Some Italians tonight are asking if America is their friend, who needs enemies? What are these soldiers at check-points thinking? Shoot first and ask questions later? If Iraq is indeed tilting the way of democracy, then these kind of incidents are certainly going to disrupt progress.

Marina Ottaway has just published her interesting take on the recent Iraq elections, which she argues are an auspicious start to democracy-building but are not enough in and of themselves.

A.O. Scott has written the must-read review of Gunner Palace, about which I have written several posts before.

A while back, Washington Post columnist Sebastian Mallaby wrote a good piece on the qualities he thought the next World Bank president ought to have — and he disqualified a number of candidates who were in the news then. Here is my link to that discussion.

Alan Greenspan is supposed to be this long-term thinking guy, but where has he been when Congress passed the Bush tax cuts years ago? He is clearly in legacy-preservation mode.

Robert D. Kaplan, a former colleague of mine at the New America Foundation and a correspondent for the Atlantic Monthly, has an interesting and provocative piece in the New York Times this morning that basically argues that tough, fire-breathing Marines can be cuddly and do great humanitarian relief work as well.

I am still here and getting some posts ready on Bush’s foreign policy, particularly the important trends in some key Middle East states. I have been offline for several days because of travel and because of a really nasty chest cold that has kept me down despite being in Hawaii on a work trip.

One of the mistakes of American foreign policy over the last several decades was to not heavily invest in, build, and fortify serious multilateral security and economic institutions among Asian nations. America has not really taken APEC seriously and on the security front has long chosen to rely on bilateral arrangements between the U.S.

I like watching tennis and particularly enjoy watching Roger Federer and Andre Agassi play, as long as my tennis-fanatic friend is with me to explain the points and all the bad calls by judges. But this match in Dubai makes my head spin.

Thanks to all of you who signed the Gunner Palace petition requesting that the Motion Picture Association of America revise its “R” rating of the film to “PG-13”. This is a big win for Michael Tucker who shot this documentary and the soldiers whose story he helps tell in their words.