Guest post by Michael Foote Many critics of Attorney General Holder’s decision to prosecute Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM) and his fellow 9/11 conspirators in federal criminal court seem to believe military commissions would be an efficient and straightforward solution to all the weaknesses present in criminal courts. They promote military commissions as some kind of panacea that would disperse efficient...

In his Oslo speech accepting the Nobel Prize for Peace this past weekend, Pres. Barack Obama said the following (emphasis is mine):

Watching President Obama on 60 Minutes recalls a memorable exchange from the 1987 movie, “Broadcast News,” in which Holly Hunter’s boss taunts her, “It must be nice to always believe you know better, to always think you’re the smartest person in the room.” With a stricken expression, she answers, “No. It’s awful.” Last night, as he was being pressed by Steve...

Guest post by Peter Henne President Obama’s rhetoric in his Nobel acceptance speech was as powerful as ever. Obama pointed to the importance of striving for peace, and attempted to justify the U.S. involvement in Afghanistan. But the most significant aspect of Obama’s speech may be a precarious balance between acknowledging the sad reality of the world and aspiring towards the realization of a better...

PARIS — Europeans are coming to terms with the fact that President Obama is not a miracle worker, and with the reality that everything he does is not magic. Oh, yes, most Europeans are still happy Obama is president. They remain fascinated by him and grateful for the direction of his policies. A French diplomatic veteran ticked off all the good news: Obama’s pledge to close Guantanamo, the ban...

Tony Blair tells BBC that he would have looked for another reason to invade Iraq if the weapons of mass destruction argument had not been available:

The Land Mines Obama Won’t Touch by Bill Moyers and Michael Winship Many people are troubled that Barack Obama flew to Oslo to receive the Nobel Peace Prize so soon after escalating the war in Afghanistan. He is now more than doubling the number of troops there when George W. Bush left office. The irony was not lost on the President, and he tried to address it in his Nobel acceptance speech. “I am...

Ten months and trillions of dollars after taking office, Barack Obama has finally found a way to make Republicans happy: Go to Europe, do a Bush impersonation, order Freedom Fries and tell those pusillanimous peace-mongers they would be toast if Americans weren’t always ready to come over there and kill bad people. Dick Cheney hasn’t weighed in yet, but Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich are thrilled with the...

Guest post by Jonathan Powers and Robert Diamond Jon Powers is the Chief Operating Officer of the Truman National Security Project. He is a veteran of the Gulf War, serving as an officer in the United States Army, and the founder of War Kids Relief. He was previously Veterans Program Director at the Eleison Group, where he worked on outreach efforts by the progressive community to veterans and military families....

Is there any reason to believe that American troops will begin leaving Afghanistan in 18 months, as President Obama announced last week? Or, as this surprisingly forthright article from China’s state-controlled Guangzhou Daily asserts, was this just an eloquent rhetorical fig leaf to hide the fact that America won’t leave anytime soon? Implying shamelessness on Obama’s part, Columnist Dong...

Accepting the Nobel Prize, Barack Obama deferred to “Schweitzer and King, Marshall and Mandela” as well as Ghandi and a long line of peacemakers in parsing the irony of a wartime leader being honored in their company, as he acknowledged “the hard truth that we will not eradicate violent conflict in our lifetimes. “I make this statement mindful of what Martin Luther King said in this same...

Having read the transcript of the President’s Nobel Peace Prize, and his mentioning of his rationale for Just War in Afghanistan, I wonder if the President looked up the true origin of the phrase. The meaning of Just War comes from the Old Testament, specifically the Book of Deuteronomy. In the 20th chapter, scripture reads: If they refuse to make peace and they engage you in battle, lay siege to that...

Earlier this week, Andrew Sullivan noted a left-leaning voice disavowing the left. We picked up on that, contrasting the disenchanted left-leaner with a disenchanted right-leaner. Subsequently, Andrew published several of his readers’ favorable reactions to the renegade lefty. Glenn Greenwald decided to chastise those Sullivan readers — and then the readers (predictably) punched back. I’m...

Over the long Thanksgiving weekend, I finally had the chance to watch Roman Polanski’s Oscar-winning film, The Pianist. It isn’t the story of Polanski’s own survival, although it seems natural to conclude that Polanski was able to evoke the Holocaust so effectively because he lived through it himself. He lost his mother to Auschwitz and survived in hiding with a Polish family. Before Polanski’s...

Editor’s Note: Here’s the text of President Barack Obama’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech. Several websites including the Washington Times, The Huffington Post and MSNBC put the White House-provided full text online. The speech will most assuredly become a political football today with partisans on each side giving predictable reactions to it — in fact, some of the politics-based reactions...

The White House sent Bob Gates and Hillary Clinton out on Sunday morning to do a set of joint interviews on Meet the Press, Face the Nation and This Week. (Fox had to settle for Gen. Petraeus. CNN got Jim Jones.) After his address to the nation on healthcare reform, Obama himself made the rounds on Sunday morning. I’m inclined to think that the President didn’t want to face the music this time,...

If you don’t read Shadow Government, you should. It’s a blog written by a lot of very smart people who held significant positions in the Bush administration. (No, that isn’t a contradiction, wiseguy.) Shadow Gov’s recent posts focus (naturally) on Afghanistan. One very interesting question comes from Peter Feaver — Did Obama’s speech give us any sense of why it took him...

AFGHANISTAN: A GOP TWOFER? David Obey, chairman of the House Appropriations Committee has introduced a war tax bill. “As presidential historian Robert Dallek reminds us, ‘war kills off great reform movements’,” Obey said, noting that World War I ended the Progressive Era, Korea ended Harry Truman’s Fair Deal and Vietnam ended Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. Now, I know that’s supposed to be...

Even if we assume that God created planet earth and everything on it including human beings less than 20,000 years ago, that’s still a long time in dog or cat years, and even in human years. Assuming each generation is spaced from 15 to 25 years apart, or 20 years on average, that constitutes 1,000 generations. For most of the past 10,000 years, we practiced all sorts of discarded religious beliefs and only...

President Obama seems ready to deliver on a threat Candidate Obama made over two years ago–that, if Pakistan doesn’t go after its terrorists, he will. The Surge in Afghanistan, according to White House leaks, comes with “a fairly bald warning that unless Pakistan moved quickly to act against two Taliban groups they have so far refused to attack, the United States was prepared to take unilateral...

How do you defeat your perceived “enemy”? Use bombs, grenades and drones? Substitute the bombs with books? Or, have a mix of both? Greg Mortenson, a humanitarian worker and author of two best-selling books, has demonstrated the power of books, and education, even in the highly violence-ridden worlds of Pakistan and Afghanistan. Mortenson is finding admirers in unlikely places. In the words of Admiral...

The War-ette Raging Moderate, by Will Durst The best part of a long-term Afghanistan occupation is there’s no shame in failing, since we’ll be joining so many other proud names on such a very long list. The worst part of a long-term occupation of Afghanistan is the many moons it’s going to take for us to figure that out. And according to the president, we should input that online calendar repeating entry...

Continuing with our coverage of NATO reaction to President Obama’s Afghanistan troop surge, this article from Poland’s Rceczpospolita demonstrates more determination to continue to assist the United States than we’ve seen from newspapers in any other U.S. ally – barring, perhaps, Great Britain. But along with a staunch statement in support for the Alliance, the article also contains...

So this is the editorial published today by 56 newspapers (all but one outside the United States) that is causing the right to self-immolate (emphasis is mine):

Sixty eight years ago today, Americans suffered a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor that brought us into a world war that would last less than four years. This week, after months of debating, we took a step deeper into an eight-year war with no end in sight. On December 7, 1941, I was a college student with a part-time job in a hospital maternity ward showing fathers their new babies on the other side of a large...