Al Qaeda has claimed credit for a large, sophisticated attack Monday on the two hotels in Baghdad where most foreign journalists and many defense contractors stay.

The attack failed, but it was a near run thing.

The Palestine and Sheraton hotels are across a short street from each other, adjacent to Firdous Square, a traffic roundabout where the statue of Saddam Hussein was torn down on April 9th, 2003.

The attack involved three suicide bombers and an unknown number of other fighters. The attack took place at dusk, over a span of four minutes.

Several news organizations were tipped off in advance, and cameras were rolling. And we wonder which side the media is on?

On the morning of Oct. 12th, Syria's Interior minister, Maj. Gen. Ghazi Kanaan, was found dead in his office from a gunshot wound to the head. Kanaan's death was ruled a suicide, but there were doubters.

"For those of you who don't know what 'committed suicide' means in Syria, it means someone committed it for him," said Anton Efendi, an American PhD candidate who lives in Lebanon.

Kanaan's "suicide" may lead to the suicide of Syria as an intact country.

On July 9th, Ayman al Zawahiri, the number 2 man in Al Qaeda, wrote a 6,000 word letter to Abu Musab al Zarqawi, the Al Qaeda chieftain in Iraq. The letter was captured by U.S. forces, translated, and posted on government Web sites.

Democrats and journalists scoff at President Bush's claim that Iraq is the central front in the War on Terror. Zawahiri agrees with Bush:

There were more than a dozen bombings in Baghdad Sept. 14th, four of them suicide bombings, which killed at least 152 people. Yet this may be "early signs of diminishing jihadist capability." Here's why:

Colonel Thomas Spoehr is annoyed with New York Times reporter Michael Moss,for what I think is a good reason. Spoehr is the director of materiel for the Army staff. He had a good news story to tell Moss, which Moss converted into a bad news story.

Here is the story as Spoehr tells it:

The 14 Marine reservists killed last week when the amtrac in which they were riding was struck by a powerful roadside bomb would have been safer if they had been riding in up-armored humvees, opined CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer.

"I'm very disappointed that we don't have the good vehicles in the al Anbar province," Blitzer said. "It's a very sensitive issue for me, because I was there in March."

An amtrac with 15 combat loaded Marines aboard weighs more than 23 tons. The IED -- reportedly made from a 500 lb. bomb -- flipped it over like a toy. An up-armored humvee weighs less than four tons. Only an idiot would deem it more survivable, especially since an amtrac has more armor than an up-armored humvee.

Blitzer, alas, is typical of the near perfect ignorance of most in the news media about matters military.

There is good news and bad news in the attacks Thursday in London. The bad news, of course, is that the attacks took place. The good news is that they were so clumsily executed.

The attacks mirrored those of July 7th. Now as then, three subway trains and a bus were targeted. NBC has reported the Brits have told American authorities that both the backpacks used in Thursday's attacks and the (homemade) explosives in the backpacks were identical to those of July 7th.

What was different is that this time only the detonators went off. Just one person -- apparently one of the bombers -- was injured in Thursday's attacks. The fact of the attack, coupled with its ineffectiveness, is more likely to infuriate than to intimidate the British. When an attack inspires more contempt than terror, the terrorists are in trouble.

Why is special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald pursuing so zealously the outing of CIA officer Valerie Plame, since it is all but impossible to prove that the leaker or leakers committed a crime?

The Intelligence Identities Protection Act requires that the leaker have learned the identity of a "covert agent" from authorized sources. And it requires that the leak be deliberate. The law defines a "covert agent" as someone working undercover overseas, or who has done so in the last five years. Plame has been manning a desk at CIA headquarters since 1997.

So why is Fitzgerald acting like Inspector Jauvert in Les Miserables? The answer may lie in a sentence Walter Pincus of the Washington Post wrote on June 12th, 2003.

What recruiters tell prospective recruits makes a difference, says retired Army Major Donald Sensing, whose son is a Marine lance corporal. Though they have suffered, proportionately, three times the casualties the Army has, the Marines are meeting their recruiting goals.

His son chose the Marines over the Army because the Marines appealed directly to his patriotism, while Army recruiters talked of job training and pizza parties. “The problem is the Army’s recruiting strategy with its heavily civilianized marketing influences,” Sensing said. The Marines don’t hide what they’re about.

Recruiting is harder because many parents wont let their children talk with Army recruiters, said Maj. Gen. Michael Rochelle, commander of Recruiting Command. Parental concern for the safety of their sons and daughters is understandable. But there is another group of influencers whose behavior borders on sedition.

Any high school or college which denies military recruiters access to campus should lose all of its federal funding immediately. Any high school or college which does not expel students who disrupt recruiters at job fairs should lose all federal funding immediately.

According to the Iranian government, former secret policeman Mahmoud Ahmadeinejad defeated former president Ali Hashemi Rafsanjani, 62 percent to 37 percent, in a runoff for the presidency last Friday. Turnout was 60 percent, the government said.

AP reported the government's figures as if they were true, even though there was a boycott of the election (photographs taken throughout the day showed polling places in urban areas virtually empty), and Rafsanjani claimed massive ballot box stuffing.

The blatant manipulation of an already sham election to install a hardline reactionary as president suggests that the Ayatollah Khameini, chief of the Guardian Council, no longer sees a need to put a "reformist" face on the regime.

That suggests to me that Iran is very close to -- or already possesses - a nuclear weapon and the means to deliver it.

The self-outing of former FBI Deputy Director Mark Felt as "Deep Throat" still leaves the most important questions about Watergate unanswered.

Bob Woodward has said Felt was Deep Throat, and he was seen visiting Felt at his Santa Rosa, California home in 1999. What is cloudy is how much of a role Felt played in the Watergate saga. We know of Deep Throat not from the reporting Woodward and Bernstein did for the Washington Post in 1972, but from their book, "All the President's Men."

But Woodward's literary agent, David Obst, has said Deep Throat was not mentioned in the original book proposal, and emerged only after Woodward had discussed movie possibilities with Robert Redford.

Is Deep Throat a Hollywood invention?

“I hate to say this to Iraqis, but I pray for chaos and civil war,” Nina from Toronto emailed the BBC. "It's the only way to stop Bush's policies and show that peace can never come through force. If Iraq gets peace, Bush gets credibility. It cannot be allowed to happen."

These are miserable days for Nina and others of her ilk. Two British newspapers report that the resistance in Iraq is crumbling. Sharif Ali bin al Hussein, a Sunni Muslim who heads Iraq's main monarchist movement, told the Financial Times that “many insurgents would lay down their arms and join the political process if they receive guarantees for their safety.”

Mr. Sharif Ali said the success of Iraq's elections “dealt the insurgents a demoralizing blow, prompting them to consider the need to enter the political process,” the Financial Times reported March 26th. The left-wing Guardian reported March 27th that "the Iraqi resistance has peaked and is turning on itself, according to recent intelligence reports received by Middle Eastern intelligence agencies."

Giuliana Sgrena does not lack a sense of self importance. The 56-year-old journalist for the Italian communist newspaper Il Manifesto thinks she knows so many deep dark secrets the U.S. military tried to shut her up permanently.

Sgrena went to Iraq to report on the heroic resistance to the American imperialists. Dutch journalist Harald Doornbos rode in the airplane to Baghdad with her. "Be careful not to get kidnapped," Doornbos warned Sgrena.

"You don't understand the situation," she responded, according to Doornbos' account in the Nederlands Dagblatt. "The Iraqis only kidnap American sympathizers. The enemies of the Americans have nothing to fear."

She got nabbed on her way back to her hotel. Sgrena told her captors she was on their side, and suggested they kidnap an American soldier instead. But the U.S. government doesn't pay ransoms.

It will be some months before the news media recognize it, and a few months more before they acknowledge it, but the war in Iraq is all but won. The situation is roughly analogous to the battle of Iwo Jima, which took place 60 years ago this month. It took 35 days before the island was declared secure, but the outcome was clear after day five, with the capture of Mt. Suribachi.

Proof of this was provided by Sen. Hillary Clinton. Iraq is functioning quite well, she said in a press conference in Baghdad Feb. 19. The recent rash of suicide attacks is a sign the insurgency is failing, she said.

When politicians like her start flocking to Iraq to bask in the light of its success, then you know that the corner has been turned.

What the liberal press won’t tell you is the astoundingly good news coming out of Iraq now. An example is a series of raids by the Iraqi police in Baghdad last week that netted at least 525 criminals. Since Saddam Hussein emptied his jails of some 70,000 hard-core criminals on the eve of the war, the Iraqi police have a long way to go to restore law and order. But the skill with which the raids were pulled off, and the courage displayed by the cops indicate they are off to a very good start.

But best of all is that foreign jihadi terrorists who have come to Iraq in response to al Qaeda's call are giving up and going home.