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.

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leaders infuriated by the televised carnage of sixty-eight dismembered bodies at Sarajevo's Markela marketplace—had withdrawn their tanks and cannons and mortars from the mountains and ridges above the city, heavily armed Serb soldiers in camouflage uniforms forced their way into a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"...

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

Inward-gazing and self-absorbed, Americans tend to learn about the world only during times of crisis.

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

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.

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

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

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?

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?

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