While debate has continued in recent months in Washington and Baghdad about the wisdom and need for U.S. forces to remain in Iraq, Obama's statement at the United Nations General Assembly appears to end the debate.

Turkish diplomats tell their American counterparts that they need the helicopters to combat Kurdish guerillas. Turkey may have other motives however. Turkish President Abdullah Gül has suggested Turkey might seek to punish Kurds collectively for the actions of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK).

Twenty-first century economists blithely talked of the "risk-free debt" of governments, and European bank regulators set a zero-capital requirement on the debt of their governments. The manifold proof of their error is that banks and other investors are now taking huge credit losses on their Greek government bonds. The only question is why anybody would be surprised by this.

The recent spontaneous, Twitter-led uprising in Moldova sounded too good to be true--and it was.

Forces allied to the former Gadhafi regime could still threaten a fragile new government using guerilla and terrorist tactics. It would be a mistake to underestimate his tenacity or to dismiss the warning of his son Seif that "We will fight to our very last man, woman, and bullet."

For the U.S. to prevail in this game of chicken, it will have to accept two basic premises that it has shied away from thus far. First, that the Pakistani army is an adversary, if not an enemy. Second, that the U.S. can only win if the generals at army headquarters in Rawalpindi cease to believe that America will always blink first.

The likelihood of the war with Iraq casts new light on the structure of American military presence in Europe, which has hardly changed since the cold war. The United States needs more flexible forces that can be deployed without delays caused by anti-American sentiment. New Europe--Hungary, Poland, Romania, and...

It is likely that today's global financial market crisis will mark the end of any serious challenge by the euro to the U.S. dollar as an alternate international reserve currency.