WASHINGTON — For now, the Bush administration has chosen compromise over confrontation in dealing with Iran's disputed nuclear program with a dramatic gesture intended to demonstrate commitment to a negotiated solution.

In breaking with past policy to send a top diplomat to weekend talks with Iran's chief nuclear envoy, the administration has in its waning months refined its position on contact with the hardline Iranian regime, much as it did in the ongoing effort to rid North Korea of its atomic weapons, which has shown recent promise.

U.S. officials on Wednesday dismissed comparisons between the administration's approach to the two remaining members of Bush's "axis of evil," but they acknowledged broad similarities in the end game.

They said the participation of William Burns, the State Department's third-ranking diplomat, in Saturday's meeting in Switzerland is aimed at proving America's resolve to peacefully prevent Iran from developing nuclear arms while also exploiting perceived splits in Iran's hardline Islamic government.

"What this does show is how serious we are when we say that we want to try to solve this diplomatically," White House press secretary Dana Perino told reporters a day after President Bush signed off on dispatching Burns to the meeting with Iranian nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili.

Burns will not negotiate with Jalili but officials said he will listen to his presentation of Iran's final answer to the package. Burns will also restate a U.S. offer for formal negotiations with Iran if it suspends uranium enrichment and reprocessing. He will warn that if the deal is not accepted, the Iranian government can expect more sanctions to be imposed on its banking and financial sectors. And, he will remind Iran that Bush has not taken the military option off the table.

US troops in Afghanistan massed close to the border yesterday for a possible attack on al-Qaeda and Taleban bases in the lawless North Waziristan tribal belt in Pakistan.

Reports from the area said that hundreds of Nato troops were airlifted across the mountains from the village of Lowara Mandi, which has been an important base for cross-border attacks in Afghanistan. Heavy artillery and armoured vehicles were also being moved into position.

The deployment followed a claim by the Afghan Government on Monday that the Pakistani Army and its spy agency had become “the world's biggest producers of terrorism and extremism”. The Pakistani Foreign Ministry accused Kabul of creating an “artificial crisis to satisfy short-term political expediencies”.

US Admiral Michael Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, made an announced visit to Islamabad at the weekend and held a series of meetings with Pakistan's top civil and military leadership.

According to well-placed sources, Admiral Mullen warned Pakistan that the US could take unilateral military action if the cross-border attacks in Afghanistan were not stopped. The US official said that some elements within Pakistani security agencies could be helping the insurgents operate from their bases in the border region.

KABUL, AFGHANISTAN -- The president of Afghanistan threatened Sunday to send troops into Pakistan if Taliban fighters holed up there continue to cross the border and attack his country.

"Afghanistan has the right of self-defense," President Hamid Karzai told journalists at his presidential palace here. He specifically threatened to target Baitullah Mahsud, the self-declared commander of Pakistan's Taliban movement, who has boasted of sending fighters into Afghanistan.

The comments were the Afghan leader's sharpest warning yet to Pakistan's new leadership, which has been conducting negotiations with Islamic militants, including Mahsud, based in the tribal areas adjoining the border.

In response to the warning, Pakistan said it would consider any such strike by foreign forces inside its territory a violation of its sovereignty. "We hope that it is not the reinitiation of the blame game by Afghanistan," Foreign Ministry spokesman Mohammed Sadiq said in a statement.

As part of a 1979 terror attack in the Israeli coastal town of Nahariya, Kuntar shot dead 28-year-old Danny Haran in front of his 4-year-old daughter Einat Haran, then drowned Danny Haran in the sea to confirm the kill. Kuntar then smashed Einat Haran’s head on rocks and crushed her skull with his rifle butt.

Yet Israeli analyst Jonathan Spyer notes that “the news of the planned swap has been greeted with enthusiasm from politicians on both sides of the [Lebanese] divide.”

Against the Hezbollah-led, mostly Shiite bloc stands the March 14 Sunni-Druze-Christian bloc. Yet new Christian president Michel Suleiman (whose affiliation vis-à-vis the two blocs is a matter of dispute) has told Hezbollah he wants to take part in Kuntar’s welcome-home ceremony. Druze leader and sharp Hezbollah-foe Walid Jumblatt is planning to visit Kuntar (also Druze) and congratulate him on his return, which he called a “national occasion.”

Sunni prime minister Fuad Saniora said Hezbollah’s “success … in the negotiations [with Israel] is a national success for the party and for the struggle of the Lebanese because it secured national goals.…” Spyer reports that “other March 14 leaders spoke in similarly glowing terms.” The Lebanese daily As-Safir reported plans to make the day of the terrorists’ return a national holiday.

Israeli Middle East scholar Barry Rubin notes that “no one in the Arabic-speaking world will say a single negative word about Kuntar’s deed or his being made a hero, despite a small liberal minority’s disgust.”

At a recent meeting of city officials in Dallas County, Texas, a small racial brouhaha broke out. County commissioners were hashing out difficulties with the way the central collections office handles traffic tickets. Commissioner Kenneth Mayfield found himself guilty of talking while white. He observed that the bureaucracy “has become a black hole” for lost paperwork.

Fellow Commissioner John Wiley Price took great offense, shouting, “Excuse me!” That office, the black commissioner explained, has become a “white hole.”

Seizing on the outrage, Judge Thomas Jones demanded that Mayfield apologize for the “racially insensitive analogy,” in the words of the Dallas Morning News’s City Hall Blog.

Houston Chronicle science blogger Eric Berger notes that everyone should be “very glad that the central collections office has not become a white hole, a theoretical object that ejects matter from beyond its event horizon, rather than sucking it in. It wouldn’t be fun for Dallas to find itself so near a quasar.”

Maybe so, but speaking metaphorically, if it were a white hole, that might suggest central collections was actually doing its job, ejecting paperwork in a timely fashion.

"Help me," he cries repeatedly in despair.

The 10 minutes of video — selected by Omar Khadr's Canadian lawyers from more than seven hours of footage recorded by a camera hidden in a vent — shows Khadr weeping, his face buried in his hands, as he is questioned by Canadian intelligence agents over four days in 2003.

A Canadian Security Intelligence Services agent in the video grills Khadr about events leading up to his capture as an enemy combatant when he was 15. Khadr, a Canadian citizen, is accused of throwing a grenade that killed a U.S. Special Forces soldier during a 2002 firefight in Afghanistan. He was arrested after he was found in the rubble of a bombed-out compound — badly wounded and near death.

At one point in the interrogation, Khadr pulls off his orange prisoner shirt and shows the wounds he sustained in the firefight. He complains he cannot move his arms and says he had not received proper medical attention, despite requests.

"They look like they're healing well to me," the agent says of the injuries.

"No, I'm not. You're not here (at Guantanamo)," says Khadr, the son of an alleged Al Qaeda financier.

The agent later accuses Khadr of using his injuries and emotional state to avoid the interrogation. "No, you don't care about me," Khadr says.

Khadr also tells his interrogator that he was tortured while at the U.S. military detention center at the Bagram air base in Afghanistan, where he was first detained after his arrest in 2002. Later on in the tape, a distraught Khadr is seen rocking, his face in his hands.

What will the U.S. do if Israel decides to initiate military action? There was a time when the Bush administration might itself have seriously considered using force, but all public signs are that such a moment has passed.

Israel sees clearly what the next 12 months will bring, which is why ongoing U.S.-Israeli consultations could be dispositive. Israel told the Bush administration it would destroy North Korea's reactor in Syria in spring, 2007, and said it would not wait past summer's end to take action. And take action it did, seeing a Syrian nuclear capability, for all practical purposes Iran's agent on its northern border, as an existential threat. When the real source of the threat, not just a surrogate, nears the capacity for nuclear Holocaust, can anyone seriously doubt Israel's propensities, whatever the impact on gasoline prices?

“This war distracts us from every threat that we face and so many opportunities we could seize,” Obama said. “By any measure, our single-minded and open-ended focus on Iraq is not a sound strategy for keeping America safe.”

“Senator Obama will tell you we can’t win in Afghanistan without losing in Iraq. In fact, he has it exactly backwards,” McCain said in Albuquerque, N.M. “It is precisely the success of the surge in Iraq that shows us the way to succeed in Afghanistan.”

 

“Senator Obama is departing soon on a trip abroad that will include a fact-finding mission to Iraq and Afghanistan,” McCain said. “He is speaking today about his plans for Iraq and Afghanistan before he’s even left, before he has talked to General Petraeus, before he has seen the progress in Iraq, and before he has set foot in Afghanistan for the first time. In my experience … fact-finding missions usually work best the other way around: First you assess the facts on the ground, then you present a new strategy.”

DEBKAfile’s military sources report that Israel has placed its military and air forces on its northern borders on high alert after Iran and Syria ignored Jerusalem’s warning, relayed to Washington, that the continued presence of Iranian, Syrian and Hizballah officers on the strategic Lebanese Sannine peak may spark a military clash.

Monday, July 14, two days ahead of the prisoner swap with Hizballah, Israel’s army spokesmen disclosed that Iranian officers had assumed command of Hizballah’s fighting units.

"You know, the truth is that this was an example where we had some poor phrasing in the speech, and we immediately tried to correct the interpretation that was given," Obama stated yesterday during an interview on CNN's show, "Fareed Zakaria – GPS."

"The point we were simply making was, is that we don't want barbed wire running through Jerusalem, similar to the way it was prior to the '67 war, that it is possible for us to create a Jerusalem that is cohesive and coherent. I was not trying to predetermine what are essentially final-status issues."

"Well, obviously, it's going to be up to the parties to negotiate a range of these issues. And Jerusalem will be part of those negotiations," he said in response to a question about whether Palestinians have a legitimate claim to the city.

Obama said "as a practical matter, it would be very difficult to execute" a division of the city. "And I think that it is smart for us to, to work through a system in which everybody has access to the extraordinary religious sites in Old Jerusalem but that Israel has a legitimate claim on that city."

"It will be impossible to make progress on serious peace talks without putting the future of Jerusalem on the table," adviser Daniel Kurtzer said as recently as last month at a conference organized by the Jewish People Policy Planning Institute, or JPPPI.

For 31 years, the federal government has subsidized new wind and solar projects. A tax break that provides up to 30 cents on every dollar it costs to build solar facilities and one for operating wind turbines are set to expire this year. The Senate last week voted to renew them.

7/13/2008 (Oruzgan, Afghanistan) - A suicide attack near a busy market leaves over two dozen people dead.

7/12/2008 (Tirah, Pakistan) - Two women are among seven people killed in clashes between rival Islamist groups.

7/12/2008 (Grozny, Chechnya) - Mujahideen detonate a bomb hidden in a trash can, killing one person.

7/12/2008 (Bargi Matal, Afghanistan) - A youth is killed defending his village from a Taliban attack.

7/12/2008 (Hangu, Pakistan) - Sixteen pro-government tribesmen are killed by the Taliban, eight by execution.

7/12/2008 (Tal Afar, Iraq) - The bodies of seven people kidnapped by Islamic terrorists are discovered.

French president Nicolas Sarkozy organized a jovial photo-op with Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian Authority chairman Mahmoud Abbas to launch his Mediterranean union debut in Paris Sunday, July 13, attended by 40 leaders.

The first sour note came from Syrian president Bashar Assad, who was reinstated by Sarkozy’s invitation on the international stage. He and foreign minister Walid Mualem walked out as Olmert entered to the hall to deliver a speech. Earlier, Assad had his security men jostle Israel correspondents and TV cameras out of his way as he swept past. And he firmly rejected Sarkozy’s effort to arrange a meeting with the Israeli prime minister and announced that peace with Israel could take another two years.

This reply followed Olmert’s optimistic statement to reporters: “We have never been as close to an accord as we are today.”

Abbas and Sarkozy beamed their approval of Olmert’s statement and co-chairman Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak called on Israel and the Palestinians to work harder for a peace deal to pave the way for a Palestinian state.

Behind the bonhomie, DEBKAfile’s Middle East sources report that Abbas’ Fatah and its rival, the rejectionist Palestinian Hamas, have never been so close to a peace accord as they are today, largely due to the efforts of Mubarak himself. Success in this effort would write finis to the US-sponsored Palestinian peace track with Israel.

This is the real purpose of the lengthy talks the Hamas delegations from Gaza and Damascus have been holding in Cairo. According to our sources, the rival factions have covered considerable ground:

1. Hamas has agreed to relinquish its rule of the Gaza Strip and accept a government manned by nonpartisan technocrats.

2. Parliamentary and presidential elections will be held in the Gaza Strip and West Bank, the date subject to the Hamas proviso that it is admitted to the Palestinian Liberation Organization leadership under a major structural reform.

3. Hamas and Fatah have agreed to Egyptian military forces’ deployment in the Gaza Strip to organize and train Palestinian security and intelligence bodies.

Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah, Hamas and Egypt agreed to leave Israel out in the cold and present the Palestinian reunion as a fait accompli. They reckoned that Israel would swallow the deal if captive Israeli soldier Gilead Shalit were freed. In any case, the prime minister Olmert is not expected to survive the corruption scandals gathering over his head.

The Palestinians groups and Cairo are moving forward as though George W. Bush, whose two-state solution was one of the high points of his international policy, had already left the White House.