Those Are Some Great New Friends We Got.

I'm beginning to like our older friends more and more every day. From my column in tomorrow's Ottawa Citizen (online today):

There’s no hiding it now.

With U.S. President Barack Obama pulling out all the stops this week to convince Israel to hold its fire and give multilateral sanctions time to bring Iran’s Khomeinist regime to heel, Canada’s sanctions law is a complete shambles. It was designed that way, and if we don’t fix things fast the Americans are going to do it for us.

. . . Now that Ottawa has welcomed Tehran’s most generous benefactors and the world’s most notorious Iran sanctions-busters into the heart of Alberta’s oilpatch, that moment may arrive sooner than anyone expected.

And so on.

Meanwhile, I've got an analysis of the deadly koran-burn hullabaloo in Afghanistan, coming up in Saturday's Citizen. This week's tumults are a too-eerie replay of last year's madness. My Saturday piece is informed mainly by a telephone conversation late last night with the legendary Afghan spy chief Amrullah Saleh, someone I have never known to be wrong about anything that matters.

For what its worth, my take will leave the impression that the Obama White House isn't grossly incompetent on te Af-Pak front after all, but rather treacherous and sinister (and not the same 'old friends' I was referring to in the headline up there). Not that my opinion should count for much anyway but if I am wrong about that, then for starters, Joe Biden is the dumbest vice-president since Dan Quayle. I don't come out and say that in the Ottawa Citizen essay Saturday so I thought I'd just say it here.