Looking idly at the front page of last Wednesday's Washington Post Express as I rode the Metro to work, I received a shock. It showed a railroad station in Iraq, recently destroyed by an American air strike. So now we are bombing the railroad stations in a country we...
The March 14 Los Angeles Times contained that rarissima avis, good news from Ramadi: "The commander of U.S. troops in Iraq wanted some sweets, and nothing was going to stop him. Not even the fact that he was tramping through a neighborhood that only days ago had...
It's springtime for Congress, and the Washington Dodgers are batting 1,000 in the exhibition season. No, I'm not talking about baseball. I have just enough interest in sports to know that the Dodgers play in Los Angeles and Washington's baseball team is the Nationals....
Bush's splurge is already bringing premature claims of success, even though the first troops are just arriving in Iraq. A column in today's Washington Times by Ollie North quotes an American officer in Iraq as saying, "Do they [members of Congress opposed to the war]...
One way to look at the situation in Iraq is to try to identify variables, elements that could change. Without change, the war is likely to end with troops having to fight their way out, if they can. The military situation in Iraq is not a variable. All that can change...
On the surface, President Bush's Wednesday night speech adds up to precisely nothing. The president said, "It is clear that we need to change our strategy in Iraq," but the heart of his proposal, adding more than 20,000 U.S. troops, represents no change in strategy....
For more than a decade, Somalia has been Exhibit A in the Hall of Statelessness, a place where the state had not merely weakened into irrelevance but disappeared. Somalia's statelessness had defeated even the world's only hyperpower, the United States, when it had...
Last week, the Iraq Study Group report [.pdf] burst upon a breathless world, and proved to be an empty piñata. None of its recommendations has the slightest chance of reversing the course of the war in Iraq. Only those who just got into town on the last...
The latest serpent at which a drowning Washington Establishment is grasping is the idea of sending more American troops to Iraq. Would more troops turn the war there in our favor? No. Why not? First, because nothing can. The war in Iraq is irredeemably lost. Neither...
Lose a war, lose an election. What else should anyone expect, especially when the war is one we never had to fight? Had Spain defeated us in '98, does anyone think McKinley/Roosevelt would have won in 1900? A logical corollary is, lose two wars, lose two elections....
