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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rule of law
Editorial, America, July 21, 2008

… in the years ahead our country must still come to grips with our national acquiescence to the politics of fear, which has led to the detention and abuse of hundreds of individuals. Among the necessary steps will be restoration of freedom to innocent detainees, accompanied by public apology and some monetary restitution for the years they lost to incarceration. Furthermore, Congress needs to accept responsibility for its complicity with the executive in laws that denied suspects rightful appeal. A national truth commission should be instituted to establish political accountability for the decisions, policies and statutes that placed suspects outside the protection of the law.

Congress might create a bipartisan commission in the style of the Iraq Study Group (members of both parties have criticized the detention system), or, failing Congressional action, a broad association of foundations and human rights groups could organize such an effort. A truth commission should not engage in a witch hunt, but make a serious effort to understand the subversion of the rule of law in the post-9/11 panic and to build a barrier of public opinion and professional responsibility to prevent similar failure in the future. If the nation does not make a collective effort to come to grips with the subversion of liberty in the name of security, we will leave ourselves and generations to come vulnerable to still greater violations and silent coups d’état.

Editor’s Comment — As the pendulum has swung from national support to disenchantment with the war presidency, it’s been all too easy for ordinary Americans to absolve themselves of responsibility for the mess this country is in and the damage it has inflicted on the world. Even to speak of the politics of fear is in some degree evasive.

What far too few have ever been bold enough to say is that America’s response to 9/11 was cowardly. A willingness to indulge in a form of national hysteria was the enabling factor that turned a catastrophic event into the foundation for war. Even now, the promise of a presidency of change is that we can shift our attention away from a war that is a “dangerous distraction” to the one that tackles the “real threat.” If we are at a defining moment, it is apparently not one that opens the political opportunity to challenge the assumptions that war is an effective instrument of counterterrorism or that national security should be uppermost among our concerns.

Collateral damage
By Andrew J. Bacevich, Washington Post, July 13, 2008

With the appearance of this very fine book, Hillary Clinton can claim a belated vindication of sorts: A right-wing conspiracy does indeed exist, although she misapprehended its scope and nature. The conspiracy is not vast and does not consist of Clinton-haters. It is small, secretive and made up chiefly of lawyers contemptuous of the Constitution and the rule of law.

In The Dark Side, Jane Mayer, a staff writer for the New Yorker, documents some of the ugliest allegations of wrongdoing charged against the Bush administration. Her achievement lies less in bringing new revelations to light than in weaving into a comprehensive narrative a story revealed elsewhere in bits and pieces. Recast as a series of indictments, the story Mayer tells goes like this: Since embarking upon its global war on terror, the United States has blatantly disregarded the Geneva Conventions. It has imprisoned suspects, including U.S. citizens, without charge, holding them indefinitely and denying them due process. It has created an American gulag in which thousands of detainees, including many innocent of any wrongdoing, have been subjected to ritual abuse and humiliation. It has delivered suspected terrorists into the hands of foreign torturers.

Under the guise of “enhanced interrogation techniques,” it has succeeded, in Mayer’s words, in “making torture the official law of the land in all but name.” Further, it has done all these things as a direct result of policy decisions made at the highest levels of government.

How the war on terror turned into a war on American ideals,’ by Jane Mayer
By Tim Rutten, Los Angeles Times, July 15, 2008

“The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in the insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.”

Justice Louis Brandeis wrote those lines 80 years ago, but as Jane Mayer’s brilliantly reported and deeply disturbing new book, “The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals,” more than amply illustrates, they’ve never been more relevant.

In fact, if you intend to vote in November and read only one book between now and then, this should be it. By and large, Mayer does not add any strikingly new information to what attentive readers already will know about Bush/Cheney’s adoption of torture as an instrument of American state power and of how the Central Intelligence Agency, its international accomplices and the U.S. military constructed what amounts to an American gulag to further that end. Mayer’s singular accomplishment is to fuse the years of events that have brought us to this pass into a single compelling narrative and to use her own considerable reportorial powers to fill in important connective and contextual events.

Obama’s brave (new?) world
By Pepe Escobar, Asia Times, July 17, 2008

Democratic presidential candidate Senator Barack Obama is the man with the plan for Iraq and Afghanistan. Presidential in tone and delivery, quoting Harry S Truman and Dean Acheson, George Kennan and George Marshall – the greatest generation – Obama, in a major foreign policy speech in Washington on Tuesday, outlined what he calls his “new overarching strategy”.

He said he would “focus this strategy on five goals essential to making America safer: ending the war in Iraq responsibly; finishing the fight against al-Qaeda and the Taliban; securing all nuclear weapons and materials from terrorists and rogue states; achieving true energy security; and rebuilding our alliances to meet the challenges of the 21st century”.

To say that Obama’s plan – sketched earlier in an op-ed piece for The New York Times – is more realistic, thoughtful and sensible than that of rival Republican Senator John McCain’s “road to victory” in Iraq would be an understatement.

Palestinians reluctantly put faith in Obama
By Omar Karmi, The National, July 14, 2008

Ask many Palestinians or Israelis and they will tell you that US presidential elections are so important for their futures they should be allowed to vote.

Like Israelis, Palestinians see Washington as the most influential third-party player in their conflict. Unlike Israelis, Palestinians see that influence as mostly malign.

Both will carefully watch John McCain and Barack Obama as they try to become the leader of the world’s only superpower. And where polls show Israelis split over which senator they would support, Palestinians overwhelmingly favour Mr Obama.

Yet that support is qualified by cynicism. Palestinians have no illusions when it comes to the US position on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. “America,” a local restaurateur recently told me, “is irredeemably pro-Israel. I only support Obama because I think he will be good for America and good for black people. For us it will make no difference.”

US troops poised to cross Afghan border for raid on bases
By Zahid Hussain, The Times, July 16, 2008

US troops in Afghanistan massed close to the border yesterday for a possible attack on al-Qaeda and Taleban bases in the lawless North Waziristan tribal belt in Pakistan.

Reports from the area said that hundreds of Nato troops were airlifted across the mountains from the village of Lowara Mandi, which has been an important base for cross-border attacks in Afghanistan. Heavy artillery and armoured vehicles were also being moved into position.

The deployment followed a claim by the Afghan Government on Monday that the Pakistani Army and its spy agency had become “the world’s biggest producers of terrorism and extremism”. The Pakistani Foreign Ministry accused Kabul of creating an “artificial crisis to satisfy short-term political expediencies”.

Militants ready for a war without borders
By Syed Saleem Shahzad, Asia Times, July 17, 2008

From thinly disguised insinuations against Pakistan following the suicide attack on the Indian Embassy in Kabul this month to outright accusations against Islamabad by the Afghan government over the unrelenting Taliban-led insurgency, the blame game has entered a critical time: a major regional battle could erupt in a matter of days.

Last week, US Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Admiral Mike Mullen paid a sudden visit to Pakistan during which he revealed to Pakistani leaders and military officials the possibility of surgical strikes on Taliban and al-Qaeda networks operating in the border regions and that coalition forces in Afghanistan would not hesitate to conduct hot-pursuit raids into Pakistan.

Mullen urged Pakistani leaders to play their part from their side. He pin-pointed the North and South Waziristan tribal areas as a focal point, along with the areas of Razmak, Shawal, Ghulam Khan and Angor Ada along the border with Afghanistan. Across the divide, Khost province is considered a likely target for carpet bombing and an offensive by the Afghan National Army.

To Iran or not to Iran
By Martin van Creveld, NPQ, July 15, 2008

Perhaps because his American “strategic adviser” has told him that this is the way to win the approaching primaries in his Kadima Party, Israel’s former minister of defense, Shaul Mofaz, says that Israel must eliminate the “existential threat” that Iran’s nuclear program represents. Probably because he is afraid, Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, says that if Israel (or the U.S) attacks his country, the latter will hit back with all its might.

Israel holds maneuvers over the Mediterranean, testing its forces and probably sending a message to Tehran: Back off. Iran also holds maneuvers, testing its forces and sending a very clear message to Washington and Tel Aviv: Back off. “Senior sources” in the Pentagon say that, in view of the progress the Iranians are making, Israel must attack by the end of the year and that it got the yellow light from the U.S administration. “Senior sources” in the State Department say that their opposite numbers in the Pentagon are talking rubbish.

Nobody knows whether Israel and/or the U.S will attack Iran — after all, there are no limits to how crazy some people can be. That neither the U.S nor Israel shouldattack Iran is, to this writer at any rate, very clear indeed. Here is why.

American envoy to join Iran talks
By Glenn Kessler, Washington Post, July 16, 2008

The Bush administration will send a senior envoy this weekend to international talks with Iran about its nuclear program in what U.S. officials described as a “one-time deal” designed to demonstrate a serious desire to negotiate a solution to the impasse over Tehran’s ambitions.

In a significant departure from long-standing policy, Undersecretary of State William J. Burns will join a scheduled meeting in Geneva between European Union foreign policy chief Javier Solana and top Iranian nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili, according to a senior State Department official.

Burns, State’s third-ranking official, will not negotiate with the Iranians nor hold separate meetings, the official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because the decision had not yet been announced. Instead, Burns will advance the White House’s position that serious negotiations can begin only after Iran suspends uranium enrichment.

The current oil shock
By Dilip Hiro, TomDispatch, July 15, 2008

When will it end, this crushing rise in the price of gasoline, now averaging $4.10 a gallon at the pump? The question is uppermost in the minds of American motorists as they plan vacations or simply review their daily journeys. The short answer is simple as well: “Not soon.”

As yet there is no sign of a reversal in oil’s upward price thrust, which has more than doubled in a year, cresting recently above $146 a barrel. The current oil shock, the fourth of its kind in the past three-and-a-half decades, and the deadliest so far, shows every sign of continuing for a long, long stretch.

The previous oil shocks — in 1973-74, 1980, and 1990-91 — stemmed from specific interruptions of energy supplies from the Middle East due, respectively, to an Arab-Israeli war, the Iranian revolution, and Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. Once peace was restored, a post-revolutionary order established, or the invader expelled, vital Middle Eastern energy supplies returned to normal. The fourth oil shock, however, belongs in a different category altogether.

Obama says New Yorker insulted Muslim Americans
AP, July 15, 2008

Democrat Barack Obama said Tuesday that the New Yorker magazine’s satirical cover depicting him and his wife as flag-burning, fist-bumping radicals doesn’t bother him but that it was an insult to Muslim Americans.

“You know, there are wonderful Muslim Americans all across the country who are doing wonderful things,” the presidential candidate told CNN’s Larry King. “And for this to be used as sort of an insult, or to raise suspicions about me, I think is unfortunate. And it’s not what America’s all about.”

My plan for Iraq
By Barack Obama, New York Times, July 14, 2008

The call by Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki for a timetable for the removal of American troops from Iraq presents an enormous opportunity. We should seize this moment to begin the phased redeployment of combat troops that I have long advocated, and that is needed for long-term success in Iraq and the security interests of the United States.

The differences on Iraq in this campaign are deep. Unlike Senator John McCain, I opposed the war in Iraq before it began, and would end it as president. I believed it was a grave mistake to allow ourselves to be distracted from the fight against Al Qaeda and the Taliban by invading a country that posed no imminent threat and had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks. Since then, more than 4,000 Americans have died and we have spent nearly $1 trillion. Our military is overstretched. Nearly every threat we face — from Afghanistan to Al Qaeda to Iran — has grown.

Editor’s Comment — This seems like a rather jaded statement from a jaded campaign. I don’t know whether Obama had time to read the papers on Sunday, but when the message emerging is that the administration has given up on trying to reach a status-of-forces agreement with the Iraqi government, it’s conceded that a withdrawal date must be set, it’s readying to speed up the pace of withdrawal, and the Iraqis are pushing to reclaim control of the Green Zone — when all of this is happening, then it’s time for Obama to come out with a more nuanced message and less worn-out campaign rhetoric.

Does John McCain’s sick sense of humor matter?
By Juan Cole, Informed Comment, July 14, 2008

First, he sang ‘bomb, bomb, bomb/ bomb, bomb Iran’ to the tune of the Beach Boys’ ‘Barbara Ann.’

Now, on being told that Iran has increased its importation of American cigarettes, he quipped “Maybe that’s a way of killing them.”

Let us review the things wrong with this statement as a joke.

First of all, it is a standard sentiment that in the United States, we do not wish the people of any country ill, whatever our relations with their government. McCain was hoping Iranians would drop dead from smoking American cigarettes, not the Iranian regime. Coming on top of his ditty about bombing them, I come away with an increasingly sick feeling in my stomach that the man is a sadist who enjoys the idea of killing people.

By the way, for all the propaganda to the contrary, neither Supreme Jurisprudent Ali Khamenei nor President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has talked about killing Israelis as opposed to causing the regime in Jerusalem to collapse. Can you imagine the outcry if they joked about doing it?

Editor’s Comment — It’s worth repeating that on several occasions, Ahmadinejad has likened the end of Israel to the end of the Soviet Union. He’s talking about the end of an ideology (Zionism); not the annihilation of Jews.

9 Americans die in Afghan attack
By Carlotta Gall, New York Times, July 14, 2008

Taliban insurgents carried out a bold assault on a remote base near the border with Pakistan on Sunday, NATO reported, and a senior American military official said nine American soldiers were killed.

The attack, the worst against Americans in Afghanistan in three years, illustrated the growing threat of Taliban militants and their associates, who in recent months have made Afghanistan a far deadlier war zone for American-led forces than Iraq.

The assault on the American base in Kunar Province was one of the fiercest by insurgents since the American-led invasion of Afghanistan routed the Taliban and Al Qaeda militants in late 2001.

Collateral ceremonial damage
By Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch, July 13, 2008

It was a tribal affair. Against a picture-perfect sunset, before a beige-colored cross and an altar made of the very Texas limestone that was also used to build her family’s “ranch,” veil-less in an Oscar de la Renta gown, the 26 year-old bride said her vows. More than 200 members of her extended family and friends were on hand, as well as the 14 women in her “house party,” who were dressed “in seven different styles of knee-length dresses in seven different colors that match[ed] the palette of… wildflowers — blues, greens, lavenders and pinky reds.” Afterwards, in a white tent set in a grove of trees and illuminated by strings of lights, the father of the bride, George W. Bush, danced with his daughter to the strains of “You Are So Beautiful.” The media was kept at arm’s length and the vows were private, but undoubtedly they included the phrase “till death do us part.”

That was early May of this year. Less than two months later, halfway across the world, another tribal affair was underway. The age of the bride involved is unknown to us, as is her name. No reporters were clamoring to get to her section of the mountainous backcountry of Afghanistan near the Pakistani border. We know almost nothing about her circumstances, except that she was on her way to a nearby village, evidently early in the morning, among a party 70-90 strong, mostly women, “escorting the bride to meet her groom as local tradition dictates.”

It was then that the American plane (or planes) arrived, ensuring that she would never say her vows. “They stopped in a narrow location for rest,” said one witness about her house party, according to the BBC. “The plane came and bombed the area.” The district governor, Haji Amishah Gul, told the British Times, “So far there are 27 people, including women and children, who have been buried. Another 10 have been wounded. The attack happened at 6.30AM. Just two of the dead are men, the rest are women and children. The bride is among the dead.”

State of siege
By Paul Rogers, Open Democracy, July 10, 2008

Each year since the Taliban regime was ended, foreign troop numbers in the country have risen; the single greatest increase has been since early 2007, with 20,000 additional troops arriving to take the overall total to around 66,000 (see the editorial, “Afghan Escalation”, Washington Post, 6 July 2008). Despite this, the intensity of Taliban activity has also increased. Much of it is seasonal, with less fighting during the severe winter months, but even here there has been a change. In recent years, suicide-attacks in cities such as Kabul and Kandahar have increased overall, but they have also continued through the winter months.

For the US forces, the biggest surprise has been the growth in Taliban activity in the eastern part of the country. This region, close to the Pakistan border, has been garrisoned by US forces operating independently of Nato, and there have been frequent claims of progress over the past two years. The US forces and spokespersons have made pointed references to the contrast between their “success” and the difficulties experienced by British troops in Helmand province and the Canadians in Kandahar.

Now, though, the US claims are sounding less assured. The newly-appointed US military commander for eastern Afghanistan, Major-General Jeffrey J Schloesser, has highlighted the increased sophistication of the methods used by the insurgents as a factor in the rising violence. This has led to a near-doubling of the number of US troops killed in the country in the first six months of 2008 compared with the similar period in 2007. What has become particularly noticeable has been the more widespread use of roadside bombs, with tactics developed in Iraq being deployed in Afghanistan.

U.S. and Iraq near a ‘bridge’ deal on status of U.S. troops
By Sam Dagher, Christian Science Monitor, July 14, 2008

By the end of July, US and Iraqi officials hope to finalize a deal that would map out the role and length of stay for US troops in the country.

But this is likely to be a temporary “bridge” agreement, including specific goals for terms of US withdrawal from major cities, followed by further talks on a long-term status of forces agreement (SOFA), says a senior US administration official involved in the talks here.

The US shift to a short-term deal follows comments last week by Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki suggesting for the first time that a timetable be set for the departure of US troops. On Saturday, Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama said that “we need a timetable for withdrawal” and that the US should not commit to a long-term occupation of Iraq,

But a key question is whether any deal can be sold to Iraq’s political factions in an election year. The Iraqi government is beset by divisions and conflicting agendas with regard to the status of US forces that are playing out both in the media and in private.

Sarkozy helps to bring Syria out of isolation
By Steven Erlanger and Katrin Bennhold, New York Times, July 14, 2008

Leaders of 43 nations with nearly 800 million inhabitants inaugurated a “Union for the Mediterranean” on Sunday, meant to bring the northern and southern countries that ring the sea closer together through practical projects dealing with the environment, climate, transportation, immigration and policing.

But the meeting was also an opportunity for President Nicolas Sarkozy of France to exercise some highly public Middle East diplomacy by bringing President Bashar al-Assad of Syria out of isolation for an Élysée Palace meeting and by playing host to a session between Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of Israel and the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas.

The Union for the Mediterranean is the brainchild of Mr. Sarkozy, but his original concept was watered down to include all members of the European Union, not just those along the Mediterranean coast. The enlargement of the group to the north made it easier for Mr. Sarkozy to include some southern countries, like Syria and Israel, that remain in a formal state of war with one another, and others, like Jordan, that are only notionally Mediterranean.

Our man in Iran?
By James P Rubin, New York Times, July 14, 2008

Iran’s latest missile tests occurred just as there have been glimmers of progress in nuclear negotiations between Tehran and the Western powers. Whether or not those talks succeed, it’s time for Washington to open a diplomatic post in Tehran.

A high-level official has told me that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is seeking President Bush’s approval to establish a United States Interests Section in the Iranian capital. This is a smart idea that Democrats and Republicans should support.

Iran is an anomaly in the Middle East. In Iran, unlike in the Arab world, America is seen as an adversary primarily by the government while most of the Iranian people see it as a country of freedom and moderation.

The US in the Mideast: ignorance abroad
By Rami G. Khouri, Daily Star, July 5, 2008

One of the frightening lessons one learns from spending time in Washington is that most of the men and women who make, or influence, American policy in the Middle East actually have little or no first-hand experience of the region. They know very little about its people or its political trends at the grassroots level, as the Iraq experience reconfirms so painfully.

American policy-making throughout the Middle East remains defined largely by three principal forces: pro-Israeli interests and lobbies in the United States that pander almost totally to Israeli government positions; an almost genetic, if understandable, need to respond to the 9/11 terror attack against the US by politically and militarily striking against Middle Eastern targets; and a growing determination to confront and contain Iran and its assorted Sunni and Shiite Arab allies.

A significant consequence of Washington’s deep pro-Israeli tilt has been to ignore public sentiments throughout the region, which in turn generates greater criticism of the US. It is not clear if American policymakers ignore Middle Eastern public opinion because of ignorance and diplomatic amateurism, or because of the structural dictates of pro-Israeli compliance.

Editor’s Comment — When it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it turns out that Washington is not only ignoring the public sentiments across the Middle East — it is also ignoring public sentiment in America. A new poll indicates that 71% of Americans favor the US government adopting an even-handed approach to help resolve the conflict. That this poll has not been reported by a single American newspaper should be a source of embarrassment to any self-respecting American journalist working in the mainstream media who is aware of the fact. That Americans would express support for an even-handed approach (something that Howard Dean advocated in 2004 until he got jumped on by the Israel lobby), says nothing about any broad understanding of the issues, but simply that Americans — like most people — value fairness. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for those who hold the levers of power inside government, among lobbyists, and inside the media.

Does the Israeli-Palestinian conflict still matter? [PDF]
By Shibley Telhami, Brookings, June, 2008

In 2006, for the first time since we began polling, Arabs were asked what step taken by Washington would most improve their views of the United States. They were asked to choose two steps among the following: Pushing for the spread of democracy in the Middle East even more; providing more economic assistance to the region, stopping economic and military aid to Israel; withdrawing American forces from Iraq; withdrawing American forces from the Arabian peninsula; and brokering comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace. More than 60% of respondents chose brokering Arab-Israeli peace as the number one answer, followed by withdrawal from Iraq and the Arabian Peninsula…

In 2008, 50% of the public identified brokering Arab-Israeli peace based on the 1967 border as the single most important step to improving their views of the United States–still the number one issue. Notable was the increase in the number of people who want to see an American withdrawal from Iraq (from 33% in 2006 to 44% in 2008) and the Arabian Peninsula (from 22% in 2006 to 46% in 2008), as more people were expressing less confidence in America’s ability to broker peace.

US Pentagon doubts Israeli intelligence over Iran’s nuclear programme
By Tim Shipman, The Sunday Telegraph, July 6, 2008

American commanders worry that Israel will feel compelled to act within the next 12 months with no guarantee that they can do more than slow Iran’s development of a weapon capable of destroying the Jewish state.

Gaps in the intelligence on the precise location and vulnerabilities of Iran’s facilities emerged during recent talks between Admiral Mike Mullen, the Chairman of the American Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Israeli generals, according to an official familiar with the discussions who has briefed Iran experts in Washington and London.

The assessment emerged as Iran in effect thumbed its nose at proposals by the West to freeze its uranium enrichment programme in exchange for easing economic sanctions. In its reply, sent to the European Union’s foreign policy chief, Javier Solana, Iran said it was prepared to negotiate but only from a position of equality – and made no reference to the specific proposals.

The Truth Commission
By Nicholas D Kristof, New York Times, July 6, 2008

When a distinguished American military commander accuses the United States of committing war crimes in its handling of detainees, you know that we need a new way forward.

“There is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes,” Antonio Taguba, the retired major general who investigated abuses in Iraq, declares in a powerful new report on American torture from Physicians for Human Rights. “The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account.”

The first step of accountability isn’t prosecutions. Rather, we need a national Truth Commission to lead a process of soul searching and national cleansing.

Editor’s Comment — The suggestion (which Kristof applauds) that Guantanamo be turned into a research facility for tropical diseases, sounds like the perfect way of helping America forget its crimes, rather than face them. Better instead to turn the facility into an international monument, preserved to visibly demonstrate how a democratic nation can fail to live up to its ideals when national security is used to subvert the enduring need for political accountability.

American energy policy, asleep at the spigot
By Nelson D Schwartz, New York Times, July 6, 2008

Just three years ago, with oil trading at a seemingly frothy $66 a barrel, David J. O’Reilly made what many experts considered a risky bet. Outmaneuvering Chinese bidders and ignoring critics who said he overpaid, Mr. O’Reilly, the chief executive of Chevron, forked over $18 billion to buy Unocal, a giant whose riches date back to oil fields made famous in the film “There Will Be Blood.”

For Chevron, the deal proved to be a movie-worthy gusher, helping its profits to soar. And while he has warned about tightening energy supplies for years and looks prescient for buying Unocal, even Mr. O’Reilly says that he still can’t get his head around current oil prices, which closed above $145 a barrel on Thursday, a record.

“We can see how you can get to $100,” he says. “At $140, I just don’t know how to explain it. We’re surprised.”

For the rest of the country, the feeling is more like shock. As gasoline prices climb beyond $4 a gallon, Americans are rethinking what they drive and how and where they live. Entire industries are reeling — airlines and automakers most prominent among them — and gas prices have emerged as an important issue in the presidential campaign.

Barack at risk
By Tom Hayden, The Nation, July 5, 2008

Call him slippery or nuanced, Barack Obama’s core position on Iraq has always been more ambiguous than audacious. Now it is catching up with him, as his latest remarks are questioned by the Republicans, the mainstream media and the antiwar movement. He could put his candidacy at risk if his audacity continues to shrivel.

I first endorsed Obama because of the nature of the movement supporting him, not his particular stands on issues. The excitement among African-Americans and young people, the audacity of their hope, still holds the promise of a new era of social activism. The force of their rising expectations, I believe, could pressure a President Obama in a progressive direction and also energize a new wave of social movements. And of course, there is the need to end the Republican reign that began with a stolen election followed by eight years of war and torture, corporate gouging, environmental decay, domestic spying and right-wing court appointments, just in case we forget whom Obama is running against.

Besides the transforming nature of an African-American President, the issue that matters most to me is achieving a peaceful settlement of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan–and preventing American escalations in Iran and Latin America. From the beginning, Obama’s symbolic 2002 position on Iraq has been very promising, reinforced again and again by his campaign pledge to “end the war” in 2009.

But that pledge has also been laced with loopholes all along, caveats that the mainstream media and his opponents (excepting Bill Richardson) have ignored or avoided until now.

Is there a nexus between torture and radicalization?
By Chris Zambelis, Jamestown Foundation, June 26, 2008

Radical Islamist discourse highlighting the scourge of authoritarianism in the Middle East takes on many forms. One subject in particular, however, receives a great deal of attention in militant literature, communiqués, and discussions on radical Islamist chat room forums: The practice of systematic torture by the ruling regimes, especially that which occurs in prisons. Brutal and humiliating forms of torture are common instruments of control and coercion by the security services in police states intent on rooting out all forms of dissent. Previously the domain of human rights activists, researchers investigating the many pathways toward radicalization in the Middle East are increasingly considering the impact of torture and other abuses at the hands of the state during periods of incarceration in an effort to better understand the psychology of the radicalization process. Many researchers see these kinds of experiences as formative in the path toward violent radicalization.

Believe me, it’s torture
By Christopher Hitchens, Vanity Fair, August, 2008

There was a paramedic present who checked my racing pulse and warned me about adrenaline rush. An interval was ordered, and then I felt the mask come down again. Steeling myself to remember what it had been like last time, and to learn from the previous panic attack, I fought down the first, and some of the second, wave of nausea and terror but soon found that I was an abject prisoner of my gag reflex. The interrogators would hardly have had time to ask me any questions, and I knew that I would quite readily have agreed to supply any answer. I still feel ashamed when I think about it. Also, in case it’s of interest, I have since woken up trying to push the bedcovers off my face, and if I do anything that makes me short of breath I find myself clawing at the air with a horrible sensation of smothering and claustrophobia. No doubt this will pass. As if detecting my misery and shame, one of my interrogators comfortingly said, “Any time is a long time when you’re breathing water.” I could have hugged him for saying so, and just then I was hit with a ghastly sense of the sadomasochistic dimension that underlies the relationship between the torturer and the tortured. I apply the Abraham Lincoln test for moral casuistry: “If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.” Well, then, if waterboarding does not constitute torture, then there is no such thing as torture.

China inspired interrogations at Guantánamo
By Scott Shane, New York Times, July 2, 2008

The military trainers who came to Guantánamo Bay in December 2002 based an entire interrogation class on a chart showing the effects of “coercive management techniques” for possible use on prisoners, including “sleep deprivation,” “prolonged constraint,” and “exposure.”

What the trainers did not say, and may not have known, was that their chart had been copied verbatim from a 1957 Air Force study of Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean War to obtain confessions, many of them false, from American prisoners.

The recycled chart is the latest and most vivid evidence of the way Communist interrogation methods that the United States long described as torture became the basis for interrogations both by the military at the base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and by the Central Intelligence Agency.

Editor’s Comment — Back in September 2001, when the popular and simplistic question inside the United States was, “Why do they hate us?”, the sophisticated answer was, “They don’t hate us; they hate our foreign policy.”

Suppose instead the response had been, “They hate us because we support the regimes that tortured them. Instead, we’re now going to torture them ourselves.”

A collective outcry might have welled up: the government has gone insane!

Alas, we were instead treated to sober discussions on whether torture “works”; on whether it’s legal if it can elude the label; and whether it’s morally justifiable if an argument of necessity can be applied.

Perhaps we could have saved ourselves the trouble of needing to press the case that it neither works, nor is legal, nor is morally justifiable, if sufficient evidence had already been on hand that torture promotes terrorism.

My trip to the West Bank
By Bernard Chazelle, Princeton University, Spring, 2008

Sa’ad Nimr is a close confidant of Marwan Barghouti, the popular Palestinian leader currently serving 5 life sentences in an Israeli prison. He heads the Ramallah branch of the “Free Marwan Barghouti” campaign, which counts Nelson Mandela on its board. The release of Barghouti is a divisive topic in Israel. Advocates point out that he is the only leader capable of uniting Palestinians. Opponents object for precisely the same reason. Uri Avnery calls him the Palestinian Mandela. (Who’s then the Israeli de Klerk?) While Abbas and Haniyeh would score evenly in a presidential contest, Barghouti would trounce both.

Sa’ad Nimr embraces a binational state, an opinion shared by a quarter of all Palestinians. His view that Oslo was a sham, however, is consensual. Did he feel bitter about prison? “Bernard, hating people is a waste of time. We have to learn to live with the Israelis. We’re not going to push them into the sea […] It was never about Jews, remember this, only about Israeli occupiers.” Sonia added, “We have a saying in Arabic we used to repeat all the time: Will it happen before we die?” Sa’ad was doubtful: “Maybe our children or grandchildren will see peace in Palestine.” Both of them condemned suicide bombings unequivocally: “Devastating to the Palestinian cause!” What about nonviolence? Someone suggested a march of 20,000 unarmed women through Qalandiya: “The Israelis wouldn’t know what to do. They would freak out.” It’s never been tried.

Well, there was the first intifada. Which led to Madrid and Oslo. Some Palestinians will say, “Cool, nonviolence got us a doubling of the settlement population.” Others will point out that it got Israel’s Labor government to warm (ever so slowly and unevenly) to the idea of a two-state solution. Indeed, and then to lose the premiership to rejectionist Bibi Netanyahu, the man who heads the Israeli version of Hamas, also known as Likud.

Iraq hints at delay in U.S. security deal
By Alissa J Rubin, New York Times, July 3, 2008

Declaring that there will not be “another colonization of Iraq,” Iraq’s foreign minister raised the possibility on Wednesday that a full security agreement with the United States might not be reached this year, and that if one was, it would be a short-term pact.

American officials, speaking anonymously because of the delicate state of negotiations, said they were no longer optimistic that a complete security agreement could be reached by the year’s end.

At a news conference in Baghdad, the foreign minister, Hoshyar Zebari, told reporters that some headway had been made, but that negotiators were deadlocked over issues like the extent of Iraqi control over American military operations and the right of American soldiers to detain suspects without the approval of Iraqi authorities.

The case for talking
By James Dobbins, IHT, June 30, 2008

There are instances of diplomacy backed by force succeeding. There are far more examples of it failing. Saddam Hussein, after all, could not even be coerced into demonstrating persuasively that he had no WMD.

Taking the military option off the table might come at some cost if there were good reason to believe that Iran could be coerced into giving up its nuclear program.

There is, however, better reason to believe that the threat of attack is a prime motivation for the Iranian program. As long as the United States maintains a military establishment, the military option remains available. Taking this threat off the table, and putting it in a readily available drawer, would improve the prospects for negotiation while avoiding the most likely result of the current approach, which is that in the end America either has its bluff called or finds itself launching a war it cannot win.

Editor’s Comment — From most of the indications I can see, however firmly military options still remain placed on that table, President Bush has reconciled himself to the idea that he is passing on the Iran issue to his successor — whether it’s McCain or Obama. Indeed, I think that Bush and Cheney, as men whose courage has always relied on the protective walls of executive power, both recognize that if this presidency really was to end with a bang, the chances that out of office they would end up incarcerated would be all the more higher.

But let’s suppose — just for the sake of argument — that a zealous obsession with halting Iran’s nuclear program led Bush to order a November attack. Even then, the secretary of defense and/or the JCOS could resign. As for the chances of Israel going it alone, I’d say — as did Iran’s FM — they’re virtually zero. American support of one kind or another would be essential — Israel can’t really go it alone.

Ultimately, the factor that’s likely to carry more influence than anything else is the national rage that would boil up if gas prices jumped from $4 to $6 or $8 a gallon overnight.

Threats are not the way for the US to persuade Iran to change tack
By Tony Karon, The National, June 28, 2008

The oxymoron in a Jerusalem Post headline last week summed up the efforts of some in Israel and the United States to create the impression that military confrontation with Iran is imminent. The paper proclaimed – four days in advance – that the US military chief of staff would make a “surprise” visit, suggesting this was further evidence that an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities is planned before president George W Bush leaves office.

This was conjecture, of course, but we are plainly in the season for it: the Post’s report followed the New York Times claiming that Israel had flown some 100 aircraft 900 miles across the Mediterranean as a “dry run” for a strike on Iran.

As any gangster will tell you, don’t worry when your enemies are telling the world that they’re coming to kill you; the real peril comes in stealth and silence. When Israel bombed Iraq’s nuclear reactor at Osirak in 1981, there was no advance warning. As most sober Israeli and American commentators concluded, the Times story had been leaked to raise pressure on Tehran to abandon uranium enrichment.

How likely is a scenario in which the US or Israel strikes Iran before Bush leaves office? (Or is the Left falling for the hawks’ propaganda?)
By Laura Rozen, Mother Jones, June 28, 2008

Trita Parsi: The recent war rhetoric coming out of Israel seems more geared towards ensuring that America keeps its military option on the table, than towards signalling that Israel itself is prepared to take military action. Even if Israel does have the capability to strike Iran—which is debatable—Israel certainly does not have the capability to successfully eliminate all Iranian nuclear facilities. Would Israel initiate an attack—knowing it would fail—only to force the US to step in and utilize its military option? Possibly, but it would come at a great expense to Israel: the Jewish state’s deterrence is to a large extent based on the outside world not knowing what Israel can and cannot do. By attacking Iran and failing to destroy the Iranian facilities, Israel would reveal the limitations of its capabilities and strike a major blow against its own deterrence.

Editor’s Comment — In spite of it’s go-it-alone image, Israel is not going to act without consulting Washington. And if push came to shove, the easiest way of figuring out what Washington’s position would be is to ask: How will the American electorate react when gasoline goes from $4 to $6 or $8 a gallon? How many Americans care that much about whether Iran acquires nuclear weapons?

McCain likes to use the line, “There’s only one thing worse than the United States exercising the military option; that is a nuclear-armed Iran,” and he’s also said, “If the price of oil has to go up, then that’s a consequence we would have to suffer.”

That’s easy to say, but as is already evident, pain-at-the-pump holds the attention of most Americans much more than dire national security warnings.

Preparing the battlefield
By Seymour Hersh, The New Yorker, July 7, 2008

Late last year, Congress agreed to a request from President Bush to fund a major escalation of covert operations against Iran, according to current and former military, intelligence, and congressional sources. These operations, for which the President sought up to four hundred million dollars, were described in a Presidential Finding signed by Bush, and are designed to destabilize the country’s religious leadership. The covert activities involve support of the minority Ahwazi Arab and Baluchi groups and other dissident organizations. They also include gathering intelligence about Iran’s suspected nuclear-weapons program.

Clandestine operations against Iran are not new. United States Special Operations Forces have been conducting cross-border operations from southern Iraq, with Presidential authorization, since last year. These have included seizing members of Al Quds, the commando arm of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, and taking them to Iraq for interrogation, and the pursuit of “high-value targets” in the President’s war on terror, who may be captured or killed. But the scale and the scope of the operations in Iran, which involve the Central Intelligence Agency and the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), have now been significantly expanded, according to the current and former officials. Many of these activities are not specified in the new Finding, and some congressional leaders have had serious questions about their nature.

Editor’s Comment — Time’s running out fast for Hersh to be vindicated on his perennial war-with-Iran warnings. In this case, I’d want to know what his sources meant when they used the word “conducting” — as in Special Ops forces have been conducting cross-border operations. At face value, that sounds like American troops sneaking into Iran. What it could mean is members of the MEK being given directives by Americans. The political risks involved in Iranians being caught by Iranians, is clearly much less than that of having US troops put on trial in Tehran.

In courts, Afghanistan air base may become next Guantanamo
By Del Quentin Wilber, Washington Post, June 29, 2008

Jawed Ahmad, a driver and assistant for reporters of a Canadian television network in Afghanistan, knew the roads to avoid, how to get interviews and which stories to pitch. Reporters trusted him, his bosses say.

Then, one day about seven months ago, the 22-year-old CTV News contractor vanished. Weeks later, reporters would learn from Ahmad’s family that he had been arrested by U.S. troops, locked up in the U.S. military prison at Bagram air base and accused of being an enemy combatant.

Lawyers representing Ahmad filed a federal lawsuit early this month challenging his detention on grounds similar to those cited in successful lawsuits on behalf of captives at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The lawyers are hoping to turn Ahmad’s case and a handful of others into the next legal battleground over the rights of terrorism suspects apprehended on foreign soil. More lawsuits are expected on behalf of Bagram detainees in coming months, the lawyers said.

The rise and fall of a Sons of Iraq warrior
By Ned Parker, Los Angeles Times, June 29, 2008

A year ago, Sunni Arab fighter Abu Abed led an improbable revolt against Al Qaeda in Iraq. As he killed its leaders and burned down hide-outs, he became a symbol of a new group called the Sons of Iraq — the man who dared to stand up to the extremists in Baghdad when it still ranked as a suicidal act.

Today, Abu Abed is chain-smoking cigarettes in Amman, betrayed by his best friend, on the run from a murder investigation in his homeland. He once walked the streets of Baghdad wearing wraparound sunglasses and surrounded by a posse of men in matching fatigues like something out of “Reservoir Dogs,” but now he shouts futilely for speeding taxis to halt, a slight figure in jeans and a button-down short-sleeve shirt.

Abu Abed’s rise and fall encapsulates the complexities of the U.S.-funded Sons of Iraq program. Although the Shiite-led Iraqi government has regarded the Sons of Iraq as little more than a front for insurgent groups, the Sunni fighters’ war helped end the cycle of car bombings and reprisal killings by Shiite militias that had sent Baghdad headlong into civil war. America’s new friends also helped bring down the death rate of U.S. forces in Iraq.

The urge to surge
By Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch, June 29, 2008

On March 19, 2003, as his shock-and-awe campaign against Iraq was being launched, George W. Bush addressed the nation. “My fellow citizens,” he began, “at this hour, American and coalition forces are in the early stages of military operations to disarm Iraq, to free its people and to defend the world from grave danger.” We were entering Iraq, he insisted, “with respect for its citizens, for their great civilization and for the religious faiths they practice. We have no ambition in Iraq, except to remove a threat and restore control of that country to its own people.”

Within weeks, of course, that “great civilization” was being looted, pillaged, and shipped abroad. Saddam Hussein’s Baathist dictatorship was no more and, soon enough, the Iraqi Army of 400,000 had been officially disbanded by L. Paul Bremer, the head of the occupying Coalition Provisional Authority and the President’s viceroy in Baghdad. By then, ministry buildings — except for the oil and interior ministries — were just looted shells. Schools, hospitals, museums, libraries, just about everything that was national or meaningful, had been stripped bare. Meanwhile, in their new offices in Saddam’s former palaces, America’s neoconservative occupiers were already bringing in the administration’s crony corporations — Halliburton and its subsidiary KBR, Bechtel, and others — to finish off the job of looting the country under the rubric of “reconstruction.” Somehow, these “administrators” managed to “spend” $20 billion of Iraq’s oil money, already in the “Development Fund for Iraq,” even before the first year of occupation was over — and to no effect whatsoever. They also managed to create what Ed Harriman in the London Review of Books labeled “the least accountable and least transparent regime in the Middle East.” (No small trick given the competition.)

U.S. advised Iraqi ministry on oil deals
By Andrew E Kramer, New York Times, June 30, 2008

A group of American advisers led by a small State Department team played an integral part in drawing up contracts between the Iraqi government and five major Western oil companies to develop some of the largest fields in Iraq, American officials say.

The disclosure, coming on the eve of the contracts’ announcement, is the first confirmation of direct involvement by the Bush administration in deals to open Iraq’s oil to commercial development and is likely to stoke criticism.

In their role as advisers to the Iraqi Oil Ministry, American government lawyers and private-sector consultants provided template contracts and detailed suggestions on drafting the contracts, advisers and a senior State Department official said.

Political theater seen in Israeli drill
By Amy Tiebel, AP, June 26, 2008

An Israeli military exercise over the Mediterranean appears to have been less a dry run for an attack on Iran than a message that Tehran must curb its nuclear ambitions, according to officials and experts.

U.S. defense officials suggested last week that the drill was a dress rehearsal for an Israeli strike. But the Greek government, which took part in the exercise, rejected that assessment. And some observers think the disclosure of the maneuvers was aimed at getting the international community to step up diplomatic pressure on Tehran.

“The exercise has no connection with Israeli ‘preparations’ for an attack on Iran, as has been inaccurately reported,” said Greek government spokesman Theodoros Roussopoulos. He said Israeli aircraft flew at high altitudes inconsistent with an attack, and the exercise did not simulate anti-aircraft fire.

News of the drill sent oil prices spiking. U.N. nuclear watchdog Mohamed ElBaradei warned an attack could turn the Mideast into a “ball of fire.” And Iran’s parliament speaker hinted a military strike could actually provoke the building of bombs.

Editor’s Comment — I can’t resist tooting my own trumpet on this story. While news organizations and bloggers alike were happy to run with Michael Gordon’s “attack rehearsal” Pentagon propaganda, I pointed out here and here that this was a story that shouldn’t be taken at face value.

Hamas: Continued rocket fire by Fatah armed group harms Palestinian interests
By Avi Isacharoff and Yuval Azoulay, Haaretz, June 27, 2008

The Hamas government in the Gaza Strip lashed out at rival militants after two Qassam rockets were fired at southern Israel yesterday, causing no injuries but further straining the shaky truce between Israel and Hamas that went into effect last Thursday morning.

In view of the continued rocket fire, Israel will keep the crossings into the Gaza Strip closed today, for the third straight day.

The Fatah-affiliated group Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade claimed responsibility for yesterday’s rocket fire and demanded that the cease-fire be extended into the West Bank.

Editor’s Comment — Well, it’s safe to assume that we won’t be hearing any public appeals from Ehud Olmert, Tony Blair (he is still The Quartet’s star envoy, isn’t he?), George Bush, Condoleezza Rice, John McCain, or Barak Obama, calling on Mahmoud Abbas to reign in the Fatah militants. Neither will there be wider support for a ceasefire covering all the Palestinian occupied territories. I guess it’s because all the peace processors are such deep believers in true peace that they can only offer tepid support for a mere truce.

Is Obama turning out to be just another politician?
By Margaret Talev, McClatchy, June 26, 2008

From the beginning, Barack Obama’s special appeal was his vow to remain an idealistic outsider, courageous and optimistic, and never to shift his positions for political expediency, or become captive of the Inside-the-Beltway intelligentsia, or kiss up to special interests and big money donors.

In recent weeks, though, Obama has done all those things.

He abandoned public campaign financing after years of championing it. Backed a compromise on wiretap legislation that gives telecom companies retroactive immunity for helping the government conduct spying without warrants. Dumped his controversial pastor of two decades — then his church — after saying he could no more abandon the pastor than abandon his own grandmother.

He said he wouldn’t wear the U.S. flag pin because it had become a substitute for true patriotism, then started wearing it. Ramped up his courtship of unions. Shifted from a pledge to protect working-class families from tax increases to a far more expensive promise not to raise taxes on families that earn up to $250,000 a year. Turned to longtime D.C. Democratic wise men to run his vice-presidential search and staff his foreign-policy brain trust.

Editor’s Comment — I don’t subscribe to the theory that the seemingly idealistic Obama was merely a contrivance and now the “real Obama” — a cynical political opportunist — is revealing himself. But in the name of realism and so-called political necessity, it’s easy to forget your core values.

Compromise is an incremental process whose individual steps are never too egregious when viewed in isolation. But the steps aggregate and by the time the sum of the aggregation can be clearly seen, it’s too late to reverse.

There’s nothing wrong with showing that you’re a pragmatist and that you don’t fit into an ideological box, but if it comes at the expense of defining your political bedrock, then eventually no one will know whether that foundation exists.

Tony Blair and Bill Clinton liked to flatter themselves with the cute claim that they were seasoned practitioners of “principled compromise.” In the end though it became clear that they honed their skill in compromise not in conjunction with but rather at the expense of their principles.

Obama’s supreme move to the center
By Massimo Calabresi, Time, June 26, 2008

When the Supreme Court issues rulings on hot-button issues like gun control and the death penalty in the middle of a presidential campaign, Republicans could be excused for thinking they’ll have the perfect opportunity to paint their Democratic opponent as an out-of-touch social liberal. But while Barack Obama may be ranked as one of the Senate’s most liberal members, his reactions to this week’s controversial court decisions showed yet again how he is carefully moving to the center ahead of the fall campaign.

On Wednesday, after the Supreme Court ruled that the death penalty was unconstitutional in cases of child rape, Obama surprised some observers by siding with the hardline minority of Justices Scalia, Thomas, Roberts and Alito. At a press conference after the decision, Obama said, “I think that the rape of a small child, six or eight years old, is a heinous crime and if a state makes a decision that under narrow, limited, well-defined circumstances the death penalty is at least potentially applicable, that that does not violate our Constitution.”

Iran fights scourge of addiction in plain view, stressing treatment
By Nazila Fathi, New York Times, June 27, 2008

More than 93 percent of the opium produced for the world’s illicit narcotics markets comes from Afghanistan, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, and Iran is the main trafficking route for nearly 60 percent of the opium grown in Afghanistan.

With opium production skyrocketing in Afghanistan, some Iranian officials accuse the American military of ignoring poppy cultivation in Afghanistan, even though it is a major source of revenue for the Taliban and Al Qaeda.

“We think the Americans want to keep this source of infection near us,” said Mr. Jahani, the Iranian antidrug official. “Because of the animosity between Iran and the U.S., this is the best way to keep our resources and forces occupied.”

The government grew so concerned about drug trafficking that it spent $6 billion in 2006 to build a wall 13 feet high, with barbed wire, and a trench 13 feet deep and 16 feet wide along a third of Iran’s border with Afghanistan. Iran seizes more illicit opiates than any other country, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime said, and it burns tons of confiscated drugs in a ceremony every year.

West links drug war aid to Iranian nuclear impasse
AP, June 24, 2008

Iranian forces have battled for years in the lonely canyons and deserts on the Afghan border against opium and heroin traffickers — winning rare praise from the United States and aid from Europe for the fight along one of the world’s busiest drug routes.

But now, international support for Iran’s drug agents could be threatened by the standoff over Tehran’s nuclear policies.

Western nations have told Iran that they could cut off any new help to Iran’s anti-drug units unless the Islamic regime halts uranium enrichment, which Washington and its allies worry could be used to develop nuclear arms.

The warning was a small but potentially significant item tucked amid an array of trade and economic incentives seeking to sway Iranian leaders to strike a deal. Iran has not formally responded to the package, presented June 14 by the five permanent U.N. Security Council members plus Germany.

Editor’s Comment — The refrain from the Bush administration has always been that the US is at odds with the regime and not the people of Iran. However, if the West is seen as being willing to apply political leverage through controlling the flow of opium, then it can reasonably be accused of attempting to poison Iranian society. That’s no way to win friends.

Bush rebuffs hard-liners to ease North Korean curbs
By Helene Cooper, New York Times, June 27, 2008

Two days ago, during an off-the-record session with a group of foreign policy experts, Vice President Dick Cheney got a question he did not want to answer. “Mr. Vice President,” asked one of them, “I understand that on Wednesday or Thursday, we are going to de-list North Korea from the terrorism blacklist. Could you please set the context for this decision?”

Mr. Cheney froze, according to four participants at the Old Executive Office Building meeting. For more than 30 minutes he had been taking and answering questions, without missing a beat. But now, for several long seconds, he stared, unsmilingly, at his questioner, Steven Clemons of the New America Foundation, a public policy institution. Finally, he spoke:

“I’m not going to be the one to announce this decision,” the other participants recalled Mr. Cheney saying, pointing at himself. “You need to address your interest in this to the State Department.” He then declared that he was done taking questions, and left the room.

North Korea destroys tower at nuclear site
By Choe Sang-Hun, New York Times, June 28, 2008

In a gesture demonstrating its commitment to halt its nuclear weapons program, North Korea blew up the most prominent symbol of its plutonium production Friday.

The 60-foot cooling tower at the North’s main nuclear power plant collapsed in a heap of shattered concrete and twisted steel, filmed by international and regional television broadcasters invited to witness the event.

When anonymity fails, be nasty, brutish and short
By Dana Milbank, Washington Post, June 27, 2008

Throughout the Bush presidency, he toiled in secrecy deep within the White House, a mysterious and feared presence who never stepped into the sunlight of public disclosure.

Until yesterday.

There he sat, hunched and scowling, at the witness table in front of the House Judiciary Committee: the bearded, burly form of the chief of staff and alter ego to the vice president — Cheney’s Cheney, if you will — and the man most responsible for building President Bush’s notion of an imperial presidency.

David Addington was there under subpoena. And he wasn’t happy about it.

Muslim sues over loss of security clearance
By Sally Kalson, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, June 27, 2008

Charging violation of his constitutional rights to free speech and religion, equal protection and due process, nuclear scientist and prison imam Moniem El-Ganayni filed a federal lawsuit yesterday against the Department of Energy and its acting deputy secretary, Jeffrey F. Kupfer.

The action stems from the loss of Dr. El-Ganayni’s security clearance, and hence his job, at Bettis Laboratory in West Mifflin, based on unspecified grounds of “national security.” It does not seek to overturn the revocation, but rather the right to see the alleged evidence against him — he doubts any exists — and the chance to contest the decision “before a nonpolitical, neutral arbiter, as mandated by DOE regulations.”

“The government has offered no factual details in this case. All they’ve done is to parrot boilerplate language from the DOE,” said Witold Walczak, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania, which is representing Dr. El-Ganayni along with lawyers from the Downtown offices of Schnader Harrison Segal and Lewis.

Nuclear physicist/Muslim cleric fights to get back job, security clearance
By Sally Kalson, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, February 3, 2008

(This is the Original Post-Gazette report on this story published in February.)

Dr. Moniem El-Ganayni is not the only imam to have served as a chaplain inside a state prison. But he may be the only one who is also a nuclear physicist working on classified U.S. military projects that require a security clearance.

At least, he used to do classified work at the Bettis Laboratory, an advanced naval nuclear propulsion technology lab in West Mifflin operated by Bechtel Bettis Inc. for the U.S. Department of Energy.

But in October, the two tracks of his life collided. His security clearance was suspended, barring him from the lab where he has worked for 18 years.