mideast

http://www.mapsofwar.com/ind/imperial-history.html 5000 years of history in 90 seconds. Forgive me in this has been posted before. I put it in this forum because it's bound to turn out way more political than historical.

I have been hearing more and more how Bush in particular has this long range goal of totally transforming that part of the world to be like us. Who says he can do this? Doesn't he know that these countries want us to bud-out, and for us to live our type of democracy, while they live theirs? That...

I haven't had time to be around much lately, and won't be able to contribute much to this discussion in the next few weeks (should it survive that long), but I've been mulling over some troubling ideas the last several days. Let's take a few items as self-evident, even even axiomatic: Whether...

Charles Krauthammer had an optimistic column on the Palestinian/Israeli conflict: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/01/AR2005120101172.html It sounds good to me. I guess people with my view of the situation are not going to be happy that Israel's fences ended up in...

This thread is intended to be short and mundane. I wonder if there is a comprehensive set of recent mid-east (since 1900 +-) historical political maps that can be agreed upon as fact reasonable observers from both camps? This is exactly the type of map I'm looking for: EDIT: Link unreliable...

Can there be any defense for the fact that new settlement is non-stop occurence, a constant thumb in the nose of US efforts to broker an agreement? Despite party in power, despite peace negotiations, despite interim agreements, settlements continue. Intractability on top of intractability.

From the BBC: But what about the settlements?