Philip Morris, not content with professionalizing women's sports, being the largest corporate art supporter, defending our civil liberties via its legal budget, revolutionizing auto racing technologies, creating inhalable insulin, also isolates and destroys Al Qeada. Thank you Marlboro Man!

Also, have we considered that these relationships may be collapsing because Massachusetts allows gay marriage? I'd say that we have overlooked a powerful weapon in the war on terror.

The original concept was that we... would create security, which would in turn create space for a “grand bargain” at the national level. Instead, we are seeing the exact opposite: a series of local political deals has displaced extremists, resulting in a major improvement in security at the local level, and the national government is jumping on board with the program. Instead of coalition-led top-down reconciliation, this is Iraqi-led, bottom-up, based on civil society rather than national politics. And oddly enough, it seems to be working so far... This was not what we expected,...

Why is this odd? Why were we not "expecting" this? As Tip O'Neil once said, "All politics is local." This is what we should have been trying to foster from the very beginning.

It gives me hope that we may yet survive the blundering of the Bush Admin.

tom

Some aspects of the war in Iraq are hard to fit into “classical” models of insurgency. One of these is the growing tribal uprising against al Qa’ida, which could transform the war in ways not factored into neat “benchmarks” developed many mon...

As I understand it Arabizing local populations through intermarriage is a practice that goes back thousands of years. Apparently, Al Qaeda has adopted the strategy themselves as a method of creating bonds with local populations.

There is nothing unusual about this--it has been done since the dawn of civilization. Hell, European colonialization used this same technique.