I’ve written myself about the Obama administration’s more-than-flatfooted policies on Syria (here, here, and here) and Iran (

Hardly a day goes by that the Financial Times doesn’t do a hit job on Israel. The otherwise sober pink sheet has such an obsession with the Jewish state that I’ve come to wonder what its views were on the rescue of Jewish children into England during the Nazi onslaught on them and on their parents.

Continuing my last Spine…

Really, I don’t care if there is an American ambassador in Damascus. It’s true, given the environment, that he might be shot by terrorists. But, otherwise, why not? We had U.S. diplomats in Tokyo, Berlin and Rome until just after Pearl Harbor. Of course, they did no good. But probably, they also did no harm—except prolonging the illusion that America was at peace with the host countries. 

Why doesn't the administration just say that we are returning to our embassy in Syria because Syria is a player in the Middle East? Basta!

“The cruel God of the Jews has you beaten too.”--Racine

Geopolitical realities force Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri to visit Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad, who probably orchestrated a massive car bomb that killed Hariri's father in 2005.

Israel and Palestine: Reappraisals, Revisions, Refutations

By Avi Shlaim

(Verso, 392 pp., $34.95)

Avi Shlaim burst upon the scene of Middle Eastern history in 1988, with the publication of Collusion Across the Jordan: King Abdullah, the Zionist Movement, and the Partition of Palestine. Before that, as a young lecturer at Reading University in England, he had produced two books, British Foreign Secretaries Since 1945 (1977) and The United States and the Berlin Blockade, 1948–1949 (1983), and several revealing essays on modern Middle Eastern historical issues in academic journals. But it was Collusion Across the Jordan, with its 676 pages of solid and well-written research, that thrust him into the academic limelight.

All dictators, from Creon onwards, are victims.­ --Gabriel García Márquez

I.

Many years later, in the course of writing his memoirs, Gabriel García Márquez was to remember that distant afternoon in Aracataca, in Colombia, when his grandfather set a dictionary in his lap and said, "Not only does this book know everything, it’s the only one that’s never wrong." The boy asked, "How many words are in it?" "All of them," his grandfather replied.

One remarkable thing about watching the Middle East is how what’s celebrated as brilliant in Europe or America is errant nonsense.

Writing such stuff makes people successful and gives them an audience of millions. What they say is so ridiculous that one wants to laugh, yet so totally accepted as true in Washington and European capitals that the laughter would be laughed at.

"I mean, in a way, Obama's standing above the country, above--above the world, he's sort of God." These drug-addicted words come from Evan Thomas, a longtime editor at Newsweek. He uttered them on Chris Matthews's MSNBC show. Such words would wreak havoc on any person's ego, even Barack Obama's. It also would enrage his enemies.

After all, the president has told us that he is a mere student of history, and that he is.

'Yes, sometimes I go into the room with my advisers and I start shouting. And then they say, 'And then what?'" The question hangs in the perfectly cooled air in Sa'ad Hariri's marble-floored sitting room, where Beirut appears as a sunlit abstraction visible at a distance through thick windows. Hariri's father, the former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri, martyr of the Cedar Revolution, arches his black eyebrows from a giant poster near the sofa, looking out at his son with a sidelong, mischievous glance. "It hasn't been a joyful trip," Sa'ad Hariri is saying.

Baghdad, Iraq In December 2007, the Alpha Company of the 4-64 Armor Battalion of the Fourth Brigade, Third Infantry Division, arrived in the neighborhood of Saidiyah in southwest Baghdad. More than half of the onceupscale, religiously mixed neighborhood's 60,000 residents had fled to Jordan, Syria, or other parts of Iraq. Those who stayed rarely ventured out of their homes. Up until a few months earlier, human corpses had littered the street, where stray dogs feasted on them. The police were responsible for collecting the bodies and delivering them to the morgue, but they tended to shirk this duty because warring militias often booby-trapped the bodies.

JERUSALEM--At first glance, Ehud Olmert and Bashar al-Assad have nothing in common. The first is a slick, media-savvy politico, while the second is an awkward, anti-charismatic, unloved and unlovable dictator. But Israel's prime minister and Syria's ruler have both concluded that the best way to beat the rap, respectively, on corruption and murder charges is to make peace with one another.

CONFRONTING IRAN:
THE FAILURE OF AMERICAN FOREIGN POLICY AND THE NEXT GREAT CONFLICT IN THE MIDDLE EAST By Ali M.

Ever since the staggering pictures of naked Iraqi men being brutalized by young men and women in American uniform at Abu Ghraib first surfaced last April, only to be followed by the stunning news of torture and murder of prisoners not only in Iraqi detention camps but also in Afghanistan and Guantanamo, and now, most recently, the astonishing reports of American operatives abducting suspected foreign terrorists and sending them to our "allies" in Syria and Egypt to torture them on our behalf--with its corny, yet horrifying Orwellian name, "extraordinary rendition"--I rep

If the Bush administration's preparations for war with Saddam Hussein were proceeding appropriately, the president would probably be curling up right now with something called a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) for Iraq. An NIE is a document pooling all the information on a particular country that U.S. intelligence services have collected from overheard phone calls, satellite photos, decrypted e-mails, defectors, paid informants, foreign intelligence services, diplomat tipsters, newspaper articles, and official speeches.

This piece originally ran on September 2nd, 1957.

C. L Sulzberger, the scholarly editorial columnist of The New York Times, had the courage in a recent dispatch from Paris to put forward a daring brink-of-war proposal for the Middle East -- a Western blockade of Russian arms shipments. The Soviet arms buildup in Egypt during 1956, he assumes, precipitated the Israeli attack. Likewise, Russian arms shipments to Yemen led to the more recent Yemini attack on British Aden. And the present Russian deliveries to Syria can be directed only against four neighbors—-Turkey, Iran, Saudi Arabia or Israel.

This article was originally published on January 26th, 1963.

President Nasser's armed intervention in Yemen is the most ambitious and dangerous foreign adventure of his career. It has brought him to the brink of war with Saudi Arabia and Jordan and provides American diplomacy in the Middle East with possibly its greatest challenge since Suez. By recognizing, in December, the republican regime of Marshal Sallal--Nasser's protege in Yemen--the United States has clashed with her British ally and has taken sides in the inter-Arab struggle for power. Why did Washington do it, and what are the military facts?