Foreign Discomfort
The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic By Chalmers Johnson, Metropolitan Books, 400 pages, $25.00 America Unbound: The Bush Revolution in Foreign Policy By Ivo H. Daalder and James M. Lindsay, The Brookings Institution, 246 pages, $22.95 President George W. Bush’s foreign policy has been nothing if not…
Soft News, Hard Cash
Backstory: Inside the Business of News By Ken Auletta, Penguin, 296 pages, $24.95 All the News That’s Fit to Sell: How the Market Transforms Information into News By James T. Hamilton, Princeton University Press, 342 pages, $35.00 There’s a lot of muttering nowadays about the future of a minor, almost wholly owned subsidiary…
The Muscle State
Closing the Leadership Gap: Why Women Can and Must Help Run the World By Marie C. Wilson, Viking Press, 256 pages, $24.95 Americans are currently living under the most stereotypically male leadership we have seen in decades, if not longer. The president is a parody of the swaggering, steely-eyed gunfighter; the vice president…
One-Sided World
In Defense of Globalization By Jagdish Bhagwati, Oxford University Press, 296 pages, $28.00 When N. Gregory Mankiw, chairman of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers, declared in February that the outsourcing of jobs to foreign countries was a good thing, he was only saying what advocates of free trade have always believed. But…
Incurious George
The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, The White House, and the Education of Paul O’Neill By Ron Suskind, Simon & Schuster, 348 pages, $26.00 George W. Bush has had a cold winter, and it’s not chiefly the Democrats’ doing. The weapons of mass destruction in Iraq — and with them the raison…
Good Work
More than two decades ago, the Nobel Prize-winning economist Wassily Leontief imagined a world where productivity was so high that machines would produce all physical goods. There would be just one manufacturing job: the human worker who flipped the switch. Leontief wondered, what would everyone else do for a living? His answer was that the…
Liberalism’s Lost Script
Lately, trying to determine exactly how we became embroiled in Iraq has become a kind of intellectual parlor game. Was it oil? Settling old scores? Diverting attention from terrorism? Fulfilling the neoconservative agenda? There is probably some truth in each of these, but of all the reasons that have been adduced for the war…
Immigration Conflagration
People either love Tom Tancredo, the Republican representative from Colorado’s 6th District (home of Columbine High School), or they hate him. But they all agree on one thing: He is a man of character. Indeed, he has defined his political career by his principled stand on immigration. In September 2002, after reading a glowing Denver…
Road Nap
Here’s the conventional wisdom, stated at a sadly conventional Israeli news event: “With respect to Israel, [George W.] Bush has been one of the best presidents we have ever had.” The speaker was James Tisch, chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. The venue was Jerusalem’s Keren Hayesod Street on the…
Return to Empire
An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror By David Frum and Richard Perle, Random House, 284 pages, $25.95 America’s Inadvertent Empire By William Odom and Robert Dujarric, Yale University Press, 285 pages, $30.00 To readers familiar with the memoirs and histories of Great Britain’s imperial era, the echoes evoked…
Truth Squad
The rumors began almost at once. It was 10:06 a.m. on September 11, 2001, when United Airlines’ Flight 93 — the last of the four hijacked jets — plowed into a field in rural Pennsylvania. Within hours the coffeehouses of the Arab world were abuzz with speculation that the attacks were the work of the…
Handle With Care
“You did a great thing!” With that unexpected greeting from an Iranian diplomat in New York last December, my trip to Iran began to take shape. A few months earlier I had published a book that tells how, in 1953, the CIA deposed Iran’s last democratic leader, Mohammed Mossadegh, and set his country on a…
Fear Factor
For a majority of Americans — those who did not vote for George W. Bush the first time — democracy has failed to deliver on its promise that the candidate with the most votes wins. And those who voted for the president — a minority — did not get what they were promised, either. Their…
Reaching to the Choir
In early February, 60 minutes’ Morley Safer portrayed white evangelical Christians as the carnies of American Protestantism. Nine million viewers tuned in and saw shots of vast “megachurch” congregations swaying hypnotically and raising their hands in song. Tacky cinematic renderings of a fiery Armageddon added some dramatic tension. The slick ringmaster of these goings-on, of…
Kerry’s Women
When the old boy’s club kicked into gear in east Los Angeles in 1998, Mary Beth Cahill, then executive director of Emily’s List, took action. Nine-term Representative Esteban Edward Torres announced he was retiring from his seat in a safe Democratic district just two days before the filing deadline for candidates. The heir apparent to…
Misoverestimated
In July 2003, President George W. Bush made a five-nation tour of Africa. The purpose of the visit was to cast American foreign policy in a gentler light after the diplomatic donnybrook over Iraq — by, among other things, showcasing the Bush administration’s seriousness about combating Africa’s AIDS pandemic. But Africa didn’t have the president’s…
