"This public pressure would be appropriate, even laudable, had it not been accompanied by an unseemly private insistence that the Pakistanis deliver these high-value targets (HVTs) before Americans go to the polls in November. The Bush administration denies it has geared the war on terrorism to the electoral calendar." [more]

"Most people don't realize just how frequently the United Nations puts itself between trigger-happy combatants around the globe ... [yet] which do most people associate with the United Nations? The ones in which U.N. troops failed to prevent disaster." [more]

"If the greatest injustice in the world is U.S. imperialism, the world's greatest injustices must be found where U.S. imperialism is strongest. And, here, Africa poses a problem. Africa, after all, has less contact with the United States than any other part of the world ... the United States has avoided acting like an empire in post-cold-war Africa, and, thus, the hard left has found little cause for moral concern." [more]

"Iraqi scientists I met insist that the combination of U.S. bombing, U.N. inspections, disarmament efforts, unilateral destruction by Iraqi officials, and stiff U.N. sanctions had indeed eliminated Saddam's illicit weapons by the mid-'90s." [more]

"Foreign policy is always difficult in a democracy. Democracy requires openness. Yet foreign policy requires a level of secrecy that frees it from oversight and exposes it to abuse. As a result, Republicans and Democrats have long held that the intelligence agencies—the most clandestine of foreign policy institutions—should be insulated from political interference in much the same way as the higher reaches of the judiciary. As the Tower Commission, established to investigate the Iran-Contra scandal, warned in November 1987, 'The democratic processes ... are subverted when intelligence is manipulated to affect decisions by elected officials and the public.' " [more]

"Rather than allowing Iraqis to create a federal state—which is to say, a democratic one—Foggy Bottom, which lost the argument over whether to topple an authoritarian central government in Baghdad, has settled for the next best thing: an authoritarian central government under U.S. control." [more]

"Saddam Hussein's regime 'is busy enhancing its capabilities in the field of chemical and biological agents,' Vice President Dick Cheney told the Veterans of Foreign Wars in August, adding, 'These are not weapons designed for the purpose of defending Iraq. These are offensive weapons for the purpose of inflicting death on a massive scale.' Billed by the White House as laying out the case for military action against Iraq, the speech employed the phrase 'weapons of mass destruction' eight times. George W. Bush also regularly uses 'weapons of mass destruction' as a collective term for chemical, biological, and atomic arms. In his 2002 State of the Union address, for example, the president stated that the United States would not 'permit the world's most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world's most dangerous weapons,' citing chemical, biological, and atomic arms as equal concerns." [more]

"Attorney General John Ashcroft is claiming that indefinite detention of suspected terrorists without a trialor any other judicial review of the allegations against themis justified by 'clear Supreme Court precedent.' Presumably, he's referring to the case of the Nazi saboteurs. If so, then Ashcroft is dead wrong." [more]

"For people like Condi Rice to suggest they had never considered this possibility of suicide hijackings is either a bald-faced lieóor a more scathing indictment of our anti-terrorism establishment than any memo the president actually did see." [more]

"The United Statesówhich has the final say in a country it still deems a war zoneóhas steadfastly opposed the deployment of foreign peace-keepers, regardless of nationality, beyond the confines of Kabul. Not only won't we provide the Afghans security; we won't let anyone else do it either." [more]