Music, for me, was something I did because I was disillusioned after the Cold War's end and did not know what I wanted in life.
The Great War was a progressive revelation and disillusionment.
No person can escape Einsteinian relativity, and no soldier or veteran can escape the trauma of war's dislocation.
The United States has tried for years to live down President Franklin D. Roosevelt's order during World War II to move Japanese-Americans on the West Coast to inland detention camps on grounds that they might be disloyal.
The men who made the war were profuse in their praises of the man who kicked the P.M. out of his office and now degrades by his disloyal, dishonest and lying presence the greatest office in the State.
Iraq made commitments after the Gulf War to completely dismantle all weapons of mass destruction, and unfortunately, Iraq has not lived up to its agreement.
Since the end of the Cold War two main nuclear powers have begun to make big reductions in their nuclear arsenals. Each of them is dismantling about 2,000 nuclear warheads a year.
Jewish fundamentalism is teaching that Jews can fight with guns and with civil war, against being relocated off the West Bank, and disobey the orders of their government. That is the call to jihad, to several kinds of jihad.
My younger brother's death in Vietnam was both sobering and cause for reflection. In 'Fallen Angels' I wanted to dispel the notion of war as either romantic or simplistically heroic.
We had better dispense with the personification of evil, because it leads, all too easily, to the most dangerous kind of war: religious war.
No one has the right to ignite a war and lead an occupation and armies to conquer people, invading them and make them suffer all kinds of torture, murder, expulsion, displacement, bombing and terrorism by different lethal prohibited weapons and then come and speak as the savior of the people or a defender of their rights.
Having been raised during the war, I know very well how childhood hampered by displacement, poverty, violence, and fear looks like.
The cultural war of words has actually been won by the most dispossessed people in the Western world, the urban American blacks.
If you're against war, you're against war regardless of what happens. It's a wrong method of trying to settle a dispute.
Mexico attacked United States troops in 1846 because they had moved into disputed border territory; President James Polk used this as a convenient casus belli, but he was preparing a war message for Congress even before the attack.
China invaded India, and there was a war between India and China in some of the disputed terrain in 1962, and India got hurt by that.
I'd finished a dissertation, writing about how international humanitarian organizations worked with kids in war zones and then I made this transition from the academic world to officer candidate school and to the SEAL teams. It was one of the best decisions I ever made in my life.
If I took the 40 years of my dad talking to me about war and battles and taking me to battlefields and distilled it down into one question, it would probably be the idea of the necessary or unnecessary war.
Edelman diversified into public affairs in the late '60s with important programs for the Concorde SST, gaining landing rights at JFK Airport in New York, and in the late '70s generating public approval for the building of the very stark Vietnam Veterans War Memorial in Washington, D.C., from a design by the very young architect Maya Lin.
But the central point is that any campaign against Iraq, whatever the strategy, cost and risks, is certain to divert us for some indefinite period from our war on terrorism.
