Imagine it's June 7, 1944, the day after the D-Day invasion.  You pick up your newspaper.  There's no mention of Normandy on the front page, and only a brief reference to it in a roundup story on an inside page. The biggest battle since the invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein's regime is under way in Iraq.  Its outcome could determine whether the war is won or lost.  But our news media have paid less attention to it than to Paris Hilton's legal troubles. The heart of the offensive is Operation Arrowhead Ripper, in Diyala province northeast of Baghdad, involving some 8,000 American and 2,000 Iraqi troops.

Assume you are an agent for a country that is hostile to the United States, and you want to undermine the American economy by attacking a couple of key industries. Which ones would you go after? You would learn that the computer, Internet and wireless industries, coupled with the world's most productive financial engineering, have provided much of the U.S. economic growth for the last quarter-century. Given that you, as an agent of a foreign government, could not possibly literally blow up these sectors, what would you do?

This past year more than one trillion dollars flowed between the U.S. and the EU. The EU now accounts for 21 percent of U.S. merchandise exports and 19 percent of U.S. merchandise imports, and about 34 percent of U.S. services exports and 37 percent of U.S. services imports. The U.S. is not only the largest recipient of foreign direct investment, but far and away the world's largest investor elsewhere. Of the more than two trillion dollars the U.S. has invested directly abroad, a little more than half ($1.1 trillion) is invested in Europe. Europeans account for 70 percent ($1.2 trillion) of the direct investment in the U.S. The bottom line is that the U.S. and Europe are economically joined at the hip, and any actions which damage trade and investment between these two economic giants hurt everyone. The U.S. and EU have a combined population of about 650 million people, and their combined GDP equals 57 percent of the world's total. The U.S. has also provided...

In the Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll released Tuesday, 69 percent of those polled think things in this country "are seriously off on the wrong track." The "wrong track" numbers haven't been this high since the late 1970s.  There were good reasons then for public discontent.  The economy was stagnant, but inflation was soaring. The Watergate scandal and our defeat in Vietnam were fresh in the public mind. But today the stock market is hitting record highs; inflation and unemployment are near record lows.  Our discontent is less with our circumstances than with our perception of our political "leadership." President Bush's polling numbers have been plumbing the political depths for quite some time. But he's less unpopular than...

Hamas "fighters" took gunmen captured from the rival Fatah organization from their headquarters in Rafah in the Gaza Strip and "shot them to death gangland style in the street in front of their families," the Associated Press reported Thursday. Jamal Abu Jadian, a top Fatah commander, fled his home dressed as a woman. "But when Abu Jadian arrived at a hospital a few hundred meters away from his house, he was discovered by a group of Hamas gunmen, who took turns shooting him in the head with automatic rifles," the Jerusalem Post reported. That sort of behavior can sow mistrust between partners. At least 30 people were killed and 80 wounded in fighting between the rival Palestinian factions Wednesday, bringing the total for the week to...

It's hard to think of a more dreadful action against the Almighty than the orgy around the golden calf, while Moses received the tablets of the Law. No wonder, then, that Moses ordered the Levites to draw their swords and kill all the idolators. Yet, as our rabbi reminded us last Sabbath, many Jewish scholars believe the Israelites en route to the Holy Land performed an even greater sin when they believed ten of their twelve spies who said that the inhabitants of the land of Canaan were too strong, and that any effort to conquer them was doomed to failure. The other two, Joshua and Caleb, said that victory was possible.