Whether it's online or in the real world, I do seem to attract some interesting "characters" into my life.

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Tomorrow is World AIDS Day.


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Afghan Autopsy

After a month traveling around Afghanistan this autumn, I was forced to a grim conclusion: This project is lost, and nothing very good will likely replace it. The reasons for the international community’s failure here are several. First, there are the immediate blunders of the occupiers who, despite extensive European involvement, are led by the Americans. Next are deeper historical dynamics dating back to the U.S. role in the anti-Soviet jihad. And finally there are much older cultural, political and economic facts about Afghanistan that have long made this a wild, lawless place, impervious to conquest and even resistant to the modernizing efforts of its urban middle classes.

Learning to Live with the Ayatollahs

How in the world did George W. Bush manage to turn Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the “Supreme Leader” of “Axis of Evil” Iran, into a prophet of peace in the Middle East?

Good question Mr. Scheer.

So it is that Iraqi President Jalal Talabani was so desperate in his pleas to the ayatollah, admitting that “We are in dire need of Iran’s help in establishing security and stability in Iraq.”

Of course he is, because six years of Bush’s foreign policy has had the presumably unintended consequences of elevating radicals and theocrats into positions of dominance throughout the region, from Iraq, Lebanon, the West Bank and even, this past week, to the oil emirate Bahrain, where Shiite and Sunni radical Islamists split elections in an upset.