McCain called Iraq the "test of a generation" and said the United States would pay dearly if it left the country before establishing a new order based on freedom and democracy.

"We need to make tough decisions about where our wartime priorities lay and this means that we have to reassess our domestic priorities ... we simply cannot have it all -- tax cuts, pork for the special interests, ever-growing entitlement programs and war in Iraq," he said.

"Congress cannot demand discipline and sacrifice only of the men and women fighting in the desert. We need it at home as well," he said.

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More Vanunus are urgently needed. That is true not only in Israel but in every nuclear weapons state. Can anyone fail to recognise the value to world security of a heroic Pakistani, Indian, Iraqi, Iranian or North Korean Vanunu making comparable revelations?

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According to the US Bureau of Justice Statistics, 650,000 are incarcerated in jails every day - 1 in 31 adults is in jail or prison, or on parole or probation - and 10 million are admitted each year.

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(from murdocks 'the australian', via TheTimes)
TONY Blair's European Union U-turn is the biggest gamble of his career.

And he raised the stakes by suggesting a no vote would leave Britain on the margins in Europe.

In doing so, he left serious questions over whether he could survive a defeat - which bookmakers declared to be an odds-on certainty in Eurosceptic Britain - in the referendum, expected in the first half of next year.

It is possible the referendum will be held before the next British election, also due in 2005.

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The Pentagon deleted from a public transcript a statement Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld made to author Bob Woodward suggesting that the administration gave Saudi Arabia a two-month heads-up that President Bush had decided to invade Iraq

Rumsfeld told reporters at a briefing yesterday that he may have used the phrase "take that to the bank" but that no final decision had been made to go to war.

Woodward supplied his own transcript showing that Rumsfeld told him on Oct. 23, 2003: "I remember meeting with the vice president and I think Dick Myers and I met with a foreign dignitary at one point and looked him in the eye and said you can count on this. In other words, at some point we had had enough of a signal from the president that we were able to look a foreign dignitary in the eye and say you can take that to the bank this is going to happen."

All told, the Pentagon transcript omits a series of eight questions and answers, some of them just a few words each.

Rumsfeld, who gave Woodward two lengthy interviews after Bush asked his Cabinet to cooperate, was a rare dissenter in an administration that has embraced the book despite the mixed portrayal it offers of Bush's campaign to unseat Saddam Hussein

But Bush's closest aides, who typically resist efforts to pull back the Oval Office curtains, are actively promoting sales of the book.

"We're urging people to buy the book," White House communications director Dan Bartlett said. "What this book does is show a president who was asking the right questions and showing prudence as well as resolve during very difficult times. This book undermines a lot of the critics' charges."

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"We cannot forget these lessons. Thank God that on Sept. 11, George W. Bush was the president of America," Pataki told hundreds

"Saddam Hussein, an evil dictator who killed tens of thousands of his own people, was himself a weapon of mass destruction against the people of Iraq and against the civilized people of the world," Pataki said.

"On Sept. 11, a weapon of mass destruction was a simple box cutter that was used to carry out the attacks that killed thousands of my friends and neighbors and co-workers," he said.

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In another signal of the importance suddenly accorded to international institutions by the White House, the President has also nominated U.N. Ambassador John Negroponte to serve as ambassador to the new Iraq. Mr. Negroponte, one of the nation?s most experienced diplomats, was notably unenthusiastic about the drive to war last year, even while he dutifully carried out the President?s reckless policies.

Were the stakes not measured in human blood, this rush to the U.N. would rank among the most comical flip-flops in recent diplomatic history. It?s an embarrassing comeuppance for arrogant unilateralism that Mr. Bush has yet to acknowledge, let alone explain.

While Mr. Bush and his supporters talk loudly about "staying the course" in Iraq, their course took a sharp, dizzying turn when he ceded authority over the interim government to Mr. Brahimi. This shift followed the remarkable admission by L. Paul Bremer, the American satrap in Baghdad, that the Bush administration had no idea who or what would replace his writ in six weeks.

Just how stunning a reversal the Brahimi mission represents can be seen in the angry reaction of the neoconservative policymakers and pundits who ushered us into this bloody cul-de-sac. Among the outraged is former Defense Policy Board chairman Richard Perle, who regarded dismissal of the U.N. as one of the ancillary benefits of the Iraqi adventure. He now warns that the U.N. role should be kept to "an absolute minimum," whatever that means. The Wall Street Journal accuses the President of "abdicating" responsibility to Mr. Brahimi in an editorial that contemptuously describes him as "an Algerian who works for Kofi Annan," the U.N. secretary general.