Week of April 4, 2011

Libya is an outlier. It won’t be and can’t be a bellwether. Apart from enabling policymakers in Washington, London, and Paris to reclaim a sense of self-importance, Western intervention in Libya will have little effect on the drama now unfolding in the Middle East. Pundits can talk of the United States shaping history. The truth is that history is shaping itself, while we are left to bear witness.

[Paul] Ryan says his party is actually trying to “save Medicare [and] save Medicaid,” I know of at least one person who would be skeptical: Lyndon Johnson.

Military victory — to adapt Oscar Wilde — is rarely pure and never simple. The Allied triumph in Europe at the end of World War II was a case in point. The war and the Holocaust forced millions of civilians across national frontiers. Afterward, multitudes of ethnic Germans were expelled from Eastern Europe and many of the Jews in Poland fled from a new wave of persecution there. Those lucky enough to survive these migrations faced months and years in limbo as the authorities wrestled with the logistical, political and moral difficulties involved in returning them home — or in finding them a new one.