Hawks clamor for escalation, stuff about Syria, Neo-con accuses BBC of antisemitism

It's hard to know where the motives of defense people begin or end... Another memo leaked out from that sieve of a British government, which said that they are looking for a way to withdraw troops. We've got a little bit about Syria, as well.

BAGnewsNotes is usually interesting photo analysis, including this pic of an Iraqi soldier in some house, as well as photos of Bashar Assad and the memorably titled "Move Over Zarqawi: The New Iranian President And The 1979 Embassy Take-Over."

Brad at Bradblog interviews Joe Wilson.

I would recommend looking at Syria Comment, which is down at the moment but quite good. Josh Landis has a lot of interesting stuff, including a really good story translated from French press about Syria's history and political development. A huge feature on Syria & Assad by lead NY Times reporter James Bennet is really quite good.

Prof. Juan Cole talks about increased sectarian violence in Iraq, as well as the fact that apparently his site is being censored by some military computer administrators in Iraq itself--the soldiers are cut off. (via Dkos) As he says:

I have a lot of .mil readers, and know for a fact that the blog is valued by many intelligence professionals in DC, so it is a shame if it is not available at some bases.

Good stuff from Billmon at Whiskey Bar: The Devil's Flypaper. I didn't know that Bush's nasty new counterterror specialist, Fran Townsend, had quite likely pressured Abu Ghraib personnel to give detainees that special care. Evidently she's still upholding the flypaper theory. As Billmon put it,

"I don't know how you would even begin to de-program someone capable of believing, with fanatical certainty, two completely contradictory statements: i.e., that because there are terrorists in Iraq, they can't be in London blowing up the subways -- even though they're in London, blowing up the subways."

There's a good column by Dionne about this in WaPo:

Appearing on "Fox News Sunday," Fran Townsend, the president's homeland security adviser, said that the war in Iraq attracts terrorists "where we have a fighting military and a coalition that can take them on and not have the sort of civilian casualties that you saw in London."
Huh? If British troops fighting in Iraq did not stop the terrorists from striking London, then what is the logic for believing that American troops fighting in Iraq will stop terrorists from striking our country again? Intelligence reports -- and Townsend's own words -- suggest that Iraq has become a terrorist breeding ground since the American invasion. How, exactly, has that made us safer?

This is also a weirdly racist or at least dehumanizing argument: Townsend is stating that there aren't massive civilian casualties in Iraq? Can we actually be sure she believes Iraqis are real human beings?

This was a good article in The American Conservative about how the phenomenon of suicide terrorism is most closely linked to foreign military occupation -- or the perception of foreign military occupation.
Oh good, one of Bush's top intelligence advisors is lobbying to help China buy UNOCAL.

I feel like throwing in a true classic: Judith Miller's famous NY Times article about Saddam purchasing those damn aluminum tubes.

Arch-neocon Michael Ledeen is accusing a wide set of the British public, including the BBC, of sweeping, deeply rooted antisemitism... and who better to exemplify this than Ahmed Chalabi?!?

The final component of British blindness on the subject of the Middle East is one we are not supposed to talk about in good company: the Jews. Yet I don't know any country this side of the Levant in which there has been so much anti-Semitism, so many complaints that "Zionists," "Likudniks," "Jewish hawks," and — the single epithet that sums up all of the above — "neocons" had manipulated America and its poodle Blair into the ghastly blunder of Iraq. The BBC has devoted hours of radio and television to slanderous misrepresentations of places like the American Enterprise Institute, where I sit, and of such Jewish luminaries as Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, William Kristol, and Paul Wolfowitz. Sometimes it seemed one was reading translations from the Saudi or Egyptian or Iranian press, so total was the hatred of the Jews.

This fit nicely with the desire of the British establishment to carry on their special relationship with some Arab leaders, and many British elites often seemed a micro-step away from saying that the world would be a better place if only Israel weren't there. The Middle East would be so much easier, you know. And when London was bombed, you can be sure — indeed you can read it — many of these people blamed Israel and the Jews, both those in the Middle East and those in New York and Washington. Indeed, within minutes of the attack, a story appeared according to which the Israelis had advance notice, and had instructed Finance Minister Netanyahu to stay put, instead of going to give a speech. The story was as false as the one according to which Israelis had stayed away from the World Trade Center on 9/11, but they both reflected a state of mind. An anti-Semitic mind.
All too many Brits (as some Americans, albeit far fewer) would prefer to devote their national energies to the elimination or "taming" of Israel, and, as they see it, the silencing of their own Jews, rather than fighting Islamic terrorism. Combined with the desire to keep Arab money in London and special access for British businessmen and diplomats and scholars in the Arab world, it explains why HMG gave sanctuary and indeed benevolent assistance to the jihadis in their HMG midst.

IRAQIS — THE NEW JEWS?
And so Israel was not on the prime minister's list [of damaged countries]. What about Iraq?

The Iraqis are viewed much the same way, and are at some risk of becoming the new Jews of the Middle East. In the enormous hate literature directed against the neocons, Ahmed Chalabi is part and parcel of the anti-Semites' hateful vision. No matter that he is a Shiite, and no matter that he was rudely dismissed by the Israeli government before Operation Iraqi Freedom. He was in cahoots with the Jewish cabal, and was therefore "one of them." And as Chalabi, so the rest of the lot. ..... When is the last time you read anything, anywhere (with all too few exceptions — like Arthur Chrenkoff's "good news" beat), celebrating these rare qualities of spirit? And this question goes hand in hand with its twin: When is the last time you read anything about the incredible performance of the State of Israel, similarly under siege and similarly stressed by the crisis that surrounds it?
[......]
This sickness is certainly not limited to Great Britain; we find it here as well, in such personages as Pat Buchanan and Juan Cole, along with their acolytes.

It is a bit depressing to hear Ledeen resort to tarring the BBC with the Nazi brush. Where does Macalester prof. Emily Rosenberg, for example, fit into his rubric of Jew haters? In a fine moment during the International Roundtable conference last year, she took him to task for his shady prescriptions of global Trotskyist-inspired revolution, the war and all the rest. Naturally Ledeen also calls for attacking Iran after the London bombings (via Prospect.org).

It's also a little weird to hear him claim that the AP story about Israel getting tipped off by Scotland Yard was basically the product of an antisemitic mind. It was just an AP story, not 21st Century Goebbels. The antisemitism gun is pretty much the first refuge of a scoundrel, the rhetorical fog deployed to cover for a handful of nasty bureaucrats in Washington - Christians, Jews, Muslims, Moonies and their newspapers. (note: Among Holocaust researchers it is accepted to spell "antisemitic" as such, or as "anti-semitic" -- "Semitic" doesn't need to be capitalized because the term was first developed by bigots anyway)

More about post-London hawks randomly calling for overthrowing Tehran without really explaining how, or why the hell it would even be feasible, helpful, good, etc...

Kos bans some people who have been posting raving conspiracy theories in the diaries, as well as those recommending said diaries. This seems like a decidedly hazardous step for DailyKos, as one of the people on the huge reaction thread put it:

Or maybe my definition of a conspiracy theory is different. Definitions are important, because a large portion of "acceptable" diaries on this site could be defined as conspiratorial in nature, by right wing ideologues or even average joe types. Check the recomended list, Congressman Conyers diary asks for a timeline of Bush Administration actions up to the war, specifically looking for evidence of fixed intelligence. The President lies and it ends up in the death of close to 2000 military personnel, thousands badly injured, and billions of tax payer dollars sunk into the sand and the pockets of corporations linked to administartion officials. Sound like a wacked out conspiracy theory?

But this response makes some damn good sense:

The point is (so far as I can tell) not to ban all discussion of conspiracies at all.
Markos believes in several conspiracies, at least.
The point is that if you are speculating about a conspiracy, or promoting others who do, you have an obligation to either:
a) cite some documented facts that lend credence to your assertions
or
b) recognize that you are engaging in rank speculation and that therefore
b-sub1) especially if it is inflammatory and not backed up by any real investigation - 
b-sub2) and most especially if you are nasty to those who challenge you to back up your claims - b-sub3) people here will come down on you

True enough... but the question about the barrier between conspiracy and plain political speculation's a tough one... Eh whatever...