George W. Bush

Former Bush Administration official Elliott Abrams has taken to the pages of Foreign Policy to offer a defense of the Neoconservative policies that were a hallmark of the Bush-era world view, and to link them with the ongoing Arab Spring movement (note: author/pundit Niall Ferguson was also pushing this argument on Sunday's episode of “Fareed Zakaria GPS”).  It is an odd defense on the part of Abrams, since he basically boils neoconservativism down to a couple of pro-de

Not far from where I grew up there's a tiny park, at its centerpiece is a misshapen lump of corroding metal.  For years I could never decide whether the lump was a modern art installation or just a large piece of refuse that the town simply refused to collect.  Years later I learned that it in fact was a piece of the USS Maine, a United States battleship which blew up in the harbor of Havana, Cuba in 1896.  The destruction of a US Navy warship in a foreign port was as shocking to the citizens of end-of-the-century America as the terrorist attacks of 9/11 would be just over one hundred years later; the Maine would go on to serve as the causus belli<

If you have been following international news recently, you are no doubt aware that the world has been an eventful place to say the least. These past few weeks alone saw the emergence of the world’s 193^rd country, Human Rights Watch’s call for the prosecution of George W.

Perhaps it’s the August heat, but invariably whenever the summer months roll around, American political discourse always seems to get fixated on some nonsensical issue - this year is no different with talk of the proposed “Ground Zero Mosque” dominating the airwaves.  Of course the name is something of a misnomer - the “mosque” isn’t a mosque per se, but rather an Islamic cultural center that will contain a dedicated prayer facility within its 13-stories (in fact its creators stress that the prayer space officially is not a mosque) and it will not be at “Ground Zero” (the former World Trade Center site), but on

Last Tuesday, Intelligence Squared sponsored a debate on whether or not President Barack Obama’s foreign policy signaled America’s decline as the driving force in global affairs: Dan Senor and Mort Zuckerman argued yes; Wesley Clark and Bernard-Henri Levy argued no.