The Secretary of State’s wildly belated trip to the Palestinian territories raises a few questions. First — what on God’s green earth is a “provisional” state? Something like the Irish Free State? I don’t know. Why, one wonders, would you bother making this proposal to President Abbas at a time when due to his domestic political weakness he couldn’t possibly accept? Well, I suppose I do know the answer to that one, namely that for the next five years suggestions that the US should be aggressively involved in forging an Israeli-Palestinian settlement will be shot down on the theory that “Abbas was offered a state and turned it down.” Something like that.

Then we get to the small matter of “State Department proposal for $86 million in ‘nonlethal assistance’ to enhance the Palestinian security forces directly under his political wing — as opposed to those loyal to Hamas.” The distinction between “lethal” and “nonlethal” assistance to security forces escapes me. Perhaps more to the point as you’ll recall several years ago the Palestinian Authority was a corrupt and authoritarian structure, ruling undemocratically over the Palestinian people with the aid of its security services. The United States government insisted on reforms, democratic elections, etc. Hamas — which, to be clear, everyone understood to be the only realistically possible alternative to Fatah — won the election. And now we’re pumping money into those very same Fatah security forces so that they can re-establish the autocracy we insisted they dismantle? Yet another “I don’t see any method at all, sir” moment from Team Bush.

Here’s some more on the American military raid on that Iranian consulate in Kurdistan. Obviously, Iran complaining about violations of diplomatic protocol is a bit rich. By the same toke, Americans complaining that a foreign country’s military is meddling in Iraqi affairs is a bit rich.

The arrests of the Iranians “is an illegal act and if such an act took place in another country there would have been grave consequences,” said Nouri Talabani, a member of the parliament in Kurdistan.

Is this Nouri Talabani related to Jalal Talabani?

No real rationale for linking to this two year-old article except a lot of people don’t know it exists. Suffice it to say, however, that the Bush administration wasn’t the first one to fib a bit about Iraq’s WMD programs.

Brookings Institution scholar Michael O’Hanlon, who I’m given to understand would have received a high-level appointment in a Kerry administration, and co-author of a recent book on “what the Democrats need to do” about national security policy, feels the urge to surge. As we’ve seen previously, O’Hanlon’s Brookings colleague Ken Pollack feels much the same way.

My advice to Democrats in congress and hoping to run for president would be to stop listening to these guys.

UPDATE: Elsewhere in the liberal hawk multiverse, Jeffrey Herf explains that the Bush administration’s long record of incompetence is a good reason to support the surge.