Publications

President Obama has issued an executive order making good on his promise to close down America’s detainee facility at Guantánamo Bay, though not as rapidly as his supporters wanted. While activists will hail this as a major step towards dismantling the Bush administration’s wartime policies, the Guantánamo they object to exists more as reputation than reality. To many, the name Guantánamo screams “No Due Process!” “Torture!” and “War Crimes!” But Camp Delta is the most humane facility of its type in the history of warfare.

As the conflict in Iraq winds down, the “forgotten front” of the War on Terror, Afghanistan, has moved back into the forefront of the national security debate. Operation Enduring Freedom-Afghanistan (hereafter OEF) is aptly named, since the conflict will endure long into the next administration. Whoever takes the oath of office in January of 2009 will face the same types of challenges in Afghanistan that have bedeviled the current administration since 2001, and to an extent have been characteristic of Afghan politics for decades.

"The Islamic Republic of Iran has three phobias," according to Iranian expatriate journalist Amir Taheri. "Women, Jews and America." Forget bombs. Maybe we should send in Barbra Streisand.

During the presidential campaign Vice President-elect Joe Biden predicted, "It will not be six months before the world tests Barack Obama like they did John Kennedy." This wasn't just another gratuitous allusion to the impending Camelot 2.0, but an apt comparison. A new, young president is a standing temptation to foreign powers seeking to find his limits.

Over the past few years we have been witnessing the slow rolling defeat of the United States at the hands of North Korea. In the past six years this charter member of the Axis of Evil, a country with a nominal GDP slightly less than Aruba — and GDP per capita one-thirteenth that of the island paradise — has gone from being an isolated remnant of Stalinist political theory in action to joining the nuclear club and becoming a major weapons-of-mass-destruction proliferator. This took place while the United States asserted that North Korea should not, must not, will not be allowed to go nuclear, but obviously could not figure out how to get the North to cooperate.