William Kristol knows what is wrong with the United States. As he wrote recently in the flagship magazine of the neo-conservatives, the Weekly Standard, the problem with the US is that we seem to have lost our appetite for war. According to Kristol, the troubles that...
The Creaming of Paul Ryan
In the first exchange of the presidential election season over foreign policy issues, the neocons — in the person of GOP vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan — got creamed. That’s the good news. The bad news is that Ryan got creamed by Joe Biden — who serves in an...
America’s Last Crusade
For Americans of the Greatest Generation that fought World War II and of the Silent Generation that came of age in the 1950s, the great moral and ideological cause was the Cold War. It gave purpose and clarity to our politics and foreign policy, and our lives. From...
Why the Mideast Exploded
“Why Is the Arab world so easily offended?” asks the headline atop an article by Fouad Ajami, which the Washington Post published online last Friday to give perspective to the recent anti-American violence in Muslim capitals. While the Post described Ajami simply as a...
The Washington Post Gets Tough With Iran
Many Washington pundits understand that the conclusion of a tale very much depends on where one starts. The starting point is how the argument is framed, and if the reader accepts the initial premises, then the rest of the case being made falls into place. Many of the...
How Bill Kristol Purged the Arabists
After taping John Stossel's show on May 15 in New York, the Mrs. and I took the 10 a.m. Acela back to Washington. Once we had boarded the train, who should come waddling up the aisle but Bill Kristol. The Weekly Standard editor seemed cheerful, and we chatted about...
Neocons Assail Possible Compromise on Iran Talks
As at least two days of talks on the future of Iran's nuclear program got underway in Baghdad Wednesday, neoconservatives and other hawks escalated their campaign against any compromise agreement, particularly one that would permit Tehran to continue enriching uranium...
Obama’s Foreign Policy Guru
On the eve of the President’s last State of the Union speech the White House let it be known that a recent essay by Robert Kagan in The New Republic, which excerpted his book, The World America Made, had been sent to his national security staff for their perusal. As...
‘Egypt the Prize’
Imagine the following scenario: a wealthy foreign country decides that the United States is insufficiently democratic. They launch a program to “teach” us the ABCs of “democracy” via a plethora of organizations devoted to “human...
Neocons Preoccupied With Islamic Conspiracy Theories
The Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement, for all its flaws, is a genuine expression of the growing recognition in the United States that the government no longer serves the interests of the people. It has been described as an American version of the “Arab Spring,”...