<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1" ?><rss version="2.0"><channel><title>washingtonpost.com - Anne Applebaum</title><link>http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/opinion/columns/applebaumanne?nav=rss_opinion/columns/applebaumanne</link><description>Anne Applebaum</description><language>en-us</language><ttl>15</ttl><image><title>washingtonpost.com</title><width>140</width><height>20</height><link>http://www.washingtonpost.com</link><url>http://media.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/hp/image/wp_web.gif</url></image><item><title><![CDATA[. . . Starting Among the 'Christophobes']]></title><link>http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A2948-2005Apr19.html?nav=rss_opinion/columns/applebaumanne</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A2948-2005Apr19.html?nav=rss_opinion/columns/applebaumanne</guid><pubDate>Sat, 23 Apr 2005 12:27:21 GMT</pubDate><description><![CDATA[  After the dust has settled  --  after the processions are over and the Masses have been said, after the new pope has accustomed himself to new apartments, new tasks, new vestments  --  Benedict XVI will face an extraordinary list of problems, ranging from the bioethical to the geopolitical. But for this German pope, among his toughest tasks by far will be the battle for acceptance on the continent of his birth.]]></description><author> Anne Applebaum</author></item><item><title><![CDATA[The Drug Approval Pendulum]]></title><link>http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A48135-2005Apr12.html?nav=rss_opinion/columns/applebaumanne</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A48135-2005Apr12.html?nav=rss_opinion/columns/applebaumanne</guid><pubDate>Sat, 23 Apr 2005 12:27:21 GMT</pubDate><description><![CDATA[ <em> "It just breaks my heart when I think of American citizens having to go to Switzerland or Mexico to get the drugs and devices they need to stay alive because the Washington bureaucracy won't approve them." </em>]]></description><author> Anne Applebaum</author></item><item><title><![CDATA[How the Pope 'Defeated Communism']]></title><link>http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A28398-2005Apr5.html?nav=rss_opinion/columns/applebaumanne</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A28398-2005Apr5.html?nav=rss_opinion/columns/applebaumanne</guid><pubDate>Sat, 23 Apr 2005 12:27:21 GMT</pubDate><description><![CDATA[  If you've been watching  television or reading  newspapers at all over the past week, it would have been difficult not to learn that the late Pope John Paul II helped "defeat" communism. The pope has been said to have "sparked the fall of communism," to have "stared down communism" or to have "championed communism's collapse." Some give him only partial credit: "Pope, Reagan  collaborated to halt communism," read one headline. Others make it sound as if he actually manned the barricades, describing him as the pope who "helped overthrow communism."]]></description><author> Anne Applebaum</author></item><item><title><![CDATA[How We Die: Choice and Chance]]></title><link>http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A11308-2005Mar29.html?nav=rss_opinion/columns/applebaumanne</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A11308-2005Mar29.html?nav=rss_opinion/columns/applebaumanne</guid><pubDate>Sat, 23 Apr 2005 12:27:21 GMT</pubDate><description><![CDATA[  No matter how you ask the question, most people  --  right-wing, left-wing, atheist, religious  --  will tell you that they don't want to die like Terri Schiavo. That is, they don't want to spend their final days in a hospital, tied up to a machine, unable to feed themselves, unable to speak. Nine out of 10 Americans have told Gallup pollsters that they don't want to die in an institution. Another poll found that 82 percent of Americans would, upon being told they had very little time to live, prefer simply to go home: They want to die in their own beds, surrounded by family, in a setting that feels natural.]]></description><author> Anne Applebaum</author></item><item><title><![CDATA[Writing Women Into a Corner]]></title><link>http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A38563-2005Mar15.html?nav=rss_opinion/columns/applebaumanne</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A38563-2005Mar15.html?nav=rss_opinion/columns/applebaumanne</guid><pubDate>Sat, 23 Apr 2005 12:27:21 GMT</pubDate><description><![CDATA[   This week I had planned to write a column about Sinn Fein, the political front organization for the Irish Republican Army, whose leaders have recently been linked to acts of murder and grand larceny. I chose the subject because I wrote often about the IRA while living in Britain in the 1990s, because I've worked as a reporter in Belfast, because it's timely  --  tomorrow is St. Patrick's Day  --  and because there might be lessons in the story for Hamas and Hezbollah, terrorist groups that may or may not be able to make the transition to democratic politics as well.]]></description><author> Anne Applebaum</author></item><item><title><![CDATA[Defending Bolton]]></title><link>http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A18706-2005Mar8.html?nav=rss_opinion/columns/applebaumanne</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A18706-2005Mar8.html?nav=rss_opinion/columns/applebaumanne</guid><pubDate>Sat, 23 Apr 2005 12:27:21 GMT</pubDate><description><![CDATA[   For the record, let me begin by repeating a few quotes from John Bolton, newly nominated as ambassador to the United Nations, just so that no one can accuse me of naivete. He has said,   "The Secretariat building in New York has 38 stories. If it lost ten stories, it wouldn't make a bit of difference." He has said that "wishful thinking about the United Nations . . . ran into a wall of reality in Kosovo." He has been skeptical of U.N. peacekeeping operations, skeptical of the U.S. obligation to pay its U.N. dues, skeptical of just about everything, really, to do with the United Nations.]]></description><author> Anne Applebaum</author></item><item><title><![CDATA[Snow Daze]]></title><link>http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A64392-2005Mar1.html?nav=rss_opinion/columns/applebaumanne</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A64392-2005Mar1.html?nav=rss_opinion/columns/applebaumanne</guid><pubDate>Sat, 23 Apr 2005 12:27:21 GMT</pubDate><description><![CDATA[  As it happens, I was awake on Monday at 5 a.m., the time when Washington area school superintendents decide whether a weather emergency is so severe that school must be canceled. I looked out the window. It wasn't snowing. When the alarm went off at 7, it still wasn't snowing, so I began getting my children ready for school. At 7:27 a.m., when it was still not snowing, I decided, just in case, to check the Montgomery County schools Web site -- and the rest is history. School was canceled. Everywhere. Clearly, none of the school superintendents were looking out the window.]]></description><author> Anne Applebaum</author></item><item><title><![CDATA[Missing The Point At Harvard]]></title><link>http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A45574-2005Feb22.html?nav=rss_opinion/columns/applebaumanne</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A45574-2005Feb22.html?nav=rss_opinion/columns/applebaumanne</guid><pubDate>Sat, 23 Apr 2005 12:27:21 GMT</pubDate><description><![CDATA[   From a general, human-interest perspective, I suppose it is exciting when the Harvard faculty gangs up on the Harvard president, as the Harvard faculty ganged up on Larry Summers yesterday -- illustrating again the old saw about the emotions in academic battles running so high precisely because the stakes are so low.]]></description><author> Anne Applebaum</author></item><item><title><![CDATA[Shadow of the Files]]></title><link>http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A27624-2005Feb15.html?nav=rss_opinion/columns/applebaumanne</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A27624-2005Feb15.html?nav=rss_opinion/columns/applebaumanne</guid><pubDate>Sat, 23 Apr 2005 12:27:21 GMT</pubDate><description><![CDATA[   WARSAW -- For the past 15 years, every time I've returned to Warsaw -- a city I first saw shrouded in the gloom of martial law -- I've been surprised anew by the scale of the changes. Every year there are more new buildings and more small businesses. Every year the middle class seems larger, and the once-vast gap between the average Pole and the average European seems smaller. Last week was no exception. While I was there, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was also in Warsaw, while the Polish president, Aleksander Kwasniewski, was in Washington -- and nobody made a fuss about either visit. Business as usual, in other words, in an ex-communist country that is now an active member of NATO and the European Union.]]></description><author> Anne Applebaum</author></item><item><title><![CDATA['Remembering' Philip Johnson]]></title><link>http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A55664-2005Feb1.html?nav=rss_opinion/columns/applebaumanne</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A55664-2005Feb1.html?nav=rss_opinion/columns/applebaumanne</guid><pubDate>Sat, 23 Apr 2005 12:27:21 GMT</pubDate><description><![CDATA[  When Kurt Waldheim, a former U.N. secretary general, was found in 1986 to have served in a German military unit that may have committed wartime atrocities, his reputation was ruined. Although elected president of Austria, he was forbidden to visit the United States. Shunned by the international community, he eventually dropped out of politics.]]></description><author> Anne Applebaum</author></item><item><title><![CDATA[A Test on 'Tyranny']]></title><link>http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A36711-2005Jan25.html?nav=rss_opinion/columns/applebaumanne</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A36711-2005Jan25.html?nav=rss_opinion/columns/applebaumanne</guid><pubDate>Sat, 23 Apr 2005 12:27:21 GMT</pubDate><description><![CDATA[   <em>"We were blindfolded and our hands were tied behind our backs. . . . They made me sit on the floor. When I tried to speak, they said 'Are you here to talk? Shut up, you are a terrorist. Just confess to being one of the Mahdi Army.' They poured cold water over me and applied electric shocks to my genitals. I was also beaten by several people with cables on my arms and back."</em>]]></description><author> Anne Applebaum</author></item><item><title><![CDATA[Only a Game?]]></title><link>http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A19404-2005Jan18.html?nav=rss_opinion/columns/applebaumanne</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A19404-2005Jan18.html?nav=rss_opinion/columns/applebaumanne</guid><pubDate>Sat, 23 Apr 2005 12:27:21 GMT</pubDate><description><![CDATA[  It is 9 a.m. Eastern Standard Time. You are the president of the United States, or the chancellor of Germany, or the British prime minister. You switch on the news and learn that three members of a Turkish family, recently arrived in Munich, have been diagnosed with smallpox. Across Europe, there are rumors of further outbreaks. You know that smallpox has been eradicated in nature and that its appearance can only signal a  terrorist attack. You know that a few cases will quickly multiply, killing one out of three victims. What do you do?]]></description><author> Anne Applebaum</author></item><item><title><![CDATA[The Torture Myth]]></title><link>http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A2302-2005Jan11.html?nav=rss_opinion/columns/applebaumanne</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A2302-2005Jan11.html?nav=rss_opinion/columns/applebaumanne</guid><pubDate>Sat, 23 Apr 2005 12:27:21 GMT</pubDate><description><![CDATA[Just for a moment, let's pretend that there is no moral, legal or constitutional problem with torture. Let's also imagine a clear-cut case: a terrorist who knows where bombs are about to explode in Iraq. To stop him, it seems that a wide range of Americans would be prepared to endorse "cruel and unusual" methods. In advance of confirmation hearings for Attorney General-designate Alberto Gonzales last week, the Wall Street Journal argued that such scenarios must be debated, since "what's at stake in this controversy is nothing less than the ability of U.S. forces to interrogate enemies who want to murder innocent civilians." Alan Dershowitz, the liberal legal scholar, has argued in the past that interrogators in such a case should get a "torture warrant" from a judge. Both of these arguments rest on an assumption: that torture -- defined as physical pressure during interrogation -- can be used to extract useful information.]]></description><author> Anne Applebaum</author></item><item><title><![CDATA[Does the Right Remember Abu Ghraib?]]></title><link>http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A48618-2005Jan4.html?nav=rss_opinion/columns/applebaumanne</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A48618-2005Jan4.html?nav=rss_opinion/columns/applebaumanne</guid><pubDate>Sat, 23 Apr 2005 12:27:21 GMT</pubDate><description><![CDATA[  During the past eight months there have been many news cycles, many front-page stories, many events. There have been elections. There have been hurricanes and tidal waves. Nevertheless, in the grand scheme of things, eight months is not a very long time. In most of the world, something that happened eight months ago is considered "recent." In Washington, however, it seems that eight months ago is considered "ancient." How else to explain the nomination of Alberto Gonzales to the post of attorney general of the United States?]]></description><author> Anne Applebaum</author></item><item><title><![CDATA[Russia's Last Stand]]></title><link>http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A130-2004Dec14.html?nav=rss_opinion/columns/applebaumanne</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A130-2004Dec14.html?nav=rss_opinion/columns/applebaumanne</guid><pubDate>Sat, 23 Apr 2005 12:27:21 GMT</pubDate><description><![CDATA[  MOSCOW -- She had just turned 18. She was a freshman at a small American college. In flawless English, she explained that she was home for Christmas, visiting her family in Moscow. We spoke about how much her city had changed in the  past decade, about the new shops, about how many Muscovites now travel abroad. Then, because we were stuck in Moscow traffic and had run out of small talk, I asked her what she thought about recent events in Ukraine. "We're really upset about it," she said. At first I thought she meant that she and her family were upset because the Russian government had helped the Ukrainian government try to steal the election. But in fact, they were upset because they thought Ukraine might leave Russia's sphere of influence. "If all of these countries around us join NATO and the European Union, Russia will be isolated," she said. "We must prevent that from happening."]]></description><author> Anne Applebaum</author></item><item><title><![CDATA[The Freedom Haters]]></title><link>http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A23721-2004Nov30.html?nav=rss_opinion/columns/applebaumanne</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A23721-2004Nov30.html?nav=rss_opinion/columns/applebaumanne</guid><pubDate>Sat, 23 Apr 2005 12:27:21 GMT</pubDate><description><![CDATA[   Just in case anyone actually thought that all of those people waving flags on the streets of Kiev represent authentic Ukrainian sentiments, the London Guardian informed its readers otherwise last week. In an article titled "US campaign behind the turmoil in Kiev," the newspaper described the events of the past 10 days as "an American creation, a sophisticated and brilliantly conceived exercise in western branding and mass marketing." In a separate article, the same paper described the whole episode as a "postmodern coup d'etat" and a "CIA-sponsored third world uprising of cold war days, adapted to post-Soviet conditions."]]></description><author> Anne Applebaum</author></item><item><title><![CDATA[The New Iron Curtain]]></title><link>http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A8881-2004Nov23.html?nav=rss_opinion/columns/applebaumanne</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A8881-2004Nov23.html?nav=rss_opinion/columns/applebaumanne</guid><pubDate>Sat, 23 Apr 2005 12:27:21 GMT</pubDate><description><![CDATA[Before the election, the government mobilized groups of thugs to harass voters. On the day of the election, police prevented thousands of opposition activists from voting at all. Nevertheless, when the votes were counted, it was clear that the opposition had won by a large margin. As a result, the ruling party decided to falsify the result, and declared victory. Immediately, the Russians sent their fraternal congratulations.]]></description><author> Anne Applebaum</author></item><item><title><![CDATA[In ATMs, Not Votes,  We Trust]]></title><link>http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A55691-2004Nov16.html?nav=rss_opinion/columns/applebaumanne</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A55691-2004Nov16.html?nav=rss_opinion/columns/applebaumanne</guid><pubDate>Sat, 23 Apr 2005 12:27:21 GMT</pubDate><description><![CDATA[   When the ATM asks whether I want a receipt, I usually say no. When a Web site wants my credit card number, I usually say yes. When I pay bills online, there is no paper record of the transaction. In my failure to demand physical evidence when money changes hands, I am not very unusual. Most Americans now conduct at least some of their financial transactions without paper, or at least sleep happily knowing that others do. Yet when it comes to voting -- a far simpler and more straightforward activity than electronic bank transfers -- we suddenly become positively 19th century in our need for a physical record.]]></description><author> Anne Applebaum</author></item><item><title><![CDATA[A German Lesson for Remaking Iraq]]></title><link>http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A38237-2004Nov9.html?nav=rss_opinion/columns/applebaumanne</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A38237-2004Nov9.html?nav=rss_opinion/columns/applebaumanne</guid><pubDate>Sat, 23 Apr 2005 12:27:21 GMT</pubDate><description><![CDATA[   Yesterday Germans celebrated the 15th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Or, to put it differently, yesterday Germans marked 15 years of what has been the most peaceful, most comfortable, most orderly transition from totalitarianism to democracy ever -- the polar opposite of the transition now taking place (if it is taking place) in Iraq. There was no violence, no unrest. There was no looting or pillaging.]]></description><author> Anne Applebaum</author></item><item><title><![CDATA[Accept the Verdict]]></title><link>http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A21057-2004Nov3.html?nav=rss_opinion/columns/applebaumanne</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A21057-2004Nov3.html?nav=rss_opinion/columns/applebaumanne</guid><pubDate>Sat, 23 Apr 2005 12:27:21 GMT</pubDate><description><![CDATA[   Unlike 99.9 percent of the nation, I didn't think that yesterday's election represented a choice between good and evil. When I pressed the little button on the touch-screen voting machine, I did not do so feeling that the defeat of my chosen candidate would signify the onset of Armageddon. Regardless of the outcome, I knew I would neither be elated nor plunged into despair.]]></description><author> Anne Applebaum</author></item></channel></rss>
