The work of almost a decade of U.S. counterterrorist and counterinsurgency operations, at a cost of thousands of lives, is coming undone as al Qaeda operatives regain power in Iraq.

President Obama's efforts to appease Sudanese president Omar Hassan al-Bashir's government have increased Bashir's perception of U.S. weakness and reinforced his inclination and willingness to use military force to suppress Sudanese opposition in the South, Darfur, and elsewhere.

The extremists who harbored al Qaeda could get control of Pakistan's nuclear arsenal.

Election day in Iraq may surprise the press.

Western liberalism and democracy have found few takers in the Middle East. Instead, the people of the region have chased totalitarian fantasies.

The London bombings look like the work of a network that is losing its effectiveness, cohesion, and some of its ideological attractiveness to radical Muslims in the West and worldwide.

Nowadays we find something disreputable about this kind of assertion and counter-assertion of identity. It is fundamentally at odds with the multiculturalist orthodoxy of the last 30 years.

A pragmatic assessment of the situation in Egypt and elsewhere in the Middle East underlines the daunting obstacles in the way of a democratic transformation.