News Abroad

Camp Followers, Contractors, and Carpetbaggers in Iraq

by Richard F. Miller

Boarding the C-130 for Baghdad at a U.S. base in Kuwait I was surprised to discover that despite the military flight, the majority of my fellow passengers were not soldiers but private contractors. I was thus reminded of one constant in military history that seems to transcend time and place—where armies go private enterprise will surely follow. Thucydides’ The Peloponnesian War is replete with privately outfitted vessels, grain merchants supplying distant armies, and fr

A Dawn of Peace in Bethlehem?

by Jonathan Goldstein

BETHLEHEM, West Bank--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 will have gone full circle from where they were four years ago, a low point in Palestinian-Israeli relations. Since then there has been significant improvement in both Israeli-Arab and Muslim-Jewish relations in the region.    By 2001, Christmas had become a casualty of Israeli-Palestinian viol

Did the Israeli Army Really Shoot to Death that Boy in 2000?

by Richard Landes

If anyone wants to start thinking about what has been ailing the world since 2000, there is no better place to start than with the poisonous tale of Muhammed al Durah. On September 30, 2000, Talal abu Rahma, a Palestinian cameraman working for France2 sent his boss, Charles Enderlin what he claimed was footage of the Israeli army shooting to death in cold blood an unarmed boy. Enderlin edited the rushes, cutting out

With an NCO in Iraq

by Richard F. Miller

Few would dispute that a competent noncommissioned officer corps is sine qua non to a successful military. As a Civil War historian embedded with a Marine Corps unit at Camp Fallujah, Iraq, I was especially interested in how modern NCOs—as distinguished from commissioned officers—established their moral authority and fitness to lead as well as demonstrated competence with the weapons, vehicles, and communications systems operated by their squads. Until I began embedded a

Tom Paine's Bone-headed Predictions

by Thomas Fleming

Tell them, tell them about Tom Paine, America's first intelligence failure. The urgent voice whispered in my ear in the dawn. I realized it was Oliver Wiswell, hero of Kenneth Robert's novel about the loyalists in the American Revolution. Oliver is one of my favorite fictional characters. I've often imagined him still fuming over the victory the despised rebels won in their war for independence. "Huh?" I growled. It's all there. All in that travesty of the truth, Common Sen

American Peace Activists in Iraq? Part of a Long and Overlooked Tradition

by Mary Hershberger

When four members of Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT) were taken hostage in Iraq, American mainstream media revealed a near-total ignorance of the group. In accounts that I read, reporters seldom even cited its name correctly. Given that official information about the conduct of the war in Iraq is both misleading and woefully limited, ignorance of CPT’s long-term and carefully documented eyewitness reports out of Iraq raises questions about the media, of course, but more profoundly abo

What New Empires Inherit from Old Ones

by Maya Jasanoff

Empires do not just rise and fall—they bump into one another when they come and go. For an evocative glimpse of how, pay a visit to Istanbul’s sublime Hagia Sofia, formerly a Byzantine basilica, now perhaps the only mosque where you can find mosaics of a

Not Even the Earthquake Has Shaken Loose Old Prejudices in Kashmir

by Sumantra Bose

As the bitter Himalayan winter settles on Kashmir, hundreds of thousands of survivors of the 8 October earthquake huddle in temporary shelters. The humanitarian catastrophe has been brought under some control six weeks after the disaster struck. Last Saturday a donor

Why We Need a Little Ronald Reagan-Style Protectionism

by Jonathan Rees

A few months ago, the Japanese automobile maker Toyota announced that it would be building a new plant in Canada. According to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, even though several states were prepared to offer larger financial incentives to Toyota to locate in America, the car company built in Canada anyway: [Gerry Fedchun, president of the Automotive Parts Manufacturers’ Association] said Nissan

How Presidents Use the Term "Democracy" as a Marketing Tool

by Lawrence S. Wittner

George W. Bush’s recent claim that the U.S. war in Iraq is part of an attempt to spread “democracy” to the Middle East should not surprise anyone familiar with the use of that word to camouflage sordid realities.When, in the aftermath of World War II, Stalin had the Soviet Union gobble up the nations of Eastern Europe, he christened them People’s Democracies – although they were neither democratic nor meant to be. This debasement of “democracy”

Why a Historian Based in Iraq Couldn't Help but Draw Parallels to the Civil War

by Richard F. Miller

My last embed was at Camp Fallujah in Iraq with the 3rd Battalion, 8th Marines, part of the II Marine Expeditionary Force. I was assigned to Weapons Company and spent most of my time as a passenger patrolling in up-armored Humvees. By day, we traveled the highways that connected the city of Fallujah with other Iraqi cities strung out to the west along the Euphrates River; the mission was to search for IEDs (improvised explosive devices). When found, they were destroyed. By night, we enforced

Why Are Liberals So Weak In Middle East?

by Judith Apter Klinghoffer

During a talk he gave at FPRI introducing his new book The Long War for Freedom , Barry Rubin estimated the percentage of democratic liberals in the region at 5% and Islamists at 25%. One may quibble about the exact percentage but it is difficult to ignore the obvious weakness of the reformist forces in the Middle East. The more consequential question is, why? The rote answer is because the region does not have a large enough middle class or its i

Coming to Grips with Japan's History and Role in the World

by Yoshikazu Sakamoto

The phrase ‘sixty years of the post-war’ is often used to mean ‘60 years since the end of the war’ or ‘these past sixty years’. However, the term ‘post-war’ itself is premised on a ‘pre-war’ and a ‘wartime’. In other words, prior to the sixty years of post-war, there is the disjuncture between ‘post-war’, on the one hand, and ‘pre-war’ and ‘wartime’ on the other. For me, it is this experie

Indonesia, Like Other Countries, Is Having Trouble Coming to Terms with History

by David Jardine

The bronze patina on Ratna Sarumpaet's face shines in the soft light. Her hands sculpt abstracts in the air around her as she speaks, her eyes light up with determination as she enunciates each point. “Are you not worried about a possible reaction?” I ask her. We are discussing her latest play Dalam Kegelapan Panjang (In the Long Darkness), a production this internationally reputed Indonesian playwright wrote about the fate of hundreds of thousands of her compatr

Can Saddam Receive a Fair Trial? (Why He Should)

by Rodger Citron

As the trial of Saddam Hussein and his co-defendants began in October in Baghdad, there were inevitable comparisons to the trial of Nazi leaders 60 years ago before an international tribunal at Nuremberg, Germany. Although the Nuremberg trials were criticized by some (most famously Sen. Robert Taft) as “victor's justice,” they remain the most successful war crimes prosecutions in history and serve as a model for the current prosecution in Iraq. The Nuremberg trials succeede

How Does the Memory of Jewish Suffering Affect Israel's Chance to Make Peace?

by Dagmar Barnouw

Past and future have mingled most dangerously in the Middle East, a region dominated for the larger part of the 20th and into the 21st century by the entrenched Arab-Jewish conflict resulting in the rapid growth of Islamic fundamentalist terrorism. In the hindsight perspective of many decades, it seems that the future of this region has always been nothing but its future past: a repetition of the past, the past continuing into the future unchanging, therefore repressive and explosive. In this p

Can We Do Business with Islamists?

by Martin Kramer

Martin Kramer delivered these remarks on September 20, at an open briefing on Islamism and U.S. policy. He shared the podium with Alastair Crooke, founder of the Conflicts Forum. The event took place at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington. I am pleased to speak here at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Back in 1980, CSIS published one of my earliest efforts, a "Washington Paper&qu

Playing the Chaos Card in the Middle East

by Mark A. LeVine

Within twenty-four hours, on October 16-17, the New York Times ran three stories about the threat increasing chaos posed to emerging, still fragile political orders in Iraq, Palestine, and the Sudan. In all three cases, the chaos afflicting these societies was described as an unintentional and negative consequence of ill-conceived policies put in place by the various governments involved: the U.S. in Iraq, Israel as it withdrew from Gaza, and the Sudanese Government as it finally tried

Selective Muslim Silence

by Judith Apter Klinghoffer

Where is the sane moderate peace loving Muslim world? Why is its voice so rarely raised in condemnation of Islamist atrocities? It is a question which has been raised in ever increasing urgency since 9/11 and not only by Westerners. A few Muslim commentators have raised it too, but they remained the exception rather than the rule. Last time I raised the issue, it was in the context of a number of cased involving the charge of “insultin

Why Bush Abandoned the Plan for New Nukes

by Lawrence S. Wittner

Confronted with strong opposition from disarmament groups and from Congress, the Bush administration has abandoned its plan to develop a nuclear “bunker buster.”This new weapon, formally known as the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator, became the symbol of the Bush administration’s plan to build up the U.S. nuclear arsenal and wage nuclear war. The administration alleged that the bunker buster was necessary to destroy deeply buried and hardened enemy targets, and that&md