The New Republic

Liberals are no strangers to foreign intervention. Democratic presidents took the United States into two world wars, as well as Korea and Vietnam; Bill Clinton himself sent American forces to Haiti, the Balkans, and Iraq. But, if there was a connection between liberalism at home and intervention abroad, it generally ran from the former to the latter. Liberals believed that by intervening abroad they were spreading or defending liberal values. The Clinton administration's 1996 National Security Strategy, for instance, was based on "enlarging ... the community of democratic nations." READ MORE >>

Next to nuclear facilities, chemical plants pose the greatest danger in the case of a terrorist attack. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has identified 123 facilities where an attack could injure or kill more than one million people and 750 other facilities where more than 100,000 people would be threatened. A refinery near Philadelphia, for instance, has 400,000 pounds of hydrogen fluoride on hand, which, if released into the air, can cause blindness; kidney, liver, or lung damage; and even death. READ MORE >>

The preferred slogan of those opposed to war with Iraq is "No blood for oil"--an explicit assumption that the Bush administration, dominated by former oilmen, is going to war primarily to secure Iraq's copious reserves for U.S. oil companies. "'Regime change' to a pro-U.S. government would permit the privatization of Iraq's state-controlled oil resources--and a bonanza for U.S. oil companies," warns Miriam Pemberton of Washington's left-wing Institute for Policy Studies. Administration officials, on the READ MORE >>

For decades, Republicans have attacked Democrats' alliance with labor, slamming union "bosses" as corrupt and undemocratic. It's more than a touch ironic, then, that as the Bush administration tries to make political inroads with labor, it continues to favor unions whose recent record on these scores has been particularly problematic. The most notorious of these are the Teamsters, who appear to be currying favor with the administration in the hope that it will lift the Independent Review Board that has overseen the union since 1992 (see "Dirty Deal," April 1 & 8). But, fond as George W. READ MORE >>

For decades, Republicans have attacked Democrats' alliance with labor, slamming union "bosses" as corrupt and undemocratic. It's more than a touch ironic, then, that as the Bush administration tries to make political inroads with labor, it continues to favor unions whose recent record on these scores has been particularly problematic. The most notorious of these are the Teamsters, who appear to be currying favor with the administration in the hope that it will lift the Independent Review Board that has overseen the READ MORE >>

Democrats are gradually coalescing around an interpretation of why their party did so poorly. The party, the argument goes, failed to get out its base; and the reason it failed to do so was because it didn't draw a clear enough distinction between its policies and the Republicans'. As former political consultant Paul Begala argued on CNN, "The Democrats didn't fight Bush hard enough on the tax cut, and they didn't campaign on it. They didn't fight him hard enough on the war. That means that base Democrats are very depressed on READ MORE >>

"We've never seen in our lifetime an effort to attract the black vote by Republicans like we're seeing now," Former Kansas City Mayor Emanuel Cleaver told The Kansas City Star last month. In Missouri, Republican Senate candidate Jim Talent is making the rounds of black business groups, while black radio stations are inundated by Republican ads calling on blacks to "break the habit" of voting Democratic. In Arkansas, Republican ads are running on black radio as well. Speaking in August at a barbecue organized by READ MORE >>

The Democrats probably don't deserve to do well in November's elections. The party's national leaders have refused to make an issue of President Bush's tax cuts, which will threaten deficits through the decade; and many of them muffled their reservations about war with Iraq in the hope of refocusing on more politically congenial topics like prescription drugs and Social Security. The Bush administration, by contrast, has maneuvered brilliantly over the last six weeks, using the debate over Iraq to solidify the READ MORE >>

You'll find the same view of the roots of Al Qaeda in The Weekly Standard and on the editorial pages of The New York Times: The group draws its energy and its recruits from the unresolved conflicts in the Middle East. "[A]ll the Arab-Muslim states that are failing at modernity ... have become an engine for producing undeterrables," wrote the Times' Tom Friedman on September 18. Democratize Iraq, reform the Saudi autocracy, and/or bring peace to Israel and the Palestinians, and Al Qaeda will go away. But Olivier Roy, France's READ MORE >>

Telecommunications was the driving force behind the great economic boom of the late '90s. Between 1996 and 2000 the telecom industry grew at twice the rate of the national economy. By March of last year telecom companies had reached a market value of $3 trillion, and their share of the national GDP had risen to almost 6 percent. The Internet, and wireless and other telecom services, spurred investment in information technology, which by 1999 accounted for 43 percent of private, nonresidential investment. To a great extent, READ MORE >>