Sometimes it pays to read a news story to the last paragraph where a reporter can slip in that little gem for the news jockeys, or maybe just for the hell of it. You know, the irresistible bit that doesn't fit comfortably into the larger news frame, but that can be...
Back in 2007, when Gen. David Petraeus was the surge commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, he had a penchant for clock imagery. In an interview in April of that year, he typically said: "I'm conscious of a couple of things. One is that the Washington clock is moving more...
There's something viral about the wondrous new weaponry an industrial war system churns out. In World War I, for instance, when that system was first gearing up to plan and produce new weapons by the generation, such creations – poison gas, the early airplane, the...
Here's a bit of cheery news: Last week, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates met with the nation's top defense company executives, including the CEOs of those mega-military-industrial combines Lockheed Martin and Boeing, and called for a "closer partnership." He also...
A country programmatically gripped by fear – yes, that's us for more than eight years now. Fear of terrorism to be exact, even as truly terrible things happened in this land and elsewhere, from hurricane Katrina in 2005 to last week's devastating Haitian earthquake,...
The Obama administration's Iran policy is a riddle wrapped inside a conundrum folded into a pickle. So many signals are being sent in so many directions that it's a wonder the Iranians (or other involved parties) have any idea what's going on. Barack Obama came into...
It was a Christmas and New Year's from hell for American intelligence, that $75 billion labyrinth of at least 16 major agencies and a handful of minor ones. As the old year was preparing to be rung out, so were our intelligence agencies, which managed not to connect...
According to the Chinese calendar, 2010 is the Year of the Tiger. We don't name our years, but if we did, this one might prospectively be called the Year of the Assassin. We, of course, think of ourselves as something like the peaceable kingdom. After all, the shock...
