ISRAEL - IRAN - SYRIA - HAMAS - HEZBOLLAH - WWWIII?

Okay, you're right. I should have formulated my response differently.




You might be right. I don't know more as what is reported in the media. Therefore

The point is that there was no evidence that Israel planned to attack Lebanon without provocation. There is only evidence that Israel had a plan on the drawing board for invading/dealing with Lebanon. They did not attack without provocation however.

Planning an attack and the decision to execute one are not necessarily the same thing.

Correct. But Olmert (and the Israleian government) always had said that they didn't want to attack Lebanon.

In his testimony on Feb. 1, Olmert told the commission that he held numerous meetings long before the war to discuss a possible conflict with Hezbollah.
Olmert said Sharon had asked the army to prepare a list of Lebanese targets after a failed kidnapping attempt by Hezbollah in November 2005, Haaretz said.


Olmert told the commission that the decision to respond to a kidnapping with a broad military operation was made at a meeting in March, four months before the war.

Planning a strategy in response to an attack and wanting to attack are not the same thing, however. As previously stated, the USA has contingency plans for just about every scenario for war imaginable. That doesn't mean anybody hopes to use them or wants to use them. In the same way, I don't see any inconsistency in Olmert's testimony and the action Israel took in retaliation to a hostile act.

Goodness. Productive discussions with N Korea, then engagement with Iran and Syria in more discussions, now this. It looks like this administration can make some sane decisions after all. Or maybe it is just law of averages. In any case, it does seem as if the war mongers are losing some ground.

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Israel-Arabs.html?_r=1&oref=login

Dems abandon war authority provision
AP - 1 hour, 13 minutes ago WASHINGTON - Top House Democrats retreated Monday from an attempt to limit President Bush's authority for taking military action against Iran as the leadership concentrated on a looming confrontation with the White House over the Iraq war.
link

Fox really wrote: As previously stated, the USA has contingency plans for just about every scenario for war imaginable.

Is that the reason why Iraq is in such a huge quagmire?

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/article2352781.ece

Spank me, you big spanish nazi bitch.

Bunch of blowhearted wimps, huh, blueflame.

Everyones afraid of Israel. Everyone is trying their damnest to suck up to Israel; Obama, Clinton, Bush,......

When it comes to the Middle East I wonder who runs this country, Americans or Israel.

xingu, Haven't you figured that out yet? LOL

Ya, that's pretty sad. Like it or not, as big and bad as we like to think we are it's tiny Israel that calls the shots in the Middle East.

Condi on top



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worth reading in whole

and worth watching her progress

Israel meanwhile struggles with refugees from Sudan, saying, "it must be cautious with infiltrators from Sudan, a country listed by the U.S. as a sponsor of terrorism and suspected of being a base for Al-Qaeda and Palestinian militant groups".




"Some incarcerated, some confined to kibbutzes, the Sudanese have posed an ethical dilemma for Israel, a country created as a haven for Jews in the aftermath of the Holocaust and now faced with the arrival of refugees from another genocide."


Full report at Chicago Tribune.

US warplanes kill British soldiers- "a criminal act" says court.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article1524626.ece

Iran's Operative in the White House
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
If an 18-year-old American soldier were caught slipping obscure military paperwork to Iranian spies, he would be arrested, pilloried in the news media and tossed into prison for years.

But in fact there's an American who has provided services of incalculably greater value to Iran in recent years. So you have to wonder: Is Dick Cheney an Iranian mole?

Consider that the Bush administration's first major military intervention was to overthrow Afghanistan's Taliban regime, Iran's bitter foe to the east. Then the administration toppled Iran's even worse enemy to the west, the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq.

You really think that's just a coincidence? That of all 193 nations in the world, we just happen to topple the two neighboring regimes that Iran despises?

Moreover, consider how our invasion of Iraq went down. The U.S. dismantled Iraq's army, broke the Baath Party and helped install a pro-Iranian government in Baghdad. If Iran's ayatollahs had written the script, they couldn't have done better ? so maybe they did write the script ...

We fought Iraq, and Iran won. And that's just another coincidence?

Or think about broader Bush administration policies in the Middle East. For six years, the White House vigorously backed Israeli hard-liners and refused to engage seriously in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, thus nurturing anti-Americanism and religious fundamentalism. Then last summer, the White House backed Israel's invasion of Lebanon, which turned Iran's proxies in Hezbollah into street heroes in much of the Arab world.

Consider also the way the administration has systematically antagonized our former allies in Europe and Asia, undermining chances of a united front to block Iranian development of nuclear weapons. Mr. Cheney may nominally push for sanctions against Iran, but by alienating our allies he makes strong sanctions harder to achieve.

And by condoning torture and extralegal detentions in Guantánamo, the White House antagonized Muslims around the world and made us look like hypocrites when we criticize Arab or Iranian human rights abuses. Take Mr. Cheney's endorsement of the torture known as waterboarding, which simulates drowning: "It's a no-brainer for me," he said. The torturers in Iran's Evin prison must have cheered. They got a pass as well.

Even at home, Iran's leaders have been bolstered by President Bush and Mr. Cheney. Iran's hard-liners are hugely unpopular and the regime is wobbly, but Bush administration policies have inflamed Iranian nationalism and given cover to the hard-line president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Why focus on Dick Cheney rather than his boss? Partly because Mr. Cheney, even more than Mr. Bush, has systematically pushed an extreme agenda that has transparently served Iranian purposes. And domestically, his role in the Scooter Libby scandal ? and his disgraceful refusal to explain just what he was doing at the crime scene ? ended up paralyzing executive decision-making and humiliating our government.

Is that really just one more coincidence? Or could it be another case of Mr. Cheney's following instructions from his Iranian bosses to damage America?

O.K., O.K. Of course, all this is absurd. Mr. Cheney isn't an Iranian mole. Nor is he a North Korean mole, though his we-don't-negotiate-with-evil policy toward North Korea has resulted in that country's quadrupling its nuclear arsenal. It's also unlikely that he is an Al Qaeda mole, even though Al Qaeda now has an important new base of support in Iraq.

Like Kennedy and Johnson wading into Vietnam, Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney harmed American interests not out of malice but out of ineptitude. I concede that they honestly wanted the best for America, but we still ended up getting the worst.

So what are the lessons from this episode?

Our national interests are as vulnerable to incompetence as to malicious damage. So we must identify and abandon the policies that backfired so catastrophically. The common threads of those damaging policies are clear: a refusal to negotiate with "evil"; an aggressive willingness to use military force to solve problems; contempt for our allies; and the bending of legal and moral principles to allow indefinite detention and even torture, particularly for anyone with olive skin and a Muslim name.

Whenever we've suspected a mole in our midst, we've gone to extreme lengths to find the traitor. This time, betrayed not by a mole but by failed policies, let's be just as resolute. It's time to uproot policies that in the last half-dozen years have damaged American interests incomparably more than any mole or foreign spy ever has in the last 200 years.

March 16, 2007
America's Clear and Present Danger
By Kathleen Parker <http>

As presidential candidates try to stake out an electable position on the war in Iraq, Americans are justified in wondering: Is it reality, or is it just politics?

Can anyone's judgment be trusted during an election cycle?

Some measure of comfort may be found in the dual reality that is Washington. What you see on TV isn't necessarily what you get away from the cameras. Off the set, honest discussions about Iraq and the war on terror have a different tone and content than one might expect based on the gibbering of talking heads. Even pundits are sometimes of a different mind off-camera than on. There's no underestimating the power of peer pressure in the green room.

Serious people, in fact, are increasingly concerned that our media-driven political environment makes honest debate impossible. Iraq has become a case in point.

Is bringing home the troops in our national security interest, or is it merely politically comfortable and expedient?

Behind closed doors, more-honest debates are taking place among Republicans and Democrats, led in part by members of the recently resurrected Committee on the Present Danger.

Its Tom Clancyish title is not far removed from its purpose, which is to strategically fight the bad guys -- through education and advocacy rather than espionage. Members include such familiar names as Sens. (and honorary co-chairs) Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., and Joseph Lieberman, I-Conn., and the co-chairs, former CIA Director James Woolsey and former Secretary of State George P. Shultz. Among international members are Jose Maria Aznar, former prime minister of Spain, and Vaclav Havel, former president of the Czech Republic. (For more information, go to fightingterror.org)

Originally formed in the 1950s as a bipartisan education and advocacy group to deal with Soviet expansionism, the committee was reorganized early this year to address the global threat of "Islamist totalitarianism'' -- the committee's new name for our enemy.

Part of the committee's concern has been the Bush administration's failure both to adequately communicate our mission and to properly name the enemy. Our war is not against "terror,'' but against a specific enemy -- a virulent, religion-based ideology.

Not all of Islam, we always hasten to add, but Islam as distorted and hijacked by radicals.

Although most of the committee's efforts will be focused on educating Congress, a broader goal is to break through the politically correct sensitivity about religion that prevents us from confronting the real enemy.

Lawrence Haas, vice president of policy for the committee, explains that we need to enhance recognition of this danger among members of both parties. "But first and foremost, we need to make it acceptable and then respectable particularly for Democrats to talk about this problem.''

As Haas put it: "We need to make Lieberman less lonely. And we need to expand the circle of Scoop Jackson Democrats.''

Haas, who served as director of communications for Vice President Al Gore and then for the Clinton Office of Management and Budget, is one of those Democrats mugged by reality on 9/11. Now a visiting senior fellow at Georgetown University's Government Affairs Institute, Haas says Americans are in denial about the present danger and that Congress is complicit in that denial.

Simply put, the present danger is a worldwide threat from radical Islamist terrorism that has a strong state sponsorship component, an overt and covert military component, and an "insidious peaceful component" that is now present in the United States.

That is to say, peacefully and without much notice, Islamists are trying to use our laws of tolerance against us to carve out exceptions for themselves. The radical Islamist faction that has infiltrated and intimidated Europe has found a home in our polite denial.

The question is: Do we wait until, say, a documentary filmmaker critical of Islam is stabbed to death in the street -- as happened to Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh?

Or do we risk hurt feelings and start talking honestly now?

Haas and other committee members are betting on the "now.'' Toward that end -- and behind closed doors -- Bernard Lewis, Princeton University historian of Islam and the Middle East, recently addressed a few dozen senators, House members and staff.

The hope is that as congressional leaders begin to feel less isolated, they'll become more comfortable being honest on-camera. Critical to those discussions is recognition that leaving Iraq is not an option.

"Whatever you thought before the war, it is now linked to the present danger,'' says Haas. "We simply cannot walk away. We have to keep our eye on the ball.''

And, preferably, keep the ball out of our enemies' court.

[email protected] <mailto>

(c) 2007, Washington Post Writers Group

Perhaps not. It simply denotes the fact that American Foreign policy is dictated by the Zionist lobby group in America. Does AIPAC ring a bell?
Indubitably the most powerful lobbying group in America.

Is this the result of Bush leaning on Mushie?

Pakistan looking for AQ types to kill?

Malarkey!

Here's one of several more powerful lobbying groups in America: