It has become a sad cliche that Americans deserve better from their leadership than they are getting.

I do think that this is a good move. Khalilzad, who has been both Ambassador to Iraq and Afghanistan, may have signed a number of PNAC letters, but he is a realist. The situation has deteriorated around him in Iraq — but he knows how to deal in the region.

Some things make sense about Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte’s move to serve as Condi’s Deputy at the State Department — and others don’t.

On December 31st, my colleague and friend Nir Rosen posted on Iraq Slogger what I think are the first English language translations of the banter around Saddam Hussein’s hanging.

Annie the Amazing Weimaraner’s resolution is to get even better at catching that tennis ball. Oakley’s is to catch a squirrel. But he also thinks a duck would do. Just to be friends of course. I have a few.

The probability is that 2007 will be a worse year for America’s national security portfolio than 2006. I’ve just been reading thoroughly Bob Woodward’s State of Denial, which I had previously read only in snippets.

Arlen Specter has impressed me this week by bucking the Bush administration and going to Syria to meet President Bashar al-Assad and then to Jerusalem to meet leading Israeli authorities and pressing for a Palestinian-Israel final settlement. He has even stated that he favors direct talks with Iran.

This is one of those big nights — the kind Shakespeare was good at capturing and memorializing. Consequences ahead we think.

It has been a long time since America has had such a direct hand in the execution of a former head-of-state. Hussein is was a thug, but this has not been handled right. The former leader should have been tried at the Hague — with a lot of distance between the U.S.

Senator Lieberman just spent 10 days in the Middle East and still does not get it. He’s penned an op-ed calling for more deployed American troops in Iraq.