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 youll 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 McCaffreys 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...
The Next War?
I should have known it when I talked to "drug czar" Gen. Barry McCaffrey's people a couple of weeks ago about the good general's selective use of information from the Institute of Medicine report his office had commissioned and all they wanted to talk about was...
EMPIRE AS A WAY OF DEATH
OVERVIEW Pericles' Funeral Oration is widely seen as a noble statement of core Western values. Noble, doubtless, but the rest is arguable (Western Civilization having had a bad day or two). Pericles the Athenian FDR? saw the Athenian Empire as the great...
THE EMPIRE’S CASUAL CASUALTIES
It's easy enough to comprehend the shooting of 14 Serbian farmers in the Kosovan village of Gracko as part of the aftermath of NATO's war against Yugoslavia. These farmers along with hundreds, perhaps thousands of ethnic Albanians killed by Serbs before, during...


