The very limited progress made by the American troop surge in Iraq means President Bush is fast running out of options. Under pressure in Congress and from public opinion to withdraw, he instead sent in reinforcements, following advice from his army commanders that lack of troops on the ground was the reason that parts of central Iraq, including areas of Baghdad, were slipping out of anybody's control. But signs of deterioration are still everywhere. Moving pleas were heard this week from Unicef for something to be done to relieve the suffering of Iraq's millions of children, who have borne the burden of innocent victimhood for decades in that tragic country. The Christians of Iraq are having a dreadful time, being the targets of sustained and ruthless pressure from jihadist militants to convert to Islam or to leave - or be killed. Refugees from Iraq are becoming a serious problem to neighbouring countries like Jordan and Syria.

  All these crises arise from the underlying situation. The world has to stop imagining a change for the better some time soon, and go into ambulance mode, rescuing whom it can where it can. The United Nations in general, and surrounding countries in particular, have a major humanitarian task ahead, and the United States can no longer ignore the importance of the roles they might play. Life under the dictator Saddam Hussein was an existence to be endured, but anarchy is proving even worse than tyranny. The forces driving Iraq ever further into catastrophe seem unstoppable. The argument that outside forces are necessary to stop it getting worse sounds increasing hollow. Indeed, the insurgents have found a way to make the American presence a further engine of mayhem rather than part of its cure.

Something similar is being attempted in the south, where Britain has a far smaller troop concentration. The question is increasingly being asked what, apart from postponing an inevitable showdown between rival factions in and around Basra, British ...

What might be termed the Age of the Military Dictatorship in Latin America is now largely in the past, and the Catholic Church has had to adapt to a new political reality. Instead of a series of right-wing juntas who looked for support from old-fashioned church traditionalists, from rich landowners and from the US, the continental centre of gravity is now left-of-centre. Marxism is not the American bogeyman it was, ...

Brazil presents a range of hard challenges to the leadership of Pope Benedict XVI, whose response may determine the Church's future in the world's largest Catholic nation. Indeed, whether it stays Catholic at all cannot be taken for granted. The spirit of post-modernist relativism and secularism, which has already undermined the Church's place in Europe, is only one of a number of threats, though in the ...

History will reach its own verdict on Tony Blair's 10 years as Britain's Prime Minister, and it may be a more generous one than the voters delivered in this week's local and Scottish elections. Because the date of his departure has been so long arriving - he first signalled it in 2004 and it is still some weeks ahead - the country has come to feel somewhat leaderless and directionless. At such a time a ...