Big Picture views on Mideast

With word that President Bush is mulling a United Nations-sponsored military presence in Iraq, I'd like to point out a couple of analysis pieces that try to lend a broader perspective to current events:

• In The Ever-Expanding War on Terror, Newsweek's Richard Wolfe cautions that the administration's growing ambitions about remaking the Middle East, especially wrapping in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, risk "driving a wedge into what is left of its international coalition."
• In How 'pushback' plays for Bush on Iraq, the Christian Science Monitor's Linda Feldmann examines the political pressure Bush faces on the home front as the scale and cost of occupying Iraq grow.