Lawbreakin'.

The Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee have put together - and are about to release - what promises to be a fairly remarkable report on some of the Bush administration's walks on the wild side. As it stands, it's completely toothless, but if the Democrats by the grace of God win control of the House later this year, it suddenly becomes a very big deal: the foundation of proper investigations.

Long overdue proper investigations, I might add.

Representative John Conyers (D-MI) has already put out the draft summary; you can find it hosted at TPM, and no doubt many more places besides.

Impeachment now.

[Israeli]Defense officials told the Post last week that they were receiving indications from the United States that the US would be interested in seeing Israel attack Syria.

The quote originally comes from the Jerusalem Post, but since it seems to be Josh Marshall who's making the most of it I'm going to go ahead and link to TPM. If there's any truth behind this passage, then the title of this post is absolutely sincere - I don't know what the Founders meant by "high crimes and misdemeanors," but to my mind trying to address the "root causes" of terror by getting Israel to launch an unprovoked attack on an Arab nation completely clears the bar. Israel would be in the worst position it's been in for decades, it would earn us a level of hatred in the Muslim world we can't even imagine, it would inflame Iraqi Shi'ites to wild heights of craziness, and - just for the selfish Americans in the audience - it would do terrible, terrible things to the price of oil. Count on it.

But, of course, it would give President Big Daddy a chance to tell the American electorate that the world is going to hell in a handbasket, and only the Republicans are man enough to keep America safe - or maybe he really just thinks that the problem with American efforts so far is that we haven't punched out at everyone in the region who looks funny at us. Either way, we're talking about something that's going to read in the history books like incitement to regional war - if not genocide - and the insanity of that would have to amount to Constitution-shaking malfeasance.

Meanwhile, in the light of this morning's terrible bloodletting in Qana, Secretary of State Rice seems to have concluded that the best diplomacy is transparent lies.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was forced to cancel a trip to Beirut Sunday after an Israeli airstrike killed more than 50 people, mostly women and children, in the southern Lebanese town of Qana in the bloodiest attack since the hostilities began between Israel and Lebanon's Hezbollah militia. But she did not call for an immediate ceasefire.

. . .

Earlier, at a hastily called news conference, Rice said she was "deeply saddened" by the "terrible loss of life" and insisted the United States was working harder than any party to try to achieve a ceasefire.

Yes. Working harder than anybody by making no public efforts. It's very zen.

And that trip to Beirut she was forced to cancel?

"In the wake of the tragedy that the people and the government of Lebanon are dealing with today, I have decided to postpone my discussions in Beirut," Rice said. "In any case, my work is here today."

Whew! Good way to save face, Ms. Rice! Glad to see you're still calling the shots!

In Beirut, following the attack, Lebanese government officials said Rice was not welcome. Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Siniora said he would not hold talks with Rice until a ceasefire is called.

Whoops.

Yeah, in point of fact, we've alienated Lebanon something fierce by our active participation in Israel's failed strategy. Whatever material loss Hezbollah has suffered, in exchange it gets this:

Lebanese Prime Minister Fuoad Siniora expressed his 'gratitude' to Hizbullah and its leader Hassan Nasrallah for "sacrificing their lives for the country."

During a press conference held in wake of the Qana village incident in which 55 Lebanese were killed, Siniora asked: "Is Israel's mission to wipe out the Lebanese? It seems they want to kill all of us. One of those killed today is a baby just one day old. With its aggression, Israel is encouraging extremism."

PM Siniora is a moderate. PM Siniora was soliciting help in disarming Hezbollah when all this started. PM Siniora was just about the biggest success story the West had in the Middle East.

Now PM Siniora is caught between a rock and a hard place. Hezbollah are heroes, the US and Israel are radioactive, and his country is billions of dollars in the hole and psychologically battered.

In the One Percent Doctrine, Ron Suskind notes that the experts in the CIA were absolutely convinced that Osama bin Laden came out against President Bush in 2004 with the hopes that the public backlash in the States would hand the jackass a second term in office. It's not hard to see why.

Just in case anyone doubted it . . .

Hezbollah has some cynical monsters in its ranks.

The words of a Canadian United Nations observer written just days before he was killed in an Israeli bombing of a UN post in Lebanon are evidence Hezbollah was using the post as a "shield" to fire rockets into Israel, says a former UN commander in Bosnia.

Those words, written in an e-mail dated just nine days ago, offer a possible explanation as to why the post -- which according to UN officials was clearly marked and known to Israeli forces -- was hit by Israel on Tuesday night, said retired Maj.-Gen. Lewis MacKenzie yesterday.

Mind you, even if this is true, it doesn't seem like the Israelis handled the situation in a particularly admirable manner:

UN peacekeepers in south Lebanon contacted Israeli troops 10 times before an Israeli bomb killed four of them, an initial UN report says.

The post was hit by a precision-guided missile after six hours of shelling, diplomats familiar with the probe say.

. . .

The UN report says each time the UN contacted Israeli forces, they were assured the firing would stop.

A senior Irish soldier working for the UN forces had warned the Israelis six times that their bombardment was endangering the lives of UN staff, Ireland's foreign ministry said.

Had Israel responded to the requests, "rather than deliberately ignoring them", the observers would still be alive, a diplomat familiar with the report said.

Mind you, the UN representatives are probably - and quite rightly - pissed off.

I don't pretend to know what the real story is; with luck, Israel will get a fair, trustworthy investigation underway, and some truth will spill out. Based on these two takes, though, it may be fair to presume that (1) Hezbollah are scumbags who'll do some really contemptible things to win the PR war (not news), and (2) that Israeli ambivalence over intelligence-sharing with the UN may have cost some lives.

Neither point boosts my spirits.

How Things Work.

Presidential vision, July 21:

In the administration's view, the new conflict is not just a crisis to be managed. It is also an opportunity to seriously degrade a big threat in the region, just as Bush believes he is doing in Iraq. Israel's crippling of Hezbollah, officials also hope, would complete the work of building a functioning democracy in Lebanon and send a strong message to the Syrian and Iranian backers of Hezbollah.

"The president believes that unless you address the root causes of the violence that has afflicted the Middle East, you cannot forge a lasting peace," said White House counselor Dan Bartlett. "He mourns the loss of every life. Yet out of this tragic development, he believes a moment of clarity has arrived."

Moment of clarity, July 27:

At the onset of the Lebanese crisis, Arab governments, starting with Saudi Arabia, slammed Hezbollah for recklessly provoking a war, providing what the United States and Israel took as a wink and a nod to continue the fight.

Now, with hundreds of Lebanese dead and Hezbollah holding out against the vaunted Israeli military for 15 days, the tide of public opinion across the Arab world is surging behind the organization, transforming the Shiite group’s leader, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, into a folk hero and forcing a change in official statements.

The Saudi royal family and King Abdullah II of Jordan, who were initially more worried about the rising power of Shiite Iran, Hezbollah’s main sponsor, are scrambling to distance themselves from Washington.

An outpouring of newspaper columns, cartoons, blogs and public poetry readings have showered praise on Hezbollah while attacking the United States and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice for trumpeting American plans for a “new Middle East” that they say has led only to violence and repression.

A few days ago, Matt Yglesias wrote - I think quite rightly - that there's no way an ineptly managed war can be a just war. Just off the top of my head, there are a couple of dimensions to it: first, the loss of life is unlikely to be redeemed (insofar as it ever could be) by objectively good ends, and, second, death through recklessness is by definition amoral at best.

Which is to say, the Israelis have screwed up (read Meron Benvenisti for some ruminations on the coming of a tipping point), and they've done indefensible harm to innocent citizens of Lebanon along the way. There are simply no results out there that can justify their tactics.

And, naturally, the Bush administration has thought it was all a great idea - and that could ultimately amount to one of the US's greatest modern sins in the Middle East. It's something inherent in the way they think; there's been a lot of talk over the last five and a half years about their inability to disassociate terrorist movements from traditional state actors, and though there's some of that in evidence even here - i.e., President Bush's apparent conviction that Bashar Assad could shut Hezbollah down with a phone call - I think it's possible that it's exaggerated. I mean, Dick Cheney's time with Halliburton shows, if nothing else, that he's quite comfortable with the idea of transnational institutions placing their own interests outside those of their host nations. But I do think they all share a real difficulty in grasping the nature of diffuse systems; they seem to believe that all political and military institutions are essentially dominated by elites, and that, without hostile centers of authority pointing the way, most of the nihilistic and violent tendencies of any given region will simply dry up. It's how they could believe that quickly wiping out Saddam's hangers-on could end the Iraqi insurrection (once upon a time), and how they can line up now and talk about the carnage in Lebanon as the "birth pangs" for a new Middle East; without the puppet-masters in Hezbollah, the thinking goes, obviously things will go more smoothly. So who cares if the damage done along the way seems capricious or irrational or even actively cruel?

The problem is that this is completely wrong. Hezbollah's issues and al-Qaeda's issues and Iran's issues - the hatred of Israel, the longing for political and institutional strength in modern geopolitics - are all being manipulated by elites, yes, but they're deeply rooted in local populations, and they're deeply rooted in local populations because they arise from genuine problems and imbalances. The sentiments won't go away if we kick the hell out of their proponents and their neighbors; let's remember that Lebanon got stuck with Hezbollah in the first place in no small part because the country was torn to hell in the drive to weed out the PLO - not because Hassan Nasrallah stood up on a soapbox and told people that it was a good day to hate "the Zionist entity." Sure, we have to kick the hell out of the lunatics, but we also have to demonstrate some respect and appreciation for the adverse conditions at the grassroots. We have to demonstrate that we can be agents of positive change - or at least not get in the way of it - or else we have to be capable of total genocide. Those are our routes to a quiet year in the Middle East.

Thankfully, we're not at that latter point yet. But we are acting like we're completely oblivious to the realities on the ground - apparently, dreadfully, because the administration really seems to think they don't matter in the long run. When Condoleezza Rice says, "It doesn’t do anyone any good to raise false hopes about something that’s not going to happen. It’s not going to happen. I did say to the group, ‘When will we learn?’ The fields of the Middle East are littered with broken cease-fires," she's not talking to the people who are on the ground and who could, in fact, benefit from a transitory cease fire. She's not talking to the people around the world who identify with the victims - not even to explain her position. She's just talking to the people whom this administration recognizes: its supporters and its peers.

And that's only going to make things worse.

Anyway, another good news/bad news bulletin, both care of Ha'aretz. The good news is that Israel seems to've done potentially mortal damage to the most dangerous of Hezbollah's missile systems - the array centered in Tyre. With a little bit of luck, this should ease a lot of fears (at least in the short-to-medium term) in northern Israel. The bad news - or the bad news on which I'm choosing to focus - is that Israel's UN ambassador is acting like kind of a dick. No UN role in the investigation of the deaths of four UN observers he says, with some sneering at the UN itself on the side. I'm not sure what the swagger is meant to accomplish, but Mr. Gillerman seems to be making a habit of it.

One bad habit out of many.

Boltonwatch, redux!

Less than eight hours to go until the 2006 confirmation hearings start! Want to know more? Steve Clemons is your man!

For my own part, I'm pessimistic. Geoge Voinovich has flipped, and I don't really doubt the Republicans as a bloc will move with him. Mr. Bolton seems to have done a generally lousy job . . .

Mr. Bolton began his tenure with an argument over the preparations for a gathering of heads of state. He demanded that the summit document omit, among other things, references to the anti-poverty Millennium Development Goals, on the ground that these had been interpreted by U.N. officials to include a commitment to more foreign aid. Mr. Bolton's action alienated other U.N. ambassadors with no obvious gain; such commitments, even if accepted, are non-binding.

Mr. Bolton's handling of the new U.N. Human Rights Council was equally clumsy. He failed to show up at nearly all of the 30 or so negotiating sessions leading up to the council's creation, then waded in at the eleventh hour with a bizarre proposal that the State Department quickly repudiated. Mr. Bolton's spokesman says that the ambassador engaged in good faith throughout the process. But U.S. allies felt that Mr. Bolton did not do so.

Mr. Bolton has embarrassed himself most recently by his mishandling of U.N. management reform, a cause supported by U.N. officials and the richer member states. Mr. Bolton came up with the idea of threatening to cut U.N. funding unless the management reforms were adopted, and his spokesman insists that this brinkmanship was helpful. But South Africa's U.N. envoy called it "poison"; Germany's ambassador called it "wrong"; his British counterpart said it was a mistake to hold the budget hostage. After six months the budget threat was dropped.

We see little evidence here that Mr. Bolton is good at "working multilaterally." Rather than building support at the United Nations, Mr. Bolton has more often solidified the anti-American coalition.

. . . and he seems to be hard at work at personally alienating the envoys of every other nation on the planet - but he hasn't done any of it on TV, so the political penalty for confirming him in the job is probably looking fairly mild to our beloved senatorial class.

If any American readers would like to tell their senators otherwise, though, the UN Association of the United States of America has a helpful page up at its advocacy center. Just for the record.

The view from the widening gyre.

I'd missed this amid all the coverage of the hotter wars in the region, but it turns out that Kurdish terrorists working out of Iraq killed fifteen Turkish soldiers in a week.

Domestic political pressures are building to take a leaf from Israel's book and hit back at the guerrillas of the Kurdistan Workers' Party, or PKK. Since the beginning of the year, attacks on Turkish military garrisons and police stations have escalated across the country's southeast, along with random shootings, bombings and protests—many of them, authorities suspect, organized in Iraq. Already the Turkish military has laid detailed plans for possible helicopter-and-commando assaults, government sources tell NEWSWEEK. Meanwhile, Ankara's frustration with Washington has grown palpable. For all the Bush administration's repeated promises to crack down on the PKK, little if anything has happened. With elections coming next year, Erdogan could be pardoned for soon concluding that his forbearance might prove politically dangerous. "Moderate, liberal people in Turkey are becoming increasingly anti-American," warns Turkey's Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul. "That isn't good."

Apparently, we're not at a crisis point yet - though Turkish public opinion is increasingly to be charted somewhere near "seething" - but the US just doesn't have the resources on the ground in Iraq to address the problem. Regional stability really is riding on Turkish restraint in the face on continuing aggression, and . . . well, not to be too pessimistic, but that's a lot to ask.

I can only hope Zalmay Khalilzad has a card or two left to play with the leaders in Iraqi Kurdistan . . . .

"Elegy for Beirut."

Powerful stuff.

Democrats can be idiots too.

Democrats in the US Senate called on Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki to condemn Hezbollah's attacks against Israel and to recognize Israel's right to defend itself.

The lawmakers expressed dismay during a press conference over Maliki's recent criticism of "Israel aggression" in Lebanon and called for a "clarification" from the Iraqi leader before he appears Wednesday before a joint session of Congress.

The lawmakers suggested that some members of Congress may choose to boycott the event if an explanation is not forthcoming.

"No matter how politically expedient he thinks it may be, to stand with America, you have to stand against terrorism," said Senator Chuck Schumer.

"Before he speaks in front of the Congress and the American people, there's a very simple question we are asking the prime minister today: Which side is he on when it comes to the war on terror?" Schumer said.

This may be well intended. This may be political posturing. This may be well intended political posturing.

But, ultimately, whatever good it does Israel and the Middle East to have the Prime Minister of Iraq say for the record that Hezbollah is full of shit, it is not good for the Prime Minister of Iraq. If the man were directing his government to provide material support for the crazy Shi'ite party in Lebanon, that would be one thing, but nobody's saying he is. Instead, he's trying to hold together a failed state where we have well over a hundred thousand troops in place, and where every other politician in sight is trying to demonstrate his religious bona fides by giving Hezbollah big hugs - and we want him to take a horrendously unpopular position for the sake of . . . what, our domestic audience? The pros don't outweigh the cons. His support won't give cover for other moderate voices in the region - it'll just make him look like an American puppet. If we're going to pressure him to do anything, it should be - at most - to express sympathy and support for the legitimate government in Beirut in a way that won't reflect well on Hezbollah, and, seriously, that pressure should be exercised off-damn-camera.

Sigh.

This is the sort of thing I ordinarily direct toward President Bush and his hounds, but this time it goes to Senator Schumer: there are more important foreign policy objectives out there than making people admit your side is right. Besides, we have needy dictators for that.

[As an aside, the Democratic Policy Committee just pulled together a master list of indicators of the condition of Iraq; it's not like any senator should be unaware of the state of affairs.]

Anyway, I gather that Israel is having a good news/bad news kind of moment - the good news is that Mahmoud Abbas may finally have gotten the Palestinians in Gaza to sign on to a deal with which the Israelis can live . . .

Palestinian factions, including Hamas and Islamic Jihad, have agreed to stop firing rockets at Israel and to free a captured Israeli soldier in a deal brokered by Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president.

The deal, agreed on Sunday, is to halt the rocket attacks in return for a cessation of Israeli attacks on the Gaza Strip, and to release Corporal Gilad Shalit, the Israeli soldier captured on June 25, in exchange for the freeing of Palestinian prisoners at some point in the future.

An adviser to Mr Abbas told the Guardian that all Palestinian politicians were united on the need to free the Israeli soldier and stop all violence in Gaza, but the obstacles were the Israeli government and the Hamas leadership in Damascus.

"The problem is that both Islamic Jihad and Hamas have to seek the advice of their political bureaux in Damascus and we are waiting for their response," he said.

Ibrahim al-Naja, a Hamas minister in Ramallah, told the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz: "This initiative was presented in an attempt to alleviate Palestinian suffering, but now it depends on Israel, which is showing no indication yet of its willingness for a ceasefire."

The ceasefire has yet to take hold completely but there has been a marked reduction in the number of rockets fired at Israel.

. . . assuming the Israelis are inclined to live with a deal. It's some kind of step forward, anyway.

The bad news? Israel seems to be about to move back into Lebanon, for a period of weeks to months. The Lebanese government has officially adopted four of Hezbollah's prerequisites for a cease-fire - despite the fact that it's very hard to imagine PM Olmert offering another handover of land in the current climate - and, just for that extra twist of the knife, reconstruction bucks (1.5 billion of them, to be precise) have just been promised to the Lebanese by the Saudis. The US could match it - that'd be worth more than all the "public diplomacy" Karen Hughes has ever slapped down on unsuspecting Muslims, and it would really do some good for the afflicted. The Israelis could match it; they'd be reviled as hypocrites, but it would still be noticed. It would still count.

But, in the end, I think it's much more likely that Wahhabi petrodollars will be the single largest source of aid Lebanon's civilian infrastructure receives - unless the Iranians jump in, of course. That's just the way things are; they play a longer game in the region than we do.

As for Iraq? Well, we're apparently going to try to retake Baghdad; in exchange, we're letting Anbar get a little bit wilder. It may be a fair trade, but it doesn't allow too many illusions about where the momentum is.

I hope the Democrats - who, if I hadn't stressed this before, really should know better than the Republicans - start paying attention.

It takes so little to make me happy. [The cinematic edition.]

What's "so little?" you might be asking. I'll tell you, my friends: it starts in the second century AD and ends in John Woo and looks on paper like it might just be the reason movies were invented - an adaptation of a the Battle of Red Cliffs, a chunk of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, set to reunite Mr. Woo, Chow Yun-Fat, and everything else that's good in the world.

If you're a detail hound, this may be the place to start looking - courtesy of the legendary Ferrous Buller.

If you're more into the big picture, there's really nothing to do but join me in just sitting back and wallowing in warm and richly fragrant joy.

Here's one you won't want to read.

Sorry about that. I promise it's good for you.

. . .

Probably.

Anyway, I don't know if you can access the essay directly without a TNR subscription, so I hope the gods of fair use will smile on me as I quote the whole damn thing (bar one extraneous sentence meant for Jon Chait). The thrust of it, for the impatient among you, is that everyone's favorite Shi'ite Iraqi opportunist (okay, second favorite - we're talking Muqtada al-Sadr, not Ahmed Chalabi) is apparently on the verge of sending in a team of fifteen hundred jihadis to side with Hezbollah against Israel. Welcome to your moment of clarity, President Bush.

A week ago, I [That would be Spencer Ackerman - J.] entertained a nightmare scenario whereby Moqtada Sadr sends his Mahdi Army militia to fight alongside Hezbollah. The nightmare would be Israel attacking Sadr in retaliation for his attacks on the IDF or Israeli civilians, thereby prompting the inevitable, inflammatory charge that Israel and the United States were out to destroy Lebanon, Iraq, Shiism, etc., and further prompting increased violence against American troops in Iraq.

Last week, Sadr was merely grumbling about sending his fighters to Lebanon. Now, according to Sharon Behn of The Washington Times, he's ready to deploy:

A senior member of Muqtada al-Sadr's Iraqi Shi'ite militia, the Mahdi Army, says the group is forming a squadron of up to 1,500 elite fighters to go to Lebanon.

The plan reflects the potential of the fighting between Israel and Hezbollah to strengthen radical elements in Iraq and neighboring countries and to draw other regional players into the Lebanon conflict.

"We are choosing the men right now," said Abu Mujtaba, who works in the loosely organized following of radical Shi'ite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. "We are preparing the right men for the job."

Sadr's ultimate goal is to dominate Iraqi Shia politics. Unsurprisingly, he's using his now-declared response to the Lebanon war as a way to marginalize his Shia rivals in the Maliki government: Abu Mujtaba told Behn, "If some politicians or Iraqis laugh at us, I think the coming days will prove these reports and we will see who is defending Islam to prove he is a Muslim and who is not." Combined with Maliki's visit to the White House this week, Sadr is positioning himself extremely well to call his rivals Quislings. Maliki has already denounced Israel. Given his reliance on Bush to stay in power, it's unthinkable that he could top Sadr and actually send fighters to Lebanon. Advantage Moqtada.

To make matters even worse, Behn further reports that despite all the talk about Sunnis resisting the pull of Hezbollah, the Iraqi Sunnis feel pressure to one-up Sadr and join the fight against Israel as well, quoting Sunni Sheik Abdul Rahman Al Duleimi:

"This is a must-do, to show all the Arabs that Iraq is still standing," said the Sunni cleric.

"And the other reason is we want to extend the fighting range so they will know Lebanon is not just one country and Iraq is not just one country, it is Muslims from all over the world," he said.

Bush's strategy is to resist international pressure on Israel and allow the war to continue. The longer it lasts, the greater the likelihood it will spill over into Iraq.

Even if doesn't, Chris Nelson observes that it's hardly shaping up to be a win for the Israeli-American bloc.

I really do wonder if Ehud Olmert and his cadre expected something other from the US than they got. I mean, I'm reasonably confident that there would've been some sort of exchange between Tel Aviv and Washington before the campaign in Lebanon started, and there were probably assurances given on both sides - but, still, decades of experience has led the Israelis to expect the American administration to tug on the leash after a few days of symbolically convincing overwhelming force. What was consistently allowed amounted to a reminder (and maybe even an exaggeration) of Israeli military superiority and resolve, but it was contained. There would be room for negotiations - along with a sense that Israel still had another shoe to drop, should it be forced.

For the Bush administration, though, the productivity of any such approach is apparently more than offset by its gosh-darn murkiness. We should all stand up and fight our enemies if we want the world to be a better place, after all! So now Ehud Olmert finds himself in the midst of the sort of mess even Ariel Sharon chose to avoid (the Hezbollah kidnappings that started this off were not the first ones to come along this century, as it happens), and - at least for a few days - our president was sitting there egging him on instead of offering face-saving cover for a draw-down. Maybe that's what PM Olmert wanted all along, of course; there's not really any way to know.

Still, I can't help but think that we've made a bad situation worse. Again.

Dick Cheney's solution, by the way? Make sure the Republicans are in office forever.

From the Truer Words Never Written department.

President Bush should stop issuing statements claiming the power to bypass parts of laws he has signed, an American Bar Association task force has unanimously concluded in a strongly worded 32-page report that is scheduled to be released today.

The bipartisan panel of legal specialists includes a former FBI director, a former federal appeals court chief judge, former Republican officials, and leading scholars.

The panel said presidents do not have the authority to declare that sections of the bills they sign are unconstitutional, and that they thus need not be enforced as Congress wrote them.

Bush has used these so-called signing statements to challenge more than 750 laws that have been enacted since he took office, more than all previous presidents combined.

"The president's constitutional duty is to enforce laws he has signed into being, unless and until they are held unconstitutional by the Supreme Court," the report said. "The Constitution is not what the president says it is."

Read the whole thing, from Charlie Savage at the Boston Globe.

A few frivolous asides.

Well, my computer was away for surgery over the weekend; important bits were replaced, and now all that's left is testing the fragile hope that the problems have been addressed. She's been humming contentedly for almost an hour now, and I take that to be a good sign.

Anyway, just in passing, a cheap shot. I've just reached the front page of the New York Times online edition, and there are six headlines/ledes on my screen. Three of those six are:

1) Top Iraqi's White House Visit Shows Gaps With U.S.

Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki is expected to make requests that clash sharply with President Bush’s foreign policy.

2) Stem Cell Work Gets States' Aid After Bush Veto

Two governors have offered state money for research, and the issue has sprung to the forefront of crucial elections.

3) Most States Fail Demands Set Out in Education Law

Failure to meet standards set by the No Child Left Behind Act leaves several states in danger of losing some aid.

Or, more concisely, the Bush administration's signature foreign policy, moral statement, and domestic program are all being eroded by continuing exposure to reality. Some are being challenged, some are being worked around, some are just having bad effects; none are working as promised.

Good thing they still have tax cuts, right?

Today's bad insight into the powers that be.

Explaining the reluctance to push quickly for a cease-fire, one senior administration official who was not authorized to speak on the record indicated a belief that premature diplomacy might leave Hezbollah in a position of strength.

"We don't want the kind of truce that will lead to another conflict," said this official, who added that, when the time comes, "you will see plenty of diplomacy."

Why, we've got buckets full of diplomacy out back! You can't open the closets in the Lincoln Bedroom `cause all the diplomacy we've been stacking up would spill all over the darn place!

So, yeah - Condoleezza Rice is planning to do a little diplomatic tour next week that won't actual involve anyone who enjoys any leverage over Hezbollah - Egypt and Saudi Arabia aren't exactly known for their Shi'ite outreach programs, after all. Apparently, we're not even grovelling to the most respectable Iraqi Shi'ites (Ayatollah Sistani, say) to go out and make any overtures.

Why the soft-footing? Well, according to the Post article at hand . . .

The U.S. position also reflects Bush's deepening belief that Israel is central to the broader campaign against terrorists and represents a shift away from a more traditional view that the United States plays an "honest broker's" role in the Middle East.

In the administration's view, the new conflict is not just a crisis to be managed. It is also an opportunity to seriously degrade a big threat in the region, just as Bush believes he is doing in Iraq. Israel's crippling of Hezbollah, officials also hope, would complete the work of building a functioning democracy in Lebanon and send a strong message to the Syrian and Iranian backers of Hezbollah.

Where's the damn endgame?!

Seriously, I'm sorry, but how do we get from the paragraphs above to normalcy? Wiping out Hezbollah fortifications is one thing, but demolishing billions of dollars of Lebanese infrastructure and rendering hundreds of thousands of its civilians homeless is going to stabilize the democratic government how? Chucking away our negotiation options before we get to any table helps us how?

Supporting Israel's right to self-defense is one thing - I can respect the urge even when I think the Israeli approach is horrifically misguided - but embracing the current carnage as an "opportunity" is delusional. It smacks precisely of the hubris with which the administration set out to remake Iraq with too few troops and no long-term planning. The president and his advisors seem honestly to believe that God has built them a world in which the weight of all human history tips the scales toward virtue, and that as long as they're loyal to their own vision of righteousness, everything will be fine.

God help us from governments led by small men who were born rich.

Ten seconds of Dick Morris is too many seconds.

I saw the man himself on Fox News earlier tonight, and though I only gave him enough time to finish his thought before screaming off to detox my brain with some reality show featuring hoola hoops and the Beverly Hills Cop theme played on water glasses, I'm still twitchy all this time later. What he did, in those brief moments when he lived in the magic box in my family room, was he took a deep breath, and he made the mournful observation that, in the degraded world in which we live today, American Christian conservatives were more "pro-Israel" than American Jews (who, after all, had voted overwhelmingly for Kerry).

I can't swear I'm speaking on behalf of my Jewish friends when I say very rude things about Mr. Morris, but I think there's a better than even chance. Take, if you will, a parallel: as an American, I could characterize Tony Blair's unflinching support of President Bush's hysterically half-assed geopolitical impulses in any number of ways, but not as "pro-American" in any complimentary sense; the measure of how well one loves a country isn't how enthusiastically one embraces the most destructive impulses of any one political party.

More directly, an American Jew - or anybody else, for that matter - who'd rather see Labour holding the Knesset doesn't deserve to have his or her attachments to Israel questioned.

As for the current campaign in Lebanon, I certainly see the reasons behind it. It's an effort to dismantle the presumed advantages the little guy enjoys in asymmetrical warfare - and, in a less big picture-y kind of way, to wipe out Hezbollah's capacity to fling rockets into Haifa. The world may yearn for a return to the relative elegance of the raid on Entebbe, but this time the problem is more diffuse than just a knot of lunatics and a highjacked airplane. Moreover, Fuad Siniora - Lebanon's prime minister - seems to've admitted (albeit in an interview he has since disavowed) that the government in Beirut simply doesn't have the leverage to deal with Hezbollah on its own; I think, realistically, there simply are no local powers on which Israel can call for meaningful political/diplomatic/police action assistance. [I'm certainly hoping that some Euro-UN force can be sent in to support the legitimate Lebanese forces in a sweep of the south, but God only knows how long it could take to happen.]

That said, indulging in collective punishment and blowing up the odd tissue factory is only damaging Israel's strategic position. [Setting aside the fact that collective punishment isn't the most moral of approaches to begin with; civilian casualty rates in Lebanon are already appallingly high, half a million people are apparently without home and shelter, and God only knows how long it'll take to restore the infrastructure - and, for that matter, who'll pay for it. Iran's more likely to chip in than Israel, alas.] Juxtapositions like this . . .

"They're hitting everything, not just Hezbollah," wailed Leila Chahrour, 30, whose home was destroyed, forcing her family to live with 15 other people in a cramped motel room. "It's like this: If you are Lebanese, Israel will kill you."

Israeli officials may believe that their air war will turn more Lebanese against Hezbollah, which started the latest outburst of violence by kidnapping the Israeli soldiers.

. . . simply make my head spin. Israel may be scaring the Lebanese shitless, but at the same time every Shi'ite in the Middle East gets just a bit more hostile, and the political fortunes of President Ahmadinejad and his philosophical kin get brighter and brighter.

And now fighting on the ground is officially underway, despite the fact that the Lebanese government has indicated that it might well mobilize what army it has against any new arrivals. Does it feel to anyone else like this is getting out of control? Are we all confident that Ehud Olmert has an endgame that anybody else will support?

Seriously, are we?

Then Dick Morris should shut his fool mouth.

Making the most of these three minutes . . . .

Obviously, when I go without posting for this long, it is to some degree a matter of choice: you can say I'm taking a vacation, or you can simply say that I suck.

That said, there's another dimension to this current jag: my computer has been enjoying a series of strokes. The symptoms still point to overheating - but, alas, the thermometers in the beast's guts tell a different story. All I can say is that the machine works for some length of time, then craps out, and can generally only be restarted an hour or more later - and then, generally, not for very long.

So I haven't had as much time to read the news as I like, let alone to park over it, scribble with a highlighter, and twist the good bits around to their most comically oversimplified forms. Along with what's going on in the Middle East, I'm afraid it can only be taken as another sign of the coming apocalypse - so, please, book your hours in that beachfront co-op while you still have a chance!

Sigh.

Also in the news? President Chimp hates sick people.

. . .

Okay, no. President Chimp just doesn't seem to grasp that when people say the blastocysts in question are to be destroyed anyway, implicit in that is that they will never, ever become babies. There is no potential for human life. There is no chance the womb fairy will intercede and turn these clumps of cells into infants. They will never think, they will never feel, and such souls as they have are destined for immediate release because there is simply no way to make it otherwise. Even if you believe life begins at conception, I challenge you to make a case for blocking stem cell research proceeding from these particular sources that doesn't equally compromise our ability to autopsy the corpses of fully grown adults to help track and correct diseases.

But I guess the real point of this is that, veto in place, President Chimp doesn't have to grapple with the fact that his current policy is wrong-headed.

Another win for America!

The best missile defense . . .

. . . is, apparently, only having North Korean missiles to worry about.

Now, in all seriousness, I'm not as sanguine as all that; I had gotten complacent about the whole situation, and had really come to hope that the Kim regime would recognize that acts of provocation - or, at least, this particular act of provocation - wouldn't pay off. Instead, they waited `til the fourth of July and then launched their missiles in a bid to overshadow the latest space shuttle mission. So now I'm a bit shaken - we don't want our adversaries to be smarter than we are, but something better than aching stupidity would probably also do the world some good.

Anyway, the fact remains: the North Koreans may have hoped to scare the world into coughing up concessions, but high-profile failures aren't what they needed. From what I've read, the Chinese are embarrassed, the Japanese are furious, and even diplomacy geeks like myself are decidedly more willing to support the Bush gang's policy of nothing but unrelenting disdain than we were forty-eight hours ago.

Except insofar as they may once again make a push for regime change without making any serious preparations for the chaos that would ensue, either during or after.

. . .

Which is a pretty big "except."

The next topic of discussion is sanctions, and I have to admit I have no idea what the outside world can really take away from the North Korean regime anymore; I certainly don't have the sense that they're drowning in Western luxuries - at least, not those legally secured. I suppose the only real answer is to focus in on strategic support from China (and any other state that's trading for North Korean military tech and that we can leverage), and who knows how willing our "partners" are going to be? Fun times ahead at the UN.

Anyway, the main point: here's hoping that Kim Jong Il and his generals learn to embrace reality very quickly. Bluster and threats backfired on them hard this week, and they're not doing the rest of us a whole lot of good either.