Iraqi officials are howling about Bob Woodward's new book like Captain Renault in Casablanca: They are shocked that the CIA has been spying on them.

What a hoot. 

Maybe here, some Americans will truly be shocked, of course, and outraged.

Attention, K-Mart shoppers: Iraq is in the Middle East.

The Baghdad government is an Iranian Trojan Horse, bulging with Tehran agents, including, perhaps, the Shiite Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki himself.

His government is a viper's nest of intrigue, as befits a remnant of the Byzantine Empire. It owes its existence to Iran and Syria.

"The prime minister spent long years of exile in Syria and his most important ally in Iraq is the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq," notes the respected British military journalist, Patrick Coburn, "which was founded on Iran's initiative in Tehran in 1982."

They're used to spies.

"They will be used to Syrian and Iranian security monitoring their activities," Cockburn observes. 

But he makes a more salient point.

"Overall, the extent of U.S. surveillance of its Shia and Kurdish allies in Iraq reveals a deep anxiety in Washington that, in supporting a government in Baghdad dominated by Shia Islamic parties, it has promoted a government that is closer to Iran than the U.S."

So of course we're spying on them!

The only surprise is whether it's true, as Woodward alleges, that the CIA has been proficient enough to plant spies -- and eavsdropping technology -- amid the prime minister's inner circle.

To date, most accounts from intelligence sources and former CIA officers who have served in Baghdad paint the agency's spy operations there as extremely limited.

For a Vice Presidential candidate who didn't own a passport until last year, Sarah Palin's brief passages on national security Thursday night were perfectly tailored to her lack of expertise or experience in foreign affairs.

But it hit the spot -- the oil spot, to be precise -- in a rollicking acceptance speech spent mostly ridiculing the Democratic ticket and extolling the expertise hockey moms bring to high office.

The Alaska governor's office floats in a sea of oil politics. During her 20 months in office, Palin threw herself into ramping up exports of North Slope supplies to the lower 48. In fact, she accelerated the construction of infrastructure to deliver fuel.  

It's hard to imagine an Alaska governor not knowing at least something about what's going on in the rest of world's energy markets.

But it's a sure bet that the average Alaskan is as familiar with the intricacies of crude futures as ordinary Iowans are with the price of ethanol or, for that matter, Third Worlders with the price of kerosene.

But otherwise, Palin has shown little interest in the world outside the United States.

Her first, and apparently only, foreign travel came last year, to visit members of the Alaska National Guard stationed in Kuwait, and wounded troops in Germany, according to her deputy communications director, Sharon Leighow.

That was roughly equal to the travels of George W. Bush when he entered the White House in 2001. The erstwhile Texas governor had visited China when his father was ambassador to Beijing in the 1980s, and Israel, and there were the famous "lost weekends" in Mexico  during his drinking years -- all of which, critics say, left him woefully unprepared for the rigors of the post-9/11 world.

Historians will have the final call on that.

Palin sounded authoritative when she mentioned "Russia wanting to control a vital pipeline in the Caucasus and to divide and intimidate our European allies by using energy as a weapon...."  

Critics have credited speechwriter Matthew Scully, late of the Bush White House, with writing the words Palin merely sang.  

But as tidy a line as that was, it's likely Palin had at least as much a hand in drafting it as Scully, considering her involvement with oil infrastructure during her term as governor, no matter how brief.

She went on to talk about the scary what-ifs:

To confront the threat that Iran might seek to cut off nearly a fifth of the world's energy supplies, or that terrorists might strike again at the Abqaiq facility in Saudi Arabia, or that Venezuela might shut off its oil discoveries and its deliveries of that source, Americans, we need to produce more of our own oil and gas . . . .

Big applause.

And take it from a gal who knows the North Slope of Alaska: We've got lots of both.

More big applause.

If Palin didn't write that line, she sure had obvious fun delivering it.

The next lines, though, came right out of the Republican boilerplate for the past eight years.

Starting in January, in a McCain-Palin administration, we're going to lay more pipelines, and build more nuclear plants, and create jobs with clean coal, and move forward on solar, wind, geothermal, and other alternative sources . . . .

The problem is, it's a script grounded more in the kind of kitchen-table, hockey-mom talk that makes so much sense to so many people, until it's tested against the complicated real world.
Washington has shown only fitful interest in alternative energy supplies (the technology for which, most energy economists say, doesn't exist yet to generate meaningful amounts of power) .

And nuclear is a non-starter, unless she and McCain win the election and the Republicans take both houses of Congress -  not -- unless we want to buy them from France; U.S. companies deserted the business years ago.

Nor is there's going to be any explosion of offshore drilling, which all the Republicans, except those who actually would have to look at them from their patios, seem to be for. (Likewise, look up Ted Kennedy's position on windmills in Nantucket Sound.)

Meanwhile, even capitalist icons, notably, T. Boone Pickens, have given to issuing Al Gore-like pronouncements that natural gas, not oil, is only a temporary solution to our energy problem.

So, like it or not -- and nobody outside Saudi Arabia does -- we'll be mired in global oil politics for decades to come, particularly in the Middle East

So when Palin falls back on right-wing red-meat rather than thoughtful alternatives, as she did Thursday night, she sounds like nothing more than an echo of Harry and Louise on the Republican ticket -- not a serious contender for the second highest post in the land.  

"Victory in Iraq is finally in sight, and he wants to forfeit," she said of Barrack Obama, in a disturbing slander. (Has anyone noticed that the Iraqis themselves have forced the Bush administration into adopting Obama's position?)  

She goes on, in a similar vein:

Terrorist states are seeking nuclear weapons without delay; he wants to meet them without preconditions.

and:

Al Qaeda terrorists still plot to inflict catastrophic harm on America, and he's worried that someone won't read them their rights.

The Republicans lapped it up. 

Do they really believe it? Does she?

If so, God help us.

If it's hard to imagine Sarah Palin touting her foreign policy experience tonight, it's even harder to imagine her taking up where Dick Cheney left off at the CIA.

Cheney famously visited the spy agency to quiz its analysts about Iraq, Afghanistan and terrorist threats, and took a leading role in formulating the administration's national security policies and tools, from warrantless wiretaps to waterboarding.

But whether you agreed with him or not -- and many at the CIA did not -- Cheney brought heavyweight foreign policy credentials to the table as a former White House chief of staff, a Secretary of Defense (who oversaw the 100-hour war to evict Iraqi troops from Kuwait in 1991), and as chairman and CEO of Haliburton, which has extensive business in the Middle East, during the five years before he was elected Vice President.

But Palin, it hardly needs saying, would be starting at ground zero when it comes to intelligence and foreign policy experience, notwithstanding Alaska's geographic proximity to Russia and her nominal command of the Alaska National Guard, which her most fervent supporters count as national security credentials.

As Vice President, she's not likely to rush out to CIA headquarters to challenge its analysis of Sunni splinter groups in Iraq. But if she did, it's fun to picture senior CIA officials greeting her while grinning through gritted teeth.

Of course, her reception there would be far different it came as President of the United States. 

In the face of such qualms, Palin may well take a swing tonight at critics of her foreign police experise, according to John McCain's strategist Steve Schmidt.

"People will hear about her reform-and-change message" and about energy and its links to national security, Schmidt told USA Today.

In stark contrast to Palin, it's easy to foresee Joe Biden, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, picking up where Cheney left off.

As my CQ colleague Jonathan Broder wrote back in January:

"Unlike many lawmakers who can't tell the difference between a Sunni and a Shiite, Biden is a man who not only knows the difference, but also can speak knowledgeably about the allegiances of different Iraqi tribes, the shifting demographics in the northern city of Kirkuk, and the finer points of the Iraq constitution."

Indeed, Biden may well play Al Gore to Obama's Bill Clinton, another president who had little interest in national security, to the extent that he eventually abolished his daily CIA briefing.

Despite Barack Obama's chairmanship of a Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee on Europe, the first-term Illinois legislator has shown neglible interest in national security, as opposed to domestic, issues during his political career, which began with anti-poverty work in Chicago's South Side.

As for finding a parallel to a McCain-Palin administration, you have to go all the way back to Richard Nixon's choice of Maryland Governor Spiro Agnew as his running mate.

Like Palin, Agnew had no foreign policy credentials to speak of, either. But Nixon, a two-time Vice President under World War Two hero Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, had a long and deep involvement in national security affairs, particularly in regard to the Soviet Union -- which evidently made the issue moot.

In any event, Agnew wasn't hired to play the role of statesman. He was dropped onto the electorate like a torpedo, with the single duty of blowing the Democrats out of the water, which he did with obvious relish until his resignation in disgrace over corruption allegations in 1974.

Considering Palin's likewise meager acquaintance with foreign policy, it looks like she's being positioned to follow in Agnew's wake, starting tonite.