It seemed to be a victory for everybody. Iran regained its main source of revenue; Britain salvaged a handsome reward from what once seemed a total loss; the U.S. found itself participating for the first time in one of the world's richest oilfields. More than that, a strategic chunk of the globe's surface was made safer from Communist penetration. Last week, in the cool garden of Elah-yeh Palace outside Teheran, Iran's Finance Minister and a U.S. oil negotiator put their initials on a settlement of the ...

Democrats are in a grumpy mood, and with good reason. A big special-election victory in upstate New York quickly sagged into a disastrous media frenzy over Democratic Congressman–Internet lothario Anthony Weiner's spectacular success in becoming the Twittersphere's most obvious twit. To make matters worse, a brand-new Washington Post/ABC News poll shows President Obama actually losing to Mitt Romney among registered voters, in a tight 49 contest. The race is close because next year both Obama and the Republican ...

For Anwar Ibrahim, redemption must be feeling pretty sweet. On Aug. 26, the Malaysian opposition leader won a landslide victory in a local by-election, a political comeback for the former deputy prime minister who has been out of office for the last decade. "We won! And our victory is decisive and overwhelming," an exhausted Anwar told thousands of supporters gathered outside a ballot counting center several hundred kilometers north of the capital that night. Taking over 31,000 ...

"The momentous victory gives us very much courage," said Malaysian Prime Minister Tunku Abdul Rahman. "I pray that God will give us help and shelter from adversity and that Malaysia will continue to flourish and prosper in peace. To hell with Sukarno." It was quite a post-election statement, but justified in the sense that the big issue at the polls had indeed been Sukarno and his vicious guerrilla and propaganda offensives against the new Federation of Malaysia. In a lively ...

It took Sam Hormusji Framji Jamshedji Manekshaw only 14 days to secure his place in Indian history. The career officer, who died June 27 at 94, had a mystique as thick as his silvered mustache, after fighting heroically against the Japanese in World War II. But his defining moment came with the Indian army's decisive victory in the two-week 1971 war against Pakistan. For a country that had been mired in seemingly endless battles on its borders for most of ...

When Barack Obama traveled to Texas this month to talk immigration, David Plouffe, his top message guru, decided to stay home and watch Twitter instead. While Obama spoke, Plouffe sat before two flat-screen televisions in the White House complex. One showed live footage of Obama in El Paso. The other flickered with a lightning-quick vertical ticker tape of people tweeting with the #immigration hashtag, reacting line by line to the President in real time. "I find it useful," ...

IT was a year of visitations and bold ventures with Russia and China, of a uniquely personal triumph at the polls for the President, of hopes raised and lately dashed for peace in Viet Nam. Foreign policy reigned preeminent, and was in good part the base for the landslide election victory at home. And U.S. foreign policy, for good or ill, was undeniably the handiwork of two people: Richard Milhous Nixon and Henry Alfred Kissinger, the President's Assistant for National ...

AT its simplest, the Russian-Chinese quarrel is over what strategy to follow toward the ultimate victory of Communism—and over who shall be in charge of operations. But beneath this there lies a far deeper split: the split between Communist theory and human reality. Ever since Karl Marx predicted that the Revolution would break out in industrially advanced Western Europe, while it actually came in backward, agricultural Russia, such contradictions have haunted Communism. Today, according to Marxist theory, capitalism should be ...

From the opening lines of The Fear, Peter Godwin makes it clear he does not intend to write a neutral chronicle of the land of his birth. "I am on my way home to Zimbabwe, to dance on Robert Mugabe's political grave," he writes. "The crooked elections he has just held have spun out of his control, and after 28 years the world's oldest leader is about to be toppled." Godwin never gets his victory jig. He was writing ...

On Wednesday, when asked why the Libyan rebels were retreating, one of their spokesmen, Colonel Ahmed Bany, said archly, "You are obviously well aware of the difference between a tank and a Kalashnikov." It could be the difference between victory and defeat. The rebels have repeatedly emphasized their relative hopelessness in squaring off against Muammar Gaddafi's forces, using only an apparently large supply of light arms, including AK-47s, machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades. These arms are no match ...