In a new indication that the balance of power within the administration of President George W. Bush has tilted strongly in favor of the realists, Washington's influential ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, has disclosed that Bush has authorized him to open direct...
Sometimes, when I recommend that people read Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations (the full title is An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations), I am met with a supercilious snort, as if nothing that was written in 1776 could be relevant to today. A...
"Is the United States now going to cut and run in Iraq?" asks Bronwen Maddox, foreign editor of the London Times. While the answer from President Bush remains a defiant "No!" the question is now being raised by the most hawkish of his backers. And understandably so....
Many in my profession – journalism – were understandably outraged to discover that in a get-together with his partner in crime Tony Blair in April 2004, President Bush allegedly made a bad-taste gag about bombing the Qatar headquarters of the Arab TV channel...
Back in mid-October, I noted that informal "walls" and exhibits to honor those Americans (and sometimes Iraqis) who fell – and continue to fall – in the Bush administration's war and occupation of choice in Iraq have been arising on- and off-line for some...
When someone is accused of a crime, a key component of determining their innocence or guilt is assigning a motive – and this remains the biggest mystery of the Scooter Libby affair. Why did the vice president's then-chief of staff embark on a campaign to expose a...
How do you convince military planners to prepare detailed plans for a nuclear attack against a non-nuclear nation, without having them think you are a madman? Use the dachshund principle, as illustrated by this old story: A small boy asked his father how wireless...
I fear the vice president has had one too many heart attacks. His mind seems to have slipped its moorings and is drifting out into the sea of fantasy. Dick Cheney was the misleader in chief prior to the war in Iraq, and in a recent speech in which he chastised people...
Re-igniting Bosnia In November 1995, after months of cajoling, threatening, scheming, plotting, bombing, and blackmailing, the American-organized peace conference in Dayton, Ohio, resulted in a peace agreement that ended the hostilities in Bosnia-Herzegovina. The...
According to Bob Woodward, we're not to worry: "When the story comes out I'm quite confident we're going to find out that it started kind of as gossip, as chatter. And that somebody learned that Joe Wilson's wife had worked at the CIA and helped him get this job...
