As we all await the Petraeus Report on the state of the surge, we may also need to be anticipating the Allawi Coup.

I’m talking, of course about Ayad Allawi, longtime C.I.A. asset and former interim prime minister of Iraq. He’s making quite the PR push to get his old job back, penning an op-ed for the Washington Post, hooking up with Wolf Blitzer on Late Edition on Sunday, and even putting the high-powered GOP lobbying firm Barbour Griffith & Rogers on a $300,000 retainer.

It says everything you need to know about who the true power holders in Iraq are that Allawi, who has a “six-point plan” for Iraq that involves replacing the current Prime Minister, is campaigning in Washington — not Baghdad.

He clearly knows that despite Bush’s bathetic paeans to Iraqi sovereignty, the real deciders in Iraq are not the Iraqi people, but a few dozen folks in the White House and the Pentagon. They are Allawi’s true constituency.   more »

Lately, the standard accepted practice after getting caught is to say anything. First, do not get caught and secondly, do not admit to being caught.

It has been working for the administration for several years. Say anything. Say it often and then say something else. Maybe cry. Then have someone else say anything for you.

Let it be ridiculous - that helps even. If someone is scratching his head he can’t point a finger.

Senator Craig is part of it - his story is graphic and pained - but so is the war and everything else about the current crumbling regime.

This recent scandal is both illuminating and emblematic. All the president’s men, and the president, are in the men’s room explaining obscene behavior by claiming they have a wide (and principled) stance.   more »

I find the reaction to this entire dog fighting case to be a frightening example of the worst kind of group-think: an unreflective mob-mentality run amok.

I will not dwell on the various Internet postings that call for Vick to be lynched, beaten, or put in a phone booth with pit bulls.

In less than five seconds of mouse-work, you too can buy a "Save a Pit Bull & Neuter Vick" T-shirt. They are easy enough to find since he Internet has always proven comfortable quarters for enterprising bottom feeding parasites.

I will also not harp on the sundry sports columnists using this opportunity to cluck about black athletes, "hip hop gangsta" culture, and what happens when you hold onto your "boyz."   more »

The question landed on Hugo Chávez's desk with a thud and he paused to inspect it. His nose wrinkled, as if the Caribbean which lapped metres away had thrown up something unpleasant.

It was a rare moment of silence in a seven-hour talkathon and did not last long.

Venezeula's president hurled the question back out to sea, far over the horizon, and turned it into a harangue against Europe, the British navy, the Queen, racism, imperialism and that embodiment of old world vice, the Guardian.

By the end of it, Mr Chávez had urged the Caribbean to reconsider membership of the Commonwealth, Latin America to recover the Falklands, and this newspaper, which he named about a dozen times, to stir republican sentiment in Britain.   more »

Bush repeated the unsubstantiated charges that American forces are coming under increasing attack from Iranian-supplied weapons and that Iranian Revolutionary Guard elements are training and arming Iraqi “extremist groups.”

Such claims are unsupported by the US military’s own reports from Iraq. The Pentagon recently acknowledged that since the escalation of the US intervention last February, it has recorded a 50 percent increase in the number of detainees it is holding—soaring from 16,000 to 24,500.

Yet, it has identified only 280 “foreign fighters,” none of whom are Iranian.

Moreover, according to the statistics reported in the New York Times last week, 85 percent of those detained are Sunni, with the remaining Shia detainees drawn largely from supporters of the Sadrist Mahdi Army, which is openly hostile to Teheran.   more »