Who's AWOL now?

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How goes the war? No, not Vietnam. The other one. You remember. It was in all the papers until a month ago when Vietnam returned for a Democratic Party dinner-theater tour starring Massachusetts' answer to Robert Goulet.

Can't get into it myself. I dozed off the other day watching a White House press conference in which President Bush was asked nary a question about anything that had happened since 1972, and I dreamt there was a muffled explosion from al-Qaeda down the street blowing up the Capitol. And, when it had died away, the press corps brushed the plaster dust off their suits and said, "But, Mr President, critics point out that National Guard pay stubs from the '70s are notoriously easy to forge. ..."

It has been said America is divided into September 11 people and Sept. 10 people. The former category are those for whom September 11, 2001, changed everything. The latter are those for whom Sept. 10, 1972, changed everything. That's when Mr. Bush didn't show up at the Air National Guard base because he was dancing naked on a bar in Acapulco with Conchita the surly waitress. Or whatever.

If you think this is the most important issue facing America, feel free to vote for John Kerry, who back in 1972 was proudly serving his country by accusing its armed services of war crimes. Or whatever. Like I said, I can't get my head round the whole retro this-is-the-aging-of-the-dawn-of-Aquarius scene.

Meanwhile, there's this whole other war going on, the one Mr. Bush has to attend to while everyone else is on cable TV talking about the early '70s. This war has an ambitious aim: the transformation of the most dysfunctional region of the world. You can't do it overnight. But, 10 months after the Iraqi liberation, it should be possible to discern a trend. And right now all the Middle Eastern dominoes are beginning to teeter in the same direction.

Last year, about a month after the war, I was heading back through Iraq's western desert to Amman, came to Jordan Junction just past Rutba and decided to take a swing up the road to the Syrian border. A weird sight: on one side, the frontier guards of the last surviving Ba'athist regime; on the other, American troops.

It must have looked a lot weirder from the Syrian side, if you're suddenly spending your entire shift a few hundred yards from U.S. soldiers, relaxed and chewing the proverbial gum.

It seems to have concentrated the mind of Bashir Assad, Syria's boy dictator. He has no desire to wind up looking like Saddam when they fished him out of that hole.

So the other day Syria's vice president, Abdul Halim Khaddam, said his government had sent messages to Israel via Turkey, offering to resume peace talks with the Zionist entity.