MER Article Editor's Picks (Summer 2009) Bakalian, Anny and Mehdi Bozorgmehr. Backlash 9/11: Middle Eastern and Muslim Americans Respond (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2009). Bashkin, Orit. The Other Iraq: Pluralism and Culture in Hashemite Iraq (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009). Benedict, Helen. The Lonely The Editors • 1 min read
MER Article From the Editors (Summer 2009) At least 60 people were killed in the South Waziristan region of Pakistan on June 23 by a US drone attack. The dead were among those attending a funeral for a suspected Taliban commander who, along with six other people, had been killed by a drone earlier that day. Since The Editors • 5 min read
MER Article Editor's Picks (Spring 2009) Abdel-Latif, Omayma. In the Shadow of the Brothers: The Women of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, October 2008). Al-Ali, Nadje and Nicola Pratt. What Kind of Liberation? Women and the Occupation of Iraq (Berkeley, CA: University of Califor The Editors • 2 min read
MER Article From the Editors (Spring 2009) Tehran, February 9, 1979. The Shah was gone. Iran was governed, if governed is the word, by Shahpour Bakhtiar, a former minister in the cabinet of Mohammad Mossadeq, the nationalist premier whose CIA-engineered overthrow had restored the monarchy 26 years earlier. The country was roiled by massive d The Editors • 7 min read
Current Analysis Cast Lead in the Foundry A stopped clock, the saying goes, is right twice a day. The “senior Bush administration official” who chatted with the Washington Post on December 28 was right that Israel is “not trying to take over the Gaza Strip” with the massive assault launched the previous day, and correct that the Israelis ar The Editors • 10 min read
MER Article From the Editor (Fall 2008) It’s easy to forget, but the United States has a pressing year-end deadline to meet in Israel-Palestine as well as in Iraq. At Annapolis in November 2007, President George W. Bush, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas pledged to “make every effort” to hammer out The Editors • 3 min read
MER Article From the Editors (Summer 2008) Like the Palestinians, the Kurds are routinely described as a “question.” The label refers, in one sense, to their status as a people who sought self-determination in the wake of World War I but whose claim is still unsettled. From the standpoint of the states that divided the population of Kurdista The Editors • 4 min read
MER Article From the Editor (Spring 2008) From December 2006 through the late summer of 2007, four foreign policy commentators reached for the same 1980s movie title, Back to the Future, to describe the peregrinations of US Middle East policy in the oft-proclaimed twilight of the neo-conservative moment. There was confusion, however, as to The Editors • 6 min read
MER Article From the Editors (Winter 2007) Some good news, for a change: The excruciating ordeal of the Los Angeles Eight is finally over. On October 30, federal prosecutors gave up on their efforts to deport Khader Hamide and Michel Shehadeh, the last of the seven Palestinians and one Kenyan arrested in 1987 on patently silly anti-terrorism The Editors • 4 min read
MER Article From the Editors (Summer 2007) Both political parties in Washington seem determined not to end the US occupation of Iraq until they are convinced the other party will get blamed for the consequences. It is charmless political theater and grotesque public policy. The occupation cannot end too soon. The Editors • 2 min read
MER Article From the Editor (Spring 2007) Twin specters hang over the Middle East of the American imagination -- the perceived rise in the geopolitical power of the region’s Shi‘i Muslims and the dark shadow cast by the sectarian reprisals that increasingly propel the Iraqi civil war. In the United States, pundits and Democratic presidential The Editors • 15 min read
Current Analysis A Reckoning Deferred How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake? That haunting question, posed by John Kerry to Congress when he was a discharged Navy lieutenant in 1971, helped to slow, and eventually stop, a pointless, unpopular war in Vietnam. That question, in part because Kerry declined to pose it The Editors • 10 min read
