About that ‘New’ Middle East…
By Tony Karon, Rootless Cosmopolitan, May 13, 2008
Could there be a more perfect image of the catastrophic self-inflicted rout suffered by U.S. Middle East policy under President George W. Bush? This week, the President will party with Israel’s leaders celebrating their country’s 60th anniversary — and champion the pursuit of a phony peace agreement explicitly aimed at producing an agreement to go on the shelf — with Bush curiously choosing the moment to honor the legend of the mass infanticide and suicide of the Jewish Jihadists at Masada. Meanwhile, across the border in Lebanon, Hizballah are riding high on the tectonic shifts in the Middle East’s political substructure, making clear that the “new Middle East” memorably (if grotesquely) inaugurated by Condi Rice in Beirut in 2006 is nothing like that imagined or pursued by the Bush Administration. On the contrary, the Bush Administration has managed to weaken its friends and allies and empower its enemies to an almost unprecedented degree.

Democratic victory may be a bellwether
By Paul Kane, Washington Post, May 14, 2008
A Democrat won the race for a GOP-held congressional seat in northern Mississippi yesterday, leaving the once-dominant House Republicans reeling from their third special-election defeat of the spring.

Travis Childers, a conservative Democrat who serves as Prentiss County chancery clerk, defeated Southaven Mayor Greg Davis by 54 percent to 46 percent in the race to represent Mississippi’s 1st Congressional District, which both parties considered a potential bellwether for the fall elections.

Our great economic U-turn
By Thomas Frank, Wall Street Journal, May 14, 2008
What has overtaken America’s working people is not a natural disaster like “globalization,” and not even some kind of societal atavism in which countries regress mysteriously to their 19th-century selves. This is a man-made catastrophe, a result that proceeded directly from the deliberate beatdown of organized labor and the wrecking of the liberal state.

It is, in other words, a political disaster, with tax cuts, trade agreements, deregulatory measures, and enforcement decisions all finely crafted to benefit one part of society and leave the rest behind. Few of the voters who gave Ronald Reagan his landslide victories, it is fair to say, intended for this to be the outcome. They wanted their country to stand tall again, certainly; they wanted the scary regulators off their backs, maybe; but I can recall no conservative who trumpeted those long-ago elections – or any of the succeeding contests, for that matter – as a referendum on plutocracy.

Republicans twist Obama’s words about Israel
Washington Post, May 14, 2008
Did Barack Obama call Israel a “constant sore,” as Republican leaders are saying? Both House Minority Leader John A. Boehner (Ohio) and Deputy Minority Whip Eric Cantor (Va.) have taken the Democratic presidential front-runner to task for allegedly saying that Israel is a “constant wound” in U.S. foreign policy. The right-wing blogosphere is lending its voice to the chorus. But a fair-minded reading of Obama’s remarks shows that his comment has been taken completely out of context.

Obama gave an interview over the weekend to Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic in which, among other things, he rejected former president Jimmy Carter’s characterization of Israel as an “apartheid state.” Here is the passage that has now become controversial.

Finding Obama guilty of insufficient devotion to Israel
By Glenn Greenwald, Salon, May 13, 2008
The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg conducted what he’s calling an “interview” with Barack Obama regarding Israel, but it sounded much more like an inquisition. Goldberg repeatedly demanded that Obama swear his devotion to Israel and affirm prevailing orthodoxies (“I’m curious to hear you talk about the Zionist idea. Do you believe that it has justice on its side?”; “Go to the kishke question, the gut question: the idea that if Jews know that you love them, then you can say whatever you want about Israel, but if we don’t know you –- Jim Baker, Zbigniew Brzezinski –- then everything is suspect. There seems to be in some quarters, in Florida and other places, a sense that you don’t feel Jewish worry the way a senator from New York would feel it”; “Do you think that Israel is a drag on America’s reputation overseas?”; “If you become President, will you denounce settlements publicly?”). Afterwards, Goldberg pronounced himself satisfied: “Obama expressed — in twelve different ways — his support for Israel to me.”

The ‘Long War’ fallacy
By Andrew J. Bacevich, Los Angeles Times, May 13, 2008
For the United States, the prospect of permanent war now beckons.

Well into the first decade of this generational struggle, Americans remained oddly confused about its purpose. Is the aim to ensure access to cheap and abundant oil? Spread democracy? Avert nuclear proliferation? Perpetuate the American empire? Preserve the American way of life? From the outset, the enterprise that Gates now calls the “Long War” has been about all of these things and more.

Back in September 2001, Rumsfeld put it this way: “We have a choice — either to change the way we live, which is unacceptable, or to change the way that they live; and we chose the latter.” In this context, “they” represent the billion or so Muslims inhabiting the greater Middle East.

When Rumsfeld offered this statement of purpose and President Bush committed the United States to open-ended war, both assumed that U.S. military supremacy was beyond dispute. At the time, most Americans shared that assumption. A conviction that “the troops” were unstoppable invested the idea of transforming the greater Middle East with a superficial plausibility.

Editor’s Comment — Bacevich closes by saying:

We can either persist in our efforts to change the way they live — in which case the war of no exits will surely lead to bankruptcy and exhaustion. Or we can recognize the folly of generational war and choose instead to put our own house in order: curbing our appetites, paying our bills and ending our self-destructive dependency on foreign oil and foreign credit.

“Dependency on foreign oil” is a cheap line that’s long overdue being ditched. It’s become synonymous with America’s ties to the Middle East. The fact about which nearly every American seems to be ignorant about is that America’s number one oil supplier is Canada. America has less need to reduce its dependence on foreign oil than it and the rest of the world has to reduce our dependence on oil – period. It’s massive consumption – not the location of the sources – that’s the issue.

Iraq: Will we ever get out?
By Thomas Powers, New York Review of Books, May 29, 2008
The two wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have already cost about $700 billion, and the economists Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes estimate that costs such as continuing medical care will add another $2 trillion even if the Iraq war ends now. But the true cost of the Iraq war ought to include something else as well—some fraction of the rise in the price of oil which we might call the Iraq war oil surcharge. If we blame the war for only $10 of the $80–$90 rise in the price of a barrel of oil since 2003, that would still come to $200 million a day.

At some point the government will have to begin paying for these wars—if it can. What looks increasingly like a serious recession, complicated by an expensive federal bailout of financial institutions, may combine to convince even John McCain that the time has come to declare a victory and head for home. It’s possible. But the United States did not acquire a $9 trillion national debt by caution with money. A decision to back out of the war is going to require something else—resolve backed by a combination of arguments that withdrawal won’t be a victory for al-Qaeda or Iran, that it isn’t prompted by fear, that it doesn’t represent defeat, that it’s going to make us stronger, that it’s going to win the applause of the world, that the people left behind have been helped, and that whatever mess remains is somebody else’s fault and responsibility.

Missing from this list is victory—the one thing that could make withdrawal automatic and easy. Its absence makes the decision an easy one for McCain—no victory, no withdrawal. But everybody else needs to think this matter through the hard way, trying to understand the real consequences of easing away from a bloody, inconclusive war. After six and a half years of fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Democratic candidates for president and the public weighing a choice between them have a moment of relative quiet, right now, with the primaries nearly over and the nominating conventions still ahead, to consider where we are before deciding, to the extent that presidents or publics ever do decide, what to do.

The U.S. quietly slashes the reward posted for the leader of al Qaeda in Iraq
By Anna Mulrine and Kevin Whitelaw, US News and World Report, May 12, 2008
The U.S. government has quietly withdrawn a $5 million reward it was offering for the killing or capture of Abu Ayyub al-Masri, named by Pentagon officials as the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq.

Al-Masri had been one of America’s most wanted figures in Iraq ever since his identity was revealed in 2006. But U.S. News has learned that the bounty for him was reduced and that he was unceremoniously dropped in late February from the State Department’s Rewards for Justice Program, which offers cash payments for information that leads to the capture or killing of wanted terrorists.

Currently, the bounty for the Egyptian militant stands at $100,000, a more modest payout that is now covered by the separate—and decidedly lower profile—Department of Defense Rewards Program.

Al-Sadr ceasefire allows troops to enter Shia slum
By Patrick Cockburn, The Independent, May 13, 2008
The anti-American Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr is the great survivor of Iraqi politics. In a tactical retreat he yesterday authorised a ceasefire under which the Iraqi army, but not US troops, will enter the great Shia slum of Sadr City in Baghdad while Mr Sadr’s Mehdi Army militia will stop firing rockets and mortars into the fortified Green Zone.

The ceasefire agreement is intended to end seven weeks of fighting in which more than 1,000 people, mostly civilians, have been killed during US-backed Iraqi government offensives against Mehdi Army strongholds in Basra and Baghdad. The Iraqi Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, has emerged strengthened by his confrontation with the Mehdi Army, but the Sadrists survive to fight another day. “We have agreed on a ceasefire and to end displaying arms in public,” said Salah al-Obeidi, spokesman for Mr Sadr. “But we did not agree to disbanding the Mehdi Army or handing over its weapons.”

Racist incidents give some Obama campaigners pause
By Kevin Merida, Washington Post, May 13, 2008
Danielle Ross was alone in an empty room at the Obama campaign headquarters in Kokomo, Ind., a cellphone in one hand, a voter call list in the other. She was stretched out on the carpeted floor wearing laceless sky-blue Converses, stories from the trail on her mind. It was the day before Indiana’s primary, and she had just been chased by dogs while canvassing in a Kokomo suburb. But that was not the worst thing to occur since she postponed her sophomore year at Middle Tennessee State University, in part to hopscotch America stumping for Barack Obama.

Here’s the worst: In Muncie, a factory town in the east-central part of Indiana, Ross and her cohorts were soliciting support for Obama at malls, on street corners and in a Wal-Mart parking lot, and they ran into “a horrible response,” as Ross put it, a level of anti-black sentiment that none of them had anticipated.

McCain in the mud
By Richard Cohen, Washington Post, May 13, 2008
In 2000, I boarded John McCain’s campaign bus, the Straight Talk Express, and, in a metaphorical sense, never got off. Here, truly, was something new under the political sun — a politician who bristled with integrity and seemed to have nothing to hide. I continue to admire McCain for those and other reasons, but the bus I once rode has gone wobbly. Recently, it veered into the mud.

I have in mind McCain’s charge that Barack Obama is the favored presidential candidate of Hamas. The citation for this remark is the statement of Ahmed Yousef, a Hamas political adviser, who said, “We like Mr. Obama, and we hope that he will win the election.” Yousef likened Obama to John F. Kennedy and said that Obama “has a vision to change America” and with it the world. Yousef apparently got so carried away that he forgot that Obama has repeatedly called Hamas a “terrorist organization.”

Once again, the US weakens its allies and strengthens its enemies
By Tony Karon, The National, May 11, 2008
One of the adages popular in the treatment of recovering alcoholics in America is the notion that repeating the same behaviour and expecting a different result is insanity. President George W Bush, however, appears to have recovered from his own youthful drinking problem without digesting that particular lesson. Last week’s events in Lebanon suggest that his administration remains intent to the very end on repeating the strategies that have failed in Gaza and Basra and Sadr City, expecting that the result in Beirut would somehow be different.

“But what if nobody takes notice?”
By Alastair Crooke, Conflicts Forum, May 11, 2008
But what if nobody takes notice?” is the question posed by Robert Malley and Hussein Agha in an article in the recent New York Review of Books concerning the putative ‘shelf agreement’ being discussed between President Abbas and Prime Minister Olmert. A ‘shelf agreement’ is an exercise in outlining some principles for the settlement of the Palestinian issue, rather than to attempt a full solution. It is a document, the culmination of the Annapolis process, intended not for implementation; but rather immediately to be set aside — on the ‘shelf’ — whilst all parties, Bush, Abbas and Olmert declare the document to represent a huge triumph — whilst shamelessly waving this Chamberlinesque ‘peace in out time’ paper before their electorates in order to ‘help’ in their respective elections, or to cement legacies.

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

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

Hillary Clinton’s suicidal gamble with race poison
By Andrew Sullivan, The Sunday Times, May 11, 2008
From the very beginning, the premise and the promise of Barack Obama’s campaign was that it would transcend race. And last autumn the Obama team also knew this was the only way it could win.

The Clinton brand among black voters was so strong, so unbreakable, so resilient a force that even the first credible black candidate for the presidency remained stuck 20-30% behind Hillary Clinton among African-American voters. She was, after all, the wife of the “first black president”, as the author Toni Morrison called Bill.

How to end a presidential campaign
By Ben Smith, Politico, May 12, 2008
There are 50 ways to leave your lover, 13 ways of looking at a blackbird, and at least six ways to drop out of a presidential race. With Hillary Rodham Clinton’s campaign running on empty with little hope of victory, the New York senator’s allies and independent observers alike have begun to consider which one she’ll choose.

Clinton is balancing a range of considerations: her bank account; her political future and the party’s; her need to win back Obama’s supporters, particularly African-Americans; and her need to keep faith with voters in her own (nearly) half of the party, many of whom have grown to dislike her rival.

Clinton team acknowledges $20 million debt
By Anne E. Kornblut, Washington Post, May 12, 2008
With her campaign falling ever deeper into debt, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton spent a rainy Mother’s Day seeking votes ahead of Tuesday’s primary here, turning a deaf ear to calls for her to leave a Democratic presidential contest she has little hope of winning.

Clinton aides continued to insist that she will remain in the race even while confirming that she is $20 million in debt. “The voters are going to decide this,” senior adviser Howard Wolfson said on “Fox News Sunday,” acknowledging the $20 million figure. “There is no reason for her not to continue this process.” Wolfson said he has seen “no evidence of her interest” in pursuing the second-place spot on the Democratic ticket, contrary to rumors that she is staying in the race to leverage a bid for the vice presidential nomination.

Mr Cool’s intensity
By David Ignatius, Washington Post, May 11, 2008
Barack Obama called himself an “imperfect messenger” in his victory speech in North Carolina last Tuesday. That was a refreshing touch of humility, but it was also a fact. The presumptive Democratic presidential nominee is far from perfect. But he has demonstrated the most mysterious and precious gift in politics, which is grace under pressure.

Obama has remained “Mr. Cool,” even when his campaign seemed to be blowing up around him. He didn’t do the politically expedient things: He didn’t wear his patriotism on his lapel with an American flag pin; he didn’t promptly disown his race-baiting former pastor, Jeremiah Wright; he didn’t apologize for comments by his wife, Michelle, that many Americans found unpatriotic. You can say what you like about the substance of these positions, but the interesting fact is that Obama didn’t flinch.

As losses mount, GOP begins looking in the mirror
By Paul Kane, Washington Post, May 11, 2008
Since losing 30 seats and their 12-year stranglehold on power in 2006, House Republicans have kept asking themselves the same question: Can it get any worse?

On Tuesday, they may get another answer they won’t like.

With lots of help from Washington — including more than $1.3 million in campaign cash and a last-minute visit by Vice President Cheney — Mississippi Republicans are desperately trying to retain a congressional seat in one of the most reliably conservative districts in the nation.

The rise of the Muslim terrorists
By Malise Ruthven, New York Review of Books, May 29, 2008
In Sageman’s view the appeal of jihad is not so much narrowly religious as broadly romantic and consonant with the aspirations of youth everywhere. The young Moroccans with whom he spoke outside the mosque where the Madrid bombers used to worship equated Osama bin Laden with the soccer superstars they most admired. Their utopian aspirations are inspired as much by iconography as ideology. The images of Sheikh Osama, the rich civil engineer, and his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri, once a promising physician from an elite Cairo family—both of whom are seen to have sacrificed everything for the sake of their beliefs—send powerful messages to aspirants far removed from the grimy realities of tribal Waziristan.

Sadr City residents fear a cease-fire means more violence
By Leila Fadel, McClatchy, May 11, 2008
One day after an agreement between followers of Shiite cleric Muqtada al Sadr and the Iraqi government to end more than six weeks of fighting, the streets in parts of the vast Shiite slum of Sadr City were deserted, amidst signs of a battle. Wires snaked out of potholes and from underneath tires – signs of past or future roadside bombs; abandoned pickup trucks, destroyed by airstrikes, littered the streets, and bullets or shrapnel scarred the houses.

Hussein Abd Sakran walked three hours, holding up a white flag, to escape southeast Sadr City, where U.S. and Iraqi forces battled Sadr’s Mahdi Army militia, and took refuge inside the home of his brother-in-law, Raheem Abdul Hassan.

He arrived Saturday after most other residents had fled, in fear that the agreement that would allow Iraqi security Forces into the northeast district would bring more violence. It was a long route in order to get past the barricade the U.S. military is building to isolate the southern edge from the rest of the slum and avoid the gun battles in the southern parts of the area, he said.

‘Ghost city’ Mosul braces for assault on last bastion of al-Qa’ida in Iraq
By Patrick Cockburn, The Independent, May 12, 2008
Mosul looks like a city of the dead. American and Iraqi troops have launched an attack aimed at crushing the last bastion of al- Qa’ida in Iraq and in doing so have turned the country’s northern capital into a ghost town.

Soldiers shoot at any civilian vehicle on the streets in defiance of a strict curfew. Two men, a woman and child in one car which failed to stop were shot dead yesterday by US troops, who issued a statement saying the men were armed and one made “threatening movements”.

Mosul, on the Tigris river, is inhabited by 1.4 million people, but has been sealed off from the outside world by hundreds of police and army checkpoints since the Iraqi government offensive against al-Qa’ida began at 4am on Saturday. The operation is a critical part of an attempt to reassert military control over Iraq which has led to heavy fighting in Baghdad and Basra.

Is it time to invade Burma?
By Romesh Ratnesar, Time, May 10, 2008
The disaster in Burma presents the world with perhaps its most serious humanitarian crisis since the 2004 Asian tsunami. By most reliable estimates, close to 100,000 people are dead. Delays in delivering relief to the victims, the inaccessibility of the stricken areas and the poor state of Burma’s infrastructure and health systems mean that number is sure to rise. With as many as 1 million people still at risk, it is conceivable that the death toll will, within days, approach that of the entire number of civilians killed in the genocide in Darfur.

So what is the world doing about it? Not much. The military regime that runs Burma initially signaled it would accept outside relief, but has imposed so many conditions on those who would actually deliver it that barely a trickle has made it through. Aid workers have been held at airports. UN food shipments have been seized. US naval ships packed with food and medicine idle in the Gulf of Thailand, waiting for an all-clear that may never come.

Hizbollah rules west Beirut in Iran’s proxy war with US
By Robert Fisk, The Independent, May 10, 2008
Another American humiliation. The Shia gunmen who drove past my apartment in west Beirut yesterday afternoon were hooting their horns, making V-signs, leaning out of the windows of SUVs with their rifles in the air, proving to the Muslims of the capital that the elected government of Lebanon has lost.

And it has. The national army still patrols the streets, but solely to prevent sectarian killings or massacres. Far from dismantling the pro-Iranian Hizbollah’s secret telecommunications system – and disarming the Hizbollah itself – the cabinet of Fouad Siniora sits in the old Turkish serail in Beirut, denouncing violence with the same authority as the Iraqi government in Baghdad’s green zone.

An anxious morning amid Beirut gunfire
By Rami G. Khouri, Daily Star, May 10, 2008
Hizbullah and its allies decided on Wednesday and Thursday to make a show of force by quickly taking control of and closing Beirut’s airport and seaport, and then shutting down all the Hariri-owned media (television, radio and newspaper). The message was clear: Hizbullah could take over all Beirut at any moment it desired.

This was probably an inevitable moment, when Hizbullah felt it had to show the government the real balance of power between them. The fighting Thursday morning saw Hizbullah, Amal and smaller Lebanese parties quickly take over Hariri-owned facilities, and then just as quickly turn them over to the Lebanese Army, which is still seen as a national institution working for the unity and security of the country.

Hizbullah may have been making the point that it did not want to conquer Beirut or run all of Lebanon, but rather that it wanted to push the government into making a negotiated deal that would recognize and institutionalize the real political and military power of Hizbullah and its allies. Thursday evening, both Hizbullah’s secretary general, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, and Saad Hariri had made television statements in which they criticized each other, but also offered proposals to end the clashes and reach political agreement.

Fighting in Beirut threatens a top Bush administration priority
By Robin Wright, Washington Post, May 10, 2008
The Bush administration has been scrambling to mobilize international support for the beleaguered government of Prime Minister Fouad Siniora. Rice spoke to Siniora as well as U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and the French and Saudi foreign ministers. The Arab League announced an emergency meeting Sunday to discuss the crisis, with the State Department calling on the regional body to show its displeasure with Hezbollah and its sponsors.

The Bush administration has spent $1.3 billion over the past two years to prop up Siniora’s government, with about $400 million dedicated to boosting Lebanon’s security forces. But Washington’s assistance has been put in check by Hezbollah — the Shiite militia trained, armed and financed by Iran and Syria — which has the Siniora government under virtual siege.

Along with Iraq and the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, Lebanon has been central to the administration’s Middle East agenda, especially in promoting democracy. Bush had been scheduled to meet with Siniora in Cairo at the end of his Middle East tour, but it is now unclear whether Siniora will be able to leave Beirut. The airport and port are closed.

“Clearly, Bush has a two-header now. He’ll have to explain away the lack of progress on the peace process, and a crisis in Lebanon that could see the collapse of the Siniora government. It comes at a time when the news from Iraq is as gloomy as ever and oil prices have reached $126 a barrel,” said Geoffrey Kemp, a Reagan administration National Security Council staffer who worked on Lebanon during the Shiite takeover of West Beirut in 1984.

State Department officials said Friday that the international coalition supporting the Lebanese state against Hezbollah, which has failed to comply with two U.N. resolutions to disarm, has never been stronger. But in each of the three Middle East crises where it plays a major role, the United States finds itself pitted against increasingly powerful forces loyal to Iran and Syria.

“The U.S. has put a lot of capital into Lebanon to support the weaker side politically and militarily. The U.S. approach is based on [the idea that] one side can prevail, and that’s not how things work. This is a country where consensual politics is the name of the game and the way things are done,” said Augustus Richard Norton, who served with the United Nations in Lebanon and is the author of “Hezbollah: A Short History.” “If there’s going to be a solution, it will involve some compromise with the opposition, which will include Hezbollah.”

Mideast change is coming, and may not be pretty
By Rami G. Khouri, Daily Star, May 8, 2008
A huge difference between the 1970s and today is that angry or frightened citizens seem now to have many more outlets for their political activism, not all of them orderly. The Islamist political movements that flourished in the 1970s and 1980s were not successful in changing government policies or equitably redistributing limited state financial assets. Political liberalization and democratic reform have proved illusory in most countries in the region, leading to recent situations (for example, Morocco and Egypt) in which most citizens ignored local and parliamentary elections.

Not surprisingly, growing frustration and weakening central government authority in some cases has prompted new forms of political organization and expression throughout the Arab world. These have included local gangs, militias, criminal networks, tribal groups, family associations, terrorist organizations, and highly efficient Islamist political parties. In contrast, democracy and human rights groups have floundered.

A fresh round of economic and social pressures, combined with even more limited outlets for political expression and orderly policy change, portend a new stage of political action in many Arab countries. This time, however, greater urgency and even some existential desperation – families that cannot feed themselves or heat their homes in winter – will lead to more extreme forms of action. We should not be surprised when this happens – the biggest test that Arab governance systems will have faced in a generation.

War with Iran might be closer than you think
By Philip Giraldi, The American Conservative, May 9, 2008
There is considerable speculation and buzz in Washington today suggesting that the National Security Council has agreed in principle to proceed with plans to attack an Iranian al-Qods-run camp that is believed to be training Iraqi militants. The camp that will be targeted is one of several located near Tehran. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates was the only senior official urging delay in taking any offensive action. The decision to go ahead with plans to attack Iran is the direct result of concerns being expressed over the deteriorating situation in Lebanon, where Iranian ally Hezbollah appears to have gained the upper hand against government forces and might be able to dominate the fractious political situation.

The elusive Iranian weapons
By Tina Susman, Los Angeles Times, May 8, 2008
There was something interesting missing from Maj. Gen. Kevin Bergner’s introductory remarks to journalists at his regular news briefing in Baghdad on Wednesday: the word “Iran,” or any form of it. It was especially striking as Bergner, the U.S. military spokesman here, announced the extraordinary list of weapons and munitions that have been uncovered in recent weeks since fighting erupted between Iraqi and U.S. security forces and Shiite militiamen.

In big concession, militia agrees to let Iraqi troops into Sadr City
By Leila Fadel, McClatchy, May 9, 2008
Followers of rebel cleric Muqtada al Sadr agreed late Friday to allow Iraqi security forces to enter all of Baghdad’s Sadr City and to arrest anyone found with heavy weapons in a surprising capitulation that seemed likely to be hailed as a major victory for Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki.

In return, Sadr’s Mahdi Army supporters won the Iraqi government’s agreement not to arrest Mahdi Army members without warrants, unless they were in possession of “medium and heavy weaponry.”

The agreement would end six weeks of fighting in the vast Shiite Muslim area that’s home to more than 2 million residents and would mark the first time that the area would be under government control since Saddam Hussein was toppled in 2003. On Friday, 15 people were killed and 112 were injured in fighting, officials at the neighborhoods two major hospitals said.

US tightens its grip on Pakistan
By M K Bhadrakumar, Asia Times, May 10, 2008
Alphonse Karr, the 19th-century French novelist and pamphleteer, is principally remembered for the epigram, “The more it changes, the more it is the same thing.” That could be the thought that comes to mind at first glance of speech made by US Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte at the National Endowment for Democracy’s (NED) Pakistan forum in Washington on Monday. Yet, the speech merits attention.

In all practical terms, the speech is a final summing up but at the same time it sets outs the tone of the US policy towards Pakistan in the remaining months of the George W Bush administration. Pakistan is indeed a transformed home. New applications of new principles must be quickly forthcoming.

It is extraordinary that a seasoned diplomat like Negroponte has chosen the NED forum to make such a major speech on Pakistan. But then, “promoting democracy” – the motto of NED – also happens to be a stated objective of US policy towards Pakistan. Over the past quarter century, the US government-funded NED has specialized as a handmaiden of American regional policies.

The loathsome smearing of Israel’s critics
By Johann Hari, The Independent, May 8, 2008
In the US and Britain, there is a campaign to smear anybody who tries to describe the plight of the Palestinian people. It is an attempt to intimidate and silence – and to a large degree, it works. There is nobody these self-appointed spokesmen for Israel will not attack as anti-Jewish: liberal Jews, rabbis, even Holocaust survivors.

My own case isn’t especially important, but it illustrates how the wider process of intimidation works. I have worked undercover at both the Finsbury Park mosque and among neo-Nazi Holocaust deniers to expose the Jew-hatred there; when I went on the Islam Channel to challenge the anti-Semitism of Islamists, I received a rash of death threats calling me “a Jew-lover”, “a Zionist-homo pig” and more.

Ah, but wait. I have also reported from Gaza and the West Bank. Last week, I wrote an article that described how untreated sewage was being pumped from illegal Israeli settlements on to Palestinian land, contaminating their reservoirs. This isn’t controversial. It has been documented by Friends of the Earth, and I have seen it with my own eyes.

The response? There was little attempt to dispute the facts I offered. Instead, some of the most high profile “pro-Israel” writers and media monitoring groups – including Honest Reporting and Camera – said I an anti-Jewish bigot akin to Joseph Goebbels and Mahmoud Ahmadinejadh, while Melanie Phillips even linked the stabbing of two Jewish people in North London to articles like mine. Vast numbers of e-mails came flooding in calling for me to be sacked.

Hezbollah overruns west Beirut as Lebanon on brink
AFP, May 9, 2008
Hezbollah gunmen seized control of west Beirut on Friday after a third day of battles with pro-government foes in the Lebanese capital pushed the nation dangerously close to all-out civil war.

Hizballah prevailing in Beirut siege
By Andrew Lee Butler, Time, May 9, 2008
Just why the government chose this particular moment to move against Hizballah’s telecoms remains unclear. Hizballah, which fought Israel to a stand-still in the summer war of 2006, is much stronger on the ground than the government and is certain to win any confrontation. Still, Hizballah would have much to lose in an open civil war. Not only would the chaos distract the group from the far more dangerous struggle with Israel, but it could also help radical al-Qaeda-affiliated Sunni jihadi groups infiltrate Lebanon. Tellingly, Hizballah regulars have so far stayed out of the fighting, leaving the wet work to street gangs and a few regular fighters belonging to the Amal movement, an allied Shia opposition party.

But the government officials who moved against the Hizballah network are known to coordinate their actions with the United States, and the Bush administration may be digging in its heels into Lebanon while its days in office are on the wane. The Bush administration is keen both to preserve Lebanon’s independence from Syria, which ended its occupation of Lebanon in 2005 under American pressure, and to push for the disarmament of Hizballah, which the U.S. regards as a terrorist organization and a major threat to Israel. “Hizbollah needs to make a choice: Be a terrorist organization or be a political party, but quit trying to be both,” said a White House spokesman yesterday.

A secret Afghanistan mission prepares for war with Iran
By William M Arkin, Washington Post, May 8, 2008
Those predicting war with Iran or some Bush-Cheney October surprise attack on Tehran are constantly looking for signs of military preparations: a B-52 bomber that mistakenly takes off from North Dakota with nuclear-armed cruise missiles; a second or third aircraft carrier entering the Persian Gulf; a B-1 crashing in Qatar.

Since the most likely path to war with Iran is not Marines storming the beach but a strike on nuclear facilities and “regime” targets, signs such as these can often just be mirages. The true strike is not necessarily going to come with any warning, and the U.S. military has developed an entire system called “global strike” to implement such a preemptive strike.

A secret mission conducted last August over Afghanistan caught my eye because it tells us everything we need to know about the ability of the U.S. military to conduct a bolt-out-of-the-blue attack in Iran. It also tells us how useless such a strike might be.

Israel is 60, Zionism is dead, what now?
By Tony Karon, Rootless Cosmopolitan, May 8, 2008
Israel at 60 is an intractable historical fact. It has one of the world’s strongest armies, without peer in the Middle East, and its 200 or so nuclear warheads give it the last word in any military showdown with any of its neighbors. Don’t believe the hype about an Iranian threat – Israel certainly fears Iran attaining strategic nuclear capability, but not because it expects Iran to launch a suicidal nuclear exchange. That’s the sort of scare-story that gets trotted out for public consumption in Israel and the U.S. Behind closed doors, Israeli leaders admit that even a nuclear-armed Iran does not threaten Israel’s existence. (Israel’s security doctrine, however, is based on maintaining an overwhelming strategic advantage over all challengers, so the notion of parity along the lines of Cold War “Mutually Assured Destruction” with Iran is a major challenge, because without a nuclear monopoly, Israel loses a trump card in the regional power battle.)

Palestinian militants may be able to make life in certain parts of Israel exceedingly unpleasant at times, but they are unable to reverse the Nakbah of 1948 through military means. (Hamas knows this as well as Fatah does, which is why it is ready to talk about a long-term hudna and coexistence – although it won’t roll over and accept Israel’s terms as relayed by Washington in the way that the current Fatah leadership might.)

Portrait of an oil-addicted former superpower
By Michael Klare, TomDispatch, May 8, 2008
Nineteen years ago, the fall of the Berlin Wall effectively eliminated the Soviet Union as the world’s other superpower. Yes, the USSR as a political entity stumbled on for another two years, but it was clearly an ex-superpower from the moment it lost control over its satellites in Eastern Europe.

Less than a month ago, the United States similarly lost its claim to superpower status when a barrel crude oil roared past $110 on the international market, gasoline prices crossed the $3.50 threshold at American pumps, and diesel fuel topped $4.00. As was true of the USSR following the dismantling of the Berlin Wall, the USA will no doubt continue to stumble on like the superpower it once was; but as the nation’s economy continues to be eviscerated to pay for its daily oil fix, it, too, will be seen by increasing numbers of savvy observers as an ex-superpower-in-the-making.

That the fall of the Berlin Wall spelled the erasure of the Soviet Union’s superpower status was obvious to international observers at the time. After all, the USSR visibly ceased to exercise dominion over an empire (and an associated military-industrial complex) encompassing nearly half of Europe and much of Central Asia. The relationship between rising oil prices and the obliteration of America’s superpower status is, however, hardly as self-evident. So let’s consider the connection.

U.S. officials urged to avoid linking Islam, jihad with terrorism
By Shaun Waterman, UPI, May 6, 2008
U.S. officials are being advised in internal government documents to avoid referring publicly to al-Qaida and other terrorist groups as Islamic or Muslim, and not to use terms like jihad or mujahedin, which “unintentionally legitimize” terrorism.

“There’s a growing consensus (in the administration) that we need to move away from that language,” said a former senior administration official who was involved until recently in policy debates on the issue.

Instead, in two documents circulated last month by the National Counter-Terrorism Center, the multiagency center charged with strategic coordination of the U.S. war on terrorism, officials are urged to use terms like violent extremists, totalitarian and death cult to characterize al-Qaida and other terror groups.

U.S. deploys more than 43,000 unfit for combat
By Gregg Zoroya, USA Today, May 7, 2008
More than 43,000 U.S. troops listed as medically unfit for combat in the weeks before their scheduled deployment to Iraq or Afghanistan since 2003 were sent anyway, Pentagon records show.

This reliance on troops found medically “non-deployable” is another sign of stress placed on a military that has sent 1.6 million servicemembers to the war zones, soldier advocacy groups say.

“It is a consequence of the consistent churning of our troops,” said Bobby Muller, president of Veterans For America. “They are repeatedly exposed to high-intensity combat with insufficient time at home to rest and heal before redeploying.”

Killing by the numbers
By Mark Benjamin and Christopher Weaver, Salon, May 9, 2008
Three snipers with exemplary military records from the 1st Battalion of the 25th Infantry Division’s 501st Regiment were charged in Khudair’s killing. They were tried by the military judicial system in Iraq beginning in 2007. But the most important question raised by his death remains unanswered. Why would these elite American soldiers kill an unarmed prisoner in cold blood? The answer: pressure from their commanding officers to pump up a statistic straight out of America’s last long war against an intractable insurgency.

A review of thousands of pages of documents from the legal proceedings obtained by Salon shows that in the months prior to Khudair’s death, the young snipers, already frustrated by guerrilla tactics, were pressed to their physical limits and pushed by officers to stretch the bounds of the laws of war in order to increase the enemy body count. When the United States wallowed in Vietnam’s counterinsurgency quagmire decades ago, the same pressure placed on soldiers resulted in some of the worst atrocities of that war. A paratrooper who remembered the insidious influence of body counts in Vietnam warned Salon in 2005 that the practice could also ensnare good soldiers in Iraq. “The problem is that in Iraq, we are in a guerrilla war,” said Dennis Stout. “How do you keep score? How do you prove you are winning?”

Pentagon targeted Iran for regime change after 9/11
By Gareth Porter, IPS , May 5, 2008
Three weeks after the 9/11 terror attacks, former U.S. Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld established an official military objective of not only removing the Saddam Hussein regime by force but overturning the regime in Iran, as well as in Syria and four other countries in the Middle East, according to a document quoted extensively in then Undersecretary of Defence for Policy Douglas Feith’s recently published account of the Iraq war decisions.

Feith’s account further indicates that this aggressive aim of remaking the map of the Middle East by military force and the threat of force was supported explicitly by the country’s top military leaders.

The new immorality of Iraq war
By James Carroll, Boston Globe, May 5, 2008
Insanity is defined as repeating one mistaken action again and again, each time expecting a better result that never comes. Prime example: the United States in Iraq. Washington perceived a weapons of mass destruction threat from Saddam Hussein, but instead of responding with diplomacy – internationally coordinated weapons inspections – it went to war. When Saddam Hussein was toppled, the initiative should have passed from the Pentagon to a State Department-led program of stabilization and reconstruction, but instead a crudely violent military occupation was begun. Diplomacy was once again rejected.

Today, the United States, fearing a geo-political setback that will undercut the broader “war on terror,” is putting the diehard goal of military “victory” ahead of the diplomatic initiatives that alone can enable the reconstruction of Iraqi society. The needed spirit of cooperation among Iraqi factions, and from other nations, will never materialize as long as the United States pursues the fantasy that its armed might will at last prevail. Once again, diplomacy is being rejected in favor of war. This is insane.

The last war and the next one
By Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch, May 4, 2008
The last war won’t end, but in the Pentagon they’re already arguing about the next one.

Let’s start with that “last war” and see if we can get things straight. Just over five years ago, American troops entered Baghdad in battle mode, felling the Sunni-dominated government of dictator Saddam Hussein and declaring Iraq “liberated.” In the wake of the city’s fall, after widespread looting, the new American administrators dismantled the remains of Saddam’s government in its hollowed out, trashed ministries; disassembled the Sunni-dominated Baathist Party which had ruled Iraq since the 1960s, sending its members home with news that there was no coming back; dismantled Saddam’s 400,000 man army; and began to denationalize the economy. Soon, an insurgency of outraged Sunnis was raging against the American occupation.

America’s newshounds have turned into a pack of poodles
By James Zogby, The National, May 4, 2008
The Arab media may not be free, in the sense that there is government ownership and, in varying degrees, interference and censorship. But Arab journalists are free thinkers, and quite serious about expanding their freedom to examine critical issues.

All this stands in interesting contrast to the US media that, while cherishing and boasting of its freedom, is increasingly constrained by factors that have resulted in limiting that freedom. The US press is technically free of government influence, but there are a combination of political, cultural and commercial considerations that have made the US media less free and less inquisitive. The controls are not overt, but subtle and at all times pervasive — and decisive.

There is, for example, the “corporatisation” of the media, which has resulted both in a dumbing down of content and the push to mimic, rather than compete in the ever-demanding need to increase ratings. There is the incestuous nature of the Washington scene: its revolving door of journalists going into government and vice versa; the self-serving need to protect access, and the shared social circle of too many government and media elites that results in self-imposed restraint.

A progressive antidote to AIPAC
Gary Kamiya, Salon

Nothing is more urgently needed in our political discourse than for the taboo against speaking forthrightly about Israel to be overthrown. After all, notwithstanding its profound connection to some American Jews and its (partly justified) status as a beloved icon with whom we have a “special relationship,” Israel is not the 51st state — it is a foreign country, and one smack-dab in the center of the Middle East, a region in which we have some considerable national interest. The enforced silence about Israel has prevented us from thinking clearly about the Middle East, and helped enable both the disastrous war we are now fighting in Iraq and a possible future one against Iran.

God bless Richard Nixon
Time

Turns out the presidential prayer is quite a youngster and only just turned 35. “Tonight, I ask for your prayers to help me in everything that I do throughout the days of my presidency. God bless America and God bless each and every one of you.” Richard Nixon, April 30, 1973

National Watermelon Month
New York Times

Americans are pumping their paychecks into their gas tanks, and the economy is in a stall. Food scarcities threaten governments overseas and spur hoarding at home. Foreclosures are up, home sales are down. Progress in Iraq and Afghanistan is halting.

Despite this confluence of crises on the nation’s doorstep, official Washington is beset by election-year inertia. After a fleeting bipartisan moment in January produced the rebate checks that began going out this week, the House and Senate floors have been given over to partisan sniping and small-bore bills. The House voted Tuesday to designate National Watermelon Month and National Funeral Director and Mortician Recognition Day.

Driving hunger
AP

Some top international food scientists Tuesday recommended halting the use of food-based biofuels, such as ethanol, saying it would cut corn prices by 20 percent during a world food crisis.

But even as the scientists were calling for a moratorium, President Bush urged the opposite. He declared the United States should increase ethanol use because of national energy security and high gas prices.

“A fantastic time to be farming”
Washington Post

Across the country, ethanol plants are swallowing more and more of the nation’s corn crop. This year, about a quarter of U.S. corn will go to feeding ethanol plants instead of poultry or livestock.

Which came first: memos or torture?
By Scott Horton, Los Angeles Times, April 21, 2008
John C. Yoo likes the limelight, but it’s causing him some grief. Of the half a dozen lawyers who played important roles in a Bush administration decision to legalize the use of highly coercive interrogation techniques, only Yoo has emerged as the public face — and target — related to the policy.

In 2002 and 2003, Yoo was second in command at the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel and wrote two memos, one for Alberto R. Gonzales and one for the Pentagon, that provided broad legal authority for the use of extreme measures in the questioning of wartime detainees. In one famous phrase, the memo to Gonzales concluded that only techniques “equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function or even death,” could be considered torture. The 81-page Pentagon memo, declassified April 1, contained similar language and added fuel to the fire over torture and the White House. Through it all, Yoo has defended his position in the media.

12 reasons to get out of Iraq
By Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch, April 20, 2008
Can there be any question that, since the invasion of 2003, Iraq has been unraveling? And here’s the curious thing: Despite a lack of decent information and analysis on crucial aspects of the Iraqi catastrophe, despite the way much of the Iraq story fell off newspaper front pages and out of the TV news in the last year, despite so many reports on the “success” of the President’s surge strategy, Americans sense this perfectly well. In the latest Washington Post/ABC News poll, 56% of Americans “say the United States should withdraw its military forces to avoid further casualties” and this has, as the Post notes, been a majority position since January 2007, the month that the surge was first announced. Imagine what might happen if the American public knew more about the actual state of affairs in Iraq — and of thinking in Washington. So, here, in an attempt to unravel the situation in ever-unraveling Iraq are twelve answers to questions which should be asked far more often in this country:

Rice, in Iraq, praises moves against militias
By Erica Goode, New York Times, April 21, 2008
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, making a surprise stop in Baghdad on Sunday, praised the Iraqi government’s decision to take on Shiite militia members in Basra and in Baghdad and painted an upbeat picture of the Iraqi government’s progress toward unifying the country.

Ms. Rice, who visited the Iraqi capital on her way to a conference in Kuwait of Iraq’s neighbors, said that Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki’s government “has made a choice to pursue militias and is willing to bear the consequences.”

Conceding that it had been “a long five years,” Ms. Rice said that Iraq had made “significant progress, remarkable progress,” however fragile, and she quoted the Iraqi president, Jalal Talabani, who said that the country was experiencing “a political spring.”

Iraqi Army takes last Basra areas from Sadr force
By James Glanz and Alissa J Rubin, New York Times, April 20, 2008
Iraqi soldiers took control of the last bastions of the cleric Moktada al-Sadr’s militia in Basra on Saturday, and Iran’s ambassador to Baghdad strongly endorsed the Iraqi government’s monthlong military operation against the fighters.

By Saturday evening, Basra was calm, but only after air and artillery strikes by American and British forces cleared the way for Iraqi troops to move into the Hayaniya district and other remaining Mahdi Army militia strongholds and begin house-to house searches, Iraqi officials said. Iraqi troops were meeting little resistance, said Maj. Gen. Abdul-Karim Khalaf, the spokesman for the Iraqi Interior Ministry in Baghdad.

Despite the apparent concession of Basra, Mr. Sadr issued defiant words on Saturday night. In a long statement read from the loudspeakers of his Sadr City Mosque, he threatened to declare “war until liberation” against the government if fighting against his militia forces continued.

A diplomat’s view on engaging Iran
Scott Simon interviews Thomas Pickering, NPR, April 19, 2008
Former Ambassador Thomas Pickering has had unofficial meetings with Iranian academics and policy advisers for the past several years on everything from the war in Iraq to Iran’s nuclear program. Pickering discusses his diplomatic efforts.

U.S. military seeks to widen Pakistan raids
By Mark Mazzetti and Eric Schmitt, New York Times, April 20, 2008
American commanders in Afghanistan have in recent months urged a widening of the war that could include American attacks on indigenous Pakistani militants in the tribal areas inside Pakistan, according to United States officials.

The requests have been rebuffed for now, the officials said, after deliberations in Washington among senior Bush administration officials who fear that attacking Pakistani radicals may anger Pakistan’s new government, which is negotiating with the militants, and destabilize an already fragile security situation.

American commanders would prefer that Pakistani forces attack the militants, but Pakistani military operations in the tribal areas have slowed recently to avoid upsetting the negotiations.

Perceived slights have left many U.S. Muslims wary of Pope
By Robin Shulman and Keith B. Richburg, Washington Post, April 20, 2008
Pope Benedict XVI has said he would like to reach out to the Muslim community through dialogue, and Muslims were included in the pontiff’s meeting with interfaith leaders in Washington on Thursday night. But many Muslims in America remain wary, saying the pope has created the impression that he is insensitive to their faith.

On Sunday, the pope will visit Ground Zero, perhaps the most poignant symbol of the divide between the West and the more extremist elements of Islam. But interviews in New York and elsewhere indicate that even those Muslims who do not hold such radical views are critical of the pope.

Many still recall the pope’s September 2006 lecture at the University of Regensburg in Germany, in which Benedict quoted a Byzantine Christian emperor saying that the prophet Muhammad brought “things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.”

The problems with ‘strategic patience’
By Marc Lynch, Abu Aardvark, April 17, 2008
Michael O’Hanlon’s latest in the Washington Post (with Ann Gildroy) offers a chance to step back and assess the emerging argument for “strategic patience” which I suspect will become central to the upcoming national debate. What strikes me most about these arguments is their refusal to spell out the mechanisms by which they expect to see American military presence translate into a happy ending, to frankly assess the conditions under which an American drawdown would become possible, to specify indicators which would suggest that their approach is not working, and their refusal to think seriously about the strategic incentives created by different American postures. Instead, it’s just a “magic box”: keep the troops in place and hope for the best.

Pentagon institute calls Iraq war ‘a major debacle’ with outcome ‘in doubt’
By Jonathan S. Landay and John Walcott, McClatchy, April 17, 2008
The war in Iraq has become “a major debacle” and the outcome “is in doubt” despite improvements in security from the buildup in U.S. forces, according to a highly critical study published Thursday by the Pentagon’s premier military educational institute.

The report [PDF] released by the National Defense University raises fresh doubts about President Bush’s projections of a U.S. victory in Iraq just a week after Bush announced that he was suspending U.S. troop reductions.

The report carries considerable weight because it was written by Joseph Collins, a former senior Pentagon official, and was based in part on interviews with other former senior defense and intelligence officials who played roles in prewar preparations.

Poll: Obama pulling away
By Michael Hirsh, Newsweek, April 18, 2008
Despite her campaign’s relentless attacks on Barack Obama’s qualifications and electability, Hillary Clinton has lost a lot of ground with Democratic voters nationwide going into Tuesday’s critical primary in Pennsylvania, a new NEWSWEEK poll shows.

The survey of 1,209 registered voters found that Obama now leads Clinton by nearly 20 points, or 54 percent to 35 percent, among registered Democrats and those who lean Democratic nationwide. The previous Newsweek poll, conducted in March after Clinton’s big primary wins in Ohio and Texas, showed the two Democrats locked in a statistical tie (45 percent for Obama to 44 percent for Clinton). The new poll puts Obama ahead among women as well as men, and voters aged 60 and older as well as younger voters.

Superdelegates unswayed by Clinton’s attacks
By Patrick Healy, New York Times, April 18, 2008
Throughout their contentious debate on Wednesday, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton tried again and again to put Senator Barack Obama on the defensive in a pointed attempt, her advisers say, to raise doubts about his electability among a small but powerful audience: the uncommitted superdelegates who will most likely determine the nomination.

Yet despite giving it her best shot in what might have been their final debate, interviews on Thursday with a cross-section of these superdelegates — members of Congress, elected officials and party leaders — showed that none had been persuaded much by her attacks on Mr. Obama’s strength as a potential Democratic nominee, his recent gaffes and his relationships with his former pastor and with a onetime member of the Weather Underground.

U.S. lacks plan to operate in Pakistani tribal areas, GAO Says
By Dan Eggen, Washington Post, April 18, 2008
The Bush administration has no comprehensive plan for dealing with the threat posed by Pakistan’s lawless tribal areas, where al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden is believed to be hiding, according to a new report released yesterday from the research arm of Congress.

The Government Accountability Office also said “the United States has not met its national security goals to destroy terrorist threats and close the safe haven” provided by the tribal areas, despite having spent more than $10 billion for Pakistani military operations in the mountainous border region.”

GAO staff members interviewed experts inside and outside the government, and “we found broad agreement . . . that al-Qaida had regenerated its ability to attack the United States and had succeeded in establishing a safe haven” in the unpoliced region, the report says.

The Democrats play trivial pursuit
By Michael Grunwald, Time, April 17, 2008

In The Audacity of Hope, Barack Obama tells an amusing story about his first tour through downstate Illinois, when he had the audacity to order Dijon mustard on his cheeseburger at a TGI Friday’s. His political aide hastily informed the waitress that Obama didn’t want Dijon at all, and thrust a yellow bottle of ordinary-American heartland-values mustard at him instead. The perplexed waitress informed Obama that she had Dijon if he wanted. He smiled and said thanks. “As the waitress walked away, I leaned over and whispered that I didn’t think there were any photographers around,” Obama recalled.

Obama’s memoir dripped with contempt for modern gotcha politics, for a campaign culture obsessed with substantively irrelevant but supposedly symbolic gaffes like John Kerry ordering Swiss cheese or Al Gore sighing or George H.W. Bush checking his watch or Michael Dukakis looking dorky in a tank. “What’s troubling is the gap between the magnitude of our challenges and the smallness of our politics—the ease with which we are distracted by the petty and trivial,” he wrote.

Last night at the National Constitution Center, at a Democratic debate that was hyped by ABC as a discussion of serious constitutional issues, America got to see exactly what Obama was complaining about. At a time of foreign wars, economic collapse and environmental peril, the cringe-worthy first half of the debate focused on such crucial matters as Senator Obama’s comments about rural bitterness, his former pastor, an obscure sixties radical with whom he was allegedly “friendly,” and the burning constitutional question of why he doesn’t wear an American flag pin on his lapel — with a single detour into Senator Hillary Clinton’s yarn about sniper fire in Tuzla. Apparently, Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos ran out of time before they could ask Obama why he’s such a lousy bowler.

Jimmy Carter, Hamas, and the media
By Ken Silverstein, Harper’s, April 16, 2008
Jimmy Carter is, predictably, being savaged for meeting with officials from Hamas during his current visit to the Middle East. “It’s bad enough that Carter…will be putting a stamp of legitimacy on a gang of cutthroats who’ve never hesitated to include Americans in their growing body count,” said the New York Post in its typically measured style. “The saddest thing about this get-together is that it comes as no real surprise. Indeed, it’s entirely in keeping with Carter’s recent embrace of Palestinian extremism–to the point where, in his latest published anti-Israel screed, he all but gave his blessing to attacks on Israel.”

Carter’s general position on the need for the U.S. to engage Hamas receives little support elsewhere in the media, including the liberal blogosphere. “Since Syria and Hamas will have to be involved in a final peace agreement,” he said yesterday, “they will have to be involved in discussions that lead to final peace.”

No peace without Hamas
By Mahmoud al-Zahar, Washington Post, April 17, 2008
Our movement fights on because we cannot allow the foundational crime at the core of the Jewish state — the violent expulsion from our lands and villages that made us refugees — to slip out of world consciousness, forgotten or negotiated away. Judaism — which gave so much to human culture in the contributions of its ancient lawgivers and modern proponents of tikkun olam — has corrupted itself in the detour into Zionism, nationalism and apartheid.

A “peace process” with Palestinians cannot take even its first tiny step until Israel first withdraws to the borders of 1967; dismantles all settlements; removes all soldiers from Gaza and the West Bank; repudiates its illegal annexation of Jerusalem; releases all prisoners; and ends its blockade of our international borders, our coastline and our airspace permanently. This would provide the starting point for just negotiations and would lay the groundwork for the return of millions of refugees. Given what we have lost, it is the only basis by which we can start to be whole again.

Israel’s deputy prime minister to Carter: Tell Meshal that I want to discuss prisoner swap
By Akiva Eldar, Haaretz, April 18, 2008
Deputy Prime Minister Eli Yishai asked former U.S. President Jimmy Carter to tell Hamas leaders, including Khaled Meshal, that he would like to meet in order to expedite a prisoner exchange that would bring home kidnapped soldier Gilad Shalit.

Yishai relayed his message to Carter during a meeting on Monday. The meeting was held at the request of the former president, who wanted to meet with Israeli political leaders from across the political spectrum. The meeting was arranged through the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv.

Yishai’s bureau said he did not ask Prime Minister Ehud Olmert for permission to hold the meeting, nor did he tell Olmert what he discussed. Yishai said other Israeli officials erred in boycotting Carter.

My militia is more untouchable than yours
By Pepe Escobar, Asia Times, April 18, 2008
In a make-believe world where the green, green grass of the “surge” is alive with the sound of music, the George W Bush administration and US counterinsurgency ace General David Petraeus – not to mention presidential candidate Senator John McCain – keep assuring American public opinion the “surge” (now reconverted into a “pause”) is working.

But back in real life, an Iraq transfixed by no less than 28 militias is burning – again – all over, even in “invisible” (at least for Western media) places. Couple that with the relentless Bush administration narrative of “blame, blame Iran” and we have American public opinion strangled by a formidable disinformation octopus.

Washington keeps spinning the success of a “war on terror” narrative in northern Iraq against “al-Qaeda”. This is false. The US is basically fighting indigenous Sunni Arab guerrilla groups – some with Islamic overtones, some neo-Ba’athists. These are no terrorists. Their agenda is unmistakable: occupation out.

What will they really do about Iraq?
By Mark Benjamin, Salon, April 17, 2008
As they’ve campaigned for president, John McCain, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have staked out their positions on the war. But remarkably, even this far into the campaign their plans have largely escaped close scrutiny by the press.

Salon spoke recently with a half dozen national security advisors to presidential candidates from both parties, as well as with independent military experts, about the daunting Iraq issue. In private conversations, all agreed that a political solution among Iraq’s bitterly divided sects was the only road to some version of success in that country. And all agreed that certain outcomes, such as a regional war, would be unacceptable from the standpoint of U.S. interests in the crucial oil-rich area.

But even in off-the-record conversations, it was difficult to nail down what the three candidates consider to be an acceptable, and attainable, end state in Iraq. And there is little evidence that the broader plans and tactics espoused by the candidates would result in such an outcome.

The end of the world as you know it
By Michael T. Klare, TomDispatch, April 15, 2008
Oil at $110 a barrel. Gasoline at $3.35 (or more) per gallon. Diesel fuel at $4 per gallon. Independent truckers forced off the road. Home heating oil rising to unconscionable price levels. Jet fuel so expensive that three low-cost airlines stopped flying in the past few weeks. This is just a taste of the latest energy news, signaling a profound change in how all of us, in this country and around the world, are going to live — trends that, so far as anyone can predict, will only become more pronounced as energy supplies dwindle and the global struggle over their allocation intensifies.

Energy of all sorts was once hugely abundant, making possible the worldwide economic expansion of the past six decades. This expansion benefited the United States above all — along with its “First World” allies in Europe and the Pacific. Recently, however, a select group of former “Third World” countries — China and India in particular — have sought to participate in this energy bonanza by industrializing their economies and selling a wide range of goods to international markets. This, in turn, has led to an unprecedented spurt in global energy consumption — a 47% rise in the past 20 years alone, according to the U.S. Department of Energy (DoE).

An increase of this sort would not be a matter of deep anxiety if the world’s primary energy suppliers were capable of producing the needed additional fuels. Instead, we face a frightening reality: a marked slowdown in the expansion of global energy supplies just as demand rises precipitously. These supplies are not exactly disappearing — though that will occur sooner or later — but they are not growing fast enough to satisfy soaring global demand.

Jimmy Carter and the art of growing up
By Tony Karon, Rootless Cosmopolitan, April 15, 2008
You could say Jimmy Carter was tempting fate by meeting with Hamas leader Khaled Meshal — after all, his entirely appropriate evocation of apartheid in reference to the regime Israel has created on the West Bank earned him the label “Holocaust-denier” from the more demented end of the American Zionist spectrum. But Carter, bless him, is sticking to his guns, making the rather straightforward adult argument that has eluded so much of the U.S. political mainstream that the only way to achieve peace is to talk to all of those whose consent it requires.

And I’d say Carter has reason to suspect that despite the pro-forma criticisms of his Meshal meeting from Secretary of State Condi Rice as well as the McCain-Clinton-Obama roadshow, the backlash won’t be anything like the firestorm created by his apartheid book. It was reported today, in fact, that the Bush Administration is regularly briefed on back-channel talks between Iranian officials and a group of former U.S. diplomats led by Papa Bush’s U.N. ambassador, Thomas Pickering. So, far all the posturing and bluster, there’s a back channel. And I’d wager that despite the official sanctimony, Carter will be debriefed on his conversations with Meshal by both Israeli and American officials — because Meshal is a key player, like it or not.

Carter gets reduced protection in Israel
By Joel Greenberg, Chicago Tribune, April 15, 2008
A dispute erupted Monday over the lack of Israeli secret service protection for former President Carter as he visited this border town and called rocket attacks by Palestinian militants “a despicable crime” that he hoped a cease-fire would halt.

Carter’s planned talks with the leader of the militant group Hamas and a book he published in 2006 that called Israeli policy in occupied Palestinian territories “a system of apartheid” have caused official displeasure in Israel. His efforts to meet Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and senior Cabinet ministers were rebuffed.

Israel’s Shin Bet security service, which is overseen by Olmert’s office and normally helps protect visiting dignitaries, has not assisted U.S. Secret Service agents guarding Carter.

Jewish liberals to launch a counterpoint to AIPAC
By Michael Abramowitz, Washington Post, April 15, 2008
Organizers said they hope those efforts, coupled with a separate lobbying group that will focus on promoting an Arab-Israeli peace settlement, will fill a void left by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, and other Jewish groups that they contend have tilted to the right in recent years.

The lobbying group will be known as J Street and the political action group as JStreetPAC. The executive director for both will be Jeremy Ben-Ami, a former domestic policy adviser in the Clinton White House.

“The definition of what it means to be pro-Israel has come to diverge from pursuing a peace settlement,” said Alan Solomont, a prominent Democratic Party fundraiser involved in the initiative. In recent years, he said, “We have heard the voices of neocons, and right-of-center Jewish leaders and Christian evangelicals, and the mainstream views of the American Jewish community have not been heard.”

Solomont is a top fundraiser for the presidential campaign of Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.), but the organizers include supporters and fundraisers for both Obama and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.). Many prominent figures in the American Jewish left, former lawmakers and U.S. government officials, and several prominent Israeli figures, as well as activists who have raised money for the Democracy Alliance and MoveOn.org, are also involved.

Guns, God and gotchas
By Richard Cohen, Washington Post, April 15, 2008
Long ago I discovered that the word “frankly” often meant a lie was coming. I learned this from an insurance agent, who preceded every attempt to sell me useless coverage with a “frankly.” This is why I distrust what Hillary Clinton said about Barack Obama and his admittedly klutzy statement about guns, church, immigrants and bitterness — “elitist, out of touch and, frankly, patronizing,” she said. Frankly, I don’t believe her.

And this, frankly or not, is the trouble with Clinton. Obama clearly misspoke. But there are very few moments with him where I feel that he does not believe what he is saying — even when, as with his lame capitulation of leadership regarding the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, I can’t respect it. With Clinton, on the other hand, those moments are frequent. She is forever saying things I either don’t believe or believe that even she doesn’t believe. She is the personification of artifice.

Two speeches on race
By Gary Wills, New York Review of Books, May 1, 2008
Two men, two speeches. The men, both lawyers, both from Illinois, were seeking the presidency, despite what seemed their crippling connection with extremists. Each was young by modern standards for a president. Abraham Lincoln had turned fifty-one just five days before delivering his speech. Barack Obama was forty-six when he gave his. Their political experience was mainly provincial, in the Illinois legislature for both of them, and they had received little exposure at the national level—two years in the House of Representatives for Lincoln, four years in the Senate for Obama. Yet each was seeking his party’s nomination against a New York senator of longer standing and greater prior reputation—Lincoln against Senator William Seward, Obama against Senator Hillary Clinton. They were both known for having opposed an initially popular war—Lincoln against President Polk’s Mexican War, raised on the basis of a fictitious provocation; Obama against President Bush’s Iraq War, launched on false claims that Saddam Hussein possessed WMDs and had made an alliance with Osama bin Laden.

Into the lion’s den
By Hussein Agha and Robert Malley, New York Review of Books, May 1, 2008
In its final year in office and the first year of its Israeli–Palestinian diplomacy, the Bush administration has introduced the latest and in some respects oddest idea for achieving peace, the shelf agreement. Its logic is straightforward. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and President Mahmoud Abbas should conclude a final peace treaty by the end of 2008. The Israeli and Palestinian people subsequently would ratify it in near-simultaneous referenda or elections. And then, once approved, the treaty ought simply to be put aside (on the aforementioned shelf) until circumstances permit it to be carried out. No agreement can be fully put into effect immediately upon signature. But whereas a phased agreement includes an approved schedule, with starting date and endpoint, implementation of a shelf agreement would depend on an assessment by the parties that specified conditions have been met.

Jimmy Carter: Israel must talk to everyone
By Akiva Eldar, Haaretz, April 14, 2008
Former United States president Jimmy Carter, who arrived in Israel Sunday, rejects the criticism he’s been subjected to over his planned meeting with Hamas leader Khaled Meshal. According to Carter, peace cannot be achieved without talking to all the relevant people, and he will use the meeting to promote efforts to release Gilad Shalit and to uncover the fate of soldiers Eldad Regev and Ehud Goldwasser. Carter told Haaretz Sunday in an exclusive interview that he intends to check Meshal’s willingness to accept the Arab League peace initiative. Carter says that acceptance of this plan by Hamas would be a very positive step.

Carter said ignoring a large segment of the Palestinian people would make it impossible to achieve peace.

Carter also said no one from the U.S. State Department had tried to dissuade him from holding the meetings, and that they were aware of his schedule. “Before I went to Nepal, I put in a call for Condoleeza Rice just to have a personal conversation with her about my plans,” Carter said. “I went over the entire itinerary. She could not take my call because she was traveling in Europe, so she asked David Welch, who is the assistant secretary of state. We had a 20-minute conversation, which was very pleasant, never a single negative word and not a single request that I modify my itinerary.”

Carter said he understood the pressures on the presidential candidates to release statements critical of his meetings with Hamas. “I forgive them all and I understand their motivations,” he said.

Report: Israel uses mental torture
By Aron Heller, AP, April 14, 2008
A human rights group accused Israel on Sunday of stepping up its psychological torture of Palestinian suspects, in part by insinuating that their families would be hurt if they don’t cooperate.

The Shin Bet internal security agency, which conducts the interrogations, denied the allegations.

The Public Committee Against Torture in Israel made the accusations in an 86-page report that examined six cases over the past year. It said Israel has put more emphasis on psychological torture since Israel’s Supreme Court restricted the use of physical torture in a 1999 ruling.

In one case, the group said, Israeli agents convinced a suspect his wife had also been arrested and tortured, driving him to attempt suicide. In another, they detained a couple for an extended period, tortured them physically, and withheld information about their two young children to try to break them, the report said.

In Iraq, a quiet philosophical retreat for U.S. military
By Julian E. Barnes, Los Angeles Times, April 13, 2008
As last year’s troop buildup was being planned, the Joint Chiefs of Staff began pushing for a more pragmatic — and modest — approach that de-emphasized democracy, according to military officers.

A Joint Campaign Plan for Iraq developed by Petraeus and Crocker also adopted a more realistic approach. That document, setting out U.S. military and diplomatic strategies, emphasizes security over good government, said John R. Martin, a retired colonel who worked on it.

“I hate to say it was pushed off, because democracy is such an important thing. But, in effect, that was what happened,” Martin said. “We said we have got to get security first, and then some of the political progress can occur. So in that sense, it was pushed to a lower priority.”

The Iraq wars
By Juan Cole, Boston Globe, April, 2008

At last week’s Iraq hearings on Capitol Hill, amid the talk of progress, withdrawal timetables, and casualty numbers, one crucial question was largely ignored: How much of Iraq can American troops really expect to fix?

American leaders and media tend to focus on the insurgency in Baghdad and its environs, but that’s only a small part of the total picture. When the United States toppled Saddam Hussein’s regime in 2003, it engendered a series of power struggles around the country.

Today Iraq is embroiled in three separate civil wars, only one of which has involved US troops in a significant way. These three conflicts have generated most of the country’s violence, and are intensively reported on in the Iraqi press, which I follow closely.

The next president will inherit these ongoing Iraqi and regional conflicts – and the vexing question of how, and whether, America can address them. Amid the high-level generalizations about the Iraq war, these are the conflicts the candidates – and the country – really need to be considering. [complete article]

Palestinians versus Tibetans – a double standard
By Gideon Levy, Haaretz, April 13, 2008
Israelis have no moral right to fight the Chinese occupation of Tibet. The president of the Israeli Friends of the Tibetan People, the psychologist Nahi Alon, who was involved in the murder of two Palestinians in Gaza in 1967 – as was revealed in Haaretz Magazine last weekend – chose to make his private “atonement” by fighting to free Tibet, of all places. He is not alone among Israelis calling to stop the occupation – but not ours. No small number of other good Israelis have recently joined the wave of global protest that broke out over the Olympics, set to take place in Beijing this summer. It is easy; it engenders no controversy – who would not be in favor of liberating Tibet? But that is not the fight that Israeli human rights supporters should be waging.

To fight for Tibet, Israel needs no courage, because there is no price to pay. On the contrary, this is part of a fashionable global trend, almost as much as the fight against global warming or the poaching of sea lions.

These fights are just, and must be undertaken. But in Israel they are deluxe fights, which are unthinkable. When one comes to the fight with hands that are collectively, and sometimes individually, so unclean, it is impossible to protest a Chinese occupation. Citizens of a country that maintains a military subjugation in its backyard that is no less cruel than that of the Chinese, and by some parameters even more so, and against which there is practically no more protest here, have no justification in denouncing another occupation. Citizens of a country that is entirely tainted by the occupation – a national, ongoing project that involves all sectors of the population to some extent, directly or indirectly – cannot wash their hands and fight another occupation, when a half-hour from their homes, horrors no less terrible are taking place for which they have much greater responsibility.

Hunger. Strikes. Riots. The food crisis bites
By Robin McKie and Heather Stewart, The Observer, April 13, 2008
Across the world, a food crisis is now unfolding with frightening speed. Hundreds of millions of men and women who, only a few months ago, were able to provide food for their families have found rocketing prices of wheat, rice and cooking oil have left them facing the imminent prospect of starvation. The spectre of catastrophe now looms over much of the planet.

In less than a year, the price of wheat has risen 130 per cent, soya by 87 per cent and rice by 74 per cent. According to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation, there are only eight to 12 weeks of cereal stocks in the world, while grain supplies are at their lowest since the 1980s.

How to defuse a human bomb
By Drake Bennett, Boston Globe, April 13, 2008
Saudi Arabia is one of the last places on earth one would expect to find an art therapy course for convicted terrorists. The kingdom, after all, is known for an unforgiving approach to criminal justice: thieves risk having their hands amputated, “sexual deviance” is punishable by flogging, and drug dealers are beheaded.

And yet, over the past few years, jailed Saudi jihadis, led by therapists and motivated by the possibility of a shortened sentence, have been putting paint to paper to work their way through – and hopefully leave behind – the thoughts and feelings that drove them to support violent strains of Islam.

Extremist art therapy, it turns out, is only part of a new global movement to “deradicalize” terrorists. The Saudi program, a multipronged effort, is among the biggest and best-funded, but in recent years a growing number of Muslim countries and countries with large Muslim minorities have started similar ones: Indonesia, Malaysia, Yemen, Jordan, Egypt, Singapore, Great Britain, and the Netherlands among them. Last September, the US-led military coalition in Iraq created an ambitious program of its own to handle its more than 24,000 detainees. And psychologists and political scientists are starting to take an interest in the topic.

Target: Bin Laden
By Steve Coll, Los Angeles Times, April 13, 2008
Osama bin Laden lives among friends, follows news on satellite television or the Internet and reads books about American foreign policy; this much can be safely inferred from his periodic audio and video statements. His latest topical punditry surfaced just a few weeks ago on jihadi websites when he addressed violence in Gaza and the pope’s travels.

Because of his passable grasp of current events, Bin Laden may well understand what many Americans do not: that he is more likely to be killed or captured during the next year or so than at any time since late 2001, when he escaped U.S. warplanes bombing him in eastern Afghanistan, at Tora Bora.

This welcome change in probabilities has almost nothing to do with the Bush administration’s counter-terrorism strategy, which remains rudderless and starved of resources because of the war in Iraq. It is a consequence, instead, of dramatic political changes in Pakistan, where Bin Laden is believed to be hiding and where Al Qaeda’s local mistakes and the restoration of civilian democracy have combined to make him considerably less safe.

Gaza’s unemployed have handouts or Hamas
By Griff Witte, Washington Post, April 13, 2008
Less than a year ago, Abu Hammed worked in a garment factory, sewing pants.

Now he totes a Kalashnikov assault rifle as a Hamas police officer, imposing order in this eerily desolate city on behalf of the armed Islamist movement.

Given a choice, he’d rather be back in the factory.

“If the Israelis opened the crossings again, I would leave the police and become a tailor again,” said Abu Hammed, who would give only his nickname for fear of a Hamas reprisal. “The salary is better in the factory.”

Yet the factory jobs are long gone. Ten months into an Israeli siege that followed the Hamas takeover of Gaza last June, 90 percent of the factories that once existed in this narrow coastal strip have closed, driving tens of thousands of people out of work. Those who lose their jobs face a stark choice: stay at home and survive on international aid, or try to work for the only employer around that’s still hiring — Hamas.

Don’t know much about Tibetan history
By Elliot Sperling, New York Times, April 13, 2008
For many Tibetans, the case for the historical independence of their land is unequivocal. They assert that Tibet has always been and by rights now ought to be an independent country. China’s assertions are equally unequivocal: Tibet became a part of China during Mongol rule and its status as a part of China has never changed. Both of these assertions are at odds with Tibet’s history.

The Tibetan view holds that Tibet was never subject to foreign rule after it emerged in the mid-seventh century as a dynamic power holding sway over an Inner Asian empire. These Tibetans say the appearance of subjugation to the Mongol rulers of the Yuan Dynasty in the 13th and 14th centuries, and to the Manchu rulers of China’s Qing Dynasty from the 18th century until the 20th century, is due to a modern, largely Western misunderstanding of the personal relations among the Yuan and Qing emperors and the pre-eminent lamas of Tibet. In this view, the lamas simply served as spiritual mentors to the emperors, with no compromise of Tibet’s independent status.

In China’s view, the Western misunderstandings are about the nature of China: Western critics don’t understand that China has a history of thousands of years as a unified multinational state; all of its nationalities are Chinese. The Mongols, who entered China as conquerers, are claimed as Chinese, and their subjugation of Tibet is claimed as a Chinese subjugation.

War at the Pentagon
By Jim Hoagland, Washington Post, April 13, 2008
The most intense arguments over U.S. involvement in Iraq do not flare at this point on Capitol Hill or on the campaign trail. Those rhetorical battles pale in comparison to the high-stakes struggle being waged behind closed doors at the Pentagon.

On one side are the “fight-win guys,” as some describe themselves. They are led by Gen. David Petraeus and other commanders who argue that the counterinsurgency struggle in Iraq must be pursued as the military’s top priority and ultimately resolved on U.S. terms.

In this view, the Middle East is the most likely arena for future conflicts, and Iraq is the prototype of the war that U.S. forces must be trained and equipped to win.

Arrayed against them are the uniformed chiefs of the military services who foresee a “broken army” emerging from an all-out commitment to Iraq that neglects other needs and potential conflicts. It is time to rebuild Army tank battalions, Marine amphibious forces and other traditional instruments of big-nation warfare — while muddling through in Iraq.

The Petraeus-Crocker show gets the hook
By Frank Rich, New York Times, April 13, 2008
The night before last week’s Senate hearings on our “progress” in Iraq, a goodly chunk of New York’s media and cultural establishment assembled in the vast lobby of the Museum of Modern Art. There were cocktails; there were waiters wielding platters of hors d’oeuvres; there was a light sprinkling of paparazzi. Then there was a screening. We trooped like schoolchildren to the auditorium to watch a grueling movie about the torture at Abu Ghraib.

Not just any movie, but “Standard Operating Procedure,” the new investigatory documentary by Errol Morris, one of our most original filmmakers. It asks the audience not just to revisit the crimes in graphic detail but to confront in tight close-up those who both perpetrated and photographed them. Because Mr. Morris has a complex view of human nature, he arouses a certain sympathy for his subjects, much as he did at times for Robert McNamara, the former defense secretary, in his Vietnam film, “Fog of War.”

More sympathy, actually. Only a few bad apples at the bottom of the chain of command took the fall for Abu Ghraib. No one above the level of staff sergeant went to jail, and no one remotely in proximity to a secretary of defense has been held officially accountable. John Yoo, the author of the notorious 2003 Justice Department memo rationalizing torture, has happily returned to his tenured position as a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley. So when Mr. Morris brings you face to face with Lynndie England — now a worn, dead-eyed semblance of the exuberant, almost pixie-ish miscreant in the Abu Ghraib snapshots — you’re torn.

The Army is spending millions to hire ‘experts’ to analyze Iraqi society. If only they could find some
By Dan Ephron and Silvia Spring, Newsweek, April 21, 2008
Though he wears Army fatigues and carries a gun, Griffin is a civilian, part of a controversial program known as the Human Terrain System. According to a Pentagon blueprint from 2006, the idea is to recruit academics whose area expertise and language skills can help the military wage a smarter counterinsurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan. These specialists, among other things, are meant to map the population of towns and villages, identify the clans that matter and the fault lines within them, then advise U.S. commanders on the right approach for leveraging local support.

But implementation of the $40 million project, which was handed to British Aerospace Engineering (BAE) without a bidding process, has fallen short, according to more than a dozen people involved in the program and interviewed by NEWSWEEK. Of 19 Human Terrain members operating in five teams in Iraq, fewer than a handful can be described loosely as Middle East experts, and only three speak Arabic. The rest are social scientists or former GIs who, like Griffin, are transposing research skills from their unrelated fields at home.

For their services, the anthropologists get up to $300,000 annually while posted abroad—a salary that is six times higher than the national average for their field. (The teams also include some active-duty service members who are paid their regular military salary.) Most team members admit they are hampered by an inability to conduct real fieldwork in a war zone. Some complain that the four-month training they underwent in the States was often a waste of time. Matt Tompkins, who returned home in January after five months in Iraq, said he thought his team provided helpful input to its brigade, but the contribution was more superficial than planners of the program had conceived. “Without the ability to truly immerse yourself in the population, existing knowledge of the culture … is critical,” he said in an e-mail. “Lacking that, we were basically an open-source research cell.”

Video link plucks Afghan detainees from black hole of isolation
By Carlotta Gall, New York Times, April 13, 2008
Early this year, a 10-year-old Afghan named Esrarullah got his first chance in months to see his father, who had been held since last May at Bagram Air Base outside Kabul. It was not in person, but in a video conference call, and the boy was so overcome, he clutched the phone to his ear and stared mutely at the screen.

Afghan families like his are traveling from distant provinces and turning up by the hundreds for a similar chance to get a glimpse of loved ones who have been held at the American base for months, sometimes years, without charges or legal redress.

It is a measure of their desperation for any word on the fate of their husbands, fathers and brothers that so many families have come so quickly.

In the three months since the program began, about 500 calls have been made. On a recent morning a dozen families gathered to wait their turn before the video screens provided by the American military and set up in three small booths at the Kabul offices of the International Committee of the Red Cross.

Afghan detainees sent home to face closed-door trials
By Candace Rondeaux, Josh White and Julie Tate, Washington Post, April 13, 2008
Afghan detainees held at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, are being transferred home to face closed-door trials in which they are often denied access to defense attorneys and the U.S. evidence being used against them, according to Afghan officials, lawyers and international rights groups.

Since October 2006, the United States has transferred approximately 50 detainees out of Guantanamo to the custody of the Afghan government, part of a policy aimed at reducing the prison population and ultimately closing the facility. Once home, many of the Afghans have been left in a legal limbo not unlike the one they confronted while in U.S. custody.

“These people have been thrown into a deeply flawed process that convicts people on inadequate evidence and breaks numerous procedural rules of Afghan law and human rights standards,” said Jonathan Horowitz, an investigator at One World Research, a public interest investigation firm that works with attorneys and advocacy groups on human rights cases and has monitored some of the detainees’ trials.

Administration set to use new spy program in U.S.
By Spencer S. Hsu, Washington Post, April 12, 2008
The Bush administration said yesterday that it plans to start using the nation’s most advanced spy technology for domestic purposes soon, rebuffing challenges by House Democrats over the idea’s legal authority.

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said his department will activate his department’s new domestic satellite surveillance office in stages, starting as soon as possible with traditional scientific and homeland security activities — such as tracking hurricane damage, monitoring climate change and creating terrain maps.

Sophisticated overhead sensor data will be used for law enforcement once privacy and civil rights concerns are resolved, he said. The department has previously said the program will not intercept communications.

Elitist my ass
By Erin Kotecki Vest, Huffington Post, April 12, 2008
This former Midwest girl is telling you Obama is not being ‘elite’ or ‘out of touch’ -he could NOT be MORE in touch. He’s LISTENING and understanding that many of us who moved away and many of us that stayed are angry, frustrated, disappointed, disillusioned, and UNEMPLOYED.

War-weary Pa. voters question exit strategy
AP, April 12, 2008
Both candidates promise to end the war, but in a state with a remarkable history of venerating military service, how that end should be achieved weighs heavily with many voters. Polling shows Democratic voters overwhelmingly disapprove of the war. What divides them is a quick withdrawal versus a longer drawdown of troops.

Strategic confusion
By Brian Katulis and Matthew Duss, Baltimore Sun, April 11, 2008
In their testimony before Congress this week, Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker and General David Petraeus portrayed recent clashes between competing Iraqi factions as a fight between the Iraqi government and Iranian-supported groups looking to undermine that government. This simplistic “good guys versus bad guys” depiction masks a much more complicated reality in which U.S. policy in Iraq unwittingly strengthens Iran’s overall hand there and around the region.

A cleric, a pol, a warrior
By Patrick Cockburn, Los Angeles Times, April 12, 2008
The iraqi government has decided that the moment has come to crush the Mahdi Army and the followers of Muqtada Sadr once and for all. Despite its failure to eliminate his militiamen in Basra at the end of March, the government, with American backing, is determined to try again, according to senior Iraqi officials.

It is a dangerous strategy for both Prime Minister Nouri Maliki and the U.S. Sadr remains one of the most powerful and revered leaders of the Shiite community — and the Shiites make up 60% of Iraq. What’s more, the 34-year-old Sadr is not exactly the mercurial “firebrand” or “renegade” cleric portrayed by journalistic cliche-mongers; rather, he has repeatedly shown himself to be a cautious and experienced political operator.

9 propositions on the U.S. air war for terror
By Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch, April 11, 2008
Let’s start with a few simple propositions.

First, the farther away you are from the ground, the clearer things are likely to look, the more god-like you are likely to feel, the less human those you attack are likely to be to you. How much more so, of course, if you, the “pilot,” are actually sitting at a consol at an air base near Las Vegas, identifying a “suspect” thousands of miles away via video monitor, “following” that suspect into a house, and then letting loose a Hellfire missile from a Predator drone cruising somewhere over Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, or the tribal areas of Pakistan.