Debate over the new strategy for Iraq mostly has been between those who regard it as a "last chance" for victory, and those who think the war already is irretrievably lost.  About this, two observations: The first is that we have a much lower threshold for what constitutes defeat than our grandparents did.  In the summer of 1942, the Japanese were planning to invade Australia, and German tanks were parked at the Eiffel Tower.  But few then said we should throw in the towel. Our parents and grandparents realized the fascists we were fighting then were really nasty guys; that living in a world in which they were dominant would be intolerable.  They realized our country had great strengths, and our enemies had weaknesses.  If our strengths could be mobilized, and their weaknesses exploited, victory would be ours. We did mobilize our strengths.  Half our gross domestic product was devoted to the war effort. Things sure are different now.

It's hard to win a war if you quit fighting in the middle of it.  That's the lesson we should learn from Ethiopia's New Year's message to us. Six months ago, when the militia of the Islamic Courts Union seized the Somali capital of Mogadishu, it appeared that the al Qaeda-affiliated radicals were on the verge of a major triumph.  The redoubtable StrategyPage declared them "unstoppable," and the usual hand wringers were urging us to negotiate with them. Ethiopia's military quickly defeated them last week because it unapologetically used force against vicious people who understand only force.  They killed the people they needed to kill without worrying overmuch about collateral damage, and not at all about world opinion.  And though the Ethiopian soldiers are Christians, they were hailed as liberators in this overwhelmingly Moslem country. We need to apply Ethiopia's lesson to Iraq.

On Christmas day this week, the National Academy of Sciences issued a report which indicates Iranian oil production is about to plunge. Iran currently earns about $50 billion a year in oil exports.  Oil profits account for about 65 percent of Iranian government revenues.  But Iranian oil exports could decline by half within five years, and virtually disappear within ten, said the report's author Roger Stern, an economic geographer at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. The effect on Iran would be catastrophic. Thanks to mismanagement by the mullahs, and corruption on a scale so vast as to make even an Iraqi blush, Iran's economy is already a basket case.  Here's an example:  Iran, one of the world's largest oil producers, has to import 35% of its gasoline.  The fools haven't built new refineries and can't operate efficiently the ones they have.  So they have to import refined gasoline for their cars. Get ready for the next War For Oil in the Middle East.

Sir Thomas Gresham noted that: "bad money drives out good." A kind of Gresham's Law applies in politics and journalism. Bad advice drives out good.  The recommendations of the Iraq Study Group (composed of 10 famous people who know next to nothing about either the military or the Middle East) received enormous attention from the news media.  But the report last week from people who actually know what they're talking about received little. Aside from the surreal recommendation that we ask our enemies, Iran and Syria, for help in quelling the violence they are largely responsible for fomenting, the ISG recommended, essentially, that we do more of what hasn't worked very well.  President Bush has been asking a lot of people what he should do next in Iraq.  But he should have consulted with Travis Patriquin.

I panned the puerile recommendations of the Iraq Study Group in an earlier column, and will not re-plow that ground here.  But the mere existence of the ISG tells us some unpleasant things about ourselves that we ought to know, but evidently don't. First, there is the speed with which Congress palmed off its responsibility to conduct oversight of Executive  Branch policies to a private panel of has-beens.  It's time our lawmakers paid more attention to their responsibilities, and less to their privileges. Then there is the glee with which many in the Washington establishment -- particularly in journalism -- greeted the (glaringly obvious) finding that things are not going well in Iraq suggests an elite so insulated and out of touch that it sees no ill consequences flowing to themselves from a defeat being inflicted upon their country.  The appropriate response of serious people would have been concern, perhaps anger.  But an elite that sees a big setback in the war against Islamofascism chiefly in terms of its impact on domestic politics is not comprised of serious people.

In a story that attracted international attention, the Associated Press reported Nov. 24 that:

Shia militiamen grabbed six Sunnis as they left Friday worship services, doused them with kerosene and burned them alive near Iraqi soldiers who did not intervene, Iraqi Police Capt. Jamil Hussein said. The savage revenge attack for Thursday's slaying of 215 people in the Shiite Sadr City slum occurred as members of the Mahdi Army militia burned four mosques and several homes while killing an unknown number of Sunni residents in the once-mixed Hurriyah neighborhood of Baghdad.

President Kennedy once hosted a dinner for Nobel Prize winners.  At the dinner he reportedly said: "I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined here alone." After reviewing the report of the Iraq Study Group, released Wednesday, New York Post editorial page editor John Podhoretz declared: "The nation's capital hasn't seen such concentrated wisdom in one place since Paris Hilton dined alone at the Hooters on Connecticut Avenue." T. F. Boggs, an Army sergeant recently returned from his second tour in Iraq, said the recommendations were a "joke" that "could only have come from a group of old people who have been stuck in Washington for too long."

Americans voted as they did in the midterm elections in large part because they are tired of the war in Iraq.  But to slightly paraphrase one of the founders of the Soviet Union, Leon Trotsky: "You may not be interested in the war, but the war is interested in you."  A major part of our problem in Iraq is that we think our problem is Iraq.  It's much bigger than that. We are at war with Islamic extremism, which is by no means restricted by the borders of Iraq.  Many in the Democrat Party think we can quit the war in Iraq at little cost to ourselves, as we did in Vietnam 30 years ago.  But this is a war that will follow us home. Our enemies hate us because we are not like them, and they will go on trying to kill us unless we become like them, whether we are in Iraq or not.  They cannot be appeased.  We can destroy them, or let ourselves be destroyed by them.  There are no other choices.

Nancy Pelosi has yet formally to become Speaker of the House, but she already is taking steps which could cut short her tenure - the first being her support of the extraordinarily corrupt Jack Murtha in his bid for majority leader over the current number two Democrat in the House, Steny Hoyer. Mr. Murtha is known to most Americans as the chief tenor in the Cut & Run chorus. Ms. Pelosi said in her endorsement letter that she was backing Mr. Murtha because of his stand on Iraq. Exit polling indicated corruption was even more on the minds of voters than was Iraq.  Understandably so, because four GOP lawmakers were forced to resign because of ethical lapses.  But the current Democratic advantage on this issue is likely to diminish if voters come to believe that Ms. Pelosi's primary interest in corruption is to change its beneficiaries.

Dick Tuck was a Democratic political consultant whose pranks bedeviled Richard Nixon in the 1950s.  Mr. Tuck helped many clients to victory, but he got creamed in his lone bid for elective office, for the California state senate in 1964.  His defeat permitted him to make the most memorable concession speech in history: "The people have spoken...the bastards." Many conservatives share Mr. Tuck's sentiments in the wake of Tuesday's debacle.  How could an electorate whose judgment we praised in 2004 go so far off the rails in just two years? The truth is, they didn't.  The Republicans lost because they deserved to lose.  And we have Tom DeLay to thank for it.

Some of the Republicans likely to lose Tuesday -- like Rep. Don Sherwood in Pennsylvania's 10th district -- deserve to.  But when the public gets in a "throw the bums out" mood, some who get thrown out aren't bums. On July 26, 1945, less than two months after Germany's surrender, a British electorate weary of the demands of greatness replaced Winston Churchill as prime minister with  Clement Attlee, and Britain's swift decline as a world power began. The three GOP senators thought to be in the deepest kimchee are Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, Mike DeWine of Ohio, and Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island.  The republic would miss Mr. DeWine only a little, and Mr. Chafee not at all. Rick Santorum is another story.

Why is the Moqtada al Sadr - nicknamed "Mookie" by our troops - still alive? That this question can still be asked illustrates why things are going south for the U.S. in Iraq. The Moqtada al Sadr is a creature of Iran, which funds his militia.  Twice before (in April and August of 2004) he ordered uprisings against U.S. troops.  At the time, there was a warrant out for his arrest for the murder of (the genuinely moderate) Shia cleric Ayatollah Abdul Majid al Khoei, who was gunned down by Mahdi army members in April, 2003. "Mookie" al Sadr has the blood of dozens of Americans, and thousands of Iraqis, on his hands.  There is evidence he has been coordinating with al Qaeda.  Yet al Sadr is not dead.  He is not in prison.  He is in the government.  And people wonder why U.S. policy in Iraq is failing.

As the U.S. takes the lead in formulating the international response to North Korea's (apparently fizzled) nuclear test, there is a question which ought to be asked: Why is this our problem? In 1950, this was easy to answer.  The fledgling democracy in South Korea was too weak to protect itself.  North Korea was then an agent of an international Communist conspiracy.  But that was more than half a century ago.  The Soviet Union has collapsed.  North Korea remains Stalinist, has a formidable military, and still dreams of conquering the South.  But its objectives are peninsular, not global, and it has little likelihood of obtaining them, even without American intervention. That's because South Korea now  has a formidable military, which could be made much more formidable if the South Koreans chose to do so.  South Korea today has more than twice the population of North Korea, 24 times the national wealth. So why can't the South Koreans take care of the problem themselves?

If Democrats went after America's enemies with the relentless ruthlessness with which they attack Republicans, the Axis of Evil would be toast. No sooner had North Korea made its (either botched or faked) nuclear bomb test last weekend than Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid and Sen. Hillary Clinton were blaming it on "the failed policies of the Bush administration." Democrats tend to view foreign policy crises through the narrow prism of their impact on domestic politics.  But the villain here isn't Bill Clinton or George Bush.  It's Kim Jong Il.  And what's important here is not which party controls the House of Representatives.  It's whether we can prevent a second Korean War. The Democrats are behaving as if the cost of another Korean War with thousands of American soldiers dead is the price they'd willingly pay to gain control of the House.

The time for our soldiers to depart from Iraq is most certainly not now, and seems far away. But the Iraqi army and police are getting larger and more capable with each passing month.   I now think the benefits of setting a timetable for the withdrawal of American conventional units exceed the liabilities of doing so.  Neither the Iraqi nor the American publics will stand much longer for an indefinite commitment. The deadline should be flexible, but a deadline should be set.  The Iraqis aren't ready to stand on their own yet, but at some point the training wheels must come off.

The New York Times who, along with the Washington Post did stories last Sunday on a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) issued in April deserves a horsewhipping. The NIE represents the collective judgment of the 16 U.S. intelligence agencies.  The stories insinuated the intelligence chiefs had concluded the war in Iraq was a mistake.  "Spy Agencies Say Iraq War Worsens Terrorism Threat," said the headline in the New York Times.  "Spy Agencies Say Iraq War Hurting U.S. Terror Fight," said the headline in the Washington Post. "We assess that the Iraq jihad is shaping a new generation of terrorist leaders and operatives; perceived jihadist success there would inspire more fighters to continue the struggle elsewhere," the NIE said. The Times and the Post reported only the first half of that sentence.

Do you think Al Qaeda terrorists are planning another attack on the United States? You'd have to have a two-digit IQ to believe they aren't.  Yet if Senate Democrats and a handful of renegade Republicans have their way, we will never learn the details of what is being planned through interrogating captured al Qaeda suspects. Thanks to the Supreme Court's breathtaking overreach in the Hamdan case this summer, which extended Geneva Convention protections to terrorists (who clearly are not entitled to them), our ability to obtain information from captured terrorists is in jeopardy. John McCain and the other senators who are blocking efforts to clarify the law argue that permitting the CIA to use the coercive techniques described above would open the door to other countries torturing U.S. prisoners.  They argue further that any attempt to "amend" Article 3 would bring worldwide condemnation of the U.S. The first argument is ludicrous; the second irrelevant.

His face swathed in bandages, Kassem Shalan had a chilling tale to tell the journalists who gathered around his bedside in the Jebel Amil hospital, where he was being treated for minor shrapnel wounds. As he was loading patients into his ambulance from another in the village of Qana, Lebanon, on July 23, both were attacked by an Israeli Apache helicopter:  "There was a boom, a big fire, and I was thrown backwards," Mr. Shalan told Time magazine. Curiously, he then told Martin Chulov, Middle East correspondent for the Australian newspaper, a very different story.  Mr. Shalan said he was driving the ambulance when it was struck by the Israeli missile, and was "spared more serious injuries by the armored vest he was wearing and the driver's canopy that protected him from a direct hit." "He remembers nothing after the flash and bang of the missile then the crunch of the crash as his ambulance veered off the road," Mr. Chulov said then.

The State Department has granted a visa to Mohammad Khatami, the former president of Iran, to visit the United States.  Mr. Khatami is coming this week chiefly to attend meetings at the United Nations.  He also will speak at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard; at a function sponsored by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) in Arlington, Virginia, and at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C.  And he will meet with former president Jimmy Carter.  Mr. Khatami requested the meeting with Mr. Carter. Perhaps to say "thank you." Thanks to James Buchanan (1791-1868), Pennsylvania's unfortunate contribution to the presidency (1857-1861), Jimmy Carter can claim not to have been the worst president in U.S. history. But he is unquestionably the worst ex-president, snuggling up to every tyrant who will allow his buttocks to be smooched.  

Judge Anna Diggs Taylor illustrates why Democrats cannot be trusted with political power in time of war. Ms. Taylor, who is the chief judge of the federal district court in Detroit, ruled Aug. 17 that it is unconstitutional for the National Security Agency to listen in, without warrants, on telephone conversations between terror suspects abroad and people in the United States. Her ruling was praised by Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid, House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi, and other prominent Democrats.   Then it was discovered that Judge Taylor served on the board of a foundation which gave $125,000 to the Michigan ACLU, the lead plaintiff in the case, and did not disclose this apparent conflict of interest.

Finally, a war like Vietnam. If the cease fire in Lebanon actually goes into effect, Israel will have lost despite having won every battle, because political dithering prevented decisive victory. Hezbollah will have won through a propaganda campaign what it could not obtain on the battlefield. Hezbollah won by surviving.  Israel's reputation for military invincibility is shattered.  The vultures are circling: "Today Arab and Muslim society is reasonably certain that the defeat of Israel is possible and that the countdown to the disappearance of the Zionist entity in the region has begun," Ahmed Barakat, a member of Hezbollah's central council, told a Qatari newspaper. As in Vietnam, the overwhelming failure was in political leadership. 

Reuters announced Sunday (August 6) it was suspending its relationship with Adnan Hajj, a freelance photographer in Lebanon who had worked for the British news service since 1993, because he doctored a photograph on the aftermath of an Israeli air strike in south Beirut. Mr. Hajj cloned the image of a plume of smoke rising from a bombed building, which made it appear the damage was more widespread than in fact it was. The doctoring was discovered by Web logger Charles Johnson (Little Green Footballs), the man who proved the memo then CBS anchor Dan Rather was relying on for his expose of President Bush's National Guard service had been typed on Microsoft Word, which did not exist at the time of the date on the memo.

My dish of crow went down easier after I read the hilarious editorial in the New York Times Wednesday celebrating zillionaire businessman Ned Lamont's victory over Sen. Joseph Lieberman in Connecticut's Democratic primary. (I'd predicted a Lieberman win in a July 16 column.) "The rebellion against Sen. Lieberman was actually an uprising by that rare phenomenon, irate moderates," the Times declared. Flanking Mr. Lamont when he gave his victory speech were those famous moderates, Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton.  Just the faces, I'm sure, Democrats in swing districts want representing their party in the fall.

Hezbollah and its sponsors, Iran and Syria, are relying upon our soft hearts and softer heads to destroy us. Many think Israel suffered a major defeat last Sunday (July 30)  when the Israeli air force bombed a building in the village of Qana, near the Lebanese port city of Tyre. Initial reports were that 57 people -- most of them women and children -- had been killed. The Red Crescent (the Muslim version of the Red Cross) has been able to confirm only 28 deaths. The bombing's aftermath featured some of the most dramatic pictures of the war.  Several featured a man wearing an orange reflective vest and a green helmet, carrying a dead child from the rubble to an ambulance. Dr. Richard North, a British Web logger, noticed something odd about the photos.  Some of the workers are wearing different gear in different photos, yet they were clearly carrying the same corpse.

In military parlance, a "spoiling attack" is when you see your enemy mobilizing to strike you, you hit him first to throw him off balance. By responding more vigorously to the kidnapping of its soldiers and the rocket attacks on its cities than Hezbollah likely expected, Israel may have launched a spoiling attack on Iran. On July 20, Iran said it would reply on August 22 to the Western package of incentives for ending its nuclear program.  For Westerners, the only thing peculiar about this is the length of time Iran is taking to respond, since for us, the date August 22 has no special meaning. But it may have more significance for Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

The Israeli-Hezbollah war wouldn't have happened if John Kerry were president, John Kerry told the Detroit News last Sunday. President Bush hasn't devoted the attention to the Middle East that he would have, Mr. Kerry told reporter Valerie Olander. Sen. Kerry didn't explain how his personal attention would have prevented Hezbollah's abduction of two Israeli soldiers, or its firing of rockets into Israeli cities, and Ms. Olander didn't ask. Sen. Kerry has misplaced confidence in his own persuasive powers, and in what can be accomplished by diplomacy.  The lesson liberals like Kerry can never seem to learn is that diplomacy based on hubris and cowardice inevitably leads to failure.

High noon approaches for the moonbats.  We'll soon know if they'll sit above the salt at the Democratic table, or be exiled to the outer darkness. High noon is Aug. 8, the date of the Connecticut primary.  The "netroots" gang of left-liberal Web loggers have picked a fight they must win, or suffer a potentially catastrophic loss of face.

In Connecticut's Democratic primary, three-term incumbent Sen. Joseph Lieberman is being opposed by millionaire businessman Ned Lamont in a race in which there is essentially only one issue:

We in journalism are selective about what we think you need to know in the war on terror. The New York Times thinks you need to know the National Security Agency has been listening in on phone calls from al Qaeda suspects abroad to people in the United States, even though telling you also alerts the terrorists, who, presumably, have sought more secure ways to communicate. The Washington Post thinks you need to know the CIA has "secret prisons" in Europe, even though telling you reduces the cooperation we receive from foreign governments, for fear we cannot keep their secrets. And the New York Times thinks you need to know we've been tracking terrorist financing through the SWIFT consortium in Belgium, even though publication means al Qaeda will seek other ways to move money. We are less eager to provide you with information harmful to our enemies.

Their efforts to politicize science are at once the most amusing and most alarming trait of liberals. On June 6, the National Academy of Sciences issued a report on climate change.  It "represented a unanimous decision that global warming is real, is getting worse, and is due to man," said CNN reporter Michelle Mitchell.  "There is no wiggle room." Dr. Richard Lindzen of MIT, one of the 11 scientists who prepared the report and considered by many to be America's leading climatologist, said this wasn't true: 

We spend tens of billions of dollars each year on (often not very good) intelligence.  But all al Qaeda needs to buy is a subscription to the New York Times. The administration has sound legal grounds for prosecuting the Times under the Espionage Act, Gabriel Schoenfeld argued in a lengthy essay in Commentary in March.  Newsday columnist James Pinkerton thinks the Times should be prosecuted, but that the Bush administration lacks the political courage to do so. For the sake of the nation's security, the Times must be prosecuted, most especially its Editor, Bill Keller. (Google "Bill Keller" + "treason" and you'll get close to 40,000 hits.)

Dan Rather's 44-year relationship with CBS News came to an unceremonious end this week.  This should remind us that of the many differences between the Vietnam war and the war in Iraq, the three most important are talk radio, Fox News, and the Internet. Mr. Rather must think his fate unfair. He was in effect fired when the documents on which he based an expose of President Bush's National Guard service were shown to be clumsy forgeries.  But Walter Cronkite, who told a much bigger lie, is still an esteemed figure at CBS. The one great similarity between Vietnam and Iraq is that our enemies, despairing of victory on the battlefield, sought to win with a propaganda campaign.  In Vietnam, this strategy succeeded.  If it fails in Iraq, it will be chiefly because of the emergence of the new media.

There was anger, anguish and incredulity in the fever swamps this week when Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald make it clear he would not indict White House political guru Karl Rove in his apparently endless investigation of the outing of CIA officer Valerie Plame.

This should remind us the greater threat to our civil liberties comes not from the measures the Bush administration has taken to protect us from terrorists, but from prosecutors who abuse their power for political purposes.

Liberals wanted Rove indicted only because he is a skilled political adversary.  The interest among liberals in an indictment of the person who actually told columnist Robert Novak about Ms. Plame (thought to be former deputy secretary of state Richard Armitage) is zero, because there would be no political gain from it.

 It was unthinkable, like a plot to kill the Care Bear, Santa Claus, or the Easter Bunny.

Most liberals here and abroad think Islamic terrorists exist primarily to cause embarrassment to the Bush administration. 

And most liberals here and abroad think that if people overseas dislike us, it is our fault.

But Canada -- especially in the minds of Canadians -- is the kindest and gentlest of nations, the very model of global citizenship, with none of the rough edges of its neighbor to the south. 

Zarqawi's death is a huge psychological and political boost to the fledgling Iraqi government.  Iraqis danced in the streets.  Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki pushed through a parliament giddy at the news his choices for the critical ministries of defense and interior (which is in charge of the police), finally completing formation of his government.

Zarqawi's legendary brutality had made many Iraqis fearful of cooperating with their government.  Now that he is dead, what has been a stream of tips could become a river.

Things will now get much worse for al Qaeda.  Thanks to leads from "a treasure trove" of documents recovered from the rubble, Coalition forces launched 17 raids in greater Baghdad Thursday.

While Iraqis celebrated, news of the demise of the murderous thug was greeted sourly on the left-liberal blogs Democratic Underground and Daily Kos, where posters feared Zarqawi's death would boost support for President Bush and the Iraq war.

Jesse Macbeth, a self-styled "special forces ranger," regaled moonbat audiences with tales of the atrocities he committed in Iraq:

"Fallujah is where we slaughtered people in mosques," he said.  "We would dig holes and leave mass graves of children, women and old men."

Unfortunately for Mr. Macbeth, he made a video which was seen by actual veterans. In it, he is wearing his beret improperly ("like a pastry chef," said an Army spokesman).  He's wearing a Ranger beret, but it has a Special Forces flash.  The sleeves on his BDU jacket are rolled up the way the Marines do it; not the Army. 

And there is no such thing as a "special forces ranger."  The "Green Beret" Special Forces and the Rangers are two distinct Army units.

A rare bipartisan unity was achieved in the House of Representatives this week.  What was it that brought lawmakers together?  A determination to win the war on terror?  A plan to secure our borders?  A compromise to save Social Security from bankruptcy?

Nah.  Democratic and Republican leaders in the House joined together to protest the search the FBI made last weekend of the offices of Rep. William Jefferson (D-La), who is under investigation for allegedly accepting a bribe from a Kentucky businessman.

Partisan differences are set aside when (and apparently only when) the privileges of lawmakers are threatened.

One would imagine that in the wake of the Duke Cunningham and Jack Abramoff scandals, the GOP would be grateful for the attention devoted to Mr. Jefferson, because his case, and that of Rep. Alan Mollohan (D-WVa), make Democratic denunciations of the "Republican culture of corruption" seem a case of the pot calling the kettle black.

Because it dominated the news this past weekend, many Americans are aware of the USA Today story May 11 revealing that the National Security Agency has established a data base containing the records of telephone calls made by tens of millions of Americans.

Not so many Americans are aware that USA Today's "scoop" is recycled news.  The New York Times ran a story on the NSA database last December.  It was treated then with the ho hum response it so richly deserves.

Cynics note the recycling occurred on the eve of Senate hearings on the nomination of Gen. Michael Hayden -- who as head of the NSA established the data mining program -- to be director of the CIA.  Could the leakers and the journalists going bananas over the recycled revelation be trying to sidetrack his nomination?

Whatever the reason, the contrast between the ink and air time given the NSA telephone number database rehash and the inattention given a startling al Qaeda document captured in Iraq could not be greater.

You've got to hand it to President Bush.  For a pretty decent, straightforward guy, he sure has a knack for making enemies.

The economy is booming.  There has been no successful terrorist attack in the United States since Sept. 11, 2001.  Al Qaeda officials acknowledge we're winning the war in Iraq.  Yet in the history of polling, only three presidents have had job approval ratings as low or lower than President Bush does now.

They were Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter just before they left office, and Harry Truman after he had fired Gen. Douglas MacArthur.  Mr. Bush is about where Mr. Carter was (34 percent), but still has a ways to fall to reach the nadirs of Nixon (24 percent) and Truman (23 percent).  Will he?

Abu Musab al Zarqawi, the al Qaeda chieftain in Iraq (or maybe not, see below) is changing tactics, says London's Sunday Times (4/30).

Mr. Zarqawi "is attempting to set up his own mini-army and move away from individual suicide attacks to a more organized resistance movement," writes Michael Smith.

Col. John Gronski of the Pennsylvania Army National Guard indicated Monday (5/1) why the change in tactics isn't such a good idea.  Col. Gronski is commander of the 2nd Brigade Combat Team of the Pennsylvania Guard's 28th Infantry Division, stationed in Ar Ramadi.

Will Mary McCarthy and Dana Priest end up sharing a jail cell?

The CIA announced Friday it has fired a senior analyst for leaking classified information to the news media.

After she failed a polygraph examination, Mary McCarthy confessed to leaking to Dana Priest of the Washington Post information about secret CIA prisons for al Qaeda bigwigs.  Earlier this month, Ms. Priest was awarded a Pulitzer prize for her reporting on the secret prisons.