Plus: Affirmative Action; Citizen Bezos; Rembrandt and Friends; Tony Judt on the War in Iraq
| Today in The New York Review of Books: David Cole and Joost Hiltermann decry Trump’s war in Iran; separately, Cole asks how universities can pursue diversity now that the Supreme Court has struck down most affirmative action programs; Robert G. Kaiser mourns Jeff Bezos’s decimation of The Washington Post; Ruth Bernard Yeazell looks at a collection of the old Dutch masters; and, from the archives, Tony Judt in 2003 on Bush’s war in Iraq, a “tragedy of historical proportions.” Never has Donald Trump’s willful blindness to legal limits been more evident than in his decision to start a war with Iran. What will come of the US igniting yet another war in the Middle East? Progressives may have lost the battle for racial affirmative action, but ironically, Supreme Court decisions should allow colleges to give advantage to groups defined by their income, geography, or heritage. When Jeff Bezos bought The Washington Post in 2013 and promised to find inventive ways to make journalism profitable in the digital age, he seemed like a godsend. He wasn’t. The Leiden Collection—one of the largest private collections of Dutch art in the world—was conceived as a “lending library for Old Masters,” animated by the humanist spirit found in Rembrandt’s paintings. Free from the ArchivesIn the Review’s March 27, 2003, issue—one week after the United States military invaded Iraq—Tony Judt wrote about how George Bush’s cavalier charge into war would lead to the dissolution of the international order that had obtained since World War II. Whatever its merits and failures, Judt argued, the postwar order had fostered international cooperation based on “the memory of thirty calamitous years of war, depression, domestic tyranny, and international anarchy, as those who were present at its creation fully understood.” Absent such an accord, “the United States can go out and win not just the Mother of All Battles but a whole matriarchal dynasty of Desert Storms; it will inherit the wind—and worse besides.” It is thus a tragedy of historical proportions that America’s own leaders are today corroding and dissolving the links that bind the US to its closest allies in the international community. The US is about to make war on Iraq for reasons that remain obscure even to many of its own citizens. The war that they do understand, the war on terrorism, has been unconvincingly rolled into the charge sheet against one Arab tyrant. Washington is abuzz with big projects to redraw the map of the Middle East; meanwhile the true Middle Eastern crisis, in Israel and the Occupied Territories, has been subcontracted to Ariel Sharon.
New Subscriber Benefit!Subscribers are now able to share unlocked versions of our articles with friends, family, and social media channels. When signed in to your account, look for this gift box icon in any of our articles. To some cops and the unions that represent them, the federal invasions of American cities are a chance to undercut the already fraying democratic constraints on police power. Robert McNamara’s failure to reckon with the exceptionalism that led the United States into the Vietnam War contributed to fifty years of foreign policy failures. It can help us understand the crisis facing American democracy today. You are receiving this message because you signed up
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