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| washingtonpost.com - Op-Ed Columns
The nation of Georgia is a place of inspiration and danger. I saw both in a single hour.
At the risk of heresy, let it be said that setting up the two presidential candidates for religious interrogation by an evangelical minister -- no matter how beloved -- is supremely wrong.
It was February 2006 in Munich, and John McCain's eyes were flashing with the mischievous spark that comes when he's about to fire a verbal rocket. "I've got a zinger coming," he told me, referring to a speech on Russia he would give a few hours later at the annual Munich Conference on Security Policy.
By the time Election Day arrives, you might be forgiven for thinking that Barack Obama's running mate is named Lilly Ledbetter.
Obsessed with rankings, Americans are bound to see the Beijing Olympics as a metaphor for a larger and more troubling question. Will China overtake the United States as the world's biggest economy? Well, stop worrying. It almost certainly will.
Forty years ago this week, on the night of Aug. 20-21, 1968, thousands of tanks and hundreds of thousands of Soviet and Warsaw Pact soldiers entered Czechoslovakia. The goal of the invasion was straightforward: to prevent a Soviet satellite from carrying out democratic reforms that, had they been allowed to succeed, could have threatened the legitimacy of the governments of other Soviet satellites and, indeed, of the Soviet Union itself.
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan -- The resignation of President Pervez Musharraf yesterday after nine years in office is a major victory for Pakistan's long-battered and still fragile democratic forces. But particularly given the meltdown the country has endured in recent weeks, there are still many obstacles to effective civilian governance. Although the United States will expect things to change in a hurry, they are unlikely to do so right away.
The Democratic and Republican conventions have a couple of tough acts to follow. Two compelling spectacles -- one glorious, one shocking -- have stolen the spotlight this summer to remind us all that whatever nostrums we hear from Barack Obama and John McCain about it being morning again in America, the truth is that we live in a much more complicated world.
Last year, Brent Scowcroft described to the Council on Foreign Relations his "most difficult judgment call" as George H.W. Bush's national security adviser. It entailed preparing Bush for an early morning news conference regarding an attempted coup against Mikhail Gorbachev. Later on, Scowcroft was asked about the first Bush administration's decision to look the other way as Saddam Hussein's attack helicopters slaughtered Shiites in the south of Iraq. He seemed unmoved. It is not for nothing that he is called a "realist."
Anyone who still doubts that the evangelical Christian world is going through a political revolution was not watching Pastor Rick Warren's presidential forum this weekend. The era of reducing Christianity to a narrow set of ideological commitments is over.
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