You could, of course, sit there, slack-jawed, thinking about how mindlessly repetitive American foreign and military policy is these days. Or you could wield all sorts of fancy analytic words to explain it. Or you could just settle for a few simple, all-American...
In the always-good-news category, a Monday front-page New York Times piece by David Sanger and Thom Shanker, filled with obvious administration leaks, lays out another step in the White House’s march out of American legality. As it...
Consider Inauguration Day, more than two weeks gone and already part of our distant past. In its wake, President Obama was hailed (or reviled) for his “liberal” second inaugural address. On that day everything from his...
Credit the Arab Spring and what’s followed in the Greater Middle East to many things, but don’t overlook American “unilateralism.” After all, if you want to see destabilization at work, there’s nothing like having a heavily armed crew...
Think of it as the Great Obama Shuffle. When U.N. ambassador Susan Rice went down in flames as the president’s nominee for secretary of state, he turned to ally, former presidential candidate, and chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee John...
The euphemisms will come fast and furious. Our soldiers will be greeted as "heroes" who, as in Iraq, left with their "heads held high," and if in 2014 or 2015 or even 2019, the last of them, as also in Iraq, slip away in the dark of night after...
Once upon a time, former Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping suggested that Asia’s Pacific powers and wannabes should “put aside differences and jointly develop resources.” That was, of course, when China itself was still something of a wannabe and no...
Forty-six years ago, in January 1966, Jonathan Schell, a 23-year-old not-quite-journalist found himself at the farming village of Ben Suc, 30 miles from the South Vietnamese capital, Saigon. It had long been supportive of the Vietcong. Now, in what was...
Given these last weeks, who doesn’t know what an AR-15 is? Who hasn’t seen the mind-boggling stats on the way assault rifles have flooded this country, or tabulations of accumulating Newtown-style mass killings, or noted that there are barely more gas stations...
We got Osama bin Laden -- and now, for millions of Americans, we’ll get him again onscreen as Zero Dark Thirty hits your neighborhood multiplex. Lauded and criticized, the film’s the talk of the town. But it’s hardly the only real-life...
