The logic of trying to strengthen Abbas and Fatah and improve living conditions in the West Bank seems clear enough to me, but does having George Bush and Ehud Olmert explicitly praise Abbas really help that cause? It seems to me that if I’m Abbas, I want improvements in Palestinian quality of life to be framed as concessions I succeeded in wringing out of the clutches of the Zionists, not favors that are being done for me because Israel and the USA thing I’m super-neat.

Photo by Flickr user Jordan Klein used under a Creative Commons license.

Michael O’Hanlon, Very Serious Person, decides to write a Washington Times op-ed attacking Harry Reid. I joke from time to time that I’m ready to endorse the first Democrat who’s willing to publicly rule out giving O’Hanlon a high-level job in his administration. The more I think about it, the less it sounds like a joke.

Back in February, Justin Logan pointed out that predictions of DOOM following an American departure from Iraq echo essentially similar predictions being made about Vietnam in the late 1960s. Now via Justin I see that Kurt Campbell and Shawn Brimley have a Foreign Policy article making the same point.

The difference, however, is that as best I can tell Campbell and Brimley read the lesson in the opposite direction. Brimley’s one of the coathors, for Campbell’s new think tank, of a memo (PDF) arguing we can’t afford to leave Iraq. These guys are part of the “residual force” consensus to which the Democratic Party seems weirdly hostage.

Taliban leaders warn the South Waziristan food services industry to stop playing CDs and televisions or else “their establishments will be demolished.” This via Brian Ulrich who adds a bit of context.

Zack Phillips, author of the article on MANPAD countermeasures I blogged about over the weekend emails to note that the State Department does have an initiative geared to locating and destroying MANPADs in the field. Apparently this has been a pretty modest program ($7 million in FY ’07) but there’s a request out for a big increase to $41 million for FY ’08.

Obviously, the devil’s in the details here — does the State Department’s program work? — but on the face of things this is a much smarter area in which to invest money than on R&D for $1 million a pop plane-based countermeasures.

Marc Lynch, author of such classics of Middle East commentary as “No Jordan Option”, says things may have changed. Since King Abdullah “put an end to the political crisis of 2004-2005, he has overseen a steady de-liberalization of the Kingdom, cracking down on public freedoms and going after the Islamist movement aggressively, with nary a peep from the Bush administration,” which transforms the larger political context and makes Jordan re-involving itself in the West Bank imaginable again.

The question, however, is why Jordan would want to do any such thing. If the West Bank in question included East Jerusalem you could see it, but the relevant “West Bank” for these purposes would include much more headaches than upside for Jordan. Presumably, this option would only come into play if Abdullah saw a big political payoff in terms of his relationship with Washington.

Fred Thompson on Harry Reid: “Whether he means to or not, he’s encouraging our enemies to believe that they are winning the critical war of will.” Needless to say, K-Lo loved it. The guys kind of smells like a primary winner to me and while he’s a buffoon, if the Bush years have taught us anything it’s that being a buffoon is no obstacle to also being a successful nationwide politician.

A classic in the Iran hawk literature in the form of a National Review editorial. It leads with the stunning hypocrisy of charging another country with interfering in Iraqi affairs:

When one country trains a force to infiltrate and destabilize its neighbor, it has committed an act of war. And by now, it is hardly a secret that Iran has been funding, arming, and training radical factions of the Mahdi army. Still, most American politicians have been reluctant to call Iran’s behavior exactly what it is: an act of war against Iraq, and against the United States.

Then come seven additional grafs of bloviating, followed by the necessarily vacuous conclusion: “Iran won’t stop so long as there is no price to its acts of war. The controversy over Lieberman’s remark shows how we aren’t prepared to make it pay one.” What price should Iran be made to pay? Are the likely consequences of extracting said payment really that Iran will back down? Or will this launch a spiral of escalation? It’s hard to say since National Review won’t even say which policy they’re advocating. But they want to widen the war, in some sense, to somehow include Iran, even though they have no particular measures in mind or sense of the overall strategy thereby served.

Thanks to J.T. for the pointer.