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For a more accurate picture of how the Al Qaeda connection works and doesn’t work, see After Zarquawi: The Dilemmas and Future of Al Qaeda in Iraq, by Brian Fishman, in the Washington Quarterly, Autumn 2006, p. 19
He explains the differences between Zarquawi and Bin Laden’s Al Qaeda, how they came together for tactical reasons, but how they split over Zarquawi’s willingness to kill other Moslems.
Hey, there is one Democrat with a backbone after all! Check out Tim Ryan schooling Bush here. Also check out “unable to govern” and “Tim Ryan tells it like it is”
Walter Posch in Middle East Policy (Fall 2006, p. 109) lays out the evidence that the U.S. is indeed making plans to remain in Iraq for some years. One of the most disgusting pieces of evidence he offers is how members of Congress are now protesting against “permanent” bases, but silently acquiescing in “enduring” bases in a slight of hand they are confident no member of the press can ever figure out.
"A glass half full - on the Titanic"
That's the subtitle of Carl Robichaud's piece in the Spring 2006 World Policy Journal that reminds us that there is another part of the War on Whatever and that we're loosing that one also.
Afghanistan is coming apart again, an insurrection is growing (as are poppies) and the Talaban are making a comeback.
I'm sure the Bush will blame this on Clinton also.
For a more reasonable and informative take on what Iran is up to, look at the article by David Albrights, “When Could Iran get the Bomb? What we know and what we don’t know about Iran’s nuclear program.”
The first clue that we might learn something is that this is in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists July 2006 and our second clue is that the author is president of the Institute for Science and International Security. In other words, an article written by a scientist for scientists.
What does he say? Iran, in his judgment, is doing things that imply it wants at least to preserve the option of making a fast push to build a weapon and that it will take them a minimum of three years to do so, and likely much more.
He also flatly accuses US government sources of flat out lying about what the IAEA actually found to hype the fear of a real danger to the world. Himm, have we heard this before?
He recommends diplomacy, but also sanctions on Iran’s acquisition of duel use items.
Let’s remind ourselves what Secretary of Defense, Donald Rmsfeld actually said at both the VFW and the American Legion. First some words from the VFW speech:
We're really fighting the first war of the 21st century, the first war that's been fought in the new media realities with bloggers and 24-hour talk radio and Internet and e-mails and video cameras, digital cameras. Things speed around the world so rapidly, truth generally takes a long time to catch up with untruth.
As our forces strive to protect civilians, the enemy uses civilians as shields. As our troops strive to obey the laws of warfare, the enemy uses those laws against us. And as our troops are held to the standards of mere perfection, the enemy is held to no standard at all. And while some at home argue for tossing in the towel, the enemy is waiting and hoping that we will do just that.
At the American Legion he said:
It was a time when a certain amount of cynicism and moral confusion set in among Western democracies. When those who warned about a coming crisis, the rise of fascism and nazism, they were ridiculed or ignored. Indeed, in the decades before World War II, a great many argued that the fascist threat was exaggerated or that it was someone else's problem. Some nations tried to negotiate a separate peace, even as the enemy made its deadly ambitions crystal clear. It was, as Winston Churchill observed, a bit like feeding a crocodile, hoping it would eat you last.
There was a strange innocence about the world. Someone recently recalled one U.S. senator's reaction in September of 1939 upon hearing that Hitler had invaded Poland to start World War II. He exclaimed: “Lord, if only I had talked to Hitler, all of this might have been avoided!”
And it's a time when Amnesty International refers to the military facility at Guantanamo Bay -- which holds terrorists who have vowed to kill Americans and which is arguably the best run and most scrutinized detention facility in the history of warfare -- as "the gulag of our times." It’s inexcusable. (Applause.)Those who know the truth need to speak out against these kinds of myths and distortions that are being told about our troops and about our country. America is not what's wrong with the world. (Applause.)
The struggle we are in -- the consequences are too severe -- the struggle too important to have the luxury of returning to that old mentality of “Blame America First.”
The rhetorical move here, as BushCo often do, is to confuse themselves with America. Criticize the current administration, and you are criticizing America. Further, Rumsfeld puts the blame on low-ranking troops (“in every army, there are occasional bad actors, the ones who dominate the headlines today, who don't live up to the standards of the oath and of our country.”) for his own mistakes. It is Rmsfeld who put the troops there, gave them a confused strategy, told them to fight an insurgency with conventional tactics.
And then, of course, he equates people who disagree with him to appeasers.
Olbermann replied:
...it credits those same transient occupants, our employees, with a total omniscience, a total omniscience which neither commonsense nor this administration‘s track record, at home or abroad, suggest they deserve it.that about what Mr. Rumsfeld is confused is simply this, this is a democracy, still, sometimes just barely and as such, all voices count, not just his.
But to date, this government has proved little besides its own arrogance and its own hubris. Mr. Rumsfeld is also personally confused, morally or intellectually, about his standing in this matter. From Iraq to Katrina, to flu vaccine shortages to the entire fog of fear which continues to envelopes our nation, he, Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney and their cronies have inadvertently or intentionally profited and benefited, both personally and politically.
And yet he can stand up in public and question the morality and the intellect of those of us who dare ask just the receipt for the emperor new clothes.
Aptly, he reversed the appeasement analogy, pointing out that it was the government back in the 30s that was wrong, as the government is wrong today. And he wisely closed with timeless words from Edward R. Murrow:
"We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty” he said in 1954, “We must remember always that accusation is not proof and that conviction depends upon evidence and due process of law. We will not walk in fear one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not disended from fearful men, not from men who fear to write, to speak, to associate and to defend causes that were, for the moment, unpopular. "
It took a lot of courage for Olbermann to rebut so strongly Rumsfeld, a courage Howard Dean just couldn’t quite match earlier in the show. And it courage for his bosses to allow him six minutes to stand up for freedom.
Keith Olbermann, American Hero.
The Weekly Telegraph (Aug. 23, p.3) reports the findings of a North Carolina nutrition professor, Barry Popkin, that there are now more obese people than malnourished people in the world.
One of the curious aspects of the public perceptions of the Middle East wars is what constitutes provocation – who is seen to be striking first. Despite all the back and forth that has gone on for decades, it is still quite common to envisage Israel as the innocent. Indeed it is almost universal to have the opinion that the recent war between Hezbollah and Israel was the result of an “unprovoked” attack by Hezbollah that resulted in the capture of two solders. However there is a much larger, and more complex context as reported by George Monbiot in the August 8th Guardian.
Here are some key excerpts.
Since Israel's withdrawal from southern Lebanon in May 2000, there have been hundreds of violations of the "blue line" between the two countries. The United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (Unifil) reports that Israeli aircraft crossed the line "on an almost daily basis" between 2001 and 2003, and "persistently" until 2006. These incursions "caused great concern to the civilian population, particularly low-altitude flights that break the sound barrier over populated areas". On some occasions, Hizbullah tried to shoot them down with anti-aircraft guns.
On May 26 this year, two officials of Islamic Jihad - Nidal and Mahmoud Majzoub - were killed by a car bomb in the Lebanese city of Sidon. This was widely assumed in Lebanon and Israel to be the work of Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency. In June, a man named Mahmoud Rafeh confessed to the killings and admitted that he had been working for Mossad since 1994. Militants in southern Lebanon responded, on the day of the bombing, by launching eight rockets into Israel. One soldier was lightly wounded. There was a major bust-up on the border, during which one member of Hizbullah was killed and several wounded, and one Israeli soldier wounded. But while the border region "remained tense and volatile", Unifil says it was "generally quiet" until July 12.
But there is no serious debate about why the two soldiers were captured: Hizbullah was seeking to exchange them for the 15 prisoners of war taken by the Israelis during the occupation of Lebanon and (in breach of article 118 of the third Geneva convention) never released. It seems clear that if Israel had handed over the prisoners, it would - without the spillage of any more blood - have retrieved its men and reduced the likelihood of further kidnappings
On July 12, in other words, Hizbullah fired the first shots. But that act of aggression was simply one instance in a long sequence of small incursions and attacks over the past six years by both sides. So why was the Israeli response so different from all that preceded it? The answer is that it was not a reaction to the events of that day. The assault had been planned for months.
The San Francisco Chronicle reports that "more than a year ago, a senior Israeli army officer began giving PowerPoint presentations, on an off-the-record basis, to US and other diplomats, journalists and thinktanks, setting out the plan for the current operation in revealing detail". The attack, he said, would last for three weeks. It would begin with bombing and culminate in a ground invasion. Gerald Steinberg, professor of political science at Bar-Ilan University, told the paper that "of all of Israel's wars since 1948, this was the one for which Israel was most prepared ... By 2004, the military campaign scheduled to last about three weeks that we're seeing now had already been blocked out and, in the last year or two, it's been simulated and rehearsed across the board".