The United States is promising an "intense" diplomatic drive in the Middle East, hoping to buck regional skepticism and its own weakened position by cracking open the Israeli-Palestinian deadlock.

With US troops mired in Iraq after nearly four bloody years, the White House turning up the heat on Iran and Syria, and Lebanon on a political knife edge, the prospect of peace dawning anywhere in the region appears slim.

WASHINGTON - President Bush has called Iraq a crucial battleground in a decades-long struggle against Islamic terrorism.

"It's important for our fellow citizens to understand that failure in Iraq would be a disaster for our future," he told soldiers at Fort Benning, Ga., last week. "It's a different kind of war in which failure in one part of the world could lead to disaster here at home ... That is why we must, and we will, succeed in Iraq."

Five years after the fall of the Taliban, Afghanistan remains hooked on opium. The drug trade has become the country's largest employer, its biggest export and the largest source of income and credit in a land devastated by decades of war...

So pervasive is the trade that Afghanistan is at risk of becoming a lawless narco-state where drug dealers will determine who holds power. Even now it is a major source of corruption that undermines the fledgling government of President Hamid Karzai and is the chief source of funds for regional warlords and Taliban terrorists.

JOHN YDSTIE, host: President Ahmadinejad's trip to Venezuela, Russia's cutoff and then resumption this week of oil exports to Europe, and the growing partnership between Russia and oil-hungry China; all signs of a shifting oil geopolitics. It adds up to an axis of oil that seriously threatens U.S. interests, according to Flynt Leverett. He's a former national security advisor in the Bush White House who parted ways with the administration and ended up advising John Kerry's presidential campaign.