Books keep pouring off the presses on the subject of why George W. Bush should not be reelected. I got four in my mailbox recently. Bush might be the biggest boon to book publishing since Harry Potter. The most serious of the four books is The Bubble of American...
Every May, Sirbuz Khan, 26, makes his way north along the Karakorum Highway from Islamabad and spends the next six to seven months moving around China's Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region buying silk for his family's cloth business. Business is good – for every...
ATHENS - The guns are not pointing at visitors, they do not need to. The men carrying them have visitors to the new Olympics stadium in their sight all the way. The men are carefully positioned to see there is not a moment anyone could be out of sight. A visitor...
"Under democracy, one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule – and both commonly succeed, and are right." - H.L. Mencken A few weeks ago, I received a phone call from my sister, a thoughtful and...
In reading the Abu Ghraib articles Seymour Hersh wrote for the New Yorker in May (here, here, and here), what struck me about the revelations of abuse and torture was the similarity in detail to what I experienced in Vietnam 35 years ago. The one major difference has...
PARIS - Four French prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba who were transferred to France earlier this week are likely to be released because the police have no case against them. In this they will follow their British, Danish and Spanish counterparts who were all...
The most dismaying development at the ongoing Democratic convention so far is the effort to convince Americans that the Democrats would be tougher than the Republicans on the issues of war, peace and national security. This essentially means that those who question...
The more I think about it, the more I'm convinced that we're reliving the last days of the Roman Empire. Of course, that's not all bad, especially if you like peeled grapes, gladiatorial games, and those cute little tunics on men: but it isn't all fun and games,...
Do We Want a War Criminal as President? Being a left-wing reader of your site can be an interesting experience. I alternate between spasms of absolute joy and absolute outrage – I so passionately agree and disagree with you on a variety of issues, I never know...
DAMASCUS - After years of hostility and recent tension over foreign fighters sneaking into Iraq, interim Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi ended a visit to Syria with a declaration that diplomatic relations between the two countries would be restored soon. Following...
