Looking back on the life of an extremely difficult woman.

With the death of Osama bin Laden at the hands of American Special Forces on May 2, 2011, the 9/11 decade may be said to be psychologically over.1 Political decades, after all, do not have to fit neatly into the calendar.  Just as the Sixties began with the assassination of President Kennedy on November 2, […]

As I surveyed the photographs of people in Cairo and elsewhere in the Arab world, mostly young and brimming with enthusiasm, often with fingers raised in a “V” for victory, I was reminded of three similar moments in recent Latin American history, each of which I witnessed firsthand: the Dominican revolution of 1965; the Sandinista […]

How Americans have commemorated the Civil War at fifty, one hundred and 150 years tells us who we are as a nation-in-progress.

A former Ambassador critiques a former Special Envoy’s take on Pakistani double-gaming.

I really cannot resist commenting on two phenomena that seem quite different in nature but whose simultaneity suggests a few curmudgeonly observations. I am of course still on curmudgeon alert, but I can’t get to my real work today until I get these observations off my chest.First, about Washington’s earthquake yesterday early afternoon. There isn’t […]

The Obama Administration needs to be bolder in reforming the two government-sponsored mortgage giants.

I have not written in this space on Libya, and the Western intervention therein, since March 22—just days after some $350 million worth of U.S. cruise missiles commenced the NATO campaign against the regime of Muammar Qaddafi. That is nearly five months ago, in a war that was supposed to be over in days, not […]

“The information contained in our shared [genome] is so fundamental, and requires so much further research to understand its utility, that patenting it at the earliest stage is like putting up a whole lot of unnecessary toll booths on the road to discovery”, said National Institutes of Health Director and former head of the Human […]

Last month, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy (IRGCN) chief Ali Fadavi declared, “The frontline of the Islamic Republic is the sea. Our enemy, the United States, has a military capacity at sea and has secured hegemony by the means of its naval capacity. . . . It is necessary that the Iranian navy counters […]