Iran is the enemy; Al Qaeda is the enemy. Therefore Iran is Al Qaeda. Or so you might conclude from last night’s State of the Union address. Via Chris Preble (who has the highlight reel), Glenn Kessler takes the logic apart in The Washington Post.

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There’s a piece in Der Spiegel reporting that many in Iraq consider the “Kalashnikov Index,” a tongue-in-cheek name for average local arms prices, “the most reliable indicator of what the future may bring”: On Thursday morning, only hours after US President George Bush once again promised America would help bring peace and stability to the […]

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If, as Megan complains, some of us who opposed the war in Iraq (it belatedly occurs to me that “doves” is too open to misreading) are a bit hung up on the whole who-was-right, who-was-wrong thing, perhaps this piece in Radar, looking at how pundits on opposite sides of the issue before the war have […]

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Plenty of others have by now responded to the general tone of this Jason Zengerle post at The Plank, so let me just zero in on this: I’m talking about something more nebulous: what are the consequences of America losing a war–which is, after all, what withdrawal will mean? What will it do to our […]

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Megan McArdle argues that those of us who opposed the Iraq War from the get-go should pause a moment before we dislocate our elbows patting ourselves on the back: This has not convinced me of the brilliance of the doves, because precisely none of the ones that I argued with predicted that things would go […]

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My neighbor Heather reports from India on all the goodwill our democracy-spreading efforts in Iraq are generating. Remember, if we make everyone despise us everywhere else, we won’t have to fight them over here. Or something.

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I meant to link this back when it first appeared a couple weeks back, but Justin Logan has an excellent short response to the proponents of a “surge” strategy for Iraq.

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TPMmuckraker catches the following interesting admission from Trent Lott, interviewed by Chris Matthews on last night’s Hardball: Matthews: I think [Vice President] Cheney had his thumb on the scale, do you agree? That they were pushing this war so hard, they were working to look at any evidence that backed the war and ignore any […]

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Via Brad deLong, this speech by Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas is pretty amazing: In the past, they said: “Under no circumstances will we accept a state, unless it includes all of Palestine, because Palestine is a land of Islamic endowment.” Fine. This doesn’t work. I can say: “We demand all of the land,” and you […]

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I was among those cheered by the departure of Donald Rumsfeld, but

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