Via Blake Hounshell, al-Qaeda leaders say they want the occupation of Iraq to continue as long as possible:

The most important thing is that you continue in your jihad in Iraq, and that you be patient and forbearing, even in weakness, and even with fewer operations; even if each day had half of the number of current daily operations, that is not a problem, or even less than that. So, do not be hasty. The most important thing is that the jihad continues with steadfastness and firm rooting, and that it grows in terms of supporters, strength, clarity of justification, and visible proof each day. Indeed, prolonging the war is in our interest, with God’s permission.

An important point that, naturally enough, I have no doubt the press will overwhelmingly ignore.

Things get worse and worse, as North Korea promises a nuclear test. It’s always — always — worth revisiting Fred Kaplan’s “Rolling Blunder” on how Bush made a hash of our DPRK policy.

Glad we’ve gotten that cleared up. Condoleezza Rice was, in fact, warned of al-Qaeda threats on July 10, 2001 by George Tenet and Tenet’s counterterrorism guy, Cofer Black. Rice’s story is now that she denied any such meeting had taken place because she forgot. Well, let’s just say I don’t find that especially plausible. She got the briefing, blew it off as just another dude whining that his issue is the most important one and deserves more attention, then — bam — two months later thousands of people are dead. Never took the opportunity to look back and reflect? Never had a sleepless night wondering “could I have done more?” Never thought back to that briefing that seemed so trivial at the time?

But maybe she forgot. Maybe this is just a government composed of extraodinarily thoughtless people who never took a minute to look back at their pre-9/11 behavior and see if anything might have gone wrong. Maybe she’s not lying and she’s just incredibly irresponsible. It’s often hard to say with this crew. And lord knows they were helped by a press corps that showed no interest for years in the question of whether or not the occurrence of a massive terrorist attack on Bush’s watch might reflect poorly on the people in office at the time, rather than simply providing a venue to demonstrate Churchillian grandeur.

Bill Frist says we ought to support efforts to bring “people who call themselves Taliban” into the government of Afghanistan. What an ass. Why you would say that right before an election, I c’ouldn’t say. And Frist is a scumbag who eminently deserves the public coal-raking he’s in for.

That said, I do think it’s worth pointing out that several weeks ago I was at one of these panel events. This very subject came up, and a range of expert-type dudes with generally sound views all thought that this was the thing to do. Their take was that there had long been a Taliban faction that was uncomfotable with the group’s association with Osama bin Laden, and that tried to persuade their colleagues to sell him out after 9/11. They failed, the whole crew got booted from government, and now you get the current situation. But since the hard-core has disproportionately gotten themselves killed, the theory goes, the “moderate Taliban” (not actually especially moderate in their views about domestic governance) now has a stronger hand and it should be possible to cut a deal with them and bring them into the fold.

Blogging involves a lot of discussing issues you don’t really understand, and I really wouldn’t want to claim any expertise in the nuances of Afghan politics, but it seems worth making the point that sensible people are thinking along these lines. It seems to me that, politically speaking, to make any such arrangement work it would be absolutely vital for whomever you cut a deal with to stop calling themselves “Taliban” since it’s never going to fly with Americans under that name.