Archive for December, 2007

Notes on the Post-Bush Mideast

Should auld aquaintance be forgot…
A year from now, the Bush Administration will be emptying its desks into cardboard boxes and preparing to hand over to its successor. And, it’s a relatively safe bet that the menu of foreign policy crises and challenges it will leave in the in-trays of its successors will be largely unchanged [...]


Hillary’s ‘Southern Strategy’: Muslim-Baiting

So this is the big secret that Hillary’s campaign is trying to warn us will crop up like some old floozie of Bill’s to wreck the Dems chances if they nominate Obama? Hillary surrogate Senator Bob Kerrey casually tossed out this little bon mot on Sunday: “It’s probably not something that appeals to him, but [...]


An Inconvenient Truth for Israel

Uri Avnery argues that the U.S. National Intelligence Estimate on Iran is a catastrophic blow to the Israeli leadership, which has been using the “Iran threat” as a political organizing principle at home and abroad.


Constructing Hanukkah

Guest Column: David Shasha, the founder and director of the Center for Sephardic Heritage in Brooklyn, New York, is one of my favorite weekly email reads. (You can subscribe, too, by contacting him directly.) He offers a fascinating, and very scholarly, take on matters of Jewish theology, philosophy, identity and politics, all from [...]


The Latest
  • Guest Columns
    How I Overcame My Jewish-Evangelical Upbringing and Learned to Love Christmas, Anyway
    Guest Column: Gavin Evans Back in the day, when Gavin and I were young activists trying to change the world, the doorbell rang at our Observatory student house. I opened it to see a tall and handsome man in the silky purple shirt and dog collar of an Anglican Bishop. "You must be Tony," said Bis...
  • Featured Analysis
    Does Obama Have a Mideast Plan B?
    It's hardly surprising that President Barack Obama chose to schedule a White House visit by Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the dead of night on Monday, because right now Obama has little to show for his 10-month effort to revive a Middle East peace process. The Israeli leader's refu...
  • Unholy War
    Who Lost Fatah?
    ‘Who lost China?” was the battle cry of a witch-hunt conducted in the US State Department following the 1949 victory of Mao Zedong’s communists. The department’s “China hands”, critics charged, had been woefully ignorant of the dynamics at work on the ground in China after the Second W...
  • A Skeptical Read
    More Iran Hysteria from the NY Times
    The surest sign that another neocon bill of goods is being hawked in respect of the Iran "nuclear peril" is the revival of Rumsfeld-esque "unknowable unknowns", a la Iraq WMD panic circa late 2002. In the real world, of course, solid progress is being made towards a plausible diplomatic deal to ...
  • 99c Blogging
    The 'Metrics' of Obama's Vietnam
    Why is the Administration conducting a "test run" for its metrics of success in Afghanistan? Because the metrics used will be those that provide the desired verdict
  • Hear! Hear!
    Helena Cobban Explains Fatah
  • If I Was a Blogger...
    More Dennis Ross Dissembling
    Obama's Iran point man can't seem to get his head around the reasons for Israeli emigration
  • A Wondering Jew
    Obama, Foxman and Israel's Purpose
    Having spent decades drumming home the idea that Israel is rooted squarely in the Holocaust experience, and should be viewed by the world as the state of the survivors, Israelis and some of their most fervent backers in the U.S. are suddenly insisting that this is a misleading, even hostile idea.
  • Glancing Headers
    The Shebab, the Shahids and the Champion's League Final
    The Shebab gunman on the left appears to be a Gunner, i.e. an Arsenal fan... In honor of today's Champion's League final, I republish my op ed that ran in the National a year ago. What was most fascinating about the photograph of the Somali gunman who was part of the crowd dragging the body...
  • Annals of Globalization
    The Shebab, the Shahids and the Champion's League Final
    The Shebab gunman on the left appears to be a Gunner, i.e. an Arsenal fan... In honor of today's Champion's League final, I republish my op ed that ran in the National a year ago. What was most fascinating about the photograph of the Somali gunman who was part of the crowd dragging the body...
  • The Whole World's Africa
    Congo's Not Africa's WWI, It's Worse Than That
    If there is a European analogy to be applied in the Congo, it would be the brutal Thirty Year War in Germany that ended in 1648
  • Shameless Cronyism
    Embedded with the Jihadis
    My crazy friend Nir Rosen goes on embed with the Taliban, and finds out just why the U.S. can't win in Afghanistan
  • Rebellion Into Money
    Why Joe Strummer Was a Socialist
    Hint: It had nothing to do with bailing out banks
  • Could Die Laughing
    Whatever Became of that Nice Mr. Blair...
    The problem with a global conversation between Muslims and Christians refereed by Tony Blair? Two words: Tony Blair.
  • The 51st State
    A Teachable Moment in Basra
    It should come as no surprise that Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's disastrous offensive against the Mahdi Army of Moqtada Sadr in Basra has had the exact opposite effect of that intended -- strengthening rather than weakening Sadr, and making clear that he, and the Iranians, have far greater in...
  • Futures Market
    Will Russia Partition Kosovo?
    Why my tea-leaf reading suggests that Moscow has a nasty surprise in store for Washington in the Balkans
  • Cuisine
    Yummy yummy Umami
    Why a leftover lamb bone turned a bean stew into an ecstatic event
  • Housekeeping
    'Lost' Entries on Rootless Cosmopolitan
    Previous entries that now register as "not available" are ones that got left behind in a server migration. We're working on retrieving them
  • New York Moments
    The Debka Made ‘Em Do It
  • From Tony's Archive
    A Playground Lesson for Bush
    How a spontaneous alliance of jocks, do-gooders and lesser bullies against the biggest bully at the school changed the balance of power at Milnerton Primary
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