On the eve of a summit between president Bush and Iraqi prime minister Maliki, someone at the White House leaked a memo describing Iraq’s prime minister as either clueless, deluded or impotent. The leak may have some bearing on the postponement of the Bush-Maliki meeting, although the primary reason may be the decision by followers […]

Last week, Nicolo Pollari, the head of SISMI (the Italian counterpart to our CIA), was fired.

Three highways through their own separate hells.
Cormac McCarthy, The Road: A
Paul Park, Celestis: B+
Roger Zelazny, Damnation Alley: C-
The atomic post-apocalypse, as a warning or as a story unto itself, originated roughly in September, 1945 and has been flogged so mercilessly since that time, it’s become a field of cliché so barren of fruit that authors […]

If president Bush keeps up the good work, he’ll leave office every bit as popular as Richard Nixon was the day he left. The occasion should be suitably memorialized. (This is assuming Bush actually leaves.)
Incoming presidents don’t customarily use their inaugural addresses to slam their predecessors but in this case there’s really no point […]

Michael Ledeen has the solution for Iraq: get US troops out of their latte shops and yuppie gyms, plus regime change in Iran and Syria. “[W]e may not need new troops,” he says, “just better use of the ones already there.”
The way we win in Iraq, according to Ledeen, is by convincing the Iraqis […]

“Why do they hate us? Is it somehow connected to the way we cut off their limbs with chainsaws?” That’s Jonathon Schwarz’s question, and by golly it’s a good one. He’s referring to the exhumation of butchered bodies from a mass grave near a Colombian village that was attacked by chainsaw-wielding right wing paramilitaries who […]

From the Department of Oh Lord We’re Screwed comes news that Europeans think the US wants to start a civil war in Palestine.
AMERICAN proposals to strengthen Mahmoud Abbas’s Palestinian security forces with additional guns and fighters have alarmed other Western nations, who argue that it is tantamount to supporting one faction in a potential civil […]

President Bush and secretary of state Condoleezza Rice have both been drawing hopeful analogies between Iraq and Vietnam. What Vietnam teaches us, they say, is that over time old enemies can reconcile and a war-torn nation can chart a happy future. This is both true and, in context, unbelievably bizarre.
To review: the US spent 15 […]

From the Department of Obviousity comes news that Donald Rumsfeld’s presumptive heir will make Iraq his top priority.
Robert Gates, President Bush’s pick for defense secretary, emerged from meetings on Capitol Hill Friday to say Iraq would be a top priority for him if confirmed by the Senate … “One of the highest priorities, if […]

Steve Clemons at The Washington Note earns a ticket behind the curtain and finds that the Wizard is depressed. After attending a dinner populated with “a few former Secretaries of State and foreign ministers, top intelligence officials, think tank chiefs, Senators and House Members, former National Security Advisors and Secretaries of Defense,” Clemons says that […]