In 2003 I was asked to speak at Clemson University, James Dickey's alma mater, about his work as a poet and mine as a journalist. The speech was adapted afterward into this essay published by the Clemson University Press, but, I fear, no longer available on line.
I am re-posting now as we enter a new phase of war in the Middle East, the result of so many bad decisions that were apparent 16 years ago exacerbated, now, by the miscalculations of the current administration.
My apologies for the format. I hope to re-post shortly as a PDF.
Back in Paris ... Among the major world news stories of the last week, I wrote about the aftermath of the attack on Saudi Arabia's oil infrastructure, a hit claimed by the Houthis using Iranian missiles and drones. It was a clear act of war and the veil of deniability was mighty thin, but both the Saudis and Trump quickly realized they were in no position to respond in kind. So they took the opportunity afforded by Iran's denials to stall, if not indeed to hide, behind a bodyguard of lies.
What a long, troubling week. It began with Trump's tweets about Camp David accords with the Taliban that he planned to brand as a triumph, then called off before anybody had actually heard of them. And this just days before the anniversary of 9/11. Then came word that the CIA had had to exfiltrate one of its best-placed assets in the Kremlin in 2017, possibly because Trump has trouble keeping secrets. The White House headlines continued with the firing of John Bolton. And the week ended with Iran's Houthi clients staging a massive attack on Saudi oil facilities that cut the Kingdom's oil production in half, raising the prospects of a new Middle East war and hastening the slide toward global recession. I lost count of the number of times I went on MSNBC to talk about all this, so I'll just post here the articles I worked on, and links to a couple of appearances.
