From the New York Times

[http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/27/world/asia/27afghan.html?_r=1&oref=slogin|Attacks in Afghanistan Grow More Frequent and Lethal]

By CARLOTTA GALL
Published: September 27, 2006
KANDAHAR, Afghanistan, Sept. 26 — Afghanistan suffered two deadly bombings on Tuesday that killed 20 people, providing another sign of the increasing size and power of suicide attacks and roadside bombs by insurgents.
The more devastating attack occurred when the police stopped a suicide bomber as he approached a security checkpoint near the governor’s office in Lashkar Gah, in southern Helmand Province, and he detonated explosives strapped to his chest.

From the [http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/27/washington/27assess.html?hp&ex=1159416000&en=4390e3dcfece8e76&ei=5094&partner=homepage|New York Times]

Study Doesn’t Share Bush’s Optimism on Terror Fight

By DAVID E. SANGER
Published: September 27, 2006
WASHINGTON, Sept. 26 — Three years ago, Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld wrote a memo to his colleagues in the Pentagon posing a critical question in the “long war’’ against terrorism: Is Washington’s strategy successfully killing or capturing terrorists faster than new enemies are being created?
Until Tuesday, the government had not publicly issued an authoritative answer. But the newly declassified National Intelligence Estimate on terrorism does exactly that, and it concludes that the administration has failed the Rumsfeld test.

New polls show a “strong majority” of Iraqis want "US-led military forces to immediately withdraw from the country, saying their swift departure would make Iraq more secure and decrease sectarian violence."

Nearly 75 percent of Baghdad residents said they would feel safer if US forces left Iraq.

From the Australian

Andrew Bacevich: [http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,20481756-7583,00.html|Chickens are home to roost] in Iraq

The Bush administration is running out of troops, money and ideas, warns Andrew Bacevich
September 27, 2006
AS if by stealth, almost without our noticing, the Iraq war's long-awaited turning point has arrived. After the innumerable events touted as decisive that turned out to be anything but that - the capture of Saddam Hussein, the killing of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the various milestones related to the creation of a new Iraqi political order - the end game now becomes clear. And the outcome points ineluctably towards an American failure of immense proportions.
Historians of the global war on terror will likely recall September 2006 as a pivotal moment. Throughout this month, chickens have come home to roost. Each has arrived bearing bad news for the Bush administration...
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Gus: etc

In The 7:30 report last night (5/10/06) [http://www.abc.net.au/7.30/content/2006/s1755762.htm|Maxine McKew interviews Barry Jones], whose book book called "A Thinking Reed" (ABC transcript calls it A Thinking Read which may or may not be the correct title — "A Thinking Reed" would make more sense here) is about to hit the bookshops... Barry Jones deserves our attention. His greater knowledge is often recognised but his power of analysis is underestimated, or dismissed by the Howard of this world. I believe that our Minster senses that people could awake from his spell and wishes to prevent intelligence prevail over beliefs...

The present campaign by Howard to discredit the New South Wales government is for example designed to split the Labor party which basically has been running the country in all states and territories, and replace it with the right wing of Opus Dei and the Exclusive Brethren, under the baton of a Debnam...

Our greedy Howardian grocer is also bent on shooting down intellectuals, these cautious people who use reason and evidence to guide us to better pastures while our grocer believes that if you tell the grass here is good, often enough, then the wilted grass is good is good is good... Faith base politics is running this country down the rocky road of the straight and narrow full of hypocritical bends, at accelerating speed in the belief that since the cart has no brakes, there is no need for brakes... Johnnee is smart but not intelligent. This is why he attacks this intelligentsia, with the help of motor mouths like the Devines and Hendersons. Intelligent people are often the people who doubt themselves and the pathways until they are sure of the proper route to take. The Johnnee of this world believe that what they believe is correct and if evidence to the contrary props up, they deny the evidence until no cow can come home. By then, our cart is buried in awful stinking mud of duplicity, of racism, of lies, of hypocrisy, of deceit to the axles and the Johnnee driver will tell us that it's our fault and our problem for not believing enough he could walk on water... Faith base politics is the privilege of the psychopath — refined to lead others up the garden path with brilliance and in denial of the true consequences.

In her [http://www.smh.com.au/news/opinion/speech-from-the-heart-cements-a-place-in-history/2006/10/04/1159641392678.html|opinionated gunk], Miranda reveals the truth of our problem:

"WHEN John Howard gave a speech in May at the 30th anniversary dinner of the Centre for Independent Studies, the audience was a bit disappointed by its lack of intellectual red meat."
Yes miranda as mentioned here Johnnee is smart red neck but not an intellectual...
.....
"It was a speech to cement the "real" John Howard's place in history and his role in the culture wars, through which he has steered Australia resolutely and irrevocably in his 10 years in office, much to the chagrin of his detractors.
Yes Miranda, History will cement the real John Howard with concrete boots while some deluded con artist will carry on praising the "real" John Howard. a very subtle difference in the quote marks... Faith based or reason based politics... People using reason always come to "reason"... people using faith end up in wars.

MAXINE MCKEW: Let's start where your book ends and I think there's an elegiac feel to the way you finish this book because you're talking about the state of the world since the attacks of September 11 in 2001 and you say this you say, this was the year when politics dropped out of the politics and paranoia broke the spirit of political oppositions. That's a bleak conclusion, isn't it?
BARRY JONES: Well, it's an apocalyptic conclusion, but in the end I quoted Samuel Beckett and in the end one simply has to go on. In the United States, a phenomenon that people hardly recognise, in the United States you've had since September 11th, 2001, this concept that Dick Cheney called the "new normal" and the idea of that was to say the process of the rational analysis of evidence and then you reach a conclusion on the basis of that analysis the kind of process that was honed by the Enlightenment of the 18th century, that era came to an end on September 11, 2001. Now we're in the "new normal" and in the new normal decisions have to be faith based, not evidence based. Faith based. You've got to rely on gut and on instinct. Now, that meant, for example, that the American decision to go to war in Iraq over the weapons of mass destruction didn't have to rely on evidence. In fact, the evidence was counter-intuitive or almost irrelevant. The question was: did you believe it to be true? Did you have faith that it was true? Well, if you had faith it was true, that was enough. You made a decision based on faith. Strangely, in the United States now, they've got faith based national parks and they've got signs and they've got material out saying that the Grand Canyon, it now appears, was produced by God in only six days. So, you've now got a faith based National Park.

MAXINE MCKEW: Of course, that brings to mind what John Howard has been talking about this week at the birthday bash for Quadrant Magazine, the 50th birthday celebrations, he praised the moral clarity, as he said, of Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and most recently John Paul II. Again, that raises questions for your side of politics. Where's the moral clarity of the leaders of the left?
BARRY JONES: Well, first of all, I would challenge the idea completely. I mean, first of all, the argument is to say he says the left had been soft with tyrants. Well, one of the things you don't do with tyrants is to subsidise them and I would have thought the whole AWB debacle indicates that when Saddam Hussein was in control, we were subsidising the Saddam Hussein regime very significantly in order to guarantee our pre-eminent share of the wheat market there. So the result is you can't operate on both levels. You can't say, "We have absolute contempt for Saddam. We are fiercely opposed to it - on the other hand, we are significantly financing it."

I propose to vote our present prime minister, the "Honourable" John W Howard, as the most unAustralian prime Minster this country ever had. First class grocer if you will, but definitely unAustralian for going to war under false and internationally illegal pretences, for telling fibs about many things including the GST (if he was not lying to us, either he's got a short memory which we know since he can't remember anything about the AWB, or he has a butterfly span of attention on subjects of great importance)... Medicare, etc... The list is much longer than my two arms.
Thus from now on this site I will refer to "UnAustralian Johnnee" or "UnAustralian Howard" — he seems more pleased to bend over backwards for his mate Bushit-the-lesser than be true to the devastating reality of his little war — if I can remember my own thoughts beyond my gentle senility...