Boston Review

No Going Back

Articles — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 10:29:00 -0400

“You have now entered Iraq,” my taxi driver joked. We had in fact just entered Sayida Zeinab, a neighborhood on the outskirts of Damascus. This shrine city, long a destination for Shia pilgrims, had become home to an estimated one million Iraqis seeking refuge in Syria. “Everybody is Iraqi,” laughed another driver after several people he had asked for directions replied in Iraqi Arabic that they did not know. Indeed, walking through the alleys of Sayida Zeinab I felt as though I were in Iraq, except it was safe. After nearly three years in the war-torn country, I had… more

Anatomy of a Civil War

Articles — Thu, 30 Nov 2006 15:08:00 -0500

On April 7, 2006, the third anniversary of the U.S. occupation of Iraq, I drove south with Shia pilgrims from Baghdad to the shrine city of Najaf. The day before, on the same route, a minibus like ours had taken machine-gun fire in the Sunni town of Iskandariyah. Five pilgrims were killed.

My companions -- a young man named Ahmed, his mother, and their friend Iskander, a driver -- came from Sadr City, the Shia bastion in Baghdad named for Muhammad Sadiq al Sadr, a popular and politically ambitious Shia cleric slain in 1999. They wanted to hear a sermon… more

The Lesser Evil

Articles — Thu, 30 Nov 2006 08:16:00 -0500

A fatal riddle of our time is why the United States, which in the end won the Cold War peacefully and emerged from it as the uncontested world hegemon, has in a few years thrown away its moral and political leadership through reckless and illegal war.

James Carroll, in his latest book, House of War, illuminates part of the answer. Carroll attributes most of the blame to forces within the Pentagon -- his “house of war” -- and in particular the U.S. Air Force. He argues that it is chiefly to them -- to their professional needs and paranoid mentality… more

On the Ground in Iraq

Articles — Sat, 01 Apr 2006 00:00:00 -0500

The Americans came for Sabah one Friday night in September. His house in Radwaniya, on the western outskirts of Baghdad, stood in a dry, yellow field surrounded by brick walls. Three cars were parked in front the day I came to visit, two weeks after Americans had shot him. It was the month of Ramadan, and our mouths were as dry as his yard. The resistance was active in Radwaniya, and we drove through fields and dry canals to avoid any checkpoints that might reveal to locals that I was a foreigner. Journalists were targets now too.

… more

Once the Americans Leave, Sunnis Will Have No Common Cause with Foreign Mujahideen

Articles — Wed, 11 Jan 2006 00:00:00 -0500

America lost Iraq as soon as it won the war. A pervasive sense of lawlessness set in immediately following the fall of Saddam's regime from which neither Iraq nor the Americans ever recovered. On the ground, it was apparent from the first month of the occupation that things would be much worse than anybody had imagined. Observing the violence, often caught up in it, listening to sermons in mosques throughout the country, reading the posters on the walls and the graffiti and the banners in demonstrations and religious processions, I could not predict what would happen, but I felt… more

What Went Wrong

Articles — Thu, 09 Dec 2004 00:00:00 -0500

In post-9/11 America a politician seeking applause need only call terrorists "murderers," "barbarians," and "cowards" and vow that terrorism will never succeed. But if by "succeed" one means have a dramatic effect on the way people live, terrorism has in fact done remarkably well.

In New York City, where I live, signs of Osama bin Laden's success are ubiquitous. This August, police armed with automatic weapons were on patrol after an Orange Alert warned of another al Qaeda attack. And when the Republicans descended on New York for their convention, the city filled with helicopters, surveillance blimps, subway police patrols, roadblocks,… more

Russia's Quagmire

Articles — Thu, 01 Jul 2004 00:00:00 -0400

I. Plehve's Ghost

In 1904 the Romanov dynasty was in trouble. Russia's industrialization had accelerated in the last decades of the 19th century but could not forestall the widening of the economic and military gap between Russia and Europe's other powers. To save the regime, Interior Minister Vyacheslav von Plehve reportedly recommended a "small victorious war." But Russia's rout in the 1904–1905 Russo-Japanese war fueled a revolution. The Romanovs, who had reigned for almost 300 years, would soon fall. In 1904 Plehve himself was assassinated by a revolutionary.

Ninety years later, Oleg Lobov, the head of… more