There's an old joke in which a fellow natters on endlessly about himself. Finally, he turns to his friend and says, "Well, enough about me, how about you? What do you think of me?" Sometimes, we in the U.S. seem to be that guy. There are so many voices crucial to...
On January 30-31, 1968, the Tet holiday, the North Vietnamese and the National Liberation Front (NLF, known to Americans as "the Vietcong") struck at five of the country's six largest cities, 34 provincial capitals, 64 district capitals, and numerous military bases....
Within the next month, the Pentagon will submit its 2009 budget to Congress and it's a fair bet that it will be even larger than the staggering 2008 one. Like the Army and the Marines, the Pentagon itself is overstretched and under strain – and like the two...
The other day, as we reached the first anniversary of the President's announcement of his "surge" strategy, his "new way forward" in Iraq, I found myself thinking about the earliest paid book-editing work I ever did. An editor at a San Francisco textbook publisher...
Consider the ultimate gift in a homeland security country: the iTaser, a weapon with its own MP3 player and earphones that can deliver a 50,000 volt electrical charge while you catch your favorite tunes. This new Taser, on display at the Consumer Electronics Show in...
Consider the debate among four Democratic presidential candidates on ABC News last Saturday night. In the previous week, the price of a barrel of oil briefly touched $100, unemployment hit 5 percent, the stock market had the worst three-day start since the Great...
Open Steve Coll's aptly titled book, Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001, at almost any page and you're likely to find something that makes a mockery of the film Charlie Wilson's War....
"Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!" – Emma Lazarus, 1883 If you don't mind thinking about...
In Wednesday's Wall Street Journal, reporter Siobhan Gorman offered a striking little portrait of José A. Rodriguez, who, in 2005, as chief of the CIA's National Clandestine Service, ordered the destruction of those "hundreds of hours" of CIA videotapes of...
Whatever else the release of the 16-agency National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on the Iranian bomb may be, it is certainly a reasonable measure of inside-the-Beltway Bush administration decline. Whether that release represented "a preemptive strike against the White...
