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The political blogosphere roared back to life Monday after a week of relative quiet, with some rampant speculation about whether Barack Obama plans to pick Joe Biden, the Delaware senator, as his running mate.

Adding fuel to the fire, Adam Nagourney and Jeff Zeleny of the New York Times report this evening that Obama has "all but settled on" his veep choice, and that it's most likely either Biden, Indiana Sen. Evan Bayh, or Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine.

Biden, who traveled to Georgia this weekend at the behest of President Mikheil Saakashvili, would be seen by many as a solid choice for Obama on foreign policy. He hasn't hesitated to launch sharp attacks on John McCain, and he has a record of making prescient comments about Pakistan, among other issues.

Still, I wonder what people will say about Biden's ideas about Iraq, and what kind of influence they would have on Obama's position. The Biden-Gelb plan, described here by George Packer, took a lot of heat from respected Iraq experts such as Joost Hilterman of the International Crisis Group and was widely panned by Iraqis. It was rejected by the Iraq Study Group and the Bush administration as unworkable. Has Biden talked about it lately? Given how much the surge exceeded everyone's expectations, I doubt it. But I'm curious to know what the senator thinks about it these days.

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The departure of 2,000 Georgian troops from Iraq -- the third largest presence after the U.S. and Great Britain -- obviously poses a challenge for what's left of the coalition of the willing. Most of the Georgians were posted to a series of anti-smuggling checkpoints in Wassit Province, near the Iranian border.

While U.S. commanders described Georgia as an "important and valued partner," the locals don't seem to broken up about their departure:

I do not think that the departure of the Georgian soldiers will have an impact on the situation in the province," [Wassit Governor] Latif Hamad said in a telephone interview. "There were always language and poor performance problems. Our security forces can fill any vacuum."

Local Iraqis were happy to see the Georgians leave. They complained that the Georgians, most of who could speak little English or Arabic, were rude and disrespectful.

"They did not try to give us services. Instead, they were a source of annoyance by delaying us at their checkpoints and mocking the simple locals," said Salim Ali, a 45-year-old farmer.

Georgia mistakenly anticipated that its help in Iraq would compel the U.S. to intervene during its time of crisis. I wouldn't be surprised if some other coalition partners started dropping out soon.

The Hoover Institution, the conservative-leaning think tank located at my alma mater Stanford University, is finding itself in a bit of hot water over some 7 million pages of Baath Party records that both Iraqi and American archivists now say were taken by an "act of pillage" and must be returned to Iraq immediately.

The documents came to Stanford as part of a deal with the Iraq Memory Foundation, a nonprofit group run by Kanan Makiya (above left) -- an Iraqi exile known for his outspoken advocacy for the war in Iraq. Makiya, who stumbled upon the documents during the invasion's nascent period in 2003, maintains the information they contain is too dangerous for general view because they explicitly mention individuals who collaborated with the Hussein dictatorship:

This was not stuff for every Tom, Dick, and Harry to have access to," he said in a recent interview. "This stuff was dynamite."

While the last thing Iraq needs is more dynamite, this episode is yet another example of the United States and a certain cabal of Iraqi exiles thinking they know what's best for the country. As long as there's a reasonable enough guarantee that the documents will be safe, I agree with Jon Weiner's op-ed in Friday's Los Angeles Times: "It's up to the Iraqis to decide what to do with them."

Iraqis are painting the security walls in Sadr City:

Wathiq Khuzaie/Getty Images

When I spoke with McClatchy's Nancy Youssef a few weeks back, she couldn't stress enough how important Iraq's provincial elections were to the politics and stability of the country. A delay in the elections, she said, "fundamentally changes Iraq, because everybody was electioneering and politicking toward this fall, and suddenly that disappeared."

Now, anonymous blogger Dr. iRack ("a Washington, DC-based analyst who works on Iraq issues") weighs in with some specific concerns based on his recent travels in Mesopotamia. "The failure to pass the law, and the significant delay in elections it seems likely to produce, will put huge strains on the fragile calm that has descended across Iraq," he writes.

He lists four main reasons:

1. Sunnis in the "Awakening" movement are "pissed" about not getting a seat at the table and access to patronage
2. The Mosul area is still a tinderbox and Sunnis feel shut out of the political process. "Sunni Arabs in Mosul have not turned en masse against [al Qaeda in Iraq] because AQI has been careful not to target Sunni civilians and have instead focused most of their attacks on Kurdish security forces," he says.
3. Provincial elections in the center and south or Iraq will "put the nail in JAM's coffin," referring to radical Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army militia
4. Finally, Kirkuk is still up in the air, and communal tensions are rising there in part because of disputes over the new law

Violence in Iraq might be declining, but a recently, there's been a troubling rise in the number of female suicide bombers in the country. Women account for 23 of the country's suicide bomb attacks so far this year, including two last week in Baghdad and Kirkuk that left nearly 60 people dead and 250 wounded.

One anonymous Iraqi woman explained the motivation:

The Americans took my husband. They destroyed our home. We've got nothing. We're living by the grace of God. We will not stay silent, and everything, including bombings, we can do in response."

Iraqi insurgent groups have taken advantage of this grief, benefitting from some tactical advantages women bombers offer: They can easily hide explosives under their robes, and cultural protocol means male guards are less likely to fully frisk them. Cultural norms also mean women are forced more easily into the act by a male recruiter or even a family member.

One woman recently entered police station seeking protection from a close relative -- an al Qaeda member -- who had tried forcing her into an explosive belt. She's now in protective custody, but too many other grieving and victimized women -- many of whom have lost not only a spouse, but their source of income -- are out there, ready to destroy themselves and others in the name of justice and revenge. Given the Iraqi government's budget windfall, there's no excuse for not helping them.

Boston Red Sox slugger Manny Ramirez apparently has great faith in the success of the surge. Look at this press conference brilliance:

I don't care where I play. I can even play in Iraq if need be. My job is to play baseball."

If this latest from Ramirez comes as even a remote surprise to you, you're probably not a baseball fan.

KHALED DESOUKI/AFP/Getty Images

Appearing today at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, former Iraqi Prime Minister and serving parliamentarian Ayad Allawi stressed that the security gains of the "surge" are only temporary. The surge "did succeed from a military point of view," he told a small group of reporters before the event, but he emphasized that its gains could evaporate unless political reconciliation follows. "The first issue is reconciliation," he said in the public session. But sitting down with his "friends" such as current President Jalal Talabani won’t do the trick. "We need to sit with those people who have been disenfranchised," he said. "Except for terrorists."

More than 4 million Iraqis remain internal and external refugees, he repeated several times, and they need "security and stability" above all before they can return. Allawi isn't impressed by the current Iraqi army and police, which he views as sectarian. "Sectarianism is worse than terrorism," he said during the public question-and-answer session. "The militias are still roaming the streets in Iraq… In Basra, there are 13 kinds of militias, and only one was attacked."

Asked in multiple ways whether he agreed with Sen. Barack Obama's call for a 16-month timeline for the withdrawal of U.S. troops, the former prime minister called for any such timetable to be linked to conditions. "I don't know how realistic 2010 is," he said. But when asked what his conditions would be, Allawi said that they go beyond internal factors, such as political reconciliation and nonsectarian institutions, to external issues. "There are regional powers who do not believe in reconciliation," he warned in the press meeting. Iraq needs to protect itself, but its military is not ready. "We haven't seen the Iraqi security forces yet in action," he said.

He blamed himself in part for Iraq's ongoing troubles. "We -- all of us -- we have failed in creating what we promised the Iraqi people."

DAVID FURST/AFP/Getty Images

U.S. Army soldiers carry shotguns as they walk along a corridor separating what they deem to be the most extreme and dangerous detainees held inside the Camp Bucca detention center located near the Kuwait-Iraq border on May 19, 2008.

KHALED DESOUKI/AFP/Getty Images

Assuming all goes as planned, I'm going to get a chance to speak with Former Iraqi Prime Minister Ayad Allawi tomorrow. Given the format of the event, I'm only likely to get to ask just one or two questions. So, dear readers, what should I ask him? Send me your thoughts and I'll ask the best question you all come up with (And no, "Why is your Web site so bad?" does not make the cut).

Also, if you have questions for Yasheng Huang, the author of our July/August cover story on what India can teach China about economic growth, send them to letters@ForeignPolicy.com by July 25 (tomorrow), and we’ll post his answers on July 30 at: ForeignPolicy.com/extras/huang.

It's official. Iraq won't be competing in Beijing:

The International Olympic Committee says Iraq will not compete at Beijing because of Iraqi government interference.

The IOC suspended Iraq's national Olympic committee in June after Baghdad dismissed elected officials and installed its own people who are not recognized by the IOC.

William Thomas Cain/Getty Images

John McCain has been tying himself in knots lately trying to explain what he meant when he told CBS's Katie Couric that the "Anbar Awakening" was made possible by the "surge." Chronologically speaking, that's dubious -- but McCain later said that he conceives of the surge as the broader counterinsurgency strategy that the U.S. military began putting in place in the fall of 2006, not solely in terms of the five additional combat brigades that began arriving in the spring of 2007.

McCain's getting lots of criticism for his chronology, but his broader point is not obviously wrong. Gen. David Petraeus testifed earlier this year that the Awakening "started before the surge, but then was very much enabled by the surge." And let's remember that General Petraeus was put in charge in part because he advocated more troops, whereas Generals Casey and Abizaid objected while the change in strategy was under consideration.

That said, it's still highly debateable whether injecting more troops was the decisive factor, and moreover, the additional troops mostly went to Baghdad, not Anbar province (though 4,000 went there). The "surge" announced in January 2007 was really Petraeus's Baghdad security plan, and the key was a shift toward protecting Iraqis and working with local forces rather than strictly going after the bad guys.

One thing nobody is talking about, however, is Basra. Nancy Youssef of McClatchy explains the Iraqi view of the surge:

When you ask the Iraqis here, they say that the added U.S. forces were a part of it, but what really turned things around was the Sahwa movement [of former insurgents switching sides], Moqtada's ceasefires, and in their minds, Basra. Basra was the first Iraqi-led success story, and it really changed the momentum. So, the Iraqis that we talk to see it as a complex equation with the U.S. troop surge as just one factor. And frankly, the situation on the ground suggests that they're right, because the surge troops have left, and the security situation remains better.

Eli Lake reports:

The matter [of endorsing Barack Obama's withdrawal timeline] was taken up at a meeting of Iraq's National Security Council on Thursday on the recommendation of Mr. Maliki, who had been advised by the Iraqi politician Ahmad Chalabi to express public support for the Obama withdrawal plan. Asked for a comment yesterday, Mr. Chalabi, an old hand at working the American political process to the advantage of Iraq, conveyed a statement via his Washington representative, Francis Brooke: "This is an honor I will not claim and a rumor I will not deny."

Here's a photograph from British Prime Minister Gordon Brown's recent trip to Iraq. What do you think was on his mind? Who do you think he wants to see on the receiving end?

Daniel Berehulak/Getty Images

UPDATE: And the winner is... nycbrian, with "do you think i can mow my backbenchers into submission w/ this?"

In the area of security cooperation, the President and the Prime Minister agreed that improving conditions should allow for the agreements now under negotiation to include a general time horizon for meeting aspirational goals -- such as the resumption of Iraqi security control in their cities and provinces and the further reduction of U.S. combat forces from Iraq.

—Statement by the Press Secretary on Iraq, WhiteHouse.gov

More here from the New York Times.

Any day now, Barack Obama will make his second trip to Iraq and his first visit to Afghanistan, hoping to bolster his foreign-policy credentials and disarm his critics. About time, the McCain campaign says. Others speculate on who Obama ought to see, and what he'll likely be told. But I'm not sure how much it matters. Do trips to war zones really affect lawmakers' perspectives on the conflict?

McCain seems to think so, having suggested that his opponent will change positions on Iraq after meeting with General Petraeus and seeing the surge's success firsthand. But when surveying members of the Senate last summer for The Hill on who has and has not visited Iraq, I noticed that large numbers from both sides of the aisle have made trips, yet many remain steadfast in their support for or opposition to the war. Republicans, for example, often return calling for more time for the troops to secure military gains. Democrats, on the other hand, tend to argue for withdrawal in order to pressure the Iraqi government toward a political solution.

Rep. Jim Marshall noted this tendency in today's Washington Post:

If somebody has been a pessimist about this all along, would their pessimism evaporate? Not necessarily. . . . I'm trying to recall an epiphany," Marshall said. "I can't.

Part of the reason is that most trips are strictly limited to two days, and largely occupied by briefings from military leaders and diplomatic officials. It is often difficult for the junkets to give a true sense of how things are going on the ground, and drawing definite conclusions can backfire politically (recall McCain's embarassing assertion that his heavily guarded trip to a Baghdad market last year was a sign of security and stability).

That said, the trips are still an important piece of the political puzzle. They are more than Sen. Jim Webb's "dog and pony shows" characterization (note that two other would-be Obama veeps, Chuck Hagel and Jack Reed, are accompanying the candidate, not Webb). And while trips alone won't change a candidate's perspective, they can add some much needed credibility to his argument. When Obama returns from his trip and calls anew for withdrawing troops to focus on Afghanistan and Pakistan, he'll be able to back it up, having seen things for himself on the ground.

UPDATE: John McCain says Obama will visit Iraq this weekend.

SABAH ARAR/AFP/Getty Images

Baghdad's streets are looking a bit brighter, thanks to a little help from solar power. The Iraqi government has started installing solar-powered streetlamps to improve nighttime security in the country's capital, where an insufficient grid system has long failed to provide enough night light. Plans call for 5,000 of the sun-powered streetlights to be installed in Baghdad, as well as 1,000 more for each of Iraq's 18 provinces.

Iraqi officials are pumped about the new lights, which have already allowed some businesses to stay open later. Aziz Shimari, a spokesman for the Electricity Ministry, said that more people "are likely to go out at night."

But its unlikely that a few thousand solar-powered streetlamps, which still often rely on gas-powered generators to supplement their less-than-bright light, are going to shore up major security problems. Nor do they get to the heart of the country's power woes. Since Saddam's fall, Iraqis have been snatching up electronics and appliances, putting pressure on the nation's already shaky grid system. Demand still outstrips supply, and many Iraqis end up paying a pretty penny for generators and other power alternatives.

The U.S. government is pitching in with almost $5 billion to help the country's electricity infrastructure, even putting up bullet-proof lights around Baghdad, Fallujah, and other major cities. But the United States refused to undertake bigger solar-powered projects because of their prohibitive cost.

As for the new solar-powered lights, they might alleviate a little stress on the national grid -- but not without bringing their own share of problems. Desert dust and grime prevent the photovoltaic solar cells from functioning properly, and extreme heat reduces a panel's lifespan. Solar-power might be a start, but Iraq will need total energy security before it can get the real street security it needs. That means a bigger effort to improve the national grid system, and not just piecemeal -- albeit environmentally-friendly -- efforts.

Mario Tama/Getty Images

Last week, the White House released a report card on Iraq, declaring that the Iraqi government had made "satisfactory" progress on 15 of 18 benchmarks. Democrats scoffed at the supposed "false standard" used by the Bush team, but both sides may be looking at the wrong indicators.

On Thursday, The Times of London reported on the progress made in the southern port city of Basra, which the Iraqi government liberated in March after British troops had failed to stem the growing tide of fundamentalist Islamic militia rule:

Three months ago, standing on the main street of Jumhuriya, a former militia stronghold in Basra, would have been a death sentence for a Westerner. Nowadays, with a bit of asking around, you can actually buy a beer here, even if you cannot drink it in public.

So, what does everyone think? Should we expect congressional testimony from General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker about the fledgling microbrewing industry in Sadr City? Will Barack Obama crack open a cold one during his upcoming visit to the Middle East?

Wathiq Khuzaie /Getty Images

U.S. officials aren't impressed with the Iraqi government's recent noises about setting a hard date or a timeline for the withdrawal of American forces. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Tuesday that a drawdown "depends on the situation on the ground," and State Gonzalo Gallegos stressed that any decision to withdraw would be "conditions-based."

The Bush administration seems pretty confident it can convince the Iraqis to back down. After all, the position is logical: Why withdraw if Iraqi security forces aren't ready to assume control? Alternatively, U.S. officials may be privately telling the Iraqis that the requisite conditions will be met soon or by a certain date, so there's no need to set a public timetable.

The trouble with such a strategy would be that it doesn't help Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki very much in fending off the political threat from the radical Moqtada al-Sadr ahead of this fall's provincial elections. As Matt Yglesias explains, one way to work around the contested legal status of U.S. troops in the country, a major stumbling block in the current negotiations, is to tell Iraqis that the troops won't be there much longer anyway. "That should buy the United States an added degree of public support within which to conduct some additional operations and leave the best possible situation behind," he writes.

I doubt it will be so easy to avoid the thorny legal status issue, though, because there are still going to be tens of thousands of troops and contractors in the country for years to come. Even Barack Obama wants to leave some kind of residual force behind. Under what and whose rules will it operate?

KHALID MOHAMMED/AFP/Getty Images

Iraqi soldiers stand guard over rows of rifles seized by Iraqi security forces during recent operations in the Shiite enclave of Sadr City, June 18, 2008.