ICYRMI: Six online classics of 21st century history

"ICYMI" generally refers to something written a day or a week ago.  In recent days, I've had recourse several times to Michael Hastings' deeply reported 2012 reconstruction of Bowe Bendahl's upbringing, inner life and military career -- as well as of the negotiations for his release. It would be a mistake to suggest that everything most of us are learning now about Bendahl is in that story, but my sense is that 80 percent of it is.

That set me thinking this morning about other articles, written years ago but still online, that made a strong impression on me and that still resonate. Here's a short "in case your really missed it" list.

America's Sicilian Expedition: in the runup to the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, pundits and scholars analogized the impending war to every conflict in American history, with the possible exception of the War of 1812. Some went further afield. One that struck me as a bit outlandish at the time was historian Simon Schama's essay raising the specter of ancient Athens' disastrous exercise in imperial overreach:

Prophets of the new millennium

A stray link took me back in time and made me think of various chilling prophecies uttered when the millennium was young. Read them and weep.

1. February 2, 2000 

So how can those reasonable men advising George Bush think that he can offer $1.3 trillion in tax cuts? Assuming that they are neither planning to raid Social Security nor counting on favorable revenue surprises to save them (unfavorable surprises are, of course, out of the question), they must have in mind a sharp scaling back of government programs.

Noughty and nice

Mein Gott but the zeitgeist is sour. Paul Krugman has (already famously) dubbed the decade past "the big zero" -- "the decade in which we achieved nothing and learned nothing." Simon Schama looks back cheerfully on "the book-ending of the decade by two immense calamities--mayhem and meltdown, mass murder...and mass unemployment."  Transported by the irrational exuberance of his own eloquence, Schama paints an almost gleeful picture of Dystopia Now:

Give me a sceptic and I will take him to Shanghai or São Paulo on a day of ripe smog and see how sceptical he remains while coughing his guts into a mask and peering at brown sunlight as if through a dome of begrimed glass. Lake Baikal is a saline puddle and the Sahara is heading for Timbuktu. If the earth is not yet in its terminal death rattle, it sure ain’t looking good. Population pressure on shrinking and degraded resources in the poorest parts of the world is unrelenting and no mega-city – Lagos, Caracas, Rio, Mumbai – is without its mountain range of trash on which humans can be seen like skeletal goats picking over the black plastic for something to eat. Along with drought and famine, pandemics have returned: in which, like some as yet unwritten scripture, the animal kingdom – avian, porcine, bovine – is a bellwether of human perishability.

All of which seems to put the nail in the coffin of a collective optimism born 200 years ago, when the Enlightenment envisioned a world illuminated by reason, banishing the afflictions of ignorance, poverty, war and disease. hat the arch-prophet of this smiley-faced secularism, the Marquis de Condorcet, perished while imprisoned by French revolutionary authorities should have told us something.

Whew. Well, key up the guillotine for Condorcet Jr. -- that is, me, a.k.a. Pollyanna the Fukuyaman, giving way to a fit of knee-jerk contrarian optimism. I'm used to this.  My poor mother (born in 1933 and still commuting to Manhattan 3x a week) witnessed the crumbling of WTC Tower #2 with her own eyes on 9/11. I've been trying to convince her ever since that humanity remains on an upward trajectory, that the Soviet Union was a more dangerous adversary than al Qaeda, etc. etc.  So for what it's worth, a reality check on the last decade: