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Published Thursday, March 23, 2007
Four years ago this week, "shock and awe" entered the American argot. Now, tolerance for the grim daily reports leaving Iraq seems to be reaching a nadir, as the reverberations of worldwide protests were felt in the halls of Congress. A different Beltway drama is playing out in the Supreme Court, where a student's free-speech case challenges a landmark 1969 First Amendment ruling that students do not "shed their constitutional rights… at the schoolhouse gate." Constitutional matters weighed on Egypt, too, as hasty amendments proposed by President Mubarak brought outrage from the opposition party. In Pakistan, General Musharraf's removal of his country's chief justice sparked nationwide riots.
Despite the disheartening news, there was also much to wonder at. The race to land the biggest bird in the sky, the Airbus A380, in the United States brought aerophiles to airstrips in Chicago and Los Angeles. And in Arizona, glass-bottomed tourism hit the roof some 3,000 feet above the Grand Canyon.
At the four-year mark of the United States' invasion of Iraq, thousands protested the war worldwide, and the ripple effect of the conflict was evident from Baghdad to Washington.
A new BBC poll showed decreasing optimism among Iraqis — and increased mistrust of US military personnel stationed in the country — while in neighboring countries a refugee crisis deepens, demanding international attention. Meanwhile, the Sunni insurgency unexpectedly proved a bigger threat than its Shiite counterpart in the aftermath of the US troop surge. And stateside, President Bush pushed for more patience from Americans as he fights legislation that would advocate for US troop withdrawals by 2008.
