Alan Bock

Spencer Ackerman, associate editor of the magazine, has written a remarkable piece for the New Republic, most of whose editors and writers, it is worth remembering, were generally favorable to the war in Iraq during the run-up and through most of the first two years. He sees the administration and many war supporters among conservatives … Continue reading “Missing the Fundamentals”

I’m not much of a voting man myself. I agree with former Washington Post managing editor Howard Simon, who preferred (though he couldn’t enforce it) that his political writers not vote because it might make them feel vested in a candidate they would have to cover once he or she was elected, arguing that a … Continue reading “A Referendum on War?”

Perhaps the most fascinating thing about North Korea conducting what U.S. intelligence now believes, on the basis of radiation sampling, was an actual nuclear test, is how little it substantively changes the strategic equation in northern Asia. North Korea is still an isolated regime that calls attention to itself from time to time by doing … Continue reading “The More Things Change…”

Except for the fact that the crowd in the White House, however poorly it may do other things, like conducting a war, has a certain facility for pulling electoral victory from the jaws of defeat, Washington Post assistant managing editor Bob Woodward’s new book, State of Denial, would almost seem like piling on. To be … Continue reading “Denial of the Obvious”

Although Afghan president Hamid Karzai may not be much of a ruler of the kind that firmly establishes control of the entire country – which might not be a bad thing in less parlous times in Afghanistan, which has never really cottoned to central government – he clearly excels President Bush at one aspect of … Continue reading “Much Ado Over Not Much”

The great American essayist Albert J. Nock once devoted a long piece to the question of how one knows whether or not one is living in a Dark Age. From inside such an era, of course, the question is not so simple. Historians and propagandists name ages years or even centuries after the fact, but … Continue reading “Torture Chic: Sign of Decadence”

Well, you can say this for President Bush. Even in the midst of a clearly politicized action designed to show candor and that he is changing and evolving as the threats from terrorism evolve, he stays remarkably close to the concepts that have guided him since September 12, 2001. Push for power and keep the … Continue reading “Reverting to Form”

Speeches given this week by Secretary of Defense Don Rumsfeld, Vice President Cheney and President Bush, invoking World War II, the Cold War, and Fascists, Nazis and Communists amount to a bit of nostalgia combined with a desperate, last-ditch attempt to convince the American people – and perhaps themselves – that the war they maneuvered … Continue reading “Invoking the Past”

Perhaps I wrote too soon? It seemed certain last week that the foiling of the apparent plot by young Pakistani-British Muslims to blow up airliners with liquid explosives was not only a good thing, but that it had been accomplished through old-fashioned gumshoe police work rather than fancy new police-state-like surveillance techniques. A similar situation … Continue reading “The Police-State Impulse”

Can we learn anything pertinent from the apparent thwarting of a terrorist plot in Great Britain this week? Probably more than those who consider themselves the masters of the vaunted "war on terror" would like us to know. If we absorbed what seem to me to be the obvious lessons, there would be a hue … Continue reading “Can We Learn Anything?”