A nephew of Saddam Hussein serving a life sentence for financing insurgents and possessing bombs escaped from prison yesterday in northern Iraq with the help of a police officer, authorities said.

The Iraq Study Group recommended reintegrating qualified members of Saddam Hussein's Ba'ath Party, who are thought to form the backbone of the insurgency, into the Iraqi government. Mr. al-Hayani said he hopes militants can be persuaded to take part in the political process but that insurgent demands of a U.S. withdrawal and the dismissal of the current Iraqi government provided little common ground for negotiation.

The Iraq Study Group recommended reintegrating qualified members of Saddam Hussein's Ba'ath Party, who are thought to form the backbone of the insurgency, into the Iraqi government. Mr. al-Hayani said he hopes militants can be persuaded to take part in the political process but that insurgent demands of a U.S. withdrawal and the dismissal of the current Iraqi government provided little common ground for negotiation.

Why are men, taken on average and as a whole, funnier than women? Well, for one thing, they had damn well better be. The chief task in life that a man has to perform is that of impressing the opposite sex, and Mother Nature (as we laughingly call her) is not so kind to men. In fact, she equips many fellows with very little armament for the struggle. An average man has just one, outside chance: he had better be able to make the lady laugh. ...  Women have no corresponding need to appeal to men in this way. They already appeal to men, if you catch my drift. ...

This is not to say that women are humorless, or cannot make great wits and comedians.

Male humor prefers the laugh to be at someone's expense, and understands that life is quite possibly a joke to begin with—and often a joke in extremely poor taste. Humor is part of the armor-plate with which to resist what is already farcical enough.

Men have prostate glands, hysterically enough, and these have a tendency to give out, along with their hearts and, it has to be said, their dicks. This is funny only in male company. For some reason, women do not find their own physical decay and absurdity to be so riotously amusing, which is why we admire Lucille Ball and Helen Fielding, who do see the funny side of it. But this is so rare as to be like Dr. Johnson's comparison of a woman preaching to a dog walking on its hind legs: the surprise is that it is done at all.

The plain fact is that the physical structure of the human being is a joke in itself: a flat, crude, unanswerable disproof of any nonsense about "intelligent design." The reproductive and eliminating functions (the closeness of which is the origin of all obscenity) were obviously wired together in hell by some subcommittee that was giggling cruelly as it went about its work. ("Think they'd wear this? Well, they're gonna have to.") The resulting confusion is the source of perhaps 50 percent of all humor.

But the Woman that God gave him,
every fibre of her frame
Proves her launched for one sole issue,
armed and engined for the same,
And to serve that single issue,
lest the generations fail,
The female of the species must be
deadlier than the male.

Childbearing and rearing are the double root of all this, as Kipling guessed. As every father knows, the placenta is made up of brain cells, which migrate southward during pregnancy and take the sense of humor along with them. And when the bundle is finally delivered, the funny side is not always immediately back in view.

Humor, if we are to be serious about it, arises from the ineluctable fact that we are all born into a losing struggle. Those who risk agony and death to bring children into this fiasco simply can't afford to be too frivolous. (And there just aren't that many episiotomy jokes, even in the male repertoire.) I am certain that this is also partly why, in all cultures, it is females who are the rank-and-file mainstay of religion, which in turn is the official enemy of all humor.

The Baker-Hamilton-Chamberlain Report is already past its shelf-life, and scenes of Baker testifying lead to a click quicker than a real estate investment infomercial.  Very few serious people will be citing it this weekend, much less next month, and the legacy of the ISG may be the end of such commissions.  Justice O'Connor and General Meese, at least, ought to be asking themselves how they allowed Secretary Baker to rope them into this smash-up, and General Meese at least might want to consider how to notice his many friends that, believe it or not, he kept it from being worse.

On yesterday's program, the American military's Kipling, Robert Kaplan, argued that the ISG Report could have been worse.  I responded:

If in 1938, a panel of distinguished Brits had gotten together and said "The pressure on Austria is unacceptable, the threats to Czechoslovakia must stop, Italy must withdraw from Ethiopia, and negotiate its territorial claims in that part of the world, et cetera, et cetera. But let’s all understand Hitler can be negotiated with." Would such a report have been as bad as it could have been? No. But would it still have been a dangerous and terrible thing? Yes. That’s the analogy. Why am I wrong?

In 1975 the Americans suffered a spectacular military defeat at the hands of North Vietnam and the Vietcong, with US helicopters seeking to rescue leading US personnel from the tops of buildings as Vietnamese guerrillas closed in on the centre of Saigon.

From 1968 until at least 1971 and perhaps 1972, the balance of power of power was shifting in favor of the US and the ARVN. The losses suffered in the Tet Offensive had weakened the South Vietnamese Communist apparatus considerably, and steady pounding by the US and the ARVN weakened it still further in the following years. The area controlled by Saigon increased. Communist political organizers in many villages were captured or killed by the "Phoenix Program." As the South Vietnamese Communist organization suffered increasing losses, more and more key positions came to be occupied by North Vietnamese. In short, the political links between the Communist organization and the South Vietnamese peasants, relatively strong in 1967, had been much weakened by 1971. The Saigon government gained in strength at the same time.

By the spring of 1972 the US was hardly participating in ground combat at all. A major Communist offensive in the spring of 1972 (the "Easter Offensive"), was carried out much more by the North Vietnamese, and less by the PRG, than the Tet Offensive of 1968. This fact reflected the extent to which the South Vietnamese Communist organization had been weakened in the intervening period. The Saigon Government managed to weather this offensive, with US air support, but it was weakened substantially.

In January 1973, the peace negotiations in Paris produced an agreement of sorts. The main points of the Paris Peace Accord were:

There was to be a cease-fire in place; both sides would stop shooting and, until some final settlement could be reached, they would control the territory they controlled at the time the agreement went into effect.

All prisoners of war were to be released.

All US forces would pull out of Vietnam, and take their weapons and equipment with them.

North Vietnamese infiltration of men and supplies through Laos and Cambodia into South Vietnam was to cease.

The future of South Vietnam would be settled through peaceful political means.

What the United States got out of the agreement was, essentially, a way out of Vietnam. US forces were withdrawn, US casualties ceased, and the Americans who had been taken prisoner during the war were released. The US retained very limited influence over the course of events in Vietnam. When US forces pulled out they left behind a situation in which the combined strength of the Communist forces in Vietnam (North and South) was considerably greater than the strength of the Saigon government.

When the agreement supposedly went into effect, the actual results were:

Almost all US military personnel were withdrawn; a few were put in civilian clothes and continued to serve in Vietnam, in non-combat roles. However, instead of taking all their equipment with them, the US forces gave much of it to the Saigon government, and then explained that since it no longer belonged to the US, the Paris Agreement did not require the US to withdraw it.

The Communists utterly ignored the requirement that they cease infiltrating men and supplies from the North to the South via Laos and Cambodia. On the contrary, they expanded their transportation network in Laos and Cambodia very substantially, creating by 1974 a larger infiltration capacity than they had ever had before.

The warfare that occurred after the supposed peace of 1973 developed in three stages.

From early to mid 1973, the Saigon government was on the offensive. The Communists, busy rebuilding their supplies and their supply lines, and wanting to avoid provoking the US into resuming combat operations in Vietnam, stayed mostly on the defensive.

In late 1973 and most of 1974, with the Nixon administration collapsing and their own forces growing stronger, the Communists were about as aggressive as the Saigon government.

In January 1975, the Communists (mainly North Vietnamese forces) finally resumed serious efforts to destroy the Saigon government.  The United States had cut back military aid to the ARVN in the last years of the war. The US Congress was not willing to put big money into Vietnam, once there were no longer US troops on the ground there, needing the support.  Communist commanders apparently expected that the job would take a year or two, but when the North Vietnamese offensive began, the ARVN started to disintegrate in panic. ARVN units began abandoning important towns without even waiting to be attacked; some ARVN officers abandoned their men. Within a few weeks the Communist commanders realized that they could conquer all of South Vietnam immediately if they wanted to; it would not even cost them many casualties. Communist forces, mostly North Vietnamese but including some PRG personnel, marched into Saigon at the end of April, 1975.

The Tet Offensive was militarily a defeat for the Communists; it had weakened them very substantially. However, in public relations it was a Communist victory. There were several reasons for this.

1) The most important was the way the optimistic statements US spokesmen had been making about Communist weakness contrasted with the strength the Communists had shown in this battle. US spokesmen had been saying for months that the Communist forces were weakening. The Tet Offensive made it obvious that the Communist forces were far stronger than US spokesmen had admitted. When the same spokesmen said after the Tet Offensive that the Communists had been badly weakened, they were telling the truth for a change, but they had a lot of trouble persuading anyone to believe them. When General Westmoreland, the US commander in Vietnam, asked for 200,000 more American soldiers to be sent to Vietnam, this made people even less willing to believe that the Tet Offensive had been a brilliant American victory.

2) The Tet Offensive made the brutality of the war very visible to Americans. The US Air Force had been bombing South Vietnamese villages for years; during Tet the Air Force was bombing South Vietnamese cities. The ARVN had been killing prisoners for years; during Tet the American television viewing public actually got to watch a prisoner, with his hands bound behind his back, being shot through the head by a South Vietnamese general. The Communists also committed atrocities, of course; the Communists appear to have killed several thousand civilians in the city of Hue during the period they held parts of that city. That, however, did not happen within sight of American television cameras.

3) Tet, although militarily it was a clear American victory, had not been a cheap victory. The total number of US soldiers reported killed in Vietnam during the year 1968 was about 14,000, the highest number for any year of the war.

4) The US and ARVN forces shifted their activities toward the cities for a while as a result of the Communist attacks on those cities. Therefore, the weakening of the Communist forces in the countryside was not immediately apparent.

For all of these reasons, the Tet Offensive made the US news media, and the US public, much less enthusiastic about the war than they had been previously. General Westmoreland did not get the 200,000 additional troops he had requested, and in less than two years the US began withdrawing substantial numbers of troops. Negotiations began between the US and the Communists, and for most of the time the negotiations were going on, the US imposed limits on its bombing of North Vietnam.

One might reasonably say that in the long run the Tet Offensive was a victory for the Communists, because of the way it reduced the American will to fight.

From a regional standpoint, it is clear that the Iraq moment is far more serious for the US than the Vietnam moment.

What is true regionally is also the case globally. We are reminded of how even the most powerful and, indeed, the most knowledgeable can get things profoundly wrong. It is worthwhile recalling the longer-term global context of the American defeat in Vietnam. It did not signal any serious upturn in the fortunes of the Soviet Union; this was already in a state of economic stagnation and growing political paralysis that was to become terminal in the 80s, leaving the US as the sole superpower.

The ramifications of the Iraq moment will surely influence US foreign policy for decades to come.

James Baker has achieved the perfect reductio ad absurdum of diplomatic self-adulation: he's less rational than Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.