Category: Politics

I vaguely recall that in one of Terry Pratchett’s books there is a quote along the lines of “he liked the idea of democracy until he considered the other people who would be voting.” No doubt other people have said similar things. Democracy always has the chance of devolving into mobocracy. The U.S. has a…

I read an interesting article about Montenegro, a country which I know nothing about. Montenegro only recently became an independent country, after an election in 2006. (This was not the first time Montenegro was independent, but until the election it was joined with the much larger country of Serbia). The point of the article was…

It’s nice to see the Bush administration doing another quick flyby of Israel and Palestine. Getting them to agree to end the conflict, and getting the rest of the Middle East to feel that the Palestinians were treated fairly, would make us far safer than even the best possible invasion of Iraq could ever have…

In an article in the New York Review of Books about the transcript of the conversation between President Bush and Spanish Prime Minister Aznar before the Iraq war, Mark Danner writes a comment that I found interesting: Surely one of the agonizing attributes of our post–September 11 age is the unending need to reaffirm realities…

When the war in Iraq was under discussion, but before it started, a friend of mine said: if you’re worried about a country which has WMDs and which supports Al Qaeda, looking at Iraq doesn’t make any sense at all. Look at Pakistan. They’ve already got the bomb. They helped create the Taliban in Afghanistan.…