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.”
A few weeks after the fall of Jean-Claude Duvalier, in February, 1986, the statue of Christopher Columbus presiding over the harbor of Port-au-Prince was seized and thrown into the sea by persons unknown, who left fastened on the empty pedestal a sheet of paper with a simple scrawled message: “Pa de blans en Hayti!”
Mornings in Port au-Prince, just before dawn, as the last, scattered gunshots faded in the distance and the outlines of the city began to take shape in the dirty air—tiny houses, painted aqua and salmon; the huge and ghostly National Palace, gleaming white; gray and rust-colored slums, canopied in smoke—my colleagues and I would go off in search of bodies.
This is the first draft of Mark Danner’s first feature article about Haiti, written in 1987 for The New York Times Magazine.
When General Westmoreland hauled CBS into court for libel last year, the American press responded with a flood of sober commentary on a cherished subject – itself.
When Yasir Arafat spoke at the United Nations some years ago with a gun in his belt, he was giving a performance in what has become the terrorist theater.
Almost from the moment the first “contra” was issued his American, made combat boots, the Reagan Administration’s secret war against Nicaragua has been embroiled in a vociferous if somewhat bizarre public debate: Congressmen proclaim their outrage, editorialists confess their misgivings, while officials in Washington – who are running the war – blandly “decline to comment on intelligence matters.”