Strategy Page says that the “insurgents” are running out of money.

Lileks says that the Middle East is a lot like the Sopranos.

[Update at 10 AM EST]

GaijinBiker says that freedom is sexy.

A lot of nostalgic lefty anti-war types have been warning us for years that Iraq was going to be just like Vietnam. Claudia Rossett says that they may be right. But they won’t be as happy about it as they think they will.

It kind of reminds me of an old joke that a USC grad told me, back when their football program was in the doldrums in the eighties. He said that his nightly prayer had been that USC would have a basketball program as good as its football program. And he finally got his wish.

Heh.

The Iraqis seem to be fed up with the “insurgents”, his “Minute Men.”

More than 2,000 people held the impromptu demonstration on front of the clinic, chanting “No to terrorism!” and “No to Baathism and Wahhabism!”

The pro-Syrian Lebanese government has fallen. Just goes to show you what can happen when the vaunted “Arab Street” really gets stirred up.

A while back, I recall seeing a poll, or survey, indicating that the vast majority of Iraqis had an acquaintance or family member who had been tortured, imprisoned or killed by the Saddam regime. But I can’t find hide nor hair of it on Google. Am I going nuts (well, that’s probably a separate issue), or can someone point me to a cite?

Once again, it is employed by the increasingly odious Professor Cole (who makes me embarrassed to be a Michigan alumnus), and slapped down by the Baseball Crank.

Condi Rice committed the gravest diplomatic sin of ignoring Arafat’s grave:

Unlike a long line of other leaders who paid some kind of homage to Arafat’s grave at the entrance to the Mukata, when visiting PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen), Rice’s car simply pulled into the compound, passed the grave and Rice got out and walked into the building.

On the way out, she also made no acknowledgment of the grave, unlike other leaders, like EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana who laid a wreath or British Prime Minister Tony Blair who walked by and nodded.

History will record that the major (in fact only) contribution that Yasser Arafat ever made to peace in the Middle East was shuffling off this mortal coil. He didn’t do it willingly, of course, but still, credit where credit’s due.

The Iraqis are turning on the “insurgents”:

The insurgents raided the village of al-Mudhiryah south of Baghdad after warning its inhabitants not to vote in the election.

The villagers fought back, killing five of the insurgents and wounding eight others.

The insurgents’ cars were then set alight.

Al-Mudhiryah’s tribal sheikh says his people are sick of being threatened by Islamic extremists.

Maybe they’ll start to get the message now. I doubt if Michael Moore will, though. Just what the heck kind of quagmire is this, anyway?

Guest blogger “Ross” over at Andrew Sullivan’s place is a little confused in his critique of Michael Ledeen’s optimism about democracy in Iran:

…I’d be more convinced that “a bit of guidance in the methods of non-violent resistance, a bit of communications gear, and many words of encouragement” will bring down the mullahs in Iran if there were a single example of a successful democratic revolution anywhere in the Arab world that Ledeen could cite.

This might be a salient question if we were discussing an Arab country, but Iran is Persian. And in fact most polls I’ve seen indicate that in a free election, it’s likely that a democratic Iranian government would be pro-west and pro-America. The generation that’s grown up over the past quarter century of mullahcracy has had its fill.