First off, let’s be clear about something: It’s easy to be against the war now; everyone is against it. Three and four years into Vietnam, more than half the country was for it—probably 60 percent. Right now no one with any sense in America thinks this war was a smart idea. Figuring out how to Read More
A few minutes ago in a speech before the New America Foundation, Flynt Leverett, a former CIA and NSC official, attacked Kenneth Pollack, the “thinker” at Saban/Brookings who served up the Iraq war on a silver platter for liberals. Leverett said Pollack had made a “deeply-flawed and flat-out wrong case regarding WMD,” which led him Read More
As a devotee of Chris Matthews, I’d point out a couple new trends on Hardball. A, he’s been using profanity, saying “damn” a lot and “bastards,” usually about our failed foreign policy; and B, he’s trying to give the neocons their comeuppance, but isn’t able to. The trends merged last week when he said to Read More
In New York Magazine, Kurt Andersen offers an agonized but honorable take on the liberal taboo on talking about Israel, and says that Walt and Mearsheimer “have been both strenuously ignored and unjustly besmirched as anti-Semites.” Good for him. But when it comes to the Iraq war, Andersen doesn’t buy their argument that the Read More
The Observer did what I wanted a newspaper to do: reporter Jason Horowitz stuck Israel into the Connecticut Senate race. He asked Lieberman how Israel played out in the politics of the primary, and Lieberman said (in a lovely allusion to Rabbi Hillel’s famous trope on the Torah), “That’s too big a question Read More
America’s Secret War: Inside the Hidden Worldwide Struggle Between America and Its Enemies, by George Friedman. Doubleday, 354 pages, $25.95.
The War for Muslim Minds: Islam and the West, by Gilles Kepel. Harvard University Press, 336 pages, $23.95.
America Right or Wrong: An Anatomy of American Nationalism, by Anatol Lieven. Oxford University Press, 274 Read More
