India Vows to Keep Troops on Border With Pakistan …

India Vows to Keep Troops on Border With Pakistan (washingtonpost.com)

Vajpayee says “we don’t want a war,” but you could fool me. It looks like Pakistan is making good-faith efforts, under difficult conditions, to round up the radicals. (In stark contrast to the Taliban’s stonewalling after Sept. 11.) India needs to back off a little and give them a chance.

India is also pretty much ignoring President Bush; I didn’t vote for him, but ignoring the President of the United States is not done.

Officials said today that they were drawing up plans and requisitioning supplies, including large rolls of camouflage cloth, to shroud the Taj Mahal, a 17th-century mausoleum that is India’s most famous monument.

I have no idea why camouflage cloth is useful in this situation. I don’t think you can hide the Taj, it’s pretty big.

New Afghan Leader Sworn In Spirit of Hope and Uni…

New Afghan Leader Sworn In

Spirit of Hope and Unity Prevails; Karzai Vows to Rebuild Economy

Good luck, Hamid. You’re going to need it.

The whole “nation-building” concept makes me as nervous as it does President Bush. But if ever there was a time for nation-building, this is it. The leadership of the new government has asked for American aid, the US is as popular in Afghanistan as it could possibly be, and — let’s face it — almost anything we do would have to be an improvement. Having an ally in that part of the world wouldn’t be a bad thing either.

I get the idea though that we’re willing to leave the nation-building to the Brits and the other Europeans. Hopefully, mostly the Brits.

I don’t think that "An Al Gore Liberal supports th…

I don’t think that “An Al Gore Liberal supports the war on terrorism” should be such a surprise. Most people who voted for Gore do. But I couldn’t come up with a better description.

Anyway, the leftward half of the American political spectrum, and the Democratic Party, haven’t exactly been a group of raging doves over the years. FDR and JFK were hardly pacifists. After Vietnam, somehow people decided that the natural impulse for liberals was pacifism, or the nearest thing to it. But that hasn’t been the tradition, not really. For most of American history, it’s been the conservatives who wanted to ignore the world while liberals wanted to interfere and to export American values. After Communism stopped being a danger, some conservatives wanted to retreat again from the world, but the Republican Party seems to have them under control now.

Meanwhile, there remain leftist and liberal elements that are horrified by the idea of the United States standing up for itself. They’re isolated, though. They don’t represent most left-of-center Americans. My guess is most of them voted for Nader anyway.