"The Saudi Paradox," by Michael Scott Doran, published in the Jan/Feb Foreign Affairs is a good source of background information on the likely motivation for this week’s anti-Shi’ite terrorist attacks (though I don't agree with all of his conclusions): "To better...
From the typewriter of--gasp!-- Bill Buckley himself: It is being claimed, ever more widely, that neocon policies are determined by the advantages they bring, manifest or putative, to the State of Israel. Patrick Buchanan, in the current American Conservative,...
The Passion: Redemption through Pain, Not Anti-SemitismYes, The Passion is a jolting shocker of a movie. And my immediate reaction as a white, middle-class, non-religious American was pretty much that of Tikkun: If Jesus was about love, why focus on the violence and...
One of the most famous thought-experiments in economics is Bastiat's story of the broken window, which the French economist used to argue against the common belief that destruction stimulates economic activity. In Economics in One Lesson, Henry Hazlitt uses the broken...
Abuse of death is nothing new in the Balkans or, indeed, the Empire. It was perhaps too much to expect that Boris Trajkovski's tragic end in the Herzegovina mountains would be spared the same fate. Antiwar.com's resident Macedonia expert Chris Deliso has a great piece...
You do understand that Albright did lie, innocent people did (and continue to) die, the Clinton administration and NATO did sex-up intelligence about Yugoslavia and did misrepresent Milosevic as the new Hitler, and that our Balkan adventure is indeed a quagmire, don't...
Another delightful article on NRO today from Ion Mihai Pacepa, onetime Communist thug in charge of Romania's DIE, current neoconservative flak. The typical Pacepa essay, I've noticed, opens with a brief "trust me, I've hung with some bad mofos" hook to reel the Tom...
They Marched into Sunlight is worth reading, especially for people like me who are interested in the Vietnam War but too young to remember it. Maraniss tells two main stories, based on interviews: an ambush of US soldiers in Vietnam and an antiwar demonstration gone...
Nestled inside another Economist article is this little tidbit about the Iraqi governing council's take on freedom of the press: Though appointed and not elected, the council is reasonably representative of Iraq's various groups. But it also has its flaws, one of...
