Pundits Say Islamic Courts Are Effectively Marginalized

They say the Islamic Courts over played their hand after international moves to shore up the recognized government radicalized the leadership and induced them to move against Ethiopian troops in central Somalia.
Meanwhile, the Telegraph reports Islamists digging in near the southern town of Jilib where fleeing residents reported heavy artillery and gunfire.

Officials from Somalia's weak transitional government, which now holds sway over Mogadishu, said they would leave open the offer of peace talks with the ICU providing that they surrendered. "We are contacting them for dialogue. We have repeatedly asked them to come to Mogadishu to talk," Mr Gedi told reporters, adding that the foreign fighters now constituted 65 per cent of the Islamist force.

PINR's latest analysis of the situation in Somalia predicts the Islamic Courts may well mount a guerrilla war in the south, but they will be one of many forces vying for control of Somalia. Moderates who supported the Islamic Courts will no longer support the movement for now having no desire for guerrilla war. PINR predicts that Somalia's recognized government is no stronger than it was. Ethiopia is predicted to be leaving soon with the result of re-emergence of clan militias fragmenting political power and a return to status of a failed state.

Prime Minister Gedi has eliminated his major rival Sharif Hassan Sheikh Adan, who had attempted to broker a reconciliation agreement between the T.F.G. and I.C.C. Nonetheless, the rise of Gedi to a central position for the moment does not betoken the emergence of a strong central government in Somalia. The Ethiopians will withdraw and the T.F.G. will not have the power to prevent political fragmentation.


Addis Ababa has accomplished its own mission in Somalia, which was to eliminate the threat of an Islamic state on its eastern border, and is content to leave the country in a condition of political weakness. Having leagued with the warlords and Puntland militias, as well as the T.F.G., in its campaign against the I.C.C., and needing to mend its relations with Somaliland, which is resistant to unification with the T.F.G. and has serious border disputes with Puntland, Addis Ababa is unlikely to give whole-hearted support to Gedi. Since Somalia launched an unsuccessful irredentist war against Ethiopia in 1977 to gain control of the latter's ethnic-Somali Ogaden region, Addis Ababa has striven to keep Somalia fragmented and to play factions off against one another. Addis Ababa has not changed that strategy and should not be considered the T.F.G.'s reliable patron.


Understanding the I.C.C.'s aborted revolution is facilitated by the trenchant analysis of Somali intellectual Dr. Abdishakur Jowhar in his article, "A War of Miscalculation," published on the website Hiiraan Online. Commenting on the I.C.C.'s declaration of jihad against Ethiopia and its aggressive moves in mid-December to challenge Ethiopian forces based around the T.F.G.'s provisional capital Baidoa in the south-central Bay region, Jowhar writes: "They threatened Ethiopia and stirred the wasp's nest, but they have not bothered to prepare themselves with protective clothing. They had the guts, the belief, the belligerence but not the arms, the organization or the depth of pocket necessary for waging war (jihad) against Ethiopia. They believed their own rhetoric of god being on their side, of representing all Somalis, of having already taken over and centralized the whole power of the nation in their hands."


As Jowhar sees it, the I.C.C.'s leadership got carried away with itself and succumbed to a triumphalist illusion that led them to throw "young bodies armed with weapons not much better than spears and a prayer against the well oiled fully equipped Ethiopian meat grinder." As do many Somali intellectuals, Jowhar epitomizes his analysis in a Somali proverb: "The tree lamented that the axe with wooden handle would not have been able to cut it down if part of it was not in the axe."


[...]Three possible scenarios present themselves for the new chapter in Somalia's political history. The most unlikely is that the T.F.G. will unify Somalia south of Puntland in an effective central government; its clan-based constitution is an inherent weakness, and the many sub-clans are in a mode of self-protection. More likely is a return to the pre-I.C.C. period of extreme decentralization, warlordism and state failure, either with or without an Islamist insurgency -- the latter being the more probable outcome.


External actors will revert to their previous positions, with regional states playing off Somali factions against one another to their own perceived advantage and Western powers drawing back from the scene, unless an Islamist insurgency becomes a base for international Islamic revolutionaries. Ethiopia's prime minister, Meles Zenawi, has said that massive humanitarian, reconstruction and development aid from Western powers is required for Somalia's stabilization, but that is unlikely to come in sufficient quantities.

Islamic Courts Make a Stand in South Somalia

The New York Times continues its cheerleading for the Ethiopians describing their "heroic" rescue of the UN supported government of Somalia. While this move may well temporarily improve the situation of the government, unless the moderate clerics with the Islamic Courts can be separated from the Al Qaeda allies, there will be no real progress, just a long grueling guerrilla war along the Kenyan border further destabilizing both countries.

A phalanx of Ethiopian tanks and armored personnel carriers chugged toward the last city occupied by Somalia’s diminished Islamist movement, witnesses said today, setting the stage for one final major battle. According to residents along Somalia’s coast, the Ethiopian troops, along with soldiers from Somalia’s transitional government, were preparing to seize Kismayo, a port city near the Kenyan border where the Islamist leaders have holed up.


Sheilk Sharif Sheikh Ahmed, a high-ranking cleric, vowed not to go down without a fight. "I want to tell you that the Islamic courts are still alive and ready to fight against the enemy of Allah," Mr. Ahmed told residents of Kismayo in a speech today. "We left Mogadishu in order to prevent bloodshed in the capital, but that does not mean we lost the holy war against our enemy.” Mr. Ahmed called on Somalis to begin an anti-Ethiopian insurgency, and already several masked gunmen have surfaced on Mogadishu’s streets.


Diplomats in Kenya, though, said that they were talking to moderate representatives of the Islamic movement today, trying to persuade them to back down.


In Mogadishu, the presence of Ethiopian troops continued to spark violence, with supporters of the Ethiopians battling street by street against the remaining Islamist partisans. Gunshots rang out, men and women battled with sticks and rocks and the thick black smoke of burning barricades lifted into the air.

Minnesota Under the National Spotlight

This election season was a big win for the Democrats. But I don't expect to see a sweeping move of progressives into positions of power in government. Instead, all the signs suggest both sides will swing towards the center in preparation for the 2008 presidential election.
Minnesota has attracted attention as one of the new swing states, a purple state since the Reagan revolution took hold. Both parties looked closely at Minnesota for it's national convention. But the Republicans committed first. Minnesota's Governor Pawlenty is one of the few Republicans to survive in states where Democrats surged. Pawlenty is considered a front runner for a Vice Presidential offer from presumed Republican candidate McCain.
Now, political pundits are watching the internal workings of a state legislature, having swung control to the Democrats, politics in general have been pushed to the center. The New York Times is beginning a series analysing Minnesota politics from time to time, expecting to learn something about national trends as we head towards 2008. This could be a very interesting two years in Minnesota.

Money, policy and tactical choices are all in play: how best to spend a $2 billion surplus and address what both parties see as a mandate for improving public education, health care and transportation and for making taxes more fair.


[...]But if Minnesota’s capital, with all of its local quirks and traditions, shows where the election’s wave may lead, it also confounds much of what may be expected.


The Democrats won big here — taking the House for the first time since 1998, expanding their majority in the Senate, winning the secretary of state’s and attorney general’s offices and nearly defeating Gov. Tim Pawlenty, a Republican.


But they emerged divided, too, owing much of their surge to newly elected moderates from the suburbs who are unlikely to embrace a pure liberal agenda. The Republicans lost big, but were pushed toward the center as well, led by Mr. Pawlenty, who has said since the election that many of his second-term priorities will overlap with those of the Democrats he fiercely battled in his first four years.


And those pincer forces, both pushing toward the political center, will set the stage for everything to come when the Legislature convenes in January, elected officials and political experts here say. In the first Pawlenty term, a $4.5 billion budget shortfall was resolved through deep cuts in spending for health care, education and other programs, capped by a bitter shutdown of the government in 2005 when Mr. Pawlenty and the Legislature could not agree.


The fight of 2007 will revolve around restoring some of the cut programs, and how far to go beyond that in pushing what both parties say is pent-up demand for property tax relief and for spending increases on education, health care and transportation.


One of the first tests could be a Democratic Party plan to extend health care benefits to 70,000 low-income children not covered by the MinnesotaCare program. That alone would cost hundreds of millions of dollars. MORE

A Viable Government in Somalia?

Could it be that the Islamists in Somalia were a paper tiger? The New York Times would have us believe that. They also talk about thousands of Somali government troops? I suspect it's the government of Somalia that is the paper tiger and this is just another chapter in the chaos that is Somalia the failed state.

In a matter of five days, the internationally recognized government, a fledging authority that had been so weak it was marooned in a provincial market town, captured the formidable capital and most of Somalia — with more than a little help from Ethiopia.


The Islamists, whom many Western nations had considered a grave and growing regional threat with terrorist connections, were vanquished faster than anyone had expected, or at least removed from power.


[..]On Thursday morning, before most of the troops arrived, the city exploded in anarchy as armed bandits rushed into the streets and fragmented militia units began to fight each other for the spoils of war.


Witnesses said that an intense gun battle raged around a former Islamist ammunition dump, and that clan warlords instantly reverted to setting up roadside checkpoints and shaking down motorists, reminiscent of the years of chaos before the Islamists pacified the city in June.


By Wednesday, the Islamist military had been decimated by Ethiopian airstrikes and mass desertions. Clan elders, traditionally the pillars of Somali society, pulled their troops and firepower out of the Union of Islamic Courts, or U.I.C., after a string of back-to-back military loses in which more than 1,000 fighters, mostly teenage boys, were quickly mowed down by the better-trained and equipped Ethiopian-backed forces.


“Our children were getting annihilated,” said Abdi Hulow, an elder with the powerful Hawiye clan. “We couldn’t sustain it.”


By Thursday, government officials said, many of the Islamist leaders had fled into the thickly forested areas to the south, where the government plans to hunt them down. But there were also worries that the Islamists would wage guerrilla warfare, as they have threatened.


“The U.I.C. may have decided not to fight the Ethiopians and their allies this time around,” said Ted Dagne, an Africa specialist for Congressional Research Service. But he added: “This does not mean the U.I.C. is finished. The U.I.C. fighters simply changed their uniform to a civilian cloth.”


Sheik Sharif Sheik Ahmed, an Islamist leader, said Thursday that his forces had surrendered Mogadishu to avoid a bloodbath. “We don’t want to see Mogadishu destroyed,” he told Al Jazeera television by telephone from an undisclosed location.


Mr. Hulow and other elders said they had asked transitional leaders for positions in the new government in exchange for support. Ali Mohammed Gedi, the prime minister, told the elders that first he needed help in disarming the militias.


Mr. Gedi also gave a short news conference on the outskirts of Mogadishu in which he reached out to the Somali diaspora, saying: “We need your help. It’s time to come home.”


One group was noticeably absent from all these talks: conservative clerics, who seemed to have overplayed their cards. MORE

But Al Qaeda has always had an interest in Somalia and if they are advising, they will tell them to fall back as the Taliban did in Afghanistan, and prepare for guerrilla war. I don't think we've heard the last from the Islamic Courts.
It is interesting like in most parts of Africa, tribal elders hold the real power. The side they take has the upper hand.

A Rare Glimpse of Good Sense, as Rice Heads to the Middle East

Every once in awhile we get a sense that Rice might have some competence when she stands up and goes against the grain of the Bush II legacy. Will Rice reign in the Israelis and bring them back to the negotiation table? No, I think this two will disappear in a flood of propaganda from Israel and a private rebuke from Bush.
Have you noticed Rice still talks about that "road map" that everyone has been calling dead for years? Nothing has changed.
New York Times

In a rare public rebuke to Israel, the Bush administration said Wednesday that an Israeli plan to construct a Jewish settlement in the occupied West Bank for the first time in 10 years could violate the terms of an American-backed peace proposal.


[...]“The U.S. calls on Israel to meet its road map obligations and avoid taking steps that could be viewed as pre-determining the outcome of final-status negotiations,” Mr. Gallegos told reporters.


For the Bush administration, which has shied away from criticizing Israel, the rebuke was so unusual that State Department officials took pains to assure reporters that it represented official policy and had been cleared by senior members of the administration.


The criticism was made as Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was expected to go to the Middle East early in 2007 to try to shore up support for Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian Authority president.

More Rumors of Expanding the Middle East War

Could Bush be still dreaming of a historic role of remaking the Middle East? Rumors persist that Bush, Blair, and Olmert are hoping to retrieve their lost support by provoking an attack of Syria by Israel and a bombing campaign in Iran. It's said that is why Bush has been pushing for a 30,000 man increase in US forces in Iraq.
Can this man be this stupid?
AlterNet

President Bush's goal would be to transcend the bloody quagmire bogging down U.S. forces in Iraq by achieving "regime change" in Syria and by destroying nuclear facilities in Iran, two blows intended to weaken Islamic militants in Iraq, Lebanon and the Palestinian territories.


The Israeli army and air force would carry the brunt of any new fighting albeit with the support of beefed-up U.S. ground and naval forces in the Middle East, the sources said. Bush is now considering a "surge" in U.S. troop levels in Iraq from about 140,000 to as many as 170,000. He also has dispatched a second aircraft carrier group to the coast of Iran.


So far, however, Bush has confronted stiff opposition from the Pentagon's Joint Chiefs of Staff to the plan for raising troop levels in Iraq, partly because the generals don't think it makes sense to commit more troops without a specific military mission.


But it's unclear how much the generals know about the expanded-war option which has been discussed sometimes in one-on-one meetings among the principals -- Bush, Olmert and Blair -- according to intelligence sources.


[...]In early 2007, the revival of this neoconservative strategy of using the Israeli military to oust the Syrian government and to inflict damage on Iran's nuclear program may represent a last-ditch -- and high-risk -- gamble by Bush and the neocons to salvage their historic legacy.


If that is the case, then Bush will approve "the surge" in U.S. forces into Iraq, which likely will be followed by some provocation that can be blamed on Syria or Iran, thus justifying the expanded war.

Ethiopia Marches on Mogadishu

Bolstered by Bush Administration expressions of support for it's invasion of Somalia, Ethiopian troops appear to be destined to surround Mogadishu. However, the consequences of this action seems unclear. Ethiopia is not likely to occupy Somalia, since doing so would face non-symetric conflict that they have too few troops to sustain.
The most likely explanation is they have been persuaded by the Bush Administration to invade to bring the Islamic Courts to the negotiation table with the weak UN recognized government. But will that strategy work? Certainly the foreign fighters active on the side of the Islamic Courts will not fight for a negotiated settlement. They will want to forward their ambition of Islamic revolution.
So Islamic Courts troops seem to fade into the countryside as the Ethiopians advance, seeking to fight on their terms since they can't compete with tanks and planes.
The most likely outcome is another strategic foreign policy loss for the inept simplistic thinking Bush Administration.
washingtonpost.com

U.N. officials warned of a humanitarian crisis in Somalia, while fears remained high that Ethiopia's aggressive military campaign could have disastrous consequences not only for Somalia but across the Horn of Africa. "I find it perplexing what the Ethiopians are up to," said David Shinn, a former U.S. ambassador to Ethiopia. "Over the long term, I don't see where this gets them. And one wonders how long they can hang on in this situation, because eventually it's going to turn into a nasty guerrilla war, and I don't think the Ethiopians have the stomach to carry on with that kind of campaign."


[..]It was unclear Tuesday whether Ethiopian troops were preparing to invade Mogadishu or merely surround it. But Shinn and others noted that a force of 15,000 troops had failed to subdue the capital in 1993, when 18 U.S. troops were killed in an incident depicted in the book and film "Black Hawk Down."


At a news conference in Addis Ababa, Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi said that he had no plans to push into Mogadishu but that the campaign was only half-completed. The only option now, he added, was to win. He said that he was pleased at how swiftly the campaign had gone and that 3,000 to 4,000 Ethiopian troops had "broken the back" of the Islamic Courts movement, which he has repeatedly accused of supporting secessionist groups in Ethiopia.


As Ethiopian troops pushed ahead, however, the Islamic Courts militias appeared to withdraw almost simultaneously from their front line positions, suggesting a coordinated strategy rather than a chaotic retreat, analysts said. It was unclear where the Islamic fighters went. Some were spotted with their battle gear around Mogadishu; analysts said it was likely that most headed into the bush to prepare for a war on their own terms.


[..]A U.N. report this year found that at least 10 countries were in some way involved in the conflict in Somalia, a sign of the country's strategic importance in the region. And Monday, witnesses said fighters from Eritrea, a bitter foe of Ethiopia, as well as from Pakistan were among those fighting alongside the Islamic militias.


[..]The United States and Ethiopia have been of one mind that a complete takeover of Somalia by the Islamic Courts is unacceptable, because of fears that the country could become a base for Muslim extremists.


Yet U.S. policy in Somalia has been widely criticized for having the opposite of its intended effect, often encouraging the expansion of the Courts movement. This year, the United States supported warlords who called themselves an "anti-terrorism" coalition. The warlords generally bribed and terrorized ordinary Somalis, who came to despise them. The Islamic Courts came to power as an alternative to the hated warlords, establishing order based on Islamic law village by village and earning widespread support from beleaguered Somalis tired of 15 years of near-anarchy.


More recently, perceived U.S. support for Ethiopia, like U.S. sponsorship of the U.N. resolution calling for the African Union deployment, appears to have been used by the Courts movement to rally support.

Impeachment: Pro and Con

While impeachment would be an important lesson for America, it would come at a great cost politically for those who have been on the short end of the stick since the Republicans took over in 2000. Impeachment would be largely unpopular. The voters would rather give a "war-time" president more latitude. Yeah, I know all the arguments about that and certainly don't agree. This has been the most dangerous period for our Democracy certainly since WWII and probably well before that. Here is an excerpt from the most cohesive argument against impeachment I've seen.
AlterNet

Impeachment is the magic bullet the conservatives in Congress are hoping for so they cannot only take back Congress, but the Presidency as well. We are at a crucial juncture in having the opportunity to reform the government and to move this country back to a representative democracy that serves the people. There is nothing more certain than this: impeachment proceedings would distract the essential work of our legislators.


[...]The risk to our democracy for Congress to attempt to impeach the President, and lose, is far greater than winning the battle and losing the opportunity to conduct the people's business that has been neglected by the control of the conservative movement over the last 20 years.


We must not fall into this trap, which will be used to view this as a means to use our power, as a vindictive act against a President who many feel was not fairly elected to begin with. Doing the right thing in Iraq at this point requires the full attention of all parties and a trial is not the way out of this quagmire. Nor is it going to help us deal with the other crucial issues that need to be addressed immediately. Perhaps if Democrats did not get control of Congress, I might have argued differently. But now, they have the responsibility to govern, and impeachment prevents that from happening.

Somalia Erupts in War Against Ethiopian Troops

Ethiopian troops attacked Somalia's Union of Islamic Courts on four fronts, Ethiopian officials said Sunday. Ethiopian MIG fighter bombers have attacked several Islamic Court held towns in a significant escalation of fighting.

For a fifth day, the heaviest fighting took place outside the southern town of Baidoa, the government's only stronghold, and sources said the Ethiopians were close to taking the nearby town of Beletwayne. Fighting was also reported around the northern town of Galkayo, near the Ethiopian border, along a main supply route to the northern part of the country.


In Mogadishu, Islamic Court leaders, who have received support from Ethiopia's bitter enemy, Eritrea, and other countries, called on foreign fighters to join a holy war against the Ethiopian troops. [...]The Islamic movement has accused the United States of tacitly giving Ethiopia the green light to invade. In a recent interview, Ibrahim Hassan Addou, foreign minister for the Courts, said that even if the movement was harboring terrorists, the United States should pursue them lawfully by presenting evidence, rather than "by threats and intimidation." "If war breaks out, the U.S. is siding with Ethiopia . . . and the consequences of war will be because of Ethiopia and the U.S.," he said.

The scariest part of all this is that Ethiopia is a country dominated by Christian leaders and a Christian army even though Muslims now comprise nearly half the population. The Courts movement has and will continue to use that fact as a tool to recruit young Muslim fighters. Somalia's leaders have called for foreign fighters to join in a jihad against the infidel Ethiopia.
It seems likely that Ethiopia will be unable to impose peace and the war will emerge as another regional quagmire of terrorist-style attacks. Already, car bomb attacks in Baidoa have killed several people. However, if Ethiopia can hit the Islamic Courts hard enough, they may be forced to the negotiating table with the weak internationally recognized government.
Ethiopia claims it was forced into war. Claiming Ethiopia was waging war against Somalia's Islamists to protect his country's sovereignty, Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi said against Islamic courts terrorists and anti-Ethiopian elements they are supporting, in particular by Ethiopia's foe, Eritrea.

Ethiopian Information Minister Berhan Hailu said the operation targeted several fronts including Dinsoor, Bandiradley and Baladwayne and the town of Buur Hakaba - close to the administration's encircled south-central base Baidoa.


[...]Somalia's ambassador to Ethiopia Abdikarin Farah said government forces had killed 500 Islamist troops, most of them Eritreans, in two days of heavy fighting, but there was no independent confirmation of the death toll. The Islamists say they have killed hundreds of pro-government troops, but aid agencies put the total number of dead at dozens.


Farah said Islamists killed 10 government soldiers and wounded 13, adding that 280 enemy fighters were taken prisoner, some of them from Pakistan, Afghanistan and Sudan.


[...]Independent specialist on Somalia, Matt Bryden, told Reuters he did not expect either side to win the war decisively. "The Ethiopians are trying to hit the Islamists hard enough that they will come to the negotiation table," he said. "But they run the risk the war will become a protracted and unwinnable conflict."


Military experts estimate Ethiopia has 15,000-20,000 troops in Somalia, while Eritrea has about 2,000 behind the Islamists.

A "Groatian Moment"

I'd say "Old Europe" was right all along.
Before the name of a blog obscures a symbolic term from legal history, lets visit A Grotian Moment in foreign policy.

A "Grotian Moment" is a legal development that is so significant that it can create new customary international law or radically transform the interpretation of treaty-based law.

Hugo Grotius (Huig de Groot, or Hugo de Groot; Delft, 10 April 1583 – Rostock, 28 August 1645) worked as a jurist in the Dutch Republic and laid the foundations for international law, based on natural law.

From an article on AlterNet, the writer talks about the historical significance of the end of the cold war, our allies concieved of a "New World Order" created by globalization.

After the cold war ended, the world faced a "Grotian moment" -- the end of an era in international politics brought an opportunity to pause and consider the fundamental assumptions underlying the international system. The consensus among our allies -- and our strategic class at the time -- was that we should develop a "New World Order" of strengthened international institutions based on the exigency of a far deeper degree of interdependence than existed previously.

No one country can survive with any level of citizen comfort without embedding itself in the world market. Once placed and maintained by it's producing economy, each country becomes another a cog in the gear of international commerce. No one country can afford to dictate terms in an aggressive manner to it's neighbors because they will share consequences of the economic disruption.
The US's adventure in Iraq was intended as military hegemony for economic gains in the oil market. The result has undermined the US position vis-a-vis oil by contributing to substantial increases in the price of oil, and undermining the US's longterm influence in Iraqi oil policy. The US has squandered it's future geopolitical position due to it's debt and loss of political influence. It has destabilized Iraq and its neighbors who control 25% of the world's oil. It has strengthened the position of our enemies, Iran and North Korea, and significantly contributed to world political power vacuum that ushered into world politics a resurgent Russia and launched prematurely a new super power, China.

A Setback for President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, A Crisis Averted For Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei

Apparently, the set back in the recent elections in Iran where his party lost 6 seats was orchestrated by Ayatollah Khamenei. It seems that Ahmadinejad had his own spiritual leader he wanted to promote to Supreme Leader. His name is Mohammad Taqi Mesbah-Yazdi.

Ayatollah Mohammad Taghi Mesbah Yazdi (born 1934) is an Iranian Shia cleric and politician. He is widely seen as President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's spiritual advisor, and a member of Iran's Assembly of Experts, the body responsible for choosing the Supreme Leader. Mesbah Yazdi espouses complete isolation from the West and opposes non-fundamentalist interpretations of the Koran. He advocates a return to the values of the 1979 Iranian revolution and is a prominent opponent of the Reformist movement in Iran. He believes that the use of nuclear weapons has religious legitimacy under Islamic Law.

Isolation from the west enforced by nuclear weapons. Given Ahmadinejad proclivity to attack Israel verbally, one wonders if this isolation included a liberated Palestine. However, the idea that Iran could liberate Palestine with Hezbollah and Hamas support is absurd. Iran may well be a threat to oil supplies and destabilize the fragile balence in Iraq towards civil war and partitian, but they don't want a Kurdish state on their border anymore than Turkey. And they know their oil income will take a precipitous drop should their been a regional Sunni-Shiite war.
Short of enduring nuclear devastation should they develop and use their nuclear skills, I just can't see Iran being a particular threat to anything more than economic hegomony by the US. What country would choose nuclear war? On the other hand, I suspect most countries with hostility towards the US are hoping to go nuclear to prevent what happened in Iraq.
Here is an excerpt from The Head Heeb has the details of the political intrigue behind the scenes.

Articles 91 through 99 of the constitution give the powerful Iranian Council of Guardians authority to supervise national elections, and this authority includes the power to disqualify candidates from the ballot. In effect, the Guardians can thus limit the political space within which the voters can choose.


The Guardians are, theoretically, subject to the oversight of both the velayat-i-faghih and the parliament, with the former appointing half the council and the latter choosing the other half from nominees proposed by the judiciary. In practice, however, the supreme leader has exercised total control over the appointment process. The one time that the Majlis tried to exercise its authority - in 2001, when the reformist majority that existed at the time rejected two of the three names put forward by the chief justice - Khamenei forced them to back down by threatening to hold up then-President Mohammed Khatami's inauguration.


As a result, the Guardians' primary guiding principle in exercising their power has been to pre-empt any threat to the supreme leader's authority. In the past, as in the 2004 parliamentary election, their primary targets have been reformists. This time, though, the threat came from the faction associated with Ahmedinejad and his spiritual mentor Ayatollah Mohammed Taghi Mesbah-Yazdi. The Ahmedinejad faction hoped that, if it could take control of the Assembly of Experts, which has the power to dismiss the supreme leader and appoint a new one, it could replace Khamenei with Mesbah-Yazdi and give the president a free hand in foreign and security policy.

Maliki to US: Attack Sunnis, He'll Handle Sadr

There is more BS coming from the Iraqi government. Apparently they are concerned about a precipitous withdrawl of US forces. Nor have they been enamored by even a temporary increase in forces, largely due to Sadr opposition rather than the shear folly of the effort. But Bush will do anything to appear effective at this point, no matter how many of our sons and daughters he sacrifices.
According to washingtonpost.com,

Iraq's Shiite prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, has created a two-pronged security plan for Baghdad in which U.S. forces would aggressively target Sunni Arab insurgents instead of Shiite militias. At the same time, Maliki would intensify his efforts to weaken Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr and contain his Mahdi Army militia, Iraqi officials said Tuesday. Under these conditions, Maliki would accept a surge in U.S. troops in Baghdad, according to two Maliki advisers with knowledge of the plan. Maliki plans to discuss his proposal with Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and senior U.S. commanders during a meeting in Baghdad on Thursday, the officials said. The Bush administration is contemplating a temporary increase in troops to help stem the highest levels of violence since 2003.

It seems that Sistani has blessed a new coalition to form an Iraqi government, now languishing without a quorum due to absent members and the withdrawl of the Sadr representatives. From the New York Times

Iraq’s most venerated Shiite cleric has tentatively approved an American-backed coalition of Shiite, Sunni Arab and Kurdish parties that aims to isolate extremists, particularly the powerful Shiite militia leader Moktada al-Sadr, Iraqi and Western officials say.


[...]American officials have been told by intermediaries that Ayatollah Sistani “has blessed the idea of forming a moderate front,” according to a senior American official. “We wouldn’t have gotten this far without his support.”

However, this seems unlikely to be successful. The Shia coaltion have made many similar promises in the past. Even with the support of Sistani, as Juan Cole of Informed Comment points out:

The problem is that not all of the Iraqi Accord Front may be willing to join the coalition, and perhaps not all of the National Iraqi list will come in. Moreover, the idea that the Iraqi Islamic Party, the Kurds, and the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq are going to hold together as a united coalition very long strikes me as daft.
This plan of cutting the Sadrists out of parliamentary power and then launching a military attack on their paramilitary, the Mahdi Army, seems to me unlikely actually to reduce Muqtada's power and influence.

Anti-Urban Politics

Ever wondered why the deteriorating Cities in America get so little press and attention these days? Our righteous friends from the Christian Right see them of the source of all evil in America. So you see the idea is to let them fester and die. Welfare reform isn't about "work fare", it's about sending the handouts to the heartland. Read on:
AlterNet

The formula that emerged from the 2000 and 2004 Presidential elections was provocative: The less dense the population, the more likely it was to vote Republican. Republicans appeared to have lost the cities and inner suburbs, positioning themselves as the party of country roads, small towns and traditional values. Though Bush was often mocked for the time he spent on his ranch, sleeves rolled up, gun in hand, the image was widely promoted and became a cornerstone of his identity among Republican voters.


[...]Mann coins the term "homelander" to describe largely white, anti-urban conservatives and says the homeland is a state of mind. You hear the homeland ethos not only in George W. Bush's acquired Texas twang, but in the voices documented in recent books from Mann, Steve Macek, and Juan Enriquez.


"Urban America breeds things that will probably never be here [in Perryton, Texas], but it scares people," Jim Hudson, publisher of Perryton Herald, tells Mann. What kinds of things? asks Mann. "Gay culture," he replies. "HIV sure wasn't bred in rural America."


[...]Yet in recent political history, that heritage was obscured by conservative organizing that promoted a race-based depiction of the city as "chaotic, ruined, and repellent, the exact inverse of the orderly domestic idyll of the suburbs," as Steve Macek writes in his recent book Urban Nightmares: The Media, the Right, and Moral Panic Over the City. In such a view, urban poverty is a natural byproduct of unnatural urban life; it is slack morals, not racism or capitalism, which create the urban underclass and its affluent liberal enablers.


Thus the solution to urban poverty and lawlessness is not welfare and economic development, which will "prolong the problems and perhaps make them worse," but instead law enforcement, religious evangelism, and market-driven ethnic cleansing.


[...]When the New Right emerged as a political force in the early 1980s, journalist Frances Fitzgerald paid a visit to Lynchburg, Virginia, where Jerry Falwell founded one of the first suburban megachurches and launched the Moral Majority, the first major organizational expression of the modern religious Right. There, in 1981, Fitzgerald found a homelander utopia with over one hundred churches.


"Lynchburg calls itself a city," she writes in Cities on a Hill, "but it is really a collection of suburbs. In the fifties, its old downtown was supplanted by a series of shopping plazas, leaving it with no real center ....The automobile has cut too many swaths across it, leaving gasoline stations and fast-food places to spring up in parking-lot wastelands. But it is a clean city, full of quiet streets and shade trees." She also found Falwell's congregation to be astonishingly uniform in race, culture, and dress, despite a substantial minority of African-Americans in the suburbs around them.


In his church sermons Falwell talked with his congregation about his trips to New York "and the narrow escapes he has had among the denizens of Sin City," hitting racial code words like "welfare chiselers," "urban rioters," and "crime in the streets" -- all phenomena with which his congregation had little or no personal contact. These helped mobilize the homeland against the forces of modernism that converged in the city.


[...]Though the Religious Right bases its public policy agenda on the authority of the Bible and the libertarian Right bases its on the sovereignty of the individual, they converge in the same suburban parking lot. As the Right gained power on a national level, their policies and preconceptions have had a direct impact on cities. "During the Reagan and Bush eras alone," Steve Macek writes, "federal aid to local governments was slashed by 60 percent. Federal spending on new public housing dropped from $28 billion in 1977 to just $7 billion eleven years later. Meanwhile, shrinking welfare benefits have made it harder for the disproportionately urban recipients of public assistance to make ends meet."


Conservative policies and the retreat of liberal commitment to ending poverty combined to make cities increasingly unequal. But as Juan Enriquez makes clear in the The Untied States of America: Polarization, Fracturing and our Future, welfare didn't disappear -- the money just shifted from cities to the homeland in the form of farm and corporate subsidies, price supports, military spending, and pork-barrel projects. Reviewing a chart of tax benefits to states, Enriquez notes that it is curious "that the most productive, high-tech states tend to vote Democratic. The most dole-dependent tend to be hard-line, antigovernment, antispending Republicans. Seventy-five percent of Mr. Bush's votes came from taker states."


Conservative policy initiatives like California's Proposition 13 (which in 1978 slashed property taxes by more than two-thirds) devastated urban school systems, to the benefit of suburban and exurban homeowners. More recently we've seen public transportation funding slashed, AIDS funding shift from Blue to Red States, and homeland security funding distributed as a form of pork. "Low-population states such as Wyoming and North Dakota received forty dollars per person to arm themselves against the impending al-Qaeda menace," Brian Mann notes. "Meanwhile, the big I-have-a-bulls-eye-on-my-forehead states like California and New York managed to pocket about five dollars per capita."


Mann points to the 9,000 residents of Ochiltree County, Texas, "the most Republican place in America," who were graced by nearly $53 million in federal money in 2003 alone -- which is, by any standard, a generous reward for their unstinting support of President Bush. The state of Kansas went from losing $2 million a year in what it paid in taxes, to making "a sweet profit of $1,200 per person" by 2004.


[...]And as Brian Mann points out, even if The Stranger's strategy was desirable, it would be extremely difficult to pursue on a national level. The Senate, for example, gives each state two seats regardless of population. "As a consequence, those lucky homelanders in Wyoming and Alaska receive 72 times more clout per capita than do California's metros," Mann writes. "It's a startling fact that half of the American people live in just nine highly urbanized states -- most of them staunchly Democratic -- but they hold only 18 percent of the Senate's power." Similarly, the structure of the Electoral College has tilted power towards the rural states, while gerrymandering has given Republicans an edge in the House of Representatives.


"Put bluntly, our political system is no longer a neutral playing field," Mann writes. "In ways our founding fathers could never have imagined, the Electoral College and the Senate now favor one way of life, one set of cultural and political values, over another. Because those values are no longer shared by most Americans, the result is a growing disconnect between our political elites and the people they govern."

Texas Is Fast-tracking Global Warming

Texas just may effectivelly counter act all of the CO2 emissions promised by Japan!
AlterNet

Here in the U.S. we are doing something worse than nothing -- we are actively working in the wrong direction. Never has this been more apparent than in Texas where utility giant TXU Corp. is seeking $11 billion to build 11 new coal-fired power plants in the state. If these plants are built, TXU will become the country's largest corporate emitter of greenhouse gases. To put this in perspective, TXU would be contributing more greenhouse gas emissions than a combined 21 states and more than entire countries, such as New Zealand, Ireland, Denmark, and Sweden. They will also be negating all of the emissions that Japan had planned to cut and 80 percent of the U.K.'s pledged reduction.


Despite the fact that 79 percent of Texans are in favor of renewable energy and just six percent are in favor of more coal production, TXU's project is being fast-tracked by Gov. Perry (who received more than $80,000 in campaign contributions for TXU interests). By trying to quickly push through the permitting process, Perry will be allowing the state to skip the normally mandated period where alternative energy sources would be considered. But don't worry, it's not like there's a lot of wind or sun in Texas or anything.


Even with Perry's best efforts on behalf of polluting energy, there is still a lot to be done to stop the project: just ask the ever-vigilant folks at Rainforest Action Network (RAN).

The Horn of Africa Headed For War

With the US bogged down, breaking it's military in Iraq, the main fight in with Al Qaeda remains were it has always been, in Afghanistan. But now shifts to the Horn of Africa. Somalia has it's own Islamic revolution going on with the dominant leaders long time affiliates with Al Qaeda in the The Council of Islamic Courts. While there are moderates in the group, the main players are aggressive and in control.
The week central government in the north is propped up by Ethiopian troops. Eritrea, who has it's own conflict over borders with Ethiopia, has sent special forces to training and equip The Council of Islamic Courts.
Naturally, the Bush Administration has few options. So far they have alienated The Council by supporting the very warlords that shot up US troops 10 years ago. The Courts have threatened Ethiopian troops with attack. Ethiopia has said, "bring it on."
The "clash of civilizations" advocates are smiling today. From Robert D. Novak column today, he quotes the Iraq Study Group report:

"The United States will not be able to achieve its goals in the Middle East unless the United States deals directly with the Arab-Israeli conflict. There must be a renewed and sustained commitment by the United States to a comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace on all fronts."

Then he quotes Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel scathing warning to world:

"Until the United States helps lead a renewed Israeli-Palestinian peace process, there will be no prospect for broader Middle East peace and stability." He went further by warning of a "Judeo-Christian/Muslim split" that "would inflame the world."

washingtonpost.com

Among administration officials, Congress, U.S. allies and other interested and fearful parties, there is a rising sense that Somalia is spinning rapidly out of control. But even as events there have focused Washington's attention, they have led to a wave of finger-pointing and a feeling that there are few good ideas and little time for turning the situation around.


A wide range of interviews and commentary last week provided assessments that differed only in their degree of bleakness and apportionment of blame.


"The Council of Islamic Courts is now controlled by . . . East Africa al-Qaeda cell individuals," Assistant Secretary of State for Africa Jendayi Frazer said of Mogadishu's new rulers.


Early hopes of a power-sharing deal with secular politicians have dissipated as Courts Chairman Hassan Dahir Aweys -- put on the U.S. terrorist list in 2001 as the head of a militant group accused of having links to al-Qaeda in the 1990s -- and Aden Ayrow, who heads the Courts' military arm, have increased their power.


Moderates remain within the Courts, a coalition of local Islamist groups and militias that drove CIA-supported warlords out of Mogadishu, Frazer said. But "they are not emerging as they could get their heads taken off, literally."


The Islamists have ignored U.S. insistence that they turn over three al-Qaeda operatives -- the core of what is called the East African cell -- who the administration says took refuge in Somalia after terrorist attacks in Africa, including the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.


In a taped statement released in July, bin Laden called on Somalis to begin preparing for regional war. He recalled the 1994 withdrawal of U.S. military forces after a warlord attack killed 18 U.S. troops, saying, "This time, victory will be far easier."


U.S. intelligence officials described the statement at the time as part of bin Laden's failing claim to the leadership of a worldwide Islamic movement, despite the dispersion of the al-Qaeda network by the U.S. terrorism fight. Now they are not so certain.


[...]Ethiopia, a Christian-dominated nation, also fought a war with Somalia in the 1970s, over the ethnic Somali and largely Muslim Ethiopian province of Ogaden.


Last week, Somali Islamists threatened a "major attack" if the Ethiopians do not withdraw by Tuesday. Ethiopia has said, in essence, bring it on.


[...]"By making a bad bet on the warlords to do our bidding," incoming Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.) charged last week, "the administration has managed to strengthen the Courts, weaken our position and leave no good options. This is one of the least-known but most dangerous developments in the world, and the administration lacks a credible strategy to deal with it."

Anthrax Attack on U.S. Congress Made by Ft. Detrick, Md., Scientist and Covered Up by FBI, Expert Says

The Smirking Chimp has a major expose on the anthrax attack on Congressional Democrats. Was it an attempt to force through the Patriot Act and covered up by the FBI?

The perpetrator of the 2001 anthrax attack on Congress likely was a government scientist employed at the Army's Ft. Detrick, Md., bioterrorism lab having access to a "moonsuit" that made it possible to safely process and manufacture super-weapons-grade anthrax, a bioterrorism authority says.


Although only a "handful" of scientists had the ability to perpetrate the crime, the culprit, or culprits, among them may never be identified as the FBI ordered the destruction of the anthrax culture collection at Ames, Ia., from which the Ft. Detrick lab got its pathogens, the authority said.


This action made it impossible "to pin-point precisely where, when, and from whom these bio-agents had originated," said Dr. Francis A. Boyle of the University of Illinois at Champaign.


Boyle, who drafted the U.S. Biological Weapons Convention of 1989 that was enacted by Congress, says destruction of the Ames anthrax "appears to be a cover-up orchestrated by the FBI."


Calls for comment to two FBI press offices in Washington, D.C., on this charge were not returned. Members of the Senate have been pressing the FBI for additional information on its investigation, thought to be ongoing.


If impartial scientists could have performed genetic reconstruction of the anthrax found in letters mailed to Senators Daschle(D-S.D.) and Patrick Leahy, (D -Vt.), "the trail of genetic evidence would have led directly back to a secret but officially-sponsored U.S. government biowarfare program that was illegal and criminal" in violation of biological weapons conventions and U.S. laws, Boyle said.


"I believe the FBI knows exactly who was behind these terrorist anthrax attacks upon the United States Congress in the Fall of 2001, and that the culprits were U.S. government-related scientists involved in a criminal U.S. government biowarfare program," Boyle said.


The anthrax attacks killed five people, including two postal workers, injured 17 others, and temporarily shut down the operations of the U.S. Congress, Supreme Court, and other Federal entities.


Boyle, a leading American authority on international law, said after the attacks he contacted senior FBI official Marion "Spike" Bowman, who handles counter-terrorism issues, and provided him with the names of the scientists working with anthrax. Boyle told Bowman the Ft. Detrick scientists were not to be trusted.


In addition to then destroying the anthrax, the FBI "retained every independent life-scientist it could locate as part of its fictitious investigation, and then swore them all to secrecy so that they cannot publicly comment on the investigation or give their expert opinion," Boyle said.


Boyle pointed out that Bowman is the same FBI agent "who played a pivotal role in suppressing evidence which in turn prevented the issuance of a search warrant for the computer of Zacarias Moussaoui, the alleged 20th al-Qaeda hijacker on 11 September 2001, which might otherwise have led to foreknowledge and therefore prevention of those terrorist attacks in the first place."


[...]"Could it truly be coincidental, " he continued, "that two of the primary intended victims of the terrorist anthrax attacks --- Senators Daschle and Leahy---were holding up the speedy passage of the pre-planned USA Patriot Act∑an Act which provided the federal government with unprecedented powers in relation to U.S. citizens and institutions?"


Leahy is incoming Chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee and may have a personal interest in holding hearings to learn who tried to kill him. An anthrax-laced letter to Leahy turned up in a search of Capitol Hill mail in the week of October 15, 2003. The letters sent to Leahy and Daschle were both postmarked from a Trenton, N.J.-area post office.


During its probe of the anthrax attack, the Justice Department identified Dr. Steven J. Hatfill, a biological defense scientist and one-time government employee, as "a person of interest." Dr. Hatfill, a medical doctor, took a post in 1997 at Ft. Detrick but left to work the next year for a private firm that helps the government create defenses against germ weapons. Dr. Hatfill repeatedly denied any role in the anthrax attacks and said he knows nothing about anthrax production, The New York Times reported.


Boyle's views are contained in his book "Biowarfare and Terrorism", published by Clarity Press, Inc., of Atlanta, Ga.

The Cheney "Final Solution" for Iraq

According to AlterNet Dick Cheney has a "final solution" US position for the Iraq war. It's called choosing sides. By backing the Shia government the US stands to compete directly with Iran for candyman for the Shia dominated government.
There is a few major hurdles to overcome. First, as Saudi Arabia told Cheney when they called him on the carpet, they will back the Sunni insurgency to prevent a massacre. The other sticking point is that Cheney's plan plays right into Iranian hands. Iran figures they will win a Iraqi civil war.

So, Dick Cheney is reportedly pushing for the U.S. to side with Iraq's Shiites to a much greater degree than we already have and give up on any squishy attempts to reach out to the Sunni minority [ht: Steve Benen]. Some are calling it the "80 percent solution" -- Shiites and Kurds are believed to make up about 80 percent of the Iraqi population.


Much more on that from Juan Cole, here.

Moderates in the region told me the resistance in Iraq is based on the U.S. occupation and a power grab by Persian controlled clerics. Blaming it all on Sunni-Shia tensions is not just incorrect, they say, it is exactly what Iran hopes, because it leaves them out.


[snip]Failure by the President to understand it's Persian versus Arab --- Iran versus Iraq--- has produced one disastrous decision after another. The solution, they believe, is obvious: strategically re-deploy US troops out of harm's way to close the Iranian border and stop the infiltration of Iranian agents into Iraq.


Arab leaders told me they estimate that as many as 14,000 Persians have infiltrated to run death squads who kill Arab Sunnis and incite a civil war ---- as cover for the real war--- Iran versus Iraq.


Unless we change course, the day will come when the only banner proclaiming Mission Accomplished will be flown by Iran. We can't let that happen.

And for the non-news of the day on Iraq, current military leaders confirm what the retired brass have been saying for a year. From washingtonpost.com.

Warning that the active-duty Army "will break" under the strain of today's war-zone rotations, the nation's top Army general yesterday called for expanding the force by 7,000 or more soldiers a year and lifting Pentagon restrictions on involuntary call-ups of Army National Guard and Army Reserve troops.

Meanwhile McCain is showing himself to be cut from the same "don't confuse me with the facts" cloth as Bush. Despite Iraqi leadership ambivalence for more troops, military brass warnings of a looming decline in readiness, Mc Cain pushing the military to send more of our sons and daughters into harms way. From the New York Times.

Senator John McCain said Thursday that American military commanders were discussing the possibility of adding as many as 10 more combat brigades — a maximum of about 35,000 troops — to “bring the situation under control” while Iraq’s divided political leaders seek solutions to the worsening bloodshed here.

Maybe 350,000 troops would make a difference.

Joint Chiefs Embrace Part of Iraq Study Group Agenda

The Joint Chiefs are offering Bush the political cover he needs to make some real changes in his Iraq policies. They are embracing the military side of the proposal, shifting the military mission to supporting Iraqi troops by training and embedding in Iraqi units and then chasing Al Qaeda.
They also advised the President to continue to balence support for the Iraqi government between the Shia majority and the Sunni minority to keep the support for insurgents by neighbors Syria and Saudi Arabia under wraps. Then they advise against confronting Sadr's Mahdi army because of the trouble Iran could cause in it's support for them and the Badr Corps militias.
All in all, this report sounds like an endorcement of the Iraq Study Group sans the plan to start withdrawls in 2008. But even that is not ruled out. Perhaps there will be real change.
washingtonpost.com

The nation's top uniformed leaders are recommending that the United States change its main military mission in Iraq from combating insurgents to supporting Iraqi troops and hunting terrorists, said sources familiar with the White House's ongoing Iraq policy review.


President Bush and Vice President Cheney met with the members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff yesterday at the Pentagon for more than an hour, and the president engaged his top military advisers on different options. The chiefs made no dramatic proposals but, at a time of intensifying national debate about how to solve the Iraq crisis, offered a pragmatic assessment of what can and cannot be done by the military, the sources said.


The chiefs do not favor adding significant numbers of troops to Iraq, said sources familiar with their thinking, but see strengthening the Iraqi army as pivotal to achieving some degree of stability. They also are pressing for a much greater U.S. effort on economic reconstruction and political reconciliation.


Sources said that Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the top U.S. commander in Iraq, is reviewing a plan to redefine the American military mission there: U.S. troops would be pulled out of Iraqi cities and consolidated at a handful of U.S. bases while day-to-day combat duty would be turned over to the Iraqi army. Casey is still considering whether to request more troops, possibly as part of an expanded training mission to help strengthen the Iraqi army.


[...]The Pentagon chiefs also are urging that any new strategy be sensitive to regional context, particularly the impact of political or military decisions. They are concerned that any decision to effectively throw U.S. support to the Shiite majority may lead Sunni governments in the region to take a more active role in supporting Sunni insurgents. But they are also concerned that a crackdown on Iraq's largest Shiite militia, the Mahdi army, may have repercussions on Iran's actions in Iraq, say officials familiar with the ongoing review.


A constant subtext in the meeting yesterday, and in the ongoing White House review, is the Joint Chiefs' growing concern about the erosion of the U.S. military's ability to deal with other crises around the world because of the heavy commitment in Iraq and the stress on troops and equipment, said officials familiar with the review. The chiefs planned to tell Bush of the significantly increased risk to readiness in the event of a new emergency, rather than push for a timeline to leave Iraq.

Iraq Study Group Proposal Snubbed

So where is political statemanship these days? The Iraq Study Group comes up with a reasonable proposal and the President and Congress on both sides of the aisle duck and cover. Even the American people have made a clear endorsement of the plan.
The political climate, the early Presidential run for 2008 all has contributed to the climate of politics first, statesmanship is an after thought. The Dems want Bush to take a position so they can shoot at him. Bush is making distance from the report so he can make an appearance of change without substance.
Meanwhile, our son's and daughters continue to die and be maimed every day in a war sold on false pretenses by incompetent leadership. Isn't that a reason to take charge?
washingtonpost.com

Most Americans think the United States is losing the war in Iraq and support a bipartisan commission's key proposals to change course, according to a poll released yesterday. But the Iraq Study Group's report has become a political orphan in Washington with little backing from either party.


Nearly eight in 10 Americans favor changing the U.S. mission in Iraq from direct combat to training Iraqi troops, the Washington Post-ABC News survey found. Sizeable majorities agree with the goal of pulling out nearly all U.S. combat forces by early 2008, engaging in direct talks with Iran and Syria and reducing U.S. financial support if Iraq fails to make enough progress.


[...]Overall, 52 percent now say, the United States is losing the war, up from 34 percent last year. Three in 10 say the United States is making significant progress in restoring civil order; nearly half thought so in June. And 41 percent say Iraq is now in a civil war, up from 34 percent in August. Forty-five percent describe the situation as close to a civil war.


Although the public remains leery of immediate withdrawal, it has lost faith that the Bush administration has a clear solution for Iraq. Twenty-five percent think it does, down 13 points since September. Even Republicans are no longer convinced, with 49 percent saying the president has a clear plan, down 22 points since September. The solace for Bush is that just as few Americans say the Democrats have a clear plan.


The public is more open to the Iraq Study Group plan, with 46 percent for it and 22 percent against it. When asked about some of its specific recommendations, respondents are dramatically more supportive. Seventy-nine percent favor shifting U.S. troops from combat to support; 69 percent support withdrawing most combat forces by early 2008; 74 percent support reducing aid if Iraq fails to make progress toward national unity and civil order; and about six in 10 support talking with Syria and Iran to try to resolve the conflict.

From digital divide to social empowerment

V Ramaswamy
Looking at the socio-economic picture of India, it is clear that there is a large segment of our people who are entirely outside of the IT revolution. The existing social structure ensures that such people live out their lives without any access to the technology, its instruments, its education. Existing socio-economic disparities are magnified, as the new technology is embraced by those with access to good education, exposure and social confidence, skills, capital etc. This has given rise to the term "digital divide". The term suggests that the world shall henceforth comprise of those who are part of the digital revolution, and those who are left out of this. The former would have a stake in the emerging future, while the latter are consigned to a sub-human status.
One section is entering the post-digital age, in terms of cognitive development, while the other languishes in the pre-literate era. Increasingly, the common space binding together our people in a shared world - is vanishing.
The response
There could be two kinds of response to this situation.
The first, a normative one, an idealistic view, calling for social justice, equity, opportunity etc. Actually, this is not simply idealistic, but also quite realistic. No one thinks very much about the pernicious effect of socio-economic disparities, and the social instability, violence etc that results. Since we do ultimately coexist in the same geographical space, in the long run effects do catch up with causes.
The second approach, is a more practical one. This looks at the distorted nature of the IT sector in India and advocates a drastic reorganisation. In a manner that breaks the nexus between social structure and technology access. Where technology access becomes the means to change the social structure.
The application of the technology and its impact is determined by the existing social structure. However, the same technology may also be subversive of the existing structure.
Mass computing
Notwithstanding the growth of PC use in India over the last decade and more, this is still something touching a miniscule part of the country's people or economic activities. While improvements have definitely taken place, in terms of electrification and spread of the telephone and television network, there still remains the immense metro / urban - rural gap in infrastructure.
Even within this dichotomy, there is a further dichotomy. No one looks at computing in the context of the whole spectrum of economic activities - especially on the humbler side. Even as computer-use grows, computing as such remains a casualty. But the scope for mass computing, as applied to diverse professions and activities, including many humble ones, remains an untapped field. This calls for greater communication with users and customer-specific applications and solutions. Most significantly, it calls for marketing strategies that break the socially defined barriers of communication. Even within metro cities, PC vendors do not think of selling to modest retail outlets, small businesses, run by unsophisticated people who do not belong to the English-medium domain. But in its own interest, the IT sector has to break out of this syndrome.
This is something that could well be a means to enhance livelihood, employment, enterprise, productivity, efficiency and profit. Most fundamentally, it could bring dignity to the down-trodden.
Looking at the technology itself, and its applications, it is clear that this could actually be a powerful means for positive change, in the direction of empowerment of the poor. But for this potential to be realised, and over a mass scale, a number of major steps have to be taken. These would go against the grain of the predominant orientation of the computers-related industry.
This then poses a tremendous challenge, to the whole field of information technology, as well as to social thinkers and planners. The longer this challenge is ignored, the deeper and more immutable the digital divide.
There have been a number of visionary experiments and small-scale efforts along these lines, internationally as well as in India. These have only affirmed the revolutionary empowering potential of the computer. But there is now a need to move from the stage of small experiments to actions at a mass scale. Programmes of socio-economic empowerment have also to be integrated with "digital empowerment ".
Recycling hardware
Keeping the focus on real computing applications (rather than machines to sell), in a real user context, will necessarily mean that a whole new operation has to be established. To make available affordable computing hardware and software, which will significantly empower a range of economic actors who are presently outside the purview of IT.
Where do the old machines go? In a poor country like India, which is capital scarce, can we afford to waste the valuable social capital that usable computing hardware represents? Recycling hardware, within an approach of developing and presenting use-focused computing applications, is a key challenge.
A match has to be made - between potential users of computing, and computing equipment. This calls for people, information and capital.
Computer education
Once again, if one keeps the entire society in view, then there is not much to be said about computer education in India. Illiteracy, school drop-outs, school and university graduates who are unemployable for all practical purposes - all this casts a very dark shadow. What is the way out?
How long does it take to bridge the chasm between illiteracy, or limited education, and computer-literacy? What are the cognitive foundations of computer application? Most significantly, how can one somehow bring about access and exposure to computers for the deprived?
Even today, the commonest "social welfare" intervention in urban slum areas is to impart tailoring skills to poor women and provide them with sewing machines. But could one imagine imparting basic computer education to some of these very women, and distributing recycled PCs, with which a range of home or workplace-based data-entry, processing, storage, communications, service and web-related operations can be undertaken?
Can one conceive of huge databases, all valuable to specific users, that are maintained by neo-literates? Consider the employment generated in hardware assembly and maintenance, customer relations, software adaptation.
Can one envision computer-based networks spreading through the interstices of the city, binding together deprived people in a movement for empowerment?
All bringing income, dignity, and parity with the emerging world?
Thus a second major area of challenge is mass computer education. In turn, this presumes the recycling operation.
Institutional infrastructure
When one talks about any kind of change, one should think about the ownership of this process. Who is responsible? This leads us to the third, and perhaps most crucial link of the chain: grassroot-level institutions.
We need to build institutions and institutional capabilities, to work with IT, among the deprived sections. In urban slum neighbourhoods for instance. Not self-serving institutions, but institutions which act as resource units and catalysts for empowerment of large numbers of humble citizens. Institutions which will work, patiently, and with vision, amidst difficult conditions, and nurture a generation of post-digital divide learners and workers.
Can the socially enlightened application of technology be used as a powerful means for the substantive empowerment of the weaker sections, and thus bring to life and vitality the whole social fabric of the nation?

The "Talibanization" of Northern Pakistan

Thanks to Ronald Reagan's legacy to the region, Al Qaeda and it's Taliban allies have virtually taken over northern Pakistan. The Jihad continues, hands off to US Special Forces per our "ally" Musharraf who believes the Taliban will drive the infidels from Afghanistan.
With allies with these who needs Bush? The real war on terrorism is in Afghanistan, not in Iraq.

New York Times

Islamic militants are using a recent peace deal with the government to consolidate their hold in northern Pakistan, vastly expanding their training of suicide bombers and other recruits and fortifying alliances with Al Qaeda and foreign fighters, diplomats and intelligence officials from several nations say. The result, they say, is virtually a Taliban mini-state.


The militants, the officials say, are openly flouting the terms of the September accord in North Waziristan, under which they agreed to end cross-border help for the Taliban insurgency that revived in Afghanistan with new force this year.


The area is becoming a magnet for an influx of foreign fighters, who not only challenge government authority in the area, but are even wresting control from local tribes and spreading their influence to neighboring areas, according to several American and NATO officials and Pakistani and Afghan intelligence officials.


This year more than 100 local leaders, government sympathizers or accused “American spies” have been killed, several of them in beheadings, as the militants have used a reign of terror to impose what President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan calls a creeping “Talibanization.” Last year, at least 100 others were also killed.


[...]The links among the various groups date to the 1980s, when Arabs, Pakistanis and other Muslims joined Afghans in their fight to drive the Soviet Union out of Afghanistan, using a network of training camps and religious schools set up by the Pakistani intelligence agency and financed by the C.I.A. and Saudi Arabia.


The training continued with Pakistani and Qaeda support through the 1990s, and then moved into Afghanistan under the Taliban. It was during this time that Pakistanis became drawn into militancy in big numbers, fighting alongside the Taliban and hundreds of foreign fighters against the northern tribes of Afghanistan. Today the history of the region has come full circle.


[...]After failing to gain control of the areas in military campaigns, the government cut peace deals in South Waziristan in 2004 and 2005, and then in North Waziristan on Sept. 5. Since the September accord, NATO officials say cross-border attacks by Pakistani and Afghan Taliban and their foreign allies have increased.


In recent weeks, Pakistani intelligence officials said the number of foreign fighters in the tribal areas was far higher than the official estimate of 500, perhaps as high as 2,000 today.


These fighters include Afghans and seasoned Taliban leaders, Uzbek and other Central Asian militants, and what intelligence officials estimate to be 80 to 90 Arab terrorist operatives and fugitives, possibly including the Qaeda leaders Osama bin Laden and his second in command, Ayman al-Zawahri.


The tightening web of alliances among these groups in a remote, mountainous area increasingly beyond state authority is potentially disastrous for efforts to combat terrorism as far away as Europe and the United States, intelligence officials warn. MORE

Conspiracies About Conspiracies

There is a great article over at AlterNet. The author posits that the 9/11 Truth Movement is a symptom of the uncritical response of the news media to politics as usual. Of course, all politicians operate exclusively in good faith and without hidden agendas.
As the average Fargo resident would say, "Ya shoor...."

So it's hard to blame people for thinking we're not getting the whole story. For six years, the government has prevaricated and the press has largely failed to point out this simple truth. Critics like The New Yorker's Nicholas Lemann might lament the resurgence of the "paranoid style," but the seeds of paranoia have taken root partly because of the complete lack of appropriate skepticism by the establishment press, a complementary impulse to the paranoid style that might be called the credulous style. In the credulous style all political actors are acting with good intentions and in good faith. Mistakes are made, but never because of ulterior motives or undue influence from the various locii of corporate power. When people in power advocate strenuously for a position it is because they believe in it. When their advocacy leads to policies that create misery, it is due not to any evil intentions or greed or corruption, but rather simple human error.


[...]Meanwhile, those who realized this was the White House's MO from the beginning have been labeled conspiracy theorists. During the 2004 campaign Howard Dean made the charge that the White House was manipulating the terror threat level and recycling old intelligence. The Bush campaign responded by dismissing Dean as a "bizarre conspiracy theorist." A year later, after Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge retired, he admitted that Dean's charge was, indeed, the truth. The same accusation of conspiracy-mongering was routinely leveled at anyone who suggested that the war in Iraq was and is motivated by a desire for the United States to control the world's second-largest oil reserves.


For the Administration, "conspiracy" is a tremendously useful term, and can be applied even in the most seemingly bizarre conditions to declare an inquiry or criticism out of bounds. Responding to a question from NBC's Brian Williams as to whether he ever discusses official business with his father, Bush said such a suggestion was a "kind of conspiracy theory at its most rampant." The credulous style can brook no acknowledgment of unarticulated motives to our political actors, or consultations to which the public is not privy.


The public has been presented with two worldviews, one credulous, one paranoid, and both unsatisfactory. The more the former breaks apart, the greater the appeal of the latter. Conspiracy theories that claim to explain 9/11 are wrongheaded and a terrible waste of time, but the skeptical instinct is, on balance, salutary. It is right to suspect that the operations of government, the power elite and the military-industrial complex are often not what they seem; and proper to raise questions when the answers provided have been unconvincing. Given the untruths to which American citizens have been subjected these past six years, is it any surprise that a majority of them think the government's lying about what happened before and on 9/11?

Iraqi President Rejects Baker's Plan for Iraq

The Iraq Study Group chairmen Lee Hamilton and James Baker have said in comments to the Congress, that their plan may be too late. Indeed, we see the signs that is indeed the case. Talabani, one of the more reliable leaders in Iraq rejects the plan as a violation of sovereignty. It would appear that even President Talabani recognizes that political considerations make a grand realignment of elements of US influence would not be accepted politically. Talabani is closing ranks with his Shia collegues and accepts the reality of civil war.
Talabani is making Iraqi foreign policy which includes engagement with Syria and Iran. Now here is a man who plays his cards well.
Now if Bush could accept that reality, maybe we could get out of harms way.
washingtonpost.com

Iraqi President Jalal Talabani on Sunday strongly rejected a bipartisan U.S. panel's report on U.S. war strategy in Iraq, calling some of its recommendations "dangerous" and a threat to his country's sovereignty.
"The report does not respect the will of the Iraqis in dealing with their problems," he said in a statement released by his office.


Talabani was particularly critical of recommendations to embed thousands of U.S. troops with Iraqi security forces to train and advise them, to centralize control of the country's oil revenue and to allow former loyalists of deposed president Saddam Hussein back into their old government jobs.


"I think that the report is unjust and unfair and contains some dangerous articles which reduce the sovereignty of Iraq and its constitution," he said, according to a Washington Post translation of his comments.


The Iraq Study Group said most U.S. troops should be withdrawn by early 2008. Talabani demanded that Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki be given full control over Iraqi security forces before then.


"The report does not respect the will of the Iraqi people in controlling its army and its capability to arm and train the army," he said.


[...]Talabani embraced the group's recommendation that the United States and Iraq engage in talks with Iraq's neighbors, especially Iran and Syria. The Bush administration has been reluctant to do so.


Iraq has already opened the lines of communication with both countries. Last month, Talabani met with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Tehran. On Sunday, he said he planned to make an official visit to Syria but did not specify when.


As Talabani criticized the report, Saudi Arabia's foreign minister, Prince Saud al-Faisal, praised it for emphasizing the need to focus more attention on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and reexamine the Iraqi constitution, which he said has divided the sects vying for power, according to wire reports of comments he made in Riyadh.

al-Faisal appears to be reinforcing his message to Cheney last week. The primary political problem in the Middle East, even Iraq, resides in Israel.

Carter Accuses Israel of Apartheid

Finally someone has dared to use his formidable bully pulpit to correctly criticise Israel for it's policies of stealing Palestinian land. But of course, now the sickening drone of character assassination begins by neo-cons and Likudniks against one of our more cherished statesmen.
Didn't you know? Carter is anti-semitic.
Truly, he is an honest broker with a williness to stare down the Israeli lobby. He dealt with Egypt and Israel with equal objectivity and is personally responsible for advancing the cause of peace in the Middle East beyond any other president, past or present. Listen to his words, world, and see the truth as it is.
washingtonpost.com

While acknowledging that the word "apartheid" refers to the system of legal racial separation once used in South Africa, Carter says in his book that it is an appropriate term for Israeli policies devoted to "the acquisition of land" in Palestinian territories through Jewish settlements and Israel's incorporation of Palestinian land on its side of a separating wall it is erecting.


He criticizes suicide bombers and those who "consider the killing of Israelis as victories" but also notes that "some Israelis believe they have the right to confiscate and colonize Palestinian land and try to justify the sustained subjugation and persecution of increasingly hopeless and aggravated Palestinians."


Accusing the Bush administration of abandoning the effort to promote a lasting peace, he calls for renewed negotiations on the basis of security guarantees for Israel and Israel's recognition of U.N.-established borders.

Thanks to Climate Change, by 2050 America's Breadbasket Will Be in Canada

SciAm Observations

The minimizing of global warming over the past several years has made one reality true. It's not a matter of whether or not there will be world wide climate change, it's a matter of how much change and how the serious the consequences are. According to the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), a non-profit research institute working mainly on agriculture in developing countries and the tropics, the consequences will be catastrophic unless new plant varieties that are warm hardy are developed. The shift to the northern latitudes for aerable land (shown in the map above for wheat), will not off-set losses of viability in the tropics.
BBC NEWS

"We're talking about large scale human migration and the return to large-scale famines in developing countries, something which we decided 40 or 50 years ago was unacceptable and did something about."
Raining problems The most significant impact of climate change on agriculture is probably changes in rainfall. Some regions are forecast to receive more rain, others to receive less; above all, it will become more variable.


[...]"The livelihoods of billions of people in developing countries, particularly those in the tropics, will be severely challenged as crop yields decline due to shorter growing seasons," said Robert Zeigler, Director General of the International Rice Research Institute (Irri), a CGIAR affiliate.


Conversely, rising temperatures will open up areas of the world which are currently too cold for crop cultivation, in regions such as Siberia and northern North America. And the same Cimmyt study forecasts that wheat will become viable in parts of Alaska.


But the CGIAR figures suggest that extra yield from these regions will not fill the shortfall in the tropics - added to which there are questions of how poorer tropical countries will afford to buy food from richer temperate states. All this means, CGIAR says, that research into the technological, social and economic dimensions of future farming needs to accelerate.


Climate-proof crops
Boosting photosynthesis of rice is like supercharging a car engine
John Sheehy


Within the CGIAR network, various research initiatives are already under way to develop "climate-proof" varieties.

Clearly, part of the reason that we've heard so little about this is that the major consequences will be felt in the third world, where vulnerable populations already teeter on the brink of starvation and natural disasters. Africa, Bangledesh, SE Asia will bear the brunt of the industrialized world's excesses.
AlterNet

Fourteen percent of the world's population lives in the 57 countries on the African continent. However, because the majority of Africans live with little to no access to electricity and personal transport usage is among the world's lowest, Africans contribute only 3 percent of the global greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming.


The United States, conversely, with only 5 percent of the world's population, contributes nearly 25 percent of worldwide greenhouse gas pollution annually. In the United States, with our consumption of electricity, our ecologically harmful industries and our 230 million passenger vehicles, we are literally fueling the destruction of the planet's environment.


Last month, at the United Nations Climate Change summit in Nairobi, Kenya, climate change experts from around the globe reported to 165 countries on the impacts of global warming, which will be felt most harshly by poor developing countries. If that weren't bad enough, the former World Bank chief economist Sir Nicholas Stern recently released a report that suggests that global warming could shrink the global economy by 20 percent over the next 50 years. From the report and the summit, it is clear that climate change is as much a humanitarian, security and economic issue as an environmental one.

After all, it's just dark skinned people who will suffer.

Incompetence At the Highest Level

There is a very interesting article at the New York Times about Bolton's resignation. What's instructive is that it pretty well outlines his competencies.
Bolton is a neo-con ideologue who led the charge to invade Iraq. So one would expect him to have a command of his subject matter and particularly effective at selling his ideology to like minded. The problem is that the UN representative is a diplomatic post. Bolton has no diplomatic skills. He burned bridges with our closest allies at a time those relations were already at their lowest point in years. He openly insulted Sec'y General Annan which guaranteed unnecessary acrimony and opposition to any disfavored positions.
It's not that Bolton is incompetent. It's that he is incompetent as a diplomat. The person who placed him there, Dubya, is the man who is responsible, demonstrating malfeasance at the most important tasks set for a president.

The announcement on Monday of John R. Bolton’s decision to step down was greeted by United Nations officials with relief, while diplomats from other nations offered mixed assessments of his effectiveness during his 17 months as the American envoy. “ ‘No comment,’ he said with a smile,” Mark Malloch Brown, the deputy secretary general, said over his shoulder to reporters as he hustled to a meeting.


Mr. Malloch Brown had angered Mr. Bolton during the summer by accusing the United States of “stealth diplomacy” — turning to the United Nations when Washington needed it while showing public disdain for the institution. At the time, Mr. Bolton demanded that Secretary General Kofi Annan “personally and publicly” repudiate Mr. Malloch Brown’s remarks, but Mr. Annan stood by them.


A year ago, at a monthly lunch for Security Council ambassadors, Mr. Annan signaled how deep the divide had become by chastising Mr. Bolton for trying to “intimidate” him.


Security Council ambassadors said they respected Mr. Bolton’s professionalism and command of the subject matter, and thought he had represented the Bush administration’s foreign policy goals well.


On the other hand, they said his manner, often described as abrupt, unyielding and confrontational, had alienated traditional American allies and undercut American influence.


They said that in areas where he was clearly taking his instructions from Washington, he performed well, but that in pursuing the objective on which he planted his personal stamp — overhauling the sclerotic United Nations management — he had been unsuccessful.


But even Mr. Bolton’s success in championing the administration’s policy represented a problem for him: At the United Nations, that policy is perceived as disdainful of diplomacy and single-minded in its assertion of American interests.


“I think he was serious about the American objective here of reforming the United Nations, and he pushed hard,” said Wang Guangya, the Chinese ambassador. “But of course, sometimes in order to achieve the objective, you have to work together with others.”


Another Council envoy, Adamantios Vassilakis of Greece, said, “Sometimes it was not easy, but we managed to find a solution whenever I dealt with him.”


Augustine P. Mahiga, the ambassador of Tanzania, also a Council member, said Mr. Bolton’s style, which he described as “abrasive and not very helpful to amenable consensus,” had deepened the divisions between the developing world and the great powers.


“He will be remembered, of course, for his principled stand on various issues,” Mr. Mahiga said, “but at the same time, he was the person who could have done it differently in order to minimize the negative perceptions of the positions of the United States.”


Mr. Vassilakis said he thought Mr. Bolton had been particularly effective in obtaining backing for resolutions condemning North Korea’s nuclear program, but less so in gaining support for joint action against Iran’s nuclear program. “But then, Iran is more complicated,” he said.

What the Media Isn't Telling Us

I was doing a little surfing and tripped over a site that provides previews of on-line text books. The quote below stunned me, not that it's a surprise, but that there has been no media coverage of the facts. I suspect like me, many people have noticed while pay checks have gone up, it's buying power is no better or worse than it was 20 years ago.
There has hard data out there since the mid-1990's that the middle class and working class is taking it in the nose and the media hasn't picked it up! It is apparent that government policies since the Nixon era have been squeezing the middle class. The have been a couple of short reprieves during Democratic Administrations in the White House, but the predominance of Republicans on Pennsyvania Avenue and it's recent control of Capital Hill have crushed the working class and basically frozen the middle class in place while billionaires have become a dime a dozen.
Doesn't that piss you off? Everytime I see a $100,000 car on the road, I think about the disparity and hunger in the working class. If that's not class warfare, what is it?
Macroeconomic Changes Affecting the Family

Many contemporary parents feel that they are working harder than their own parents did, just to maintain a modest standard of living. Many researchers agree: "Families seem to be in a situation where they have to run as fast as they can just to remain in the same place" (Zill and Nord, 1994 : 11). Because of an increase in income inequality, poverty, and homelessness in the past 30 years, some families fell out of the race no matter how fast they tried to run, whereas a growing number of families are watching the race from their penthouses. Unequal Income Distribution The expansion in the U.S. economy in the past 25 years has not benefited all families. Instead, income inequality has increased since the late 1960s (Karoly, 1993 ). The rich have gotten richer and the poor have gotten poorer. Income inequality in the United States is greater than in any other Western, industrialized nation (Galbraith, 1998 ; Bernstein, McNichol et al., 2000 ).


The Census Bureau uses several methods to measure income inequality. One of the most common methods is the share of combined household income, by which households are ranked from lowest to highest on the basis of income and then divided into quintiles, or fifths. Census Bureau data and other studies on household incomes show that the rich are getting richer, the middle class is shrinking, and the working class is barely surviving. A /social class / is a category of people who have a similar standing or rank based on wealth, education, power, prestige, and other valued resources.