At the moment, the spectacle of the I. Lewis Libby trial, of the den of thieves falling out, of the unraveling of old administration war stories, and of the possibility that, in the near future, the vice president might appear in the witness stand for a grilling all...

The dream of the Bush administration – eternal global domination abroad with no other superpower or bloc of powers on the military horizon and a Republican Party dominant at home for at least a generation – long ago evaporated in Iraq. A midterm election and...

Rural America Pays the President's Price in Iraq When we hear about the American dead in Iraq, we normally learn about the circumstances in which they died. Last Saturday, for instance, was, for American troops, the third bloodiest day since the Bush administration...

State of the what? Let's see, 28 percent, 31 percent, 33 percent, 35 percent. That pretty much sums up the state of the president – or, at least, of his ever more dismal approval ratings in four of the latest major polls (and don't even mention his state of...

It's been a repetitive phenomenon of these last years – when fears about disaster (or further disaster, or even the farthest reaches of disaster) in Iraq rise, so does the specter of Vietnam. Despite the obvious dissimilarities between the two situations, Vietnam...

Just five days after the September 11th attacks in 2001, in a Q and A with reporters on the South Lawn of the White House, a president with a new mission, a new cause, and a new purpose in life told the American people that, though they had to "go back to work...

On January 4th, the Pentagon "announced the identities" of six American soldiers who had died between December 28th and New Year's Eve. It was just one of many such listings over these last years and, like similar announcements, this one had a just-the-facts quality...

Just this week, the Bush administration is considering making a little futuristic news. The president might soon approve "a major step forward in the building of the country's first new nuclear warhead in nearly two decades," the Reliable Replacement Warhead. If only...

In our world, the Pentagon and the national security bureaucracy have largely taken possession of the future. In an exchange in 2002, journalist Ron Suskind reported a senior adviser to President Bush telling him: "that guys like me were 'in what we call the...

Every now and then, you have to take a lesson or two from history. In the case of George Bush's Iraq, here's one: No matter what the President announces in his "new way forward" speech on Iraq next week – including belated calls for "sacrifice" from the man whose...