Robert Westbrook
A review of Washington Rules
No one has anatomized the misadventures of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq with greater historical perspective or critical acuity than Andrew Bacevich....
Arming the president
Rapidly shifting gears from translating Martial’s Epigrams to explicating the scriptures (Wha...
Traces of God
If by the early years of the 20th century traditional monotheism had not died in the hearts and minds ...
Believe it or not
If you are, as I am, often puzzled by the landscape of contemporary religious belief and unbelief, you will regard Charles Taylor’s huge and hugely rewarding intell...
Deer Hunting with Jesus
If social democracy is ever again to be taken seriously in this country, its proponents have to admit that much of th...
Not so good war
World War II is not only history that we think about, but history with which we think....
Second thoughts
The war in Iraq has begun to shatter the ranks of the neoconservatives—the faction that gave us this disaster. The most prominent turncoat is Francis Fukuyama, whose forecast played no small part in the neoconservative project of a war that was to make the Middle East safe for Halliburton and Republican political consultants. America at the Crossroads is Fukuyama's apologia for apostasy. He has much to regret.
Occupational hazards
In the spring of 2003, Washington Post reporter Anthony Shadid noted that, for Iraqis, the Arabic word for occupation is ihtilal. The word is "shadowed by humiliation, notions of resistance, and still resonant memories of the occupation by the British 85 years before.” Yet that same year the U.S. secured sweeping formal authority from the UN Security Council to serve as the principal “occupying” power in Iraq. John Negroponte, U.S. ambassador to the UN, declared that “the council has taken decisive action to help the Iraqi people.” This was not the way many Iraqis greeted the news.
Mission impossible
The war in Iraq grinds on, now at the cost of over 2,000 American lives and uncounted thousands of Iraqi lives. Few are reluctant to attack the way the Bush administration has managed the war, but fewer still are willing to say that this war should never have been waged. The U.S. should make what amends it can to the Iraqi people for the damage it has done and let them decide their own fate. Our task is not to “complete the mission," but to abandon it.
Sweet land of agency
A Nation of Agents: The American Path to a Modern Self and Society. By James Block. Harvard University Press, 658 pp., $45.00.
...Back to school
School: The Story of American Public Education. Produced by Sarah Mondale and Sarah Patton. Public Broadcasting System.
...Project living: The rise and fall of public housing
Social policy is inscribed on the landscape. And perhaps the most telling such inscription in U.S. cities is the public housing project, an inscription that is currently being erased....
Dubya-ism: The logic of "compassionate conservatism"
Compassionate Conservatism: What It Is, What It Does, and How It Can Transform America, by Marvin Olasky
...Nullifiers and insurrectionists: America’s antigovernment tradition
A Necessary Evil: A History of American Distrust of Government, by Garry Wills
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