The other thing about the Pelosi story is that I don’t even understand which Syria policy Pelosi is supposed to have violated. We have diplomatic relations with Syria. Bush has not sought to change that fact. Nor has he sought new sanctions against Syria. He ordered our ambassador to come home, he ordered the State Department to cease contacts with Syria’s ambassador in the US, and proclaimed there would be no high-level executive branch contacts. This policy has accomplished nothing in terms of Syrian behavior vis-a-vis Iraq, nothing in terms of Syrian behavior vis-a-vis Lebanon, and nothing in terms of Syrian behavior vis-a-vis Iran. It’s a stupid, pointless policy.

But that’s the policy. If Bush wants to institute a new policy wherein members of congress or members of the press can’t go to Syria — or can go, but can’t speak to officials of the Syrian government — he needs to ask congress to pass such a law, since the president isn’t a God-King who gets to just arbitarily decide where people can go or who they can talk to.

I’m continually surprised by the number of people who refuse to people that leading Democratic Party advocates of the Iraq War were, in fact, advocates of the Iraq War. Petey, for example, wrote in comments “My recollection was that Hillary Clinton and Richard Holbrooke and Joe Biden were backing a policy of threatening force to get UN weapons inspectors back into Iraq, not the policy of invading Iraq for the sake of invading Iraq followed by the administration.” If, however, these fine individuals disapproved of Bush’s policy of invading Iraq despite the inspectors’ presence in Iraq, how come none of them said so?

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I wrote about this yesterday, but the sheer quantity of people who are very upset that the British hostage situation didn’t wind up providing a pretext for further hostilities between the US and Iran is really remarkable. Here’s Krauthammer in the Post, and someone named Yoav Fromer in TNR.

Interestingly, The Weekly Standard, which I think of as the most enthusiastic of war-boosters, has been relatively restrained in its coverage.

Jeffrey Smith for The Washington Post: “Captured Iraqi documents and intelligence interrogations of Saddam Hussein and two former aides ‘all confirmed’ that Hussein’s regime was not directly cooperating with al-Qaeda before the U.S. invasion of Iraq, according to a declassified Defense Department report released yesterday.”

Of course all this really proves is that the traitorous liberal media is working hand-in-glove with Baath intelligence and al-Qaeda (and, of course, the CIA) to undermine the administration and, indeed, the United States itself.

There‘s those chemical weapons: “A truck bomb exploded in the volatile Iraqi city of Ramadi on Friday, killing at least 15 people and releasing chlorine gas into the air, police and security sources said.” Turns out that while I wasn’t looking, “There has been a spate of chlorine truck bomb attacks in recent months, mainly in western Anbar province.” Note also that US forces are taking heavy casualties during the “surge” era such that “at least 18 American service members have been killed this month.” Read down in the article for a whole cavalcade of continuing violence incidents.

So far, the “surge” has coincided with Iraq’s traditional seasonal lull in violence. As we move deeper into the higher-violence months and armed groups continue to adapt to the new surged environment, I think we can expect the violence level to steadily tick back up. Meanwhile, on the political front the superficial improvements in the security situation have not lain the groundwork for political reconciliation but, rather, made Shiite parties once again intransigent and more confidence of continued US backing and eventually crushing their foes.