This paper examines the representation of American everyday life and the language of the legal system in the work of Charles Reznikoff. It draws comparisons between Reznikoff's accounts of the lives of immigrants to America in his work, and Jacques Derrida's experience of colonial relationships as described in his book Monolingualism of the Other or The Prosthesis of Origin. Charles Reznikoff was the son of Russian Jews who moved to America to escape the pogroms of the late nineteenth century. His parents spoke Yiddish and Russian, his grandparents spoke Hebrew, and Reznikoff's first language was English. This familial linguistic complexity was further added to by his associations with experimental modernist poetry and poetics through the “Objectivists,” an environment that provided him with the poetic forms in which to explore relationships between language, experience and its representation. I cite two other linguistic contexts: that of the law, acquired through his legal training, and that of commerce and sales, acquired through working as a hat salesman for his parents' business. Reznikoff therefore had no naturalized relationship between language and either family or national identity, or between language and place. I use Derrida's notion of “a first language that is not my own” to explore the implications for Reznikoff's poetry, and particularly the relationship between the specific accounts of experience in Testimony and the more general notions of nation and justice. While I conclude that a concern of the poems is always language, and what language means in different contexts, the poems also seek to connect with the material consequences of injustice for the fleshly bodies of the victims.

As Samuel Eliot Morrison had done when he delivered the first Harmsworth lecture eighty-seven years ago, I, too, must begin with a Prologue. “Through the Prologue,” Professor Morrison told his audience, “the author endeavoured to establish a personal relation between himself and his audience, and to arouse their curiosity and interest in the play that followed.”1 I pray he is correct.

This essay examines the way that US secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld sought to apply one of the central lessons of the Vietnam War to the George W. Bush administration's War on Terror after 9/11. Following the disastrous withdrawal from Vietnam, Rumsfeld had argued that one of the major lessons to be taken forward was that, in future conflicts, the US needed to ensure that the war was portrayed to the public in a way that would ensure ongoing success. The way to do this, Rumsfeld subsequently averred, was to convey a message of perpetual, unstoppable, but not too rapid, progress; victory was at hand, but it would take some time to achieve. As part of this process, Rumsfeld developed an elaborate narrative based around a keyhole satellite picture of the Korean peninsula at night – one half, that of South Korea, bathed in the light of progress; the other, North Korea, nearly completely dark. This photo, Rumsfeld suggested, told you all you needed to know about the fact that the US would ultimately succeed in the War on Terror. In taking this approach, however, Rumsfeld unwittingly revealed an inherent contradiction that has continued to blight the administration of Barack Obama: that there is a very fine line between progress toward an inevitable endpoint of victory and progress toward a position whereby the US is able to withdraw. For Rumsfeld, progress was toward an endpoint of victory and it was only the change in political context after 2006 that derailed his attempts to set out this message; for Obama, on the other hand, progress has become a prerequisite for getting out of Afghanistan and Iraq.

This article examines the development of two distinct theories of American internationalism in the 1990s – the political humanitarianism of the liberal hawks and the unipolarism of the neoconservatives – and the fundamentally different and opposing grounds on which these two groups supported the 2003 Iraq War. The liberal hawks, however, failed almost completely to examine the motivations of the neoconservative architects of the “war on terror.” Instead, they imposed their own normative schema on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and campaigned for them as wars of liberation. Their almost total failure to engage with the intellectual origins of the war led them to accept uncritically the idealistic rhetoric of the President and to assume that the Bush administration and the neoconservatives were motivated by the same idealism and world view as they were themselves. This led them to dismiss critics of the war as opponents of liberal values. As the situation in Iraq worsened, they continued to view the war as a moral endeavour – just one that had gone wrong, as opposed to a war fought for strategic reasons in which nation building was never a priority.