By Steve Clemons

Unless you are a Japan watcher, this post probably won’t interest you — unless you are into royals. And most Japan watchers for that matter aren’t interested in the imperial family and the goings-on within Japan’s secretive aristocracy. But I am going to write about this Tokyo soap opera anyway.

James Woolsey has been on the speech circuit, most recently at the 2005 Camden Conference up in Camden, Maine. I wonder how much folks are paying him to come up and scare them with his World War IV rhetoric.

This is from pages 22-23 of U.S. District Court (Charleston, South Carolina) Judge Henry Floyd’s important decision in the case of Jose Padilla: 2.

Gavin Sheridan does a great job challenging a post of mine on an ‘over the top’ tennis match on top of an exotic building in Dubai. He rightly accuses me of over-reacting to a tennis match and over-reaching by using this as a metaphor of some of the problems in the Middle East.

This USA Today editorial makes a point that I have been trying to emphasize in Washington circles: freedom, liberty and equal protection are only real if they are observed during times of high social stress. During World War II, American society interned innocent Japanese-Americans because of the fear that this U.S.

Not too long ago, I was at a conference with Hans Binnendijk of the National Defense University and a number of other senior defense policy hands.

Some Italians tonight are asking if America is their friend, who needs enemies? What are these soldiers at check-points thinking? Shoot first and ask questions later? If Iraq is indeed tilting the way of democracy, then these kind of incidents are certainly going to disrupt progress.

Marina Ottaway has just published her interesting take on the recent Iraq elections, which she argues are an auspicious start to democracy-building but are not enough in and of themselves.

A.O. Scott has written the must-read review of Gunner Palace, about which I have written several posts before.

A while back, Washington Post columnist Sebastian Mallaby wrote a good piece on the qualities he thought the next World Bank president ought to have — and he disqualified a number of candidates who were in the news then. Here is my link to that discussion.