WAR

WITH THE Olympics in full swing and the presidential election on the horizon, patriotic themes are in the air, and the Norton Simon Museum hopes to tap into that dialogue by exploring the connection between modern politics and visual arts in its exhibition "The Art of War." On display will be 33 rarely seen posters commissioned by the U.S. government during World Wars I and II -- chosen from a collection of 525 pieces donated in 1952 by Helen and Edith Robinson.

Igniting a provocative new debate, senior military officials are pushing the Pentagon to go on the offensive in cyberspace by developing the ability to attack other nations' computer systems, rather than concentrating on defending America's electronic security.

A powerful earthquake struck the mountains near Kyrgyzstan's border with Tajikistan, killing 58 people, injuring 50 and destroying more than 100 buildings in Nura village in southern Kyrgyzstan, emergency officials said. No damage or casualties elsewhere were reported. The magnitude 6.6 quake's epicenter was in Kyrgyzstan, the U.S. Geological Survey said. Kyrgyzstan said the epicenter was in Tajikistan.

Britain's commander in Afghanistan has said the war against the Taliban cannot be won, British newspapers reported. It quoted Brig. Mark Carleton-Smith as saying that if the Taliban was willing to talk, then that might be "precisely the sort of progress" needed to end the insurgency. "We're not going to win this war. It's about reducing it to a manageable level of insurgency that's not a strategic threat and can be managed by the Afghan army," he said. He said his forces had "taken the sting out of the Taliban for 2008" but that troops may well leave Afghanistan while a low level of insurgency remains.

They are the sullen architecture of the "surge," gray armies shrinking the horizon. Baghdad is a city of blast walls, towering maze-like from the Tigris to the battered, seething neighborhoods of Shula and Sadr City. Concrete sentinels of last year's troop buildup, they seal and sequester. They absorb explosions from car bombs, they bottle up bad guys.

"What's it like there?" It's the question we get asked most often by people who haven't been to Baghdad, followed closely by, "Do you live in the Green Zone?" The answer to that one is easy: No. The answer to the first is more difficult. Baghdad, like any big city, is a porridge of ugliness, beauty, charm, humor, scowls, color and grayness, but with a twist: It is under military occupation, and signs of U.S. and Iraq security forces are everywhere.

Traumatic brain injuries, one of the signature injuries of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, can be linked to such long-term problems as seizures, aggression and dementia reminiscent of Alzheimer's disease, according to an Institute of Medicine report released Thursday. Even mild brain injuries, the report found, appear associated with some long-term problems. The report is a wake-up call, said Dr.

Gently admonishing President Bush, the nation's newly retired chief intelligence analyst suggested that the Iraq war was as much the failure of policymakers as it was the flawed intelligence on which they relied. Bush told ABC News last week that his biggest regret was "the intelligence failure in Iraq." "I wish the intelligence had been different, I guess," he said. Thomas Fingar, until this week the deputy director of national intelligence for analysis, declined to directly address the president's swipe.

Do military officers have the right to publicly voice dissent about their commander in chief and U.S. war policy? That question highlighted last week's pretrial hearing at Ft. Lewis Army base near Seattle for 1st Lt. Ehren Watada, the nation's first commissioned officer to refuse deployment to Iraq. Watada faces a court-martial and six years in prison for failing to deploy with his Stryker Brigade last year and for making four public statements criticizing President Bush and the Iraq war.

By the time the Vietnam war ended in 1975, it had become America's longest war, shadowed the legacies of four presidents, killed 58,000 Americans along with many thousands more Vietnamese, and cost the U.S. more than $660 billion in today's dollars.