Year: 2011
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Sometimes something can worry you for years, and you don’t quite know what to do about it. Robert Fisk’s writing is one of those things for me. His stories are compellingly fluent, fabulously channel Middle Eastern victimhood, and satisfyingly cast grit in the eye of Western governments’ hypocrisy. And yet against this I always have…
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Informed by his State Department employers that he could either serve in a Middle East war zone or watch his career wilt, Peter Van Buren chose active service helping to rebuild Iraq. His year embedded in Provincial Reconstruction Teams in the notorious Sunni triangle resulted in We Meant Well: how I helped lose the battle for…
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Fine 30 Sept 2011 New York Times review (here) of what looks like an important book on how President George W. Bush never discussed whether the Iraq war was a good idea, or, indeed, how nobody knows the answer to the question of what the reason for the war was at all! Some excerpts from…
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Some words of wisdom from a friend deep in U.S. officialdom. I had complained about the superficiality of some American approaches to the Arab revolts in the Mideast (continuing a theme of Dining with al-Qaeda), thus: [There is] unjustified hoopla about the dynamics of the Arab spring … and then, when it turns out that…
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An interview with Vera Marie Badertscher of A Traveler’s Library, one of America’s top 100 travel blogs. A full review of the book on the blog is here. After reading Dining with Al Qaeda, I thought that Hugh Pope was one of those writers I would like to sit with over a cup of tea…
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A lovely review to brighten a writer’s morning, from Vera Marie Badertscher at the website ‘A Travelers Library’ – original available here. Books for the Arab World in Troubled Times Vera Marie Badertscher Every Monday for a while now, I’ve been writing about books that might shed some light on the current internal struggles of…
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All welcome! The final lecture of the 2010-2011 Kadir Has University Culture and the Arts Lecture Series, sponsored by the Department of American Culture and Literature, will be presented by Hugh Pope, who will discuss his most recent book, Dining with Al-Qaeda: Three Decades Exploring the Many Worlds of the Middle East. Hugh Pope has…
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Broaching the Ergenekon issue at a Turkish social gathering is very like trying to have a rational discussion about fox hunting at a London dinner party – soon everyone is shouting angrily at each other and nobody knows quite why.
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This English version of Dining with al-Qaeda‘s review by Francis Ghilès – a leading authority on Algeria and the Magreb – was printed in the winter 2010/2011 edition of Afkar/Ideas, a bilingual Spanish/French publication of Madrid’s Estudios de Política Exterior and Barcelona’s European Institute of the Mediterranean (IEMed). A fascinating exploration of the many worlds…
Hugh Pope 