Ariel Sharon has told his cabinet that he plans to extend the "security fence" Israel is building along the length of the West Bank so that it entirely encircles any Palestinian state.

The revelation, which follows the Israeli government's decision to oppose full independence for Palestine in favour of a state with "certain attributes of sovereignty", immediately drew fire from the Palestinians who accused the Israeli prime minister of trying to turn the occupied territories into a huge prison.

Meanwhile, the Israeli army killed 10 Palestinians, including a four-year-old girl, in a raid on a Gaza refugee camp yesterday.

Hanan Ansar and two teenagers were among those killed as tanks and helicopters led an assault on Nusseirat camp in search of wanted Palestinians and to destroy the homes of "terrorists".

Mr Sharon dropped what is being called a political bombshell on Sunday while taking his cabinet on a secret tour of the fence, which is a six-metre (20ft) wall topped with barbed wire and lined with guard towers in many places.

The 230-mile wall and fence already under construction will extend the length of the West Bank, creeping deep inside Palestinian territory for long stretches. It will almost surround at least one, and probably two, cities.

Now Mr Sharon is proposing to link the two ends of the fence already under construction with an additional section along the length of the Jordan valley. But he denied it was intended to define the borders of a Palestinian state ahead of the implementation of the American "road map".

"A fence is not a political border. It is not a security border but rather another means to assist in the war against terror, and greatly assist in stopping illegal aliens," Mr Sharon said.

Ironically, it is only because Iraq's military forces are so weak that we can even contemplate its invasion. Some advocates of conflict claim that Saddam's forces are so weak, so demoralised and so badly equipped that the war will be over in a few days.

We cannot base our military strategy on the assumption that Saddam is weak and at the same time justify pre-emptive action on the claim that he is a threat.

Iraq probably has no weapons of mass destruction in the commonly understood sense of the term - namely a credible device capable of being delivered against a strategic city target.

It probably still has biological toxins and battlefield chemical munitions, but it has had them since the 1980s when US companies sold Saddam anthrax agents and the then British Government approved chemical and munitions factories.

Why is it now so urgent that we should take military action to disarm a military capacity that has been there for 20 years, and which we helped to create?

Why is it necessary to resort to war this week, while Saddam's ambition to complete his weapons programme is blocked by the presence of UN inspectors? ...

Only a couple of weeks ago, Hans Blix told the Security Council that the key remaining disarmament tasks could be completed within months.

I have heard it said that Iraq has had not months but 12 years in which to complete disarmament, and that our patience is exhausted.

Yet it is more than 30 years since resolution 242 called on Israel to withdraw from the occupied territories.

We do not express the same impatience with the persistent refusal of Israel to comply.

I welcome the strong personal commitment that the prime minister has given to middle east peace, but Britain's positive role in the middle east does not redress the strong sense of injustice throughout the Muslim world at what it sees as one rule for the allies of the US and another rule for the rest.

Nor is our credibility helped by the appearance that our partners in Washington are less interested in disarmament than they are in regime change in Iraq.

That explains why any evidence that inspections may be showing progress is greeted in Washington not with satisfaction but with consternation: it reduces the case for war. ...

What has come to trouble me most over past weeks is the suspicion that if the hanging chads in Florida had gone the other way and Al Gore had been elected, we would not now be about to commit British troops.

The longer that I have served in this place, the greater the respect I have for the good sense and collective wisdom of the British people.

On Iraq, I believe that the prevailing mood of the British people is sound. They do not doubt that Saddam is a brutal dictator, but they are not persuaded that he is a clear and present danger to Britain.

They want inspections to be given a chance, and they suspect that they are being pushed too quickly into conflict by a US Administration with an agenda of its own.

Above all, they are uneasy at Britain going out on a limb on a military adventure without a broader international coalition and against the hostility of many of our traditional allies.

Dear Mr. Secretary:

I am joining my colleague John Brady Kiesling in submitting my resignation from the Foreign Service (effective immediately) because I cannot in good conscience support President Bush’s war plans against Iraq....

Throughout the globe the United States is becoming associated with the unjustified use of force. The president’s disregard for views in other nations, borne out by his neglect of public diplomacy, is giving birth to an anti-American century.

The president's view is that in the absence of a U.N. endorsement, this war will become "self-legitimating" when the world sees most Iraqis greet U.S. troops as liberators. I think there is a good chance that will play out. ...

Some 35 years ago Israel won a war in Six Days. It saw its victory as self-legitimating. Its neighbors saw it otherwise, and Israel has been trapped in the Seventh Day ever since — never quite able to transform its dramatic victory into a peace that would make Israelis feel more secure.

It's hyperbole to argue that the Bush administration wants to invade Iraq only for the benefit of its friends in the corporate world (though some people no doubt believe that). For some businesses -- most notably the airlines, which fear billions in losses if there is a war -- an invasion will likely be terrible for the balance sheet. But, as in the Gulf War, some companies will make a bundle from an attack, and one doesn't have to be very conspiracy-minded to notice that these are the very same firms that have intimate ties with the Bush administration. Is it unreasonable to think that the high-minded goal of bringing freedom to Iraqis exists, in this White House, alongside many less noble political calculations -- for instance, old-fashioned corporate opportunism? Or, making sure that the spoils of war stay out of the hands of the troublesome French?

It was a time of great and exalting excitement. The country was up in arms, the war was on, in every breast burned the holy fire of patriotism; the drums were beating, the bands playing, the toy pistols popping, the bunched firecrackers hissing and spluttering; on every hand and far down the receding and fading spread of roofs and balconies a fluttering wilderness of flags flashed in the sun; daily the young volunteers marched down the wide avenue gay and fine in their new uniforms, the proud fathers and mothers and sisters and sweethearts cheering them with voices choked with happy emotion as they swung by; nightly the packed mass meetings listened, panting, to patriot oratory which stirred the deepest deeps of their hearts, and which they interrupted at briefest intervals with cyclones of applause, the tears running down their cheeks the while; in the churches the pastors preached devotion to flag and country, and invoked the God of Battles beseeching His aid in our good cause in outpourings of fervid eloquence which moved every listener. It was indeed a glad and gracious time, and the half dozen rash spirits that ventured to disapprove of the war and cast a doubt upon its righteousness straightway got such a stern and angry warning that for their personal safety's sake they quickly shrank out of sight and offended no more in that way.

Victory in Iraq won't end the world's distrust of the United States because the Bush administration has made it clear, over and over again, that it doesn't play by the rules. Remember: this administration told Europe to take a hike on global warming, told Russia to take a hike on missile defense, told developing countries to take a hike on trade in lifesaving pharmaceuticals, told Mexico to take a hike on immigration, mortally insulted the Turks and pulled out of the International Criminal Court — all in just two years. ...

It's a matter of public record that this war with Iraq is largely the brainchild of a group of neoconservative intellectuals, who view it as a pilot project. In August a British official close to the Bush team told Newsweek: "Everyone wants to go to Baghdad. Real men want to go to Tehran." In February 2003, according to Ha'aretz, an Israeli newspaper, Under Secretary of State John Bolton told Israeli officials that after defeating Iraq the United States would "deal with" Iran, Syria and North Korea.

Will Iraq really be the first of many? It seems all too likely — and not only because the "Bush doctrine" seems to call for a series of wars. Regimes that have been targeted, or think they may have been targeted, aren't likely to sit quietly and wait their turn: they're going to arm themselves to the teeth, and perhaps strike first. People who really know what they are talking about have the heebie-jeebies over North Korea's nuclear program, and view war on the Korean peninsula as something that could happen at any moment. And at the rate things are going, it seems we will fight that war, or the war with Iran, or both at once, all by ourselves.

[The Smirking Chimp]

Thank you for having achieved something that very few have so far managed to do in this century: the bringing together of millions of people on all continents to fight for the same idea, even though that idea is opposed to yours.

Thank you for making us feel once more that though our words may not be heard, they are at least spoken - this will make us stronger in the future.

Thank you for ignoring us, for marginalising all those who oppose your decision, because the future of the Earth belongs to the excluded.

Thank you, because, without you, we would not have realised our own ability to mobilise. It may serve no purpose this time, but it will doubtless be useful later on.

Now that there seems no way of silencing the drums of war, I would like to say, as an ancient European king said to an invader: 'May your morning be a beautiful one, may the sun shine on your soldiers' armour, for in the afternoon, I will defeat you.'

Thank you for allowing us - an army of anonymous people filling the streets in an attempt to stop a process that is already underway - to know what it feels like to be powerless and to learn to grapple with that feeling and transform it.

So, enjoy your morning and whatever glory it may yet bring you.

Thank you for not listening to us and not taking us seriously, but know that we are listening to you and that we will not forget your words.

Thank you, great leader George W. Bush.

Thank you very much.

Eve of destruction
Moments like the present offer a strange sense of suspension on the edge of a precipice. War is 99 percent inevitable. Yet I keep thinking, what if? Surely... But...

Forty-eight hours offers a million opportunities to leave the road we are on. But it is a road that Bush and Cheney chose long ago, and these are not the sorts of men to suffer 11th-hour pangs of remorse for unnecessary bloodshed.

The nation -- and the world -- know that Saddam Hussein is a dangerous dictator. The moral or strategic logic that makes this precise moment the time to depose him remains obscure, however. And in that obscurity we are forced back on the suspicion that the timing, for Bush, is a matter of political convenience (first war, then 2004) and logistical efficiency (can't have a quarter of a million troops sitting around idly, losing morale). And those seem like poor reasons to begin dropping thousands of bombs and killing thousands of people.

The president's speech tonight, full of the rhetoric of "liberty and peace," was suffused with an almost millenarian triumphalism, an attitude of certainty in U.S. victory that is no doubt borne out by the superiority of American weaponry and power and that, yet, to anyone with a sense of the twists of history, seems fatuously arrogant. War is rarely easy; the speed of the victories in 1991 Kuwait or 2001 Afghanistan was, historically, the exception, and there is no guarantee that every future American campaign will be as fast or as painless to Americans. Overconfidence breeds disaster.

When you go in assuming easy victory, even the slightest setback feels enormous. President Bush has not prepared the ground for setbacks; he has not assumed the necessary burden of wartime leadership, whether through marshalling support for his plans overseas or through justifying his policies at home. Heaven help him -- and us, the electorate that did not really elect him -- if the road is longer or rougher than he and his team promise.

He has offered us a handful of weak words in place of a persuasive case; he has shuffled from one justification to another, shifting goals as the diplomatic climate altered; he has resorted to half-truths and outright lies and insulted the nations of the world by providing evidence that crumbled upon close inspection; and he has utterly failed to play a strategic game that looks beyond the next move. In the name of protecting the U.S. from terror attacks, he is launching us on a campaign of imperialism; in smashing open Saddam Hussein's dormant nest of horrors, he will spread the seeds of destruction to a thousand new plots.

These are not just vague, eve-of-war fears. In a Fresh Air interview tonight that I can only describe as "dreadful," in the primal meaning of the word, CIA historian Thomas Powers put details on the face of these fears. He predicted, as everyone does, a swift U.S. victory in a month or so. Then a couple months of calm. Then, a gradual awareness: That this project of installing a client government in Iraq, even in the sunniest of outcomes, must last a generation or more. That hundreds of thousands of American troops have now become sitting-duck targets for suicidal terrorists who will have no need to hijack a plane to access their foes. That these troops will now sit on the border with another "axis of evil" enemy, Iran, which, like Saddam's Iraq, also seeks nuclear weapons. That this war, like Bush's larger "war on terrorism," has no clear definition of its aims, its scope or its foes -- and that such a war has no end in sight and can have no victory.

[Scott Rosenberg@Salon]

When George Bush took office in January 2001, he did not have majority support of the nation or the legitimacy of a genuine winner, but he did have a nation at relative peace, a budget in surplus, a Dow Jones Industrial Average that was approximately 30 percent higher than it is today, a nation with most of our civil liberties intact and the good opinion of much of the world, particularly our NATO allies. That America is gone forever now. And while much of the changes that ensued can be laid at the feet of Al-Qaeda and the attacks of 9/11, a great many of them are merely the result of the Bush Administration’s unconscionable but successful exploitation of that tragedy.

We are now about to enter a world in which the values we practice are pre-emptive war, fiscal indiscipline, domestic theocracy and the good opinion of human kind be damned. Since 9/11, Bush and company have done almost everything possible to alienate the world and inspire more terrorists to hate us, despite the initial wellspring of sympathy and solidarity the attacks inspired worldwide. Meanwhile, for all its collective bluster, the Bush crowd has done almost nothing to protect the nation from the entirely predictable consequences of their folly and the hatred we have engendered across the Islamic and Arab worlds.