But a police official said the gunmen opened fire on the soldiers, believing they were insurgents. A year earlier, the same house had been attacked by insurgents, the official said.

The U.S. military in a statement identified the gunmen as "suspected members of al-Qaida in Iraq." It said four gunmen were also detained.

The military did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

During the height of the insurgency in the nearly seven-year war, targeted airstrikes were common practice. But as violence in Iraq dramatically declined, the U.S. use of airstrikes has also dropped off.

The U.S. military has continued to provide air support during Iraqi military missions because Iraq does not have a functioning air force.

The airstrike was called in shortly after a firefight broke out at about 3 a.m. between the patrol and the gunmen, the statement said.

The police official identified the dead gunman as a member of the Kurdish security forces whose home was attacked a year earlier by insurgents.

The homeowner and his two sons had taken turns guarding the house since the attack, the official said.

"So he and his two sons opened fire, thinking that the house was being attacked by al-Qaida," the official said.

The police official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to release the information to the media.

Sadiyah is 60 miles (95 kilometers) northeast of Baghdad.

------

Associated Press Writer Sameer N. Yacoub contributed to this report.

Obama explicitly referred to the Iraq withdrawal as a model for Afghanistan, saying, "Today, after extraordinary costs, we are bringing the Iraq war to a responsible end. We will remove our combat brigades from Iraq by the end of next summer, and all of our troops by the end of 2011." He was referring to the Status of Forces Agreement imposed on Bush by the Iraqi parliament in fall of 2008, which set a timetable for withdrawal. The SOFA has worked better than its critics expected, in part because the new Iraqi Army is now capable of patrolling independently and is willing to stand and fight against popular militias, albeit with U.S. supplies and close air support.

Moreover, Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki gained control of his field officers, establishing forward operating bases that reported directly to him. He exaggerated his victory at Basra in spring of 2008 over the Mahdi Army militia, and unfairly discounted the role of U.S. air power and troops in lending the operation crucial support. He and his American allies, moreover, seldom acknowledge the crucial mediating role of Iran in getting the Mahdi Army to stand down. It is nevertheless true that the 275,000-strong Iraqi army can now face down most security challenges from militias. It cannot entirely stop terrorism and has not restored security to Sunni Arab cities such as Baquba and Mosul in the north, but overall attacks and civilian deaths have for the most part declined since the U.S. military ceased its active patrols. Iraq is an oil state, and is spending nearly $10 billion this year on the Ministries of Defense and the Interior (which oversees the police). Afghanistan’s entire gross domestic product is only about $12 billion a year on an exchange rate basis.

In contrast to his Iraqi counterpart, President Hamid Karzai is said by U.S. intelligence to control only about 30 percent of the country, while the Taliban control ten to fifteen percent. The rest is in the hands of warlords. Karzai is known as a prickly micro-manager of his own bureaucratic turf, but seems unable to see the big picture. He has not attempted anything nearly as ambitious as al-Maliki’s Basra campaign. The attempt of Karzai’s camp to steal the recent presidential election deeply hurt his legitimacy, as President Obama acknowledged in his speech. Meanwhile, Al-Maliki’s Islamic Mission (Da'wa) Party gained dramatically in popularity in last January’s provincial elections, suggesting that he has real popularity in the big Shiite urban centers. So the political situation in Iraq is much more promising than that in Afghanistan, despite the former’s tendency toward political gridlock and ethnic jockeying, which may delay the parliamentary elections originally scheduled for January.

A major plank of Obama’s Afghanistan platform is a troop escalation -- another 30,000 on top of the 22,000 he dispatched last winter. It inevitably recalls to mind the Iraq escalation that then-Senator Obama opposed. The Washington consensus is now that Bush’s "surge" or troop escalation defeated "al-Qaida" in Baghdad and in al-Anbar province, allowing the new Iraqi military to begin patrolling and ultimately to do so independently, and thus paving the way for a "responsible" U.S. withdrawal. While it is certainly true that the steps taken by Gen. David Petraeus in spring and summer 2007 contributed to a substantial reduction of violence in Iraq, the actions of the U.S. military were only one piece of the puzzle.

The simple fact of the matter is that in 2006 amd 2007 the Shiite militias and government troops decisively won the civil war in Baghdad. They ethnically cleansed the Sunni Arabs from the capital, creating a massive refugee problem in Jordan and Syria. Baghdad went from being a mixed city to being 85 to 90 percent Shiite, as a team at Columbia University recently charted. The killing was thereafter so much reduced because there were few mixed neighborhoods left. Even the willingness of Sunni Arabs to join pro-American Awakening Councils or Sons of Iraq militias that took on Sunni extremist groups derived in some important part from this fear of being ethnically cleansed.

In Iraq, for all its acts of stupidity, the Bush-Cheney regime at least backed the majority, the Shiites. With 60 percent of the population, the Shiites were always likely to win the civil war produced by the power vacuum left by Washington’s defeat of Saddam Hussein and his feared Republican Guards tank corps.

In Afghanistan, the major allies of the U.S. and NATO have been the national minorities -- the Sunni Tajiks, the Shiite Hazaras, and the Uzbeks. Admittedly, they are joined by pro-Karzai Pashtuns, but Pashtun support for the U.S. and NATO is clearly dwindling. Obama’s surge of U.S. troops into Helmand and Qandahar could easily provoke a Pashtun backlash. The Pashtuns are thus not analogous to Iraq’s Sunni Arabs. They are a plurality of the population, not a minority, and they have not lost the low-intensity civil war in which the country is embroiled. Nor have they been ethnically cleansed under the current government. The Sunni Arabs of Iraq threw in the towel, joined in elections, and even formed pro-American militias only as it became clear that the Shiites were routing them. The Pashtuns are not in that position.

Standing up an Afghanistan security force is a key element of Obama’s plan, as it was a central strategy in Iraq for the Bush administration and its allies. Doing so in Afghanistan, however, is a far more daunting task than in Iraq. Only 44 of the 127 units of the Afghanistan National Army surveyed for the U.S. Congress this fall were found capable of operating independently. That is, although there are on paper 95,000 troops in Afghanistan’s army, only about 33,000 can strike out on their own. U.S. military doctrine prior to the advent of smart munitions was that a three-to-one manpower advantage was sufficient for an attack. If there are 15,000 committed Taliban and other insurgent fighters, who have the advantage of fighting on their home terrain, then government forces could at the moment simply not marshal enough capable forces to defeat them, which helps explain the country’s downward security spiral. There is reason to believe, moreover, that the Afghan National Army troops are considerably less effective than their rating suggests. In the year ending September, one in four had quit or deserted. Only ten percent of troops are literate. (In contrast, 74 percent of Iraqis can read and write.) One in every six Afghan soldiers is alleged to be a drug addict.

The military is, moreover, anything but national. The new report to Congress reveals that the army is disproportionately drawn from and commanded by officers of the Tajik ethnic group, who are 41 percent of the trained troops but only a quarter of the population. (Tajiks speak a form of Persian and are more urban than other Afghans.) The Pashtuns, the biggest ethnic group, at 42 percent, are only a third of the troops. There are virtually no Pashtun troops from Helmand and Qandahar provinces, the centers of guerrilla opposition to the Karzai government and to the foreign troop presence.

The implication is that often, when we speak of Afghanistan National Army troops patrolling Pashtun villages alongside U.S. or other NATO forces, we may well be speaking of Tajik troops doing so. Many Pashtun clansmen are fiercely proud and independent, and would be humiliated by having Tajik soldiers lord it over them. (In Afghanistan, Pashtuns often unfairly depict Tajiks as soft, urban and effeminate.) The only thing worse than Tajik dominance would be what the Tajiks brought along with them -- Western Christian soldiers outfitted like astronauts. Ironically, the Tajik dominance of the old 1980s communist government of Afghanistan, and their alliance with Russian troops, were among the reasons that impelled the Pashtuns to mount a Muslim insurgency in the first place.

If there are considerable problems with the Afghanistan army, the police, numbering around 93,000, are considered much worse -- poorly trained, undisciplined and held to be highly corrupt. But the main problem is that there are not enough of them. The entire province of Qunduz north of the capital only has 800 police for a population of nearly a million. In contrast, the similarly-sized San Francisco has over 2,000 police officers and rather fewer armed militants.

Iraq in 1990 had a million-man army and possessed many relatively educated and able recruits for its military. It was, after all, an industrializing society with advanced factories and large cities. Thousands of Shiite militiamen trained by Iran’s professional Revolutionary Guards Corps were allegedly inducted into the army in 2008. Afghanistan’s military, on the other hand, numbered only 60,000 under the Taliban, and the Northern Alliance militias that held out against the minions of Mullah Omar were small.

Seasoned observers find preposterous the prospect that a crash training program could double the size of both the police and the army and turn them into effective, upright and independent security forces in the space of two years or so. (Obama wants to begin drawing back down U.S. forces in only 18 months.) Nor would mere basic training address the problems of illiteracy, drug use, corruption, desertion and ethnic grievances.

There is a sense in which the easy victory that American special forces operatives -- allied with the Northern Alliance -- won over the Taliban in fall of 2001 proved a fatal, siren call, inviting Bush and the arrogant men around him into the Iraq quagmire. As it turned out, the victory in Afghanistan was declared prematurely. (The previous administration suffered from a tendency to premature ejaculations, as on the deck of the USS Lincoln on May 1, 2003.) The Taliban were not gone, but merely changed the color of their turbans and faded away to fight another day. Their opposition to the new order was joined by some of America’s former allies among the Mojahedin (whom Ronald Reagan had lauded as "freedom fighters"), such as Jalaluddin Haqqani and Gulbadin Hikmatyar. Obama is in danger of being misled by the inside-the-Beltway think tank consensus on what happened in Iraq, and of applying those "lessons" to Afghanistan. Even if the two actually resembled one another, the Washington story about Iraq is full of holes. But they are very different countries, societies, and situations. Bush caught a break with his surge, inasmuch as it coincided with a massive shift in the local power balance. Obama will have to be very lucky indeed to catch a similar break in Afghanistan.

Galbraith was one of the most vocal Democratic supporters of the attack on Iraq, having signed a March 19, 2003 public letter (.pdf) -- along with the standard cast of neocon war-lovers such as Bill Kristol, Max Boot, Danielle Pletka, and Robert Kagan -- stating that "we all join in supporting the military intervention in Iraq" and "it is now time to act to remove Saddam Hussein and his regime from power."  As intended, that letter was then praised by outlets such as The Washington Post Editorial Page, gushing that "it is both significant and encouraging that a bipartisan group of influential foreign policy thinkers, veterans of both Democratic and Republican administrations, has signed on to a statement of policy on Iraq that makes sense on the war."  Throughout 2002 and 2003, Galbraith appeared in numerous outlets -- including repeatedly on Fox News and with Bill O'Reilly -- presenting himself as a loyal Democrat firmly behind the invasion of Iraq.  In 2002, he was an adviser to Paul Wolfowitz on Kurdistan.

After playing a key role in enabling the invasion of Iraq, Galbraith first became one of a handful of U.S. officials who worked on writing the Iraqi Constitution, and after he resigned from the government, he then continuously posed as an independent expert on the region and, specifically, an "unpaid" adviser to the Kurds on the Constitution.  Galbraith was an ardent and vocal advocate for Kurdish autonomy, arguing tirelessly in numerous venues for such proposals -- including in multiple Op-Eds for The New York Times -- and insisting that Kurds must have the right to control oil resources located in Northern Iraq.  Throughout the years of writing those Op-Eds, he was identified as nothing more than "a former United States ambassador to Croatia," except in one 2007 Op-Ed which vaguely stated that he "is a principal in a company that does consulting in Iraq and elsewhere."  When he participated in a New York Times forum in October, 2008 -- regarding what the next President should be required to answer -- he unsurprisingly posed questions that advocated for regional autonomy for Iraqis generally and Kurds specifically, and he was identified as nothing more than the author of a book about the region.

What Galbraith kept completely concealed all these years was that a company he formed in 2004 came to acquire a large stake in a Kurdish oil field whereby, as the NYT put it, he "stands to earn perhaps a hundred million or more dollars."  In other words, he had a direct -- and vast -- financial stake in the very policies which he was publicly advocating in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and countless other American media outlets, where he was presented as an independent expert on the region.  As Cobban wrote:

For the preceding four years, while Galbraith was an influential participant in Iraq-related constitutional and political discussions, he also had an undisclosed financial interest in a KRG-authorised oil development venture. . . .

Here in the U.S., Galbraith has long been associated with the "liberal hawk" wing of the Democratic Party . . . Many members of this group have been liberal idealists - though some of those who, on "liberal" grounds, gave early support to Pres. George W. Bush's decision to invade Iraq later expressed their regret for adopting that position.

Galbraith has never expressed any such regrets, and last November, he was openly scornful of Bush's late-term agreement to withdraw from Iraq completely. The revelation that for many years Galbraith had a quite undisclosed financial interest in the political breakup of Iraq may now further reduce the clout, and the ranks, of the remaining liberal hawks.

Unfortunately, that last sentence is likely wishful thinking.  What Galbraith has done, as sleazy and dishonest as it is, is simply par for the course in accountability-free Washington.

Galbraith's relationship with the Kurds goes back many years.  He undoubtedly knew that overthrowing Saddam would empower his Kurdish friends and their ability to dole out oil contracts.  Indeed, in his own 2006 book, he recounts that he began working on Kurdish autonomy and independence "two weeks after the fall of Saddam Hussein."  Less than a year later, having helped convince the public -- and many Democrats -- to invade Iraq, he formed a company that then acquired a huge stake in Kurdish oil.  And he then spent years running around trying to use his status as Foreign Policy Community expert to exploit the war he cheered on for his own massive personal gain, while keeping completely concealed those glaring conflicts of interests.  

Reider Visser, a historian of southern Iraq, told The Boston Globe last month:  "Galbraith has been such a central person to the shaping of the Iraqi Constitution, far more than I think most Americans realize. All those beautiful ideas about principles of federalism and local communities having control are really cast in a different light when the community has an oil field in its midst and Mr. Galbraith has a financial stake."  So here's a leading advocate of the war on Iraq who used his influence in the U.S. Government and the Foreign Policy Community -- as well as the break-up of Saddam's regime -- to enrich himself on Iraqi oil.  As the NYT put it:

As the scope of Mr. Galbraith’s financial interests in Kurdistan become clear, they have the potential to inflame some of Iraqis’ deepest fears, including conspiracy theories that the true reason for the American invasion of their country was to take its oil. It may not help that outside Kurdistan, Mr. Galbraith’s influential view that Iraq should be broken up along ethnic lines is considered offensive to many Iraqis’ nationalism. Mr. Biden and Mr. Kerry, who have been influenced by Mr. Galbraith’s thinking but do not advocate such a partitioning of the country, were not aware of Mr. Galbraith’s oil dealings in Iraq, aides to both politicians say.

Some officials say that his financial ties could raise serious questions about the integrity of the constitutional negotiations themselves. "The idea that an oil company was participating in the drafting of the Iraqi Constitution leaves me speechless," said Feisal Amin al-Istrabadi, a principal drafter of the law that governed Iraq after the United States ceded control to an Iraqi government on June 28, 2004.

In effect, he said, the company "has a representative in the room, drafting."

Remember how all those freakish and paranoid people -- on the crazed "Arab street" and in American-hating leftist circles -- actually believed in "conspiracy" theories such as the wacky notion that one of the motives for invading Iraq was a desire to exploit its oil resources?  

Here we have yet another example of one of America's most Serious and respected "experts" advocating various policies while maintaining huge, undisclosed financial and personal interests in his advocacy.  He was given access to every major media outlet virtually on demand to do so -- the NYT, The Washington Post, NPR, CNN, Fox -- all while those interests remained concealed.  His uniting with the country's most extreme neocons to support the Bush administration's attack on Iraq didn't prevent the Obama administration from pushing him to be hired as the U.N.'s number two official in Afghanistan.  He continued to be revered by leading establishment Democrats as an important and respected expert.  In other words, Peter Galbraith is a perfect face showing how America's Foreign Policy Community and our political debates function. 

 

UPDATE:  Jonathan Schwarz recalls what was done to those who suggested that part of the motive in invading Iraq might have something to do with that country's oil reserves.

 

UPDATE II:  The New York Times is forced to publish an Editor's Note today in light of this story, noting that "Mr. Galbraith signed a contract that obligated him to disclose his financial interests in the subjects of his articles"; he "should have disclosed to readers that Mr. Galbraith could benefit financially" from the policies he was advocating in his Op-Eds; and "had editors been aware of Mr. Galbraith's financial stake, the Op-Ed page would have insisted on disclosure or not published his articles."

Harrelson, on the other hand, seems like a guy totally determined not to let the artificiality of these interactions impinge on his sense of who he is. Perversely, the fact that he is frank and thoughtful, and known to hold unorthodox political opinions he doesn't keep to himself, has only augmented his fame. You can't throw an empty Chardonnay bottle out your car window in west L.A. without hitting a Hollywood liberal, but Harrelson is something much rarer: a vegan, raw-foodist, antiwar, anti-capitalist, pro-marijuana, eco-funky, genuine radical who happens to be a beloved character actor with a good-ol'-boy demeanor.

Like the other journalists who showed up to talk to him about his role in "The Messenger," writer-director Oren Moverman's film about the United States Army's Combat Notification Unit (i.e., the dreaded door-knockers who show up with really bad news), I was asked by the publicists to restrict my questions to the film and Harrelson's acting career. It's a laughable request anyway, but in fact I would have needed to tie Harrelson up and gag him if I didn't want to hear his opinions about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the dangers of capitalism and the looming possibility that Barack Obama could become a second LBJ.

For the first half of this decade, Harrelson was mostly absent from the movie screen; he did some theater and TV, a fair amount of environmental and pro-cannabis activism -- his illegal banner-drop from the Golden Gate Bridge goes back to 1996 -- and a lot of time with his family. (He lives most of the year on Maui with his wife and three daughters.) It seemed entirely plausible that the one-time "Cheers" star and Oscar nominee (for "The People vs. Larry Flynt") had burned up his 15 minutes, and then some.

It doesn't look that way now. Harrelson has appeared in more than two dozen films over the past three years, with more in the pipeline, and three of them are piling up on top of each other this fall. He co-stars in the action-comedy "Zombieland" and the apocalypse-thriller "2012," both of them likely to gross more in a single weekend than "The Messenger" will in its entire history. But Moverman's low-budget, high-intensity drama about the social and psychological costs of war is clearly "a labor of love" for all concerned, as Harrelson puts it.

In "The Messenger," Harrelson plays Capt. Tony Stone, a damaged, middle-aged hardass assigned to mentor the younger Sgt. Will Montgomery (Ben Foster), a decorated and wounded Iraq vet, as they take on the uniquely difficult task of informing civilians that their loved ones serving overseas won't be coming home. If that sounds wrenching, well, it is. But the acting is superlative -- Harrelson's right when he says that Foster's starring role has echoes of James Dean or the young De Niro -- and the half-improvised quality of the filmmaking feels dangerous and intimate but never showoffy.

When Stone and Montgomery are assigned to notify an NOK -- that's "next of kin," in Army parlance -- Foster and Harrelson literally went into the scene not knowing what would happen. They hadn't even met the actors playing the bereaved-civilian roles, and weren't sure whether they would break down in tears or respond with physical violence. (Moverman and co-writer Alessandro Camon partly based his screenplay on stories they heard from casualty-notification soldiers.) The story of what Stone and Montgomery have to do, and how it affects them, offers an intimate, human-scale portrait of the real costs of warfare.

Once Harrelson was safely tucked under the covers, wearing an Army T-shirt and a pair of blue jeans, I put my tape recorder on top of the duvet and we got talking. It was a nice big bed, and looked extra-comfy. Woody probably wouldn't have taken it the wrong way. I can't say I wasn't tempted.

This movie isn't connected to the Fort Hood shooting in any way, but still. It's kind of intense to be talking about this subject, about death and the military, right after that.

It's related in the sense that it's another sad story connected to this war. There's a lot of those, and that one's pretty devastating. I feel really terrible for those families.

And then I just happened to notice, on the same page of today's New York Times as that story, two more of those names in bold-face type. Two more soldiers whose families are going to be getting visits from guys like the one you play in the movie. [Just to put names to them, they were Spc. Tony Carrasco Jr., of Berino, N.M., and Staff Sgt. Amy C. Tirador of Albany, N.Y.]

It really is a devastating thing. I've had an evolution of sorts in terms of my attitude toward the war. Not in the sense of the war itself, which I do continue to think is wrong -- and I think it's pretty obvious what the war is about, both of them. During the course of making this, I had the opportunity to spend time with a bunch of soldiers and hear a bunch of stories, and you know, just start to feel a great deal of empathy and compassion toward the men and women who are over there working their asses off every day, not getting paid much and just putting their lives on the line for love of country. I do think that a big part of supporting the troops would be the concept of not sending them into battle in a war for resources.

So you think both Iraq and Afghanistan are wars over resources?

Iraq's about the oil and Afghanistan's about a pipeline. It always has been. They started building a pipeline as soon as there was a moment to do so. They started building a pipeline to the Caspian Sea, that's always been their directive. The guys from Chevron went in and met with the Taliban and realized those guys just weren't in control enough. That's why they wanted to oust them. Otherwise it's an absurd concept: You're going to war because a guy from some other country, a Saudi, is living somewhere in the mountains? So we're going to bomb Kabul, bomb the cities? That's absurd. It's a foreign policy gone way wrong. But that's how it always is. American foreign policy has always been, not about spreading democracy, but about spreading capitalism.

It does feel sometimes like our government suffers from some kind of amnesia or OCD. It's like they keep making the same foreign policy mistakes and just hoping it won't turn out quite as badly the next time.

I'm hoping that other countries look at us and say, "OK, there's the government and then there's the people." Granted, you'd like the will of the government to be conjoined with the will of the people. But it's the same way I've made the evolutionary step of looking at the war as separate from the soldiers. When I look at Russia, I don't look at Putin as representing the Russian people. I'm sure they'd love to get him out of there. Regardless, the Bushes and their various oligarchies have gotten us into a situation that's just very unfortunate.

At least at this point, it appears that Obama is pushing onward with the war in Afghanistan. Is he just constrained by geopolitics? Is he simply not free to say, "Look, we're not going to do this anymore"?

I think there's a lot of persuasive and powerful people around Obama. For a president to make his own decisions, I think that's a rarity. Even someone who we think of as our guy -- this is a guy with integrity, a guy who cares, for the first time in a long time -- in the Oval Office, even with him we don't really know who's pulling the strings. I think of every president as being a marionette. Whether he's any different, I don't know. Certainly his military advisors all want him to prosecute this war to the end, just as they did in Vietnam with LBJ.

It's just too depressing, I think we're going to have to hit the streets. Obama has the chance of becoming JFK or LBJ. I think JFK was one of our last great presidents, although I thought Carter was pretty great too. LBJ could have been a great president if he hadn't gotten bogged down in war, but that was quite a war to get bogged down in. Notwithstanding the fact that the war was wrong and they were talking about the Red Scare and the domino effect, if you go and read the Pentagon Papers they were also talking about rubber, tin and oil. They killed 2 and a half million people. What was it all for? In Korea they killed 4 and a half million. Like, we're liberating these people?

Well, one of the things this movie engages, in a way, is the fact that the combined U.S. fatalities in Iraq and Afghanistan are still below 4,500. Not that that's not terrible for those families, but it's not a number that has affected every town and every neighborhood, the way other wars did.

Yeah, but it's got to be more than 10 times that in terms of people with injuries, people strongly affected by it. I'm not sure what's going to make people hit the street, and, you know, I'm one of those people who's not on the street. I recognize that I'm just a guy bitching about it, not a guy who's doing anything.

The thing I love about this movie is that it really takes into account the consequences of going to war. It's been gratifying to me to hear from people who say, "Before it was just a thing in the news, a statistic." You're not really seeing a blown-up body, or seeing the coffins at Dover. I think it's a good thing that it puts a human face on it.

On one level I really dreaded those scenes where you and Ben went to knock on people's doors, do the notifications. They were hard to sit through. But on the other hand, I kind of needed that emotional catharsis. And they're very intense. In the first scene we see, the woman completely goes nuts and attacks you.

That was cool because of the way Oren shot it. We really didn't know what was going to happen. I didn't know she was going to hit me. You don't know what level the people are going to, the way they'll manage their grief. I think it made those scenes much more realistic. We never rehearsed, and never even met the people ahead of time. We shot those in one shot. All of that was really good.

They weren't all done in one shot, were they?

No, there's only two notification scenes that are actually one shot as you see them in the movie. One is Steve Buscemi's and then there's another one. But they were all shot as a one-camera, single-shot thing, with one camera following the action. Later on, if Oren did three takes or whatever, he'd join the different takes together, find whatever worked better. But they were designed to be one-shot takes, and it felt very real. It kept us right on our toes, and on edge.

That guy that you're playing felt very real to me. He's this hardass military lifer, an Army guy, and he's really messed up in ways he doesn't even recognize. I mean, this guy badly needs a hug.

[Laughter.] That's the best description yet. He badly needs a hug. That's true.

I thought there was terrific chemistry between you and Ben Foster, who plays your younger tag-team partner. Obviously you guys are pros so it can be hard to tell, but it felt like there was something real happening there.

Oh, it was incredible. I feel like he's my brother, I really love him. And as an actor, he's one of the best I've ever worked with, if not the best. Total immersion in the mind-set of the character, and constantly reminding himself of the significance of what we're doing. Just before a scene, maybe I'm not completely grounded, and he hands me these pictures of soldiers smiling or hanging with their kids, and they're marked with the dates they died, 2003, 2004, whatever. You can't help but be full of the emotion, with what this movie's connected to. It's one of the few times that I've felt emotional pretense really skirting on emotional reality. I don't think I said that right. It's just, you know, we're pretending, but the reality of it is big.

I've seen him in other movies, but people are really going to notice him this time, if they haven't already.

I think he's one of the most amazing actors. It's like I'm working with James Dean before people know that he's James Dean. I feel like I just did "East of Eden" with James Dean. His talent is so expansive, he's got a huge career ahead of him.

You took several years off, and for a while there it didn't seem clear whether you wanted to make Hollywood movies anymore. I guess you're at peace with them now! I'm not ranking on you for making movies. You're an actor. But does it help you somehow to do a smaller project like this one alongside a big movie like "2012," which can pay a lot of bills?

You know, I don't feel like a movie has to have a message, necessarily. If a movie's fun and funny and just great entertainment, that's enough. But it's nice to do a movie like "The Messenger" where you feel like people watch it and it's initiating conversations that are important. What more could you hope for?

I did take a long time off. I wasn't planning on taking that long, it just kind of happened. Five years. I did keep my hand in, in terms of doing some plays. I wasn't entirely out of the loop. But it was a good thing. I needed to spend some time with my kids. I needed to get away from it. I wasn't liking the whole, I guess you would say, business-y side of it. I came into acting initially because I loved theater, I wanted to be on Broadway. You know, I would have been on Broadway, but I ended up doing this show.

I've heard about that! Apparently you were on TV for a few years.

Yeah. Otherwise I just would have been here in New York. I love theater, that is where my passion is. There was a lot about "The Messenger" that felt very theatrical. Just really being in a scene with a fucking serious actor, like a young De Niro type of actor. It was just a great experience all the way around. I feel super lucky to be a part of this movie.

"The Messenger" opens Nov. 13 at the Angelika Film Center and Lincoln Plaza Cinemas in New York, with wider release to follow.

That, of course, was then; this -- some 11 months into the future -- is now and how things have changed. Futuristic predictions will just have to catch up to the fast-shifting realities of the present moment. Although published after the onset of the global economic meltdown was under way, the report was written before the crisis reached its full proportions and so emphasized that the decline of American power would be gradual, extending over the assessment's 15-year time horizon. But the economic crisis and attendant events have radically upset that timetable. As a result of the mammoth economic losses suffered by the United States over the past year and China's stunning economic recovery, the global power shift the report predicted has accelerated. For all practical purposes, 2025 is here already.

Many of the broad, down-the-road predictions made in "Global Trends 2025" have, in fact, already come to pass. Brazil, Russia, India and China -- collectively known as the BRIC countries -- are already playing far more assertive roles in global economic affairs, as the report predicted would happen in perhaps a decade or so. At the same time, the dominant global role once monopolized by the United States with a helping hand from the major Western industrial powers -- collectively known as the Group of 7 (G-7) -- has already faded away at a remarkable pace. Countries that once looked to the United States for guidance on major international issues are ignoring Washington's counsel and instead creating their own autonomous policy networks. The United States is becoming less inclined to deploy its military forces abroad as rival powers increase their own capabilities and non-state actors rely on "asymmetrical" means of attack to overcome the U.S. advantage in conventional firepower.

No one seems to be saying this out loud -- yet -- but let's put it bluntly: less than a year into the 15-year span of "Global Trends 2025," the days of America's unquestioned global dominance have come to an end. It may take a decade or two (or three) before historians will be able to look back and say with assurance, "That was the moment when the United States ceased to be the planet's preeminent power and was forced to behave like another major player in a world of many competing great powers." The indications of this great transition, however, are there for those who care to look.

Six way stations on the road to ordinary nationhood

Here is my list of six recent developments that indicate we are entering "2025" today. All six were in the news in the last few weeks, even if never collected in a single place. They (and other events like them) represent a pattern: the shape, in fact, of a new age in formation.

1. At the global economic summit in Pittsburgh on Sept. 24 and 25, the leaders of the major industrial powers, the G-7 (G-8 if you include Russia), agreed to turn over responsibility for oversight of the world economy to a larger, more inclusive Group of 20 (G-20), adding in China, India, Brazil, Turkey and other developing nations. Although doubts have been raised about the ability of this larger group to exercise effective global leadership, there is no doubt that the move itself signaled a shift in the locus of world economic power from the West to the global East and South -- and with this shift, a seismic decline in America's economic preeminence has been registered.

"The G-20's true significance is not in the passing of a baton from the G-7/G-8 but from the G-1, the U.S.," Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University wrote in the Financial Times. "Even during the 33 years of the G-7 economic forum, the U.S. called the important economic shots." Declining American leadership over these last decades was obscured by the collapse of the Soviet Union and an early American lead in information technology, Sachs also noted, but there is now no mistaking the shifting of economic power from the United States to China and other rising economic dynamos.

2. According to news reports, America's economic rivals are conducting secret (and not-so-secret) meetings to explore a diminished role for the U.S. dollar -- fast losing its value -- in international trade. Until now, the use of the dollar as the international medium of exchange has given the United States a significant economic advantage: It can simply print dollars to meet its international obligations while other nations must convert their own currencies into dollars, often incurring significant added costs. Now, however, many major trading countries -- among them China, Russia, Japan, Brazil and the Persian Gulf oil countries -- are considering the use of the euro, or a "basket" of currencies, as a new medium of exchange. If adopted, such a plan would accelerate the dollar's precipitous fall in value and further erode American clout in international economic affairs.

One such discussion reportedly took place this summer at a summit meeting of the BRIC countries. Just a concept a year ago, when the very idea of BRIC was concocted by the chief economist at Goldman Sachs, the BRIC consortium became a flesh-and-blood reality this June when the leaders of the four countries held an inaugural meeting in Yekaterinburg, Russia.

The very fact that Brazil, Russia, India and China chose to meet as a group was considered significant, as they jointly possess about 43 percent of the world's population and are expected to account for 33 percent of the world's gross domestic product by 2030 -- about as much as the United States and Western Europe will claim at that time. Although the BRIC leaders decided not to form a permanent body like the G-7 at this stage, they did agree to coordinate efforts to develop alternatives to the dollar and to reform the International Monetary Fund in such a way as to give non-Western countries a greater voice.

3. On the diplomatic front, Washington has been rebuffed by both Russia and China in its drive to line up support for increased international pressure on Iran to cease its nuclear enrichment program. One month after President Obama canceled plans to deploy an anti-ballistic missile system in Eastern Europe in an apparent bid to secure Russian backing for a tougher stance toward Tehran, top Russian leaders are clearly indicating that they have no intention of endorsing strong new sanctions on Iran. "Threats, sanctions, and threats of pressure in the current situation, we are convinced, would be counterproductive," declared the Russian foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, following a meeting with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in Moscow on Oct. 13. The following day, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said that the threat of sanctions was "premature." Given the political risks Obama took in canceling the missile program -- a step widely condemned by Republicans in Washington -- Moscow's quick dismissal of U.S. pleas for cooperation on the Iranian enrichment matter can only be interpreted as a further sign of waning American influence.

4. Exactly the same inference can be drawn from a high-level meeting in Beijing on Oct. 15 between Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao and Iran's first vice president, Mohammed Reza Rahimi. "The Sino-Iran relationship has witnessed rapid development as the two countries' leaders have had frequent exchanges, and cooperation in trade and energy has widened and deepened," Wen said at the Great Hall of the People. Coming at a time when the United States is engaged in a vigorous diplomatic drive to persuade China and Russia, among others, to reduce their trade ties with Iran as a prelude to toughened sanctions, the Chinese statement can only be considered a pointed rebuff of Washington.

5. From Washington's point of view, efforts to secure international support for the allied war effort in Afghanistan have also met with a strikingly disappointing response. In what can only be considered a trivial and begrudging vote of support for the U.S.-led war effort, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown announced on Oct. 14 that Britain would add more troops to the British contingent in that country -- but only 500 more, and only if other European nations increase their own military involvement, something he undoubtedly knows is highly unlikely. So far, this tiny, provisional contingent represents the sum total of additional troops the Obama administration has been able to pry out of America's European allies, despite a sustained diplomatic drive to bolster the combined NATO force in Afghanistan. In other words, even America's most loyal and obsequious ally in Europe no longer appears willing to carry the burden for what is widely seen as yet another costly and debilitating American military adventure in the Greater Middle East.

6. Finally, in a move of striking symbolic significance, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) passed over Chicago (as well as Madrid and Tokyo) to pick Rio de Janeiro to be the host of the 2016 summer Olympics, the first time a South American nation was selected for the honor. Until the Olympic vote took place, Chicago was considered a strong contender, especially since former Chicago resident Barack Obama personally appeared in Copenhagen to lobby the IOC. Nonetheless, in a development that shocked the world, Chicago not only lost out, but was the city eliminated in the very first round of voting.

"Brazil went from a second-class country to a first-class country, and today we began to receive the respect we deserve," said Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva at a victory celebration in Copenhagen after the vote. "I could die now and it already would have been worth it." Few said so, but in the course of the Olympic decision-making process the U.S. was summarily and pointedly demoted from sole superpower to instant also-ran, a symbolic moment on a planet entering a new age.

On being an ordinary country

These are only a few examples of recent developments that indicate, to this author, that the day of America's global preeminence has already come to an end, years before the American intelligence community expected. It's increasingly clear that other powers -- even our closest allies -- are increasingly pursuing independent foreign policies, no matter what pressure Washington tries to bring to bear.

Of course, none of this means that, for some time to come, the U.S. won't retain the world's largest economy and, in terms of sheer destructiveness, its most potent military force. Nevertheless, there is no doubt that the strategic environment in which American leaders must make critical decisions, when it comes to the nation's vital national interests, has changed dramatically since the onset of the global economic crisis.

Even more important, President Obama and his senior advisers are, it seems, reluctantly beginning to reshape U.S. foreign policy with the new global reality in mind. This appears evident, for example, in the administration's decision to revisit U.S. strategy on Afghanistan.

It was only in March, after all, that the president embraced a new counterinsurgency-oriented strategy in that country, involving a buildup of U.S. boots on the ground and a commitment to protracted efforts to win hearts and minds in Afghan villages where the Taliban was resurgent. It was on this basis that he fired the incumbent Afghan war commander, Gen. David D. McKiernan, replacing him with Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, considered a more vigorous proponent of counterinsurgency. When, however, McChrystal presented Obama with the price tag for the implementation of this strategy -- 40,000 to 80,000 additional troops (over and above the 20,000-odd extra troops only recently committed to the fight) -- many in the president's inner circle evidently blanched.

Not only will such a large deployment cost the U.S. Treasury hundreds of billions of dollars it can ill afford, but the strains it is likely to place on the Army and Marine Corps are likely to be little short of unbearable after years of multiple tours and stress in Iraq. This price would be more tolerable, of course, if America's allies would take up more of the burden, but they are ever less willing to do so.

Undoubtedly, the leaders of Russia and China are not entirely unhappy to see the United States exhaust its financial and military resources in Afghanistan. Under these circumstances, it is hardly surprising that Vice President Joe Biden, among others, is calling for a new turn in U.S. policy, forgoing a counterinsurgency approach and opting instead for a less costly "counter-terrorism" strategy aimed, in part, at crushing al-Qaida in Pakistan -- using drone aircraft and Special Forces, rather than large numbers of U.S. troops (while leaving troop levels in Afghanistan relatively unchanged).

It is too early to predict how the president's review of U.S. strategy in Afghanistan will play out, but the fact that he did not immediately embrace the McChrystal plan and has allowed Biden such free rein to argue his case suggests that he may be coming to recognize the folly of expanding America's military commitments abroad at a time when its global preeminence is waning.

One senses Obama's caution in other recent moves. Although he continues to insist that the acquisition of nuclear weapons by Iran is impermissible and that the use of force to prevent this remains an option, he has clearly moved to minimize the likelihood that this option -- which would also be plagued by recalcitrant "allies" -- will ever be employed.

On the other side of the coin, he has given fresh life to American diplomacy, seeking improved ties with Moscow and approving renewed diplomatic contact with such previously pariah states as Burma, Sudan and Syria. This, too, reflects a reality of our changing world: that the holier-than-thou, bullying stance adopted by the Bush administration toward these and other countries for almost eight years rarely achieved anything. Think of it as an implicit acknowledgment that the U.S. is now descending from its status as the globe's "sole superpower" to that of an ordinary country. This, after all, is what ordinary countries do; they engage other countries in diplomatic discourse, whether they like their current governments or not.

So, welcome to the world of 2025. It doesn't look like the world of our recent past, when the United States stood head and shoulders above all other nations in stature, and it doesn't comport well with Washington's fantasies of global power since the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. But it is reality.

For many Americans, the loss of that preeminence may be a source of discomfort, or even despair. On the other hand, don't forget the advantages to being an ordinary country like any other country: Nobody expects Canada, or France, or Italy to send another 40,000 troops to Afghanistan, on top of the 68,000 already there and the 120,000 still in Iraq. Nor does anyone expect those countries to spend $925 billion in taxpayer money to do so -- the current estimated cost of both wars, according to the National Priorities Project.

The question remains: How much longer will Washington feel that Americans can afford to subsidize a global role that includes garrisoning much of the planet and fighting distant wars in the name of global security, when the American economy is losing so much ground to its competitors? This is the dilemma President Obama and his advisers must confront in the altered world of 2025.