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Last week found me standing on a Sussex beach, lost in my own thoughts, staring out towards the channel and (presumably) France beyond. I had come, on a whim, onto the small village of Rottingdean, sometime home to Max Boot’s hero, so as to be beside the sea after a trip to Lewes. Like all … Continue reading “My Day at the Seaside”

The retiring and the designated Israeli Chiefs-of-Staff sound like twins: both Shaul Mofaz and Moshe Yaalon insist that the next war is inevitable. – Yet another war? Yes: the re-occupation of the West Bank has not satiated the junta’s desires at all. In fact, the on-going war on the Palestinians, with its clear genocidal features, … Continue reading “The New World Order and the Stone Age”

I do not mean, by the odd title I have chosen, to suggest there are no war powers, plural, to be found in this fair land of freedom. Far from it. “There’s a lot of it about,” as the Brits were saying a decade ago, even if no one quite knew what that phrase meant. … Continue reading “Show Us the ‘War Power’!”

The neocons are up in arms – one of their own has been fired from his position as a "journalist" at the Voice of America and may be on his way to becoming the Mumia Abu Jamal of the War Party. The cause of Stephen Schwartz, a writer formerly known as "Comrade Sandalio," has been … Continue reading “THE VOA FOLLIES”

It may have slipped in under the radar by now that the United States vetoed an extension of the UN mission in Bosnia this weekend, since the UN could not be blackmailed into granting US troops immunity from the new International Criminal Court. Since the Security Council refused to compromise, and the threat of veto … Continue reading “Bosnia As Chump Change”

One of the salutary lessons from the scary India-Pakistan standoff (which has still not ended) is that the political and military leadership of neither country can be trusted to desist from nuclear brinkmanship, even downright nuclear adventurism. More than a billion people in South Asia once again came close to the brink of a nuclear … Continue reading “Reducing the Nuclear Danger”

If you want to see the face of pure evil, cast your eyes on a recent column in National Review Online by resident financial guru Larry Kudlow, "Taking Back the Market – By Force." The market is down, he moans, and it isn’t really about corporate corruption and the Bush administration’s anti-free market policies: these, … Continue reading “PURE EVIL”

I‘m not sure I was quite prepared for the question from Leslie Dutton, host of a Los Angeles-area public-affairs program called “Full Disclosure” that taped last week. (The program, which is independently produced on a shoestring and distributed to cable networks on public access, just won a Local Emmy for Informational/Public Affairs Series for a … Continue reading “Assessing the War”

A few years ago Niall Ferguson made the unexceptionable observation in The Pity of War that Great War soldiers as much as anything fought on, and fought to win, because they enjoyed fighting. This caused some of the more po-faced reviewers of his book to tut-tut – and murmur about, ‘what can a civilian academic … Continue reading “Fighting Is Fun”

The latest scare stories – the terrorists are going to give us a display of nuclear fireworks on July 4, commandeer dams, electrical grids, and traffic lights via the Internet, and launch suicide attacks in shopping malls – don’t phase me. I guess we’re all so used to the hysterics of our demagogic leaders that … Continue reading “LOOK ON THE BRIGHT SIDE”