We see the world through the stories we tell, and until recently the story most Americans told themselves about the war in Iraq was a simple and dramatic narrative of imminent threat, daring triumph, and heroic liberation —a story neatly embodied in images of a dictator's toppling statue and a president in full flight gear swaggering across a carrier deck.

Tags: Middle East | Iraq

The first time I was killed, or nearly so, came just past dawn on election day 1987 at a deserted crossroads in northern Haiti.

Tags: Foreign Affairs | Writing

A year after a tiny band of religious zealots managed with stunning audacity to mutilate the face of America, the world's sole superpower trembles on the threshold of a new imperial season.

Tags: American Politics | Foreign Affairs | War On Terror

In Afghanistan, the targets are running out. Such are the frustrations of the powerful; Joseph Conrad, writing of an African "heart of darkness" a century ago, well understood: "Once, I remember, we came upon a man-of-war anchored off the coast...

Tags: War On Terror | American Politics | Foreign Affairs

After you have spent some days searching for the secret of political legitimacy in Miami and West Palm Beach, you want to go further.

Tags: American Politics

Related Content: The Road to Illegitimacy

Gaze upward, through the gaseous clouds of rhetoric littering the sky from the campaign that would not end—"I will never let you down," "I will restore honor and dignity to the White House"—and you can spy, casting a shadow on the land like Barthelme's Dead Father, an enormous pair of lips, belonging not to the Vice President or the Texas governor but to a young woman from Beverly Hills who one fateful day delivered a slice of pizza to the President of the United States.

Tags: American Politics

Few of our predilections seem more distinctly modern than the compulsion to name "our era" and thereby claim it.

Tags: Media | Olympics

In foreign affairs, folly is the privilege of great powers, for they alone can be certain to survive it. Last month Americans embarked on a policy of exquisite folly: funding both sides of Colombia's civil war.

Tags: Latin America | Clinton | Colombia

Like ill-matched partners in a bad marriage, American politics and American television seem bound inextricably together, unable to escape a relationship that increasingly degrades both partners.

Tags: Media | Politics

Striding triumphantly down the streets of conquered Srebrenica, General Ratko Mladic announced to a television interviewer that "on this great Serb holy day," commemorating "the uprising against the Turks, the time

Tags: Balkans | Srebrenica | PBS

Carried forward amid an ocean of cheering refugees in the Stankovic refugee camp, Madeleine Albright could hardly contain her excitement. "We have been victorious," the secretary of state shouted triumphantly to the roaring crowds, "and Milosevic has lost!"

Tags: Kosovo | Balkans | Clinton

Across this near-exhausted century, imagery recurs. The knock at the door, the forced march, the mass evacuation - expressions now impossible to hear without their attendant echoes.

Tags: Balkans | Kosovo | Clinton

Related Content: Kosovo: Contending Voices on Baltic Intervention

Six decades ago, in a classroom at Groton, a young man rose slowly to his feet, gazed down at a sheaf of papers in his hand, and began to read.

Tags: Vietnam | Foreign Affairs

Standing motionless among their hulking war machines like statues in the dark, 200,000 Croat soldiers dropped their cigarettes, then clambered into tanks and trucks and armored personnel carriers and, in a sudden earsplitting eruption of grating gears, pushed forward into Serb-held Krajina.

Tags: Balkans | Croatia

Im Juli 1995, während die Menschen in Europa und Amerika Fe- rien machten, wurden in einer kleinen Stadt in Ostbosnien Hunderte von Muslimen mit verbundenen Augen auf Lastwagen und in Busse geladen.

Tags: Balkans | Bosnia

Only now, more than three years after he recorded the interview with CNN's World Report, can one see subtle signs of Richard Holbrooke's discomfort and unease.

Tags: Balkans | Bosnia | Srebrenica

Near the lovely North Portico of the White House, on a mild and breezy evening in mid-June 1995, the President and First Lady danced alone.

Tags: Balkans | Bosnia | Clinton

To the hundreds of millions who first beheld them on their television screens that August day in 1992, the faces staring out from behind barbed wire seemed powerfully familiar.

Tags: Balkans | Bosnia | Karadzic

Plunging forward into pitch-black night, their faces lashed by unseen branches, Srebrenica's fleeing Muslims stumbled forward one against another.

Tags: Balkans | Bosnia | Srebrenica

On May 22, 1995, fifteen months after Bosnian Serbs—bowing to an ultimatum from Western leaders infuriated by the televised carnage of sixty-eight dismembered bodies at Sarajevo's Markela marketplace—had withdrawn their tanks and cannons and mortars from the mountains and ridges above the city, heavily armed Serb soldiers in camouflage uniforms forced their way into a United Nations "weapons collection point"...

Tags: Balkans | Bosnia | Srebrenica

Early one February afternoon in 1994, people in Sarajevo shed their heavy coats and hats and poured out into streets and markets, allowing themselves to forget, in the bright warming sun, that from artillery bunkers and snipers' nests dug into hills and mountains above the city hunters stared down, tracking their prey.

Tags: Balkans | Bosnia | Sarajevo

Synopsis:

Our differences regarding enlargement do indeed remain deep, even after you were generous enough to teach me a number of things in your well-crafted letter -- in particular, what you call the "central syllogism" of European security.

Tags: Cold War | Foreign Affairs

I thought Mark Danner's essay, "Marooned in the Cold War," made a strong case against NATO enlargement, cogently presenting the negative arguments.

Tags: Cold War | Foreign Affairs

Three years have passed since I stood in a tiny market in Sarajevo, notebook in hand, gazing through a chaos of smoke and running feet at the scores of dead heaped about the blood-slick earth.

Tags: Cold War | Foreign Affairs

In the bitter wind and cold of late December 1995, shortly before the coming of Orthodox Christmas, the Serb fathers of Sarajevo began trudging toward the graveyards.

Tags: Balkans | Bosnia | Clinton | UN

To the hundreds of millions who first beheld them on their television screens that August day in 1992, the faces staring out from behind barbed wire seemed powerfully familiar.

Tags: Balkans | Bosnia

Three years have passed since I stood in a marketplace in Sarajevo, notebook in hand, gazing through the chaos of smoke and running feet at the scores of dead heaped upon the earth.

Tags: Cold War | Foreign Affairs

Scarcely two years ago, during the sweltering days of July 1995, any citizen of our civilized land could have pressed a button on a remote control and idly gazed, for an instant or an hour, into the jaws of a contemporary Hell.

Tags: Balkans | Bosnia | Srebrenica

I think I'd like to begin by asking about Iran-Contra the question the Jesuits like to ask when they see a difficult problem, which is: What is its quiddity? What is its "whatness"? What separates it from everything else - in particular, from other scandals?

Tags: Latin America | Iran-Contra | Reagan

Related Content: President Reagan and the World

A spectator of the culture wars writes: For a while there, Bob Dole had me worried.

Tags: Media

Hypocrisy may be the mother's milk of politics, but there are occasions -- the controversy now being manufactured in Congress over "secret" Iranian arms shipments to Bosnia is one -- when the glass runs over.

Tags: Foreign Affairs | Balkans | Bosnia

That excellence equals beauty was taken for granted by the Greeks, fathers of the Olympiad, and Hassiba Boulmerka embodies the equation's power.

Tags: Olympics

You can do anything with a bayonet, Napoleon is said to have observed, except sit on it.

Tags: Foreign Affairs | Haiti

How can it be that America is on the verge of invading a country already burdened by catastrophe?  What does it take to get killed here?

Tags: Haiti

For besiegers of cities, a child is an especially lucrative target. If the aim is to sow terror among those holding out behind the walls, how better to do it than by murdering children?

Tags: Balkans

American fighter planes in the skies over Sarajevo. To the survivors in the ruined city below, the planes are a familiar sight.

Tags: Bosnia

Heading up into the mountains of Morazán, in the bright, clear air near the Honduran border, you cross the Torola River, the wooden slats of the one-lane bridge clattering beneath your wheels,  and enter what was the fiercest of El Salvador's zonas rojas...

Tags: Central America | Latin America | El Salvador

Related Content: The Massacre at El Mozote, What Happened at El Mozote?

Late on a breezy afternoon, Father Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the elected president of the Republic of Haiti, descended from his limousine on Capitol Hill and, accompanied by his entourage of Haitian aides and American lawyers, made his way slowly into the Capitol to meeting room S-116, where a group of senators and staff assistants awaited him.

Tags: Aristide | Haiti

On a sunny Columbus Day afternoon, Father Jean-Bertrand Aristide, president of the Republic of Haiti, walked slowly down the steps of the Georgetown house in which he has made his home for much of the last two years, and faced a restless crowd of reporters and photographers.

Tags: Aristide | Haiti

On a sweltering morning in Port-au-Prince, in July of 1915, a party of gentlemen attired in black morning coats, striped pants, and bowler hats strolled past the wrought-iron gates and around the courtyard of the elegant mansion that housed the French legation and pushed through a side door.

Tags: Aristide | Haiti

It strikes me that "The Future of the Transatlantic Relationship" has quite a considerable past.

Tags: Foreign Affairs

Americans are so devoted to democracy and so respectful of its central ritual that we tend to confuse the one with the other. Call it the Election Day Myth.

Tags: Haiti

For a half-dozen years, Iran-contra has haunted American political life. The ghost arose anew on Christmas Eve, thanks to President Bush's pardons, and it is fated to reappear one day soon when Lawrence Walsh, the independent counsel, releases his final report.

Tags: Foreign Affairs

During the nineteen-eighties,while Iraqis and Iranians killed one another by the hundreds of thousands in a struggle for supremacy in the Persian Gulf, the United States maintained a vigilant neutrality-or so Americans were assured by the governments they elected.

Tags: Iraq

Less than a year after Americans paraded in the streets to celebrate victory in the Gulf War, the entire conflict, which appeared so cataclysmic at the time, is rapidly receding from view.

Tags: Iraq

Rarely has the portal, the moment of passage from ordinary to revolutionary time, been so well captured in a single image: At the wheel of the gray BMW sits the young dictator, well-dressed, prosperous, slightly overweight, his face impassive, his shoulders thrown back; he has spent all but five of his thirty-four years in the Palace, fifteen of them as President-for-Life, having been inaugurated, at his dying father's insistence, as a mountainously obese, glassy-eyed teenager.

Tags: Haiti

With the publication of Oliver North's memoirs and the start of the Colonel's nineteen-city tour to promote it, the Iran-Contra affair completed a five-year journey from tragedy to farce and began its inevitable transformation into "product."

Tags: Iran-Contra

Related Content: The Massacre at El Mozote

Two weeks ago, when Haitian soldiers deposed their country's President, jean-Bertrand Aristide, the United States reacted quickly and forcefully, cutting off foreign aid and freezing Haiti's assets in this country.

Tags: Haiti

Driving south in Haiti one day in the spring of 1986, I passed a great 18-wheeled tractor-trailer speeding north, heard a volley of automatic weapons fire, and, craning my neck to look back, witnessed an absurd and amazing tableau...

Tags: Haiti

Though the Cold War no longer casts its shadow over us, our government has shown little eagerness to surrender the powers it claimed under cover of that shadow.

Tags: CIA | Foreign Affairs

Like an untreated infection within the political system, the Iran-Contra affair continues to grow, spreading corruption not only into the future but, oddly, back into the past as well.

Tags: Iran-Contra

Three months after United States Marines liberated Kuwait City, the victors of Operation Desert Storm are still being honored across the country.

Tags: Middle East | Iraq

In November, a year after the Berlin Wall was breached, American troops and airmen by the thousand began leaving the German bases they had occupied for four decades and heading for the Persian Gulf.

Tags: Foreign Affairs | Cold War

For almost four months, the United States has been sleepwalking toward war. Though there are the trappings of a debate -- hearings in Congress, argument and speculation on the editorial pages, discussion on the public-affairs programs -- thus far they have seemed insubstantial when set against the reality of President Bush's military buildup

Tags: Middle East | Iraq

A year after the Berlin Wall was breached and the "post Cold War era" proclaimed, Americans face the prospect of a "hot war" fought against an enemy that a few months ago they didn't know they had.

Tags: Foreign Affairs | Cold War

Though the rhetoric surrounding the Middle East crisis has softened somewhat since the threats of mid-August, the United States and Iraq remain caught in what President Mitterrand has called the "logic of war."

Tags: Foreign Affairs

The last great public scandals of the decade are remarkable, above all, for their inconclusiveness, their strange resistance to closure.

Tags: Iran-Contra

Americans tend to examine distant regimes, and the commitments our government has made to them, only during times of crisis.

Tags: Middle East | Iraq

Just past ten on a sunny morning last month in Port-au-Prince, four men carrying automatic weapons, two of whom wore the green uniforms of the Haitian Army, strolled into the garden of the Hotel Santos, where Haiti's Council of State was meeting with union and business leaders, and asked for Dr. Louis Roy.

Tags: Haiti

On February 7,1986, the day the dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier and his wife, Michele Bennett, flew off to exile in France, a crowd of jubilant Haitians invaded the National Cemetery, a vast expanse of concrete crammed with bright-colored tombs — ivory and turquoise and rose --  bearing the names of Haiti's great families.

Tags: Haiti

A few weeks after the fall of Jean-Claude Duvalier, in February, 1986, the statue of Christopher Columbus presiding over the harbor of Port-au-Prince was seized and thrown into the sea by persons unknown, who left fastened on the empty pedestal a sheet of paper with a simple scrawled message: "Pa de blans en Hayti!"

Tags: Haiti

Mornings in Port au-Prince, just before dawn, as the last, scattered gunshots faded in the distance and the outlines of the city began to take shape in the dirty air—tiny houses, painted aqua and salmon; the huge and ghostly National Palace, gleaming white; gray and rust-colored slums, canopied in smoke—my colleagues and I would go off in search of bodies.

Tags: Haiti

Having ferreted out the ''sophisticated rebels'' of Europe from Cardiff to Cracow, H. Stuart Hughes found himself rather nonplussed when asked to suggest their counterparts in the United States.

Tags:

History, it's said, is written by the winners; but perhaps it's truer to say it belongs to the least reticent. Dean Rusk, on becoming Secretary of State, vowed never to write his memoirs.

Tags:

On West Germany's ''Day of National Unity'' this summer, a dapper, white-haired, German-born American stood in the Bundestag, facing the President, Prime Minister and other high officials of the West German Government, and spoke about German history.

Tags:

Tags:

Three hours out of New York, I start awake to find myself floating over a grotesque landscape - the sickly, reddish-brown hills of Haiti, wave upon wave of blood-dark corrugations, thickly marbled with white sand.

Tags: Haiti

"I don't recognize myself as a satirist,'' said Vladimir Voinovich. ''No, I'm just trying to depict reality.''

Tags:

It is likely the question was first asked as soon as it could be - that the hope of abolition followed shortly after the task of creation.

Tags: Foreign Affairs

Wolfgang Leonhard would seem well qualified to deliver what he promises here -- a ''new policy toward [the] USSR.''

Tags:

In Haiti, as in many deeply troubled places, it was comforting to identify the national demons with one man, and to assume that his destruction would bring theirs.

Tags: Haiti

An American's distrust of welfare should come as no surprise. Public assistance threatens what is after all the central doctrine of capitalism: that the incentive to work is born of the burning desire to have, and then to have more.

Tags: American Politics | Welfare | Harper's Forums

The public schools of America long ago sank to a level of decrepitude guaranteeing them the sort of dogged scrutiny by blue ribbon commissions reserved for a "crisis" both intolerable and permanent.

Tags: American Politics | Schools | Education | Harper's Forums

The immortal power of gossip was already well understood in ancient Greece - "lt too," said Hesiod, "is a kind of divinity" - but it required the particular talents of the present age to make money off it.

Tags: Gossip | Media | Foreign Affairs

Last year Americans spent $30 billion on illegal drugs, while their government spent $1.5 billion trying to shut down their sources of supply.

Tags: Drugs | Foreign Affairs | Harper's Forums

When a mysterious contagion known as Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome began to kill large numbers of people a few years ago, various moral authorities took solace in the observation that its victims, most of whom were homosexuals or drug addicts, seemed well chosen for divine retribution.

Tags: Harper's Forums | AIDS

In an age when the peccadilloes of all the traditional idols, from presidents to Miss Americas, are gleefully exposed, athletes totter on their pedestals as the last American heroes.

Tags: Harper's Forums | Sports

The book, never a staple American product, seems destined to become a rare and precious object intended only for the cognoscenti who still know how to read.

Tags: Harper's Forums | Books

Almost since its beginning, the nuclear age has defined itself as a tug of war between technicians and diplomats, a match in which the diplomats seem forever doomed to finish in the mud.

Tags: Harper's Forums | Arms Control

Eighty years ago this summer the birth of a new era was announced not by a star twinkling over Bethlehem but by a mushroom cloud rising over Alamogordo. By miraculous intellectual effort mankind had acquired the power to destroy the earth.

Tags: Harper's Forums | Arms Control

Crime long ago emerged as one of those peculiar phenomena of modern life - the permanent crisis.

Tags: American Politics | Crime | Harper's Forums

In the ten years since the last Marine was plucked from the roof of the besieged U. S. Embassy in Saigon, "Vietnam" has come to stand for a good deal more than America's first military defeat.

Tags: Vietnam | Foreign Affairs | Harper's Forums

Disparaging television has long been a favorite national pastime - second in popularity only to watching it.

Tags: Harper's Forums | Television | Media

In the American religion there stands no icon more sacred than the "free market," embodying as it does the belief that Americans must trust in the benevolence of unseen forces to fulfill their destiny of wealth and power. In times of economic unrest, however, when factories close down, workers lose their jobs, and towns become impoverished, the prayers to the mysterious market gods give way to cries of anger and disbelief.

Tags: Harper's Forums | Economics

When General Westmoreland hauled CBS into court for libel last year, the American press responded with a flood of sober commentary on a cherished subject - itself.

Tags: Journalism | Media, | Harper's Forums

When in 1947 the UN handed down the Solomonic judgment that to resolve the "Palestine problem" the Holy Land would be divided into two nations bound together in "economic union," the laughter on Sinai must have been loud indeed.

Tags: Middle East | Foreign Policy | Harper's Forums

When no less sacred a national symbol than Miss America found herself displayed in a pornographic magazine last summer, the public was duly outraged - at the pornographers, for profiting from a young woman's inexperience; at the pageant committee, for demanding she relinquish her crown; and finally at Miss America herself, for not knowing better.

Tags: American Politics | Pornography | Media

When Yasir Arafat spoke at the United Nations some years ago with a gun in his belt, he was giving a performance in what has become the terrorist theater.

Tags: Terrorism | Media | Harper's Forums

Almost from the moment the first "contra" was issued his American, made combat boots, the Reagan Administration's secret war against Nicaragua has been embroiled in a vociferous if somewhat bizarre public debate: Congressmen proclaim their outrage, editorialists confess their misgivings, while officials in Washington - who are running the war - blandly "decline to comment on intelligence matters."

Tags: Secret Wars | Foreign Policy | Latin America | CIA | Harper's Forums

"The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem." Thus Walt Whitman, in his 1855 preface to Leaves of Grass, expressed what has been the American poet's struggle from the beginning-to wrest from the land a separate work of art.

Tags: Harper's Forums | Landscape | Poetry