Richard Cohen (Continuación)

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I started writing a column for The Post in 1976. It was about local affairs, and so it took me about a year to write my first column about anti-Semitism. Since then, I have written about 90 more, most of them full-throated condemnations of the hatred that killed fully one-third of all Jews during my own lifetime. So it comes as a surprise that has the force of a mugging to be accused of aiding the very people I so hate -- of being an abettor of something called "The New Anti-Semitism."

The accusation comes from the pen of Indiana University's Alvin H.…  Seguir leyendo »

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George W. Bush has executed 153 people, 152 of them in Texas and one so far in Iraq. The Iraqi, of course, is Saddam Hussein, who went to his burlesque of a death with more dignity than the Iraqi government, which so hurried him to the gallows that in much of the world the hanging looked a lot like a lynching. The president, we are told, did not bother to view the spectacle on tape. Maybe he feared he would learn something.

I bring up Bush's appalling record of executions not because I have once again mounted my anti-capital-punishment hobbyhorse but because his record offers an insight into why the United States will stay in Iraq and with even more troops than before.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoAmérica,

Since this is my last column of 2006, tradition and custom obligate me to choose a person of the year. This practice was started by the late Henry Luce, who realized that choosing a man of the year would call as much attention to his Time magazine as it would to the person himself. I have somewhat the same object in mind. My person of the year is Gregory Thompson. I choose him to call attention to the madness of the death penalty.

I apologize for the un-Christmasy nature of my topic, and I will understand if you choose to skip to another subject.…  Seguir leyendo »

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James A. Baker III, the renowned foreign policy realist, looked realism in the eye -- and blinked. The Iraq report he co-authored with Lee Hamilton recommended many things, but shied from the most realistic one of all: Get the hell out as soon as possible.

I know, I know. That would not be realistic, you say. Iraq would implode, Shiites and Sunnis would kill one another with abandon, al-Qaeda would prosper, Iran would extend and enhance its influence, Syria would gloat, Israel would be even more threatened, and the United States would suffer the sort of humiliating defeat that would encourage fanatics all over the world to take a whack at us.…  Seguir leyendo »

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The way President Bush whisked through Vietnam -- oh, if only we had done the same 40 years ago -- it seemed as if he was feeling an obvious parallel with the war in Iraq. His aides, who somehow lose IQ points by mere proximity to the commander in chief -- national security adviser Stephen Hadley argued that Bush had "gotten a real sense of the warmth of the Vietnamese people" as he sped by in his motorcade -- insisted that no parallel existed. But these aides are dead wrong. There is this: I would have fought neither war.

Before you protest "of course, Cohen," let me explain that the "I" in the foregoing sentence is really four people.…  Seguir leyendo »