The World Is United!

Except, you know, it's not.

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev warned in a nationally televised address Wednesday that he will deploy short-range missiles near Poland capable of striking NATO territory if the new Obama administration presses ahead with plans to build a missile defense shield in Europe.

The threat, which came just hours after the conclusion of the U.S. election, appeared intended to signal Moscow's priorities to the American president-elect. It could present an early foreign policy test for Obama, who says he supports a missile defense system against Iran but has also accused the Bush administration of exaggerating the system's capabilities and rushing deployment for political purposes.

If he were smart, Obama would cancel missile defense, which doesn't work at all and is both costly and unnecessary. Yet there's this whole puffed-up serious foreign policy establishment that thinks their testicles will shrink if the big bad Russian Bear forces Obama to back down from a policy that no sane person would ever want in the first place.

So there's that box. And then there's Hamid Karzai's take:

The Afghan president congratulated Barack Obama and called on him Wednesday to halt civilian casualties as villagers said U.S. warplanes bombed a wedding party, killing 37 people — most of them children.

President Hamid Karzai said airstrikes cannot win the fight against terrorism.

"Our demand is that there will be no civilian casualties in Afghanistan. We cannot win the fight against terrorism with airstrikes," Karzai said. "This is my first demand of the new president of the United States — to put an end to civilian casualties."

Which he needs to do, of course; these airstrikes do far more harm than good. But there's also the matter of sabotage from Afghan forces seeking to undermine American troops and attack them.

This is the source of a lot of my tension today. People say "we have great challenges" because we do. The Bush regime has driven us into a ditch and I am concerned there's no way out.