“My name is Khaled. I don’t wish to alarm you, but watch your back, my friend over there wants to kill you.”

The first week of May 1986, Urumchi airport in far western China, I was waiting for a flight to Kashgar en route to the Khunjerab Pass over…

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”  George Santayana.

“I’ve got news for Mr. Santayana:…

Before invading Iraq in 2003, George Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld didn’t know the difference between the Sunni and Shi’a branches of Islam, much less why it would matter and turn out badly once they ousted Saddam Hussein. So a brief history of Islam in order before…

First the demographics. Of the 1.6 Billion or so Muslims in the world, roughly 85%, 1.35 Billion, are Sunni, the rest, 15%, 240 million, Shi’a.

Westerners who tend to hyperfocus on Islam in the Arab world likely do not know that only 20% of all Muslims live in the…

Even before World War 1 was over, two colonial administrators, Mark Sykes for Great Britain and François Georges-Picot for France, aristocrats both, carved up the defunct Ottoman Empire into colonial spheres of influence based on lines drawn quite literally in the sand, Jordan, Palestine and Iraq for Great Britain,…

Theodore Herzl

In the late 1800’s, Theodore Herzl and other Jewish leaders in Europe began pushing for the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, then under Ottoman control.

After World War I, Palestine was governed under Sykes-Picot by the British, and…

Syria was created as a French mandate after World War I as the Arab Kingdom of Syria,  but in 1946, with King Faisal as its nominal head, Syria became an independent, democratic, self-governing country. Or so Syrians were led to believe.

Shukri al-Quwatli

Shukri al-Quwatli was elected as independent…

In 1953, the CIA deposed Mohammed Mosaddegh, the Prime Minister of Iran, and replaced him with Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, the man we call “the Shah,” whose autocratic rule led to the 1979 Iranian Revolution and 40 years of enmity between Iran and America. 

How did we get…

Suez Canal 1954

A chronology of U.S. policy in the Middle East would be incomplete without the Suez Crisis, the 1956 invasion of Egypt by Britain, France and Israel after Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal. 

King Farouk (1950)

In 1952, Nasser and other nationalistic…

Featured Image: For a Perfect Holiday – Visit Egypt

Following the partition of Palestine and the establishment of Israel in 1948, and Israel’s subsequent invasion of the Sinai eight years later during the 1956 Suez Crisis, only a most tenuous ceasefire had existed between Israel and its Arab neighbors….