Junior is finally keeping his 2000 campaign promise to bring us together. Republicans and Democrats in the Congress are at long last united--against him, or at least his policies in Iraq.

WASHINGTON (AP)--Senators from both parties urged the Bush administration on Sunday to make a realistic assessment of the situation in Iraq and adjust its policies aimed at pacifying the country. But Bush readied a firm defense of his Iraq policy--and a sharp new attack on rival John Kerry's stance--for a speech Monday.

``The fact is a crisp, sharp analysis of our policies is required. We didn't do that in Vietnam, and we saw 11 years of casualties mount to the point where we finally lost,'' said Sen. Chuck Hagel, a Vietnam War veteran who is co-chairman of President Bush's re-election committee in Nebraska.

``We can't lose this. It is too important,'' Hagel, R-Neb., said on CBS' ``Face the Nation.''

A major problem, said leaders of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was incompetence by the administration in reconstructing the country's shattered infrastructure.

The chairman, Sen. Richard Lugar, noted that Congress appropriated $18.4 billion a year ago this week for reconstruction. No more than $1 billion has been spent. ``This is the incompetence in the administration,'' Lugar, R-Ind., said on ABC's ``This Week.''

``Exactly right,'' interjected Delaware Sen. Joseph Biden, the committee's top Democrat. He said later: ``This has been incompetence so far. Five percent of the $18.4 billion that George Bush keeps ... beating the other candidate up and about the head for how he voted and didn't vote, and he's released 5 percent.''

Sen. John McCain, who has campaigned often with the president, said mistakes in Iraq generally can be attributed to inadequate manpower. McCain, R-Ariz., said problems began arising shortly after the dash through the desert to take Baghdad, the capital, in April 2003.

``We made serious mistakes right after the initial successes by not having enough troops on the ground, by allowing the looting, by not securing the borders,'' McCain said.

``Airstrikes don't do it; artillery doesn't do it. Boots on the ground do it,'' McCain told ``Fox News Sunday.''

Now that's leadership.

I was going to kick my new home off with a long piece on the direness of the situation in the Middle East caused by Junior's war-fever and imperialist chest-thumping that I've been knocking around on the word processor for a few days now. But then something happened that sent my mind off on a whole different tangent and I decided to spend my first post talking about that instead as a sort of signal--you know?--that Arran's Alley is going to be, well, different, if you know what I mean. No holds barred, everything on the table, prejudices and all. So Ok, here goes.

Why do women feel this compulsion to 'share' absolutely everything that happens to them with somebody even when that somebody was right there with them when it happened? It's not an exclusively female trait but it is primarily female and extreme in almost every case.

So I'm standing at the bus stop outside the supermarket the other day with nothing much to do except admire the shine on the shopping cart that was, no matter which way I moved, unerringly bouncing the glare of the midday sun right straight toward my left eyeball, when this woman with two kids got out of an SUV and walked across the parking lot toward the store. She was talking when she got out of the truck and she talked without letup all the way across the lot. Even before I could actually hear what she was saying, I could see the 14-yr-old daughter rolling her eyes while the 12-yr-old boy had apparently found something that fascinated him sticking to the toe of his sneaker.

Now, I had a daughter--well, I mean, I still have her but she's not 14 any more, she's 35--who started rolling her eyes at her mother when she was 9 and didn't stop until she was 24, so I am not unaware that adolescent female eye-rolling is endemic to the breed and can be set off by nothing more consequential than being told to tuck her shirt in or an offhand comment to the effect that the Beatles were a way better group than, say, Duran-Duran, and that once started it can go on for days, during which time everything you've ever thought, said or done comes in for close examination and is judged to be either seriously flawed or convincing proof that you've been daffy since Nero was a tot rolling around on the palace floor playing with matches.

However, as they got closer and I could hear what the mother was--still--saying, I had to admit that in this case the girl had a clear and objective case that could be defended in any court from Natchez to Mobile, from Memphis to St Jo. Mom had been out during the morning with her camera and had taken, it seemed, a few thousand pictures.

Mother: --and I saw this cute outfit in the window of Lane's that reminded me of that time I went to Portland with my girlfriend Jane and her friend Kathy, the one with blonde hair out of a bottle that was cut so short she looked like she was bald, so I wanted to take a picture of it but I didn't know how the light would play out through the reflection in the glass so I backed up all the way across the sidewalk so of course this guy walking his dog, a Schnauzer, the cutest little thing, it had a red collar, had to come by and stand right in front of the window and I had to ask him to move so I could take the picture--

Daughter:(patiently) I know, Mom, I was there.

Mother:(without missing a beat, as if Daughter hadn't spoken) --and he got all grumpy about it and pulled the dog away while you were still petting it--

Daughter: I remember, Mom, it was only 20 minutes ago.

Mother: --and then I realized I forgot to take the lens cap off, so of course I had to do that, and then I took the picture and we got back in the car to go to the drug store but when I was supposed to make that left turn some guy cut me off and I had to take a right and go all the way around the rotary again and then I got stuck behind this black Ford--

Daughter: I know, Ma, I was sitting right there next to you.

Mother: --and she didn't know which way she was going so I--

And that's when the supermarket's automatic door shut behind them and I couldn't hear any more.

Now, what struck me about this (maybe it struck you, too) wasn't that she wanted to tell the story of her morning's picture-taking but that in doing it she felt the need to include every single extraneous detail that she could remember, right down to the color of the dog's collar, no matter how mind-numbingly irrelevant and miniscule and insignificant it was, and that she had to tell this story as soon as she could even if that meant telling it to people who had been there with her and seen it all for themselves. And a moment later I was struck again, this time by the realization that I hadn't thought anything whatever of this when it was going on. It was so familiar, I was so used to sitting through exactly the same kind of long-winded, pointlessly-detailed and strung-out-to-the-max story-telling emanating from virtually every female I have known well enough to call by their first names, that it never for a moment occured to me that there was anything odd about it.

I know that men do this, too, but only when they're talking about sports (in which every conceivable detail of Manny Ramirez's breakfast is dissected for its potential effect on his batting average) or cars (where the intricacies of cleaning a fuel-injection system can take longer to catalog than it took to do the actual cleaning) but women do it about practically everything. Any woman alive, it seems, can make a 30-minute story out of a 5-minute trip to the corner store for a half-gallon of milk that will have any normal male's head spinning trying to figure out the point while other women just nod and sympathize with the ungodly unfairness of, apparently, having to suffer the indignity of getting milk rather than it being delivered to her doorstep so she doesn't have to go through the double-bladed traumas of driving, parking, mingling with other people in the store, and then carrying this heavy burden back to the car all by herself.

It is as if every woman considers every second of her life worthy of epic saga, a tale of such monumental cosmic importance that every last tiny, remorselessly banal detail of it should be encased in amber and preserved for future generations to study with awe and reverence. If you think I'm exaggerating, I suggest 2 tests:

1) Stop closing your ears when the women in your life talk, and try actually listening to them. I realize this will be painful, but suck it up for the sake of widening your horizons.

2) Do what I did: cruise female blogs. I did that for several months looking for blogs to include in Women Blog, Too!, and I learned a few things.

* Whenever a blog has entries that start with 'I got up this morning and took a shower. I used the pink soap and rinsed my hair thoroughly twice, just like it said on the bottle', 99 times out of 100, that blog belongs to a female. After awhile I realized that 'I got up this morning and--' was all that was needed for purposes of gender identification. Men rarely--if ever--start that way (I think I saw it once).

* Whenever a female blog has entries that start with 'The most important thing happened to me today--' the odds are overwhelming that it will be followed by 20 long, unutterably verbose grafs in which nothing happens of any importance whatever to anyone, living or dead, except--maybe--the blogger herself, and even then you'd have to stretch the traditional definition of 'important' to include activities like buying a different brand of ketchup (how daring!) and leaving work 15 minutes early to pick up the dry cleaning.

There are exceptions, thank god. When Cyclopatra talks about her personal life, not only is she witty and straightforward about it but she connects it to life in general for a lot of people, not just herself, and every detail she includes is there for a reason. (Whether she shows such admirable restraint and concision when telling her partner these very same things is veiled in mystery, however.) But they pale into insignificance next to the inordinate numbers of merciless tale-spinners who are entirely without pity for male brains that lack either the interest in or the capacity for processing long, complicated files whose only excuse for being is that they're there, like lumps of coal in a Christmas stocking, and can't be ignored.

So you might say that this post is in the nature of a plea. There's nothing actually illegal about telling long, pointless stories that fry the brains of any male inside the 12-mile marker in any direction, but it isn't very nice.

Have a heart. Lay off once in a while. You may not believe this, but the world will not explode into a billion pieces tomorrow if one--or even two--of your stories remain untold. Honest. The sun will still come up, birds will still sing, and Red Lobster restaurants will still be a blot on the suburban escutcheon from which there is no forseeable escape.

Give us a break one time, OK? It would be an act of kindness that will ease your way into a Heaven where every woman gets to be the only guest on Oprah for eternity. That's worth a little self-control, isn't it?

That's what former UN Ambassador Richard Holbrooke had to say about the situation in Iraq last week. He pointed to the potentially disastrous consequences of waging a never-ending war in the region which supplies most of the world's oil and suggested bluntly that it could lead to destabilization of the world's economy. I read five papers a day, and I missed that little item. Holbrooke is one of the few looking past the immediate quagmire to see the larger picture: what's the occupation of Iraq doing to the global balance of power? We are treating the deteriorating situation there as at best a temporary chaos created by outside agitators and remnants of the old Ba'athist regime and at worst a local insurrection, but Holbrooke is seeing it as a developing regional conflict that could easily force other Arab nations to choose up sides, enlarging the 'insurrection' into a region-wide nationalist struggle. Kaveh L Afrasiabi of the Asia Times agrees. In an essay entitled 'Refocus on the the big picture', Afrasiabi lays out the way the war has already changed.

The stage is now set for another chapter in a showdown between the forces of occupation and their local props on the one hand, and the diverse forces of (religious) nationalism seeking to regain Iraq's independence on the other. This means that contrary to some recent analyses focusing on a Shi'ite-Sunni divide, the most important determining factor in the war-torn country is, and for the foreseeable future will be, nationalism versus imperialism.

Whether we think of ourselves as an imperial power or not, the point is that they do.

As things go, nothing much has changed. There will be a bit less posting and the posts may be a bit longer, but the man behind the curtain is still wearing a rubber nose.