Last week the White House said the president would issue his decision on Afghanistan around Nov. 19. Hmm. Now the White House gatekeepers are casually dropping “December” into their answers about questions on Afghanistan. To hear the Democrats talk, one would think we are not already committed with troops on the ground: “The decision to put troops in harm’s way is the toughest decision any president can make,” said former Clinton advisor Bruce Reed.

As we wait perhaps even this weekend a pronouncement from the president, I commend the recent commentary by Henry Kissinger on Afghanistan:

Full disclosure compels me to state at the beginning that I favor fulfilling the commander’s request and a modification of the strategy. But I also hope that the debate ahead of us avoids the demoralizing trajectory that characterized the previous controversies in wars against adversaries using guerrilla tactics, especially Vietnam and Iraq.

The former secretary of state and architect of the U.S. exit strategy from Vietnam, now 86, is a mellowed version of his realpolitick self of 30+ years ago. While acknowledging that “the most unambiguous form of exit strategy is victory,” Kissinger goes on to explain why military and political leaders need to move beyond the current counterterrorism/counterinsurgency debate to look at a regional peace involving Afghanistan’s neighbors. This is the dynamism and imagination that made Kissinger a loved/hated diplomat, and it’s sorely needed now. Read it.

Underscoring the relevance of WORLD’s cover story on domestic terrorism in this new issue (written by Lynn Vincent), are important developments this week. Two 20-somethings involved in a plot to blow up the Sears Tower were this week sentenced in federal district court in Miami. As AP reports:

One of the men, Burson Augustin, 24 was sentenced to six years in prison; his older brother, Rotschild Augustin, 26, was sentenced to seven years.

Today the ringleader of that plot is to be sentenced in Miami.

And in Chicago David C. Headley and Chicago businessman Tahawwur Hussain Rana have been arrested as “suspected Islamist militants” but with a twist: The two are charged not with targeting the United States, but with staging foreign operations from relative anonymity on American soil. As The Washington Post comments today:

Their profile is a fresh one, and it is being viewed by U.S. authorities with alarm.

Captives Maryam Rustampoor, 27, and Marzieh Esmaeilabad, 30, were freed today by Iranian authorities after almost nine months’ confinement in Tehran’s notorious Evin prison for refusing to deny their Christian faith. According to Open Doors and its sources in Iran, the two were set free without bail and are currently at home.

As I reported in the current issue of WORLD the two were charged with “propagation of Christianity,” apostasy (for converting from Islam), and “anti-state activity.” It is not known if their release is unconditional, and if all charges were dropped. The two are reportedly in poor health following their captivity.

Over at SarahPAC you can pay $100 for a signed copy of Going Rogue: An American Life or you can pay $14.50, half the retail price, at Amazon. Demand for the Palin memoir is so strong, reports the Wall Street Journal, that on the day of its official release HarperCollins Publishers is going back to press for an additional 100,000 run. That brings the total number  in print to 1.6 million copies. And

a spokeswoman for Amazon.com Inc.’s Web site noted in an email that the title “is already one of our bestselling nonfiction books of 2009.” At 2:40 p.m., the book ranked No. 1 on Amazon’s list of best sellers.

The anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall was two days ago, granted, but I keep rereading Reagan speechwriter Anthony Dolan’s Sunday op-ed in the Wall Street Journal for its relevance to the political correctness exhibited this week toward enemies of the state. Dolan recounts the fierce battle among the State Department, National Security Council (in the form of then-deputy adviser Colin Powell), and others to get the offending sentence “Tear down this wall” stripped from the president’s Berlin speech of June 1987.

The advisers little understood that the line was Reagan’s own, and came not simply from a provocative whim but from Reagan’s “caring about larger ideas” and a recognition that communist regimes weren’t simply “other”; they were also criminal.

Reagan had the carefully arrived at view that criminal regimes were different, that their whole way of looking at the world was inverted, that they saw acts of conciliation as weakness, and that rather than making nice in return they felt an inner compulsion to exploit this perceived weakness by engaging in more acts of aggression. All this confirmed the criminal mind’s abiding conviction in its own omniscience and sovereignty, and its right to rule and victimize others.

The players have changed, but the morality play at work in the run against Islamic regimes and their terrorist offspring is very similar.

“Nidal Hassan Did the Right Thing,” is the title of today’s blog post by Anwar al-Awlaki. It begins:

Nidal Hassan is a hero. He is a man of conscience who could not bear living the contradiction of being a Muslim and serving in an army that is fighting against his own people. . . . Nidal opened fire on soldiers who were on their way to be deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan. How can there be any dispute about the virtue of what he has done?

Al-Awlaki was the imam of the controversial Dar al-Hijrah mosque in Great Falls, Va., a Washington suburb, and now lives in Yemen. According to a report in London’s Telegraph, Hasan, the sole suspect in the massacre of 12 soldiers and one civilian at Ft. Hood attended the mosque in 2001 at the same time as two of the 9/11 terrorists:

Hasan’s eyes “lit up” when he mentioned his deep respect for al-Awlaki’s teachings, according to a fellow Muslim officer at the Fort Hood base in Texas.

Pacing back and forth on the streets of New York, Abdullah As-Sayf Jones tells passersby that the shootings at Ft. Hood were “premeditated, planned” in retaliation for U.S. killings in Afghanistan and Pakistan. In a bit of footage posted by Islamic Revolution TV called “The Message of the Attack,” the Muslim convert, who elsewhere on YouTube describes growing up in Florida and in evangelical churches as David Scott Jones, says that last Thursday’s killings were purposely “not a civilian target…it took place at a military base…the mujahideen targeting a military target.”

Here’s an interesting tidbit to think about on Election Day: Using Polidata projections for the 2010 census, and electoral distribution from the 2004 presidential election, Republican states will grow (in both congressional seats and number of electors to the Electoral College) while Democrat-leaning states will shrink. As analyst and columnist Michael Barone has pointed out, the demographic trends don’t prevent President Barack Obama from being reelected in 2012—

but they would make it marginally more difficult. Demography, modestly, favors the Republicans, and more than modestly over the long haul.

The demographic trend is more significant in light of what Gallup and others are finding regarding individual Americans’ shift to identifying themselves more prevalently as conservative. But as E.J. Dionne has pointed out, “There is a debate over what these ideological labels actually mean to voters.”

If you aren’t following the special election for the 23rd congressional district in upstate New York, you should be. As WORLD’s Alisa Harris reports, Conservative Party candidate Doug Hoffman is taking away significant momentum from the GOP candidate, Dede Scozzafava, who is pro-gay marriage and pro-abortion. Both are challenging Democrat Bill Owens for the seat in what should be a Republican district, and splitting the vote is driving establishment Republicans wild.

But is Newt Gingrich establishment? On Fox News Gingrich, maker of the new documentary Rediscovering God in America II: Our Heritage, said Scozzafava was “adequately conservative” despite her views on social issues. Adequately conservative, as defined by the former speaker of the House, means the NRA endorsed her, she’s signed a pledge not to raise taxes, and is against a cap-and-trade tax increase and healthcare reform.

“I think if this third party candidate takes away just enough votes to elect the Democrat, then we will have strengthened Nancy Pelosi by the divisiveness. We will not have strengthened the conservative movement.”

Conservatives who have endorsed third-party candidate Hoffman—including Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, Dick Armey, Steve Forbes, and others—might say that’s the kind of thinking that got Republicans defeated in 2008.

President Barack Obama had time to travel to Copenhagen to endorse Chicago’s bid for the 2016 Olympics, and appears likely to make time in December to receive his Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo. But November in Berlin? Apparently the president is too busy to make the 20th anniversary celebration of the fall of the Berlin Wall. The Nov. 9 event falls too close to a long-planned trip to Asia, government sources told Reuters last week. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will attend in his place. Meanwhile:

Berlin is going all out for the anniversary, with such luminaries as Kofi Annan, Mikhail Gorbachev and Lech Walesa expected to be in attendance.

The White House has said little about the momentous events and nothing that I can discover about the president’s decision not to attend and stand for a moment in that train of history. Here’s what it did say about Vice President Joe Biden’s European tour that began today, noting that he will “mark the moment” that the wall fell but:

In his view, the real validation of 1989 is less in what we took down and more in what we built, and continue to build together—strong democracies, strong partnerships that deliver for people in all of our countries and beyond.

The brave men and women who scaled the wall to open the Brandenburg Gate in 1989 for the first time in over 30 years might disagree with the White House downplaying of their achievement.