There are many self-styled friends of Israel in the United States who have been enthusiastically supportive of Kosovo’s independence for years. People like Sen. Joe Lieberman, Rep. Elliot Engel, Morton Abramowitz, William Kristol, Douglas Feith and ...
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Kosovo: A New Day of Infamy for a New Century
The grotesque charade in Pristina on Sunday, February 17, crowned a decade and a half of U.S. policy in the former Yugoslavia that has been mendacious and iniquitous in equal measure. By encouraging its Albanian clients go ahead with the unilateral proclamation of ...
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So Goes Old Europe
Last December 10, after four months of futile shuttle diplomacy, the mediating effort by the U.N. Contact Group “troika” to reach an agreement on the final status for Kosovo predictably collapsed. “Neither party was able to cede its position on the fundamental question of sovereignty,” the U.S.-E.U.-Russian group reported to the U.N. Secretary General. The...
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The Empire: Not So Great in ’08
Iraq will continue to top the list of American foreign-policy concerns in 2008. While tactical successes in Baghdad and the Anbar Province were achieved in 2007 through the U.S. forces’ marriage of convenience with various Sunni Arab tribal leaders and former Saddam loyalists who detest Al Qaeda even more than they dislike the Americans, translating...
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Putin Versus the Kremlin on the Potomac
Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party scored an overwhelming victory in the country’s parliamentary elections last Sunday, winning almost two-thirds of the vote and 315 of the 450 seats in the Duma. The election was widely seen as a referendum on the past seven years ...
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Kosovo as a Symbol of Anti-Postmodernism
A nation’s cultural space is marked by its spiritual fruits and not by the frontier posts. It is possible to maintain a cultural space devoid of territory (the Jews). It is also possible to lose that space under the auspices of an ostensibly functioning state—and ...
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A New Balance of Power
Seven years is a well-rounded time span, for better (“Behold, there come seven years of great plenty”) or for worse (“And there shall arise after them seven years of famine”). As we enter the final year of George W. Bush’s presidency, it is time to look at his septennial foreign-policy scorecard without malice, which his...
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The Death of Genocide
A congressional resolution recognizing as “genocide” the killing of up to 1.5 million Armenians by Ottoman Turks in 1915 collapsed on October 25, when its sponsors—led by Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA)—asked House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to set the matter aside until “the timing is more favorable.” The nonbinding resolution passed the Foreign Affairs Committee two...
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Remember the Red October?
Had the Soviet Union not collapsed, today would have been a festive day in Moscow. The 90th anniversary of the October Revolution (“October” since in 1917 Russia was still using the Julian calendar) would be marked by a big military parade, with Western correspondents and military attaches on the lookout for new types of ICBMs...
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Debate on U.S. Kosovo Policy Brewing in Washington
As we near the deadline of December 10 for the Contact Group “Troika’s” report on its attempts to negotiate a solution to the problem of Kosovo, the voices of reason in the United States are finally becoming more influential and more articulate than ever before. Over the past two weeks alone, John Bolton, Christian Science...
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Staying the Course
Those of us who grew up under communism remember well the ritual of the Leader’s Speech. At a Party congress—invariably dubbed “historic” even before it began—or on the occasion of the opening of a new steel mill, the Dear Comrade would deliver a much-heralded oration. It usually contained three main ingredients: “We” are making great...
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Kosovo Negotiations Stalled
An international conference that would jump-start the stalled talks on the future status of Kosovo could be held after elections in the Serbian province next month, European diplomats said Monday. The current round of negotiations, supervised by an international âTroikaâ of the EU, Russia and the United States, is scheduled to end on December 10....
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Sudden Jihad Syndrome in Vienna
Austrian authorities announced on October 2 that they arrested a second Bosnian-Muslim suspect in the plot to attack the American Embassy in Vienna. Mehmed D. (34) was apprehended following the arrest of Asim C. (42) last Monday, after the latter tried to enter the ...
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A Divided Subcontinent
A 31-gun salute boomed at daybreak on August 14 in Islamabad to mark Pakistan’s 60th anniversary of independence from British rule—or, to be precise, her birth as a Muslim state that resulted from the bloody partition of India in 1947. That event was accompanied by the largest mass migration in history, as over ten million...
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Remember Diana?
I was in London on a brief visit last weekend, which happened to be the tenth anniversary of the accidental death, at the age of 36, of Princess Diana, the divorced wife of the heir-apparent to the British throne. In marked contrast to the ...
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The President’s Painted Corner
A prudent power will always seek to keep open as many options as possible in its foreign-policy making. An increasingly rigid system of alliances, coupled with mobilization blueprints and railway timetables, reduced the European powers’ scope for maneuver in the summer of 1914 and contributed to the ensuing catastrophe. The United States, by contrast, entered...
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The President’s Painted Corner
A prudent power will always seek to keep open as many options as possible in its foreign-policy making. An increasingly rigid system of alliances, coupled with mobilization blueprints and railway timetables, reduced the European powers’ scope for maneuver in the summer of 1914 and contributed to the ensuing catastrophe. The United States, by contrast, entered...
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Waiting for Greatness
According to John O’Sullivan’s version of recent history, in the fullness of time, three great conservative leaders—Ronald Reagan, Pope John Paul II, and Margaret Thatcher—came unexpectedly to occupy positions of power, to shatter post-World War II orthodoxies, to facilitate the collapse of the Soviet empire, and to make the overall revival of their institutions and...
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Conservative Russia, Imperial America
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s refusal to yield to Western pressure and accept Kosovo’s independence at the G-8 summit in Heiligendamm has prompted a new round of Russia-bashing at both ends of the political spectrum. Editorial columns were filled with references to Putin’s “posturing,” “bluff,” “intimidation,” and “empty rhetoric.” His “hard line” may “reignite ethnic violence,”...
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Balkan Blowback
On May 1, at a hearing on the future of Kosovo, the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Democrat Tom Lantos of California, made a truly remarkable statement: Just a reminder to the predominantly Muslim-led governments in this world that here is yet another example that the United States leads the way for the...
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The Summer of Italian Discontent
“The only thing that keeps the ruling coalition together is the loathing of Berlusconi,” Sylvia Poggioli, NPR’s veteran Rome correspondent, told me over the morning coffee last week, “and the fear that after the next election they’d no longer be in power.” In other ...
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Wolfowitz in Love
Two years ago, upon learning of President Bush’s nomination for president of the World Bank, I expressed relief (Cultural Revolutions, May 2005) that, “at his new post, [Paul] Wolfowitz will not be able to do nearly as much damage as he has done at the Pentagon.” The damage, however, has continued. For the past three...
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Living With the Albanians
In the current debate on the future of Kosovo, it is often overlooked that hundreds of thousands of Serbs and other non-Albanians had fled the province under Albanian pressure well before the KLA terror campaign of 1996-1998. Under Tito, the Albanians’ share of the population thus rose from 64 percent in 1953 to 77 percent...
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Our Daily Lies, From Tbilisi to Tripoli
A prominent opposition figure was shot dead last Sunday in the capital of a former Soviet republic. Had it been a “pro-Western reformist” in Moscow, you’d be force-fed the victim’s name for days on end. A legion of editorialists and “analysts” would be telling you that Vladimir Putin is behind the crime and that we...
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Northern Ireland’s Immaterial Accord
On my first visit to Belfast, on a BBC World Service assignment 24 years ago, I was taken on a tour of the troubled areas by an RUC patrol in bulletproof vests. They were all Proddies, of course, tough and persevering, with low life expectancy. Our Land Rover—not a fully-clad Tangi but a regular Army...
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Kosovo Blowback Reaches America
The story: four Albanian Muslims from Kosovo, plus a Turk and a Jordanian, are arrested for conspiring to attack Fort Dix, a military base in New Jersey, with AK47s and “to kill as many soldiers as possible” (U.S. Attorney’s Office). The Mainstream Media spin: “Four ...
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France’s Fateful Choice
Nicolas Sarkozy, the Center-Right candidate, will face Socialist Segolene Royal in the run-off of France’s presidential election on May 6. In the first round last Sunday M. Sarkozy had 31 percent of the vote, Mlle Royal just under 26 percent, “extreme-centrist” Francois Bayrou 18 ...
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“A Pure American Type of a Rather Rare Species”
Dean Gooderham Acheson was born in Middletown, Connecticut, on April 11, 1893, into a stable world of which Europe was the center and where America was poised to attain hemispheric dominance. That world’s certainties were shattered in the trenches of Northern France, but the shock was less profound among America’s northeastern aristocracy—to which Acheson belonged...
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A Mainstream Conservative
In a sane world, Dinesh D’Souza would not merit a single inch of this column. The greater Middle East, Islamic terrorism, Korea, the Balkans, the imperial mind-set, and many other problems and challenges America faces around the world would take precedence over the musings of a self-designated “conservative intellectual” with few original ideas and little...
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Sharia Comes to Germany
The husband routinely beat his 26-year-old German-born wife, the mother of their two young children, and threatened to kill her when the court ordered him to move out of their Hamburg apartment. Police were called repeatedly to intervene. The wife wanted a quick divorce—without waiting a year after separation, as mandated by German law—arguing that...
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A Tale of Two Cabals
Imagine yourself at a fashionable party, a century ago, in Belgravia, the Upper East Side, or the Ballplatz. After-dinner brandy is served, Augustas are lit, and the talk turns to world affairs. The host asks his guests what they deem to be the issue that threatens peace and stability more than any other. A senior...
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Kosovo Gets Interesting
The problem of Kosovo, an already complex equation with many unknowns, is getting more vexing by the day. On February 2, U.N. special envoy Martti Ahtisaari unveiled his much-anticipated plan for the final status of the southern Serbian province, which has been under NATO-U.N. occupation since Bill Clinton’s war against the Serbs in 1999. While...
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Exiting Iraq: The Least Undesirable End
When a patient is diagnosed with lung cancer, it is tempting but not useful to harangue him on the evils of his three-pack-a-day habit. But when he refuses to kick that habit, or to accept its link with the disease, or even to acknowledge the seriousness of his condition, it is reasonable to assume that...
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Domestic Distraction
President George W. Bush’s sixth State of the Union Address was his best so far, rhetorically speaking. As befits a President in deep trouble, his body language was that of a beta male, and he smiled demurely. His tone was calm and conciliatory, at times to the point of pleading. To the uninitiated, Mr. Bush...
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The Grass Is Not Greener
The outcome of last November’s mid-term elections reminded us for the umpteenth time that democracy in America is a corrupt “democratic process” controlled by an elite class that conspires to make secondary issues important and to treat important issues as either irrelevant or illegitimate. One party may be in; another, out; but the regime is...
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The Shiite Gallows
To taunt and curse a condemned man who is about to meet his Maker is one of the lowest forms of human depravity. The practice, commonly associated with lynching, brings to mind the quasijudicial bestialities of Dzerzhinsky and Roland Freisler’s Volksgerichtshof, Parisian tricoteuses, and various ethno-tribal atrocities down through the ages. The hanging of Saddam...
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Iraq: The Least Bad Scenario
The Democrats’ victory on November 7 and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s departure a day later marked the beginning of the end game in Iraq. The moment is reminiscent of December 1970, when President Nixon decided to pull U.S. forces out of Vietnam by the end of the following year. The major difference is that...
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Rummy Reduced
Had President George W. Bush fired Donald Rumsfeld a month before, rather than a day after, November 7, the Republican Party could have retained control of both houses. Still, doing it late is better than not doing it at all. Rumsfeld was a liability and an embarrassment, the embodiment of all that went wrong in...
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The Untold Story of Kosovo Negotiations
Vojislav Kostunica, Serbia’s prime minister for the past three years, has one of the most challenging jobs in the world. He nevertheless seems at ease with that burden, and appears more confident than while he was Yugoslavia’s last president (2000-2003). When we met in ...
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Eurabian Nights: A Horror Travelogue
Thousands of young Muslims, armed with clubs and sticks and shouting, “Allahu akbar!” riot and force the police to retreat. Windows are smashed; stores are looted; cars are torched. Europeans unlucky or careless enough to be trapped by the mob are viciously attacked, and some are killed. The scene could be Mogadishu in the aftermath...
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Terror on the Underground
Two muslim terrorists held under Britain’s controversial “control order powers”—an Iraqi with possible links to Al Qaeda and a British citizen likely connected to the London Underground bombings last year—have escaped, as Tony Blair’s government reluctantly acknowledged on October 16. Both were suspected of being linked to international terrorist groups, and, in a sane world,...
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To Lose a War
President George W. Bush’s highly anticipated prime-time speech to mark the fifth anniversary of the terrorist attacks on America was supposed to be nonpartisan and conciliatory. It offered him an opportunity to present mature thoughts on one of the most momentous events in this country’s history, to correct several manifest flaws in his conceptual approach...
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Oriana Fallaci, R.I.P.
Oriana Fallaci, R.I.P. Back in the 1960’s, Oriana Fallaci was a “brave,” leftist, feminist hackette. Her iconoclastic interviews were praised by the chattering classes for bringing the genre to the heights of postmodernism: She was lauded for doing for journalism what Susan Sontag was doing for fiction. But whereas the latter progressed to become an...
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A Turbulent Layman
If you did not know beforehand that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadine-jad was one of the most important men in the most neuralgic region of the world—and, by extension, in the world itself—you’d never have guessed it. One of the few things he has in common with President George W. Bush is a forgettable face. In...
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Sir Alfred Sherman, R.I.P.
Sir Alfred Sherman, R.I.P. My dear friend and long-time associate Sir Alfred Sherman, who died in London on August 26, started his long political life as a Stalinist and ended it as one of the few “paleo” thinkers in today’s Britain. He will be remembered as the man who first invented “Thatcherism” and then explained...
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An Undesirable Independence
Given the wars and rumors of war from North Korea to the Middle East, the last thing America needs is to reignite the proverbial powder keg in the Balkans, a region that has been fairly stable for the better part of this decade, especially when compared to the bloody 1990’s. That precarious stability could be...
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The Destruction of Lebanon
Much of the Western commentary on the violence in Lebanon has not been about the events themselves but about the commentators’ feelings about the warring parties. Israel’s staunch friends and apologists would not admit that the IDF has done anything wrong, or that it could do anything wrong, even if the whole of southern Lebanon...
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Israeli-Arab Conflict
The Holy Land’s long, hot summer started with a spate of rocket attacks by Palestinian militants based in Gaza on the Israeli border town of Sderot. Over 100 homemade Kassems had been fired by the last week of June, resulting in civilian casualties and calls for the return of Israeli troops to the Gaza Strip—a...
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Decline Without Fall
Stephen Glain, a former Middle East correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, joins a long list of journalists, pundits, and think-tank analysts who have endeavored, since the World Trade Center attacks, to help America understand the Arab world. In his first (and, so far, only) book, he argues that the relationship between economics and political...
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A Serious Third Party?
The looming amnesty of millions of illegal immigrants is deeply unpopular with millions of Americans, and for good reason: If the immigration bill the Senate passed in June gets through the House, this nation is finished. The bill would not only legalize some ten million illegal aliens but bring in five times that many—legally—over the...