Neither Western Donor Countries Like The U.s.

American Airstrikes...create Risks, Especially If Our Intelligence There Is Rusty. The Crucial Step, And The One We Should Apply Diplomatic Pressure To Try To Achieve, Is For Maliki To Step Back And Share Power With Sunnis While Accepting Decentralization Of Government. If Maliki Does All That, It May Still Be Possible To Save Iraq. Without That, Airstrikes Would Be A Further Waste In A Land In Which We've Already Squandered Far, Far Too Much.

More Girls Were Killed In The Last 50 Years, Precisely Because They Were Girls, Than Men Killed In All The Wars In The 20th Century. More Girls Are Killed In This Routine Gendercide In Any One Decade Than People Were Slaughtered In All The Genocides Of The 20th Century. The Equivalent Of 5 Jumbo Jets Worth Of Women Die In Labor Each Day... Life Time Risk Of Maternal Death Is 1,000x Higher In A Poor Country Than In The West. That Should Be An International Scandal.

You Could Perhaps Better Tell The Story Of A Place By Writing Of A Tiny Village As A Sort Of Prism Into The Bigger Issues The Culture Was Facing. It Struck Me As A Better Way To Learn About A Place, Or At Least A Different Way, Than Just Going To Interview The President. So I Have Often Tried To Tell The Story Of A Place Through People There. But I'm Just Amazed.

I Try To Be Careful About Wording. One Of The Things I've Tried To Combat In My Blog Is The Notion That Journalists Are Arrogant And Unconcerned With The Readership.

Let Me Be Clear: I'm A Believer In A Robust Military, Which Is Essential For Backing Up Diplomacy. But The Implication Is That We Need A Balanced Tool Chest Of Diplomatic And Military Tools Alike. Instead, We Have A Billionaire Military And A Pauper Diplomacy. The U.s. Military Now Has More People In Its Marching Bands Than The State Department Has In Its Foreign Service - And That's Preposterous.