National Review articles from May 2003

National Review archives from May 2003

The Week.
May 5, 2003... -- We won't gloat. We don't need to. It's enough just to watch them sulk. -- One liberated Iraqi was reported to say that what he wanted from America was "Democracy. Whiskey. And sexy." Maybe we can send Bill Clinton as a special envoy?...

Editorial: AT WAR: Victory and After.(Editorial)
May 5, 2003... Saddam hussein's regime is dead, as the man himself may be. Three weeks of war freed Iraqis from his tyranny, and the region and the world from the threat it posed. Our coalition has suffered only 154 casualties. Dictators from Damascus to...

Notes & Asides.(Column)
May 5, 2003... -- Dear Mr. Buckley: European newspapers have taken to caricaturing President Bush as a reckless cowboy who rides into town, gets drunk, and shoots the place up. However, there are different images to conjure up when thinking of the...

A World of Possibilities: President Bush has an opportunity given to very few.
May 5, 2003... Not since Winston Churchill redrew the map of the Middle East after World War I has a Western statesman encountered such an opportunity for cartographical and strategic creativity as George W. Bush currently enjoys in the aftermath of the Iraq...

The Great Sorting Out: Iraq has been reborn; how shall it grow up?
May 5, 2003... Violence is latent in Iraq, but with forethought and goodwill retired general Jay Garner and the several hundred other American officials of the newly formed Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance should be able to contain and...

The Road to Damascus: What the recent toppling means to that other Ba'athist state.
May 5, 2003... Most of the world's TV stations broadcast images of toppling Saddam statues. Not in Syria, though: When the Iraqi regime fell, Syrian TV suddenly changed its format and broadcast history films. The country's state-controlled media had not...

President of the World: The wonderful, sad, and ultimately outrageous Kofi Annan.
May 5, 2003... If you like the U.N., you love Kofi Annan. The current secretary general represents the best of U.N. Man. He is dignified, uncorrupt, and earnest. He brings a certain calm to what can be a noxious circus. But, as we have seen in recent weeks,...

Off the Air: Radio and TV for Free Iraq have been MIA.
May 5, 2003... When troops with the Army's 101st Airborne Division approached the Imam Ali Mosque in Najaf on April 3, they didn't expect to face resistance from Iraqi civilians. The Grand Ayatollah Sistani had agreed to meet with the U.S. commander, but...

How Cheap Is Your Manhood?: The question of warrior envy.
May 5, 2003... "We talked of war. Johnson: 'Every man thinks meanly of himself for not having been a soldier, or not having been at sea.'" -- James Boswell, Life of Johnson, April 10, 1778 Johnson's apothegm has never been truer. I recently passed...

An Army That Drawls: Johnny Reb goes to Iraq, and everywhere else.
May 5, 2003... Midlothian, Va. War is indeed hell, as many a poor Iraqi regular has learned over the past weeks. The Hussein family has found out, too. Could be that Uday and Qusay resemble pate these days, along with the old man -- and good riddance....

Don Rumsfeld, Radical for our Time: The defense secretary has ushered in a new era, whose contours we have barely glimpsed.
May 5, 2003... The Taliban defeated without American infantry, and at a cost of fewer than ten U.S. fatalities? Ten thousand Special Operations troops turned loose to work independently in northern Iraq? Not one traditional armored division on the ground near...

Analyze This: Civilian officials reached a point of sufficiency only because they were pushed to it.
May 5, 2003... In a recent film version of, believe it or not, the Battle of Trenton, Washington at the head of half his army approaches a Hessian guard post that must be silenced, and dispatches two men to overcome an enemy of indeterminate strength....

The Teflon Secretary: Nothing sticks to Colin Powell -- except a bewildering adulation.
May 5, 2003... Among critics of the Bush administration's foreign policy, the most common response to the military success in Iraq has been to applaud it, tepidly, while more loudly lamenting the diplomatic wreckage it has left in its wake. Our failure to win...

The Long View.
May 5, 2003... Transcript from CNN's NewsNight with Aaron Brown, April 29, 2004: aaron brown: "And now with some analysis of the current American policy towards North Korea, we go to CNN adviser and retired totalitarian dictator Saddam Hussein. Sir, from...

Creation Story.("Right Face: Organizing the American Conservative Movement 1945-65")(Book Review)
May 5, 2003... Right Face: Organizing the American Conservative Movement 1945-65, by Niels Bjerre-Poulsen (Museum Tusculanum Press, University of Copenhagen, 333 pp., $29.95) In the ever-quickening tumult of current political debate, it is easy to forget...

The Old Order.("Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power")(Book Review)
May 5, 2003... Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power, by Niall Ferguson (Basic, 352 pp., $35) In 1897, the year of her Diamond Jubilee, England's Queen Victoria ruled over a quarter of the world, more than...

Free Men, Free Markets.("The Mind and the Market: Capitalism in Modern European Thought")(Book Review)
May 5, 2003... The Mind and the Market: Capitalism in Modern European Thought, by Jerry Z. Muller (Knopf, 448 pp., $30) The market starts as a physical place, a Middle Eastern souk or a midwestern mall or a square in Paris or Nairobi. Then economists turn...

Cults of Ignorance.("Getting It Wrong from the Beginning: Our Progressivist Inheritance from Herbert Spencer, John Dewey, and Jean Piaget")(Book Review)
May 5, 2003... Getting It Wrong from the Beginning: Our Progressivist Inheritance from Herbert Spencer, John Dewey, and Jean Piaget, by Kieran Egan (Yale, 224 pp., $25) 'Spencer is unreadable today," the literary historian A. O. J. Cockshut has written,...

Wonder Boy.("Being America: Liberty, Commerce, and Violence in an American World")(Book Review)
May 5, 2003... Being America: Liberty, Commerce, and Violence in an American World, by Jedediah Purdy (Knopf, $24, 352 pp.) Jedediah Purdy, the American Left's winsome scourge of irony, is a great one for name-dropping. In the course of a three-page...

Girls Gone Wild.("Why There Are No Good Men Left: The Romantic Plight of the New Single Woman")(Book Review)
May 5, 2003... Why There Are No Good Men Left: The Romantic Plight of the New Single Woman, by Barbara Dafoe Whitehead (Broadway, 210 pp., $22.95) The plight of the modern accomplished woman: She tries to have it all, and too often ends up both alone and...

On the Right.(Column)
May 5, 2003... No Gay Things Allowed? NEW YORK, MARCH 28 There are of course other wars and one of them, on Wednesday, was being waged before the Supreme Court. The question before the house: Did the Court rule improperly in 1986 in Bowers v....

What's Right.(Column)
May 5, 2003... A Must-Read If you're going to write books for a living, you have to make up your mind not to pay any attention to reviews of your work. But I doubt that I will ever manage to feel indifferent to reviews of my friends' books -- especially...

The Week.(Column)
May 19, 2003... -- We think it's safe to assume that a regime with figures called "Chemical Ali" and "Dr. Germ" had WMD. -- George Galloway, a showy Scottish Labour MP, has been a scourge of Anglo-American Iraq policy, denouncing Tony Blair and George W....

Editorial: AT WAR: Reconstruction.
May 19, 2003... America takes on the reconstruction of Iraq and the challenges of a postwar world at a happy time, for it is flooded with advice, all of it good. Unfortunately, all of it is also contradictory. We must have an agenda for Iraq's political...

Editorial: HOMOSEXUALITY AND THE LAW: Sex and the Senator.
May 19, 2003... Sen. rick santorum, a conservative Republican from Pennsylvania, is in the dock for saying -- well, how to characterize what he said is a subject of dispute. In an interview with an AP reporter, Santorum implied that he supported state laws...

Notes & Asides.(Column)
May 19, 2003... -- Dear Mr. Buckley: As a professional engineer, I am stereotypically recognized as unqualified to address matters of grammar. However, Dr. Neely's March 10 letter has touched upon one of my perpetual questions. Why should closing...

Special Section: Frum Forum.(Letter to the Editor)
May 19, 2003... William A. Rusher Former Publisher of NR San Francisco, Calif. David Frum's article "Unpatriotic Conservatives" (April 7) will serve the important purpose of compelling conservatives to consider more carefully just what their...

The Men Who Won the War: An 'embed' looks at our soldiers.
May 19, 2003... Since returning from Iraq a short time ago I have been answering a lot of questions about the war from friends, family, and strangers. When they ask me how it was over there I find myself glossing over the fighting, the heat, the sandstorms,...

A Little Patience, Please: Iraq won't look like Our Town overnight.
May 19, 2003... The absolute monarchs of the op-ed pages and television commentary predicted fearful outcomes to the Iraqi Freedom operation -- hundreds of thousands of casualties on all sides, Baghdad razed, the Muslim world in an uproar, every Arab an Osama...

The View from Pluto: Germans see the world with peculiar eyes.
May 19, 2003... Berlin The day after Baghdad fell I was ordering coffee with a friend at Starbucks in Berlin. He is a freelance journalist and hails from Basra. His wife still has family in Iraq. When we mentioned to the young woman on the other side of...

He, Gary Hart: The author of I, Che Guevara, gets frisky again.
May 19, 2003... Some people are afraid of heights. Others are scared of spiders. Gary Hart has a different phobia, according to a quote on his website: "My greatest fear is never having another opportunity to serve my country." Yes, the former Democratic...

Fighting AIDS Right: A couple of bumps, in Bush's grand plan.
May 19, 2003... In his State of the Union address, President Bush asked Congress "to commit $15 billion over the next five years . . . to turn the tide against AIDS in the most afflicted nations of Africa and the Caribbean." It was a dramatic moment, and not...

Death Becomes Them: What SARS says about China, and us.
May 19, 2003... The French prime minister, M. Raffarin, has restored the reputation for courage of Frenchmen everywhere: He visited Peking at the height of the SARS epidemic, taking a personal risk that even warriors such as Messrs. Blair and Cheney declined...

An Army of Jessicas: About women in combat: Let's fight. Hard.
May 19, 2003... According to much post-war commentary, the Iraqi Republican Guard wasn't the only force decisively routed during Operation Iraqi Freedom: From coast to coast, editorial writers declare that the experiences of American military women in Iraq...

The Reluctant Empire: The U.S. leads the world -- but doesn't have to rule it.
May 19, 2003... Is America an empire? This simple question elicits astonishingly passionate answers. Those who argue that the Pax Americana is effectively an imperium generally do so in a somewhat shamefaced way. They are quick to point out that it is a very...

Long View.
May 19, 2003... Official Transcript The Dr. Phil Show August 23, 2003 [theme music] [applause] dr. phil: "Thanks very much. Today we have on the show two guys who just can't get along, but who need to get along. Let's get into this....

After Care.("After: How America Confronted the September 12 Era")(Book Review)
May 19, 2003... After: How America Confronted the September 12 Era, by Steven Brill (Simon & Schuster, 723 pp., $29.95) Steven Brill is not the conservative's favorite journalist. Most infamously, he did a smear job on Ken Starr, back in 1998. But he is...

The Terror State.("Gulag: A History")(Book Review)
May 19, 2003... Gulag: A History, by Anne Applebaum (Doubleday, 592 pp., $35) Gulag is an acronym for the Russian phrase meaning Main Camp Administration, or -- in more direct language -- the system of concentration and labor camps that was an essential...

The Liberals' Collapse.("Terror and Liberalism")(Book Review)
May 19, 2003... Terror and Liberalism, by Paul Berman (Norton, 216 pp., $21) The resurgence of Muslim political extremism, which reached its apogee on 9/11, has shocked our sense of safety and invulnerability and led to a fundamental reappraisal of the...

Shelf Life: Defending the Human.(Book Review)(Brief Article)
May 19, 2003... 'As a child of God, I believe my rights are not derived from the Constitution. My rights are not derived from any government. My rights are not derived from any majority. My rights are because I exist. They were given to me and each of my...

The Straggler: Long Island Easter.(Column)
May 19, 2003... Religious observances aside, the principal component of Easter, so far as the Derbyshire household is concerned, is a picnic at Caumsett State Park. This is a spread of open land, about two miles by one and a half, on Long Island's north shore....

On the Right.
May 19, 2003... Toward a Revised Koran NEW YORK, APRIL 11 The horror of U.S., Inc., when an enterprising soldier draped an American flag over the bronze head of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad, is an early warning signal of the efforts being made to hoist...

What's Right.(Column)
May 19, 2003... True to Our Schools THUMP! THUMP! The backpacks hit the floor with the whomph of a 500-pound bomb detonating inside a Baathist bunker. My children are still in elementary school, but when loaded up with textbooks and notepads, the bags...