"The U.S.-led coalition is facing separate Sunni and Shiite Muslim uprisings, and the fighting widened on Saturday when five Marines were killed after they were ambushed on the Syrian border," Knight Ridder reports. "That prompted Air Force Gen. Richard Myers, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to demand that Syria do more to prevent foreign fighters from crossing into Iraq." The frontier between Syria and Iraq is approximately 400 miles long. If the US cannot prevent people from crossing the US-Mexico border, how do they expect Syria to prevent people from crossing the Syria-Iraq border?

According to the late Israel Shahak, "The idea that all the Arab states should be broken down, by Israel, into small units, occurs again and again in Israeli strategic thinking. For example, Zeev Shiff, the military correspondent of Ha'aretz (and probably the most knowledgeable in Israel, on this topic) writes about the "best" that can happen for Israeli interests in Iraq: 'The dissolution of Iraq into a Shi'ite state, a Sunni state and the separation of the Kurdish part' (Ha'aretz 6/2/1982). Actually, this aspect of the plan is very old."

Increasingly, the ABB crowd ("Anybody But Bush"), sadly including Noam Chomsky and Michael Parenti, are looking completely ridiculous as it becomes obvious daily that Kerry is Bush and his installation in the White House will translate into more of the same.

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America?s use of indiscriminate, overwhelming firepower to kill and maim 600 elderly men, and women and children of all ages in Fallujah (no photos of the mangled babies, please) in retaliation for the murder and mutilation of four American ?contractors (but do show their crispy corpses, please), is a stark example of the Hundred-to-One Rule the Gestapo made popular in its occupied territories in the Second World War.

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If I could capture the mood in a sentence, it is, "If this doesn't sink the guy, nothing will."