Lebanon

As if to remind people why there was a “serious” CIA program possibly aimed at assassinating members of al-Qaeda, bin Laden lieutenant Ayman Zawahiri has a new audiotape message to the Pakistani people. It’s what you’d expect: only Zawahiri’s allies in the Pakistani Taliban represent the historic mission of a Muslim bulwark to Indian aggression [...]

With the long-awaited announcement of Defense Secretary Bob Gates’ “hard-choices” budget coming in about an hour, there’s been a lot of talk this morning about Greg Jaffe’s piece in The Washington Post on U.S. defense planners’ fascination with the Israel-Hezbollah war of 2006. As Greg writes, and many others discuss, the war is viewed in [...]

There’s no sugarcoating this. Israel is looking like a country that is quickly losing its mind. Consider this statement:
In an interview Tuesday, Ambassador Gabriela Shalev said Israel’s main goal is to “destroy completely” what she called a “terrorist gang.”
I truly truly hope this is empty rhetoric. Because the evidence is accumulating that Israel is determined [...]

Matt Bai’s long article on Sen. Barack Obama in this Sunday’s New York Times Magazine is already reverberating among news junkies. There’s plenty of political and racial points to debate.
One passage really caught my eye,  because I attended the same small-town Obama event in southwestern Virginia that Bai describes. Pardon the long excerpt, but Bai [...]