America owed its military renaissance in the 1980s and 1990s to Vietnam. Veterans like Norman Schwartzkopf, Colin Powell, Alfred Grey, Charles Krulak, and Wesley Clark returned home angry and ashamed at their defeat and rebuilt all-volunteer, professional armed forces from the ground up.

A good journalist is modest; his only job is simple: to decide what counts as news.

After spending the 1980s building up Saddam's Iraq as a counterweight to Iran, U.S. policy abruptly reversed course with his invasion of Kuwait and has since tried to cut him down to size. The policy is called 'containment,' but the question is, containment of what?

Since Franklin Roosevelt's leadership in setting up the United Nations and the Nuremberg trials, the U.S. has promoted universal legal norms and the institutions to enforce them while seeking, by hook or by crook, to exempt American citizens, especially soldiers, from their actual application.

Health care reform, the marquee legislative accomplishment of the Obama administration's first term, was passed before we entered the world of divided government.

I am probably not alone in sensing above me the huge corporations and monstrous banks, science, politics and technologies, spy satellites and stock markets, military systems and massive wealth - forces and dynamics I don't understand or can hardly imagine.

I quit politics because I hated it.

Our government... teaches the whole people by its example. If the government becomes the lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy.