While Israel, a rogue state, is reducing its northern neighbor to a failed state, Sudan already is both. The escalating disaster in the west of that giant country, larger than Western Europe, is being totally eclipsed by the Lebanon war:

It is not inconceivable that denizens of Darfur are less understanding.

Village torched by Janjaweed milita, Darfur.

Writes leading Darfur specialist, Eric Reeves:

The stumbling block is oil-thirsty China, whose intransigence on behalf of its rogue client state equals that of the US on Israel’s behalf. Yet there is an asymmetry: Whereas China threatens to veto any Chapter 7 resolution authorizing an international peacekeeping force in defiance of Khartoum, the US threatens to veto any resolution that does not authorize such a force in defiance of Beirut. In other words, China wields its veto power to buttress legal state sovereignty; the US wields its ditto in contradiction thereof. About the humanitarian dimension, neither really gives a damn.

The result may very well be that an international peacekeeping force with a robust mandate is sent to occupy south Lebanon on behalf of Israel as a reward for the latter’s willful and catastrophic escalation of a low-intensity border conflict, while millions of Darfurians continue to be starved, gang raped, shot, or hacked to death by genocidal Janjaweed, abetted by the bombs of the Sudanese Air Force.

Thus the rogue regimes of Khartoum and Tel Aviv will be equally pleased.

It’s a sobering prospect for anyone clinging to the hope that in A.D. 2006, power and basic decency can mix.

For some background on the Darfur disaster, see my post from earlier this year: They sing when they rape.

So British police has foiled a major international terrorist plot.

Said plot aimed to blow up as much as ten commercial airliners en route from the UK to the US. Most of the around 21 suspects are British born Muslims. Not Saudi born. British born.

Does this ring a bell? The Iraq War and other misadventures of the War on Terror ™ are not merely irrelevant to the objective of quelling the international jihadi Salafist movement: they positively boost the latter. In particular they give rise to terrorism against the countries leading this perceived “War on the Ummah,” the terrorists frequently being alienated Muslim citizens of same.

For a while now, we have been reassured that al-Qaeda is finished off as a command-and-control structure, persisting solely on a “franchise” basis. The fresh mega-operation is the latest sign that the reality may be more complex. Last month I quoted one Bruce Hoffman at the Rand Corporation (not a hotbed of leftist pacifism) to the effect that a reassessment may be in order. Let’s have a fuller excerpt of that WaPo article:

Predictably, Bush called the plot a “stark reminder that this nation [the USA] is at war with Islamic fascists who will use any means to destroy those of us who love freedom.” But pace Chimpoleon, when such ploys are actually foiled in time, it’s due to police work, not preventive war.

In the aforementioned post from July I also quoted a certain Osama bin Laden’s own account of the formative experiences leading him to find his vocation. This, too, is worth a rerun:

I ask again: how many jihadi mass murderers will go into business after the unholy trinity of Bush, Blair, and Olmert are done grinding Lebanon back to dust? Could something possibly be learned from history over and above the hackneyed mantra of “Münich 1938″?

Shimon Samuels, Director for International Relations at the Simon Wiesenthal Center, Paris division, goes into a frenzy over the essay by Jostein Gaarder:

Shimon Samuels and his “center” — in fact a huge international lobby group — are a disgrace. In the name of millions of murdered Jews they shy no means, short of violence, to bully, intimidate and vilify anyone who points out the dark underbelly of Israel, or what I have called the Spartan side of Israeli society.

One example out of many is how they have led a campaign to have the UN recognize any objection to Zionism (the nationalist ideology underpinning Israel as a specifically Jewish nation-state) as racism worthy of censure and censorship:

In other words, far from being in a position to criticize Gaarder’s highly problematic conflation of Judaism with the state of Israel, Samuels has lobbied for having the UN recognize that very same conflation. The only difference is that Samuels extols the package solution and condemns anyone who doesn’t as evil or deranged.

Samuels’ previous communiques on matters Norwegian are marked by the same sense of unhinged dishonesty. In a recent open letter to the Prime Minister he claims that Norway has donated $100 million to Hamas since January 2006, whereas the actual amount is $0 (all support being channeled to President Mahmoud Abbas of Fatah, whose office even the US doesn’t mind funding). He also conveniently ignores the reason why one government party is proposing to slash tax deductibility for donations to certain Zionist institutions: these are financing settlement expansion on the occupied West Bank, a war crime under the Fourth Geneva Convention and under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, which Israel refuses to ratify on these very grounds.

Last year, in another open letter to PM Jens Stoltenberg, he held the national government responsible for a provincial council’s boycott of Israeli products, which he called a return to Quisling. I don’t know, Mr. Samuels. The motivation for the provincial council’s decision is the similarities between Israeli occupational practices and the apartheid regime of South Africa, which that council was the first in Norway to boycott. The similarities are confirmed by people like Ronnie Kasrils, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and Nelson Mandela; are they Nazis too?

Perhaps in your mind, Israelis and they alone are a priori immune from such comparisons, judging by your misplaced complaint to Norway’s ambassador in Washington about a newspaper caricature of Ehud Olmert?

This is how the Israel lobby operates.

Anyone who sincerely wants to restore Israel’s standing in the eyes of the world are better advised to engage in honest dialogue with those of us who find pictures such as this more obscene than any cartoon or essay:

Manal Husseini, killed in Israel’s war of choice. R.I.P.

P.S. The English version of Gaarder’s piece accompanying Samuels’ letter is largely based on my translation. It is instructive to note, however, that Samuels & co have tried to get a better fit with traditional anti-Semitic myths. For instance, my accurate translation of the term ‘barnemordere‘, ‘child murderers’, has been altered to the incorrect ‘baby killers’. Nice job.

This isn’t funny anymore. Actually, it ceased to be so quite a while ago.

After some 3,149 Iraqis were killed in June alone and 20,000 citizens of Baghdad — mostly the last tattered remains of the middle class — were driven out by militias during the last ten days of July, Chimpoleon takes stock of the situation:

Incredible. By standard scholarly definitions, there has been civil war in Iraq since 2004. And if democracy was “born quickly,” it was either stillborn or strangled in the cradle.

A few days ago, this entity that passes for a US President diagnosed the dramatic conditions a bit farther west:

I cannot improve on Matt Yglesias’ comment:

Obviously that assumes he was aware of it in the first place. Another possibility is that his lips just mindlessly mouthed some staff-prepared script. If that sounds far-fetched, consider this:

Sorry, I don’t know how to properly comment on that. I just don’t.

What I do know, and what in fact any fool with a newspaper must know, is that the New Middle East ™ and adjacent areas are turning out less than stellar under the guiding hand of this monstrous man-child. Here’s Daniel Levy summing it up in Haaretz:

Oh, and Lebanon — that tiny place with the adorable “Cedar Revolution” which until a month ago was a showcase for the “domino theory of democracy” — has been reduced to a smoking crater whose hitherto pro-American PM now talks like a Hezbollah spokesman without a beard.

Bush and his regime are a cosmic joke. Yet it’s been a long time since laughter was even possible.

Update: God help us. See Fred Kaplan on the Killer Chimp’s most recent press conference. To make this individual POTUS was an insult to the entire human race.

Nearly three out of four Americans think Iraqis are better off now than before the invasion, a survey shows.

Iraqi blogger Riverbend might beg to differ. She describes how Baghdad’s middle class is being expelled by Mahdist goons:

This takes the surprise out of the fact that, in a survey carried out this April by the International Republican Institute, only 1% of Iraqis said they trusted American and coalition forces for their personal protection (and that poll was taken before a certain ‘incident’ was known).

Mahdist militiamen in Baghdad

Nor is it rocket science to see why, as even the Wall Street Journal admits, “the middle class — upon whom so much depends — is fleeing Iraq in numbers.” A point worth noting for the 55 percent of Americans who, according the the aforementioned poll, think “history will give the U.S. credit for bringing freedom and democracy” to Iraq. For without an urban, educated middle class, Iraqi freedom and democracy remain a chimera.

It’s the last remains of this middle class that are going now. Here’s a BBC report from 2002:

Riverbend continues:

As documented in this HRW background paper, Iraq ranked among the most progressive Arab societies with respect to women’s rights from the 1968 Baathist coup until the Gulf War. Gender equality was enshrined in the constitution; there were compulsory schooling and free higher education for both genders; and the law ensured equal employment opportunities in the public sector. However, the tide turned after 1991, as a weakened dictator traded off his modernizing vision for religious support, especially among reactionary Shias. Additionally, UN sanctions hit women disproportionately, just as they decimated the middle class.

After the second US-led war on Iraq, the wheel has now turned full cycle.

Not depressing enough, you say? Try this fresh report in the Observer:

What’s not to like? Reading on:

I think this goes to show that three out of four Americans can be wrong.

Besides Digby, my favorite American blogger these days is Billmon. As am I, he is giving up on the spineless lickspittles known as the Democrats.

I have nothing to add, except the observation that the difference between Democrats and Republicans on foreign policy is generally lesser than that between Bush and his lapdog, Blair.

Oh wait, there’s also another thing. Even celebrities of the liberal netroots, dismissed by the über-corrupt Washington establishment as “crazy lefties,” have proven themselves pathetic cowards. Yes, I’m talking about you Markos Moulitsas of Daily Kos, you who haven’t objected to Usrael’s blasting away of Lebanon with a single word.

I never admired your mediocre writing, but I used to respect you once. Now, to be blunt, I wouldn’t cross the street to take a leak in your face if your hair were on fire.

Times they are a-changing on the Hill:

And maybe all of you will finally realize one day that fried potatoes is a Belgian dish.

As vicious as the onslaught against Lebanon is, we might as well recall that in Iraq there is the equivalent of nearly two Qana massacres on average every day.

Nonetheless the US President has the audacity to present Iraq as a model of democracy which Russia should strive to emulate, to Vladimir Putin’s face, in front of press.

How come this monster’s approval ratings are not in single digits? One reason is that a majority of Americans are blitheringly ignorant imbeciles of the kind that thinks the sun orbits the earth, or more ludicrously still, that “history will give the US credit for bringing freedom and democracy” to Iraq. However, I suspect there is an even more egregious reason as well.

Most Americans simply do not care about non-Americans. They couldn’t care less about what goes on in Iraq insofar as it doesn’t affect Americans, especially themselves. If you doubt this, consider the runup to the 2000 Presidential election, where it was a commonplace that one couldn’t find two Americans in a row that cared about foreign policy. Otherwise, a man whose experience with the world abroad was pretty much limited to Mexican hookers would never have come within a bloodless coup d’état’s reach of the Oval Office. Even the rediscovery of the outer world on the morning of September 11 2001 had nothing to do with an interest in the welfare of same and everything to do with restoring, by whichever means, the illusion of living on a planet of one’s own, shielded by the seas, a ferocious military, and Star Wars from the rest of the pale blue dot.

That’s why the ad hoc, ex post facto justification for illegally invading Iraq — “spreading freedom and democracy” — would have been ridiculous even without the civil war. The American people would never have given a used kleenex for “spreading freedom and democracy” to a country which, after four years of continuous coverage, two thirds of young adults cannot find on the map.

Not only do the vast majority of Americans not know that their so-called great nation has sponsored the worst of the worst war criminals and murderous despots to walk the earth since World War II, including but not limited to Mobutu Sese-Seko, Pol Pot (after the genocide!), Mohammad Suharto, the Shah of Persia, Jonas Savimbi, Augusto Pinochet, Gulbuddin Hekmatayar, Fulgencio Batista, Rafael Trujillo, Manuel Noriega, Hissène Habré, Carlos Castillo Armas, Antonio Somoza, and Saddam Hussein. They also wouldn’t care if told.

A nation’s thoughts and dreams and priorities are reflected in its movies. I honestly cannot think of a single Hollywood movie, apart from cheesy “historical” dramas like Ben Hur, wherein the world outside “America” appears as anything but a scary place for Americans to be at risk. In the ongoing movie cycle called Iraqi Freedom, US soldiers and Marines are at risk from ungrateful savages; and to the limited extent that there is a movement to call off the operation, it has precious little to do with any wish of the Iraqis. It has to do with the wish of Americans for a happy ending, wherein their heroes helicopter off to safety as the $1-2 trillion set explodes in the background. Titles.

Telephone polling of 1002 Americans lays bare the staggering extent of American distaste for facts.

In the midst of a catastrophic civil war, no less than fifty-five percent of respondents “think history will give the U.S. credit for bringing freedom and democracy” to Iraq.

I have given the American people every possible benefit of the doubt over the last six years. That’s not an error I am likely to repeat.

BBC News:

No kidding. A convoy of international press, clearly marked and giving the IDF half-hourly updates on its position, was shelled on Friday on its way out of south-east Lebanon. Several cars with refugees had joined the convoy, mistakenly believing this would be safer. These refugees were hit, wounding several children.

The Norwegian TV2, which had a reporter in this convoy, interviewed terrified villagers trapped with their children in the area and running out of food. They either didn’t have a car or were afraid to be attacked if they left the house.

In the subsequent segment, the Killer Chimp filled the TV screen with his hideous grin, boasting that what is going on in Lebanon “is US policy.”

– We’ll get every last one of those turrrist children.

Update: Good news. A terrorist mother and her six terrorist children were killed when an Israeli F-16, paid for with American tax money, bombed the family’s house outside of Nabatiyeh. Another terrorist family member was also offed.

Unfortunately the terrorist family father, Adnan al-Kharakeh, survived as he was out working for the terrorist Lebanese Civil Defense, saving other terrorist bomb victims.

In other uplifting news on the fruits of US policy, six terrorist civilians were killed in an airstrike against several residential houses in the border village Ain Arab, and a further eight terrorist civilians were found killed on the deadly roads of southern Lebanon. Among the latter were a terrorist married couple and their three terrorist children, hit by an Israeli missile as they shamelessly tried to flee the Israeli self-defense.

Source: NTB/Aftenposten.

Meanwhile, Norwegian TV showed images of a terrorist woman, nine months pregnant, trying to walk the 30 kilometers to relative safety in the blistering heat with bombs literally raining around her. After a near-hit she squatted and cried in despair, as only a true, hardened terrorist would do.

Additionally, another terrorist UN observer post has been destroyed in an airstrike. Two terrorist unarmed UNIFIL observers were wounded.

Israel defends its destruction of Lebanon with reference to UN Security Council Resolution 1391, calling on Lebanon to seize control of its entire territory. In this context it is interesting to consider Israel’s own record when it comes to UN resolutions.

The Israeli Ambassador to Norway, Miryam Shomrat, has kindly answered questions from readers of the Norwegian daily Aftenposten. One question read: “Is Israel free to pick and choose which UN Resolutions are to be complied with?” Her Excellency replied as follows:

That’s quite a study in disingenuity. Three follow-ups come to mind:

1. If it’s fine and dandy to ignore UN General Assembly resolutions at will because they aren’t legally binding, why are we constantly reminded that Israel was established under a UN General Assembly resolution? Indeed, Israel’s own establishment proclamation cites this resolution immediately before declaring the state:

The ambassador herself complains in another reply: “The historical fact is that when the State of Israel was established the Arab countries attacked it a [sic] war of aggression and at the end of the war refused to sign peace agreements and establish recognised borders - which Israel wanted.” But if a barrage of UN General Assembly resolutions critical of Israel count for nil, why was it so wrong for Arab states to reject the particular resolution authorizing Israel’s creation in the former British Mandate? (For the record, I don’t personally oppose it.)

2. Is it really true that “Israel is adhering to Security Council resolutions”? If by this one means, ‘adhering to some Security Council resolutions’, then it is doubtless so, though not mind-bendingly impressive. But what about the following, Mrs. Ambassador?

The above list relies on this compilation by Professor Stephen Zunes, updated from the primary sources. Note that it only includes resolutions which Israel currently is flaunting; otherwise it would have been longer. For instance, UNSC Resolution 425 (1978), calling on Israel to withdraw from Lebanon, was ignored by the former for 22 years.

3. To the extremely limited extent that passed UNSC resolutions are palatable to Israel, could that possibly be because the US, after adopting Israel as a client state in the early 1970s, has used its veto power more than all other permanent members during that period combined? After all, since Ambassador George Bush cast the first pro-Israel veto in 1972, forty UNSC Resolutions critical of Israel have been shot down by the USA, the most recent one calling for a halt to the Lebanon slaughter.

I rest my case.

Update:

A fresh NYT/CBS poll finds ample support for Israeli war crimes in the only demographic that matters:

And what is this “handling” of which only 27 percent disapprove? Apart from rush-delivering “precision-guided” ordnance to Israel, financed by 20 percent of US “development aid,” it amounts to vetoing a call for ceasefire by the UNSC and similarly torpedoing the summit in Rome:

At the Rome talks, Rice resisted pressure from allies for Washington to change its stance and call for an immediate halt to the violence.

Rice insisted any cease-fire must be “sustainable” and that there could be “no return to the status quo” — a reference to the U.S. and Israeli position that Hezbollah must first be pushed back from the border and the Lebanese army backed by international forces deployed in the south.

Israel takes the result of Rice’s sabotage as a pat on the back:

So heartened by the “world’s support,” the “justice” minister openly threatens a campaign of relentless war crimes:

Except the children; the elderly; those who lie wounded in their homes because you have bombed the ambulances and hospitals; and those who are trapped for want of a vehicle or because you have destroyed the roads and bridges and targeted convoys of refugees marked with white flags.

Is someone taking notes at the Hague? Oh, wait. At a previous conference in Rome, Israel was one of only seven countries rejecting the International Criminal Court. The others were China, Iraq (under Saddam Hussein), Libya, Yemen, Qatar, and the USA. As usual, the latter is in a class of its own: Congress has authorized the President to “use all means necessary and appropriate” to free US personnel (and certain allied personnel, including Israeli such) detained or imprisoned by the ICC. Presumably, the Hague has taken note of that.

However, might does not make right. Morally speaking, the USA stands to Israel as Serbia stood to the regime of Radovan Karadžić. It is, and I regret having to write these words, a blight on humanity.

Crossposted from Booman Tribune and European Tribune.

The United States of America has no problem with Israel burning the skin off children’s bodies with incendiary weapons, reducing cities to rubble, targeting UN positions and Red Cross ambulances, forcing 900,000 civilians to flee, and generally bombing a sovereign, democratic state a generation back in time. On the contrary, it provides munitions, diplomatic support, and moral encouragement for these war crimes, financed in no small part with US tax money, to go on. This is not without implications.

The landmark seen below is the traditional, universally recognized symbol of the United States of America and the values on which it builds:

The Statue of Liberty, New York

As such it is, however, obsolete. In all seriousness, I hereby propose a replacement structure, seen below:

The US Navy base Coronado, California

The advantage is that this structure already exists, so that there is no need to divert funds away from burning the skin off children, targeting ambulances, destroying cities, and the other purposes which it so poignantly serves to represent.

– Lick my boots and die

Advice to all Lebanese: play dead. Maybe then conditions will be “right.”

Half a million 700,000 Lebanese are fleeing as their homes are being wasted and their infrastructure destroyed. The last time the world saw a similar campaign of ethnic cleansing, it led to Slobodan Milošević being tried for war crimes in the Hague.

In fact, when Milošević commenced his vile offensive in Kosovo, Serbia was already the target of NATO’s first-ever war — a war involving 38,004 combat sorties and nearly depleting US stocks of cruise missiles. At least 500 civilians were killed.

Israel, too, is at the receiving end of US bombs. However, there is a subtle difference in the mode of delivery this time:

Are there huge demonstrations in Washington against this evil madness? But of course not! See, this terrorist child urgently needs to be bombed some more:

I’ll be honest. This has gone too far. Right now I hate the whole United States of fucking America.* Maybe the feeling will pass, and maybe it won’t.

*) Naturally, individuals are judged on their merits.

As Iraq descends into Congo-scale carnage and top government officials say Iraq as a political project is finished, while 500,000 flee the Israeli destruction and imminent invasion of southern Lebanon, the de facto US President probes the depths of naked psychopathy:

John Bolton, buffoon extraordinaire and recess appointed mouthpiece of madness at the United Nations, has received unexpected support for his reappointment. Only a year ago, Senator George Voinovich (R-Ohio) wept on the Senate floor as he declared that he owed his grandchildren a vote against Bolton’s nomination. This act of conscience lead to his vilification in vicious attack ads as a ‘traitor to the Republican party’.

Might that explain why Voinovitch now proclaims it the solemn duty of the US Congress, Democrats included, to indulge the President who defied it last year by recess appointing this clown in the dead of summer? Perish the thought! The reason, says Voinovitch in the WaPo, is that evaluating Bolton on his merits would be to appease America’s enemies in light of the “deteriorating situation in the Middle East”:

Though a nifty piece of Rovian rhetoric, the above is weapons-grade stupidity by any other measure. On what far-flung planet will terrorists even pretend to give a damn about Bolton?

For the Senator’s edification, here is what actual terrorists — or more importantly, potential such — might give a damn about (click to enlarge):

Don’t believe me, Senator? Then consider, if you will, this sunny teenager cheerfully posing with his brothers and sisters.

Whatever formative experiences turned him into the world’s most deadly terrorist? Here is Osama’s own account:

Sound familiar? Bin Laden continues:

Even if this is pure rhetoric, and it probably isn’t, it is still a dead-on description of how terrorist intent takes shape in a typical case. How many future “resistants” are being spawned in Lebanon, or in front of TVs around the world, consumed by desperate, murderous rage against America, the West, and their puppet regimes?

Does the Senator think the mad dog approach to counterinsurgency has succeeded brilliantly so far? Has it not pushed Afghanistan to the edge of an abyss dwarfed only by the high-intensity civil war engulfing Iraq while the world stares transfixed at the wrecking of Lebanon?

If this Senator is unaware that the revolutionary jihadi movement is rising like a phoenix from these disasters, then it’s not because he hasn’t been better briefed:

(Emphasis added.)

But heaven forbid that there be deliberation in the US Congress about John Bolton’s fitness, or lack thereof, for office: the C-SPAN coverage would inestimably aid al-Qaeda!

I’d like to think it doesn’t get more absurd than this, but I’ve been wrong before.

So let’s see if I have this right. According to the world’s most powerful man, the below is a picture of murdered children:

Embryonic stem cell research at UWI, Madison

…while this is not:

Incinerated children at Rumaylah, Lebanon

When, oh when will stem cell research offer a cure for absolute, total, and utter moral perversity?