Losing ground.

Myanmar’s armed forces appeared to have succeeded today in sealing tens of thousands of protesting monks inside their monasteries, but they continued to attack bands of civilian demonstrators who challenged them in the streets of the main city, Yangon.

Witnesses and diplomats reached by telephone inside Myanmar said troops were now confronting and attacking smaller groups of civilians around the city, sometimes running after them through narrow streets, sometimes firing at protesting groups.

“Today has been quieter than previous days, meaning far fewer protesters came out, but the military is being very quick to use violence, tear gas, guns and clubs to break it up,” said the chief diplomat at the United States Embassy, Shari Villarosa.

Diplomats said there was no way to estimate the numbers of dead and wounded in Yangon or other cities, but they said it was certainly far higher than the number the junta has reported.

The Burmese people's only real hope was that, this time around, the military would refuse to be complicit in the crimes of its generals. All the days of restrained and confused response got my hopes up, but I worry that a tipping point has been passed, and the guys with guns are increasingly committed to stupid, evil obedience.

There may be a way to effectively intercede from outside, but I don't think anyone's found it yet. The generals, by virtue of their crimes, are better insulated than anyone else in the country against the debilitating economic conditions we can bring down (and, indeed, have been bringing down for years), and a cleansing invasion wouldn't be in the cards even if such things had a significant history of success.

Mind you, Andrew Sullivan still sees hope from within. Can't tell how authoritative most of his sources are, but if you want a lifeline to grab, it's the best I can do.

Blowhard roundup!

As a general rule, when Bill O'Reilly says something perplexingly bigoted, or when Rush Limbaugh reminds us all that he's a hypocritical opportunist with poor critical thinking skills, I'm blissfully unaware of it. Failing that, I pretend to be - it's just better for the blood pressure. This week, though, the idiocy has been really hard to avoid.

Which is good, sure. Much as I hate turning on the TV and hearing O'Reilly's voice on non-Fox channels, the harder it is for these doofuses (doofi?) to pretend to be elder statesmen the better.

Still, if you're going to flag one scary and inappropriate right-wing perspective, I'd recommend that of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, who wants to be sure that military employment policy doesn't contravene God's law as he understands it. In a way, it seems admirably fair - it really looks like he's saying he doesn't want any soldiers, homosexual or heterosexual, who're having sex outside of marriage, but anyone who's married or celibate is welcome to serve. It's at least consistent!

Unfortunately, it's also wildly inappropriate for a secular democracy.

That said, at least he isn't actually running around telling Muslims his God is bigger than theirs; in the Bush years, that makes him a moderate!

Not what I was hoping for.

Me, on Wednesday:

What I'm really wondering about is how far the junior officers and the Burmese soldiers on the ground are prepared to go.

The New York Times, today:

Other unconfirmed reports from exile groups described scenes of brutality and humiliation of monks and their superiors when soldiers entered the monasteries.

“We were told by a lot of residents that the soldiers came in very rudely and told them to kneel down,” Mr. Aung Zaw said. “Their senior abbot was beaten in front of the others. They were told to walk like dogs. That news quickly spread, and whether it is rumor or true, people got very, very angry.”

Remember Lieberman-Kyl?

It just passed, albeit in a watered-down form. "Watered-down" doesn't equal constructive, of course; saying that it's the sense of the Senate that "the United States should designate Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps as a foreign terrorist organization...and place the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps on the list of Specially Designated Global Terrorists" gets us tacit support for the Cheneyites' saber-rattling and precisely nothing else.

Hillary Clinton voted for the thing, and to my mind failed another test. Barack Obama blew off the vote, thereby winning at least half points; his final score will depend on what he says about the amendment when asked.

Damn.

The killing has started in Burma.

Security forces in Myanmar opened fire Wednesday on demonstrators, and witnesses said police beat and dragged away dozens of Buddhist monks. The government said at least one person was killed, while dissident groups and media reported up to eight dead.

The military junta's announcement on state radio and television was the first acknowledgment that force has been used to suppress the protests and its first admission that blood had been shed after a month of mostly peaceful demonstrations.

. . .

About 300 monks and activists were arrested on the ninth straight day of anti-government protests in Yangon, dissidents said, although that number could not be independently confirmed.

Myanmar's leaders had warned the monks to stop the protests after some 100,000 people joined marches Monday in the largest anti-government demonstrations since a 1988 pro-democracy uprising was violently suppressed in the country formerly known as Burma.

The government said security forces opened fire after the crowd of 10,000 people, including "so-called monks," failed to disperse at Yangon's Sule Pagoda. It said the police used minimum force.

The dead man, aged 30, was hit by a bullet, the announcement said. It added that the wounded, two men aged 25 and 27, and a 47-year-old woman, were also hurt when the police fired, but did not specify their injuries.

Witnesses who were known to The Associated Press said they had seen two women and one young man with gunshot wounds in the chaotic confrontations.

Khim Maung Win, deputy editor of the Democratic Voice of Burma, said eight people — five monks and three civilians — were reported killed and at least four seriously wounded.

That's from here. The coverage at the Times adds that crowds are down somewhat, but don't seem to be dispersing; the US and the EU are pressuring China and India to, in turn, pressure the generals to keep things from getting worse. It's probably already happening, actually; none of Burma's neighbors want bloodbaths now.

Still, the generals really like being fabulously wealthy and free from prosecution; if they think their reign is in danger, there's only so much outside forces can do. What I'm really wondering about is how far the junior officers and the Burmese soldiers on the ground are prepared to go.

Burmese confusion.

President Bush announced new sanctions against the military government of Burma Tuesday, figuratively joining hands with tens of thousands of protesters in the streets of Rangoon and challenging the United Nations to join him in a broader "mission of liberation."

. . .

Bush said he will tighten economic sanctions against government leaders and their financial backers and expand a U.S. visa ban on those deemed responsible for "the most egregious violations of human rights." He also called on other nations "to use their diplomatic and economic leverage to help the Burmese people reclaim their freedom."

I can't really fault Bush for his choice of villains this time around, but this may not be the best tactic for the moment. As of yesterday, the sad little generals of Burma had actually been consistently restrained (by their standards) over the course of this growing uprising; informing them that deeper sanctions would come if they went for the machine guns might actually have helped to keep them paralyzed while their power base eroded. Instead, Bush seems to be hoping that kicking them while they're down will break their will.

Unfortunately, that really only seems to work on Democrats.

Anyway, the first shots have been fired in Burma, but so far it seems like nobody's been hurt. It's a really imperfect parallel, but I keep flashing on the `91 coup attempt in Russia - is it possible that junior officers in the military are doubting the crazies here? Could the hardliners be falling apart behind the scenes? This whole arrest and release business has a familiar kind of schizophrenic air - or so it seems from an ocean away.

Time management.

If you haven't been following the Blackwater developments of the last few days, it's okay. The State Department didn't want you to.

In fact, there've been a series of communiques from State to Blackwater reminding them not to tell Congress a damn thing that the White House hasn't vetted, while Condoleezza Rice herself is apparently asserting a heretofore unexplored right to ignore Congressional inquiries on the grounds that that's just the way she rolls. Why go to all the effort of defending the indefensible when you can just refuse to show up?



UPDATE: Today's Post has an article that touches more deeply than anything else I've seen on the real military's response to the Blackwater mess. For my money, the most terrifying single passage is probably, "'This is a nightmare,' said a senior U.S. military official. 'We had guys who saw the aftermath, and it was very bad. This is going to hurt us badly. It may be worse than Abu Ghraib, and it comes at a time when we're trying to have an impact for the long term.'" But it's just possible you can find something more depressing still if you read closely enough.

The Empire Strikes Back (Deep, Dumb South Edition).

No sooner did tens of thousands of African-American demonstrators depart the racially tense town of Jena, La., last week after protesting perceived injustices than white supremacists flooded in behind them.

First a neo-Nazi Web site posted the names, addresses and phone numbers of some of the six black teenagers and their families at the center of the Jena 6 case and urged followers to find them and "drag them out of the house," prompting an investigation by the FBI.

Then the leader of a white supremacist group in Mississippi published interviews that he conducted with the mayor of Jena and the white teenager who was attacked and beaten, allegedly by the six black youths. In those interviews, the mayor, Murphy McMillin, praised efforts by pro-white groups to organize counterdemonstrations; the teenager, Justin Barker, urged white readers to "realize what is going on, speak up and speak their mind."

I'm a white reader, and I'd like this guy and this community to stop making me feel embarrassed about it.

The whole article's here.

Quick note.

One usually goes to Andrew Sullivan to check in on American politics from the point of view of a rational, insightful right-winger (a very rare club), but today he's put up a nice little collection of links and insights on the state of affairs in Burma. I may be untrue to my metiér as a tight-assed scold in holding out hope here, but so be it - I'm floored by what the protesting monks have been able to accomplish so far (apparently with the help of Chinese domestic politics, according to Andrew). I don't recall Burma's noxious generals seeming quite this badly at a loss even in the period following their last stab at elections, and it just keeps getting worse for them.

Anyway, go read the post in question, and maybe take a moment to gloat wish the Burmese well. They deserve it.

The friend of our friend is someone we really, really hate.

Check this article out if you have a chance - it's short, and it really says something about the state of affairs in Iraq.

For the record, the title is "US Says Iran Smuggling Missiles to Iraq," and, yeah, the Bushies are saying that - still, what's really interesting is the bit where it's revealed that we've detained an Iranian in Iraq who turns out to be there at the express invitation of the Iraqi government, which is pissed.

On Thursday, U.S. troops arrested an Iranian in the Kurdish city of Sulaimaniyah. U.S. officials said he was a member of the elite Quds force of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards that smuggles weapons into Iraq.

Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki condemned the Iranian's arrest, saying he understood the man, who has been identified as Mahmudi Farhadi, had been invited to Iraq.

"The government of Iraq is an elected one and sovereign. When it gives a visa, it is responsible for the visa," he told The Associated Press in an interview in New York. "We consider the arrest ... of this individual who holds an Iraqi visa and a (valid) passport to be unacceptable."

Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, a Kurd, also demanded the Iranian's release.

Iraq has a vaguely legitimate government; in fact, it wasn't that long ago that the Bush administration billed it as the ultimate expression of Iraqi sovereignty and unquestionable evidence that everything was going to be okay. Said legitimate government rather likes Iran - and why not? It's in Iranian interests to have a stable, pro-Shi'ite government next door, and Maliki's current administration is already half-way there!

It may be that elements of the Iranian state are offering organized and sustained military aid to forces in Iraq; I don't really trust the cases the Bush team has made, but it seems possible enough nonetheless. Still, if they're helping anybody, it's going to be forces aligned with the Iraqi government - very possibly with the government's explicit permission. That may be what's happened here. [Unfortunately, it's also possible that the guy could've been on a more conventional diplomatic mission, and just got caught up in anti-Persian paranoia.]

Either way, we're contravening Iraqi policy inside Iraqi borders. I know the Bush administration really wants to treat Maliki's crowd as a puppet regime, but it tends to do more harm than good - particularly when it's in service of generalized belligerence rather than, y'know, actual strategy.

The new man in Japan.

Well, actually, he's not that new. Yasuo Fukuda, the designated Prime Minister-in-waiting, is a seventy-one year old ex-oil man, whose father was the Prime Minister - kind of like an older George W. Bush, only without the specter of perpetual failure dogging his heels. I take it he's expected to be relatively cautious in office - probably to the detriment of Koizumi's reformist legacy - but he's also an internationalist with a stated antipathy for some of the revisionist/hyper-nationalist excess of his recent predecessors. I'm tentatively prepared to call that a win!

The Lieberman-Kyl Amendment.

Turns out the gentlemen named above have crafted a "sense of the Senate" blurb to attach to the 2008 Defense Authorization Bill. The point of it, basically, is that the Senate collectively feels that George Bush should be free to attack Iran or Hezbollah if he thinks that'll cut down on their "destabilizing influence" inside of Iraq. It's moronic and provocative and it gets us nothing we want - but, of course, that's what we expect from these guys.

What disturbs me is that it could easily pass without so much as a mildly heated debate. Ever since the original authorization of force passed with only a handful of senators having bothered to read the NIE on Iraq, it's been painfully clear that the "greatest deliberative body in the world" doesn't generally concern itself with being informed about the subjects of its votes, and the only news organization to have picked up on this particular act of idiocy is the National Review, which . . . well, it's the National Review. Whatever safeguards ought to be in place to challenge this kind of thing before it can pass are just nowhere to be seen so far.

Y'know, we don't have the healthiest system of government in the world.

Dickery.

The federal government has told New York State health officials that chemotherapy, which had been covered for illegal immigrants under a government-financed program for emergency medical care, does not qualify for coverage. The decision sets the stage for a battle between the state and federal governments over how medical emergencies are defined.

The change comes amid a fierce national debate on providing medical care to immigrants, with New York State officials and critics saying this latest move is one more indication of the Bush administration’s efforts to exclude the uninsured from public health services.

State officials in New York and other states have found themselves caught in the middle. The New York dispute, focusing on illegal immigrants with cancer — a marginal group of unknown size among the more than 500,000 people living in New York illegally — has become a flash point for health officials and advocates for immigrants in recent weeks.

Under a limited provision of Medicaid, the national health program for the poor, the federal government permits emergency coverage for illegal immigrants and other noncitizens. But the Bush administration has been more closely scrutinizing and increasingly denying state claims for federal payment for some emergency services, Medicaid experts said.

Because it's so much cheaper to care for them if their health continues to deteriorate. Compassionate conservatism, ladies and gentlemen.

Quoted with non-snarky approval:

Chile’s Supreme Court on Friday approved the extradition of Peru’s former president, Alberto K. Fujimori, on charges of human rights abuses and corruption during his time in power in the 1990s.

The ruling, which cannot be appealed, may have broader influence, legal experts said. In Latin America and elsewhere, former heads of state have normally been able to avoid extradition, even between countries with treaties, or they have been sent for trial before special tribunals, usually after political negotiations between governments.

The very fact that Chile’s judiciary seriously reviewed the case at the request of Peruvian prosecutors was exceptional, and the judges then treated Mr. Fujimori, Peru’s president from 1990 to 2000, like any citizen, handling his case in its own courts.

. . .

“This is a significant historical decision for both Chile and Peru,” Mr. Vivanco said. “It involves the workings of domestic institutions, not political negotiations between governments.”

But in the Pinochet case, the British courts ultimately turned down Spain’s extradition request and let the general return to Chile on grounds that a series of strokes had left him unfit for trial.

“A taboo has been broken, with Fujimori treated like any other person accused of embezzlement or murder who flees to Chile,” said M. Cherif Bassiouni, an expert on extradition at the DePaul University College of Law in Chicago. “The symbolic consequences of this decision will embolden other countries to say that nobody is above the law.”

The U.S. may be creeping slowly toward crazed authoritarianism, but the rest of the hemisphere (Chavez's bit notwithstanding) is rediscovering the rule of law! W00t!

Not a big surprise, but . . .

Blackwater's already back in play in Iraq, albeit apparently in a fairly limited capacity. It's not likely to be the end of the story; Maliki and the Iraqi government have gone too far out on their limb in condemning Blackwater (right down to their somewhat suspect account of what went down the other day) to accept anything like the old status quo without paying a huge political cost - plus, of course, the old status quo sucked on the merits - but the State Department sure as hell isn't going to sign on to Maliki's proposed alternative, replacing our mercenaries with Iraqi mercenaries.

What comes next? Who the hell knows? But note the subtext here: we've officially arrived at the point where we can't guarantee either side is going to care a whole lot about helping the other save face. And these are the only people who want us there!

Very good news from Egypt.

There's a crackdown on female genital mutilation underway, and it's actually showing signs of being effective. This is one of those lovely customs that's always kept me from ever embracing total cultural relativism, and if the Egyptians can wipe it out within their borders, I'm perfectly prepared to put on my Ugly American cap and presumptuously root for them all the while.

Belatedly . . .

There was a really good article on Blackwater in this morning's Post. I have to say, I hadn't fully appreciated before the extent to which this particular outfit and its excesses are ultimately attributable to Condoleezza Rice - but there it is. Blackwater is the State Department's baby, and State apparently likes what it's been getting.

This is very odd.

Belgium has suffered through previous political crises and threats of partition. But a number of political analysts believe this one is different.

The turning point is widely believed to have been last December when RTBF, a French-language public television channel, broadcast a hoax on the breakup of Belgium.

The two-hour live television report showed images of cheering, flag-waving Flemish nationalists and crowds of French-speaking Walloons preparing to leave, while also reporting that the king had fled the country.

Panicked viewers called the station, and the prime minister’s office condemned the program as irresponsible and tasteless. But for the first time, in the public imagination, the possibility of a breakup seemed real.

It's not like separatist movements in Europe are unheard of, and in this case the long-time aggrieved sect, the Flemish, are suddenly the more prosperous - and they don't really like seeing their taxes go to cover the French-speakers. No real surprises there.

Still, I can't shake the feeling that this is like a sitcom version of your usual separatist movement. It's not that the ideas at play aren't themselves comprehensible and powerful, but: it's a civil society in northern Europe, at peace, that's talking about breaking up after having seen a TV show. I want Nigel Hawthorne and Paul Eddington to be prominently involved!

And if you think that outlook, in all its frivolous glory, implies that I don't really expect the breakup to happen any time soon . . . well, yeah. I don't totally rule it out, no, but I'm thinking that the simmering pique between the north and the south ultimately isn't going to outweigh the kinds of institutional and economic trauma an actual split would entail. Call me seventy percent confident.

Anyway, the original article is here.

George Bush in summary.

"You know I'm gonna be a dick, so you should just be responsible and give me what I want."

The longer form version of the president on expanding children's health insurance (and why it would be bad) can be read here.

In my defense, I've barely blogged at all for a few weeks.

Still, yeah, I haven't mentioned the Jena 6 lunacy, reprieve and (today's) protests - mostly because by the time I'd pieced together what was going on the worst of the offenses seemed already to be withering under a pretty big spotlight. One of the weird byproducts of the Bush years is that I've come to think of public outcries/protest marches/rallies/what have you as being presumptively ineffective; I'm delighted that that may be proving to be unduly pessimistic here.

There's a level on which I feel like I should add some qualifier about the six-on-one violence that preceded the charges - but, shit. The victim of the violence seems to be okay (though probably still in need of some closure and/or genuinely proportionate justice), and nobody's really saying the six are heroes; they're kids who happen to be going to a school that has a "whites-only tree" (!) in a region that has lousy district attorneys. They need to stop beating other kids up, sure, but the underlying problems there didn't start with them.

We're still in the twelfth century!

That's the obligatory allusion to the pre-Magna Carta era, in case you were wondering - inspired by the fact that Republicans and Panicked Lunatic Party member Joe Lieberman have successfully filibustered the Habeas Restoration bill. The breakdown of naughty versus nice is available here.

The thing is, the glass really is half-empty.

Three-quarters, even.

The glass in question is Iraq, and there are a couple of status reports up on the blogs I frequent. Now, Kevin Drum, at the behest of one of his readers, flags a few "things are getting better" stories, and more power to him.

Since I'm a deeply depressing person, though, I find more of my attention going over to the final paragraphs of this post, over at Wired's Danger Room.

Do away with one problem, and you now have to cope with the blowback from your success.

I worry that’ll be the case on the political scene, as well. Sunni political and tribal leaders are increasingly throwing in their lot with U.S. forces here against Al-Qaeda in Iraq and other insurgent types. But, to get them to come over to our side, the American military has fed them a steady diet of anti-Shi'ite propaganda.

Arrests and killings of Shi’ite militants are announced from loudspeaker blasts; President Bush’s bellicose rhetoric towards Shi’a Iran is reported on friendly radio programs. But the majority of this country is Shi’ite. Are we setting ourselves up as the enemies of the majority here? Are we priming the pump for an all-in sectarian battle royale? It seems like a possibility.

So, we're co-opting the Sunni insurgency by arming them and encouraging them to look at Shi'ites as their natural enemies. Nice way to put short-term gains in the proper perspective.

I snark, but I really do worry about this - I don't think that the Middle East is doomed to religious wars and a Muslim Reformation; I don't think Shi'ite/Sunni holy wars are inevitable. I'm afraid, though, that they're increasingly possible, and that's largely (though by no means entirely) because the Bushies like playing up sectarian tensions in the region to buy themselves breathing room (or pressure on Iran). It's a dangerous game, and it doesn't get nearly the kinds of coverage it deserves.

Six days later . . .

The blogging desert stretches on. For what it's worth, I'm perfectly healthy; this is all about temporarily insurmountable (or, at least, unsurmounted) distractions.

That said, there's fairly big news out of Iraq, and I like being pedantic too much to let it slip by: security contractors/mercenaries from Blackwater USA were involved in some kind of firefight that left eight Iraqis dead, and, under the laws we bequeathed to the Iraqi government, said Blackwater guys can't be prosecuted in Iraq, nor held subject to American martial law. Nonetheless, the Iraqi government has announced that the company's entire force is no longer welcome, and that the people responsible for the killing of these eight Iraqis will end up in an Iraqi court.

There are two problems with that. First - as already mentioned - thanks to our sorry excuse for a constitutional convention, the Iraqis simply don't seem to have the statutory authority to do it. Second, Blackwater's one of three organizations supplying contractors (some thirty thousand of which are of the armed and dangerous variety) to supplement our already overstretched military presence, so the luminaries of the Bush administration can't really afford to see them go - which means they're in a position where they almost have to tell Iraqis that we don't recognize the full sovereignty of their government. I wouldn't expect it to go over well.

Still alive!

I'm on a blogging vacation, obviously, but I had to break the silence for this one: Shinzo Abe, my nemesis in Japan, is calling it quits. Now, in all fairness, I can't guarantee that his replacement won't share his shallow and dishonest brand of hypernationalism, but we can at least hope that the levels of crookedness in the cabinet will go down.

Rafsanjani pulls a win!

Hashemi Rafsanjani, a former president and longtime Machiavellian figure in Iranian politics, was picked Tuesday to head a powerful clerical body — another defeat for the current president's hard-line faction.

Rafsanjani's election as chairman of the Assembly of Experts means the charismatic cleric will oversee the secretive body that chooses or dismisses the Islamic Republic's ultimate authority, its supreme leader.

. . .

Above all, Rafsanjani, who served as president from 1989 to 1997, is thought to be more pragmatic on issues involving Iran's dealings with the West and disturbed by Iran's growing isolation. He is believed to have played a behind-the-scenes role in Iran's decision to release British sailors who were seized earlier this year, for example.

In Tuesday's election, Rafsanjani defeated Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati, an extremist within the hard-line camp, to become chairman of the body of 86 senior clerics empowered with monitoring Iran's supreme leader, state-run television reported. Rafsanjani succeeds Ayatollah Ali Meshkini, who died in July.

Analysts said the election showed that more moderate conservatives like Rafsanjani were gaining ground in Iran, where there is increasing discontent with the ruling hard-liners over rising tensions with the West, a worsening economy and price hikes in basic commodities and housing. Ahmadinejad's allies were humiliated in December local elections, in which moderate conservatives won a big victory.

W00t!

Man, there's too much going on!

I didn't really mean to blog at all tonight, but there are a few stories out there I feel like connecting. Start with the LA Times' "Troop Buildup Fails to Reconcile Iraq."

The U.S. military buildup that was supposed to calm Baghdad and other trouble spots has failed to usher in national reconciliation, as the capital's neighborhoods rupture even further along sectarian lines, violence shifts elsewhere and Iraq's government remains mired in political infighting.

In the coming days, U.S. military and government leaders will offer Congress their assessment of the 6-month-old plan's results. But a review of statistics on death and displacement, political developments and the impressions of Iraqis who are living under the heightened military presence reaches a dispiriting conclusion.

Despite the plan, which has brought an additional 28,500 U.S. troops to Iraq since February, none of the major legislation that Washington had expected the Iraqi parliament to pass into law has been approved.

The number of Iraqis fleeing their homes has increased, not decreased, according to the United Nations' International Organization for Migration and Iraq's Ministry for Displacement and Migration.

Military officials say sectarian killings in Baghdad are down more than 51% and attacks on civilians and security forces across Iraq have decreased. But this has not translated into a substantial drop in civilian deaths as insurgents take their lethal trade to more remote regions. Last month, as many as 400 people were killed in a bombing in a village near the Syrian border, the worst bombing since the war began in March 2003. In July, 150 people were reported killed in a village about 100 miles north of Baghdad.

And in a sign that tamping down Sunni-Shiite violence is no guarantee of stability, a feud between rival Shiite Muslim militias has killed scores of Iraqis in recent months. Last week, at least 52 people died in militia clashes in the Shiite holy city of Karbala.

At best, analysts, military officers and ordinary Iraqis portray the country as in a holding pattern, dependent on U.S. troops to keep the lid on violence.

Cut then to the New York Times' "Bush Shifts Terms for Measuring Progress in Iraq."

With the Democratic-led Congress poised to measure progress in Iraq by focusing on the central government’s failure to perform, President Bush is proposing a new gauge, by focusing on new American alliances with the tribes and local groups that Washington once feared would tear the country apart.

That shift in emphasis was implicit in Mr. Bush’s decision to bypass Baghdad on his eight-hour trip to Iraq, stopping instead in Anbar Province, once the heart of an anti-American Sunni insurgency. By meeting with tribal leaders who just a year ago were considered the enemy, and who now are fighting Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, a president who has unveiled four or five strategies for winning over Iraqis — depending on how one counts — may now be on the cusp of yet another.

. . .

It was the White House and the Iraqi government, not Congress, that first proposed the benchmarks for Iraq that are now producing failing grades, a provenance that raises questions about why the administration is declaring now that the government’s performance is not the best measure of change.

By the way, note this little aside from Spencer Ackerman ("U.S.-Backed Sunnis Fight al-Qaeda -- and Maybe 'Iran-Backed' Shi'ites?") on how this might actually be playing out in the afflicted region.

Indications that hardliners within the Bush administration are (again) pushing for war with Iran casts new light on the recent alliance of convenience between the U.S. military and Sunni insurgents in Iraq. We've been highlighting for a while the administration's penchant for implying that the deterioration of Iraqi politics isn't as important as the U.S.-Sunni alliance against al-Qaeda. And there's little doubt that the alliance is important, both for fighting al-Qaeda in Iraq and for the prospect of an Iran war spilling over into Iraq. It's not inconceivable that our new Sunni allies of convenience would read the push for war with Iran as a green light to go after the Iraqi Shiites they view as Iran's proxies, politically or militarily.

Throughout 2005, when U.S. military commanders met for talks with Sunni insurgents, one message the insurgents delivered, according to several sources of mine, was that the U.S. was handing Iraq over to the Iranians by allowing the Shiites to take power through elections. If the U.S. didn't want to see Iran claim a hegemonic role in the region, said the insurgents, it had better return to its traditional posture of preferring Sunni rule in Iraq. Nor were insurgents the only ones articulating that fear: so were key Sunni allies of the U.S. in Jordan and Saudi Arabia.

Fast forward two years and the Bush administration's premiere argument that the war is proceeding well is the cleavage between Sunni insurgents and al-Qaeda. Shiite political leaders, knowing that the Sunnis largely consider the Shiite-dominated government illegitimate, view the emergent Sunni-U.S. alliance with extreme concern. It's only a matter of time, many reason, before the Sunni tribal figures and ex-insurgents attempt to reclaim Baghdad by force -- something that they view as consistent with the U.S.'s hardening posture outside Iraq against the Iranians. It's within that context that Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, visiting Tehran last month, praised Iran's "constructive role" in "fighting terrorism." Sectarianism in Iraq is such that the U.S. inching closer to Sunni tribal leaders creates an incentive for Iraqi Shiite politicians to inch closer to the Iranians.

Right, so: arming the Sunnis (who just about everyone expects to go back to full-on insurgent mode once al-Qaeda in Iraq is sufficiently bloodied) and railing against the Iranians is alienating Iraq's majority. Okay.

By the way, that war with Iran? Nicolas Sarkozy, president of France, has announced he could see it happening.

After a brief interruption of his New Hampshire vacation to meet President Bush in the family compound at Kenebunkport, Maine, French President Nicolas Sarkozy came away convinced his U.S. counterpart is serious about bombing Iran's secret nuclear facilities. That's the reading as it filtered back to Europe's foreign ministries:

Addressing the annual meeting of France's ambassadors to 188 countries, Mr. Sarkozy said either Iran lives up to its international obligations and relinquishes its nuclear ambitions — or it will be bombed into compliance. Mr. Sarkozy also made it clear he did not agree with the Iranian-bomb-or-bombing-of-Iran position, which reflects the pledge of Mr. Bush to his loyalists, endorsed by Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain of Arizona and Sen. Joe Lieberman, Connecticut Independent. But Mr. Sarkozy recognized unless Iran's theocrats stop enriching uranium to weapons-grade levels under inspection by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), we will all be "faced with an alternative that I call catastrophic."

A ranking Swiss official privately said, "Anyone with a modicum of experience in the Middle East knows that any bombing of Iran would touch off at the very least regional instability and what could be an unmitigated disaster for Western interests."

This despite the fact that the crazies are running Iran into the ground all on their own.

The economic component of Iran’s go-it-alone approach began with Mr. Ahmadinejad’s election two years ago. He laid down a series of erratic economic decrees that he said were aimed at helping the poor, but instead often made their lives harder. Recently, the head of the central bank and the ministers of oil and industry resigned, warning that the country was heading toward trouble. The president’s decisions have frightened away investors, derailing efforts to open Iran to world markets, analysts said.

The leadership has been able to ease some of the pain because of unprecedented income from the sale of crude oil. Ultimately, those interviewed agreed, the president has continued unimpeded because he has the support of Mr. Khamenei, who has the final say.

“The only thing that has kept Ahmadinejad in power is the support of the leadership,” said Muhammad Atrianfar, publisher of two newspapers that have been closed and an ally of former president Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. “As soon as the leader stops supporting him, he can easily be impeached and dismissed.”

No one accuses the leadership of deliberately fostering economic chaos; instead, economists here say Mr. Ahmadinejad fails to understand the effect of his policies. “He feels the pain of the poor, but doesn’t have any solution,” said Ali Rashadi, an independent economist. “He is wrecking a system that was patched together over 25 years.”

. . .

When Mr. Ahmadinejad was elected, he campaigned as a sort of Islamic Robin Hood, promising to redistribute the country’s oil wealth from the rich to the poor. One of his first edicts was to order banks to lower interest rates to 12 percent from as high as 17 percent. The order, like others, backfired, making loans harder to come by.

In another case, Mr. Ahmadinejad decided that the price of cement was too high, so he ordered that reduced, too. Mr. Rashadi, the economist, said the decree frightened away investors who had planned to build new cement factories around the country. Mr. Rashadi said the president’s constant insults aimed at the stock market undermined investor confidence, which he said encouraged people with money to invest in real estate, driving up property values.

“My income does not match my cost of living,” said Hassan Khalili, 37, who rents a small apartment in the village of Vardan, a meandering hillside community of about 9,000 people an hour outside of Tehran. “I thought it was going to get better under Ahmadinejad, but it didn’t.”

The only good news for the average Iranian cited in that article is that real estate values (or, at least, prices) have skyrocketed, and even that's something of a mixed bag - particularly for the poor. The maniacs are delegitimizing themselves every day they blunder along.

So, of course, it's the perfect time to be agitating for expanding our current war into Iran! Never mind that all we have in Iraq is a short-term strategy that's likely to backfire on us! Never mind that blowing shit up in Iran will fortify Ahmadinejad and the reactionaries! Michael Ledeen says we need to seize the moment, and the vice president seems to agree!

And there's our crazy nation in a snapshot.

"Very legitimate."

THE Pentagon has drawn up plans for massive airstrikes against 1,200 targets in Iran, designed to annihilate the Iranians’ military capability in three days, according to a national security expert.

Alexis Debat, director of terrorism and national security at the Nixon Center, said last week that US military planners were not preparing for “pinprick strikes” against Iran’s nuclear facilities. “They’re about taking out the entire Iranian military,” he said.

Debat was speaking at a meeting organised by The National Interest, a conservative foreign policy journal. He told The Sunday Times that the US military had concluded: “Whether you go for pinprick strikes or all-out military action, the reaction from the Iranians will be the same.” It was, he added, a “very legitimate strategic calculus”.

Yeah, if we're going to unilaterally attack a sovereign nation anyway, we might as well do it on a scale that makes a mockery of our pretext and kills a few extra thousand people. Won't make any difference to us!

Great.



EDIT: More on my favorite source of semi-rational panic over here.