“So let us today drudge on about our inescapably impossible task of providing every week a first rough draft of history that will never be completed about a world we can never really understand.”
Philip Graham,
Former President & Publisher
The Washington Post
By James Kitfield In his new book Duty: Memoir of a Secretary at War, Robert Gates memorably impugns Joe Biden’s judgment as “wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four…
Geneva II: Is it Always Better to “Jaw Jaw” than to “War War”? Winston Churchill’s adage is being sorely tested this week in Switzerland at the peace conference on Syria. To avoid the perverse outcome…
By James Kitfield President Obama had finally replied to NSA leaker Edward Snowden’s revelations of the NSA’s massive, globe-spanning spying network. In a speech at the Justice Department Friday, Obama offered some welcome yet modest…
By James Kitfield With his Sphinx-like demeanor and penchant for playing his cards close to his chest, there was always something of Chauncey Gardner in former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates’ public persona. Like the…
By James Kitfield In these hyper-partisan times perhaps it was inevitable that the Benghazi tragedy that claimed the lives of Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans in Libya, just months before a bitterly contested…
By James Kitfield The outrage and backlash from military retirees resulting from the recent Congressional budget deal that trimmed one percentage-point from the annual cost-of-living increases in military pensions bodes ill for efforts to reform…
“This is a fight that belongs to the Iraqis. That is exactly what the President and the world decided some time ago when we left Iraq. So we are not, obviously, contemplating returning. We’re not…
By James Kitfield The unsettling news in recent days that Al Qaeda in Iraq (newly renamed the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS) has captured the strategic crossroads town of Fallujah, Iraq, was…