After looking more like a fratboy at a kegger than a sober statesman in most of the images to come out of the European stops on his current trip, Bush apparently got serious upon arriving in the Middle East. He reportedly met with five Arab leaders with only translaters (and no handlers!) present, and was so caught up in this whole “leader of the free world” thing (or is it religious fervor?) that he persisted in speaking his own words even when Egyptian TV cameras were rolling (though apparently that was an accident). Anyway, interesting stuff. From the NYT: On camera but unaware, Bush displays his fervor.

Aaron passed this story on to me, with the comment, “Holy fucking crap. Sharon might actually be serious about this.” “This,” in this case, is the whole roadmap thing, including recent statements by Sharon that Israeli settlements in the West Bank are an “occupation” that needs to be ended. Which is sort of like Bush using a press conference to push for US energy independence achieved through tough new fuel-efficiency standards and a special tax on gas-guzzling SUVs.

My own take is that the extent of Sharon’s reversal, and the timing of these statements, are pretty suspicious. I’m inclined to view it as political payback to Bush for the overthrow of Saddam, with a lot of surprising talk now, but an eventual reversion to the Sharon we know.

Anyway, here’s the story: Sharon mystifies, scares supporters.

While Bush has fun playing president in Europe, Tony Blair is coming in for some grown-up-sized criticism regarding the WMD thing. I found the following analysis in The Scotsman interesting: Blair: Dossier will prove we were right to have Iraq war.

Here’s some clever cartoon animation regarding the war and the world from Mark Fiore that you may enjoy.

I liked this column by Gwynne Dyer, and think it makes an interesting counterpoint to Craig’s recent WMD posting: The missing WMD. It tells the story of how Vladimir Putin mocked Tony Blair about Iraqi WMDs during a Moscow press conference. Ouch.

Everyone’s linking to this really cool panorama taken atop Mt. Everest, so I will, too.

I remember when I first saw a QTVR panorama; it was of a hiking trail in Arizona or New Mexico or somewhere like that, and it blew me away. Wow, I thought. This Web thing is amazing!

These days the novelty of bandwidth-hogging 360-degree images that you can rotate and zoom around in has worn off somewhat, but that Everest panorama is still very much worth a look.

Some people seemed to believe that Putin was trying to make Bush squirm by refusing to drop U.N. sanctions without a declaration of the non-existence of WMD’s, in order to win the moral point for all the brave countries that stood up to the US agression. Surprise! This USA Today article sheds light on a possibly more self-interested motive of Mr Putin and his diplomatic cronies.

This just in…….money still makes the world go ’round.

Since everyone has a different opinion of Saddam Hussein being connected to Osama bin Laden, why shouldn’t a judge join the fray?

Judge Harold Baer said the experts “provide a sufficient basis for a reasonable jury to draw inferences which could lead to the conclusion that Iraq provided material support to al Qaeda.”

9/11 victims awarded $104 million

The Washington Post has an article today that puts an interesting twist on things: Putin opposes US, Britain on lifting Iraqi sanctions. It seems the Russian president is taking the position that UN sanctions on Iraq can be lifted only when the country no longer has weapons of mass destruction. Which actually sounds somewhat reasonable, since it was the possession of those WMDs that the original sanctions were based on. So now Bush and Blair are in something of a Catch-22: They want the sanctions lifted, so they can begin exporting more Iraqi oil than is allowed under the oil-for-food program. But they can’t produce Iraqi WMDs and destroy them, since they haven’t been able to find any. So the only way to get the sanctions lifted would be to argue that the WMDs weren’t actually there in the first place. But that, of course, would constitute an admission that the justification for the invasion, as presented to the UN, was itself a lie.

D’oh!

Here are a pair of pieces looking at the fences our uniter-not-a-divider president is building between the US and the rest of the world. From the New York Times’ Paul Krugman: Rejecting the world. And from Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean: Bush: It’s not just his doctrine that’s wrong.

An update on where things currently stand in our previous toppled regime is available from WorkingForChange’s Bill Berkowitz: Report card Afghanistan. Among the points he makes:

• US troops are still engaged in sporadic fighting.
• Our installed government under Hamid Karzai is essentially only in charge of Kabul.
• The much-hailed liberation of Afghanistan’s women is being steadily rolled back to a Taliban-esque repression.
• Opium cultivation has exploded. According to the State Department Afghanistan is now the world’s leading producer of heroin, with roughly 20 times as much land being used for opium cultivation as was used in 2001.

So, the bottom line is that the current team running things in Washington, while they’ve got this whole bombing and invading thing down cold, clearly suck ass when it comes to putting things back together afterward. Expect more of the same in Iraq.

Nice piece at Daily Kos: Syria countermoves, scores against US. It lists some of the advantages Syria enjoys (compared with Iraq) in the current confrontation with the US, and goes on to discuss Syria’s recent move to introduce a resolution in the UN Security Council banning all weapons of mass destruction throughout the middle east. Kos calls the move “nothing short of genius.”

If the US is truly serious about ridding the Middle East of WMDs, it should have no problem endorsing a resolution that would compell Syria to disarm. Right?

Wrong. The resolution would have the (intentional) effect of forcing Israel to surrender its nuclear arsenal — a course of action Israel would never accept. And the US, Israel’s most loyal ally, will thus be forced to veto the resolution.

So picture this — the US vetoing a resolution calling for the banning of all WMDs from the Middle East. In one fell swoop, Syria has negated the charges of WMDs against it, exposed the US’s hypocrisy on WMDs (our allies can have them, everyone else can’t), solidified its leadership of the Arab world, and forced the US to veto a seemingly common sense resolution, after blasting France and Russia for threatening vetoes on Iraq.

It’s clear that this administration has zero ability to wage a competent foreign policy. We may be able to wage war, but even that has its limits.

I’m not sure how it came about, but both these stories ended up in front of me at the same time, and they seem to share a certain ineffable something, so I’m posting them together. So there.

First, from Janus: the Reuters Oddly Enough story of “The Great Sasuke”: Masked wrestler wins Japan assembly seat. Good stuff, especially the part about how “the wrestler said he now hopes to demonstrate his ‘superabundant power’ outside of the ring as well as in it.”

Because who could hear about a Japanese wrestler-turned-politican wielding his “superabundant power” without immediately thinking of realultimatepower.net, the ninja-tribute site created by faux-12-year-old Robert Hamburger. I previously posted a lies.com item about the site; that item continues to be one of the top comment-getters here.

Including the recent comment from reader Jeremy, who pointed to a really excellent piece from Studio 360, the public radio show, featuring an interview with the site’s creator. It’s actually worth enduring the suck of Realplayer to listen to it; that guy Robert (the real Robert, not his 12-year-old alter ego) is so cool it makes my pee pee hurt.

Update: Be sure to check out http://www.internetmammogram.net/, which appears to be the work of the same subversive character. Thanks to Beck for the link.

Columnist and self-described “liberal iconoclast” Harley Sorensen has this nice little historical summing up in today’s SFGate.com: Occupational hazard. A sample:

We won the war, but will we win the peace? If you believe George W. Bush, who is saying all the right things, we will. Bush is saying that Iraq’s wealth belongs to Iraqis. And, he says, the U.S. will stay in Iraq “not a day longer than necessary,” these words spoken by Bush’s puppy dog, Tony Blair.

Unfortunately, Bush himself sometimes seems a bit dyslexic in his public statements. If he says Iraq’s wealth belongs to Iraqis, what he really means is, the Iraqis will get what’s left after we skim what we want. As for when we leave Iraq, “not a day longer than necessary” means, in Bush-speak, when hell freezes over.

I’m not sure if this is only going to be funny to long-time computer-mediated-communication obsessives like me, but God, is this funny. From daypop: Kim Jong Il (the illmatic)’s LiveJournal.

Vincent Ferraro, a professor of international politics at Mount Holyoke College, gave the following convocation address at Pomfret School, a Connecticut prep school, this past September: Saving the world. Seemed appropriate.

Here’s a nice article from The Guardian that provides more specifics on how the US has been violating the Geneva Convention with respect to prisoners from Afghanistan, making it kind of silly for Rumsfeld to issue stern pronouncements about how he expects the Iraqis to toe the line in their handling of US prisoners: One rule for them. Thanks to lies.com reader michael for the link.

In some ways the folks in Europe are just so far advanced compared with us colonials that it’s not even funny. Except when it actually is pretty funny. Thanks to Hiro for the link.

From ElectronicIraq.net comes this relatively upbeat story to counter some of the stuff we’ve been seeing lately: Amal Shamuri’s thirteenth birthday party. “When asked what she wanted for her birthday, Amal – whose name means ‘hope’ in Arabic – smiled and simply replied, ‘All I want is peace.'” Happy birthday, Amal. May you get your wish.

It’s a little starry-eyed, and a little long-winded, but still, there’s something there that’s worth thinking about. I’m referring to Anthony Barnett’s World opinion: the new superpower?