Your correspondent’s sleep-deprived mutterings on various interesting issues of foreign policy (i.e., aggression, atrocity, torture, rapine) and domestic politics (videlicet, going to hell in a great big handbasket) is now up at Antiwar Radio, with the excellent Scott Horton directing the conversation. Check it out, if you take a notion.

Just in case anyone still thought that the ignominious departure of Tony Blair meant some kind of sea change in Britain’s slavish obedience to the Bush Regime’s warmongering, new  British PM Gordon Brown came out as a hardliner against Iran on Monday, declaring that the UK “will lead” the global fight to thwart Iran’s nuclear program, as the Guardian reports.Brown’s broadside came just days after the White House complained that he was not being as bellicose with the Persians as Bush’s best new friend, the fiery French President Nicholas Sarkozy. Duly chastened, Brown seized the opportunity of his first major

Following on from our previous report on the America’s new allies in Iraq, Juan Cole has more on another “success” of the surge: the loudly-trumpeted “return” of some Baghdad residents to the city.