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Consider:

"It is better to be drunk with loss and to beat the ground, than to let the deeper things gradually escape."

- I. Compton-Burnett, letter to Francis King (1969)

"Cynical realism – it is the intelligent man’s best excuse for doing nothing in an intolerable situation."

- Aldous Huxley, "Time Must Have a Stop"







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Friday, 21 July 2006
War Thoughts
Topic: Reality-Based Woes
War Thoughts
Friday, July 21, the week ended with the war between Hezbollah and Israel in its tenth day, with Israeli troops and tanks lining up to cross into southern Lebanon for the ground phase - cleaning out the tunnels and bunkers and getting at the stores of the fabulously inaccurate but deadly rockets that Hezbollah has been popping into northern Israel. The word is they have thirteen thousand of them and have only used about a thousand. Time to get the rest. On the other front - Israel fighting Hamas, the folks the Palestinians elected to represent them, to the south in Gaza - the day brought the news of Israeli forces shooting and killing a nurse tending one of the wounded in the streets. War is like that. Things happen. And this will not be over quickly. The day brought the news that our secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, will finally go over there to chat with some of the folks involved, dropping in briefly on her way to an Asian summit. It's on the way, if you fly east.

But all day long the news was playing the clip of her saying that, unlike the UN and the Europeans and Russians and most everyone else, the United States will certainly not call for a ceasefire.

Our UN ambassador, John Bolton, had previously said such a thing was simple-minded and stupid - you cannot deal with a non-state terrorist organization as if it were a nation or anything. Who there has the authority to enter into a ceasefire agreement? Yeah, yeah, Hezbollah is part of the government of Lebanon, with seats in their parliament and a few cabinet ministries, but they aren't the official government, although, if you think about it, they might as well be. The nominal government is somewhere between feckless and useless, with a small army of seventy thousand, with maybe forty thousand deployable, with no modern equipment and no battlefield experience. Like they'll go stomp on Hezbollah, their fellow Shiites, for being so stupid and making so much trouble? Or they'll go up against Israel with its F-16's we sold them and the drones overhead and all the tanks and artillery? You actually might want to work with Hezbollah, as the only thing like a government there.

Rice's take on the matter was slightly different. Her position, and thus the position of the United States, is that there's no point in getting some sort of ceasefire agreement, as Hezbollah would just break it, and you need to break and humiliate Hezbollah, and disarm them, first. Then something can be worked out. Those weren't her exact words. But the idea is there should be no ceasefire that puts things back to where they were two weeks ago, or for the last ten years. The cease fire must be based on Hezbollah just going away. Hezbollah is not impressed. But then, we don't talk to them.

It's unclear who she will talk to when she drops in. There are the Israelis, the Saudis, and the Egyptians. When the Palestinians elected Hamas, in an election we insisted upon (that spreading democracy thing), we cut all communication with them and cut off all aid too. We don't deal with terrorists. That only makes them think they're legitimate. Similarly we don't speak with Hezbollah. We isolate terrorist organizations, and shun them, lest they think they're important and get all uppity. We long ago cut all diplomatic relations, and stopped all back-channel talks, with Syria and Iran, as they sponsor terrorism. So we punish them all by just ignoring them. That'll show them. Of course this means Rice could not help negotiate any ceasefire anyway. There are only the Israelis. That makes for a rather pointless conversation about terms and conditions. The Saudis and the Egyptians aren't even in the fight. The other players and their sponsors are probably saying, "What are we, chopped liver?" Well, probably not - too Jewish.

One commentator, Digby at Hullabaloo (becoming one of the most insightful writers on this madness), say this business always had "a certain kabuki element," explained this way -
In the past when these situations would flare up, Israel would take an aggressive action to demonstrate that it wasn't a pushover and the US would step in like a Dutch uncle and reluctantly pull the pissed off Israelis back. In a dangerous part of the world, these face-saving kabuki's can prevent things from hurtling out of control while allowing each side to stage a little bloodletting. It's an ugly, ugly business, but ultimately it has managed to help keep this volatile region from hurtling out of control. The "honest broker" thing may have always been phony, but sometimes a phony "honest broker" is all you need.
But we don't do that any more. We're, as he notes, "letting Israel off the leash to do some real damage" before we "step in."

But why? Things could easily spin out of control, or more out of control. A regional war would be messy, and the disruption in the oil markets devastating. And we aren't exactly winning hearts and minds, and building consensus with other nations, by saying a ceasefire would be wrong right now. What's the deal?

The Washington Post ran an article where they seem to think they found out what the real deal is. The president thinks he's really smarter than everyone else on all this, and more farsighted.

The core of the Post investigation (emphases added) -
When hostilities have broken out in the past, the usual U.S. response has been an immediate and public bout of diplomacy aimed at a cease-fire, in the hopes of ensuring that the crisis would not escalate. This week, however, even in the face of growing international demands, the White House has studiously avoided any hint of impatience with Israel. While making it plain it wants civilian casualties limited, the administration is also content to see the Israelis inflict the maximum damage possible on Hezbollah.

As the president's position is described by White House officials, Bush associates and outside Middle East experts, Bush believes that the status quo - the presence in a sovereign country of a militant group with missiles capable of hitting a U.S. ally - is unacceptable.

The U.S. position also reflects Bush's deepening belief that Israel is central to the broader campaign against terrorists and represents a shift away from a more traditional view that the United States plays an "honest broker's" role in the Middle East.

In the administration's view, the new conflict is not just a crisis to be managed. It is also an opportunity to seriously degrade a big threat in the region, just as Bush believes he is doing in Iraq. Israel's crippling of Hezbollah, officials also hope, would complete the work of building a functioning democracy in Lebanon and send a strong message to the Syrian and Iranian backers of Hezbollah.

"The president believes that unless you address the root causes of the violence that has afflicted the Middle East, you cannot forge a lasting peace," said White House counselor Dan Bartlett. "He mourns the loss of every life. Yet out of this tragic development, he believes a moment of clarity has arrived."

One former senior administration official said Bush is only emboldened by the pressure from U.N. officials and European leaders to lead a call for a cease-fire. U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan demanded yesterday that the fighting in Lebanon stop.

"He thinks he is playing in a longer-term game than the tacticians," said the former official, who spoke anonymously so he could discuss his views candidly. "The tacticians would say: 'Get an immediate cease-fire. Deal first with the humanitarian factors.' The president would say: 'You have an opportunity to really grind down Hezbollah. Let's take it, even if there are other serious consequences that will have to be managed.'"

Digby's comment - "They are now officially crazy."

No, the man simply believes things are going just fine in Iraq, where we have shown the terrorists and the religious nuts who's boss - we defanged them all. And Israel is doing the same thing in south Lebanon and Gaza. So you don't tamper with success. We're on a roll.

Yep, that's madness - all the facts are just wrong. This may be denial, a form of self-protection for the ego, or all the ambitious staffers making sure he hears what they know he wants to hear, or delusion. "Everyone else is wrong, and I'll show them." Maybe it's a personality thing - the insecure bully showing off. It doesn't really matter one way or the other. He's the decider, and the decisions have been made, including this one - "The official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said U.S. ideas for ending the Middle East conflict are still evolving but Washington does intend to contribute humanitarian aid to Lebanese people displaced by fighting between Israel and the militant Islamic group Hezbollah."

We're on a roll. Why bother?

Some foreign policy, but maybe it's not Bush. Digby thinks it's all Cheney - "I won't bother with Junior - he's a foreign policy ventriloquist dummy."

And Dick is mad as a hatter. The pointer is to Frances Fitzgerald in the New York Review of Books here -

In "A World Transformed," the memoir that he and Bush senior published in 1998, [Brent] Scowcroft makes it clear that while all Bush senior's top advisers had different perspectives, the fundamental division lay between Defense Secretary Richard Cheney and everyone else. By his account, and by those of others in the administration, Cheney never trusted Gorbachev. In 1989 Cheney maintained that Gorbachev's reforms were largely cosmetic and that, rather than engage with the Soviet leader, the US should stand firm and keep up cold war pressures.

In September 1991 Cheney argued that the administration should take measures to speed the breakup of the Soviet Union - even at the risk of encouraging violence and incurring long-term Russian hostility. He opposed the idea, which originated with the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Colin Powell, that the US should withdraw its tactical nuclear weapons from Europe and South Korea. As a part of the preparations for the Gulf War he asked Powell for a study on how small nuclear weapons might be used against Iraqi troops in the desert.
So we get this conclusion from Digby -
This is the person who is playing a longer game than the tacticians, not Little Bushie. And he is playing a long game. His shark-like, relentless, predatory concentration on achieving long held goals no matter what the current circumstances is quite awesome to behold. The problem is that he's nuts.
Maybe so, but he's not the only enabler here.

There's the new Director of National Intelligence, John Negroponte - the man who administered our death squads in Nicaragua and such, later our ambassador to the UN, and then to the new Iraq. It seems he likes to keep the boss happy, and we see here that he has told the CIA not to do any National Intelligence Estimates any longer. There's too much risk things will be leaked, and the last one, in 2004, was "too negative." When that got leaked the president had to say publicly it was just opinion, and he wasn't paying much attention to it. It's supposed to be the best assessment at the world situation and what could be a bother soon.

Yeah and a new one might be a bit uncomfortable, as things get real nasty in Iraq -
"What do you call the situation in Iraq right now?" asked one person familiar with the situation. "The analysts know that it's a civil war, but there's a feeling at the top that [using that term] will complicate matters." Negroponte, said another source regarding the potential impact of a pessimistic assessment, "doesn't want the president to have to deal with that."
What is there to say? Is it best he doesn't know? Tell him things are going fine, and the media is filled with people what hate him (except for Fox News) and are lying, and who hate America. Let him work with that and things will be fine.

Whether the leader of the free world should be protected from bad news, so he can retain his optimism and strong convictions, is an interesting question. When a leader is misinformed does he make better decisions? That is both an interesting management theory and model for government.

And the upcoming meeting where Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki of Iraq meeting with the president in the Whit House could be more than awkward, as everyone seems to be pointing to what Reuters reports here -
Iraqi leaders have all but given up on holding the country together and, just two months after forming a national unity government, talk in private of "black days" of civil war ahead.

Signaling a dramatic abandonment of the U.S.-backed project for Iraq, there is even talk among them of pre-empting the worst bloodshed by agreeing to an east-west division of Baghdad into Shi'ite and Sunni Muslim zones, senior officials told Reuters.

Tens of thousands have already fled homes on either side.

"Iraq as a political project is finished," one senior government official said - anonymously because the coalition under Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki remains committed in public to the U.S.-sponsored constitution that preserves Iraq's unity.

One highly placed source even spoke of busying himself on government projects, despite a sense of their futility, only as a way to fight his growing depression over his nation's future.

"The parties have moved to Plan B," the senior official said, saying Sunni, ethnic Kurdish and majority Shi'ite blocs were looking at ways to divide power and resources and to solve the conundrum of Baghdad's mixed population of seven million.

"There is serious talk of Baghdad being divided into east and west," he said. "We are extremely worried."

On the eve of the first meeting of a National Reconciliation Commission and before Maliki meets President George W. Bush in Washington next week, other senior politicians also said they were close to giving up on hopes of preserving the 80-year-old, multi-ethnic, religiously mixed state in its present form.

"The situation is terrifying and black," said Rida Jawad al -Takki, a senior member of parliament from Maliki's dominant Shi'ite Alliance bloc, and one of the few officials from all the main factions willing to speak publicly on the issue.

"We have received information of a plan to divide Baghdad. The government is incapable of solving the situation," he said.

As sectarian violence has mounted to claim perhaps 100 lives a day and tens of thousands flee their homes, a senior official from the once dominant Sunni minority concurred: "Everyone knows the situation is very bad," he said. "I'm not optimistic."
Nuri al-Maliki will tell him things are fine. You don't upset the boss. If Iraq as a political project is finished, the he'll deal with that later, "if there are other serious consequences that will have to be managed."

And who needs another comprehensive National Intelligence Estimate from the CIA? Other presidents, even his father, would have demanded one - just to know what we're dealing with. This one knows in his gut knows how things are, just as he looked into Vladimir Putin's eyes and saw his good soul, and dismisses all the negative stuff that messes up your head. Cool. And scary.

But people seem to love this approach. After a long discussion of Vice President Cheney telling a campaign crowd, Friday, July 21, that everything we do shows the administration is serious about keeping us safe, and making the right assessments of threats, and the right decisions - and saying the fall elections should be about how right and strong the Republicans are, and the only issue should be "national security" - this Digby fellow says this -
... remember, the Republicans are counting on thirty years of rightwing propaganda to get them over the line again. They expect that many voters will simply fall back into their comfortable understanding of the two parties: the Republicans are tough men who can handle national security and the Democrats are sensitive women who will help you when you need help (if you're a pathetic loser who actually needs help that is.) The Fighters and the Lovers. This is the paradigm under which we've lived for many years and people find it very disconcerting to be asked to relinquish such reflexive internalized beliefs - no matter what they see before them.

I do not know that they can pull it off one more time. We may have finally reached a tipping point. But I'm not counting any chickens.
No one is. There's always something compelling about the strong-willed fellow who says what you see is not actually what you see at all, and the world is not at all what is seems, but much better - so get rid of those negative thoughts and ignore the so-called reality. It'll only bring you down. There's another reality.

That sort of things sells a whole lot of self-help books, and gizmos on the infomercials, and diet-plans. Americans eat it up. We're an optimistic people. And "life is not what is seems" packs the Contemporary Christian churches and drives the forces saying science - Darwin and all that global warming stuff - is just facts, not reality. We're not skinny, bitter, sissy Frenchmen sitting in some left bank café or bistro, smoking odd cigarettes and sipping bad coffee, thinking about reality and what is coherent and valid. This is the new world. That coherent and valid stuff is for losers.

And that may work in November, one more time. War will be perpetual. How else do you make things better?

Posted by Alan at 23:01 PDT | Post Comment | Permalink
Updated: Friday, 21 July 2006 23:04 PDT home

Thursday, 20 July 2006
Learning from Experience
Topic: Reality-Based Woes
Learning from Experience
Three years and five months ago, February 2003, the president delivered a speech to the American Enterprise Institute (transcript here), explaining how the war in Iraq was going to "begin a new stage for Middle Eastern peace" by "bringing hope and progress into the lives of millions." So how's that going? (He also said that Saddam Hussein was "building and hiding weapons that could enable him to dominate the Middle East and intimidate the civilized world," but let that pass - he needed people to feel this was important, and that would do the trick.)

But what he said about how shaking things up dramatically with a war to overthrow a nasty government would result in - when what was shaken and turned inside out and utterly rearranged in the Middle East fell back to earth - a new and better and amazingly good thing, and a far better world, seems to have been a gamble that didn't exactly pan out. The whole idea seemed to be that stability - achieved over the long years by lots of talk and compromise and ignoring some awful stuff for some practical convenience and grudging peace (traditional diplomacy) - was just crap. You needed to do something startling and spectacular to make real progress in this sorry world, to really change things.

That's an interesting theory of what this country should really be doing - change the world and eliminate evil everywhere and spread our way of doing things ("best practices" and all that) around the globe and so on. Yeah, no one asked us to do any of that, but you have to assume, for some reason that's rather obscure, that's what we're supposed to be doing, and anyway, all of that will keep us safe and is in our national interest. That was the idea. So the goal seemed to be to save the world, to transform it, because after we broke all the old patterns and ways of thinking, the new patterns and ways of thinking would be good for us, and good for everyone.

Well, Iraq was shattered and now it's so bad there, and not falling into a new pattern, that bright shiny new secular democracy, you get this - Gil Gutknecht, a Republican congressman from Minnesota, who last month was admonishing the House to "give victory a chance" in Iraq and not "go wobbly," took a field trip to Baghdad. He says it was "worse than I expected" and it's time to bring the troops home. "We learned it's not safe to go anywhere outside of the Green Zone any part of the day." No kidding. Well, he hadn't trusted the press, just the administration. He says he seems to have been receiving faulty "spin" - claims that the violence in Iraq was being caused by just a few hundred insurgents. "All of the information we receive sometimes from the Pentagon and the State Department isn't always true." Oh. Really? It's almost comic. The idea that congress checks up on the executive branch to see how they're doing in faithfully executing the laws passed and wisely using the funds allocated hadn't occurred to him. He's learning on the job. We'll see how saying he was keeping himself uninformed, was a gullible follower, and actually not really doing his job, plays out in his reelection bid. Too bad about all the dead people - ours, theirs, and the civilians in the middle.

And since the congressmen had his epiphany, it just gets more dismal, as on Thursday, July 20, there was more.

There was this -
Bombings and shootings soared by 40 percent in the Baghdad area in the past week, the U.S. military said Thursday. An American general said extremists were preparing "an all-out assault" on the capital in a decisive battle for the future of Iraq

... U.S. military spokesman Maj. Gen. William Caldwell said there had been an average of 34 attacks a day involving U.S. and Iraqi forces in and around the capital since Friday - up sharply from the daily average of 24 registered between June 14 and July 13.

"We have not witnessed the reduction in violence one would have hoped for in a perfect world," Caldwell told reporters. "The only way we're going to be successful in Baghdad is to get the weapons off the streets."

Caldwell said insurgents were streaming into the capital for "an all-out assault against the Baghdad area."
Say, how often does one get what one would have hoped for in a perfect world? Just a thought... Think what Samuel Johnson said about the triumph of hope over experience - he mocked it.

And there was this - "Tens of thousands more Iraqis have fled their homes as sectarian violence looks ever more like civil war two months after a U.S.-backed national unity government was formed, official data showed on Thursday." The data showed a hundred Iraqis die each day, and six thousand in the last two months. Anyone would get out fast. The relatives get the kids someplace safe when mom, a translator for the Americans, gets grabbed off the streets, raped, has holes drilled in her head, then is shot, and her body is dumped in the street (see this on July 18). No point in hanging around.

And Israel, Hezbollah and Hamas are at war and have been for a week - and now Israel hints at full-scale Lebanon attack - and, yes, they rolled in once before and stayed eighteen years. That didn't work out well, so this may be a bit more temporary. But Beirut is under siege. And we're blocking all attempts at any cease fire.

And the same time our troops are under attack from Taliban forces in southern Afghanistan (here) - but didn't we wipe them out? And the president keeps warning that Syria is trying to reassert control over Lebanon and Iran is hoping that the fighting between Hezbollah and Israel will mean everyone forgets about its nuclear plans. And now Turkey is sending signals that it's ready to send troops into Iraq to fight Turkish Kurdish guerrillas there (see this).

Bill Montgomery links to even more such stories and see it all like this -
Let's see. We've got: Israeli Jews fighting Lebanese Shi'a and Palestinian Sunnis; Palestinian Fatah militants who've stopped fighting Hamas militants, but only because they're both fighting the Israelis; Saudi Sunni fundamentalists issuing fatwas against Hezbollah Shi'a fundamentalists; Egyptian Sunni fundamentalists backing those same Hezbollah Shi'a fundamentalists; Iraqi Sunnis killing Iraqi Shi'a and vice versa; Iraqi Shi'a (the Mahdi Army) jousting with Iraqi Shi'a (the Badr Brigade); Iraqi Kurds trying to push Sunni Arabs and both Sunni and Shi'a Turkomen out of Kirkuk; Turks threatening to invade Kurdistan; Iranians allegedly shelling Kurdistan, Syrian Kurds rebelling against Syrian Allawites who are despised by Syria's Sunni majority but allied with the Lebanese Shi'a who are hated and feared by the House of Saud and its Sunni fundamentalist minions. Oh, and American and Israeli neocons threatening to bomb both Syria and Iran.
That's about it. So begins begin a new stage for Middle Eastern peace. Maybe the "shake everything up and see what happens" approach was a bad idea. But it all could have worked out. It just didn't. Bummer.

Ah well, live and learn.

And the curious thing is that the White House has a "Director of Lessons Learned." Really, they do. Mid-month they released a list of White House employees and their salaries, and pay increases - required by law as congress is supposed to know how the money appropriated is being spent. That led to this speech by congressman Rahm Emanuel on the House floor -
Mr. Speaker, yesterday the President said we continue to be wise about how we spend the people's money.

Then why are we paying over $100,000 for a "White House Director of Lessons Learned?"

Maybe I can save the taxpayers $100,000 by running through a few of the lessons this White House should have learned by now.

Lesson 1: When the Army Chief of Staff and the Secretary of State say you are going to war without enough troops, you're going to war without enough troops.

Lesson 2: When 8.8 billion dollars of reconstruction funding disappears from Iraq, and 2 billion dollars disappears from Katrina relief, it's time to demand a little accountability.

Lesson 3: When you've "turned the corner" in Iraq more times than Danica Patrick at the Indy 500, it means you are going in circles.

Lesson 4: When the national weather service tells you a category 5 hurricane is heading for New Orleans, a category 5 hurricane is heading to New Orleans.

I would also ask the President why we're paying for two "Ethics Advisors" and a "Director of Fact Checking."

They must be the only people in Washington who get more vacation time than the President.

Maybe the White House could consolidate these positions into a Director of Irony.
No, that wouldn't work. The president doesn't understand irony. It puzzles him, or makes him angry.

Meanwhile, back at the American Enterprise Institute, it seems the neoconservative who have shaped everything we've done don't do irony either, as the Washington Post here, quoting Danielle Pletka, their "Vice President For Foreign And Defense Policy Studies" - she doesn't know anyone who is "not beside themselves with fury at the administration" given the way things are going. They have issues - "Conservatives complain that the United States is hunkered down in Iraq without enough troops or a strategy to crush the insurgency. They see autocrats in Egypt and Russia cracking down on dissenters with scant comment from Washington, North Korea firing missiles without consequence, and Iran playing for time to develop nuclear weapons while the Bush administration engages in fruitless diplomacy with European allies. They believe that a perception that the administration is weak and without options is emboldening Syria and Iran and the Hezbollah radicals they help sponsor in Lebanon."

We need to be strong and kick ass - if all who oppose us are defeated and humiliated and seething with resentment but unable to do anything, and we keep reminding them of that, then we'll be safe. No, that can't be right. But that is the thinking. They have no Director of Lessons Learned, or so it seems.

Tim Grieve here -
Why are Iran and North Korea able to do what they want with little fear of serious repercussions? Why might Syria and Iran and Hezbollah think the administration is weak and without options for stopping them? It gets back to the beginning of all of that, the part about those U.S. troops "hunkered down" in Iraq. They're there, of course, because Bush sent them there - and because people at places like the American Enterprise Institute applauded so enthusiastically when he told them what they'd been telling him: Invade Iraq, and we'll transform the Middle East. Invade Iraq, and we'll make the world a safer place.

Are they chastened by the experience? Wiser for the knowledge that the deaths of 2,544 Americans and more than 50,000 Iraqis have bought? It doesn't look that way. This morning on Fox News, neocon pundit Bill Kristol said that the United States has to be ready to use military force against Iran. "Think what this crisis would be like given what we now know about the Islamic Republic of Iran, its regime, its recklessness, its close, close ties to terrorist groups," Kristol said. "Think what the world would be like with an Iran with nuclear weapons."

It sounded like satire, only Kristol was dead serious - even as he delivered the greeted-as-liberators punch line: The Iranian people "dislike their regime," he said, and they might just welcome "the right use of targeted military force."
He wasn't laughed off the set. It was Fox News. He's a brilliant man, and a fine writer. He's a slow learner. Those of us who have done project management and remember all that stuff about "lessons learned" and "best practices" may wonder if the Project for the New American Century could use a real project manager, with the PMI certificate and all. The idea is to learn from experience.

Maybe the refusal to learn from experience isn't a lack project management skills, but just a psychological limitation, as in this -
The current squawking also strikes me as a useful reminder of how very, very important war is in the neoconservative vision. It is as central to that vision as peace is to the classical liberal vision ... Who we're fighting is secondary. That we're fighting is the main thing. To be a neoconservative is to thrill to the sound of gunfire.
Well, they do love war, and shaking everything up, scorning stability and working things out. It must be the thrill of gunfire - makes you think big things are happening. And they are. They're just not good things.

So you set aside what happened, and shrug at the idea of learning from experience. That only takes the thrill away, and messes up the theory of how things should be.

Of course that's kind of the opposite of how science works, but that too is overrated, as the president made clear when, as promised, he vetoed legislation that would have expanded federal funding for embryonic stem cell research. It was very the first veto of his presidency, but there was no ceremony, and press photographers were barred from the event (noted here). Seventy-two percent of the population favors this research, and the Democrats would love to have photos of the president vetoing thing for their campaign ads this fall. But the White House Press Secretary, Tony Snow, late of Fox News, said that wasn't it at all. Photographers weren't allowed in because the president "doesn't feel it's appropriate," Snow said. "He's signing a veto."

So this puts him at odds with almost all scientists and most Americans, including some in his own Republican Party, but "It crosses a moral boundary that our decent society needs to respect so I vetoed it." And there aren't enough votes to override the veto.

Anger from the left, Oliver Willis here -
The pathetic excuse for a president uses his constitutional powers to do the bidding of the extremist "religious" right and issues a veto of the stem cell bill, consigning many Americans to pain and death. But hey, the conservative mullahs wanted it done, so whaddya gonna do?

There are two uses for these cells:

1. Throw them away down the drain

2. Use them to save possibly hundreds of thousands of human lives

The president and the con movement has chosen the latter, simply to boost their own inflated egos.
No, not at all, as Andrew Sullivan, notes here -
I feel obliged to come to the president's defense on his embryonic stem cell research veto. I find the absolutism of those who view a blastocyst as a human person to be morally unpersuasive, but I cannot see how it can be seen as anything other than human life. I know also that many of these superfluous blastocysts and embryos will be discarded anyway and so not using them for research does not protect them from extinction. Nevertheless, it is hard not to be troubled by the line this crosses. Human life is created and then experimented on to save other human lives. I think the argument for the benefits of such research is compelling; there's little doubt that this avenue could be extremely fruitful. I live with one of the diseases, HIV, it might help cure or treat. For those reasons, I don't believe such research should be banned - or even that individual states shouldn't, if their citizens support it, directly finance such research from the public purse. I'm a federalist. But when a very significant number of Americans feel deeply that this really is morally unconscionable, and when the research is taking place anyway under other auspices, I see no reason why the feds should actively finance this research as well. I don't think that Bush's compromise is so unreasonable, in other words. This isn't a ban on such research; it's a decision not to throw the weight of federal financing behind it. I respect the case of those who favor it; but, when push comes to shove, I'm with Bush on this. It took political courage to take this stand. And the morality it reflects - a refusal to treat human life as a means rather than as an end - deserves respect even from its opponents.
Of course you could argue, and may have, that the current wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and those to come in Syria and Iran, are treating human life as a means rather than as an end, a geopolitical and political end, writ large.

And even then, Sullivan may be wrong, as one of his readers from San Francisco points out here -
What you don't understand is that when a researcher conducts research, he is often involved with many projects. Therefore it is likely that one who would engage in embryonic stem cell research, funded by a state or private organization, will also be participating in research funded by federal agencies such as the NIH. The problem with this ban means that none of the researchers implements funded with federal money can ever be involved/associated with research funded by other means. This includes the lab space, every beaker, piece of paper, pencil, etc.! This is not practical in the slightest. That means that a researcher, say here at UCSF, who wants to tap into the money allocated by the state of California for stem cell research, would have to have a completely different facility whereby NOTHING funded with federal dollars can enter, and that likely includes the researcher himself. In academic medicine this is impossible.
Too bad. It's done. The living will die so the blastocysts might live, or remain frozen, or be thrown out in the medical waste. The theory wins, or the principle. It's just that the principle here looks more like a political calculation. The man isn't big on science (see global warming), and he has always been more than willing, from his days as governor of Texas to these wars now, to makes sure others die. He just doesn't seem like a "life is sacred" kind of guy. Maybe he's just sentimental.

Not to say he doesn't learn. After five years of icy separation, he finally addressed the NAACP [the writer is a member so this may be biased]. This is a first for him. And he was showing he may have learned something after all, as in this -
"I understand that racism still lingers in America," Bush told the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. "It's a lot easier to change a law than to change a human heart. And I understand that many African-Americans distrust my political party."

That line generated boisterous applause and cheers from the thousands in the audience, which generally gave the president a polite, reserved reception.
No kidding. The Republican Southern Strategy since Nixon has been to get the white vote in the south LBJ threw away by backing all that civil rights stuff in the sixties. The party made its bones on the race issue.

But he was slick, as John Dickerson explains here -
Condi Rice hasn't left for the Middle East yet, perhaps because the president wanted to send her into combat here at home. Today the secretary of state joined George Bush for his first presidential visit to the NAACP. Rice received no special announcement when she arrived, and she didn't have to say a word, but when she preceded Bush into the vast ballroom, she got a standing ovation. "I knew he was bringing her," said one woman as she applauded. "That's his confidence blanket."

Bush was braced for a tough reception from the audience of a thousand or so at the Washington Convention Center. In 2004, the president described his relationship with the nearly 100-year-old civil rights organization as "non-existent." Openly hostile would have been a more accurate characterization. During the 2000 presidential race, the organization ran a television ad against Bush featuring the daughter of James Byrd, a black man dragged to death by three white men in a pickup, blaming Bush for refusing her pleas for a hate-crime law when he was governor. Julian Bond, the NAACP chairman who sat behind Bush on the stage, once accused him of appeasing the "wretched appetites of the extreme right wing" and picking "Cabinet officials whose devotion to the Confederacy is nearly canine in its uncritical affection." Before he stepped to the podium, Bush took the kind of consuming deep breath David Blaine does before an underwater stunt.

White men generally behave in one of two ways when they are anxious to connect with African Americans: They're excessively solicitous or self-consciously chummy. The first produces an unending smile. The second produces expressions like: How is it hanging, my African brother? When Bush shook Bond's hand with the sweeping theatricality of friends meeting to play a pickup game of basketball, I thought we were in for an uncomfortable morning, but Bush put away the awkwardness. Instead he was relaxed, and immediately addressed the tension in the room. Speaking about NAACP President Bruce S. Gordon's introduction, Bush said: "I thought he was going to say, 'It's about time you showed up.' "

Bush kept at it, describing the country's history for the audience in a way that would drive conservative talk-radio hosts to their prescription medications if a Democrat did it. Slavery placed a "stain on America's founding, a stain that we have not yet wiped clean," said Bush, before going on to compare African slaves to Thomas Jefferson and George Washington. "Too often [people] ignore another group of founders - men and women and children who did not come to America of their free will, but in chains. These founders literally helped build our country."
Yipes! What's going on here?

What's going on is the Republicans need votes. It looks bad this year. He's learning. And later in the day the Senate confirmed what the House had done the week before, and voted to renew the 1965 Voting Rights Act, unchanged, the same legislation that drove half the south into the Republican Party back then. Various southern senators had put up a fuss, saying things were better now and they were still being punished, and the "damned dirty Mexicans everywhere" senators had wanted mandatory English-only ballots put in, but votes are votes. The right will forgive the president's NAACP comments, and congress renews the voting rights act. Votes are votes. You learn.

Sometimes, not always, experience is a good teacher.

Posted by Alan at 23:32 PDT | Post Comment | Permalink
Updated: Friday, 21 July 2006 06:39 PDT home

Wednesday, 19 July 2006
Our Man in Paris: The Heat Wave
Topic: World View
The Heat Wave
Cole Porter may love Paris in the summer, when it sizzles, but it can be unbearable. Our Man in Paris, Ric Erickson, editor of MetropoleParis, sends us the status midweek, with photos.
Paris - Wednesday, July 19 -

I don't know how things are in Hollywood today, but here the thermometers are popping their gaskets. The breeze - there is one - feels like it is full of fine sand from the Sahara. So appropriate for the beginning of "Paris-Plages" tomorrow.

Captured, Matt z'Art standing under the famous pharmacy thermometer, convinced that it gets its temperatures from Yahoo France because that is what he has on his Internet radio. He can look out the window and see if the sign is right. While standing there the temp hopped up another half degree, to blood temperature. Cool, eh?

alt="Paris

 

 


























The previous afternoon, 15h00 [3:00 pm], in the 14th arrondissement -

Paris heat wave - pharmacy thermometer

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

My Fahrenheit to Celsius converter says 37 Celsius in the first photo is 98.6 Fahrenheit. And Ric has much more to say about all this here.

Out here? At three in the afternoon on the 19th it was 104 at the corner of Laurel Canyon Boulevard and Ventura Boulevard, over the hill in Studio City. That's what the thermometer on the bank said anyway. That would be 40 Celsius.

Wednesday, July 19, USA Today says Europeans Struggle to Keep Cool in Heat Wave.

A few paragraphs on France -

In France, several days of dry heat and high temperatures - which reached 97 degrees in Paris on Wednesday and 102 degrees in Bordeaux a day earlier - recalled a heat wave in 2003, when 15,000 people died from dehydration and heat-related disorders. Many were elderly and were in some cases left alone while families vacationed. Since then, France's government has adopted measures to avoid a repeat of the disaster. On Wednesday, French Health Minister Xavier Bertrand and Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin visited a retirement home to check on the prevention plan.

In Paris, heat-busters included four giant humidifiers placed around the Eiffel Tower, one at each foot, that sprayed passersby with water vapor as they tried to escape the sun's punishing rays.
And some news nuggets from London -
At the historic Royal Courts of Justice, judges were allowed to remove their traditional wigs for court proceedings. One of Britain's largest trade union federations, the Trades Union Congress, issued a statement urging people to wear shorts to work.

And in a rare move, the two-hour shifts of the royal guards who stand outside Buckingham Palace were reduced to one hour at the beginning of the week in preparation for the heat, said the London headquarters spokesman, Col. David Sievwright.

At the Colchester Zoo, zookeepers gave lions ice blocks flavored with blood, and monkeys got blocks containing fruit.

But the heat failed to dash one of Queen Elizabeth II's annual garden parties. Nearly 8,000 people lined up to enter Buckingham Palace.

Did they serve ice blocks flavored with blood?

A screen capture at 6:30 in the evening, Wednesday, July 19, 2006 in Hollywood, 9:30 in New York, and 3:30 in the morning in Paris -

Weather forecast - LA, NYC, Paris

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Global warming, or just summer?

Paris photos and text, copyright © 2006 - Ric Erickson, MetropoleParis


Posted by Alan at 19:04 PDT | Post Comment | Permalink
Updated: Wednesday, 19 July 2006 20:16 PDT home

Tuesday, 18 July 2006
Research: Is the Sky Falling?
Topic: For policy wonks...
Research: Is the Sky Falling?
On Tuesday, July 18, the seventh day of the current war Israel is fighting on two fronts, it seemed best to decide if this was really the start of World War III, or IV, depending on which neoconservative enabler you listened to (see Steven Colbert on the matter here or here). World Wars are a big deal - millions die, economies collapse, refugees pour across borders, and the investments on which one's retirement depends can evaporate without anyone like Ken Lay doing a thing. It would be nice to know what's up, and who to believe.

So some research was in order. And here are the results.

There was more of that 1914 stuff, like this from Fred Kaplan -
Is Israel really planning to invade Lebanon - not just a minor raid on a discrete target but a full-blown invasion and an occupation to follow? Are the Hezbollah militants really trying to blow up the chemical plant in Haifa? Are Syria and Iran really going to let this happen? Could Israel restrain itself from retaliating against not just the attackers but their sponsors?

All over the world, people are asking themselves: Could this really be happening? It seems like the inveterate foes of Israel's existence are gearing up for a shot at dream-fulfillment. And it seems like Israel is gearing up to take out the dreamers first.

This sensation of palpable prelude - is this how people felt in the summer of 1914, as the major powers played out the logic of mobilization and escalation? Will future historians draw parallels between the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand and the nabbing of the two Israeli soldiers across the Lebanese border?
Oh my. Say it's not so, Fred.

And he says it's not so -
There are at least two differences between the preparations for war in Europe 92 years ago and those taking place in the Middle East now. First, today's big powers are not locked in to escalation through alliances; one country going to war does not necessarily force another to follow. The world isn't even divided into hostile blocs, at least not to the same extent. Second, global institutions have been formed in the intervening century precisely to keep such scenarios from cascading.
But it could be so -
.... there are two other facts that mitigate those differences and that draw attention to the similarities between 2006 and 1914. The major powers and the global institutions are just standing by. UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan talks about putting a "stabilization force" on the Israeli-Lebanese border, but he has little leverage to impose anything meaningful. The G8 nations unanimously harrumph a resolution of concern and condemnation, but they take no action. President George W. Bush tells British Prime Minister Tony Blair that he thinks his secretary of state will make a trip to the Middle East pretty soon.
Oh crap. So that's not good at all. Both sides here view their very existence as being at risk and so no one will back down. Diplomacy is called for, and it might work, or not, but no one to give it a try - not those in conflict or those looking on.

Kaplan says it's like this -
Israeli leaders seem to think that if they fight on for another week, they can strengthen their strategic position - and weaken Hezbollah's - so that when the international community does step in to impose a cease-fire, they'll come out significantly ahead.

However, another argument can be made that the longer Israel keeps bombing and shelling Lebanon, and unavoidably killing Lebanese civilians, the more its standing will diminish, regionally and globally. An editorial in today's Daily Star, Beirut's relatively moderate newspaper, is headlined, "Israeli onslaught will strengthen, not weaken, Hezbollah's popular appeal."
And then you mix in the sectarian stuff and it just gets weird -
The opportunity for a nonmilitary solution (the phrase "peaceful solution" may be going too far) is golden right now but not for long. In a remarkable statement, the Saudi foreign minister criticized Hezbollah's cross-border attacks as "unexpected, inappropriate, and irresponsible acts." So did the leaders of Egypt, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates. Some criticized Israel's response as "disproportionate," or they urged "restraint." But these caveats seemed almost pro forma. Rarely, if ever, have Arab leaders so condemned other Arabs on an issue of conflict with the Jewish State.

Yet there's something else that binds those Arab leaders - they're all Sunnis, while Hezbollah, Iran, and (nominally) Syria are ruled by Shiites. This is another reason this fire needs to be put out as soon as possible. Otherwise, it might not only ignite the grand battle between Israel and its most fervent foes, but also feed the flames of the region's larger war between Sunnis and Shiites.
Okay, the neoconservatives arguing it's time to get with what Israel has started and join them by taking out Syria and Iran, and occupying Damascus and Tehran and setting up the governments there that we really want, is too simplistic. We don't get World War III or IV and the "clash of civilizations" about which Rush Limbaugh is so excited he is nearly peeing his pants - we get to sit on the sidelines as international war between Sunnis and Shiites is waged everywhere. Bummer.

But something must be done. This is getting really dangerous. Will Bush send Condoleezza Rice over there to knock heads and set things straight, doing that shuttle diplomacy thing?

No -
The point of shuttle diplomacy, when Henry Kissinger and James Baker conducted it, was to talk with leaders who can't talk with one another, shuttling back and forth conveying messages, feints, fears, and ultimately offers. One problem right now is that the United States - the would-be shuttle diplomat - has long cut off relations with Syria and Iran, both of Hezbollah's enablers (and thus potential disablers). If Bush doesn't reopen the lines, there's no point in sending Rice on the plane; it would be a shuttle to nowhere - and, short of sensational luck, a region sliding to war.
We're screwed. But is a World War coming?

That's hard to tell. There are wheels within wheels here, and we just don't talk with the bad guys. We've made things so clear and simple we're out of the equation - and we call it "moral clarity." That precludes diplomacy, which is never clear and what Henry Kissinger once defined as "purposeful ambiguity." We no longer do ambiguity. The president can't grasp it, and Cheney and the neoconservatives think it's un-American. Maybe it is.

Okay, let's turn to Aluf Benn, the diplomatic editor of the Israeli daily newspaper Ha'aretz. He's covered Israel's foreign policy and the Arab-Israeli peace process since 1993, so he must know a thing or two. His analyses of what's really going on have appeared in Foreign Affairs over the years. He knows stuff. He can say how dire things are right now, or reassure us things will be fine.

And Aluf Benn says this -
The wisest of all Israeli statesmen, Moshe Dayan, once made a prescient comment about the inexplicable nature of Arab-Israeli wars. "All our wars started when afterwards we needed very thorough research to explain and understand why they had started at all," he said in a closed Cabinet consultation in April 1973. Indeed, several months later, the Yom Kippur War took Dayan and the rest of Israel's political-military elite by total surprise.

Dayan died in 1981, but had he lived today, he would undoubtedly have repeated his age-old analysis. This summer started out as the best one that Israel has had since the outbreak of the second Palestinian intifada six years ago. Tourists filled Tel Aviv beaches, the stock market hit its all-time high, and the government, flush with unexpected budgetary fat, lowered taxes and discussed cutting defense and beefing up welfare programs that had been cut in previous years.
And then things went south, and north as it were. The war was on. The regional troublemakers, the Palestinian Hamas and Lebanese Hezbollah, would be dealt with, severely.

And Benn provides a narrative of how that happened, with the political and psychodynamics, which actually helpful (emphases added) -
The road to war began in early June, when the tacit cease-fire between Hamas and Israel began to crack. Smaller Palestinian groups kept firing their Qassam missiles at the Israeli border town of Sderot. The IDF responded with targeted killings of suspected perpetrators, unfortunately killing innocent bystanders as well. Ehud Olmert, Israel's prime minister, put the brakes on military plans to escalate the fighting, and so did the Hamas leaders. But on June 25, a small Hamas unit attacked a military outpost on the Israeli side of the border, abducting a soldier and killing several others. Olmert decided against exchanging prisoners and hit back at Hamas, aiming to crush its military wing, halt the Qassams and weaken the civilian Hamas-led Palestinian government, which, despite enormous external pressure, has refused to recognize Israel and forswear terror.

Olmert's decision to fight back was in part a result of his political weakness: Israel's new Cabinet, sworn in on May 4, is led by a freshman team lacking battlefield experience and hangs on a loose coalition. It is a byword of Israeli politics that weak governments tend to hit harder. A former war hero like Ariel Sharon, Yitzhak Rabin or Ehud Barak, "Mr. Security" at the top, could afford politically to be more flexible. But Olmert, who was smeared by his right-wing adversary Benjamin Netanyahu as a leftist weakling, could not. Along with the new defense minister, Amir Peretz, Olmert had to show the weary public and the military leaders that he had balls.

The world stood by as Israeli tanks returned to Gaza, and Washington intervened only to tell Israel to avoid hitting key civilian facilities (after the IDF destroyed Gaza's only power plant) and to spare Mahmoud Abbas, the powerless president of the Palestinian Authority and America's darling. But Israel has failed to this day to achieve its goals in Gaza. Its abducted soldier, Gilad Shalit, is still missing, the Qassams keep hitting Sderot, and the Hamas government has stuck to its positions despite the arrest of dozens of its ministers and legislators in the West Bank.
It's odd how much that sounds like politics over here. Can't be a leftist weakling, and you have to show some balls and send the kids off to war. Sigh. Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah is in the same fix. Nasrallah rose to his present position when Israel assassinated his predecessor, Abbad Moussawi, in 1992. They play hardball over there.

And there was a George Bush moment, although Olmert wasn't reading "My Pet Goat" to grade school kids at the time -
Olmert heard the news about the Hezbollah attack when he was meeting the parents of Gilad Shalit, the abducted Gaza GI. This was his ultimate leadership test. As he said later, "There is a moment when a state says: No." Decisive by his nature, he instantly resolved to hit back forcefully and use the opportunity to reduce Hezbollah's capability for "holding Israel hostage" through its arsenal of rockets.

This was not an easy decision. Olmert was putting at risk not only the abducted soldiers, but also the lives, property and welfare of hundreds of thousands of Israelis within the rockets' range. The country's hard-won economic boom and tourism revival were at stake too. But he sensed correctly that the public expected him "to hit the bastards" and therefore would support his actions, and that given the circumstances, Israel would receive unprecedented international backing even for forceful attacks.
Sounds familiar. We threw our international support away by attacking the wrong guys, against all advice, but maybe that won't happen here.

And the attack was focused on the practical, "a Kosovo-style air campaign to destroy Hezbollah's headquarters and the south Beirut neighborhood where it is centered, its ammunition and rocket hideouts and village bases, as well as targeting Lebanese infrastructure like roads, power stations and bridges to prevent Syrian re-supply."

And, surprise, international support has not evaporated, yet -
The international community sided with Israel, stipulating only that it avoid killing too many innocent bystanders, and not topple the fragile Beirut government of Premier Fouad Siniora. G8 leaders, convened in St. Petersburg, Russia, put the blame firmly on Hamas and Hezbollah and all but halted the "diplomatic hourglass" to give Israel more time to finish the job. President George W. Bush's support for Israel is no surprise, but for key Arab states like Saudi Arabia to criticize Nasrallah, and then remain silent when Israeli warplanes destroy parts of an Arab capital is unprecedented.
But we'll see how long that lasts.

But it may work out -
If Israel succeeds in destroying Nasrallah's forces - and even in killing him - and a new international force dismantles Hezbollah's rockets and prevents a new buildup, then Olmert would be the clear winner in this round. Israel's economy will resume its growth course (even if defense cuts would be called off) and public morale will soar. If, however, Nasrallah walks out of his hiding place, shakes the dust off his beard, and still has thousands of rockets with their launchers - perhaps even replenishing them from Iran - he would be positioned as the king of "Arab resistance" against "the Zionists."
Yeah, yeah. Unlikely. The Sunni Saudis and Sunni Egypt may be a little alarmed, and al Qaeda may feel a bit miffed as the new kids on the block get to be the heroes. But writing from Tel-Aviv, concerned with the immediate war, Aluf Benn may think that's something for later, something to consider in the next bigger war.

Well, it's one view.

Ann Arbor, Michigan, is 5,995 miles (9,648 kilometers) from Tel-Aviv, but your research take you where it will, and there you will find Juan Cole, the eminent professor of Middle East Studies at the University of Michigan, and things look different from there. Of course he might have been at Yale this year, but they withdrew their offer after all sorts of pressure from the right wing side of things (detailed here with Cole's comments here) - the "Bush can do no wrong" side doesn't much like what he concludes about the Middle East, and about the efficacy of our policies. But he's been all over the region and speaks, read and writes the major languages, and he knows the players. Ridiculing his views may be short-sighted.

And Juan Cole has a few things to say about the two-front Israeli war in progress here, which he calls Israel's "maximal option." He's not impressed. He's not impressed with either side.

The situation -
Everyone is wondering about the military objectives of the Israeli and Hezbollah leaderships, whose rash and immoral actions have brought their countries to this dangerous pass.

Beirut, of course, has taken the far heavier punishment, with dozens of buildings razed, massive bomb-produced potholes in the streets and frantic rescue crews carting away bloody bodies, mainly of civilians, including families and children. But Haifa is in greater shock, its inhabitants unused to taking direct enemy missile fire. Nor are they accustomed to seeing a bombed-out Israeli warship towed into the bay. The big international companies with offices not far from where the rockets landed include Microsoft, and the danger posed to Israel of capital flight in the billions dwarfs in magnitude the Lebanese losses of $100 million a day, mainly in forfeited tourism.
Both sides are screwing thing up for everyone, but he notes this -
One option being entertained by the Israeli leaders would have the effect of turning the Lebanese capital into a fetid slum, swamped by hundreds of thousands of cowering peasants expelled north by a vast Israeli human engineering project. And if this project produces a civil war between Shiite Lebanese and the central government, as the Israeli high command and the Kadima Party who are considering this plan believe, then all the better.
He thinks they want to do that Jordan thing again, like in 1970-71 when Jordan had filled up with Palestinian refugees after the 1967 war and the fledgling Palestine Liberation Organization was doing guerrilla crap against Israel- so back then they bombed and forced King Hussein to clamp down on the PLO. That led to a civil war within Jordan but the PLO was taken care of, severely. The idea might work in Lebanon now - get the current government to crush Hezbollah.

Bu the parallel doesn't pertain -
Lebanon, however, is far more fragile than Jordan. It is a multicultural society, sometimes called a country of minorities. In East Beirut, Jounieh and points north, into Mount Lebanon, Maronite Catholics are the majority. Sunnis are important in the port cities - Tripoli, West Beirut and Sidon - as well as in the Bekaa Valley and in the far north. In the Shouf mountains live the Druze, hardy adherents of an esoteric offshoot of Ismaili Islam. The deep south down near the Israeli border is orthodox (or a "Twelver") Shiite territory, though they are also a majority in the Bekaa Valley to the east, with Baalbak a major center, and decades of immigration to the capital have created a southern ring of Shiite slums around Beirut. Poor Shiites are the constituency for the fundamentalist Hezbollah Party, though in opinion polls most of them do not report their main political commitment as Muslim fundamentalism.
That's more detail than you might need. Don't worry about it. It's quite complicated and complex -and simple ideas may not work.

And Hezbollah aren't raggedy displaced nonentities. They're part of the government now.

This is the compressed history -
Hezbollah emerged as the militarily most important group in Lebanon when 14,000 Syrian troops withdrew from the country in spring 2005. The Syrians had played the role of peacekeeper, or at least referee, during the Lebanese Civil War. When the warring factions made peace from 1989 forward, all the Lebanese factions disarmed their paramilitaries except Hezbollah, which was struggling against the continued Israeli occupation of the south. In the 1990s and early zeroes, a reduced Syrian force provided some security in the rest of the country at a time when the Lebanese army was being rebuilt. Following the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, which a UN investigation linked to Syria, a popular movement, known in the West as the "Cedar Revolution," led to a Syrian withdrawal last year. Although the anti-Syrian reformers did well in the elections held late last spring, so too did the Shiite parties, including Hezbollah and Amal, who together won 29 seats in the 128-seat parliament. Hezbollah became part of the government for the first time, but resisted demands that it disarm its militia in the south, maintaining that the continued threat of Israeli violence and renewed occupation made it necessary. It pointed out that Israel continues to retain control of the Shebaa Farms, a small border area claimed by both Lebanon and Syria. (If the Israelis had negotiated the return of this land years ago, it would have been much more difficult for Hezbollah to have justified not disarming.)

The Cedar Revolution was hailed by the Bush administration as a great achievement of democratization, but in fact it pushed the fragile Lebanese political system into a state of dangerous instability, in which the Lebanese ethnic factions no longer had a referee. As members of the reformist bloc such as Druze leader Walid Jumblatt began pressing for disarming Hezbollah, they threatened its prime source of political legitimacy and power. Within the arena of Lebanese politics, escalation of tension with Israel benefited Hezbollah at a time it was under this pressure.
So they're important, and integrated into the government, and big trouble -
On Sunday, Hezbollah leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah delivered a disturbing videotaped speech in which he gloated over his party's missile strikes on Israel. He said that the attack on Haifa had not been for revenge but for the purpose of deterring Israeli assaults on Lebanon. He contrasted his strikes, which he claimed deliberately avoided targeting civilians, with Israel's, which he claimed had targeted civilians. Since his missiles are inaccurate, this was a self-serving lie: Any Katyushas he launched could (and did) kill civilians. He sanctimoniously pointed out that he could have hit chemical plants and fuel plants and produced a much worse disaster for the city, but had refrained from doing so for the moment. He also promised further "surprises" for the Israelis. Nasrallah, soft-spoken behind his white-speckled soft black beard, exuded an adolescent nationalism, taking pride in this "Arab" achievement of striking back at last against the Israeli cities from which the Lebanese Shiites had taken decades of bombings.

... Nasrallah's speech was full of delusions of grandeur. His goals appear to include giving aid to the beleaguered Palestinians in Gaza, claiming the mantle of the most important political and military leader in Lebanon now that the Syrians are gone, and forcing Israel to negotiate with him as an equal. None of these goals is realistic. He has raised Hezbollah's status with the Arab street, but has no way to translate that into actual power. His ability to help the Palestinians is nonexistent. His amateurish missile attacks, most of which have done no real damage, cannot possibly deter Israel from its military plans for the destruction of Lebanon's infrastructure. And after years of fighting the Israelis, he should have known enough about their psychology to know that nothing would guarantee a widening of the war more than menacing the descendants of victims of the Holocaust with poison gas.
Yeah, he's a real piece of work. Rush Limbaugh is a piker compared to him.

As for Israel, it is being just as odd -
There is no question that Israel has the right to defend itself against rocket attacks, and to respond appropriately to Hezbollah's illegal and immoral abduction of two soldiers and killing of others. A "proportional" response by Israel to Hezbollah's initial attack, of the sort demanded by international human rights lawyers, would have involved killing three Hezbollah fighters and capturing two down at the border between the two countries - and a heavier response directly specifically at Hezbollah could also have been justified. Instead, Israel has bombed, blockaded, isolated and crippled the entire country. Why? In preparation for what?
Who knows? What they says is the idea is to move all the Hezbollah bad guys back from the border, so their rockets cannot reach any part of Israel, but that's displacing a whole lot of people. And UNICEF's representative in Lebanon told AFP that "The situation is both alarming and catastrophic. There are about 500,000 people displaced already."

But the logic is clear -
If it comes about, the forced transfer of the Shiites of the south would have several advantages for the Israelis. The depopulated territory would make it easier to search for and destroy all the Katyusha emplacements and the heavier missiles of which Hezbollah boasted on Sunday. With Hezbollah's approximately 5,000 fighters deprived of civilian cover, it would be easier to kill them. The Israelis clearly anticipate that a refugee crisis in Beirut will put pressure on the Lebanese government to turn on Hezbollah decisively and to intervene against it militarily. Finally, they expect Prime Minister Fouad Siniora, in the aftermath, to send the Lebanese army south to take up positions along the border and so form a buffer between Hezbollah and Israel.
That might work, but Cole notes that, ethically, it is "monstrous, involving war crimes on a vast scale insofar as it targets a civilian population for forcible relocation."

And it won't work anyway -
Even if Lebanon's famously fractured political elite could come to a consensus that Hezbollah had to be curbed, it is unclear how they could accomplish that task. The reconstituted Lebanese army formed after the civil war is 60,000 strong, but most of the troops are green and many of the infantrymen are Shiites. The 5,000 battle-hardened Hezbollah fighters defeated the Israeli occupation with suicide bombings and guerrilla tactics. Even if the Shiite troops in the regular Lebanese army would fight their own, it is not clear that they could do so successfully.

... The Israeli plan to pressure the Lebanese government to take on Hezbollah will therefore likely fail. The Jordan precedent has no analogies here. The Shiites of Lebanon have played a role in contemporary Lebanese nationalism very unlike that of the Palestinian refugees in Jordan. Neither President Emile Lahoud nor Prime Minister Siniora command the respect, or have the steel, of Jordan's King Hussein, and the Lebanese army lacks the cohesion and loyalty that had characterized his Bedouin troops.

Instead, if Israel follows through on threats to create a massive internal refugee problem in Lebanon, they will further radicalize the Shiites, many of whom now support Hezbollah because of the services it provides or because it looks out for their interests rather than because they really want an Islamic Republic. If the Israelis manage to disrupt the party structure, as they appear to hope, they will simply remove any discipline over rank-and-file members and encourage small-group terrorism of the sort that has recently plagued Madrid, Spain, and London. Radicalized Lebanese Shiites can expect ongoing aid not only from Iran but from the newly liberated radical Shiites of Iraq, such as the Mahdi Army of Muqtada al-Sadr.
Yep, he did mention Iraq -
... the kind of large-scale injustice apparently being planned in Israel against tens or hundreds of thousands of Lebanese Shiites may profoundly affect the situation in Iraq. Many Iraqi Shiites entertain a profound hatred for the American and other coalition troops in Iraq, feeling humiliated by what they view as an infidel military occupation. Many have refrained so far from attacking the foreigners, however, because they have seen them as allies against Saddam Hussein and other Sunni Arab leaders, who persecuted the Shiites. Anger has grown in the Shiite south of Iraq against coalition troops, however, as witnessed by persistent attacks on the British in Basra and elsewhere. If the Iraqi Shiites decide that Britain and the United States are enabling Israel to crush the Lebanese Shiites, they may begin attacking the coalition in revenge. On Friday, Shiites demonstrated in the thousands in Baghdad against Israel's predations in Lebanon. The US and Britain have already had difficulty dealing with a vigorous Sunni Arab guerrilla movement, and the opening of a second front, with enraged Iraqi Shiites, could doom their enterprise in Iraq.
And locally nothing good can come of it all either -
There are two most likely outcomes of the war. One is the collapse of the Lebanese government and the creation of another failed state on Israel's border, where desperation will breed terrorism for decades. The other is a strengthened Hezbollah, which will become the leading force in Lebanese nationalism, weakening the reformists. The maximalist option would likely turn Beirut into a poor Shiite city, reinforcing Shiite political power at the center. Destroying a few Katyusha emplacements in the south will not affect either outcome, and in both cases Hezbollah will probably be able to rebuild its arsenal.

The Israelis' current blank check will begin to be canceled by the world community, as the full scale of the destruction of Lebanon becomes apparent and humanitarian crises ensue. At some point it will be forced to cease its attack. Israel will not get the Lebanese government of which it dreams. It may get a UN or Lebanese buffer for a while, but it will not be effective, and the southern Lebanese clans are famed for nothing if not long memories and determined feuding.
But that wouldn't be World War III (or IV), just the same old same old.

Aluf Benn opened with a quote. Cole ends with one -
If, as Abba Eban once said, the Palestinians never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity, it is equally true that the Israelis, with their reflexive instinct to shoot first and negotiate later, never miss an opportunity to make a bad situation worse.

The Israelis have responded the same way to military threats for decades -- with overwhelming force. This is perhaps understandable, but each time they overreact they create future catastrophes for themselves. Just as their 1982 invasion of Lebanon and occupation of the south haunted them for a generation, they will be living with the blowback of their ill-considered war on hapless little Lebanon for decades to come. Tragically, the United States, as Israel's closest ally, will also have to suffer for its actions.
But it won't be World War III. At least that what the research shows so far.

So now you know the basics. It's more than enough. There will be a test.

On the other hand, the president says it's quite simple - "You see, the ... thing is what they need to do is to get Syria, to get Hezbollah to stop doing this shit and it's over."

Maybe he knows best. People make things so complicated.

We're in trouble.

Posted by Alan at 23:19 PDT | Post Comment | Permalink
Updated: Wednesday, 19 July 2006 06:41 PDT home

Monday, 17 July 2006
War Talk: On the Sixth Day of the More-Than-Six-Day War
Topic: Couldn't be so...
War Talk: On the Sixth Day of the More-Than-Six-Day War

As a record of the divide between the old school and the new school in United States foreign policy, on Monday, July 17, the national dialog regarding the two front war in which Israel now finds itself - bombing and shelling Lebanon on the north to take care of the Hezbollah that Lebanon cannot rein in, and doing the same to the south in Gaza to deal with Hamas - took some odd twists. Yes, Hezbollah had captured two Israeli soldiers and was sending rocket fire down on everything down to Haifa as Israel leveled selected pars of Jordan, as earlier Hamas has captured on Israeli soldier and that meant Gaza had to be leveled. These were two provocations on two fronts, and had do be dealt with in some way, and overwhelming force was the option. The widespread civilian suffering in Gaza and the destruction of large chunks of Lebanon's infrastructure (most major roads, bridges and the Beirut airport) seemed to many to be a bit over the top ("disproportionate" in diplomat-speak), but at the UN we had vetoed a resolution that said that. No one agreed with our veto, but we have one, and we used it. We have no problem with what Israel is doing.

All this over three soldiers? Soldiers get captured and held by the other side all the time in military action. Why this, and why now? Yes, the incidents were in-your-face provocations. The response was, "Well, here's something you didn't expect - full war." That was supposed to amaze them. The counter-response was, "Oh yeah, so how do like these rockets?" The reply to that was serious major bombing. And so on and so forth. Shock and awe only works when the other side is appropriately shocked and awed. They were supposed to be devastated and humiliated. That's how it's supposed to work - they're so shamed and disgraced they make no more trouble. Well, it's a theory. It may actually work one day, or not. You never know. In the meantime they will have safety and logistic challenges.

Something else is going on here. This is where the odd twists come in.

At this link you can listen (MP3 format) to the most popular political commentator on radio, Rush Limbaugh, saying that what Israel was doing was "a gift to the world" - what should happen was happening, the ultimate "clash of civilizations." The idea here seems to be that Israel is helping us break free of the wimpy constraints of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq - because everyone knows the real war was "never intended to stop with Iraq." So what Israel is doing, fighting these two minor puppets of Iran and Syria, is giving us a chance to back them and join them and really go after Iran, and anyone else like them. This will get us down to the basics, and we can clean out the whole area - and occupy Damascus and Tehran one supposes, setting up the right people in power, just as we did in Afghanistan and Iraq. We can finally clean up the whole place, as all we have to do is join Israel in what they're doing, and go after the big boys behind Israel's bothersome but really second-string tormentors.

Given Limbaugh's populist red-meat style, it sounds compelling in a details-are-for-eggheads way. That is, it sounds superficially logical and, if you think for moment, quite mad. No wonder he's so popular.

But then he's a "popularizer" - and he's riffing on a more obscure source. That would be William Kristol, one of the founding members (with Cheney, Richard Perle and the whole crew known as the neoconservatives, or "Vulcans") of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) back in the nineties. Their statement of principles is here, and they were quite open about it all - the United States should take the initiative and change the world, and spread our vision of democracy everywhere, particularly in the Middle East, using our overwhelming superiority as the only "superpower" left after everything settled out at the end of the Cold War. This is our chance. We have to seize it. Thus we get the doctrine of "preemption" - attack any country that the might be a problem somewhere down the road - and regime change in place of diplomacy - we don't talk to bad people, we remove them. And we got the president they found for us who they got to buy into all this - George Bush, not like his father at all (the old man did old-fashioned diplomacy) - giving his famous speech at West Point some years ago saying we will now use our military not to response to those who threaten or attack us, but those who might one day, given their attitude or whatever. It's called taking the initiative. Why wait?

William Kristol in his Weekly Standard is the public voice of the neoconservative movement, and Limbaugh was simplifying what Kristol had written in It's Our War (July 24, 2006, Volume 11, Issue 42). The subhead there is "Bush should go to Jerusalem - and the US should confront Iran." It's now time to take out Iran's nuclear sites with massive bombing. Israel has given us the opening, or excuse or whatever. So Bush should stand with the Israeli prime minister in Jerusalem and show we are the sort that doesn't take crap, as the nuclear bunker-busters fall all over Iran. And anyone who doesn't agree is clearly anti-Semitic. But he says it quite elegantly. He's no lout like Limbaugh. He's just kind of creepy with his nervous smile. And like the other PNAC members, he has no military experience at all. These are the theory guys, and the patriotic idealists.

Over at "Crooks and Liars," the go-to place for video clips and audio grabs for political junkies, there's this, Kristol in a discussion of all this with host Bruce Wallace and the token opposition, Juan Williams, on Fox News.

The video is amazing, and it goes like this -

KRISTOL: Look, our coddling of Iran - if I can use the neutral term like that - over the last six to nine months has emboldened them. I mean, is Iran behaving like a timid regime that's very worried about the US? Or is Iran behaving recklessly and in a foolhardy way?

WALLACE: But isn't that the result of what's happened in Iraq?

KRISTOL: No, it's a result of our deducing from the situation in Iraq that we can't stand up to Iran. I mean, when we stand up over and over and say Iran is shipping Improvised Explosive Devices into Iraq and killing US soldiers, and Syria's providing a line for terrorists to come into Iraq and kill US soldiers, and that's unacceptable. That's not helpful. And then we do nothing about it. When Ahmadinejad says provocative things, continues to ship arms to Hezbollah, and we say, okay, maybe now we'll give you direct talks. That, unfortunately, that weakness has been provocative. Ahmadinejad feels emboldened. Now we need to show him, and I think the administration has done a good job the last couple of days of showing him, that he miscalculated.

And indeed, this is a great opportunity. I think our weakness, unfortunately, invited this aggression, but this aggression is a great opportunity to begin resuming the offensive against the terrorist groups. Israel is fighting four of our five enemies in the Middle East, in a sense. Iran, Syria, sponsors of terror; Hezbollah and Hamas. Al Qaeda doesn't seem to be involved. We have to take care of them in Iraq. This is an opportunity to begin to reverse the unfortunate direction of the last six to nine months and get the terrorists and the jihadists back on the defensive.

WILLIAMS: Well, it just seems to me that you want... you just want war, war, war, and you want us in more war. You wanted us in Iraq. Now you want us in Iran. Now you want us to get into the Middle East, where I think there's a real interesting dynamic at play. I think it's psychological on the part of Israel and many of its supporters, and I'll throw you in here. Somehow you see Israel as weak, and you see Ehud Olmert as weak -

WALLACE: He's the new prime minister -

WILLIAMS: The new prime minister of Israel. And the defense minister as weak. Everybody is weak in the aftermath of Sharon, and so everybody has to prove what a man they are in the Middle East, including - you're saying, why doesn't the United States take this hard, unforgiving line? Well, the hard and unforgiving line has been, we don't talk to anybody. We don't talk to Hamas. We don't talk to Hezbollah. We're not going to talk to Iran. Where has it gotten us, Bill?
And at that point Kristol just throws up his hands. What can you do with people who think talk solves anything? Williams clearly thinks Kristol and the whole grew are mad, and on some macho kick that could get us all killed.

And it's not just Kristol. Go here and see former CIA Director James Woolsey to John Gibson of Fox News that it's time, right now, to bomb both Syria and Iran back to the stone age. No Israeli-Hezbollah ceasefires or arrests - just bomb Syria immediately. Gibson asks him why we shouldn't just attack Iran. He says, "Well, ah, one has to take things to some degree by steps."

He's one of the moderates. And, according to this, he belongs to a group that says we've been in an actual world war since 2003. The group was founded by the former Education Secretary William Bennett, the man who wrote "The Book of Virtues" and has the gambling problem. Over the weekend Newt Gingrich said we were really in World War III and no one was willing to admit the obvious. The other group says it's World War IV. That may not matter. We just have to win.

Two writers at The New Republic say here that we should just let the Israelis do all the bombing invloved, as long as they're careful about civilian casualties. That's a thought.

Digby at Hullabaloo has some thoughts the other way -
When are Americans going to take the neocons seriously?

I'm not talking about the Republican Party here or the movement conservatives. I'm speaking specifically of the group that can be called the true neocons of the era: The PNAC signatories and their supporters throughout the rightwing think tank intelligentsia.

I've been writing about these guys online from practically the first moment I went online back in the 90's. My friends thought I was a tin-foil nutter and at times, I thought I was too. The sheer grandiosity of their scheme was awesome.

Despite a reputation for Straussian opacity, the truth is that they have always made their plans known. There is no mystery about what they are about. To a shocking degree they have successfully promoted their agenda within the Republican establishment for the last two decades. And in the last six years we have seen them act without hesitation to opportunistically advance their strategic goals, regardless of the price.

These guys have been around for a long time, but I honestly never thought they would ever be granted the kind of power they would need to do what they sought to do.

How foolish of me.
And that leads to Joseph Cirincione of the Carnegie Endowment with this item -
Neocons Resurrect Plans For Regional War In The Middle East

In 1996, Richard Perle, Douglas Feith and David Wurmser (all later senior officials in the Bush administration) had a plan for how to destroy Hezbollah: Invade Iraq. They wrote a report to the newly elected Likud government in Israel calling for "a clean break" with the policies of negotiating with the Palestinians and trading land for peace.

The problem could be solved "if Israel seized the strategic initiative along it northern borders by engaging Hizballah (sic), Syria, and Iran, as the principal agents of aggression in Lebanon." The key, they said, was to "focus on removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq — an important Israeli strategic objective in its own right — as a means of foiling Syria's regional ambitions." They called for "reestablishing the principle of preemption." They promised that the successes of these wars could be used to launch campaigns against Iran, Saudi Arabia and Egypt, reshaping "the strategic balance in the Middle East profoundly."

Now, with the US bogged down in Iraq, with Bush losing control of world events, and with the threats to national security growing worse, no one could possibly still believe this plan, could they? Think again.

William Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard, is still pushing this radical vision. He now uses the excuse of Hezbollah terrorist attacks - what he calls "Iran's Proxy War" - to push the United States deeper into a regional war against Iran and Syria:

We might consider countering this act of Iranian aggression with a military strike against Iranian nuclear facilities. Why wait? Does anyone think a nuclear Iran can be contained? That the current regime will negotiate in good faith? It would be easier to act sooner rather than later. Yes, there would be repercussions - and they would be healthy ones, showing a strong America that has rejected further appeasement.

Perle has already weighed in in a June 25 Washington Post editorial decrying Bush's "ignominious retreat" on Iran. He, too, wants war. Newt Gingrich on Meet the Press this Sunday said we were already in World War III and that the US needed to take direct action against North Korea and Iran. Less well known pundits have flooded cable news and talk radio this weekend beating the war drums. Meanwhile, David Wurmser is ensconced in Vice-President Cheney's office, and his neoconservative colleague Elliot Abrams (the convicted Iran-Contra felon who urged war with Iraq in a 1998 letter to President Bill Clinton) directs Middle East policy on the National Security Council staff.

The neoconservatives are now hoping to use the Israeli-Lebanon conflict as the trigger to launch a US war against Syria, Iran or both. These profoundly dangerous policies have to be exposed and stopped before they do even more harm to US national security then they already have.
But who will stop them? Try that and you get labeled, at best, anti-Semitic, an at worst a traitor (or what Ann Coulter calls a girly-man).

And we got the president they found for us who they got to buy into all this, and his now famous comments at the G8 summit in Russia, where he didn't know the microphone was still on and we got a chance to see how he thinks. He speaks to Tony Blair, with his mouth full, being real casual.

The University of Michigan professor of Middle East Studies, Juan Cole, offers a transcript here -
BUSH to Blair: "I think Condi is going to go (to the Middle East) pretty soon."

BLAIR: "Right, that's all that matters, it will take some time to get that together ... See, if she goes out she's got to succeed as it were, where as I can just go out and talk."

BUSH: "See, the irony is what they need to do is get Syria to get Hezbollah to stop doing this shit and it's over."

BLAIR: "Who, Syria?"

BUSH: "Right ... What about Kofi? That seems odd. I don't like the sequence of it. His attitude is basically ceasefire and everything else happens."

BLAIR: "I think the thing that is really difficult is you can't stop this unless you get this international presence agreed."

BUSH: "I felt like telling Kofi to get on the phone with Assad and make something happen. We're not blaming Israel. We're not blaming the Lebanese government."
So it's all Syria's fault. Someone should call up the head man there, Bashar al-Asad, and tell him to knock it off. He's supporting Hezbollah. We don't speak to such people. But someone should make the call - the quiet black guy from the UN maybe. That would fix everything.

Everyone thinks it's complicated. All it takes is one phone call. No big deal.

Cole -
So, the whole blow-up is Syria's fault, for putting Hezbollah up to making mischief. No reference to Israeli actions in Gaza. No reference to, like, the wholesale destruction of Lebanon by the Israeli air force. And no blame for the Lebanese government of Fouad Siniora. And Bush thinks that Nasrullah of Hezbollah takes direct orders from Damascus. And he thinks that if Bashar al-Asad orders Hizbullah to stop firing its little katyushas and give back the two Israeli soldiers, everything will suddenly settle down.

It is an astonishingly simple-minded view of the situation, painted in black and white and making assumptions about who is who's puppet and what the Israeli motivations are. Israel doesn't appear as a protagonist. It is purely reactive. Stop provoking it, and it suddenly stops its war.

Since Israel is just being provoked and has no ambitions of its own, in this reading, it is useless to begin with a ceasefire. That treats the two sides as both provoking one another. Here, only Hezbollah matters, so you lean on Syria to lean on it, and, presto, peace breaks out.

It is a little window into the superficial, one-sided mind of the man, who has for six years been way out of his depth.

I come away from it shaken and trembling.
That may be overreacting, but Bush has fresh eyes. He knows nothing of the details and doesn't care for details. He's never bothered himself with knowing very much So he must be right?

We're in trouble. And everyone is upset he said a bad word?

To those of the old school, this is upsetting, as shown by Marc Lynch here -
American public diplomacy has been virtually invisible on all this, at a time when it is more urgently needed than ever. I can understand this - you have to have a policy if you want to try to explain or defend it, and right now the Bush administration doesn't seem to have any policy at all beyond supporting Israel and issuing calls for "restraint" which Israel promptly and publicly rejects. And what administration official wants to subject him or herself to tough Arab questioning on live TV right now? The idea that Palestinian-Israeli relations could be cordoned off from wider Middle East questions was always misguided. It's now become actively destructive to all of our interests in the region.

The only reason I'm not calling more loudly for Bush to get involved and take a leadership role in the conflict is the expectation that he would probably do the wrong thing. But at this point, doing nothing is, in fact, doing something. The Bush administration right now looks weak, confused, and vaguely pathetic... which is better than batshit crazy (like the folks who are demanding that America either smile on or even join in a war with Damascus and/or Tehran), but not nearly as good as exercising actual grown-up leadership at a time when the world could really, really use some.
Well, yes. But we have a leader who doesn't like the grown up stuff, like policy based on who's who and what their aims are.

Also very old school is Fred Kaplan here -
Where's the shuttle diplomacy? In any other administration, at least since Nixon's, the secretary of state would have flown to the Middle East days ago, would already have touched down in Tel Aviv, Beirut, and Damascus - maybe more than once - to hammer out a cease-fire, a settlement, or at least some sort of compromise to keep the conflict from expanding.

This is how Henry Kissinger and James Baker made their reputations (the good sides anyway). President Clinton and the first President Bush had a special Middle East envoy, Dennis Ross, whose sole job was to put out local and regional fires the instant somebody struck a match.

Yet six days into Israel's most violent border conflict in nearly a quarter-century, President George W. Bush seems in no hurry to put Condoleezza Rice on a plane.

... Why the wait?

There are two possible reasons, neither mutually exclusive. First, Bush may not yet have decided what to do, and there's no point sending Rice - who would clearly be speaking with the president's authority - if she has no position to offer. Second, Bush may be in no hurry to put this fire out; he may want the Israeli government to gain more leverage, to twist Hezbollah's arm tighter, before pressuring them both to the negotiating table.

... in order to do what Bush himself sees is necessary to "make something happen," he needs to get some third party to get Syria to get Hezbollah to stop firing rockets.

What kind of way is this for a superpower to behave?

Unless he wants to heighten the chances of a war that engulfs the entire Middle East, Bush needs to do what most presidents in far less dire circumstances would already have done: drop the moral posturing; resume diplomatic relations (not the same thing as friendship) with all parties; "get on the phone with Assad" himself (don't leave it to Annan, whose leverage is limited); and get Condi on that plane, not "pretty soon," but now.
Won't happen - too complicated.

So on we go.

Here's a good summary (Tim Grieve, Salon) of how the day, Monday, July 17, ended, and it notes that March 5, 2005, the president chatted up "remarkable developments" in the Middle East. "In the last five months, we have witnessed successful elections in Afghanistan, the Palestinian Territory and Iraq; peaceful demonstrations on the streets of Beirut; and steps toward democratic reform in Egypt and Saudi Arabia. The trend is clear: In the Middle East and throughout the world, freedom is on the march."

Now we have this -
Afghanistan: No less of an authority than the Voice of America reports that "daily violence" is now routine in Afghanistan, which is now suffering through its "bloodiest year" since the US-led invasion in 2001. More than two years after the president declared the Taliban "no longer ... in existence," Afghan officials said today that the group has taken control of two towns in the southern part of the country.

Palestinian territories: According to an AFP report, Israeli warplanes destroyed the Palestinian Foreign Ministry building in Gaza today. At least 85 Palestinians have been killed in fighting that followed the kidnapping of an Israeli soldier. Reuters says that the yellow flag of Hezbollah is "flying off the shelves" of stores in Gaza.

Iraq: Coordinated car bombs killed dozens of Iraqis at a Shiite market south of Baghdad today in what the Washington Post calls "one of the most brazen assaults in months of sectarian fighting." (Maybe it was more retaliation for what the New York Times called a "brazen daytime rampage" that killed more than a dozen Sunnis last week.) Meanwhile, three more American soldiers were killed in Iraq today, bringing the US death toll to about 2,552.

Beirut: Israel attacked Beirut's port and other targets across Lebanon today as Hezbollah fired rockets deeper into Israel. The U.N.'s Kofi Annan and Britain's Tony Blair are calling for an international force to help stem the violence, but the Bush administration seems to want no part of it. Pentagon officials say the United States is sending military vessels, airliners and cruise ships to help evacuate Americans from Lebanon as the president declares that all would be better if Syria would just get Hezbollah to "stop doing this shit."

Egypt and Saudi Arabia: The two countries joined Jordan and several other Arab states over the weekend in condemning Hezbollah for its "unexpected, inappropriate and irresponsible acts," but the condemnation comes, the New York Times reports, not from some movement toward democracy but rather from fear of Iran. "There is a school of thought, led by Saudi Arabia, that believes that Hezbollah is a source of trouble, a protégé of Iran, but also a political instrument in the hands of Iran," Jordanian sociologist Adnan Abu Odeh tells the Times. "This school says we should not play into the hands of Iran, which has its own agenda, by sympathizing or supporting Hezbollah fighting against the Israelis."
Other than that, things are fine.

So the joint is now being run by those who, never having been in one, want this war to be done right - they want us to be real men and roll into Damascus and Tehran, and make the world better, and explain nothing, discuss nothing, and just be strong-willed, and well-armed. And they found a man to be the spokesman for all of this, and he doesn't like details.

Head for the hills.


Posted by Alan at 23:36 PDT | Post Comment | Permalink
Updated: Tuesday, 18 July 2006 06:47 PDT home

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