Uncle Sam is down on his knees, and some observers already are administering the last rites. But are they too quick to judge?
Eavesdrop on the two scenes for a moment.
“If money isn’t loosened up, this sucker could go down,” he said of the US economy, marshalling the inimitable eloquence of the President who has given [...]

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The United States is now winning the war that two years ago seemed lost. Limited, sometimes sharp fighting and periodic terrorist bombings in Iraq are likely to continue, possibly for years. But the Iraqi government and the U.S. now are able to shift focus from mainly combat to mainly building the fragile beginnings of peace [...]

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The hundreds of drones cruising over Iraq and Afghanistan have changed war forever.
The UAV is the “smart bomb” of the Iraq War, the latest turn in the unending offense-defense spiral that characterizes the history of warfare. Army units searching and fighting house-to-house are using hundreds of drones, some of them as small as a model [...]

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But look today at Europe’s political leadership: Nicolas Sarkozy in France has replaced the bitterly anti-American Jacques Chirac. In Germany, Angela Merkel has replaced the dyspeptic and anti-Iraq war Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder. Prime Minister Gordon Brown in Britain now once again speaks about the US-UK “special relationship.” And now, Berlusconi will soon return to the [...]

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But some observers see other motives in pulling back Syria’s nuclear curtain. Andrew Semmel, the former top State Department official for nonproliferation, tells Voice of America the release may have been aimed at “putting a positive spin” on intelligence that was bound to leak. Dar Al-Hayat columnist Elias Harfoush sees the disclosure as an attempt [...]

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