Serbia’s Choices

Pressure to Surrender Kosovo Grows The ongoing farcical "talks" between Serbia and the rebel Albanians from Kosovo reached the heights of absurdity last Monday, when the Serbian president and prime minister were brought to the same table as the...

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The Moral Culpability for Qana

"Everyone in southern Lebanon is a terrorist and is connected to Hezbollah," roared Israeli Justice Minister Haim Ramon on July 27. "Every village from which a Katyusha is fired must be destroyed," bellowed an Israeli general in a quote bannered by the nation's...

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Kurdish ‘Thank You’ a Republican Stunt?

Kurdish officials toured the United States last week to launch a massive advertising and public relations campaign thanking the United States for overthrowing Saddam Hussein and urging U.S. companies to invest in the region. The campaign looks suspicious to some...

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Republican Realists Call for Major Course Change

Some of the Republican Party's most venerable foreign policy strategists are calling urgently for a major course change in U.S. policy in the Middle East, but neither the administration of President George W. Bush nor Republicans in Congress appear inclined to pay...

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Backtalk August 1, 2006

The Iraqi Ballot, Translated I have an actual ballot of the 2002 and 2003 elections and don't find your political satire amusing especially since there were a variety of issues and people on it and it did cost people their lives to render this document forward,...

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One Is Not the Other

One of the most useful devices of general semantics is the use of numbers and dates to remind ourselves of individuality and change. Cow-1 is not the same as cow-2, and Israel-1967 is not the same as Israel-2006. In 1967, Israel launched a blitzkrieg attack against...

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A Nice Little War Gets Out of Hand

It is the old story about the losing gambler: he cannot stop. He continues to play, in order to win his losses back. He continues to lose and continues to gamble, until he has lost everything: his ranch, his wife, his shirt. The same thing happens in the biggest...

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Why Do They Hate Us?
Listen to Qana (Again)

The crowds in Beirut last year demanding a Cedar Revolution, "the first shoots of democracy" supposedly planted by the United States, are a distant memory. Yesterday we saw in their place the fury of Lebanon directed against the capital's United Nations building...

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NSG Consensus – or Not?

The U.S.-India Nuclear Cooperation Promotion Act [.pdf], just overwhelmingly passed by the House, perversely begins by declaring that "it is the sense of Congress" that "sustaining" the Treaty on Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) and "strengthening its...

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