Mr. Biden is equally skeptical—albeit in a slightly more backhanded way—about Mr. Obama. “I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy,” he said. “I mean, that’s a storybook, man.”

1. All men are mortal
2. Socrates is mortal
3. Therefore, Socrates is a man.

The Israel that emerges in Radicals, Rabbis and Peacemakers -- a country characterized as "amoral," "barbaric," "brutal," "destructive," "fascistic," "oppressive," "racist," "sordid," and "uncivilized" -- is indistinguishable from the despised country regularly denounced by the most impassioned anti-semites.

But these are mad and treacherous times, when even resentful elderly statesmen feel no constraints of decency, decorum and love of country, and let fly with bottled-up bile.

As anti-war rallies go, as any post-feminist arm candy vocal Christian autobiographer could tell you, this one was small turnips compared with the monster rallies of her barefoot years, which drew millions to the Mall.

The phrase "the global war on terror"—to which some have objected-- is not intended to be a legal statement. The United States does not believe that it is engaged in a legal state of armed conflict at all times with every terrorist group in the world, regardless of the group’s reach or its aims, or even with all of the groups on the State Department’s list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations. Nor is military force the appropriate response in every situation across the globe. When we state that there is a “global war on terror,” we primarily mean that the scourge of terrorism is a global problem that the international community must recognize and work together to eliminate.

He lamented that Iraq's death and destruction had convinced some Shiites that the end of days was coming.

"There's nothing bizarre left in Iraq anymore," Nomas said in a telephone interview. "We've seen the most incredible things."

All Americans see on TV screens are Sunnis slaughtering Shiites and ethnic cleansing in the streets.

Unfortunately this is true. But this is only one part of the picture. Only 12 months ago, we had elections and 12 million people voted, Sunnis and Shiites.

Yes, and as a result, all Americans see on TV screens are Sunnis slaughtering Shiites and ethnic cleansing in the streets.

Although Iraqi officers emphasized their support for the U.S. forces' methodical approach to clearing villages, many of their men grew impatient. They repeatedly asked in broken English, "When we kill Wahhabis?," a reference to adherents of the fundamentalist form of Sunni Islam practiced by many Al Qaeda members.

Democracy, he explained, was acceptable within the boundaries of Islam, and human rights were contained within Islam, but such rights should not include freedom of worship or freedom to believe things that are untrue or unwise. (His examples were the misguided beliefs of Nietzsche and Machiavelli.) The Islamic penal code required no modification in the modern era; its harshest punishments, he asserted, were no more violent than some American and European spectator sports. He appeared shocked by the suggestion that Iran held political prisoners and demanded an example. I offered the journalist Akbar Ganji, imprisoned for six years on account of his critical writings. Gharavian replied: “Did you read Mr. Ganji’s manifesto? He questioned the whole establishment.” Freedom of expression, he explained, did not include the freedom to “breach the peace of the society.” He demanded, “Don’t you have prisoners in your country?”

We will not allow hegemony of a hostile regime to have power over this area.

If the Bush White House were wise, it would ensure that all parliamentary debates are accessible free via satellite throughout the entire Middle East. Such Iraqi C-SPAN coverage could possibly have enormous repercussions. For just a bit of extra money, Washington should dub all of the proceedings into Persian, remembering that Baghdad's echo is easily as loud in Tehran as it is in Amman and Cairo.

Mr. Maliki made his threat to arrest the Sunni lawmaker shortly after promising once again that a crackdown on illegal activity and would be carried out with equal vigor in Shiite as well as Sunni communities.

The prime minister’s claim was challenged by Abdul Nasir al-Janabi, who represents a powerful Sunni Arab bloc. “We can not trust the office of the prime minister,” he said over jeers from the Shiite politicians before his microphone was cut off.

Mr. Maliki could barely contain his rage, waving his finger in the air and essentially accusing Mr. Nasir of being a criminal.

“I will show you,” Mr. Maliki said. “I will turn over the documents on you” showing all your crimes, “then you can talk about trust,” Mr. Maliki said.

Shiite politicians in the room erupted in applause.

But Mahmoud al-Mashhadani, the speaker of Parliament and a Sunni Arab, slammed his gavel down and condemned the prime minister and those who applauded.

“That is unacceptable, Mr. Prime Minister,” Mr. Mashhadani said over the tumult. “It is unacceptable, Mr. Prime Minister, to make such accusations against a lawmaker under the dome of Parliament.”

Blogging is overrated, and I, in particular, am overrated. ...

Anyway, it's kind of fun to be overrated--an experience everyone should have at some point in his life.

If this new judicial oversight doesn't alter the program, such oversight must entail a novel reading of the FISA statute. In the background briefing, one of the Justice Department officials said, tellingly, that in securing a compromise that allows the program to continue under the wiretapping law, administration lawyers had drawn on "our own approach to the statute." The officials said several times that the solution they had arrived at was "innovative," and one wonders whether they managed to innovate their way around one of the keystones of the FISA system—the requirement that warrants be issued on a particularized basis.

The objection to this scenario is that a FISA Court judge presumably wouldn't allow the Justice Department to unilaterally rewrite the statute. But Keefe points out something I didn't know, and should have: "the Jan. 10 orders had not come from the entire panel, or even from the FISA court's presiding judge, Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, but from one particular judge who happened to be on duty that day. These orders appear to be unappealable, and no one outside the FISA court and the administration knows what they say."

How solid a connection to a known Al Qaeda member is required to trigger surveillance? How solid a connection should be required?

So, even if Yglesias is right that "such an eventuality" refers only to the loss of Israel's nuclear superiority, Rafsanjani is celebrating that loss of superiority because it will allow Iran to pursue Israel's destruction by conventional means.

As of 2000 it was estimated that only 40 of the 132 F-4Ds, 177 F-4Es and 16 RF-4E. Phantoms delivered before 1979 remained in service. At that time, approximately 45 of the 169 F-5E/Fs delivered are still flying, while perhaps 20 F-14A Tomcats of the 79 initially delivered were airworthy. Another 30 F-4s, 30 F-5s and 35 F-14s have been cannibalized for spare parts. One report suggested that the IRIAF can get no more than seven F-14s airborne at any one time. Iran claims to have fitted F-14s with I-Hawk missiles adapted to the air-to-air role.

Oh, now you want a cease-fire? How convenient. A cease-fire, of course, is not the same thing as peace. Peace is a long-term accommodation. A cease-fire is a tactical move, usually called for by the losing side in a conflict so it can regather its forces and resume the offensive when the time is right.

What's even sillier is judging someone's foreign policy insight solely based on his or her stance on the last war. Over-learning the lessons of the last war is a classic foreign policy blunder. Yet many liberals want to make the lessons of the Iraq debacle the central basis of American foreign policy.

Arkan al-Mujamai, 28, a day laborer who lives near the crash site, said in a telephone interview that the helicopter was shot down by a group of Sunni Muslim insurgents, one of whom is his uncle.

I will say this: If I were Israeli, I would be terrified of Iran getting a nuclear weapon. As an American Jew, I am terrified on Israel's behalf.

Who am I? Graeme Lamb. I'm a Scotsman.I spend my entire adult life doing this stuff, 25 -- no, 35 years now; know nothing else, really.I have a youthful spirit, a sense of humor.I still believe in duty, service and sacrifice.May be a bit old-fashioned."Go as a pilgrim and seek out danger, far from the comforts and the well-lit avenues of life" type stuff.I still believe in heroes.

Q Sir, this is Pam Hess with United Press International.I think we all appreciate your optimism, but many people watching this will have a hard time squaring your optimism and your statements that there's been progress on the ground with what we see, and not necessarily just from the news but the U.N. report, 34,000 Iraqis dead this year; the Pentagon reports of just spiraling sectarian violence. Can you square up for us where your optimism comes from more specifically and how we balance that against what we have to take to be fairly objective reports?

GEN. LAMB:Yeah, it's just the way I see it.

Now, I could take it as the glass half full or the glass half empty.

I want to address kind of a rumor, an urban legend that's going around -- and it comes from language in the President's Wednesday night address to the nation, that in talking about Iran and Syria, that he was trying to prepare the way for war with either country and that there are war preparations underway: There are not.

(g) Statements obtained by torture are not admissible (10 U.S.C. 948r(b)), but statements "in which the degree of coercion is disputed" may be admitted if reliable, probative, and the admission may best serve the interests of justice...

(A)s far as I was concerned they were all to blame and I was ready to send the lot of them home and let Marcel win by default.

For the first time all season, the Producers stepped in with a veto. Sending all of the chefs but Marcel home wasn't going to happen.

If we will the means--if we believe the war in Iraq is worth the effort (and you obviously believe we have more to gain by leaving Iraq than staying)--we will defeat the insurgents and check the militias in Baghdad.

As bold a statement of imperial America as it gets. Only we can interfere in Iraq!

Rear Adm. Mark Fox, acting spokesman for U.S. military in Iraq, reiterated U.S. claims on Wednesday that ... "The sovereignty issue for the government of Iraq is one that means that neighbors don't interfere or meddle inside their neighbors' borders," he said. "And we have always felt that it has not been a useful thing for Iranian influence to be active inside the government _ inside the borders of Iraq."

Ah, life's rich tapestry.

(W)e have begun to respond to the attacks visited upon American soldiers and civilians by Iran and Syria over nearly 30 years.

There's been a lot of progress in Afghanistan. For example, under the Taliban government, women were subject to arbitrary rules, roles, rules and punishment. Now 74 women serve in the Afghan Parliament, writing the laws that govern the society. Only 8 percent of Afghans used to have access to some form of health care; today some 80 percent do. So this is an important time to secure the gains of the past and to build on them in the future and continue strengthening this government and this country.

Come on! This is a 2002-vintage talking point. If there's nothing more recent to say that's good, it's time to worry.

Q: Mr. Secretary, you were at the border today -- you know, visiting base at the border today, officials here say that the number of border incidents in that border area have increased by more than 300 percent since an agreement in September by Pakistan with tribal leaders in North Waziristan.

How can you make any headway to breaking this insurgency without some change in policy by Pakistan?

SEC. GATES: Well, there's no question that there has been a significant increase. I don't know the exact amount, but a significant increase of attacks from across the border, particularly in North and South Waziristan, and it is a problem. By the same token, Pakistan is one of America's strongest allies in the war on terror, and we will continue working with the Pakistanis to see if there's a way that we can begin to reduce the violence coming from that side of the border.

If attacks in Iraq went up by 300 percent, Gates and all his subordinates would be fired; Bush would start drinking again; and the Democrats could nominate me in 2008 and win 35 states. A 300 percent spike in attacks is simply not something to be sanguine about. Gates was standing next to Hamid Karzai when he said this. Imagine if Karzai had said, "Wow, 3,000 Americans killed in Iraq. It is a problem. By the same token, the Association of Muslim Scholars and Moqtada al-Sadr are some of Afghanistan's strongest allies, and we'll continue working with them to see that we can begin to reduce the violence coming from that side of the world."

Gates told an Afghan reporter that he's "strongly inclined" to recommend an increase in troops for Afghanistan. Two questions. First, from where; and second, for what? If General Eikenberry turns out to be a Ricardo Sanchez-style military idiot, how would Gates know the difference? Troop levels are a means to an end. That end is decided by, among other people, the secretary of defense. Get on it, Bob.

American and NATO military commanders in Afghanistan are worried about the resurgent Taliban insurgency and have asked for additional troops, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said today, adding that he was “sympathetic” to the request.

(snip)

Lt. Gen Karl Eikenberry, the top American commander in Afghanistan, told reporters earlier this week that he wanted a 1,200-soldier battalion now midway through a four-month deployment to remain in Afghanistan beyond its planned departure date. Officials would not say how many more American troops General Eikenberry was seeking.

This is a classic counterinsurgency approach focused on securing the populace, and it has never really been tried before in the capital. It could work, especially if the surge is long lasting and if it's coupled with other vital steps — such as increasing the number of American advisors in the Iraqi security forces, instituting a biometric identity card to make it easier to detain terrorism suspects and enhancing the capacity of the Iraqi legal system to incarcerate more violent offenders. (Emphasis added.)

Potential Witnesses and Names that may be Mentioned During the Trial:

* Floyd Abrams (Partner at the Law Firm Cahill, Gordon, & Reindell)

* Spencer Ackerman (Journalist)

* David Addington (Vice President Cheney's Chief of Staff)

I can understand--though not appreciate--Americans who don't want to see Americans dying in Iraq because they value American lives more highly than they do Iraqi ones. This sentiment, more common on the right than on the left, inevitably leads to a bigoted isolationism that allows nefarious forces to run amok. Dressed up by a higher education, it usually depicts most foreigners as too culturally retrograde to sustain liberal and democratic values--and therefore not worth the loss of American life. Saving people from slaughter, even genocide, isn't worth the effort for this school of thought, since such calamities are, in part, condign punishment for having retrograde political cultures. Foreigners would have to be real innocents being butchered by easily defeated bad guys before these folks would be compelled to dispatch American soldiers to stop a slaughter. Even if the United States were in part responsible for provoking a humanitarian catastrophe, this group doesn't feel guilt long, at least not sufficiently to stop the mess, especially if we have to spill much blood and treasure for natives deficient in reasonableness and gratitude.

Gerecht will not directly say what he means. "What important," he writes, "... is that the Iraqi political system among the Shia is still functioning." What's significant, however, is that this dubious assertion -- working in the sense of not having formally collapsed? Does Gerecht deny that the most powerful Shiite political actor, Moqtada al-Sadr, steps out of the process whenever he feels like, and only reaps more prestige as a result? -- is contrary to the strategy of the surge, which he advocates. Bush said last week that the issue is sectarianism. Gerecht, as his Islamic Paradox monograph demonstrates, rather likes sectarianism. He believes the best case is one in which the "Shiite Crescent" rises across the Middle East to smite the Sunnis and somehow create a democratic/theocratic awakening that will, by some alchemy, undermine the Teheran regime. It's crackers, but fair enough -- he should argue for that explicitly, and then we can debate its merits. The most-recent troubling thing about the neocons is that they are hitching their star to the surge despite

1) not believing enough troops are being devoted to make it "work"

2) half-conceding it will probably fail

3) disbelieving, in significant ways, that it supports a wise strategy

A generous person might say that the neocons are doing this in order to preserve the rhetorical gambit that the war is winnable, now that there's a presidential option on offer to "make it work," Tim Gunn-style. More cynical readers might say that they're doing this to show some politically loyalty to the GOP at a time when the 2008 candidates, except for McCain, are inclined to throw them out on their asses. Either way, it's a lot easier to call your opponents racists. I now propose that if the neocons are going to say this about us, we should rally our efforts to say this about them, over and over and over. I suspect we'll have an easier time making our case.

A newspaper that had opposed the war would not tolerate "positive reporting" from Baghdad. One young British reporter who didn't understand that was surprised to see himself shifted to Paris to become a European correspondent.

Who knows what animates Gorbachev? Maybe he hopes just to be remembered. He won't be. Certainly not by the Russian people. A passing figure. Not even one on whom American colleges will bestow honorary degrees.

The A.D.L., for all its myriad activities, is a one-man Sanhedrin doling out opprobrium or absolution for those who speak ill of Israel or the Jews. (Emphasis added.)

Vietnam was an extremely painful reminder that when it comes to intervention, time and patience are not American virtues in abundant supply.

Usually, the financial documents collected through the letters do not establish any links to espionage or terrorism and have seldom led to criminal charges, military officials say. Instead, the letters often help eliminate suspects.

“We may find out this person has unexplained wealth for reasons that have nothing to do with being a spy, in which case we’re out of it,” said Thomas A. Gandy, a senior Army counterintelligence official.

But even when the initial suspicions are unproven, the documents have intelligence value, military officials say. In the next year, they plan to incorporate the records into a database at the Counterintelligence Field Activity office at the Pentagon to track possible threats against the military, Pentagon officials said.

Sgt. 1st class Matt MacClellan, 37, a father of two who trains another division of Iraqis but lives on Old MOD, said he is not in Iraq to fight the war on terrorism. If anything, he said, the United States spread terrorism by invading Iraq. "Now that we are here, though, it definitely has morphed into the war on terror," he said. "We took over a country that had structure and took that structure away."

The soldiers say they want to leave a stable country but also want to get out alive. "I don't think you can use the word 'winnable,' " MacClellan said. "Really, I've scrubbed that from the vocabulary of my thinking. 'Subdued' would be about the best."

Another:

"I see pictures of him walking on the American flag. Is that irritating?" (Lt. Colonel Edward) Taylor said. "It's irritating, but Sadr is not my enemy. He is not considered a terrorist." Sadr, he added, is "a guy who can be part of the government or considered to be someone you want to negotiate with, and at the same time he has his hands in things you want to stamp out."

Say you're an average congressman. How do you react to President Bush's Iraq speech? You suspect, deep down, that he's probably doing more or less what he needs to do.

I thought of a question that I’d like to see every presidential candidate asked: “Is it your position that that United States must have the world’s largest and most expensive military, and if so, why?”

I think it’s a surprisingly hard question to answer on its merits. Clearly if 9/11 has shown anything it’s that a massive military apparatus doesn’t necessarily protect us (and by extending our footprint into places like Saudi Arabia might make is into targets). And there’s no reason to suppose that a smaller US military would make us significantly more vulnerable to attack from, say, North Korea. I mean, I’m not saying the US becomes Japan (though they seem pretty safe and free of terrorism, thanyouverymuch), but can you really argue that Italy or France are less safe than the US or more imperiled by international threats because they have smaller militaries?

On a substantive note, the Iraqi Citizen Job Corps they propose doesn't sound like a bad idea. But analogizing the current situation in Iraq to the one in New York City in the 1990s seems like a stretch, to put it mildly.

(W)ouldn't the honorable thing be for the Democrats as a party basically to say, "This administration has made tragic mistake after tragic mistake in Iraq. We oppose this surge. We don't think it will work. But we really, really hope it does work. We will give it a year and anything we can do at the margins to help make it work, we will."

The troops raided the building at about 0300 (0001GMT), taking away computers and papers, according to Kurdish media and senior local officials.

The US military would only confirm the detention of six people around Irbil. ...

Iranian media said the country's embassy in Baghdad had sent a letter of protest about the raid to the Iraqi foreign ministry.

One Iranian news agency with a correspondent in Irbil says five US helicopters were used to land troops on the roof of the Iranian consulate.

It reports that a number of vehicles cordoned off the streets around the building, while US soldiers warned the occupants in three different languages that they should surrender or be killed.

Critics of the covert program say that Gates and Cambone's replacement, Lt. Gen. James R. Clapper, are concerned that too much collateral damage may work against U.S. interests. Giraldi says the U.S. Special Ops teams operate too often without accountability, not even notifying the local U.S. Embassy of their presence. In one case in East Africa a clandestine team was arrested by the host government and had to be bailed out by the ambassador, Giraldi says. Adds Arquilla, an advocate of dropping small teams into countries rather than launching air strikes: "There's a growing realization in the Pentagon that the more collateral damage is done, the worse is our position in the 'battle of the story'—in other words, every time we kill innocents our story is much less compelling and the clash of civilizations story is much more compelling."

U.S. ground forces have been active in Somalia from the start, a senior military intelligence officer confirmed. “In fact,” he said, “they were part of the first group in.”

These ground forces include CIA paramilitary officers who are based out of Galkayo, in Somalia’s semiautonomous region of Puntland, Special Operations forces, and Marine units operating out of Camp Lemonier in Djibouti. ...

The ground forces have been serving in the role of military advisors. Their duties include identifying ground targets for the Ethiopian air force.

“The goal is to take the ICU apart so they don’t come back,” a military intelligence source said. Sources within the U.S. military, intelligence community, and Somalia’s transitional federal government are concerned that the ICU will mount an insurgent fighting campaign if it is not eviscerated.

So, the idea is to wipe out an ICU insurgency before it takes root. Maybe this is a wise idea. Maybe it isn't. Maybe it can be accomplished with minimal cost. Maybe it can't. If this is truly as open-ended a commitment as that sounds, then this is really the sort of thing that should be, you know, debated openly and then voted upon.

And I'd hate for such certainty--on the part of opponents of the war (some of whom were actually certain in their support of the war not that long ago)--to get us into another (mess).

As Jefferson later reported to Secretary of State John Jay, and to the Congress:

The ambassador answered us that [the right] was founded on the Laws of the Prophet, that it was written in their Koran, that all nations who should not have answered their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as prisoners, and that every Mussulman who should be slain in battle was sure to go to Paradise.

Medieval as it is, this has a modern ring to it. Abdrahaman did not fail to add that a commission paid directly to Tripoli—and another paid to himself—would secure some temporary lenience. I believe on the evidence that it was at this moment that Jefferson decided to make war on the Muslim states of North Africa as soon as the opportunity presented itself.

Today's Washington Post reports that almost 25,000 Iraqi civilians and police officers were killed in 2006, with almost three quarters of the deaths occurring in the second half of the year. But here's something you're unlikely to read about in the Post -- Iraq is making substantial economic strides.

The United States had ample opportunities to ensure the survival of South Vietnam, but it failed to develop the proper strategy to do so. And by far our greatest mistake was to acquiesce in the November 1963 coup that deposed and killed Diem, a decision that "forfeited the tremendous gains of the preceding nine years and plunged the country into an extended period of instability and weakness."

Bayh believes that the American experience in Iraq is turning some Democrats away from the Party’s internationalist tradition, and although that split in the Party is not new—it helped to shape the race in 2004—Bayh appears to think that it has become more intense as the next election draws closer. “While we’re rightfully pointing out those errors in Iraq, we’ve got to say very clearly that Afghanistan was the right war to fight,” he said. “There are those kinds of tough steps that occasionally involve the use of force. Lots of Americans wonder whether we Democrats have that in us.” ...

Clinton, Edwards, and Obama view themselves as internationalists—eager to keep America engaged in the world and willing to employ force if necessary. And yet, if polls are to be trusted, this outlook separates them from their party’s base. A 2005 poll conducted by the Democratic-affiliated Security and Peace Institute found that the top two foreign-policy priorities of Republicans were the destruction of Al Qaeda and a halt to nuclear proliferation; Democrats named the withdrawal of troops from Iraq and the elimination of AIDS. Grassroots Democratic opposition to the Iraq war has been especially potent; it cost Senator Joseph Lieberman the support of Democrats in his primary fight last year. Polls also show that a sizable minority of Democrats now feel that the war in Afghanistan was a mistake—thirty-five per cent, according to an M.I.T. survey conducted in November of 2005. Even more noteworthy, only fifty-seven per cent of Democrats questioned in the same poll would support the deployment of U.S. troops against a known terrorist camp. A German Marshall Fund poll in June of last year found that seventy per cent of Republicans would approve of military action as a last resort to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, as opposed to only forty-one per cent of Democrats.

In Washington's bipartisan mind-set, the next six months are always crucial in Iraq. Persistently, we believe that one big, intense effort will turn the country around -- or make it possible for us to leave.

Why? Perhaps because Bush has never been willing to ask the country to commit itself to a long struggle in Iraq, despite his view of it as "the central front" in a war on terrorism that will define the 21st century. Instead he proposes the war that the Army and the public can tolerate without too much strain.

One day, on its own time, Iraq will reach equilibrium. At that moment a new power structure will solidify in a country that ranks second in the world in proven oil reserves; that occupies the geographic and ethnographic center of the world's most volatile region; that now harbors many of the most dedicated enemies of the democratic West. Will the United States want to be present, as one of the shaping forces, when that settlement is finally reached?

Abu Omar wrote that he was grabbed on the street in Milan and thrown into a van by men who never spoke. When he tried to resist, he wrote, he was "severely beaten" until white foam spewed from his mouth and he became incontinent.

Suddenly, his kidnappers, evidently fearing a heart attack or some other cardiac event, "began to tear at my clothes quickly and one of them began to compress on my heart," performing heart massage. ...

Refusals to answer questions were met with electric shocks, "hand beatings," and threats of rape, Abu Omar claimed. "I was hung like slaughtered cattle," he wrote, "head down, feet up, hands tied behind my back, feet also tied together, and I was exposed to electric shocks all over my body and especially the head area to weaken the brain. ..."

He also described being tied up and placed on a mattress that was hosed down with water and connected to electricity.

Even when he was not being tortured, he wrote, "I was placed near the torture chambers for long periods of time to hear the screams of the tortured and their moans and their howls so that I would collapse psychologically."

There has been some sniping at the Keane-Kagan plan. But what is striking is that so few of the critics actually go to the trouble of analyzing it--or proposing a substitute. Instead, Keane and Kagan are treated with annoyance and disdain. Don't they know that we're losing in Iraq and that it's time to leave? What's all this talk about staying and fighting and winning? Didn't anyone tell them that the Bush Administration's errors have been so grievous that success is hopeless?

For just at the point where the U.S. interest in a strong Israel diverges from the perceived interests of the Democratic party, there leading Islamic organizations find themselves in tune with the latter. So much is this the case that, in the judgment of the political scientist Peter Skerry, we may now be witnessing the emergence of a new force in American politics. Writing in Time, and citing a whole range of such convergent interests, Skerry calls this a “Muslim-liberal coalition” (more accurately it might be called a Muslim/Arab-liberal coalition). If he is right, and if this coalition can be organized to act with any degree of coherence, it could indeed end up, through sheer numbers alone, wielding a disproportionate influence on American politics, to the clear detriment of the interests of American Jews.

Muslims are now able to serve as a decisive swing vote. In the critical and close-run Senate race in Virginia, for example, the Republican incumbent George Allen lost by fewer than 10,000 ballots to the Democratic challenger James Webb. Approximately 50,000 Muslim American voters participated in this election; according to one Muslim advocacy group, some 90 percent cast their ballots for Webb.

America is a complicated country. Understanding it requires a politician's alertness that is beyond the intelligence community. Actually I forbade the intelligence community from deducing from press and political analysis anything about America. I told them that (this) was not their specialty, because these organizations, when they are unable to find hard facts, start deducing from newspapers, which is what I already know. I said I don't want either intelligence organization (IIS or GMID) to give me analysis -- that is my specialty... we agree to continue on that basis... which is what I used with the Iranians, some of it out of deduction and some of it through invention and connecting the dots, all without having hard evidence. (Italics in the original.)

Today, New York political personalities, like H & H Bagels, travel badly. They lose texture with every mile from the Upper West Side. By the time they reach South Carolina, they're like zeppole that have been trucked down from Mulberry Street -- alien and unpalatable. The Carolinian forgets that zeppole taste different where they're baked. But that doesn't do the zeppole much good.

One of McCain's aides tells me that two years ago, campaigning with McCain, George W. Bush asked him if the senator would like to work out with him. Told that McCain did not, could not, really "work out," Bush replied, "What do you mean?"

"The Department of Defense policy is clear -- we treat detainees humanely," (Lt. Cmdr. Joe) Carpenter said. "The United States operates safe, humane and professional detention operations for enemy combatants who are providing valuable information in the war on terror."