Quotes From Around Yon Blogosphere

Redeeming his inaugural pledge to "pay any price, bear any burden, fly any distance to meet with our enemies," [Barack] Obama's first major international meeting is with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran. National security adviser Samantha Power does her best to talk tough on human rights in preparation for the meeting. But, as Henry Kissinger once said, "When talks become their own objective, they are at the mercy of the party most prepared to break them off." Having made Iranian talks "without precondition" his major foreign policy goal, Obama is left with little leverage to extract concessions, and little choice but to move forward.

The New York Post runs a front-page picture of the Obama-Ahmadinejad handshake under the headline "Surrender Summit!" The story notes another of Obama's historic firsts: the first American president to meet with a Holocaust denier. The Israeli prime minister publicly asks, "Why is the American president meeting with a leader who calls us 'filthy bacteria' and threatens to wipe us 'off the map?'" Tens of thousands protest in Tel Aviv, carrying signs reading "Chamberlain Lives!"

-- MICHAEL GERSON

President John McCain celebrates his inauguration by declaring that the American people have spoken: there will be no departure from Iraq until the job is done, no matter how long it takes and no matter the cost. Iraqi Sunnis, whose cooperation with the U.S. had in part been based on assurances that Americans would soon begin to leave and that they would be integrated into the Iraqi army and police, abandon the Awakenings and return to the insurgency. As American forces, already stretched to their limit, scramble to deal with the renewed violence, McCain escalates his rhetoric against Iran - blaming them for the chaos and threatening "massive retaliation". The Iranians ignore him, and even encourage their Iraqi allies to turn up the heat - resulting in a mass-casualty attack on the Green Zone. McCain retaliates by bombing Iran, to the horror of the Gulf states and the region. The bombing has little effect on the Iranian regime, but throws the region into chaos, Iraq descends into bloody hell, and . . .

-- MARC LYNCH

Iraq is a sovereign and free country. That means it gets to decide whom to invite for dinner and sleepovers. It was made free by George W. Bush. That means he gets to decide who can invade Iraq. He made the first decision before Iraq was a free and sovereign country and that decision is what turned it into a free and sovereign country. That was back in 2003.

Having nothing much else to do in 2003, Mr. Bush decided an invasion of Iraq would be one way of creating the kind of legacy every president is searching for. A good war seemed like an insurance policy for his reputation. Accordingly he fabricated some facts that, if believed by others he believed, would justify an invasion of Iraq. He presented them to the legislative bodies that needed to approve war and, the approval in hand, he proudly sent his armies to conquer Iraq and install a government that would be to his liking.

The war did not turn out exactly as he had hoped although he kept telling his people that it was going really well and that democracy was being installed in a country that had been subject to the whims of another ruthless ruler, Saddam Hussein. The war is still going on and no one knows how it will end but its ending is not what concerns Mr. Bush who is only concerned about his reputation. What is important to him, as to a small child pretending to be a great warrior, is that he be remembered as the president who led the country in a time of war even though it was one he had created.

-- CHRISTOPHER R. BRAUCHLI

The same people -- same individuals, same organizations, same publications, same blog sites - that ginned up a war with Iraq, and that have supported ginning up a war with Iran, are settling for a longer term confrontation with China.

These people need to be judged on their track record. And compared with a confrontation with Iraq or Iran, a military showdown with China would be 10 times as unnecessary and 100 times as stupid.

-- JAMES FALLOWS

How cool is this? Bruce Springsteen wants you to buy this book -- this book being the new So Wrong for So Long: How the Press, the Pundits -- and the President -- Failed on Iraq by my friend Greg Mitchell, the editor of Editor and Publisher who hobnobbed with rock 'n' roll glitterati during his stint at the legenday magazine Crawdaddy! Springsteen says in a brief (i.e., it's a lot more concise than "Jungleland") preface that Mitchell's book "is to remind us that we all need to be more questioning, skeptical and savvy than ever in assessing information that's presented to us. And we ought to teach our children to do the same."

So Wrong for So Long is certainly a big start in the right direction. Using a variety of writing techniques and approaches that stretch over five agonizing years of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the collected works touch on the wide scope of journalistic malpractice that stretches to the present, including the early ignoring of Abu Ghraib, civilian casualties, Haditha, and military suicides, among others. One thing stood out as a recurring and awful theme: That it didn't have to be this way, that America's journalists had plenty of information that was readily available in late 2002 and early 2003 to show that the case for the war was partly overhyped but mostly bogus.

-- WILL BUNCH

Photograph by Patrick Baz/Agence-France-Presse