The New Republic

Is the war won?  Probably not.  Is it going much better for Iraq and for us?  Certainly.  This was certified by the big three-column headline in last Tuesday's  New York Times.  And even big-time opponents of what they had come to think of as the president's own demented enterprise are beginning to admit it.  The news is very difficult for those folk because many of them had drawn outlandish conclusions about the future of American power in the Middle East.  Actually, about its pass READ MORE >>

I met Seymour Hersh early in the early winter of 1968 when he was press secretary to Eugene McCarthy in the first primary state of New Hampshire.  There wasn't time to get to know him since in a matter of weeks he quit with a shabby attack on Gene for not being serious about civil rights.  This was hum-bug which turned out, save for his important story about My-Lai, to be Hersh's specialty in the rest of his career. READ MORE >>

Senator John F. Kerry already has a Democratic opponent for his U.S. READ MORE >>

Chris Hedges is perhaps the shrillest of today's left-wing chicken littles -- no small feat, that -- whose decline into paranoia has been made all the more fascinating by just how quickly he has sunk (Hedges was not always a polemicist; in the 1990's, he was the Middle East bureau chief of The New York Times). READ MORE >>

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Oil approached just short of $100 a barrel.  That is, within pennies.  The stock markets fell...drastically.  When West Texas Crude hits $100 the markets will fall even more.  The governments that are most delirious are the Chavez regime in Venezuela and the Islamic dictatorship of Iran.  It is, after all, another blow to the United States.  This is not something that Saudi Arabia desires.  They want to maintain the link to the dollar and they have no interest in propelling these deeply radical states.    READ MORE >>

Condoleeza Rice is busy preparing her picnic at Annapolis that will start next Tuesday, November 26.  Nobody is quite sure who will come although almost everyone is quite sure that nothing much will happen.  Maybe a statement that will not really commit anyone to anything.  Following in the footsteps of the Clinton administration, the Bushies are giving their desperate all for for some semblance of an Israeli-Palestinian accord, however vague.  And the Olmert government has cooperated in announcing that it will close down all the "illegal" outposts in the West Bank (these are two or three-c READ MORE >>

I'll be posting on the prospects of the Annapolis jamboree which already has 49 invitees, perhaps three or four of which can be counted as friends of Israel.  Among those governments asked are Sudan (seasoned expert at peacemaking), South Africa, the Vatican, Malaysia.  The entire list is in Wednesday's Globe.  Please take a look.  Some of those coming will have had to be bribed.  Others pushed to be asked as a reminder of empire, like Spain.  So there is no re READ MORE >>

Presumably, not many of you read Commentary.  Sometimes that's a mistake.  In any case, in the December issue, there's a longish article with a sharp eye for the significant detail.  Written by Gary Rosen, it's a report of a sponsored trip for several mainstream journalists and Rosen, the managing editor of Commentary.  Was the official trip boring?  Yes, there were long boring moments; and Rosen is deft at bringing some real meaning out of these expe READ MORE >>

Look, there is no amount of German reparations that can compensate for the calamity inflicted on the Jewish people by the Nazi regime.  The post-war Federal Republic has paid out billions and billions of dollars in atonement and concrete restitution to individual Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, to Jewish cultural organizations and to Israel, the Jewish State.  Now comes the Israeli Pensioners Affairs Minister who claims that Germany owes more.  "Get it from the Germans" has long been a reflex when money was short.  Apparently, it is still a reflex...when money is not short.  It is demean READ MORE >>