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BAGHDAD (AP) -- Roadside bombs killed seven American troops in Iraq on Saturday, including four in a single strike outside Baghdad, the military said, as U.S. and Iraqi troops captured two senior al-Qaida militants in northern Iraq.

Separately, a predawn operation by U.S. forces working with Iraqi informants in Baghdad's main Shiite district of Sadr City netted three other militants suspected of ties to Iran, the military said.

The Americans have accused Iran of providing mainly Shiite militias with training and powerful roadside bombs known as explosively formed projectiles, or EFPs, that have killed hundreds of U.S. troops in recent months.

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BAGHDAD ? Roadside bombers killed seven U.S. troops in one day, four of them in a single blast near Baghdad, and three other soldiers died of other causes ? raising to at least 30 the number of American soldiers killed this week.

Explosions aimed at U.S. patrols that kill several troops at once are common, but the recent frequency of such large-scale attacks may signal militants are using larger bombs or explosively formed penetrators, known as EFPs, as they fight back against a series of U.S. military operations.

The military has staged a series of counterattacks this week on roadside bomb factories and insurgent strongholds where stockpiles of explosives have been uncovered.

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Are we chasing an impossible mission in Iraq? The process of creating democracy is extraordinarily complex. Remember that the founding elements of our democracy started some four centuries before Jamestown was settled.

Clearly Iraq is a multi-polar (Sunni, Shia, Kurd, al Qaeda, Iran, Syria, and criminals, etc.) problem festering in centuries of internecine hatred. Given this we are naively arrogant to believe a democratic society can be formed instantly in Iraq.

Today only the mentally deranged believe it won't take long to make Iraq into a happy democracy. Heck, maybe by September!

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BEIRUT -- Tiny Lebanon is enduring, despite snowballing violence and a persistent political crisis.

The army is locked in battle with Islamic militants in the north, rockets were fired into Israel from the south a week ago, a car bomb in Beirut killed a prominent politician earlier this month and a political impasse threatens to produce two rival governments.

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WASHINGTON--Gaza is now run not by a con- ventional political party, but by a movement that is revolutionary, Islamist, and terrorist. Worse, Hamas is a client of Iran. Gaza now constitutes the farthest reach of the archipelago of Iranian proxies: Hamas in Palestine, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Mahdi Army (among others) in Iraq, and the Alawite regime of Syria.

This Islamist mini-replica of Comintern is at war not just with Israel but with the moderate Arab states, who finally woke up to this threat last summer when they denounced Hezbollah for provoking the Lebanon war with Israel. The fall of Gaza is particularly terrifying to Egypt because Hamas is so closely affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood, the chief Islamist threat to the secular-nationalist regime that has ruled Egypt since the revolution of 1952. Which is why Egypt has just invited Israel...

The splitting of Palestine into two entities is nonetheless clarifying. Since Hamas won the parliamentary elections of January 2006, we've had to deal with the fiction of a supposedly unified Palestine ruled by an avowedly "unity" government of Fatah and Hamas. Now the muddle has undergone political hydrolysis, separating out the relatively pure elements: a Hamas-ruled Gaza and Fatah-ruled (for now) West Bank.

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