BELGRADE, Serbia -- The arrest of the wartime Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, charged in the worst massacre since World War II, was an unlikely yet radical transformation in a country that had appeared to be headed on a path toward virulent nationalism and isolation." -- The New York Times, July 23, 2008
WASHINGTON -- When Bronislaw Geremek was tragically killed in a car crash in Poland in mid-July, most Americans did not recognize his name. Geremek, who? Bronislaw, what? Oh yes, we do know where Poland is -- more or less.
WASHINGTON -- This presidential campaign is so ungodly long that, every few weeks or so, it seems that we enter an entirely new phase. In roughly the last two weeks, we have found ourselves in a phase that I call "the candidates as men of war."
WASHINGTON -- In many years of witnessing the faces of men and women in anguishing pain, I cannot recall a face that better exemplified the ultimate in misery than that of Ingrid Betancourt's last week in Colombia. I also cannot remember one that, in the very next moment, better characterized an almost biblical expression of joy.
WASHINGTON -- As the Fourth of July approached that summer of 1826, John Adams, the second president of the United States and designer of American constitutionalism, lay dying in his Massachusetts home.
WASHINGTON -- It was supposed to be Iraq that was threatened. For at least the last five years, it was assumed by the best American analysts that the strange and ominous tribal warfare at the heart of that historically troubled country would inevitably "do it in."
WASHINGTON -- When I visited the British colony of Rhodesia in 1979 before it gained its much longed-for independence as Zimbabwe -- an independence that has today virtually destroyed it -- it was, even then, not difficult to hear ominous musings about the independence leader and soon-to-be president, Robert Mugabe.