After five months of confusion, bickering, dickering, dithering, and strong-arm tactics from Zalmay Khalilzad, our ambassador to Iraq, and various high American officials arriving on the fly, Prime Minister-designate Nouri al-Maliki has reportedly chosen his cabinet,...
Recently, a number – one billion – in the New York Times stopped me in my tracks. According to a report commissioned by the foundation charged with building Reflecting Absence, the memorial to the dead in the attack on the World Trade Center, its projected...
"We must perhaps reluctantly accept that we have to help this region become a normal region, the way we helped Europe and Asia in another era. Now it's this area from Pakistan to Morocco that we should focus on. … The world has gotten smaller and is getting...
After those weapons of mass destruction never appeared and Saddam's al-Qaeda connection proved but a figment of the overly vivid neocon (and vice-presidential) imagination, the Bush administration wheeled out the shiniest of American exports, democracy. It had worked...
It's the perfect day for a march. Sunny, crisp, clear, spring-like. The sort of day that just gives you hope for no reason at all, though my own hopes are not high for New York's latest antiwar demonstration. I haven't received a single e-mail about it. Many people I...
Just a week back, I suggested that there was no reason to believe the president's approval ratings had bottomed out. In fact, I wrote, "There is no reason to believe that a polling bottom exists for this president, not even perhaps the Nixonian Age of Watergate nadir...
On Tuesday April 18, Chinese President Hu Jintao landed in the United States and, after a tour of a Boeing plant, made his official way, with all due pomp and ceremony, to the expectable "state banquet" in Washington… no, not at the White House but at the...
You can count on one thing. All over Washington, Republicans are at least as capable as I am of watching and interpreting the polling version of the smashup of the Bush administration. With each new poll, the numbers creep lower yet. Presidential approval in the...
In the first part of his unique history of the car bomb, "The Poor Man's Air Force," Mike Davis (author of the only significant book on the Avian flu, The Monster at Our Door, and Planet of Slums, a startling analysis of the way significant parts of our planet have...
In a column on March 23 ("A Vision, Bruised and Dented"), David Brooks of the New York Times wrote about "the rise of what Richard Lowry of the National Review calls the 'To Hell With Them' Hawks." In part, Brooks characterized these hawks as being conservatives who...
