NOTES FROM SRI LANKA.

(April '04)

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04/04/04

Looka there. Three fours.

I wish I was a spa-aceman, the fastest guy alive...I'd fly a-cross the universe in Fireball X-L....wait a minute, wait a minute. Who's pulling my strings now?

Well, don't tell anybody at the Pentagon, but we made it to Mars in just about an hour (that's taking the scenic route -- once around the asteroid belt then hard to port at the big red spot). You can just imagine how aggravated our minder Admiral Gonutz (ret.) would be if he knew we were all up here in an unauthorized space vee-hickle, breaking all the laws of physics like so many toothpicks and generally turning the scientific assumptions of his federal agency on their collective head. His cartoon pirate hat would spin off and the top of his head would blow like a volcano. Trust me -- you don't want to see that happen...not to a crusty old sea-dog like Gonutz. (This was supposed to be his cushy retirement posting -- a place where he could sleep late, drink heavy, and issue a few orders in-between.)

So anyway, when we got to Mars, it actually took us longer to get through customs than to cross the inky interplanetary void (they're getting a little touchy about foreigners since the landing of those two little Tonka-truck science experiments, worrying that this may be a prelude to colonization or, even worse, door-to-door sales). The five of us checked into our usual Martian hotel, then set off to the remote desert where the man-sized tuber's primitive space capsule had reportedly touched down. We found the landing site pretty easily and were able to follow the tracks of his little pleasure vehicle up to the point where they ended abruptly at the base of a sheer rock cliff. Most curious.

This is where planning can make all the difference in the world. See, if we had thought to bring Mitch Macaphee's crystal set along on this trip, we might have been able to track tubey more accurately by following his internal radio source. Or if we had contrived some way to pry Marvin (my personal robot assistant) loose from admiral Gonutz (ret.)'s endless ping-pong jubilee, we might have sent him stumbling aimlessly through the fractured and frozen rock garden that is rural Mars. So now you know why NASA spends billions of dollars a year on guys sitting around thinking about this shit. It's for a damn good reason! (Nice work if you can get it, too.) Would you believe not one of us thought to carry even a boyscout compass, never mind our indispensable Fodor's color guide to greater Mars. Under the circumstances, it seemed only prudent that we should return to the ship...so naturally we kept right on going.

It fell to Trevor James Constable to guide us. No, he wasn't using his patented orgone generating device -- that's a bit too large to wheel around in this rough terrain. Trevor James has a pretty good sense of direction, but even more importantly, he is decisive and not at all shy about pointing the way (if we ever do an inner-planetary journey-to-the-center-of-the-earth tour again, I'm taking him whether he volunteers or not). He brought us to some bad-looking caves -- the primordial equivalent of a rough neighborhood -- and said he had reason to believe the man-sized tuber had taken refuge in one of these foreboding orifices. Now, this is the point where we typically put Marvin to good use, but where the hell is he when you need him? He's probably marking his ballot in the Sri Lankan parliamentary elections, in as much as he's the only naturalized citizen among us (having been manufactured in our adopted island home by Mitch Macaphee).

Damn it all -- this trip was supposed to be fast and easy! Now we're looking at having to go spelunking for that crazy root vegetable on the off-chance he might be nestled somewhere in the Martian crust. It's enough to make you drop your ornamental Jim Morrison whiskey bottle down the nearest crevice. Sometimes I wish I weren't a spa-ace man....

Nothing To Hide. Well, the big red Dubya caved this week on letting Condi "Supertanker" Rice testify before his handpicked 9/11 commission, after deploying his legion of Sunday morning talking heads to swear up and down that sitting national security advisers never testify under oath before congressional committees...except for Sandy Berger, that is...and, oh yeah, Zbigniew Brzezinski. (By the way, who said anything about testifying before congress?) Of course, then there's the story your local paper didn't carry -- that the White House cut a deal with its (hand-picked) 9/11 commission allowing Rice to give testimony under oath with the proviso that the commission cannot call any other White House officials to testify...including Rice. So if Lady Chevron says something that requires clarification from someone else in the Bush Administration, tough shit. And she can't be recalled for further testimony. Sweet. Further, Bush and Cheney have agreed to testify, but in closed, secret session, not under oath, and only at the same time.

So let's see. First he says we don't need an "independent" 9/11 panel. Then he gives in on that, but tries to make Henry Kissinger the chairman. When that doesn't fly, he still manages to put the body under the care of close associates, like Phillip Zelikow and proven Democratic party lightweights like Bob Kerry, who was with Bush all the way on the Iraq war. And even with such favorable pre-conditions, Junior is still stonewalling and refusing to testify under oath. Why? Because he's too busy signing the new automatically-register-each-fetus-at-conception-as-a-Republican law? Because he's too engrossed in the ongoing battle for his third hundred million in corporate campaign cash? Or is it because he's got something to hide that he doesn't want hitting the newspapers before election day? Ka-ching! Where's my kewpie doll? Honestly -- we could be forgiven for coming to this conclusion based on all this overcautious behavior...just as one might understandably have surmised that the administration was a tiny bit eager to go to war in Iraq a little over a year ago.

These people have no accountability. No authority stands up to them because they have a monopoly on political power. Such an arrangement practically guarantees abuse, and the Bush administration has lived up to this truism. No matter what they do, they will never face serious censure or impeachment so long as their party controls congress. The judiciary will never take serious issue with their specious and gratuitous claims of national security in the context of a post-9/11 global "war on terror". If they can bulldoze their way to victory in November, they're home free -- simple as that. Right now, American voters are the only power that can hold them accountable. People should demand -- now, today -- that Bush order all relevant documents regarding 9/11 released to the Commission, including Clinton era documents he has put a lid on. People should demand that Bush testify under oath, in public, and without uncle Cheney there to hold his hand. There is no way in hell these people should be allowed to run their re-election campaign on 9/11 while engaging in a cover-up of the circumstances that led to that disastrous day.

So friends, it's up to us. Speak now...or forever hold your peace.

Good Reads. Check out the Black Commentator website for excellent coverage of the outlaw coup regime recently installed in Haiti by our great leaders. Robert Fisk is back in Iraq, where things are going just swell (ask anybody named Bremer) -- read his reports at The Independent (there is a fee...though you can catch some of them republished gratis at the Counterpunch website).

Joke. Colin Powell said this week that the intelligence on Iraqi mobile bioweapons labs appears to have been unreliable. What...is he reading year-old papers or something?

luv u,

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04/11/04

Glawry Hahlalooyuh.

Lookout, Joe...yer comin' home. (Old times were good times.) Guess I remember my Neil Young well enough...especially the more down-and-out songs. Now if I could remember how to get home. (Where's home again? Oh, yeah...)

Whoever said Mars ain't the kinda place to raise your kids might have been talking about root vegetables, just as well. Great screaming Christmas, this has been one steee-range sojourn right from the moment we locked onto the man-sized tuber's natural radio source transmissions. That old reliable pok...pok....pok....led us straight across the Martian rock desert and up one side of Mount Olympus to a little hidden plateau on the shady face of that most imposing of topographical features. Mitch Macaphee, who had cleverly converted his cell-phone into a "super Geiger" (see photo for an actual full-size "super Geiger"), used what resources were available to point to a small grove of Martian palms and announced, "He's there." Words cannot express the joy of that moment.

Were the good professor's readings accurate? Well -- as near as can be expected in so hostile an environment. Sand gets into everything, as you might imagine, and then there's the ultra thin atmosphere and the icy cold...not the best for electronics. In any case, when we entered the palm grove we did see the great lumbering silhouette of the man-sized tuber before us -- only he appeared to be wearing a confederate cavalryman's hat. It turned out that this was not, in fact, the man-sized tuber we know and love, but his cousin, Colonel Jeremiah Beauregard Tuber, one of the "Kentucky Tubers", no less, and owner of one of the most bogusly overblown southern accents ever heard in the history of television.

Colonel Tuber told us he was on one of his gambling junkets (he's retired, you see) when his stellar-infrarometer picked up evidence of a similar tuber-based life form on the surface of the red planet. Always glad to meet a member of the family, the Colonel pointed the nose of his craft right at the reading and hit the boosters. (Fact is, I think he might have been hoping for a bit of fraternal largesse from our man-sized tuber, in as much as the Colonel fairly reeks of unpaid gaming debts.) He told of his encounter with the first root vegetable in space -- tubey, being wholly non-verbal, didn't hold up his end of the conversation, or so the Colonel averred with a hoarse laugh. "Ah ex-pect he was a bit surprised tuh see me aft'all thays ye-ahs," he explained, and Mitch Macaphee beckoned to his translator (who was, of course, back on planet Earth at that moment).

Well, I could go into more painful detail about how Colonel Jeremiah Tuber tried to interest us in a little money-making proposition by way of a small loan against the value of his fiddlehead ranch back on Regulus 9 to be placed on a surefire marker already in play at the baccarat table in the north corner of the Red Spot casino, but I won't trouble you with it. Suffice to say that when we finally caught up with his cousin, our very own man-sized tuber, the giant root vegetable's wallet was a good bit lighter than it had been when he left Earth, and I'm not talking about the gravity difference. Everywhere you go these days there's a swindler waiting to "show you the elk," as they say back in my old home town. (Back in my new home town, the local euphemisms for getting ripped off are more mongoose-based.)

We actually did play an impromptu gig at the Martian Red Rock amphitheatre (really just a bandshell trailer parked in the middle of the desert). Matt put a call in to sFshzenKlyrn, our perpetual sit-in Zenite guitarist, who happened to be visiting some cronies on Jupiter, and he popped over to play a few numbers with us. (Matt restrung his 1976-vintage Aspen acoustic guitar for the occasion -- probably the only decent instrument Aspen ever made...a trained luthier must have stumbled into the factory by mistake on that particular day...) So it was bam, thud, and a couple of twangs, then we were back in our saucer headed for the Cheney Hammer Mill, where Marvin (my personal robot assistant) will likely be preparing a fitting reception for the first man-sized tuber in space. (I told him to do whatever he thought appropriate...just don't invite cousin Jeremiah.)

Occupational Hazards. You have to wonder if it's just plain stupidity or stone-cold carelessness that drives U.S. policy in Iraq. Either way, it cost a great many lives this week -- probably 40 American soldiers and certainly hundreds of Iraqi combatants and civilians. The CPA/Pentagon chose to mete out Israeli-style collective punishment on the city of Fallujah, mounting a siege of the city, destroying houses, using helicopter gunships to lay down withering fire, and declaring repeated "unilateral suspensions of offensive operations," in the same exact wording of the Israeli armed forces as they surrounded Beirut in 1982 (per Robert Fisk). Sharon in Beirut, Jenin and Nablus is definitely the gloss for this operation. What is to my mind almost inexplicable is the administration's decision to provoke a confrontation with Muqtada al Sadr and, by extension, a large portion of the majority Shi'a community at the same time...I honestly cannot see how they expected shutting down Muqtada's puny 10,000-circulation newspaper and arresting his lieutenant to produce a good outcome. The resulting firestorm was beyond most anyone's expectations, but certainly not astounding, given the circumstances. Why the hell did they do it?

Of course, to hear Rumsfeld and company talk, you'd think everything is hunky dory (the man is obviously so insulated by his own delusions that he wouldn't know reality if it stuck a lit firecracker up his ass). And I haven't seen a lot of rending of garments amongst my neighbors, co-workers, etc. -- it is still just a distant storm to most people, particularly those who have no children, parents, siblings, friends, etc., on the firing line. It's ironic that these "conservatives" (reactionary statists) who never tire of preaching personal responsibility have nurtured so pervasive a culture of irresponsibility regarding those issues that should matter the most. U.S. troops in Iraq (and, indeed, anywhere) are there on our behalf, whether we support the war or not, and we bear a far greater responsibility for their actions than they do. (In fact, their portion is next to nil, since they are under orders to act as instruments of our foreign policy.) Aside from the pure horror of it, this is what angers me most about the Iraq war and the bonehead cowboys running it. That's us out there...all of us...and we should take it bloody seriously.

Speaking of responsibility, I see Condi "Supertanker" Rice effectively dodged hers at the 9/11 Commission hearings this week. Not that the strange and motley collection of washed-out ex-politicians that make up the panel held her feet to the fire over what was certainly the most dramatic national security failure since the invention of the NSC more than fifty years ago. (If I'd been her, I'd have expected to be fired...but the Bush team is so obsessed with the virtues of the nuclear family, they probably took pity on her, an unmarried woman with no man to protect her...) I did see the two doddering co-chairs of the Commission on TV shortly after Rice's testimony. Highlights? Tom Keane referred to 9/11 at one point as "7/11" (I think his mind may have been on picking up a little something for the weekend on the way home from the committee room). Lee Hamilton was musing about what level of priority the Bush white house may have given terrorism as opposed to the "other threats" we were facing in the summer of 2001, such as "China and Russia." He left out gossip. (Have we "Whipped Inflation Now" yet?)

I have no doubt that this razor-sharp team will get right to the bottom of 9/11...and while they're there, maybe they should pick up a carton of half & half.

luv u,

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04/18/04

That's one small step...

Hey, buddy. Yeah, you. Come over here. I got a little piece of advice for ya. Short and sweet. Never leave your squat-house to a retired naval officer. Not even for a weekend. Got that? Good.

What the hell is the matter with me, anyway? I mean, when will I ever learn? (Send your answers here.) How could I ever have thought I could leave Marvin (my personal robot assistant) in charge of the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, our one home in the whole fat world since the destruction of our beloved lean-to some years back. (For those of you just surfing in for the first time, the principal members of Big Green all live together under one roof, like most pop bands, only instead of a groovy bachelor pad, we share an old drafty mill on the outskirts of Colombo.) Whatever my reasoning may have been, it was sadly mistaken. This is worse than when the rampaging revelers nearly torched our compound in an orgy of congratulations over the man-sized tuber's successful launch. Far worse.

When we got back from Mars, the front gate of the mill was wide open and a trail of half-eaten breadfruit was strewn clear across the courtyard. This could only mean one thing -- mongoose invasion! We scrubbed our planned hero's welcome and ticker tape parade for the triumphant returning space tuber and scurried down to the game room where we had last seen our Pentagon minder Admiral Hermann von Gonutz (ret.) locked in a life or death ping-pong struggle with Marvin. Neither contestant remained. Indeed, the room had been overrun by mongooses, who had turned it into one of those trendy cigar bars where you can light up an $11.00 stogie while quaffing bourbon out of a hollowed-out breadfruit half. They were even in the bathroom, frightening our web designer's kid brother. Fiends!

If took some looking, but I eventually found Marvin in the control room of our makeshift studio, playing back one of the songs we had done before our departure a few weeks ago (a little remix called "One Small Step"). He had clearly been slipped some tainted WD-40 or something at some point, since he was far from being himself (I'm not sure where he acquired the propeller beanie, but I suspect it might have been from one of the alpha-mongooses -- the same one who had lubed him up with spiked oil). Matt and John tried to snap him out of it with long division flash cards and small explosive charges, but it was no good. Marvin was simply not responsible for his actions. (If we'd had one of those automotive diagnostic analyzer gizmos, he probably would have blown a 1.9.)

There was no sign of Gonutz anywhere in the Mill. When we broke open the door to his "cabin", we found a parchment map spiked to the wall with a ceremonial dagger. On the reverse side of this somewhat rudimentary depiction of a south sea passage was a hastily scribbled message in what I recognized as the admiral's own hand. "Arrrrr" it began (he always opened his official communiqués with "Arrrr" or "Avast")....

Arrr! ye scurvy cyber-minstrels! I've been recalled to Washington on urgent business. Give nay quarter teh thays verminous beasties who've scuttled the Mill. Arrrrr(*hic*)arrrrrrr.....

Gonutz recalled...the Mill overrun by mongooses...Marvin drugged...no victory parade for the tuber. That's the kind of week we've had. And you?

Dr. Demento (redux). The good Dr. D played "The President's Brain (is Missing)" again on his nationally syndicated show last week (see playlist), thanks to Pat Fish and legions of email requests. To ask for a replay, follow this link. (This time, we were between the Dead Kennedy's "California uber alles" and a Spike Jones song....good placement!)

Dagger to the Brain. Read Tim Hinely's review of "President's Brain" in the new Dagger (#34), in the spotlight. And while you've got it in your hands, read the rest of it...it's a stone solid groove. (Check your local record store or send $3.50 ppd in the U.S. to Dagger c/o Tim Hinely / P.O. Box 820102 Portland OR 97282-1102)

Making (Up) History. Dubya did the equivalent of spinning on his heel while flipping off the entire Arab world with both hands this week, continuing his bloody and bloody-minded collective punishment in Fallujah and his confrontation with the Shi'a, then moving right to public rejection of any viable 2-state solution in Israel/Palestine by endorsing Sharon's unilateral "disengagement" plan. At his Tuesday night press conference -- really just a speech with questions at the end -- the boy bristled at the Vietnam/Iraq comparison, naturally enough. Funny how that offends them. Of course, the relevance of the comparison is not so much in Iraq being similar to Vietnam, but rather in the degree to which Dubya's team is behaving like the Johnson Administration in 1964-65.

Then, too, we were fighting not just an enemy but a global "ideology" predicated on fear that sought to make us "cut and run." Then, too, we and the other "civilized nations of the world" were fighting to defend "freedom" against "foreign" fighters and their local allies, variously described as "insurgents" and "terrorists." Then, too, expressly political ends were pursued through military means largely because the small segment of society allied with the U.S. invader could not compete politically, and a government abjectly compliant to U.S. interests was the only acceptable product of the "liberty" we had imposed by force of arms. (While the Tet offensive of 1968 is oft mentioned as a parallel to the recent troubles, it really seems more like the Buddhist crisis in 1962-63 when Diem attacked the pagodas and sparked a massive uprising....but again, the relevant similarities are in our own policy.)

Credibility once again on the line, our Texas commander in chief postures a bit more laughably than his 1960s predecessor, truly a giant among lesser men, unable to face even carefully controlled Q&A sessions without overreaching himself. Tuesday's non-answer regarding his upcoming joint testimony (closed session, not under oath) with uncle Cheney was emblematic -- Dubya gave the same uncomfortable response twice, the second time groping for the same words. Why doesn't he just tell the truth? (Oh, wait...I know the answer to that one.) Actually, I think it's Cheney who's insisting on the buddy system testimony. Without the dummy-in-chief, Dick's ventriloquist act is reduced to doing "Cecil the Seasick Sea Serpent," and that doesn't go over very well with most official audiences.

Mushroom Cloud. You may have missed it (it was a one-inch news item deep inside my local paper) but the IAEA has reported Iraqi nuclear facilities are going unguarded under the U.S. occupation, and that radioactive material and dismantled equipment are showing up in Europe, including yellowcake uranium mined in Iraq before 1991. Apparently Dubya and the boys aren't that worried about mushroom clouds anymore, and the press certainly doesn't rate this story very highly, even though it puts the lie to the administration's whole bogus case for war. Q: Why wasn't this front page? (A: That spot was taken up by Donald Trump's winning apprentice.)

luv u,

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04/25/04

Aku-aku...

What -- can you think of a better way to greet an old friend? Yeah, so can I. Sometime my language faculty gets tangled up in knots and I start forgetting which is my mother tongue. It's such a confusing world, particularly when you have experienced other worlds to compare this one to. Manna-calluci, as Dr. Hump is fond of exclaiming, bless his disembodied Tuscan brain. Now, see? There I go again. Damn!

Now where was I? Or, more to the point, where am I? The mill, as in Cheney Hammer Mill, currently occupied in force by -- wait for it! -- dozens, perhaps hundreds of mongooses (mongeese?), who waited for the opportunity of our recent absence to come pouring down out of the hills and into our poorly guarded adoptive home. Engrossed with the task of retrieving our man-sized tuber from his Martian exile, it never occurred to John, Matt, or me that our home might have been invaded while we were on our mission of mercy. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) was powerless to stop the attackers, having been slipped an oily mickey finn by parties unknown. (So despondent was our mechanical friend upon "sobering up," he had to be coaxed down from a high ledge by the man-sized tuber, who uttered some of his first comprehensible words for the occasion.) Our Pentagon minder Admiral Hermann Von Gonutz (ret.) went AWOL before the invasion, bringing his entourage of rent-a-goons with him. First rule of the tropics -- never leave your home unguarded if you don't want to share it with a mongoose or twelve. Blimey.

Of course, Big Green and the mongooses go way back -- back to one of the first interstellar tours I chronicled in this column some years ago, when a horde of the hairy geezers took up residence in our lean-to. That saga ended with the destruction of property, prolonged exposure to radioactive isotopes, and some bad feelings all around. I hate to seem the pessimist, but our current troubles may be headed for a similar outcome, I fear. Already the mongoose party has made itself very much at home in every corner of our squat house (or squat mill, I should say), filling up our shoe trees with their footwear and displacing our crockery with their own copper-bottom pots and pans (quite nice, actually). They've even yanked all our linen and replaced it with their own, including monogrammed mongoose family towels and napkins! And the portrait from the Big Green Family album? Mongeese!

We spent the first couple of nights huddled in Mitch Macaphee's makeshift laboratory, strumming Spanish guitars and thumb wrestling while the stalwart professor of mad science worked to develop a means to repel the mongooses without driving the humans from the mill along with them. First he came up with something called the "Manilow Ray" -- a concentrated directional audio wave generator that projects the sound of Barry Manilow's "Daybreak" on any solid body within a radius of two miles. The rationale behind this was the Mongooses' notorious distaste for the 70s pop icon (trouble is, the thing is even more effective against us). Then he unveiled the "Phantom Pizza Joint" -- a converted follow spot that projects a holographic image of a pizzeria on any blank wall, with a big sign that reads "Mongooses Eat FREE!" Mitch suggested we set it up on the roof, point it at one of Gung Ho's blockhouses, wait until the mongooses run out to get their free pizza, then lock the gates behind them. (John thought we should project the image onto a moving truck, but that seemed a little too elaborate.)

I don't know if we opted for the second option out of common sense or sleep deprivation, but either way we gave Mitch the go-ahead to attempt this noble experiment. Once Marvin had become responsible for his actions again (and came down from the ledge), he was enlisted to distribute phony pizza flyers throughout the Hammer Mill, slipping a copy under every door. That done, we took our position on the roof and waited...but before we had any opportunity to use the new invention, a squadron of vehicles pulled up to the curb. I slapped my forehead in disbelief -- the mongooses had all ordered their pizza delivered (and as luck would have it, some local joint was offering free delivery for the first 50 mongooses who order a large pizza). What are the chances??

Subliminable Messaging. When we finally release our next CD (when???), listen carefully to the tracks. Deep in the textured background, you'll be able to hear the distinctive sound of mongooses chewing on stale pizza.

Arik the Red. You may remember my ramblings last week about Bush's endorsement of Ariel "Arik" Sharon's plan for "unilateral disengagement" -- i.e. implementing the extremist annexation of large areas of the West Bank long contemplated by both major political groupings in Israel. (This is the logical outcome of Rabin's 1993 Oslo accord -- nothing new, here.) Of course, Dubya's embrace of this project does go a bit further than official Washington has been willing to go in publicly abandoning the principle of Israel's return to the 1967 borders -- so much so that Colin Powell was dispatched to "clarify" (i.e. backpedal) that this was not a major policy change. Still, given the duplicity of the last seven presidents on this issue, it wasn't much of a departure, and I'm sure Bush had one eye (the Rove-ing eye) on that millenarian Christian constituency he so covets -- the folks who hope things go septic in Israel so that Jesus can make his second entrance and the world can be righteously incinerated. (Hey -- that killer chimp Dubya is a saint to these people...so you know they're at least a little loopy.)

Anyway, after getting Junior's sign-off, Arik Sharon was so overjoyed he had to run right home and kill a few Palestinians in celebration. Nothing unusual about that either, except this time instead of some seven-year-old, Sharon whacked yet another Hamas leader -- Rantisi -- killed along with his son and driver by a missile fired from a US-supplied helicopter. This is the bloated general's idea of grandstanding, since this brutal, cowardly act obviously had no military value. A little street theatre for his ultra-right constituency that will no doubt cost many lives in the coming weeks, just as Yassin's murder did (including several Americans in Iraq). There is simply no possibility that Sharon and his generals believe killing Hamas leaders will lead to less violence. They have repeatedly and consistently provoked militant retaliation and confrontation at every turn and are substantially responsible for the loss of hundreds of Israeli lives, to say nothing of the thousands of Palestinians they have killed.

Though it's tempting to think of this as mere gansterism (you almost want to call Sharon "Fat Tony" now that he's added bribery to his long list of far more serious crimes), the strategy is really quite simple if you don't try to reconcile their actions with the utterances of the Israeli government's many cheerleaders in the U.S. media and political establishment. Israeli governments (Likud and Labor) have always preferred military solutions to political ones, because they hold a near monopoly on the means of violence. If this long festering conflict had been allowed to play out politically, they may have been compelled to settle for something less than their maximal objectives -- total control and annexation of East Jerusalem, effective control over most of the West Bank and its aquifer, control of the Jordan and its headwaters in the Golan. That's why Mossad helped establish Hamas back in the 1980s -- because the PLO had essentially accepted the broad outlines of a 2-state settlement by that time. That's why Lebanon was invaded and close to 20,000 killed. The Israeli government does not want an equitable political settlement -- they want the Palestinians to accept, in the words of one of Sharon's ministers, that they are "a defeated people." To get that, they need war.

If this seems like the same politically weak/militarily strong combination that brought us every disaster from Vietnam to Operation Iraqi Freedom, it's no accident. Bush is right when he says Israel is fighting our war. It's the part about its being a just war that's a heinous lie.

luv u,

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