By this standard, President Barack Obama should now be in a hopeless situation.

Top military and diplomatic experts desperately warned Bush not to invade Iraq.

There is certainly a degree of envy for what others have accomplished and a sense of desperation about how Al Qaeda can capitalize on this change.

The increasingly forlorn resistance operations staged from Indian territory were shut down in the hope of reciprocation from the Burmese side.

Cypriot President Nicos Anastasiades, reportedly with some support from European institutions, desperately tried to avoid this fate in the name of financial stability.

In mid August, I had the temerity to predict that risks had come home to roost, and that a large US investment bank might soon fail or be forced into a highly distressed merger.

In a desperate, last ditch effort, the IMF is now inventing spill over reports for a few systemically important economies, to be conducted at the margins of its country (Article IV) consultations. This initiative is destined to fail as did the IMF Multilateral Surveillance Exercise or the G 20 peer reviews in the recent past.

These Sunni leaders live in abject fear of the geopolitical earthquake that any disintegration of political authority in Baghdad would bring, believing that all out civil war would invariably follow a war that would not respect international borders.

Other Al Qaeda thinkers have expressed admiration for the ability of young men like Wael Ghonim to mobilize thousands of his fellow Egyptians by conveying his sincere desire for change and love of country. There is certainly a degree of envy for what others have accomplished and a sense of desperation about how Al Qaeda can capitalize on this change.