Terence Smith

As a Christmas gift to all of us, the U.S. military involvement in Iraq is over.

The last units withdrew from Iraq into Kuwait just before Christmas. The only uniformed American military personnel still in Iraq are the roughly 200 members of an Office of Security Cooperation lodged in...

Anyone with a modicum of common sense, and my record as a political prognosticator, would avoid making any predictions in a campaign as chaotic as the current Republican Presidential nomination sweepstakes. After all, I predicted Carter over Reagan in 1980, Gore over Bush in 2,000, (well, of course, Gore...

The dysfunction of the American government has never been so transparent.

With the so-called super committee kaput, more market instability looming and the distinct possibility of another recession, the absolute inability of Washington to solve the nation's fiscal problems is inescapable.

The task was not that difficult: cut $1.2...

My Republican Friends...

...are embarrassed by the field and the foibles of the current crop of Republican candidates for the party's presidential nomination.

My Republican friends -- and I do have them -- are past patience with the Hermanator, who can't seem to recall the difference between Libya and other...

Fair warning: my record as a political prognosticator is checkered, to say the least.

I established my credentials in 1980 by declaring on live television in the midst of the lopsided Presidential race that... "The American people are not going to elect a failed, B-movie actor to the highest...

I took a break from the endless debt-ceiling debate over the weekend.

We attended a wedding in Massachusetts, stopped by the wonderful FDR Presidential Library in Hyde Park on the way back to Washington and even dug into some family roots around Morristown, NJ. Five days on the road,...

There was no way that President Obama could win with his speech last night on Afghanistan.

His compromise drawdown -- 10,000 U.S. troops by the end of the year, 23,000 more by the end of next summer -- was bound to disappoint the McCain School, the military men who...

Two of the best columnists writing in America today have written excellent pieces in recent days that caught my eye. The first was by Tom Friedman in the NYT in the wake of Bibi Netanyahu's visit to Washington, the second is Eugene Robinson's piece in today's...

Here we go again.

These days, the mainstream media are openly cheerleading for the rebel forces in Libya. Before that, they were in love with the demonstrators who occupied Pearl Square in Bahrain. And before that, the protesters who brought down the regime of Hosni Mubarak. And even before...

President-Elect Barak Obama has been famously channeling Abraham Lincoln as he prepares for his inauguration.

This weekend, he'll take a train, as Lincoln did, from Philadelphia to Washington. Next Tuesday, he'll be sworn in on the same bible that Lincoln used and enjoy a lunch in the Capitol of...

The most remarkable thing about Barack Obama's remarkable campaign was his personal consistency.

In his victory speech last night before 100,000 cheering fans in Chicago's Grant Park, he was the same composed, confident, understated, serious Barack Obama who came out of political nowhere to win the Iowa caucuses. That...

When the great photographer Cornell Capa died at 90 last week, the obituaries said he covered conflicts from Latin America to the Middle East, including the 1967 Six Day War between Israel and her Arab neighbors.

What the obits didn't describe was the pivotal moment when he decided, during...

Rooney, our elegant, black-and-white Borzoi, or Russian wolfhound, is dead. At age five. From bone cancer. A terrible conclusion, by any description.

Not big news, perhaps, but it is to me. He was the most free-spirited, acrobatic, energetic, sunny, enthusiastic, delightful, downright funny dog . Never met a person or...

When five former secretaries of state -- three from Republican administrations and two from Democratic - -sit down to give foreign policy advice to the next president in the midst of two wars and a heated campaign, sweet reason and unanimity is not guaranteed.

Include polar opposites like Henry Kissinger...

"It is time to get real -- get real about how we actually win this election," Hillary Clinton told an audience in New York this week. "it is time to get real about the challenges facing America."

"Get real," is her new mantra.

The unspoken subtext is "don't...

Eugene Robinson, arguably the best columnist writing in America today, posed a two-part question in his column this morning in The Washington Post:

"Are the news media being beastly to Hillary Clinton? Are political reporters and commentators... basically in the tank for Barack Obama?"

Gene's answer: no...

So, what do the first caucuses and primaries tell us about the last glass ceiling in American Presidential politics?

Is it race, as some surmise after New Hampshire? Is it gender, as some concluded after Iowa? Is it both?

Or do the results demonstrate that neither is meaningful anymore?

If the past truly is prologue, then you can find a detailed roadmap to a future Hillary Clinton administration, should there be one, in the pages of Sally Bedell Smith's new book, For Love of Politics.

In 450 pages, Smith dissects the unique political and personal partnership of Bill and...

The charming, historic town of Annapolis is quiet again, now that the President, the Israeli and Palestinian leaders and the representatives of 40 other nations have had their one-day conference and headed back to Washington. Those of us who live nearby can drive downtown again and sailboats can cruise alongside...

Now that he's got it, the time has come to take Rupert Murdoch at his word.

He has said that he intends to build up The Wall Street Journal, not dumb it down. He has said that he will strengthen the Washington bureau, not reduce it through layoffs and...