Paul Starr

Like Woodrow Wilson during World War I, George W. Bush has held out the promise that by going to war, America can make the world safe for democracy. Once Saddam Hussein is ousted, we can turn Iraq into a political and economic model for the Arab world, addressing the causes of terrorism at their roots. […]

“If you want peace, understand war,” the military historian B. H. Liddell Hart once wrote, and during the past century — some would say ever since Gen. Sherman’s march through Georgia — that injunction meant anyone interested in peace needed above all to understand the practice of “total war.” Total war overflowed earlier boundaries. Instead […]

Since Lyndon Johnson, every Democrat who has run for president has suffered repudiation within his own party after either serving in office or losing the election. Democrats repudiated Johnson because of the Vietnam War, Jimmy Carter because of the economy and Bill Clinton because of his personal conduct, and they repudiated George McGovern, Walter Mondale […]

I should be among the supporters of an invasion of Iraq. A decade ago, after Iraq seized Kuwait, I agreed with the decision to go to war and wrote in The New Republic, at the start of the conflict, that allied forces should go all the way to Baghdad. My view was that Saddam Hussein […]

September 11 will be commemorated this year as a day of national and private grief, but it is also a political anniversary. One year ago, the post–Cold War era came to an end and a new phase in our country’s history began. What this new phase will be — whether the September 11 attacks will […]

The dimensions of the collapse in the telecommunications industry during the past two years have been staggering. Half a million people have lost their jobs. In that time, the Dow Jones communication technology index has dropped 86 percent; the wireless communications index, 89 percent. These are declines in value worthy of comparison to the great […]

Only a short time ago the Democratic presidential candidate in 2004, whoever that might be, seemed to face two possibilities: losing to George W. Bush by a respectable margin or being wiped out in a colossal landslide. Such dismal prospects, if they had persisted into next year, would have hampered Democratic fund raising and put […]

Affirmative action in higher education is almost certainly on its way back to the Supreme Court in the wake of contradictory appellate decisions about racial preferences in admissions. Ten years ago it seemed that the Court might strike down affirmative action altogether in public universities. While that conceivably could still happen, the political context has […]