Europe wants an army. Tony Blair wants a European rapid deployment force that can work through NATO in concert with the United States to build “one polar power” that spans the Atlantic. Jacques Chirac, Gerhard Schroeder and the leaders of Belgium, Greece and Luxembourg — the continent’s leading critics of the war with Iraq — […]
Harold Meyerson
Harold Meyerson is editor at large of The American Prospect.
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Intelligence Designed
So whose books were more cooked — Enron’s accounts of its financial doings or the administration’s prewar reports on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction? Enron’s books didn’t lack for detail. They were simply and deliberately fictitious. They documented all manner of energy sales and swaps that in fact never transpired but that had to be […]
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Total Recall
The problem with socialism, noted Oscar Wilde, that most social of socialists, was that it took “too many evenings.” It’s the left that’s always been committed to the permanence of politics, to continual deliberation and decision-making. Conservatism, by contrast, promises fewer evenings lost by leaving more decisions to the market and fewer to the realm […]
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Squandering Prosperity
Economists are admitting to confusion, always a bad sign. The American economy has entered “a baffling twilight zone,” writes Robert J. Samuelson. “People yearn for clarity and confidence, while the new stagnation provides mainly uncertainty and contradiction.” The Federal Reserve seems particularly vexed. Profits and productivity are up, but growth is negligible and employment is […]
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The Most Dangerous President Ever
I miss Ronald Reagan. I know, I know: Reagan was our first president to proclaim government the problem, to cut taxes massively on the rich, to deliberately create a deficit so immense that the government’s impoverishment did indeed become a problem. He waged a war of dubious merit and clear illegality in Central America; he […]
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Historical Present
I. THE LOGIC OF MOBILIZATION. “Events in Iraq have now reached the final days of decision,” the president said in beginning his Monday night de facto declaration of war. The only decision that mattered, however — that of going to war — was being made nowhere near Iraq but right in the White House. That […]
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Clash of Civilizations
I. Bush v. World George W. Bush may believe he has the mandate of heaven for what, as I write, is still the looming war in Iraq, but he’s not doing very well on earth. Indeed, he’s all but unified the planet in opposition to the notion of a U.S.-led preemptive war. Governments that support […]
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The Tough Dove’s Moment
It is Saturday morning, Jan. 18, and in Washington and San Francisco, hundreds of thousands of demonstrators have gathered to protest the president’s pending war. In Des Moines, Iowa, hundreds of Democrats are turning out, too — both to oppose that war, it seems, and begin the process of unseating that president. Almost a year […]
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Post-Gore Democrats
Gore is gone, and the race for the Democratic nomination in 2004 is so wide open, says one Democratic pollster, “The plausibility of why-not-me? candidacies has just exploded.” This isn’t 1992, when Mario Cuomo’s decision not to run failed to prompt any prominent national Democrats who’d been holding back to hop into the race. Running […]
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The Cult of Karl
So who you gonna believe, Bob Woodward or Ron Suskind? In Bush at War, Woodward’s new behind-the-scenes account of the White House in wartime, mighty battles are waged between the Powellites and the Cheneyistas over the fundamentals of foreign policy. Multilateralists duke it out with unilateralists, leaving the president to choose between, or meld, two […]
