The Washington Times

Thanks to the spike in insurgent violence in Iraq, beginning with the grisly scene of mutilated American bodies in Fallujah and continuing through a violent weekend, the question of whether the June 30 transfer of sovereignty to an interim Iraqi authority should go forward is now on the table. Is it, perhaps, too soon? Doesn’t handing over sovereignty in a deteriorating security environment pose additional risks, including, perhaps, an emerging full-scale civil war?

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The Washington Times

BRATISLAVA, Slovakia. — This “New Europe” capital on the banks of the Danube is rapidly emerging as a crossroads of Central and Eastern Europe. I first started to get the point as I was getting on a plane a week ago bound for Frankfurt, Germany, en route to a conference in Bratislava of prime ministers and NGOs, mainly from countries about to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the European Union, on the subject of “Towards a Wider Europe.”

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The Washington Times

President Bush has been through a bad patch. This fact has been evident in his declining poll numbers, the disaffection of his conservative base, the administration’s defensiveness about weapons of mass destruction and a manifest hesitancy that Mr. Bush seemed to have banished from his major public appearances post-September 11.

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The Washington Times

Undeniably, the project of building liberal democracy in Central and Eastern Europe since the end of the Cold War has been a resounding success. But the purpose of this international gathering in Latvia’s capital last week, which drew a high-powered congressional delegation led by Sen. John McCain, was not to celebrate success but to draw attention to one conspicuous failure: Europe’s last dictator, Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus.

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The Washington Times

It wasn’t clear to me exactly how long the Bush administration here and Prime Minister Tony Blair’s government in Britain were going to have to contend with the charge they somehow cooked up a phony intelligence case that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction [WMD]. But with former chief WMD-hunter David Kay’s congressional testimony this week and the release of the exculpatory report of an independent inquiry into 10 Downing’s handling of Iraq intelligence, the scurrilous season seems to have come to an end.

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The Washington Times

It might be a little premature to declare its demise, but among serious candidates, the use of federal matching funds in presidential primaries is dying. Far from a resource for a presidential primary campaign, matching funds have begun to look like an obstacle to raising what’s necessary to be competitive.

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The Washington Times

I guess we should consider Sen. Edward Kennedy’s op-ed in The Washington Post Sunday the state-of-the-art in sober, Democratic anti-war criticism of President Bush. The piece is noteworthy not for the shrillness of its tone or the harshness of its judgment – the senator left that to the wrecking crew on the Democratic campaign trail and their overheated comrades at MoveOn.org, et. al. – but for its elegiac, more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger tone. The problem is that his own relatively sober description of events simply doesn’t support the charge of dishonesty that is the essence of Mr. Kennedy’s case against Mr. Bush.

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The Washington Times

Another hum-drum week for the Bush administration: a proposal to establish a permanent colony on the moon, possibly as a way station en route to a human expedition to Mars. And what was that other modest proposal again? Oh, yes, a reform of immigration laws that would liberalize and regularize the status of the 8 million or more people living in the United States illegally [to say nothing of collateral effects on employers and on those who benefit from illegals’ labors indirectly in the form of cheaper goods and services].

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The Washington Times

“Is the United States Overstreched?” That’s the subject I had to speak to before a Paris audience last month. Well, even if one was feeling a steady tug on the ankles and a gradual elongation of the spine, one might not want to draw too much attention to the discomfort, either out of a stoic commitment to live through what one must, or in order not to give aid and comfort to those wishing one ill. The French moderator of the panel, a friend of mine, offered an out, namely, that putting the question in terms of an “overstretched” United States seemed somehow characteristically French. But nevertheless, let us say at the start of 2004 in Paris or Washington precisely this: The United States is stretched.

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The Washington Times

The pre-Christmas announcement that Libya’s ruler, Moammar Gadhafi, has decided to end his development programs for and destroy his stocks of weapons of mass destruction [WMD] marks a watershed moment in the new Bush administration strategy of prevention. Make no mistake about what has happened, thanks to deft diplomacy by the administration and Tony Blair’s government in Britain: Col. Gadhafi has concluded that he is safer without such weapons.

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