Late last week I had a chance to sit down for a talk with Matthew Hoh. You might remember his name from when he resigned his post with the State Department in Zabul Province in Afghanistan in 2009. Here’s a link to an article which was published around the time of his resignation. It ought […]

The news that George Mitchell is resigning as US special envoy closes a chapter in the greatest international failure of the Obama administration to date.  The President’s foreign policy team has some real successes under its belt — the reset with Russia, a marked reduction in global levels of anti-Americanism, steady progress in Iraq, and […]

I don’t want to make this a habit, and I suspect he doesn’t either, but Paul Krugman and I are once again in (very) partial agreement.  We both think the American elite has intellectually and morally lost its way, and we agree that the problems our country faces today have more to do with elite […]

On April 27, 2011, The New York Times carried a story about atheists campaigning to have their own chaplaincy in the American military. The campaign is led by an organization called Military Association of Atheists and Freethinkers. Jason Torpy, its president (a former Army captain) identified the group’s faith as “humanism”. He stated the case […]

The taking of Osama was a defeat for Al Qaeda.  It was a disaster for Pakistan. The Assassination in Abbottabad was a strategic catastrophe for the military rulers of this slowly and painfully failing state.  On the one hand, it leaves the reputation of Pakistan as an effective partner against fanatical terror groups in ruins.  […]

As it turns out, I was brave enough to read this morning’s press. Let me follow up on my earlier posts with just two confirmatory comments.The first is that the U.S. military has reportedly killed two high-level terrorists in Yemen, two brothers named Mubarak, with a Predator strike. This operation derived from the intelligence taken […]

Today’s news brings yet more frustration with how the government, and the White House in particular, is handling the aftermath of the bin Laden killing. But at least the news is mixed. The good news is that the President has made the right basic decision not to release photographs that are gruesome, that would incite […]

On April 23, 2011, The New York Times carried a story about the Embassy of God, a Pentecostal megachurch in, of all places, Kiev. I had known about this church before, but the Times story, in combination with other items about Ukraine that had come to my intention, made me reflect about it once more. […]

I have to admit that the killing of Osama bin Laden on Sunday put me in a halfway good mood. It seemed to me not only a victory against resolute and still dangerous enemies, but also an event that could help galvanize the national spirit at a time when so many Americans think that our […]

George Monbiot of the left-leaning British newspaper The Guardian has a must-read column in which he admits that because of a whole series of intellectual mistakes, the global green movement’s policy prescriptions are hopelessly flawed.Read the whole piece for a thoughtful and brutally clear expose of the intellectual bankruptcy of the green movement from one […]