Rising To A Crescendo!

[Annie]

Excerpts, lots of links here:

THE BELMONT CLUB

World War 3
The US is rolling on three fronts. The first is against Sadr in Najaf. The BBC quotes President Bush as saying US forces are "making pretty good progress" in Najaf. The New York Times has a John Burns piece entitled U.S. Is Tightening Grasp on Rebels Encircled in Iraq. It begins with the dry assessment that "American forces besieging militiamen of a rebel cleric in a shrine and cemetery sacred to Shiite Muslims tightened their cordon on Monday, warning that the rebels had been left no way in or out." The Guardian thinks America is also looking across the border to Iran. In a story entitled Diplomacy sidelined as US targets Iran, the British newspaper editorializes that "The US charge sheet against Iran is lengthening almost by the day, presaging destabilising confrontations this autumn and maybe a pre-election October surprise." Although the Guardian's assertion rests soley on US efforts to line up sanctions against Teheran's failure to stop nuclear proliferation, it sounds, in the context of recent American successes, like something that could happen. On the third front, recent arrests of Al Qaeda leadership may have hurt it so badly as to disrupt its planned pre-election attack on America. The intelligence leads are burgeoning so quickly that it has become hard to pursue them all.

Don't miss the Addendum, EXCERPTS, also some links:

Although it may be premature to say that the War on Terror is rising to a crescendo, recent events have imparted a distinct sense of movement, as in 'hey, this thing might actually be going somewhere'. If so, it will force those who opposed the notion of fighting fundamentalist terrorism, as distinct from negotiating with or appeasing it, to admit at least to themselves (if they have any intellectual honesty) that they were not only wrong, but deeply and fundamentally mistaken. Some ground for salvage may be found in Todd S. Purdum's New York Times article of February 2003, in which he argues that the strategy for bringing democracy to autocratic regimes in the Middle East sprang in part from impeccable liberal antecedents.

Any history of the Bush administration's march toward war with Iraq will have to take account of long years of determined advocacy by a circle of defense policy intellectuals whose view that Saddam Hussein can no longer be tolerated or contained is now ascendant. ... At the center of this group are longtime Iraq hawks, Republicans like Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz; Richard Perle, a former Reagan administration defense official who now heads the Defense Policy Board, the Pentagon's advisory panel; and William Kristol, who was chief of staff to Vice President Dan Quayle and now edits the conservative Weekly Standard. But the war camp also includes more recent and reluctant converts like Kenneth M. Pollack, an Iraq expert in the Clinton White House, who has become a prominent advocate for an attack on Saddam Hussein as the best way to avoid, as he calls his recent book, "The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq" (Random House 2002); and Ronald D. Asmus, a former deputy assistant secretary of state in the Clinton administration.