Alan Bock

It would be difficult to exaggerate my profound lack of confidence, let alone faith, in the political system of this or any other country to make your life or mine better. I’m with Thomas Jefferson, who once put it something like this: If I have no choice but to be in a political party to … Continue reading “A Debate at Last?”

If you forced me to bet today, I would probably wager that Dubya will win the election in November, despite some interesting observations from Will Saletan at Slate.com suggesting that the president is more vulnerable than he seems to be. However, in his speech Thursday before the National Guard Association in Las Vegas, Democrat John … Continue reading “Trading for Peace”

The war in Iraq is coming to resemble the War on Drugs in this narrow sense: if it were simply a matter of having enough persuasive, well-written, well-researched and responsible books out there critiquing the war from different perspectives, the war would have been ended some time ago. Unfortunately, while whatever intellectually defensible justifications for … Continue reading “Deconstructing the Neocons”

Silly me! When President Bush told Matt Lauer on Monday that you can’t really "win" the vaunted war on terror in the way we have viewed winning traditional state-on-state wars, I thought that it might have been the opening gambit in a shift to more candor about the problems that confront the United States around … Continue reading “Misunderstanding Terrorism”

What I took away from reading the entire James Schlesinger “independent” commission report [.pdf] and the executive summary and a skim of the rest of the Jones-Fay generals’ report [.pdf] on the abuses of prisoners at Abu Ghraib was a profound confirmation of what many of us have been saying for some time. The Bush … Continue reading “A Culture of Improvisation”

At first it looked fairly interesting, perhaps even modestly promising, from the perspective of somebody who worries about the United States being overcommitted overseas and stretched rather thin militarily to meet some of the challenges that could arise from chronic overcommitment. But the more one looks at President Bush’s ostensibly dramatic announcement that he plans … Continue reading “Repositioning on the Titanic”

The battle for Najaf, at least at the military level, is inconclusive as I write, and the ultimate political implications will probably take weeks or months to sort out, though it is virtually certain that one result will be better recruiting prospects for militants, insurgents, jihadists and the like. The nomination of Porter Goss to … Continue reading “Parsing the Libyan Myth”

Perhaps the most encouraging thing about the terrorist alert first issued on Sunday was the relatively extensive debate it engendered in much of the country, even though the alert was in some ways calculated to be responsive to criticisms of previous alerts. Instead of being a vague and generalized alert about a possible attack somewhere … Continue reading “Alert to Implications”

The most dismaying development at the ongoing Democratic convention so far is the effort to convince Americans that the Democrats would be tougher than the Republicans on the issues of war, peace and national security. This essentially means that those who question the war in Iraq have no place to go if they want to … Continue reading “Out-Toughing the Republicans”

Some observers believe that with the departure of George Tenet as CIA director, along with critical reports from both the Senate Intelligence Committee and the 9/11 commission (surely the House Intelligence Committee cannot be too far behind) regarding massive intelligence failures of radically different kinds, the time for reform may be at hand. Indeed, the … Continue reading “Toward More Intelligent Intelligence”