As he heads for the office these days, Nouri al-Maliki should bid his family especially tender farewells. If the patterns of U.S. foreign policy are any guide, the Iraqi prime minister is a very poor insurance risk.

On Monday, Aug. 20, a leading Democratic senator, Carl Levin of Michigan and chairman of the Armed Services Committee, returned from a weekend outing to Iraq and declared publicly that Iraq's parliament should remove al-Maliki from power. "The Maliki government is nonfunctional," Levin declared, "and cannot produce a political settlement because it is too beholden to religious and sectarian leaders."

The next day, Hillary Rodham Clinton, front-runner of Democrats seeking the nomination of their party for the presidency, went before the annual convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars and reiterated her senate colleague's call. She said that al-Maliki should be replaced by a "less divisive and more unifying figure."

The final grim news for al-Maliki came on Wednesday when President Bush affirmed confidence in the prime minister, declaring him to be a fine fellow.

"To address the war in Iraq as unwinnable is ludicrous, the only issue is the resolve of the people and how many believe the misinformation pandered by the far left"  (Marty Scott, News & Advance, Aug. 22).

Contrary to promises, we are LESS SAFE here at home since the US invasion of Iraq: al-Qaeda is more active and dispersed than before the war and the US presence in Iraq breeds extremist violence and puts our service people in harm’s way. According to figures from the Brookings “Iraq Index” and the Institute for Policy Studies, as of November 2003 the number of resistance fighters in Iraq was estimated at 5,000; as of March 2007 the estimate is 70,000.

Furthermore we have seen and are seeing the dire consequences and strategic nightmares that then former Secretary of Defense Richard Cheney predicte4d in an April 15, 1994 interview:

Q: Do you think the U.S., or U.N. forces, should have moved into Baghdad?

CHENEY: No.

Q: Why not?

It's been two years.  And America's media is about to have another tear-gasm over New Orleans.  Maybe Anderson Cooper will weep again.  The big networks will float into the moldering corpse of the city and give you uplifting stories about rebuilding and hope.

Now, let's cut through the cry-baby crap. Here's what happened two years ago - and what's happening now.

This is what an inside source me.  And it makes me sick:

"By midnight on Monday, the White House knew.  Monday night I was at the state Emergency Operations Center and nobody was aware that the levees had breeched.  Nobody."

The charge is devastating:  That, on August 29, 2005, the White House withheld from the state police the information that New Orleans was about to flood. From almost any other source, I would not have believed it.  But this was not just any source.  The whistle-blower is Dr. Ivor van Heerden, deputy director of the Louisiana State University Hurricane Center, the chief technician advising the state on saving lives during Katrina.

The “ahhh” of familiar pleasure I felt as I accelerated cut off abruptly as I watched the gas-mileage readout on my sister’s new Camry plummet.

How dare the requirements of fuel-efficient driving presume to contradict the habits — and unacknowledged godlike joys — of a lifetime of gasoline consumption? I looked at my sister, a “hypermiling” neo-enthusiast, who seemed to be wagging her finger at me (she wasn’t, but I’m sure the impulse was there), and said, “Nanny state.”

At least I uttered it as a joke — that grating, illuminating expression of adolescent politics and individual triumphalism. Libertarians. You gotta love ’em. They survey the human landscape and wince at . . . a government that cares too much, in a bumbling, overreaching way, of course, and tries to protect us not merely from thieves and terrorists and snake oil salesmen but from ourselves. They hate seatbelt laws and anti-smoking laws and picture government not as a shifting coalition of organized, often malign interests, but as a self-righteous scold.

St. Louis -- A young man from Palestine and another from Israel riveted 400 U.S. military veterans to their seats last week in this city on the Mississippi River.  What captivated the audience was their recent decision to put down the guns they’d pointed at each other for years.    

The two members of Combatants For Peace addressed the mid-August national convention of Veterans For Peace, a 7,000 – member organization dedicated to abolishing war.

Yonaton Gur, a 28 year-old Israeli journalist and Tel Aviv University student spoke first. 

“My grandfather commanded the Israeli Navy during the 1967 war, my father was an officer in Israeli Army Intelligence, and I grew up on a kibbutz.”  But, he explained, “I also grew up in the 90’s, with a more peaceful perspective following the (1993) Oslo Accords.”