Dan doesn’t get much into international politics on this site (other than Iraq, of course), but this bears mentioning.

The Chinese military has secretly targeted American satellites with lasers to disable their surveillance capabilities. I often wonder why more attention isn’t paid to the growing threat that the Chinese pose to U.S. security and economic interests. Iraq, Iran, North Korea… combined they are nothing next to the potential foe that exists in the land of 1.4 billion people. If there is any world power capable of mounting a serious challenge to the United States in the next 20 years, it is China. As to whether China is willing to do so, there a bit of circumstantial evidence that says yes.

It is reported that the Bush administration has known that this was occurring for a few years. It was kept secret, however, in the hopes that China could be persuaded to join us the wars of the Middle East. Keeping this activity a secret can only embolden the Chinese government.

President Bush told us that the declassified NIE report would cure us of our naivete and set the record straight on Iraq’s role in global jihadism. Survey says…

The Iraq conflict has become the “cause celebre” for jihadists, breeding a deep resentment of US involvement in the Muslim world and cultivating supporters for the global jihadist movement. BBC

So we’ve got that going for us. Which is nice.

The report does go on to suggest that victory in Iraq would seriously harm the jihadist movement. Bush will point this out as support for his policies. If we don’t “stay the course” we will only make matters worse. What he will forget to mention is that this all would have been a moot point if we’d never gone into Iraq in the first place. We wouldn’t be stuck in this catch-22 if the Bush administration hadn’t waged an all-out war of lies to “persuade” the people to accept its war.

In other news:

Congresswoman Jane Harman said there was a second NIE focused purely on Iraq.

“I hear it paints a grim picture,” she said. “And because it does, I am told it is being held until after the November elections.” BBC

Can’t wait to see just how naive Ms. Harman is, believing that Iraq could ever be described as grim.

I should make this the week of “Lack of surprise weblog entries”:

The Bush administration has blocked release of a report that suggests global warming is contributing to the frequency and strength of hurricanes, the journal Nature reported Tuesday. – AP

This is just another in a series of attempts to block the truth from getting out by this administration. Whether it was blocking the 9/11 commission, blocking the public’s right to know if big oil executives drafted our energy policy, blocking intelligence reports critical of the administration, blocking the truth on WMDs, or blocking the truth about global warming, this administration has made it clear that no matter what it’s doing, it doesn’t want the people who pay the bills to find out.

Just in case you didn’t hear about this – and if you get the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, chances are you didn’t – a Dane County judge has ruled that Rep. Mark Green has $467,000 in illegal special interest money in his campaign, and he broke the law.

Judging from past experience, the Green campaign defense will probably run something like this: “The partisan judge is the real criminal here, and this only proves that Jim Doyle is corrupt and up is in fact down.”

It’s sad and predictable, and also a good indication of what kind of leader Mark Green would be. It’s always everyone else’s fault, never his own.

…Not lessened it as Pres. Bush and others have been saying for the past three years!

I’ve also been saying it for years: The Iraqi war has made us less safe against terrorism and created tens of thousands of new terrorists who want nothing more than to hurt the US. According to a leaked National Intelligence Estimate, which is basically the consensus of the entire intelligence aparatus in the US, I’ve been right all along.

Go check it out for yourself.

Expect the President to deal with the reports findings by making the issue about who leaked the report instead of the contents of the report itself.

You might be surprised to hear that nearly 7,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed (many of them tortured and executed) in the past two months.

The American media is bored with Iraq so they’re not reporting on it anymore. And it looks bad for Republicans to boot, which they don’t want either. Even when over 100 people a day are being killed, tortured, and executed, you have to go to a British paper to read about it.

Nearly 7,000 civilians were killed in Iraq in the past two months, according to a UN report just released – a record high that is far greater than initial estimates had suggested.

Just remember that our President thinks that things continue to go just peachy over there.