by Victor Davis Hanson // NRO’s The Corner
We are on the verge of a war with Syria. Yet I don’t think the administration has as of yet articulated what its aims are and thus is confused about the means of obtaining them. Is the point of the impending military action to remove Assad, engage his opposition, and foster a consensual society in his place, as if the U.S. can at last do
what so far the Arab Spring has not? To destroy enough of his assets to allow the insurgents (but who exactly are they?) to rebound somewhat? To establish a new American-enforced global statute that WMD use is not permissible in a way that a Rwanda, Grozny, or the Sudan apparently was? To Continue reading “What Is the Syria Plan?”
a big stick,” but Obama has spoken loudly and carried a little stick. Churchill said, “You can always count on Americans to do the right thing—after they’ve tried everything else.” Obama can be always counted on to do the wrong thing––before he’s tried anything else. The Roman general Sulla was “no better friend, and no worse enemy.” 
newspapers, 
imperial elite. The Satyricon is an often-cruel parody about how the Roman agrarian republic of old had degenerated into a wealth-obsessed, empty society of wannabe new elites, flush with money, and both obsessed with and bored with sex. Most of the Satyricon is lost. But in its longest surviving chapter — “Dinner with Trimalchio” — Petronius might as well have been describing our own 21st-century nomenklatura.