A hurricane smacks the Big Easy again. Back-to-back political conventions. A surprise VP pick. Russians behaving like Russians . . .

All too easy to miss the biggest story out of Iraq this year: Yesterday, security responsibility for once-bloody Anbar Province officially passed from the US military to the Baghdad government.

Fallujah. Ramadi. Al Qaeda's worst atrocities. Those opposed to the liberation of Iraq celebrated years of headlines from Anbar.

Then it all changed: We won - and the headlines vanished. That's because a story of victory in Iraq is also a story of shameful defeat for Barack Hussein Obama.

As the Democrat Convention's carefully-scripted coronation of perhaps the least qualified major party presidential candidate in recent American history builds up to its climax, few have noticed that the convention's most pregnant political message may have already been delivered before it officially started.

It came in the form of a decision by Obama's campaign to feature the president of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), Ms. Ingrid Mattson, at an "Interfaith Gathering" of Leftist religious luminaries the day before the convention opened (8/24).

In doing that, Obama and the Democrat leadership rather demonstratively bestowed their seal of approval on the largest and most important front organization of the American Muslim Brotherhood, a conspiratorial Islamist revolutionary movement dedicated, in their own words, to "a grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and sabotaging its miserable house by their hands."  

The implications of this political legitimization of a group dedicated to the destruction of our constitutional order are so profoundly disturbing that some background on what exactly ISNA and the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) or Ikhwan Muslimi are is in order.

Russia is continuing its invasion of free, democratic Georgia with overwhelming military force. Given the raw power Russia has been willing to apply, there's no question as to which side will win.

But one of the many untold stories of this fateful war is how poorly Russian forces are performing - despite careful planning and extensive preparations.

Putin, currently in his "Wolfschanze" in Vladikavkaz, must be especially furious with his pride and joy, the Russian air force.

The inept performance of the Russian air force may have been the most striking feature of the war thus far. Again, numbers alone guarantee a Russian win. The abysmal performance of Russian pilots has been on display for all the world to see -  although, once again, the media don't understand what they're witnessing.

As I write this in the early morning hours of August 9, Russian tanks grind into a brave and isolated democratic state.

Assuming that the world's attention would focus on Beijing, Moscow stage-managed an elaborate act of aggression against Georgia.

But the world has changed since Soviet tanks rolled unchallenged into Afghanistan at Christmastime 29 years ago. Global communications now spotlight aggression instantly.

Yesterday, millions around the world didn't watch the Olympic opening ceremonies (the Chinese must be furious at the Russians). Instead, they saw images of Soviet - sorry, I meant Russian - aircraft pounding Georgian territory as Russian armor rolled over the Caucasus Mountains.

So let's discuss the background, what just happened, and what happens next.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who died Sunday (8/03) of heart failure at age 89, was a titan in Russian literature and politics of the 20th century. He survived the Stalinist purges, World War II, eight years in the gulag, a successful battle with cancer, and communist denunciation. After spending 18 years exiled in America, he made a triumphant return to his homeland in 1994.

Mr. Solzhenitsyn's life was full of contradictions. Together with another giant, Russian Nobel Prize winning physicist Andrei Sakharov and fellow dissidents, he contributed greatly to the exposure of totalitarian socialism's moral bankruptcy.

However, he was a harsh critic of liberal democracy, and of America, despite the fact that it gave him shelter and protection during his difficult years of exile. A Harvard commencement speech in which he accused Americans of hedonism and cowardice became a scandal. While his family became U.S. citizens, he refused to do so.

Russia today probably approaches Mr. Solzhenitsyn's ideal.

In March 2009, Russia will deploy modern S-300 long-range anti-aircraft missiles in Iran. By June 2009, they will become fully operational, as Iranian teams finish training with Russian instructors, according to U.S. and Russian sources.

Mikhail Margelov, chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Russian Senate, visited Washington last week. He said Iran is likely to produce a nuclear bomb "soon." Given the blood-curdling rhetoric of its President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, it is feared that Iran may use it against Israel.

The deployment of the anti-aircraft shield next spring effectively limits the window in which Israel or the United States can conduct an effective aerial campaign aimed at destroying, delaying or crippling the Iranian nuclear program.

A rally in Berlin in front of a quarter-million glistening-eyed, bosom-clenching, swooning Germans is a historically awkward spot for a leader to proclaim his worldwide goals for tomorrow.  But that's where Barack Hussein Obama chose to declare:

"The walls between the countries with the most and those with the least cannot stand. The walls between natives and immigrants cannot stand. These now are the walls we must tear down. We know that these walls have fallen before. After centuries of strife, the people of Europe have formed a union of promise and prosperity."

That last sentence would suggest that Obama is not terribly keen about nation-states -  ours in particular.

That is why, presumably, he says that we must tear down the walls between the countries "with the most" -- that would be the United States -- and those with the least. That is why he calls for tearing down walls between "natives and (illegal?) immigrants."

Watching Obama glide through his foreign trip so far, nervous Republicans and other patriots have to hope that American voters will not view Obama through the eyes of a Hollywood casting director. That's because one could not cast a man who visually can portray a worldly statesman better.

We all must envy his ability to effortlessly drape his tall, imperially slender form in gilded Louis XV chairs in foreign palaces. Mixing just the right combination of worldly bonhomie and serious mien, his presentation (conveniently presented to the world with video but no audio) make, by comparison, Henry Kissinger, FDR and Winston Churchill all look like clumsy provincial oafs.

The visual is everything in his campaign, for when he does submit himself to the occasional press interview, his actual words read in print must make his handlers as nervous as his visual images make Republicans nervous.

His discussion of his Iraq policy is almost incomprehensible, and his understanding of the world stunningly simplistic.