When you negotiate, you need someone to negotiate with. The insurgency has no coherence, we don't understand it, and whenever we try to reach out to Sunnis, other insurgents tend to blow them up or shoot them. This situation will be worsened if it is obvious that we plan to withdraw and need their help. We will be negotiating from a position of weakness, and this will embolden and legitimate the extremists.

Negotiations are most successful when made from a position of strength. We have little to offer the Sunnis, but the Shiites need us badly. Can they combat the insurgency without us? We should negotiate with them. Their constitution tramples on Sunni needs, like a centralized government that Sunnis require to ensure they will have a share of oil revenue. Tell the Shiites we're packing up, but we might stay a while longer if they can make the Sunnis happy.

They'll have a better chance to find the right people and cut the right deals than we will, and no one needs to know the source of their newfound concern for their Sunni countrymen.

Jesse Jackson used to run around the world negotiating with people when presidents couldn't or wouldn't. I don't really want Jesse Jackson to mediate--God forbid--but I think Conason is right that the Iraqi government (AKA the Shiites) needs to negotiate with the insurgency (AKA the Sunnis). Here's the problem: how do we get Bush to make them? It would be easy to make the Shiites negotiate. He'd just have to cut off their money or threaten an immediate withdrawal. The problem is motivating Bush to do it. Evidence says he's an idiot and a zealot trapped in a bubble. I don't think you pop his bubble by demanding negotiations. I think it is just a power issue: we need to keep hurting him any way we can until he can't take it any more, and then he'll find the right buttons to push to get us out himself. So the issue isn't really what brilliant plan Democrats can think of to get us out, or even whether we can get Democratic unity on a brilliant plan. We just need to keep challenging Bush's non-stop desperate lies until he cracks.

I agree with Keillor. Writing is not any harder than building a house. What's really hard is thinking you should be a writer and trying to write and failing, but not letting go of the dream. Not that that's happened to me, or anything, you know. But I've heard of that kind of thing.

I've never heard of anyone who felt he should be a carpenter even though he could never finish a house, so he just kept trying to do it, and every time he started a house he felt maybe he wasn't really building the right kind of house, and then he quit and then felt ashamed for a while so he tried again. Writing is special that way.

But consider that bicycling commuters would probably be exercising in some other way if not commuting, and gaining the longevity anyway. So the longevity is a constant and the foregone emissions a gain.

Hirsch got paid for this article. It comes at a time when Lieberman is likely to be particularly sensitive to criticism. Lieberman has made clear that he does not change course easily, and does not regret his past choices.

So isn't Hirsch's piece a self-interested, humiliating rebuke unlikely to change Lieberman's behavior? So doesn't that mean Hirsch is in trouble?

Since I am not observant in the religious sense, I suppose I can rebuke both Hirsch and Lieberman with impunity. Call it a perk of being an infidel!

Laser organized his essay loosely around the stages of grief. He didn't label the last stage, but he may have reached it in his final sentence, when he claims that as the writer, he can't know if his book is really any good. We all know this is true when we are starting out, but he is facing the surprise that even after being published, he still doesn't know. Extending his idea, suppose his book was wildly successful: would he know then? No, because the history of literature is full of successful writers who were soon dismissed or forgotten.

As writers, we can't compute the value of our work with any sort of totalizing metric. When we finish the work and send it on its way, it is no longer ours. All we have is the blank page before us.

The last stage of grief is acceptance.

Save yourselves the trouble of trying to figure out Jameson, because Cary Tennis didn't listen to the guy who asked for his advice. The advice-seeker specifically said he had no problem with his co-workers who are under 29, it was just Gen-Xers he had a problem with. But Tennis refers the guy to post-modern theory to explain what he claims must be the consequence of a wholesale abandoment of modernism. How is Jameson's weighty tome relevent? The ramifications of the post-modern age, with its world-shaking decenterings of self, reality, time and space, couldn't possibly fall only on those under 40 but over 28, could it? If it does, let me be the first to suggest we just ignore it, rather than wading through the tedious po-mo writing that purports to explain it.

Perhaps he should have said, " Surviving Marines and Iraqis from the two units continue to live, eat and fight alongside and with each other."