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The case for the war in Iraq, with testimony from Bill Clinton. "When I left office, there was a substantial amount of biological and chemical material unaccounted for. That is, at the end of the first Gulf War, we knew what he had. We knew what was destroyed in all the inspection processes and that was a lot. And then we bombed with the British for four days in 1998. We might have gotten it all; we might have gotten half of it; we might have gotten none of it. But we didn't know. So I thought it was prudent...

Realities are sometimes unpleasant. Presidents are elected to confront such realities, and to deal with them. Evading them doesn't work. Pundits can afford to indulge in wishful thinking. Partisans can choose to preoccupy themselves with rock-throwing and blame-casting. But presidents have to govern. They have to deal with difficult realities — even if disingenuous liberals are capitalizing on them, and Democrats are distorting them. Perhaps the biggest such reality for President Bush is the disarray within his administration. That disarray has been highlighted by reactions to the leak in mid-July of the name of an undercover CIA employee — the...

Every Tuesday morning during the Iraq war Washington's opinion-makers and journalists knew there was only one place to be: at the "black-coffee briefings" held at the American Enterprise Institute, a fortress-like building on M and 17th streets, opposite the main offices of the National Geographic magazine. Technically, AEI is a thinktank. More than that, though, it is the headquarters of the intellectual movement known as neoconservatism. Its staff includes famous names such as Richard Perle, Irving Kristol and Newt Gingrich. The magazine Weekly Standard, the neocon bible, is published at the same address. Black coffee was not strictly compulsory at...

NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISER Condoleezza Rice gave an important speech a couple of weeks ago, in which she called on the United States to make a "generational commitment" to bringing political and economic reform to the long-neglected Middle East--a commitment not unlike that which we made to rebuild Europe after the Second World War. It was a stirring speech, made all the more potent by the knowledge that it reflects the president's own vision. President Bush recognizes that, as is so often the case, American ideals and American interests converge in such a project, that a more democratic Middle East will...

The United States must be serious about its "generational commitment." NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISER Condoleezza Rice gave an important speech a couple of weeks ago, in which she called on the United States to make a "generational commitment" to bringing political and economic reform to the long-neglected Middle East--a commitment not unlike that which we made to rebuild Europe after the Second World War. It was a stirring speech, made all the more potent by the knowledge that it reflects the president's own vision. President Bush recognizes that, as is so often the case, American ideals and American interests converge in...

THE 2004 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION will be the biggest in at least a generation. Perhaps more. The choice between Bush and Dean/Kerry/Hillary (to list Democrats in the order of their chance to become the nominee) will be the starkest since Reagan-Mondale in 1984. More will be at stake in terms of the direction of the country than in any election since 1980, or perhaps since 1964. After the last decade's noticeably smaller elections, in terms both of starkness of choice and magnitude of consequence, 2004 will be the real thing. Let's start with foreign policy. The Bush administration's response to September...

THE GOOD NEWS is that we may turning the corner in the debate on post-war Iraq. The phony Niger/uranium scandal has run out of steam: There never really was enough oxygen there to sustain a firestorm in the first place, and the release of excerpts from October's National Intelligence Estimate has made the notion of systematic deceit and deception incredible. More important, and despite the continued killings of American soldiers, the situation on the ground in Iraq may well be turning. Aggressive military tactics may be breaking the back of the several thousand Baath die-hards, and we're probably closing in...

"George Bush has left us less safe and less secure than we were four years ago."-- Rep. Richard A. Gephardt(D-Mo.), July 22President Bush's 16 words on uranium and Africa in his January State of the Union address -- "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa" -- have become famous, or infamous. But Dick Gephardt's 16 words, spoken in the course of a major foreign policy speech this past Tuesday, are the ones that matter.Bush's words, though probably a mistake, didn't change anything. The vote to authorize war had taken place months...

One day, this Iraq War will be thought of as the Intellectuals' War. That is, it was a war conceived of by people who possessed more books than common sense, let alone actual military experience. Disregarding prudence, precedent and honesty, they went off - or, more precisely, sent others off - tilting at windmills in Iraq, chasing after illusions of Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction and false hope about Iraqi enthusiasm for Americanism, and hoping that reality would somehow catch up with their theory. The problem, of course, is that wars are more about bloodletting than book-learning. Tilting at...

Anatomy of a scandal that wasn't. KARL ROVE is a genius. No--Rove probably gets more credit than he deserves for political smarts, and the president gets too little, so let's rephrase that: George W. Bush is a genius. Almost two weeks ago, the president ordered his White House staff to bollix up its explanation of that now-infamous 16-word "uranium from Africa" sentence in his State of the Union address. As instructed, and with the rhetorical ear and political touch for which they have become justly renowned, assorted senior administration officials, named and unnamed, proceeded to unleash all manner of contradictory...

AT THE REPUBLICAN NATIONAL CONVENTION IN 1976, as Ronald Reagan's challenge to Gerald Ford for the GOP presidential nomination was on the verge of falling short, the Reagan forces assembled for one last battle. They rallied behind a challenge to Ford's secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, and his "realistic" foreign policy of détente. They succeeded in substituting their own foreign policy plank for the administration's preferred one in the Republican platform. The Reagan plank was entitled "Morality in Foreign Policy." In 1976, George W. Bush was, one assumes, like his father, a Ford supporter. Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld, and Paul...

<p>The swift military defeat of the Iraqi regime by U.S.-led forces represents a dramatic foreign policy victory for the evolving worldview called "neoconservatism."</p> <p>"Neoconservative ideas have penetrated very deeply and have tremendous influence," said Michael Joyce, who from the late 1970s until his retirement last year was the most powerful financial backer of the movement.</p>

President Bush's Neoconservatives Were Spawned Right Here in N.Y.C., New Home of the Right-Wing Gloat "It’s a small world," said William Kristol, editor in chief of The Weekly Standard, describing the intertwined world of the neoconservatives. And indeed it is, at least to Mr. Kristol: His father is the legendary New York intellectual Irving Kristol, who is widely considered to be the founder of neoconservatism, and Mr. Kristol now edits the magazine owned by the financial godfather of the movement, American citizen Rupert Murdoch. Somewhere between Mr. Kristol’s ideas and Mr. Murdoch’s muscle, the modern neocon economy was built, complete...

THE US was attacked a little more than 1½ years ago. This assault was the product of two decades of US weakness in the face of terror and three decades of US fecklessness in the Middle East. From the barely-responded-to bombing of the marine barracks in Lebanon in 1983 to the host of subsequent, little-noticed or quickly forgotten attacks in the later '80s and in the '90s, the US came to be seen as a "weak horse". That characterisation was Osama bin Laden's, and he made it with reason. Similarly, from the oil embargo of 1973 through to the destruction...

The era of American weakness and doubt in response to terrorism is over. AMERICA WAS ATTACKED a little over a year and a half ago. This assault was the product of two decades of American weakness in the face of terror and three decades of American fecklessness in the Middle East. From the barely-responded-to bombing of the Marine barracks in Lebanon in 1983 to the host of subsequent, little-noticed or quickly forgotten attacks in the later 1980s and in the 1990s, we came to be seen as a "weak horse." That characterization was Osama bin Laden's, and he made it...

The buzz in Washington and beyond has been that President Bush's attack on Iraq came straight from the playbook of the neoconservatives, a group of mostly Republican strategists, many of whom have gotten funding from Milwaukee's Bradley Foundation. The neoconservatives differ from traditional conservatives in favoring a more activist role for government and a more aggressive foreign policy. Led by Weekly Standard editor William Kristol, the neoconservatives have offered a sweeping new vision for U.S. foreign policy: to restructure the Middle East and supplant dictators around the world, using pre-emptive attacks when necessary against any countries seen as potential threats....

Toogood Reports [Weekender, March 16, 2003; 12:01 a.m. EST]URL: http://ToogoodReports.com/ The closer we get to extending the War on Terror to an Iraqi front, the more frequently I have been coming across strong anti-war arguments. Not surprisingly, the arguments have largely been from conservatives of the group referred to in some circles as paleo-conservatives, with some coming from libertarians. (I say, "some circles," because in most circles they are ignored.) The articles that since 911 have essentially said, "Praise the Proposition Nation, and pass the ammunition," have all come from folks who are known as "neo-conservatives." At least since 911,...