Your Weekend Reading Assignment

Great Vanity Fair article on the administration's long-running obsession with Iran. This is as comprehensive an overview as you'll find on the tortured logic that underlies our policy right now. Two things jump out at me. First, the appointment of Admiral William Fallon to the top post at CentCom was indeed ponderous, unless you look at it through the prism of an impending action against Iraq. Secondly, Gary Sick's dreaming if he thinks that the Boy King, who proudly "doesn't do nuance" is attempting a double-bank shot that will solidify our Sunni allies against the Shia government in Iraq that we have created.

Read this article on who actually controls Sadr City to understand that Maliki is a prop, and that we've put our forces in an untenable situation.

This alone should send shivers down your spine:

"Half of them are JAM. They'll wave at us during the day and shoot at us during the night," said 1st Lt. Dan Quinn, a platoon leader in the Army's 1st Infantry Division, using the initials of the militia's Arabic name, Jaish al Mahdi. "People (in America) think it's bad, but that we control the city. That's not the way it is. They control it, and they let us drive around. It's hostile territory."

I get the feeling that some people do not understand that this administration is undeterred by the facts on the ground. As long as Bill Kristol or Fred Kagan are out there explaining to Fox News that if we only pushed harder we'd wrap this thing up in a flash, they have a receptive audience in the White House. The petulant Bush and the ghoulish Cheney are unfazed by the fact that we've lost in Iraq by any reasonable measure.

Lastly, anybody who lives near Philadelphia understands that if Curt Weldon is at all involved, this whole enterprise is beyond comprehension: