ParisTampaBlog

President Obama’s future in elective politics may well depend on how well he can make his countrymen understand and accept his view that terrorists prior to their capture are the legitimate objects of all the deadly forces (in particular the Predator Missiles that have been so effective in killing their leaders) that we can muster [...]

What has happened that President Obama finds himself allied with Karl Rove (and the Republican leaders in the U.S. Congress) on the hawkish side of the debate regarding the U.S. role in Afghanistan, while, for example, nearly the entire gamut of NYTimes op ed writers from left to right (not to mention myriad liberal voices [...]

Are there still people in the world today who speak the truth to those in power who lie? This might seem a not unreasonable conclusion from two recent articles in the Times. First, the Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, a widely respected founding member of the present Iranian religious hierarchy, is mounting his own verbal [...]

Why are we still at great material and personal cost to ourselves continuing to send our sons and daughters to fight, and, for some, to die in Afghanistan? Googling does turn up a number of answers, but none of them are convincing, no more than the domino theory ever satisfactorily explained our decision to remain [...]

Sometimes I think that this is the only important question confronting the elected leaders of our democracy: Is it the proper and essential role of government to most of all promote fairness or opportunity? Current government spending habits seem to come down on the side of fairness, given that current spending bills will, if nothing [...]

Quick, how many winners of the Nobel Peace Prize can you name? Probably a few of your own countrymen? Barack Obama, Al Gore, Jimmy Carter? Anyone else? Well going back a bit further, to 1993, probably Nelson Mandela (and Fredrik Willem De Klerk), and going way back to 1964, Martin Luther King Jr.  You’d probably [...]

9/11 made it become a priority for us, the threat of Al Qaeda taking precedence, at least for a time, over health care, education, illegal immigrants, and global warming, and we set our sights on terrorists and terrorism. And so far we’ve successfully confined the threat, or at least the attacks, to foreign soil. Will [...]

Here’s a point of view in favor of leaving Afghanistan that I haven’t yet encountered. But before presenting it let’s first ask why would we even consider leaving a country in which we have so much blood and treasure already invested? The short answer is that success there is highly unlikely, and things could very [...]

What is it about Iran that I, and probably most Americans who read and follow the international news, find so fascinating about that country? Right now it’s the struggle, a death struggle for some, between the Iranian people and their Iranian oppressors. And the latter, for the moment anyway, hold all the clubs. David and [...]

There is little hope that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will soon end, the outcome that President Obama is now pushing for, probably not even during his one or two terms of office, much as it didn’t happen during the terms of his predecessors. And here’s why. (If you still believe there is hope see Ethan Bronner’s [...]