Latest Articles

Eye to Eye on Iran?

February 4, 2010  •  Scripps Howard News Service

Washington's partisan divide is as wide as it's ever been. Democrats and Republicans bitterly disagree on fundamental points of principle and policy. So it should not go unremarked: Last week, the Senate passed — unanimously — a bill that would impose serious sanctions on Iran. A similar bill already has passed the House by a 412-to-12 margin. What explains this sudden outburst of harmony?

Members of Congress from both parties appear to have recognized that if those who now rule Iran acquire nuclear weapons the consequences will be dire.

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The Sun Also Flares

January 28, 2010  •  Scripps Howard News Service

Had the earthquake that hit Haiti shaken Florida instead, the death toll would not have been so tragically high — over 150,000 at last count. In Haiti, as in other impoverished countries, buildings are often shoddily constructed, infrastructure is weak, and governance is incompetent. The primary response to disaster: Wait for help from abroad.

It's a well established rule: Rich nations endure natural disasters better than poor nations. But there may be an exception. Stay with me for a moment and you'll see what I mean.

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The War Against the Infidels

January 21, 2010  •  Scripps Howard News Service

In 2001, the monumental 6th-century buddhas of Bamiyan were dynamited on orders from Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar. The United States and other Western governments issued protests. Afghanistan's Islamist rulers shrugged them off.

In 2010, Al-Kifl, the tomb of the Prophet Ezekiel, near Baghdad, is being desecrated. On the tomb are inscriptions in Hebrew and an ark in which a Torah was displayed centuries ago. Iraq's Antiquities and Heritage Authority, under pressure from Islamists, is erasing the Hebrew words, removing the Hebrew ornaments, and planning to build a mosque on top of the grave.

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Reinventing Airport Security

January 14, 2010  •  Scripps Howard News Service

Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab may have done us a favor. More than eight years after 9/11, he revealed that our multi-billion-dollar airport-security system doesn't work.

It doesn't work because it was conceptualized as a search for weapons — or anything that might be used as a weapon. On Christmas Day, you can bet TSA agents confiscated plenty of nail files and toothpaste, even if they did miss the explosives in Umar's undershorts.

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Nineteen-Thirty-Something

January 7, 2010  •  Scripps Howard News Service

A few days of vacation in the Rocky Mountains is a good time to catch up on one's reading. But if I was looking for escape from the issues on which I spend most of my time, I didn't find it in Churchill, the brief but penetrating biography by Paul Johnson, who is among the world's greatest living historians. In particular, Johnson's account of the 1930s holds up an eerie mirror to the present.

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