Georgie Anne Geyer

GEYER: Napolitano will help enforce the border

With the president-elect's most recent and most effective appointment - that of no-nonsense Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano to be head of the Department of Homeland Security - we can finally hope that something intelligent will be done on immigration.

December 11, 2008

GEYER: Straight-shooting Jones

You have in Gen. James Jones an exemplary military man who always accomplishes his mission and repeatedly risked his life - but also (and this is the really interesting part) you have a man who let it be known in his own way that he was totally against American policy in both Vietnam and Iraq, and yet stayed in office and never lost his integrity. That is almost a unique accomplishment in the morally (to put it kindly) "diffuse" world of these last years.

December 7, 2008

GEYER: South Asian opportunity?

Often someone in the midst of an especially terrible crisis will come out with words that seem to encompass the entire tragedy. So it was in Mumbai after last week's massacres.

December 4, 2008

GEYER: Requiem for the work ethic?

They are "the" questions, unspoken but bitterly nagging, that are on everyone's minds. They haven't come up in a major public manner quite yet. But they did begin to reveal themselves last weekend, when 70-some demonstrators marched on Wall Street protesting you-surely-know-what.

November 29, 2008

GEYER: Cuba policy could be a portent

With all the attention being paid to other supposedly "more important" parts of the world, few have noticed a specially revealing anniversary will come upon us in the same month as the Inauguration of the new American president. Talk about irony — an old problem that has bedeviled America for more than a century versus the new hopes.

November 22, 2008

BOOKS: Wise words from a university leader

Several years ago, at a reception at the Tunisian Embassy, I found myself sitting next to the president of George Washington University, that humongous inner-city university in downtown D.C.

November 9, 2008

GEYER: Mistakes we can’t afford

I have to admit that, yes, I have indeed made foolish mistakes during my lifetime. I once put Ukraine out in Central Asia in a column. I once told my superbly honest mother there were no apples left at the store (I just didn't want to go back for them). And once I told a guy in Chicago, my hometown, that I was in love with him when, well, no need to go into that!

November 1, 2008

GEYER: ‘Crisis’ mode international

Mikhail Gorbachev today is a dour and humorless man. His hopes were dashed in the 1980s, when he became the reformist Russian president only to suffer the seemingly eternal hatred of the Russian people. Resentment hangs over him like a dull cloak. At one time during his speech to a small group of us, he proclaimed as if trying to reassert his lost importance, "I was not an accidental leader."

October 18, 2008