There’s good and bad in Thomas Ricks’ Washington Post article on the contrast between Iraq-the-place and Iraq-the-issue but the conclusion is absurd:

Yet, with a new approach underway in Baghdad, the Washington debate is largely irrelevant to the concerns of the soldier on the ground, said the Army officer who recently returned from Baghdad. “All the talk about pullouts, votes and budgets really doesn’t mean much to that 18-year-old with his body armor driving across Iraq worried about IEDs,” he said, referring to roadside bombs. “For him, life consists of trying to survive for 365 days to get back home — only to know he’ll have to come back again.”

Now, to be sure, most 18 year-olds don’t care about congressional debates and no doubt 18 year-olds serving in a combat zone are even less inclined to become political junkies. But the Washington debate is hardly irrelevant to his concerns. He’s “trying to survive for 365 days to get back home — only to know he’ll have to come back again.” Whether or not he has to come back again is, however, exactly what’s being debated. There’s a lot of political posturing going on inside the Beltway, but it’s not all posturing — the actual policies that determine how many people go to Iraq and for how long get made here.

David Brooks offers up a fairly novel line of attack on John Mearsheimer and Steven Walt:

There seemed to be a time, after 9/11, when it was generally accepted that terror and extremism were symptoms of a deeper Arab malaise. There seemed to be a general recognition that the Arab world had fallen behind, and that it needed economic, political and religious modernization. . . .

The events of the past three years have shifted their diagnosis of where the cancer is — from dysfunction in the Arab world to malevolence in Jerusalem and in Aipac. Furthermore, the Walt and Mearsheimer paper on the Israel lobby has had a profound effect on Arab elites. It has encouraged them not to be introspective, not to think about their own problems, but to blame everything on the villainous Israeli network.

Yes, it’s true. The main obstacles to political and economic reform in the United States are . . . American critics of current US Israel policy. Please. Any nice Jewish boy can tell you that Arab political elites were pretty damn good at deflecting attention of their own shortcomings and onto Israel long before The London Review of Books decided to publish the infamous article. The key variable here — as Brooks has it in the previous sentence — is not Walt and Mearsheimer, but “the events of the past three years.” America suffered a serious and deadly terrorist attack that, fortunately, did not damage our nations key sources of economic or military strength and, indeed, had the consequence of strengthening our hand politically. As Brooks notes, it opened up a hopeful moment in international relations. But rather than seizing the moment, the Bush administration squandered it.

(Actually funding the DPRK — our friends in Ethiopia)

The sober-minded manner in which the captive British sailors matter was handled had given me some hope that the country wasn’t being run by crazy people. Not so fast, reports the Guardian, whose after-action report on the crisis states that “Pentagon officials asked their British counterparts: what do you want us to do,” and “offered a series of military options” including “for US combat aircraft to mount aggressive patrols over Iranian Revolutionary Guard bases in Iran.” The British government, however, wasn’t looking to be used as a pretext for war, but actually wanted to handle the issue at hand. “The British declined the offer and said the US could calm the situation by staying out of it. London also asked the US to tone down military exercises that were already under way in the Gulf.” Meanwhile, “The British government also asked the US administration from Mr Bush down to be cautious in its use of rhetoric, which was relatively restrained throughout.”

And, well, good for Britain.

To me, the view that this affair was some kind of humiliation for the West or a PR coup for Iran is nutty and says more about the bloody-minded instincts of Americas hawks than it does about events in the world. The important issue in US-Iranian relations remains the Iranian nuclear program. One key variable here remains the attitudes of a wide swathe of countries who don’t necessarily put a tremendous priority on this issue. What went down over the hostages is exactly the sort of thing likely to make policymakers in, say, Argentina or Belgium or South Korea inclined to see the Iranian regime as dangerously unpredictable and prone to envelope-pushing and the anti-Iranian coalition as being led by responsible people. Now, of course, it turns out that the anti-Iranian coalition wasn’t quite as responsible as it seemed.

Catherine and I chat at Friday’s game versus the Cavs:

Not, perhaps, my finest media hour. Camerawork is by Catherine on her digital camera. I wasn’t aware that those things could shoot movies but, of course, it makes sense that in a digital world the video/still dichotomy would break down.