Unswayed by anti-war passions, US President Bush was on television yesterday to say that he is expanding the war in Iraq. He will send 21,500 additional US forces to "quell Iraq’s near-anarchy."

This move puts the president on a collision course with the new Democratic-controlled Congress and pushes the American presence in Iraq toward its highest level. The Wall Street Journal writes that Arab allies are worried what will happen if this strategy fails. Worsening strife would engulf the entire region, sparking a wider war in the middle of the world’s largest oil patch.

"The potential of a much larger regional conflict that pits Sunnis against Shi’ites is increasingly on the minds of both Arab leaders and the US military planners. Some are calling such a possible outcome the ‘nightmare scenario’."

"If President Bush wants to add to this mission, he is going to have to justify it. And [justifying] is new for him because up until now the Republican Congress has given him a blank check with no oversight, no standards, no conditions."– House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D., Cal.)

"I, for one, am at the end of my rope when it comes to supporting a policy that has our soldiers patrolling the same streets in the same way, being blown up by the same bombs day after day. That is absurd. It may even be criminal.

I cannot support that anymore.... We have no business being a policeman in someone else’s civil war."–Senator Gordon Smith (R., Ore.) who not too long ago supported the administration’s policy on Iraq.

There will be a presidential change in 2008.

Obamamania is resonant in American politics–that is, Barack Obama, a unique name of the junior senator from Illinois. Born 1961 in Hawaii, he’s a fresh face, a new direction. Recent opinion polls identify Obama as the second most popular choice among Democratic voters for their party’s nomination in the 2008 election behind Senator Hillary Clinton. Obama is charismatic, a superb public speaker.

He is the fifth African-American senator in US history, and the only African-American currently serving in the Senate. Voters would like to select a black man, one with his caliber. In his 1995 memoir, Dreams from My Father, Obama describes a nearly race-blind early childhood:

"That my father...was black as pitch, my mother white as milk–barely registered in my mind."

After Harvard law school, Obama moved to Illinois, where he was elected to the state senate in 1996. Winning reelection in 2002, Obama ran for an open seat in the US Senate two years later. Midway through the campaign, Obama delivered the keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. This address was a mega-exposure raising his national stature.

Barack Obama is unlikely to get a better chance to run than the present, either as president or vice president.