Quick Hits, International Edition

Let me take you on a trip around the world:

• Great news, girls of Afghanistan: Department for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice is back! Just when you thought it was safe to take off the burqa, you can now be arrested for laughing out loud or wearing nail polish! Smell that freedom!

• I was talking to a friend who recently spent time in Afghanistan, and he said that Kabul is slowly coming around to a more liberal and cosmopolitan city, but at the same time the attacks are more frequent throughout the country. Anecdotal, but take it for what it's worth:

• It took Lebanese leaders all of two seconds to dismiss Condi Rice's diplomatic mission as nothing but Israeli sock-puppetry. The big idea is apparently to gather a multinational force, but nobody has a clue who'll supply the troops for it (the US has specifically declined). And this baby imagery that Rice keeps using is disturbing:

"I have no doubt there are those who wish to strangle a democratic and sovereign Lebanon in its crib," Rice said. "We, of course, also urgently want to end the violence."

Digby claims that it's code language for the fundie Christians. I think that talk of dead babies during a conflict which is producing, you know, dead babies, kind of defeats the purpose. But maybe that's me. I guess that's why I can't see how an escalating and destabilizing conflict in the very part of the world we sought to spread with democracy butter and goodness represents great news for the President.

• This dates back from when fighting began, an eternity ago, but the whole idea of a reverse domino theory is pretty interesting, especially when it's coming from Gen. William Odom:

Recently on national television, Vice President Cheney warned that withdrawing U.S. forces from Iraq would prompt the collapse of governments in other countries in the region, namely Pakistan, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia, putting them in the hands of radical Islamist rulers.

Cheney has it exactly backwards. Our continued entanglement is what is destabilizing the region.

The escalating conflict between Israel and Hezbollah and Hamas could become a new Arab-Israeli War. And it is precisely our actions in Iraq that have opened the door for Iran and Syria to support Hezbollah and Hamas actions without much to fear from the U.S.

Read the whole thing, as they say.

• As if to prove the reverse domino theory, now Saudi Arabia is losing patience and threatening that continued Israeli attacks will cause a wider war. So much for the "moderate" Sunni faction cheering on the death of Muslims in their neighborhood. It was a stupid thought to begin with. Digby has more on this as well.

• Meanwhile, as additional troops are sent into Baghdad (watch the Sunni Triangle erupt on this news, forcing us to move troops back there), Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki apparently didn't get the memo that when you're in the US, you have to loudly proclaim unequivocal support for Israel, even though if you're the Iraqi Prime Minister you likely have to do exactly the opposite. He's in a bind.