A Cornell MBA student tells the Sun about his deployments in Iraq.  

Quick quiz: Whom are we fighting in Afghanistan? If you say “the Taliban,” you’re only giving the easy answer. What exactly is “the Taliban?” Who comprises it? What are its motives, its goals?

Most people would say that the Taliban is a hardened group of “terrorists,” an extremist group of murderers bent on destroying freedom and eliminating the West. This view is understandable — it’s all anyone hears from the politicos and pundits, who, in their laughably narrow debate over the war (has anyone in power seriously advocated immediate withdrawal?), paint “the enemy” in broad strokes and leave little doubt that we’re engaged in a conflict of ideas.

Jean Paul Sarte once famously said, “When the rich make war, it’s the poor who die.” And it’s true, to an extent. From the beginning of history to our modern conflicts, war has been declared and organized by people with power – and fought by those without.

Just because George W. Bush has passed you the baton does not mean it is OK to use it as a bludgeon.

Next month will mark the eighth anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, a war instigated by Bush and inherited by President Barack Obama.

For the last six of those years the Afghan conflict has shared the public stage with, and played second banana to, the Iraq war. But as Obama vows to wind down the Iraq war and rev up the Afghan war, Afghanistan may end up taking centre stage — and defining Obama’s legacy.

“If only the Palestinians had better leadership.” I often hear this point from well-intentioned, but in this case at least misguided, pro-Israeli friends and colleagues. They continue to bemoan, “If only they had a Ghandi or an MLK.”

And one can surely make a logical case about previous and current Palestinian (and other Arab) leadership missing the mark. But there are a few more interesting points here. First of all, a Ghandi or an MLK prototype a priori requires the background of either an oppressive colonizing regime or a brutally racist one. Either scenario is not quite ideal, and is fascinating to me that folks, in trying to highlight flawed Palestinian resistance, inadvertently draw this moral parallel to today’s Israel.

The television tells me no one has any money and I believe them because they play me a particularly persuasive montage of FOR SALE signs and deserted malls and confused-looking homeless people. This is the first recession (or worse?) brought to you with FULL TEAM COVERAGE — we can watch it live, in hi-definition, every minute of every day. It’s like the Olympics but with an exponentially longer, yet untraceable tape delay. We can watch banks turn away outstretched hands, bankrupt auto executives weep in $XXXX suits, foreclosed houses overrun with tumbleweeds and bobcats and fat Midwestern-looking factory workers moving what appear to be levers.

This past Sunday evening I sat perched in Libe Café poring over Titus Andronicus and The War Between the Tates, and in the failing light I watched as half a dozen students lined the quad’s walkways with over a thousand black flags.

Witnessing these young people brave Ithaca’s brutal winter twilight warmed my heart, for in my naïveté I thought they were paying tribute to Black History Month.

Perhaps each black flag represented a fallen African American soldier in the Civil War or each African American imprisoned and murdered in the struggle for civil rights.

FORT DRUM, N.Y. (AP) — No more than an estimated 30,000 additional troops will be sent to Afghanistan as the U.S. ramps up forces there, the nation's top military officer told soldiers Monday.

Joint Chiefs Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen also called U.S. efforts in Iraq a success, even though "we're not done."

Mullen, speaking to fresh-faced soldiers and war-weary military wives, sought to boost morale and soothe concerns at the Army base that has seen a constant revolving door of troops sent to Iraq and Afghanistan over the last eight years.

"I don't see us growing a force well beyond the 20,000 to 30,000 for Afghanistan — American soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines — beyond that 30,000 or so," Mullen told about 800 soldiers and specialists gathered for a town hall meeting.

In President Skorton’s most recent Sun column, he rightfully encouraged members of the Cornell community to engage in reasoned discussions on the current events in Gaza. If we are to have a constructive dialogue, though, we must acknowledge the facts and discard the lies and double standards. Unfortunately, several recent Sun articles are plagued with numerous such fallacies. I am compelled to write this piece to address a few of those faults.

Ariela Rutkin-Becker wants to know what I want to know, and the bomb-loving crowd won’t tell: “What I want to know,” she wrote on Tuesday, “what burns me up at night is how are so many other American Jews not red-in-the-face, infuriated, embarrassed and righteously indignant now with Israel’s response to Gaza’s rocket-fire?” Ms. Rutkin-Becker, unwillingly and unknowingly conscripted by her temple sisterhood into the Stay-Here-in-America-but-Send-Money brigade of the Israel Defense Forces, isn’t the only one with a presumptive synagogue.