Welcome! This is an unapologetic, agenda-free zone. Just commentaries on current events that’ll move you to think, laugh, rage, and even cry.
It might seem impossible for a president to be triumphant, modest, contradictory, solemn and opportunistic all at once. Yet President Obama was just that when he made the following announcement on Friday: After nearly 9 years, America’s war in Iraq will be over… Over the next two months, our troops in Iraq—tens of thousands of them—will… Read more.
With all of the media focus on democratic uprisings across the Middle East these days it’s easy to forget that coalition forces are still bogged down in a misadventure to bring democracy to Afghanistan and Iraq. Therefore it’s more than a little ironic that no less a person than U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates reminded… Read more.
It is a fateful indication of how little progress the US has made in Afghanistan that President Obama had to deploy even more cloak and dagger maneuvers to visit there last weekend (over eight years into this war) than former President Bush did in 2006 (five years after launching it). And you’d think that having… Read more.
I wholly agreed with candidate Barack Obama when he argued during the 2008 presidential campaign that Afghanistan was “the good war.” For me, however, this only meant the US had a just cause (namely, avenging 9/11) to launch it – juxtaposed to Iraq (the bad war) for which it had no just cause. After all,… Read more.
The media did quite a Barnum & Bailey job of drumming up suspense, but President Obama’s address tonight on his new military strategy “to bring this war [in Afghanistan] to a successful conclusion” was wholly anticlimactic. Not to mention the pedantry he displayed in restating all of the (now Bushy) reasons why this is a just war, which only served… Read more.
In continuing the 18-year ban on media coverage of US troops returning home in body bags, President Bush insisted that he was doing so out of respect for the troops and regard for their families. But everybody knew that he was doing so because he feared that broadcasting this deadly cost would have a demoralizing… Read more.
On Monday, the Washington Post made a mockery of President Obama’s correspondence with his military commander in Afghanistan when it published an “urgent, confidential assessment of the war” by Gen. Stanley A. McCrystal within hours after Obama indicated that he has yet to even receive it. In any event, as is the case with most classified… Read more.
Westerners reacted with indignation and contempt last week when it was reported that President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan had signed a bill which, according the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) “legalizes rape.” In pertinent part, the offending Article 132: … requires women to obey their husband’s sexual demands and stipulates that a man… Read more.
Barack Obama, the presumptive Democratic nominee, has taken a detour from his US presidential campaign trail this week to go on a “fact-finding and listening” tour of Europe and the Middle East. But John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee, is leading a chorus of pundits criticizing Obama’s trip as variously long-overdue, misguided and inappropriate. They say… Read more.
