Is the Bush administration capable of facing the world's problems, much less solving them?

The world seems to be falling apart, and the designated powers are fumbling at the controls, unsure which levers spin, which axes in what direction. The metaphor is a bit of a stretch; no country or alliance could command the planet, like an orchestra conductor or a god, regardless of how clever its leaders might be. Still, it's horrifying to scan the full horizon of disasters—in the Middle East, the Persian Gulf, East Asia, South Asia, all the simmering hot spots on the verge of boiling over—and to realize that no one in charge knows what to do.

It's a perfect storm out there, each crisis feeding into the others yet at the same time laden with unique origins and features, demanding unique approaches and solutions. George Marshall himself would have a hard time keeping his grip.

The United States is hardly the only country at fault. Yet by its claims ("the sole superpower," "the indispensable nation," "we're an empire now") and by the objective facts (we are closer to being those things than any other country is), it does have the leverage—some would argue, the responsibility—to organize, mediate, and lead the way toward some solution.

Michael Hirsh has an excellent column in the latest Newsweek, an impassioned exhortation for President Bush to lead, dammit! The problem, though, is that neither Bush nor most of the top people around him have shown any inclination to do the things that leadership requires.

Two stories in today's New York Times reveal pieces of the problem. One reports that Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the U.S. commander in Iraq, wants to move more American troops into Baghdad to prevent the capital's deadly cycle of violence from worsening. (More than 140 people have been killed in sectarian violence over the past four days alone.)

It's unclear what effect this would have. The same story quotes Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld as saying that troop levels in Baghdad have already been increased—from 40,000 to 55,000—to deal with the surge of killings. Yet, as the Times reporters dryly observe, "[T]he increase has not noticeably restrained the sectarian bloodletting."

At one point during this occupation, an extra 15,000 troops, deployed in the right place and given the right orders, might have quelled this sort of disruption. But the hatred between Sunnis and Shiites has so intensified, their militias have taken such hold, the Americans are so widely viewed as occupiers, and the fledgling government has amassed such scant legitimacy that it's hard to see how force alone can bring order—unless we're talking about 10 times as many extra troops, a real occupying army, but this is out of the question; we simply don't have that many extra troops to send.

Gen. Casey is a military commander; troops are his basic tools. But what are we to make of Rumsfeld? On Wednesday, according to the Washington Post, he said that settling the violence is "as much a political task as anything." True enough, but it's not clear he knows what this means. On Thursday, at his news conference with Gen. Casey, Rumsfeld elaborated on the point. Iraqi officials, he declared, are "going to have to persuade as many people as possible that it's in their interest to support the government and participate in the political process. And anyone who doesn't want to, they're going to have to go find and do something about."

Ah.

The other Times story that sheds light on our failures is an op-ed by Rory Stewart headlined, "Even in Iraq, All Politics Is Local." Stewart is the 33-year-old, Farsi-speaking former British foreign service officer who walked across Afghanistan shortly after the Taliban were defeated and chronicled his adventure in a wonderful best seller, The Places in Between. Just after the toppling of Saddam Hussein, Stewart took a taxi from Jordan to Baghdad and soon found himself the appointed acting governor of a province in southern Iraq. (He writes about that tale in a new book, The Prince of the Marshes, out next month.)