A Thinking Reed

"Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed" – Blaise Pascal

War & Peace

  • Left and Right: the prospects for liberty*

    John is wondering how committed “the Left” is to civil liberties given that Barack Obama is largely getting a free pass on his deviations, while Bob Barr, a genuinely pro-civil liberties candidate, is being ignored. Meanwhile, in reviewing Bill Kauffman’s latest, W. James Antle III seriously questions whether “there is still such a thing as Read more

  • Put not your trust in princes, the continuing series…

    Andrew Bacevich writes that we need a wholesale repudiation of the Bush legacy in foreign policy – preventive war, “enhanced” interrogation, the metastasizing national security state, the black hole version of the executive that draws all power to itself, etc. McCain, with minor modifications, represents a continuation of the Bush legacy. It falls, then, to Read more

  • Why it matters

    I can imagine some Obama supporters saying, in response to this post, that Obama doesn’t really believe those things; he’s just saying what he needs to say to get elected. And that as president he would certainly never go to war with Iran to prevent it from getting nukes. First, we (or at least I) Read more

  • How antiwar is Obama? or Put not your trust in princes

    Antiwar.com’s Justin Raimondo has recanted his earlier support for Obama in light of the latter’s recent speech to AIPAC where he, among other things, called Iran the greatest threat to world peace and vowed to do whatever it takes to prevent it from obtaining nuclear weapons. Lots of antiwar people have been drawn to Obama, Read more

  • What part of “last resort” isn’t clear?

    It’s a sad state of affairs when someone needs to make the case that war should be a last resort, but Doug Bandow does a good job this thankless task. Also, via Dan McCarthy, I see that Bandow has signed on as Libertarian presidential candidate Bob Barr’s foreign policy advisor, which is surely a point Read more

  • Unintended consequences

    David Rieff is a repentant liberal interventionist whose book At the Point of a Gun traces his disillusionment from the days when he was an advocate of Western intervention in Bosnia. Here he asks whether calls for intervention in various trouble spots hasn’t become a form of cheap moral posing since those who advocate intervention Read more

  • Pray for peace

    I did not know this: Memorial Day is not actually a day to pray for U.S. troops who died in action but rather a day set aside by Congress to pray for peace. The 1950 Joint Resolution of Congress which created Memorial Day says: “Requesting the President to issue a proclamation designating May 30, Memorial Read more

  • The literature of peace

    Here’s a review of an interesting-sounding book on pacifism and English literature (though, given the subject, the review spends a surprising amount of time talking about Tolstoy). Read more

  • Umbrellas and mushroom clouds

    Maybe instead of debating how far to extend our “nuclear umbrella” we should be re-thinking the morality of nuclear retaliation itself. Is it ok to threaten our enemies (real or potential) with mass, indiscriminate slaughter? Read more

  • Conscience of a torturer

    I’ve really been enjoying the subscription to Mother Jones my in-laws got me for my birthday. They do exactly what you’d want a monthly magazine to do: run long, in-depth investigative articles that go beyond the surface coverage you tend to get in weeklies or dailies. I used to subcribe to half a dozen or Read more