18 days in July

Former CIA agent Ray Close describes how close the world is to widespread war in the Middle East:

. . . intelligence being produced for the Bush Administration by the Pentagon strongly supports the thesis that Hizballah operations are directly controlled and closely managed from Teheran ... this [is] an exaggerated picture of the real situation [which] contributes to an unhealthy and even dangerous mindset in Washington, leading to potentially serious miscalculations and errors of judgment by President Bush and his closest advisors at this very critical time . . .

Former CIA agent Larry Johnson provides further details:

I am disturbed to learn that this analysis enjoys so much credibility at the senior levels of the USG [United States government]. This is, of course, the point of view being pushed so hard by both the Israelis and the neocons in Washington.
I was equally upset to hear this view repeated unanimously (and identically) by a variety of people on national TV yesterday, coming from Senators McCain, Schumer, George Allen and John Warner as well as official spokespersons from State and the NSC. It was as if they were all reading from the same artfully crafted briefing sheet . . . It is a dangerously one-sided point of view that furthers Israel's long-standing objective of luring the US into a violent confrontation with Iran. The ultimate consequence could be that everyone in the USG --- Democrats as well as Republicans --- from the President on down --- will, by such dangerously oversimplified logic and careless rhetoric, accelerate America's momentum toward:
(1) officially defining and treating Hizballah's actions against Israel just as if they were atrocities by international terrorism aimed directly at the people of the United States, and thereby:
(2) making it almost inevitable that both political parties in the US will talk themselves into a "moral" commitment to aggressively confront those who encourage, support and harbor Hizballah terrorists (i.e. Syria and Iran), and thereby:
(3) making impossible the establishment of any constructive dialogue with either Iran or Syria in which other critical issues, such as Iraq and nuclear proliferation, for example, might be dealt with by means short of violence. In other words, this widely-supported urban legend is rapidly becoming another potentially disastrous conflation of biased intelligence analysis, simplistic political bombast and lunatic fringe right-wing Christianity that could drive us toward another major military confrontation --- whether or not that was really our carefully considered and intelligently reasoned objective.
I do not think I am overstating the danger here. Once momentum starts moving in that direction, we might soon find ourselves in another situation where stubborn pride, as much as anything else, would make it hard for us to modify our rhetoric and admit our inability and that of our Israeli allies to disarm and dismantle the military arm of Hizballah. It's a proxy war right now, but if our surrogates (the Israelis) fail to achieve their objectives, they will attempt very purposefully to broaden the conflict into a much larger one directly involving the United States and Iran.

Halifax protest

Hmmm - this is interesting:

Hundreds demonstrated in Halifax on Saturday to condemn Prime Minister Stephen Harper's defence of Israel's attacks on Lebanon . . .

When we were in Halifax, though of course we were there for just for a few days, it struck us as a very pro-military town. So if THEY are protesting, I wonder what the rest of the country thinks...

Today's pop quiz

We take as our text a question and the full answer from today's Bush and Blair news conference:

QUESTION: Mr. President, three years ago, you argued that an invasion of Iraq would create a new stage of Arab-Israeli peace. And yet today there is an Iraqi prime minister who has been sharply critical of Israel. Arab governments, despite your arguments, who first criticized Hezbollah, have now changed their tune. Now they're sharply critical of Israel. And despite from both of you warnings to Syria and Iran to back off support from Hezbollah, effectively, Mr. President, your words are being ignored. So what has happened to America's clout in this region that you've committed yourself to transform?
BUSH: It's an interesting period because, instead of having foreign policies based upon trying to create a sense of stability, we have a foreign policy that addresses the root causes of violence and instability.
For a while, American foreign policy was just, "Let's hope everything is calm" -- kind of, managed calm. But beneath the surface brewed a lot of resentment and anger that was manifested on September the 11th.
And so we've taken a foreign policy that says: On the one hand, we will protect ourselves from further attack in the short run by being aggressive in chasing down the killers and bringing them to justice.
And make no mistake: They're still out there, and they would like to harm our respective peoples because of what we stand for.
In the long term, to defeat this ideology -- and they're bound by an ideology -- you defeat it with a more hopeful ideology called freedom.
And, look, I fully understand some people don't believe it's possible for freedom and democracy to overcome this ideology of hatred. I understand that. I just happen to believe it is possible. And I believe it will happen.
And so what you're seeing is, you know, a clash of governing styles.
For example, you know, the notion of democracy beginning to emerge scares the ideologues, the totalitarians, those who want to impose their vision. It just frightens them.
And so they respond. They've always been violent.
You know, I hear this amazing kind of editorial thought that says, all of a sudden, Hezbollah's become violent because we're promoting democracy. They have been violent for a long period of time. Or Hamas?
One reason why the Palestinians still suffer is because there are militants who refuse to accept a Palestinian state based upon democratic principles.
And so what the world is seeing is a desire by this country and our allies to defeat the ideology of hate with an ideology that has worked and that brings hope.
And one of the challenges, of course, is to convince people that Muslims would like to be free, that there's other people other than people in Britain and America that would like to be free in the world.
There's this kind of almost -- kind of a weird kind of elitism that says well maybe -- maybe certain people in certain parts of the world shouldn't be free; maybe it's best just to let them sit in these tyrannical societies.
And our foreign policy rejects that concept. And we don't accept it. And so we're working.
And this is -- I said the other day, when these attacks took place, I said it should be a moment of clarity for people to see the stakes in the 21st century.
I mean, now there's an unprovoked attack on a democracy. Why? I happen to believe because progress is being made toward democracies.
And I believe that -- I also believe that Iran would like to exert additional influence in the region; a theocracy would like to spread its influence using surrogates.
And so I'm as determined as ever to continue fostering a foreign policy based upon liberty. And I think it's going to work unless we lose our nerve and quit. And this government isn't going to quit.

1. Huh?
2. How many imaginary enemies has Bush got?
3. Do you think he has imaginary friends too?

Great line of the day

The Sideshow references this Gore Vidal interview:

I would suggest Canada or New Zealand as a possible place to go until we are rid of our warmongers. We’ve never had a government like this. . . . This is an eternal war against terrorism. It’s like a war against dandruff. There’s no such thing as a war against terrorism. It’s idiotic. These are slogans. These are lies. It’s advertising, which is the only art form we ever invented and developed.

Emphasis mine. I liked the whole interview, but having once worked in advertising and PR, I appreciated this little segue about the advertising industry.

Kangaroo courts

It's pretty clear what is going on still with the Guantanamo prosecutions.
For hundreds and hundreds of the people imprisoned at Gitmo, the Bush administration has no evidence of wrongdoing and never did.
I'm not saying they have no "admissable" evidence, as in evidence which under usual rules of courtroom procedure and legal precedent can be admitted into court. I'm saying they haven't got "any" evidence, as in no evidence at all -- just some story, perhaps, that some anonymous neighbour told some soldier years ago and thousands of miles away. Or a personal rival to a tribal chief. Or someone who was driving past a checkpoint at the wrong time. Or trying to hide from a firefight in their front yard.
The thing is, the Bush administration KNOWS this. They KNOW they have locked up hundreds of innocent people. They just cannot admit it to the world -- bad for morale, you know, plus think of how embarassing it would be for Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld. Can't have that, can we?
So in defiance of what the Supreme Court has been ruling for the last three years, the Bush administration continues to be bound and determined to keep the Gitmo detainees far far away from any actual US judge -- who would take one glance at the story the prosecutors are trying to sell, and would throw it out as a ridiculous tissue of lies and delusion.
Once again we're seeing the Bushies trying to gin up some kind of kangaroo court:

A copy of the draft, obtained this week by The Washington Post and others, explains how the government would create commissions of U.S. military personnel who could impose a penalty of life imprisonment or death based on evidence never disclosed to the accused. Military judges could also exclude defendants from their trials whenever 'necessary to protect the national security.' . . . The draft states that using the federal courts or existing military court-martial procedures to try suspects in the war on terrorism -- described formally as "alien enemy combatants" -- is "impracticable" because they are committed to destroying the country and abusing its legal processes. Routine trial procedures would not work, it states, because suspects cannot be given access to classified information or tried speedily. Service members involved in collecting evidence cannot be diverted from the battlefield to attend trials, and hearsay evidence from "fellow terrorists" is often needed to establish guilt.

Billmon weeps

From Billmon, A Blight Unto the Nations:

I've felt many emotions about the Israelis before. I've admired them for their accomplishments -- building a flourishing state out of almost nothing. I've hated them for their systematic dispossession of the Palestinians -- even as they smugly congratulated themselves for being the Middle East's only "democracy." I've pitied them for the cruel fate history inflicted on the Jewish diaspora, respected them for their boldness and daring, honored them for their cultural and intellectual achievements. But the one thing I've never felt, at least up until now, is contempt.
But that is what I'm feeling now. The military and political leaders of the Jewish state are doing and saying things that go way beyond the blustering arrogance of a powerful nation at war. Not to put too fine a point on it, but they are behaving like a gang of miltaristic thugs -- whose reply to any criticism or reproach is an expletive deleted and the smash of an iron fist.
The most brutal public example would probably be the suggestion by the Israeli Justice Minister (!) that the IDF now has the world's blessing to simply line up the artillery and turn every village in southern Lebanon into a rubble pile -- lest too much Jewish blood be spilled in the vicious door-to-door fighting required to "make something happen" on the ground.
. . .
I've been watching events in the Middle East off and on for the past 25 years, and I've seen the Israelis get ugly before. But I can't remember a time when I've seen them this ugly . . . Massively disproportionate use of force (as defined in the Geneva Conventions, not the fevered war porn fantasies of Right Blogistan) reprisal terror bombings, an if-it-moves-shoot-it mentality on the ground:
"Over here, everybody is the army," one soldier said. "Everybody is Hezbollah. There's no kids, women, nothing." Another soldier put it plainly: "We're going to shoot anything we see."
And now a proposal to turn all of southern Lebanon into a free fire zone.
This all might be considered normal military behavior for, oh say, a Bosnian Serb militia captain, circa 1991, but when the political and military leaders of an allegedly civilized state start talking this way, something big is going on, and going wrong. The dehumanization of the enemy (much of the Israeli press routinely uses the word "terrorist" to refer to any Hizbullah fighter or Palestinian militant), combined with the rage and humiliation at not being able to stop the rain of rockets falling on northern Israel, are knocking the props out from under whatever remains of Israel's claim to be different from, and morally superior to, its enemies.
The Israeli national persona has always had a macho swagger to it (it's part of the rationale for the state -- that Jews should be able to act like "normal" masculine hyperpatriots everywhere) but what we're seeing now is something different. It has a nasty edge of hysteria to it, a compulsive need to prove to the Arabs, and the world, that Israel still can and will stomp on anyone who gets in its way. The fact that Hizbullah is now demonstrating the limits of Israeli power -- or rather, the limits on how much Jewish blood the Israeli government is willing to spend to exercise that power -- is only making matters worse. The Israeli leadership elite is starting to sound like the semen-crusted violence addicts at Little Green Footballs. Given how much real violence the generals and politicians can inflict, that's a sobering thought, to say the least.
Combine this with an enormous sense of historic grievance ("Serbs will never be beaten again!" "The Versailles Treaty has shamed the Fatherland!") and a gnawing fear of encirclement, and you've got all the ingredients for a catastrophe, of the kind that could leave the Israelis, and their American patrons, up to their necks in blood -- of the innocent and the guilty alike.
. . .
If there's one thing that should be obvious from this God awful tragedy in the making, it's that history has a savage sense of irony -- cruel and pitiless almost beyond belief. That Israel, haven to Holocaust survivors, should find itself in this situation, and respond to it in this way, is enough to make the very walls of Jerusalem weep. As I weep now.

Will they ever learn?

How can the Democrats argue against Bush's foreign policy if they are willing to go along with his choice for UN ambassador, a man who happens to be one of the architects of that foreign policy?
Guys --- you don't get to be the new ruling party by agreeing with the old ruling party -- why should anyone bother to vote for you if you can't be bothered to take a stand?
AP is reporting that the Democrats just aren't quite sure yet whether they will filbuster John Bolton or not:

Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., has 'not made a decision either way' on calling for a filibuster, his spokesman said.
Political experts said choosing not to filibuster Bolton could be a political tactic in an election year, when Democrats plan to argue the Bush administration has failed at bringing peace to the Middle East and bringing U.S. troops home.
'To turn the issue to a Democratic filibuster, rather than Bush's foreign policy is a mistake,' said Julian Zelizer, a history professor at Boston University.
If Bolton is at the United Nations, 'he's someone they can point to' as obstructing real progress, he said.

Seems to me I remember back at the last congressional mid-terms, when the Democrats were just so anxious to get that pesky Iraq vote over with so they could get back to campaigning. The "political experts" were dishing out the same BS then, too, about how argumentative and negative the Dems would look if they didn't vote the way the Republicans wanted them to.

Stupidest. Remark. Ever.

So Harper thinks it was the UN's fault our soldier was killed because he shouldn't have been in the way of Israel's bombs.
Does he think it is Canada's fault that our soldiers are dying in Afghanistan, because we shouldn't be putting them into the path of Taliban bullets?

Great line of the day

Digby writes:

I have said it before many times and I'll say it again: the neocons have always been wrong about everything. This is just the latest in a decades long series of delusional miscalculations . . . The megalomaniacal belief that if only the Israelis are allowed to "get tough" or the Americans "take it to the Iranians" or whatever other simplistic schoolyard impulses they have been operating under have led us to the point at which the US is taking on the character of a rogue superpower, not a global leader.
. . . it's still hard to wrap your mind around the fact that the most powerful country in the world is being led so incompetently that it simply cannot rise to the occasion when the stakes are so high. I confess that I'm still shocked by that myself, although less so each time we are confronted with a challenge and these neocon magical thinkers automatically default to bellicose trash talk they are unable to back up. This is a very dangerous moment for the world. The US is showing over and over again that it is immmoral and incompetent. That is the kind of thing that leads ambitious, crazy or stupid people to miscalculate and set disasterous events in motion . . .

Words to live by -- the neocons are wrong about everything.

For its early in the morning that I'm far, far away

So farewell, farewell
To my Nova Scotia home
For it's early in the morning
That I'm far, far away *

I just heard the 6 am plane flying overhead, and realized it was three weeks ago today that my husband and I were on that very plane, as we began our trip to the Maritimes.
We had a terrific time, too -- what a beautiful part of Canada.
I'm not sure if our 10-day Maritimes trip quite make up for the three weeks in England that we missed in March because of my car accident, but it was pretty close, really.
If we had known then what we know now, we would have booked more time in Prince Edward Island - four days was not enought. Because we had lived on the west coast for several years, we found the geography of Nova Scotia very similar but we thought PEI was unique.
One very notable thing we noticed about the Maritimes that I must comment on -- how very proud the people there are of their home and their place in Canada.
Though Nova Scotia and PEI have both had tough times economically, just like the Prairies have, no one there is apologizing -- I don't think it would ever occur to them to be apologetic about where they come from. They wear their hearts on their sleeves and they love their home.
In the Maritimes, they appear to accept that of course many of their young people will go off to take jobs elsewhere, for a few years at least -- there are direct flights now between St. Johns, NFLD, and Fort McMurray, Alta -- but everyone also seems to agree that the Maritimes are the best place in Canada and therefore no one would ever want to leave if they didn't have to.
Such a contrast to the Saskatchewan attitude -- maybe its partly because we live next door to the Alberta economic powerhouse, but here in Saskatchewan we too often feel slightly apologetic, as though just because the Saskatchewan economy isn't as large as Alberta's, it means that Saskatchewan doesn't really quite measure up in some way.
We don't show our pride in our province often enough, I think, maybe because we take our province for granted and we don't realize how much we have here to be proud of.
Being in the Maritimes, even for just a short time, made me realize how we need to wear our Saskatchewan hearts on our sleeves, too.

Unfriendly fire

Reuters reports that the UN post where four UN observers were killed, including a Canadian soldier, was deliberately targeted by the Israelis:

. . . Kofi Annan [said] "I am shocked and deeply distressed by the apparently deliberate targeting by Israeli Defense Forces of a U.N. Observer post in southern Lebanon" . . . "This coordinated artillery and aerial attack on a long established and clearly marked U.N. post at Khiam occurred despite personal assurances given to me by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert that U.N. positions would be spared Israeli fire," . . . The U.N. force commander in southern Lebanon, General Alain Pelligrini had been in repeated contact with Israeli officers throughout the day, stressing the need to protect that particular U.N. position from attack, he said . . . There had been 14 incidents of firing close to the outpost from Israeli forces in the afternoon before it was hit, U.N. officials said, adding that the firing continued even as rescue operations were under way.

The Vancouver Sun is reporting that the Canadian was a soldier from the Princess Pats. The Sun story also notes that Kofi Annan's statement was mocked by Israel's UN ambassador:

Israel's UN ambassador, Dan Gillerman, expressed his "deep regret" for the deaths and denied Israel hit the post intentionally. "I am shocked and deeply distressed by the hasty statement of the secretary general, insinuating that Israel has deliberately targeted the UN post," he said, calling the assertions "premature and erroneous."

Billmon says:

If you really are looking to encourage NATO peacekeepers to plunk their behinds down in southern Lebanon, this ain't the right way to do it . . .

Shrub: Shit. A Canadian? Tell Laura to send Harper a crate of maple syrup or something.

Shorter Rush

Rush Limbaugh riffs about William Buckley and ends with this priceless bit of military analysis:

. . . It was easier in the old days when nobody saw this stuff. Nobody saw 92,000 battle fatalities in the Pacific theater in World War II, and nobody saw the million and a half Japanese deaths so it was easier to do. It's a different set of circumstances today, and it results in the United States and its allies not using the full force of the power that we are able to project in order to appease. You get caught up and worried about what other people think of you and world opinion and so forth and you're going to get hamstrung, and we're hamstrung, precisely where we are.

Shorter Rush:

If we could only get rid of the media, then we could nuke the Middle East back to the Stone Age -- because nobody cares about war crimes if nobody sees it happening.

Another great line

I know I shouldn't post too many "great line" posts, but I just cannot resist this one -- Dave at Galloping Beaver begins his post on Peter MacKay with this great line:

Peter MacKay is either a liar or the stupidest foreign affairs minister Canada has ever had. Anyone who can make Lloyd Axeworthy look good deserves nothing less than a good swat across the back of the head and then immediate dismissal.

Emphasis mine.

Being unpopular has its advantages

Well, the fact that the Afghanistan troop deployment is increasingly unpopular with Canadians may not bring any troops back from Afghanistan, but at least it may prevent Peter MacKay from promising to join the Rice-capades and send any Canadian troops to Lebanon at the Rome summit.

Great line of the day

Billmon writes about how Arab countries in the Middle East are lining up with Hezbollah:

Those who thought it might turn out otherwise . . . probably should have remembered the old Arab proverb: My brother and me against my cousins, my cousins and me against my village, my village and me against my tribe, my tribe and me against the world.
That's not an Arab or a Muslim thing, really -- just basic human psychology. And it appears that in the concentric circles of Middle East loyalties, Sunni versus Shi'a is still trumped by Arab versus Jew, believer versus infidel and (it would appear) tough Islamic fighters versus corrupt pro-U.S. elites.
The "new" Middle East, in other words, still looks a lot like the old one.

Emphasis mine.