141 articles
FOR THE BOSTON RED SOX, the Clubhouse Blowup has over the last quarter-century been as reliable a summer fixture as the August Collapse. Generally the debates have been over whether Yaz is a fathead or Lynn's a malingerer or Roger deserves his pay. But this season the whole team--along with the…
THE ONLY LIGHT in the hospital-green back of a Bradley Fighting Vehicle on the move and battened down against the threat of attack is refracted through the dust on the five 6-inch-wide, 2-inch-high periscope windows. But in the gloom you can make out the junk accumulated during five months training…
PRESIDENT BUSH made his visit with Iraqi Americans in Dearborn, Michigan, yesterday into something more than a feel-good photo op with natural fans. Bush used the occasion to hammer on two crucial themes. One was America's unequivocal commitment to the rebuilding of Iraq. The other was his…
Shia Muslim prisoners at New York's Fishkill Correctional Facility are suing state prison authorities. Their complaint is that the state, in accommodating the religious activities of Muslim inmates within its prison system, has favored one Islamic sect over another--Sunni Islam over Shia Islam. The…
WHEN THE U.S.-UK-AUSTRALIA coalition found that Iraq's technicians had refused to torch their oil fields or damage pumping stations, buyers looked forward to falling crude prices. But analysts who had predicted that the liberation of Iraq would quickly increase the volume of crude oil coming onto…
ACCORDING TO pre-Islamic Alawi belief, people at first were stars in the world of light, but fell from celestial orbit through disobedience. Faithful Alawis believe they must be transformed seven times before returning to take their place among the stars. Syria's rookie Alawite president, Bashar…
Extra, Extra: Clinton Appointees Diss Bush Chances are excellent that you have never heard of an obscure executive branch body called the Cultural Property Advisory Committee. According to the State Department website, "State accepts requests from countries for import restrictions on archaeological…
WITH SADDAM HUSSEIN kaput, it's time to address another mess in the Middle East, time for the United States to champion the trampled rights of an oppressed people, time to end the occupation. It's time, in sum, for Syria to get out of Lebanon. Syria's purloining of an entire neighboring country has…
IT'S MORE THAN a decade since my wife Cita and I came to Washington, with the intention of spending a year here before returning to New York. The "why" we came is easy: Irving Kristol, the Pied Piper of the neoconservative set, persuaded us that the intellectual excitement of the Washington policy…
October Men
FEDERAL COURTS UNDERSTAND the First Amendment ban on establishing religion to mean that government may not prefer one religion, or sect, over another. Why then has New York state, in treating the religious activities of Muslim inmates within its prisons, favored one Islamic sect over…
HERE BEGINNETH the lesson: "The major combat portions of the war are over." The stunning success of the "combat portion" of Operation Iraqi Freedom challenges any understanding based upon previous military history. Vice President Dick Cheney's cutting comment about retired generals "embedded in…
Tallahassee, Florida
AMERICA WAS ATTACKED a little over a year and a half ago. This assault was the product of two decades of American weakness in the face of terror and three decades of American fecklessness in the Middle East. From the barely-responded-to bombing of the Marine barracks in Lebanon in 1983 to the host…
Paris
GEORGE ORWELL was a genuinely modest man. But he knew he had a talent for facing unpleasant facts. That doesn't seem at first glance like much of a gift. But when one looks around the world, one quickly sees how rare it is. Most people nurture the facts that confirm their worldview and ignore or…
LIKE ALL HISTORICALLY SIGNIFICANT CONFLICTS, the war in Iraq has produced its share of "winners" and "losers." Yet beyond the fates of individuals or organizations--Jacques Chirac, Jean Chrétien, Brent Scowcroft, the New York Times, the BBC, the National Organization for Women, the Congressional…
IT'S BEEN SEVERAL MONTHS since I last thought about Benjamin and Elizabeth. It hit me as our older children were headed off to school. Elizabeth would have been in first grade in our local elementary school and Ben would be getting on the bus in September headed to kindergarten. Had it not been for…
Damn Senators
EDUCATION SECRETARY Roderick R. Paige, it appears, is the latest victim of gotcha journalism. In his private life, Paige is a deacon at Houston Baptist Church. Last week the Baptist Press, a denominational news service, asked him in an interview, "Given the choice between private and Christian, uh,…
The Last Good Season
WHEN IT COMES TO WEAPONRY, America's prowess is unmatched. Precision-guided bombs and missiles that can target a specific window in a specific building in downtown Baghdad have become the symbol of U.S. combat power. But America's greatest military advantage lies in its unparalleled ability to…
THE DAILY STANDARD welcomes letters to the editor. Letters will be edited for length and clarity and must include the writer's name, city, and state.
THERE WAS TRENT LOTT on one side, and now Rick Santorum on the other. Like bookends, they seem to frame the war with Iraq--each subject to an attack in which an offhand comment is taken by opponents for a steed and ridden to death with spurs. Some commentators (and many, many politicians) hoped…
ACTOR EDWARD NORTON attacked President Bush as possessing a "low quality mind" this week, and thus joined a long list of stars, pundits, and professors who have elected to stand opposite three-quarters of American public opinion. Others who have done so--including Tim Robbins, Susan Sarandon,…
WITH THE WAR in Iraq mostly over, America's foreign policy establishment is widening its gaze and turning to other international problems, most notably the reconstruction of Iraq, the disarming of North Korea, and settling of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But they should also turn their…
HISTORIANS will look back at this month and regard it as one of our nation's most important ever. April 2003 will be seen as the month in which we toppled a regime that tyrannized its own people and was a threat to its region and even beyond it. We don't know what the liberation of Iraq will fully…
DON'T GET YOUR HOPES UP yet for a peace settlement between Israel and the Palestinians. Yasser Arafat, the Palestinian president, has allowed the new prime minister, Mahmoud Abbas, to form a governing cabinet. And Abbas's emergence represents a shrinking of Arafat's authority. But Arafat has lost…
SOMETIMES it's necessary to beat a dead horse. Many recriminations pieces have been written since the end of the war (here, for starters) and while they may seem like simple gloating, they're not. It's crucial to keep score on public commentators because if you bat .115 in the bigs, you get canned.…
THE LEFT EDGE of the Senate Democratic caucus has taken control of the judicial-nomination process and has forced the entire Senate into what is, at best, an extra-constitutional swamp. With their filibuster of D.C. Circuit Court nominee Miguel Estrada, their threatened filibusters of Fifth Circuit…
SOME TIME in the morning of April 9, 2003, as the statue of Saddam Hussein was being hauled down in Baghdad, another statue--of Walter Cronkite, famed CBS newsman--hacked at with hammers by various bloggers, also came crashing down. Cronkite, once called "the most trusted man in America," was…
PRESIDENT BUSH'S foreign policy team is trying to persuade him that he should now turn his attention to Syria. His domestic advisers want him to concentrate on jobs--enough new jobs to ensure that he keeps his own after next year's election. Right now the president is riding the brilliant American…
WHEN KARL ROVE, President Bush's chief political adviser, appeared recently at a hotel near the White House for a luncheon with the media, more than fifty newspaper and magazine reporters jumped at the chance to interview him. Nearly as many turned up when Jean-David Levitte, the French ambassador…
Existential America
[img_assist|nid=|title=|desc=|link=none|align=right|width=|height=] Safat, Kuwait
Berlin
[img_assist|nid=|title=|desc=|link=none|align=right|width=|height=] Umm Qasr, Iraq
[img_assist|nid=|title=|desc=|link=none|align=right|width=|height=] NOW THE RECONSTRUCTION BEGINS. What it will cost no one yet knows. Nor do we have a clear idea where the many billions will come from. But we do know this. The amount of outside aid that Iraq will require will depend on a prior…
Paris
AT THE END of "Gangs of New York," Martin Scorsese inserts a montage of the city across time--from a decrepit nineteenth-century slum to the modern megalopolis of Manhattan. In the last shot, right before the credits roll, two buildings stand out: the twin towers of the World Trade Center. They…
IT'S NOT OFTEN that you see an American commit hari-kari in public, but that's what John Kerry appears to have done. In one thrill-packed day--April 2--in New Hampshire, he managed to (1) blame George W. Bush for the train wreck in the U.N. Security Council, (2) take his stand with this country's…
Dereliction of Duty
THE WEEKEND OF APRIL 5, the Organization of American Historians (OAH)--the leading association of professors of American history--held its annual meeting in Memphis, Tennessee. The best-attended event, televised live by C-SPAN, was a panel discussion entitled "Historians Reflect on the War in…
AREN'T YOU PROUD of us? For most of this past week, as an overwhelmingly successful, lightning-quick Anglo-American military assault liberated Iraq's capital city, and ordinary Baghdadis poured into the streets to kiss our GIs and stomp on pictures of Saddam Hussein, THE SCRAPBOOK has remained the…
My Brother's Keeper
Jarhead
Books in Brief
[img_assist|nid=|title=|desc=|link=none|align=right|width=|height=] THE UNITED NATIONS is a temptation that's easy to resist. It won't enforce its own resolutions. Libya, a police state, chairs its human rights commission. It provides an arena where France, with its unearned Security Council veto,…
I WRITE A NEWSPAPER COLUMN, to which I append my e-mail address. For the most part, it's a joy to get reader reaction, pro and con. The pro mail makes you feel wonderful and the con makes you feel like you've at least disturbed the comfortable thought processes of people who disagree with you.
[img_assist|nid=|title=|desc=|link=none|align=right|width=|height=] THERE'S A HUNGER in the world of public intellectuals and chattering commentators--among everyone from Unitarian peace activists to hawkish Catholic neoconservatives--for just-war theory to work like a gumball machine: You pay your…
I HAVE A FEELING I'm about to make a lot of people mad. I don't want to, you understand, but there's something I've had on my mind, and I think it'll make a bunch of folks angry. Maybe not so much angry, as horrified. Yeah, that's it, horrified and disbelieving. Aghast; agog. They'll gasp, stagger…
THE DAILY STANDARD welcomes letters to the editor. Letters will be edited for length and clarity and must include the writer's name, city, and state.
LAST SATURDAY the antiwar group ANSWER was scheduled to hold their first postwar protest in Washington at noon, but by 1:30 p.m. there was still little indication of any organized assembly in front of the White House at Lafayette Park. In fact, two of the most prominent protesters were a pair of…
BOTH SENATOR TOM DASCHLE and Bishop Robert Carlson responded to yesterday's article after its publication with prepared statements. Neither denied the existence of the letter, but both refused to discuss the contents of what one Catholic official in Sioux Falls angrily described as "private…
ALWAYS ON THE LOOKOUT for creative ways to mold my teenage daughter, I accidentally discovered an efficient weapon in a pile of clothes earmarked for Goodwill. "Whose is that?" Maggie asked. "Mine," I said.
JIM SLEEPER is a lecturer in political science at Yale, and an author and former columnist at the New York Daily News. He wrote a column for the Yale Daily News on April 14. We can assume he knows about the need to choose words carefully, and we can assume he chose his words below carefully. Eliana…
TOM DASCHLE may no longer call himself a Catholic. The Senate minority leader and the highest ranking Democrat in Washington has been sent a letter by his home diocese of Sioux Falls, sources in South Dakota have told The Weekly Standard, directing him to remove from his congressional biography and…
PERHAPS because of the mixed and novel aims of the war in Iraq, no single argument against the war ever came to define the antiwar movement. Rather, the pro- and antiwar camps roughly divided into people who believe in the moral potential of American might and those who don't. The latter have been…
EDUCATION SECRETARY Rod Paige gave an interview to the Baptist Press early in the year. The publication, the news service of the Southern Baptist Convention, isn't widely read in the nation's capital. But the just-published story, featuring Paige's comments on Christian schools and Christian…
"TOO GOOD TO CHECK" is the technical term for a story like the censoring of "Guernica." Secretary of State Colin Powell, so the story goes, went to the United Nations to present the case for war against Iraq to the Security Council, then took questions from the press standing before a blue…
IN AMERICAN HISTORY, there are three dire dates--December 7, 1941; November 22, 1963; and September 11, 2001--that send a collective shudder through our memory. The left also has its own special roster of days not to cherish: December 12, 2000, when George W. Bush became president; November 7,…
IT'S ALMOST AS IF some people want Iraqi civilians to die. So eager are they to score political points that you can almost see them licking their chops as they desperately seek out any reports--however sketchy--of Iraqi casualties. For their political agenda, the only good Iraqi is a dead Iraqi.…
MORALE HAS CURDLED in many American units around Iraq, despite the amazing success of coalition forces since the invasion began on March 20th. The reason isn't 95-degree heat or the relentless dust or the suicidal harassment by Saddam's Fedayeen. It's the shameful total breakdown of the army's…
Last Friday, CNN's Eason Jordan published an op-ed in the New York Times that contained some admissions that cannot be considered as anything other than astonishing. CNN's "chief news executive" confessed that, among other things, Saddam's crazy son Uday had told Eason in 1995 that he, Uday,…
WHEN IT COMES TO IRAQ, media policy seems to be: Good news is no news.
THEY KNOW THE WORDS, but they don't quite have the tune.
A WASHINGTON POST, Style section feature today--Let Slip the Poets of War--manages to completely misrepresent the work of Walt Whitman, recasting The Good, Gray Poet as a patron of the antiwar constituency among versifiers.
I HAVE BEEN REMARKABLY DILIGENT in keeping up with the news from the war in Iraq--some might say a little too diligent. I was the first one on my block to track the Command Post hour by hour, and I recall with a surge of pleasure the first time I got to a juicy story before Glenn Reynolds could…
WITH THE POSSIBILITY that Saddam Hussein was killed last week in the bombing near a Baghdad restaurant, there has been much speculation over whether allied authorities will be able to positively identify his remains. The blast was so intense (it left a 60 foot hole and shattered windows 300 yards…
A GROUP identified as administration officials, anxious advisers of President Bush, former Republican officeholders, and party leaders told the Washington Post early last week that the president has been getting "bum advice" from his top advisers on the war with Iraq. The group, whose members…
IN THE 1960 MOVIE "Please Don't Eat the Daisies," the theater critic Larry Mackay says of his new job at a major New York newspaper, "There's something about getting to the top of your field, even if it's only the bottom of the top." The author Jean Kerr, who died in January at age seventy-nine,…
The Victorians
Umm Qasr, Iraq
MICHAEL KELLY was born into a newspaper family. His father Tom was a reporter on the Washington Daily News. His mother Marguerite writes the wonderful "Family Almanac" column for the Washington Post. Sometime over the past few decades reporters became journalists, but Michael never really made the…
LAST WEEK, Democratic party consultant Jenny Backus told the New York Times that Democratic congressmen and presidential candidates "don't need to do any criticism of the Bush administration right now" because the "generals are doing that job for us." Of all the retired rent-a-generals currently…
Oxford Days
WHEN MY BROTHER MIKE walked in one day and announced that he had joined the Marine Corps, the rest of our family was shocked. None of us had thought he was the type. Physically Mike could cut it; he'd wrestled and run track in high school. But like a lot of guys at 18, he was unfocused, not sure of…
The Kerry Regime The difference between a military campaign and a political campaign is that a military campaign has occasional pauses. Massachusetts senator John Kerry traveled to Peterborough, N.H., last Wednesday for another meet-and-greet to further his presidential candidacy. He spoke so…
Manchester, New Hampshire
Safwan, Iraq
Books in Brief Revolt of the Masscult by Chris Lehmann (Prickly Paradigm, 79 pp., $10). In this, the seventh in a series of pamphlets by the oddly named Prickly Paradigm Press, Washington Post Book World deputy editor Chris Lehmann argues for Culture--with a capital C--against its many enemies,…
THE WAR FOR IRAQ'S LIBERATION began on March19. The fourth anniversary of the NATO intervention in Kosovo was March24. Kosovar Albanians, a majority of whom are Muslims, lead the Islamic world in their enthusiasm for America. But they hate the United Nations and the European meddlers in whose hands…
"YOUR COUNTRY sinks beneath Jewish-Anglo-American bombs. Your parents lie amid the ruins. Come avenge them." That might be a quote from the Iraqi information minister; it comes in fact from a leaflet printed by the SS and discovered in liberated Cologne, March 1945. The similarities between Iraq on…
FROM THE CEASELESS and often disgraceful efforts to tease meaning out of the first two weeks of the Iraq war, two serious lessons stand out. The first is a reacquaintance with the contours of modern tyranny. Saddam Hussein is not merely a dictator; he is the head of a police state administered by…
SO WHAT HAPPENS NEXT? I'm not talking about the future of Iraqi democracy, the state of Iraq's economy, or who will be its next leader. But rather, what happens to the old leader and the 54 other thugs now listed on a deck of cards to assist coalition troops in the manhunt? Where do they go, what…
IT'S THE TOUGHEST kind of battle imaginable. A sniper around every corner. Ambushes on all sides. Booby traps and mines at every step. It's hard to tell friend from foe. Casualties are the rule, not the exception. Welcome to urban combat.
THE FOLLOWING are selected quotations (approximately two-thirds of the total) included by Seymour M. Hersh in his New Yorker article Offense and Defense (cover date April 7, 2003, posted on the New Yorker website March 31, 2003, ten days before the fall of Baghdad):
THE APRIL 7, 2003 ISSUE of the New Yorker contains an article by Seymour Hersh that will be taught in journalism classes for decades to come: "Offense and Defense: The Battle between Donald Rumsfeld and the Pentagon." Hersh's opening sentences read: "As the ground campaign against Saddam Hussein…
FIRST, SOME STIPULATIONS: The war is not over yet. There is still much fighting to be done and many things could go wrong. Chemical weapons could still be used. More allied soldiers will die in fighting. There will be more civilian casualties. Yesterday's collapse of the regime in Baghdad was a…
IN ALL LIKELIHOOD, the pictures Americans saw on every news network Wednesday morning will be the ones we see on the covers of newsweeklies when they run their year-end wrap-ups next December: jubilant Iraqis dancing around the toppled statue of Saddam Hussein in Firdos Square, citizens of all…
ON MONDAY the Supreme Court released its ruling in Virginia v. Black, et al., a constitutional free-speech challenge to a 50-year-old Richmond legislative enactment that bans Klan-style cross burnings specifically designed to "intimidate" their victims. And here's the lead sentence of Tuesday's New…
I WISH MICHAEL KELLY were alive to see this day. He would have known how to savor it. I wish Ronald Reagan could be aware of the scenes being played out in Baghdad. He would know that the liberationist sentiment he rekindled in the American heart didn't die out with the liberation of eastern and…
THIS MORNING CNN reports that many Iraqi officials didn't show up for work in Baghdad and that the police are not on the streets. Also, the network is broadcasting footage of a massive anti-Saddam rally in the Saddam City section of eastern Baghdad. There are pictures of one man spitting on a…
ONCE IN A BLUE MOON, I read something in the New York Times that actually brings a smile to my face. Take this story from last Saturday's edition, which chronicled the split on college campuses between students and professors over the war in Iraq. It sounds almost too good to be true: Leftist…
COMMENTING UPON the progress of coalition forces in Operation Iraqi Freedom has, over the past week, become an increasingly fruitless endeavor. United States troops are racing through the streets of Baghdad nearly as fast as they marched from Kuwait to the city outskirts, and the much awaited…
AFTER SYRACUSE'S BIG VICTORY last night, the women's NCAA tourney concludes tonight with the University of Connecticut taking on the University of Tennessee. In an effort to make this match-up seem like less of an afterthought, the defenders of women's basketball will be out in force. "Women's…
YOU WOULDN'T WANT to be a defender of Saddam's regime right about now. Not only is the country teeming with coalition regulars, but also a vast and deadly array of the world's elite special forces. We're not just talking about the Green Berets. There's the Delta Force, Navy SEALs, and the…
THE ATTEMPT by France to protect Saddam, even at the cost of a crack-up of NATO and the United Nations, has confused many Americans who had long believed that France was an ally. So speculation abounds: Is Chirac on the take? Is it about the oil contracts? Are French munitions going to show up in…
"WAR IS GOD'S WAY of teaching Americans geography," Ambrose Bierce, the eccentric author of "The Devil's Dictionary," told a Carnegie Hall audience one year before America entered WWI. He might have added economics to the disciplines about which we learn something from wars. One lesson we have…
IF YOU FOLLOW men's college basketball, you know that Georgia didn't play last night in New Orleans for the national championship. But it could have--had it not disgraced itself. Georgia finished the regular season with 19 wins and 8 losses, having won 11 of 16 games in the Southeastern Conference.…
"THERE ARE OTHER WAYS to go about [this war] than to have thousands of people killed on both sides." So proclaimed House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi last Tuesday on CNBC's "Capital Report."
I'M SURE MOST OF YOU are familiar with Marcel Proust's brilliant and epic work, "Remembrance Of Things Past." That is, I'm sure you're as familiar with it as I am, which is to say you picked it as one of your free book-club selections 14 years ago, got a few pages in, found it less convivial than…
ANYONE STILL DOUBTING the criminal essence of Saddam's regime need only survey the methods employed so far by Iraqi fighters to see that laws, humanitarian conventions, and elementary standards of decency hold no sway with the dictator or the men who carry out his will. Already, there are too many…
IT IS BECOMING INCREASINGLY clear that the bio-anarchists leading the charge to Brave New World want a virtually unlimited license to engage in human cloning. The proof is in the legislation they keep trying to pass.
Encounters and Reflections
Kuwait City
San Francisco
"We are his nemesis"
WARFARE IS ABOUT balancing three goals. On the one hand, you must accomplish military objectives, like seizing territory or destroying enemy forces. On the other hand, you must accomplish political objectives, the larger geopolitical goals that the combat is meant to serve, like stability in the…
Paris
THE WORLD has no need for another contribution to the fitting stream of tributes to Daniel Patrick Moynihan's extraordinary life and work. But I hope a brief personal reminiscence will not be amiss.
Near the Iraqi border
IT'S HUGE, OPAQUE, PERVERSE, run by the United Nations, and about the last thing a postwar Iraq will need. But after a short pause, the Oil-for-Food program is with us once again, revived last week at the urging of France, and with the backing of President Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair.
EVEN WITH THE START of the war to unseat Saddam Hussein, religious leaders continue to oppose the use of force as unnecessary and unjust. Bob Edgar, general secretary of the National Council of Churches, laments the "failures of heart, mind and will that led to this war." The Church World Service,…
Dancing in the Wind
Tehran
IN THE DAYS before the British Parliament voted on a resolution endorsing war with Iraq, Prime Minister Tony Blair was a nervous wreck. He feared losing so many Labor members that the opposition Conservatives would be in a pivotal position to save or embarrass him. The Bush administration rushed to…
Amusing Guy
WE'VE LEARNED at least two things in the first nine days of the Second Gulf War. The American people are fine. American liberalism is not.
Truth and Truthfulness
MUCH HAS BEEN MADE in recent days of the fact that coalition forces have not yet found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The BBC, among many other media outlets, has been positively obsessed with this failure--running nonstop packages that juxtapose comments made by Tony Blair and Dick Cheney…
AFTER IRAQ INVADED Kuwait in 1991, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher met with the first President Bush and urged him not to "go wobbly." Bush didn't. Now, when the current President Bush confers with Prime Minister Tony Blair in Belfast, Northern Ireland, on Monday, he'll return the favor by…
LET THE over-exuberance recommence! Washington is in the grip of a series of mood swings. An insanely negative tone prevailed in the war coverage here at the beginning of this week, but now it is the hawks who feel justified in gloating. If you had read the American press last Sunday, Monday and…
A FEW DAYS AGO I wrote a piece about some of the ridiculous questions foreign reporters have been asking Brigadier General Vincent Brooks at the daily CENTCOM briefings. I thought I got it all out of my system. I was wrong. On April 3, an Al Jazeera correspondent asked Brooks:
"THE CHINESE GOVERNMENT has not covered up. There is no need," Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao said last Tuesday in regard to the country's outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS). "We have nothing to hide," assured Jianchao. But shortly afterwards, CNN's satellite feed to a…
Safwan, Iraq
SOME POINT and counterpoint from recent days:
HAVING MADE the mistake of agreeing to "debate" the war before a college campus audience, I ought not to have expected much beyond emotional appeals from the antiwar participants. But I did, and of course, I was disappointed.
COMEDY, performers tell us, is harder than drama. One reason may be that grimness and weight come more naturally than lightness. To achieve the sour gloom of the dramatic performer, one need only take oneself seriously, which is both easy to do and psychologically gratifying. Take yourself…
IT SHOULDN'T SURPRISE anyone that the editorial writers and opinion columnists at the New York Times oppose the war in Iraq. But what is surprising is that two weeks into the war, much of that opposition has leaked off of the editorial pages and into the news coverage. It's almost as if the paper…
[img_assist|nid=323|title=|desc=Marines from the 3rd Air Naval Gunfire Liaison Company call in close air support from AH-1 Cobra helicopter gunships during an exercise at the Mountain Warfare Training Center in Bridgeport, Calif. (Photo by Christian…
WASHINGTON PUNDITS are focused on the difficult challenge of winning the hearts and minds of the Arab world. We would be well advised to spend some time thinking about how to win some hearts and minds in Europe. The situation in Britain is not as favorable as one might think if you looked only at…
SHOULD WE BE SURPRISED that American troops are cutting through the "elite" Republican guards like a knife through butter? Of course not. It's not really an even fight. And if you'd ignored the media critics and armchair generals and instead paid attention to John Keegan, the great military…
LAST SUNDAY on "Meet the Press," Tim Russert confronted Iraq's ambassador to the United Nations, Mohammed Al-Douri, with evidence of Iraqi human-rights abuses documented by Amnesty International. Asked for comment, Al-Douri demurred, saying, "Amnesty International is not reliable for me. . . . They…
THE ENGLISH-LANGUAGE version of Al Jazeera's website was test-launched early last week, but became inaccessible almost immediately and has been down ever since. It appears that American hackers are the most likely culprits. (For a brief period last week, those who tried to access the site were…
REND RAHIM FRANCKE talks to Iraqis--her own wide contacts inside her native country, but also a network of exiles, who in turn stay in touch with family and friends back home. As executive director of the Iraq Foundation, which promotes democracy and human rights in Iraq, Francke keeps abreast of…
BOUNCING AROUND the Internet is a photo of a huge banner that was carried in the recent "peace" demonstration in San Francisco. The banner says, "We support our troops when they shoot their officers." Now, the calm response to that banner is that "our troops," were they to shoot "their officers,"…
IF THERE IS ANYTHING that can be said to be "enjoyable" about this war, it must surely be the delights of the CENTCOM 7:00 a.m. press briefings. Handled mostly by the able Brigadier General Vincent Brooks, they shed little light on the actual progress of the war, but give a clear look into the…
GIVE SADDAM HUSSEIN CREDIT. He learned from the first Gulf War that it makes no sense to go toe-to-toe with U.S. forces in conventional combat. In the second Gulf War, he has adopted a smarter strategy of retreating into urban areas and harassing U.S. supply lines with irregular forces. Saddam's…
Umm Qasr, Iraq
IMAGINE that it is Day 1 in the post-Saddam era. The war is over, save for the mopping up of a few irregulars, the tyrant has been "dealt with," to use military lingo, and Jacques Chirac is leading a charge in the United Nations to wrest control of the reconstruction process from the Americans and…