Wanted: A Foreign Policy—Since the Bush administration decided to abandon its doctrine of pre-emptive military force in the wreckage and rubble of Iraq, conservative hawks have begun labeling President Bush “weak,” “soft,” and “Clintonian.” The cover of Time heralded “the end of cowboy diplomacy.” The establishment journal Foreign Affairs echoed this with “The End of the Bush Revolution.” All […]

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In Max Frisch’s play The Fire Raisers, the respectable Herr Biedermann prefers to accept the palpably thin excuses that his tenants offer as they haul wagonloads of incendiary materials into his house, because that is easier than taking any action. Something like that is happening now. While the congressional and media types who magnify molehills of […]

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Editor’s note: A new book, The Kurds: A People in Search of Their Homeland, by Kevin McKiernan, recently caught our eye. It’s at once a history of the largest ethnic group in the world without their own state and a contemporary account of the Kurdish role in the war in Iraq. As the book makes clear, […]

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Handling Haditha—The killing of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi bumped news of Haditha off the front page, blunting public impact of the incident, in which U.S. troops stand accused of killing 24 Iraqi civilians and then covering it up. On the day of Zarqawi’s death, the State Department’s coordinator for Iraq said, “Haditha is a serious issue […]

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Editor’s note: We’ve offered many critiques of the Bush administration’s decision to invade Iraq. But what we like about the case advanced by the author Dilip Hiro is that he takes the administration at its word that the real motive behind the invasion was to seed democracy in the volatile Middle East and thereby increase […]

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