If U.S. corporations get their way, none of their European competitors will be doing business in Baghdad.

For those of us seriously interested in the Middle East, Bernard Lewis has attained a stature in the field and with the general reading public unrivaled by any historian of the Middle East and Islam.

So long as European defense remains largely theoretical-and at least some Atlanticist members of NATO truly believe that ESDP is a step toward burden-sharing-I believe that we should concentrate our energies on the most immediate challenges at hand and not find ourselves lost in unproductive acrimony where it can be avoided.

The Iraq war, widely said to have discredited the basic tenets of the neoconservative school of thought, has in fact vindicated them.