Maybe Bush needs a Foreign Policy Czar, but things don't look good for his War Czar (scapegoat)

[ProSense]

Middle East:

Israel pummels Hamas targets in Gaza

by Adel Zaanoun

GAZA CITY (AFP) - Israel bombed Hamas targets in Gaza on Friday as rival Palestinian factions continued to battle in the streets of the impoverished coastal strip amid growing international appeals for calm.

US President George W. Bush urged all parties to work towards a two-state solution and the Organisation of the Islamic Conference called for the United Nations to intervene.

Life in Gaza was at a standstill with shops shuttered, schools shut, mosques empty and masked gunmen roaming the streets.

"For one week, death strikes us from everywhere," said Um Hossam, 29, from Gaza City. "Israel is killing us from the air and Hamas and Fatah are killing us from the ground."

In the latest Israeli strike, warplanes targeted a Hamas post in southern Gaza, without causing any casualties. Five militants were killed in an early morning raid in Gaza City, medics said.

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Pakistan:

As Pakistan goes, so goes a war

Fri May 18, 4:00 AM ET

After 9/11, the US had little choice but to rely on Pakistan to free Afghanistan of Al Qaeda and the Taliban – and to try to keep it that way. But since March, Pakistan's ruler has lost popular support. Gen. Pervez Musharraf looks less reliable as an ally in the war on Islamic terrorists.

Washington now faces a difficult decision. Middle-class protests against Mr. Musharraf have risen in recent months, triggered by his ouster of the Supreme Court's chief justice. Violent incidents, such as 42 demonstrators killed in Karachi last weekend, have raised alarm at home and abroad. Support by the military may be fading.

Despite his success in boosting the economy and helping to capture or kill key leaders of Al Qaeda and the Taliban, the man who took power in a 1999 coup could be headed for a dangerous downfall.

Unless, of course, the US and other Western powers help arrange a peaceful transition to a less-polarizing figure and to a better form of democracy than Musharraf has tried to manufacture in Pakistan.

For too many years, the Bush administration has shown too much interest in Musharraf as a short-term strategic partner in a hot war and not enough on whether he could deliver a stable democracy that could maintain a long-term struggle against radical Islamists. And the US has largely agreed with him – and many Pakistanis – that the country's history of inept civilian rule demands some sort of strong military hand in government.

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A general state of disarray

May 17th 2007 | ISLAMABAD, KARACHI AND LAHORE
From The Economist print edition

A slaughter in Karachi, and a vengeful judge, are signs that Pervez Musharraf is struggling to remain in power

ON MAY 12th the port mega-city of Karachi, a great and seething Asian bazaar, returned to the violence that has scarred its modern history. Around 40 people were killed and scores injured in two days of gun battles. Corpses were dragged from shot-up cars and displayed on the tarmac. Along Shahrah-e-Faisal, the main thoroughfare, shop-fronts were smashed and set ablaze. As the carnage spread, 15,000 police and paramilitary troops stood by, unwilling or unable to intervene.

Many reports suggest the violence was perpetrated by Karachi's ruling party, the Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM), an ethnically-based mafia allied with Pakistan's president and army chief, General Pervez Musharraf. Its target was an anti-government rally planned for Karachi on May 12th, at which thousands of lawyers and opposition supporters were to protest against General Musharraf's efforts to remove the head of Pakistan's Supreme Court, Iftikhar Chaudhry. Mr Chaudhry was due to address the rally.

If the MQM meant to deter General Musharraf's opponents with violence, it failed. On May 14th opposition parties called a national strike to condemn the slaughter. They included the parties of two exiled former prime ministers, Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif, and a coalition of Islamists, the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal (MMA). The MMA once backed the general, as Islamists in Pakistan usually have; but not any more. With an election due this year, Pakistani democracy is stirring from the coma it slipped into eight years ago, when General Musharraf seized power.

Its awakening, if that is what it is, may be traced to March 9th and a previously unimaginable event. In the presence of six other uniformed generals, at his army headquarters in Rawalpindi, General Musharraf ordered Mr Chaudhry to resign. The judge—eccentric, vain, some say incompetent—had upset his colleagues on the bench, and had given populist rulings against the government. More audaciously, he had demanded investigations into several of an alleged 400 cases where people have disappeared, mostly from his native Baluchistan, where an insurgency is flickering. These were probably the work of the powerful military intelligence agency, whose boss was one of the generals present.



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Afghanistan:

Death of a Talib

May 17th 2007 | KABUL
From The Economist print edition

But not of the Taliban

A CORPSE with one leg and three bullet holes; few would have been surprised at such an end for Mullah Dadullah Akhund, who was killed by American forces this week in Afghanistan. Like Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in Iraq, to whom he was often compared, the Taliban's most notorious commander mixed extreme rhetoric and brutality with an appetite for publicity.

Dadullah was revered by his fighters, but was also foolhardy and as careless with the lives of his men as he was thoughtless for his own safety. According to Rahimullah Yusufzai, a Pakistani authority on the Taliban, Dadullah was thought “too big for his shoes” by others in the organisation. Some commanders complained of his enthusiasm for sectarian massacres of Shia civilians and his refusal to listen to orders. Others thought his self-serving videos, with their frequent beheading sequences, were counter-productive or simply “un-Afghan”. He was stripped of his command three times during the Taliban's rise to power.

His death is a blow to the insurgency and a boost to the Afghan government, not least because it is the third strike against the Taliban's old Kandahar-based leadership in the past six months. Of the three closest deputies to Mullah Omar, the Taliban's leader, Dadullah and Mullah Osmani are dead and Mullah Obaidullah is reported to be under arrest by the Pakistani government.

The intriguing question is whether Dadullah's death reveals divisions in the Taliban that might open the way for possible negotiations. There are suggestions he may have been betrayed. Certainly Western commanders are not going to do anything to allay the paranoia over internal security evident in Taliban ranks. American forces were watching Dadullah from the moment he crossed the Pakistani border into Helmand province on May 10th; they killed him within 24 hours.

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Iraq:

Editorial

Gen. Fix-it or Gen. Exit?

Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute takes on the oddest job in Washington. Ostensibly, he is President Bush's war czar to oversee fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, but he really has been promoted to a hopeless, futile position.

None of the descriptions appended to his task sound accurate. He is a three-star general in a four-star world, and he will be a deputy national-security adviser. Emphasis on deputy. He will not have the unlimited power of a czar or the authority of a referee to call operational or policy fouls. Lute will attempt to coordinate a war with no discernible strategy. Why is this job necessary going into the fifth year of a disastrous conflict? The question may sound as if it answers itself, but it begs another question: Where is the president, variously self-described as the commander and the decider for the war?

Did the secretary of defense, Joint Chiefs of Staff, secretary of state and Lute's immediate boss, national-security adviser Stephen Hadley, fall off the face of the Earth?

Lute will not manage any of those folks, nor is he likely to boss around senior commanders in the field. One cannot imagine Army Gen. David Petraeus deferring to a junior-ranking interloper in Washington, D.C.

Creation of the job reveals a sad truth and hearty measures of wishful thinking. For four bloody years of fighting in Iraq, key players in the top military and civilian tiers of the Bush administration would not or could not talk to one another. Lute is a desperate attempt to bridge those gaps.

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[TwilightGardener]

1. Well, that SHOULD be Condi, but then the "War Czar" SHOULD

be Chimpy or the SecDef--multiple layers of incompetency going on here.

[global1]

2. And A Domestic Policy Czar; A Energy Policy Czar; A Health Care Policy Czar;....

An Immigration Policy Czar; etc, etc, etc.

He needs a scapegoat for whenever he opens his mouth.

[havocmom]

3. In bush-speak, Czar = designated whipping boy/scapegoat/sacrifical goat

All the responsibility, no real sway with policy in the land of the Unitary Executive.

Anybody who would take a job with the criminal administration now is fucking insane.