Bush To Musharraf: Deal Or No Deal?

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The New York Times' front page had already revealed why, after speaking with some anonymous senior administration officials: the Bush administration has had just about enough of waiting around for Musharraf to deliver results in the way of hunting down al-Qaeda operatives in his country.

Cheney delivered a message to the General that Congress could cut off aid to Pakistan – the fifth-largest recipient of it – unless the general makes good on a number of commitments he made to President Bush about aggressively thwarting Al Qaeda.

Said one anonymous official: "He's made a number of assurances over the past few months, but the bottom line is that what they are doing now is not working. The message we're sending to him now is that the only thing that matters is results."

Sunny Iraq

How is Baghdad's new security plan working out? The Washington Post takes a look at the gradual influx of soldiers into the area – which has brought the total to 40,000 so far – to find that among U.S. troops, Iraqi soldiers and civilian Iraqis "the plan is hampered because security forces cannot identify, let alone apprehend, the elusive perpetrators of the violence."

"I don't know who I'm fighting most of the time," said Staff Sgt. Joseph Lopez, 39, a soldier based in the northern outskirts of the capital. "I don't know who is setting what IED."

But as one anonymous "senior U.S. defense official" told the paper: "This is the very start, and it's too early to make any determinations at all on whether it's working, not working, what effect it's had. We just don't have all the forces on the ground yet. People are looking for this big D-Day event and it's not going to happen."

In other Iraq news, yesterday's suicide bomb attack on a Baghdad university campus that killed at least 40 Iraqis, most of them female students, makes the front page of the Los Angeles Times and the top of the Wall Street Journal's newsbox.

No one immediately claimed responsibility for the attack, "but it was similar to others on mainly Shiite targets, such as crowded markets, which have appeared designed by Sunni insurgents to inflict maximum suffering," writes the Times. At least 70 students were killed in the university's main campus in January, when two car bombs exploded simultaneously.

Iran: Not Just Our 'Hot Button' Issue

As the U.S. continues to put pressure on Iran (which it views as "a rogue nation that arms militias in Iraq, wants to build a nuclear bomb and seeks Israel's destruction"), the Wall Street Journal notes that Iran is a "hot button domestic issue" for rest of the Arab world as well.

For many of those countries, Iran is viewed "as a non-Arab, and, for some, heretical power intent on expanding the clout of itself and fellow Shiites at the expense of the region's Sunni establishment." (The majority of the Arab world is Sunni while Persian Iran is mostly Shiite.)

While Shiites account for 15 percent or less of the world's Muslims, "in many Sunni eyes they hold outsize influence because of Shiite-ruled Iran, which now rivals and sometimes even eclipses Israel as an object of loathing."

Today In Obama

In today's edition of the New York Times' daily front-page series on the goings-on of Sen. Barack Obama's presidential campaign, the paper looks at the senator's position on the Iraq war: he opposes it.

While he hasn't been one of the party's most outspoken critics of the war until recently, he is now. And he is "unburdened by expressions of regret or decisions over whether to apologize for initially supporting the invasion," something that does plague some other candidates.

The Subtle Campaign

In Oscar-related news, the tale of director Martin Scorsese's long slog toward an Academy Award (which he finally got last night) makes the front page of the Los Angeles Times.

The irony of the win? The marketing machine for "The Departed" was apparently not geared toward generating an Oscar by highlighting its credentials, which "took a back seat to its commercial prospects."

In the past, Scorsese films like "Gangs of New York" and "The Aviator" had "collapsed under the weight of their relentlessly advertised importance." This year, Scorsese's film "may have prevailed Sunday night by never blowing its own horn too loudly."

Oh, the humanity.

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