The self-appointed election "monitors" of the Council of Europe have delivered their official verdict on the procedures and results of the recent Russian election, in which Dmitry Medvedev, Vladimir Putin's designated heir, skated to victory. "We think there is not...
The USS Cole isn't engaged in a sightseeing tour of the Eastern Mediterranean: its sudden deployment just "over the horizon" near Lebanon – in tandem with two other warships – is a clear sign that the Americans are preparing for something big. That's what...
I must be getting old. This virus, or whatever the heck it is, really knocked me for a loop. It's funny, but I recall thinking, just before I came down with this, that I'd managed to entirely avoid getting sick this winter, and – whammo! Hubris – it's the...
American advocates of imperialism have been few and far between, and we have to go all the way back to the latter years of the 19th century and the early years of the 20th to unearth the most explicit. Theodore Roosevelt is perhaps the best known, but there were...
The violent reaction from the Serbian "street" to Kosovo's unilateral declaration of independence is "blowback" – as the writer Chalmers Johnson terms it – with a vengeance, and we have not yet experienced the worst of it. The U.S. attack on Kosovo has come...
Back in December, I said this election year would be characterized by the collapse of the alleged "front-runners" – i.e. presidential candidates favored by the pundits and the Beltway know-it-alls – and so it has come to pass. Barack Obama has...
John McCain loves reporters, and the feeling is mutual: after all, he's great copy, has a fantastic narrative, and is always eager to make their jobs easier by giving them plenty of good quotes to chew over. The latest installment of the longest love affair in...
How did we manage to mire ourselves in the midst of Mesopotamia, enmeshed in a three-sided (at least) civil war, with vanishing hopes of extrication – and the putative Republican presidential nominee hailing a hundred-year occupation? The key to this mystery may...
He's said it many times, in many different venues, and perhaps the words change a bit over time, and the cadences, too, but the message is always the same: "I think the pundits have it wrong. I think the American people have had enough of politicians who go out...
As the ugly reality of what we had gotten ourselves into in Iraq settled on the national consciousness, like a viral infection settling on the lungs, the conventional wisdom was that the authors of this war – the political tendency known as the neoconservatives...
