Mark Danner

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The Logic of Torture

June 24, 2004

what is difficult is separating what we now know from what we have long known but have mostly refused to admit.

Torture and Truth

June 10, 2004

Last November in Iraq, I traveled to Fallujah during the early days of what would become known as the “Ramadan Offensive”—when suicide bombers in the space of less than an hour destroyed the Red Cross headquarters and four police stations, and daily attacks by insurgents against US troops doubled, and the American adventure in Iraq entered a bleak tunnel from which it has yet to emerge.

Campaigns

April 5, 2004

As the war in Iraq enters its second year, Americans find themselves trapped in an epistemological black hole: the war’s end recedes into an indefinite future while its beginning grows daily more contentious and obscure.

Delusions in Baghdad: An Exchange

February 12, 2004

I am glad that Ambassador Horan finds my article “interesting and accurate, as far as it goes.” I must confess that I feel the same way about his letter—up to and including the implication that the writer does not, alas, go quite far enough.

Delusions in Baghdad

December 18, 2003

Autumn in Baghdad is cloudy and gray. Trapped in rush-hour traffic one October morning, without warning my car bucked up and back, like a horse whose reins had been brutally pulled.

The Struggles of Democracy and Empire

October 8, 2003

A year after a tiny band of religious zealots managed with stunning audacity to mutilate the face of America, the world’s sole superpower trembles on the threshold of a new imperial season.

Iraq: How Not to Win a War

September 25, 2003

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.

The Battlefield in the American Mind

October 16, 2001

In Afghanistan, the targets are running out. Such are the frustrations of the powerful; Joseph Conrad, writing of an African “heart of darkness” a century ago, well understood: “Once, I remember, we came upon a man-of-war anchored off the coast.

The Road to Illegitimacy

February 22, 2001

After you have spent some days searching for the secret of political legitimacy in Miami and West Palm Beach, you want to go further.

Scandal and the Road to Deadlock

December 21, 2000

Gaze upward, through the gaseous clouds of rhetoric littering the sky from the campaign that would not end—”I will never let you down,” “I will restore honor and dignity to the White House”—and you can spy, casting a shadow on the land like Barthelme’s Dead Father, an enormous pair of lips, belonging not to the Vice President or the Texas governor but to a young woman from Beverly Hills who one fateful day delivered a slice of pizza to the President of the United States.

The Lost Olympics

November 2, 2000

Few of our predilections seem more distinctly modern than the compulsion to name “our era” and thereby claim it.

Clinton & Colombia: The Privilege of Folly

October 5, 2000

In foreign affairs, folly is the privilege of great powers, for they alone can be certain to survive it. Last month Americans embarked on a policy of exquisite folly: funding both sides of Colombia’s civil war.