107 articles
The melodramatic saga swirling around the sale of U.S. energy company Unocal has had a strong damsel-in-distress flavor about it: Will the fair maiden be rescued by Chevron Texaco-the nominally American knight in shining armor-or be spirited away by the Black Knight of Beijing, aka the China…
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.
SENATOR CHARLES SCHUMER of New York has led the charge for Senate Democrats over the last several days in demanding the release of thousands of pages of highly confidential internal executive branch memos written by Supreme Court nominee John Roberts when he worked as a deputy solicitor general in…
REJOICE! The National Hockey League is back! All it took was a lost season, a lost TV contract with ESPN, a lost draft, God knows how much lost revenue, untold numbers of lost fans--but, fear not, pro hockey is ready to go for 2005-06. And who among us isn't brimming with anticipation?
IN A LETTER WRITTEN to the al Qaeda leadership in early 2004, Abu Musab Zarqawi described the Iraqi Kurds in less than favorable terms. As far as Zarqawi was concerned, they were "a Trojan horse" who had opened their land to the Jews and established a society that served as the antithesis to his…
JUDGE JOHN ROBERTS IS CURSED: with a sense of humor.
ZIMBABWEAN PRESIDENT ROBERT MUGABE has signed a deal with his Chinese counterpart Hu Jintao in Beijing. The details have not been made public but sources say that China has been given mineral rights to platinum and other minerals. A land deal for tobacco may also be included. Mugabe requires…
AMONG THE MANY unresolved issues of the former Iraqi regime's support for terrorism, few are more potentially important than the activities throughout the mid to late 1990s of Iraqi military officials and chemical weapons specialists in Sudan.
London
ANYONE FAMILIAR WITH WEDDINGS knows the drill: for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health, until death do us part. But if New Jersey author and wedding expert Sharon Naylor has analyzed the current direction of marriage correctly, that phrase may soon pass from modern weddings faster than it…
IN RECENT TIMES the United Nations has seemed a sclerotic bureaucracy mired in corruption and pointlessness. But now President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe has presented U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan with a golden opportunity to reestablish the reputation of the organization. Mugabe has invited…
Read The Pope of Terrorism, Part I
ON SATURDAY, former CIA analyst Larry Johnson gave the Democratic party's weekly radio address and excoriated President Bush for not having fired Karl Rove and others in connection with the leak of CIA officer Valerie Plame's name to the press. This followed Johnson's appearance before a panel of…
PRESIDENT BUSH'S NOMINATION of John Roberts to the Supreme Court has brought into public view a hitherto-obscure movement, or conspiracy; or maybe just an obscure hoax: the "Constitution in Exile" movement. The concern that Roberts might be part of this shadowy group was voiced most explicitly by…
LAURA BUSH APPEARED ON NBC'S Today show last Tuesday, speaking from a classroom in Cape Town, South Africa. She answered a couple of questions about the Supreme Court vacancy created by the resignation of Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, volunteering that she "would really like for [her husband] to…
IT'S THE SUMMER OF THE second year of the Bush administration, trouble is brewing in Iraq and a seat has come open on the Supreme Court. I'm talking about 1990, of course. But the similarities are suggestive, and one lesson to be taken from that year is that a Republican president can nominate an…
Waterloo: June 18, 1815
WHAT A SUMMER OF LOVE this has been. Tom Cruise fell for the nubile actress Katie Holmes, just in time for the premiere of War of the Worlds. Brad Pitt became smitten with his costar Angelina Jolie, conveniently prior to their film Mr. & Mrs. Smith. And in light of such calculated coupling, it's a…
YEARS AGO, A SCIENTIFIC study of the Eskimos of Greenland concluded that a diet rich in fish oils could help reduce the risk of heart disease. This, in turn, led to a surge in demand for fatty fish like wild salmon. It's a shame scientists haven't done a separate study on the people of the…
The Prince of the City
THE JULY SUICIDE BOMBINGS IN London--some or all of whose perpetrators were Muslims born and reared in Britain--are likely to produce in the United Kingdom the same intellectual reflection on Muslim identity in Europe that is already underway in nearby countries. The French began this reflection in…
The Nine Lives of Joe Wilson's Reputation
London
Waukee, Iowa
Bagram Air Base, Afghanistan
Rare Rationality
THE FIRST 15 MINUTES OF Wedding Crashers are about as good as American comedy gets. Washingtonians John Beckwith (Owen Wilson) and Jeremy Klein (Vince Vaughn) work as divorce mediators, and as the movie opens, we see them browbeat a husband and wife who would just as soon kill each other as settle…
THERE WAS SOMETHING BEYOND OLD-fashioned--maybe the right word is archaic--about Shelby Foote. It emerged full-blown that evening a decade ago when he appeared in Ken Burns's Civil War series as the best voice of our national Iliad. He recited his anecdotes with a twinkling eye and in that mellow,…
IS THERE A FOREIGN-student crisis in American higher education? Last November, the Institute of International Education reported "the first absolute decline in foreign enrollments" at American colleges and universities in more than three decades. Overnight, the 2.4 percent one-year drop in foreign…
WHILE LONDON POLICE WERE SIFTING through the wreckage of three subway trains and a bus on the evening of July 7, an agitated woman was calling the emergency hotline that had been arranged for people to report missing family members and friends.
"America incarnates the devil for Muslims. When I say Muslims, I mean all the Muslims in the world." --Hassan al-Turabi, Saddam Hussein's close ally, Osama bin Laden's friend and one-time benefactor, as quoted in an interview with the Associated Press (1997) WHEN SECRETARY OF STATE CONDOLEEZZA RICE…
ON JULY 25, DEFENSE secretary Donald Rumsfeld is scheduled to visit Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan. The topic of discussion will be the continuation of U.S. military activities at Manas, the U.S. base on Kyrgyz territory established after 9/11 propelled Central Asia back to strategic importance.
AS THE WAR with Saddam's Iraq approached, a small group of terrorists in Kurdish-controlled Iraq garnered a significant amount of news coverage. Senior-level Bush administration officials had claimed that this group, Ansar al Islam, represented a key link between Saddam's regime and al Qaeda. There…
THERE WAS A TIME when political winds flowed west to east across America. But this summer in California, the breeze blows the opposite way, with politicians here playing by East Coast rules.
"You, gracious brothers, are the leaders, guides, and symbolic figures of jihad and battle. We do not see ourselves as fit to challenge you, and we have never striven to achieve glory for ourselves. All that we hope is that we will be the spearhead, the enabling vanguard, and the bridge on which…
JUDGE JOHN ROBERTS was a member of the ill-fated White House basketball team in the 1986 City of Alexandria Men's Division D. I know, as I was the player-coach on a squad that went 1-9, and which depended on speechwriters Peter Robinson and Josh Gilder to work the boards and Roberts to hit 20…
AS ANNOUNCED ON Wednesday, July 20, Saudi Arabia's long-serving ambassador to the United States, Prince Bandar bin Sultan bin Abdul-Aziz, is leaving town. Allegedly, he resigned. The dean of the foreign diplomatic corps in Washington will be replaced by Prince Turki al Faisal, the former…
ISRAEL'S UPCOMING WITHDRAWAL FROM GAZA is drawing so much attention that few have noticed the dramatic vote this week in Israel's Knesset Finance Committee ratifying a government resolution to finally reform Israel's regressive financial markets. This reform will break up a bank duopoly which has…
EARLIER THIS SPRING the journalistic world celebrated the most famous of all anonymous sources, Deep Throat. More than three decades after he inadvertently began the Age of Anonymous Sourcing, Mark Felt became the toast of media circles when he acknowledged his role in Watergate, the scandal that…
AT FIRST GLANCE, Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri does not appear to be the most likely candidate to serve as an ally of militant Islamists. The former vice chairman of the Iraqi Baath Party's Revolutionary Command Council, al-Douri was the only member of Saddam's inner circle not in Baghdad when the city…
PRESIDENT BUSH kept his promise in nominating John Roberts, a federal appeals court judge, to replace Justice Sandra Day O'Connor the Supreme Court. Since Bush first announced for the presidency in 1999, he has vowed to name judicial conservatives who will interpret the law rather than legislate…
WITH THE SUPREME COURT PICK of John Roberts, George W. Bush rose to the occasion.
"The British and the American people loudly declared their support for their leaders decision to attack Iraq. It is the duty of Muslims to confront, fight, and kill them." -Osama bin Laden, as quoted in various press accounts, December 26, 1998 "Oh sons of Arabs and the Arab Gulf, rebel against the…
IT IS IMPORTANT not to become so absorbed in studying the blips in interest rates, exchange rates, inflation rates and other economic indicators that we forget these are merely thermometers. They can tell us something about the temperature of an economy, but, taken alone, not much about the major…
RALPH NADER once mused to me about what a terrible thing it was that Jack Kevorkian was (at the time) the world's most famous doctor. He was right. That distinct honor should have belonged to Dame Cecily Saunders, the founder of the modern hospice movement who died last week at age 87 in London at…
ON MARCH 7, 2004, Ahmed Chalabi, the controversial head of the Iraqi National Congress, appeared on 60 Minutes. Lesley Stahl grilled him about claims that the INC provided bad prewar intelligence on weapons of mass destruction to the U.S. government--something virtually no one these days disputes.…
EPISCOPALIANS often get tarred as America's most liberal Christian denomination. But there is a more liberal one! (Hint: it's the one Howard Dean joined after he quit the Episcopal Church in a dispute over a bike trail.)
ON MAY 23, THE Supreme Court announced it would review the constitutionality of a New Hampshire law requiring parental notification at least 48 hours before an abortion may be performed on an "unemancipated minor" (a female under age 18). Immediately, Ayotte v. Planned Parenthood figured to be one…
PRESIDENT BUSH NEEDS TO KEEP two facts in mind as he looks to replace retiring Supreme Court justice Sandra Day O'Connor (and, should he step down, Chief Justice William Rehnquist). The first is that he can win confirmation of almost any conceivable nominee for the High Court, screams of protest by…
Tomlinson Agonistes
IN SCALE, IT WAS neither a 9/11 nor even a 3/11. Though grisly, brutal, and indiscriminate, the terror attack on London produced many fewer casualties than the assaults on New York four years ago or Madrid last year. On the gruesome slide rule of death Osama bin Laden and his cronies lovingly…
AS IS ITS RELENTLESS WONT, the New York Times has brought me bad news, but not just bad news about the world, its standard fare, but about my own life. In a recent Sunday Styles section, the newspaper announced that jokes, formal jokes, with a beginning-middle-and-end structure, are out. "It's a…
The Worlds of Herman Kahn
Open Doors?
YOU CAN BE SURE, had Hashemi Rafsanjani been voted president in Iran's recent election, a chorus of pundits would have been calling for the administration to drop its hard line and "engage" Tehran. We witnessed this last time, when "moderate" Mohammad Khatami became president in 1997. Of course,…
How She Really Does It
The End of Poverty
JUDITH MILLER OF THE New York Times has been sent to jail for refusing to reveal the anonymous source who told her (and presumably told the whole damn world via Robert Novak's syndicated column) that Valerie Plame was a covert CIA agent. Never mind that Miller's source has probably been revealed…
AS PRESIDENT BUSH EXAMINES HIS Supreme Court options, he almost certainly understands that a year from now, his performance will be evaluated mainly on whether he confirmed the unelected Court's centrality in American politics, or took a historic first step in beginning to curb that centrality.
"In August 1998, the detainee traveled to Pakistan with a member of Iraqi Intelligence for the purpose of blowing up the Pakistan, United States and British embassies with chemical mortars."
Shadowplay
Books in Brief
"You ask, What is our policy? I will say; It is to wage war, by sea, land and air, with all our might and with all the strength that God can give us. . . . That is our policy. You ask, What is our aim? I can answer with one word: Victory--victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror,…
London
MINNEAPOLIS'S MURDER RATE peaked in 1995; that year the New York Times dubbed Minneapolis "Murderapolis." Gangs had taken over the city's poorest neighborhoods and gang crime had become highly visible. In 1996 three Minneapolis officers were dispatched to New York City to study the "broken windows"…
A FEW MONTHS AGO, Markos Moulitsas, proprietor and founder of the left-wing blog Daily Kos, penned a brief but extremely insightful posting. Under the heading, "Evidence that we live in a different world," Moulitsas pointed to a recent Time magazine poll that showed 79 percent of the American…
THERE IS A STRANGE PAIRING of positions on the left.
IN THE FIRST FEW DAYS after the horror in London on July 7, media in Britain and abroad focused considerable attention on "Londonistan"--the local zoo of Islamist agitators, almost entirely Arab, who have made headlines for years with their extremist preaching. Analytical lines, many of them…
THOUGH HE DEFENDED Attorney General Alberto Gonzales against conservative critics, President Bush now appears highly unlikely to nominate Gonzales to replace retiring Supreme Court justice Sandra Day O'Connor. Nor is Gonzales expected to be chosen to fill a second vacancy on the high court should…
London
HILLARY CLINTON made headlines earlier this week when she compared President George W. Bush to Mad magazine's Alfred E. Neuman, the gap-toothed, freckle-faced mascot whose signature statement is "What, me worry?" As political put-downs go, this hardly ranks as the most egregious, even in the modern…
IF YOU'VE BEEN CASTING A SIDELONG GLANCE at the world through the liberal press of late you've likely been alarmed by the latest faith-based assault on science and rationality. You might have been moved, despite your better instincts--born of the sad knowledge of hope's futility in the new Dark Age…
A GROUP calling itself "the Secret Group of al Qaeda's Jihad in Europe" has claimed "credit" for Thursday's deadly bombings in London. Some refer to the perpetrators of this latest horror as "an unknown group." But there is nothing mysterious about the background of the London atrocities.
THE U.S. ECONOMY, we were told at the beginning of the year, is in trouble. The boom in house prices is producing a bubble that will burst, with consequences even more dire than the bursting of the Internet bubble. The dollar will fall and the federal budget deficit rise, increasing inflationary…
TODAY'S FRONT PAGE of the Washington Post carries a story about a classified memo from Britain's defense minister to Prime Minister Tony Blair detailing "emerging U.S. plans" to reduce by half the number of soldiers in Iraq by next summer. This would leave American troop levels at around 66,000.…
THE G-8 MEETING is over, tragically overshadowed by the atrocities in London. And while Londoners demonstrated their resilience, G-8 leaders have followed the path of least resistance, again. The notion that more aid to Africa will help this poorest of continents ignores the likely entrenchment of…
FOR LIBERAL AND CONSERVATIVE CRITICS of the Bush administration, it is an article of faith that neoconservatives have hijacked American foreign policy. The neocons accomplished this, the theory goes, by selling their half-baked ideology to a president too unschooled, dim-witted, or panicked to…
LAST WEEK'S TERRORIST ATTACKS in London cast a pall over the meeting of the G-8 heads of state in Gleneagles. The bombings instantly overshadowed the summit's scheduled talks, an intrusion of history--in all its barbarism and violence--into what would otherwise have been a carefully-managed and…
IN 1987, the Reagan administration seriously underestimated the energy and ruthlessness that its opponents would be willing to bring to bear against a Supreme Court nominee.
London
THE BEST MOVIES are usually both earnest and smart (The Insider). Many successful movies are superficial and smart (Die Hard). And every so often, you can find an enjoyable movie which is superficial and stupid (The Fast and the Furious).
ON JUNE 29, in its comfortable Watergate suite, the Kuwait Information Office hosted a lunch in honor of its National Assembly's historic May 16 decision to grant women the right to vote and run for office. Granted, the very idea of a government ministry devoted to the regulation and dissemination…
AMONG THE MOST ENTHUSIASTIC people in Washington when news of Justice O'Connor's retirement surfaced had to have been North Carolina Senator Elizabeth Dole. Senator Dole is chair of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, and she is following two blockbuster cycles for the committee under the…
OF THE MANY LAWYERS under consideration for nomination to the seat vacated by Sandra Day O'Connor, only one, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, is drawing substantially negative reviews from conservatives. Of course, it's understandable why Gonzales is on the president's short list. Bush first…
AMERICANS RETURN TO WORK TODAY after a bittersweet weekend. Yesterday we celebrated our Declaration of Independence from Britain with fireworks, parades, unfurled flags, and the consumption of 150 million hotdogs, a statistic that warms the hearts at the National Hot Dog and Sausage Council, but…
THE SUPREME COURT'S DECISION in Kelo v. City of New London has sparked a great deal of comment, most of it critical. Conservatives, in particular, have denounced Kelo's holding that economic development projects are a "public use" that municipalities and other government units can use eminent…
THROUGH A CAMPAIGN AIDE, Bush answered a question about the kind of Supreme Court justice he admired. The answer was Antonin Scalia, a conservative. That was in 1999, as Bush was beginning his race for the presidency. He was asked a similar question later that year by Tim Russert on Meet the Press.…
Beirut
I HAVE LIVED IN TWO large cities in my life, Washington and Los Angeles, and if you have a taste for bumping into famous people, they are good places to live.
Fighting for Christendom
George Washington
Habitat For Whom?
Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
TAX CUTS--especially the supply-side tax cuts of May 2003--were the controversial center of the Bush administration's first-term economic policy. Most Democrats opposed most of the tax rate reductions. John Kerry promised to repeal many of them if elected president. The president, and Republicans…
The Hon. Cyclops from West Virginia
The Washingtonienne
THREE YEARS AGO, IN the 2002 election cycle, the economy was sluggish, struggling to emerge from the recession and the dislocations of 9/11. According to most polls, President Bush received solid ratings on his handling of the economy. Today, GDP growth has firmed at 4 percent a year, and several…
Never Let Me Go
Books in Brief
DEMOCRATS DON'T HAVE A DEATH wish. It just seems that way. What they actually have is a habit of falling into the national security trap. They did it in 1972. They did it in 1984. They did it in 1994. They did it in 2002. And they're doing it again this year as they prepare for the 2006 midterm…
The Breaking Point
ALTHOUGH PATRICK LEAHY STOPPED SHORT of calling for the closure of the counterterrorism prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in a June 15 Senate hearing on detainees in the war on terrorism, the Vermont Democrat certainly expressed views that now dominate his party and the liberal media. Those views are…
American Traveler
ON OCTOBER 23, 1987--a day that lives in conservative infamy--Robert Bork's nomination to the Supreme Court was rejected by a Democratic Senate. Now, 18 years later, George W. Bush has the chance to reverse this defeat, and to begin to fulfill what has always been one of the core themes of modern…
When Robert Bork was nominated to the Supreme Court in 1987, the Reagan White House was not prepared to fight effectively for his confirmation. Indeed, Bork was such a respected judge and admired legal scholar that President Reagan and his aides assumed Bork would have a relatively easy time…
"I WOULD ALSO ARGUE that if Saddam Hussein were left in power, weapons of mass destruction or no, he would be now, if he were in power, trying to acquire those weapons and use them. Eventually the sanctions were eroding," said Sen. John McCain on Fox News following the president's speech Tuesday at…
HOW MANY TIMES have you seen a young woman toting around a large plastic container filled with pure spring water--a commodity more precious than fuel at the pump--from the hills of Colorado, Pennsylvania, the Alps or some such high elevation? Is she really constantly thirsty? Is her need for water…