I wrote a column a ways back that infuriated a lot of Asians out there. Friends here in Sichuan said I had gone over the top and I apologized for what I thought was a pretty poor attempt to explain stereotypes in China. I have thought about that column for a while now...
Saddam’s Enablers May Also Go on Trial
ARBIL A year after the fall of Saddam Hussein, the mountains and plains of northern Iraq are still covered in landmines planted by the former Iraqi dictator's regime during the 1980s. That is when he fought a decade-long war with Iran and many battles with...
Bush Team Tries to Brazen It Out
WASHINGTON "The reason I keep insisting that there was a relationship between Iraq and Saddam and al-Qaeda," U.S. President George W. Bush told reporters Thursday, is "because there was a relationship between Iraq and al-Qaeda." This is what logicians call a...
Maybe We Do Need a Draft
With all this talk about a draft, I thought that, as a professional soldier, I'd throw my two cents worth in. Let me begin by saying that I'm against a general draft for a number of reasons. Conscription makes free citizens into slaves and the property of the state. A...
Japan Abandoning Postwar Constitution
TOKYO The commitment made by Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi to the international community that the country's Self Defense Forces (SDF) would join a planned multinational force in Iraq, has far-reaching implications globally. According to analysts,...
A Brawl in the Persian Gulf
DUBAI A series of escalating spats in the Gulf waters between Iran, on one hand, and the United Arab Emirates, Qatar and Oman, on the other, has cast a large shadow over relations between these countries. Officials from the three Gulf countries and many foreign...
Beirut Redux
From Dahr's weblog BAGHDAD Dr. Faiq Amin, the manager of the Medico Legal Institute (i.e., the Baghdad morgue), told me a couple of days ago that their maximum holding capacity is 90 bodies. Since Janurary an average of over 600 bodies each month have been...
The Neoconservative Moment
So it turns out that there weren't any links between Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, after all, but, hey, guess what? The story has been revised and updated. Forget Iraq, we really meant to link Al Qaeda to Iran! Yeah! That's it! And the beat goes on ....
Deep Denial Remains
Perhaps it is just as well to conclude regretfully that mere facts will seldom if ever hold much sway with people whose minds are already made up. In the wake of the report from the 9/11 commission to the effect that there is "no credible evidence that Iraq and...
Group Wants US to Intervene in Sudan
WASHINGTON Amid increasingly strident calls from United Nations officials for international intervention to stop "ethnic cleansing" in western Sudan, a U.S. group is calling on Washington to declare the situation "genocide" and lead a military force into the...


