Margaret Thatcher enjoyed being who she was. She did not think of this inner bounce as a gift of fortune but as a virtue, as obligatory self-respect. She was a patriot and a Tory in that way. The party was her milieu—the people whose self-respect resembled her own and supported it. The country, too, was...
Leon Hadar has written a short, dispassionate, and gently theoretical sort of book on American policy in the Middle East. It is not, chiefly, about military operations, terrorists, prisons, and headlines but about policy at the “geo-political” and “geo-economic level” and about predictions. Though dry, Sandstorm is accessible to the general reader. Hadar believes that the...
Iraq is the land of the Tigris and the Euphrates, the fertile area around and between the two great rivers, the territory between Baghdad, the ancient capital of the entire Arab world, and Basra, over 500 miles away where the great rivers converge as the Shatt-el-Arab before entering the Persian Gulf. Some say Iraq is...
“We are divided in the face of a Mohammedan world, divided in every way—divided by separate independent national rivalries, by the warring interests of possessors and dispossessed—and that division cannot be remedied because the cement which once held our civilization together, the Christian cement, has crumbled.” —Hilaire Belloc Neither Christians nor Jews can claim that...
Slobodan Milosevic’s delivery to a NATO airbase in Tuzla marks the end of an era—but which one? It appears to conclude the period in which the Serbian people tried to find leaders who would not accept that their national interests should be defined either by a socialist Yugoslavia or by the great powers. Their willingness...
The pace of cultural redefinition in Britain is steady and strong. Since the day in 1991 when Prime Minister John Major refused to veto the Maastricht treaty, a new picture has emerged. To put it crudely, the Tories and the monarchy are looking unprecedentedly vulnerable. The only good argument for their continued survival is that...