Two Articles

The Death of Arafat and the Myth of New Beginnings by Mark Levine in Juan Cole’s Blog Here is a graf: "In the weeks leading up to Palestinian President Yassir Arafat’s death American politicians and pundits have repeatedly called on the Palestinian people to use the opportunity of his passing to transform the intifada from a violent uprising into a non-violent, democratic and pragmatic program for achieving independence. This is very good advice, needless to say, except for one small problem: Palestinians have been trying to build such a movement for the last two decades, and the Israeli Government, IDF…

Never in my darkest days did I ever think that I would be agreeing soooo much with Patrick Buchanan.  The clairty of his arguement in this case is simply stunning.  He takes on the term "Islamo-facism" as used by Bush et al and digs a 6 feet grave for it (RIP).  Here are some tasty quotes: Unsurprisingly, it is neoconservatives, whose roots are in the Trotskyist-social Democratic left, who are promoting use of the term. Their goal is to have Bush stuff al-Qaida, Hamas, Hezbollah, Syria and Iran into the same “Islamo-fascist” kill box, then let Strategic Air Command do…

It seems that the number excludes Fallujah, and the count may actually be closer to 200,000 if Fallujah is included…. Iraq Body Count all of a sudden looks like a conservative website telling us how wonderful things are in Iraq.