Year’s end prediction columns are always problematic: my last one wasn’t all that accurate, as it turned out. I was dead wrong on the Big One — war with Iran, to which I assigned a 65 percent probability. This year, however, it looks as if the issue — like a huge,...
Naftali Bennett is the rising star of Israeli politics, and his party, Jewish Home, is projected to be the third largest in Israel: he is also an upfront racist who has made the presence of Africans in the country a major campaign issue, calling for their immediate...
I’m taking Christmas off, which means no column the day after. I don’t usually take off for this particular holiday, but this year I’m, frankly, quite tired: exhausted, really. I need a break, however brief: I’ll be back on Friday. I don’t know how many Christmas...
This Christmas is a bleak one for those who hold out hope that there might be peace on earth — or just a more peaceful earth. In the Middle East, wars and rumors of war roil an already volatile region. A proxy war in Syria shows every sign of metastasizing into a...
There has been a lot of pushback against the neoconservatives' preemptive smear campaign against Chuck Hagel, much of it illuminating, but none as clear-headed as that by Paul Pillar in The National Interest, who starts out his piece this way: "The effort to...
The campaign to demonize Chuck Hagel in the run up to his possible confirmation hearings as Secretary of Defense is going full swing. As I told my readers the other day, “get ready for a mudslide of smears and innuendo as the [Israel] Lobby homes in for the kill.”...
The knives are out: "Send us Hagel and we will make sure every American knows he is an anti-Semite." That’s what a top Republican Senate aide told the Weekly Standard in response to the news that President Obama is likely to nominate former Republican Senator Chuck...
Americans are sick and tired of war, they are incredulous when they see their own country going down the tubes while our preening politicians plot "regime change" in faraway lands, and they positively hate "foreign aid. So why – if the US is a...
The poet Robinson Jeffers isn’t thought of as a foreign policy theorist: his oeuvre, when it is remembered at all, is generally reduced to a crude sort of nature worship, combined with a misanthropic leave-me-alone-I-don’t-want-to-hear-it view of life. He considered...
“He’s killing his own people!” It’s a familiar refrain to those of us who’ve been paying attention the past decade or so: it’s what our leaders in both parties said about Saddam Hussein by way of justifying the invasion and occupation of Iraq, and it’s what they’re...
