The World in Brief (4/20/06)

Islamic Jihad continues attacks on Israel

Dion Nissenbaum, Knight Ridder Newspapers… Islamic Jihad continues attacks on Israel

Dion Nissenbaum, Knight Ridder Newspapers

JERUSALEM — Islamic Jihad is one of the Middle East’s smaller militant groups, but it’s been one of the more tenacious and troublesome forces affecting events in Israel, Gaza and the West Bank.

Unlike the larger Islamist group Hamas, which declared a temporary halt to suicide bombings last year, Islamic Jihad has pressed on, claiming responsibility for most of the nine suicide bombings that have struck Israel in the last 15 months. Thirty-six people have died in those attacks.

Islamic Jihad has been behind some of Israel’s deadliest suicide bombings, including the October 2003 bombing of Maxim’s restaurant in Haifa, which killed 21 people. The attacker was one of the first Palestinian women to become a suicide bomber.

A year later, Israel bombed what it said was an Islamic Jihad training base in Syria, where one of the group’s leaders, Ramadan Shallah, lives.

Islamic Jihad was founded by three Palestinians studying in Egypt who were expelled to Gaza after the assassination of President Anwar Sadat in 1981. In Gaza, they found fertile soil, and Islamic Jihad grew into a potent force during the first Palestinian uprising.

Like Hamas, Islamic Jihad has been a prime target for Israeli assassinations. The group’s founder, Fathi Shakaki, was assassinated in Malta in 1995 in a hit that Islamic Jihad accused Israel of launching.

U.S. ignored Shiite militias, focused on Sunni insurgency

Tom Lasseter, Knight Ridder Newspapers

BAGHDAD, Iraq — U.S. officials were warned for more than two years that Shiite Muslim militias were infiltrating Iraq’s security forces and taking control of neighborhoods, but they failed to take action to counteract it, Iraqi and American officials said.

Now American officials call the militias the primary security concern in Iraq, blaming them for more civilian deaths than the Sunni Muslim-based insurgency and demanding that the Iraqi government move quickly to stem their influence.

U.S. officials concede that they didn’t act, in part because they were focused on fighting the Sunni-dominated insurgency and on recruiting and training Iraqi security forces.

“Last year, as we worked through the problem set, that (militias) wasn’t a problem set we focused on,” Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch, the top American military spokesman, said at a recent news briefing.

U.S. inaction gave the militias, with support from Iran, time to become a major force inside and outside the Iraqi government, and American officials acknowledge that dislodging them now would be difficult.

Bush’s new budget designee must grapple with huge deficit

Kevin G. Hall, Knight Ridder Newspapers

WASHINGTON — Awaiting Rob Portman when he becomes director of the White House Office of Management and Budget is this chilling fact: By one measure, the government’s budget deficit is actually twice as big as last year’s official total of $319 billion.

President Bush on Tuesday picked Portman, a family friend and the current U.S. trade representative, to head the OMB. The former Ohio congressman, 50, is widely praised for his smarts and pluck. He’ll need all that and more for his new job. If confirmed by the Senate, Portman must grapple with chronic budget deficits and severe government accounting problems to head off a looming fiscal crisis.

“Director Portman will be inheriting the most dire long-term fiscal outlook we’ve ever had,” said Brian Riedl, the chief budget analyst for the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank. “The first baby boomers retire in 18 months, and the Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid costs are set to explode. On top of that, he’ll be dealing with a Congress that’s absolutely addicted to runaway spending and pork!”

Conservatives like Riedl complain that federal spending has grown 45 percent since 2001 and that the budget deficit for fiscal 2005 was a whopping $319 billion.

But it’s actually more. When Treasury Secretary John Snow signed off in mid-December on the 2005 Financial Report of the United States Government — the official federal balance sheet — he acknowledged that a parallel accounting method showed the budget deficit was actually about $760 billion.