September 2005

The U.S. State Department's latest report on Adherence to and Compliance With Arms Control, Nonproliferation, and Disarmament Agreements and Commitments is worth a read.

Guess who delivered this speech? President Abbas must be held accountable for any and all actions that take place under his leadership. The disengagement has shown a bright spotlight on the Palestinian people and their leadership. The excuses have had to end. They now have responsibility for Gaza.…

Prime Minister Blair on why Britain stands alongside America in the war on terror: I never doubted after September 11th that our place was alongside America and I don't doubt it now. And for a very simple reason. Terrorism struck most dramatically in New York but it was aimed then, and is aimed…

JOSS WHEDON has had a curious career. He broke into movies by writing the script for the 1992 film Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The movie, directed by Fran Rubel Kuzui, was something of a disaster. Five years later, Whedon brought the Buffy concept to television, where it met with enormous success and…

NOW THAT JOHN ROBERTS has been confirmed as chief justice of the Supreme Court, time alone will tell whether President Bush has made good on his promise to appoint judges in the mold of Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia. After all, it is a curious but undeniable fact that Republican presidents,…

WE HAVE HEARD IT STATED SO OFTEN it has become a media mantra: Embryonic stem cells (ESCs) offer the greatest hope for cures; adult and umbilical cord blood stem cells have far less potential; the Bush administration's embryonic stem cell funding restrictions have caused America to fall behind in…

ON TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 6, the New Orleans Times-Picayune published a report from staff writer Brian Thevenot that began this way:

MUCH LIKE Iraq's "purple finger" election in January, a trial will begin in October that could help change the lens through which Arabs see their world. For the first time, an Arab despot, Saddam Hussein, will be tried by his own people. The trial will be beamed by satellite into millions of Arab…

THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION of 2008 is a long way off, but Republicans better start worrying about it now. The 2006 midterm election? Republicans are likely to hold onto the Senate and House. But 2008 is another story. In the midst of a Republican era, Democrats stand a good chance of taking the…

SENATOR CHUCK SCHUMER had just finished his last sputtering of outrage at the nomination of John Roberts to the Supreme Court when news broke that the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, which he chairs, had a small problem. Newsday and the New York Post both reported that the DSCC was in…

"IF WE EXPECT LARGE CHANGES but are very uncertain as to what precise form these changes will take, then our confidence will be weak." So wrote John Maynard Keynes in his classic General Theory of Employment Interest and Money in 1936. That might explain why consumer confidence fell 14 percent…

WHEN NAVY JUDGE ADVOCATE GENERAL RECRUITER Brian Whitaker visited Yale Law School in October 2003 to meet with students interested in serving as Navy lawyers, his reaction must have been something like that of the man who was tarred and feathered and ridden out of town on a rail; if it weren't for…

THE TERMS "BRAIN TRUST" and "Cynthia McKinney" do not roll off the tongue like "peanut butter and jelly." But that's how the press release advertised a series of "Brain Trust" panels moderated by Rep. McKinney this past weekend at the Congressional Black Caucus's annual legislative conference. The…

In the Footsteps of Churchill

ON THE FINAL DAY OF the Roberts hearings, Sen. Richard J. Durbin of Illinois tried one last time: "If you've made one point many times over . . . the course of the last three days," he told the judge, "it is that as a judge you will be loyal and faithful to the process of law, to the rule of law."…

ONE OF THE MOST POTENTIALLY significant events in Russian politics this year was the national conference of the Republican party of Russia (RPR). It witnessed what may prove to be the last credible attempt to create a democratic opposition with broad enough appeal to contest the Kremlin's control…

Harvard's al Qaeda Apologist

KATHLEEN BABINEAUX BLANCO, LOUISIANA'S lachrymose governor, wants hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayers' money so that she can "recreate our communities." You know, the community that appalled the rest of America when wall-to-wall television coverage of Katrina showed us just what it looked…

IT IS ONLY BY THINKING of Walker Percy that I can begin to make sense of what has befallen the city by which I live, where my wife and our four children were born, and that I have come to call home. Percy, the celebrated author of six novels, lived in Covington, Louisiana, just north of Lake…

THERE ARE THREE QUALITIES ESSENTIAL for any successful romantic comedy. First, it has to be amusing. Not screamingly funny, necessarily, but lighthearted and diverting enough to hold one's attention. Second, there have to be a few eccentric secondary characters who will provide jolts of unexpected…

Sakharov and the Gipper

IT IS THE FIRST WORK of literature ever written down, The Epic of Gilgamesh, and it's a masterpiece. Ironically, it stems from that cradle of civilization, Mesopotamia, which has gone by many names but is now Iraq. Where once the civilizing art of letters sprung up, there now is war and…

The Lonely Planet Guide to Iran

PRESIDENT BUSH, LIKE NO president in modern times, has guarded himself against a second-term slump. His most competent aides--the first team--stayed on at the White House. He has a sweeping agenda to keep staff busy and out of trouble. He has a majority in both houses of Congress. The economy,…

THE BOLSHOI BALLET'S RECENT TWO-week engagement at New York's Metropolitan Opera House was like a marvelous party. There were good stories, feisty politics, funny jokes (albeit, ballet jokes), and lots of dancing. Oh, and there was an orgy--a proper Roman one, with satyrs and red-haired courtesans.…

THE BOARD OF GOVERNORS OF the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is scheduled this week to decide whether to refer Iran to the United Nations' Security Council for alleged violation of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. Iran is making a last-minute effort to stall the decision, but it is…

The Essential Ronald Reagan

BOOKS IN BRIEF

NOT LONG AGO, TASER International requested a meeting with this magazine, and the honor fell to me. It seems the folks at TASER have contended with some bad publicity of late, and they're making an effort to rehabilitate their "nonlethal" product in the eyes of a wary public. To that end, the…

ON AUGUST 31, FOUR men were charged with participation in a terrorist plot hatched in a California prison. The six-count indictment describes a conspiracy to attack military and Jewish targets in the Los Angeles area, including military bases and recruitment centers, synagogues, the Israeli…

IN THE AFTERMATH of the London bombings perpetrated by homegrown jihadists, Europeans are rethinking their approach to multiculturalism in general and their tolerance for hate speech--especially the sermons of radical imams--in particular. In France, which has long had hate-speech laws, Interior…

"EVEN MONKEYS FALL FROM TREES," says an old Japanese proverb. Opponents of Junichiro Koizumi, Japan's intrepid prime minister, have been predicting his fall for some time now. Known for his high-stakes gambles--on, among other things, deploying troops to Iraq and revamping the Japanese postal…

THE AFTERMATH OF KATRINA obscured many stories from public view. One of them concerned same-sex marriage. It deserves much more attention, particularly from national politicians.

FOUR YEARS AFTER September 11, 2001, the United States government has passed a significant turning point in the war on Islamist terror. In an official report the federal authorities have directly and identified the enemy as "Islamic extremism"--one of the few instances in which they have dared to…

FEW DECISIONS BY PRESIDENT BUSH have generated as much agony among conservatives as his selection of Supreme Court nominees. With the nomination and likely confirmation of John Roberts as chief justice, Bush has satisfied conservatives, even thrilled some of them. But it's his next pick--the person…

"DON YOUNG'S WAY" is a $231 million bridge to be built in Anchorage. Don Young's "way" is to use his position as chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee to bring home as many federal dollars as possible for his home state. For instance, the highway bill passed at the end…

SHAKESPEARE HAD IT RIGHT. Thanks to C-SPAN and the passions stoked from the nomination of John Roberts to the Supreme Court, the American voters had a chance to see a range of idiocy from the Senate Judiciary Committee last week, all of it coming from the sound and fury of Democrats trying…

AS SPECIAL COUNSEL to President Richard Nixon Charles Colson was known as Nixon's hatchet man and one of the most hated men in America. After he left the Nixon administration he was caught in the snare of Watergate. Although he was only peripherally involved in the scandal, he pled guilty and…

HALF OF ALL PASSENGERS flying around America are now sitting in airplanes operated by bankrupt airlines, flown by pilots about to see their wages and pensions cut, and served by cabin staff worrying that a pink slip awaits them when they land. These carriers are part of an industry set to lose $7.4…

GEORG HEGEL was a German philosopher of the early 19th century. Hegel believed that history unfolds through a "dialectical" process, in which each stage is the product of the contradictions inherent in the ideas that defined the preceding one. Within these tensions and contradictions, Hegel…

WE DO NOT YET KNOW enough to make a definitive estimate of the amount of time it will take to get the pipelines pumping at full capacity, all of the refineries up and running, the port operating on a normal basis, and other parts of the Gulf Coast economic structure back into pre-Katrina shape. But…

The first issue of this magazine appeared in September 1995, part way through the Clinton administration, and less than a year after the Republican victory in the congressional elections of 1994. The pressing foreign policy issue of the day was Bosnia. The world seems a very different place today.…

The first issue of this magazine appeared in September 1995, part way through the Clinton administration, and less than a year after the Republican victory in the congressional elections of 1994. The pressing foreign policy issue of the day was Bosnia. The world seems a very different place today.…

The first issue of this magazine appeared in September 1995, part way through the Clinton administration, and less than a year after the Republican victory in the congressional elections of 1994. The pressing foreign policy issue of the day was Bosnia. The world seems a very different place today.…

The first issue of this magazine appeared in September 1995, part way through the Clinton administration, and less than a year after the Republican victory in the congressional elections of 1994. The pressing foreign policy issue of the day was Bosnia. The world seems a very different place today.…

The first issue of this magazine appeared in September 1995, part way through the Clinton administration, and less than a year after the Republican victory in the congressional elections of 1994. The pressing foreign policy issue of the day was Bosnia. The world seems a very different place today.…

NOT LONG AGO I STUMBLED upon what I would guess to be an undiscovered piece of T.S. Eliot ephemera--an obscure bone from the corpus, as it were--and have spent the past few years contemplating its announcement. It is obviously too unimportant to be included in any sort of biographical work or…

The first issue of this magazine appeared in September 1995, part way through the Clinton administration, and less than a year after the Republican victory in the congressional elections of 1994. The pressing foreign policy issue of the day was Bosnia. The world seems a very different place today.…

IN THE Federalist, James Madison observed that judges are "shoots from the executive stock." With this phrase, Madison was making a point about where, in a government of separated powers, judges come from; and of course, the answer is the executive, since the Constitution plainly sets forth that it…

The first issue of this magazine appeared in September 1995, part way through the Clinton administration, and less than a year after the Republican victory in the congressional elections of 1994. The pressing foreign policy issue of the day was Bosnia. The world seems a very different place today.…

The first issue of this magazine appeared in September 1995, part way through the Clinton administration, and less than a year after the Republican victory in the congressional elections of 1994. The pressing foreign policy issue of the day was Bosnia. The world seems a very different place today.…

I TAKE CREDIT FOR THE creation of The Weekly Standard--but only a portion of the credit. My cofounders, Bill Kristol and John Podhoretz, deserve more. In any case, it wasn't exactly the brainstorm of the century to start a weekly conservative magazine on politics and policy (and a lot more on…

The first issue of this magazine appeared in September 1995, part way through the Clinton administration, and less than a year after the Republican victory in the congressional elections of 1994. The pressing foreign policy issue of the day was Bosnia. The world seems a very different place today.…

The first issue of this magazine appeared in September 1995, part way through the Clinton administration, and less than a year after the Republican victory in the congressional elections of 1994. The pressing foreign policy issue of the day was Bosnia. The world seems a very different place today.…

The first issue of this magazine appeared in September 1995, part way through the Clinton administration, and less than a year after the Republican victory in the congressional elections of 1994. The pressing foreign policy issue of the day was Bosnia. The world seems a very different place today.…

"WE ARE ABOUT TO drive a stake into the heart of the Taliban," the U.S. military official in Kabul confidently declared. It was late January, three months after Afghanistan had successfully held its first democratic presidential election, and the mood in the capital--at least among American…

The first issue of this magazine appeared in September 1995, part way through the Clinton administration, and less than a year after the Republican victory in the congressional elections of 1994. The pressing foreign policy issue of the day was Bosnia. The world seems a very different place today.…

A-Mentoring We Will Go

Cairo

The first issue of this magazine appeared in September 1995, part way through the Clinton administration, and less than a year after the Republican victory in the congressional elections of 1994. The pressing foreign policy issue of the day was Bosnia. The world seems a very different place today.…

New Orleans

The first issue of this magazine appeared in September 1995, part way through the Clinton administration, and less than a year after the Republican victory in the congressional elections of 1994. The pressing foreign policy issue of the day was Bosnia. The world seems a very different place today.…

The first issue of this magazine appeared in September 1995, part way through the Clinton administration, and less than a year after the Republican victory in the congressional elections of 1994. The pressing foreign policy issue of the day was Bosnia. The world seems a very different place today.…

The first issue of this magazine appeared in September 1995, part way through the Clinton administration, and less than a year after the Republican victory in the congressional elections of 1994. The pressing foreign policy issue of the day was Bosnia. The world seems a very different place today.…

The first issue of this magazine appeared in September 1995, part way through the Clinton administration, and less than a year after the Republican victory in the congressional elections of 1994. The pressing foreign policy issue of the day was Bosnia. The world seems a very different place today.…

WHEN I LONG FOR ESCAPE, I dream of the prairie. The last time I was out west, visiting my childhood home in Pierre, South Dakota, I drove up to one of the river hills on the edge of town. Why is the sun so much bigger out on those plains than it is back east? Sitting on the warm hood of the car to…

WHEN WE LAUNCHED THE WEEKLY STANDARD 10 years ago, I didn't know what I was doing. I'd never actually worked on a magazine before. But I'd grown up watching my father edit a couple of them. I'd read lots of magazines. I had a great many friends in the business. What's the problem, I figured? How…

ON SEPTEMBER 18, THE Germans will go to the polls. The extraordinary elections are being held a year before the end of the Bundestag's regular four-year legislative term, thanks to an elaborate and, to many Germans, distasteful charade. That price would be well worth paying if it produced a…

FROM ARISTOTLE TO TOCQUEVILLE, wise critics of democracy have noted that comedy debunks the high and mighty. Its targets are vanity, arrogance, moralism, and ambition: all the vices of power. So comedy is the natural vantage point from which to compare two remarkable television shows about…

NANCY PELOSI, THE HOUSE Democratic leader, tells a great story about questioning a benighted President Bush on Katrina relief. At a White House meeting last week with congressional leaders, she told Bush he should immediately fire Michael Brown, the head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.…

Vanishing Point

The first issue of this magazine appeared in September 1995, part way through the Clinton administration, and less than a year after the Republican victory in the congressional elections of 1994. The pressing foreign policy issue of the day was Bosnia. The world seems a very different place today.…

WEEK BY WEEK IN KATRINA'S wake, Americans and their leaders are in for two deeply painful civics lessons having nothing whatsoever to do with racially conditioned responses or partisan politics. Lesson one is that the only thing worse than having big government in the first place is relying on it…

Mark Twain

JUDGE JOHN ROBERTS'S Senate confirmation hearings last week were only the opening salvo in a broader war over the future of the Supreme Court. Most observers expect Justice O'Connor's replacement to generate far more contention than Judge Roberts did, since that nominee could substantially change…

Berlin

Berlin

Bonn

YESTERDAY I predicted that the Roberts hearings might turn out to be a free televised seminar in constitutional theory. Boy was I wrong. Tuesday's question and answer session revealed that members of the Senate Judiciary Committee currently suffer from a severe bout of jobidenitis--the inability to…

Bonn

AT FIRST BLUSH, not much happened during the first day of John Roberts's senate confirmation hearings to replace William Rehnquist as chief justice of the Supreme Court. Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Arlen Specter swung his gavel and began the hearing right on schedule--12 o'clock noon, in…

SO I GOT UP ON SUNDAY AND FELT PRETTY GOOD. Very good, in fact. Great, actually. It was the first Sunday in a few weeks--or a few years--where I hadn't had too much to drink the night before. Well, weeks, years, why quibble, right? The point is, I'd had a good night's sleep, made everyone…

ON JULY 15, the District of Columbia Court of Appeals issued its decision in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld affirming the power of the president to designate the trial of enemy combatants by military commissions. Supreme Court nominee Judge John Roberts was a member of the unanimous three-judge panel which…

EVERY TIME the National Hockey League makes headlines with a particularly ghastly bit of on-ice thuggery, a chorus of tut-tutters laments the "violent culture" that besmirches an otherwise magnificent sport. In most cases, these handwringers come off as ignorant fusspots: folks who never played…

[img caption="A conceptual drawing of the Navy's new DD(X) class destroyer. Image courtesy of Raytheon." float="right" width="400" height="300" render="<%photoRenderType%>"]8860[/img] "The situation was an answer to the prayers of a War College strategist or a gunnery tactician. The enemy column,…

A FEW MONTHS AGO, most observers expected Chief Justice William Rehnquist's failing health to trigger President Bush's first Supreme Court nomination. But Rehnquist hung on, to the surprise of many, and it was Sandra Day O'Connor whose resignation brought about the first vacancy on the Court since…

IT IS TEMPTING to speculate about how the new Supreme Court will differ from the old (Senator McConnell might want to find another complaint to file against McCain-Feingold), but that debate will rage for months into the future, and the blogosphere has had a very interesting two weeks responding to…

Jakarta

POINTING OUT the sorry state of filmmaking has become a summer tradition over the past few years, usually due to the target market of the movies released during this season. It seems as though half the films released after Memorial Day have roman numerals following the title and the other half are…

Late last week, as New Orleans was sliding into savage conditions, some talking heads were glowing with pleasure at the idea of a moral meltdown of such immense proportions that it would not only bury George Bush in its rubble, but erode forever the country's self confidence. Or, as Robert Scheer…

WITH JOHN ROBERTS sailing toward confirmation last week, President Bush had the O'Connor seat "won." The Court was set to move one click to the right (so to speak). Then Chief Justice William Rehnquist died. The president chose to move Roberts over to fill the Rehnquist slot--thereby re-opening the…

NOW THAT THE IRAQI PEOPLE'S ELECTED REPRESENTATIVES are actually trying to draft a new constitution, there is a single, central provision that any party or politician interested in shaping the country's future should seriously consider. This provision would, at a stroke, create a powerful,…

LET ME BEGIN WITH A simple sentence that, even as I write it, appears less than Swiftian in the modesty of its proposal: "Prison conditions at Abu Ghraib have improved markedly and dramatically since the arrival of Coalition troops in Baghdad."

I AM A MEMBER OF the Oprah Book Club, though perhaps not in good standing, having once complained in print that while Oprah Winfrey was certainly a great lover of books, she was no lover of great books.

SAY THIS FOR JUNICHIRO KOIZUMI: He's a gambler, with a penchant for the bold stroke. At home, Japan's maverick prime minister seeks to overhaul the farming, highway, construction, banking, pension, and postal systems. Abroad, he dances nimbly around the limits of a pacifist constitution, sending…

Nature's Keepers

Amman, Jordan

PATRICK HENRY WAS ONE OF the most passionate and fearless orators of his day. Now, a similarly named politician is ruffling feathers with a variation on the great man's battle cry: Says Patrick McHenry, a self-described "hard-core conservative" representing the 10th district of North Carolina,…

The Limits of International Law

The KGB File of Andrei Sakharov

AHMED HIKMAT SHAKIR IS A shadowy figure who provided logistical assistance to one, maybe two, of the 9/11 hijackers. Years before, he had received a phone call from the Jersey City, New Jersey, safehouse of the plotters who would soon, in February 1993, park a truck bomb in the basement of the…

Raleigh, N.C.

WHAT WAS THAT THUNDEROUS NOISE? It sounded like my upstairs neighbor's furniture falling, perhaps a bookcase. And why was everyone outside screaming? I wished they would be quiet (I'm not a morning person). Twenty minutes later, it happened again--the booming noise, the screams . . . and then the…

SOMETHING TO LISTEN FOR DURING the Roberts confirmation hearings is an uncommon word, "superprecedent." Sen. Arlen Specter, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, used "superprecedent" in a July 24 op-ed in the New York Times previewing the hearings, which are scheduled to begin September 6. Specter…

Henry R. Luce, Time, and the American Crusade in Asia by Robert E. Herzstein (Cambridge University Press, 368 pp., $32) Robert Herzstein has written a powerful attack on the "Luce network," as he refers to the handful of publications (most notably Time) that Henry Luce owned and edited for having…

ON AUGUST 16, ELIZABETH Edwards, the wife of the failed vice presidential candidate, sent out an email. She urged recipients to sign an online petition in support of Cindy Sheehan, the bereaved mother of a 24-year-old soldier who was killed in Iraq last year. Since August 6, Sheehan has been camped…

"During the last few decades, the terrorists grew to believe that if they hit America hard, as in Lebanon and Somalia, America would retreat and back down. . . . So now they're trying to break our will with acts of violence. . . . Their goal is to force us to retreat. . . . We will stay on the…

A Day to Remember

THE OTHER DAY, ON C-SPAN, I saw Bernard-Henri Lévy, the French intellectual, giving a talk plugging one of his books at a Barnes & Noble. Monsieur Lévy is a man with a vivid face, including a nose that doesn't disappoint, high coloring, and a small mouth worth watching. Yet I soon found my mind…

Venice

"WE WILL ACCEPT NOTHING less than total victory over the terrorists and their hateful ideology," President Bush told the Veterans of Foreign Wars last week. But, as they say both on the streets of New York and the ranches of Texas, talk is cheap. We now have a choice--in the vernacular, it is to…

CALIFORNIA'S POLITICAL WINDS blow south these days. That's the direction of approval ratings (34 percent for Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and 27 percent for the state legislature, per the latest survey by the San Francisco-based Public Policy Research Institute). It's also where state Assembly…

YESTERDAY America's emergency relief effort went into high gear and is likely to stay there for weeks, as all across the country citizens open their wallets to help out their fellow countrymen.

IN MAY OF THIS YEAR, John McCain teamed with Ted Kennedy to propose a new bill to "solve" the illegal immigration problem. The McCain-Kennedy bill was DOA with Republicans in the House and the Senate.

THERE HAVE BEEN rumblings of late about the developing alliance between Islamic radicals and neo-Nazis. In late May, Israeli president Moshe Katzav gave a speech before the German parliament in which he warned, "Let's not be surprised if terror organizations use neo-Nazis for carrying out terror…