In the short run, the Second Gulf War has been a great success for United States arms.

Critics charge that, over medium and longer time frames, President Bush's new National Security Strategy and its call for preventive military action to forestall "rogue states" that seek to acquire weapons of mass destruction risk embroiling the United States in an open-ended series of adventures that could overstretch the nation's capabilities and ultimately undermine the very national security that the strategy is supposed to safeguard.

As the price of bipartisan unanimity, the 9/11 Commission Report assiduously avoids apportioning blame to individuals, or naming names.

But no one who has actually read the report can miss its searing indictment.

One spring morning, Professor Steven Kurtz of the State University of New York (SUNY), Buffalo campus, woke to the horrid discovery that his wife of 20 years had died overnight from a cardiac arrest.

He called 9-1-1.

Paramedics arriving at the Kurtz home noticed technical equipment that would normally only be found in a laboratory. If the emergency responders had not been suspicious and reacted, it would have been worrisome, particularly given the unexpected death.

In allocating blame for the intelligence failure over Iraq, critics of the Bush administration focus on former CIA Director George Tenet's bending to White House pressure or the administration's mishandling of intelligence. Supporters of the president downplay White House responsibility and focus instead on the failings of the intelligence community and the possible need for structural reforms.

Neither side has it completely wrong -- or right.

Deep political fissures have opened in the West.

Contending visions of the future have arisen on each side of the Atlantic.

America, driven by its outsize military and economic strength, has developed a unipolar, hegemonic vision of the future. Europe pursues its own self-sustaining union of nation states that points towards a pluralist world order that is multipolar, balanced and multilateral.

The future of the West, and perhaps of the world, will depend on whether these two visions can accommodate each other sufficiently to establish a harmonious balance.

Like many primary products, coffee has long been characterised as a commodity with falling terms of trade and volatile prices.

Yet, in recent years, there has been growing product differentiation in final markets, with premium prices being earned and high and sustainable incomes being provided. So far, these product rents have been almost entirely appropriated by residents of high-income economies.

However, to the extent that growers can learn to improve their product through the systematic application of knowledge throughout the value chain, and consumers are taught to recognise that product variety and quality are determined in the growing rather than the roasting stage of the chain, an alternative outcome is possible.

By cleverly deploying both its hard power and its sensitive side, the European Union has become more effective -- and more attractive -- than the United States on the catwalk of diplomatic clout.

With the transfer of power to a new interim Iraqi government on June 28, the political phase of US occupation came to an abrupt end.

The transfer marked an urgently needed, and in some ways hopeful, new departure for Iraq. But it did not erase, or even much ease at first, the most pressing problems confronting that beleaguered country: endemic violence, a shattered state, a nonfunctioning economy, and a decimated society.

Some of these problems may have been inevitable consequences of the war to topple Saddam Hussein. But Iraq today falls far short of what the Bush administration promised. As a result of a long chain of U.S. miscalculations, the coalition occupation has left Iraq in far worse shape than it need have and has diminished the long-term prospects of democracy there. Iraqis, Americans, and other foreigners continue to be killed.