Editorials

The Wall Street Journal reports: Complaints from Israel about the U.S.’s public engagement with Iran have pushed the White House to consider more forcefully outlining potential military actions, and the “red lines” Iran must not cross, as soon as this weekend, according to people familiar with the discussions. President Barack Obama could use a speech [...]

First we were warned to be suspicious about accounts of a revolution in Syria because the “citizen journalists” telling the story were supposedly either Islamist extremists, or agents of Western interests, or both. Then, as Western journalists with increasing frequency managed to sneak into Syria and file first-hand accounts of the struggle, we were told [...]

Al Neuharth, founder of USA Today and former head of Gannett, says there’s no justification for so much alarm around Iran’s nuclear ambitions. (For the umpteenth time it should be noted that no one outside Iran actually knows for sure what those ambitions are. For that matter, the Iranians themselves may still remain undecided about [...]

That’s a misleading headline. And so is this: The caption to the right of this photo of Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad reads: “At left, the the [sic] reactor building of the Bushehr nuclear power plant in October 2010.” But in order to see the image of Bushehr, the reader needs to click to the next [...]

One man uses a bomb to kill another and he’s a terrorist. Another does the same and it’s a form of kinetic activity. I guess that makes the latter a kineticist. However, this kinetic activity is something that Americans are not allowed to engage in — because it’s illegal. It’s illegal because in the view [...]

Christopher Hitchens died last night. The strange thing about death — especially the death of a public figure — is that it evokes in most onlookers the desire to revisit a life rather than view its conclusion. Hitchens’ obituaries will perpetuate this death-denying ritual, but thankfully he offered his readers an opportunity to bravely look [...]

On the internet, “free” means someone else paid. We live in economically challenging times and if like me you live close to or the wrong side of the poverty line, then I’m happy I can provide this service without charge. But if you can afford to eat in restaurants, take vacations, or buy the latest [...]

Dear Readers — War in Context began ten years ago. In the first few months the name “The war in context” was just the subject line on an email I was sending out to colleagues and friends after 9/11. Then in January, 2002, I started blogging — that was back when using Blogger meant logging [...]