Expensive Favor

One question Americans should be asking the Bush administration is why it wishes to do such an expensive favor for the Iraqi people. I cannot think of any instance in which the federal government has been willing to spend $1 billion a week and 1,700 lives just to...

read more

American Gulag

In case you haven't noticed it, the Bush administration's standard response to any criticism is to attack the critic. Ad hominem attacks are designed, of course, to avoid the subject of the criticism. Such a tactic greatly appeals to armchair patriots with petrified...

read more

The ‘Ism’ at the Gate

If you look at the past 100 years or so, you will see plainly that there has always been an "ism" at the gates. The old idea of controlling the people and increasing government power by warning of an "enemy at the gates" dates back to the Roman Empire, and probably...

read more

Brass and Chutzpah

I will give the Bush administration credit: it has more brass and more chutzpah than a pawnbroker in Bombay. It has now proclaimed that America's miserably bad image in the Muslim world is entirely the fault of one or two lines that appeared in a Newsweek magazine...

read more

More Manly Galloways, Fewer Slimy Colemans

If you would like a role model on how a manly person should act in front of politicians and the media, I highly recommend the Honorable George Galloway, a member of the British Parliament. A Senate subcommittee out to discredit the United Nations made the mistake of...

read more

Boot the Imperialists

Humans have the capacity to create and to destroy. It seems to me that if we do not rein in our destructive capacity, bugs will one day inherit an otherwise empty and barren planet. It's no use assigning blame. The urge to destroy resides in every human heart....

read more

Mission Accomplished, Captain Queeg?

Well, here we are, two years out (as they say in Washington) from "mission accomplished," the president's now-famous speech during the photo opportunity on an American carrier. The American death toll in Iraq is now 1,585, and the wounded exceed 10,000. The cost is...

read more

The Zero

Robert E. Lee advised his children to avoid fiction and read biography and history so that they might know the world "as it really is." Only recently I came upon a new paperback edition of a book originally published in 1956. If you haven't already read it,...

read more

An Unjust War

It would pay us all to remember that the war in Iraq was both unjust and illegal. We launched a war of aggression against a country that was not attacking us, did not have the means to attack us, and had never expressed any intention of attacking us. Thus, America's...

read more

A Stupid War to Die In

The Italian journalist Giuliana Sgrena, who was wounded by American soldiers as her car approached the Baghdad Airport, believes she was shot at deliberately. I doubt that is true. Of course, our government would kill an Italian journalist if it had a reason to do so,...

read more