Typical Biden mistake, from today's Times:

The senator explained that he had just barely caught the direct flight from Washington to Des Moines that evening, “since neither Hillary nor Barack will lend me their G5 jets,” and that there had been no time to change. “I got in the plane — I was meeting with President Talabani, you know, he’s the Kurdish leader in Iraq, and I literally ran from that meeting in the Capitol.”

Talabani, of course, is the president of Iraq, not "the Kurdish leader." If anyone is the Kurdish leader, it's Masoud Barzani. Talabani is a Kurd, and leader of the PUK, but he's supposed to be the president of Iraq. Only the partition-minded Biden can only see him as assigned to a particular ethnic group.

The Post ( on Oct. 7) revealed a secret government memo that reputedly put all the blame for the August Shia battle in Karbala on the Sadrists. On hearing about the charges, levied by a commission led by former Ahmed Chalabi aide Mithal al-Alousi, an aide to Sadr said:

"There is no evidence against the Sadr movement. The people who started it all are linked to the Supreme Council, who are linked to Iranian intelligence. They get their salaries from Iran. Their homes are in Iran."

According to a Zogby poll, more than half of American voters support the idea of bombing Iran to halt its nuclear program:

More than half of likely voters in the United States would support a U.S. military strike against Iran to prevent it from building a nuclear weapon, according to a poll released Monday.

The poll found 53 percent of Americans believe it is likely the United States will be involved in a military strike against Iran before the November 2008 presidential election.

The nationwide telephone survey, conducted by polling firm Zogby International, found 52 percent of U.S. adults interviewed would support such a strike.

This, of course, is without the impact of a full court press by the administration to build public support for war with Iran. So far, that effort has been restricted to an occasional speech by the president or vice president and the usual neoconservative op-eds.

Meanwhile, at a panel I attended at the annual conference of the Middle East Institute yesterday, Philip Gordon of the Brookings Institution laid out the prospects for war with Iran like this:

"I can envision a scenario in which, sometime next year, the intelligence community is against a war, telling the White House it doesn't know enough; the military is against it, saying that they're bogged down in Iraq; the State Department is against it, saying that there won't be any allies for a war with Iran; and the political people tell the White House that Congress won't support it--and still, the president and the vice president decide to go to war anyway."