Iraq is not Vietnam. Lyndon Johnson sacrificed a popular majority and promising social reforms to a futile war. George Bush – who won the presidency while losing the popular vote – and the leadership of Congress-which owes its legislative majorities …
These are heroes then-among the plain people-Heroes did you say? And why not? They give all they’ve got and ask no questions and take what comes and what more do you want? -Carl Sandburg, The People, Yes September 11, 2002, …
Regime change now? It would be wonderful if Saddam Hussein were gone, the miserable, old-style totalitarian thug. But do we want the new-style U.S. techno-thugs, smooth and increasingly precise, to take charge? Perhaps we’ll look back at communism and rogue …
I appreciate many of Michael Walzer’s thoughts on current Israeli-Palestinian conflicts (“The Four Wars of Israel/Palestine,” Fall 2002)—a topic on which he and I have often had trouble seeing eye-to-eye. The best part of his message is his insistence that …
As the first anniversary of September 11 approached, a controversy over the meaning of that fateful day and the place it will occupy in our national self-understanding irrupted into public view. The debate emerged not as battling manifestos by prominent …
Jeffrey C. Isaac’s review of Frances Stoner Saunders’s The Cultural Cold War (“Rethinking the Cultural Cold War,” Summer 2002) argues, in effect, that the end justifies the means. The end was the cause of liberal anticommunism. The means was the …
I would only support an American war against the current Iraqi regime if (1) the current regime blocks inspections and refuses to carry out its obligations to disarm and a renewed and reinforced policy of blockade, sanctions and deterrence has …
I do not support an American attack against Iraq under current conditions. Such an attack would be justified only with a broad spectrum of international support, based on a convincing consensus of imminent and extraordinary danger. Both disarmament and regime …
Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam by Gilles Kepel Harvard University Press, 2002 454 pp $29.95 Unholy War: Terror in the Name of Islam by John L. Esposito Oxford University Press, 2002 196 pp $25.00 Political Islam is all …
The Surveillance State
Environmental Protection in a Postmodern Age
I support a war on the grounds that the current regime of the Ba’ath Party in Iraq is a criminal state that has gone beyond the pale even as judged by the very low standards of the Middle East region, …
The name James Chapin may not be familiar to many Dissent readers. He didn’t write a great deal for the magazine. Until the last year or so of his life—when he turned out superb political analysis for an unlikely outlet, …
Like a few million other people, I consider George Orwell one of my favorite political writers, but I don’t riffle through his books, looking for wisdom whenever a political crisis comes along. In the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, …
Telecom companies are staggering into the emergency rooms of the world economy, candidates for life support or even euthanasia. Long viewed as leading the way into the “information age” of productivity and enlightenment, they are suddenly presenting symptoms of what …
