This ran first a couple days ago in the LA Times , and is picked up this morning in the WNJ . Bacevich is the highly regarded Professor of History and International Relations at Boston University: When he visits Strasbourg, France, this week to participate in festivities marking NATO's 60th anniversary, President Obama should deliver a valedictory address, announcing his intention to withdraw the United States from the alliance. The U.S. has done its job. It's time for Europe to assume full responsibility for its own security, freeing the U.S. to attend to more urgent priorities.... Present-day NATO is a shadow of what it once was. Calling it a successful alliance today is the equivalent of calling General Motors a successful car company -- it privileges nostalgia over self-awareness. As with GM, so too with NATO: Fixing past mistakes will require painful changes. Continuing along the existing trajectory is not an option. If the alliance pursues any further eastward expansion ...

The NATO Commander-in-Chief is, well, pissed , about the leaking (pissed, leaking, get it?) of his operational directives to NATO commanders in the field to kill Afghan drug dealers, pretty much on sight: Yesterday we reported on the “guidance” of NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander for Europe General John Craddock, which ordered NATO soldiers in Afghanistan to kill anyone involved in the drug industry, even if there was no evidence they were insurgents. The story has caused no shortage of outrage since the German magazine Der Spiegel initially broke it. NATO Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer is riled up too, but not in the way you’d figure. He’s not so much upset at the general for ordering troops which are already losing ground to the insurgency to waste their time killing random opium dealers: he’s mad at whoever leaked the report. “The secretary-general considers it is unacceptable that confidential documents have been leaked,” according to spokesman James Appathurai, “he is call...