Photo of the Day

Take a gander at Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki shaking hands with Iranian President Mamoun Ahmadenijad (call it a fair use of ISNA's photo). Going to Teheran for the meeting is a sensible thing to do. After all, Iran's right next door so they have plenty to talk about. But how can it possibly be that it's both absolutely vital for the United States to make a massive, open-ended military commitment to one of these governments and also absolutely vital for the United States to refuse to sit down and attempt good-faith negotiations with the other? Is Maliki now part of the unappeasable Islamofascist menace? How does this fit in with the 1939 narrative?

We turn to the Corner to see what the conservative movement's best minds have to say about these developments and find a multi-part series of posts where Rich Lowry and Kate O'Beirne just quote from a chat the White House seems to have organized between Bush and some friendly journalists about which our conservative analysts have no actual analysis to offer. We learn that, according to Bush, "The ideological struggle is being manifested as radicals attacking young democracies . . . the extremists and radicals are flocking to Iraq to stop the flourishing of democracy.”