MER Article Mossad Books Dan Raviv and Yossi Melman, Every Spy a Prince (Houghton Mifflin, 1990). Victor Ostrovsky and Claire Hoy, By Way of Deception (St. Martin’s Press, 1990). Promoting their book around the US last fall, Yossi Melman and Dan Raviv touted it as the first critical study of Israel’s intelligence establis Jane Hunter • 5 min read
MER Article Binder, Islamic Liberalism Leonard Binder, Islamic Liberalism: A Critique of Development Ideologies (Chicago, 1988). Sami Zubaida • 6 min read
MER Article War and Sexuality The Gulf way may ultimately transform Arab politics even more radically than the political-military defeats of 1948 and 1967. Those experiences were the midwives of self-critical reassessments that, while severe, accepted the fundamental legitimacy of Arab nationalism and its political project. In t Joel Beinin • 4 min read
MER Article The More You Watch, the Less You Know The Persian Gulf crisis received massive and sustained coverage in the American media. As numerous critics have pointed out, television network news in particular largely parroted the Bush administration’s line, accepting and passing on its version of reality as the truth. A study released in March Al Miskin • 3 min read
MER Article War and State Power A student of European states finds much to wonder at in the recent Persian Gulf War. [1] Not that the armed, predatory character of Middle Eastern states, the invasion of a rich state’s territory by a financially strapped neighbor or a great power’s massive intervention in a local Charles Tilly • 8 min read
MER Article Women and the Stability of Saudi Arabia On November 6, 1990, some 50 women met in a supermarket parking lot in Riyadh. The women dismissed their drivers and drove their cars in tandem through the streets of Riyadh, defying publicly an unofficial but strictly observed ban on women’s driving. In Saudi Arabia, where women may not travel with Eleanor Abdella Doumato • 10 min read
MER Article Harvest of War It takes two to make a war, and there were indeed two protagonists in making this war. On the one hand, there was the United States, which wanted the war for a number of reasons, primarily global: to consecrate its world hegemony, to liquidate any sequels to bipolarism, to marginalize Europe and Jap Fawwaz Traboulsi • 7 min read
MER Article Oil and the Gulf War No blood for oil! The rallying cry of many of those who took to the streets in protest against the Gulf war is simple. Is it too simple? “Even a dolt understands the principle,” said one unnamed US official, “We need the oil. It’s nice to talk about standing up for freedom, but Kuwait and Saudi Arab Paul Aarts, Michael Renner • 16 min read
MER Article This Is Not Vietnam In 1926 the French surrealist, Rene Magritte, painted an unmistakable pipe and labeled it, in careful schoolboy script: “This is not a pipe.” In 1991 George Bush began a war in the Persian Gulf which, he insisted, was not Vietnam. Iraq, he pointed out, is a desert; Vietnam was a jungle. Moreover, Ir Marilyn Young • 10 min read
MER Article The Intellectuals and the War Edward Said is Parr Professor of Comparative Literature at Columbia University, a member of the Palestine National Council and a contributing editor of this magazine. Along with Noam Chomsky, he is one of the foremost opposition public intellectuals in the United States, a role he plays in the Arab Barbara Harlow • 15 min read
MER Article Eyewitness: Iraq Joost Hiltermann, an editor of this magazine, traveled through Iraq from March 23 to April 10, 1991, as Middle East field coordinator of the Boston-based organization Physicians for Human Rights. The delegation, whose mission was to study the impact of the Gulf war and civil conflict on the health o Joost Hiltermann • 4 min read
