Vice President-elect Joseph Biden arrived in Baghdad on January 12 for an unannounced visit. It was part of a three-nation Asian tour for the vice president-elect, who visited Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iraq. The trip provided further confirmation that the incoming Obama administration intends to pursue an interventionist foreign policy — allying ourselves with Pakistan in our war against terrorism despite the fact that Pakistan is far from a paragon of human rights and "democracy"; supporting the planned U.S. military buildup in Afghanistan that basically entails shifting the war in Iraq to a new theater; and staying engaged in Iraq, a country that Biden once proposed dividing into three parts. 

Speaking to reporters in New Delhi, India, on December 3, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said that Pakistan must act "fully and transparently" in efforts to bring the terrorists responsible for the deaths of at least 188 people in Mumbai — India's financial capital — to justice.

During a speech given on November 13 before the Atlantic Council think tank, CIA Director Michael Hayden offered his best-informed opinion that Osama bin Laden is isolated and most likely hiding amidst the mountainous terrain along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.

One of the first orders of business for a new president-elect is to consider which people to nominate for his cabinet. The position of secretary of state is generally regarded as the most critical of these, since it is one of four original cabinet positions, and the secretary of state is first among cabinet members in the line of presidential succession (following the vice president, speaker of the House, and president pro tempore of the Senate).

A report in the British newspaper, the Guardian, for November 1 examined the plight of 17 members of a dissident ethnic Chinese group who have been incarcerated at the U.S. detention facility inside Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba for almost seven years. The men are members of the Uyghur ethnic group — Turkic-speaking Muslims who are seeking political autonomy from China.

When the United Nations General Assembly opens today (September 23), Governor and Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin will attend and will meet with former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger.

Voice of America News reported on September 27 that Afghan and NATO forces engaged in Operation Dragon Strike are conducting a major push to drive Taliban militants out of their stronghold around the southern city of Kandahar.

President Bush startled conservatives in his own party in 2005 with his support for U.S. ratification of the United Nations Law of the Sea Treaty (LOST). The Republican rank-and-file has adamantly opposed this effort to give the UN regulatory and taxing powers over all the world’s oceans and territorial seas since President Reagan torpedoed U.S. participation in the LOST scheme in the 1980s.

Has the United States gone to war in the Middle East for oil? That allegation has generally emanated from opponents of our military interventions in the Middle East, and it has been dismissed by the neoconservatives who have supported those interventions as far-leftist propaganda.

The increasing presence of representatives from Turkey — both corporate executives and government officials — at the annual Bilderberg conferences has coincided with stepped-up pressure from the White House, the State Department, and the bureaucracy of the European Union to grant the Islamic nation full EU membership.