One such challenge, the Vatican Bank, is equivalent to cleaning up the Augean stables. It is enough to mention the words Vatican and bank in the same sentence to start a cascade of jokes about comic opera ineptness and skullduggery.

I hope so, and certainly the Obama administration is a breath of fresh air after the stunning ineptness of the Bush Cheney years. But governments all over the world are always convinced that their expansions can be substantially financed by efficiency gains, and that dream usually proves chimerical.

The Chinese option economic rights and prosperity in exchange for public quiescence is not feasible, owing to these regimes ineptness and rampant corruption. As a result, their inability to reform, combined with rapid population growth and a rising cohort of young people, is placing them under pressure, creating a possibility of explosive change.

Osama bin Laden was very adept at narrative. He was not able to do as much damage to the US as he hoped, but he managed to dominate the world agenda for a decade, and the ineptness of the initial American reaction meant that he could impose larger costs on the US than were necessary.

Some Europeans and others may gloat over America s failure in Iraq, and the ineptness or worse of US post occupation policy cries to heaven. Yet the root causes of that failure go deeper, to Iraq s creation as an artificial entity in the 1920 s by British imperialist planners, who stitched together three disparate provinces of the defeated Ottoman Empire into a state that never had a coherent identity.