13 Tuesday Dec 2005
Posted in Washington Times
The Washington Times
I have come to the capital of elegant pessimism in order to address the question “When should the U.S. leave Iraq?” at the French Center on the United States’ estimable annual conference on what’s going on in America.
06 Tuesday Dec 2005
Posted in Washington Times
The Washington Times
A year after the Orange Revolution saw millions of Ukrainians take to the frozen streets of Kiev to protest a rigged election, ultimately leading to the nullification of its results and the election of opposition candidate Viktor Yushchenko to the presidency, I found myself in a seminar room at Donetsk National University in eastern Ukraine, answering questions students posed in generally excellent English on the future of their country and its place in the Western world.
29 Tuesday Nov 2005
Posted in Washington Times
The Washington Times
Try looking at it this way: Country X, a large multi-ethnic state, was ruled for a generation by a brutal dictator from the smallest ethnic group. Finally, however, the dictator lost his grip and the government fell, propelling Country X into conditions verging on anarchy.
22 Tuesday Nov 2005
Posted in Washington Times
The Washington Times
Two Sundays ago in The Washington Post, it was former senator (and Iraq war supporter) John Edwards on deck with an op-ed accusing the Bush administration of having misled him on the question of weapons of mass destruction. This Sunday, it was former senator (and Iraq war opponent) Bob Graham’s turn to level the same accusation. Mr. Edwards portrayed himself as a victim of the administration’s perfidy. Mr. Graham portrays himself as someone who saw through the administration’s perfidy at the time.
15 Tuesday Nov 2005
Posted in Washington Times
The Washington Times
“I was wrong,” wrote John Edwards in The Washington Post Sunday, repudiating his vote to authorize military action against the Saddam Hussein regime in September 2002. Well, yes, he was wrong. Then, a prudent political calculation for a Democrat with national political aspirations was to support the Bush administration’s effort to get Saddam to disarm or take his regime down by force. Now, the prudent calculation to maintain your viability within the late-2005 Democratic Party is to run as far away from your unfortunate 2002 vote as possible – by presenting yourself as yet another victim of the supposed deception foisted on the American people.
08 Tuesday Nov 2005
Posted in Washington Times
The Washington Times
“Voter Anger Might Mean an Electoral Shift in ’06” screamed the headline of the lead story in The Washington Post on Sunday. Ah, how it took me back – to a late winter day in 1994 when Adam Meyerson, then editor of Policy Review, called me at my office at The Washington Times’ editorial page to ask me to write an article for him about what would happen if the Republicans won control of Congress that November.
01 Tuesday Nov 2005
Posted in Washington Times
The Washington Times
So, if you thought Bill Clinton lying to the grand jury was a serious matter, are you obliged to take the same dim view of the crimes alleged against Scooter Libby? Or if you thought Mr. Clinton’s dissembling needed to be understood in the context of a process that was so deeply unfair to him that it trumped whatever offenses he may have committed, are you obliged to hold open the same possibility in the case of Mr. Libby?
25 Tuesday Oct 2005
Posted in Hoover Digest, Washington Times
Printed in both The Washington Times and Hoover Digest
Based on accounts from the scene, things have clearly taken a turn for the worse in a hurry in
Darfur. At the U.N. summit in September 2005, countries included an affirmation of their “responsibility to protect” their populations and the necessity for collective action to protect people when a government fails in this basic responsibility—or worse, as in the case of the Sudan government, is actively complicit in war crimes against civilians. It would be tragic if, having declared this bold new principle, governments couldn’t bring themselves to act on it effectively in Darfur.
The problem is as it was: The Janjaweed militias—armed bands of killers, marauders, and rapists of Arab origin set up to fight a burgeoning armed resistance movement—have acted in conjunction with forces of the Khartoum government or at its behest to terrorize the black African population of Darfur, the Texas-sized western region of Sudan. The militias, often operating with assistance from helicopter gunships flown by the Sudanese military, have destroyed whole villages, driving millions of Darfuris into internally displaced persons (IDP) camps or across the border into refugee camps in Chad.
18 Tuesday Oct 2005
Posted in Washington Times
The Washington Times
William Galston and Elaine Kamarck, two of the keenest observers of American politics and the fortunes of their Democratic Party in it, were co-authors of a 1989 analysis and strategy paper that in certain respects paved the way for Bill Clinton’s triumph in 1992 as a “New Democrat,” a candidate set apart from the left-liberalism that had come to dominate the party and to which Mr. Galston and Miss Kamarck rose in opposition. The two have just released a new study and strategy paper, “The Politics of Polarization,” that hopes to galvanize Democrats’ fortunes once again by directing the party back toward the electoral center.
11 Tuesday Oct 2005
Posted in Washington Times
The Washington Times
I was busy into the early afternoon following President Bush’s announcement of his nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court last Monday. So, it wasn’t until about 2:30 p.m. that I clicked into the blogosphere to see what the initial impressions of the nominee were on the right side of the political spectrum.
Tod Lindberg 