Think Again About Invading Iran

Take a look at Asymmetry at Sea from The Atlantic.com. Here is one paragraph that ought to scare anyone not owning oil stock:

Iran is bringing 21st century warfare to the seas by planning small-boat suicide attacks that would resemble in some ways the aerial and naval suicide missions launched by Imperial Japan during its last desperate days in the Second World War. At the Battle of Okinawa in 1945, the Japanese mixed unconventional and conventional tactics to kill 12,000 Americans and wound more than 33,000. Iran, by contrast, is threatening a purely unconventional naval war, including attacks on U.S. military targets and on international maritime traffic. Oil prices would spike, and Iran would enjoy a long-term profit, even if it temporarily could not export its own oil.

That is me making the emphasis in the last sentence.

Then there is this to think about:

In 2002, the U.S. military conducted a war game that revealed a critical vulnerability to swarming speedboats in shallow coastal waters like the Gulf. The war game led to “the worst [simulated] naval defeat since Pearl Harbor,” according to the San Francisco Chronicle. Stanley Weeks, a naval specialist at the Institute for Defense Analysis in Washington, told me that “swarming, together with mobile coastal missile batteries aimed at our ships, might overload our combat systems and is, therefore, a real concern and stress.” U.S. ships and helicopters with precision guided weapons might destroy most of these small boats, but if even a few boats and missiles get through, they could create psychological and financial havoc.

There is one nightmare scenario, however, that will not happen. A third Gulf war won't replicate many times what happened in 2000 in Aden, Yemen, when a suicide bomber rammed the USS Cole and killed 17 sailors. The Cole was at anchor and at a minimum state of readiness. In the next Gulf war, our ships will be moving and on high alert. And the Aegis system is designed to shoot over the horizon at multiple attackers. Swarming small boats might turn out to be an unnerving nuisance, rather than a pivotal threat, somewhat like the attacks from small trucks of the Fedayeen Saddam on U.S. ground forces en route to Baghdad in 2003.

We can’t be sure how a naval war will play out. We defeated Iran’s conventional navy in the Gulf in 1987-88, during the reflagging and escort of Kuwait tankers. The Iranians have, as the losing side, worked hard to find fixes to the problems that conflict revealed. Despite all our preparations, the Iranians have been faster and more aggressive in expanding their sea-based asymmetric warfare capability than we have been in countering it. The U.S. Navy has been working on the Littoral Combat Ship, which would provide added protection against swarm attacks. But it could be years before the required dozens of these ships are ready. The U.S. Navy is still, by and large, a conventional blue-water force designed to patrol vast oceans, win classic sea battles, and pound an enemy with overwhelming firepower from offshore positions. A close-in, dirty war in narrow coastal waters is not something we can’t do, but it is something we should try to avoid. It does not play to our strengths.

Some of the promoters of a strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities have sold the strike as a high-tech, airborne surgical attack. But a look at the naval environment indicates that like the Iraq invasion, what starts surgically could end very messily indeed.

Would George Bush Please Be a Lame Duck?

Eugene Robinson's Bush's Parting Shots? scared me. I now have images of George W. Bush as General Jack D. Ripper as played by Elmer Fudd.

"As for the other Evils, we know the story: Iraq is a bloody quagmire that has claimed more than 4,000 American lives, and Iran is more powerful than at any time since the fall of the shah. Bush's legacy on the world stage is defined by Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, secret CIA prisons and waterboarding. His successor will face an enormous task restoring America's image and moral standing.

But if Bush is chastened by failure or troubled by doubt, he doesn't show it. He has said that he expects to be vindicated by history. The danger is that he will decide to give historians more fodder by taking care of unfinished business -- especially business that the next president might want no part of."

Since then we have had the Iranians shoot off their rockets. Tough talk from us. Yeah, it is only four months till the election and another six till the Inauguration - it could be a long, long six months.

Thinking About Iran

Vali Nasr writes Iran on Its Heels in The Washington Post. This Nasr writer is a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and an adjunct senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. So sounds like he knows a thing or two. This gets me thinking that Bush and McCain are distracting us from something:

"Iran wants U.S. forces to leave Iraq and assumes that a friendly Shiite government would then protect Iran's interests. Tehran has looked to Gen. Qasem Soleimani, commander of the Revolutionary Guards' Quds Force, to manage its strategy of supporting Shiite unity and resisting American occupation. But these efforts do not go hand in hand. The first means supporting stability and state-building and working with Iraq's government; the second involves building violent militias that undermine government authority.
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It was easy for Tehran to do both when a sectarian war united Shiites against a common Sunni enemy. But sectarian violence has largely ceased, and Sunni insurgents and al-Qaeda are no longer imminent threats. Throughout 2007, militias challenged the government as they terrorized neighborhoods in southern Iraq, disrupting commerce and assassinating clerics as well as government and provincial officials. The situation came to a head in August when Mahdi Army gunmen killed several pilgrims in Karbala. Tehran intervened; Sadr agreed to a truce with government forces and rival Shiite parties and ordered his militia to stand down."

***

It is a frequent refrain in Washington that the United States needs leverage before it can talk to Iran. In Iraq, Washington is getting leverage. America has the advantage while Iran is on its heels. Engaging Iran now could even influence who wins the Iraq debate in Tehran.

Iran - Why Talking to Ahmadinejad Is Not A Bad Idea

First, give a quick look at where The President of Iran sits within the hierarchy of Iranian government. I figure that George W. Bush figured that since Ahmadinejad has the title of President and is another shooting his mouth off without thinking, then Ahmadinejad has just as much authority as Bush. Which shows how much George W. and John McCain know about Iran.

A more important player gets featured in David Ignatius' column, At the Tip of Iran's Spear:

Let's try for a moment to put ourselves in the mind of Brig. Gen. Qassem Soleimani, the commander of the Quds Force of Iran's Revolutionary Guard. For it is the soft-spoken Soleimani, not Iran's bombastic president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who plays a decisive role in his nation's confrontation with the United States.
***
Soleimani is confident about Iran's rising power in the region, according to an Arab official who met recently with him. He sees an America that is weakened by the war in Iraq but still potent. He has told visitors that U.S. and Iranian goals in Iraq are similar, despite the rhetoric of confrontation. But he has expressed no interest in direct, high-level talks. The Quds Force commander prefers to run out the clock on the Bush administration, hoping that the next administration will be more favorable to Iran's interests.

Zbigniew Brzezinski and William Odom's A Sensible Path on Iran does its bit to puncture Ahmadinejad's importance:

"To look at the issue another way, imagine if China, a signatory to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and a country that has deliberately not engaged in a nuclear arms race with Russia or the United States, threatened to change the American regime if it did not begin a steady destruction of its nuclear arsenal. The threat would have an arguable legal basis, because all treaty signatories promised long ago to reduce their arsenals, eventually to zero. The American reaction, of course, would be explosive public opposition to such a demand. U.S. leaders might even mimic the fantasy rhetoric of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad regarding the use of nuclear weapons."

The best way I know of promoting a bombastic windbag is to keep giving them reasons to run their mouths. If they rant and rave about someone wanting to do them harm, let the other person give them every reason to believe they intend to do that harm. Talking past the blowhard, to the people he is intimidating with his rhetoric, and appearing rational but firm puts the demagogue on the defensive. Any bets that Obama is already thinking about this?

Iraq and Iran from Scotland

The Sunday Herald published A dilemma … what to do about Iran today and it has some interesting points - things I have not heard mentioned over here:

While the "surge" has not been the overwhelming success claimed by cheerleaders, such as Vice-President Dick Cheney, the policy has at least helped stem the tide of violence, especially in Anbar province where Sunnis are now co-operating in the fighting against al-Qaeda terrorist groups. It has also given US forces on the ground that most useful of military commodities - hope.

In so doing, Petraeus has also torn up the rule book by rewriting the Army Field Manual that controls US military doctrine. It was a seismic shift: out went big armoured operations and in came a new reliance on the dynamics of asymmetrical warfare. Overnight, or so it seems, US commanders found they had to learn the most important message of counter-insurgency warfare: if the government doesn't win, it loses; if the insurgents don't lose, they win.

Okay, we know that the surge has not done what it was supposed to - give the Iraqis a viable government - but the rest of that paragraph contains information not emphasized much over here.

Now for the scary stuff:

The other main issue in his bailiwick will be Iran. Already there are some clues. Petraeus has made no secret of the anger he feels about Iranian complicity in the manufacture of the roadside bombs that have killed so many US and coalition soldiers.

Whenever these lethal weapons have been used, he has been quick to blame the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, the organisation that has been fingered by US intelligence as the main culprit for its role in supplying the technology to Shia insurgency groups.

How to deal with it is another matter. Petraeus and Lieutenant-General Ray Odierno, his new man in Iraq, are too cautious to recommend an invasion or even a nuking, but a surgical strike could be on the cards. Just look at what happened in the Syrian desert last September.

Hil, Can We Nuke Iran?

I missed the actual comment last night but heard about it when I was listening to the 10 pm version of Countdown. I finally found the one thing that gives me a very long pause with Hilary.

Eugene Robinson wrote about this in his column today:

He should have pressed instead for more explanation of Clinton's proposal to counter the Iranian government's nuclear ambitions with a broad shield of U.S. nuclear deterrence -- protecting not just Israel but other countries in the region as well, such as Saudi Arabia. This strikes me as the kind of big, complicated idea that someone should have asked Clinton to explain further. That didn't happen, though.

Now if Obama should not get the nomination this might cause a problem. Who has the wackier solution for Iran: McCain or Clinton?

In the theatre of the absurd that currently passes for US foreign policy

Wish I had written that first but you can find it here: Known knowns on Iran.

So Iran is not building the Bomb

I thnk everyone has probably heard or read about it, but here is the report from The New York Times: An Assessment Jars a Foreign Policy Debate About Iran :

"The impact of the National Intelligence Estimate’s conclusion — that Iran had halted a military program in 2003, though it continues to enrich uranium, ostensibly for peaceful uses — will be felt in endless ways at home and abroad."

Does anyone else here echoes of Iraq and WMD in this:

I think it is very important for the international community to recognize the fact that if Iran were to develop the knowledge that they could transfer to a clandestine program it would create a danger for the world. And so I view this report as a warning signal that they had the program, they halted the program. And the reason why it's a warning signal is that they could restart it. And the thing that would make a restarted program effective and dangerous is the ability to enrich uranium, the knowledge of which could be passed on to a hidden program.

Text of President Bush’s Press Conference on Iran’s Nuclear Program.

Maybe George W. should change his name to Peter?

Some more items that have come to my attention: Time to Talk to Iran, The Myth of the Mad Mullahs, The Right Nuclear Red Line, The report changes nothing: Iran is still a threat, says defiant George W. Bush (and do read the reader's comments), and Joy in Iran over nuclear bomb report, but Bush still sees danger.

Was Syria playing with nukes?

Take a look at How close were we to a third world war? from The Sunday Herald.

Though officially carrying a cargo of cement, according to intelligence sources quoted in the Washington Post newspaper, the Israelis believed that on board the ship was a consignment of nuclear material or equipment.

On September 15, Washington Post reporter Glenn Kessler wrote that "an Israeli official provided the US with evidence of Syrian-North Korean co-operation on a nuclear facility".

Many veteran Middle East intelligence hands believe this to be plausible explanation. Among them is Ray Close, a former CIA analyst in the Near East Division and former station chief in Saudi Arabia, who served for 27 years as an "Arabist" for the agency.

According to what Close himself admits is a "speculative" analysis, he believes that: "The Israelis offered us the US intelligence that Syria is beginning to develop a nuclear capability based on North Korean technology and urged the US to co-operate with them in mounting a military attack to destroy the Syrian site."

So is our government getting confused again about the real Middle East danger? Why are we seeing these kind of headlines: Cheney: Iran faces 'serious consequences' over nuclear drive?

Fight Against Alqaeda Unites Shia And Sunni Groups In Lebanon (from Sunday Herald)

For those of you still thinking that al Quaeda and Iran have united against us, for those who think that all Islamic terrorists are the same, read Fight Against Alqaeda Unites Shia And Sunni Groups In Lebanon from Scotland's Sunday Herald.

"HEZBOLLAH, THE Iranian-backed Lebanese Shia militant group, is arming, training and financing a Palestinian Sunni militia inside Lebanon's most violent refugee camp, tasked with controlling the rise of al-Qaeda fighters, many of them veterans of the sectarian war in Iraq.

In an interview with the Sunday Herald inside Ain al-Hilweh camp near the southern port city of Sidon, Sheikh Abu Ayoub, a commander of Ansar Allah (Followers of God), said his Palestinian group was leading a security force to expel foreign jihadis and prevent a repeat of the devastating summer conflict between Sunni extremists and the Lebanese army in the northern Nahr al-Bared refugee camp.

'Lebanon is now the new front for al-Qaeda,' said Ayoub. 'Al-Qaeda sees Lebanon as weak because of the split in decision-making, and weak security. Over the past year there were many foreigners in the camp. They spoke about wanting to get back into Iraq. There were Saudis among them and they were closely monitored before being expelled. They all moved to Nahr al-Bared.'

Read the whole article. Hezbollah are anything but saints. Quite a few things comes to mind after reading the article:

1. Under Bush's logic, we need to invade Lebanon now.
2. We are not getting the proper information so that we can judge our government's actions and the politician's talk.
3. The whole Islamic terrorist-Iraq-Iran-Shia-Sunni thing is a mess that our leaders do not seem to understand very well and certainly are not explaining to us in a sensible manner.
4. That whenever a mess is ungodly complicated, then subtleness and nuance are very good methods rather than jumping with both feet. Jumping in does work if you are, say, Alexander the Great (see Gordian Knot). On the other hand, I think Alexander was probably a psychopath.
   

Chrysler Strikes; Delaware County Dems angry; Backfround on Iraq

Sort of a slow day here. The weather cools down and I can breathe again and little going on.

The UAW walks out on Chrysler. The New York Times has this headline: Auto Union Workers Walk Out at Chrysler. The Kokomo Tribune has this early report:

Workers carrying picket signs gathered at the entrances of Kokomo Transmission Plant Wednesday afternoon as the United Auto Worker union strike of Chrysler continued.

Tens of thousands of Chrysler employees, including around 6,000 in Kokomo, went on strike at 11 a.m. today.

Shortly after 11 a.m., Kokomo police reported traffic congestion around U.S. 31 and Lincoln Road and Boulevard as many workers from Kokomo Transmission Plant and Kokomo Casting Plant were seen leaving the factories.

UPDATE 5: Chrysler workers strike.

Meanwhile, Delaware County Democrats are upset at the Republicans. From Anderson, it is hard to tell if this is Republican stupidity or something more sinister. The Star Press headlines the story as Democrats cry foul over local GOP envelope:

An envelope used for a recent Republican mailing had both parties crying politics on Tuesday.

The mailing, sent to city residents who applied this fall for absentee ballots, included campaign literature for Republicans running for city offices.

***

The envelope featured the words "IMPORTANT Absentee Ballot Information" underneath the return address, and did not identify the sender.

Inside the envelope was a form letter signed by mayoral candidate Sharon McShurley, city clerk candidate Kris Shroyer and city council candidates Basil Davis, Micah Maxwell, Mark Conatser, Dan Ridenour and Brad Polk, along with a sample ballot and flyers.

The form letter was on Republican Central Committee of Delaware County letterhead.

***

The election board voted to 2-1 dismiss Brown's complaint.

Republican members William Bruns and Karen Wenger voted in favor of dismissal while Democrat Steve Craycraft dissented.

"I don't see any violations of election laws," Bruns, an attorney, said.

Bruns said he believed the envelope was protected under a section of Indiana Code that states disclaimers need not appear on the front or cover page of a communication if the disclaimer appears within the communication.

Of course, I find something off-the wall to be a whole more interesting. I thought the conservatives did not like us liberals and Democrats because we were moral relativists; that we did not find anything absolutely true. Then I read these paragraphs in the Muncie Star-Press:

Speaking before the election board on Tuesday, Brown called the mailing -- postmarked Oct. 1, 2007 -- immoral.

***

In an interview with The Star Press after the meeting, Delaware County Republican Party vice-chairman Tom Bennington called the complaint political posturing.

"Morality happens to be a personal opinion," Bennington said, referring to Brown's comments. "I do not agree with his personal opinion."

Yeah, I italicized that part of the quote above.

I want to recommend The New York Review of Books. They send out e-mail notices when a new issue appears and a lot of them are available online. Some of the articles are political or historical and the other are book reviews. I will warn you that these are essays and not short articles, and they do have a liberal bias. (It is interesting to read something unabashedly liberal and then look at what the conservatives whine about being liberal. My conclusion a long time ago was that they cried liberal bias whenever anything contradicted their worldview. Not unlike my six year old stepson in that respect).

While not in the latest issue but the last one before the current one, take a look at The Victor?. The article reviews Treacherous Alliance: The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran, and the United States. One paragraph stood out for me:

The scale of the American miscalculation is striking. Before the Iraq war began, its neoconservative architects argued that conferring power on Iraq's Shiites would serve to undermine Iran because Iraq's Shiites, controlling the faith's two holiest cities, would, in the words of then Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, be "an independent source of authority for the Shia religion emerging in a country that is democratic and pro-Western." Further, they argued, Iran could never dominate Iraq, because the Iraqi Shiites are Arabs and the Iranian Shiites Persian. It was a theory that, unfortunately, had no connection to reality.

This story reinforces my belief that the neo-conservatives lacked any practical knowledge about Iraq or foreign policy. I have no idea why I keep[ running into these articles about neo-conservatives (see my earlier post Kind of a follow up on Neo-cons examining themselves). Nothing changes my opinion that idealists (in the philosophical sense) are too dangerous to the public welfare to have real power. Ideas are grand things but they need tested against reality, but then that is pragmatism and not idealism.

The article details how our government set itself up with a problematic Iran.

Oh, What a Day: Putin, We Talk to Iran

The Sunday Herald from Scotland profiled Valdimar Putin. The British are bit upset with Putin over the former KGB spy murdered in London last year.

WHEN IT comes to tweaking the West's noses, there are few better exponents that Vladimir Putin. Last week, the Russian leader was at it again. During a whistlestop European tour which took in Vienna and Luxembourg, he showed no sign of easing up in his opposition to the proposed US missile shield, made clear his dislike of the UN's plans for an internationally monitored scheme to give independence to Kosovo and insisted the European Union should think again before doing anything which might damage relations with Moscow.

He also showed that he would not be told what to do about human rights: "We in Russia should listen to the criticism against us," he said in Vienna. "But, also, the European partners should listen to the accusations against them."

Putin does not take kindly to what he regards as peremptory demands from the West. He is also under pressure from the military, who are arguing that, as it now has the spending power, Russia should start re-equipping its armed forces. The expansion of Nato eastwards has also made Russian commanders nervous: they object to seeing Western military hardware on their borders and former allies such as the Baltic states embracing the transatlantic alliance.

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All this helps to explain Putin's hardline attitude to the British request for the extradition of Andrei Lugovoy for his alleged involvement in the murder of the former KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko. And apart from it being a matter of national pride, Putin is nearing the end of his presidency - he stands down next April - and he wants to be remembered as a leader who made Russia strong again.

The remainder of Why Putin is determined to make Russia strong again has some interesting bits and is not worth reading - as are the comments.

Today's New York Times reports that American and Iranian diplomats are speaking directly for the first time in decades. Hopefully, Bush is out decorating graves and will keep his mouth shut.

There are connections between these two stories.

Reading around: Iraq

Scotland's Sunday Herald puts a reporter on the ground in Iraq and publishes what he sees:

The Badlands of Baghdad,Tony Blair insists Iraq is getting better ... but there’s little evidence of that on the ground. Report by Foreign Editor David Pratt on the front line.

Each house cleared has a sticker put on its front door. But that's little protection, the locals say, from the shadowy gunmen who vanish by day and reappear by night.

Necessary as the searches are said to be, they are often disquieting to witness. In one house in the early hours, a woman and her small children cower petrified, as up to 20 American and Iraqi soldiers trawl through their belongings. More than once, I overhear lewd and insulting wisecracks from the troops.

"Too young even for you,"one American soldier says to another, as they pass a little girl of about 10. Both of the men are presumably unaware that I am within earshot - and that the girl's mother speaks excellent English.

Like the translators, some of the Iraqi troops wear ski masks to hide their identity,and I often witness them inexplicably rifling through jewellery boxes and jars containing small, precious personal items.

Every so often we come across a Kalashnikov. And if there is more than one weapon in the house,the occupants are taken in for questioning, their hands tied with plastic cuffs and a hood put over their heads.

In most places, though, we find nothing but traumatised civilians bunkered down and short of basic provisions. Often they are without electricity and are simply too scared to go beyond the front door.

Not for the squeamish but ask why we never read this sort of reporting from American sources?

The Scotsman reports that the presumptive British Prime Minister Brown will pull out British troops:

GORDON Brown will remove all British forces from Iraq before the next election under a plan to rebuild support among disillusioned Labour voters.

Scotland on Sunday can reveal the Prime Minister elect is working on a withdrawal plan that could see troop numbers slashed from 7,000 to as few as 2,000 within 12 months.

If implemented, the strategy would culminate in total withdrawal no later than spring 2010, the date by which Brown must go to the country to seek his own mandate.

This news probably surprised President Bush like so much else does but no one else. The Iraqi fiasco never enjoyed much enthusiasm in Britain. I think the only national leader able to continue military operations in Iraqi while opposed by the nation's electorate is...yep, George W. Bush. After writing this paragraph, I read David Broder's column in today's Washington Post where he makes pretty much the same point. I disagree with Broder's conclusion. He finds Bush and Blair heroically resisting the terrorists of Iraq when I see them as having created the terrorists of Iraq.

History will record that both of them saw the threat to the West posed by terrorism and responded courageously. The wisdom of their policy and the conduct of their governments are not likely to be judged as highly.

Ironies abound in this headline from The London Times: Blair under mortar attack in Iraq when compared with this headline from Scotland's Sunday Herald: Five US soldiers killed, Green Zone and Basra bombed, 13 civilians massacred ... yet Blair visits Iraq to say: it’s getting better. Oops, so much for a better Iraq. In all fairness, the Sunday Herald reports on the mortars, too.

Back to the States, and David Ignatius column in the Washington Post, An Army Against the Clock. Ignatius writes from a different perspective
than the Sunday's Herald's writer and while not an antidote to the British papers, it does offer a view in what I think is an unexplored complexity of Iraq.

TAJI, Iraq -- America set a long clock ticking when it decided to spend $300 million to rebuild the sprawling military base here as a logistical center for the new Iraqi army. This was to be the soldier's version of nation-building -- maintenance depots, orderly barracks and professional schools for Iraqi officers and NCOs.

But the political clock in Washington is running on a different speed. Congress is impatient with the slow work of building a modern army -- especially in a country where sectarian violence is destroying any semblance of normal life outside the confines of well-guarded compounds such as this one.

Also in the Washington Post, Jim Hoagland criticizes Bush's saber rattling with Iraq. Hoagland writes that Bush may be tempted to take bold and decisive action. I am worried about the same thing since every time Bush acted boldly and decisively he manged to screw things up to FUBAR status. I suspect the rest of the world fears not Bush's retribution but just how much worse Bush can make any situation. Hoagland writes about a possible scenario that ought to worry everyone:

But history and contemporary politics both suggest that this is a time for steady nerves and calibrated pressure tactics -- not sudden lurches in policy. Using Iraq as a springboard and rationale for an American military strike into Iran would expand the current disaster, just as Nixon's invasion of Cambodia, nominally undertaken to show American strength, came to undermine the U.S. presence in Indochina.

That invasion was meant to bolster an earlier U.S.-backed coup in Phnom Penh. Washington would risk similar results in Iraq by strong-arming the admittedly faltering government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki out of office and replacing Maliki with a U.S.-anointed Iraqi savior.

Arab allies are urging such a course on Bush and would not object to U.S. military action against Iran. There is growing concern in Baghdad that Washington is developing a "Plan B" that involves both hitting Iran and ousting Maliki -- who ironically was brought to office by American pressure to force out Ibrahim al-Jafari, Maliki's predecessor. The concern is augmented by demands from both sides of the aisle in Congress that Maliki meet obviously unrealistic benchmarks quickly or face a cutoff of U.S. support.

Thinking I missed something important, I checked the main web pages for the Washington Post and The New York Times. The Post has three headlines directly about Iraq: Iraq's Sadr Overhauls Tactics, 7 U.S. Troops Die and Assessments Foretold Situation. The New York Times has Bombs Imperil U.S. Troops Searching for Captured Comrades, Roadside Bombs Kill 7 U.S. Soldiers in Iraq, and In the Heat of Battle and Politics, Hard Facts Melt.

The British headlines possess a pungency lacking in our American papers and so does their reporting. So much for the liberal media is about all I can say at this point.

Britian and Iran and Scotalnd's Sunday Herald

I think the British sailors seized by Iran poses a hell of a problem for us that may not be getting enough attention here. The following are from yesterday's Sunday Herald:

Iran's captives: how can we free them?

What should have been a minor international incident has spiralled into a major controversy. Diplomatic Editor Trevor Royle examines the real reasons behind their capture

'Tehran has decided to exploit the historic mistrust of the old coloniser'

By Bob Tait in Tehran

WHATEVER THE priorities of Iran's Islamic authorities in the first days after the capture of British sailors in the Shatt al-Arab waterway, mobilising public opinion apparently did not figure high. In contrast to the feeding frenzy triggered in Britain by the sailors plight, in Iran the story fell into a media black hole.

The Britons had been captured three days into the Norouz (new year) holiday, with most Iranians and government officials on vacation. Stemming from Iran's ancient Persian civilisation and pre-dating Islam, it is the biggest festive event on the annual national calendar, a time of year when newspapers cease publication for more than a fortnight.

Against that backdrop, government spokesmen maintained a virtual silence on the issue. Coverage by state-controlled television was minimal.

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As a result, the biggest crisis to strike British-Iranian relations since Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini passed a death sentence on the author Salman Rushdie in 1989 met with a mixture of apathy and ignorance on the streets of Tehran.

Toronto Star on Pakistan and the Taliban and on Iran

Afghanistan here:

Those who invaded Iraq claiming it had weapons of mass destruction and have been blaming Iran and Syria for the murderous mess in Iraq, are also the same people now blaming Pakistan for the mess in Afghanistan.

They say Pakistan is aiding and abetting the Taliban and Al Qaeda. Maybe it is. But U.S. President George W. Bush and Afghan President Hamid Karzai have offered little or no proof.

The American media are running a parallel campaign, hurling a more serious allegation, that the Pakistan army is extending logistical help to the Taliban and Al Qaeda. Most such stories are based on unnamed sources.

The New York Times, which in the pre-Iraq war days carried phony WMD stories, is back practising the same sort of discredited journalism.

In a Washington-datelined story last week on ostensible Al Qaeda camps in North Waziristan, I counted 20 attributions to unnamed "American officials," "intelligence officials and terrorism experts," "American analysts," "counterterrorism officials," etc.

Iran here:

The Bush administration's approach – surrender and then we can negotiate – will not move the Iranians or gather needed allies. If the U.S. could deal with the far greater threat of the Soviet Union, surely it can talk to Iran.

The Toronto Star notes that this originally appeared in the Financial Times.