Week of Jan. 21, 2008

The great Italian historian, Arnoldo Momigliano, could, his admirers said, make history"out of two used bus tickets" . Patrick Wright can not only do the same; he proves that the litter, the ruins, the rusty old vehicles of the past are our most trustworthy records of the heap of hope, deathliness and mendacity which is history. What's more, he adduces such proofs in some of the most vigorous, ironic and generous-hearted prose of any historian of our day.

When you're a historian focusing on politics, like I was, you just don't really care about houses. There's almost a culture of dismissiveness — there are house historians and then there are real historians. But I had a kind of awakening when I was working on this book — if you don't know the setting, you don't know the people. It really hit home for me.

It is virtually impossible to overstate the profligacy of what our government spends on the military. The Department of Defense's planned expenditures for fiscal year 2008 are larger than all other nations' military budgets combined. The supplementary budget to pay for the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, not part of the official defense budget, is itself larger than the combined military budgets of Russia and China. Defense-related spending for fiscal 2008 will exceed $1 trillion for the first time in history. The United States has become the largest single salesman of arms and munitions to other nations on Earth. Leaving out of account President Bush's two on-going wars, defense spending has doubled since the mid-1990s. The defense budget for fiscal 2008 is the largest since World War II.

"Iraq floats over two seas; one is oil and the other is antiquities," said Abdul Zahra Talaqani, media director for Iraq's Ministry of State for Tourism and Archaeology."The American forces, when they entered, they protected all the oil wells and the Ministry of Oil . . . but the American forces paid no attention to Iraq's heritage."

Ronald Reagan Is Still Dead