Nicaragua
The Rushdie Affair and the Struggle Against Islamism
Joseph Anton: A Memoir By Salman Rushdie (Random House, 636 pp., $30) I. READ MORE >>
How Human Rights Became our Ideology
The International Human Rights Movement: A History By Aryeh Neier (Princeton University Press, 379 pp., $35) I. READ MORE >>
The Great Democracy Meltdown
Take Them To Detroit
Matthew Yglesias dreams of turning Detroit into a mecca for refugees: READ MORE >>
The Reinvention of Robert Gates
Contra Expectations
On his first day in office, President Barack Obama will head to the situation room for a video conference with his most important commander, General David Petraeus. If the conversation is chilly, it is not just the awkwardness of virtual chatting. Obama and Petraeus have a history. While Obama has called for withdrawing U.S. forces from Iraq, Petraeus oversaw the deployment of more than 30,000 additional troops. To win support from the left, Obama postured as a skeptic of the general's Iraq strategy during congressional hearings. READ MORE >>
America's Proxy War.
"When the elephants fight, the grass suffers." Or so went a variation of the Third World lament during the cold war. The lament clearly applies today in Lebanon. But it also applies in Washington, where the administration views the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah as a classic case of great-power brinkmanship--in this case, pitting the United States against Iran. The paradigm that the Bush team has drawn on in its response to the Lebanon crisis isn't the war on terrorism. It's the proxy battles of the cold war. READ MORE >>
De Nada
JUST WHEN YOU thought the world couldn’t get any more anti-American, it seems a whole other continent has suddenly lined up against us. While we turned our backs to focus on the Middle East, Latin America went and painted itself red. Last week, Evo Morales—an admirer of Fidel Castro, as well as a proponent of nationalizing industry and decriminalizing coca production— ascended to the Bolivian presidency. Most press accounts portray his election as part of a Latin American socialist revival. These stories point out that Morales’s political mentor, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, may soon h READ MORE >>
Asia Minor
In June 1997 the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) was on the congressional chopping block, its funding zeroed out by the Senate Appropriations Committee. Created to promote democracy around the globe, the endowment seemed about to fall victim to an argument that was potent from the early 1990s through September 10, 2001: that, with the cold war over, democracy faced no serious threat. READ MORE >>
A Child of His Century
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