Also via Jeff Jarvis, this story showing that things are getting tense in Iraq. Five bearded Islamic men were shot dead by guards at a checkpoint watching for members of the Islamist group Ansar al Islam scouting out American locations. These weren't Ansar, but they looked like them, apparently.

They were five men with the wrong length of beards driving the wrong car at the wrong place at the wrong time. Their quick, violent deaths amid the ongoing dirty war between Kurdish Islamists and secularists illustrate the tricky ground-level political minefield the United States will enter if it decides to use northern Iraq as a staging point for a northern front against Saddam Hussein's Baghdad regime.

Since its establishment following the 1991 Gulf War, the northern Kurdish-run section of Iraq has become a relatively prosperous enclave where people enjoy many of the civil liberties denied those living in other Middle East countries. But that freedom also has produced an often-confusing mix of political parties, armed militias and ethnic groups.

This waiting makes everybody jumpy. Let's roll.