In a more diverse America, a mostly white convention
By Eli Saslow and Robert Barnes, Washington Post, September 4, 2008

Organizers conceived of this convention as a means to inspire, but some African American Republicans have found the Xcel Energy Center depressing this week. Everywhere they look, they see evidence of what they consider one of their party’s biggest shortcomings.

As the country rapidly diversifies, Republicans are presenting a convention that is almost entirely white.

Only 36 of the 2,380 delegates seated on the convention floor are black, the lowest number since the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies began tracking diversity at political conventions 40 years ago. Each night, the overwhelmingly white audience watches a series of white politicians step to the lectern — a visual reminder that no black Republican has served as a governor, U.S. senator or U.S. House member in the past six years.

Editor’s Comment — How can a party that doesn’t resemble the country, credibly put the “country first”?

A white minority that claims a right to speak for everyone is merely expressing its contempt for those outside its ranks.

That Sarah Palin can rouse the spirits of the Republican faithful by no means suggests that she’s about to inspire a groundswell of popular support across the nation. That John McCain was correct in believing that Palin could fire up a lackluster campaign does not resolve the Republicans’ fundamental challenge: How can a party that has been dominant for this long now plausibly present itself as a force for change?

Biden: Israel’s decisions must be made in Jerusalem, not D.C.
By Natasha Mozgovaya, Haaretz, September 4, 2008

The former chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations also criticized presumptive Republican Presidential Nominee John McCain’s approach to Israel and the United States’ diplomatic tensions with Iran by portraying the Islamic Republic as being in a fractured and weak state.

“McCain says it’s status quo or war – and there’s nothing in between. We all know Iran is weak and weak economically,” Biden said. “We should stop making Iran into this 12-foot giant. They are not. They are not. The more we do that, the more we undercut our own self-interest.”

Biden also questioned the wisdom of a pre-emptive U.S.-led attack on Iran, at a time when the U.S. is “bogged-down in Iraq,” adding that he has been “stunned by the incompetence” of the Bush administration in its handling of the war in Iraq.

Biden defended his opposition to the Kyl-Lieberman Iran amendment, which calls for labeling Iran’s Revolutionary Guard a terrorist organization and passed by a vote of 76 – 22, saying that he didn’t want to help the government find a “pretext for war with Iran,” especially in light of what he described as the Bush administration’s inept handling of the war in Iraq.

Going on an imperial bender
By Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch, September 4, 2008

Here it is, as simply as I can put it: In the course of any year, there must be relatively few countries on this planet on which U.S. soldiers do not set foot, whether with guns blazing, humanitarian aid in hand, or just for a friendly visit. In startling numbers of countries, our soldiers not only arrive, but stay interminably, if not indefinitely. Sometimes they live on military bases built to the tune of billions of dollars that amount to sizeable American towns (with accompanying amenities), sometimes on stripped down forward operating bases that may not even have showers. When those troops don’t stay, often American equipment does — carefully stored for further use at tiny “cooperative security locations,” known informally as “lily pads” (from which U.S. troops, like so many frogs, could assumedly leap quickly into a region in crisis).

At the height of the Roman Empire, the Romans had an estimated 37 major military bases scattered around their dominions. At the height of the British Empire, the British had 36 of them planetwide. Depending on just who you listen to and how you count, we have hundreds of bases. According to Pentagon records, in fact, there are 761 active military “sites” abroad.

American forces attack militants on Pakistani soil
By Pir Zubair Shah, Eric Schmitt and Jane Perlez, New York Times, September 4, 2008

Helicopter-borne American Special Operations forces attacked Qaeda militants in a Pakistani village near the border with Afghanistan early Wednesday in the first publicly acknowledged case of United States forces conducting a ground raid on Pakistani soil, American officials said.

Until now, allied forces in Afghanistan have occasionally carried out airstrikes and artillery attacks in the border region of Pakistan against militants hiding there, and American forces in “hot pursuit” of militants have had some latitude to chase them across the border.

But the commando raid by the American forces signaled what top American officials said could be the opening salvo in a much broader campaign by Special Operations forces against the Taliban and Al Qaeda inside Pakistan, a secret plan that Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates has been advocating for months within President Bush’s war council.

It also seemed likely to complicate relations with Pakistan, where the already unstable political situation worsened after the resignation last month of President Pervez Musharraf, a longtime American ally.

Ukraine government near collapse
By Clifford J Levy, New York Times, September 4, 2008

The Western-leaning governing coalition in Ukraine, which took power during the Orange Revolution in 2004 but has endured repeated tumult ever since, appeared once again near collapse on Wednesday.

The president of Ukraine, Viktor A. Yushchenko, asserted that he was the victim of a “political and constitutional coup” carried out by his ally, Prime Minister Yulia V. Tymoshenko, and threatened to call for early parliamentary elections. She blamed him, saying he was seeking ways to rebuild his flagging popular support.

The instability erupted on the eve of a visit to Ukraine by Vice President Dick Cheney, who arrived in the region to show his support for American allies in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Georgia last month.

Palin: average isn’t good enough
By Sam Harris, Los Angeles Times, September 3, 2008

Americans have an unhealthy desire to see average people promoted to positions of great authority. No one wants an average neurosurgeon or even an average carpenter, but when it comes time to vest a man or woman with more power and responsibility than any person has held in human history, Americans say they want a regular guy, someone just like themselves. President Bush kept his edge on the “Who would you like to have a beer with?” poll question in 2004, and won reelection.

This is one of the many points at which narcissism becomes indistinguishable from masochism. Let me put it plainly: If you want someone just like you to be president of the United States, or even vice president, you deserve whatever dysfunctional society you get. You deserve to be poor, to see the environment despoiled, to watch your children receive a fourth-rate education and to suffer as this country wages — and loses — both necessary and unnecessary wars.

Obama answers your science questions
By Brandon Keim, Wired, September 2, 2008

America asked Barack Obama about science, and Obama answered.

“This is the first time we know of that a candidate for president has laid out his science policy before the election at this level of detail,” said Shawn Otto, CEO of ScienceDebate2008.

A 38,000-member coalition of scientists, engineers and concerned citizens, ScienceDebate2008 pushed presidential candidates to attend to science — an area that is vital to America’s economy and touches on nearly every important political issue, but is generally neglected during elections.

What Palin says about McCain
By Mark Mellman, The Hill, September 2, 2008

In selecting Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin (R) as his running mate, John McCain violated the first, and perhaps only, rule of vice presidential selection — first do no harm.

Commentary aplenty has explored her qualifications for the job. Instead of retracing that well-trod ground, consider what the process reveals about John McCain himself.

With his first “presidential” decision, McCain has cast considerable, and mostly unflattering, light on his own character and thinking.

First and foremost, it underlines his rash and impetuous nature. Whatever her appeals, what kind of person offers the vice presidency to someone he met just once before? What kind of judgment does that reflect?

Editor’s Comment —

“By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection, which is noblest; Second, by imitation, which is easiest; and Third by experience, which is the bitterest.” — Confucius

“The intelligent want self-control; children want candy.” — Rumi

A word that has fallen out of the contemporary political vernacular but dearly needs resurecting is wisdom. Has this not been, thoughout history, what people most wanted from their leaders: that their actions be guided by wisdom?

Experience is the field in which wisdom can grow, but no amount of experience eliminates the danger of impulsiveness. Indeed, to be impulsive is to unshackle oneself from the past and disregard everything but the passion of the moment.

The flash of impulse invigorates and empowers the individual by confusing his adversaries. It might at very specific moments demonstrate the courage and flexibility that the circumstances demand. But beyond that, if impulsiveness is an operating procedure — if it is the way someone works — there’s no doubt that those driven by impulse are parading their lack of wisdom.

If John McCain has more wisdom than he’s recently displayed, he’ll give the GOP another shock and with or without grace engineer the means to allow Sarah Palin to step aside. But for this to happen would seem so un-McCain, it seems almost impossible to imagine.

Palin disclosures raise questions on vetting
By Elisabeth Bumiller, New York Times, September 2, 2008

A series of disclosures about Gov. Sarah Palin, Senator John McCain’s choice as running mate, called into question on Monday how thoroughly Mr. McCain had examined her background before putting her on the Republican presidential ticket.

The “Eagleton scenario”
By Joshua Green, The Atlantic, September 2, 2008

Barring a dramatic reversal, Sarah Palin will formally become the Republican vice presidential nominee Wednesday night. Since Friday, when the pick was announced, news surrounding Palin has been almost uniformly negative: the initial focus on her lack of experience quickly gave way to reports of her involvement in the Troopergate scandal, the “Bridge to Nowhere” earmark, an Alaskan separatist party, a 527 group organized by recently indicted Alaska Senator Ted Stevens, and, on Labor Day, her teenage daughter’s pregnancy.

Here in St. Paul, talk of Palin has dominated the Republican convention—even more so than cable news—and by Monday night discussion among Republican operatives and reporters had turned to whether Palin would survive or become the first running mate since Thomas Eagleton in 1972 to leave a major-party ticket. On Monday, the InTrade futures market opened trading on whether Palin would withdraw before the election.

McCain ad: Palin more qualified than Obama
By Mike Allen, Politico, September 3, 2008

Mounting a ferocious defense of his embattled running mate, John McCain said he is buying a TV ad arguing that Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin has more experience than the Democratic presidential nominee, Barack Obama.

In an effort to rev up conservatives, a campaign statement issued a list of critical media mentions that it called “smears” of Palin, who speaks in primetime at the convention on Wednesday night.

Obama, Arabs and cheap shots
By Scott McLeod, Time, September 1, 2008

Friends here are still annoyed by the hint of unexpected Arab-bashing they detected in the historic acceptance speech last week by Barack Obama, otherwise a very popular figure in the Muslim world. I hope that Obama wasn’t taking a cheap shot. But my friends have a point.

Al Qaida has free movement in Pakistan, top official concedes
By Saeed Shah, McClatchy, September 1, 2008

Pakistan’s top security official Monday admitted that al Qaida’s leadership moved freely in and out of the country and vowed that “no mercy” would be shown to extremists based in its tribal territory that borders Afghanistan.

In the past, Pakistan has been heavily criticized for rejecting evidence that al Qaida was largely based in the country and for denying that the tribal territory was used as a safe haven for Afghan insurgents.

U.S., Afghan troops kill 20 in Pakistan
By Candace Rondeaux, Washington Post, September 3, 2008

At least 20 people were killed in northwest Pakistan on Wednesday after U.S. and Afghan troops crossed from Afghanistan to pursue Taliban insurgents in an early morning attack that marked the first known instance in which U.S. forces conducted an operation on Pakistani soil since the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan began, according to witnesses and a Pakistani official.

The United States has conducted occasional air and artillery strikes against insurgents lodged across the border in Pakistani territory, and “hot pursuit” rules provide some room for U.S. troops to maneuver in the midst of battle. But the arrival of three U.S. helicopters in the village of Musa Nika, clearly inside the Pakistani border, drew a sharp response from Pakistani officials.

“We strongly object to the incursion of ISAF troops on Pakistani territory,” said Maj. Gen. Athar Abbas, chief spokesman for the Pakistani military, referring to the International Security Assistance Force, the coalition of U.S. and other NATO troops that has been battling the Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan since 2001.

A sting in Pakistan’s al-Qaeda mission
By Syed Saleem Shahzad, Asia Times, September 4, 2008

The Pakistani military has halted operations in Bajaur Agency in the northwest of the country, saying “the back has been broken” of the militancy there.

A military spokesman said that in light of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, which began on Sunday, all action would stop, which would allow about 500,000 displaced people to return home. Officials claim that in three weeks of fighting 560 militants have been killed, with the loss of 20 members of the security forces.

The ground reality, though, is that the operation failed in its primary objective, to catch the big fish so wanted by the United States – al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri. This would have been the perfect present for Islamabad to give the George W Bush administration in the run-up to the US presidential elections in November.

Return to the Valley of Death
By Sebastian Junger, Vanity Fair, October, 2008

This is not a war where soldiers are taken prisoner; if a position were to be overrun, virtually every American in it would be killed during the firefight. The wounded would probably be executed where they lay, or worse. The Taliban would take astronomic casualties, but they may have calculated that one or two such incidents would cause the American public to demand an end to the small-base strategy in Afghanistan. With roughly 30,000 troops in the country—there are more police in New York City—the U.S. command would never be able to reinforce those small bases. They would have to withdraw to larger ones instead, and swathes of territory between these bases would become open to infiltration by the Taliban.

In early July, American military intelligence learned that a force of 300 foreign and local fighters had massed around another remote base, named Bella, but the Americans completed a planned pullout before they could be attacked. Bella had been occupied by Chosen Company, part of the Second Battalion of the 503rd Infantry, and Chosen had just finished a 15-month deployment in one of the most rugged and dangerous parts of Afghanistan. Like the rest of their brigade, they were literally days from going home. Chosen had acquired a bit of a reputation in the battalion, however. The previous August they had nearly been overrun at a 22-man outpost named Ranch House; at one point the enemy was so close that Chosen asked the A-10 pilots to strafe their own position. And several months later, 14 men from Chosen—along with 14 Afghan soldiers—were ambushed along a mountain trail in the same valley. Within minutes, every single man on the patrol was dead or wounded. An American unit hasn’t suffered a casualty rate of 100 percent in a firefight since Vietnam.

Israel of the Caucasus
By Arnaud de Borchgrave, UPI, September 2, 2008

NATO guarantees that an attack against one member country is an attack against all are no longer what they used to be. Had Georgia been inside NATO, a number of European countries would no longer be willing to consider it an attack against their own soil.

For Russia, the geopolitical stars were in perfect alignment. The United States was badly overstretched and had no plausible way to talk tough without coming across as empty rhetoric. American resources have been drained by the Iraq and Afghan wars, and the war on terror. As Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov put it, Washington must now choose between its “pet project” Georgia and a partnership with Moscow.

Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili evidently thought the United States would come to his side militarily if Russian troops pushed him back into Georgia after ordering an attack last Aug. 8 on the breakaway province of South Ossetia. And when his forces were mauled by Russia’s counterattack, bitter disappointment turned to anger. Along with Abkhazia, Georgia lost two provinces.

U.S. is set to announce $1 billion in aid for Georgia
By Steven Lee Myers, New York Times, September 3, 2008

The Bush administration plans to announce a $1 billion package of aid to help rebuild Georgia after its rout by Russian forces last month, administration officials said on Wednesday, as Vice President Dick Cheney arrived in the region to signal support for Georgia and other countries neighboring Russia.

The aid — along with Mr. Cheney’s visit — is sure to increase tensions with Russia, whose leaders have accused the United States of stoking the conflict with Georgia over its two separatist regions, by providing weapons and training to the Georgians. President Dmitri A. Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin have also complained that humanitarian supplies delivered by the American Navy and Air Force since Russian forces routed Georgian forces and occupied parts of the country were a disguise for delivering new weapons.

Arab mismanagement? Blame colonialism
By Rami G. Khouri, Daily Star, September 3, 2008

The agreement signed last Saturday that saw Italy apologize and pay $5 billion in compensation for its colonial rule and misdeeds in Libya was a powerful example of why it is so important to acknowledge that which many of our friends in the West constantly tell us to put behind us: history.

History matters, and endures, and its consequences constantly must be grasped, not ignored. In this case, we witness neither the end nor the resumption of history, but the neutralization of one aspect of history as a fractious force of resentment and discord.

For many in the West, history, especially the West’s colonial and imperial history in Asia, the Middle East and Africa, is something to skim through in a high school class, and then to relegate to the past as irrelevant to today’s conflicts and tensions. For many people in the former colonized world, however, history is a deep and open wound that still oozes pain and distortion. Libya is a classic example of colonialism’s twisted and enduring legacy of nearly dysfunctional states governed by corrupt and often incompetent elites, whose people never have a chance to validate either the configuration of statehood or the exercise of power.

MK Eldad forms anti-Islam coalition
By Ronen Medzini, Ynet, September 3, 2008

A new front being formed by representatives of the Israeli Right and European lawmakers is threatening to ignite flames of hatred. Knesset Member Arieh Eldad (Nationa Union-National Religious Party) announced Wednesday that he would be hosting a convention in Jerusalem under the banner, “Standing Up to Jihad.”

“The spread of Islam threatens the foundations of Western civilization,” he explained, and screened a scene from a film produced by Dutch politician Geert Wilders, which sparked a row in the Arab world several months ago and was banned in many places in Europe.

Iraqi army readies for showdown with Kurds
By Jonathan Steele, The Guardian, September 3, 2008

Iraqi troops and Kurdish peshmerga forces are bracing for conflict in the disputed city of Khanaqin in the most serious threat of clashes between Arabs and Kurds since the fall of Saddam Hussein.

A delegation flew from Erbil, the capital of the Kurdish regional government, to Baghdad at the weekend to try to resolve the crisis. The two main Kurdish parties are allied and form part of Iraq’s coalition government.

However, Massoud Barzani, the president of the Kurdistan region, and leader of the Kurdish Democratic party, said Iraq was still living under the influence of Saddam’s regime and the central government was not serious about sharing power with Kurds. He claimed many military decisions were made without consultations with General Babakir Zebari, a Kurd who is the Iraqi army’s chief of staff.

Maliki’s growing defiance of U.S. worries allies and critics
By Leila Fadel, McClatchy, September 1, 2008

Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki has been on a roll, and American officials are getting worried.

Once perceived as a sectarian Shiite Muslim leader, the U.S.-backed Maliki has won over Sunni constituents in recent months with offensives to curb Shiite militias in southern cities such as Basra and Amara and in the Baghdad Shiite slum of Sadr City.

He then turned his security forces north to wrest control of Mosul and Diyala province from Sunni extremists. U.S. forces provided strong backing, and except for Basra and Sadr City, the operations were announced in advance so that militants and insurgents had a chance to run.

Whether anyone admits it or not, Hamas appears to have won
By Daoud Kuttab, Daily Star, September 3, 2008

Whether those supporting the moderate leadership of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas admit it or not, Hamas appears to have won. Now, before Islamists around the world start celebrating, it is important to note that the Middle East, let alone the world, is far from embracing hard-line fundamentalists. Hamas, for the record, has made some important ideological and practical changes, the most important of which was the tahdiya, or temporary cease-fire with Israel.

The signs of Hamas’ victory can be seen all over. From the success of the siege-breaking peace boats to the partial opening of the Rafah crossing with Egypt and the serious talks Hamas leaders are holding with Egyptian and Jordanian intelligence chiefs.

Part of the reason for Hamas’ success is the fact that the region and the world have little choice but to accept the reality that emerged in February 2006 and that Hamas in June 2007, with its takeover of Gaza, served notice that it was not going away.

American revolutionary
By Walter Shapiro, Salon, August 29, 2008

Barack Obama — smiling, reassuring and firm — was the face of change. Four years after this little-known Illinois state senator delivered the keynote address at the Democratic convention, Obama accepted the Democratic nomination in a stunning testament to the pace of change. Mile High Stadium filled to the rafters with 80,000 walking-on-air Democrats was the place of change.

The Democratic Party, hungry for power after being in the wilderness for 20 of the last 28 years, could have played it safe, could have searched until it found a politically acceptable white male politician. But instead, after a spirited and historic battle against Hillary Clinton, the Democrats selected the first African-American presidential nominee in history, decades before the poets, preachers and certainly the political pragmatists dreamed that such a transformation of America was possible.

Watching Barack Obama give the most important — though not the most eloquent or boldest speech of his career — was a reminder that near miracles can happen even in this jaded decade. And, win or lose in November, America has been reshaped forever by this alliance of what Obama described as “young people who voted for the first time and the young at heart.” On a night for defying the taboos of intolerance, the Democratic nominee went out of his way to affirm that “our gay and lesbian brothers and sisters deserve … to live lives free of discrimination,” even if Obama glided by gay marriage.

Yet the subtext of the Obama speech was an acknowledgment of how arduous the political climb to November victory remains.

Editor’s Comment — In anticipating this event, my fear was that it might reinforce the perception that this election has been reduced to a single issue: support for, or opposition to, Barack Obama. But as Obama said: “What the naysayers don’t understand is that this election has never been about me, it’s about you.”

There’s a paradoxical truth in this. Obama can only be a catalyst for change in a country that is sufficiently sickened by its own recent past. At the same time, this hunger for change is not a tidal force and the status quo enjoys support from a much broader base than simply those concentrations of power who benefit most. Without Obama on the political scene, I see America all too easily continuing taking refuge in the familiar.

That this is now Obama’s moment says, I believe, more about him than it says about America.

7 years to climate midnight
By Carlos Pascual and Strobe Talbott, Washington Post, August 28, 2008

The world may have only seven years to start reducing the annual buildup in greenhouse gas emissions that otherwise threatens global catastrophe within several decades. That means that between Inauguration Day in January 2009 and 2015, either John McCain or Barack Obama will face the most momentous political challenge of all time.

Reflecting a consensus of hundreds of scientists around the world, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has affirmed that greenhouse gas emissions are raising the Earth’s temperature. The Earth is on a trajectory to warm more than 4.5 degrees Fahrenheit by around mid-century. Exceeding that threshold could trigger a series of phenomena: Arable land will turn into desert, higher sea levels will flood coastal areas, and changes in the convection of the oceans will alter currents, such as the Gulf Stream, that determine regional weather patterns.

Editor’s Comment — Among the many ways in which Republicans want to couch a Democratic presidency as a threat, none is more potent than that it risks the emasculation of America – that America would thereby surrender its status as the pre-eminent global power. This is what forces Democrats to repeatedly place offerings on the altar of national security. Yet the way in which America does without question continue to wield superpower status is as the world’s number one energy consumer. This is the arena in which American leadership is truly indispensable. This is where America needs to start leading the world instead of dragging it down. This is where America needs to transmute its power status and show that having accumulated great might it can now demonstrate great responsibility.

Georgia is the graveyard of America’s unipolar world
By Seumas Milne, The Guardian, August 28, 2008

If there were any doubt that the rules of the international game have changed for good, the events of the past few days should have dispelled it. On Monday, President Bush demanded that Russia’s leaders reject their parliament’s appeal to recognise the independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Within 24 hours, Bush had his response: President Medvedev announced Russia’s recognition of the two contested Georgian enclaves.

The Russian message was unmistakable: the outcome of the war triggered by Georgia’s attack on South Ossetia on August 7 is non-negotiable – and nothing the titans of the US empire do or say is going to reverse it. After that, the British foreign secretary David Miliband’s posturing yesterday in Kiev about building a “coalition against Russian aggression” merely looked foolish.

That this month’s events in the Caucasus signal an international turning point is no longer in question. The comparisons with August 1914 are of course ridiculous, and even the speculation about a new cold war overdone. For all the manoeuvres in the Black Sea and nuclear-backed threats, the standoff between Russia and the US is not remotely comparable to the events that led up to the first world war. Nor do the current tensions have anything like the ideological and global dimensions that shaped the 40-year confrontation between the west and the Soviet Union.

Only a two-page ‘note’ governs U.S. military in Afghanistan
By Karen DeYoung, Washington Post, August 28, 2008

For the past six years, military relations between the United States and Afghanistan have been governed by a two-page “diplomatic note” giving U.S. forces virtual carte blanche to conduct operations as they see fit.

Although President Bush pledged in a 2005 declaration signed with Afghan President Hamid Karzai to “develop appropriate arrangements and agreements” formally spelling out the terms of the U.S. troop presence and other bilateral ties, no such agreements were drawn up.

But after a U.S.-led airstrike last week that United Nations and Afghan officials have said killed up to 90 civilians — most of them children — Karzai has publicly called for a review of all foreign forces in Afghanistan and a formal “status of forces agreement,” along the lines of an accord being negotiated between the United States and Iraq.

The prospect of codifying the ad hoc rules under which U.S. forces have operated in Afghanistan since late 2001 sends shudders through the Bush administration, which has struggled to finalize its agreement with Baghdad. “It’s never been done because the issues have been too big to surmount,” said one U.S. official who was not authorized to discuss the subject on the record. “The most diplomatic way of saying it is that there are just a lot of moving parts,” the official said.

Friends across the divide
The Economist, August 21, 2008

For Plato the art of music was so firmly anchored in moral and political reality that any alteration to the musical system would necessarily require a corresponding political shift. Two and a half millennia later, when classical music is generally seen as a high-class lifestyle accessory, Plato’s conception seems outlandish, even absurd. To be sure, most people involved in classical music today consider their art to be of profound cultural importance, but there are very few who are able to articulate this convincingly.

One such, however, is the Argentine-born, Israeli and Palestinian passport-wielding conductor and pianist Daniel Barenboim. Since founding the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra in 1999 with the late Edward Said, Mr Barenboim’s advocacy for music and music-making as forces for social and political good has grown in prominence and force. Invited to give both the BBC Reith lectures and the Harvard Norton lectures in 2006, he chose the same topic for each—the power of music—and it is from these lectures that the current volume is shaped.

The basic thesis of “Everything is Connected” is simple and powerful. We live in a world in which different voices—different expressions of political will and behavioural norms—collide and compete. Some struggle to be heard; others seem to be continuously present. In music we have the perfect model of contrasting voices working together harmoniously.

Editor’s Comment — Music is the quintessential expression of multiculturalism; the proof that there is no such thing as cultural purity; the language that animates language; the promise of the possibility of one world.

Wrong on Russia
By Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett, The National Interest, August 20, 2008

In the wake of Russia’s military incursion into Georgia, too many current, former, and aspiring U.S. officials are caricaturing the Russian state that was shaped and is still guided by Vladimir Putin as a revisionist aggressor. For Robert Kagan, John McCain’s neoconservative foreign policy adviser, as well as for long-time Democratic foreign policy hands Richard Holbrooke and Ronald Asmus, Russia’s actions in Georgia are comparable to Hitler’s invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1938. For Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Russia’s actions are more reminiscent of the Soviet Union’s invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968.

But, in reality, today’s Russia is not a resurgent imperial power. In the post-Cold War period, it was Washington, not Moscow, which started the game of acting outside the United Nations Security Council to pursue coercive regime change in problem states and redraw the borders of nominally sovereign countries. In Russian eyes, America’s invasion and occupation of Iraq, including arresting and presiding over the execution of its deposed President, undermined Washington’s standing to criticize others for taking military action in response to perceived threats. And American unilateralism in the Balkans, along with planned deployments of missile defense systems in Eastern Europe and support for “color revolutions” in former Soviet republics, trampled clearly stated Russian redlines.

Georgia after war: the political landscape
By Robert Parsons, Open Democracy, August 26, 2008

As the dust from Russia’s tank-tracks settles again over Georgia, the accounting inside the country has begun. For the moment, the accent is on damage- assessment and reconstruction but the focus is already slowly shifting to the role in starting the conflict of Mikheil Saakashvili. Georgia’s young president will soon find himself in the spotlight again and it will not be a comfortable place.

So far, the criticism has been muted. I spent two weeks in Georgia in the immediate wake of the Russian attack and found few ready to publicly condemn Saakashvili’s decision on the night of 7 August 2008 to launch an offensive against South Ossetian positions. But Saakashvili should not mistake that for acquiescence.

Across the country – from occupied Poti on the Black Sea coast to Tbilisi in the east – the murmur of complaint is growing louder. Why, people are asking, did he allow himself to be dragged into a fight that Georgia could not possibly win?

US-Russian deal on nuclear access may be shelved
AP, August 27, 2008

A key civil nuclear agreement between Russia and the U.S. looks likely to be shelved until next year at the earliest amid mounting tensions over the fate of Georgia’s breakaway republics.

The nuclear pact — signed last May — set the framework to give the U.S. access to Russian state-of-the-art nuclear technologies, while helping Russia establish an international nuclear fuel storage facility for spent fuel. Russia cannot achieve that goal without the deal, since the U.S. controls the vast majority of the world’s nuclear fuel.

US tax breaks help Jewish settlers in West Bank
By Adam Entous, Reuters, August 25, 2008

The United States says Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank threaten any peace between Israel and the Palestinians — yet it also encourages Americans to help support settlers by offering tax breaks on donations.

As Condoleezza Rice flew in on Monday for another round of peace talks, Israeli and American supporters of settlements defended the tax incentives, which benefit West Bank enclaves deemed illegal by the World Court and which the U.S. secretary of state has said are an obstacle to Palestinian statehood.

Pro-settler groups say they are entitled to the tax breaks because their work is “humanitarian”, not political, and reject any comparison to Palestinian charities, some of which face U.S. sanctions over suspected links to Islamist groups like Hamas.

Taliban gain new foothold in Kandahar
By Carlotta Gall, New York Times, August 27, 2008

The Taliban bomber calmly parked a white fuel tanker near the prison gates of this city one evening in June, then jumped down from the cab and let out a laugh. Prison guards fired on the bomber as he ran off, but they missed, instead killing the son of a local shopkeeper, Muhammad Daoud, who watched the scene unfold from across the street.

Seconds later, the Taliban fired a rocket-propelled grenade into the tanker, setting off an explosion that killed the prison guards, destroyed nearby buildings, and opened a breach in the prison walls as wide as a highway. Nearly 900 prisoners escaped, 350 of them members of the Taliban, in one of the worst security lapses in Afghanistan in the six years since the United States intervention here.

The prison break, on June 13, was a spectacular propaganda coup for the Taliban not only in freeing their comrades and flaunting their strength, but also in exposing the catastrophic weakness of the Afghan government, its army and the police, as well as the international forces trying to secure Kandahar.

U.S. killed 90, including 60 children, in Afghan village, U.N. finds
By Carlotta Gall, New York Times, August 27, 2008

A United Nations human rights team has found “convincing evidence” that 90 civilians — among them 60 children — were killed in airstrikes on a village in western Afghanistan on Friday, according to the United Nations mission in Kabul.

If the assertion proves to be correct, this would almost certainly be the deadliest case of civilian casualties caused by any United States military operation in Afghanistan since 2001.

The United Nations statement adds pressure to the United States military, which maintains that 25 militants and 5 civilians were killed in the airstrikes, but has ordered an investigation after Afghan officials reported the higher civilian death toll.

A Syrian-Israeli breakthrough?
By David Ignatius, Washington Post, August 27, 2008

Of all the wild cards in the Middle East deck, this one may be the most intriguing: Syrian President Bashar al-Assad appears ready for direct peace talks with Israel, if the United States will join France as a co-sponsor.

That’s the word from senior advisers to Assad, who spoke with me here this week. The same assessment comes from top French officials in Paris. A direct meeting would raise the Syrian-Israeli dialogue to a new level; so far, it has been conducted indirectly, through Turkey.

The Syrians would like to see a clear signal from the Bush administration that it supports the peace process and that the United States is prepared to join the French as “godfather” of the talks. But Syrian officials are pessimistic and say they doubt that the administration, which has sought to isolate and punish Syria, will change its policy in the few months it has left. That would disappoint some of Assad’s advisers, who prefer to move quickly, rather than wait for a new U.S. administration to organize its foreign policy priorities.

In nuclear net’s undoing, a web of shadowy deals
By William J Broad and David E Sanger, New York Times, August 25, 2008

The president of Switzerland stepped to a podium in Bern last May and read a statement confirming rumors that had swirled through the capital for months. The government, he acknowledged, had indeed destroyed a huge trove of computer files and other material documenting the business dealings of a family of Swiss engineers suspected of helping smuggle nuclear technology to Libya and Iran.

The files were of particular interest not only to Swiss prosecutors but to international atomic inspectors working to unwind the activities of Abdul Qadeer Khan, the Pakistani bomb pioneer-turned-nuclear black marketeer. The Swiss engineers, Friedrich Tinner and his two sons, were accused of having deep associations with Dr. Khan, acting as middlemen in his dealings with rogue nations seeking nuclear equipment and expertise.

The Swiss president, Pascal Couchepin, took no questions. But he asserted that the files — which included an array of plans for nuclear arms and technologies, among them a highly sophisticated Pakistani bomb design — had been destroyed so that they would never fall into terrorist hands.

Behind that official explanation, though, is a far more intriguing tale of spies, moles and the compromises that governments make in the name of national security.

The United States had urged that the files be destroyed, according to interviews with five current and former Bush administration officials. The purpose, the officials said, was less to thwart terrorists than to hide evidence of a clandestine relationship between the Tinners and the C.I.A.

Editor’s Comment — “CIA Used AQ Khan Network to Sabotage Iran’s Nuclear Program.”

That could have been the headline. Instead we get “In Nuclear Net’s Undoing, a Web of Shadowy Deals” with a subheadline: “3 Swiss Engineers Are Tied to CIA Efforts to Take Down Global Black Market.” And even though this “intriguing tale” made the front page, it will surely get buried under a week’s saturation coverage of the Democratic Convention.

It’s long been asked why the AQ Khan network took so long to be dismantled. This report suggests — even if it refrains from fully spelling it out — an answer: the CIA had not merely penetrated the network but was actively using it. The network was allowed to continue in operation because it provided a possible means to sabotage the nuclear programs that it was ostensibly facilitating.

If the CIA doesn’t want to see the Tinners go on trial, perhaps it has a similar desire not to see AQ Khan face questioning. This is a story that has barely begun to be told.

The souls of young Muslim folk
By Justin Jouvenal, Salon, August 26, 2008

The question posed by W.E.B. DuBois in his classic “The Souls of Black Folk” cut to the marrow of what it was like to be black under Jim Crow. Now, more than a century after DuBois penned his query, Moustafa Bayoumi thinks it is appropriate to ask it again. The associate professor of English at Brooklyn College argues in his new book, “How Does It Feel to Be a Problem?” that young Arabs and Muslims are America’s latest “problem.”

In a few destructive hours on Sept. 11, he writes, the groups went from being just another set of minorities in our multicultural patchwork to “dangerous outsiders” in many Americans’ eyes. Hate crimes spiked 1,700 percent against Arabs and Muslims in the months after the terrorist attacks and thousands were detained, questioned and deported. A 2006 USA Today/Gallup poll found 39 percent of Americans believed all Muslims –including U.S. citizens — should carry special IDs.

“We’re the new blacks,” a Palestinian-American in his 20s tells Bayoumi as the young man puffs on apple-flavored tobacco in a hookah lounge. “You know that, right?”

Disarming the bomb in the basement
By Khaled Diab, The Guardian, August 24, 2008

Israel’s interior minister Meir Sheetrit – who is vying to take over the reins from outgoing prime minister Ehud Olmert – has struck a welcome note of caution on Iran in his campaign for the ruling Kadima party’s leadership.

On Wednesday, he said: “Israel must on no account attack Iran, speak of attacking Iran or even think about it … Israel must defend itself only if attacked by Iran, but attacking Iran on our own initiative is a megalomaniacal [and] reckless idea.”

Earlier, former Mossad chief Ephraim Halevy also struck alarm bells against calls to bomb Iran. He warned that an attack could hurt Israel’s interests for a century. “It will have a negative effect on public opinion in the Arab world.”

Israel’s missile shield against Iran: Three Americans in a trailer
By Aluf Benn and Barak Ravid, Haaretz, August 24, 2008

A commander and two operators monitor missile radars in an armored trailer somewhere in Europe. Inside, they use satellite technology to track the origin and trajectory of long-range missiles. In true American fashion, each shift begins with calisthenics, followed by an intelligence briefing.

That is the envisioned routine of the U.S. team that will be responsible for protecting Israel from surface-to-surface missiles launched from Iran or Syria.

Earlier this month the U.S. and Israel agreed on the deployment of a high-powered early-warning missile radar system in the Negev, to be staffed by U.S. military personnel. The station will receive information from the U.S. team in Europe that will aid it in its work.

The deployment of the Joint Tactical Ground Station (JTAGS) system, is widely seen as a kind of parting gift from Washington to Jerusalem as President George W. Bush prepares to leave office.

The system will protect Israel’s skies from missile attacks, but the flip side of the deal is that Israel’s freedom of action against Iran or Syria will be significantly curtailed.

U.S. to leave Iraq by 2011, Maliki says
By Campbell Robertson and Riyadh Mohammed, New York Times, August 26, 2008

Days after top Iraqi and American officials suggested that a draft of the security pact between the countries was close, Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki toughened his language, reiterating earlier Iraqi demands for a fixed date for the withdrawal of American troops.

“It is not possible for any agreement to conclude unless it is on the basis of full sovereignty and the national interest, and that no foreign soldiers remain in Iraqi soil after a defined time ceiling,” Mr. Maliki said in a speech to Shiite tribal leaders in Baghdad’s Green Zone.

The Bush administration has consistently emphasized that the agreement — needed to legalize the presence of American forces after the United Nations mandate expires at the end of this year — is still in draft form.

Fear keeps Iraqis out of their Baghdad homes
By Sabrina Tavernise, New York Times, August 24, 2008

When Jabbar, an elderly Shiite man, stormed out of his house here in June wanting to know where all his furniture had gone, the sharp look of the young Sunni standing guard on his street stopped him cold.

The young man said nothing, but his expression made things clear: Jabbar had no home here anymore.

After Iraq’s sectarian earthquake settled, his neighborhood had become a mostly Sunni area. Instead of moving back, he is trying to sell the house while staying in a rented one less than a mile away in an area that is mostly Shiite.

It is not an unusual decision. Out of the more than 151,000 families who had fled their houses in Baghdad, just 7,112 had returned to them by mid-July, according to the Iraqi Ministry of Migration. Many of the displaced remain in Baghdad, just in different areas. In one neighborhood alone, Amiriya, in western Baghdad, there are 8,350 displaced families, more than the total number of families who have returned to their houses in all of Baghdad.

How a Jihadist curtailed a president’s authority
By Jonathan Turley, New York Times, August 21, 2008

When Salim Hamdan was born in 1970, the horizon of his life extended little beyond his poor Yemeni village and a life (if he was lucky) as a farmer like his father. He was anything but lucky. His mother died when he was 7, his father when he was 11, and he soon found himself living on the streets of Mukalla. He eventually found work as the driver of a dabab, a beat-up minibus stuffed with riders — making just enough to rent a mattress in a flophouse and a daily supply of the mild narcotic khat to chew away his problems.

Yet, within a few years, this dabab driver with a fourth-grade education would occupy not only a cell in Guantánamo Bay but also the minds of members of the Supreme Court and the president of the United States.

Israel has nothing to gain from a Palestinian civil war
By Daniel Levy, Daily Star, August, 2008

When a bomb exploded in the Shajaiyyah district of Gaza last month, killing four Hamas operatives and a 5-year-old girl, Hamas blamed Fatah, and moved violently against its remaining Gazan enclaves. Fatah forces then pursued retribution against Hamas in the West Bank. Another round of intra-Palestinian conflict and bloodletting ensued, with the leading pro-Fatah family in Gaza, the Hilles clan, fleeing to Israel in the hopes of making it to the West Bank.

But do you think that Palestinians nearing civil war and the ongoing collapse of a central Palestinian governing entity serves Israel’s security interests? If so, think again.

Those who are taking comfort in the televised images of Palestinian-on-Palestinian violence, or in the “propaganda coup” of Human Rights Watch condemning both the Hamas government in Gaza and the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority (PA), are dangerously misguided. These events neither exonerate Israel for its own violations of human rights and international law in the Occupied Territories, nor improve Israel’s own strategic environment.

U.N. envoy’s ties to Pakistani are questioned
By Helene Cooper and Mark Mazzetti, New York Times, August 26, 2008

Zalmay Khalilzad, the American ambassador to the United Nations, is facing angry questions from other senior Bush administration officials over what they describe as unauthorized contacts with Asif Ali Zardari, a contender to succeed Pervez Musharraf as president of Pakistan.

Mr. Khalilzad had spoken by telephone with Mr. Zardari, the leader of the Pakistan Peoples Party, several times a week for the past month until he was confronted about the unauthorized contacts, a senior United States official said. Other officials said Mr. Khalilzad had planned to meet with Mr. Zardari privately next Tuesday while on vacation in Dubai, in a session that was canceled only after Richard A. Boucher, the assistant secretary of state for South Asia, learned from Mr. Zardari himself that the ambassador was providing “advice and help.”

“Can I ask what sort of ‘advice and help’ you are providing?” Mr. Boucher wrote in an angry e-mail message to Mr. Khalilzad. “What sort of channel is this? Governmental, private, personnel?” Copies of the message were sent to others at the highest levels of the State Department; the message was provided to The New York Times by an administration official who had received a copy.

McCain unsure how many houses he owns
By Jonathan Martin and Mike Allen, Politico, August 21, 2008

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said in an interview Wednesday that he was uncertain how many houses he and his wife, Cindy, own.

“I think — I’ll have my staff get to you,” McCain told Politico in Las Cruces, N.M. “It’s condominiums where — I’ll have them get to you.”

The correct answer is at least four, located in Arizona, California and Virginia, according to his staff. Newsweek estimated this summer that the couple owns at least seven properties.

Where’s Obama’s passion?
By Joe Klein, Time, August 21, 2008

A few days before Barack Obama was to announce his choice for Vice President, he was asked at a North Carolina town meeting what qualities he wanted in a running mate. He wandered through a derisive, if desultory, critique of Dick Cheney, then switched gears. “I want somebody … who shares with me a passion to make the lives of the American people better than they are right now,” he said. “I want somebody who is mad right now that people are losing their jobs.” And I immediately thought, Uh-oh.

Memories of John Kerry in 2004 came flooding back, of how he tended to describe his feelings rather than experience them, of how he suddenly—and unconvincingly—started to say he was “angry” about this or that when his consultants told him that Howard Dean’s anger about the war in Iraq was hitting home with voters. And then, in the general election, Kerry kept repeating the word strength rather than demonstrating it. Clearly, Obama’s consultants have given him similar advice, that he was on the short end of a passion gap—that it was time for emo. A day earlier, he had said wage disparities between genders made his “blood boil.”

One of the great strengths of the Obama candidacy has been the sense that this is a guy whose blood doesn’t boil, who carefully considers the options before he reacts—and that his reaction is always measured and rational. But that’s also a weakness: sometimes the most rational response is to rip your opponent’s lungs out.

Editor’s Comment — It’s interesting to contrast these two tableaux of the candidates. On one side we have a man who’s so stinking rich he doesn’t know how many houses he owns. On the other side a whose calm and thoughtfulness seemingly constrain the all-important passion needed for connecting with the voters.

The greater liability is Obama’s — not McCain’s. Why?

Firstly, no one in America is stinking rich. It’s called success or good fortune. Secondly, McCain will (like George Bush) be judged much more by his persona than his assets and he has the universally popular image of a regular guy. (Just happens to be one of those regular guys who — aw-shucks — just happened to forget how many houses he owns. “I’ll get back to you just as soon as I’ve found my glasses.”)

His failings are as much a part of his appeal as they are potential liabilities. In a word, McCain scores points just for being himself.

Obama — and the Obama campaign — on the other hand, seem to think that the Democratic candidate lacks the same advantage. They seem to think that his appeal needs to be packaged. In other words they think his success hinges on the effectiveness of the Obama marketing campaign.

In their assuming this I would venture to say that they are completely wrong and that contrary to the conventional wisdom the marketing of Obama has been a miserable failure. If the marketing was really working, shouldn’t he be soaring ahead in the polls by now?

Obama is different. Instead of running a campaign that’s trying to convince Americans that he’s a low-risk choice, he needs to challenge voters to take a leap. And the only way he can inspire the confidence of the electorate is by showing that he has the courage to be himself. He isn’t a typical American. He should stop trying to pretend he is.

Afghanistan on fire
The New York Times, August 21, 2008

Washington must finally make clear to Pakistan’s leaders the mortal threat they face. The Army must turn its attention from India to the fight against the Taliban. Civilian leaders must realize that there can be no separate peace with the extremists. Sending American troops or warplanes into Pakistani territory will only feed anti-American furies. That should be the job of Pakistan’s army, with intelligence help and carefully monitored financial support from the United States.

More American ground troops will have to be sent to Afghanistan. The Pentagon’s over-reliance on airstrikes — which have led to high levels of civilian casualties — has dangerously antagonized the Afghan population. This may require an accelerated timetable for shifting American forces from Iraq, where the security situation has grown somewhat less desperate.

Editor’s Comment — One of the most under-reported stories of recent weeks is that Pakistani military action in the tribal areas has resulted in an exodus of as many as 300,000 civilians, as Bruce Loudon reports for The Australian.

If, as the New York Times editorial board and many in Washington seem to think, the key problem was the reluctance of the Pakistani government to confront extremists, then, supposedly, we are now seeing the implementation of the solution. What seems clear though is this is a “solution” destined to produce yet another generational problem.

What’s curious though is that with success in Iraq being so widely hailed, the one lesson that would seem so obviously applicable to Afghanistan and Pakistan is that the lynch pin consists of winning over support from the indigenous enemy and turning them against al Qaeda. Instead, al Qaeda and the Taliban are becoming progressively more integrated. This strategic failure derives from the kernel of insanity upon which the war on terrorism was conceived: we will make no distinction between the terrorists and those who harbor them.

Afghan numbers don’t add up
By Syed Saleem Shahzad, Asia Times, August 22, 2008

The United States plans to bolster the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in Afghanistan with an additional 12,000 to 15,000 troops to confront the Taliban-led insurgency. Influential European and American think-tanks, such as the Senlis Council, also favor urgent extra deployment to Afghanistan.

The nature of the war in Afghanistan is changing, though, and it is not the sheer numbers that count. NATO has approximately 45,000 troops, including 15,000 American troops, while an additional 19,000 US forces operate separately. It has also been reported that the Pentagon plans to spend US$20 billion on doubling the size of the Afghanistan National Army to 120,000 troops.

Beyond the Taliban, local alliances between warlords and former mujahideen commanders against NATO have added a fresh dimension to the insurgency, in addition to spreading resistance to many new parts of Afghanistan.

It is this extension of the battlefield that alarms NATO, and its dilemma is that if it pumps more troops into the country, they will have to be widely spread and more open to attack. The alternative is to cede territory to the resistance groups.

Musharraf not the problem, or solution
By M K Bhadrakumar, Asia Times, August 22, 2008

The “war on terror”, as it winds down and begins heading for the exit tunnel, has secured its fifth and, possibly final victim – Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan. It is hard not to recall that the flamboyant general and president was doomed from the day he hitched his star to George W Bush’s war wagon almost seven years ago.

Equally, it must be recalled that he had no real choices in the matter. In that sense, his ultimate fate was more poignant than that of the other four political “victims” in the Bush era – Spain’s Jose-Maria Aznar, Australia’s John Howard, Poland’s Jaroslaw Kaczynski and Britain’s Tony Blair.

Therefore, Musharraf’s political epitaph cannot be written without recalling that if he finally found himself left with no supportive domestic civilian constituency, it was primarily because in the eyes of the overwhelming majority of Pakistanis, including the Westernized sections of the middle class, their president was a “burnt out case”.

He demeaned Pakistan by being subservient to foreign masters and in the common perception, rightly or wrongly, he compromised the country’s sovereignty. Alas, no one remembers that each time a US aircraft fired missiles violating Pakistani territorial integrity and killed innocent Pakistani civilians, the country felt humiliated. Its national pride took a relentless beating. And no self-respecting people in any country would forgive their president for allowing that to happen.

The Afghan fire looks set to spread, but there is a way out
By Seumas Milne, The Guardian, August 21, 2008

This is the conflict western politicians have convinced themselves is the “good war”, in contrast to the shame of Iraq. Britain’s defence secretary, Des Browne, recently declared it “the noble cause of the 21st century”. Nicolas Sarkozy, who faces a similar level of domestic opposition to the Afghan imbroglio as in Britain, insists that France is fighting for “democracy and freedom”. Barack Obama calls it the “central front” in the war on terror and, like Gordon Brown, is committed to transferring troops from Iraq to Afghanistan to bolster the fight.

That will certainly jack up the killing and suffering still further. As Zbigniew Brzezinski – the former US national security adviser who masterminded the early stages of the mujahideen war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan – argues, putting more troops in is not the solution: “We run the risk that our military presence will gradually turn the Afghan population entirely against us.”

The original aims of the invasion, it will be recalled, were the capture or killing of Osama bin Laden and the Taliban leader, Mullah Omar, and the destruction of al-Qaida in the aftermath of 9/11. None of those aims has been achieved. Instead, the US and its friends brought back to power an alliance of brutal and corrupt warlords, gave them new identities as democrats with phoney elections, and drove the Taliban and al-Qaida leaderships over the border into Pakistan.

New guidelines would give FBI broader powers
By Eric Lichblau, New York Times, August 21, 2008

A Justice Department plan would loosen restrictions on the Federal Bureau of Investigation to allow agents to open a national security or criminal investigation against someone without any clear basis for suspicion, Democratic lawmakers briefed on the details said Wednesday.

The plan, which could be made public next month, has already generated intense interest and speculation. Little is known about its precise language, but civil liberties advocates say they fear it could give the government even broader license to open terrorism investigations.

Congressional staff members got a glimpse of some of the details in closed briefings this month, and four Democratic senators told Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey in a letter on Wednesday that they were troubled by what they heard.

The senators said the new guidelines would allow the F.B.I. to open an investigation of an American, conduct surveillance, pry into private records and take other investigative steps “without any basis for suspicion.” The plan “might permit an innocent American to be subjected to such intrusive surveillance based in part on race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, or on protected First Amendment activities,” the letter said. It was signed by Russ Feingold of Wisconsin, Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts and Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island.

U.N. readies ‘grand deal’ to resolve Iraq’s dispute over Kirkuk
By Stephen Farrell, New York Times, August 21, 2008

The United Nations said Wednesday it would present a list of proposals to resolve the conflict over the oil-rich city of Kirkuk and other disputed regions in northern Iraq.

Staffan de Mistura, the United Nation’s special representative for Iraq, said that its assistance mission for Iraq would present proposals by the end of October. The objective, he said, was “a grand deal” among the Sunni Arabs, Shiite Arabs, Kurds, Turkmens, Yazidis, and other groups now passionately pressing their claims in the area.

The proposals will reflect months of research by a diverse team of 15 lawyers, negotiators, academics, diplomats and historians, some with experience in Bosnia, Israel and the Palestinian territories. They will center on Kirkuk, “the hottest issue in Iraq these days,” Mr. de Mistura said.

The strategic lessons of Georgia
By Mark Thompson, Time, August 18, 2008

The Powell Doctrine of overwhelming force has just been used effectively — and not by the U.S., which tried to prevail on the cheap with its 2003 invasion of Iraq. This time around, it might as well be rechristened the Putin Doctrine, given what the Russian military has done to Georgia over the past two weeks. In the aftermath, assorted soldiers and graybeards in the Pentagon, the National Security Council and government warrens around the world are evaluating the military lessons of Moscow’s move into the Caucasus. Just what does it mean for the way war is waged in the 21st century?

Military strategists see it as vindication for their continued calls for heavy, armor-centric warfare, while geo-strategists take it as a lesson in the dangers of a small country baiting a bigger and nearer foe when its key ally packs little more than rhetorical firepower, at least in the short term.

Despite U.S. embarrassment at the humiliation of its Georgian ally, the U.S. Army’s tankers and artillerymen at Fort Knox’s armor school have been encouraged by the success of the Russian army’s blitzkrieg. Moscow’s triumph suggests that there is wisdom behind Defense Secretary Robert Gates’ insistence that the U.S. be prepared to wage “full-spectrum operations” — not just the past five years of irregular warfare that America has been engaged in, with small units of soldiers patrolling Baghdad streets and Afghan mountains.

Editor’s Comment — Yep, there’s no doubt that Vladamir Putin must be the discreetly-toasted darling of the defense industry right now. The successful invasion of Georgia was the best news for General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin, BAE, and Boeing in over a decade.

How America is squandering its wealth and power
Andrew Bacevich interviewed by US News & World Report, August 19, 2008

Andrew Bacevich is no fan of George W. Bush. The conservative historian and former military officer lost a son fighting in Iraq and has publicly called the administration’s foreign policy record one of “substantial, if almost malignant, achievement.”

Yet in his new book The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism, he argues that the country’s foreign policy is a direct result of the American way of life. The only way of changing that policy, he contends, is changing the way Americans live.

In 1995, Bacevich wrote presciently that “to cope with a world in which terrorists and warlords pose as great a challenge as massed armies, a radical revision of military thinking is essential,” arguing that the lessons of Vietnam had largely been forgotten. With those lessons still forgotten, he now says, the country’s problems are of its own making. Bacevich, a professor of international relations at Boston University, recently spoke with U.S. News.

Editor’s Comment — Andrew Bacevich points to a reality upon which no one is likely to be able to build a popular cause: the need for changes so profound that they would change everyone’s lives.

Generally speaking, political rallying cries all apply the same socio-psychological gimmick: posit an external entity (Bush and Cheney, Republicans, Democrats, government, corporations, immigrants, Muslims, foreigners, the West, Washington, the military-industrial complex, etc) and then fire up a sense of solidarity that comes from standing in opposition to whatever it is that one sees as the problem. Self-righteously, we can come together, stand up and speak out, confident that it is the “other” that must change. And if — because that other is too powerful or vast — it is unrealistic for us to have any hope of being agents of change, then we can at least find comfort in the idea that we remained true to our principles.

In Europe, as in Asia, Nato leaves a trail of catastrophe
By Simon Jenkins, The Guardian, August 20, 2008

Nato is useless. It has failed to bring stability to Afghanistan, as it failed to bring it to Serbia. It just breaks crockery. Nato has proved a rotten fighting force, which in Kabul is on the brink of being sidelined by exasperated Americans. Nor is it any better at diplomacy: witness its hamfisted handling of east Europe. As the custodian of the west’s postwar resistance to the Soviet Union’s nuclear threat it served a purpose. Now it has become a diplomats’ Olympics, irrelevant but with bursts of extravagant self-importance.

Yesterday’s Nato ministerial meeting in Brussels was a fig leaf over the latest fiasco, the failure to counter the predictable Russian intervention in Georgia. Ostensibly to save Russian nationals in South Ossetia, the intervention was, in truth, to tell Georgia and Ukraine that they must not play games with the west along Russia’s frontier. Nato, which Russia would (and should) have joined after the collapse of the Soviet Union, is now a running provocation along the eastern rim of Europe.

There was no strategic need for Nato to proselytise for members, and consequent security guarantees, among the Baltic republics and border states to the south. Nor is there any strategic need for the US to place missile sites in Poland or the Czech Republic. This was mere Nato self-aggrandisement reinforcing the lobbying of the Pentagon hawks.

Russia and the Georgia war: the great-power trap
By Ivan Krastev, Open Democracy, August 19, 2008

Europe has entered the new 19th century. The Russia-Georgia war of 8-12 August 2008 has acted as a time-machine, vaporising the “end of history” sentiment that shaped European politics in the 1990s and replacing it with an older geopolitical calculus in modern form.

An older calculus – but not a cold-war one. Indeed, though the conflict over South Ossetia has generated heady rhetoric of the cold-war’s return, the real constellation of power and ideology it has revealed is different from the days of superpower confrontation in the four decades after 1945. This is indeed time-travel, not a mere reversal of gears.

It is the singular element of a power-confrontation not accompanied by developed ideological polarisation that makes the Russia-Georgia war the first 19th-century war in 21st-century Europe. The near-coincidence of the fortieth anniversary of the Red Army’s invasion of Czechoslovakia to crush the “Prague spring” in August 1968 makes the point. The punitive incursion into Georgia is not a remake; its conditions, motives, driving certainties and governing justifications are different. Russia’s military expedition – and victory – in Georgia marks Moscow’s attempt to return to the centre of European power-politics. It signals the resurgence of Russia as a born-again 19th-century power eager to challenge the early-21st century post-cold-war European order.

We’re not all Friedmanites now
By Thomas Frank, Wall Street Journal, August , 2008

Once upon a time there was a master narrative, and a neater little theory-of-everything you never did see. In its 19th century heyday it rationalized the having of the haves and commanded the deference of the have-nots; it spoke from the pulpit, the newspaper and the professor’s chair.

Its name was market, and to slight it in even the smallest way was to take your professional life into your hands. In 1895, the economist Edward Bemis found this out when he was dismissed from John D. Rockefeller’s University of Chicago thanks to his “attitude on public utility and labor questions,” as he put it in a letter to Upton Sinclair. Professors elsewhere paid the same price for intellectual independence.

But the orthodoxy lost its power of life and death. Academia developed protections for scholars who pursued unpopular ideas. Rockefeller’s University of Chicago went on to become the pre-eminent research university in the land, a temple of free inquiry and a magnet for Nobel prizes. I studied there and loved its atmosphere of endless debate.

Today, though, that old master narrative is back in a softer form. The market doesn’t so much intimidate scholars as bend them in particular, profitable directions. For example, a contract between Virginia Commonwealth University and Philip Morris reportedly gives that company the right to veto publication of certain research done by VCU professors. The New York Times tells of a prominent Harvard child psychologist, a powerful advocate for certain drugs, who received large consulting fees from drug manufacturers. Further examples could be piled up by the dozen.

Citizens’ U.S. border crossings tracked
By Ellen Nakashima, Washington Post, August 20, 2008

The federal government has been using its system of border checkpoints to greatly expand a database on travelers entering the country by collecting information on all U.S. citizens crossing by land, compiling data that will be stored for 15 years and may be used in criminal and intelligence investigations.

Officials say the Border Crossing Information system, disclosed last month by the Department of Homeland Security in a Federal Register notice, is part of a broader effort to guard against terrorist threats. It also reflects the growing number of government systems containing personal information on Americans that can be shared for a broad range of law enforcement and intelligence purposes, some of which are exempt from some Privacy Act protections.

While international air passenger data has long been captured this way, Customs and Border Protection agents only this year began to log the arrivals of all U.S. citizens across land borders, through which about three-quarters of border entries occur.

Staring down the Russians
By Zbigniew Brzezinski, Time, August 14, 2008

The end of the cold war was supposed to usher in a new age in which the major powers would no longer dictate to their neighbors how to run their affairs. That is why Russia’s invasion of Georgia is so tragic and so potentially ominous. Russia is now on watch: Will it continue to rely on coercion to achieve its imperial aims, or is it willing to work within the emerging international system that values cooperation and consensus?

Editor’s Comment — Zbigniew Brzezinski eptomizes the coming end of the anti-Bush alliance. While he has in recent years been one of the most clear-eyed critics of the administration’s Middle East policies and its misconceived War on Terrorism, when it comes to Georgia, Brzezinski speaks as an old Cold Warrior.

Instead of heeding a call to form a bipartisan approach in pushing back against Russia’s imperial ambitions, now would be a good time to reflect upon the fact that the strategic blunder that laid the foundations for the current crisis was the Clinton administration’s squandering of an opportunity to bring Russia in from the cold. The failure of America and Europe to embrace Russia when it was weak has fed enduring resentment. It suggested that what had been cast as an ideological struggle was a mask for much more deeply rooted antagonisms and cultural prejudices.

At a time when people are talking about the end of the post-Cold War era, we should be considering how that era failed by allowing a Cold War assumption to endure: that strategic alliances need to be based on shared hostility rather than a mutual desire for cooperation.

Russia’s big Caucasus win
By Robert Marquand and Fred Weir, Christian Science Monitor, August 14, 2008

In less than a week of military operations sparked by Georgia’s assault on its breakaway province of South Ossetia, Moscow is emerging as the immediate winner. A still-stunned West is looking for ways to censure Russia for its “disproportionate” incursion into Georgia that has reshaped the strategic game in the Caucasus and beyond to Russia’s great advantage.

“If the Russians stop hostilities now, they will have redrawn the whole strategic situation in the Caucasus, to the detriment of the Americans,” says François Heisbourg, special adviser to the Foundation for Strategic Research in Paris. “No one will invest in Georgia, in oil pipelines, in new ventures [there] now…. The game is over. In the new version of the Great Game, the Russians can cash in.” The scope of the “victory” is substantial: Moscow controls territory and leverage, has incapacitated the Georgian military, denied Tblisi its much-hoped-for NATO status, and put the Georgian leader it despises – Mikheil Saakashvili – into a tough position.

After warnings to Moscow, U.S. has few options
By Dan Eggen and Karen DeYoung, Washington Post, August 14, 2008

The Bush administration mixed strong rhetoric with modest action yesterday in response to Russia’s continued military incursion in Georgia, warning that Moscow’s international aspirations are threatened if it does not honor a negotiated cease-fire in the conflict.

President Bush announced the start of a humanitarian aid program for Georgia using U.S. military airplanes and ships, although officials said the effort so far includes only two scheduled flights. One shipment arrived later yesterday and another is to land today. He also dispatched Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice for a diplomatic trip that will take her to Paris and then to Georgia’s capital of Tbilisi to show “America’s unwavering support.”

“The United States stands with the democratically elected government of Georgia,” Bush said during an appearance at the White House. “We insist that the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Georgia be respected.”

Yet Bush’s statement, along with the moderate measures that came with it, served to underscore the limited options available to the United States, which has neither the wherewithal nor the willingness to enter into a military conflict with Russia on its territorial border.

Peace plan offers Russia a rationale to advance
By Andrew E Kramer, New York Times, August 14, 2008

It was nearly 2 a.m. on Wednesday when President Nicolas Sarkozy of France announced he had accomplished what seemed virtually impossible: Persuading the leaders of Georgia and Russia to agree to a set of principles that would stop the war.

Handshakes and congratulations were offered all around. But by the time the sun was up, Russian tanks were advancing again, this time taking positions around the strategically important city of Gori, in central Georgia.

It soon became clear that the six-point deal not only failed to slow the Russian advance, but it also allowed Russia to claim that it could push deeper into Georgia as part of so-called additional security measures it was granted in the agreement. Mr. Sarkozy, according to a senior Georgian official who witnessed the negotiations, also failed to persuade the Russians to agree to any time limit on their military action.

Rejuvenated Georgian president cites U.S. ties as ‘turning point’ in conflict
By CJ Chivers and Nicholas Kulish, New York Times, August 14, 2008

On Monday, President Mikheil Saakashvili, his army in retreat and his Western allies still surprised by the intensity of the Russian attack, was the very picture of vulnerability, dodging Russian military jets.

By Wednesday he seemed an almost preternaturally reinvigorated man, once again raising the temperature in Georgia’s bitter disagreements with Russia, and invoking special ties with American democracy and freedom.

Moments after President Bush appeared at the Rose Garden to say that the Pentagon would begin a humanitarian aid mission to support Georgia, Mr. Saakashvili was on the phone with a Western reporter, talking fast. “This is a turning point,” he said. Soon he appeared on national television, his tousled hair combed back flat and wearing a freshly pressed suit, assuring his country that the worst had passed.

No matter that Russian troops were 30 miles away, milling on the road outside the capital, meeting no resistance. Mr. Saakashvili was in cocky form in an interview later in the evening with reporters, expounding on Nazi propaganda, Orwell and the film “Dr. Strangelove.”

Russia working to destroy Georgia’s wounded military
By Tom Lasseter and Jonathan S. Landay, McClatchy, August 13, 2008

Russian troops, in clear violation of a cease-fire agreement set only on Tuesday, embarked Wednesday on what Georgian officials called a deliberate and systematic attempt to demolish what remains of the Georgian military.

The actions ignited an angry response from the United States, with President Bush demanding that Moscow withdraw its forces from Georgia.

The president also announced that U.S. military aircraft and ships would begin delivering humanitarian aid to the former Soviet republic in a “vigorous and ongoing” operation and that U.S. officials would expect unfettered access to Georgia’s ports and highways.

Georgia: a blow to U.S. energy
By Steve LeVine, BusinessWeek, August 13, 2008

The sudden war in the Caucasus brought Georgia to heel, reasserted Russia’s claim as the dominant force in the region, and dealt a blow to U.S. prestige. But in this part of the world, diplomacy and war are about oil and gas as much as they are about hegemony and the tragic loss of human life. Victory in Georgia now gives Russia the edge in the struggle over access to the Caspian’s 35 billion barrels of oil and trillions of cubic feet of gas. The probable losers: the U.S. and those Western oil companies that have bet heavily on the Caspian as one of the few regions where they could still operate with relative freedom.

At the core of the struggle is a vast network of actual and planned pipelines for shipping Caspian Sea oil to the world market from countries that were once part of the Soviet empire. American policymakers working with a BP-led consortium had already helped build oil and natural gas pipelines across Georgia to the Turkish coast. Next on the drawing board: another pipeline through Georgia to carry natural gas from the eastern shore of the Caspian Sea to Austria—offering an alternate supply to Western Europe, which now depends on Russia for a third of its energy.

Conflict narrows oil options for West
By Jad Mouawad, New York Times, August 14, 2008

Then the main pipeline that carries oil through Georgia was completed in 2005, it was hailed as a major success in the United States policy to diversify its energy supply. Not only did the pipeline transport oil produced in Central Asia, helping move the West away from its dependence on the Middle East, but it also accomplished another American goal: it bypassed Russia.

American policy makers hoped that diverting oil around Russia would keep the country from reasserting control over Central Asia and its enormous oil and gas wealth and would provide a safer alternative to Moscow’s control over export routes that it had inherited from Soviet days. The tug-of-war with Moscow was the latest version of the Great Game, the 19th-century contest for dominance in the region.

A bumper sticker that American diplomats distributed around Central Asia in the 1990s as the United States was working hard to make friends there summed up Washington’s strategic thinking: “Happiness is multiple pipelines.”

Now energy experts say that the hostilities between Russia and Georgia could threaten American plans to gain access to more of Central Asia’s energy resources at a time when booming demand in Asia and tight supplies helped push the price of oil to record highs.

Iraq minister: US combat troops to pull out in three years under new deal
By Deborah Haynes, The Times, August 14, 2008

American soldiers will withdraw from cities across Iraq next summer and all US combat troops will leave the country within three years, provided the violence remains low, under the terms of a draft agreement with the Iraqi Government.

In one of the most detailed insights yet into the content of the deal, Hoshyar Zebari, the Iraqi Foreign Minister, has also told The Times that the US military would be barred from unilaterally mounting attacks inside Iraq from next year.

In addition, the power of arrest for US soldiers would be curbed by the need to hand over any detainee to a new, US-Iraqi committee. Troops would require the green light from this joint command before conducting any operation.

Old media dethroned
By Tim Rutten, Los Angeles Times, August 9, 2008

When John Edwards admitted Friday that he lied about his affair with filmmaker Rielle Hunter, a former employee of his campaign, he may have ended his public life but he certainly ratified an end to the era in which traditional media set the agenda for national political journalism.

From the start, the Edwards scandal has belonged entirely to the alternative and new media. The tabloid National Enquirer has done all the significant reporting on it — reporting that turns out to be largely correct — and bloggers and online commentators have refused to let the story sputter into oblivion.

Editor’s Comment — That John Edwards finally had no choice but to engage in what has become a pro forma act of “coming clean” – the up-close-and-personal prime-time confession – was really among the least interesting of the ways in which he could have revealed himself. What would have been far more telling would have been for him to share the calculations he must have been making in late 2006.

Did he really believe he could make it all the way through a presidential campaign without this story coming out? Or was he holding in reserve a Clintonian back-up plan to engage in the kind of damage control that helped Bill and Hillary save their first run for the White House?

Ironically, confessing to his infidelity seems like the lesser of the confessions Edwards could have made.

Reticence of mainstream media becomes a story itself
By Richard Perez-Pena and Bill Carter, New York Times, August 9, 2008

For almost 10 months, the story of John Edwards’s affair remained the nearly exclusive province of the National Enquirer — through reports, denials, news of a pregnancy, questions about paternity and, finally, a slapstick chase through a hotel in Beverly Hills.

Political blogs, some cable networks and a few newspapers reported on it — or, more accurately, reported on The Enquirer reporting on it. Jay Leno and David Letterman made Mr. Edwards the butt of jokes on their late-night shows, but their own networks declined to report on the rumors surrounding him on the evening news. Why?

A number of news organizations with resources far greater than The Enquirer’s, like The New York Times, say they looked into the Edwards matter and found nothing solid enough to report, while others did not look at all.

New evidence suggests Ron Suskind is right
By Joe Conason, Salon, August 8, 2008

If Ron Suskind’s sensational charge that the White House and CIA colluded in forging evidence to justify the Iraq invasion isn’t proved conclusively in his new book, “The Way of the World,” then the sorry record of the Bush administration offers no basis to dismiss his allegation. Setting aside the relative credibility of the author and the government, the relevant question is whether the available facts demand a full investigation by a congressional committee, with testimony under oath.

When we look back at the events surrounding the emergence of the faked letter that is at the center of this controversy, a strong circumstantial case certainly can be made in support of Suskind’s story.

That story begins during the final weeks of 2003, when everyone in the White House was suffering severe embarrassment over both the origins and the consequences of the invasion of Iraq. No weapons of mass destruction had been found in Iraq. No evidence of significant connections between Saddam Hussein’s regime and the al-Qaida terrorist organization had been discovered there either. Nothing in this costly misadventure was turning out as advertised by the Bush administration.

Plucky little Georgia? No, the cold war reading won’t wash
By Mark Almond, The Guardian, August 9, 2008

For many people the sight of Russian tanks streaming across a border in August has uncanny echoes of Prague 1968. That cold war reflex is natural enough, but after two decades of Russian retreat from those bastions it is misleading. Not every development in the former Soviet Union is a replay of Soviet history.

The clash between Russia and Georgia over South Ossetia, which escalated dramatically yesterday, in truth has more in common with the Falklands war of 1982 than it does with a cold war crisis. When the Argentine junta was basking in public approval for its bloodless recovery of Las Malvinas, Henry Kissinger anticipated Britain’s widely unexpected military response with the comment: “No great power retreats for ever.” Maybe today Russia has stopped the long retreat to Moscow which started under Gorbachev.

Has Georgia overreached in Ossetia?
By Tony Karon, Time, August 9, 2008

Whether or not the effect was intended, Moscow now appears to be using Saakashvili’s strategic overreach to teach a brutal lesson not only to the Georgians, but also to other neighbors seeking to align themselves with the West against Russia. Saakashvili is appealing for Western support, based on international recognition of South Ossetia as sovereign Georgian territory. “A full-scale aggression has been launched against Georgia,” he said, calling for Western intervention. But given NATO’s previous warnings, its commitments elsewhere and the reluctance of many of its member states to antagonize Russia, it remains unlikely that Georgia will get more than verbal support from its desired Western protectors. Saakashvili appears to have both underestimated the scale of the Russian backlash, and overestimated the extent of support he could count on from the U.S. and its allies. The Georgian leader may have expected Washington to step up to his defense, particularly given his country’s centrality to the geopolitics of energy — Georgia is the only alternative to Russia as the route for a pipeline carrying oil westward from Azerbaijan. But Russia is not threatening to overrun Georgia. Moscow claims to be simply using its military to restore the secessionist boundary, which in the process would deal Saakashvili a humiliating defeat.

Although its outcome is yet to be decided, there’s no win-win outcome to the offensive launched by Georgia with the goal of recovering South Ossetia. Either Saakashvili wins, or Moscow does. Unless the U.S. and its allies demonstrate an unlikely appetite for confrontation with an angry and resurgent Russia in its own backyard, the smart money would be on Moscow.

‘Invasion of Georgia’ a ‘3 a.m. moment’
By Ben Smith, Politico, August 8, 2008

When the North Caucasus slid into war Thursday night, it presented Senators John McCain and Barack Obama with a true “3 a.m. moment,” and their responses to the crisis suggested dramatic differences in how each candidate, as president, would lead America in moments of international crisis.

While Obama offered a response largely in line with statements issued by democratically elected world leaders, including President Bush, first calling on both sides to negotiate, John McCain took a remarkably—and uniquely—more aggressive stance, siding clearly with Georgia’s pro-Western leaders and placing the blame for the conflict entirely on Russia.

The abrupt crisis in an obscure hotspot had the features of the real foreign policy situations presidents face—not the clean hypotheticals of candidates’ white papers and debating points.

Iran, the US and the post-Cold War world
By Rami G. Khouri, Daily Star, August 9, 2008

The American-European-led international diplomatic minuet with Iran is the most interesting and significant political dynamic in the world today. What happens on the Iran issue will determine power relations for years to come, far beyond Iran’s immediate neighborhood, because some critical issues are captured in the Iranian nuclear question. These include global energy flows, the credibility and impact of the UN Security Council, the limits of economic and political sanctions, the capacity of determined regional powers to defy greater global powers, the interplay between Israeli, Western and global interests, the coherence of political Europe, and the spirit and letter of international law, conventions and treaties.

Domestic political posturing in Iran, the United States, Israel and Europe aside, three core issues are at stake here: Iran’s right to develop nuclear technology for verifiably peaceful purposes; Israeli concerns that an Iranian nuclear bomb would be an existential threat, which Israel will never allow to happen; and Western fears of Iran’s military power, nuclear capabilities, and radicalizing political influence around the Middle East.

Pakistan army to ask Pervez Musharraf to resign
By Isambard Wilkinson, Daily Telegraph, August 8, 2008

Pakistan’s all-powerful army chief will ask President Pervez Musharraf to resign from office within a week, a senior government official claimed today.

The claim was supported by a former military aide to the president who said that the army’s leadership wished Mr Musharraf to be spared the humiliation of impeachment.

The civilian government intensified an attritional, seven-month long power struggle with the presidency when it announced earlier this week that it is to begin impeachment proceedings against Mr Musharraf on Monday.

Close Musharraf allies say he has no plans to resign under pressure
By Jane Perlez, New York Times, August 9, 2008

President Pervez Musharraf will stage a spirited defense against impeachment charges that the governing coalition is pursuing against him, and has no intention of resigning under pressure, his key allies said Friday.

Mr. Musharraf, who has been president for nearly nine years, faces the first impeachment proceedings in Pakistani history, after the leaders of the two major political parties in the coalition announced Thursday that they would seek to remove him.

The grounds for impeachment included mismanagement of the economy, along with Mr. Musharraf’s imposition in November of emergency rule and the firing of nearly 60 judges, the party leaders said.

A US withdrawal deal with Sadr?
By Mark Kukis, Time, August 8, 2008

Shi’ite militia leader Muqtada al-Sadr stepped back into Iraq’s political fray Friday with an offer that (if genuine) Washington would be hard-pressed to refuse: Set a timetable for withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq, and the Mahdi Army will begin to disband. “The main reason for the armed resistance is the American military presence,” said Sadr emissary Salah al-Ubaidi, who spoke to reporters in Najaf Friday. “If the American military begins to withdrawal, there will be no need for these armed groups.”

Sadr in the past has vowed to expand the humanitarian work of his movement but promised to maintain fighters from his Mahdi Army militia, which has fought against both the Iraqi government and U.S. forces. Al-Ubaidi’s remarks effectively offered the strongest assurances yet that the Mahdi Army is willing to stand down entirely in Iraq, if American military forces back away.

In Iraq, regional politics heats up
By Sudarsan Raghavan and Ernesto Londono, Washington Post, August 8, 2008

A growing number of Iraqi groups are choosing to pursue their agendas through politics instead of bloodshed, a trend that has helped bring down levels of violence. But as Iraqis leave behind the sectarian cataclysms of recent years, ethnic and regional political disputes in several parts of Iraq are becoming more pronounced.

In the south, ruling Shiite parties are vying for electoral power against loyalists of Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr and Shiite tribal leaders. In the west, Sunni tribes are challenging the political control of established Sunni religious parties. And in the north, ethnic Kurds, Arabs and Turkmens are in a struggle for control of the oil-rich city of Kirkuk.

“What we have now is people who know how to use weapons and who now want to play politics,” said Mithal al-Alusi, an independent Sunni legislator. Even so, some leaders seem unable to decide whether to trust their fortunes to the ballot box.

Obama to House Dems: If sanctions fail, Israel will likely strike Iran
By Jake Tapper, ABC News, July 30, 2008

Sen. Barack Obama, D-Illinois, met with House Democrats yesterday, talking about his trip abroad and his observations.

Obama told the caucus, according to an attendee, “Nobody said this to me directly but I get the feeling from my talks that if the sanctions don’t work Israel is going to strike Iran.” Others in the room recall this as well.

Editor’s Comment — So I guess Obama has decided that if he becomes president and Israel decides to attack Iran, then as president he would of course be utterly impotent — Israel being the most powerful nation on Earth. What’s an AIPAC-loyal American president to do? No doubt Benjamin Netanyahu has already taken due note. Bibi already knows that if he becomes Israel’s next prime minister he’s got carte blanche from McCain; now he just got a passive green light from Obama.

Israel after Olmert
By Andrew Lee Butters, Time, July 31, 2008

The surprising thing about Ehud Olmert’s announcement on Wednesday was not his declared intention to resign in September as Prime Minister of Israel after just two years in office; it’s that he managed to last this long. Olmert’s handling of the botched Lebanon war in the summer of 2006 plunged his approval ratings into the single digits, and he never really recovered the confidence of the Israeli electorate. Still, he hung on, even when he became the target of a criminal investigation into corruption allegations, promising to resign in the event of an indictment. Some will see the fact that he has chosen to do so now, making clear that he will not be a candidate when his Kadima party holds a primary to choose a new leader in September, as a sign that charges may be in the offing over the case of U.S. businessman Morris Talansky, who has admitted giving Olmert large undeclared donations.

Police: Olmert quitting because he knows we have him
By Jonathan Lis, Haaretz, July 31, 2008

During the two-hour interview – which is the time alloted to the police by Olmert’s office – the investigators are expected to ask Olmert to explain a series of documents, collected by police during the past month, and which allegedly bolster the suspicions that the prime minister was aware and was party to the use of a mechanism for which he received multiple-funding for his trips abroad. Police suspect the excess funds were used to pay for dozens of flights for Olmert’s family over the years.

Police are focusing their investigation on the years when Olmert served as minister of Industry and Trade from 2003 to 2006.

Law enforcement sources suggested in recent days that the investigators may surprise Olmert with questions about other investigations being conducted against him.

But the focus will be Olmertours, and the prime minister will be asked to provide explanations on a precise list of flights for which he allegedly sought multiple funding, and the names of the institutions that funded the trips.

Hamas frees German TV’s cameraman after 5 days
AP, July 31, 2008

The Hamas militant group released a Palestinian cameraman for German TV on Thursday, and the broadcaster said the 42-year-old man was tortured during his five days in detention.

Masked Hamas gunmen nabbed Sawah Abu Saif from his Gaza home last Saturday during a mass weekend roundup of alleged activists of the rival Fatah movement. Hamas blames Fatah for a Gaza City explosion that killed five Hamas members and a 6-year-old girl. Fatah denies the charges and the Germany broadcaster ARD denies Abu Saif has any political affiliation with either group.

ARD had shut down its Gaza City office to protest the arrest of its cameraman.

Time running out for US in Iraq
By Bill Delahunt and Rosa DeLauro, Boston Globe, July 31, 2008

A timetable for the withdrawal of US troops has long been a priority for Iraqis – 70 percent want the United States out, according to the latest polls. This sentiment is also reflected in Parliament – the only directly elected branch of government. Two months ago, the political parties representing a majority sent a letter to Congress opposing any US-Iraq security agreement without a timetable.

The Iraqi executive branch, usually allied with the Bush administration on this issue, has joined this consensus. Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki insists that the agreement must “either remove US forces from the country or include a timetable for withdrawal.”

But the Bush administration continues to resist, even as the clock ticks toward Dec. 31 – when the current UN mandate expires and US troops lose their legal authority to fight and their immunity from prosecution in Iraq. We are concerned that the administration is not preparing to renew the mandate, which has been done routinely and will be necessary if negotiations do not culminate in a valid security agreement.

Afghanistan: Not a good war
By Conn Hallinan, Foreign Policy in Focus, July 30, 2008

Every war has a story line. World War I was “the war to end all wars.” World War II was “the war to defeat fascism.”

Iraq was sold as a war to halt weapons of mass destruction; then to overthrow Saddam Hussein, then to build democracy. In the end it was a fabrication built on a falsehood and anchored in a fraud.

But Afghanistan is the “good war,” aimed at “those who attacked us,” in the words of columnist Frank Rich. It is “the war of necessity,” asserts the New York Times, to roll back the “power of Al Qaeda and the Taliban.”

Barack Obama is making the distinction between the “bad war” in Iraq and the “good war” in Afghanistan a centerpiece of his run for the presidency. He proposes ending the war in Iraq and redeploying U.S. military forces in order “to finish the job in Afghanistan.”

NW Pakistan clashes intensify; peace deals at risk, Taliban says
By Candace Rondeaux, Washington Post, July 31, 2008

Clashes between insurgents and Pakistani troops escalated Wednesday in the country’s fractious northwest as Taliban leaders threatened to withdraw their support for peace deals brokered this year with Pakistan’s new government.

Accounts of casualties from the skirmishes in Pakistan’s Swat Valley, near the Afghan border, varied widely and could not be independently verified. A local military spokesman said that five Pakistani soldiers and at least 38 insurgents were killed, but a spokesman for a pro-Taliban group disputed that tally, saying that only three of its fighters had been slain.

It was the third consecutive day of violence between pro-Taliban extremists and government troops in the formerly serene Swat Valley. After skirmishes erupted near the town of Matta, Pakistani security forces began enforcing a 24-hour curfew in the area, a military spokesman said.

Living through the age of denial in America
By Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch, July 31, 2008

If, on the evening of October 22, 1962, you had told me that, in 2008, America’s most formidable enemy would be Iran, I would have danced a jig. Well, maybe not a jig, but I’ll tell you this: I would have been flabbergasted.

On that October evening, President John F. Kennedy went before the nation — I heard him on radio — to tell us all that Soviet missile sites were just then being prepared on the island of Cuba with “a nuclear strike capability against the Western Hemisphere.” It was, he said, a “secret, swift and extraordinary buildup of communist missiles — in an area well known to have a special and historical relationship to the United States and the nations of the Western Hemisphere.” When fully operational, those nuclear-tipped weapons would reach “as far north as Hudson Bay, Canada, and as far south as Lima, Peru.” I certainly knew what Hudson Bay, far to the north, meant for me.

“It shall be the policy of this nation,” Kennedy added ominously, “to regard any nuclear missile launched from Cuba against any nation in the Western Hemisphere as an attack on the United States, requiring a full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union.” And he ended, in part, this way: “My fellow citizens: let no one doubt that this is a difficult and dangerous effort on which we have set out. No one can foresee precisely what course it will take or what costs or casualties will be incurred…”

Study questions US strategy against al-Qaida
By Barry Schweid, AP, July 28, 2008

The United States can defeat al-Qaida if it relies less on force and more on policing and intelligence to root out the terror group’s leaders, a new study contends.

“Keep in mind that terrorist groups are not eradicated overnight,” said the study [253-page PDF document] by the federally funded Rand research center, an organization that counsels the Pentagon.

Its report said that the use of military force by the United States or other countries should be reserved for quelling large, well-armed and well-organized insurgencies, and that American officials should stop using the term “war on terror” and replace it with “counterterrorism.”

Editor’s Comment — After 9/11, the US government and the American people colluded in a charade: an American conquest that would supposedly result in the eradication of terrorism and — taken to its hyperbolic height — bring about the end of evil. The idea that George Bush and Dick Cheney were going to lead the charge in bringing about an end of evil should have been met with howling, derisive laughter. Instead, the phrase “war on terrorism” slid so smoothly into everyday language that it quickly acquired social weight even while remaining conceptually as light as ether.

So, now we get word from the sober and hardcore establishment RAND Corp. that — surprise, surprise — combating terrorism is really a policing and intelligence issue.

Obama has promised to end not only “the war” (limited to Iraq) but also the mindset to took us into war. To do so will require deconstructing the concept of a war on terrorism, yet far from doing that, his campaign rhetoric merely echoes the mindset that took us to war by reinforcing the idea that the war on terrorism is a real war.

Abbas vows to dismantle PA if Israel frees Hamas prisoners for Shalit
By Uri Blau, Haaretz, July 30, 2008

If Israel releases Hamas members of the Palestinian parliament as part of a deal for the return of kidnapped soldier Gilad Shalit, PA President Mahmoud Abbas will dismantle the Palestinian Authority, Abbas warned Israel last week.

Abbas sent the warning to GOC Central Command Maj. Gen. Gadi Shamni via Hussein al-Sheikh, head of the PA’s civil affairs department, who is responsible for coordinating with Israel on anything involving the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Al-Sheikh, who told Shamni that this was a “personal message” from Abbas, stressed that the Palestinian leader did not speak merely of “resigning,” but of “dismantling the PA.”

Israel arrested dozens of Hamas politicians, including ministers and parliament members, shortly after Hamas kidnapped Shalit on June 25, 2006. Many have since been released by order of a military court, but about 40 remain in Israeli jails.

The message from Abbas was highly unusual, since publicly, he tries to portray himself as the leader of all the Palestinians – for instance, by repeatedly demanding that Israel release all its Palestinian prisoners.

Editor’s Comment — The Haaretz report says:

According to an Israeli source well-versed in what is happening in the PA, publication of Abbas’ threat to dismantle the PA if Israel releases the Hamas parliamentarians is liable to discredit him massively in the eyes of many Palestinians.

Worse than that, the more obvious it becomes that there is virtually no such thing as Palestinian solidarity, the more tenuous it becomes to sustain the idea that there is such a thing as a Palestinian cause. Palestinians face an existential threat and while that threat may have originated from Zionism and the state of Israel, the greatest danger now appears to be of self-destruction.

Neo-con Richard Perle in Kurdish oil deal?
By Johanna Neuman, Los Angeles Times, July 29, 2008

Is neo-conservative Richard Perle — one of the most effective voices in encouraging the Bush administration to topple Saddam Hussein — in talks to join a consortium of investors to drill for oil in Iraq’s Kurdistan and in Kazakhstan?

The Wall Street Journal says so in a piece this morning, pointing out that Perle has been talking to Kazakhstan’s Washington envoy, Alexander Mirtchev, and his associate, Kaloyan Dimitrov. As for the Kurds in northern Iraq, the Bush administration — and the government in Baghdad — have asked them not to issue any oil-drilling contracts until Iraq enacts a national oil bill to divvy up lucrative oil revenues. The Journal says Perle has approached the Kurds.

Barack’s European vacation
By Thomas Frank, Wall Street Journal, July 30, 2008

As I watched the right pour out its rain of fury on Barack Obama after his Berlin speech I couldn’t help but think of poor old Wile E. Coyote, raging impotently as the Road Runner zips through one of his carefully prepared snares.

Over the years conservatives have invested considerable capital, and enjoyed considerable success, in making “old Europe” a veritable synonym for all that is effete and snobbish and Chablis-drinking and just plain alien about liberalism. “Europe” was a bit of symbolism they thought they had tarnished beyond redemption; a well they had poisoned for good.

Remember “Freedom Fries”? Or how John Kerry was supposed to “look French”? Or how misguided Europeans were supposed to be with their national health plans and their failure to tremble before the Almighty?

CIA outlines Pakistan links with militants
By Mark Mazzetti and Eric Schmitt, New York Times, July 30, 2008

A top Central Intelligence Agency official traveled secretly to Islamabad this month to confront Pakistan’s most senior officials with new information about ties between the country’s powerful spy service and militants operating in Pakistan’s tribal areas, according to American military and intelligence officials.

The C.I.A. emissary presented evidence showing that members of the spy service had deepened their ties with some militant groups that were responsible for a surge of violence in Afghanistan, possibly including the suicide bombing this month of the Indian Embassy in Kabul, the officials said.

The decision to confront Pakistan with what the officials described as a new C.I.A. assessment of the spy service’s activities seemed to be the bluntest American warning to Pakistan since shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks about the ties between the spy service and Islamic militants.

Good cop, bad cop: Pakistan reels
By Syed Saleem Shahzad, Asia Times, July 30, 2008

Ever since Pakistan signed onto the United States’ “war on terror” in 2001, Washington has adopted a carrot-and-stick approach in an attempt to prod its often reluctant partner.

Palestinians ‘routinely torture’ rival detainees
By Jonathan Steele, The Guardian, July 28, 2008

Palestinians detained by Fatah and Hamas, the two main factions in the West Bank and Gaza, face routine abuse and torture, according to two leading human rights organisations in reports published this week.

Al-Haq, an independent Palestinian human rights group, said yesterday that more than 1,000 people have been detained by each side within the past year. An estimated 20%-30% of the detainees suffered torture, including severe beatings and being tied up in painful positions, said Al-Haq director Shawan Jabarin, citing sworn statements from 150 detainees. It said mistreatment had led to three deaths in Gaza and one in the West Bank.

Al-Haq blamed Hamas’s Executive Force and the group’s armed wing, the Izz-al-Din al-Qassam Brigades, for most of the abuses in Gaza. It said the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas’s Preventive Security Force and General Intelligence Service were the main culprits in the West Bank.

Editor’s Comment — Ever since 9/11 there has been a popular Western trend of opinion convinced that the roots of terrorism are embedded in Islam, but the domain that has received pitifully little attention is one that is exclusive to no particular culture: the institutionalization of brutality. This is something that appears to be pervasive in political cultures across the Middle East; it is embedded in the American penal system; it is an undercurrent to the glorification of military cultures; it is one of the most influential dimensions of the entertainment industry.

Fatah and Hamas may be getting ready for another bloodbath
Editorial, Daily Star, July 28, 2008

After three deadly bombings and a string of tit-for-tat arrests, tensions between Fatah and Hamas are once again running dangerously high. The last time that the rivalry between the two groups degenerated into street violence nearly a year ago, hundreds of innocent people were killed as a result. If the leaders of both Palestinian factions fail to come to their senses and rein in their respective supporters, the streets of Gaza and/or the Occupied West Bank could soon see yet another needless bloodbath.

Hamas leaders acted rashly when they almost immediately accused Fatah of carrying out an attack in Gaza late Friday night – and then responded by rounding up almost 200 Fatah members and shutting down cultural and sports offices. Fatah upped the ante of irresponsible behavior when it retaliated to Hamas’ move by arresting 20 the Islamist group’s members in the Occupied West Bank. Both groups know what can happen when these kinds of retaliatory actions get out of hand and both groups now have an urgent responsibility to prevent that from happening again.

Our torture policy has deeper roots in Fox Television than the Constitution
By Dahlia Lithwick, Slate, July 26, 2008

The most influential legal thinker in the development of modern American interrogation policy is not a behavioral psychologist, international lawyer, or counterinsurgency expert. Reading both Jane Mayer’s stunning The Dark Side and Philippe Sands’ The Torture Team, I quickly realized that the prime mover of American interrogation doctrine is none other than the star of Fox television’s 24: Jack Bauer.

This fictional counterterrorism agent—a man never at a loss for something to do with an electrode—has his fingerprints all over U.S. interrogation policy. As Sands and Mayer tell it, the lawyers designing interrogation techniques cited Bauer more frequently than the Constitution.

According to British lawyer and writer Philippe Sands, Jack Bauer—played by Kiefer Sutherland—was an inspiration at early “brainstorming meetings” of military officials at Guantanamo in September of 2002. Diane Beaver, the staff judge advocate general who gave legal approval to 18 controversial new interrogation techniques including water-boarding, sexual humiliation, and terrorizing prisoners with dogs, told Sands that Bauer “gave people lots of ideas.” Michael Chertoff, the homeland-security chief, once gushed in a panel discussion on 24 organized by the Heritage Foundation that the show “reflects real life.”

Olmert: Living with 270,000 Arabs in Jerusalem means more terror
By Shahar Ilan, Avi Issacharoff and Barak Ravid, Haaretz, July 28, 2008

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said Monday that the situation in which Jews and Arabs live side by side in Jerusalem inevitably leads to terror attacks.

“Whoever thinks its possible to live with 270,000 Arabs in Jerusalem must take into account that there will be more bulldozers, more tractors, and more cars carrying out [terror] attacks,” Olmert said, referring to two incidents this month in which Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem deliberately plowed bulldozers into passing cars in the capital, causing casualties.

Olmert added that in light of the volatile situation in Jerusalem, it was unlikely that Israel and the Palestinians would reach an agreement on the issue by the end of the year, as is the stated goal. He said that other core issues, such as the fate of the Palestinian refugees and the borders of a future Palestinian state, could be agreed upon by the year-end deadline.

Editor’s Comment — Olmert’s statement is nothing more than a thinly veiled appeal for ethnic cleansing.

Pakistan plans a push into its tribal areas
By Julian E. Barnes, Los Angeles Times, July 29, 2008

Meeting a key Pentagon demand, Pakistan’s military is planning to move a major unit of its regular army into the tribal areas on its western border, a largely lawless area used as a haven by Al Qaeda and Afghan insurgents, Pakistani commanders have told U.S. military officials.

The army unit would supplement the country’s Frontier Corps, an ill-trained force frequently routed by insurgents, a senior U.S. military officer said. A fully trained and equipped army unit would represent a change, long sought by U.S. officials, in Islamabad’s stance toward the troubled region.

However, U.S. officials also question how effective or long-lasting the Pakistani push is likely to be.

Pakistani leader reproaches Bush for missile strike
By Jonathan S. Landay and Saeed Shah, McClatchy, July 28, 2008

A U.S. missile strike that’s believed to have killed a senior al Qaida operative in Pakistan’s tribal area roiled talks Monday between President Bush and Pakistani Prime Minister Sayed Yousaf Gilani, who reproached Bush for acting unilaterally and failing to share intelligence with Pakistani authorities.

A U.S. official defended the missile strike as a message that Washington will no longer abide Pakistan’s failure to deny al Qaida and the Taliban refuge at a time of surging cross-border attacks on U.S., NATO and Afghan forces in Afghanistan.

“If they (Pakistan) aren’t doing anything, then we are,” said the official, who requested anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to discuss the issue publicly.

Why Sunday’s bombings could help Erdogan
By Jürgen Gottschlich, Der Spiegel, July 28, 2008

Sunday’s terror attack in Istanbul hit Turkey at a particularly critical juncture. The country’s highest court is expected to rule soon on the legality of the prime minister’s Islamist-rooted AKP party. But Erdogan himself stands to profit if the bloodbath leads the judges to issue a ruling that fosters national unity.

Regardless who was responsible for the bombings on Sunday evening in Istanbul, the attackers could hardly have chosen a more sensitive time to hit the country. Just a few hours after the massacre in the district of Güngören, which killed 17 people and left more than 150 injured, the Constitutional Court in Ankara convened to deliberate the case seeking to ban the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP). A verdict is expected by the end of the week. It is possible that by next week the country could be without any political leadership at all.

Meanwhile another historic case was launched on Friday by a different prosecutor — for the first time former generals were indicted on charges of plotting a putsch to overthrow the government. They are accused of having formed a shadowy organization called Ergenekon along with ultranationalist commandos, far-right lawyers, well-known business leaders and journalists with radical Kemalist sympathies.

Snub for Iran eases nuclear crisis
By M K Bhadrakumar, Asia Times, July 29, 2008

A window of opportunity for Iran to become a member of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) seemed to have opened when on July 18 the Russian news agency quoted a source in the Foreign Ministry in Moscow hinting at such a prospect. It happened two days after Washington let it be known that a shift in its Iran policy was under way.

The unnamed Russian diplomat said the SCO foreign ministers at a meeting in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, a week later would decide on whether to lift a moratorium on bringing in new states. “The moratorium has lasted for two years. We have now decided to consider the possibility of the SCO’s enlargement,” he said. It appeared that weathering US opposition, Moscow was pushing Iran’s pending request for SCO membership. Founded in 2001, the SCO currently comprises China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. Iran has observer status.

However, in the event, following the meeting in Dushanbe on Friday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov revealed that the foreign ministers did not discuss the enlargement of the SCO, while finalizing the agenda of the organization’s summit meeting on August 28, and that Iran wouldn’t be able to get the status of an associate member.

California field goes from rush to reflection of global limits
By Steven Mufson, Washington Post, July 29, 2008

In May 1899, a pair of oil prospectors wielding picks and shovels dug into a bank of the Kern River where some gooey liquid had seeped to the surface. About 45 feet down, they hit oil, and when the local newspaper printed the news, it set off an oil rush that swept up hundreds of fortune seekers, oil companies, a big railroad and even some enterprising school districts that bought up tracts in hope of turning a profit.

Today, on an arid square of land the size of Manhattan, thousands upon thousands of black derricks crowd the landscape, bobbing gently up and down and sipping crude oil from the field discovered a century ago. The wells aren’t gushers these days, but they still squeeze out a few barrels a day here, a few more there.

Chevron has injected steam into the reservoirs, coaxing the sedimentary rock into giving up millions of barrels of heavy oil that was too thick and sticky to retrieve using the technology of decades past.

Gates: War with Iran would be ‘disastrous’
By Amir Oren, Haaretz, July 28, 2008

A war with Iran would be “disastrous on a number of levels,” according to U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates.

In an article appearing in the latest issue of Parameters, the U.S. Army War College quarterly, Gates wrote that with the army already bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan, “another war in the Middle East is the last thing we need” – despite the fact that Iran “supports terrorism,” is “a destabilizing force throughout the Middle East and Southwest Asia and, in my judgment, is hell-bent on acquiring nuclear weapons.”

Editor’s Comment — Haaretz also notes that in another document, the Pentagon’s 2008 National Defense Strategy, Gates does not include Israel among the US’s “closest allies” — those being the “U.K., Australia, and Canada.”

This might be newsworthy but it shouldn’t be surprising. It’s easy enough to see why the US is an ally of Israel — “one in helpful association with another” — but not vice versa. Does Israel help the United States? Not in any ways that I’m aware of — but I welcome suggestions to the contrary.

End of the two-state solution
By Saree Makdisi, The Guardian, July 28, 2008

In order to try to create an exclusively Jewish state in what had been the culturally diverse land of Palestine, Israel’s founders expelled or drove into flight half of Palestine’s Muslim and Christian population and seized their land, their houses, and their property (furniture, clothing, books, personal effects, family heirlooms), in what Palestinians call the nakba, or catastrophe, of 1948.

Even while demanding – rightly – that no one should forget the Jewish people’s history of suffering, and above all the Holocaust, Israel has insisted ever since 1948 not merely that the Palestinians must forget their own history, but that what it calls peace must be premised on that forgetting, and hence on the Palestinians’ renunciation of their rights. As Israel’s foreign minister has said, if the Palestinians want peace, they must learn to strike the word “nakba” from their lexicon.

Some must never forget, while others, clearly, must not be allowed to remember. Far from mere hypocrisy, this attitude perfectly expresses the Israeli people’s mistaken belief that they can find the security they need at the expense of the Palestinians, or that one people’s right can be secured at the cost of another’s.

Global pressures have converged to forge a new oil reality
By Steven Mufson, Washington Post, July 27, 2008

The two events, half a world apart, went largely unheralded.

Early this month, Valero Energy in Texas got the unwelcome news that Mexico would be cutting supplies to one of the company’s Gulf Coast refineries by up to 15 percent. Mexico’s state-owned oil enterprise is one of Valero’s main sources of crude, but oil output from Mexican fields, including the giant Cantarell field, is drying up. Mexican sales of crude oil to the United States have plunged to their lowest level in more than a dozen years.

The same week, India’s Tata Motors announced it was expanding its plans to begin producing a new $2,500 “people’s car” called the Nano in the fall. The company hopes that by making automobiles affordable for people in India and elsewhere, it could eventually sell 1 million of them a year.

Although neither development made headlines, together they were emblematic of the larger forces of supply and demand that have sent world oil prices bursting through one record level after another. And while the cost of crude has surged before, this oil shock is different. There is little prospect that drivers will ever again see gas prices retreat to the levels they enjoyed for much of the last generation.

Iraq clings to a rickety calm between war and peace
By Ned Parker, Los Angeles Times, July 28, 2008

The departure this month of the last of the 28,500 extra troops sent in a U.S. military buildup leaves Iraq in a rickety calm, an in-between space that is not quite war and not quite peace where ethnic and sectarian tensions bubble beneath the surface.

Politicians and U.S. officials hail the remarkable turnaround from open civil war that left 3,700 Iraqis dead during the worst month in the fall of 2006, compared with June’s toll of 490, according to Pentagon estimates.

Signs abound that normal life is starting to return. Revelers can idle away the hours at several neighborhood joints in Baghdad where the tables are buried in beers and a man can bring a girlfriend dolled up in a nice dress.

Despite the gains, the political horizon is clouded: Shiite Muslim parties are locked in dangerous rivalries across central and southern Iraq. Kurds and Arabs in the north compete for land with no resolution in sight. U.S.-backed Sunni Arab fighters who turned on the group Al Qaeda in Iraq could return to the insurgency if the government does not deliver jobs and a chance to join the political process.

The art of asymmetric warfare
By Jason Burke, The Guardian, July 27, 2008

A US military officer quoted in the excellent report by the International Crisis Group into Taliban propaganda operations released a few days ago says, “unfortunately, we tend to view information operations as supplementing kinetic [fighting] operations. For the Taliban, however, information objectives tend to drive kinetic operations … virtually every kinetic operation they undertake is specifically designed to influence attitudes or perceptions”.

This is strategic thought of extreme novelty, and in no small way helps explain the relative success of the Taliban so far in Afghanistan. In terms of a communication strategy it certainly goes well beyond the clumsy international coalition efforts which have remained largely focused on the international audience. Western press officers’ ability to talk to the Afghan public is hindered by their minimal language skills and the cultural gaps that separate them, and remains very limited.

Equally, the idea that military operations should be decided primarily according to their effect on populations and thus should be determined to a significant degree by the exigencies of modern media technology and by journalists is anathema to most western soldiers, most of whom see the press as a necessary evil at best.

The Taliban by contrast are quite happy to shape their military strikes according to the media demand. They know that spectacular attacks such as that on Kabul’s Serena hotel or the repeated attempts on President Karzai’s life are effective.

The military-industrial complex
By Chalmers Johnson, TomDispatch, July , 2008

Most Americans have a rough idea what the term “military-industrial complex” means when they come across it in a newspaper or hear a politician mention it. President Dwight D. Eisenhower introduced the idea to the public in his farewell address of January 17, 1961. “Our military organization today bears little relation to that known by any of my predecessors in peacetime,” he said, “or indeed by the fighting men of World War II and Korea… We have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions… We must not fail to comprehend its grave implications… We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.”

Although Eisenhower’s reference to the military-industrial complex is, by now, well-known, his warning against its “unwarranted influence” has, I believe, largely been ignored. Since 1961, there has been too little serious study of, or discussion of, the origins of the military-industrial complex, how it has changed over time, how governmental secrecy has hidden it from oversight by members of Congress or attentive citizens, and how it degrades our Constitutional structure of checks and balances.

From its origins in the early 1940s, when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was building up his “arsenal of democracy,” down to the present moment, public opinion has usually assumed that it involved more or less equitable relations — often termed a “partnership” — between the high command and civilian overlords of the United States military and privately-owned, for-profit manufacturing and service enterprises. Unfortunately, the truth of the matter is that, from the time they first emerged, these relations were never equitable.

The Taliban’s Baghdad strategy
By Sami Yousafzai and Ron Moreau, Newsweek, July 26, 2008

Faridoon stares in alarm at the two Newsweek reporters who just walked into his shop. “You guys better get out of town fast,” the 21-year-old Afghan says as quietly as possible. “There’s Taliban everywhere.” Lying in the street outside are the burned-out hulks of a gasoline tanker and a shipping-container truck that someone set ablaze two nights before, right in front of Faridoon’s motor-oil shop in Maidan Shar, the tiny, dust-blown capital of Maidan Wardak province, barely 25 miles south of Kabul. Only days earlier and a few miles farther down Highway 1, Taliban fighters ambushed and burned a 50-truck commercial convoy that was carrying fuel and supplies for the U.S. military. Even during the day, Faridoon and other townspeople warn, it’s not safe to visit the area.

Afghanistan’s insurgents have a new target—Kabul, and the belt of towns and villages surrounding the capital. “Today the Taliban are here,” says Maidan Shar’s white-smocked pharmacist Syed Mohammad, 32. “Tomorrow they may be in Kabul.” The supply convoy was attacked in his home village, a dot on the map called Pul Surkh, where he says insurgents now travel freely, packing new AK-47s and rocket-propelled-grenade launchers. A series of spectacular recent terrorist incidents have shaken Kabul, a city that is all too familiar with violence. Blast walls and barbed wire have sprouted to defend against suicide bombers; residents are afraid to travel even a few miles outside the city. To some, the Afghan capital is beginning to feel like a new Baghdad.

U.S. war on terrorism loses ground in Pakistan
By Greg Miller, Los Angeles Times, July 27, 2008

Although the “war on terrorism” remains a consuming focus of the U.S. government, the Bush administration appears poised to leave behind a situation not unlike the one it inherited nearly eight years ago: a resurgent Al Qaeda ensconced in South Asia, training new recruits, plotting attacks against the West, and seemingly beyond the United States’ reach.

In dozens of interviews, senior U.S. national security, intelligence and military officials described a counter-terrorism campaign in Pakistan that has lost momentum and is beset by frustration.

CIA officers pursuing Al Qaeda fighters are confined largely to a collection of crumbling bases in northwestern Pakistan. Most are on remote Pakistani military outposts, where they are kept on a short leash under an awkward arrangement with their hosts — rarely allowed to leave and often left with little to do but plead with their Pakistani counterparts to act.

Embraced overseas, but to what effect?
By Dan Balz, Washington Post, July 27, 2008

As Obama moved from Iraq and Afghanistan to Jordan and Israel and then to three European capitals before flying back to Chicago on Saturday night, strategists back home measured the political fallout for the senator from Illinois and for the presumptive Republican nominee John McCain on an almost hourly basis. Their consensus was that the week turned into a near-rout for Obama.

John Weaver, who once was McCain’s top political strategist, said his old boss made a big mistake by virtually daring Obama to go to Iraq and Afghanistan, only to see Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki generally embrace the Democrat’s plan for withdrawing combat forces when he went there.

“McCain lost the week badly, let’s be honest,” Weaver said in a message on Friday. “John [McCain] is still in striking distance, thanks to his own character, biography and memories of the McCain of previous election cycles. But he cannot afford another week like this one.”

Alex Castellanos, another Republican strategist, agreed that Obama had acquitted himself well overseas. ” ‘Barack goes global’ is working,” he noted. But he sounded a cautionary note, nonetheless. Obama, unlike McCain, he said, remains a work in progress who is still trying to answer the question, “Who is this guy?”

The risks of rapture
By Ronald Brownstein, National Journal, July 26, 2008

On his radio show this week, Rush Limbaugh declared of Europeans: “They love Obama because he loathes America.” Conservative blogger Jennifer Rubin predicted that “the race for international popularity” might prompt Obama to undermine Israel and abandon Iraq.

Could arguments like these hurt Obama? Andrew Kohut, director of the nonpartisan Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, is dubious. Recent Pew surveys have found a slight increase since 2004 (from 67 percent to 71 percent) in the number of Americans who say they think the U.S. is less respected in the world than in the past–and a bigger jump in the share who consider that a major problem (56 percent, up from 43 percent). “More people see the importance of rebuilding international ties than four years ago,” Kohut says. And foreign acclaim could help Obama maintain that he is better equipped than McCain to restore those connections.

But fault lines remain. College-educated Obama supporters, when asked why they back him, nearly always insist that his election–as a mixed-race, mixed-heritage president–would transform America’s image abroad. I have almost never heard that argument from blue-collar voters, especially blue-collar men, who Pew polls show are the voting bloc least concerned about America’s international standing and most supportive of GOP arguments that the best way to ensure peace is through military strength, not diplomacy.

European cheers may strengthen Obama at Starbucks, but it remains to be seen whether they will sweeten his prospects at Dunkin’ Donuts.

What did Obama learn in Iraq?
By John Dickerson, Slate, July 25, 2008

The main complexity Obama has to confront in Iraq is the apparent success of the most recent phase of U.S. military strategy, of which the troop surge was a key part. Violence has come down from stratospheric heights. The success is relative (violence is still at 2005 levels), but the situation is far better than Obama predicted. When he voted against the surge in January 2007, he claimed on more than one occasion that it would lead to increased casualties and sectarian violence. It didn’t. How’d he get that one wrong? In January 2007, Obama claimed that the Iraqi government would make no hard choices if the United States stayed. But they have made hard choices. Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki launched incursions into Basra and confronted cleric Muqtada Sadr, both of which helped pave the way for the Sunni faction’s return to the government. This is not enough progress to suggest Iraq is anywhere near stable, but like the drop in violence, it’s more than Obama predicted.

These are not academic questions. Some people would say the vote on the surge was one of Obama’s most important as a senator. As Obama pointed out regularly during the Democratic primaries with Hillary Clinton and John Edwards, both of whom voted to authorize the Iraq war, a person’s past vote tells you something about his or her judgment. Obama has talked a lot about the clarity of his judgment in opposing the Iraq war. He also once suggested that if he’d been forced to cast an actual vote for or against the Iraq war as a senator, his view might have been complicated. On the surge, we get a chance to watch Obama grapple with similar complexities in real time. Or, at least, we should.

Editor’s Comment — How long will it be before “surge” becomes re-purposed as a marketing term? It’s become such an all-powerful signal of positive change it surely has the power to sell goods or get people elected…

How quickly we forget that it’s a matter of only a few months ago that the word was: “the surge should by now be a stunning success… if only it wasn’t for the meddlesome Iranians. It’s the Iranians who are stopping the surge from working.”

Logically, the question now — if one accepts the Pentagon’s claims from before — is not about whether the success of the surge can be acknowledged and applauded; the question should be: why has Iran decided to make life much easier for the US in Iraq? By what logic are we to understand that Iran could carry so much blame for the surge’s failure, yet accrue no credit for the surge’s success?

Arabs under siege as Israel tightens grip on Holy City
By Peter Beaumont, The Observer, July 27, 2008

Fawzia al-Kurd’s home is nothing special. She has lived within its walls for the past quarter of a century, in the heart of East Jerusalem’s Sheikh Jarrah district. The house is tidy. But at first glance, it would not appear to be worth $10m.

That is the sum that the al-Kurd family claim they were offered by Israeli buyers as an incentive to move on, a figure confirmed by their lawyer. Fawzia refused to make a deal, whatever the price. It would have hurt her ‘integrity’ to take it and leave, she said. So last week she received an eviction notice, based on an arcane legal claim to the site that her husband first called home in 1956.

If she and her family are forced to leave as a result, ultra-Orthodox Israeli settlers from a company called Nahlat Shemoun – linked to a nearby Jewish shrine – will take over half of the house. Settlers have already occupied her illegally built extension. The Kurd house may soon be draped with Israeli flags – as is another a handful of metres distant – and Arab East Jerusalem will have shrunk perceptibly once more.

‘Their objective [in trying to evict me] is political’, said Fawzia. ‘They are claiming as theirs something that is not.’

The story of Fawzia’s house reflects the larger battle for the future of Jerusalem, a city contested with an intensity and urgency unmatched anywhere else in the world. In the interminable saga of the Middle East peace process, agreement on the ‘final status’ of the Holy City remains as elusive as ever.

Tensions high in Gaza as Hamas cracks down on rival groups
By Avi Issacharoff, Haaretz, July 27, 2008

Hamas security forces fanned out across a tense Gaza Strip Sunday, following a mysterious weekend car bombing that killed six people and sparked the toughest Hamas crackdown against its Fatah rivals in months.

Human rights groups said Hamas released over a dozen of the some 200 Fatah men it arrested Saturday in connection with the bombing, which killed five Hamas men and a 6-year-old girl. But Hamas police remained deployed in force around Gaza City, manning roadblocks and checking cars.

Meanwhile Palestinian security forces loyal to Abbas detained 15 Hamas activists, including two officials, in the West Bank city of Tul Karm on Sunday, Palestinian security officials said. They gave no reason for the arrests.

Analysis: Salafism – the worrying process of self-radicalization
By Jonathan Spyer, Jerusalem Post, July 24, 2008

The process whereby young men become radicalized through contact with Islamist ideas via preachers or the Internet and then go on to form ad hoc terror cells has been observed in Muslim communities in Europe and further afield. So how is Salafism gaining its foothold west of the Jordan River? Through the relatively simple formula of preaching, education, the creation of groups of devotees, and the subsequent self-organization of those devotees.

In the West Bank, the removal of Hamas-affiliated imams in over 1,000 mosques has paradoxically opened the door for the rising prominence of Salafi-oriented preachers.

Some of the radical preachers are associated with the Hizb-ut-Tahrir (HT) party. This veteran Islamist group was long regarded as a curiosity because of its failure to maintain an armed wing and its refusal to engage in active politics. However, HT has enjoyed an unprecedented rise in popularity in the West Bank over the last 18 months. Many of its imams are known to be in contact with the broader, amorphous Salafi subculture. HT itself is not a Salafi grouping. But its role as a radicalizing force and then a conduit for young men to violent activity is a key concern.

‘Compared to us, Hamas is Islamism lite’
By Ulrike Putz, Der Spiegel, July 18, 2008

So far, Hamas has done what it can to keep the Salafis under control. They know the ultra-radicals are just waiting to take over Hamas’ position of leadership. “They are traitors,” Abu Mustafa says of Hamas. “Compared to us, they are Islamism lite.”

Nevertheless, he’s willing to be merciful. “We will give them the chance to turn away from the false path,” he says. And what happens if they don’t take up the offer? “Then there will be confrontation,” Abu Mustafa promises, bringing his fists together. Still, he doesn’t think it likely that the Salafis will have to take up arms against Hamas. “It won’t be necessary. They will destroy themselves.”

His explanation is clear. “For many people in Gaza, Hamas embodied the promise of a good, Islamic lifestyle,” Abu Mustafa says. But once the group seized power in the Gaza Strip over a year ago, many were disappointed. Of the 10 defectors who call him everyday, many of them are Hamas fighters, he claims. “These are tough men and they have insider knowledge. They will be very useful should it come to a power struggle.”

U.S. official preparing scathing report on Israel’s West Bank policies
By Amos Harel and Avi Issacharoff, Haaretz, July 22, 2008

The United States security coordinator for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, retired general James Jones, is preparing an extremely critical report of Israel’s policies in the territories and its attitude toward the Palestinian Authority’s security services.

A few copies of the report’s executive summary (or, according to some sources, a draft of it) have been given to senior Bush Administration officials, and it is reportedly arousing considerable discomfort. In recent weeks, the administration has been debating whether to allow Jones to publish his full report, or whether to tell him to shelve it and make do with the summary, given the approaching end of President George Bush’s term.

Jones was appointed by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice following the Annapolis peace conference last November. His assignment was to draft a strategic plan to facilitate stabilization of the security situation, as a necessary accompaniment to Israeli-Palestinian final-status negotiations. In this context, he assessed the PA security forces in the West Bank, whose reform is being overseen by another American general, Keith Dayton. Jones has visited the region several times and met with senior Israeli government officials and army officers.

Editor’s Comment — There’s sure to be a stampede of the Washington press corps trying to get comments from the administration and the presidential candidates on this report …. Of course I jest. Chances are, we won’t hear a whisper. It would be so impolite to raise the matter. Then again, Gen Jones apparently doesn’t have his balls being squeezed in a vice, so maybe he’d be happy to do an off-the-record briefing — if only there was someone with enough guts to give him a call.

Arab world doubts US approach will change
By Andrew England, Financial Times, July 20, 2008

As Barack Obama’s profile rose with each victory during the US Democratic primary race, many in the Arab world watched with a mixture of curiosity and a degree of anticipation.

Here was an African-American who had opposed the Iraq war, whose father was raised a Muslim and who represented a new, youthful and relatively unknown face to US politics. Many hoped that if his campaign were successful he might initiate a fresh stance for US policy in the Middle East and be more sympathetic towards the Arab cause. After two terms of George W. Bush’s presidency – deemed a disaster throughout much of the Arab world – the buzz among many in the region was that anybody would be better. And Mr Obama, perhaps more than other candidates, inspired thoughts of a genuine shift.

Yet as he makes his first trip to the Middle East as the presumptive Democratic presidential candidate, he will find that just as questions have been mounting in the US about his credentials to be commander-in-chief, so too is he coming under greater scrutiny among Arabs, with queries about his ability to deal with the crises in their region.

Barack who? Arabs weigh in
By Caryle Murphy, The Christian Science Monitor, July 22, 2008

Senator Obama’s campaign may have launched groundswells of hope, ardor, and optimism at home and in Europe. But at the start of his closely watched trip to the Middle East, the all-but-certain Democratic nominee is little known in the Arab world, and has yet to generate widespread interest or enthusiasm.

From Baghdad to Beirut, people said in recent interviews that they are unfamiliar with his policies, except for his plan to move quickly to pull US troops out of Iraq.

In general, they said they prefer Obama over the likely Republican nominee, Sen. John McCain (R) of Arizona, whom they view as unsympathetic to Arabs.

But even those who like Obama’s personality are not expecting him to initiate major turnabouts on US Middle East policies, particularly on the most contentious one of all, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Obama to Arabs is an American with Muslim middle name
By Caroline Alexander, Bloomberg, July 21, 2008

…many Muslims around the world doubt the 46-year-old Illinois senator will advance their interests much and expect Obama to leave largely unchanged a U.S. foreign policy they perceive as unfairly tilted toward Israel.

Obama’s comment on Jerusalem, in a speech to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, was a “radical rupture with the Arab public,” said Habib Samarkandi, a professor at the University of Toulouse in France who edits a journal about North African culture. “We discovered our support was based on illusions rather than the reality of the person.”

Obama sought to clarify his position the day after his speech, saying on CNN that “obviously, it’s going to be up to the parties to negotiate a range of these issues. And Jerusalem will be part of those negotiations.”

“The damage is done,” Samarkandi said, discounting the explanation.

Maliki, Obama hedge their bets on U.S. troops in Iraq
By Charles Crain, World Politics Review, July 18, 2008

It isn’t shocking that, all else being equal, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki would prefer to have American troops out of his country. But all else isn’t equal. After Maliki caused a stir last week by calling for a timetable for the withdrawal of American troops, other members of his government immediately began qualifying the statement.

The ambivalence is understandable; it reflects the ambivalence of Iraqis in general. Most are deeply suspicious of American motives and want U.S. troops out of their country. At the same time, in towns across Iraq and neighborhoods around Baghdad, U.S. soldiers and Marines are often credited with keeping sectarian tensions under control after the catastrophic violence of 2006 and 2007.

The American presence poses a special dilemma for Maliki and his government. They are loathe to be seen as puppets of the Americans, their positions guaranteed only by U.S. force. But U.S. forces have been an Maliki’s invaluable ally. His enemies — Sunni insurgents and rival Shiite militias — are their enemies.

Comment stings Iraqi leader on eve of Obama visit
By Sabrina Tavernise and Jeff Zeleny, New York Times, July 21, 2008

In Iraq, controversy continued to reverberate between the United States and Iraqi governments over a weekend news report that Mr. Maliki had expressed support for Mr. Obama’s proposal to withdraw American combat troops within 16 months of January. The reported comments came after Mr. Bush agreed on Friday to a “general time horizon” for pulling out troops from Iraq without a specific timeline.

Diplomats from the United States Embassy in Baghdad spoke to Mr. Maliki’s advisers on Saturday, said an American official, speaking on condition of anonymity in order to discuss what he called diplomatic communications. After that, the government’s spokesman, Ali al-Dabbagh, issued a statement casting doubt on the magazine’s rendering of the interview.

The statement, which was distributed to media organizations by the American military early on Sunday, said Mr. Maliki’s words had been “misunderstood and mistranslated,” but it failed to cite specifics.

“Unfortunately, Der Spiegel was not accurate,” Mr. Dabbagh said Sunday by telephone. “I have the recording of the voice of Mr. Maliki. We even listened to the translation.”

But the interpreter for the interview works for Mr. Maliki’s office, not the magazine. And in an audio recording of Mr. Maliki’s interview that Der Spiegel provided to The New York Times, Mr. Maliki seemed to state a clear affinity for Mr. Obama’s position, bringing it up on his own in an answer to a general question on troop presence.

Leaving Iraq: debate shifts to when
By Michael Sherer, Time, July 21, 2008

Republican political strategists have long said privately what Republican candidates for President only hinted at publicly. No one can win the White House in 2008 by campaigning to continue an unending war in Iraq.

“The sentence has to have the word ‘leaving’ in it,” said Grover Norquist, the influential Republican operative, at a breakfast meeting in June of 2007. “Doesn’t mean you have to leave tomorrow, doesn’t mean you have to surrender, doesn’t mean you have to cut and run, but the articulation of the policy needs to be clear to the American people that we are not staying there indefinitely, and that there is a ‘doing something’ and a ‘leaving.'”

At the time, the major Republican candidates for President, save John McCain, had already begun to dull the edges on their support for President Bush’s war policy. When asked about the war, Mike Huckabee would talk about the strain on the Arkansas National Guard. Mitt Romney would say he wanted the troops home “as soon as possible.” Rudy Giuliani speculated openly that the so-called “surge” might fail, saying “we have to be ready for that.”

Analysis: U.S. advisers could stay long after troops leave Iraq
By Charles Levinson, USA Today, July 20, 2008

Can Iraqi troops fight — and win — on their own?

That question has become even more urgent after President Bush, Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama and Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki all spoke in recent days about setting either vague or specific time frames for withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq.

Recent evidence suggests that although the Iraqi military has made enormous progress, it is still dependent on small teams of American advisers who can rein in overly aggressive Iraqi commanders, call in U.S. airstrikes and help coordinate basic supplies such as food, rifle-cleaning kits and even printer cartridges.

The advisers could remain on the ground in Iraq long after most U.S. combat troops have left. Col. John Nagl, who resigned last month as commander of the U.S. Army’s school for military advisers, says they are “the key to our exit strategy in Iraq.”

Report: Israel willing to free Marwan Barghouti for Shalit
By Barak Ravid and Amos Harel, Haaretz, July 21, 2008

A Gulf newspaper reported Monday that Israel is willing to include jailed Fatah leader Marwan Barghouti in a list of 300 Palestinian prisoners to be freed in exchange for abducted Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit.

Shalit was seized in a cross-border raid in June 2006 and has been held in captivity in the Gaza Strip ever since. Unlike the soldiers who were snatched several weeks later by Hezbollah, Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev, several signs of life from Shalit have been released. Barghouti is serving five life sentences in Israel for his role in a series of deadly terrorist attacks during the second intifada.

The newspaper, Al-Bayan which is published in the United Arab Emirates, also said that the list would also include senior Hamas officials Hassan Salame Abdullah Barghouti and Ibrahim Hamad. But, the report says, Israel will not free the leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Ahmed Sadat. According to Al-Bayan, the talks on the exchange to secure Shalit’s release have seen significant progress, but Egyptian officials fear that agents in the region will try to scupper the deal.

‘Iran is friends with Israeli people’: Ahmadinejad aide
AFP, July 20, 2008

Iran is “friends with the Israeli people”, a deputy of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said, in stark contrast to Tehran’s usual verbal assaults against the Jewish state, local media reported on Sunday.

Esfandiar Rahim Mashaie, vice president in charge of tourism and one of Ahmadinejad’s closest confidants, also described the people of Iran’s arch-enemy the United States as “one of the best nations in the world”.

“Today, Iran is friends with the American and Israeli people. No nation in the world is our enemy, this is an honour,” Rahim Mashaie said, according to the Fars news agency and Etemad newspaper.

Editor’s Comment — For clarification, Mashaie later said: “It is preposterous to assume that any Iranian official would acknowledge the Zionist regime.” Even so, when one of the figures closest to the president in the Iranian government who is also the father of Ahmadinejad’s daughter-in-law makes a conciliatory gesture of this kind towards the Israelis, it somewhat undermines the neocons’ claim that Iran is intent on bringing about another holocaust.

When spies don’t play well with their allies
By Mark Mazzetti, New York Times, July 20, 2008

As they complete their training at “The Farm,” the Central Intelligence Agency’s base in the Virginia tidewater, young agency recruits are taught a lesson they are expected never to forget during assignments overseas: there is no such thing as a friendly intelligence service.

Foreign spy services, even those of America’s closest allies, will try to manipulate you. So you had better learn how to manipulate them back.

But most C.I.A. veterans agree that no relationship between the spy agency and a foreign intelligence service is quite as byzantine, or as maddening, as that between the C.I.A. and Pakistan’s Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, or I.S.I.

Poorly directed aid increases Afghanistan’s woes
Editorial, The Observer, July 20, 2008

It would be hard to deny the evidence that Afghanistan is at a crossroads as Democratic nominee Barack Obama yesterday met the country’s President Hamid Karzai. Despite the claims by some British officers that the Taliban is being tactically routed, no one seems to have told the Islamist insurgents. Opium production in the areas under their control – and that of other warlords – has reached new records this year. Corruption and criminality, linked often to the very heart of government, is endemic. Despite $15bn in aid that has been disbursed, Afghanistan remains mired in pervasive poverty with unemployment standing at more than 40 per cent. The country’s position as one of the world’s poorest has barely shifted since 2001.

Confronted with these multiple failures, the temptation, voiced yesterday by Obama, and by his Republican opponent John McCain already, is to throw more military forces at the problem in a replication of the Iraq ‘surge’. A parallel attraction, encouraged by Karzai, is to insist that the international community provide ever more money in the hope that some of the billions will stick. But in a country beset by rapidly increasing pessimism over the ability of the international community finally to bring to an end Afghanistan’s 30-year cycle of poverty and violence, what is needed is a large-scale rethinking of what we are doing in Afghanistan, not more violence and more largesse.

Editor’s Comment — The Observer is here endorsing/reiterating the views expressed by Rory Stewart in the latest issue of Time magazine.

Obama abroad
By Fareed Zacharia, Newsweek, July 19, 2008

The rap on Barack Obama, at least in the realm of foreign policy, has been that he is a softheaded idealist who thinks that he can charm America’s enemies. John McCain and his campaign, conservative columnists and right-wing bloggers all paint a picture of a liberal dreamer who wishes away the world’s dangers. Even President Bush stepped into the fray earlier this year to condemn the Illinois senator’s willingness to meet with tyrants as naive. Some commentators have acted as if Obama, touring the Middle East and Europe this week on his first trip abroad since effectively wrapping up the nomination, is in for a rude awakening.

These critiques, however, are off the mark. Over the course of the campaign against Hillary Clinton and now McCain, Obama has elaborated more and more the ideas that would undergird his foreign policy as president. What emerges is a world view that is far from that of a typical liberal, much closer to that of a traditional realist. It is interesting to note that, at least in terms of the historical schools of foreign policy, Obama seems to be the cool conservative and McCain the exuberant idealist.

We’re quick to damn the US but slow to see our own faults
By Constanze Stelzenmüller, The Observer, July 20, 2008

President Obama is finally coming to Europe! All right, the Americans haven’t elected him … yet. But that’s a mere technicality as far as we’re concerned. We made up our minds long ago: our President is Barack Obama.

This week, Senator Obama will be giving a speech in Berlin, the headquarters of his biggest fan-base on the old continent. The Germans are rooting for America’s Democratic nominee with a fervour they otherwise reserve for the Dalai Lama or Nelson Mandela, bringing a distinctly wistful glint to the eyes of German politicians. Take Germany’s foreign minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, a laconic Westphalian not known for flights of emotional exuberance. Even he, speaking at Harvard, could not resist bursting into an impassioned cry of: ‘Yes, we can!’

There are excellent reasons for Europeans’ enthusiasm. Obama is a charismatic politician of formidable stature, but so is John McCain. In fact, the choice before the Americans on 4 November is what Germans call a Luxusproblem: your problems, friends, we’d like to have. And despite America’s diminished stature, the President of the USA remains the most powerful man in the world, able like none other to make decisions of global consequence. In that sense, at least, he really is President of us all.

Snubbed by Obama
By Christoph von Marschall, Washington Post, July 20, 2008

Barack Obama is on his way to Europe, where an adoring public awaits. But I wonder if the reception would be quite so enthusiastic if Obama’s fans across the Atlantic knew a dirty little secret of his remarkable presidential campaign: Although Obama portrays himself as the best candidate to engage the rest of the world and restore America’s image abroad, and many Americans support him for that reason, so far he has almost completely refused to answer questions from foreign journalists. When the press plane leaves tonight for his trip, there will be, as far as I know, no foreign media aboard. The Obama campaign has refused multiple requests from international reporters to travel with the candidate.

As a German correspondent in Washington, I am accustomed to the fact that American politicians spare little of their limited time for reporters from abroad. This is understandable: Our readers, viewers and listeners cannot vote in U.S. elections. Even so, Obama’s opponents have managed to make at least a small amount of time for international journalists. John McCain has given many interviews. Hillary Clinton gave a few. President Bush regularly holds round-table interviews with media from the countries to which he travels. Only Obama dismisses us so consistently.

Are U.S.-Iran ties undergoing significant change?
By Yossi Melman, Haaretz, July 20, 2008

Events during the past month suggest that relations between the United States and Iran may be undergoing a significant change. Each development is not dramatic on its own, but as a whole they formulate a trend.

Iran has signaled that it intends to find a way out of the nuclear impasse. This began with a clear statement by Ali Akbar Velayati, adviser to Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei on foreign affairs. Velayati said that Iran should accept the “package” offered by the group of “five plus one” – the five permanent members of the Security Council and Germany, through the European Union official charged with foreign policy, Javier Solana.

Iran given two-week deadline to end the nuclear impasse
By Julian Borger, The Observer, July 20, 2008

Iran was given a fortnight to agree to freeze its uranium enrichment programme yesterday or face further international isolation.

After a day of inconclusive talks in Geneva, a six-nation negotiating team warned the Iranian delegation that it had run out of patience and demanded a ‘yes or no’ answer to a proposal it put forward five weeks ago.

Under that offer, sponsored jointly by the US, Britain, France, Germany, Russia and China, Iran would not expand its uranium enrichment programme, while the international community refrained from imposing further sanctions. This phase would last six weeks, possibly paving the way for suspension of enrichment and more comprehensive talks.

U.S. talks with Iran exemplify Bush’s new approaches
By Dan Eggen, Washington Post, July 20, 2008

With his moves last week involving Iraq, Iran and North Korea, President Bush accelerated a shift toward centrist foreign policies, a change that has cheered Democrats, angered some Republicans and roiled the presidential campaign.

Bush sent his first high-level emissary to sit in on nuclear talks with Iran, which ended without agreement Saturday. Also in the past two days, the president agreed for the first time to set a “time horizon” for withdrawing troops from Iraq, and authorized Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to join North Korean diplomats at six-party talks about ending that country’s nuclear weapons program.

The maneuvers underscore how much the Bush administration has changed since 2002, when the president proclaimed Iraq, Iran and North Korea to be an “axis of evil.” Now Bush is pushing forward with diplomatic gestures toward Iran and North Korea while breaking with a long-held position on troop withdrawals in the interest of harmony with the Iraqi government.

White House tips press off to Maliki interview
By Steven Lee Myers, New York Times, July 19, 2008

The White House is quick to distribute its point of view in e-mail messages with headings like “News You Can Use,” “In Case You Missed It,” and “Setting the Record Straight.” So it was a surprise on Saturday morning when the White House distributed an article by Reuters that offered an endorsement of Senator Barack Obama’s Iraq policy by the leader of Iraq.

“Iraq PM backs Obama troop exit plan,” the headline read over a story about an interview of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki in the German magazine Der Spiegel, in which he expressed support for the senator’s plan to withdraw American combat brigades from Iraq over the next 16 months.

“U.S. presidential candidate Barack Obama talks about 16 months,” Mr. Maliki told Der Spiegel, Reuters reported. “That, we think, would be the right time frame for a withdrawal, with the possibility of slight changes.”

Turns out it was a mistake by the White House clipping service, which had intended to distribute it internally but instead sent it to thousands signed up to receive the administration’s press releases, transcripts, statements and other documents, drawing attention to an interview that might otherwise have received less.

Editor’s Comment — Kevin Drum suggests that the mistake resulted from the White House being so unnerved by the news, while the New York Times would have us believe that the White House error alerted the attention of the press.

I have little doubt that the Washington press corps is well supplied with flakes, but seriously, it shouldn’t have taken an email alert to bring attention to this story – even on a Saturday – when the press is monolithically focused on Obama’s trip to the region. Neither do I find the theory that a staffer in panic mode “hit the wrong button” particularly credible. How were the internal group list and the press list named, such that they could be mixed up?

No, while goofy mistakes are often believable, in this case it’s possible that someone in the White House was cunning enough to come up with an effective strategy for creating a distraction from the story. Look how the blogosphere reacted: More attention went to the email mistake than to what Maliki said!

Sunni bloc rejoins Iraqi government, amid reconciliation hopes
By Sudarsan Raghavan, Washington Post, July 20, 2008

Iraq’s largest Sunni political bloc rejoined the government Saturday after a nearly year-long boycott, a move that could help bridge the country’s sectarian divide.

The return of the Iraqi Accordance Front is widely seen as a victory for Shiite Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and his efforts to portray himself as a nationalist leader uninfluenced by sectarian pressures.

“It means the success of the political process and the success of the security situation and of reconciliation,” said Adnan al-Dulaimi, leader of the bloc

Surge protector
By William J Fallon, New York Times, July 20, 2008

The prospect of a long-term security arrangement between the United States and Iraq has become a lightning rod for criticism. Yet such an agreement — which the White House believes could be completed this month now that the two countries have agreed to set a “general time horizon” for reducing the number of American troops in Iraq — would be in the best interests of the governments of both countries, and of the people who live in a region of the world that urgently needs stability.

The United Nations Security Council resolution that authorizes coalition operations in Iraq expires at the end of this year. But the calendar is not the most important reason for the United States to enter into a long-term pact with Iraq. The opportunity presented by the improved situation on the ground begs to be exploited lest it disappear in the ever-shifting sands of Middle East strife.

Are the desires of the American people and the Iraqi people different? I don’t think so. During my year in command of all American forces in the Middle East, I met often with Iraqis of all walks of life. Discussions with people — from Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki to clerics, governors and generals to men in the streets of Baghdad and towns and cities throughout the country — left me with several strong impressions. The top objective of both countries is security and stability in the region. Letting Iraq’s security forces assume responsibility for their country is another mutual goal. Withdrawing the vast majority of American and coalition troops from Iraq as soon as possible is a clear priority.

Gordon Brown agrees to cut British troops in Iraq
By Deborah Haynes and Francis Elliott, The Times, July 20, 2008

Gordon Brown, on a flying visit to Baghdad and Basra, said today he plans to reduce the remaining number of British troops in Iraq following a drop in attacks, but declined to set a timeframe for their departure.

An Iraqi Government official said he hoped British forces would exit within a year.

The British Prime Minister also agreed with Nouri al-Maliki, his Iraqi counterpart, to set up two teams, Iraqi and British, to study the technicalities of Britain’s long-term relationship with Iraq.

Editor’s Comment — Gordon Brown is to the Labour Party what John Major was to the Conservatives: someone upon whom a shadow has permanently been imprinted. Even so, there’s something perversely intriguiging about a man who can wear a dark suit and tie and flack jacket when it’s 126 degrees Fahrenheit!

Detaining Mr. Marri
Editorial, New York Times, July 20, 2008

The Bush administration has been a waging a fierce battle for the power to lock people up indefinitely simply on the president’s say-so. It scored a disturbing victory last week when a federal appeals court ruled that it could continue to detain Ali al-Marri, who has been held for more than five years as an enemy combatant. The decision gives the president sweeping power to deprive anyone — citizens as well as noncitizens — of their freedom. The Supreme Court should reverse this terrible ruling.

Mr. Marri, a citizen of Qatar legally residing in the United States, was initially arrested in his home in Peoria, Ill., on ordinary criminal charges, then seized and imprisoned by military authorities. The government, which says he has ties to Al Qaeda, designated him an enemy combatant, even though it never alleged that he was in an army or carried arms on a battlefield. He was held on the basis of extremely thin hearsay evidence.

It’s the economic stupidity, stupid
By Frank Rich, New York Times, July 20, 2008

The best thing to happen to John McCain was for the three network anchors to leave him in the dust this week while they chase Barack Obama on his global Lollapalooza tour. Were voters forced to actually focus on Mr. McCain’s response to our spiraling economic crisis at home, the prospect of his ascension to the Oval Office could set off a panic that would make the IndyMac Bank bust in Pasadena look as merry as the Rose Bowl.

“In a time of war,” Mr. McCain said last week, “the commander in chief doesn’t get a learning curve.” Fair enough, but he imparted this wisdom in a speech that was almost a year behind Mr. Obama in recognizing Afghanistan as the central front in the war against Al Qaeda. Given that it took the deadliest Taliban suicide bombing in Kabul since 9/11 to get Mr. McCain’s attention, you have to wonder if even General Custer’s learning curve was faster than his.

Mr. McCain still doesn’t understand that we can’t send troops to Afghanistan unless they’re shifted from Iraq. But simple math, to put it charitably, has never been his forte. When it comes to the central front of American anxiety — the economy — his learning curve has flat-lined.

Leaving Israel a different man
By Orly Halpern, Globe and Mail, July 19, 2008

In 1979, at the age of 16, Samir Kuntar led an armed team by boat from Lebanon to the seaside Israeli city of Nahariya to kill and kidnap Israelis. He was in a war against the Zionist state, but he knew almost nothing about the people or the country. The only Hebrew word he knew was shalom – peace – an irony that does not escape him today. That night he made an attack and was caught and convicted of killing a policeman, a second man and his six-year-old daughter.

Thirty years later – spent entirely in Israeli prisons – the 46-year-old man speaks fluent Hebrew without a trace of an accent. He reads Israeli authors, is up-to-date on Israeli pop culture and knows more about the Holocaust and Zionism than many Israelis.

On Wednesday, Israel released Mr. Kuntar as part of a prisoner exchange. It was a tough decision for the government because Mr. Kuntar had become an icon of terror and evil for Israeli society. Yet, before he left Israel for freedom he sent his collection of Israeli books to his home in Lebanon.

None of that would probably have been public were it not for a chance meeting between Mr. Kuntar and Chen Kotas-Bar, a Jewish Israeli journalist, in the prison library in January, 2004. Their short conversation ignited her interest – and his, she says – and the two met often after that. The result was two articles in the Maariv newspaper: one in 2005 and the other published yesterday. The articles reveal a man very different from the teenager who first arrived on Israeli shores.

Putting al Qaeda on the couch
Marc Sageman interviewed by Christopher Dickey, Newsweek, July 19, 2008

Marc Sageman has charted an unlikely path. The first scholar-in-residence at the New York City Police Department survived the Holocaust to become a psychiatrist, a sociologist and a CIA case officer. Since the publication of “Leaderless Jihad” earlier this year, Sageman has been at the center of a debate about the inner workings of Al Qaeda. Is the organization dispersed and disorganized, as Sageman suggests, or is it resurgent, as CIA analyses have reported? Sageman spoke with Newsweek’s Christopher Dickey in New York.