Uh oh. Even Iran's clerics can't tolerate this little gem from Ahmadinejad:

"The Imam Mahdi is in charge of the world and we see his hand directing all the affairs of the country."

So said the prez, and it's the mullahs in a kerfuffle.

Two leading clerics retorted that Ahmadinejad would be better off concentrating on Iran's social problems -- most notably its double-digit inflation -- than indulging in such mystical rhetoric.

"If Ahmadinejad wants to say that the hidden imam is supporting the decisions of the government, it is not true," sniped Gholam Reza Mesbahi Moghadam, the spokesman of the conservative Association of Combatant Clerics.

"For sure, the hidden imam does not approve of inflation of 20 percent, the high cost of living and numerous other errors," he said, according to the Kargozaran daily.

Ali Asghari, a member of the conservative Hezbollah faction in parliament, told the president not to link the management of the country to the imam.

"Ahmadinejad would do better to worry about social problems like inflation ... and other terrestrial affairs," Etemad Melli daily quoted him as saying.

A top Mahdi Army (JAM) commander in Sadr City has described the role of Iran in building ties to corrupt and "greedy" factions of Sadr's militia:

A year ago, in one of a series of interviews with the Times, his voice rose in anger when he talked of Iran's efforts to co-opt the Mahdi Army movement. He seethed about Tehran's drive to recruit fighters to bomb U.S. convoys at a time when Sadr was trying to halt such activities. He railed against militia members whom Iran had bought off.

At this time of immense pressure, however, he embraces the breakaway factions.

"Not all Jaish al Mahdi members are angels," he acknowledged, using the group's Arabic name. "Some have material interests in mind and they're greedy, and so Iran was able to hit on this particular angle and put them on its side."

But this is the price of survival.

OK, no surprise here:

John Bolton, America’s ex-ambassador to the United Nations, has called for US air strikes on Iranian camps where insurgents are trained for war in Iraq.

“This is a case where the use of military force against a training camp to show the Iranians we’re not going to tolerate this is really the most prudent thing to do,” he said. “Then the ball would be in Iran’s court to draw the appropriate lesson to stop harming our troops.”

Bolton also called for carpet-bombing the U.S. State Department and the CIA. "That would show we're not going to tolerate any crap from them either," he said. [This last part is not true. But he actually said the other stuff. You can look it up.]

Representative Walter Jones, one of the very few Republican members of Congress with a conscience, won big in his primary election against a pro-war GOP challenger. I profiled Jones in a cover story for Mother Jones magazine (no relation!) in 2006. See: "The Three Conversions of Walter Jones."

A delegation of Iraqi Sunnis traveled to Cairo with unfriendly things to say about Iran:

An Iraqi Sunni delegation on a visit to Cairo on Wednesday urged Arab countries to act against what it called the "Iranian occupation" of Iraq.

"We would like a common Arab position to save Iraq and its people ...(in the face of) the Iranian occupation," Sheikh Majid Abdel Razzak al-Ali Suleiman said after a meeting with Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Abul Gheit.

"Such an Arab position, led by Egypt, is necessary to weaken Iran's role in Iraq, because if Tehran occupies this country, it will occupy other Arab countries too," said the head of the Dulaim tribe, which is concentrated mainly in Anbar province, west of Baghdad.

There's more than a grain of truth in what the Sunnis are saying. As I wrote in a lengthy Nation piece recently, quoting Chas Freeman, "The American military occupation of Iraq has facilitated an Iranian political occupation of Iraq." But it's important to remember that most Iraqi Shia are not supporters of Iran. The great Shia "silent majority" is intimidated by the power of the armed militia organized by pro-government religious parties.

Iraq's ambassador to the United States, Samir Sumaida'ie, said this week that "the majority of Shi'ites in his country maintain strong nationalistic ties to Iraq," according to the Washington Times. "In fact, the Iraqi Shi'ites presents a threat to the Iranian state rather than the other way around," said Sumaida'ie.

Never one to admit his errors, a typical point of view for neoconservatives who backed the war in Iraq, Reuel Marc Gerecht has an editorial in the Weekly Standard proclaiming the imminent end of Iran's influence in Iraq. As if.

Says Gerecht:

The Iranians have seriously overplayed their hand along the Tigris and Euphrates.

Oh, have they? And I suppose Gerecht thinks we have played our own hand "along the Tigris and Euphrates" beautifully. He adds: "The clerics in Tehran could be dealt out of the inner circles of Iraqi Shia politics."

It's true that Iran's odious clerics might be dealt out of Iraq, but those doing the dealing out will be Iraqi nationalists, Sunni and Shia both. Yet Gerecht insists that the good guys in Iraq are those in the pro-Iranian government of Iraq, including Maliki and the Hakims. These are the same people Gerecht, Ahmed Chalabi, et al. were hobnobbing with in 2001-2003. They still, apparently, love those Iraqi Shia turban-wearers.

Gerecht seems to believe that Hakim and SCIRI-ISCI have changed their spots, transforming into Iraqi nationalists willing to betray their Iranian sponsor. He writes:

Although conscious of the fleeting loyalty of Iraqi Shiites who once took refuge in Iran from the wrath of Saddam Hussein and are now blessed with ever-larger Iraqi oil revenues, Tehran probably didn't anticipate how quickly Shiite sentiment in Iraq could change.

But what's the evidence that Hakim ("who once took refuge in Iran") has broken with Iran? There isn't any. And there wasn't any in 2002, either, when Hakim and Co. showed up en masse to take over the London conference of U.S.-backed Iraqi exiles. Oops.

Picking up on the item below -- namely, Reuel Gerecht's odd observation that Iran has overplayed its hand in Iraq -- I can't help but add the Times' latest account of how Iran helped to broker the deal that led to the ceasefire (of sorts) in Sadr City. This comes after Iran did the same in Basra:

The Iraqi government and leaders of the movement of the Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr agreed Saturday to a truce, brokered with help from Iran, that would end more than a month of bloody fighting in the vast, crowded Sadr City section of Baghdad. ... The Iranians helped end the standoff by throwing their weight behind the government after a delegation of Shiite members of Parliament visited Iran earlier this month, according to three people involved in negotiating the truce....

The members of Parliament asked Iran to lean on the Shiite militias they have influence with, said Ali Adeeb, a Parliament member from Mr. Maliki’s Dawa Party who was part of the delegation. “They said the better way to deal with the Sadrists is by negotiation; don’t fight them and don’t use force.”

Haider Abbadi, another member of Parliament, said the Iranians “promised that they would pressure all the groups that they have communication with to defer to Iraqi law.”

So first of all we have Gates sounding dovish on Iran:

We need to figure out a way to develop some leverage with the Iranians and then sit down and talk with them. ... If there is going to be a discussion then they need something, too. We can't go to a discussion and be completely the 'demandeur' with them not feeling they do not need anything from us.

Pretty intelligent stuff, coinciding as it does with suggestions from Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov that the world powers negotiating with Iran ought to give Iran some incentives:

I think the 'Six' could make the following step: directly put concrete offers on the negotiating table, give Iran security guarantees and ensure a more distinguished place in negotiations on the situation in the Middle East. I am convinced that this is an effective way of relieving tensions in the region and regulating the situation surrounding Iran's nuclear problem.

Even more sensible. Does this mean something is going on? I continue to argue that the United States is not going to war with Iran: not now, not later this year, and not in 2009 (unless Senator McCain is president). That doesn't mean that tensions with Iran won't rise in 2008, especially if the White House wants to use escalating tensions with Iran to boost McCain's electoral prospects.

The Iraqi delegation that went to Iran got its head handed to it by the Iranians:

On Monday, the hard-line Iranian newspaper Jomhuri-e-Eslami accused al-Maliki of lacking backbone in talks with Washington, which include the long-range status of U.S. military operations in Iraq. The daily, which is considered close to Iran's ruling clerics, claimed Washington wants a "full-fledged colony" in Iraq.

It was a rare public jab at al-Maliki, a Shiite. But it was mild compared with the closed-door recriminations during the high-level Iraqi visit, according to accounts by Shiite politicians close to Iraq's prime minister.

The five-member delegation sought to pressure and cajole the Iranians into cutting suspected support for Shiite militias that have battled U.S. and Iraqi forces. But the Iraqis mostly received a scolding, the politicians said.

"The Iranians were very tough and even angry with us," said one of the delegates in the Tehran talks. "They accused us of being ungrateful to what Iran has done for the Shiites during Saddam's rule and of siding with the Americans against Iran."

Iran is worried that (1) the Maliki government might make a deal to authorize a long-term U.S. military presence in Iraq through the Bush-Maliki accord that is supposed to be signed this summer, and (2) that the war against Muqtada's JAM has gone a little too far. To understand this tangle, I'd look at the emerging possibility that the Iraqi government itself is split: that Maliki is increasingly opting for a pro-American stance, while the hard-core pro-Iranian ISCI faction around the Hakims is more willing to align itself with Tehran. Problem is, Tehran isn't willing to make a choice between Sadr and Hakim.

In my view Obama got by far the best of this exchange.

Obama:

Iran, Cuba, Venezuela –- these countries are tiny compared to the Soviet Union. They don't pose a serious threat to us the way the Soviet Union posed a threat to us. And yet we were willing to talk to the Soviet Union at the time when they were saying we're going to wipe you off the planet.

McCain:

Obviously, Iran isn't a superpower and doesn't possess the military power the Soviet Union had. But that does not mean that the threat posed by Iran is insignificant. On the contrary, right now Iran provides some of the deadliest explosive devices used in Iraq to kill our soldiers. They are the chief sponsor of Shia extremists in Iraq, and terrorist organizations in the Middle East. And their president, who has called Israel a 'stinking corpse,' has repeatedly made clear his government's commitment to Israel’s destruction. Most worrying, Iran is intent on acquiring nuclear weapons.

It seems pretty obvious that Obama gets it, and McCain doesn't. In fact, McCain's entire campaign rests on the idea that he can inflate Iran into such a big monster that voters will flock to him to defend them against it. Meanwhile, if Iran is such a menace, according to McCain, doesn't that make it even more important to talk to Iran?

From the Jerusalem Post, an obviously biased but still worth-passing-on take on Bush and Iran:

US President George W. Bush intends to attack Iran in the upcoming months, before the end of his term, Army Radio quoted a senior official in Jerusalem as saying Tuesday.

The paper says Cheney's for an attack, and Rice and Gates are against it. And it says Bush told Israeli officials that it's not worth challenging Iran in, say, Lebanon over Hezbollah. Bush supposedly said: "The disease must be treated - not its symptoms."

The "quietist" cleric Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani has told followers (who number in the many millions) that it is permissible to kill American troops in Iraq. This is being reported by AP. THie gist of the report says that Sistani, who met Prime Minister Maliki in Najaf yesterday, issued the fatwas "verbally and in private" to a "handful of people." He is considering a public call for "jihad" against the U.S. occupation, and he is opposed to the disarming of Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army. Write AP reporters Hamza Hendawi and Qassim Abdul-Zahra from Iraq:

In the past, al-Sistani has avoided answering even abstract questions on whether fighting the U.S. presence in Iraq is allowed by Islam. Such questions sent to his Web site — which he uses to respond to followers' queries — have been ignored. All visitors to his office who had asked the question received a vague response.

The subtle shift could point to his growing impatience with the continued American presence more than five years after the U.S.-led invasion.

Then there is this, more ominous note:

A longtime official at al-Sistani's office in Najaf would not deny or confirm the edicts issued in private, but hinted that a publicized call for jihad may come later.

"(Al-Sistani) rejects the American presence," he told the AP, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to comment to media. "He believes they (the Americans) will at the end pay a heavy price for the damage they inflicted on Iraq."

And finally, this, on Sadr:

In perhaps another sign of al-Sistani's hardened position, he has opposed disarming the Mahdi Army as demanded by al-Maliki, according to Shiite officials close to the cleric.

Disarming the Mahdi Army would — in the views of many Shiites — leave them vulnerable to attacks by armed Sunni factions that are steadily gaining strength after joining the U.S. military fight against al-Qaida.

The House of Representatives voted to insist that any U.S.-Iraq security agreement be submitted for congressional approval. According to the Congressional Progressive Caucus:

Today, by bipartisan a vote of 234 to 183, the House adopted Congresswoman Barbara Lee’s amendment to the Department of Defense Authorization Act requiring congressional approval of any agreement between the U.S. and Iraq making commitments related to Iraq’s security. ...

"If prior review and approval is good enough for the Iraqi Parliament, it is essential for the Congress," said Lee.

That's good news. But I'm starting to doubt that the U.S. and Iraq will agree on anything, so it might be moot.