Category: Hawkwatch

McCain v. Sa’di

I once admired Senator John McCain. We even appeared together 16 years ago on a national radio call-in show, just after I returned from my first trip to Iran. I complimented him then for his “independence” and for then having one of the better observers of the Arab world on his staff (Tony Cordesman). One of my best students then was a niece of the Senator. During the last decade, it was Senator McCain, despite his own harrowing ordeal as a POW in North Vietnam, who helped normalize ties with Vietnam, even without “regime change.”
Alas, I don’t recognize the McCain of late, especially this past month amid his “Straight Talk” campaign to be President. His “April Fool’s Day” Alice-in-Wonderland tour of Iraq was bad enough. His comments last week at a South Carolina VFW rally hit an even lower “note.” Challenged with an uber-hawk question about “when are we going to send an air message to Iran,” McCain started by singing the version of the famous Beach Boys tune, “Barbara Ann” with a few bars of “Bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb…” (Iran.)
The video-clip of McCain’s performance has been played far and wide, and is now enshrined at YouTube.
One wonders if McCain was familiar with last year’s sardonic anti-war video spoof by Adam Kontras, found, naturally, at letsbombiran.com.
More likely, McCain remembers, as I do, the 1980 “propaganda parody” version of “bomb Iran” by “Vince Vance and the Valiants” amid the diplomatic hostage crisis. I found an “mp3” version here. Note the pronunciation then of “I-ran.” Their record label, a sign of the times then was, “Towel Records,” as in “Towel-heads.”
Alas, McCain’s handlers may figure that most Americans are still hostage to those same black and white images of Iran from 1980. In the following clip McCain laughs off a question about the “insensitivity” of his bomb joke with the reply, “Insensitive to what, the Iranians?”
One suspects McCain has watched 300 too much. Or maybe he was trapped by a leading question, cracked a nervous poor-taste joke, and now can’t figure out how to take it back without offending his shrinking base. That would be a charitable interpretation.
Regarding McCain’s quip for critics to “get a life,” Ali Moayedian’s rejoinder will “strike a chord” (if you will) with many:

“Mr. McCain, I will get a life. I do have a life. But what do you have to tell to all the dead? How can you look into the eyes of mothers, fathers, wives, husbands and children and sing your happy bombing tune? Can you tell them to get a life? I wouldn’t be surprised if you can. I always wonder if people like you have a soul?”

And on the matter of being “insensitive” to Iranians, Moayedian, who writes from California (where hundreds of thousands of Iranian-Americans vote), poignantly asks what Iranians of all stripes will be wondering,

“Mr. McCain, I know it’s too much to expect you to be sensitive to Iranians. After all they must be less of a human. You don’t care about Americans. Why should you care about Iranians?”

Ironically, on the day McCain’s “bomb Iran” clip began circulating, Iranians around the world were commemorating Sa’di day, in honor of the great Persian poet.
Writing seven centuries before Nelson Mandela spoke of “we are humans together or nothing at all,” Sa’di may be best known in the west for his poetic lines on the oneness of humanity:
The sons of men are members in a body whole related.
For a single essence are they and all created.
When Fortune persecutes with pain one member solely, surely
The other members of the body cannot stand securely.
O you who from another’s trouble turn aside your view
It is not fitting they bestow the name of “Man” on you.
Not bad for a writer in the 13th Century – anywhere
Sa’di’s works have been translated into English since the 18th Century, and several recent works on Sa’di are available. I gather too that leading World Literature texts in American high schools now include passages of Sa’di wisdom and wit.
McCain too should be familiar with the “oneness of humankind” poem, as it has graced the walls of the United Nations since its founding. The UN recently put on display a priceless carpet, donated by Iran, with Sa’idi’s original words woven into it in Gold.
Even the current Iranian Mission to the UN features a modern, gender neutral rendering of the same passage on its web home page:
All human beings are limbs of each other
Having been created of one essence
When time afflicts a limb with pain
The other limbs cannot at rest remain.
Sounds more “human” to me than, “bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran.”
A final irony here: The original “Barbara Ann” song was not written or first performed by the Beach Boys. Rather the song was a 1961 “doo-wop” hit by The Regents. Fred Fassert, who wrote the ditty in honor of his little sister, and Chuck Fassert who sang it, were of Iranian descent….

George Will vs. The Weekly Standard

In a wildly confused front-page Washington Post story today (19 July), Michael Abramowitz asserts that President Bush is “facing a new and swiftly building backlash on the right over his handling of foreign affairs.”
Abramowitz claims “conservative intellectuals and commentators” are infuriated by perceived “timidity and confusion about long-standing problems” ranging from Iran to North Korea to Lebanon. Kenneth Adelman tops the cake by accusing President Bush of middle-of-the-road “Kerryism.” By “conservatives,” Abramowitz is mostly referring to “neoconservatives” – no doubt the many who went apoplectic when the Bush Administration recently appeared to shift gears on Iran and even to de-emphasize the “regime change” mantra.
Yet burried within Abramowitz essay is a vague reference to yesterday’s startling WaPo essay by traditional “conservative” columnist George Will. Will argues first that the Administration’s core hope that the democratic “infection” emanating from the democracy imposed on Iraq has, at best, produced democratic movements prone to extremism. He then rejects Secretary Rice’s rejoinder that democatic turmoil and “violence” is unavoidable.

“that argument creates a blind eye: It makes instability, no matter how pandemic or lethal, necessarily a sign of progress. Violence as vindication….”

Yet Will saves his most choice words for attacks on the Administration coming from what he deems to be a radically un-conservative and different direction, one

Continue reading “George Will vs. The Weekly Standard”

Ledeen, Franklin, Rhode, SCIRI, Iranians in key pre-war meeting?

Nur al-Cubicle has an English translation today of yet another great piece from La Repubblica on the Italian angle to the planning of the US War on Iraq. Like the earlier ones on the SIItalian origins of the yellow cake fantasy, this article is also by Carlo Bonini and Giuseppi d’Avanzo.
They write that a high-ranking official in the Italian sintel organization SISMI told them:

    For us Italians… the war on Iraq was already underway in the days before Christmans, 2002. He smiles. He is animated with a glint of excitement in his eyes and for once seems seems to have no qualms about letting his personal satisfaction slip from behind a frozen mask.
    Our man is too disciplined to crow about his successes and too stubborn to be discouraged by defeat. He tells us: It was a novelty, a revolution for our intelligence services. Never before in its history has SISMI been so prominently involved in military ground operations and a major role in planning a war campaign, to boot. The Italian Government? Of course our work was authorized by the Italian Government—are you joking? It was real war, not an exercise! The twenty men we sent to Iraq were risking their lives. He pauses. The espresso arrives. He sips it slowly, his eyes half-closed with satisfaction.
    He continues. Twenty men from three SISMI departments were involved: Intelligence, Operations, and Counterterrorism…

So this whole thing seems, in this account, to have started with a fateful meeting:

    The story of Italian military intervention in Iraq begins when the resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, [and well-known Iran-contra sleaze-bag] Michael Ledeen, sponsored by Defense Minister Antonio Martino, debarks in Rome with Pentagon men in tow to meet a handful of “Iranian exiles.” The meeting is organized by SISMI. In an agency “safe house” near Piazza di Spagna (however, other sources have told us it was a reserved room in the Parco dei Principi Hotel).

(This meeting, by the way, was probably the same December 2002 gathering described by Josh Marshall and Laura Rozen in this September 2004 article.)
The Repubblica writers continue:

    Twenty men are gathered around a large table, covered by a maps of Iraq, Iran and Syria. Those who count are Lawrence Franklin and Harold Rhode of the Office of Special Plans, Michael Ledeen of the AIE, a SISMI chief accompanied by his assistant…

So there we have it: AIPAC-gate indictees Larry Franklin and Harold Rhode– and Michael Ledeen… all there in Rome at that planning meeting. But who were these other people, these “iranian exiles” they were meeting with, you ask??
SISMI agent Nicolo Pollari tells the Repubblica reporters:

    I can tell you those Iranians were not exactly “exiles”. The came and went from Tehran with their passports with no difficulty whatsoever as if they were transparent to the eyes of the Pasdaran…

The Repubblica writers continue by quoting an American intel source as saying, “You Italians have always underestimated the work of conversion carried out Ahmed Chalabi, the chairman of Iraqi National Congress.” They note the important roles played by two key Chalabi lieutenants, Aras Habib Karim and Francis Brooke (Brooks?) But it gets even better. They say that the pro-Iranian Iraqi Shiite group SCIRI was also involved… Also, long-time Iranian shyster and arms salesman Manoucher Ghorbanifar (though according to the Repubblica duo he was only included in the Rome meetings as a diversionary tactic.)
Josh Marshall and Laura Rozen had placed Ghorbanifar at that meeting. But not anyone from SCIRI, or come to that anyone else still very well-connected to the mullahs’ regime in Teheran.
The Repubblica reporters write:

    So, forget about Manusher Ghorbanifar. In the Rome meeting held at the Parco dei Principi Hotel—or in the safe house near Spanish Steps—three intelligence paths will cross: Nicolò Pollari’s SISMI, Ahmed Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress and SCIRI and the Sadr (Badr?) Brigades led by Muhammad and Abdalaziz al-Hakim. The integration of the “processing” and “output” of the three “networks” will provide essential information to the Anglo-American war planners and above all, a concrete estimation of Saddam’s defenses, from the willingness to fight of his generals to the arsenal of weaponry at their disposal, in addition to the influence operations. Each of the three intelligence networks has an ace on the table which will be useful to the Pentagon…

Juicy, fascinating stuff, indeed! Thanks so much for the translation work, Nur! (I think she’s promising us a translation of the second part of the article, yet to come? I can’t wait….)
So what do you think? Will there be one single massive harmonic convergence in which the AIPAC-gate trial suddenly all starts to mesh together with the Lewis Libby trial? Are all these guys’ heinous tricks and manipulations all starting to come unraveled together?

Libby indicted; administration battered

I work hard at not being a vengeful person, but I can’t help being really delighted with the news that Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby, has been indicted on no fewer than five charges related to the Valerie Plame affair.
As spelled out by AP, the grand jusy in the “Plamegate” investigation has charged Libby

    with one count of obstruction of justice, two of perjury and two false statement counts. If convicted on all five, he could face as much as 30 years in prison and $1.25 million in fines.
    …In each of the counts, the basic allegation against Libby is that he lied to investigators or [Special prosecutor Patrick] Fitzgerald’s grand jury about his conversations with reporters. He is not accused of purposely revealing the identity of a covert officer, the potential charge that Fitzgerald was initially appointed to investigate.
    Fitzgerald said in a statement, “When citizens testify before grand juries they are required to tell the truth. Without the truth, our criminal justice system cannot serve our nation or its citizens. The requirement to tell the truth applies equally to all citizens, including persons who hold high positions in government.”
    Any trial would dig into the secret deliberations of Bush and his team as they built the case for war against Iraq.

Excellent! To quote a famous phrase: “bring it on!”
I think this is just about the best possible outcome from the Fitzgerald investigation one could reasonably imagine. While some people had hoped there would be an indictment of Bush’s vice-chief of staff Karl Rove, and while I myself recently speculated that it would be interesting to see if Cheney would be indicted, still, keeping the focus on Libby– while Rove, Cheney, and many others must also feel that the trial will put them significantly off-balance– is not a bad outcome at all.
I didn’t see Fitzgerald’s presentation to the media. My spouse, who did, said he was extremely articulate, forthright, well-prepared, and persuasive. In the US system of justice, Fitzgerald, as a “Special prosecutor” with wide-ranging powers of sub-poena etc cannot issue indictements in his own name. (And since he was investigating allegations of governmental malfeasance, he couldn’t do so in the name of the US government.) So he has to run his preliminary findings by the special (“grand”) jury, which has been empanelled for that purpose; and it is the grand jury that issues the indictment (the criminal charges) in the name of– I believe– “the American people.”
So now, there will most likely be atrial– uness Libby pleads guilty to the charges. I don’t know what scope Fitzgerald has to offer a plea-bargain to Libby, whereby Libby might plead guilty to some of the lesser charges in return for having the other ones dropped, and therefore no need for a trial. Such plea bargains are fairly common in the US criminal-justice system.
I, however, think that the country and the world deserve to have a trial, in which all the evidence about the concoction of the whole “Niger yellow-cake” excuse for invading Iraq would be fully aired.
Also, though Fitz has now dismissed the grand jury that considered (and endorsed) the Libby indictments, he has said his pursuit of pre-trial investigations has not finished, and that if necessary he will empanel another grand jury to consider future charges.
That AP story I read– sorry I don’t have a link as I’m on a crappy slow connection here in New York– said:

    Rove’s lawyer said he was told by special prosecutor Fitzgerald’s office that investigators would continue their probe into the aide’s conduct. Fitzgerald’s office said Rove would not be indicted Friday, said people close to the Republican strategist, speaking only on condition of anonymity because of grand jury secrecy. Rove is deputy White House chief of staff.
    The lack of an indictment against Rove was a mixed outcome for the administration. It keeps in place the president’s top adviser, the architect of his political machine whose fingerprints can be found on virtually every policy that emerges from the White House.
    But leaving Rove in legal jeopardy keeps Bush and his team working on problems like the Iraq war, a Supreme Court vacancy and slumping poll ratings beneath a dark cloud of uncertainty.
    Rove, who testified four times before the CIA leaks grand jury, has stepped back from some of his political duties such as speaking at fundraisers but is said to be otherwise immersed in his sweeping portfolio as deputy White House chief of staff…

Usual caveat here: Where is the Democratic Party leadership??? But apart from that, I just feel overjoyed that the fabrication of this portion of the evidence for launching the ghastly, illegal war against Iraq now has a chance of being fulling investigated and made fully public.

“Yellow-cake” from Niger: the Italian angle

Nur al-cubicle, a gifted linguist as well as dedicated blogger, has a lengthy post up that translates for us non-Italian-speaking lowlifes the first half of a lengthy piece in La Repubbblica on the gang of slimeballs in Italy (and Luxemburg) who put together the two stories on the yellow-cake from Niger and the aluminum tubes that, between them, played such a big part in helping the Bush-Cheney administration jerk the world into war.
Fabulous work (once again), Nur!
Nur gives a full translation of the first half of the Repubblica piece. A quick version of the second half can be found here. And yes, it does indeed mention that veteran sleaze-bag from the neo-con, extremist pro-Israeli camp, Michael Ledeen.

Cheney as Agnew?

NYT today:

    I. Lewis Libby Jr., Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, first learned about the C.I.A. officer at the heart of the leak investigation in a conversation with Mr. Cheney weeks before her identity became public in 2003, lawyers involved in the case said Monday.

There had already been several indications that Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald had Libby and top George W. Bush aide Karl Rove in his sights… Now, might Cheney make three?
The NYT reporters write that Fitz “is expected to decide whether to bring charges in the case by Friday.” So I guess we’ll know soon enough.
From what these reporters’ sources have told them, there so far seems only a small possibility that a threat of imminent indictment might force Cheney to follow the example that Spiro Agnew set in 1973–also, in October– and become only the third vice-president in the history of this republic to resign from office.
But who knows? Thus far, Fitzgerald’s staff has done a good job of holding their cards remarkably close to their chests. (There is no indication that this latest leak to the NYT people came from them.) So we did not know about this new twist in the case until now. What more might we learn in three days’ time?
Anyway, the newly disclosed information about the Cheney-Libby conversation, certainly seem to make matters harder for Libby. The reporters write:

    Notes of the previously undisclosed conversation between Mr. Libby and Mr. Cheney on June 12, 2003, appear to differ from Mr. Libby’s testimony to a federal grand jury that he initially learned about the C.I.A. officer, Valerie Wilson, from journalists, the lawyers said.
    The notes, taken by Mr. Libby during the conversation, for the first time place Mr. Cheney in the middle of an effort by the White House to learn about Ms. Wilson’s husband, Joseph C. Wilson IV.
    … The notes help explain the legal difficulties facing Mr. Libby. Lawyers in the case said Mr. Libby testified to the grand jury that he had first heard from journalists that Ms. Wilson may have had a role in dispatching her husband on a C.I.A.-sponsored mission to Africa in 2002 in search of evidence that Iraq had acquired nuclear material there for its weapons program.
    But the notes, now in Mr. Fitzgerald’s possession, also indicate that Mr. Libby first heard about Ms. Wilson – who is also known by her maiden name, Valerie Plame – from Mr. Cheney. That apparent discrepancy in his testimony suggests why prosecutors are weighing false statement charges against him in what they interpret as an effort by Mr. Libby to protect Mr. Cheney from scrutiny, the lawyers said.
    It is not clear why Mr. Libby would have suggested to the grand jury that he might have learned about Ms. Wilson from journalists if he was aware that Mr. Fitzgerald had obtained the notes of the conversation with Mr. Cheney or might do so. At the beginning of the investigation, Mr. Bush pledged the White House’s full cooperation and instructed aides to provide Mr. Fitzgerald with any information he sought.

We do, however, all need to understand that the serious erosion/implosion of the pro-war “cabal” that is the heart of the Bush administration is not necessarily unmitigated good news for the anti-war, pro-sanity strand in US public life. For the following two reasons:

    (1) The Democratic Party leaders are still nowhere in terms of being out there, advocating a compelling alternative to the cabalists’ view of the world (or even, apparently, able to any significant political profit from the cabalists’ escalating discomfiture, at all.)
    (2) There are numerous “wag the dog” scenarios being feverishly discussed around Washington right now. Ludicrous those each of these scenarios might appear on its own merits– Syria? Iran??– the fact that there are no adults (from either party) on the scene in Washington DC means we need to be very concerned indeed that even the most childish and incendiary scenarios may get played out over the weeks ahead as a desperate attempt at a “wag the dog” diversion…

Time for calm. Time for maturity. Time to subject to radical re-examination not just the possibly criminal past activities of the cabalists, but also the whole philosophy of US global hegemony that has underlain both their actions and also, I fear, far too much of the thinking of the rest of the US “political elite”, of whatever political party or none…
Human equality now!
Addendum 4 p.m.: Check out Nur al-Cubicle’s excellent work on an Italian angle on this story! Hat-tip to Dubhalatch for the tip-off there.)

Former Powell aide tells all (okay, “much”)

Col. Larry Wilkerson, who was Colin Powell’s chief of staff at the State Department, and had worked for Powell for many years before that, gave a blockbuster speech at the New America Foundation in Washington yesterday. (I was invited to the event, couldn’t make it. Kinda wish I had been able to.)
Anyway, the speech got some great press coverage today. Here is the full transcript from the NAF.
The first portion contains a decent, solid, poli-sci-ey sort of study of the “virtues” of the 1947 National Security Act, some nostalgia for Eisenhower, etc. Then we get to this:

    Read George Packer’s book, “The Assassin’s Gate,” if you haven’t already. George Packer, a New Yorker – reporter for the New Yorker, has got it right… [I]f you want to read how the Cheney-Rumsfeld cabal flummoxed the process, read that book. And of course there are other names in there: Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith, whom most of you probably know Tommy Franks said was the stupidest blankety, blank man in the world. He was. (Laughter.) Let me testify to that. He was. Seldom in my life have I met a dumber man. (Laughter.) And yet – and yet – and yet, after the secretary of State agrees to a $40 billion department rather than a $30 billion department having control, at least in the immediate post-war period in Iraq, this man is put in charge. Not only is he put in charge, he is given carte blanche to tell the State Department to go screw itself in a closet somewhere. Now, that’s not making excuses for the State Department; that’s telling you how decisions were made and telling you how things got accomplished. Read George’s book. [I am, Larry, I am… ]
    In so many ways I wanted to believe for four years that what I was seeing – as an academic now – what I was seeing was an extremely weak national security advisor, and an extremely powerful vice president, and an extremely powerful in the issues that impacted him secretary of Defense – remember, a vice president who has been secretary of Defense too and obviously has an inclination that way, and also has known the secretary of Defense for a long time, and also is a member of what Dwight Eisenhower warned about – God bless Eisenhower – in 1961 in his farewell address, the military industrial complex – and don’t you think they aren’t among us today – in a concentration of power that is just unparalleled. …

Continue reading “Former Powell aide tells all (okay, “much”)”

Rats and sinking ships

This important piece by Tim Phelps of Newsday highlights the disillusionment that three key, previous ultra-hawks– Kanan Makiya, Rend Rahim (Francke), and Danielle Pletka– are now expressing about the situation inside Iraq, including the contents of the draft constitution. (Hat-tip to Juan Cole for noting Tim’s story.)
Kanan and Rend are both Iraqi-Americans… Kanan was probably the leading “liberal” intellectual validator of the whole project of the US invading Iraq (but now admits he earlier misunderstood some key aspects of the Baath Party control system there…. Thanks for telling us, Kanan.)
Rend was the woman who famously, in the run-up to the war, said she hoped to ride atop the first US tank to enter Baghdad. She didn’t do that but was for a while Allawi’s pick to be Iraqi Ambassador to the US.
Pletka is a different kind of political personality. An intensely pro-Likud Jewish-American, she worked a while as Sen. Jesse Helms’s chief foreign-affairs aide and is now Vice-President at key neo-con power-house the American Enterprise Institute. She has outraged people throughout the Arab world by, e.g., insisting on walking through very socially conservative downtown Gaza in a mini-skirt, or going to various capital cities and lecturing heads of government on how they should run their countries. (Oh, and did I mention she was a key advocate of the war?)
I don’t consider any of these three to be, literally, “rats”; and I have some lingering admiration for Kanan, whom I’ve met a couple of times, though I always thought he was more than a little naive.
But if these three individuals are now openly quitting the “ship” of the Bush administration’s Iraq policy, then I have to say the ship is headed rapidly for the depths.
(This whole phenomenon seems eerily similar to, and parallel with, the ire that social conservatives are launching against Bush re the Harriet Miers nomination… Interesting, huh?)

George and Cindy

I guess practically every reader of JWN is well familiar by now with the campaign of that persistent and heroic woman, Cindy Sheehan. She’s been camping outside GWB’s vacation home in Crawford, Texas, trying to win a face-to-face meeting with the man whose disastrous decision to launch the invasion of Iraq resulted in the death of her son Casey, some 1,840 other US service-members, and scores of thousands of Iraqis and others.
Sheehan has already– around a year ago– had one face-to-face meeting with Bush. On Wednesday, Juan Cole published the excerpt from the Wolf Blitzer interview in which Sheehan described the bizarre, affect-less way that Bush behaved during that meeting:

    He didn’t even know Casey’s name. He didn’t want to hear it. He didn’t want to hear anything about Casey. He wouldn’t even call him “him” or “he.” He called him “your loved one.”
    Every time we tried to talk about Casey and how much we missed him, he would change the subject. And he acted like it was a party.

(See also Lakshmi Chaudry’s interview with Sheehan, on Alternet.)
So I’ve been thinking about George W. Bush. It’s clear that Ronald Reagan– a consummate acting professional– could have summoned an appropriate set of words and gestures to convey “comfort” to a recently bereaved mother. Indeed, given Reagan’s inability to recognize any clear distinction between acting and reality, he may well– once having been programed by his expert handlers to “perform” comfort-to-the-bereaved– have actually started to feel it. He did after all, have these sudden flashes of real human feeling from time to time during his presidency.
But the question I had about GWB was why, back during Sheehan’s June 2004 meeting with him– he could not even summon a performance of comfort-to-the-bereaved… Was he totally emotionally frozen??
Then I thought, why, maybe his emotional freezing-up at that time was the only thing that stood between his maintaining his amour propre as president and his completely losing it in face of the growing realization that his blithely embarked-upon, gung-ho adventure in Iraq was coming very badly unglued, indeed… With very real human consequences, as exemplified by the very real, grieving family then standing before him.
This may sound far-out. But I tested the proposition last night in a discussion with Bill and some friends. Bill recalled that something eerily like “losing it” in politically very similar circumstances was indeed what had happened to Israeli PM Menachem Begin back in September 1983.
What happened to Begin at that time has been referred to by Sam Lewis– then the US ambassador to Israel– as “his extraordinary self-imposed withdrawal from public life.”
September 1983 was 15 months after Begin’s government– at the intense urging of Ariel Sharon, then Israel’s Defense Minister– launched a full-scale invasion of Lebanon that was intended to “transform the political geography of the whole Middle East.”
By September 1983 it was clear the Israelis were stuck deep over their heads in Lebanon… The promised transformation was backfiring and the Israeli troops were stuck in a debilitating Lebanese quagmire from which it would take them a further 17 years to extricate themselves…
In June 2004, it was 15 months after Bush’s governement– at the intense urging of Ariel Sharon, then Israel’s Prime Minister– launched a full-scale invasion of Iraq that was intended to “transform the political geography of the whole Middle East.”
By June 2004 it was clear the US was stuck deep over its head in Iraq… The promised transformation was backfiring and the US troops were stuck in a debilitating Iraqi quagmire from which it would take them…
Well, you get the drift.
I guess the other thing that happened to Begin around September 1983 was that his wife had died.
I do wonder what role Laura Bush plays in providing counsel to her husband on the war and other issues???
Another difference between Begin and GWB: Begin was a very fully developed, intelligent, and well-informed adult personality, agree with him or not…
As for GWB???
Anyway, I still think this idea that his bizarre lack of appropriate affect in so many public encounters must be a key to something is this very weird guy’s personality…

Rosen & Weissman indicted

Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman, both former high-level employees of the powerful, strongarming pro-Israeli pressure group AIPAC, were both indicted in federal court today. The WaPo’s Dan Eggen wrote that,

    Today’s indictment outlines a much broader case against Rosen and Weissman than has previously been indicated, alleging that the two disclosed sensitive information as far back as 1999 and that the topics ranged from Saudi Arabia to al Qaeda to Iran. Recipients of the information included foreign governments and reporters, the 26-page indictment says.

It’ll be interesting to see how much further this goes.