Do You Want Total War?

*Prime Minister Tony Blair, defending his interventionist policies in Iraq and Afghanistan, said Britain should carry on influencing world affairs through fighting wars as well as peacekeeping.

*Washington intelligence, military and foreign policy circles are abuzz today with speculation that the President, yesterday or in recent days, sent a secret Executive Order to the Secretary of Defense and to the Director of the CIA to launch military operations against Syria and Iran.

*Some Somali officials with the TFG, however, openly boast that U.S. ground forces are in Somalia, while others stick to the party line and flatly deny it. And in a telephone interview today from Mogadishu with NEWSWEEK, the TFG's interior minister, Hussein Aidid, confirmed that U.S. ground forces were involved in the mop-up in southern Somalia.

*OK, so the question is: Was the U.S. assault on the Iranian consulate in Irbil--sovereign Iranian territory--legal? Does the President have the power to invade another country without authorization under the war powers act? I would think not, but I just spoke to a Democratic Member of Congress who was freaked by the obvious attempt to provoke the Iranians into a military response, but said that it might have been legal if the people and information seized were directly involved in attacks on U.S. citizens.