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.