53 killed in Baghdad bombings. I should say that no matter how badly U.S. tactics in Iraq fail, I don’t think you’ll ever see violence levels return to where they were at the late-06/early-07 peak when you had a lot of sectarian massacres. At this point, given the number of people who are already either dead or else displaced to somewhere safer than where they were before, things aren’t going to get that bad again.

But that’s essentially irrelevant to the main question we spent 2003, 2004, and 2005 debating — namely whether or not it’s in the capacity of 100,000+ U.S. Army and Marine Corps members to effectively bring an end to Iraqi political conflicts. The answer continues to appear to be no. Similarly, there’s really nothing we can do to stop sporadic bombing attacks. It’s not, after all, that you look at Italy and say “man, there’s a country where they have great tactics to prevent suicide bombings — Iraq should really implement those.” Rather, you don’t see suicide bombing where you don’t see would-be suicide bombers and that’s not the kind of outcome a foreign military force can produce in Iraq. So things will probably get worse again, but not as bad as they were at the very worst times.

Steve Chapman: “McCain’s Consistent Folly on Iraq”. There’s a lot of folly in there and, in a lot of ways, Chapman’s just scratching the surface. To really put McCain’s thinking on Iraq in context, you need to recall his role in the 1990s in building up Ahmed Chalabi and other related antics. Almost all Republicans have been willing to say and do absurd things on behalf of the Iraq War since the Bush administration chose to take the party in that direction. But McCain is one of the handful of major actors in actively pushing the GOP in that direction.

Justin Elliot does a nice run-down of the candidate’s efforts to render himself kosher. At the end of the day, I think the more bigthink-oriented Israel hawk activists are never going to like Obama because his ideas about Iraq and Iran don’t jibe with their broader regional vision. But he’s shown know indication of being the sort of person who’s interested in risking his political career over the Palestinian issue one way or another.