As the Israelis continue to pound Gaza, killing Hamas cadre, traffic cops, and civilians alike, Americans shake their heads and wonder: why can't they all just get along? Why must we be involved? The answer to both questions lies in understanding the peculiar nature...
If you're looking for the cause of the most recent Israeli aggression against the Palestinians – over 300 killed so far, and many more wounded – forget Hamas. The real casus belli is politics, in Israel and America. On the Israeli front, elections loom...
Well, well, well – it looks like our war-birds over at the American Enterprise Institute are getting kicked out of their very well-feathered nest, as Jacob Heilbrunn, author of a fascinating book on the neoconservatives, reports: "The neocon world has been...
If anything underscores the tragic absurdity of the armed effort to "export democracy," it's the comic opera that played out the other day in Baghdad. I realize that's an ambiguous statement, because there's lots to choose from in that arena, but, no, I...
The idea that the United States is the global hegemon, that we have first dibs on the title of world policemen – indeed, our entire post-WWII foreign policy – is nothing but a delusion. That is one of the chief lessons of the recent economic downturn, one...
The shoe-throwing Iraqi journalist, who is, by now, probably half beaten to death for the "crime" of paying back – in very small measure – George W. Bush for his crimes against the Iraqi people, is a folk hero to millions. And his admirers aren't...
Did you, too, get that frisson of déjà vu when you first heard about the bank bailout and its rationale? If you don't hand over untold trillions of dollars in the next five minutes, the economy is going to explode. This was how the PATRIOT Act got rammed...
How, one wonders, could President-elect Barack Obama possibly hope to implement his announced foreign policy goals when he's entrusted his enemies – the Clntonites, and the Republicans – to implement them? I've wondered that myself, but now the mystery is...
Gigantism is the handmaiden of modernity, or so we have been led to believe. In literature, future utopias are almost always characterized by a world government, on the grounds that presumably the people of earth have evolved beyond the narrow confines of nationalism...
The idea that a nuclear war could be started by a hoax caller may seem too Bizarro Worldish, even for the post-9/11 era, but there you have it: "A hoax caller claiming to be India's foreign minister threatened Pakistan's president with war during the final hours...
