Via Crooks and Liars:

For those of you who haven't been paying attention...or for those of you who have but needed a nice little primer to help you keep track of what's what, Mother Jones has put up a well-researched and well-sourced primer called Iraq 101.

While not a lot of the information in there is news to me, I tend to get the political parties and who represents whom mixed up. For example, I tend to assign Sunnis to Shiite political parties and Shiites to Sunni political parties, which...yeah...very, very stupid and very, very bad. At least I tend to correctly match the Kurds to their correct political parties.

Even if you think you know all the Playas and all the facts, guaranteed that you'll be learnin' something new in this handy online primer.

The sources section is an especially nice collection of links.

Fellow U.S. citizens, it's been 4 years since we launched an illegal war on Iraq — a country that we not only armed back in the day, but never attacked us and also posed zero threat to our national security.

If you haven't educated yourself on the key facts, it's time to start.

I have finally read the transcript of His Lordship's Speech to the Nation. I know I should've watched it, but I was busy being amused by a discussion about dirty words.

I definitely got the better end of the deal, from all accounts.

I also read the fact sheet on the 'new way forward' in Iraq (If I had a vote, I'd vote, "Go back in time and not invade Iraq in the first place.") as well as the PDF of the Iraq Strategy Review PowerPoint for Dummies (Again, I vote: "Not go in the first place, nitwit.").

In reading over the speech, I started wondering if he had just declared war on Iran and Syria. Now, to be fair, news organizations on both the left and right picked up on this before I settled down to read it for myself this ayem, but I thought they were overstating the case. Even in reading the speech, I still wasn't entirely sure if it was pure rhetoric from His Lordship or if the commentators were right on the money.



Update: It appears that the Senate may also be gearing up for a Constitutional Crisis as Sen. Joe Biden (D-Del.), chair of the Foreign Relations Committee threatened a Constitutional confrontation between Congress and the White House if Bush attempts to push a war on Iran without the consent of the legislative branch. (via No Quarter, as this was just aired on CSPAN-3 and a transcript isn't available yet nor has the comment hit the wires.)