Word: pentagon
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Today the fastest-rising practitioners of the sneak attack--what the Pentagon likes to call using "asymmetric warfare" to slip past America's vast military superiority--are fanatics pursuing hate. "The normal restraints on the use of violence don't apply to them," says Steven Simon, assistant director at London's International Institute for Strategic Studies. These kinds of terrorists, he says, "want a lot of people watching and a lot of people dead." More important, he adds, "they want God watching. That's why they don't care about claims of responsibility...
...intellectual significance who didn't submit to Buckley's leisurely sparring. He might open a show, as he did with Norman Mailer in 1967, like this: "I should like to begin by asking Mr. Mailer, who has been sentenced to five days in jail for a march on the Pentagon and is appealing on the grounds that he was sentenced because he is famous, to disclose whether he believes that artists should be immune from the harassments of the law." Geraldo couldn't even parse that sentence...
When this policy was first formulated in 1993, the Pentagon and Joint Chiefs of Staff justified it by saying the combat readiness of heterosexuals would be undermined by the presence of homosexual servicepeople. However, this implies some fundamental difference in ability between soldiers of different sexual orientations. Numerous gay soldiers have served with distinction in the armed forces, even while saddled with the added burden of keeping their sexual orientation secret. But as soon as the soldiers' homosexuality was revealed they were quickly discarged and their medals and honors were trampled over...
...heroic comrades but about average Americans and their everyday lives, he is working with much dryer clay. He is best when he is angry, not empathic. He blazes with indignation that 12,000 military families are on food stamps while Congress approves a $325 million aircraft carrier the Pentagon doesn't want. But when the subject turns to the dining-room-table issues that top every list of voter concerns--education, health care, moral values--McCain seems to lose some fire. In last week's debate, he took a question about how to fix HMOs--an issue as salient...
...Headlines, of course, tend to paint matters in black and white; the true picture of race relations in the American military is more one of half-full, half-empty. Although the Pentagon sat on the conclusions of the congressionally mandated race report for two years, grappling with how to present it to the public, the news it contained was not all bad. A high percentage of minority respondents reported that race relations have improved in the military in the past five years. And while twice as many minority respondents as white feel the military isn't doing enough to address...