What makes the Palestinians so special that they deserve their own country when the Catalans and the Québécois and all the rest don't have them? The answer is pretty simple -- the alternative to independence is citizenship. The Québécois don't have an independent country, but they are citizens of Canada. Catalans are citizens of spain. Flemish and Walloons are both citizens of Belgium. Komi are citizens of Russia. When you see legal discriminatory treatment against citizens -- as with African-Americans in the United States until very recently -- that's a problem. People are owed equal citizenship.

It's clear, though, that granting Israeli citizenship on terms of equality to residents of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip is incompatible with the idea of Israel as a Jewish state. Thus, Palestinian independence emerges as a reasonable, practical, and moral alternative.

Iraq has been, first and foremost, a strategic miscalculation based on a disastrously wrongheaded conception of the strategic challenge revealed on 9/11/01.

The United States had a chance to implement a focused, disciplined effort to go after al-Qaeda and remove the threat but instead George W. Bush, aided and abetted by a wide swathe of elites, chose to go in for a broad-brush vision of a "war on terror" whose centerpiece would be the invasion and occupation of a country that had nothing to do with 9/11 and no meaningful relationship with al-Qaeda. The costs of that decision have been enormous, not just in terms of the tragedy that's played out for American soldiers and Iraqis of all stripes, but in terms of the opportunity cost of totally reorienting America's foreign policy and defense priorities away from useful things and toward Iraq instead.

By all accounts, the points of contention between Fallon and Bush administration officials centered on three points: 1) his belief that the indefinite occupation of Iraq is a disaster for the US military, 2) that diplomacy has a central role in American foreign and national security policy, 3) that war is not a credible policy for the US to pursue in dealing with Iran. The last of these was believed to be the key issue.

It is widely believed in media and political circles that despite the difficulties in Iraq and Afghanistan, American foreign policy is back under some kind of adult/mainstream management. In other words, that we've left the Cheney/Rumsfeld era behind for a period of Gates/Rice normalcy and that Iran regime change adventurism is safely off the table. But put together what the disagreements with Fallon were about, the fact that the president chose him as someone he thought he could work with not more than one year ago, and the almost unprecedented nature of the resignation and it becomes clear that that assumption must be gravely in error.

Rice announced that Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas would resume peace negotiations with Israel, despite Abbas's earlier position that he would only do so after a ceasefire in Gaza was in place.

Yes, Abbas needs the peace process in general. But politically, he can't very well sit down with Ehud Olmert while Israeli bombs are killing Palestinian civilians. He needs to wait a decent interval until the fury dies down. By agreeing to pretend to negotiate instead of pretending not to negotiate, all he did was reinforce his image as an American-Israeli puppet -- and he will get no closer to a peace treaty by being dragged to the table against his will. And having Rice announce the reversal? That was the icing on the cake.

I don't think that Iran's regime should be under-estimated. It is a highly religious, fundamentalist and dangerously fractured entity. But it seems much more likely that it would use nuclear weapons as leverage to extend its power in the region and world, to counter-balance Israel and the Sunni powers and to enhance its influence than that it would start an apocalyptic battle which it would lose.