August 7, 2016

Israel Must Stop Waging Tit-for-Tat Warfare

Despite maintaining one of the best air forces and armies in the world, Israel persists in fighting tit-for-tat wars rather than crush-or-be-crushed wars. The trouble is that tit-for-tat warfare, especially in the Middle East, does not work. If th...

March 19, 2016

What Our Mis-educated Younger Generation Misses

Recently, Britain’s The Economist magazine began a piece with “One of the perks of getting old is that you are allowed to talk nonsense about the young.”  Since I am old, I shall claim my perk. What bothers me the most is...

June 20, 2015

A suggested aide memoire from the government of Israel to the United Nations secretary general

In my view, here is what Israel should state as its official position as the U.N. marks a significant moment: On October 14, 2015, the United Nations will convene in New York to celebrate its 70th anniversary.  In connection with that event, ...

June 2, 2015

A suggestion for a Palestinian State

The Palestinians already have a state.  They have had it for 93 years.  However, there is understandable confusion, because their state has never been called Palestine.  It has always been called Jordan, even though half of its inhabit...

March 29, 2015

Latinos and Americanos: The two societies compared

In 1971, President Richard Nixon said: “Latin America doesn’t matter. People don’t give a damn about Latin America.”  He may have been right then, but not now. Both the United States and Brazil are conti...

November 28, 2014

Israel has every reason to fear an Iranian nuclear weapon

In 2006 Thomas Friedman of the New York Times wrote: “I'd rather live with a nuclear Iran” because it’s “the wisest thing under the circumstances.” Friedman may think it wise but the Israelis and I do not. We are convinced that the Iranian leaders wi...

September 8, 2014

Crush or be Crushed

Recent events in Israel and Gaza prove that the winning-hearts-and-minds approach to ending wars and insurrections has the same success rate as getting rain by praying for it. If it were indeed the key to victory, armies would have exchanged their we...

July 13, 2014

Even if it is no larger than the smallest postage stamp

The current confrontation between Hamas and Israel reminds me of an event that occurred in 1978 at England’s Oxford University where I delivered a paper on the role of terror and retaliation in the Palestine-Israel conflict.  My paper h...

February 17, 2014

Palestinian Irredentism and the Anti-Israel Double Standard

The international legal justification for the re-establishment of Jewish sovereignty in the Middle East lies in a 1922 document issued by the League of Nations, the precursor organization of the United Nations. It gave Great Britain a mandate to...

November 25, 2013

War, Peace, and a Nuclear Iran

When I was a young man, two books impressed me. They still do. One is Konrad Lorenz's On Aggression. An M.D. and a Ph.D. and a 1973 Nobel laureate in medicine and physiology, Lorenz established the field of ethology, the study of the behavior of anim...

July 10, 2013

The Bullet that Brought My Father to America

The debate on amnesty for millions of illegal immigrants brings to mind something that happened to me when I was 16.  I was standing behind my father when he happened to be putting on his pants. For the first time, I noticed a gash in the back o...

March 22, 2013

Eleanor Roosevelt talks about her husband and the Holocaust

See also: Franklin Roosevelt, Ibn Saud, and American Jews April 19 will mark the70th anniversary of the uprising of the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto. That date always reminds me of 1958 when Eleanor Roosevelt, the widow of Democratic President Fran...

August 19, 2012

Sayings of My Father

My father was known as Louis Glick in English and Laibl Glick in Yiddish.  He was born around 1900 in Meziboz, in the Russian Ukraine.  When Fiddler on the Roof came out, he remarked that his shtetl, where  the Baal Shem Tov ...

December 27, 2010

Who Will Be on Top at the End of this Century?

What will the world look like at the end of this century?  I ask this in light of the emergence of Brazil and India, German dominance of the European Union, the rise of China, and the apparent decline of America.China and India each have about a...

September 26, 2010

Repatriating Jobs

One of the ways we can end the current "jobless recovery' is to repatriate as many former U.S. manufacturing jobs as possible, as quickly as possible.In the 1970s about a quarter of our workers made their living by making things within our borde...

June 26, 2010

Relabeling Americans

For two centuries, the melting pot was America's defining symbol and crowning achievement. It allowed millions of integrating immigrants to formulate and maintain this nation's social contract. But new concepts of separateness, new feelings about div...

May 31, 2010

Tolerance for me but not for thee

Portland is a proud city. One of the things it's proudest of is its tolerance for different life styles. It's the reason so many outsiders move here. Some years ago, the Oregon Supreme Court ruled that full nudity and lap dancing are constitutional. ...

May 19, 2010

A lifetime of self reliance and accepting personal responsibility

The more our governments and their deficits grow, the more I think of my late mother-in-law. A trained bookkeeper and armchair economist, she had ideas that could save the country some real money today. She came to America at 13, speaking only Yiddis...

April 20, 2010

The Grand Illusions of America's Liberals

America's liberals are consumed with guilt. If not soon purged from our society, their guilt will kill us all.Bent on rewriting history, or else entirely ignorant of it, they deny that the United States has brought more freedom and well-being to more...

March 4, 2010

If the Workers Can't Buy, Their Bosses Can't Sell

It is an axiom of economics that in order for businesses to be competitive and profitable, they must always strive to be labor-lean. They must shed as many workers as possible, as quickly as possible, for as long as possible."As long a...

December 14, 2009

Uncoupling the U.S. from the U.N.

Over the past sixty years, the political architecture and mathematics of the United Nations have changed drastically. Not only has the number of Security Council non-permanent members been increased from six to ten, but the pivotal position in the Ge...

October 3, 2009

President Perks

Have you ever wondered why our Barack Obama, not noted for devotion to hard work in his previous jobs as a law associate, community organizer, state senator, and U.S. senator, raced around America, risking life, limb, and laryngitis, crying ...

August 23, 2009

Obama and the Holy Land

When Lyndon Baines Johnson was a young congressman, he saved 42 Jews from the Nazis. Indirect evidence shows that he rescued another 400 Jews, including the famed orchestra conductor Erich Leinsdorf. While Johnson didn't risk his life to save Je...

May 5, 2009

The President hasn't apologized enough

President Barack Obama has made abject apologies for the actions of his predecessors a cornerstone of his foreign policy."In his recent trips to Europe and the Caribbean, he apologized for the arrogance of President George W. Bush, and he s...

January 20, 2009

Israel has lost another war

Those whom the gods would destroy they first make mad. - Anonymous ancient proverbOnce again Israel's Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has proved that he is not formed from the same mold as Prime Ministers David Ben Gurion, Levi Eshkol, Golda Meir, Yi...

January 2, 2009

Is the IDF going to lose again?

Has the IDF, the vaunted Israeli army that captured the Sinai Peninsula in 72 hours in 1956, and captured it again - along with the West Bank, East Jerusalem, the Golan Heights, and the Gaza Strip - in the 1967 Six Day War, lost its grip and its...

October 12, 2008

Israel doesn't have much time to attack Iran

It was in  October 2005 that the Iranian President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, first said that the "Zionist regime" must "be wiped off the face of the Earth." And it was in April 2006 that he called Israel a "fake regime"...

June 17, 2008

How our Marxist faculties got that way (corrected)

It's August 1968. Anti-Vietnam War demonstrators have just wrecked the Democratic national convention in Chicago and ruined Hubert Humphrey's chances to become President. So what did these Marxist demonstrators and their cohorts elsewhere do nex...

May 14, 2008

Israel's Democratic Garrison State Turns 60

Not counting anti-terrorist actions, the Israelis have fought seven wars since their independence: the 1948-1949 War of Liberation, the 1956 Suez War, the 1967 Six Day War, the 1968-1970 War of Attrition, the 1973 Yom Kippur ...

December 2, 2007

After Annapolis, what?

In the zero-sum-game Middle East, if you don't win, you lose.  Despite the conference at the United States Naval Academy, if one looks at the Palestine struggle the way Iran, Hamas, Hizbollah, and Israel's other existential enemies look at it, t...

July 29, 2007

Let's Hail Those Whom We Really Need

During the Vietnam War, I taught courses in civil-military relations and the politics of national defense at Temple University. A must topic was the military draft. It was important because men who had the economic and intellectual resources to ...

March 13, 2007

The Darfurians and the Sudanese

Visit almost any American church or college these days, and you will be confronted with pleas to "Save Darfur" - not "Free Tibet" or "Liberate Zimbabwe" - before you have been there very long. The only other cause t...

August 3, 2006

Lost Audacity: Once Again a Time for Boldness in Israel

Israel lost its first war in Lebanon when it fought Hezbollah for eighteen years and withdrew suddenly in 2000 without victory. If it loses this second war, it will be for the same reasons: political immobility, military timidity, and the fear of neg...

July 6, 2006

Does World Opinion Really Matter?

Since September 11, 2001, I have often wondered how, say, Frenchmen, Britons, and Swedes, would have behaved if, instead of destroying New York's World Trade Center, terrorists had killed nearly 3,000 people in attacks on the Eiffel Tower in Paris, t...

May 17, 2006

Hamas and the Killing of Innocents

Why should Hamas care if its irredentist terrorism kills or causes Israel to kill innocent civilians? If one looks at the existential Palestine—Israel struggle as Hamas looks at it, it is obvious that Hamas is winning. Not only did it prevail i...

February 25, 2006

How the Israel-Palestine Problem Came to Pass

History doesn't solve problems, but it explains them, including the evolution of the intractable Israel—Palestine problem. The idea of revived sovereignty in their ancient homeland has excited Jews for millennia. Until the nineteenth century th...

December 15, 2005

If 1941 Were 2005

As Iraqis vote today, enjoying the fruits of Coalition victory despite caterwauling to the contrary by many opponents of the Presaident Bush, one has to wonder whether we would have fought the Second World War if American Leftists then had the defeat...

September 28, 2005

Winning Hearts and Minds Doesn't Do It

I was in favor of toppling President Saddam Hussein long before President George W, Bush was. Indeed I have advocated Saddam's removal ever since the following verbal exchange took place in Tokyo between me and the Iraqi ambassador to Japan, two week...

March 14, 2005

The feminist assault on the English language

In 1965 I stopped working for Department of Defense think tanks and became a professor at Temple University. One of my contractual obligations — right in the middle of anti—ROTC demonstrations and of protests against the Vietnam war ...

October 19, 2004

The two most terrible countries in the world?

Most Europeans, their pontificators and their polls tell us, think that America and Israel are the two most terrible polities on this planet. Not nuclear North Korea. Not near—nuclear Iran. Not the Sudan, which is practicing genocide. Not even ...

September 27, 2004

Why so many class traitors vote Republican

As the 2004 elections near, a question haunts the Democrats: why will so many lower—income voters 'betray' their brethren and vote for Republicans ? A deracinated descendant of Marxian "class interest" analysis still entices liberal thinke...