113 articles
DURING THE LAST FEW DAYS the administration has been coming under increasing pressure to step up its war efforts against the Taliban in Afghanistan. In yesterday's Washington Post, William Kristol wrote that the United States would need significant ground troops to unseat the Taliban and Charles…
IN LATE SEPTEMBER three men of Middle Eastern origin had tickets on Northwest Airlines out of Minneapolis. They were set to board when other passengers--presumably not of Middle Eastern origin--objected. Their objection was sustained. The Middle Eastern men took a later flight on Delta. Once upon a…
FIRST SEX: Late yesterday afternoon, George Gedda of the Associated Press filed an interesting wire about the anthrax risk currently confronting employees at the State Department's headquarters building in Washington. On Monday, department spokesman Richard Boucher had announced that, save for two…
Oct. 31, 2001 William Kristol Editor The Weekly Standard Washington, D.C. Via e-mail and fax Dear Mr. Kristol: In his Daily Standard column "Accuracy in Media," Stephen Hayes not only misses the point of our guidelines to avoid racial and religious stereotyping, but he twists them beyond…
SEVEN WEEKS after being attacked, three weeks after beginning the bombing of Afghanistan and since the discovery of anthrax here at home, how goes the war? According to plan, the administration says. Unfortunately, it's a flawed plan. The administration's plan is shaped by three (self-imposed)…
WINTER IS COMING once again to an Afghanistan at war, and what the bureaucrats call a "complex humanitarian disaster" is unfolding. As news accumulates of relief warehouses accidentally bombed and refugees fleeing U.S. strikes, some would have us believe that the American campaign is the principal…
Clarence Thomas A Biography by Andrew Peyton Thomas Encounter, 661 pp., $29.95 IN RECENT YEARS THE PUBLIC PERCEPTION of Clarence Thomas has undergone a remarkable change. Few who closely follow the work of the Supreme Court now indulge the notion he isn't up to the job. Seldom is it said that he…
WHAT IS ANTHRAX? Bacillus anthracis is a rod-shaped bacterium that typically appears--when outside a living host--in a dormant state, protected by a hard-shelled spore. Provided it is lodged in rich soil subject to dramatic changes in climate, the organism can and does persist in this form for many…
IT WAS CLEAR EVEN FROM THE POLLS that something changed during Anthrax Week. When Gallup asked Americans about the most important issues facing the nation, that perennial favorite response from prosperous times--"education!"--registered only 3 percent. AIDS, drugs, civility, and various other…
IN 1998, on the day Sen. Bob Kerrey of Nebraska dropped out of the 2000 Democratic presidential race, Steve Jarding got a call from Mark Warner, a wealthy Virginia politician looking to be governor. Jarding, 43, was Kerrey's chief political strategist. Now Warner wanted him, though Jarding is from…
The River War An Account of the Reconquest of the Sudan by Winston Churchill Carroll & Graff, 380 pp., $14 INNUMERABLE COMPARISONS HAVE BEEN MADE, in the days since September 11, to World War II and especially to Winston Churchill's wartime leadership. In some ways, of course, the comparison is…
IN THE DAYS AFTER SEPTEMBER 11, those of us living along the flight path for Reagan National Airport couldn't help noticing the preternatural quiet as civilian air traffic was grounded. That eerie calm wouldn't last long. It was replaced by the deep-throated exhaust notes of F-16s, which have been…
Cambridge, Mass. HARVARD SQUARE is looking strange these days. With red, white, and blue fluttering from every street lamp and storefront, the city affectionately known as the "People's Republic of Cambridge" seems to have undergone a complete makeover. In the wake of September 11, this new…
ON NOVEMBER 16 begins the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, and some Muslims and Islamophiles at home and abroad are suggesting that its arrival ought to mark a pause in the U.S.-led coalition's war on terror: Finish what needs doing in Afghanistan by then, they say, or risk offending Muslims…
TWO OF THE MOST BRILLIANT EXPLANATIONS of Osama bin Laden were written eleven years ago. The first is an essay that appeared in the September 1990 issue of the Atlantic Monthly by Bernard Lewis called "The Roots of Muslim Rage." The second is a lecture delivered by V.S. Naipaul as part of the…
HERE'S A PREDICTION. When all is said and done, the conflict in Afghanistan will be to the war on terrorism what the North Africa campaign was to World War II: an essential beginning on the path to victory. But compared with what looms over the horizon--a wide-ranging war in locales from Central…
WHAT IS THE ROLE and responsibility of Saudi Arabia in financing Osama bin Laden, poster boy for Wahhabism, the extremist Islamic sect that justifies murder? In some quarters, efforts are emerging to quash discussion of Wahhabism and of the Saudi connection to September 11. The Saudis are unhappy,…
TWO QUESTIONS have been raised about Osama bin Laden. First, if bin Laden opposes the Saudi regime, why has he never struck Saudi targets? Second, if he threatens Saudi Arabia, why has the Saudi government taken the lead in recognizing and funding the Taliban government of Afghanistan, which is…
THE SONTAG AWARD BY RIGHTS, the latest Susan Sontag Award--our acknowledgment of inanity by intellectuals and artists--belongs to playwright Tony Kushner, author of "Angels in America." He started by telling the Los Angeles Times, "I'm hoping people will be respectful of the horror--unlike Bush,…
LESS THAN TWO WEEKS after what many consider the worst intelligence failure in U.S. history, George W. Bush went to CIA headquarters to give George Tenet a hug. In case anyone missed the message of the trip, the president was explicit. "George and I have been spending a lot of quality time…
SHORTLY BEFORE getting on a plane to fly to New Jersey from Europe in June 2000, Mohamed Atta, the lead hijacker of the first jet airliner to slam into the World Trade Center and, apparently, the lead conspirator in the attacks of September 11, met with a senior Iraqi intelligence official. This…
CALIFORNIA LEGISLATORS ARE moving to change the legal definition of family through two new bills. The first, AB 1338, proposed by Democratic assemblyman Paul Koretz, was heard in committee for the first time last week. AB 1338, otherwise known as the California Family Protection Act, would create a…
IF YOU WANT TO GET CHEERED UP, go to a college campus. I spent a day at Yale this week and found the campus alive with debate. Students were generally more supportive of George W. Bush and the war effort than their professors, and there was a wide range of views. What's more, some of the…
From: across@spj.org Date: Mon, 29 Oct 2001 18:28:48 -0500 To:webeditor@weeklystandard.com Subject: Respond to Article: Stephen F. Hayes 10/26/2001 To: Stephen Hayes, Fred Barnes From: Al Cross, SPJ president Sally Lehrman, chair of SPJ's Diversity Committee, is preparing a reply to your 10/26…
IMAGINE THE OUTCRY if a newspaper editor permitted a Catholic priest to revise--before publication--a reporter's story about a pro-life rally. Or if a columnist called in a tobacco executive to edit an article about the hazards of smoking. Or if a publisher gave an advertiser the opportunity to…
MOST AMERICANS HAVE FACED the war on terrorism knowing that we may have to "go it alone" at some point. According to this unilateralist school, the anti-Taliban, anti-al Qaeda, anti-terrorism coalition we've assembled will--as the bombing toll in Afghanistan rises--gradually erode until there's no…
ON SEPTEMBER 14, the Department of Defense published a press release on its website saying "Tuesday's tragedies provided an all-too-real test for one of the National Guard's Weapons of Mass Destruction Civil Support Teams." It was a little feel-good statement publicizing the "first operational…
WITH THE RIGHT TIMING AND PLACEMENT--a joint session of Congress, for instance--a weapon of mass destruction could kill dozens or hundreds of senators and representatives. What would happen then? How Congress would function in such a state of emergency was the subject of an October 22 panel…
BY NOW YOU HAVE PROBABLY HEARD the e-mail hoax about the Arab who warned his girlfriend not to be in New York on September 11 and not to be in a mall on Halloween. You've heard about the thousands of Jews who did not show up to work at the World Trade Center on the day of the attacks (thus pointing…
THE WORD YOU DON'T WANT to hear from the Pentagon brass, civilian or uniformed, or from the White House is "message." When you do, it means that a military maneuver in Afghanistan, usually a bombing raid, may not amount to much by itself but is making a point with a terrorist, the Taliban, a member…
NOW THAT TWO D.C. postal workers appear to have died of anthrax, perhaps the TV networks will retire those inappropriate "anthrax scare" and "anthrax anxiety" titles and replace them with a more apt headline-maybe "anthrax attacks" or "anthrax assault" or "anthrax murders." After all, "anxiety"…
AT A WHITE HOUSE NEWS CONFERENCE yesterday afternoon, homeland security czar Tom Ridge announced that "the residents of Washington, D.C., and all Americans, can be confident that their government is taking every step possible to ensure that our mail systems are safe and that they are secure." About…
PRESIDENT BUSH never tires of saying the fight against terrorism is "a different kind of war." He said it four times, in one form or another, at his prime-time press conference last week. But it's not only the war that's different. Bush himself is a different kind of war president. Sure, he…
IN CENTRAL ASIA and Afghanistan, the vital interests of four nuclear powers--Russia, China, Pakistan, and India--collide. That critical fact should suffice to dispel any thought that the United States has the option of vanquishing bin Laden, overthrowing the Taliban, and abandoning the region to…
IN THE AFTERMATH of the attacks of September 11, attempts are being made in the United States and elsewhere to understand the hatred of the attackers by shifting responsibility for it onto their target, the United States. We are witnessing a new outpouring of anti-Americanism on a scale not seen…
PALM BEACH COUNTY IF ANY PLACE IN THE COUNTRY deserves a respite from dubious headlines, it is surely Palm Beach County. "I remember May of 2000, when that Lake Worth middle schooler shot his teacher in the face," recalls a Palm Beach Post staff writer, pining for a simpler time. "I thought that…
THIS YEAR MARKS THE CENTENARY of Giuseppe Verdi's death, and you can hardly move without meeting some sign of it. Companies with short schedules, such as the Atlanta Opera and the Palm Beach Opera, have devoted the entire season to Verdi; the rather grander San Francisco Opera conducted a Verdi…
BY THE SECOND WEEK OF AUGUST, instructors at the Pan Am Flying Academy in Eagan, Minnesota, had become so suspicious about the behavior of a new, foreign student that they were moved to contact the FBI's field office in Minneapolis. One Zacarias Moussaoui, a French citizen of Moroccan extraction in…
The Best American Essays 2001 edited by Kathleen Norrisand Robert Atwan Houghton Mifflin, 400 pp., $13 TO READ "THE BEST AMERICAN ESSAYS 2001," the new collection of two dozen essays edited by Kathleen Norris and Robert Atwan, is to realize two things. The first is that writers in America today…
WITH THE COMING of the war on terrorism, the United States acquired an ally about which most Americans know very little: the Central Asian nation of Uzbekistan. The mistakes our government--and supposedly friendly "non-governmental organizations"--have made in the past in relating to the Uzbeks are…
AT A CHURCH DINNER RECENTLY I stepped out during a lull to use the facilities. That wasn't all I did, nor, I'll confess, was it my only purpose. I proceeded outside, into the parking lot and then to my car. I got in and turned on the radio, preset to WSB-Atlanta, which is found at 750 AM, in case…
Peace: The Arabian Caricature A Study of Anti-Semitic Imagery by Arieh Stav Gefen, 288 pp., $30 AS THE MORAL STENCH OF MASS MURDER by Islamic terrorists lingers, so does a blunt question: Why? In his classic memoir, "Survival in Auschwitz," Primo Levi recounts a moment now famous in Holocaust…
Why everything is at stake.
THE SONTAG AWARD This week's winner is the London Review of Books, which asked its regular writers for commentary on the terrorist attack against the United States. The result is an extraordinary tissue of political hatred, intellectual vulgarity, and moral incapacity. The entire issue belongs in a…
SHORTLY BEFORE HE RETIRED in July 2000, General Anthony Zinni speculated about life after the Marine Corps. "The biggest shock," he mused, "will be to turn on the TV and something's happening somewhere in the world and your phone's not ringing." But that shock hasn't come. Zinni spent the last…
IF YOU'VE WATCHED ANY of the live coverage from Afghanistan, you've probably noticed that there's not much to see on the screen but the evening sky and the stars. That's because it's 4:30 p.m. in Afghanistan as we sip our 8:00 a.m. coffee here in the states. Strange as it sounds, Afghanistan is 8…
IDEOLOGICAL PURISTS HAVE NO DOUBT been wondering if there is a larger political significance to the competing transliterations of the Arabic names now dominating the news. What does it signify when the Fox News ticker refers to Usama bin Laden while MSNBC calls him Osama? Is this a replay of the…
WASHINGTON TIMES PENTAGON REPORTER Bill Gertz reported last week that U.S. officials believe Osama bin Laden may possess raw radioactive material, the source material for a radiological weapon, a so-called "dirty nuke." A 1999 Air Command and Staff College report by Major Scott Nichelson and Major…
SINCE SEPTEMBER 11, the New York Times has exhaustively and admirably run a daily feature called "Portraits in Grief." It is a page of small obituaries of people who died at the World Trade Center. Reporters are sent out to talk with the families, friends, and co-workers of the victims, and they…
DESPITE HIS SAINTLY RETREAT from the dirty things of this world, J.D. Salinger remains ubiquitous and annoying. It's been thirty-six years since he published anything, but he is reportedly the object of homage in the upcoming Wes Anderson comedy "The Royal Tenenbaums." And only last year, Sean…
AMONG THE MANY THINGS that have changed since September 11 is the public profile of Attorney General John Ashcroft. It's a lot bigger now. You can get an idea of how much bigger by visiting the Justice Department's website. It lists all of the A.G.'s public appearances going back to when he was…
PRESIDENT BUSH HAS NEVER been accused of nuance, especially in his dealings with foreign countries. But the war against terrorism has brought out skills in Bush that even he didn't know he had. Among them: speechmaking, command of press conferences, and a nuanced approach to foreign affairs.…
AMERICANS ARE BRUSHING UP on Afghanistan, Islam, anthrax, the capabilities of precision-guided weapons, and a score of related subjects--notable among them our old adversary Iraq. Anyone looking for current information on that singularly forbidding country should know about the Iraq Report, updated…
THE MESSAGES CHALKED on the sidewalks and asphalt pathways across Stanford University are enough to make you cringe--in part, of course, for what they intend to say, but even more for how they say it. "War is bad for children and other small animals," the pastel scrawl near the library read. "You…
WHO CARES ABOUT a few strippers in the context of the slaughter of 6,000 innocent people? Actually, the strippers--together with some booze, some hookers, and maybe even a little gambling that some of the hijackers enjoyed before September 11--could help the United States win one of the minor…
London The Biography by Peter Ackroyd Doubleday, 864 pp., $45 TO AMERICAN TOURISTS, standing in line at the Tower or Westminster Abbey, London seems an old city, enveloped in architectural and historical atmosphere. In fact, next to nothing survives of the Romans' London--or Chaucer's, or…
CHATTERING ASSES, VILLAGE VOICE EDITION
War in a Time of Peace Bush, Clinton, and the Generals by David Halberstam Scribner, 544 pp., $28 THE STORY OF AMERICA'S FOREIGN POLICY during the years of Bill Clinton will be of considerable interest to historians. The United States, having won a stunning and surprising victory in the Cold War,…
AS HE LEFT A CROWDED HOUSE FLOOR after his speech to Congress on September 20, George Bush didn't notice Richard Gephardt at first. But when the president glanced back, he spotted the House Democratic leader and walked over to greet him. Bush cuffed his hand behind Gephardt's neck and gave him an…
Buffalo For the Broken Heart Restoring Life to a Black Hills Ranch by Dan O'Brien Random House, 254 pp., $22.95 THE GREAT PLAINS ARE A WRECK. In a northward swath from western Kansas to eastern Montana, birth rates have plunged, towns are dying, schools and stores are closing. The landscape is…
THE EVENTS OF SEPTEMBER 11 in New York and at the Pentagon fell like an axe across old political groupings, threatening alliances of many years standing, as people realized, perhaps for the first time, how strange their bedfellows were. Conservatives discovered that there are other conservatives…
ON A RECENT FLIGHT FROM LONDON, back in the pre-September 11 era when a transatlantic trip meant an opportunity to relax and read, I took along a reprint of E.B. White's slim volume "Here is New York," written in 1949. Delightful read, I thought, paying no particular attention to a passage I have…
IN THE AFTERMATH OF THE TERRORIST ATTACKS on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the Bush administration has proposed a number of legal changes to improve the government's ability to investigate terrorists. The largest number of these changes involve the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act,…
TWO DAYS AFTER the new era of bipartisanship began, it ended. At least in the Senate. On September 13, Senator Jon Kyl, one of the chamber's top experts on terrorism, introduced an amendment to an appropriations bill that would give law enforcement some of the additional tools President Bush is…
EVEN BEFORE PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH approved covert support for the factions opposing the Taliban regime, pundits began warning us about "blowback," in which we are engulfed by the unintended consequences of our actions. Time and again, we are told, American support for Afghan resistance to the…
MANY HAVE SUGGESTED THAT THE September 11 attack on America was payback for U.S. imperialism. If only we had not gone around sticking our noses where they did not belong, perhaps we would not now be contemplating a crater in lower Manhattan. The solution is obvious: The United States must become a…
CAN THE UNITED STATES WIN A WAR ON TERRORISM while winking at some terrorists and cozying up to nations that support them? Can the United States effectively fight terrorism and reward terrorism at the same time? You shouldn't have to ponder those questions very long. The certain answer is no. But…
EDITOR'S NOTE: With this issue, The Weekly Standard begins a new feature: The Standard Reader, a section of commentary on books, arts, and ideas. Week after week, under restrictions of space, we found ourselves forced to ignore events, books, and intellectual items deserving mockery or praise.…
UNTIL SEPTEMBER 11, the American media typically portrayed only two kinds of Arabs and Muslims: rich oil princes and unemployed ranters in the streets. Even after the atrocities in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania, the common wisdom has it that we must listen to the "Arab street," because, we…
ON MAY 23, FDA INSPECTORS visited the Sargento plant in Plymouth, Wis., and took some cheese samples for bacteria testing. Such visits are relatively routine--two or three a year, according to a company spokeswoman. Sargento took its own samples from the same lot of cheese and sent them off for…
WE MAY BE AT WAR, but that doesn't make our president any less polite. During his prime-time press conference on October 11, President Bush made a point of saying that the United States would track down "Mr. bin Laden." Why the honorific? The other President Bush was never so cordial in speaking…
[img caption="From our October 30, 2000 issue" float="right" width="140" height="189" render="<%photoRenderType%>"]981[/img]IMAGINE DIRT STREETS AND WALLED, stone walkways worn smooth by centuries of footsteps and weather. Imagine flat-roofed, mud-brick and cracked-cinder-block houses providing…
[img caption="From our October 30, 2000 issue" float="right" width="140" height="189" render="<%photoRenderType%>"]980[/img]THE DUST FROM THE RUBBLE of the Berlin Wall had barely settled when, in December 1989, George Bush inaugurated the post-Cold War era by sending thousands of American Rangers…
ONE OF THE MORE SURPRISING casualties of the post-September 11 political landscape in America is the intractable opposition to missile defense. Before the terrorist attacks, the prospects for moving forward on missile defense looked bleak. Democrats on the Senate Armed Services committee, led by…
FOR THE PAST FEW MONTHS, the British army and navy have been conducting joint exercises in the sultanate of Oman. The operation is called Swift Sword II, and by happy coincidence, it happens to put 23,000 British soldiers in the vicinity of Afghanistan. Many of them are now expecting to take part…
THE RESPONSE OF AMERICANS TO THE hijack-threatening videotaped rant of Osama bin Laden's spokesman Sulaiman abu Ghaith on Tuesday was probably: "I don't remember ordering this crap in my cable package." Of course they didn't--the footage came from Al Jazeera, the Qatar-based independent news…
SEPTEMBER 11, A DAY MARKED BY GREAT HATRED, has provoked a whole lot of money and love from a gushing music industry. The television fund-raiser "America: A Tribute to Heroes" may have been sick-making to watch, but it raised upwards of $150 million for the United Way's survivor fund. Individual…
ON SEPTEMBER 11, TWO OF PRESIDENT BUSH'S cabinet-level administrative positions sat dormant: United Nations ambassador and National Drug Control Policy director, or drug czar. But the terrorist attacks inspired bipartisan cooperation on a number of foreign policy and domestic security issues. Just…
TWO OF THE MOST BRILLIANT EXPLANATIONS of Osama bin Laden were written 11 years ago. The first is an essay that appeared in the September 1990 issue of the Atlantic Monthly by Bernard Lewis called "The Roots of Muslim Rage." The second is a lecture delivered by V.S. Naipaul as part of the Manhattan…
1957 July 30: Born in Riyadh to Yemeni bricklayer cum construction magnate Mohammed bin Laden and his fourth wife, reported variously as a Syrian or Palestinian woman.1 He is the 17 th of Mohammed's reported 52 children and the only child of his mother. 2 1968 Inherits somewhere between $20 million…
LET'S PLAY "JEOPARDY." The category is Bipartisanship in a Time of National Emergency. And the answer is, 24 hours. Ding, ding, ding, ding: "How long can Democrat Jim McDermott stand to keep his anti-Bush feelings to himself once the United States begins military operations?" Correct--24 hours!…
IN WAR, THE APHORISM GOES, the first casualty is truth. That's not the case in Washington at the outset of the war against terrorism. Instead, the first casualty is access--to national security intelligence, to operational details of the war, to much of President George W. Bush's schedule…
"We may find that our self-defense requires further actions with respect to other organizations and other states." --Ambassador John Negroponte's letter to the United Nations Security Council, reporting measures taken by the United States in the exercise of its right of self-defense, pursuant to…
IN MY CHURCH A WEEK AGO SUNDAY, we sang the fourth verse of the National Anthem. I wonder how many others have had the chance to sing it recently. I can't remember ever singing it before. As we lifted our voices, I wondered what the church-state police would say if this verse ever came to be sung…
DO YOU REMEMBER THE SIGHTS and sounds of campaign 2000? Al and Tipper’s big kiss. Chaka Khan closing the show at the ultra-inclusive Republican convention. Granny D. marching for campaign finance reform at Arianna Huffington’s Shadow Convention. There were slogans like "Prosperity With a Purpose"…
POOR BILL AYERS. His timing could not have been worse. Just when his widely publicized memoir of his days as a terrorist was coming out, our nation suffered its worst terrorist assault ever. Indeed, the very morning of the attack, the New York Times printed a fawning profile of Ayers and his…
CONSERVATIVES HAVE BEEN RAILING AGAINST the leftist takeover of the academy for a generation, with little to show for their efforts. A scholarly attack on Jane Austen for her unwitting complicity with British imperialism in Mansfield Park is, after all, unlikely to stir public outrage. But what…
GENERALS AREN’T THE ONLY ONES at risk of fighting the last war. Indeed, military leaders today may be less prone to this failing than are members of some other professions, since military leaders are aware of experiences like World War I and Vietnam that remind them in a most painful way of the…
JESSE JACKSON INVITES HIMSELF TO AFGHANISTAN Like herpes simplex, Jesse Jackson never really goes away—he just lies dormant. Clearly, the present national crisis was too much for him to resist. So Jackson last week announced he had received an "invitation" from the Taliban to lead a "peace…
ON THE AFTERNOON before his televised speech to the nation on September 20, President Bush invited 27 religious leaders to join him at the White House and draft an ecumenical response to the terrorist attacks on America. Bush spent more than an hour with the group, talking about his concerns as…
SEVERAL AMERICAN EXPATRIATES ARE PASSING THE TIME in a bar in Bangkok, decades after the fall of Saigon. One says he hears that "Brandon Condley is back from...hell, I guess Viet Nam." "I doubt that Brandon Condley will ever get back from Viet Nam," responds another. In Lost Soldiers, his sixth…
WHEN I MOVED TO WASHINGTON in the late 1980s, I was without a job; I saved face by calling myself a "freelancer." And I had few friends; I found the next-best thing in bars. At 10 or so most weeknights, I’d walk down to the Blockhouse. I chose the place because it happened to be on the corner. But…
IN THE SPACE OF FIVE DAYS, a man named Bill Maher, who hosts a late-night program called Politically Incorrect on the ABC network, underwent a kind of public nervous breakdown on national television. The spectacle had its voyeuristic fascinations, certainly. It’s not often you can watch a…
THE EXTRAORDINARY ACT of destruction seen on September 11 had a noteworthy harbinger in Islamic history. In 1925, Ibn Saud, founder of the present Saudi Arabian dynasty, ordered the wholesale destruction of the sacred tombs, graveyards, and mosques in Mecca and Medina. These are, of course, the two…
IF YOU’VE HEARD IT ONCE, you’ve heard it a thousand times already—from the same people who always tell us obvious things a thousand times when once would do: In response to a mass murder of our fellow citizens carried out by foreign hands, Americans must be careful not to alter the fundamental…
IN JUNE 1950 President Harry S. Truman had on his desk, or perhaps already in a drawer, a copy of one of the most insightful and important documents of modern times. National Security Council Report 68 laid out a clear statement of the global threat that the Soviet Union and international communism…
THEY ARE THE TALLEST towers in town, a pair of them in the hub of the city’s financial district. And thanks to some good intelligence and smart police work, which nabbed the terrorists before they completed their mission, the buildings are still standing today. In this real-life story the city is…
WINSTON CHURCHILL ONCE CASTIGATED HIS BUTLER—and when the butler complained, Churchill apologized, saying: "You must remember I’m a great man." The great man was in danger of being forgotten for some years after his death in 1965, but over the last decade what amounts almost to a book-writing…
THE AIRLINES have too few passengers and too many seats, and so go to the government for an immediate $15 billion bailout. Amtrak has too many passengers and too few seats, and goes to the government for an immediate $3 billion bailout. The airlines want subsidies so that they can fly more empty…
WHEN AN EVANGELICAL CHRISTIAN Republican president agrees with radical feminists, there's only one explanation: The subject is the Taliban. The feminists, of course, would have the world believe that they condemned the Taliban first: back in 1996, as soon as that band of militant Islamists seized…
"SURVIVOR RETURNS TO TELEVISION this Thursday. The third edition of TV's most-watched show is set in Africa and will again pit 16 American contestants against one another in contrived social combat. "Survivor" is the flagship of reality television, a genre that now comprises nearly 20 percent of…
AS I WRITE LATE SUNDAY AFTERNOON, brevity seems, even more than usual, the soul of wit. It would be foolish to try to say much about the current situation, early as it is in its development, and clouded as it is by the fog of war. Here are three brief observations. (1) I'm as much of a…
DOES ANYBODY BUT ME feel upbeat, and guilty about it? I feel upbeat because the country seems to be a better place than it was a month ago. I feel guilty about it because I should be feeling pain and horror and anger about the recent events. But there's so much to cheer one up. In the first place,…
HALF A DECADE AGO, I wrote an essay for The Weekly Standard on "Five Ways America Keeps Getting Better." It concerned, for the most part, various revolutions in retail the 1990s had wrought: Borders, where you could sit eating cheesecake at 10 o'clock at night, listening to Joni Mitchell and…
JOHN BUCKLEY WORKS FOR Brainerd Communicators in the Metlife building in Midtown Manhattan, right above Grand Central Station. When he and his fellow employees got back to work the week after September 11, the first topics of discussion were building security and emergency protocol. In the…
FORMER VICE PRESIDENT AL GORE has done President Bush a favor that's likely to have lasting political impact. In his speech at a Democratic dinner in Des Moines last Saturday, Gore declared Bush is his "Commander in chief." He said it emphatically, and added: "We are united behind our president,…
SAMI AL-ARIAN, THE UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH FLORIDA PROFESSOR featured in the editorial I wrote for this week's print edition of The Weekly Standard, now appears to be in some difficulty with his employers. Last Wednesday, during an on-air interview with Fox News Channel controversialist Bill O'Reilly,…
THE FIRST SUSAN SONTAG CERTIFICATE--The Weekly Standard's way of recognizing inanity by intellectuals and artists in the wake of the terrorist attacks--goes, of course, to the essayist and novelist Susan Sontag for her note in the Sept. 24 issue of the New Yorker. She managed, in the space of only…
IS THERE ANY DISASTER SO AWFUL, so overwhelming, that it cannot be transformed into just another landmark moment in the heroic personal odyssey of William Jefferson Clinton? Given the man's behavior since Sept. 11, the answer appears to be a big fat no. He's covering his ass, feeling our pain,…
THE LOW POINT FOR REAGAN ADMINISTRATION foreign policy came in 1986 when National Security Adviser Bob McFarlane took a cake baked in the shape of a key as a peace offering to "Iranian moderates"--hoping to secure the release of U.S. hostages but in fact triggering the Iran-Contra scandal. The idea…
OCTOBER 9, 2001, is a day many Americans are waiting for with bated breath. No, it isn't the date for an attack against Afghanistan (some of us hope that would come sooner). It is, instead, the DVD release of one of the greatest movies of all time: The Godfather Part II. (Oh, the joy of finding an…
What follows is part of a personal letter from a 38-year-old Karachi businessman to a fellow Pakistani friend in the Washington area. Americans have heard innumerable warnings that we shouldn’t fault Muslims as a whole—but almost no testimony from the communities whose hospitality was abused by the…
Whether or not the culture war is history, one of its more colorful rhetorical excesses appears to have been retired on September 11. We haven't heard much lately about the Republican party's "Taliban wing." Back in the heady days of impeachment, this was liberal shorthand for the puritanical…