Bush is on vacation, his favorite place to be during a major crisis. The August retreat is the only open admission he makes that Cheney and Rumsfeld are actually running the country, and he just doesn't need to be in his office. The only difference between his stonewalling of Lebanon and the way he let New Orleans drown is that he has put away the banjo this summer, at least in public view. He had someone tie a necktie on him and stopped manically clearing brush for long enough to come out with Condi and hold a press conference. He lied, saying that no one wants to see the violence continue. He wants to see the violence continue. Otherwise he would insist on a ceasefire. You see, if you don't have a ceasefire, the violence continues. If you oppose a ceasefire, you are saying you want the violence to continue. He does.

Then he tried to explain the war in Lebanon by saying this, 'They try to spread their jihadist message -- a message I call, it's totalitarian in nature -- Islamic radicalism, Islamic fascism, they try to spread it as well by taking the attack to those of us who love freedom. '

There are many problems with this passage.

The first is that the Israelis are not confining themselves to bombing Muslim radicals. They dropped 3000 bombs on Aitaroun in a single day. They are leveling the towns of the south altogether. They are hitting people who are not Muslim fascists.

In fact, they are hitting Christian areas such as Jounieh.

Jounieh is the sort of place that had "Oriental Dance" festivals.

Not only have the Israelis bombed out the bridges at Jounieh, destroying the local economy and harming the Christians there, but their air raid on the Jiyye oil refinery has caused an enormous ecological disaster and the ruining of the beach resorts along the coast. So much for Jounieh and its "Islamic fascists."

I guess that will show them. (The oil spill also threatens Cyprus and Turkey).

The Israelis have also bombed Ashrafiyah, a Christian area of Beirut. They have ruined Christian businesses-- restaurants, nightclubs, retail shops, by destroying bridges, roads and ports and by killing tourism for years to come.

The Syrians, about whom the Bush administration complained so bitterly for their role in Lebanon, had actually protected the Lebanese Christians from the PLO back in the 1970s and never did to them a hundredth of the damage that Israel has now done.

I don't mean to suggest that one should only worry about Lebanon's Christians, who form 40 percent of the electorate.

The Shiite Muslims of the south have been subjected to collective punishment on a mass scale. Whole towns and villages have been destroyed. Nearly a million people are displaced and homeless. The deliberate deportation or forcible transfer of a civilian population during war time is a crime against humanity, as is unnecessary expulsion of civilians from their homes.

Lebanon is a small country, with a population of only 3.8 million. A fourth of the country is homeless! That would be like a disaster that left 70 million Americans wandering around with just the shirts on their backs, living in shelters and schools, wondering where their next bite of food would come from, their homes in rubble, their lives destroyed.

In other times and places, the authorities in Jerusalem have complained about this sort of thing.

Relatively few Shiite Muslims of Lebanon are fascists of any sort. There are all kinds of Shiites. The father of the renowned entertainer Haifa Wahbi is Shiite.

Look closely at this AP photo above from Monday, captioned "FLIGHT FROM TERROR: A woman runs past a destroyed building, still in flames, after it had been attacked by Israeli warplane missiles, in the southern suburbs of Beirut, Lebanon yesterday." Look at the woman. This is the Shiite "Islamic fascist" that BushMert is making war on?

Then there are other problems with what Bush said. He contrasted "Islamic fascism" to "democracy," presumably a reference to the Lebanese Hizbullah.

This point is incorrect and offensive for many reasons.

It is a misuse of the word "Islamic." "Islamic" has to do with the ideals and achievements of the Muslims and the Muslim religion. Thus, we speak of Islamic art. We speak of Islamic ethics.

There can be Muslim fascists, just as there can be Christian fascists (and were, in Spain, Italy and Germany, and parts of Central and South America; the Spanish fascists and the Argentinian ones, e.g., were adopted by the United States government as close allies.)

But there cannot be "Islamic" fascists, because the Islamic religion enshrines values that are incompatible with fascism.

Fascism is not even a very good description of the ideology of most Muslim fundamentalists. Most fascism in the Middle East has been secular in character, as with Saddam Hussein's Baath Party. Fascism involves extreme nationalism and most often racism. Muslim fundamentalist movements reject the nation-state as their primary loyalty and reject race as a basis for political action or social discrimination. Fascists exalt the state above individual rights or the rule of law. Muslim fundamentalists exalt Islamic law above the utilitarian interests of the state. Fascism exalts youth and a master race above the old and the "inferior" races. Muslim fundamentalists would never speak this way. Fascism glorifies "war as an end in itself and victory as the determinant of truth and worthiness." Muslim fundamentalists view holy war as a ritual with precise conditions and laws governing its conduct. It is not considered an end in itself.

The lazy conflation of Muslim fundamentalist movements with fascism cannot account for their increasing willingness to participate in elections and serve in parliamentary government. Hizbullah, for example, ran in the 2005 elections and had 12 members elected to parliament. Altogether, the Shiite parties of Hizbullah and Amal, who have a parliamentary alliance, have 29 members in the Lebanese parliament of 128 seats. Hizbullah and Amal both joined the national unity government, receiving cabinet posts. This is not the behavior of a fascist movement tout court.

Indeed, Hizbullah has made political alliances with Christian parties, most recently with that of Michel Aoun. Opinion polls have shown that a significant proportion of Lebanese Shiites who voted for Hizbullah are more secular-minded than the party is. Hizbullah has authoritarian tendencies, but has shown itself willing to compromise and act pragmatically within the Lebanese system, and has demonstrated an ability to gain support from voters that do not share its fundamentalist ideology.

Hizbullah is a poor people's movement. It could have been moderated over time, and its adherents could have been pulled into more moderate, mainstream politics if the world had devoted itself to seeing that the Lebanese economy flourished and its government was gradually strengthened. That was the achievement of the Lebanese and regional political elite in the 1990s. If the Israelis had not aggressively occupied the Lebanese South, there would have been no Hizbullah. If the Israelis had left ten years earlier, Hizbullah would have disarmed when all the other militias did. Hizbullah could have been nurtured out of existence if Lebanon had been helped.

Now, extremism has been strengthened. Lebanon is abject, on its knees, stricken with a plague inflicted on it by Bush and Olmert. The abject, the humiliated, the impoverished do not, as Bush and Olmert fondly imagine to themselves, lie down and let the mighty walk over them. They blow up skyscrapers.

FOR ME it was a moment of shocking revelation.

I was listening to one of the daily speeches of our Prime Minister. He said: "We are a wonderful people!" He said: We have already won this war, it is the greatest victory in the history of our state. He said: We have changed the face of the Middle East. And more to that effect.

Well, I told myself, that's Olmert.

I have known him since he was 20-something. At that time, I was a member of the Knesset, and Olmert was the book-carrier (literally) of another member. Since then I have followed his career. He has never been anything but a party functionary, a small-time politician specializing in manipulations, a run-of-the-mill demagogue. On the way changed parties several times and served as a mayor with a grade of D minus, until he climbed on the bandwagon of Ariel Sharon. More or less by accident he was given the empty title of "Deputy Prime Minister", and when Sharon suffered his stroke, something happened that took Olmert too by surprise: he became Prime Minister.

Throughout his career he has remained a complete cynic, basically a right-winger but willing to pretend to be a liberal when faced with leftists.

So, I told myself, this is just another cynical speech. But suddenly a ghastly thought struck me: No, the man believes what he is saying!

Hard as it is to imagine, it seems that Olmert really believes that this is a successful war. That he is winning. That he has radically changed Israel's situation. That he is building a New Middle East. That he is a historic leader, far superior to Ariel Sharon (who, after all, was beaten in Lebanon and who allowed Hizbullah to build up its arsenal of rockets). That the longer he is allowed to go on with the war, the more his stature in history will grow.

Ehud Olmert has obviously cut himself off from reality. He lives in a bubble all by himself. His speeches show that he has a very real problem.

Of all the dangers facing Israel now, this is the most severe. Because this man is deciding, quite simply, the fate of millions: who will die, who will become a refugee, whose world will be shattered.

BUT OLMERT'S problem with megalomania is nothing compared to what has happened to Amir Peretz.

Exactly nine months ago, after his election as Labor Party chairman, Peretz made a speech in Tel-Aviv's Rabin Square in which he revealed his dream: that in the no-man's land between Israel and the Gaza Strip a football field will be built, and a match between the Israeli children of Sderot and the Palestinian children of nearby Bet-Hanoun will take place. An Israeli Martin Luther King.

Nine month's later, a monster has been born to us.

In the Knesset election campaign, Peretz appeared as a social revolutionary. He announced that he would change the face of Israeli society, set new national priorities, cut billions from the military budget and transfer them to education, welfare and measure to reduce the glaring gap between rich and poor. As a veteran peace-lover, he would, of course, achieve peace with the Palestinians and the entire Arab world.

This won him the votes of many citizens, including many who would normally never consider voting for the Labor Party.

What followed is history. He seduced himself, when Olmert offered him the Ministry of Defense. That was still Olmert the cynic. He knew, as we all did, that Peretz was walking into a trap, that as a rank civilian without serious military experience he would be easy prey for the generals. But Peretz did not shrink back. The supreme aim of his life is to become Prime Minister, and in order to become a credible candidate he believed that he must present himself as a security expert.

Since then, Peretz has become a rabid warmonger. Not only does he endorse all the demands of the generals, not only does he act as their spokesman - he has also helped to push Israel into war, and since then he has been demanding that it should continue, enlarge, widen, kill more, destroy more, occupy more. He himself declared, "Nasrallah will never forget the name Amir Peretz!" - like a spoilt child inscribing his name on a tourist attraction.

At the moment, he is trying to be more extreme even than Olmert. While the Prime Minister is afraid of continuing to advance, fearing that too many casualties from the rockets and the battle on the ground might cloud the brilliance of his victory, Peretz wants to reach the Litani River, whatever the cost. There's no other way - if one wants to become Prime Minister, one has to walk over dead bodies.

Thus a monster has been born to us. Rosemary's Baby.

TODAY, THE 25th day of the war, we can draw up an interim balance. What were the aims? What are the results?

* "To destroy Hizbullah".

Who would have believed it, but on the 25th day Hizbullah is still standing and fighting. A few thousand fighters against the fifth strongest army in the world. Nobody speaks anymore about eliminating it. Not Olmert, not Peretz, not even Dan Halutz - the third corner of this unholy triangle.

* "To weaken Hizbullah".

That is a watered down version of the first aim. It is more convenient, because it cannot be measured. After all, in any war both sides are weakened. People are killed and wounded, arms are destroyed, installations demolished. But while the Israeli army can mobilize another division and another one, and the Americans are rushing more bombs to us, can Hizbullah absorb such losses?

Nobody knows how many fighters the organization has lost. The Israeli army distributes estimates, without being able to prove them. The Lebanese speak about far smaller numbers, and do not have any proof either.

But that is not the main thing. An organization like Hizbullah has no problem in raising more and more volunteers for "holy war". Be their losses as they may, after the war the organization will train as many new fighters as necessary. Their arsenals will also be replenished with new weapons arriving from Iran and Syria. The border is long, it is impossible to seal it.

* "To push Hizbullah away from the border".

That is the crumpled aim, after the two preceding ones were shown to be unattainable. It, too, has not been realized yet, and never will be, because it is also unattainable. Most Hizbullah fighters are local boys of the South Lebanese towns and villages. They will continue to be there, overtly or covertly. No international force can prevent that, and certainly not the Lebanese Army.

The rockets can be moved further away. How many kilometers? Ten? Twenty? That will not remove the threat from Nahariya, Haifa and Tel-Aviv - especially since the range of the missiles is bound to grow with time, when technologically more advanced types arrive.

* "To kill Hassan Nasrallah".

For the time being, so it seems, the report of his death was an exaggeration, to quote Mark Twain. True, in a kind of parody of the Entebbe exploit, Nasrallah was pulled out of a hospital in Baalbek, but it was another Hassan Nasrallah. Oops.

In the meantime, the original Nasrallah is flourishing. Compared to the kitschy speeches of Olmert, with their endless clichés and the fist thumping on the table, the Hizbullah leader comes over as a sober speaker, measured and mostly quite credible.

* "To return to the Israeli army the power of deterrence".

Nobody has any doubt that the Israeli army is a good, professional army, capable of defeating regular armies. But this war proves that it is not capable of achieving a military decision against an able guerilla organization with determined fighters. If Hizbullah is alive and kicking after 25 days, the deterrence power of the Israeli army has been weakened - whatever happens from now on.

From this point of view, the war has harmed the security of Israel. It has proved that the Israeli rear is exposed, that the Hizbullah fighters are not inferior to the Israeli soldiers, that there is no de-luxe war, that the Air Force cannot win without land forces. Not even in ideal circumstances, when the other side has no anti-air defense to speak of.

Some comfort themselves with the thought that "the Arabs have seen that we are crazy". We react to a small local provocation with an orgy of killing and destruction, destroying whole countries, a sort of national amok. But running amok is not a policy. It does not solve any problem. It is an uncontrollable reflex. It does not allow for straight thinking. It even allows the other side to manipulate us with premeditated provocations.

* "Deploying an International Force along the border".

That is a kind of emergency exit, after all the other aims have gone up in smoke.

At the beginning of the war, Olmert himself strenuously objected to such a force, because it would restrict the freedom of action of the Israeli army. Clearly, no international force will dare to come, unless there is a cease-fire in place and an agreement with Hizbullah has been reached. Nobody wants to be exposed to cross-fire. Therefore, this force will also have to serve Hisbullah's interests, for fear of a guerilla war starting against it. Have all the sacrifices been made for this?

* "We shall create a new situation in the Middle East".

This aim has indeed been achieved - but not the way Olmert told himself (and us).

The long-range results of the war are not immediately obvious. They belong to the category defined by Bismarck as "imponderables" - things that cannot be measured.

Every day on their TV screens tens of millions of Arabs and hundred of millions of Muslims see the atrocious pictures of crushed babies, the sights of the horrible destruction. These are deeply imprinted in the consciousness of the masses and will leave behind them an accumulation of anger and hatred that is far more dangerous than an arsenal of missiles. In these 25 days, thousands of new suicide bombers have been created. And as the stature of Nasrallah as the hero of the Arab world increases, so the respect for the "moderate" Arab regimes hit new lows - the very regimes that the US and Israel rely on for creating the New Middle East.

AFTER THE 25th day, the 26th will arrive, and so on and on. President Bush, who pushed us into this war to start with, is now pushing us to fight on ("Until the last Israeli soldier," as the saying goes.) Like Olmert, he lives in an imaginary world.

Bush, Olmert and their like can incite and draw the masses behind them, until the call of "the Emperor is naked" finds receptive ears.

One of the most sickening sights of the war is the picture of the international diplomats doing everything they can to enable Olmert & Co. to go on with the war. The UN has long since become an agent of the White House. Hypocrisy and sanctimoniousness are having a field day, while lives are being destroyed and the dead buried on both sides of the border.

Olmert wants to "gain" as many days as possible for continued fighting. What sort of gain is this? We are conquering South Lebanon as flies conquer fly-paper. Generals present maps with impressive arrows to show how Hizbullah is being pushed north. That might be convincing - if we were talking about a front-line in a war with a regular army, as taught in Staff College. But this is a different war altogether. In the conquered area, Hizbullah people remain, and our soldiers are exposed to attacks of the kind in which Hizbullah has excelled from its first day.

So we shall get to the Litani River. Beyond it, there is another river, and another one. Lebanon has an abundance of rivers we can get to. <> Perhaps it would be worthwhile for these two junkies, Olmert and Peretz, to come down from their "high" and study the map.
(c) 2006 Uri Avnery Gush Shalom

The Talmudic council of Rabbis and Torah sages known as "Yesha", which represents Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank and Jerusalem, has ruled that it is permissible, even desirable, to target and exterminate non-Jewish civilians during war time.

The council's latest edict, published on the Israeli newspaper Yedeot Ahronot's website "Ynetnews" Tuesday, stated that "according to Jewish law, during a time of war, there is no such term as 'innocent civilians' of the enemy."

[More:]

"All of the discussions on Christian morality are weakening the spirit of the army and the nation and are costing us in the blood of our soldiers and civilians," the statement said.

The same council issued a similar ruling two weeks ago, urging the Israeli army to "exterminate the enemy" and "not to flinch from killing enemy civilians."

The council described as "Christian morality" international conventions and laws prohibiting the deliberate targeting of civilians during war time.

It called the targeting and killing of enemy civilians "a mitzvah" or a good deed.

According to Israeli sources, much of the non-secular camp in Israel, which includes powerful religious and national-religious movements, expressed deep satisfaction at the Qana-II massacre, which took place on 31 July and resulted in the death of as many as 60 Lebanese civilians, 37 of them children and babies.

The Israeli army claimed initially that Hizbullah fighters had been staying inside the 3-story building targeted by the Israeli air force.

However, Israeli military commanders changed their account of the atrocity Tuesday, acknowledging that they had no evidence that any resistance fighters were among the civilians massacred in the bombing.

Some Israeli officials apologized for the carnage, upsetting rabbis and Talmudic sages who argued that Israel shouldn't apologize for killing enemy civilians since according to Halacha or Jewish religious law there is no such thing as civilians and innocents in war time.

This is not the first time such rulings are issued. Nearly two years ago, a group of prominent rabbis urged the Israeli army "not to flinch from killing Palestinian civilians including children."

In a letter to Shaul Mofaz, then Defense Minister, the rabbis, who represent mainstream Orthodox Judaism, wrote that "killing civilians was a normal thing in war time" and that the Israeli army "should not hesitate to kill non-Jewish civilians to save Jewish lives."

"The Christian preaching of 'turning the other cheek' doesn't concern us, and we will not be impressed by those who prefer the lives of our enemies to our lives," said the letter, signed by dozens of rabbis, including Haim Druckman, a former Knesset member who heads a large religious youth movement known as the Bnei Akiva Society.

Other signatories include Elizer Melamed, head of the West Bank religious college, Youval Sharlo, the head of the Talmudic college in Petah Tikva which combines Talmudic studies with active military service, and Dov Lior, the rabbi of Kiryat Arba near Hebron.

Lior, who had called Jewish mass murderer Baruch Goldstein a "great saint," argued that "it is very clear in light of the Torah that Jewish lives are more important than non-Jewish lives."

"A thousand non-Jewish lives are not worth a Jew's fingernail."

Goldstein on 25 February, 1994, murdered 29 innocent Palestinians who were praying at the Ibrahimi Mosque in downtown Hebron.

Jewish lives worth more.

Talmudic edicts encouraging the targeting by the Israeli army of "enemy civilians" are based on several Talmudic injunctions as well as passages from the Old Testament where the Israelites are instructed by Yahweh to massacre every man, woman and child in the Land of Canaan and not to leave a living thing.

In fact, many Jewish rabbis supporting targeting enemy civilians in war time rely on Biblical passages such as Joshua 6-20:

"Then the people cried out, and still the trumpets blew, till every ear was deafened by the shouting and the clangor and all at once the walls fell down flat...and they took the city and all that was in it they slew, sparing neither man nor woman, neither youth nor age, even cattle and sheep and asses were put to the sword."

There are also numerous and unmistakable passages in the Babylonian Talmud that view non-Jews as animals whose lives have little or no significance.

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert publicly declared in June that "Jewish lives are worth more than non-Jewish lives." Talmudic edicts of this nature shouldn't be dismissed as insignificant.

Indeed, with nearly 50% of high-ranking officers serving in the Israeli army indoctrinated in the Talmudic ideology and affiliated with the so-called national-religious camp, e.g. Talmudic rulings are unlikely to fall on deaf ears in the Israeli army.

Two telling stories came over the transom this week - seemingly unrelated, except tangentially, as both deal with different aspects of the fiasco in Iraq. Yet together they provide an illuminating glimpse - like a discarded corpse revealed by a lightning flash - of the moral horror that George W. Bush and his sycophants have wrought both in Iraq and the United States.

First, from the Catholic News Service: " Half of All Christians Have Fled Iraq Since 2003, Says Baghdad Bishop ." Excerpt:

Chaldean Catholic Auxiliary Bishop Andreos Abouna of Baghdad said that before the invasion there were about 1.2 million Christians in the predominantly Shiite Muslim state. Since then the overall number has dropped to about 600,000, he said. "What we are hearing now is the alarm bell for Christianity in Iraq," the bishop said. "When so many are leaving from a small community like ours, you know that it is dangerous -- dangerous for the future of the church in Iraq."

...About 97 percent of the country's total 27 million Iraqis are Shiite and Sunni Muslims; Christians make up the majority of the remaining 3 percent. The Chaldean Catholics speak Aramaic, the language of Jesus.

....Many people were unnerved by the lack of security and confidence in the political process that was supposed to usher in a new era of peace, democracy and rule of law following the removal of President Saddam Hussein by coalition forces, Bishop Abouna said.

......Bishop Abouna said he thought it was unlikely that many of those who had emigrated would return.

The destruction of Iraq's Christian community - one of the oldest in the world - is no mean feat. The religion took root in the land in the first generation after the Romans executed the troublesome of Nazareth, and has flourished there for almost 2,000 years. Now it is being wiped out before our eyes. Half gone already, it will certainly disappear altogether in the next few years, as civil war consumes the nation, and sects devoted to the most fanatic and retrograde distortions of Islam - empowered beyond measure by the Bush Faction's war of aggression - impose their draconian rule. Surely the oh-so-Christian Coalition of Bush and Blair will record this with their many high and worthy deeds.

As the story notes, Iraq's Christians still speak the language that Jesus spoke, a fragment of which is preserved in the English Bible that we're told Bush reads every day - the cry from the cross: "Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?" My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? It's a lament of utter existential despair that is no doubt echoed every day by his followers in the "liberated" land.

But of course Bush doesn't speak the language of Jesus, literally or metaphorically. (With the possible exception of the world-devouring Pantocrator portrayed in the Book of Revelation, a work of genocidal frenzy well-described by Martin Luther: "Christ is neither taught nor known in it." Naturally, this Grand Guignol is a great favorite among the sects devoted to the most fanatic and retrograde distortions of Christianity - i.e., Bush's loyal "base.") No, the itinerant preacher who denounced the rich and served the poor is incomprehensible to the Crawford Caligula. Bush speaks only the language of Caesar: brute force, adorned with preening, self-serving lies.

This imperial mendacity undergirds the second story in our lightning flash. This is an AP report - an excellent piece of work by Charles Hanley -- on the alarming poll showing that fully 50 percent of all Americans now believe that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction at the time of the Bush invasion. This number represents a hefty increase in credulity from the 36 percent of Ostrich-Americans who held this same false belief just last year.

As Hanley notes, one major factor in this higher heaping of horseshit was the codswallop disgorged last month by a pair of greasy pols: the swiftly sinking, sex-obsessed, K Street corruptocract Sen. Rick "Saneless" Santorum and his House-mate, Rep. Pete "Huckster" Hoekstra. With great, Fox-fueled fanfare, the dimbulb duo released an "intelligence report" claiming that WMD had indeed been found in Iraq - fully "justifying" Bush's Babylonian conquest.

What they had "unearthed," of course, was the decidedly unsecret fact that over the course of three years, Iraq's occupiers had come across a few old chemical weapon shells scattered here and there around the country. These were remnants of the once-great arsenal of deadly toxins that Saddam had amassed with the direct and ample aid of a U.S. president named George Bush, who explicitly ordered American agencies to approve the shipment of weaponizable poisons and other "dual-use technologies" for WMD to his favorite tough guy, Saddam. But Saneless and Huckster were trumpeting was not a noble casus belli but simply the fetid leavings of a former Bush Family crime.

As Hanley points out, "the Pentagon and outside experts stressed that these abandoned shells, many found in ones and twos, were 15 years old or more, their chemical contents were degraded, and they were unusable as artillery ordnance. Since the 1990s, such 'orphan' munitions, from among 160,000 made by Iraq and destroyed, have turned up on old battlefields and elsewhere in Iraq, ex-inspectors say. In other words, this was no surprise."

What was the truth of the situation? Hanley again: "The reality in this case is that after a 16-month, $900-million-plus investigation, the U.S. weapons hunters known as the Iraq Survey Group declared that Iraq had dismantled its chemical, biological and nuclear arms programs in 1991 under U.N. oversight. That finding in 2004 reaffirmed the work of U.N. inspectors who in 2002-03 found no trace of banned arsenals in Iraq."

The story makes clear that is not just the Congressional con-men and the knowing liars on Fox News hoodwinking the public. In this case, as in so many others in our fetid day, the fish rots from the head: "I think the Santorum-Hoekstra thing is the latest 'factoid,' but the basic dynamic is the insistent repetition by the Bush administration of the original argument," said John Prados, author of the 2004 book "Hoodwinked: The Documents That Reveal How Bush Sold Us a War."

Administration statements still describe Saddam's Iraq as a threat. Despite the official findings, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has allowed only that "perhaps" WMD weren't in Iraq. And Bush himself, since 2003, has repeatedly insisted on one plainly false point: that Saddam rebuffed the U.N. inspectors in 2002, that "he wouldn't let them in," as he said in 2003, and "he chose to deny inspectors," as he said this March.

The facts are that Iraq - after a four-year hiatus in cooperating with inspections - acceded to the U.N. Security Council's demand and allowed scores of experts to conduct more than 700 inspections of potential weapons sites from Nov. 27, 2002, to March 16, 2003. The inspectors said they could wrap up their work within months. Instead, the U.S. invasion aborted that work.

As recently as May 27, Bush told West Point graduates, "When the United Nations Security Council gave him one final chance to disclose and disarm, or face serious consequences, he refused to take that final opportunity."

All of them --- Bush, Rice, Hoekstra, Santorum, the warmongering nabobs at Fox News - know they are peddling lies. The truth is too glaringly obvious to ignore, even for a pathologically incurious, spoon-fed twit like Bush. But they don't care. Hanley's story is one of the very few in the mainstream press to have ever laid out the facts alongside their lies in a calm, straightforward fashion. It's clear, concise, quietly but utterly devastating - and it won't make a damn bit of difference.

The Bushists know that a wire story buried on page 16 of the Topeka Capital Journal - or even splashed on the front of the Washington Post - poses no threat to their propaganda machine. They know that the majority of Americans get their "news" from TV - or rather, from glimpses at the scrolling headlines rolling by under the bland, blathering, blow-dried heads of the anchors and the fulminating mugs of the countless hard-right apparatchiks who dominate the screen. The lies will go on - and the corpses will keep piling up, despite the occasional flash of lightning piercing through the dark.
(c) 2006 Chris Floyd

George W. Bush and his neoconservative advisers saw the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah as an opportunity to expand the conflict into Syria and possibly achieve a long-sought "regime change" in Damascus, but Israel's leadership balked at the scheme, according to Israeli sources.

One Israeli source said Bush's interest in spreading the war to Syria was considered "nuts" by some senior Israeli officials, although Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has generally shared Bush's hard-line strategy against Islamic militants.

After rebuffing Bush's suggestion about attacking Syria, the Israeli government settled on a strategy of mounting a major assault in southern Lebanon aimed at rooting out Hezbollah guerrillas who have been firing Katyusha rockets into northern Israel.

In an article on July 30, the Jerusalem Post hinted at the Israeli rejection of Bush's suggestion of a wider war in Syria. "Defense officials told the Post last week that they were receiving indications from the US that America would be interested in seeing Israel attack Syria," the newspaper reported.

On July 18, Consortiumnews.com reported that the Israel-Lebanon conflict had revived the Bush administration's neoconservative hopes that a new path had opened "to achieve a prized goal that otherwise appeared to be blocked for them - military assaults on Syria and Iran aimed at crippling those governments."

The article went on to say:

After the fall of Baghdad in April 2003 - after only three weeks of fighting - the question posed by some Bush administration officials was whether the U.S. military should go "left or right," to Syria or Iran. Some joked that "real men go to Tehran."

According to the neocon strategy, "regime change" in Syria and Iran, in turn, would undermine Hezbollah, the Shiite militia that controls much of southern Lebanon, and would strengthen Israel's hand in dictating peace terms to the Palestinians.

But the emergence of a powerful insurgency in Iraq - and a worsening situation for U.S. forces in Afghanistan - stilled the neoconservative dream of making George W. Bush a modern-day Alexander conquering the major cities of the Middle East, one after another.

Bush's invasion of Iraq also unwittingly enhanced the power of Iran's Shiite government by eliminating its chief counterweight, the Sunni regime of Saddam Hussein. With Iran's Shiite allies in control of the Iraqi government and a Shiite-led government also in Syria, the region's balance between the two rival Islamic sects was thrown out of whack.

The neocon dream of "regime change" in Syria and Iran never died, however. It stirred when Bush accused Syria of assisting Iraqi insurgents and when he insisted that Iran submit its nuclear research to strict international controls. The border conflict between Israel and Lebanon now has let Bush toughen his rhetoric again against Syria and Iran.

In an unguarded moment during the G-8 summit in Russia on July 17, Bush - speaking with his mouth full of food and annoyed by suggestions about United Nations peacekeepers - told British Prime Minister Tony Blair "what they need to do is get Syria to get Hezbollah to stop doing this shit."

Not realizing that a nearby microphone was turned on, Bush also complained about suggestions for a cease-fire and an international peacekeeping force. "We're not blaming Israel and we're not blaming the Lebanese government," Bush said, suggesting that the blame should fall on others, presumably Hezbollah, Syria and Iran.

Meanwhile, John Bolton, Bush's ambassador to the United Nations, suggested that the United States would only accept a multilateral U.N. force if it had the capacity to take on Hezbollah's backers in Syria and Iran.

"The real problem is Hezbollah," Bolton said. "Would it [a U.N. force] be empowered to deal with countries like Syria and Iran that support Hezbollah?" [NYT, July 18, 2006]

Strategy Meetings

Though the immediate conflict between Israel and Hezbollah was touched off by a Hezbollah cross-border raid on July 12 that captured two Israeli soldiers, the longer-term U.S.-Israeli strategy can be traced back to the May 23, 2006, meetings between Olmert and Bush in Washington.

At those meetings, Olmert discussed with Bush Israel's plans for revising its timetable for setting final border arrangements with the Palestinians, putting those plans on the back burner while moving the Iranian nuclear program to the front burner.

In effect, Olmert informed Bush that 2006 would be the year for stopping Iran's progress toward a nuclear bomb and 2007 would be the year for redrawing Israel's final borders. That schedule fit well with Bush's priorities, which may require some dramatic foreign policy success before the November congressional elections.

At a joint press conference with Bush on May 23, Olmert said "this is a moment of truth" for addressing Iran's alleged ambitions to build a nuclear bomb.

"The Iranian threat is not only a threat to Israel, it is a threat to the stability of the Middle East and the entire world," Olmert said. "The international community cannot tolerate a situation where a regime with a radical ideology and a long tradition of irresponsible conduct becomes a nuclear weapons state."

Olmert also said he was prepared to give the Palestinians some time to accept Israel's conditions for renewed negotiations on West Bank borders, but - if Palestinian officials didn't comply - Israel was prepared to act unilaterally.

The prime minister said Israel would "remove most of the [West Bank] settlements which are not part of the major Israeli population centers in Judea and Samaria. The settlements within the population centers would remain under Israeli control and become part of the state of Israel, as part of the final status agreement."

In other words, Israel would annex some of the most desirable parts of the West Bank regardless of Palestinian objections. That meant the Israelis would need to soften up Hamas, the Islamic militants who won the last Palestinian elections, and their supporters in the Islamic world - especially Hezbollah, Syria and Iran.

In a speech to a joint session of Congress, Olmert added that the possibility of Iran building a nuclear weapon was "an existential threat" to Israel, meaning that Israel believed its very existence was in danger.

Nuclear Face-Off

Even before the May 23 meetings, Bush was eyeing a confrontation with Iran as part of his revised strategy for remaking the Middle East. Bush was staring down Iran's hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad over demands Iran back off its nuclear research.

By spring 2006, Bush was reportedly weighing military options for bombing Iran's nuclear facilities. But the President encountered resistance from senior levels of the U.S. military, which feared the consequences, including the harm that might come to more than 130,000 U.S. troops bogged down in neighboring Iraq.

There was also alarm among U.S. generals over the White House resistance to removing tactical nuclear weapons as an option against Iran.

As investigative reporter Seymour Hersh wrote in The New Yorker, a number of senior U.S. officers were troubled by administration war planners who believed "bunker-busting" tactical nuclear weapons, known as B61-11s, were the only way to destroy Iran's nuclear facilities buried deep underground.

"Every other option, in the view of the nuclear weaponeers, would leave a gap," a former senior intelligence official told Hersh. "'Decisive' is the key word of the Air Force's planning. It's a tough decision. But we made it in Japan."

This former official said the White House refused to remove the nuclear option from the plans despite objections from the Joint Chiefs of Staff. "Whenever anybody tries to get it out, they're shouted down," the ex-official said. [New Yorker, April 17, 2006]

By late April, however, the Joint Chiefs finally got the White House to agree that using nuclear weapons to destroy Iran's uranium-enrichment plant at Natanz, less than 200 miles south of Tehran, was politically unacceptable, Hersh reported.

"Bush and Cheney were dead serious about the nuclear planning," one former senior intelligence official said.

But - even without the nuclear option - senior military officials still worried about a massive bombing campaign against Iran. Hersh wrote:

"Inside the Pentagon, senior commanders have increasingly challenged the President's plans, according to active-duty and retired officers and officials. The generals and admirals have told the Administration that the bombing campaign will probably not succeed in destroying Iran's nuclear program. They have also warned that an attack could lead to serious economic, political, and military consequences for the United States."

Hersh quoted a retired four-star general as saying, "The system is starting to sense the end of the road, and they don't want to be condemned by history. They want to be able to say, 'We stood up.' " [New Yorker, July 10, 2006 ]

The most immediate concern of U.S. military leaders was that air strikes against Iran could prompt retaliation against American troops in Iraq. U.S. military trainers would be especially vulnerable since they work within Iraqi military and police units dominated by Shiites who are sympathetic to Iran.

Iran also could respond to a bombing campaign by cutting off oil supplies, sending world oil prices soaring and throwing the world economy into chaos.

Israel's Arsenal

While the Joint Chiefs may have had success in getting the White House to remove the use of nuclear weapons from its list of options on Iran, the rising tensions between Israel and Iran may have put the nuclear option back on the table - since Israel has the largest and most sophisticated nuclear arsenal in the Middle East.

As Hersh reported, "The Israelis have insisted for years that Iran has a clandestine program to build a bomb, and will do so as soon as it can. Israeli officials have emphasized that their 'redline' is the moment Iran masters the nuclear fuel cycle, acquiring the technical ability to produce weapons-grade uranium."

In spring 2006, Iran announced that it had enriched uranium to the 3.6 percent level sufficient for nuclear energy but well below the 90-percent level for making atomic bombs. The U.S. intelligence community believes that Iran is still years and possibly a decade away from the capability of building a nuclear bomb.

Still, Iran's technological advance convinced some Israeli strategists that it was imperative to destroy Iran's program now. Yet to do so, Israel faces the same need for devastating explosive power, thus raising the specter again of using a nuclear bomb.

One interpretation of the Lebanese-Israeli conflict is that Bush and Olmert seized on the Hezbollah raid as a pretext for a pre-planned escalation that will lead to bombing campaigns against Syria and Iran, justified by their backing of Hezbollah.

In that view, Bush found himself stymied by U.S. military objections to targeting Iran's nuclear facilities outside any larger conflict. However, if the bombing of Iran develops as an outgrowth of a tit-for-tat expansion of a war in which Israel's existence is at stake, strikes against Iranian targets would be more palatable to the American public.

The end game would be U.S.-Israeli aerial strikes against Iran's nuclear facilities with the goal of crippling its nuclear program and humiliating Ahmadinejad.

Strangling an Axis

While U.S. officials have been careful not to link the Lebanon conflict to any possible military action against Iran's nuclear facilities, they have spoken privately about using the current conflict to counter growing Iranian influence.

Washington Post foreign policy analyst Robin Wright wrote that U.S. officials told her that "for the United States, the broader goal is to strangle the axis of Hezbollah, Hamas, Syria and Iran, which the Bush administration believes is pooling resources to change the strategic playing field in the Middle East. ...

"Whatever the outrage on the Arab streets, Washington believes it has strong behind-the-scenes support among key Arab leaders also nervous about the populist militants - with a tacit agreement that the timing is right to strike.

"'What is out there is concern among conservative Arab allies that there is a hegemonic Persian threat [running] through Damascus, through the southern suburbs of Beirut and to the Palestinians in Hamas,' said a senior U.S. official." [Washington Post, July 16, 2006]

Another school of thought holds that Iran may have encouraged the Hezbollah raid that sparked the Lebanese-Israeli conflict as a way to demonstrate the "asymmetrical warfare" that could be set in motion if the Bush administration attacks Iran.

But Hezbollah's firing of rockets as far as the port city of Haifa, deep inside Israel, has touched off new fears among Israelis and their allies about the danger of more powerful missiles carrying unconventional warheads, possibly hitting heavily populated areas, such as Tel Aviv.

Since the Soviet Union collapsed a decade and a half ago, nuclear weaponry has been mostly relegated to back pages and mental back burners in the United States. A big media uproar about nuclear weapons is apt to happen only when the man in the Oval Office has chosen to make an issue of them.

Sometimes a "nuclear threat" has been imaginary. During the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration went into rhetorical overdrive -- fabricating evidence and warning that an ostensible smoking gun could turn into a mushroom cloud. The White House publicly obsessed about an Iraqi nuclear-weapons program that didn't exist.

In sharp contrast, North Korea really seems to have a nuclear warhead or two. And because the Pyongyang regime is apparently nuclear-armed, Bush isn't likely to order an attack on that country, as he did against Iraq and as he has been not-too-subtly threatening to do against Iran.

By all credible accounts, Tehran is at least several years -- and probably more like a full decade -- away from acquiring a nuclear bomb. But America's top officials and leading pundits have been sounding urgent alarms.

Judging from the frequent denunciations of some countries for alleged plans to build a nuclear arsenal, you might think that the U.S. media are down on nuclear weapons. Not so.

Red-white-and-blue nuclear weaponry has been depicted by U.S. news media as a reassuring guarantor of national security -- or at worst an unfortunate necessity -- since the nuclear age went public 61 years ago with the atomic bombing of Hiroshima.

That first atomic bombing of Japan came three days before an initial presidential lie about U.S. nuclear weapons policies. The lie was huge, but very few journalists in the United States have ever done so much as murmur a complaint about it.

On Aug. 9, 1945, President Harry Truman told the public this whopper: "The world will note that the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a military base. That was because we wished in this first attack to avoid, in so far as possible, the killing of civilians."

Actually, the U.S. government went out of its way to select Japanese cities of sufficient size to showcase the extent of the A-bomb's deadly power -- in Hiroshima on Aug. 6 and in Nagasaki on Aug. 9. As a result of those two bombings, hundreds of thousands of civilians died, immediately or eventually. If Truman's conscience had been clear, it's doubtful he would have felt compelled to engage in such a basic distortion at the dawn of the nuclear era.

The scientific know-how of the Manhattan Project that developed the atomic bomb was headquartered at the secret Los Alamos laboratory in northern New Mexico beginning in the spring of 1943. Today, that one laboratory has a $2 billion annual budget, with most of the money devoted to the lab's key role in helping to maintain the "reliability and safety" of the U.S. government's nuclear arsenal -- which currently includes about 10,000 thermonuclear weapons. But you'd have to search far and wide to find mainstream American news coverage that raises fundamental questions about that arsenal as any kind of "nuclear threat."

Meanwhile, experts say that the Israeli government now has about 200 nuclear weapons. Israel's military actions in recent weeks underscore its willingness to use high-tech weaponry for reckless offensives that kill many civilians.

But in U.S. news media, the implicit message is that American nuclear bombs are A-OK, and the fact that Washington's ally Israel maintains a large nuclear arsenal is supposed to be no cause for major concern.

Until the moment when events prove otherwise, the policy of deploying an array of nuclear weapons with the rationale of "deterrence" can convince the faithful that the nuclear priesthood in Washington is worthy of our trust.

At 8:52 p.m. on Tuesday night, the report came in that Senator Joseph Lieberman had lost his home precinct in the Connecticut primary. Just after 9:00 p.m., the talking heads on Fox News began telling their viewers that Lieberman was finished. Just after 11:00 p.m., Lieberman stepped to the podium to congratulate Ned Lamont on his victory. Lieberman, with this loss, became only the fourth incumbent Senator in all of American history to be beaten in a primary.

Moments after congratulating Lamont, however, Lieberman announced his intention to abandon the Democratic party and run as an Independent in the general election. He spouted sad lines deploring partisan politics - one wonders how partisan politics are possible within a one-party primary - and sounded for all the world like the Republican-in-sheep's-clothing the Left has been painting him as for several years now.

It was, in the end, a disgusting display.

The noise levels from the media's chattering classes will spike for a few days with this result. The bloggers won the election for Lamont, they'll say. The Loony Left is taking over the Democratic party, they'll say. It was all about the war, they'll say. As ever, the shortest distance between two points, as far as the news media is concerned, will be the dumbest, simplest answer possible.

It wasn't about the war. Not all of it. Iraq, of course, was the central motivating factor. Connecticut is a predominantly Democratic state, and some 80% of Democrats strongly oppose the occupation. The news out of Iraq has been uniformly dismal, and it was impossible to forget the manner in which Lieberman had stapled himself to George W. Bush and his collapsing war plan. This was the Democratic Senator, recall, who warned us all that criticizing Bush was terribly dangerous to the country. He said that only a few months ago.

Columnist Joe Conason weighed in as the polls closed. "The fundamental argument of the propagandists," wrote Conason, "is that opposition to the war in Iraq represents an obsession of the far-left fringe, and that the Democrats will be destroyed by any attempt to extricate our troops from the quicksand. That claim is easily refuted by every reputable survey of public opinion over the past year. Support for the Bush administration's conduct of the war, and for the President himself, has been declining steadily, in fact, since the end of 2004. And every anchorperson, pundit and squawking head seeking to suggest otherwise is either inexcusably ignorant or purposely lying."

There was more to it than Iraq, however. Lieberman's voting record has been, for the most part, right between the Democratic yardsticks over his 18-year tenure. But he has blown it on a number of notable occasions. Lieberman supported the disastrous Bankruptcy Bill, following a pro-corporate voting record that made him Enron's favorite Democrat.

William Greider's seminal article "Enron Democrats" tells the tale. "His most important crusade," wrote Greider of Lieberman, "was protecting the loopy accounting for corporate stock options. Nervous regulators recognized early on that the profusion of stock options had the potential to deceive investors while cheating the tax system - illusions that could drive company stock prices to impossible heights. Yet when employees eventually cashed in the options, the companies claimed them as tax deductions. This two-way mirror is symptomatic of the deceptive bookkeeping that permeated corporate affairs during the boom and the bubble."

"Back in 1993," continued Greider, "when the Financial Accounting Standards Board proposed to stop it, Lieberman went to war. 'I believe that the global pre-eminence of America's vital technological industries could be damaged by the proposal,' he warned. The FASB, he insinuated, was politically motivated or simply didn't grasp the bright promise of the New Economy. Lieberman organized a series of letters warning the accountants' board to stop its meddling. In the Senate, he mobilized a resolution urging the Securities and Exchange Commission to squelch the reform. It passed 88 to 9. The regulators backed off - and stock prices soared on the inflated earnings reports. Whenever FASB tried to reopen the issue, Lieberman jumped them again. He was well rewarded by Silicon Valley and auditing firms."

It wasn't just the war. It was a long, slow slide that eventually tipped Lieberman's applecart. It was a process of insinuation into the cash-and-carry culture of Washington, DC. It was a series of astonishingly bad votes on incredibly important issues. It was, above all, political cowardice; Lieberman attached himself to Bush while Bush was riding high, and was unable to extract himself as Bush's popularity collapsed.

It will be interesting to see how this shakes out from here. Big-time Democrats like Senators Lautenberg, Clinton, Obama and Feingold have signaled their intention to support the Democratic nominee from Connecticut. If the GOP pulls the same kind of trick we see in Pennsylvania - funneling cash to the third-party candidate to undercut the Democratic candidate - it will come to light, and Lieberman will be hard-pressed to defend himself.

This was historic. Opposition to the war was the main issue in this primary, and it was proven to be a winning issue. The effect upon the upcoming midterms will be dynamic. Several Democratic hopefuls will have to do some tall stepping to get around their own Lieberman-like positions on Iraq if they hope to have a shot at the Oval Office in 2008. The media will, of course, blast them for flip-flopping, thus undercutting their nascent campaigns. In short, the deck has been shuffled by Ned Lamont.

Heil Bush,

Dear Propaganda Ansager Jacoby,

Congratulations you have just been awarded the 'Vidkun Quisling Award' for 2006! Your name will now live throughout history with such past award winners as Marcus Junius Brutus, Judas Iscariot, Benedict Arnold, George Stephanopoulos, Ralph Nader, Vidkun Quisling and last year's winner Volksjudge Johnny (the Enforcer) Roberts.

Without your lock-step calling for the repeal of the Constitution, your support of our two coup d'etats, your blind obediance and support of Israel no matter what war crimes they commit, Iraq and these many other profitable oil wars to come would have been impossible! With the help of our mutual friends, the other "Media Whores," you have made it possible for all of us to goose-step off to a brave new bank account!

Along with this award there will be an Iron Cross first class presented by our glorious Fuhrer Herr Bush at a gala celebration at "der Wolf's Lair" formally "Rancho de Bimbo" on 08-26-2006. We salute you Herr Jacoby, Sieg Heil!

Signed,
Vice Fuhrer Cheney