This is the last day of Conference-a-thon. I’ll be home tonight, to my own bed. And home to Miss Lucy the cat, who reliably wakes me up by 5:30 every morning. Sometimes earlier. Maybe I should stay another day and get some sleep. I can still speak in complete sentences, though, so I’m not licked yet.

Morning news:

Sheryl Gay Stolberg reports in the New York Times that President Bush is still turning corners.

In visiting Baghdad on Tuesday, President Bush was trying to deliver a carefully calibrated message to Americans: that Iraq and the administration’s strategy there appear to be turning a corner, but troops will not be withdrawn anytime soon.

They have a strategy? Wow. Who knew?

The headline for this article, btw, says that “Bush seizes on a step forward.” He steps forward, he turns. Some kind of dance?

From a New York Times editorial on the President’s visit to Baghdad:

By now, Americans surely know the difference between a presidential publicity stunt and a true turning point in this ever-lengthening war. If they had any question about which one this was, Karl Rove provided some guidance in New Hampshire, where he delivered the campaign talking points to the Republican faithful: the Democrats could never have summoned the will to kill Mr. Zarqawi. For an administration that is supposed to be rallying a nation at war, it was a revealingly nasty, partisan and divisive moment.

I’m having a hard time understanding how much “will” it takes for someone in Washington to give an order to kill someone on the other side of the planet. I mean, if Karl Rove had been there to kick the door down or light the fuse or whatever they did to kill Zarqawi — I haven’t paid attention to details — I might be impressed at how much “will” he had to “summon.” But I ‘spect the little hothouse flowers of the White House would, in a truly dangerous spot, mostly summon the will to wet their pants.

These are the same weenies who still haven’t summoned up the will to kill Osama bin Laden. Never forget that.

It took ’em long enough to summon up the will to kill Zarqawi, for that matter. And by many accounts Zarqawi was a minor figure whose importance to al Qaeda was blown up way out of proportion by the White House. See, for example, Mary Ann Weaver’s excellent article on Zarqawi in the July/August 2006 issue of Atlantic Monthly.

One can only imagine how astonished al-Zarqawi must have been when Colin Powell named him as the crucial link between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein’s regime. He was not even officially a part of al-Qaeda, and ever since he had left Afghanistan, his links had been not to Iraq but to Iran.

“We know Zarqawi better than he knows himself,” the high-level Jordanian intelligence official said. “And I can assure you that he never had any links to Saddam. Iran is quite a different matter. The Iranians have a policy: they want to control Iraq. And part of this policy has been to support Zarqawi, tactically but not strategically.” …

… “In the beginning they gave him automatic weapons, uniforms, military equipment, when he was with the army of Ansar al-Islam. Now they essentially just turn a blind eye to his activities, and to those of al-Qaeda generally. The Iranians see Iraq as a fight against the Americans, and overall, they’ll get rid of Zarqawi and all of his people once the Americans are out.”

“Even then—and even more so now—Zarqawi was not the main force in the insurgency,” the former Jordanian intelligence official, who has studied al-Zarqawi for a decade, told me. “To establish himself, he carried out the Muhammad Hakim operation, and the attack against the UN. Both of them gained a lot of support for him—with the tribes, with Saddam’s army and other remnants of his regime. They made Zarqawi the symbol of the resistance in Iraq, but not the leader. And he never has been.”

He continued, “The Americans have been patently stupid in all of this. They’ve blown Zarqawi so out of proportion that, of course, his prestige has grown. And as a result, sleeper cells from all over Europe are coming to join him now.” He paused for a moment, then said, “Your government is creating a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

Western and Israeli diplomats to whom I spoke shared this view—and this past April, The Washington Post reported on Pentagon documents that detailed a U.S. military propaganda campaign to inflate al-Zarqawi’s importance. Then, the following month, the military appeared to attempt to reverse field and portray al-Zarqawi as an incompetent who could not even handle a gun. But by then his image in the Muslim world was set.

I must have missed the April WaPo article, and right now I’m a little short on time to look for it. If anyone can find a link, please add it to the comments.