*with Ngoc Nguyen HANOI - Nguyen Thi Thuy was 22 when she left her village to help build roads for the North Vietnamese army during the war. She remembers crawling into tunnels during the day and covering her mouth with a wet rag when the United States military...
JERUSALEM - After months of flattering opinion polls, the first sign of nerves was beginning to show in the camp of acting Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert. In the space of a month, his front-running Kadima (Forward) party had lost 15 percent support, and the acting...
War consists of killing people and destroying property. That's all there is to war. Any honest soldier will tell you the same thing: His job is to kill people and destroy property. That's true of all branches of the service. The difficult question is, When is a nation...
The rituals of Empire have their own meaning and structure, and, as we morph from a republic to an imperial hegemon, these are becoming more formalized. Note the proliferation of grandiosely named agencies and other offices, staffed by a multitude of officials with...
U.S. Pres. George W. Bush issued his second-term National Security Strategy Thursday, a document outlining the administration's strategy for using diplomatic, economic, and military tools to deal with global challenges. Ironically, the 47-page document that outlines a...
It is almost unfair to analyze the president’s speeches on Iraq these days. It seems increasingly apparent that most Americans aren’t listening any more. Even if Dubya were to defy all expectations and deliver a convincing argument for staying the course...
The third anniversary of the Iraq invasion is bound to attract a lot of media coverage, but scant recognition will go to the pundits who helped to make it all possible. Continuing with long service to the Bush administration's agenda-setting for war, prominent media...
Philip Bobbitt's The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace, and the Course of History (Alfred A. Knopf) received a few glowing reviews when it was published in early 2002 but did not get much attention beyond the confines of think-tanks and academia. Perhaps the book was too...
Since today's dispatch is by a former federal prosecutor, let me suggest a small "law" of my own, one fit for the present moment: When it comes to the Bush administration, whatever the subject may be and however bad you think things are, they're going to be at least...
Washington finally realizes after its chronic troop shortage in Iraq and elsewhere that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s vision of quickly "shocking and awing" enemies to win victories has been spectacularly unsuccessful and that the US needs foreign...
