In a successful operation Sept. 2, BP replaced the "blowout preventer" on the Deepwater Horizon well, although the "bottom kill" relief well is still underway five months and counting after the disaster began. (VOA, Sept. 2) Also Sept. 2, a new explosion ripped through an offshore oil platform off the Louisiana coast, throwing 13 crew-members into the water. All were rescued alive by a Coast Guard vessel. Mariner Energy of Houston, Texas, the owner of the platform, deployed three firefighting vessels to the scene and extinguished the fire. No oil is believed to have leaked from the platform, called Vermillion Block 380. (ENS, Sept. 3)

The punditocracy may well be correct that the Israel-Palestine peace process that the Obama White House is now attempting to jump-start is doomed to failure—but their analyses as to why are predictably skewed. Bonnie Erbe writes in US News & World Report: "How can two sides negotiate as long as Hamas flouts Palestinian Authority control? ...[A]s long as the Gaza problem continues to exist, there can be no peace for Israel..." It has been a fundamental of all peace proposals since the Oslo process began that there be some kind of corridor linking the Gaza Strip to the West Bank. Yet Ma'an News Agency reported July 16 that Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman is proposing to do just the opposite—to unilaterally separate Gaza from the West Bank, allowing it to function as an independent entity—but behind "hermetically sealed" borders, making the enclave even more of a de facto open-air prison camp than it already is.

China has made great strides in overtaking the West...in a headlong rush to dystopia. From AP, Sept. 3:

Thousands of trucks stuck in China traffic jam
BEIJING — Thousands of coal trucks and other vehicles were backed up for miles on a highway in northern China on Friday, the latest in a series of monster traffic jams that have plagued the overloaded road since construction began on a parallel route earlier this summer.

All of a sudden everybody's talking about this. On Aug. 12 the Jerusalem Post noted a story by Jeffrey Goldberg in the current issue of The Atlantic, "The Point of No Return," predicting an Israeli attack on Iran by the end of the year. After speaking with 40 Israeli, Arab and US officials (past and present), Goldberg writes that "based on my conversations with Israeli decision-makers, this period of forbearance, in which Netanyahu waits to see if the West's nonmilitary methods can stop Iran, will come to an end this December." He asserts that the Pentagon has issued a directive not to shoot down Israeli planes in Iraqi airspace.


New York's Mayor Michael Bloomberg, rightly winning praise from civil libertarians over his principled position on the "Ground Zero Mosque," blows it bigtime with Native Americans—weighing in against their right to tax-free tobacco sales on their reservations in blatantly racist terms. New York state Indian nations held a rally at City Hall on Aug. 23 to demand an apology, which your trusty blogger covered for the weekly Indian Country Today. Excerpts:

We truly hate to say it, but Iran's protestations that it is seeking nuclear power purely for peaceful purposes are starting to ring a little hollow. The same day Iranian and Russian engineers began loading uranium fuel into the Bushehr nuclear power plant, Iran's military announces the development of a prototype long-range unmanned bomber, dubbed the Karrar. Reuters Aug. 22 reports that in a speech at the unveiling ceremony, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad "said Iran should seek the ability to make pre-emptive strikes against a perceived threat, although he said it would never strike first." This is of course exactly the kind of Orwellian doublethink that characterized the Bush administration.

We have noted before the strange phenomenon of neocons exploiting Sufis on the op-ed page of the New York Times. On Aug. 17, William Dalrymple, author of Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India, is the latest to weigh in with a defense of Islam's pluralistic mystics in a piece entitled "The Muslims in the Middle." We have no particular reason to believe Dalrymple is a neocon, and his strong support of the so-called "Ground Zero Mosque" (which we applaud) clearly sets him apart from most of them. However, he exhibits some elements of their thinking. He cites (without criticism) the recent RAND report advocating US encouragement of Sufism to counter jihadism in the Islamic world. Worse yet, he compares the courage of Sufis who "risk their lives for their tolerant beliefs" to that of "American troops on the ground in Baghdad and Kabul"! At the same time, he notes that Sufis such as Haji Sahib of Turangzai (in contemporary Pakistan) were persecuted by the British colonial overseers—oblivious to the irony. As we stated the last time Sufism made the op-ed page: Nothing will discredit the Sufis (and make them targets for terror) faster than making them appear as collaborators with the US and and its brutal proxy regimes—legitimizing the Wahhabi types as the "resistance." We present here the text of the editorial, with relevant or problematic passages in bold:

New York's Metropolitan Transportation Authority on Aug. 9 approved a bus advertisement protesting the so-called "Ground Zero Mosque" (which, as we have pointed out, is neither at Ground Zero nor a mosque). AP writes that the ads depict "a plane flying toward the World Trade Center's towers as they burn along with a rendering of the proposed mosque near Ground Zero." But we question whether the ad's depiction of the "proposed mosque" (sic) is accurate. An image of the ad at MSNBC shows a tall building inlaid with a giant star-and-crescent, whereas a rendering of the proposed Cordoba House (actually an ecumenical community center, now dubbed Park51 for its address on Park Place) on the progressive Jewish website Tikkun Olam shows it without the star and crescent. Poking around on the site of the Cordoba Initiative, the group behind the project, we were unable to find a depiction. The ad's caption reads "WTC Mega Mosque—Why There?" The ad was produced by the American Freedom Defense Initiative, whose website banner (in vivid contrast to pacifistic imagery at the Cordoba Initiative site) features an image of a charging soldier with an assault rifle below an American flag.