I was bemused to read about the uproar caused by press revelations of "bags" of money from the CIA being delivered to the office of President Hamid Karzai in Kabul...as if we were all born yesterday.

The most striking to me were four letters to the editor published on...

Perhaps out of logic, straightforwardness and/or a desire to meet the other halfway, President Obama appears to have a tendency to make commitments that later come back to bite him.

In the first instance, on Sept. 25, 2012, the president stated publicly that "containment is not an option" in...

In a meeting at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, shortly after the Yom Kippur War of October 1973, Secretary Of State Henry Kissinger said to Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir: "Golda, it's those damn settlements that are causing us all the trouble." To this, Mrs. Meir had responded: "Henry,...

President Obama, in an appearance on April 17 at the Rose Garden, was understandably angry at the spectacle of a group of quailing (excuse the pun) senators who voted down a mild tightening of gun control laws that a majority of Americans -- some say as much as...

I must say I was a bit shocked to read the words Leon Panetta used before Hillary Clinton during a National Security meeting in June 2011, as reported in the April 14 issue of the New York Times Magazine: "No, Hillary, it's you who are flat wrong."

To...

I saw, earlier this week, the astonishing film, The Gatekeepers, a documentary of interviews with six former chiefs of the Israeli Internal Security Service, the Shin Beth. I would describe the film as the pendant of the Gilles Pontecorvo film, The Battle of Algiers, which is a documentary on the...

As I wrote in the introduction to my most recent book, "La République de Dieu",

Though they both operate out of an Embassy, a profound difference in temperament distinguishes a diplomat from an intelligence officer. Whereas the former seeks to resolve problems by negotiation, which implies adopting a conciliatory attitude,...

Members of Congress do not get paid by manna from heaven. They draw their compensation from the same federal trough as government bureaucrats, and they freely give themselves raises at a rate greater than that of their bureaucratic counterparts. Would it not be reasonable to ask, by leading from example,...

The followers of the present Tea Party movement have stood the formula of the British colonists on its head. "No Taxation Without Representation" was the watchword that became widespread in the 1750s and 1760s. The colonists decried the fact that they had no presence in the faraway British Parliament, which...

Apart from the fact that the new Egyptian Constitution was rammed through at the last minute, at a moment when the non-Islamists had walked out of the Constituent Assembly in protest; as well as the fact that the judiciary was held at bay after President Mohammed Morsi had issued a...

The rationale for the drone strikes, which started in Pakistan, was that Americans were being targeted from a foreign country that wouldn't let us in to do something about it. And what is more, nothing, or not much, was being done by Pakistan to curb the terrorist activities that were...

Algeria, it has often been noted, has escaped the Arab Spring. This is because it had its own, and extremely bloody, Arab Spring throughout the decade of the 1990s. An estimated 200,000 people were killed after the Islamic Armed Group (GIA in the French acronym) rose in rebellion...

On the fashionable rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, not far from the Place de la Concorde, lies the Cercle interallié, one of a string of dazzling buildings, with extended gardens, that include the British Ambassador's residence, the American Ambassador's residence, and the Élysée Palace itself, the seat of the French Presidency.

On Jan. 8, The Wall Street Journal published a tableau of quotable quotes from Chuck Hagel, President Obama's controversial choice to be Secretary of Defense.

The ensemble is breathtaking, from the Iraq War ("this misstep will play out to be the most dangerous and costly foreign policy debacle in our...

In the Sunday Review section of the New York Times on Jan. 6, Susan Jacoby, a self-described atheist, secular humanist and freethinker, wrote an op-ed entitled, "The Blessings of Atheism: It is Here & It is Now." In it she argues that atheists should be more assertive about spreading their...

In all the Sturm und Drang over who provided the information about the courier who led to Osama bin Laden and in particular whether he was tortured, the most curious element is the following phrase from an April 11, 2012 memo written by the Senate overseers of the...

It has often been said that that the United States has been guided by the hand of Special Providence. This term is a sort of euphemism for God, and this softened term would seem to serve as a bow to Deist sympathies. Furthermore, it would be a little stark to...

While acknowledging the Iranian penchant for deception, and recognizing that Iran is continuing along a downward path toward totalitarianism, with a Revolutionary Guard and Bassij militia presence spreading out into villages throughout the country, we should take a look at the nuclear negotiations from a more neutral angle -- the...

It would seem that even an itsy-bitsy step toward the goal of a two-state solution in ex-Palestine would be welcomed in all capitals. On Nov. 29, the United Nations General Assembly voted to upgrade the Palestinian status from that of a non-member "entity" to that of a non-member "state."

The...

The tragedy-cum-farce that has enveloped General David Petraeus calls to mind my beginning days at the CIA in the fall of 1954, when we were treated to a series of orientation briefings, as new members of the Junior Officer Trainee (JOT) program, by the great and near-great of the Agency,...