Watching foreign affairs is sometimes like watching a magician; the eye is drawn to the hand performing the dramatic flourishes, leaving the other hand - the one doing the important job - unnoticed.

Here among the constant ruins and rebuilding of civilizations lies the coexistence of diversity and intolerance.

Obama has already rejected the bright sunlight of public knowledge, which is democracy's great disinfectant and cure.

Officers are taught to use all the tricks and lies that courts permit within the scope of the Fifth Amendment's shield against self-incrimination.

Obama behaves like a centrist who leans tentatively left on certain social programs but boldly right on military force and civil liberties.

Caricatures created by politics never fit comfortably into the Oval Office.

The Holocaust never quite leaves Israeli Jews alone. Arabs use it against them and they use it against Arabs. Jews use it against other Jews. Even the president of the United States, it seems, can use it against the prime minister of Israel.