Running or Hiding

In 2001, after the attack on the Twin Towers, the Patriot Act passed and the So-Called, "War On Terror" (SCWOT) escalated with the detentions of hundreds of Arabic speaking people in the New York area, the heightened airport security, no-fly lists, random baggage checks in public places, detentions without hearings, sneak and peak searches of private personal effects, threats against anti-war protesters. I got nervous.

The illegal detentions in Guantanamo and the extraordinary renditions were rumors, and it was 2005 before the Times broke the story on the illegal wiretapping.

Still, the mosaic had been taking shape for years. The Republican administration was taking imperious measures in the name of public safety. They claimed these curtailments of common liberty were necessary, minor inconveniences, that enabled our rulers to protect our safety. We were to trade our liberty for their provision of security.

But the governing party seemed unable to question their own capability to govern. They were the administration that allowed the terrorist attacks of 9/11. Who could have confidence in them?

Meanwhile, we knew poor peasants were being blown up, defenseless, in Afghanistan, while the Taliban forces, along with Osama bin Laden, escaped. And we knew in 2004 that Bush was driving in a convoy of black SUVs around America with military personnel who pointed guns out the windows at bystanders. We knew citizens were being evicted, arrested, harrassed and detained for wearing anti-war t-shirts and John Kerry lapel pins at Bush campaign events.

There was an inhumanity about the efficient invasion of Iraq that made me shiver in horror: shock and awe: blitzkreig. Cold and calculated killing, overwhelming force of destructive power unleashed against a poor and vulnerable, nearly defenseless country of families, houses, hospitals, highways, schools, roads, shops, mosques. We flooded the place with soldiers and weapons, impoverished, broke it.

Bushco preached terror and tax cuts while the country slowed--the society slowed--like a great long train struggling up a hill and then slowly, gradually, running out of momentum and power and coming to a stop before we reached the pinnacle.

And the 2004 election was that moment of the stop--that single, tiny, timeless moment before the intertia shifted and the whole mass of that train began to roll backwards, downhill. There was a pause when the upward mobility ended, before the downward mobility commenced. It was a moment of stillness when the great machine of progress reached the farmost point of its ascent. It was still. Then our rolling backward began.

In A Failed Revolution Krugman wrote, in today's Times

The collapse of the push to privatize Social Security recapitulated the failure of the Republican revolution as a whole. Once the administration was forced to get specific about the details, it became obvious that private accounts couldn’t produce something for nothing, and the public’s support vanished.

In the end, Republicans didn’t shrink the government. But they did degrade it. Baghdad and New Orleans are the arrival destinations of a movement based on deep contempt for governance.

1798

In 1798 the Federalist majority in Congress drafted the Alien Friends and the Sedition Acts in response to fear of war with France and what were perceived as calumnous attacks on the Administration of President John Adams. According to Geoffrey Stone,

Federalists believed that the governors were superior to the people and must not be subjected to censure that might diminish their authority. Republicans believed that governors were the servants of the people, who therefore had a right and a responsibility to question and criticize their judgments.

The Federalists, or Hamilitonians had the votes in Congress and succeeded in passing the Sedition Act, which said,

That if any person shall write, print, utter or publish ... any false, scandalous, and malicious wrting or writings agains the government of the United States,... with intent to defame, or to bring them contempt or disrepute; or to excite against them hatred of the good people of the United States,... then such person ... shall be punished....

Of course the argument against it was that the First Amendment forbade Congress from making any law abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press. So the Republicans, or Jeffersonians were correct in opposing the Act. Free expression is indispensable to the political process.

But as Krugman says,

bad policy ideas are like cockroaches: you can flush them down the toilet, but they keep coming back. Many of the ideas that failed in the Bush years had previously failed in the Reagan years. So there’s no reason to assume they’re gone for good.

Hence, the petering out of our political momentum under Bushco, and the accompanying reversal of our progress here in America and around the world.

Decider Destroyer

Robert Parry has a probing website, Consortium News, which slipped off the brightly lit middle of cyber-attention span for a couple of years.

He reminds us in, Bush's Global War On Radicals, that we aren't really fighting foreign terrorists anymore. We never really were.

In other words, the war against “terrorist groups of global reach,” which became the “global war on terrorism,” now has morphed into what might be called the “global war on radicals and extremists,” a dramatic escalation of the war’s ambitions with nary a comment from the U.S. news media.

So, under Bush’s new war framework, the enemy doesn’t necessarily have to commit or plot acts of international terrorism or even local acts of terrorism. It only matters that Bush judges the person to be a “radical” or an “extremist.”

While the word “terrorism” is open to abuse – under the old adage “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter” – the definition of “radical” or “extremist” is even looser. It all depends on your point of view.

Needless to say, an interchangeable foe is an elemental totalitarian mechanism for control of the patriotic passions of the population. Eastasia and Eurasia were frequently substituted one for the other and Winston Smith--even after he figured out it was simply a doublethink exercise, allowed himself to perform the necessary patriotic mental sommersaults in order to sustain the intensity of his hatred for the enemy of the moment.

Parry implies, too, that this expansion of the war is not intended to stop with foreign opponents, but to widen with Bush's self-described plenary executive power until the laws of the United States and our Constitution itself are superceded by the will of the President alone.

For this and other reasons, many view Bush himself as a radical extremist.

More than anything, though, I suppose he is a man of some talent and energy who has been put forward to lead the nation and the world. The direction is being set by conservative idealogues in banking, industry, and the military. They use Bush because he is able to put a warm and neighborly face on the neo-imperialism his backers have engineered.

Thinly Veiled Deceit

The So-Called, "War On Terror" (SCWOT) is a hoax.

BushCo needs a catchy slogan to bedazzle the American public into more stupefied taxpaying for corporate welfare on behalf of weapons makers and defense contractors.

In addition, national mind control can proceed under the guise of, "Information Warfare" by the Pentagon and the intelligence services.

Obviously when, according to Susan Milligan of the Boston Globe,

President Bush prepared the nation yesterday for a "long struggle" against enemy forces in Iraq and around the world and said more US troops would be needed to confront the global terrorist threat,

he needs to be able to explain how the "long struggle" and "additional troops" will "confront" the "threat." The reporters aren't asking the obvious question, which is, "How does more translate into better?"

The Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts clearly show that our leaders are not confronting the "threats" appropriately, but are squandering taxpayers' money in a misguided blitzkrieg of runaway spending.

The more we spend and the more people we kill, the less "safe" we get and the more dangerous the "terrorists" become.

Obviously, another response to terrorism and sectarian violence is needed than terrorism and military intervention. If we want peace instead of terrorism and war, we should be constructive instead of terrorizing and threatening.

Terrorism is a crime, not a causus belli. What is also a crime is deceiving the American people about this distinction in order to keep them in fear and abjection, selling their grandchildren into economic slavery.

Privatization Post-PUHCA

David Cay Johnson is back with ahead-of-the-curve mainstream media reporting of the worsening electricity supply situation in parts of the country.

His article in today's Times focuses on the town of Chambersburg in south central Pennsylvania, where, he claims,

The cost of electricity for households in this southern Pennsylvania town soared this year by 31 percent, or an average of $24 a month.

.

Continuing To Continue To Stay The Course (Continued)

Everybody's been holding their breath since the bipartisan Iraq Study Group launched their much-publicized recommendations on "changing the course" in Iraq.

Bush signalled, "wait and see," and then decided to go talk to more of his handpicked policymakers in the State Department and the Pentagon.

Meanwhile, everybody from Reverend Moon to Joe Leiberman is lobbing dirt-bombs at the Iraq Study Group, trying to discredit their findings in the media and the public mind.

So, lo and behold, we're all turning blue in the face. Bush has "decided on a new course" and is not ready to release it to the public.

Jennifer Loven of the AP writes that an anonymous "defense specialist" in the negotiations told her what's in the works.

The message to Bush, the defense specialist said, is that the U.S. cannot withdraw a substantial number of combat troops by early 2008, as suggested in the Iraq Study Group report, because the Iraqis will not be ready to assume control of their country.

What he didn't say is that the longer we stay there, the more the situation deteriorates. Why? Because we are not able to assume control of the country and are therefore unable to train anyone else to do so.

We can't help the Iraqi government "deal with the extremists and killers," because we are the catalyst of the extremism.

Having missed the boat on rebuilding after we destroyed their infrastructure, we let the window for rebuilding during a secure domestic climate shut, and now the country is too unstable to launch major civil engineering and rebuilding programs.

Let's face it. The bottom line is American influence and control in the region and the world, especially over energy supplies.

Otherwise, we'd be out of there by May 1st.

Israel's Not-So-Secret Nukes

Everybody knows and doesn't say that Israel has dozens of nuclear warheads, everybody except their new prime minister, that is.
Greg Myre reports, in today's New York Times,

In an interview with the N24 cable news channel in Germany, Mr. Olmert was asked about Iran’s nuclear program. He gave a lengthy response, saying that the United States, France, Britain and Russia had nuclear weapons, and were “civilized countries that do not threaten the foundations of the world.”

Mr. Olmert then added: “Iran openly, explicitly and publicly threatens to wipe Israel off the map. Can you say that this is the same level, when they are aspiring to have nuclear weapons as America, France, Israel, Russia?”

Everyone picked up on it, too.

Dan Williams of the Washington Post reports that, in Israel, a lot of people are angry.

Leading opposition lawmakers accused Olmert, whose popularity was already hard-hit by the recent Lebanon war, of incompetence and of undermining Israel's campaign for Western nations to curb the atomic ambitions of its arch-foe, Iran.

Olmert's aides denied it was a slip--an admission. But that doesn't explain what Robert Gates said at last week's Senate confirmation hearings. According to Myre, Gates referred to Israel's nuclear weapons when he included Israel in a group of nuclear-armed states surrounding Iran: the US (in Iraq), Israel, Russia and Pakistan.

So, in case anyone is wondering why Kofi Anan kept reiterating Truman's references to the supremacy of international law yesterday, in comments like this:

The US has given the world an example of a democracy in which everyone, including the most powerful, is subject to legal restraint. Its current moment of world supremacy gives it a priceless opportunity to entrench the same principles at the global level. As Harry Truman said, "We all have to recognize, no matter how great our strength, that we must deny ourselves the license to do always as we please."

and this:

First, we are all responsible for each other's security.

Second, we can and must give everyone the chance to benefit from global prosperity.

Third, both security and prosperity depend on human rights and the rule of law.

Fourth, states must be accountable to each other, and to a broad range of non-state actors, in their international conduct.

My fifth and final lesson derives inescapably from those other four. We can only do all these things by working together through a multilateral system, and by making the best possible use of the unique instrument bequeathed to us by Harry Truman and his contemporaries, namely the United Nations.

- In fact, it is only through multilateral institutions that states can hold each other to account. And that makes it very important to organize those institutions in a fair and democratic way, giving the poor and the weak some influence over the actions of the rich and the strong.

and this:

You Americans did so much, in the last century, to build an effective multilateral system, with the United Nations at its heart. Do you need it less today, and does it need you less, than 60 years ago?

Surely not. More than ever today Americans, like the rest of humanity, need a functioning global system through which the world's peoples can face global challenges together. And in order to function more effectively, the system still cries out for far-sighted American leadership, in the Truman tradition

It strikes me that the growing threat of conflict between Israel and her Sunni and Shiite neighbors is more dangerous than ever for the rest of the world. Because of BushCo's belligerent foreign policy, no peace agreement or peace process has progessed between Israel and her neighbors. The consolidation of Shiite power with Iraq has led to a new period of confrontation with Iran, this time involving nuclear weapons.

Again, BushCo is trying to sidestep the mulilateral processes that the world benefitted from so greatly in the post-war era, in order to establish a military hegemony in the Middle East, and even in the rest of the world.

By allowing the nonproliferation and Middle East peace programs to languish on the sidelines while we blindly waged a unilateral "So-Called, "War On Terror" (SCWOT), have set the stage for greater conflict and destruction than we complained of in our drive to seek "security" in unilateral American action.

BushCo Takes an "oh-fer" on Diplomacy

We held all the cards after 911. Musharaff wanted to be friends, Putin was nice, they held a candlelight vigil in Tehran in solidarity with New Yorkers. "We are all Americans," Chirac said.

Things sure are different now. Five years later, the so-called, "War On Terror" (SCWOT) has seen us fail to win over enough influential and powerful friends in Pakistan, Central Asia, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Palestine, not to mention Mexico, Venezuela, Nicaragua and most of Latin America, Europe and Asia.

North Korea still isn't talking to us, and is on the way to having operational nukes and missiles to deliver them.

Mexico is bitterly divided, and most of Latin America is veering towards hostility and anti-Americanism in the wake of the Bolivarian revolution, even as Fidel Castro lays on his death bed.



"How could this be?" America wonders. You win some, you lose some, right? How come we are losing on all fronts at once?

A clue as to the diplomatic formula for American failure could always be seen in our disasters of the past: backing the wrong side. That is certainly still true today. We back the rich and powerful for "stability" instead of the poor and oppressed for "justice."

A perfect example of us stepping in it is in just about every foreign affairs article of today's papers, but this dispatch from Beirut by Michael Slackman sheds a glaring light on the hypocrisy, especially where he says

In many ways, Hezbollah has adopted a strategy that has been cheered by the White House in the past, in places like Ukraine, and even Lebanon, leaning on large, peaceful crowds to force unpopular governments to resign and pave the way for elections.

But this time Washington and its allies have said the protest amounts to a coup d’état, fueling charges that the United States supports democratic practices only when its allies are winning.

Brave New America

There's an article originally penned by Nicholas Ouroussoff and appearing in the Week In Review in the Architecture section entitled, All Fall Down.

The article refers to a federal Department of Housing and Urban Development. plan to raze four of the largest and most successful public housing units in New Orleans, even though the City cannot house its population 16 months after Hurricaine Katrina. The project's goal seems to be "relieving the entrenched poverty of the City's urban slums."

Five thousand units of public housing will be replaced with a range of privately owned "mixed income" developments.

"Residents suspect a sinister agenda is at work here."

The article goes on to explain the history of post-war public housing in New Orleans. Originally comprised of the most habitably designed New Urbanism style projects, the 1950s public housing communities in New Orleans were originally afforded quality nursery schools, recreation facilities, and access to public health care. But they were victimized by the region's racist politics and, as the whites fled to the suburbs, the poor blacks remaining in the housing projects had their quality of life provisions stripped away.

The deterioration continued until, by 2002, the City of New Orleans handed over their housing projects' control to the federal Bureau of Housing and Urban Development.

Today, the richly landscaped gardens are gone. Many of the lawns have been paved over and replaced by basketball courts. Huge garbage bins, some with fading paintings of balloons, are scattered across decaying lots. Towering floodlights illuminate forbidding concrete pathways.

The article ends rather abruptly on a note of frustration with the New Orleans planners. They are unwilling to compel funders to piece the city back together, and are willing to accept development models that "replace one vision of social isolation with another." The colors and materials may change, outside money will be spent on develpment, but the communities are going to be designed to be cut off from the lifeblood of the urban centers.

Our *sses In The Fire

Blair concurs with Bush over the danger of the recommendations by the Iraq study group.

“I think we’ve got to plan to succeed,” Mr. Blair said on “This Week” on ABC. “And I think that if we start saying to the people that we’re fighting in Iraq that we’re ready to get out, irrespective of the success of the mission, I think that would be very serious for us.”

It's nice that our leaders are finally taking somebody's best interest into account, besides the oil companies. It would be even better if they considered the best interest of the people we've invaded and whose country we've destroyed.

NY 15 Impeach for Change Committee Update

We held an organizing session after the forum at Ethical Culture. We decided to meet at 104th & Amsterdam at 12:30 on Sunday to do the petitioning for a couple of hours.

The forum featured very inspiring speeches by Cindy Sheehan and Elizabeth Holzman. Cindy Sheehan went over the reasons for impeachment: murder, torture, spying, and emphasized that this issue transcends partisanship. We need to approach others for justice, upholding the Constitution, accountability, to show the world what our values are, and to show the next president they're not above the law.

Ms. Holzmann emphasized that we the people have the Constitutional power to impeach because the framers anticipated executive threats and included impeachment as necessary to protct the people from tyranny. She emphasized that Impeachment was "off the table" in 1973, too, but the American people organized, raised their voices, and put it back on there for Congress.

Congress has to be involved in truthful and informed warmaking power decisions to check Presidents who want to go to war to aggrandize their own power.

The war in Iraq would never have happened if Bush had told the truth about 9/11.

The FISA law was specifically passed to prevent unauthorized Presidential wiretapping. The Constitution says President has to "see that the laws are faithfully executed."

Bush & Cheney unleashed a reign of harsh and unlawful detentions in violation of our law and Geneva Conventions.

Bob Fertik empbasized that we need to ask Why Congress isn't litening to the people about impeachment. We will have investigations and subpoenas; will BushCo honor them? No, he said, they won't, so there will be a Constitutional crisis.

Our Congressional grass roots Impeach for Change committees have to bring about a Constitutional crisis by demanding impeachment when BushCo blocks the Congressional investigations into their crimes. History has shown that when an administration is determined to keep the American people in the dark, they will implode.

We have to be ready -- district by district, all across America -- to apply the pressure to impeach upon the Congress at the moment the Constitutional crisis arises.

Both Bob and Cindy talked about Resolution 4232 -- the Emergency Supplemental funding.

Footnote to Doomsday

The AP entitled an article, Bush Quickens Search For New War Plan. It's by my old favorite, Deb Reichman of the White House press corps.

WASHINGTON - Quickening his search for a new war strategy, President Bush sought ideas from lawmakers on Friday and lined up three days of urgent talks with military brass, diplomats and outside experts on how to stop Iraq's slide toward anarchy.

I guess the vaunted "new direction" in Iraq isn't going to involve any actual change, such as, for example... looking for a peace plan!

Staying the Course, Part II

On the home front, BushCo's shrinking approval ratings are reflected in new expressions of public outrage and proactive popular resistance on a weekly basis.

Yes, the assault on the environment continues, but the people are fighting back. A particularly destructive mission by BushCo to delete decades of progress identifying and effectively limiting the dispersal of toxic substances and pollutants is being fought by PEER, Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility.

The bad news is that what PEER is specifically fighting at the moment appears to be a losing battle to preserve the public interest in the war against giant corporate polluters.

In a Pearl Harbor Day press release, we find that EPA officials are purging their website of documents, destroying documents and research data, and limiting the ability of their own scientists and researchers--and the public, too--from getting access to information that has been accumulated in libraries to serve the public interest.

For Immediate Release: December 7, 2006
Contact: Carol Goldberg (202) 265-7337

EPA SCRUBBING LIBRARY WEBSITE TO MAKE REPORTS UNAVAILABLE — Agency Sells $40,000 Worth of Furniture and Equipment for $350


Washington, DC — In defiance of Congressional requests to immediately halt closures of library collections, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is purging records from its library websites, making them unavailable to both agency scientists and outside researchers, according to documents released today by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER). At the same time, EPA is taking steps to prevent the re-opening of its shuttered libraries, including the hurried auctioning off of expensive bookcases, cabinets, microfiche readers and other equipment for less than a penny on the dollar.

In a letter dated November 30, 2006, four incoming House Democratic committee chairs demanded that EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson assure them “that the destruction or disposition of all library holdings immediately ceased upon the Agency's receipt of this letter and that all records of library holdings and dispersed materials are being maintained.” On the very next day, December 1st, EPA de-linked thousands of documents from the website for the Office of Prevention, Pollution and Toxic Substances (OPPTS) Library, in EPA’s Washington D.C. Headquarters.

Last month without notice to its scientists or the public, EPA abruptly closed the OPPTS Library, the agency’s only specialized research repository on health effects and properties of toxic chemicals and pesticides. The web purge follows reports that library staffers were ordered to destroy its holdings by throwing collections into recycling bins.

“EPA’s leadership appears to have gone feral, defying all appeals to reason or consultation,” stated PEER Executive Director Jeff Ruch, noting that Congress has yet to review, let alone approve, the library closures. “The new Congress convening in January will finally have a chance to decide whether EPA will continue to pillage its library network.”

Meanwhile, in what appears to be an effort to limit Congressional options, EPA is taking steps to prevent the re-opening of the several libraries that it has already completely shuttered. In its Chicago office, which formerly hosted one of the largest regional libraries, EPA ordered that all furniture and furnishings (down to the staplers and pencil sharpeners) be sold immediately. Despite an acquisition cost of $40,000 for the furniture and equipment, a woman bought the entire lot for $350. The buyer also estimates that she will re-sell the merchandise for $80,000.

“One big irony is that EPA claimed the reason it needed to close libraries was to save money but in the process they are spending and wasting money like drunken sailors,” Ruch added, noting EPA refuses to say how much it plans to spend digitizing the mountains of documents that it has removed from library shelves. “While the Pentagon had its $600 toilet seat and $434 hammer, EPA has its 29 cent book case and file cabinets for a nickel.”

In spite of its pleas of poverty, EPA is spending millions on a public relations campaign to improve the image of its research program, as well as a $2.7 million program (more than its estimated savings from library closures ) to digitize all employee personnel files, in a program called “eOPF.”

“No one believes that EPA is closing libraries and crating up irreplaceable collections for fiscal reasons,” Ruch concluded. “Instead, the real agenda appears to be controlling access by its own specialists and outside researchers to key technical information.”

This jaw-dropping piece of journalism is concluded by a list of hypertext links:

• Look at the materials removed from the OOPTS Library website


• Note the December 1, 2006 date at the bottom of the notice of file unavailability for OPTTS collections


• Read the November 30, 2006 letter from Democratic House leaders requesting a moratorium on further library closures


• Revisit the order to “recycle” the OPPTS collection


• Trace EPA’s campaign to shut down its libraries

Impeachment

Howard Zinn weighed in with an inspiring reflection on history and the fall of evil administrations.

We can't expect George Bush to scurry off in a helicopter. But we can hold him accountable for catapulting the nation into two wars, for the death and dismemberment of tens of thousands of human beings in this country, Afghanistan, and Iraq, and for his violations of the U.S. Constitution and international law. Surely these acts meet the constitutional requirement of "high crimes and misdemeanors" for impeachment....

A country with military power can destroy but it cannot build. Its citizens become uneasy because their fundamental day-to-day needs are sacrificed for military glory while their young are neglected and sent to war. The uneasiness grows and grows and the citizenry gathers in resistance in larger and larger numbers, which become too many to control; one day the top-heavy empire collapses. Change in public consciousness starts with low-level discontent, at first vague, with no connection being made between the discontent and the policies of the government. And then the dots begin to connect, indignation increases, and people begin to speak out, organize, and act.

Tomorrow is the impeachment meet-up here in New York City. One hundred twenty-five people have signed up to attend. We are organizing a petition and grass roots effort to gather one million signatures to urge Congress to investigate and impeach BushCo.

Of course, impeachment won't solve the problems in Washington, the environment, Iraq, Palestine, or the New York City public schools. But working together, the American people can begin to tackle these issues again for the common good. Ousting BushCo might just ignite collective engines, too.

Continuing to Continue to Stay the Course: Part I (Continued)

More of the same? I don't think so!



As the BushCo, Inc., Unltd., Iraq Study Group Report goes public, the world gains a keyhole perspective upon the inside workings of the BushCo policy-crafting operation.

Meanwhile, in reality, the world shudders and shrieks in the throes of tortured agony and deprivation under the slapstik, dysfunctional, and delusional control of BushCo.

Yes, it's a joke, a very sad joke, my friends.

And in case we manage to tear our attention away, momentarily, from the bizarre spectacle of the BushCo "Stay The Course" pie fight, we may take note of this ironic story in today's AP, Saudis Reportedly Funding Sunni Insurgency.

Salah Nasrawi writes that

Private Saudi citizens are giving millions of dollars to Sunni insurgents in Iraq.

The Saudis are naturally interested in keeping their religious and ethnic allies within Iraq from losing all leverage within the government and being slaughtered wholesale. But we're supposed to be on Saudi Arabia's side (or are they supposed to be on ours?) in stabilizing Iraq and the region.

Needless to say, the Saudi government insists that they are choking off all those illegal funds, and that nothing meaningful is getting through to the insurgents, anymore, especially now that the Saudi intelligence forces have clamped down to ensure the financial houses and banks over there aren't shifting any funds at all in a way that would support their neighbors, family members, and denomination cobelievers who are being disenfranchised, slaughtered and tortured.

Saudi Arabia is a key U.S. ally in the Middle East. The Iraq Study Group report noted that its government has assisted the U.S. military with intelligence on Iraq.

But Saudi citizens have close tribal ties with Sunni Arabs in Iraq, and sympathize with their brethren in what they see as a fight for political control — and survival — with Iraq's Shiites.

The Saudi government is determined to curb the growing influence of its chief rival in the region, Iran. Tehran is closely linked to Shiite parties that dominate the Iraqi government.

Saudi officials say the kingdom has worked with all sides to reconcile Iraq's warring factions. They have, they point out, held talks in Saudi Arabia with Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, whose militia is accused of killing Sunnis.

Nasrawi, however, let's the facts speak for themselves, specifically in the form of

Iraqi truck and bus drivers.

Several drivers interviewed by the AP in Middle East capitals said Saudis have been using religious events, like the hajj pilgrimage to Mecca and a smaller pilgrimage, as cover for illicit money transfers. Some money, they said, is carried into Iraq on buses with returning pilgrims.

"They sent boxes full of dollars and asked me to deliver them to certain addresses in Iraq," said one driver, who gave his name only as Hussein, out of fear of reprisal. "I know it is being sent to the resistance, and if I don't take it with me, they will kill me."

To further illustrate the slapstik, tragicomic state of Middle Eastern diplomacy in the BushCo era, Nasrawi offers this parting shot,

Last week, a Saudi who headed a security consulting group close to the Saudi government, Nawaf Obaid, wrote in the Washington Post that Saudi Arabia would use money, oil and support for Sunnis to thwart Iranian efforts to dominate Iraq if American troops pulled out. The Saudi government denied the report and fired Obaid.

How To Stay The Course: Part I

The New York Times reports on Bush's response to the Iraq Study Group recommendations

With Mr. Blair by his side, the president said he needed to be “flexible and realistic” in considering troop movements, and made clear he would impose preconditions for talking to Iran and Syria that neither side is willing to accept. He was especially animated in describing what he said would be the consequences of a failure to stabilize Iraq, saying that future generations of Americans would be put at risk.