After Richard Nixon started the U.S. troop drawdown in Vietnam, the American public thought “problem solved” and demonstrations on college campuses dissipated. Then it was disclosed that Nixon, while reducing U.S. forces in Vietnam, was escalating a parallel war in...
The talk in Washington of late has been Bob Woodward's book Obama's Wars. The books are piled in the front of every bookstore in town, and people are whispering in the usual “inside baseball” way, about who in the Washington security bureaucracies dissed whom to...
The U.S. Supreme Court is hearing a case where the father of a fallen serviceman is suing members of a church over its picketing of military funerals with signs that say, “Thank God for Dead Soldiers,” “God Killed Your Sons,” and “Thank God for 9/11.” These protesters...
Although David Petraeus, the top American commander in Afghanistan, recently peddled the notion that senior Taliban chieftains had made contact with senior Afghan government officials about the possibility of starting reconciliation talks, such talk of peace in our...
American policymakers love to see purple thumbs in the developing world, especially in countries in which the United States has undertaken “nation-building” projects (read: invasions and occupations). The recent Afghan parliamentary elections are a case in point. Yet...
Even in an age of media sensationalism, the intense coverage of the proposed Islamic center at Ground Zero, and a shamelessly bigoted Christian minister's threat to burn the Koran in response to it, are both jolting and saddening. Neither of these events merited media...
In a recent column, Thomas Friedman, probably the most influential “internationalist” – read: proponent of U.S. interventionism in faraway places – has finally discovered that the United States must soon turn inward and put domestic economic growth first because of...
As President Obama gave a self-congratulatory speech about keeping his campaign promise to remove U.S. combat forces from Iraq by the end of August, he accomplished this feat by merely redefining the mission of the 50,000 combat-trained U.S. forces remaining there to...
The U.S. Justice Department is apparently considering prosecuting Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, which is a Web site that publishes classified documents from governments, under the rarely used Espionage Act of 1917. Such a prosecution would have adverse...
The American media, and to a lesser extent the world media, focus on symbolism at the expense of underlying reality. And sometimes they can't even make sense of the symbolism. The artificially generated controversy over a proposed mosque within about two blocks of the...
