On US foreign policy:

* Check the newest Progressive Response, a weekly newsletter from Foreign Policy in Focus.

"Many of the same people who led the campaign for war against Iraq signed a report released three years ago that called for using military force to disarm Syria of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and to end its military presence in Lebanon.

Among the signers are several senior members of the administration of President George W. Bush, including the chief Middle East aide on the National Security Council, Elliott Abrams; Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith; Undersecretary of State for Global Affairs Paula Dobriansky; and senior consultants to both the State Department and the Pentagon on Iraq policy, Michael Rubin and David Wurmser. Also signing were Richard Perle, the powerful former chairman of the Defense Policy Board (DPB); Jeanne Kirkpatrick, former United Nations ambassador; Frank Gaffney, a former Perle aide who heads the Center for Defense Policy; Michael Ledeen, another close Perle collaborator at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI); and David Steinmann, chairman of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA).

The study, Ending Syria's Occupation of Lebanon: The U.S. Role, was co-authored by Daniel Pipes, who has just been nominated by Bush to a post at the U.S. Institute of Peace (USIP), and Ziad Abdelnour, who heads a group founded by him called the United States Committee for a Free Lebanon (USCFL). The study was released by Pipes' group, the Middle East Forum."



* PNAC - The rise of the Washington neo-con's - The Guardian brings a short summary of the PNAC movement shaping America's foreign policy, who's who etc. Most segments are taken from articles duly posted here in the past (how about we make our own executive summaries?).

And their Middle East plan? - "The US establishes a reasonably democratic, pro-western government in Iraq. When Palestinians see Iraqis beginning to enjoy real freedom and economic opportunity [they'll] demand the Palestinian Authority reform politically and negotiate with Israel. A democratic Iraq will also hasten the fall of the fundamentalist Shia mullahs in Iran, whose citizens are gradually adopting anti-fanatic, pro-western sympathies. Jordan's pro-western Hashemite monarchy would likely come into full bloom. Syria would be no more than a pale reminder of the bad old days. (If they made trouble, a US invasion would take care of them, too). The corrupt regimes of Saudi Arabia and Egypt would [look like] holdouts against the democratic tide. We could decide whether to ignore them as harmless throwbacks to the old days or deal with them, too." Joshua Micah Marshall in Washington Monthly, April



* Edward Said article in the current London Review of Books on misguided US policy

"For Lewis, vast generalisations about Islam and about the backwardness of 'the Arabs' were viable routes to the truth. Common sense about human experience was out: resounding pronouncements about the clash of civilisations were in (Samuel Huntington derived his lucrative concept from one of Lewis's essays about the 'return of Islam'). A generalist and an ideologue, Lewis found a new audience within the American Zionist lobby to whom, in journals such as Commentary and later the New York Review of Books, he addressed his tendentious pontifications."

[...]

"Another thought-stopping premise underlying the campaign in Iraq is that the map of the Middle East can be redrawn in such a way as to set in motion a 'domino effect' that will introduce Israel-friendly democracies all over the territory. According to this model, the Iraqi people are a blank sheet on which to inscribe the ideas of William Kristol, Robert Kagan and other deep thinkers of the Far Right. As I said in an earlier article for the LRB (17 October 2002), such ideas were first tried out by Ariel Sharon in Lebanon during the 1982 invasion, and then more recently in Palestine, where, in terms of security, peace and subaltern compliance, there's been nothing to show for it."