Obama’s order, approved earlier this year and known as an intelligence “finding,” broadly permits the CIA and other U.S. agencies to provide support that could help the rebels oust Assad.
This and other developments signal a shift toward growing, albeit still circumscribed, support for Assad’s armed opponents - a shift that intensified following last month’s failure of the U.N. Security Council to agree on tougher sanctions against the Damascus government.
The order stops just short of having the U.S. give rebels weapons.
(via brooklynmutt)
![mohandasgandhi:
kohenari:
The books Netanyahu is reading before deciding whether to attack Iran
For Hebrew Book Week, which takes place this week, the Prime Minister’s Office released a greeting recorded by Netanyahu. In the short clip, filmed in the premier’s office in Jerusalem, Netanyahu holds a book written by his father, historian Ben-Zion Netanyahu, entitled The Five Forefathers of Zionism.
[…]
The clip provides a glimpse at the books that Netanyahu keeps in his office, most of which represent his fields of interest: the Bible, the Iranian nuclear threat, Jerusalem and David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister.
One of the more prominent books on the shelf could not be more predictable: The Rise of Nuclear Iran – How Iran Defies the West, published in 2009 and written by Dore Gold, who served as Netanyahu’s political adviser during his first term as premier and was later appointed Israel’s ambassador to the UN by Netanyahu. Gold still visit Netanyahu’s bureau once every few weeks and advises him on various issues.
Another book that speaks to Netanyahu’s never-ending dealings with the Iranian nuclear project is Deterrence and Security in the 21st Century: China, Britain, France, and the Enduring Legacy of the Nuclear Revolution. The author, Dr. Avery Goldstein, an expert on China at the University of Pennsylvania, writes in the book that attaining nuclear weapons “will remain an attractive option for many other less powerful states worries about adversaries who capabilities they cannot match.”
Netanyahu claims he has not yet decided whether or not to attack Iran’s nuclear sites, but one book in his library could help him make up his mind:Advice to War Presidents: A Remedial Course in Statecraft by former diplomat and current academic Angelo Codevilla. In the book, published in 2009, Codevilla claims that most American presidents have waged failed and unnecessary wars because they tried to impose their personal values on the international reality.
Among the other titles on Netanyahu’s shelf: Novardok by Shmuel Ben-Artzi, Netanyahu’s father-in-law, on the pre-WWII world of Lithuanian Jewish seminaries; Gandhi: Conversations with Rehavam Zeevi by Michael Shashar; James the Brother of Jesus: The Key to Unlocking the Secrets of early Christianity and the Dead Sea Scrolls by American archaeologist and Bible scholar Robert Eisenman; Ben-Gurion and the Arabs of the Land of Israel, by Shabtai Tevet; Avraham Ibn Shoshan’s dictionary of the Hebrew language and The War on Terror, by none other than one Benjamin Netanyahu.
Can you read a little more Gandhi and a little less, well, you, Bibi?](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m5eh0eximp1qzy2emo1_500.jpg)
