Dear Senator,
I teach an op-ed writing seminar and heard about your troubles landing your Op-Ed at the rag of those liberal rascals, the New York Times. May I offer you some suggestions?

First, you need a better lede. Why are you quoting Petraeus up top when you...

Barack Obama is on a fact-finding mission to Afghanistan and Iraq. He is not alone. UN diplomats, as I write this, are on a fact-finding mission to Djibouti to investigate its border scuffle with Eritrea. A South African delegation of human rights workers are on a fact-finding mission to the...

Yesterday was a bonanza of foreign policy speeches, denunciations, one-ups, flip-flops, macho chest-bumping, and anti-terrorist fist-bumps. The race to the White House, we were reminded, is really a race to be commander in chief, and our candidates have very different views on how they would conduct the wars in Afghanistan...

Who has greater foreign policy experience: Obama or McCain? Well, that's easy. Just count their frequent flyer miles, says McCain's chief foreign policy adviser, Randy Scheunemann. Let's see, McCain has visited dozens of countries, many of them in Latin America: "He's been to the Amazon rain forest, he's been to...

For the love of cheap gas, shut up, already. Let's stop with this nonsense about us or the Israelis launching a preemptive strike against Iran. Every time Seymour Hersh fires up his typewriter -- warning the world that an invasion of Iran is imminent -- the price of oil inches...

If terrorist groups like Hamas and Hezbollah are for Obama, as Republicans like to allege, but a new terrorist attack on American soil would tip the scales toward McCain, as his advisor Charles Black maintains, then logically there will be no terrorist attack against U.S. targets before the November election....

The U.S. debate on Iraq seems to hinge on timetables for withdrawal. That's it. But for Obama there are many things he could do to bring about change in Iraq, short of outright withdrawal, which nobody in the foreign policy community expects is imminent anyways. Here's my short list:

1)...

I'm often asked who Barack Obama should select as vice president. My answer: Elizabeth Edwards. Think about it. As a woman, she will help lure female Democrats and undecided voters who supported Clinton. As a southerner, she may help Obama win a few battleground states in the south. And as...

Obama is the candidate of change, new beginnings, new blood. Except where it matters most: foreign policy. Obama has sought advice from a council of graying experts, whose best years are behind them -- dullards like Warren Christopher and Madeleine Albright. This is change we can believe in?

The...

Come on, Democrats. Let's cut it out with the self-righteous political correctness, please. I'm tired of reading about every little slip-up or awkward phraseology by anyone on the other side being blown out of proportion and having to hear Keith Olbermann hector us as if he were our era's Edward...

The candidates for president are shedding advisers and aides faster than my Rottweiller is shedding her hair. And that should be greater cause for concern, especially if you are planning on voting for Obama. Ask yourself: Does he have a habit of dumping politically inconvenient loyalists?

To wit, Obama...

The storm over President Bush's "appeasement" remarks in Israel misses the point. No, we should not appease, engage, or give shoulder rubs to Islamist organizations like Hamas and Hezbollah. But wishing they would go away, while arming their enemies has gotten us nowhere.

Plus, haven't we, to some degree,...

The casualty counts from the earthquake in China and cyclone in Myanmar are staggering. What's interesting, however, is that whenever a natural disaster strikes, the number of casualties first reported is always deceptively low but creeps upward as more information is made available. Interestingly, the opposite tends to be the...

I don't believe a word this administration says about Iran. We hear the Iranians are just moments away from flipping the switch on a nuclear weapons program. Then a national intelligence estimate discredits that theory. We hear they are funneling arms to the Iraqi insurgency and "special groups" (by the...

Is Hillary right? Should we bomb Iran, were its mullahs to launch a preemptive strike against Israel? Or at least should we send them a warning shot across their bow, just in case they are harboring the idea--which a lot of hawks in Jerusalem and Washington suggest?

Obama says...

Here we go again. Another architect of the Iraq war's disastrous aftermath has written a spine-tingling tell-all that basically reads as a had-you-listened-to-me-none-of-this-would've-happened fairy tale. Douglas Feith, a neo-con from the Henry "Scoop" Jackson School for War Mongering Idealists and former No. 3 man at the Pentagon, insists had we...

Am I the only non-Russian who thinks NATO is too weighed down by history to be any effective? Its name invokes Cold War imagery of airlifts and agitprop. One of its members, Greece, is still squabbling about the historical name of Macedonia, a NATO aspirant. And many of its European...

Much of our understanding of Iraq, five years on, is gotten in drive-by glimpses. John McCain swoons into Baghdad for a 48-hour stopover full of photo-ops. American personnel dart out of the Green Zone for quickie missions, rarely sharing tea with the people they are paid to protect. The evening...

VICE PRESIDENT DICK CHENEY: "Admiral, do you know why I've brought you in here?"

ADMIRAL WILLIAM FALLON: "I think so, sir."

CHENEY: "I want to invade Iran..."

FALLON: "Sir..."

CHENEY: "...lemme finish there, four stars. I can't have my generals on the ground questioning the wisdom of...

Thank God Samantha Power has resigned from the Obama campaign. Her style of honest, brash, off-the-cuff statement-making has no place in presidential politics. Political operatives should not say anything other than the talking points handed down from the campaigns' higher-ups. That is what we the viewers and voters want--not unscripted...