Saddam has been moved out of Iraq because the CPA was worried that he'd be busted out by the insurgents.

Two NYT op-eds on questions for Condi Rice tomorrow: here and here. Good stuff. Compare and contrast with tomorrow.

I haven't found Juan Cole to be particularly partisan, though I haven't been reading him long. So what follows is not, as far as I can tell, lefty raving. Instead, it's, well, informed commentary about the reality of what's happening.

But major fighting in most Shiiite urban areas is unambiguous in its significance. It means that the Bush administration rule of Iraq is FUBAR. It seems inevitable to me that the US military will pursue a war to the death with the Army of the Mahdi, the Sadrist movement, and Muqtada al-Sadr himself. They will of course win this struggle on the surface and in the short term, because of their massive firepower. But the Sadrists will simply go underground and mount a longterm guerrilla insurgency similar to that in the Sunni areas.

The United States has managed to create a failed state, similar to Somalia and Haiti, in Iraq.

...and don't be surprised to see stuff like this happen:

The Mahdi Army kidnapped and held 2 South Korean human rights workers from Sunday through Tuesday, but Korean authorities said they had been released. (This development reminds one of the terrible "hostage crisis" in Lebanon during the 1980s, and may be yet another tactic in the quiver of the Sadrists).

Wal-Mart suffered a crushing defeat in its ballot attempt to create its own sovereign zone close to LA.

(Yahoo: "Leaning away"? 70-30 is not a leaner. Sorry.)

About the seriousness of the Iraq situation can be found in great quantities on Instapundit, if one cared to look.

From today's Iraq'd, from the New Republic:

Congratulations, President Bush. You have turned a marginal enemy, the thuggish and anti-democratic cleric Moqtada Al Sadr, into a symbol of Shia aspirations in a free Iraq. The Washington Post describes the stakes: "If put down forcefully, a Shiite uprising--infused with religious imagery, and symbols drawn from Iraq's colonial past and the current Palestinian conflict--could achieve a momentum of its own."

Read the whole thing.

He's a stumbling, bumbling fool, who can't even come up with a non-garbled answer to the most important question he's faced with.

Q: Mr. President, in regard to the June 30th deadline, is there a chance that that would be moved back?

THE PRESIDENT: No, the intention is to make sure the deadline remains the same. I believe we can transfer authority by June 30th. We're working toward that day. We're, obviously, constantly in touch with Jerry Bremer on the transfer of sovereignty. The United Nations is over there now. The United Nations representative is there now to work on the -- on a -- on to whom we transfer sovereignty. I mean, in other words, it's one thing to decide to transfer. We're now in the process of deciding what the entity will look like to whom we will transfer sovereignty. But, no, the date remains firm.

Wow. Mindblowing example of the exercise of corporate power:

While Wal-Mart has turned to the ballot in a number of cities and towns to win the right to build its giant emporiums, the Inglewood initiative is significantly different. The proposal would essentially exempt Wal-Mart from all of Inglewood's planning, zoning and environmental regulations, creating a city-within-a-city subject only to its own rules. Wal-Mart has hired an advertising and public relations firm to market the initiative and is spending more than $1 million to support the measure, known as initiative 04-A.

The company is blanketing the community, which is roughly half African-American and half Latino, with mailers and telephone calls and is broadcasting advertisements on television stations with black and Latino audiences.

Company officials say that Wal-Mart adopted this aggressive new tactic only after it became clear that Inglewood officials — backed by allies in organized labor, church groups and community organizations — would never approve the complex. Wal-Mart is strongly anti-union.

...

All four members of the Inglewood City Council oppose the project, along with the area's congresswoman and state assemblyman. One Inglewood council member, Curren D. Price Jr., who is a lawyer and expert on community development, said he had researched Wal-Mart's plans across the country and had not found a single instance in which the company sought such broad exemption from local control.

"That's what's so offensive," Mr. Price said.

"We're talking about 60 acres and an area covering 17 football fields and they don't want to have any give and take on how this thing rolls out," he said.

Here.

By those criteria, McCain is a great choice. He is by all accounts an honorable man, and has walked the walk for several years now of a responsible budgeter, a good-government type, and of someone who values free markets over a "pro-business" attitude. In one possible universe, this is the future of the Democratic Party. Democrats become the party of reasonable conservatism, allied with a mildly progressive attitude toward the social issues, while the GOP continues to be the party of fanatics and the corrupt. In another, better possible universe, the Republicans become the party of responsible conservatism while Democrats have a chance to advance the progressive agenda.

Now it's not clear to me what kind of decision for 2004 is more likely to bring about the better scenario. Under one theory, if the Democrats stand their ground and fight, they're bound to win sometime -- 2004, perhaps, or else 2008 or 2012 -- and perhaps a Democratic victory will lead the GOP to reform their ways. On this theory, if the Democrats compromise too far in pursuit of victory, then the GOP never reforms and we have Scenario I. The other way of looking at it, is that if you got McCain on the ticket, the Dems might really kick some ass, albeit with a watered-down platform. Said ass-kicking causes the Republicans to realize they're doomed unless they clean up their act, and then Scenario II develops down the road.

I don't really know.

I'd vote for a Kerry-McCain ticket if it were on the ballot, and pretty enthusiastically, but I'm far from certain that would be the right way to go.

McCain is a conservative. So what? Veeps have no power. He would grin and bear it on most things, and maybe he would say that he differs with the administration on other things (abortion?). If he ran with Kerry, it would realign how Americans think about parties, which is very important.

If you're truly ABB, then, with McCain, what is lost for the progressive agenda by having a relatively conservative VP is massively outweighed by removing Bunnypants and his corrupt gang of quasi-fascist thugs from office.

Juan Cole is the person you turn to when you want to know what's really going on in Iraq.

For example:

The problem began in some ways on Sunday March 28, when Paul Bremer decided to close the main Sadrist newspaper, al-Hawza, purportedly for publishing material that incited violence against Coalition troops. Many observers in Iraq said that move was a mistake, since no specific violence could be traced to the newspaper, and closing it was itself a provocation. As it turns out, it seems clear that the newspaper closing played into Muqtada al-Sadr's apocalyptic mindset. He became convinced that it meant the US planned to silence him and destroy his movement, leaving him no choice but to launch an uprising. The Coalition, which just closed a newspaper for 2 months, probably thought of it as a relatively mild response to Sadr's own provocations. But Muqtada saw his father and brothers cut down by Saddam and he is clearly a paranoid personality deeply traumatized by Baath terror against Shiites, and he views the Americans as little different from the Baathists. Saddam also sent warnings to Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr, in January of 1999, which were a prelude to Sadiq's assassination in February of that year. In Muqtada's own mind, the Coalition 'warnings' may also have been perceived as a prelude to removing him. The US army appears to have seriously threatened him with arrest or worse last October.

Serious nerds will want to read his article "The United States and Shi`ite Factions in Post-Baath Iraq" in The Middle East Journal. Volume 57, Number 4, Autumn 2003, pp. 543-566.