For almost four months, the United States has been sleepwalking toward war. Though there are the trappings of a debate — hearings in Congress, argument and speculation on the editorial pages, discussion on the public-affairs programs — thus far they have seemed insubstantial when set against the reality of President Bush’s military buildup
A year after the Berlin Wall was breached and the “post Cold War era” proclaimed, Americans face the prospect of a “hot war” fought against an enemy that a few months ago they didn’t know they had.
Though the rhetoric surrounding the Middle East crisis has softened somewhat since the threats of mid-August, the United States and Iraq remain caught in what President Mitterrand has called the “logic of war.”
The last great public scandals of the decade are remarkable, above all, for their inconclusiveness, their strange resistance to closure.
Americans tend to examine distant regimes, and the commitments our government has made to them, only during times of crisis.
Just past ten on a sunny morning last month in Port-au-Prince, four men carrying automatic weapons, two of whom wore the green uniforms of the Haitian Army, strolled into the garden of the Hotel Santos, where Haiti’s Council of State was meeting with union and business leaders, and asked for Dr. Louis Roy.
On February 7,1986, the day the dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier and his wife, Michèle Bennett, flew off to exile in France, a crowd of jubilant Haitians invaded the National Cemetery, a vast expanse of concrete crammed with bright-colored tombs — ivory and turquoise and rose — bearing the names of Haiti’s great families.
A few weeks after the fall of Jean-Claude Duvalier, in February, 1986, the statue of Christopher Columbus presiding over the harbor of Port-au-Prince was seized and thrown into the sea by persons unknown, who left fastened on the empty pedestal a sheet of paper with a simple scrawled message: “Pa de blans en Hayti!”
Mornings in Port au-Prince, just before dawn, as the last, scattered gunshots faded in the distance and the outlines of the city began to take shape in the dirty air—tiny houses, painted aqua and salmon; the huge and ghostly National Palace, gleaming white; gray and rust-colored slums, canopied in smoke—my colleagues and I would go off in search of bodies.
Having ferreted out the ”sophisticated rebels” of Europe from Cardiff to Cracow, H. Stuart Hughes found himself rather nonplussed when asked to suggest their counterparts in the United States.
History, it’s said, is written by the winners; but perhaps it’s truer to say it belongs to the least reticent. Dean Rusk, on becoming Secretary of State, vowed never to write his memoirs.
On West Germany’s ”Day of National Unity” this summer, a dapper, white-haired, German-born American stood in the Bundestag, facing the President, Prime Minister and other high officials of the West German Government, and spoke about German history.