Yesterday’s Washington Post carried a very scary front-page article, and no, I am not referring to the coverage of the Oklahoma twister. I refer to the article above the fold, left, signed by Scott Wilson and Karen deYoung entitled “Petraeus at heart of Benghazi Dispute.” The article supplies much more detail about the origins of […]

The historian Philip Jenkins, who is an erudite and insightful observer of contemporary religion, writes a column for The Christian Century. In the issue of May 15, 2013, he has a piece reflecting on the twentieth anniversary of the attack by agents of the US government on the Branch Davidian compound near Waco, Texas, during […]

As the latest round of scandals swirls around the White House, there is the usual empty chatter from various spokesmen about the President’s intention to “pivot toward the economy” (again!) and to prioritize unemployment.If only that would happen; America’s jobs problem is big enough and crucial enough that it should be the President’s priority every […]

More than 70,000 Syrians have been killed by their own government, and there is now overwhelming evidence that the regime has used chemical weapons. The “international community”, in a display that is cynical even by its own usual jaded standards, has remained impassive and impotent. Even the Obama Administration, which declared Syria’s use of chemical […]

This piece is fourth in a series on the challenges facing the U.S. Armed Forces. Previous entries discussed the Army, the Air Force and the Marine Corps. The past eight months have been troubling for American security and for how the world regards American power. The September 11, 2012 attack on our consulate in Benghazi […]

Editors’ note: What follows is the eighth part of an exchange on Russian-Western relations following from David Kramer and Lilia Shevtsova’s monthly column at The American Interest Online (see especially their February 21 essay, “Here We Go Again: Falling for the Russia Trap”). The exchange, a complete listing of which may be found below, has also provoked […]

Antipathy between Sunni and Shi’a radicals in and around the Syrian cauldron is growing rapidly, lately manifested in the battle of the shrines—wherein Sunnis destroy Shi’a holy sites (most recently one not too far from Damascus) and proudly disinter centuries-dead bodies (or the dust thought to have once been bodies), and the Iranian regime threatens […]

It’s no fun blogging at moving targets.Since I tried on May 8 to make the simple point that Gregory Hicks’s testimony was being used for partisan purposes, and hence deflected attention from the Obama Administration’s real, seminal errors on Libya—which date to March 2011, not September 2012—some interesting developments have taken place.It is now clear, for example, […]

Pretty much everybody understands at some level that the question of jobs is at the heart of America’s politics today. An old world of stable, reasonably well paid jobs in manufacturing (stuff processing) and in corporate or government bureaucracies (information processing) is passing away. What comes next is up in the air, but as things […]

The media have been full these days with news about the seemingly inexorable victories (at least in America and Europe) of the sexual liberation movements that began over fifty years ago. Same-sex marriage is being legislated in a lengthening list of American states and European nations. The ruling coalition in Germany is threatened with dissolution […]