with Alaa Hassan BAGHDAD - Basra in the south of Iraq is beginning to splinter under increasing violence and sectarian divisions. Smuggling of oil on a large scale coupled with increasing violence and the lack of basic services like water and electricity has caused...
The Ever Elusive ‘Tipping Point’ in Iraq
For a day or two after the killing of terrorist gang leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, I was fantasizing that US President George W. Bush and his aides were finally getting smart when it came to Iraq. A few hours after the Jordanian-born head of al-Qaeda in Iraq was killed...
Meaningful Lives
Ann Coulter, to use one of her favorite words, is an over-40 smart "broad" who makes a ton of money out of being controversial. She laughs all the way from her Palm Beach, Fla., mansion to the bank when Democrats and liberals get outraged by something she says or...
Nuke-Free Zone
The Neo-Crazies, in cahoots with the Anti-Nuclear-Whatever crazies, have managed to get Western politicians from across the political spectrum to view-with-alarm the Iranian nuclear weapons "threat." Of course, as those politicians know, there is no evidence...
‘Debating’ the Iraq War
The Republican offensive in support of the Iraq war should have crashed shortly after launching: unfortunately, they had some essential allies who helped fuel their shaky effort the Democrats. As one news report about the House debate put it: "In both the...
Condi and the Isolationists
To buttress crumbling support for his interventionist policy, President Bush played his ace of trumps, sending his most popular champion, Condi Rice, to the Southern Baptist Convention. If seven standing ovations and 20,000 Christians bursting forth into a spontaneous...
Misguided Theology Makes Bad Foreign Policy
Iraq is an unalloyed disaster. War with Iran would be even worse. Lebanon's Cedar Revolution has empowered groups hostile to America. Where is the new democratic dawn in the Mideast that the administration promised? It certainly isn't represented in the...
Hillary Clinton’s
Premature Triangulation
Two years from now, Hillary Clinton might be pleased to hear the kind of boos and antiwar chants that greeted her days ago when she spoke at the annual Take Back America conference of Democratic activists and argued against a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq. But so...
The Tripolar Chessboard
Since the British imperial moment of the late 19th century, the image of much of the world especially Central Asia and the Middle East as but a set of pawns in a "Great Game" on a geopolitical "chessboard" where the great powers of whatever era are at...
Bush Hitches GOP’s Political Star to Iraq
With less than six months before the mid-term congressional elections, President George W. Bush and his top aides are gambling heavily some would say recklessly that Iraq will not be the political liability for Republicans that most pundits have believed...


