Al Gore makes a striking point in his op-ed in the New York Times today:

If Mr. Bush is not willing to concede that things are going from bad to worse in Iraq, can he be trusted to make the decisions necessary to change the situation? If he insists on continuing to pretend it is “mission accomplished,” can he accomplish the mission? And if the Bush administration has been so thoroughly wrong on absolutely everything it predicted about Iraq, with the horrible consequences that have followed, should it be trusted with another four years?

Gore has Bush in a Catch 22. He can’t admit that things are getting worse in Iraq and can’t pretend that things are getting better. The reality for Bush is less tricky. He just has to convince voters that his plan for Iraq (essentially, kill insurgents and don’t postpone elections) is better than his opponent’s. If Kerry keeps on saying the solution to our problems is sharing the burden with France and Germany, Bush shouldn’t have too much difficulty.

Why did the House authorize spending $104 million to kill snakes in Guam? I’m sure the brown tree snake is quite destructive, but $104 million for snakes in Guam? It’s not even a state. To put the $104 million in better context, that’s twice the budget of the National Endowment for Democracy, whose mandate is a bit broader than killing snakes. OK, doing a little more reading, I understand people fear the snake will find its way to Hawaii, and then I guess, perhaps, California? Now that I think about it, this is an allegory about the dangers of isolationism. Kill that snake.

Blair didn’t offer an apology about waging war in Iraq or even a qualified one, though the lede and headline of this Reuters article states differently. Blair, as quoted in the story, apologized for bad intelligence and quite clearly defended his decision to remove Saddam. The Times should correct the headline.

Jackson Diehl, a member of the editorial board of the Washington Post and an op-ed columnist, has a must-read piece in today’s Post. How rare is it for a columnist to change his mind and admit error? If you take a look at Diehl’s columns on Israel, especially in 2002, you’ll find a constant questioning of Sharon’s hawkish tactics and predictions that Sharon’s invasions of Palestinian territories were only adding to Israel’s security threat. Of course, if the security situation in Israel worsens, Diehl would probably abandon his new respect for the effectiveness of military force. But at least he’s flexible, which is a lot more than you can say about many of the major columnists.

“The greatest danger we face in the days and weeks and months ahead is a nuclear 9/11, and we hope and pray that it is not already too late to prevent,” said Ted Kennedy. “The war in Iraq has made the mushroom cloud more likely, not less likely.”

–And this quote was not taken out of context.

Poll after poll shows that the war in Iraq is a top concern among Americans. But if you only read the official Web sites of George Bush and John Kerry you wouldn’t know we have nearly 150,000 troops in Iraq fighting what appears to be an increasingly lethal and long-term insurgency. Go ahead and check out the home pages of each site, georgebush.com and johnkerry.com and run a search for the word, “Iraq.” You’ll hear a beep, signaling zilch. Of course, if you click around a few times, you can find a perfunctory promise that John Kerry will “win the peace” in Iraq (ironically contained within the national security section) or a vague affirmation from Bush that the “interim government is leading the Iraqi people to freedom.” But it’s telling that both candidates are reluctant to put it out there front and center what they plan to do. I’m not entirely criticizing the candidates. The war in Iraq at this stage is so confusing and unpredictable that no candidate is willing to risk promoting a specific plan. That’s unfortunate because judging by the polls, Americans would like to hear one.

In case you missed it, check out George Will’s attack on Robert Kagan in Newsweek. A lot has been said about the brewing Republican civil war between the deficit hawks and the big spenders or as David Brooks put it recently in the Times magazine, between an “old anti-statist governing philosophy” or “strong government” philosophy. The more interesting split happening right now and one that is more relevant to the War on Terror is over democracy and the use of force. It’s between the neoconservative realists (Will, Fukuyama) and the neoconservative optimists (Kagan, Kristol, Krauthammer). The struggle in Iraq has shaken the confidence of many of the hard-core, democracy-is-the-solution intellectuals, who now are casting doubt on America’s ability to transform dictatorships, or aspiring dictatorships in the case of Russia, into freedom-loving, pluralistic democracies. As Fred Hiatt described so eloquently in his latest Washington Post column, the state of democracy in the world is in trouble, its progress looking less and less inevitable. It is the optimists in the conservative movement who are sticking to the belief that American force and determination will carry the day. But their ranks are shrinking.