A Website of the Radical Imagination
Denial is not a river in Egypt. Denial is flooding the USA these days. But wake up calls can be heard here and there too. The Hudson is a river in New York State that runs south toward New York City. And on its banks about 30 miles North of NYC there sits a genuine … Read more
Kanan Makiya held a press conference in mid-October in Washington D.C. We’ve adapted and excerpted his opening statement and a few of the more pointed exchanges between Makiya and his interlocutors. Makiya’s comments on the Baathist ‘resistance’, the constitutional process and the issues raised by Ayatolla Sistani’s fatwa provide deep background for understanding current and … Read more
For some little time now, the people who make a living knowing these things have been saying a “spectacular” suicide operation was inevitable. And sure enough, along came the peace movement. It’s not enough to say that those who opposed the war against the Iraqi state were wrong. Nobody can be asked to know the … Read more
Paul Berman tells some pretty good stories, but you have to wait for the punch line. No one will be astonished to learn that Breyten Breytenbach, the celebrated South African novelist and homme de gauche, last year published (in Le Monde) an open letter to Sharon, and began with the now-rote observation that when any … Read more
Kanan Makiya – author of “Republic of Fear” and “Cruelty and Silence” – spoke about the future of Iraq on a panel organized by NYU’s Cultural Reporting and Criticism Program and the Center for War, Peace and the News Media on November 22, 2002. Arguing against other speakers at the forum, Makiya made a moral … Read more
On September 22, the New York Times Magazine ran a lengthy cover story about Paul Wolfowitz, the number two man in the Pentagon and the Bush administration’s most ardent proponent of overthrowing Saddam Hussein. Under the title of “Stalking Saddam: How Paul Wolfowitz’s agenda became the Bush agenda,” the Times’ Bill Keller used over 10 … Read more
The truth is, nobody knows what the 2002 election means. If the Republicans won by about 53-47 (the alt parties not even an irritant), six points difference is not so great that it can’t be imaginably recouped in some near future, nor is it itself evidence of a trend. That said, the news is all … Read more