Yesterday, in an interview aired by PBS, President Obama said that the United States must now attack Syria. The reason was the imminent danger that, if we do not, the Assad government will use chemical weapons against Americans on the U.S. mainland. This fantastic and hollow pretext comes so close to a statement made by Tony Blair in the run-up to the Iraq war that the two assertions invite a comparison.
Click here to read the rest of our election symposium. 2012 may be remembered as the presidential election in which we chose between candidates about whom we could not be sure who they really were. Neither man was a new …
If you look at recent academic discussions about the good and bad energies brought into play by patriotism, you are struck by a certain elusiveness regarding the commitment of the commentators. Patriotism, the love of our country, is sometimes presented …
Michael Foot, who died on March 3, 2010, at the age of ninety-six, was the soul of the democratic Left in England. His political engagements started in the late 1930s, with editorials against the appeasement policy of Neville Chamberlain and …
David Bromwich: Too Many Children Left Behind
David Bromwich: Obama and the Vigilantes
The resolution required to get out of an imperial or a humanitarian-improvement occupation is not different in kind from the heave of the will required for getting in. The problem is that getting in was made possible by a morale …
Day After: D. Bromwich – Overwhelming
Norman Mailer came to public attention as the young author of a best-selling novel of 1948, The Naked and the Dead. It quickly became one of three war novels by Americans that any reader of that generation was likely to …
The slanting of intelligence estimates, early plans for the war in Iraq concealed from the Congress and from the secretary of state, internal memos to create a rationale for torture and the abrogation of due process-it would be hard to …
When I was fourteen and fifteen, I used to ride my bike three miles to a bookshop run by people whom I thought of vaguely as beatniks. The owner was a man in his late twenties, dark-haired, bearded, scholastically gaunt. …
The most fateful and clever decision made by George W. Bush’s administration in the days just after September 11, 2001, was the decision to call the American response to terrorism a war. So much becomes possible in a war that …
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 …
What has struck many observers by now is the failure of the ordinary system of legal checks to assist the country in a time of constitutional crisis. The failure has several dimensions: the arrogance of the courts, which stripped a …
