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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Repealing the Paris Hilton Tax—A dozen or so protesters gathered outside the Senate in early June, dressed as the grim reaper: black robe, white mask, scythe. “Bury the Death Tax,” their signs read. The invocation of death and taxes, they hoped, would prove particularly lethal. The movement to abolish a long-standing tax on inherited wealth, known as […]

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Editor’s note: President Bush has never made a secret of his opposition to gay marriage, but his high-profile embrace of the issue in early June was something unusual. In a weekly radio address and in a White House speech to religious leaders, Bush urged Senate passage of a constitutional amendment that would ban same-sex marriage. […]

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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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