As I expected, the Pentagon is denying the story about a withdrawal of all troops from Iraq by early 2007.

Fred Barnes says the President is losing friends and influence through his handling of the Dubai Ports World deal and the immigration issue. Clearly, his poor poll numbers reflect more than just the public's dissatisfaction with how things are going in Iraq. The Democrats need to move away from the political narrative called "Bush lied, people died" and move on to the narrative "Bush is incompetent" if they want to win in November. Professor Niall Ferguson compares the President with 19th Century British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli in this column. He says, if Bush could run for reelection in 2008 and the Democrats could find another Gladstone, they would be able to mount a devastating campaign against him. But, he says the Democrats won't do it, not just because Bush can't run in '08, but because the GOP will likely run away from the President's policies at that time.

And yet it is highly unlikely that the next Democratic contender for the presidency will be in a position to deliver a modern version of Gladstone's Midlothian speech. Why? For the simple reason that, unless it is collectively stark raving mad, the Republican Party will select a candidate to replace President Bush who subscribes to every single one of Gladstone's principles. The challenge for those who aspire to the Republican nomination will be to create as great a distance between themselves and Mr Bush as it is possible to do without explicitly disavowing him.

The Republicans would certainly be foolish to climb on to what is left of Bush's foreign policy. Nearly all its premises are crumbling before our eyes. The theory of a democratic peace is a chimera; give Muslims the vote and they vote for militants. Regime change in Iraq has not enhanced American security; its principal beneficiary has been Iran. As for the unipolar world, the reality is that the occupation of Iraq and its ramifications in the Greater Middle East now so dominate this administration's agenda that the truly world-shaking event of our times has all but vanished from view. The administration is in at least two minds about the resurgence of China, and the result is a dangerous diplomatic schizophrenia, with half the signals indicating a new Cold War strategy of "containment" (why else help the Indians with their nukes?), and the other half continuing the older policy of conciliation.

After recklessness, ineptitude was the greatest defect of Disraelian foreign policy. Too bad the 22nd amendment will likely prevent us ever hearing a Gladstonian critique of today's inept imperialism.

Read the whole thing. I was an early believer in the Bush Doctrine. I bought into the idea that democracy was the way to prevent the Islamists from winning. I believed that Saddam was a threat and that he should be overthrown. Today, I am plagued by doubts. Will democracy in the Middle East simply lead to the Islamists achieving the goals they were unable to achieve through violence? Is the limited war solution truly the right way to deal with the threat? I don't know. Worse, I can't tell whether the original intellectual arguments are wrong, or they were simply applied by this administration in an incompetent way. Unfortunately, we will likely pay the price for our mistakes for decades to come.

Jack Kelly thinks that there are moderate Muslims out there who will embrace our version of civilization.

On a different subject, here is a 'sky is falling' column about global warming.

On immigration, here is a good recitation of the advantages we have when dealing with this issue, as compared to the Europeans.