The Washington Post

Like most people who write about Washington politics, I operate from a bifurcated point of view whose components are A) a set of positions I favor on a variety of issues and B) a curiosity about how the Washington animal works. One must be vigilant against allowing the former to interfere with one’s investigations into the latter. But, of course, this is not an easy thing.

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The Washington Times

I came to Washington in 1985 with the expectation that I was going to spend my professional career fighting the Cold War (ideas division, that is). This was just fine with me. I thought the difference between a democratic, free-market system in which civil, political and human rights were protected, on one hand, and, on the other, the expansionist totalitarianism of the Soviet Union was something worth devoting a career to.

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The Washington Times

Having spent the past couple months in this space on weightier matters, I thought I might look at the pre-September 11 subject of this column, namely, what’s going on in politics. It’s clear that the pre-September 11 political world is gone, but it’s entirely unclear now who best understands the post-September 11 concerns of American voters.

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The Washington Times

Russian President Vladimir Putin has advanced by retreating. Since September 11, most of the old red lines Russia had drawn with regard to United States policies have been erased, some of them quite dramatically. Russia’s former determined opposition to the enlargement of NATO in general, and especially to the inclusion of states from the territory of the former Soviet Union (the Baltics), has all but dissipated. Similarly, opposition to U.S. missile defense efforts seems to have given way to a willingness to accommodate the United States by modifying the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty. Also, Mr. Putin’s Russia made it easy for the governments of Central Asian countries of the former Soviet Union to say yes to U.S. requests to use their territory in staging the war against the Taliban in Afghanistan – something hard to imagine a year ago, or even six months ago.

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The Washington Times

One month into the military operations in Afghanistan, and already the second-guessing is running high as hopes for success are running low. You would almost think people had developed the expectation that wars are supposed to be over and done with in six weeks at most – and in that time are supposed to deliver an unbroken string of success stories from the battlefield.

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The Washington Times

I have an ambition for the heirs of Osama bin Laden, or at any rate, his spiritual heirs, or the sons and for that matter the daughters of those heirs, however long it takes. I would like for them to become televangelists, in the fashion of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson.

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The Washington Times

Violent anti-American demonstrations are mounting in a number of Islamic countries. Meanwhile, the deranged conviction is taking hold in some circles within them that the real perpetrator of the Sept. 11 attacks was Israel, for the purpose of kindling a broader war against Islam. Both of these are indicators of how long and difficult the war on terror is going to be. We can surely accomplish a lot by way of improving our security with the measures the United States and our allies are currently taking, from military action against al Qaeda and the Taliban, to intelligence efforts to break up terror cells and networks, to coordinated international criminal investigations, to aggressive moves on the financial assets of the terrorists. This is all necessary, but it’s insufficient. What we really have to overcome, in the long run, is a certain frame of mind that, while hardly universal in the non-Western world, is nevertheless deeply rooted there, and not just in Islamic countries.

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The Washington Times

SOFIA, Bulgaria. – A long-scheduled summit meeting of the presidents of the 10 new democracies of Central and Eastern Europe seeking to join the Atlantic alliance took on a solemn, even historic dimension last week as a result of the Sept. 11 terror attack. Three days before the Sofia meeting, NATO’s 19 members formally reached the determination that the attacks on New York and Washington had originated from abroad. For the first time, then, article 5 of the NATO treaty, which declares that an attack on one is an attack on all, came into effect. Sofia became a wartime summit.

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The Washington Times

BERLIN. – At a hastily arranged conference here organized by the American Enterprise Institute’s New Atlantic Initiative and the Aspen Institute Berlin, I got a chance to take the temperature of the European (especially German) response to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the United States. Europe is all right – not great, but all right.

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The Washington Times

There is something I have long found vaguely off-key about the rhetoric encapsulated in the phrase “the greatest generation,” Tom Brokaw’s designation for the people who went off to fight and win World War II. It is not that their hardship and heroism warrant any lesser designation, but there is, indeed, something wrong with the word “greatest” – not as applied to them, but coming out of the mouths of us.

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