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Christian Soldiers
Kathryn Joyce 6/19/2009 12:00:00 AM
Ever since former president George W. Bush referred to the war on terror as a “crusade” in the days after the September 11 attacks, many have charged that the United States was conducting a holy war, pitting a Christian America against the Muslim world. That perception grew as prominent military leaders such as Lt. Gen. William Boykin described the wars in evangelical terms, casting the U.S. military as the "army of God." Although President Obama addressed the Muslim world this month in an attempt to undo the Bush administration's legacy of militant Christian rhetoric that often antagonized Muslim countries, several recent stories have framed the issue as a wider problem of an evangelical military culture that sees spreading Christianity as part of its mission.
INTERNATIONAL
Plotting The Pullout
Lennox Samuels 3/11/2009 12:00:00 AM
Coming on the very day that U.S. and Iraqi officials were detailing withdrawal plans for American troops, Sunday's suicide-bomb attack on a police academy in east Baghdad underscores the challenges being faced. In a country of high unemployment, the promise of a $500 monthly salary is a powerful magnet, and news that the Iraqi government is hiring 50,000 more police officers had drawn a long line of applicants. But a suicide bomber drove his motorcycle into the group and detonated his explosives vest, killing some 30 people and injuring twice that many.
INTERNATIONAL
Reality on the Ground
John Barry 2/26/2009 12:00:00 AM
"We campaign in poetry, but we govern in prose," Mario Cuomo once said. The governor of New York for a decade and, in his day, a possible contender for the presidency elegantly captured the rueful task of all legislators, a task that is now facing President Barack Obama.
THE MILITARY
17,000 … and Counting
John Barry 2/19/2009 12:00:00 AM
President Obama was initially wary of agreeing to this week's announced deployment of some 17,000 extra troops to Afghanistan, according to administration sources. He preferred to await the outcome of a full-blown review on U.S. strategy in the country which could land on his desk in six weeks or so. But with critical elections looming, even that delay wasn't acceptable.
FACTCHECK.ORG
GOP Convention Spin
Viveca Novak 9/3/2008 12:00:00 AM
Lieberman said Obama hadn't "reached across party lines" to accomplish "anything significant," though Obama has teamed with GOP Sens. Tom Coburn and Richard Lugar to pass laws enhancing government transparency and curtailing the proliferation of nuclear and conventional weapons.
The Basra Model
Michael Hirsh 4/3/2008 12:00:00 AM
The outcome of the Battle of Basra is still unclear. But as things stabilize in that critical city—the southern gateway to Iraq's oil wealth—Basra may well turn out to be Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's Kasserine Pass. That notorious battle, which took place in Tunisia in late February 1943, marked the first large-scale encounter between untested American troops and the battle-hardened Germans. The Americans, to put it mildly, did not do well. But they quickly fired incompetent commanders, adjusted in tactics, and never lost another major battle. In Basra the nascent Iraqi Army—also riddled with incompetence and self-doubt—actually came out looking better against Iraq's well-established militias than the American Army had 65 years earlier against the entrenched Nazis, says retired Army Gen. Barry McCaffrey. "At Kasserine we got our asses kicked. These people didn't," McCaffrey says.