. This commentary first appeared in the Algemeiner on January 11. The last time I wrote about President Obama’s then only rumored selection of Chuck Hagel I said two things I knew I would wish to revise. The first, rhetorically, was the question: “What was he thinking?” The second was a quotation from Gil Troy’s generally very good writing […]
Obama and the Vision Thing
. The big news of the weekend – bigger than the rise of Pizza Pie Guy in the John Birch Society’s GOP’s hot-air-balloon derby – is the growing rebellion against Wall Street. Occupy Wall Street may have been organized by the vanguard of diffuse, unfocused anarchy-romancing antiestablishmentarians railing against “the system,” but they have been […]
William Colby and the War on Terror
. William Colby, according to the new film by his son Carl Colby, The Man Nobody Knew: In Search of My Father, CIA Spymaster William Colby, was the quintessential intelligence agent. He was daring and courageous behind enemy lines with the OSS during World War Two in Europe . He fought the good fight, and won, against […]
The Arab Revolution: a Case for Realism
If the oldest profession is prostitution, the second oldest pastime (the very oldest being left to the imagination) is heckling. There is, too, no more timeless heckle of the cautious leader than “Why don’t you do something!” Obama Seeks a Course of Pragmatism in the Middle East In the Middle East crisis, as on other […]
Stuxnet, WikiLeaks, and the Cold War
Everyone’s talking about an extraordinarily well report article in The New York Times this weekend that finally begins to put together the story behind the Stuxnet worm and its attack on the Iranian nuclear program. Apparently, to no one’s surprise, it was an American-Israeli coup accomplished with the probable help of Britain and Germany, including […]