When Steve Clemons first asked me to contribute to The Washington Note this week, my reaction was to decline, on the ground of fatigue following an intense few weeks — as many of you know, the memorial service for my father was held on May 31st.
I am glad to see that the Bush administration, having backed the losing side in fighting between Somalia’s Islamic militias and secular warlords, has — according to a story by Karen DeYoung in today’s Washington Post — chosen to offer an olive branch to the Islamic factions that seized control of Mogadishu yesterday. The U.S….
My thanks to Steve for the chance to guest blog. Reaching back to early March, I was struck by a NY Times piece by David Brooks entitled “It’s Not Isolationism, but It’s Not Attractive” on March 5, 2006.
I’m a newbie to the blogosphere, but thanks to Steve for asking me to pinch hit on The Washington Note. I hope I can live up to his and his readers’ expectations. Both Washington and Tehran have used the term “positive” to describe a package of incentives — including an offer of some U.S.
I’m grateful to Steve for inviting me back to The Note, and to repay his trust and friendship, I’m going to raise a disagreement with one of his other guests. Arianna Huffington suggested yesterday that calling for a troop removal from Iraq would nationalize the elections this fall for the Democrats. I don’t agree.
It’s too early to know for certain how deep the Bush Administration’s commitment to Iran diplomacy runs.
Listening to the gay marriage debate on NPR amid the ongoing revelations about the mass murder at Haditha, I feel as if I’m listening to the late Gilda Radner on Saturday Night Live ranting about something she misheard. When corrected, she would blithely reply, “never mind.
Now that we’ve got the technical issues taken care of (sort of), I wanted to centraize in one place all the posts lost in the ether: Mohammad Mohamedou: The 1970s Redux — In Politics and at the Movies Bruce Schneier: Data Mining and Terrorism Arianna Huffington: What Haditha Means to Our Safety — and the…
After cleaning thousands of spam comments out of the system and upgrading Steve’s blogging software, things are back to near-normal here at TWN. We’ve made two changes to the comment system, hopefully temporary — we’ll find a more permanent solution when Steve’s back in town. First, no html in the comments.
(June 5) On its final descent into Istanbul yesterday, my plane swooped low over the length of the Bosphorus, that narrow sluiceway between continents, before landing at Ataturk International Airport.
