Keen On

In his early opposition to the Iraq war and other overseas misadventures in Bosnia, Haiti and El Salvador, Mark Danner is one of the most respected observers of American foreign policy. So it was a real honor to sit down with him and talk about his life both as an American and as a critic of America’s increasingly frayed relations with the rest of the world. Given his peripatetic life as a correspondent of overseas conflict, there’s a Homeric quality to Mark Danner, both as a man and as a writer. And so it wasn’t surprising that we began our conversation with Danner’s memories of how the Illiad inspired his life of travel and adventure.Mark Danner is a writer, journalist and educator who has written on war and politics for more than three decades. He has covered conflicts in Central America, Haiti, the Balkans, Iraq and the greater Middle East, and has written extensively about the development of American foreign policy during the Cold War and the post-Cold War era, focussing on human rights and democracy. He