When the insurgency started in the summer of 2003, it was made up primarily of the same class of alienated Sunnis who are now part of the tribal Anbar Awakening.

The insurgents I spent time with in 2003 and 2004 were, in essence, nationalists who didn’t like the U.S. Army driving around their villages, kicking down their doors and shooting their cousins at checkpoints. They were also deeply suspicious of American plans for democracy, because they feared it would lead to Iran taking over the government.

from alan ramsey …..

You probably read about Kim Beazley's valedictory speech two days ago. What you would not have read was how good it was. After 27 years Beazley, too, is quitting politics this election.

This is yet another of those sneaky programs blindly authorized under the screaming banner of "homeland security." It has received practically no mass-media coverage, but I'm sure you'll be excited to learn that the National Animal Identification System (NAIS) sets up a whole new surveillance program to defend you and yours from a rather odd national security threat: terrorist chickens. And terrorist cows, horses, pigs, sheep, llamas ... and so on. Advanced under the benign guise of protecting public health from outbreaks of animal-borne diseases, this program is intended to tag and track every farm animal in America from birth to death.

President Bush today called on Congress to make permanent a law that gives the government broad authority to eavesdrop without warrants on phone calls, e-mail and other communication between people in the United States and suspected terrorists abroad.

The president wants Congress to extend the law, set to expire in February, that allows spy agencies to intercept the communications of suspected terrorists that pass through U.S. switching facilities.

The Bush Republicans with complicit Democrats have essentially brought government accountability to an end in the US. The US government has 80,000 people, including ordinary American citizens, on its “no-fly list.” No one knows why they are on the list, and no one on the list can find out how to get off it. An unaccountable act by the Bush administration put them there.

Americans are notoriously good at moving on, which tends to amount to turning our backs on the messes we’ve made, and averting our noses from the stench of what our government likes to call foreign policy. Currently that government is taking pains to assure us that the mess in Iraq is improving, and hinting heavily that we lend our attention to the fresh hydra’s head of Iran. Time to move on. The President’s troop "surge" is doing the trick, Eden is just around the corner, the war really was the grand idea it was always billed to be.

Gen. David Petraeus' report to Congress and President Bush's nationally televised address have had little impact on Americans' distaste for the Iraq war and their desire to withdraw U.S. troops, polls show.

Fifty-four percent still favor bringing the troops home as soon as possible, a measurement that has not changed in months, according to a poll released Tuesday by the non-partisan Pew Research Center.

In 2003, University of Lausanne theology professor Thomas Römer received a telephone call from the Elysée. Jacques Chirac's advisers wanted to know more about Gog and Magog ... two mysterious names pronounced by George W. Bush while he was attempting to convince France to enter the war in Iraq at his side. In its September edition, the University of Lausanne's review, Allez savoir, reveals this story that could seem fantastic did it not, as Allez savoir's Editor-in-Chief Jocelyn Rochat emphasizes, reveal the religious underpinnings of Bush's policy.

A US lawyer says thousands of Iraqi families may join a class action against Australian wheat exporter AWB because of the kickbacks it paid which helped fund Saddam Hussein's regime.

The class action against AWB, its US office and a French bank has been filed by lawyers acting for two women whose husbands were killed by Hussein's regime.

Lawyer John Murray says the case alleges AWB entered into a conspiracy to fund a Government which carried out genocide.

If the invasion of Afghanistan had been a success, we would not still be fighting the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. If the invasion of Iraq had been a success, we would not be fighting there.

Two invasions of practically defenseless countries with obsolete weapons and decaying infrastructures have to be termed failures. Both the civilian leadership in Washington and the military's officer corps share the blame.

The overwhelming majority of the American people are not breaking any laws.

We cannot say that about the government.

Frankfurt - Finance ministers and central bankers have long fretted that at some point, the rest of the world would lose its willingness to finance the United States' proclivity to consume far more than it produces - and that a potentially disastrous free-fall in the dollar's value would result.

But for longer than most economists would have been willing to predict a decade ago, the world has been a willing partner in American excess - until a new and home-grown financial crisis this summer rattled confidence in the country, the world's largest economy.