Has bin Laden been reading This Blog? Well, maybe not "the man" himself, but perhaps, maybe, in my wildest dreams, one of his advisers on all matters western.

Anyway, don't take my word for it. Here's a brief quote from the Jim Lehrer discussion with David Brooks on the latest bin Laden tape:

JIM LEHRER: Scary in any way?

DAVID BROOKS: No, ludicrous. I mean, on one hand, he’s a malevolent guy who killed 3,000 Americans. But you read this thing, and it’s like he’s been sitting around reading lefty blogs. You know, like ZNet or Radical Left or Ed Strong.

And he’s one of these childish people posting rants at the bottom the page, you know, Noam Chomsky and all this stuff.   more »

Keywords: bin, islam, capitalism, leftist, laden, tape, revolution

For years now, the man widely touted as America’s most influential journalist has indicated that his patience with the war in Iraq might soon run out.

But, like the media establishment he embodies, Friedman can’t bring himself to renounce a war that he helped to launch and then blessed as the incarnation of virtue.

On the last day of November 2003 -- eight months after the invasion -- Friedman gushed that “this war is the most important liberal, revolutionary U.S. democracy-building project since the Marshall Plan.” He lauded the Iraq war as “one of the noblest things this country has ever attempted abroad.”

But the assumptions built into a Friedman column are murky outside the context of his world view.

“The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist,” Friedman wrote approvingly in one of his explaining-the-world bestsellers.   more »

From Pax Romana through Pax Britannica to the current Pax Americana, empires have justified their own power by insisting that they were not simply serving their own interests but rather the common good.

Looking back at the British imperial high-water mark of 1900, H.G. Wells wrote that "the sprawling British Empire still maintained a tradition of free trade, equal treatment and open-handedness to all comers round and about the planet."

Such confidence in Britain's fundamental benignity as an empire is matched today by figures across the American political spectrum, from Barack Obama to Rudy Giuliani, from the conservative policy analyst Robert Kagan to the liberal academic Michael Mandelbaum.

Whatever their other, substantial differences, all seem convinced that the world works best with the United States at the helm, and that without American leadership, the world would soon become more dangerous and anarchic and less prosperous.   more »

This is another one of those very "serious" weeks in Washington, when we put aside matters like senators skulking about in men's rooms and turn our attention to the life-and-death questions as General David Petraeus testifies to Congress on the progress of the surge in Iraq.

Our concern here is not the testimony itself, since it's been obvious for some time that Petraeus will say that the surge is showing sufficient signs of success for Congress to continue funding the war.

Cynosure though he will be today, Petraeus in fact has only a limited role to play in seeing to it that the US continue its mad engagement.

The stars of that dispiriting drama will be the phalanx of foreign policy experts based in Washington, who will, in the wake of the general's testimony, fan out across the cable channels and op-ed pages, arguing that giving the surge one more chance is the only "serious" option.   more »