Recent reports of al Qaida infiltration of the Syrian resistance have strengthened our national reluctance to intervene in the slow-motion train wreck that is the Syrian civil war. After all, we hardly want to be in the position of arming our enemies (that didn’t go so well with the Mexican drug cartels), and should they be successful an al Qaida backed regime is one of | Read More »
Ozzie Guillén, manager of the newly re-minted Miami Marlins, has earned himself a five-game suspension by declaring his affection for Cuban dictator Fidel Castro in Time magazine: “I love Fidel Castro. You know why? A lot of people have wanted to kill Fidel Castro for the last 60 years, but that son of a bitch is still there.” Many entities survive through unsavory methods—cockroaches and kudzu | Read More »
Robert Kagan’s The World America Made (Alfred A. Knopf, 2012) is an extended essay on the role of the United States in the current global order. Kagan identifies political and economic freedom combined with military strength as the foundation of the enduring American power that has encouraged the current historical “wave” towards democracy, and argues the unique nature of this power has played a pivotal | Read More »
Like Beijing, Hong Kong faces a “leadership transition” this year. In the 15 years since control of the island passed from Great Britain to China, successive rulers have been chosen by a committee of officials–and while large for a committee (1,200 people), this body is only a fraction of Hong Kong’s 7.1 million inhabitants, who have no voice in their government. But that may be | Read More »
In the most recent round of violent protests that have rocked Greece, a group of aggrieved Communist party members went up onto the Acropolis and hung banners from the massive rock. “Down with Dictatorship” they proclaimed (in English as well as in Greek for the benefit of the western media and/or relevant parties in London and Washington, D.C.). The message was not particularly subtle: Here, | Read More »
While the recent increase of attention to the ongoing carnage in Syria is a welcome change from the Obama administration’s collective state of denial over the past ten months, signals remain mixed, and our policy is unclear if not non-existent. This week alone, for example, we got the welcome news that the Pentagon is preparing military options on Syria for the President, but at the | Read More »
Like most parents, I have become adept at the rapid fire muting of the satellite radio when shepherding my children around in the car. Not only are the ads wildly inappropriate, but the news itself is not far behind. To wit, this morning when they caught a few sentences of Weinergate. The natural impulse is to shield them from the squalor, to turn off the | Read More »
There seems to be some confusion over why the Israelis should be so hostile to President Obama’s suggestion that the two-state solution be achieved by returning the Jewish state to its 1967 borders. The President’s supporters argue that since these borders were previously acceptable to Israel, they should be acceptable now. After all, pre-1967 Israel fought to defend those borders and they were on the table | Read More »
The abrupt arrest of IMF director Dominique Strauss-Kahn on charges of sexual assault against an employee at the New York hotel where he was staying are being treated as shocking in France. This is a “coup de tonnerre,” a bolt from the blue, not to mention a body blow to the socialist party he was to represent in the upcoming elections. Everyone in Paris claims | Read More »
63 years ago, Israel was established, giving the Jewish people their own state. Over the ensuing decades the tiny country has been attacked with everything from sticks and stones in its own sovereign territory to words in the hallowed halls of the United Nations. Through a combination of ceaseless vigilance and sheer faith the people of Israel have persevered in the face of relentless bombardment | Read More »
“Inheritance” is a neutral word–it can be bad and good depending on the circumstance. You don’t get to pick what you get any more than you can pick your parents. On the one hand, you have things like photo albums and trusts funds. On the other you have the lasting repercussions of bad behavior, the sins of the father if you will, that can reach | Read More »
The news of Osama bin Laden’s demise has been a long time coming–so long in fact that it has taken some hours to sink in and become real. A decade can be a long time when you are grieving and angry and needful of closure. The scenes of jubilation that spread from ballpark to subway to the White House seemed like a movie in the | Read More »
In the most recent Obama administration shake up, Bob Gates will be leaving the Department of Defense, Leon Pannetta will move from the CIA to DoD, General David Petraeus will move from Afghanistan to the CIA and Ryan Crocker will move from Texas A&M (from whence came Bob Gates) to Afghanistan. As in the previous major changes in the White House staff and the economic | Read More »
Speaking at Tufts University on April 8th, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi had one of those marvelous moments of self-revelation in which a usually polished politician speaking casually and without a script among like-minded friends says what everyone is thinking–what everyone knows to be true–in this case what is considered an unquestionable “fact” by their audience. As you can see from the video, there was | Read More »
Earlier today a bomb exploded on a crowded public bus outside the Jerusalem convention center, injuring more than 40 people. As Jennifer Rubin reports via Hareetz, this is the worst terrorist attack in the city in seven years, and given recent terrorist aggression against Israel out of Gaza, particularly disturbing. The Obama administration response to this atrocity is stunning silence. Rubin also reports that no | Read More »
With thanks to Cousin Aaron, I bring you the news that Michael Hastings of Rolling Stone, the professional military gadfly and all-around speaker of truth to power, hit a new low yesterday. At a Congressional Progressive Caucus Peace and Security Task Force briefing, Hastings lit into General David Petraeus, accusing him of employing the “Charlie Sheen strategy:” General Petraeus is giving us the Charlie Sheen counter-insurgency strategy, | Read More »
I have a few sad thoughts to add to this more thorough, magisterial deconstruction of Peggy Noonan’s column today on Donald Rumsfeld’s Known and Unknown. Through the years I have tried to like Noonan, primarily because there are so few prominent female writers on major editorial pages, and even fewer that are conservatives. Also, as she frequently reminds us, she worked for Ronald Reagan and what | Read More »
On December 11, 2005 former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright went on “Meet the Press” to opine that the Iraq war had been a mistake–worse than that it had de-railed the successful pre-war program of sanctions and a no-fly zone, which had contained the paper tiger: And what we did was to keep Saddam Hussein in a box by using diplomacy, sanctions and force, with | Read More »
Promoted from Diaries – DM I had a novel experience last Thursday–I had lunch with my boss in our office conference room, not as we have untold numbers of times, but as a blogger hoping to get a question in. In a way it was a lunch more than four years in the making.
There are reasons certain controversial pieces of legislation have short sell-by dates. They can be unusual powers authorized by the legislature in moments of extreme danger, powers that during less turbulent times are not worth impinging on our civil liberties. Tonight, House Republicans failed to hold the line on one such bill–the Patriot Act. It needed a two-thirds majority to pass, and it didn’t get | Read More »
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