Keith Olbermann on the Rumsfeld speech.

Video and transcript here. Kudos to Mr. Olbermann, and kudos to MSNBC for running the thing without apology or frantic disavowal.

Plus, while we're looking at strange and lovely instances of America's better angels coming to the fore, I'll mention the Times has an article up on the state of the investigation of voting irregularities (2004 edition) in Ohio. Nobody's going to void President Bush's reelection . . .

. . . dammit . . .

. . . but at least there's a decent chance that abuses will come under a spotlight. It's something the system badly needs, and a lot of people in power have a lot of incentive to fight it; here, at least, they're losing.

Real terror.

Sunnis' increasing suspicion of hospital workers is perhaps the most vivid illustration of their widespread distrust of the Shiite-led government. Suhaib al-Obeidi, 35, a supermarket owner from the heavily Sunni district of Adamiyah, said he lost his final ounce of confidence in the government during a brush with death in a hospital two weeks ago.

On a quiet weekday morning, as Obeidi unloaded canned chicken and Pepsi from a van and into his store, a gunfight broke out on the street and a spray of bullets struck him, he said -- first in his right shoulder, then in his back. As he tried to crawl away, another bored into his leg. A friend shoved his bleeding body into a taxi and took him to nearby al-Nuuman Hospital.

But when they arrived, a friendly doctor warned them that the Mahdi Army was coming to arrest Sunnis, Obeidi said. So they sneaked out to another hospital, Medical City in the Bab al -Muadam district, to get treatment.

"Tell me where you live!" a nurse at Medical City snapped at the arriving patients, Obeidi recalled, as the staff moved residents of mainly Sunni areas into a separate room.

A few moments later, he saw Mahdi Army troops handcuff five Sunni men who were donating blood -- including the friend who had brought him to the hospital -- and haul them out of the hospital, Obeidi said. A Sunni doctor ran up to him and said he would be killed unless he fled immediately.

Wearing only underwear and some bandages the doctor had applied to his wounds, Obeidi escaped in a taxi to the home of his in-laws in the upscale Mansour district. He lay in bed for an hour as he waited for the Sunni doctor to follow him from the hospital. The bed was drenched in so much blood that his family later dumped it in the trash.

"You were only a few minutes away from death," said the doctor, who arrived at the home an hour later. The doctor, one of the few Sunnis at Medical City, asked that his name not be used because he felt it would further endanger his life.

Inside an illegal clinic in a dingy apartment building, the doctor operated on Obeidi for seven hours. But Obeidi hasn't been able to get any follow-up treatment; he has vowed never to set foot in a hospital again, even if he is mortally wounded or deathly ill.

"I'd rather go to the pharmacy and take random simple medicine," he said.

It would be horrifying enough even if it weren't part of a trend.

The executive has invented new powers for itself again.

This time around, it involves barring American citizens from coming to American soil. These may or may not be bad guys - based on the Bush administration's history, I'm not eager to give the powers that be the benefit of the doubt - but, regardless, from where in the Constitution does the FBI derive the authority to refuse Americans entry to America without any hint of due process?

Hint: it's a trick question.

Pope Benedict, we had a deal!

Sure, it was never explicitly stated, but we've both adhered to it pretty well since the early days of your papacy - I'd stop bitching about you, and you'd avoid doing high-profile things that would inspire me to bitch! Well, sir, my complacency and inaction has been utterly reliable for months, but apparently you can't keep your unhealthy fixations in your pants any longer. Fine, then: this is your warning shot.

Apparently, the pope may think that what the Roman Catholic Church really needs right now is to pick a fight with demonstrable fact and accepted scientific theory.

Philosophers, scientists and other intellectuals close to Pope Benedict will gather at his summer palace outside Rome this week for intensive discussions that could herald a fundamental shift in the Vatican's view of evolution.

There have been growing signs the Pope is considering aligning his church more closely with the theory of "intelligent design" taught in some US states.

. . .

A prominent anti-evolutionist and Roman Catholic scientist, Dominique Tassot, told the US National Catholic Reporter that this week's meeting was "to give a broader extension to the debate. Even if [the Pope] knows where he wants to go, and I believe he does, it will take time. Most Catholic intellectuals today are convinced that evolution is obviously true because most scientists say so."

And why should scientists know more about observable phenomena and the fine workings of life than a bunch of old men who've devoted their lives to interpreting religious tradition?

Sigh.

We'll have to see where this goes, of course, but it ain't a good sign. [Thanks, such as they are, go to Kevin Drum for flagging the story.]

And now some spectacular idiocy from a Democrat.

"The international community must use all our available means to stiffen Lebanon's spine and convince the government of Lebanon to have the new UNIFIL troops deployed on the Syrian border in adequate numbers," [Rep. Tom Lantos] said. "To provide aid while allowing a porous Lebanon-Syria border will only invite the repetition of a Hizbullah attack in the future. Hizbullah must not be allowed to rearm."

More here.

Mr. Lantos is described as a Holocaust survivor, so maybe he's entitled to be reflexive in his response threats to Israel (as a human being, if not as a legislator), but I have to repeat my mantra nonetheless: policies of collective punishment aggravate local hostility to us and to the Israelis, and they end up doing the entire neighborhood more harm than good. In this particular case, that's doubly true - the best result that could come from blackmailing the Lebanese government would seem to be their refusal to submit; at least that way Fouad Siniora and his relatively sane friends would be able to demonstrate independence from us.

We still come across as arrogant thugs, of course.

Iran and Hezbollah have the power they do in southern Lebanon in no small part because their aid seems transparent and unconditional (regardless of whether or not it is), and because it's efficiently administered. Most Lebanese are non-violent, and most have done nothing at all wrong; withholding help and respect to make a political point alienates them from the West, though - it's exactly the opposite of what Iran proves works - and that's the last thing Israel would seem to need at the moment.

Setting aside the rather inconvenient fact that it's not at all clear that the Europeans would cough up the troops needed to police this particular border even if Rep. Lantos got his way.

And without good results to mitigate bad actions, all you've got is . . . well, a mess.

Good news (with a bad aftertaste).

Over the weekend, Uganda finally arrived at a truce between its government and its crazy-ass, Sudan-sponsored rebels, the Lord's Resistance Army. Peace is good news.

Bad news is that the people behind the LRA have apparently been promised pardons if it all pans out. I'm not really one for vengeance for vengeance's sake, and I'll even stipulate that undeserved forgiveness is better than ongoing carnage, but - for the record - the LRA has had a special policy of ruining children's lives, by taking them either for "soldiers" or for sex slaves, and that takes a ruinous military campaign fueled primarily by greed and makes it something still more despicable. It would be nice if this all ended with answers for the families of the victims and a clear indication to the rest of the world (and particularly Khartoum) that this sort of brutality would no longer be conducted with quiet acquiescence from anybody in a position to see and remember.

sigh

But peace is good news.

Japan Watch: the new edition.

Just thought I'd mention in passing that Steve Clemons (of Washington Note fame) had a piece in the Sunday Opinion section of the Washington Post on the rise of hard-core scary nationalism in old Nihon. The whole thing is scary, but the examples he cites are bad enough to seem like throwbacks to another age.

But in the political atmosphere that has overtaken Japan, it's not surprising. Emboldened by the recent rise in nationalism, an increasingly militant group of extreme right-wing activists who yearn for a return to 1930s-style militarism, emperor-worship and "thought control" have begun to move into more mainstream circles -- and to attack those who don't see things their way.

Just last week, one of those extremists burned down the parental home of onetime prime ministerial candidate Koichi Kato, who had criticized Koizumi's decision to visit Yasukuni this year. Several years ago, the home of Fuji Xerox chief executive and Chairman Yotaro "Tony" Kobayashi was targeted by handmade firebombs after he, too, voiced the opinion that Koizumi should stop visiting Yasukuni. The bombs were dismantled, but Kobayashi continued to receive death threats. The pressure had its effect. The large business federation that he helps lead has withdrawn its criticism of Koizumi's hawkishness toward China and his visits to Yasukuni, and Kobayashi now travels with bodyguards.

In 2003, then-Japanese Deputy Foreign Minister Hitoshi Tanaka discovered a time bomb in his home. He was targeted for allegedly being soft on North Korea. Afterward, conservative Tokyo Gov. Shintaro Ishihara contended in a speech that Tanaka "had it coming."

Another instance of free-thinking-meets-intimidation involved Sumiko Iwao, an internationally respected professor emeritus at Keio University. Right-wing activists threatened her last February after she published an article suggesting that much of Japan is ready to endorse female succession in the imperial line; she issued a retraction and is now reportedly lying low.

Lovely stuff.

I should probably add that Prime Minister Koizumi's most likely successor, Shinzo Abe, seems to be another man given over to provocative acts of nationalism (if we can take Yasukuni visits as a kind of synecdoche for a broader approach) - so there's probably not a lot of hope for top-down pressure to get better textbooks and more honest evaluation of the darker stretches of 20th century Japanese history. Unless it comes from the Emperor himself, I guess - though some Japanese are hoping for exactly the opposite (see, in chronological order, this, this and this).

I doubt they're going to invade Manchuria again any time soon, but I really have the sense that Japan is enduring something very similar to the rise of the post-Goldwater "conservatives" in America (only with politically successful firebombing). Neo-nationalists seem to have been very successful at incrementally introducing their beliefs to the political mainstream (one glaring example is the shift rightward in the textbook controversy since 1982), and resistance from people who pay attention to real history has been fragmented and desultory. It's nothing outsiders can fix - except maybe insofar as we can help make the outside world less threatening - but it's something we can note with concern.

Good news?

Biologists have developed a technique for establishing colonies of human embryonic stem cells from an early human embryo without destroying it. This method, if confirmed in other laboratories, would seem to remove the principal objection to the research.

You'd think so, wouldn't you?

Ha! Suckers!

But Emily Lawrimore, a White House spokeswoman, suggested that the new procedure would not satisfy the objections of Mr. Bush, who vetoed legislation in July that would have expanded federally financed embryonic stem cell research. Though Ms. Lawrimore called it encouraging that scientists were moving away from destroying embryos, she said: “Any use of human embryos for research purposes raises serious ethical questions. This technique does not resolve those concerns.”

See, the embryos might get scared. The president feels their fear - he was a scared embryo once himself!

Sigh.

Actually, the article goes on to cite more elegantly phrased opposition thinking. The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops condemns all in vitro fertilization and anything that could emerge from it because, apparently, the good of delivering new life to loving parents (to say nothing of developing cures for, say, Parkinson's) would be outweighed by the risk of lab technicians becoming jaded. Leon Kass, the former chairman of the President's Council on Bioethics, wants to wait for techniques we don't have in order to minimize the risk of long-term damage to embryos, despite the fact that the approach used to cultivate cells is apparently akin to that used to test for Down Syndrome, which has been in use for something like ten years.

Setting aside the fact that embryos slated for implantation probably wouldn't be used for this in the first place. We have a lot of spares in America.

The story's everywhere, of course, but the quotes above come care of the New York Times.

Today's unanswerable question.

Some senior Bush administration officials and top Republican lawmakers are voicing anger that American spy agencies have not issued more ominous warnings about the threats that they say Iran presents to the United States.

Some policy makers have accused intelligence agencies of playing down Iran’s role in Hezbollah’s recent attacks against Israel and overestimating the time it would take for Iran to build a nuclear weapon.

The complaints, expressed privately in recent weeks, surfaced in a Congressional report about Iran released Wednesday. They echo the tensions that divided the administration and the Central Intelligence Agency during the prelude to the war in Iraq.

The criticisms reflect the views of some officials inside the White House and the Pentagon who advocated going to war with Iraq and now are pressing for confronting Iran directly over its nuclear program and ties to terrorism, say officials with knowledge of the debate.

Gosh. How long will it take our intelligence experts to learn that ideologues' opinions count as much as facts? Don't they know we'd've won in Iraq if we'd all just believed a little bit harder?

Seriously, I'm not surprised that the intelligence services are still facing direct political pressure to give the answers the more belligerent Republicans expect to hear. Disappointed, but not surprised.

The real news in this article, to my mind, is how forcefully representatives from the spook/analyst community are defending their positions and insisting that they won't repeat the mistakes of Iraq. Ordinarily, bureaucratic infighting on the front page of the New York Times probably isn't much to be desired, but this time around it seems like a very good sign. The more dissenting voices go public, the harder it'll be to pre-script the opening act to another war.

A money quote.

This has been the most bizarre part of the NSA scandal all along: the President got caught red-handed violating an extremely clear law -- he admitted to engaging in the very behavior which that law says is a felony punishable by up to 5 years in prison and a $10,000 fine -- and yet official Washington (the political and pundit classes) simply decided to pretend that wasn't the case.

They agreed to acquiesce to the administration's fiction that there are some sort of complex and difficult legal questions with which one must grapple, and that only shrill partisans say that the President is violating the criminal law. And thus, a Washington ruling class which reveled in subpoenas and criminal investigations over such towering matters as Whitewater, Vince Foster and Monica Lewkinsky has collectively decided that talk of criminality on the part of the President for how he is spying on Americans is imprudent and unserious.

The Justice Department lawyers who approved this illegal program, the political officials who ordered it, and the journalists who defended it (and have enabled this presidency) are all part of the same circle, and the very suggestion that any of this is actually criminal -- even though it is all being done in violation of the crystal clear criminal law -- is just too unpleasant, too unruly, too disruptive to admit. As Turley puts it: "The question of the president's possible criminal acts has long been the pig in the parlor that polite people in Congress refused to acknowledge."

But Judge Taylor's ruling -- with its very un-Beltway irreverence towards the President, and free of the fear of describing the President's lawbreaking as what it is -- is forcing that question out into the open, which is what explains so much of the hostility towards Judge Taylor. This judge, unknown to the Important People in academia and the political power centers, sitting in her little Detroit courtroom, has broken the rules. She used language which is uncouth (she pointed out the obvious -- that this President has pretenses to being a King) and refused to pay homage to the false orthodoxy that there are really difficult questions triggered by the President's refusal to abide by the criminal law. How irresponsible, unscholarly and unserious she is.

From Glenn Greenwald.

So what do you do with a president who's confessed to thirty counts of a felony when you have a Congress with no will to impeach? Hope he does better?

Formal notice.

Posting will probably be sparse for the next few days; I'm working on a couple of other things just now. I am not, nor do I immediately expect to be, dead.

More later . . . .

A rare case of over-optimism?

In which J. gets his ass kicked for sloppiness again.

Which is to say, in this morning's triumphant announcement of Judge Taylor's ruling on the Bush administration's surveillance hoodoo, I not only forgot that "unconstitutional" means . . . well, unconstitutional, I also neglected to actually read the full ruling, or even to read much commentary beyond Glenn Greenwald's.

Ezra Klein, over at TAPPED, has been a bit more thorough, and there seems to be some legitimate concern that the ruling might be both correct in essence and yet too poorly constructed to survive.

[Or was it a cunning plan?]

Anyway, it seems like I may've been too complacent about the appeals dance - and that's kind of a shame.

A whole new kind of bad news in Iraq.

I'm desperately sorry to have to highlight this.

Turkey and Iran have dispatched tanks, artillery and thousands of troops to their frontiers with Iraq during the past few weeks in what appears to be a coordinated effort to disrupt the activities of Kurdish rebel bases.

Scores of Kurds have fled their homes in the northern frontier region after four days of shelling by the Iranian army. Local officials said Turkey had also fired a number of shells into Iraqi territory.

. . .

Frustrated by the reluctance of the US and the government in Baghdad to crack down on the PKK bases inside Iraq, Turkish generals have hinted they are considering a large-scale military operation across the border. They are said to be sharing intelligence about Kurdish rebel movements with their Iranian counterparts.

"We would not hesitate to take every kind of measures when our security is at stake," Abdullah Gul, the Turkish foreign minister, said last week.

There has been sporadic shelling of the region since May but officials worry that concerted military action against PKK bases in Iraq could alienate Iraqi Kurds and destabilise their self-rule region, one of few post-invasion success stories. Some analysts say Ankara and Tehran may be trying to pressure Iraq's Kurds, afraid that their de facto independent region would encourage their own Kurdish population.

This doesn't seem to be even close to critical mass yet, but it's a dangerous sign of how compromised the Iraqi immune system (as it were) has become - absent a stable central government either to reign in Kurdish militias or to stare down armed neighbors with axes to grind, there's really no easy way to stave off these incursions.

Unsettling stuff.

The sweet light of reason.

A federal judge ruled yesterday that the National Security Agency’s program to wiretap the international communications of some Americans without a court warrant violated the Constitution, and she ordered it shut down.

The ruling was the first judicial assessment of the Bush administration’s arguments in defense of the surveillance program, which has provoked fierce legal and political debate since it was disclosed last December. But the issue is far from settled, with the Justice Department filing an immediate appeal and succeeding in allowing the wiretapping to continue for the time being.

In a sweeping decision that drew on history, the constitutional separation of powers and the Bill of Rights, Judge Anna Diggs Taylor of United States District Court in Detroit rejected almost every administration argument.

Judge Taylor ruled that the program violated both the Fourth Amendment and a 1978 law that requires warrants from a secret court for intelligence wiretaps involving people in the United States. She rejected the administration’s repeated assertions that a 2001 Congressional authorization and the president’s constitutional authority allowed the program.

“It was never the intent of the framers to give the president such unfettered control, particularly when his actions blatantly disregard the parameters clearly enumerated in the Bill of Rights,” she wrote. “The three separate branches of government were developed as a check and balance for one another.”

Again, the administration is appealing this, and while the appeal's in motion the anti-FISA shenanigans can continue. Still, I'm cautiously optimistic for the republic on this one front - Republican-appointed judges will no doubt put up with a lot from this administration (in fact, they already have), but once we start talking about assaults on the separation of powers and, more to the point, judicial prerogative, I have to hope that institutional pride will kick in.

Though God knows it's been slow in coming to Congress.

Anyway, have a link.

By the way, let me just note that - to my mind - the greatest argument against the incredibly whiny position of the administration and its most ardent congressional supporters in the aftermath of this ruling is its obvious remedy. If the appeals are rejected down the line, what's the worst case scenario from the "warrants weaken us all" crowd?

They have to pass a law to make their approach legal. That's all - and the president's party still controls both houses of Congress, so it shouldn't be impossible, if they can make any kind of an argument. They just have to translate their policy into law. [Sure, it may still be unconstitutional, but that would be an argument for another day.]

Think about that: their humors are all out of equilibrium `cause they might have to do their jobs the way the Framers intended. Heavens to Betsy, it's the end of the republic!

Sigh.

Thank you, Judge Taylor.


UPDATE: Okay, I'm an idiot. If Judge Taylor's ruling is fully upheld, then the policy is, in fact, unconstitutional on its face, and writing it into law won't fix it. Apologies for the brain fart - I preserve the evidence to keep myself humble.

Still, insofar as all the administration has to do is comply with FISA - updated FISA, no less - I still don't feel like the burden placed on them is so horrendously high that America is doomed to suffer from it.

Terror scare, revisited.

Around this time last week, news was breaking that the Brits had successfully foiled a massive terrorist attack on trans-Atlantic air travel; my contemporaneous comments can be found here and here, if you want a refresher. The second of those two links leads to a post that's primarily about how pissed off I was at the lessons certain politicians wanted to draw from the affair.

It's now starting to look like the political manipulation was a big part of the point. Andrew Sullivan and Kevin Drum have done some news collation over the past day or so, and - if I'm remembering other stories reasonably well - the picture on the ground seems to be something like this: people have been detained in England, yes, but after a week no charges have been filed, and at least one individual has been released. Said individuals had been under surveillance for a year, but the only evidence of the bombing plot that made all the papers came from the testimony of an individual in Pakistani custody, who seems to've been tortured. Beyond that, there are no bombs, there are no plane tickets, and - in some cases - there are no passports.

The British were apparently not inclined to make the arrests at the time they did; their hands were forced by police action in Pakistan, which may or may not have come at the request of the Bush administration.

And I'm feeling really stupid for having taken this at face value. Maybe more details will come out to make this seem less half-assed and manipulative, but, for now, this is what we've got.

This and not being able to have toothpaste in your carry-on luggage.

. . .

Feel safer yet?

The Long Wall's first annual tradition.

Apparently, it's lamenting unnecessarily provocative gestures from the Prime Minister of Japan. [Last August's highlights are here, here and here.] There seems to be more ambivalence from the Japanese media this time around - and it is, of course, Mr. Koizumi's last August in office.

Still, it's always dismaying to watch countries I like wound themselves.

[Meanwhile, for the royal-watchers in the audience, Princess Kiko has apparently just checked into the hospital to await the birth of another potential prince. I can't help but hope it's another girl - I suspect Japan would do well to have an empress - but, of course, first hopes are for the health of mother and child.]

Would that it were so.

In case you didn't see it, President Bush took the good ship Desperate Spinning for a little cruise yesterday:

President Bush on Monday defended his handling of the war between Israel and Hezbollah, declaring that Hezbollah had been the loser in the monthlong fight and warning Syria and Iran against re-supplying the Lebanese militia.

. . .

Mr. Bush spoke on a day of intense competition to shape world opinion on the conflict. Hezbollah claimed that it had won an “historic victory” by fending off a regional superpower; Israel and the United States said Hezbollah was the loser because the resolution calls for ending its control of southern Lebanon.

Now, I suspect that Hezbollah really had hit a point of diminishing returns: Hassan Nasrullah's prestige in the Muslim world wouldn't have been that much more enhanced by another week or three of bloodshed, and his gang really was losing personnel amid all the civilian casualties. Still, even assuming the multinational force succeeds in disarming these guys (the Lebanese have already announced that they're not even going to try), their political fortunes in Lebanon are clearly on the rise - that's not a loss.

Particularly when compared to the PR drubbing and existential damage Israel has taken.

Now, even assuming President Bush is actually aware of what's going on, he's got good reason to put on the bravest face he can - and not just because it's the only intellectually easy setup for a fresh round of threatening Iran. The sad truth (from his point of view) is that even the red meat Republicans seem to be appalled at how this played out. Sure, the broad complaint from that side of the aisle is more that war wasn't total enough to work than that collective punishment is counterproductive in contained pacification scenarios (to say nothing of immoral) - but, regardless, the common wisdom from the Right seems to be that Israel blew it and President Bush has earned a big share of the culpability.

And, basically, if the president really loses the hard right, then his favorability ratings start heading for the twenties. And that would make Karl Rove (and a great many prospective Republican congressmen) sad.

For my own part: well, it should be obvious at this point, but I think the ceasefire was a very good thing, and I hope it holds. [The person most benefitting from the destruction and the loss of life was arguably Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who's already had way too much opportunity to pretend he's a regional statesman.] That said, it's not a happy ending - just the best available. It's way too easy to imagine Hezbollah rebuilding, Ehud Olmert getting kicked right out of the Knesset in favor of Bibi Netanyahu (though I haven't seen any Israeli polling), and a louder second act coming together within the next couple of years. And God help the Lebanese, the Israelis, the Palestinians, and the Iraqis, and every other vulnerable, volatile group on the periphery.

Gah. An incredibly stupid show from PM Olmert and the American cheerleader-in-chief, all in all.

On a mostly unrelated note, Andrew Sullivan points out that there's other bad insurgent on military on civilian action going on in the world right now: the Sri Lankan air force apparently bombed an orphanage, killing forty-three young girls, in an effort to get at the Tamil Tigers.

Just in case you weren't feeling bad enough already, gentle reader.

Behind the scenes of the Lebanese campaign.

Big new piece from Seymour Hersh.

A short rant from Larry Johnson.

On the subject of binary explosives and our apparent surprise at their use. He apparently made very similar points on Joe Scarborough's TV show two years ago, so . . . well, sounds like he's entitled.

Here's Mr. Johnson's bio, by the way. He's no lightweight.

Irritation.

Yes, yes. We know the spin.

The London conspiracy is "a stark reminder that this nation is at war with Islamic fascists who will use any means to destroy those of us who love freedom, to hurt our nation," the president said on a day trip to Wisconsin.

"It is a mistake to believe there is no threat to the United States of America," he said. "We've taken a lot of measures to protect the American people. But obviously we still aren't completely safe."

His remarks came a day after the White House orchestrated an exceptionally aggressive campaign to tar opposition Democrats as weak on terrorism, knowing what Democrats didn't: News of the plot could soon break.

Vice President Dick Cheney and White House spokesman Tony Snow had argued that Democrats wanted to raise what Snow called "a white flag in the war on terror," citing as evidence the defeat of a three-term Democratic senator who backed the Iraq war in his effort to win renomination.

Martin Peretz manages to get out more, over at the New Republic, before the scorn gets so thick it starts to choke him off.

I also believe that Lieberman will probably be helped by the case of the would-be airplane terrorists arrested in Britain. This episode shows that Islamofascism is a real threat to civilized life and that it must be fought severely and wholeheartedly. I don't know if Ned Lamont has thought seriously about this. It seems so remote from life in Greenwich. But, if he plays true to form, he might suggest taking the whole issue before the United Nations. That would be a gracious setting. After all, Lamont can no longer avail himself of the country club he quit on the eve of his primary campaign.

Uh-huh.

There's going to be a lot more of this crap over the next several days, and the main role it'll serve in the great media discourse is to distort and displace any substantive coverage of the plot itself.

But, just to add to the smog of the commentariat: the statements above are kind of unhinged. This constitutes a very clear success against a terrorist effort, yes, but it didn't come as a function of pure, smoldering willpower. It wasn't about fighting "severely," and it was only about Iraq insofar as Iraq might've been on the minds of a bunch of British-Pakistani idiots who wanted to die for a cause. What made the difference here was an investigation, not a military campaign.

Joe Lieberman himself does tie it more directly to the question of whether we stay in Iraq or not.

If we just pick up like Ned Lamont wants us to do, get out [of Iraq] by a date certain, it will be taken as a tremendous victory by the same people who wanted to blow up these planes in this plot hatched in England. It will strengthen them and they will strike again.

It's shrill, and steeped in exaggeration, but there is an underlying point of some seriousness: with most of the world pissed, with Islamist extremism at an all-time high, and with Team Bush having spent all its term characterizing every fool thing it did as a point of unshakeable principle, it's going to be way too easy to spin any change of direction as proof of a failure of resolve. Remember, a big part of al-Qaeda's own animating mythology is that Muslim holy war in Afghanistan was directly responsible for the total collapse of the Soviet Union. If we pull out of Iraq, it almost certainly will raise crazy Islamist morale, if only in the short term.

That said, it's only one factor to consider when formulating global strategy; we can't be unwilling to switch to more effective methodologies just because we think it could give the bad guys a temporary buzz. The truth here is, there's just not going to be a way to declare a mulligan and skip all negative consequences of the Iraqi war - that's precisely why most of the people who are paying attention are calling it a catastrophic mistake (be it in conception or in execution). Whenever we pull out, I'm afraid that there are going to be disasters we'll have to try to mitigate, for ourselves and for the Iraqis, and the trick is going to be doing that while preserving our ability to maneuver effectively against the global-scale whackjobs.

Clinging to the hope of a perfect, clean win just isn't going to do us any good, and if there's an argument to be made for staying indefinitely it's damn well not that anyone who says we shouldn't doesn't care if the terrorists hit us again.

Now can we please talk about what we can do to boost the FBI's ability to do the kinds of work that the Brits seem to've managed?

Breaking news.

A major terrorist plot to allegedly blow up aircraft in mid-flight has been thwarted.

The plot was foiled in a joint intelligence-led operation by the Metropolitan Police's anti-terrorist branch and security service.

It is believed the aim was to detonate explosive devices smuggled on board the aircraft in hand luggage, and that the attacks would have been targeted flights from the UK to the USA. Overnight, police arrested a number of people in London.

Thursday's arrests are the culmination of a major covert counter-terrorist operation lasting several months.

The original article is here, the New York Times has another here. I'm sure there'll be more in the next few hours.

Good job from the Brits.

It's good of them to be so concerned.

Throughout the day, Republicans issued statements calling on Democratic challengers in some of the most contested elections to renounce Mr. Lamont.

It was, of course, Vice President Cheney who went the extra mile and said Mr. Lamont's primary win "might encourage 'al Qaeda types.'" [I'm sure he'd have added that another round of tax cuts would put them in their place, if only he had been given the chance.]

I'm so glad they're looking out for us.

Meanwhile, Kevin Drum helpfully directs all good readers' eyes toward a piece in Slate from Jacob Weisberg, in which he presents the theory that the fall of the House of Lieberman signifies the utter collapse of the Democratic Party, hereafter to be known to the red-blooded masses as "Hippyclub-a-Go-Go." The bit that Mr. Drum finds deserving of mention?

The problem for the Democrats is that the anti-Lieberman insurgents go far beyond simply opposing Bush's faulty rationale for the war, his dishonest argumentation for it, and his incompetent execution of it. Many of them appear not to take the wider, global battle against Islamic fanaticism seriously. They see Iraq purely as a symptom of a cynical and politicized right-wing response to Sept. 11, as opposed to a tragic misstep in a bigger conflict. Substantively, this view indicates a fundamental misapprehension of the problem of terrorism.

It's an interesting idea - though it's not really the role of the blogosphere (or of blogheads' big kid colleagues in the real world of punditry) to generate policy. We can approve or disapprove of existing ideas, with effects possibly proportionate to the effort we invest, but actual strategy-generation? I'd say that's pretty far beyond our brief.

Still, for myself, I'd respond (in a very cursory way) so: Iraq is a part of the larger conflict now precisely and primarily because it was a symptom of a cynical and politicized right-wing response to September 11 in 2003; it was dishonestly arranged, it was ineptly conducted, and it has almost certainly done more to inspire future terrorist acts against American forces than any other step the United States has taken as a nation in the last twenty years. If I obsess on it, it's not puerile point-counting so much as a sincere effort to ensure that the bad thinking underlying it is made so clear that it can't easily be repeated - at least in the next two and a half years. Given that neither I nor my representatives can expect to have any affirmative role in setting foreign policy for the foreseeable future, that's really the only reasonable place to start.

If you want a longer plan of action . . . well, trot out some experts to tell me how much political room we have in Pakistan. Tell me who we might be able to bribe to push for better intelligence in Indonesia. Tell me how we can move China and Russia to help us with Iran, and how we can support the AU in Darfur, and how we can support more liberal madrassahs across the region. Give me enough information to make informed choices, rather than demanding that I stand up and explain how my character as an American makes some reflexive response necessary.

My overall approach in a nutshell, though? Broad diplomacy, deep reliance on humint and old-school international law enforcement, and, when dealing with al-Qaeda, tactical, targeted exercises in blowing crap up. No invasions anytime soon. The greater problem of militant Islamism isn't going to be solved by exclusively (or predominantly) military means, and no positive resolution is going to emerge from any national demonstration of machismo.

And don't tell me that makes me weaker on national defense than the guys we have now, `cause I have quite enough information to believe that what they're doing isn't making the world any safer for anybody.

[Beyond that, see Matt Yglesias on the whole "Lawdy, it's 1970 all over again!" issue. I'm all for learning from history, but let's try and keep perspective as we do.]

Can a comic book cure cancer?

In this case, I'm gonna say yes. And if it doesn't, it's because it thinks the person with cancer needs to gain character.

Stephen Colbert's ALPHA SQUAD 7 - it's what Ronald Reagan would be reading if he were just a little bit less dead.

What does it take to make you leave?

The above is, unsurprisingly, directed at Joe Lieberman. He's out to save us all from ourselves, you see.

“For the sake of our state, our country and my party, I cannot, I will not let this result stand,” Mr. Lieberman said of the Lamont victory.

There's more than one way for a Democrat to look at this. Take, for example, this post from TAPPED's Alec Oveis:

Democrats in Connecticut may succeed today in replacing one moderate Democrat with another moderate Democrat, and if so, their chances at taking back the House will be somewhat slimmer. My thoughs: Democrats never had much of a chance in taking back the Senate, but winning the House was a distinct possibility. The most likely scenario for this would involve Diane Farrell, Joe Courtney, and Chris Murphy defeating Chris Shays, Rob Simmons and Nancy Johnson, respectively. I was Murphy’s campaign manager in 2004, when he was running for re-election to state Senate, and I know what the district is like. Murphy has his work cut out for him, to say the least, and will need all the resources he can get. The attention and energy directed at the Senate race have been at Murphy’s and the others’ expense. Campaign donations and volunteers that may have gone to Murphy or Farrell have instead gone to Lamont or Lieberman. And the argument that building support at the top of the ticket will help those further down doesn’t hold; voters in the second, fourth, and fifth districts voted for Kerry but reelected Shays, Simmons and Johnson in ’04.

What disturbs me about this primary battle isn’t so much that some people want Joe Lieberman purged from the Democratic Party. That’s fine. What disappoints me is that this seems like a terrible waste of influence. Kos, Stoller, and Hamsher could have gone to Connecticut to help Democrats defeat actual Republicans. Instead, they’re there helping one Democrat defeat another. I understand that Lieberman sometimes serves a useful role for Republicans, but I’m afraid some bloggers and activists have lost sight of the real goal for 2006 -- retaking the House -- and in the process have made it more difficult to achieve.

This is informed, thoughtful, and terribly, terribly wrong. Mr. Lieberman is certainly entitled to run for his current office, but it's - at best - disingenuous to place the cost of his disloyalty to the Democratic Party on the backs of the people who supported the candidate whom the majority of the participating citizens of Connecticut actively endorsed. The blogheads Mr. Oveis names aren't really my role models for good citizenship - but so what? They haven't perverted the system and, in response to the "terrible waste of influence" crack, they haven't lost anything from this; they're not going to go lie down and nap until November is over. The guy they wanted to beat lost the primary: how does that leave them with less influence than they had at the outset?

Sigh.

As for Mr. Lieberman himself - well, I obliquely referred to his independent run as "disloyalty to the Democratic Party" up above, and that's pretty much the most polite articulation of my views imaginable. Regardless of how valid one considers his apparent conviction that he is the living conscience of the Washington establishment, the fact is, he's entering into "phase two" of his race well aware that he's probably draining resources (if only in terms of available labor) from those aforementioned Democratic candidates for the House of Representatives - in the middle of a genuine battle for control of the body. That's his choice. Not Kos's, not Jane Hamsher's. His. And though it's primarily selfish in its dimensions, the consequences on the national scale - and to the party which he claims to want to rescue - could be catastrophic.

Now, in the interests of full disclosure, I should say I've been increasingly anti-Lieberman for . . . oh, at least a year or two, and increasingly pro-Lamont for the last couple of months. I haven't blogged any testimonials over the course of this race in no small part because none of the developments along the way seemed particularly worthy of more attention than they got on their own. But it's also true that I didn't really want to pile on Mr. Lieberman for the sake of piling on - I didn't (and, I guess, still don't) bear any great personal dislike for the man, and, though he ran a fairly lousy campaign, most of the real sins which earned him my political disapproval came months or more back. [Glenn Greenwald has a helpful analysis up at Salon.]

Now, though? New sin. Big sin.

And I hope he gets some time out of office to think on it.

Let's hope he's wrong.

"I think if you think of what's happening in Lebanon and Israel right now, you see the face of the beginning of the 21st century," Mr. Rumsfeld said in a radio interview on Aug. 2.

It's not the most salient quote from Insight's new piece on a schism between Condoleezza Rice and President Bush over Israel and Hezbollah, but I'd say it's the one most likely to come back and haunt us someday.

For anyone who doubts, Ms. Rice is apparently pushing for . . . well, something approaching diplomacy.

Ms. Rice believes the United States should engage Iran and Syria to pressure Hezbollah to end the war with Israel. Ms. Rice has argued that such an effort would result in a U.S. dialogue with Damascus and Tehran on Middle East stability.

"The United States and Israel must understand that it is not in their long-term interests to allow themselves to become isolated in the Middle East and the world," said Sen. Chuck Hagel, a Rice ally and senior member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. "Both Damascus and Tehran must hear from America directly."

Ms. Rice has garnered support from several senior Republicans on the Foreign Relations Committee, including chairman Sen. Richard Lugar. Members of the inner circle of Mr. Bush's father, the former president, have also been advocating for an immediate ceasefire in Lebanon, with subsequent pressure on Israel for a diplomatic settlement with the Palestinians.

Ms. Rice's biggest supporter has been Brent Scowcroft, who served under the first Bush administration as national security advisor. Sources said Mr. Scowcroft, regarded as Ms. Rice's mentor, has been sending messages to his friends in Congress and the White House that U.S. support for the Israeli war could jeopardize relations with Gulf oil suppliers, particularly Saudi Arabia.

"A comprehensive peace settlement would not only defang the radicals in Lebanon and Palestine, and their supporters in other countries, it would also reduce the influence of Iran -- the country that, under its current ideology, poses the greatest potential threat to stability in Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Egypt and Jordan," Mr. Scowcroft wrote in a column in the Washington Post on July 30.

Meanwhile, President Bush (backed, of course, by Don Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney) thinks Israel should just keep plugging away at Hezbollah so that Iran doesn't think we're all a bunch of wimps. As proxy wars go, it seems kind of off-point to me - unless he really does mean to suggest that he'd encourage Israel to launch sorties into Iraq if Ayatollah Khameini doesn't promise to stop playing tickle games with Muqtada al-Sadr, in which case he's simply deranged.

I can't rule it out, of course.

Zimbabwe: a survey for would-be depressives.

Here.

Good (old) news from the Middle East.

Spy satellite images taken in the 1960s and declassified in the 1990s have been used to find ancient settlements in Syria.

The sites are near the ancient fortress of Jebel Khalid, which was established in the wake of conquest of Western Asia by Alexander the Great in the third century BC.

Work led by Ph.D. student Mandy Mottram of the Australian National University uncovered early Islamic pottery factories, mounds of artifacts from 130,000 years ago, and a hilltop complex of megalithic tombs in Euphrates River valley, northeast of the Syrian city Aleppo.

The tombs are similar to chambers of stone called dolmens that are found in Europe.

Cool.

Not too much to say tonight.

Partly because I'm preoccupied with the wait for Lieberdammerung, and partly just because I haven't found any single news story that has screamed out for glossy representation at my oh-so-capable hands.

Perversely enough, the closest thing I've got to a motivating emotion is the ambivalence I'm feeling over the Democratic win in the case of legislative alpha predator Tom DeLay. Yep, the most offensive House Majority Leader of my lifetime is locked into an unwanted (and quite possibly doomed) race for his old Texas seat, care of the Supreme Court, and it's his own damn fault. He knew he wasn't going to run; he knew his legal problems and ties to Jack Abramoff were going to make him toxic. Still, he stood in the primaries and beat down all the other Republican candidates, pretty much just to prove he could (as far as I can tell), and then tried to walk away a winner. It's entirely appropriate - even delightful, for those of us given over to schadenfreude - that he (and his partisans) should take that recklessness and that hubris right in the teeth, and it's downright poetically compelling to think that, in so doing, he could play a decisive part in kicking the Republicans out of the majority slots in the House.

That said, it's a damn shame that Mr. DeLay's ego has cost the citizens in his district a fair choice between the Democratic candidate and someone who isn't under indictment. It's not as ugly as the gerrymandering game Mr. DeLay inflicted on his state, but it's not how democracy is supposed to work, either.

The bad news is that you may have to pay to read it . . .

But, for the record, James Fallows has an excellent article in the latest print edition of the Atlantic Monthly; it's also up on the Atlantic online. It has to do with our campaign against al Qaeda, and its title is "Declaring Victory" - stunningly enough, it's not meant ironically. It is, in fact, advice.

It's not self-congratulatory, and it's not triumphalist. The central thesis is that Osama bin Laden's vile outfit has been crippled, and that the greatest advantage it currently enjoys is an American propensity to overreact wildly; if we were actually, as a nation, to sit down and reflect on what we were doing and then make rational changes, crazy postnational Islamism would have almost nothing to work with - almost no one in the Muslim world wants to live in Mr. bin Laden's dream iron age caliphate, after all.

I'll let Mr. Fallows do most of the work, though the long quote that follows is only a small part of the larger article.

Here is something I never expected. When I began this reporting, I imagined that it would mean a further plunge into current-events gloom. Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri might be under siege, but they had spawned countless imitators. Instead of having one main terrorist group to worry about, the United States now had hundreds. America’s explicit efforts to win the “war of ideas” for support from the world’s Muslims were being drowned out by the implicit messages from Afghanistan and Iraq and Guantánamo (and from the State Department, as it rejected requests for student visas). Our enemies were thinking in centuries-long terms, while we were living election to election—and with the results of the 2004 presidential election, anti-American sentiment hardened among Muslims worldwide. Sooner or later our enemies would find one of our vulnerable points—and then another, and another.

To some degree, many of these discouraging possibilities are likely to come true. Hostile groups and individuals will keep planning attacks on the United States. Some of the attacks will succeed. Americans—especially those who live in Washington, New York, and other big cities—will share a reality known for many years to residents of cities from London to Jerusalem: that the perils of urban life include the risk of being a civilian casualty of worldwide political tensions.

But the deeper and more discouraging prospect—that the United States is doomed to spend decades cowering defensively—need not come true. How can the United States regain the initiative against terrorists, as opposed to living in a permanent crouch? By recognizing the point that I heard from so many military strategists: that terrorists, through their own efforts, can damage but not destroy us. Their real destructive power, again, lies in what they can provoke us to do. While the United States can never completely control what violent groups intend and sometimes achieve, it can determine its own response. That we have this power should come as good and important news, because it switches the strategic advantage to our side.

So far, the United States has been as predictable in its responses as al-Qaeda could have dreamed. Early in 2004, a Saudi exile named Saad al-Faqih was interviewed by the online publication Terrorism Monitor. Al-Faqih, who leads an opposition group seeking political reform in Saudi Arabia, is a longtime observer of his fellow Saudi Osama bin Laden and of the evolution of bin Laden’s doctrine for al-Qaeda.

In the interview, al-Faqih said that for nearly a decade, bin Laden and al-Zawahiri had followed a powerful grand strategy for confronting the United States. Their approach boiled down to “superpower baiting” (as John Robb, of the Global Guerrillas blog, put it in an article about the interview). The most predictable thing about Americans, in this view, was that they would rise to the bait of a challenge or provocation. “Zawahiri impressed upon bin Laden the importance of understanding the American mentality,” al-Faqih said. He said he believed that al-Zawahiri had at some point told bin Laden something like this:

The American mentality is a cowboy mentality—if you confront them … they will react in an extreme manner. In other words, America with all its resources and establishments will shrink into a cowboy when irritated successfully. They will then elevate you, and this will satisfy the Muslim longing for a leader who can successfully challenge the West.

The United States is immeasurably stronger than al-Qaeda, but against jujitsu forms of attack its strength has been its disadvantage. The predictability of the U.S. response has allowed opponents to turn our bulk and momentum against us. Al-Qaeda can do more harm to the United States than to, say, Italy because the self-damaging potential of an uncontrolled American reaction is so vast.

How can the United States escape this trap? Very simply: by declaring that the “global war on terror” is over, and that we have won. “The wartime approach made sense for a while,” Dearlove says. “But as time passes and the situation changes, so must the strategy.”

As a general principle, a standing state of war can be justified for several reasons. It might be the only way to concentrate the nation’s resources where they are needed. It might explain why people are being inconvenienced or asked to sacrifice. It might symbolize that the entire nation’s effort is directed toward one goal.

But none of those applies to modern America in its effort to defend itself against terrorist attack. The federal budget reveals no discipline at all about resources: the spending for antiterrorism activities has gone up, but so has the spending for nearly everything else. There is no expectation that Americans in general will share the inconveniences and sacrifice of the 1 percent of the population in uniform (going through airport screening lines does not count). Occasional speeches about the transcendent importance of the “long war” can’t conceal the many other goals that day by day take political precedence.

And while a standing state of war no longer offers any advantages for the United States, it creates several problems. It cheapens the concept of war, making the word a synonym for effort or goal. It predisposes us toward overreactions, of the kind that have already proved so harmful. The detentions at Guantánamo Bay were justified as a wartime emergency. But unlike Abraham Lincoln’s declaration of martial law, they have no natural end point.

A state of war encourages a state of fear. “The War on Terror does not reduce public anxieties by thwarting terrorists poised to strike,” writes Ian Lustick, of the University of Pennsylvania, in his forthcoming book, Trapped in the War on Terror. “Rather, in myriad ways, conducting the antiterror effort as a ‘war’ fuels those anxieties.” John Mueller writes in his book that because “the creation of insecurity, fear, anxiety, hysteria, and overreaction is central for terrorists,” they can be defeated simply by a refusal to overreact. This approach is harder in time of war.

A state of war also predisposes the United States to think about using its assets in a strictly warlike way—and to give short shrift to the vast range of their other possibilities. The U.S. military has been responsible for the most dramatic recent improvement in American standing in the Islamic world. Immediately after the invasion of Iraq, the proportion of Indonesians with a favorable view of the United States had fallen to 15 percent, according to the Pew Global Attitudes Survey. After American troops brought ships, cargo planes, and helicopters loaded with supplies for tsunami victims, the overall Indonesian attitude toward the United States was still negative, but some 79 percent of Indonesians said that their opinion of America had improved because of the relief effort. There was a similar turnaround in Pakistan after U.S. troops helped feed and rescue villagers affected by a major earthquake. But in most of the Muslim world, the image of American troops is that of soldiers or marines manning counterinsurgency patrols, not delivering food and water. “The diplomatic component of the war on terror has been neglected so long, it’s practically vestigial,” a Marine officer told me. “It needs to be regrown.” But in time of war, the balance is harder to correct.

Perhaps worst of all, an open-ended war is an open-ended invitation to defeat. Sometime there will be more bombings, shootings, poisonings, and other disruptions in the United States. They will happen in the future because they have happened in the past (Oklahoma City; the Unabomber; the Tylenol poisonings; the Washington, D.C.-area snipers; the still-unsolved anthrax mailings; the countless shootings at schools; and so on). These previous episodes were not caused by Islamic extremists; future ones may well be. In all cases they represent a failure of the government to protect its people. But if they occur while the war is still on, they are enemy “victories,” not misfortunes of the sort that great nations suffer. They are also powerful provocations to another round of hasty reactions.

War implies emergency, and the upshot of most of what I heard was that the United States needs to shift its operations to a long-term, nonemergency basis. “De-escalation of the rhetoric is the first step,” John Robb told me. “It is hard for insurgents to handle de-escalation.” War encourages a simple classification of the world into ally or enemy. This polarization gives dispersed terrorist groups a unity they might not have on their own. Last year, in a widely circulated paper for the Journal of Strategic Studies, David Kilcullen argued that Islamic extremists from around the world yearn to constitute themselves as a global jihad. Therefore, he said, Western countries should do everything possible to treat terrorist groups individually, rather than “lumping together all terrorism, all rogue or failed states, and all strategic competitors who might potentially oppose U.S. objectives.” The friend-or-foe categorization of war makes lumping together more likely.

The United States can declare victory by saying that what is controllable has been controlled: Al-Qaeda Central has been broken up. Then the country can move to its real work. It will happen on three levels: domestic protection, worldwide harassment and pursuit of al-Qaeda, and an all-fronts diplomatic campaign.

Domestically, a sustainable post-victory policy would mean shifting from the early, panicky “Code Orange” days, in which everything was threatened and any investment in “security” was justified, to a more practical and triage-minded approach. Four analysts—Mueller, of Ohio State; Lustick, of the University of Pennsylvania; plus Veronique de Rugy, of the American Enterprise Institute; and Benjamin Friedman, of MIT—have written extensively about the mindlessness and perverse effects of much homeland-security spending. In most cases, they argue, money dabbed out for a security fence here and a screening machine there would be far better spent on robust emergency-response systems. No matter how much they spend, state and federal authorities cannot possibly protect every place from every threat. But they could come close to ensuring that if things were to go wrong, relief and repair would be there fast.

Internationally, the effort to pin down bin Laden—to listen to his conversations, keep him off balance, and prevent him from re-forming an organization—has been successful. It must continue. And the international cooperation on which it depends will be easier in the absence of wartime language and friction. The effort to contain the one true existential threat to the United States—that of “loose nukes"—will also be eased by smoother relations with other countries.

Now, the article neglects the awkward, inescapable fact that the current administration has political and psychological incentives to keep things as they are (or even to make them worse). To a very real degree, I'm sure it's actually a matter of conviction; the president is, from all accounts, not a subtle man - for him, "war" probably really is the only proportionate response to what he perceives as an existential threat.

But, if we're very lucky, a new president might look hard at Mr. Fallows' thinking come 2009 - and I think the chance is real enough that we should be attentive to good ideas now.

Just . . . well, here's hoping we don't do anything more stupid than we've already done in the meantime.

Everything old is new again.

Israel has ten thousand soldiers in Lebanon now. The money quote from the big article in the New York Times?

“We certainly hope that some international resolution will come before another 18 years passes,” Brig. Gen. Ido Nehushtan said.

Meanwhile, Hezbollah is busy building its reputation as the little terrorist militia who could - Friday saw rocket strikes landing fifty miles inside Israel's borders - and it's now officially confirmed that Iran is handing out the bad candy.

A senior Iranian official admitted for the first time Friday that Tehran did indeed supply long-range Zelzal-2 missiles to Hezbollah.

Mohtashami Pur, a one-time ambassador to Lebanon who currently holds the title of secretary-general of the "Intifada conference," told an Iranian newspaper that Iran transferred the missiles to the Shi'ite militia, adding that the organization has his country's blessing to use the weapons in defense of Lebanon.

Pur's statements are thought to be unusual given that Tehran has thus far been reluctant to comment on the extent of its aid which it has extended to Hezbollah.

The article from which that quote comes wraps itself up with a comment on how very much Hassan Nasrallah would like to end this particular round of combat by lobbing missiles at Tel Aviv.

My generation - or at least I - really came to awareness of the Middle East in the `90s. And in the `90s, it looked a lot like a regional reenactment of the Cold War: for all the tension, and for all the flare-ups, it was possible to believe that the great geopolitical pattern of pacification and reconciliation was going to replicate itself once again. Despite Arafat, despite Netanyahu, despite Assad and Khameini and Hussein and every crazy Saudi cleric who wanted the caliphate back and the modern world blown all to hell. Maybe that outlook was always naive, maybe not - but it certainly didn't survive the last five years.

Now it's hard to see anything other than another generation of catastrophe, despite the fact that the Middle East has already had too many.

Mesopotamian highlights.

I had dinner with a conservative friend of mine the other night, and though parts of the conversation nearly gave me the bends - trying to wrap my liberal head around the Fox Newsy approach to the sins of the New York Times isn't something I enjoy doing in a hurry - I get the impression that even he thinks the war in Iraq is pretty much a disaster.

Today's news isn't going to change his mind.

The commander of American forces in the Middle East bluntly warned a Senate committee on Thursday that sectarian violence in Iraq, especially in the capital, Baghdad, had grown so severe that the nation could slide toward civil war.

The commander, Gen. John P. Abizaid, also acknowledged that since the security situation remained so unstable, significant reductions in American forces were unlikely before the end of this year.

Asked by Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, whether Iraq risked falling into civil war, General Abizaid replied, “I believe that the sectarian violence is probably as bad as I’ve seen it, in Baghdad in particular, and that if not stopped, it is possible that Iraq could move towards civil war.”

For Tom Friedman, still secluded in the hermitage zone of the Times (or the pay-per-view, if you prefer - TimesSelect), this seems officially to serve as the straw that cripples the proverbial camel; he's calling for plans for US withdrawal, in the desperate hope that our exit would force the kind of global convergence of interests and support that our beloved president failed to assemble in 2002-3. Also? Federalism and light partitioning.

I don't know; I suspect we missed whatever shot we might have had at a reasonably peaceful transition to three states in a state a year or more back. At this stage, the majority coalition in the Iraqi government has hammered home a constitution that more or less serves its needs, and I can't imagine that its members would be in any hurry to step back and craft a new system that would give the Sunnis more (more security, more oil money, more independence) than they've currently got - never mind the fact that the massive relocation of quasi-national groups to their designated zones would be flirting with ethnic cleansing at every step.

I don't suppose there are any really good answers - and I should almost certainly be thanking Mr. Friedman for trying.

Sigh.

I will helpfully observe that we'd be in a better position if we had any honest claim on the hearts and minds of most of the Iraqi citizenry, but we don't. Our managerial incompetence was bad enough, but ever since Abu Ghraib broke it's been hard to deny that a fair number of our policies (and, even more, our practices) have been actively malicious. The LA Times has the latest bad news on that front:

Military prosecutors and investigators probing the killing of three Iraqi detainees by U.S. troops in May believe the unit's commanders created an atmosphere of excessive violence by encouraging "kill counts" and possibly issuing an illegal order to shoot Iraqi men.

At a military hearing Wednesday on the killing of the detainees near Samarra, witnesses painted a picture of a brigade that operated under loose rules allowing wanton killing and tolerating violent, anti-Arab racism.

The military's primary report on the Haditha incident, completed this year, does not explicitly accuse the Marine command in Iraq of a cover-up. But the investigation cites several instances of information being ignored or evidence being destroyed, including log entries from the day the killings took place. The Defense official, who has reviewed the report, spoke on condition of anonymity because the findings have not been released.

Initial findings of investigators looking into the Samarra incident may be even more troubling. Military officials are investigating Army Col. Michael Steele, the commander of the 101st Airborne Division's 3rd Brigade, whose soldiers are accused of killing the three Iraqi detainees.

Investigators are trying to determine whether Steele issued an illegal order to "kill all military aged males" and encouraged unrestrained killing by his troops.

On Wednesday, a military court heard testimony from a witness who suggested that a culture of racism and unrestrained violence pervaded the unit.

This is only one brigade, of course, but I can't help but think that it represents an object lesson for future fourth generation warriors (to say nothing of future feckless civilian leaders); the Army needs to be teaching its soldiers everything that can be known about the societies into which they're going to be embedded if we're going to have any chance at pulling off non-genocidal campaigns in the new, asymmetical era of warfare. Anger without understanding just keeps on biting us in the ass.

How's that for clarity, Mr. President?

A question of expertise?

Okay, I'm wary of anyone who says that the road to success against Hezbollah is for Israel to keep doing what it's been doing - but there are indeed people saying that, and Laura Rozen seems of the opinion that at least one such guy knows enough about the scene to be worth hearing. She's posted a short interview up at the American Prospect, and . . . well, I highlight it if for no other reason than it's neither overtly delusional nor centered entirely around short-term gains.

Beyond that, I submit no comment.