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Georgie Anne Geyer is a widely respected and well-known liberal columnist whose articles focus on foreign affairs issues and appear in approximately 120 newspapers in North and Latin America. She is the author of several books, including a biography of Fidel Castro. Ms. Geyer devotes much of her attention to criticizing conservative presidents – particularly with respect to their Central American and South American policies. My regular readers are well aware that I devote this weblog often to the dangers multiculturalism poses to the future of the United States and to its role as a beneficent, functioning republic – the...

One of the many distasteful and underestimated influences on American and European life to emerge from the turbulent, anti-establishment '60s was the concept of "multiculturalism" -- which still dooms us today. It sounded so good. Not only were all people "created equal," as our founding documents had it, but equal opportunity was to be solemnly strived for, and men and women of every stripe and culture were to be guaranteed equal outcome. There was also the underlying (and insulting) idea that those "others" had no culture or memory or history of their own -- they were just like us. They...

One recent sunny afternoon, as the city's venerable buildings cast ever-changing reflections in the famous canals, a prominent Dutch editor was ruminating with me on the reasons behind the immigration upheavals here. "For too long, we were too much afraid to speak out on religious -- or any -- differences," Hubert Smeets was saying, a touch of sadness in his voice. "It was taboo to speak of religious, or even ethical, differences.

For those few of us who have championed rational immigration control policies over the last 30 years, there have been constant and insensate challenges to what seemed the most central of nation-state business: controlling the borders and carefully choosing new immigrant populations. Thirty years ago, when I started writing in this column about border control, self-righteous professional Third World-sympathizers such as Sen. Teddy Kennedy had already arrogantly pushed through the 1965 immigration reform act, which switched traditional immigrant preferences from the ethnic groups already in America to the impoverished and uneducated Third World, especially Mexico.

For those few of us who have championed rational immigration control policies over the last 30 years, there have been constant and insensate challenges to what seemed the most central of nation-state business: controlling the borders and carefully choosing new immigrant populations. Thirty years ago, when I started writing in this column about border control, self-righteous professional Third World-sympathizers such as Sen. Teddy Kennedy had already arrogantly pushed through the 1965 immigration reform act, which switched traditional immigrant preferences from the ethnic groups already in America to the impoverished and uneducated Third World, especially Mexico. Most of us shook with...

By Georgie Anne Geyer Mon Apr 3, 8:04 PM ET WASHINGTON -- Behind the illegal immigrants waving Mexican and Salvadoran flags in Los Angeles last week; behind the Mexican girl in Arlington, Va., who was quoted as saying on radio, "Citizens -- what are they for? We do all the work"; behind the antiquated calls for taking back the Southwest in the name of a Mexican Aztlan -- there is a plan. I am not saying that this plan, propagated by Mexico City, could challenge the lies, secrecy and Machiavellian scheming of American war plans in the Middle East. I...

Forgive me if, after watching the United Nations this week, I seem a little confused. I AM a little confused! Remember George W. Bush, pugnacious unilateralist who for the last four years has spurned any idea of working with anyone else? In his U.N. speech this week, he said the world is "better when we act together." Remember the President Bush who three years ago, as he grandly made the case for invading Iraq, said the international organization would sink into "irrelevancy" if it failed to act at his command in that "difficult and defining moment"? The man who has...

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- By the early 1970s, after seven long and savage years of fighting in Vietnam, the phrase that came to characterize the pitiful hopelessness and absurdity of that conflict was, "We had to destroy the village in order to save it." Unbelievably, our secretary of defense has just given us the existential phrases for the Iraq (news - web sites) war: "As you know, you go to war with the Army you have ... not the Army you might want or wish to have at a later time." How could Donald Rumsfeld, a smart and savvy man despite...

WASHINGTON -- The Ottoman Empire of Turkey lasted nearly 600 years, from the 14th century to 1922. The Byzantine Empire lasted 1,100 years, from 330 to 1453 A.D. The Brits ruled the world for well over a century, as did the Moguls of India and too many Chinese emperors to count. We can now say that the much-touted "American Empire" of the radicals in the Bush administration has seen its brief spring and summer and is approaching the snows of late December. Two years, and the Great American Empire that the likes of Dick Cheney and the neocons dreamed of...

<p>IT'S NOT AS THOUGH Osama bin Laden gave a Jihad Award to Ariel Sharon, or Donald Rumsfeld gave his Good Pal Award to Condoleezza Rice. It's not even as though Dick Cheney gave his Favorite Foreigners Citation to the French.</p>

<p>DO YOU SUDDENLY feel part of an ''empire''? Are you moved to march on Mexico and build aqueducts in Honduras? In the dark of night, when the town is still, do you sometimes slip away into the basement and surreptitiously try on the uniforms of Caesar and Hannibal and Napoleon?</p>

POWER SHIFT IN IRAQ COULD RESCUE WEAK POST-WAR POLICY WASHINGTON -- Although little noticed by the American people since the Iraq war supposedly ended, a crucial change of power in Washington is redefining the real outcome of the war and, surely, the future positioning of the United States in the world. To oversimplify, the State Department and CIA realists are now in control inside Iraq -- and the Pentagon civilian hawks, who had such cynical plans for the entire Middle East, are at least momentarily in retreat. Most unfortunately for all the poor people who got caught in the hawks'...

EVANGELICALS' ANTI-ISLAM REMARKS ARE TESTAMENT TO IGNORANCE WASHINGTON -- Evangelical Christianity's leaders, meeting here this week, performed a great service for the geopolitical health of the world. They denounced as "unhelpful" and even "dangerous" the outrageous anti-Islam remarks made by some of the movement's star preachers over recent months. The Rev. Franklin Graham was not there. He was in San Diego at a "mission." But his words of the last year and a half -- that Islam is a "very evil and wicked religion" -- clearly hung over the landscape. Nor was the Rev. Jerry Falwell at the conference, sponsored...

NEXT STEPS IN MIDDLE EAST WILL REVEAL BUSH'S TRUE MEASURE WASHINGTON -- When I interviewed former Secretary of State James Baker III several weeks ago while we were both speaking at the University of Oklahoma, he expressed great hope for a "moment" after the Iraqi war, when a unique window would suddenly open to Israeli-Palestinian peace. "Israel will never, ever enjoy security so long as she occupies the territories," he said, "and the Palestinians will never, ever achieve a state through violence. Trading the occupied lands for peace is the only basis upon which we can base a settlement. I...

The words popularly used to characterize the war in Iraq were "cakewalk" and "victory." From the beginning, war supporters here liked to say it would be a cakewalk, which it wasn't, but also a victory, which it surely was. Our military men and women deserve great credit for their courage, imagination and decency in a wildly ambivalent theater of war. But there is a new word to apply to the next phase of the war, and it is an elusive one. The word is "legitimacy," and the success of occupation will depend upon its political application within Iraq. Consider the...

In the 1980s, when I traveled several times to Baghdad to cover the bitter Iran/Iraq war, for moments of joy I would slip over to the Iraqi National Museum and lose myself — and reclaim myself — among the glorious treasures of our least-known antiquity. I remember it as a rather small museum. Apparently it has since been enlarged. But there was incredible intimacy to be found among the cultural riches, such as the Sumerian silver harp from Ur and the iconic "Head of a Woman" from Uruk. I recall particularly moving very slowly through the basement of the museum...