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Afghanistan to Ask NATO for Bigger Army Afghan officials will go to the NATO summit in Romania Thursday with a request: pay to increase our national Army by 40 percent. A bigger Army, Afghan officials argue, will allow the US and other coalition members to scale back in the coming years. This appeal comes amid pleas from the US and Canada for other NATO members to commit more to the Afghanistan mission, which many analysts say has floundered over the past year for lack of resources and a coherent strategy. France is expected to contribute another 1,000 forces and...

I posted here Tuesday night that Cindy Sheehan is coming to speak at Chicago's St. Xavier University in mid-February. Here is the entire press release, courtesy of St. Xavier's web site: U.S. peace activist Cindy Sheehan will give a lecture titled "One Person Can Make a Difference, Not One More" at Saint Xavier University’s Shannon Center at 7 p.m. on Thursday, Feb. 16. This will mark Sheehan’s first lecture on a college campus and in Illinois. Sheehan won nationwide attention with an anti-war vigil outside President George W. Bush’s Texas ranch after her son, Army Specialist Casey A. Sheehan, was...

Fresh from a trip to the World Social Forum in Venezuela--where she met with President Hugo Chavez, "Peace Mom" Cindy Sheehan has a visit to Chicago's Southwest Side coming up, the Daily Southtown reports.St. Xavier University will host Cindy Sheehan on February 16 at 7:30pm at the school's Shannon Center. Expect a lot of Code Pink activists and their ilk prowling around St. Xavier that night.

If a Korean War veterans group had wanted a softball presentation by a speaker they would find agreeable, they shouldn’t have called Peter Kirstein. More than simply being anti-war, the St. Xavier University history professor just might be the sharpest and most outspoken critic of the military within a reasonable drive of the North Shore. In a sometimes heated exchange with a Wilmette- based veterans’ roundtable recently, Kirstein debated the impending conflict with Iraq, but also blasted the military’s growing role in foreign policy and its conduct in all modern wars. “We normally hear that it’s the military that is...

The Nutty Professor The other day a friend of mine forwarded an account of an e-mail exchange between a cadet at the Air Force Academy and a professor at St. Xavier University. The cadet was innocently informing the college about an event called The Academy Assembly, a gathering where political subjects are discussed and inquiring about the best methods of advertising in the St. Xavier area. The letter ended up in the hands of a certain professor, Peter Kirstein, and here is the professor’s reply: “You are a disgrace to this country and I’m furious you would even think I...

Some of the dumbest people I’ve met have considerable formal education. For many, there appears to be some sort of reverse correlation between years of formal education and common sense. Making this more agonizingly apparent is the posturing of academic types who are self-styled deep thinkers and judge themselves to be so much smarter than the rest of us. Peter Kirstein holds a Ph.D. and is a professor of history at Chicago’s St. Xavier University. He recently received an email from an Air Force Academy cadet who asked for suggestions on how to publicize to the St. Xavier community a...