Worth Reading 20060722

Worth reading, July 22, 2006:

The Minister of Civil War (Harpers.org) Bayan Jabr, Paul Bremer, and the rise of the Iraqi death squads. By Ken Silverstein: In May 2005, Shiite militia groups in Iraq began depositing corpses into the streets and garbage dumps of Baghdad. The victims, overwhelmingly Sunni, were typically found blindfolded and handcuffed, their corpses showing signs of torture--broken skulls, burn marks, gouged-out eyeballs, electric drill holes; by that October, the death toll attributed to such groups had grown to more than 500. In November, American troops discovered more than 160 beaten, whipped, and starved prisoners--again, mostly Sunni--at a secret detention center run by the country's Interior Ministry. Since then, Shiite militias have become so integrated into the Iraqi government's security apparatus and their work so organized, systematic, and targeted that they are commonly referred to in Iraq (and in the American media) by their proper name: death squads. The death squads, which have expanded their area of operations from the capital across much of the country, are now believed to be responsible for more civilian deaths than the Sunni and foreign insurgents who are the United States' ostensible enemies there. By any reasonable measure, Iraq is in a state of civil war, and some of its most ruthless and lawless combatants are members of the government's own security units. The rise of the death squads corresponds almost precisely to the April 2005 appointment of Bayan Jabr as interior minister in Iraq's transitional government. The Interior Ministry, which is something like a combined FBI and Department of Homeland Security, controls billions of dollars and more than 100,000 men in police and paramilitary units. Jabr was a former high-ranking member of the Iranian-backed Badr Brigade, the military arm of the fundamentalist Shiite Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) that is now the dominant political force in the country. After taking over the Interior Ministry, he quickly purged it of Sunnis, and members of the Badr Brigade were widely incorporated into the ministry's police and paramilitary units...

Conservative Anger Grows Over Bush's Foreign Policy: Michael Abramowitz: GOP lawmakers, meanwhile, appear to be lining up closely with the president on foreign policy. It has not helped the neoconservative case, perhaps, that the occupation of Iraq has not gone as smoothly as some had predicted...

Worth reading--but not in a good way: Martin Peretz: The Plank: THE EXERCISE OF COMMON SENSE: I have just read the five Lebanon Travel Warnings issued by the Department of State from November 18, 2004 through today, July 19.... [They] don't make Lebanon seem at all inviting, and the insistent travelers--come to think of it--also have only themselves to blame.... [E]ach of the warnings tells you that U.S. air carriers are not permitted to use Beirut International Airport.... The warnings also caution you about suicide bombs, terrorist activities, land mines, unexploded ordnance, and a general atmosphere of violence, predictable and unpredictable. The reader is especially warned against visiting the southern neighborhoods of Beirut, southern Lebanon (especially Sidon), Tripoli, the Bekaa Valley, etc. Why families would take their kids for long summer vacations into this environment is beyond me. But many have, and a lot of them have been whining on television.... No sense of individual responsibility either for having put themselves in harm's way despite State's effort to keep them at home... or maybe go to Venice instead...

Discourse.net: A Resource is a Resource -- Of Course, Of Course: Yesterday, the SEC bought the first criminal charges against a Gregory Reyes, the CEO of Brocade Communications, the company's CFO, and Brocade's VP for human resources for options backdating. This is the first criminal action brought with regard to the growing option backdating scandal. The SEC also indicated that at least 80 companies are under investigation.... [T]his seems like a good time to review what the problems are here...

Bob Sutton: Strong Opinions, Weakly Held: I’ve been pretty obsessed about the difference between smart people and wise people for years. I tried to write a book called “The Attitude of Wisdom” a couple times. And the virtues of wise people – those who have the courage to act on their knowledge, but the humility to doubt what they know – is one of the main themes in Hard Facts. We show how leaders including Xerox’s Ann Mulcahy, Intel’s Any Grove, Harrah’s Gary Loveman, and IDEO’s David Kelley turn this attitude into organizational action. Perhaps the best description I’ve ever seen of how wise people act comes from the amazing folks at Palo Alto’s Institute for the Future. A couple years ago, I was talking the Institute’s Bob Johansen about wisdom, and he explained that – to deal with an uncertain future and still move forward – they advise people to have “strong opinions, which are weakly held.” They've been giving this advice for years, and I understand that it was first developed by Instituite Director Paul Saffo. Bob explained that weak opinions are problematic because people aren’t inspired to develop the best arguments possible for them, or to put forth the energy required to test them. Bob explained that it was just as important, however, to not be too attached to what you believe because, otherwise, it undermines your ability to “see” and “hear” evidence that clashes with your opinions. This is what psychologists sometimes call the problem of “confirmation bias.”

Legitimate targets Posted by Henry: Via Kevin Drum, this quite disgusting claim from Alan Dershowitz. "Hezbollah and Hamas militants, on the other hand, are difficult to distinguish from those 'civilians' who recruit, finance, harbor and facilitate their terrorism. Nor can women and children always be counted as civilians, as some organizations do. Terrorists increasingly use women and teenagers to play important roles in their attacks. The Israeli army has given well-publicized notice to civilians to leave those areas of southern Lebanon that have been turned into war zones. Those who voluntarily remain behind have become complicit." Irish and British readers may find this line of reasoning familiar. It was advanced by the IRA at the height of its murder campaign. According to the IRA, civilian bystanders, including women and children, who were killed when bombs blew up police officers or soldiers should have known better than to be associating with the security forces or socializing in places that they were known to frequent. These bystanders were complicit in their own deaths. It was an utterly contemptible argument then. It's just as contemptible today...

Economist's View: They Know What They're Doing: They Know What They're Doing: Robert Reich says there are three things you should know: "China Growth, by Robert Reich: I've been watching the statistics coming out of China about its economic growth. Here are three things you should know. 1. The people managing China's economy (I'm not talking about the politicians but about the financial and economic wizards who are actually making decisions about money supply, capital markets, and the like) are extremely good. They match the best economic minds anywhere in the world. In other words, they know what they're doing. 2. The latest data show China is now growing at a rate faster than 11 percent. That's extraordinary. It's faster than China has been growing for the last five years -- and that was faster than anyone had predicted. China's rate of economic growth is the biggest economic news in the world. 3. That growth is putting huge demands on world energy supplies, and raw materials. Oil prices will continue to rise, as will all other commodities. This is the most important economic fact in the world right now. It is also among the most important political facts in the world"...

The Minister of Civil War (Harpers.org): Bayan Jabr, Paul Bremer, and the rise of the Iraqi death squads. Originally from Harper's Magazine, August 2006. By Ken Silverstein: In May 2005, Shiite militia groups in Iraq began depositing corpses into the streets and garbage dumps of Baghdad. The victims, overwhelmingly Sunni, were typically found blindfolded and handcuffed, their corpses showing signs of torture--broken skulls, burn marks, gouged-out eyeballs, electric drill holes; by that October, the death toll attributed to such groups had grown to more than 500. In November, American troops discovered more than 160 beaten, whipped, and starved prisoners--again, mostly Sunni--at a secret detention center run by the country's Interior Ministry. Since then, Shiite militias have become so integrated into the Iraqi government's security apparatus and their work so organized, systematic, and targeted that they are commonly referred to in Iraq (and in the American media) by their proper name: death squads. The death squads, which have expanded their area of operations from the capital across much of the country, are now believed to be responsible for more civilian deaths than the Sunni and foreign insurgents who are the United States' ostensible enemies there. By any reasonable measure, Iraq is in a state of civil war, and some of its most ruthless and lawless combatants are members of the government's own security units...

NYO - Joe Conason: Our Coarse President Can’t Fix Middle East: Watching the President of the United States try to fulfill his responsibilities at an international summit is a sobering experience these days. To observe George W. Bush talking trash, chewing with his mouth open and demonstrating his ignorance of geography marks still another step down in the continuing decline of U.S. prestige. It’s the diplomatic equivalent of flag burning. While Mr. Bush’s little misadventures make headlines, what they symbolize is a collapse of policy and a vacuum of competence that are far more troubling than mere cloddishness. Preoccupied... with Iraq, alienated from our traditional allies and the United Nations and neglectful of broader American interests in the Middle East, he and his team now confront a sudden crisis for which they seem woefully unprepared. We are learning what happens when the leadership of “the indispensable nation” takes a mental vacation. We are also beginning to learn why regime change in Iraq, originally sold as the solution to every problem in the region, has proved to be such an enormous liability for us and for our allies. Recall that when the Bush administration decided to invade Iraq—-on the pretext of disarming Saddam Hussein—a new era of peace and democracy was supposed to dawn. Making an example of the toppled Saddam would, according to neoconservative theory, persuade other despots in the region to reform and reconcile themselves to co-existence with Israel, and stimulate the “peace process” too. (That same theory, of course, similarly predicted flower-strewn parades in Baghdad and enough oil revenues to finance the whole bloody enterprise.) Indeed, when the weapons of mass destruction didn’t turn up, those anticipated dividends became the retrospective justification for the war...

Daniel Gross: July 16, 2006 - July 22, 2006 Archives: NO SCANDAL HERE. Today, Brad DeLong once again (rightly) spanks Felix Gillette of Columbia Journalism Review's business news blog, the Audit, for his inane June 21 post pooh-poohing the options backdating scandal. But, Brad, it's worse than that. On July 6, Gillette magisterially returned to the subject, critiquing and criticizing an article by the great Adam Lashinsky of Fortune. Considering the judgment shown in his postings on the matter, Gillette has an awful lot of nerve criticizing the news judgment of the reporters and editors (especially those at the Wall Street Journal) who have blown this story open. See, with every passing day, evidence mounts that, yes, Mr. Gillette, this is a real scandal. Check out Stephanie Saul's article in yesterday's New York Times, which reports that some 30 percent of companies engaged in backdating, and that the U.S. Attorney in San Francisco has set up a task force to investigate backdating. And check out the latest rumblings from the SEC, or the news from Broadcom that it will have to restate earnings by $750 million due to problems with accounting for its options. And for some truly righteous bile directed at abusers of options backdaters, see Barry Ritholtz. Gillette notes at the close of his piece that "the bigger this scandal gets, the smaller it seems." I'd rephrase that: the bigger this scandal gets, the smaller The Audit seems...

Discourse.net: A Resource is a Resource -- Of Course, Of Course: Yesterday, the SEC bought the first criminal charges against a Gregory Reyes, the CEO of Brocade Communications, the company's CFO, and Brocade's VP for human resources for options backdating. This is the first criminal action brought with regard to the growing option backdating scandal. The SEC also indicated that at least 80 companies are under investigation.... [T]his seems like a good time to review what the problems are here...

RGE - Adding to echo chamber started by the New Economist, with a bit on China thrown in: Brad Setser | Jul 21, 2006: I second the New Economist’s description of Tim Duy as the John Berry of the blogoshere. I thought Tim retired from Fed Watching when he moved to Oregon, but the internet gave him a second life...

Eric Umansky: The Coming Ground War: Open intel center Statfor's analysis seems reasonable: "Hezbollah's strategy appears to be threefold. First, force Israel into costly attacks against prepared fortifications. Second, draw Israeli troops as deeply into Lebanon as possible, forcing them to fight on extended supply lines. Third, move into an Iraqi-style insurgency from which Israel -- out of fear of a resumption of rocket attacks -- cannot withdraw, but which the Israelis also cannot endure because of extended long-term casualties. This appears to have been a carefully planned strategy, built around a threat to Israeli cities that Israel can't afford. The war has begun at Hezbollah's time and choosing.... Destruction of Hezbollah's infrastructure does not mean annihilation of the force. If Israel withdraws, Hezbollah or a successor organization will regroup. If Israel remains, it can wind up in the position the United States is in Iraq. This is exactly what Hezbollah wants. So, Israel can buy time, or Israel can occupy and pay the cost. One or the other." This fills me with dread...

Carpetbagger Report: I'll delve into Newsweek's 4,000-word cover story on my favorite subject -- "Bush in the Bubble" -- in more detail later, but I wanted to do a separate post on one telling anecdote from the article. What Bush actually hears and takes in, however, is not clear. And whether his advisers are quite as frank as they claim to be with the president is also questionable. Take Social Security, for example. One House Republican, who asked not to be identified for fear of offending the White House, recalls a summertime meeting with congressmen in the Roosevelt Room at which Bush enthusiastically talked up his Social Security reform plan. But the plan was already dead -- as everyone except the president had acknowledged. Bush seemed to have no idea. "I got the sense that his staff was not telling him the bad news," says the lawmaker. "This was not a case of him thinking positive. He just didn't have any idea of the political realities there. It was like he wasn't briefed at all"...

New Economist: Great expectations: How FDR ended the Depression : Can this be the final nail in the monetarist coffin? Gauti Eggertsson, an economist at the New York Fed, argues in new Staff Report 234, Great Expectations and the End of the Depression, that the US economic recovery under FDR was not about monetary factors, but public expectations...

On the production of fresh wingnuts: In “The Toad in the Garden: Thatcherism Among the Theorists,” which veteran readers of this blog will know is one of my very favorite essays, Stuart Hall tries to account for how Thatcherism achieved the kind of hegemony it enjoyed in the UK of the early 1980s. While he takes his distance from Louis Althusser’s structuralist-Marxist determinism (my own distance from Althusser can be gauged here), Hall nevertheless insists that it’s not the case that people simply change their minds like they change their clothes, and that therefore, if we are to understand how former liberals came to affiliate with the New Right, we have to understand the “discourses” and “subject positions” made available to them by the New Right...

Lebanon--The Rut Becomes A Grave | TPMCafe: By Larry Johnson: Israel's latest offensive to root out and destroy Hezbollah probably will fail and in the process will ignite a new round of international terrorist attacks that will put the United State squarely in the crosshairs. It is as if we are watching a plane crash in slow motion. We see the plane hurtling towards the earth, our mouths agape in a silent scream. We know it will explode on impact and can do nothing but watch...

The *Washington Note reads James Galbraith* The Washington Note: China: Looks Like Capitalism to the Naked Eye, But It's Not: Economist James Galbraith, Lloyd M. Bentsen Jr. Chair at UT Austin, has written a brilliant review of two books -- the first The End of Poverty by Jeffrey Sachs and the second The Global Class War by Jeff Faux -- in the latest American Prospect.... I found this bit on China particularly intriguing, revealing more about Galbraith I think than either Faux or Sachs: "China has adopted markets without capitalism; it has not had broadly open, speculative markets for capital assets and land. The result is that you usually have to make something in order to get rich. So companies produce and produce, flood the markets with goods, accept low profit margins, improve quality, and hope to strike gold by exporting to the West. If they have losses, as they often do, these may be covered by borrowing from China's rotten, state-owned banks, protected by capital control. Workers thrive on the glutted market for goods. Meanwhile, the richer local governments finance themselves with land rent and spend the proceeds on infrastructure at an incredible pace." The system looks like capitalism to the naked eye. But it is not capitalism; it's an outgrowth of what was there before. What was communism has become, one might almost say, Galbraithian -- private affluence, with much less public squalor than one finds elsewhere in the Third World...

Eschaton: Foul-Mouthed Bloggers: Tom Friedman has a potty mouth: "George Bush and Condi Rice need to realize that Syria on its own is not going to press Hezbollah -- in Mr. Bush's immortal words -- to just "stop doing this shit." The Bush team needs to convene a coalition of The World of Order. If it won't, it should let others more capable do the job. We could start with the elder George Bush and Bill Clinton, whose talents could be used for more than just tsunami relief...

alicublog: Rent. I saw this thing when it came out on Broadway, and it annoyed the crap out of me: the squatters were idealized beyond recognition, and made shitty art besides, which fatally trivialized their beef with The Man and made them look like the kids from Fame but in an alternate, distressed wardrobe, and with less reliably pleasing tunes (and numbing recitative passages like "What are you DO-ing with this YUP-pie SCUM?"). That left AIDS as the only real antagonist, and I was repulsed by the dramatic shortcut: you mean I paid all this money for a musical version of Spirochette? But what annoyed me most was that I wound up being moved by the thing. It was a mess, but some embers of real feeling burned in it...

Bob Sutton: Strong Opinions, Weakly Held: I’ve been pretty obsessed about the difference between smart people and wise people for years. I tried to write a book called “The Attitude of Wisdom” a couple times. And the virtues of wise people – those who have the courage to act on their knowledge, but the humility to doubt what they know – is one of the main themes in Hard Facts. We show how leaders including Xerox’s Ann Mulcahy, Intel’s Any Grove, Harrah’s Gary Loveman, and IDEO’s David Kelley turn this attitude into organizational action. Perhaps the best description I’ve ever seen of how wise people act comes from the amazing folks at Palo Alto’s Institute for the Future. A couple years ago, I was talking the Institute’s Bob Johansen about wisdom, and he explained that – to deal with an uncertain future and still move forward – they advise people to have “strong opinions, which are weakly held.” They've been giving this advice for years, and I understand that it was first developed by Instituite Director Paul Saffo. Bob explained that weak opinions are problematic because people aren’t inspired to develop the best arguments possible for them, or to put forth the energy required to test them. Bob explained that it was just as important, however, to not be too attached to what you believe because, otherwise, it undermines your ability to “see” and “hear” evidence that clashes with your opinions. This is what psychologists sometimes call the problem of “confirmation bias.”

Sunday Discussion Group: Matt Stoller noted the other day that Bill Clinton, like most of the Dem establishment, has agreed to campaign on Joe Lieberman's behalf. (It's also worth remembering, however, that the former president has also said he'd support the winner of the Dem primary, whether it's Lieberman or not). But Stoller added an interesting observation: "Clinton is a loveable character in Democratic politics, like Barack Obama. He's perceived as a winner, as a good President, and as a strong Democrat who set a good tone for the party and the country. The Democratic party in DC largely grew around his personality and politics, and since no other leadership center has really arisen, Clintonian candidate-centric politics still looms large. I'm not surprised or even disappointed that Bill Clinton is out for Lieberman. He was an exceptional politician, but he's also part of the past." It got me thinking: as far as the Democratic Party and its activists are concerned, what is the Clinton legacy? In the interests of full disclosure, I'm not exactly neutral on the question. I am now, and have always been, a Clinton supporter. I campaigned for him; I interned in his White House; and I remain an admirer. But the Discussion Group isn't necessarily about what I think. At the risk of oversimplifying things a bit, there are two Democratic camps when it comes to how (or whether) the party should venerate the former president. One side says Clinton was not a genuine champion of progressive causes; his "triangulating" ended up hurting the party; he was impeached; and Dems were weaker when he left office than when he started. This side believes it's probably best to leave his presidency in the past. The other side says Clinton was a popular and successful president; his policies produced peace and prosperity; and his unique political skills, which helped him win 10 now-red states in '96, should be emulated as often as possible. Besides, they say, Clinton is probably the most popular person on earth right now, and he looks even better in hindsight thanks to his successor's embarrassing failures. So, how should Democrats consider Clinton now? Should Dems canonize Clinton the way Republicans honor Reagan?...

Firedoglake: Tim Russert was on a high simmer this morning on Meet the Press. No biscuit for him today — but he scored anyway. (And, frankly, I was left wondering if Russert has been reading Jane?) Pressing Joshua Bolten, WH Chief of Staff, on the hypocritical inconsistencies in President Bush’s veto of the stem cell bill, and the comments by Tony Snow that the President thinks that the destruction of human embryos for research purposes is murder — Russert hit the nail on the head by asking why, then, the President doesn’t outlaw in vitro clinics and all stem cell research if he truly believes that it is murder. After Bolten began stammering his way through a non-answer dodge and weave tap-dance-a-thon, I realized something: their soft underbelly is showing on so many fronts, the message machine is no longer working with rapid-fire precision. Bolten tip toed through any number of questions this morning on the conflict between Israel and Lebanon, the mess in Iraq, our lack of any diplomatic or foreign policy initiatives that come close to working... and then the questions on stem cell research, where Bolten tried very hard to say nothing that would offend anyone, and succeeded in offending people who think science ought to be respected and the entire evangelical base by exposing the Bush failure to walk his smarmy, hypocritical talk about respecting life while allowing more than 400,000 blastocysts to be destroyed via in vitro clinics. No one likes to learn that they’ve been played for a fool — here’s hoping that the hypocritical differences between the public statements supporting "life" and the real actions which do no such thing other than at a surface level to do Presidential political CYA for public relations purposes hit home with the evangelical crowd. The message: we’ll do only as much as we have to do to make the fundamentalists happy, but we really don’t walk our talk. (Remember how Michael Scanlon talked about the evangelical political machine via Ralph Reed? Oh yeah, hypocrisy, thy name is Republican.)...

U.S. and Lebanon / From complaining to talking - Haaretz - Israel News : By Shmuel Rosner: WASHINGTON - "There is no green light" from America for the Israeli operation, David Welch managed to hiss, while answering the cellphone urging him to cut short his meetings with the press and get back to the office. Here's an official who is not to be envied: On Monday he returned from a long Mideast trip, including a stop in Israel, and today he is departing for another one. Israel, Rome, and Israel again. "He's exhausted," says an Israeli colleague who knows him well. Is it any wonder that the Assistant Secretary of State for the Middle East is angry at Hezbollah? The folly of their action got the whole area jumping - Welch included. He gestures dismissively when asked if "the occupation" is responsible for the outbreak of violence. "I don't see how the occupation is connected to this," he states. After all - there is no Israeli occupation in Lebanon. Plain and simple. "And it's not me saying that, it's the UN." Formally there may not be a green light, but it is hard to interpret the American approach otherwise. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice rejected without batting an eye the initiatives for an immediate cease-fire. If there's a crisis - then let it go all the way. Let it do some good. The U.S., from the get-go, spotted the potential inherent in the outbreak, and decided to grab the bull by the horns and has not backed down...

Prairie Weather: Britain pulls away from Bush: Britain pulls away from Bush: "Britain dramatically broke ranks with George Bush last night over the Lebanon crisis, publicly criticising Israel's military tactics and urging America to 'understand' the price being paid by ordinary Lebanese civilians. The remarks, made in Beirut by the Foreign Office minister, Kim Howells, were the first public criticism by this country of Israel's military campaign, and placed it at odds with Washington's strong support. The Observer can also reveal that Tony Blair voiced deep concern about the escalating violence during a private telephone conversation with the Israeli Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, last week." The problem with our British allies is that they continue, annoyingly, to take note of the "destruction of the infrastructure, the death of so many children and so many people." Don't they realize how much more important ideology is than people? More on Tony Blair, and the "humiliating Yo Summit" and the new image of George W. Bush. "When Tony Blair offers himself as a Middle East peace envoy, he is casually rebuffed by the American President between bites on a bread roll"...

The Observer | Comment | It wasn't the 'Yo' that was humiliating, it was the 'No': Tony Blair wanted Britain to look big in the world. But being a satellite of George Bush is making him and us look small: Andrew Rawnsley: You will have your own view - there's so much to choose from - on which part of the open-mic conversation between George W Bush and Tony Blair at the Yo Summit was the most toe-curling. One of my favourite excruciating moments is when Bush thanks Blair for sending him a Burberry sweater as a birthday gift. The American President sends up the British Prime Minister by mocking: 'I know you picked it out yourself.' There's no question which exchange is most enjoyable for those with contempt for the Prime Minister. It is the moment that makes Mr Blair look like the poodle of popular caricature. Worse, he comes over as a poodle who can't even beg his master to toss him a dog biscuit. It is the same bit of the encounter that has caused the most wincing among the Prime Minister's friends. When Tony Blair offers himself as a Middle East peace envoy, he is casually rebuffed by the American President between bites on a bread roll. Told by Bush that 'Condi is going', the normally fluent Blair is reduced to inarticulate jabbering. 'Well, it's only if, I mean, you know, if she's got a... or if she needs the ground prepared as it were... Because obviously if she goes out, she's got to succeed, if it were, whereas I can go out and just talk.' Yeah, just talk. It was awful for Tony Blair to be caught asking for permission to go to the Middle East. It was dire to hear George Bush saying he wouldn't let the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom go out - not even on a pointless trip. It looks even more humiliating when the French Foreign Minister is going...

N Bodies | Cosmic Variance: Sean at 10:13 am, July 23rd, 2006: This will be familiar to anyone who reads John Baez’s This Week’s Finds in Mathematical Physics, but I can’t help but show these lovely exact solutions to the gravitational N-body problem. This one is beautiful in its simplicity: twenty-one point masses moving around in a figure-8...

U.S. and Lebanon / From complaining to talking - Haaretz - Israel News : By Shmuel Rosner: WASHINGTON - "There is no green light" from America for the Israeli operation, David Welch managed to hiss, while answering the cellphone urging him to cut short his meetings with the press and get back to the office. Here's an official who is not to be envied: On Monday he returned from a long Mideast trip, including a stop in Israel, and today he is departing for another one. Israel, Rome, and Israel again. "He's exhausted," says an Israeli colleague who knows him well. Is it any wonder that the Assistant Secretary of State for the Middle East is angry at Hezbollah? The folly of their action got the whole area jumping - Welch included. He gestures dismissively when asked if "the occupation" is responsible for the outbreak of violence. "I don't see how the occupation is connected to this," he states. After all - there is no Israeli occupation in Lebanon. Plain and simple. "And it's not me saying that, it's the UN." Formally there may not be a green light, but it is hard to interpret the American approach otherwise. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice rejected without batting an eye the initiatives for an immediate cease-fire. If there's a crisis - then let it go all the way. Let it do some good. The U.S., from the get-go, spotted the potential inherent in the outbreak, and decided to grab the bull by the horns and has not backed down. Not when faced by the French, nor UN Secretary General Kofi Annan. As of the weekend, the U.S. seems to have succeeded. The world grasped that without American, it will not be able to stop the Israeli operation, and changed course - from complaining to talking. Last Thursday, Jewish community activists in Washington swept into the offices of officials and legislators to enlist support for Israel. The task did not require much effort at persuasion. That same morning the House of Representatives passed by a resolution backing Israel by a huge majority. Even the Congressmen of Lebanese descent - three out of four - voted in favor. The Jews were briefed on the crisis by the deputy National Security Adviser, Elliott Abrams, who is coming to Israel with Rice and Welch. Kathy Manning, treasurer of United Jewish Communities, heard him describe Hezbollah as an organization that had become "a monster that needs to be dealt with." That, in general, is the prevailing atmosphere in the administration, and also the tone of speech...

Buckley: Bush Not A True Conservative, In Exclusive Interview, Buckley Criticizes President For Interventionist Policies - CBS News: Buckley views the three-and-a-half-year Iraq War as a failure. "If you had a European prime minister who experienced what we've experienced it would be expected that he would retire or resign," Buckley says. Only on CBSNews.com: Watch more of Thalia Assuras's interview with William F. BuckleyAsked if the Bush administration has been distracted by Iraq, Buckley says "I think it has been engulfed by Iraq, by which I mean no other subject interests anybody other than Iraq. ... The continued tumult in Iraq has overwhelmed what perspectives one might otherwise have entertained with respect to, well, other parts of the Middle East with respect to Iran in particular." Despite evidence that Iran is supplying weapons and expertise to Hezbollah in the conflict with Israel, Buckley rejects neo-conservatives who favor a more interventionist foreign policy than he does, including a pre-emptive air strike against Iran -- and its nuclear facilities. "If we find there is a warhead there that is poised, the range of it is tested, then we have no alternative. But pending that, we have to ask ourselves, 'What would the Iranian population do?'" Buckley does support the administration's approach to the North Korea's nuclear weapons threat, believing that working with Russia, China, Japan and South Korea is the best way to get Pyongyang back to the negotiating table. But that's about where the agreement ends. "Has Mr. Bush found himself in any different circumstances than any of the other presidents you've known in terms of these crises?" Assuras asks. "I think Mr. Bush faces a singular problem best defined, I think, as the absence of effective conservative ideology -- with the result that he ended up being very extravagant in domestic spending, extremely tolerant of excesses by Congress, and in respect of foreign policy, incapable of bringing together such forces as apparently were necessary to conclude the Iraq challenge," Buckley says. Asked what President Bush's foreign policy legacy will be to his successor, Buckley says "There will be no legacy for Mr. Bush. I don't believe his successor would re-enunciate the words he used in his second inaugural address because they were too ambitious.... So therefore I think his legacy is indecipherable"...

Econo-Girl: Waterboarding is Torture, and Torture is Wrong: Econo-Girl's purpose in writing this blog is to start a dialog on the Geneva Convention, since it now applies to the Department of Defense again. Guess it's not quaint anymore, eh? Over the next few weeks, Econo-Girl would like to post articles about the Geneva Convention, like its origin and major provisions. Legal analysis is not the magic some would have you believe. If the grunts and paper pushers are knowledgeable, the anti-torture infrastructure will be strengthened. The above post is a recreation of a post that got me fired from the CIA. It is not exact, but covers the main points as best I remember them. I had a blog called Covert Communications on a kind of classified Internet. I wrote a version of the above post and classified it so that only Americans with clearances could read it. You couldn't even get to the blog if you had less than a Top Secret and above clearance anyway. Another purpose of the blog post was to start a dialog on interogation techniques with the people who are asked to do the interogating. It was to be a public education campaign, of sorts. I was going to do the research on my own time and type in the results when I got to work. I never spent more than 15 minutes writing any of my posts. What can I say? Waterboarding is torture, and torture is wrong...

CBR: If a president gives a chancellor a back-rub in a forest: The AP ran an item yesterday about the now-infamous massage Bush gave German Chancellor Angela Merkel at the G8 Summit earlier this week. The AP didn't actually do a story about the incident; it did a story about blogs laughing at the incident.... In other words, the president's frat-boy tactics aren't necessarily enough to prompt a story in the Associated Press, but dissemination of the video of those tactics is. Indeed, the AP story about online interest in the incident got me thinking: hasn't the media downplayed the massage story a bit?.... The Washington Post didn't mention the incident at all in its news coverage, but the story did get three paragraphs in a column on page A17 on Wednesday.... The New York Times also didn't mention the story in its news coverage either, though Maureen Dowd devoted a couple of sentences to the "impromptu shoulder rub" in her column this week. The LA Times devoted three sentences to the incident in a broader news story about the summit. According Lexis-Nexis and Google News, major papers such as USA Today, Chicago Tribune, Houston Chronicle, and Philadelphia Inquirer didn't mention the massage at all. The exception to this trend was the Scripps-Howard chain, which ran a full-length news story.... But even that story highlighted the fact that "the incident didn't get a lot of play on major TV media." Why is that? It was an unusual "diplomatic" event; there's clearly considerable public interest; and there's even video and still shots for the media to obsess over. Why blow it off?...

Six Questions on the Bush Administration and the Middle East Crisis for Wayne White (Harpers.org): Six Questions on the Bush Administration and the Middle East Crisis for Wayne White: Wayne White, now an Adjunct Scholar with Washington's Middle East Institute, was Deputy Director of the State Department's Office of Middle East and South Asia Analysis until March 2005. By Ken Silverstein. 1. Condoleezza Rice is leaving for the Middle East. Is her trip likely to lead to any favorable diplomatic outcome? I don't think so. At least not anytime soon. Despite her meetings in New York at the UN, back in Washington, and her upcoming trip to the region, I believe her activities have been tailored to give the impression of action while not designed to make any real progress toward the urgent ceasefire that should be everyone's highest priority. To cite just one disappointment, the apparent failure to engage senior Syrian officials directly is a serious omission since Syria may be the only Arab government in a position to pressure Hezbollah in any meaningful way. 2. Why has the Bush Administration reacted so passively to the current situation? Is it likely that the administration gave Israel a "green light" for what we have been seeing on the ground? Judging from what I saw during my time in government, one should not jump to the conclusion that Israel either asked for or was given a proverbial "green light" in advance to initiate this robust campaign in Lebanon. More likely, the Israelis took action on their own, counting on Washington's support after the fact, which is precisely what they have gotten. Indeed, the administration has been somewhat passive because it appears to want the Israelis to have all the time they believe they need to complete what is probably viewed as a mission of interest to both governments: an effort to destroy Hezbollah, once and for all...