Does it matter if you win an important political battle with bad arguments? The natural Tory reaction, honing straight in on that evasive little word, 'bad', is to reply: not a bit, winning's the thing. After all, who's to say what being bad in this context amounts...
After five months of unthinking unanimity, deluded triumphalism, and self-righteous posturing, some in Congress appear to be awakening from the war trance that gripped the nation after 9/11 – and not a moment too soon. Republicans went ballistic when Senator Tom...
March 2, 2002 Third World Kaplan and the Empire of Gloom A TRACT FOR OUR TIMES Robert D. Kaplan has made a name for himself writing politically tinged travelogues from various Third World pest-holes and global hot spots for the Atlantic Monthly. Now, in his new book,...
Occupation, as I mentioned in an earlier column, is one of the most unpopular terms in media coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In fact, some people say there is no occupation at all, meaning that occupation is not the right term to refer to Israel's...
A Note from the editor: Matt Welch's analysis of conflicting claims over the effect of sanctions on Iraq, published in Reason magazine, is typical of the "war-blogger" mentality: preening arrogance and pretensions to a strict just-the-facts standard. When he...
In my last column, I pointed to the probable genesis of the mysterious anthrax letters – a clique of former US scientists, including one in particular who had been fired from his US government job at Fort Detrick's biowar research lab – and complained that a...
Last year, The Daily Telegraph sponsored a conference in London on the contentious subject of Star Wars – or to foreign policy bores like you and me, National Missile Defence. We will straight-away pass up on the cheap shot about, 'uh, which nation's that then,...
The "trial" of Slobodan Milosevic couldn't have come at a better time. As the US rampages through Afghanistan, bombing friend and foe alike, openly gearing up for an excursion into Iraq – all the name of a holy "war on terrorism" – the double standard...
To date, 272 officers and soldiers of the Israeli army have signed the initiative to refuse to serve the illegal Israeli occupation of Palestinians, while thousands of other Israeli citizens have expressed their support. Those that have signed are not pacifists...
The news that the US government has set up a special department, the "Office of Strategic Influence," to plant false news items has liberals and journalists (or do I repeat myself?) in a funk: this is terrible, they whine, why it's unprecedented. To which the only...
