Posted in David Schenker, Israel, Jon Alterman, Jordan, Palestinians on Jan 9th, 2008 1 Comment »
From Jon Alterman The Bush administration has been mugged by reality. After vowing to transform the Middle East, the administration is submitting to it, resorting to the sort of process-driven incremental diplomacy that previous administrations had pursued and that this administration had disdained. Five years ago, there was a sense that things couldn’t get any […]
Posted in Andrew Exum, Counterinsurgency, Hezbollah, Lebanon, Military on Jan 8th, 2008 Comments Off on Learning from Israel’s mistakes
From Andrew Exum If there is but one article readers of this blog should take the time to read in the next few days, it is most certainly Matt Matthews’s interview with Israeli general Shimon Naveh on the 2006 war between Hezbollah and Israel. Since I wrote my study of Hezbollah’s performance during the 2006 […]
Posted in Geopolitics, Maps on Jan 6th, 2008 Comments Off on Survey: Americans lost on the map
From MESH Admin The 2006 National Geographic-Roper Survey of Geographic Literacy surveyed geographic knowledge of 18- to 24-year-olds across the United States. (The full report is here.) Respondents were shown a blank political map of the Middle East and asked to identify four countries: Israel, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Iran. These were the results:
Posted in Adam Garfinkle, Democracy, J. Scott Carpenter, Jon Alterman, Joshua Muravchik, Michele Dunne, Tamara Cofman Wittes on Jan 2nd, 2008 7 Comments »
Charles Issawi (1916-2000) was a leading economic historian of the Middle East and an astute commentator on history, politics, and human nature. In 1956 he published an article on the foundations of democracy and their absence from the Middle East. Below, we reproduce a key passage from that article (in green, beneath Issawi’s photograph). In […]
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