The inauguration this week of Pakistan’s new president, Asif Ali Zardari, widower of the slain Benazir Bhutto, should have brought some hope and direction to embattled Pakistan. It did not. A sense of weary déjà vu hung over the event.

Pipsqueak Georgia’s harebrained and disastrous attack on tiny South Ossetia has produced a full-blown crisis pitting the US and NATO against Russia. In an act fraught with danger, US and NATO warships are delivering supplies to Georgia, watched by Russian men of war. The US Congress may soon vote $1 billion for America’s embattled Georgian satellite.

For those who savor historical irony, the Soviet Empire  collapsed in the years 1989-1991 because of an implosion of its economy brought on by a ruinous arms race with the United States and the heavy costs of occupying Afghanistan.

`Pirates of the Caribbean’ and cute little Johnny Depp they are not. Somalia’s pirates tote AK-47’s and RPG rockets, chew the narcotic shrub qat, use satellite cell phones for their negotiations, and are just about the only people in strife-ravaged Somalia these days who have a regular job.

The respected US strategic think tank, RAND Corp, estimated that a nuclear exchange between India and Pakistan would initially kill two million people, wound 100 million, and send clouds of radioactive dust around the globe.

It now seems clear the last disastrous act of the Bush administration was giving Israel a green light to launch its final solution campaign against the Hamas government in Gaza.

The Russians are coming! The Russians are coming! Or are they? That depends on whom you ask.

There are a lot of unhappy campers at the Pentagon right now. US Defense Secretary Robert Gates chose last week to present a controversial new budget that will affect the course of US foreign and military policy for decades to come.

Those growing numbers of foreign policy critics who have been claiming that the Obama administration is simply George W. Bush’s third term were confounded last week as the new president put the kibosh on one of Bush’s most beloved and most dim-witted projects.

As this column predicted a month ago, Afghanistan’s much ballyhooed recent election staged by its foreign occupiers turned out to be a fraud wrapped up in a farce. The election was as phony and meaningless as US run elections in Vietnam in the 1970’s.