History, Ismael Reed once said, is the story of warfare between secret societies. I'm not ready to go that far, but I think it's fair to say the history of U.S. foreign policy over the past forty years has been the story of the war between two not-so-secret societies:...
Orange is not exactly a Christmas color: more like Halloween, but then there is definitely a Halloween-ish quality to our chieftain of Homeland Security, Tom Ridge, who raised the color-coded terror alert from an "elevated yellow" to "high" orange, and...
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Back in my tadpole days, sometime in the Pleistocene, my fellows at Roehm Junior High (Frederick, not Ernst) enjoyed hanging the name of "Scrooge" around my neck. Whether or not they did so in response to my "Bah! Humbug" attitude toward Christmas...
I. IDEOLOGICAL POWER REVISITED I have alluded at times in this space to John A. Hall's division of power into three types – ideological, political-military, and economic.(1) I have also suggested, over the past several years, that in our time, the first of the...
While most of the world is still trying to come to terms with the neo-imperial ambitions of the post-Sept. 11 Bush administration, U.S. political analysts, particularly those on the libertarian right and the left, have been trying to map out the various forces behind...
The Fox News crew was breathless the morning Saddam's capture broke. Of course, when I had last been watching, some Fox babe was breathless about Scott Peterson, Michael Jackson, Kobe Bryant, or whoever was threatening our way of life at the time, so it took me a...
The decision by Libya's Moammar Qadaffi to come clean, so to speak, and give up his weapons of mass destruction is being touted, by the War Party, as proof that their program of "regime change" in Iraq has put the fear of God – or, at least, of Washington and...
I don't believe the capture of Saddam Hussein will have any effect on the guerrilla war being conducted against Americans and their Iraqi allies. Saddam's power was always his ability to command and control. The day he went on the run, he lost that power. He couldn't...
Last evening, in Amman, we met with Fadi Elayyan and Jihad Tahboub, two Palestinian young men who were imprisoned for two months, without charge, by US Occupying forces who seized them, in Baghdad, on April 10, 2003. They are trying to help four of their companions...
