Truthdig

Over one million Lebanese gathered in a vast square in a southern Beirut suburb on Sept. 22 to celebrate their country’s largely successful campaign against Israel. Seyid Hassan Nasrallah, secretary-general of Hizballah, risked his life by appearing in public after Israeli leaders had sworn to kill him, and spoke to his adoring supporters in Lebanon and around the world.

Many children were given the day off from school, and buses ferried supporters from all over Lebanon for the victory celebration.… more

Sometimes one entity has to die for another to be born.

In the Balkans alone, the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire enabled the creation of ethnic-national territories, but it was close to a century later that the Yugoslav federation violently dissolved and Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Serbia finally emerged as modern nation-states. As for the Ottoman’s eastern realm, it is said that if Arabs had drawn the maps after World War I, Iraq would never have existed anyway. But undoing… more

Editor's note: This oral history is composed almost entirely of e-mail correspondences that Rosen received from a soldier, who wished to remain anonymous.

About the soldier: He served in Iraq during 2003 and 2004 as part of a Special Forces unit whose job, as he told Rosen, was to "hunt enemies and destroy their networks" -- to go after "former masterminds and leaders of Saddam's Baath Party." His targets soon morphed into members of "Al… more

Three years into an occupation of Iraq replete with so-called milestones, turning points and individual events hailed as "sea changes" that would "break the back" of the insurgency, a different type of incident received an intense, if ephemeral, amount of attention. A local human rights worker and aspiring journalist in the western Iraqi town of Haditha filmed the aftermath of the massacre of 24 Iraqi civilians. The video made its way to an Iraqi working for Time magazine, and the… more