My first reaction is one of support to hear that the Iraqi Governing Council has nominated Iraq's interim prime minister without the help (read: officious browbeating) of the United Nations. Some believe the man's exile status makes him tailor made for term limits; one report, via IP, tells of a flummoxed United Nations that was neither notified nor consulted for the choice. Even the State Department is treading carefully. From what we know of the United Nations' internal bureaucracy, some of its Security Council's member countries and the very official charged with staffing Iraq's transitional authority, any selection they don't like is probably a good one.

The IGC's man is Iyad Allawi, a Shiite: western-educated neurologist, exile, sworn opponent of Saddam Hussein's regime, colleague of the British and our own CIA and State Department. He worked prominently for the October 2003 International Donors Conference in Spain.

As long as the representatives of Iraq select a leader dedicated to a pluralist, free-market democracy, foreign preferences are irrelevant — which is why this could very well be a victory for the White House, intentional or not. Bush benefits from some constituents by assigning the United Nations to Iraq's transition, slapping the seal on a few events to at least keep internationalists quiet. France, Germany and Russia, meanwhile, have made quite a lot of noise for months demanding that Iraqi sovereignty trump all, most recently in the debate on authority over security and military forces: a noble enough conviction, if only our Euro-Asian rivals weren't instead looking to keep Iraq authoritarian and the United States in an untenable political position.

But they were on the record early for Iraqi supremacy, as was United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan. So what do they say now that Iraq, their candidate for sovereignty, has made a sovereign decision they didn't anticipate? With their bluff called and their envoy's job done for him, the United Nations offers brittle words of praise through spokesmen.

If Brahimi had nothing to do with Allawi's nomination, we may know why President Bush simply let him traipse in. Or perhaps we've seen just how clever our Iraqi friends can be.

Bold words:

I don't think anybody can deny that we would have liked it to have threatened force and we would have liked it to carry the term 'serious consequences will flow.' On the other hand, the coalition is together. I mean the fact is there is a unanimous statement by the Security Council and the United Nations that there has to be immediate, unrestricted, unconditional access to the sites. That's very strong language. And it also references the underlying resolution on which the use of force is based. So clearly the allies may not like it, and I think that's our great concern – where's the backbone of Russia, where's the backbone of France, where are they in expressing their condemnation of such clearly illegal activity? But in a sense, they're now climbing into a box and they will have enormous difficulty not following up on this if there is not compliance by Iraq.

John Kerry, November 12, 1997, rushing his way to war. I wanted to take the Democratic presidential candidate's "Me, Too" four-star plan for Iraq point by point but the man's inconsistencies are so glaring, closer examination seems like overkill. He spins like a top, coming up whichever way suits the moment. (Huh? Rebuild the military you've spent your career defunding, senator?) Clumsy transparency notwithstanding, the senator's statement deserves scrutiny — though examining them formally versus Googling for five minutes to find two completely contradictory statements is still under internal debate.

Last week Omar showed us some photographs of private commercial and public reconstruction in Baghdad. Ays, filled with the good spirits of a free man and a few more dinars in his pocket, fixed his own house up.

Busy. If you're a regular (the Few, the Compulsive) and need uBlog, read one of my essays. Or if you prefer light material, hit entries from Only in Japan. Or write me — speed-reading only takes a second.

I'll be blogging some this evening and through the weekend but before I do anything else, best wishes for the Memorial Day weekend. Attend your city's parade and stay for the service — it's the least each one of us can do to honor our country's fallen.

Blackfive's associate Chrenkoff has news on reconstruction and normalization in Iraq so abundant that it can't be called a roundup. Call it Volume II.

Struggling beneath headlines of political and civil uncertainty are signs of Iraq's normalization:

Iraq plans to spend 300 million dollars on planes and hopes European giant Airbus will come up with a new offer within two weeks, more than a decade after a proposed deal was frozen, the interim transport minister said.

"We have a budget of 300 million dollars to lease or buy aircraft from Airbus and Boeing," Behnam Polis told AFP -- a budget that he hopes will kickstart Iraq's grounded national airline. He said he had discussed the stalled deal with Airbus officials during a visit to Britain last week, but that officials in Paris had been unable to see him.

"We discussed everything. We want to cooperate with Airbus and I am expecting them to give us a proposal in two weeks," Polis said.

Engineering News Record is reporting the introduction of a web-based cartographical-geographical database to help coordinate reconstruction; and while the past two months have been difficult for the harvesting of the Iraqi people's greatest natural resource, rebuilding continues.

One by one, they all fall down:

An aide of radical Shiite Muslim cleric Moqtada al-Sadr was arrested today by U.S. troops in Iraq, Agence France-Presse reported, citing Fuad al-Turfi, a spokesman for al-Sadr's office.

He was captured in Najaf — where, contrary to the wishful thinking of the press, Shiite leaders are blaming al-Sadr for damage to religious sites. Meanwhile, American troops turn to restoring Karbala to relative normalcy while Khomeinist thugs continue to lose tens of their numbers in Kufa. What's left for Moqtada al-Sadr? Mercy from the Iraqi people, little more. It occurred to me the other day that, lacking any helpful definition from the press, many Americans may not have a clear understanding of how extremist and unpopular al-Sadr and his gangs are. Imagine David Duke summoning and arming every Klansmen he could find within a few hundred miles and trying to take Baton Rouge in the name of brute force dolled up as piety: as politically incomprehensible and personally repugnant as the Iranian lackey who might receive a paragraph or two, under the subchapter "Iran's Subversion Fails," in Iraqi history books.

BETTER THAN IT'S REPORTED, AS USUAL: With a Baghdad leader, Donna Hughes talked Iraq over lunch.

POOR CHOICE OF TIMING, OPPONENTS: More of al-Sadr's louts fall in Najaf. Many more.

I still haven't had a chance to take the president's speech line-by-line — of course the sound bites indicate a helpful repetition of the same principles the Bush administration has retained for over a year, so I'm satisfied. Should you be unfamiliar with what makes a good policy announcement, watching the reaction of Democrats the morning after is a helpful metric: if they're left to quibble over details and plead for the line items they wanted, the speech succeeded. No longer a loyal opposition, the Democrats are somewhere between backbencher contrarians and a peanut gallery; that is, either uncooperative or irrelevant. But their behavior speaks volumes.

New Jersey Senator John Corzine was interviewed by Fox's E.D. Hill this morning; he didn't care for the president's speech. Why? Mostly because Bush failed to reach out to foreign leaders, firmly coupled to Saddam's gravy train, who opposed the Iraqi dictator's ouster. Presidential candidate John Kerry offered the same complaints, as if the scores of nations already involved — referred to by the Massachusetts senator as a "fraudulent coalition," not exactly the wisest salutation to international relations — weren't enough. Overall, little more than political hunts and pecks from across the aisle — and if they'd smelled blood, Corzine and Kerry would be speaking differently.

Glenn Reynolds notes a Middle East Media Research Institute newsflash, detailed in a Newsmax release:

Taped recorded interrogation sessions of Saddam Hussein reportedly show the captured Iraqi dictator naming specific leaders in the Middle East and other parts of the world as recipients of bribes paid by Baghdad, an Iraqi press report claimed this week.

"Diplomatic sources confirm the existence of 150 recordings of Saddam's confessions which include information on bribes paid to heads of state and political leaders in Arab and foreign states," the Iraqi newspaper Al- Mu'tamar reported on Thursday, according the Middle Eastern Media Research Institute.

Damning if true.

While more than a few news agencies — including Fox — reported yesterday afternoon that both Allied troops and al-Sadr's gangs had "left Karbala," as if Sheriff shot into the air to disperse the ornery cowpokes, Craig Brett found reports that now seem to be prevailing, those of an Allied victory:

U.S. commanders said early today that insurgents loyal to a rebel cleric appeared to have given up control of central Karbala, where they had been shielding themselves at two shrines. ...A large overnight raid met no resistance coming from a group of buildings where insurgents had been firing at U.S. tanks with rocket-propelled grenades. Civilians were seen returning to homes in central Karbala that they had abandoned during the fierce fighting. And Saturday afternoon, tribal sheiks approached U.S. commanders offering to persuade the militia, the Mahdi Army, to lay down its arms and leave the city.

During the raid early today, Iraqis at a nearby teahouse told soldiers that busloads of fighters from Fallujah who came to town last week left Friday. The fighters fled after concluding that they could not stand up to U.S. tanks, these Iraqis said.

Emphasis mine. Muscle bused in from Fallujah? That city is Sunni, and reports indicated Syrian and other foreign fighters among the insurgents there. What of the sempiternal divide between Sunni and Shiite? For the caliber of lowlife with which Allied forces have battled since April, simply the joy of carnage and the prospect of dominating the innocent and weak could be enough for ecumenism — not that these killers' dirty work conforms to any religion in the first place. It's just another reminder that neither piety nor ideal has anything to do with the attempt to undo Iraq's democratization — or the superficially complex nature of Near East authoritarianism. A thug who can wax eloquent is still a thug.

For Muqtada al-Sadr, whose insurrection was judged a long shot over a month ago, the end may be near:

U.S. commanders said they would press the Iraqi police to do patrols in the old city this week. Whether and how the police get attacked will determine how much is left of the insurgency, the commanders said. If the insurgency in Karbala has truly dissipated, then al-Sadr's six-week insurrection has suffered badly.

And if it has truly dissipated, al-Sadr's forces are left with Najaf and Kufa but publicly unwanted in first place and under withering Allied attacks in the second.

FROM THE IRAQIS: Zeyad has posted a statement from leading Shiite clerics in Karbala and Najaf chastising Muqtada al-Sadr and repudiating his supporters in Iraq and beyond.

Wretchard has been busy extrapolating from reports on the Allied attack on what they describe as a terrorist safehouse along the Syrian-Iraqi border. Locals claim a wedding had been hit. The military has disclosed findings at the scene:

Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, coalition deputy chief of staff for operations, showed slides of military binoculars, guns and battery packs that could be used to trigger roadside bombs found by U.S. troops at the site. He said "terrorist manuals," telephone numbers for Afghanistan and foreign passports, including one Sudanese, were also recovered there.

...Associated Press Television News footage taken at the site Thursday showed broken musical instruments, pieces of bloodied women's hair and the bodies of children. Kimmitt said no musical instruments were found, however.

..."There was no evidence of a wedding: no decorations, no musical instruments found, no large quantities of food or leftover servings one would expect from a wedding celebration," he said. "No gifts. The men were almost all of military age."

A Guardian story is Belmont Club's main source, leading to Wretchard's latest postulation that a raid was executed and civilian casualties occurred. For insight into that possibility, Wretchard offers an account from the April 9th attack on a convoy in Baghdad that led to Thomas Hamill's brief captivity. As in Fallujah, the enemy used civilian shields a month ago to frightening effect — and this may have been the case at the tiny border town.

In a report from the Defense Department, however, Kimmitt is quoted as further disputing accusations, including that of children among the dead. That directly contradicts one of the Guardian's witnesses, who claims that, after two of her three sons were cut down by an exploding shell while the four fled, she left her two dead sons where they lay — only after American soldiers "kicked [her]," soldiers who would have certainly viewed the bodies. And Kimmitt was adamant that a video distributed to the media did not depict a location consistent with the target site.

As Wretchard said, "a plethora of detail" in the accusation. But is it true?

MORE: Belmont Club has set the military's press release against the Guardian, catching one particular detail I'd missed. The targeted building, according to Kimmitt, was "somewhat of a dormitory," with "over 300 sets of bedding gear in it." Not only that but "a tremendous number of pre-packaged clothing" that Kimmitt explains was intended to help assimilate foreign fighters converging on this waypoint for terrorist work inside Iraq. Not your average reception hall.

EVEN MORE: You know, I thought initial claims were that celebratory firing into the air drew response from the Allies. Michael Moynihan found more flaws in the accusations.