A couple of tidbits from today's W$J. (1) Avaliable free at OpinionJournal.com is former Bush administration official Dan Senor's column, in which he admits:
During his trip to Washington earlier this week, the Iraqi prime minister again failed to condemn Hezbollah and instead focused exclusively on the "destruction that happened to the Lebanese people as a result of the military air and ground attacks." ... [It] wasn't supposed to be this way. We had thought that a post-Saddam Iraqi government would be less susceptible to Arab League pressure; Israel as the old whipping-boy was to find little resonance there. This change of tone was to be a model for the region. Wasn't the road to Arab-Israeli peace supposed to go through Baghdad?
Sure doesn't look that way. Senor blames the malicious influence of Moqtada al-Sadr. Of course, al-Sadr has power only because the US invasion of Iraq created a power vacuum, after which al-Sadr proved adept at manipluating the rules of the US-imposed democracy.
(2) From a WSJ editorial, also availlable free at OpinionJournal.com:
The number of bombs since the death of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi only reinforces our view that the majority of Sunni violence has always come from elements of the former regime, such as its KGB-trained mukhabarat, and not al Qaeda.
So much for the theory that Iraq is a front in the war on al Qaeda terrorism.
