For besiegers of cities, a child is an especially lucrative target. If the aim is to sow terror among those holding out behind the walls, how better to do it than by murdering children?
American fighter planes in the skies over Sarajevo. To the survivors in the ruined city below, the planes are a familiar sight.
Heading up into the mountains of Morazán, in the bright, clear air near the Honduran border, you cross the Torola River, the wooden slats of the one-lane bridge clattering beneath your wheels, and enter what was the fiercest of El Salvador’s zonas rojas…
Late on a breezy afternoon, Father Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the elected president of the Republic of Haiti, descended from his limousine on Capitol Hill and, accompanied by his entourage of Haitian aides and American lawyers, made his way slowly into the Capitol to meeting room S-116, where a group of senators and staff assistants awaited him.
On a sunny Columbus Day afternoon, Father Jean-Bertrand Aristide, president of the Republic of Haiti, walked slowly down the steps of the Georgetown house in which he has made his home for much of the last two years, and faced a restless crowd of reporters and photographers.
On a sweltering morning in Port-au-Prince, in July of 1915, a party of gentlemen attired in black morning coats, striped pants, and bowler hats strolled past the wrought-iron gates and around the courtyard of the elegant mansion that housed the French legation and pushed through a side door.
Americans are so devoted to democracy and so respectful of its central ritual that we tend to confuse the one with the other. Call it the Election Day Myth.
It strikes me that “The Future of the Transatlantic Relationship” has quite a considerable past.
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.
Rarely has the portal, the moment of passage from ordinary to revolutionary time, been so well captured in a single image: At the wheel of the gray BMW sits the young dictator, well-dressed, prosperous, slightly overweight, his face impassive, his shoulders thrown back; he has spent all but five of his thirty-four years in the Palace, fifteen of them as President-for-Life, having been inaugurated, at his dying father’s insistence, as a mountainously obese, glassy-eyed teenager.
With the publication of Oliver North’s memoirs and the start of the Colonel’s nineteen-city tour to promote it, the Iran-Contra affair completed a five-year journey from tragedy to farce and began its inevitable transformation into “product.”
Two weeks ago, when Haitian soldiers deposed their country’s President, jean-Bertrand Aristide, the United States reacted quickly and forcefully, cutting off foreign aid and freezing Haiti’s assets in this country.
Driving south in Haiti one day in the spring of 1986, I passed a great 18-wheeled tractor-trailer speeding north, heard a volley of automatic weapons fire, and, craning my neck to look back, witnessed an absurd and amazing tableau…