Middle East Articles

By the middle of the 20th century, pundits and intellectuals in the West generally took it for granted that secularism was the coming ideology and that religion would never again play a major role in public life. However, within a few years, it became clear that a militant piety had erupted in every major faith, dragging God and religion back to center stage from the sidelines to which they had been relegated. The 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran showed the potential of this new form of faith. Western observers were astonished to see an obscure mullah overturning what had appeared to be one of the most progressive countries in the Middle East. “Who ever took religion seriously?” cried a frustrated official in the US State Department shortly after the revolution.

What aspects of the conflict in Bosnia made it possible for the United States to intervene?

For centuries the olive branch has been offered as a symbol of unconditional peace, since olive trees take decades to produce fruit and thus can only be cultivated during long periods of stability. Ironically, these symbols of peace are a significant crop in the Middle East, where they are prized for their ability to flourish for hundreds of years despite bad soil and little water. Moreover, the widespread destruction of olive trees in the West Bank and Gaza Strip since the Intifada is a microcosm of the ongoing internecine conflict between Israel and Palestine.

Humanitarian intervention was supposed to have gone the way of the 1990s. The use of military force across borders to stop mass killing was seen as a luxury of an era in which national security concerns among the major powers were less pressing and problems of human security could come to the fore. Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, East Timor, and Sierra Leone: these interventions, justified to varying degrees in humanitarian terms, were dismissed as products of an unusual interlude between the tensions of the Cold War and the new threat of terrorism. The events of September 11, 2001, supposedly changed all that by inducing a return to more immediate security challenges.