Israel Plans to Lobby Washington For an Attack on Iran

Laura Rozen says that the hard sell will start to happen over the next two weeks:

While the Israeli government considers the Bush administration highly sympathetic and sensitive to its security concerns, there are growing signs that Washington and Jerusalem may be diverging in their analysis of the urgency of the threat posed by Iran's nuclear program and its defensive military preparations for countering a possible strike, and their subsequent prospective timelines for considering possible military action against Iran. While Israeli national security experts say that Israel would not act without coordinating with the US, and there are other significant factors weighing against prospective Israeli military action on Iran before the Bush term ends, there are also emerging differences between the US and Israel on the accepted intelligence over when Iran would be considered to have a nuclear breakthrough, as well as what would constitute a "redline" that would prompt military action, Washington analysts say. In addition, the US, unlike Israel, feels more deeply constrained by the considerable investment it has made in blood and treasure in stabilizing Iraq, which could be risked by the tumult that could follow military action on Iran.

"My sense is the Pentagon would be worried or opposed to an Israeli attack," says David Wurmser, former Middle East adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney, who left the White House job late last summer. "They are afraid it would inflame the situation in Iraq, which could undermine the US position there.

It's refreshing to hear Wurmser speaking a little more sensibly these days, but let's not forget that this "genius" and this "strategist" once joined Douglas Feith, Richard Perle and others to come up with a nearly ingeniuous plan to destabilize the entire Middle East based on assumptions that were wrong and ideas that dissipated into nothing when actually put in play by the Bush Administration.

So I don't know what Wurmser adds--an attack on Iran proper would legitimize the Iranian regime and cause the price of oil to skyrocket--thanks to the fact that it's already headed that way anyway. Every time someone beats the war drums, oil goes up a notch. The oil needed by the industrialized world is now transferring unprecedented wealth to the Middle East. Pretty soon, they'll be able to buy armies and protection anyway, so maybe attacking them now isn't so crazy.

Except that it is.

--WS

Someone Help Mr. Bolton From the Stage...

Sheer ridiculous wankery from John Bolton...

I don’t think you’d hear the Arab states say this publicly, but they would be delighted if the United States or Israel destroyed the Iranian nuclear weapons capability.

It's hard to count just how many ways that Bolton is wrong when he speaks like this in public. No credible news organization should look to him for analysis or commentary, at least not the ones who value what they put out as far as content is concerned. Bolton reads and sounds like the last Neocon standing, a relic of 2003 that simply can't find anyone to take him seriously anymore.

His statement is wrong on so many different levels--but yes, it would technically be true to say that many Arab nations would like to see Israel "disarm" Iran and "destroy their nuclear weapons capability." Except that there are a whole host of other reasons they would be horrified and would react accordingly against it--namely, I don't think OPEC would sit there and do nothing. I don't think Jordan and Syria would allow their airspace to be used for any kind of overflight, at least not without serious protest or military force. The fledgling Iraqi government would likely collapse into hysterics over such a thing.

Does anyone seriously think Israel could do such a thing? Well, no, because, for starters, Iran doesn't have a nuclear weapons capability--hence, the disconnect in Bolton's logic. He knows they don't have one, but he cannot make his case if he has to sit there and patiently explain just how far away they are from having one. They have a series of initiatives and programs headed in that direction, and there's a good chance they could get there in five to ten years with a massive effort and an influx of money, and with support and technology they don't currently possess. However, there are at least a handful of other nations around the world that you could say the same thing about. But no one talks about Algeria or Taiwan like this, do they? No one talks about the fact that Brazil, South Africa, Argentina, Spain, Romania, or South Korea could probably beat the Iranians in the race to get a weapon if they put forth that same herculean effort. How seriously do you take a country like Iran when they're largely incapable of doing anything other than talking and repressing their own people?

So we're to believe that Arab countries would celebrate an aggressive projection of Israeli military force into a distant country, one that "succeeded" in destroying dozens of facilities, and left Iran defenseless? Because in order for Israel to destroy Iran's nuclear program, it would involve sending thousands and thousands of sorties over hostile territory into hostile territory, it would involve systematically destroying the Iranian air defense systems which use some fairly modern SAMs and SAM systems, and it would take months. Months of attacks, months of assessing damage, and months of determining what the end state of the situation was. As in, did we get it all? Did we get everything?

All while expecting Iran to do nothing in response to this.

Last time I looked into this, Iran was a founding member OPEC. They're not the end all, be all, but they're part of an organization which is running the table right now on energy prices. When was the last time anyone stood up and said, "you know, Iran is part of OPEC." Why do we never hear anyone point that out? We hear the likes of Bolton, we hear the proxies and the shills, and they always conveniently fail to point out that Iran is a member of OPEC.

So is Bolton being ridiculous? Yes, of course. Should Israel do nothing? Of course not--but how do you explain this to the Neocons? They're not totally wiped out, unfortunately. They're like the last shithouse rat looking to bite someone just to see if they can still pull it off.

Until we are rid of them, we are cursed with their presence in the media.

--WS

Are We Going to Find Out What Was There?

It would be a pretty shocking revelation if we find out anything dramatic about what was going on in Syria at the Al-Kibar site:

A delegation of the International Atomic Energy Agency arrived in Syria on Sunday, hoping to get to the bottom of the mystery of the Syrian remote building which was destroyed by the Israelis last September on suspicion it was a plutonium-producing reactor.

Led by IAEA chief inspector Olli Heinonen, the inspectors will stay until Tuesday.

Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian president, has recently told an Indian newspaper that the allegations were "fabricated 100 percent."

He said his country would welcome the visit but insisted the mission would be limited to the Al-Kibar site in the Syrian eastern desert, 90 miles north of the Iraqi border.

Syria's ambassador to the U.N. Ibraheem Jaafari denied late last month that the site was a nuclear installation, saying it only contained a disused military building.

The Israeli airstrike inside Syria on Sept. 6, 2007, reignited international debate over whether the Syrians are trying to overcome past obstacles by starting their own small nuclear program, or by trying to buy nuclear components from an outside supplier. Washington believes it is North Korea.

Well, the last person I would ever believe would be al-Assad, right after Bush. Isn't it sad when the credibility of the leader of the free world is about that as the idiot son of a Syrian dictator?

Arms Control Wonk has more info--including an interesting comparison of the site to some old ruined Byzantine fortresses and to the North Korean site at Yongbyong...

The facility at Al-Kibar:



A composite of ruined Byzantine fortresses, compiled by Arms Control Wonk:

Despite early press reports that the fuel channels atop the Al Kibar reactor core were identical to Yongbyon, I and others — including Geoff Forden, Cheryl Rofer and Richard Wendland — see some pretty significant differences that suggest Al Kibar might have been quite a bit smaller than its North Korean cousin.

To be clear, I don’t doubt that Al Kibar was a reactor and, although I think the evidence of North Korean involvement is less impressive than early press reports suggested, that’s my working hypothesis too.

But I don’t understand the claim that Al Kibar is a copy of Yongbyon in the strict sense — in particular, I don’t understand how the IC concluded that Al Kibar is the same size as Yongbyon.

Maybe--just maybe--we'll get some answers...

A (Mediterranean) Sea Change

The admission is just this side of stunning for anyone who pays even idle, passing attention to the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians - but in all likelihood the overture made by Hamas on Friday - that Israeli forces were not responsible for a massive blast that killed seven of its fighters and a baby in the Gaza Strip, by saying that the explosion occurred as militants were preparing for "a jihad operation" - can be interpreted as an act of reaching out in peace by the Palestinians of Hamas.

Initially, Hamas blamed Israel for the blast that leveled the house and injured up to fifty people. In response, militants fired dozens of rockets and mortar rounds at Israel in the hours following the explosion. And naturally the rest of the story follows...Israel retaliated to the mortars by targeting militants.

And then, a piano dropped on my head...or it might as well have.


On Friday, the Islamist movement's armed wing issued a statement/admission: "Members of the Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades were trying to prepare for a jihad operation" when six members of the brigades were killed in the blast in Beit Lahya.

Despite preparations for further conflict, both sides on Thursday outlined their conditions for a truce with each other.

The Hamas leader, Ismail Haniya, speaking from Gaza said that any truce must include, "a lifting of the [Israeli] siege, with a precise timetable for opening the crossing points [out of Gaza] and a list of the categories of products that will enter the Gaza Strip."

"It is important that the Rafah terminal [between Gaza and Egypt] be part of the project for calm. The Israelis and others have insisted that the Rafah terminal not be included" in an eventual deal, he added.

The Israelis have been linking the opening of Rafah – the only outlet for Gaza that does not pass through Israel – to the freeing of Corporal Gilad Shalit, captured by Hamas and others in a cross-border raid two years ago.

What is really noteworthy in this is that this is the first time Hamas has demanded a timetable for opening the crossings and a list of products since Israel imposed the blockade after the Islamist movement seized control of Gaza from forces loyal to Abbas last June.

And this post could go on for at least a thousand dissertations or at least as many pages as there are books in the old testament...but none of what would be contained therein is as important as this...HAMAS ADMITTED THEY WERE TO BLAME FOR AN INCIDENT IN GAZA.

I don't care what your politics or motives are...that is an undeniable peace overture.

~~BG

What in the World?

What the hell? Don't they know that America's wingnuts go nuts when someone burns a Bible?

Police in Israel are investigating the burning of hundreds of New Testaments in a city near Tel Aviv, an incident that has alarmed advocates of religious freedom.

Investigators plan to review photographs and footage showing "a fairly large" number of New Testaments being torched this month in the city of Or-Yehuda, a police spokesman, Micky Rosenfeld, said Wednesday.

News accounts in Israel have quoted Uzi Aharon, the deputy mayor of Or-Yehuda, as saying he organized students who burned several hundred copies of the New Testament. The deputy mayor gave interviews to Israeli radio and television stations after word of the incident surfaced about two weeks ago.

Soon he was talking with Russian, Italian and French television stations, "explaining to their highly offended audiences back home how he had not meant for the Bibles to be burned, and trying to undo the damage caused by the news (and photographs) of Jews burning New Testaments," The Jerusalem Post reported.

Aharon told CNN on Wednesday that he collected New Testaments and other "Messianic propaganda" that had been handed out in the city but that he did not plan or organize a burning. Instead, he said, three teenagers set fire to a pile of New Testaments while he was not present. Once he learned what was going on, he said, he stopped the burning.

It's not news that there are Messianic Jews who do this kind of thing--every religion has its fundamentalists, you know.

Flashback to the wingnut who tried to tell us that this kind of thing went on all the time in Iraq. Somewhere, John McCain and his pastors and Joe Lieberman are sitting in a room, all looking uncomfortably at each other with beady little eyes...

--WS

Israel's Prime Minister Told to Resign

Will he or won't he? The corruption charges do look pretty bad. But remember, it's not even clear if Olmert broke Israeli law.

Israel's defense minister, Ehud Barak, has called on the nation's prime minister, Ehud Olmert, to step down.

More from McClatchy after the jump...


A breakdown of what Olmert is faced with:

He railed against his Israeli interrogators, lectured the judges on American democracy and wept with frustration over his unwelcome role as a pivotal figure in an unfolding corruption investigation that could bring a premature end to Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's political career.

By the time he was done testifying on Tuesday at a special court hearing, American businessman Morris Talansky had painted an unflattering portrait of Olmert as a manipulative figure whose taste for luxury had overwhelmed his potential to become one of Israel's legendary leaders.

In a rare public deposition before a three-court judge, Talansky told Israeli prosecutors that he gave Olmert tens of thousands of dollars in cash, checks and loans to finance overseas trips, upscale New York hotel rooms and struggling political campaigns.

Talansky said he was "very, very uneasy" about the large amounts of cash he gave Olmert over the years, but he trusted a politician he revered as one of Israel's potential saviors.

"Cash disturbed me," Talansky said. "I couldn't understand it, and I accepted the answer simply because I saw something bigger, hopefully, out there."

Talansky estimated that he'd given Olmert $150,000 in cash, checks and loans over 15 years. To date, he said, Olmert hasn't repaid the loans.

Jimmy Carter Acts Like a Statesman Again

What is a statesman? Is it a soothing presence like James Baker, willing to lend his name to things like "The Iraq Study Group" so that the United States can ignore what was offered as advice in exchange for an extra six months of pretending the war in Iraq is going well? Or is it something more like Jimmy Carter, who stands up and delivers knock out blows to the collective consciousness of people who pay attention to what's going on?

Chris Floyd nails it:

Here's a thought experiment. Try to imagine a major American political figure boldly calling on Europe to break with the United States, unilaterally lift the blockage on Gaza and negotiate directly with Hamas, the democratically-elected government of Palestine.

He then goes on to reveal -- from his access to the most highly classified intelligence -- that Israel, far from being at risk from "destruction" by Iran or anyone, possesses a minimum of 150 nuclear weapons: the first time that any such high-level U.S. official has ever publicly confirmed the existence of Israel's arsenal, much less detailed its size.

What's more, this Establishment renegade then calls for the complete withdrawal of American forces from Iraq, combined with pledges of massive aid to rebuild Iraq "from the destruction we've caused."

Yes, Jimmy Carter did just that over the weekend. Did any of that appear in your newspaper or on your television? Chances are, if it ever does, it will be accompanied by the sneering presence of someone who has worked tirelessly to provide political cover to the Bush Administration. Think of a Fox News roundtable and a wholesale condemnation of Carter, accompanied by sneering and leering and misinformation.

What did Jimmy Carter do that was so wrong? He met with people and used his status as a former President to advocate for peace. Then, he had the temerity to follow through on what he had promised. And, he had the courage to speak about what he was doing:

Although it is 27 years since he left the White House, Carter recently met Hamas leaders in Damascus. He declared a breakthrough in persuading the organisation to offer a Gaza ceasefire and a halt to Palestinian rocket attacks on Israel if Israel stopped its air and ground strikes on the territory.

Carter described western governments' self-imposed ban on talking to Hamas as unrealistic and said everyone knew Israel was negotiating with the organisation through an Egyptian mediator, Omar Suleiman. Suleiman took the Hamas ceasefire offer to Jerusalem last week.

Israel was still hesitating over the ceasefire, Carter confirmed yesterday. "I talked to Mr Suleiman the day before yesterday. I hope the Israelis will accept," he said.

While being scrupulously polite to the Palestinian Authority president, Mahmoud Abbas, and prime minister, Salam Fayyad, who represent the Fatah movement, he was scathing about their exclusion of Hamas. He described the Fatah-only government as a "subterfuge" aimed at getting round Hamas's election victory two years ago. "The top opinion pollster in Ramallah told me the other day that opinion on the West Bank is shifting to Hamas, because people believe Fatah has sold out to Israel and the US," he said.

Carter said the Quartet's policy of not talking to Hamas unless it recognised Israel and fulfilled two other conditions had been drafted by Elliot Abrams, an official in the national security council at the White House. He called Abrams "a very militant supporter of Israel". The ex-president, whose election-monitoring Carter Centre had just certified Hamas's election victory as free and fair, addressed the Quartet for 12 minutes at its session in London in 2006. He urged it to talk to Hamas, which had offered to form a unity government with Fatah, the losers.

That, in a nutshell, is what a statesman does. This, in a nutshell, is what delusional neocons do:

Confidential documents obtained by "Vanity Fair" magazine have surfaced that appear to show that the U.S had planned to overthrow the Hamas-led Palestinian government shortly after they won their election in 2006.

In one of the documents, from March of 2007, detail a plan to remove Hamas by force. By supplying weapons and money to rival Fatah fighters, the U.S could install the movement into power, even though Hamas was democratically elected.

Sources at the U.S. State Department and Palestinian officials corroborate the documents, which revealed the plans were to be implemented by the State Department.

[SNIP]

The report confirms long-standing allegations by Hamas and other Palestinian officials that the U.S has been supplying arms and money to Fatah, so that fighters could "bring down the government". Even some senior Fatah officials themselves have accused the U.S of "meddling" in Palestinian affairs.

The magazine said that Condoleezza Rice and Deputy National Security Adviser Elliott Abrams "were entrusted with provoking a Palestinian civil war", and also quoted a former U.S Intelligence officer--experienced in covert planning--as saying that the plan was "close to the margins" of legality, but "probably wasn't illegal".

Your State Department at work. These are the people who are enabled by the people who sneer at Carter. These are the people who were supposed to bring dignity and honor back to Washington. And, once can just hear the "anti-Semite" charges cranking up, courtesy of the likes of Joe Lieberman and Alan Dershowitz. Floyd notices that Carter let loose with a bombshell:

Carter's unprecedented explicitness regarding Israel's nuclear weapons somehow escaped the notice of the Guardian -- which sponsored the festival and conducted the interview -- but The Times picked it up:

Israel has 150 nuclear weapons in its arsenal, former President Jimmy Carter said yesterday, while arguing that the US should talk directly to Iran to persuade it to drop its nuclear ambitions.

His remark...is startling because Israel has never admitted having nuclear weapons, let alone how many, although the world assumes their existence. Nor do US officials deviate in public from that Israeli line.

But Carter, who as president had full access to America's secret knowledge about Israel's arsenal, steamrolled right over the long-held public line. The existence of this arsenal is of course the true context of Middle East relations: the fact that Israel can "obliterate" any of its antagonists in a matter of minutes, while none of them poses, even remotely, a similar "existential threat" to Israel. Yet the entire U.S. "bipartisan foreign policy establishment" gears much of its Middle Eastern policies around the professed goal of guaranteeing the survival and security of Israel.

The plain fact is that Israel is more than capable of guaranteeing its own survival. As for its manifold security problems, these might be better addressed by a more realistic, pragmatic engagement with its neighbors, and with the Palestinians locked down under its control. But as long as Israeli leaders can count on the full backing of the United States -- financially, diplomatically and militarily -- no matter what they do, they will have no incentive to come to any viable terms, and can continue their own dominationist policies, which over the years have only bred more suffering, more radicalization and more intransigence in their opponents.

How can it be wrong to point out that what is happening in Gaza is a humanitarian nightmare? Are all of the people complicit in the crimes of a militarized few? Wouldn't it make sense to reach out to the suffering and encourage them to get involved in the political process? Or is it too late, given that the Bush Administration has meddled in the affairs of these people to an extent that has blown away any possible chance of American influence?

I think the most important question is not whether there really are 150 nuclear weapons in Israel's arsenal. The most important question is whether any of them are scattered or deployed throughout the world for strategic reasons.

Either way, how much of a threat can Iran really be to a country with 150 nuclear weapons?

Will Bush and McCain call the Israelis "Appeasers?"

Don't hold your breath...

Israel confirmed Wednesday that it is holding indirect peace talks with Syria mediated by Turkey.

The statement from Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert was the first official Israeli admission of the contacts.

Wednesday's statement said the sides "have declared their intent to conduct these talks in good faith and openly." The statement says the goal is "to reach a comprehensive peace agreement."

There have been reports in recent months of new Israeli-Syrian contacts through Turkey. Syria wants Israel to return the Golan Heights, which it captured in the 1967 Mideast war.

U.S.-mediated peace talks between the two countries broke down in 2000 because of disagreements over the extent of an Israeli withdrawal.

Due to their lack of historical context or actual knowledge of diplomacy, it is highly unlikely that the Bush Administration will know how to react to this. The Israelis will not be denounced as appeasers, for it is likely that the Israelis took Bush aside last week and casually told him of their own "appeasement" of their sworn enemy. And, please note that the US Secretary of State was probably kept, deliberately, out of the loop and out of the room. I say probably, but I would hasten to add "definitely."

Bush Cites Republican in Smearing Democrats as "Appeasers"

President Bush addressed the Israeli Knesset today and had this to say:

There are good and decent people who cannot fathom the darkness in these men and try to explain away their words. It's natural, but it is deadly wrong. As witnesses to evil in the past, we carry a solemn responsibility to take these words seriously. Jews and Americans have seen the consequences of disregarding the words of leaders who espouse hatred. And that is a mistake the world must not repeat in the 21st century.

Some seem to believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along. We have heard this foolish delusion before. As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: "Lord, if I could only have talked to Hitler, all this might have been avoided." We have an obligation to call this what it is -- the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history.

Bush's remarks echo a Charles Krauthammer column:

But even assuming some short-term victories, where will the Democrats be when the war is over and President Bush is gone?

Lamont said in his victory speech that the time had come to "fix George Bush's failed foreign policy." Yet, as Martin Peretz pointed out in the Wall Street Journal, on Iran, the looming long-term Islamist threat, Lamont's views are risible. Lamont's alternative to the Bush Iran policy is to "bring in allies" and "use carrots as well as sticks."

Where has this man been? Negotiators with Iran have had carrots coming out of their ears in three years of fruitless negotiations. Allies? We let the British, French and Germans negotiate with Iran for those three years, only to have Iran brazenly begin accelerated uranium enrichment that continues to this day.

Lamont seems to think that we should just sit down with the Iranians and show them why going nuclear is not a good idea. This recalls Sen. William Borah's immortal reaction in September 1939 upon hearing that Hitler had invaded Poland to start World War II: "Lord, if I could only have talked with Hitler, all this might have been avoided."
This naivete in the service of endless accommodationism recalls also the flaccid foreign policy of the post-Vietnam Democratic left. It lost the day -- it lost the country -- to Ronald Reagan and a muscular foreign policy that in the end won the Cold War.

Vietnam cost the Democrats 40 years in the foreign policy wilderness. Anti-Iraq sentiment gave the antiwar Democrats a good night on Tuesday, and may yet give them a good year or two. But beyond that, it will be desolation.

The quote cited by President Bush and Krauthammer is attributed to a Republican, Idaho Senator William Borah (1865-1940). They also fail to identify Borah as a person who, according to Wikipedia, held these positions and views:

In 1919 Borah and other Senate Republicans, notably Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts and Hiram W. Johnson of California, clashed with President Woodrow Wilson over Senate ratification of the Treaty of Versailles ending World War I and establishing the League of Nations. Borah emerged as leader of the "Irreconcilables," a group of senators noted for their uncompromising opposition to the treaty and the League. During 1919 Borah and Johnson toured the country speaking against the treaty in response to Wilson's own speaking tour supporting it. Borah's impassioned November 19, 1919, speech on the Senate floor in opposition to the treaty and League of Nations was considered to be helpful in the Senate's ultimate rejection of it.

From 1925 to 1933, Borah served as the Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. As Chairman, he became known for his pro-Soviet views, favoring recognition of the Communist regime, and sometimes interceded with that government in an unofficial capacity during the period when Moscow had no official relations with the United States. Purportedly, Kremlin officials held Borah in such high esteem that American citizens could gain permission to travel throughout the Soviet Union with nothing more than a letter from the Senator.

They fail to note a startling coincidence Borah shares with Senator John McCain:

In an attempt to revitalize the progressive wing of the Republican Party, in 1936 a 71-year-old Borah ran for President of the United States, becoming the first Idahoan to do so. Borah's candidacy was opposed by the conservative Republican leadership and dismissed by Roosevelt.

And:

Borah conducted a long-time affair with Alice Longworth, the daughter of Theodore Roosevelt and the wife of fellow politician Nicholas Longworth. He was long rumored to be the biological father of Alice Longworth's only child, Paulina Longworth, who was born nearly 20 years into her parents' marriage. The opening of Alice Roosevelt's diaries to modern historian, Stacy Cordery, who wrote "Alice: Alice Roosevelt Longworth, From White House Princess to Washington Power Broker" and found in them Alice's own admission of Borah's paternity.

It is not known if the irony of quoting an isolationist Republican Senator, who ran for President at the age of 71 and failed, and who also likely fathered an out-of-wedlock child with the daughter of Teddy Roosevelt, has occurred to the President.

This is not the sort of thing that fosters peace

Miyasar Abu Maatak gathered her six children around the breakfast table this morning, like mothers worldwide do every morning, before sending their families out into the world. But Miyasar Abu Maatak's kitchen table was in Gaza, where the only guarantee is that everyone is in peril pretty much every second of every day.

As the family ate breakfast, their house exploded, killing the mother and four of her children, one an infant, only fifteen months old.

Palestinian witnesses and the IDF offer differing accounts of what, exactly, happened to level the house and kill five innocents.

Palestinian witnesses insist that a shell fired from an Israeli tank struck the families dwelling, and the IDF insists that an Israeli tank fired on and hit two militants who were carrying heavy arms, and when the shell hit them, the ordinance they were carrying exploded, blew back and destroyed the house behind them.

But does it really matter how their house exploded?

Not so far as I can tell. A mother and four of her children are just as dead, and two more children are gravely injured and if they survive they may have significantly compromised quality of life, especially in a troubled community like Gaza. It doesn't matter whose arms killed them. Do you think that the grieving father and husband, who escaped death or injury by virtue of running an errand to the market, cares whether the explosion was caused by an Israeli shell directly, or indirectly? His children and his wife are gone. In less time than it took for him to run an errand, his life is upended, his heart not merely broken, but shattered.

What the fuck does it matter which finger-pointing thug is right?

A thug pointing the finger is still a thug.

And what the hell else do you call anyone, no matter which fable they embrace so fervently they can easily kill the "other" and call it collateral damage? You have two warring factions with no regard for civilian lives who have the pat response when something like this happens that "we have to retaliate against (circle one) Hamas terrorists/Israeli aggression."

I am just so fucking sick of this. I have been wailing about it since 1983, when I walked into the membership warehouse on Speedway in Tucson with my friend Linda Kovacs, to learn that the barracks in Beirut had been attacked between leaving home by the back gate of Davis-Monthan and arriving at our shopping destination. I could not leave the bank of teevees - one of my husbands best friends from highschool was a Marine in Beirut. The last time we saw him before departing for D-M, my husband, upon learning he had enlisted in the Marines in 1982, said "I hear Beirut is lovely this time of year." That was a tense 24 hours before we heard from his mother that he was okay.

Almost 25 years of wailing in grief and working for peace, still to no avail.

Can we listen to Moishe Dyan yet? You want to make peace, you talk to your enemies, not your friends. We know this to be true. Why the fuck, all these years on, do we still refuse to listen?

Although I am perhaps the least religious person you will ever encounter, I close this post with a prayer for peace. Oseh Shalom, Gaza.

Oh, what I wouldn't give to have a functioning and capable State Department

I don't presume to speak for anyone else, but I would rather have the Secretary of State dealing with issues like this instead of hurling schoolyard taunts at Moqtada al-Sadr.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Members of Congress will be told this week about intelligence suggesting that North Korea was helping Syria build a nuclear reactor similar to one it has constructed, a government official familiar with the matter said Tuesday.

The Senate and House intelligence committees were scheduled to be briefed on Thursday, and several other panels such as the Senate Armed Services Committee were expected to be briefed as well.

North Korea has been suspected of helping Syria with a secret nuclear program, but both countries deny it. Pyongyang says it has never spread its nuclear expertise beyond its borders.

Israeli warplanes bombed a site in Syria on Sept. 6 that private analysts say appears to have been the site of a reactor, based on commercial satellite imagery taken after the raid. The site later was razed and wiped clean.

Evidence will be presented to the Congress that North Korea has helped Syria construct a reactor modeled on their facility at Yongbyon, which has, in the past, yielded plutonium in sufficient quantity to create a nuclear weapon.

An official inside the Bush administration, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that the intelligence community had been inundated with requests for information on North Korea and Syria since the Israeli airstrike against a suspected reactor on September 6 of last year. and that now seemed like the right time to brief the lawmakers. It is a tenuous proposition - talks are ongoing with the North Koreans and leaks could jeopardize their prospects.

At the same time, those who pay attention to the Middle East are concerned that timing the briefing for this week runs the risk of upstaging visits this week by Jordanian King Abdullah II and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and hurt the negotiations for an Arab-Israeli peace settlement with allegations of nefarious activity by an Arab nation with the aid of North Korea flying around, the official said.

Speculation has run wild in recent weeks, especially in the Israeli media, that the briefing of the Congress will include intel gathered by Israel and that the Israeli government has signed off on the information sharing. Another official, invoking anonymity, said that the impending briefing would present intelligence gathered by various sources and methods and synthesized into a coherent package after carefully being analyzed over a period of several months.

Under the agreement reached in the Six Party Talks last year, the North Koreans are obligated to give a full account of it's nuclear programs, including whether or not it has been a party to the proliferation of nuclear technology.

North Korea claims that it has complied with the declaration it presented last November, but the U.S. says that the North has not provided a "complete and correct" assessment.

The briefing is scheduled to take place one say before a U.S. delegation that went to North Korea to press for details of the North's nuclear programs is scheduled to report back.

The U.S. recently has stepped back from its push for a detailed declaration addressing the North's alleged secret uranium enrichment program and nuclear cooperation with Syria. Now, the U.S. says it wants the North to simply acknowledge the concerns and then set up a system to verify the country doesn't continue such activity in the future.

President Bush defended the plans over the weekend during a meeting with new South Korean President Lee Myung-bak, saying North Korea had the burden of proof under the agreements.

The Wall Street Journal first reported Tuesday that U.S. intelligence officials would tell the committees that North Korea was helping Syria build a plutonium-fueled reactor.

This is just one more issue that has been mismanaged and fumbled by this inept and ineffectual administration. Here is hoping the other parties to the talks can keep it together until January, when we can send competent representation to the table.

Update I - Pale Rider

Here's where it would be fairly obvious to state that a US State Department, run by the likes of Bill Richardson, would definitely be an improvement.

Your Secretary of State in all her incompetent glory

What I wouldn't give for a competent State Department right now.

Condoleeza Rice is still parroting the party line, that Annapolis was the beginning of a grand lasting peace, and the Bush administration can broker a lasting peace between Israelis and Palestinians - even as Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas rebuffed her, refusing to publicly commit to restarting peace talks with Israel.

This annoyed the Bush administration no end. The official Bush position is that his refusal to agree to return to the table lends credence to Hamas, whose political arm took control of Gaza after a brief civil war that deposed the Palestinian Authority to the West Bank last June. They accuse Abbas of handing Hamas a "tactical victory" by "allowing it to hijack Arab-Israeli peace negotiations."

As for Abbas, he seems to be enjoying standing up to Israel and the United States for a change. So I'm not holding my breath that he is going to be in a rush to comply just cuz Condi sez. And I'm sure not betting the farm on the Bush administration brokering any sort of lasting peace! In fact, the mere notion that these incompetent nincompoops even deign to peddle that line of bullshit makes me snort with derision. They are leaving office with a Middle East legacy, all right. But it most certainly is not the one they envision.

Lantos Dead

Let's just say that there are "implications" here, and they relate to Sibel Edmonds and some other "issues."

For now, respect and reverence for the only Holocaust survivor to serve in the US Congress.

UPDATE I - PALE RIDER

For background - go here:

sibel-edmonds-calls-out-fbi

AND

if-this-is-true

The President Throws US Intel Agencies Under the Bus

[updated some of my rambling and my less-than-clear indignation]
Starting off another incredible week of mind-bogglingly frightening developments and insane incidents, here is what amounts to a stunning revelation, one the media seems to have paid absolutely no heed as they stampede themselves through another round of meaningless primary races and celebrity news:

Bothersome Intel on Iran
By Michael Hirsh | NEWSWEEK
Jan 21, 2008 Issue

In public, President Bush has been careful to reassure Israel and other allies that he still sees Iran as a threat, while not disavowing his administration's recent National Intelligence Estimate. That NIE, made public Dec. 3, embarrassed the administration by concluding that Tehran had halted its weapons program in 2003, which seemed to undermine years of bellicose rhetoric from Bush and other senior officials about Iran's nuclear ambitions.

But in private conversations with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert last week, the president all but disowned the document, said a senior administration official who accompanied Bush on his six-nation trip to the Mideast.

"He told the Israelis that he can't control what the intelligence community says, but that [the NIE's] conclusions don't reflect his own views" about Iran's nuclear-weapons program, said the official, who would discuss intelligence matters only on the condition of anonymity.

Yes--the President of the United States has "his own views" and those views are NOT informed by the work of the intelligence services that work for this country. That's "work for this country" and "not specifically to reinforce his policy choices and preferences."

Yeah, yeah--Cheney runs things. Cheney has his fingerprints all over this statement and this leak. We get that.

Why is this not page 1, and on every network, and screaming at you from all sides? How is it that the President of the United States of America can go to a foreign country and tell the leader of that country that the collective judgement and estimate of the massive intelligence community means nothing to him? When is he going to come out and tell the American people that the 43.5 billion dollars spent in 2007 by this country to defend itself might as well have been pissed away down the drain?

What are we paying for? Why bother to even have an intelligence community? He's just going to put on his Carnac hat and make the wrong guesses and not get any laughs, right?



How would you like to be a career intelligence professional, and know that your President went overseas and sat down with some other leader and, in a chummy sort of way, basically said that the work you've done to protect America is a joke and a fraud and that he knows more than you do?

Here are the reasons why this matters--the President hasn't fired the DNI or the head of any of the agencies that matter. He hasn't fired any of the people who aren't telling him what he wants to hear. But he holds the work of those people in obvious low regard. Why else would they "leak" that Bush told Olmert that he has his own ideas about what Iran is doing to develop nuclear weapons? Every one of these people is an appointee of his own choice. He nominated these people. He could fire all of them in one fell swoop. He is, ultimately, responsible for everything they oversee. And what they now know is this--he doesn't care what the people who work for them have to say about a critical issue. He'll just dismiss it and do whatever the hell he wants.

That's NOT a great way to go about things in a Democracy. Just wanted to mention that.

What country is this? Where do we live? What nation is this, again? I simply have no idea anymore.

The incredible hubris of a man who thinks he knows more than the tens of thousands of people who have spent their lives defending this country is astonishing. Isn't there someone close to him that can remind him that he has no viable track record for getting anything right? Someone to speak truth to power? Someone who can show him, at least in theory, "a DVD of what is going on in New Orleans", only tailored to show him why the US intel community downgraded the threat from Iran?

Why didn't someone, decades ago, basically sit down and explain to this man that his inability to get anything right means he doesn't get to dismiss the opinions, findings and research of tens of thousands of people who have a better track record than he does? Not a great track record, but significantly better. At least they have subjected themselves to criticism, review, and reorganization.

Apparently, the man who got it wrong about virtually everything knows more than the people who are there to figure these things out. So why bother funding them next year? We might as well spend the money erecting a monument to the fabulous insight and intellect of a President who will leave office at record low approval ratings, record high number of scandals and disasters yet to be sorted out, and with more hubris than any mad dictator who has ever lived. I mean, really. Does reality figure into any of this anymore?

So this is the way we start the week--with this leaked tidbit that throws our intelligence agencies under a bus. And that's what it really was--a leak. That leak places this country in serious jeopardy.

Annapolis

After seven years of diplomatic neglect, George Bush has set aside a day - yes, one day - tomorrow - to try to work out the intractable six-decades-long Israel/Palestine problem.

What, pray tell, do they think they can accomplish in one day? Ask the people in the Middle East and you discover that Arabs and Jews can indeed agree on at least one thing: When asked that question, they all answer "Not much."

Oy vey. Even the choice of location is damning: The United States Naval Academy is the setting, and the motto of the Navy is "Don't give up the Ship" - invoking tenacity and determination, not diplomatic acumen and compromise. In Arabic, "Ana" means "I" and people the world over know the word "police." A Saudi humorist joked that the choice of location was an arrogant message from Bush to the Middle East "I am the police."

The question of borders has plagued both Israel and the neighbors for over 40 years, since June 4, 1967; and the implementation of the Six Day War armistice. Since then, conservative, some would say fundamentalist whack-job, settlers have made the occupied territories their home. Kicking them out of the West Bank will not be as easily achieved as the same feat was two years ago, when the settlers were evicted from Gaza. The Gaza Strip is not biblically significant. Jews do not have deep emotional or historical attachments to Gaza. Not so the West Bank, which is historically, theologically and emotionally significant to most Jews worldwide - let alone the "fundamentalist whack jobs" I just referenced. I can't see removing them without violence. The issue of borders certainly isn't going to be achieved in a day.

And you can't talk about the borders without acknowledging the 800-pound-gorilla playing the zither in the sitting room: Jerusalem.

On paper, the equation balances. The Arab neighborhoods would fall under Palestinian control, and the Jewish neighborhoods would be controlled by Israel. Except it gets dicey real quick - the neighborhoods are intertwined.

Ask any chemist - when you are working with volatile compounds, the slightest variation from the recipe and it will blow up in your face. And what cocktail could be more volatile than the 35 acres of the walled city of Old Jerusalem? All three of the major monotheistic religions consider Old Jerusalem and the Haram al-Sharif/Temple Mount to be sacred ground.

The problems are exacerbated by Christianist Zionists (who should make with the butting out already) who stick their noses where they don't belong and urge their constituencies to pressure the Israeli government to take Jerusalem off the negotiating table. Fortunately, we are making headway, and even the occasional Zionist Rabbi Is waking up and smelling the coffee. But before any Jew throws in with that lot, remember they are mentally ill. They want to precipitate Armageddon and damn us all to their hell. Those Jews who wake up pissed every morning that the Messiah didn't come last night find natural allies in them. The rest of us find ulcers, migraines and anxiety. Again we have a problem that's going to take more than a day to sort out.

And then you have nearly four and a half million Palestinians living in limbo, many still in refugee camps. And everyone, Jew and Arab alike, needs to be scolded by my grandmother for being obstinate jackasses and using the Palestinian people as pawns, especially the Arab world. They really screwed the Palestinians in 1948, the bastards. All of the Arab neighboring states should be held accountable. They are every bit as culpable as Israel in contributing to the suffering of the Palestinian people and need to be called out on that publicly. There is plenty of sin and blame to go around. Everyone has behaved abominably and nobody gets a pass. This can't even be mentioned at Annapolis. Hell, it would take a good 6 months of Arabs storming the door every time that little bit of reality comes up and is said aloud. I shake my head in disbelief. They offer a day? Oh, the humanity...

And how the hell do they even bring up security in the time allowed?

This is why I don't often write about Israel and Palestine. It's damned infuriating. No one is asking me, but if anyone did, I would say Frost was employing irony; good fences do NOT make good neighbors. The first order of business should be to tear down that damned fence and fill in the trenches, and restore the 10% of the territory that it's construction seized.

Then I would say let Gaza go to Egypt. Give the West Bank to Jordan. Give the Golan Heights to Syria, and let a disinterested third party settle the border with Lebanon, and nobody would get to whine about it. And suck it up. Learn to live with a divided Jerusalem.Until everyone concerned learns how to act, I would make Old Jerusalem a U.N. protectorate. Don't like it? Learn how to act.

But no one is asking me. Probably because they are afraid I would tell them.

UPDATE FROM COMMENTS: Pale Rider is spot on as usual.

You can't make this shit up:

[Indeed! You gotta get this...BG]

"Annapolis" was named after Queen Anne of England:

Queen Anne was the last of the Stuarts, the second daughter of James II and his first wife Ann Hyde.

She was shy, conscientious, stout, gouty, shortsighted and very small.

Anne was 'homely', and she did not have a particularly happy married life. Her husband, Prince George of Denmark, was a drunk and a crashing bore!

Prince George was a gross, rather ridiculous figure, even King James, Anne's father, remarked "I have tried him drunk and I've tried him sober, but there is nothing in him".

And:

Alex Haley, the late author of the world-famous account of his family entitled Roots, was able to trace back the arrival of his ancestors, who had been kidnapped from Africa, to the Annapolis City Dock. Although Maryland was formally a slave state, many of its citizens opposed the institution. Archaeologists have found that there was a large, free African American population in the area before the Civil War.

The Middle East: just waiting out the ineffectual and counterproductive Bush administration

Throughout the Middle East, there seems to be a degree of resignation in the air – a sense that Gaza will suffer for the remainder of the Bush administration, and once he is out of the way, the dialogue will commence. The next administration will talk to Hamas, and so will the Israelis. "They'll have to," said Dr. Eyad Sarraj, a Palestinian human rights activist "because they'll have seen that Hamas can deliver."

The looming end of the Bush regime underpins the political thought throughout the region. The political leaders of the region are looking forward to the end, preparing for change, and readying themselves for the coming dialogue.

Throughout the region, the disdain is virtually palpable, even among people like Dr. Sarraj, who consider themselves friends of the United States. The aura of just waiting it out does not bode well for any future Bush administration initiatives where the Israel/Palestine dilemma is concerned.

This sense of resignation and time-biding offers context for Condi’s recent embarrassingly inept trip to the region. (We know it was a failure because we didn’t hear anything about it.) The trip was such a flop that the tepid response by the Saudis that they might consider attending a U.S. sponsored summit was hailed as a significant development.

One Egyptian diplomat put it about as bluntly as possible "No one likes American policy."

The Israeli’s are equally critical:

A senior Israeli official sat silently for several seconds after he was asked which negotiating approach was most likely to lead to progress in peace talks with Israel's Arab neighbors. Then he laughed and, in flawless English, suggested to a colleague that he must not have understood the question. "I don't see any promising pathway," he said. "There is a huge gap between the rhetoric and what people believe."

The Israeli government understands that to have peace with Syria "means giving back the Golan Heights," the strategic high ground that Israel seized in 1967, and "we're willing to discuss it," he said. But with Bush insisting "from the Oval Office" that the U.S. won't talk to Syria, nothing can be expected. "The Syrians really want to talk to the United States," the official said. Even among government officials in Iraq there's little embrace of Bush policy, and surprising expressions of distrust.

Former Mossad chief Efraim Halevy, with three decades in clandestine service, sworn to protect the Jewish state from enemies such as Hamas, now speaks aloud what was unthinkable until recently. “It is time to negotiate with the movements leaders.” (The leaders he now advocates dialogue with are the same leaders Mossad has made a policy of targeting for assassination.)

The Hamas takeover of Gaza in June effectively split the Palestinians into Gaza, controlled by Hamas, and the West Bank, politically dominated by the more secular Fatah party and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and his appointed prime minister, Salam Fayad.

In response, the White House has rolled out what it calls a "West-Bank-first" strategy. (Without batting an eyelash that the strategy was “Gaza First” right up to the moment it blew up in their faces.)

The “new” approach envisions financial, political and diplomatic support for Mr. Abbas and Fatah. The thinking is that life can be improved in the West Bank to such a degree that support for Hamas will evaporate in both the West Bank and Gaza. Simultaneously, Washington maneuvers to work with Israel to isolate Hamas further, while refusing to talk to the leaders.

"I don't say we should talk to Hamas out of sympathy to them. I have no sympathy whatsoever for Hamas. I think they are a ghastly crowd," Mr. Halevy says. "But I have not seen anybody who says the Abbas-Fayad tandem is going to do the job."

Mr. Halevy says defeating Hamas politically is unrealistic, given its enduring popularity among Palestinians. Hamas defeated Fatah in Palestinian parliamentary elections last year.

"The danger is that they will not be defeated, that they will become more despairing...and they will no longer feel constrained by anything, because there is nothing left for them to hope for," he says.

Then he said something that truly gives me hope. When the former Mossad chief finally “gets it” there is reason to rejoice. "We don't need their recognition," he says. "We are a sovereign state...They need us to recognize them. The shoe is on the wrong foot." (Really, who cares whether Hamas recognizes Israel or not?) We're dealing in issues which are existential to free society," Mr. Halevy says. "When you look around for potential allies in this war, sometimes you have to settle for strange bedfellows."

Rice and Gates are off to the Middle East on a Salvage Operation

On Monday, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice will leave on a highly unusual joint mission to the Middle East. They leave with three objectives, and low expectations.

They need to persuade Iraq’s neighboring states to do more to help stabilize the country, they need to counter the growing influence of Iran in the region, and they hope to get some significant motion going on the development of a peace plan between the Palestinians and Israelis.

Lofty goals, but not likely to be very successful. The United States has little or no credibility in the region. The U.S. has caused massive death and instability in Iraq, and strengthened al Qaeda; they have also failed to calm the strife in Lebanon, bolster the Palestinian Authority, or bring pressure to bear on Syria.

Quite the contrary – U.S. policies have fanned the flames of Sunni extremism, and strengthened Iran. Those are the two things that cause the greatest consternation among the moderate Arab countries, because those are the two entities that threaten their grip on power.

Also not playing well to the locals is U.S. support for the ill-fated Israeli war against Hezbollah last summer. Continued attempts to undermine the popularly-elected Hamas in the Gaza strip. "The strategy is based on the assumption that you could isolate, weaken ... Hamas," while strengthening Abbas and his Fatah faction, said Shibley Telhami, a Middle East expert at the University of Maryland. "It cannot succeed. ... Everybody agrees that you can't simply isolate Hamas." Couple that failed strategy with United States’ continued support for Mubarak in Egypt, it pretty much puts the lie to claims that the United States “fosters Muslim democracy.”

The leaders of friendly states have lost faith in the Bush administration and do not believe he will deliver on his promises. Therefore, they are reluctant to risk anything for Bush. “Our credibility is in tatters. They are not going to commit because they don’t trust us. That doesn’t mean they are not concerned about Iran. It just means they just don’t know what we are going to do,” said one senior State Department official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he wasn't authorized to speak to reporters.

One needn’t read Runes to see other signs of discord in the administration.

On the eve of the trip, unnamed U.S. officials told The New York Times that Washington believes Saudi Arabia has been unhelpful in Iraq by not supporting Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki's government. The administration publicly disavowed the report, but said that Saudi Arabia could do more to help. The leaked complaint seems unlikely to make life easier for Rice and Gates when they arrive in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, early in the trip.

Pentagon and State Department officials said the trip is intended to reassure Arab leaders that the U.S. will uphold its security commitments in the region, and meanwhile, Arab diplomats in Washington resolutely maintain that they need more than reassurances. They have heard a lot of proposals and reassurances, but they have not seen a clear plan for peace or security in the region. The U.S. promises a more active role, but consistently fails to deliver. Arab diplomats in Washington voiced skepticism – anonymously – that the trip would be fruitful.

More than what Rice and Gates say on the trip, “[P]eople will be monitoring the debate in Washington. Everybody is watching that very closely and then will draw their own conclusions.” said one anonymous diplomat.

“There is no clarity,” another diplomat said on condition of anonymity, because he didn't want to disagree publicly with the administration. “The trip in and of itself is not important. What’s important is that the administration commit to dealing with the substantive issues.”

Rice and Gates have their work cut out for them. With 18 months left in office, it will be difficult to reshape the way the region sees the United States, said William Quandt, a professor of international relations at the University of Virginia, who as an aide to President Jimmy Carter helped craft the 1978 Camp David accords between Israel and Egypt.

“I don’t think they have a real strategy that has much chance of working,” Quandt said. Gates, who joined the administration in December, “may be able to calm things down a little. But that won’t change the course.”

The two Secretaries will attend meetings together in Saudi Arabia and Egypt, then they will part company. Gates will visit “other gulf states” and Rice will head for Israel and the Palestinain territories to meet with Mahmood Abbas and Israeli leaders. Saudi Arabia, Egypt and other U.S. allies in the region want the United States to reach out to the popularly-elected Hamas, which now controls Gaza, but Rice has steadfastly maintained that there will be no dealing with the Hamas, which is the U.S. classifies as a terrorist organization.

Civil War in Gaza

Oh where to even start. I have been trying all day to write something about the pressure-cooker in Palestine that has blown apart in the last few days.

Five years ago this month, the President of the United States made a Rose Garden speech, wherein he laid out a bold, vivid two-state vision for the Middle East. Israel and Palestine, coexisting side by side, their peoples living in peace and prospering together. "I call on the Palestinian people to elect new leaders, leaders not compromised by terror." he declared back then.

That vision was a mirage.

I certainly do not have the answers to this dilemma but I do know one thing beyond all doubt – a lot of it can be directly traced to the horrid policies of the Bush (mal)administration and the State Department that wasn’t.

United States policy overtly encouraged Israel to withdraw from the Gaza strip – not in and of itself a bad thing. But they also pressed for elections in both the Palestenian territory and Israel. Abbas won the election to replace Arafat as the President of the Palestinian Authority after Arafat’s passing in late 2004. He arrogantly allowed Hamas to run candidates to stand for legitimate election to parliament, thinking that he could defeat them at the polls.

He thought wrong.

So the Bush administration – on the heels of moving the goalposts in Iraq from WMD’s to fostering Democracy – decided that they didn’t much care for Democracy the way the Palestinians exercised it, because gosh-darnit, they picked the wrong leaders. Money and aid was cut off – a situation choreographed by Washington D.C. – in an attempt to strangle Hamas out of the political process.

This blew up in their faces most spectacularly. The attempt to make Hamas unpopular enough that the Palestinians would blame them and their support would erode, instead engendered hatred and pure, unadulterated resolve toward the west, and by extension, to the man they perceived as a marionette of western masters, Abbas. This week, the seething cauldron boiled over. Hamas and Fatah turned their guns on one another, and as it stands now, Hamas is in control in Gaza.

"The two-state vision is dead. It really is," said Edward G. Abington Jr., a former State Department official who was once an adviser to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.

Abbas, whose bouts of vacillation have irritated U.S. officials, yesterday dissolved the Palestinian government in response to Hamas's takeover of Gaza. U.S. officials signaled that they will move quickly to persuade an international peace monitoring group -- known as the Quartet -- to lift aid restrictions on the Palestinian government, allowing direct aid to flow to the West Bank-based emergency government that Abbas will lead.

"There is no more Hamas-led government. It is gone," said a senior administration official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because the administration must still consult with other members of the Quartet. He said that humanitarian aid will continue to Gaza, but that the dissolution of the Palestinian government is a singular moment that will allow the United States and its allies to create a "new model of engagement."

The evolving U.S. strategy would let the Hamas-run Gaza Strip fend for itself while attempting to bolster Abbas as a moderate leader who can actually govern and deliver peace with Israel. The senior administration official noted that Gaza has no territorial issues with Israel, since there are no Israelis in Gaza, so the Hamas entity there would have no stake in potential peace talks concerning the border on the West Bank.

Referring to Abbas, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told reporters yesterday that "we fully support him in his decision to try and end this crisis for the Palestinian people and to give them an opportunity to return to peace and a better future."

But analysts said yesterday that this strategy of dividing the moderates from the extremists -- which was the core of Bush's 2002 speech -- proved ineffective and may have led to the dilemma facing the administration.

So now, the government has been dissolved, and the Gaza Strip is under Hamas control. Fatah has retreated to the West Bank, and the Bush administration is still supporting Abbas. And a radical Islamic state, committed to the destruction of the jewish state, exists literally on Israel’s doorstep.

No one has asked me, but if they did, I would say that it looks to my eyes like we should probably bow out. Every damned thing we have done has turned around and bit us on the ass. Beyond encouraging the “Quartet” to get aid and assistance flowing, and maybe send a check.

Although I am perhaps the least religious person you will ever encounter, I leave you with a prayer for peace. Oseh Shalom, Gaza.