The audacity of hype

Last week, Senator Barack Obama made an international tour. Senator John McCain is the very one who goaded Obama into doing so by belittling Obama's foreign policy experience. Now McCain has the audacity to spin hype about how presumptuous Obama was to give a speech at the Tiergarten in Germany. The media have been just as relentless at trying to trip Obama up. Even the sweetheart anchor, Katie Couric, tried relentlessly but unsuccessfully to weave Obama into a catch-22 on the 'surge' while he was visiting Jordan.

Meanwhile, as Obama was addressing 200,000 spectators in Germany, McCain showed him up by visiting a grocery store in Pennsylvania where the local Republican party was able to funnel an entire shopper to meet him and drive home the message about the rising prices of food. As if he did not wreak enough damage on Obama with that move, McCain followed it up by drawing a throng of six small business owners to the Sausage Haus in Ohio. At the Haus, McCain said:

Well I’d love to give a speech in Germany to -- a political speech -- or a speech that maybe the German people would be interested in but I would much prefer to do it as president of the United States rather than as a candidate for the office of the presidency.

Translation: "I would love for the German people to be interested enough in me to draw a crowd of even 200 people (let alone 200,000). Maybe then it would be worthwhile for me to visit there as a candidate instead of waiting to be President." This is what makes the media's hype about Obama's trip being presumptuous so audacious. McCain had just finished an international trip of his own, meeting with American generals and foreign leaders. Yet the press never asked him if perhaps he should have waited to be elected President before making his trip.

Granted, 200,000 Germans attended Obama's speech, which could have been seen by some as over the top. But it's not as if he put a gun to their heads and forced them to attend. They wanted to hear Obama speak to them. Isn't that 200,000 reasons enough for Obama to make his international tour, whether he be President or just a candidate?

An al-Maliki endorsement of Obama's candidacy?

This week, Nuri al-Maliki, the prime minister of Iraq, said he wanted US troops to withdraw from Iraq as soon as possible. He said that "US presidential candidate Barack Obama talks about 16 months. That, we think, would be the right timeframe for a withdrawal, with the possibility of slight changes." That's the sound of the US occupation of Iraq wearing out its welcome.

It makes you wonder what al-Maliki's position might be on Senator John McCain's candidacy. He was much less candid about that, saying that he did not want to recommend who American's should vote for. He did say of the two candidates, however, that "whoever is thinking about the shorter term is closer to reality. Artificially extending the stay of US troops would cause problems.

Should we consider that an endorsement of Senator Barack Obama's candidacy by al-Maliki?

The Senate reports on Bush's deceit of the American people

Last month, the Senate released a report on whether public statements regarding Iraq by U.S. officials were substantiated by intelligence information. Is this really news? I was connecting the dots on the Bush administration's campaign of deceit back in August of 2005. I'm returning to the topic now because the evidence of this keeps piling on.

In 2002, Bush was unequivocal about Iraq "seeking nuclear weapons." He stated on October 7 that "the evidence indicates that Iraq is reconstituting its nuclear weapons program." The de facto President, Dick Cheney, was even more adamant when he said on August 26 of the same year that, "They continue to pursue the nuclear program they began so many years ago … we now know that Saddam has resumed his efforts to acquire nuclear weapons."

Yet the intelligence of the time evidenced that Saddam Hussein's nuclear weapons program had been destroyed years earlier by American military strikes. The only evidence that Hussein was "reconstituting" his nuclear weapons program was the supposed uranium shopping in Africa and the aluminum tubes which were supposedly for weaponizing uranium. The uranium shopping was discounted by former Ambassador Joseph Wilson and the aluminum tubes had already been determined to not meet the tolerances required for centrifuging uranium.

Even then defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who was noted for speaking in riddles and contorting his responses, was remarkably clear when he asserted that Hussein's weapons of mass destruction facilities were underground. He told the House Armed Services Committee of those facilities on September 18, 2002, that "a good many are underground and deeply buried" and so "not … vulnerable to attack from the air." The truth of the matter, the Senate report found, was that there was no intelligence-community report that supported Rumsfeld's claim.

In spite of the report's substantial evidence that the Bush administration twisted and hyped intelligence regarding the threat Iraq posed to the U.S. before Bush invaded her, Republican Senators stonewalled the public release of the report for years. Only two of the seven Republicans on the fifteen-member Senate panel supported the report. When the five dissenting Republicans failed to prevent the release of the report, they then tried to delete most of its conclusions. The GOP clearly does not feel that Bush should be held accountable for intentionally deceiving the American people into an illegitimate, disastrous war.

The impending end of the war in Iraq

In this campaign season, one of the questions on voters' minds is how much longer will the Iraq war continue? Senator John McCain has voiced support for the possibility of maintaining military troops in Iraq for as long as a century. Both Senators Obama and Clinton would withdraw our troops as rapidly as prudence allows after taking the Oval Office, with some minor variations of what that means between the two of them. What none of them are talking about is that the time is actually much more cut and dried than any of them would want you to know.

President Bush acquired his authority to invade Iraq under the Joint Resolution to Authorize the Use of United States Armed Forces Against Iraq. Remember it? That's the one both Senators Clinton and McCain voted in favor of in 2002.

What the resolution says is that congress supports the president to "strictly enforce through the United Nations Security Council all relevant Security Council resolutions applicable to Iraq and encourages him in those efforts." It's not as though Bush needed any encouragement but he does need the relevant Security Council resolution. There is a series of them which approves the United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq (UNAMI), the last of which was the Security Council resolution dated December 18, 2007. With it, the council "decides to extend the [UNAMI] mandate as set forth in that resolution until 31 December 2008." Finally it decides to remain "seized of the matter."

Whether the council remains seized or not, the administration is not requesting an extension of the resolution for 2009. That leaves the UN multinational forces, led by the US military, less than seven months to wrap up the war in Iraq. Considering Bush makes it crystal clear that the American forces will not be withdrawn from Iraq while he's commander in chief, it's unclear what authority he will use to perpetuate the war into 2009. If he follows his standard operating procedures, his authority is certain to be some grotesque contortion of US and international law.

Measured in blood and treasure

"Measured in blood and treasure, the war in Iraq has achieved the status of a major war and a major debacle." This is a claim you'd expect to hear from a critic of Bush's foreign policy. But this was written by a former senior department of defense official, Joseph J. Collins. In the paper, Choosing War: The Decision to Invade Iraq and Its Aftermath, he goes on to say, "Our status as a moral leader has been damaged by the war, the subsequent occupation of a Muslim nation, and various issues concerning the treatment of detainees."

The latest of the Institute for National Strategic Studies' occasional papers published by the National Defense University Press, this one was released this month. The paper notes that the biggest cost of the war to the treasury is yet to come. "No one as yet has calculated the costs of long-term veterans' benefits or the total impact on service personnel and materiel," Collins wrote. And contrary to Bush's justification du jour for invading Iraq, he reports that our efforts in Iraq have caused it to become an "incubator for terrorism and have emboldened Iran to expand its influence throughout the Middle East."

Americans are in agreement that until recently, things have gone very poorly in Iraq. But since the 'surge,' the situation in Iraq appears to be improving. Does that mean there's light at the end of the tunnel? Unfortunately, Collins believes that "despite impressive progress in security during the surge, the outcome of the war is in doubt." He states that, "It is arguable whether the Iraqis will develop the wherewithal to create ethnic reconciliation and build a coherent national government." For many analysts, the war looks like a 'can't win.'

The central finding of this study is that U.S. efforts in Iraq were hobbled by a set of faulty assumptions, a flawed planning effort, and a continuing inability to create security conditions in Iraq that could have fostered meaningful advances in stabilization, reconstruction, and governance.

Collins lays the blame at the feet of the President for the impact made by "senior U.S. national security officials" when they "exhibited in many instances an imperious attitude, exerting power and pressure where diplomacy and bargaining might have had a better effect." They not only treated our allies this way but they even treated our own Congress autocratically.

Collins has substantial credibility to make such claims. He has a Ph.D. in Political Science from Columbia University. He retired in 1998 as a Colonel in the United States Army after 28 years of service. He was also a Special Assistant to the Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff. He makes Bush's claims that the war in Iraq is not a debacle ring hollow. Hopefully America now recognizes the folly of choosing war.

Height of hypocrisy

The Mexican-American border dispute has reached a new height of hypocrisy. Arizona passed a law, that took effect on the New Year, which punishes employers who knowingly hire workers without valid legal documents to work in the US. In response, a delegation of nine state legislators from Sonora was in Tucson saying that Arizona's new employer sanctions law will have a devastating effect on the Mexican state.

For Mexican officials to point their fingers across the border without acknowledging their own responsibility in this economic situation is not only hypocritical but also arrogant. Their first duty is to create an economic infrastructure in Mexico which would give the Mexican people a decent standard of living. But Mexico, as my friend so aptly put it, is a kleptocratic oligarchy. That would mean the Mexican elite would have to stop hoarding all of Mexico's vast wealth for themselves and invest it instead in their people and their country's future. If they did that, the Mexican people would not want to come to the US in the first place.

America owes the same duty to her people that Mexico owes to hers. That includes maximizing the opportunity of employment for American people. Arizona's move could only serve to reduce the rate of unemployment in the state. The Arizona people should be proud of this legislation, regardless of Mexico's response.

Al Qaeda's incredible comeback

Al Qaeda has seemingly managed an overwhelming turnaround. The Pentagon reported earlier this year that its attempts before going to war in Iraq to establish links between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda were contrary to the findings of the intelligence community. In 2005, a CSIS study found that 90% to 96% of the insurgents in Iraq were Iraqi nationals, not foreign elements. Iraq was the location where al Qaeda was having the greatest difficulty establishing a significant presence, even a couple of years after invading it.

Before deserting Afghanistan to invade Iraq, the Bush administration claimed to have decimated al Qaeda leadership, frozen all of its foreign-held assets, and destroyed its bases of operations. Now the latest news is that, in the heat of America's troop surge into Iraq, there are still too few men hunting al Qaeda. It's widely reported that al Qaeda is entrenched in Pakistan, established a stronghold in Iraq, resurged in Afghanistan, and infiltrated England. Could "al Qaeda" have truly mastered such an amazing comeback?

Global terrorism reaches new highs

I'm beginning to sound like a broken needle. I've been blogging for two years about how the war in Iraq has actually caused an increase in terrorism. I'm not talking about a slight uptick, I'm talking about exponential increases! To get a sense of the scale to which terrorism has grown around the world since the Iraq invasion, it's worth reading about the war president Bush loses.

Each year, the U.S. Department of State releases a report on the incidence of global terrorism. Under Bush's leadership, the news was consistently so bad that his administration even changed the name of the report. Condi recently released the latest report, now called the Country Reports on Terrorism 2006.

This awkwardly named report has some awkward statistics for those who think we're defeating terrorism in Iraq. After substantial increases in global terrorism year after year since the war there began, it turns out that there were again 25 percent more terrorist attacks in 2006 than in 2005. Those attacks killed 20,494 people -- a forty percent increase over 2005. Ironically, fifty percent of those killed by Islamic terrorists were other Muslims, with more than 1,800 of them children.

So how accurate are these statistics? It should come as no surprise if it turns out they're understated. After all, this is the same administration that claims sectarian violence is down in Baghdad since the 'surge.' However, it turns out that U.S. officials exclude car bombs in touting this drop in Iraq violence. The number of people killed in explosive attacks is actually up from 323 in March, the first full month of the security plan, to 365 through April 24.

Faced with these facts, Bush would certainly pull out his old line that 'we're fighting the terrorists in Iraq so we don't have to fight them here.' This is a fallacy easily dispelled. Just last week, six men described by federal prosecutors as "Islamic militants" were arrested on charges they plotted to attack the Fort Dix Army base and "kill as many soldiers as possible," authorities reported. Let's be clear, Fort Dix is not a base in Iraq, it's in New Jersey. None of the six Islamic militants are from Iraq, and they had been in the U.S. for some time.

No, the war in Iraq is not making us safer from terrorism. With global terrorism at an all-time high, it's leading to much greater danger of us suffering more terrorist attacks here in our homeland.

Defense department disagreement

A recently released Department of Defense report details how the Pentagon linked Saddam Hussein and al Q'aeda. Four months after the 9/11 attacks, the DoD's number three official, the undersecretary of defense, was Douglas J. Feith. He led a year-long Pentagon project intended to convince the most senior levels of the Bush administration that Saddam Hussein and al Q'aeda were linked. His group of Pentagon officials and intelligence analysts from other departments deflected reports contradictory to the findings Feith wanted to end up with. They instead focused on whatever intelligence they could find, no matter how weak, which supported the link. The team persuaded top administration officials that they had powerful evidence of connections between Hussein's regime and al Q'aeda.

Yet, contrary to Feith, a different DoD official, the Pentagon's inspector general, Thomas F. Gimble, tells a different story. He reported that Feith's intelligence report on Iraq was faulted, with "dubious" intelligence which fueled the push for war. The report said that Feith's team "was predisposed to finding a significant relationship between Iraq and al Q'aeda," ignoring the conclusions of the intelligence community. The inspector general reported that Feith fabricated a link between al Q'aeda and Iraq "that was much stronger than that assessed by the [Intelligence Community] and more in accord with the policy views of senior officials in the Administration." This is clear evidence that the Bush administration intentionally shaped intelligence to justify invading Iraq.

About face in four years

On March 16, 2003, vice president Cheney said, when asked whether the war would be a short one or a long one, that it would be measured in "Weeks rather than months." Fast forward four years (and three days, to be exact) and the USA is still mired in a war that has now lasted longer than World War II. Last week found Bush in the Roosevelt Room of the White House discussing his bloating troop 'surge.' Of the Baghdad security plan, the latest tactic in the war, Bush said "success will take months, not days or weeks." This is a direct contradiction of how the White House was representing the Iraq war to the American people before president Bush invaded Iraq.

With allies like this, who needs insurgencies?

England is supposed to be the right hand of the "coalition of the willing." One would think that would qualify the Brits as allies. Well, it seems that they're not so willing anymore. Just as Bush is beginning to surge 21,500 additional troops into Baghdad, his key ally in the war, Tony Blair, is pulling out 2,100 of his own troops from Basra.

In total denial of the implications, the Bush administration is painting the withdrawal as a "sign of success." Vice president Dick Cheney said "I look at it and what I see is an affirmation of the fact that in parts of Iraq ... things are going pretty well." What Cheney failed to consider is that Basra is right on the supply line to Baghdad. With reduced security in the south of Iraq, the logistics supporting the surge are compromised, right at the time when they become most crucial.

Meanwhile, the Iraqi security forces are supposed to be the Americans' allies in Baghdad. Iraq's forces are leading American troops into Baghdad for the White House's 'new' Clear, Hold, and Build strategy (which didn't seem to make a dent in the insurgency when American troops tried it a year ago). However, it turns out the reason the mostly Shiite Iraqi forces are leading the American troops into Baghdad is so that they can warn Shiite residents to hide their weapons and other incriminating paraphernalia from the Americans. It seems the Iraqi forces are more like insurgents than national police officers.

The implication of Bush's 'surge' strategy is that, while there will be an initial swelling in forces, it will not be sustained. However, Gen. David Petraeus's counterinsurgency plan, which is setting up hundreds of "mini-forts" all over Baghdad and the rest of the country, will take at least five years to as much as ten years to complete. With 160,000 American troops leveraged all around Iraq for many years to come, and insecure supply lines, they will need more allies, not more insurgents.

An incomplete title

The New York Times today published an article titled U.S. Says Iran Meddles in Iraq but Is Delaying Release of Data. It actually should've been titled "U.S. Says Iran Meddles in Iraq but Is Delaying Release of Data Until the Bush Administration Gets the Chance to Finish Fabricating It." They're not successful connecting the dots with the data they have now.

The cost of extraordinary rendition

Maher Arar was a victim of extraordinary rendition by the USA. Rendered to Syria, Arar was imprisoned there for ten months and tortured.

Clearly a violation of Arar's human rights, the government made restitution for the harm Arar suffered. It compensated him $8.9-million for its role in the rendition. The restitution was clearly acknowledgement that extraordinary rendition is an unjust act.

Does this mean that the USA will end its practice of extraordinary rendition? Sadly, it doesn't. The USA was not the country who made restitution; Canada did. The USA will go on rendering terror suspects (i.e. people not convicted of terrorism) to countries that have no qualms about torturing people.

Canada was only indirectly involved in the rendition. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police wrongly labeled Arar as an Islamic fundamentalist and passed misleading and inaccurate information to U.S. authorities. Canada considered this role in Arar's rendition worth $9-million.

How much is the USA's role in Arar's rendition worth? After all, the USA is the country that interrogated Arar for eleven days while he was chained and shackled. It was the USA that put Arar on a plane and flew him to Syria (ironic that the USA will not talk to Syria about the mess in Iraq but would use it to outsource torture), leaving him there for almost a year knowing full well that he would be tortured. As long as the torture czar himself, Albert Gonzales, is the attorney general, you can be sure Arar will not see a dime from the USA.

Inviting the terrorists in

President Bush promulgates many fallacies to the American people but the greatest fallacy of all of them must be his "we'll fight the terrorists in Iraq so we don't have to fight them here" adage. Every time he or one of his mouthpieces uses it in the media, it's like the elephant in the room. How can these "journalists" not call out the president on that line every time?

First of all, we're already fighting them here, even though we're also fighting them over there at the same time. Secondly, if a terrorist really wanted to take the fight to us in our homeland, why would he go to Iraq where he'll face nothing but the most battle-hardened American troops on the alert for terrorists? He could instead come straight through our vast unprotected ports to our own soil where millions of lax Americans are in huge groups in unhardened locations to fight us.

The Iraq Study Group Report says that in Iraq, "most attacks on Americans still come from the Sunni Arab insurgency." They are "former elements of the Saddam Hussein regime, disaffected Sunni Arab Iraqis, and common criminals," not terrorists. It goes on to say "most wish to restore Sunni Arab rule in the country. Some aim at winning local power and control."

Al Q'aeda, on the other hand, is just a "small portion of the violence in Iraq." Even at that, al Q'aeda in Iraq is now run by Iraqis, for the most part, and composed of Sunni Arabs. The Iraq Study Group found that "al Qaeda's goals include instigating a wider sectarian war between Iraq's Sunni and Shia, and driving the United States out of Iraq." These are not terrorists that would suddenly pack up and leave their homes in Iraq and come to a land as foreign to them as the USA is just because American troops leave Iraq -- driving the troops out of Iraq is precisely the stated goal of the insurgency.

Bush's foreign policy is, in fact, creating the opposite effect of fighting terrorism. The Iraq war has actually caused an increase in global terrorism. Meanwhile, thousands of miles of our remote borders are wide open to anyone who wants to cross them, it has been demonstrated that the Department of Homeland Security is very vulnerable to and unprepared for a major terrorist attack, and our National Guard is not protecting us on American soil because they're deployed in Iraq. Sadly, fighting "terrorists" in Iraq is actually exposing us to a greater risk of being attacked by them here in our homeland.

What Americans believe

Americans believe*:

• There is a civil war in Iraq now.
• With regard to Iraq, the US government should set a timetable for withdrawal.
• It was a mistake to take military action against Iraq in the first place.
• It is a good thing that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld will be stepping down.
• The nomination of Robert Gates, the former director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), by President Bush to succeed Donald Rumsfeld as Secretary of Defense will make no difference to the situation in Iraq.

*Harris Interactive poll, 11/20/2006

Bush disagreeing with his Marines

The commander in chief apparently only believes in one way communication. The message he's sending down is directly contradicted by the message being sent up by his troops.

In a speech Bush gave in Latvia last week, he said "I'm not going to pull our troops off the battlefield before the mission is complete," speaking about his war in Iraq. He went on to say, "We can accept nothing less than victory."

Apparently, Bush did not read a classified Marine Corps intelligence report released in August. The report stated "the social and political situation has deteriorated to a point" that US and Iraqi troops "are no longer capable of militarily defeating the insurgency in al-Anbar," a Sunni dominated province in Iraq where the insurgency is at its strongest.

Yes, Bush made his speech three months after the report was released. But things did not improve in the time that transpired. The day before Bush's speech, a senior US intelligence official said, "The fundamental questions of lack of control, growth of the insurgency and criminality" remain the same.

Let's review: Bush insists that he will not pull the troops from Iraq and that he will only accept victory there. Meanwhile, his Marines say they are not capable of militarily defeating the insurgency. These opposing perspectives cannot be reconciled in spite of the fact that Bush claims he takes his cue on the Iraq war from the leaders in the battlefield.

What a difference a year makes

In October 2005, Iraqis were celebrating their purple fingers. In response to the election in Iraq, president Bush said:

"We're making progress toward peace. We're making progress toward an ally that will join us in the war on terror, that will prevent al Qaeda from establishing safe haven in Iraq, and a country that will serve as an example for others who aspire to live in freedom."

It was quite a rosy picture he painted of the prospects for the Iraqi people.

A year has now passed. That's enough time to assess the accuracy of Bush's predictions. It seems clear now that they were far off target.

The UN reported the number of Iraqi civilians that were killed in October 2006. It was 3,709, the highest tally since the beginning of the war. Considering that 101 Iraqi civilians were killed today, and recent counts have been as high or higher, November is well on track to surpass October's count.

The killings are not the only staggering numbers. The UN also reported that Iraqi civilians are leaving the country at a rate of 100,000 per year. Since the beginning of the war, 1.6-million Iraqis have fled their homeland.

The favored targets of insurgents are journalists, physicians, professors, politicians and the like. How Iraq could become "a country that will serve as an example for others who aspire to live in freedom" without professionals such as these, Bush has failed to say. It's also unclear how the Iraqi children can go on to replace them considering that many of their schools failed to open in September.

The jury is still out on whether or not Iraq will become that safe haven for al Q'aeda that Bush was convinced it would not become. Nonetheless, the fact that the majority of civilian killings are caused by sectarian violence rather than terrorist attacks is little consolation to the Iraqi people. Meanwhile, a Defense Department official said that the force in Iraq could be increased by 20,000 troops or more over the next few months to quell the growing violence.

Sadly, the state of affairs in Iraq has not turned out to be anything like what Bush described a year ago. Worse yet, for those who say it's only because more time is needed for the peaceful democracy to develop, all indications are that Iraq is headed in the opposite direction.

Pre 9/11: Powell and Rice Say Iraq NOT a Threat

Powell: "He [Hussein] has not developed any significant capabilities with respect to weapons of mass destruction. He is unable to project conventional power against his neighbors."

Rice: "We are able to keep on him [Hussein]. His military forces have not been rebuilt."

watch quotes | digg video

Taking the Lebanese side

I've had a hard time finding sound justification for condemning Israel's current defensive action in Lebanon. While I find the loss of innocent lives in Lebanon a tragedy, I consider it equally tragic when Hezbollah indiscriminately bombs civilian population centers in Israel, killing unsuspecting women and children. To paint Israel as the "bad guy" in this conflict simply because they are killing more Lebanese people than Hezbollah is killing Israelis is to discount innocent human life. Who's to say that X lives are move valuable than Y lives? Therefore, I do not begrudge the tactics Israel has chosen to defend herself. The best defense is a good offense, I say.

That said, after all the fallacious and biased reasons I've heard warranting the claim that Israel is in the wrong which have left me unconvinced, I've finally found one person who makes a sound case for denouncing Israel. It comes as no surprise to me that it is George Galloway, Respect MP for Bethnal Green and Bow, that does so. He first caught my ear when I heard him speaking truth to power before the US Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. Later I discovered him denouncing the Iraq War when he accused Christopher Hitchens of being prepared to "fight to the last drop of other people's blood." What a profound way to portray chicken-hawks like Hitchens!

Earlier this week I found Galloway on Sky News being interviewed by Anna Botting. As one would expect from an outlet like Sky News, Murdock's British version of FOX News, Botting took a conspicuously unbalanced pro-Zionist position during the interview. Nonetheless, in spite of the host's decidedly advantageous control over the interview and her position contrary to Galloway's, he still managed to thoroughly dominate the debate and leave Botting embarrassingly incapable of making her point.

Galloway's main point was that the media views the Israeli-Hezbollah conflict through a zoom lens, focusing only on the past four weeks. He claims that there is decades of history in the Middle East which is much more damning of Israel than what has transpired since Hezbollah kidnapped the two Israeli soldiers and bombed northern Israel just a few weeks ago. Granted, Galloway unconvincingly claimed that Hezbollah is not a terrorist organization -- there are plenty of grounds to demonstrate to the contrary (in the interest of focus, I'll save that for another blog). However, the bulk of his responses to Botting made a sound case that Israel is in the wrong regarding the current conflict.

Personally, I'm not ready to condemn Israel in this regard. Nonetheless, Galloway has certainly opened my eyes to a perspective that I did not have before. I'm not going to try to make Galloway's case here because I could never write as eloquently as he speaks. Instead, I'm going to recommend viewing his interview, whether you would be swayed by Galloway or not, if for nothing else than to be better informed about the Lebanese viewpoint when you defend Israel's action the next time you debate it.

From bad to worse

Have the failures of the Bush administration become so commonplace that they don't even make the major news nowadays? A year ago, I wrote about the war president Bush loses. No, not the Iraq war -- the war on terror.

Earlier reports by the State Department showed that terrorism had reached its highest point in decades. That was a colossal failure considering Bush had been waging his war against it for a couple of years. Surely things could not get worse, right?

As incredible as it seems, they have. The latest report shows that terrorism has reached an all-time high. In 2005, more than 10,000 terrorist attacks occurred for the first time ever. Bush's war on terror is only making things worse.

Don't buy his story that the fact that there hasn't been a terrorist attack on American soil for over four years shows that we're safer. After all, we had not been attacked on our soil for twice as long before the 9/11 attack. Although the first attempt to take down a World Trade Center tower in 1993 didn't bring it down, it did kill six people. More importantly, it showed that terrorists have been intent on attacking us on our shores for much longer than the eight "safe" years before 9/11.

It's clear that America was much safer from terrorism under president Clinton than it is now.