The greatest denouncers of Palestinian violence against Israel also tend to be the greatest defenders of pre-state Zionist violence against Britain.
A total of 396 civilians, 89 policemen and 50 soldiers died in attacks in July, data compiled by the health, defence and interior ministries showed.
The death toll is the highest for a single month since May 2008 when 563 people were killed in violence. July's figure is significantly higher than that for June, when 284 people died, and is nearly double the death toll from the same month a year ago, when 275 people were killed.
Saturday's figures also showed that 1,043 people -- 680 civilians, 198 policemen and 165 soldiers -- were injured in attacks this month, the highest such number this year.
The data also showed that 100 insurgents were killed and 955 were arrested.
According to Mohammed Kirresh, 22, a member of the Palestinian family, "Jewish people and Israeli soldiers with weapons" came at 2am, when most of the family was at a wedding.
He said the family, which had rented the property since 1936, had won two previous court cases challenging eviction orders. He claimed the Israelis had broken furniture and damaged belongings.
"Everything we own is inside – our money, ID papers, clothes, food," he said. Armed police were guarding the entrance to the house.
Around 20 members of the Kirresh family pledged to stay on the narrow street outside the house. "We are staying here," said Mohammed Kirresh. "We hope the court will rule in our favour."
The new occupants of the house refused to speak to the press.
In scenes reminiscent of the worst years of the insurgency, when militants ruled supreme in the neighborhood, gunmen overran an army checkpoint on a busy street around 3 p.m., killing three soldiers and setting their bodies ablaze. Then, as police and army vehicles raced to the rescue, the assailants detonated five explosive devices in quick succession and pinned down the stricken forces with automatic weapons.
Shops closed, residents raced for home, and gunfire rattled through the deserted streets as the neighborhood seemed to be spiraling out of control. Police said about 35-40 insurgents were involved in the assault, operating in groups of four or five and hiding in surrounding houses. Some were wearing masks, but others were not, suggesting they had no fear of being recognized by locals.
As the battle raged, army and police officials said, the militants pulled down the Iraqi flag from the checkpoint and raised in its place the black banner of the insurgent group Al Qaeda in Iraq, recalling the time before the area was pacified by U.S. troops and members of the Awakening movement in the fall of 2007.
By nightfall, the security forces had sealed off the area, imposed a curfew and began carrying out widespread arrests, moving house to house detaining suspects amid sporadic bursts of gunfire. . . .
The ease with which insurgents appeared to overwhelm the army, albeit briefly, was a chilling reminder of the potential for an insurgent comeback as the political stalemate over the formation of a new government drags on. The country's political factions have not even agreed which bloc should lead the government, leaving wide open the question of who will be the next prime minister. . . .
Officials say U.S. troops remain on track to complete their drawdown to 50,000 noncombat forces by Aug. 31. Visiting Baghdad this week to prod Iraqi leaders into speeding up their negotiations, U.S. Adm. Michael G. Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said he saw "absolutely nothing to negatively impact that." All U.S. troops are scheduled to leave by the end of 2011.
U.S. officials say the drawdown will have little practical effect because Iraqi security forces have been responsible for most of the nation's hotspots since U.S. troops withdrew from Iraq's cities in June of last year.
Adhamiya has been under Iraqi army control for most of the last three years, and although it has been mostly calm, relations have long been strained between the mostly Shiite Muslim security forces and the mostly Sunni Muslim residents, who complain of discriminatory behavior by the soldiers.
Those sectarian tensions surfaced during Thursday's battles. A policeman in Adhamiya who requested anonymity because he was not authorized to speak on the matter said some residents came onto the streets during the initial assault to applaud the gunmen as the bodies of the dead soldiers burned.
Another officer, who also spoke on condition of anonymity, said the security forces did not dare take their injured to the hospital for fear that Sunni doctors would not treat them well. Instead, the officer said, they took their injured to more distant facilities, and one policeman bled to death on the way.
"When we took the decision on the settlement freeze, we said explicitly that it was only for 10 months and that afterward life would return to the way it was. We think people here, who were sent here by previous Israeli governments to live, have a right to live normal lives."That right to normal lives evidently must include the "right" of Jewish settler hooligans to torch Palestinians' olive trees. (The WaPo noted that "From the bulletproof window of his bus, Lieberman could see Palestinian olive trees burning on a hillside that settler youths had torched.") Adding more fuel to that fire, Lieberman also told one of the settlers of his intention to bring mobile homes to the settlement to house new immigrants from Russia (who, in Lieberman's view, have more of a right to live in the West Bank than do Palestinian families who have lived there for generations.
Israeli bulldozers, flanked by helicopters and throngs of police, demolished the entire Bedouin village of al-Araqib in the northern Negev desert. Despite their land rights cases still pending in the court system, hundreds of al-Araqib villagers were instantly made homeless a month after Israeli police posted demolition orders.An Arab opposition group has stated:
Eyewitness reports say the police were accompanied by several busloads of right-wing Israeli civilians who cheered during the demolitions.
"The destruction's declared aim is to facilitate plans by the Jewish National Fund to plant a [forest] on the site. We regard this demolition as a criminal act. Bedouin citizens of Israel are not enemies, and forestation of the Negev is not a reasonable pretext for destroying a community which is more than 60 years old, dispossessing its residents and violating the basic rights of hundreds of Israeli civilians, men, women and children."It's not only local Arabs who protest Israel's shabby, arguably racist treatment of Arabs who live either in Israel itself or in the West Bank. (I won't even mention the prison camp into which Israel has turned Gaza.) Note the case of this American Jewish student who, while visiting Israel, decided to act:
"This act by the state authorities is no 'law enforcement' -- it is an act of war, such as is undertaken against an enemy. This act cannot be dissociated from yesterday's statement by Prime Minister [Benjamin] Netanyahu, who at the cabinet meeting sounded a warning about 'a situation in which a demand for national rights will be made from some quarters inside Israel, for example in the Negev, should the area be left without a Jewish majority. Such things happened in the Balkans, and it is a real threat.' Presenting the Bedouin citizens of Israel as 'a real threat' gives legitimacy to the expulsion of Israel's Bedouin citizens from the Negev in order to 'Judaize' it. We call on all who care for democracy to give their support to this threatened community."
A macabre legal wrangle is under way over who should pay the hospital bill for an American art student who lost an eye after being struck by a tear-gas canister fired by an Israeli border police officer at a Palestinian-led protest in the West Bank.
The student, Emily Henochowicz, 21, was injured on May 31 after she joined Palestinian and foreign activists protesting that morning’s deadly raid by Israeli naval commandos on a Turkish boat trying to breach the blockade of Gaza. Israeli security forces fired tear gas to disperse the demonstration after a few Palestinian youths threw rocks.
Witnesses at the protest, by the Qalandiya checkpoint near Ramallah, said that a border police officer had fired the tear-gas directly at the demonstrators, rather than into the air in line with regulations. The Israeli police have begun a criminal investigation.
But the lawyer representing Ms. Henochowicz, Michael Sfard, recently received a letter from the Israeli Ministry of Defense rejecting any demand for compensation or payment of hospital costs. The reason, the ministry stated, was that the protest was violent and that the tear-gas canister was not fired directly but had ricocheted off a concrete barricade.
Ms. Henochowicz, who is Jewish and is a student at the Cooper Union in New York, arrived in Israel in February for what was supposed to be a six-month student exchange. Her father was born in Israel to Holocaust survivors whom he described as “ardent Zionists.”
Ms. Henochowicz, who was treated at Hadassah University Medical Center in Ein Kerem, had her left eye removed and suffered fractures that required the insertion of titanium plates. She returned to the United States in early June, where she is continuing to visit doctors and specialists.
But more than the cost of the treatment in Israel, which amounted to about $10,000, there are clearly legal principles and interests at stake.
The student’s father, Dr. Stuart Henochowicz, said by telephone that he had not yet explored the question of whether his daughter’s insurance would cover the bill, because he was under the impression that it would be paid by the Ministry of Defense.
On Tuesday, the ministry stated that according to preliminary checks, the border police dealt lawfully with the “violent protest at Qalandiya,” and that the firing of tear gas was justified. While expressing sorrow over Ms. Henochowicz’s injury, the ministry added that it did not cover hospitalization expenses in circumstances such as these.
After her arrival in Israel, Ms. Henochowicz, who came to Jerusalem’s Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, got involved with the pro-Palestinian International Solidarity Movement after meeting activists at a demonstration in Sheikh Jarrah, an East Jerusalem neighborhood where settlers have won court cases and evicted several Palestinian families from their homes.
From Sheikh Jarrah, Ms. Henochowicz frequented the regular Palestinian protest spots in the West Bank like Bilin, Nilin and Nabi Saleh. The late May protest was her first at Qalandiya. “I did not know what it would be like,” she said.
The demonstration came hours after Israel’s raid on an aid flotilla. Violent clashes broke out on the Turkish boat and nine activists — eight Turks and an American-Turkish youth — were killed.
Ms. Henochowicz said she was not standing near the stone throwers. She was holding a Turkish and an Austrian flag when she was struck.
Avi Issacharoff, an Israeli journalist from the newspaper Haaretz, was watching the demonstration. “The police fired a tear-gas grenade, and then another and another,” he wrote in June “I remember that what surprised me was the volley of grenade fire directly aimed directly at the demonstrators, not at the sky. After the fourth grenade, if I am not mistaken, a shout was heard about 100 meters away.”
Unusual for a foreign activist in a conflict where battle lines are often starkly drawn, Ms. Henochowicz says she feels a certain affinity with both sides. She said she had wanted to help the Palestinians, but because of her background, she said she also felt “very attached” to Israel “in lots of ways.”
She added, “If I did not really care about what was happening in the country, I would have hung out on the beach all day.”
Mr. Blix. . . used the word “absurd” on several occasions to describe American arguments for going to war. He also described Britain, the United States’ main ally in the invasion, as “a prisoner on the American train.”
Mr. Blix concluded three hours of testimony by saying that Iraqis had suffered worse from the “anarchy” that followed the invasion in March 2003 than it had under Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship. Iraq was already “prostrate” under Mr. Hussein, he said, and the impact of economic sanctions, and the invasion and its aftermath, made things worse.
Mr. Blix, 82, is customarily courtly, in the way of the Cambridge-educated international lawyer he was before he became Sweden’s foreign minister in the late 1970s. But appearing before the British inquiry as the first non-British witness to speak in a public session, his quiet, detailed account of the weapons inspections — and the decision to go to war before inspections were completed — was punctuated by acerbic observations about the American role.
He repeatedly referred to the American president as “Bush,” without using his title or an honorific, while referring to Tony Blair, the British prime minister who joined the invasion, as “Mr. Blair.” He criticized both leaders, as he has before, for resting their case for going to war on intelligence about Iraq’s weapons programs that he described as poor.
“I have never questioned the good faith of Mr. Blair, or Mr. Bush,” he said at one point. “What I questioned was the good judgment, particularly of Bush, but also about Mr. Blair to some extent.”
As for Mr. Hussein, Mr. Blix said he attributed Iraq’s failure to comply fully with United Nations inspection teams in the years before the invasion to a refusal by Mr. Hussein to undergo what he viewed as “humiliation” at the hands of the West.
A successful outcome in Afghanistan always was dependent on two local factors, no matter how brilliantly the U.S. military performed: an honest, competent Afghan government and a true ally in Pakistan, which ceased its support for the Afghan Taliban elements operating from Pakistani soil. In the past year, we've learned that an honest, competent Afghan government is a fantasy. The Wikileaks gusher will now direct attention to the Pakistani side of the equation--and increase the public sense that the Afghan war is an exercise in futility. It remains to be seen whether the Obama Administration can wait until December, as planned, to reevaluate its Afghan strategy.
If you need further evidence of why our war in Afghanistan is so de-stabilizing for Pakistan, or how Pakistan’s "Strategic Depth" is a threat to the United States, or, of course, why General Kayani’s "silent coup" in Pakistan means we need to accelerate our withdrawal, then look no further than this New York Times article:The documents. . . suggest that Pakistan, an ostensible ally of the United States, allows representatives of its spy service to meet directly with the Taliban in secret strategy sessions to organize networks of militant groups that fight against American soldiers in Afghanistan, and even hatch plots to assassinate Afghan leaders.[...]
Some of the reports describe Pakistani intelligence working alongside Al Qaeda to plan attacks. Experts cautioned that although Pakistan’s militant groups and Al Qaeda work together, directly linking the Pakistani spy agency, the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI, with Al Qaeda is difficult. [...]
The man the United States has depended on for cooperation in fighting the militants and who holds most power in Pakistan, the head of the army, Gen. Parvez Ashfaq Kayani, ran the ISI from 2004 to 2007, a period from which many of the reports are drawn. American officials have frequently praised General Kayani for what they say are his efforts to purge the military of officers with ties to militants.
Get it? Not only are we fighting a civil war in Afghanistan, which has nothing to do with Al-Qa’eda, but we are also fighting a proxy war against Pakistan. They don’t care about our US interests, they care about their own country’s interests, and it is in their interest to kill Americans in Afghanistan, as well as aiding Al-Qa’eda. All so that Pakistan can control Afghanistan and battle against India.
The US must stop escalating in Pakistan and end the war in Afghanistan. Afghanistan’s future government is already taking shape, and Pakistan has enough of a powerful progressive movement that they can stabilize their country, and bring their government into line, provided that we end our war in both countries. Our troops should not be dying for General Kayani’s proxy war with India and they should not be dying in a civil war on behalf of President Karzai.
"The real story of this material is that it is war, it's one damn thing after another," he said.
"It's the continuous small events, the continuous deaths of children, insurgents, allied forces, the millions of people."
"You will find that the US military units when self-reporting of course often speak in self-exculpatory language, redefine civilian casualties as insurgent casualties, downplay the number of casualties.
"And we know this by comparing these reports to the public record for where there has been comprehensive investigation."
"The revelation of abuse by the US and coalition forces may cause Afghans to be upset, and rightly so.
"If governments don't like populations being upset, they should treat them better, not conceal abuses that have been undertaken."
If you need further evidence of why our war in Afghanistan is so de-stabilizing for Pakistan, or how Pakistan’s "Strategic Depth" is a threat to the United States, or, of course, why General Kayani’s "silent coup" in Pakistan means we need to accelerate our withdrawal, then look no further than this New York Times article:The documents. . . suggest that Pakistan, an ostensible ally of the United States, allows representatives of its spy service to meet directly with the Taliban in secret strategy sessions to organize networks of militant groups that fight against American soldiers in Afghanistan, and even hatch plots to assassinate Afghan leaders.[...]
Some of the reports describe Pakistani intelligence working alongside Al Qaeda to plan attacks. Experts cautioned that although Pakistan’s militant groups and Al Qaeda work together, directly linking the Pakistani spy agency, the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI, with Al Qaeda is difficult. [...]
The man the United States has depended on for cooperation in fighting the militants and who holds most power in Pakistan, the head of the army, Gen. Parvez Ashfaq Kayani, ran the ISI from 2004 to 2007, a period from which many of the reports are drawn. American officials have frequently praised General Kayani for what they say are his efforts to purge the military of officers with ties to militants.
Get it? Not only are we fighting a civil war in Afghanistan, which has nothing to do with Al-Qa’eda, but we are also fighting a proxy war against Pakistan. They don’t care about our US interests, they care about their own country’s interests, and it is in their interest to kill Americans in Afghanistan, as well as aiding Al-Qa’eda. All so that Pakistan can control Afghanistan and battle against India.
The US must stop escalating in Pakistan and end the war in Afghanistan. Afghanistan’s future government is already taking shape, and Pakistan has enough of a powerful progressive movement that they can stabilize their country, and bring their government into line, provided that we end our war in both countries. Our troops should not be dying for General Kayani’s proxy war with India and they should not be dying in a civil war on behalf of President Karzai.
To the extent that U.S. officials should take moral considerations into account, which comes first—the government’s obligation to provide for the well-being of the American people or the government’s obligation to provide for the wellbeing of people who are not Americans?
To the extent that the United States government has a moral obligation to people who are not Americans, why does the moral obligation to the people of Afghanistan qualify as a particular priority?
To the extent that the United States government has a specific and pressing moral obligation to Afghanistan, why does open-ended war qualify as the preferred way to acquit that obligation?
To the extent that fulfilling America’s moral obligation to the Afghan people requires the perpetuation of war, what should we make of the fact that responsibility for fulfilling that obligation falls on the backs of a small segment of our fellow citizens while the rest carry on as if there were no war?
On the first question, my own view is that U.S. officials have a moral obligation to the American people that takes precedence over all others. Those officials take an oath to the Constitution. That document does not commit the United States to saving or policing the world. It declares that the purpose of our union is to “secure the Blessings of Liberty to Ourselves and our Posterity.” Although not necessarily evident to those who make their living in well-heeled Washington think tanks, that obligation remains unfulfilled. (Were foreign policy analysts to set up shop in downtown Detroit or Cleveland, they might reach different conclusions.) Indeed, with military adventurism helping to swell our trillion dollar annual federal deficits, posterity is in for a rude awakening: By the time members of Exum’s generation get around to filing for social security and Medicare, there won’t be any. When the coffers are bare, that failure will be moral as well as fiscal.
On the second question, if the United States does have an obligation to others, it’s not at all clear why the Afghans should come first. Does anyone think that America’s moral debt to the Iraqi people has been paid in full? How about the Vietnamese? Iranians? Filipinos? Nicaraguans? Guatemalans? Cubans? The list goes on. On this score, my personal favorite is Mexico–a near-neighbor used and abused for most of two centuries. We stole Texas. We launched a war of naked aggression to seize California and the southwest. We’ve pillaged Mexico’s resources. We’ve meddled in their revolution. We’ve a long track record of siding with kleptocratic elites against the Mexican people. Today the American demand for drugs along with our lax gun laws is transforming Mexico into a violence-riddled narco-state. Sure, Mexican institutions (like Afghan institutions) are weak, inept, and thoroughly corrupt. But does that provide a moral justification for treating Mexico like a footnote? If the U.S. Treasury has extra billions available for nation-building, doesn’t simple justice demand that we ship the money south of the border before attending to Central Asia?
And even if Afghanistan deserves to be first in line, why does it follow that war provides the best means of doing right by the Afghan people? The truth is that few of the resources that Washington expends in Afghanistan actually benefit the people. Instead, most dollars go to arms merchants and private security contractors, a.k.a., mercenaries, who couldn’t care less about the people’s wellbeing. Meanwhile U.S. operations routinely kill and maim innocent civilians: our commanders may regret that fact, but regret hasn’t ended the practice. Were the United States serious about actually doing something for Afghans, we’d spend less on munitions and more on economic assistance and social development. Better still, we’d offer interested Afghans the chance to get out of Afghanistan altogether and pursue the American dream, welcoming any and all to settle in the Land of Liberty. Carving an Afghan enclave out of a few million unused acres of Montana and Wyoming would show that U.S. expressions of solidarity with suffering Afghans go beyond mere rhetoric.
And finally, even if perpetuating a war already nearly a decade old really does provide the best way to meet some overriding collective U.S. obligation toward Afghanistan, it would seem to follow that the burden of service and sacrifice should be equitably distributed among Americans. Rather than passing the bill to Exum’s children, the present generation of Americans should pay for the war through higher taxes or by reducing domestic spending. They should also pay by changing the socioeconomic composition of the American military, ensuring that the U.S. forces sent off to Afghanistan “look like” America itself. Surely, it cannot be moral to pursue a policy of endless war, when the burden of service and sacrifice falls on the shoulders of 0.5 percent of the population.
“Mother Nature is just chemistry, biology and physics. That’s all she is.” You cannot sweet-talk her. You cannot spin her. You cannot tell her that the oil companies say climate change is a hoax. No, Mother Nature is going to do whatever chemistry, biology and physics dictate. . . ."
Making our country more energy efficient is not some green feel-good thing. Retired Brig. Gen. Steve Anderson, who was Gen. David Petraeus’s senior logistician in Iraq, e-mailed to say that “over 1,000 Americans have been killed in Iraq and Afghanistan hauling fuel to air-condition tents and buildings. If our military would simply insulate their structures, it would save billions of dollars and, more importantly, save lives of truck drivers and escorts. ... And will take lots of big fuel trucks (a k a Taliban Targets) off the road, expediting the end of the conflict.Do ya thing that our collectively cowering congressmen are taking note?
. . . . the cause of four months of political deadlock is Maliki's refusal to step down as head of government.All of this, of course, has come in the wake of the attempt by George W. Bush and his entourage to make a "new Middle East," starting with Iraq in 2003 (and then - they hoped - Lebanon in 2006, courtesy of the supposedly invincible Israeli military). Many of the same politicians and think-tank "scholars" who set the Iraq debacle in motion are now demanding that the US bomb Iran. Its nuclear installations are supposedly the target (although some, such as Amitai Etzioni, advocate bombing civilian infrastructure as well) - but as with Iraq, regime change is surely envisioned as a possible result.
Iyad Allawi, whose Iraqiya coalition won most seats in parliament, insists that he should be called on first to form a government. He has little chance of doing so because his party represents secularists and Sunnis while the post-war regime was founded on ethno-sectarianism and has been dominated by sectarian Shiites and separatist Kurds for the past seven years.
Under Iranian pressure, Maliki's sectarian State of Law bloc joined forces with the Iraqi National Alliance, comprising the Supreme Iraqi Islamic Council headed by Ammar Al Hakim and the party loyal to radical Shiite cleric Muqtada Sadr. Tehran clearly hoped that given the fact that this grouping is just four short of the 163 majority needed to form a government, the new super-Shiite alliance would agree on a premier and get on with the job of choosing ministers.
However, Sadr absolutely refuses to countenance Maliki's return as premier because he was responsible for the neutralisation of the Sadrist militia in the spring of 2008 and the arrest of hundreds of followers. Hakim does not share Maliki's political agenda and has his own candidate for the top job.
In a bid to weaken him, Maliki's super-bloc partners engineered the fall of the minister of electricity by organising mass protests over the lack of power in Basra and other southern cities as temperatures climbed to 50 degrees centigrade. The shortfall in electricity production has been a particularly hot issue since the fall of the Baathist regime. Iraqis simply cannot understand why the US occupation administration and Iraqi government have not been able to restore power to pre-war levels. Many Iraqis blame Maliki for failing to rein in widespread corruption which, they believe, is a major cause of the electricity crisis.
What is more surprising, senior SIIC figures met last month with three pro-Baath Iraqi exiles based in Damascus, in spite of the fact that the former ruling party has been outlawed in Iraq since 2003. All three of the pro-Baath interlocutors attended a conference held by one wing of the Baath party in Damascus on April 29. This wing, led by Muhammad Younis Al Ahmad, a former governor of Mosul, is seeking to unite with the wing led by Ezzat Ibrahim Al Duri, Saddam Hussein's deputy who is believed to be conducting resistance operations inside Iraq.
Following a series of deadly bombings of government sites in Baghdad, beginning with last August, Maliki blamed Syria for the attacks and demanded the extradition of former officials, including Ahmad, who was accused of organising the bombings.
Damascus-based Khalid Al Maeny, civil engineer and political scientist, is involved in political resistance. He told this correspondent that he and other Iraqi exiles seek to establish a "national political movement" to work "against the occupation as political resistance" and "save Iraq". He stated: "There are many [Iraqi] technocrats in Syria, independents who do not belong to any party, who are interested in joining in the struggle in Iraq.”
He said the US occupation has failed at all levels. The military failed because armed resistance continues. A US political presence in Iraq is unwelcome once Washington withdraws its troops.
"After seven years, there is no real government and the economy is in very bad shape."
His group is prepared to work with Baathists but "we will not repeat the Baathist government. We refuse all religious parties. We don't want [Sunni] Al Qaeda or [Shiite] Muqtada Al Sadr. We want to separate religion and state.... The first stage is reconciliation. We must forge a new national, political contract and substitute military resistance with a political project."
He said the sectarian constitution of 2005, written under US guidance, has produced only "violence and division".
An independent who left Iraq 30 years ago and now dwells in the Syrian capital, Fadhil Al Rubaiee observed that the post-war "political process is at a dead end… Iraqis were deluded into thinking the [March parliamentary] election would bring change. The question of who is next prime minister is a detail. We are drowning in details. The very existence of Iraq is in danger.... A national conference should be called and Iraqis should prohibit division or federalism and insist on a secular state for all its citizens."
Unfortunately, he remarked, "there is no political will for such an effort.
The tensions with Israel due to the Gaza war and the Israeli attack on the flotilla of humanitarian aid ships represent a new element in the region: truly independent Muslim-majority states that will not allow themselves to be pushed around and insulted by Israel or Western powers, as most Arab states allow. . . .
Turkey’s relations with Israel today comprise only one aspect of its multi-faceted regional strategy, which also includes good relations and diplomatic activism with foes of Israel like Syria and Iran. The emergence of a stronger Turkey that is more directly engaged with all in the region is a positive development, and any one party that thinks it can win Turkey totally to its side is probably engaged in wishful thinking.
The temptation for Obama to double down on Iran will grow rapidly as he concludes that Afghanistan will remain a festering sore as far as anyone can peer into a murky future, hardly a recipe for success at the polls in November. With a war in Afghanistan, which is bound to get worse, and a military theater in Iraq replete with sectarian violence, the bombing of Iran may give Obama a three-front war -- and a chance to retain both houses of Congress.(And along these lines, be sure to check out this recent essay from the Leveretts.)
To win the war in Afghanistan, the United States must turn a nation that stands as a model of bald-faced thievery into a clean, honest institution that cares for its people, now the most neglected in the world.America's self-mythologizing, on which so many of us were brought up, imbued us with a sense that we Americans - and especially, the American military, the military of that "Greatest Generation" era - can do anything, can fix anything, will always prevail. Why? "Because we're Americans!" Like a mantra . . .
It can't be done.
"We're starting to see the fruits of [our] labors . . . . Victory! I'm starting to taste it!"The increasingly clueless American public (most of whom seem more concerned with the fates of Lebron James and Lindsay Lohan than with the fates of fellow citizens serving in Iraq and Afghanistan) have had their collective awareness of what's happening in Iraq numbed by the mainstream media's decision to more or less blow off covering the situation there. (After all, the "Surge" worked, right? Aren't we just mopping up there?) (Along these lines, see this interesting post to The Atlantic by Dominic Tierney.)
an Israeli Foreign Ministry official told the Israeli Ynet website it would be “interesting” to see how the UK Foreign Office reacts to the newest praise of Fadlallah by UK Ambassador to Lebanon Frances Guy who eulogized Fadlallah on her personal blog. . . .Here's hoping that the UK Foreign Office has more courage and integrity than CNN, the self-proclaimed news leader that features a former top AIPAC official (Wolf Blitzer) as one of its "stars."
Guy had written Fadlallah was one of the figures she respected and enjoyed to meet the most in Lebanon.
"Actually, it's a lot of fun to fight. . . . ''You know, it's a hell of a hoot. . . . It's fun to shoot some people. I'll be right upfront with you. I like brawling.''
''You go into Afghanistan, you got guys who slap women around for five years because they didn't wear a veil. You know, guys like that ain't got no manhood left anyway. So it's a hell of a lot of fun to shoot them.''
