BuzzMachine

As if Baghdad did not have enough troubles
: Now it has to contend with Lycraed bikers.

Salam Pax, bound
: Tom Coates got hold of an advance copy of Salam Pax’ book, set to be released in the U.S. in October, says Amazon (but on Sept. 5 in Britain, says Amazon there).

Coates says that in present tense, he found Salam’s weblog “essentially unreadable,” but he decrees that in hindsight, it is “an abiding – albeit small – artefact of life on the ground during the second war in Iraq.”

He also says — and I agree with this — that because Salam was a witness from there, not here, he helped us listen to new perspectives. The same can be said of Iranian weblogs, I’d say.

: I wonder whether Salam’s 15 minutes are long since over. I wonder whether his book will sell now, so many months after the war. The reason I wonder is that the buzz about him has subsided greatly recently, partly because he has had less to say online, partly because he is no longer the only witness there.

May caption contests abound
: Bush drops his dog.

Winning the peace
: Gene at Harry’s place (darn, that’s confusing) points us to John McCain’s Washington Post op-ed today criticizing our postwar progress in Iraq:

A recent visit to Iraq convinced me of several things. We were right to go to war to liberate Iraq. The Iraqi people welcome their liberation from tyranny. A free Iraq could transform the Middle East. And failure to make the necessary political and financial commitment to build the new Iraq could endanger American leadership in the world, empower our enemies and condemn Iraqis to renewed tyranny.

If we are to avoid a debate over who “lost” Iraq, we must act urgently to transform our military success into political victory….

We do not have time to spare. If we do not meaningfully improve services and security in Iraq over the next few months, it may be too late. We will risk an irreversible loss of Iraqi confidence and reinforce the efforts of extremists who seek our defeat and threaten Iraq’s democratic future….

Iraq must be important to us because it is so important to our enemies. That’s why they are opposing us so fiercely, and why we must win.

He is all the more correct, of course, after the terrorist bombings in Iraq, which I’ll bet come from al-Queda et al. As Tom Friedman said today:

o one can say with any certainty who was behind the bombings at the U.N. headquarters in Baghdad and the Shiite holy place in Najaf, but here is what you can say about them: They are incredibly sick and incredibly smart.

With one bomb at the U.N. office, they sent a warning to every country that is considering joining the U.S.-led coalition in Iraq: Even the U.N. is not safe here, so your troops surely won’t be. They also stoked some vicious finger-pointing within the Western alliance. And with the bomb Friday in Najaf, they may have threatened the most pleasant surprise about post-Saddam Hussein Iraq: the absence of bloodletting between the three main ethnic groups

Whodathunkit?
: Perry de Havilland escapes to Bratislava and reports:

I had always thought that Amsterdam and Zagreb were locked in mortal combat to see which had the most beautiful women per square kilometer but now I realize that those two august cities were just battling it out for second place. I do not think I have ever seen as many extraordinarily attractive young ladies in my life. Bratislava is, to use the technical term, seething with babes.

: A further report here.