The Rice-Cheney War

Is it intensifying? Hirsh and Hosenball provide some reporting. Michael Stickings summarizes:

In a nutshell, as one might expect: She wants diplomacy; he wants war. (Although one could argue, and should, that they’ve both had a key hand in the unmitigated disaster that has been Bush’s foreign policy. She was just as much, or almost as much, a warmongerer on Iraq, for example. Needless to say, though, she’s much, much more preferable than he.) But read the whole thing.

Scott Horton worries:

There are now three American hostages in Iranian hands, and five Iranian hostages seized by the Americans in Arbil. Cheney’s decision to block Rice’s proposal to release the Iranians in Arbil was a conscious provocation targeting Tehran, and the Ahmedinejad government has responded just the way Cheney wants: in kind. The hands of this crisis are again approaching midnight, and Rice’s mastery of the strategic playing field in Washington is anything but clear.

The Next Hurrah ponders the internecine strife here.