"The market made me do it." Thats what some lenders are telling us about the crisis they've created that's reverberating now from Asia to Europe. Hysteria even hit the Federal Reserve, which dropped its measured demeanor and slashed interest rates by 125 basis points in the space of eight days, with the first cut of three-quarters of a percent announced at 8:30 on the morning of January 22, with the hope of beating back the frenzy that surely awaited the New York Stock Exchange in the wake of a rout in other parts of the world.

Not since the shooting of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin of Israel a dozen years ago has a political assassination been so fraught with bad fortune. The brutal death of Nobel Peace Prize winner Rabin led straight to chaos, and the killing of Pakistan's former prime minister Benazir Bhutto while she campaigned for a comeback threatens to do the same.

Where Bill White of Houston used to be the star mayor of Texas, soon he may well be displaced by Tom Leppert of Dallas. A Republican where Bill White is a Democrat, a construction magnate where White leaned toward oil and gas with some building thrown in, Leppert nonetheless shares with White an affinity for Harvard (source of his MBA and White’s undergraduate degree) and a startling ability to get things done.

First, President Bush could have closed Guantanamo. This would have had high symbolic importance and done a lot to repair the damage done by holding prisoners there much too long under circumstances that are much too murky. I heard a former military chaplain say at the beginning of the war in Iraq that under circumstances as extreme as those following September 11, excessive actions often are taken, but they usually right themselves within a reasonable period of time. That, regrettably, did not happen at Guantanamo.

This time President Bush is making an important point. A Congressional resolution passed by the House Foreign Affairs Committee condemning the genocide of Armenians by the Ottoman Turks that began in 1915 is ill timed and quite possibly damaging to our interests in Iraq. There is no question that the killing of 1.5 million Armenians by the crumbling Ottoman Empire during World War I was genocide. The Turkish government would save itself and us a lot of trouble if it would simply say so, and make amends that are appropriate and necessary. But that seems unlikely for reasons both emotional and immoral.