I pray for the day when the scales fall from our leaders’ eyes, they expiate their political sins, and Washington is wholly transfigured.

War grabs the headlines, and anti-war art grabs our attention. They do so with some of the same tools: guns, bombs, and body counts. Does the visual jujitsu of anti-war art expose the horrors of violence or inadvertently reinforce our collective fascination with bloodletting?

According to the compromise proposal of UN special envoy Martti Ahtisaari, the international community was to grant “supervised independence” to Kosovo, the largely Albanian enclave in southern Serbia. This compromise plan provided Kosovo with its own constitution,its own national anthem, and perhaps most symbolically, its own flag.

Name the country in the Middle East that is most anti-American. Egypt? Palestine? Lebanon? Try again. Try instead our key NATO ally, the third largest recipient of U.S. military aid, and one of the countries in line for membership in the European Union.

Just as American consumers have guzzled down more and more glucose drip, U.S. executives have also taken a bigger and bigger gulp out of the overall income stream.

With the policymakers who have steered our country in the wrong direction absent from Washington, now is the time for YOU to start making US foreign policy.

Although we are currently considered revisionist historians, I believe that my End of Empire books definitively establish that the financial crisis that the United States experienced in 2007 was the key element in destroying our position in the world.

Poor Roh Moo-Hyun. The South Korean president’s popularity rating has dipped as low as 10% recently. His backers on the left have savaged him for pushing a free-trade agreement with the United States. With only a few months remaining in his term and the presidential elections coming up in December, he faces a likely victory by the conservatives.

According to Starbucks, all the world’s a cafe, and all the men and women merely imbibers. “Geography is a flavor,” the conglomerate proclaims. In the store, customers can choose coffee beans from three regions of the world: Africa/Arabia, Asia-Pacific, and Latin America. It is part of a marketing strategy designed to educate consumers to treat coffee more like wine, with flavor connected to locale.

The recent assault on the Red Mosque in Islamabad seems to be the latest example of “our man in Pakistan” doing our bidding despite his questionable credentials. But this week, Foreign Policy In Focus gives you a very different picture of the Red Mosque assault.