So how about that political progress in Iraq? Well, Time says it’s actually a fraud. See more from Kevin Drum, Marc Lynch, and Ilan Goldenberg. Basically, the Iraqi cabinet seems to have cobbled something meaningless together so that Ryan Crocker can go before congress and say that just when it looked like the administration was going to need to report (fake) security progress but no political progress — bam! — in the nick of time along comes some (fake) political progress.

The difference, one assumes, is that Crocker and Petraeus won’t be mentioning the part about how it’s all fake. Then whatever they say, Bush will further exaggerate three or four notches, while Dick Cheney goes for five or six and Condoleezza Rice keeps her reasonable rep by leaving it at one or two notches of additional misleadingness. I’m excited. Have I mentioned that Bush wants $50 billio more dollars and that maybe all this cash we’ve been throwing away on Iraq had instead funding productive investments (be they public or private sector) wages might be going up instead of down?

Justin Logan makes a good, if provocative, point about the president’s overblown rhetoric on Iraq has the effect of amplifying Osama bin Laden’s propaganda. We shouldn’t be sending people the message that al-Qaeda really is on the verge of seizing control over Iraq’s oil resources and building a universal Caliphate. The people who blow themselves up for al-Qaeda’s sake are murdering people, but they’re not accomplishing anything and they’re certainly not right around the corner from world domination and people need to know that.

They say that when the only thing you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. When it comes to Afghanistan, though, we actually do have tools available to us besides monomaniacal focus on poppy eradication. Unfortunately, as Sameer Lalwani explains, to the relevant American policymakers, everything related to Afghanistan still looks like monomaniacal focus on poppy eradication when what’s needed is a much more pragmatic and comprehensive approach to trying to offer some stability.

It’s hard in many ways to express exactly how deeply crackpottery has bored into America’s discourse over national security. Take, for example, Frank Gaffney’s Center for Security Policy. The good news is that most of the stuff they publish isn’t nearly as crazy as the column calling for the nuclear destruction of Iraq followed by Bush installing himself as a military dictator. That said, a good deal of it isn’t that much less unhinged. Caroline Glick, for example, wrote yesterday not merely that she disagrees with Mohammed ElBarredei’s approach to non-proliferation policy, but that he has deliberately “used his power to facilitate the proliferation of nuclear energy for military purposes.” Her key piece of evidence for this claim was a breathtaking bit of up-is-downism:

Take Iraq for example. Right up to the US-British invasion of Iraq in March 2003, ElBaradei consistently maintained that he either couldn’t tell if Iraq was or was not pursuing nuclear weapons, or that he could see no evidence that Saddam Hussein was pursuing nuclear weapons. Indeed, just before the war, in an effort to scuttle US-British efforts to convince the UN Security Council to pass a new resolution approving the use of force against Saddam Hussein’s regime, ElBaradei reported to the Security Council that Iraq had abandoned its nuclear weapons program.

Needless to say, the reason ElBarredei shifted over time from “it’s uncertain” to “there’s no evidence” to “there’s no program” is that there was no program, as became clear the more the IAEA learned about the situation in Iraq. This appeared not on some random person’s website, but in a daily newspaper, The Jerusalem Post, written by the senior fellow for Middle East affairs of a think tank that boasts an endorsement from the Vice President of the United States.

The Corner’s Andy McCarthy writes that “At the Weekly Standard Kim Kagan’s account demonstrates in detail that Iran’s war against the U.S. in Iraq goes back some five years.” Just yesterday, Jamie Kirchick scolded readers that “it’s not ‘warmongering’ to simply state the fact that two rogue states are themselves complicit in unwarranted acts of warmongering against the United States and a nascent democracy in the Middle East.”

I’m not sure if Kirchick is entirely clear on what the concept of “warmongering” means, but I’m pretty sure that this is, in fact, warmongering. But rather than quibble over semantics, the basic point is that these writers for America’s top conservative publications would like to see the United States take military action against Iran (and possibly Syria) and to that end they’re trying to convince the public that those countries are already at war with us. They started it, you see. I mean, arming and supporting Iraqi factions! What meddlers! Where do they get the nerve!

The McClatchey newspapers Iraq team did a lengthy interview with Nouri al-Maliki. You can see their writeup here. Not surprisingly, he doesn’t agree with his critics in the US and also doesn’t think he should be removed by a coup. Near the end, though, comes something a bit more interesting as Leila Fadel is asking him why he doesn’t meet with Muqtada al-Sadr anymore:

FADEL: Why not, at this time, when there are troubled relations, and the Mahdi Army is being accused of killing governors and running astray?

MALIKI: I have no problem with meeting him. But he withdrew from the challenges to a large degree and he has big problems within the movement. That is why I have meetings with leaders from the movement but not with Muqtada and I have many efforts for reform and to bridge the mistakes through bilateral or more dialogue. Perhaps what is holding back our talks is my firm rejection of the policies adopted by the movement. And I believe some leaders have begun to understand my position and accept it as the correct position in spite of my firmness. Indeed now is the time for meetings but I believe that meeting the leaders who actually represent the movement is more to the point and more effective in quelling the situation and in isolating the gangs from the good elements and cadres in the movement.

If I read him right, Maliki is contending that Sadr himself doesn’t really control the movement at this point, so there’s no reason to meet with him and Maliki can just meet with faction leaders instead.

A.J. Rossmiller (who, for the record, used to do political intelligence in Iraq for the defense department, so he’s not just bullshitting around) has a great post about the myriad problems with the Allawi Gambit, noting such salient facts as how we already installed Allawi as Prime Minister of Iraq once, he performed horribly in office, and he was overwhelmingly booted out in an election. I like A.J.’s conceit that Allawi-love is a kind of Iraqi corollary to Broderism here at home, with both sides suffering the same problem: “Like Americans, Iraqis have preferences about issues.”

Jane Hamsher’s also reading A.J.:

I still find it mystifying that Hillary Clinton and Carl Levin decided to get out in front of this thing by calling for the removal of Maliki. The danger of winding up once again in a “you broke it, you bought it” situation seem pretty extreme.

I put this alongside the Department of Homeland Security in my “too clever by half” file. The Democrats’ basic feeling seems to be that erring on the side of overly castigating Iraqi political leaders is the smart move since it helps evade charges that you’re Criticizing The Troops when pointing to lack of success in our Iraq policies. Just keep punching Maliki while walking backwards, and maybe everything’ll be okay. But as Hamsher says, there’s a danger here of Levin getting what he asked for and Democrats finding themselves re-entrapped into support for a doomed policy.