This column appears in he 21 May 2008 edition of Gulf News, published in Dubai. It can also be found on their website: www.gulfnews.com.

Remember the 2000 campaign? The one where the Republicans put up as their presidential candidate a Texas governor with no background, and little apparent interest, in foreign policy? Their argument at the time amounted to: "not to worry, he may not know much about the world but the people around him are old hands at this stuff".

We all know that did not work out quite the way it was advertised. Still, one might have thought President George W. Bush and his foreign policy team had developed some sense of timing where the Middle East is concerned.

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The following column appears in the 9 April 2008 edition of Gulf News, published in Dubai. It can also be found on the newspaper's weebsite: www.gulfnews.com.

By Gordon Robison, Special to Gulf News

Say what you will about the Iraq War, as a news story it has a way of driving all else before it.

After months of hearing that the war had pretty much gone away as an issue in this year's presidential campaign (a line of argument I, for one, never bought into, though it has been remarkably popular with America's pundit class all winter) the spike in Iraqi violence that began in late March pushed it back onto the nation's front pages.

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