06 Tuesday Jul 2004
Posted in Washington Times
The Washington Times
Does politics still have a slow season? If so, the Fourth of July weekend marks its official beginning. According to conventional wisdom, even in an election year, summer is no time to try to drive a political message. People aren’t interested. But does that old conventional wisdom adequately take into account the intensity of feeling this year? That’s the proposition we are likely to test this summer.
29 Tuesday Jun 2004
Posted in Washington Times
The Washington Times
Because of Iraq, 2004 has been a very edgy year. The absence of bad news is excellent news, minimal bad news on any given day is good news, and as for good news, there isn’t enough to take the edge off for long. At least the nature of the challenge has clarified itself over the past couple months: on one side, Abu Musad Zarqawi’s world of barbarity, mayhem and beheadings; on the other, the United States, its allies, the new Iraqi government and what would seem to be the vast majority of Iraqis themselves.
22 Tuesday Jun 2004
Posted in Washington Times
The Washington Times
The main reason for going to war in Iraq, in my view then and now, was the danger posed by Saddam Hussein going forward. This is a view I came to only after starting to think about the nexus of rogue states [such as Saddam’s Iraq], terrorist organizations [such as al Qaeda] and weapons of mass destruction [WMD] that might be produced using the resources of states but transferred to terrorist organizations for release.
15 Tuesday Jun 2004
Posted in Washington Times
The Washington Times
There is nothing wrong with George W. Bush’s re-election prospects that a little conspicuous success wouldn’t cure. The economy is now delivering the goods – and the jobs – and it is probably only a matter of time before Mr. Bush gets credit for basic competence in its management. The most recent Associated Press/Ipsos poll shows that a solid majority of Americans, 57 percent, think the economy has lost jobs in the past six months, when in fact employment has grown by 1.2 million. Perception eventually will move more into line with reality.
08 Tuesday Jun 2004
Posted in Washington Times
The Washington Times
The legacy of an American politician has two main components. One of them relates to policy, the way in which the country’s affairs, its position in the world and world order itself changed as a result of the politician’s guiding hand. On this score, Ronald Reagan looms larger with each passing year. The second component is only slightly less consequential: It is a politician’s political legacy. If politics is the art of the possible, then a great politician has an effect on what is possible not only during his own term in office but also in the years that follow. By now, the imprint that Mr. Reagan left has been visible for fully a generation and shows few signs of fading anytime soon.
01 Tuesday Jun 2004
Posted in Hoover Digest, Washington Times
Printed in both The Washington Times and The Hoover Digest
CHISINAU, MOLDOVA—At the checkpoint where my car is stopped, it is pretty clear from those in attendance—in assorted military garb or the ill-fitting suits that remain the uniform of the lower ranks of the successor organizations to the KGB—that there is a list inside the guardhouse with my name on it. So I will not, after all, be visiting Transnistria, the region of the former Soviet republic of Moldova that saw the worst violence in the breakup of the USSR and remains under the control of a local strongman, Igor Smirnov, who maintains his Stalinist grip thanks to an extensive security apparatus and a 1,300-strong contingent of Russian “peacekeeping” troops.
26 Wednesday May 2004
Posted in Washington Times
The Washington Times
One gets some sense of the heavy political weather President Bush was flying in Monday night by the pre-speech observation of a cable news anchor. He condescendingly observed that it must have escaped the White House’s attention that the war college where Mr. Bush was to speak was close to Gettysburg, Pa., where Abraham Lincoln delivered his magnificent Gettysburg Address, compared with which Mr. Bush’s speech would doubtlessly be found wanting. Talk about a tough audience. What is worse, that comment was on Fox News Channel – which passes for friendly journalism in Mr. Bush’s Washington today.
18 Tuesday May 2004
Posted in Washington Times
The Washington Times
So, ask yourself this question: In the absence of the photographs taken at Abu Ghraib prison, how much credence would you have attached or did you attach to reports of abuse of the detainees there? How credible did you find the complaints of mistreatment? Asked to guess how the U.S. military was treating prisoners, in your wildest imagination would you have conjured up the image of a female U.S. soldier leading a hooded, naked Iraqi around on a leash?
11 Tuesday May 2004
Posted in Washington Times
The Washington Times
As a siren and flashing lights stream past an outdoor cafe here, my Israeli dinner companion, an acute observer of manners, tells me to watch the way our Israeli fellow patrons’ heads turn – first in the direction in which the emergency vehicle was going, next in the direction whence it came. Why look back? Well, my dinner companion explains, if other emergency vehicles aren’t following the first one, it’s routine, maybe a heart attack or something. Only if more are following could it be a terrorist attack.
04 Tuesday May 2004
Posted in Washington Times
The Washington Times
Forget about the “fog of war” for a while – that is, the inability to know what’s going on in the heat of battle. Let us turn our attention instead to the “fog of occupation.”
Tod Lindberg 