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Obama planned to make a rare appearance in the Pentagon press briefing room Thursday to announce results of a strategy review that he ordered last spring. The aim was twofold: Streamline the military in an era of tighter budgets and reassess defense priorities in light of China’s rise and other global changes.

Obama’s decision to announce the results himself underscores the political dimension of Washington’s debate over defense savings. The administration says smaller Pentagon budgets are a must but will not come at the cost of sapping the strength of a military in transition, even as it gets smaller.

In a presidential election year, the strategy gives Obama a rhetorical tool to defend his Pentagon budget-cutting choices. Republican contenders for the White House already have criticized Obama on a wide range of national security issues, including missile defense, Iran and planned reductions in ground forces.

Obama also wants the new strategy to represent a pivot point in his stewardship of defense policy, which has been burdened throughout his presidency by the wars he inherited and their drag on resources.

A prominent theme of the Pentagon’s new strategy is expected to be what Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has called a renewed commitment to security in the Asia-Pacific region. China is a particular worry because of its economic dynamism and rapid defense buildup. A more immediate concern is Iran, not only for its threats to disrupt the flow of international oil but also for its nuclear ambitions.

The revamped strategy, to be outlined at a news conference also attended by Panetta and the Joint Chiefs chairman, Army Gen. Martin Dempsey, is not expected to radically alter defense priorities. It may set the stage, however, for expected cutbacks in Europe and big weapons programs.

It also will move the U.S. further from its longstanding goal of being able to successfully fight two major regional wars – like the 1991 Gulf War to evict Iraqi forces from Kuwait or a prospective ground war in Korea – at the same time. This takes into account a bigger focus on immediate threats like cyber warfare and terrorism.

The administration and Congress already are trimming defense spending to reflect the closeout of the Iraq war and the drawdown in Afghanistan. The massive $662 billion defense budget planned for next year is $27 billion less than Obama wanted and $43 billion less than Congress gave the Pentagon this year.

White House spokesman Tommy Vietor said Wednesday that Obama was closely involved in the defense strategy review, meeting six times since September with top defense officials, including Panetta and Dempsey. Vietor said the review established priorities to ensure that defense spending cuts are “surgical.”

As for Obama’s decision to make a personal appearance at the Pentagon, Vietor said, “It’s a sign of how personally engaged he is in this process and the level of importance he puts in shaping our priorities for the next decade.”

Factors guiding the Obama administration’s approach to reducing the defense budget are not limited to war-fighting strategy. They also include judgments about how to contain the growing cost of military health care, pay and retirement benefits. The administration is expected to form a commission to study the issue of retirement benefits, possibly led by a prominent retired military officer.

The administration is in the final stages of deciding specific cuts in the 2013 budget, which Obama will submit to Congress next month. The strategy to be announced by Panetta and Dempsey is meant to accommodate about $489 billion in defense cuts over the coming 10 years, as called for in a budget deal with Congress last summer. An additional $500 billion in cuts may be required starting in January 2013.

On a trip to Asia last fall, Panetta made clear that the region will be central to American security strategy.

“Today we are at a turning point after a decade of war,” Panetta said in Japan. Al-Qaida is among a range of concerns that will keep the military busy, but as a traditional Pacific power the United States needs to build a wider and deeper network of alliances and partnerships in that region, he said.

“Most importantly, we have the opportunity to strengthen our presence in the Pacific – and we will,” he said.

The administration is not anticipating military conflict in Asia, but Panetta believes the U.S. got so bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan after 9/11 that it missed chances to improve its position in other regions.

Also looming large over the defense budget debate is the prospect of reducing spending on nuclear weapons.

Thomas Collina, research director at the Arms Control Association, believes the U.S. nuclear program can cut $45 billion over the coming decade without weakening the force. He estimates that reducing the U.S. strategic nuclear submarine force from 12 subs to eight could save $27 billion over 10 years. A further $18 billion could be saved by delaying the building of a new fleet of nuclear-capable bomber aircraft, he says.

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Congolese-born Augusta Chiwy, now 93, received the Civilian Award for Humanitarian Service medal from U.S. Ambassador Howard Gutman at a ceremony in the military museum in Brussels.

“She helped, she helped, and she helped,” Gutman said at the ceremony. He said the long delay in presenting the award was because it was assumed that Chiwy had been killed when a bomb destroyed her hospital.

The Battle of the Bulge was a ferocious encounter in the final stages of World War II. In desperation, Adolf Hitler ordered a massive attack on allied forces in the Ardennes, in southern Belgium. More than 80,000 American soldiers were killed, captured or wounded.

Chiwy had volunteered to assist in an aid station in the town of Bastogne, where wounded and dying U.S. soldiers in their thousands were being treated by a single doctor in December 1944 and January 1945. Chiwy braved the gunfire, helping whoever she could, and saving the lives of hundreds of American GIs.

The Nazis hoped the surprise attack would reach the sea at the Belgian port of Antwerp and cut off the advancing allied armies. Bastogne, a market town that was also a critical road junction, was quickly besieged.

The U.S. troops – led by paratroopers of the 101st Airborne Division – found themselves surrounded. But they resisted fiercely, and the key crossroads was never taken.

During the battle, Brig. Gen. Anthony McAuliffe, the 101st’s acting division commander, delivered his famous reply to a German surrender demand when he scribbled: “To the German commander: Nuts! The American commander.”

In the ensuing siege, Bastogne was heavily shelled and quickly reduced to ruins. Another Belgian nurse – Chiwy’s friend Renee Lemaire – was killed along with about 30 patients when a bomb penetrated a cellar where she was tending to the wounded.

Gutman said the diminutive Chiwy combed battlefields during the battle, often coming under enemy fire, to collect the wounded in the deep snow.

“What I did was very normal,” Chiwy said during the ceremony. “I would have done it for anyone. We are all children of God.”

But Col. J.P. McGee, who commands a brigade of the 101st Airborne Division based in Fort Campbell, Kentucky, said that to the wounded soldiers Chiwy was “a goddess.”

“Men lived and families were reunited due to your efforts,” he said.

McGee said the army’s doctor in Bastogne, John Prior, had joked that the German snipers couldn’t hit Chiwy because she was so tiny. But Chiwy, who moved to Belgium from the colony of Congo before the war, responded that they were just bad shots.

Historian Alexander Omhof, who has dealt extensively with the history of the allied advance, also praised Chiwy’s deeds during the month-long battle.

Chiwy then received a letter of appreciation from Gen. David Petraeus, himself a former commander of the 101st Airborne.

After the battle, Chiwy slipped into obscurity, working as a hospital nurse treating spinal injuries. She married a Belgian soldier and had two children.

She was finally located several years ago by a British author and historian, Martin King, who had heard stories about a black nurse at Bastogne.

Chiwy was knighted by the Belgian king in June.

KHABARI CROSSING, Kuwait — A line of heavily armored American military vehicles, their headlights twinkling in the pre-dawn desert, lumbered past the barbed wire and metal gates marking the border between Iraq and Kuwait early Thursday and rolled into history.

For the troops of the 4th Stryker Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division, it was a moment of relief fraught with symbolism but lightened by the whoops and cheers of soldiers one step closer to going home. Seven years and five months after the U.S.-led invasion, the last American combat brigade was leaving Iraq, well ahead of President Barack Obama’s Aug. 31 deadline for ending U.S. combat operations there.

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President Barack Obama will describe his plan to en U.S. combat operations in a speech today to the national convention of disabled veterans. Here is an excerpt.

Now, one of those chapters is nearing an end. As a candidate for President, I pledged to bring the war in Iraq to a responsible end. Shortly after taking office, I announced our new strategy for Iraq and for a transition to full Iraqi responsibility. And I made it clear that by August 31, 2010 America’s combat mission in Iraq would end. And that is exactly what we are doing — as promised, on schedule.

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WASHINGTON — After a take-it-or-leave-it vote by the Senate, House Democrats face little choice but to drop billions in aid for schools, college students and others that they had hoped could ride on legislation paying for President Barack Obama’s troop surge in Afghanistan.

The Senate rejected the House measure, passed earlier this month, by a 46-51 vote that fell short of a majority, much less the 60 votes required to defeat a filibuster.

Instead, the Senate on Thursday stripped out the $20 billion in House add-ons and returned to the House an almost $60 billion measure passed by a bipartisan vote in May. The Senate measure is limited chiefly to war funding, foreign aid, medical care for Vietnam War veterans exposed to Agent Orange, and replenishing almost empty disaster aid accounts.

It would bring the amount of money appropriated for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan above $1 trillion.

Eleven Senate Democrats and Independent Joe Lieberman of Connecticut voted against the House version of the bill. Not a single Republican supported it.

The moves repel a long-shot bid by House Democrats earlier this month to resurrect their faltering jobs agenda with $10 billion in grants to school districts to avoid teacher layoffs, $5 billion for Pell Grants to low-income college students, $1 billion for a summer jobs program and $700 million to improve security along the U.S.-Mexico border.

The Senate measure is likely to be grudgingly accepted by House Democrats next week despite opposition from liberals who oppose the war in Afghanistan, which many of them view as unwinnable.

A spokesman for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., wouldn’t comment on whether the House will simply approve the Senate measure and send it on to Obama for his signature.

But the pressure to do so is intense, especially after Defense Secretary Robert Gates warned lawmakers this week that unless the measure is enacted into law before Congress leaves for its August recess, the Pentagon could have to furlough thousands of employees.

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House Dems Pressured To Drop Funding For Schools, Students To Pay For Wars In Iraq And Afghanistan

ANDREW TAYLOR | 07/23/10 11:14 AM | AP
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WASHINGTON — After a take-it-or-leave-it vote by the Senate, House Democrats face little choice but to drop billions in aid for schools, college students and others that they had hoped could ride on legislation paying for President Barack Obama’s troop surge in Afghanistan.

The Senate rejected the House measure, passed earlier this month, by a 46-51 vote that fell short of a majority, much less the 60 votes required to defeat a filibuster.

Instead, the Senate on Thursday stripped out the $20 billion in House add-ons and returned to the House an almost $60 billion measure passed by a bipartisan vote in May. The Senate measure is limited chiefly to war funding, foreign aid, medical care for Vietnam War veterans exposed to Agent Orange, and replenishing almost empty disaster aid accounts.

It would bring the amount of money appropriated for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan above $1 trillion.

Eleven Senate Democrats and Independent Joe Lieberman of Connecticut voted against the House version of the bill. Not a single Republican supported it.

The moves repel a long-shot bid by House Democrats earlier this month to resurrect their faltering jobs agenda with $10 billion in grants to school districts to avoid teacher layoffs, $5 billion for Pell Grants to low-income college students, $1 billion for a summer jobs program and $700 million to improve security along the U.S.-Mexico border.

The Senate measure is likely to be grudgingly accepted by House Democrats next week despite opposition from liberals who oppose the war in Afghanistan, which many of them view as unwinnable.

A spokesman for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., wouldn’t comment on whether the House will simply approve the Senate measure and send it on to Obama for his signature.

But the pressure to do so is intense, especially after Defense Secretary Robert Gates warned lawmakers this week that unless the measure is enacted into law before Congress leaves for its August recess, the Pentagon could have to furlough thousands of employees.
Story continues below

The House bill also attracted a White House veto threat over $800 million in cuts to education programs to help pay for the additional domestic spending under a “pay-as-you-go” culture that the administration itself advocates.

The Senate measure blends about $30 billion for Obama’s 30,000-troop surge in Afghanistan with more than $5 billion to replenish disaster aid accounts, as well as funding for Haitian earthquake relief, and a down payment on aid to flood-drenched Tennessee and Rhode Island.

The measure contains $13 billion in benefits for Vietnam War veterans exposed to Agent Orange, but does not provide more than $4 billion requested by the administration to finance settlements of long-standing lawsuits against the government, including $1.2 billion to remedy discrimination by the Agriculture Department against black farmers and $3.4 billion for mismanaging Indian trust funds.

The measure contains $1.1 billion for mine-resistant vehicles, $657 million for military bases in Afghanistan and $6.2 billion in foreign aid for Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan and Haiti.

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From VOANews.com:

North Korea says an American man being held for illegally crossing its border has tried to kill himself.

A statement issued by the regime’s official Korean Central News Agency says Aijalon Mahli Gomes’ suicide attempt was “driven by his strong guilty conscience,” plus disappointment and despair that the U.S. government “has not taken any measure for his freedom.”

The statement said the Swedish embassy in Pyongyang is aware of Gomes’ condition, but it did not give any details of the incident.

Click here to read more.

Click here to view photos:

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If you were a Jew, you’d probably feel like you had to be God’s chosen people because other human beings have always treated you so horribly.

Enslaved in Africa, your top guy Moses, through war and attrition, secures you a homeland called “Israel”.

You more or less keep Israel right up until around 70 A.D. when the same Romans who cosigned on the necessity of the death of that heretic among your people, would eventually decide to name that same heretic the “Son of God”, place the entire blame for his death on you and wipe you out.

So what do you do?

Well, first you scatter then you blend of course, wherever you go, but you keep your same traditions and religion, settling throughout the world but being most visible now in Europe.

Then Hitler comes along.

Text continues after gallery…

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It speaks volumes that a decision was made basically for the Jews that they should have their own homeland. It was almost as if the West understood that another European Hitler could always arise—and probably would—in which case the Jews would need to be protected by, if nothing else, isolation.

And it’s not like the murder of 6 million Jews really seemed to bother anybody but Jews.

I’m not exactly saying that Hitler punked Europe, but if he hadn’t gotten cocky enough to pull a blitz on London, who knows if and when the Allies would have deaded his run towards world domination.

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One might almost imagine that so long as Hitler’s agenda was only the killing of the Jews, everybody would have continued to pretend that they didn’t see anything.

But imagine that you had nothing to do with the killing of the Jews and you were just home chilling when suddenly you get the news that your home won’t be your home anymore.

You see, it wasn’t your home 2000 years ago and the original inhabitants all of a sudden need it back.

“God” had given them that land and it always had and always would be theirs.

At the very least, you might stop and wanna ask somebody “Whose God?”

And let’s really do it right this time.

Let’s install our own leadership over there. Put Jay-Z in charge. Then let’s go after Ireland and install Will Smith. Then let’s take over the rest of Europe. As many countries as we have rappers for.

The good folks at BP are sonning us crazy. Carl-Henric Svanberg says, “We care about the small people.”

Small people?

Then to make sure that we didn’t miss the diss he added, “The American People”.

Look man, we don’t have no European class system over here. There’s no Duke or Duchess of Jacksonville, Florida. We don’t wear those funny outfits or powder our faces unless we’re partying in Greenwich Village!

We knew before you tried to clown us that the “small people” are the American people.

Text continues after gallery …

If Barack Obama proves anything, it’s that our “small people” can become President. That’s why I hope Barack becomes so insulted that he sends out a bunch of rappers to conquer Europe. Puts Puffy in charge of France.

People have been waiting for Obama to show an ugly side and I think it’s high time. Lets send our soldiers right into the middle of Piccadilly Circus.

Let’s run the dreds outta Brixton.

Lets do to downtown London what we did to downtown Baghdad.

Then get those bloody wankers in Parliament to bugger off.

I mean think about it: one of their companies has virtually ruined our southern coastline. We’re the only country that’s allowed to be that callous towards the international community.

Great Britain is treating us the way Super Powers are only supposed to treat Third World nations and I say it’s time we dead that.

Also, if you know anything about Revolutionary War history, you know that British tried to incite Black slaves into attacking our masters.

We wouldn’t do it. We knew this day would come. And now that we have a Black president that can pay you guys back for trying to con us into a suicide mission that would have only benefited ya’ll, it’s time that we get some getback.

So brace yourself, England.

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From BlackVoices.com:

He served two tours in Iraq and patrolled the potentially dangerous streets of Chicago. When he wasn’t in his Chicago police uniform, he volunteered as head of an effort to improve a local park and return it to residents.
But it wasn’t overseas or in the line of duty that Thomas Wortham IV lost his life. Chicago police say Wortham was killed by three people trying to steal his new motorcycle. Wortham was at his parents’ home, when he was approached by the suspects. His father, a retired Chicago police sergeant, came to his son’s aid, killing one attacker and critically wounding another. A third was able to escape.

Click here to view photos.

“This is a tragedy. This young man survived two tours in Iraq and came home and got murdered on the streets in front of his house that he grew up in,” Alderman Freddrenna Lyle, who has known the officer and his family for years, told the Chicago Tribune. “In front of his father, it’s just unbelieveable.”

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While the Tea Partiers are complaining about taxes and health care today. Let’s not forget where most of our tax dollars go to. As of today the costs of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq is more than $983 billion. That means on average, every tax payer has paid an average cost of $6,533 dollars. The only things that have cost as much as the wars in the past 10 years are health care, education, and pensions all of which cost taxpayers slightly more than $1 trillion. Source

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Now that President Obama has ordered more troops to Afghanistan, Roland asks the question no one else is asking, how will he answer to Black America who is decidedly against this war?

TELL US: What do you think of Susan Rice’s answer? Will it be enough to convince those who are already against the war?

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I have supported Obama strongly during the election and during his first year of Presidency. Still I cannot stand by his decision to send more troops to Afghanistan. I realize that he said he would add troops during the campaign but I believed that was just posturing for those who said he was soft on defense. I don’t see his decision as a betrayal but as a continuance of a stupid belief of his that I overlooked due being caught up with the energy of the election.

We have been in Afghanistan for almost eight years and I have seen no improvements. We are not closer to finding Bin Laden, the Taliban is strong, the government is corrupt and warlords run the country.

To understand Afghanistan you need to understand its history. The Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979 and occupied the country for 10 years. Many credit their long occupation for the fall of communist Russia. The long occupation left more than one million Afghans dead, three million severely wounded and five million, a third of the Afghan population became refugees.

It was the CIA and the American government who funded and trained the insurgents against the Russian occupation, who were also known as the mujahideen. One prominent member of the mujahideen was a tall Saudi by the name of Osama Bin Laden. Bin Laden and his cronies would use the same tactics they were taught by the CIA and become the Taliban and Al Qaeda.

Obama said he is going to send more troops to Afghanistan to “finish the job.” What exactly is the job? To get Bin Laden? Does it take 40,00 soldiers to catch one man? Inelligence reports say that there are only 100 Al Qaeda members in Afghanistan. If Bush wasn’t able to get Bin Laden during 8 years off occupation, how many troops and how much more time is required to get them?

If Obama has learned anything from the Soviet occupation of Afghnisatn or the American occupation of Vietnam is that occupations do not fix a country’ problems but only create civilian casualties, corrupt governments and animosity towards the occupiers.

Just as the USA gave power to Bin Laden and the Taliban, when they funded and supported the mujahideen, now they have created a a narco-state full of corrupt officials, drug dealing warlords, lawlessness, and a resurgent Taliban. The CIA is putting drug lords on their payroll now just like they had radical jihadists on their payroll like Bin Laden 30 years ago.

The problem in Afghanistan is a political problem that needs a political solution, not a military problem that needs a military solution. Most of Al Qaeda has relocated to Pakistan. Bin Laden has been extremely successful with propaganda reaching out to the Muslim world. He has done it without an Army. Maybe if Obama continued to win the hearts and minds by speaking out to the Muslim world he could counter Bin Laden more effectively than by sending troops to occupy an Arab country.

Using a massive army to stop Bin Laden and Al Qaeda is like using a machine gun to kill a rat. To beat them we must be smart and crafty and use intelligence (in both sense of the word). More troops means more civilian casualties, more disgruntled soldiers and more civilians feeling oppressed by an occupation.

If you believe that a surge in Afghanistan will be successful like the like it was supposedly in Iraq, remember that many believe that the slow down in violence in Iraq was caused by ethnic cleansing and not the surge. I’m not sure if you are letting the military bully you around. The same generals who have not made any progress in Afghanistan in eight years should not have a say in the matter.

The $30 billion dollars being used in Afghanistan is about half our entire budget for education. During a recession when unemployment is at an all time high, is it wise to use so much government money for a cause you can’t even explain?

This decision is wrong for the country and wrong from the world. The lessons of history tell us that this is wrong. When the people of America elected Obama, they elected to change the way America does business in the world and this decision seems to be right out of the Bush playbook.

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NAIROBI, Kenya — The bullet hit mother and son as they walked through Somalia’s capital. She felt a sharp pain in her palm. Then she saw her 8-year-old: The bullet tore through his cheekbones, nose and mouth. Blood gushed down to his waist.

Two months later, Ahmed Mohamed Mohamoud’s nose is a small hole. His mouth is always open because he has no upper lip and his right eye is gone. He can barely speak.

His is a lost face of Somalia’s war.

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Like so many other victims of a savage war, Ahmed was caught in the crossfire between Islamist insurgents and government forces, struck as he walked home from a Mogadishu market with his mother, who says a barrage of bullets poured out from the presidential palace.

Unlike Afghanistan and Iraq, there are few images of the bloodshed in Somalia, where thousands of children have been casualties without the world knowing. Most foreign journalists stay away because of the danger.

On Sept. 24, an Associated Press photographer was present after Ahmed was shot and took pictures of the boy, bleeding profusely as he was carried from the scene by two bystanders. During the weeks that followed, AP journalists kept tabs on Ahmed and his mother, who are still struggling with his grievous wounds.

“My heart bleeds whenever I recall his former face, whenever I compare the two faces,” said Safi Mohamed Shidane as she inspected her son’s scars at a hospital in neighboring Kenya, where Ahmed was flown for treatment after a Minnesota-based Somali immigrant group intervened.

“God will judge those who did this to my son,” she said.

The lack of basic medical care, much less specialized doctors, has worsened the plight of children wounded in Somalia, a country mired in chaos since the last central government was ousted in 1991 and warlords turned their guns on each other.

“Ahmed’s situation represents the crisis faced by many, many children in Somalia,” said Katherine Grant, a child protection specialist with UNICEF who has visited the boy in the hospital outside Nairobi. Her agency will soon release a report accusing all parties in Somalia’s conflict of recruiting child soldiers.

There are no reliable casualty figures for children in Somalia, according to Grant and Susannah Friedman, emergencies director for Somalia for Save the Children U.K.

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“It is one of the most dangerous situations we’ve seen for children,” said Friedman, whose agency has aid workers in southern and central Somalia, but has pulled out of Mogadishu.

Yet even in violence-plagued Somalia, where the U.N. says one child in 10 dies before his or her first birthday and only 30 percent of the population has access to clean drinking water, Ahmed’s suffering tugged at heartstrings.

Doctors at Mogadishu’s Medina Hospital did all they could: They inserted a tracheotomy tube for Ahmed to breath and a feeding tube for nourishment. Doctors stitched together the horrific wounds to his face and wrapped it in thick layers of gauze.

But medical supplies — and expertise — are scarce in Somalia. When heavy fighting hits the seaside capital, tents go up at Medina to accommodate all the casualties. Inside, bloody footprints track down long corridors echoing with screams.

Appeals went out for help for Ahmed, including on Somali Web sites.

In late October, a Somali immigrant aid group, Healing the Children of Minnesota, had the boy flown to Kenya, where there are specialists and more advanced equipment. The Nigerian physician treating him there, Dr. Igohwo Etu, said the boy will need surgeries costing hundreds of thousands of dollars to reconstruct his face.

The Rochester, Minn.-based aid group is now trying to arrange treatment for Ahmed overseas and has contacted hospitals in the U.S., Britain, Italy and Mexico, its associate director, Abia Ali, said Monday.

The group, which is funded mainly by contributions from Somali immigrants, has helped 56 Somali war victims, mostly children, obtain medical care, according to its executive director, Abdi Gaal. These included two children treated at the Mayo Clinic and one at Fairview University in Minneapolis, Ali said.

Despite his uncertain future, Ahmed is a cheerful little boy who likes to play with a toy helicopter and spends time reading the Quran while lying in his hospital bed, his left eye twinkling as he scans the pages.

At the urging of his mother, he uttered a few words during a recent AP interview: “hooyo” — or “mother” in Somali — and his name.

But at other times the boy’s spirits sink.

His mother consoled him and wiped away tears that streamed from the swollen spot where his right eye once was, even as another tear dropped from his good eye and rolled into the opening where his lips and nose once were.

“With the help of God, you will recover and go back to your school,” his mother murmured, stroking her son.

Doctors had planned to remove Ahmed’s feeding tube Monday, but delayed the procedure until Nov. 30. Shidane says she was told that American or Canadian doctors might operate on Ahmed after the new year, but isn’t sure about future plans for her son.

Tens of thousands of Somalis have fled the fighting in Mogadishu, where gun battles occur daily and the Islamist insurgents hold public amputations and executions within shooting distance of the headquarters of the embattled government.

“Right now it’s very hard to be optimistic that the situation will improve, let alone that the violence will end,” said Chris Albin-Lackey, a researcher for Human Rights Watch. “In Mogadishu the situation is one of a bloody military stalemate. Neither side can gain the upper hand and the civilians are caught in between them.”

With some wanting to call the Ft. Hood shooting a terrorist act, Roland asks the question “are we at war with Islam?” Watch what his panel has to say here:

Catch this week’s episode at 5 p.m. ET on TV One!

Have a question or comment for an upcoming show? SUBMIT your videos here!

With some wanting to call the Ft. Hood shooting a terrorist act, Roland asks the question “are we at war with Islam?” Watch what his panel has to say here:

Catch this week’s episode at 5 p.m. ET on TV One!

Have a question or comment for an upcoming show? SUBMIT your videos here!

From CNN:

United Nations — The United Nations has suspended assistance to a Congolese army brigade battling rebels amid allegations that its troops killed 62 civilians, including women and children, between May and September.

The U.N. director of peacekeeping, Alain Le Roy, announced the move in an interview Sunday with Democratic Republic of Congo-based Radio Okapi.

The killings allegedly occurred near Lukweti — a village in North Kivu province in eastern Congo — about 60 miles (100 kilometers) northwest of the regional capital, Goma.

The U.N. mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo — known by its French acronym MONUC — has been providing logistical and operational support to Congolese troops since May as they battle Rwandan Hutu rebel groups in the easternmost provinces of the war-torn nation.

The support includes medical evacuations, resupply of materiel and transport.

Click here to read more.

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From HuffingtonPost.com:

Grammy-winning singer-songwriter John Legend delivered a stirring commencement address on Sunday at the University of Pennsylvania, College of Arts and Science.

In his speech, Legend powerfully expressed his own journey from a belief in simple black and white dichotomies to a more tolerant view of humanity.

Click here for VIDEO & text.

From BBC.com:

James Kimondo told reporters outside the Nairobi High Court his wife had observed the boycott and caused him “anxiety and sleepless nights”.

“I have been suffering mental anguish, stress, backaches, lack of concentration,” he said.

It is unclear how many women joined the strike, which ended on Wednesday.

Click here for more.

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The Obama administration is close to announcing a redrawn strategy for a war in Afghanistan that the president says the United States is not winning, focusing on enlisting Pakistan in the fight against extremism and trimming U.S. expectations for military victory, administration, defense and intelligence officials said.

The White House expects to announce new objectives for the flagging war as soon as next week that place an onus on next-door Pakistan to contain extremism, defense and administration officials said Thursday.

President Barack Obama was expected to explain the redrawn U.S. objectives to NATO allies when he attends a NATO summit in Europe next month.

The in-house review coordinated by the White House National Security Council lays out objectives over three years to five years, although that doesn’t necessarily mean the U.S. military could leave in that time, defense officials said.

The White House objectives were expected to roughly parallel 15 goals contained in a 20-page classified report to the White House from the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Among them were getting rid of terrorist safe havens in Pakistan and adopting a regional approach to reducing the threat of terrorism and extremism in both countries.

The U.S. goal in Afghanistan must be to protect Kabul’s fragile government from collapsing under pressure from the Taliban — a goal that can only be achieved by securing Pakistan’s cooperation, increasing substantially the size of Afghanistan’s national security forces and boosting economic aid in the region, according to senior military and intelligence officials.

“We’re just about done,” Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen said in an interview with PBS’ “The Charlie Rose Show” on Thursday.

The review addresses “the safe haven in Pakistan, making sure that Afghanistan doesn’t provide a capability in the long run or an environment in which al-Qaida could return or the Taliban could return,” Mullen said, as well as the need for stability, economic development and better governance in Afghanistan, and the development of the Afghan armed forces.

An administration official said that although the review was not complete, one thrust was that Pakistan needed to recognize that combating extremism was in its own interest as well as that of U.S. and NATO fighting forces across the border in Afghanistan. The official, like others interviewed for this story, spoke on condition of anonymity because the review was not complete.

The review overseen by former CIA analyst Bruce Riedel drew on several generally bleak internal government assessments of the war done over the past six months. People familiar with those accounts sum up the conclusions much as Obama himself described the Afghanistan war in a New York Times interview last week: The United States is not winning.

Gen. David Petraeus, head of U.S. Central Command, and Richard Holbrooke, the U.S. special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, met privately on Thursday with more than a dozen senators. Although the session was confidential, it was part of the administration’s effort to recruit support for a trimmed-down U.S. mission in the war begun by former President George W. Bush following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

It is not clear whether Obama will approve additional forces for Afghanistan this year beyond 17,000 he has already dispatched. His ground commander in Afghanistan, Gen. David McKiernan, has requested up to 30,000 troops.

The White House review was expected to frame U.S. objectives in two major categories: strategic regional goals for stability in impoverished Afghanistan and nuclear-armed Pakistan and smaller-scale warfighting goals for the growing U.S. military commitment in Afghanistan.

Broadly speaking, the Obama administration was expected to endorse a doctrine of counterinsurgency that has military and civilian components and that scales back U.S. expectations for Afghan democracy and self-sufficiency. A main theme is the premise that the military alone cannot win the war, officials said.

The review was expected to focus on containing the Taliban and the proliferation of lesser-known militant groups, providing a greater sense of security and stability for Afghan civilians and increasing the size and proficiency of the Afghan armed forces.

“I would say that, at a minimum, the mission is to prevent the Taliban from retaking power against a democratically elected government in Afghanistan and thus turning Afghanistan, potentially, again, into a haven for al-Qaida and other extremist groups,” Defense Secretary Robert Gates said in an interview with National Public Radio this week.

Part of the strategy would be purely military, as the 17,000 additional troops Obama has approved for Afghanistan this year attest. Their role is to face off against extremists in the busy spring and summer fighting season and buy time for less tangible counterinsurgency tactics to take hold.

Administration and military leaders have given a glimpse into one such tactic, describing ways that Afghan and U.S. leaders might co-opt or pay off mid- and lower-level Taliban and other insurgents in rough imitation of a successful strategy to blunt the insurgency in Iraq.

Barack Obama often has said he will issue orders to swiftly close down the Iraq war. Now military leaders are getting a chance to tell the new commander in chief how they could comply, and why he might want to wait.

Obama was to hear the opinions of the four U.S. military service chiefs on Wednesday in a meeting the White House called one more step toward fulfilling his promise of withdrawing all combat troops from Iraq. The Joint Chiefs of Staff will be ready with a rough sketch of what would be required to fulfill the president’s timetable for a 16-month withdrawal.

Defense officials have said they can meet Obama’s campaign pledge, but several officials have signaled that a fast withdrawal could upset the fragile security that currently holds in Iraq.

“We are developing other options as well,” Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Tuesday. “We are laying out, with each of the options we will present to him, our view — each of the commander’s — of the risks associated with that timeline.”

In preparing those, Obama has asked for more information behind assumptions and for additional analysis, Gates said. “I think that the president will listen to the commanders,” he said.

Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters Tuesday that all the scenarios will meet the president’s “desire for a responsible drawdown that preserves the security gains we have made in Iraq and protects our forces.”

Mullen said he hopes to give Obama that menu “in the very near future,” but Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell said there will be no decisions made at Wednesday’s meeting.

The Joint Chiefs are among those in the Pentagon hierarchy who have expressed concerns about the impact that long, repeated war tours in Iraq have had on the U.S. military.

Much of the discussion is also expected to look ahead to the building fight in Afghanistan and how Obama’s plans to add forces and resources there will depend in part on the success of the Iraq exit. The Pentagon is nearing an announcement of new troop deployments in Afghanistan, with forces arriving in numbers in the spring and summer.

Obama pledged during his presidential campaign to immediately order the withdrawal of all combat troops from Iraq by May 2010. He said he would call in the Joint Chiefs and tell them so on his first day in office, a bit of campaign hyperbole that has evolved in practice into a series of consultations with military leaders, including commanders in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The new president also has said he would adjust his timeline if it would risk the safety of U.S. troops remaining behind to train Iraqis and fight al-Qaida or if it would cause backsliding in Iraqi stability.

“Ultimately the commander in chief will decide which option he prefers and how much risk he can accept,” Morrell said.

Obama has not said when he plans to announce a new Iraq plan. Iraqi leaders already have said they want to stick to terms of an agreement negotiated with the United States last year that would leave some fighting forces in place longer.

“The president has laid down the test of ensuring that he hears specifically from both those on the ground and in the region before he makes decisions on our force posture going forward,” White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said Tuesday.

Obama has not changed his determination that the war must end, his spokesman said.

“There will be a new mission in Iraq,” Gibbs said.

Two U.S. helicopters crashed Monday in northern Iraq, killing four American troops, the U.S. military said.

The military said the crash happened at about 2:15 a.m. local time and it “does not appear to be by enemy action.”

No precise location was given but a military spokesman said it happened in Tamim province, which includes the oil-rich disputed city of Kirkuk.

Iraqi officials said the crash site was located about 20 miles west of Kirkuk, which is about 180 miles north of Baghdad. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not supposed to release the information.

Maj. Derrick Cheng, a spokesman for U.S. forces in northern Iraq, said all the dead were Americans. He declined to give more details or release their names.

The deaths raised to at least 4,236 the number of U.S. service members who have died in the Iraq war since it began in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count.

The U.S. military relies heavily on helicopters and other aircraft to ferry troops, dignitaries and supplies to avoid the threat of ambushes and roadside bombs in Iraq.

At least 70 U.S. helicopters have gone down since the war started in March 2003, according to military figures. Of those, 36 were confirmed to have been shot down.

The most recent previous incident was on Nov. 15, when a helicopter that made a hard landing after hitting wires in the northern city of Mosul killed two American soldiers.

A Russian-made cargo plane chartered by FedEx also crashed in November after reporting a malfunction west of Baghdad, leaving the seven crew members dead.

The Jan. 2005 crash of a U.S. Marine CH-53 Sea Stallion helicopter in western Iraq claimed 31 lives — the biggest single U.S. loss of life in the Iraq war. Investigators determined the crash was not due to hostile fire.

A senior Obama administration official said the president would sign an order Thursday to shutter the Guantanamo prison within one year. The U.S. naval facility has been a major sore point for critics around the world who say it violates domestic and international detainee rights. The aide spoke on condition of anonymity because the order has not yet been issued.

The executive order was one of three expected on how to interrogate and prosecute al-Qaida, Taliban or other foreign fighters believed to threaten the United States. The administration already has suspended trials for terrorist suspects at Guantanamo for 120 days pending a review of the military tribunals.

Obama also had in hand executive orders to review military trials of terror suspects and end harsh interrogations, a key part of aides’ plans that had been assembled even before Obama won the election on Nov. 4.

“In view of the significant concerns raised by these detentions, both within the United States and internationally, prompt and appropriate disposition of the individuals currently detained at Guantanamo and closure of the facility would further the national security and foreign policy interests of the United States and the interests of justice,” said the draft executive order that would close Guantanamo. The draft was obtained by The Associated Press.

On Thursday, Obama was visiting the State Department to meet with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and his top national security advisers.

White House aides announced that the president would meet with retired military officers to discuss the executive orders in the morning, but would not confirm that Obama planned to sign them immediately.

The Obama-Clinton meeting also was to include Vice President Joe Biden and national security adviser Jim Jones and his deputy. It was to be followed by an address by Obama and Clinton to State Department employees.

The address could provide an opening for Obama to enter the daunting thicket of Middle East diplomacy, long dodged by deferring to President George W. Bush, who left office Tuesday. It could also be the time he announces George Mitchell, the former Senate Democratic leader, as his special envoy to the region.

During his two-month stint as the president-elect, Obama promised he would have plenty to say on the conflict as soon as he was in office, but the country could only have one foreign policy voice at a time.

Some of Obama’s other promises, though, have already been attended to. On Wednesday, he signed executive orders to limit his staff’s ability to leave the administration to lobby their former colleagues. He also limited pay raises for his senior aides making more than $100,000 a year — a nod to a flailing economy and voters’ frustrations.

He also opened the doors to the White House to visitors on Wednesday, meeting with guests in the White House’s Blue Room.

“Enjoy yourself, roam around,” a smiling Obama told one guest as he shuffled through the room. “Don’t break anything.”

Obama was starting his day Thursday with a private meeting on the nation’s struggling economy, a signal to the millions of Americans struggling with tighter credit, increasing home foreclosures and the dollar’s shrinking value.

According to officials, Obama will conduct a videoteleconference late Wednesday afternoon with members of the National Security Council as well as the U.S. military commanders in the two war zones.

Obama has said he wants combat troops out of Iraq in 16 months and a greater effort made in Afghanistan. In his inauguration speech Tuesday he offered a glimpse of what was to come.

“We will begin to responsibly leave Iraq to its people and forge a hard-earned peace in Afghanistan,” he said.

At the same time, he added a warning to America’s enemies: “We will not apologize for our way of life, nor will we waver in its defense, and for those who seek to advance their aims by inducing terror and slaughtering innocents, we say to you now that our spirit is stronger and cannot be broken; you cannot outlast us, and we will defeat you.”

Ali al-Dabbagh, a spokesman for the Iraqi prime minister, told Associated Press Television News on Tuesday that Iraq is willing to have the U.S. withdraw its troops and assume security for the country “before the end of 2011,” the departure date agreed to by former President George W. Bush in November.

Summoned to the White House were Defense Secretary Robert Gates — the lone Republican Cabinet holdover from the Bush administration — along with chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen; the top military commander in the Middle East, Gen. David Petraeus; and other members of the security council.

Gen. Ray Odierno, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, and Gen. David McKiernan, the top commander in Afghanistan, were due to participate from the war fronts, according to two senior military officers. The officers spoke on condition of anonymity because the meeting has not been officially announced by the White House.

Obama pledged during his campaign to pull all U.S. combat brigades from Iraq within 16 months, but it was not clear whether he would issue any hard-and-fast orders Wednesday to end the war on that specific timeline or declare his intentions in more general terms.

Petraeus is in the midst of a broad review of his entire region of responsibility, which encompasses Iraq and the rest of the Middle East as well as Afghanistan, Pakistan and the rest of Central Asia. He is expected to finish his review by late next month.

With the inclusion of Petraeus, Odierno and McKiernan, the meeting Wednesday appeared to reflect, at least in part, Gates’ preference for offering the president a full range of views — from senior civilians as well as top military commanders — at key junctures in the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts.

The military service chiefs, with whom Obama would be expected to consult at some point, were not expected to attend Wednesday’s session. Some have expressed concerns about the impact the long, repeated war tours have had on the U.S. military.

JERUSALEM – Israel declared a unilateral cease-fire in its 22-day offensive that turned Gaza neighborhoods into battlegrounds and dealt a stinging blow to the Islamic militants of Hamas, but the government said its troops will stay in the Palestinian territory for now.

Shortly before top leaders voted for the cease-fire at an emergency security meeting, Hamas threatened to keep fighting until Israeli troops leave Gaza.

“Our goals as they were set at the beginning of the operation were fully realized, and even more than that,” Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said after the 12-member Security Cabinet voted to halt the assault.

“Hamas was hit hard, in its military arms and in its government institutions,” Olmert said. “If the fire stops entirely, the IDF (Israel Defense Forces) will weigh pulling out of Gaza at a time that befits us. If not, the IDF will continue to act to defend our residents.”

More than 1,100 Palestinians have been killed since the Israeli offensive began on Dec. 27, according to Palestinian and U.N. officials. At least 13 Israelis have also died.

The offensive will stop at 2 a.m. local time (7 p.m. EST), Olmert said.

One Israeli airstrike killed two Hamas militants and another unidentified man, while another flattened a five-story building in northern Gaza, killing at least seven people, including an infant, Hamas officials said. Israeli aircraft struck more than 30 targets before dawn, and there were constant explosions after first light.

By midday, 19 Palestinians had been killed, pushing the death toll to more than 760 and in the two-week-old conflict, according to Gaza health officials who say at least half of those killed were civilians. Thirteen Israelis have also been killed.

A U.N. Security Council resolution approved Thursday night called urgently for an immediate, durable and fully respected cease-fire, leading to the full withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza. The U.S., Israel‘s closest ally and a veto-wielding member of the Security Council, abstained.

While the call is tantamount to a demand on the parties, Israel’s troops won’t be required to pull out of Gaza until there is a durable cease-fire. The resolution calls on U.N. member states to intensify efforts to provide guarantees in Gaza to sustain a lasting truce, including prevention of illicit trafficking in arms and ammunition.

In Israel’s first official response to the resolution, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert‘s office said the Hamas rockets fired at Israel Friday “only prove that the U.N.’s decision is not practical and will not be kept in practice by the Palestinian murder organizations.”

A Hamas spokesman said the Islamic militant group “is not interested” in the cease-fire because it was not consulted and the resolution did not meet its minimum demands.

Israel launched its assault on Dec. 27 in an attempt to halt years of rocket fire from the Hamas-controlled territory.

Despite the devastating offensive, Hamas has kept up rocket attacks on southern Israel. The rockets fired Friday hit in and around two of the largest southern cities, Beersheba and Ashkelon. Cities within rocket range of Gaza have largely been paralyzed since the fighting began.

The Security Council action came hours after a U.N. agency suspended food deliveries to Gaza, and the Red Cross accused Israel of blocking medical assistance after forces fired on aid workers. It also followed concerns of a wider conflict after militants in Lebanon fired rockets into northern Israel early Thursday, though the border has been quiet since.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said the U.S. “fully supports” the resolution but abstained “to see the outcomes of the Egyptian mediation” with Israel and Hamas, also aimed at achieving a cease-fire.

Osama Hamdan, a Hamas envoy to Lebanon, told the al-Arabiya satellite channel that the group “is not interested in it because it does not meet the demands of the movement.”

Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri said the U.N. failed to consider the interests of the Palestinian people.

“This resolution doesn’t mean that the war is over,” he told the Al-Jazeera satellite television network. “We call on the Palestinian fighters to mobilize and be ready to face the offensive, and we urge the Arab masses to carry on with their angry protests.”

Israel’s government says any cease-fire must guarantee an end to rocket fire and arms smuggling into Gaza. During a six-month cease-fire that ended with the current operation, Hamas is thought to have used tunnels under the Egypt-Gaza border to smuggle in the medium-range rockets it is now using to hit deeper than ever inside Israel.

Hamas has said it won’t accept any agreement that does not include the full opening Gaza’s blockaded border crossings. Israel is unlikely to agree to that demand, as it would allow Hamas to strengthen its hold on the territory which it violently seized in June 2007.

With Israeli troops now in control of many of the open areas used by militants to launch rockets, gunman have continued shooting from inside populated neighborhoods.

The conflict has left hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza increasingly desperate for food, water, fuel and medical assistance, and the situation was expected to worsen as humanitarian efforts fall victim to the fighting.

One of the dead Thursday was a Ukrainian woman, the first foreigner to die in the fighting, according to Gaza Health Ministry official Dr. Moaiya Hassanain. He said the woman was married to a Palestinian doctor who trained in Ukraine and returned with her to Gaza. Her 2-year-old son was also killed in the tank shelling east of Gaza City, he said.

Details are emerging of other incidents in which civilians were killed. A U.N. agency said Israeli troops evacuated Palestinian civilians to a house in Gaza City on Jan. 4, then shelled the building 24 hours later, killing 30 people.

The U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs report was based on eyewitness testimony. It added details to an incident previously reported by The Associated Press and an Israeli human rights group.

The U.N. agency said 110 people were in the house. The 30 people reported killed is a far higher figure than in other accounts.

The Israeli military had no comment on the report Friday.

The West Bank saw its biggest protests so far Friday, as thousands took to the streets following prayers to express their anger at the Israeli offensive.

From Rami G. Khouri at the Middle East Online:

Of course, the immediate consequences of the Israeli assault on Gaza are felt primarily by the Palestinians in Gaza. But the political shockwaves will be felt throughout the Arab world in forms that cannot be easily predicted today. The Israeli attempt to inflict patricide — the killing of a country — on Gaza emphasizes a series of transformational trends that have been clear throughout the Arab region for about the past quarter century.

The most important trend concerns the reconfiguration of power, legitimacy and activism in the modern Arab state. As governments in existing Arab states effectively ignore what is happening in Gaza — to judge by their political immobility — we will continue to witness the weakening impact, control and even the legitimacy of many of those regimes. We will also continue to see the rise of non-state actors who become so strong and credible that they should be called parallel states.

Click here for the full story.

Two people were lightly injured, and the rockets that exploded in Israel’s north raised the specter of renewed hostilities with Hezbollah, just 2 1/2 years after Israel battled the guerrilla group to a 34-day stalemate. Hezbollah started the 2006 war as Israel was battling Palestinian militants in Gaza.

No group claimed responsibility and Lebanon’s government, wary of conflict, quickly condemned the rocket fire. Israel fired mortar shells into southern Lebanon in response.

For a second straight day, Israel said it suspended is Gaza military operation for three hours to allow in humanitarian supplies.

Before the lull on Thursday, Israel killed at least 11 people in Gaza, including five militants, raising the death toll from its 13-day offensive to 699 people, according to Palestinian medical officials. The offensive is meant to halt years of Palestinian rocket attacks on southern Israel, but with roughly half the dead believed to be civilians, international efforts to broker a cease-fire have been gaining steam.

One of the Lebanese rockets went through the roof of a retirement home in Nahariya, about five miles from the border, and exploded in the kitchen as some 25 residents were eating breakfast in the adjacent dining hall. One resident suffered a broken leg, another bruises, apparently from slipping on the floor after emergency sprinklers came on.

“The rocket entered through the roof, hurling the water heaters into the air. It went through bedrooms upstairs and then into the kitchen. There was a serious blast,” said Henry Carmelli, the home’s manager.

About three hours later, air-raid sirens went off again. But authorities said it was a false alarm.

Israel has repeatedly said it was prepared for a possible attack on the north since it launched its bruising campaign against Hamas militants in Gaza on Dec. 27. Israel has mobilized thousands of reserve troops for such a scenario, and leaders have warned Hezbollah of dire consequences if it enters the fighting.

“We are following what is happening in the north. We are prepared and will respond as necessary,” Defense Minister Ehud Barak told reporters.

Lebanese Prime Minister Fuad Saniora condemned both the attacks and Israel’s retaliatory fire. The attacks are “the work of parties who stand to lose from the continued stability in Lebanon,” Saniora said.

Hezbollah, which did not comment, has said it does not want to draw Lebanon into a new war. Small Palestinian groups, who have rocketed Israel twice since the end of the 2006 war, have recently threatened to open a new front against Israel if the fighting in Gaza continued.

An Israeli Cabinet minister, Meir Sheetrit, suggested that Lebanese splinter groups, not Hezbollah, were responsible. He said the government had no interest in renewing hostilities.

“Even though we have the ability to respond with great force, the response needs to be carefully considered and responsible,” Sheetrit told Army Radio. “We don’t need to play into their hands.”

Shortly after the first rockets fell around the town of Nahariya, five miles south of the Lebanese border, Lebanese TV stations reported Israeli mortar fire on open areas in southern Lebanon. The Israeli military confirmed it carried out “pinpoint fire” in response without elaborating.

Israeli defense commentators said they expected the rocket fire to be a one-time show of solidarity with the Palestinians, not a declaration of war. Still, police said public bomb shelters throughout the north were opened.

Palestinians reported some two dozen airstrikes in Gaza on Thursday. One militant was killed and 10 wounded in Gaza City, while an airstrike in northern Gaza killed three members of a rocket-launching cell, Palestinian medical officials said. The attack took place about 150 yards from a hospital and wounded 12 bystanders. The Israeli army has repeatedly said militants use civilian areas for cover.

Nine other Palestinians were killed in separate incidents, including three civilians — en elderly man and two women — who were fleeing their homes in northern Gaza, officials said.

In Geneva, the international Red Cross said it found four small children alive next to their mothers’ bodies in the rubble of a Gaza home hit by Israeli shelling. The neutral aid group says a total of 15 dead were recovered from two houses in the Zeitoun neighborhood of Gaza City on Wednesday.

A Red Cross spokesman says rescuers had been refused permission by Israeli forces to reach the site for four days. It said the delay in allowing rescue services access was”unacceptable.”

The Israeli offensive has reduced Palestinian rocket fire, but not stopped it altogether. Several barrages were reported Thursday, including one strike that damaged a school and sports center in the southern city of Ashkelon, police said. Both buildings were empty.

For a second day, Israel’s Defense Ministry said the offensive was halted for three hours to allow Gaza residents to stock up on supplies and to allow aid shipments into the besieged area. Ministry spokesman Peter Lerner also said some 300 Palestinian holders of foreign passports would be allowed to leave.

The lull appears to be in response to international pressure on Israel to try relieve civilian suffering in Gaza. U.N. spokesman Chris Gunness said three hours was “wholly inadequate” and would not be enough to relieve widespread food and water shortages.

After Wednesday’s lull, Israel quickly resumed its offensive, bombing suspected smuggling tunnels near the border with Egypt after Hamas responded with a rocket barrage. Israeli planes destroyed at least 16 empty houses.

The tunnels are Hamas’ lifeline, used to bring in arms, money and basic goods. Israel says local homes are used to conceal the tunnels.

Of the Palestinians killed since Dec. 27, some 350 were civilians, among them 130 children, according to Palestinian medical officials. Eleven Israelis have been killed, including three civilians, since the offensive began. The army said Thursday that an infantry officer was killed by an anti-tank missile.

Growing international outrage over the human toll of Israel’s offensive, which includes 3,000 Palestinians wounded — could work against continued fighting. So could President Bush’s departure from office this month and a Feb. 10 election in Israel.

But Israel has a big interest in inflicting as much damage as possible on Hamas, both to stop militant rocket fire on southern Israeli towns and to diminish the group’s ability to play a spoiler role in peace talks with Palestinian moderates.

Despite the heavy fighting, strides appeared to be made on the diplomatic front with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice saying the U.S. supported a deal being brokered by France and Egypt.

While the U.N. Security Council failed to reach agreement on a cease-fire resolution, Egypt’s U.N. Ambassador Maged Abdelaziz said representatives of Israel, Hamas and the Palestinian Authority agreed to meet separately with Egyptian officials in Cairo.

Israeli envoys arrived in Egypt on Thursday to discuss the proposal.

For Israel to accept a proposed cease-fire deal, “there has to be a total and complete cessation of all hostile fire from Gaza into Israel, and … we have to see an arms embargo on Hamas that will receive international support,” said government spokesman Mark Regev.

For its part, Hamas said it would not accept a truce deal unless it includes an end to the Israeli blockade of Gaza — something Israel says it is not willing to do. Israel and Egypt have maintained a stiff economic embargo on Gaza since the Hamas takeover.

The Palestinian Authority controls the West Bank while Hamas rules Gaza — two territories on opposite sides of Israel that are supposed to make up a future Palestinian state. Hamas took control of Gaza from forces loyal to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas in June 2007.

The Israeli Cabinet formally decided on Wednesday to push ahead with the offensive while at the same time pursuing the cease-fire.

The military has called up thousands of reserve troops that it could use to expand the Gaza offensive. Defense officials said the troops could be ready for action by Friday.

In Geneva, the international Red Cross said it found four small children alive next to their mothers’ bodies in the rubble of a Gaza home hit by Israeli shelling. The neutral aid group says a total of 15 dead were recovered from two houses in the Zaytun neighborhood of Gaza City on Wednesday.

A Red Cross spokesman said rescuers had been refused permission by Israeli forces to reach the site for four days. It said the delay in allowing rescue services access was “unacceptable.”

The Ohio man, who became famous during the U.S. presidential campaign after asking Barack Obama about his tax plan, is heading to Israel as a war correspondent for a conservative Web site called pjtv.com.

Dubbed “Joe the Plumber” by McCain’s campaign, Samuel “Joe” Wurzelbacher was held up as an example of an American worker who would be hurt economically by Obama’s election.

Wurzelbacher says he’ll spend 10 days covering the fighting and explaining why Israeli forces are mounting attacks against Hamas.

He tells WNWO-TV in Toledo that he wants “go over there and let their ‘Average Joes’ share their story.”

Wurzelbacher later joined Republican John McCain on the campaign trail.

At one stop, Wurzelbacher agreed with a McCain supporter who asked if he believed a vote for Obama was a vote for the death of Israel.

With criticism rising of the operation’s spiraling civilian death toll and Gazans increasingly suffering the effects of nonstop airstrikes and shelling, Israel’s military said opened “humanitarian corridors” to allow aid supplies to reach Palestinians.

Israeli military spokesman Peter Lerner said the “recess in offensive operations” was aimed at allowing in supplies and fuel and would last from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m local time (6 a.m. to 9 a.m. EST). He said similar lulls in the coming days would be considered.

However, Lerner said that even during the pause “for every attack against the army, there will be a response.” Gaza residents reported scattered gunfire and explosions even after it was supposed to have gone into effect, but the scale of fighting appeared to drop.

As Israel’s leadership met in the morning in Tel Aviv, sounds of heavy gunfire and thick plumes of smoke engulfed the Zeitoun neighborhood east of Gaza City. Israel said it struck 40 Hamas targets during the hours of darkness. Gaza health officials said new strikes Wednesday morning killed eight people.

Outrage over an Israeli strike Tuesday near a U.N. school continued, with the U.N. agency responsible for the building demanding an “impartial investigation” into the attack. Gaza health officials put the death toll from the strike at 39, while the U.N. said 40 were killed.

Israel said its forces fired at militants who launched mortars from that location.

About 300 of the more than 670 Palestinians killed so far are civilians, according to Palestinian and U.N. figures. Of those killed, at least 130 are children age 16 and under, says the Gaza-based Palestinian Center for Human Rights, which tracks casualties.

The number of armed fighters killed remains unclear. Gaza residents say Hamas fighters are known to have begun wearing civilian clothes and the organization is keeping its casualties secret and housing its wounded and dead in undisclosed locations.

Israel has lost six soldiers since launching a ground offensive on Saturday, and four other Israelis have been killed by rocket fire, three of them civilians.

Israel’s lull in operations could ease the plight of civilians in Gaza, where much of the territory has no power or running water, because pumps are dependent on electricity.

More than 500 aid trucks have been shipped into Gaza since operations began. But even when aid crosses into Gaza military operations have prevented officials from distributing it, leading to food shortages in some areas.

A World Bank statement Wednesday said there are growing signs of a severe public health crisis in Gaza because of a shortage of drinking water and an escalating failure of the sewage system.

Militants hit the Israeli city of Ashkelon on Wednesday with a medium-range rocket, causing no casualties. Rocket fire has fallen off as Israeli troops tighten their hold on Gaza, taking over open areas used to launch rockets, but Gaza residents say militants are still launching from heavily populated areas.

Israel’s leaders — including the top troika of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni and Defense Minister Ehud Barak — were to discuss whether to broaden the operation in Gaza or move to accept a plan being proposed by Egypt and France to end the fighting.

Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak said the initiative calls for an immediate cease-fire by Israel and Palestinian factions for a limited period to allow humanitarian aid into Gaza and an urgent meeting of Israel and the Palestinian side on arrangements to prevent any repetition of military action and to deal with the causes.

International Mideast envoy Tony Blair said Tuesday the key to any cease-fire will be an arrangement to stop weapons smuggling over the Gaza-Egypt border.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy said Tuesday he saw the proposal as a “small hope” for ending the Gaza violence.

Israeli officials have said any cease-fire agreement must prevent further rocket attacks by Gaza militants and put in place measures to prevent the smuggling of missile and other weapons into the small Palestinian territory. Hamas has demanded that Israel open Gaza’s blockaded crossings as part of any agreement.

In the meantime, Israel has been making preparations to continue fighting. The military has called up thousands of reserve troops that it could use to expand the Gaza offensive, supporting the three brigade-size formations of regular troops now inside. Defense officials said the troops could be ready for action by Friday. They spoke on condition of anonymity because the army’s preparations are classified.

The Franco-Egyptian plan was given increasing urgency by the Israeli mortar strike near a U.N. school that stained the streets with blood.

The United Nations said the school was sheltering hundreds of people displaced by the onslaught on Hamas militants. Israel said its troops returned fire on a Hamas squad that fired mortars at them from nearby.

Israel’s military said its shelling — the deadliest single episode since Israeli ground forces invaded Gaza on Saturday following a weeklong air bombardment — was an attack on a military target and accused Hamas militants of using civilians as cover.

Christopher Gunness of the U.N. Relief and Works Agency, responsible for the school, said the agency is “99.9 percent certain there were no militants or military activity in its school.”

That would not necessarily contradict Israel’s claim that the militants were just outside.

Gunness demanded an investigation, and punishment for anyone found to have violated international law.

Two residents of the area who spoke with The Associated Press by telephone said they saw a small group of militants firing mortar rounds from a street near the school. They spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal. Gunness said 1,300 people were taking shelter from the shelling at the school.

Hamas spokesman Fawzi Barhoum said there were no militants there at the time.

The Gaza-based Palestinian Center for Human Rights said the presence of militants did not justify Israel’s response. “The presence of armed resistance does not justify in any way the use of excessive force that is disproportionate,” the center said in a statement.

The carnage, which included 55 wounded, added to a surging civilian toll and drew mounting international pressure for Israel to end the offensive against Hamas.

From Habib Battah at Al Jazeera:

The images of two women on the front page of an edition of The Washington Post last week illustrates how mainstream US media has been reporting Israel’s war on Gaza.

On the left was a Palestinian mother who had lost five children. On the right was a nearly equally sized picture of an Israeli woman who was distressed by the fighting, according to the caption.

As the Palestinian woman cradled the dead body of one child, another infant son, his face blackened and disfigured with bruises, cried beside her.

The Israeli woman did not appear to be wounded in any way but also wept.

Arab frustration

To understand the frustration often felt in the Arab world over US media coverage, one only needs to imagine the same front page had the situation been reversed.If an Israeli woman had lost five daughters in a Palestinian attack, would The Washington Post run an equally sized photograph of a relatively unharmed Palestinian woman, who was merely distraught over Israeli missile fire?

Click here for the full story.

President-elect Barack Obama’s studied silence on the subject of Israel’s 10-day-old war against Palestinian Hamas militants in the Gaza Strip is only partly out of deference to the man who still has the big job for two more weeks.

Obama’s reserve is also a political calculation that saying nothing is the better of his unappealing options. At least it lets all sides think he’s in their corner for a little while longer.

Obama’s promises to start fresh in the Middle East, and Arab hopes for a more sympathetic U.S. ear are part of that calculation. So are the strongly pro-Israel views of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, Obama’s choice for secretary of state.

Anything Obama says about the crisis, either now or on Jan. 21, will be taken as a clue to his longer-term approach to peacemaking, and it is bound to disappoint someone.

There is little in Obama’s resume or his public statements to suggest he suddenly would be tough on Israel or brimming with fresh ideas to address the dismal web of interlocking economic, political and security problems in the Palestinian territories. Obama’s only extensive remarks about the Israel-Palestinian conflict during the presidential campaign were strongly pro-Israel.

Clinton was considered naive for a gaffe as first lady in which she kissed PLO leader Yasser Arafat’s wife, but as a New York senator she’s been consistently pro-Israel.

Nonetheless, Palestinians look to Obama.

Palestinian Foreign Minister Riad Malki expressed disappointment that the president-elect has refused to comment on the Israeli offensive in Gaza, even though he made a statement on the recent attacks in Mumbai, India.

“We expected him really to be open and responsive to the situation in Gaza,” Malki said Monday. “And still … we expect him to make a strong statement regarding this as soon as possible.”

Talking about the crisis in the same terms Bush uses would drain the goodwill of Palestinians and the Arab intermediaries Obama needs, said Daniel Levy, a former Israeli peace negotiator and a scholar at The Century Foundation. It also would limit Obama’s maneuvering room later.

Talking about Gaza in markedly different terms – for instance, by calling for an unconditional truce – would be awkward in the extreme, Levy said.

“I’ve been getting briefed every day. I’ve had consistent conversations with members of the current administration about what’s taking place,” Obama told reporters Monday in his only comments on the Gaza crisis.

“I will continue to insist that when it comes to foreign affairs, it is particularly important to adhere to the principle of one president at a time, because there are delicate negotiations taking place right now, and we can’t have two voices coming out of the United States when you have so much at stake.”

The voice that is coming out belongs to a president who is a stout defender of Israel, as he affirmed Monday.

“I understand Israel’s desire to protect itself,” President George W. Bush said in the Oval Office. “The situation now taking place in Gaza was caused by Hamas.”

Over the weekend, Israel began moving tanks and troops into the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip after a week of punishing aerial bombing of Hamas targets, which caused dozens of civilian casualties and drew widespread condemnation in the Muslim and Arab world. By moving ground forces into Gaza, Israel has raised the risk of escalating the latest Mideast conflict into urban warfare, which would surely increase the casualties and consequences for the region.

Bush, however, laid the blame squarely on Hamas, which the United States labels a terrorist organization.

Israel may end its broad ground war before Obama takes office on Jan. 20, but the festering problem of Israeli-Arab hostilities will remain.

In the near term, if the Israeli incursion continues under an Obama administration, Obama must decide whether to continue Bush’s policy of defending Israel even in the face of mounting world criticism of civilian deaths.

If the war ends quickly, Obama would be left to help administer whatever cease-fire terms or other international arrangement Israel agreed to, and to choose a response in the very likely event that the truce proves imperfect.

Even if Obama isn’t talking, there’s no shortage of Mideast hands hoping he is listening.

The advice includes a position paper provided to The Associated Press that carries the signature of one of Obama’s own transition advisers, former diplomat Wendy Chamberlin.

“The Obama administration should lead an international effort to arrange a two-phase process: an immediate cease-fire, followed by a longer term armistice,” the paper from the Israel Policy Forum said.

“Thus, if a cease-fire has not been established by the time Obama takes office, his team should work assiduously, through intermediaries, to establish a viable cease-fire,” said the paper signed by Chamberlin and a dozen others.

From Foreign Policy Watch:

When President-elect Barack Obama takes office in two weeks, he will immediately be faced with two elusive foreign policy problems whose resolution has evaded every post-war US president: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the Indo-Pakistani rivalry. Each has visibly reasserted itself in its own way in recent weeks, as Israel has trounced Hamas-related installations in Gaza in retaliation for the latter’s rocket attacks, and as Pakistan has diverted troops to its border with India in the wake of New Delhi pressure over November’s attacks in Mumbai.

While both are messy and seemingly intractable, they have only assumed greater urgency over the last few months. And both old problems pose new challenges for the incoming administration.

Click here for the full report.

Spokesman Gordon Johndroe told reporters in Texas that President Bush had a detailed briefing early Monday by video conferencing with Vice President Dick Cheney, White House chief of staff Josh Bolten and national security adviser Stephen Hadley.

Johndroe blamed the militant Hamas organization for the latest wave in violence, saying that it broke a six-month cease-fire agreement arranged by Egypt. He said that Hamas has “shown its true colors as a terrorist organization.”

At the same time, Johndroe said the United States has asked Israel to avoid civilian casualties in Gaza.

But the spokesman declined to respond to questions about whether the United States believes Israel is ready to launch a ground attack on Gaza.

He said that Bush had spoken early Monday with King Abdullah of Jordan, and had spoken on Saturday with King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia.

Johndroe said the Israeli actions were “in response to the mortar and rocket attacks on Israel” and said that the United States has asked Israel to avoid civilian casualties in Gaza.

Johndroe also said that parties on all sides should clear the way for humanitarian assistance such as food and medical supplies in Gaza.

Asked if the administration believes it permissible for Israel to launch attacks in Gaza, Johndroe said, the spokesman replied: “The United States understands that Israel needs to take actions to defend itself.”

Johndroe repeated that President-elect Barack Obama is getting daily intelligence briefings “and we will continue to stay in touch with his staff as developments warrant.”

Johndroe said that “at this time” there are no plans for Bush to speak on the issue.

He said he did not want to speculate too heavily on the impact the new violence will have on Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas.

Asked why Hamas broke the cease-fire, “You know, it’s hard for me to get into the minds of terrorists … so it’s impossible for me to answer.”

Asked if the Israelis would be justified in seeking to destroy Hamas if it does not renounce further rocket attacks, he said, “I think what people want is peace on the ground and an end to the violence so people can go about living normal lives, and especially people in southern Israel, who spend so much time living in bomb shelters. It’s unacceptable.”

He said the ultimate goal of Israelis is “for their people to be able to live in peace.”

I truly believe that we dodged a serious bullet this year with the election of Barack Obama. While I cannot say for certain what would’ve happened if John McCain had won the election this year, here is an educated guess at what might have happened if the philosophies and attitudes of John McCain and Sarah Palin were brought into the current political climate of the US and the world.

November 3rd: McCain airs his Reverend Wright ads in Florida, Pennsylvania and Ohio. Sean Hannity plays the infamous “Whitey Tape” from Michelle Obama in which a woman reported to be Michelle Obama says “Whitey is so dumb, he about to elect my light-skinned husband to be president, so we can take over the country, make it socialist, and give away all the white jobs to our Black friends and pal around with terrorists.”

November 4th: Despite leading in the polls and decisively winning the popular vote, Obama loses both Pennsylvania and Ohio due to faulty voting machines in Pittsburgh and Cleveland. There are reports of voter suppression and intimidation in Virginia, Georgia, Ohio and North Carolina.

November 5th: At 2 a.m., Fox News calls the election for McCain. Obama and the Democrats call for a recount. Tensions erupt across the country as  police clash with protesters. Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson make public pleas to the government to stop police brutality against the non-violent protesters. The New York Times reveals the Michelle Obama “Whitey” tape to be a fraud.

December 12th: McCain claims that the military will back him if the high court makes Obama president by decree, McCain. Barack Obama, fearing a civil war, concedes the election. The Supreme Court rules that Barack Obama’s request for a recount is illegal.

December 13th: Massive protests erupt in New York, L.A., Detroit and Philadelphia against McCain stealing the election. A twelve-year-old girl is shot in the back of the head by police in Philadelphia during a protest. Barack Obama addresses the nation and gives what the media calls “the speech of a lifetime,” telling his supporters not to give in to violence and to work to build a better America.

December 20th: McCain names Joe Lieberman Secretary of State, General Petraeus Secretary of Defense, advisor Charlie Black Director of Commerce, and Elizabeth Hasslebeck Press Secretary.

December 22: McCain gives his economic plan to the nation. Tax cuts for the rich, increased spending on the military, cutting of social programs, and corporate deregulation are highlights of his agenda. After McCain reveals his plan, the stock market crashes, the Dow landing below 4,000. Companies make massive layoffs the day before Christmas.

January 20th 2009: McCain’s inauguration is marred by a massive protest. 200 people are arrested. McCain is forced to use a decoy car while he uses an alternate route to the White House.

March 5th, 2009: McCain blasts Democrats for leading the country into a depression. He attacks liberal media outlets such as MSNBC and the Huffington Post for being anti-patriotic and driving the nation into chaos. McCain suspends contact between his staff and all news organizations, except for Fox News.

April 25th, 2009: The National Enquirer releases videotape of Cindy McCain kissing former rock-and-roll star and soap opera actor, Rick Springfield. A taped conversation between Cindy McCain and a close friend reveals affairs from both John and Cindy and a “terrible, hypocritical marriage of convenience.”

May 15th, 2009: With the U.S. in a grave financial crisis, John McCain cuts Headstart, after-school programs, welfare and funding to community colleges. Protests erupt across the nation. Social unrest occurs all over urban America.

July 4th, 2009: Citing intelligence, Israeli and American forces attack a suspected nuclear weapons site in Iran. 600 workers are killed in a steel factory.

July 11th, 2009: Iran retaliates against the U.S. and Israel, bombing US bases in Kuwait and Iraq. Iranian-backed Hezbollah invades Israel from the north, and fights a drawn out battle with many military and civilian casualties on both sides.

See more of NewsOne’s BEST OF EVERYTHING 2008!!

July 25th, 2009: John McCain’s son is killed when his warship is attacked by Iranian missiles.

August 12th, 2009: John McCain launches a preemptive nuclear strike on Iran, killing 500,000 civilians in Tehran. Media everywhere declare the start of World War III.

September 11th, 2009: John McCain declares a draft and lowers the age of miliary service eligibility to 16.

September 20th, 2009: Massive student protests against the war. Hundreds of students are arrested at the University of California at Berkeley and Columbia University in New York. A 19-year-old college freshman is killed when a tear gas canister fired by police hits her directly in the head at Indiana State University.

September 25th, 2009: Due to massive social unrest, John McCain creates a new position in his cabinet, Secretary of Un-American Affairs, and names Michelle Bachman to the post.

October 17th, 2009: Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid draft up orders for impeachment of John McCain.

November 8th, 2009: Barack Obama is arrested for high treason for trying to overthrow McCain. Obama is detained indefinitely.

November 9th, 2009: More protests around the country. Massive rioting in Philadelphia, Oakland, Detroit and Los Angeles. With no army or national guard to contain the riots, gangs begin take control of the cities.

November 10th, 2009: John McCain declares martial law in the United States and suspends habeas corpus.

November 22nd, 2009: Russia, China, India and Brazil impose sanctions on the United States, citing Human Rights violations and preemptive war with Iran.

December 4th, 2009: John McCain dies of a heart attack during a meeting at the White House.

December 5th, 2009: Sarah Palin is sworn in as President. She says she will continue John McCain’s fight against evil, and calls for the nation to rally against both domestic and foreign terrorists.

December 13th, 2009: Sarah Palin charges Russia and Vladimir Putin with arming the Iranians and trying to cripple the U.S. economy with sanctions.

December 21st: Sarah Palin claims she has had a vision from God to complete the fight of good over evil and threatens a nuclear attack on Russia.

December 22nd: Russia declares war on the United States. Troops are sent into Eastern Europe. The conflict has not gone “nuclear”

January 5th: Russia invades Alaska and is met with no resistance. They begin to move their forces through Canada into the U.S.

January 13th: American citizens, angry at the Republican despots, storm the White House and Capitol Building. Sarah Palin is arrested in a coup by several generals in conjunction with congressional dissenters.

January 20th: Russian, Cuban, Venezuelan and Bolivian forces invade southern Florida and begin making their way to D.C. With all of the U.S. army in the Middle East, they are also met with no resistance. The United States surrenders.

See more of NewsOne’s BEST OF EVERYTHING 2008!!

The current draft would have U.S. soldiers leave Iraq by Dec. 31, 2011, unless the government asks them to stay to help with training or other missions.

But Ali al-Adeeb, a member of the prime minister’s inner circle, said the government wants that possibility removed.

“The Iraqi side wants to remove any mention of a possible extension of U.S. troops, fearing that the existing clause might be subjected to misinterpretation or could bear different interpretation because Multinational Forces might demand for extension depending on their evaluation of the security forces or the incomplete readiness of the Iraqi forces,” al-Adeeb told The Associated Press.

He also said the Iraqis want a joint U.S.-Iraqi committee to decide whether U.S. soldiers accused of crimes off base were really on authorized missions.

The current draft also gives Iraqi courts limited jurisdiction over U.S. troops accused of major crimes committed off post and off duty.

Those are among proposed changes which the Iraqis say must be made in the draft agreement before it can be approved by parliament in time for a Dec. 31 deadline when the U.N. mandate under which coalition forces here operates.

Without an agreement or a new U.N. mandate, the U.S. military would have to suspend all operations in Iraq. The Cabinet decided this week to ask the U.S. for changes in the draft before referring it to parliament.

“We are waiting for a response from the U.S. negotiators on how much they can accommodate,” Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari said Thursday on CNN. “I think both sides here have reached the moment of truth. The time window is closing, and a decision has to be made as soon as possible.”

U.S. officials have urged the Iraqis to consider what could happen here if the U.S. suspends military operations.

Violence is down here sharply after the Sunni revolt against al-Qaida and the routing of Shiite militias in Baghdad and southern Iraq last spring. But the U.S. military also provides considerable help to Iraqi ministries in infrastructure and quality of life projects which would have to stop.

Despite the drop in violence, attacks are continuing, although at a lower level.

On Thursday, a car bomb exploded near a market in north Baghdad, killing one person and wounding five, police said.

The explosion took place about a half hour after a roadside bomb went off near a police patrol at an intersection in the Fudhailiya area in eastern Baghdad, wounding six people, including three policemen, officials said.

They all spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not supposed to release the information to media.

Meanwhile, police raised the death toll from a bombing Wednesday evening in eastern Baghdad to six, with another 17 people wounded. The blast occurred when a roadside bomb planted near a stall selling ice cream exploded near a police patrol on Palestine Street.

First reports said two people were killed but police said Thursday there were six dead, all of them civilians.

Iraq.

When Senator Obama said recently that the surge had succeeded “beyond our wildest expectations,” he conceded far too much. For complex reasons, some of which pre-date the Spring 2007 escalation in US force presence, violence in Iraq has dropped dramatically in the past eighteen months. Whether this is a temporary blip, or a permanent new reality, remains to be seen. As Senator Biden observed after the debate, the surge was intended as a means to an end: reduce the violence long enough to provide breathing space for the political process to work.

Whether the surge has accomplished that larger goal remains very much an open question. But, it is extraordinary that John McCain portrays the success of the now-ended surge as a sign of his own good judgment, ignoring his full-throated support for the invasion, and all of its false premises in the first place.

Obama’s single strongest point of the night was the moment he called McCain on this bizarre implication-noting that the war did not start in 2007, listing all of the basic facts about which McCain was dead wrong going back to 2001 and 2002, and pointing out all the catastrophic consequences of those bad judgments since 2003.

Russia.

Obama’s position on Georgia-that it should be a NATO member-is unsurprising. He has nothing to gain politically by arguing otherwise, but it’s still lame. Among the Alice-in-Wonderland premises of American foreign policy doctrine is the idea that Russia has no legitimate interest in, or concern about, the expansion of an adversarial military alliance all along its borders. Would the US ever tolerate any remotely comparable development anywhere close to its own borders? Every adult American knows the answer to that question. Ever heard of the Monroe Doctrine?

It’s especially annoying to listen to our political leaders fulminate about Russia’s incursion into Georgia when those same leaders have let pass, with scarcely any comment, the fact that Russia has, in the course of two separate military invasions since the mid-1990s, killed perhaps 100,000 people in Chechnya.

And, speaking of mass murder of civilians in remote regions, did anyone hear the word “Darfur” uttered even once during the debate? The Russian/Georgian conflict resulted in a few hundred deaths. That’s a tragedy. But, it’s not genocide. To recap: Russia’s near-genocidal incursions into Chechnya are irrelevant. So, apparently, is the genocide in Darfur. But, a border skirmish that both sides are responsible for and that lasted for about a week merits chest-thumping and ill-considered policy pronouncements during a presidential debate? Welcome to America.

More War.

John McCain has surrounded himself with foreign policy advisers that include the most fanatical elements of the neo-conservative movement. His relish for further war-in Iran and Syria, as well as Iraq, is a fact.

Obama’s position on Afghanistan is also disturbing. Few people would have denied the US the right to respond militarily in Afghanistan after 9/11. But, seven years later, our escalating presence in that country is only driving it further back into the hands of the Taliban. American bombings there repeatedly kill Afghan civilians and our increasingly provocative incursions into Pakistan threaten to de-stabilize a nuclear-armed country that has strongly and fanatically anti-American elements. A major military escalation there-as Obama proposes-could well inflame the situation further.

Furthermore, it’s no longer clear what, if any strategic value, capturing or killing Bin Laden has, as Obama repeatedly vowed to do. Al Qaeda is a diffuse network in dozens of countries, as Obama himself pointed out. And, the 9/11 plotters mostly prepared for their attack in places like Florida.

In short, the answer to terrorism is not necessarily conventional military action. Obama may know this, but, he’s still unwilling to challenge the fundamental, disturbing prerogative at the heart of American foreign policy: our unique right to project military force anywhere in the world, regardless of the consequences for innocent civilians.

Obama offers depressingly little in the way of “change” here. Is his position politically necessary? Perhaps. Is it disturbing and insidious? Certainly.

Having said all of the above, the single most relevant distinction between McCain and Obama from a foreign policy standpoint is this: John McCain’s temperament is unpredictable. He is convinced of the greatness of his own character and judgment.

Convinced of the greatness of his own character and uniqueness of his experience, McCain appears to believe that Americans should simply trust his judgment in matters of war and peace. Such acquiescence will give him free reign to be as aggressive and belligerent as he deems necessary. Will voters forget that that kind has affected our international standing, our ability to address urgent needs at home and, most fundamentally, our own national security?

His policy positions suggest that such belligerence and war mongering will keep Americans safe. His terrible ordeal in Vietnam has allowed him to use words like “honor” and “sacrifice” to mask an appetite for ceaseless war. And, it is McCain’s seeming indifference to the potentially catastrophic consequences of war, which makes President Bush by contrast look like a model of prudence and restraint.

The foreign policy aspects of round one more than any else reveal how misleading political labels are this political season. The dangerous radical this round is the Republican. And the cautious conservative is the Democratic standard-bearer.

Watch video of the debate here:

Much has been made about John McCain’s war heroism. Even his opponent Barrack Obama has gone out of his way to praise McCain’s patriotism and heroism. America has a long tradition of electing war heroes, from George Washington to Ulysses S. Grant to John F Kennedy. Unlike Washington Grant and Kennedy who fought in the Revolutionary war Civil War and World War II, McCain fought in a war that was highly unpopular and viewed as unnecessary.

The Revolutionary War gave the U.S. independence, the Civil War ended slavery, WWII saved the world from Hitler’s domination and ended the genocide of the European jews. What exactly was accomplished by the Vietnam War other than the deaths of thousands of U.S. soldiers and millions of Veitnamese soldiers and civilians? Most non-neocons would agree that the Vietnamese war was an ideologically based war for the US empire of capitalism against the communists.

Fighting in a war does not make you a hero. Were the Nazi soldiers heroes? Were confederate soldiers heroes? Part of being a hero is fighting for a good cause that saves lives and makes the world a better place not taking lives and making it a worse one. Unfortunately for our soldiers, it is not them who decide whether they are heroes, villains or victims of the wars they fight but up to the leaders who wage the wars. Most of the soldiers who fought in Vietnam did not want to fight in the war at all and were drafted, victims of their government’s imperialist warmongering policies. McCain on the other hand volunteered for the war, marking the 1st time he followed his president to an idiotic war.

Unlike Kennedy, John McCain did not fight on the front lines, instead flying a plane and bombing strategic targets and the occasional innocent civilian. McCain participated in Rolling Thunder, an Operation that dropped hundreds of tons of bombs on Vietnam.By all accounts, Mccain was an unqualified, incompetent pilot Given that Vietnam did not have an airforce it is unlikely that McCain engaged in any Top Gun like arial maneuvers. .

McCain’s plane was shot down by anit-aircraft fire in 1967. He parachuted into a lake and was saved by a Vietnamese peasant who fought off an angry mob that wanted to kill him. If someone were to bomb a power plant in the US and had their planes shot down they would be seen as a terrorist. I doubt any American would pull him out the Hudson river and save him from an angry mob, Americans would call for his execution and justify his torture.

When McCain’s plane was shot down he wasn’t bombing any military target at all just a power plant in Hanoi with a team of 20 planes that were made to shut down vietnam’s infrastructure. Millions of Vietnamese civilians were killed by American bombs from planes like McCain’s. In 1997, on 60 Minutes McCain said ‘I am a war criminal, I bombed innocent women and children.’

Unlike the many Arab prisoners in Guantanamo bay and Abu Ghraib, McCain quickly cracked under the pressure of his captors. Giving up all relevant information he had and issuing a statement, “I am a black criminal and I have performed the deeds of a war pirate…I almost died and the Vietnamese people saved my life thanks to the doctors”

In a time where we can clearly see the negative affects of a war-mongering president on the economy and foreign policy, McCain seems a bad choice for president. McCain’s history as a bomber and his disregard for civilian casualties make him an ideal candidate for continuing Bush’s foreign policies. If anything his experience in Vietnam have made him more mean-spirited. On his tour bus in 2000 McCain said “I hate gooks, I will hate them all my life” He has called his wife a cunt and cursed out several senators who disagreed with him.

A true patriot follows his country to war when it is absolutely necessary and leads his country away from war when he is not. McCain is a war villain and a war criminal, not a hero. Muhammed Ali was a hero for standing up for his beliefs and refusing to go to the Vietnam war. The many people who risked their freedom to protest the Vietnam war are heroes. People like John Kerry who fought in the war and then came back to reveal the atrocities to the American people were heroes. People like John McCain who voluntarily fought an illegal, immoral war and admitted to killing innocent civilians in the cause of spreading capitalism and eliminating communism are not at all.

In 1967 an accident involving a napalm bomb on a Navy ship lead to the deaths of 134 soldiers. After it, McCain told the New York Times: “Now that I’ve seen what the bombs and napalm did to the people on our ship, I’m not so sure that I want to drop any more of that stuff on North Vietnam.” He kept bombing even when other pilots refused to take place in the bombing until his plane was shot down.

I’m sure Obama will stay clear of criticizing McCain’s war experience and continue to praise him on his service. However, I’m sure that others will attack his patriotism and war experience. Being a veteran or P.O.W. does not qualify you for the presidency, especially in a time where war-mongering and disregard for civilian casualties have led to abysmal international relations for the US and its lowest popularity rating since Vietnam.

If America really wants to have another Vietnam, another draft, billions more dollars taken away from our schools, healthcare system given to our military to kill civilians abroad then we should elect John McCain. John McCain is an admitted war criminal who still hates “gooks” and wants to bomb Iran, with no regard for the deaths of innocent civilians. In 2001 Mccain said “I hated my enemies even before they held me captive because hate sustained me in my devotion to their complete destruction and helped me overcome the virtuous human impulse to recoil in disgust from what had to be done by my hand.” Is this the kind of man we want in charge of our armed forces?

Related Links:

Interview with John McCain

John McCain’s Imaginary Black Friends

John McCain’s Version of Charity

Video: John McCain is a War Criminal

Nigeria’s president called Thursday for help finding a way to fingerprint crude oil stocks in order to combat the theft and lucrative overseas sale of unrefined petroleum, aiming at stopping the flow of “blood oil” from Africa’s biggest producers.

Umaru Yar’Adua said in a statement released by the presidency that he envisions a scheme similar to the tracking system used to cut back on the export of so-called “blood diamonds” that has long fueled African wars.

Nigerian militants, criminals and corrupt government officials are finding a lucrative trade in crude oil illegally siphoned from Nigeria’s petroleum infrastructure and battles over the vast proceeds are helping keep the southern oil region in chaos.

Yar’Adua, through his vice president, asked a group of extractive-industry experts gathering in the Nigerian capital, Abuja, to look into whether chemical markings could be added to crude oil so that it could be tested in overseas markets to ensure it was tapped legally.

He called on the delegates to “seriously interrogate this issue and explore the possibility of chemically marking oil stolen from conflict areas and laundered in the international market,” saying: “The Nigerian experience shows that there is a sense in which we can talk of blood oil.”

Yar’Adua said oil, which began flowing from Nigeria five decades ago, hadn’t helped the country develop. An estimated 400 billion dollars is missing from government coffers just since the 1970s, and Nigeria is now known as one of the world’s most-corrupt nations.

“Fifty years after we started exporting oil in commercial quantity, we are yet to diversify our economy satisfactorily, provide requisite physical infrastructure, and develop our human capital adequately,” said Yar’Adua. “Rather, oil seemed to fuel corruption and bad governance.”

The Kimberley Process, for diamonds, has drastically cut the illegal export of gems from African war zones, where the profits were used to buy weapons, experts say. Gems are certified when they’re dug from the ground and tracked step by step to consumers, making it far more difficult for uncertified stones to enter the global gem industry.

The theft of oil is no less lucrative, with thieves hooking tanker ships up to the oil infrastructure traversing a network of rivers in Nigeria’s oil delta. The crude is then shipped to overseas refineries and sold. While the exact amount of crude oil stolen daily in Nigeria is unknown, oil industry officials here estimate as much as 10 percent of the nation’s daily production is siphoned off illegally before it is logged by oil companies.

At current rates, that means about $20 million or more in illegal crude leaves Nigeria each day. Squabbles over the funds are adding to violence and insecurity across the southern production regions of Africa’s biggest producer.