David & Goliath: Antigua v USA

Paul Blustein reports for the Washington Post:

WASHINGTON - Locked in a federal prison in the Nevada desert, tortured by the distant lights of the Las Vegas Strip, Jay Cohen couldn't stop thinking about getting even with the government that had put him away - and his revenge fantasy had a unique twist.

U.S. prosecutors put Cohen behind bars in 2002 for running an Internet gambling site in the Caribbean country of Antigua and Barbuda. Not long before the prison gates clanged shut, he had learned that the federal crackdown on online betting might violate global trade rules.

So he got Antigua and Barbuda to instigate a complaint at the World Trade Organization. "It kind of helped keep my spirits up," he said.

Fast forward: Antigua and Barbuda, population 69,000, is winning. The case has become an embarrassment to Washington, one that could result in economic pain. It isn't quite over, but the world's only superpower may have to capitulate to a country whose entire population could easily fit into the Rose Bowl.

Never has such a tiny nation brought a WTO complaint against the United States, which is one reason the dispute has implications well beyond the issue of gambling.

Ha'aretz:Israel is Winning...

According to Shmuel Rosner:

During their meeting on Monday, Peres spent most of the time relaying the following message to the Secretary of State: We are winning. Peres gave Rice details of the numbers of rockets captured, launchers destroyed and Hezbollah fighters killed.

The Security Council is meant to meet today to discuss the makeup of the multinational force that will be deployed to the region, but a key state, one meant to lead the others, announced on Monday it intended to boycott the meeting - unless it has a last minute change of heart. France believes that a cease-fire must first be agreed to and only then a political arrangement can follow.

The U.S. would like to see the order reversed. Bush, sources in Washington say, would like to emerge from the Lebanon crisis a winner. In the absence of an unequivocal victory over Hezbollah, only a convincing political settlement, backed by tough conditions, can provide the goods.

If Israel's leadership is astounded by the Bush administration's support, the American public's backing is also impressive. In a Gallup Poll a few days ago, 80 percent of the respondents said that Israel's action in Lebanon was justified. Only one in 10 Americans thinks otherwise. These support figures are equal to those of the Israeli public.

Victor David Hanson on the Israel-Hezbollah War

From VDH Private Papers (ht LGF):

When I used to read about the 1930s — the Italian invasion of Abyssinia, the rise of fascism in Italy, Spain, and Germany, the appeasement in France and Britain, the murderous duplicity of the Soviet Union, and the racist Japanese murdering in China — I never could quite figure out why, during those bleak years, Western Europeans and those in the United States did not speak out and condemn the growing madness, if only to defend the millennia-long promise of Western liberalism.

Of course, the trauma of the Great War was all too fresh, and the utopian hopes for the League of Nations were not yet dashed. The Great Depression made the thought of rearmament seem absurd. The connivances of Stalin with Hitler — both satanic, yet sometimes in alliance, sometimes not — could confuse political judgments.

But nevertheless it is still surreal to reread the fantasies of Chamberlain, Daladier, and Pope Pius, or the stump speeches by Charles Lindbergh (“Their [the Jews’] greatest danger to this country lies in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio, and our government”) or Father Coughlin (“Many people are beginning to wonder whom they should fear most — the Roosevelt-Churchill combination or the Hitler-Mussolini combination.”) — and it is even more baffling to consider that such men ever had any influence.

Not any longer.

Our present generation too is on the brink of moral insanity. That has never been more evident than in the last three weeks, as the West has proven utterly unable to distinguish between an attacked democracy that seeks to strike back at terrorist combatants, and terrorist aggressors who seek to kill civilians....

...It is now a cliché to rant about the spread of postmodernism, cultural relativism, utopian pacifism, and moral equivalence among the affluent and leisured societies of the West. But we are seeing the insidious wages of such pernicious theories as they filter down from our media, universities, and government — and never more so than in the general public’s nonchalance since Hezbollah attacked Israel .

These past few days the inability of millions of Westerners, both here and in Europe, to condemn fascist terrorists who start wars, spread racial hatred, and despise Western democracies is the real story, not the “quarter-ton” Israeli bombs that inadvertently hit civilians in Lebanon who live among rocket launchers that send missiles into Israeli cities and suburbs.

Yes, perhaps Israel should have hit more quickly, harder, and on the ground; yes, it has run an inept public relations campaign; yes, to these criticisms and more. But what is lost sight of is the central moral issue of our times: a humane democracy mired in an asymmetrical war is trying to protect itself against terrorists from the 7th century, while under the scrutiny of a corrupt world that needs oil, is largely anti-Semitic and deathly afraid of Islamic terrorists, and finds psychic enjoyment in seeing successful Western societies under duress.

In short, if we wish to learn what was going on in Europe in 1938, just look around.

NY Post: Osama Bin Laden's Son Joins Hezbollah

One thing about war, it is terrible, but brings sublime clarity to the question:

"Whose side are you on?"

Reese Schonfeld on Oil and War

This is an interesting tale of US-Russian cooperation that worked. From Me and Ted.com

Monday, July 31st, 2006
The Oil Caldron

This is a background story. It serves to define the background for the Eisenhower administration’s termination of the Anglo-French occupation of Suez and to explain Prime Minister Blair’s participation in the war in Iraq. It involves the who, why and how of it all, especially the why. It is based on two sources and includes quotes from Kevin Phillips’s American Theocracy and Paul Roberts’s The End of Oil.

Who: Robert B. Anderson, Secretary of the Navy (1953-1954), Deputy Secretary of Defense (1955), in private industry (1956), Secretary of the Treasury (1957-1961); a Texas oil lawyer who represented, among others, the rough and ready Texas oil barons, Clint Murchison and the Richardson-Bass family, Anderson was a particular favorite of Ike who was widely reported to have hoped that Anderson would get the Republican Presidential nomination instead of Richard Nixon.

Why: To establish U.S. primacy in the oil world.

How: By forcing the Anglo-French out of Suez with their tails between their legs.

The story begins in 1957. I was going to Columbia Law School while working at UPI/Movietone News. Henry Simon Bloch, one of my professors, who was also a partner in E.M. Warburg and Company, in explaining to us the use of economic power in international affairs; used as his prime example the success of the United States and Russia in forcing the British and the French out of Suez by threatening to destroy their currencies. The U.S. and the Soviets had said they would dump pounds and francs until they were worthless. That was something I had not known and that was not known to UPI or, to the best of my knowledge, by any other news organization. The Suez War was long over. It wasn’t a story anymore, and we didn’t put it on the wire.

During the Suez affair, it was Secretary of State John Foster Dulles who had delivered the hard line messages to our British and French allies. It wasn’t until the 80’s that a friend of mine who was a member of America’s corporate establishment told me of Robert Anderson’s role in the affair. My friend said that in 1956, Anderson, while representing Texas oil interests, had convinced Ike to cut the legs out from under the British and the French by attacking their currencies. He got his way and, since then, the flow of oil has been controlled by Washington and Houston, not London and Paris.

[My friend was no fan of Robert B. Anderson. He told me that in the oil industry, Anderson was referred to as ‘Robert the Bad” in contrast to Robert O. Anderson, who had created Arco and was known as “Robert the Good.” Years later, I met with “Robert the Bad” at the request of Arthur Taylor, the former President of CBS. Anderson wanted me to help him establish a television news service to be funded by South African money that would covertly push the cause of the Apartheid government. I declined but I still think of him as “Robert the Bad,” and I still see his hand as making mischief in Suez.]

Flash forward to spring, 2001. Paul Roberts writes in The End of Oil, “Months before the September 11th attacks, when Vice President Cheney…was drawing up a new national energy policy, he and other White House energy strategists had poured over maps of Iraqi oil fields to estimate how much of Iraqi oil might be dumped quickly on the market.” Roberts reports that Cheney and his oil industry allies thought, “If Iraq could be convinced to ignore its OPEC quota and start producing at maximum capacity the flood of new oil would effectively end OPEC’s ability to control prices….The oil markets, free at last from decades of manipulation, would seek a more natural level, which according to some analysts, would be around fourteen dollars a barrel, or even lower.” In short, if we could get control of the Iraqi oil fields, we would regain control of the flow and price of oil.

There are four great worldwide oil companies: ExxonMobil, ChevronTexaco, BP and Royal Dutch/Shell. The first two are American, the last two, British. Kevin Phillips, in American Theocracy, writes, “Were ExxonMobil, ChevronTexaco, BP and Royal Dutch/Shell to divide up Iraq, their receipts over several decades would be in the trillions of dollars.” This came at a critical time for BP and Shell. Phillips reports that Michael Meacher, Britain’s Environment Minister, who resigned to protest the Iraq War, had reported that “four months ago [Autumn, 2003], Britain’s oil imports overtook its exports, underlining a decline in North Sea oil production that was already well underway.”

I had never understood Prime Minister Blair’s willingness to join the “coalition of the willing.” Now, perhaps, I do. If in 2001, Cheney and the American oil companies were poring over maps of Iraq getting ready to divide the spoils of an easy war, BP and Shell wanted to be at the table, too. If getting there meant sending British troops to Basra, if getting there meant remaining there and taking casualties, Blair thought it worth the price. (The French, who no longer play in the worldwide oil game, could oppose the war with nothing to lose.) Blair could not chance an American victory that would leave BP and Shell high and dry.

To summarize, American wrested control of the world’s oil supply in 1956, gradually lost it to OPEC and saw Iraq as a chance to get it back. The Brits had lost military and political power in 1956 but still retained an economic role in the oil business realized that if the U.S. won the war on its own even that would be in jeopardy. For the U.S. the Iraq war may have been an option, but once the U.S. was committed to going in, for Tony Blair and the British oil industry, it was a necessity.

Thursday, July 27th, 2006

It Seems Like Old Times

Fifty years ago, in the same week as Andrea Doria, Gamal Abdel Nasser, the President of Egypt, nationalized the Suez Canal. The British and the French, who had previously controlled the canal, along with the U.S. launched the Suez Canal Users Association to take over its management. Egypt rejected the SCUA. The U.N., which had been participating in the negotiations with Egypt made no progress.

The U.N. dithered, but finally, early in October called a meeting of the Security Council to endorse the USCA. The Council never voted. On October 29, Israel, which had been colluding with the allied Brits and French, invaded the Sinai Peninsula, moving its troops down to the canal. On the 31st, the allies began bombing Egypt, and Naser sank forty ships in the canal to end its usefulness.

The U.N. General Assembly meets and calls for an immediate ceasefire. It offers to send a United Nations Emergency Force (UNEF) into the canal zone within a few days. The French and Brits veto the Assembly proposal and drop 1,000 paratroopers onto the canal. America pressures the French and the Brits to get out by threatening to dump British pounds and French francs, breaking their currency. The Soviets do likewise. Britain, France and Israel bow to the pressure and agree to withdraw. A month later the UNEF troops arrive and Egyptians celebrate their victory over the West. Fifty years later, the canal belongs to Egypt.

Israel had agreed to play the catspaw on behalf of the West in the battle with Islam. Now, fifty years later, Israel is once again fighting a war on behalf of Western Civilization against an even more militant Islam. Once more, the U.N. is dithering, ringing its hands and proposing meaningless ceasefires. To the credit of President Bush, the U.S. is vetoing all attempts to impose a ceasefire until Hezbollah is defanged. The U.S. currency is not yet so weak that the Russians and Chinese can pressure us by dumping dollars.

Israel is spending lives and America is spending dollars to preserve Western civilization. If we had done that fifty years ago, the British and French might be on our side now -- better late than never.

[There is more to the “why we did it” in 1950 and other results of that decision. I know something of it, and I’ll write more about it later.]

Russia Should Oust Hezbollah

This interesting news analysis comes from Russia's Interfax News Agency, via Johnson's Russia List:

Analyst: Russia Should Seek Hezbollah's Ouster From Lebanon

MOSCOW. July 31 (Interfax) - A senior Russian
analyst said that, in the current
Israeli-Lebanese conflict, "Russia should
navigate between the Arab world and Israel" but
seek the "squeezing" of militant Islamic group
Hezbollah out of Lebanon in order to strengthen
the position of the Lebanese government.

"Russia should thread between the Arab world and
Israel and try to find a path toward a peace
settlement. This path is understandable:
strengthening the Lebanese government and the
Lebanese army, and for this reason squeezing
Hezbollah out of Lebanon," Sergei Markov,
director of the Institute of Political Studies, told Interfax.

This would be a difficult course for Russia to
follow, because it "is in tune with the American
plan and contradicts the interests of Syria,
which keeps supporting Hezbollah," he said.

"But there hardly is any other position that
would guarantee lasting peace, because the
possibility for Hezbollah to act as a military
power would sooner or later manifest itself in
their attacking Israel again and in Israel attacking them," Markov said.

He predicted that Hezbollah would switch to
guerrilla warfare if Israel destroys most of its military power.

The Power of Film

"What Artistotle did for drama, Suber has now done for film. This is a profound and succinct book that is miraculously fun to read." -David Koepp, Screenwriter, War of the Worlds (2005), Spider-Man, Mission Impossible, Jurassic Park

That's the blurb for my former UCLA Film School professor's new book, The Power of Film. You can buy a copy from Amazon.com, by clicking on the box:

RobertDreyfuss.com

Just found out that the author of Devil's Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam has his own website, here:

A second big mistake that emerges in Devil’s Game occurred in the 1970s, when, at the height of the Cold War and the struggle for control of the Middle East, the United States either supported or acquiesced in the rapid growth of Islamic right in countries from Egypt to Afghanistan. In Egypt, Anwar Sadat brought the Muslim Brotherhood back to Egypt. In Syria, the United States, Israel, and Jordan supported the Muslim Brotherhood in a civil war against Syria. And, as described in a groundbreaking chapter in Devil’s Game, Israel quietly backed Ahmed Yassin and the Muslim Brotherhood in the West Bank and Gaza, leading to the establishment of Hamas.

Still another major mistake was the fantasy that Islam would penetrate the USSR and unravel the Soviet Union in Asia. It led to America’s support for the jihadists in Afghanistan. But as Devil’s Game shows, America’s alliance with the Afghan Islamists long predated the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 and had its roots in CIA activity in Afghanistan in the 1960s and in the early and mid-1970s. The Afghan jihad spawned civil war in Afghanistan in the late 1980s, gave rise to the Taliban, and got Osama bin Laden started on building Al Qaeda.

Would the Islamic right have existed without U.S. support? Of course. This is not a book for the conspiracy-minded. But there is no question that the virulence of the movement that we now confront—and which confronts many of the countries in the region, too, from Algeria to India and beyond—would have been significantly less had the United States made other choices during the Cold War.

Herb Meyer: Time to Crush Hezbollah

From The American Thinker:

...on April 18, 1983, Hezbollah blew up that building and killed her, along with the agency’s top Mideast analyst, Bob Ames, and more than 60 other people. Six months later, on October 23, Hezbollah launched an attack in Beirut that killed 241 of our Marines, sailors and soldiers.

Why Reagan Held Back

President Reagan decided not to retaliate for either of these attacks, and I believe this was among the toughest decisions he ever made. What the President understood – and what so many people demanding retaliation back then did not – is that in 1983 we were in the final stages of winning the Cold War. This was the President’s great objective and achieving it would absorb all of his, and the administration’s, energies and efforts. He would allow nothing – not even Hezbollah’s attacks on our embassy and our Marines – to distract us from defeating the Soviet Union.

Now we are engaged in another global struggle, and this time Hezbollah is right in the middle of it. In the war on terrorism, Hezbollah isn’t a distraction. It’s a wholly-owned subsidiary of Iran, and a partner of Syria – both of which are determined to stop us from winning in Afghanistan and Iraq. Today, through what appears to be its own miscalculation, Hezbollah finds itself at war with Israel. Good. This may be the best break we’ve had since 9-11. We ought to give the Israelis all the help we can – militarily, on the ground as well as in the air – to annihilate Hezbollah and all its leaders. That will weaken Iran and Syria, and by doing so help us win in Afghanistan and Iraq....

...When you’re in the middle of a war, of course you need to think before you act. But there is such a thing as over-thinking, and today we are in serious danger of making this mistake. In war there is nothing – absolutely nothing – that brings victory faster and more completely than the total annihilation of your enemy. Do that and everything else – what the late, great Senator Sam Ervine of North Carolina once called “the complex complexities” – sort themselves out.

Right now we have an unexpected opportunity to obliterate Hezbollah, and by doing so to increase our chances for victory in Afghanistan and Iraq. We’d be fools not to go for it.

Jerusalem Post: NGOs Demonize Israel for Hezbollah

Gerald Steinberg writes:

IN THIS battlefield of political warfare, a group of powerful NGOs play a central role, introducing and amplifying the demonization of Israeli self-defense.

New York-based Human Rights Watch issued eight statements on the Lebanon conflict between July 13 and July 24, of which only one focuses on criticism of Hizbullah.

HRW, which has been producing anti-Israel propaganda for many years (often providing a single exception as a fig leaf to mention in responses to critics), included a detailed "Q and A" report purporting to analyze violations of international law, primarily by Israel.

In a detailed article written by Dr. Avi Bell and published by NGO Monitor, HRW's analysis was shown to be based on "distorted views of the underlying facts, selective omission of crucial legal issues... [that] mislead readers and betray the bias of the piece."

HRW's campaign was joined by similar statements - some more balanced and honest than others - issued by Amnesty International, B'Tselem, Christian Aid, the International Commission of Jurists (based in Geneva), the International Federation of Human Rights Leagues (based in Paris), Oxfam, Norwegian People's Aid, MIFTAH (run by Hanan Ashrawi), and others.

THESE NGO superpowers have immediate access to the media and politicians. HRW and Amnesty have annual budgets of tens of millions of dollars, of which more seems to be used for promotion than for actual research.

Enjoying what is know as the "halo effect," few if any journalists or diplomats bother to check the details, biases or credibility of NGO claims. When the details were examined by NGO Monitor's research staff, or Prof. Alan Dershowitz of Harvard University, the claims have often been shown to be false or unverifiable.

Bull Moose on the Israel-Hezbollah War

From The Bull Moose:

We have now arrived at the point in Israel's war of self defense against Hezbollah when world opinion is turning against the Jewish state. As the Moose expected, it was inevitable. It happens every time.

The bottom line is that world opinion will not be satisfied until Israel stops defending herself. This war is as just as Israel's fight for existence in '48 or '67 or '73. It is not about occupation. It is a fight against evil. It is as clear cut as WWII.

It truly boggles the mind that the world carps and complains that Israel is "disproportionate" in its war to defend itself. Israel was a nation at peace that was attacked by a terrorist organization that was given refuge in Lebanon and is part of the government. Israel has every right to eliminate that threat. Israel has the power to level Lebanon - and that would have been the fate of that suffering country during any other time in human history. Instead, Israel is risking the lives of her troops to avoid as many civilian casualties as possible.

Israel should be celebrated and applauded by the world for her actions. Instead, the world denounces the Jewish state.

The problem is that liberal civilization lacks the moral clarity that existed in the '40s. Now, all is relative. And the world is weary of this fight. But, once again, Jews have no choice.

Victor Davis Hanson: A Dictionary of the Israel-Hezbollah Conflict

VDH channels Ambrose Bierce in National Review Online:

“Civilians” in Lebanon have munitions in their basements and deliberately wish to draw fire; in Israel they are in bunkers to avoid it. Israel uses precision weapons to avoid hitting them; Hezbollah sends random missiles into Israel to ensure they are struck.

“Collateral damage” refers mostly to casualties among Hezbollah’s human shields; it can never be used to describe civilian deaths inside Israel, because everything there is by intent a target.

“Cycle of Violence” is used to denigrate those who are attacked, but are not supposed to win.

“Deliberate” reflects the accuracy of Israeli bombs hitting their targets; it never refers to Hezbollah rockets that are meant to destroy anything they can.

“Deplore” is usually evoked against Israel by those who themselves have slaughtered noncombatants or allowed them to perish — such as the Russians in Grozny, the Syrians in Hama, or the U.N. in Rwanda and Dafur.

“Disproportionate” means that the Hezbollah aggressors whose primitive rockets can’t kill very many Israeli civilians are losing, while the Israelis’ sophisticated response is deadly against the combatants themselves. See “excessive.”

Anytime you hear the adjective “excessive,” Hezbollah is losing. Anytime you don’t, it isn’t.

“Eyewitnesses” usually aren’t, and their testimony is cited only against Israel.

“Grave concern” is used by Europeans and Arabs who privately concede there is no future for Lebanon unless Hezbollah is destroyed — and it should preferably be done by the “Zionists” who can then be easily blamed for doing it.

“Innocent” often refers to Lebanese who aid the stockpiling of rockets or live next to those who do. It rarely refers to Israelis under attack.

The “militants” of Hezbollah don’t wear uniforms, and their prime targets are not those Israelis who do.

“Multinational,” as in “multinational force,” usually means “third-world mercenaries who sympathize with Hezbollah.” See “peacekeepers.”

Seattle Gunman Reportedly Won US Institute of Peace Essay Contest

According to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer:

Those who knew Naveed Haq said Saturday that to them he was an enigma, a puzzle that they wish they could have solved before his deadly rampage in a Seattle Jewish center.

Stunned and saddened by the news, some of Haq's acquaintances recounted many of what they saw as the contradictions of his life.

He held a degree in electrical engineering and was the son of a successful engineer, yet he couldn't keep a regular job. He was smart, creative and skilled as a writer. He recently won an essay contest for a U.S. Institute of Peace scholarship.

I wonder what the US Institute for Peace has to say about this report?

Civilian Deaths in Perspective

After following the incredible atrocity propaganda campaign (it reminded me of British "Germans Raped Belgian Nuns" stories during World War I) waged by Hezbollah and its allies in the non-Fox media, I googled statistics on other wars, and found this study by Marc Herold analyzing significant civilian casualties in
America's Afghanistan campaign, NATO's Serbia campaign, and in Cambodia. Russia's Grozny campaign not included in study, but probably no better: ...And this site claims there have been over 39,000 civilian casualties so far in Iraq.

Ann Althouse on Woody Allen's Scoop

This is the most interesting review of the film that I've read, anywhere:

So I think this is Woody's elaborate meditation about sex, specifically about an old man's exclusion from sex. The scoop, which Splendini can't get, is the woman's vagina. (Dictionary definition of "scoop": "7. A hollow area; a cavity.") There are many more things I could talk about here, but I don't want to spoil the ending and I've gone on too long already.

Yoel Marcus: Israel Must Fight Harder, Faster

Yoel Marcus writes in Ha'aretz:

Until 1967, the State of Israel fought against neighbors who refused to recognize its existence. Since then, all the Islamic countries (with the exception of Iran) have stopped talking about the destruction of Israel. We have peace treaties with some of them, and some of the more sane ones even appreciate having us around.

The current war is being waged by fanatic Islamic organizations - President George Bush's axis of evil - whose declared aim is to wipe Israel off the face of the earth. They are fighting us in the name of Allah, attacking civilian targets in Israel and Jewish targets overseas. In the same way that we have no answer to long-range ballistic missiles, we have no answer to the ideology that promotes Israel's destruction.

The trouble is that we are fighting with yesterday's weapons. Israel should have switched over long ago to another form of deterrence and retaliation. When Hezbollah kidnapped two soldiers on our border, using rocket fire as a diversion, Israel should have responded with a very powerful pinpointed strike. Instead, the chief of staff recommended a war best described as half tea, half coffee - bombing and besieging Lebanon in the hope that the world would intervene and create a demilitarized zone between us and Hezbollah. So far, the air raids and massive destruction that were meant to restore our power of deterrence have only done the opposite. No minister in the security cabinet, apart from Shimon Peres, has asked what Israel is planning to do in the last stage of the game.

A recent scenario has Israel agreeing to a cease-fire and a multinational force deployed between the Litani River and the international border. But Israel cannot go about its business and ignore the intolerable ease with which Hezbollah lobs missiles at innocent civilians - something that no Arab country at war with Israel has ever dared to do in all the years of its existence. It is unthinkable to walk away from the battlefield with the depressing sense that out of all the wars Israel has ever fought, only Hezbollah, a mere band of terrorists, was able to bombard the Israeli home front with thousands of missiles and get off scot-free.

Before any international agreement, Israel must sound the last chord, launching a massive air and ground offensive that will end this mortifying war, not with a whimper but with a thunderous roar.

Debka Analysis: International Community Hands Victory to Hezbollah

From Debka.com:

DEBKAfile notes: France has a highly-developed relationship with Hizballah. French diplomats in Beirut have maintained contacts with Hizballah leaders close to Hassan Nasrallah in the last two week of fighting. In 2004, President Jacques Chirac invited Nasrallah to a conference of Francophone Arab leaders. They shook hands and the Hizballah leader was seated beside the French president at the top table. France may well have obtained prior Hizballah consent to its draft.
In Jerusalem, Rice was assigned with clinching Israeli concessions, which reportedly include:
1. Release of Lebanese prisoner in return for Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev. The argument is still ahead on the exact definition of “Lebanese prisoners.” defined.
2. Withdrawal of Israeli positions from the Shebaa Farms and the Mt. Hermon and Mt. Dov slopes and passes for the handover of these strategic points to the multinational force. This would give Nasrallah, who has been fighting to achieve this end for six years, his greatest triumph and give Syria and the Palestinians an object lesson on the application of brute force to obtain results.
3. Israel no longer presses for the disarming of Hizballah. That too is left to the “international community.”
In other words, just as Ariel Sharon and Ehud Olmert handed over the Gaza-Egyptian border terminals to a European unit in 2005 to expedite the pull-out from the Gaza Strip, so too is Olmert again entrusting to a foreign force the Israel-Lebanese border and the security of northern Israel - with the Shebaa Farms thrown in as an extra. This result lets Nasrallah come out on top after provoking a full-scale war and provides a boost for all the forces of fundamentalist Islamic terror waging war on the West. It is also the outcome of the Israeli army’s unfortunate failure to break the back of Hizballah in 18 days of combat.

Andrew McCarthy: Seattle Attack is Terrorism

Read it here. (ht lgf)

Debbie Schlussel: Inside Hezbollah's American Support Group

Debbi Schlussel reports on Hezbollah's American supporters in Dearborn, Michigan:

Sunday was a busy day.

First, I watched Michigan FBI Special Agent in Charge Daniel Roberts chase after Hezbollah terrorists on the elliptical machine at a swanky suburban Detroit gym.

Then, I did the work he and his agents should be doing. But aren't. (Don't believe claims by Roberts and paunchy FBI sidekick, William Kowalski, that they are "monitoring" Hezbollah.) I headed to the Bint Jebail Cultural Center in the heart of Islamic America--Dearborn, Michigan. More on that club--a hangout for thousands of Hezbollah supporters on our shores--later.

Tony Blair Explains Worldwide Struggle Against Islamist Extremism

At the White House, with George W. Bush, yesterday:

PRIME MINISTER BLAIR: I don't think, actually, it's anything to do with a loss of American influence at all. I think -- we've got to go back and ask what changed policy, because policy has changed in the past few years. And what changed policy was September the 11th. That changed policy, but actually, before September the 11th this global movement with a global ideology was already in being. September the 11th was the culmination of what they wanted to do. But, actually -- and this is probably where the policymakers, such as myself, were truly in error -- is that even before September the 11th, this was happening in all sorts of different ways in different countries.

I mean, in Algeria, for example, tens and tens of thousands of people lost their lives. This movement has grown, it is there, it will latch on to any cause that it possibly can and give it a dimension of terrorism and hatred. You can see this. You can see it in Kashmir, for example. You can see it in Chechnya. You can see it in Palestine.

Now, what is its purpose? Its purpose is to promote its ideology based upon the perversion of Islam, and to use any methods at all, but particularly terrorism, to do that, because they know that the value of terrorism to them is -- as I was saying a moment or two ago, it's not simply the act of terror, it's the chain reaction that terror brings with it. Terrorism brings the reprisal; the reprisal brings the additional hatred; the additional hatred breeds the additional terrorism, and so on. But in a small way, we lived through that in Northern Ireland over many, many decades.

Now, what happened after September the 11th -- and this explains, I think, the President's policy, but also the reason why I have taken the view, and still take the view that Britain and America should remain strong allies, shoulder-to-shoulder in fighting this battle, is that we are never going to succeed unless we understand they are going to fight hard. The reason why they are doing what they're doing in Iraq at the moment -- and, yes, it's really tough as a result of it -- is because they know that if, right in the center of the Middle East, in an Arab, Muslim country, you've got a non-sectarian democracy, in other words people weren't governed either by religious fanatics or secular dictators, you've got a genuine democracy of the people, how does their ideology flourish in such circumstances?

So they have imported the terrorism into that country, preyed on whatever reactionary elements there are to boost it. And that's why we have the issue there; that's why the Taliban are trying to come back in Afghanistan. That is why, the moment it looked as if you could get progress in Israel and Palestine, it had to be stopped. That's the moment when, as they saw there was a problem in Gaza, so they realized, well, there's a possibility now we can set Lebanon against Israel.

Now, it's a global movement, it's a global ideology. And if there's any mistake that's ever made in these circumstances, it's if people are surprised that it's tough to fight, because you're up against an ideology that's prepared to use any means at all, including killing any number of wholly innocent people.

And I don't dispute part of the implication of your question at all, in the sense that you look at what is happening in the Middle East and what is happening in Iraq and Lebanon and Palestine, and, of course, there's a sense of shock and frustration and anger at what is happening, and grief at the loss of innocent lives. But it is not a reason for walking away. It's a reason for staying the course, and staying it no matter how tough it is, because the alternative is actually letting this ideology grip a larger and larger number of people.

And it is going to be difficult. Look, we've got a problem even in our own Muslim communities in Europe, who will half-buy into some of the propaganda that's pushed at it -- the purpose of America is to suppress Islam, Britain has joined with America in the suppression of Islam. And one of the things we've got to stop doing is stop apologizing for our own positions. Muslims in America, as far as I'm aware of, are free to worship; Muslims in Britain are free to worship. We are plural societies.

It's nonsense, the propaganda is nonsense. And we're not going to defeat this ideology until we in the West go out with sufficient confidence in our own position and say, this is wrong. It's not just wrong in its methods, it's wrong in its ideas, it's wrong in its ideology, it's wrong in every single wretched reactionary thing about it. And it will be a long struggle, I'm afraid. But there's no alternative but to stay the course with it. And we will.