Can we admit that we’ve failed in the Mid East and start to move on?

Sam Smith - Regardless of our military strategy, regardless of how many laptops we ban from trans-Atlantic flights, regardless of how many Syrian refugees we keep out of the United States, our Mid East war is the longest and one of the most futile in our history. There is really no mystery to this; we …

Eight hours in a basement for peace

Sam Smith, 2010 Last Saturday I spent eight hours with three dozen other people in a basement conference room of a Washington hotel engaged in an extraordinary exercise of mind and hope. The topic was, by itself, depressingly familiar: building an anti-war coalition. What made it so strikingly different was the nature of those at …

The role of respect in peace

If you deconstruct the language of those who Bush would have us believe form the axis of evil, one finds not so much megalomania as insecurity, hurt feelings, and bitterness over their global inferiority. This has become particularly apparent with the rise of Chavez and Ahmadinejad, two national leaders who have proved unusually adept at …