Back in September 2006, I wrote a post, "The Facts on the Ground, Mini-Gulags, Hired Guns, Lobbyists, and a Reality Built on Fear," in which I wondered whether any new administration, any new president would ever be able to take real steps toward ridding our world of...
Last Jan. 16, a car bomb blew up near an entrance to Mustansiriya University in Baghdad – and then, as rescuers approached, a suicide bomber blew himself up in the crowd. In all, at least 60 Iraqis, mostly female students leaving campus for home, were killed and...
Last week, the World Health Organization (WHO) released new figures on the disintegrating health situation in Iraq, where, according to the group, 100 people a day die, on average, and countless more are wounded. Of the injured who manage to make it to an emergency...
My aunt Hilda, whose very name came from some other century, once told me her earliest memory: She was a little girl standing under a large tree in the backyard of her house in Brooklyn, and she cried out for help. Her mother (my grandmother) Celia came out to ask...
Mortar attacks on the Green Zone, the American-controlled and massively fortified citadel in the heart of Baghdad, were already on the rise when, late last week, a suicide bomber managed to penetrate the parliament building inside the Zone and kill at least one...
Like a giant piece in an intricate, if ugly, jigsaw puzzle, the aircraft carrier, the USS Nimitz, and its strike group are now sailing toward the Persian Gulf. On arrival, they will join the strike groups of the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower (which it is officially...
One night when I was in my teens, I found myself at a production of Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author. I had never heard of the playwright or the play, nor had I seen a play performed in the round. The actors were dramatically entering and exiting in...
On Tuesday, meeting with the press in the White House Rose Garden, the president responded to a question about House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's visit to Syria this way: "[P]hoto opportunities and/or meetings with President Assad lead the Assad government to believe...
At the White House Correspondents' Dinner the other night, Karl Rove was called up on stage and asked to identify himself. "Peter Fitzgerald," he promptly said. Then, he corrected himself, "Patrick Fitzgerald." (That is, Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald, who had...
Ever since September 2001, the president's central operative image has been "war" – specifically, his "global war on terror" (promptly transformed into the grim acronym GWOT). With it went the fantasy that we had been plunged into the modern equivalent of World...
