A River Runs Backward

When historians look back on the war in Afghanistan, they may well point to last December's battle for Musa Qala, a scruffy town in the country's northern Helmand province, as a turning point. In a war of shadows, remote ambushes, and anonymous roadside bombs, Musa...

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Blood

Four years ago this week, Kosovo burned; tens of thousands of ethnic Albanians – armed, organized and determined – systematically went after the province's Serbs. They burned churches and monasteries, destroyed entire villages, and drove over four thousand...

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Why Did the US Invade Iraq?

So why, exactly, did the US invade Iraq five years ago this week? The official reasons – the threat posed to the US and its allies by Saddam Hussein's alleged programs of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and the possibility that he would pass along those arms to...

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Jeremiah Wright: True and False

I stayed home Tuesday morning to watch the much-hyped Barack Obama speech on race and Jeremiah Wright. I was glad I did. I'll forgive him his 35-minute, Bill Clinton-style delay before speaking because this speech was obviously one of the most important of his...

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Thursday: 25 Iraqis Killed, 28 Wounded

Updated at 8:50 p.m. EDT, Mar. 20, 2008 At least 25 Iraqis were killed and another 28 were wounded in the latest round of violence. No Coalition casualties were reported, but Turkey resumed air attacks on Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) hideouts in northern Iraq. U.S....

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Who Got Iraq Right?

Just imagine: You run a flagship national newspaper, the New York Times. It's the fifth anniversary of President Bush's catastrophic invasion of Iraq. Your own record of reportage in the period leading up to the invasion was not exactly sterling. So, for a change of...

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Futile Surges and Bailouts

There is a lot of talk in Washington these days about "containment." Foreign policy pundits insist that the U.S. must contain Iran, whose rise as a political-military power poses a threat to Western strategic and economic interests in the Persian Gulf...

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US Vets Testify to Torture of Detainees

SILVER SPRING, Maryland – "I would like to share with you how one goes about becoming a concentration camp guard without having made many decisions," 24-year-old former Guantanamo prison guard Christopher Arent told a crowd of hundreds at last weekend's...

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