The walls and ceiling were painted black. Acid rock blared around the clock. It was cold in the tiled room, located in a building outside Baghdad International Airport, on January 1, 2004. But despite the chilly temperature, Mohamed (he asked me to use a fake name), a 36-year-old sound engineer from the al-Bunuk district of […]
Features
Posted inFeatures
Against the Neocons
Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Carter’s national-security adviser and the author, most recently, of The Choice: Global Domination or Global Leadership, spoke with Michael Tomasky on January 31 about the Iraqi elections and plausible alternatives to neoconservatism. MICHAEL TOMASKY: Will the Iraqi elections validate the neoconservative view? ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI: I don’t think it’s going to be validated […]
Posted inFeatures
The Gravest Danger
When asked in the first presidential debate of 2004 what constitutes the “single most serious threat to American national security,” there was a brief instant of agreement between President Bush and Senator Kerry. Both answered, “Nuclear terrorism.” The president repeated that he agreed with his opponent that the biggest threat facing the country is nuclear […]
Posted inFeatures
Neo-Economics
In late January, after weeks of waiting for a sign that the Bush administration would lead a coordinated effort to try to prevent the dollar’s recent slide from turning into a full-fledged crash, the world finally seemed to get the message. “There’s nobody home on economic policy in America right now,” a frustrated Morgan Stanley […]
Posted inFeatures
Pulpit Bullies
“And we have raised, from among them, leaders … ” — Koran, al-Sajdah, “The Prostration,” 32:24 Just before midnight one Friday last December, an Egyptian American professor of electrical engineering at West Virginia University, clad in a track suit and red-and-white checkered scarf, stepped through the green steel doors of our mosque in […]
Posted inFeatures
Theocracy Now
Not since the Islamic revolution of 1979 has the Middle East witnessed a political upheaval of the magnitude of the Iraqi election held on January 30. The Shia majority has now come decisively to power in the new parliament, and it may make the Kurds its junior partner. The core of the new government consists […]
Posted inFeatures
Hired Education
M. Michael Wolfe, a gastroenterologist at Boston University, admits he was duped by the Pharmacia Corporation, the manufacturer of the blockbuster arthritis drug Celebrex. (In 2003, the company was purchased by Pfizer.) In the summer of 2000, The Journal of the American Medical Association asked Wolfe to write a review of a study showing that […]
Posted inFeatures
Almost Heaven?
In April 2004, several members of the West Virginia House of Delegates flew to Minnesota to speak at a national meeting of the Council of State Governments. The legislators were eager for support from other states to bolster their ongoing effort to force drug companies to lower prices. Specifically, the West Virginia delegation wanted the […]
Posted inFeatures
Unusual Suspects
On the morning of September 24, 2003 — five weeks after the suicide bombing of a United Nations compound in Baghdad killed 23 people, including top envoy Sergio Vieira de Mello, signaling an intensified phase of Iraqi insurgency — a group of American soldiers burst into Selwa’s villa near the banks of the Tigris River […]
Posted inFeatures
The Democrats’ Da Vinci Code
As the Democratic Party goes through its quadrennial self-flagellation process, the same tired old consultants and insiders are once again complaining that Democratic elected officials have no national agenda and no message. Yet encrypted within the 2004 election map is a clear national economic platform to build a lasting majority. You don’t need Fibonacci’s sequence, […]
