When a member of a recent audience told Sen. John McCain she thought Sen. Barack Obama is an Arab the Republican candidate for the presidency of the United States said, “No, ma’am, he’s a decent family man.”
And with this supposed magnanimity the man who would be president told 200 million members of the human race [...]
It is perhaps a measure of the White House’s cockeyed hubris that Russia has seized a moment in history when our armed forces are overextended to bully our ally, neighboring Georgia. Given such hubris, it was inevitable the White House would forget it’s not the only bully on the block.
Read More...The news industry is worrying itself from its 19th Century decrepitude to the ether, but it needs to redefine the concept of news itself. What we read in our newspapers and watch on television is antiquarian. In some ways magazines, with their broader perspectives, are ahead of the curve.
What the news needs more than anything [...]
When you search the web for Sinbad you’re likely to find David Adkins, the comedian, before you find that wealthy young sailor of Basra whose adventures are immortalized in The Thousand and One Nights.
When you search on Odysseus you find Homer’s mythological sailor immediately. We are, after all, Eurocentric, and worldwide accessibility to the web [...]
I don’t know what metrics social scientists use to measure a civilization’s progress and decline. But every time I hear the increasingly inane debate about flip-flopping, every time I hear a slogan or receive a swift-boat e-mail, I think of the progress bars on our computers.
We wait more or less patiently as software downloads or [...]
Our military academies have curricula of a very high order, so why are we turning to widespread use of mercenaries? What’s the connection, you ask, between good teaching and mercenaries? History teaches us that mercenaries are used when there isn’t enough support for a war at home and when great powers become exhausted, corrupt and [...]
Read More...I understand the argument for a volunteer army. It’s a powerful argument. Its proof is how very good our army is. But I think ultimately it’s a deeply flawed argument, because if we are to remain a democratic republic the rich should not be sending the sons and daughters of the poor to war.
And even [...]
The soldiers we see in Iraq, looking more and more like cyborgs with their night vision headgear, and the soldiers who won the great tank battles of Desert Storm because of their night vision capability, could not have carried out their missions were it not for a son of Iraq named Abu Ali Hasan al [...]
Read More...The ability to walk a mile in someone else’s shoes is as rare and precious in our private lives as it is in the affairs of nations. Word that young Muslims are flocking to the tribal areas of northwestern Pakistan to take up arms against the West has Washington beltway insiders beating the war drums [...]
Read More...Here’s a modest proposal about the Sunday TV talk shows. Let’s call them the Sunday agenda shows, because, when you study them you see that these pundits aren’t shedding light, examining, dissecting, they’re setting the agenda, they’re telling us what’s important instead of enabling us to understand what is happening.
Read More...