Our bill calls for the redeployment of U.S. troops out of Iraq so that we can focus more fully on the real war on terror, which is in Afghanistan."—Speaker Nancy Pelosi, March 8

The Senate and the House have both passed bills…

"What is wrong with Dick Cheney?’’ asks Michelle Cottle in the inaugural issue of the newly relaunched New Republic. She then spends the next 2,000 words marshaling evidence suggesting that his cardiac disease has left him demented and mentally disordered.

The charming…

You might not have noticed, but we broke another space record last month when astronaut Michael Lopez-Alegria logged 67 hours of spacewalking. If you consider that the equivalent of the Guinness record for pogo-stick bouncing (23.11 miles in 12 hours and 27 minutes)—amazing but pointless—I agree with you.…

The United States has fought many wars since 1941, but never again declared one. Abroad, no one declares war anymore either, perhaps because it has the anachronistic feel of an aristocratic challenge. Whatever the reason, today Congress doesn’t declare war; it ``authorizes’’ the ``use of force.’’
…

Vladimir Putin—Russia’s president, although the more accurate title would be godfather—made headlines last week with a speech in Munich that set a new standard in anti-Americanism. He not only charged the U.S. with the ``hyper-use of force,’’ ``disdain for the basic principles of international law’’ and having ``overstepped…

National Intelligence Estimates are not supposed to be amusing. And the latest NIE on the situation in Iraq was uniformly grim. But the document’s determined effort to split the difference on the use of the phrase ``civil war’’ did verge on the comical. One can only imagine the…

This week the internecine warfare in Iraq, already bewildering—Sunni vs. Shiite, Kurd vs. Arab, jihadist vs. infidel, with various Iranians, Syrians and assorted freelancers thrown into the maelstrom—went bizarre. In one of the biggest battles of the war, Iraqi troops reinforced by Americans wiped out a heavily armed,…

Is there anything more depressing than yet another promise of energy independence in yet another State of the Union address? By my count, 24 of the 34 State of the Union addresses since the oil embargo of 1973 have proposed solutions to our energy problem.

If we were allied with an Iraqi government that, however weak, was truly national—cross-confessional and dedicated to fighting a two-front war against Baathist insurgents and Shiite militias—a surge of American troops, together with a change of counterinsurgency strategy, would have a good chance of succeeding. Unfortunately, the Iraqi…

When President Bush announced in August 2001 his restrictive funding decision for federal embryonic stem cell research, he was widely attacked for an unwarranted intrusion of religion into scientific research. His solicitousness for a 200-cell organism—the early embryo that Bush declared should not be destroyed to produce a…

Of the 6 billion people on this earth, not one killed more people than Saddam Hussein. And not just killed, but tortured and mutilated—doing so often with his own hands and for pleasure. It is quite a distinction to be the pre-eminent monster on the planet. If the…

  ROUNDS: the ritual whereby a senior doctor goes from bed to bed seeing patients, trailed by a gaggle of students.

ROUNDSMANSHIP: the art of distinguishing oneself from the gaggle with relentless displays of erudition.

he roundsman is the guy…

Now that the ``realists’’ have ridden into town gleefully consigning the Bush doctrine to the ash heap of history, everyone has discovered the notion of interests, as if it were some new idea thought up by James Baker and the Iraq Study Group.

  "A republic, if you can keep it."

-- Benjamin Franklin, upon leaving the Constitutional Convention, in answer to

"What have we got?"

We have given the Iraqis a republic and they do not…

When just a week ago Barack Obama showed a bit of ankle and declared the mere possibility of his running for the presidency, the chattering classes swooned. Now that every columnist in the country has given him advice, here’s mine: He should run in ‘08. He will lose…

The first stop on Condoleezza Rice’s post-detonation, nuclear reassurance tour was Tokyo. There, she dutifully unfurled the American nuclear umbrella, pledging in person that the U.S. would meet any North Korean attack on Japan with massive American retaliation, nuclear if necessary.

An…

It shall be the policy of this Nation to regard any nuclear missile launched from Cuba against any nation in the Western Hemisphere as an attack by the Soviet Union on the United States, requiring a full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union.

-- President…

Lost between the Foley tsunami and the Woodward hurricane is the storm that began the great Republican collapse of 2006. It was only a few weeks ago that the Republicans were clawing their way back to contention for the November election, their prospects revived by the president’s strong…

So much for the ``strategic and historic victory'' Nasrallah had claimed less than two weeks earlier. What real victor declares that, had he known, he would not have started the war that ended in triumph?

Nasrallah's admission, vastly underplayed in the West, makes clear what the Lebanese already…