Arnaud de Borchgrave

Growing risk of a Taliban offensive

Pity the al Qaeda analyst in the 16-agency, 100,000-strong U.S. intelligence community, which spends $50 billion a year, much of it to track al Qaeda operatives the world over.

September 14, 2009

Cynical scenarios still soar

From the right, "green jobs czar" Van Jones was pro-communist and a race-baiting no-goodnik. From the left, he was an exceptional, inspired leader just in from a little sprint on the Sea of Galilee.

September 11, 2009

When President Kennedy was assassinated, there were 16,300 U.S. fighting men in Vietnam. Their status had been upgraded from advisers to the South Vietnamese army to warriors. Five years later, when President Johnson decided the war was unwinnable, following the Tet offensive and Walter Cronkite's verdict the war was unwinnable, there were 536,000 U.S. soldiers in Vietnam. By the time the Paris peace accords were signed on Jan. 17, 1973, Americans killed totaled 58,193. The 21-year-olds and younger KIA numbered 24,488. Conventional wisdom was turned on its head, and defeat in Vietnam didn't make a particle of difference in the outcome of the Cold War. The U.S. and its allies won; the USSR and its captive states lost.

September 4, 2009

Release lubricated by oil

Heated denials notwithstanding, Scotland's "compassionate release" of convicted Libyan Lockerbie bomber Abdel Baset al-Megrahi was part of a three-way oil deal among Britain, Libya and Scotland. The two key players were Seif al-Islam Gadhafi, the ebullient Libyan leader's second son and heir apparent, and Sir Mark Allen, former head of the counterterrorism department of Britain's MI6 intelligence service.

August 31, 2009

War of necessity or choice?

Afghanistan is not only President Obama's war, but also what he now calls "a war of necessity." For the head of the Council on Foreign Relations, Richard N. Haass, who was head of policy planning at the State Department in the run-up to the Iraq war, who voted for Mr. Obama, Afghanistan is a "war of choice, not of necessity," that he fears we will learn to regret. This also reflects public opinion: Half the American people are against the Afghan war.

August 24, 2009

Town halls with a rat-a-tat-tat?

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August 21, 2009

Al Qaeda’s navy?

Hollywood's glamorization of the Barbary pirates over the years blurred the horror of a seaborne plague. Between 1530 and 1789, some 1.5 million European Christians and Jews, and American sailors and travelers, were kidnapped and enslaved in Islamic North Africa.

August 17, 2009

Pakistan nuclear thefts foiled

Is Pakistan's nuclear arsenal theft-proof? Former President Pervez Musharraf and his successor, Asif Ali Zardari, and their army and intelligence chiefs repeatedly have assured both the Bush and Obama administrations that their 80-odd nuclear weapons are as secure as the U.S. arsenal of some 7,000 city busters.

August 13, 2009

Doomsday — pros and cons

Two major entrepreneurial tycoons, in the multibillion-dollar league, with worldwide interests, speaking not for attribution, agree that the worst is yet to come. America has to reinvent itself for the 21st century, but this won't happen before another big credit-rattling shock. Millions of jobs are not coming back, they said.

August 10, 2009

Israeli know-how

He speaks like an American, looks like an American, and acts like an American -- because he is American-born. He is Israel's new ambassador to the United States, formerly a citizen of both countries.

July 9, 2009

Waiting for al Qaeda’s Godot

It's no longer a war on transnational terrorism? Before Emile Coue's method of psychotherapy, self-improvement based on the healing power of optimistic autosuggestion, becomes our national security comfort blanket, it would behoove us all to take a deep breath and snap out of creeping amnesia.

July 3, 2009

Rogue regime inches to precipice

This year - A.D. 2009 to us - in the Islamic calendar is 1430 A.H. (Anno Hegirae, which began with the Prophet Muhammad's flight from Mecca to Medina). But in strife-torn Iran, it felt more like A.D. 1430, approaching the end of the Middle Ages, when religious bigotry and cruel fanaticism ruled Torquemada's era of some 2,000 burned at the stake.

June 29, 2009

Age of Twitter vs. tyranny

Until recently, a twitter was simply a bird making high-pitched mating calls. Now Twitter is in the vanguard of an army of cybernauts whose speedy steeds are propelling both democratic and authoritarian governments through a period of social change more profound than anything we have experienced in 5,000 years of recorded history.

June 23, 2009

The two-state chimera

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was the sixth Israeli leader to concede the expression "Palestinian state." It was a first for Mr. Netanyahu, but the caveats drained it of any significance. Besides, events in a soon-to-be nuclear-capable Iranian theocracy - some now say thugocracy - where elections were rigged in favor of a president who despises the United States and sees no room for Israel in the Middle East, dictated geopolitical prudence. Even more so now that hundreds of thousands of young Iranians - the majority of Iran's 70 million people was born after the 1979 Islamic revolution - are protesting President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's lopsided victory.

June 19, 2009

DE BORCHGRAVVE: Karl Marx marked to market

Political Science majors can be forgiven for recycling Karl Marx's prediction, made 160 years ago, that capitalism would sow the seeds of its own destruction by widening the gap between workers and "capitalists." Since the end of the Cold War and the defeat of communism 20 years ago, board room-authorized CEO emoluments in the Fortune 100 have gone from 40 times to 300 times factory floor wages.

March 19, 2009