We pride ourselves in being realists first of all, and thus we know well, or tell ourselves we do, that “the first casualty when war comes is truth.”
Perhaps it would have surprised George Orwell, poet laureate of the Cold War, to find himself so much in our thoughts in this second decade of the post-Cold War age.
Being invited to deliver a commencement address to the Department of Rhetoric is akin to being asked out for a romantic evening by a porn star.
In the ruined city of Fallujah, its pale tan buildings pulverized by Marine artillery in the two great assaults of this long war (the aborted attack of March 2004 and then the bloody, triumphant al-Fajr (The Dawn) campaign of the following November), behind the lines of giant sandbags and concrete T-walls and barbed wire that surrounded the tiny beleaguered American outpost there, I sat in my body armor and Kevlar helmet and thought of George F. Kennan.
In November 2003, barely six months into the Iraq War, Specialist Joseph Darby returned from leave and asked a fellow soldier at Abu Ghraib prison to tell him what had happened while he”d been away.
When I look back over the many years of conversations with Carol Feldman, I realize that what brought us together, first and foremost, was our vices.
The phrase I come back to, not only about interrogation but the many other steps that constitute the Bush state of exception, state of emergency, since 9/11 is “take the gloves off.”
Scanning my memory for especially telling episodes in my friendship with Fritz has brought much pleasure, for my memories are full of laughter and also, of course – this is after all Fritz Stern – much wisdom.
Seldom has an image so clearly marked the turning of the world. One of man”s mightiest structures collapses into an immense white blossom of churning, roiling dust, metamorphosing in 14 seconds from hundred-story giant of the earth into towering white plume reaching to heaven.
For more than two years the United States has been fighting a war in Iraq that was launched in the cause of destroying weapons that turned out not to exist.
The great value of the discussion recounted in the Downing Street memo…is to show, for the governments of both countries, a clear hierarchy of decision-making.
When I was invited to give this speech, I was asked for a title. I dillied and dallied, begged for more time, and of course the deadline passed.