Hebron for Beginners

Hebron is again in the headlines. More than almost any other place, this divided city represents the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in a nutshell. Occupied by Israel in 1967, the Palestinian town saw its very heart taken over by Israeli settlers, whose presence there is...

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Another Undeclared War?

Is the United States about to launch a second preemptive war, against a nation that has not attacked us, to deprive it of weapons of mass destruction that it does not have? With U.S. troops tied down in Afghanistan and Iraq, and Pakistanis inflamed over a U.S....

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Guess What? Democracies Are Not Always Peaceful

If you've been listening to the recent "democracy is the way to go" sermons by President George W. Bush and his advisers, you'll have to conclude that embracing "democracy" – a concept that is open to different interpretations – is the...

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The Empty Shirts, Courtiers, and ‘Crazies’

Individually, the new "dots" supplied by revelations about the Iraq war in James Risen's State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration are not very surprising. Collectively, though, they provide valuable insight into the peculiar way in which...

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Does the President Really Know Best?

In every way they could imagine – unnoticed in broad daylight and in the darkness of eternal secrecy – the president and his top officials have been hardest at work not at governing the country but at bulking up presidential powers. This, it now seems, was...

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Gore Channels Taft

Has Al Gore become a conservative? His recent speech to the Liberty Coalition, a group of conservatives and liberals united in opposing the growing authoritarianism that drives this administration, sounded as if it had been written by some disgruntled...

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What Noncompliance?

In President Bush's first State of the Union message, he essentially accused North Korea, Iran, and Iraq of having clandestine nuke programs: "States like these, and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world. "I will...

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If Iran Gets Nukes…

Although Iranian and EU officials have recently agreed to resume talks on Iran's nuclear activities, there is little optimism that such talks will lead to any breakthrough in the existing deadlock over Iran's nuclear program. As senior Iranian diplomats and nuclear...

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