The Heyday of the Dead

The skull has lost virtually all of its fearsome meaning.

The Treasury reported this week that foreign central banks were net sellers of Treasuries in May, as they had been in March. The May sales, of $14.3 billion, were the largest for any month since August 1998, when the United States government was running surpluses and the supply of Treasuries was shrinking.

Democrats to Map Out Election Message

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By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Published: July 27, 2006

Filed at 7:38 a.m. ET

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Democrats plan to press for a minimum wage increase and ''tough, smart'' national security in their final push to wrest power from the Republicans in the November elections.

House and Senate Democrats will hold a joint meeting on Thursday to discuss events planned for the 100 days leading up to midterm congressional elections and lay out their party agenda, called ''A New Direction for America.''

As usual, Israel is radicalizing the Muslim world. The US, too, will suffer.

Zawahiri has turned to pan Islam and the Near Enemy. He is willing to help Nasrallah and the Qassam Brigades. It is a historic about face. It could be significant. More later.

"What's sad is that the 'war on terror' began as a fairly straightforward affair. Al Qaeda hit us. Then we went after Al Qaeda. . . . We had a lot of support around the world in pursuit of our mission to hunt these men down, kill them or capture them and do with them as we pleased.

"But inexorably, month by month, the Bush administration broadened the war on terror to include ever more peoples and countries, especially Saddam's Iraq, relying on thinner and thinner evidence to do so. And what began as a hunt for a relatively contained group of self-declared murderers like bin Laden became a feckless dragnet of tens of thousands of hapless Arab victims. . . .

"Today, more from the muddled strategic thinking of the Bush administration than the actual threat from Al Qaeda, the 'war on terror' has become an Orwellian nightmare: an ill-defined war without prospect of end. We are now nearly five years into a war against a group that was said to contain no more then 500 to 1,000 terrorists at the start. . . . The war just grows and grows. And now Lebanon, too, is part of it."

Jonathan Freedland (here's his bio ) writes in the Guardian: "It's fashionable to blame the US for all the world's ills, but in this case the sins, both of omission and commission, of the Bush administration genuinely belong at the heart of the trouble. . . .

"Bush's animating idea has been that the peoples of the Middle East can be bombed into democracy and terrorised into moderation. It has proved one of the great lethal mistakes of his abominable presidency -- and the peoples of Israel and Lebanon are paying the price."