Monthly Archives: April 2003

Hard Lessons

The newspapers say President Bush is determined to avoid the mistake his father made in 1992. Now that Bush Junior’s Persian Gulf war is winding down, George W. is said to be prepared to pay attention to his domestic agenda in ways his father did not.
The domestic agenda could stand a bit of attention. [...]

Hail, Dorothy

My friend Jeanne said, “Those guys at the Pentagon must have watched ‘The Wizard of Oz’ too many times. They think Saddam Hussein is the Wicked Witch of the West and now that he’s gone everyone will kneel down and say, ‘Hail, Dorothy.’” If you follow the analogy, George W. Bush is Dorothy. [...]

Freedom’s Just Another Word for Nothing Left to Lose

The battle for Baghdad, and thus the war in Iraq, is drawing to a close. Already the hawks in the Pentagon are rattling their sabers toward Syria. The war on terror, it is to be assumed, continues unabated even if we still can’t find Osama bin Laden.
Shortly after 9-11, President Bush, referring to [...]

Shock Waves

I was reading the twenty-fourth paragraph of a war story in the Washington Post Sunday when the sentence jumped out at me: “If the Pentagon does deploy into Iraq all the troops currently scheduled to go, almost half the combat power of the Army and the Marine Corps will be in Iraq.”
That’s an uncomfortable thought, [...]