In Baghdad, a carwash uses water stolen from broken pipes. There is a sense that Iraq has slipped to new depths of lawlessness even as security has improved.

Ms. Kuvaas is the mayor of Narvik, a remote seaport where the season’s perpetual gloom deepened even further in recent days after news that the town — along with three other Norwegian municipalities — had lost about $64 million, and potentially much more, in complex securities investments that went sour.  ...

Above all, the residents want to know how their close-knit community of 18,000 could have mortgaged its future — built on the revenue from a hydroelectric plant on a nearby fjord — by dabbling in what many view as the black arts of investment bankers in distant places.

“The people in City Hall were naïve and they were manipulated,” said Paal Droenen, who was buying fish at a market across the street from the mayor’s office. “The fund guys were telling them tales, like, ‘This could happen to you.’ It’s a catastrophe for a small town like this.”

Now, the towns are considering legal action against the Norwegian brokerage company, Terra Securities, that sold them the investments. They allege that they were duped by Terra’s brokers, who did not warn them that these types of securities were risky and subject to being cashed out, at a loss, if their market price fell below a certain level.

“When you sell something that is not what you say it is, that is a lie,” Ms. Kuvaas said. She disputed the suggestion that people here lacked the sophistication to understand what they were buying. “We’re not especially stupid because we live so far in the north,” she said.

Myth #1. The U.S. nuclear stockpile is the smallest since the Eisenhower administration.

A recent statement from Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Energy Secretary Samuel W. Bodman touts Bush administration "reductions in the nuclear stockpile" that "will result in the lowest level since the Eisenhower Administration." Well yes, but one might infer that the number of U.S. nuclear weapons is rather small, perhaps around a thousand or so. Not quite.

We haven't seen such low levels since the Truman administration. When Dwight D. Eisenhower left office in January 1961 -- not a particularly warm period of the Cold War -- the U.S. stockpile had swelled to almost 19,000 nuclear weapons. The United States stayed above Eisenhower levels until 1991, when President George H.W. Bush wisely slashed the unnecessarily large stockpile of tactical battlefield nukes.

According to administration statements, the United States in 2012 will still have 5,000-6,000 nuclear weapons, with about a third of those remaining on Cold War levels of alert.

A more relevant marker is 1,200 nuclear weapons, the size of the nuclear stockpile when Ike took over from Truman.  

Myth #2. Our nuclear arsenal is as small as it can be.

Not even close. Americans often assume that the U.S. arsenal has been kept at the bare minimum level necessary to maintain our deterrent through some abstract level of "mutual assured destruction." But we could do that with far fewer nukes than the 2,200 strategic warheads that the administration plans to deploy on alert in 2012.

In fact, as one senior administration official recently acknowledged, that level of 2,200 long-range weapons represents a "judgment call" based on intelligence estimates of what other countries might do in the future. Some administration officials fear that China will "sprint to parity" -- a wonkish way of saying "quickly build up to U.S. levels" -- if Washington cuts its arsenal much below 2,000. (China currently has about 20 warheads that could reach the United States.) U.S. nuclear forces, in other words, are dictated by a hypothetical future scenario, not by the forces that Russia or China have today or even those that the intelligence community believes they or other worrisome countries may have in the future. Rather than just sticking to the bare minimum number of nuclear weapons, U.S. policy is to build in a lot of slack.

Myth #3. Accidents can't happen.

Myth #4. Russia isn't an enemy, so we don't need arms control.

The Bush administration has made a fetish of "flexibility." "We don't know where the threats of the future are going to come from," one senior Pentagon official recently told reporters on the condition of anonymity. "A negotiated treaty might tie our hands in dealing with a future threat."

But there are very good reasons that we might want to "tie our hands" -- most obviously, to get something in return.

Myth #5. Reductions in U.S. forces don't matter to Iran or North Korea.

The Bush team loves this one. "There is absolutely no evidence," insisted a senior administration official, that U.S. nuclear reductions "have caused North Korean or Iranian leaders to slow down their covert programs to acquire capabilities to produce nuclear weapons."

Now, I don't know anyone who believes that Kim Jong Il would suddenly become a leading advocate of nonproliferation if the United States were to unilaterally disarm.

Sure, we may never quite achieve total nuclear disarmament. But it is still the ultimate goal supported by every president during the Cold War and post-Cold War period -- except George W. Bush.

Jerusalem, Moscow, Paris, Pyongyang and other capitals are continually calculating whether to make deals and accommodations with Washington now or wait out this administration and try their luck with a new president. The notion that timing is everything has become the silent driving force of international power politics as Jan. 20, 2009, approaches.

George W. Bush's looming exit helped prompt Israelis and Arabs to sit down together in Annapolis last week and see what they could extract from each other and from Washington. The modest results -- primarily a temporary weaning of Syria away from Iran's erase-Israel bluster and the Saudis turning up at all -- will keep hopes, and bargaining, alive for a while longer.

Other examples: North Korea made its choice last summer to stick with the old by starting to make deals with the United States within the six-party talks on its nuclear weapons. The U.N. calendar and Bush's dwindling time push Iraq's leaders to negotiate far-reaching status-of-forces and bases agreements with Bush & Co. before the next U.S. election. Russia could yet try for a package deal with Bush concerning arms control in Europe, Kosovo independence and Iran.

And France has launched an ambitious effort to split the difference by reaching a final agreement with Bush on terms for rejoining NATO's military command -- and then have the deal formally adopted by the alliance shortly after Bush's successor has been inaugurated.

Arthur Balfour, the British statesman, once said that a rival's clarity was a liability because he had nothing to say. As the presidential nomination contests approach a crescendo, some candidates are making themselves perilously clear, one of them with the help of her helpmate.

Last Tuesday, Bill Clinton, trying to whet Iowans' appetites for another Clinton presidency, announced/discovered/remembered that he opposed the Iraq war "from the beginning," thereby revealing disharmony with his spouse, who voted for it. Backward reels the mind, to 1992, when Gov. Clinton explained his opinion of Congress's 1991 authorization of the Persian Gulf War: "I guess I would have voted with the majority if it was a close vote. But I agree with the arguments the minority made."

 Such muddiness clarifies: Do voters who are weary of the scary clarity of the current president's certitudes really want to replace them with a recurrence of the hairsplitting evasions that created the adjective "Clintonian"?

John Edwards's health-care agenda involves un-Jeffersonian bossiness. "It requires," he says, "that everybody get preventive care. If you are going to be in the system, you can't choose not to go to the doctor for 20 years." In an ad running in Iowa, Edwards brandishes his mailed fist at Congress, to which he vows to say: "If you don't pass universal health care by July of 2009, in six months, I'm going to use my power as president to take your health care away from you."

What power would that be? What power enables presidents to "take" health care from people who have it by statute? This is the Democrats' riposte to the grandiosity of the current president's notion of executive prerogatives?

Edwards might, however, reconsider -- he is, after all, a serial apologizer. Of his actions during his six years in the Senate, he says: My vote for the Iraq war? Sorry about that. For the Patriot Act? I don't know what I was thinking. For No Child Left Behind? Oops! For liberalized trade with China? Forgive me. For storing waste in Nevada's Yucca Mountain? I was for it before I was against it.

Many Iowans think it would be wise to nominate a candidate who, when the Republicans were asked during a debate to raise their hands if they do not believe in evolution, raised his. But, then, Huckabee believes America can be energy-independent in 10 years, so he has peculiar views about more than paleontology.

Although Huckabee is considered affable, two subliminal but clear enough premises of his Iowa attack on Mitt Romney are unpleasant: The almost 6 million American Mormons who consider themselves Christians are mistaken about that. And -- 55 million non-Christian Americans should take note -- America must have a Christian president.

Pax Americana, the era of U.S. global dominance, is over. The struggle for global hegemony is now between China, a resurgent Russia and radical Islam.

Prescriptions from Mr. Buchanan to move back from the brink:

A new foreign-defense policy that closes most of the 1,000 bases overseas, reviews all alliances, and brings home U.S. troops.

A purge of neoconservative ideology and the "Cakewalk crowd" from national power.

To avert a second Cold War, the U.S. should "get out of Russia's space and get out of Russia's face," and shut down all U.S. bases on the soil of the former Soviet Union.

Hard to see where bin Laden would demur. He has said time and again, the United States should get out of all Muslim countries and abandon all military bases, which would give him a free hand to Islamicize Europe.

In a case in which it is clear that Gillian Gibbons did not intend to malign the Prophet Muhammad and that the children in her class had chosen the name Muhammad for their class teddy-bear, some might still question why she was not more culturally sensitive to a potential backlash. That said, school officials or the courts could have asked her to apologize for an inadvertent “mistake” in judgment. But instead, Gibbons who had made the decision and sacrifice to teach in Sudan, was found guilty of ‘insulting religion,’ a victim to a court’s distorted notion of Islamic law and justice.

The Sudanese case came on the heels of a recent decision by a Saudi Arabian court that sentenced a 19-year-old rape victim to 200 lashes and six months in prison. Instead of being appalled at the rape, the gang rape of a woman, a Justice Ministry statement is reported to have declared that the woman invited the sexual attack by seven men because she was in a parked car with a man who was not a relative.  ...

All our futures depend upon an ability to agree upon a global ethic, based upon mutual understanding and respect, that transcends our religious and cultural differences. Whatever our differences, there can never be an acceptable excuse for injustice and intolerance in the name of our religions.

As though Christians, Hindus, Buddhists or Jews were imprisoning people over teddy bears' names, or flogging women for the "crime" of being raped!

The fact is that most of the Islamic world is backward economically, politically and culturally. To ignore this backwardness, and the extent to which a kind of madness, by no means limited to a handful of mass murderers, has taken root within many Islamic societies, is a willful blindness that serves no one's interest.

In Cole Porter's "Miss Otis Regrets," the heroine announces that she's unable to lunch today. Why? Because she was strung up by a mob for killing "the man who had led her so far astray." Something like the equivalent occurred this week in the world of political fundraising when the Clinton campaign had to cancel the December 15 event to be hosted by Mississippi attorney Richard Scruggs starring Bill Clinton. As the Wall Street Journal's Washignton Wire reported this past Thursday, the fundraising event was cancelled following Scruggs's federal indictment for attempting to bribe a state court judge.

The Royal Navy can no longer fight a major war because of years of under­funding and cutbacks, a leaked Whitehall report has revealed.

With an "under-resourced" fleet composed of "ageing and operationally defective ships", the Navy would struggle even to repeat its role in the Iraq war and is now "far more vulnerable to unexpected shocks", the top-level Ministry of Defence document says.

The report was ordered by Des Browne, the Defence Secretary, who had intended to use it to "counter criticism" on the state of the Navy in the media and from opposition parties.

But in a damning conclusion, the report states: "The current material state of the fleet is not good; the Royal Navy would be challenged to mount a medium-scale operation in accordance with current policy against a technologically capable adversary." A medium-scale operation is similar to the naval involvement in the Iraq War.

Earlier this week, the leading Shi'ite cleric in Iraq issued a fatwa that has largely gone unnoticed by the world media, but could have an impact on reconciliation and the political gridlock in Baghdad. Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani forbade the killings of Sunnis by Shi'ites on Tuesday while meeting with Sunni clerics in an ecumenical council, and called for a renewed sense of Iraqi nationalism to replace sectarian divides in the country (via SCSU Scholars):

Leading Shiite cleric in Iraq Ali Sistani Tuesday banned the killing of Iraqis, particularly the Sunnis, and urged the Shiites to protect their brother Sunnis.

Sistani bans the Iraqi blood in general the blood of Sunnis in particular. His announcement came during a meeting with a delegation from Sunni clerics from southern and northern Iraq.
The clerics are visiting Najaf to participate in the first national conference for Ulemaa of Shiites and Sunnis.

Sistani called on the Shiites to protect their Sunni brothers, according to Sheikh Khaled Al-Mulla, head of the authority of Ulemaa of Southern Iraq, noting that the Fatwa of Sistani would have positive impacts nationwide.

"I am a servant of all Iraqis, there is no difference between a Sunni, a Shitte or a Kurd or a Christian," Al-Mulla quoted Sistani as saying during the meeting.

One has to wonder why the only source for this development comes from the Kuwait News Agency, and not any of the other media, especially American media.

Sistani's fatwas have tremendous influence in Iraq, perhaps partly because he uses them so infrequently. Where his rival Moqtada al-Sadr frequently issued threats and exhortations to violence, Sistani has spoken out only occasionally -- which makes his fatwas all the more powerful when they come. In this case, it has directly attacked Sadr's legitimacy as the leader of a Shi'ite militia that had routinely attacked Sunnis, until Sadr got caught up in an intrasect war with the Badr Brigade. Sistani essentially told Iraq's Shi'ites that Sadr's organization not only has no reason to exist, but its existence offends Islam.

But there is nothing fair about American politics. And, while Clinton has made some progress when it comes to softening her image, she has not begun to transform herself so successfully as did the "ruthless" Bobby Kennedy in 1967 and 1968 -- or even the "boring" Al Gore in the period since he ceded the presidency to George Bush.

FALLUJAH, IRAQ - In August, I wrote in these pages that it was too soon to judge Gen. David Petraeus' surge of troops in Iraq a success or a failure. It's not too soon anymore.

Baghdad, the most dangerous city in all of Iraq, is only half as violent as it was when I was there during the summer. And the fact that the capital is now the deadliest city is itself evidence of a tectonic shift on the ground.

In the spring of 2007, Ramadi was the most violent place in Iraq. But the insurgency there has been finished. The Taji area north of Baghdad, which was a catastrophe when I paid a visit in July, is now going the way of Ramadi.

I am writing these words from Fallujah, site of the most horrific battle of the entire war in November 2004, and the city thought to be the meanest in Iraq since at least the time of the British in Mesopotamia.

Almost everyone I know back home was sure I'd be shot at every day, that it's still a war zone out here. Based on the news reports - even the new, optimistic ones, could you blame them for thinking that?

But attacks against coalition forces in Fallujah are down by more than 90% since March of this year. Almost all attacks these days are single, ineffective pot shots rather than the lethal IEDs of last year.

There hasn't been a single firefight in this city for months. The Marines at Camp Fallujah haven't been shot at with a rocket or mortar since April. Not one Marine from the 3rd Battalion, 5th Regiment has even been wounded since they rotated into the city two months ago. The only shots the Marines have fired have been practice rounds on the range.

It was at the 1997 conference, held in Japan, that the Kyoto Protocol was passed, but since then, there's been little progress, thanks in no small part to President George W. Bush's determined foot dragging on climate change.

One major dispute could trip up progress at Bali, however. Under Kyoto, only developed countries were required to make mandatory cuts in their carbon emissions; developing nations like China and India had no such demands. The U.S. has long maintained that it won't sign onto a new deal unless the developing countries are included in a more substantive way — a position unlikely to change even when the occupant of the White House does.

These are some rather eye-opening facts:  Since the start of the war on terror in Iraq and Afghanistan, the sacrifice has been enormous. In the time period from the invasion of Iraq in March 2003 through now, we have lost over 3000 military personnel to enemy action and accidents. As tragic as the loss of any member of the US Armed Forces is, consider the following statistics:  The annual fatalities of military members while actively serving in the armed forces from 1980 through 2006:

1980 ........ 2,392
1981 .......  2,380
1984 ........ 1,999
1988 ........ 1,819
1989 ........ 1,636
1990 .......  1,508
1991 ........ 1,787
Bush the father:  6,224  (4 years)        1992 ........ 1,293
1993 ........ 1,213
1994 ........ 1,075
1995 .........2,465
1996 ........ 2,318
1997 ........   817
1998 ........ 2,252
1999 ........ 1,984
Clinton era total: 14,107  (8 years)      2000 ........ 1,983
2001 ........   890
2002 ........ 1,007
2003 ........ 1,410
2004 ........ 1,887
2005 ........   919
Bush era through 2006: 7,077  (6 years)     2006.........   920

If you are confused when you look at these figures...so was I.

Do these figures mean that the loss from the two latest conflicts in the Middle East are LESS than the loss of military personnel during Mr. Clinton's  presidency; when America wasn't even involved in a war? And, I was even more confused; when I read that in 1980, during the reign of President (Nobel Peace Prize) Jimmy Carter, there were 2,392 US military fatalities!

These figures indicate that many of our Media & Politicians will pick and choose.  They present only those "facts" which support their agenda-driven reporting. Why do so many of them march in lock-step to twist the truth. Where do so many of them get their marching-orders for their agenda?

Our Mainstream Print and TV media, and many Politicians like to slant; that these brave men and women, who are losing their lives in Iraq, are mostly minorities!  Wrong AGAIN--- just one more media lie! The latest census, of Americans, shows the following distribution of American citizens, by Race:
>>European descent (White) ...... 69.12%
>>Hispanic .......................... 12.5%
>>Black.............................. 12.3%
>>Asian .............................. 3.7%
>>Native American ................ . 1.0%
>>Other ............................  2.6%

Now... here are the fatalities by Race; over the past three years in Iraqi Freedom:
>>European descent (white) ...... 74.31%
>>Hispanic .........................10.74%
>>Black ............................. 9.67%
>>Asian ........................... . 1.81%
>>Native American ................. 1.09%
>>Other ............................  .33%

You do the Math! These figures don't lie... but, Media-liars figure...and they sway public opinion!  (These statistics are published by Congressional Research Service, and they may be confirmed by anyone at: 
http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/RL32492.pdf )

Now ask yourself these two questions:
"Why does the mainstream Print and TV Media never print statistics like these?" and "Why do the mainstream media hate the web as much as they do?"