Middle East

Democracy and Terrorism The United States wishes to use democracy in a double capacity, first to unsettle current enemies and second, through regime change, as a long-term inoculation against terrorism. Applied to terrorism in general and the Middle East...

The past few decades have borne out the warning made more than thirty years ago by Jacques Ellul, the French moral philosopher and sociologist, that the phenomenal development of mass media would revolutionize politics, with the flood of information...

Welcoming Remarks Walter McDougall opened the conference with remarks on the U.S. democratization effort in Iraq, noting similarities to Reconstruction in the Confederate South. Then, too, U.S. troops crushed an oppressive regime and occupied its land, the federal government...

On April 7, 1965, President Lyndon Johnson delivered a major address at The Johns Hopkins University. At the time, historian Barbara Tuchman writes, Johnson believed that to lose South Vietnam would be a catastrophe that would make the loss...

The debates among American strategists before both the first (1991) and the second (2003) Gulf Wars naturally differed, because strategic circumstances differed. But at least one common element—aside from the obvious fact that Iraq was the target of both...

What do George Clooney, Manute Bol, Elie Wiesel, and Olympic speed skater Joey Cheek have in common? They have all publicly called for the UN Genocide Convention of 1948 to be applied to Darfur and for greater intervention to...

In the run-up to the Iraq war, many of us reasoned that if a successful democracy took root, then this just might establish a model that would replicate itself throughout the region, forever altering the currently highly negative image...

Born circa 1966 in the Bedouin tribe of Bani Hassan in Zarka, Jordan, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was killed in a U.S. air strike on June 7, near Bakuba, Iraq. Lately known as the “amir” of Al Qaeda in the...

We in the West have long identified Islam with Arab culture. In one sense this is reasonable enough. After all, the Quran and the canonical accounts of the actions and sayings of the Prophet Mohammed (the Hadith)are all written...

John J. Mearsheimer, R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago, and Stephen M. Walt, Robert and Renee Belfer Professor of International Affairs at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard...