The U.S. occupation of Iraq is a debacle not because the government did no planning but because a vast amount of expert planning was willfully ignored by the people in charge. The inside story of a historic failure

It isn't just people who are dying in Afghanistan. So is an entire concept of war.

It is no coincidence that struggles over control in Louisiana and Texas were keys to the outcome of both Conventions in 1952. These two states especially, in the regions bordering the Gulf, have developed a rich new empire, as dynamic as any this country has seen, and what its future is to be is for a historian to decipher. OSCAR HANDLIN is Associate Professor of History at Harvard and the author of Boston’s Immigrants, Commonwealth, and This Was America. His fourth book, The Uprooted, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for History in 1951.

» Under the spur of war the West Coast has developed an enormous industrial plant. With its new-found strength, will it challenge the old supremacy of the Eastern Seaboard?