Since his election as president of Venezuela in 1998, leftist strongman Hugo Chávez has shattered his country’s already weak institutions to expand and sustain his grip on power and has built an anti-U.S. alliance with Cuba, Iran, Russia and China.

If there is one success story since 9/11, it has been the efforts to combat terror finance. If military action is sometimes akin to conducting surgery with an axe, efforts to dry up sources of funding are like wielding a scalpel.

The Iraq Effect is a thought-provoking but flawed study commissioned by the U.S. Air Force on the regional implications of the 2003 Iraq war. Trends discussed may be real, but their presence before Operation Iraqi Freedom suggests that they should not be attributed only to the war.

As memory of past tragedies fade, many Australians question their participation in the war on terror. Whereas three years ago, the Australian mission in Afghanistan was relatively popular, polls now show almost two-thirds of Australians want their troops withdrawn from Afghanistan.

China's leaders are calculating that it pays to be populist and anti-Western, but they are well aware of how many of its citizens are unhappy with a government whose rule is marked by increasing levels of corruption and inequality.

On March 30, Afghan president Hamid Karzai strongly condemned actions of the "Kill Team," a rogue military unit accused of deliberately murdering Afghan civilians. Reaction to the photos in Afghanistan has largely been muted, but this may change as Karzai's condemnation draws more attention.

Mubarak cannot stay in office until the September elections; Egypt needs a transitional government until that time.

In The Sixth Crisis, Dana Allin and Steven Simon argue that Tehran's nuclear drive--and the possibility of a preemptive Israeli strike--constitutes a crisis as momentous as any of these.