While it may be true that the Republicans have been reading Sun Tzu for election strategy, it is equally obvious that Bush and Cheney have not read it in connection with the Iraq invasion and occupation.

Throughout The Art of War, Sun Tzu manifests appreciation for the awsome costs of military engagement. He especially warns against a prolonged war, which brings about the ruin of a nation.

Contributing to maintain an army at a distance causes the people to be impoverished. (II:10)

* * *

When you engage in actual fighting, if victory is long in coming, then men's weapons will grow dull and their ardor will be damped. If you lay siege to a town, you will exhaust your strength.

Again, if the campaign is protracted, the resources of the State will not be equal to the strain.

Now, when your weapons are dulled, your ardor damped, your strength exhausted and your treasure spent, other chieftains will spring up to take advantage of your extremity. Then no man, however wise, will be able to avert the consequences that must ensue." (II: 2-4)

It appears that the Bush administration has encouraged strongman Saakashvili of Georgia to invade South Ossetia, perhaps even promising support in the event of a Russian military pushback. If so, it was another betrayal in a long list of Bush family betrayals, and the Georgians were fools to believe for one second that the U.S. would come to their aid. Georgia is not worth a nuclear war, or even the risk of one, however slight.

If one assumes, however, that Bush had a purpose in bringing this disaster upon Georgia, it is likely that he has done it with the intent to poison U.S. relations with the Russians, and thus present President Obama next January 20 with the gift of a new Cold War that he will find extremely difficult to abate.

It’s a variation of the scorched earth policy.

Will Bush attack Iran? Will Israel attack Iran as a surrogate for the Bush administration? In either case, it would bring about military disaster in Iraq and probably Afghanistan. Look at the map of Iraq the JP posted years ago. Note that Iraq and Iran share a very long border. Note also where Iraq meets the Persian Gulf. Supplies must be offloaded near Basra and trucked north over the desert to the troops. For our troops to survive, those supply lines must be preserved not only against insurgents, including the Shiite population of the southern provinces, but in the event of an attack against Iran, it must be defended both on both land and sea against Iranian interdiction. Our forces are already stretched thin.

I've recently been reading Lucian Prices's dialogues with the English philosopher, Alfred North Whitehead. Speaking of the Great War (WWI), Whitehead recalled:

"They [historians] conscientiously examine state papers, but what do state papers have to do with it? The condition of fear that reigned from 1900 to 1914 was unspoken, almost unconscious. People forbore to mention it, hoping thereby not to detonate the explosive, but the dread was always there. Only for a few years after 1870, when it was evident that France would not attack, was there a sense of security in England. The real history does not get written, because it is not in people's brains, but in their nerves and vitals." 1

The passage reminded me of psychologist Carl Jung's pre-war dreams of Europe being drenched in blood:

In October [1913], while I was alone on a journey, I was suddenly seized by an overpowering vision: I saw a monstrous flood covering all the northern and low-lying lands between the North Sea and the Alps. When it came up to Switzerland I saw that the mountains grew higher and higher to protect our country. I realized that a frightful catastrophe was in progress. I saw the mighty yellow waves, the floating rubble of civilization, and the drowned bodies of uncounted thousands. Then the whole sea turned to blood. This vision lasted about one hour. I was perplexed and nauseated, and ashamed of my weakness.

Two weeks passed; then the vision recurred, under the same conditions, even more vividly than before, and the blood was more emphasized. An inner voice spoke, "Look at it well; It is wholly real and will be so. You cannot doubt it." That winter someone asked me what were the political prospects of the world in the near future. I replied that I had no thoughts on the matter, but that I saw rivers of blood.2

This writer is no clairvoyant, but it often seems to me that we are now being sucked into an insane vortex, much like the vortex that in 1913 seemed to be inexorably drawing Europe into a war that would shatter the civilization that countless numbers of workers, thinkers and dreamers had built since the beginning of the Dark Ages. Small 19th Century minds, equipped with 20th Century technology, initiated a war the horror of which they could neither comprehend not control, once it had begun.

The Cold War could have been such a vortex, but the men in charge clearly understood that nuclear weapons simply were not an option and that there could be no victor in a nuclear exchange. They drew back from the nuclear abyss, but they were also lucky, because the world came close to war several times.

The vortex has not gone away, though. Until January 20, 2009, this country will be in the hands of some very stupid, arrogant and vicious people that seem bent upon drawing the entire world into a flaming vortex. Such a catastrophe would represent the third and final phase of the Great War that began in August, 1914, and resumed in September, 1939. It would complete the work of destruction and end western civilization.

It is beginning to look more and more likely that such an outcome is likely.

It is possible to avoid disaster, but the opportunities are diminishing every day. It is easy to despair, but to give into despair now is suicide.

Tom Lowe

Footnotes:
1. Price, Lucien, Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead, p. 20, Boston 2001.
2. Jung, Carl, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, p. 175-176, New York, 1989.

Links:
http://www.worlddreambank.org/J/JUNG-WWI.HTM
http://www.nndb.com/people/910/000031817/
Israel, Iran and the Bomb

When the government in power seem to be doing some unbelievably irrational and stupid things, don't commit the deadly error of concluding that the rulers are stupid and irrational. They appear to be stupid only because you don't understand the rulebook.

Take the war in Iraq, for instance. Look who is winning and who is losing. The winners: Exxon, Haliburton, KBR, Blackwater, BP, Shell, etc.

The losers: first, you, my friend, unless you work for one of the aforesaid winners. A gas station is nothing more than a device to transfer your money to the coffers of the aforesaid winners. Of course the IRS also transfers quite a bit of your money into the coffers of the winners as the government pays them obscene amounts of money for the war

The rest:

• your sons and daughters serving in Iraq;
• 
  
• the standing of the United States as a bastion of freedom, justice and prosperity;
• 
  
• the Iraqis; and
• 
  
• the less affuent of the world who are starving because the price of food staples has gone through the ceiling.
• 
  

Enter Greg Palast, reporter, disturber of the noisy and violent peace, who cracks open the rule book of the global energy business and its lackey, the Bush Administration, and shows us that there is a method in the Bushite madness. Here is the beginning of his latest column on TomPaine.com/OurFuture.org:

I can’t make this up:

In a hotel room in Brussels, the chief executives of the world’s top oil companies unrolled a huge map of the Middle East, drew a fat, red line around Iraq and signed their names to it.

The map, the red line, the secret signatures. It explains this war. It explains this week’s rocketing of the price of oil to $134 a barrel.

It happened on July 31, 1928, but the bill came due now.

Barack Obama knows this. Or, just as important, those crafting his policies seem to know this. Same for Hillary Clinton’s team. There could be no more vital difference between the Republican and Democratic candidacies. And you won’t learn a thing about it on the news from the Fox-holes.

In short, the energy barons of the world have, since 1928, been doing everything in their considerable power to keep Iraq's oil off the market.

Palast has been writing about this for years. Has it gotten any traction? Don't be silly.

Read the column. Is there any other reasonable explanation for U. S. Policy towards Iraq since 1928? As Sherlock Holmes remarked, “When you have excluded the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”

So what these barons are doing is not stupid. It's a lot worse; it is insane. It will, if not stopped, lead to our impoverishment and eventually our destruction. Even the wealthy and powerful will not be able to avoid the consequences of what they are doing.

So much to write about, so little time.

Via Stan Goff:

Unknown to me The Independent (UK) stopped charging to read Robert Fisk's excellent writings on the middle east, and in one of the first articles that I read, Fisk confesses to doubts about the official 9/11 story.

Like most of us, Fisk doesn't claim to know what really happened, but he seem pretty sure that it didn't happen the way the administration said it happened:

I am increasingly troubled at the inconsistencies in the official narrative of 9/11. It's not just the obvious non sequiturs: where are the aircraft parts (engines, etc) from the attack on the Pentagon? Why have the officials involved in the United 93 flight (which crashed in Pennsylvania) been muzzled? Why did flight 93's debris spread over miles when it was supposed to have crashed in one piece in a field? Again, I'm not talking about the crazed "research" of David Icke's Alice in Wonderland and the World Trade Center Disaster – which should send any sane man back to reading the telephone directory.

I am talking about scientific issues. If it is true, for example, that kerosene burns at 820C under optimum conditions, how come the steel beams of the twin towers – whose melting point is supposed to be about 1,480C – would snap through at the same time? (They collapsed in 8.1 and 10 seconds.) What about the third tower – the so-called World Trade Centre Building 7 (or the Salmon Brothers Building) – which collapsed in 6.6 seconds in its own footprint at 5.20pm on 11 September? Why did it so neatly fall to the ground when no aircraft had hit it? The American National Institute of Standards and Technology was instructed to analyse the cause of the destruction of all three buildings. They have not yet reported on WTC 7. Two prominent American professors of mechanical engineering – very definitely not in the "raver" bracket – are now legally challenging the terms of reference of this final report on the grounds that it could be "fraudulent or deceptive".

Journalistically, there were many odd things about 9/11. Initial reports of reporters that they heard "explosions" in the towers – which could well have been the beams cracking – are easy to dismiss. Less so the report that the body of a female air crew member was found in a Manhattan street with her hands bound. OK, so let's claim that was just hearsay reporting at the time, just as the CIA's list of Arab suicide-hijackers, which included three men who were – and still are – very much alive and living in the Middle East, was an initial intelligence error.

But what about the weird letter allegedly written by Mohamed Atta, the Egyptian hijacker-murderer with the spooky face, whose "Islamic" advice to his gruesome comrades – released by the CIA – mystified every Muslim friend I know in the Middle East? Atta mentioned his family – which no Muslim, however ill-taught, would be likely to include in such a prayer. He reminds his comrades-in-murder to say the first Muslim prayer of the day and then goes on to quote from it. But no Muslim would need such a reminder – let alone expect the text of the "Fajr" prayer to be included in Atta's letter.

Let me repeat. I am not a conspiracy theorist. Spare me the ravers. Spare me the plots. But like everyone else, I would like to know the full story of 9/11, not least because it was the trigger for the whole lunatic, meretricious "war on terror" which has led us to disaster in Iraq and Afghanistan and in much of the Middle East. Bush's happily departed adviser Karl Rove once said that "we're an empire now – we create our own reality". True? At least tell us.

Read the whole article.

Fisk is a middle east scholar and reporter. He speaks Arabic and who knows how many other languages fluently. He knows Islamic culture by having lived among Muslims for years and years. He is totally at home in the middle east. Fisk's remarks about the "weird letter" supposedly written by Mohamed Atta tells much about what is wrong with the official story.

It's beginning to look that way. This administration is insane. And Congress is pusillanimous. God help us.

Updates:

Juan Cole: Cheney & Iran: Here We Go Again?, and Bush and Ahmadinejad: Will they or Won't They?

Todd Gitlin: Iraq with an N? Anatomy of a Rumor That Has to be Taken Seriously

George Packer: Test Marketing

Victor Davis Hanson In the National Review: Don't Bomb, Bomb Iran (Included to show that even some of most prominent wingnuts think that bombing Iran is nuts.)

See the article below. With a small amount of googling, one can find a tremendous amount of dirt on the Plum Island facility. According to sources, it was privatized in 1991 and has been run since that time by a private corporation based in Maryland.

http://cryptome.org/piadc.htm

According to the Long Island Business News on August 10, 2006, the new facility will be a biosafety level 4, rather than the current level 3 on Plum Island. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4189/is_20060810/ai_n16656220.

What that means, dear reader, is that the facility that is being proposed for Flora, Mississippi, is more dangerous than a facility that is now located on an island because of the danger it poses to humans and animals.

Do we really want this facility here?

In 2000, the Jackson Progressive republished an article by Theodore Postol from the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, entitled The Target is Russia. The article began with the following:

The Clinton administration is relentlessly moving toward an ill-informed decision this summer to deploy an untested and fundamentally unworkable national missile defense (NMD) system. The administration claims this technically flawed defense is needed to negate an unproven long-range missile threat posed by "rogue" states.

The cost of this defense will not simply be measured in dollars. It may include an end to further nuclear arms reductions with Russia, an increased Chinese effort to expand its nuclear forces in response to the defense, negative reactions from U.S. allies in Europe and East Asia--who know that their security will also suffer from this ill-thought out American initiative--and an eventual collapse of global arms control and nonproliferation efforts.

The Bush Administration has continued the development and deployment of this unbelievably expensive and highly unreliable system, whose official purpose is to protect against "rogue" states, such as Iran and North Korea. It is hard to escape the conclusion, however, as Dr. Postol did in 2000, that our government has not been entirely candid about its real purpose.

It is difficult to imagine, as Postol pointed out, that a radar facility located near Vardo, on the northern tip of Norway and only 40 miles from the Russian border, is intended for surveillance of only North Korea and Iran.



Perhaps it's just the coincidence of today's headlines in USA Today and the fact that I'm listening to an audiobook version of Gore Vidal's novel, The Golden Age: An American Chronicle Novel, set in Washington, D.C. around the time of this nation's entry into World War II, but it is looking more and more that since the fall of the Soviet Union the power elite has been slowly maneuvering us into a new cold war. The headlines proclaim "Bush says Russia 'derailed' moves toward democracy," although the headlines on the inner page state "Bush: 'Russia is not our enemy.'" Bush made his remarks at a democracy conference in Prague, Czech Republic, prior to leaving for the Group of Eight summit in Germany.

Needless to say, Vladimir Putin has not been happy with either Bush's remark or an anti-missile system obviously designed and deployed against Russia, despite Bush's protestations to the contrary.

Vidal's novel is the remarkable reconstruction of how Roosevelt, Harry Hopkins, and War Secretary Stimson, together with the help of the mass media and others, deliberately provoked the Japanese to attack the United States. It is fascinating to read Vidal's description of the elaborate web that Roosevelt wove, a web so vast and elaborate that no one else could see just where he was leading the nation, especially as the strands of the web invariably ended in the Oval Office.

Obviously, the invention of nuclear weapons has altered the script. Once Russia had the bomb and a method of delivery, total war was no longer an option. On the other hand, the threat of nuclear war became a fearsome tool to enrich the arms industry, diminish civil liberties. and colonize the third world to keep it free from the "scourge of Communism."^®

The fear du jour technique of the Bush administration is beginning to look ridiculous, because it requires a level of inventiveness seldom possessed by authoritarians like the ones now in power. The cockeyed plan to blow up a jet fuel pipeline leading to JFK Airport by some terrorist wannabes has become the subject of snickering, not a source of terror. After a while, any con game becomes stale and grows mold. Now that the Global War on Terror^® is losing its ability to terrify the guy in Texarkana or Hennepin, a suitable replacement must be found for the GWOT, which is now rancid and must be discarded.

A second Cold War could easily fill the bill. Looking back to the '50s, it is amazing how the the First Cold War subsumed reason, memory and ethics into a mindless, bipolar Manicheanism that justified nearly anything the power elite decided it wanted.

This is not an exclusively Republican project, by any means. Once the security establishment recovered from the surprise of the disintegration of the Soviet Union, it immediately began to search for threats. The economics and financial side of the power elite made sure that the "reforms" made in Russia would not lead to a more democratic state, but instead would lead to an oligarchy run by bosses and former Soviet officials who had little or no experience with democratic institutions and even less respect for them. Recall that Boris Yelsin, a democratic hero in the West, settled his dispute with parliament by having his tanks shoot into the building.

This process has continued throughout the Clinton and Bush II administrations. Russia was very unhappy with Clinton's bombing of Serbia, a Slavic nation with historic ties to Russia. Bush has been provoking the Russians, not just with the anti-missile system, but by his continual rhetoric criticizing Russia's internal politics. Putin and the Russian government are reacting predictably, and, I suggest, according to plan. Whenever they push back, the U.S. government and its media mouthpieces can point to it as an indication of Russian intransigence.

A presidential candidate who does not buy into this program cannot be elected. If by some strange twist of fate such a person were elected to the presidency, he or she would be either sidelined, impeached or assassinated.

So the stage is set for a new cold war. The actors are studying the scripts and trying them out on the population and each other.

This is a different kind of drama, however; the audience is required to participate according to the instructions in the script, it can't leave, and the actors try to keep the play going as long as possible.

It's a dangerous play, so sit back and enjoy it while you can.

-------------

Memory: Some readers will recall that in 1999, the Russian army reached the Serbian air base in Pristina before NATO forces, under the command of Gen. Westly Clark, had reached it. When Clark learned of it, he became furious and ordered British General Sir Mike Jackson to order an assault on the Russian troops, whereupon Jackson refused and told Clark "I'm not going to start the third world war for you." The original article appeared in the Guardian but is not available from its web archives but there are a number of existing articles that amplify the dispute among the NATO commanders and their governments:

Gen. Strangelove and the Wimps

Tracing Clark's Military Map

Wikipedia Article on Westly Clark (obviously the contents of this article can change)

Jeff Elkins: When thieves fall out (commentary)

Via Helena Cobban in Just World News, the right-wing Washington Times features a column by Major General Robert H. Scales, former commander of the Army War College, entitled Is the Army Headed for Collapse?

Scales says yes, the Army is broken:

If you haven't heard the news, I'm afraid your Army is broken, a victim of too many missions for too few soldiers for too long. Today we have deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan all of our fighting brigades, both active and reserve. Every brigade save one in Korea has spent time in combat.

The essence of Scales's argument is based upon the necessity of keeping 2 brigades at home for every one in the theater of war. One of the home brigades would be recovering whicle the other would be training and otherwise preparing for combat. With such an arrangement the Army could keep one brigade in combat indefinitaly. After the surge, according to Scales, the nation will have to keep 33 brigades of 3000 troops each in Iraq, thus requiring a total of 99 brigades to sustain the fighting. There are only about half that number in the Army, which makes a sustained effort impossible in the long run.

This is not news to anyone who has been following the way the administration has been treating the troops during this war. Our nation is in a very perilous situation with respect to its military strength and unless there is relief soon our Army will cease to exist as an effective fighting force. In the international situation that Bush has created over the past six years, that is a bad position for our nation to be in.

According to the New York Times, our own senator, Thad Cochran, introduced an amendment to the supplemental Iraq spending bill that would have removed the deadline for withdrawal.

Surely he realizes that the Army will break long before next March if things continue as they have been. Our military should be out of Iraq long before then.

It appears that virtually all the Republicans in the Senate still check their brains (along with two other important bodily parts) at the door before they vote blindly and cowardly the way Bush tells them.

Senate Keeps Pullout Date in Iraq War Bill

Here is a transcript of a panel discussion between Juan Cole, expert on middle eastern affair, Dr. Gilbert Burnham, a Ph.D. and an M.D., who is a co- director of the Center for Refugee and Disaster Response at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and Les Roberts, associate professor of Clinical Public Health at the Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University. The latter two academics wrote a recent article in the British medical journal, Lancet, estimating the number of civilian deaths that have resulted from the U. S. invasion of Iraq. The conclusions are shocking: 650,000 persons have perished as a direct result of our invasion, the proportional equivalent of 7.8 million Americans out of our population.

Read and ponder.

Kucinich-Paul Congressional Hearing on Civilian Casualties in Iraq

Helena Cobbin puts together the resignation of Phiip Zelikow as counsellor to Secretary of State Condi Rice and the visits of high administration officials—including Bush himself—to mideast sunni moslem nations: the administration is planning an attack on Iran and the meetings all over the mideast are to prepare those nations for what is to come. Zelikow, who is intelligent and knowledgeable, and, knowing that the results of such an attack would be disastrous to the U.S., quit.

It's speculation, of course, but given that Bush is a lame duck with no more elections in front of him, he could very well feel emboldened to strike out at Iran with little fear of political retribution. Our soldiers in Iraq will feel the retribution, however, as Iran stirs the boiling pot that is now Iraq. Since the recommendations of the Iraq Study Group are due to be released shortly, and rumors have it that it will recommend bringing Syria and Iran into negotiations, it is entirely conceivable that Bush and Cheney believe that they must strike before those recommendations are released:

... So maybe all the haste with which Olmert and the Bushites are acting these days has to do with them trying to pre-empt the recommendations that the ISG [Iraq Study Group]are expected to come out with? After all, once the relatively sage recommendations of the wise adults of both parties are out there publicly on the table, and framing the national debate, it would be a lot harder for Bush and Olmert to launch a military adventure against Iran, unconstrained by political realities.

(Bush and Olmert would have to create some kind of an immediate "pretext" for the attack. But doing that need not be hard to arrange.)

So maybe all the present visits by Bush and his high-level acolytes to Sunni countries are related not so much to planning regarding Iraq, but to some final advance planning for a military strike against Iran that may be fairly imminent?

Let us hope that Bush and Olmert have not gone completely crazy. Read Cobbin and ponder. I personally believe that the trips are more likely to be for the purpose of preparing U.S. allies, particularly Israel, for the shock that will inevitably accompany the U.S.'s bringing Iran and Syria into the negotiations. Still, it's hard to fit Zelikow's resignation into that scenario.

Helena Cobbin: Zelikow: What does he know?

The BBC reports that Iran will give inspectors access to records and equipment from two of its nuclear sites, according to the head of the the IAEA, the UN's atomic agency. This is a beginning, and a hopeful one. With our armed forces in desperate shape in Iraq, the utter stupidity of attacking Iran seems to have finally penetrated the saner heads in the Whitehouse. The result of the elections undoubtedly helped, too. There is no solution to the Iraqi mess without Iran's cooperation, so we had better get on with it.

It's hard not to be a little smug when this blog predicted precisely what is now happening.

Helena Cobban, a true middle east expert who writes for the Christian Science Monitor, has recently written what must be done to extricate the U.S. from its precarious military posture in Iraq. Her answer: Iran, the U.N. and Iraq's other neighbors, in that order. I guessed previously that former Iranian president Khatami's recent visit to the U.S. was related to obtaining Iran's assistance as a stabilizing influence.

While I am not privy to the details of Khatami's visit, I still find it simply inconceivable that he would be allowed to undertake a speaking tour in the U.S. unless the administration, which routinely denies visas to even its minor foreign critics, was interested in a rapprochement.

The Bush administration is demonizing Iran's Islamic government. There can be no other reason than to prepare the American people for military action against Iran. Like the propaganda campaign against Iraq leading up to the invasion of that unfortunate nation, the current one is a mixture of half-truths and outright lies. Once Washington has decided to attack, Iran's compliance with U.N. resolutions will protect Iran to the same extent that Saddam's compliance with U.N. resolutions protected Iraq. One can only hope the American people and the Congress see through this (neo-) con game in time to avert another disaster.

The Bush Administration just can't get away from the notion that if it decides you are a terrorist, you have no rights, not even the right to contest your terrorist status. The latest episode in this struggle is the refusal of the administration to even consider allowing defendants on trial for terrorism to see the evidence against them. The Justice Department, in the wake of Hamdi, is drawing up rules and procedures for trials and ignoring the input of military lawyers that permitting secret evidence in trial is a violation of the Geneva Accords and risks being declared unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court.

The idea that the government can declare you a terrorist and strip you of your rights without recourse strikes at the very heart of the American idea of justice. We rebelled against the British in great part because of the abuses of executive power. Bush wants to find the Guantanimo prisoners guilty before trial, and convert what should be fair and impartial trials into mockeries of justice. For extensive background on the right to confrontation against one's accusers, see Justice Scalia's opinion in Crawford v. Washington, in which the Supreme Court affirmed the absolute right of a defendant to cross-examine his accusers in open court.

Once again, Bush believes that he is above the law. Can the republic survive this administration? Are enough people even concerned?

The Boston Globe: Military Lawyers See Limits on Trial Input (The title is deceiving. The article discusses Bush's intention of dominating the workings of the military courts, including the independence of military lawyers.)

Juan Cole has a very interesting post on his blog on the geopolitics of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. The comments are thoughtful and knowledgeable.

Juan Cole: One Ring to Rule Them

by Paul Rogers

A week into the war, Israel's intransigence and the United States's indulgence make the prospects for peace minimal.

Israel's attacks on Lebanon continued over the night of 17-18 July with fifty sites being hit. Many of these were said to be Hizbollah facilities, even though the targets have included a lighthouse, a medical truck and a dairy factory. In any case, the main effect has been to cause disruption across much of the country as numerous bridges are hit and movement of refugees made difficult if not impossible. The attacks continue through 18 July with equal ferocity, and no let up in sight.

The level of trauma and anxiety in Lebanon has increased greatly in the past week; 200 civilians have been killed (with several examples of internally-displaced people being caught out in the open by Israeli air raids) and thousands injured. The effect of this is to cause mass anxiety for many thousands more civilians now trying to move away from zones of conflict.

Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) spokespersons claim that, as a result of IDF actions so far, a high proportion of Hezbollah's 12,000-plus rockets and missiles have been destroyed. There is little independent evidence for this, and in any case such claims have been accompanied by the direct evidence of Hizbollah firing another fifty rockets into Israel in the past twenty-four hours. This in itself is hugely significant, given the massive level of Israeli military activity across the border; the Hizbollah attacks are having a great impact on a deeply insecure population across northern Israel.

The IDF is making a massive effort through the use of air power, artillery and naval gunfire support to stop Hizbollah's offensive actions, and has so far failed to do so. In a further indication of the militant group's capabilities under bombardment, one missile attack reached as far south as the town of Atlit, eight kilometres south of Haifa and fifty-five kilometres south of the Lebanese border – indicating either that Hizbollah can fire missiles from very close to the border or else has longer-range missiles that can be launched from deep inside Lebanon. Meanwhile, the IDF has began the process of calling up reservists, with three battalions being mobilised for deployment in the West Bank to release regular army troops to support IDF actions in the north.

The weakness of power

Tentative peace moves have been proposed, primarily from United Nations sources, but the government of Ehud Olmert is highly unlikely to call a halt to its extensive military actions. The level of vulnerability felt in Israel is palpable, even though the idea of such an incredibly strong military power even feeling vulnerable is difficult for outsiders to understand. One indication of this is an effect of the Hamas-instigated event that helped begin this specific cycle of violence.
On 29 June, a Hamas unit dressed in IDF uniforms infiltrated a well-defended IDF unit on the Israeli side of the border with Gaza through a 1,000-yard tunnel dug from deep inside the strip. Two Israeli soldiers were killed and one, Gilad Shalit, was kidnapped. This was the latest of a series of tunnelling episodes that, like the crude homemade Hamas rockets and the much more sophisticated Hizbollah missiles, have hugely damaged the validity of Israel's policy of establishing security through solidly-protected borders.

The reaction to the tunnelling episodes has been extraordinary. On one recent occasion, the IDF actually experimented with a 1,000-metre stretch of an underground steel barrier, over fourteen metres deep, on the Gaza/Egyptian border. Shuki Rynski, a retired colonel and former deputy commander of the IDF's Gaza division, has even advocated building a polymer-reinforced cement wall going twenty-two metres down, as a supplement to border protection on the surface (see Barbara Opall-Rome, "Israel Confronts Threat of Gaza Tunnels" Defense News, 10 July 2006 [subscription only]). This would cost around $500,000 per kilometre, a quarter of the cost of the wall being built round much of the West Bank; some observers have pointed out that in any case, Palestinian militias would simply dig deeper.

Such plans, coupled with the extensive IDF raids into Lebanon that have widespread support within Israel, all point to a national mindset of protection that is currently unable to even comprehend that the entire process is ultimately self-defeating. Israel cannot achieve physical security without political security, and that cannot be achieved except by negotiating with its adversaries and recognising the predicament of the Palestinians. In the final analysis there is no alternative to a peace settlement encompassing the creation of a viable Palestinian state.

There is little chance of that even beginning to be recognised in the current insecure environment within Israel. It is made even less likely by the solid support from the Bush administration, due in no small measure to the political significance of Christian Zionism in the United States (see David Brog's new book, Standing with Israel: Why Christians Support the Jewish State, Front Line Books, 2006).

Almost a week into the war, a weak and disunited Europe concentrates very largely on evacuating its citizens from Lebanon, and the United States displays a special sense of irony by chartering a cruise ship to do the same. At present, the prospects for peace are minimal.


Paul Rogers is professor of peace studies at Bradford University, northern England. He has been writing a weekly column on global security on openDemocracy since October 2001 Among Paul Rogers's columns on Hizbollah, Iran and Israel: "Hizbollah's warning flight" (5 May 2005); "Iran in Israel's firing-range" (8 December 2005);"Iran: war by October?" (20 April 2006); , Lebanon, and beyond: the danger of escalation" (17 July 2006)

In addition to his weekly openDemocracy column, Paul Rogers writes an international security monthly briefing for the Oxford Research Group; for details, click here

A collection of Paul Rogers's Oxford Research Group briefings, Iraq and the War on Terror: Twelve Months of Insurgency, 2004-05 is published by IB Tauris (October 2005)

This article originally appeared on openDemocracy.net under a Creative Commons licence. To view the original article, please click here.

Based on the Geneva Conventions, the Supreme Court systematically dismantled the Bush administration's argument for trying "enemy combatants" in Guantánamo before military commissions with virtually none of the protections guaranteed to Americans under the Constitution or even to military personnel under the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Stevens, Kennedy, Ginsburg, Souter and Breyer formed the majority, with Scalia, Thomas and Alito the minority. Roberts, who had voted to uphold the government while sitting on the Court of Appeals, was disqualified.

The ball is back in Congress's court. It could pass another law to strip the federal courts of jurisdiction over the tribunals. It is troubling to this lawyer that Congress has the power under the Constitution to limit the jurisdictions of the federal courts at its whim. It is even more troubling that Congress would exercise that power to facilitate what are in essence Star Chambers, in which the defendants are not allowed to attend their own trials, to confront their accusers, or even be informed of all the evidence against them.

There is no legitimate justification for such marsupial jurisprudence based on military expediency. The War on Terror is no more a war than the War on Drugs and Guantánamo is no battlefield. The administration's argument--that the prisoners are not entitled to due process or even humane treatment because they are "enemy combatants"--is an argument no person of minimal intelligence and decency would accept for a moment. Only a judge conditioned by years of slicing and dicing principles of justice and fairness in the interest of expediency could seriously entertain such a monstrous proposition that merely by calling prisoners of war something different the administration can strip them of the rights enjoyed by prisoners of war under the U.S. Constitution and solemn treaties our government entered into more than 50 years ago.

What is so disheartening about this whole controversy is that it should even exist. What have we become as a people when we regard justice as something that can be doled out by the government to some but denied to others with an arbitrary logic determined by a powerful few? That's far more scary than the terrorist threat.

Hamden v. Rumsfeld, Secretary of Defense, No. 05-184, Supreme Court of the United States (large .pdf file)

Thom Hartmann observes that the United States is not at war with Saddam Hussein or Iraq; we won that war. Didn't the president announce the end of the war in May 2003 from the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln? Remember "mission accomplished?" This is one time we should take him at his word. The United States wages war extraordinarily well; our troops were in Baghdad in a matter of days, having rolled over the Iraqi armed forces like a high-speed bulldozer.

Once the enemy is conquered, the war ends and the occupation begins. We are no longer at war with Iraq or in Iraq. Our troops are standing on someone else's soil, not ours, and the course of the occupation as well as its ultimate outcome depends on our recognizing that fact and acting accordingly. The Bush administration has ignored that fact and treated the Iraqi people like serfs or worse. The Iraqis have responded predictably, just as we would, by fighting back the only way they can: with guerilla tactics.

When an occupation goes sour the occupier will ultimately face only two choices: it must either withdraw and cut its losses or it must wipe out a significant part of the population in order to subdue the rest. That is a choice that the Bush administration is avoiding, for reasons that I will discuss when I review Greg Palast's new book, Armed Madhouse. The result is that soldiers are dying every day with no progress in controlling the insurgency.

The Republican party, according to Hartmann, is attempting to frame the occupation as a war because Americans don't like to lose wars, even endless ones. Occupations, on the other hand, have none of war's patriotic dimensions, and people expect them to be over in a reasonable time and for the troops to come home. Democrats, therefore, have every reason to challenge the Republicans' misuse of the term war and every reason to frame the occupation of Iraq as what it really is, an occupation.

The war is over and we won. We're losing the occupation. There's no shame in ending an occupation, even one we're losing. Let the Iraqis solve their own problems. We have plenty of problems here at home to keep us occupied. Uppermost is how to repair the damage done to this nation by the party that presently controls the White House and Congress.

Thom Hartmann: Reclaim The Issues - "Occupation," Not "War"

In going through some of the JP Yugoslavia archives this evening, I came across a speech by Svend Robinson made on June 13, 2000 before the Canadian Parliament regarding the NATO bombing of Serbia and Kosovo. Since Clark is a possible candidate for the presidency in 2008, Robinson's speech is relevant in evaluating his qualifications and character.

When I joined the Air Force in the spring of 1968 and reported for OTS, I was a bitter young man, forced to withdraw from graduate school in the middle of a semester by the certainty of being drafted in the summer and to abandon my aspirations to an academic career in mathematics. That was before the draft was abolished and even before the lottery, which introduced an element of evenhandedness into what seemed before to be a purely arbitrary selection process.

To the jaundiced eye of this middle-aged veteran it now looks as though the lottery itself forced the end of the draft, as the sons of the influential and well-connected found it more difficult to avoid conscription. (This, of course, did not apply to certain Texan well-connected families). Once in the military and having survived the ordeal of Officers Training School, the debate over the draft became more and more personally irrelevant, so when the draft was finally ended, I thought little of the long-range effects that an all-volunteer force might have on our future.

It was a mistake, I now believe, to end the draft. In military matters there is a fine line between "professional" and "mercenary." The former is a highly trained citizen-soldier, loyal to the Constitution and devoted to protecting the republic. The latter is a hired killer, loyal only to his paymaster and devoted only to protecting the interests of his employer. A professional army of citizen-soldiers constitutes a powerful defense for a democratic republic. It is mostly a shield, although at times it can be an awesome sword. A mercenary army, having no connectedness to the people and beholden only to a king, dictator, or party that writes their paychecks, is usually the instrument of tyranny. It is a shield for rulers and a sword to everyone else. History is full of Praetorian Guards and private armies, who, identifying only with their rulers, ultimately became a law unto themselves.

Implicit in a citizen-army, especially one in which most of the officers come from the ranks of the commoners, is the threat that it will refuse to obey a tyrant; that it will refuse to acquiesce in the dismantling of the republic or allow itself to be used against its fellow-citizens. Most importantly for us is the possibility that it will refuse to engage in an unprovoked war of aggression.

Vietnam was the tipping point. It then became obvious to the power elites that the great game could not be played with an army conscripted from educated, well-informed citizens with decent employment prospects. The elite solution was to end conscription and raise military pay. The buzzphrase was "professonal military." The problem with such a solution was that the average educated, well-informed citizen with decent employment prospects was still a difficult, it not impossible, sell for a military intended to be used in imperialistic pursuits.

The solution? Reduce the number of educated, well-informed citizens with decent employment prospects. This program began in earnest when Reagan became president. Is it necessary to point out all the seemingly insignificant measures the Reagan administration took to implement this program? Let me point out just a few.

Educated: Higher education began to grow far more expensive as federal aid to colleges and universities waned, especially in the liberal arts. The educational economy moved from grants to government-guaranteed loans, thus saddling students with crushing debt burdens upon graduation. When I graduated from law school in 1978, my entire educational debt amounted to $2,000 in deferred undergraduate loans. Today, it is not unusual for law students to owe $125,000 in variable interest rate student loans when they graduate, a powerful deterrent to public-interest careers, where modest salaries are inadequate to repay the debt and live a decent life.

Well-informed: Prior to the Reagan administration, the FCC required broadcasters, in return for the privilege of using the public airwaves, to give equivalent time to opposing viewpoints. The "Fairness Doctrine" was abolished by the Republican-controlled FCC in 1987, and ushered in the era of right-wing talk shows that were able to spew their venom far and wide without being challenged. Limbaugh and Savage are two particularly vicious examples that would not have lasted a day had they been exposed to intelligent opposition on their shows, or even on adjacent timeslots.

Decent employment prospects: The Reagan administration's relentless war against labor unions, together with its successors' encouragement of labor outsourcing under the guise of free trade has destroyed job security for all but the very rich, who don't need a job, anyway. Even highly-educated and skilled workers cannot compete with foreign workers brought to this country under special work programs.

The result: more recruits, desperate for a job, hoping to get an education from the G.I. Bill.

Another result: the increasing use of mercenaries instead of our armed forces. Iraq is swarming with heavily-armed mercenaries with little or no oversight, and paid exorbitantly by the American taxpayer.

More ominous: New Orleans after Katrina is swarming with heavily-armed men, apparently deputized to keep order, but who do pretty much what they want to with no accountability whatever. The National Guard couldn't do the job because a great part of it was in Iraq. I personally think that using soldiers of fortune to keep order in an American city is an outrage and a prelude to a police state.

What can be done? It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure this one out. The processes outlined above are reversible, given the political will.

This blog and publication has been scandelously negligent about conveying news and announcements of the Mobile to New Orleans march organized and sponsored by Veterans for Peace that began the other day. Here is the website and here is the running blog for the march.

Of the 580,000 soldiers that served in Gulf War I, 325,000 were on permanent disability in 2000. It's nearly certain that the principal cause was the extensive use of depleted uranium in military ordinance. Uranium is a heavy metal like lead, so although environmental uranium may pose very little danger from radioactivity, it is at least as chemically lethal as lead.

http://www.sfbayview.com/012605/headsroll012605.shtml

The Guardian recently published a sober assessment of the neocon debacle and how we got to where we are. It rings true, but not novel. Republics are undermined and eventually destroyed by their very successes. The empires that emerge from failed republics gradually decay until they are unable to resist aggression from without. For an example, read Pericles's funeral oration given at the height of Athens's power and prestige. Print it out and then read it again.

Keep in mind that Athens was defeated a few years later, having alienated its allies by mistreatment and its subjects by harsh and brutal oppression.