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Christian Soldiers
Kathryn Joyce 6/19/2009 12:00:00 AM
Ever since former president George W. Bush referred to the war on terror as a “crusade” in the days after the September 11 attacks, many have charged that the United States was conducting a holy war, pitting a Christian America against the Muslim world. That perception grew as prominent military leaders such as Lt. Gen. William Boykin described the wars in evangelical terms, casting the U.S. military as the "army of God." Although President Obama addressed the Muslim world this month in an attempt to undo the Bush administration's legacy of militant Christian rhetoric that often antagonized Muslim countries, several recent stories have framed the issue as a wider problem of an evangelical military culture that sees spreading Christianity as part of its mission.
A Friend in Need
Jacob Weisberg 6/13/2009 12:00:00 AM
Since the first stirrings of the Arab-Israeli peace process after the Yom Kippur war in 1973, America's relations with Israel have been characterized by a paradox: those presidents regarded as the least friendly to the Jewish state have done it the most good. Its strong allies have proved much less helpful.
The Hundred-Year War
Michael Hirsh 6/4/2009 12:00:00 AM
Barack Obama had a head start when he stepped onto the stage in Cairo on Thursday. He had already pledged a "new beginning" to the American people, and now the same grand concept was on offer to the Muslim world: the policies of the Bush administration, in other words, were history. The symbolism was better too. It wasn't just the fact that an American president whose middle name is Hussein was extending a hand to his father's coreligionists, but also that among those in attendance in Cairo were representatives of the Muslim Brotherhood as well as some Egyptian dissidents. Both groups had been conspicuously absent from Condoleezza Rice's 2005 speech in Cairo, which was delivered at American University (Obama's was staged at prestigious Cairo University).
Getting Off the Island
5/29/2009 12:00:00 AM
Late one night in February 2004, the U.S. ambassador for war-crimes issues, Pierre-Richard Prosper, and the Danish ambassador to the United States, Ulrich Federspiel, sat in the living room of Denmark's ambassadorial residence in Washington ironing out the details of an agreement to repatriate Guantánamo's only Danish detainee. His name was Slimane Hadj Abderrahmane, and while he had drawn little attention in the United States, his fate had been the subject of intense negotiations between Danish diplomats and a group of high-ranking American officials, including Prosper, Undersecretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and the White House National Security Council's legal adviser, John Bellinger.
Washington’s Pyramid Scheme
5/23/2009 12:00:00 AM
Early next month, Barack Obama plans to visit Cairo to address the Muslim world. Egyptians will use the occasion to press him to keep U.S. assistance flowing. There was a time when Egypt—still the second-largest U.S. aid recipient in the world—could have taken such largesse for granted. No longer.
Dick Takes Manhattan
Howard Fineman 5/16/2009 12:00:00 AM
Dick Cheney hadn't planned to speak, but others at the dinner in Manhattan noticed him growing a grimmer shade of grim. He was listening to Nicholas Burns, a former State Department official in Cheney's own Bush administration, wax eloquent about the virtue of diplomacy: how a new joint effort with France, Britain, Germany and even Russia and China could prevent Iran from gaining nuclear weapons and terrorizing the Persian Gulf region and the world. In other words, President Barack Obama's position. The host asked if the former vice president wished to respond. Yes indeedy, he did.