I have a confession to make: I am the foreign affairs columnist for The New York Times and I didn't listen to one second of the Sept. 11, 2001 hearings and I didn't read one story in the paper about them. Not one second. Not one story.
Lord knows, it's not out of indifference to Sept. 11. It's because I made up my mind about that event a long time ago: It was not a failure of intelligence, it was a failure of imagination. We could have had perfect intelligence on all the key pieces of Sept. 11, but the fact is we lacked -- for the very best of reasons -- people with evil enough imaginations to put those pieces together and realize that 19 young men were going to hijack four airplanes for suicide attacks against our national symbols and kill as many innocent civilians as they could, for no stated reason at all.
Imagination is on my mind a lot these days, because it seems to me that the only people with imagination in the world right now are the bad guys. As my friend, the Middle East analyst Stephen Cohen, says, "That is the characteristic of our time -- all the imagination is in the hands of the evildoers."
I am so hungry for a positive surprise. I am so hungry to hear a politician, a statesman, a business leader surprise me in a good way. It has been so long. It's been over 10 years since then Israeli prime ministerYitzhak Rabin thrust out his hand to Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat on the White House lawn. Yes, yes, I know, Arafat turned out to be a fraud. But for a brief, shining moment, an old warrior, Rabin, stepped out of himself, his past, and all his scar tissue, and imagined something different. It's been a long time.
I have this routine. I get up every morning around 6am, fire up my computer, call up AOL's news page and then hold my breath to see what outrage has happened in the world overnight. A massive bombing in Iraq or Madrid? More murderous violence in Israel? A hotel going up in flames in Bali or a synagogue in Istanbul? More US soldiers killed in Iraq?
I so hunger to wake up and be surprised with some really good news -- by someone who totally steps out of himself or herself, imagines something different and thrusts out a hand.
I want to wake up and read that US President George W. Bush has decided to offer a real alternative to the stalled Kyoto Protocol to reduce global warming. I want to wake up and read that 10,000 Palestinian mothers marched on Hamas headquarters to demand that their sons and daughters never again be recruited for suicide bombings. I want to wake up and read that Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia invited Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to his home in Riyadh to personally hand him the Abdullah peace plan and Sharon responded by freezing Israeli settlements as a good-will gesture.
I want to wake up and read that General Motors has decided it will no longer make gas-guzzling Hummers and Bush has decided to replace his limousine with an armor-plated Toyota Prius, a hybrid car that gets over 40 miles to the gallon.
I want to wake up and read that Vice President Dick Cheney has apologized to the UN and all our allies for being wrong about weapons of mass destruction. in Iraq, but then appealed to our allies to join with the US in an even more important project -- helping Iraqis build some kind of democratic framework. I want to wake up and read that Representative Tom DeLay called for a tax hike on the rich in order to save Social Security and Medicare for the next generation and to finance all our underfunded education programs.
I want to wake up and read that Justice Antonin Scalia has recused himself from ruling on the case involving Cheney's energy task force when it comes before the Supreme Court -- not because Scalia did anything illegal in duck hunting with Cheney, but because our Supreme Court is so sacred, so vital to what makes our society special -- its rule of law -- that he wouldn't want to do anything that might have even a whiff of impropriety.
I want to wake up and read that Bush has announced a Manhattan Project to develop renewable energies that will end America's addiction to crude oil by 2010. I want to wake up and read that Mel Gibson just announced that his next film will be called Moses and all the profits will be donated to the Holocaust Museum.
Most of all, I want to wake up and read that Senator John Kerry just asked Senator John McCain to be his vice president, because if Kerry wins he intends not to waste his four years avoiding America's hardest problems -- health care, deficits, energy, education -- but to tackle them, and that can only be done with a bipartisan spirit and bipartisan team.
Concerns that the US might abandon Taiwan are often overstated. While US President Donald Trump’s handling of Ukraine raised unease in Taiwan, it is crucial to recognize that Taiwan is not Ukraine. Under Trump, the US views Ukraine largely as a European problem, whereas the Indo-Pacific region remains its primary geopolitical focus. Taipei holds immense strategic value for Washington and is unlikely to be treated as a bargaining chip in US-China relations. Trump’s vision of “making America great again” would be directly undermined by any move to abandon Taiwan. Despite the rhetoric of “America First,” the Trump administration understands the necessity of
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The military is conducting its annual Han Kuang exercises in phases. The minister of national defense recently said that this year’s scenarios would simulate defending the nation against possible actions the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) might take in an invasion of Taiwan, making the threat of a speculated Chinese invasion in 2027 a heated agenda item again. That year, also referred to as the “Davidson window,” is named after then-US Indo-Pacific Command Admiral Philip Davidson, who in 2021 warned that Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) had instructed the PLA to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027. Xi in 2017
Sasha B. Chhabra’s column (“Michelle Yeoh should no longer be welcome,” March 26, page 8) lamented an Instagram post by renowned actress Michelle Yeoh (楊紫瓊) about her recent visit to “Taipei, China.” It is Chhabra’s opinion that, in response to parroting Beijing’s propaganda about the status of Taiwan, Yeoh should be banned from entering this nation and her films cut off from funding by government-backed agencies, as well as disqualified from competing in the Golden Horse Awards. She and other celebrities, he wrote, must be made to understand “that there are consequences for their actions if they become political pawns of
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