Palin’s problem
By Charles Krauthammer, Washington Post, September 5, 2008

The vice president’s only constitutional duty of any significance is to become president at a moment’s notice. Palin is not ready. Nor is Obama. But with Palin, the case against Obama evaporates.

So why did McCain do it? He figured it’s a Democratic year. The Republican brand is deeply tarnished. The opposition is running on “change” in a change election. So McCain gambled that he could steal the change issue for himself — a crazy brave, characteristically reckless, inconceivably difficult maneuver — by picking an authentically independent, tough-minded reformer. With Palin, he doubles down on change.

The problem is the inherent oddity of the incumbent party running on change. Here were Republicans — the party that controlled the White House for eight years and both houses of Congress for five — wildly cheering the promise to take on Washington. I don’t mean to be impolite, but who’s controlled Washington this decade?

The resentment strategy
By Paul Krugman, New York Times, September 5, 2008

Can the super-rich former governor of Massachusetts — the son of a Fortune 500 C.E.O. who made a vast fortune in the leveraged-buyout business — really keep a straight face while denouncing “Eastern elites”?

Can the former mayor of New York City, a man who, as USA Today put it, “marched in gay pride parades, dressed up in drag and lived temporarily with a gay couple and their Shih Tzu” — that was between his second and third marriages — really get away with saying that Barack Obama doesn’t think small towns are sufficiently “cosmopolitan”?

Can the vice-presidential candidate of a party that has controlled the White House, Congress or both for 26 of the past 28 years, a party that, Borg-like, assimilated much of the D.C. lobbying industry into itself — until Congress changed hands, high-paying lobbying jobs were reserved for loyal Republicans — really portray herself as running against the “Washington elite”?

Yes, they can.

Cheney backs membership in NATO for Georgia
By Steven Lee Myers, New York Times, September 5, 2008

Vice President Dick Cheney flew here on Thursday to deliver a forceful American pledge to rebuild Georgia and its economy, to preserve its sovereignty and its territory and to bring it into the NATO alliance in defiance of Russia.

Mr. Cheney spent only four and a half hours in Georgia, but the visit included a strong rebuke to Russia’s behavior and a highly symbolic visit to American troops unloading humanitarian supplies at the airport here within sight of an airplane factory that Russian bombs had damaged.

He arrived a day after the United States pledged $1 billion to help Georgia recover from its defeat by Russia’s armed forces, which continue to control two breakaway regions, as well as buffer zones in Georgia.

US navy ship steams into port where Russian troops stationed
By James Hider, The Times, September 5, 2008

A US navy flagship has steamed into a Georgian port where Russian troops are still stationed, stoking tensions once again in the tinderbox Caucasus region.

A previous trip by American warships was cancelled at the last minute a week ago amid fears that an armed stand off could erupt in the Black Sea port of Poti.

The arrival of the USS Mount Whitney came as Moscow accused Dick Cheney, the hawkish US vice-president, of stoking tensions during a visit to Tbilisi yesterday, in which he vowed to bring Georgia into the Nato alliance. Russia sees any such move as a blatant Western encroachment on its traditional sphere of influence.

Why Ukraine’s pro-Western coalition split
By Yuri Zarakhovich, Time, September 4, 2008

Vice President Dick Cheney arrived in Ukraine Thursday to bolster its pro-Western government in the wake of the Georgia debacle, but he’s unlikely to save it from collapse. The mortal threat to the administration of President Victor Yushchenko comes not from Russia, but from Prime Minister Yuliya Tymoshenko, his arch-rival for leadership in the democratic coalition that swept to power in 2005. And whereas Yuschenko has rallied to the Georgian cause and reiterated his own desire to accelerate Ukraine’s entry into NATO, Tymoshenko is seen to be more willing to accommodate Russian concerns, and is seeking to oust the president by making common cause with the main opposition party traditionally endorsed by Moscow.

Will Israel and America spurn yet another Arab overture?
Editorial, Daily Star, September 5, 2008

Israel and its American backers recently missed a historic opportunity when they ignored the Arab peace initiative, which offered normalized relations to the Jewish state in exchange for a withdrawal from occupied land. They would be foolish to miss another one that emerged this week at a four-way summit that gathered the French, Qatari, Turkish and Syrian leaders in Damascus. Syrian President Bashar Assad announced on Thursday at the close of the meeting that his country had submitted a proposal to the Israelis through Turkish mediators to launch direct peace talks with Israel, and it would be in the Jewish state’s interests to accept the offer.

Previous Syrian peace overtures have been rejected by the Jewish state as “not serious.” But if the Israelis have any lingering doubts about the soberness and earnestness with which this latest offer was made, they should step back and look at the partners who have implicitly lent their backing to the initiative. French President Nicolas Sarkozy is not only putting France’s support behind the proposal, but also that of the European Union, whose rotating presidency his country currently holds. Turkey brings to the equation diplomatic credentials that are perhaps unmatched in the region, as Ankara had shown itself to be the only state capable of straddling the divides between Russia and the United States, Arabs and Israelis and Iran and the West. The added involvement of Qatar, whose leader Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani currently heads the Gulf Cooperation Council, means that the road to peace could eventually lead to countless economic opportunities.

U.S. may step up raids in Pakistan
By Julian E. Barnes and Greg Miller, Los Angeles Times, September 5, 2008

Even as angry protests spread in Pakistan, Pentagon officials said Thursday that the number of cross-border commando missions may grow in coming months to counter increasing violence in Afghanistan.

The developments threatened to aggravate U.S.-Pakistani tensions just before the country’s presidential election Saturday, in which attitudes toward the United States are likely to be a key issue. The U.S. raid Wednesday and its aftermath also fanned a long-standing debate within the Bush administration over how to deal with militants in Pakistan.

Pakistani officials said U.S. troops flew into South Waziristan by helicopter in the raid and that as many as 20 people were killed, many thought to be civilians. The White House, State Department and Pentagon all moved to clamp down on administration discussion of the assault, but government officials confirmed the broad details provided by the Pakistani government.

Republic of blowback
By Ken Menkhaus and Karin von Hippel, IHT, September 4, 2008

Back in the 1980s, frustrated aid workers joked that Somalia was the “graveyard of foreign aid,” a place where hundreds of millions of dollars were wasted on projects that occasionally left villagers worse off than before.

In the early 1990s, an ambitious UN peace enforcement operation set out to end a famine and promote reconciliation in war-torn Somalia, only to be drawn into the very war it was meant to stop, producing a debacle that put a quick end to hopes of a more robust UN peace enforcement capacity in the post-Cold-War era.

Thus began the schooling of the international community on the law of unintended consequences in Somalia, a country where what foreigners want and what they get rarely coincide. The latest example is U.S. counter-terrorism efforts.

Maliki drops the mask
By Jonathan Steele, The Guardian, September 5, 2008

What’s up with Nouri al-Maliki? As security anxieties subside in this slowly calming city, political speculation has rarely been so intense. First, it was Maliki’s demand that all US troops leave Iraq by the end of 2011. Then came signs that his government wants to undermine the Sunni tribal militias, known as the Awakening councils, on whom the Americans have relied to defeat al-Qaida in Iraq. Now there are moves to take on the powerful Kurdish peshmerga troops and push them out of disputed areas in the strategic central province of Diyala.

Why is the prime minister doing this? Is “the puppet breaking his strings”, as one Arab newspaper put it? Or is the more appropriate metaphor “dropping the mask”? Those who knew Maliki in exile in Syria during Saddam Hussein’s time now recall that he opposed the US-led invasion. His Daawa party did not attend the eve-of-invasion conference of US- and UK-supported exiles in London, and he opposed the party’s decision six months later to join the hand-picked “governing council” set up by the first occupation overlord, Paul Bremer.

Pentagon urges extended pause in Iraq drawdown
By Karen DeYoung and Ann Scott Tyson, Washington Post, September 5, 2008

Pentagon leaders have recommended to President Bush that the United States make no further troop reductions in Iraq this year, administration officials said yesterday.

The plan, delivered this week, calls for extending a pause in drawdowns until late January or early February — after the Bush administration has left office. At that point, up to 7,500 of the approximately 146,000 troops in Iraq could be withdrawn, depending on conditions on the ground there. The reduction would coincide with new deployments to Afghanistan, officials said.

U.S. spied on Iraqi leaders, book says
By Steve Luxenberg, Washington Post, September 5, 2008

The Bush administration has conducted an extensive spying operation on Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, his staff and others in the Iraqi government, according to a new book by Washington Post associate editor Bob Woodward.

“We know everything he says,” according to one of multiple sources Woodward cites about the practice in “The War Within: A Secret White House History, 2006-2008,” scheduled for release Monday.

The book also says that the U.S. troop “surge” of 2007, in which President Bush sent nearly 30,000 additional U.S. combat forces and support troops to Iraq, was not the primary factor behind the steep drop in violence there during the past 16 months.

Rather, Woodward reports, “groundbreaking” new covert techniques enabled U.S. military and intelligence officials to locate, target and kill insurgent leaders and key individuals in extremist groups such as al-Qaeda in Iraq.

No experience necessary
By Michael Kinsley, Slate, August 31, 2008

We all know that modern political campaigns choose their issues from the cafeteria line, after market-testing them, and then having them professionally framed. Rarely, though, are we offered such a clear and unarguable example. How could anyone truly believe that Barack Obama’s background and job history are inadequate experience for a president, and simultaneously believe that Sarah Palin’s background and job history are perfectly adequate? It’s possible to believe one or the other. But both? Simply not possible. John McCain has been—what’s the word?—lying. And so have all the pundits who rushed to defend McCain’s choice.

Obama outwits the bloviators
By Frank Rich, New York Times, August 31, 2008

Stop the presses! This election isn’t about the Clintons after all. It isn’t about the Acropolis columns erected at Invesco Field. It isn’t about who is Paris Hilton and who is Hanoi Hilton. (Though it may yet be about who is Sarah Palin.) After a weeklong orgy of inane manufactured melodrama labeled “convention coverage” on television, Barack Obama descended in classic deus ex machina fashion — yes, that’s Greek too — to set the record straight. America is in too much trouble, he said, to indulge in “a big election about small things.”

As has been universally noted, Obama did what he had to do in his acceptance speech. He scrapped the messianic “Change We Can Believe In” for the more concrete policy litany of “The Change We Need.” He bared his glinting Chicago pol’s teeth to John McCain. Obama’s still a skinny guy, but the gladiatorial arena and his eagerness to stand up to bullies (foreign and Republican) made him a plausible Denver Bronco. All week long a media chorus had fretted whether he could pull off a potentially vainglorious stunt before 80,000 screaming fans. Well, yes he can, and so he did.

But was this a surprise? Hardly. No major Obama speech — each breathlessly hyped in advance as do-or-die and as the “the most important of his career” — has been a disaster; most have been triples or home runs, if not grand slams. What is most surprising is how astonished the press still is at each Groundhog Day’s replay of the identical outcome. Indeed, the disconnect between the reality of this campaign and how it is perceived and presented by the mainstream media is now a major part of the year’s story. The press dysfunction is itself a window into the unstable dynamics of Election 2008.

Agreement on U.S. withdrawal from Iraq said to be in peril as Maliki ousts negotiators
By Ned Parker, Los Angeles Times, August 31, 2008

At the “make-or-break” stage of talks with the U.S. on the withdrawal of American troops from Iraq, Prime Minister Nouri Maliki has swept aside his negotiating team and replaced it with three of his closest aides, a reshuffle that some Iraqi officials warn risks sabotaging the agreement.

The decision on the team negotiating the pact, which the Americans have described as the basis of a long-term strategic alliance between the United States and Iraq, remains so sensitive that it has not been announced. In disclosing the switch to the Los Angeles Times this weekend, a senior Iraqi official close to Maliki also suggested that the two sides remained deadlocked on key issues.

SAS kills hundreds of terrorists in ‘secret war’ against al-Qaeda in Iraq
By Sean Rayment, The Sunday Telegraph, August 31, 2008

More than 3,500 insurgents have been “taken off the streets of Baghdad” by the elite British force in a series of audacious “Black Ops” over the past two years.

It is understood that while the majority of the terrorists were captured, several hundred, who were mainly members of the organisation known as “al-Qa’eda in Iraq” have been killed by the SAS.

The SAS is part of a highly secretive unit called “Task Force Black” which also includes Delta Force, the US equivalent of the SAS.

Russia claims its sphere of influence in the world
By Andrew E Kramer, New York Times, August 31, 2008

President Dmitri A. Medvedev of Russia on Sunday laid out what he said would become his government’s guiding principles of foreign policy after its landmark conflict with Georgia — notably including a claim to a “privileged” sphere of influence in the world.

Speaking to Russian television in the Black Sea resort of Sochi, a day before a summit meeting in Brussels where European leaders were to reassess their relations with Russia, Mr. Medvedev said his government would adhere to five principles.

Russia, he said, would observe international law. It would reject what he called United States dominance of world affairs in a “unipolar” world. It would seek friendly relations with other nations. It would defend Russian citizens and business interests abroad. And it would claim a sphere of influence in the world.

Medvedev disappointed in Dushanbe
By Nabi Abdullaev, Moscow Times, August 29, 2008

Moscow fell short of the diplomatic support it was looking for Thursday, as Central Asian states and China failed to back its recognition of independence for South Ossetia and Abkhazia, offering instead only qualified praise for Russia’s actions in the Georgian conflict.

That failure, coupled with a statement by French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner that European Union leaders were set to consider sanctions against Russia at a special session Monday, threatened to leave Russia even further isolated diplomatically.

The hope of winning significant support from the membership of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, a security alliance Moscow has embraced as a counterbalance to NATO in Central Asia, vanished with a joint statement at a meeting in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, calling for the respect of all countries’ territorial integrity and denouncing the use of force in local conflicts.

Russia threatens to supply Iran with top new missile system as ‘cold war’ escalates
By Philip Sherwell in New York and William Lowther, The Sunday Telegraph, August 31, 2008

US intelligence fears the Kremlin will supply the sophisticated S-300 system to Tehran if Washington pushes through Nato membership for its pro-Western neighbours Georgia and Ukraine.

The proposed deal is causing huge alarm in the US and Israel as the S-300 can track 100 targets at once and fire on planes up to 75 miles away.

That would make it a “game-changer”, greatly improving Iranian defences against any air strike on its nuclear sites, according to Pentagon adviser Dan Goure. “This is a system that scares every Western air force,” he said.

Pakistani city of Peshawar could fall to Taliban as fear and attacks grow
By Nick Meo, The Telegraph, August 30, 2008

Should they let their daughters go back to lessons in the rubble of their school, blown up by the Taliban in the middle of the night, or should they keep them safe at home?

Hashim, the caretaker who was held at gunpoint by masked gunmen, was warned that they would be back if the school is rebuilt. He fears that next time they could blow it up with pupils inside.

Yet this is not Kandahar, the Taliban capital of southern Afghanistan, but Peshawar – a city of 1.4 million people in neighbouring Pakistan, once celebrated as a cultural haven for artists, musicians and intellectuals.

A year ago schools were considered safe in the city, the capital of North-West Frontier Province. But the Taliban insurgency that has been growing in the wild mountains that rise in the distance is spreading into urban Pakistan.

Bush seeks to affirm a continuing war on terror
By Eric Lichtblau, New York Times, August 29, 2008

Tucked deep into a recent proposal from the Bush administration is a provision that has received almost no public attention, yet in many ways captures one of President Bush’s defining legacies: an affirmation that the United States is still at war with Al Qaeda.

Seven years after the Sept. 11 attacks, Mr. Bush’s advisers assert that many Americans may have forgotten that. So they want Congress to say so and “acknowledge again and explicitly that this nation remains engaged in an armed conflict with Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and associated organizations, who have already proclaimed themselves at war with us and who are dedicated to the slaughter of Americans.”

The language, part of a proposal for hearing legal appeals from detainees at the United States naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, goes beyond political symbolism. Echoing a measure that Congress passed just days after the Sept. 11 attacks, it carries significant legal and public policy implications for Mr. Bush, and potentially his successor, to claim the imprimatur of Congress to use the tools of war, including detention, interrogation and surveillance, against the enemy, legal and political analysts say.

Scholars question Palin credentials
By Fred Barbask and David Mark, Politico, August 30, 2008

John McCain was aiming to make history with his pick of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, and historians say he succeeded.

Presidential scholars say she appears to be the least experienced, least credentialed person to join a major-party ticket in the modern era.

So unconventional was McCain’s choice that it left students of the presidency literally “stunned,” in the words of Joel Goldstein, a St. Louis University law professor and scholar of the vice presidency. “Being governor of a small state for less than two years is not consistent with the normal criteria for determining who’s of presidential caliber,” said Goldstein.

2 top Alaska newspapers question Palin’s fitness
By Greg Mitchell, Huffington Post, August 30, 2008

Since yesterday’s shocking arrival of Gov. Sarah Palin as John McCain’s running mate there has been the usual cable news and print blathering about the pick from those who know little about her. But what about the journalists close to home — in Alaska — who know her best and have followed her career for years?

For the past 24 hours, the pages and web sites of the two leading papers up there have raised all sorts of issues surrounding Palin, from her ethics problems to general lack of readiness for this big step up. Right now the top story on the Anchorage Daily News web site looks at new info in what it calls “troopergate” and opens: “Alaska’s former commissioner of public safety says Gov. Sarah Palin, John McCain’s pick to be vice president, personally talked him on two occasions about a state trooper who was locked in a bitter custody battle with the governor’s sister.

Pollsters say Americans ready to back attack on Iran if diplomacy fails
By Josh Rogin, CQ, August 27, 2008

A pro-Israel organization argued Wednesday that a majority of Americans would support military action against Iran under certain circumstances, in a rare concurrence of message between some Democrats and Republicans at the Democratic National Convention.

Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg and Republican pollster Frank Luntz joined under the banner of the Israel Project to release data from a poll of voters in the United States, Great Britain, and Germany. They aimed to make the case that a U.S. consensus exists on Iran’s regime and the need for tough measures to combat it.

The Israel Project officials say the group is pushing for a diplomatic approach to dealing with Iran. But they prominently presented data portraying that a majority of Americans could eventually get behind an Israeli or U.S. strike on Iranian nuclear facilities.

Iran warns any attack would start ‘world war’
AFP, August 30, 2008

A senior military commander warned on Saturday that any attack on Iran would start a new world war, as Tehran pressed on with its controversial nuclear drive despite the risk of further UN sanctions.

“Any aggression against Iran will start a world war,” deputy chief of staff for defence publicity, Brigadier General Masoud Jazayeri, said in a statement carried by the state news agency IRNA.

The front against Iran is unraveling
By Yossi Alpher, The Forward, August 28, 2008

Barring a doomsday scenario, Israel may be forced to concede to Washington at least some of its freedom to make independent decisions aimed at militarily neutralizing or even delaying the Iranian nuclear threat. In the near future, Israel is far less likely to receive American backing and support for an attack on Iran, as it might have just a few months ago.

In short, Israel and the United States may be falling out of sync regarding Iran.

In recent days we were informed that the United States had agreed to deploy an American-manned, high-power early-warning system in the Negev. By linking up to a sophisticated American radar and satellite system, Israel would increase its early-warning time against missiles launched from Iran by crucial minutes and could intercept them at a greater distance from home. The catch is that an American green light is now required before Israel can launch a preemptive attack against Iran.

In parallel, the United States reportedly refused to sell Israel sophisticated new aerial refueling tankers — the kind that could be used to extend the flight time and range of F-15s attacking Iran. Additional reports indicate that recent visits to Israel by high-level American military officers were dedicated to informing Jerusalem that the United States would not give its aircraft access to Iraqi airspace on their way to and from Iran, and to warning Israel not to preemptively attack Iran without first consulting Washington.

Iraq signs oil deal with China worth up to $3 billion
By Erica Goode and Riyadh Mohammed, New York Times, August 29, 2008

In the first major oil deal Iraq has made with a foreign country since 2003, the Iraqi government and the China National Petroleum Corporation have signed a contract in Beijing that could be worth up to $3 billion, Iraqi officials said Thursday.

Under the new contract, which must still be approved by Iraq’s cabinet, the Chinese company will provide technical advisers, oil workers and equipment to help develop the Ahdab oil field southeast of Baghdad, according to Assim Jihad, a spokesman for Iraq’s Oil Ministry. If the deal is approved, work could begin on the oil field within a few months, Mr. Jihad said.

He said that Iraq had agreed to provide security for Chinese workers and that the Chinese company would also bring its own security team.

Joint inquiry on deaths of Afghans is proposed
By Carlotta Gall, New York Times, August 30, 2008

The American commander of the NATO force in Afghanistan, Gen. David D. McKiernan, expressed regret on Friday at the loss of civilian life in the airstrikes last week in western Afghanistan. He offered to conduct a joint investigation with the Afghan government and the United Nations to resolve broad discrepancies in accounts of what had happened.

The general said he did not agree with the United Nations and Afghan government reports that as many as 90 civilians had been killed in the bombardment. But he raised the military’s tally of all those killed, including militants, to up to 40, in an interview at his Kabul headquarters.

His overall estimate was slightly higher than that of an official Pentagon review released this week, which repeats the military’s earlier assessment that 5 civilians and 25 militants were killed in the raid on the night of Aug. 21 and into the early morning of Aug. 22. But General McKiernan also contended that only 5 civilians had been killed.

Afghanistan: on the cliff-edge
By Paul Rogers, Open Democracy, August 28, 2008

Many sober analysts of the war in Afghanistan expected a military offensive by the Taliban in the early months of 2008. They also suspected that Taliban paramilitaries would avoid major confrontations with foreign forces, out of awareness of the overwhelming firepower that these could launch even on quite small groups. They expected instead an extension of the use of small raids, improvised roadside-bombs and suicide-attacks.

In the event these tactics have indeed been widely used. But the increased level of Taliban activity has been expressed in many other ways as well. They have included a closely coordinated assault on a prison in Kandahar that released hundreds of Taliban detainees; an attack on the Serena international hotel in the heart of Kabul on 14 January; the bombing of the Indian embassy there on 7 July; and a major increase in attacks on transport links (see “The global economic war”, 14 August 2008).

This widening of targets is serious enough for American, British and other military commanders. What has really surprised them, however, has been the ability of Taliban and other militias to engage in significant conventional military attacks. One of these, on 13 July, killed nine United States troops in a newly established but isolated base in Kunar province; another, on 19 August, killed ten French soldiers in Sar0bi (Surobi) district, only fifty kilometres east of Kabul. The deteriorating situation in Afghanistan had even before these assaults been reflected in the redeployment of a full aircraft-carrier battle-group led by the USS Abraham Lincoln to the Indian Ocean to bring its planes within range of southern Afghanistan.

Russia: we are ready for a new cold war
By Ian Traynor, The Guardian, August 26, 2008

Russia’s relations with the west plunged to their most critical point in a generation today when the Kremlin built on its military rout of Georgia by recognising the breakaway provinces of South Ossetia and Abkhazia as independent states.

Declaring that if his decision meant a new cold war, then so be it, President Dmitri Medvedev signed a decree conferring Russian recognition on Georgia’s two secessionist regions. The move flouted UN Security Council resolutions and dismissed western insistence during the crisis of the past three weeks on respecting Georgia’s territorial integrity and international borders.

Tonight, Medvedev accused Washington of shipping arms to Georgia under the guise of humanitarian aid.

Russian threat to Nato supply route in Afghanistan
By Jeremy Page, The Times, August 26, 2008

Russia played a trump card in its strategic poker game with the West yesterday by threatening to suspend an agreement allowing Nato to take supplies and equipment to Afghanistan through Russia and Central Asia.

The agreement was struck at a Nato summit in April to provide an alternative supply route to the road between the Afghan capital and the Pakistani border, which has come under attack from militants on both sides of the frontier this year.

Zamir Kabulov, the Russian Ambassador to Afghanistan, told The Times in an interview that he believed the deal was no longer valid because Russia suspended military cooperation with Nato last week over its support for Georgia.

Why Georgia matters [LRB Archives 1992]
By John Lloyd, LRB, November 19, 1992

In the wire services of the world, the Georgian ‘story’ blips in and out of the schedules, usually with some mention of Eduard Shevardnadze, for the past month the elected head of Georgia’s Parliament. In the scale of what matters to those who believe foreign affairs matter to their lives, Georgia seems minor: self-contained, complex, resistant to solutions. The argument for it mattering is not the so far relatively small loss of life, but the fact that it is an extreme but not wayward example of the particularist and defensive ethno-nationalism which is now becoming the dominant political principle throughout Eastern Europe and beyond.

That Abkhazians are killing and being killed by Georgians stems directly from the collapse of Soviet power. Until quite recently it was generally believed, by me among others, that the rapid dismantling of the Empire was a good thing which would allow the suppressed nations to recover an identity from whose search they had always been deflected by force or the threat of force. It is hard to hold onto that belief now, especially in the Caucasus and Transcaucasus.

Doubts cast on Zardari’s state of mental health
By Michael Peel and Farhan Bokhari, Financial Times, August 26, 2008

Asif Ali Zardari, the leading contender for the presidency of nuclear-armed Pakistan, was suffering from severe psychiatric problems as recently as last year, according to court documents filed by his doctors.

The widower of former prime minister Benazir Bhuttowas diagnosed with a range of serious illnesses including dementia, major depressive disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder in a series of medical reports spanning more than two years.

Mr Zardari, the co-chair of the Pakistan People’s party, and its candidate to succeed president Pervez Musharraf, who stepped down last week, spent 11 of the past 20 years in Pakistani prisons fighting corruption allegations, during which he claims to have been tortured.

Peace Now settlement watch report
Peace Now, August, 2008

Despite the Israeli government’s renewed commitment during the Annapolis Summit to freeze all settlement activity, the construction has continued and almost doubled in all of the settlements and outposts on both sides of the Separation Barrier. No outpost had been evacuated, and instead, many outposts were expanded. In East Jerusalem the construction increased dramatically.

It seems that the government of Israel repeats the mistakes of the past, by on the one hand negotiating an agreement with the Palestinians and in parallel constructing in the settlements. This construction undermines the Palestinian partners and creating facts on the ground that might prevent the possibility of a peace agreement.

Israeli outposts seal death of Palestinian state
By Jonathan Cook, Counterpunch, August 25, 2008

Long-established Palestinian villages are instantly identifiable by their homes’ flat roofs and the prominence of the tall minarets of the local mosques. Interspersed among them, however, are a growing number of much newer, fortified communities of luxury villas topped by distinctive red-tiled roofs.

These are the Jewish settlements that now form an almost complete ring around Palestinian East Jerusalem, cutting it off from the rest of the West Bank and destroying any hope that the city will one day become the capital of a Palestinian state.

“These settlements are supposed to be the nail in the coffin of any future peace agreement with the Palestinians,” said Dror Etkes, a veteran observer of the settlements who works for the Israeli human rights group Yesh Din. “Their purpose is to make a Palestinian state unviable.”

The majority of the half a million settlers in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, according to Mr Etkes, are “economic opportunists”, drawn to life in the occupied territories less by ideological or religious convictions than economic incentives. The homes, municipal services and schools there are heavily subsidised by the government.

Afghans want a deal on foreign troops
By Carlotta Gall, New York Times, August 26, 2008

The Afghan Council of Ministers decided Monday to review the presence of international forces and agreements with foreign allies, including NATO and the United States, after a series of military operations that have caused mounting civilian losses.

The ministers demanded a status of forces agreement, which would stipulate that the authority and responsibilities of international forces be negotiated, and they said that aerial bombing, illegal detentions and house raids by international forces must be stopped.

The declaration came after several military operations involving American forces resulted in heavy civilian casualties, most recently airstrikes in western Afghanistan on Friday that killed more than 90 people, most of them women and children, according to a government commission. The United States military is investigating the latest episode; it earlier said the airstrikes had killed 5 civilians and 25 militants.

Baghdad’s misguided crackdown on the Sons of Iraq
By Shawn Brimley and Colin Kahl, Los Angeles Times, August 26, 2008

There is a gathering storm on Iraq’s horizon. Over the last several weeks, its central government has embarked on what appears to be an effort to arrest, drive away or otherwise intimidate tens of thousands of Sunni security volunteers — the so-called Sons of Iraq — whose contributions have been crucial to recent security gains. After returning from a trip to Iraq last month at the invitation of Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, the U.S. commander in Iraq, we are convinced that if Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki and his advisors persist in this sectarian agenda, the country may spiral back into chaos.

Much of Iraq’s dramatic security progress can be traced to a series of decisions made by Sunni tribal leaders in late 2006 to turn against Al Qaeda in Iraq and cooperate with American forces in Anbar province. These leaders, outraged by Al Qaeda’s brutality against their people, approached the U.S. military with an offer it couldn’t refuse: Enter into an alliance with the tribes, and they would turn their weapons against Al Qaeda rather than American troops.

The 21st-century man
By David Brooks, New York Times, August 26, 2008

At the core, Obama’s best message has always been this: He is unconnected with the tired old fights that constrict our politics. He is in tune with a new era. He has very little experience but a lot of potential. He does not have big achievements, but he is authentically the sort of person who emerges in a multicultural, globalized age. He is therefore naturally in step with the problems that will confront us in the years to come.

So as I’m trying to measure the effectiveness of this convention, I’ll be jotting down a little minus mark every time I hear a theme that muddies that image. I’ll jot down a minus every time I hear the old class conflict, and the old culture war themes. I’ll jot down a minus when I see the old Bush obsession rearing its head, which is not part of his natural persona. I’ll write a demerit every time I hear the rich played off against the poor, undercutting Obama’s One America dream.

I’ll put a plus down every time a speaker says that McCain is a good man who happens to be out of step with the times. I’ll put a plus down every time a speaker says that a multipolar world demands a softer international touch. I’ll put a plus down when a speaker says the old free market policies worked fine in the 20th century, but no longer seem to be working today. These are arguments that reinforce Obama’s identity as a 21st-century man.

Barack’s big night
By Dayo Olopade, The New Republic, August 25, 2008

More than any politician in recent history, Barack Obama’s national career began with a speech–his keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. On the eve of the convention that caps the journey begun that night, it’s remarkable how little is understood about how he obtained his historic break–and who really deserves credit for it.

In his 2006 book, The Audacity of Hope, Obama wrote, “The process by which I was selected as the keynote speaker remains something of a mystery to me.” Today, the process remains shrouded in competing versions of events. A slew of top Kerry aides (understandably) take credit for putting Obama on the campaign’s radar. “I knew about him in the Illinois senate primary. I knew about what he had done on the war before the war,” says Kerry’s top strategist, Bob Shrum, who learned about Obama from his friend Laurence Tribe, the Harvard professor for whom Obama had served as a research assistant during his years in law school. Jack Corrigan, who managed Kerry’s convention operations and closely follows Illinois politics, told me that he had contemplated hiring Obama to work on voter outreach months before the convention. “I thought, ‘This guy’s going to lose in a month,'” Corrigan recalled, referring to the grim odds Obama faced in February 2004. “We should go after him.”

Last call for Change We Can Believe In
By Frank Rich, New York Times, August 23, 2008

Obama should go after McCain’s supposedly biggest asset — experience — much as McCain went after Obama’s crowd-drawing celebrity.

It is, after all, not mere happenstance that so many conservative pundits — Rich Lowry, Peggy Noonan, Ramesh Ponnuru — have, to McCain’s irritation, proposed that he “patriotically” declare in advance that he will selflessly serve only a single term. Whatever their lofty stated reasons for promoting this stunt, their underlying message is clear: They recognize in their heart of hearts that the shelf life of McCain’s experience has already reached its expiration date.

Is a man who is just discovering the Internet qualified to lead a restoration of America’s economic and educational infrastructures? Is the leader of a virtually all-white political party America’s best salesman and moral avatar in the age of globalization? Does a bellicose Vietnam veteran who rushed to hitch his star to the self-immolating overreaches of Ahmad Chalabi, Pervez Musharraf and Mikheil Saakashvili have the judgment to keep America safe?

R.I.P., “Change We Can Believe In.” The fierce urgency of the 21st century demands Change Before It’s Too Late.

How Obama reconciles dueling views on economy
By David Leonhardt, New York Times, August 24, 2008

As Barack Obama prepares to accept the Democratic nomination this week, it is clear that the economic policies of the next president are going to be hugely important. Ever since Wall Street bankers were called back from their vacations last summer to deal with the convulsions in the mortgage market, the economy has been lurching from one crisis to the next. The International Monetary Fund has described the situation as “the largest financial shock since the Great Depression.” The details are too technical for most of us to understand. (They’re too technical for many bankers to understand, which is part of the problem.) But the root cause is simple enough. In some fundamental ways, the American economy has stopped working.

Obama fatigue? (NYT)

Racism is the only reason Obama might lose (Slate)

We tilt at windmills as world war looms
By Simon Jenkins, The Sunday Times, August 24, 2008

Might it be that a raging seven-year obsession with Osama Bin Laden and his tiny Al-Qaeda organisation has blinded strategists to the old verities? Wars are rarely “clashes of civilisation”, but rather clashes of interest. They are usually the result of careless policy, of misread signals and of mission creep closing options for peace.

Terrorists, wherever located and trained, can certainly capture headlines and cause overnight mayhem, but they cannot project power. They cannot conquer countries or peoples, only manipulate democratic regimes into espousing illiberal policies, as in America and Britain. By grossly overstating the significance of terrorism, western leaders have distracted foreign policy from what should be its prime concern: securing world peace by holding a balance of interest – and pride – among the great powers.

To any who lived through the cold war, recent events along Russia’s western and southern borders are deeply ominous. Moscow initially spent the 17 years since the fall of the Soviet Union flirting with the West. It had been defeated and had good reason for disarming and putting out feelers to join Nato and the European Union. It took part in such proto-capitalist entities as the G8.

In the case of Nato and the EU it was arrogantly rebuffed, while its former Warsaw Pact allies were accepted. Moscow was told it would be foolish to worry about encirclement. A nation that had never enjoyed democracy should content itself with basking in its delights. Russians in the Baltic states and in Ukraine should make their peace with emerging governments. The political clutter of the cold war should be decontaminated.

Suddenly this has not worked. The world is showing alarming parallels with the 1930s. Lights are turning to red as the world again approaches depression. The credit crunch and the collapse of world trade talks are making nations introverted. Meanwhile, the defeated power of the last war, Russia, is flexing its muscles and finding them in good working order.

Georgia and the push for cold war
By David Bromwich, Huffington Post, August 21, 2008

John McCain said it first: “In the 21st century nations don’t invade other nations.” George W. Bush said it, too: Russia’s way is not the “way to conduct foreign policy in the 21st Century”. And Condoleezza Rice on August 19 said it: “Russia is a state that is unfortunately using the one tool that it has always used whenever it wishes to deliver a message and that’s its military power. That’s not the way to deal in the 21st century.” Outside of the United States, these utterances are greeted with laughter, for they betoken a hypocrisy so ingrained it suggests insanity. The United States looks in the mirror and what do we see? Russia. And what do we say? “That is no way to do things in the 21st century!” And then we go back to reading the interview with General Petraeus on the occupation of Baghdad.

But these statements are a sideshow. The Georgia debacle started on May 4, 2006, with a longer and more considered statement, by Vice President Cheney, in Vilnius, Lithuania. Cheney there threatened Russia with a new Cold War if Russia did not capitulate to American demands of cheap oil for Russia’s pro-American neighbors. “Russia has a choice,” he said. The same curious locution, with its undertone of parental menace — the parent who stops payments and knows when to use the whip — was employed by President Bush addressing Iran in 2007. “Iran has a choice.” Has a nation ever talked to another nation in this style? But then, has there ever been a nation that sees itself as America sees itself in the 21st century? “Russia has a choice” — the language of a man with his hand on his gun, very sure of his moral as well as physical superiority. This is the language of omnipotence, barely disguised. It is ill-adapted for the purposes of social intercourse, yet finely adapted to threats that have a quality at once intimate and public; threats, indeed, part of whose function is to abort diplomacy.

What Russia’s moves on Georgia could mean for Iran
By Christopher Dickey, Newsweek, August 21, 2008

…the new Great Game, like the old one, will be a long narrative of intrigue and confrontation in which there is no sudden or decisive resolution. Realism will dictate efforts to improve relations with states on Russia’s periphery whether or not their ideologies are compatible with American democratic ideals. Another Iran scholar, Gary Sick at Columbia University, believes the policymakers remaining in the Bush administration have actually come to understand this, albeit very late. “After 9/11 their world view was that the United States had limitless power,” says Sick. “I don’t think they believe that anymore. And if you really believe you have to husband your power in ways that are more cost effective, you have to change our approach to Iran.” It won’t be easy. The Iranians are hard bargainers with regional ambitions of their own, but they are not irrational, and their primary interest is security. Oddly enough, Washington may find that the U.S. benefits by helping them feel safer, not more threatened.

Russia’s oil boom may be running on empty
By Tom Lasseter, McClatchy, August 22, 2008

The Russian oil boom, which has produced a gusher of cash, political power and an opulent elite — and has helped fuel the country’s renewed assertiveness in Georgia and elsewhere — is on shakier ground than officials in Moscow would like to admit.

Most of the oil produced after the country’s 1998 financial collapse has come from drilling and re-drilling old Soviet oil fields with more advanced equipment — squeezing more black gold out of the same ground — and efforts to develop new fields have been slow or non-existent.

After pullout, Russia envisions long-term shift
By Clifford J Levy, New York Times, August 23, 2008

As the Russian Army withdrew most of its forces from Georgia, it was becoming ever more clear on Friday that Moscow had no intention of restoring what once was — either on the ground or diplomatically.

The West wants a return to early August, before an obscure territorial dispute on the fringes of the old Soviet empire erupted into an international crisis. But Russia’s forces are digging in and seizing ribbons of Georgian land that abut two breakaway enclaves allied with Moscow, effectively extending its zone of influence.

At the same time, the Kremlin is nearing formal recognition of the independence of the enclaves, South Ossetia and Abkhazia, possibly as early as next week.

Afghan leader assails airstrike he says killed 95 (NYT)

Rockets, guile and the lessons of history: the Taleban besiege Kabul (The Times)

Behind the Taliban surge (Time)

Pakistan turns tables on militants (The Australian)

Is the Iraq war winding down? (Time)

Iraq seeks breakup of U.S.-funded Sunni fighters (LAT)

Iraqi stance led to Bush shift on pullout (WP)

Iraq cleric Muqtada Sadr critical of draft plan on U.S. troop withdrawal (LAT)

What Israel lost in the Georgia war
By Tony Karon, Time, August 21, 2008

“It is important that the entire world understands that what is happening in Georgia now will affect the entire world order,” Georgian Cabinet Minister Temur Yakobashvili said last weekend. “It’s not just Georgia’s business, but the entire world’s business.” Such sentiments would have been unremarkable but for the fact that Yakobashvili was expressing himself in fluent Hebrew, telling Israeli Army Radio that “Israel should be proud of its military, which trained Georgian soldiers.”

However, the impression that Israel had helped bolster the Georgian military was one the Israeli Foreign Ministry was anxious to avoid. Last Saturday it reportedly recommended a freeze on the further supply of equipment and expertise to Georgia by Israeli defense contractors. (Israel doesn’t supply foreign militaries directly, but its private contractors must get Defense Ministry approval for such deals.) The Israelis decided to refrain from authorizing new defense contracts, although those currently in effect will be fulfilled. Israel stressed that the contracts are to provide equipment for defensive purposes. But if the Israelis were looking to downplay the significance of military ties, they weren’t helped by comments like Yakobashvili’s — or by Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili’s enthusing at a press conference earlier this week that “the Israeli weapons have been very effective.”

Nor did the Russians fail to notice. “Israel armed the Georgian army,” grumbled General Anatoly Nogovitsyn, deputy chief of staff of the Russian military, at a press conference in Moscow earlier this week. An Israeli paper had, last weekend, quoted an unnamed official warning that Israel needed “to be very careful and sensitive these days. The Russians are selling many arms to Iran and Syria, and there is no need to offer them an excuse to sell even more advanced weapons.” As if on cue, on Wednesday, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad arrived in Moscow hoping to persuade Russia to sell him sophisticated air-defense systems — and reportedly offering the Russian navy the use of one of its Mediterranean ports. Late on Wednesday, the Israeli Foreign Ministry announced that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Russian President Dmitri Medvedev had spoken on the phone to clear the air over the Georgia conflict and Russian arms sales to Syria.

Investors quit Russia after Georgia war
By Charles Clover, Financial Times, August 21, 2008

Investors pulled their money out of Russia in the wake of the Georgia conflict at the fastest rate since the 1998 rouble crisis, new figures showed on Thursday.

Russian debt and equity markets have also suffered sharp falls since the conflict began on August 8, with yields on domestic rouble bonds increasing by up to 150 basis points in the last month.

The moves come as President Dmitry Medvedev faces pressure from business leaders concerned that the impact of the global credit crisis is starting to be felt in Russia.

U.S. sees much to fear in a hostile Russia
By Peter Baker, New York Times, August 22, 2008

The president of Syria spent two days this week in Russia with a shopping list of sophisticated weapons he wanted to buy. The visit may prove a worrisome preview of things to come.

If Russia’s invasion of Georgia ushers in a sustained period of renewed animosity with the West, Washington fears that a newly emboldened but estranged Moscow could use its influence, money, energy resources, United Nations Security Council veto and, yes, its arms industry to undermine American interests around the world.

Although Russia has long supplied arms to Syria, it has held back until now on providing the next generation of surface-to-surface missiles. But the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, made clear that he was hoping to capitalize on rising tensions between Moscow and the West when he rushed to the resort city of Sochi to meet with his Russian counterpart, Dmitri A. Medvedev.

The list of ways a more hostile Russia could cause problems for the United States extends far beyond Syria and the mountains of Georgia. In addition to escalated arms sales to other anti-American states like Iran and Venezuela, policy makers and specialists in Washington envision a freeze on counterterrorism and nuclear nonproliferation cooperation, manipulation of oil and natural gas supplies, pressure against United States military bases in Central Asia and the collapse of efforts to extend cold war-era arms control treaties.

Hoping it’s Biden
By David Brooks, New York Times, August 22, 2008

Barack Obama has decided upon a vice-presidential running mate. And while I don’t know who it is as I write, for the good of the country, I hope he picked Joe Biden.

Biden’s weaknesses are on the surface. He has said a number of idiotic things over the years and, in the days following his selection, those snippets would be aired again and again.

But that won’t hurt all that much because voters are smart enough to forgive the genuine flaws of genuine people. And over the long haul, Biden provides what Obama needs:

Working-Class Roots. Biden is a lunch-bucket Democrat. His father was rich when he was young — played polo, cavorted on yachts, drove luxury cars. But through a series of bad personal and business decisions, he was broke by the time Joe Jr. came along. They lived with their in-laws in Scranton, Pa., then moved to a dingy working-class area in Wilmington, Del. At one point, the elder Biden cleaned boilers during the week and sold pennants and knickknacks at a farmer’s market on the weekends.

U.S., Iraqi negotiators agree on 2011 withdrawal
By Karen DeYoung and Sudarsan Raghavan, Washington Post, August 22, 2008

U.S. and Iraqi negotiators have agreed to the withdrawal of all U.S. combat forces from the country by the end of 2011, and Iraqi officials said they are “very close” to resolving the remaining issues blocking a final accord that governs the future American military presence here.

Iraqi and U.S. officials said several difficult issues remain, including whether U.S. troops will be subject to Iraqi law if accused of committing crimes. But the officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they were unauthorized to discuss the agreement publicly, said key elements of a timetable for troop withdrawal once resisted by President Bush had been reached.

“We have a text,” Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari said after a day-long visit Thursday by U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

Iraq takes aim at leaders of U.S.-tied Sunni groups
By Richard A Oppel Jr, New York Times, August 22, 2008

The Shiite-dominated government in Iraq is driving out many leaders of Sunni citizen patrols, the groups of former insurgents who joined the American payroll and have been a major pillar in the decline in violence around the nation.

In restive Diyala Province, United States and Iraqi military officials say there were orders to arrest hundreds of members of what is known as the Awakening movement as part of large security operations by the Iraqi military. At least five senior members have been arrested there in recent weeks, leaders of the groups say.

West of Baghdad, former insurgent leaders contend that the Iraqi military is going after 650 Awakening members, many of whom have fled the once-violent area they had kept safe. While the crackdown appears to be focused on a relatively small number of leaders whom the Iraqi government considers the most dangerous, there are influential voices to dismantle the American backed movement entirely.

Militants ready for Pakistan’s war
By Syed Saleem Shahzad, Asia Times, August 23, 2008

Pakistan has two options. The country can give in to militancy or it can conduct military operations against it, influential advisor to the Interior Ministry, Rahman Malik, said on Thursday. And the government is not going to negotiate with militants, he added.

His remarks follow a suicide bomb attack outside the country’s main defense industry complex at Wah, 30 kilometers northwest of the capital Islamabad, which killed as many as 100 people. The Pakistani Taliban immediately claimed responsibility, saying the attack was in response to the military’s recent air bombardment of Bajaur Agency, which led to the displacement of 250,000 people.

Rahman’s comments amount to a declaration of war on growing Islamic militancy, but it could be that the new civilian Pakistani leadership is steering the “war on terror” in the wrong direction.

Rahman’s remarks cannot be dismissed as a knee-jerk reaction in the heat of the moment. Only a few hours before the suicide attack, the chief minister of North-West Frontier Province (NWFP), Amir Haider Khan Hoti, announced in a policy statement that even if militants shunned violence and laid down their weapons, they would not be pardoned.

64 in Pakistan die in bombing at arms plant
By Jane Perlez, New York Times, August 22, 2008

Two suicide bombers killed at least 64 people outside Pakistan’s biggest weapons factory complex on Thursday, in the deadliest attack by the Taliban since they began hitting Pakistani government sites with suicide bombers more than 18 months ago.

The Taliban said the bombings were in response to a fierce Pakistani military campaign, including fighter jets and helicopter gunships, that has unfolded over the past two weeks in the tribal region of Bajaur.

The insurgents warned of more attacks if the government continued its campaign, which the military says has led 200,000 people to flee their homes.

The Limits of Power
Andrew Bacevich interviewed by Bill Moyers, PBS, August 15, 2008

Andrew Bacevich: Our foreign policy is not something simply concocted by people in Washington D.C. and imposed on us. Our foreign policy is something that is concocted in Washington D.C., but it reflects the perceptions of our political elite about what we want, we the people want. And what we want, by and large – I mean, one could point to many individual exceptions – but, what we want, by and large is, we want this continuing flow of very cheap consumer goods.

We want to be able to pump gas into our cars regardless of how big they may happen to be, in order to be able to drive wherever we want to be able to drive. And we want to be able to do these things without having to think about whether or not the book’s balanced at the end of the month, or the end of the fiscal year. And therefore, we want this unending line of credit.

Abkhazia and South Ossetia: heart of conflict, key to solution
By George Hewitt, Open Democracy, August 14, 2008

The torrent of media commentary on the Georgia-Russia war has been characterised by near-obsessive geopolitical calculation, which – as so often where Georgia and the region is concerned – tends by default to view Georgia’s “lost” territories (if they are viewed at all) as nothing more than inconsiderate and irritating pawns on a global chessboard. For this reason – but mainly because Abkhazia and South Ossetia matter in themselves and are central to any resolution of the issues underlying the August 2008 war – it is useful to consider the arguments for taking them and their claims seriously.

A striking feature of the Georgian political landscape even in these desperate days of Mikheil Saakashvili’s humiliation is that there is very little recognition in the country of how deep are the scars inflicted by Georgia’s invasions of South Ossetia (1990-92) and Abkhazia (1992-93). It is only when Georgia can at an official level come to take responsibility for its own role in this period that progress in resolving these now so-called “frozen conflicts” can be made.

One vital ingredient of this rethinking is to recognise the longstanding residency-claims of South Ossetians and Abkhazians to their respective territories.

The US missile defence system is the magic pudding that will never run out
By George Monbiot, The Guardian, August 19, 2008

It’s a novel way to take your own life. Just as Russia demonstrates what happens to former minions that annoy it, Poland agrees to host a US missile defence base. The Russians, as Poland expected, respond to this proposal by offering to turn the country into a parking lot. This proves that the missile defence system is necessary after all: it will stop the missiles Russia will now aim at Poland, the Czech Republic and the UK in response to, er, their involvement in the missile defence system.

The American government insists that the interceptors, which will be stationed on the Baltic coast, have nothing to do with Russia: their purpose is to defend Europe and the US against the intercontinental ballistic missiles Iran and North Korea don’t possess. This is why they are being placed in Poland, which, as every geography student in Texas knows, shares a border with both rogue states.

They permit us to look forward to a glowing future, in which missile defence, according to the Pentagon, will “protect our homeland … and our friends and allies from ballistic missile attack”; as long as the Russians wait until it’s working before they nuke us. The good news is that, at the present rate of progress, reliable missile defence is only 50 years away. The bad news is that it has been 50 years away for the past six decades.

Russia and the Middle East
By Walter Laqueur, Middle East Strategy at Harvard, August 17, 2008

Some have said that the Kremlin is unpredictable. I always found the Soviet (Russian) leadership more predictable than the White House.

According to Vladimir Putin, the breakdown of the Soviet Union was the greatest disaster of the 20th century. If so, one ought to undo (or reduce) the damage, and Moscow is now in a position to do so.

In his view, this does not necessarily mean physical occupation. The Central Asian governments need Russian political and economic help in facing many internal problems; they have every interest to keep close relations with the Kremlin. The same is true with regard to Azerbaijan and Armenia. The Baltic republics on the other hand are weak but indigestible; military occupation is ruled out, the game is not worth the candle. Ukraine and Moldova will be more careful not to antagonize Russia following the events in Georgia.

The Terrorism Index 2008
Foreign Policy, August, 2008

For the first time since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, issues of national security no longer dominate political discourse. Rising energy costs, the subprime mortgage implosion, and other domestic imperatives now monopolize the national conversation. In a recent poll conducted by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, Americans ranked terrorism as the country’s 10th-most important priority—behind healthcare, education, and the federal budget deficit. But even as attentions shift, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have become the longest U.S. military engagements in a century, with the exception of Vietnam. Around the world, terrorists have continued to strike with deadly effect—from Athens and Paris to Beirut and Baghdad. The upcoming presidential election presents the United States with a choice about how it will seek to combat this threat, even as, somewhere, terrorists might be plotting their next attack. Wherever the war on terror may exist in the public’s consciousness, there is no doubt that it rages on.

Six questions about the anthrax case
By Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch, August 18, 2008

Oh, the spectacle of it all — and don’t think I’m referring to those opening ceremonies in Beijing, where North Korean-style synchronization seemed to fuse with smiley-faced Walt Disney, or Michael Phelp’s thrilling hunt for eight gold medals and Speedo’s one million dollar “bonus,” a modernized tribute to the ancient Greek tradition of amateurism in action. No, I’m thinking of the blitz of media coverage after Dr. Bruce Ivins, who worked at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, Maryland, committed suicide by Tylenol on July 29th and the FBI promptly accused him of the anthrax attacks of September and October 2001.

You remember them: the powder that, innocuously enough, arrived by envelope — giving going postal a new meaning — accompanied by hair-raising letters ominously dated “09-11-01” that said, “Death to America. Death to Israel. Allah is great.” Five Americans would die from anthrax inhalation and 17 would be injured. The Hart Senate Office Building, along with various postal facilities, would be shut down for months of clean-up, while media companies that received the envelopes were thrown into chaos.

For a nation already terrified by the attacks of September 11, 2001, the thought that a brutal dictator with weapons of mass destruction (who might even have turned the anthrax over to the terrorists) was ready to do us greater harm undoubtedly helped pave the way for an invasion of Iraq. The President would even claim that Saddam Hussein had the ability to send unmanned aerial vehicles to spray biological or chemical weapons over the east coast of the United States (drones that, like Saddam’s nuclear program, would turn out not to exist).

Today, it’s hard even to recall just how terrifying those anthrax attacks were. According to a LexisNexis search, between Oct. 4 and Dec. 4, 2001, 389 stories appeared in the New York Times with “anthrax” in the headline. In that same period, 238 such stories appeared in the Washington Post. That’s the news equivalent of an unending, high-pitched scream of horror — and from those attacks would emerge an American world of hysteria involving orange alerts and duct tape, smallpox vaccinations, and finally a war, lest any of this stuff, or anything faintly like it, fall into the hands of terrorists.

Six days that broke one country – and reshaped the world order
By Ian Traynor, The Guardian, August 16, 2008

If Georgia and Nato are the principal casualties of this week’s ruthless display of brute power by Vladimir Putin, the consequences are bigger still, the fallout immense, if uncertain. The regional and the global balance of power looks to have tilted, against the west and in favour of the rising or resurgent players of the east.

In a seminal speech in Munich last year, Putin confidently warned the west that he would not tolerate the age of American hyperpower. Seven years in office at the time and at the height of his powers, he delivered his most anti-western tirade.

To an audience that included John McCain, the White House contender, and Robert Gates, the US defence secretary and ex-Kremlinologist, he served notice: “What is a unipolar world? It refers to one type of situation, one centre of authority, one centre of force, one centre of decision-making. It is world in which there is one master, one sovereign. This is pernicious … unacceptable … impossible.”

This week, he turned those words into action, demonstrating the limits of US power with his rout of Georgia. His forces roamed at will along the roads of the Southern Caucasus, beyond Russia’s borders for the first time since the disastrous Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s.

As the Russian officers sat on the American stockpiles of machine guns, ammunition, and equipment in Gori, they were savouring a highly unusual scenario. Not since the Afghan war had the Russians seized vast caches of US weaponry. “People are sick to the stomach in Washington,” said a former Pentagon official. And the Russians are giddy with success.

Russia has stopped retreating: that’s the message for America
By Tony Karon, The National, August 16, 2008

President George W Bush has long proclaimed Teddy Roosevelt as one of his heroes, but he seems to have missed a crucial piece of advice bequeathed by the swashbuckling president of a century ago: “Speak softly and carry a big stick.”

All of last week, Mr Bush loudly berated Russia, accusing it of bullying little Georgia and demanding that it withdraw its forces. “The people of Georgia have cast their lot with the free world,” Bush intoned, “and we will not cast them aside.” He promised a “robust and ongoing” military mission to deliver aid in Georgia, implicitly warning the Russians to stay out of their way. He repeatedly used the phrase “We expect Russia…” as if to convey authority. Russia, added his Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on Friday, would face “consequences” for its action.

Despite the tenor of his statements, it was plain to see that there was no stick in Bush’s hand. No answer to an “or else what?”. In case anyone got the wrong idea – as did the Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili, pouncing on Bush’s aid announcement to boast that the US military was coming to take charge of Georgia’s air and sea ports – the US Defence Secretary Robert Gates made clear that the aid mission was far more limited than Bush’s language had suggested, and that the US military had no intention of putting itself between Russian and Georgian forces.

China seeks Caucasian crisis windfall
By M K Bhadrakumar, Asia Times, August 19, 2008

A geopolitical convulsion measuring six points on the Richter scale is bound to produce aftershocks. The reverberations of the conflict in the Caucasus are beginning to be felt. We may be unwittingly bidding farewell to the “war on terror”. In any case, the international community has lost interest in Osama bin Laden.

The United States has spotted a promising new enemy on the horizon and an engrossing war may be offering itself, with infinite possibilities.

Needed: a new war doctrine. As often enough, Britain may be putting it all together. British Foreign Secretary David Miliband said in Churchillian tones, “The aggressive Russian force beyond South Ossetian borders has been something that really shocked many people … The sight of Russian tanks in Gori, Russian tanks in Senaki, the Russian blockade of the Georgian port of Poti, is a chilling reminder of times that I think we had hoped had gone by.” US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, on a visit to the Georgian capital Tbilisi, promptly echoed Miliband, recalling the Soviet intervention in Czechoslovakia in 1968.

U.S. watched as a squabble turned into a showdown
By Helene Cooper, C. J. Chivers and Clifford J. Levy, New York Times, August 18, 2008

Five months ago, President Mikheil Saakashvili of Georgia, long a darling of this city’s diplomatic dinner party circuit, came to town to push for America to muscle his tiny country of four million into NATO.

On Capitol Hill, at the State Department and at the Pentagon, Mr. Saakashvili, brash and hyperkinetic, urged the West not to appease Russia by rejecting his country’s NATO ambitions.

At the White House, President Bush bantered with the Georgian president about his prowess as a dancer. Laura Bush, the first lady, took Mr. Saakashvili’s wife to lunch. Mr. Bush promised him to push hard for Georgia’s acceptance into NATO. After the meeting, Mr. Saakashvili pronounced his visit “one of the most successful visits during my presidency,” and said he did not know of any other leader of a small country with the access to the administration that he had.

Three weeks later, Mr. Bush went to the Black Sea resort of Sochi, at the invitation of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. There, he received a message from the Russian: the push to offer Ukraine and Georgia NATO membership was crossing Russia’s “red lines,” according to an administration official close to the talks.

A dirty little war
By Luke Harding, Ian Traynor and Helen Womack, The Observer, August 17, 2008

Russia’s war in Georgia is about more than just punishing Mikheil Saakashvili, Georgia’s pro-American President, whose doomed military incursion into South Ossetia 10 days ago caused the most serious crisis between Russia and the West since the Cold War.

The objectives of Russia’s Prime Minister, Vladimir Putin, are much bigger: to create a new global order in which the US and Russia are equal partners again. Putin has frequently lamented the demise of the Soviet Union. He has described it as the greatest geo-political catastrophe of the 20th century. For Putin, the 1990s under Boris Yeltsin was a period of national humiliation in which a weakened Russia was forced to accept Western economic help and which saw former members of the Warsaw Pact embrace Nato, the West’s military club.

Over the past two years, Putin has given ample warning of his intentions to overturn the status quo in international affairs. Last year in Munich he launched a vituperative attack on America, denouncing its ‘unilateralism’. The Kremlin has criticised Nato’s westward expansion and the Bush administration’s deal with Warsaw last week to site missile defence systems in Poland and the Czech Republic. Nato membership for Ukraine and Georgia would, Putin made clear, be the final straw.

Putin’s aim, it appears, is to rewrite history, in particular the narrative that suggests that Russia lost the Cold War. Over the previous eight years as President, he has fashioned Russia into an advanced post-modern authoritarian state, governed by former KGB officers whose attitudes to the West were forged under communism. Putin has apparently never been reconciled to Russia’s new boundaries, which left millions of ethnic Russians living outside the borders of the Russian Federation in Ukraine, Georgia, the Baltic states and Central Asia.

President Musharraf of Pakistan resigns
By Jane Perlez, New York Times, August 18, 2008

Under pressure over impending impeachment charges, President Pervez Musharraf announced he would resign Monday, ending nearly nine years as one of the United States’ most important allies in the campaign against terrorism.

Speaking on television from his presidential office here at 1 p.m., Mr. Musharraf, dressed in a gray suit and tie, said that after consulting with his aides, “I have decided to resign today.” He said he was putting national interest above “personal bravado.”

“Whether I win or lose the impeachment, the nation will lose,” he said, adding that he was not prepared to put the office of the presidency through the impeachment process.

300,000 flee as jihadis attacked
By Bruce Loudon, The Australian, August 18, 2008

A human tide of more than 300,000 civilians has fled the al-Qa’ida badlands, amid indications that the fighting there has reached unprecedented levels, with the Pakistani army using massive firepower to attack jihadi militant strongholds.

Helicopter gunships, fixed-wing strike aircraft, tanks and heavy artillery have been used in the onslaught that followed the visit last month by Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani to Washington, where he was berated for Pakistan’s failure to wipe out the militants.

The offensive runs counter to perceptions that Pakistan’s new civilian Government is “soft” on Islamic extremism.

This will reassure Washington, whose ally in the war in terror for the past nine years, President Pervez Musharraf, was given by the Coalition Government until midnight last night (4am today AEST) to resign or face impeachment proceedings beginning tonight in the National Assembly.

Pakistani television showed thousands of civilians caught in the crossfire streaming out of the Bajaur, Mohmand and Kurrum agencies during the fighting estimated to have killed more than 500 militants. Tens of thousands of people are camping on the perimeter of Peshawar, the capital of the North West Frontier Province, and some have reached Rawalpindi, the garrison city adjoining Islamabad.

Pakistan looks to life without the general (The Observer)

Pakistan weak as militancy surges (CSM)

Al Qaeda at 20 dead or alive? (Peter Bergen)

Response to 9/11 offers outline of McCain doctrine (NYT)

The candidate we still don’t know (Frank Rich)

The great illusion (Paul Krugman)

Russia vows pullout as troops dig in (WP)

Georgia-Russia conflict a blow to Bush foreign policy (LAT)

‘We are all Georgians’? Not so fast. (Michael Dobbs)

U.S.’ Gates scoffs at Russian warnings to Poland (Reuters)

Russia in nuclear threat to Poland (The Times)

Attack on Georgia gives boost to big U.S. weapons programs (WSJ)

War casts cloud over pipeline route (Moscow Times)

Arab world sees Bush’s response to Georgia-Russia crisis as hypocritical (LAT)

Russia has called our bluff over countries we can’t defend (Neal Ascherson)

Fear of Russian ‘protection’ spreads to Ukraine and the Baltic (The Observer)

Psychologists clash on aiding interrogations (NYT)

US worries as Maliki gets ‘difficult’ (Gareth Porter)

Russia’s strike shows the power of the pipeline
By Steven Pearlstein, Washington Post, August 13, 2008

It was surely not lost on Russia’s bully in chief, Vladimir Putin, that the oil giant BP decided to shut down the pipeline that runs through parts of Georgia controlled by Russian troops. Indeed, that was one of the aims of the cross-border incursion.

Putin understands better than anyone that oil and gas are the source of Russia’s resurgence as a military and economic power and his own control over the Russian government and key sectors of its economy. It is oil and gas that provide the money to maintain Russia’s powerful military, along with a vast internal security apparatus and network of government-controlled enterprises that allow the president-turned-premier to maintain his iron grip on the levers of political and economic power.

Editor’s Comment — For those who see American power as wholly dependent on its military strength, the Georgia War will have come as a breath of fresh air. Russia demonstrated the incontestable power of military hardware and an old-fashioned army and the perfect justification for revving up an ideologically-lite New Cold War.

The real lesson here should however be about energy. The world’s second-largest oil producer is enfeebled by its flagrantly excessive oil consumption. Were it not for that, America would now be reaping the rewards of being an oil-rich nation while Russia’s power would correspondingly be diluted. What will it take for America to realize that it’s long past time for it to stop pigging itself?

Georgia: Mikheil Saakashvili, the man who lost it all
By Nick Allen, The Telegraph, August 13, 2008

When he burst on to television screens across the world last week, speaking perfect English, Mikheil Saakashvili looked every inch the charismatic New York-trained lawyer that he is.

Known to friends as “Misha” the cosmopolitan 40-year-old is unquestionably brilliant, speaks half a dozen languages and has a Dutch wife he met in Paris.

But Mr Saakashvili has handed Russia a victory it could scarcely have dreamed of – his decision to invade South Ossetia has left his army humiliated and he could soon be fighting for his political life with no prospect of any meaningful help from his Western allies.

Editor’s Comment — An emerging conspiracy theory is that Georgia would not have triggered a war with Russia without having Americans — such as the McCain foreign policy adviser Randy Scheunemann — egging them on. There might be a grain of truth to this idea, but I suspect that the sad truth is disastrous political judgments can too often be attributed to the psychological flaws of the individuals who make them. By most accounts, Mikheil Saakashvili is a man in whose hands power has always rested like a bomb waiting to explode.

Georgia President Saakashvili accepts Russia’s truce proposal
By Borzou Daragahi, Los Angeles Times, August 13, 2008

Bowing to the reality of vastly superior military might, the Georgian president said Tuesday that he would accept a Russian cease-fire agreement to end a five-day conflict, despite terms that some described as humiliating to his small, proud nation.

President Mikheil Saakashvili, while at times seeming defiant, appears to have all but given up his bid to reclaim two disputed regions on the Russian border. Russia, which said it had suspended a campaign that routed Georgia’s U.S.-trained military, continued bombing sites deep in the country hours later.

At a rally attended by thousands of people in Tbilisi, Saakashvili pledged that one day Georgia would beat Russia.

While aide advised McCain, his firm lobbied for Georgia
By Matthew Mosk and Jeffrey H. Birnbaum, Washington Post, August 13, 2008

Sen. John McCain’s top foreign policy adviser prepped his boss for an April 17 phone call with the president of Georgia and then helped the presumptive Republican presidential nominee prepare a strong statement of support for the fledgling republic.

The day of the call, a lobbying firm partly owned by the adviser, Randy Scheunemann, signed a $200,000 contract to continue providing strategic advice to the Georgian government in Washington.

The McCain campaign said Georgia’s lobbying contract with Orion Strategies had no bearing on the candidate’s decision to speak with President Mikheil Saakashvili and did not influence his statement. “The Embassy of Georgia requested the call,” said campaign spokesman Brian Rogers.

But ethics experts have raised concerns about former lobbyists for foreign governments providing advice to presidential candidates about those same countries. “The question is, who is the client? Is the adviser loyal to income from a foreign client, or is he loyal to the candidate he is working for now?” said James Thurber, a lobbying expert at American University. “It’s dangerous if you’re getting advice from people who are very close to countries on one side or another of a conflict.”

War puts focus on McCain’s hard line on Russia
By Michael Cooper, New York Times, August 12, 2008

The intensifying warfare in the former Soviet republic of Georgia has put a new focus on the increasingly hard line that Senator John McCain has taken against Russia in recent years, with stances that have often gone well beyond those of the Bush administration and its focus on engagement.

Mr. McCain has called for expelling what he has called a “revanchist Russia” from meetings of the Group of 8, the organization of leading industrialized nations. He urged President Bush — in vain — to boycott the group’s meeting in St. Petersburg in 2006. And he has often mocked the president’s assertion that he got a sense of the soul of Vladimir V. Putin, who was then Russia’s president and is now its prime minister, by looking into his eyes. “I looked into his eyes,” Mr. McCain said, “and saw three letters: a K, a G and a B.”

His hard line has been derided as provocative, and possibly dangerous, by some so-called realist foreign policy experts, who warn that isolating Russia would do little to encourage it to change. But others, including neoconservatives who deem promoting democracy a paramount goal, see Mr. McCain’s position as principled, and prescient. Now, with Russia moving forcefully into Georgia as Mr. McCain seeks the presidency, his views are being scrutinized as never before through the prism of Russia’s invasion.

After mixed U.S. messages, a war erupted in Georgia
By Helene Cooper and Thom Shanker, New York Times, August 13, 2008

One month ago, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice arrived in Tbilisi, Georgia, for a high-profile visit that was planned to accomplish two very different goals.

During a private dinner on July 9, Ms. Rice’s aides say, she warned President Mikheil Saakashvili of Georgia not to get into a military conflict with Russia that Georgia could not win. “She told him, in no uncertain terms, that he had to put a non-use of force pledge on the table,” according to a senior administration official who accompanied Ms. Rice to the Georgian capital.

But publicly, Ms. Rice struck a different tone, one of defiant support for Georgia in the face of Russian pressure. “I’m going to visit a friend and I don’t expect much comment about the United States going to visit a friend,” she told reporters just before arriving in Tbilisi, even as Russian jets were conducting intimidating maneuvers over South Ossetia.

U.S. puts brakes on Israeli plan for attack on Iran nuclear facilities
By Aluf Benn, Haaretz, August 13, 2008

The American administration has rejected an Israeli request for military equipment and support that would improve Israel’s ability to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities.

A report published last week by the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS) states that military strikes are unlikely to destroy Iran’s centrifuge program for enriching uranium.

The Americans viewed the request, which was transmitted (and rejected) at the highest level, as a sign that Israel is in the advanced stages of preparations to attack Iran. They therefore warned Israel against attacking, saying such a strike would undermine American interests. They also demanded that Israel give them prior notice if it nevertheless decided to strike Iran.

As compensation for the requests it rejected, Washington offered to improve Israel’s defenses against surface-to-surface missiles.

How the United States did not reinvent war… but thought it did
By Andrew Bacevich, TomDispatch, August 12, 2008

“War is the great auditor of institutions,” the historian Corelli Barnett once observed. Since 9/11, the United States has undergone such an audit and been found wanting. That adverse judgment applies in full to America’s armed forces.

Valor does not offer the measure of an army’s greatness, nor does fortitude, nor durability, nor technological sophistication. A great army is one that accomplishes its assigned mission. Since George W. Bush inaugurated his global war on terror, the armed forces of the United States have failed to meet that standard.

In the aftermath of September 11, 2001, Bush conceived of a bold, offensive strategy, vowing to “take the battle to the enemy, disrupt his plans, and confront the worst threats before they emerge.” The military offered the principal means for undertaking this offensive, and U.S. forces soon found themselves engaged on several fronts.

Two of those fronts — Afghanistan and Iraq — commanded priority attention. In each case, the assigned task was to deliver a knockout blow, leading to a quick, decisive, economical, politically meaningful victory. In each case, despite impressive displays of valor, fortitude, durability, and technological sophistication, America’s military came up short. The problem lay not with the level of exertion but with the results achieved.

U.S. analyst depicts Al Qaeda as secure in Pakistan and more potent than last year
By Mark Mazzetti, New York Times, August 13, 2008

Al Qaeda’s success in forging close ties to Pakistani militant groups has given it an increasingly secure haven in the mountainous tribal areas of Pakistan, the American government’s senior terrorism analyst said Tuesday.

Al Qaeda is more capable of attacking inside the United States than it was last year, and its cadre of senior leaders has recruited and trained “dozens” of militants capable of blending into Western society to carry out attacks, the analyst said.

The remarks Tuesday by the intelligence analyst, Ted Gistaro, were the most comprehensive assessment of the Qaeda threat by an American official since the National Intelligence Estimate issued last summer, which concluded that Al Qaeda had largely rebuilt its haven in Pakistan’s tribal areas.

Russia bids to rid Georgia of its folly
By John Helmer, Asia Times, August 12, 2008

One word explains why the United States, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the European Union have obliged themselves to sit on their hands, while Russia’s defends its citizens, and national interests, in the Caucasus, and liberates Georgians from the folly of their unpopular president, Mikheil Saakashvili. That word is Kosovo.

Russia sent troops into the breakaway Georgian region of South Ossetia to take on Georgian troops that had advanced into the territory. Four days of heavy fighting have seen thousands of casualties and the Georgian forces withdrawing. Russian troops were reported on Monday to be continuing fighting in parts of Georgia, including around the capital Tbilisi.

Eight hundred years of Caucasian history explain why Saakashvili has brought such destruction and ignominy on his countrymen over the past few days. Queen Tamar, the greatest of the Georgian sovereigns (1184-1213), is responsible for the habit Georgian rulers have displayed for the past millennium of treating neighboring Armenia, Azerbaijan, Ossetia and the Black Sea coast of Turkey as protectorates. But as Tamar also taught her countrymen, Georgian ambition always runs out of gas when the neighbors prove to be just as ambitious, richer or tougher.

In Georgia and Russia, a perfect brew for a blowup
By CJ Chivers, New York Times, August 11, 2008

As the bloody military mismatch between Russia and Georgia unfolded over the past three days, even the main players were surprised by how quickly small border skirmishes slipped into a conflict that threatened the Georgian government and perhaps the country itself.

Several American and Georgian officials said that unlike when Russia invaded Afghanistan in 1979, a move in which Soviet forces were massed before the attack, the nation had not appeared poised for an invasion last week. As late as Wednesday, they said, Russian diplomats had been pressing for negotiations between Georgia and South Ossetia, the breakaway region where the combat flared and then escalated into full-scale war.

“It doesn’t look like this was premeditated, with a massive staging of equipment,” one senior American official said. “Until the night before the fighting, Russia seemed to be playing a constructive role.”

A path to peace in the Caucasus
By Mikhail Gorbachev, Washington Post, August 12, 2008

The past week’s events in South Ossetia are bound to shock and pain anyone. Already, thousands of people have died, tens of thousands have been turned into refugees, and towns and villages lie in ruins. Nothing can justify this loss of life and destruction. It is a warning to all.

The roots of this tragedy lie in the decision of Georgia’s separatist leaders in 1991 to abolish South Ossetian autonomy. This turned out to be a time bomb for Georgia’s territorial integrity. Each time successive Georgian leaders tried to impose their will by force — both in South Ossetia and in Abkhazia, where the issues of autonomy are similar — it only made the situation worse. New wounds aggravated old injuries.

Nevertheless, it was still possible to find a political solution. For some time, relative calm was maintained in South Ossetia. The peacekeeping force composed of Russians, Georgians and Ossetians fulfilled its mission, and ordinary Ossetians and Georgians, who live close to each other, found at least some common ground.

Pakistani Taliban repel government offensive
By Jane Perlez and Pir Zubair Shah, New York Times, August 11, 2008

Taliban fighters forced Pakistani soldiers to retreat from a militants’ stronghold near the border with Afghanistan over the weekend, after a three-day battle sent civilians fleeing from government airstrikes.

The pullback from Bajaur, an area of Pakistan’s tribal region where the Taliban and Al Qaeda have forged particularly close ties, came after the military began an offensive there late last week.

Military spokesmen said 6 soldiers had been killed, though the Pakistani Taliban put the number at 22. It was unclear how many civilians had died.

Iraq demands ‘clear timeline’ for U.S. withdrawal
By Robert H Reid, AP, August 10, 2008

Iraq’s foreign minister insisted Sunday that any security deal with the United States must contain a “very clear timeline” for the departure of U.S. troops. A suicide bomber struck north of Baghdad, killing at least five people including an American soldier.

Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari told reporters that American and Iraqi negotiators were “very close” to reaching a long-term security agreement that will set the rules for U.S. troops in Iraq after the U.N. mandate expires at the end of the year.

Zebari said the Iraqis were insisting that the agreement include a “very clear timeline” for the withdrawal of U.S.-led forces, but he refused to talk about specific dates.

After setbacks, Sadr redirects Mahdi Army
By Tom A. Peter, Christian Science Monitor, August 11, 2008

Moqtada al-Sadr has taken yet another step in an attempt to transform his Mahdi Army militia from a force intent on battling US soldiers into a much broader social and political network that can still hold sway in the shifting landscape of Iraq.

During Friday prayers in Sadr City, clerics read instructions from the young anti-American leader ordering his militiamen to join a new religious and cultural wing of the movement that he is calling the Momahidoun, or “those who pave the way.”

The move comes just months after Mr. Sadr’s movement was dealt a serious blow in springtime battles with both American and Iraqi forces in Baghdad and Basra that ended when Sadr called off his fighters after the deaths of hundreds of his followers and innocent Iraqis.

“The Mahdi Army is in a real crisis,” says Abdul Kareem al-Mohmedawi, a native of Sadr City and deputy editor of Al-Jamaher, a liberal newspaper in Baghdad. “There is a weapons shortage and a shortage of volunteers.”

Palestinian ‘gambit’ could be prophetic
By Omar Karmi, The National, August 11, 2008

For the second time in four years, Ahmed Qurei, the chief Palestinian negotiator with Israel and a former prime minister, has wielded what can best be described as the bi-national weapon.

In a closed-door meeting on Sunday night with top Fatah leaders, Mr Qurei, a stalwart of the PLO, told those assembled that while the current round of negotiations was serious this did not mean that agreement was in sight.

In fact, he said, in remarks that were repeated in a subsequent statement issued by his office, “if Israel will not support our choice of an independent Palestinian state in the occupied territories including East Jerusalem, then the alternative demand of the Palestinian people and leadership will be a bi-national state”.

His remarks would appear to be a bargaining gambit as Palestinian-Israeli negotiations perhaps enter a crucial phase.