The Enemy Combatant

Israeli shells hit UN posts in Lebanon, no one hurt

2006-07-19T16:50:00.000-04:00

BEIRUT, July 19 (Reuters) - Two Israeli artillery shells on Wednesday landed inside a compound run by U.N. peacekeepers in south Lebanon who were sheltering 36 civilians, but no one was hurt, a spokesman for the UNIFIL force said.

The shells caused material damage to the position in Maroun al-Ras, an area that had seen heavy fighting between Israel and Hizbollah guerrillas during the day.

Another Israeli artillery shell landed in the UNIFIL headquarters compound in the southern town of Naqoura, he said. No one was wounded.

In 1996, during Israel's Grapes of Wrath campaign in Lebanon, an Israeli jet struck a UNIFIL compound in the southern village of Qana, killing 106 civilians sheltering inside.

Israeli air strikes on Lebanon killed 56 civilians and a Hizbollah fighter on Wednesday, the deadliest toll of the eight-day-old war, as thousands of villagers fled north and more foreigners were evacuated.

Despite international diplomatic efforts, there was no sign Israel or its Lebanese Shi'ite foes were ready to heed the Beirut government's pleas for an immediate halt to a war that has killed at least 292 in Lebanon and 25 in Israel.

Dazed Refugees Flood Beirut

2006-07-19T12:11:00.000-04:00

Lebanon is facing a vast humanitarian crisis, with the displaced estimated at 500,000.
By Megan K. Stack, Times Staff Writer
July 19, 2006

BEIRUT — Nonstop battles between Israel and Hezbollah have wreaked a massive humanitarian crisis in Lebanon, driving as many as 500,000 people from their homes, according to United Nations estimates.

The frazzled refugees who have flooded Beirut are struggling to find food, water and medicine. They sleep chockablock in city parks, abandoned basements and sweltering schools in the capital.

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Traumatized and disoriented, many of them stagger in from the country's south or Beirut's southern suburbs. They are safer here in the capital, but they are also living without clean drinking water, showers or a change of clothes.

"Where will we go now?" asked Ibtesam Srour, 36, who had taken shelter in a Beirut school after her home on Beirut's outskirts was flattened in a missile strike.

Srour's eyes brimmed with tears. Her husband was injured in the attack, as were several other family members.

"We're not getting medicine," she fretted. "They come and ask what we want, write it down and leave."

Tens of thousands of Israelis also have fled their homes, to escape Hezbollah rocket attacks, but they have not suffered the food, water and medical shortages facing the Lebanese.

Lebanon's government has opened the schools of Beirut to the sudden wave of refugees, but many of the shelters are being run by the cadres of Hezbollah, along with a few nongovernmental organizations. Across the city, vignettes of despair play out against a backdrop of playgrounds, blackboards and lunchrooms.

As the afternoon heat presses down, the sour stench of sweaty skin, soiled diapers and dirty clothes fills the classrooms. Babies wail, children scream, adults snap at one another and weep.

An old man and his grandchildren arrived at a crammed schoolhouse near central Beirut with injuries suffered in the air raids, but there was no doctor. An old woman fainted; an ambulance was summoned but it never came. There were no ambulances left to come.

"They came here with the clothes on their backs, and the crisis is deepening every day," said Mazen Ismael, a teacher who volunteered to run one of the shelters on behalf of the family of the late prime minister Rafik Hariri. "The situation has gotten so bad that we're truly afraid of disease."

The country has fallen so deep into chaos that it's almost impossible to know the extent of the humanitarian troubles. Entire neighborhoods have been drained of their residents.

The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees on Tuesday released an estimate of 500,000 displaced Lebanese. The agency, which did not explain how it arrived at the figure, also said it was sending as many as 11 more staff members to Lebanon.

Isolated by its crippled airport, blockaded seaports and bombed roads, Lebanon has seen its food and medical supplies dwindle to dangerously low levels. Officials are struggling to accommodate the massive waves of the displaced and reach people left in warfare-racked areas. They are also keenly aware that even towns that have escaped the bombings will soon run out of basic commodities.

As the crisis deepened this week, Lebanese officials said Israeli bombs hit the nation's largest milk factories, a major food factory and an eagerly awaited aid convoy that was making its way toward Beirut from the United Arab Emirates.

"It's a very serious escalation," Social Affairs Minister Nayla Mouawad said. "We were putting a lot of hope on the milk factories, to get milk for children and elderly people."

An Israeli military spokesman denied targeting the factories and aid trucks. Only Hezbollah facilities and vehicles believed to be transporting weapons were struck, he said.

The most harrowing reports emerged from the Hezbollah-dominated southern region closest to the Israeli border, where residents have been trapped in bomb shelters and basements for nearly a week while earth-shaking battles raged outside.

With the network of roads eviscerated by Israeli bombs, villages have run out of food, Lebanese officials said, adding that hunger had begun to set in.

"We can't meet their daily needs. There's no food, and the logistics are very difficult to send them food," said Freddy Yarak, an advisor to the Social Affairs Ministry. "We're having problems with the malnutrition of babies."

Most of the refugees are poor and working-class. They have abandoned their homes, lost track of family members and spent days huddled in shelters.

"I'm very, very tired. I want to sleep but I can't," said Ali Assem, 48, who packed up his six children and drove to Beirut from the southern city of Tyre last week. "They only give us food once a day, and we're hungry."

One of Assem's daughters uses a wheelchair. She sat alone in a schoolhouse corridor Tuesday, watching children file up and down the staircase.

"She doesn't cry," her father said, "but she's shocked every time a bomb falls."

Sometimes firefighters come by the school where the family is staying and refill the water tanks outside. But the water isn't suitable for drinking, and many of the refugees have come down with bacterial infections. There are 15 toilets for 700 people.

In another shelter, an old man sleeps sitting up against the schoolhouse wall, calloused feet stretched bare before him, fingers working the empty air as if he has prayer beads. At his side stretches another man, fast asleep on his stomach, flies crawling over his skin.

The men didn't have the soggy slabs of foam used in many of the shelters; they slept on sheets of hard foam, the kind that would be used to pack television sets in the United States. Others slept on the floor, or atop a thin blanket.

A tour of Beirut's shelters offers a revealing look at the power of Hezbollah. Known for its social and charity network as well as its powerhouse political party and its militia, the Shiite Muslim group has once again eclipsed government efforts: Many of the facilities are being run by Hezbollah. The group says it is collaborating with the government at the shelters, but representatives of the government are generally not present.

"Because this war is against Hezbollah, this is our legal obligation," said Jihad Akil, 45, a Hezbollah activist who was overseeing a Beirut schoolhouse sheltering hundreds of people. "It's also our religious obligation."

The government hasn't been able to determine how many people have been displaced, officials said Tuesday. The figure is at least 70,000, probably much higher and rising all the time, estimated Yarak, the social affairs advisor.

When the United Nations investigated, it found 60,000 people displaced in a single valley in the Chouf mountains, the office for refugees said. Of those, 20,000 were sleeping in public buildings; the rest where staying with friends and family.

Lebanese are also among the 100,000 people who have fled into Syria.

Despite good intentions, aid organizations have been floundering in their efforts to deliver help. The bombing has been too heavy, the crisis too sudden, the infrastructure too broken.

"No Hezbollah, no Red Cross, no government," said Mohammed Ali, 40, a grocer who has stuck it out at home despite the bombings in his suburban Beirut neighborhood. "Nobody has brought us so much as a kilo of water."

The streets of Ali's neighborhood, which is home to Hezbollah's offices, were deserted Tuesday. A few residents stood on the edge of the road, fidgeting nervously while they scanned the crater-filled streets for a taxi. Most young men who'd been sent on behalf of their families, they clutched plastic bags stuffed with a change of clothes.

"There was no more house," said Hussein Abu Yehiya, an engineering student who had made his way back to the neighborhood from a shelter at a schoolhouse. "The cupboard was intact, but we had to pull the rubble off of it."

At the schools, families struggled to make themselves at home. Barefoot boys played soccer in a concrete yard. Girls dangled from monkey bars, their heads swathed in Islamic veils.

A chaotic weaving of children's voices spilled out into the afternoon through open windows. Women washed clothes in buckets in the schoolyard, hanging them to dry on the bushes.

Under a flimsy strip of corrugated tin propped up by beams, middle-aged men and women crammed themselves into tiny chairs to smoke cigarettes and trade gossip.

"This was something we did not expect," said Aniya Salman, 34.

Salman and her five children spent the first nights of the bombardment sleeping in an alleyway alongside their apartment house in a southern suburb of Beirut; it was the closest thing they had to a bomb shelter.

"My children were very frightened, saying 'Israel is going to kill us,' " Salman said, her children pressing curiously around her. "There wasn't any power. The strikes and bombs were so strong we couldn't hear anymore."

Her 11-year-old daughter, Sama, tucked her chin shyly into the neck of her hijab and hugged herself tight. Her face was round, the fabric of her blouse embellished with rhinestone hearts.

"I thought we were going to die," she said. "It was like thunder, but stronger."

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Times staff writer Ken Ellingwood in Jerusalem contributed to this report.

Israeli troops, Hezbollah clash in Lebanon

2006-07-19T11:45:00.000-04:00

Guerilla rockets kill two in Nazareth; Israeli planes strike targets in Beirut
Ali Hashisho / Reuters

Lebanese women walk by a building which was damaged by an Israeli aristrike near Sidon, in south Lebanon, on Wednesday.

JERUSALEM - Israeli troops clashed with Hezbollah guerrillas on the Lebanese side of the border Wednesday, while warplanes flattened buildings and killed at least 20 people overnight as fighting entered its second week with the U.S. signaling it will not push Israel toward a fast cease-fire.

Meanwhile, Hezbollah showered northern Israel with rockets on Wednesday, killing two people in the mainly Arab town of Nazareth, Israeli authorities said.

The two were killed by a direct hit from a Katyusha rocket, the army said. Nazareth, in northern Israel, is revered as the hometown of Jesus and is filled with churches. It is about 19 miles from the Lebanese border.

Previous attacks during the eight days of rocket barrage have hit the nearby Jewish town of Upper Nazareth, but the latest wave was the first to hit a holy city.

More Hezbollah rockets fell on the Israeli city of Haifa and one hit an empty seafront restaurant. A few people were hurt.

'Measured' incursion into Lebanon
With diplomatic efforts stalled, Israel said Wednesday that its airstrikes had destroyed "about 50 percent" of the arsenal of Hezbollah, whose guerrillas have bombarded northern Israeli towns with rockets that have killed 13 civilians in the past eight days.

"It will take us time to destroy what is left," Brig. Gen. Alon Friedman, a senior army commander, told Israeli Army Radio.

Military officials said Israeli troops crossed the border in search of tunnels and weapons. Hezbollah claimed to have "repelled" Israeli forces near the coastal border town of Naqoura. Casualties were reported on both sides.

The Israeli army confirmed there were clashes with Hezbollah in the border area and some Israelis had suffered casualties. The army would not elaborate. Hezbollah's Al-Manar television channel reported that two Israeli soldiers had been killed and three wounded, but that could not be confirmed.

Israel, which has mainly limited itself to attacks from the air and sea, had been reluctant to send in ground troops because Hezbollah is far more familiar with the terrain and because of memories of Israel's ill-fated 18-year-occupation of south Lebanon that ended in 2000.

Israeli military officials said that, for several days, small numbers of their soldiers have going in and out of south Lebanon looking for Hezbollah bases and weapons. The officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, would not give the exact number of troops involved or their location.

Israel's ambassador to the United Nations, Dan Gillerman, stressed the incursion was not large scale and would not last long.

"This is an operation which is very measured, very local," Gillerman told CNN. "This is no way an invasion of Lebanon. This is no way the beginning of any kind of occupation of Lebanon."

Rice: 'Lasting value' cease-fire
The Bush administration also has refused to yield to international calls to press Israel for a prompt end to it campaign against the Hezbollah militia.

Instead, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is trying to drum up support for what she called a cease-fire of “lasting value.” That is, one that would have the Lebanese army take over the south of the country where Hezbollah guerrillas have conducted a cross-border war against Israel for years.

Rice is likely to make a trip to the area this weekend, but no announcement has been made. State Department spokesman Sean McCormack would only say Wednesday that her trip would come “in the near future” and told CNN the timing would depend upon “when she thinks it’s most useful and most effective.”

Israel also said Wednesday it did not plan to target Hezbollah's main sponsors, Iran and Syria, during the current fighting.

"We will leave Iran to the world community, and Syria as well," Vice Premier Shimon Peres told Army Radio. "It's very important to understand that we are not instilling world order."

The Israeli airstrikes late Tuesday and early Wednesday killed at least 20 people, bringing to 246 the number of people killed in Lebanon since the fighting began on July 12, when Hezbollah guerrillas raided an Israeli border outpost and kidnapped two soldiers. The overall figures were provided by the police control center, but they did not give a breakdown of the attacks.

Twenty-five Israelis have been killed in Israel in the past eight days.

Five people were killed when a missile struck a neighborhood in the southern Lebanese town of Nabatiyeh, police and hospital officials said. The target was a commercial office of a firm belonging to Hezbollah, but those killed were residents.

The bodies of three members of the Hamed family and a Sri Lankan maid were retrieved from the destroyed building. A fifth body remained under the debris.

In the village of Srifa, near Tyre in southern Lebanon, the airstrikes flattened 15 houses. The village's headman, Hussein Kamaledine, said 25 to 30 people lived in the houses, but it was not known if they were at home at the time. Many people have fled southern Lebanon.

In the southern village of Ghaziyeh, one person was killed and two were wounded when a missile struck a nearby building that housed a Hezbollah-affiliated social institution.

In the eastern Bekaa Valley, four people were killed and three were wounded in an air raid on the village of Loussi, police said.

Targets around Beirut hit
Israeli planes continued their strikes on Beirut on Wednesday, hitting a Christian suburb on the eastern side of the city for the first time.

The target was a truck-mounted machine used to drill for water but which could have been mistaken for a missile launcher. The vehicle, parked in an empty lot in Ashrafieh, was destroyed but no one was hurt.

The planes also hit the southern suburbs, a Hezbollah stronghold, causing one explosion that reverberated across the city much louder than any previous impact in the eight days of fighting.

More Israeli missiles landed in two towns outside Beirut — Chuweifat and Hadath. One person was killed at the Galerie Semaan junction, near Hadath, police said.

MSNBC-TV’s Chris Matthews, Reuters and The Associated Press contributed to this report.

14,000 Iraqis Killed This Year

2006-07-18T17:18:00.000-04:00

Title speaks for itself...

UN says 6,000 Iraqi civilians killed in May-June

2006-07-18T15:16:00.000-04:00

BAGHDAD, July 18 (Reuters) - About 6,000 Iraqi civilians were killed in the last two months alone as casualties continued an "upward trend", the United Nations said on Tuesday.

The estimate, compiled with data from Baghdad morgue and the Health Ministry, is the latest attempt to give some statistical expression to the daily bloodshed in Baghdad and elsewhere. It was part of a bi-monthly U.N. report on human rights in Iraq.

In a country with barely functioning public institutions, where relatives routinely remove the bodies of victims for burial with little legal formality, any estimates of mortality from the violence are highly approximate.

But a surge in sectarian killing in the past few months has been seen in rising trends in those statistics that exist.

Baghdad morgue officials have told Reuters they took in 1,595 bodies in June, 1,375 in May and 1,155 in April. Of those, about 80 percent were victims of violent deaths, they said.

In December, in the first and only official U.S. estimate of the cost of the war in Iraqi lives, President George W. Bush said some 30,000 Iraqis had been killed since the 2003 invasion.

A Web site that compiles media reports of casualties now estimates civilian deaths alone at around 40,000. By no means all deaths have been reported in the media.

The U.N. noted Iraqi health officials have said a recent media reckoning of 50,000 dead is probably an underestimate.

The U.N. report included all the morgue entries for May and June in its total of violent deaths along with 1,294 deaths recorded in May by the Health Ministry and 1,554 in June.

That gave a total cited in the report of 5,818 deaths in the two months, the "overwhelming majority" of them in Baghdad.

Health Ministry figures incorporated in a monthly report issued by the Interior Ministry, however, show a lower level of civilian deaths. According to that report, 935 civilians were killed in violence in May and 889 in June.

The U.N. report cited a Health Ministry figure of 6,826 civilians killed in the first six months of 2006 and a morgue total of 14,338 bodies taken in in Baghdad in the same period.

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Human Rights Situation in Iraq Grave, UN Report Shows

2006-07-18T14:35:00.000-04:00

(AXcess News) New York - A new report on the human rights situation in Iraq paints a grave picture of abuses while pointing to the possibility for positive change with the establishment of a Government there.

In its bimonthly human rights report for May – June 2006, the UN Assistance Mission for Iraq expressed the hope that there are "unique opportunities with a new Government of national unity announced on 22 May and its firm commitment to address forcefully urgent human rights concerns so as to establish the rule of law in the country."

At the same time, the report notes a grave situation of human rights in Iraq that the new Government must address.

While welcoming recent positive steps by the Government to promote national reconciliation, the report raises alarm at the growing number of casualties among the civilian population killed or wounded during indiscriminate or targeted attacks by terrorists and insurgents, as well as militias and criminal groups.

Kidnapping of individuals and groups, for ransom or political purposes also continued to surge, according to the report, which commends the release of over 3,000 detainees but expressed concern at new evidence of torture in detention centres administered by the Ministry of Interior.

The report also reiterated the UN's call for "the immediate release of the report on Al-Jadiryia, a detention centre run by the Ministry of Interior uncovered on 14 November 2005, and for criminal prosecution of those held responsible."

The document recognizes that the security forces are working under extremely difficult conditions but points out that, on occasions, the response of the security forces itself has been a source of human rights violations and further violence.

Sectarian violence continues to fuel displacement at an alarming pace, UNAMI warns. Mosques and religious leaders have been victims of attacks while teachers, professors and students continue to be severely affected by the violence. The killing and wounding of significant numbers of health workers and professionals is crippling health services at a time when there is an increasing need for health care services as a result of ongoing violence. Women continued to face restrictions in their freedoms while children, minorities, Palestinian refugees and other groups continued to suffer.

The document also describes reports received by the United Nations regarding military operations carried out by the MNF-I which resulted in the loss of civilian life and property.

The report noted a markedly better situation in the Region of Kurdistan. "UNAMI is encouraged that while current challenges remain significant, progress is also manifested in the advancement of legislation in favour of women's rights, the protection and promotion of children's rights and in some areas of economic, social and cultural rights. Concerns remain regarding freedom of expression, detainee rights and discrimination."

The UN, together with other donors, continue to assist the Government of Iraq to establish a strong national human rights protection system which can address both current and past human rights violations. To this end, the report outlines activities conducted to advance the establishment of the rule of law and progress made toward the establishment of a National Commission for Human Rights in the country.

Original

US hawks smell blood

2006-07-18T14:31:00.000-04:00

By Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON - Seeing a major opportunity to regain influence lost as a result of setbacks in Iraq, prominent neo-conservatives are calling for unconditional US support for Israel's military offensives in Gaza and Lebanon and "regime change" in Syria and Iran, as well as possible US attacks on Tehran's nuclear facilities in retaliation for its support of Hezbollah.

In a Weekly Standard column titled "Our war", editor William Kristol called Iran "the prime mover behind the terrorist groups who have started this war", which, he argued, should be considered part of "the global struggle against radical Islamism".

He complained that Washington recently had done a "poor job of standing up and weakening Syria and Iran" and called on

President George W Bush to fly directly from the "silly [Group of Eight] summit in St Petersburg ... to Jerusalem, the capital of a nation that stands with us, and is willing to fight with us, against our common enemies".

"This is our war, too," said Kristol, who was also a founder and co-chairman of the recently lapsed Project for the New American Century (PNAC).

Echoed Larry Kudlow, a neo-conservative commentator, at the Standard's right-wing competitor, the National Review: "All of us in the free world owe Israel an enormous thank-you for defending freedom, democracy and security against the Iranian cat's-paw wholly owned terrorist subsidiaries Hezbollah and Hamas.

"They are defending their own homeland and very existence, but they are also defending America's homeland as our frontline democratic ally in the Middle East," according to Kudlow, who, like Kristol and other like-minded polemicists, also named Syria, "which is also directed by Iran", as a promising target as the conflict expands.

The two columns are just the latest examples of a slew of commentaries that have appeared in US print and broadcast media since Israel began bombing targets in Lebanon in retaliation for Hezbollah's fatal cross-border attack last Wednesday.

They appear to be part of a deliberate campaign by neo-conservatives and some of their right-wing supporters to depict the current conflict as part of global struggle pitting Israel, as the forward base of Western civilization, against Islamist extremism organized and directed by Iran and its junior partner, Syria.

This view was perhaps most dramatically expressed by the former Republican Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich, in an appearance on the National Broadcasting Co's Meet the Press on Sunday when he described the conflict as "the early stages of ... the Third World War".

The effort to frame the current round of violence as part of a much larger struggle - and Israel's role as Washington's most loyal front-line ally - recalls the neo-conservatives' early reaction to the terrorist attacks on New York and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001.

Just nine days after September 11, Kristol and PNAC - whose charter members included Vice President Dick Cheney, Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld and half a dozen other senior Bush administration officials - released an open letter to Bush that called for the United States to retaliate not only against al-Qaeda and Afghanistan, but also against Israel's main regional foes, beginning with Iraqi president Saddam Hussein and Palestine Liberation Organization chairman Yasser Arafat.

In addition, the letter advised, "any war against terrorism must target Hezbollah. We believe that the administration should demand that Iran and Syria immediately cease all military, financial and political support for Hezbollah and its operations. Should Iran and Syria refuse to comply, the administration should consider appropriate measures of retaliation against these state sponsors of terrorism.

"Israel has been and remains America's staunchest ally against international terrorism, especially in the Middle East," the letter asserted. "The United States should fully support our fellow democracy in its fight against terrorism."

While the Iraqi and Palestinian components of PNAC's agenda were soon adopted as policy and in essence achieved, neo-conservative hopes that Bush would move on Hezbollah - as well as Syria and Iran - eventually stalled as US military forces became bogged down in an increasingly bloody and costly counter-insurgency war in Iraq.

As the situation in Iraq worsened, neo-conservative influence in and on the administration also declined to the benefit of "realists" based primarily in the State Department who favored a less aggressive policy designed to secure Damascus' and Tehran's cooperation in stabilizing Iraq and strengthen the elected Lebanese government of which Hezbollah was made a part.

In that context, the current conflict represents a golden opportunity for the neo-conservatives to reassert their influence and reactivate their Israel-centered agenda against Hezbollah and its two state sponsors.

"Iran's proxy war", blazed the cover of this week's Standard, which also featured no fewer than three other articles, besides Kristol's editorial, underlining Iran's sponsorship of Hezbollah and Hamas and the necessity of the US standing with Israel, if not taking independent action against Tehran and/or Damascus as recommended by Kristol himself.

A major theme of the new campaign is that the more conciliatory "realist" policies toward Syria and Iran pursued by the State Department have actually backfired by making Washington look weak.

"They are now testing us more boldly than one would have thought possible a few years ago," wrote Kristol. "Weakness is provocative. We have been too weak, and have allowed ourselves to be perceived as weak," he went on, adding that "the right response is renewed strength", notably "in pursuing regime change in Syria and Iran [and] consider[ing] countering this act of Iranian aggression with a military strike against Iranian nuclear facilities".

The notion that US policy in the region has become far too flaccid and accommodating is echoed by a number of other neo-conservatives, particularly Michael Rubin, a prolific analyst at the hardline American Enterprise Institute and protege of Cheney confidant and former Defense Policy Board chairman Richard Perle.

In a companion Standard article, Rubin qualified recent State Department policy as "all talk and no strategy" that had emboldened enemies, especially Iran, to challenge Washington and its allies.

In another article for the National Review on Monday, bluntly titled "Eradication first", Rubin elaborated on that theme, arguing that diplomacy in the current crisis will only be successful "if it commences both after the eradication of Hezbollah and Hamas, and after their paymasters pay a terrible cost for their support. If ... peace is the aim, it is imperative to punish the Syrian and Iranian leadership," he wrote.

Above all, according to the neo-conservatives, the US position in the region is now inextricably tied to the success or failure of Israel's military campaign.

In yet another Standard article, titled "The rogues strike back: Iran, Syria, Hamas and Hezbollah vs Israel", Robert Satloff, executive director of the hawkish, pro-Israel Washington Institute for Near East Policy, argued that "defeat for Israel - either on the battlefield or via coerced compromises to achieve flawed ceasefires - is a defeat for US interests; it will inspire radicals of every stripe, release Iran and Syria to spread more mayhem inside Iraq, and make more likely our own eventual confrontation with this emboldened alliance of extremists."

(Inter Press Service)

Original

Israel's path to total war

2006-07-18T14:27:00.000-04:00

By Kaveh L Afrasiabi

One of the most malignant aspects of the new chapter in the Arab-Israeli conflict is the myth of Israel as the assaulted party, lavishly propagated by the White House and the infinite pro-Israel pundits in the US media, including the editors of the New York Times, who have labeled Israel's blatant aggression against the nation of Lebanon as "legally and morally justified".

Never mind that the rest of the world, including the European Union, does not share this perception of who is mainly at fault for the deadly cycle of violence that has gripped the Middle East again. The irony is that one can detect greater voices of dissent and opposition to Israel's massive, disproportionate response to the token kidnapping of a few of its soldiers than is the case in the "pluralistic" US media, nowadays sheepishly toeing the official line.

This line was expressed by President George W Bush in his press conference alongside President Vladimir Putin on Sunday when he stated firmly, "In my judgment, the best way to stop the violence is to understand why the violence occurred in the first place. And that's because Hezbollah has been launching rocket attacks out of Lebanon into Israel."

Sure, Hezbollah conducted a raid across the border and kidnapped two Israeli soldiers, and that as a show of solidarity with the much-repressed Palestinians, but the rocket attacks on Israel were in response to Israel's massive bombardment clearly pre-planned to attain the dual objective of defanging Hezbollah and creating a regime change in Lebanon, perhaps as a prelude to a wider war on Syria and Iran.

Gideon Levy in the liberal Israeli paper Haaretz has put it cogently: "In Gaza, a soldier is abducted from the army of a state that frequently abducts civilians from their homes and locks them up for years with or without a trial - but only we're allowed to do that. And only we're allowed to bomb civilian population centers."

The White House-led masterly mischaracterization of the chronology of events culminating in the widening war show how nicely adapted are the standards of public relations that serve the Israeli war machine, currently pressing hard to pave the road for a future attack on Iran, by either the US or Israel itself, without the fear of any retaliation through Lebanon, thus depriving Iran of one of its multiple lines of defense.

Little wonder, then, that the pro-Israeli pundits in Washington are wasting no time in pushing for an attack on Iran. "Why wait?" asks William Kristol of the Standard Weekly, rationalizing his warmongering bid in the form of "It is our war, too."

But of course, assuming that the script for war on Iran began with the one-ton bombs on Gaza residential neighborhoods a few weeks ago, propelling Hezbollah inevitably into action, and the specter of wider war getting more and more imminent as we witness the ever-expanding list of "targets" by Israel, now including government buildings in both Gaza and Lebanon.

Ze'ev Schiff, considered a top Israeli military analysts, penned an article titled "Invitation for escalation: Take note of what hasn't been hit" arguing that the Israeli air raids were deliberately selective, sparing the Lebanese government and army and focusing on Hezbollah strongholds. But wire reports of "colossal damage" to Beirut in retaliation for the Hezbollah rocket attacks on Haifa tell a distinctly different story, that is, a spiraling conflict that is fast turning the capital city of a sovereign nation to rubble.

Not to be outdone by the Israeli apologists, New York Times columnist David Brooks disingenuously penned an opinion article in the Sunday paper titled "As Israel withdraws, its enemies go berserk".

Putting the discourse of Israel as the aggrieved party to full throttle, Brooks and other like-minded pundits are busy cultivating an ill-informed American public, as there is no serious attempt by the US media to bring home the Palestinians' sufferings to Americans. There are not even half-decent reports on their plight after the recent barrage of lethal Israel attacks throwing Gaza into "semi-feudalism", other than a passing reference in the New York Times that there is no electricity or adequate running water, causing the beginning of a massive health epidemic. As Arnold Toynbee once wrote in A Study of History, "The absent are always in the wrong."

A war to create Pax Israelica?
A disconcerting truth, revealed recently by two prominent Jewish American political scientists, about the extraordinary control of United States' foreign policy by the pro-Israel forces, has now been fully confirmed by the empirical realities of this brutal war.

Despite dire warnings by certain US politicians, such as Senator John Warner, the Bush administration has failed to call on Israel to halt its offensive, opting instead to focus on Syria and Iran - reminding one of the Vietnam War when Moscow or Peking (Beijing) were often blamed for the efforts of the North Vietnamese.

History unfortunately repeats itself more often on the tragic side, for otherwise we would not be witnessing such concerted scapegoating of Syria and Iran for the two-pronged warfare Israel has deliberately ignited. On the one hand, this is to dismantle the Palestinian Authority and return the Palestinians to the status quo ante, somewhat similar to the millet system in the old Ottoman Empire (in the best-case scenario). And on the other hand, seeking the "implementation of the UN resolution" calling for the disarming of Lebanese militias.

Of course, from an observer's point of view, it is ironic that Israel has no qualms about disregarding other relevant United Nations resolutions, above all 242 and 338, which call for the restoration of rights of Palestinians, focusing selectively on a resolution pertaining to a sovereign nation.

As the tide of war intensifies, it is increasingly obvious that Israel's hidden objective is to inflict such mortal wounds on the weak nation of Lebanon as to bring it to its knees and thus take a giant step toward its grandiose objective of a Pax Israelica.

A big regional superpower, bounded in a small physical space and bloody, ill-defined borders, Israel's warmongering is not a result of its absence of policy, as claimed by The Nation's recent editorial. Rather, it is the result of a sedimented power dynamism better understood from the prism of the (Michel) Foucaultian theoretical framework, which shows how the operation of (sacred) knowledge/power of Zionist ideology has now manifested itself in the deadly form of military regression that Israel has opted for in Lebanon and the occupied territories.

Indeed, Gideon Levy and other Israeli liberals currently bemoaning Israel's "war of choice" miss this crucial point that long ago was articulated by the likes of Maxime Rodinson in his writings on Israel as a post-colonialist, expansionist state, for the very motif of this state militates against anything short of a "Greater Israel".

The key question is, of course, if the present architects of this state will ever settle for the less-than-grandiose notion of a tiny Jewish state in a sea of Arabs.

Looking back, at Israel's masterly use of preemptive warfare, most vividly demonstrated in the course of the 1967 war, and its clever maneuvers of taking half-steps toward the fulfillment of a "two-state" solution, such as the Oslo Agreements, only somehow to nullify those measures under one excuse or another, then their breach of peace with Lebanon and the Palestinian people is anything but surprising.

Rather, Israel's actions today fully conform with its prior history, and its cyclical pattern of warfare with its Arab subjects and neighbors. Israel's strategy of provoking the "hostile other", eg, by assassination of a Hamas chief on June 8 and its "mistaken" shelling of Gaza, killing scores of civilians, without venturing a word of apology to the innocent victims, is indeed quite familiar in the annals of Arab-Israeli conflict, as is its strategy of massive, overwhelming response to a token breach from Lebanon.

A more penetrating vision may, no doubt, discern some underlying, disconcerting realities, about the nature of world politics, role of power and the premature post-Cold War predictions of the world's passage beyond the old paradigm known as "realism". The military logic of action by Israel, discarding all peaceful options with the Palestinian people, is indicative of a Leviathan running rampant, in a world supposedly led by the US "unipolar moment".

Yet that moment is increasingly turning a different color, that is, as the appendage of a much smaller state, whose supporters "wield political power disproportionate to their number", to paraphrase Toynbee. To add to Toynbee's insight, as the biased interpretations of the present conflict cited above clearly show, wielding media power is a key as to how this political power has come to such heights that bedevil and mesmerizes those who study it today.

Kaveh L Afrasiabi, PhD, is the author of After Khomeini: New Directions in Iran's Foreign Policy (Westview Press) and co-author of "Negotiating Iran's Nuclear Populism", Brown Journal of World Affairs, Volume XII, Issue 2, Summer 2005, with Mustafa Kibaroglu. He also wrote "Keeping Iran's nuclear potential latent", Harvard International Review. He is author of Iran's Nuclear Program: Debating Facts Versus Fiction.

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Israeli school kids autograph artillery shells

2006-07-18T13:56:00.000-04:00

Israeli children at Kiryat Shmona writing messages on shells that are fired into Lebanon

Gonzales: Bush blocked eavesdropping probe

2006-07-18T13:50:00.000-04:00

By MARK SHERMAN, Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON - Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said Tuesday that President Bush personally blocked Justice Department lawyers from pursuing an internal probe of the warrantless eavesdropping program that monitors Americans' international calls and e-mails when terrorism is suspected.

The department's Office of Professional Responsibility announced earlier this year it could not pursue an investigation into the role of Justice lawyers in crafting the program, under which the National Security Agency intercepts some telephone calls and e-mail without court approval.

At the time, the office said it could not obtain security clearance to examine the classified program.

Under sharp questioning from Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Arlen Specter, Gonzales said that Bush would not grant the access needed to allow the probe to move forward.

"It was highly classified, very important and many other lawyers had access. Why not OPR?" asked Specter, R-Pa.

"The president of the United States makes the decision," Gonzales told the committee hearing, during which he was strongly criticized on a range of national security issues by Specter and Vermont Sen. Patrick Leahy (news, bio, voting record), the panel's senior Democrat.

Last week, under a deal with Specter, Bush agreed conditionally to a court review of his antiterror eavesdropping operations.

When the program was disclosed in December, it outraged Democrats and civil libertarians who said Bush overstepped his authority.

Bush's 2001 directive authorized the National Security Agency to monitor — without court warrants — the international communications of people on U.S. soil when terrorism is suspected. The administration initially resisted efforts to write a new law, contending that no legal changes were needed. But after months of pressure, officials have grown more open to legislation.

Under the deal with Specter, the president agreed to support a bill that could submit the program to the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court for a constitutional review.

Last week, Gonzales said the bill gives Bush the option of submitting the NSA program to the intelligence court, rather than requiring the review.

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W The Cowboy Cartoon

2006-07-18T13:46:00.000-04:00

Battle in Mideast Widens U.S.-Russia Rift

2006-07-18T11:19:00.000-04:00

Tense Bush-Putin Relations at G-8 Summit
Complicate Diplomatic Response to Conflict

By YOCHI J. DREAZEN
July 18, 2006; Page A4

ST. PETERSBURG, Russia -- The U.S. and Russia differ sharply on the causes and cures for the outbreak of Middle East violence, complicating the diplomatic response and further straining relations between Washington and Moscow.

The tension between President Bush and Russian President Vladimir Putin hung over this year's Group of Eight summit here, as the two sides traded jabs over whether responsibility lay with Israel or the Lebanese-based Hezbollah militia. It also heralded further diplomatic strains, because Russia's proposals -- negotiating with Hezbollah, pressing Israel to halt its offensive and resisting efforts to lay blame on Syria and Iran -- run counter to those of the U.S.

Mr. Bush offered a blunt prescription during a lunch meeting yesterday with other G-8 leaders, when a microphone accidentally left on picked up the president using an expletive to illustrate his belief that Syria bore responsibility. In an exchange with British Prime Minister Tony Blair, Mr. Bush said global powers had to "get Syria to get Hezbollah to stop doing this s-, and then it's over." Mr. Bush also told Mr. Blair he wanted to tell United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan "to get on the phone with [Syrian President Bashar] Assad and make something happen."

The divide came to a head during a tussle over a Russian attempt to have the summit formally condemn Israel's assault on Lebanon. After the U.S. blocked the move, Russia stymied a U.S. effort to include language specifically linking Syria and Iran to the violence. Ultimately, the G-8 statement on the Middle East expressed the leaders' "determination to pursue efforts to restore peace," but didn't address differences between the U.S. and Russian approaches.

Still, the U.S. and Russia have some common ground, with both expressing cautious support for an emerging proposal to send an armed international force to the Israel-Lebanon border. "The G-8 will ask the U.N. Security Council to consider sending an international peacekeeping force to Lebanon...and I hope the United Nations Security Council will take this decision," Mr. Putin said. He said Russia would consider sending troops to a U.N.-created force.

Disagreement over Mideast violence is a new irritant in the rocky ties between the U.S. and Russia. Despite round-the-clock negotiations, the two sides failed last week to reach agreement on a deal that would allow Russia into the World Trade Organization, a priority for Mr. Putin. The leaders also had tense exchanges about Russia's record on democracy and human rights. And Mr. Putin publicly mocked U.S. progress in Iraq.

Today's Mideast dispute reflects each country's positions on the decades-old Arab-Israeli conflict, but U.S. officials say it is being fueled by Russia's desire to challenge the U.S. on a variety of fronts to demonstrate its resurgence as a global power. A senior U.S. official said Russia's position also reflects Moscow's growing business and financial ties with Iran.

While the gap between the U.S. and Russia looks to be widening over the Middle East, the summit seemed to chart new agreement between the U.S. and its European allies, who often find themselves on opposite sides of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

None of the European countries backed Israel as strongly as the U.S., and several mixed condemnations of Hezbollah with expressions of concern about the scope of the Israeli offensive. Still, the public statements of most G-8 leaders seemed closer to Mr. Bush's than Mr. Putin's.

French President Jacques Chirac, in an appearance with Mr. Bush, emphasized the need for "to-the-letter implementation of Security Council Resolution 1559," which calls for Hezbollah to be disarmed. Mr. Blair echoed American language accusing Iran and Syria of contributing to the violence through military and financial support of Hezbollah.

Mr. Putin's denunciation of the Israeli offensive could open him up to charges of hypocrisy in his views in the war on terror, given Russia's crackdown on Chechnya, where Russian forces battling Islamic separatists have killed thousands of civilians. Mr. Putin's public statements make clear that he sees Hamas's and Hezbollah's battles with Israel as predominantly political in nature, while he sees the Chechens' attacks on Russia as religiously inspired terrorism.

The U.S. has rejected Arab and European appeals to pressure Israel to halt its counteroffensive and has condemned Syria and Iran for supplying arms and financial aid to the Shiite militia. The U.S. wants Lebanon to fulfill the U.N. resolution calling for Hezbollah to be disarmed and has called for international pressure on Syria and Iran to curtail support for the group.

"For the first time we've really begun to address with clarity the root causes of the conflict...and that is terrorist activity -- namely, Hezbollah, that's housed and encouraged by Syria, financed by Iran, are making these moves to stop the progress of peace," Mr. Bush said.

Russia argues that the root cause of the current violence is Israel's occupation of Palestinian territory in the West Bank and Syrian territory in the Golan Heights. Moscow has criticized Hezbollah for abducting Israeli soldiers and striking northern Israel, but it broke with the U.S. by condemning the Israeli military attacks as excessive and disproportionate. Mr. Putin also said that there is no definitive proof that Syria and Iran have continuing ties to Hezbollah.

Mr. Putin's government also has laid out a different set of responses. Speaking to reporters in recent days, Mr. Putin has said his government has held back-channel talks with Hezbollah and would be willing to hold formal negotiations with the group, as it does with the Palestinian militant organization Hamas.

--Guy Chazan contributed to this article.

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Car bomb in Iraq's Shi'ite Kufa kills 59

2006-07-18T11:17:00.000-04:00

By Khaled Farhan

KUFA, Iraq, July 18 (Reuters) - A car bomb hit a group of labourers after they boarded a minibus in a market in a Shi'ite city in Iraq on Tuesday, killing 59 people and sparking clashes between protesters and police, witnesses and officials said.

The blast, some 50-100 metres from a Shi'ite shrine in the southern city of Kufa, tore through the minibus after it had pulled out of the crowded market.

Hospital and security sources said 132 people were wounded in the blast, which dealt a fresh blow to Shi'ite Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's efforts to promote national reconciliation.

Riyadh al-Shibni, a doctor in a Najaf health centre, said hospitals in Najaf and Kuf had received 59 bodies.

Police in the scene were pelted with rocks by angry crowds. Many appeared to be followers of radical Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, who has many supporters in the town. Kufa is near the holy city of Najaf, 160 km (100 miles) south of Baghdad.

The protesters chanted to the police: "You are traitors!" "You are not doing your job!" "American agents!".

Police then fired into the air to disperse the onlookers and confused scenes ensued, a Reuters reporter at the scene said.

"It is very chaotic now. The police are shooting in the air and the crowds are running," he said. "Ambulances are racing around town."

BRINK OF WAR

The blast, one of the bloodiest since a government of national unity took office in April, came a day after gunmen killed more than 50 people in Mahmudiya, near Baghdad.

Najaf Governor Assad Abu-Kalal blamed the Kufa attack on the "criminal Baathists and terrorists of Mahmudiya." Witnesses said the minibus had Baghdad licence plates. The blast destroyed six cars and two restaurants in the area.

Violence between majority Shi'ites and Sunnis, dominant under Saddam Hussein but now the backbone of an insurgency against the U.S.-sponsored political process, has pushed Iraq to the brink of civil war.

Maliki, a Shi'ite, has urged Iraqis to rally behind his reconciliation plan as the last hope to avert all-out war.

But Shi'ite religious and political leaders have warned that mass attacks against their community by suspected Sunni insurgents meant their calls for restraint and to avoid retaliation were being ignored.

Earlier this month, a suicide car bomber blasted two coach- loads of Iranian pilgrims in Kufa, killing 10 and wounding 40.

Gatherings of labourers in crowded markets have become a favourite target of Sunni al Qaeda insurgents, who Iraqi and U.S. officials say are intent on sparking a civil war between Shi'ites and Sunnis.

President Jalal Talabani, an ethnic Kurd, called on clerics from both Sunni and Shi'ite Muslim sects to condemn violence, which he said aimed to destabilise the country and "to create a climate of mistrust among the citizens".

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More than 100,000 flee Lebanon for Syria

2006-07-18T11:15:00.000-04:00

More than 100,000 people have crossed into Syria from Lebanon over the past five days to escape Israeli attacks, Syrian authorities say.

Official data shows that at least 24,000 Lebanese entered Syria through four crossing points since Thursday, when Israeli strikes to avenge the abduction of two soldiers by Hezbollah fighters intensified.

At least 27,000 Arabs, mostly Gulf tourists, also left, together with more than 6,500 foreigners and 19,000 Syrians.

Syrian border posts registered another 28,000 people leaving Lebanon, but their nationalities were not yet recorded.

Syria remains Lebanon's only outlet to the world since Israel blockaded Lebanese ports and destroyed the country's transport infrastructure.

The country is sending non-military supplies to Lebanon to help it cope with the attacks, the head of the council overseeing bilateral ties says.

Higher Syrian-Lebanese Council secretary general Nasri al-Khoury says the Syrian authorities have also waived airport and port fees for aid bound to Lebanon.

"Aid from Syria, especially medical, has already arrived in Lebanon and a cargo from Kuwait at Damascus airport is on its way," he said.

Mr Khoury says Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has "given his instructions to open Syria's ports, airports and roads to help Lebanon".

He says more power is flowing through a joint electricity grid to help Lebanon compensate for capacity destroyed by Israeli air strikes.

- AFP/Reuters

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Pakistan arrests scores of Taliban in crackdown

2006-07-18T11:13:00.000-04:00

Reuters
Tuesday, July 18, 2006; 2:07 AM

QUETTA, Pakistan (Reuters) - Pakistan arrested about 52 Taliban militants in raids overnight in the southwest province of Baluchistan, taking action that Afghanistan, the United States and NATO powers have long called for.

"They are Taliban, and they have links with those living in Afghanistan. They had no documents so we will hand them over to the Afghan authorities," Chaudhary Mohammad Yaqub, Baluchistan's police chief, told Reuters on Tuesday.

A total 150 Afghans had been arrested during an operation in the past two days, but many of those picked up were held for not possessing proper identity papers, Yaqub said.

The Afghan government, the United States and NATO powers with forces in Afghanistan all want Pakistan to act more forcefully against the Taliban, particularly in the Baluch capital Quetta where many settled after they were ousted from power in 2001.

Among those detained in raids in Quetta on Monday evening was Mullah Hamdullah, a former commander of Taliban forces in the southern Afghan province of Helmand, where British troops have met fierce resistance since their deployment a few months ago.

Arrests of Taliban in Pakistan have been relatively rare, leading to accusations that while the government has aggressively hunted al Qaeda remnants, particularly in the tribal regions of north and south Waziristan, it has been soft on the Taliban.

President Pervez Musharraf's government had backed the Taliban prior to 2001.

President Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice have spoken to Musharraf in the past few months about the need to do more to help quell the insurgency in the southern Afghan provinces.

A war of words had broken out earlier this year over what Afghanistan calls Pakistan's inaction. Pakistan countered by saying Afghan intelligence was out of date, and a rising insurgency was being fueled from within Afghanistan.

The Baluch police chief said the operation in the past two days was principally aimed at catching Afghans illegally living in Pakistan. He said Taliban would have no protection.

"It is a continuing process and anybody who has links with the Taliban, we will nab them," Yaqub said.

Pakistan's past failures to follow through in the campaign against the Taliban has led to Afghan suspicions that it is letting the movement thrive in case it needs them to exert influence over its western neighbor at some point in the future.

Another reason for Pakistani hesitancy in tackling the Taliban could be fear of igniting sentiments among the millions of ethic Pashtuns living in the border areas because the Taliban are mainly Pashtuns.

Pakistan is also fighting a revolt led by powerful ethnic Baluch tribal chieftains, and would be wary of risking further instability in its mineral-rich western province, analysts say.

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Russia May Send Navy Ships to Lebanon

2006-07-17T19:30:00.000-04:00

Russia may send navy ships to the Lebanon coast, the ITAR-TASS news agency reported on Monday quoting a source in the Defense Ministry. The move is being considered as Russia prepares to evacuate its citizens from the conflict zone.

On Sunday Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said that Russia is preparing to evacuate its citizens from Lebanon

Lavrov warned that the fighting between Israel and Lebanese guerrillas could ignite a wider conflict, and said the international community had to use all means possible to end the violence immediately.

“If Lebanon explodes, we all know ... how it can resonate across other countries in the region,” Lavrov told reporters at the G8 meeting in St. Petersburg.

The United States and France have also begun preparations and Britain dispatched two ships, including an aircraft carrier, to the eastern Mediterranean in apparent preparation for evacuations.

Israel launched air strikes in Lebanon last week after militants captured Israeli soldiers in a cross-border raid. At least 130 people have been killed in the fighting, mostly in Lebanon.

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U.S. Won't Help German Kidnap Claim Probe

2006-07-17T17:20:00.000-04:00

By STEPHEN GRAHAM
The Associated Press
Sunday, July 16, 2006; 3:33 PM

BERLIN -- Germany said Sunday the United States has refused to help investigate the alleged abduction of a German citizen, a case that has ignited criticism of U.S. tactics against international terrorism.

Khaled al-Masri, who was born in Lebanon, says he was seized in Macedonia in December 2003 and flown by the CIA to a detention center in Afghanistan. He says he was questioned and abused during five months in custody before he was dumped in Albania.

Prosecutors in Munich have opened an investigation and Berlin asked Washington for assistance with it.

The U.S. Justice Ministry declined to help due to a civil lawsuit that al-Masri has brought against the Central Intelligence Agency, the German Justice Ministry said Sunday.

"The American side has informed us that no legal assistance can be provided in the al-Masri case, at least for the time being, in view of the ongoing civil case," ministry spokeswoman Eva Schmierer said.

The letter did not address al-Masri's allegations, Schmierer said, and she did not know when Berlin received the rejection.

Human rights advocates have seized on al-Masri's story to press the United States to stop flying terrorism suspects to other countries, where they could face abuse.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and other U.S. officials have declined to address the al-Masri case. However, German Chancellor Angela Merkel has said the United States has acknowledged making a mistake with him.

German authorities insist they were unaware of al-Masri's case until after he was freed.

However, Germany's intelligence agency acknowledged in May that that one of its employees in Macedonia overheard at the time that a German citizen called al-Masri had been detained and passed to U.S. custody. It said the employee apparently failed to inform his superiors.

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House Backs U.S-Russia Polar Bear Accord

2006-07-17T15:27:00.000-04:00

By JIM ABRAMS
The Associated Press
Monday, July 17, 2006; 2:38 PM

WASHINGTON -- The House gave its approval Monday to a U.S.-Russia treaty to help
protect polar bears from overhunting and other threats to their survival.

The House bill puts into effect a 2000 treaty that sets quotas on polar bear hunting
by native populations in the two countries and establishes a bilateral commission
to analyze how best to sustain the polar bear habitat. It passed by voice vote.

The Polar Bear Specialist Group of the World Conservation Union estimates the current
polar bear population in the Arctic at 20,000 to 25,000, and projects a 30 percent
decline in that number over the next 45 years. Climactic warming that melts the bears'
sea ice habitat is regarded as the main threat, but pollution and overhunting are other
major concerns.

Only subsistence hunting by native peoples is legal, but there is an illegal market
in Asia for gall bile and gall bladders from polar bears and other bears because
of their uses in medicine.

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Iraq market massacre leaves 48 dead (coordinated bomb attacks)

2006-07-17T15:24:00.000-04:00

by Salam Faraj Mon Jul 17, 11:57 AM ET

BAGHDAD (AFP) - A deadly coordinated assault of car bombs, mortar rounds and a shooting rampage by masked gunmen on a market south of Baghdad has killed 48 people believed to be Shiites, including women and children.

Police also found 22 bodies across
Iraq, 20 of them in Baghdad, of men tortured and shot dead in apparent sectarian attacks as the inter-confessional violence that has dogged Iraq for the past months showed no sign of abating.

The latest violence came a day after a suicide bombing in a coffee-shop in the northern town of Tuz Khurmatu killed 28 people.

Major General Abdel Aziz Mohammed, head of defence ministry's operation centre, told reporters Monday that the onslaught on the market in the town of Mahmudiyah comprised "two car bombs, followed by four mortars slamming into the market which were then followed by armed men randomly shooting in the market."

Iraqi security sources said armed men in several cars sprayed bullets at civilians and shops as they drove through the main market street of Mahmudiyah, giving a casualty toll of at least 48 dead and 46 wounded.

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Syria offers safe haven to US nationals fleeing Lebanon

2006-07-17T15:17:00.000-04:00

WASHINGTON (AFP) - The Syrian embassy said it was offering "safe haven" to Americans and other citizens wishing to flee Lebanon, where nearly 200 civilians have been killed during a massive Israeli military bombardment.

"Now, while thousands of United States citizens are stranded in Lebanon attempting to flee the ongoing massacre there, Syria has opened its borders to US citizens as well as citizens of other nationalities," the embassy said in a statement.

"In Syria, US and citizens of other nations find a safe haven from the barbaric and atrocious acts of the Israeli army in Lebanon," it said, adding that already a "huge influx of US and foreign nationals" have entered Syria.

Syria was waiving visa requirements for entry and offering "all sorts of humane assistance to the thousands of refugees coming from Lebanon including medical attention," it said. "From Syria, US citizens can return safely home."

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Putin twists knife as Levy blames the boss

2006-07-17T14:54:00.000-04:00

By TIM SHIPMAN in St Petersburg, Daily Mail

17:25pm 16th July 2006

Russian greeting: President Vladimir Putin welcomes Tony Blair to the G8 summit in his hometown of St Petersburg

A gleeful Vladimir Putin has publicly embarrassed Tony Blair over the cash-for-peerages scandal.

The Russian president spoke of 'corruption' in Britain and singled out the arrest of the Prime Minister's personal fundraiser Lord Levy.

A year ago Mr Blair played the part of the consummate international statesman when he hosted the G8 summit in Gleneagles.

But yesterday, as the G8 leaders met in Mr Putin's hometown of St Petersburg, Mr Blair's latest attempt to grandstand on the world stage was left in tatters.

He was forced to defend himself against the charge that the cash-for-honours affair has made him a public laughing stock with other leaders and undermined his ability to fight for Britain's interests at the summit.

Mr Putin made clear that he would condemn the cash-for-honours affair if Mr Blair criticises Russia's record on democracy and human rights.

Asked what his message would be to Mr Blair, Mr Putin said: "There are also other questions. Questions, let's say, about the fight against corruption. We'd be interested in hearing your experience, including how it applies to Lord Levy."

Later Mr Blair was humiliated again. Standing next to President George Bush he was asked if his international role is now being seriously undermined by Lord Levy's activities?

He replied: "No I don't," but acknowledged that he would "have a discussion" about the issue with Mr Putin.

The exchange was stunning evidence of Mr Blair's diminished international status.

And back in Britain, it has emerged that Lord Levy has left police in no doubt that the Prime Minister played a key role in the cash-for-peerages scandal.

Labour's top fundraiser has told investigators that the key decisions on whether to accept secretive loans from wealthy donors were left to the Prime Minister.

Mr Blair's tennis partner and Middle East envoy has said that he was little more than a fixer charged with finding the money the party desperately needs to stay afloat.

But the big decisions about whether to ask for donations or loans from the millionaires willing to contribute to party coffers were a matter for Mr Blair and his top aides.

Lord Levy, 62, has denied any wrongdoing in the affair which led to his arrest last Wednesday and has criticised the police for the way they handled it. Privately he is furious at the way his reputation has been tarnished by a political scandal which has reached deep into Downing Street.

And he is understood to have left Labour chairman Hazel Blears in no doubt that he is not prepared to be the 'fall guy' for an operation run from Downing Street.

In a blistering conversation on Friday night, after two days being interviewed under arrest, Lord Levy sparked panic in Labour circles by making clear his anger.

It is understood that he has provided the Metropolitan Police team led by Assistant Commissioner John Yates with evidence of Mr Blair's role in the cash-for-peerages operation.

Labour figures are said to be growing increasingly nervous at the prospect of Lord Levy disclosing what he knows about the party's finances to detectives. As a former accountant, he is known to have kept records which could play a key part in an eventual decision to prosecute.

With police intent on interviewing the Prime Minister under caution, Lord Levy's testimony could prove vital.

One source said: "Lord Levy finds the money, but he doesn't decide who gets the peerages. That's a matter for Downing Street and ultimately the Prime Minister."

Lord Levy has made clear that he opposed the plan to ask for loans - which do not have to be declared - instead of outright donations.

Mr Blair is said to have insisted on secretive arrangements as a way of encouraging donors who did not want to go public to support the party.

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SOLDIER KILLED IN AL ANBAR PROVINCE #2550

2006-07-17T14:52:00.000-04:00

SOLDIER KILLED IN AL ANBAR PROVINCE

Release Date:
7/17/2006
Release Number:
06-07-01C
Description:

CAMP FALLUJAH, Iraq – A Soldier assigned to 1st Brigade, 1st Armored Division died due to enemy action while operating in Al Anbar Province today.

The name of the deceased is being withheld pending notification of next of kin and release by the Department of Defense.

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2 American soldiers killed in Baghdad

2006-07-17T14:51:00.000-04:00

2 American soldiers killed in Baghdad
Associated Press

BAGHDAD, Iraq - Two American soldiers were killed Monday in separate attacks in the Baghdad area, the U.S. military said. Names and units were not released. A U.S. statement said one soldier was hit by small arms fire early in the day in western Baghdad and died at 12:55 p.m.

Another soldier died at 4:55 p.m. from injuries suffered in an explosion south of the capital, the military said in a separate sttatement.

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Soldier killed in Afghan clash

2006-07-17T14:49:00.000-04:00

A coalition soldier has been killed and 11 others wounded in heavy fighting against the Taleban in southern Afghanistan, US-led forces said.

Foreign troops in the Tirin Kot district of the Uruzgan province came under fire after destroying a truck that militants were loading.

The nationality of the dead soldier and of those wounded have not yet been released.

t is not clear whether militants suffered any casualties.

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Haifa-hit rockets were Syrian made

2006-07-17T14:46:00.000-04:00

By YAAKOV KATZ, JPOST STAFF AND AP
Chief of General Staff Lt.-Gen. Dan Halutz said on Sunday afternoon that the more advanced Fajar missiles that were fired with a barrage of other rockets at Haifa on Sunday morning, killing eight people, were made in Syria.

Meanwhile, the names of the eight victims of the Haifa attack were released for publication. The following people all died when a rocket hit a maintenance depot at the train station: Shlomi Mansora, 35, from Nahariya; Rafi Hazan, 30, from Haifa; Kiryat Ata residents Nissin Elharach, 43, and Reuven Levy, 46; Kiryat Yam residents Asahel Damati, 39, David Feldman, 28, and Dennis Lapidus, 24, and Shmuel Ben Shimon, 41, from Upper Yokne'am.

Just two hours after the fatal attack, a second barrage of rockets landed in Haifa's port area and Nahariya.

A third barrage of rockets hit the Haifa area on Sunday afternoon. Nobody was wounded in the latest attack. Air raid sirens had sounded immediately before the Katyushas hit.

<

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Haliburton Carton

2006-07-17T14:30:00.000-04:00

Mexico leftist to launch civil resistance

2006-07-17T14:09:00.000-04:00

By Noel Randewich Sun Jul 16, 5:50 PM ET

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - Backed by hundreds of thousands of followers, the leftist who lost Mexico's presidential vote vowed on Sunday to launch a civil resistance campaign to protest at fraud and force a recount.

Huge crowds chanting "You are not alone," cheered Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, runner-up in the July 2 election by a fraction, on a march through the capital to the Zocalo square.

The size of the protest, bigger than a similar demonstration last week, gave Lopez Obrador a lift in his attempt to persuade an election court to declare him winner.

"We are going to start peaceful civil resistance to defend democracy," Lopez Obrador told supporters, some of whom walked, traveled on battered old buses or even rode on horseback to the capital from around the country.

Lopez Obrador, a former Indian welfare officer, said aides would meet this week to work out what form the resistance would take. The official result showed conservative ruling party candidate Felipe Calderon won by less than a percentage point, or just over 240,000 votes.

The race divided Mexico only six years after President

European Union observers say there was no significant fraud.

Lopez Obrador did not say what kind of civil resistance he envisaged. But as a local politician in the state of Tabasco in the 1990s he blocked oil wells and encouraged tens of thousands of people not to pay energy bills to protest at alleged vote fraud and environmental damage by the Pemex oil company.

Despite Lopez Obrador's ability to put supporters on the streets, an opinion poll on Saturday showed most Mexicans do not agree with his call for a vote-for-vote recount. A recount of tally sheets has already confirmed Calderon as the winner.

"SAD, ANGRY AND IMPOTENT"

The leftist also said Fox's government illegally backed Calderon, its Harvard-educated former energy minister.

"I feel sad, angry and impotent because the people's will was not respected," demonstrator Salvador Torres said. Protesters, many dressed in the yellow of Lopez Obrador's Party of the Democratic Revolution, or PRD, set off firecrackers near the U.S. embassy and a major international hotel.

People packed the Zocalo, once the center of the Aztec empire and now the heart of modern Mexico, and filled surrounding streets for several blocks. The square holds well over 100,000 people for concerts.

Mexico City's police, controlled by the left, put the crowd at 1.1 million people but it seemed more like over 200,000.

The court must rule on the fraud claims then declare a president-elect by early September. Legal deliberations are likely to take weeks and be highly technical. Lopez Obrador asked his followers to hold another mass rally in the capital on July 30 to keep the focus on his cause.

Leftists streamed into the capital from all over Mexico to back Lopez Obrador, known as AMLO from his initials. An austere widower, he vows to take millions of Mexicans out of poverty.

Five people carrying yellow PRD flags rode horses through the Spanish colonial city center toward the rally.

A youth dressed in a black Che Guevara T-shirt carried a banner of the Virgin of Guadalupe, Mexico's most revered religious icon, reading, "The mother of Mexico is with AMLO."

Lopez Obrador, a fiery speaker, inspires fear in the middle class but devotion among many of Mexico's poor.

"People are really angry. We're not just going to go home. We're going to keep going until he is declared president," said Francisco Benavides, a farmer from the state of Morelos.

(Additional reporting by Anahi Rama and Kieran Murray)

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Military leaders foresee Iraq exit in 2016

2006-07-17T14:01:00.000-04:00

U.S. war commanders think some level of American forces will be needed in Iraq until 2016 and those forces will receive continued support from the vast majority of Iraqis.

At the tactical level, the U.S. is getting better at detecting deadly improvised explosive devices (IEDs), especially using unmanned spy planes. But the enemy is growing more sophisticated. A raid on an IED factory earlier this year netted two bomb-makers who hold master's degrees in chemistry and physics -- from U.S. colleges.

The seminar is just one example of how the Army is constantly re-examining how it conducts the war on terror in Afghanistan, Iraq and worldwide. Insurgent infiltration of the Iraqi Security Forces is also a big problem. A Green Beret caught a police lieutenant directing by telephone the placement of an IED so it would damage a coalition convoy.

One retired officer attendee made notes and e-mailed his minutes of the session to other officers. The notes say there was general agreement on one issue: the "mainstream media" largely ignores progress. A commander said an embedded reporter filed a generally positive story on the operation in Tal Afar, only to see his stateside editors gut it and apply a negative spin.

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10,000 EPA SCIENTISTS PROTEST LIBRARY CLOSURES

2006-07-17T13:41:00.000-04:00

In an extraordinary letter of protest, representatives for 10,000 U.S. Environmental Protection Agency scientists are asking Congress to stop the Bush administration from closing the agency’s network of technical research libraries. The EPA scientists, representing more than half of the total agency workforce, contend thousands of scientific studies are being put out of reach, hindering emergency preparedness, anti-pollution enforcement and long-term research, according to the letter released today by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER).

In his proposed budget for FY 2007, President Bush deleted $2 million of support for EPA’s libraries, amounting to 80% of the agency’s total budget for libraries. Without waiting for Congress to act, EPA has begun shuttering libraries, closing access to collections and reassigning staff. The letter notes that “EPA library services are greatly reduced or no longer available to the general public” in agency regional offices serving 19 states.
....
“The Bush administration apparently decided that it was politically easier to close the libraries than to burn the books, although the end result will be the same,” Ruch added, noting that the EPA Administrator brushed aside an earlier request by the scientist unions to bargain about the library shutdowns internally.

In their letter, the EPA scientists cite library closures as “one more example of the Bush administration’s effort to suppress information on environmental and public health-related topics.” At the same time, other outside observers, such as the Chair of EPA’s own Science Advisory Board, are expressing growing concerns over the viability and coherence of EPA’s research program.

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Despite Joint Statement on Mideast, Strains Emerge as U.S. Supports Israel’s Campaign

2006-07-17T13:26:00.000-04:00

STRELNA, Russia, July 16 — The Bush administration on Sunday appeared to give Israel tacit approval to cripple Hezbollah, casting the widening conflict in the Middle East in terms of a wider war on terrorism.

That was a central theme of both public and private statements from senior United States officials, even as President Bush and his aides issued a statement that included a call for restraint in Israel’s attacks on Lebanon. They were trying their best to minimize differences with European nations and their Russian hosts at the opening of the annual summit meeting of the Group of 8 industrialized nations here.

But the strains were clear as different leaders offered their interpretations of the statement drafted at the summit meeting that said, in an apparent allusion to Hezbollah and its Iranian and Syrian supporters, “These extremist elements and those that support them cannot be allowed to plunge the Middle East into chaos.”

President Jacques Chirac of France characterized the statement issued here as a call for a cease-fire — a word the Bush administration has sidestepped at every turn over the last few days. The host of the summit meeting, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, told reporters that “we do get the impression that the aims of Israel go beyond just recovering their kidnapped soldiers.’’

snip

Yet Mr. Bush won a victory here on Sunday, when a statement issued by the leaders urged Israel to show the “utmost restraint’’ but also cast the new conflict in terms of a wider war on terrorism. The statement blamed militants for the start of the five-day conflict, saying they were intent on destabilizing the entire region, and more specifically were setting back progress toward democracy in Lebanon.

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Harris takes back $100,000 from campaign to renovate home

2006-07-17T13:19:00.000-04:00

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. - Katherine Harris gave her campaign more than $3 million to run for Senate, but then took back $100,000 to finish renovating her "historic home in Washington, D.C." her campaign revealed Friday.

The campaign said that the Republican congresswoman would sell the house, if necessary, to fund her embattled Senate race to unseat Democratic incumbent Bill Nelson. The decision was immediately questioned.

"I have never heard of a candidate taking money out of a campaign coffer like it's an ATM. It absolutely boggles my mind," said former Harris campaign manager Jim Dornan. "This is a woman who has completely lost touch with reality. You don't take your campaign contributors' money, whether it's yours or not, and spend it to renovate you house. This is absolutely insane."

The campaign announced Harris repaid some of the money she already gave the campaign in a press release detailing fundraising for the three months ending June 30.

Nelson's campaign manager Chad Clanton was almost speechless when he heard about the report.

more Here

US defends rights record to United Nations panel

2006-07-17T13:13:00.000-04:00

US defends rights record to United Nations panel

Jul 17, 2006 — By Laura MacInnis

GENEVA (Reuters) - The United States defended its record on prisoner treatment, racial profiling, immigration and the death penalty on Monday in its first appearance before a top United Nations human rights panel in 11 years.

Matthew Waxman, who lead the U.S. delegation to the U.N. Human Rights Committee, submitted a 66-page document offering legal justifications for policies ranging from renditions of foreign detainees to juvenile sentencing in the United States.

Acknowledging an "intense international interest" in U.S. activities abroad since the September 11, 2001, attacks propelled Washington into wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and sparked an overhaul of many U.S. laws, Waxman said geopolitics had recently made rights protection more complicated.

"Although the threat from al Qaeda presents tough legal challenges, our guiding principle is that our actions must be consistent with our Constitution, our laws and our international obligations," the principal deputy director for policy planning of the State Department told the committee.

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Bush's puppets living in the Green Zone disliked Putin's democracy remark

2006-07-17T13:12:00.000-04:00

Iraq raps Putin for 'sarcasm' on Iraqi democracy

BAGHDAD, July 17 (Reuters) - Iraq's government criticised Russian President Vladimir Putin on Monday for making fun of its U.S.-sponsored democracy at the G8 summit.

At a news conference on Saturday in St. Petersburg with U.S. President George W. Bush, Putin responded to comments by Bush on Russia's own brand of democracy by saying in a barbed aside: "We of course don't want to have a democracy like the one in Iraq."

"Mr. Vladimir Putin ... has diminished the importance of the democratic experience in Iraq with a sarcastic remark," read a statement from the office of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki.

Maliki's office said: "The government of Iraq was astonished at this remark. It ignores the daily sacrifices and unique courage shown by Iraqis who turned out in large numbers ... to exercise their right to vote.

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The west must recognise that Israel's agenda is in conflict with its own

2006-07-17T13:07:00.000-04:00

The Olmert government, Hizbullah and Hamas are tacitly united in rejection of any moves towards a compromise peace

David Clark
Monday July 17, 2006
The Guardian

Whatever else can be said for or against Israel's escalation of military action against Lebanon, there is little prospect that it will achieve its stated objectives. If Israel couldn't defeat Hizbullah after 18 years in which its army occupied large swaths of Lebanese territory, it is not going to succeed with air strikes and blockades, or even another occupation. The same point applies even more forcefully in the case of Gaza. Every time Israel applies the iron fist in an effort to beat the Palestinians into submission, their resistance simply re-emerges in a more extreme and rejectionist form. Far from fearing Israel's wrath, Hizbullah and Hamas must be rather pleased at their success in provoking it into the sort of over-reaction from which they have always benefited.

Nor does it seem plausible that military action will enable Israel to secure the release of its captured soldiers. The civilian victims of Israel's indiscriminate retaliation have no real influence over the militias that hold them, while the militias themselves are untroubled by the spectacle of public suffering. On the contrary, they thrive on it. In the case of Lebanon, it is possible that acts of collective punishment, such as the destruction of Beirut airport and yesterday's killing of yet more civilians, might divide Hizbullah and its supporters from the rest of the country, but only at the risk of triggering another civil war and creating a vacuum that Israel's enemies in Syria and Iran will find easier to exploit.

In view of all this, it is valid to ask what Israel thinks it is doing. Indeed, this question is implicit in the statements of world leaders at the G8 and elsewhere who have called on Israel to use force proportionately, avoid civilian casualties and refrain from acts that might strengthen Hamas or destabilise Lebanon's fragile political settlement. No one quibbles with Israel's right to defend itself, but doesn't it understand how irresponsible and immoral it is to deliberately escalate the conflict in this way?

The problem is that the premise of the question is false. It assumes that Israel shares our view that a de-escalation followed by negotiation is the best route to a settlement. It assumes, therefore, that when Israeli ministers complain of having "no partner for peace", they actually want one. A much more sensible approach would be to credit them with having the intelligence to know exactly what they are doing and to work backwards from there.

If so, it might become apparent that far from wanting a partner with which to negotiate, the Israeli government is acting with the specific intention of forestalling that possibility. There is nothing particularly new in this. The extremists on both sides have always formed a kind of tacit alliance, with the supporters of "greater Israel" and "no Israel" understanding their joint interest in preventing any moves towards a compromise peace. That is the main reason why Israel encouraged the growth of Hamas as it emerged in the 1980s. Unwilling to negotiate with the secular nationalists of Fatah, even as they were moving towards support for a two-state solution, the Israeli authorities thought it would be a clever idea to promote their Islamist rivals.

In the case of the current crisis, it is no accident that it occurred at precisely the moment when the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, was gaining the upper hand in the latest round of that struggle. By using the threat of a referendum to force Hamas to accept the existence of Israel as the basis for a final settlement, Abbas had created the most promising opening for peace in six years. Faced with internal division and the loss of political initiative, Hamas militants understood that the only way to prevent it would be to trigger another cycle of violence. In turn, the Israel government, whose interests were also threatened by the Abbas initiative, recognised that it had an equally good reason to oblige. The effect of Hizbullah's intervention and Israel's over-reaction has been to put peace even further down the agenda.

The plain truth is that Israel thinks that it can get more by imposing a solution through force than by negotiation and is not interested in any kind of peace process. The Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, pays lip service to the road map, but he has already received American endorsement for his fallback position, artfully dubbed "unilateral convergence". George Bush has described it as a "bold idea". Armed with the knowledge that he will continue to enjoy American patronage if the road map fails, Olmert has set out to ensure that it does just that. Bush's diplomacy has been truly inept.

It's high time western governments grasped the fundamental truth that Israel is pursuing an agenda that conflicts directly with their own. In the context of the fight against terrorism and the need to promote international cooperation, the west's interest must be to remove the Palestinian question as a source of grievance among mainstream Muslims in a way that guarantees justice for the Palestinians and security for Israel. A settlement of this kind is perfectly feasible and has been outlined in countless documents and initiatives over the years, most recently in the Geneva accords. But the main reason it has proved illusive is that Israel is not, and never has been, prepared to make the territorial compromises required. It still believes that it is entitled to the victor's spoils by annexing large tracts of Palestinian land.

This situation will persist as long as the west remains in denial about the reasons for the ongoing conflict and until the Israeli political establishment is forced to pay a price for its obstinacy. Yet the US remains entirely complicit in its role as Israel's main strategic ally. In the midst of last Friday's onslaught, in which Israeli bombers killed dozens of Lebanese civilians, the Pentagon announced the export of $210m of aviation fuel to help Israel "keep peace and security in the region". Even Britain and other European countries indulge in a form of diplomatic misdirection by focusing one-sidedly on the roles played by Syria and Iran.

The key to resolving the situation in Lebanon lies, as it did throughout the 1970s and 1980s, in finding a solution to the Palestinian question. A viable and successful Palestinian state would rob Hizbullah and its sponsors of the conceit that they are defending helpless Muslims and make it easier for those in the region who oppose them to gain the upper hand. Mahmoud Abbas is the only leader currently working for the kind of negotiated two-state solution the Middle East and the wider world desperately need. But he is being let down by the west at the moment when he had earned the right to expect better. The Palestinian president needs a partner for peace. If Israel will not play that role, the international community must.

· David Clark is a former Labour special adviser at the Foreign Office dkclark@aol.com

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From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You 'Axis of Evil'

2006-07-17T12:44:00.000-04:00

From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You 'Axis of Evil'
by Frank Rich

Published: July 16, 2006

AS American foreign policy lies in ruins from Pyongyang to Baghdad to Beirut, its epitaph is already being written in Washington. Last week's Time cover, "The End of Cowboy Diplomacy," lays out the conventional wisdom: the Bush doctrine of pre-emptive war, upended by chaos in Iraq and the nuclear intransigence of North Korea and Iran, is now officially kaput. In its stead, a sadder but more patient White House, under the sway of Condi Rice, is embracing the fine art of multilateral diplomacy and dumping the "bring 'em on" gun-slinging that got the world into this jam.

The only flaw in this narrative — a big one — is that it understates the administration's failure by assuming that President Bush actually had a grand, if misguided, vision in the first place. Would that this were so. But in truth this presidency never had a vision for the world. It instead had an idée fixe about one country, Iraq, and in pursuit of that obsession recklessly harnessed American power to gut-driven improvisation and P.R. strategies, not doctrine. This has not changed, even now.

Only if we remember that the core values of this White House are marketing and political expediency, not principle and substance, can we fully grasp its past errors and, more important, decipher the endgame to come. The Bush era has not been defined by big government or small government but by virtual government. Its enduring shrine will be a hollow Department of Homeland Security that finds more potential terrorist targets in Indiana than in New York.

Like his father, George W. Bush always disdained the vision thing. He rode into office on the heels of a boom, preaching minimalist ambitions reminiscent of the 1920's boom Republicanism of Harding and Coolidge. Mr. Bush's most fervent missions were to cut taxes, pass a placebo patients' bill of rights and institute the education program he sold as No Child Left Behind. His agenda was largely exhausted by the time of his fateful Crawford vacation in August 2001, so he talked vaguely of immigration reform and announced a stem-cell research "compromise." But he failed to seriously lead on either issue, both of which remain subjects of toxic debate today. To appear busy once he returned to Washington after Labor Day, he cooked up a typically alliterative "program" called Communities of Character, a grab bag of "values" initiatives inspired by polling data. That was forgotten after the Qaeda attacks. But the day that changed everything didn't change the fundamental character of the Bush presidency. The so-called doctrine of pre-emption, a repackaging of the long-held Cheney-Rumsfeld post-cold-war mantra of unilateralism, was just another gaudy float in the propaganda parade ginned up to take America to war against a country that did not attack us on 9/11. As the president's chief of staff then, Andrew Card, famously said of the Iraq war just after Labor Day 2002, "From a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August." The Bush doctrine was rolled out officially two weeks later, just days after the administration's brass had fanned out en masse on the Sunday-morning talk shows to warn that Saddam's smoking gun would soon come in the form of a mushroom cloud.

The Bush doctrine was a doctrine in name only, a sales strategy contrived to dress up the single mission of regime change in Iraq with philosophical grandiosity worthy of F.D.R. There was never any serious intention of militarily pre-empting either Iran or North Korea, whose nuclear ambitions were as naked then as they are now, or of striking the countries that unlike Iraq were major enablers of Islamic terrorism. Axis of Evil was merely a clever brand name from the same sloganeering folks who gave us "compassionate conservatism" and "a uniter, not a divider" — so clever that the wife of a presidential speechwriter, David Frum, sent e-mails around Washington boasting that her husband was the "Axis of Evil" author. (Actually, only "axis" was his.)

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Putin rejects Bush's Iraq democracy model

2006-07-17T12:42:00.000-04:00

Saturday, July 15, 2006; Posted: 6:57 a.m. EDT (10:57 GMT)

ST. PETERSBURG, Russia (CNN) -- Russian President Vladimir Putin has rejected a suggestion from U.S. President George W. Bush that his country should emulate democracy in Iraq

"I talked about my desire to promote institutional change in parts of the world, like Iraq where there's a free press and free religion, and I told him that a lot of people in our country would hope that Russia would do the same," Bush said.

To that, Putin replied, "We certainly would not want to have the same kind of democracy that they have in Iraq, quite honestly."

See, Georgie, that's what what's called diplomacy. Instead of saying that you are an Asshat for suggesting that ANY country should emulate the clusterfuck you created in Iraq, he politely declined your suggestion

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Military leaders foresee Iraq exit in 2016

2006-07-17T12:41:00.000-04:00

Russia may send troops to Middle East

2006-07-17T12:40:00.000-04:00

Russia may send troops to Middle East
By ASSOCIATED PRESS

Putin says Russia will consider contributing troops to an international force for the Mideast if UN approves deployment.

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Israeli strikes on Lebanon kill 41 people (Reuters)

2006-07-17T12:36:00.000-04:00

By Lin Noueihed

BEIRUT (Reuters) - Israeli strikes killed 41 people across Lebanon on Monday, including 10 civilians hit on a southern bridge, on the sixth day of a bombardment that has wreaked the heaviest destruction in Lebanon for over 20 years.

Rescuers also pulled nine bodies from the wreckage of a building in the southern city of Tire that was bombed on Sunday, raising the death toll since Israel's offensive began above 200.

The fighting was triggered when Hizbollah, the guerrilla group which is backed by Syria and Iran and is part of Lebanon's government, seized two Israeli soldiers and killed eight in a cross-border raid on northern Israel on Wednesday.

U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said Security Council members would start work on a detailed agreement on deploying a multinational security force to south Lebanon.

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Bush caught on open microphone

2006-07-17T12:29:00.000-04:00

Agence France-Presse
Last updated 05:28pm (Mla time) 07/17/2006
SAINT PETERSBURG -- US President George W. Bush, caught on an open microphone at a summit here, said Monday that a key to defusing the Middle East crisis was for "Hezbollah to stop doing this shit."

"What they need to do is get Syria to get Hezbollah to stop doing this shit, and it's over," Bush told British Prime Minister Tony Blair at a leaders' lunch at the Group of Eight industrial countries gathering here.

The president was on camera but apparently unaware that his words were being captured by a microphone. It was unclear who 'they' were.

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