Limp. Quack. Limp. Quack.

Hold firm, hold strong, Congress.

“The House and Senate bills have too much pork,” President Bush declared on Wednesday, referring to the latest “supplemental” spending bill for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Pork? Let’s see. The bill is a monstrosity. No question about that: $122 billion to finish off the year’s fighting – and raise the cost of the wars this year alone to $200 billion, or $3.8 billion a week, or, essentially, $500 million a day.…

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Is Bush suggesting that spending that amount of money on 30 hours of illegitimate war-making in Iraq is more valuable than a calendar year’s worth of extra assistance for the poor? Of course he is. “The House and Senate bills have too much pork,” he says, because it’s the only way to deflect attention from the true crime in the supplemental appropriation, the $116 billion being spent on a war we shouldn’t be fighting in a place we shouldn’t be, at the expense of crying needs at home.… Article

Robert Fisk on “The Crushing Fear That Stalks America”:

…the girl in Noll’s seminar isn’t spouting this stuff about “jihadists” traveling from Iraq to America because she supports Bush. She is just frightened. She is genuinely afraid of all the “terror” warnings, the supposed “jihadists” threats, the red “terror” alerts and the purple alerts and all the other color-coded instruments of fear. She believes her president, and her president has done Osama Bin Laden’s job for him: he has crushed this young woman’s spirit and courage. Article

Analysis du jour:

The US has long viewed terrorism as ahistorical and apolitical, more of a moral mutation than a social phenomenon, which can be battered away with military might. Analysing jihadists as social actors driven by political, religious and geostrategic concerns may prove beneficial to the US and the world at large in seeking a lasting and nuanced political-diplomatic strategy to deal with this essentially social phenomenon.

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Sadly, the dominant narrative in Washington neglects the role of politics and foreign policy in driving violence and constantly downplays political means in combating it. In fact, the Bush administration, while paying lip service to public diplomacy, has relied excessively on militarism to wage all-out war against an unconventional and fractured foe.

The irony is that Bin Laden and Zawahiri had actually failed to draw the bulk of former jihadists into their war against the US. Many former jihadists, whom I interviewed in the late 1990s and after 9/11, said that while delighted at America’s humiliation, they also feared that Bin Laden and Zawahiri recklessly endangered survival of the Islamist movement. Instead of the river of recruits to Afghanistan, only a trickle of volunteers signed up to defend the Taleban and Al Qaeda after 9/11.

Widespread empathy for the victims came from the Arab and Muslim world. Leading Muslim clerics and opinion makers condemned Al Qaeda’s terrorist tactics and exposed the falsity on which Al Qaeda based its jihad. An historic moment was lost, as the Bush administration declared war against both real and imagined enemies.

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Tragically, the Iraq war has given rise to a new generation of militants who use terrorism as a rule, not an exception. More youngsters are deeply affected by what they see as external aggression perpetrated against their religion. Article