All of this leaves me inclined to think that leadership style should carry much more weight. We should all ask ourselves: how does this candidate make decisions? With what kind of people does this person associate; on whom does he fall back when facing a hard choice? Can this person admit mistakes? Can this person do something unpopular with their party if they think it is the most sensible thing? Can they sift through facts and separate valid arguments from foolish ones? And so on.

Such things, of course, prove much harder to glean than a knee-jerk, single-issue stance.

If I could answer that question, I’d run for office. We are faced with bad options all around and no reliable basis for determining anything. I do not envy our next president. (Of course, I envy none of them.)

I’m sure that many people would agree with your comment that:

we would be ill-advised to simply pull out until Iraq really does have a security base that works well enough.

What intrigues me is by what criteria are you going to determine that it is working well enough?

It seems to me that the last two thousand years of Middle East history would point to the region constantly teetering from one inherently unstable solution to another at random intervals. Whenever you pull out and however careful you are about your timing you will be well advised to retire to a safe distance and put fingers in both ears.

This week I have been reading No God But God by Reza Aslan, a book about Islam written by a Muslim for the non-Muslim audience. In the introduction he talks about the current Islamophobic trends in many media reports and political speeches comparing them unfavourably with the Crusades; the Republican senator from Oklahoma comes in for some severe criticism in this regard. (I don’t intend to get into a debate about whether this approach is justified, I am just setting the scene for the comment that follows). Then Mr Aslan asks us to: Add to this the perception, held by many in the Muslim world, that there is a collusion between the United States and Israel against Muslim interests in general and Palestinian rights in particular, and one can understand how Muslim’s resentment and suspicion of the West has only increased, and with disastrous consequences.

From this I would conclude that whatever the US agenda in Iraq, no matter how benevolent you try to be you will always be perceived as being duplicitous and working to some hidden agenda.

If Barack Obama’s Secretary of State manages to get one Iraqi to agree on what the day of the week she will have made big progress and I wish her the very best of luck. Yes. We. Can.

First off, it’s hard to tell why people vote the way they do, but in the case of Shrub, he garnered a huge amount of the blue-collar vote and that was clearly not in the interests of blue-collar workers. Maybe they had deluded themselves about what would be in their personal best interest or maybe they all just think that some day we’ll somehow all be millionaires, but those who voted for Bush did not vote in their own best interest.

Secondly, when I say we haven’t had our faces rubbed in it, I’m not talking about anything other than the fact that, on a person by person level, just what is it we can’t do that we were able to do ten years ago? Fifteen? The day comes you go to the grocery and they tell you that you can’t buy milk because there isn’t any because of the national rationing, or you can’t take a book out of the library because it’s on a proscribed list, or you can’t vote because your income fell below a certain level, or you won’t be permitted into a town council meeting for security reasons, or…when the day to day private lives of people who are still trundling their children around to a round of junior sports events, still living and able to make payments on a house they think they’ll own someday, still able to eat what they want, when they want it, read what they want when they want it, and can elect to change jobs for personal reasons, when those people are faced with costs and consequences that intrude on their distractions, then they will be having their face rubbed in it. You’re talking about people who are already paying attention and count what to many other people are abstract freedoms as essential freedoms.

When you can’t walk out your front door and do what you could last year or five years ago, then you will see face rubbing. Till then, as I said, we’re “adapting.”

I think that people take single-issue stands because the world is so big and so complex that getting one’s mind around the whole thing is just impossible. So people delude themselves into believing that all the wrong and all the evil in the world would be eliminated if they could just solve that one “monumental, all-encompassing” problem. It is naive and unsophisticated, but it is also very common.

It is also not likely to go away soon. Sure, the solution to the problem is education, but most people don’t seem to want to be educated. They might actually learn that their beliefs are unfounded, you see, and that’s just too much for them to bear.