John McCain resays what he really meant to say when he said what he didn't mean to say

My friends, I will have an energy policy that we will be talking about, which will eliminate our dependence on oil from the Middle East that will - that will then prevent us - that will prevent us from having ever to send our young men and women into conflict again in the Middle East.

His explanation (via Atrios and Think Progress):

But then when specifically asked by an Associated Press reporter if, when he made the statement, he was “thinking about the first Gulf War,” he said no.

“No, I was thinking about- it’s not hard to- we will not,” McCain stumbled. “By eliminating our dependency on foreign oil, we will not have to have our national security threatened by a cut off of that oil. Because we will be dependent, because we won’t be dependent, we will no longer be dependent on foreign oil. That’s what my remarks were.”

Right. McCain sure doesn't play the Bush "who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?" game very well, does he?

The incompetence of Condi

Condi Rice went to the Middle East to get the peace process back on track:

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has held talks with Egyptian officials, the first stage of a trip aimed at saving Israeli-Palestinian peace talks.

Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas broke off contacts with Israel in protest at its recent offensive in Gaza, which has left more than 110 Palestinians dead.

Ms Rice said the US was concerned about the toll of innocent life, but blamed Hamas for triggering the bloodshed.

She said talks must not be sabotaged by those rejecting a peace deal.

Ms Rice headed on to Israel and the West Bank for further negotiations with Israeli and Palestinian leaders.

Yet still the circle of violence and the helplessness of those caught in its vortex continues:

Israeli tanks and infantry moved out of Gaza before dawn today after a five day operation to kill militants that left more than 110 Palestinians dead, including 22 children.

Hopes that the incursion had ended the barrage of Palestinian rockets raining down from Gaza on Israeli border towns proved in vain, however, when three missiles hit the resort town of Ashkelon this morning, damaging an apartment building. No-one was hurt.

Israel said that its withdrawal did not mean it was scaling back its operation against the Islamists, but merely suspending it temporarily for a two day visit by Condoleezza Rice, the US Secretary of State.

“This very limited (Gaza) operation was intended to show Hamas what could happen, what you may call a ’prequel’,” said an Israeli official.

So then:

The killing of eight people at a Jewish religious college by a Palestinian gunman will not derail peace talks, the Israeli government has said.

The gunman was shot dead after opening fire with an assault rifle inside a crowded library at the Mercaz Harav seminary in West Jerusalem.

Israeli police said the attacker was a Palestinian resident of East Jerusalem.

Some Israelis have called for peace talks with the Palestinians to end but Israel has said they will continue.

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas condemned his Hamas rivals - who are in control of Gaza - for hailing the attack.

Hamas described the shooting as a "natural reaction" to Israeli military actions in the Gaza Strip last week that left more than 120 Palestinians dead.

And in Gaza:

Gaza's humanitarian situation is at its worst since Israel occupied the territory in 1967, say UK-based human rights and development groups.

They include Amnesty International, Save the Children, Cafod, Care International and Christian Aid.

They criticise Israel's blockade on Gaza as illegal collective punishment which fails to deliver security.

Israel says its military action and other measures are lawful and needed to stop rocket attacks from Gaza.

Israel pulled its troops and settlers out of the Gaza Strip in 2005, but retains control over Gaza's airspace and coastline, and over its own border with the territory.

And into this confusion and endless retaliations we send ....

There is no plan. There never has been a plan...

For Iraq... for Israel ... for peace:

New York Times reporter Philip Shenon’s new book — The Commission: The Uncensored History of the 9/11 Investigation — paints a damning portrait of Condoleezza Rice. Shenon argues that Rice was “uninterested in actually advising the President,” but was instead more concerned with being his “closest confidante — specifically on foreign policy — and to simply translate his words into action.”

Today’s Sydney Morning Herald prints an extract from Shenon’s book which provides further details about Rice’s incompetence. “Emails from the National Security Council’s counter-terrorism director, Richard Clarke, showed that he had bombarded Rice with messages about terrorist threats” before 9/11, Shenon writes.

[snip]

The former weapons inspector in Iraq — David Kay — passed word to the 9/11 Commission that he believed Rice was the “worst national security adviser” in the history of the job.

Wait... I have a picture for this 'closest confidante' thing:



and maybe even a love letter?



No? Then this one of Rice and her husb... the president will do:



Incompetence has its own reward:

In 2005, an “unprecedented 19 reporters” accompanied Condoleezza Rice on her first trip overseas as Secretary of State. Now, however, things have changed. The Washington Post reports that “vastly fewer reporters” joined Rice on her latest trip to the Middle East:

The three wire services–Associated Press, Reuters and Agence-France Presse–are on board. Bloomberg News and National Public Radio took seats. But only three newspapers–The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Washington Times–are on the plane, down from the standard five. And the networks did not even bother to send a camera crew, let alone a correspondent.

Sidney Blumenthal in 2006 wrote:

A few months after Rice became secretary of state, in July 2005, she transported senior staff to a West Virginia retreat where her head of policy planning, Stephen Krasner, delivered a lecture on the Peace of Westphalia followed by one on the Truman Doctrine to explain the magnitude of Rice - and Bush's - ambition for "transformational diplomacy".

This May, as the situation in Iraq drastically worsened, Rice told senior staff that she wants no more reporting from the embassies. She announced in a meeting that people write memos only for each other, and that no one else reads them. She said she wouldn't read them. Instead of writing reports, the diplomats should "sell America", she insisted. "We are salesmen for America!"

On Tuesday, kicking off the mid-term elections campaign, Bush delivered a speech that cited Bin Laden's screeds, Lenin's What Is To Be Done? and Hitler's Mein Kampf, and promised "complete victory". Rice contributed her own comparison of the "war on terror" to the American civil war. "I'm sure there are people who thought it was a mistake to fight the civil war to its end and to insist that the emancipation of slaves would hold," she said.

But the more delirious the rhetoric, the more hollow the policy. "There is no plan for Iraq," a senior national security official with the highest intelligence clearance and access to the relevant memos told me. "There is no plan."

We have an incompetent president who has surrounded himself with incompetent sycophants.

Isolating the Middle East?

Bryan of Why Now? noted when it was three cables and then four... but now...

Five (5)! undersea cables have been cut, affecting Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, India, Malaysia, Iran, Egypt, and Dubai:

DUBAI — An estimated 1.7 million Internet users in the UAE have been affected by the recent undersea cable damage, an expert said yesterday, quoting recent figures published by TeleGeography, an international research Web site.

Internet data was majorly affected as it is the biggest capacity carried by the undersea cables.

However, all voice calls, corporate data and video traffic were also affected.

Two du experts yesterday briefed the media on the current methods being undertaken by the telecom provider to re-route the Internet traffic to provide normalcy to the users.

Quoting TeleGeography and describing the effect the cuts had on the Internet world, Mahesh Jaishanker, executive director, Business Development and Marketing, du, said, “The submarine cable cuts in FLAG Europe-Asia cable 8.3km away from Alexandria, Egypt and SeaMeWe-4 affected at least 60 million users in India, 12 million in Pakistan, six million in Egypt and 4.7 million in Saudi Arabia.”

A total of five cables being operated by two submarine cable operators have been damaged with a fault in each.

These are SeaMeWe-4 (South East Asia-Middle East-Western Europe-4) near Penang, Malaysia, the FLAG Europe-Asia near Alexandria, FLAG near the Dubai coast, FALCON near Bandar Abbas in Iran and SeaMeWe-4, also near Alexandria.

Who the hell is behind this? The Bush administration or Osama bin Laden? Hard to tell between the two terrorist organizations....

No 70 virgins?

70 RAISINS?

There seems to be a discrepancy in the history and translation of the Koran:

Islam watchers blogged all weekend about news that a secret archive of ancient Islamic texts had surfaced after 60 years of suppression. Andrew Higgins' Wall Street Journal report that the photographic record of Koranic manuscripts, supposedly destroyed during World War II but occulted by a scholar of alleged Nazi sympathies, reads like a conflation of the Da Vinci Code with Indiana Jones and the Holy Grail.

Why would the Nazis care? I think they were doing all sorts of work setting up for their 1000 year Reich and were into all sorts of research. (Hard work creating your own reality, you know.) Why would they keep a variant of the Koran yet suppress it?:

Why were the Nazis so eager to suppress Koranic criticism? Most likely, the answer lies in their alliance with Islamist leaders, who shared their hatred of the Jews and also sought leverage against the British in the Middle East.

What will happen now?

When the Atlantic Monthly story on Koranic criticism appeared nine years ago, author Toby Lester expected early results from the Yemeni finds.

Von Bothmer, Puin, and other scholars will finally have a chance to scrutinize the texts and to publish their findings freely - a prospect that thrills Puin. "So many Muslims have this belief that everything between the two covers of the Koran is just God's unaltered word," he says. "They like to quote the textual work that shows that the Bible has a history and did not fall straight out of the sky, but until now the Koran has been out of this discussion. The only way to break through this wall is to prove that the Koran has a history too. The Sana'a fragments will help us to do this.

In 2005, Puin published a collection of articles under the title, Die dunklen Anfange. Neue Forschungen zur Entstehung und fruhen Geschichte des Islam ("The dark beginnings: new research on the origin and early history of Islam," Hans Schiller Verlag, 2005). This drew on the work of the pseudonymous German philologist "Christoph Luxenburg", who sought to prove that incomprehensible passages in the Koran were written in Syriac-Aramaic rather than Arabic. Luxenburg's thesis became notorious for explaining that the "virgins" provided to Islamic jihadis in paradise were only raisins. The Koran, according to the research of Puin and his associates, copied a great deal of extant Christian material.

[snip]

The Islamic world is forced to adopt an openly irrational stance, employing its power to intimidate scholars and frustrate the search for truth. It is impossible for Muslims to propose a dialogue with Western religions, as 38 Islamic scholars did in an October 13 letter to Pope Benedict XVI and other Christian leaders, and rule the subject of text criticism out of the discussion.

[snip]

Throughout the Internet, Islamist sites denounce the work of a handful of marginalized scholars as evidence of a plot by Christian missionaries to sabotage Islam. What the Muslim world cannot conceal is its vulnerability and fear in the face of Koranic criticism. In the great battle for converts through the Global South, this may turn out to be a paralyzing disadvantage.

Sounds vaguely like some of our own homegrown fundamentalists who become rabid and froth at the mouth when challenged on biblical translation....

We need this really big arena where all religious literalists can gather clutching their own specific translation of their holy book. Then they can attack each other with their gospels and hymnals. Last one standing wins....

Update: Suggested in comments by DistributorCap:

Peace on earth, good will to men

Blackwater wants you to know they are peacekeepers.

And I suppose we should start apologizing now.... Georgie is planning a bunch of furrin trips:

At his year-end press conference last week, President Bush said “I go around spreading good will” to other countries. His schedule next year will test his ability to spread good will:

In early January, Bush flies to Israel for his first visit as president. While in the region, he also will visit the West Bank, Kuwait, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Egypt. The trip is a follow-up to the Israeli-Palestinian talks that the U.S. hosted in Annapolis, Maryland, last month.

In February, Bush will tour Africa, where U.S. public health initiatives are popular. That will be followed by an April North Atlantic Treaty Organization summit in Romania, a June U.S.-European summit in Slovenia, a July meeting of Group of Eight leaders in Japan, the summer Olympics in China and a November Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum in Peru. Bush is likely to visit other, nearby countries during those trips.

Jim Jeffrey, the deputy White House national security adviser, said, “We want to be well-perceived in the world.”

Besides choking on my tea when I saw there actually is a Jimmy/Jeff in the White House (is he bald?), this last line apparently was said with a straight face and no trace of irony....

Even the Germans can tell

Georgie just doesn't give a shit:

Bush's Half-Hearted Summit
US President George W. Bush plays host this week to a massive summit aimed at pushing the Middle East peace process forward. Expectations, though, are low. Many doubt that Bush is truly dedicated to the project.
[snip]
Officially the United States is the proud host, welcoming high-ranking representatives from 49 countries and organizations to the summit with the intention of exploring possible paths to peace between the Israelis and Palestinians. The countries represented even include Saudi Arabia and Syria, neither of which was present at the last major US negotiation initiative, Bill Clinton's 2000 Camp David summit. All the parties are meeting on Tuesday on the premises of the picturesque Annapolis Naval Academy in the state of Maryland, where a banner in one room features the encouraging motto: "Don't give up the ship!"

But even before the first speech was held at the conference, many observers had already abandoned any hope of significant progress. "All the participants have the fear of failure on their minds rather than the hope of success," Tamara Cofman Wittes from the Brookings Institution told SPIEGEL ONLINE, adding that the key protagonists -- US President George W. Bush, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert -- are all very weak domestically.

Georgie offers his idea for fixing the Israeli/Palestine problem....

Don't diplomats use big words?

Maybe that's why Georgie doesn't have this meeting high on the agenda:

Steve Benen of Crooks and Liars:

The good news is, the administration is now poised to hold a major Middle East peace conference. The bad news is, no one seems to have any idea who’s coming, when they’ll meet, or what they’ll do.

[N]o conference date has been set. No invitations have been issued. And no one really agrees on what the participants will actually talk about once they arrive at the Naval Academy for the meeting, which is intended to relaunch Bush’s stillborn “road map” plan to create a Palestinian state.

“No one seems to know what is happening,” one senior Arab envoy said last week, speaking on condition of anonymity to avoid appearing out of the loop. “I am completely lost.”

Incompetence. Nobody does it better.

That boat has already sailed, that test has already been graded

That bird has already flown. What on earth have you guys been doing for the last seven years?

JERUSALEM (AP) -- In an effort to salvage a Middle East peace conference planned for next month, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice hoped to find some common ground during a meeting Monday with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.

After her first round of talks with Israeli leaders on Sunday, State Department officials indicated the conference, called by President Bush, might have to be postponed.

[snip]

Heads of negotiating teams have been appointed only in recent days - former Palestinian premier Ahmed Qureia last week and Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni on Sunday - and officials said they would meet for the first time later this week, six weeks before the tentative date of the Mideast gathering.

After Rice's first series of meetings Sunday, a senior State Department official hinted that the date could slide.

"This is going to take some time," the official told reporters on condition of anonymity to describe the private conversations. "This is going to require a lot of hands-on American diplomacy. These are really tough issues."

Rice cautioned against expecting breakthroughs during her four days of meetings, punctuated by a trip to Cairo and followed by talks in London with the king of Jordan.

Olmert also appeared to scale back hopes for broad agreement before the conference.

Hands-on diplomacy? Does the Bush administration have any diplomats left? And to help things along, there's this from John Dugard:

Earlier this year, in his role as special rapporteur to the UN Human Rights Council for the Palestinian Territories, the South African law professor wrote a report for the UN General Assembly in which he compared Israel's actions to those of apartheid South Africa.

Indeed, the word "apartheid" appears 24 times in the 24-page report.

But in his interview with the BBC, Mr Dugard goes further than before.

He has been trenchant in his belief in the past seven years that he has held the UN post that Israel is collectively punishing the Palestinians.

Now, though, he has the international community, and the UN itself, in his sights for complicity.

[snip]

Although some inside Israel agree that the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza has distorted and damaged Israel's democratic values, there are plenty who will say Mr Dugard's view is one-sided.

They will argue that condemnation of the restrictions on Palestinians' freedom of movement fails to take into account the right of Israelis to live free from terrorist attack.

Mr Dugard's argument - again shared by some inside Israel - is that the military occupation fuels what he calls "resistance".

And, in an unusually harsh warning from a senior UN official, he worries aloud about how high the Palestinian leadership is raising expectations ahead of next month's scheduled peace conference with Israel.

If, as he fears, those expectations are not met, then, he says, a third intifada could be unleashed.

And he compares the actions of Palestinian militants to those of the French Resistance during World War II.

I put it to Mr Dugard that that comparison in particular would be very difficult for some to stomach. He was unabashed.

"History is replete with examples of populations that have resisted military occupation," he said.

"I can't see why one shouldn't draw these analogies."

It sounds like a lot of heavy duty homework for a C student....

For those who declare that it doesn't matter how we got into this quagmire

And all we have to do is figure how to get out of it, I give you this response (Via Digby at Hullabaloo, Gary Kamiya at Salon) (my bold):

Like a vibration that causes a bridge to collapse, the 9/11 attacks exposed grave weaknesses in our nation's defenses, our national institutions and ultimately our national character. Many more Americans have now died in a needless war in Iraq than were killed in the terror attacks, and tens of thousands more grievously wounded. Billions of dollars have been wasted. America's moral authority, more precious than gold, has been tarnished by torture and lies and the erosion of our liberties. The world despises us to an unprecedented degree. An entire country has been wrecked. The Middle East is ready to explode. And the threat of terrorism, which the war was intended to remove, is much greater than it was.

All of this flowed from our response to 9/11. And so, six years later, we need to do more than mourn the dead. We need to acknowledge the blindness and bigotry that drove our response. Until we do, not only will the stalemate over Iraq persist, but our entire Middle Eastern policy will continue down the road to ruin.

We can do both, figure out how we got to this low point in our nation's history as well as figure out how to remove ourselves from the bottomless quagmire we've been steered into.

We must do both.

Look who is representing us abroad as the voice of America?

The neocons who are planning to 'fix' Bush's messes. Why does this not fill me with confidence?

Neo-cons take spin to US-backed airwaves

By Khody Akhavi

WASHINGTON - As the administration of US President George W Bush struggles through its last two years in office, it appears that the agenda of neo-conservative ideologues has finally lost its appeal among strategic parts of the US foreign-policy apparatus.

But as their influence has waned at the Pentagon and State Department, neo-conservative hawks have taken charge on the battlefield of public diplomacy.

Intent on fixing what American Enterprise Institute (AEI) fellow Joshua Muravchik termed President Bush's "public diplomacy mess", right-wing hawks have gained control of the weapons in the "war of ideas" - US government-funded and supported media outlets such as Voice of America (VOA), Al-Hurra, and Radio Farda, which broadcast to the Middle East and aim to offer an alternative view of the news.

The recent appointment of Jeffrey Gedmin, a veteran neo-conservative polemicist, as the director of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE), and a smear campaign that led to the recent resignation of Larry Register, Al-Hurra's former news director, appears to herald a turn toward more ideologically rigid programming.

As a result, viewers and listeners of US-supported media in the Middle East are being exposed to a tougher ideological line that endorses the hallmarks of the neo-conservative agenda - regime change and interventionist policies in the region.

Lovely. The neocons and their beloved PNAC need to be dragged out into the sunlight and dosed with bleach. There needs to be a public discussion as to why the neoconservative agenda is not American, or else we will be dealing with yet another hijacking of our government in thirty years or so.

Why Pelosi is so dangerous even without her headscarf

To the neocon mindset:

..., the war against Pelosi is a rear-guard assault by the White House against moderates and liberals in both political parties who understand that the failed Bush policies have jeopardized American interests and hurt the Mideast peace process. What Wolf and Pelosi have in common is their endorsement of the Iraq Study Group's proposals, which emphasize regional diplomacy, including direct talks with both Syria and Iran. Indeed, it was Wolf who first approached James Baker about undertaking the Iraq report, and who sponsored the legislation that paid for the group's work.

The neoconservatives, both within and outside the White House, resent Pelosi for publicly dissenting from their ideology of war and their rejection of diplomacy. Their own vision has collapsed in ruins; they have gravely harmed the American military and discredited the ideals of democracy, and they have run out of ideas. That sucking sound is the vacuum of their minds.

Now in their bankruptcy, they can only smear those who, like Speaker Pelosi, are attempting to promote a bipartisan alternative. Let us hope she possesses the courage to continue that crucial mission.

But Pelosi's visit to Damascus had this reaction there:

"There is a feeling now that change is going on in American policy- even if it's being led by the opposition," said Ziad Haider, Damascus bureau chief for Al Safir, a leftist Lebanese daily. Syrian officials are increasingly betting on improved relations with American Democrats, whom they expect to lead the United States in coming years, Mr. Haider said. "Pelosi's approach represents a more practical policy; the administration's policy over the last few years has been based on demands and ideology," he said.

In Damascus's old section where Ms. Pelosi's name had become a household word, many spoke optimistically of an impending change in relations.

"Ms. Pelosi is going to be very happy in Syria," said Izzat Abdoulkarim, who runs an optical shop in downtown Damascus. "George Bush says we are bad, but she will see this is not true."

He added, emphatically: "She views the world through a different perspective than Bush. She's more open-minded."

Things that make you go hmmm... or aaaarrrggghhh depending

This article:

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian president, has marked the 28th anniversary of Iran's revolution by pledging to maintain the country's nuclear programme, but adding that he wanted to remain within international rules.

"We are ready for talks, but will not suspend our activities," he said in a speech broadcast on state television on Sunday.

Along with this article:

Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, has arrived in Saudi Arabia on the first leg of a three-day tour of the Middle East aimed at building energy and military ties with traditional US allies.

The tour began a day after Iran asked Putin to block any UN resolutions passed against it when a deadline to halt nuclear work expires on February 21.

Along with this article:

MUNICH, Feb. 10 -- Russian President Vladimir Putin, in some of his harshest criticism of the United States since he took office seven years ago, said Saturday that Washington's unilateral, militaristic approach had made the world a more dangerous place than at any time during the Cold War.

"The United States has overstepped its national borders in every way," he said in an address at an annual international security conference here. "Nobody feels secure anymore, because nobody can take safety behind the stone wall of international law."

Although the US brushed off the criticism:

But Washington has clearly decided to politely brush aside Mr Putin's remarks rather than to escalate tensions with Russia.

Making his first appearance at the conference as the new US Defence Secretary, Robert Gates tried to deflate President Putin's attack by poking a bit of fun at their past careers as spies.

"As an old Cold Warrior," he said, "one of yesterday's speakers almost filled me with nostalgia for a less complex time. Almost.

" Many of you have backgrounds in diplomacy or politics. I have, like your second speaker yesterday, a starkly different background - a career in the spy business.

"And, I guess, old spies have a habit of blunt speaking"

Mr Gates bluntly said there was no new Cold War and that the US certainly did not want one.

We know that the PNAC neocons remember fondly the good old days when the USSR was the evil empire, defense spending unquestioned, and the world chess board game was easier to play than fighting stateless terrorism. Condi's 'strength' was purportedly the Soviet Union. Could they thinking 'wouldn't it be nice to go back to the 1960s'?

Or are they still working on the old plan to piss everyone in the world off?

Update: This is interesting: (my bold)

It is seldom that the Russian president is publicly contradicted by officials in Moscow. But in the Russian reaction to Tehran's proposal for formal cooperation among the major gas-producing countries, it happened.

Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei conveyed the Iranian suggestion to the visiting secretary general of Russia's National Security Council, Igor Ivanov, in Tehran on January 28. The next day, Russia's Gazprom reacted in Moscow that "establishing a gas OPEC [Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries] is impossible because of different structuring of the oil and gas business".

A spokesman of the Russian Economic Development and Trade Ministry also reacted sharply: "I do not understand why Russia would need to create a gas cartel - I do not see any sense in it. The more so as Iran is now coming under serious external pressure." The official asked: "Why should we undertake commitments to synchronize our actions, why force ourselves into regulatory frameworks which could boil down to setting quotas?"

Then came a structured Russian position when Ivanov put the Iranian proposal in perspective at a press briefing in Moscow this Tuesday. He said the Iranian side mentioned the idea "not as a question or proposal for discussion, but as a general idea that natural-gas producers should seek such forms of cooperation, which fully supports their interests. As far as I know, no talks on setting up a cartel are under way."

But two days later, at a press conference in Moscow, President Vladimir Putin took a giant leap forward. He said, "A gas OPEC is an interesting idea, and we will think about it. In this initial stage we will agree with the Iranian specialists, with our Iranian partners and with some of the other countries that are large suppliers of fossil fuels, above all gas, to world markets, and we are already trying to coordinate our activities on the markets of third countries. We plan to continue doing so in future."

Putin added, "We have no plans to create some kind of a cartel, but I think it would be a good idea to coordinate our activities, especially in the context of achieving our main aim of ensuring a certain and reliable supply of energy resources for our main consumers."
However, five days later, Russian Energy Minister Viktor Khristenko was still at Square 1. "Fantasies about cartels and 'gas OPECs' are products of a sick imagination," he said.

So what's the problem? First, Moscow wanted to see that alarm bells didn't ring in Western capitals, especially when a top-level European Union delegation was due to visit Moscow. In the West, sweat breaks out at the very mention of "cartel", invoking images of production quotas, price rigging, and so on. Second, Moscow knows that a "gas OPEC" is still a decade away from realization, given the regional structure of the market, absence of a floating gas price (gas is mostly price-indexed to petroleum), double dependency resulting from the transportation through pipelines (gas-carrier ships are nowhere near meeting the needs of transportation) and the prevalence of long-term contracts between the supplier and the consumer, and, of course, the absence of a developed gas-liquefaction infrastructure.

Third, a masterly stroke in ambiguity doesn't do Russian interests any harm. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization has visualized that it is a matter of time before a "gas OPEC" takes shape. On the sidelines of the last NATO summit, in Latvia in November, there were calls for the formation of a "gas NATO" that is geared to safeguarding the energy security of Western consumer countries.

Thanks to Russian ingenuity, between the illusion and the reality of a "gas OPEC" a gray zone has appeared, with no certainty that this zone will not incrementally become the reality itself.

[snip]

Clearly, Tehran has sized up the growing assertiveness in Russian regional policies and is keen to harness it geopolitically. But more important, Tehran has signaled to European capitals that they may have to pay a heavy price for any further identification with the US policy toward Iran. The fact that the

Iranian proposal on the "gas OPEC" as made by spiritual leader Khamenei should leave Western capitals in no doubt that Tehran is not scoring a propaganda point. They must now rethink before imposing unilateral sanctions on Iran.

Iran is the "last frontier" for European countries seeking to access natural gas from the Middle East. By 2015-20, Europe will face serious gas shortages, even if Russia augments its supplies via the Northern European pipeline. Tehran knows it is a "special case" for European countries. Tehran was hoping all along that it could normalize relations with the European Union, and that it would receive serious economic and political carte blanche.

NTodd at Dohiyi Mir notes the similarities between Bush and Putin, both of them 'vile, anti-democratic creatures'.

Step by step replay

We are just waiting for the Pearl Harbor moment.

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) -- A second U.S. aircraft carrier strike group now steaming toward the Middle East is Washington's way of warning Iran to back down in its attempts to dominate the region, a top U.S. diplomat said here Tuesday. Nicholas Burns, U.S. undersecretary of state for political affairs, ruled out direct negotiations with Iran and said a rapprochement between Washington and Tehran was "not possible" until Iran halts uranium enrichment.

If we talk to Iran we would actually have to come to an understanding which means the Iranians get to sit at the same table which means we'd have to acknowledge they are equals to the macho mighty muscly Bush administration who apparently is incapable of listening to anyone. Further in the article (my bold):

"Iran is going to have to understand that the United States will protect its interests if Iran seeks to confront us," Burns continued.
[snip]
Ahmadinejad said last week that Iran is "ready for anything" in its confrontation with the United States.

Iran conducted missile tests on Monday, the first of five days of military maneuvers southeast of Tehran.

U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates has said the U.S. buildup in the Gulf was intended to impress on Iran that the four-year war in Iraq has not made America vulnerable.
[snip]
Some among the audience of Dubai-based diplomats and analysts complained that American wars in the Middle East were already threatening the region's stability and asked Burns to sort out Iraq and the Israel-Palestinian conflict before turning attention to Iran.

"What we are not interested in is another war in the region," Mohammed al-Naqbi, who heads the Gulf Negotiations Center, told Burns. "Iraq is your problem, not the problem of the Arabs. You destroyed a country that had institutions. You handed that country to Iran. Now you are crying to Europe and the Arabs to help you out of this mess."

Burns' speech appeared to respond to similar comments by Iranian officials in Dubai and Bahrain last month. In December, Iran's top national security adviser, Ali Larijani, appealed to Gulf Arabs to shut down American bases on their soil and instead join Iran in a regional security alliance.

According to the brilliant tacticians in the White House

Attacking Iran and the resulting firestorm will actually calm down Iraq so democracy and corporate greed can take place. (my bold)

(W Joseph Stroupe is author of the new book entitled Russian Rubicon: Impending Checkmate of the West and editor of Global Events Magazine online at www.GeoStrategyMap.com.)

Kuwaiti media reports in the Arab Times on January 14, written by the Times' editor-in-chief Ahmed al-Jarallah and based on a "reliable source", relay that the US/British naval buildup underway in and around the Persian Gulf is designed, not merely to "send Iran a signal", but to put in place all assets necessary for a massive air strike on Iran, likely by April.

And according to reports from the Chinese news agency Xinhua, the US and Britain "believe that attacking Iran will create a new power balance in the region, calming down the situation in Iraq and paving the way for their democratic project".

Obviously, the US and Britain wish to roll back Iran's regional advances and restore the rough balance of power that existed between Iran and the region's Sunni regimes prior to the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

The West has had no success in using United Nations sanctions and diplomatic/political means to contain or constrain Iran. Therefore, the military options are rapidly coming to the fore. The US hopes to insulate the oil-rich Sunni regimes from Iranian missile retaliation by putting in place Patriot anti-missile batteries. And US and British ships will be used to keep Iran from stopping the flow of oil through the strategic Strait of Hormuz.

One has to ask, though: are their preparations, plans and strategies any better than the ones they put in place in 2003 before they invaded Iraq? Is it possible that an attack on Iran could become the great equalizer, restoring the balance of power in the region? Or will the US and Britain achieve an early but short-lived victory over Iran, only to massively lose the longer war, just as happened in Iraq?

The conclusion:

By unintentionally shoving the entire oil-and-gas-rich Middle East on to a fast track to chaos, the US will empower Russia as the immovable global energy kingpin. Already, Europe and Asia are being forced to reconsider placing too much reliance on the region for energy imports, opening the way for Russia.

Africa and Latin America come a distant second for the simple reasons of their strategic instability and long distances to their resources, respectively.

Also, Iran is on good terms with Russia and China, and the three powers could form a global energy axis that is distinctly opposed to US power.

Update:

Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) tells the New York Times the Bush administration is “building a case against Tehran even as American intelligence agencies still know little about either Iran’s internal dynamics or its intentions in the Middle East.

Angela Merkel wants to help solve the Israeli-Palestinian conundrum

""We want to take on responsibility in the Middle East process even if we're aware that it is an extremely difficult political area," the chancellor told the Guardian in an interview at the chancellery in Berlin. "We know that the issue of the two-states solution is of the greatest importance for many other conflicts in the region."

My god, how strange. A politician who actually wants to stop wars.