New entry for The Weekly Standard‘s ever-expanding list of regimes that need changing: Eritrea, which “is looking ever more like a state sponsor of terrorism.” Eritrea’s sin is backing the ICU is Somalia.

All Eritrea’s doing in the real world, of course, is trying to prevent its larger, hostile neighbor from growing even more powerful. But this is what happens once you decide that you need to be in the proxy war business. We’ve decided that backing Ethiopia’s bid for regional hegemony in East Africa is identical with fighting terrorism, so any group or state that seeks to check Ethiopian power is now de facto a pro-terrorist enemy of the United States. Since it’s the Horn of Africa probably none of this really matters at the end of the day (except, of course, to Africans) but that doesn’t make this kind of mucking around advisable.

K-Drum wonders (well, not really, he knows the answer) what Bill Kristol will do now that Bush has started taking his advice: “So if it doesn’t work, Bill, what are you going to do? Will you admit that the strategy you endorsed was wrong? Or will you just regroup and blithely insist that it was never implemented the way you wanted?” The latter, obviously. The striking thing is that Kristol is already laying the groundwork for this:

The key is the urgency, the speed and the full bore commitment that the U.S. government, across the board, puts on implementing this. Don’t slow-walk the troops in. Front-load the surge. Get Petraeus over there. He’s the commander who has to execute it. It’s crazy to have Casey execute the first month of the plan and then have a transition then.

Kristol also reveals during the same exchange that he doesn’t know the difference between blackjack (where you can double-down) and poker (where you can’t) and offers fresh material for the right’s inevitable stab in the back narrative. The economy with which all this is achieved is truly impressive; you need to read it for yourself. Victor Davis Hanson would expend 37,000 words making these points.

UPDATE: Even dumber excuses from New York Post columnist and fabricator Amir Taheri. This last, incidentally, is why it doesn’t make sense to wonder why hawks don’t suffer from being wrong. Rightwing pundits don’t suffer under any circumstances — you can make things up, get busted on drug charges, whatever, and it all works out fine.

Martin Peretz’s 1,027th reason why Arabs are teh suck:

Berber comes from the same root as barbarian. But there is nothing barbarian about the Berbers. Their rugs and and especially their vases are so much more subtle than the glimmery ornate of their Arab neighbors.

In all seriousness, yesterday I eschewed my usual supermarket purchase of Tribe of Two Sheiks Hummus in favor of Sabra Hummus and got better results with the fake-Arab product than with the fake-Israeli one. But never an Arab vase!

Ed Kilgore’s note so concerned “that the administration is about to deliberately widen the Iraq war by provoking Tehran and Damascus into armed conflict.” After all, “where the hell is the Pentagon going to get the resources for a regional war?” Well, I’d say they’d get them from the Air Force and the Navy, hence the significance of appointing a naval officer to run CENTCOM. Certainly the argument that provoking a military confrontation with Iran isn’t going to happen because such a provocation would be a very bad idea in light of the objective constraints on the American military strikes me as unconvincing. Sometimes leaders initiate extremely poor policies. George W. Bush happens to have a history of initiating such policies.

David Sanger at The New York Times, meanwhile, is not in the conspiracy theory business. He notes that while “administration officials say the goal is limited to preventing Iranians from aiding in attacks on American and Iraqi forces inside Iraq.” Nevertheless, “in recent interviews and public statements, senior members of the Bush administration have made it clear that their agenda goes significantly further, toward foiling Iran’s dream of emerging as the greatest power in the Middle East.” Clearly, I think, for now the hope is that foiling Iran’s dreams of regional power can somehow be accomplished by raiding consulates and hoping there are ponies inside. Nevertheless, if the goal is to check Iranian regional power, that means wider war sooner or later.