Troopergate and Palin

Witness flips in troopergate.

A private contractor now admits under oath that she was pressured by Palin's office over Palin's attempt vindictively to fire her ex-brother-in-law.
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Al-Maliki: US Cannot Afford to Stay; Physicians to Carry Weapons

In an interview with the Associated Press, PM Nuri al-Maliki warned that the future is dark if Iraq and the US do not agree on a security pact. And without a pact, he said, all the security progress made in the last year would be at risk. He points out that the alternative is to go back to the UN security council for an extension of Chapter 7 authorization of foreign troops in Iraq, and that UNSC approval is no longer assured because Russia may be in a bad mood after the Georgia tiff. He says Iraq still insists that US troops who are off base and not on a military mission, who commit crimes in Iraq, must be tried in Iraqi courts.

Al-Maliki, who wants a timetable for US withdrawal by the end of 2010, ended the interview with a clever appeal over Bush's head to the American public:

' "If I had enough funds to assist the American economy, I would do all that I can. But unfortunately Iraq cannot solve America's economic problems.

"But what Iraq can do is take up more responsibility security-wise here inside Iraq. And I have told the Americans repeatedly that we are ready to take up responsibility here in Iraq so there are less losses, a decreased number of American lives lost, and I am prepared to present this case before the American people. ...'

Maybe al-Maliki has been reading John Gray, who writes, "The global financial crisis will see the US falter in the same way the Soviet Union did when the Berlin Wall came down. The era of American dominance is over . . ."

Al-Maliki is reminding an economically prostrate America that it cannot afford to buck him on the troop withdrawal timetable. Literally cannot afford! As in, best you go home now and let us take care of security, and save what little money you have left. And, oh, thanks for forking over the $1 trillion while you still had it . . . I guess he is not afraid of McCain's forlorn hope of keeping a US military base on Iraqi soil (expensive!).

To paraphrase T.S. Elliot, "This is the way the [war] ends/ This is the way the [war] ends/This is the way the [war] ends/Not with a bang but a whimper."

The Iraqi government will permit physicians to carry firearms. The decree is a bid to tempt back to Iraq 8,000 medical doctors who have fled the country because they were targeted by guerrillas hoping to destabilize the country by crippling its services. The problem I see with this decree is that many of the physicians have been personally threatened by armed militias. So you'd have to believe you were a quick draw, a good shot, and able to mow down several guys with AK-47s before they could get you, before you would go back.

This sort of stunt, and the situation it is meant to address, both prove how terrible is the situation in Iraq still. If it were 'calm,' the physicians would come back without firearms. If the police and government amounted to anything, the doctors would not have to pack heat themselves. Another thing that works against the physicians' return is that they can survive in Jordan and Syria. Even though they cannot get formal work permits,they can hire on to clinics as 'consultants'. If they have capital, they can also invest locally (in Jordan at least, an investment of $100,000 gets you a residency visa).

Sunday's bombings in Baghdad, and the killing of nearly 100 civilians in Baghdad during Ramadan, raise questions for Iraqis. Is this increase in violence a secular trend, a sign of deterioration, or is it just that guerrillas have more spare time during the month of fasting (when typically people do not work full work days, and lots of people circulate for dinner (i.e. breaking-the-fast) parties. Although this Ramadan was 40% less deadly than last year, it was also more deadly than July and August.

Iraq is buying 12 reconnaissance planes from the US. This purchase is a step toward the Iraqi government regaining control of Iraq's skies. Now that it has more of an armored corps in the army, it needs fighter jets and bombers to provide air cover for them. The US is not ready to relinquish Iraqi air space, but PM Nuri al-Maliki probably sees this purchase as a step in that direction.

McClatchy reports political violence in Iraq on Monday:

' Baghdad

- Mortars hit Hurriyah neighborhood (northwest Baghdad). Five people were injured with one house was damaged.

- Mortars hit Ghazaliyah neighborhood (northwest Baghdad) near Um Al-Qura mosque. Three people were injured with some houses nearby were damaged.

- Mortars hit Abu Ghraib (west of Baghdad). One person was injured with two houses were damaged.

- Police found one dead body in Saidiyah in Karkh bank (south Baghdad) today.

Mosul

- Sunday night, a bomb was put under a taxi car detonated in Abu Tamam intersection in Mosul city. Only the taxi driver was injured in that incident.

- Around 5:30 pm a car bomb detonated in Nabi Yunis neighborhood in Mosul before the Iraqi army experts defuse it. Nine people were injured including 5 Peshmerga members of the PDK.'

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Karzai: Civilian Gov't of Pakistan better against Terrorism; Pakistan Bajaur Campaign Leaves 15 Dead

Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai believes that the new civilian government will take more effective steps against the Pakistani Taliban on the Afghan border.

This stance is the opposite of that of John McCain, who supported military dictator Pervez Musharraf (who was forced to resign as president in August under threat of impeachment).

Pakistani forces claim to have killed 15 Taliban north of Khar in the Bajaur tribal agency overnight. The fighting in this northernmost of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) is said to have displaced 20,000 individuals to Kunar Province in Afghanistan, as well as hundreds of thousands of local residents to elsewhere in Pakistan.

In a reversal of charges, Pakistan is now saying that Pakistani Taliban in Bajaur are receiving aid and volunteers from Afghanistan. Most often the Afghanistan and Pakistan governments have charged that the Tehrik-i Taliban of Pakistan has aided Afghan Taliban mounting attacks on NATO troops.

Aljazeera English reports on the Bajaur battle:


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Kaptur: Playing Wall Street Bailout

Representative Marcy Kaptur (D-Ohio) on how the Reality Game, "Wall Street Bailout," is played:



See also Chalmers Johnson at Tomdispatch.com on the Pentagon Bailout Fraud.
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Bombings in Baghdad Kill 34, Wound 100; Arab-Kurdish Violence in Diyala

A wave of deadly bombings and other attacks swept Baghdad on Sunday, killing nearly three dozen persons and wounding over 100.

The attacks on Shiite neighborhoods were likely intended to remind the Iraqi public on the eve of Eid al-Fitr (the celebration of the end of the fasting month of Ramadan) that the Sunni guerrilla movement is still active and has not been defeated.

The situation in Iraq is dire, and the discourse about Iraq in the presidential campaign is often disconnected from reality. McCain is asserting that "victory" is at hand and rewriting his own history of support for Bush's invasion and policies there. Now the McCain people are trying to claim that McCain called for the resignation of former secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld, which he certainly did not.

And, the McCain call for "victory," meaning an Iraq that can police its own borders, begs the question of what those borders even are. ("Kurdistan" is not a settled place). See below.

The attacks come days after the Iraqi parliament finally approved enabling legislation for provincial elections. The parliamentarians agreed to postpone elections in the disputed oil province of Kirkuk.

I have long been a proponent of early provincial elections. The Sunni Arab provinces have never had proper elections since the January 2005 polls were boycotted because Bush leveled Fallujah. The elections could create a new post-Baath political elite in the Sunni Arab provinces that has legitimacy and actually represents big constituencies. Some of the trouble in Diyala comes from minority Shiite dominance of a majority Sunni province. If the al-Maliki government wants to find a Sunni negotiating partner (which is still unclear), the provincial leaders to be elected next winter could fit the bill. Some of them will go on to national political careers. A lot of Sunnis are still secular, and could begin the process of moving away from religious fundamentalist parties always dominating.

The likely emergence of significant political rivals among the Sunnis would cause the fundamentalist vigilantes to redouble their efforts to destabilize Iraq further.

On the other hand,that parliament had to postpone elections in Kirkuk is a very bad sign, as is the military and paramilitary conflict between Arabs and Kurds.

Kurds are reversing Saddam's ethnic cleansing drive of earlier decades, returning and expelling Arabs. Not all Kurds going to such regions are returnees, and not all the Arabs being forced out are internal migrants.

Iraqi police and Kurdish paramilitary members seem to have had a shoot-out in Jalaula on Sunday that left a Kurdish politician dead.

In nearby Sa'adiya, a Kurdish mayor was wounded in a bombing.

McClatchy reports details of political violence in Iraq on Sunday:

' Baghdad

- Around 8 a.m. a roadside bomb targeted an Iraqi army vehicle in Mansour neighborhood, killing one soldier and injuring two soldiers and a civilian.

- Around 1 p.m. American soldiers searched an empty house in Zayuna neighborhood and shot randomly, injuring two civilians in the area, Iraqi police said. U.S. military said they had no information about the incident.

- Around 5:30 p.m. a parked car bomb exploded in a busy market in Shurta Rabaa neighborhood, southwest Baghdad, killing 12 civilians and injuring 35 others.

- Around 5:30 p.m. a bomb planted in a car exploded on a main road near Al Bayaa neighborhood, killing one and injuring one.

- Around 7 p.m. a parked car bomb exploded in the busy market area of Karrada neighborhood in central Baghdad, followed by a roadside bomb that killed 19 civilians and injured 72 others.

- Police found two dead bodies throughout Baghdad, one near Al Rasheed Camp and one in Hurriyah.

Diyala

- Around 9 a.m. a roadside bomb targeted Ahmed Samir Zargush, the mayor of Al Saidiyah town, about 50 miles east of Baquba. Zargush was injured along with three of his bodyguards and two civilians.

Nineveh

- Gunmen killed one citizen, a Christian, in Al Baladiyat neighborhood and in another incident gunmen killed a man and injured his brother in Mosul.'

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Daragahi: Damascus Bombing Payback from Radical Sunnis

These bombings in Baghdad follow a major such attack in Damascus, Syria, which was probably carried out by radical revivalist Sunnis ("Salafis") to punish the Syrian regime for cracking down on their movements, both into Iraq and between Lebanon and Syria. The Syrian regime, as Borzou Daragahi points out, is also a strong backer of the Shiite Hizbullah militia and at the same time has been negotiating with Israel via Turkey. The Baath leaders of Syria, as secularists from an Alawi (heterodox Shiite) background, were already seen as infidels worthy of death by the radical Sunnis. But this list of charges against them would drive radical Salafis to violence.

Aljzaeera English reports on the Damascus bombing:



Joshua Landis has more.
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Obama Won: Gallup/USA Today Poll; 52% Say Obama best to Fix Problems, vs. 35% for McCain

In addition to those two snap polls done just after the debate on Friday by CNN and by CBS, there is now further evidence that Obama won the first debate handily.

A Gallup/ USA Today poll of 701 viewers of the debate done on Saturday found that 46% of viewers said Barack Obama did better; 34% said McCain did. Obviously, there is still a big group of viewers who saw it as a tie or could not decide.

But it is not so important who they thought was the better debater. The big news in this poll is about economic competence, on which over half of viewers gave the nod to Obama while only a little over a third did to McCain

Obama picked up 16 points on the question of how favorably the public views him, whereas for McCain it was a wash. And in this poll viewers were overwhelmingly more enthusiastic about Obama as a steward of the US economy than about McCain

Other scores:

Which candidate offered the best proposals for change to solve America's problems?

Obama 52%
McCain 35%

Obama made great strides in public acceptance according to this poll. Although a little over half of viewers said their view of him did not change, 30% said they became more favorable toward Obama after seeing the debate. He lost ground with only 14%

The poll did not advance McCain's campaign. 56% said it did not change their view of him, and 21% said it gave them a more unfavorable view of him, while he improved with another 21%. Since McCain was already behind in the polls going into the debate, this result is very bad for him.

While McCain was dead in the water on favorability, he actually lost ground on perceived economic competence. %37 percent said they had less confidence in his ability to fix the economy after saying the debate, while only 24% said they had more. These figures were almost the reverse in Obama's case, which is to say, he gained 8 points on this issue while McCain lost 15.

On national security issues it was a tie, which is, again, very bad news for McCain! Not so long ago the Republicans were attempting to portray Sarah Palin as having more executive and foreign policy experience than Obama! It was their hope that McCain would come across as a wise elder statesman and Obama as uninformed and naive. Instead, Americans see Obama as McCain's peer on foreign policy issues!

The poll has a plus or minus margin of error of 4%. That means that the overwhelming margin of victory for Obama on competence in problem-solving and ability to deal with the economy, and the massive loss of confidence in McCain on the economy, are very solid findings.

It seems to me likely that the stunt McCain pulled, of trying to cancel the debates, raised questions in the public's mind about his competence. His pick of Palin as running mate (about which he unwisely boasted in the debate) might have shored up the Republican base a little, but that is now only 33% of the electorate, and she will hurt him with everyone else. That 52-35 spread on competence in my view is the big takeaway from this poll.

Gallup is a fine polling agency and I am sure it did its best to weight the respondents by age, income and region. The USA Today article did not provide that information. But the likelihood is that they in fact over-represented the Republicans, because youth and African-Americans are harder to poll, with many of them first-time registrants, and they may well come out for Obama this year, voting in unprecedented numbers because they now finally feel they have a stake in the system, with this candidate.

These results should not make Democrats sanguine. Kerry won his debates with W., but W. went on to destroy Iraq further and then bring down the whole American economy around our ears.

We could still be at war with Iran next year this time, with Captain McCain lobbying nukes at Isfahan from his sub in the Persian Gulf, with all the unpleasant backlash that would entail.
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Saudi Oil Moguls fear Hybrid Cars

Saudi Arabia wants lower petroleum prices. As a country with enormous reserves, Riyadh would like to preserve their value. In contrast, countries like Algeria with relatively shallow reserves want to get top dollar for their petroleum while it lasts.

Businessweek provides the telling quote:

' Any threat to oil's leading role as a source of energy is a big worry for a country that sits on reserves of some 260 billion barrels. "We are concerned about the permanent destruction of demand," says a senior Saudi official. "Those who buy hybrid vehicles are not going back to SUVs." '

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Iraqi Hopes for US Troop Withdrawal

One of the things that struck me about Friday night's debate on the time line for troop withdrawal was that McCain appeared to believe that how long US troops remain in Iraq and at what strength is a unilateral matter dictated by Washington. The government of prime minister Nuri al-Maliki is already trying to negotiate a timetable for US withdrawal as part of the proposed security agreement. A majority of parliament certainly supports a timetable.

Indeed, the Iraqi government wanted a 2010 deadline for withdrawal. Bush pushed for a delay until 2015 in part because he was afraid that agreeing to 2010 would make McCain look bad. The Iraqis were forced to accept 2011.

There is even less tolerance for a long term foreign troop presence among ordinary Iraqis, thousands of whom have lost relatives to US military operations. Aljazeera English reports on the death of a respected Iraqi academic in Baquba, shot at a US checkpoint.



One exception to this yearning to see the Americans go is the some of the Kurds, who as a minority trying to remain independent of Baghdad and able to confront Turkey. Some Kurds would very much like to keep US troops in Iraq. This Kurdish aspiration explains Iraqi foreign minister Hoshyar Zebari's continual announcements about there being no timetable in the security agreement. Clearly, the Shiite Arabs do want a timetable.

It is not just Iraqis. About 60 percent of Americans want a timeline for US troop withdrawal from Iraq.

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Palin Says She did Not Have Money to Travel in Youth; But She went to College in Hawaii!

On seeing this part of the Couric interview of Palin, I suddenly remembered something about her:

' Couric: In preparing for this conversation, a lot of our viewers … and Internet users wanted to know why you did not get a passport until last year. And they wondered if that indicated a lack of interest and curiosity in the world.

Palin: I'm not one of those who maybe came from a background of, you know, kids who perhaps graduate college and their parents give them a passport and give them a backpack and say go off and travel the world.

No, I've worked all my life. In fact, I usually had two jobs all my life until I had kids. I was not a part of, I guess, that culture. The way that I have understood the world is through education, through books, through mediums that have provided me a lot of perspective on the world.'

Video here:



But, but . . .

she went to college for a while in Hawaii!. Do you know how long it takes to fly to Hawaii from Alaska? And do you know how expensive it is to live in Hawaii? Milk is $5 a gallon (not many places to put cows on the islands, so it is imported).

It is a five and a half hour flight from Anchorage to Honolulu, i.e. an hour less than the flight from JFK to London.

So Palin seemed to have money to gallivant around plenty, hopping from college to college over 6 years. Maybe she held down part time jobs as an undergraduate. So do lots of people. Studies show that such students get better grades because they have to organize their time.

I just don't think she was interested.

And, if you think she ever read any books about foreign countries, raise your hand.
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Debate Fact Check 5

About that claim by McCain that he warned about the mortgage crisis:

McCain: "But -- but let me -- let me point out, I also warned about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and warned about corporate greed and excess, and CEO pay, and all that. A lot of us saw this train wreck coming."

In fact, he has already admitted that he did not see the financial meltdown coming.

"But I don't really know of anybody,with the exception of a handful, who said, 'wait a minute, this thing is getting out of hand and is over-heating.' I'd like to be able to tell you I anticipated it, but I have to give you straight talk, I did not."


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Debate Fact Check 3

Did Henry Kissinger advise direct talks with Iran at the highest levels?

Yes.

Kissinger gave an interview with Bloomberg Television News Service on March 14, 2008:

' "One should be prepared to negotiate, and I think we should be prepared to negotiate about Iran," Kissinger . . . said in an interview with Bloomberg Television. Asked whether he meant the U.S. should hold direct talks, Kissinger, 84, responded: "Yes, I think we should." . . . '

Not only did he advocate such talks, he personally engaged in them!

' "I've been in semi-private, totally private talks with Iranians," he said. "They've had put before them approaches that with a little flexibility on their part would, in my view, surely lead to negotiations." '

Kissinger added:

' "It's not really the willingness to talk, it's so far the inability to define what we are trying to accomplish," Kissinger said. "The negotiations depend on a balance of incentives and penalties. Have we got those right at every point? Not at every point." . . . The Nobel Peace Prize winner said any direct talks between the U.S. and Iran on issues such as the nuclear dispute would be most likely to succeed if they first involved only diplomatic staff and progressed to the level of secretary of state before the heads of state meet.'

So Kissinger envisaged the heads of state meeting. N.B. that would be the US president and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei (Ahmadinejad as president is a lesser figure in the Iranian system.)

He explicitly said that the talks should begin "without conditions."

Kissinger did advise a progression from lower level to higher level, despite his call for no pre-conditions.

Kissinger didn't seem embarrassed at all by the kind of considerations McCain instanced in the debate, of legitimating the Iranian government and the way it talks dirty about Israel by a US president's meeting with its top leaders.

The difference is that Kissinger is a foreign policy realist and McCain is surrounding himself with Neoconservatives.
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Debate fact-check 2: The Surge

In the debate, McCain promised 'victory' in Iraq and praised the surge.

First of all, it isn't 'victory' if Baghdad's best hospital doesn't even have working elevators any more.

Second of all, the violence fell in Baghdad because the Sunnis were massacred or chased to Syria, leaving few mixed neighborhoods, not because of 'take, clear, hold' (which is in fact a tactic, not a strategy). Satellite pictures show Sunni Baghdad dark now.
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Fact-Checking 1

Fact-checking the debate (transcript available here).

For Pakistan and the controversy over McCain's ridiculous assertion that Pakistan was a 'failed state' in 1999 when Musharraf made his coup, see my "McCain's Holiday from History" from last February (the terms of the debate between McCain and Obama on these issues, interestingly hasn't changed).

But one thing that has changed is that Pakistan made its transition from military to civilian rule, a transition McCain was not enthusiastic about-- he supported military dictator Pervez Musharraf.

By the way, Nawaz Sharif, the former prime minister against whom Musharraf made the coup, is the leader of the major opposition party in parliament, the Muslim League. Isn't McCain dissing Nawaz Sharif big time, equating his term as prime minister with Somalia? Moreover, Musharraf kept the current president of Pakistan, Asaf Ali Zardari, in prison for several years and threatened his wife, Benazir Bhutto, with a jail sentence as well, as a way of keeping civilian politicians out of power.

Given this 'failed state' allegation against the civilian politicians now in power in Pakistan, hasn't McCain just screwed up any chance he had of a close working relationship with the new government?

I mean, it would be like saying that dictator Leonid Kuchma of the Ukraine was doing his best and had to act as he did in cracking down on dissent in the Ukraine because it was a failed state, and then saying you hope to have a good working relationship with dissident activist and now president Viktor Yushchenko today! (McCain probably would have adopted that stance if Kuchma had been a right-wing dictator instead of a Soviet holdover.

And, imagine, McCain accused Obama of poisoning relations with Pakistan by saying he'd take the shot at Bin Laden if we found him!
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Debate Fact Check 4

McCain said in the debate:

' So we have a long way to go in our intelligence services. We have to do a better job in human intelligence. And we've got to -- to make sure that we have people who are trained interrogators so that we don't ever torture a prisoner ever again.'

Last winter, McCain voted against a bill that would have disallowed waterboarding by the CIA.

US Intelligence Chief Mike McConnell has essentially admitted that waterboarding is torture.

The bill McCain rejected would have constrained CIA operatives from violating the interrogation techniques outlined in the Army Field Manual, a public document.

McCain wanted the CIA to continue to be able to deploy secretive interrogation techniques not mentioned in the Army manual. Of course, we don't know what those are or whether they meet the definition of torture. In any case, McCain had a chance to force Bush to stop waterboarding and he declined to take it.

McCain continues to say he is against waterboarding, which makes his vote hard to understand.

Here is McCain on Bill O'Reilly last May:

'CHANNEL "THE O'REILLY FACTOR" INTERVIEW WITH SENATOR JOHN MCCAIN
(R-AZ) INTERVIEWER: BILL O'REILLY SUBJECT: WATERBOARDING, IRAN, IRAQ WAR, PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN TIME: 8:37 P.M. EDT DATE: FRIDAY, MAY 9, 2008

(Begin videotaped interview.)

MR. O'REILLY: Let's take war on terror first. You're opposed to waterboarding.

SEN. MCCAIN: Yes.

MR. O'REILLY: And I disagree with you on that. I think the president of the United States, just the president, should have the legal authority to order waterboarding in extraordinary circumstances. Now, according to Tenet and to President Bush, used three times on Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, al-Nashiri and Abu Zubaydah. All three times, the men broke when they were waterboarded, and they gave out information, according to the Bush administration, that saved thousands of lives.

SEN. MCCAIN: Well, first of all, the scenario you're talking about is one million to one. Second of all, well, you know that when torture anybody, we know, that they'll give you things only that that they want you to --

MR. O'REILLY: These people gave up very good information.

SEN. MCCAIN: They gave up very bad information, too, according to some sources. But the point is, do you want to abrogate the Geneva Conventions? In the next war that we're in, if you want an American tortured, a service man or woman, by some foreign country when we're in another war and because we did it to the people in our captivity --

MR. O'REILLY: (Inaudible) -- not soldiers, though. They're not entitled to Geneva Conventions.

SEN. MCCAIN: Yes, they are.

MR. O'REILLY: No, not a one.

SEN. MCCAIN: The Geneva Conventions apply -- oh, in all due respect, I'll send you the information. Geneva applies to every person who is held in captivity by another country.

MR. O'REILLY: Even criminals?

SEN. MCCAIN: Even criminals if they are in combat. Now, there's a difference between uniformed combatant and non-uniformed combatant.

MR. O'REILLY: Do you think 9/11, they were combatant soldiers, though?

SEN. MCCAIN: I think we're in a war against radical Islamic extremism, and I think that war is all over the globe. And I believe, as Colin Powell does and these military officers who have spent an entire career, that the Geneva Conventions call for a prohibition --

MR. O'REILLY: They apply to everybody.

SEN. MCCAIN: -- a prohibition for inhumane, cruel and degrading treatment. And their concern is what happens to Americans in future wars if they are held captive.

MR. O'REILLY: Now, we're not fighting a nation now.

SEN. MCCAIN: We are fighting a conflict. And the Geneva Conventions have clear applications.

MR. O'REILLY: We'll have a gentleman's disagreement on that one. Dick Morris wants me to ask you this question.'

(Uh, O'Reilly cannot have a gentleman's agreement with anyone; he is not a gentleman. Even if it weren't for the Great Loofah Scandal, he obviously supports torture.)
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CBS Poll of Independents: Obama Won

Keith Olbermann just read out the results of a snap poll of 500 uncommitted voters commissioned by CBS News just after Friday night's presidential debate:

(The snap poll is here):

Obama won: 40%

Tie: 38%

McCain won: 22%


46% of independent voters said their opinion of Obama had improved

55% said McCain would make the right decisions about Iraq

49% said Obama would make the right decisions about Iraq

And:

' Forty-six percent of uncommitted voters said their opinion of Obama got better tonight. Thirty-two percent said their opinion of McCain got better.

Sixty-six percent of uncommitted voters think Obama would make the right decisions about the economy. Forty-two percent think McCain would.'

That's a pretty impressive 20-point lead for Obama on the economy, now the most important issue in the race!

I have to say I thought the debate was closer than that and am surprised these uncommitted voters gave it so lopsidedly to Obama.

TPM has a CNN snap poll of a mixed audience that was watching the debate:

These were the statistics from this snap poll that seemed to me most interesting:

' Next, regardless of which presidential candidate you support, please tell me if you think Barack Obama or John McCain would better handle each of the following issues:

• The war in Iraq: Obama 52%, McCain 47%

• Terrorism: McCain 49%, Obama 45%

• The economy: Obama 58%, McCain 37%

• The current financial crisis: Obama 54%, McCain 36%

Thinking about the following characteristics and qualities, please say whether you think each one better described Barack Obama or John McCain during tonight's debate:

• Was more intelligent: Obama 55%, McCain 30%

• Expressed his views more clearly: Obama 53%, McCain 36%

• Spent more time attacking his opponent: McCain 60%, Obama 23%

• Was more sincere and authentic: Obama 46%, McCain 38%

• Seemed to be the stronger leader: Obama 49%, McCain 43%

• Was more likeable: Obama 61%, McCain 26%

• Was more in touch with the needs and problems of people like you: Obama 62%, McCain 32% '

This audience trusted Obama much more on the economy than McCain, saw him as almost McCain's equal on security issues, and found Obama far more likeable and intelligent and strong.

Gee, maybe this really is a win for McCain.

Of course these snap polls are really flawed as social science instruments, and it will be the middle of next week before we get something more reliable. Unfortunately, the further polling will be contaminated by the bad economic news if there isn't a deal in congress soon.
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Palin's Russian Roulette

On being a Russia expert by virtue of contiguity:

"We have trade missions back and forth," Palin told Couric. "We, we do, it's very important when you consider even national security issues with Russia as Putin rears his head and comes into the airspace of the United States of America, where, where do they go? It's Alaska."

Putin rears his head and comes into US air space? Is she Dr. Strangelove?



The LAT blog notes,

'In fact, a veteran reporter from her home state, Hal Bernton, reported in the Seattle Times this month how Russian politicians had sought more contact with Palin, but in vain. The governor cut funding and her office's participation, it seems, in the Northern Forum, which promotes relations between regional governments in the Northern Hemisphere.'

Note that Russia is not in the top 20 trading partners of Alaska.



I am not sure if it is the witch of deceit or of inarticulateness that is afflicting her,but I don't think this guy finished the job:


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US Helicopters Fired on By Pakistani Troops

Pakistani troops fired on US military helicopters on Thursday. Pakistani officials insisted that the helicopters, which were not hit, had strayed into Pakistani territory. The Pentagon denied this charge. President Asaf Ali Zardari, meeting with US Secretary of State Condi Rice, attempted to paper over the incident, asseting that the Pakistani troops had only been firing flares to mark the border for their American colleagues.

If the Pakistani troops had managed to hit the US helicopters, the latter would have fired back, creating a serious international incident.

In fact,such an exchange of fire took place this past summer between the US and Pakistan, leaving 11 Pakistani troops dead. The cover story at the time had been that the Pakistanis were killed accidentally.

Apparently, along the border there has been a hot war going on for some time between US and Pakistani forces, since Pakistani border patrols support the Taliban over the foreigners.

These incidents do not affect cordial US-Pakistani relations, since everyone knows they are not ordered by the prime minister or president in Islamabad.

Afghanistan has called for joint patrols with Pakistan along their mutual borders.

Aljazeera English reports on the Afghan reaction to the US presidential elections. AFghan elders advise against increasing the number of foreign troops in the country.



NATO Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer answers questions about the mission in Afghanistan. Scheffer disagrees with the Afghans interviewed above, and wants more troops in Afghanistan. He predicts that Afghanistan will be a central issue for the next American president.


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McCain Rushes Campaign to Nowhere

Mao Zedong announced the adage by which John McCain is clearly living now: "The enemy advances, we retreat. / The enemy camps, we harass. / The enemy tires, we attack." Mao was describing not a conventional but a guerrilla war, and McCain is now unexpectedly playing the Filipino insurgents of 1899 to Obama's America. Guerrilla wars are waged by the weak but wily. McCain has all but announced that his conventional campaign has crashed and burned. We do not know if the prepping for the debate was a disaster, or it turns out you really can't let Palin be interviewed freely by normal people, or whether terror set in that a second great depression will turn the country starkly to the left for the foreseeable future.

Far from challenging Obama in swing states such as Michigan, Pennsylvania and Colorado, McCain is suddenly behind substantially in all three (McCain 45% to Obama's 49% in Colorado; McCain 44% to Obama 51% in Michigan).

McCain thus threw off his stiff officer's uniform and donned the silky black pyjamas of the guerrilla, beating a hasty retreat before the Obama surge. The retreat was dressed up as a "suspension" of the campaign and a "postponement" of the debate (a debate that would have been McCain's Waterloo. Forced to debate a charismatic policy wonk on top of economic issues on the very week of the financial meltdown, the economically challenged McCain would have gone down flaming to decisive defeat.

Thus McCain's Long March back to Washington and his suspension of a campaign he cannot win by conventional means.

The panic of Wall Street and its Republican ventriloquists is palpable. What must be running through their heads? Is this another 1929? Will they lose everything? Is Obama another FDR, with a New Deal in his coat pocket, which the public is now primed to demand? Is the Iraq gravy train really finished? Is universal health care an assured thing? What will happen to their vacation homes in the Hamptons, or the pieds-a-terre in Jamaica, or the private jet for spontaneous partying in Rio? How will they ever get ahead again if they have to pay their fair share of taxes? Could Obama and Biden preside over 16 years of Democratic Raj? Could their entire fate for decades have been sealed as early as Friday night?

Nothing is more difficult than to execute an orderly retreat in the face of superior enemy firepower. The troops are constantly tempted to break and run, in which case the army is lost. Mustafa Kemal (later Attaturk) pulled off a fighting retreat in northern Syria as the Ottomans withdrew to Anatolia, thereby saving his army.

McCain made several perhaps fatal mistakes on his Long March. He allowed Sarah Palin to be interviewed on television again, this time by Katie Couric. It is therefore McCain's fault that Palin was permitted to respond to a question of whether the US faces a second Great Depression, "Unfortunately, that is the road that America may find itself on."

It is not a message that from a Republican party strategic point of view, should, in such stark terms, have been delivered to an already anxiety-ridden public here is the video:



The greatest calamity of all struck the McCain camp on the David Letterman show, when David found out that contrary to his assurances, McCain was not on his way to Washington. Rather, McCain had deliberately substituted a serious interview by tv news anchor Couric for a more light-hearted appearance on Letterman.

David Letterman, among the more feared interviewers on television, who has reduced Cindy Crawford and Paris Hilton to tears for the fun of it and went mano-a-mano with Madonna over their respective headgear, was not a man to be trifled with.

He actually got hold of video of McCain getting made up for the Katie Couric interview, having not left for the airport in any case. It was one thing for McCain to cancel, it was another for his campaign to blow off Letterman in favor of Couric.



McCain's retreat has been hasty and poorly planned, so that it looks more like a rout than a clever guerrilla movement. Not all guerrilla wars succeed, after all-- the Philippines was subdued by US forces with long hard fighting. McCain, having lost to a guerrilla war, may now face the irony that he is not only not successful in conventional struggles, but has not mastered the form of his greatest enemies.

And the American public, who had expected him to stand his ground and fight, had been expecting an Eisenhower, not a Ho Chi Minh, will hardly be delighted.
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Cole in Salon: Bashing Ahmadinejad

My column is out at Salon.com:

"Obama goes over the top in bashing Mahmoud Ahmadinejad:"

Once again, U.S. politicians, including both Sarah Palin and Barack Obama, pile on the Iranian president. Why does Larry King (!) sound like the adult in the room?

excerpt:

'As for the imposition of economic sanctions on Iran, it might be worth considering for a moment whether the U.S., with its faltering economy, is even able to cause a major oil exporter such as Iran much harm through a unilateral boycott. The law passed by Congress at the insistence of the Israel lobby, placing sanctions on firms doing business in Iran, does not punish those who merely distribute or import Iranian petroleum. Does Obama want to go even further with sanctions? If Congress really could close down Iran's production of 4 million barrels a day, it would cause the price of petroleum to soar and throw the U.S. into a deep recession or depression. From the point of view of a reality-based foreign policy, this sort of step is known as "cutting off your nose to spite your face." Russia and China are now balking at placing any further sanctions on Iran via the United Nations Security Council. (Russia is not exactly in a cooperative mood after the drubbing it took from U.S. politicians over its intervention to protect South Ossetia from Georgia.)

The sanctions have in any case had no effect on Iranian policy, though they are keeping Iran's gas fields from being developed by American and European firms, a task that may fall to Russia's Gazprom or its Chinese counterpart instead. (One would not advise a President Obama to threaten to cut off economic cooperation with China over its Iran investments, given how much U.S. debt Beijing holds.) Since natural gas is a global market, this boycott of Iran harms American consumers twice, causing the price of gas to be higher than necessary and making sure that the development of Iranian gas creates no jobs for Americans and brings no profits into this country. '

Read the whole thing.
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McCain admits Country has no current President

McCain says he will suspend his political campaign on Thursday morning and is calling for a cancellation of the debate.

Joe Barton (R-Texas) just came on CNN and said there are not 50 votes in the House for the Paulson plan. In otherwords,the financial markets are flying on one engine for a while, with no guarantee of swift government intervention.

Isn't McCain's desperate move an admission that there is currently no president? I mean, why does everything hang on a senator from Arizona? Shouldn't it be Bush who is handling this? We've long known that the emperor has no clothes, but McCain is making a "Republicans Gone Wild" video with this grandstanding.

Very suspicious that as soon as Obama is up 9% in the polls, all of a sudden the mess the Republicans made is so important that McCain can't go on competing with his rival.
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Palin wasTalking with Karzai about his Son!

You know those ballyhooed meetings of Sarah Palin with world leaders? What if they weren't even talking about foreign policy? Since the press was kept out, how would we know? But the press did get one glimpse:

'The first meeting was with Afghan President Hamed Karzai, and the content was hardly diplomatic dynamite. According to a CNN producer who was let into Mr Karzai's hotel suite after earlier being barred, Mr Karzai was talking about his son. Ms Palin was nodding, and asked his name. Mr Karzai replied his name was Mirwais, meaning "light of the house". The media were escorted out after about 40 seconds.'

He was talking about the meaning of his son's name? So this conversation mints her as a foreign policy expert?

Then I heard some guy on tv today saying that Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili had remarked after meeting her that Palin had 'asked the right questions.'

Isn't that the guy who launched an aggressive attack on South Ossetia, provoked a Russian response, started a war and then got his behind handed to him by Putin?

Is he the one we really want vetting our politicians for how sharp they are?
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McCain's Aide's Lobbying for Criminal Failed Mortgage Firm

Michael Tomasky writes:

'The lobbying firm of Rick Davis, the manager, was being paid $15,000 a month by Freddie Mac until last month. That fact is a direct contradiction of words McCain had spoken Sunday night. At that time, responding to a Times story being prepared for Monday's paper revealing that Davis had been the head of a lobbying consortium led by Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae until 2005, McCain said Davis had done no further work for either mortgage giant. Someone's lying – either Davis to McCain, or McCain to the public. I trust you see the problem here.'

What I cannot understand about the Obama campaign is that when I turn on the television I see McCain blaming Obama for the real estate melt down (which is of course ridiculous) but I have to read a British newspaper to see this item put bluntly. I mean, it is not as if it is an unfair smear or something. There are two big issues: 1) big money going to a McCain aide to lobby for firms now under FBI investigation, which helped destroy the US economy and 2) lying about it. Where's the Obama ad making these points?

I don't get it.
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US-Iran Relations

Riz Khan on US-Iranian relations, interviewing Gary Sick.



Veteran diplomat Edward P. Djerejian also weighs in on US-Iranian relations:

'You negotiate peace with your adversaries and enemies, not with your friends. That is what diplomacy is all about. With current sanctions and talks under the aegis of the United Nations making little progress in impeding Iran's nuclear program, concerns are mounting and there is a steady drumbeat of possible resort to military options. Under these circumstances, and on the eve of our presidential elections, there could be no more urgent need than to address the overall United States-Iranian relationship. '

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Royal Dutch Shell Deal in Iraq

Aljazeera English on the Shell deal with Iraq to develop natural gas.



Critics of the deal say there was no competitive bidding. Supporters say it will help the British, Dutch and Iraqi economies.

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GI Killed in Baghdad by Guerrillas; Mass Grave near Baquba with Dozens of Bodies; $13 Bn. in Taxpayer Money Embezzled or given to 'al-Qaeda'

Reuters reports that "A U.S. soldier died after a small-arms fire attack on his patrol in Baghdad."

Near Baquba, Reuters says, "Police found three mass graves containing tens of bodies in two areas south of Baquba, 65 km (40 miles) northeast of Baghdad, the government said in a statement. . . "

Iraqi auditor Salam Adhoob told Congress on Monday that $13 billion in American aid was embezzled by Iraqi politicians or ended up being wasted. Some of the money actually made its way from the Iraqi Defense Ministry to 'Al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI)." Iraqi officials also stand accused of coordinating petroleum theft from the Baiji refinery with AQI.

A webcast of the hearing is available at this site

Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari said Monday that he was worried that it was entirely possible that there will be no security agreement between the Iraqi government and the Bush administration. He said that in that case, there would be no choice but to ask the United Nations Security Council to authorize foreign troops in the country for a further year. Most Iraqis want to become independent of the UN.

The Shiite-dominated Iraqi government will take over responsibility for the Sunni Awakening Councils or "Sons of Iraq" militias in Baghdad next week. Created by the US to fight radical Muslim vigilantes, they contain many former guerrillas in their ranks who agreed to take $300 a month from the US. The Shiite government does not want to bring them wholesale into the Iraqi security forces lest they prove a Sunni Trojan Horse.

Shell has opened a Baghdad office in connection with its new contract to develop Iraqi natural gas. It is the first time a Western energy Major has opened such an office since the early 1970s when the Iraqi government nationalized its fossil fuels.

Reuters reports other political violence in Iraq on Monday:

'
* BALAD RUZ - Police arrested seven members of a suicide cell near Balad Ruz, 90 km (55 miles) northeast of Baghdad, the government said in a statement...

BAGHDAD - The Iraqi army killed two gunmen and arrested 81 others in the last 24 hours in different parts of the country, the Defence Ministry said.

BAGHDAD - A car bomb killed at least two people and wounded five others in the Karrada district of central Baghdad, police said.

BAGHDAD - A mortar bomb killed one person and wounded four others in western Baghdad, police said.

BAGHDAD - A car bomb wounded two people when it exploded near an Iraqi army patrol in Jamiaa district in western Baghdad, police said.

MOSUL - Gunmen killed two brothers and wounded a third when they opened fire in a market in Mosul, 390 km (240 miles) north of Baghdad, on Sunday, police said. . .

MOSUL - A morgue in the city of Mosul received two bodies with gunshot wounds, police said. . .

SUWAYRA - Police recovered a body showing signs of torture from the Tigris River in Suwayra, 50 km (30 miles) southeast of Baghdad, police said. . . .'

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Chorev Reviews Hafez on Suicide Bombers

Suicidal Ambitions: Human Bombs and the War in Iraq

By Matan Chorev

Review of Mohammed M. Hafez

Suicide Bombers in Iraq: The Strategy and Ideology of Martyrdom

(Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace, 2007)

285 pages, $17.50 hardcover.


Since 2003, according to the United States Library of Congress, over 800 books on the Iraq war have been published in the U.S. alone, each of which aspires to provide some explanation for the seemingly inexplicable patterns of violence in Iraq. Any contribution to this mountain of printed knowledge faces the increasingly ambitious task of adding a semblance of clarity to the exceedingly complex con?agration that is Iraq’s Hobbesian reality.

In "Suicide Bombers in Iraq: The Strategy and Ideology of Martyrdom," Mohammed M. Hafez applies his earlier research on Palestinian suicide bombers and the causes of rebellion in the Islamic world to analyze the patterns of suicide attacks in Iraq. His goal is twofold. First, Hafez assesses whether existing theories on suicide terrorism offer an analytic lens capable of explaining the phenomenon in Iraq. Second, he endeavors to explain the nature and goals of the insurgency, what it portends for the future of Iraq and the United States’ objectives, and its global repercussions.

In the book, Hafez examines con?ict data from March 22, 2003, to August 18, 2006. Naturally, this timeframe disappoints. It predates important moments in the con?ict, including the implementation of the latest effort at “victory,” the Baghdad Security Plan (i.e., “the surge”) announced in January 2007. Nonetheless, the study’s ?ndings remain relevant in spite of the author’s rightfully modest insistence that they be viewed as “preliminary and subject to further research.”

During the period in question, approximately 514 suicide attacks took place—a ?gure greater than the number of suicide attacks reported in all other con?icts combined. Hafez argues that although they constitute a small proportion of insurgent activity in Iraq, “suicide attacks have a disproportionate impact on political developments in Iraq because of their targets, lethality, and psychological potency.”

To be sure, the book is an invaluable resource for understanding who exactly is volunteering to ?ght and die in Iraq and why they are willing to do so. The author’s analysis makes important advances to existing theories that try to explain the existence, spread, and use of suicide bombings. Overall, however, the reader is left unconvinced as to whether the analytic prism of suicide terrorism advances, rather than distracts from, efforts to analyze the Iraqi conflict.

Hafez demonstrates that suicide terrorism in the Iraqi insurgency differs in important respects from its use in other conflicts. First, most of the suicide bombers are foreigners. Of the 102 known suicide bombers in Iraq listed by Hafez, 44 came from Saudi Arabia, by far the leading exporter of human bombs to Iraq. Second, suicide attacks primarily target fellow Iraqis, typically Shi‘a civilians and members of Iraq’s security services, and thus have been a major precipitating factor in Iraq’s civil war. Finally, rather than nationalists ?ghting to expel occupying forces (the argument evinced most persuasively by University of Chicago’s Robert Pape in Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism), the plurality of Iraq’s suicide bombers are af?liated with a “Jihadi Sala?st” movement championed by al-Qaeda and its associated movements mobilized by informal networks. The book aptly demonstrates that the existing theories are insuf?cient in explaining the Iraqi case.

Hafez expounds upon social movement theory to offer a persuasive multi-causal explanation to those who wonder why so many volunteer to ?ght and die in Iraq. His narrative includes the well-documented grievances of the insurgents, as well as the abysmal administration of the postwar political and security environment. Its main contribution, however, is its prescient analysis of the essential role of transnational networks that linked Arab, as well as European, Muslim jihadi aspirants with the necessary persons and know-how to make it to Iraq to ful?ll their dreams of martyrdom.

It is here that Hafez’s regional expertise and ability to sift through the Arabic press, as well as the bottomless “jihadosphere,” helps color the book with distinctive analysis and insight. Readers will learn about how the ideology of martyrdom is framed and promoted, and how horri?c violence—even against fellow Muslims—is justi?ed. It reveals the signi?cant ?ssures that exist within the Islamic world. It is this struggle that will likely determine the progress of conflict in the region. It is also a confrontation on which the United States has minimal direct influence.

Hafez reserves the most intriguing analysis for the end of the book. He methodically demonstrates that the conditions which gave rise to the “second generation of jihadists” – those that succeeded the mujahedeeen in Afghanistan and brought down the towers in New York – are replicating in are replicating in Iraq and will give birth (if they haven’t already) to a third generation of glob- al jihadists with access to ever-deadlier weapons, more formidable transna- tional networks, and a new safe haven in Iraq. This ?nding is widely shared but has rarely received a sophisticated and well-substantiated treatment.

But do the ?gures about suicide terrorism in Iraq reveal anything more broadly about the complex warfare in Iraq? Hafez believes so. He attributes the majority of suicide attacks to “Jihadi Sala?sts” and “ideological Ba’athists” who are committed to a system collapse strategy—“the complete dismantlement of public order, governing political and economic

institutions, and state security forces.” The ensuing failed state will allow global jihadists associated with al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) to establish “a new safe haven to replace the one al-Qaeda lost after the collapse of the Taliban in 2001.”

The major Sunni insurgency in Iraq, however, is led by Islamic nationalists committed to a “system reintegration” strategy. Groups like the Islamic Army in Iraq share with AQI the goal of ousting the American occupiers, but they do not seek to dismantle the Iraqi government. Their goal, rather, is to reverse their marginalization in the postwar Shi‘a Arab-and Kurdish-dominated political arrangement and to guard against regional federalism.

This taxonomy is well within the consensus judgment of the analytic community. It is remarkable only because it counters the Bush administration’s imagined, if not fabricated, view of reality. In an effort to link the insurgency in Iraq with Osama Bin Laden’s al-Qaeda, President George W. Bush consistently blames AQI for carnage in Iraq. As noted by Andrew Tilghman’s provocative “The Myth of AQI” in the October 2007 issue of Washington Monthly, the President mentioned al-Qaeda 95 times in a single speech last July. The strategy works. The New York Times Public Editor Clark Hoyt, in a July 8, 2007, article, censured his newspaper for wholesale adoption of the administration’s rhetoric that, through its uncritical journalistic practices, gave credibility to what Anthony Cordesman has understatedly called the “almost absurd” notion that AQI is a central element of the insurgency.

Hafez makes the case that suicide bombers have “dragged Iraq into civil war.” This analysis exaggerates the degree to which this tactic is a precipitating factor in Iraq’s civil war. Sectarian con?ict is the inevitable outcome of the Bush administration’s bungling war effort to superimpose itself on the most inauspicious of preconditions. The Shi‘a insurgency, which unfortunately is largely untreated by Hafez (if only because of the dearth of Shi’a suicide bombers), and parasitic local militias struggling for power and spoils likely to play a greater role in fanning the flames of sectarianism in Iraq. As the August 2007 U.S. National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) notes, “Iraqi society’s growing polarization the persistent weakness of security forces and the state in general, and all sides’ ready recourse to violence are collectively driving an increase in communal and insurgent violence and political extremism.” In Iraq, human bombs are but one ingredient in a most unsavory stew of violence.

There is little doubt in Hafez’s ?nding that the Iraq war has served as a “?eld of dreams for jihadists seeking training, expertise, and experience in the ways and means of terrorism and guerilla warfare.” The Iraq war never had a thing to do with the war on terror, except, of course, that it went a long way in setting back its objectives. The new generation of terrorists and the millions of hearts and minds lost as a cause of this war will undoubtedly prove to be one of the most tragic of its innumerable negative consequences.

Decreased U.S. in?uence in the region will necessitate a return to the Cold War primacy of stability approach and thus sustain the very conditions that allow radical Islamic groups to mobilize support. Hafez correctly argues that the Iraqi petri dish is not likely to offer Jihadi Sala?s a campground as favorable as the one they enjoyed in Taliban Afghanistan. For one, this chafes against the country’s secular tradition. Second, Iraq’s Shi‘a majority is hardly a prospective bedfellow for Sunni Sala?st ideology.

But how does one contend with the fallout of U.S. failure in Iraq? On this point, the author is unsatisfactorily mum. Were one to follow Hafez’s analysis to its natural conclusion, it would reveal two important observations. The ?rst is that continued U.S. occupation will slow, not accelerate, AQI’s demise. This debunks the Bush administration’s last great reason for staying the course in Iraq. The second is that al-Qaeda has been rescued from extinction after the war in Afghanistan and has now, as the

July 2007 NIE assessed, restored the “key capabilities it would need to launch an attack on U.S. soil.” To refocus the ?ght against al-Qaeda will require quickly extracting ourselves from the Iraq morass. Hafez’s valuable study rings the alarm bells on the dif?cult challenges just over the horizon. We can only hope someone is listening.

Reprinted from The Fletcher Forum with kind permission of the author.

==

Matan Chorev is a researcher at the Belfer Center of Science and International Affairs at the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University.

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A Nation of Masochists

"I send my tormentor hurrying
hither and thither in the
service of my
suffering and desire."
- Mason Cooley (d.2002)

I have concluded that Americans, who pretend in public to be straitlaced, are in fact rabid masochists addicted to whips, black leather and the application of fists. It turns out that large numbers of people throughout the world are accidentally asphyxiated every year because they need to be choked for maximum pleasure.

The diagnosis of national masochism is the only thing that can satisfactorily explain the poll numbers in the presidential race.



Let's get this straight.

The Republican Party came to Washington, DC, in 2000 with a solid majority in both houses of Congress and on the Supreme Court, allowing them to steal the presidency, as well. If you wanted to know what a pure Republican-Party government unhindered by the Democrats, Libertarians, Greens or Socialists might look like, this was the moment.

So they came to power when there was a budget surplus bequeathed by a Democratic president.

They immediately ran up a big deficit every year since, doubling the national debt from $5 trillion to $10 trillion. You don't run big deficits of $300 and $400 billion a year in good times according to Keynes. You save the the deficit spending for a recession, when the economy needs a jolt. If you're already racking up a big deficit every year in a good economy, you have no way of making a difference during a significant downturn except by then going for a truly mega-deficit, which risks destroying the value of your currency abroad. In a service economy like that of the US, a dollar with a declining value might not even help the economy via exports very much, since the manufactured goods are being made down in Mexico now, anyway.

Note that Clinton had been talking about using the surplus to pay down the debt or to fix the looming crisis in social security.

With the government encumbered with $5 trillion in new debt before September, and now with another trillion and a half (probably when it is all said and done with), how exactly will social security be fixed?

(Hint: Republican leaders such as Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich hated social security, because the people are grateful to the Democrats for it. Bush tried to privatize it and McCain would have helped him; you wonder if they are trying deliberately to destroy it. Social security is the main reason for which the elderly are not now, as they were in the 1930s, the poorest and most miserable section of society.)

Then many of the Republicans came to Washington with a crooked plan to use fraudulent methods to ensure that campaign financing went almost exclusively to them through super-lobbyists like Jack Abramoff. Grover Norquist's K-Street Project aimed at guaranteeing big corporate dollars for the Republicans in exchange for their granting the corporations the right to write the legislation affecting their industry. Thus, laws governing pharmaceuticals were written by the pharmaceutical industry lobbyists and just signed off on by the Republicans.

This scam goes beyond Marx's fear that government in a business society was just a "managing committee" for the business classes. Tom Delay, from 2002 the Republican Party majority leader in the House, was too lazy even to be the managing committee! The K-Street crowd just let the business classes run the legislature directly, themselves, having the regulatory laws written to suit them.

So Abramoff, Delay, the K-Street crowd are busted. Once upon a time such a thing would have been a huge political scandal and would have haunted the party that produced it. But because US Big Media is mostly Republican-owned, it just quietly subsided as a story.

It is not just that the rap sheet against the Class of 2000, 2002, and 2004 among the Republican politicians is longer than a trans-Atlantic cable, it is that so much of the corruption took the form of a conspiracy.

All parties have people in them looking to get rich on the side. But the K Street Project and various other such scams weren't just about individual aggrandizement. They were about fixing the whole American system permanently to kow-tow to the super-rich without so much as a whimper, and to positively punish the middle classes.

After the 2002 mid-terms, even George W. Bush wanted to do a tax cut for the middle classes. But Cheney over-ruled him, insisting on another deep tax cut for the very wealthy. We won the mid-terms, Cheney said. This is our due. Deficits don't matter. "Our" due? Cheney is saying that the Republican Party is the party of the super-rich, of the 3 million at the top of American society who own 45% of the privately held wealth (as though we were Brazil), and they are the ones that will be exclusively benefited by Republican rule.

Of course, there were many other conspiracies by the pirouetting pirates of plunder.

There was the Iraq War, one of the great criminal conspiracies of modern times. Barton Gellman has how related the story of how Dick Cheney lied to Dick Armey before the vote on the war, telling him that Saddam's family was all al-Qaeda and that Saddam's evil scientists had made a suitcase nuclear bomb that he would certainly turn over to Bin Laden, and such rank horse manure as that. Dick Armey weeps, says he deserved better than to be bullshitted by the vice president of the United States.

They took us to war against a country that had not attacked the United States; they killed or maimed 33,000 Americans, and turned a whole Arab Muslim country into a burned-out hulk, displacing millions and continuously bombing the very cities that they had conquered and occupied, killing and disfiguring.

They propagandized us with implausible lies about mobile biological weapons labs and Baathist al-Qaeda, and our journalists and their corporate bosses bought them hook line and sinker, as did the public.

Cable and satellite television "news" tells us nothing of elections in India or constitutional crisis in Thailand, and barely mentions a major workers strike at Boeing. Dozens of car bombs go off in Iraq and we are told it is "calm" now. It is a vast electromagnetic form of bread and circuses, wherein hapless celebrities and philandering politicians are fed to the lions before millions of cheering plebes, by corporate moguls desperately hoping that the marks will not notice the legion of pickpockets in the arena, relieving them of their purses.

This crew in Washington thought nothing of assiduously attempting to induce the press to out a covert CIA operative working against Iranian nuclear proliferation, Valerie Plame. Their culture of lies is such that they attempt to divert attention from all the phone calls to journalists by Irv Lewis Libby and Karl Rove trying to get the press to print her name by saying that those two did not succeed. As if the attempt were not dastardly!

Why is trying to inform the Iranians of the identity of a CIA field officer assigned to spy on Iran not an act of treason? After all, you can't inform the world without also informing the Iranians. Isn't the punishment for treason hanging?

The Republican Party conducted a vast illegal spying operation on Americans and on foreign diplomats. We still don't know why exactly, and that the operation had domestic political motivations cannot be ruled out.

They imposed on us this so-called PATRIOT act that gutted the Constitution. The peaceful protesters in St. Paul at the RNC were actually charged with being terrorists, in this Brave New World.

By their incompetence and cupidity the Republican politicians deeply damaged the relief effort for one of America's great cities, New Orleans, which will never see the $33 billion pledged for its reconstruction. Not to mention that levies and bridges are breaking and falling down all around us because Cheney did not want to tax his billionaire friends to pay for the country's infrastructural upkeep.

And then they so radically deregulated and removed any oversight from the banking system that they came within hours of presiding over a 1929-style absolute meltdown of the entire financial and securities system. To cover the criminal activities of their cronies, they are now proposing to impose a fine of one trillion dollars on the middle class, to ensure that their partners in crime will receive their $25 million Christmas bonuses and be held harmless for their misdeeds.

And in the wake of the greatest and most sustained act of systematic plunder since the Mongol hordes appropriated to themselves the riches of everyplace in Asia from Beijing to Isfahan, the reaction of the supine and slave-like American voting public is to scratch their heads and have a hard time deciding if they would like more of the same.

Despite his aristocratic prerogatives and connections in high society, even the Marquis de Sade himself was brought down by a lowly maid, who complained to the police of his cutting her while having his way with her, leading to his arrest.

In contrast to that plucky domestic servant, the American public appears to enjoy being lacerated while being badly used, moaning with delight at each new act of abuse and abasement, while, blue-lipped, gasping for air.

One worries for our children, threatened with the fate of the homeless street children so common in the sort of third world country into which we are being turned by our managing committee.

But, well, if you are determined to bend over on November 4, at least I hope you enjoy pain. In that case, you are going to be ecstatic.

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8 Killed, 82 Wounded in Bombings, Attacks; Benchmark Laws Still Stalled

The guerrilla war continues in Iraq. On Sunday, guerrillas blew up the general manager of the Ministry of Finance, Ihsan Ridha, and a Brigadier General, Adel Abbas, who was a manager of the ministry of the interior (which has FBI-like functions in Iraq). Ridha was injured; Abbas was killed. Police and army patrols were bombed in Baghdad, and police stations were bombed in the major northern cities of Mosul and Kirkuk. One of the police patrols in Baghdad was attacked in the Sunni enclave of al-Adhamiya (the police are mostly Shiites), suggesting that the sectarian war is still going on.

There is no point in targeting high ministry officials and security forces on the ground like that unless you are trying to cause the government to collapse. The pattern of the attacks shows that the guerrillas have by no means given up and that they are still engaged in a concerted and effective attack on the institutions of the Iraqi government.

CNN Arabic says that 8 persons were killed and 82 persons were wounded in these various attacks (see below).

Al-Zaman reports in Arabic that the parliamentary session scheduled for Sunday on the enabling law for provincial elections had to be cancelled because the Arab and Turkmen members of the committee set up to reconcile the wording of the law walked out. Kurdish MP Fu'ad Ma'sum complained bitterly that the walkout was an insult given all the extensive concessions the Kurds have made. Monday is seen as a last chance for parliament to pass the law if the elections are to be held this year.
The law has been held up because parliamentarians cannot agree on how to treat the disputed oil province of Kirkuk.

Al-Zaman also reports that Oil Minister Husain Shahrastani is complaining that the independent deals struck by the Kurdistan Regional Government with a Norwegian firm have impeded the passage in the federal parliament of an oil law.

Al-Zaman says that former interim prime minister Iyad Allawi says he insists that any security agreement between the Bush administration and the al-Maliki government be submitted to 'public opinion' in Iraq (presumably via a national referendum). He added that when he was in Washington 2 months ago he had told the Americans that they had as well give up on getting a bilateral security agreement passed. He also said he was considering pulling his party out of the Iraqi national security council, on which all major parties have seats, since it had utterly failed to deal with Iraq's problems.

McClatchy reports political violence in Iraq on Sunday:

'Baghdad

- A bomb was planted under the car of the general manager of the Ministry of Finance, in Kindi street in Harthiya neighborhood on Sunday morning. Ihsan Ridha, the manager was injured in that incident.

- Gunmen assassinated Brigadier General Adel Abass, a manager in the ministry of interior in Adel neighborhood around 7:30 am. He was killed with his driver.

- Gunmen opened fire on an officer in the general inspector office in New Baghdad neighborhood. Raad Amar, the officer, was wounded and he was transferred to hospital to be treated.

- A roadside bomb targeted a police patrol at the Maghrib intersection of Waziriyah in north Baghdad. Five people were injured, including one policeman.

- A roadside bomb targeted an army patrol in Waziriyah neighborhood in northern Baghdad near the Turkish Embassy. Seven people were injured including three soldiers.

- A bomb was planted under a car in Tahriyat intersection in Karrada neighborhood in downtown Baghdad. Four people were wounded, including one policeman.

- A roadside bomb targeted the Bayna newspaper building in Nidhal street(downtown Baghdad). Two people were injured.

- A roadside bomb targeted a police patrol in Zafarniyah neighborhood (east Baghdad). Six people were wounded including three policemen.

- A roadside bomb targeted a police patrol near the in downtown Baghdad. Seven people were wounded, including three policemen.

- Police found three dead bodies in Baghdad neighborhoods today: two were found in Karkh bank; one in Dora and the other was in Amil. While the third one was found in Fudhailiyah on Risafa bank.

Mosul

- A bomb planted under an oil tanker detonated near an army check point in Arabi neighborhood in Mosul city around 3 pm. Two people were wounded including one soldier.

- A suicide truck bomber targeted the emergency police headquarter in New Mosul neighborhood in Mosul city around 6:15 pm. Two policemen were killed and 45 others wounded, including 15 policemen. Also 50 houses got damaged in that explosion.

Kirkuk

- A suicide car bomber targeted a police check point near the fourth bridge in Ghazala neighborhood in downtown Kirkuk. Five policemen were killed and twenty three were wounded.

Salahuddin

- A bomb planted under a parked car detonated near a restaurant in Tikrit. Three people were injured.'

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Baghdad Mayor: US Tanks Run Amok and There'll Never be a Street Named for Bush in Baghdad

The USG Open Source Center translates a recent interview with Baghdad mayor Sabir al-Isawi in a Czech newspaper. The mayor 1) denies that the US troop 'surge' is the major reason for the reduced violence in Iraq; 2) complains bitterly that US armored corps drivers continually run their tanks over lampposts, gardens and other things in Baghdad streets instead of going around them; and 3) says that that the US military too often goes in with guns blazing unnecessarily and arbitrarily detains too many Iraqis, treating them in ways that contravene human rights standards.

He also says plainly that there will never be a street in Baghdad named after George W. Bush!

Mayor al-Isawi seems to be more cordial toward Iran than toward the US. The Shiite Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq headed by Abdul Aziz al-Hakim won the January 2005 provincial elections in Baghdad, so I presume al-Isawi is a member of ISCI, which was formed in exile in Iran in 1982 under the guidance of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

Baghdad Mayor Criticizes US Troops' Insensitiveness, Human Rights Abuses
Interview with Baghdad Mayor Sabir al-Isawi by Teodor Marjanovic in Prague; date not given: "'I Have Survived Four Assassination Attempts:' Baghdad Mayor Says Americans Are Often Hard To Deal With and Explains What Has Calmed Down Sectarian Killing in His Country"
iDnes.cz
Saturday, September 20, 2008
OSC Translated Excerpt

. . . (Marjanovic) What has caused the improvement of the situation in Iraq?

(Al-Isawi) There are two reasons. The uprising of the Sunnite tribes against Al-Qa'ida as a result of its unending bomb attacks. Initially, Al-Qa'ida had enjoyed those tribes' support. The other cause is Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's resolve with which he crushed the Shiite militias in Basra and Baghdad's Sadr City. Even without the help and, at the beginning, knowledge of the United States.

(Marjanovic) They used to say that Al-Maliki was in cahoots with these militias.

(Al-Isawi) Yes, and he proved that it was not true. The political parties, then, finally began to approach the government. It became evident that the prime minister did not want to have anything in common with these Iran-supported armed groups.

(Marjanovic) Here in the West, the reports go that the crucial role was played by the increase of American soldiers last spring.

(Al-Isawi) This was a partial reason for the calming down. Another such partial reason was that the Iraqi armed forces are now working much better. But the two things I mentioned are certainly the most important.

(Marjanovic) When you look back, do you think that the Iraqis should be grateful to the Americans for something?

(Al-Isawi) Yes and no. As Iraqis, we should feel gratitude that the Americans brought down the hated Saddam regime for us. But -- and I wish to say it very strongly -- so long as the Americans continue to be stuck in their ruts, the last remainder of gratitude will evaporate. They ought to be able to be liberators and not act as occupiers.

(Marjanovic) Be concrete.

(Al-Isawi) During detentions, they do not heed human rights. They carry out raids without reason. They shoot more than necessary. They shrink from quickly determining the exact relations between the two states so that the situation no longer is that one occupies while the other obeys.

(Marjanovic) And how do they complicate the life for you,as the City Hall?

(Al-Isawi) They are driving their heavy vehicles and tanks insensitively, through people's gardens. They crush sidewalks. They demolish lampposts. They are driving, there is a post, but they will not go around it.

(Marjanovic) Can you complain?

(Al-Isawi) Yes, we call them and sometimes they pay for repairs. But this is not just the question of money. One example: it took us six months to build an orchard. Then arrived a tank, and the six months' efforts were destroyed within a moment.

(Marjanovic) But you are aware of the thousands of Americans who perished in Iraq.

(Al-Isawi) Of course, they must not be forgotten.

(Marjanovic) Can you imagine a street or a square in Baghdad being named after George W Bush one day?

(Al-Isawi) No. (passage omitted on Baghdad citizens' daily troubles)

(Description of Source: Prague iDnes.cz in Czech -- Website of best-selling, independent, center-right daily; most popular print source among decisionmakers; URL: http://idnes.cz)

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Truck Bomb Caught on Tape

Aljazeera English shows and analyzes a just-released security tape from the Marriott in Islamabad, showing the bomb-laden truck ramming the security perimeter. There were two initial explosions on the truck, probably to prime the big bomb and security personnel were trying to put out the fire on the truck . . .


For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Islamabad Bombing puts Pressure on US-Pakistan Ties

Bloomberg argues that Saturday's bombing of the Marriott in Islamabad will likely put pressure on US/ Pakistani relations. The bombing was a clear signal from militants that the Pakistani government must back away from its American alliance.

Newly elected president Ali Asaf Zardari gave an address to the parliament in which he called for the uprooting of terrorism and the prevention of cross-border raids on Pakistan by Pakistani militants. He also demanded, however, that Pakistani sovereignty be respected, veiled reference to US military incursions into his country.

Zardari also called for a scaling back of the president's powers,and for more fiscal and administrative semi-autonomy for Pakistan's provinces. (A few opposition party parliamentarians are disappointed that he did not just decree the abolition of the martial law amendments to the constitution, which boost his own power. Likewise they had wanted to hear him say something about the restoration of the justices and judges who had been arbitrarily dismissed by military dictator Pervez Musharraf when he was in power last year.

Hasan Askari-Rizvi argues that the Bush administration's odd mixture of unilateralism and insistence on alliances 'of the willing' produces a key contradiction that is destabilizing Pakistan.

Dawn asks if the real target of the bombing was Zardari's presidential mansion.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

German Left Stands up to anti-Muslim Fascists; Clashes in Cologne

3,000 progressives in Cologne clashed Saturday with far rightwing protesters trying to stop the building of a mosque. There are about 3.3 million Muslims in Germany, about 4 percent of the population. The Jewish population of the US is 2%, so this would be as though American rightwingers tried to stop a synagogue from being built. The far right said they were upholding the 'Western values and Christian traditions' as the heritage of Europe.

Isn't that where we came in? That sort of blinkered thinking, whereby Europe just has one master tradition, is not only wrong, it led to genocide. Europe has been multicultural. It has been pagan and Jewish, Christian and Muslim. Muslim Spain was some 800 years of European history (more if the history of the Moriscos is taken into account). Muslims were for some time in Sicily, Sardinia and southern Italy. Muslims of Serbia, Albania, Bulgaria and Greece were 600 more centuries, in the eastern reaches of the continent (There were Muslim villages even in Hungary and Poland). The Ottoman Empire was in important respects a European empire, even though it stretched deeply into the Middle East as well. If anything Istanbul was more intertwined with Europe than was Kiev and the Ukraine, or St. Petersberg & Russia. It is no accident that even today, Turkey is in NATO.

For that matter, why reify Europe? When was Egypt not a source of grain for 'Europe'? When were not her ports dominated by Europeans? Did the French in Algeria not declare it 'European soil'? Why is the Right so fickle? Either Algerians are European or they are not. Is it only when they are firmly under the jackboot that they count as such?

I am proud of my German cousins for making a stand against this ugly recrudescence of religious bigotry and racism (the mayor of Cologne rightly used the latter word).
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

40 Killed in Massive Bombing of Marriott in Islamabad

Guerrillas in Pakistan set off an enormous bomb blast at the Marriott in the Pakistani capital of Islamabad Saturday morning EDT. It left a 30 foot crater and set off a conflagration that was still burning brightly hours after the bombing.

Aljazeera English reports on the explosion:



The Pakistani military has been bombing the tribal territory of Bajaur intensively, forcing 300,000 people from their homes and killing scores,including civilians. And the US has made incursions in South Waziristan recently against the Wazir tribe there.

Just logically speaking, an attack on the Marriott where international businessmen and US government personnel tend to stay, would likely be a response by the Pakistani Taliban to these attacks on them and their people.

For the Federally Administered Tribal Areas where the Tehrik-i Taliban is based, see this link.

The tribes are not necessarily the same as the Taliban and sometimes fight them, and each is different from the foreign operatives that have gravitated to these remote regions.

The FATA areas are only 3% of Pakistani territory and have only 2% of its population, about 3 million people.

John Robertson has more and links to

Pamela Constable on the new, improved Taliban in Afghanistan.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Sunni Baghdad Dark on Satellite; Kagan Proved Wrong Again

Fred Kagan has once more been proved wrong. He called the ethnic cleansing of Sunni Arabs in Baghdad a 'myth.' For all their arrogance and academic credentials, the Neoconservatives keep having trouble with that reality-based thing.

Satellite imaging that shows Sunni Arab neighborhoods in Baghdad dark gives evidence that the ethnic cleansing of the Sunnis by Shiite militias accounts for the fall in violence in Baghdad, not the extra troops Bush sent, called the 'surge.'

'Night light in neighborhoods populated primarily by embattled Sunni residents declined dramatically just before the February 2007 surge and never returned, suggesting that ethnic cleansing by rival Shiites may have been largely responsible for the decrease in violence for which the U.S. military has claimed credit, the team reports in a new study based on publicly available satellite imagery. "Essentially, our interpretation is that violence has declined in Baghdad because of intercommunal violence that reached a climax as the surge was beginning," said lead author John Agnew, a UCLA professor of geography and authority on ethnic conflict. "By the launch of the surge, many of the targets of conflict had either been killed or fled the country, and they turned off the lights when they left." The night-light signature in four other large Iraqi cities — Kirkuk, Mosul, Tikrit and Karbala — held steady or increased between the spring of 2006 and the winter of 2007, the UCLA team found. None of these cities were targets of the surge. Baghdad's decreases were centered in the southwestern Sunni strongholds of East and West Rashid, where the light signature dropped 57 percent and 80 percent, respectively, during the same period.'

I've been saying this for some time. US officials more or less admitted it to Karen DeYoung of the Washington Post last December (and reading between the lines they also seem not to have been so disturbed by the ethnic cleansing and seemed to have hoped that those people would just find someplace else to live.

I visited some of these displaced Iraqis in one of the 'some place elses,' i.e. Amman, in August; 50,000 of them are considered 'vulnerable' by the aid agencies and their situation is desperate. Some Iraqis in exile told me that they could never return. They were Sunni and their own neighborhoods were now 100% Shiite. Or their spouse was a Shiite and they were Sunni, and there was no mixed neighborhood left where they would feel comfortable. Some 25% had had a child kidnapped. Many had received personal threats from militias that they are convinced are still in their old neighborhood.(E.g. 'If Ahmad Adib shows his face in this neighborhood again he will be shot on sight .. .') Indeed, sometimes the militias track them down in Amman and threaten them there again. A lot of Iraqis in Jordan move from apartment to apartment frequently so as to avoid the long arm of the militias.

As noted, Fred Kagan of the American Enterprise Institute has denied the ethnic cleansing even took place. US military propagandists sometimes point to continued small Sunni enclaves such as Adhamiya in Baghdad as proof that there was no ethnic cleansing. But neighborhoods near Adhamiya that used to be mixed are almost all Shiite now. I'd guess that 700,000 or 800,000 Sunnis were ethnically cleansed from the capital from June 2006-September 2007. Imagine, to lose everything, to huddle dispossessed in a foreign land worrying where your next meal is coming from, and then to have the powerful and wealthy Kagans deny your very existence.

Oh. It isn't the first time for that sort of thing, is it?
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Crowds Protest US in Tikrit after Airstrike Kills Family of 8; Sistani Site Hacked

US troops targeting a Sunni Arab guerrilla appear instead to have killed an Iraqi family of 8 in a town 70 mi. north of Baghdad on Friday. Three women were among the dead. AFP reports of Tikrit, 'Large crowds protested against the US raid after the main weekly Muslim prayers in the city, capital of Salaheddin Province. "America is the enemy of God," protesters chanted.'

The incident is important because it raises two questions pertinent to the now-stalled negotiations between the al-Maliki government and the Bush administration over the rules governing US military actions in Iraq. The townspeople are demanding that in future the US coordinate better with Iraqi forces. Al-Maliki wants US troops always to clear operations with the Iraqis.

Some in the town are demanding that the US troops responsible for the civilian deaths be put on trial. Al-Maliki is demanding that US troops who commit crimes in Iraq be tried in Iraqi courts. In short, this incident will strengthen al-Maliki's resolve to stick to his guns on these negotiating points.

Is America losing out on Iraq oil?

A cleric in Basra loyal to Muqtada al-Sadr, Shaikh Uday Ali Abbas al-Ajrish has been assassinated. The Sadrists in Basra were defeated by the rival Badr Corps with the help of the Iraqi military last spring. Al-Hayat reports in Arabic that the Sadrists in Basra are accusing the police in that city of torturing Mahdi Army fighters captured during that operation. Provincial authorities deny the charges.

Al-Sharq al-Awsat reports in Arabic that the governor of Basra, Misbah al-Wa'ili of the Islamic Virtue Party says that shootings and kidnappings have returned to Basra. He also complained that foreign countries (he means Iran) are spying on Basra, and have even targeted him. He wants to go the UK route and put surveillance cameras everywhere.

The web site of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani has been hacked and defaced by a UAE based group declaring that they are "Wahhabis." (There are very few Wahhabis in the United Arab Emirates-- it is a Saudi and Qatari thing). There have been sharp exchanges between Sunni and Shiite clerics in recent months, with a Saudi cleric launching a polemic and more recently Shaikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, who has a perch on Aljazeera, has also attacked Shiism as a 'heresy' 'invading' Sunni societies.

Cost of Iraq war ~$3 trillion, Population of Iraq ~30 million, Cost per Iraqi Liberated $100,000.. Wait what!?
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

McCain: Deregulate Health Care just Like Banking!

H t Josh Marshall:

John McCain: "Opening up the health insurance market to more vigorous nationwide competition, as we have done over the last decade in banking, would provide more choices of innovative products less burdened by the worst excesses of state-based regulation."
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Ahmadinejad Censored, Distorted in US Media

60 Minutes Interviewed Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad a couple of years ago. They cut some key passages out of the interview.

I've made the same point at Informed Comment in the past.

It is legitimate to decry his positions, and I decry a lot of them. It is not legitimate to misrepresent what he has said.

By the way, Nazila Fathi at the NYT again today attributed to Ahmadinejad the phrase "wipe Israel off the face of the map." He didn't say it, and spoke of the regime. He quoted Khomeini saying, "This occupation regime over Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time." (Een rezhim-e eshghalgar-i Quds bayad az safhih-i ruzgar mahv shavad; the verb construction mahv shodan is intransitive). (Khomeini had said 'vanish from the arena of time.') He has explained that he meant that the Zionist regime would collapse just as the Soviet one did. He didn't threaten to wipe anything off anything.

Fathi and her editors know all this.

Fathi is either a liar or was forced into this falsification by an editor who is a liar.

The Iranian press has acknowledged that I am right on this issue.

See also Jonathan Steele.


Do write the NYT complaining about this wilful and dangerous mistranslation.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

"Bring'em on"? Are the Sanaa Embassy Attacks Blowback from Iraq?

Newsweek asks if the fundamentalist vigilantes (my term) who hit the US embassy in Sanaa, Yemen included returnees from the fighting in Iraq. If the answer is yes, then it is a refutation of the right-wing US 'flypaper theory' and instead a vindication of those who feared a long US military occupation of Iraq would create a new generation of hardened terrorists whose skills were honed fighting the US military in al-Anbar, Diyala and
other Iraqi provinces.

Obsidian Wings and other bloggers have made the point about blowback, al-Qaeda and Iraq at some length. See also The Wonk Room.

AP agrees that returnees from Iraq may be among the perpetrators but concentrates on the way the weakness of the Yemeni government and a desire to buy off rather than confront the radicals has contributed to an al-Qaeda resurgence there.

Yemen is a poor fractious country and very rugged,that faces many challenges of which terrorists can take advantage.

For a fine overview of Yemen see this article by Linda Funsch.

See Borzou Daragahi's excellent article on the Yemeni water crisis.

The Daily Star on the ignored causes of Yemeni instability.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Provincial Election Law Stalled Again; Arab-Kurdish Disputes Deepen; Da'wa Security Committees Protested by Badr Head

The Iraqi parliament failed for a fifth time to pass a law on provincial elections.

Al-Hayat reports in Arabic that after months of wrangling in parliament over the enabling legislation for provincial elections, parliament has failed to find a mutually agreed-upon formula. Worse, the parliamentary debates on this issue have deepened the dispute between the Kurds and a Sunni-Shiite Arab coalition. There are fears that the sectarian civil war (between Shiites and Sunnis) will now be followed by an ethnic one, between Arabs and Kurds. The escalation of this conflict has been in significant ways impelled by the imposition of the Kurdish paramilitary, the Peshmerga, on areas outside Kurdistan proper. Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki said of the Kurds 2 days ago, "It is impossible for a state to arise without a central power," adding "political participation does not mean a vet excersized by one side against another . . ." Al-Maliki's spirited defense of a strong central government angered many Kurds. Al-Hayat says that US military commanders are petrified that the Shiite-Kurdish political alliance will fall apart and Arab-Kurdish fighting lead to a deterioration of the security situation.

CSM says that the fate of the 15,000 Iraqi prisoners still held by the US is a consideration in any draw-down of US troops. It is not clear that the Iraqi government could or would take over the prisoners or that it would be able expeditiously to hold hearings to clear inmates or send them for trial.

Last I knew, 2/3s of the US prisoners were Sunni Arabs, and I don't personally doubt that the al-Maliki government would be perfectly happy to take over their prisons. My guess is that the Shiites would be released pretty expeditiously. The idea the US interviewees in the article have that the US has arrested only the guilty and has quickly processed them is, well, susceptible of challenge let us say.

Al-Zaman reports in Arabic that Hadi al-Amiri, head of the Badr Corps paramilitary is complaining that the al-Maliki government is using government funds to set up security committees in the southern, Shiite, provinces. He said that these committees are Federal government interference in a prerogative of the elected provincial councils. The article's title accuses al-Maliki of stacking these security committees with members of his how Da'wa Party. The Badr corps led by al-Amiri is the paramilitary of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI), and together they control most of the southern, Shiite provinces. So al-Amiri is making an argument for states' rights against the expansion of the prerogatives of the central government under al-Maliki. ISCI, Badr and Da'wa are allies at the federal level, but differ on issues of federalism,i.e. how strong the central government should be vis-a-vis the provinces.

A couple of days ago, Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-Texas) succeeded in eliciting from an official of the GAO an admission that there has not in fact been much progress on the Bush benchmarks on Iraq.

'Washington, D.C. – Today, the House Budget Committee held a hearing on Iraq's Budget Surplus. While the US has a budget deficit of over $400 billion, the Government of Iraq has a budget surplus of $79 billion. During questioning by Congressman Lloyd Doggett (D-Texas), Joseph Christoff, Director, International Affairs and Trade, for the U.S. Government Accountability Office, admitted that the Iraq troop surge has failed to achieve most of the benchmarks of success originally articulated by the Bush Administration in January 2007.'

The video of the exchange is here:



McClatchy reports political violence in Iraq on Thursday:

' Baghdad

A roadside bomb targeted a police patrol in Karrada, central Baghdad at 8 a.m. Thursday, injuring two civilians.

A roadside bomb targeted a law enforcement patrol in Palestine Street, close to Mustansiriyah University, northeastern Baghdad at noon Thursday, injuring seven of the patrol members.

A roadside bomb targeted an Iraqi army patrol in Doura, southern Baghdad at five p.m. Thursday, injuring five soldiers.

One mortar round hit a military base in Garage al-Amana neighbourhood, central Baghdad, at 6.30 p.m. No casualties were reported.

Two unidentified bodies were found in Baghdad by Iraqi police today; one in Ghazaliyah and the other in al-Khullani.

Nineveh

A family of three from Tallafar who had come into the city of Mosul to issue passports was targeted by small arms fire from gunmen in a speeding car on Wednesday. The father was killed and the mother and daughter were severely injured.

Gunmen opened fire upon civilians in 17 Tammouz neighbourhood, Thursday, killing one civilian.

A roadside bomb Targeted an Iraqi army patrol near al-Khansaa Hospital, al-Sukkar neighbourhood killing two soldiers, injuring one.

Police found a parked car bomb in al-Hadbaa neighbourhood and sent for the bomb squad to defuse it at 11 p.m. Wednesday. But the car bomb detonated before the squad got to the site, injuring one policeman.'

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

The Rain in Spain falls Mainly on McCain

John McCain seems to have gotten confused in an interview about Spanish prime minister Zapatero and someone in Latin America. When pressed he kept talking about Latin America and "this hemisphere."

Did he get mixed up with the Mexican peasant protest movement, the Zapatistas? Did he just assume the question was about one of those Latin American leftists with a Z in his name?

Josh Marshall points out that McCain in an earlier interview when his mind was less foggy had left open the possibility of a White House visit by Zapatero.

As part of NATO, Spain has 1,000 troops in Afghanistan.

McCain spokesman Randy Scheunemann, an arch-Neoconservative, insisted that McCain really did mean to diss Zapatero.

Joe Klein interprets this announcement as mere spin to keep McCain from looking confused. If so, Klein suggests that maybe it isn't worth destroying our relationship with a NATO ally just to avoid having to admit that the 72-year-old's mind wandered for a second. I mean, it isn't a new thing in American politics. Ronald Reagan once went woolly-headed and imagined himself in having fought as a grunt in World War II. He just made movies about it. And Reagan was a 2 term president who got an airport named after him.

Not McCain himself but some neocons around him may really be annoyed with Spain because Spanish intelligence is in Herat province and blew the whistle on the mistake the Pentagon made in bombing the civilian village of Azizabad and killing 90 people in late August.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Arab Reaction to Ascent of Livni

Reuters on Tzipi Livni's likely stance on negotiating with the Palestinians.

Palestinian reactions to Tzipi Livni becoming head of the Kadima Party, a rightwing party that splintered from the even more rightwing Likud Party over the withdrawal from Gaza. (i.e. a Kadima supporter is a Likudnik who has been mugged by demographic reality); via Aljazeera English:



For more on how some in the Arab world perceives her, an Aljazeera report on her career:


For "cont'd" postings, click here.

7 US Soldiers Killed; Al-Maliki Doubts Security Agreement

A helicopter crash in southern Iraq killed 7 US troops on Wednesday. The crash may or may not be the result of hostile action by elements of the Mahdi Army.

Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki signaled on Wednesday that the security agreement being negotiated by Iraq with the Bush administration is in trouble. Apparently the big sticking point is that the US continues to demand that US soldiers in Iraq retain their immunity from prosecution for crimes in the Iraqi courts.

A US soldier is in custody on possible murder charges in an incident that left two other military personnel dead.

The Iraqi parliament seems unable to pass enabling legislation to allow provincial elections to be held. Some 128 parliamentarians (out of 275) are die hard opposed to the alternative, which is to hold the provincial elections under the old law, which makes people vote blind for party lists rather than for individuals.

Tariq Ali asks if the US war with Pakistan has begun.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Obama smeared by Taheri on Iraq Troop Withdrawals; Journalist Notorious for False Story on Iranian Jews; Odierno Warns Iraq still Unstable

Amir Taheri, the rightwing Iranian 'journalist' who is the least accurate reporter to feign practicing journalism since Gutenberg invented movable metal type accused Barack Obama of seeking "a deal to delay US troops' from Iraq when he was in Baghdad last summer.

That makes no sense. The Iraqis have published their negotiating points, and they have been saying that they want a US withdrawal by 2010. That is virtually the same as Obama's plan, so it is highly unlikely that he was urging them to extend that timetable to 2011 or beyond. Taheri has garbled what Iraqi Foreign Minister Zebari told him.

The Obama campaign said,

'But Obama's national security spokeswoman Wendy Morigi said Taheri's article bore "as much resemblance to the truth as a McCain campaign commercial."

In fact, Obama had told the Iraqis that they should not rush through a "Strategic Framework Agreement" governing the future of US forces until after President George W. Bush leaves office, she said.

In the face of resistance from Bush, the Democrat has long said that any such agreement must be reviewed by the US Congress as it would tie a future administration's hands on Iraq.

"Barack Obama has never urged a delay in negotiations, nor has he urged a delay in immediately beginning a responsible drawdown of our combat brigades," Morigi said.'

Taheri can't get his facts right. He alleged in his piece that Iraq would form a new government after elections late this year. False. What are being planned are only provincial elections. The al-Maliki government is safe until early 2010 when the next round of parliamentary elections is scheduled to be held. Since al-Maliki has a stable constituency in the Shite south, 60% of the population, it is a little unlikely that he will be unseated.

Amir Taheri is the one who tried to get a false story started a couple of years ago that the Iranian government had passed a law requiring Iranian Jews to wear special clothing. The story was false and was denied by the Jewish member of the Iranian parliament. Taheri has a connection to the Neoconservative 'talent' agency, Benador Associates, whose clients helped get up the Iraq War.

If McCain trusts Taheri's account on this one, he is setting himself up for a fall.

Lt. Gen. Ray Odierno has taken over command of US troops in Iraq and began his duties with a warning of how difficult things still are.

The success of Republican Party propaganda that Iraq is "calm" now has the disadvantage for US commanders facing daily violence that it may mislead Congress and the public into cutting the support the commanders feel is still very much necessary.

Ned Parker of the LAT argues that Iraq is now in the hands of Iran and Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki in any case, and increasingly that the scope for American action there is limited. Al-Maliki has gotten control of the Iraqi military and intelligence apparatuses and makes his decisions independently of the US. Iran has helped convince the Mahdi Army to stand down, allowing him to consolidate control over the Shiite areas. He will take control of 50,000 Sunnis in the awakening councils on October 1 and may demobilize them and even prosecute some of them for past acts of terrorism. He has also started projecting state power into parts of Iraq now patrolled by the Kurdish Peshmerga, provoking a conflict with the Kurds of some bitterness. Kurdistan Regional Government president Massoud Barzani warned on Sunday that Kurdish troops in the Iraqi army could mutiny if the Arab-Kurdish conflict deepened. Barzani's outrage derives from his realization that Baghdad is reasserting itself under al-Maliki.

The Bush administration has declared itwill confiscate bank accounts and assets in the United States of the Association of Muslim Scholars, a clerical political party of Sunni fundamentalists, which Washington accuses of plotting terrorist actions against the Green Zone. The AMS, which has no assets anyplace the US treasury department could get at them, denies the charges.


Iraq is being flooded with weapons and Amnesty International says that the US and the UK are doing too little to interdict them.
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20% Goal for Alternative Energy to be Set in Europe

The European Union is moving closer to a goal of 20% of European energy coming from renewable energy sources instead of fossil fuels by 2020. Unfortunately, they left in biofuels, which in my view are a distraction. The question isn't whether it is renewable, the question is whether the energy puts more carbon into the atmosphere. Solar and wind don't, or not much (the machinery has to be built with industrial techniques, so there's some carbon released). Biofuels, I don't understand. We need to *reduce* the amount of carbon in the atmosphere, not slow the rate at which we increase the amount.

Still, Europe is a big chunk of the industrialized world, and if it can make the true costs of fossil fuels apparent by leveling the playing field in favor of wind and solar, that move will have a tremendous impact on innovations. There is a big danger that this new policy will give European solar firms a further leg up and leave the United States way behind, captive to Big Oil and Big Coal, with its solar firms hobbled by Congress's hidden subsidies to the fossil fuels. That would be a way for the US to end up a third world pariah country.

I still think solar is the more important part of the mix, since there is demonstrably enormous energy to be had from solar if it could be efficiently captured, stored and distributed, whereas there is only so much wind power in the world.

At least, unlike in the US, the Europeans are not foolishly talking about natural gas and 'clean coal' (i.e. unicorns) as an environmental improvement! Nor are they chanting "Drill now, Drill Here!" and demanding poisonous oil be brought out of the tundra to create climate catastrophe.
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We have Met the Environmental Poisons and they are US

They actually put it in baby bottles!

Chemical in plastics gives you diabetes, heart attacks.

We are now exposed to thousands of chemicals in daily life. My guess is, this is only the tip of the iceberg.

The chemical companies will do some more ads. It is sort of like the coal industry trying to convince you they are doing green energy.

We are being poisoned and cooked.

For the scientists vs. the FDA on this issue see this USA Today article.
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Palestinians See no Hope in Kadima Leadership Change

Aljazeera reports on the dim view Palestinians are taking of the contest for leadership of the Kadima Party in Israel.


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35 Killed in Bombings, 73 Wounded; Petraeus Leaves Iraq Better than He Found It

In Baladruz, in Diyala Province east of Baghdad, a female suicide bomber attacked a homecoming party for an Iraqi soldier just released from nearly a year of detention in a US prison in Iraq. The bombing killed 22 persons and wounded 33. The returning prisoner, Ahmad Shukri al-Tamimi, appears to have been a Shiite who was accused of fighting for Iran-backed militias. Likely he was killed by a Sunni group such as the Islamic State of Iraq or the 1920 Revolution Brigades. The bombing killed a number of high-ranking police officers in Baladruz,who were at the party. A lot of police in Diyala are Shiite because the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq led by Abdul Aziz al-Hakim won the provincial elections there in January, 2005. Diyala is though to actually have a Sunni majority.

In Baghdad, guerrillas set off 2 bombs near the passport office, killing 13 people and wounding 40, about half of them police.

Gen. David Petraeus is leaving Iraq, refusing to engage in glib talk of victory, and providing the best rationale for deploying politics to end the war I've heard:

' In a telephone interview with The Associated Press on Sunday, Petraeus said experience in Iraq shows it will take political and economic progress as well as military action to tackle increased violence in Afghanistan. "You don't kill or capture your way out of an industrial strength insurgency," he said.'

I hope the next president is listening.

Petraeus has great virtues as a commander, the chief of which in my view is that he genuinely cares about people. He really, really wanted to stop shoppers in bazaars from being blown to bits, and by God if he didn't in fact cut down on that sort of thing. He is too smart to think the 'surge' did it all, and knows that the situation is still fragile. Another of his virtues is that he understands the need to deal with people where they are. He did not try to ignore or crush the Sunnis and the Sadrists. He dealt with them. A lot of supporters of the Da`wa Party and the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, both fundamentalist Shiite parties, are annoyed with him for striking those deals, because they are convinced that they can crush their enemies. And as long as the new Iraqi government has that attitude, the peace is fragile indeed.

Of course, he's a general so you also have to expect him to act like one, i.e to kill the enemy. We won't know for some time all the on-the-ground policies he deployed, and of course Bob Woodward intimated that he presided over a Phoenix Project-like dirty war of assassination of Sunni insurgents. My own guess is that even if such a tactic was pursued, it was the politicking that made the real difference.

Aljazeera English reports on the transition:



Iraq's vice president, Tariq al-Hashemi, a Sunni, warned Monday that the current policy of the Iraqi govenment of arresting members of the Awakening Councils for past crimes risks pushing them back into the arms of the Sunni fundamentalist radicals.
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Is the Bush Administration at War with its Own Weapons in Pakistan?

The NYT reports,

"the Department of Defense has agreed so far this fiscal year to sell or transfer more than $32 billion in weapons and other military equipment to foreign governments, compared with $12 billion in 2005. The trend, which started in 2006, is most pronounced in the Middle East, . . .'

There are two reasons that this policy is not a good idea. The first is that there is good if not conclusive evidence that arms purchases are correlated with the outbreak of inter-state conflict. It is even more sure that when states purchase a lot of weapons, it impels their neighbors to do so, as well.

The bad news is that the extra arms do not cut down on internal insurgencies, either. So big arms sales reduce security, make war more likely, do nothing to put down rebellions, and drain resources from investments by the state that might actually help people.

A second reason that the NYT article is bad news is that the US may end up having to fight against its own weapons.

For instance, the Pakistani military is now flying F-16s over the northwestern tribal areas that the US has been attack. What if they just start shooting down US Predator unmanned strike craft?

The News (Pakistan) reports that

' According to sources, US troops boarded on two helicopters were trying to enter onto Pakistan's areas near Angoor Adda along Pak-Afghan border when local tribes and troops of Pakistan army resisted the move and opened fire, forcing US helicopters to return. '

Pakistan is obviously pushing back against Bush's July authorization of US strikes and attacks on targets inside Pakistan (whereby W. adopted a policy first argued for by Barack Obama).

In fact, Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani called President Asaf Ali Zardari on Sunday in Dubai to discuss with him the "need to defend Pakistan's sovereignty," which is to say, the need to engage invading US troops in battle!

Howard LaFranchi of CSM reveals the reason for Bush's about-face:

' The administration has debated the use of commando raids in Pakistan for years, but the tipping point came in July, as relations with Pakistan's civilian and military leaders deteriorated, intelligence sources say. The "kicker," according to one source who requested anonymity over the sensitivity of the issue, was two July events: the bombing of India's embassy in Afghanistan's capital, Kabul, an act that US intelligence officials concluded was aided by Pakistani intelligence operatives; and a July 13 attack on a US military outpost in eastern Afghanistan that killed nine US soldiers. The outpost attack was carried out by Taliban militants who had crossed over the nearby border from Pakistan.'

He also quotes Pat Lang, to whom American bombing of Pakistan looks an awful lot like the spillover of the Vietnam War onto Cambodia under Nixon.

Myra McDonald asks if the US is at war with Pakistan?

OK, so at the same time the US is invading South Waziristan because Pakistan allegedly won't do it, the Pakistani military is killing 32 people in Bajaur with helicopter gunships, including 3 women. 300,000 residents of Bajaur had fled, then started tor return because of a Ramadan ceasefire, but now are fleeing again.

The way I make sense of all this is that the Pakistani military has feuds with some Pushtun tribes, for instance maybe the Tarkalanis in the northern FATA of Bajaur, which are in rebellion against the Pakistani government.

It also has a feud with the Mahsuds of South Waziristan. In fact, Baitullah Mahsud is a leader of the Tehrik-i Taliban and was accused of assassinating Benazir Bhutto. Pakistani troops have repeatedly fought the Mahsuds.

But maybe one sept of the Mahsuds has gone over to become assets of the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence. And the Pakistani military sometimes sends this clan from the Mahsud over the border to Afghanistan to do its bidding.

So the Pakistani high command can always point to all it is doing to fight terrorism, how many insurgents it has killed and troops it has lost, and it is perfectly true. But then President Hamid Karzai and Delhi can complain that Islamabad is facilitating Taliban terrorism in Afghanistan, and, well, maybe that is true, too.

So presumably if the US predators or special ops teams would hit Bajaur, or the rebellious part of South Waziristan, it wouldn't be such a big deal for the Pakistani elite. The objectionable thing is that the US is hitting Islamabad's Taliban.

Or maybe it is even more complex, with the high command in Islamabad locked in combat with the Mahsuds of South Waziristan but the Pakistani frontier constabulary sympathizing with them.

The oddest thing.


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28 Killed, 40 Wounded; Peshmerga Killed in Roadside Bombing; 4 Sharqiya Staff Kidnapped, Killed

In a continuing wave of violence in Iraq, 28 persons were killed and 40 wounded on Saturday. Among the dead were 9 members of the Kurdish Peshmerga paramilitary, killed by a roadside bomb near the disputed city of Khanaqin in Diyala. Arabs and Kurds are increasingly at odds over the future of this city, which Kurds wish to incorporate into the Kurdistan Regional Government.

Al-Hayat reports in Arabic that the director of the Sharqiyyah television channel is blaming the official Iraqiyyah television channel for a campaign of vilification of Sharqiyyah correspondents, which he said led to the kidnapping and killing of 4 Sharqiyyah staff in Mosul on Saturday. Sharqiyyah is run by a former director of television and radio under Saddam Hussein and so is considered a Baath organ and viewed with suspicion by Shiites and Kurds, who control the Iraqiyyah channel.

Al-Hayat reports in Arabic that Kurdish politicians are now demanding that an article be struck from the proposed Status of Forces Agreement between the Bush administration and the al-Maliki government. The offending paragraph permits the Iraqi central government to strike similar security deals with its neighbors. Presumably the Kurds are afraid of being constrained by a Federal government SOFA with, e.g., Turkey or Iran. Al-Maliki spokesman Ali Dabbagh expressed surprise at the demand, saying that the Kurds had for some time been urging a swift passage of the SOFA and had never objected to that paragraph before.

The government's increasing conflicts with the Kurds are also apparent in the collapse of a parliamentary committee appointed by speaker Mahmud al-Mashhadani to attempt to resolve the differences over Kirkuk so that the law on provincial elections can be passed. Members of the committee accused their Kurdish colleagues of continually bringing up issues that had nothing to do with the provincial elections, and thus derailing the party-based talks. There is a dispute about whether Kirkuk province should vote at the same time as the other provinces, and how power should be distributed there. The Kurdish leadership would like to incorporate oil-rich Kirkuk into the Kurdistan Regional Government, but Arabs and Turkmen object.

Amit Paley of WaPo finds that the Peshmerga have quietly expanded into 300 sq.mi.of neighboring territory, incorporating it de facto into the Kurdistan Regional Government even though it lies in Iraq proper. The US military,he reports,sees this Kurdish expansion as destabilizing.

Patrick Cockburn argues that Iraq violence is down, but not because of the US troop escalation or 'surge' of last year.

McClatchy reports political violence in Iraq on Saturday:

' Baghdad

- A roadside bomb targeted a police patrol in Dora neighborhood(south Baghdad). Four policemen were wounded.

- Around 11:30 am, a roadside bomb targeted a national police patrol in Karrada neighborhood in central Baghdad. Three people were killed including one policeman and five others were wounded (including 2 policemen).

- Around noon, a bomb planted under a civilian car detonated near Adela Khatoon mosque in Bab Al-Mutham (north Baghdad). Four people were injured.

-Around 6:30 pm, a roadside bomb detonated near Mulla Huish mosque in Jamia’a neighborhood(west Baghdad). Three people were wounded.

- Around 8 pm, a bomb planted under a car in Adhemiyah neighborhood(north Baghdad) detonated when it stopped near a check point for the Sahwa members. Six people were wounded (three Sahwa members and three civilians).

- Police found two dead bodies in Baghdad neighborhoods today: One was found in Tobchi in western Baghdad in Karkh bank. While one was found in Binouk neighborhood in eastern Baghdad in Risafa bank.

Diyala

- A roadside bomb targeted a Peshmerga patrol on the way between Khanaqeen city and Sadiyah town (east of Baquba). Nine members were killed including a colonel and three others were wounded.

Mosul

- Around 12;30 pm, the Sharqiya crew of Iraqi satellite channel in Mosul who were 4 persons( the local manager, two camermen and driver) were kidnapped and then killed by gunmen who broke out the house where the crew was filming in Zanjili (west of Mosul). The four dead bodies were found 30 minutes later in AL-Bursa neighborhood in Zanjili.

Basra

-On Friday night, one civilian was killed and three others were wounded including a traffic policeman when an Iraqi soldier opened fire randomly in Abu Al-khaseeb market(about 13 miles south of Basra). The spokesman of the Iraqi army in Basra said that it was an accident when the soldier pulled the trigger by mistake and he is now in detention.'

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Azizabad Survivors Demand Justice from US; S. Asian Britons "Boiling" with Anger over US Raids

Aljazeera English reports that the Afghans bombed by the US near Herat are demanding justice.

Apparently an al-Qaeda operative named "Nadir" tricked the US, telling them that there was an al-Qaeda safe house in that village, when in fact they were just civilian villagers.



Afghan authorities say the US killed 90 civilians at Azizabad in Herat province. The US military admits to only a handful.

The Times of London released video that appears to settle the issue in favor of the Afghans.

Barnett Rubin on how the genie can't be put back in the bottle in Afghanistan.

Then there is the "Fury" in Pakistan over US cross-border raids on Waziristan, Pakistani territory, which Chief of Staff Ashfaq Kayani has called unacceptable.

What is even more dangerous than anger in Pakistan is the ire these actions will raise among the already highly alienated and angry British youth of Pakistani heritage. It is almost as if someone wanted to provoke some of them to an act of violence that might return the terrorism issue to the front burner in American presidential politics . . .
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Palin: Not Governor of Alaska, Visited it once on Spring Break

Satire alert

The Republican campaign of Sarah Palin admitted on Satuday that contrary to their previous assertions,she had not actually visited US troops inside Iraq, only visiting a border checkpoint while she was in Kuwait. They further admitted that she had not actually been in Ireland, but just sat in the plane while it refueled there.

They furthermore admited that far from rejecting earmarks she had requested $192 million in earmarks from the Federal government last February. In her first year in office, she had requested $550 million in earmarks. Since Alaska has a small population, these are large requests per capita.

Then, it became clear that Alaska does not actually produce 20 percent of the energy America uses, contrary to what Palin said in her speech. It is more like 2.4 to 3.5 percent depending what exactly she meant by her vague statement. That's wrong by a factor of something like 6.

Moreover, the campaign was forced to admit , you can't actually see Russia from Alaska, because of the curvature of the earth. Not to mention, one staffer said sheepishly, Palin wears pretty thick Tina Fey glasses, and can't actually even see who she is talking to, much less all the way to Russia. She only agreed to run with John McCain, he explained, because she mistook him for Fred Thompson and thought it would be neat to appear as a judge sometime on "Law and Order."

As for those alleged trips to Mexico and Canada, it turns out that she just likes to watch "Ugly Betty" on t.v. and thinks William Shatner is "still a hunk."

The campaign finally broke down and admitted that Palin is not even governor of Alaska and only ever visited it once, on spring break in the 1980s. Palin admitted that it was an unusual choice for a spring break fling, but explained that she had been heading for Ft. Lauderdale when she and some friends tried some weed in the car and that she "couldn't remember very much else about the trip." She said it was the "spring break of a lifetime," though, and she'd like to visit Alaska again someday after she dealt with the charges stemming from impersonating a politician.

Satire alert.
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Bombings at Dujail, Sinjar Kill over 30, wound 85

Two big bombings targeted Shiites on Friday. A bomb killed over 30 persons and wounded over 40 in Dujail, a largely Shiite city northeast of Baghdad. Earlier on Friday, a bomb at the Dhakir al-Din Mosque in Sinjar killed two and wounded 15.

The security situation has deteriorated in Mosul, (pop. 1.8 mn), Iraq's second largest city, which lies in the north of the country. Reuters reports that "U.S. military officials say attacks fell from around 130 per week just before the May offensive to 30 a week in Nineveh by July, before creeping up to 60-70 per week."

When you've got 60 attacks a week in the country's second largest city, things are not "calm."

Tim Cocks did interviews with residents of Mosul: "People here are very afraid," said Nisreen Mustafa, a housewife. "We always heard explosions before the operation and we still hear them a lot now. What's changed?"

Cocks points to Arab-Kurdish ethnic divisions in the city as one reason there has not been better sharing of intelligence on guerrillas among residents and authorities.

Al-Hayat reports in Arabic that Sadrist MP Diya' Shawqi expressed his opposition on Friday at the Friday prayers in Kufa to any agreement at all on security arrangements between the Iraqi government and the United States, on the grounds that it would inevitably legitimize the occupation. The worshippers staged a demonstration against the security agreement after Friday prayers.

The same article reports that on another front, another prominent Sadrist, Abd al-Shaikh Abd al-Hadi al-Muhammadawi (who yesterday led Friday prayers in Sadr City) said, "We deplore the incorporation of the Awakening Councils into the Iraqi security forces, and enabling them to decide the fate of the Iraqis." Muhammadawi ordinarily directs the Sadr Movement office in Karbala. He added, "The Awakening Councils were enemies of the Iraqi people just yesterday."

Abdul Mahdi Karbala'i, a representative of Grand Ayatollah Sistani, called for a consensus-based resolution of the crisis over Kirkuk. He said that Sistani affirmed the important of resorting to dialogue in calming passions on this issue.

Andrew Bacevich on the anniversary of Sept. 11, which, contrary to Sarah Palin, had nothing to do with Iraq and everything to do with Neoconservative hubris.

McClatchy reports other political violence in Iraq on Friday:

' Baghdad

Five civilians were injured by an adhesive bomb that was stuck to a civilian car. The bomb exploded when the car reached a checkpoint of the Iraqi army in Mansour neighborhood in west Baghdad around 2:00 p.m.

Around 5:00 an adhesive bomb that was stuck to a car exploded in Bonouk neighborhood in east Baghdad. Two cars were destroyed in the explosion.

Gunmen threw a grenade inside a house in al Jihad neighborhood in south Baghdad around 6:00 p.m. thirteen civilians were wounded.

Police found one un identified body in Ur neighborhood.

Nineveh

Gunmen broke in a house in al Karama neighborhood in Mosul city and killed a family (parents and their son)

Three civilians were killed and fifteen others were wounded when a suicide bomber wearing an explosive vest detonated while prayers were leaving a Shiite mosque after finishing Friday prayers in Sinjar town southwest of Mosul city around 2:00 p.m. . .


Basra

A civilian was injured by a roadside bomb that targeted a British patrol in al jininiyah neighborhood in north Basra.'

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Afghanistan: Taliban hit US Security Firm, 23 Dead

Taliban in Afghanistan attacked the convoy of the US security firm, US Protection and Investigations, on Friday. 23 persons were killed in the clash,including 15 Taliban attackers.

A US predator attack on a target in nothern Waziristan, Pakistan, left 12 persons dead on Friday. The target appears to have been a building used by the radical Sunni Badr militant group.

The US attacks on targets inside Pakistan and the permission Bush has given for such attacks roiled Pakistani politics on Friday. Pakistani chief of staff Ashfaq Kayani affirmed that the military and the elected civilian government "will defend the country’s territorial integrity with full support of the people."

My guess is that the Pakistani elite secretly gave permission to Bush to hit targets inside Pakistan, and warned him they would have to attack him for the policy.

Tom Engelhardt on "Slaughter, Lies and Video in Afghanistan."
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Palin on World Affairs: Just not Ready for Prime Time

Sarah Palin revealed herself in the Charlie Gibson interview on ABC to be nervous,uninformed, green and generally not ready for prime time. The interview was full of stock phrases she was made to memorize, and which she repeated over and over again when stumped. She knows nothing about how Iran is run, or about Pakistan, or about al-Qaeda, and even is ignorant of the Bush doctrine of preemptive warfare. It was a shockingly bad performance.

She had the hubris to suggest that her lack of knowledge and experience is a virtue. Why Americans, practical people, would fall for this line is beyond me. Would you want your car to be worked on by an inexperienced and ignorant mechanic? Would you want a plumber messing around with your pipes who did not know his way around wrenches?

I'm tired of her trumpeting being from a small town as if that is qualification for high office. It isn't where you are from that matters. My parents are from Star Tannery, Va. and Winchester, Va., respectively, and I was born in Albuquerque, NM (not then a big city) and grew up mostly on army bases or in small places like Fuquay Springs, NC (near Ft. Bragg). These were not exactly Manhattan. We did not have a lot of money when I was growing up and I went to Northwestern on a scholarship. My background isn't so different from hers. But Palin futzed around at this campus and that, at one point switching from a university in Hawaii because the campus was on the rainy side of the island. How frivolous! She isn't well educated and doesn't appear to have thought it was important to become so. She has never shown any interest in the world at large, which she now wants to run. She is clearly ambitious, but nothing is more dangerous than ambition with no qualifications.

The scariest thing in the interview was this exchange:

'When Gibson said if under the NATO treaty, the United States would have to go to war if Russia again invaded Georgia,

Palin responded: "Perhaps so. I mean, that is the agreement when you are a NATO ally, is if another country is attacked, you're going to be expected to be called upon and help.

"And we've got to keep an eye on Russia. For Russia to have exerted such pressure in terms of invading a smaller democratic country, unprovoked, is unacceptable," she told Gibson. '

She went on later to talk about providing economic and other help and to back off seeming to threaten Russia with war.

But look at the video below. It is the alacrity with which she says "perhaps so" that is so alarming. He asked her specifically about having to go to war with Russia over Georgia and she said, "perhaps so!" As though a war with a nuclear power was just the most natural and expected thing in the world. I think the San Francisco Chronicle entitled their article correctly.

Help!

As I count it, McCain Palin plans to keep us in Iraq for 100 years, to invade Pakistan, and to fight a war with Russia over Georgia, all at once. They won't just need a draft, they'll need gulags to pull that off!

More excerpts from the ABC Palin interview :

' GIBSON: Let me turn to Iran. Do you consider a nuclear Iran to be an existential threat to Israel?

PALIN: I believe that under the leadership of Ahmadinejad, nuclear weapons in the hands of his government are extremely dangerous to everyone on this globe, yes.

GIBSON: So what should we do about a nuclear Iran?

PALIN: We have got to make sure that these weapons of mass destruction, that nuclear weapons are not given to those hands of Ahmadinejad, not that he would use them, but that he would allow terrorists to be able to use them.So we have got to put the pressure on Iran.'

Cole: Actually, Mahmud Ahmadinejad is not the commander in chief of the Iranian armed forces and is not in charge of national security or nuclear matters. Supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is. Moreover, Ahmadinejad cannot serve past 2013, and Iran cannot get nukes by then even if it was trying to do so, which the National Intelligence Estimate of December 2007 says it is not. If the reason to be afraid of the Iranian civilian nuclear energy research program is that Ahmadinejad is the president, she can relax. The idea that the Iranian government would give a nuclear bomb that could be traced back to Iran to a terrorist group is ridiculous, just another fear-mongering fantasy.

'GIBSON: What if Israel decided it felt threatened and needed to take out the Iranian nuclear facilities?

PALIN: Well, first, we are friends with Israel and I don't think that we should second guess the measures that Israel has to take to defend themselves and for their security.

GIBSON: So if we wouldn't second guess it and they decided they needed to do it because Iran was an existential threat, we would cooperative or agree with that.

PALIN: I don't think we can second guess what Israel has to do to secure its nation.

GIBSON: So if it felt necessary, if it felt the need to defend itself by taking out Iranian nuclear facilities, that would be all right.

PALIN: We cannot second guess the steps that Israel has to take to defend itself.'

Cole: She doesn't seem to understand that our troops (including shortly, her son) are in striking distance from Iran and that a unilateral Israeli strike on Iran would have consequences for the United States. That is why Chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff was sent to Israel by Bush to read them the riot act and instruct them that they are not to attack Iran. Palin's "anything goes" attitude to Israeli actions in the Middle East could get a lot of Americans killed.

'GIBSON: We talk on the anniversary of 9/11. Why do you think those hijackers attacked? Why did they want to hurt us?

PALIN: You know, there is a very small percentage of Islamic believers who are extreme and they are violent and they do not believe in American ideals, and they attacked us and now we are at a point here seven years later, on the anniversary, in this post-9/11 world, where we're able to commit to never again. They see that the only option for them is to become a suicide bomber, to get caught up in this evil, in this terror. They need to be provided the hope that all Americans have instilled in us, because we're a democratic, we are a free, and we are a free-thinking society.'

Cole: Well at least she knows that the radicals in the Muslim world are a tiny group. But she gives no sign of understanding what is going on in the Muslim world, and just parrots a lot of slogans about evil and democratization.

'GIBSON: Do you agree with the Bush doctrine?

PALIN: In what respect, Charlie?

GIBSON: The Bush -- well, what do you -- what do you interpret it to be?

PALIN: His world view.

GIBSON: No, the Bush doctrine, enunciated September 2002, before the Iraq war.

PALIN: I believe that what President Bush has attempted to do is rid this world of Islamic extremism, terrorists who are hell bent on destroying our nation. There have been blunders along the way, though. There have been mistakes made. And with new leadership, and that's the beauty of American elections, of course, and democracy, is with new leadership comes opportunity to do things better.

GIBSON: The Bush doctrine, as I understand it, is that we have the right of anticipatory self-defense, that we have the right to a preemptive strike against any other country that we think is going to attack us. Do you agree with that?

PALIN: Charlie, if there is legitimate and enough intelligence that tells us that a strike is imminent against American people, we have every right to defend our country. In fact, the president has the obligation, the duty to defend.'

Unbelievable. She not only had no idea what the Bush doctrine was, she tried to BS her way through the question instead of being honest about not having heard of it. It is one thing to be ignorant about something, another not to be willing to admit it. The whole interview is painful for the narrow-minded and ill-informed view of the world it displays, but this is the nadir. And remember, McCain could have chosen Kay Bailey Hutchison if he wanted a woman on the ticket.

I commented on the Bush doctrine as soon as W. enunciated it and warned how dangerous it was as an international precedent. I'm just a midwest college professor and I was following it. Shouldn't a political junkie know these things? I mean, are her horizons that narrow? If so, why should we want her a heartbeat away from the presidency? Haven't we already had 8 years of Crawford small town foreign policy? Has it been pretty?

'GIBSON: Do we have the right to be making cross-border attacks into Pakistan from Afghanistan, with or without the approval of the Pakistani government?

PALIN: Now, as for our right to invade, we're going to work with these countries, building new relationships, working with existing allies, but forging new, also, in order to, Charlie, get to a point in this world where war is not going to be a first option. In fact, war has got to be, a military strike, a last option.

GIBSON: But, Governor, I'm asking you: We have the right, in your mind, to go across the border with or without the approval of the Pakistani government.

PALIN: In order to stop Islamic extremists, those terrorists who would seek to destroy America and our allies, we must do whatever it takes and we must not blink, Charlie, in making those tough decisions of where we go and even who we target.

GIBSON: And let me finish with this. I got lost in a blizzard of words there. Is that a yes? That you think we have the right to go across the border with or without the approval of the Pakistani government, to go after terrorists who are in the Waziristan area?

PALIN: I believe that America has to exercise all options in order to stop the terrorists who are hell bent on destroying America and our allies. We have got to have all options out there on the table.'

Sounds like she has the Obama position on this one, not the McCain position. Too bad, since this is one area where McCain's is the wiser.

Part 1 of the Gibson interview with Palin:



and Part 2


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Bombings in Karbala; US Plot against Maliki? Japanese say Sayonara to Iraq

Two bombs in the Shiite holy city of Karbala were detonated near the shrine of Imam Husayn, the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad. The explosions killed 3 and wounded 15. Because of the extreme religious sensitivity of the Shiite shrines in Iraq, these bombings had security implications far beyond what is apparent on the surface.

Al-Hayat reports in Arabic that the Iraqi government continues to insist that US troops in Iraq will not have legal immunity from prosecution in Iraqi courts for criminal activity in Iraq.

A secret report by a Kurdish political party speculates that the US might kill or depose Iraqi Prime minister Nuri al-Maliki because of his insistence on US troops being out of Iraq by 2011. Note that speculation about what the US might do by a Kurdish party doesn't tell you very much about what the US might do unless its leaders are awfully well connected in Washington and have been told these things by someone high up.

The The Awakening Council movement in the Sunni areas of Iraq is coming to an end, implies McClatchy. The Iraqi government will take over payments to them on October 1 and most will be given make-work desk jobs as bureaucrats. Only 20,000 of the nearly 100,000 irregulars will be absorbed into official Iraqi security forces, according to the government. The Awakening fighters are very suspicious that the government will not honor its pledges, and, indeed, that it may turn on them and prosecute them for the acts of terrorism many of them engaged in before joining the Awakening Councils. In fact, Iraqi government officials have threatened them with prosecution if they don't stop making demands on the state. I can only imagine that the Awakening Council fighters are also afraid that if they are disarmed and given a desk job, they will become sitting duck for reprisals from the fundamentalist vigilantes on whom they had turned.

Japan is ending its small remaining military mission in Iraq, which has been extremely unpopular with the Japanese public. The Liberal Democratic Party is facing difficult elections, and its partner, the New Komeito Party, is strongly pacifist. This right-of-center, pro-peace party is supported by the Buddhist New Religious Movement, Soka Gakkai. How come Japanese Buddhists are pro-peace and so many American Christians are pro-war?

The Japanese pull-out is one of many planned by US allies this year, as the UN Security Council authorization for foreign troops in Iraq comes to an end in December.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

On the Seventh Anniversary of September 11: Time to Declare the original al-Qaeda Defeated

The original al-Qaeda is defeated.

It is a dangerous thing for an analyst to say, because obviously radical Muslim extremists may at some point set off some more bombs and then everyone will point fingers and say how wrong I was.

So let me be very clear that I do not mean that radical Muslim extremism has ceased to exist or that there will never be another bombing at their hands.

I mean the original al-Qaeda. Al-Qaeda as a historical, concrete movement centered on Usama Bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, with the mujahideen who fought in Afghanistan in the 1980s at their core. Al-Qaeda, the 55th Brigade of the Army of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan under the Taliban. That al-Qaeda. The 5,000 fighters and operatives or whatever number they amounted to.

That original al-Qaeda has been defeated.

Usamah Bin Laden has not released an original videotape since about four years ago. There was that disaster with the cgi black beard. There was the old footage spliced in by al-Sahab. But nothing new on videotape. I conclude that Bin Laden, if he is alive, is so injured or disfigured that his appearance on videotape would only discourage any followers he has left.

Ayman al-Zawahiri, Bin Laden's number two man, is alive and vigorous and oppressively talkative. But he has played wolf so many times with no follow-through that he cannot even get airtime on cable news anymore, except at Aljazeera, and even there they excerpt a few minutes from a long tape.

Marc Sageman in his 'Understanding Terror Networks' estimates that there are less than a thousand Muslim terrorists who could and would do harm to the United States. That is, the original al-Qaeda was dangerous because it was an international terror organization dedicated to stalking the US and pulling the plug on its economy. It had one big success in that regard, by exploiting a small set of vulnerabilities in airline safety procedures. But after that, getting up a really significant operation has been beyond them so far.

In the region, Usamah Bin Laden wanted to overthrow the royal family of Saudi Arabia, and install an al-Qaeda-led, Taliban-like 'emirate' in that country. He wanted to expel US troops from Prince Sultan Air Base, which he considered a form of American military occupation of Saudi Arabia and thus of two of the holiest cities in Islam, Mecca and Medina.

Ayman al-Zawahiri wanted to overthrow the Egyptian government. His Egyptian Islamic Jihad was building cells and capacity for a violent attack on the Egyptian president, just as constituent elements of al-Qaeda had assassinated Anwar El Sadat in 1981.

But the Saudi government has not been overthrown. The US troops are out of Saudi Arabia, so talk has died down about the occupation of the two holy cities, which never made much sense to begin with (there were few or no foreign troops in Hijaz, the west coast along the Red Sea, where Mecca and Medina are located). The Saudi royal family is flush with tens of billions of dollars in oil revenues. It may fall to a popular revolution as with Iran, in the future, but any such instability is unlikely to be led by al-Qaeda. Only 10% of Saudis now say they think well of that organization, and they are the ones who do not think it carried out September 11.

Ayman al-Zawahiri's organization, the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, has been devastated inside Egypt. Most of its cadres were killed or imprisoned. It had had an alliance,since 1980 or so, with the Gama'a al-Islamiyyah of the blind sheikh, Omar Abdel Rahman. The leadership of the Gama'a has broken with the sheikh, and many of the leaders have renounced violence as a political path. They have written and published 20 or so 'recantations' that interpret the Qur'an as commanding peaceful activitsm and denouncing violence.

That is, one of the major unexpected outcomes of Sept. 11 has been to turn one of the major Egyptian fundamentalist organizations into a peace movement.

Everywhere you look, the Egyptian Islamic Jihad is weaker or has dwindled into insignificance.

So if the original al-Qaeda has been defeated, what are the prospects of violent Muslim radicalism?

Terrorist groups are active in four major contexts among Muslims:

1) There are tiny one-off cells (a group of seven acquaintances, e.g., unconnected to any larger organization) among some Muslim communities of Western Europe. They have no real political prospects or import, although they can be briefly disruptive. They are expressions of discontent by a handful of obsessive personalities with Western foreign policy toward the Muslim world. There are also small one-off cells in some Muslim countries, such as Morocco, but so far they are not politically important. These cells are nurtured by the internet and might have dissipated in its absence.

2) There are larger organizations or networks in some Middle Eastern countries that deploy terrorist tactics for political purposes. The radical Muslim movement of Algeria is an example. Al-Qaeda in Saudi Arabia made a push 2003-2006 but was largely repressed.

3) In small territories under what is locally perceived as direct foreign military occupation, organized national liberation movements have sometimes deployed Muslim radicalism as an ideology of resistance and resorted to terrorist tactics, as with Hamas in Gaza, and the Kashmiri and Chechen jihadi groups (Hizbullah in Lebanon had its genesis in Israeli occupation of the South of that country). They are leant greater significance and popular support by the national liberation project, but they are operating among relatively small populations (Gaza is 1.5 million) and are taking much larger occupiers, so that they can be crushed or marginalized over time.

One implication of Sageman's work is that these groups centered on national liberation seldom pose a terrorist threat to the United States. Hamas, for instance, pledged no attack on the US. Sageman found no Kashmiris among the international terrorist groups-- they are focused on their domestic project of liberation.

4) Virtually in a class by themselves are the Islamic State of Iraq in the Sunni Arab areas of Iraq, and the Taliban, whether the Tehrik-i Taliban in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan or the neo-Taliban of southern Afghanistan. The Islamic State of Iraq and similar organizations are called by Washington 'al-Qaeda in Iraq or AQI-- but the groups themselves generally do not call themselves this since the killing of Abu Musab Zarqawi. They have been attrited in Iraq by Shiite death squads, by American military operations and special death squads, and by the opposition of tribal and other local political forces, such as the 1920 Revolution Brigades, which allied from summer 2006 with the US. They operated on a much bigger scale than the groups in 3) and had the potential to control big swathes of territory before their defeat. The radical Sunnis' strategy in Iraq, of targetting Shiites and provoking an ethnic civil war, doomed them, since it left them a small minority toward which the majority was deeply hostile. They were forestalled by their own tactics from taking up the mantle of Iraqi nationalism, and so remained terrorist groups without larger political import.

While the Taliban are broadly unpopular in both Pakistan and Afghanistan, they do have some claim on sentiments of sub-nationalism among the Pushtun ethnic group and so have managed to become political movements and not just terrorist groups (though they continue to deploy terrorism as one tool for accomplishing their political goals). The neo-Taliban in Afghanistan seem to be near to taking Ghazni, which is not so far from the capital, Kabul.

Although the US is worried about the Arab volunteers who take refuge among the resurgent Taliban, they are a tiny element and cannot easily launch international terrorist operations from FATA. NATO is making a significant error if it does not recognize that the neo-Taliban is more than just a small international terrorist organization. Rather, it has elements of a national liberation organization (in northwest Pakistan it is the lentil-eating Punjabis who are coded as the 'foreign' occupiers).

While counter-terrorism activities can be usefully pursued in these three areas, it is clear that the local perception of foreign occupation is part of the problem, and a long-term occupation is likely to exacerbate the violence rather than reduce it.

Here is some support for that thesis. Aljazeera English reports on the Afghan reaction to Bush's announcement that he will send more US troops to Afghanistan. Those interviewed are convinced it won't matter or that it will make the security situation worse, and insist that more Afghan troops are the answer.



It seems clear to me that a combination of sticks and carrots in dealing with the tribes plus strengthening the capacity and efficiency of the local military forces is the only path likely to succeed in the long run here. In any case the Taliban themselves do not pose the threat of international terrorism, though they may give safe harbor to individuals from abroad that do. The focus should be on tracking down and circumscribing the activities of those individuals. Convincing the Pushtun population generally to put up with 70,000 US and NATO troops and with air strikes that kill civilian villagers is a fool's errand.

As for the relative decline of Sunni radicalism in Iraq, it comes in part from a political failure. That al-Qaeda's inability to develop a pan-Islamic discourse and strategy helped doom it is clear from the remarks by Ayman al-Zawahiri released earlier this week regarding Iran.

'
Do you have any advice or any words to refute the argument of the theoreticians who claim that 9/11 was an internal action carried out by the Israeli Government?

Al-Zawahiri: My answer: It is enough to reply to this suspicion by saying that it is not based on any evidence. The first side that released this suspicion was Al-Manar Television, which is affiliated with the Lebanese Hizballah. It claimed that it cited a certain website. The objective behind this lie is clear. The objective is to deny that the Sunnis have heroes who harm America as no one has harmed it throughout its history. This lie was then circulated by the Iranian news media and they continued to repeat it until today for the same objective. Perhaps, they guided Al-Manar Television to begin these lies. Iran's objective is clear. It is to cover its collusion with America in invading the homelands of Muslims in Afghanistan and Iraq.

I gave examples of this collusion in my recent interview with Al-Sahab under the title "reading in the events." This lie was then repeated by some of the psychologically defeated ones in our Islamic world, whose minds, which were distorted by Western exaggeration, refuse to believe that some Muslims can cause this harm to America. These poor minds have thus far not been able to understand why America is defeated in Afghanistan and Iraq in front of the simple mujahidin, and, in fact, why America has failed to arrest Mulla Mohammad Omar and Shaykh Usama Bin Ladin, may God watch over them, after more than six years of fierce war, during which it used all means of technology, which caused us a headache about its legendary capabilities. Fur thermore, why the power of the mujahidin is growing against it day by day despite this world war that is being launched against them?'

No more eloquent testament to the defeat of the original al-Qaeda could be found than the pitiful inability of Zawahiri to name any genuine accomplishments in recent times save the ability of the top leadership to elude capture!

The Bush administration over-reacted to September 11, misunderstanding it as the action of a traditional state rather than of a small asymmetrical terrorist group. Its occupation of Iraq lengthened al-Qaeda's shelf life. But poor strategy by the Sunni radicals themselvesf brought the full wrath of Iran, the Iraqi Shiites, Jordanian intelligence, and the United States military down on their heads.

"Al-Qaeda in Iraq" is not a reason for the US to extend its occupation of that country, but is rather an epiphenomenon created by the occupation and the political mistakes it made.

My hypothesis is that the relatively high incidence of terrorism in the Muslim world in recent times is associated with two major factors. One is the final tying up of the loose ends of the 19th and early 20th century legacy of Western colonialism in the region (Algeria, Palestine, Ksahmir and Chechnya all have that context). The other is the large scale movement from rural, peasant life to an alienating urban environment. The transition from agrarian to urban society has been attended with great violence and disruptions in other culture regions as well-- consider Germany in the first halfof the twentieth century, or Russia, or China. When the contradictions of the colonial legacy are resolved, and when the urban and demographic transitions are sufficiently advanced, the incidence of terrorism in the region will likely decline. There may be further violence, but it will be rooted in future crises such as the impending water shortage and very high fuel and food prices.

For now, our war is over. Time to come home, and train and fund locals to do the clean-up work.
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Why is lying an acceptable tactic, asset, even, in campaigning for the most important job in the world?

E. J. Dionne: Does the Truth Matter any More? Subtitled at Reddit.com, "Why is lying an acceptable tactic, asset, even, in campaigning for the most important job in the world? "

John McCain wasted all that time trying to control big money in politics and got slapped down by the courts.

Maybe he would have been better off passing legislation allowing the Federal Trade Commission to fine political campaigns for purveying obvious falsehoods in their advertisements. I'm not talking about claims over which there can be a reasoned dispute. I mean claims that are just obvious lies, about which all reasonable persons would agree as to their plain falsehood.

After all, food and drug companies are not allowed to make false claims on the public airwaves. Isn't who is president potentially as vital a question for your health as whether Kevin Trudeau can lie to you in his infomercials?

The president of the United States can still start a nuclear war with an ill-considered policy, leaving tens of millions of people dead and threatening all life on earth with a nuclear winter.

That doesn't deserve the slightest due diligence from our regulatory agencies?

Ironically, McCain, who once tried to reform political campaigns, is now the Kevin Trudeau of political commercials.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Iraq F-16 Purchase Roils Relations with Kurds; Bush's Minimal Withdrawal Points to Minimal Gains; Al-Maliki's Head of Security Injured

Al-Hayat reports in Arabic that a big dispute has broken out between the three largest blocs in parliament. The government has so far been characterized by an alliance of the Shiite Iraqi Accord Front with the Kurdistan Alliance. But now the Shiites want to equip the Iraqi military with F-16s.

The day before yesterday, the Kurdish speaker of parliament demanded that any such purchase be attendant on a pledge by the Iraqi government never to use the planes against the Kurdish people.

Jalaluddin Saghir, popular Shiite preacher and a member of parliament, said that it is impossible to compare situation in the late zeroes to that of the of the former regime, and that the current, representative government would never persecute the Kurdish people. He said that the arms purchases were necessary to defend the country after the foreign troops withdrew. He insisted that this move was a clear prerogative of the central government. He observed that the current government in Iraq poses no threat to its neighbors.

MP Abdul Karim al-Samarra'i, who serves on the Security and Defense Committee, represents the Sunni Iraqi Accord Front; he called the Kurdish demands "unacceptable" and impossible to implement. He said there had to be a broad agreement on the need to equip the Iraqi military.

Among the more dangerous political developments in Iraq could be a collapse of the Shiite-Kurdish alliance, followed by a joint Sunni-Shiite Arab alliance against the Kurds.

Al-Maliki's chief of security was severely injured by a bomb Tuesday morning in Baghdad. This attack is quite ominous but does not seem to have gotten much press in English. See below.

The parliament of Kuwait also expressed concern about Iraqi rearmament, drawing a rebuke from Ali al-Adib, spokesman for the Da'wa Party of PM Nuri al-Maliki, for interfering in the domestic affairs of Iraq.

If "victory is in sight" in Iraq, then why is Bush only drawing down 8,000 troops by the end of his presidency? That will leave 138,000 in Iraq. The number of US troops in Iraq in March, 2006? 133,000. McClatchy quotes Ret. Army Lt. Col. John Nagl, co-author of the army's new counter-terrorism manual:

'"The security gains are real and tangible but fragile," said Nagl, who visited Iraq last month. "If you declare victory too soon, whether in a province or the whole country, al Qaida can come back. And it is a whole lot less work and a whole lot less blood spilled keeping them out once you have cleared an area than it is pulling out prematurely and then having to go back and clear them out again." '

The US will soon be the only troop force from the original 'coalition of the willing' in Iraq. The British, Poles, etc. are going home.

The reconvening of the Iraqi parliament offered little hope that it would pass a law any time soon enabling provincial elections to go forward. The issue of how to arrange the elections in the oil-rich province of Kirkuk has roiled the legislative process. Kurds want to incorporate Kirkuk into the Kurdistan Regional Government, whereas Arabs and Turkmen reject this move.

Al-Hayat reports in Arabic that the Iraqi Army, which had entered Kirkuk city because of civil disturbances there, has withdrawn to its outskirts. There has been a tug of war in recent months between the Iraqi military and the Kurdish paramilitary (Peshmerga) over which parts of Iraq each can patrol. Kurds insist that no federal troops must set foot on their territory.

McClatchy says that one reasons the US commanders are so nervous about the possibility that violence might return is precisely the possibility that provincial elections will not be held this year and could even slip to next summer! The Sunni-majority provinces have not had proper local elections. Such elections would be important in the Sunni provinces to establish legitimate government and to begin the process of incorporating the Awakening Councils into formal government structures. As long as this step is not taken, their reconciliation with the Shiite-dominated central government is shaky and Sunni-Shiite violence could break out again.

Al-Zaman says that Ali Adib, spokesman for al-Maliki, threatened the members of the Awakening Councils with being tried for terrorism if they did not stop demanding to be incorporated into the official police.

Another concern among the US brass is that guerrillas are making a push to take over the northern city of Mosul. All that reporting about how al-Maliki's having sent some troops up there had restored central government control and how things were calm now in Iraq's second largest city, was apparently mere spin. I have been suspicious of how the Iraqi army could have established control without fighting any major battles against the guerrillas.

Cholera has broken out in Hilla, a city south of Baghdad. Al-Hayat says that Iraqi parliamentarians blamed the central government for it. Al-Zaman says that Iran and Kuwait closed their borders with Iraq to keep the cholera out.

Sharon Weinberger at Wired speculates on the high-tech special ops capability that Bob Woodward says allowed the US military to target and kill many guerrilla leaders in Baghdad. She writes,

'I believe he is talking about the much ballyhooed (in defense geek circles) "Tagging, Tracking and Locating" program; here's a briefing on it from Special Operations Command. These are newfangled technologies designed to track people from long distances, without the targeted people realizing they are being tracked.'

McClatchy reports political violence in Iraq on Tuesday:

' Baghdad

General Hasen Maeen, from the Prime Minister's office was targeted with an adhesive bomb stuck onto the car. He and two of his security personnel were severely injured in the explosion that took place in Harthiyah, central Baghdad, at 7.30 a.m. Tuesday.

An adhesive IED was stuck onto the car of the bureau chief of al-Arabiyah satellite station in Baghdad, Jowad al-Hattab in Salhiyah neighbourhood, central Baghdad. Al-Hattab called the security forces after checking his car and suspecting something at around 11 a.m. Tuesday, but the bomb detonated without casualties, before they arrived.

A roadside bomb targeted a restaurant in Wahran intersection, Baladiyat, eastern Baghdad, killing one civilian, injuring six people including three policemen.

Two roadside bombs were discovered and detonated under control, without casualties in Zayuna.

A roadside bomb exploded under a coach [bus] in Mansour, central Baghdad at 7 p.m. injuring three civilians.

A roadside bomb targeted a police patrol near Wathiq Square, Karrada at 9 p.m. injuring seven people including five policemen.

A roadside bomb targeted a police patrol in Beirut Square, eastern Baghdad at 9.30 p.m. injuring two civilians.

Two unidentified bodies were found in Baghdad byIraqi police today; one in Shoala and the other in Zafaraniyah.

Nineveh

The body of a policeman was found in al-Shaareen neighbourhood in the city of Mosul.

Gunmen threw a grenade at a police patrol in al-Zinjili neighbourhood in Mosul at noon, Tuesday injuring two policemen.

Salahuddin

An IED targeted a police patrol in al-Isaaqi town, to the south of Tikrit, killing one policeman, injuring three.'

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Eyewitnesses: Palin Asked Repeatedly about Removing Books: Eyewitness: "No Way it was Rhetorical."

Despite the whitewashing attempt being made by the Republican Party, it is obvious to me that the allegation stands, that Palin inquired pointedly and repeatedly with the Wasilla librarian about how to remove objectionable books from the library.

"Mary Ellen Emmons was Wasilla's librarian at the time. She told a local newspaper, the Mat-Su Valley Frontiersman, in December 1996 that Palin repeatedly had asked her about removing books from the library, but said Palin never mentioned specific titles, according to the Anchorage Daily News.

Palin has cast her questions about the library's policy, including at a 1996 City Council meeting, as theoretical. Her critics, including a city resident who attended the meeting, say the questioning was more direct.

"There was no way that I thought it was rhetorical," said Anne Kilkenny, who said she attended the meeting where Palin raised the issue but says she did not remember Palin's exact words."

Some rightwing pundits have alleged that I got this wrong. I did not. I said she inquired of the librarian about how to ban the books. She did.

It is the same with her $750 mn in earmarks, which have been made to disappear with a wave of the advertising wand. Or her initial support for the 'bridge to nowhere,' which is now being denied by the ads.



And the WaPo story on her charging the state to live in her own home while in Wasilla away from the capital does not exactly back up an image of reforming zeal.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Dirty Wars in Baghdad

We know Iraq has been the scene of several wars in recent years. But it seems increasingly clear that it has been a set of dirty wars.

Al-Hayat reports in Arabic that Ali al-Lami, an Iraqi politician, protege of Ahmad Chalabi,and member of the Debaathification Committee,is being charged by a high unnamed American official with providing information on Iraqis to the "special groups" (Iranian-run cells within Iraqi Shiite militias like the Mahdi Army), which was useful to them in assassinating these individuals.

Now that is "debaathification" with extreme prejudice!

The official said al-Lami made regular trips to Iran, Lebanon and Russia (?!) in support of the aims of Iranian intelligence.

So what is being alleged is essentially that the United States (Rumsfeld & Paul Bremer) installed on the Debaathification Commission a secret agent of Iran who was running Iran-backed death squads based on the information to which he became privy by virtue of being on the commission! The same article carries allegations by Ahmad Chalabi that the car used in the attempted assassination against him last week came from an Iraqi government ministry.

This isn't a government,it is a mafia movie: The Godfather IV!

So you've been having Iran-backed assassination teams running all over the place killing Sunnis and helping ethnically cleanse them so Iran can nail down Baghad as a Shiite city, extending the region of Shiite dominance in Iraq west and north. And they have been working out of government ministries and agencies!

Of course we knew about the Sunni Arab death squads, which the US calls "al-Qaeda" if they are anti-American and "Sons of Iraq" if they take our money.

Now for yet another set of death squads. It is increasingly clear from press reporting, and from Bob Woodward's new book, that the Surge was not just 30,000 extra troops building blast walls.

The Surge was a dirty war. It was a vast effort at identifying, finding and assassinating the leaders of the Sunni Arab resistance.

Robert Parry writes:

' A third factor, which Woodward argued may have been the most significant, was the use of new highly classified U.S. intelligence tactics that allowed for rapid targeting and killing of insurgent leaders. Woodward agreed to withhold details of these secret techniques from his book so as not to undercut their continuing success.'

That is, US officers in Baghdad were playing Col Mathieu in a rerun of the Battle of Algiers, tracking down and killing the members of the Sunni resistance cells with ever increasing efficiency.

Crowing about the success of Surge wouldn't look so pretty if you were actually celebrating an assassination campaign.

Or, since the originally US-appointed Ali al-Lami was helping the Iranians to kill Sunni guerrillas, as well, we should say assassination campaigns in the plural.

One caveat: The French won the Battle of Algiers in the capital of their colony, 1954-1960. By 1962 they had nevertheless been forced out of Algeria anyway, by nationalist fighters outside Algiers. I am not saying the same thing will necessarily happen in a pacified Iraq. But it could.

McClatchy reports political violence in Iraq on Monday:

' Baghdad

Eleven civilians were injured by a roadside bomb in al Shabaka intersection in Palestine Street in east Baghdad around 7:00 a.m.

Around 7:45 a.m. Gunmen In New Baghdad neighborhood in east Baghdad opened fire targeting a vehicle for the ministry of displaced people migrants injuring four employees (3 females employees and the driver of the vehicle).

The guards of the minister of displaced people and migrants opened fire randomly in al Muthanna airport Street in downtown Baghdad killing a woman and inuring six civilians.

A civilian was killed and two people (a civilian and a policeman) were injured by an IED that targeted a police vehicle in al Wathiq intersection in Karrada neighborhood in downtown Baghdad around 8:30 a.m.

Two civilians were injured by an adhesive bomb that was attached to a vehicle of the emergency battalion in Palestine Street around 2:00 p.m.

Gunmen threw a grenade towards a sedan car in Qahtan intersection in west Baghdad injuring two civilians who were in the car.

Police found one unidentified body in Sadr city.

Nineveh

On Sunday evening; a parked car bomb exploded in Qaiyara area south of Mosul targeting the commander of Hammam al Aleel training camp Colonel Yaseen Majeed. Majeed was injured with another two companions.

Two policemen were injured by an IED in Dorat al Yarmouk neighborhood in Mosul city on Sunday evening.

Gunmen opened fire upon the house of the deputy of Mosul governor Khisro Koran (Kurdish politician from the PDK Party) in al Faisaliyah neighborhood in east Mosul city. No casualties were reported.

A member of Rabi’a Sahwa council in of west of Mosul was injured by an adhesive bomb that was attached to his car on Sunday evening.

Gunmen killed a traffic police near his house in al Hadba’a neighborhood in west Mosul on Monday morning

A policeman was killed and four civilians were injured by a parked car bomb that targeted a police patrol in Bab Sinjar area west of Mosul city around 12:00 p.m. ten cars were damaged by the explosion.

Policemen opened fire upon a suicide car bomber who tried to attack a police check point in Um al Rabiain area west of Mosul city around 1:00 p.m.

Diyala

Gunmen attacked the house of Raad Rasheed; the Sahwa leader in Shirween area north of Baquba on Monday morning. The gunmen kidnapped Rasheed. While the patrols from the Iraqi army were chasing the kidnappers, a roadside bomb exploded. Three Iraqi soldiers were injured.

A civilian was killed by US army when he came from a bystreet driving his car towards US forces in downtown Baquba around 11:30. US military confirmed the incident.

Salahuddin

Two people were killed and four others were injured when a suicide car bomber attacked a police checkpoint in Biji city north of Tikrit city around 4:30 p.m.

Basra

A civilian was injured by a roadside bomb that targeted a convoy of the MNF in Baghdad Street in west Basra around 9:00 p.m.'

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Cole in Salon: What's the difference between Palin and Muslim fundamentalists?

My column has appeared in Salon.com, What's the difference between Palin and Muslim fundamentalists? Lipstick!

Excerpt:

' The GOP vice-presidential pick holds that abortion should be illegal, even in cases of rape, incest or severe birth defects, making an exception only if the life of the mother is in danger. She calls abortion an "atrocity" and pledges to reshape the judiciary to fight it. Ironically, Palin's views on the matter are to the right of those in the Muslim country of Tunisia, which allows abortion in the first trimester for a wide range of reasons. Classical Muslim jurisprudents differed among one another on the issue of abortion, but many permitted it before the "quickening" of the fetus, i.e. until the end of the fourth month. Contemporary Muslim fundamentalists, however, generally oppose abortion.

Palin's stance is even stricter than that of the Parliament of the Islamic Republic of Iran. In 2005, the legislature in Tehran attempted to amend the country's antiabortion statute to permit an abortion up to four months in case of a birth defect. The conservative clerical Guardianship Council, which functions as a sort of theocratic senate, however, rejected the change. Iran's law on abortion is therefore virtually identical to the one that Palin would like to see imposed on American women, and the rationale in both cases is the same, a literalist religious impulse that resists any compromise with the realities of biology and of women's lives. Saudi Arabia's restrictive law on abortion likewise disallows it in the case or rape or incest, or of fetal impairment, which is also Gov. Palin's position. '

Read the whole thing.

By the way, some apologists in the letters column at Salon.com are arguing that Palin allowed state benefits to same-sex couples, showing that she does not in fact seek to impose her theological ideas on the public.

Wrong.

The wire services report:

' . . . early in her administration she supported a bill to overrule a court decision to block state benefits for gay partners of public employees. At the time, less than one-half of 1 percent of state employees had applied for the benefits. Palin reversed her position and vetoed the bill after the state attorney general said it was unconstitutional. '

In other words, she actually did try to impose her theological beliefs by supporting a bill that was punitive toward gay partners. She only backed off the effort when the lawyers warned her it was unconstitutional.

Plus I don't think she's always very truthful.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Drake: In Pursuit of Osama Bin Laden

Richard Drake writes in a guest book review for IC, reprinted by the author's permission from The Great Falls Tribune, 7 September 2008 :

In Pursuit of Osama Bin Laden

Barack Obama’s early and consistent critique of the war in Iraq gave him high standing during the Democratic primary campaign. On this crucial issue, he succeeded in contrasting himself favorably with his foremost rival, Hillary Rodham Clinton, who initially had gone along with the Bush administration’s plans for that country.

As the war turned into a costly and bloody fiasco, with the deepening enmity of the Muslim world materializing as the chief return on our estimated long-term three-trillion-dollar investment, he pulled ahead of her and now holds the Democratic Party’s nomination for the presidency.

Other factors played a role in his victory, not the least his superlative political gifts. Nevertheless, except for the Iraq War, the differences between the two candidates never amounted to much. Her belated recognition of the war’s futility only added to Obama’s prestige as a candidate of superior judgment.

At the recently concluded Democratic convention in Denver, Obama repeated his campaign pledge to end the war in Iraq responsibly and to redeploy American troops against our real enemy, Osama Bin Laden. Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, not Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath regime in Iraq, had killed nearly 3,000 of our citizens. We mistakenly had left the war in Afghanistan unfinished before invading Iraq. The Democratic Party now promises to correct the mistake of the Bush administration.

We may be permitted to wonder, in the light of Ahmed Rashid’s Descent into Chaos (2008), if the proposed correction will touch the fundamentals of the problems that we face in Afghanistan.

Rashid, a Pakistani journalist and historian, has covered the politics of Afghanistan for the past twenty-five years. In his international bestseller, Taliban (2000), he criticized the failure of the American government to develop a comprehensive policy of nation-building in Afghanistan. Rather than invest in the renewal of the country’s agriculture, educational system, and infrastructure, the Americans had decided to trust entirely to a military solution against al-Qaeda.

Rashid lamented that Washington had a policy for Bin Laden, but not one for the country as a whole. On the eve of 9/11 he predicted that with the misguided policies of the Clinton administration in Central Asia, the United States only could expect the worst.

Events soon confirmed the prophetic power of Rashid’s writing.

Now, with his new book, he reiterates the warnings of Taliban and implores the United States to pull out of its nosedive. Rashid provides a detailed account of the Bush administration’s policy failures in the war on terror. Because of decisions made in Washington since 9/11 the Taliban and al-Qaeda are on the rise. Hatred of the United States has spread in a rank growth across Afghanistan and Pakistan, where the war on terror will be won or lost.

Our crucial failure lay in the decision to invest in war lords and dictators, who were thought to be trustworthy agents for a Pax Americana. Instead the United States should have summoned the strength, wisdom, and courage to break with our Cold War habits of relying on authoritarian regimes. It is very difficult for Rashid to take seriously American claims about our concern for spreading democracy in Central Asia. Our contentment in allying with egregious dictators in Pakistan and Uzbekistan make such claims look like camouflage for our actual motives in the region: oil, gas, and imperial control.

If a Predator drone were to deposit its payload directly on al-Qaeda headquarters and incinerate the organization’s command structure, what would change? Rashid thinks that we would be facing essentially the same situation as before. A dozen Bin Ladens would be there to take the martyred leader’s place in giving expression to the fury that millions of Muslims feel worldwide in opposition to American policies and actions.

That Bin Laden has survived this long is less the fault of the Bush administration than evidence of the broad and deep support that he enjoys in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Crisis in a country’s social and economic systems invariably produces ripe conditions for extremists. In Descent into Chaos, Rashid furnishes searing eye-witness reporting on the bestial conditions in which the people of Afghanistan live. Billions have gone to the Pakistani military and trillions will end up going to the will-o-the-wisp in Iraq. For the people of Afghanistan, however, the corrupt American-dominated status quo there has been helpless in providing an alternative to the frighteningly resurgent Taliban and its ally al-Qaeda.

If we can get our leaders to read it, Rashid’s new book might give them pause before they entrust the Pentagon and the CIA with the fate of American foreign policy in Central Asia. These agencies perform splendidly in advancing the well-being of their constituents in the military-industrial complex, but the American people as a whole have a different and higher set of requirements.

Richard Drake
Missoula, Montana
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Biden: And the Economy . . ?

Biden complains that his GOP rivals virtually ignored the economy in favor of snarky personal attacks.



At a time when the Republican Party is forced into socialist policies in taking over two major mortgage companies to prevent a general collapse of the mortgage market, you'd think a proposal for fixing it would be more important than discussing the scenery at Obama's speech.

And I'd like to know how smaller government and less regulation would help with the mortgage crisis. Seems to me a good part of it was lack of government auditors and too little regulation, not to mention a handful of rich people engaged in criminality.
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Biden to McCain: Now What? Shell to Develop Iraqi Gas

Joe Biden wants to know what exactly John McCain's plans are for Iraq, beyond this vague claim of 'victory.'

Iraq has approved a preliminary deal with Royal Dutch Shell to develop its natural gas fields. Shell recently pulled out of a deal to develop Iran's much more extensive gas fields, out of fear of being slapped with economic sanctions by the US.

The Iraqi parliament will reconvene this week and will attempt to pass a law enabling provincial elections. There are lots of other laws that need passing, including one governing oil and gas contracts.

Michael Schwartz on 'Who lost Iraq?' at Tomdispatch.com.

It is not a good thing that al-Maliki is pressuring Iraqi refugees in Egypt and Jordan to return. The UNHCR says it is too dangerous for them as yet. Some returnees in Diyala Province were recently evicted from their homes yet again by militia action. Since Iraqis are still leaving Iraq for Jordan and Syria in some numbers, the whole thing is a publicity stunt. Thousands came to Jordan last May alone. More are certainly leaving than returning.
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US Missile Strike on Haqqani Compound; New President Faces Economic Mess in Pakistan

New Pakistani president Asaf Ali Zardari will face the challenge of a struggling economy. The stock market has lost 40% of its value since last March, currency reserves are deplete, and high energy and food costs are hitting ordinary folk hard.

Aljazeera English examines the remarkable victory of Asaf Ali Zardari in Saturday's presidential election in Pakistan.



Pakistan has unblocked the Khyber Pass for NATO to resupply troops in Afghanistan. It was apparently briefly closed to put pressure on the US to cease cross-border strikes on the Pakistani side of the border. There appears to have been another US missile strike on a Pakistani target on Sunday. It killed 3 militants and wounded 17 other persons. The strike seems to have been aimed at the house of Jalaluddin Haqqani.
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Zardari President; 65 Killed in Bombings, Clashes

For the nine years before 2005, Asaf Ali Zardari, widower of former prime minister Benazir Bhutto, was in prison facing corruption charges. On Saturday Zardari was elected president of Pakistan.

Ironically, given Bush's neoconservative agenda of democratizing the Muslim world, the most significant steps toward genuine parliamentary governance and rule of law, in Pakistan during the past year, have been taken by the Pakistani people and their elected leaders in the teeth of fierce opposition from Bush and Cheney. McCain, too, was a steadfast supporter of military dictator Pervez Musharraf and distinctly unenthusiastic about letting the Pakistani people choose their own government.

Zardari demonstrated that his Pakistan People's Party is capable of mustering a supermajority in parliament even absent its former coalition partner, the Pakistan Muslim League (N) led by former prime minister Nawaz Sharif. The PMLN pulled out of its coalition with the PPP to protest Zardari's unwillingness to reinstate the Supreme Court justices dismissed by Gen. Pervez Musharraf last fall (the dictator was making a bid, which ultimately failed, to secure the presidency despite his ineligibility for the office. The constitution requires that presidential candidates be civilians.) That the PPP can rule with the support of some smaller parties and that the government is in no danger of falling is a positive.

Sharif wanted the original court reinstated and the justices appointed by Musharraf to be fired. A few days ago three of the former justices were reinstated by the court itself though since the number of slots for justices has been increased, their return did not require any resignations. The return of the chief justice, Ifikhar Chaudhry, however, would be more difficult, since there cannot be two chief justices and Zardari is unwilling to have Chaudhry leading the court again because the former chief justice is thought to view the corruption charges against Zardari, for the moment dropped, as plausible.

I watched on ARY digital as Justice Syed Zahid Hussain declared that Zardari's election had restored the wholeness of parliament. I presume he meant that it had restored the sovereignty of parliament and that now all the leadership posts in that body are filled by persons elected to their positions (in contrast to Musharraf, who just grabbed power). Zardari himself declared that "parliament is sovereign," suggesting that he will stand by his pledge to reduce the powers of the presidency, which were expanded by the generals when they were in control.

Zardari is in many ways a throwback to an earlier era of Pakistani politics. He is from a rural, landed Sindhi clan, and is what they call in Pakistan a "feudal." He came by his current position through marrying into the landed Bhutto clan, which dominated Pakistani politics in much of the 1970s and 1990s via Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto and his daughter Benazir. In contrast, Zardari's rival Nawaz Sharif is a steel magnate, a representative of the rising Pakistani business classes. Likewise, Gen. Musharraf championed the white collar urban middle classes in the main, though since they value the rule of law, in the end there was a severe contradiction between his methods of rule and his class base.

As hundreds of thousands of urban lawyers, professionals and young people protested Musharraf's tyranny this past year, they could not have imagined that they would end up having the general dumped only to see him replaced by a "feudal" from a familiar political dynasty. He returns the disdain, and even called the protesting attorneys "quaint."

The new president faces many challenges in establishing his legitamacy among the people as opposed to among the country's parliamentarians. He must demonstrate to a skeptical electorate that he has turned over a new leaf and will no longer merit the nickname "Mr. Ten Percent," which he earned, it is said, because he demanded a ten percent cut of the value of foreign contracts when Benazir was in power.

Zardari has to find a way to overturn Musharraf's unconstitutional dismissal of the supreme court. He must also follow through on his pledges to work to reduce the dictatorial powers of the presidency, which flow from martial law amendments to the constitution rather than from popular sovereignty.

He also faces a big problem in the form of the Tehrik-i Taliban in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) that lie between the North-West Frontier Province and Afghanistan.

On Saturday, a suicide bomber hit a checkpoint on the outskirts of Peshawar, killing at least 35 and wounding dozens. The bad news is that the massive explosion was probably not intended for a small checkpoint, and the payload may have been aimed at Peshawar, the capital of the North-West Frontier Province, which recently voted in the main to install secular-leaning Pushtun nationalists in the provincial government, ending the rule of the fundamentalist Jama'at-i Islami and its allies, most of whom boycotted last February's elections. The Muslim radicals have several times attacked the Awami National League politicians, who have no sympathy for fundamentalism or vigilanteism.

Pushtun villagers sometimes wage battles against the fundamentalist guerrillas; such a battle on Friday and Saturday left 24 villagers dead.

The attacks by the US inside the Pakistani border on the Tehrik-i Taliban and on Arab al-Qaeda members have left Pakistani civilians dead this week, raising a public outcry.

It is interesting that when Sen. Barack Obama began pushing for US attacks inside Pakistan on Arab al-Qaeda, he was slammed as impractical by John McCain. In fact, Obama looks closer to the thinking of the US officer corps in Afghanistan than does McCain.

The aerial drone attack on Saturday on a village not far from Miranshah did appear to kill Arab al-Qaeda, but also killed two women and a child. Zardari and other Pakistani politicians have joined in the condemnation, and the government of Pakistan is now stopping the US from using the overland Khyber pass route to provision US troops. Still, it is a little unlikely that the US is able to launch such attacks without the tacit cooperation of the Pakistani government.

Still, Zardari will need to find a way to deal with this crisis, since he cannot survive if the US undermines him with the Pakistani public by openly and repeatedly infringing on Pakistani sovereignty.
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Marrin: Choice of Palin Dishonorable

A conservative Republican woman who idolizes Margaret Thatcher decries McCain's choice of Palin as cynical and dishonorable:

' In choosing a woman he doesn’t know or understand, purely for electoral advantage, he reveals a dishonourable lust for office, a disrespect for women generally and a dishonourable indifference to the future of his country. After all, if this known unknown woman does become president, it will almost certainly be because he himself is dead - quite possible given his age and health - and past caring.'

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Capital of Khazar Kingdom said Found

Russian archeologists are saying they have found the capital of the Khazar state. This largely Turkic state was multicultural, but its ruling sept converted to Judaism, which it used as the state religion. If it is borne out, this discovery will shed loads of illumination on Jewish history as well as on early medieval life in the area above the Caspian Sea.

The old thesis that most Ashkenazi European Jews were descended from the Khazars has been disproved by genetic testing (a majority of Ashkenazi men have haplotypes common to Palestinian and Lebanese populations), though some Khazar Jews may have been absorbed into the Ashkenazi community.

I recently enjoyed reading

Michael Chabon's "Gentlemen of the Road", much of which is set in the Khazar kingdom, and is part homage to Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser and part allegory of the modern Middle East.
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Assassination Attempt on Chalabi; Baghdad Outraged at Bush Spying on Maliki; Iraq Seeks F-16s

A suicide bomber attempted to assassinate Ahmad Chalabi on Friday as the politician was returning home to the Mansur district. The bomb killed 6 bodyguards and wounded 17 persons, but missed its main target.

Advisor to the Ministry of Defence, Abdulameer Hasen Abbas was shot as he was driving near Shaab district in eastern Baghdad.

Iraqi officials expressed outrage at the revelation in Bob Woodward's new book that the Bush administration has been spying on Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki. Iraqi spokesman Ali Dabbagh warned of future bad relations between Iraq and the CIA if the allegations proved true. Even Kurdish lawmaker Mahmud Osman denounced the spying as a breach of friendship.

Several hundred followers of Muqtada al-Sadr demonstrated against the US occupation in Kufa on Friday afternoon. Meanwhile, a clerical representative of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani called on Iraqis not to let their government off the hook with regard to the promises it had made to deliver basic services. At the Buratha mosque in north Baghdad, Jalal al-Din Saghir of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI) demanded that the minister of electricity be fired and replaced with someone more competent.

The 16,000 US troops in Baghdad could be withdrawn from the capital by next June, allowed Gen. David Petraeus. The security agreement being negotiated between al-Maliki and Bush calls for US troops to withdraw from Iraqi cities to bases outside them by the end of June, 2009.

Over all, US troop levels could decline from 146,000 now to 139,000 by early January, a reduction of 7,000. (In November of 2007 there were 163,000 US troops in Iraq). In summer, 2005, there were 136,000 US troops in Iraq. The number was increased for the elections of Dec.2005, then reduced back to 133,000 in March, 2006. So as Bush goes out of office, there will still be more in early 2009 than there were early in his second term.

The Iraqi government is going on an arms buying spree in the military-industrial Mall of the US. It just inquired about 36 F-16 fighter jets, and is also seeking armored vehicles and helicopter gunships. In recent security operations in Basra and Sadr City, the Iraqi army was dependent on the US for crucial air support, and the al-Maliki government seems to determined to develop its own air capabilities. Likewise, Iraq will spend $11 bn. on weapons such as 140 Abrams tanks.

I have long held that until the Iraqi military can effectively deploy armor and helicopter gunships, it won't be able to act on its own to establish internal order in the country. I notice that in the Maysan campaign al-Maliki launched against the Sadrists in Amara this summer, Iraqi armor appears to have played a role.

Aljazeera English asks, 'Who controls Khanaqin,' examining the conflict between the Iraqi government in Baghdad and the Kurdish Peshmerga paramilitary over control of the eastern, largely Kurdish city in Diyala Province, near Iran.



There was a dispute on Friday between Kurdish and Shiite sources about whether government forces and the Peshmerga paramilitary had reached an agreement on the disputed city.

Rania Abouzeid at Time reports that many Baghdad voters are apathetic about provincial elections, uncertain that they will bring increased services such as electricity and potable water.

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Palin Watch

Reactions to Sarah Palin:

Rick Steiner at Seattle P.I. slams the governor for her poor record on the environment. He says she has not taken climate change seriously, despite the thinning of the arctic ice cover; has sued Bush to stop polar bears being declared an endangered species (and lied about the scientific evidence); opposed the clean water initiative and supported mining operations that would pollute salmon streams; supports drilling everywhere you could drill regardless of the environmental impact; and has coddle Exxon with regard to compensation payments over the Valdez disaster.

Subpoenas will be issued in the investigation of whether Palin misused her powers as governor to conduct a personal vendetta against her ex-brother-in-law and wrongfully fired a public safety commissioner because he would not fire the latter.

Gee, wasn't one of the charges against Kwame Kilpatrick, who was just forced to step down as mayor and faces 4 months in prison, that he fired a deputy police chief and other officers for personal reasons?

And then, she seems to be hiding from us.
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Allegations of Israeli Plan to Attack Iran from Georgia

This story has been around for a week or so, alleging that Israel was planning to strike at Iran from Georgia.

Arnaud de Borchgrave put it more cautiously, that the Israelis thought of their jets in Georgia as useful in case they decided to do a preemptive strike on Iran.

More recently, deputy speaker of the Russian parliament, Sergei Markov, seems to have alleged an even more aggressive plan on Israel's part.

Debka also looks at the issue.

Personally, I don't understand how this could work. You'd have to fly over Armenia, which is an ally of Iran and would not permit it. Or over Turkey, which is out of the question. Or over Azerbaijan, which I also don't think would permit it. Surely both the small Caucasian states have anti-aircraft batteries and some jets. Turkey is a major military power in the region.

And then Georgia is not so far from Iran, which has 12 times its population, and could wreak a horrible revenge.

The only way Iran could be forestalled would be if Georgia was admitted to NATO first so that an attack on one would then be an attack on all. But NATO would not approve of Georgia lending its military facilities to a non-member for military aggression.

Just makes no sense to me. Maybe Israeli aircraft could do some kind of surveillance on Iran from Georgia? Or Borchgrave's idea of a contingency plan for a preemptive strike if war started brewing is plausible. Israel using Georgia as a base for attacking a third country, I don't think so.
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Rambo and the Mean Girl

The Republican Party convention in St. Paul gave us two American film narratives in an attempt to shift the national political debate away from issues and accountability to personalities and fluffy ideals.

Former Reagan speech writer Peggy Noonan let the strategy slip in an unguarded open mike moment. Asked if Sarah Palin is the most qualified woman Republican the McCain camp could have found, Noonan exploded: "The most qualified? No! I think they went for this -- excuse me-- political bullshit about narratives --"

McCain's convention speech positioned him as John Rambo. The popularity of Rambo: First Blood 2, historian Melani McAlister argued in her Epic Encounters, derived from the way it allowed its hero, a betrayed veteran, to fight the Vietnam War all over again and to win this time. McAlister suggests that the popularity in the United States of Israeli macho operations such as Entebbe derived from this same Rambo complex, a desire to compensate for the humiliating defeat of the United States by the Vietnamese and their Chinese and Russian allies.

McCain dwelled at length on his years as a prisoner of the Vietnamese and even adverted briefly to having been broken by torture. The rage and abasement of that moment when he signed a confession of war crimes and denounced the United States

McCain has spoken of his breaking before, as in an October 12, 1997 60 Minutes interview that his critics sometimes misquote:

'Sen. McCAIN: I m--made serious, serious mistakes and did things wrong when I was in prison, OK?

WALLACE: What did you do wrong in prison?

Sen. McCAIN: I wrote a confession. I was guilty of war crimes against the Vietnamese people. I intentionally bombed women and children.

WALLACE: And you did it because you were being tortured...

Sen. McCAIN: I...

WALLACE: ...and you'd reached the end of the line.

Sen. McCAIN: Yes. But I should have gone further. I should have--I--I never believed that I would--that I would break, and I did.'

The film Rambo III had the former Green Beret go off to fight in Afghanistan against the Soviets. Ronald Reagan and Saudi King Fahd's joint jihad against the Soviet Union was a kind of real-life Ramboism, a guerrilla war paid for with $5 bn from the US and Saudi matching funds, and funneled through the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence. McCain also supported the raising of a private army of tens of thousands of Muslim jihadis to target Soviet troops and Afghan communists:

' Consider this AP article from 1985:


' Rep. Tom Loeffler, R-Tex., presented the "Freedom Fighter of the Year" award to Afghan resistance leader Wali Khan on behalf of the U.S. Council for World Freedom on Oct. 3.

Loeffler called on Congress and the American people to "broaden support" for freedom fighters in Afghanistan, reminding listeners of America's own fight for freedom.

Congress has agreed to give $15 million in covert assistance to the Afghan cause, the first time the legislators have "stepped forward" with aid since the beginning of the conflict, according to Loeffler. . .

Accepting the award on behalf of Khan was Pir Syed Ahmed Gailani, head of the National Islamic Front of Afghanistan, for which Khan commands 20,000 resistance fighters.

Other congressmen who joined Loeffler included Rep. Eldon Rudd and Rep. John McCain, both Arizona Republicans. '

It was out of the Reagan jihad about which McCain was so enthusiastic that al-Qaeda emerged.

The Iraq War is another Rambo moment for McCain, another opportunity to redeem himself and his country from the failure of Vietnam. McCain's insistence on a "victory" in Iraq that he will not define is more the compulsive acting out of an internal script than it is military strategy or tactics. McCain's victory narrative about Iraq requires that he ignore what I wrote about earlier this week:

' AP reports that Baghdad is still very dangerous despite lowered death tolls from political violence:

' Small scale bombings and shootings persist in the capital — each a reminder that the war is not over and that Baghdad remains a place where no trip is routine and residents are still guided by precautions. Most won't drive at night. Many try to avoid heavily clogged streets, remembering that suicide bombers and other attackers intent on killing large numbers of civilians favor traffic jams or congested areas . . . [in August] at least 360 civilians were killed and more than 470 wounded in violence throughout the country, according to an Associated Press count. '

That would be 4,320 civilians killed in political violence every year if the level stayed that low. (I take it this number excludes killed 'insurgents' and Iraqi security forces, so that actual number of war-related deaths would be much higher annually.)

It is estimated that 75,000 persons have died in the civil war in Sri Lanka since 1982, or 2800 a year.

Iraq is higher, just with regard to civilian casualties.

The Kashmir conflict is estimated to have killed 70,000 persons since 1988, or about 3500 a year.

Iraq is higher.

In the Lebanon Civil War of 1975-1990, it is estimated that at least 100,000 persons were killed, 75,000 civilians and 25,000 military.

If we extrapolated out Iraq's August death rate for civilians over 15 years, that would be 64,000 or not far from the toll in Lebanon's war.

Let me repeat: The level of violence at this moment in Iraq is similar to what prevailed on average during one of the 20th century's worst ethnic civil wars! It is still higher than the casualty rates in Sri Lanka and Kashmir, two of the worst ongoing conflicts in the world.

Only in an Orwellian society could our press declare the relative decline in monthly death tolls in Iraq to constitute "calm" in an absolute sense.

And that is if the August levels are taken as the baseline and if the numbers continue to be that low. If we averaged deaths during the previous 12 months, the baseline would be much higher.

The current Iraq Civil War is one of the world's most deadly continuing conflicts, worse than Sri Lanka and Kashmir and on a par with the 15-year long Lebanon Civil War!'

A crucial element in the fall of violence from the catastrophic levels of summer,2006, was the ethnic cleansing of Baghdad of its Sunnis. I wrote in mid-July:

"As best I can piece it together, what actually seems to have happened was that the escalation troops began by disarming the Sunni Arabs in Baghdad. Once these Sunnis were left helpless, the Shiite militias came in at night and ethnically cleansed them. Shaab district near Adhamiya had been a mixed neighborhood. It ended up with almost no Sunnis. Baghdad in the course of 2007 went from 65% Shiite to at least 75% Shiite and maybe more. My thesis would be that the US inadvertently allowed the chasing of hundreds of thousands of Sunni Arabs out of Baghdad (and many of them had to go all the way to Syria for refuge). Rates of violence declined once the ethnic cleansing was far advanced, just because there were fewer mixed neighborhoods. Newsrack was among the first to make this argument, though I was tracking the ethnic cleansing at my blog throughout 2007. See also Karen DeYoung of the Washington Post on this issue.". . .

As Think Progress pointed out,the Washington Post illustrated Karen DeYoung's important article with a clear ethnic map showing the ethnic cleansing:



The point is not that there are no Sunni enclaves left in Baghdad, only that there are many fewer such enclaves, and that many formerly mixed neighborhoods are now entirely Shiite. In fact, this ethnic cleansing is among the major reason that the some 4 million Iraqis displaced internally and externally by Bush's war refuse to return. They have nothing to return to. The mixed or Sunni neighborhoods from which the Sunnis among them escaped no longer exist. A fourth of the Iraqi refugees in Jordan have, moreover, had a child kidnapped. Even if the child was returned, the family is not going to risk returning.

In my earlier post, I also quoted this:

"As Think Progress quoted CNN correspondent Michael Ware:

' The sectarian cleansing of Baghdad has been — albeit tragic — one of the key elements to the drop in sectarian violence in the capital. […] It’s a very simple concept: Baghdad has been divided; segregated into Sunni and Shia enclaves. The days of mixed neighborhoods are gone. […] If anyone is telling you that the cleansing of Baghdad has not contributed to the fall in violence, then they either simply do not understand Baghdad or they are lying to you.'

"

McCain and ideologues such as Fred Kagan must deny or ignore the ethnic cleansing of Baghdad and other areas, and ignore the millions of Iraqis now living abroad or in other provinces, many of them in dire straits, because their Rambo complex forces them to insist that an extra 30,000 US troops, inserted for 16 months, made all the difference.

McCain's Rambo foreign policy sets him on a course of confrontation with Russia, which he has not forgiven for its aid to Vietnam in the old days, and with Shiite Iran, which his party's propaganda continues to confuse with Sunni radicalism of al-Qaeda.

One of those slick films shown at the convention on Thursday commemorating the victims of 9/11 actually asserted that "it began in 1979" with the taking of US embassy personnel hostage in Tehran. The film then skipped over to the Sunni radicals. I can't understand what the Iranian hostage crisis has to do with 9/11. This conflating of all Muslim movements, in which McCain frequently engages, is just another Big Lie. Iranians were upset by 9/11 and sympathetic to the US, holding candlelight vigils. President Khatami spoke heartwarmingly against the terrorism that had struck the US, explaining that Iran had also suffered grievously from terrorism.

Moreover, Gary Sick gave circumstantial evidence that Reagan dealt with the Iranians behind the scenes to forestall a hostage release that would reelect Jimmy Carter. And Reagan's extensive dealings with the regime in Tehran, to the point of stealing weaponry from the Pentagon warehouses and selling it to Ayatollah Khomeini, are well known. Now for Reagan's heirs to blame 9/11 of their old partner in crime, Iran, is rich (not to mention being pathological in its dishonesty).

The Iranian hostage crisis came only 4 years after the US embassy in Saigon (later Ho Chi Minh City) was overrun and its personnel forced to helicopter out precariously. In some ways, the affront of Iran is intertwined with the humiliationof Vietnam. Perhaps this twinning of the two in his mind is what led McCain to sing "Bomb,bomb, bomb Iran" to the tune of an old Beach Boys song.

McCain keeps saying that he knows war and hates it and wants to avoid it. But no one can name a war in recent memory that he did not wholeheartedly promote. He was an enthusiastic cheerleader for Vietnam, Afghanistan in the 1980s, the Gulf War, and the 2003 Iraq War. His record strongly indicates that if elected he will plunge the US into yet more violent conflict, in a never-ceasing quest to wipe out that stain on his character, of having been broken in Vietnam, and that blemish on US nationalism, of defeat.

McCain cannot conceive of ordinary people being important, or of the simple proposition that the US could not subdue a left-nationalist mass movement in a densely populated Asian country. It was physically impossible.

In the same way, the US cannot completely dominate 27 million Iraqi Muslims. They won't put up with US bases in their country even for 5 years, much less the half-century that McCain fondly envisages. [See Tomdispatch.com on the American fixation on foreign bases]. Being Rambo is about never having to take account of the wishes of third world publics.

As for Sarah Palin, her spiteful and snarky dismissal of Barack Obama and community organizers recalls the Tina Fey film "Mean Girls." Palin, the former beauty queen with a gun, is very like the leader of the Plastics clique in "Mean Girls," the Rachel McAdams character, Regina George. Her clique sets the standard for style at school, establishing itself at the top of the social hierarchy by its regimented exclusiveness. Those who are in any way different are put down by the Plastics, who crow about their superiority just as Palin exults in her (largely non-existent) "executive experience." Although the surface narrative of Sarah Palin is her everywoman small town ordinariness, the subtext is that she is special, as capable of shooting a tiger as Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and as at the same time a veritable Miss World. The McCain camp is hoping that the American common person will be seduced into Palin's Plastic clique just as the Lindsay Lohan character was in the film. (Lohan's character was initially an outsider, having returned from Africa . . .)

The classic Mean Girl tactics are snark, put-downs and spreading around false rumors about people you don't like. When Palin falsely charged that Obama planned to raise taxes on middle class people, or blamed Senate majority leader Harry Reid for inaction even though it was the Republican plurality in the Senate that rejected most of his initiatives, she is playing classic Regina, declaring who is in the Plastic clique and who is outside. Even the boasting about being a hockey mom is a claim on status (poor women are not hockey moms, and how many minority women are?)

Palin's put-down of Obama that he lacks executive experience (unlike her own superior Mean Girl self) makes it sound as though she had run something bigger than he had. But Obama has been head of a political campaign with hundreds of thousands of workers and volunteers. Doesn't a campaign head organize people and give orders and plan strategy and tactics, i.e., act in an executive capacity? Isn't that what Barack Obama has been doing for two years and hasn't he proven that he is an excellent executive in this endeavor? Only 114,000 or so people voted to make Palin governor in 2006. In contrast, Obama's executive performance as head of his presidential campaign garnered him 18 million votes.

Rambo and the Mean Girl are narratives intended as what magicians call misdirection.

A good magician can use this technique to make a whole elephant disappear.

The Republican Party has given us a failed war in Iraq. None of the stated Bush administration goals in invading Iraq were ever actually accomplished. No threat from Iraq existed, it was completely unrelated to 9/11,had no serious weaponry or military capability, and is not 'liberated' but rather occupied. The government installed under US auspices is best friends with the ayatollahs in Iran and may actually be taking orders from them on some issues.

McCain wholeheartedly supported that war from before it was launched. Yet McRambo is posing as a challenger of the war, and is rebranding this burned-out hulk of a country that he helped to destroy as a "victory."

The Republican Party gave us a long list of massive scandals, in which the American public was actively stolen from and defrauded, not to mention disenfranchised. That was the point of Jack Abramoff and his pyramid scheme intended to create a permanent Republican majority, so that the hogs at the trough could be propped up there and remain indefinitely a drain on your pocketbook. That was the point of Tom Delay's scam, and the many cases of embezzlement and sheer criminality by Republican lawmakers.

Rambo and the Mean Girl will tell you that they are the squeaky clean Republicans, not like all those other Republicans, and we should focus on them, not on all the crooks.

The Republican Party has massively grown the size of the federal government, including especially of the Pentagon, but Rambo and the Mean Girl are all of a sudden promising to fire every other government employee.

The Republican Party oversaw the mortgage crisis. But won't admit it,and neither will these two.

You want a narrative, about a war hero tortured by the confession he signed, or about a feisty hockey mom who cleaned out the Augean stables of Seward's Ice Box, then you have got it.

You want real policy positions and a rationale for them that goes beyond "I will make my friends rich," then you won't find that in the convention in Minnesota.
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US Raid on Pakistan leaves 30 Dead; Pakistan Government Protests; 3 Canadian Troops killed in Afghanistan

US ground troops conducted a raid into Pakistan's tribal areas leaving an estimated 20 dead. The governor of the North-West Frontier Province, Owais Ahmed Ghani, said that the raid was 'outrageous," and the government charged that women and children were among the dead. The Pakistani Foreign Ministry called US ambassador Ann Patterson in for an explanation.

The US was already in trouble with people in this region because of an air raid in Afghanistan that killed civilians. Bush apologized expressed 'regret' to President Hamid Karzai for the deaths of the innocents. Afghans maintain that some 90 people were killed in the air strike. The US military insists that the toll was 30 dead Taliban and 7 dead civilians.

Also, on Wednesday, Pakistani prime minister Yousef Raza Gilani's car was fired on, presumably by the Tehrik-i Taliban; he was not in it at the time.

Despite a cease-fire for the fasting month of Ramadan, Pakistani security forces fought tribal militants in Swat on Tuesday and Wednesday, leaving 30 Taliban dead and several Pakistani troops, as well.

Aljazeera English on the struggle in the North-West Frontier Province between Pushtun nationalists and the fundamentalist vigilantes:



Since the province voted the secular nationalists into power last February, I conclude that the fundamentalists aren't all that popular.

On the situation inside Afghanistan: Aljazeera English reports that the neo-Taliban believe they could take the city of Ghazni at any time:



Pushtun guerrillas killed 3 Canadian / NATO troops on Wednesday in southern Afghanistan.
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