A new year, and a new president – plenty of grist for my prediction mill, or, at least, for the obligatory January "predictions" column. Not that there's anything special, really, about it: all punditry is prediction, in an important sense. Every time a writer...
RAMALLAH - At least 42 Palestinians sheltering in a UN school in the Jabaliya refugee camp near Gaza City were killed Tuesday afternoon after two Israeli tank shells exploded outside the school. Hundreds of terrified Palestinians, desperately trying to escape the...
Updated at 4:00 p.m. EST, Jan. 7, 2009Reports of violence were light on the final day of Ashuraa. Many reporters are on holiday. Overall, at least three Iraqis were killed and 11 more were wounded in overnight violence. The DoD reported that one U.S. soldier was...
It may finally be 2009, but in some ways, given these last years, it might as well be 800 BCE. From the ninth to the seventh centuries BCE, the palace walls of the kings who ruled the Assyrian Empire were decorated with vast stone friezes, filled with enough dead...
Our interventionist foreign policy stands ready to be put on a new course with the new administration. Unfortunately, it seems the new administration is likely to continue the mistakes of the past. I've often discussed interventionist foreign policy and the resulting...
Until mid-2007, there was a serious political obstacle to a massive conventional war by Israel against Hamas in Gaza: the fact that Hamas had won free and fair elections for the Palestinian parliament and was still the leading faction in a fully legitimate government....
Despite two wars involving more than 200,000 U.S. troops and a global economic crisis, foreign-related news coverage by the three major U.S. television networks fell to a record low during 2008, according to the latest annual review of network news coverage by the...
Updated at 7:35 p.m. EST, Dec. 6, 2009Although security is tight for the culmination of the Ashuraa religious observance, at least 15 Iraqis were killed and 26 more were wounded in violent attacks. In Baghdad, women have been banned from one neighborhood as a security...
My early reaction to the Israeli ground invasion of the Gaza Strip is perhaps more U.S.-centered than some others'. But the most significant aspect of the U.S. response, implicitly acknowledged in most news reports and commentary, is precisely that nobody really...
There's got to be some irony in the U.S. transference of control to Iraqi security forces while the Israelis pound Gaza. Why? Because, despite the hoopla in the U.S. press and its Iraqi clones, the nature of the control being "given back" to the Iraqis seems quite...
