...IRAN -- MULLEN: I WANT 'A HEALTHY DIALOGUE WITH IRAN': Last month, President Bush launched a political attack against Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) and other Democrats while speaking before the Israeli parliament, saying that they favor a policy of appeasement toward terrorists. "Some seem to believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals," said Bush. "We have an obligation to call this what it is -- the false comfort of appeasement." After Bush made the comments, CNN's Ed Henry reported that "White House aides" said that Bush was referring to those who have said that "it would be okay for the U.S. President to meet with leaders like the Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad." But now, Bush's chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Michael Mullen, appears to be siding with those who favor direct engagement with Iran. In an interview with National Journal published this weekend, Mullen spoke favorably of directly engaging with Iran. "I would like to have a healthy dialogue with Iran," said Mullen. "I do think engagement would offer an opportunity, certainly, to understand each other better." Mullen isn't the only administration official who has eschewed Bush's absolutist rhetoric in favor of a more diplomatic approach. The day before Bush made his "appeasement" remarks, Defense Secretary Robert Gates told a group of retired diplomats that we need to "figure out a way to develop some leverage" with Iran "and then sit down and talk with them." Gates later refused to defend Bush's attack.

AFGHANISTAN -- VIOLENCE ESCALATES AS TURMOIL CONTINUES TO ENGULF NATION: After several days of fierce fighting in eastern Afghanistan and along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, Gen. Egon Ramms, a German NATO general, is advocating the deployment of 6,000 additional soldiers as both U.S. and NATO commanders are acknowledging that the Taliban is "resurgent in the region." Gen. Dan McNeill, who commanded NATO's International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan for 16 months, said during a Defense Department briefing recently that attacks in eastern Afghanistan increased by 50 percent in April from the same time last year. Further, comprehensive data released by the NATO-led command show a steady escalation in violence since NATO took charge of the Afghanistan mission in 2006. In May, for the first time, American and NATO combat deaths in Afghanistan outnumbered the toll in Iraq. After fire-fights in Farah Province, which left two American soldiers dead last Thursday, the Defense Department is reporting that there have been 451 U.S. deaths in the Afghanistan region since 2001. While coverage of the war in Afghanistan has increased slightly this year, CBS News chief foreign correspondent Lara Logan noted that no American television network has a full-time correspondent in Afghanistan. "If I were to watch the news that you hear here in the United States, I would just blow my brains out because it would drive me nuts ," Logan said.

"Five years into the war in Iraq and nearly seven years into the war in Afghanistan, getting news of the conflicts onto television is harder than ever." Almost halfway into 2008, the three evening network newscasts have shown 181 weekday minutes of Iraq coverage, compared with 1,157 minutes for all of 2007. "That's about two minutes of Iraq coverage, per network, per week."

More than four years after it began broadcasting, the Arab television station Al-Hurra -- the centerpiece of a U.S. government campaign to spread democracy in the Middle East -- "is widely regarded as a flop in the Arab world, where it has struggled to attract viewers and overcome skepticism about its mission."