“The Vertical Hour,� David Hare’s timely new play, refers to that moment in combat medicine when you can be of some use after a soldier is critically wounded. Julianne Moore makes her Broadway debut as an American foreign correspondent turned Yale University professor who finds herself caught in a romantic triangle with Bill Nighy, who plays an esteemed British physician, and his son and her fiancé, Andrew Scott, who plays a thoroughly Americanized physical therapist. “The...

The hanging of Saddam Hussein apparently is imminent. According to some accounts, it could happen as soon as today. Once upon a time, the execution of the Iraqi dicator would have been cause for an enormous celebration in Iraq and an enormous sigh of relief in the free world. As a reluctant supporter of the U.S. invasion early on, I looked forward to this day. Even as things began to unravel in late 2003, the discovery of a cowering Saddam in a rat hole made me enormously proud of the soldiers on...

(1.) Some 10, 20 or 30 thousand additional troops at so late a date in a war that required three times the 140,000 troops that former Defense Secretary Rumsfeld allocated will have little impact. American troops have become central to the problem; they are no longer central to the solution. (2.) An increasing number of Iraqis depend on sectarian militas for protection from the onslaught of kidnappings and killings. More troops aren’t likely to change that. (3.) Training of Iraqi army and police...

Another indication that George Bush is one worn down president: On February 10, 2004, responding to the news that the Justice Department had launched an investigation into who revealed the identity of Valerie Plame, the president told reporters: “If there’s a leak out of my administration, I want to know who it is. If the person has violated law, that person will be taken care of. . . . I want to know the truth.” On December 20, 2006, responding to a question regarding the leak...

There are few people more despicable and less credible in the American news media than Oliver North. The right-wing darling of the Iran-Contra Scandal (whose perjury on a matter of national security was a patriotic act while Bubba Clinton’s on sex was cause for impeachment) has been reporting for Fox News from a place that he claims is Iraq. In Ollie’s Iraq, the sun always shines, attacks on American troops are way down and the progress the U.S. is making to rid the country of meanies...

The New York Times has updated its most excellent chart on the state of Iraq. Note the authors: “As 2006 winds down, two developments inside Iraq stand out: the failure of the previous year’s election to produce any sense of progress, and the commencement of Iraq’s civil war, dating back to the Feb. 22 bombing of the hallowed Shiite mosque in Samarra and escalating ever since. “It is still possible to find signs of hope in our running statistics on Iraq — the number...

If there were blogs back in Joan of Arc’s day, feminists would have accused her enemies of having her torched because she was a woman. Not without justification, mind you. And so it comes as no surprise that some feminists are questioning whether Judith Regan was booted from Rupert Murdoch’s publishing empire because she is a woman and not because she was so appallingly deaf to the marketplace that she consorted with O.J. Simpson to publish a book on how he “might” have committed...

The scenario is by now familiar: A gung-ho public servant with impeccable credentials joins the Bush administration’s War on Terror. He is ignored and marginalized because fresh thinking is verboten. He finally quits in frustration. More here.

And so the Joint Chiefs of Staff have drawn a line in the sand: No more troops will be committed to the war in Iraq until when and if the White House can present a plausible mission statement. As noted at the end of my previous post, the joint chiefs are unanimous in their refusal to approve more cannon fodder until President Bush stops talking the talk and begins walking the walk. I cannot recall an instance in American history (let’s say post-Civil War) when the commanders of the armed...

This damaged tank, with armor plate and turret rearranged and one set of tracks off, is an apt metaphor for where the U.S. is in Iraq as we slouch toward the New Year. Three years and nine months into the war, attacks against U.S. troops are at a record high, which is all the more extraordinary because many units are staying in barracks except for occasional forays out among the locals. Three years and nine months into the war, the Pentagon acknowledges that Anti-American cleric Moqtada Al-Sadr’s...

Japan’s conservative government has removed two pillars of its post-World War II pacifism. It now requires schools to teach patriotism and has upgraded its Defense Agency to a full ministry. What to make of this news? Perhaps both too much and not enough given Japan’s unique status and character: Sixty one years after the end of World War II, Germany is a fully fledged player in Europe and the world. Its Nazi past is not forgotten, but is no longer an issue. By contrast, Japan is a...

TMV regulars know that I love New Jersey. This is because I have frittered away countless summer days on its lovely beaches when I could have been baiting its jack-booted Turnpike troopers or being an extra on “The Sopranos.” It is in the spirit of comity and good humor that I present this Valentine to the Garden State on this the 223rd anniversary of the day it entered the Union: New Jersey joined the fledgling United States of America early on, unanimously ratifying the Constitution...

The debate over whether the U.S. Army should be larger is beside the point. The real question is what kind of an Army the United States should have five years after the 9/11 attacks dramatically changed the global military equation. * Do we want an Army that still is largely unprepared to fight counterinsurgency warfare? * Do we want an Army without enough of the right tools because of a crumbling infrastructure – broken-down tanks, APVs and other vehicles backed up in a repair and resupply...

John McCain says that the Pentagon is considering sending up to 10 Army combat brigades to Iraq, or about 35,000 more troops at most, although he acknowledges that only a small minority of Americans now support such a move. The Army and Army Reserve are stretched so thin that some units are being rotated back to Iraq for a third time, although observers say that this state of affairs cannot be allowed to continue without long-term repercussions in the U.S.’s ability to meet global military...

In many respects, Ahmet Ertegun provided the soundtrack to my life. Ertegun, a Turkish ambassador’s son who started collecting records for fun, helped define American music as founder of Atlantic Records, a label that popularized Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, Cream, Sonny and Cher, and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. He also shaped the career of my main man — John Coltrane. Ertegun became one of the most powerful figures in popular music, but unlike...

You may have heard that there was another school shooting the other day. Shane Halligan, a teenager in suburban Philadelphia, came home with a bad report card and was ordered by his parents to buckle down. This camouflage-wearing Eagle Scout, who dreamed of joining the military, returned to his high school the next day with a sawed-off AK-47 semi-automatic rifle and fired wildly into the air before he shot himself to death. Montgomery County District Attorney Bruce Castor said township police, whose...

Despite the magnitude of the deaths — 28 here, 57 there and 210 somewhere else, 550 one week and 700 the next — the carnage in Iraq is so predictable that it has begun to numb my senses. Single-malt Scotch is too expensive, so the only way that I have been able to deal with this disconnect is to pretty much stop blogging on individual incidents such as the bomb blasts in Baghdad this week (70 dead, dozens wounded on Tuesday, another 17 dead, dozens wounded today) and focus on the Big...

The term Thirty Years’ War, a reference to the 17th century bloodbath between the Catholics and Protestants and their royal proxies in what is now Germany, is creeping into the blogger vocabulary in the context of a region-wide consequence of the Mess in Mesopotamia. Will the mainstream media be using it next? Andrew Sullivan is the most recent to use the term: “History will probably record that the United States accidentally jump-started a thirty year war in the Middle East. Oil prices...

I can count on one hand the number of times I have agreed with Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, but he seems to have hit the right note in crafting a majority opinion stating that a federal appeals court had no basis for overturning a state court ruling allowing the family members of a murder victim to wear buttons with his picture during a trial. Note that Thomas’s main opinion in Carey v. Musladin garnered the full support of five other justices for a very narrow ruling based largely...

Is anyone buying the explanation that Prince Turki al-Faisal, Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to the U.S., has abruptly resigned after only 15 months on the job “to spend more time with his family”? Nah. First of all, things change very sloowwwly in the Saudi kingdom. Turki’s predecessor, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, was ambassador for 22 years. Secondly, the departure comes only days after Turki dismissed a consultant for suggesting in a Washington Post op-ed piece that the kingdom...

In an acknowledgement of what everyone else knows — that Iraq is in civil war — there is talk of the White House endorsing a so-called “80 Percent Solution” by throwing its weight behind the Shiite majority. As awful as abandoning the minority Sunnis in favor of the Shiites (who make up 80 percent of the Iraqi population) would be, such a solution is in keeping with an willfully arrogant administration. Never mind that lip-locking with the Shiites would be an endorsement...

When someone recently got stuck in an elevator at a New Jersey hospital, the serviceman wouldn’t make repairs until a check was hand-delivered as payment in advance. When another New Jersey hospital completed construction of a flashy new building, it was unable to equip it because the hospital is overwhelmed by debt. The new building is sitting empty and the hospital is likely to be sold to another hospital – for nothing. As noted here last week, there is no question that America’s...

The story in a London newspaper that a forthcoming report states that the U.S. Secret Service was bugging Princess Diana’s telephone conversations (without the approval of British security services) in the hours before she was killed in a car crash in Paris is shocking but not surprising. It was bad enough that driver Henri Paul was drunk on his arse while speeding through a Paris tunnel on August 31, 1997, with Diana, the 36-year-old Princess of Wales, and Egyptian playboy Dodi Al Fayed,...

I bought into the conventional wisdom that the Iraq Study Group report would provide the necessary political cover for President Bush to make some badly needed course corrections. I was wrong. The new CW is that harrumphing over the report by conservative hawks will provide the necessary cover for The Decider to reject much of the report. More here.

I’ve never quite understood the fascination with all things Mafia, but two new reports just out – one on the state of organized crime in New England and the other on mobster economics – as well as a new book bound for the bestseller list show that this phenomenon, pickled in Hollywood brine, is alive and well in contrast to the mob’s victims. I would be disingenuous if I claimed that I have not fallen prey to occasional bouts of fascination with the Mafia, which is more...