His first column, from Sunday, debunks the idea that the US is dominated by some sort of kosher conspiracy.
I liked this little line
So it was a very pleasant surprise to spend a week here in person and discover just how faint and marginal true anti-Americanism is. It exists, of course, but even when it does, it often seems motivated by envy rather than hatred. "You have to understand," one Left-wing journalist told me over a boozy lunch, "that everybody in our business here wonders whether he didn't make the mistake of a lifetime by not moving to the United States when he was 22."
Thankfully, my parents did bugger out of Europe and come here, in 1962.
His second column puntures the gassy blood for oil shiboleth.
But here is where the no-war-for-oil crowd make their mistake. Those Americans who worry most about oil tend to oppose action against Saddam, because they worry about the effects an Iraq war would have on Saudi Arabia. Take, for example, former Georgia Senator Wyche Fowler, President Clinton's ambassador to Saudi Arabia. [...]
Fowler's is the authentic voice of the oil lobby, the people who ran America's Middle East policy more or less unchallenged until September 11: pro-Palestinian statehood, sceptical of Arab democracy and concerned above all with the "stability" of the Middle East - meaning the preservation of the Saudi royal family.
That certainly isn't the predominant view now. I think most of us see that Saudi Arabia and it's royal family are the root of the problems we have with militant Islam. Taking out Hussein is just the next step in uprooting the whole lot of them.
His column today is about the misguided notion that Bush is wagin a family vendetta.
A president cannot take America into a major war all by himself. He needs the support of both houses of Congress. In 1991, after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, the elder Bush managed to win only 250 votes in the House of Representatives for a war resolution, and only 52 votes in the Senate. Earlier this month, the younger Bush's Iraq resolution passed the House with 296 votes and the Senate with 75.
Are all of those 371 legislators driven by family pride? Hardly. Bush won strong congressional backing for his resolution because, since September 11, a wide consensus has been growing in America that Saddam cannot safely be left in power.
Any questions?
