Because Barack Obama is not George W. Bush, this war has the veneer of multilateral respectability, from the cover of the United Nations to the insistence that the U.S. is allowing the British and French to lead to the pledge not to use American ground forces. Yet at the end of the day, this is an instance of the U.S. and its allies invading a sovereign country in order to overthrow its leader, as Simon Tisdall correctly points out.

I remain baffled what the West expects to accomplish from intervening in the Libyan civil war. Let's say that the West succeeds in toppling Gaddafi and installing the country's opposition as the legitimate government in Libya. (Lest you assume that this is a mere formality, read this New York Times article). Do we know how (or whether) the new regime will behave? Do we know whether they'll have the ability to manage Libya's complex system of tribal loyalties and run a stable government? Do we know whether they'll cooperate in repelling terrorism, something that Gaddafi quietly accomplished?

This war seems to be fought solely for the consciences of the West, almost just so we don't have to read about Gaddafi's brutality in the newspapers. Very few of the arguments I've read in support of the invasion have cited the American national interest, relying mostly on vague pronouncements of our "credibility" and "moral standing".  If these two goals were legitimate, why haven't we then invaded Bahrain and Yemen, two states who have violently repressed popular uprisings in recent days?  Perhaps if their leaders had the habit of wearing colorful clothes and making absurd statements the Western appetite for warfare would have grown.

Or if we wait another eight years or so, there will be another opportunity to use our military to intervene in another unnecessary conflict. If you have a hammer, then every problem looks like a nail.

In 1997, the regime felt confident enough to sanction the surprise victory of President Muhammad Khatami, who won by the same landslide margin of 69% in a joyous election that no one disputed. Khatami, a cleric, had nonetheless far stronger liberal credentials than the technocrat Mousavi (who, during the Iran-Iraq war, was well to the right of Khamenei). Lovingly hailed as "Ayatollah Gorbachev", Khatami was soon talking about the "thoughtful dialogue" he hoped to open with America. It seemed possible that international isolation, which so parches and de-oxygenates the Iranian air, was about to be eased.

Everyone understood that this process would take time. In June 2001, Khatami was re-elected with a majority of 78%. Seven months later came George W Bush's "axis of evil" speech (one of the most destructive in American history), and the Tehran Spring was at an end.

Ah, the "Axis of Evil" speech. I remember watching it, live, from a television set in Italy, and realizing with a sudden jolt that Bush didn't know what he was talking about.

Quite a few people might say, "Duh, Bush was clearly an idiot from the moment he took office," which is undeniably true. Yet after the national trauma of September 11th, I allowed myself to believe that Bush would rise to the moment, unite the country, and help us defeat this frightening new adversary. I wasn't alone- Bush's approval ratings in late 2001 approached 90 percent.

Other people turned on Bush after the invasion of Iraq, or when the occupation of Iraq began to go badly. Some didn't turn on him until his second term, when his breathtaking incompetence shone forth in high-definition relief. But me, the "Axis of Evil" speech was my "wait a sec" moment.

Think of the repercussions. First, the speech led to the subsequent sorry prelude to the Iraq War,  launched 14 months later. Secondly, labeling North Korea in the group managed to effortlessly roll back diplomatic progress with the hermit kingdom. And of course, as Amis mentions, the damage done to Western rapproachement with Iran was incalcuable.

Not only did the "evil" remark deflate the reformist movement's momentum, it also slammed the door shut on possible Iranian cooperation in the war against al-Qaeda, the group we ostensibly wanted to eradicate. In the weeks after 9/11, Iran quietly approached the US with help against their common enemy. The US said thanks, but no thanks, preferring to keep all of our enemies lumped together in the same bunch.

In the halcyon days after 9/11, Bush's ardent supporters publicly thanked God that he was president. His shellshocked opposition didn't disagree. With historical hindsight,  we can conclude that having such a buffoonish idiot in office during a national crisis amounted to extraordinarily bad luck on our part.

Herein lies the problem: Russia's appeal to them just does not sound very seductive. Ideally, it would present an attractive model for its neighbors, politically and economically. Young generations would learn Russian because they wanted to, and the post-Soviet alliances would be clubs its neighbors are lining up to join.

In political science parlance, this is called 'soft power', and is a power well-worth remembering by present and future great powers.

Consider the question of Iran. American neo-conservatives have predictably bleated on about how the US and Obama, needed to 'do' something to assist the demonstrators.

What they fail to realize, time and again, is that any American military action against Iran would unite the country against us and dampen any possible spirit of political pluralism in the country.

Iranians are often cited as having the most pro-American population in the Middle East. If this is true, then our popularity assuredly stems not from our belligerence but rather the relative openness of our political system and our cultural vibrance.

Fortunately, Obama seems to understand this- hence his caution during recent events. Being a bully- as Russia is finding out- doesn't pay off.

As China's zone of influence expands westward, a network of north-south roads through Pakistan, India, and Burma will one day connect both Xinjiang and Tibet with ports on the Arabian Sea and Bay of Bengal, economically liberating landlocked inner China. A new Silk Route will form, in which Lhasa will be linked with Kolkata, Kashgar with Karachi, and so on.

Here in Kunming, China's massive investment in international road and rail links will change the face of the city within the next ten or twenty years. Before long, it will be possible to drive from Kunming to Calcutta or Kunming to Bangkok on modern, high-speed roads. As Kaplan notes, these transport links will fuel economic expansion to southwestern and western China, regions that have been slow to share in the coastal provinces' economic prosperity.

I was chatting to a friend the other day about East Asia's two "rogue states": Burma and North Korea. He said that each problem will eventually resolve itself, as both countries will eventually become client states of China. In one sense, they already are: China's imports of Burmese timber helps prop up the latter's sagging economy and China is the only significant global power with any ties at all to North Korea. My friend believes that before long both the Kim family and the Burmese junta will be taking orders from Beijing.

Whether or not my friend's prophecy comes true (and I suspect it might), I do believe that one of the major global trends in the next few decades will be a realignment toward great powers having regional "spheres of influence". China isn't necessarily a great power yet; its military and economic strength are no match for fully developed countries; but its rise as the regional power in East Asia is inevitable.

What does this mean for the United States? Its military and economic dominance will not wane for some time, but in the (somewhat) near future the American moment of unipolarity will undoubtedly recede. The US has based its foreign policy since the Cold War on being the global hegemon, leading a network of friendly, secular liberal democracies in its new world order. This policy has led to an overstretched military and ill-advised wars against regional tyrants, hardly the best use of US resources or power.

A consequence of relative US decline vs. the rise of China and the EU may be a stable series of spheres of influence, with each power having a controlling stake in its periphery. As for China, this may mean they will have to compromise in places such as Africa in order to exert greater hegemony in Taiwan, Burma, North Korea, and other neighboring places.

Most of the apologies can be summarized in one sentence: I didn't expect the Bush team to fuck it all up so badly. In other words, the merits of the invasion were sound but the execution was what caused the current fiasco.

Some hawks remain unrepentant and point to the recent "surge" as evidence that the war will be won, after all. Others aren't so sure. Yet what bothers me about all this hemming and hawing is this: precious few who opposed the war from the start have been given a platform. You would think that, having been proved largely correct about the war, these pundits and politicians who presciently believed Iraq would be a bad idea would have seen their stature elevated. This has largely not been the case.

Of course, the occupation has been a disaster. I suppose one can say (and several do) that had their been sufficient troops to maintain security, sufficient funds to keep essential services functioning after the war, sufficient wisdom that disbanding the army and the police force and purging the entire Baath Party was a terrible idea, then the war would have worked. There is logic to this point of view. Most Iraqis truly welcomed Saddam's removal from power and would largely have been supportive of the war effort had their lives not been ruined by the bungled occupation.

But these options never, ever existed. There wasn't a vigorous debate within the government about how to proceed after the US military inevitably defeated the Iraqi one. The war and the occupation that we got was the same one that was sold to the American public in the fall of 2002. Sobering thoughts about the need for a huge military force were pooh-poohed. Dissent doves were labeled as unpatriotic and sufferers of "Bush Derangement Syndrome". There was never a possibility that the war was going to work. People who were paying attention knew this, but they were sidelined. And now, after five years, they remain outside the realm of official debate.

The Iraq War was not a good plan that failed due to poor execution. It was a bad plan that was exacerbated by poor execution. Why this opinion remains somewhat taboo in the American media mystifies and depresses me.

Bush's latest has to do with the war in Afghanistan, begun six and a half years ago and still mired in stalemate. From Slate's Fred Kaplan:

Speaking by videoconference with U.S. military and civilian personnel in Afghanistan about the challenges posed by war, corruption, and the poppy trade, the president unleashed this comment:

I must say, I'm a little envious. If I were slightly younger and not employed here, I think it would be a fantastic experience to be on the front lines of helping this young democracy succeed. It must be exciting for you €¦ in some ways romantic, in some ways, you know, confronting danger. You're really making history, and thanks.

Go ahead, dear reader, pour yourself a stiff one before trudging on.

Someone with such a jaunty vision of war€”concocted from who knows what brew of Rudyard Kipling, John Wayne, and sheer fantasy€”has no business leading young men and women into real-life battle, no business serving as the armed forces' commander in chief.

It only compounds the insult to reflect that Bush, when he was younger and not employed anywhere, passed up his chance for a romantic fling with danger in the jungles of Southeast Asia.

The whole article is spot-on, but the last paragraph of this excerpt truly nails how despicable our president truly is.

I remember during the halcyon days of 2002-2004 when right-wing politicians and pundits attacked the Democrats for being "unserious" about the war, if for no other reason than the then-minority party occasionally criticized its execution. What could be less serious than Bush's comment above? I wonder if he imagines fighting a war as being like a frat-house party with machine guns and tanks.

Cuba is one of the five remaining Communist countries in the world, alongside China, Vietnam, Laos, and North Korea. The former three have each implemented market reforms that have modernized their respective economies without loosening the Communist Party's grip on power. Cuba, like North Korea, remains a somewhat fossilized Communist state, dominated by a single man who rules amid a cult of personality.

For the United States, Castro's resignation represents a unique opportunity to reconsider our idiotic, counter-productive trade embargo. Since Castro's ascension nearly fifty years ago, the US has attempted to isolate the Cuban regime in the hopes that it would collapse, something that has clearly not worked out as planned. Instead, Castro emerged as something of a hero for other Latin American regimes resentful of American economic and political interference. The embargo persists due to intense political pressure from Cuban exiles in south Florida, a powerful interest group willing to spend large amounts of money in order to maintain a stupid policy.

Florida's Cubans tend to be staunch Republicans, so a Democratic president such as Barack Obama may feel safe enough to alienate them. Obama has pledged direct engagement with unfriendly nations as part of his foreign policy platform, and Cuba would be a fairly low-risk theater in which to implement it.

One such country of course is China, whose reaction has merely been to express "grave concern" and to call for a solution more congenial to Serbia's interests. Beijing did not say whether or not it would recognize Kosovo, although my sense is that this is extremely unlikely. China falls into a category of countries concerned that Kosovar independence might inspire their own separatist movements to emulate its example.

This issue dovetails with a discussion I'm having with commenter Marco in this thread about China's Janus-faced relationship with imperialism. Beijing has long denied harboring imperialist intentions itself, pointing out that China was a victim of foreign domination in the century prior to the founding of the People's Republic. This cannot be swept aside: China was intimidated, carved up, bullied, and ultimately occupied by a number of imperialist powers, an experience that has not been forgotten.

That aside, what does China make of its historical behavior in Tibet, Xinjiang, and Mongolia? In each case, China appropriated ethnically separate territories under its own control, brutally suppressed any dissent and encouraged Han settlement in order to dilute the native proportion of the population. Beijing's flatters itself by claiming its significant material investment in each region has greatly improved the overall quality of life, and to an extent this is true. Yet were the Japanese to claim that their occupation of China in the 1930s and 40s represented an altruistic attempt to develop the country, all Chinese would be up in arms.

Nowadays, these issues are largely moot. Turkic people in Xinjiang comprise but a minority of their own autonomous region, and Han settlement in Inner Mongolia has been so thorough that they now represent 90% of the province's population. Tibet's situation is rather more complicated, but even their exiled supreme leader (the Dalai Lama) has ceased calling for independence. In other words, China lacks a breakaway region on par with Kosovo.

And as for Taiwan? Its parallels with Kosovo are rather slim. One of Kosovo's strongest claims for independence was its ethnic distinctiveness from Slavic Serbia: 95% of the Kosovar population is ethnically Albanian. Taiwanese people are predominately Chinese. And while Kosovars endured a brutal suppression by Slobodan Milosevic's Serbian army, Beijing has mainly left Taiwan alone since 1949. The international community has largely united behind the mainland's One China Policy, and few countries still recognize Taiwan as China's rightful government.

So China is left in a pickle. Recognize Kosovo, and it leaves itself susceptible to claims of hypocrisy. Denounce the new country, and it then has to fend off questions of why an ethnically homogeneous country should be at the whim of an aggressive, dominant foreign power. As a result, I sense that "gravely concerned" will be Beijing's official policy for awhile.

"In 1972 I was in Baghdad having Christmas dinner with Iraqi friends- a big, sumptuous traditional Arab feast- when one began lecturing me about the Christmas bombing of Vietnam. 'Why,' he said, 'does your country do this? Don't they understand the human consequences?' I patiently replied that I was no supporter of either Nixon or the Vietnam War and told him not all Americans agree with our government's policies.

"Thirty years later, almost to the date, I was sitting with Vietnamese friends in this very restaurant, when the same topic came up. 'Why,' they asked, 'is your government going to attack Iraq? Don't they consider what will happen to ordinary Iraqis?' Again, I patiently explained that I was no supporter of Bush or the Iraq War, and that not all Americans agree with the government's policies.

"So yes, I understand your point."

I thought about his story just the other night, when my parents and I saw the new film "Charlie Wilson's War". The film, set in the 1980s, details the efforts of a hard drinking Texas congressman to assist the Afghan mujahideen repel the Soviet invaders. Wilson (played by Tom Hanks) manages to cajole his fellow congressmen to increase the covert operations budget so the Afghans would have the weapons they needed to shoot down Soviet helicopters. Of course, as we know, the USSR would retreat and the mujahideen would recapture their land. At the end of the film, when Wilson celebrated the Afghan victory, his accomplice (a hard-drinking CIA agent played by Philip Seymour Hoffman) reminded him that what seems like good news today can become bad news tomorrow. Of course, this is precisely what happened as the mujahideen formed the basis of the Taliban government that the U.S would be forced to topple less than twenty years later.

Think of all the changes. No one could have predicted in 1968 that China would embrace market capitalism and the pursuit of wealth not twenty years later. No one could have predicted then that by 2007 the world city with the highest number of billionaires would be Moscow, Russia. No one could have predicted in 1976 that Cambodia and Vietnam would become major tourist destinations less than thirty years later. No one foresaw Iran turning into a repressive theocracy, or Lebanon descending into civil war and chaos. No one would have imagined that formerly Communist Lithuania would have a freer press than the United States.

So here's a question for all you global thinker types as we lurch into a new year. What sorts of changes could we see in the next twenty years? Will we be discussing the Iraq war someday from a cafe....in Pyongyang?

Like most people outside of Australasia, I have never paid much attention to Australian politics. Yet John Howard was a distinctly loathsome figure, perhaps the only leader outside of the United States to match President Bush's belligerent, hawkish rhetoric. Howard was no Tony Blair- a brilliant politician felled by a monumental error in supporting Iraq. Howard was a neocon's neocon. He marched lockstep with Bush and never questioned the White House's prosecution of the war. For that, he paid the ultimate political price.

Howard's fealty toward Washington was often a point of embarrassment for Australians, even among those ordinarily sympathetic to his politics. Perhaps no moment better exemplified Howard's disregard for opponents of the Bush Administration than his appalling comment about Barack Obama, uttered earlier this year:

If I was running al-Qaeda in Iraq, I would put a circle around March 2008, and pray, as many times as possible, for a victory not only for [Barack] Obama, but also for the Democrats.

Such comments are common fare among members of the American right, but for the prime minister of a foreign country and a major US ally, they were extremely inappropriate to say the least.

So who becomes the new Australian premier? Kevin Rudd. The Labour Party head campaigned on two central issues: reversing Howard's opposition to the Kyoto Protocol on climate change and removing Australian troops from Iraq. What interests me about Rudd, though, is his background. In the 1980s, he served in the Australian diplomatic corps in Beijing, acquiring fluent Mandarin in the process. Earlier in the year, Rudd made quite a splash in China by delivering a speech in Mandarin in front of the suitably impressed President Hu Jintao.

Does this mean Australia will tilt toward China? Probably not, and I would suspect the Australia/US alliance won't suffer in the slightest. Yet the West needs better leadership in terms of China policy, and Rudd seems uniquely positioned to offer it. In the meantime, let me offer a hearty "good on ya mate!" to the collective voters of Australia. As one so eloquently put it last night, "Sanity has been restored to the people of my homeland"

Indeed.

More: Excellent analysis by Salon's Glenn Greenwald, from which I culled the Howard quote regarding Obama.