"Arafat is guilty of everything here." Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon declared on television Monday night. "Arafat has made his strategic choices: a strategy of terrorism." In sync with these fierce words, Israeli forces launched attacks close to the Palestinian leader's house and destroyed his helicopters, an onslaught that the U.S. government conspicuously failed to condemn.

So, in the wake of the last suicide bomb attacks launched by Hamas, the sky is now the limit for Israeli reprisals: the killing of Arafat, and, not so far down the road, possible forced expulsion of tens of thousands of Palestinians from the West Bank. In other words, the substitution of untrammeled military repression by Israel's forces and a deaf ear from the United States to all Palestinian calls for fair dealing. Write "FINIS" to all efforts across the past 35 years to secure a just settlement in Israel and some measure of satisfaction for Palestinian aspirations.

But, to be honest about it, is that not exactly what Israelis like Ariel Sharon have wanted all along? Can anyone claim with a straight

And now, a news dispatch from the Media Twilight Zone...

WASHINGTON -- There were unconfirmed reports yesterday that the United States is not the center of the world.

The White House had no immediate comment on the reports, which set off a firestorm of controversy in the nation's capital.

Speaking on background, a high-ranking official at the State Department discounted the possibility that the reports would turn out to be true. "If that were the case," he said, "don't you think we would have known about it a long time ago?"

On Capitol Hill, leaders of both parties were quick to rebut the assertion. "That certain news organizations would run with such a poorly sourced and obviously slanted story tells us that the liberal media are still up to their old tricks, despite the current crisis," a GOP lawmaker fumed. A prominent Democrat, also speaking on condition of anonymity, said that classified briefings to congressional intelligence panels had disproved such claims long ago.

Scholars at leading think tanks were more restrained, and some said

It had seemed to me that one absolutely certain fact, beyond all dispute or question, is that the terror attacks of Sept. 11 had no silver lining, no unexpectedly beneficial fallout. It was, is and will be a terrible business with endlessly terrible consequences. It killed thousands, and impelled a punitive expedition that will almost certainly procreate further martial forays. The war party is agitating for an onslaught on Iraq, maybe on North Korea. Here in America, the backwash of Sept. 11 has shriveled civil liberties and political dissent, and we will spend the rest of our lives trying to recapture lost ground.

But no. The editor of the Nation, Katrina vanden Heuvel, (whose periodical has promoted the notion of a "just war" in Afghanistan) has now coauthored a column with Joel Rogers of the University of Wisconsin/ Madison, published in the Los Angeles Times on Nov. 25, proposing the following:

"If anything, the war on terrorism creates an opening for progressives, not closure -- indeed, it presents the opportunity of a lifetime ... War's mobilization of the populace against a shared threat also

AUSTIN -- Now is no time to quit worrying. Keep up that nail-biting, team. Foreign policy is like chess: It's necessary to think at least three or four moves ahead. According to The New York Times, the Pakistanis are deeply unhappy with us. They don't trust the Northern Alliance worth squat. Unhappy Pakistanis may strike you as no skin off your nose, but the problem is that Gen. Pervez Musharraf is not firmly in the saddle, as it were.

Since he took over in a coup, his support base is the military, and the Pakistani Army has a lot of Islamic hard-liners. Bush told Musharraf we would keep the Northern Alliance out of Kabul, but we couldn't stop them. Then they slaughtered at least 100 Pakistani fighters holed up in a school in the battle for Mazar-i-Sharif.

From the Pakistani point of view, it looks as though their enemies in the Alliance are taking over the whole country, and that the everybody-in government we promised them is a pipe dream.

If Musharraf falls to an Islamist coup, that puts 20 nukes in the hands of some loony mullahs, in turn causing India, also a nuclear

The weekend before Thanksgiving, as the Taliban fled into the Hindu Kush and America's children flocked to "Harry Potter," the nation's opinion-formers discovered that the Bush administration had hijacked the Constitution with the Patriot Act and the military tribunals. Time magazine burst out that "war is hell on your civil liberties." The New York Times suddenly began to run big news stories about John Ashcroft as if he were running an off-the-shelf operation, a latter-day Oliver North.

On Nov. 15, the Washington Post's Richard Cohen discarded his earlier defenses of Ashcroft and declared the U.S. attorney general to be "the scariest man in government." Five days earlier, The New York Times editorial was particularly incensed about suspension of client-attorney privileges in federal jails, with monitoring of all conversations. For the Hearst papers, Helen Thomas reported on Nov. 17 that Attorney General Ashcroft "is riding roughshod over the Bill of Rights.

In this outburst of urgent barks from the watchdogs of the fourth estate, the first yelp came on Nov. 15 from William Safire. In a fine