What’s going on in Iran right now is the result of many forces coming together. But I have little doubt that the most powerful of them are specific to Iran and its people rather than being international in scope. The … Continue reading →
Today is the 65th anniversary of D-Day, the Normandy landings in WWII. Here’s a video with a few grainy clips of the Allies wading ashore: I wonder how many people under forty, either here or in Europe, now know or … Continue reading →
Hugh Van Es, the photographer who took the iconic “helicopters on the roof” photo of the fall of Saigon, has died at 67: [Van Es’s] shot of the helicopter escape from a Saigon rooftop on April 29, 1975 became a … Continue reading →
There was some discussion yesterday in the comments section about this recent quote from Joe Biden (remember him?): [T]he last administration left us in a weaker posture than we’ve been any time since World War II: less regarded in the … Continue reading →
I was expecting some naivete and pandering to the Left from President Obama’s foreign policy. But so far it is trending worse, much worse, than I thought it would. Cue the violins (literally!) and butterflies here, for Obama’s most recent … Continue reading →
What important military defeats has America ever known? If you don’t count the South in the Civil War, we have a single one: Vietnam. The consequences of that defeat, in a land so far away, were easy for Americans to … Continue reading →
I first read John Updike’s Vietnam War essay “On Not Being a Dove” in 1989. That’s when his memoir Self-Consciousness, the book in which it was included, was first published. At the time the essay seemed to me to be … Continue reading →
I recently reread the two-volume graphic novel Maus, by Art Spiegelman. It struck me once again, as it did the first time I read these books, that they should not work on any level. And yet, against all odds, they … Continue reading →
Sixty-seven years ago today Pearl Harbor was attacked. That’s long enough ago that only the elderly remember the day and its aftermath with any clarity. Several generations—including my own tiresome one, the baby boomers—have come up since then, and the … Continue reading →
It’s pretty much “mission accomplished” in Iraq. But it’s a victory we’re not willing to openly claim. In another world and time, this war would have been lauded as one of the least brutal in history, although it was fought … Continue reading →
It’s ironic that the surge’s success has made the issue of the Iraq War less central rather than more in this campaign. “Ironic,” because the passage of time has made it clearer that, no matter what one thinks of the … Continue reading →
For those of us old enough to remember the most frigid days of the long Cold War, the recent Russian military action in Georgia has a familiar ring. Not exactly, of course; history never repeats itself, it merely rhymes—and sometimes … Continue reading →