Middle East
The False God of 'Narrative'
"What if the government starts enforcing the espionage statute whenever there's a leak?" Steve Roberts, a former New York Times journalist...
Broken Promises
On the evening of April 15—the day two bombs exploded at the Boston Marathon, killing three people and wounding more than two hundred eighty—President...
The Culture of Preconception
The political response to the Boston Marathon bombings suggests that we live in an age of shrink-wrapped, prepackaged opinions.
When something new comes along, we...
This Time Is No Different
The blood runs cold when one fully appreciates how vulnerable Western policymakers are to slogans and magical thinking. The Reinhart-Rogoff case is the latest, and...
Outside the Law
Jess Bravin’s The Terror Courts: Rough Justice at Guantánamo Bay traces the vexed history of the military commissions at Guantánamo, established...
Unfriendly Skies
Polls show that the vast majority of Americans do not want armed drones circling their own neighborhoods. Who could blame us for not wanting to be taken out by a...
Walled In
Shin Bet, Israel’s security agency, oversees counterterrorism and intelligence gathering in Israel and the Palestinian territories. It also bears...
From a Distance
War is war and murder is murder. The law draws the distinction. The American armed drone is a weapons system of war, not of policemen. And even if it were a police...
Can Obama Save the Two-State Solution?
The administration has set expectations for President Obama's trip to Israel so low you'd think he was making another visit to Ohio. Yet this is a very...
Irrational Fear of Iran
A Gallup poll issued this month says that 99 percent of the American public now has become convinced that Iran's civilian nuclear program will threaten "the vital...
Change at the Pentagon
During his first term, President Barack Obama steered a middle course that displeased people on both extremes of the political spectrum. His health-care law...
Reagan Is Obama's Touchstone
To understand how Barack Obama sees himself and his presidency, don't look to Franklin Roosevelt or Abraham Lincoln. Obama's role model is Ronald Reagan -- and that...
