It's just too obvious. This administration always zeroes in on something that supports their military ambitions and then gets tunnel vision.

Remember Iraq? Chalabi? The twisted informant who helped draw the inside plans of the moving vans full of WMDs? We all know now there was little effort to find anyone to rebutt the liars and foxes who were feeding Cheney & Rumsfeld falsehoods in order to win favor, political power, or money.

Now it seems the "we must attack Iran" build-up centered around this laptop.

The discovery led officials to revisit intelligence mined in 2004 and 2005 from the laptop obtained from the Iranian engineer. The documents on that laptop described two programs, termed L-101 and L-102 by the Iranians, describing designs and computer simulations that appeared to be related to weapons work. Link...

Appeared to be?

A telling moment about freedom and gays with the Iranian President

I found it interesting when the president of Iran answered the question about gays he responded by saying there weren’t any gays in Iran. The audience of course hooted and howled. Suddenly it seemed having gays was a very wonderful thing for America. I felt proud because I knew it showed we were far more advanced than other countries in that way. Yeah! Go gays. Hug a gay today. Salute a gay person next time you spot one.. Hand one a flag and thank him/her for being a citizen of our country.

I did get the point:

Yesterday during the Karzi/Bush press conference one question was asked that seemed to contradict Bush's recent inditements of Iran's role in the Middle East.

The reporter asked:

Q: President Karzai said yesterday that he believed Iran was playing a helpful role in Afghanistan. Was he able to convince you, in your meetings, that that was the case, or do you still have concerns about Iran's role?

Fresh from his Sunday editorial entitled Victory Is Not An Option, former Reagan NSA chief William Odom gets in a tussle with Hugh Hewitt.

The outcome doesn't make Hewitt look good at all. Hewitt throws every defense of the Iraq strategy at him, and General Odom parries every point. General Odom destroys every historical analogy that Hewitt offers in defense by providing much-needed (and continuously ignored) context.

I normally don't advocate going to Townhall, but this is a must read.

A sample:

WO: Look, I mean, I…this a kind of a pointless argument. I mean, the issues…all of your things can be true. They don’t make it any better for us. We are on a path to suffer every month we stay. The defeat we face will be larger, and we will put off the time at which…and where we will have even less resources to recover. If you remember the Second World War, Hitler had 600,000 troops thrown into Stalingrad, refused over four, five months to withdraw them, at the plea by, from his generals, and he ends up losing them all. If he had withdrawn them as they said, asked him to do, and let Stalingrad go, he could have shortened his lines by seven or eight hundred kilometers, and had nearly, had over 600,000 troops survive. Now that’s…a military commander that doesn’t know when to retire from one area so he can approach the conflict from another area, is not a smart commander. And it seems to you’re advocating a kind of policy where you have a president who jumps off the Empire State Building, and he goes by the 50th floor, and he says I’m on course. Well, I want a president who knows how to change course.

(More after the jump…)

I found this post by Kevin Drum, in which he analyzes Insty's recent assertion that we should just go ahead and kill Iranian atomic scientists, pretty interesting.

Here again is yet another example of how democracy blooms in Iraq like the flowers thrown at the feet our liberating forces.

While on brief holiday from the office (took the day off, cough cough, wink), I ran across this little gem.

Convicted terrorist -- for his role in the 1983 US embassy bombings -- is now an Iraqi parlimentarian:

A man sentenced to death in Kuwait for the 1983 bombings of the U.S. and French embassies now sits in Iraq's parliament as a member of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's ruling coalition, according to U.S. military intelligence.

Jamal Jafaar Mohammed's seat in parliament gives him immunity from prosecution. Washington says he supports Shiite insurgents and acts as an Iranian agent in Iraq.

Jamal Jafaar Mohammed was convicted in absentia & sentenced to death for his role as a member of the "Al Da'wa 17" in the December 1983 bombings of embassies in Kuwait.

(I've heard of state-sponsored terrorism before, but this is ridiculous.)

If you were paying attention to the world this week, you probably heard that a trusted aide and translator for the commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan was arrested on espionage charges. Also, in the past day or two, British and American soldiers in Iraq raided houses thought to be important centers for Shia insurgents, only to wind up holding Iranian diplomats as captives. These diplomats were invited to Iraq by Jalal Talibani, who sat with President Bush in the White House earlier this month...