasion of Iraq in the first place, and their desire for vindication for their part in authoring what all serious analysts agree has been the most catastrophic strategic blunder in America’s history is all too understandable. (Less understandable is the echo of this position by the Washington Post, which claims the U.S. and the Iraq government are “winning the war” and gaining full control of the country from al-Qaeda and rival militias.)

But the suggestion that a shift or fall in the pattern of violence indicates that the U.S. is “winning” in Iraq betrays the same lack of understanding of dynamics in that country as was so evident in the original decision to invade and occupy Iraq.

Democrats, put down your swords
By Joe Conason, Salon, June 6, 2008
For Democrats of all persuasions, the conclusion of the primaries should encourage reflection rather than recrimination. Now is the time to listen to the calm counsel that cannot be heard amid the roar of combat, and to think.

Hillary Clinton needs to think about how best to preserve the gains of her campaign without spoiling it all. Barack Obama must consider how best to unite his party while making choices, including a running mate, true to his own instincts and style. Meanwhile their supporters can take deep breaths and try to imagine how they will feel on Nov. 5 if John McCain has won the presidency.

Obama’s Clinton problem surfaces — in GOP ads
By Steven Thomma, McClatchy, June 4, 2008
Months of bare-knuckled campaign fights, pitched rhetoric and debate jousting produced a treasure chest of sound bites and videos of Clinton ripping Obama as inexperienced, elitist or simply wrong on various issues.

Now that the Democratic primaries are over and Obama has clinched his party’s nomination, the Republicans are ready to pounce.

The Republican National Committee on Wednesday rolled out new ads quoting Clinton criticizing Obama, the first of what likely will be many such ads.

McCain bumbles the delivery
By Jonathan Martin, Politico, June 6, 2008
As Democrats buzzed this week about their new de facto nominee, his historic candidacy and the unlikely political demise of Hillary Rodham Clinton, Republican circles were humming with another topic.

The topic: Is there a way John McCain can win the presidency without giving another speech?

That’s overstated, of course, but the concern about McCain’s wooden and stumbling address before a few hundred supporters here Tuesday night – the same evening as Barack Obama’s soaring acceptance address before thousands of screaming fans – has sent something of a shudder through the party and left GOP operatives shaking their heads in dismay.

Adviser says McCain backs Bush wiretaps
By Charles Savage, New York Times, June 6, 2008
A top adviser to Senator John McCain says Mr. McCain believes that President Bush’s program of wiretapping without warrants was lawful, a position that appears to bring him into closer alignment with the sweeping theories of executive authority pushed by the Bush administration legal team.

In a letter posted online by National Review this week, the adviser, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, said Mr. McCain believed that the Constitution gave Mr. Bush the power to authorize the National Security Agency to monitor Americans’ international phone calls and e-mail without warrants, despite a 1978 federal statute that required court oversight of surveillance.

Mr. McCain believes that “neither the administration nor the telecoms need apologize for actions that most people, except for the A.C.L.U. and trial lawyers, understand were constitutional and appropriate in the wake of the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001,” Mr. Holtz-Eakin wrote.

The great divide
By Nir Rosen, The National, June 5, 2008
Five years after a war allegedly launched to liberate Iraq’s Shiite majority, American forces have been bombing Shiite neighbourhoods in Basra and Baghdad while their snipers and tanks remain on the ground in places like Sadr City.

Iraq seems to have emerged from the worst phase of its civil war, but the victorious Shiite factions have turned their arms on one another in a fight over the spoils, battling for political power in advance of the upcoming provincial elections.

But as the Americans attempt to secure an agreement with the government of Nouri al Maliki to legalise the long-term presence of troops in Iraq, Muqtada al Sadr and his followers remain a formidable obstacle. Whether or not Sadr has been weakened by the clashes in Basra and Sadr City, marginalising the Sadrists will be almost impossible, for they remain the only genuine mass movement in Iraq, with roots that long predate the fall of Saddam.

America’s medicated army
By Mark Thompson, Time, June 5, 2008
Seven months after Sergeant Christopher LeJeune started scouting Baghdad’s dangerous roads — acting as bait to lure insurgents into the open so his Army unit could kill them — he found himself growing increasingly despondent. “We’d been doing some heavy missions, and things were starting to bother me,” LeJeune says. His unit had been protecting Iraqi police stations targeted by rocket-propelled grenades, hunting down mortars hidden in dark Baghdad basements and cleaning up its own messes. He recalls the order his unit got after a nighttime firefight to roll back out and collect the enemy dead. When LeJeune and his buddies arrived, they discovered that some of the bodies were still alive. “You don’t always know who the bad guys are,” he says. “When you search someone’s house, you have it built up in your mind that these guys are terrorists, but when you go in, there’s little bitty tiny shoes and toys on the floor — things like that started affecting me a lot more than I thought they would.”

Indicted Saudi gets $80 million US contract
By Gretchen Peters, ABC News, June 4, 2008
The US military has awarded an $80 million contract to a prominent Saudi financier who has been indicted by the US Justice Department. The contract to supply jet fuel to American bases in Afghanistan was awarded to the Attock Refinery Ltd, a Pakistani-based refinery owned by Gaith Pharaon. Pharaon is wanted in connection with his alleged role at the failed Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), and the CenTrust savings and loan scandal, which cost US tax payers $1.7 billion.

The Saudi businessman was also named in a 2002 French parliamentary report as having links to informal money transfer networks called hawala, known to be used by traders and terrorists, including Al Qaeda.

Interestingly, Pharaon was also an investor in President George W. Bush’s first business venture, Arbusto Energy.

US issues threat to Iraq’s $50bn foreign reserves in military deal
By Patrick Cockburn, The Independent, June 6 , 2008
The US is holding hostage some $50bn (£25bn) of Iraq’s money in the Federal Reserve Bank of New York to pressure the Iraqi government into signing an agreement seen by many Iraqis as prolonging the US occupation indefinitely, according to information leaked to The Independent.

US negotiators are using the existence of $20bn in outstanding court judgments against Iraq in the US, to pressure their Iraqi counterparts into accepting the terms of the military deal, details of which were reported for the first time in this newspaper yesterday.

Iraq’s foreign reserves are currently protected by a presidential order giving them immunity from judicial attachment but the US side in the talks has suggested that if the UN mandate, under which the money is held, lapses and is not replaced by the new agreement, then Iraq’s funds would lose this immunity. The cost to Iraq of this happening would be the immediate loss of $20bn. The US is able to threaten Iraq with the loss of 40 per cent of its foreign exchange reserves because Iraq’s independence is still limited by the legacy of UN sanctions and restrictions imposed on Iraq since Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in the 1990s. This means that Iraq is still considered a threat to international security and stability under Chapter Seven of the UN charter. The US negotiators say the price of Iraq escaping Chapter Seven is to sign up to a new “strategic alliance” with the United States.

Iran makes the sciences a part of its revolution
By Thomas Erdbrink, Washington Post, June 6, 2008
Iran’s determination to develop what it says is a nuclear energy program is part of a broader effort to promote technological self-sufficiency and to see Iran recognized as one of the world’s most advanced nations. The country’s leaders, who three decades ago wrested the government away from a ruler they saw as overly dependent on the West, invest heavily in scientific and industrial achievement, but critics say government backing is sometimes erratic, leaving Iran’s technological promise unfulfilled.

Still, Iranian scientists claim breakthroughs in nanotechnology, biological researchers are pushing the boundaries of stem cell research and the country’s car industry produces more cars than anywhere else in the region.

“Iran wants to join the group of countries that want to know about the biggest things, like space,” Richter said to the students during his speech at Sharif University, which draws many of the country’s best students. Every year, 1.5 million young Iranians take a national university entrance exam, or “concours.” Of the 500,000 who pass and are entitled to free higher education, only the top 800 can attend Sharif, considered Iran’s MIT.

The ignorant American voter
Bret Schulte interviews Rick Shenkman, US News and World Report, June 3, 2008

The long Iraq war. The bungled Hurricane Katrina response. The credit crunch. A quick look at the newspapers will give many voters reason to doubt the wisdom of America’s political leaders. Unfortunately, Americans are doing little to educate themselves about their leaders and their policies, says bestselling author and George Mason University historian Rick Shenkman in his new book Just How Stupid Are We? Facing the Truth About the American Voter. Shenkman cites some damning facts to make his case that Americans are ill-prepared to guide the world’s most powerful democracy. Only 2 of 5 voters can name the three branches of the federal government. And 49 percent of Americans think the president has the authority to suspend the Constitution. But, for Shenkman, the severity of the problem snapped into focus after Sept. 11, 2001, when polls showed that a large number of Americans knew little about the attacks and the Iraq war that followed. He blames some of the public’s misunderstanding on the White House message machine, but he argues that Americans did little to seek the truth. “As became irrefutably clear in scientific polls undertaken after 9/11…millions of Americans simply cannot fathom the twists and turns that complicated debates take,” Shenkman writes. Shenkman spoke to U.S. News about the competence of the American voter.

Also, see the Just How Stupid Are We? blog.

Is Barack Obama too naive to be president?
By Fred Kaplan, Slate, June 4, 2008
On Tuesday, hours before Obama clinched the Democratic nomination, McCain, signaling the start of the general election, told a crowd in New Orleans, “Americans ought to be concerned about the judgment of a presidential candidate who says he’s ready to talk, in person and without conditions, with tyrants from Havana to Pyongyang.”

And so it’s worth taking a look at what Obama actually said during that July 23 debate. Here is his full reply:

I would [be willing to meet with those leaders], and the reason is this: The notion that somehow not talking to countries is punishment to them—which has been the guiding diplomatic principle of this administration—is ridiculous. … [Ronald Reagan and John Kennedy talked with Soviet leaders because] they understood that we may not trust them, and they may pose an extraordinary threat to us, but we have the obligation to find areas where we can potentially move forward.

Obama added, referring to the countries that the questioner listed, “It is a disgrace that we have not spoken with them.” For instance, he said, we need to talk with Iran and Syria, if only about Iraq, “because if Iraq collapses, they’re going to have responsibilities.”

I would submit there is nothing wrong with any of this. Obama might have done well to focus more intently, at the time, on the phrase “without preconditions”—to parse its meaning and to distinguish the lack of preconditions from the lack of preparations—but, taken in full, and in the context of the question, his reply was the acme of common sense.

Obama already mired on Middle East road
By Kaveh L Afrasiabi, Asia Times, June 6, 2008
Senator Barack Obama has finally clinched the Democratic party’s nomination for the United States presidency, and already the intense pressures on him to tame broad calls for “change” in the US’s domestic and external policies have chewed away a good deal of his initial sound and fury, already making him look like a business-as-usual candidate.

Obama walks fine line at major pro-Israel meet
By Khody Akhavi, IPS, June 4, 2008
Obama’s speech in many ways marked a shift in the usual approach, as it seemed the Illinois senator was encouraging the AIPAC faithful to support his positions, rather than submitting to what the group’s policy agenda otherwise suggested.

“His speech was remarkably different in tone and substance from any other speaker that you heard at the conference,” said Trita Parsi, who heads the National Iranian American Council. “Instead of staying away from the issue, he made a strong case, he didn’t back down from the fact that diplomacy would not only be valuable to U.S. interests, but is also good for Israel’s security.”

Obama and Dean team up to recast the political map
By Sam Stein, Huffington Post, June 5, 2008
Sixteen months after he launched his campaign for the White House, Sen. Barack Obama may, just now, be entering his campaign’s most perilous stage. Facing a rift of sorts within the Democratic Party and concerns over the scope of his political base, the Illinois Democrat is pursuing an unconventional path to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave: unlike those before him, he has pledged to redraw the electoral map by putting new, traditionally Republican states in play.

Secret plan to keep Iraq under US control
By Patrick Cockburn, The Independent, June 5, 2008
A secret deal being negotiated in Baghdad would perpetuate the American military occupation of Iraq indefinitely, regardless of the outcome of the US presidential election in November.

The terms of the impending deal, details of which have been leaked to The Independent, are likely to have an explosive political effect in Iraq. Iraqi officials fear that the accord, under which US troops would occupy permanent bases, conduct military operations, arrest Iraqis and enjoy immunity from Iraqi law, will destabilise Iraq’s position in the Middle East and lay the basis for unending conflict in their country.

But the accord also threatens to provoke a political crisis in the US. President Bush wants to push it through by the end of next month so he can declare a military victory and claim his 2003 invasion has been vindicated. But by perpetuating the US presence in Iraq, the long-term settlement would undercut pledges by the Democratic presidential nominee, Barack Obama, to withdraw US troops if he is elected president in November.

This raises huge questions over our independence
By Ali Allawi, The Independent, June 5, 2008
In 1930 the Anglo-Iraqi treaty was signed as a prelude to Iraq gaining full independence. Britain had occupied Iraq after defeating the Turks in the First World War, and was granted a mandate over the country. The treaty gave Britain military and economic privileges in exchange for Britain’s promise to end its mandate. The treaty was ratified by a docile Iraqi parliament, but was bitterly resented by nationalists. Iraq’s dependency on Britain poisoned Iraqi politics for the next quarter of a century. Riots, civil disturbances, uprisings and coups were all a feature of Iraq’s political landscape, prompted in no small measure by the bitter disputations over the treaty with Britain.

Iraq is now faced with a reprise of that treaty, but this time with the US, rather than Britain, as the dominant foreign partner. The US is pushing for the enactment of a “strategic alliance” with Iraq, partly as a precondition for supporting Iraq’s removal from its sanctioned status under Chapter 7 of the UN Charter. It is a treaty under any other name. It has been structured as an alliance partly to avoid subjecting its terms to the approval of the US Senate, and partly to obfuscate its significance. Although the draft has not been circulated outside official circles, the leaks raise serious alarm about its long-term significance for Iraq’s sovereignty and independence. Of course the terms of the alliance for Iraq will be sweetened with promises of military and economic aid, but these are no different in essence from the commitments made in Iraq’s previous disastrous treaty entanglements.

Smells of Gaza
By Nicki Bennet, New York Times, June 3, 2008
Like most people who read and watch a lot of news, I’ve seen a fair share of photographs and television footage of the Gaza strip in my life. And unlike some of the places I’ve worked — like Goz Beida in eastern Chad or El Zapote in Guatemala — Gaza is actually a place that many people can locate on a world map, or describe to you on the basis of the images they’ve seen. I’d been expecting the stark contrast between the modern high-rise buildings and the rubble of demolished houses — the bullet holes on both a constant reminders of the ongoing violence between the Israeli military and Palestinian armed groups. So I can’t say it’s the landscapes of Gaza that caught me off guard when I first arrived in the city after crossing the sandy piece of no man’s land between Israel and the Gaza strip. More than anything, it was the smells.

Occupation has cost Israel dear, says report
By Rory McCarthy, The Guardian, June 4, 2008
Israel’s occupied territories and conflict with the Palestinians has undermined the country’s economic growth and has cost at least an extra 36.6bn shekels (£5.7bn) in defence spending over the past two decades, according to an Israeli thinktank.

Calculations by the Adva Centre, an independent policy centre in Tel Aviv, suggest Israel’s economy has been held back, inequality within the country has grown and there have been significant government budget cuts to pay for mounting defence spending.

Iran fumes as Syria nods to Arab world
By Sami Moubayed, Asia Times, June 6, 2008
The strings pulled by Qatar, which helped end the stand-off in Lebanon last May, are now working to orchestrate a rapprochement between Syria, Egypt and Saudi Arabia.

Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, who meet King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia last weekend in Jeddah, told the Qataris he does not mind mending relations with Damascus, but wants first to see a soothing of tension between the Syrians and Riyadh.

Tension between Damascus and Cairo, after all, had stemmed from sour relations between the Syrians and Riyadh, with regard to Lebanon, and led to the no-show of both Mubarak and Abdullah at the Arab summit in Damascus held in March. Both countries accused the Syrians of prolonging the presidential crisis in Beirut and preventing the election of Michel Suleiman as president. That is now history.

It’s time to talk to Syria
By John Kerry and Chuck Hagel, Wall Street Journal, June 5, 2008
After Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1991, President George H.W. Bush did the improbable and convinced Syrian President Hafez Assad to join an American-led coalition against a fellow Baathist regime.

Today, these leaders’ sons have another chance for a diplomatic breakthrough that could redefine the strategic landscape in the Middle East.

The recent announcement of peace negotiations between Israel and Syria through Turkey, and the agreement between the Lebanese factions in Qatar – both apparently without meaningful U.S. involvement – should serve as a wake-up call that our policy of nonengagement has isolated us more than the Syrians. These developments also help create new opportunities and increased leverage that we can only exploit through substantive dialogue with Syria.