In a sharp departure from U.S. policy, a leading French diplomat has called on the international coalition sponsoring UN sanctions against Iran to support a larger Iranian role in the Middle East. Ambassador to the United States Pierre Vimont told a conference on Iran...
The biggest threat to the success of the Beijing Olympics this coming August is China itself. Come August, the world will see China for what it truly is, many for the first time. Although China's human rights record, environmental issues, and recent export scandals...
MoveOn.org is mobilizing. The "antiwar" group's Political Action members across the country voted overwhelmingly to endorse the Democratic candidacy of Barack Obama last week. MoveOn claims to have 1.7 million members in states that vote in Tuesday's primaries. "[Our]...
The new 2009 defense budget has just been released. The more you look into the numbers, the more things become unclear, very unclear. Most of the numbers being released are inaccurate or incomplete, or both. Other numbers will change as the year progresses, but we do...
For some days, the country looked like the Place de la Concorde in 1793. The entire public sat expectantly facing the guillotine, waiting for the tumbrel to bring the marquis, for the marquis to lie down, for the blade to fall on his neck, and for a soldier to hold up...
One of the more intriguing questions Clio poses is the degree to which great military victories were the fruit of smart plans as opposed to dumb luck. Did the North Vietnamese expect the Tet Offensive to be a tactical defeat but an operational victory? They now claim...
Updated at 6:45 p.m. EST, Feb. 4, 2008Turkish warplanes resumed bombing Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) targets in northern Iraq. The number of casualties, if any, is unknown. Elsewhere, at least 39 Iraqis were killed and 24 more were wounded in various attacks. No...
With the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, one of Pakistan's foremost opposition leaders, the bottom fell out of the Bush administration's already creaky policy toward that South Asian nation. The administration had hoped that Bhutto would return to a country in...
The endorsement of Barack Obama by MoveOn.org, the progressive antiwar group that represents what remains of the left wing of the Democratic Party, is perfectly understandable. After all, what's an antiwar Democrat to do these days? The party has consistently voted to...
Updated at 11:50 p.m. Feb. 3, 2008In an attempt to quell bad feelings between Sunnis and Shi’ites, the Iraq parliament passed a law allowing former Ba’ath Party members to return to the posts they held during the Saddam regime; however, there is a...
