Bush’s Budget Lunacy  

In The Right Man, a memoir of his experience as a speechwriter in the Bush White House, David Frum claims that after September 11, “There was no more domestic agenda. The domestic agenda was the same as the foreign agenda. …







Anti-Anti-Americanism  

Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace: How We Got to Be So Hated by Gore Vidal Thunder’s Mouth/Nation Books, 2002, 160 pp., $16.50Why Do People Hate America? by Ziauddin Sardar and Merryl Wyn Davies Icon Books, 2002, 231 pp., $19.99″What We …



Requiem for Welfare  

There were few mourners at welfare’s funeral. In fact, its demise was widely celebrated when congressional Republicans teamed up with a majority of their Democratic colleagues and then-president Bill Clinton to enact a new welfare law in 1996. The law …



Todd Gitlin Responds  

If wishes were arguments, the strongest argument for an American war would be the most ambitious-the wish, or prayer, that by deposing Saddam Hussein and occupying Iraq, the United States would install the first democratic regime in the Arab world, …





Mitchell Cohen Responds  

Is Baghdad simply another miserable regime? Just one of those unpleasant tyrannies that, sadly, speckles our globe, but ought not to compel overbearing concern? Much depends on how one answers this question. The answer, I think, is no. Saddam Hussein’s …



The Last Page  

In the midst of the Second World War and the 1944 election, it was the example of Abraham Lincoln, “the greatest wartime President in our history,” that Franklin D. Roosevelt evoked when he addressed the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. …



Acting Alone  

Unilateralism is a weak name for the foreign policy sketched in “The National Security Strategy of the United States of America” -a document released by the White House in September 2002 and discussed inadequately in the press. The strong name …



Marshall Berman Responds  

I dread an American attack on Iraq, and I completely oppose it. Smart as our bombs may be, in a country with a regime famous for using its people as human shields, there is no way we can avoid killing …









Morality as Style  

Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million by Martin Amis Talk Miramax, 2002, 306 pp., $24.95 All novelists are Stylists, but only a few are known chiefly for having what Vladimir Nabokov called “a fancy prose style.” Over the …