Middle East Quarterly articles from June 2003

Middle East Quarterly archives from June 2003

A window of opportunity for Israel?
June 22, 2003... The tragic conflict between Israelis and Palestinians continues to elude resolution. But I believe that there exists a window of opportunity similar to the one that existed in the aftermath of the Gulf War in 1991. --James Baker III,...

Four-part disharmony: the quartet maps peace.
June 22, 2003... On April 30, 2003, following the swift collapse of Saddam Hussein's regime in Baghdad, the Bush administration released the latest plan for Israeli-Palestinian peace, a document entitled "A Performance-Based Roadmap to a Permanent Two-State...

Syria and the United States: bad habits die hard.
June 22, 2003... Ever since Bashar al-Assad succeeded his father as president of Syria in June 2000, he has not ceased to disappoint those who pinned great expectations on him. At home, Bashar led the campaign against the reformist camp, bringing an end to the...

Iraqi Kurds: hour of power?
June 22, 2003... Since the end of the Iraq war, and for the first time in Iraqi modern history, Kurdish leaders have left their strongholds in Kurdistan and moved to Baghdad to establish a presence there. The two most influential leaders, Mas'ud Barzani and...

Iraqi Assyrians: barometer of pluralism.
June 22, 2003... In "Seventy Thousand Assyrians," a short story penned in 1934, Armenian-American writer William Saroyan's fictional character, Theodore Badal, painted a stark portrait of Assyrian identity: We're washed up as a race, we're through,...

Confessions of an anti-sanctions activist.
June 22, 2003... On May 22, 2003, the United Nations (U.N.) lifted the sanctions regime it had imposed on Iraq twelve years earlier. The end of the economic embargo invites a review of the "peace" activism that was aimed at bringing down the Iraq sanctions...

Islam and the textbooks: a report of the American Textbook Council.(Document)
June 22, 2003... Editors' Preface: Three main factors--the terrorism of September 11, 2001, the expanded military and political role of the United States in Muslim lands, and the growth of America's Muslim population--have focused attention on how Islamic...

Not grounded in facts.(Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society)(Book Review)
June 22, 2003... Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society. By Nadia Abu el-Haj. University of Chicago Press, 2001. 352 pp. $52 ($20, paper). The peoples of the Middle East have long waged battles to...

AI-Jazeera: How the Free Arab News Network Scooped the World and Changed the Middle East.(Book Review)
June 22, 2003... By Mohammed el-Nawawy and Adel Iskander. Boulder: Westview Press, 2002.240 pp. $24. Al-Jazeera, the first twenty-four-hour news station in the Arabic language, has become a household name. Best known for featuring videos of Usama bin...

Al-Qaeda: Brotherhood of Terror.(Book Review)(Brief Article)
June 22, 2003... By Oaul L. Williams. Indianapolis and Gary: Alpha, 2002. 240 pp. $14.95, paper. Williams, a Ph.D. and seasoned terrorism consultant for the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), had all the right credentials to produce a path-breaking...

Ayatollahs, Sufis, and Ideologues: State, Religion, and Social Movements in Iraq.(Book Review)
June 22, 2003... Edited by Faleh Abdul-Jabar. London: Al Saqi Books, 2002.290 pp. $55. Iraq is usually thought to be divided in three main demographic units: Kurds, Shi'ite Arabs, and Sunni Arabs. The seventeen essays on the sociology of religion in Iraq...

Colonial Effects: the Making of National Identity in Jordan.(Book Review)(Brief Article)
June 22, 2003... By Joseph A. Massad. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001. 276 pp. $49.50 ($19.50, paper). Massad has done a thorough job of mastering the source material, but his ideological bias runs deep and devalues the results. Massad portrays...

Dangerous Neighborhood: Contemporary Issues in Turkey's Foreign Policy.(Book Review)(Brief Article)
June 22, 2003... Edited by Michael S. Radu. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2002.220 pp. $44.95. In sharp contrast to the four decades of the Cold War when Ankara was largely preoccupied with the Soviet threat, the post-Cold War era forced Turkish...

Developments in Israeli Public Administration.(Book Review)(Brief Article)
June 22, 2003... Edited by Moshe Maor. London: Frank Cass Publishers, 2002. 147 pp. $62.50 ($24.50, paper). Maor, a professor of political science at the Hebrew University, attempts the by-no-means simple task of guiding a non-Israeli through the history...

Diplomacy and Murder in Tehran.(Book Review)(Brief Article)
June 22, 2003... By Laurence Kelly. New York: I.B. Tauris Publishers, 2002. 288 pp. $45 ($24.50, paper). A century and a half before Iranian radicals seized the U.S. embassy and took fifty-two hostages, a frenzied Iranian mob spurred on by the mullahs...

Divided Jerusalem: the Struggle for the Holy City.(Book Review)(Brief Article)
June 22, 2003... By Bernard Wasserstein. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001. 432 pp. $29.95 ($17.95, paper). Of the dozens of books about Jerusalem, Divided Jerusalem is one of the more authoritative and unbiased. Wasserstein accomplishes this by...

Factional Politics in Post-Khomeini Iran.(Book Review)(Brief Article)
June 22, 2003... By Mehdi Moslem. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2002.320 pp. $29.95, paper. For the entire twenty-four years since the Islamic Revolution, Americans have been searching for moderates within the Iranian elite. The effort has been...

Inside Al Qaeda: Global Network of Terror.(Book Review)(Brief Article)
June 22, 2003... By Rohan Gunaratna. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002.240 pp. $22.95 ($14, paper). Gunaratna, researcher at Scotland's University of St. Andrews, has done a fine job analyzing al-Qa'ida's history, strategy, and structure. What may...

Israeli Historical Revisionism: From Left to Right.(Book Review)(Brief Article)
June 22, 2003... Edited by Anita Shapira and Derek J. Penslar. London: Frank Cass Publishers, 2002. 190 pp. $62.50 ($26.50, paper). There is a dangerous pitfall in the trendy relativism that infects so much of academia, where all "narratives" and all...

The Middle East in 2015: the Impact of Regional Trends on U.S. Strategic Planning.(Book Review)(Brief Article)
June 22, 2003... Edited by Judith Yaphe. Washington, D.C.: National Defense University Press, 2002.237 pp. $19. What will the Middle East look like in a decade or so? The Central Intelligence Agency's National Intelligence Council asked the National...

Militant Islam Reaches America.(Book Review)(Brief Article)
June 22, 2003... By Daniel Pipes. (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2002). 309 pp. $25.95. In the war on terrorism, who is the enemy? Sounds like a trick question--it's terrorists, right?--but Pipes, more than any other public intellectual at the...

Political Parties in Turkey.(Book Review)(Brief Article)
June 22, 2003... Edited by Barry Rubin and Metin Heper. London: Frank Cass Publishers, 2002, 160 pp. $59.50 ($24.50, paper). Political parties have been largely responsible both for the achievements and the failures of Turkey's experience with democratic...

La question irakienne.(Book Review)(Brief Article)
June 22, 2003... By Pierre-Jean Luizard. Paris: Fayard, 2002.366 pp. 20, paper. Americans are prone to think of the French as reflexively anti-American, inventing conspiracy theories and twisting facts to fit a preconceived image. French intellectuals have...

Targeting Terror: U.S. Policy toward Middle Eastern State Sponsors and Terrorist Organizations, Post-September 11.(Book Review)(Brief Article)
June 22, 2003... By Matthew Levitt. Washington, D.C.: The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, 2002. 137 pp. $19.95, paper. Targeting Terror focuses on the U.S. government's diplomacy in the war on terror, a topic otherwise little covered. From a...

War Plan Iraq: Ten Reasons against War on Iraq.(Book Review)(Brief Article)
June 22, 2003... By Milan Rai, with a chapter by Noam Chomsky. London: Verso, 2002. 230 pp. $15, paper. Published by Active Resistance to the Roots of War, a self-described antiwar advocacy group, War Plan Iraq argues against removing Saddam Hussein from...

Revenge of the Ptolemies.(fire damages new library in Alexandria, Egypt)(Brief Article)
June 22, 2003... ALEXANDRIA, Egypt--A fire broke out Sunday in the sleek, new Alexandria library, sending thick smoke swirling through the building that opened to international fanfare in October. The fire, which lasted about forty-five minutes, appears to...

N.Y. Times mobile headline lab found in Iraqi desert.(Parody)
June 22, 2003... AR RUTBAH, Iraq--Troops from the U.S. Army's 113th Mobile Pundit Reconnaissance Squadron Tuesday uncovered what appears to have been a secret New York Times headline facility in western Iraq. The cache, called "disturbing" by military...