I would like to invite all writers, editors, commentators and readers to make some major predictions for the future that they believe will transpire by or around certain future dates. I ran this idea by Joe Gandelman last week who told me to run with it. These “revelations” can concern science, technology, environment, wars and militaries, climate change, healthcare, religion, politics, economics, business,...

What is common between Saudi and Chinese officials/leaders? Whenever they speak be prepared to leave a lot of room for interpretations. So let’s see what it means when Saudi Prince Turki al-Faisal (the long-time director general of Saudi Arabia’s intelligence service, the Al Mukhabarat Al Aamah, and the Saudi ambassador to the US) finds similarities between Osama bin-Laden and Robin Hood, a hero...

Andrew Sullivan: How do we know that Petraeus is, or will be, a Republican? Does anyone actually have evidence of this? Or is all this speculation based on the stereotype that military = Republican? Jason Zengerle: As best I can tell, the assumption that Petraeus is a Republican stems from the fact that he is. From Steve Coll’s New Yorker profile of Petraeus: Petraeus is registered to vote as a Republican...

Eli Lake reports. Mohammad Ilyas Kashmiri was killed by a Predator strike last month. This week, he granted an interview to the Asia Times. Comment: Cases like this highlight why drone strikes have to be part of a larger strategy,” said Andrew Exum, a former Army Ranger officer and part of an assessment team that advised Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, commander of U.S.-led forces in Afghanistan. “Drone...

Afghanistan produces over 90% of the world’s opium, the main ingredient in heroin. Many Afghans, among its predominantly rural population of around 28 million, simply grow and cultivate opium poppies across some of its vast territory that is equal in size to the state of Texas. Most of Afghanistan is very arid and mountainous, not fit for any agriculture or productive human activities. The export value...

Jack Ross at The American Conservative has the same feeling about Commentary that I do:  it’s like a catastrophe on the highway that you can’t look away from. Here, Ross reacts to Commentary’s Jennifer Rubin, who takes umbrage at Maureen Dowd’s “liberal venomous paranoia” about Liz Cheney’s post-Bush career of attacking Pres. Obama for his unforgivable decision to...

How much danger terrorists pose in Britain? “The campaign I am talking about is not being planned by Jihadis or fringe Irish nationalists but by white ‘neo-Nazis’ who want to murder Asians, black people, Jews and gays in the bizarre belief it will trigger a ‘race war’, says Johann Hari in The Independent. “The police are warning ever-more urgently that similar attacks seem...

Yesterday I wrote a post questioning the need for so many countries in the 21st Century, particular vulgar, repressive military dictatorships, to have nuclear weapons. My premise was not the relative civility of non-nuclear nations vis-à-vis those that possessed nuclear weapons but the proper use of U.S. military power. However, many nice places can be found that have no nuclear arms, nor are they signatories...

If one were to point out a central theme for most of the global reaction to President Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize win, it would be the fear on the part of the overwhelming percentage of the planet’s population that our young leader will be hamstrung by the award. This article by Olivier Picard of France’s Dernieres Nouvelles d’Alsace puts it this way in part: “Barack Obama cannot...

Some of the most dysfunctional autocratic regimes run by the most repressive and nasty leaders on the planet want Nuclear Weapons. The only explanation is their lack of perceived “Cojones” (vulgar Spanish for testicles or balls) and some modicum of international respect and fear. I apologize to some readers who might be offended by this word but I used it because these regimes are essentially so vulgar...

The Iraqi Army Diaries — Entry 2 by S. D. Liddick In the spring of 2009 I embedded with the U.S. Army’s 1-63 Combined Arms Battalion, in the small town of Mahmudiyah, 20 miles south of Baghdad. The town is a cardinal point on what American soldiers have termed the Triangle of Death. Within a month I was offered a de facto embed spot with the Iraqi Army (IA), by General Mohammed, commander of the...

I’m glad to see a staunch liberal staying strong on this issue. Hypothetical question: What if Feinstein were up for re-election in 2010 instead of 2012? I don’t know, but here’s what she said Sunday on ABC: The mission is in serious jeopardy. I think General McChrystal, who is one of our very best, if not the best at this, has said a counterterrorism strategy will not work. The president...

Osama bin Laden has all but vanished from the radar of the American media/public. Even president Barack Obama seems no longer interested in bin Laden, while the world had thought that the “war against terror” was all about capturing bin Laden! The present chase to capture al Qaeda looks like fighting with the severed tail of a lizard. Meanwhile Osama, dead or alive, manages to come back into spotlight....

Granny’s tales, and their actions/thinking, have remarkable similarities be they Christians, Jews, Muslims or Hindus. Perhaps it’s because of them the world survives despite the harshness and cruelty that we see around us. Vlasta Molak, a friend, has kindly sent me a moving story of one such grandmother, who at times appears as if she was mine. Here is an excerpt in the NYT from a book to be published...

When 10 militants burst into Army headquarters in Pakistan in a dramatic bid to take military bigwigs hostage, it signaled a major escalation in the Taliban’s ongoing efforts to undermine Pakistan’s political and military establishment. The fact that the operation flopped on the face of it doesn’t obscure one fact: it was daring and it has put Pakistan’s military on the defensive and...

As freethinking Americans, we all have our own thoughts and opinions about homosexuals and homosexuality; about same-sex marriages and same-sex unions; about “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” and about so many other related issues. As Americans, we are fortunate that we can express our opinions freely on these issues in healthy, sometimes argumentative and emotional debates, as we often see on TMV. Sometimes...

Obama to shift focus away from Taliban by Jon Wells Pick your preferred source on this one, whether it’s the AP or the Times of London. The Obama administration appears to be headed down a course that would see the focus of military operations in Afghanistan shift away from fighting the Taliban toward simply hunting al-Qaeda. During the shift the administration is apparently willing to accept the Taliban...

If the election had gone the other way, Americans would have been spared all this doubt and deliberation about the Middle East. Asked whether adding 10 or 20,000 troops for Afghanistan would suffice, John McCain tells CNN it would be “an error of historic proportions” not to meet Gen. McChrystal’s request for 40,000 or more. If Barack Obama were as sure of anything as McCain is of everything,...

WASHINGTON — It is a sign of our weird political moment that the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to President Obama will probably hurt him among some of his fellow citizens. His opponents are describing the award as premature. The deeper problem is that the Nobel will underscore the extent to which Obama is a cosmopolitan figure, much loved in European capitals because he is the change they have...

The President’s reaction to winning the Nobel Prize was to say he will “not view it as a recognition of my own accomplishments.” Presidents rarely refuse to take credit for any sort of achievement, so I won’t give Obama a hard time. What’s more interesting is how the Prize committee framed its decision: Agot Valle, a Norwegian politician and member of the committee, said in a phone...

Although I have written a couple of commentaries on the Afghanistan war, mainly illustrating the complexity of that conflict, I will be the first one to admit that I am by no means an expert on that issue and that I have no relevant suggestions on how to proceed. The real experts are hard at work, hopefully to come up with a successful strategy, corresponding troop levels, etc. However, when I say “real...

So what do the Swedes – the custodians of every other Nobel Prize – think of the Norwegian Nobel Committee’s decision to award the Peace Prize to President Barack Obama? This editorial from Sweden’s Dagens Nyheter says in part: “That the Norwegians got carried away with euphoria over Obama’s election is understandable, but that doesn’t make their decision any more justifiable....

Daryl Cagle, MSNBC.com This cartoon is copyrighted and licensed to run on TMV. Unauthorized reproduction prohibited. All rights reserved.

Americans aren’t alone in thinking that President Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize was nothing more than a West-European rejection of the polices of President Bush. For Italy’s Corriere della Sera, columnist Franco Venturini gives vent to his fear that this Nobel may have ben erroneously awarded: “If not an indictment of his predecessor, what is this Nobel for Barack Obama, which has no relation...

Nobel Peace Prize now officially a joke after Obama selection by Jon Wells The Nobel Peace Prize was already flirting with irrelevance after recent selections like Al Gore, Yasser Arafat, and Jimmy Carter, but after the award was yesterday announced as going to President Barack Obama, in office for only nine months and for only 12 days when the nomination period expired, the award can officially be said to...