Newspaper published photos of US soldiers posing with dead Afghan civilian.

Speaker John Boehner is struggling to find a position on Libya as Washington Republicans are divided between aggressive support for intervention and opposition to it.

We’ve gotten a lot of response, positive and negative, to my comments last night on our intervention in Libya. Here’s an email from a reader and American foreign policy professional in the region, taking a different view (I’ve slightly redacted the note to remove references to the reader’s identity) …

I have to disagree with your reasoning on Libya.

…

Perhaps you would have been correct a couple of months ago in saying that what happened in Libya was not of particular national or humanitarian interest to the United States. Today, though, you are wrong.

The Arab world is in a state of remarkable transformation. But you would be wrong to look at this transformation in the context of individual countries and individual revolutions. Because Arabs certainly do not see it that way. Rather, a feeling of solidarity between and among the citizens of the Arab world is what dominates: this is a regional, not national, transformation, and you can see this expressed all over the place.

Read More

Still pitching his potential fantasy run for President, Donald Trump offers up as an example of how he’d deal with Qaddafi that he once “screwed” the Libyan strongman in a real estate deal.

Tim Pawlenty’s handlers have announced that he’ll have a “major announcement” today at 3 PM on his Facebook page. Presumably, though the announcement says nothing explicitly, this will be the news that he’s setting up an exploratory committee to run for president, the penultimate move before declaring a run for president.

Alternatively, I think this may be the tell that a major new sci-fi web video is coming down the pike.

Juan Williams has decided that a House Democrats’ fundraising letter is the final straw and therefore NPR should be defunded.

National Dems jump into Indiana union fight, taking aim at Governor and would-be presidential candidate Mitch Daniels.

All eyes are on Libya. But I wanted to note that in recent days protests have been picking up pace in Syria. And just in the last 48 hours there appears to be a rapid and perhaps decisive erosion of the rule of Ali Abdullah Saleh of Yemen.

Meanwhile there is official word now that those four New York Times journalists held in custody by the Libyan government have been released into the custody of Turkish diplomats.

At the end of last week I couldn’t help tweeting that everything I was seeing in Libya was bringing out my inner foreign policy Realist. And everything I’ve seen this weekend has confirmed me in that view. Indeed, there are so many reasons this strikes me as a bad idea I really hardly know where to start. So let me focus on the three biggest problems I see. Read More

Megavangelist Franklin Graham thinks the series of overlapping disasters in Japan may signal the onset of the Second Coming.