from his website:

Statement of U.S. Senator Russ Feingold

On the Hezbollah Attacks on Israel

July 14, 2006

“I stand firmly with the people of Israel and their government as they defend themselves against these outrageous attacks. The kidnapping of Israeli soldiers and missile attacks against Israeli citizens are unacceptable and cannot be tolerated. The first steps toward establishing peace must begin with the unconditional and immediate return of the kidnapped Israeli soldiers. Lebanon, Syria, Iran and countries throughout the region must also condemn the actions of Hezbollah, Hamas, and other groups committed to blocking the peace process and must take strong actions to return stability to the region immediately.”

Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel:

On second trip to Iowa this year, talk turns to Iraq, '08 elections

By CRAIG GILBERT July 16, 2006

Maquoketa, Iowa - On a two-day political trip to Iowa, Wisconsin Democrat Russ Feingold broadened his long-running critique of the Iraq war, saying that the chaos in Iraq has emboldened U.S. enemies to attack Israel, and that it may end up fueling far broader conflict both inside and outside the Middle East.

"We have bought ourselves a world of woe," Feingold told a small group of Democrats at a downtown cafe, citing the escalating conflict along Israel's borders as further evidence of what he called the "tragic error" and "disaster" of invading Iraq.

"What we have done by becoming mired in Iraq, and by deciding to change the balance of power in that region, is enable Iran and Syria to be much more open in tormenting Israel, the United States and our allies," Feingold, a longtime supporter of Israel, said in an interview Sunday. "They don't have any restraints on them. They know that we're tied down. They see a window of opportunity being created by the fact that we are stuck in Iraq."....

With the latest Middle East crisis exploding over the course of Feingold's trip, he defended Israel's right to protect itself and blamed the conflict on Hezbollah, Iran and Syria.

He said he did not share one charge made by some critics of U.S. foreign policy, that the Bush administration has forsaken the role of "honest broker" and had tilted too far toward Israel over the Palestinians.

Instead, he argued that the Iraq war was harming Israel by emboldening its enemies. "There were some of those who support the state of Israel, which I do, who said, 'You know, this war in Iraq will be good for Israel.' Guess what? It wasn't," Feingold said Sunday in Maquoketa.

"The idea of turning Iraq into just sort of chaos opened up the deal for Iran and Syria, who are actively interested in destroying Israel. They're having a field day," he said.....

Quad City Times:

Feingold visits Q-C, denounces president

By Ed Tibbetts, July 17, 2006

....Feingold also spoke about the escalating violence in the Middle East, saying Israel has the right to defend itself. He added the attack on Haifa made it more difficult to ask it to exercise restraint. Feingold said the U.S. should push allies of Iran and Syria, like Russia, to use their influence to persuade those countries to stop “fanning the flames” of the violence.

“Some of these countries don’t always use their best offices to say if you want to have an economic and military relationship you’ve got to cut it out,” he said. He also said a special U.S. envoy should be appointed to deal with the situation.

I found this to be a very good short "big picture" summary analysis:

The Taliban’s Silent Partner

By ROBERT D. KAPLAN, New York Times Op-Ed, July 20, 2006

Excerpts:

....The United States and NATO will not prevail unless they can persuade Pakistan’s president, Pervez Musharraf, to help us more than he has....

It isn’t that President Musharraf is doing nothing. He has deployed troops along the border that have somewhat...Moreover, many of his troops are busy quelling a separatist rebellion....

But he feels himself atop a volcano of fundamentalism. He is among the last of the Westernized, British-style officers in the national army; after him come the men with the beards. The military and Pakistani society are filled with those who do not see the Taliban as a threat: it is an American problem, and one for an Afghan government toward which they feel ambivalence. So President Musharraf must walk a fine line. And he must be as devious with us as he is with any other faction.

....We can’t reverse this drift without a stronger policy toward Pakistan. I say this with extreme trepidation. President Musharraf, for all his faults, may still be the worst person to rule his country except for any other who might replace him. And yet it is necessary to hold his feet to the fire to a greater extent than we have.

Things have reached the point that it was entirely justified for the American ambassador to Islamabad, Ryan Crocker, to say this month that the exiled former Prime Ministers Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif should be allowed to return and run against Mr. Musharraf. As corrupt as those two leaders were, we need leverage.....

Robert D. Kaplan is a national correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly, and the author of “Soldiers of God: With Islamic Warriors in Afghanistan and Pakistan.”

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton said yesterday that she supported “whatever steps are necessary” to defend Israel against Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran and Syria in the military conflict in the Middle East....

...she said America must show “solidarity and support” for Israel in the face of the “unwarranted, unprovoked” seizure of three Israeli soldiers by members of Hamas and Hezbollah, which she described as among “the new totalitarians of the 21st century.”

“We will stand with Israel because Israel is standing for American values as well as Israeli ones,” said Mrs. Clinton, who joined two dozen political and religious leaders.....

By PATRICK HEALY

Published: July 18, 2006, New York Times.

with nearly 1,000 deaths last year, and 50,000 displaced, "looks increasingly like a civil war." If you didn't read it, you should, it's not about where you think:

In India, Maoist Guerrillas Widen 'People's War'

by Somini Sengupta

April 13:

.....looks increasingly like a civil war, one claiming more and more lives and slowing the industrial growth of a country hungry for.....

The insurgents blow up railway tracks, seize land and chase away forest guards. They have made it virtually impossible for government officials, whose presence here in the hinterland is already patchy, to function. Police posts, government offices and industrial plants are favored targets. Their ultimate goal is to overthrow the state....in a report in March....calls the conflict "the most serious challenge to human rights advocacy in India"....

Edward Rothstein in a review of the current show on the Russian Gulag system at the Ellis Island Museum. The relevant excerpts:

....Then something else happens. In the last third of the exhibition, the small objects disappear, and big concepts take their place. But in their way, they, too, seem eager to slight the gulag past.

The exhibition's text reads:

"Brutal systems have played a prominent role in many countries, including the United States. Although slavery ended after the American Civil War, its consequences persist. The repercussions of the Holocaust in Europe and apartheid in South Africa reverberate even today. Similarly, Russians face the legacy of the gulag. How can citizens in these countries face up to the horrors of the past?"

It turns out that the gulag museum is part of an association it helped establish in 1999, the International Coalition of Historic Site Museums of Conscience, described as "a network of organizations committed to teaching and learning how historic sites and museums can inspire social consciousness and action."

That coalition now has 14 sites, which range from a 19th-century workhouse in Britain to a slave house in Senegal, from the Theresienstadt concentration camp in the Czech Republic to the Lower East Side Tenement Museum in New York. Not to be left out.....

No doubt noble sentiments are at work in this roster, but as a result, all specificity and judgment disappears; conscience consumes everything and contains nothing. To make a grand rhetorical gesture, encompassing all human injustice when one particular example seems inconveniently egregious, has become a museum ritual, a political tic.

When I visited the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam several years ago, the somber concreteness of the Annex and the dread fate of its inhabitants were nearly erased by a final multimedia display in which the Holocaust was calculatedly eclipsed by invocations of every contemporary example of racial and social injustice the museum could formulate. The National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, in Cincinnati, did the same thing with American slavery, ending its account with a potpourri of international injustices, as if recruiting activists for a litany of causes.

In the gulag show, on a smaller scale, the approach is the same. The particulars of the past, so carefully presented, are suddenly tossed aside, and all differences in nature and scale are eliminated. Stalin really does get off easy. The coalition claims a higher moral vision. Actually, it cheapens injustice, leaving everyone equally guilty and equally innocent. Are 19th-century English workhouses and New York tenements comparable in any way to the gulag? Is the plight of women before receiving the vote similar to the starving of Kolyma prisoners, who scrambled in the ice to eat prehistoric amphibians?

Harvard University's National Resource Center for Russian, East European and Central Asian Studies is developing curriculum packets for this exhibition....The educational material I was sent is careful and informed, but here and there are whiffs of this homogenized conscience:

"Are there lessons to be learned from a study of the gulag that might apply to prison systems in countries like the United States?" the curriculum proposes asking students. "For example, should prisoners in this country be forced to work jobs such as picking up trash on the highway?"