SOURCE: Cobban, Helena. “Jean, Slavenka, and the Tea Party for Sanity.” Antioch Review 52, no. 2 (spring 1994): 270-85.

In the following essay, Cobban discusses the effects of war on women portrayed in works by Drakulic and Jean Said Makdisi.

An accident of history, really, that brought this nice young man, untested in foreign affairs, to the presidency of the republic at a time when the United States is in a position of unequaled supremacy in world politics. Decisions that he makes—on Bosnia, Somalia, Cambodia, wherever—can rip apart the fabric of whole nations.

What does Bill Clinton know of war?

Forests of print have addressed this question, and enough electronic wizardry to boost a message to the edge of the universe. But that discourse was always dominated by men—fighting men in uniforms, political men reading opinion polls, think tank men fine-tuning the game of grown-up bullyboys called “deterrence...