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Israeli forces discover Russian-made weapons supplied to Hezbollah militants, by way of Syria. Unfortunately, as the Washington Times notes, this is not an isolated thing...
Last summer, Israeli forces in Lebanon found evidence that Russian-made Kornet-E and Metis-M anti-tank systems had been provided to Hezbollah. In the final hours of the war last August, at least 24 Israeli soldiers died in a fierce battle to capture the Lebanese town of Ghandouriyeh. After the Israel Defense Forces captured the village, they found Syrian-supplied hardware near a Hezbollah outpost: eight Kornet anti-tank rockets. Written beneath a contract number on each casing, the London Telegraph reported, were the words: "Customer: Ministry of Defence of Syria. Supplier: KBP, Tula, Russia." Yet Russian officials dismiss such evidence as anti-Moscow propaganda.
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As this Washington Post editorial explains, Speaker Nancy Pelosi has intricately crafted a plan to put limits on the U.S. efforts in Iraq. She has taken into account lots of polling data and the concerns of the members of her party. What's left out, though, is anything to do with the situation on the ground today and U.S. interests in Iraq. The Post puts this well.
The only constituency House Speaker Nancy Pelosi ignored in her plan for amending President Bush's supplemental war funding bill are the people of the country that U.S. troops are fighting to stabilize. The Democratic proposal doesn't attempt to answer the question of why August 2008 is the right moment for the Iraqi government to lose all support from U.S. combat units. It doesn't hint at what might happen if American forces were to leave at the end of this year -- a development that would be triggered by the Iraqi government's weakness. It doesn't explain how continued U.S. interests in Iraq, which holds the world's second-largest oil reserves and a substantial cadre of al-Qaeda militants, would be protected after 2008; in fact, it may prohibit U.S. forces from returning once they leave.
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47 days since the August 31 deadline America and her European partners gave Iran expired.
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Hamas makes a deal with Fatah to create a unity government. At this moment, Hamas's charter continues to call for the destruction of Israel.
Fatah seeks a Palestinian state in Gaza and the occupied West Bank, land which Israel captured in the 1967 Middle East war. Hamas wants to replace Israel with an Islamic state and Haniyeh did not elaborate.
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Fukuyama on 9/11 lessons
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Bush?s belief in the desire for freedom has influenced the policy of his administration in crucial ways. One reason that the administration hadn?t more seriously considered worst-case scenarios prior to the fall of Baghdad was that its thinking was soaked in the notion that once Saddam Hussein?s dictatorship was removed, the true nature of the Iraqi people would be revealed as freedom-loving democrats. Don Rumsfeld infamously justified the post-liberation looting as the natural exuberance of a newly freed people. In this, they had forgotten conservative wisdom about the importance of institutions and culture. Even if people desire to be free, it does them no good unless their desire can be channeled through appropriate governmental institutions, which are excruciatingly hard to build up once they have been torn down. We are still working on the Iraqi police, and will probably be doing so for years.
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A crazy, crazy debate between Heritage's Ariel Cohen and ANSWER's Brian Becker, who appears to self-destruct on-air.
BECKER: I would like to answer the question. Do I consider Hezbollah a terrorist organization? The answer is no.
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Bottom news of the day.
Iran awarded Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez its highest state medal on Sunday for supporting Tehran in its nuclear standoff with the international community, while Chavez urged the world to rise up and defeat the U.S., state-run media in both countries reported.... "Let's save the human race, let's finish off the U.S. empire," Chavez said. "This (task) must be assumed with strength by the majority of the peoples of the world."
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Well, that explains a lot.
Intelligence reports indicate the leader of Hezbollah is hiding in a foreign mission in Beirut, possibly the Iranian Embassy, according to U.S. and Israeli officials.
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The plot thickens.
Israel has information that Hizbullah guerrillas who captured two Israeli soldiers are trying to transfer them to Iran, Foreign Ministry spokesman Mark Regev said.
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In recognition of their value, the Olin Institute for Strategic Studies at Harvard commissioned William McCants in 2005 to translate one of the most recent and significant of these works, Abu Bakr Naji’s Management of Savagery (some of its salient features are summarized in the Brachman and McCants article cited above). The Olin Institute, in collaboration with West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center, is making this translation available online for free. Writing as a high-level insider, Naji explains how al-Qaeda plans to defeat the U.S. and its allies in the Middle East, establish sanctuaries for Jihadis, correct organizational problems, and create better propaganda. It is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the strategic thinking of al-Qaeda’s leadership and the future of the jihadi movement.
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"We have found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, chemical weapons," Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa., said in a quickly called press conference late Wednesday afternoon.
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The GOP-controlled Senate on Thursday rejected Democratic calls to start withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq by years' end, as the two parties sought to define their election-year positions on a war that has grown increasingly unpopular. "Withdrawal is not an option. Surrender is not a solution," declared Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist of Tennessee, who characterized Democrats as defeatists wanting to abandon Iraq before the mission is complete.
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The Washington Post's editors make the case for holding firm in Iraq.
To do all this, the Iraqi government desperately needs continued U.S. military and economic support. That's why it was a little unnerving, in the middle of yesterday's celebrations, to hear President Bush speak of plans to hold high-profile consultations early next week on "how to best deploy America's resources in Iraq." U.S. commanders have been eager to reduce American troops from the current level of about 135,000 to 100,000 by this fall; the Pentagon may seize on the good news to justify the reduction. Both Americans and Iraqis would love to see U.S. troops come home -- and a redeployment might help Mr. Maliki politically, not to mention U.S. Republicans facing this fall's elections. Yet officials from both countries were unanimous in predicting yesterday that the challenge from the insurgency will continue to be severe. Perhaps U.S. troops can be drawn down without worsening that threat; but it would be tragic if, after so much suffering, Iraq's first democratic government were denied the means to succeed.
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"We have given the Iranians a limited period of time, weeks not months," to respond to an offer for an incentives package for Iran to ensure it does not pursue nuclear weapons, said Bush.
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