National Review articles from October 2002

National Review archives from October 2002

Letters.(Letter to the Editor)
October 14, 2002... -- You owe Sen. Chuck Hagel -- a man with more combat experience than yoyour entire masthead combined -- a profound apology for the gratuitous and cheap designation ("R., France") you gave him in your Aug. 12 issue. While you deplore Sen....

The Week.(national, international news )
October 14, 2002... -- In his testimony before Congress, Donald Rumsfeld noted that =93there have been many books written about threats and attacks that were not anticipated." He mentioned At Dawn We Slept, The Day the Admirals Slept Late, While England Slept... ..

At War: On Iraq, Right Reason.(international support for, national political views on possible military action against Iraq )
October 14, 2002... Give credit where it's due: Colin Powell had a point about going to the U.N. on the Iraq question. When President Bush did so, it helped change the dynamics of the debate, both domestically and internationally. But a few distinctions are in...

The Homefront: Scenes from a War.(terrorism investigations, cases )
October 14, 2002... In the month of the first anniversary of 9/11, Americans got to see three faces of vigilance. On September 11 a Northwest Airlines flight from Memphis to Las Vegas was diverted to Arkansas after the crew reported suspicious behavior on the...

Notes & Asides.(Letter to the Editor)
October 14, 2002... -- Memo to NR Lexicographers: We are swamped by your resourceful answers to the question posed by Mr. John Stephenson Jr. in the Sept. 2 issue, as well as other questions touched on. In that issue, we published a small chart submitted...

Bill Simon: En Route to Sacramento : Gunning for the governorship.(Brief Article)
October 14, 2002... Bill Simon looks a little like Christopher Reeve when he was doing Superman, wearing those horn-rimmed glasses which were supposed to make him appear pedestrian. Of course if you want to pass by unnoticed, which Superman wanted to do when he...

Leviathan to the Rescue: The responsibility of the United States of America.
October 14, 2002... The approaching war with Iraq is essentially a 21st-century problem. Strictly speaking, it has no precedent in history, and in terms of presidential power and national sovereignty, Mr. Bush is walking into unknown territory. By comparison, the...

Going with a Winner: The world takes sides, or hangs back.
October 14, 2002... In the left corner, the United Nations; in the right corner, the United States. It looks like something of a championship match. Except that it isn't really, so long as the Bush administration keeps its resolve. It is a question of doing the...

A Duty of Government?: The libertarians agonize, and split, over the war.
October 14, 2002... September 11 may not have changed everything, but it has had one shocking effect on American political life: People are rethinking their positions on foreign policy. Moreover, the rethinking is genuine and not merely a matter of political...

Worse Than a Farce: The danger and lunacy of U.N. inspections.
October 14, 2002... At a committee hearing on the eve of the 9/11 anniversary, Republican congressman Edward Schrock of Virginia paid an unusual tribute when he expressed his gratitude for the witnesses' chilling accounts of Saddam Hussein's arsenal of nuclear,...

Blix-krieg: How not to fight Saddam Hussein.(Brief Article)
October 14, 2002... Last February, Hans Blix, the United Nations arms-inspection chief who will, if the Security Council has its way, search Iraq for weapons of mass destruction, addressed a group of inspectors-in-training at a U.N. facility in Geneva. He gave a...

The Hispanic Republic of Texas: It's coming. Soon.
October 14, 2002... If Texas voters elect Ron Kirk to the Senate on November 5, his win will become the story of Election Night. The TV commentators will dwell on his amazing victory, and his smiling face will be on the front pages of the Wednesday morning papers....

Making the World Safe -- Period: The place of democracy in our foreign policy.
October 14, 2002... Will the forthcoming invasion of Iraq prove to be a war to establish the first democratic Iraqi state? Indeed, will it be the first stage in establishing a Middle East of Muslim Arab states rooted securely in modern democracy? Hey -- why stop...

European Communities: A report from Greece and Albania.
October 14, 2002... Greece is said to be the most anti-American country in Europe, and Albania the most pro-American. As it happened, my itinerary included both countries. I was to speak on 9/11 and the ongoing war, and to mix it up a little with local journalists...

Being Lee Bollinger: The very model of a modern college president.
October 14, 2002... Lee Bollinger, the recently installed president of Columbia University, is used to praise. Newsweek labeled him an exemplar of a "new, visionary breed of college presidents." In The New Yorker, Nicholas Lemann wrote that "if you were called...

Stop, Thief!: The trials of conservative publications on campus.
October 14, 2002... One day last October, the staff of The Primary Source, a conservative magazine at Tufts University, painted the cannon on campus. They did so with the slogans "God Bless America" and "Liberty and Justice for All," in honor of the victims of...

Plucking on My Mbira: The ultra-relativist world of ethnomusicology.
October 14, 2002... Imagine a college music department and all the familiar images come to mind: practice rooms containing Steinway pianos, orchestras playing Mozart and Beethoven, harmonic analyses of Bach chorales scrawled across chalkboards. What will not come...

Leagues of Their Own: The delicate question of lesbians and softball.
October 14, 2002... 'On road trips those who were dating roomed with one another and slept together." "Changing in the locker room made me feel very uncomfortable." "The issue was so pervasive at my school that I felt choked out." That lesbians play softball...

The Long View.(Brief Article)
October 14, 2002... Candidates' Diaries The International Multilateral Edition(tm) From the Tagebuch of Gerhard Schroeder: . . . Vell, now iz a bick mess dat has been made from dis idiot comment from Frau Daubler-Gmelin about how der American...

Separation Anxiety.("Separation of Church and State")(Book Review)
October 14, 2002... Separation of Church and State, by Philip Hamburger (Harvard, 560 pp., $49.95) Felix Frankfurter, nestled in the Supreme Court in the late 1940s, summed up the new orthodoxy taking hold in his circles: "We have staked the very existence of...

The Unreal Lincoln.("The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War")(Book Review)
October 14, 2002... The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War, by Thomas J. DiLorenzo (Prima, 352 pp., $24.95) To get an idea of how truly awful this book is, consider that its author sneers at what he calls some...

Hiberno-Fascism.("1916: The Easter Rising")(Book Review)
October 14, 2002... 1916: The Easter Rising, by Tim Pat Coogan (Cassell, 192 pp., $29.95) The Easter Rising of 1916 is the central event in 20th-century Irish history. At noon on April 24 of that year, Easter Monday, a small group of violent separatists...

Newman's Own Church.(John Henry Newman: The Challenge to Evangelical Religion)(Book Review)
October 14, 2002... John Henry Newman: The Challenge to Evangelical Religion, by Frank M. Turner (Yale, 724 pp., $35) It is said, with mixed feelings, that of the writing of books on Newman there is no end. Few figures are as representative of the Victorian...

Love Your Country.(country music and social virtue)
October 14, 2002... I went looking for the war on MTV and couldn't find it. True, just after 9/11, MTV did join with the USO to put on a special called "For the Troops." And for some time afterward, the station played Kid Rock's single from that special (a song...

On the Right.(Column)
October 14, 2002... Bush at the U.N.: Thoughts Said and U.N.Said NEW YORK, SEPTEMBER 13 The habit of presidents and popes, when they address the United Nations, is to sound unctuous and vapid. This time around circumstances made it impossible to come and...

What's Next?(Brief Article)(Column)
October 14, 2002... As a longstanding admirer of Florence King, who retired from this space last issue, I tread here with utmost deference, and considerable apprehension. Also, with a collection of uncertainties. To begin with: What shall we call this page...

Letters.
October 28, 2002... --I write to correct the false impression created by your Sept. 16 ararticle "Bowles's Luck" by Joel Mowbray. Mr. Mowbray suggests that I made a political decision not to sue Erskine Bowles in connection with losses to our state pension fund...

The Week.
October 28, 2002... -- The British papers are abuzz about the news that John Major had an afaffair before he became prime minister. We're more upset that he was unfaithful to Margaret Thatcher. -- Although its tenor was anti-war, Al Gore's speech on Iraq was...

CAMPAIGN 2002: Corruptions.(New Jersey senator caught in a extorsion case)(Brief Article)
October 28, 2002... There will be no Soprano jokes in this editorial. The reality of New Jersey politics outruns the whimsy of HBO. Sen. Robert Torricelli's campaign for re-election began failing after it became evident that he had shaken down a New Jersey...

Notes and Asides.
October 28, 2002... -- Dear Mr. Buckley: Re a recent column of yours: The "southern ststates" and the "Southern states" are two totally distinct entities. The most southerly state is Hawaii. California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas border on Mexico. Three...

The Wrong Man at Langley: George Tenet isn't up to it; neither is U.S. intelligence.(fumblings of the Central Intelligence Agency)
October 28, 2002... Several months ago I asked the CIA's chief spokesman, Bill Harlow, whether CIA director George Tenet had ever offered to resign after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. After all, the attacks represented a fundamental failure of strategic...

Sharia in Kabul?: A theological iron curtain is descending across Afghanistan.(radicalism taking hold across the nation)
October 28, 2002... Shortly after Afghanistan's cabinet was announced in June, new chief justice Fazul Hadi Shinwari denounced the newly appointed women's affairs minister, Sima Samar, for speaking "against the Islamic nation of Afghanistan." Samar was formally...

Saddam's Last Stand: He won't sit quietly till the Marines burst in.(Saddam Hussein, Iraq's ruler)
October 28, 2002... Like all dictators, Saddam Hussein has a high opinion of his capacities. Comparing himself to Nebuchadnezzar and Saladin, historic rulers of Baghdad, he makes the claim that he too will go down in history as one of the greatest of men....

The Jersey Jive: A state, a scandal, a legacy.
October 28, 2002... There's one question that wasn't satisfactorily answered in all the fighting over Robert Torricelli's scandal-driven withdrawal from the New Jersey Senate race. To allow Torricelli to pull out, and to allow Democrats to replace him with former...

The Case for No Confidence: On the economy, forget the White House's happy talk.
October 28, 2002... The White House recently unveiled its latest economic strategy: cheerlead the economy and the stock market back to good health. In early October, Commerce Secretary Don Evans released an upbeat report, "The Case for Confidence," which argues...

Collared-Falsely: Not every priest is rightly accused.(catholic church scandal)
October 28, 2002... 'This is like affirmative-action time for victims," says one frustrated Catholic priest. "The attitude seems to be that because the Church discriminated against victims [of clergy sexual abuse] in the past, they should make up for it by...

Visas for Terrorists: They were ill-prepared. They were laughable. They were approved.
October 28, 2002... On June 18, 2001, Abdulaziz Alomari filled out a simple, two-page application for a visa to come to the United States. Alomari was not exactly the ideal candidate for a visa. He claimed to be a student, though he left blank the space for the...

The End of an Alliance: It's time to tell the House of Saud goodbye.
October 28, 2002... Over the long run, the key to winning the war against Islamist terror is helping moderates win the political struggle within Islam. The early stages of the war on terror showed much promise in this respect. In a remarkably short time, using a...

The Long View.(Brief Article)(Excerpt)
October 28, 2002... The War Diaries The Healthy, Vigorous Debate Edition (tm) --From You Don't Get Cookies on Air Force Transport Jets, and Other NuNutty Observations by David Bonior: Wonderfully dry air, extremely healthful for the sinuses, and vast...

Our Chavez (Not Cesar).(Book Review)
October 28, 2002... An Unlikely Conservative: The Transformation of an Ex-Liberal (Or How I Became the Most Hated Hispanic in America), by Linda Chavez (Basic, 262 pp., $26) The high point of Linda Chavez's career came when George W. Bush asked her to be...

Man and Monument.(Book Review)
October 28, 2002... Cicero: The Life and Times of Rome's Greatest Politician, by Anthony Everitt (Random House, 359 pp., $25.95) Marcus Tullius Cicero belongs near the top of the long and lengthening list of writers and statesmen more quoted than read, more...

A Federal Case.(Book Review)
October 28, 2002... Narrowing the Nation's Power: The Supreme Court Sides with the States, by John T. Noonan Jr. (California, 212 pp., $24.95) Judge Noonan-a distinguished member of the Federal Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and a professor emeritus of...

Standard Deviance.(Book Review)
October 28, 2002... The Politics of Deviance, by Anne Hendershott (Encounter, 194 pp., $26.95) A play about a man in love with a goat wins the Tony award. A prime-time TV game show features a totally naked woman throwing a little football at a large screen. A...

That Was No Lady.(Book Review)
October 28, 2002... No Way to Treat a First Lady, by Christopher Buckley (Random House, 320 pp., $24.95) Back in the early days of the Clinton administration, Barbra Streisand became known as a C-SPAN junkie, immersed in the nitty-gritty of public policy. She...

Tony Tigers.(Brief Article)
October 28, 2002... Every September, New York celebrates the fashion industry with Fashion Week, but the other 51 weeks are fashion weeks too. New York has the four elements necessary to harbor both a fashion industry and a fashion- attentive culture. The...

On the Right.
October 28, 2002... Socialist Vexations NEW YORK, SEPTEMBER 24 Domestic problems in Europe make the news, one problem quirky, the second raising dogmatic assumptions of economic law. In London, as described by socialist novelist and critic John...

And another thing...(Brief Article)
October 28, 2002... I hate golf. It's an old-fashioned, even Biblical hatred that is rooted almost entirely in envy-as opposed to modern "hate," which, we are constantly told, is based on fear of gays or some other member of the Coalition of the Oppressed. I do...