By Kevin Baker 7:40pm

opinion

Photoillo by Ed Johnson

The Romney Camp’s Reckless Middle East Foreign Policy

“A Fool lies here who tried to hustle the East.”
—Rudyard Kipling

At last, Mitt Romney has told us one specific thing he intends to do as president: get weapons to al-Qaeda.

Trying to salvage a week of self-evisceration on foreign policy from the Republican presidential nominee, his leading foreign policy advisors, Eliot Cohen and Richard Williamson, told The New York Times last Friday just what a President Romney would do differently in the Middle East. Their critique included the insistence that President Obama “engage” the rebels in Syria. According to the Times, they did “[stop] short of saying that the United States should provide lethal arms” but favored “facilitating” the provision of lethal arms from other Arab states.” Read More

By Staff 12/23/06 5:08pm

Jimmy Carter, on Mission

A friend went to Jimmy Carter’s book-signing in Pasadena the other day. 3200 books, all snapped up weeks before, then signed by an aloof former president, who did not shake hands but was flanked by two phalanxes of security. Everyone who came in was X-rayed, or wanded.

My friend tells me Carter had a focused Read More

By Staff 4/06/06 2:49pm

The Smear Campaign, Continued

The intellectual challenge of the Walt-Mearsheimer paper on the power of the Israel lobby is whether Americans are capable of debating the ideas in it without freaking out. So far the answer is: No.

The paper was rejected by the Atlantic, as too hot for this country to hear. And while it has been Read More

By Joe Conason 8/26/02 12:00am

Bush Reads a Book, World Awaits Result

Suddenly, the debate over invading Iraq and overthrowing Saddam Hussein has taken a literary turn, with the news that George W. Bush is reading a book. This significant clue to future policy appeared in the last line of a dispatch by Scott Lindlaw of the Associated Press, recounting an engaging tour of the President’s Texas Read More