I looked in the index of Ms. Faludi's book on Amazon and found several references to Jessica Lynch, but none to Leigh Ann Hester and Ashley Pullen, the Kentucky Army National Guard MPs decorated for their valor in a fire fight south of Baghdad in 2005, or to Kim "Killer Chick" Campbell, the USAF pilot who successfully landed her shot-up A-10 after a combat mission over Iraq in 2003, or to Sarah Piro, the Kiowa Warrior pilot profiled in the Washington Post in 2006, or to Tammy Duckworth, the seriously wounded former Black Hawk pilot who ran for Congress in Illinois in 2006. Nor, for that matter, to Eileen Collins, the retired Air Force pilot who in 2005 commanded the first shuttle mission flown after the loss of the Columbia (her fourth shuttle flight, and second as mission commander). The stories of these women are part of American culture post-9/11, though perhaps not in ways easily recognized by contemporary "cultural studies."

Rebecca Traister writes of "America's role in the attacks," which puzzles me, since I recall the September 11 attacks as being carried out by 19 foreigners, acting as part of a foreign terrorist organization.

Although common sense precludes arguing with paranoids, especially those who are paranoid regarding Jews, an earlier letter writer called the Israeli nuclear arsenal "illegal," which is incorrect. Like India and Pakistan, and unlike Iran and North Korea, Israel has never signed the non-proliferation treaty, and thus did not violate it by developing nuclear weapons (you cannot violate a treaty you are not a party to). Nor is Israel currently violating the Symington Amendment, since it is not receiving nuclear weapons technology from other states, nor sharing it with other countries.

The problem with the Follath article is that it is too focused on the personalities of two current leaders. Deep concern about the dangers of a nuclear Iran is widespread among the Israeli political establishment, and deep hostility toward Israel, Zionism, and Jews is widespread among the Iranian political establishment.

So all Iran has to do is tear up the NPT and everyone will leave it alone to develop nuclear weapons (which all 16 US Intel Agencies agree isn't happening anyway)

Your confidence in the US intelligence community exceeds mine.

just like everyone left perfect Israel alone to develop it's nuclear weapons.

The Kennedy administration tried to stop Israel from developing nuclear weapons, but for various reasons LBJ didn't exert the same pressure.

The apologists will mention Israel nukes and Democracy in the same breath, absurd, just ask Vanunu.

Did the US cease being a democracy when the federal government executed the Rosenbergs?

In 1959 Norway agreed to sell Israel heavy water for its reactor at Dimona. It's true that, at the insistence of the Norwegian foreign ministry, the agreement pledged Israel not to use the HW for military purposes and gave Norway the right to monitor its use through inspection. What also seems clear is that the director of the Norwegian Institute for Atomic Energy, who set up the deal, knew that Dimona was being built to produce plutonium for nuclear weapons. As it turned out, the HW Israel received had been sold to the UK in 1956 but was no longer needed by the British, who happily sold 20 tons of it back to Norway on paper and then shipped it straight to Israel in 1959-60.

In any case, the Norwegians never seemed to have asked to make any inspections until the late 1980s. Rather than submit to an inspection, Israel agreed to ship 10.5 tons of HW back to Norway, which it (disingenuously) claimed was all that remained of the 20 tons it had purchased in 1959.

So yes, Israel violated its 1959 agreement with Norway, but this agreement had nothing to do with the 1968 Nuclear Proliferation Treaty, nor does it make Israel's nuclear weapons "illegal." And the US was never a formal party to the 1959 Israel-Norway agreement.

Earl Warren was elected as governor of California in 1942, 1946, and 1950 as a Republican; in 1946 he also won the Democratic primary for governor. He was the Republican vice-presidential candidate in 1948, and a "favorite son" candidate for president as the 1952 Republican convention; his eventual support for Eisenhower at the convention probably contributed to his nomination as chief justice the following year.

While researching his book The Fall of Berlin, the British historian Antony Beevor found numerous reports in the Russian archives of Red Army soldiers raping women from the USSR who had been deported to Germany for forced labor. Red Army soldiers also raped Yugoslav women in Serbia; when a Yugoslav Communist leader brought this to Stalin's attention, he rhetorically asked "what is so awful in his [i.e., a soldier in the Red Army] having fun with a woman ...?"

Accordingly, I don't think the desire for vengeance (not "payback," for goodness sakes) is the only explanation (and to try to explain is certainly not to justify) for the sexual violence of Soviet soldiers in 1945.