New year resolutions (lose weight, give up chocolate, walk the dog more often) tend to erode fairly soon.

New year predictions are fraught with danger for the columnist in this age when everything is preserved for posterity on the Internet. What may seem to the reader prescient in January could by December be pretty "lame" (a word presently in slangy teenage vogue, which has come to mean "stupid.")

So here, treading on safer ground, are some thoughts about possibilities, and a few probabilities on the national and international stages that will capture the headlines in 2006.

On the home front, President Bush will have a narrow window before the midterm elections. He likely will fail to push through Social Security but may get tax reforms. On illegal immigration he may get support for strengthening the border with Mexico but likely face strong opposition to legalizing in some manner the presence of 11 million illegals already in the country.

The elections themselves are unlikely to wrest either the House of Representatives or the Senate from Republican hands. With a Republican majority in the House of some 30 seats, Democrats would have to get a landslide to oust enough incumbents to change the balance of power. The story is pretty much the same in the Senate, where Republicans are probably safe.

After the elections, it will be pretty much downhill for a lame-duck Bush administration. Congress will be distracted by posturing and maneuvering for the 2008 election. Candidates who claim they have not given a thought to running for president will suddenly emerge. Hillary Clinton will be one of them on the Democratic side, John McCain on the Republican side. They must contend with a string of other suddenly emerging candidates who think they can do better than either of them.

On the foreign front, Iraq will be central in 2006. Saddam Hussein will have been found guilty of enormous crimes against humanity and given the death sentence. U.S. troop reduction will have begun, and troops remaining will be less engaged, having propelled Iraqi units into the forefront of the campaign against terrorists, Baathists and foreign fighters. Don Rumsfeld will likely have left office. What the state of Iraqi politics will be, nobody dares guess. But whatever it is, whether it be civil war, a narrow Islamic state or fledgling steps toward democracy, it will be the Iraqis and not the United States who make it so.

Elsewhere, the Italians will have conducted the winter Olympics without an al-Qaida disruption.

North Korea or Iran — and more likely Iran — will have acquired a nuclear weapon or weapons.