The Usual Suspect
The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy
By John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 484 pp., $26)
In October 2002, Osama bin Laden issued a statement in which he analyzed America's inexhaustible number of sins and prescribed ways of repenting for many of them. The statement was, by the standards of bin Laden's cave encyclicals, unusually coherent. (Unlike, say, his most recent video, released in early September, which ranged across the sub-prime mortgage crisis, America's high rate of taxation, and the work of Noam Chomsky--the latter treated sympathetically, of course.) The 2002 letter laid out in a somewhat deliberate fashion bin Laden's main complaints, and it helped to answer a question that Americans often ask: Do they hate us for who we are, or for what we do?
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Lagos Diarist: Fixed
Midway through bellview Airlines Flight 204 from Abuja to Lagos, Nigeria--shortly after a delightful in-flight lunch of warm fish-paste sandwiches--our pilot made the following announcement: "Now is speaking Captain Popovich. Weather outside plane is nice. Weather in Lagos also nice. Soon we land Murtala Muhammed Airport." Captain Popovich was a Serb, and a Serb of few words. He was also, I would soon see, a Serb with bloodshot eyes, a three-day growth of beard, and a shirt held together by an inch of thread and a gallon of sweat. But neither his appearance nor his taciturnity could dampen my excitement as we approached what is possibly the worst airport in the world.
Millions of Americans who have never left the United States are familiar with Murtala Muhammed: until recently, the FAA required U.S. airports to post notices at all security checkpoints warning travelers that the airport was extremely unsafe. And, for a long time, it was: corruption was said to be universal--everyone from customs officers to desk agents was looking for shakedowns, and passengers risked being robbed outside, or even inside, the terminal.
Popovich brought us in low--disconcertingly low--over Lagos and wrestled his DC-9 to the ground. This was a moment of great joy, because our plane was by all appearances the oldest DC-9 in the world and, paradoxically, a virgin to mechanical inspection.
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Jerusalem Dispatch: Unorthodox Riot
The border policeman gives me a hard push to the chest and then answers my question. "Of course I'm Jewish," he says. He has pushed me into an old woman, who loses her Hebrew prayer book and her balance. Beside me, a reporter falls to the ground and is stepped on by the police. It is the evening of Tishah b'Av at the Western Wall, and Jewish policemen, by order of the Jewish government of Benjamin Netanyahu, are shoving and beating a group of Conservative Jews off the Western Wall Plaza. It is like a Jewish soccer riot.
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Cash and Carey: More Trouble with the Teamsters
One day this past January, in a closet-sized room in a Washington office building, an obscure Teamster named John Murphy stumbled upon a startling document. The document revealed the existence of an organization called Teamsters for a Corruption-Free Union--an organization that, in the fullness of time, would be shown to count no Teamsters as members and to be unfree of corruption itself. The document had been filed with federal officials in the waning days of last year's tumultuous Teamster election, which pitted incumbent President Ron Carey--the man reputed to have rid the Teamsters of mobsters--against James P. Hoffa--son of the famously corrupt and presumably deceased union boss.
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Smoke Alarm: Death of Home Rule
I am reading an open letter slipped under my door by our neighborhood commissioner, a woman named Beth Kravetz. In the letter she reports on the local fire station at Tenley Circle on Wisconsin Avenue. The station is home to a pumper and a hook-and-ladder truck that cover a good stretch of predominantly white, mostly affluent Northwest Washington, D.C.
She writes that "true to the spirit of self-reliance," a group is forming in the virtual suburb surrounding American University to collect donations for the firehouse: among the items needed are three shower heads, eleven pillows, forty gym lockers, three space heaters, a dishwasher, three wall clocks, five air conditioners and four refrigerators.
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Prisoners
