PARIS -- The pair of black shoes, hurled at George W. Bush by a young Iraqi journalist at a Baghdad press conference last Sunday, may be seen as a bitter verdict on Bush's colonial war in Iraq - and, indeed, on his entire presidency.

PARIS -- The signature on Nov. 17 of the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) by Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari and U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker is a significant move toward the restoration of Iraq's sovereignty. But many hurdles remain.

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 Putin's 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."

There is some entertainment value when former government officials fall out with each other, and this is now happening to President George W. Bush and former U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.