Word: letters
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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First, Annan sent a letter that offered Saddam not just an out but a win: a nice reward--broad hints of accelerating the move to lift the economic embargo of Iraq--if Saddam would just act nice. Saddam responded with his "Swiss cheese" letter, a disingenuous, heavily hedged show of compliance with U.N. demands that was, in fact, a prescription for more Iraqi "cheat and retreat" on weapons inspections. Nonetheless, the very transmittal of that letter, as yet unparsed, was enough to prompt President Clinton to recall his bombers in midflight...
Then, while the U.S. remained "poised to strike" if the holes in the cheese were not filled, Annan fatally undermined the U.S. position when his personal representative in Baghdad pronounced the letter unconditional Iraqi acceptance of U.N. terms...
Then, to make U.S. action all the more impossible, a third bit of mischief: as soon as Annan received Saddam's letter, he announced that he would be returning U.N. humanitarian workers to Baghdad within a day. Doing so would effectively end the American threat, however "poised" for action the Administration claimed to be. It is one thing to bomb an enemy capital. It is another to bomb an enemy capital where U.N. humanitarian workers are flitting about doing their good works...
...unmarried narrator of Before the Change, who is back home for a visit with her father, a local physician who communicates in sarcasms. The hidden truths about their unshared lives pop up when least expected, a delayed-action effect that Munro achieves by casting the story as an unsent letter from the woman to her former lover...
...stomach is still a little puffy. There are no marks on it, but I can bunch it up in my hands," is the first hint we get that the unnamed letter writer has been pregnant. By the time she tells her doctor dad that she had a baby and put it up for adoption, she knows his secret: the "specials," as he calls some of his patients, are young women who have traveled long distances to get illegal abortions. From there, the father-daughter ironies gather for a stoic conclusion...