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Whatever else you think of John McCain's presidential bid, give him this: Formerly a Navy man, he is a soldier nonetheless. And where he most wants to soldier is Iraq.

But as he marches straight on, the ranks following him are thinning.

Among the strays: Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and President George Bush.

McCain continues to flinch at any mention of a deadline for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq or of anything even approximating a deadline. This, of course, is by way of casting his presidential rival, Barack Obama, as a cut-and-run guy who would sell out the United States for his own election.

Obama has opposed the Bush administration's misadventure in Iraq from the start and for some time has called, as have most Democrats, for setting at least a conditional withdrawal date -- OK, partly for partisan grandstanding, but substantively as a mechanism to force Iraq's ever-procrastinating politicians into cutting the political deals they need to make to set their country up for the long run.

I would like to thank the citizens of Wichita, event supporters, elected officials, city departments and Police Department members for making National Night Out 2008 a great success. As the result of this outstanding teamwork and community spirit, 219 neighborhoods and an estimated 16,800 citizens came together last week to showcase their neighborhood enthusiasm.

In addition, there were numerous community pre-National Night Out events that occurred throughout Wichita over several weeks. These events included the National Night Out poster contest, the Target Safety Fair, seniors' bingo, the Texas hold 'em poker tournament, the All Star Adventures kickoff, the National Night Out supporter-appreciation luncheon, KEYN concert series, a motorcycle rally and concert, family zoo day and the city swim day. An estimated 7,300 Wichitans participated in these various activities.

These exciting community events would not have been possible if not for our great supporters. When our supporters were approached about being involved in a National Night Out event, they did not hesitate. These major-league hitters stepped to the plate and partnered with the Wichita Police Department to provide the needed resources for the events.

I would also like to give a special recognition to officers Michelle Tennyson, Joseph Seitz and Jason Dautrich for their dedication and hard work in coordinating National Night Out community events.

National Night Out is an opportunity to heighten awareness about crime and drug prevention, strengthen neighborhood spirit and pride, build police and community partnerships, and send a message to criminals that neighborhoods are organized and fighting back.

An Eagle editorial made the statement that auto companies as a whole are "racing to roll out various electric car models" and that natural gas vehicles are a "'bridge' to future technology such as plug-in electric cars" ("Pickens: Having a plan on energy is good start," July 31 Opinion). Thus, the editorial board suggested, investing in a natural gas infrastructure, as T. Boone Pickens advises, might be too costly and not warranted.

Honda produces the Civic GX natural gas vehicle (the cleanest internal combustion engine vehicle one can buy) and is one automotive company that sees natural gas vehicles as a bridge to hydrogen fuel cell vehicles, not electric plug-ins. Honda just released its second-generation hydrogen fuel cell vehicle, the FCX Clarity, this summer.

At best, the electric plug-ins I have read about are still several years away, have large price tags (estimated $44,000 for the GM-built Volt) and limited driving range (estimated 40 miles for the Volt). The Civic GX has a retail cost of $25,260 for a 2008 model and a range of about 225-250 miles based on driving habits. Most important, it is available today and has been on the market for 11 years.

The Eagle also published a wire article on natural gas fuel ("Compressed natural gas fuel is cheaper, cleaner, ignored," Aug. 7 Eagle). The article was good but had one glaring error -- the Civic GX is not limited for sale in California and New York but is available at 123 Honda CNG certified dealers in 31 different states, including Kansas. The city of Kansas City, Mo., has been using Civic GXs for all 11 of those model years and just ordered four more from my dealership to add to its fleet of 69 currently in use.

As for the editorial board's belief that investing in a natural gas infrastructure could be too costly: What is too costly? The pipeline of natural gas being pumped into virtually every household in the country already constitutes a pretty good start to building a national infrastructure. Also, 90 percent of our natural gas is domestically produced and is in abundant supply right here in America. And natural gas fuel is currently about a third to a half cheaper than a gasoline gallon equivalent.

Barack Obama issued an "emergency economic plan" recently, followed by a big speech outlining an energy plan. For somebody identified as the "change" candidate, he served up some pretty familiar stuff.

Obama would whack big oil with a windfall profits tax and use the money to cut $1,000 checks for married couples and $500 for individuals.

He wants to release 70 million barrels of oil from the strategic reserves to lower fuel prices -- a position he opposed during the primaries.

He proposed money for development of new hybrid cars. He wants to spend $150 billion to encourage renewable technologies. He says his program would do away with the need to import any oil from Venezuela and the Middle East within 10 years.

He wants to hand out $4 billion to carmakers so they can redo their factories to produce hybrids. He offered a $7,000 tax credit for those who buy the resulting cars. (John McCain has also backed tax credits for purchasers of low-emission cars.)

Iraq and Afghanistan are the messes getting attention today, but they are only symptoms of a much broader cancer in American foreign policy.

A few glimpses of this larger affliction:

• The United States has more musicians in its military bands than it has diplomats.

• This year alone, the U.S. Army will add about 7,000 soldiers to its total; that's more people than in the entire American Foreign Service.

• More than 1,000 American diplomatic positions are vacant because the foreign service is so short-staffed, but a myopic Congress is refusing to finance even modest new hiring. Some 1,100 could be hired for the cost of a single C-17 military cargo plane.

In the time they served together in the U.S. Senate, John McCain and Barack Obama developed neither a friendship nor an intense dislike. They entered this campaign as relative strangers, and now -- as the sniping builds to a steady staccato -- each of them has acquired a strong sense of grievance about the other.

That, at least, is the clear impression I received from doing back-to-back, one-on-one interviews with the two prospective nominees. They are striving to keep their contest from becoming overtly personal. But it is a struggle.

McCain complained bitterly to me about accusations that he has run a racist campaign, and Obama voiced his anger at the charge that he would rather lose a war than jeopardize his election.

Talking with them, I realized that they have little in shared experience on which to build a relationship. They serve on none of the same Senate committees and rarely have collaborated on legislation.

On the other hand, there were few direct personal clashes. Both of them remembered only two -- the same two.

There is something familiar about the story line: Woman has more than one sex partner; woman becomes pregnant; no father's name on the birth certificate; paternity questioned.

It's the plot for "Mamma Mia," but this time without the ABBA music.

Let me stipulate, as trial lawyer John Edwards would say, that all have sinned (as Paul the Apostle wrote) and it is un-Christian to judge one better than another simply because he may not have committed a sin that someone else has committed.

This is not about that as much as it is the aftermath. Something like: It isn't the crime but the coverup that gets you.

We stopped repenting some time ago. Our preferred response after being caught in a transgression in the modern era is to explain. Our "confessional" is television, and our audience is not God but the public. After repeatedly lying about it, Edwards finally admitted to sharing another woman's bed, but he wants us to know it was while his wife was in remission for her cancer, though he told Bob Woodruff on ABC's "Nightline" that is no excuse. So then why mention it?

I was riding in a car back to my hotel in Copenhagen, Denmark, at the 6 p.m. rush hour. And, boy, you knew it was rush hour because 50 percent of the traffic in every intersection was bicycles. That is roughly the percentage of Danes who use two-wheelers to go to and from work or school every day.

What was most impressive about this day, though, was that it was raining. No matter. The Danes simply donned rain jackets and pants for biking. If only we could be as energy smart as Denmark.

Unlike America, Denmark, which was so badly hammered by the 1973 Arab oil embargo that it banned all Sunday driving for a while, responded to that crisis in such a sustained, focused and systematic way that today it is energy independent. (And it didn't happen by Danish politicians making their people stupid by telling them the solution was simply more offshore drilling.)

What was the trick? To be sure, Denmark is much smaller than the United States and was lucky to discover some oil in the North Sea. But despite that, Danes imposed on themselves a set of gasoline taxes, carbon-dioxide taxes and building-and-appliance efficiency standards that allowed them to grow their economy -- while barely growing their energy consumption -- and gave birth to a Danish clean-power industry that is one of the most competitive in the world today.

Denmark today gets nearly 20 percent of its electricity from wind. America? About 1 percent.

John Edwards' confession was a little bit breathtaking. Not the sex stuff. And certainly not covering up the sex stuff. First people uncover; then they cover up.

The stunning admission Edwards made to ABC's Bob Woodruff, and in a written statement on Friday afternoon, was that he's a narcissist.

He admitted that wallowing in "self-focus" out on the trail and thinking you're "special" can result in a solipsism that "leads you to believe you can do whatever you want, you're invincible and there'll be no consequences."

Auto-psychoanalysis by the perp. That's really rich.

Even in confessing to preening, Edwards was preening. His diagnosis of narcissism was weirdly narcissistic, or was it self-narcissistic?

There is a great deal of blame to go around for the disastrous war over South Ossetia. Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili deserves the greatest share, for starting a war to reassert control over South Ossetia that Russia can now finish on its own terms. The Russian government, with former president and current Prime Minister Vladimir Putin in the lead, has cynically taken the conflict Saakashvili began as a golden opportunity to flex its muscles, make Georgia an object lesson for the rest of Russia's neighbors, rally Russian voters, and tighten its grip on Georgia's breakaway South Ossetia and Abkhazia.

But in a classic example of blowback, past American policy also bears some responsibility for the mess in Caucasus.

Though American training and equipment, intended to make Georgia a partner in the war on terror and a future member of NATO, made Saakashvili overconfident in his ability to seize South Ossetia quickly and easily, the problem goes back further than that. However good American motivations were in Kosovo, the breakaway region of the former Yugoslavia, its actions there handed Russia what it needed to take full advantage of the crisis Georgia created.

Violating Yugoslavia's sovereignty (its right to be left alone) and territorial integrity (its right to keep itself intact) has come back to breed war in Georgia.

The Clinton administration took a fateful step in March 1999 when it led NATO into war with Slobodan Milosevic's Yugoslavia to protect the Albanians of Kosovo. Milosevic's treatment of his Albanian minority in Kosovo was brutal, but the world is filled with brutal regimes.

First James Cameron died and now they've closed his museum. If it had to happen, I'm glad it happened in that order, glad Cameron did not live to see them padlock the institution to which he dedicated his life.

I met Cameron in 1994 when I went to Milwaukee to interview him about his book "A Time of Terror." In it, he recounted his hairbreadth escape in August 1930 from a white lynch mob in Marion, Ind., that already had murdered two of his friends.

Sixty-four years later, just talking about it still made him weep. Cameron went on to found what he called America's Black Holocaust Museum, thought to be the only one in the country dedicated to memorializing a time when racial violence was rampant and widely accepted.

In 2006, after years of failing health, the 92-year-old Cameron died. His museum may suffer the same fate.

Officially, the facility's closure on the last day of July is only temporary, as it negotiates with lenders and the city in hopes of carving out some breathing room. According to Reggie Jackson, chairman of the museum's board of directors, its primary support has always come from foundations, and that money dried up when Cameron died. Jackson is seeking donors to help keep the museum alive. If you'd like to help, you can find information at the Web site www.blackholocaustmuseum.org.