Quotes From Around Yon Blogosphere

All describe the bizarro-world contrast between what most Americans seem to think is happening in Iraq versus what is really happening in Iraq. Knowing this disconnect exists and experiencing it directly are two separate matters. It’s like the difference between holding the remote control during the telecast of a volcanic eruption on some distant island (and then flipping the channel), versus running for survival from a wretch of molten lava that just engulfed your car.

I was at home in the United States just one day before the magnitude hit me like vertigo: America seems to be under a glass dome which allows few hard facts from the field to filter in unless they are attached to a string of false assumptions. Considering that my trip home coincided with General Petraeus’ testimony before the US Congress, when media interest in the war was (I’m told) unusually concentrated, it’s a wonder my eardrums didn’t burst on the trip back to Iraq. In places like Singapore, Indonesia, and Britain people hardly seemed to notice that success is being achieved in Iraq, while in the United States, Britney was competing for airtime with O.J. in one of the saddest sideshows on Earth.

-- MICHAEL YON

The chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee asserted Monday that Iraq security contractor Blackwater USA "may have engaged in significant tax evasion."

In a letter to Blackwater Chairman Erik Prince, panel Chairman Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) noted that the IRS earlier this year ruled that the company "violated federal tax laws by treating an armed guard as an 'independent contractor,' " Waxman said. "The implication of this ruling is that Blackwater may have avoided paying millions of dollars in Social Security, Medicare, unemployment and related taxes for which it is legally responsible."

The lawmaker noted that the issue came up when Prince testified before his panel earlier this month. At the time, Prince said that guards like the "flexibility" of the independent contractor status and that it is a "model that works." The IRS ruling was not mentioned and Waxman said there is "evidence that Blackwater has tried to conceal the IRS ruling and the evasion of taxes from Congress and law enforcement officials."

-- KLAUS MARRE

If you listen to [New York Times Iraq correspondent] John Burns publicly speak, his bird's nest hairdo dominating the visual, you arrive at the conclusion that to him history's best friend, unemotional time, will say that America did what the world needed and placed it's military boots in the Middle East.

When I heard him, he disclosed in his speech that his Dad was a NATO officer, a uniformed political operative so to speak. He humorously alluded that perhaps it wasn't best to disclose to the audience that he came from a military-solution background because it hung in the air that his "meddle-away-America" conclusions seemed to derive, slantedly, from his personal background.

He, however, may well be spot on with his political historical conclusions. "Time" will tell.

But, perhaps his bias towards the acceptability of invading the brown oil rich hordes had more to do with his admission that the Brits as a nation as well as the dons of Oxford and Cambridge, whilst Mister Burns was youthfully entering the halls of higher learning, had not yet become aware that the days of Empire were actually finished.

-- CRAIG JOHNSON

Showing apparent signs of concern over events in Iraq, al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden urged insurgents to "unite your lines into one" in an audiotape played on al Jazeera Monday.

"Don't be arrogant," bin Laden warned. "Your enemies are trying to break up the jihadi groups. I urge you all to work in one united group."

People familiar with bin Laden's voice say the tape appeared to be authentic, although there was no reference to any event that would indicate when it was recorded.

Bin Laden's message comes at a time when U.S. strategy to split Iraqi insurgent groups from al Qaeda units appears to be working.

-- BRIAN ROSS and REHAB EL-BURI

As in the Cold War, foreign-policy hawkishness has become the glue holding the fragile GOP coalition together, even as Iraq has made foreign policy a general-election liability for the Right, instead of the asset it was in the Reagan years. Which is one way to explain the weird aftermath of the '06 debacle, in which social conservatives and fiscal conservatives each blamed one another for the defeat, when it was perfectly clear that the Iraq War had more to do the party's degringolade than the corruption of the small-government movement or the excesses of the religious right.

-- ROSS DOUTHAT

If he had his way, [John] Bolton would solve all our world problems by bombing and invading, in contrast to his youthful aversion to warfare.

"I confess I had no desire to die in a Southeast Asian rice paddy," Bolton wrote in the 25th reunion book of his graduation from Yale about his decision to join the National Guard and go to law school. "I considered the war in Vietnam already lost."

Unlike the war in Iraq today and whatever new ones he can instigate tomorrow.

-- ROBERT STEIN

Photograph by Michael Yon