Features

Last July, as the debate over a Medicare prescription-drug bill heated up, AARP, the nation’s largest senior-citizen lobbying organization with some 35 million members, sent a letter to Congress detailing issues that “must be fixed” before it could endorse a final bill. Among the group’s chief concerns were “program structure and the adequacy and affordability […]

“It’s rough around here,” Nancy Pelosi says softly, almost in passing, as she scurries down a Capitol hallway from one meeting to another, greeting colleagues and staffers as she goes. The “here” in question is the House of Representatives, where Pelosi has been the Democratic leader for the past year and a half. What she […]

In the weeks preceding the U.S. attack on Iraq to remove Saddam Hussein from power, George W. Bush asserted that “a new regime in Iraq would serve as a dramatic and inspiring example of freedom for other nations in the world.” What Bush preached was a kind of muscular dominance permitting the United States to […]

In my view, being a liberal is something to be proud of. Yet for more than 20 years, liberals have been on the defensive and conservatives ascendant. Radical conservatives — “radcons,” I call them — are taking over the public agenda. Radcons are revolutionaries. For them, ends justify means. They’ll do whatever it takes to […]

By the fall of 2003, the main argument by which the Iraq War was sold to the public — that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction that it was likely to give to terrorists — was looking pretty threadbare. Tacking with the wind, George W. Bush took advantage of the 20th anniversary of the National […]

An interesting case study in the Bush administration’s penchant for forging bilateral alliances that are enabling some truly wretched regimes is Eritrea, a small Horn of Africa nation strategically located on the Red Sea, where some on the right would like to establish U.S. air and naval bases. Eritrea is a truly remarkable country: There’s […]

Between May and July 2001, the National Security Agency intercepted more than 30 private communications suggesting an imminent terrorist attack. In June, U.S. intelligence discovered that leading al-Qaeda operatives were vanishing from sight, possibly in preparation for a strike. By August, the CIA was reporting that Khalid al-Mindhar, Nawaf al-Hazmi, and other associates of Osama […]

There may come a day, in January 2005, when the Democrats will come back to power. Can we perhaps divert ourselves from the campaign long enough to ask, what then? The Democrats have a problem. Their base wants jobs and security. Their financial leadership wants a return to the Clinton formula of deficit reduction, leaving […]

The rumors began almost at once. It was 10:06 a.m. on September 11, 2001, when United Airlines’ Flight 93 — the last of the four hijacked jets — plowed into a field in rural Pennsylvania. Within hours the coffeehouses of the Arab world were abuzz with speculation that the attacks were the work of the […]

“You did a great thing!” With that unexpected greeting from an Iranian diplomat in New York last December, my trip to Iran began to take shape. A few months earlier I had published a book that tells how, in 1953, the CIA deposed Iran’s last democratic leader, Mohammed Mossadegh, and set his country on a […]