Mark Danner in conversation with author James Chace, published in Spring 2004 issue of the Bardian, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY
We see the world through the stories we tell, and until recently the story most Americans told themselves about the war in Iraq was a simple and dramatic narrative of imminent threat, daring triumph, and heroic liberation —a story neatly embodied in images of a dictator’s toppling statue and a president in full flight gear swaggering across a carrier deck.
Are we Safer? Justice, Security and the War in Iraq from Mark
PBS Frontline Documentary A “Frontline” interview with Mark Danner Can
A Salon magazine report on the debate between Mark Danner
Mark Danner debates Christopher Hitchens, The Goldman Forum on the Press and Foreign Affairs, at Zellerbach Hall, UC Berkeley
During the nineteen-eighties,while Iraqis and Iranians killed one another by the hundreds of thousands in a struggle for supremacy in the Persian Gulf, the United States maintained a vigilant neutrality-or so Americans were assured by the governments they elected.
Less than a year after Americans paraded in the streets to celebrate victory in the Gulf War, the entire conflict, which appeared so cataclysmic at the time, is rapidly receding from view.
Three months after United States Marines liberated Kuwait City, the victors of Operation Desert Storm are still being honored across the country.
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
Americans tend to examine distant regimes, and the commitments our government has made to them, only during times of crisis.