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11. januar 2007
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The Telegraph writes:
The Central Intelligence Agency has been authorised to take covert action against Hizbollah as part of a secret plan by President George W. Bush to help the Lebanese government prevent the spread of Iranian influence. Senators and congressmen have been briefed on the classified "non-lethal presidential finding" that allows the CIA to provide financial and logistical support to the prime minister, Fouad Siniora.
The finding was signed by Mr Bush before Christmas after discussions between his aides and Saudi Arabian officials. Details of its existence, known only to a small circle of White House officials, intelligence officials and members of Congress, have been passed to The Daily Telegraph.
The CIA hasn't even been able to keep the plan secret from the press! As Hot Air comments:
An army that fought Israel to a stalemate versus the most inept arm of the U.S. security apparatus? What could go wrong?
With the French and the CIA on board to help, we can ask what the Lebanese did wrong to deserve this.
10:34:42 PM 
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If you need to make lots of screen shots, which is not unusual if you make documentation or teaching material, I can really recommend FastStone Capture (freeware). One of its neat features, except the obvious ones, is that it is able to capture one image of an entire web-page, or other scrolling application, in one go.
Getting screen shots is also pretty important if you tend to post at message boards where dissenters are continuously banned, which happens to anyone pointing out the lies of the "Loose Change" nuts on their own board.
Via a JREF thread.
10:16:55 PM
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While the US escalates, the UK is pulling out, if we are to believe this:
Thousands of British troops will return home from Iraq by the end of May, The Daily Telegraph can reveal today.
Tony Blair will announce within the next fortnight that almost 3,000 troops are to be cut from the current total of 7,200, allowing the military to recover from four years of battle that have left it severely overstretched.
The British armed forces are simply not large enough for its commitments in Iraq and Afghanistan. With allies not exactly rushing to support combat troops in Afghanistan, the burden will increasingly fall on Britain.
Tony Blair has been one of the post-war prime ministers most dedicated to deploying troops, but he has not been that keen on military spending.
5:45:41 PM
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Is the Pentagon blocking the deployment of an effective Israeli anti-RPG system to protect its own investments?
Trophy works by scanning all directions and automatically detecting when an RPG is launched. The system then fires an interceptor — traveling hundreds of miles a minute — that destroys the RPG safely away from the vehicle.
[The Pentagon's Office of Force Transformation] subjected Trophy to 30 tests and found it is "more than 98 percent" effective at killing RPGs. Officials then made plans to battle-test the system on some Stryker fighting vehicles headed to Iraq this year.
But the US Army blocked that testing. Why? Pentagon sources tell NBC News – and internal Army documents seem to confirm – that Army officials consider Trophy a threat to their crown jewel, the $160 billion Future Combat System (FCS). Under FCS, the Army is paying Raytheon Co. $70 million to build an RPG-defense system from scratch.
I'm not a big believer in "military-industrial complex" rhetoric, but this doesn't sound good, or right.
8:09:54 AM
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It is difficult to find anyone outside the White House who thinks that adding an additional 20,000 US troops to Iraq will make much of a difference. Here's the plan:
The President's New Iraq Strategy Is Rooted In Six Fundamental Elements:
- Let the Iraqis lead;
- Help Iraqis protect the population;
- Isolate extremists;
- Create space for political progress;
- Diversify political and economic efforts; and
- Situate the strategy in a regional approach.
- Iraq Could Not Be Graver – The War On Terror Cannot Be Won If We Fail In Iraq. Our enemies throughout the Middle East are trying to defeat us in Iraq. If we step back now, the problems in Iraq will become more lethal, and make our troops fight an uglier battle than we are seeing today.
The situation has already escalated way beyond an al-Qaeda and Sunni extremist insurgency. That could have been defeated, and the war won. However, when the Iraqi moderate center is eroded, and the polarisation process is complete to the degree that the primary objective of all power players is to settle secterian scores, there is very little that can realistically be done, except waiting for the dust to settle.
Ironically, it may well be that some of the original objectives can be reached. A Shia-dominated Iraq is unlikely to be a stable base for al-Qaeda. No central extremist government would be in a position to provide support for operations against the west from Iraq itself. On the contrary, Iraq may become a battlefield where Iran and Sunni states like Saudi Arabia fight by proxy for supremacy of the region. That is undoubtedly an "uglier battle", but it is not clear that the west should become further involved if it comes to that. The big losers will be the ordinary Iraqis. The overall strategic objective of the Iraq war - a viable democracy in Iraq that will serve as a "beacon" for the region - is a secondary fatality.
PS: Full text of Bush speech. Most-quoted part:
The situation in Iraq is unacceptable to the American people - and it is unacceptable to me.
Our troops in Iraq have fought bravely. They have done everything we have asked them to do.
Where mistakes have been made, the responsibility rests with me.
Bush has been accused of being a "the buck stops nowhere" president.
7:07:13 AM
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© Copyright 2007 Jan Haugland.
Last update: 01.02.2007; 06:22:47.
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