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...
Hans Blix, head of the UN inspection team, has delivered a somewhat ambivalent report on Iraqi compliance with the UN inspection regime. There is undoubtedly enough there to satisfy many elements within the Bush administration, and perhaps the president himself, that...
The troop deployments, the tough talk about President Bush getting impatient (the hardly-hidden assumption being that by virtue of occupying the Oval Office he has the right and perhaps the duty to tell Saddam Hussein or any other titular leader in the world what to...
I've been working on pieces on the history of Iraq for the Orange County Register, and had occasion to speak with Robert Rabil, project manager of the Iraq Research and Documentation Project at the Iraq Foundation and author of the new book (I haven't read it yet)...
We've been getting all these trial balloons, so maybe there's a serious effort underway. (Or maybe not.) A December 29 Associated Press story that ran in numerous newspapers and Web sites around the world, says that Arab leaders "are considering the possibility...
Perhaps it's the time of the year. I'm not over Christmas yet – I spent much of the season singing with a quasi-professional (people actually paid us!) caroling group – and some songs stay in my head. The third verse of "I Heard the Bells on Christmas...
I try not to sound too preachy in these columns, but having just celebrated Christmas with more of my extended family than we have been accustomed to in recent years I had to wonder in print. Jesus talked about turning the other cheek, about never returning evil for...
Perhaps it's the season, and a not entirely rational desire to have the birthday of the Prince of Peace be something other than a harbinger of all-out war this year. But a phone conversation with Jessica Mathews, president of the Carnegie Endowment for International...
Interesting. I got more nasty comments about last week's piece about the un-American way the government has wanted to treat accused terrorists like Jose Padillla or whatever it is that he wants to call himself. I started to do a collective response, but it grew, so...
It is rare that we get anything even resembling good news on the ongoing effects on American liberties of the undeclared and amorphous but still useful (to some) war on terror. And in fact this is not unalloyed good news. Still, it’s worth noting and issuing a...
