A series of meetings between United States and Syrian diplomats, including U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and her counterpart, Foreign Minister Walid Muallem, at the United Nations last week are stirring speculation that Washington may at last be moving toward engaging Damascus.

Last months five-day war in Georgia, a tiny neighbor of Russia and Turkey, rekindled memories of the beautiful American ballad, "Georgia on My Mind," which was written in 1930 and became a famous hit only in 1960 when the popular blind American singer, Ray Charles, introduced it nationwide.

Veteran Russian admiral Eduard Bautin was outspoken last week. He noted that there were more U.S. and NATO warships operating in the Black Sea than ever before but he assured reporters in Moscow it was no problem – They could all be sunk by the Russian Black Sea fleet and its land-based support aircraft within 20 minutes.

On Sept. 6, the New York Times published a story by Sophia Kishkovsky titled "Conflict Tests Ties Between the Georgian and Russian Orthodox Churches." The author explains the struggle and sorrow experienced by Orthodox leaders of the two respective churches over the recent military engagement between Russia and Georgia.

The drums of war are beating louder, amplified by Irans pursuit of its nuclear agenda and the West and Israels determination not to let it do so. Continuing rhetoric by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad about "wiping Israel off the map" does little to help. Meanwhile, the U.S. administration wants to see Tehrans uranium enrichment issue resolved before January 2009, when the next administration is sworn in. The clock is ticking.

How important is the vice president to a serving U.S. president? Is there more to the job than helping the presidential candidate secure the job by attracting voters from his constituency?

Watch those clichés. There is a reason, usually a pretty good one, that they exist. Two that jump to mind when thinking about the Middle East in the post Georgian-Russian conflict is "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" and "politics makes strange bedfellows." You be the judge of just how applicable these sayings are in view of recent developments in the Caucasus.

BRICK, N.J., USA -- In an essay analyzing the Georgia/Russia conflict that appears in the New Yorker Magazine of Aug. 25, David Remnick writes of the neoconservative commentators response to the Russian invasion of Georgia. He says, "Inevitably, a number of neoconservative commentators, along with John McCain, have rushed in to analyze this conflict using familiar analogies: the Nazi threat in the 1930s; the Soviet invasions of Budapest in 1956 and Prague in 1968. But while Putins actions this past week have inspired genuine alarm in Kiev and beyond, such analogies can lead to heedless policy. As the English theologian Bishop Joseph Butler wrote, Everything is what it is, and not another thing. Cartoonish rhetoric only contributes to the dangerous return of what conservatives seem to crave -- the other, the enemy, the us versus them of the Cold War."

For almost his entire eight-year-long presidency George W. Bush said that the United States will not hold direct talks with Iran unless it discontinues uranium enrichment.

The recent Iranian missile tests demonstrate the need to deploy a missile defense capable of mid-flight interception of Iranian warheads, which in a few years may be able to reach Europe and the United States.