MACARAO, Venezuela – We got off the train in this mountainside settlement of barrios on the outskirts of Caracas and walked into a mob-scene of red t-shirts. Reggaeton, Carribean rap music, thumped from tall stacks of black speakers, thousands of people danced in the street drinking bottled beer and sangria. Motorbikes revved through the crowd spewing blue smoke and the smell of gasoline. At first, the whole scene reminded me of the wild “block-parties” I attended as a child on the outskirts of Boston. Entire streets would be blocked for the sole purpose of giving people a place to drown [...]
In two recent articles — one in the Los Angeles Times on Friday, and another in today’s New York Times — examining the foreign policy and national security strategy views of incoming U.S. Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, a 1998 New York Times op-ed written by Gates is mined for clues. Indeed, the article, which can be read in its entirety here by those who subscribe to the NYT’s TimesSelect service, is a valuable record of Gates’ thinking on a particularly difficult issue — the U.S. response to the then-increasing problem of international terrorism. Gates wrote the op-ed in the [...]
