News Abroad

The Death of Iraq's Middle Class

by Keith David Watenpaugh

On a blistering June afternoon in 2003 I sat in the Baghdad office of the president of al-Mustansiriyya University, the historian Taher al-Bakaa. I was there as part of group of Middle East historians to assess the condition of Baghdad's universities and libraries in the wake of the war. Outside, students were celebrating graduation. Inside, huddled around a fan, we talked about past dictators and tyrants, and how he would now revitalize his campus, which had been loot

Bush’s Periclean Strategy

by Lawrence W. Serewicz

Through the war on terror and the global democratic revolution, Bush has committed America to reform the international system. In this regard, Bush faces a greater dilemma than Lyndon Johnson and Dean Rusk faced as they attempted to defend a decent world order in South Vietnam. Bush’s war on terrorism has no apparent limit because, one could argue, the fate of the international system is at stake. When South Vietnam was overrun the decent world order did not end, but what is the alterna

What Right of Return, Mr. Baker?

by Richard L. Cravatts

President Bush’s January 10th speech about a strategy for the Iraqi war going forward did ignore two key suggestions found last month in Jim Baker and company’s meretricious Iraqi Study Group report: that, first, the U.S. should initiate diplomatic conversations with Syria and Iran, and, second, that it should withdraw its troops in 2008. Thankfully, another specious suggestion from the report also went unmentioned in Bush’s speech, namely the notion of creating some linkag

A Quick Fix in Iraq? Reminds Me of Reconstruction

by Marko Maunula

On the eve of yet another escalation, the comparisons of Iraq and Vietnam are again on the rise. While parallels are obvious, one could easily find a more accurate comparison from further in the past and closer to home. A careful examination of the situation reveals that the story of Iraq resembles disturbingly the story of Reconstruction. The comparison emerged first in the fall of 2003, when historian Bertram Wyatt-Brown first pointed out the

What Saddam’s Botched Execution Means

by Norman J.W. Goda

As most western commentators have pointed out, we needn’t feel badly for Saddam Hussein.  The taunts that he endured in the moments before his hanging on December 30 were nothing compared with the terror he inflicted on thousands upon thousands of his countrymen and his neighbors over the course of his brutal twenty-four year rule.  But the vengeful haste by the Shi’ite-dominated government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Malaki to execute the former dictator has robbed

What Turned Sayyid Qutb Against America?

by Lawrence Wright

In a first-class stateroom on a cruise ship bound for New York from Alexandria, Egypt, a frail, middle-aged writer and educator named Sayyid Qutb experienced a crisis of faith. “Should I go to America as any normal student on a scholarship, who only eats and sleeps, or should I be special?” he wondered. “Should I hold on to my Islamic beliefs, facing the many sinful temptations, or should I indulge those temptations all around me?” It was November 1948. The new world l

What the Iraq Study Group Gets Right--And Wrong

by William R. Polk

The most important positive element in the Baker-Hamilton study is to focus attention on the central predicament of the Middle East – the Arab-Israeli problem.  Like a cancer, this issue has infected Middle Eastern affairs for over half a century.  No American administration has chosen to attack it head-on.  Simply giving Israel a blank check to do anything it decides to do is not an American policy.  Indeed, as many thoughtful Israelis have pointed out, it is bound

"The Banality of Evil": Hussein and Eichmann on Trial

by Dagmar Barnouw

As Saddam Hussein 's execution may be getting closer, the bloody chaos in Iraq is still getting worse and the flaws of his first trial have been getting more attention.1 It is not surprising that critics have been pointing to a "demonization" of the defendant since, from its beginning, the second Bush administration has been obsessed with the "Evil" of Saddam Hussein as a potent continuation of "Nazi Evil.&q

Let Iraq Break Up? Let Kosovo Leave Serbia? The Perils of Separatism

by Jeff Mankoff

Sometime in the next several months, Kosovo is going to receive international approval for its quest to become an independent nation. While many inside Kosovo and out will rejoice at its liberation from Serbia, there are significant dangers if, as expected, the United Nations backs independence. Kosovo, which is historically Serbian but today has an Albanian Muslim majority of nearly 90 percent, has been under UN administration since the end of fighting between

In Bethlehem, Persisting Hope

by Jonathan Goldstein

When the Roman Catholic Patriarch of the Holy Land Michel Sabbah celebrates mass in the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem this Christmas Eve, events in the town and region will have changed dramatically from where they were just one year ago. Last Christmas, following an accord negotiated by U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Israel completed its withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, which abuts Israel. Cross-border terrorist attacks against Israelis diminished, and Pal

Whatever the Findings at Iran’s Holocaust Conference, It Works Politically for Ahmadinejad

by Richard L. Cravatts

In the same week that the Iraq Study Group released its own report to determine how history had unraveled internecine horror in Iraq, Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad kicked off his own “fact finding” mission, a two-day conference called "Review of the Holocaust: Global Vision," with the stated intent of determining, once and for all, the nature and extent, if any at all, of one of the most monstrous crimes of the twentieth century. Over sixty “researche

Ignorance May Be Bliss, but It Makes for Bad Policy: Analysis of the Iraq Study Group Report

by Timothy R. Furnish

In perhaps no region of the world is history more important  than in the Middle East; to note just a few of the most striking examples: Jewish claims to Jerusalem and environs are at least partially predicated on the Hebrew Scriptures’ 3,000 year-old assertions of divinely-assigned real estate rights; a significant slice of Muslim Arab public opinion resonates to every attempt by Usama bin Ladin and his ilk to link millennium-old Crusader belligerence with the Americans; and millio

Blood Libel

by Judith Apter Klinghoffer

Why the Passover Massacre?

Staticide, Not Civil War in Iraq

by Sarah Shields

Calling the tragedy in Iraq a “civil war” is not only inaccurate. It is morally indefensible, laying the blame for the horrific violence and the destruction of a country and a society upon the victims of an illegal, aggressive war. It allows pundits like Thomas Friedman to claim that the country has been dysfunctional for a millenium, ignoring a long historical context of international support for Iraq’s brutal dictator, debilitating and murderous sanctions by the United Nat

Is George Bush “The Manchurian Candidate?”

by Robert Buzzanco

If enemies of the United States had gotten together a few years ago to devise a plan to damage America and undermine its global position–diminish its power and credibility, drag it into a stubborn war, harm its relations with allies, create international financial disarray, run up huge deficits, create political openings for the Europeans and China to exploit and become equals in global economic matters, motivate terrorists, bring the U.S. image in the Middle East to its nadir, restrict

Do Arabs Speak the Same Language?

by Diana Muir

The most important underreported development in the Arab world is the increasing ability of Arabs to talk with one another.  They did not used to be able to.  Arabs in Casablanca speak a language in the Arabic family that is all but unintelligible to Arabs in Cairo, whose language is not understood by Arabs in Baghdad, and so forth.   Outsiders are blinded to these differences by our habit of calling all of these diverse languages Arabic.  If is as though w

Occupation Blues: Let’s Not Forget the Mexican War

by Ron Briley

Seeking historical parallels for the American experience in Iraq, commentators on the political right often evoke the World War II imagery of Americans liberating oppressed peoples from the yoke of tyranny. On the other hand, critics of the war in Iraq often equate the Bush administration’s invasion and occupation of Iraq with the quagmire of the Vietnam War. These polar opposites from the more recent past often obscure our view of the invasion and occupation of Mexico from 1846 to 1848

Is Iraq Vietnam?

by David Kaiser

The wars in Vietnam and Iraq differ in major respects, but U.S. policy in both suffers from the same fatal flaw. The publication of National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley's Nov. 8 memorandum shows a critical similarity between the American approaches to these wars. In both cases the United States has tried to turn a nation into something alien to its nature. Now as in Vietnam, the U.S. government is refusing to base its policies upon reality and is looking for a local leader who c

The U.S. Has a History of Using Torture

by Alfred W. McCoy

In April 2004, Americans were stunned when CBS broadcast those now-notorious photographs from Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison, showing hooded Iraqis stripped naked while U.S. soldiers stood by smiling.  As this scandal grabbed headlines around the globe, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld insisted that the abuses were "perpetrated by a small number of U.S. military," whom New York Times’ columnist William Safire soon branded "creeps"--a line that few in the pre

Kentucky Fried Globalization

by Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom

Credit: Wiki Commons.