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Today in The New York Review of Books: David Cole and Joost Hiltermann decry Trump’s war in Iran; separately, Cole asks how universities can pursue diversity now that the Supreme Court has struck down most affirmative action programs; Robert G. Kaiser mourns Jeff Bezos’s decimation of The Washington Post; Ruth Bernard Yeazell looks at a collection of the old Dutch masters; and, from the archives, Tony Judt in 2003 on Bush’s war in Iraq, a “tragedy of historical proportions.”

David Cole
The Lie of ‘Preventive’ War

Never has Donald Trump’s willful blindness to legal limits been more evident than in his decision to start a war with Iran.

Joost Hiltermann
Fool’s Errands

What will come of the US igniting yet another war in the Middle East?

David Cole
Diversity by Other Means

Progressives may have lost the battle for racial affirmative action, but ironically, Supreme Court decisions should allow colleges to give advantage to groups defined by their income, geography, or heritage.

Robert G. Kaiser
Post Mortem

When Jeff Bezos bought The Washington Post in 2013 and promised to find inventive ways to make journalism profitable in the digital age, he seemed like a godsend. He wasn’t.

Ruth Bernard Yeazell
Rembrandt’s DNA

The Leiden Collection—one of the largest private collections of Dutch art in the world—was conceived as a “lending library for Old Masters,” animated by the humanist spirit found in Rembrandt’s paintings.

Free from the Archives

In the Review’s March 27, 2003, issue—one week after the United States military invaded Iraq—Tony Judt wrote about how George Bush’s cavalier charge into war would lead to the dissolution of the international order that had obtained since World War II. Whatever its merits and failures, Judt argued, the postwar order had fostered international cooperation based on “the memory of thirty calamitous years of war, depression, domestic tyranny, and international anarchy, as those who were present at its creation fully understood.” Absent such an accord, “the United States can go out and win not just the Mother of All Battles but a whole matriarchal dynasty of Desert Storms; it will inherit the wind—and worse besides.”

Tony Judt
The Way We Live Now

It is thus a tragedy of historical proportions that America’s own leaders are today corroding and dissolving the links that bind the US to its closest allies in the international community. The US is about to make war on Iraq for reasons that remain obscure even to many of its own citizens. The war that they do understand, the war on terrorism, has been unconvincingly rolled into the charge sheet against one Arab tyrant. Washington is abuzz with big projects to redraw the map of the Middle East; meanwhile the true Middle Eastern crisis, in Israel and the Occupied Territories, has been subcontracted to Ariel Sharon.

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Stuart Schrader
Authoritarianism from Below

To some cops and the unions that represent them, the federal invasions of American cities are a chance to undercut the already fraying democratic constraints on police power.

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An American Reckoning

Robert McNamara’s failure to reckon with the exceptionalism that led the United States into the Vietnam War contributed to fifty years of foreign policy failures. It can help us understand the crisis facing American democracy today.

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