The media often reports overseas developments but doesn't always explore their underlying causes, which, in many cases, conveniently lets the U.S. government off the hook. The recent internecine violence in Somalia provides a classic example. The U.S. media has...
President Bush has scolded House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for visiting Syria. In the president's opinion, shared by others, the U.S. government should speak with just one voice overseas. Yet that view flies in the face of both the text and the spirit of the Constitution....
The conventional wisdom for dealing with Iran is demanding repeatedly that the Iranians end their uranium enrichment program and slapping on new sanctions. Although the December 2006 United Nations Security Council sanctions that banned countries from exporting...
The Bush administration, desperate for justifications to buy a little more time with the American people for its failed adventure in Iraq, markets the idea that if the United States rapidly withdraws from Iraq, the "terrorists will follow us home." A closer...
In its newly released annual report on the status of human rights around the world, the U.S. State Department disparages a long list of nations about their violations of individual freedoms. The report notes that countries in which power is concentrated in the hands...
The bulk of expert opinion predicts that the Bush administration's escalation strategy in Iraq will fail. The void created by the administration's lack of a backup plan for that outcome has been filled with proposals from pundits, academics, and think-tank analysts,...
While media attention has been focused on the U.S. quagmire in Iraq, an equally failed war in Afghanistan has received little coverage. As in countless militaristic U.S. nation-building fiascoes, "mission creep" in Afghanistan is leading to another foreign policy...
As President Bush continues his Nixonesque policy of "exiting" Iraq by escalation and intimidation, both Republican and Democratic politicians are also imitating the Vietnam-era rhetoric of blaming the citizens of the chaotic country and their neighbors for...
President Vladimir Putin of Russia recently bluntly lashed out at U.S. foreign policy. At an international security conference with U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates in attendance, referring to U.S. actions in the international arena, Putin said, "Today we are...
Each year, one of the most important events in the nation's capital is the release of the federal budget. Yet the media provides insufficient coverage because the budget is technical, unglamorous, and requires hard work sifting through mounds of data to uncover the...
