Across the Middle East, hopes for Arab-Israeli peace face obstacles that, of late, are rising on multiple fronts. Fatah and Hamas are working toward a coalition government, which will further empower a terrorist group that’s sworn to Israel’s destruction and isolate Palestinian moderates; a candidate of the Muslim Brotherhood is assuming the presidency in Egypt …
Delivering her Nobel Lecture after a 21-year delay, Burma’s Aung San Suu Kyi offered a timely reminder from the front lines of struggle. “To be forgotten,” she said in her October 16th address in Oslo, “… is to die a little. It is to lose some of the links that anchor us to the rest …
“Life,” the philosopher Soren Kierkegaard said, “must be lived forward, but can only be understood backwards.” What’s true of individuals is true of nations. As we, as a nation, look back in an effort to understand our history, we invariably question some of the decisions we made – and the horror we tolerated. Years from …
The economic news of recent days has unsettled the conventional wisdom that Washington will take an all-talk, no-action approach to fiscal policy until Election Day, with all sides posturing for electoral gain and delaying action to address looming deficits until late 2012 if not early 2013. Until recently, the political class assumed President Obama and …
Continue reading “Washington’s dangerous fiscal maneuvering”
The growing turmoil of the “Arab Spring”—the populist awakening that spread like a brushfire across the Middle East and North Africa after a desperate fruit peddler in Tunisia set himself afire in December of 2010—can shake the optimism of even the most enthusiastic human rights promoter. As of this writing, populist uprisings have toppled dictators …
Calls to ease sanctions on Iran to spur global negotiations over its nuclear program will backfire, making a deal far less likely and greatly raising the risk of an Israeli military strike to cripple the program. To its proponents, sanctions-easing is a necessary confidence-boosting measure to assure Iran that the United States and the other …
Continue reading “Global sanctions on Iran are working; relaxing them now would be foolhardy”
Nearly 40 years ago, a Congress disgusted with the value-less foreign policy realism of Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford began to require the State Department to report each year on the human rights records of other countries. That requirement was part of a package of congressionally driven reforms of the mid-1970s that were designed …
Continue reading “Latest U.S. Report Is Timely Human Rights Reminder”