There are consequences to losing a war, or being perceived not to have won. Israel's ability to win wars has been based on its capacity to pound its many enemies into submission whenever they have dared attack. Depending on how you count them, Israel has been the target of at least four wars started by one or more of her neighbors, as well as numerous terrorist attacks. It had won all of them until 2006.   Israel's ... [full story]

Forty-seven years after voters appeared to have settled the question of whether a candidate's religion should have any bearing on his ability to serve as president of the United States, the issue again is looming as a question in the 2008 race for the White House. The current debate is focused on Mitt Romney and his membership in the Mormon Church, but even Rudolph Giuliani is caught up in questions regarding his stand on abortion ... [full story]

What's the outlook for Iraq? Try as we might to keep our spirits up, the war effort has suffered what must seem a serious setback this week. President Bush telephoned Nouri al-Maliki to show that he retains full confidence in the Iraqi prime minister. Oh my. Bush's full confidence puts al-Maliki up there with Alberto Gonzales, Paul Wolfowitz, former Federal Emergency Management Agency boss Michael Brown and other failed stalwarts who have inspired confidence in ... [full story]

Just in time for the school year's end, the U.S. Supreme Court is poised to decide on two school-assignment plans used to voluntarily maintain racial integration in Seattle and Louisville, Ky., possibly taking the nation back to the days before Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark decision that deemed segregated schools unconstitutional because they violated the equal protection clause of the U.S. Constitution. The decision served to launch the civil rights movement. In the ... [full story]

Conservative Christian televangelist leaves behind a controversial legacy marked by scads of bigoted and wacky remarks as well as the building of a Christian university   The Reverend Jerry Falwell, who died Tuesday at the age of 73, is perhaps best known for his fundamentalist social positions and tirades against lesbians, gays and feminists, not to mention "pagans", "abortionists" and assorted other miscreants.   Rev. Jerry Falwell But Falwell also had a significant impact on U.S. foreign policy over the last 30 years, ... [full story]

Borrowing the famous words of Gen. Douglas MacArthur, "Old soldiers never die, they just fade away," we can now see that old treaties never die, they can be resurrected years or even decades after taking what we thought was a knockout punch. President George W. Bush is scheduled to announce any day that he will breathe new life into the old United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, which President Ronald Reagan rejected ... [full story]

Republican presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani picked the Friday before Mother's Day to tell students at Houston Baptist University that while he "hates" abortion and finds it "morally wrong," one must leave the ultimate decision to a pregnant woman. The young products of conception whose mothers chose to have them listened intently.    Republican presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani Giuliani is betting his post-9/11 image and economic conservatism will be enough to win him the nomination in a party that ... [full story]

Al Gore is going to San Diego to tie up some loose ends on global warming. The occasion will mark a happy linkage of science and politics. Scripps Institution of Oceanography, a center of learning with unchallenged claim to leadership in exposing a threat to all humankind, honors a man who - more than any other - has made the scientists' cause winnable. If our democracy decided all things by popular vote, Scripps would likely ... [full story]

Peace between Israelis and Palestinians, two peoples fated to live beside each other, must ultimately depend on mutual respect and tolerance. What chance does that dream have when the most impressionable Palestinians, children, are fed a steady diet of anti-Semitism, global Islamic supremacy and hate? Hamas, a terrorist organization that is now senior partner in the Palestinian Authority's "national unity" government, is turning entertainment for children into a weapon of war. The star of Hamas' ... [full story]

Reverend Jerry Falwell, who died in his office on Tuesday at the age 73, was a seminal figure in the rise of what liberals despairingly called the “Religious Right.” Without him, it is doubtful Christian fundamentalist, Evangelical Christians and conservative Roman Catholics would ever have mobilized into the significant voting bloc that elected Ronald Reagan twice, George H.W. Bush once and the current President Bush. As a vice president of the Moral Majority from 1980 ... [full story]

To some extent, Eddie Robinson, the former Grambling University football coach who died last month, had his own Urban League operating out of the small majority black-student college. In addition to teaching his students how to excel in athletics, he taught them how to succeed in life - how to break down institutional barriers to realize their potential. Through several presidential administrations and wars, as well as the civil rights movement, he had given young ... [full story]

C’etait genial! When applied to the French presidential election in which Conservative Nicolas Sarkozy beat the Socialist candidate Segolene Royal by a comfortable margin, it means: that is fantastic!   Nicolas Sarkozy After decades of socialist influence in France, could the French election be a precursor to a Margaret Thatcher-like comeback for conservatives? Perhaps. Though, on foreign policy, Sarkozy is more pro-American than his predecessor, Jacques Chirac, he is still opposed to the Iraq War and doesn’t ... [full story]

During recent visit, President’s brother describes the country as a 'kind of tribal democracy' In late February, only a few days after Saudi Arabia beheaded four Sri Lankan robbers and then left their headless bodies on public display in the capital of Riyadh, Neil Bush, for the fourth time in the past six years, showed up for the country's Jeddah Economic Forum. The Guardian reported that Human Rights Watch "said the four men had no ... [full story]