Everyone, rightly, jumps up and down with enjoyable rage when anyone suggests that America had September 11th 'coming'. And of course, no one would defend crashing airliners into skyscrapers, nor the cause for which this act was carried out. What is madness, plain and...
The proposal to create a new super-agency, the ominously Germanic-sounding Department of Homeland Security (HomeSec) that would absorb everything but the FBI and the CIA into a giant bureaucratic sinkhole – the BorgBureau – has certainly debunked the idea...
Although I am sympathetic to the Palestinian cause, and hardly a friend of Israel, I must admit to being shocked at the analogy – made by many in the anti-Israel camp – between the Jewish state and the Thousand Year Reich. I remember seeing photos of a...
If, twelve years ago, someone had written a book about the Balkans wars that contained even a tenth of what has actually happened since, they'd have been laughed right out of every publishing house in the world. Truth, as Mark Twain remarked, really is stranger than...
Shortly after Sept. 11, the war against al-Qaeda morphed into the war against the Taliban regime. As the US bombed Afghanistan, it enlisted the Northern Alliance (NA), led by the notoriously unsavory warlord Rashid Dostum, to do the dirty work on the ground. In...
Shortly after Sept. 11, the war against al-Qaeda morphed into the war against the Taliban regime. As the US bombed Afghanistan, it enlisted the Northern Alliance (NA), led by the notoriously unsavory warlord Rashid Dostum, to do the dirty work on the ground. In...
The controversy over the fourth of July gunman at LAX, Hashem Mohamed Hadayet, known as "Ali," is typical of any issue involving Israel. Since it advances Israel's interests to maintain that Hadayet was part of a larger terrorist operation, a footsoldier in...
The night is rounding down and my friend downs the rest of his beer, takes a slow look around the emptying club and announces: "I'm gonna get me a xiaojie!" (little sister/one-night lover) He whispers and chuckles the finer points of xiaojie hunting to me as we exit...
As the Afghan campaign devolves into what University of California political science professor emeritus Chalmers Johnson told me is something of a "phony war" in which the U.S. blunders without a plan and gets drawn in deeper, the imminent war against Iraq is starting...
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...
