Three scandals have converged in the past week to preoccupy Congress and the press. Benghazi was the first to come, and it has surprised by its staying power. The larger issue in the background -- the wisdom of the NATO destruction of the government of Libya which left an open...

Is America at war with Islam? The question began to be asked when the first evidence emerged of the transfer of hundreds of innocent Muslims to Guantanamo and the despotic new order that permitted indefinite detention of suspects. The investigations in Iraq led by David Kay and Charles Duelfer established...

The column printed below was sent on March 17, 2003 to the op-ed pages of the Washington Post and the New York Times and rejected by both. It anticipates the spectacular coverage of first days of the Iraq war by the mainstream media, and summarizes the philosophy that shaped the...

Zero Dark Thirty is a spy thriller about the tracking and killing of Osama Bin Laden. Good police work did it, the film says, and it aims to show what (in the extraordinary circumstances) good police work amounts to. Action movies have been the director Kathryn Bigelow's métier, and Zero...

It looks as if Barack Obama is poised to back off his intention of nominating Chuck Hagel as secretary of defense. To stick with Hagel against substantial (though at the beginning, surmountable) resistance would mean declaring one of his own apparent commitments to be unshakable. The pattern of Obama's career...

2012 may be remembered as the presidential election in which we chose between candidates about whom we could not be sure who they really were. Neither man was a new face. One had been president for four years, the other had been looking to become president for a decade. The...

Many people go into politics because a fantasy holds them captive. And the fantasies come in many kinds. There are those a leader may cherish about himself, or about the role he has to play, or about the problems he is expected to solve. In Obama's case, the largest fantasy...

Mitt Romney's campaign stop in Jerusalem has been criticized for the grossness of the subservience that the candidate exhibited toward Israel. This reaction was surely factored in by his handlers. Liberals, internationalists, human rights advocates might demur, but Romney's intended audience was none of these people. Nor was it the...

On June 1, in Minneapolis, the president spoke some words to supporters that ought to have left them slack-jawed. As Devin Dwyer wrote at Jake Tapper's excellent blog, Political Punch, President Obama said last Friday that "if he wins a second term the GOP 'fever' of opposition to...

President Obama, it has been said, is a master of having it both ways. Nowhere is this truer than in foreign policy. He ended the torture regime at Guantanamo, in line with rulings handed down by the Supreme Court. At the same time he assured impunity to the lawyers who...

A Supreme Court Decision on April 2 upheld, by a 5-4 vote, the right of prison officials to strip-search anyone entering a prison facility. This drastic reduction of fourth-amendment rights -- which protect Americans against unreasonable searches and seizures, and require that arresting officers show probable cause --...

A story by Eric Schmitt in the New York Times on February 1 reported the testimony of January 31 by James R. Clapper, the director of national intelligence: Iran's leaders "are now more willing" to consider attacks inside the United States. The foggy grammar may be traceable to...

The piety attached to a collective memory can be used to assist forgetting; and this is especially so when the facts are stark and engraved on every mind. Nineteen terrorists, acting on the design of a political-religious fanatic, murdered 3,000 Americans. All of the killers are now dead. The danger...

The Saved and the Sacked

Cross-posted from TomDispatch.

Is it too soon to speak of the Bush-Obama presidency?

The record shows impressive continuities between the two administrations, and nowhere more than in the policy of “force projection” in the Arab world. With one war half-ended in...

President Obama's surrender to the Tea Party in the debt-ceiling negotiations brought back an old question about his ability to lead. What is the Tea Party? A right-wing populist movement, rooted in local discussion groups and instructed by Fox TV and Fox Radio, that has dominated the Republican Party since...

July 4, 1861 -- exactly a hundred and fifty years ago -- witnessed the reading aloud, on the floor of Congress, of Abraham Lincoln's Message to Congress in Special Session.

The circumstantial appeal of Lincoln's message turned on his defense of the Union against the threat posed by...

Has it been adequately noticed that bipartisanship, the goal so cherished by Barack Obama, has now at last emerged? President Obama himself has been the means of its appearance -- though not in the way that he envisaged. The stimulus to the bipartisan rally on behalf of everything that "unites...

This post originally appeared at the London Review of Books blog.

Minutes before midnight on May 26, President Obama, in France, by a species of teleportable pen signed into law a four-year extension of the Patriot Act: the central domestic support of the security apparatus...

One of Barack Obama's first acts as president was to say that Guantanamo must go. It did not go. Soon after, he said that the Israeli settlements must go. They expanded. Obama made his peace in the end with Guantanamo and the Israeli settlements. He restarted the military tribunals at...

Crossposted with TomDispatch.com

From Egypt to Pakistan, February 2011 will be remembered as a month unusually full of the embarrassments of empire. Americans were enthralled by a spectacle of liberty in which we felt we should somehow be playing a part. Here were popular movements toward self-government, which...