I was turned on the other day to the fact that Time Magazine‘s Tony Karon has a blog about foreign affairs, Rootless Cosmopolitan. It’s really good. Good enough that a ten day old post on the subject “What’s Iraq Actually About Now?” is very much worth your time. It’s an excellent question to ponder when you hear debate about whether or not the surge is “working” — working to do what? And why?

At any rate, if Time were smart they’d incorporate this content into their Middle East blog, though I think you could safely classify a lot of Karon’s posts as “Too Hot for Time.”

As you’ll recall, back in December, the government of Ethiopia made conservatives across the land happy by proving that if you put aside liberal qualms, it’s easy for foreign invaders to crush a domestic Islamist movement. Or something: “Artillery fire rocked Mogadishu on Saturday as Ethiopian and Somali troops launched a third day of a major offensive against Islamist insurgents and clan militiamen that has killed scores of civilians.” Alternatively, nobody likes a foreign invader.

A joke from Joe Klein: “Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is testing the limits of the possible: in a recent poll by a local television station, he had a favorable rating of 3%. Given the poll’s margin of error, it was possible Olmert had no support beyond his extended family.” I’ve had that thought before when I see polls with extreme results. I assume that it’s not literally true. But I don’t understand the right way to interpret a result like that is. If your sample size gives you an MOE of four percent and Olmert has a 3 percent approval rating, how do you interpret the possibility of negative popularity?

There’s also some substantive point here about the prospects for an Israel-Syria peace deal and the Bush administration’s absolutely bizarre desire to prevent that from happening.