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“The earth is shaking” – this is how Junichero Koizumi, the man almost certain to be the new Prime Minister of Japan, described his apparent triumph over the old party bosses who have dominated the country since the end of World War II. And not only the earth, but also the heavens, by the time … Continue reading “Hail Koizumi!”

had rather expected that most American newspapers would feature the photos of Veronica Bowers and her almost achingly lovely daughter in the innocent days before her killing on the front page. Poignant as the photos were, however, they were displaced by other news, pushed to the inside pages or not used at all in many … Continue reading “Making the War All Too Real”

AN AMERICAN ORIGINAL Howard Homan Buffett was born in Omaha, Nebraska in 1903 and died in 1964. In those years he was an eyewitness to the wholesale abandonment of the American traditions of limited government at home and minding our own business overseas. He did not gladly go along with the main drift of his … Continue reading “Howard Homan Buffett:”

Contradictions abounded at the Summit of the Americas, held in Quebec City over the weekend, not the least of which was the outrage of protesters at wire fences that separated them from the prime ministers and presidents meeting on the other side. “The fence,” expostulated a young man whose face was hidden by a green … Continue reading “Quebec Crackpots”

The utter meaninglessness of the “left”-“right” political spectrum was brought home to me the other day, as I read yet another anti-Chinese diatribe: “It was,” averred the editorialist, “a sweet triumph for the philologists of appeasement” when the Bush administration settled the Hainan incident with a few words of diplomacy. WorldNetDaily? Nope. The Weekly (Sub)Standard? … Continue reading “The Anti-China Left”

What are they thinking, some of these people in Congress and on television who want to make more of the American spy plane near China incident than is warranted? One is not surprised, perhaps, at advocates of “benevolent” American hegemony like Bill Kristol and Robert Kagan whining that the American side conceded too much and … Continue reading “Commerce and Peace”

The recent confrontation with China has shifted the focus of US policymakers to Eastasia, but most analysts have viewed this in terms of cold war ideology (the neoconservatives) or economics (Team Bush). As far as I know, only William Pfaff framed the issue in geopolitical and historical terms, making the point that this may be … Continue reading “Rising Sun”

I heard about the first poster calling for demonstrations against America and death to the American devils minutes before I walked into my Tuesday afternoon English class. According to my friend, who saw the poster, members of the Southwest Agricultural University English Department put it up – in other words, students of mine. I looked … Continue reading “On the Street in China: A Report”

In a previous column we have seen how Barak united an overwhelming majority of Israelis behind the dangerous conviction that "The Enemy Does Not Want Peace." By now, this has been affirmed empirically: According to the findings of a Peace Index survey conducted by Tel Aviv University’s Tami Steinmetz Centre for Peace Research, 72 percent … Continue reading “Israeli Left Sells Out Peace”

With the downing/landing/whatever of the U.S. spy plane on the Chinese island of Hainan, talk of sovereignty is once again rampant. Was the airplane actually over territory that the Chinese nation claims as a sovereign as part of its airspace? Can the United States claim that the interior of the plane is in law a … Continue reading “Considering Sovereignty”