Arm chair generals help shape surge in Iraq - Examiner.com:
WASHINGTON - When it comes to the troop surge in Iraq, a bunch of arm chair generals in Washington are influencing the Bush Administration as much as the Joint Chiefs or theater commanders.
A group of military experts at the American Enterprise Institute, concerned that the U.S. [...]

The death of this crackpot creed is nothing to mourn:
The liberal interventionism that took root in the aftermath of the cold war was never much more than a combination of post-imperial nostalgia with crackpot geopolitics. It was an absurd and repugnant mixture, and one whose passing there is no reason to regret. What the world [...]

Via Larbi. (If you don’t get it, Cecilia Sarkozy apparently helped charm Qadhafi into releasing the nurses held in Libya. Bernard Kouchner, the Frennch foreign minister, just got back from Beirut in an attempt to resolve the split government there.)

Very interesting BBC Radio Four documentary on a coup by wealthy Americans to overthrow Roosevelt in the 1930s:
The coup was aimed at toppling President Franklin D Roosevelt with the help of half-a-million war veterans. The plotters, who were alleged to involve some of the most famous families in America, (owners of Heinz, Birds Eye, Goodtea, [...]

Activists’ parents accuse Tehran of torturing their sons:
Fears that Iran is systematically mistreating political prisoners and dissidents have been further fuelled after the parents of three detained student activists claimed their sons had been tortured.
In a letter to the country’s judiciary chief, Ayatollah Mahmoud Hashemi Shahroudi, the parents alleged that the students have suffered a [...]

The Guardian profiles former Israeli Arab lawmaker Azmi Bishara and looks at the rising self-assertion of non-Jewish Israeli citizens:
Before his resignation, his Balad party held only four seats in the Knesset in a country where many Arab Israelis still tend to vote for the mainstream political parties, particularly Labour - now part of the ruling [...]

Israeli textbook states Arab view:
The Israeli government has approved a school textbook that for the first time presents the Palestinian denunciation of the creation of Israel in 1948.
The book, to be used only in Israeli Arab schools, notes that Palestinians describe the event as a “catastrophe”.
“Both the Israeli and Palestinian versions have to be presented,” [...]

Hannah Allam has a cool inventory of signs spotted in Baghdad’s Green Zone.
Update: Now Hannah has a list of military acronyms used in Iraq.

Harpers’ Scott Horton has a really good post linking the great writer Elias Canetti, notably his Crowd and Power, and the Bush administration’s emotional management of its war dead. Do read the old Harpers’ review article on Canetti from 1980 too if you can.

The New Yorker has a profile of Avrahum Burg, the former Knesset speaker turned anti-Zionist, that’s well worth reading even if it contains obvious faults and biases, notably in the first two paragraphs. It also contains some excellent examples of how the Zionist meta-narrative brooks no dissent and savages its opponents by qualifying critiques as [...]

That stands for Massachusetts Institute of Technology Electronic Journal of Middle East Studies and the current issue contains tons of articles on the great novelist Abdel Rahman Munif.

While I can only applaud the efforts made by al-Masri al-Youm to provide an English translation for its leading articles, I think I’ll stick to the Arabic edition. The quality of the translation is at times comical, such as when the name of the current American ambassador to Cairo, Francis Ricciardone, is translated as “Francis [...]

This fine piece on that moment in French intellectual history, in 1977, that saw the birth of the “nouveaux philosophes” should have pointed out that many of these philosophers (a title undeserved by BHL at least) are now the French equivalent of neo-conservatives: BHL as “liberal interventionist” or Glucksmann as Sarkoziste.

Uber-blogger and Middle East historian Juan Cole has a new blog on Napoleon Bonaparte’s invasion of Egypt, the first modern invasion of the Middle East by a Western power. It’s called Napoleon’s Egypt and goes along with Cole’s new book, Napoleon’s Egypt: Invading the Middle East. Cole is appears to be going through the invasion [...]

LEBANON: One in three Lebanese wants to leave:
BEIRUT, 10 June 2007 (IRIN) - Researchers warn that economic instability and persistent security threats are driving ever more young, educated Lebanese abroad, creating a brain drain that threatens the country’s economic and social future.
“We’re suffering a huge brain drain,” Kamal Hamdan, head of the Lebanese Centre of [...]

Rudy Giuliani apparently wants to be known as the neo-con candidate in the US presidential race. I was aghast enough that he chose pro-Israel agitator Martin Kramer as his Middle East advisor, but now he’s gone one step further and taken on grand-daddy of all neo-cons Norman Podhoretz as his foreign policy advisor:
WASHINGTON, July 23 [...]

Am in calm, clean Morocco for the summer, but this story made me miss Egypt:
When an elder was kidnapped in a clan dispute in conservative southern Egypt, the al-Arab family’s worst fears were soon realised — they received a package containing his moustache, local media reported on Sunday.
The man himself was returned uninjured, but the [...]

I have this article on qantara.de on the WWII mines and other ammunition left behind on Egypt’s North coast. The Egyptian government wants to re-launch its efforts to clear the zones that are affected, but wants to have it all paid for by its international donors.
As Egypt has brought to perfection the art of [...]

I am traveling throughout next week, so light if any posting till the middle of the month. In the meantime:
1. Isn’t Alan Johnston great? Great TV interviews since his release.
2. The Christopher Hitchens article on Tunisia I asked about is online, and it’s awful.
3. When khawagas have no shame.

The French scholar Alain Roussillon, an expert on Egypt and the director of the CEDEJ in Cairo, passed away yesterday from a after suffering from a brain hemorrhage. He will be buried in Egypt, where his mother came from.
I last saw Roussillon on March 5, when we had a long chat about the constitutional amendments [...]