A NEW CRUSADE TAKES FORM In March 1947, President Harry Truman announced his Doctrine of "containing" communism by giving aid to all nations, anywhere, resisting it. The proposal he set before Congress was an aid package to defeat the Communist-led...
IS IRAQ NEXT?
With the Kosovo war, the criminal mendacity of U.S. foreign policy seemed to have reached its limit. The lies, the venality, the puffed-up grandiosity of our preening leaders and their repulsive spokespersons – surely, you think, it can't get any worse that that....
THE ITCH TO CHOOSE SIDES
A good deal of the fretting over what might or might not turn out to be an increasing level of hostility between mainland China and Taiwan over the arcane (and currently irrelevant) question of whether everybody still believes in "One China" is related to...
RANDOM THOUGHTS, MOSTLY ON BOMBING
BOMBING: IS THERE ANY AMERICAN CONSCIENCE AT ALL? Every year in August, someone is moved by the anniversary of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to say this or that about the morality of the first – and only – use, by anyone, of the Americans’ very own patent...
IS ANYBODY SURPRISED?
It is difficult to imagine that anybody with more than a few months' experience as an interested observer was actually surprised by the report from the international Office of High Representation – a marvelously vague but impressive-sounding title for the...
A Draft After the 2000 Elections?
There may yet be a military draft in your future if you’ll be turning 20 in 2001, once the elections are out of the way. In late July of this year Newsday published a Los Angeles Times dispatch reporting that, “key members of Congress’ military...
POLITICS AND THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE
If the truth is the "first casualty of war," then the honest use of language must be "collateral damage." George Orwell rather famously dealt with some of the details in his essay, "Politics and the English Language" (1945). My topic is...
COLOMBIAN CLARIFICATIONS (OR CONFUSIONS)
I got two kinds of responses to my comments last week on Drug Czar Barry McCaffrey’s efforts to stir up a rationale for more intensive U.S. intervention into the ongoing insurgency-cum-narco-trafficking crisis in Colombia. One type came from a fellow whose e-mail...
American Values in Dire Straits
High anxiety in the Taiwan Straits following Republic of China (ROC) President Lee Teng-hui's "two nations" challenge to the People's Republic of China raises the question: How should patriotic Americans respond to the Taipei-Beijing confrontation? The...
MERE “ISOLATIONISM”
One of the "old causes" embraced in this column – perhaps the most important one – is that of the "isolationist" Old Right. As used by the late Murray Rothbard among others, the term Old Right refers to a loose coalition opposed to the...