Berlin Wall

WASHINGTON -- I've spent the last six weeks traveling around the Arab-Muslim world, talking with people about Sept. 11 and U.S.-Muslim relations. So I didn't know whether to laugh or cry when I got home and read that the Pentagon was considering putting out false stories that might advance America's anti-terrorism campaign. I didn't know whether to laugh or cry, because if you spend five minutes in the Arab-Muslim world these days, you'll instantly discover that people there don't believe us when we tell the truth!

UNTIL this month, probably the most symbolically inspiring event of most of our lives was the tearing down of the Berlin Wall. But now an event of even greater moral magnitude has taken place.Who could have dreamed in past decades, when South Africa became the world's symbol for racial oppression, that 70 percent of South Africa's white voters would go to the polls on March 17 and vote to end apartheid? Who would have imagined the degree to which on that historic day, as President F.W. de Klerk put it after the vote, the South Africans "rose above themselves"?

BERLIN -- I haven't been to Berlin since the opening of the Berlin Wall, so when I arrived at my hotel near the Brandenburg Gate, my first question was: Where's the wall? My German friend explained that the only trace left is a cobblestone path that snakes across Berlin, drawing a line in the pavement where the wall once ran. It's easy to cross that line without even knowing it. And therein lies the core of the crisis between America and Germany today -- triggered by Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's use of anti-Bush and anti-Iraq-war rhetoric to win re-election, then fueled by a German minister comparing President Bush to Hitler and now capped by Mr. Bush's refusal to answer two letters from the German leader.

BERLIN -- The signature of the actor and singer Ernst Busch scrawls across his rough granite tombstone like one last autograph.His champions say that during his lifetime Ernst Busch was Germany's greatest actor.Unfortunately, his champions tend to be the old comrades who often think of the times before the fall of the Berlin Wall as the good old days.But he had many friends and admirers in the West who also thought he was a very, very fine actor and a wonderful singer whose rough, lyrical tenor was perfect for the revolutionary marching songs that were his specialty.

FOR THE first time since the start of the Palestinian uprising nearly three years ago, hope for real peace between Israelis and Palestinians is beginning to take shape. Strangely, the Bush administration is sending signals that it is against it. I am not referring to the "road map" for Middle East peace, the temporary truce declared by Palestinian terrorist organizations or even the emergence of new Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas, who seems genuinely committed to peace but probably lacks the power to make it happen.

WASHINGTON -- A wave of euphoria has swept over Washington in the wake of the Korean summit. Untroubled by the absence of any specific moves by Pyongyang, other than to have hosted the summit itself, the Clinton administration has rushed to lift all sanctions on the North that have been in place for more than 50 years. Some Washington analysts are already speculating about the withdrawal of American troops from the South. Others are stressing the sheer pointlessness of developing new missile defenses against a country that might no longer exist when they are finally deployed.

GIVE WAR A CHANCE.P. J. O'Rourke.Atlantic Monthly.288 pages. $20.95.This time, P. J. O'Rourke has worked himself into a corner. For years, he has been funny on demand, so nowadays editors at every publication from Rolling Stone to Playboy to House and Garden seek his services when it's time for some easy yucks -- whatever the topic.The violence of Northern Ireland? A sure Laff Riot, some editor concluded. Ditto for the fall of the Berlin Wall after years of grim oppression, the dawn of new freedoms in the former Soviet Union and, that knee-slapping funniest of all recent events, the gulf war, with its thousands of fleeing refugees and legacy of torture and lethal bombings.

A MEMORABLE EXPERIENCEBerlin 1989, on the brinkLeaving West Germany on our way to Berlin, we felt as if we had driven from a color movie into a black-and-white silent film. It was September 1989, and the Berlin Wall and communism still stood.As we drove through an opening in a dense border of barbed wire at Bay-reuth, armed guards stopped our car. They scrutinized our passports and instructed us to go directly to Berlin without leaving the highway at any time.Remembering the colorful and lively towns in West Germany, we were disheartened by the bleakness we encountered.

The Cold War was, in many ways, a dark period in world history, an era in which the United States and the U.S.S.R. spent billions of hours of labor, godless sums of money and an incalculable amount of intellectual energy on the business of "national defense." Decades of duck-and-cover drills and ominous rumblings from across the Atlantic turned eight U.S. presidents and generations of Americans into neurotics. Don't you miss it? Hard as it might seem to believe, many Americans do seem to pine for the days when Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev pounded his shoe on a table at the United Nations, shouting that his mighty country would "bury" the West.

BERLIN -- The trial of former East German Communist leader Erich Honecker ended last night with neither a bang nor a whimper but only a sad, grave sigh of mercy for the dying former dictator.Mr. Honecker was accused in the deaths of 13 people killed at the Berlin Wall as they tried to escape his regime.The Berlin Supreme Court declared yesterday that the trial of Mr. Honecker, who is 80 years old and ailing, violated constitutional protections of his "human dignity." They then told the criminal court to reconsider its imprisonment order.