Unpredictable days as road map falters

There's quite a lot of complex madness going on, as sustained riots go on in Tehran; Israel vows to obliterate HAMAS; the US Army, more than a month after 'hostilities subsided,' kills nearly a hundred mysterious guerillas and loses a helicopter. Meanwhile the WMD/lying gov't scandal continues. This is quite a long post summing up the week. If you're in the mood to get really really frightened about the political situation in Iraq, you should check out a couple writings about the problems confronting Paul Bremer, the US administrator in Iraq, and Gen. David McKiernan, the U.S. military leader in Iraq. That website, DailyKos.com, has provided really excellent coverage of Iraq, the Democratic race, and Bush's numerous failings. Check that site frequently.

It turns out that those "mobile bio-weapons lab" things were actually used to produce hydrogen. Dang, another suspected WMD site struck off.

The conclusion of the investigation ordered by the British Government - and revealed by The Observer last week - is hugely embarrassing for Blair, who had used the discovery of the alleged mobile labs as part of his efforts to silence criticism over the failure of Britain and the US to find any weapons of mass destruction since the invasion of Iraq.

Surprisingly, 82 mysterious and shadowy 'Saddam supporters' were killed at a camp this week, although they managed to shoot down an Apache helicopter in the fight. The mysterious forces seem to have quickly retaliated against American forces nearby, as another supply convoy was ambushed.

The BBC's Jim Muir, in Baghdad, says the attackers apparently caught the convoy unawares, with soldiers being carried unprotected and vulnerable in the back of an open truck. He adds that it is a considerable embarrassment for the Americans, coming soon after the end of a much publicised offensive in the riverside country around the nearby town of Balad.

Thousands of US troops took part in the operation around Balad, part of a series of raids codenamed Peninsula Strike. It was launched after a series of attacks on US forces in the area.

Our correspondent says the fact that the Americans should then take another hit so soon and so close by is a clear sign that the coalition's enemies are determined not to be intimidated by such shows of force. It also shows just how vulnerable the American troops may be to the kind of hit-and-run guerrilla tactics that this attack exemplified.

Wow. That's both frightening and suggestive of escalating problems this summer. What we've seen this past week in Israel and Palestine was hardly encouraging, as Israel attacked Hamas leaders (mostly of the so-called 'political wing') and a suicide bombing killed about 17 in Jerusalem. The situation on the ground has deteriorated this week, which might compel Israel to withdraw from areas in the northern Gaza Strip and Hamas to take a cease fire. Amos Harel in Haaretz has a lot of up to the minute insight on what's under discussion.

Israel believes Egypt has a key role to play in the latest efforts aimed at calming the violence of the last few days. While Jerusalem was rocked by a suicide bombing last Wednesday, Egyptian intelligence chief Omar Suleiman was meeting with Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat in Ramallah. Suleiman threatened Arafat with a public Egyptian condemnation if he did not stop interfering with Palestinian Prime Minster Mahmoud Abbas.

At the same time, an Israeli security source says the U.S. is fully aware of the fact that the situation is on the verge of exploding. American reservations over Israel's recent measures in the territories have been replaced by renewed pressure on Abbas and Dahlan to accept security control in the northern Gaza Strip. The source claims that the U.S. promised the Palestinians that if they "present us with a serious plan, the Israelis will oblige."

...The decision to target Hamas leaders was not an emotional response that got out of control, sources in the IDF General Staff claimed. They insist that the new policy is the result of calculated considerations, and came after a host of in-depth discussions among top defense establishment officials.

"Abbas' government was sworn in a month ago, and has done nothing," said one high-ranking officer. He added that Hamas has taken advantage of the vacuum, and has encouraged and directed Islamic Jihad and Tanzim in the carrying out of terror attacks. Israel opted for "shock therapy": it placed Hamas leaders in the crosshairs and generated a crisis that will force Abbas and his people to act. For Abbas, said a senior officer, "this is a 'to be, or not to be' moment."

All this Hamas talk could be related to the rather shocking proclamation of Senator Lugar, who now is suggesting that US troops will be used against HAMAS?!?! There is an excellent in-depth look at HAMAS in the Monday NY Times.

The group's popularity stemmed in part from the absence of the P.L.O., whose leaders were exiled in 1982. Some experts contend that Israel encouraged the development of Hamas indirectly as a way to weaken Mr. Arafat's Fatah party.

"The intention at the time was to try to stop the increasing power of Fatah," said Yohanan Tzoref of the International Policy Institute for Counter-Terrorism in Israel.

... Dr. Ranstorp said that the group believed that history would eventually reward it with a Palestinian, Islamic state on all the land that is now Israel.

"When I interviewed over 100 Hamas activists and all leadership, I was quite astonished because everyone told me that an Islamic state would begin about the years 2022 or 2023," he said. "I asked them, 'What are the conditions?' They said: 'Life after Yasir Arafat. Islamic revolution in Jordan and Egypt. Time and demography are on our side.' "

Attacking the Bush administration artfully, Paul Krugman continues to make me a happy person. He is taking the crucial task of labelling Republican political maneuvers such as the attempted redistricting of Texas as dangerously radical.

Normally states redraw Congressional districts once a decade: Texas redistricted after the 2000 census. But under Mr. DeLay's leadership, Texas Republicans are trying to increase their advantage in seats with a second redistricting. This in itself is an unprecedented power grab.

But it gets worse. Texas Democrats responded with a parliamentary maneuver, walking out to deprive the state Legislature of a quorum. In response, hundreds of state law enforcement officers were diverted from crime-fighting to search for the missing Democrats ? assisted, yes, by the Department of Homeland Security...

Above all, expect to see the wall between church and state come tumbling down. Mr. DeLay has said that he went into politics to promote a "biblical worldview," and that he pursued President Clinton because he didn't share that view. Where would this worldview be put into effect? How about the schools: after the Columbine school shootings, Mr. DeLay called a press conference in which he attributed the tragedy to the fact that students are taught the theory of evolution.

...I do, however, get angry at moderates, liberals and traditional conservatives who avert their eyes, pretending that current disputes are just politics as usual. They aren't ? what we're looking at here is a radical power play, which if it succeeds will transform our country.

Times columnist Nicholas Kristof looks at the whole WMD mystery, and manages to draw new connections about the VP's duplicity and other extreme derelictions of intelligence gathering.

Condoleezza Rice was asked on "Meet the Press" on Sunday about a column of mine from May 6 regarding President Bush's reliance on forged documents to claim that Iraq had sought uranium in Africa. That was not just a case of hyping intelligence, but of asserting something that had already been flatly discredited by an envoy investigating at the behest of the office of Vice President Dick Cheney.

Ms. Rice acknowledged that the president's information turned out to be "not credible," but insisted that the White House hadn't realized this until after Mr. Bush had cited it in his State of the Union address.

And now an administration official tells The Washington Post that Mr. Cheney's office first learned of its role in the episode by reading that column of mine. Hmm...

"It was a foregone conclusion that every photo of a trailer truck would be a 'mobile bioweapons lab' and every tanker truck would be 'filled with weaponized anthrax,' " a former military intelligence officer said. "None of the analysts in military uniform had the option to debate the vice president, secretary of defense and the secretary of state."

I don't believe that the president deliberately lied to the public in an attempt to scare Americans into supporting his war. But it does look as if ideologues in the administration deceived themselves about Iraq's nuclear programs - and then deceived the American public as well.

One of my favorite characters to emerge as an unexpected leader in this whole muck has to be that slightly tarnished southern gentleman Robert Byrd, who articulates on the Senate floor the rotten depths of what the United States government is doing. He gave this great speech on the Senate floor May 21.

[T]he danger is that at some point [the truth] may no longer matter. The danger is that damage is done before the truth is widely realized. The reality is that, sometimes, it is easier to ignore uncomfortable facts and go along with whatever distortion is currently in vogue. We see a lot of this today in politics. I see a lot of it -- more than I would ever have believed -- right on this Senate Floor.

Regarding the situation in Iraq, it appears to this Senator that the American people may have been lured into accepting the unprovoked invasion of a sovereign nation, in violation of long-standing International law, under false premises. There is ample evidence that the horrific events of September 11 have been carefully manipulated to switch public focus from Osama Bin Laden and Al Queda who masterminded the September 11th attacks, to Saddam Hussein who did not. The run up to our invasion of Iraq featured the President and members of his cabinet invoking every frightening image they could conjure, from mushroom clouds, to buried caches of germ warfare, to drones poised to deliver germ laden death in our major cities. We were treated to a heavy dose of overstatement concerning Saddam Hussein's direct threat to our freedoms. The tactic was guaranteed to provoke a sure reaction from a nation still suffering from a combination of post traumatic stress and justifiable anger after the attacks of 911. It was the exploitation of fear....

The Administration assured the U.S. public and the world, over and over again, that an attack was necessary to protect our people and the world from terrorism. It assiduously worked to alarm the public and blur the faces of Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden until they virtually became one...

I contend that, through it all, the people know. The American people unfortunately are used to political shading, spin, and the usual chicanery they hear from public officials. They patiently tolerate it up to a point. But there is a line. It may seem to be drawn in invisible ink for a time, but eventually it will appear in dark colors, tinged with anger. When it comes to shedding American blood - - when it comes to wreaking havoc on civilians, on innocent men, women, and children, callous dissembling is not acceptable. Nothing is worth that kind of lie - - not oil, not revenge, not reelection, not somebody's grand pipedream of a democratic domino theory.

And mark my words, the calculated intimidation which we see so often of late by the "powers that be" will only keep the loyal opposition quiet for just so long. Because eventually, like it always does, the truth will emerge. And when it does, this house of cards, built of deceit, will fall.

Five days of protesting have gone by in Iran, as students agitated against the conservative Islamic government. Hard-line religious militants attacked students in dorms and elsewhere. I'm wondering about the substance of accusations of American meddling. Is satellite TV meddling? This Washington Post report, filed from Turkey, clearly has an agenda, but I'm wondering how it seems from over there.

President Bush lauded the student protests that sparked five nights of rioting in the center of Tehran. "This is the beginning of people expressing themselves toward a free Iran, which I think is positive," Bush told reporters today in Kennebunkport, Maine, where he was vacationing with his family.

In Tehran, demonstrators condemned both the hard-line Islamic clerics who hold most power in Iran and the elected reformers who in six years have failed to reduce the conservatives' control over daily life. Chants of "Death to Khamenei!" were directed at the country's supreme religious leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. But crowds also called for the resignation of President Mohammad Khatami, a reform leader twice elected by landslide margins, who is a moderate cleric.

The unrest apparently peaked early Saturday, when militiamen wielding knives and iron bars attacked students in their rooms at two dormitories, reportedly injuring 50. Government officials singled out -- and by some accounts, attempted to jam -- Persian-language satellite television broadcasts operated by Iranian exiles in the United States. The broadcasts have urged Iranians into the streets, a position also championed by some in the Bush administration.

The complaints of ordinary Iranians, however, center on an authoritarian religious government that has failed to respond to demands for greater personal freedoms and at least the of a better economic future. More than 70 percent of Iran's 67 million people are under the age of 30 and too young to recall the 1979 Islamic revolution that deposed the U.S.-installed monarchy of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and brought the clerics to power.

The BBC report on the protests has a different spin, as the BBC tends to do. I have a lot of sympathy for those poor Iranian students, who are trapped in an iron triangle between the loathesome governments of Israel, the US and the mullahs. (Not to mention the US army now occupies two adjacent countries, which could cause some unrest.)