President Bush will sign into law a ban on so-called partial birth abortion, thereby culminating a long campaign of deception. The measure, which has been constantly misrepresented as limited to late-term abortions, would in fact ban common abortion procedures used after the first trimester of pregnancy but well before fetal viability.

The newly revealed small print of Mr Bush's $87bn (£54bn) funding request left many Democrats and some Republicans outraged that the administration aimed to spend more per head on Iraqi public services than it spends on each American.

Berlusconi: "I experience every terrorist attack on Israel as if it were an attack on my own people" and was lauded in turn by Ariel Sharon as Israel's "super-friend".

"I just wake up in the morning and tell myself, 'There's been a military coup'. And then it all makes sense."

The "revolutionary power", in Kissinger's theory, rejects fundamental elements of the system it seeks to control, arguing that they are wrong in principle. For the Bush administration, according to Krugman, that includes social security; the idea of pursuing foreign policy through international institutions; and perhaps even the basic notion that political legitimacy comes from democratic elections - as opposed to, say, from God.

But worse still, Kissinger continued, nobody can quite bring themselves to believe that the revolutionary power really means to do what it claims. "Lulled by a period of stability which had seemed permanent," he wrote, "they find it nearly impossible to take at face value the assertion of the revolutionary power that it means to smash the existing framework."

Kissinger writes that “the successful conduct of foreign policy demands, above all, the intuitive ability to sense the future and thereby to master it,”