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.

JEDDAH, Saudi Arabia – U.S. President George W. Bush will be out of office in a matter of months. "The sooner, the better," mutter those Americans who view his two terms as president of the United States as heavily laced with wars and aggression overseas, and poverty at home.

The good news is that Saudi Arabia has agreed to increase its oil production by 200,000 barrels a day from July, which will ease the price pressure off gas in the United States as it tops $4 a gallon at pumps.

At a gathering last May 26 Jimmy Carter said Israel possesses 150 Nuclear weapons. Carters revelation is the first credible public acknowledgment by a former U.S, president that Israel possesses a nuclear arsenal. Israel has never admitted having nuclear weapons, nor has any U.S. official ever deviated from that Israeli line. But while the possession of nuclear weapons by Israel is a threat to its enemies, it is also a threat to its friends and allies.