I can't believe what I'm reading. In a rather ordinary and predictable piece, Arianna Huffington has accused John McCain of having only a "tenuous grasp on what is happening in the [Middle East] region." This because he declared that Iran is providing support to al Qaeda in Iraq (and, according to Petraeus, was behind yesterday's attack on the Green Zone). Fine, as the Center for American Progress's Brian Katulis told me the other day, the intelligence on this is in a "gray area," and a subject of debate within the intelligence community. Reasonable intelligence professionals can and do disagree. McCain subsequently released multiple statements that made the same point, if more diplomatically, than the statement he immediately clarified in Jordan. But in the midst of this attack, Arianna writes (and this is a screen capture, though I added the red circle using my Microsoft Paint skills):

Does running a blog for a bunch of Hollywood types not, in Arianna's words, "magically translate into foreign policy expertise and judgment"? Because Syria is most certainly a transit point and safe haven for al Qaeda fighters heading into Iraq. (As Petraeus says in an interview to which Huffington links in this piece, "The flow of foreign fighters and suicide bombers that help al Qaeda typically is through Syria.") Does Arianna not know the difference between Sunni and Shia, or Syria and Iran? Apparently not.