As the Afghan campaign devolves into what University of California political science professor emeritus Chalmers Johnson told me is something of a "phony war" in which the U.S. blunders without a plan and gets drawn in deeper, the imminent war against Iraq is starting...
I'm not sure I was quite prepared for the question from Leslie Dutton, host of a Los Angeles-area public-affairs program called "Full Disclosure" that taped last week. (The program, which is independently produced on a shoestring and distributed to cable networks on...
You can catch a few items in the newspapers – usually stories about raids or massacres – about Colombia, but not much that puts the latest incident in anything resembling a context. So I was pleased that the Orange County World Affairs Council last week...
It is often said that the roots of the conflicts in the Middle East, which many U.S. diplomats seem to think can be handled with just one more full-court-press and a conference, – and we're talking not just of disputes between Israelis and Palestinians but the...
In a way, the news that the Bush administration is developing a new strategic doctrine that involves preemptive strikes against terrorists and states alleged to have chemical, biological or nuclear weapons could be viewed as simply formalizing what has been U.S....
The CBS reporter Monday morning – I didn't catch the name, coming in at the end of the report – was probably not conscious of implicitly endorsing a theory of international relations and political action, and one without a whole lot of evidence behind it....
A good deal of President Bush’s trip to Russia and Europe amounted to the kind of image-polishing and schmoozing most U.S. presidents do at various times. U.S. presidents usually spend about two years trying to work on their purported domestic agenda before...
U.S. Wades Into More Imperial OutpostsWell, let's see. The Brits have declared "Operation Snipe" (if nothing else you have to acknowledge a certain understated Brit sense of humor there), the latest two-week effort to round up al Qaida remnants, to be...
The wags say that a second marriage represents the triumph of hope over experience (though I can attest that sometimes it works). So what would you call the umpteenth effort by outside powers to impose a settlement on the Israeli-Palestinian dispute through a...
I thought it was a little curious when our newspaper, on the day of the coup that ousted Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez for 48 hours or so, received an exultant fax from one George A. Folsom of the International Republican Institute. "The Venezuelan people rose...
