They are not unconnected. They are not unconnected at all.

Now, presumably the president didn't want to provoke the rage of the Palestinians. (Although, then again, he might just have anticipated it.) But Palestinian rage is very easy to provoke. Snap your fingers and, there, you have it. You don't even have to rent a mob. It comes free will, so to speak.

The fact is that Obama did more than snap his fingers. He sent out very top members of his administration to beat up on Israel and they did.

Good WSJ story on how al Qaeda operatives migrate away from U.S. military pressure, always finding the next safe haven:

Not so long ago, the proliferation of internet technology and even of literacy was thought to be a boon to democracy and freedom. On that calculus, the more web sites and web addresses there were, the more the business of society would be accomplished through the franchise of reason and discussion. We are long since past that illusion: The urban bomb is the instrument. Contemporary Islam is the setting for this just dawning realization, and it is the setting whatever the president says to the contrary. Yes, of course, there are Muslims who are quite like Quakers ...

I know this is the president's ambition. But the thought that he has already forged it is pretension of the highest order. In fact, it can be his ambition only if he believes the task is, in some actual sense, easy and actually doable. He capsulizes this in his address at West Point thus: "a new beginning ... that recognizes our mutual interest in breaking a cycle of conflict, and that promises a future in which those who kill innocents are isolated by those who stand up for peace and prosperity and human dignity." Yes, indeed, yes, we can.

For years, advocates of climate-change legislation have struggled to find a sales pitch that will sway even the most hardened of skeptics. Polar bears, green jobs, urgent pleas to think of the grandkids … none of them have quite done the trick. But recently, a new argument has come to the fore: the national security case for cutting carbon emissions.

On July 25, Najibullah Zazi, a lanky man in his mid-twenties, walked into the Beauty Supply Warehouse in Aurora, Colorado, a suburb of Denver. The visit was captured on a store video camera. Wearing a baseball cap and pushing a shopping cart, Zazi appeared to be just another suburban guy.

Of course, not many suburban guys buy six bottles of Clairoxide hair bleach, as Zazi did on this shopping trip--or return a month later to buy a dozen bottles of "Ms. K Liquid," a peroxide-based product. Aware that these were hardly the typical purchases of a heavily bearded, dark-haired young man, Zazi--who was born in Afghanistan and spent part of his childhood in Pakistan before moving to the United States at the age of 14--kibitzed easily with the counter staff, joking that he had to buy such large quantities of hair products because he "had a lot of girlfriends."

Last week, the White House released a list of recipients of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest honor that the United States government can afford a civilian. Among the 16 awardees are truly great figures: breast cancer philanthropist Nancy Goodman Brinker, theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, and Sidney Poitier, the first African-American to win an Academy Award for Best Actor.

In the affairs of states, lessons are often learned too late or too well. Faced with unexpected crises and unwelcome demands for prompt decision-making, governments think by analogy. And they are invariably keen to demonstrate that they have learned from their--or, more conveniently, their predecessors'--mistakes.

'Take off your veil!" the Somali soldier shouted at the woman in the mostly empty street. Steadying his assault rifle with his right hand, he ripped away the woman's black niqab with his left. "Why are you coming so close to us? You have explosives?" He leveled the muzzle of his gun against the bridge of her nose. Her mouth, suddenly embarrassed and exposed, broke into a jester's forced grin.

In the current issue, I write about Afghanistan's shaky future as the country tries to overcome years of violence and a devastating dependence on opium trade. The books and testimony below help to illustrate a place whose history is fraught with tragedy--but where a cautious hope for a better life is beginning to take hold.