Month: February 2003

Most of the media are trying to make the very difficult case that in boosting defense spending President Bush is starving domestic programs. Unfortunately, too few people are questioning the defense budget itself. We’re at war, after all, and the military probably needs the money, right? We know we’ve dropped a lot of bombs, lost … Continue reading “Military Pork by the Barrel”

The idea that the "allies" – basically, the U.S. and Britain – are two liberal "democracies" that are bound and determined to "liberate" Iraq from the evil repressive Saddam has always been a complete crock. The "rapturists" and the neoconservatives have been demanding Iraq’s scalp for years as the price of their support to the … Continue reading “Free Taki!”

My goodness, but you wouldn\’t want to be French or German. Not, at any rate, if you read what their English speaking friends have to say about them. Popping up in The Times yesterday, Max Boot (he gets about) offered the helpful suggestion that to understand French diplomacy, what one really needed was a \’shrink\’. … Continue reading “You Don\’t Have to Be Brave To Be French”

White House officials have said that the space shuttle disaster will not slow down or alter the president’s plans on war with Iraq. That’s defensible, of course – or it would be if the war itself were defensible. While the loss of the space shuttle and the seven people on it commanded great attention (and … Continue reading “The Case Weakens, the Plot Thickens”

Just a day before United States President George W. Bush delivered a fresh diatribe against Iraq in his State of the Union address, India’s Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee did something unexpected. He appealed to the Great Powers to show "great restraint" and "patience" in dealing with Iraq and make "all efforts" to avoid a … Continue reading “India Should Oppose War on Iraq, But Will It?”

We’ve heard much about the "radicalism" of the antiwar movement, even as it becomes more mainstream. The War Party focuses on the most marginal elements in an effort to characterize the movement as kooky. This is not only a smear, but an effort to divert attention away from the essential craziness of their own movement, … Continue reading “The Kook Factor”