President Bush’s speech on Wednesday night only stoked such speculation. Bush paid lip service to the Iraq Study Group report, but cast aside its advice that he negotiate with Iran and Syria. Instead, he rattled sabers at Iran with some ferocity, accusing it of arming insurgents in Iraq and threatening it with international isolation. He attempted to rally his Sunni Arab allies, such as Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia, in this effort. He said, “We will disrupt the attacks on our forces. We’ll interrupt the flow of support from Iran and Syria. And we will seek out and destroy the networks providing advanced weaponry and training to our enemies in Iraq.” He announced that he would position another aircraft-carrier battle group in the Persian Gulf and would deploy Patriot antimissile batteries.

Then Thursday came a U.S. raid on an Iranian consulate in the Iraqi Kurdish city of Irbil. By the end of the day, rumors of war with Iran had spread to normally cautious corners of the Internet. The Washington Note wondered aloud if Bush had issued an executive order to commence military action against Iran and Syria. Was the raid a deliberate provocation and the preface to war?

An eyewitness report briefly posted in Arabic to the Web site of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan reported that two U.S. helicopters hovered near the building for a quarter of an hour early Thursday morning, then dropped off several soldiers. They approached the consulate and used megaphones to demand that those within surrender. They then tossed stun grenades inside before attacking it and detaining five persons within, three of whom were Iranians. The U.S. soldiers confiscated computers and records from the building. According to the Associated Press, U.S. troops also hurried to the Irbil airport in hopes of detaining persons suspected of trying to flee the country.

The Iranian mission’s application to the Kurdistan Regional Government to be recognized as a consulate is still in process, but it would be sophistry to argue, as the U.S. has done, that its status as a diplomatic mission is questionable. American forces did, indeed, raid an Iranian government installation. Thursday’s events, however, are unlikely to be the immediate preface to wider action against Iran, since the operation appears to have been carefully targeted and limited in scope. It was also not the first action taken against Iranian targets inside Iraq. Last month, U.S. forces raided the compound of influential Shiite cleric Abdul Aziz al-Hakim and netted Iranian intelligence officers.

But if Bush were to escalate the regional conflict and try to involve Iran, the assault on the Iranian consulate in Irbil suggests the ways in which he would justify his actions. He and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice have begun speaking, without presenting any evidence, of Iranian aid to groups killing U.S. troops in Iraq — hence the reference to “networks” in his Wednesday speech. The difficulties faced by the U.S. military occupation of Iraq itself may well be made the pretext for aggressive action against Iran.

In escalating a confrontation with Iran, Bush is placating his friends in Sunni-dominated states. On Thursday, the Saudi-backed London daily Al-Hayat (“Life”) reported that Bush called Saudi King Abdullah to discuss security issues with him, and described the measures to be taken in Baghdad. Saudi officials have on several occasions expressed alarm about increasing Iranian influence over Iraq. Sunni Arab allies of the U.S. such as Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt have taken the lead in asking that Bush not withdraw precipitately from Iraq and not acquiesce in growing Iranian influence and power in the region. In return, the Bush administration is pressuring the kingdom to help rein in rebellious Iraqi Sunni Arabs.

Speaking in Provo, Utah, on Thursday, Saudi ambassador to Washington Prince Turki al-Faisal seemed to endorse Bush’s plan, saying, Saudi Arabia “has always maintained that since America came into Iraq uninvited, it should not leave uninvited … For America to pack up now and leave would be very detrimental and something that would be unacceptable to our part of the world.”

The anti-Iranian passages of Bush’s speech seem to have pleased Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak as well. Al-Sharq Al-Awsat (“the Middle East”), a pan-Arab London daily, reported that Mubarak warned on Thursday against a deep cleavage in the region, which he said would harm the Middle East and the whole world. He accused the Iranians of seeking support in the region. He called on “all to keep their hands off Iraq,” urging that the dangers of a sectarian or ethnic war be recognized. He predicted that the situation in Iraq would deteriorate after the “barbaric” way in which former dictator Saddam Hussein was executed. Iran had welcomed the execution of its old enemy.

Reviews from elsewhere were less kind. Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Mohammad-Ali Hosseini condemned Bush’s new security plan, charging that more U.S. troops would only bring greater instability and tension to the Iraqi capital. He called instead for an immediate withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq as the only realistic means for solving U.S. problems in that country. He dismissed Bush’s charges of Iranian and Syrian intervention in Iraqi domestic affairs as merely an attempt to find a scapegoat for its failed policies. He described Bush’s decision to bring Patriot antiaircraft missiles to Iraq as a ploy to protect Israel (“the Zionist regime”) under the guise of safeguarding Iraq, a Muslim country. With regard to the Iranians detained in Irbil, he demanded their immediate release. He pointed out that Iraqi officials had denied Iranian interference in their domestic affairs.

And the Iranians were not the only ones alarmed by the belligerent tone of Bush’s address and the immediate follow-up with a violation of international norms in assaulting a consulate. Senators of both parties also lambasted Bush’s apparent resort to a tactic similar to that of Richard Nixon in Cambodia, when he widened a failing war. At a hearing on the Hill where Secretary of State Rice was grilled, Sen. Joseph Biden, D-Del., warned that Bush would need a new and separate congressional authorization to launch an attack on Iran. Sen. Chuck Hagel, R-Neb., called Bush’s plan “the most dangerous foreign policy blunder in this country since Vietnam.” Hagel specifically cautioned against a Cambodia-style diversion in Iran.

Within Iraq, even local critics of Iran objected to Bush’s plan to put more U.S. troops in Baghdad. The Association of Muslim Scholars, a hard-line Sunni Arab clerical organization, replied that “every U.S. soldier on Iraqi soil is one too many,” and beseeched the U.S. Congress to take a stand against the president’s plan so as “to prevent the continuing spillage of the blood of innocents,” according to German wire service DPA.

The consulate raid, meanwhile, seems to have alienated some of America’s best friends. Members of the Kurdistan Regional Government maintain that the Americans did not contact them about this operation beforehand, and Kurdish leaders protested the raid. Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari, who is of Kurdish heritage, said on the Al-Arabiyah satellite television channel, “What happened … was very annoying because there has been an Iranian liaison office there for years and it provides services to the citizens.”

The U.S. definitely failed to coordinate the raid with Kurdish security forces. When American troops went to the airport, the Kurdish peshmerga who were guarding it, alarmed at the approach of unauthorized foreign troops, came very close to firing on them. Whether or not the raid was intended to provoke Iran, it almost turned into yet another Bush gambit with unforeseen, disastrous consequences. The fallout from a big firefight between U.S. soldiers and the Kurdistan paramilitary could have been serious, since Kurds are among the few strongly pro-American populations left in Iraq.

The Hill, on the other hand, tops a story by Jonathan Allen and Alexander Bolton with “Senators: Welcome Back, Joe.” If Lieberman’s colleagues are “anxious to get rid of him,” Allen and Bolton write, “they gave no indication of it in their first gathering since Lieberman lost a Connecticut primary to Ned Lamont last month and launched an independent bid.”

The New York Times’ Mark Leibovich goes for the middle ground: Lieberman’s lunch with the Democratic Caucus may have been “an awkward family meal with senators from his own party,” but there were “no reports of plates hurled in his direction.”

And indeed, if plates or anything else had been hurled, Lieberman would have been protected, and not just by his invisible aura of Joe-mentum. When he wasn’t getting warm greetings from some Republican senators, Lieberman was being chaperoned through the Capitol by Mary Landrieu, Ken Salazar and a handful of other moderate Democrats Milbank is calling “the Lieberman caucus.”

So why the divergent stories on Lieberman’s first day back? Maybe it’s because at least some Democrats find themselves torn between their personal loyalty to Lieberman and what they see as an obligation to support their party’s candidate. Case in point: Sen. Joe Biden, who offered this wouldn’t-it-be-better-to-say-nothing-at-all endorsement of Ned Lamont: “I dont have a relationship with, nor do I even know, Joes opponent. Ive endorsed him because hes the Democratic [nominee].”

The president’s recent speech on the war continued his execrable record of mendacity, especially with his exaggerated claims about the Iraqi role in the battle of Tal Afar and his insistence that the Iraqi armed forces are well on the way to independence. Two months ago, his own commanding officer, Gen. John Abizaid, testified in the Senate that after two years of supposed training, only one of a hundred Iraqi battalions is capable of operating on its own. One of a hundred! If the general spoke truthfully, how many decades would the Iraqis need before they could operate alone?

Worse, the president failed to admit what every officer and expert knows: The liberation of Iraq from Saddam Hussein has turned into an occupation that is provoking resistance among the Sunni Arabs and attracting jihadi fighters from all over the region. Even Sen. Joe Biden, the ranking Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee and a supporter of the war, admits that “the hard truth is that our large military presence in Iraq is … increasingly part of the problem,” although he also says we must maintain troops there as “the only guarantor against chaos.”

Those remarks reflect a reality that many leading Democrats, particularly those who have supported the war, like Hillary Clinton and Joe Lieberman, have been reluctant to confront. But while Biden is beginning to articulate what is wrong, he and his Democratic colleagues remain as clueless as the president about what to do.

In a speech the other day, Biden proposed a complex, four-part solution that includes a “contact group” of allied nations to encourage cooperation among Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds, a better Iraqi civil administration, a more effective training regime for Iraqi military units, and a more effective counterinsurgency strategy. This is mostly wishful thinking, mostly a more verbose version of Lieberman’s usual happy talk.

These senators’ colleague John Kerry, who has often proved how hard it is for him to think or speak clearly about Iraq ever since last year’s presidential campaign, has not made much progress either. He wants a schedule, too: “a target schedule by which you begin to turn over provinces, by which you specifically begin to shift responsibility” to the Iraqi military. He complains that without such a “concrete” plan, “a lot of people fear that it’s going to be more of the same.” With such a plan, it will also be more of the same.

As for Clinton, she is busy trying to convince New Yorkers that she has always been critical of the president’s conduct of the war, including his decision to invade. She has had some difficulty explaining why we didn’t know this sooner. She seems to think that if the Iraqi elections proceed as planned, we will be able to start withdrawing — which is yet more wishful thinking.

As for House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and Rep. John Murtha, and the House Democrats who have endorsed Murtha’s call for withdrawing most troops before next summer, they have offered no realistic assessment of what that would mean for U.S. interests or for the Iraqis themselves.

What both the president and his hapless critics have refused to acknowledge is that we are in a bind. We cannot provide enough troops to pacify Iraq — indeed, we can scarcely maintain the current level of troop strength for an additional year. We cannot train the Iraqi army and security forces quickly and thoroughly enough to pacify their country before we will be forced to reduce our own commitment. And we cannot leave abruptly without an unacceptable risk of civil war that eventually widens into a dangerous regional conflict involving Iran, Jordan, Turkey and possibly Israel.

There is a decent and honorable way out that has been addressed by the Iraqis themselves but that no American politician, not even the brave Murtha, is willing to mention: negotiations with the Sunni insurgents. The elected Iraqi government, representing a population eager for us to leave, should begin talks with rebels who are willing to discuss laying down their arms, in exchange for an orderly and scheduled American departure. That is the only way to transform the U.S. occupation from a stick into a carrot — and to extract some kind of victory from what is becoming a strategic disaster.

So yes, Biden broke some unwritten rule of presidential posturing over the weekend when he pretty much declared his candidacy for the White House — and he acknowledged as much as he did it. “My intention is to seek the nomination,” Biden said Sunday on “Face the Nation.” “I know I’m supposed to be more coy with you. I know I’m supposed to tell you, you know, that I’m not sure. But if, in fact, I think that I have a clear shot at winning the nomination by this November or December, then I’m going to seek the nomination.”

Biden ran for the Democratic nomination in 1988 but dropped out after he was accused of plagiarizing a speech by British Labor Party leader Neil Kinnock. He flirted with a run in 2004 but decided against it, in part because his colleague John Kerry was way ahead of him in doing the groundwork needed for a campaign. Biden spokesman Norm Kurz says that his boss won’t find himself in that position again. “Now he understands it’s a long march, and if he was to do it, he’d be much better prepared,” Kurz tells the Washington Post. “He understands you don’t parachute in at the last second.”

With nearly three-and-a-half years to go before Election Day 2008, no one can accuse Biden of doing that.

Now we can add another name to the list: Joe Biden tells the San Francisco Chronicle that he’s thinking about the White House, too. “I’m sounding it out,” Biden told the Chronicle during a testing-the-waters swing through California this week. “In all my career, there’s more at stake than any time since I’ve been a senator … (and) I have some pretty clear ideas about what I think should be done.”

Biden ran in 1998 but dropped out early after he was caught plagiarizing part of a speech from British Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock. While the plagiarism charges might be fodder for the Republicans — trumped-up charges about a war 30 years earlier were apparently fair game in the 2004 race — they’d probably be considered ancient news in the Democratic primaries.

Still, Biden acknowledges that he may have an uphill fight ahead of him — and not just because Hillary Clinton is sitting on top of the mountain. Biden says he wonders whether Democrats “would be comfortable with me as the nominee.” It’s apparently a reference to his blunt talk on Iraq and just about anything else: In the course of his interview with the Chronicle, Biden warned of a coming “cesspool” in Iraq, suggested that the FBI is “completely impotent,” referred to the “sheer frigging incompetence” of the FBI and Homeland Security, and said that, while he’s deeply concerned about the effect steroid use has on the “ethics of this country,” he “almost” couldn’t care less “whether Jason Giambi’s heart gives out or Barry Bonds is crippled.”

Biden’s bluntness is a staple of Senate hearings these days — his comments during the Alberto Gonzales hearings bordered on the bizarre — but he’s also winning a lot of praise from Democrats looking for their leaders to stand up. Biden will get his next big test in the coming weeks, as Republicans make William G. Myers III their judicial test case in the new Senate. Biden voted against the Democrats’ filibuster of Myers when he was up for confirmation last time around, and Senate Republicans are counting on him to do the same this time. It’s a bit of a trap for Biden. If he sticks with his prior vote, Democrats will accuse him of paving the way for the confirmation of extremist judicial nominees. If he switches, the Republicans will accuse him of flip-flopping and then blame him when they aim for the “nuclear option.”

Welcome to the campaign.