Pick your narrative.

April 22, 2002 8:20 AM

Pick your narrative. A selection of articles on the MidEast crisis from Foreign Affairs, providing various views of the interests, goals, and political dynamics on all sides, as well as the history of the two parties' recent interactions and American involvement in the region. Some stuff to consider at least before mouthing off.
posted by semmi (4 comments total)

Ah, yes, Foreign Affairs. This is the periodical that entirely missed the story of the collapse of the Soviet Union. Prior to the collapse, they ran not one article about the biggest foreign affairs event in the 20th century.

You don't need any "expert" to sort things out for you. See here with your own eyes the truth.
posted by mikegre at 9:05 AM on April 22, 2002

http://www.mfa.gov.il/mfa/go.asp?MFAH0ll60
posted by mikegre at 9:06 AM on April 22, 2002

That Foreign Affairs missed the collapse of the Soviet Union is a little disingenuous as a response to this post. I think that when most people fish out articles that will clearly be divisive on the Middle East issue, this at least offers more than one perspective. That is worth the price of admission in my book.
posted by readymade at 9:27 AM on April 22, 2002

Well, mike, first -- you should realize the political point of view of FA before mouthing off. It's the establishment center-right, after all, not some lefty academic rag handed out by kids in hemp hats. (Foreign Policy magazine is a little closer to what you seem to think, and even that's establishment-acceptable.) Besides, the people paid to worry about things like that largely missed the prediction as well, so it's not exactly a unique failing. The most optimistic Sovietologists seemed to be taken by surprise; almost everyone presumed a more gradual process, with a weakening in the Warsaw Pact followed by a fallback 'Fortress USSR' of 10 or 20 years' duration. The dynamics of the 1991 coup were such that they reversed history not just back to the 1917 revolution, but at least 250 years' worth of Russian empire-building; and when push came to shove, the leaders of key republics like Kazakhstan and Ukraine chose to give up their nukes in exchange for copious bribes from the west, rather than prey on their weaker neighbors in a Somalia or Afghanistan writ large. It has to be one of the luckier events of the 20th century that all that occurred without much violence. And if it had been declaimed in advance, the speaker would have been laughed off the stage.
posted by dhartung at 11:14 PM on April 23, 2002