The Washington Times

The in-laws were in town, in transit from New Jersey to Florida for the season, and we were bustling in our Cleveland Park kitchen Saturday night when we heard the basso rumble of explosions in the distance. “What’s that?” somebody asked. The levity that had suffused the room dissipated, leaving only still air.

“Sounds like fireworks,” I said. So it did. Well, either that or bombs going off.

Continue reading →

The Washington Times

No, the U.N. General Assembly summit this month didn’t produce nearly as much agreement on reform as the world body needs. On the other hand, the World Summit Outcome document does have one big item in its favor.

Continue reading →

The Washington Times

Might as well announce now that New Orleans will be the site of the 2008 Republican Convention. I say this for the same reason that Capt. Ramius, the fictional Soviet skipper in “The Hunt for Red October,” sent a letter to his bigshot pal in the Kremlin announcing his intention to defect to the United States and turn his state-of-the-art ballistic-missile submarine over to the Americans: Ramius wanted to make sure that the officers who were in on the plan with him understood there was no going back.

Continue reading →

The Washington Times

Would anybody any longer say, as Winston Churchill famously did, that “democracy is the worst form of government except for all those others that have been tried”? Churchill was mounting a defense of democracy in the context of his broader view of the irreducible difficulty of politics, an undertaking fundamentally doomed in its ambition to fulfill people’s desire for happiness or justice.

Continue reading →

The Washington Times

Putting aside, for the moment only, which individuals are guilty of malfeasance in office, it is undeniable that the system America established for disaster relief failed miserably last week – and thousands of Americans died because of it.

Continue reading →

The Washington Times

Michael Barone’s provocative thesis in his U.S. News column two weeks ago, based on a reading of the most recent Pew Global Attitudes Survey of public opinion from Muslim countries (among others), is that the United States is making progress in turning people away from support for terrorism. “George W. Bush has proclaimed that we are working to build democracy in Iraq not just for Iraqis but in order to advance freedom and defeat fanatical Islamist terrorism around the world,” he writes. “Now comes the Pew Global Attitudes Project’s recent survey of opinion in six Muslim countries to tell us that progress is being made in achieving that goal. Minds are being changed and in the right direction.” Is that really what’s going on, and if so, why? I’d certainly be delighted if it’s true. But I’m not sure we’re there yet.

Continue reading →

The Washington Times

So, this is what a liberal constitution in an ethnically diverse, Islamic Middle Eastern country looks like, this draft constitution of Iraq.

Continue reading →

The Washington Times

Is U.S. policy “a recruiting poster for al Qaeda”? Did the Iraq invasion itself, as well as the occupation and now the ongoing U.S. presence, only serve to make terrorists out of a larger number (albeit still a tiny fraction) of the world’s 1.2 billion Muslims – and perhaps more worrying, terrorist sympathizers out of some significant multiple of that? Are we, accordingly, only playing into the terrorists’ hands? Last week in this space, we considered the question of whether the U.S. presence in Iraq was having the perverse effect of creating more terrorists. I argued that the question seems to be connected with the question of the affinity of al Qaeda for the Saddam regime. Although most opponents of the war tend to answer that the current situation is indeed creating more terrorists, they also tend to dismiss the notion of any affinity between Islamism and the secular Baathist regime of Saddam. Supporters of the war tend to answer each question the opposite way.

Continue reading →

The Washington Times

In American politics, sometimes questions emerge as Rorschach tests of what people think about big political events. What makes for a political Rorschach test is that the answer to the question posed is unknowable but not recognized as such: Like the random image presented by the inkblot, the scenario posed by the question actually signifies nothing. The only thing “there” is what people bring to it themselves. They may think their assessment is a product of the facts – what the inkblot portrays – but in truth the “facts” constitute a tabula rasa on which people inscribe their preexisting prejudices, preferences and hopes.

Continue reading →

The Washington Times

As revelations go, the one contained in an op-ed piece by George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley in the Los Angeles Times July 25 was a blockbuster. Mr. Turley, citing sources who had attended, described an exchange at an informal meeting with Supreme Court nominee John Roberts the week before: “Roberts was asked by Sen. Richard Durbin (D-Ill.) what he would do if the law required a ruling that his church considers immoral. Roberts is a devout Catholic and is married to an ardent pro-life activist. The Catholic Church considers abortion to be a sin, and various church leaders have stated that government officials supporting abortion should be denied religious rites such as communion … Renowned for his unflappable style in oral argument, Roberts appeared nonplused and according to sources in the meeting, answered after a long pause that he would probably have to recuse himself.” Mr. Turley continued, “It was the first unscripted answer in the most carefully scripted nomination in history. It was also the wrong answer.” Mr. Turley went on, quite correctly, to explain why it would be unacceptable to have a Supreme Court justice who routinely recused himself on matters related to the interpretation of the U.S. Constitution and U.S. law when the latter might be in contradiction with Roman Catholic doctrine.

Continue reading →