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.

While the world has been focused on negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program, there is a potentially ominous development with that other member of the “axis of evil,” the one that already has nukes, North Korea.

Whether justified or not, most voters consider Republicans better custodians of the nation’s security than Democrats. This bias began after the Democrats drove the country into the Vietnam quagmire, thereafter making many in the party uncomfortable with the use of American power.

You may have noticed that we’re having a problem with comments: clicking on “comment” doesn’t do anything. I’m not sure what the cause is, but I’m rebuilding the site, which will hopefully fix the problem. In the meantime, you can still read and post comments by clicking on “permalink” and viewing the individual post page….

We will get, in due time, to Steve Walt’s noteworthy appearance at the “Committee for the Republic” — a Washington club comprised largely of dissenters from Bush’s foreign policy.