Since I've been spending so much time in recent months reading and writing about President George W. Bush, his neoconservative advisers, and the mess in Iraq, I decided to take some time off these current topics and read a very well-written and well-researched life...
Muddling Through
As U.S. President George W. Bush concludes his visit to China, it's important to restate the obvious: Washington, under the Bush administration, doesn't have a "China Policy." Instead, when it comes to dealing with the emerging East Asian giant, the White House has...
In Praise of ‘Virtual States’
If you are like me and you've been following the news on a regular basis for a while, say, 20 or 30 years, the chances are that whether it was 1977 (when you got married), 1986 (when your kid was nine years old), or 2003 (when the grandkid was on the way), you were...
A Politically Deflated Bush Faces a Resistant World
In case you haven't noticed, it's been a while since a top U.S. official delivered one of those wordy sermons to China or Russia about their responsibility to fix their governments, fight political corruption, and protect human rights. With President George W. Bush...
My Weekend With the Wonks
When he was once asked to define what exactly an "intellectual" was, British writer Aldous Huxley proposed that it was "a person who's found something in life that's more interesting than sex." Based on Huxley's definition, I'm here to report to...
All the President’s Men, the Sequel
Under the leadership of a conservative Republican president, the U.S. was drawn into a costly military quagmire in a strategic region of Asia. The president was facing growing domestic political opposition to his management of the controversial war, and some of his...
A Town Without Pity
One of the conclusions that Harry Truman reached after spending several decades in the U.S. capital, first as a lawmaker and then as a vice-president who inherited the White House following the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt, was: "If you want to have a friend in...
Making the Middle East Safe for What?
The Bush administration seems to be drawing the outlines of a strategy to oust Syria's President Bashar Assad and his ruling Ba'ath Party. Of course, no one is considering an American-led military invasion à la Iraq to achieve "regime change" in Damascus....
The United Gates of America
Glimpse through the commentary pages of American newspapers and you are bound to run into a headline comparing the mess in American-occupied Iraq to the chaos in hurricane-devastated Louisiana. In fact, forget about the op-eds bashing the Bush administration and watch...
Realism in Washington? Don’t Hold Your Breath
Some American pundits are suggesting that a major transformation has been taking place in the direction of the Bush administration's foreign policy. "The Bush Doctrine has collapsed, and the administration has consequently embraced realism," Gideon Rose, editor of...