As you can see below, I spent some of today looking at the issue of the sharp rise in the number of American helicopters shot out of the sky in the last two weeks in Iraq. And then I posted an excerpt from an AP article from December noting US intelligence reports that wealthy Saudis are shipping money and arms, including anti-aircraft missiles, to the Sunni insurgents who are still the primary force fighting US soldiers and marines in Iraq.

This suggests a series of questions, the most obvious of which is whether we’re in the process of being gamed much as we were in 2002 when we allied with Saudi Arabia (which had a lot to do with 9/11) against Iraq (which had nothing to do with 9/11) to defend ourselves against another 9/11. Of course, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention how we were also allied with Pakistan (a highly unstable, quasi-Islamist regime with nuclear weapons and a big nuclear weapons program proliferator) to make sure secular Iraq didn’t get nuclear weapons it didn’t have to give to terrorists it wasn’t allied with. But I digress …

The point is that there’s a certain illogic in our thinking that Iran is the prime destablizer of Iraq when you consider that we are currently allying ourselves with the forces in Iraq that the Iranians would probably be happy to see run the place. I know it’s not quite that simple. SCIRI is more the mullahs’ choice, not the al Dawa folks which is where Maliki comes from. But then the last I heard we were angling to dump Maliki in favor of the SCIRI folks anyway. In any case, I won’t be a fool enough to try to disentangle the intricacies of Iraq’s sectarian and partisan divisions. But we do seem to be doing a decent job driving the Iraqi car in the direction of Iran on our own. And the ‘insurgency’ is still in the Sunni heartland, though now there is near open war between the Sunni ‘insurgents’ and the Shia para-militaries.

Still, when you consider that the political question in Iraq is whether the long-oppressed Shia will dominate the new Iraqi state in rough proportion to their numbers, the logical people to oppose such a settlement are Sunni co-religionists in places like Saudi Arabia.

But this gets to a deeper fallacy of the line of argument about neighboring countries ‘meddling’ in Iraq. Every shred of the failure that is Iraq bleeds over into the neighboring states, either as a threat or an opportunity, since they are all of the same fabric, or rather the same patchwork bleeding over national borders. The Sunnis with their coreligionists in Saudi Arabia; the Shia with theirs in Iran; the Kurds with theirs in southeastern Turkey whose affinity threatens to bring the Turks down into Iraq as well. The more we fail in Iraq, the more the threads we pull will pull into neighboring states. In other words, our inability to come to terms with and deal wtih what we have created in Iraq will almost inevitably lead to a widening gyre of escalation across Iraq’s frontiers. I take it that this is what the Iraq Study Group folks were talking about when they spoke of the bleak outlook in Iraq and the necessity of getting quickly to some regional negotiations rather than trying to fight our way out of this box.

Reed Hundt sizes up the the ‘surge’, Dick Cheney, Iran and where this path leads.

The H5N1 avian flu is found on a turkey farm in England.

A regular TPM reader, on the Iraqi civil war:

On the Newshour, Paul Pillar nicely stated the NIE’s statement on “civil war” as civil war plus a lot of other violence.

The Bushies want to read the NIE report’s caution that civil war is inadequate as a term to mean, continuing Pillar’s arithmetic metaphor, Iraq is a civil war minus.

The report in fact says the opposite, we have a civil war plus.

I think this simple contrast, civil war minus vs. civil war plus is an effective if simplistic way of pushing back Hadley et al.’s reeking bullshit about this report.

Indeed.

Update: I should also point out this formulation from TPM Reader CH: “Regarding the 4 wars in Iraq described by the NIE: how are we to ‘win’ if, in some cases, we aren’t considered a combatant?”

I’m not surprised that the case of Maher Arar, the Canadian citizen rendered to Syria by the United States, is all over the news in Canada. But it is surprising how little attention the case is getting here.

You’ll recall that Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) went off on the Attorney General during his appearance before the Judiciary Committee a couple of weeks ago. The subject was the Arar case, and Alberto Gonzales promised Leahy a secret briefing on the matter.

That briefing finally happened this week, but it apparently left Leahy and Ranking Member Arlen Specter (R-PA) with more questions than answers. According to the Globe and Mail, Leahy’s primary question–why Arar, who is both a Canadian and Syrian citizen, was bundled aboard a chartered jet and sent to Damascus rather than returned to Canada–was not answered.

Greg Sargent dissects the Joe Lieberman gang’s revisionist history of his successful re-election campaign.

You may not have noticed but this week’s UN report on global climate change based its estimate of a 1- to 2-foot rise in sea levels over the next 100 years on computer modeling which took into account only the volumetric increase in sea water as it warms. The estimate for sea level rise did not include melting glaciers and icecaps. While this was duly noted in most of the coverage I saw, it was often buried. The WSJ has a piece today on how much more dire the effects of climate change may be if you consider melting ice and increased cloud cover, neither of which factors the current computer models handle very well.

James Fallows says, in essence, forget the surge resolution. The place Congress can best draw the line, he says, is on Iran:

Deciding what to do next about Iraq is hard — on the merits, and in the politics. It’s hard on the merits because whatever comes next, from “surge” to “get out now” and everything in between, will involve suffering, misery, and dishonor. It’s just a question of by whom and for how long. On a balance-of-misery basis, my own view changed last year from “we can’t afford to leave” to “we can’t afford to stay.” And the whole issue is hard in its politics because even Democrats too young to remember Vietnam know that future Karl Roves will dog them for decades with accusations of “cut-and-run” and “betraying” troops unless they can get Republicans to stand with them on limiting funding and forcing the policy to change.

By comparison, Iran is easy: on the merits, in the politics. War with Iran would be a catastrophe that would make us look back fondly on the minor inconvenience of being bogged down in Iraq. While the Congress flounders about what, exactly, it can do about Iraq, it can do something useful, while it still matters, in making clear that it will authorize no money and provide no endorsement for military action against Iran.

President Bush tries to mend-fences with the Democrat party …

This was at the House Democrats retreat in Williamsburg, Virginia this morning.

The final days …

Cunningham (alleged) briber Brent Wilkes’ wife sues for divorce as indictment watch comes to a head.