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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My talk with Fareed Zakaria: Obama must face a post-American world
By Nathan Gardels, Huffington Post, June 3, 2008
If Barack Obama succeeds in his campaign against John McCain and becomes president of the United States, he will have to deal with much deeper issues beyond Iraq, namely the “rise of the rest” as China, India and the developing world aspire to catch up with America and want a seat at the table of global power. In such a world, the strategic vision of US leadership ought to be
to make the world safe for interdependence since we will not always be on top.

I discussed these issues recently with Fareed Zakaria, author of The Post-American World.

Republicans begin to highlight Clinton’s criticism of Obama
By Mark Preston, CNN, June 3, 2008
Hours before the polls closed Tuesday in the final two Democratic presidential primaries, the Republican National Committee began circulating a video of Hillary Clinton questioning Barack Obama’s qualifications to be commander-in-chief, and acknowledging John McCain has this important presidential credential.

“Senator McCain will bring a lifetime of experience to the campaign, I will bring a lifetime of experience and Senator Obama will bring a speech that he gave in 2002,” Clinton says in the one-minute video of CNN’s coverage of a news conference she held on March 8 – the day Obama won the Wyoming caucuses. “I think that is a significant difference. I think that since we now know Senator McCain will be the nominee for the Republican Party, national security will be front and center in this election. We all know that.

“And I think it is imperative that each of us be able to demonstrate we can cross the commander-in-chief threshold. And I believe I have done that. Certainly, Senator McCain has done that. And you will have to ask Senator Obama with respect to his candidacy.”

McCain calls Iran ‘foremost’ Middle East enemy
By Michael D. Shear, Washington Post, June 2, 2008
Sen. John McCain called Monday for broad sanctions against Iran and a South African-style worldwide divestment strategy aimed at pressuring the country’s regime to abandon efforts to acquire nuclear weapons and encourage its people’s democratic aspirations.

In a speech to the pro-Israel lobbying group AIPAC in Washington, McCain declared Iran the “foremost” enemy in the Middle East and said it could pose an “existential threat” to Israel if it succeeds in acquiring a nuclear bomb.

“A sponsor of both Hamas and Hezbollah, the leadership of Iran has repeatedly used violence to undermine Israel and the Middle East peace process,” McCain said. “It has trained, financed, and equipped extremists in Iraq who have killed American soldiers fighting to bring freedom to that country. It remains the world’s chief sponsor of terrorism and threatens to destabilize the entire Middle East, from Basra to Beirut.”

Both McCain, Obama exaggerating Iran’s nuclear program
By Jonathan S. Landay, McClatchy, June 2, 2008
The presumptive Republican nominee for president and the leading contender for the Democratic nomination are exaggerating what’s known about Iran’s nuclear program as they duel over how best to deal with Tehran.

Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Barack Obama, D-Ill., say that Iran is developing nuclear weapons.

The U.S. intelligence community, however, thinks that Iran halted an effort to build a nuclear warhead in mid-2003, and the U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency, which is investigating the program, has found no evidence to date of an active Iranian nuclear-weapons project.

Cheney builds an explosive case
By Gareth Porter, Asia Times, June 4, 2008
For many months, the propaganda line that explosively formed projectiles (EFPs) that could penetrate United States armored vehicles were coming straight from Iran has been embraced publicly by the entire George W Bush administration. But when that argument was proposed internally by military officials in January 2007, it was attacked by key administration officials as unsupported by the facts.

Vice President Dick Cheney was able to get around those objections and get his Iranian EFP line accepted only because of arrangements he and Bush made with General David Petraeus before he took command of US forces in Iraq.

The initial draft of the proposed military briefing on the issue of EFPs, which asserted flatly that EFPs were being manufactured and smuggled to Iraqi Shi’ite groups directly by the Iranian regime, was met with unanimous objection from the State Department, Defense Department and National Security Council staff, as administration officials themselves stated publicly.

Terror and truth
By Alastair Crooke, Conflicts Forum, June 1, 2008
Sir Hugh Orde speaks rarely heard truth when he says that he has never heard of a terrorist campaign that was “policed out”, adding that he could not think of one that had not ended through negotiation.

There has been an unshakeable faith in Europe that western law-enforcement officers could pad around the bazaars of Rawalpindi and in the refugee camps of the Middle East hunting-down “bad actors”. It has been a fantasy fuelled by the conviction in the west that “secular” Muslim societies must at heart be pro-western – surely they must share the antipathy many in the west feel toward movements motivated by Islam? The flawed assumption has been that these seculars loathe movements such as Hizbullah, and would become the west’s ready collaborators in undermining them.

But as Sir Hugh evidently is aware from his own Irish experience of resistance movements, it was never this simple. In one family around the dinner table would sit one brother in one wing of the IRA; another would belong to Sinn Fein, and yet another would be in the employ of the British – and yet, all saw themselves as Irish nationalists.

And the winner is … the Israel lobby
By Pepe Escobar, Asia Times, June 3, 2008
They’re all here – and they’re all ready to party. The three United States presidential candidates – John McCain, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Madam House speaker Nancy Pelosi. Most US senators and virtually half of the US Congress. Vice President Dick Cheney’s wife, Lynne. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Embattled Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. And a host of Jewish and non-Jewish political and academic heavy-hitters among the 7,000 participants.

Such star power wattage, a Washington version of the Oscars, is the stock in trade of AIPAC – the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the crucial player in what is generally known as the Israel lobby and which holds its annual Policy Conference this week in Washington at which most of the heavyweights will deliver lectures.

‘Syria to meet with weapons inspectors about site bombed by Israel
By Robin Wright, Washington Post, June 3, 2008
Nine months after Israel bombed an alleged Syrian nuclear site, the government of President Bashar al-Assad has agreed to hold talks in Damascus with the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency about the remote desert compound, the International Atomic Energy Agency announced yesterday, ending a long deadlock over access to the location.

Syria will allow international access to the al-Kibar site on the Euphrates River, but has turned down the IAEA’s request to go to at least three other facilities that U.S. intelligence says may be connected to a reactor and a clandestine nuclear weapons program, said Western diplomats familiar with the talks, which are scheduled for June 22-24. The other sites include possible reprocessing facilities, which are essential for production of fissile material.

The new face of Islam
By Christopher Dickey and Owen Matthews , Newsweek, June 9, 2008
Important Muslim thinkers, including some on whom bin Laden depended for support, have rejected his vision of jihad. Once sympathetic publics in the Middle East and South Asia are growing disillusioned. As CIA Director Michael Hayden said last week, “Fundamentally, no one really liked Al Qaeda’s vision of the future.” At the same time, and potentially much more important over the long run, a new vision of Islam, neither bin Laden’s nor that of the traditionalists who preceded him, is taking shape. Momentum is building within the Muslim world to re-examine what had seemed immutable tenets of the faith, to challenge what had been taken as literal truths and to open wide the doors of interpretation (ijtihad) that some schools of Islam tried to close centuries ago.

We are all appeasers now
By Gary Kamiya, Salon, June 3, 2008
Of the major presidential candidates, only Obama has dared to unequivocally reject the Appeasement Paradigm. He has vowed to end not only the Iraq war but, crucially, also what he called “the mind-set that got us into war in the first place.”

The coming election is shaping up to be a referendum not just on Iraq but on that black-and-white mind-set. McCain and the GOP will relentlessly attack Obama as weak, inexperienced and cowardly, pointing to his willingness to talk to our enemies as evidence. But the fact is that what Obama is proposing is simply rational, realistic foreign policy. And the proof is that the rest of the world, including Israel, has defied the Bush administration and is talking to the “terrorists.”

If it’s appeasement to talk to “evildoers,” we are all appeasers now. Everywhere you look, our allies — or we ourselves — are negotiating with members of the “Axis of Evil” and their allies.

Americans favor president meeting with U.S. enemies
By Lydia Saad, Gallup, June 2, 2008
Large majorities of Democrats and independents, and even about half of Republicans, believe the president of the United States should meet with the leaders of countries that are considered enemies of the United States. Overall, 67% of Americans say this kind of diplomacy is a good idea.

US accused of holding terror suspects on prison ships
By Duncan Campbell and Richard Norton-Taylor, The Guardian, June 2, 2008
The United States is operating “floating prisons” to house those arrested in its war on terror, according to human rights lawyers, who claim there has been an attempt to conceal the numbers and whereabouts of detainees.

Details of ships where detainees have been held and sites allegedly being used in countries across the world have been compiled as the debate over detention without trial intensifies on both sides of the Atlantic. The US government was yesterday urged to list the names and whereabouts of all those detained.

Information about the operation of prison ships has emerged through a number of sources, including statements from the US military, the Council of Europe and related parliamentary bodies, and the testimonies of prisoners.

McCain’s McClellan nightmare
By Frank Rich, New York Times, June 2, 2008
Americans don’t like being lied to by their leaders, especially if there are casualties involved and especially if there’s no accountability. We view it as a crime story, and we won’t be satisfied until there’s a resolution.

That’s why the original sin of the war’s conception remains a political flash point, however much we tune out Iraq as it grinds on today. Even a figure as puny as Mr. McClellan can ignite it. The Democrats portray Mr. McCain as offering a third Bush term, but it’s a third term of the war that’s his bigger problem. Even if he locks the president away in a private home, the war will keep seeping under the door, like the blood in “Sweeney Todd.”

Mr. McCain and his party are in denial about this. “Elections are about the future” is their mantra. On “Hardball” in April, Mr. McCain pooh-poohed debate about “whether we should have invaded or not” as merely “a good academic argument.” We should focus on the “victory” he magically foresees instead.

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

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

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

Taliban leader flaunts power inside Pakistan
By Jane Perlez, New York Times, June 2, 2008
With great fanfare, the Pakistani Army flew journalists to a rugged corner of the nation’s lawless tribal areas in May to show how decisively it had destroyed the lairs of the Taliban, including a school for suicide bombers, in fighting early this year.

Then, just days later, the usually reclusive leader of the Pakistani Taliban, Baitullah Mehsud, held a news conference of his own, in the same region, to show just who was in charge.

He rolled up in an expensive-looking Toyota pickup packed with heavily armed Taliban fighters, according to the Pakistani journalists invited to attend. Squatting on the floor of a government school, Mr. Mehsud, clasping a new Kalashnikov, announced he would press his fight against the American military across the border in Afghanistan.

Bhutto dealt nuclear secrets to N. Korea, book says
By Glenn Kessler, Washington Post, June 1, 2008
Former Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto, on a state visit to North Korea in 1993, smuggled in critical data on uranium enrichment — a route to making a nuclear weapon — to help facilitate a missile deal with Pyongyang, according to a new book by a journalist who knew the slain politician well.

The assertion is based on conversations that the author, Shyam Bhatia, had with Bhutto in 2003, in which she said she would tell him a secret “so significant that I had to promise never to reveal it, at least not during her lifetime,” Bhatia writes in “Goodbye, Shahzadi,” which was published in India last month.

Bhutto was slain in December while campaigning to win back the prime minister’s post.

The account, if verified, could advance the timeline for North Korea’s interest in uranium enrichment. David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security, a research organization on nuclear weapons programs, said the assertion “makes sense,” because there were signs of “funny procurements” in the late 1980s by North Korea that suggested a nascent effort to assemble a uranium enrichment project.

Washington trip lets suspect be statesman
By Paul Woodward, The National, June 2, 2008
“Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s departure for the US on Monday night may well turn out to be a tour to bid farewell to his friends in Washington. But Olmert is doing his best to make the visit look like everything is under control: He even extended his stay in the US by one day,” Barak Ravid wrote for Haaretz.

“Indeed, Olmert’s entourage is comforting itself with the strong friendship struck up with US President George W Bush. Olmert is also slated to meet with presidential hopefuls Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and John McCain, as well as Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.”

Jeffrey Heller writing for Reuters saw parallels with an earlier excursion: “Denying any wrongdoing in an investigation that was gathering speed, the embattled leader set off on a foreign visit to discuss issues at the heart of US-Israeli relations and the Middle East conflict.

“Richard Nixon landed in Israel in June, 1974 at the height of the Watergate scandal to a red-carpet welcome and trumpet fanfare that struck a note far different from the political discord he left back home.

A year later, Hamas rule deepens in Gaza
By Steven Gutkin, AP, June 1, 2008
A year into Hamas’ rule in the Gaza Strip, courts are meting out justice, police are arresting thieves, motorists are paying for licenses and authorities are blocking Internet porn sites.

At the same time, Gazans are stocking up on vegetable oil — not for cooking, but to run their cars during a severe fuel shortage. A punishing Israeli-led blockade has forced 80 percent of the people to rely on United Nations food handouts. With sanitation services collapsing, millions of gallons of raw sewage are flowing into the sea. Enemies of the regime have been silenced.

A year after Hamas militants seized power in five days of bloody fighting that included tossing rivals off high-rise rooftops, it’s become clear that Israel’s boycott of Gaza has not significantly weakened Hamas and its control is deepening.

Saudi clerics criticize Shiites for destabilizing
By Donna Abu Nasr, AP, June 1, 2008
Hardline Sunni clerics accused Shiites Sunday of destabilizing Muslim countries and humiliating Sunnis, just days before a Muslim interfaith conference called by Saudi Arabia’s king.

The attacks on Iran, Iraq and Hezbollah — though contrary to official policy — highlight the sharp, growing distrust between Islam’s two arms, and its potential to cause more unrest.

In a strongly worded statement, the 22 clerics savaged Iranian-backed Hezbollah militants, saying the Lebanese Shiite group has tricked other Muslims into believing it is against Jews and Americans.

Stop looking for ‘moderate’ Shiites and address interests
By Parag Khanna, World Politics Review, May 30, 2008
Even those in America who call for a more humble American foreign policy and recognize the need to listen to foreign populations and global public opinion persist in deploying at every possible moment the most patronizing of monikers in describing their preferred allies: “moderate.”

Over the past eight years, the condescending label of moderate has been applied to a variety of potential interlocutors in regional conflicts — with never a positive result. Negotiations with so-called “moderate Taliban” proved a failure; Taliban interests and unity certainly outweighed any incentives the U.S.-backed Karzai regime could muster. The much lauded effort in Iraq’s Anbar province to work with “moderate Sunni” may also backfire: Al-Qaida in Iraq has been weakened, but there has been no political progress on the national level and, thanks to U.S. weapons, the Anbar Sunnis are now armed to the teeth. Then there was the arming of the “moderate Palestinians” of Fatah over the “militants” of Hamas, which made the latter even more merciless in its takeover of Gaza, splintering the Palestinian state both geographically and politically.

A one-state solution for Palestinians and Israelis
By Ghada Karmi, Christian Science Monitor, May 30, 2008
In 2005, I was invited to do something most Palestinians can only dream of: visit the house from which my family had been driven in 1948. Of all people, a New York Times correspondent discovered that his apartment was built over my old home.

When I met him there, the Jewish occupants who showed me around were almost apologetic, perhaps aware how that incident encapsulated the central story of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: the expulsion of Palestinians and their replacement by Jews. Yet when I asked the reporter how he could still write articles that betray this reality, he was evasive.

His evasion is part of an industry of denial called the Middle East “peace process.” This industry feeds the current international consensus on the two-state solution as the only “comprehensive” settlement to the conflict. But there’s a better solution, one that’s slowly picking up steam among Palestinians and Israelis: a one-state model.

Iran’s nuclear threat will be first test for new president
By Bronwen Maddox, The Times, May 30, 2008
The slow disintegration of Israel’s Government makes it even less likely that it would attack Iran’s nuclear installations, a question that has arisen again this week after a new report cautioning that Tehran may be developing nuclear weapons. The likelihood that the US would take that course has also fallen in the past six months. The result is that the response to Iran’s determination to put nuclear weapons within reach looks more like being the first difficult decision facing the next US president, rather than the last, dramatic one of President Bush.

The prospect of a wider peace
Editorial, The Economist, May 29, 2008
Just two weeks ago, Lebanon was on the verge of civil war. Suddenly, it seems to be on the brink of a lasting peace. And just as Lebanon’s own troubles reflected wider tensions in the Middle East, the fractious country’s sudden mood of conciliation is sending positive ripples through the region. At least, that is how things appear on the surface.

U.S. cites big gains against al-Qaeda
By Joby Warrick, Washington Post, May 30, 2008
Less than a year after his agency warned of new threats from a resurgent al-Qaeda, CIA Director Michael V. Hayden now portrays the terrorist movement as essentially defeated in Iraq and Saudi Arabia and on the defensive throughout much of the rest of the world, including in its presumed haven along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.

In a strikingly upbeat assessment, the CIA chief cited major gains against al-Qaeda’s allies in the Middle East and an increasingly successful campaign to destabilize the group’s core leadership.

Could methane trigger a climate doomsday within a human lifespan?
By Alexis Madrigal, Wired, May 28, 2008
A new paper published appearing Thursday in the prestigious scientific journal Nature presents the worst-case scenario for runaway climate change that could leave the Earth entirely ice-free within a generation.

If global temperatures continue to rise, massive amounts of methane gas could be released from the 10,000 gigaton reserves of frozen methane that are currently locked in the world’s deep oceans and permafrost. Passing this climate tipping point would result in runaway global warming that would be far worse and more rapid than scientists’ current estimates.

The new paper suggests that exactly this type of cascading release of methane reserves rapidly warmed the Earth 635 million years ago, replacing an Ice Age with a period of tropical heat. The study’s lead author suggests it could happen again, and fast — not over thousands or millions of years, but possibly within a century.

Jimmy Carter is right to say the unsayable
By Bronwen Maddox, The Times, May 28, 2008
Jimmy Carter’s willingness to tell the world the size of Israel’s nuclear arsenal, as he did this week, is just the latest sign of his desire to say what his fellow American politicians find unsayable about US policy in the Middle East.

On the basis of Carter’s speeches in Britain this week, many Europeans would embrace the 83-year-old former President as their ideal occupant of the White House. But in the actual presidential election in November, Carter’s comments, his trip last month to meet Hamas leaders and his book two years ago in which he accused Israel of “apartheid” put him beyond the pale. So much so that Barack Obama took pains to condemn the Hamas trip, despite Carter’s supportive remarks on his campaign, lest the pro-Israel lobby’s loathing of Carter transfer to him.

That may be Carter’s fate: adored abroad and shorn of influence at home. But the divisions within the Democrats on whether to talk to Hamas and Iran, as he urges, and the speed with which the problems will confront the winner in November, mean that if the next president is a Democrat, Carter’s views may have some sway, even if no politician will risk thanking him for them.

Worse than Bush
By Fred Kaplan, Slate, May 28, 2008
Many foreign-policy mavens have wondered which John McCain would step to the fore once he started running for president in earnest—the McCain who consorts with such pragmatists as Richard Armitage, Colin Powell, and George Shultz; or the McCain who huddles with “neocons” like Robert Kagan, John Bolton, and William Kristol (before he started writing op-eds for the New York Times).

Last month, the Times published a story about the battle for McCain’s soul that’s being waged by those two factions.

On Tuesday, McCain cleared up the mystery: He’s with the neocons. He is, fundamentally, in sync with the foreign policy pursued by George W. Bush for his first six years in office. The clincher is that he has now broken with the president on the one issue where Bush himself reversed course more than a year ago after realizing that his policy had failed. In two op-ed articles and a speech—all of them published or delivered on Tuesday, May 27—McCain called for a return to Bush’s original, disastrous approach.

An unwanted league
By Thomas Carothers, Washington Post, May 28, 2008
A puzzle of globalization is that despite the astonishing growth in communication and information flows, Washington lives in a bubble, seeing the world through its own lens, being surprised and disappointed again and again when the world does not conform to U.S. expectations. President Bush’s foreign policy is a study in the bubble approach, marked by the constant unsuccessful projection of ideas made in the USA onto unruly foreign realities. A major question for the next administration is whether it can move out of the bubble and more effectively connect the United States to the world.

In this regard, the declarations and debates about foreign policy in the presidential campaign so far are not especially reassuring. One of the most visible proposals, the calls by experts on both sides of the political aisle and by Sen. John McCain for the establishment of a League of Democracies to tackle the world’s problems, is an example of continued thinking within the bubble.

Human rights report assails U.S.
By Alan Cowell, New York Times, May 28, 2008
Sixty years after the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, governments in scores of countries still torture or mistreat their people, Amnesty International said Wednesday in a report that again urged the United States to close down the Guantánamo Bay detention camp in Cuba.

In its annual report, the London-based human rights watchdog said “flashpoints” in Darfur, Zimbabwe, Gaza, Iraq/ and Myanmar “demand immediate action.”

“World leaders are in a state of denial but their failure to act has a high cost,” Irene Khan, the secretary general of Amnesty International, said in a statement accompanying the report. “As Iraq and Afghanistan show, human rights problems are not isolated tragedies, but are like viruses than can infect and spread rapidly, endangering all of us.”

The New McCarthyism: Israel imposes a 10-year ban on American critic of Israeli policies
By Glenn Greenwald, Salon, May 27, 2008
On Friday, Israeli security forces, Shin Bet, detained Norman Finkelstein when he tried to enter Israel, kept him in an airport holding cell for 24 hours, ordered him deported from the country, and then imposed a 10-year ban on his entry. Finkelstein, the son of a Holocaust survivor, is a Jewish-American author and academic who has frequently criticized the Israeli Government and provoked extreme animosity among right-wing factions in the U.S. He had flown to Israel 15 times previously without incident and was never charged with, let alone convicted of, any crime.

This morning, I interviewed Finkelstein regarding this episode and related issues (the audio for which is here). I also interviewed Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz, whose animosity towards Finkelstein is intense and long-standing. Dershowitz, to his credit (and, given the below-described events, somewhat ironically) was quite critical of Israel’s exclusion of Finkelstein. The full interview with Dershowitz can be heard here.

Syria: Olmert’s political weakness may affect recently renewed peace talks
Haaretz, May 28, 2008
The recently revived peace talks between Syria and Israel may be hindered by the weakness of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, beleaguered by a political crisis, Syrian analysts said Wednesday.

The Syrian comment came shortly after Defense Minister Ehud Barak urged Olmert to step down or face early elections in light of the corruption investigation currently underway against him.

Washington’s new Jewish lobby presses Israel
By Dan Ephron, Newsweek, May 27, 2008
Thanks in part to the influence of the pro-Israel lobby group AIPAC, the U.S. government rarely gets tough with Israel, even on issues like Jewish settlement expansion in the West Bank, which Washington views as harmful to the peace process. A new lobby group formed last month, J Street, wants to change that. Founded by a number of liberal Jews, J Street wants to see the administration press Israel not only for an end to settlement construction, but also a real peace effort between Israel and Syria and possibly talks between Israel and Hamas. The group’s name is a play on the political geography of downtown Washington, where K street is the traditional hub of lobbyists and J street doesn’t exist. Newsweek correspondent Dan Ephron sat down recently with the group’s executive director Jeremy Ben-Ami to discuss the organization’s agenda.

Why Israel is talking to its enemies
By Tim McGirk, Time, May 27, 2008
When President George W. Bush appeared before the Israeli Knesset recently and denounced those who appease “terrorists and radicals,” it was seen back home as a swipe against Democratic contender Barack Obama for saying that the U.S. should talk to its enemies. But his audience of Israeli legislators, who interrupted Bush’s speech at least 14 times with thunderclaps of applause, interpreted it otherwise. They saw it as the American President’s unswerving support of the Jewish nation on its 60th anniversary. Nevertheless, under instructions from Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, Israel envoys have been carrying out discreet talks with the very “radicals and terrorists” that Bush was warning against in his speech: Syria, the Lebanese militia Hizballah and the Palestinian militant group Hamas.

Talking to Hamas
By Deborah Amos, Slate, May 28, 2008
Khalid Mishaal, the exiled leader of Hamas, isn’t packing his bags just yet, but his comfortable headquarters in a Damascus suburb could be closed down soon. In a surprise announcement last week, Israel and Syria confirmed indirect peace talks for the first time in eight years. Israel has long demanded that Syria cut ties with groups like Hezbollah and Hamas, but now the Golan Heights are on the negotiating table once again, and the stakes have changed dramatically.

In a late-night meeting, Mishaal was relaxed and smiling. He offered me green tea with ginger and a plate of semolina cookies. Mishaal recited a Quranic verse to open the hourlong interview, but that was his only reference to religion. Mishaal was all about divining the recent momentous events in the region: Israeli-Syria peace talks brokered by Turkey and an agreement, mediated by Qatar, to avert a new Lebanese civil war. The agreement confirmed Hezbollah’s power and Syria’s regional influence. It was a surprisingly peaceful conclusion to an 18-month confrontation that had escalated into a street war in West Beirut. Both deals, seemingly concluded without U.S. involvement and counter to the Bush administration’s policies, will affect Palestinian politics.

111 nations, minus the U.S., agree to cluster-bomb ban
By Kevin Sullivan and Josh White, Washington Post, May 29, 2008
More than 100 countries reached agreement Wednesday to ban cluster bombs, controversial weapons that human rights groups deplore but that the United States, which did not join the ban, calls an integral, legitimate part of its arsenal.

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, whose personal intervention Wednesday led to final agreement among representatives of 111 countries gathered in Dublin, called the ban a “big step forward to make the world a safer place.”

In addition to the United States, Russia, China, Israel, India and Pakistan — all of them major producers or users of the weapons — did not sign the agreement or participate in the talks.

The Pentagon’s expansion will be Bush’s lasting legacy
By Frida Berrigan, TomDispatch, May 27, 2008
A full-fledged cottage industry is already focused on those who eagerly await the end of the Bush administration, offering calendars, magnets, and t-shirts for sale as well as counters and graphics to download onto blogs and websites. But when the countdown ends and George W. Bush vacates the Oval Office, he will leave a legacy to contend with. Certainly, he wills to his successor a world marred by war and battered by deprivation, but perhaps his most enduring legacy is now deeply embedded in Washington-area politics — a Pentagon metastasized almost beyond recognition.

The Pentagon’s massive bulk-up these last seven years will not be easily unbuilt, no matter who dons the presidential mantle on January 19, 2009.

A sensible path on Iran
By Zbigniew Brzezinski and William Odom, Washington Post, May 27, 2008
Given Iran’s stated goals — a nuclear power capability but not nuclear weapons, as well as an alleged desire to discuss broader U.S.-Iranian security issues — a realistic policy would exploit this opening to see what it might yield. The United States could indicate that it is prepared to negotiate, either on the basis of no preconditions by either side (though retaining the right to terminate the negotiations if Iran remains unyielding but begins to enrich its uranium beyond levels allowed by the Non-Proliferation Treaty); or to negotiate on the basis of an Iranian willingness to suspend enrichment in return for simultaneous U.S. suspension of major economic and financial sanctions.

Such a broader and more flexible approach would increase the prospects of an international arrangement being devised to accommodate Iran’s desire for an autonomous nuclear energy program while minimizing the possibility that it could be rapidly transformed into a nuclear weapons program. Moreover, there is no credible reason to assume that the traditional policy of strategic deterrence, which worked so well in U.S. relations with the Soviet Union and with China and which has helped to stabilize India-Pakistan hostility, would not work in the case of Iran. The widely propagated notion of a suicidal Iran detonating its very first nuclear weapon against Israel is more the product of paranoia or demagogy than of serious strategic calculus. It cannot be the basis for U.S. policy, and it should not be for Israel’s, either.

IAEA report puts pressure on Iran
By Paul Woodward, The National, May 28, 2008
“A report released on Monday by the UN’s nuclear watchdog organisation presents the clearest indication yet that Iran was working on a nuclear weapon through 2003. But there is no evidence that the weapons programme continued after 2004, it says, echoing a US intelligence assessment in December,” the Los Angeles Times reported.

“The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said its investigation was based on questions raised by its inspections and on allegations from intelligence reports provided by the US and other countries. The IAEA recently presented Iran with documents that depict a clandestine programme including uranium enrichment, missile development and plans for fitting missiles with nuclear warheads.

McClellan whacks Bush, White House
By Mike Allen, Poltico, May 27, 2008
Former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan writes in a surprisingly scathing memoir to be published next week that President Bush “veered terribly off course,” was not “open and forthright on Iraq,” and took a “permanent campaign approach” to governing at the expense of candor and competence.

Among the most explosive revelations in the 341-page book, titled “What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception” (Public Affairs, $27.95):

• McClellan charges that Bush relied on “propaganda” to sell the war.

• He says the White House press corps was too easy on the administration during the run-up to the war.

Report details effects of climate change across U.S.
By Juliet Eilperin, Washington Post, May 28, 2008
Global warming is already affecting the nation’s forests, water resources, farmland and wildlife, and will have serious negative consequences over the next 25 to 50 years, according to a report issued yesterday by the federal government.

The scientific assessment by the U.S. Climate Change Science Program, which was commissioned by the Agriculture Department and carried out by 38 scientists inside and outside the government, provides the most detailed look in nearly eight years at how climate change is reshaping the American landscape. The report, which runs 193 pages and synthesizes a thousand scientific papers, highlights how human-generated carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels have already translated into more frequent forest fires, reduced snowpack and increased drought, especially in the West.

Iraqis losing patience with militiamen
ByTina Susman and Usama Redha, Los Angeles Times, May 27, 2008
Four summers ago, when militiamen loyal to hard-line Shiite Muslim cleric Muqtada Sadr were battling U.S. forces in the holy city of Najaf, Mohammed Lami was among them.

“I had faith. I believed in something,” Lami said of his days hoisting a gun for Sadr’s Mahdi Army militia. “Now, I will never fight with them.”

Poland stalls Bush’s ‘lame duck’ deal on missile shield
By Ian Traynor, The Guardian, May 28, 2008
President George Bush’s hopes of sealing agreement to site parts of the Pentagon’s missile shield in central Europe before he leaves office are fading fast, according to senior Polish officials who despair of reaching to reach a deal with the United States before the end of the year.

The US has been negotiating with the Polish and Czech governments for five years over deploying missile interceptors in Poland and a radar-tracking station in the Czech Republic – the first elements of the American missile defence programme that would be stationed outside the US.

But while the Americans and the Czechs recently concluded their negotiations, the Polish government has balked at the US terms on offer, insisting on large-scale military aid from the US to modernise its armed forces in return for agreeing to host the silos for 10 interceptor rockets.

How the neo-fascists want to defend America
Boston Globe, May 27, 2008
Does Dunkin’ Donuts really think its customers could mistake Rachael Ray for a terrorist sympathizer? The Canton-based company has abruptly canceled an ad in which the domestic diva wears a scarf that looks like a keffiyeh, a traditional headdress worn by Arab men.
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Some observers, including ultra-conservative Fox News commentator Michelle Malkin, were so incensed by the ad that there was even talk of a Dunkin’ Donuts boycott.

“The keffiyeh, for the clueless, is the traditional scarf of Arab men that has come to symbolize murderous Palestinian jihad,” Malkin yowls in her syndicated column.

Carter urges ‘supine’ Europe to break with US over Gaza blockade
By Jonathan Steele and Jonathan Freedland, The Guardian, May 26, 2008
Britain and other European governments should break from the US over the international embargo on Gaza, former US president Jimmy Carter told the Guardian yesterday. Carter, visiting the Welsh border town of Hay for the Guardian literary festival, described the EU’s position on the Israeli-Palestinian dispute as “supine” and its failure to criticise the Israeli blockade of Gaza as “embarrassing”.

Referring to the possibility of Europe breaking with the US in an interview with the Guardian, he said: “Why not? They’re not our vassals. They occupy an equal position with the US.”

The blockade on Hamas-ruled Gaza, imposed by the US, EU, UN and Russia – the so-called Quartet – after the organisation’s election victory in 2006, was “one of the greatest human rights crimes on Earth,” since it meant the “imprisonment of 1.6 million people, 1 million of whom are refugees”. “Most families in Gaza are eating only one meal per day. To see Europeans going along with this is embarrassing,” Carter said.

Hamas seeks mediation from Qatar, AL for reconciliation with Fatah
Xinhua, May 26, 2008
Hamas on Monday confirmed it held contacts with the Arab League (AL) and Qatar to achieve reconciliation with rival Fatah movement of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.

“The contacts Hamas holds with the AL and Qatar regarding the reconciliation with Fatah are not new,” said Ahmed Yousef, an advisor to deposed Hamas premier Ismail Haneya.

Haneya and Hamas’ politburo chief Khaled Mashaal asked AL secretary general Amr Moussa and the Qatari prince to arrange for the reconciliation, Yousef said, adding the recent calls were madeafter the AL and Qatar’s success in helping settling Lebanon crisis.

Barak: Israel on a collision course with Hamas
By Amnon Meranda, Ynet, May 26, 2008
Defense minister addresses situation on Gaza border, says events in danger of escalating within days but that ‘if there is a calm, we will consider matters.’ Barak also says Syria less concerned with Golan Heights than with improving its relations with Washington.

Iran pledges to continue support of Hamas
Asharq Al-Awsat, May 26, 2008
Iran pledged to continue its military, financial, and moral support to the Hamas Movement even if Damascus abandons the latter, should a peace treaty be signed between Syria and Israel, the state of war and animosity between the two countries be ended by Israel handing the occupied Golan back to Syria, and the Syrian-Israeli border be declared secure and demilitarized. This statement was made by an Iranian source close to the talks that Hamas Movement Political Bureau Chief Khalid Mishal held in Tehran. Mishal held talks with Iranian political, security, military, and religious leaders, including Commander in Chief of the [Revolutionary] Guard Maj Gen Jafari, Commander of the Qods Force Brig Gen Qasim Sulaymani, and officials of the Defense Industries Organization, including Brig Gen Ahmad Wahid. Brig Gen Wahid promised Mishal to provide very advanced missiles that are currently being produced at the Martyr Bakiri Complex in Tehran especially for Hamas.

Master of the Senate
By Reihan Salam, The Atlantic, May 23, 2008
As Barack Obama considers his vice presidential options, he would be very wise to take Jim Webb seriously. By now the idea that Webb could help Obama connect with the Scots-Irish voters of Greater Appalachia is familiar to most of those who follow the presidential horse race. And Webb’s military experience, together with his years in Ronald Reagan’s Pentagon, give him national security expertise that few leading Democrats can match. Yet there is another reason the Virginia Senator would make an excellent vice presidential nominee. As he’s demonstrated this week, Webb can be a masterful legislative tactician.

Mid-level official steered U.S. shift on North Korea
By Glenn Kessler, Washington Post, May 26, 2008
Early in President Bush’s second term, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice convened a series of strategy sessions on how to persuade North Korea to surrender its nuclear weapons programs. One key official, Assistant Secretary of State Christopher R. Hill, remained largely silent, four participants said, except to pipe up periodically with the same refrain.

“If you just let me go to Pyongyang, I’ll get you a deal,” the career Foreign Service officer said, prompting others to roll their eyes and move on.

In the twilight of the Bush presidency, the nuclear agreement that Hill has tirelessly pursued over the past three years has emerged as Bush’s best hope for a lasting foreign policy success. In the process, Hill has become the public face of an extraordinary 180-degree policy shift on North Korea, from confrontation to accommodation.

May 26, 1908: Mideast oil discovered — there will be blood
By Randy Alfred, Wired, May 26, 2008
1908: A British company strikes oil in Persia (now Iran). It’s the first big petroleum find in the Middle East, and it sets off a wave of exploration, extraction and exploitation that will change the region’s — and the world’s — history.

Englishman William D’Arcy had obtained a license to explore for oil in Persia in 1901. He sent explorer George Reynolds, who searched fruitlessly for seven years.

Fresh investment from the Burmah Oil Co. had rescued the expedition financially in 1904, but with no results and D’Arcy’s personal fortune completely run out, he risked losing his two country houses and his London mansion. In Persia, staff was already being dismissed. Reynolds received orders from London for his last-chance well: Drill to 1,600 feet and then stop.

Sadr pursues image to match his power
By Amit R. Paley, Washington Post, May 27, 2008
When the revered head of Iraq’s largest Shiite opposition group was assassinated in 1999, the mantle of leadership passed to an unexpected heir: Moqtada al-Sadr, then a 25-year-old video game aficionado who oversaw the movement’s security forces.

Sadr, now 34, has since emerged as an ardent nationalist who commands the support of hundreds of thousands of devotees and the scorn of those who see him as a thuggish militia leader of limited intellect. He has lately sought to reposition himself as a more mainstream figure, even in the face of increasing pressure from Iraq’s Shiite-led government.

His decision last week to allow the Iraqi army to enter the capital’s Sadr City district, his base of power, was the latest in a series of calming edicts that began last summer. In August 2007, he ordered his militia, which had been responsible for some of the most horrific sectarian violence in the country, to lay down its weapons. The freeze prompted senior U.S. military officials to begin praising the young cleric, despite his steady opposition to the American presence in Iraq.

Sadr has spent the past year studying in Iran under a politically influential cleric who runs the country’s judicial system, Ayatollah Mahmoud Hashemi Shahroudi, according to several top-ranking Sadr aides. Sadr’s effort to burnish his theological credentials may offer some insight into his ambitions, since he is descended from a line of clerics who endorse “wilayat al-faqih,” the theory that high-ranking Shiite clerics should oversee affairs of state.

Mideast governments increasingly ignore U.S. views
By Jonathan Wright, Reuters, May 26, 2008
The governments of the Middle East, from Iran to Israel and beyond, are increasingly ignoring the wishes of a U.S. administration which has only eight months left in office, going their own way in regional diplomacy.

U.S. President George W. Bush’s latest speech on Middle East policy, made in the Egyptian resort of Sharm el-Sheikh last week, shows how the gap has grown between what Washington would like and what is happening in the region.

It is part of a wider picture of Washington’s declining clout, accelerated by its debilitating deployment of more than 100,000 troops to Iraq for the past five years.

Defending KSM, ‘the most hated man in the world’
By Josh Meyer, Los Angeles Times, May 24, 2008
Prince’s meetings with Mohammed also offer a glimpse into the defense strategy in the most high-profile American terrorism case in the post-Sept. 11 world, a trial sure to be followed by millions when it gets underway, probably many months from now.

Prince, a Southern lawyer who only a year ago was running a small civilian defense practice, expects the case to go on for years and culminate in a landmark Supreme Court decision. To him, it’s not only the welfare of his infamous client that matters, but also protecting the integrity of the Constitution, which he says the Bush administration has trampled by coercing information out of Mohammed and subjecting him to a system of military justice that is stacked against him.

“I think it’s the constitutional case of our time,” Prince, 53, said in a recent interview in his office, U.S. and Navy flags front and center on his desk. “Because in the 221st year of America, the question is whether the Constitution applies to the government.”

The waning influence of the US in the Middle East
By Paul Woodward, The National, May 25, 2008
In a week of dramatic developments in the Middle East, the most dramatic development of all may have been the fact that the United States, long considered the region’s indispensable player, was missing in action,” wrote Warren Strobel and Hannah Allam for McClatchy Newspapers.

“As its closest allies cut deals with their adversaries this week over the Bush administration’s opposition, Washington was largely reduced to watching.

“More painful for President Bush, friends he’s cultivated – and spent heavily on – in Lebanon and Iraq asked the United States to remain in the background, underlining how politically toxic an association with the US can be for Arab leaders.”

Misreading the Arab media
By Lawrence Pintak, Jeremy Ginges and Nicholas Felton, New York Times, May 25, 2008
Arabic TV does not do our country justice,” President Bush complained in early 2006, calling it a purveyor of “propaganda” that “just isn’t right, it isn’t fair, and it doesn’t give people the impression of what we’re about.”

The president’s statement, along with the decision by the New York Stock Exchange to ban Al Jazeera’s reporters in 2003, is a prime example of how the Arab news media have been demonized since the 9/11 attacks. As a result, America has failed to make use of what is potentially one of its most powerful weapons in the war of ideas against terrorism.

For proof, in the last year we surveyed 601 journalists in 13 Arab countries in North Africa, the Levant and the Arabian Peninsula. The results, to be published in The International Journal of Press/Politics in July, shatter many of the myths upon which American public diplomacy strategy has been based.

Israel denies entry to high-profile critic Norman Finkelstein
By Yossi Melman, Haaretz, May 25, 2008
The Shin Bet security service detained and deported an American Jewish professor who is a prominent critic of the Israeli occupation when he landed at Ben-Gurion International Airport on Friday.

Professor Norman Finkelstein was interrogated for several hours and held in an airport cell before being put on a plane back to Amsterdam, his point of departure. Finkelstein said he was told he could not return to Israel for 10 years.

The Shin Bet said Finkelstein “is not permitted to enter Israel because of suspicions involving hostile elements in Lebanon,” and because he “did not give a full accounting to interrogators with regard to these suspicions.”

However, in e-mail and phone interviews with Haaretz after leaving Israel for Amsterdam, Finkelstein said, “I did my best to provide absolutely candid and comprehensive answers to all the questions put to me. I am confident that I have nothing to hide. Apart from my political views, and the supporting scholarship, there isn’t much more to say for myself: alas, no suicide missions or secret rendezvous with terrorist organizations. I’ve always supported a two-state solution based on the 1967 borders. I’m not an enemy of Israel.”

Afghanistan adds hunger to its worries
By Pamela Constable, Washington Post, May 25, 2008
For generations, Afghans have depended on cheap, plentiful bread as their main staple. The country’s principal crop is wheat, and its farmers produce more than 5 million tons in a good year. Although that is not enough to feed the entire population, wheat can usually be trucked in from neighboring Pakistan.

Since February, however, a combination of local drought and regional shortages has driven the price of flour here to once-unimaginable levels — as much as $50 for a 40-pound sack. Pakistan, also worried about how to feed 160 million-plus people, has closed its borders to food exports, as have a number of other largely agricultural countries anxious to stave off domestic hardship and political unrest.

Wake up, America. We’re driving toward disaster.
By James Howard Kunstler, Washington Post, May 25, 2008
Everywhere I go these days, talking about the global energy predicament on the college lecture circuit or at environmental conferences, I hear an increasingly shrill cry for “solutions.” This is just another symptom of the delusional thinking that now grips the nation, especially among the educated and well-intentioned.

I say this because I detect in this strident plea the desperate wish to keep our “Happy Motoring” utopia running by means other than oil and its byproducts. But the truth is that no combination of solar, wind and nuclear power, ethanol, biodiesel, tar sands and used French-fry oil will allow us to power Wal-Mart, Disney World and the interstate highway system — or even a fraction of these things — in the future. We have to make other arrangements.

Michael Schwartz: The loss of an imperial dream
Introduction by Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch, May 22, 2008
The Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004, with its 225,000 or more deaths in 11 countries, shocked the world; so, in recent weeks, has the devastation wrought by a powerful cyclone (and tidal surge) that hit the Irrawaddy Delta of Myanmar. It resulted in at least 78,000 deaths (with another 56,000 reported missing) and a display of recalcitrance on the part of a military junta focused on its own security while its people perish. Similarly, a devastating earthquake in China’s Sichuan Province that hit 7.9 on the Richter scale and whose tremors were felt 1,000 miles away has swept into the news. Its casualty count has already reached 51,000 with unknown numbers of Chinese still buried in rubble or cut off in rural areas and so, as yet, untallied, and an estimated five million people homeless.

These are staggering natural disasters, hard even to take in, and yet it’s a reasonable question whether, in terms of damage, any of them measure up to the ongoing human-made (or rather Bush administration made) disaster in Iraq. Worse yet, unlike a natural disaster, the Iraqi catastrophe seems to be without end. No one can even guess when it might be said of that country that an era of reconstruction or rebuilding is about to begin. Instead, the damage only grows week by miserable week and yet, as has often been true in the last year, Iraq continues to have trouble even cracking the top ten stories in U.S. news coverage.

The wisdom of talking
By John F Kerry, Washington Post, May 24, 2008
As President Bush commemorated Israel’s 60th anniversary by attacking Barack Obama from overseas, here at home he found an all-too-frequent ally: John McCain.

When Bush accused “some” — including Obama, Bush aides explained — of “the false comfort of appeasement,” McCain echoed this slander.

“What does he want to talk about with [Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad?” McCain asked, fumbling to link Obama to the Iranian president’s hateful words. Soon, a GOP talking point was born.

Lost in the rhetoric was the question America deserves to have answered: Why should we engage with Iran?

Hamas: Olmert too weak to negotiate peace agreement with Syria
By Barak Ravid and Amos Harel, Haaretz, May 24, 2008
Hamas Political Bureau Chief Khaled Mashaal said Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is too weak to take the necessary steps for peace with Syria and expressed doubts about Israel’s seriousness in negotiations.

Meshal’s comments came during a joint press conference with Iranian Foreign Minister Manochehr Mottaki on Saturday, in response to a question about Wednesday’s announcement that Israel and Syria had restarted direct peace negotiations.

“There is great skepticism concerning the seriousness (of Israel) to return the Golan,” he said, referring to a strategic plateau captured by Israel in 1967.

“It’s maneuvering and playing with all the (negotiating) tracks – it’s a well known game and besides, Olmert’s weakness will not allow him to take this step.”

Finkelstein arrested and deported by Israel
By Richard Silverstein, Tikun Olam, May 23, 2008
News just in from Monsters and Critics: Norman Finkelstein, the provocative political scientist known for his criticism of Israeli policy, arrived today at Ben Gurion Airport and was promptly arrested by the authorities and informed he would be deported tomorrow on “security grounds.” His attorney, Michael Sfrad, informs us that in usual circumstances this means that Finkelstein will be unwelcome in Israel for the next ten years. Finkelstein had been intending to visit the Occupied Territories.

Let’s get a few things out of the way before we wade into the particulars of this case. While Finkelstein is known for his criticism of the Occupation, he is an advocate of a two-state solution. So let’s immediately dismiss all the malarkey bruited about by the pro-Israel crowd that he is a Holocaust denier (he is a child of survivors) and either anti-Semitic or anti-Israel. That’s all bullcrap. There is a difference between being a critic of Israeli policy and opposed to Israel’s existence. There is a difference between criticizing Jewish groups and leaders who have done well by the Holocaust and denying the Holocaust.

Bombing Iran: the clamor persists
By Massimo Calabresi, , May, 2008
Listening to the questions asked of Gen. David Petraeus in the Senate Thursday, you might think the U.S. was headed for a new war in the Gulf. Senators from both sides of the aisle spent as much time asking him about Iran as they did about Iraq and Afghanistan. Sen. Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut grilled Petraeus on Iran’s anti-U.S. activities in the region. Sen. Daniel Akaka of Hawaii plaintively asked about the utility of negotiations with Iran. And Sen. Jim Webb of Virginia pressed Petraeus on what he meant by the need to “counter malign Iranian influence” and the “consequences for its illegitimate influence in the region.”

The general, whose confirmation as head of U.S. Central Command was stake in the hearing, did his best to pacify the men and women who held his appointment in their hands, emphasizing his support for “the three rounds of negotiations that have taken place” between Iran, Iraq and the U.S. in Baghdad over security issues. But the Senators’ questions how how persistent the concern is on Capitol Hill that President Bush could be secretly planning a military strike against Iran.

Will Sistani declare jihad on US?
By Juan Cole, Informed Comment, May 23, 2008
I can only speculate, since Sistani isn’t issuing communiques that would explain what is on his mind. But let us look at the context.

First, Sistani was under a lot of pressure from his Shiite followers to denounce the US siege, blockade and aerial bombing of the civilian district of Sadr City in East Baghdad, which went on for weeks. People were actually lacking in food. And, apartment buildings were incinerated. The full horror of the siege was carefully kept from the American public, but the Shiites of Iraq knew about it all right. I think that the brutality of the US intervention against the Shiite masses, and the risk that his silence would produce a backlash against him in favor of Muqtada al-Sadr, may have helped impel Sistani toward this militancy. Aerial bombardment of civilian areas as a tactic has increased significantly this spring.

Americans tend to dismiss the aerial bombardments, in which civilians are often killed, as the cost of doing business in a war zone. But many Iraqis really, really mind these killings and you can only imagine what Sistani thinks of them. Likewise, while the incident of the US soldier using the Qur’an for firing practice only happened recently and wouldn’t be the impetus for Sistani’s new militancy, such desecrations have occurred before and the hatred of Islam by US military figures like Gen. Boykin is well known.

An unmentionable truce?
By Sadie Goldman with Jason Proetorius and I.P.F. Staff, Israel Policy Forum, May 22, 2008
A Hamas-Israel cease-fire could be on its way, but you wouldn’t know it. No press conference will be held to announce it. Instead, quiet on Gaza’s borders—no rockets going out, no Israeli fire going in—will serve as the declaration that the cease-fire has begun. But this quiet will come with a tension that at any moment the cease-fire could end. And once that happens, major confrontation can be expected.

This cease-fire, which Egypt asserts is pending final Palestinian approval, is a phased deal, which begins with what Israel’s Defense Minister Ehud Barak reportedly described as “quiet in exchange for quiet.” Hamas will stop rocket fire and terrorist activity from Gaza and ensure that all Palestinian militias do the same, and Israel, in turn, will stop air strikes and ground operations.

Without upsetting the president
By Akiva Eldar, Haaretz, May 22, 2008
It all began on January 6, 2004, when President Bashar Assad arrived in snowy Turkey for a historic visit – the first by a Syrian leader since that country won its independence in 1946. Officials in Jerusalem were apprehensive that a rapprochement with Damascus would distance Ankara from Israel. At the time, despite substantial support among the upper echelons of the Israel Defense Forces and the Foreign Ministry for the “Syria first” idea – that is, giving peace with Damascus priority over seeking an agreement with the Palestinians – no one was holding his breath about resumption of the dormant Israeli-Syrian talks. The young Assad was considered something of an oddball, who was a tool in the hands of the Syrian old guard of conservative generals and advisers. Furthermore, the Prime Minister’s Bureau under Ariel Sharon was already beginning to devise its plan for “disengagement” from the Gaza Strip.

Surprisingly, Assad suggested to Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan that he take advantage of his good relations with Israel to renew the diplomatic process between Syria and Israel, which had been broken off following the spring 2000 meeting between his father, Hafez Assad, and U.S. President Bill Clinton. Erdogan promised to give it a try.

Sistani flirting with Shiite militant message
By Hamza Hendawi and Qassim Abdul- Zahra, AP, May 22, 2008
Iraq’s most influential Shiite cleric has been quietly issuing religious edicts declaring that armed resistance against U.S.-led foreign troops is permissible — a potentially significant shift by a key supporter of the Washington-backed government in Baghdad.

The edicts, or fatwas, by Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani suggest he seeks to sharpen his long-held opposition to American troops and counter the populist appeal of his main rivals, firebrand Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr and his Mahdi Army militia.

But — unlike al-Sadr’s anti-American broadsides — the Iranian-born al-Sistani has displayed extreme caution with anything that could imperil the Shiite-dominated government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.

Lebanon’s historic accord
By Paul Woodward, The National, May 22, 2008
For the Los Angeles Times, Borzou Daragahi and Raed Rafei reported: “The Doha accord comes 18 years after the agreement signed in the Saudi Arabian resort town of Taif that ended the civil war. That agreement cemented the role of Lebanon’s Sunni Arab community as an ascendant force, and the latest deal could mark the emergence of Lebanon’s Shia as a potent political force.

“The deal also delivered a blow to Saudi Arabia, the primary patron of Lebanon’s Sunnis, as its long time Qatari rivals upstaged Riyadh as a diplomatic powerhouse. The Qataris accomplished in a week what the French and the Arab League were unable to do in months of talks.”

In Time magazine, Andrew Lee Butters wrote: “The US government may find a Hizbollah-dominated Lebanon hard to swallow. Disarming Hizbollah and securing Lebanon’s independence from Syrian and Iranian influence was one of the Bush administration’s major Middle East policies; it garnered broad support among European governments, including France, that were not on board in Iraq. Nor will Israel be keen to live with the fact that its most formidable adversary is now in de facto control of almost an entire country, with a sophisticated banking system, an international airport, and a varied mountainous terrain in which to train and prepare for war. But Israel and America have few options. They can’t isolate Lebanon like the Hamas-controlled Gaza strip, and the last two Israeli invasions of Lebanon were disasters. Like the American-backed government, they may have to admit defeat in Lebanon.”

US on the outside in peace efforts
By Robin Wright, Washington Post, May 22, 2008
Just days after President Bush returned from the Middle East, the Middle East is moving beyond the Bush administration.

Two major peace efforts — a surprise announcement of indirect talks between Israel and Syria brokered by Turkey and an eleventh-hour deal to prevent a new Lebanese war brokered by Qatar — were launched without an American role, and both counter U.S. strategy in the region.

For years, the Bush administration has resisted overtures from Jerusalem and Damascus to participate in revived peace efforts over the Golan Heights. The administration balked at including Syria in the Annapolis conference on Middle East peace last year, relenting only under pressure from allies, according to Western officials.

Israel prime minister fighting for peace and his political life
By Richard Boudreaux, Los Angeles Times, May 22, 2008
Ehud Olmert, the fiercely competitive distance runner who governs Israel, leaned back in his tall leather chair and pondered a question about his race against time.

The prime minister is having a trying month. Prosecutors spoiled the mood at Israel’s 60th anniversary festivities by disclosing that he was under investigation again, this time on suspicion of taking envelopes stuffed with cash bribes.

Then a rocket from the Gaza Strip slammed into a shopping mall in southern Israel, wounding 16 and drawing an angry crowd that shouted, “Olmert resign!” Rivals, including his foreign minister and defense minister, began maneuvering for possible early elections.

The last roundup
By Christopher Ketcham, Radar, May , 2008
According to a senior government official who served with high-level security clearances in five administrations, “There exists a database of Americans, who, often for the slightest and most trivial reason, are considered unfriendly, and who, in a time of panic, might be incarcerated. The database can identify and locate perceived ‘enemies of the state’ almost instantaneously.” He and other sources tell Radar that the database is sometimes referred to by the code name Main Core. One knowledgeable source claims that 8 million Americans are now listed in Main Core as potentially suspect. In the event of a national emergency, these people could be subject to everything from heightened surveillance and tracking to direct questioning and possibly even detention.

China earthquake pushes Tibet to sidelines
By Elisabeth Rosenthal, New York Times, May 22, 2008
As the Dalai Lama toured European capitals this week, the British prime minister closed the door to 10 Downing Street and agreed to meet him only as part of an “interfaith dialogue.” In Germany, most government officials declined to talk with him at all.

It was a precipitous comedown from just a few weeks ago, when Tibetans and their supporters unexpectedly upstaged Beijing’s elaborate global torch relay and catapulted Tibet’s cause to the forefront of the world’s human rights agenda. The German and British leaders let it be known then that they would skip the opening ceremony of the Olympics.

The shift is, partly, tectonic. An earthquake in China’s Sichuan Province killed tens of thousands of Chinese, evoking an outpouring of global sympathy for China and turning it overnight from victimizer to victim.

Deal reached with militants
By David R Sands, Washington Times, May 22, 2008
Pakistan’s new government yesterday agreed to pull its forces out of a restive region near the Afghan border and allow elements of Islamic Shariah law to be imposed there in return for a promise by local Islamic militants to end a wave of terror and arrest foreign terrorists operating in the area.

The accord came a day after Deputy Secretary of State John D. Negroponte expressed deep reservations about such accords, noting that a similar deal struck by Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf in 2006 had allowed Taliban and al Qaeda forces to recruit and rearm.

The United States and Afghanistan charge that Islamist fighters have used poorly policed tribal regions in Pakistan as a staging ground for attacks against Afghan and international forces. Many think al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden is holed up somewhere along the border.

Jim Webb speaks out on race, addresses grievances of white America
By Will Thomas, Huffington Post, May 21, 2008
It’s refreshing when someone makes the effort to advance the discussion of this year’s election beyond debating a black/white divide. So when that someone is oft-mentioned potential Democratic running mate Jim Webb, it’s worth taking note.

Webb appeared on Morning Joe today to speak about his newest book, A Time to Fight: Reclaiming a Fair and Just America, and to dodge questions about whether he would accept a spot on Barack Obama’s presidential ticket. But since the Kentucky primary had just provided pundits with fodder to discuss the ever-popular “Does Obama have a working whites problem?” Webb weighed in on the election results and his Scots-Irish heritage.

Clinton desperate to count votes, compares Fla. primary to Zimbabwe
By Fernando Suarez, CBS, May 21, 2008
Desperate to get attention for her cause to seat Florida and Michigan delegates, Hillary Clinton compared the plight of Zimbabweans in their recent fraudulent election to the uncounted votes of Michigan and Florida voters saying it is wrong when “people go through the motions of an election only to have them discarded and disregarded.”

“We’re seeing that right now in Zimbabwe,” Clinton explained. “Tragically, an election was held, the president lost, they refused to abide by the will of the people,” Clinton told the crowd of senior citizens at a retirement community in south Florida.

McCain backer Hagee said Hitler was fulfilling God’s will
By Sam Stein, Huffington Post, May 21, 2008
John Hagee, the controversial evangelical leader and endorser of Sen. John McCain, argued in a late 1990s sermon that the Nazis had operated on God’s behalf to chase the Jews from Europe and shepherd them to Palestine. According to the Reverend, Adolph Hitler was a “hunter,” sent by God, who was tasked with expediting God’s will of having the Jews re-establish a state of Israel.

Lebanon’s brush with civil war
By Jim Quilty, MERIP, May 20, 2008
When Israel commenced its bombardment of Lebanon on July 12, 2006, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and his general staff declared that the air raids were provoked by Hizballah’s kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers that day. As the destruction piled up over the ensuing 33 days, then, Lebanese did not ask themselves, “Why is Israel bombing us?” Rather, the question in many Lebanese minds, those of ordinary citizens and analysts alike, was “Why did Hizballah provoke this? Why now?” The implicit answer — that the Shi‘i Islamist party was acting in the interests of its friends in Tehran and Damascus rather than those of its constituents and compatriots in Lebanon — has reverberated through the country’s political discourse ever since, with few bothering to recall the rhetorical and historical precedents for the abduction operation.

The bloody clashes that broke out between opposition and government gunmen on May 7 have sparked fevered speculation as well. That Hizballah militants could take over West Beirut came as little surprise. Many were astonished by the speed of the advance, however, and the low number of casualties left in its wake, as the reports of 50-caliber machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades, as well as small arms, reverberated in West Beirut for a second day. The pertinent question, then, is not “How could Hizballah do this?” but “Why did the Lebanese government choose to provoke Hizballah at this time?”

Lebanese rivals set to elect president after historic accord
By Hussein Abdallah, Daily Star, May 22, 2008
Lebanese lawmakers are set to elect the commander of the Lebanese Armed Forces, General Michel Suleiman, as president on Sunday after rival political leaders clinched a deal in Doha on Wednesday to end an 18-month feud that exploded into deadly sectarian fighting and threatened to plunge the nation into all-out civil war.

The deal that was reached at Doha after four days of intensive talks will lead to electing Suleiman, forming a national unity cabinet, and drafting a new electoral law for the 2009 parliamentary elections.

After Guantánamo
By Kenneth Roth, Foreign Affairs, May/June, 2008
These days, it seems, everyone wants to close Guantánamo. In January 2002, the Bush administration created a detention camp at the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba to imprison what former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld called “the worst of the worst” terrorism suspects. The facility has since become an embarrassing stain on the United States’ reputation. With some inmates now having endured more than six years of detention without charge or trial, and with no end to their ordeal in sight, Guantánamo has come to symbolize Washington’s flouting of international human rights standards in the name of fighting terrorism. Now, even President George W. Bush says he wants to shut it down.

Rumsfeld’s claim notwithstanding, more than half of the 778 detainees known to have passed through Guantánamo have been released, and many others deserve to be. But there is a hard-core group — the Bush administration speaks of some 150 — who have allegedly plotted or committed acts of terrorism or would do so now if they could. Shuttering Guantánamo would force the government to decide what should be done with these allegedly dangerous individuals. Should they be given criminal trials? Or should they, as a growing number of lawyers and scholars suggest, be subjected to a system that permits detention without charge or trial because authorities believe they might pose a future threat — a system known as administrative, or preventive, detention?

Report details dissent on Guantánamo tactics
By Eric Lichtblau and Scott Shane, New York Times, May 21, 2008
In 2002, as evidence of prisoner mistreatment at Guantánamo Bay began to mount, Federal Bureau of Investigation agents at the base created a “war crimes file” to document accusations against American military personnel, but were eventually ordered to close down the file, a Justice Department report revealed Tuesday.

The report, an exhaustive, 437-page review prepared by the Justice Department inspector general, provides the fullest account to date of internal dissent and confusion within the Bush administration over the use of harsh interrogation tactics by the military and the Central Intelligence Agency.

Gaza cease-fire could take effect later this week
By Amos Harel, Avi Issacharoff, and Barak Ravid, Haaretz, May 20, 2008
The cease-fire (tahdiyeh) being negotiated between Israel and the Palestinian groups in the Gaza Strip is expected to go into effect in a number of days, following developments at the end of meetings held by Defense Minister Ehud Barak in Sharm el-Sheikh on Monday with the Egyptian leadership.

The Egyptian Chief of Intelligence, General Omar Suleiman, who has been mediating between the parties, is scheduled to meet Tueday with the heads of the Palestinian factions in the Strip.

Israel is waiting to learn from Suleiman whether the Palestinian groups, headed by Hamas, will agree to an unofficial deal on a cessation of terrorist activities in the strip, in return for an end to IDF attacks. Israel does not intend to officially announce that it has accepted the tahdiyeh deal, but will let the situation unfold gradually – and evaluate the indirect accord with Hamas on the basis of results on the ground.

Tuesday’s meeting between Suleiman and a Hamas-led delegation from the Gaza Strip headed by the deputy head of the group’s politburo, Mussa Abu Marzouk, is critical to whether the cease-fire deal will be closed.

France admits contacts with Hamas
By Steven Erlanger, New York Times, May 20, 2008
France confirmed Monday that it had been engaged in contacts with the leaders of Hamas, the radical Islamic group that is running Gaza, for several months to try to better understand its positions.

The Bush administration, which recently likened talks with Hamas and other groups to appeasement of the Nazis, criticized the French for the contacts, calling them unhelpful. There was no immediate comment from the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas of Fatah, who has said he will not talk to Hamas, which he accuses of carrying out a bloody coup in Gaza last June.

The French foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, said there had been no negotiations with Hamas, labeled a terrorist group by the United States, Israel and the European Union.

“These are not relations; they are contacts,” Mr. Kouchner said on Europe 1 radio. “We are not the only ones to have them. We must be able to talk if we want to play a role.”

Ramon: Negotiations with Hamas defy government policy
By Roni Sofer, Ynet, May 19, 2008
Israel officially admitted to holding talks with Hamas for the first time on Monday, with Vice Premier Haim Ramon saying that “the negations we are conducting with Hamas are in direct defiance of the government’s resolution, according to which Israel would agree to talk to the Islamist group only after it accepts the conditions set by the Quartet.”

The Quartet – US, Russia, EU and the UN – demands that Hamas recognize Israel, renounce violence and ratify past agreements and the road Map.

Up until now the cabinet claimed that the talks on a possible ceasefire and on the return of kidnapped soldier Gilad Shalit have all been conducted with Egyptian mediation so as not to breach the ‘political siege’ imposed on Ismail Haniyeh’s government, since Hamas’ violent takeover of the Strip in July 2007.

If I were Sheldon
By Nahum Barnea, Yediot Aharanot (translated for Laura Rozen’s War and Piece), May 16, 2008
When Sheldon Adelson gave his speech on the podium of the International Convention Center two days ago, I looked at Shimon Peres.

I was happy for him. The impressive, sparkling conference that he convened will warm his heart on the cold evenings when he is stuck alone, he and his security guards, in the desolate cage on Jabotinsky Street in Jerusalem. Many important, highly-respected people. An excellent organization. Well done.

As a citizen of the country, I was less happy. I saw a gambling tycoon from Las Vegas who bought my country’s birthday with three million dollars. I thought with sorrow: Is the country worth so very little? Were the champagne and the wine and the sushi that were given out for free in the lobby, unlike what is conventional for such events, worth the humiliation?

Adelson is a Jew who loves Israel. Like some other Jews who live at a safe distance from here, his love is great, passionate, smothering. It is important to him that he influence the policies, decisions and compositions of Israeli governments. He is not alone in this, either: even back in the days of Baron Rothschild, wealthy Jews from the Diaspora felt that this country lay in their pocket, alongside their wallet. Regrettably, in the latest generation, we are being led by politicians who look at these millionaires with calf’s eyes.

Blacklisted by the Bush government
By Tim Shorrock, Salon, May 19, 2008
One day in March 2004, Soliman Hamd Al-Buthe, a former member of Saudi Arabia’s national basketball team and a government official in the city of Riyadh, picked up his phone for an urgent call with two American lawyers in Washington, D.C. Most of the call concerned a growing confrontation between the U.S. government and the Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation in Ashland, Ore., the U.S. branch of a global Saudi Arabian charity organization under investigation for possible links to terrorism. Al-Buthe had been an advisor to Al-Haramain from 1995 to 2002 and was a member of the Oregon foundation’s board of directors. Just weeks prior to the call, the foundation — a respected fixture in the Ashland community run for years by an Iranian-American Muslim named Pete Seda — had been raided by U.S. law enforcement agents.

Because of their involvement with Al-Haramain, Al-Buthe and Seda were also entangled in a lawsuit filed against dozens of prominent Saudis by families of victims of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. During the call, Al-Buthe and his attorneys talked about the funds needed for his legal defense. “We had a problem of transferring money,” he says, “so we were thinking of new ways” of getting funds to Washington.

The phone call proved fateful. Unknown to its three participants, the conversation, and at least one other between them in April 2004, was monitored by officials from the National Security Agency at the behest of senior Bush administration officials. The surveillance that day — apparently conducted without a warrant and later exposed when the government accidentally released a highly classified document to Al-Haramain’s attorneys — would become a key piece in the sprawling debate over extrajudicial spying inside the United States after 9/11. The surveillance would also have profound consequences for Al-Buthe — who is considered a terrorist supporter by the Bush administration — and others connected with the Al-Haramain Foundation in Oregon.

Keeping secrets: In presidential memo, a new designation for classifying information
By Walter Pincus, Washington Post, May 19, 2008
Sometime in the next few years, if a memorandum signed by President Bush this month ever goes into effect, one government official talking to another about information on terrorists will have to begin by saying: “What I am about to tell you is controlled unclassified information enhanced with specified dissemination.”

That would mean, according to the memo, that the information requires safeguarding because “the inadvertent or unauthorized disclosure would create risk of substantial harm.”

Bush’s memorandum, signed on the eve of his daughter Jenna’s wedding, introduced “Controlled Unclassified Information” as a new government category that will replace “Sensitive but Unclassified.”

McCain can run, but Bush won’t hide
By Frank Rich, New York Times, May 18, 2008
The biggest gift President Bush has given his party this year was to keep his daughter’s wedding nearly as private as Connie Corleone’s. Now that his disapproval rating has reached the Nixon nadir of negativity, even a joyous familial ritual isn’t enough to make the country glad to see him. The G.O.P.’s best hope would be for both the president and Dick Cheney to lock themselves in a closet until the morning after Election Day.

Republicans finally recognized the gravity of their situation three days after Jenna Bush took her vows in Crawford. As Hillary Clinton romped in West Virginia, voters in Mississippi elected a Democrat in a Congressional district that went for Bush-Cheney by 25 percentage points just four years ago. It’s the third “safe” Republican House seat to fall in a special election since March.

Party leaders have been haplessly trying to identify possible remedies ever since. It didn’t help that their recent stab at an Obamaesque national Congressional campaign slogan, “The Change You Deserve,” was humiliatingly identified as the advertising pitch for the anti-depressant Effexor. (If they’re going to go the pharmaceutical route, “Viva Viagra” might be more to the point.) Yet for all the Republican self-flagellation, it’s still not clear that the party even understands the particular dimensions of its latest defeat and its full implications for both Congressional races and John McCain in November.

A campaign without the ‘gotchas’
By Ezra Klein, Los Angeles Times, May 18, 2008
… gaffe-hunting makes up a substantial slice of contemporary campaign journalism. It is certainly the part that candidates fear most. And it is poisonous to our polity. You often hear that the media are too liberal or too conservative, too corporate or too effete. But to politicians, they are something else altogether: too trivializing and too intent on ferreting out moments of humiliation. They rob politicians of their ability to campaign in an honorable or spontaneous way.

A study by Indiana University telecommunications professors Erik Bucy and Maria Grabe found that from 1968 to 1992, the clips of presidential candidates speaking on network news were cut from an average of one minute to about 10 seconds. Since 1992, that’s dropped to eight seconds. Which means that politicians are being filtered through the media lens more than ever. Only a third of those eight-second clips addressed substantive issues of policy. Ask yourself: How much substantive policy do you think you could communicate in eight seconds?

Shaping a nuclear Iran
By Ray Takeyh, Washington Post, May 18, 2008
As President Bush addressed the Israeli parliament last week, denouncing negotiations with recalcitrant regimes as the “false comfort of appeasement,” his diplomats, in conjunction with their European counterparts, offered Iran another incentive package to stop enriching uranium. Even though they are making another effort to disarm Iran through mediation, the administration’s approach is hopelessly defective. Beyond insisting on onerous conditions that are unlikely to be met by any Iranian government, the United States and its allies still hope that Tehran will trade its enrichment rights for inducements. If Washington is going to mitigate the Iranian nuclear danger, it must discard the formula of exchanging commercial contracts for nuclear rights and seek more imaginative solutions.

Although Iran’s theocratic regime is perennially divided against itself, it has sustained a remarkable consensus on the nuclear issue. In today’s political climate, neither Western sanctions nor offers of incentives will fracture state unity. Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has rejected any compromise, saying that “we will forcefully continue on our path and will not allow the oppressors to step on our rights.” In a rare note of agreement, Hashemi Rafsanjani, Khamenei’s rival and a politician known for his pragmatism, has similarly claimed, “It is our natural right; if we retreat on this path, we will allow the enemy to interfere with every issue of our country.”

The old titans all collapsed. Is the U.S. next?
By Kevin Phillips, Washington Post, May 18, 2008
More than 80 percent of Americans now say that we are on the wrong track, but many if not most still believe that the history of other nations is irrelevant — that the United States is unique, chosen by God. So did all the previous world economic powers: Rome, Spain, the Netherlands (in the maritime glory days of the 17th century, when New York was New Amsterdam) and 19th-century Britain. Their early strength was also their later weakness, not unlike the United States since the 1980s.

There is a considerable literature on these earlier illusions and declines. Reading it, one can argue that imperial Spain, maritime Holland and industrial Britain shared a half-dozen vulnerabilities as they peaked and declined: a sense of things no longer being on the right track, intolerant or missionary religion, military or imperial overreach, economic polarization, the rise of finance (displacing industry) and excessive debt. So too for today’s United States.

Famine looms as wars rend Horn of Africa
By Jeffrey Gettleman, New York Times, May 17, 2008
Somalia — and much of the volatile Horn of Africa, for that matter — was about the last place on earth that needed a food crisis. Even before commodity prices started shooting up around the globe, civil war, displacement and imperiled aid operations had pushed many people here to the brink of famine.

But now with food costs spiraling out of reach and the livestock that people live off of dropping dead in the sand, villagers across this sun-blasted landscape say hundreds of people are dying of hunger and thirst.

This is what happens, economists say, when the global food crisis meets local chaos.

“We’re really in the perfect storm,” said Jeffrey D. Sachs, a Columbia economist and top United Nations adviser, who recently visited neighboring Kenya.

There has been a collision of troubles throughout the region: skimpy rainfall, disastrous harvests, soaring food prices, dying livestock, escalating violence, out-of-control inflation, and shrinking food aid because of many of these factors.

One country’s table scraps, another country’s meal
By Andrew Martin, New York Times, May 18, 2008
Grocery bills are rising through the roof. Food banks are running short of donations. And food shortages are causing sporadic riots in poor countries through the world.

You’d never know it if you saw what was ending up in your landfill. As it turns out, Americans waste an astounding amount of food — an estimated 27 percent of the food available for consumption, according to a government study — and it happens at the supermarket, in restaurants and cafeterias and in your very own kitchen. It works out to about a pound of food every day for every American.

Grocery stores discard products because of spoilage or minor cosmetic blemishes. Restaurants throw away what they don’t use. And consumers toss out everything from bananas that have turned brown to last week’s Chinese leftovers. In 1997, in one of the few studies of food waste, the Department of Agriculture estimated that two years before, 96.4 billion pounds of the 356 billion pounds of edible food in the United States was never eaten. Fresh produce, milk, grain products and sweeteners made up two-thirds of the waste. An update is under way.

U.S. planning big new prison in Afghanistan
By Eric Schmitt and Tim Golden, New York Times, May 17, 2008
The Pentagon is moving forward with plans to build a new, 40-acre detention complex on the main American military base in Afghanistan, officials said, in a stark acknowledgment that the United States is likely to continue to hold prisoners overseas for years to come.

The proposed detention center would replace the cavernous, makeshift American prison on the Bagram military base north of Kabul, which is now typically packed with about 630 prisoners, compared with the 270 held at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

Until now, the Bush administration had signaled that it intended to scale back American involvement in detention operations in Afghanistan. It had planned to transfer a large majority of the prisoners to Afghan custody, in an American-financed, high-security prison outside Kabul to be guarded by Afghan soldiers.

But American officials now concede that the new Afghan-run prison cannot absorb all the Afghans now detained by the United States, much less the waves of new prisoners from the escalating fight against Al Qaeda and the Taliban.

Bounties a bust in hunt for Al-Qaeda
By Craig Whitlock, Washington Post, May 17, 2008
Jaber Elbaneh is one of the world’s most-wanted terrorism suspects. In 2003, the U.S. government indicted him, posted a $5 million reward for his capture and distributed posters bearing photos of him around the globe.

None of it worked. Elbaneh remains at large, as wanted as ever. The al-Qaeda operative, however, isn’t very hard to find.

One day last month, he shuffled down a busy street here in the Yemeni capital, past several indifferent policemen. Then he disappeared inside a building, though not before accidentally stepping on a reporter’s toes.

Elbaneh, 41, is one of two dozen al-Qaeda members listed under a U.S. program that offers enormous sums of cash for information leading to their capture. For years, the Bush administration has touted the bounties as a powerful tool in its fight against terrorism. But in the hunt for al-Qaeda, it has proved a bust.

Kiss American security goodbye
By Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch, May 15, 2008
When the history of this era is finally written… , Osama bin Laden and his scattering of followers may be credited for goading the fundamentalist leaders of the United States into using the power in their grasp so — not to put a fine point on it — stupidly and profligately as to send the planet’s “sole superpower” into decline. Above all, bin Laden and his crew of fanatics will have ensured one thing: that the real security problems of our age were ignored in Washington until far too late in favor of mad dreams and dark phantoms.

Tibet, Palestine and the politics of failure
By Fred Halliday, openDemocracy, May 13, 2008
Two current and high-profile events – the crisis in and around Tibet following the Lhasa riots of 14 March 2008, and the sixtieth anniversary of the establishment on 14 May 1948 of the state of Israel – have more in common than it may first appear. Indeed, their commonalities are shared to a degree by other political and ethnic disputes across the world, to the extent that they compose a distinct phenomenon – which may be termed “the syndrome of post-colonial sequestration”.

Like father, like son: Bush pleads for Saudi help, but world oil market has changed
By Kevin G. Hall, McClatchy, May 15, 2008
In April 1986, Vice President George H.W. Bush traveled to Saudi Arabia with a stern warning. Record low oil prices of $10 a barrel threatened the U.S. oil industry and U.S. national security. If prices don’t rise, he warned, perhaps a U.S. tariff on imported oil would do the job.

More than 22 years later, his son George W. Bush went on a similar mission, but with the opposite goal in mind. President Bush met Friday with Saudi King Abdullah and was politely rebuffed in his request for help in bringing down world oil prices, which have raced past $125 a barrel.

Saudis, US grapple with Iran challenge
By M K Bhadrakumar, Asia Times, May 17, 2008
A timeless and abstract passion, which could gain instantaneous contemporaneity and which has proven to be unfailingly useful for statecraft, was invoked in Middle Eastern politics once again this week. It is the ultimate weapon in Saudi Arabia’s arsenal of regional diplomacy. It is seductive in its appeal, yet almost embarrassingly direct.

That was how, most certainly, Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal would have thought when on Tuesday he warned Tehran that its support to what he termed Hezbollah’s “coup” in Lebanon would affect Iran’s relations with Arab and Islamic countries. The Saudi prince went on to exhort all Middle East countries to respect Lebanon’s independence and to refrain from stoking “sectarian tensions” in that country.

It is extremely rare for Saudi diplomacy to blatantly use the weapon of sectarianism against Shi’ite Iran and to draw a line of divide between the Persians and the surrounding Sunni Muslim Arab world. More so as Saudi clerics are usually put to use in playing the “Shi’ite card” against Iran.

Coups and counter-coups
By Kaveh L Afrasiabi, Asia Times, May 16, 2008
Back from the brink, fragile Lebanon can breathe again, thanks to the timely intervention of the Arab League which, no matter how divided and polarized, managed to pull off a big one by convincing the Lebanese government to rescind its controversial decisions that had triggered the latest crisis. This was the removal of the head of Beirut Airport and an assault on a nerve center of the Hezbollah-led resistance, its communication network.

So, as the guns begin to fall silent in Beirut, Tripoli and elsewhere in Lebanon and fractious Lebanon and the outside world reflect on what transpired this past several days on the eve of President George W Bush’s Middle East trip, it has become fairly obvious that the Saudi Arabia accusation of an Iran-inspired Hezbollah “coup” is a total misnomer. Indeed, the more apt term is a “government coup and Hezbollah’s successful counter-coup”.

Pakistan defies U.S. on halting Afghanistan raids
By Jane Perlez, New York Times, May 16, 2008
Pakistani officials are making it increasingly clear that they have no interest in stopping cross-border attacks by militants into Afghanistan, prompting a new level of frustration from Americans who see the infiltration as a crucial strategic priority in the war in Afghanistan.

On Wednesday night, the United States fired its fourth Predator missile strike since January, the most visible symbol of the American push for a freer hand to pursue militants from Al Qaeda and the Taliban who use Pakistan’s tribal areas as a base to attack Afghanistan and plot terrorist attacks abroad. In Afghanistan, cross-border attacks have doubled over the same month last year and present an increasingly lethal challenge to American and NATO efforts to wind down the war and deny the Taliban and Al Qaeda a sanctuary.

In an unusual step during a visit to Pakistan in March, Adm. Eric T. Olson, the commander of United States Special Operations Command, held a round-table discussion with a group of civilian Pakistani leaders to sound them out on the possibility of cross-border raids by American forces. He was told in no uncertain terms that from the Pakistani point of view it was a bad idea, said one of the participants.

Hunger and food prices push Afghanistan to brink
By Carlotta Gall, New York Times, May 16, 2008
Afghanistan is in a particularly unforgiving situation, Anthony Banbury, director for Asia with the United Nations World Food Program, said during a recent visit to Kandahar. It is not only one of the poorest countries, but it is grappling with a prolonged conflict, and all the attendant problems of lawlessness, displacement, poorly developed markets and destroyed infrastructure, which leave the population especially vulnerable to price shocks, he said.

“For millions of Afghans, the poorer segments of society, who spend up to 70 percent of their meager income on food, these food price rises put the basic necessities simply out of their reach,” Mr. Banbury said.

Six million people in Afghanistan, out of a population of about 32 million, are already receiving food aid, and the World Food Program is gearing up to help more.

It has agreed with the government to reopen an assistance plan through bakeries for the urban poor, a program that it ran during the years of the Taliban government but discontinued after the American-led invasion in late 2001. The government is also asking for help in providing food aid to 172,000 teachers countrywide, some of whom are not coming to work because they cannot make ends meet. That alone is an indication that things are getting harder, he said.