March 15, 2013
Vatican Spring? Don’t bet the basilica on it.
The Arabs, I was once informed by an orotund Christian Zionist, belong to a culture of shame. To the extent crime is stigmatized in Arab lands, it is more for the dishonor it imposes on family or tribe than the immorality of the crime itself. The west, by contrast, is a culture of guilt, where justice is defined and meted out under codes and systems that evolved from the Enlightenment. As cultures of shame and guilt are irreconcilable, I was told, there will never be peace until one side prevails.
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February 07, 2013
If nothing else, last week’s Senate hearings on Chuck Hagel’s fitness to run the US Defense Department exposed the deep divide that separates Washington’s world from the real one. At one point in the marathon session, for example, Republican Ted Cruz aired clips from an Al-Jazeera interview on a large video screen in which Hagel, according to Cruz, allowed that Israel had committed wartime atrocities. As the footage was all but inaudible, Cruz demanded of Hagel directly: “Do you think the nation of Israel has committed war crimes?”
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November 10, 2012
Barak Obama may have earned another four years after stabilizing an economy on life-support and winding down unpopular wars abroad, but the attack ads circulated in his name sullied a leader who presumed himself a brand above the empty suit who opposed him.
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November 10, 2012
Like the living dead, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization refuses to expire despite chronic neglect of its security commitments
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November 06, 2012
The final debate between America’s two presidential rivals made one thing painfully clear: U.S. foreign policy under President Barak Obama’s second term would deviate only marginally from a first term under Mitt Romney.
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October 22, 2012
No, I’m not referring to political contortionist Mitt Romney’s pivot back to the moderate middle. Rather, I refer readers to French President François Hollande’s celebration in Senegal this week of Africa’s independence from colonial (and specifically French imperial) rule. The era of “Françafrique,” he declared in Dakar, is over. “There is France and there is Africa . . . the continent of progress and the future of the global economy.”
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October 10, 2012
As the founder of a hugely successful private equity firm, Mitt Romney is a well-known turnaround specialist. This week, by trying to associate his hair-trigger worldview with the American statesman George Marshall, the Republican presidential contender revealed himself as a bait-and-switch artist.
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October 04, 2012
While in Washington last week I served as a panelist at a conference about the Obama administration’s Latin American policy, the defining element of which is a quarter-century old war on drugs.
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September 30, 2012
What common sense could not kill, something called “sequestration” might at least tame.
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September 21, 2012
The first thing to do when you find yourself in a hole, so goes an old saying, is to stop digging. And yet, scorched by an inferno of Arab outrage, Washington refuses to deal honestly and intelligently with its source. Instead, it just keeps on digging.
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Iraqi Economy (NPR – Talk of the Nation)