Anything that makes Robert Mugabe smile is bad.

Somebody photographs him playing with cute kittens, I'll amend that. For now, though, I rule prospects bleak:

Before the summit of 14 of southern Africa's leaders opened, Zimbabwe's critics had hoped that at the very least Robert Mugabe would get a private dressing-down as well as a few pointed public rebukes.

But when he left smiling for reporters it was clear that his colleagues had done nothing of the sort.

We still do not know what transpired behind the hotel's gilded doors, but the final communiqué gave no sense of urgency or pressure.

What it did offer was South Africa's President, Thabo Mbeki, as a facilitator for talks between Zimbabwe's opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) and President Mugabe's government.

The summit chairman, Tanzania's President Jakaya Kikwete, said that that decision alone was a breakthrough.

He described it as a landmark and to be fair, it is a departure from the deeply-held principle of non-interference in the internal affairs of member states here.

The final communiqué also called for a study group to look at Zimbabwe's plunging economy and come up with ways to help. It urged the West to end economic sanctions and engage diplomatically.

But the communiqué was also significant for what it left out.

It said nothing about timelines or dates, it gave no benchmarks for progress and said nothing about what might happen if Mr Mbeki's talks fail.

Yeah, well, it's so awkward to talk about mass starvation and the promise of a couple million refugees.

[As an aside, the BBC is also running some outtakes from African news services and African blogs on the Zimbabwe scene. Probably not a large enough sample to be considered representative of public opinion, but a lot of it serves as a useful antidote to the effect of government officials putting on happy faces and playing up the illusion of camaraderie in the face of violent repression and genocidal-scale mismanagement.]

The exhausted, incoherent rebuttal of the day.

So, I made the mistake of reading the Washington Post's editorial page again this morning, and found that the piece that took up the prime real estate at the top of the page - "The Results of Diplomacy (In Iran's case, they've been pretty thin.)" - was kinda problematic. Misleading, even. Not as bad as some, sure; it doesn't go that extra mile and overtly recommend any wildly stupid courses of action. But it seems to be chiding the Bush administration for its naiveté in trusting in the power of diplomacy against the Iranian menace, and . . . well, hell, read it for yourself.

Here's the whole thing:

IRAN'S SEIZURE of 15 British sailors and marines on the day before the U.N. Security Council approved another resolution imposing sanctions on Tehran for its nuclear program may have been a coincidence. But the seizure illustrated a stubborn reality about the diplomatic campaign the Bush administration embraced two years ago: While successful on its own terms, the campaign has yet to produce any significant change in Iranian behavior.

Administration officials were encouraged by signs of dissension in the Iranian leadership after the first of two unanimous sanctions resolutions passed the Security Council in late December. Before the second resolution was introduced, there were talks between Iranian and European officials about ways to renew negotiations. Yet the Iranian work on uranium enrichment has continued; there are signs the regime is racing to complete an industrial installation with thousands of centrifuges that it can present to the world as an accomplished fact.

Now Iran is parading captured British sailors before cameras and using their purported confessions of trespassing in Iranian waters as propaganda in a way that suggests an eagerness to escalate rather than defuse confrontation with the West. Yesterday, Britain offered evidence that its service members were captured in international waters and rightly called their treatment "completely unacceptable." Though Iran's foreign minister said a female sailor would be released "very soon," the television broadcast suggested the prisoners had been coerced.

It's widely believed that power in Iran is divided among competing factions, and it could be that hard-liners are seeking to preempt any steps by the regime to comply with the Security Council. It's impossible to predict what might come out of Tehran before the next U.N. deadline in late May. Yet what has happened so far is sobering.

Bush administration officials have been congratulating themselves on the relative speed and deftness with which the latest sanctions resolution was pushed through the Security Council. They are right, in a way: The diplomatic campaign against Iran has been pretty successful by the usual diplomatic measures. Not only has the United States worked relatively smoothly with European partners with which it differed bitterly over Iraq, but it has also been effective lately in winning support from Russia, China and nonaligned states such as South Africa.

Critics who lambasted the administration's unilateral campaign against an "axis of evil" a few years ago ought to be applauding the return to conventional diplomacy. We, too, think it's worth pursuing, especially when combined with steps short of a military attack to push back against Iranian aggression in the region. Still, two years after President Bush embraced the effort, it has to be noted: The diplomatic strategy so far has been no more successful than the previous "regime change" policy in stopping Iran's drive for a nuclear weapon.

Now, it seems to me that the assessment of the current situation isn't too far off. The scene's tense. The scene sucks, in fact. The Revolutionary Guard grabbed fifteen Brits - probably in Iraqi waters, not that it would've been a justified step even had there been an accidental crossing into Iranian territory - and has presumably made sure to keep them in the hands of people who want to ratchet up tensions with the West for political gain. Specifically, one might guess, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's political gain. Still, we don't know who exactly has them, and so we don't know the ideal proportion of carrot to stick.

Given that, "conventional diplomacy" plus "steps short of a military attack" does indeed make sense. I mean, inasmuch as anything so vague can.

But the editorial goes beyond the quick description and the nebulous prescription; it's trying to sell us the idea that the Bush administration has pushed pure diplomacy to its natural limits over the last two years, and gotten nowhere. This idea is, to be charitable, a sign of some kind of problem found somewhere between sloppiness and derangement.

There's a whole journalistic industry devoted to the matter of American policy toward Iran in the post-Powell era, but the basic lines of it go: Condoleezza Rice and the Department of State want to pursue diplomacy, and Dick Cheney and his allies want to do their damnedest to sabotage any efforts toward same. Even when Ms. Rice is having a good week, there are limits to what she can bring to the bargaining table, and all kinds of background chatter to undermine her message. If you look at the state of diplomatic play in March, 2005 - the period the Post singles out as the start of the talk-talk push - you'll note that that's the very same month the Cheneyites got John Bolton, professional anti-diplomat and known advocate of unilateral nuclear weapon deployment, in the UN. In December of that year, the American Prospect ran an article sketching out the awfulness of Mr. Bolton's tenure to date, with a long section devoted to his battles against Ms. Rice's policies:

In announcing the president’s nomination of Bolton, then the undersecretary of state for arms control and international security, Secretary Rice donned a happy face. Despite her enthusiastic exterior, though, this moment would mark the start of a new phase in their rocky relationship -- one in which Rice shadowed the heavy-handed Bolton with her own lighter diplomatic touch.

Indeed, it was Rice, not Bolton, who achieved the one significant success of Bolton’s first 100 days at the United Nations: a unanimous October 30 Security Council vote requiring Syria to fully cooperate with a UN investigation into the suspected Syria-sponsored assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. The Prospect has learned that in the days and weeks leading up to the late October UN report on Hariri’s assassination, Rice sought to sideline Bolton from the negotiations over the Security Council resolution that the report inspired. She also made the State Department, not the U.S. Mission to the UN, the central address for discussions on the resolution.

One of the first signs that a bureaucratic battle was brewing between Bolton and Rice over Syria came on October 18, when the State Department press corps was shocked to find that Rice had unexpectedly flown to New York to meet Annan. A State Department spokesman explained that the two met to “compare notes” in advance of a widely anticipated report by Detlev Mehlis, the secretary-general’s special investigator for the Hariri assassination. Yet Bolton, the man in charge of the United States’ day-to-day operations at the UN, was conspicuously absent from that meeting. In what appears to have been less of an accident than a matter of intentional timing, Rice made her trip to New York on the very morning that Bolton had to be in Washington, testifying before the Senate on the progress (or lack thereof) of UN reforms.

The Prospect has further learned that, rather than forging Security Council strategy with America’s European allies at the UN building in New York, much of the diplomatic legwork has been carried out in Foggy Bottom. On October 22, a French delegation from the UN traveled to Washington for initial discussions on the Syria resolution (later called Security Council Resolution 1636), of which the French were the original authors. According to a diplomatic source, Bolton was not initially invited to that meeting. The French, however, insisted on his presence. So Bolton attended, but not without three chaperones: Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs David Welch, Welch’s deputy (and vice-presidential daughter) Elizabeth Cheney, and National Security Council Middle East chief Michael Doran. “It’s like they stuck a strong team from the [State Department and National Security Council] to watch him,” said the diplomat.

Despite Rice’s tight oversight of the resolution negotiations, the unanimity of the council was still in doubt one day before the Security Council meeting. Finally, in a last-minute lunch meeting with her foreign-minister counterparts from the veto-wielding permanent five Security Council members, Rice personally removed references to sanctions that had been inserted by the United States. With those obstacles to unanimous consent gone, Resolution 1636 passed 15 to 0.

Rice’s involvement came after Bolton had won round one in the Syria battle. Bolton and Rice’s bureaucratic tiffs over Syria had actually boiled over two weeks prior to the Security Council vote. Journalist Ibrahim Hamidi, writing in the Arabic-language newspaper Al-Hayat, reported -- and the Prospect has independently confirmed -- that Bolton had leaked to British newspapers that the Bush administration had signaled its willingness to offer Syria a “Libya-style deal” -- a reference to Libyan President Muammar Quaddafi’s decision last year to give up pursuing weapons of mass destruction and renounce terrorism in return for a restoration of relations with the United States and the United Kingdom. According to The Times of London, Syria responded positively to the secret U.S. offer, which was made through a third party. But after Bolton publicly aired the details of the potential deal -- which would require Syria to cooperate with the Mehlis investigation, end interference in Lebanese affairs and alleged interference in Iraqi affairs, and cease supporting militant groups like Hamas and Hezbollah—Damascus quickly denied that such a deal was in the offing.

“It is no secret that Mr. Bolton and Dr. Rice are not the closest friends,” a well-placed UN official told the Prospect. “Indeed, I’ve heard it said that the main reason he came here was that she didn’t want him in Foggy Bottom.” The animosity between the two is, in fact, well established, as they locked horns on Iran. On April 18, 2005, The Washington Post reported that Bolton let Rice go on her first trip to Europe as secretary of state without briefing her on European opposition to his one-man campaign to seek the ouster of the International Atomic Energy Agency Chief Mohammed ElBaradei. ElBaradei was a popular diplomat -- and would later win the Nobel Peace Prize for his work -- but Bolton thought ElBaradei was too “soft” on Iran.

Rice was playing hardball with Bolton, too. During the first Bush term, Bolton had effectively blocked U.S. support for a French, German, and British plan for confronting Tehran’s nuclear ambitions. Soon after Rice moved to Foggy Bottom, she sought to keep Bolton out of key policy discussions about Iran. In June, The Washington Post reported that Rice sought to keep secret from Bolton a meeting of French, British, German, and American officials who flew to Washington for a “brainstorming session on Iran.” Of the Iran meeting a European diplomat told the Post, “It was the American side that didn’t want him there.”

That's not the end-all, be-all of American diplomatic schizophrenia, of course. There's a short timeline here, care of the BBC - there's not a whole lot of meat to it, granted, but you can still get the sense of the environment against which diplomatic efforts were being made. From August 2005 on, there were recurring signs that Mr. Bush and his administration were more inclined toward military strikes than compromise, and Mr. Ahmadinejad - who'd been elected as an economic populist, remember - merrily took any pretext we offered to get in front of a microphone and show off his rabid, nihilistic side. How much diplomatic leverage do we suppose Ms. Rice was capable of exercising when there was some new story every month to suggest that she wasn't dealing in good faith, or, at least, couldn't guarantee that her negotiations would be accepted by the president and by those aides to the president who were assembling questionable care packages for the media about Iranian weapons being deployed against American troops?

Look, if Mr. Ahmadinejad is hell-bent on a confrontation, and has enough political capital in the Iranian system to keep his ass covered, then there's not a whole hell of a lot we can do. The kidnapping of the British sailors really is a dangerous provocation, and it's all on the heads of whatever faction those lunatics in the Iranian Revolutionary Guard found themselves representing. It may be that we're going somewhere even darker than where we already are.

Fine.

But, please, please, let's not give political cover to all the people who've been pushing for hyper-aggressive foreign policy by pretending that the peaceniks have had free rein up `til now. Not least because it's inaccurate, and newspapers should care about that kind of thing.

Iranian weapons, again.

On top of a month-old piece on the E.F.P. matter (which I may or may not have linked to at the time - I'm not sure I care enough to check), I'll cruelly direct your poor, tired eyes to a relatively long look (by Internet standards) at the NIE on Iran (tip of the hat to Andrew Sullivan for highlighting it). The punchline, for those who can't wait, is "This is not to say that Iran is not making progress toward mastering enrichment, but merely that time remains for diplomacy," which sounds just about right.

Back to work . . . .

And, lastly (for now) . . .

Hallelujah.

Northern Ireland, March 26 — After years of hostility and recriminations, the leaders of Northern Ireland’s dominant rival groups, Gerry Adams of Sinn Fein and the Protestant leader, the Rev. Ian Paisley, held their first face-to-face talks on Monday and agreed to form a joint administration for the province on May 8.

The deal came on the day Britain and Ireland had set as the deadline for restoring Northern Ireland’s local government, more than four years after it was suspended in October 2002 in a dispute over espionage activities by the Irish Republican Army.

“The word historic has to be used,” said Brian Feeney, a historian at St. Mary’s University College in Belfast. “It was the only way it was ever going to work. The two leaders of the two traditions had to do the deal.”

Shinzo Abe: still on my list.

Facing increasing criticism for denying that Japan coerced women into sex slavery during World War II, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe repeatedly refused Monday to acknowledge state responsibility in recruiting the “comfort women,” but offered them an apology.

In a debate in Parliament, under intense questioning by an opposition lawmaker, Mr. Abe refused to withdraw a recent statement in which he said there was no evidence that the military had forcibly recruited women to work in brothels established throughout Asia.

But Mr. Abe chose his words carefully on Monday to avoid repeating his earlier denial, saying only, “What I said about coercion during the news conference, all of it became news, so that’s the way it was.”

When Haruko Yoshikawa, a Communist member of Parliament, asked Mr. Abe whether he considered as proof of coercion the testimony given by former sex slaves in the United States House of Representatives recently, Mr. Abe said he had no comment on their testimony.

The House of Representatives is considering a nonbinding resolution that would call on Japan to unambiguously acknowledge its wartime slavery and apologize for it.

Prompted by Ms. Yoshikawa to make a statement toward surviving sex slaves, who are now mostly in their 80s, Mr. Abe said, “I express my sympathy for the hardships they suffered and offer my apology for the situation they found themselves in.”

Mr. Abe said he would adhere to a 1993 government spokesman’s statement that acknowledged Japan’s role in managing the wartime “comfort stations,” as well as in forcibly recruiting sex slaves. But his repeated denial of coercion contradicted the 1993 statement, Ms. Yoshikawa said.

An ambiguous apology is better than nothing, but since the man is still reserving the right to lie, my thumbs remain in the downward position.

A couple of quick notes.

First of all, apologies to anyone who reads this particular wall for the dearth of updates in recent weeks - particularly since there ain't been anything like a shortage of news I find interesting. I've just been busy, and kinda hope to remain so a little bit longer.

Still, tonight I came across a couple of Iranian tidbits that demanded cursory and poorly considered attention. First, and perhaps least complicated, is that Michael Gordon is back with another round of E.F.P. coverage, in an article titled, "U.S. Long Worried Iran Supplied Weapons in Iraq." It's another one where almost everyone speaking does so anonymously, and almost everyone who speaks anonymously has something provocative to say - and it arrives at a time when the White House has got to be absolutely desperate to change the subject on the front pages. I'm not saying it's inherently untrustworthy, but at this stage in American history I think one would have to be pretty durn naive to see it and not suspect it's a tool meant to produce bad ends.

Then there's the kidnapped British sailors. The good news is, they seem to be healthy and comfortable - or, at least, that's the word out of Tehran. The bad news is . . . well, the fog of war turns out to be thickened by the sticky, damp air of Iranian politics. Which is to say (and h/t to Keelin McDonell at the New Republic's Plank for the catch), we don't know exactly who's holding the Brits; they were captured not by the Iranian Navy, but by members of the Ahmadinejad-loyal Iranian Revolutionary Guard. For all I know, this is actually an illegitimate action within the Iranian system, for all the good it does us; Mr. Ahmadinejad isn't supposed to have any control over foreign policy, and yet this clearly has, y'know, international repercussions. Could it be a bunch of radicals stirring shit Ayatollah Khameini didn't want stirred? Quite likely.

As I say, though, that doesn't do us a whole lot of immediate good. I suspect the Ayatollah would rather look crazy than unable to control his nation's affairs.

Go, Levy Mwanawasa!

It's always gratifying to find a blog heading I know I've never used before.

Anyway, to what does it refer? Well, gentle reader, to this:

Zambian President Levy Mwanawasa urged southern Africa to take a new approach to Zimbabwe, which he likened to a "sinking Titanic" as millions flee economic and political turmoil.

In one of the strongest African comments on Zimbabwe's political and economic crisis, Mwanawasa said the Southern African Development Community (SADC) had failed to achieve much in negotiations with Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe.

"Quiet diplomacy has failed to help solve the political chaos and economic meltdown in Zimbabwe," Mwanawasa said late on Monday in neighboring Namibia.

"As I speak right now, one SADC country has sunk into such economic difficulties that it may be likened to a sinking Titanic whose passengers are jumping out in a bid to save their lives."

Zambian government newspapers said Mwanawasa had suggested SADC "would soon take a stand" on Zimbabwe.

The world being a notoriously complicated place, Mr. Mugabe is still widely revered as a hero of African independence; south of the Sahara, it takes a certain amount of political courage to acknowledge that, in the modern era, he's also a dictatorial nutter with hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths to his name. To the best of my knowledge, President Mwanawasa is the first regional leader to call Zimbabwe's leadership out, and it's very much to his credit.

Here's hoping South Africa follows suit. Zimbabweans need all the help their neighbors can give.

Wow. Now that's denial!

Okay, I thought the Iranian government was protesting 300 because Frank Miller thinks their distant ancestors were simpering mutants . . .

[In all fairness, his fiction also suggests that he thinks that Superman is a tool of American fascists and that there are no problems ninja prostitutes can't solve. He's kind of eccentric.]

. . . but it turns out I underestimated their myth-making machinations. See, the official word out of Iran is that:

The movie has fabricated the history with depicting a war between Iran and Greece, whereas, no Greek king dared to stand up to the Persian Empire or the Emperor Xerxes.

Though Sparta's King Leonidas cherished such a dream, but, he lost his head and Iranian fighters threw his head before Emperor Xerxes's feet and told him that he had attempted a suicide attack to Persian Army.

I wonder what that means, exactly. Are they saying that Leonidas made a solo kamikaze attack on the Persian Empire? Or is it that the thousand troops he had with him (three hundred Spartans and seven hundred Thespians) weren't enough of an army to constitute half a war? Either way, do they deny that the Persians subsequently got beaten at Salamis and Mycale and all the rest?

And "no Greek king dared to stand up to the Persian Empire?" Never mind the fact that the next paragraph starts with Leonidas, y'know, standing up to the Persian Empire - I guess it's fair to say that the Athenians really led the Hellenic nations for the remainder of the war, and Themistocles wasn't a king even in the sense that his Spartan rival was.

Fair enough, I guess.

But what about Alexander the Great? Was he an honorary Persian (Macedonia having been a vassal state for about ten minutes in the reign of Xerxes' father), or just not precisely Greek, or do we just not talk about him? Or maybe the official position is that Westerners just made him up, and it's just a strange coincidence that there are still all these guys in India named Sikandar.

Regardless: wow, that's some fine hair-splitting. I'm just a little bit startled that they couldn't find a way to observe that the movie is totally ridiculous (as it pretty much is) without looking like deceitful idiots in the process.

By the way: Matt Yglesias, who flagged this in the first place, raises the interesting point that the Iranian theocracy is clearly setting itself up as the successor to the pagan empire of old (as, of course, it is), and that that should remind us all that nationalism shouldn't be forgotten amid all the talk of the great Islamofascist menace. Which is probably fair.

Anybody want a big, broad Iran update?

You, my friends, are in luck.

Incidentally, real kudos to the Bush administration for ramping up aid to Lebanon (assuming it's for real). We have soft power of the economic sort that basically no one else in the world can match; it's nice to see it used in ways that might actually do some good.

The latest steaming pile of abuse.

What's still not clear is why the prosecutors were targeted. The internal documents reveal extensive planning for the firings long before the White House and the Justice Department agreed on which prosecutors should go. Names seemed to be added and dropped from the target list for no obvious reason.

In 2005, then-White House counsel Harriet Miers proposed firing all 93 U.S. attorneys as part of a second-term house cleaning. Administration officials said Gonzales and Rove both rejected that idea.

At that point, Kyle Sampson, Gonzales' chief of staff, started working on a scaled-back plan. In an e-mail to Miers in early 2005, Sampson recommended retaining "strong" U.S. attorneys "who have produced, managed well, and exhibited loyalty to the President and Attorney General."

He called for ousting "weak" appointees "who have been ineffectual managers and prosecutors, chafed against administration initiatives, etc."

Sampson was forced to resign Monday after Justice Department officials blamed him for failing to keep Gonzales informed of the dismissal plan.

"We never had a discussion about where things stood," Gonzales told reporters. "What I knew was that there was an ongoing effort that was led by Mr. Sampson . . . to ascertain where we could make improvements in U.S. attorney performances around the country."

At least two of the U.S. attorneys who were later forced to step down, Iglesias in New Mexico and Paul Charlton of Arizona, were on Sampson's "retain" list in February 2005.

But by September of 2006 - after it became clear that Charlton had launched an investigation of Rep. Rick Renzi, R-Ariz, - Sampson included the Arizona prosecutor on another list of U.S. attorneys "we now should consider pushing out."

Other memos and e-mails suggest a variety of reasons that individual prosecutors might have fallen out of favor.

In an e-mail dated May 11, 2006, Sampson urged the White House counsel's office to call him regarding "the real problem we have right now with Carol Lam," who then the U.S. attorney for southern California. Earlier that morning, the Los Angeles Times reported that Lam's corruption investigation of former Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham, R-Calif., had expanded to include another California Republican, Rep Jerry Lewis.

Cunningham is currently serving an eight-year prison sentence in Arizona. Lewis has not been charged with any crime. Lam was forced to resign.

So, apparently, there's now direct evidence that Paul Charlton and Carol Lam were forced out of office for investigating Republicans; at the same time, you've got David Iglesias alleging he was pushed out for failing to indict a Democrat before the November elections, with similar charges from John McKay (thank you, Josh Marshall). Voter fraud? Apparently pretty consistently a bogus issue.

Among those with their fingerprints at the scene are Karl Rove and George W. Bush - indeed, selective prosecution seems to be characterized in relevant emails as "loyalty to the president" - but the New York Times suggests that the White House is trying to tip the mass of the blame over onto the reliably hapless Harriet Myers.

Who was, of course, their first choice for the last Supreme Court vacancy.

Anyway, it should be noted that assorted Bushies have already been caught lying to Congress about Mr. Rove's role in this - and about a few other things besides - so I think it's fair to say that credibility on their side should not be casually assumed.

Meanwhile, as seen in the quote cited above, Alberto Gonzales has fired his designated scapegoat, Kyle Sampson, who allegedly kept his boss tragically out of the loop. Quoth John McKay:

"My question is, if he fired the guy who fired us, why is he standing by the dismissals?" McKay asked.

Any minute now, Dick Cheney should accuse him of undermining the war effort.

The stink on this is getting more and more toxic; triple kudos go out, once again, to Josh Marshall and the TPM brigade, who've done more than anyone to drag it into the light. Keep reading; I'm sure there's more to come.

Congressional Democrats: still rather useless.

Legislation barring President Bush from attacking Iran without Congressional approval? Pulled.

Some background and some finger-pointing can be found here; h/t to Glenn Greenwald for the link.

[I would, however, contend that AIPAC and its allies aren't exactly "advocates of Israeli interests," in a broad sense, and they certainly aren't the "Israeli lobby." They support (and encourage American support of) Israeli foreign and security postures that would typically be associated with the Likud - and are therefore to the right of a good hunk of the Israeli public and almost all American Jews. It certainly doesn't limit their influence, but . . . well, there are loads of reasons not to act as though they transcend Israeli politics and speak for the greater Jewish nation.

[Just being anal.]

The plot thickens.

Presidential advisor Karl Rove and at least one other member of the White House political team were urged by the New Mexico Republican party chairman to fire the state's U.S. attorney because of dissatisfaction in part with his failure to indict Democrats in a voter fraud investigation in the battleground election state.

In an interview Saturday with McClatchy Newspapers, Allen Weh, the party chairman, said he complained in 2005 about then-U.S. Attorney David Iglesias to a White House liaison who worked for Rove and asked that he be removed. Weh said he followed up with Rove personally in late 2006 during a visit to the White House.

"Is anything ever going to happen to that guy?" Weh said he asked Rove at a White House holiday event that month.

"He's gone," Rove said, according to Weh.

"I probably said something close to 'Hallelujah,'" said Weh.

Weh's account calls into question the Justice Department's stance that the recent decision to fire Iglesias and seven U.S. attorneys in other states was a personnel matter - made without White House intervention.

You really have to think that a good hunk of the Bush administration must be wishing John Kerry had walked away with the White House in `04 - the last few months have been like water torture for them (as it were), and it's not getting any better anytime soon. If they had been washed out after just the one term, a big chunk of the country would probably never have had a clue how corrupt, uncaring, and power-hungry they really are.

Bleah.

Anyway, between this and the FBI surveillance abuses, I think there's finally a chance (a small chance, but a chance nonetheless) that Alberto Gonzales will be forced Rumsfeld-like out of the DoJ. The odds of someone ethically fit taking his place are admittedly much smaller, but one can always hope.

Quick, depressing updates.

Zimbabwe (from behind the cash wall at TNR):

The genocide in Zimbabwe is not as stark as others. There are no cattle cars and gas chambers. There are no machete-wielding gangs roaming the countryside. There are no helicopter gunships or Janjaweed. The killing in Zimbabwe is slow, oftentimes indirect, and not particularly bloody. But Mugabe's campaign of mass murder against those who oppose him has been no less deliberate than any of the other genocides in human history.

It all began with Mugabe's land seizures in 2000, in which he booted white farmers from the property they owned and replaced them with political hacks who have no interest in agriculture. The results were disastrous. Zimbabwe annually requires 1.8 million metric tons of maize. Yet, in 2006, for instance, it faced an 850,000 metric ton deficit -- of which planned imports would cover just 60 percent, with only 28 percent of that delivered by December. The country also requires 400,000 tons of wheat annually, yet, last year, it produced only 218,000 tons by the government's count -- meaning the true total was likely far less. As early as 2002, the BBC was reporting that people in Matabeleland, the southern region of the country where the minority Ndebele tribe lives, were starving. That same year, on the eve of a massive drought, the Minister of Zimbabwean State Security said, "We would be better off with only six million people--with our own who support the liberation struggle. We don't want all these extra people." Today, according to the World Food Program, 38 percent of Zimbabweans are malnourished.

The fallout has rippled through society: Zimbabwe has the world's highest inflation rate (1,600 percent annually, expected to hit 4,000 by the end of the year) and an HIV prevalence of at least 18 percent, and probably higher. It also has the lowest life expectancy, by far, in the world: 34 for women and 37 for men (it was 62 in 1990). Last year, 42,000 women died from childbirth; less than a decade ago, this figure was under 1,000. The weekly death rate exceeds Darfur's.

Meanwhile, Mugabe's party, ZANU-PF, is wielding the food shortage as a weapon against the opposition. The government's Grain Marketing Board frequently denies food aid to people in districts that voted against Mugabe in recent elections; only those with ZANU-PF membership cards are able to get rations. Several people I spoke with in Harare's poor township of Hatcliffe told me that the army and the police regularly interfere with food distribution from USAID, UNICEF, and other international aid groups. In 2002, USAID director Andrew Natsios publicly scolded Mugabe for manipulating American food aid, a practice that has continued unabated. And a 2004 Amnesty International report warned that "[T]he government has used the food shortages for political purposes and to punish political opponents."

Then, as if starvation weren't bad enough, Mugabe unleashed more destruction in May 2005. Operation Murambatsvina (Shona for "Drive out Filth") aimed to "re-ruralize" some 1 million Zimbabweans--mostly poor, urban shanty dwellers from areas that voted against Mugabe in parliamentary elections just weeks earlier. Mugabe's henchmen forcibly cleared the slums. A United Nations report filed by a special representative of the secretary-general, found that the operation was "carried out in an indiscriminate and unjustified manner, with indifference to human suffering, and, in repeated cases, with disregard to several provisions of national and international legal frameworks." The Fourth Geneva Convention considers the "deportation or forcible transfer of population" to be a crime against humanity.

There is historic and legal precedent to warrant calling these policies genocide. In 1996, U.N Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali declared that Rwandan Hutu refugees living in Zaire might be potential victims of "genocide by starvation." In December of 2006, the former Ethiopian dictator Mengistu Haile Mariam (also known as the "African Pol Pot") was found guilty of genocide by a court in his own country after a twelve-year trial. His government was convicted of having "conspired to destroy a political group and kill people with impunity"--not only through actual murder, but by creating and prolonging the 1984 Tigray famine, in which some 1.5 million people died. In 1991, Mariam escaped from Ethiopia, finding asylum in, of all places, Mugabe's Zimbabwe.

Incidentally, the starvation and transfer of Mugabe's opponents isn't the first time he has has unleashed a genocidal campaign against his own people. Not long after taking power, in the mid-'80s, Mugabe's North Korean-trained ZANU-PF army killed an estimated 25,000 Ndebeles (the minority tribe to Mugabe's own Shona majority) in an operation known as the Gukurahundi (Shona for "the early rain which washes away the chaff"). The Matabeleland massacre ended, once and for all, any Ndebele challenge to Mugabe's power.

Meanwhile, the New York Times has a piece concerning some of the World War II sex slaves Japanese nationalists are once again trying to pass off as prostitutes; as you might expect, their testimonials are decidedly bleak.

And there's my daily quota of misery spreading!

According to the Washington Post's op-ed page . . .

. . . it seems like the main lesson to take away from the Libby trial was that Joe Wilson was a serial liar and Saddam Hussein was trying to get uranium from Niger.

In conversations with journalists or in a July 6, 2003, op-ed, [Mr. Wilson] claimed to have debunked evidence that Iraq was seeking uranium from Niger; suggested that he had been dispatched by Mr. Cheney to look into the matter; and alleged that his report had circulated at the highest levels of the administration.

A bipartisan investigation by the Senate intelligence committee subsequently established that all of these claims were false -- and that Mr. Wilson was recommended for the Niger trip by Ms. Plame, his wife.

. . .

Mr. Wilson's case has besmirched nearly everyone it touched. The former ambassador will be remembered as a blowhard. Mr. Cheney and Mr. Libby were overbearing in their zeal to rebut Mr. Wilson and careless in their handling of classified information. Mr. Libby's subsequent false statements were reprehensible. And Mr. Fitzgerald has shown again why handing a Washington political case to a federal special prosecutor is a prescription for excess.

I'm sorry. The Senate intelligence committee established all the claims were false? That Saddam had been seeking yellowcake in Niger? [Hint: no.] That the intelligence-gathering mission wasn't prompted by questions from the Vice President's Office? That his report wasn't read by senior White House officials? [No and no.] The Senate hearings may've offered the administration some wiggle room - Pat frickin' Roberts was the chair, after all - but they by no means destroyed Mr. Wilson's credibility. Then that damn, disgraceful Libby trial went on to make public certain documents that further buttressed the Wilson position - it's not 2004 anymore, and these days it seems to me that there's very little informed doubt that Mr. Wilson was qualified to do the job he did in Africa, that he did it properly, and that he represented it truthfully thereafter.

Whoops.

Let's see. How else does the Post's crack editorial team try to diminish the legitimacy of Mr. Fitzgerald's case?

Let's cut back to the tail end of the last blockquote and keep on going.

. . . and that Mr. Wilson was recommended for the Niger trip by Ms. Plame, his wife. When this fact, along with Ms. Plame's name, was disclosed in a column by Robert D. Novak, Mr. Wilson advanced yet another sensational charge: that his wife was a covert CIA operative and that senior White House officials had orchestrated the leak of her name to destroy her career and thus punish Mr. Wilson.

The partisan furor over this allegation led to the appointment of special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald. Yet after two years of investigation, Mr. Fitzgerald charged no one with a crime for leaking Ms. Plame's name. In fact, he learned early on that Mr. Novak's primary source was former deputy secretary of state Richard L. Armitage, an unlikely tool of the White House. The trial has provided convincing evidence that there was no conspiracy to punish Mr. Wilson by leaking Ms. Plame's identity -- and no evidence that she was, in fact, covert.

Okay, true: no one was charged with leaking the name, and the first source was indeed the cooperative and forthright Mr. Armitage, not a particular golden boy of the administration's. The idea that the trial "provided convincing evidence that there was no conspiracy to punish Mr. Wilson by leaking Ms. Plame's identity" is something else again, though - when you have jurors wondering aloud why other White House officials weren't indicted . . .

The jurors who huddled around two pushed-together conference tables for 10 days, meticulously filling 34 pages of facts from the trial on a large flip chart, believed that Vice President Cheney's former chief of staff had been "pilloried" for a CIA leak that other top White House aides had committed along with him, according to one member of the panel.

Still, the juror said yesterday, the jury concluded that I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby had lied to FBI agents and a federal grand jury that investigated the leak. Sifting through mounds of evidence convinced the panel that Libby's memory of conversations with colleagues and journalists was not as faulty as the defense contended.

"We're not saying that we didn't think Mr. Libby was guilty of the things we found him guilty of," said the juror, Denis Collins. "But it seemed like he was . . . the fall guy."

. . .

Libby's conviction on two counts of perjury, one count of making false statements and one count of obstructing justice stemmed from what he told investigators about his role in disclosing the identity of undercover CIA officer Valerie Plame. Her husband, Joseph C. Wilson IV, a retired ambassador, was sent by the CIA to Africa to assess reports that Iraq had sought to buy nuclear material there.

In the spring and early summer of 2003, Wilson infuriated Cheney and other White House officials by accusing President Bush of twisting his findings to justify the Iraq war. The prosecution contended Libby told reporters that Plame worked at the agency to insinuate that her husband was chosen for the CIA mission because of nepotism.

Collins's detailed description of the jury's deliberations, in public comments and interviews yesterday, suggests that Libby's attorneys made headway with one of the themes they emphasized throughout the case: that the defendant, as lead defense attorney Theodore V. Wells Jr. described it, was made a scapegoat by the White House to protect other presidential aides who were complicit in disclosing Plame's identity to reporters.

During the jury's days of methodical deliberations, "it was said a number of times, 'What are we doing with this guy here?' " Collins told reporters on the steps outside the federal courthouse. "Where's Rove, where's -- you know, where are these other guys?" Collins said, referring to Karl Rove, Bush's top political adviser, and Richard L. Armitage, a former deputy chief of staff who testimony showed had been the first person to leak Plame's name.

Moreover, Collins said, jurors believed that Libby had been carrying out a directive by his immediate boss, Cheney, to "go out and talk to reporters" to tarnish Wilson's reputation.

. . . the message is pretty clearly not that the defendant's coworkers have been totally vindicated. Rather the opposite, in fact. Sure, no charges were filed - but that's maybe just possibly kinda related to why Mr. Libby was charged with and convicted of perjury and obstruction of justice. The investigation was actively confounded, according to a jury of Mr. Libby's peers.

That long, damning quote above, by the way? Taken from the Post's own reporting on the case; it's not like the writers of the editorial didn't have the details handy.

As for the bit about Ms. Plame not being proven covert? Mr. Fitzgerald didn't have to prove anything on that point one way or another; it's not what the trial was about. In the real world, though? She unquestionably had a cover outfit, even if its local offices were kind of half-assedly established. And she had a network, and there's reason to believe that that network was fairly hardcore.

The unmasking of covert CIA officer Valerie Plame Wilson by White House officials in 2003 caused significant damage to U.S. national security and its ability to counter nuclear proliferation abroad, RAW STORY has learned.

According to current and former intelligence officials, Plame Wilson, who worked on the clandestine side of the CIA in the Directorate of Operations as a non-official cover (NOC) officer, was part of an operation tracking distribution and acquisition of weapons of mass destruction technology to and from Iran.

Speaking under strict confidentiality, intelligence officials revealed heretofore unreported elements of Plame's work. Their accounts suggest that Plame's outing was more serious than has previously been reported and carries grave implications for U.S. national security and its ability to monitor Iran's burgeoning nuclear program.

Keep reading; it just gets better. Admittedly, the "intelligence officials" demanded anonymity, so there's no way to verify - but it sure as hell doesn't seem like grounds for smug complacency.

Seriously, Fred Hiatt and company don't have to slant their editorial line to meet my ideological preferences. It would be nice, however, if they at least restricted themselves to arguments that can be supported by uncontorted facts. The attacks on Mr. Wilson are largely gratuitous, and Mr. Fitzgerald's investigation was much less frivolous than the men behind the masthead would apparently have us believe; if anything, the lack of indictments aimed at Mr. Rove and company would suggest that Mr. Fitzgerald goes to some pains not to risk overreaching on the public dime.

Mind you, a robust, adversarial press would take the threads left behind and do some following up of its own; it's called reporting.

I get the impression the Post's editorial page would be challenging the propriety of it at every step.

Attacks.

Much as I'd rather be using this space to do a little rhetorical dance over the verdict in the Libby case, I'm afraid the more important story is coming out of Iraq.

Two suicide bombers killed at least 77 Shiite pilgrims in the southern city of Hilla today, the deadliest of more than a dozen attacks that killed more than 100 Shiites marching to the holy city of Karbala on the eve of one of the most important Shiite holidays, Iraqi security authorities said.

The first attacks today struck Baghdad in the morning and early afternoon, killing close to 30 Shiite pilgrims as they left their homes or passed through the capital’s western side on their way to Karbala.

Then the most devastating explosions occurred in Hilla at about 5 p.m. local time: Two bombers waded into a thick crowd of pilgrims and detonated explosive vests, killing at least 77 people and wounding 127 others, according to the Karbala police. Iraqi state-run television put the death toll closer to one hundred, with twice as many wounded.

The United States military command also reported that nine American servicemen were killed on Monday, including six soldiers in two vehicles who died from one huge bomb blast north of Baghdad making it the deadliest day for American troops in close to a month.

By volume of blather, I think I've devoted this blog more to denouncing Shi'ite death squads than to vilifying the Ba'athist/foreign Sunni fundamentalist alliance - the former are closer to the heart of government; they're more able to delegitimize the political system, and their tactics are more likely to become institutionalized in any semi-functioning state that emerges. Plus, yeah, the Sunnis are the minority, and in that sense less able to defend themselves as a group.

That said, Shi'ite death squads wouldn't be able to pass for self-defense forces if there weren't maniacal Sunni extremists spreading blood and ruin around the country scores of times a month. These guys apparently stand for spreading fear by murdering religious pilgrims and for not much else, and I fervently hope the day comes - and soon - when Iraq has a criminal justice system capable of hunting these bastards down at their homes and dragging them up to answer for it. In the meantime, let our soldiers keep having better armor and better aim.

Anyway, I worry about what this means for the big picture. I was never wildly optimistic about the surge, but I certainly want it to work - and this is a grotesquely effective kind of attack against it. The point of this stage of the Petraeus plan, as I understand it, is simply to try to impose a kind of normalcy and confidence on Baghdad, in the hopes that seeds of a civil society will take root if given the chance. Instead, Sunni killers are convincing the Shi'ite majority that coalition forces are suppressing their defenders and are therefore letting them die. And, as far as it goes, it's true - it's just that their defenders are themselves war criminals who have to be stopped. What we really need are the extra hundreds of thousands of troops that could let us impose some kind of quiet on multiple factions simultaneously, but that doesn't seem to be in the cards.

It really would be nice if there were a plan B.

You'd think they actually had a history of success!

During a White House meeting last week, a group of governors asked President Bush and Marine Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, about their backup plan for Iraq. What would the administration do if its new strategy didn't work?

The conclusion they took away, the governors later said, was that there is no Plan B. "I'm a Marine," Pace told them, "and Marines don't talk about failure. They talk about victory."

Pace had a simple way of summarizing the administration's position, Gov. Phil Bredesen (D-Tenn.) recalled. "Plan B was to make Plan A work."

Just once - just once - I'd like some indication that these guys realize they can't make an Iraq policy out of outlasting reality.

Shinzo Abe and the Japanese sickness.

Wonderful.

Japan's prime minister denied Thursday that the country's military forced women into sexual slavery during World War II, casting doubt on a past government apology and jeopardizing a fragile detente with his Asian neighbors.

The comments by Shinzo Abe, at a time when a number of lawmakers are pushing to roll back a 1993 apology to the women, were his clearest statement as prime minister on military brothels known in Japan as "comfort stations."

Historians say that about 200,000 women -- mostly from Korea and China -- served in Japanese military brothels throughout Asia in the 1930s and 1940s. Many women say they were kidnapped and forced into sexual slavery by Japanese troops.

But Abe, who since taking office in September has promoted patriotism in Japan's schools and a more assertive foreign policy, told reporters that "there is no evidence to prove there was coercion" against the women to make them prostitutes.

His remarks contradicted evidence in Japanese documents unearthed in 1992 that historians said showed that military authorities had a direct role in working with contractors to forcibly procure women for the brothels.

The documents, which are backed up by accounts from soldiers and victims, said Japanese authorities set up the brothels in response to uncontrolled rape sprees by invading Japanese soldiers in East Asia.

This may not be as extreme as Holocaust denial, but it's exactly the same principle, and we're getting it from the leader of the Japanese government. It's the most odious, dangerous kind of national myth-building there is, and the most grotesque part of it all is that he's clearly got a chance of getting away with it.

I mean, so far, it sure looks like the Bush administration - presumably for fear of alienating an ally in the Iraqi misadventure - isn't going to concern itself too much with the truth.

State Department spokesman Sean McCormack declined to comment on Abe's statement. "I'll let the Japanese political system deal with that," he said.

Yeah, super. So the ones who'll be seen to protest will be the Chinese and the Koreans, and young Japanese will have no reason not to believe that it's rooted in anything other than a cynically inflated sense of victimhood.

You don't deceive a nation like this unless the truth is getting in the way of something you want done. I don't know what Shinzo Abe's agenda is, and I don't much care; the fact that it's based on lies and contempt for his neighbors is all I need. I hope his support is rotting out from under him - it certainly seems to have been earlier in the year.


UPDATE: (6:18 AM) From the end of January.

With his support plunging and elections looming, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan issued a stern warning to his cabinet Tuesday — watch your mouths.

The warning to Abe's full cabinet at their regular meeting follows two major embarrassments for his government. First, Defense Minister Fumio Kyuma angered Japan's most important ally, the United States, by saying he thought Washington's decision to go to war against Iraq was a mistake.

Health Minister Hakuo Yanagisawa then jumped in by calling women "birth-giving machines."

Wow. Just . . . wow.

For the record, the next elections for Japan's House of Councillors (sort of a rough equivalent to the U.S. Senate) are scheduled for July 22nd. A drubbing there couldn't directly trigger Mr. Abe's fall from power, alas, but it could well lead to a vote of no confidence, which would.

I can dream, at least.

I'm ashamed not to have touched on this yet.

No, for real. I'm talking the ongoing scandal at Walter Reed, and the only defense I have for failing to do my bit to keep it in the light is that it keeps on seeming to need more time than I've been able to spend.

Anyway, from Wikipedia, the short form:

On February 18, 2007 and following days the Washington Post published a series of articles outlining cases of neglect reported by wounded soldiers and their family members.[1] Although the article focuses primarily on Building 18, a former hotel building just outside the post's main gates, authors Dana Priest and Anne Hull also included complaints of "disengaged clerks, unqualified platoon sergeants and overworked managers" that make navigating the already complicated bureaucracy to obtain medical care at WRAMC even more daunting. Despite the Army's claim of "surprise" at these conditions, they had been exposed by the Internet magazine Salon.com in a series about conditions at the hospital beginning in January 2005.[2] In 2004 and 2005, articles appeared interviewing whistleblower First Lt. Jullian Goodrum on his court martial for seeking medical help elsewhere due to poor conditions at WRAMC, in the Post and in Salon. [3][4]

The conditions of Building 18 of WRAMC are described in the article as rodent and cockroach infested. Stained carpets, cheap mattresses, and black mold are other signs of neglect. No heat and water have also been reported by soldiers staying at the facility. In addition, security is inadequate and "soldiers feel especially vulnerable." Right outside the unmonitored entry, "drug dealers work the corner at night." Struggling, injured soldiers, most suffering from PTSD, paranoid delusional disorder and traumatic brain injury, are forced to "pull guard duty" to obtain a level of security.

An attempt to alleviate the toll that Building 18's condition is taking on the wounded soldiers, a staff team headed by a clinical social worker at WRAMC obtained a grant of $30,000 from the Commander's Initiative Account for improvements; however, "a Psychiatry Department functionary held up the rest of the money because she feared that buying a lot of recreational equipment close to Christmas would trigger an audit." By January the funds were no longer available.

Renovation of Building 18 had been anticipated in connection with the Enhanced Use Lease of Building 40, but since the post was slated for closure under BRAC in 2005, the anticipated in-kind services by the building 40 developer did not materialize.

Although the Post's authors are quick to point out that "not all the quarters are as bleak as" Building 18, "the despair of Building 18 symbolizes a larger problem in Walter Reed's treatment of the wounded." "The typical soldier is required to file 22 documents with eight different commands -- most of them off-post -- to enter and exit the medical processing world, according to government investigators. Sixteen different information systems are used to process the forms, but few of them can communicate with one another. The Army's three personnel databases cannot read each other's files and can't interact with the separate pay system or the medical recordkeeping databases." This complicated system has required some soldiers to prove they were in the Iraq War or the War in Afghanistan in order to obtain medical treatment and benefits because Walter Reed employees are unable to locate their records.

Along with the latest development, as recounted in today's Washington Post:

The commander of Walter Reed Army Medical Center was fired yesterday after the Army said it had lost trust and confidence in his leadership in the wake of a scandal over outpatient treatment of wounded troops at the Northwest Washington hospital complex.

Army Maj. Gen. George W. Weightman, who assumed command of Walter Reed in August, will be temporarily replaced by Lt. Gen. Kevin C. Kiley. But the appointment of Kiley, who had earlier been the facility's commander, surprised some Defense Department officials because soldiers, their families and veterans' advocates have complained that he had long been aware of problems at Walter Reed and did nothing to improve its outpatient care.

The action came 10 days after a Washington Post series exposed the squalid living conditions for some outpatient soldiers at Walter Reed and bureaucratic problems that prevented many from getting the care they need.

"The care and welfare of our wounded men and women in uniform demand the highest standard of excellence and commitment that we can muster as a government," Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said in a statement. "When this standard is not met, I will insist on swift and direct corrective action and, where appropriate, accountability up the chain of command."

A senior Defense Department official said Gates had demanded quick action to show that the Pentagon was serious about improvements at Walter Reed. But the official said that Gates was not involved in the appointment of Kiley.

Now surgeon general of the Army and commander of the U.S. Army Medical Command, Kiley will take over temporarily as commander of Walter Reed "until a general officer is selected for this important leadership position," the Army said in a statement.

Kiley was commander at Walter Reed until 2004. He has called the Post stories a "one-sided representation" of conditions at the facility. "While we have some issues here, this is not a horrific, catastrophic failure at Walter Reed," he said.

Ordinarily, I'd excise the quotes from Mr. Gates to keep attention focused on Mr. Kiley - who is, indeed, less incensed about this than one would want him to be - but this time the Secretary of Defense is himself a big part of the story, and I don't think he's officially let us down too badly yet. Hopefully, he can keep the pressure on until things start getting fixed, and trotting his name out where appropriate might count as encouragement.

Who knows?

Anyway, all good wishes to the wounded, who deserve a hell of a lot better than they seem to have been getting.

Can we be very clear about what this means?

Let's be very clear about what this means. We used to have a deal, the Agreed Framework, that kept North Korea from getting plutonium. We supposedly discovered that they were cheating on that deal by enriching uranium. Personally, I did not think that was a good reason to scrap the Agreed Framework -- making a uranium bomb takes a lot longer than making a plutonium bomb, and I didn't see why the discovery that North Korea had embarked on a slow, cumbersome process of developing nuclear weapons, one that wouldn't actually produce any weapons for years, was a reason to say: well, go ahead and develop nuclear weapons much more quickly, then!

All this time, though, I was assuming that the North Koreans actually had a uranium enrichment program, and that they actually were cheating on the Agreed Framework. That's what this article calls into question.

If they didn't have a uranium program, then we scrapped the Agreed Framework, and let North Korea access its plutonium and build nuclear weapons, FOR NOTHING.

From hilzoy at Obsidian Wings.

Just in case anyone was wondering what kind of presidency has twenty-five percent approval ratings for its foreign policy.