Is al-Qaida a greater threat to U.S. interests in Iraq, or in the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region? Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman Joe Biden asked ambassador Ryan Crocker that question today, got an honest response, and set the Bush administration's talking points back quite a bit.

As Spencer Ackerman noted, Crocker was in an untenable position: "Give the correct answer and humiliate the Bush administration [or] give the administration's answer and look like a fool." He went with the prior.

DDay added, "The Ambassador to Iraq just admitted that Iraq is not the central front in the war on terror. He just admitted that the potential for Al Qaeda to gain a beachhead in Iraq should the United States withdraw is minuscule compared to the already-established beachhead along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. He admitted that the global fight against terror is currently misdirected."

It's probably not what the administration had hoped for. Call it a hunch.