My Menorah: This one is going to sound really familiar to all you old fans of The Knack. (I wasn’t one of them.)

So the people responsible for making sure that America is protected from her enemies, foreign and domestic, are now saying that the Iranians stopped their nuclear weapons program in 2003. I’ve got a question: Why the hell should we believe the people that couldn’t find Al Qaeda if Osama bin Laden was standing behind them yelling “Die, infidel, in the name of Al Qaeda!”?

You know what I think? I think that the intelligence agencies need to be renamed the unintelligence agencies. It’s obvious that they need someone with more brains and cunning running the show than they’ve got now, or than they’ve had for the past ten or twenty years. That way, we wouldn’t keep hearing about all the so-called moderate Muslims who work with the government and intelligence agencies having ties to Hamas and Hezbollah. And oh, yeah, hiring a Hezbollah chick to work for the CIA? Brilliant. Freaking brilliant. Yeah, how’s that Muslim outreach program working for you, CIA? Having any luck with that? Did you ever think to maybe hire the military translators that get fired because they’re gay? (Of course, if the effing military didn’t fire people because they’re gay in the first place, that would be a much better solution, but hey, Clinton was too much of a chickenshit to make the bold move and force the military to allow gays to serve. But yeah, liberals, go vote for him and his wife again in ‘08. ‘Cause it’s not like they won’t do it again.)

So now we have Mad Mahmoud Ahmadinejad crowing victory, and the Mad Mullahs laughing in their beards, and the Iranians sitting, as they say, in the catbird’s seat.

What this country needs is someone smart in charge of their intelligence agencies. I say, hire a cat. We’re smarter than you.

The peaceful people of Gaza, who got what they wanted two years ago—all “settlers” out of Gaza, Palestinian self-rule, and Israeli soldiers out of the Gaza Strip—have fired over 2,000 rockets into Israel in 2007. We can make it a new slogan: 2007 in 2007!

Tel Aviv/Gaza - Palestinian militants have fired over 2000 rockets into Israel from the Gaza Strip since the beginning of the year, an Israeli spokeswoman said Tuesday.

Only on Tuesday militants fired a total of 21 homemade Qassam rockets and mortars into Israeli territory, the spokeswoman said.

It looks like the Israelis are finally starting to try to fight back in the press. The AP has picked up the information as well:

This year, Gazan militants have fired 2,000 rockets and mortars, the army said. The rockets have killed a total of 12 people in recent years and cause widespread panic in southern Israeli border towns.

But it’s not high enough up in the article (in the first three to five paragraphs) to make it into your local paper’s “World News” section. And of course, it’s followed by this caveat:

Israel blames Hamas, the Islamic militant group that controls Gaza, for allowing the attacks, even though the group has not been directly involved in most of the rocket launchings.

By the way, once again, please note that Israeli spokespeople are almost never identified. The first article, from Deutsche Presse-Agentur, the German version of AP, does not identify any Israeli spokespeople.

Now, we do know that the wire services can count. The AP has kept a running tally of the deaths of American military personnel in Iraq, as well as a tally of the worst suicide bomb attacks, a rough count of the Iraqi death toll, and of course, the number of Palestinians killed.

The army confirmed the strike, saying the militants were preparing to fire mortar shells toward southern Israel.

The attack brings to about 30 the number of militants that Israel has killed in the past 10 days.

And yet, the AP cannot manage to count the number of rockets and mortars that rain down on Israel in a near-daily basis, even though plain, ordinary bloggers can. Nor does the AP find the 2,000 rockets fired into Israel significant enough to merit a story of its own.

But they will absolutely let us know how many Palestinians the IDF killed, often without even using the weasel-worded “militant” modifier.

What anti-Israel media bias?

Looks like Hugo Chavez’s attempt to terrorize Jews into staying home and not voting against him didn’t work.

A few hours before the polls opened in Venezuela on Sunday morning, federal police raided the main Jewish social club here, La Hebraica, ostensibly looking for weapons and explosives.

Though they left empty-handed and no major damage was done, the incident stoked Jewish fears in Venezuela’s capital about the government of President Hugo Chavez.

So when hundreds of voters lined up a few hours later around the corner from a kosher bakery in the affluent Caracas neighborhood of San Bernardino to cast their vote under the watchful eye of soldiers toting machine guns, many said it was the most important political decision of their lives.

[...] “Baruch Hashem,” said Alicia Truzman, the Moroccan-born owner of the kosher bakery in San Bernardino. “All of us are happy. We can breathe easier now.”

Truzman voted ‘no.’

“Originally we were not going to vote because we’re always getting tricked anyway,” said Truzman, 60, who lived in the Israeli city of Kiryat Malachi for eight years before immigrating to the Caribbean island of Curacao and finally Venezuela in 1974. “But at the last minute we decided to vote because there have been many demonstrations by students, so we began to have some hope.”

The names change. The players change. The thing that remains constant: Scapegoating and terrorizing the Jews.

Don’t think you can breathe easily yet. Chavez isn’t finished. He’s regrouping.

The Washington Post demonstrates that its editors possess a sophistication that is absent among the editors of the New York Times with Intelligence on Iran. After noting the positive implications of the 2007 NIE, the editors write ”

Tehran at a minimum is keeping open the option to develop nuclear weapons,” says the summary’s second sentence. Yet within hours of the report’s release, European diplomats and some U.S officials were saying that it could kill an arduous American effort to win support for a third U.N. Security Council resolution sanctioning Iran for failing to suspend uranium enrichment. It could also hinder separate U.S.-French efforts to create a new sanctions coalition outside the United Nations. In other words, the new report may have the effect of neutering the very strategy of pressure that it says might be effective if “intensified.”

The editorial continues to argue that until Tehran starts abiding by “binding U.N. resolutions and seriously address[es] other U.S. concerns” there is no room for dialogue.
(via memeorandum)Robert Kagan, on the other hand, argues that the NIE deprives the United States of necessary leverage against Tehran and that the United States should therefore open talks with the regime.

This is as good a time as any. The United States is not in a position of weakness. The embarrassment of the NIE will be fleeting. Strategic realities are more durable. America remains powerful in the world and in the Middle East. The success of the surge policy in Iraq means that the United States may be establishing a sustainable position in the region — a far cry from a year ago, when it seemed about to be driven out. If Iraq is on the road to recovery, this shifts the balance against Iran, which was already isolated.There are other reasons to move now. Even if the NIE forecasts that Iran cannot build a nuclear bomb before 2010, the time is still finite. The next administration, especially if it is Democratic, will probably want to try to talk to Tehran. But it couldn’t begin talks before the summer of 2009, at which point, if the NIE is right, Iran could be moving into the final stages of developing a bomb. Better to get negotiations started so that by the time the next administration settles in, it will be able to assess the progress, or lack thereof, after a year of talks. If it decides it must take strong action, it will have an easier time showing that all other options were exhausted.

Better, too, if talks are launched by this administration. Although trust between the parties has broken down, American policy toward Iran needs broad support in both parties. Bush could even name a hard-nosed Democrat to lead the talks.

(via memeorandum)

Yesterday I expressed skepticism that the NIE report was meant to undermine President Bush. Two articles I’ve seen, read the situation the same way. Gabriel Schoenfeld writes:

There are significant ambiguities in this NIE, and as Max Boot rightly points out, it still leaves ample reason to worry about Iranian nuclear ambitions. But in the current climate of skepticism about the competence of the CIA and other intelligence bodies, the idea that intelligence officials engaged in a coordinated effort to cook the evidence seems impossible to credit. Even if there was a shared desire among all sixteen agencies to do such a thing (which seems implausible on its face) pulling off such a caper would be a hugely difficult task, and almost certainly beyond the capacity even of America’s most ingenious spies — assuming we even have any ingenious spies.

Writing in Time Magazine, Robert Baer goes even further and argues that President Bush was behind the release of the NIE at this time.

The real story behind this NIE is that the Bush Administration has finally concluded Iran is a bridge too far. With Iranian-backed Shi’a groups behaving themselves, things are looking up in Iraq. In Lebanon, the anti-Syrian coalition and pro-Syrian coalition, which includes Iran’s surrogate Hizballah, reportedly have settled on a compromise candidate, the army commander General Michel Suleiman. Bombing Iran now would upset the fragile balance in these two countries. Not to mention that Hizballah has threatened to shell Israel if we as much as touch a hair on Iran’s head.

Israel remains unconvinced that Iran has definitely stopped as Israel Matzav observed and this could lead to a policy collision between Israel and the United States. (This is something that Ha’aretz already alluded to.)

(via memeorandum)

It would seem that the NIE really is reflective of the Bush administration’s policy. I can’t see that the President will follow Robert Kagan’s advice. Expect diplomatic pressure to continue and maybe even increase. But I don’t think that the current administration fears an Iranian nuclear bomb during its term in office.
Crossposted at Soccer Dad.