In November, a year after the Berlin Wall was breached, American troops and airmen by the thousand began leaving the German bases they had occupied for four decades and heading for the Persian Gulf.
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.”
It is likely the question was first asked as soon as it could be – that the hope of abolition followed shortly after the task of creation.
The immortal power of gossip was already well understood in ancient Greece – “lt too,” said Hesiod, “is a kind of divinity” – but it required the particular talents of the present age to make money off it.
Last year Americans spent $30 billion on illegal drugs, while their government spent $1.5 billion trying to shut down their sources of supply.
In the ten years since the last Marine was plucked from the roof of the besieged U. S. Embassy in Saigon, “Vietnam” has come to stand for a good deal more than America’s first military defeat.