The death of PLO chairman Yasser Arafat last week once again brings the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to the international forefront. The Bush administration finds itself in an uncomfortable but familiar role as peacemaker for yet another intractable, ancient, and...
In a flurry of weekend press releases, the Department of Defense named another 26 U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq. These deaths bring the total killed since Nov. 8 to 61. Such facts may conflict with "official numbers" released to the unquestioning media. However, in an...
Karl von Clausewitz, the stern old Prussian philosopher of war, had it right. War is politics carried on by other means. He didn't see fit to expand upon the apparent corollary, that politics – which most modern thinkers want to sell us as the alternative to war...
Undersecretary John Bolton has pushed – unsuccessfully – for nearly two years to get the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Board of Governors to refer to the UN Security Council what he alleges are violations by Iran of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation...
Like another empire founded on ideological hubris, and stained with the blood of countless victims, this one engages in periodic political purges: when one faction is vanquished, mass firings occur in the upper echelons of the bureaucracy. We don't send them to the...
Leaving the hotel is always an adventure. Last night, Abu Talat whisked me, with a full beard and a keffiyeh draped around my shoulders,out into the chaotic streets of occupied Baghdad. As we traveled around the capital, we took side roads, winding, varying routes...
TEHRAN – It is said that the only time Ayatollah Khomeini, the founder of Iran's Islamic revolution, smiled was when he sat next to Yasser Arafat in the Iranian capital in 1979. Arafat was the first foreign dignitary to pay tribute to the revolution and was...
President Bush's reelection mandate has apparently resulted in a radical change in our policy toward the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK). Quoting some unnamed U.S. official, the Japanese newspaper Yomiuri Shimbun said that the U.S. has just established a...
RAMALLAH - For almost four decades, Yasser Arafat was Mr. Palestine to many in this fractured homeland. Yasser Arafat represented the Palestinian people, wherever they are, as the head of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), which was accepted by the Arab...
Two, three, or four young Palestinians are killed by Israeli forces every day now (we call it "restraint"), but none of them could win even a fraction of the attention given to Yasser Arafat, the dying old leader. The endless stream of words occasioned by Arafat's...
