National Review articles from December 2001

National Review archives from December 2001

Letters.(Letter to the Editor)
December 3, 2001... In his Nov. 5 article "Your Papers, Please," John Derbyshire just does not appreciate what is a reality in this country: Anyone who has a credit card is already part of a national database, a database that the federal government can access. His...

For the Record.(News Briefs)(Brief Article)
December 3, 2001... -- President Bush: "We will no doubt face new challenges, but we have our marching orders. My fellow Americans, let's roll." . . . "We are the target of enemies who boast they want to kill: kill all Americans, kill all Jews, and kill all...

The Week.(News Briefs)
December 3, 2001... -- Former president Clinton is advertising for interns. Well, President Bush did tell us to go on with our normal lives. --The American Airlines flight that crashed after taking off from JFK in New York seems to have been the victim of...

Editorial: At war: Eloquence and Force.(Brief Article)(Editorial)
December 3, 2001... Those who watch the progress of war from home must be patient with tactical execution, impatient with strategic indecision. Almost from the beginning President Bush has expressed our injuries and our goals with eloquence and force. His...

Editorial: Russia: Dancing with the Bear.(Brief Article)(Editorial)
December 3, 2001... President Bush and President Vladimir Putin have looked into each other's soul, and admired what they have seen there. A love-in is replacing the more usual formalities of high diplomacy. A seismic event like September 11 can bring about...

Editorial: Australia: Rumbles from Down Under.(Brief Article)(Editorial)
December 3, 2001... John Howard's comfortable victory over the Australian Labour party in the recent election has been little noticed in our media-even though it was the third victory in a row for the conservative Liberal-Country coalition, achieved against...

AT WAR - Why West Is Best: Secrets-or rather, obvious ingredients-of the Good Society.
December 3, 2001... No such thing as a perfect society exists in the world or ever will. But the Good Society can and does emerge from time to time, and is far more likely to exist within the orbit of the Western system than in any other. Why is this? To...

AT WAR - Islam in Action: Extremism now, and everywhere. What later?
December 3, 2001... President Bush, Prime Minister Blair, and Pope John Paul II are among leaders repeating a mantra that Islam is peaceful and tolerant. The firmest of distinctions must be drawn between the religion and terrorism carried out in its name. There is...

AT WAR - Rules for Diplomats . . .:. . . and when to break them.(Brief Article)
December 3, 2001... Bismarck is supposed to have said that asking him to take political principles into account when conducting foreign policy was like suggesting that he walk through a dense forest with a twelve-foot pole between his teeth. Well, he would say...

AT WAR - Screen Test: The fight over airport security.
December 3, 2001... It seems odd to say, but the way John Mica sees it, the anthrax scare on Capitol Hill helped the Republican aviation-security bill pass the House. The GOP bill called for a new safety system in which the nation's 28,000 airport baggage...

AT WAR - Sly Sy: A journalist's latest tricks.(Seymour Hersh)
December 3, 2001... 'At The New Yorker, each article undergoes an extensive fact-checking process: Quotes are confirmed, details authenticated, the spellings of names verified, and so forth," write that magazine's editors in their November 12 issue. "This is well...

Crusading They Went: The deeds and misdeeds of our spiritual kin.
December 3, 2001... As a child I was given the stories of Alfred Duggan to read. Duggan, who lived from 1903 to 1964, was an English eccentric and playboy, a college acquaintance of Evelyn Waugh's. Through the 1950s and early 1960s he produced a stream of vivid...

Martyred: Muslim murder and mayhem against Christians.
December 3, 2001... President Bush's repeated assertions about the peaceful nature of Islam were briefly interrupted when the State Department issued the annual report required by the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998. This year, as in the past, our...

Delay or Die?: The imperative of counter-proliferation.
December 3, 2001... In 1946, U.S. delegate to the U.N. Bernard Baruch had an idea. All nations would be prohibited not just from seeking to develop nuclear weapons, but from building nuclear power plants that might create fissionable material appropriate for a...

Germs Against Man: Bioterror: a brief history.
December 3, 2001... When, in 1980, the World Health Organization announced the eradication of smallpox as a disease, the plot of a thriller came to me in an instant. It was set a few years later, when mankind's herd immunity to smallpox had declined and much...

The Long View.(Brief Article)(Column)
December 3, 2001... Pen pals from America, as encouraged by President Bush Dear Children in the Kindergarten Class of the Slayer of the Infidel Elementary School: Hi. We are Miss Peters's kindergarten class at Rosa Parks Elementary. We are very sorry to...

Up from Pin Point.(Clarence Thomas: A Biography)(Review)
December 3, 2001... Clarence Thomas: A Biography, by Andrew Peyton Thomas (Encounter, 661 pp., $29.95) Clarence Thomas, the most famous justice on the Supreme Court, is also the most fascinating. His rise from segregation and poverty is a compelling story; so...

Cap, a Life.(In the Arena: A Memoir of the 20th Century)(Review)
December 3, 2001... In the Arena: A Memoir of the 20th Century, by Caspar W. Weinberger, with Gretchen Roberts (Regnery, 412 pp., $34.95) Of all the men in the Reagan era, few made as deep an impression as Caspar Weinberger. And by "Reagan era," we mean, in...

Pure Simon.(Dreamers of Dreams: Essays on Poets and Poetry)(Review)
December 3, 2001... Dreamers of Dreams: Essays on Poets and Poetry, by John Simon (Ivan R. Dee, 265 pp., $26) National Review readers are familiar with John Simon's writing about movies, but in other venues he has written on just about everything, and with...

Empire Restored.(Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire)(Review)
December 3, 2001... Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire, by David Cannadine (Oxford, 264 pp., $25) What on earth was the British Empire all about? It was a money racket, thought Orwell. No, it was an exercise in racial self-aggrandizement, said...

Fundamental Wrongs.(Beggars and Choosers: How the Politics of Choice Shapes Adoption, Abortion, and Welfare in the United States)(Review)
December 3, 2001... Beggars and Choosers: How the Politics of Choice Shapes Adoption, Abortion, and Welfare in the United States, by Rickie Solinger (Hill & Wang, 284 pp., $25) In this new book-her third on the subject of abortion-historian Rickie Solinger...

Books in Brief.(Put Your Bodies Upon the Wheels: Student Revolt in the 1960s)(Review)(Brief Article)
December 3, 2001... Put Your Bodies Upon the Wheels: Student Revolt in the 1960s, by Kenneth J. Heineman (Ivan R. Dee, 251 pp., $26) In February 1960, four black students sat down at a Greensboro, N.C., lunch counter; by April 1970, the U.S. would be...

City Desk: Tough Act to Follow.(NYC Mayor Rudy Giuliani)(Brief Article)
December 3, 2001... Elections typically belong to the news of New York, not its nature, but the mayor's race of 2001 qualifies as an elemental event-not for who won, but for who left and how. Since New York City has a population greater than that of many...

On the Right.(access to presidential papers; other political issues)(Column)
December 3, 2001... On Getting to Know Our Past Presidents NEW YORK, NOVEMBER 2 Mr. bush has signed an executive order that assigns to sitting presidents the authority to hold back the publication of papers belonging to antecedent presidents-even those...

The Misanthrope's Corner.(Brief Article)(Column)
December 3, 2001... Random thoughts on what may yet go down in history as the War Without a Name . . . Can you remember, off the top of your head, the last thing they came up with? I can't. If the Bushies put it through the sensitivity grinder one more time...

Letters.
December 17, 2001... PORN and NR Abercrombie & Fitch, because of its history, is the perfect example of the "pervasion" you isolate and describe so well in "Porn, Pervasive Presence" (Nov. 19). Conceptually and in its detail this is an eye-opening piece. It's...

For the Record.(President Bush, and others, comment on the War on Terrorism)(Brief Article)
December 17, 2001... -- Bush at Travis Air Force Base in California: "You mark my words: People are going to get tired of the war on terrorism. And by the way, it may take more than two years. There's a variety of theaters. So long as anybody's terrorizing...

The Week.(September 11, 2001 terrorist attack death toll approaches 3,245)(this and other items are discussed)
December 17, 2001... -- Colin Powell goes to war-against his domestic critics. In "The World According to Powell," by Bill Keller, in The New York Times Magazine, he and his friends defend everything he has done and not done. Psst, Mr. Secretary-do you know what...

Having Their Day in (a Military) Court : How best to prosecute terrorists.(reaction to military tribunals for suspected terrorists)
December 17, 2001... The debate over the president's order creating military tribunals to try suspected terrorists consists largely of warring slogans and overripe rhetoric: "shredding our Constitution," "seizing dictatorial power," etc., on the one hand, and some...

The Mob Lawyer, Updated : One Manhattan attorney and the Chinese 'snakeheads'.(attorney Robert E. Porges accused of working with Chinese mobsters to violate US immigration law)
December 17, 2001... For Chinese nationals seeking asylum in the United States during the 1990s, Manhattan lawyer Robert E. Porges was the man to see. When 286 aliens aboard the Golden Venture shipwrecked off a Long Island beach in 1993, Porges wound up...

Studyin' War Some More What there is to learn, and re-learn.(the World Trade Center disaster finds America with little recent experience in war)
December 17, 2001... The issue of the London Spectator dated March 24 of this year ran a special section on the military, its place in British society, and its future prospects. The lead-off piece was by historian Niall Ferguson, author of a fine book, The Pity of...

Did You Say 'American Imperialism'? : Power, weakness, and choices in the Middle East.(America's Middle East policies, dating from the end of the Persian Gulf War)
December 17, 2001... In February 1991, as the defeated and shattered forces of Saddam Hussein were fleeing back into Iraq, the military commanders and political leaders of the victorious coalition faced a number of choices. One of these was to pursue and destroy...

Getting Saddam Fear not confrontation, : then liberation.(the United States, in its war on terrorism, must make a decision about Iraq)
December 17, 2001... The war against terror is swinging round the points of the compass. The needle shows Yemen, apparently, Somalia (again), and Sudan. This is reminiscent of earlier international wars waged against slavery and piracy, when the British navy took...

Clinton Has No Clothes : What 9/11 revealed about the ex-president.(President Clinton's handling of terrorists' acts)
December 17, 2001... On June 25, 1996, a powerful truck bomb exploded outside the Khobar Towers barracks in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, tearing the front from the building, blasting a crater 35 feet deep, and killing 19 American soldiers. Hundreds more were injured....

Sticking with Small : The appropriate size of government.(big government: public opinion since the World Trade Center disaster)
December 17, 2001... Big government is back. Since September 11, Americans have been looking to Washington again for answers-disregarding a generation of conservative warnings that it creates more problems than it solves. "When the chips are down, where do we...

Safe for Democracy, and a Nation : The idea of this country post-9/11.
December 17, 2001... One of the difficulties bedeviling political science is the protean nature of political words. As Robert Schuettinger pointed out in his study of European conservatism, the phrase "a conservative socialist" could mean a hardline Stalinist, a...

Up-'n'-Comers : Standouts in the Republican farm system.(Brief Article)
December 17, 2001... Even the conservative movement's most cheerful optimist is dispirited when he considers the current crop of Republican state leaders. "The problem now is that if a Republican governor is not raising taxes he can hold his head up," Grover...

The Long View.(satire)(Brief Article)
December 17, 2001... midtown mental health clinic octor's Notes patient: B. Clinton treated since: January 27th, 2001 insurance: Federal/OK September 12th, 2001 Patient calls private number and demands an appointment. Doctor reminds him that his...

American Lion.(Review)
December 17, 2001... Theodore Rex, by Edmund Morris (Random House, 772 pp., $35) Terrorism on the scale of September 11 is new to America, or to anywhere else for that matter. But there is nothing unprecedented about political attacks on U.S. soil. On September...

Golden Grouse.(Review)
December 17, 2001... Political Fictions, by Joan Didion (Knopf, 338 pp., $25) Getting a hold on Joan Didion, the essayist and novelist, is tricky. She's someone who as a high-school girl in central California "on the whole preferred to spend time" with people...

Sheen of Eloquence.(Review)
December 17, 2001... America's Bishop: The Life and Times of Fulton J. Sheen, by Thomas C. Reeves (Encounter, 479 pp., $25.95) In the early 1950s, Fulton Sheen was the most famous Catholic in America. Already well known as a radio personality, Sheen in 1952...

Shelf Life : Word Up.(English Standard Version Bible, an RSV update without inclusive language)(Brief Article)
December 17, 2001... The Revised Standard Version (1952) is generally considered the most accurate translation of the Bible into English, but it is no longer very widely available. (Ignatius Press has a densely printed Catholic edition.) As its name suggests, the...

The Un-Cookie Cutters.(pianist recitals)(Brief Article)
December 17, 2001... November in New York saw two unusual recitals by two unusual pianists: Alicia de Larrocha and Ivan Moravec. Each has been performing for as long as most concertgoers can remember. Each is an example of "supreme individuality"-to use a critic's...

On the Right.(Brief Article)(Column)
December 17, 2001... Security in the Air NEW YORK, NOVEMBER 13 It is instructive to catch the emotions on the fly. They do not always yield self-esteem. You furtively hope the bullet will hit the other guy not you. The airplane crashes and instinctively...

Nuclear Babies Stillborn.(Brief Article)(Column)
December 17, 2001... NEW YORK, NOVEMBER 16 The Northern Alliance gang in Kabul reports that our air force had a really good hit, an American rocket that opened up a Taliban compound that seems to have been a library/laboratory for ultimate war. It stored, in...

How to Handle bin Laden.(possible scenarios, following the capture of Osama bin Laden)(Brief Article)
December 17, 2001... NEW YORK, NOVEMBER 20 New York. Roy Jenkins is in town, promoting his superb biography of Winston Churchill. The diners were reminded of his eminent career and accomplishments, including a term as home secretary, during which the...

Misanthrope's Corner.(the book 'Blue Lagoon,' and the two films it inspired)
December 17, 2001... NR's anti-porn issue breathed new life into an old idea I've been mulling over for a long time, so here it is: The Blue Lagoon Syndrome. Everyone has seen the 1980 movie with Brooke Shields, but few remember the 1949 British version...

Letters.
December 31, 2001... In David Pryce-Jones's words ("The New Cold War," Nov. 5), "Communism turned out to be the Russian national interest in disguise." One wishes this were so. However, the collapse of the Soviet regime left Communists in power in China, North...

The Week.
December 31, 2001... -- Maureen Dowd asked Rudolph Giuliani if he thought John Walker was a "poor soul," as President Bush has said, or would prefer to string him up. "'I could feel sorry for someone and still string 'em up,' said the former prosecutor." Now...

The Middle East: Next Year in Jerusalem.(Brief Article)(Editorial)
December 31, 2001... The Middle East at the moment is more than unusually rocky. Islamist extremism is a threat to several Arab regimes. On the run from Afghanistan, al-Qaeda terrorists can count on clandestine networks to help them regroup and start all over...

Missile Defense: ABM, R.I.P.(US withdrawal from the antiballistic missile treaty with Russia)(Brief Article)(Editorial)
December 31, 2001... President Bush's decision to withdraw from the ABM Treaty is a brave and extraordinary thing. It means not just the end of the treaty, but probably the end of the treaty as a political issue. Vladimir Putin said on the day that Bush announced...

Nobility in the Nobel.(Nobel Prize for Literature awarded to V.S. Naipaul)(Brief Article)(Editorial)
December 31, 2001... Nothing much happens in Sweden during the long and dark winter season, except the award of the Nobel prizes. This puts the country on the map, and the Swedes rightly revel in the occasion. They do it in the grandest style. This year was the...

MIDDLE EAST - Betrayer of the Palestinians...and friend only to himself: The wretched Yasser Arafat.
December 31, 2001... One of the most famous of classical Arab stories concerns the boy Aladdin, who finds a lamp, rubs it, and sees an all-powerful slave spring up, there to do his bidding. But Aladdin soon makes unreasonable demands, and the slave takes over. The...

FOREIGN POLICY - Get Realist: How conservative foreign policy has been borne out.
December 31, 2001... At a time when a popular Republican president is waging a successful war, liberals are having to take their consolations where they can. Some liberals are telling themselves that the renewed esteem for the Pentagon will carry over to support...

THE NATION - A Junior al-Qaeda...right here at home: Meet al-Fuqra.(militant Muslims in the United States)
December 31, 2001... There are a lot of Baptist churches along rural Virginia's Route 615, just south of Appomattox-"where America reunited," as the county welcome sign puts it-but there's only one Sheikh Gilani Lane. A gate and a guardhouse prevent the public from...

CAPITOL HILL - What's Teddy Done Now?: Sen. Kennedy shafts Scalia's son.(politics behind confirmation of nomination of attorney Eugene Scalia to Labor Department post)
December 31, 2001... A majority of the Senate would vote to confirm Eugene Scalia for the post of top lawyer at the Labor Department, so Senate majority leader Tom Daschle blithely announced an extraordinary confirmation standard in the case of this nominee (who...

CULTURE WATCH - Free to Go Bad: John Walker Lindh, an American tragedy.(accused US citizen who fought for the Taliban in Afghanistan)(Column)
December 31, 2001... An old college friend of mine, the son of two prominent psychiatrists, had a saying: "A shrink's kid is always nuts." There's something about knowing too much about human development that distorts the relationship between parent and...

Rumsfeld Rules: The defense secretary is a blast from the past who is the man of the hour.(popularity of Donald Rumsfeld)
December 31, 2001... Who's the "star" of this war so far? That's a vulgar consideration, given the awful work that has to be done. But there is, undeniably, an answer: Don Rumsfeld. Yes, Rumsfeld: defense secretary, TV personality, sex symbol (no kidding-more on...

Really Big Oil: While fighting terrorism, fight OPEC, too.
December 31, 2001... Back in 1973, Sheikh Ahmad Zaki Yamani, the petroleum minister of Saudi Arabia, feared that while he was wielding his "oil weapon," the West might wield weapons of its own. Rumors circulated that Washington was considering seizing the Saudi...

Me and My Nail Clippers: A day in the airports.(evaluating airport security)
December 31, 2001... It's a little after 9 a.m. at Ronald Reagan National Airport, and a middle-aged man of indeterminate nationality has his hand in my pants. He's not very far down into them, barely over the belt line; but a little of this sort of thing goes a...

A Nation That Believes: America without religion is not America.
December 31, 2001... This is always the season of the year for reflection on new beginnings, but the horrible deaths of September 11 have added to this year's thoughts a special urgency: If terrorists are going to kill us just because we are Americans, we might as...

Before You Say No . . . A correspondence, nonfictional, between a young boy, a housewife, a headmaster, and the young boy's brother.
December 31, 2001... March 7 Dear Mrs. Heath: I wish to ask you a great favor. My brother David goes to Cranwell and he says they go easier on brothers, so I might have a chance to get in even though my grades aren't so terribly good. But I need three...

The Long View.(Brief Article)
December 31, 2001... The Crisis Advisor All of your nation-in-crisis questions answered here! Dear Advisor: Ever since September 11th, I've been unable to have a conversation-even really, really trivial ones-without beginning it by saying, "Ever since...

Attacking the Shield.(Hit to Kill: The New Battle over Shielding America from Missile Attack)
December 31, 2001... Hit to Kill: The New Battle over Shielding America from Missile Attack, by Bradley Graham (Public Affairs, 430 pp., $27.50) This book is what they call a "notebook dump," although it's an impressive and informative one. Washington Post...

Savior of the West.(Churchill: A Study in Greatness)
December 31, 2001... Churchill: A Study in Greatness, by Geoffrey Best (Hambledon, 384 pp., $29.95) In his remarkable essay "Winston Churchill in 1940," originally published in The Atlantic Monthly in 1949, Isaiah Berlin paid tribute to Churchill's greatness....

The Truth Beyond Memory.(J.R.R. Tolkien's "The Lord of the Rings")
December 31, 2001... Professor J. R. R. Tolkien was grading papers on a summer day in 1928 when he came upon a blank page in an exam book. Something inspired him to scribble a few words: "In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit." The whole thing might have...

The Press's True Colors.(Coloring the News: How Crusading for Diversity Has Corrupted American Journalism)
December 31, 2001... Coloring the News: How Crusading for Diversity Has Corrupted American Journalism, by William McGowan (Encounter, 250 pp., $25.95) Liberal delicacy has its moments. Kings County Hospital in Brooklyn, N.Y., once paid the Most Reverend Prophet...

Shelf life - Hey Hey? Ho Ho!(books about globalism, synagogue architecture, founding fathers)(Brief Article)
December 31, 2001... In the rhetoric of malcontents of all stripes-Left, Right, and center- "globalization" has become the all-purpose bogeyman, the deepest "root cause" of almost every injustice (real or perceived) in the modern world. It stands to reason that...

CITY DESK - Death.(instances of disastrous loss of life in NYC history)(Brief Article)
December 31, 2001... 'America the Beautiful" says, "Thine alabaster cities gleam / Undimmed by human tears." But that is a hope, not a description. New York has been dimmed by everything from accident to evil; by war, disease, riot, and fire. The first...

On the Right.(Column)
December 31, 2001... The End of Arafat NEW YORK, DECEMBER 3 The Palestine chief negotiator Mr. Erakat said ringingly that the night of Monday, December 3, would signal a permanent end to any prospect of peace in the Mideast. He was reacting to General...

Misanthrope's Corner.(Brief Article)(Column)
December 31, 2001... Dear Gentle Readers: Welcome to the last issue of the year, when I get to write my favorite kind of column: a chatty letter, instead of a logically (more or less) argued, structured (sort of) disquisition on what are grandly known as the...