This is a guest post by Daniel Levy, Senior Fellow and Director of the Middle East Policy Initiative at the New America Foundation as well as Senior Fellow at the Century Foundation An Informal Diplomatic Surge: Draft Israeli-Syrian Peace Deal Revealed As Secretary Rice continues her swing through the Middle East, pointedly avoiding Damascus,

Just FYI, the Prince William County Democratic Committee (in Virginia) has put this really cool cook book together. I have a recipe in it that I highlighted at TWN a while back, the “Preparing for the Daily John Bolton Battle Smoothie.” More later.

David Sanger, White House Correspondent of the New York Times, and I helped kick off a week-long run of policy lectures and discussion organized by the Center for Strategic and International Studies for a group of prominent, quickly ascending Japanese Ministry of Foreign officials yesterday.

. . .or real ones anyway. Senator Chuck Hagel is a real Republican. So is former National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft. I know darn well how hard core a Republican Nixon Center President Dimitri Simes is.

(Iraq Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari and Newsweek International Editor Fareed Zakaria) Now, this is a fine mess. The U.S. raided a Consulate like facility and detained five Iranian nationals in northern Iraq. U.S. intelligence apparently worried that the five Iranians were aiding insurgents inside Iraq.

Some read this blog for political discussion, reactions to America’s Middle East mess, or to check up on my pups. Annie and her bro are doing well as you can see.

I suspect that we will soon see more collisions between US military squads and Special Force operations against suspected Syrian and Iranian convoys and personnel — civilian and military — inside Iraq as well as more border interdiction. At some point, these units will go into Syria and Iran to accomplish their “disruption” missions.

Playboy Magazine has a very useful, long article out titled “Lockheed Stock and Two Smoking Barrels” that does a great job of exposing the power of informal networks in Washington and how such informal networks are moving billions of dollars around and teeing up military conflicts like Iraq.

(New America Foundation Senior Fellow and Geopolitics of Energy Initiative Director Flynt Leverett: photo credit: NewsHour with Jim Lehrer) I asked former CIA and Bush administration National Security Council senior official Flynt Leverett for a quick summary of his thoughts on President Bush’s Address to the Nation.

Washington intelligence, military and foreign policy circles are abuzz today with speculation that the President, yesterday or in recent days, sent a secret Executive Order to the Secretary of Defense and to the Director of the CIA to launch military operations against Syria and Iran.