Michael Pollak wrote:
> Letter in the March 8th London Review of Books
>
> 82nd Airborne
>
> Michael Byers (LRB, 8 February) quotes George W. Bush's National Security
> Adviser, Condoleezza Rice, as saying that 'we don't need to have the 82nd
> Airborne escorting kids to kindergarten.' This much-cited quotation
> appears to refer exclusively to the role of the US Forces in places like
> Kosovo. But in fact the 82nd Airborne was the division sent in by the
> Federal Government in 1957 to desegregate the schools in Little Rock,
> Arkansas, against the wishes of the state authority. As an Afro-American
> beneficiary of this intervention, Rice presumably knows this. The right of
> states to resist Federal power has of course been invoked in order to
> preserve racial segregation. If her remark is not an instance but an
> analogy, how far back do these people plan to turn the clock?
>
> David Edgar
> Birmingham