WAR ON TERROR

Guardian: Beginning of the end
The US is ignoring an important lesson from history - that an empire cannot survive on brute force alone

There are plenty of things to keep Tony Blair awake at night these days, as his grey, haggard features after last week's diplo-marathon indicated. In his nightmares of the Pentagon cooking up new hare-brained schemes and dirty bombs on the underground, a new anxiety must have begun to niggle - those domestic commentators who have started being so horribly nice to him. He's a "great statesman" now, one of the "greatest prime ministers"; it's when things are getting really bad - you're dying, for instance - that people start being this nice.