MR. GREGORY: Let me ask you about the ground invasion into Gaza. Do you think on the part of this Israeli--of the Israelis this was offensive or defensive?

SEN. REID: I spoke to Prime Minister Olmert a couple of days ago. He indicated that they would do the ground activities. Let's understand the background. For eight years they've been firing rockets into Israel. They've become more intense the last few months. Israelis have been killed, maimed and injured. Sometimes more than 200 a day coming into Israel. If this were going on in the United States from Vancouver, Canada, into Seattle, would we react? Course we do. We would have to. I think what the Israelis are doing is very important. I think this terrorist organization, Hamas, has got to be put away. They've got to come to their senses. The Fatah group, which is--makes up part of Palestinian group, has a peace arrangement with Israel. Hamas should do the same.

MR. GREGORY: And they're in power in the West Bank.

SEN. REID: That's right. And, and, and Israel, for--since 1967, controlled Gaza. They gave it to the Palestinians as a gesture of peace. And all they got are a bunch of rockets in return.

MR. GREGORY: So you think that Israel ought to move forward and try to remove Hamas from power?

SEN. REID: They have to. I, I'm not concerned about removing Hamas from power, I'm concerned about stopping the rocket fire and the mortar fire into Israel. That is the key, and that's what Israel's up to according to the prime minister.

MR. GREGORY: Should there be an immediate cease-fire?

SEN. REID: If the Hamas organization will agree and there is some degree of certainty that they will follow through. They, in the past, have simply not lived up to what they said they would do. If there's a way of enforcing this cease-fire, then yes. Otherwise, Israel has to continue till they stop the rockets and mortars coming into Israel, maiming, injuring...

MR. GREGORY: Right.

SEN. REID: ...and killing Israelis.

MR. GREGORY: So you, you're in sync with the Bush administration on this point?

SEN. REID: Yes, I am.

MR. GREGORY: OK. [my emphasis]

This Rasmussen Reports poll -- the first to survey American public opinion specifically regarding the Israeli attack on Gaza -- strongly bolsters the severe disconnect I documented the other day between (a) American public opinion on U.S. policy towards Israel and (b) the consensus views expressed by America's political leadership. Not only does Rasmussen find that Americans generally "are closely divided over whether the Jewish state should be taking military action against militants in the Gaza Strip" (44-41%, with 15% undecided), but Democratic voters overwhelmingly oppose the Israeli offensive -- by a 24-point margin (31-55%). By stark constrast, Republicans, as one would expect (in light of their history of supporting virtually any proposed attack on Arabs and Muslims), overwhelmingly support the Israeli bombing campaign (62-27%).

Israelis point to thousands of rocket attacks by Hamas on Israel, without mentioning that no Israelis had been killed by them during the truce stretching from mid-June, 2008 until December 26. That is, the prelude to the most violent Israeli attack on Gaza since 1967 was . . . not a single Israeli death at the hands of Hamas in the preceding half-year. And in 8 years, Hamas had killed about 15 Israelis with those home made rockets, during which time the Israelis had killed nearly 5000 Palestinians, nearly 1000 of them minors. The rockets were small, handmade affairs for the most part and most landed uselessly. Some did damage to property and a few wounded or killed people. That would be a legitimate assertion. But the quotation of "thousands" of rockets is a half-truth and intentionally misleading.

Another half-truth is that Israel is involved in a "peace process" or supports Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, when in fact it has gone on stealing Palestinian land in the West Bank and making Palestinian lives miserable and colonizing them.

MR. GREGORY: Let me ask you about the war in Iraq. In April of 2007, this is what you said: "I believe myself that ... this war is lost and the surge is not accomplishing anything." Were you wrong?

SEN. REID: David, I first met General David Petraeus in Iraq. He was training the Iraqi forces at that time. At that time, he knew it wasn't working. After he became the commander in Iraq, he and I sat down and talked. He said to me, and he said within the sound of everyone's voice, "The war cannot be won militarily." I said it differently than he did. But it needed a change in direction. Petraeus brought that about. He brought it about--the surge helped, of course it helped. But in addition to that, the urging of me and other people in Congress and the country dictated a change, and that took place. So...

MR. GREGORY: But you said the surge was not accomplishing anything. Even Barack Obama said last fall that it exceeded everyone's expectations and succeeded beyond our wildest dreams.

SEN. REID: Listen, at that--the time that statement was made, the surge--they weren't talking about the surge. Petraeus added to the surge some very, very interesting things that changed things. He said a lot--just simply numbers of troops is not going to do the deal. What we need to do is work with the Iraqi people, which we haven't done before. That's where the Awakening Councils came about, as a result of David Petraeus' genius. He's done--he will be written about in the history books for years to come. My original statement was in keeping what David Petraeus said; that is, the war cannot be won militarily.

MR. GREGORY: Do you believe that the war in Iraq has been lost?

SEN. REID: I don't think at this stage we can talk about that with any degree of sensibility. That has to be something that will talked about in the history books to come. We...

MR. GREGORY: So you spoke to soon in 2007?

SEN. REID: David Petraeus and Harry Reid spoke at the same time. David Petraeus said that the war cannot be won militarily, I said what I said. Who, who phrased it the best is...

MR. GREGORY: You said that the war is lost. Today, in 2009, that's no longer your view?

SEN. REID: David, listen, someone else will have to determine that as the years go on. What has the war done? It's brought about--it's destabilized the Middle East. We have a civil war going on in Israel. We have a civil war in Iraq, as indicated today, more than 50 people killed with a bomb in Iraq today. We have Lebanon, a civil war there. We have Iran thumbing their nose with every, everyone. And if that weren't bad enough, our standing in the world community is so far down as a result of this war, so--and that doesn't take into consideration the tens of thousands who have been injured...

MR. GREGORY: Mm-hmm.

SEN. REID: ...and the thousands have been killed in the war. So it's, it's--historians will have to talk about what the war in Iraq did. But I think historians today indicate, as I have, the outline that I've given. [my emphasis]

6. The sole explanation for the fall in the monthly death rate for Iraqi civilians was the troop excalation [sic] or surge of 30,000 extra US troops in 2007. In fact, troop levels had been that high before without major effect. The US military did good counter-insurgency in 2007. The major reason for the fall in the death toll, however, was that the Shiites won the war for Baghdad, ethnically cleansing hundreds of thousands of Sunnis from the capital, and turning it into a city with a Shiite majority of 75 to 80 percent. (When Bush invaded, Baghdad was about 50/50 Sunni and Shiite). The high death tolls in 2006 and 2007 were a by-product of this massive ethnic cleansing campaign. Now, a Shiite militiaman in Baghdad would have to drive for a while to find a Sunni Arab to kill.

--Concrete walls built between Sunni and Shiite areas made “death-squad” raids more difficult but also "cantonized" much of Baghdad and other Iraqi cities, making everyday life for Iraqis even more exhausting as they sought food or traveled to work.

--An expanded U.S. policy of rounding up so-called "military age males" locked up tens of thousands in prison.

At home, the Justice Department's "torture memo" would be a legal defense for any but the lawyers who wrote it, and Congress, in the Military Commissions Act, granted retrospective immunity to officials involved in the interrogation of al-Qaeda suspects in the wake of September 11.

Something has changed in the Mideast equation, and the killing of Ghayan [pronounced like Ryan with a hard R], is a telling indication of that change.

Knowing Israel (having listened to the Israeli far-right as it condemned the IDF as an army of pansies afraid to fight, and to the Israeli far-left as it sympathized only with Gaza casualties and not those in Sderot), Ghayan knew that he could surround himself with the human shields of four wives and 11 children and survive this war.

Knowing the UN and the international community, Ghayan knew that if he used mosques for Hamas armed wing headquarters and storage armories for longer-range rockets from Iran and China, Israeli military planners would not dare to attack them, fearing a grave diplomatic and public outcry.

Knowing that the Israeli Air Force (in his view, demonstrating the Jew's essential weakness) had begun warning Gazans of impending attacks, Ghayan refused to have his family take to the roof to cause Israel to call off the bombing. The human shield would suffice.

In a matter of 24 hours, two mosques serving as Hamas military bases were destroyed, and Ghayan and his family killed.

The world? The world has taken much more interest in New Years.
The Palestinians? A central fact of the Mideast equation may, at long last, be dawning on them:

To win, all that Israel has to do, is survive.

[Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi] Livni told her French counterpart Bernard Kouchner that Hamas must must not be given the opportunity to gain any sort of legitimacy within a renewal of a truce. ...

Israel's offensive in the Gaza Strip has damaged Hamas and will not end until Israel no longer deems the Palestinian Islamist faction a threat, Livni told reporters in Paris. ...

On Wednesday, Israel rejected the proposal for a 48-hour humanitarian truce as unreasonable. "We did not go into the Gaza operation only to end it while rocket fire continues," Olmert told cabinet ministers during a special session.

To me, the production of this book was a way of getting close to my own history as well as the history of the RAF, which has been distorted by myths. And yet, appraising this type of 1970s terrorism in West Germany has become much more difficult since Al Quaida showed their murderous contempt for human life on 11 September 2001. Compared with the commandos who flew jet planes into the World Trade Center in New York, we were troubled amateurs, tormented by moral scruples. While Islamic assassins not only accept the death of civilians but attempt to kill as many as possible, we had long discussions about the issue of legitimate goals. When 17 workers were unintentionally hurt in a bomb attack on the headquarters of the Springer media corporation in Hamburg in May 1972, there was serious criticism about it and heavy tension within the group.

In making this comparison I do not want to, nor can I, deny our responsibility, but I wish to point out nevertheless that the term terrorism has undergone a change of meaning and is now understood in a different context than it was in the seventies. The media revolution through the Internet, satellite TV and 24-hour news channels around the world, creating the possibility of messages from all corners of the world, give the terrorists of today a power and visual impact which we never had.

Today, the propaganda methods we used seem completely antiquated. Andreas Baader did not pose for a video camera like Osama Bin Laden, Kalashnikov in hand, to recruit new comrades. In Ulrike Meinhof we had an excellent, professional journalist, but our press releases were always reduced to brief, formulaic commando-like declarations. We never really tried to use the power of pictures. [my emphasis]

We wanted to be part of the world-wide youth revolt in the late 190s, and we wanted to be its vanguard. We were shocked and enraged by the images of the war in Vietnam, such as the photograph of the Saigon Head of Police who killed a captured Vietcong on a open road by shooting him in the head. Most Germans accepted the Vietnam War without taking action - we, by contrast, identified with Ho Chi Minh, Che Guevara and the liberation movements in the Third World. In Nazi Germany our parents had been stranded in an ugly, despicable place in history. We wanted to escape their guilt and their nightmare, as well as their continuing love of law and order.

We wanted to be radical, courageous, pioneers, we considered ourselves to be a vanguard. We overestimated ourselves excessively, indulging in the illusion that revolution was possible in the prosperous German Federal Republic [West Germany]. In this light we were self-timers [i.e., self-justifying] who acted cut off from reality in a void. We lived a kind of armed existentialism. The men were ready to get going. While they were busy affectionately cleaning their guns, the women did the major part of organising and thinking. The women did bank raids, too, but more carefully and reluctantly. I also carried a gun, though I would have tried everything else to defend myself before using it. The weapon was the membership card of the RAF which we, in accordance with the [American] Black Panthers, would only use in self-defence, if it was really necessary.

At first in Cologne I was kept isolated in a normal prison block. Then I was taken to an empty wing, a dead wing, where I was the only prisoner. Ulrike Meinhof later called it the "Silent Wing". The shocking experience was that I could not hear any noises apart from the ones that I generated myself. Nothing. Absolute silence. I went through states of excitement and was haunted by visual and acoustic hallucinations, extreme concentration disturbances, horrible weakness and fatigue. I had no idea how long this would go on for. I had a terrible fear of going mad.

But America in 1993 was a very different country — not just a country that had yet to see what happens when conservatives control all three branches of government, but also a country in which Democratic control of Congress depended on the votes of Southern conservatives. Today, Republicans have taken away almost all those Southern votes — and lost the rest of the country. It was a grand ride for a while, but in the end the Southern strategy led the G.O.P. into a cul-de-sac. [my emphasis]