A few months back I watched the film Baghdad High on HBO.  From Wikipedia:

It documents the lives of four Iraqi schoolboys over the course of one year in the form of a video diary. The documentary was filmed by the boys themselves, who were given video cameras for the project.

One of the more remarkable aspects of the film to me was how familiar it seemed…how similar in essence Iraqi school boys are to American school boys…how two Iraqis can look at the same event (for example, the execution of Saddam Hussein’s execution) and have completely different perspectives.

Mohammad: Do you think Saddam was really killed?

His grandmother: Yes he was killed.

Mohammad: Do you think his trial was fair?

His grandmother: Yes, but he didn’t need a trial anyhow.

Mohammad: Why?

His grandmother: He inflicted so much suffering on the Iraqi people.  If we hadn’t executed him we would have been the weakest people on earth.

Mohammad: Do you think the situation will improve?

His grandmother: I don’t care if it makes life better or not.  The main thing is we did the right thing.  Every dictator deserves the same fate.

and then another one of the boys:

The situation is very bad.  We got pretty upset after Saddam’s execution.  This is not the right time.  A country’s leader to be executed this way?  The people in power are not better than he was.  Dad was especially sad for Iraq.  It means that Iraq is finished.  God help us!

I give it 4 out of 5.

From a NY Times editorial of the same title (link):

The United States once had the world’s top high-school graduation rate. It has now fallen to 13th place behind countries like South Korea, the Czech Republic and Slovenia. Worse still, a new study from the Education Trust, a nonpartisan foundation, finds that this is the only country in the industrial world where young people are less likely than their parents to graduate high school.

h/t: The Week

Who would have guessed that such a reasonable analysis of the Obama/McCain race would come from the Iranian government:

We are leaning more in favor of Barack Obama because he is more flexible and rational, even though we know American policy will not change that much…

(h/t Powerline)

But before you make up your mind based on Iran’s analysis, you should know that al Qaeda has endorsed McCain.  From an article in WaPo (link):

"Al-Qaeda will have to support McCain in the coming election," said a commentary posted Monday on the extremist Web site al-Hesbah, which is closely linked to the terrorist group. It said the Arizona Republican would continue the "failing march of his predecessor," President Bush…

In language that was by turns mocking and ominous, the newest posting credited al-Qaeda with having lured Washington into a trap that had "exhausted its resources and bankrupted its economy." It further suggested that a terrorist strike might swing the election to McCain and guarantee an expansion of U.S. military commitments in the Islamic world.

"It will push the Americans deliberately to vote for McCain so that he takes revenge for them against al-Qaeda," said the posting, attributed to Muhammad Haafid, a longtime contributor to the password-protected site. "Al-Qaeda then will succeed in exhausting America."

Curiously, although Hamas’ brief endorsement of Obama was clearly genuine (link), this perspective from al-Qaeda was clearly a case of reverse psychology (link).

Obviously, al-Qaeda has no hope of defeating us in any sort of conventional conflict.  Therefore, they have a different strategy as bin Laden outlined in 2004: (link):

"We are continuing this policy in bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy. Allah willing, and nothing is too great for Allah," bin Laden said in the transcript.

He said the mujahedeen fighters did the same thing to the Soviet Union in Afghanistan in the 1980s, "using guerrilla warfare and the war of attrition to fight tyrannical superpowers."

"We, alongside the mujahedeen, bled Russia for 10 years until it went bankrupt and was forced to withdraw in defeat," bin Laden said.
He also said al Qaeda has found it "easy for us to provoke and bait this administration."

"All that we have to do is to send two mujahedeen to the furthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written al Qaeda, in order to make generals race there to cause America to suffer human, economic and political losses without their achieving anything of note other than some benefits for their private corporations," bin Laden said.

Good thing we were too smart to fall for that and didn’t get lured into a seemingly endless occupation of a Middle Eastern country that would cost us hundreds of billions of dollars right before our economy teetered on the verge of collapse..er..I mean, unfortunately, he's right that we have been (and many of us continue to be) eager to take the bait.

It kind of seems like Bush is trying to implement Obama's foreign policy before Obama gets a chance to do it. 

He's agreed to a "time horizon" for withdrawal from Iraq (from an article in The Washington Post by Dan Eggen and Michael Abramowitz):

President Bush and Iraq's prime minister have agreed to set a "time horizon" for the withdrawal of U.S. combat troops from Iraq as part of a long-term security accord they are trying to negotiate by the end of the month, White House officials said yesterday.

The decision, reached during a videoconference Thursday between Bush and Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, marks the culmination of a gradual but significant shift for the president, who has adamantly fought -- and even ridiculed -- efforts by congressional Democrats to impose what he described as artificial timetables for withdrawing U.S. forces.

In recent weeks, Bush and senior officials have hinted that they would be open to "aspirational" goals for removing U.S. troops, as Maliki and other Iraqi politicians have voiced increasing discontent with the idea of an open-ended U.S. troop presence in their country.

and we're talking to the Iranians (from an article in The Wall Street Journal by Jay Solomon):

On Saturday the U.S. will hold its highest-level contacts with Iran since 1979, a marked thaw in the two countries' troubled relationship. At the same time, the U.S. is fine-tuning a package of new financial penalties against Iran that target everything from gas imports to the insurance sector.

U.S. and European officials said they will intensify efforts to impose these penalties should their diplomatic drive fail to induce Iran to freeze its nuclear program. The sanctions effort could also include measures to impede Iran's shipping operations in the Persian Gulf and its banking activities in Asia...

but it sounds like the new sanctions will be coming since Iran has preemptively said that halting enrichment is off the table.

Via Andrew Sullivan from a couple months back, an article titled "A Country Ruled by Faith" by Garry Wills in The New York Review of Books, among other things, described the process by which ideology was placed above competence as people were selected by the Bush administration to manage and rebuild Iraq as part as the Coalition Provisional Authority (we now know how well that went):

The equivalent director of personnel for the Iraq Coalition Provisional Authority (headed by Catholic convert Paul Bremer) was the White House liaison to the Pentagon, James O'Beirne, a conservative Catholic married to National Review editor Kate O'Beirne. Those recruited to serve in the CPA were asked if they had voted for Bush, and what their views were on Roe v. Wade and capital punishment. O'Beirne trolled the conservative foundations, Republican congressional staffs, and evangelical schools for his loyalist appointees. Relatives of prominent Republicans were appointed, and staffers from offices like that of Senator Rick Santorum. Right moral attitude was more important than competence.

That was proved when the first director of Iraqi health services, Dr. Frederick Burkle, was dismissed. Burkle, a distinguished physician, was a specialist in disaster relief, with experience in Kosovo, Somalia, and Kurdish Iraq. His replacement, James Haverman, had run a Christian adoption agency meant to discourage women from having abortions. Haverman placed an early emphasis on preventing Iraqis from smoking, while ruined hospitals went untended. This may suggest the policy on appointments that put Michael Brown in charge of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, but the parallel is insufficiently harsh. Chris Matthews brought it up on his television show while interviewing the Washington Post reporter who had covered the CPA in Iraq, Rajiv Chandrasekaran, who said, "There were a hundred Browns in Iraq." But there were Bible study groups in the Green Zone.