Who’s writing the Washington Post editorials?

The WaPo editorials are making sense these days.

Ms. Rice is trying to solidify an alliance of “the mainstream” against Iran and in support of U.S. policy in Iraq. To do that, she is making a high-profile effort to revive the Israeli-Palestinian peace process — in spite of an unfavorable situation in the region — because “the mainstream states . . . would actually really like to see a resolution of this conflict now.”

The new strategy explains a series of reversals of U.S. policy that otherwise would be baffling. In addition to embracing the Middle East peacemaker role that it has shunned for six years, the administration has decided to seek $98 million in funding for Palestinian security forces — the same forces it rightly condemned in the past as hopelessly corrupt and compromised by involvement in terrorism. Those forces haven’t changed, but since they are nominally loyal to “mainstream” Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and serve as a check on the power of the “extremist” Hamas, they are on the right side of Ms. Rice’s new divide.

So is Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, a thuggish autocrat who was on the wrong side of Ms. Rice’s previous Mideast divide between pro-democracy forces and defenders of the illiberal status quo. In past visits to Cairo, Ms. Rice sparred with Mr. Mubarak’s foreign minister over the imprisonment of democratic opposition leaders such as Ayman Nour and the failure to fulfill promises of political reform. On Monday, she opened her Cairo news conference by declaring that “the relationship with Egypt is an important strategic relationship, one that we value greatly.” There was no mention of Mr. Nour or democracy.

Wow. Who’s writing these things? What’s with the WaPo?

(Post fixed. It’s the Washington Post, not LA Times.)