TheNextReport

The Urge to Surge The debate over whether to increase the number of troops in Iraq has been raging ever since the Iraq Study Group issued its report a few weeks ago recommending a temporary surge in troop levels to help control the deteriorating situation. The Bush administration now seems to cling to a desperate belief that adding 15-30,000 more troops to the Iraq theatre could at last bring down the curtain of the conflict with some measure of applause from the American public. Reports that the Joint Chiefs of Staff would be opposed to such an increase were summarily denied by the White House. Mr. Bush, who has publicly stated numerous times that his decision making in Iraq depends on the advice of his generals, would be in a difficult position if the reports about the Chiefs are accurate. The election of a new Congress with a Democratic majority has been seen by most observers as a clear indication that the majority of Americans are opposed to extending the conflict in Iraq. Polls

Responsibility in Washington Dennis Hastert said he accepted full responsibility for the Mark Foley scandal. Donald Rumsfeld said he accepted full responsibility for the Abu Grahib scandal. George Bush said he accepted full responsibility for Katrina, Dubai Ports, the record deficit and the war in Iraq. These statements beg the question: just what does accepting responsibility mean in our nation’s capital? After six long years of the Bush administration, the answer would seem obvious. Accepting responsibility in Washington means getting away with murder. Other than finally giving the boot to Donald Rumsfeld, President Bush, who has never held anyone in his administration truly accountable for the failures of his office, still appears unwilling to take the kind of corrective measures one might expect after seeing his party lose the Congress. By any standard, the Bush Administration has clearly been one of the most irresponsible regimes in the nation’s history. The president and party t

Reflections on John Coltrane’s 80th birthday. John Coltrane was a poet without words, a holy man without need of a holy book. He rewrote the text every time he played and it was all revelation. In Coltrane's sound, one can hear the glory of the human drama, the story of evolving consciousness and humanity's unique capacity to consciously and deliberately participate in the process. Coltrane's sound was an acknowledgement of our divine mission as human beings, a hymn to understanding our identity, and a recognition of the oddity of being animal, human and god-like all at once. Coltrane first discovered multi-phonic sound -- the ability to play more than one note at a time -- sometime in 1957 when he played with Thelonius Monk. Somewhat a stranger to rational thought, Monk advanced the evolution of jazz by persistently refusing to acknowledge the physical limitations of the keyboard and the structural limitations of Western music. Coltrane would set off on a path that would

SO LONG STEVO Stevo is gone. The crocodile hunter with the heart of a lion, who thrilled us by confronting some of nature's most deadly creatures, met his end on the tip of a sting ray's tail. His accidental death shocked many. As a television personality he had appeared eminently masterful in the ways of the natural order. He couldn’t have felt more at ease snorkeling the calm waters of the Australian reef -- it was common knowledge that sting rays weren't dangerous. Everyone loved Stevo for his courage; a courage born of an intimate understanding of the animals with whom we share the planet. Steve Irwin befriended the natural world, gloried in its treacherous beauty, and helped us to understand our place within it. Overcoming the instinct to run from danger, Stevo encountered it personally and deliberately. In cozying up to poisonous snakes, toxic lizards, hungry crocs and other fearsome creatures, he helped us to visualize our own animal nature and ponder the evolvin

CABLE NEWS - LEBANON MAKES WAY FOR JONBENET You have to hand it to the people that make the decisions at CNN, Fox News and MSNBC. They are so certain of the rank stupidity of the American viewing public that they seamlessly shifted their wall-to-wall coverage of the Israeli-Lebanese war to all JonBenet all the time. It is a well known fact that the tradition of insightful and in-depth broadcast journalism that began with Edward R. Murrow has been changed by corporate ownership primarily concerned with ratings and the bottom line. In the struggle for minds and eyeballs, the surrender of broadcast news to the realities of the marketplace is a phenomenon that Murrow himself struggled with towards the end of his career and is a problem that will continue to exist as long as there is commercial television. Americans have become so inured to the watering down of hard news programming and thoughtful analysis that they have come to expect little from their broadcasters. As an avid news consume

NASRALLAH VIOLATES LEBANESE SOVEREIGNTY In rejecting the French/US ceasefire proposal, the Lebanese government backed by the Arab League urged the world to accept their idea that Lebanese Army forces could be dispatched to the border with Israel, replace Israeli troops and make an international peacekeeping force unnecessary. We can assume that Lebanese President Siniora believes that the world has forgotten the threat his defense minister made on July 20th that the Lebanese Army would join Hezbollah in the fight if Israel launched a widespread invasion. Siniora is asking the international community to trust that a Lebanese Army force would somehow be able to control Hezbollah in spite of the fact that Lebanon clearly demonstrated its inability to do just that when given the opportunity under UN Resolution 1559 two years ago. Lebanon's government would like to believe it is still in a position to control events after Hezbollah invaded Israel from Lebanese territory and after the Je

SHEHERAZADE, SOLOZZO AND THE BIG KHAN By Paul Schwartz Last weekend in an interview on CNN, a spokeswoman for a company that is a front for the Dubai government described the sophisticated safety procedures in place at the port of Dubai. In a comforting tone, she told the story of her organization and urged Americans to remember that a deal that would put the firm in control of operations at six major American ports “is just for the sake of business.” Hearing this I couldn’t help but being reminded of a similar line uttered by Virgil “The Turk” Solozzo in “The Godfather” when he was planning to move in on the Corleone family empire. I remembered then that the best way to judge the value of any story is to lift the veil of its words and closely examine the characters. It is safe to say we live in an age when assurances about the benign nature of business and business ethics have lost much of their meaning. Nobody knows this better than those who sit in the U.S. Congress. The uproar sur

Logic in the Middle East and The Limitations of Democracy by P.J. Schwartz Not long after I watched President Bush on CNN extolling the virtues of democracy evidenced by the Palestinian legislative elections, I felt an odd wave of disgust. Then I thought of Winston Churchill. Among the British Prime Minister's most famous sayings was the remark: "democracy is the worst form of government; except all the others that have been tried." Events in the Middle East this week, however, would seem to suggest that only the first part of Churchill's dictum is true. The victory of Hamas in the elections for the Palestinian parliament has demonstrated once again that the process of democracy in the Middle East may result in a state of affairs entirely worse than what we in the West want or expect. In the wake of the overwhelming electoral victory of what is arguably the world's most prolific terrorist organization -- one that has entirely rejected the peace process that succe

Watch this blog in the coming weeks for a perspective on American politics and culture, the environment, the Middle East, relations with France and other tasty bits of information. PJ