New York Times reporter Stephen Kinzer recounts these in his recent superb book "Overthrow." The United States has a long history of supporting dictators: Duvalier, Trujillo, Suharto, Marcos, Park Chung Hee, Chiang Kai-shek, Saddam Hussein, Somoza, Mobutu, and legions of others.

Iraq Insurgents Starve Capital of Electricity

Baghdad has been all but isolated electrically, and attempts to repair power lines are falling behind attacks on the grid.

Attacks in Iraq at Record High, Pentagon Says

Senator Sam Brownback of Kansas, who blocked the confirmation of a woman to the federal bench because she attended a same-sex commitment ceremony for the daughter of her long-time neighbors, says he will now allow a vote on the nomination.

Mr. Brownback, a possible contender for the Republican presidential nomination in 2008, said in a recent interview that when the Senate returned in January, he would allow a vote on Janet Neff, a 61-year-old Michigan state judge, who was nominated to a Federal District Court seat.

Mr. Brownback, who has been criticized for blocking the nomination, said he would also no longer press a proposed solution he offered on Dec. 8 that garnered even more criticism: that he would remove his block if Judge Neff agreed to recuse herself from all cases involving same-sex unions.

In an interview last week, Mr. Brownback said that he still believed Judge Neff’s behavior raised serious questions about her impartiality and that he was likely to vote against her. But he said he did not realize his proposal — asking a nominee to agree in advance to remove herself from deciding a whole category of cases — was so unusual as to be possibly unprecedented.

Mr. Brownback, a member of the Judiciary Committee who supported those other nominees, has tried to put himself forward as the Republican presidential contender who best represents the interests of the nation’s conservative religious community.

Democratic candidates are dropping like flies out there.

Why would the Indiana senator drop out of the '08 sweepstakes 13 days after forming his exploratory committee? That's one quick exploration, huh?

But if the media are playing a role in the early exits of Bayh, Russ Feingold and Mark Warner, it's a troubling one. It is, after all, more than a year before the first caucuses and primaries.

What's more, every cycle we miss someone who begins as an asterisk and turned out to be a serious contender. Over the years, this has included Gary Hart, Paul Tsongas, Steve Forbes and Howard Dean.

At the moment McCain is probably the most prominent proponent of the pour-it-on school regarding Iraq. He wants the United States to considerably beef up its forces there, which as far as I'm concerned is throwing good money after bad -- providing the insurgents with even more targets as well.

The American people had been bled long enough in Vietnam and could not, for the life of them, figure out why. These many years later it's even harder to answer that question. Just what was that war about?

But even if additional troops could succeed in tamping down the level of violence in Baghdad, we have learned enough about Iraq to suggest that it would be only a temporary reprieve. The rivalries, hatreds and vengefulness that are so much a part of Iraqi religious, sectarian, tribal and God-knows-what-else animosities will erupt the minute Uncle Sam's boot is off Baghdad's neck. So what's the point?

McCain has attributed some of his more bellicose statements to the freedom that a senator -- and not a president -- has to mouth off. Maybe. No doubt, though, the senator likes to speak loudly as well as carry a big stick. Back when he first ran for president (in 2000), this threatening language did not matter much. The country was at peace and no enemy was in sight.

Anyone who knows McCain appreciates that his call for more troops in Iraq is not, at bottom, part of any political strategy. McCain is a thoroughly admirable man. Like any other politician, he will punt when he has to, but he is fundamentally honest, with sound political values. For a long time those values -- a belief in public service, a visceral hostility toward the ways of Washington's K Street lobbying crowd and a sense of honor that his Vietnamese captors came to appreciate -- obscured the always present, but muffled, sound of drums and bugles.

But the martial music grows louder and more insistent as McCain leads a charge whose mission cannot be defined and whose sound is increasingly grating to the American people. Colin Powell put it nicely Sunday on CBS's "Face the Nation." "If somebody proposes that additional troops be sent [to Iraq] . . . my first question to whoever is proposing it is, what mission is it these troops are to accomplish?" That "somebody" is none other than McCain.

On Friday, a leading cleric with close ties with Ahmadinejad fired what sounded like the first shots in the coming clash with Saudi Arabia over the Hajj. Addressing the Friday prayer congregation in Tehran, Ayatollah Ahmad Khatami warned the Saudi authorities against any attempt at preventing the Iranian pilgrims from "venting their anger at the Crusaders and the Zionists."

Khatami dismissed suggestions that the Middle East is entering a period of sectarian wars between Sunni and Shi'ite Muslims. He claimed that the real issue was the choice between revolutionary Islam, represented by Iran, and "an Islam of defeat and compromise" represented by all other governments in the Muslim world.

Speaking to voters at a polling station in Tehran on Friday, Ahmadinejad claimed that the United States was already defeated in the Middle East. "They are like rubble, and we are like the flood," he said.

In 1986, Kohmeini claimed that the slogan "Death to America!" was as important to Muslims today as the more traditional one of Allah Akbar.

The government yesterday filed civil charges against former Fannie Mae Chief Executive Franklin D. Raines and two other top executives, accusing them of misconduct costing shareholders billions of dollars.

The government yesterday filed civil charges against former Fannie Mae Chief Executive Franklin D. Raines and two other top executives, accusing them of misconduct costing shareholders billions of dollars.   ...  Attorneys for Mr. Raines, Mr. Howard and Ms. Spencer disputed the regulators' charges and said they were politically motivated.

Barry says arrest racially motivated

Marion Barry told WRC Channel 4 last night that he is talking to his lawyers and thinking about suing the D.C. government and the U.S. Park Police after he was stopped, arrested and then released this past Saturday.

    Barry said that he was driving to a holiday party around 4:30 p.m. Saturday when U.S. Park Police officers, who said that he was driving too slowly, stopped him.

    Barry said the officers asked him for his license and registration and then said that his license was suspended.

 All available data show that global sea levels have risen 400 feet since the peak of the most recent ice age 18,000 years ago. In recent millennia, the rate has been 18 cm (7 inches) per century -- and there is good argument for this rate to continue until the next ice age. Tidal gauges around the world show no acceleration during the 20th century but only a steady rise -- in spite of strong global warming before 1940.

    How can this be? Evidently, the rise expected from melting glaciers and a warmer, expanding ocean is largely offset by loss of water from increased ocean evaporation and consequent more ice accumulation on the Antarctic continent. Hence, a short-lived warm period (lasting decades or even centuries) would not accelerate the ongoing sea-level rise of 18 cm per century. ...

    This idea, discussed in my book "Hot Talk, Cold Science," seems to be penetrating to more climate scientists. For example, in 1990, the U.N.-Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) estimated a "best-value" rise of 66 cm by the year 2100; in 1996, the U.N. panel reported 49 cm (with a range of 13-94 cm); in 2001, the U.N. panel gave 9-88 cm, while the 2007 report estimates a more reasonable range of 14-43 cm. ... 

    ... the only relevant evidence (was) published in May 2006 by the federal Climate Change Science Program (CCSP).  ...   ...the federal climate-change program report shows quite clearly that greenhouse models cannot explain the observed patterns of warming. (See esp. Fig. 5.4G at www.climatescience.gov/Library/sap/sap1-1/finalreport/default.htm.) This disparity leads to the inescapable conclusion that most of the warming is of non-greenhouse origin and therefore part of a natural climate cycle. In other words, models exaggerate the effects of CO2, and even drastic efforts to control emissions are unlikely to affect global climate.

    In fact, there is good reason to consider rising CO2 levels a blessing -- a thesis supported by published economic studies. Agronomists agree that, as the essential plant food, more CO2 would enhance growth of crops and forests. Longer growing seasons and fewer frosts would benefit agriculture. Further, ocean warming inevitably increases evaporation and therefore precipitation, raising global supplies of fresh water. In addition, most warming would occur mainly at night in winter at high latitudes. Such warming may delay or even cancel the next ice age, expected to follow the present warm interglacial period.

    Thus, the drive to regulate CO2 -- and effectively control energy -- appears to be based on ideology rather than science or any real concern about climate. Quoting Lenin: "The establishment of socialism in capitalist nations requires only targeting their supply of energy."
    
    Atmospheric physicist S. Fred Singer is professor emeritus of Environmental Sciences at the University of Virginia and a former director of the U.S. Weather Satellite Service. His most recent book is "Unstoppable Global Warming — Every 1500 Years."

There is clearly a demand in the political marketplace for candidates who can rise above the bitter partisanship that has dominated our politics since Bill Clinton took office in 1993. That partisanship has been bitter in part because Mr. Clinton and George W. Bush -- both born in the lead-off Baby Boom year of 1946 -- happen to have personal characteristics that Americans on opposite sides of the cultural divide absolutely loathe. And it has been bitter because the demographic factor most highly correlated with voting behavior is religion and degree of religious devotion -- which is to say, people with deeply held moral views.

 Mr. Obama, by emphasizing what Americans of differing views have in common, invites us to an era of less bitter partisanship. His own background -- mother from Kansas, father from Kenya, childhood in Hawaii and Indonesia, education at Columbia and Harvard Law -- seems to span the breadth of American experience. He is clearly smart and carries himself with an attractive grace. But does all that really qualify him to be president?

Mrs. Clinton has experience working and achieving results in the White House. Al Gore made serious contributions to governance in Congress and in the White House. Mr. Obama's resume includes one executive position: He directed Illinois Project Vote in 1992. Two, if you count his presidency of the Harvard Law Review. He's been a law professor at the University of Chicago since 1993 and served in the Illinois Senate from 1996 to 2004, when he was elected to the U.S. Senate.

The important thing is that religions shape the personalities of whole cultures. A religion is a template for a society. What a religion says makes an enormous difference in how that society and individuals act in history. In fact, it is history itself.

We live in a civilization that has been created by Christianity, an offshoot of Judaism. Because Christianity is the air that we breathe, it's easy to forget its role -- or even to assume that we don't need it at all.

All religions are not alike. Christianity, as it happens, is religion built around forgiveness. "Turn the other cheek," "Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us," "Father forgive them for they know not what they do" -- you don't have to look very far. All this may seems natural, routine, inevitable -- maybe even boring to educated people -- but it is not universal. Hinduism is a religion that established a caste system and revolves around helping people escape the great chain of being. Buddhism is a reform of Hinduism that rejected the caste system but still seeks escape from the suffering of being by attaining non-being. Islam is a religion built on forced conversion and conquest. It does not put a value on forgiveness. The Shi'ia have still not forgiven the Sunni for the death of Hussein at the Battle of Karbala in 680 A.D.

HOW IMPORTANT IS FORGIVENESS in establishing a peaceful culture? Well, science itself has provided the answer. About twenty years ago game theorist Robert Axelrod wrote a book entitled The Evolution of Cooperation exploring the great evolutionary mystery of how individual organisms -- all pursuing their own Darwinian self-interest -- ever learn to cooperate with each other. To investigate in scientific terms, Axelrod used a game called "The Prisoner's Dilemma," in which two hypothetical criminals are being interrogated by the police. If they both deny the crime, they may get away with it. If each one betrays the other, however, the betrayer can get a lighter sentence while the betrayed individual suffers. How do individuals weigh the long-term risks and advantages of cooperating against the short-term advantages of not cooperating? In other words, how do individuals and societies build trust?

The game theorists found that trust does not develop in a single encounter. It may evolve, however, over a long series of anticipated encounters. Trying to figure out how people act in real life, they asked mathematicians all over the world to design strategies on how to play the game. Then they matched the strategies against each other on a computer.

The winner turned out to be the simplest strategy of all, called "Tit for Tat." Tit for Tat cooperates on the first encounter and then copies the other person on each subsequent encounter. In other words, it swiftly rewards cooperation and punishes betrayal. This strategy proved best at eliciting cooperation from other players -- since it always takes two to win. This seemed like a model for all justice systems -- "an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth."

There was only one problem. In certain instances Tit for Tat failed completely. This was against what you might call a "neurotic" or "sinner" strategy, where a person refuses to cooperate on the first round and then copies the other person on each succeeding round. The result is an endless series of reprisals. So the scientists tweaked the system once again. They found Tit for Tat works best when there is an occasional round of "forgiveness" that breaks the cycle of reprisal. Forgiveness is a way of wiping the slate clean and starting anew, no matter what the past history.

We in the West are incredibly lucky to have inherited this Christian tradition. There is no forgiving others in Islam -- only the beheading of enemies (the Prophet himself practiced it). Finding your spiritual destiny means becoming a jihad warrior. Even in Buddhism (according to a book I am now reading) confession "is not like the Christian confession, where there is a sense of forgiveness and atonement." Instead it involves confessing to your fellow monks that you have not yet succeeded in obliterating the desires of self and cutting all ties with the world.

...this sense of universal forgiveness saturates Western culture, creating a grand equality among all people. Long before Thomas Jefferson wrote that "All Men are Created Equal" or the French philosophers declared the "Universal Rights of Man," St. Paul declared, "In Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female. You are all one." This ideal of the brotherhood/sisterhood of humanity is what has enabled the West to establish democracies, abolish slavery, and create peaceful societies -- so that even today we continue to try to wipe out every trace of inequality among sexes, races, and classes. It is certainly something worth celebrating at Christmastime.

Should we view the Islamic movements as the primary historic force guiding the Arab world at this time? Or should we accept the Baker view halfway, namely that the Islamic enemy is rootless and stateless and our best ally in defeating it is the sitting Arab hierarchy? Which is the hit show of the next Mideast generation, Despot Housewives or Allah in the Family?

One thing is certain. On either side of this coin, dealing with Iran is poison. If Islam is in the ascendant, Iran is its avatar. And if Islam is a dangerous sideshow, Iran is its one sovereign foothold and needs to be kept in check. One piquant idea emerges from this meditation: if someone could figure out a bonus we can hand Syria, short of control of Lebanon, enough to enlist them as an ally against Iran, now that could be very interesting. But for right now, I think I'll keep my wig on.

Conservatives need to realize that something is not dubious just because it’s reported by the New York Times.

The “good news” that conservatives have accused the media of not reporting has generally been pretty weak. The Iraqi elections were indeed major accomplishments.

"Everyone says that Karl Rove is a genius. Yeah, right. So are cigarette companies. They get you to buy cigarettes even though we know they cause cancer. That is the kind of genius Karl Rove is. He is not a man who has designed a strategy to reunite our country around an agenda of renewal for the 21st century -- to bring out the best in us. His 'genius' is taking some irrelevant aside by John Kerry and twisting it to bring out the worst in us, so you will ignore the mess that the Bush team has visited on this country." -- Columnist Thomas Friedman, November 3.

Alexander Litvinenko's killers reportedly used polonium worth $10 million to kill him.   The argument that these were non-state actors just got a lot weaker.

The Cato Institute put out a paper holding that some 15 percent of voters are libertarian and that, more important, they are the much-coveted “swing voters” who decide elections. And in a number of very close elections in November, many libertarians seemed almost giddy that they might have been responsible for the defeat of Republicans.

In its most basic form, the libertarian complaint should be familiar by now: From Terri Schiavo to diarrheic spending, the GOP has betrayed its commitment to limited government. So, the libertarians reason, why not “experiment” with the Democrats a bit? They expand government too, but at least they’re more liberty-loving when it comes to drugs, sex, abortion, etc.

The problem here is that “libertarian” is a shmoo-like word but libertarians are not shmoo-like people (shmoos being the magical creatures from Lil’ Abner who could take any form and be anything). Everyone likes to think he’s in favor of maximizing freedom. But in reality most folks want to maximize only the freedoms they like.

With some exceptions, the weird reality is that most European governments, whatever their original views on the war, are either officially or unofficially opposed to an immediate U.S. withdrawal: Chaos might ensue. And the chaos would be a lot closer to Europe than to North America. Most European governments, officially or unofficially, are also now worried that the next American president will retreat from world politics or become "isolationist."

Nor is there anybody here, of any stature, who believes that Europe -- for all its recent economic improvement, for all its trading power and for all its dislike of American foreign policy -- is going to replace the United States anytime soon. Germany is about to take over the rotating presidency of the European Union, and therefore Germany is discussing E.U. integration policy, E.U. immigration policy and E.U. economics. Germany is not discussing how the European Union will take on a leading military and diplomatic role in the Middle East. And not even Germany wants any of the other potential world powers -- Russia, say, or China -- to replace the United States in the role of dominant superpower.

The time may be fast approaching to turn the lights off in Europe. Get a load of this article in the Brussels Journal, confirming everything Mark Steyn and others have been telling us. (No one has told us more vividly than Mark.)

The German author Henryk M. Broder recently told the Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant (12 October) that young Europeans who love freedom, better emigrate. Europe as we know it will no longer exist 20 years from now. Whilst sitting on a terrace in Berlin, Broder pointed to the other customers and the passers-by and said melancholically: “We are watching the world of yesterday.”

Europe is turning Muslim. As Broder is sixty years old he is not going to emigrate himself. “I am too old,” he said. However, he urged young people to get out and “move to Australia or New Zealand. That is the only option they have if they want to avoid the plagues that will turn the old continent uninhabitable.”

Many Germans and Dutch, apparently, did not wait for Broder’s advice. The number of emigrants leaving the Netherlands and Germany has already surpassed the number of immigrants moving in.

Saudi Arabia has long thought of Iraq as its buffer against Iran and for this reason opposed the removal of Saddam Hussein and would not allow its soil to be used for the operation. Saudi princes and officials have long been worried by the state of opinion among the Shiite underclass in Saudi Arabia itself, because this underclass—its religion barely recognized by the ultra-orthodox Wahabbi authorities—happens to live and work in and around the oil fields. Since 2003, there have been increasing signs of discontent from them, including demands for more religious and political freedom.

In 1991, which is also the year when the present crisis in Iraq actually began, it was Saudi influence that helped convince President George H.W. Bush and Secretary of State James Baker to leave Saddam Hussein in power and to permit him to crush the Shiite intifada that broke out as his regime reeled from defeat in Kuwait. If, when reading an article about the debate over Iraq, you come across the expression "the realist school" and mentally substitute the phrase "the American friends of the Saudi royal family," your understanding of the situation will invariably be enhanced.

Many people write as if the sectarian warfare in Iraq was caused by coalition intervention. But it is surely obvious that the struggle for mastery has been going on for some time and was only masked by the apparently iron unity imposed under Baathist rule.   ...Shiite grievances against the state were decades old and had been hugely intensified by Saddam's cruelty. Nothing was going to stop their explosion, and if Saddam Hussein's regime had been permitted to run its course and to devolve (if one can use such a mild expression) into the successorship of Udai and Qusai, the resulting detonation would have been even more vicious.

And into the power vacuum would have stepped not only Saudi Arabia and Iran, each with its preferred confessional faction, but also Turkey, in pursuit of hegemony in Kurdistan. In other words, the alternative was never between a tranquil if despotic Iraq and a destabilizing foreign intervention, but it was, rather, a race to see which kind of intervention there would be.

Iraq has only three alternatives before it. The first is dictatorship by one faction or sect over all the others: a solution that has been exhausted by horrific failure. The second is partition, which would certainly involve direct intervention by all its neighbors to secure privileges for their own proxies and would therefore run the permanent risk of civil war. And the third is federalism, where each group would admit that it was not strong enough to dictate terms to the others and would agree to settle differences by democratic means. Quixotic though the third solution may seem, it is the only alternative to the most gruesome mayhem—more gruesome than anything we have seen so far. It is to the credit of the United States that it has at least continued to hold up this outcome as a possibility—a possibility that would not be thinkable if the field were left to the rival influences of Tehran and Riyadh.

I once heard U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad say that he was surprised by how often the different factions in the Iraqi parliament (the very existence of which, by the way, is itself a miracle*) would come to him and ask his help as a broker. It was often possible to perform this role to some extent, he went on to say, as long as each group understood that it could not get what it wanted by force. The necessary corollary of this, though, was that nobody believed they could drive the U.S. presence out of the country.

The unspoken corollary of that, however, was that nobody believed that the Americans were going to withdraw suddenly or of their own accord. In that event, each group would immediately start making contingency plans—such as soliciting foreign support—to grab what it could from the impending scramble. The danger now is that all parties in the region are setting their watches and presuming that all they need to do is wait out the moment. This almost automatically dooms any negotiations that are currently being conducted.

...the root problem is not the United States and not the tactical errors that we have made in Iraq. The root problem is the Iraqis and their own political culture. Since this an evening honoring Benjamin Franklin, I want to recall to you one of his most famous statements. When leaving the Constitutional Convention, he was asked what they had accomplished. His response was "A republic, if you can keep it." What we have done in Iraq is given them a republic, but they appear unable to keep it.

I think that has a lot to do with Iraqi history. We had two objectives going into Iraq. The first was to depose the regime--relatively easy. The second was to try to establish a self-sustaining, democratic successor government. That has proved to be extraordinarily difficult.

the problem, I believe, is Iraq's particular culture and history. This after all is a country that was raped and ruined for thirty years by a uniquely sadistic and cruel and atomizing totalitarianism. What was left in its wake was a social and political desert, a dearth of the kind of trust and good will and sheer human capital required for democratic governance.

Is this our fault? I think the answer is no. It's the result of Iraq's first experiment in democracy. When the U.S. went into Iraq, it was not going to replace on tyrant with another. We were trying to begin the planting of democracy in the heart of the Middle East as the one conceivable antidote to terrorism and extremism. In a country that is two thirds Shiite, that meant inevitably Shiite rule. It was never certain whether the long-oppressed Shia would have enough sense of nation or sense of compromise to set aside their own grievances and internal differences and make a generous offer to the Sunnis in order to tame the insurgency and begin a new page in their country's political history. The answer to whether that was going to happen is now in, and the answer is no.

What I think we are beginning to see now is Iran positioning itself at the center of a regional alliance against us, again with the--Hezbollah, Hamas, Syria, Sadr--looking to overawe the entire region with the acquisition of nuclear weapons, which would make it the regional superpower. And Iran is receiving tacit backing for its regional and anti-American ambitions from two great powers: Russia and China. That, I think, is the structure of the adversary that we will be looking at for the decades to come.

As the Bush Doctrine has come under attack, there are those in America who have welcomed its apparent setbacks and defeats as a vindication of their criticism of the policy. But the problem is that that kind of vindication leaves America in a position where there are no good alternatives. The reason that there is general despair now is because if it proves to be true that the Bush Doctrine has proclaimed an idea of democratizing the Arab/Islamic world that is unattainable and undoable, then there are no remaining answers to how to counter ultimately the threat of Islamic radicalism.

It remains the only plausible answer--changing the culture of that area, no matter how slow and how difficult the process. It starts in Iraq and Lebanon, and must be allowed to proceed and not precipitate an early and premature surrender.