Publications

The first days of August brought with them news that one of Russia’s great public figures, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, had died at the age of 89. There are a great many reasons to mourn his passing. During his more than six decades in the public spotlight, Solzhenitsyn was an intellectual giant, a courageous opponent of Soviet repression, a crusader against communism’s excesses, and a champion of moral truth in a system that brooked no ideological opposition. For me, however, he was also much more.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is at it again. In late July, Iran's firebrand president used a meeting of the foreign ministers of the Nonaligned Movement (NAM) in Tehran as the platform for a renewed call to arms in the Third World. In his remarks before the summit, Mr. Ahmadinejad blamed the West for everything from the spread of AIDS to nuclear proliferation, and called on the NAM countries to band together to create an alternative to the United Nations as a way of becoming "the pioneer of peace and justice in the world."

Give Nouri al-Maliki credit. Since assuming his post in May 2006, Iraq's embattled prime minister has been written off by more than a few observers as an agent of Iranian influence or a cat's paw of the US-led Coalition. However, since early this year, Al-Maliki has definitively proven that he is neither. In the process, he has moved his country considerably closer to lasting stability.