Last week, the New York Times carried a front-page story on Libya entitled “Libya Struggles to Curb Militias as Chaos Grows.” If the headline were not enough to clarify the main point, the subheads in the print edition were: “Government Paralyzed” and “Officials Confronted by Rivalries, Grievances and Old Habits.”To my knowledge, this is the […]

Joe Nocera has been a welcome addition to the New York Times op-ed page since his start there as a regular some months ago. On Tuesday he wrote another fine column, this one on why the current German leadership is on a path to do what he thinks, in retrospect, will look completely insane—not to […]

One of my admittedly arcane little hobbies is to discover behavior in our avowedly secular society here in 21st-century America that looks, feels and quacks not like a duck, but like what in earlier ages would have been recognized as obviously religious in character.When I describe a behavior as religious in character I mean something […]

I have taken up space in the electronic ether twice before on the general subject of Libya: once on March 22, just days after President Obama ordered a cruise missile attack on Tripoli, and again on August 16, when I raised the prospect of revenge killings on a large scale and what that might portend […]

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, […]

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 […]

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 […]

Watching the political circus here in Washington, and not only in Washington, often throws up no little bit of frustration. People in this town say the damnedest things sometimes. The typical think tank event here is rich in posturing and positioning, far poorer in any capacity to recognize, let alone follow, rules of evidence normal, […]

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 […]