IRAQ

Arab News via Rense: Brits Abandon Major Southern Iraq Base

-- On Friday, Aug. 25, the Washington Post published a startling story from its Baghdad bureau. I can do no better than to quote its opening paragraph: "British troops abandoned a major base in southern Iraq on Thursday and prepared to wage guerrilla warfare along the Iranian border to combat weapons smuggling, a move that anti-American cleric Moqtada Sadr called the first expulsion of US-led coalition forces from an Iraqi urban center. 'This is the first Iraqi city that has kicked out the occupier!' trumpeted a message from Sadr's office that played on car-mounted speakers in Amarah. 'We have to celebrate this occasion!'"

Details painted the larger picture. Local resentment had boiled into anger when British soldiers entered a mosque to make arrests. Insurgents, clearly loyal to Sadr, began shelling the British base, Camp Abu Naji, which had 1,200 soldiers and was on the border of Iran. In simple language, the British withdrew from the camp, which was looted when they left, so clearly the withdrawal was less than orderly. The decision may have been encouraged by the fact that "the 2nd Battalion of the Iraqi Army's 4th Brigade mutinied".

MIDDLE EAST

Commondreams: Israel Prepares for the Next War

As Israelis read their newspapers, the message comes through loud and clear: Get ready for the next war, the really big war. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert gave his people an ominous warning yesterday when he “toured northern Israel Thursday and visited, among other venues, the hospital in Nahariya directly hit by rocket fire during the Lebanon war. ‘We must be prepared for (various) scenarios and ready for anything,’ he said. ‘We must push forward deadlines and be ready for the possibility of receiving casualties under all conditions.’ … ‘At this time we shall prepare for any possible scenario of a threat, in full force.’”

But who will be the enemy? “The head of the Israel Defense Forces Military Intelligence Maj.-Gen. Amos Yadlin told the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee that after the war with Hizbullah, Syria will try to reclaim the Golan Heights through either diplomatic or military means,” Yediot Aharonot reports.

ISRAEL

The Sun: Olmert, Minister in Clash Over Returning the Golan to Syria

TEL AVIV, Israel — Dissent within Israel's war Cabinet appeared to spill into the open yesterday with the country's minister for internal security defying an order from Prime Minister Olmert and publicly saying that if Syria was interested, he would endorse negotiating the return of the Golan Heights to the Baathist regime in Damascus in exchange for peace.

The statements from Avi Dichter — a former chief of Israel's FBI, known as the Shabak — seemed directly to contradict the prime minister, who said on Sunday before the weekly Cabinet meeting that members of the government should not discuss possible Golan negotiations.

ISRAEL

ICH: Restarting the 34 Day War
By Mike Whitney

Israel is in a state of post-war trauma. Its 34 day pounding of Lebanon achieved none of the stated goals and has left the public furious at the incompetence of the Olmert government. 118 soldiers were killed in the conflict and Israel’s celebrated "power of deterrents" has been smashed to smithereens. Nothing was gained. In the north, industry was brought to a complete standstill while the local people were shunted off to fallout shelters for weeks on end.

IRAQ

Tom Dispatch: 7 Facts You Might Not Know about the Iraq War

With a tenuous cease-fire between Israel and Lebanon holding, the ever-hotter war in Iraq is once again creeping back onto newspaper front pages and towards the top of the evening news. Before being fully immersed in daily reports of bomb blasts, sectarian violence, and casualties, however, it might be worth considering some of the just-under-the-radar-screen realities of the situation in that country. Here, then, is a little guide to understanding what is likely to be a flood of new Iraqi developments -- a few enduring, but seldom commented upon, patterns central to the dynamics of the Iraq war, as well as to the fate of the American occupation and Iraqi society.

CHOMSKY ON LEBONON

The Anatolian: Chomsky: UN Security Council acts within constraints set by great powers
Interviewed by Nermeen Al Mufti

UN Security Council Resolution 1701 came very late and posed a fragile ceasefire, yet there will be another war as long as the Bush-backed Israel has the pretext of "safer borders," and Bush himself is insisting on going further in his war against terrorism.

Eminent Professor Noam Chomsky, in this interview with The New Anatolian, speaks about Israeli-Lebanese war and the UN Security Council.

ISRAEL BREAKING CEASE-FIRE

ABC News: Israeli Warplanes Roar Over Lebanon

With concern mounting over the fragile truce, Israel sent war planes Monday over the coastal city of Tripoli, some 35 miles north of Beirut, and over Baalbek, scene of an Israeli commando raid two days ago which Israel said was to disrupt weapons shipments for Hezbollah from Syria.

Lebanon considers overflights a violation of the U.N. resolution that ended 34 days of fighting last week.

Reuters: Three hizbollah fighters killed in Israel clash-TV

DUBAI, Aug 21 (Reuters) - Three Hizbollah fighters were killed and four Israeli soldiers were wounded in a clash in south Lebanon on Monday, Al Arabiya television reported. The station did not give further details in its news flash. An Israeli army spokesman said earlier that Israeli troops had shot and wounded three Hizbollah guerrillas

USA/ISRAEL

Foreign Policy in Focus: How Washington Goaded Israel

There is increasing evidence that Israel instigated a disastrous war on Lebanon largely at the behest of the United States. The Bush administration was set on crippling Hezbollah...

..Israel was a willing partner. Although numerous Israeli press reports indicate that some Israeli officials, including top military officials, are furious at Bush for pushing Olmert into war, the Israeli government had been planning the attack since 2004. According to a July 21 article in the San Francisco Chronicle, Israel had briefed U.S. officials with details of the plans, including PowerPoint presentations, in what the newspaper described as “revealing detail.” Political science professor Gerald Steinberg of Bar-Ilan University told the Chronicle that “[O]f all of Israel's wars since 1948, this was the one for which Israel was most prepared. In a sense, the preparation began in May 2000, immediately after the Israeli withdrawal …”

ENGLAND

Guardian: Ryanair threatens government over airport security

Ryanair today threatened to sue the government for compensation unless airport security measures are returned to normal within seven days.

Michael O'Leary, the outspoken chief executive of Ryanair, described the new restrictions as "farcical Keystone Cops security measures that don't add anything except to block up airports", as he issued the ultimatum.

At a news conference in London, Mr O'Leary, described as "nonsense" the increased body checks and the new carry-on restrictions. Flanked by a Winston Churchill figure - in reference to the company's advertising campaign - he went on to say that the disruption at airports handed extremists a public relations victory.

TERRORISM/RACISM

Daily Mail: Mutiny as passengers refuse to fly until Asians are removed

Passengers refuse to allow holiday jet to take off until two Asian men are thrown off plan

British holidaymakers staged an unprecedented mutiny - refusing to allow their flight to take off until two men they feared were terrorists were forcibly removed.

"The Goverment Propaganda seems to work"

LEBANON

ICH: From Mania to Depression
by Uri Avnery

Thirty three days of war. The longest of our wars since 1949.

On the Israeli side: 154 dead--117 of them soldiers. 3970 rockets launched against us, 37 civilians dead, more than 422 civilians wounded.

On the Lebanese side: about a thousand dead civilians, thousands wounded. An unknown number of Hizbullah fighters dead and wounded.

More than a million refugees on both sides.

So what has been achieved for this terrible price?

AFGHANISTAN

AP: Afghan opium cultivation hits a record

ABUL, Afghanistan - Opium cultivation in
Afghanistan has hit record levels — up by more than 40 percent from 2005 — despite hundreds of millions in counternarcotics money, Western officials told The Associated Press.

The increase could have serious repercussions for an already grave security situation, with drug lords joining the Taliban-led fight against Afghan and international forces.

IRAQ

New York Times: July deadliest month in Iraq, tallies show

BAGHDAD More Iraqi civilians appear to have been killed in July than in any other month of the war, according to national and morgue statistics, suggesting that the much-vaunted Baghdad security plan started in June by the new government had failed.

An average of more than 110 Iraqis were killed per day in July, according to figures from Iraq's Health Ministry and the Baghdad morgue. At least 3,438 civilians died violently that month, a 9 percent increase over the total in June and nearly twice as many as in January.

USA

Los Angeles Times: Group Says Iran Is 'Not a Crisis'

WASHINGTON — Seeking to counter the White House's depiction of its Middle East policies as crucial to the prevention of terrorist attacks at home, 21 former generals, diplomats and national security officials will release an open letter tomorrow arguing that the administration's "hard line" has actually undermined U.S. security.

The letter comes as President Bush has made a series of appearances and statements, including a visit Tuesday to the National Counterterrorism Center in McLean, Va., seeking to promote the administration's record on security issues in advance of November's midterm congressional elections.

The rhetoric has increased since last week's Democratic primary in Connecticut, in which antiwar political newcomer Ned Lamont defeated three-term Sen. Joe Lieberman to become the party's Senate candidate — a victory that senior administration officials are describing as a sign that Democrats are embracing their party's extreme left.

"for me as european it is kinda funny to see what the americans are calling "extreme left" but maybe it is because they just have have a two party system where both parties are acting as big-business frontgroups""

LEBANON

ICH: Lebanese deaths, and Israeli war crimes, kept off the balance sheet
by Jonathan Steele

During Israel’s war against the people of Lebanon, our media, politicians and diplomats have colluded with the aggressors by distracting us with irrelevancies, by concocting controversies, and by framing the language of diplomacy. In the fragile truce that is currently holding while Lebanon waits for Israel to withdraw, we are simply getting more of the same.

One example of the many distractions during the war that neatly reveals their true purpose is the “faked Reuters photograph” affair. The supposed scandal of a Lebanese photographer tampering with a picture to add and darken smoke from an Israeli missile attack -- to little or no effect, it should be noted -- has not only been decried by activists on Zionist websites but amplified by mainstream commentators into a debate about whether we can trust the images of this war.

ISRAEL

Teheran Times: Olmert may not survive this disastrous war

The ceasefire in southern Lebanon will not hold. Israel will probably lose more soldiers killed in combat in the next month than in the past month (119). Ehud Olmert will probably no longer be prime minister of Israel by the end of this year. And it is all too likely that Binyamin Netanyahu will take his place.

The UN-sponsored ceasefire will not hold because Hezbollah has not been defeated. Despite a month of pounding by Israeli bombs and artillery, it still holds at least 80 percent of the territory south of the Litani river: in most places, Israeli forces have advanced no more than a few miles (kilometers) from the frontier. In the last few days before the ceasefire, Hezbollah was launching twice as many rockets into northern Israel as its daily average in the first week of the war.

LEBANON

Independent via ICH: In the face of Bush's lies, it's left to Assad to tell the truth
by Robert Fisk

In the sparse Baathist drawing rooms of Damascus, reality often seems a long way away. But it was a sign of the times that President Bashar al-Assad was able to bring the great and the good of Damascus to their feet by the simple token of telling the truth - which no other Arab leader has chosen to do these past five weeks: that the Lebanese Hizbollah guerrilla army has, in effect, won this round of their war with Israel.

LEBANON/IRAN

Democracy Now: Seymour Hersh: U.S. Helped Plan Israeli Attack, Cheney "Convinced" Assault on Lebanon Could Serve as Prelude to Preemptive Attack on Iran

Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh reports in this week's issue of the New Yorker that Israeli officials visited the White House earlier this summer to get a "green light" for an attack on Lebanon. The Bush administration approved, Hersh says, in part to remove Hezbollah as a deterrent to a potential US bombing of Iran. [includes rush transcript]

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LEBANON/IRAN

New Yorker: Washington’s interests in Israel’s war.
by Seymour M. Hersh

Issue of 2006-08-21 --In the days after Hezbollah crossed from Lebanon into Israel, on July 12th, to kidnap two soldiers, triggering an Israeli air attack on Lebanon and a full-scale war, the Bush Administration seemed strangely passive. “It’s a moment of clarification,” President George W. Bush said at the G-8 summit, in St. Petersburg, on July 16th. “It’s now become clear why we don’t have peace in the Middle East.” He described the relationship between Hezbollah and its supporters in Iran and Syria as one of the “root causes of instability,” and subsequently said that it was up to those countries to end the crisis. Two days later, despite calls from several governments for the United States to take the lead in negotiations to end the fighting, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said that a ceasefire should be put off until “the conditions are conducive.”

"a must read"

LEBANON

Haaretz: IDF general: Troops lacking food can steal from Lebanese stores

"If our fighters deep in Lebanese territory are left without food our water, I believe they can break into local Lebanese stores to solve that problem," Brigadier General Avi Mizrahi, the head of the Israel Defense Forces logistics branch, said Monday.

Mizrahi's comments followed complaints by IDF soldiers regarding the lack of food on the front lines.

"If what they need to do is take water from the stores, they can take," Mizrahi told Army Radio.

"The most moral army in the world"