The Most Unethical Act: Losing a War
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Taking Tea with the Taliban
• February 2010
Declassified State Department documents tell a sorry tale of diplomatic engagement for its own sake—and offer a cautionary lesson for the future.
Ignoring ‘Climategate’
• February 2010
Hacked data debunked the warming consensus, but the environmentalist band played on in Copenhagen and Washington.
A Political Inflection Point
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Here are some thoughts on last night. 1. A year ago Barack Obama took the oath of office with enormous public support and unprecedented goodwill behind him. Today he presides over a party that is panic-stricken, having lost a Senate race in Massachusetts that ranks among the most consequential nonpresidential elections in American history. The president is now badly wounded, his agenda badly weakened, his signature domestic issue in critical and perhaps fatal condition. Not many presidents have had a worse opening act.
Wahhabism and the First Amendment
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You would be excused for thinking that the Wahabbi religious establishment of Saudi Arabia and the religion guarantees of our First Amendment have no more in common than fire and water. But I think this oddest of odd couples helps to explain two recent events involving American Muslims and the rest of us -- instances of so-called “home-grown” Islamist terrorism, such as the Ft. Hood murders, and the resentment being reported among American Muslims at FBI and other law-enforcement-agency activities at U.S. mosques.
Obama's Year of Living Blamelessly
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Why Jews Hate Palin
• January 2010
The problems with her go beyond policy disagreements. They are about wildly differing views of the qualities necessary for American leadership.
Obama's Next Three Years
• January 2010
The president isn’t interested in foreign policy, but his ideas and his approach mark him as the first “post-American” president.
Jew Be Not Proud
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I’ve just published a book that attempts to explain Judaism’s view of life in the universe in terms of a few deep images, which have grown and deepened over thousands of years into brooding, beautiful thunderheads. But along the way I also make these assertions: the Jews are the senior nation of the Western world. Judaism is the most important intellectual development in Western history. The best ideas we have come straight from Judaism.
Finally, a Valid Vietnam Analogy for Afghanistan
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We’ve spent most of the past several years listening to liberals nattering away about how first Iraq and now Afghanistan is the new Vietnam. But finally, those making such arguments in the hope of undermining our efforts to resist the Taliban have a leg to stand on, even if a proper understanding of this episode leads to conclusions they don’t like. Today’s front-page story in the New York Times about the efforts of American diplomat Peter W. Galbraith to depose the president of Afghanistan last year ought to set our collective Vietnam-analogy alarm bells ringing.
Dodging Shoes, One Year Later
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Surprise security breaches, too, show the character of a president under pressure.
Hitchens vs. Koestler
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The journalist Christopher Hitchens has abandoned his role as a leading activist-scribe-provocateur of the radical Left, but here and there he shows that he has held fast to his radical aversion to Zionism. In a column last year on the 60th anniversary of the Jewish state, he confided that it is only the “degeneration of Palestinian Arab nationalism into the theocratic and thanatocratic hell of Hamas and Islamic Jihad” that “forces non-Zionists like me to ask whether, in spite of everything, Israel should be defended as if it were a part of the democratic West.” (The Israelis, as he sees it, have not “returned a completely convincing answer.”)
The Health-Care 'Trifecta'
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For all their thousands of pages of complexity, the House and Senate health-care reform bills have three simple and admirable objectives: to bring good health care to more Americans, to improve the quality of care, and to control rising costs. It’s hard to reconcile these three goals -- and impossible by government diktat. But there is a mechanism that works in other sectors (think consumer technology, for example) that can achieve broader reach, higher quality, and lower costs. It’s called competition.
The Missile-Defense Betrayal
• December 2009
The president’s abrogation of his predecessor’s agreements with Poland and the Czech Republic inaugurates a new era in which America’s word will not be its bond.
The 35-Year War on the CIA
• December 2009
The campaign to discredit the agency continues to be a leftist obsession.
