American foreign policymakers have known all along that ousting President Bashar al-Assad will not magically end the civil, ethnic, and sectarian wars that are now raging in what's left of Syria. But that fact hasn't stopped them from trying.

It's not often that a dictator takes out an advertisement in The New York Times. But there it was on Sunday, full-page spread touting President Joseph Kabila's supposed record of championing democracy and reform in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

My own minor, rather frivolous, contribution to the creation of the new diplomatic jargon -- pubic diplomacy -- did not appeal to the wordmasters of the universe. But it does occasionally appears as a typo in some U.S. Embassy internal memoranda.