On the afternoon of September 13, 1999, I joined one of the last United Nations patrols to venture out into Dili, the capital of East Timor. Clad in flak jackets, but unarmed, we toured the city in three vehicles. In …
There is nothing new about human disasters caused by human beings. We have always been, if not our own, certainly each other’s worst enemies. From the Assyrians in ancient Israel and the Romans in Carthage to the Belgians in the …
The Fracture Zone: My Return to the Balkans by Simon Winchester HarperCollins, 1999, 272 pp., $13 The Road to Kosovo: A Balkan Diary by Greg Campbell Westview, 1999, 228 pp., $15 Only the Nails Remain: Scenes From the Balkan Wars …
A glass wall covered by blinds separated the courtroom participants from the spectators in the public gallery, but a hush enveloped both sides when the witness known as FWS-50 began to speak. Although a voice modulator screened her identity from …
It’s never a good idea to refight the last big war. But perhaps one can learn a lesson from it. The atmosphere of American politics since September 11 bears an uncomfortable resemblance to that of the cold war, particularly during …
I was almost fourteen years old when things became a mess. My school was half Serbian, half Muslim, but no one recognized the difference, and we were all together. My best friend was a Serbian girl named Boriana. One day, …
All around town houses were burning. We heard gunfire all the time. On the 5th of September [1999] the police came to us and said that if we wanted to stay alive, we had to come to the police station. …
I have no serious disagreements with Leo Casey or Michael Kazin. Casey’s description of religious totalitarianism as the real enemy is persuasive. I will continue to argue for the condemnation of terrorism, whoever uses it, and for a general “war” …
In the midst of his speech at the 1993 dedication of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel shocked President Bill Clinton and the audience by departing from his prepared remarks to observe, …
Viewed from inside “history in the making,” a place where Americans now dwell, September 11 appears as a day that marked a radical change in our world. When we finally went to sleep that night, it seemed that a familiar …
In the early days of the Bosnian War, Colin Powell, who at the time chaired the Joint Chiefs of Staff, came to the conclusion that stopping the fighting would require the use of 250,000 troops. Then-President George Bush took his …
Here are five tangential responses to Michael Walzer. (1) Remember, in 1989, the left’s hope that the end of the cold war might bring a “peace dividend,” an economy less dependent on war? Those hopes died in Yugoslavia, Somalia, and …
Seven years after the fact, the most enduring—and perhaps haunting—image of the Rwandan genocide is that of the nameless Hutu peasant standing over a pit of putrid corpses, a machete in one hand and a radio in the other. The …
“What is there to ‘admit’?” -Adolf Eichmann, pretrial testimony REBECCA WEST thought they were boring. Karl Jaspers hoped they might lead the Germans to salvation. Janet Flanner regarded them as an island of sanity in a sea of moral wreckage. …
This is not going to be a straightforward and entirely coherent argument. I am still reeling from the attacks of September 11, and I don’t have all my responses in order. I will try to answer five questions about terrorism. …
