The latest on Iyad Allawi's plan to re-take Iraq via Juan Cole: Al-Hayat reports that Iyad Allawi, a secular ex-Baathist Shiite who leads the Iraqi National List (25 seats in parliament), visited Kurdistan on Saturday. He is attempting to convince the Kurdistan Alliance to join his new coalition in parliament. Allawi has said that his list will leave the 'national unity government' headed by Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki. Allawi's list is small and he is deeply disliked by most of the religious...

This is a bit dated in blog terms, but awhile ago Ezra Klein had this to say on the Bush administration’s reluctance to withdraw from Iraq: The question, of course, is why we don’t [withdraw from Iraq]. What’s the compelling national interest in occupying a country that deplores our presence? That murders our soldiers? That depletes our treasury? That shows no sign, hint, or hope of molding itself to our desires? There is none. Instead, we remain in Iraq because the current Administration...

Ted Koppel has apparently joined up with the Discovery Channel and produced a documentary that tries to explain the decades of antecedents behind the latest US/Iran impasse by uncovering the average Iranian’s view of the United States. It is an attempt at mutual understanding, an intriguing and needed project, to be certain. Unfortunately, it suffers from an expected pro-American, anti-Iranian bias at times, propagated by Koppel himself even if he doesn’t realize it. The documentary’s...