John McCain on the psycho stuff
By Jeffrey Goldberg, The Atlantic, May 30, 2008

Jeffrey Goldberg: Do you think that Israel is better off today than it was eight years ago?

John McCain: I think Israel, in many respects, is stronger economically, their political process shows progress – when there is corruption, they punish people who are corrupt. The economy is booming, they have a robust democracy, to say the least. Bin Laden has not limited his hatred and desire to destroy the United States to the Israeli-Palestinian issue, though Israel is one of the objects of his jihadist attitude. What you’re trying to do is get me to criticize the Bush Administration.

JG: No, I’m not, what I’m —

JM: Yeah, you are, but I’ll try to answer your question. Because of the rise of Islamic extremism, because of the failure of human rights and democracy in the Middle East, or whether there are a myriad of challenges we face in the Middle East, all of them severe, all of them pose a threat to the existence to the state of Israel, including and especially the Iranians, who have as a national policy the destruction of the state of Israel, something they’ve been dedicated to since before President Bush came to office.

JG: What do you think motivates Iran?

JM: Hatred. I don’t try to divine people’s motives. I look at their actions and what they say. I don’t pretend to be an expert on the state of their emotions. I do know what their nation’s stated purpose is, I do know they continue in the development of nuclear weapons, and I know that they continue to support terrorists who are bent on the destruction of the state of Israel. You’ll have to ask someone who engages in this psycho stuff to talk about their emotions.

Editor’s Comment — If there was a poll asking political stand-up comics who they want to become the next president – want, that is, in terms of who would be good for the trade – John McCain would surely be the favorite. This is a guy who’s out there every day crafting new parodies of himself. The man who disclaims any knowledge of “the psycho stuff” flashes back his instant response: it’s hatred that motivates the Iranians, and then goes on to say how he’s in no position to know what their emotions are – barring of course that they’re filled with hatred. And this coming from a man who in the same interview claims that he’d want to be “chief negotiator” for resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Level-headed, thoughtful, even-minded, well-informed, broad-minded – yep, John McCain would make a great chief negotiator!

McCain, the Surge, and ‘verb tenses’
Fact Checker, Washington Post, May 30, 2008
John McCain got ahead of events this week in claiming that the United States military has gone down to “pre-surge levels” in Iraq. That will not happen until later this year, even by the most optimistic scenario. He is also wrong about the city of Mosul being “quiet”, unless you exclude car bombs and other mayhem. His advisers attempted to spin his remarks as a simple matter of “verb tense.” But there is a big difference between “Mission Accomplished” and “We expect the mission to be accomplished soon.”

Memo to Scott McClellan: Here’s what happened
By Warren P. Strobel and Jonathan S. Landay, McClatchy, May 29, 2008
Until now, we’ve resisted the temptation to post on former White House press secretary Scott McClellan’s new book, which accuses the Bush White House of launching a propaganda campaign to sell the war in Iraq.

Why? It’s not news. At least not to some of us who’ve covered the story from the start.

(Click here, here and here to get just a taste of what we mean).

Second, we find it a wee bit preposterous — and we are being diplomatic here — that a man who slavishly – no, robotically! — defended President Bush’s policies in Iraq and elsewhere is trying to “set the record straight” (and sell a few books) five years and more after the invasion, with U.S. troops still bravely fighting and dying to stabilize that country.

But the responses to McClellan from the Bush administration and media bigwigs, history-bending as they are, compel us to jump in. As we like to say around here, it’s truth to power time, not just for the politicians but also for some folks in our own business.

Former Bush donors now giving to Obama
By Greg Gordon, McClatchy, May 30, 2008
Beverly Fanning is among the campaign donors who’ll be joining President Bush at a gala at Washington’s Ford’s Theater Sunday night, but she says that won’t dissuade her from her current passion: volunteering for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign.

She isn’t the only convert. A McClatchy computer analysis, incomplete due to the difficulty matching data from various campaign finance reports, found that hundreds of people who gave at least $200 to Bush’s 2004 campaign have donated to Obama.

The new Middle East
By Paul Woodward, The National, May 29, 2008
“Iran, Turkey, all the Arabs, Hizbollah, Hamas, and Israel all share one and only one common trait: They routinely ignore the advice, and the occasional threats, they get from Washington,” the Daily Star columnist Rami G Khouri wrote this week.

“[Condoleezza] Rice was correct in summer 2006 when she said we are witnessing the birth pangs of a new Middle East. But the emerging new regional configuration is very different from the one she fantasised about and tried to bring into being with multiple wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, Somalia and Lebanon, and threats against Iran and Syria.”

In McClatchy Newspapers, Warren Strobel and Hannah Allam wrote: “In a week of dramatic developments in the Middle East, the most dramatic development of all may have been the fact that the United States, long considered the region’s indispensable player, was missing in action.

Iraqi officials worry about security deal with U.S.
By Leila Fadel, McClatchy, May 30, 2008
Thousands of followers of militant Muqtada al Sadr peacefully took to the streets Friday following his call to protest a bilateral pact that would govern the economic, security and political relationship between Iraq and the United States.

The Status of Forces Agreement and an economic and political accord are expected to be completed by July and must pass the parliament before being finalized. Already voices of dissent are in the air.

The United Nation’s mandate that allows foreign forces to occupy Iraq will not be renewed at the end of the year. So any future U.S. military involvement in the war-torn nation can only continue with such an agreement.

Cowardice of silence
By John Pilger, The Guardian, May 31, 2008
When I phoned Aung San Suu Kyi’s home in Rangoon yesterday, I imagined the path to her door that looks down on Inya Lake. Through ragged palms, a trip-wire is visible, a reminder that this is the prison of a woman whose party was elected by a landslide in 1990, a democratic act extinguished by men in ludicrous uniforms. Her phone rang and rang; I doubt if it is connected now. Once, in response to my “How are you?” she laughed about her piano’s need of tuning. She also spoke about lying awake, breathless, listening to the thumping of her heart.

Now her silence is complete. This week, the Burmese junta renewed her house arrest, beginning the 13th year. As far as I know, a doctor has not been allowed to visit her since January, and her house was badly damaged in the cyclone. And yet the secretary-general of the United Nations, Ban Ki-moon, could not bring himself to utter her name on his recent, grovelling tour of Burma. It is as if her fate and that of her courageous supporters, who on Tuesday beckoned torture and worse merely by unfurling the banners of her National League for Democracy, have become an embarrassment for those who claim to represent the “international community”. Why?

Hizbullah is less credible. So now what?
By Rami G. Khouri, Daily Star, May 31, 2008
The Doha agreement that ended the latest round of political tension and armed clashes in Lebanon has, at best, bought 18-24 months of calm for the country, and an opportunity for the largely discredited political elite to start acting responsibly. Hizbullah remains the focus of discussion about the challenges ahead, given its military strength relative to the other Lebanese factions, including the central government and its armed forces.

The dilemma for Hizbullah is that its strength since its inception a quarter of a century ago in the early 1980s is now its weakness when it comes to its political engagement inside Lebanon. Its combination of military prowess, links with Syria and Iran, and domestic strategic political ambiguity about its ultimate aims for Lebanon are all issues that have rallied significant opposition to it among a growing circle of Lebanese.

This is not purely a question of “What does Hizbullah want?” or “Will Hizbullah give up its arms?” Hizbullah’s power and aims cannot be analyzed in a vacuum, because the party did not emerge as the most powerful military force in the country in isolation of the behavior of other national actors. Two issues are at play here: Hizbullah’s status, and the quality of Lebanese statehood. The strength and status of Hizbullah and the weakness of the Lebanese state are symbiotic developments that feed off each other, and can only be resolved together. The coming era of calm political adjustment in Lebanon, including the national unity government and the summer 2009 parliamentary elections, must address very difficult core disputed issues. The central one is the Hizbullah-state relationship, which is directly or indirectly linked to other tough issues such as Syrian-Lebanese ties, and the role of external powers such as Iran, Saudi Arabia and the United States.

Lebanon’s new president supports fight against Israel
By Raed Rafei, Los Angeles Times, May 25, 2008
The United States along with most other countries enthusiastically supported the ascent of army Chief of Staff Michel Suleiman as president of Lebanon.

To many, he appears to be a beacon of stability for the country. But don’t expect the Maronite Christian to change the country’s position on the staunchest of U.S. allies in the Middle East, Israel.

In his inaugural speech to parliament today, he affirmed the right of the Hezbollah-led “resistance” to confront Israel and obtain a disputed piece of property under Israeli occupation called the Shebaa Farms:

The continuing occupation of Shebaa Farms and the breaches and threats by the enemy [Israel] compel us to find a defense strategy that protects the nation coupled with a calm dialog to benefit from the competence of the resistance so that the achievements of the resistance are not consumed in internal struggles. And this way we can preserve its values and its national position.

He also said Lebanon would continue to refuse to grant the 400,000 Palestinians living in Lebanon passports in order to keep alive their dream of returning to a viable Palestinian state:

Our rejection of giving them nationality is not a rejection of hosting of our brothers the Palestinians and caring for their human rights, but an establishment of their right of return when a viable state is formed.

But much of Suleiman’s speech was focused on healing the country’s recent self-inflicted wounds.

Editor’s Comment — In brokering the agreement that led to Suleiman’s inauguration, much has been made about Qatar’s instrumental role. “Qatar emerges as diplomatic powerhouse,” read an earlier headline in the LAT. And Barbara Slavin writes:

You know something interesting is happening in the Middle East when a major peace agreement is brokered by Qatar. This tiny emirate (population 900,000) has accomplished what the United States, France, the United Nations and the Arab League failed to do: get Lebanon’s chronically feuding factions to agree to a deal that will at least give the country a temporary government and allow Qataris and other Gulf Arabs to spend their summer in Beirut without worrying about being caught in another civil war.

The big diplomatic victory for the little emirate makes for a good narrative, but to be realistic, how successful would Sheikh Hamad have been had he tried to intervene in Lebanon just three weeks ago? The end of the political stalemate didn’t hinge on Arab League or Qatari intervention; it came about through Hezbollah’s show of force and the reality that its power is unmatched by any of its opponents. The Lebanese government briefly imagined that it could push Hezbollah into retreat, and then just as quickly the government and its allies were disabused of that notion. The task of the peacemakers was to get all parties to formalize the balance of power in a written agreement – no small task, but one certainly made easier by virtue of the fact that no one had any illusions about the fact that Hezbollah had already won.

Price of quiet in Lebanon is Hezbollah in power
By Zvi Bar’el, Haaretz, May 26, 2008
The smiles, handshakes and congratulations that followed the election of Lebanese President Michel Suleiman yesterday were unable to erase questions and fears over what Hezbollah has in store for the country, and the region as a whole. That is because the lovely principle of “no victor, no vanquished,” as the emir of Qatar described the deal reached in Doha that allowed for Suleiman’s election, does not reflect reality.

Lebanon did manage to engage the emergency brake before spiraling into civil war, and can even look forward to a period of relative quiet. But the price is liable to be Hezbollah’s long-term de facto control of Lebanon.

Suleiman’s election is not the product of a democratic compromise between a majority and an opposition; it is the product of threats and violence. The fancy swearing-in ceremony yesterday could not have taken place without the agreement of Hezbollah, which delayed the selection of a president by seven months. Hezbollah conditioned its acceptance on the establishment of a national unity government in which it and its partners will have 11 ministers. This grants Hezbollah veto power over key government decisions, since the Lebanese constitution requires important decisions to be approved by a two-thirds majority.

How we can really honor our veterans
By Joseph L. Galloway, McClatchy, May 22, 2008
How strange that today in our country, in a time of war, battles are raging over the need for medical care, educational benefits, employment opportunities and assistance for those who’ve served honorably and come home to begin new lives in a nation they risked their lives to defend.

The shameful thing is that most of those battles are being waged against the very government, the very bureaucracies, the very politicians who sent those young men and women to war in Iraq and Afghanistan. Maybe the right word here isn’t shameful, but criminal.

Not everyone is hailing the chief at this commencement
By Dan Eggen, Washington Post, May 26, 2008
President Bush was probably expecting a warm welcome at Furman University, a small Baptist-rooted school in Greenville, S.C., where he is delivering the commencement address on Saturday.

It hasn’t quite turned out that way.

More than 200 faculty members and students signed a letter this month criticizing the Bush administration’s policies on the Iraq war, secret interrogations, the environment and other issues. The letter says that although it would ordinarily be “an honor” to host a president, “these are not ordinary circumstances.”

Sistani forbids feeding Americans; warns against security agreement; hundreds of Sadrists arrested
By Juan Cole, Informed Comment, May 25, 2008
…if Sistani is laying the grounds for a Gandhi-style non-cooperation movement, he certainly could put a crimp in the American military’s style in Iraq. I can’t imagine US troops could function in the Shiite south or much of Baghdad without Shiite cooperation. Sistani still has a great deal of moral authority, and would be backed by less cautious clerics such as Muqtada al-Sadr and Ayatollah Jawad al-Khalisi.

The return of Iraq’s Ayatollah
By Mark Kukis, Time, May 25, 2008
Maliki’s visit Thursday to Najaf, where he met with Sistani, seemed to be acknowledgment of just that change in status, one that the Ayatollah did not appear to shrink from. “Sistani emphasized that everything should be done to get back total sovereignty on all levels,” said Sheik Abdul Mehdi al-Karbala’e, who summed up Sistani’s meeting with Maliki in a speech to Shi’ite follower attending Friday prayers in Karbala.

Amid calm in Sadr City, officials and cleric’s backers swap charges of weakness
By Stephen Farrell and Richard A Oppel, New York Times, May 26, 2008
As some semblance of normal life began to return to the Sadr City area on Sunday, the Iraqi government and followers of the radical Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr accused each other of being weak. The verbal sniping occurred despite a cease-fire that had finally brought calm to one of Baghdad’s most volatile areas.

Jimmy Carter says Israel had 150 nuclear weapons
By Bronwen Maddox, The Times, May 26, 2008
Israel has 150 nuclear weapons in its arsenal, former President Jimmy Carter said yesterday, while arguing that the US should talk directly to Iran to persuade it to drop its nuclear ambitions.

His remark, made at the Hay-on-Wye festival which promotes current affairs books and literature, is startling because Israel has never admitted having nuclear weapons, let alone how many, although the world assumes their existence. Nor do US officials deviate in public from that Israeli line. Carter, who has immersed himself since his presidency in Israeli-Palestinian relations, was highly critical of Israeli settlers on the West Bank, and of Israel’s refusal to talk to elected officials of the Islamic party Hamas, although he said that Israel’s security was his prime concern.

Party like it’s 2008
By Frank Rich, New York Times, May 11, 2008
Almost every wrong prediction about this election cycle has come from those trying to force the round peg of this year’s campaign into the square holes of past political wars. That’s why race keeps being portrayed as dooming Mr. Obama — surely Jeremiah Wright = Willie Horton! — no matter what the voters say to the contrary. It’s why the Beltway took on faith the Clinton machine’s strategic, organization and fund-raising invincibility. It’s why some prognosticators still imagine that John McCain can spin the Iraq fiasco to his political advantage as Richard Nixon miraculously did Vietnam.

The year 2008 is far more complex — and exhilarating — than the old templates would have us believe. Of course we’re in pain. More voters think the country is on the wrong track (81 percent) than at any time in the history of New York Times/CBS News polling on that question. George W. Bush is the most unpopular president that any living American has known.

And yet, paradoxically, there is a heartening undertow: we know the page will turn. For all the anger and angst over the war and the economy, for all the campaign’s acrimony, the anticipation of ending the Bush era is palpable, countering the defeatist mood. The repressed sliver of joy beneath the national gloom can be seen in the record registration numbers of new voters and the over-the-top turnout in Democratic primaries.

Editor’s Comment — The Bush legacy may turn out to be not the one he intended or will ever lay claim to, but to be that he has transformed the way Americans view politics. He has stripped away whatever aura may have once surrounded the institution of the presidency and helped convince thousands of Americans that whatever their humble backgrounds they could do a better job of running the country. By cloaking the workings of the executive branch of government in secrecy he has demonstrated the urgent need for transparency in government. By conducting a disastrous foreign policy he has helped raise foreign affairs above its status as an arcane interest reserved for specialists, to an issue that visibly affects and should concern all Americans.

In effect, Bush has governed so badly that rather than produce a loss of faith in government, he has helped ignite a widespread desire for government of the people to be reclaimed by the people. Thanks to George Bush, more Americans than ever, understand that individually we share responsibility in determining how this country is governed.

Sadrists and Iraqi government reach truce deal
By Alissa J Rubine, New York Times, May 11, 2008
The Iraqi government and leaders of the movement of the Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr agreed Saturday to a truce, brokered with help from Iran, that would end more than a month of bloody fighting in the vast, crowded Sadr City section of Baghdad.

The fighting there, which has claimed several hundred lives, left many more wounded and forced residents to flee, has tested the ability of Iraq’s Shiite-led government to confront powerful Shiite militias, here in Baghdad and in Basra, to the south.

The deal would allow the sides to pull back from what was becoming a messy and unpopular showdown in the months leading up to crucial provincial elections. It is not clear who won, how long it would take for the truce to take effect or how long it would hold. But at least for now it would end the warfare among Shiite factions.

Crisis eases in Lebanon
By Mark Mackinnon, Globe and Mail, May 10, 2008
Lebanon’s violent political crisis appeared to ease Saturday after the country’s army stepped in to freeze a pair of controversial government decrees that had set off four days of deadly clashes. The militant Hezbollah group responded by saying it would pull its fighters off the streets, a day after seizing control of half the Lebanese capital.

The army’s intervention appeared to confirm complete victory for Hezbollah, which stunned observers by routing pro-government forces and taking control of West Beirut on Friday. The attack came hours after Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah accused the government of “declaring war” on his movement through the two cabinet decrees that have now been overturned.

Hizbollah’s show of force
By Paul Woodward, The National, May 11, 2008
After three days of street battles against pro-government fighters in Saad Hariri’s Future Movement, Hizbollah and its allies seized control of west Beirut on Friday.

The Los Angeles Times spoke to one of the Hizbollah fighters: “He held what he described as an Israeli-made M-16 assault rifle equipped with a night-vision scope and a laser sight.

“‘It was an insult for us to fight these people,’ he said of the Sunni militia loyal to the government. ‘We fight great armies.'”

Lebanon: the next step?
By Nicholas Blandford, The National, May 10, 2008
Fierce battles have been reported in northern Lebanon over night between rival clans after the Hizbollah-led opposition said it was ending its takeover of west Beirut.

A security official said the fighting in the city of Tripoli was between Sunni supporters of the Western-backed government and members of an Alawite sect loyal to Hizbollah. He added that one woman had been killed and thousands were fleeing the area.

Silence from our sabre rattlers as Burma’s dying cry out to be saved
By Simon Jenkins, The Sunday Times, May 11, 2008
What are we waiting for? Where now is liberal interventionism? More than 100,000 people are dead after a cyclone in the Irrawaddy delta and the United Nations has declared that up to 2m people, deprived of aid for a week, are at risk of death. Barely 10% are reported to have received any help. The world stands ready to save them. The warehouses of Asia are crammed with supplies. Ships and planes are on station. Nothing happens.

Anyone who has visited this exquisite part of the world will know how avoidable is further catastrophe to the delta people. They are resourceful, peaceable and hugely resilient. Like those of lowlying Bangladesh next door, they are used to extreme weather. Their agriculture is fertile and they are self-sufficient in most things. But no one can survive instant starvation and disease.

They need not wait. There are three giant C130s loaded and ready in Thailand. There are American and French ships in the area, fortuitously on a disaster relief exercise, with shelters, clothing, latrines, medicines and water decontamination equipment. Above all there are helicopters, vital in an area where roads are impassable by flooding and fallen trees.

Forget the two-state solution
By Saree Makdisi, Los Angeles Times, May 11, 2008
There is no longer a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Forget the endless arguments about who offered what and who spurned whom and whether the Oslo peace process died when Yasser Arafat walked away from the bargaining table or whether it was Ariel Sharon’s stroll through the Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem that did it in.

All that matters are the facts on the ground, of which the most important is that — after four decades of intensive Jewish settlement in the Palestinian territories it occupied during the 1967 war — Israel has irreversibly cemented its grip on the land on which a Palestinian state might have been created.

Sixty years after Israel was created and Palestine was destroyed, then, we are back to where we started: Two populations inhabiting one piece of land. And if the land cannot be divided, it must be shared. Equally.

U.S. Jews’ relationship with Israel evolves
By Michelle Boorstein, Washington Post, May 11, 2008
Growing up at Congregation Olam Tikvah, Michelle Pearlstein remembers how Israel was taught at religious school: “Black and white — you can’t trust anyone, and it was a united front in support of Israel.” Today, Pearlstein, 35, is the Israel specialist at the Fairfax synagogue, where she teaches what is now the mainstream approach: “We call it ‘Israel, warts and all.’ ”

The change in curriculum is but one manifestation of the changing relationship between American Jews and the Jewish state, even as the country celebrates its 60th birthday this week.

Multiple new polls show that younger American Jews feel less of a connection to Israel than older Jews. And while there is heated debate about some of the polls’ methodologies and conclusions, most Jewish leaders are very concerned about the data. The leaders see them as a long-term byproduct of intermarriage, assimilation and controversial Israeli policies, including settlement expansion in the occupied territories.

A last chance for civilization
By Bill McKibben, TomDispatch, May 11, 2008
Even for Americans, constitutionally convinced that there will always be a second act, and a third, and a do-over after that, and, if necessary, a little public repentance and forgiveness and a Brand New Start — even for us, the world looks a little Terminal right now.

It’s not just the economy. We’ve gone through swoons before. It’s that gas at $4 a gallon means we’re running out, at least of the cheap stuff that built our sprawling society. It’s that when we try to turn corn into gas, it sends the price of a loaf of bread shooting upwards and starts food riots on three continents. It’s that everything is so inextricably tied together. It’s that, all of a sudden, those grim Club of Rome types who, way back in the 1970s, went on and on about the “limits to growth” suddenly seem… how best to put it, right.

All of a sudden it isn’t morning in America, it’s dusk on planet Earth.

There’s a number — a new number — that makes this point most powerfully. It may now be the most important number on Earth: 350. As in parts per million (ppm) of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

A few weeks ago, our foremost climatologist, NASA’s Jim Hansen, submitted a paper to Science magazine with several co-authors. The abstract attached to it argued — and I have never read stronger language in a scientific paper — “if humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on earth is adapted, paleoclimate evidence and ongoing climate change suggest that CO2 will need to be reduced from its current 385 ppm to at most 350 ppm.” Hansen cites six irreversible tipping points — massive sea level rise and huge changes in rainfall patterns, among them — that we’ll pass if we don’t get back down to 350 soon; and the first of them, judging by last summer’s insane melt of Arctic ice, may already be behind us.

Purchases linked N. Korean to Syria
By Robin Wright and Joby Warrick, Washington Post, May 11, 2008
When North Korean businessman Ho Jin Yun first caught the attention of German customs police in 2002, he was on a continental buying spree with a shopping list that seemed as random as it was long.

Yun, police discovered, had been crisscrossing Central Europe, amassing a bafflingly diverse collection of materials and high-tech gadgets: gas masks, electric timers, steel pipes, vacuum pumps, transformers and aluminum tubes cut to precise dimensions.

Most of these wares Yun had shipped to his company’s offices in China and North Korea. But some of the goods, U.S. and European officials now say, were evidently intended for a secret project in Syria: a nuclear reactor that would be built with North Korean help, allegedly to produce plutonium for eventual use in nuclear weapons.

According to U.S. officials, European intelligence officials and diplomats, Yun’s firm — Namchongang Trading, known as NCG — provided the critical link between Pyongyang and Damascus, acquiring key materials from vendors in China and probably from Europe, and secretly transferring them to a desert construction site near the Syrian town of Al Kibar.

The plight of Myanmar
By Paul Woodward, The National, May 8, 2008
CNN reported: “The death toll from the cyclone that ravaged the Irrawaddy delta in Myanmar may exceed 100,000, the senior US diplomat in the military-ruled country said on Wednesday.

“‘The information we are receiving indicates over 100,000 deaths,’ said the US charge d’affaires in Yangon, Shari Villarosa…

The Rule of Lords blog carries first hand testimonies of the plight of survivors on the Irrawaddy delta, as told to the Yoma 3 television channel in Thailand: “Along every road … whatever road, there are so many dead they’re uncountable. For this reason many more in the villages could die. My mother, father, brothers and sisters are all dead. I can’t do anything. I’m left all alone.”

A terrible crime – the punishment of a whole population
By Jimmy Carter, The National, May 7, 2008
The world is witnessing a terrible human rights crime in Gaza, where a million and a half human beings are being imprisoned with almost no access to the outside world by sea, air, or land. An entire population is being brutally punished.

This gross mistreatment of the Palestinians in Gaza was escalated dramatically by Israel, with United States backing, after political candidates representing Hamas won a majority of seats in the Palestinian Authority parliament in 2006. The election was unanimously judged to be honest and fair by all international observers.

Born at the dawn of a new state
By Griff Witte, Washington Post, May 8, 2008
Sixty years ago, Dror Gurel and Nabil Zaharan were born into a land at war.

Sons of middle-class families, they entered the world during the same week and along the same stretch of sun-splashed Mediterranean coast. Gurel was born in Jewish Tel Aviv; Zaharan’s mother gave birth just down the road, in Arab Jaffa.

Yet it was a third birth that week that, more than anything, has shaped their lives.

Clinton enters the twilight zone
By John M Broder, New York Times, May 8, 2008
End the dynasty!” a young man holding an Obama poster shouted when Chelsea Clinton stepped to the microphone.

All the while, a smile was fixed on Mrs. Clinton’s perfectly made-up face — not a hair was out of place — and she betrayed only an occasional glimmer of recognition of the exceedingly narrow straits she must now navigate.

Government in secret
By Russ Feingold, Los Angeles Times, May 8, 2008
The Bush administration recently announced it will allow select members of Congress to read Justice Department legal opinions about the CIA’s controversial detainee interrogation program that have been hidden from Congress until now. But as the administration allows a glimpse of this secret law — and it is law — we are left wondering what other laws it is still keeping under lock and key.

It’s a given in our democracy that laws should be a matter of public record. But the law in this country includes not just statutes and regulations, which the public can readily access. It also includes binding legal interpretations made by courts and the executive branch. These interpretations are increasingly being withheld from the public and Congress.

Ex-Guantanamo detainee joined Iraq suicide attack
By Josh White, Washington Post, May 8, 2008
A Kuwaiti man who complained about maltreatment during a three-year stay in the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, was involved in a deadly suicide bombing in northern Iraq last month, the U.S. military confirmed yesterday.

Abdallah Salih al-Ajmi, 29, whom the U.S. military accused of fighting with the Taliban in Afghanistan and wanting to kill Americans, was involved in one of three suicide bombings that killed seven Iraqi security forces in Mosul on April 26, Defense Department officials said.

Editor’s Comment — There are a series of questions here that can be peeled away like the layers of an onion. On the outside, the one that Gitmo fans will say has an obvious answer: Was it a mistake for al Ajmi to have been released? Next: Would he have been likely to become a suicide bomber had he never been detained? Would he have become a suicide bomber had he not been tortured?

But most important of all: How many suicide bombings would there have been in the last seven years had Guantanamo never become the globally recognized emblem of American vengeance?

The next big mistake in Iraq: trying to shut out Moqtada al Sadr
By Mohamad Bazzi, The National, May 7, 2008
In hindsight, it is easy to see the mistakes that the United States made in Iraq: the disbanding of the Iraqi army and the whole-scale purge of Ba’ath Party members that crippled any effort to build a new government. It is harder to see mistakes about to be made. But there’s one major error unfolding right now, and it’s not too late to prevent it: the exclusion of Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr from the political process.

The consequences of trying to isolate Sadr and his political movement are profound: he will lash out further at the Iraqi government and US troops, his supporters will completely abandon the ceasefire he imposed last August, and violence will spiral out of control once again. US commanders credit Sadr’s ceasefire with a significant drop in both attacks on US forces and sectarian bloodletting. Those highly touted gains made during the “surge” of US troops will evaporate.