Category: Musings
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Syria was the first country in the Middle East I got to know well more than three decades ago. I loved much about it. But my experiences – retold in the first chapter of Dining with al-Qaeda – seem fully part of the continuum being acted out today. For instance, on my first visit in…
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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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When I was wondering what to call my new book on the broader Middle East, I went to Homer’s bookshop in Istanbul to check out the many shelves full of competition. I soon decided I didn’t want my title to be heavy with dry theorification about Islam, democracy, politics, or terrorism. It also seemed a…
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Having persuaded myself that America under President Obama is becoming more sophisticated in its approach to the Middle East — opening its eyes to the complications of Afghanistan and Iraq, questioning its blanket support for Israel, renouncing the legacy of the neocons — watching the film ‘The Hurt Locker’ was an unexpected reality check of…
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One of my favourite chapters in Dining with al-Qaeda is Chapter Eight, ‘War, War to Victory’, set in and around the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq War. In this part of the book I try to show the reader how the Iranians’ sense of martyrdom for God and Iran is not that different from the blind volunteering to…
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I moved to Turkey in 1987, somewhat accidentally, since opening a Reuters news bureau in Istanbul was the first job I found after claustrophobia got the better of me in Beirut. But I have never left the country for more than a few months since then. Dining alone in Ankara one evening last week, I…
Hugh Pope 