Morning Brief 3/30

Jill Carroll is free! Video available here. John Podhoretz is not a fan of the headscarf.

Iran 

The Security Council gives Iran 30 days to get back to the table. But, as the NYT notes, the final version was weakened to get consensus. Russia and China didn’t want to say that an Iranian drive to produce nukes would be a “threat to international peace and security.”

Steve Clemmons quotes from a Larry Wilkerson e-mail about Iran. The familiar theme: good policy being ruined by a neocon “cabal.”

At NRO, Anne Bayefsky is ticked about this “unserious nonbinding nonsense.” David Enders hangs out with pro-democracy Kurds in Iran over at MoJo. 

Israel’s Election 

In a Haaretz op-ed Aluf Benn says Olmert will have to break promises, because: “[T]here is no chance of the White House and Yesha Council agreeing on the same withdrawal line. And so Olmert, like Sharon before him, will reach the point where he will have to decide between Bush and settler leader Ze’ev Hever (Zambish).“

At Slate, Shmuel Rosner gets into how the election “shattered the entire structure of Israeli political life as we knew it.”

Iraq 

Al-Jaafari tells Bush to butt out. 

Richard Cohen now thinks Bush wanted war: “Whatever Bush’s specific reason or reasons, the one thing that’s so far missing from the record is proof of him looking for a genuine way out of war instead of looking for a way to get it started. Bush wanted war. He just didn’t want the war he got.”

Tidbits: Uganda’s war toll may be “worse than Iraq.” Democrats release a national security platform. Bush arrives in Cancun for a three-country meeting. South Korea is angry about Japanese textbooks again. The Afghan Christian flies to Italy. In upcoming meetings, India will look to play catch-up in the energy race. The Middle East needs about $1 trillion for 100 million news jobs.