Alan Perlman's Blog Posts Tagged 'war' (2)

“I have been meaning to write to you for some time, and the tenth anniversary of the beginning of the Iraq war provides as good an occasion as any to do so. Distracted by other, more recent eruptions of violence, the country has all but forgotten the war. But I won’t and I expect you can’t, although our reasons for remembering may differ.”

--Andrew Bacevich, letter to Paul Wolfowitz, Harper’s magazine, March 2012

Dumb question: Why have the…

“…the name Vietnam…arrived…as a summary and combination of everything one had ever learned…about the horrors of war.  There was something profoundly, horribly shocking in the odds and the proportions of the thing.  To all appearances, it seemed as if a military-industrial superpower was employing a terrifying aerial bombardment of steel and explosives and chemicals to subdue a defiant agrarian society.  I had expected the newly-elected Labour government to withhold British…