Pentagon Contract For More Positive Spin On Iraq War Available For Bid

Here is an interesting opportunity for public relations professionals:

U.S. military leaders in Baghdad have put out for bid a two-year, $20 million public relations contract that calls for extensive monitoring of U.S. and Middle Eastern media in an effort to promote more positive coverage of news from Iraq.

The contract calls for assembling a database of selected news stories and assessing their tone as part of a program to provide "public relations products" that would improve coverage of the military command's performance, according to a statement of work attached to the proposal.

The request for bids comes at a time when Bush administration officials are publicly criticizing media coverage of the war in Iraq.

The proposal, which calls in part for extensive monitoring and analysis of Iraqi, Middle Eastern and American media, is designed to help the coalition forces understand "the communications environment." Its goal is to "develop communication strategies and tactics, identify opportunities, and execute events . . . to effectively communicate Iraqi government and coalition's goals, and build support among our strategic audiences in achieving these goals," according to the statement of work that is publicly available through the Web site http://www.fbodaily.com . ...

The proposal calls for monitoring "Iraqi, pan-Arabic, international and U.S. national and regional markets media in both Arabic and English." That includes broadcast and cable television outlets, the Pentagon channel, two wire services and three major U.S. newspapers: The Washington Post, New York Times and Los Angeles Times. ...

The media outlets would be monitored for how they present coalition or anti-Iraqi force operations. That part of the proposal could reflect Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld's often-stated concern that the media does not cover positive aspects of Iraq. ...

The proposal suggests a team of 12 to 18 people who would provide support for the coalition military command as well as the Iraqi government leadership.

Prospective contractors are also asked to propose four to eight public relations events per month, such as speeches or news conferences, including "preparation of likely questions and suggested answers, themes and messages as well as background, talking points."

FBI's Investigative Data Warehouse Unveiled

Data mining nation is proud of its newest creation for "counterterrorism", the FBI's Investigative Data Warehouse.

The FBI has built a database with more than 659 million records -- including terrorist watch lists, intelligence cables and financial transactions -- culled from more than 50 FBI and other government agency sources. The system is one of the most powerful data analysis tools available to law enforcement and counterterrorism agents, FBI officials said yesterday....

Privacy advocates said the Investigative Data Warehouse, launched in January 2004, raises concerns about how long the government stores such information and about the right of citizens to know what records are kept and correct information that is wrong....

The system, designed by Chiliad Inc. of Amherst, Mass., can be programmed to send alerts to agents on new information, Grigg said. Names, Social Security numbers and driver's license details can be linked and cross-matched across hundreds of millions of records.

No top secret information is in the system, officials said.

(Gurvais Grigg, acting director of the FBI's Foreign Terrorist Tracking Task Force) said that before 2002, it would take 32,222 hours to run 1,000 names and birth dates across 50 databases. Now agents can make such a search in 30 minutes or less, he said.

The 13,000 agents and analysts who use the system make an average 1 million queries a month, Grigg said. The system does not reach into the databases themselves but mines copies that are updated regularly, he said.

Irrelevant information can be purged or restricted, and incorrect information is corrected, he said. Willie T. Hulon, executive assistant director of the FBI's National Security Branch, said that generally information is not removed from the system unless there is "cause for removal."

David Sobel, senior counsel of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said the Federal Register has no record of the creation of such a system, a basic requirement of the Privacy Act. He also said the FBI's use of an internal privacy assessment undercuts the intent of the privacy law. ...

"It appears to be the largest collection of personal data ever amassed by the federal government," Sobel said. "When they develop the capability to cross-reference and data-mine all these previously separate sources of information, there are significant new privacy issues that need to be publicly debated."

Rummy Gins Up Some B.S.

The old kook is really laying it on thick today:

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld on Tuesday accused critics of the Bush administration's Iraq and counterterrorism policies of trying to appease "a new type of fascism."

In unusually explicit terms, Rumsfeld portrayed the administration's critics as suffering from "moral or intellectual confusion" about what threatens the nation's security and accused them of lacking the courage to fight back.

In remarks to several thousand veterans at the American Legion's national convention, Rumsfeld recited what he called the lessons of history, including the failed efforts to appease the Adolf Hitler regime in the 1930s.

"I recount this history because once again we face similar challenges in efforts to confront the rising threat of a new type of fascism," he said.

The rest of the world feels the same way about American-style fascism.

Rumsfeld spoke to the American Legion as part of a coordinated White House strategy, in advance of the fifth anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, to take the offensive against administration critics at a time of doubt about the future of Iraq and growing calls to withdraw U.S. troops.

Might as well take the offensive against critics of the war, since we are finding it impossible to gain any traction in Iraq. Lashing out from a position of impotence is pretty unseemly to all concerned.

Rumsfeld recalled a string of recent terrorist attacks, from 9/11 to bombings in Bali, London and Madrid, and said it should be obvious to anyone that terrorists must be confronted, not appeased.

It should also be obvious that we should not be adding unnecessary enemies and additional terrorists to those already lined up against us.

"But some seem not to have learned history's lessons," he said, adding that part of the problem is that the American news media have tended to emphasize the negative rather than the positive.

That's because there has been more negative than positive to cover, not because the military is somehow keeping all the good news secret.

He said, for example, that more media attention was given to U.S. soldiers' abuse of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib than to the fact that Sgt. 1st Class Paul Ray Smith received the Medal of Honor.

Which does Rumsfeld think was more newsworthy? One man's heroism or a scandal that calls into question the American self-deception at the heart of the Iraq mission. Especially since he personally approved the permissive interrogation regime in Iraq.

Rumsfeld is said to be on his last legs as Defense Secretary, so he must have figured that he might as well take advantage of any last opportunity to cover his ass. The American Legion is a perfect audience for his twaddle, since they too have a vested interest in believing an untenable version of U.S. history.

Rumsfeld Considering Use of ICBMs in "War on Terror"

This idea is impractical in the extreme.

Rumsfeld ... said the Pentagon was considering a plan to replace the nuclear warheads on some intercontinental ballistic missiles with conventional weapons, a move that would make the missiles less lethal and therefore more conceivable for politicians to use in preemptive strikes against terrorist groups.

The re-tipped missiles would offer the ability to accurately and quickly target such groups as the threat they pose grows due to their acquisition of weapons of mass destruction and other lethal weapons from proliferators, Rumsfeld said.

"We think that it's conceivable that five, 10 years from now there could be a target because of proliferation ... that would be able to be hit or deterred as the case may be by a conventional ICBM," Rumsfeld said.

Why would a nation who is engaging in proliferation be deterred by a conventional threat? This flies in the face of 50+ years of international security studies.

Sounds instead like the Secretary of Defense thinks that the rest of the world has caught a case of the missile willies from Israel's experience under the gun from Hezbollah.

He would be wrong.

The stress of being under threat from missile attack is not to be ignored, but Rumsfeld surely must realize that the real leverage of ICBMs come from the nuclear payload they carry.

Also, ICBMs are too expensive to waste delivering conventional payloads.

I'm smelling a psy-op here.

Hoagland Going Wobbly On Iraq

One of the Washington Post's most senior international types -- Jim Hoagland -- who was Ahmad Chalabi's chief ally in the punditocracy, is close to throwing in the towel in Iraq.

Change is news, and the important news from the second trial of Saddam Hussein is this: The U.S. government is helping expose the ex-dictator's genocidal assault on Kurdish tribesmen instead of helping hide it.

Welcome the change. But do not rush past the original malfeasance: U.S. officials were directly involved two decades ago in covering up and minimizing the horrifying details that were finally spread on the legal record in a Baghdad courtroom last week. In a long history of U.S. involvement in Iraq stained by official mistakes, betrayals and misunderstandings, the initial coverup of Hussein's Anfal campaign is among its darkest moments.

I visited Baghdad in May 1987, a month after Iraqi troops began using poison gas and burning Kurdish villages in a systematic program of ethnic slaughter and cleansing. The U.S. Embassy quickly learned of the devastation through a trip to northern Iraq by an assistant military attache. But he denied to me what I had learned elsewhere: that he had reported to Washington the beginning of the operation code-named Anfal. His report was promptly stamped secret....

The onslaught resulted in the destruction of 2,000 villages, the deaths of at least 50,000 Kurds and the forced resettlement of hundreds of thousands of others. The Reagan-Bush administration remained silent as it helped the Iraqis fight the Iranians; Washington even made sure Iraq was invited to a prestigious international conference on chemical weapons in 1988....

It is also important to recognize that without the U.S. invasion, these trials would never have occurred. But that in turn underscores a bitter reality that the Bush administration must now confront:

Military intervention can be justified when it changes things for the better. It does not have to be perfect. But conducting a military occupation that has lost the ability to change the situation for the better for those being occupied is unwise and ultimately untenable. It is also immoral. U.S. involvement in Iraq is again perilously close to being just that.

Invading a sovereign country absent an imminent threat was immoral.

Not to mention -- stupid.

Everything we have seen since then has flowed naturally from the initial mistake.

Too bad it has taken until now for Hoagland to articulate the facts of the matter.

More Fuel For The Pro War With Iran Element

Many people with experience in the field of international politics are suspecting that Iran has been trying to provoke the U.S. into a confrontation that would cause a legion of pitfalls for the aggressor.

A similar strategy worked splendidly for Hezbollah recently.

Today's development is additional evidence supporting this opinion.

An Iranian plant that produces heavy water officially went into operation on Saturday, despite U.N. demands that Tehran stop the activity because it can be used to develop a nuclear bomb.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad inaugurated the plant, which Tehran says is for peaceful purposes.

The announcement comes days before Thursday's U.N. deadline for Iran to stop uranium enrichment -- which also can be used to create nuclear weapons -- or face economic and political sanctions. Tehran has called the U.N. Security Council resolution "illegal" and said it won't stop enrichment as a precondition to negotiations.

Mohammed Saeedi, the deputy head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, said the heavy water plant is "one of the biggest nuclear projects" in the country, state-run television reported. He said the plant will be used in the pharmaceutical field and in diagnosing cancer....

Nuclear weapons can be produced using either plutonium or highly enriched uranium as the explosive core. Either substance can be produced in the process of running a reactor.

Reactors fueled by enriched uranium use regular -- or "light" -- water as a "moderator" in the chain reaction that produces energy. Reactors using "heavy water" contain a heavier hydrogen particle, which allows the reactor to run on natural uranium mined by Iran, foregoing the enrichment progress.

But the spent fuel from a heavy water reactor can be reprocessed to extract plutonium for use in a bomb.

The West's main worry has been uranium enrichment. Iran on Tuesday responded to an incentives package presented by the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council plus Germany aimed at getting Tehran to roll back its disputed nuclear program.

Iran said it would be open to negotiations but did not agree to the West's key demand for Tehran to halt uranium enrichment as a precondition to talks.

At least one key vote on the United Nations Security Council is publicly resisting the Bush administration's desire for the body to enact sanctions against Iran for their nuclear program:

Russia's defense minister said Friday that it was premature to consider punitive actions against Iran despite its refusal so far to suspend its efforts to enrich uranium as the United Nations Security Council has demanded.

Although Russia agreed to the Security Council's resolution on July 31, Defense Minister Sergei B. Ivanov's remarks made it clear that Russia would not support taking the next step that the United States and Britain have called for: imposing sanctions against Iran or its leaders over its nuclear programs. The Council set Aug. 31 as the deadline for Iran to respond to its demand.

Russia has repeatedly expressed opposition to punitive steps, even as President Vladimir V. Putin and others have called on Iran to cooperate with international inspectors and suspend its enrichment activity.

But on Friday Mr. Ivanov went further, saying the issue was not "so urgent" that the Security Council should consider sanctions and expressing doubt that they would work in any case.

"I know of no cases in international practice or the whole of previous experience when sanctions achieved their goals or were efficient," Mr. Ivanov, a close ally of Mr. Putin who also serves as deputy prime minister, said in televised remarks in the Far East....

On Wednesday a spokesman for the Foreign Ministry, Mikhail L. Kamynin, said that it was important to "grasp nuances" in Iran's lengthy written response and that Russia would continue to use its influence with the Iranians.

Urging the Bush administration to "grasp nuances", especially over a matter as important to them as attacking Iran, is like asking an alcoholic to begin a 12-step program on New Year's Eve.

U.S. Cracks Down On Hezbollah TV Provider In NYC

Additional evidence (as if any more is needed by our readers) that the wars of the 21st century will be fought with increasing emphasis on information operations.

A New York man was arrested yesterday on charges that he conspired to support a terrorist group by providing U.S. residents with access to Hezbollah's satellite channel, al-Manar.

Javed Iqbal runs HDTV Corp., a Brooklyn-based company registered with the Federal Communications Commission that provides satellite television transmissions to cable operators, private companies, government organizations and individual customers.

According to an affidavit made public yesterday in U.S. District Court in New York, a paid FBI confidential informant told law enforcement officials in February that Iqbal's company was selling "satellite television service, including access to al-Manar broadcasts." The informant then had a recorded conversation during which Iqbal offered al-Manar broadcasts along with other Arab television stations.

The U.S. Treasury Department in March designated al-Manar a "global terrorist entity" and a media arm of the Hezbollah terrorist network. The designation froze al-Manar's assets in the United States and prohibited any transactions between Americans and al-Manar.

Iqbal's attorney, Mustapha Ndanusa, said yesterday that the accusations against his client are "completely ridiculous," according to the Associated Press. Ndanusa added that he is not aware of another instance in which someone was accused of violating U.S. laws by enabling access to a news outlet.

This episode is important in that governments are starting to find it harder to sell hare-brained military pursuits to their citizenry in the wired world. Without a population that is complacent when faced with the idea of fighting unprovoked wars, those urging such actions quickly lose political traction, and the enterprise becomes unworkable.

Electronic media based information wars thus assume importance that could have only been dreamed about by Goebbels.

That's why the U.S. government is taking such a hard line in this case.

Politicization Of Iran Intelligence Requested By GOP

This politicization of intelligence is most unseemly considering the damage wrought so far by the same malfeasance regarding Iraq.

Some senior Bush administration officials and top Republican lawmakers are voicing anger that American spy agencies have not issued more ominous warnings about the threats that they say Iran presents to the United States.

If the threat was as bad as these lunatics imagine, the intelligence community would not be keeping the facts of the matter under wraps.

A recent Israeli intelligence report -- forwarded to U.S. intelligence agencies -- claims that Iran may be as close as seven months from having a workable nuke. The most recent U.S. estimate says at least four years.

Needless to say, U.S. intelligence analysts are not buying it.

The kooks are out in force:

"When the intelligence community says Iran is 5 to 10 years away from a nuclear weapon, I ask: 'If North Korea were to ship them a nuke tomorrow, how close would they be then?' said Newt Gingrich, the former Republican speaker of the House of Representatives.

What a ludicrous statement. Even if North Korea had a workable nuke (which contrary to the conventional wisdom--they don't) they could ship these weapons to any country in the world, not just Iran. Under Mr. World War III's rationale, we would be forced to take action against every conceivable enemy just because they might receive a weapon from the DPRK.

The issue at hand is Iran's nuclear program.

The GOP members of the House intelligence committee are moving to further politicize the intelligence regarding the Iranian nuclear program.

A key House committee issued a stinging critique of U.S. intelligence on Iran yesterday, charging that the CIA and other agencies lack "the ability to acquire essential information necessary to make judgments" on Tehran's nuclear program, its intentions or even its ties to terrorism.

The 29-page report, principally written by a Republican staff member on the House intelligence committee who holds a hard-line view on Iran, fully backs the White House position that the Islamic republic is moving forward with a nuclear weapons program and that it poses a significant danger to the United States. But it chides the intelligence community for not providing enough direct evidence to support that assertion.

"American intelligence agencies do not know nearly enough about Iran's nuclear weapons program" to help policymakers at a critical time, the report's authors say. Information "regarding potential Iranian chemical weapons and biological weapons programs is neither voluminous nor conclusive," and little evidence has been gathered to tie Iran to al-Qaeda and to the recent fighting between Israel and Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, they say.

Not good enough for pretextual uses. Go back and look again, the House intelligence committee says.

There is an interesting caveat to their report:

(The report)warns the intelligence community to avoid the mistakes made regarding weapons of mass destruction before the Iraq war, noting that Iran could easily be engaged in "a denial and deception campaign to exaggerate progress on its nuclear program as Saddam Hussein apparently did concerning his WMD programs."

The operative information operation is reflected by the existence of this "study."

Jamal Ware, spokesman for the House intelligence committee, said three staff members wrote the report, but he did not dispute that the principal author was Frederick Fleitz, a former CIA officer who had been a special assistant to John R. Bolton, the administration's former point man on Iran at the State Department. Bolton had been highly influential in the crafting of a tough policy that rejected talks with Tehran.

It is really important to a certain element in Washington that the U.S. attacks Iran. However, the track record of this bunch is shaky at best.

Failure is never an option to these people. It is the only possible outcome of their actions.

Iran Main Beneficiary Of U.S. "War On Terror"

Iran says "Outstanding, Red Team, outstanding! Get you a case of beer for that one."

The US-led "war on terror" has bolstered Iran's power and influence in the Middle East, especially over its neighbour and former enemy Iraq, a thinktank said today.

A report published by Chatham House said the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan had removed Iran's main rival regimes in the region.

Israel's conflict with the Palestinians and its invasion of Lebanon had also put Iran "in a position of considerable strength" in the Middle East, said the thinktank.

Unless stability could be restored to the region, Iran's power will continue to grow, according to the report published by Chatham House.

The study said Iran had been swift to fill the political vacuum created by the removal of the Taliban in Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein in Iraq. The Islamic republic now has a level of influence in the region that could not be ignored.

In particular, Iran has now superseded the US as the most influential power in Iraq, regarding its former adversary as its "own backyard". It is also a "prominent presence" in its other war-torn neighbour, Afghanistan, according to Chatham House's analysts.

The report said: "There is little doubt that Iran has been the chief beneficiary of the war on terror in the Middle East.

Reclassification Of Cold War Data Continues

The Bush administration's secrecy fetish -- and specifically the reclassification of previously declassified information -- has been a topic here in the past, see Intelligence Agencies Reclassifying Old Papers at National Archives, Archives Kept Reclassification Program Secret, and Reclassification Update.

The attempts to put the genie back into the bottle is continuing with the government now trying to hide the previously published data on the Cold War numbers of U.S. strategic weapons and weapons systems.

The Bush administration has begun designating as secret some information that the government long provided even to its enemy the former Soviet Union: the numbers of strategic weapons in the U.S. nuclear arsenal during the Cold War.

The Pentagon and the Department of Energy are treating as national security secrets the historical totals of Minuteman, Titan II and other missiles, blacking out the information on previously public documents, according to a new report by the National Security Archive. The archive is a nonprofit research library housed at George Washington University....

The report comes at a time when the Bush administration's penchant for government secrecy has troubled researchers and bred controversy over agency efforts to withhold even seemingly innocuous information. The National Archives was embroiled in scandal during the spring when it was disclosed that the agency had for years kept secret a reclassification program under which the CIA, the Air Force and other agencies removed thousands of records from public shelves....

Experts say there is no national security reason for the administration to keep such historical information under wraps -- especially when it has been publicly available for years.

Robert S. Norris, a senior research associate at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said U.S. officials handed more detailed accounts of the U.S. nuclear arsenal over to the Soviets as part of the two Strategic Arms Reduction Treaties (START) and the two Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) agreements in the 1970s, 1980s and early 1990s.

New Book Says Flight 93 Was Shot Down

There is a new book -- to be published next week in the U.K. -- that alleges that the "let's roll" mythology of 9-11 was concocted to cover up a U.S. military shoot-down of Flight 93 over Pennsylvania.

This theory is not new to readers of this blog, see inter alia, The Flight 93 Shoot Down, Flight 93 Tapes To Be Played in Moussaoui Sentencing Trial, and No Flight 93 CVR Tape To Be Released.

From the new book:

A news report on September 20, 2001, said: "America's defence establishment has disclosed that it ordered its fighter jets to intercept all the passenger aircraft hijacked in last week's attacks on New York and Washington."

The report also stated that military intelligence was aware of the hijackings before any of the aircraft had hit their targets.

Three years later, however, the military said it hadn't heard about Flight 93 until after the plane had crashed -- a line accepted by the official 9/11 Commission, which published its findings in July 2004.

The official inquiry said the Federal Aviation Authority -- responsible for the security and safety of U.S. civilian aviation -- had been incompetent in failing to alert the U.S. Air Force.

But the FAA had already acted quickly in ordering more than 4,000 aircraft to land at the nearest airstrip to avoid any more hijacks. And the military would have learned of Flight 93's hijack via teleconferences set up by the FAA, the White House and the U.S. Defence Department as events began to unfold on September 11. Richard Clarke, who ran the White House video conference, stated that at 9.27am, the FAA informed both Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and General Richard Myers, Chief of Defence Staff, of a number of "potential hijacks" including "United 93 over Pennsylvania". Therefore, more than 25 minutes before Flight 93 went down, both Rumsfeld and Myers knew all about it. No wonder the military's claim to have learned about Flight 93 only after it crashed is dismissed by many as a bare-faced lie.

Excerpt from from Flight 93: What Really Happened On The Heroic 9/11 ‘Let’s Roll’ Flight by Rowland Morgan, published by Constable & Robinson on August 24 at £7.99.

NSA Warrantless Eavesdropping Loses Round One

The case is being kicked upstairs to the U.S. Court of Appeals, but this lower court's ruling (pdf) is a clear blow to those people who believe that President Bush has more power than the founding fathers dictated at the creation of the American experiment.

A federal judge in Detroit ruled yesterday that the National Security Agency's warrantless surveillance program is unconstitutional, delivering the first decision that the Bush administration's effort to monitor communications without court oversight runs afoul of the Bill of Rights and federal law...

Ruling in a lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union and other advocacy groups in the Eastern District of Michigan, Taylor said that the NSA wiretapping program, aimed at communications by potential terrorists, violates privacy and free speech rights and the constitutional separation of powers among the three branches of government. She also found that the wiretaps violate the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the 1978 law instituted to provide judicial oversight of clandestine surveillance within the United States.

"It was never the intent of the framers to give the president such unfettered control, particularly where his actions blatantly disregard the parameters clearly enumerated in the Bill of Rights," Taylor wrote in her 43-page opinion.

Glenn Greenwald adds:

The court's ruling that warrantless eavesdropping violates the Fourth and First Amendments clearly means (although the decision is far from a model of clarity) that Congress cannot authorize warrantless eavesdropping with legislation, which would preclude enforcement of the Specter bill.

This is clearest when the court rejects the administration's argument that the AUMF implicitly authorized violations of FISA. The court ruled that: (a) the AUMF cannot be read to amend FISA, but that (b) even if it could be so read, it would not matter, because Congress cannot authorize an unconstitutional program:

The AUMF Resolution, if indeed it is construed as replacing FISA, gives no support to Defendants here. Even if that Resolution superceded all other statutory law, Defendants have violated the constitutional rights of their citizens.

Op. at 39 (emphasis added). If Congress is not empowered to authorize this program through the AUMF (because the program is unconstitutional), then there is no good argument as to why the Specter bill can.

FISA as it stands does not prohibit the government from spying on terrorists or those legitimately suspected of contact with terrorists. The Bush administration took advantage of a bad situation to implement a warrantless surveillance program that has serious potential for abuse.

The all-purpose justification that "we were hit on 9-11" has outworn its utility. The president and his cohorts have been acting to strip the freedoms from the American people that the Islamic terrorists supposedly hate us for having.

As if that will make the Islamists any less angry with U.S. policies in the Middle East.

The pusillanimous supporters of the Bush administration are going to need to manage their own fears responsibly, and stop expecting everyone else to forfeit their own freedoms.

Then, if the nebbish community still requires additional assistance to cope, they really need look no further than their local supermarket.

Adult diapers are always cheap and available.

U.S. Position In Iraq Deteriorating

In the last two months, an increasing number of supporters of the Iraq war in Washington have been voicing doubts about the mission and asking hard questions of the DOD and uniformed military who have been sent to the Hill to brief lawmakers.

This is because things are getting worse on the ground, and are showing little chance for improvement.

The number of roadside bombs planted in Iraq rose in July to the highest monthly total of the war, offering more evidence that the anti-American insurgency has continued to strengthen despite the killing of the terrorist leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

Along with a sharp increase in sectarian attacks, the number of daily strikes against American and Iraqi security forces has doubled since January. The deadliest means of attack, roadside bombs, made up much of that increase. In July, of 2,625 explosive devices, 1,666 exploded and 959 were discovered before they went off. In January, 1,454 bombs exploded or were found.

The bomb statistics -- compiled by American military authorities in Baghdad and made available at the request of The New York Times -- are part of a growing body of data and intelligence analysis about the violence in Iraq that has produced somber public assessments from military commanders, administration officials and lawmakers on Capitol Hill.

"The insurgency has gotten worse by almost all measures, with insurgent attacks at historically high levels," said a senior Defense Department official who agreed to discuss the issue only on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak for attribution. "The insurgency has more public support and is demonstrably more capable in numbers of people active and in its ability to direct violence than at any point in time."

A separate, classified report by the Defense Intelligence Agency, dated Aug. 3, details worsening security conditions inside the country and describes how Iraq risks sliding toward civil war, according to several officials who have read the document or who have received a briefing on its contents.

The nine-page D.I.A. study, titled "Iraq Update," compiles the most recent empirical data on the number of attacks, bombings, murders and other violent acts, as well as diagrams of the groups carrying out insurgent and sectarian attacks, the officials said.

The report's contents are being widely discussed among Pentagon officials, military commanders and, in particular, on Capitol Hill, where concern among senior lawmakers of both parties is growing over a troubling dichotomy: even as Iraq takes important steps toward democracy -- including the election of a permanent government this spring -- the violence has gotten worse.

Senior Bush administration officials reject the idea that Iraq is on the verge of civil war, and state with unwavering confidence that the broad American strategy in Iraq remains on course.

This willful disregard of the facts by the administration is resulting in more Americans being sent to their doom for no better reason than to help forestall the loss of face for the plotters of the Iraq misadventure.

There is an old truism that warns against throwing good money after bad.

A related maxim in finance points to the folly of adding to a bad position.

The architects of the war -- mostly wealthy men -- wouldn't dare ignore such admonitions when dealing with their own money.

It is easier to take reckless chances when you are playing with other peoples' assets.

Or blood.

Bush Unhappy With Lack Of Iraqi Appreciation For U.S. Mission

This is a symptom of the type of leadership you get when you elect a president who has a selective ability to empathize with the downtrodden.

President Bush made clear in a private meeting this week that he was concerned about the lack of progress in Iraq and frustrated that the new Iraqi government -- and the Iraqi people -- had not shown greater public support for the American mission, participants in the meeting said Tuesday.

He is probably still wondering why the Iraqi people have been so remiss in presenting our troops with the expected flowers upon their liberation.

More generally, the participants said, the president expressed frustration that Iraqis had not come to appreciate the sacrifices the United States had made in Iraq, and was puzzled as to how a recent anti-American rally in support of Hezbollah in Baghdad could draw such a large crowd. "I do think he was frustrated about why 10,000 Shiites would go into the streets and demonstrate against the United States," said another person who attended.

He must have been really frustrated when he heard the truth that the Baghdad demonstration actually had more than 100,000 participants.

One participant in the lunch, Carole A. O'Leary, a professor at American University who is also doing work in Iraq with a State Department grant, said Mr. Bush expressed the view that "the Shia-led government needs to clearly and publicly express the same appreciation for United States efforts and sacrifices as they do in private."

Bush, a master of pandering to his domestic base, does not understand that such political considerations are common to every country?

Meanwhile, the civil war in Iraq -- which the administration is taking great pains to avoid acknowledging -- is growing worse:

July appears to have been the deadliest month of the war for Iraqi civilians, according to figures from the Health Ministry and the Baghdad morgue, reinforcing criticism that the Baghdad security plan started in June by the new government has failed.

An average of more than 110 Iraqis were killed each day in July, according to the figures. The total number of civilian deaths that month, 3,438, is a 9 percent increase over the tally in June and nearly double the toll in January.

The rising numbers suggested that sectarian violence is spiraling out of control, and seemed to bolster an assertion many senior Iraqi officials and American military analysts have made in recent months: that the country is already embroiled in a civil war, not just slipping toward one, and that the American-led forces are caught between Sunni Arab guerrillas and Shiite militias.

We will see every semantic trick imaginable by the administration to avoid admitting the truth that Iraq is already embroiled in a civil war. Pro-war Sen. John Warner of the Senate Armed Services Committee has been giving hints that a withdrawal will be forthcoming if civil war breaks out.

A withdrawal under less than favorable circumstances would remind the world of America's last big military fiasco.

And make it much harder for the U.S. to insouciantly throw its weight around in the international arena.

Propaganda Over London "Airline Plot" Examined

The media eagerly ate up and regurgitated the propaganda that was spoon-fed to them about the "unimaginable proportions" of the pernicious London "airline plot."

Soon after the alleged terror plot to blow up trans-Atlantic flights last week, one of the first things that became apparent was that the so-called independent media were being far from independent in their reporting of this alleged plot foiled by the British police and security services, for long plagued by accusations of being inept and trigger-happy.

Although bias was evident in all media, it was especially prevalent in the round-the-clock coverage of their broadcasting counterparts - and it was almost physically painful to behold. For example, it was clear from the outset that what we were being told was devoid of any analysis; what was being served up was being served up straight from the mouths of the securitariat, verbatim.

For example, we were told that the alleged plot entailed blowing up five US-bound planes from London with liquid explosives. That was on Thursday, the day the alleged plot was foiled. Had the alleged plot been successful, we were told, it would have resulted in the deaths of "hundreds of innocent civilians". This was credible, in the sense that five aircraft would obviously be capable of carrying hundreds of passengers.

MISINFORMATION IN REAL TIME

However, this figure would clearly not do, given that the very next day a top cop was featured claiming that its success would have resulted in "mass killing of unimaginable proportions". This was on both the BBC and Sky. Since "hundreds of deaths", by any stretch of the imagination, did not qualify for the tag of "unimaginable proportions", the figure for aircraft targeted was swiftly revised upwards the following day to "at least ten".

It was thus not surprising to learn several hours later from the "independent" media that the alleged plot would have resulted in the "mass murder of thousands". Given this slight adjustment of the figures, our friends were now able to say that this mass "mass murder" would have been "unprecedented". If anything, we were witnessing misinformation and propagandising in real time.

Some might say that it is possible that the figures were progressively revised as and when information from the securitariat became available to our friends in the corporate media. However, even if that was the case, why was there no questioning of the figures and the rest of the information being spoon-fed to the media by the authorities? Given the fiascos of the execution of the innocent Brazilian Jean Charles de Menezes on the pretext he was a would-be suicide bomber, the bogus "ricin plot" and the Forest Gate Two, this lack of independence and journalistic detachment was glaring. These guys were in bed with the politicians!

An inquisitive person may ask why the basis for these revisions in the figures was not made public. It may be the case that certain information was being withheld until the alleged plotters were formally charged, but something so crucial as the reliability of data emanating from sources which have engaged in misinformation on previous occasions should have been treated with more professionalism.

The media were indeed remiss in their duty to the public and the democratic process. Also, how could the deaths by terrorist bombing of "thousands of innocent civilians" by these alleged plotters be described by any right-thinking person as "unimaginable" or "unprecedented", in a new world order with reference points such as Bush Senior's 1991 Gulf Slaughter of innocent Iraqis (at least 250,000) , Junior's in 2003 (at least 100,000) and 9/11?

The casual observer would be forgiven for drawing two obvious conclusions from this. First, that the lives of Arabs and Muslims, or non-Western or non-white victims of terrorism do not matter. Second, that the whole coverage of the alleged plot was being hyped up for some nefarious purpose. And one did not have to wait long for the latter suspicion to be confirmed, for just a few hours later the BBC informed us that the government was planning to rush through parliament new anti-terror legislation.

That misinformation and propagandising was involved here has other things going for it. Aside from providing ample justification for the introduction of more repressive, fascist-like anti-terror legislation, it very conveniently came at a crucial time in the neocon "war against terror" -- after the "civilised" nations were frantically searching for much-needed cover for the carte blanche accorded Israel to commit war crimes in its attempt to crush the Hizbolla and Hamas resistance to neocon/Zionist ambitions in the Middle East.

The rationale here is that people would be thus persuaded to connect the dots of a spurious equivalence between the alleged plot to "commit mass murder on an unimaginable or unprecedented scale", and the legitimate resistance by Hizbolla and Palestinian freedom fighters. Since both sets of "perpetrators" were labelled as "Islamic terrorists", then their methods and objectives would be seen as an attack on "our way of life" and, to use the refrain of the extra-planetary "war president" Bush, "an attack on freedom and democracy".

Bush Claims Israel Won Lebanon War

President Bush is clearly no Clausewitz:

President Bush, just hours after a cease-fire took hold Monday, said Hezbollah guerrillas had suffered a sound defeat at the hands of Israel in their month long Mideast war...

"Hezbollah attacked Israel, Hezbollah started the crisis, and Hezbollah suffered a defeat in this crisis," the president said. "The reason why is, this is because there's going to be a new power in the south of Lebanon, and that's going to be a Lebanese force with a robust international force to help them seize control of the country."

If this is the caliber of briefing that the president of the United States is getting these days, then the country is in big trouble.

More likely, the briefers have shared the bad news with the president, and he is putting on the best possible public face.

Hezbollah is recognized by everyone in the world to have dealt Israel a severe blow to their military posture as the big kid with the best toys in the neighborhood. Israel was incapable of preventing attacks upon their nation for over a month by a militia which will not be disarmed and will blend back into the towns and villages of South Lebanon to be available for future action.

This equals a political victory for Hezbollah.

Bush pretty much has to kiss Israel's ass at this point, because it is becoming clearer that he had a large role in the disproportional response conducted by the Jewish state in the wake of the awaited pretext.

Amid the political and diplomatic fallout from Israel's faltering invasion of Lebanon, some Israeli officials are privately blaming President George W. Bush for egging Prime Minister Ehud Olmert into the ill-conceived military adventure against the Hezbollah militia in south Lebanon.

Bush conveyed his strong personal support for the military offensive during a White House meeting with Olmert on May 23, according to sources familiar with the thinking of senior Israeli leaders.

May 23, eh? That was some time before the capture of the two Israeli soldiers near Aita al Shaab on the Lebanese border.

As part of Bush's determination to create a "new Middle East" -- one that is more amenable to U.S. policies and desires -- Bush even urged Israel to attack Syria, but the Olmert government refused to go that far, according to Israeli sources.

One source said some Israeli officials thought Bush's attack-Syria idea was "nuts" since much of the world would have seen the bombing campaign as overt aggression.

In an article on July 30, the Jerusalem Post referred to Bush's interest in a wider war involving Syria. Israeli "defense officials told the Post last week that they were receiving indications from the US that America would be interested in seeing Israel attack Syria," the newspaper reported.

With U.S. forces bogged down in Iraq, Bush and his neoconservative advisers saw the inclusion of Israeli forces as crucial for advancing a strategy that would punish Syria for supporting Iraqi insurgents, advance the confrontation with Iran and isolate Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza.

Strategic setbacks are becoming something of a habit for the Bush administration.

Each time the White House engineers one of their ideologically-inspired fiascos, it is helping to create a world which is less safe for Americans.

These ill-considered moves are not "showing strength", but instead displaying weakness and inviting further problems for the United States in the future.

I will bet that Israel doesn't ask "how high?", the next time the U.S. says "jump."

Hersh: Lebanon Is Warm Up For Iran War

Investigative reporter Seymour Hersh says that the U.S. and Israel coordinated the air war against Hezbollah in Lebanon to destroy the Shiite militia's capability to respond to a U.S. attack against Iran.

The Bush Administration ... was closely involved in the planning of Israel's retaliatory attacks. President Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney were convinced, current and former intelligence and diplomatic officials told me, that a successful Israeli Air Force bombing campaign against Hezbollah's heavily fortified underground-missile and command-and-control complexes in Lebanon could ease Israel's security concerns and also serve as a prelude to a potential American pre-emptive attack to destroy Iran's nuclear installations, some of which are also buried deep underground. ...

According to a Middle East expert with knowledge of the current thinking of both the Israeli and the U.S. governments, Israel had devised a plan for attacking Hezbollah -- and shared it with Bush Administration officials -- well before the July 12th kidnappings. ...

A Pentagon consultant said that the Bush White House "has been agitating for some time to find a reason for a pre-emptive blow against Hezbollah." He added, "it was our intent to have Hezbollah diminished, and now we have someone else doing it." ...

Earlier this summer, before the Hezbollah kidnappings, the U.S. government consultant said, several Israeli officials visited Washington, separately, "to get a green light for the bombing operation and to find out how much the United States would bear." The consultant added, "Israel began with Cheney. It wanted to be sure that it had his support and the support of his office and the Middle East desk of the National Security Council." After that, "persuading Bush was never a problem, and Condi Rice was on board," the consultant said.

The initial plan, as outlined by the Israelis, called for a major bombing campaign in response to the next Hezbollah provocation, according to the Middle East expert with knowledge of U.S. and Israeli thinking. Israel believed that, by targeting Lebanon's infrastructure, including highways, fuel depots, and even the civilian runways at the main Beirut airport, it could persuade Lebanon's large Christian and Sunni populations to turn against Hezbollah, according to the former senior intelligence official...

The Israeli plan, according to the former senior intelligence official, was "the mirror image of what the United States has been planning for Iran." ...

Cheney's office supported the Israeli plan, as did Elliott Abrams, a deputy national-security adviser, according to several former and current officials. (A spokesman for the N.S.C. denied that Abrams had done so.) They believed that Israel should move quickly in its air war against Hezbollah. A former intelligence officer said, "We told Israel, 'Look, if you guys have to go, we're behind you all the way. But we think it should be sooner rather than later -- the longer you wait, the less time we have to evaluate and plan for Iran before Bush gets out of office.' " ...

The long-term Administration goal was to help set up a Sunni Arab coalition -- including countries like Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Egypt -- that would join the United States and Europe to pressure the ruling Shiite mullahs in Iran. "But the thought behind that plan was that Israel would defeat Hezbollah, not lose to it," the consultant with close ties to Israel said. ...

Nonetheless, some officers serving with the Joint Chiefs of Staff remain deeply concerned that the Administration will have a far more positive assessment of the air campaign than they should, the former senior intelligence official said. "There is no way that Rumsfeld and Cheney will draw the right conclusion about this," he said. "When the smoke clears, they'll say it was a success, and they'll draw reinforcement for their plan to attack Iran." ...

The crisis will really start at the end of August, the diplomat added, "when the Iranians" -- under a United Nations deadline to stop uranium enrichment -- "will say no."

Neo-Cons Criticize Israel For Not Being Aggressive Enough In Lebanon

American neoconservatives, who as a group have given pathetically inexpert military advice in our ill-fated endeavor in Iraq, are extending their advertised incompetence to Israel's war in Lebanon.

The neo-cons' desire to extend the war to neighboring countries is prompting some of the usual suspects to recommend a more aggressive ground campaign in what they view as America's proxy war against the Islamic Republic of Iran.

The major American Jewish newspaper, The Forward, has an article complaining about "backstage generals, sitting in Washington or in New York, trying to manage Israel's war."

Staunchly pro-Israel conservatives with close ties to the Bush administration say that Jerusalem is hindering America's global war on terror by failing to wage an all-out war to eliminate Hezbollah.

In interviews with the Forward and in recently published opinion articles, conservatives slammed Israel's reluctance to launch a comprehensive ground-war against the Lebanese Shiite militia. Top Israeli officials -- particularly Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, Defense Minister Amir Peretz and the military's chief of staff, Dan Halutz -- have been subject to unusually harsh criticism from the pro-Israel right, including prominent neoconservatives.

By not dealing a swift, decisive blow to Hezbollah, these critics say, Israel is eroding its own ability to deter terrorist attacks and undermining efforts by the democratic world to demonstrate that the international community is resolute in its campaign to defeat terrorism.

"The only way you defeat an organization like Hezbollah is on the ground. So I would have been much more comfortable if the Israelis had called up all of their reserves and gone all out in Lebanon from the first 24 hours," former speaker of the House of Representatives Newt Gingrich told the Forward. Bombing campaigns, Gingrich said, are "counterproductive, because they don't hurt the enemy that much and they weaken you on television."

Gingrich has lately appeared dangerously unhinged in his advocacy of "World War III", and shouldn't be taken seriously by anyone.

Comments similar to Gingrich's are reverberating throughout conservative think tanks in Washington, and -- according to some sources and pundits -- are shared by hawks in the Bush administration. Charles Krauthammer, a leading neoconservative commentator, wrote a column insisting that Olmert's "unsteady and uncertain leadership" is threatening the Bush administration's confidence in Israel as a dependable and strategic ally in the war on terror.

Publicly, at least, the administration has not expressed any such criticism of Israel. Some spokesmen have denied sharply the suggestion that Washington has given Israel a "green light" to pursue the campaign against Hezbollah. But in private conversations, sources close to the White House and the Pentagon said, administration hawks have expressed disappointment and frustration about Israel's inability to deal a swift and decisive blow to Hezbollah.

Frustration and impotence seem to be endemic to the administration in many areas of policy these days. This is caused, of course, by unrealistic expectations of success in questionable undertakings. The "stay the course" approach in Iraq comes from this denial of the facts on the ground. Denial being the operative strategy for the Iraq war, why not apply it to the Lebanon imbroglio?

"Some in the administration expected that Hezbollah, which is a fully owned Iranian subsidiary, would be not just bloodied but put in a desperate position," said Ariel Cohen, a Middle East expert at the Washington-based Heritage Foundation. "So far, we are not seeing that." It is not clear whether these sentiments were communicated to Israel and whether the administration advised or pressured Israel to change its war tactics accordingly. Multiple well-placed sources said that administration officials did convey their puzzlement with the slow pace of the operation.

Charles Krauthammer, who is on record as having screamed for several minutes at a insufficiently warmongering rabbi in his synagogue during a Yom Kippur service, gives a subtle hint to the Israeli government by implicitly threatening their lifeline from the U.S (from the Forward article):

Krauthammer, in a scathing August 4 column that ruffled the feathers of many in Washington's pro-Israel community, wrote that because Israel has failed to score a clear victory against Hezbollah, it is missing a "rare opportunity to demonstrate that it can contribute to America's global war against militant Islam" and, in the process, it was triggering serious questions within the administration about Israel's strategic value to America. Olmert's "search for victory on the cheap has jeopardized not just the Lebanon operation but America's confidence in Israel as well," Krauthammer wrote.

The neo-cons, who have no idea of the dynamics of Fourth Generation warfare, are trying again to get the U.S. to bite off more than it can chew by calling for impulsive ventures into dark alleys in the Middle East. That is the motivation of their seemingly ill-timed (and certainly ill-advised) advice to Israel to step up the level of violence.

Crass Political Pandering Over London Airline Plot

The Bush administration -- which allowed Osama bin Laden to escape from Tora Bora, and then pulled troops away from the real war on terrorism to pursue the neo-con wet dream of domination over the Arab hoards in Iraq -- is now using the London airline plot as a political cudgel against people who have been right all along about the White House's misplaced priorities in the national security arena.

"The country is safer than it was prior to 9/11," (President Bush) said in Green Bay. "We've taken a lot of measures to protect the American people. But obviously, we're still not completely safe, because there are people that still plot and people who want to harm us for what we believe in."

If Bush really believes that the Muslim terrorists hate us "for what we believe in", and not for our decades-long support of Israel and dictatorial Arab regimes in the Middle East, all the presidential assistants and intelligence community briefers need to be fired and replaced by people willing to tell the emperor the real deal about his fancy new duds.

Some odious shitpails are also jumping on the bandwagon, including a prominent whiny con-man:

Campaigning in Connecticut, Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman, who lost Tuesday's Democratic primary and is now running as an independent, said the antiwar views of primary winner Ned Lamont would be "taken as a tremendous victory by the same people who wanted to blow up these planes in this plot hatched in England."

Rep. Mark Kennedy, the Republican Senate candidate in Minnesota, used the alleged plot as a campaign wedge only hours after it was disclosed.

"The arrests this morning in Great Britain make it clear that now, more than ever, this is an ongoing battle and we need leaders in Washington who remain committed to doing what is right instead of what may be seen as politically advantageous," he said. To amplify the point, Kennedy endorsed Lieberman over the GOP candidate in the race, Alan Schlesinger.

Rep. Kennedy proves that the death of irony has been prematurely announced.

The natural tendency of people to ignore the "boy who cried wolf" is working against the administration in this latest terrorism threat:

(T)he alleged British plot "is really, really serious," one intelligence official insisted yesterday. "This is the real deal. Honestly. This was not the Moorish Nation," he said, referring to the arrest this summer in Miami of a ragtag, FBI-infiltrated group allegedly plotting to blow up the Sears Tower in Chicago. "We have reason to believe that this is an al-Qaeda-related operation. I don't mean in terms of a bunch of wannabes finding inspiration" in bin Laden.

If the London plotters really are Al Qaeda, this is further proof that Bush's reckless abandonment of the war against Osama bin Laden is coming back to haunt us.

As will any future attacks by Al Qaeda.

But some experts are not convinced by the claims that the airline plot was really Al Qaeda at all:

Others were withholding judgment on al-Qaeda's ties to the alleged plot in England. "I would say that the core of the organization has suffered some serious blows," said Daniel L. Byman, director of Georgetown University's Security Studies Program. "It's harder for them to do large-scale operations successfully, and their ability to do long-term planning of catastrophic events has degraded. But they still have a number of skilled operatives and global connections, and a strong desire" to stage such attacks.

Byman said, however, that he is "still very skeptical until I see more evidence of how close these guys really were" to al-Qaeda. "I've read too many breathless FBI statements" over the years, he said.

We all have lived through the politicization of national security by the Rovian attack dogs.

Perhaps Bush shouldn't have let Osama bin Laden get away when he could have heeded the recommendation of Special Forces and CIA officers to send available elements of the 10th Mountain Division into Tora Bora to conduct a blocking action rather than to leave the job to Afghan warlords who turned out to be on the Al Qaeda payroll.

The dereliction of duty by the president by going to Iraq rather than staying and finishing bin Laden will be an important point in any future debates about the "war on terror."

The people who used the threat of terrorism as a political tool here in America may well rue the day they decided on that slimy course of action.

Wider "Clash Of Civilizations" Beckons

Seeing that the international community is in no hurry to help dig them out of the hole they are in, Israel has decided to expand the ground offensive that has thus far been less than effective against Hezbollah.

Making a bad matter worse seems to be the mantra. Maybe if they can piss off enough people in the region, events will escalate and the U.S. can be relied upon to join the fight.

That has to be the strategy. Viz the following:

(Eli Yishai, the Israeli trade minister) told reporters ... he believes the military should prolong its air campaign against rocket launchers. "In my opinion, entire villages should be eliminated from the air when we have verified information that Katyusha rockets are being fired from there," he said.

Guernica, anyone?

The diplomatic delaying tactic by the United States continues, with adverse consequences for Israel on the ground now, and probably for the U.S. soon. It is clear now why the neo-cons thought that John Bolton would be a good pick for U.S. ambassador to the U.N.. The "clash of civilizations" beckons:

(T)he United States has backed Israel's demand that it be permitted to remain in southern Lebanon until a new, larger and more muscular international force is brought in to supervise the 50-mile border and guarantee that Hezbollah can no longer attack Israeli cities. Bolton insisted that the United States is committed to ensuring an "effective security presence in the southern part of Lebanon as the Israeli forces withdraw."

"We don't want Hezbollah to re-infiltrate the southern part of Lebanon," he added.

That's putting the cart before the horse, to put it mildly.

Israel has been unable to eject Hezbollah from South Lebanon. Bolton is setting up as a diplomatic sticking point a fanciful scenario that is unrealistic in the short to mid term timetable for a cease-fire that the international community (sans the U.S.) recognizes as being essential for defusing a wider conflict.

A wider regional war against Islam is clearly the goal here of the United States. If the nearly month-long preclusion by the U.S. of effective diplomacy isn't evidence enough, the steadfast refusal to view events with the dispassionate clarity that real crises demand is an error of commission.

Errors of commission are usually not really errors at all.

An Israeli Expert's View On The Lebanon Morass

Does this type of reasoning sound familiar?

"I don't think anybody had any way to really grasp the implications of this kind of war," said Gerald Steinberg, head of the conflict management program at Bar-Ilan University.

The preceeding quote might lead the reader to think that the professor is not conversant with the concept of Fourth Generation Warfare.

However, a glance at his published oeuvre shows that Prof. Steinberg is actually well acquainted with the concept of assymetrical war. However, he apparently drew questionable conclusions going forward from the Israeli "success" against the Palestinians:

(H)ad the IDF not responded powerfully to the Kassam rocket barrages from Gaza, they would indeed have continued ... Instead, the military response created the necessary conditions for a return, at least for now, to a political relationship and a deterrence-based cease-fire.

He does have an opinion about the issue of disproportional force and the info wars being fought over serial Israeli overreactions:

(T)here is no basis for blaming the IDF in the context of the political war that has been waged to delegitimize and demonize Israeli responses to terror ... A small number of targeted attacks against terrorists may have, in retrospect, applied "excessive force" that resulted in accidental civilian deaths, but the vast majority were morally and military justified, and saved countless Israeli lives.

The basic national security attitude of Israel and the post 9-11 United States turn out to be rather similiar:

However, the main question is not how well the IDF performs relative to the armies of other democracies fighting similarly “dirty wars.” For Israelis, the core issue is whether their freedom and their lives are protected to the greatest possible extent.

In a nutshell, this is the calculus that leads countries into military misadventures that turn into national nightmares.

Shebaa Farms Bullshittery From Bolton

Sounds like someone is bullshitting us here:

But the United States ruled out putting Shebaa Farms under U.N. custody since the Security Council concluded that Israel had fully withdrawn from Lebanon years ago. "If there's going to be a change in the condition of Shebaa Farms, that's for Syria and Lebanon to decide," U.S. Ambassador John R. Bolton said.

WTF?

Bolton neglects to mention that Israel occupies Shebaa Farms and that Lebanon and Syria can decide to "change the condition of Shebaa Farms" until the cows come home, and that won't make any difference as to who controls that particular piece of real estate.

It is Hezbollah's demand that Israel give up Shebaa Farms that is one of the intractable issues that will need to be addressed, one way or another, in order to get to the "sustainable cease-fire" that President Bush claims to desire.

Bolton knows this, and knows that Israel occupies Shebaa Farms, yet still makes a statement that everyone in the world (except the Americans) will view as evidence that the U.S. is not ready to be a partner in seeking a negotiated solution to the crisis.

Israel is increasingly interested in getting help from the international community in extricating itself from the mess they have created by their escalation of a minor border skirmish with Hezbollah. And their enabler, the U.S. -- by going with risibly amateurish gambits -- is continuing to let down the team diplomatically.

U.S. Got Blair To Fire Foreign Secretary Jack Straw

A distinguished (not to mention, well-connected) British insider is alleging that the United States prevailed upon Prime Minister Tony Blair to fire Foreign Secretary Jack Straw because he wouldn't support an attack upon Iran.

When Jack Straw was replaced by Margaret Beckett as Foreign Secretary, it seemed an almost inexplicable event. Mr Straw had been very competent -- experienced, serious, moderate and always well briefed. Margaret Beckett is embarrassingly inexperienced. I made inquiries in Washington and was told that Donald Rumsfeld, the Defence Secretary, had taken exception to Mr Straw's statement that it would be "nuts" to bomb Iran. The United States, it was said, had put pressure on Tony Blair to change his Foreign Secretary. Mr Straw had been fired at the request of the Bush Administration, particularly at the Pentagon.

The Lebanon War skullduggery -- being connected to the plans for attacking Iran -- also figures into Baron Rees-Mogg's narrative:

It is also possible that Mr Straw was moved sideways because Mr Blair already had preliminary information that Israel planned to hit back hard at any aggression by Hezbollah. When the Hezbollah kidnapping and the Israeli counter-attack took place, the United States and Britain jointly refused to call for an immediate ceasefire. The fighting, with its terrible impact on Lebanon, has now continued for four weeks. There is an allegation that Israel's plans for the counter-strike were given to the Americans, and that information was passed to the Prime Minister. These questions will be pressed if Parliament is recalled. Obviously Mr Straw's potential resignation in these circumstances would have been very difficult for the Prime Minister.

The "who knew what and where" issue will not go away. If there is no immediate and effective ceasefire in Lebanon, there will be increasingly urgent demands for the recall of Parliament. Lebanon will be raised at the Labour Party conference, as will Iraq and Afghanistan. The Labour Party is pro-Palestinian, critical of Israel, and hostile to the Bush Administration. Many Labour Members of Parliament want a new leader, if only to save their seats. The annual July political crisis started in April this year, and will still be running in November.

Strategic Thinking From The White House

Thought for the day:

(Dan Bartlett, the White House counselor) said the administration would spend the fall explaining the strategy in Iraq, describing success as certain and providing “the necessary context and consequences and stakes in the fight,” which the administration has defined as creating the democratic conditions needed to defeat terrorism.

Israeli Public Support For Lebanon War Starts To Waver

Americans who watched in horror as our government bit off more than it could chew in Iraq can entirely understand the feelings of a growing segment of the Israeli public.

With much of Israel's northern population huddling in underground shelters and Hezbollah proving more resilient than Israeli leaders had publicly predicted, Israel's news media, intellectual elite and public are starting to question the judgment of the country's political and military leadership.

After an extraordinary national surge of unanimity during the first days of the conflict, public support is starting to fray, with some of the nation's most influential voices criticizing political leaders and Israel Defense Forces generals for military strategies they say have failed to protect Israeli citizens.

They blame Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Defense Minister Amir Peretz for trying to lull citizens into a false sense of security, fault generals for relying too heavily on air power to destroy Hezbollah rocket launchers, and worry that Israeli troops may not have been prepared to defeat a force far tougher than Palestinian fighters....

"The strikes on the home front are becoming worse as the IDF sends more and more brigades into Lebanon," wrote Amos Harel in the daily newspaper Haaretz. "Launchings from areas in which the army is operating have been reduced by half, but Hezbollah combatants simply relocate to the next range of hills and fire from there."

Israel is currently hoping that the international community can come up with a peacekeeping force to move into the (still limited) areas that Israel has taken in South Lebanon.

If such a force cannot be assembled, Israel will have the Hobson's choice of either remaining as an occupation force, or departing and allowing Hezbollah to move back into their old positions.

Blair Receives Iraq Civil War Warning

Everything is not going along swimmingly in Iraq these days, according to a well informed Brit.

Civil war is a more likely outcome in Iraq than democracy, Britain's outgoing ambassador in Baghdad has warned Tony Blair in a confidential memo.

William Patey, who left the Iraqi capital last week, also predicted the break-up of Iraq along ethnic lines....

BBC correspondent Paul Wood said although the document does not contradict government denials that civil war is imminent, "it is a devastating official assessment of the prospects for a peaceful Iraq, and stands in stark contrast to the public rhetoric".

The bleak assessment of the country's future was contained in Mr Patey's final e-cable, or diplomatic telegram, from Baghdad.

The distribution list included the UK's prime minister, foreign secretary, defence secretary and House of Commons leader, as well as senior military commanders in both Iraq and the UK.

Mr Patey wrote: "The prospect of a low intensity civil war and a de facto division of Iraq is probably more likely at this stage than a successful and substantial transition to a stable democracy.

"Even the lowered expectation of President Bush for Iraq - a government that can sustain itself, defend itself and govern itself and is an ally in the war on terror - must remain in doubt."

In other Iraq news, testimony in a Article 32 military judicial hearing claimed that some rather unorthodox orders were given to soldiers of the 101st Airborne Division who are facing allegations of murder:

Four American soldiers from an Army combat unit that killed three Iraqis in a raid in May testified Wednesday that they had received orders from superior officers to kill all the military-age men they encountered.

The soldiers gave their accounts at a military hearing here to determine if four colleagues should face courts-martial on charges that they carried out a plan to murder the three Iraqis, whom they had seized after an assault on what they were told was an insurgent stronghold northwest of Baghdad.

Their testimony gave credence to statements from two defendants that an officer had told their platoon to "kill all military-age males" in the assault, regardless of any threat they posed. That officer, Col. Michael Steele, has declined to testify, an unusual decision for a commander....

"We are now talking about the possibility of command responsibility, not just unlawful orders and simple murder, "said Gary D. Solis, a former military judge and prosecutor who teaches the law of war at Georgetown University.

Environmental Disaster On Lebanese Coast

How not to "Win Friends and Influence People":

The fires continued to burn Monday at a seaside power plant, the source of 15,000 tons of heavy fuel oil that spilled into pristine Mediterranean waters after an Israeli attack two weeks ago. The resulting slick has fouled close to 50 miles of beaches and rocky coastline, and threatens aquatic life and the fishing industry.

Emergency teams at the Jiyah plant on the southern Lebanon coast are allowing oil to burn, sending up towering plumes of black smoke, in an effort to prevent further spills into the sea. But it is too late for the coastline from Damour in the south to the prime beach district of Amchit and Byblos north of the capital....

"We are really talking about an environmental massacre here, with about 15,000 tons of heavy fuel oil," said Edgard Chehab, head of the U.N. Development Program unit for energy and the environment. By comparison, the tanker Exxon Valdez released about 38,000 tons of crude oil after running aground in Alaskan coastal waters in 1989.

"This is affecting algae, rocky and sandy beaches, as well as aquatic life," he said. Because of the thickness of the oil, "oxygen cannot enter the water and the life chain of aquatic vegetation that fish eat to survive will die. Fishermen who make their daily living off this sector are doomed," he added.

Israel in Lebanon has already proved to be as challenged in the area of "4th Generation Warfare" as has the U.S. in Iraq, and still apparently needs further lessons:

The Israeli security Cabinet today unanimously approved extending its military campaign in southern Lebanon with a ground sweep four miles into Lebanese territory.

The plans kill off hopes of an early ceasefire and resolution to the conflict, which were raised by optimistic comments by Condoleezza Rice and Tony Blair yesterday. Ms Rice claimed that a ceasefire was achievable within a week.

Today even the 48-hour halt to Israeli air strikes appeared to be null and void, as Israeli warplanes carried out numerous bombing missions overnight at the scene of fierce fighting between Hezbollah and Israeli troops near the border.

The cessation had been trumpeted by the US State Department on Sunday night as a diplomatic success for Ms Rice, but more cautiously described by Israel as a "restriction" in aerial attacks in response to the massacre of Lebanese civilians at Qana on Sunday, while reserving the right to continue using air strikes if it came under attack....

The Israeli army claimed that it had advanced half a mile, and rejected a claim by Hezbollah, the Shia military and political grouping, that it had forced Israeli troops to retreat in another part of the border, 20 miles to the south-west.