How Not to Reconstruct Iraq, Afghanistan -- or America A Guide to Disaster at Home and Abroad By Peter Van Buren Some images remain like scars on my memory. One of the last things I saw in Iraq, where I spent a year with the Department of State helping squander some of the $44 billion American taxpayers put up to “reconstruct” that country, were horses living semi-wild among the muck and garbage of Baghdad. Those horses had once raced for Iraqi autocrat Saddam Hussein and seven years after their “liberation” by the American invasion of 2003, they were still wandering that unraveling, unreconstructed urban landscape looking, like many other Iraqis, for food. I flew home that same day, a too-rapid change of worlds, to a country in which the schools of my hometown in Ohio could not afford to pay teachers a decent wage. Once great cities were rotting away as certainly as if they were in Iraq, where those horses were scrabbling to get by. To this day I’m left pondering these questions: Why has the United States spent so much money and time so disastrously trying to rebuild occupied nations abroad, while allowing its own infrastructure to crumble untended? Why do we even think of that as “policy”?
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This announcement speaks for itself: Dear Colleagues, After two decades teaching medieval art history and doing photography for my own use,...
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I have always loved maps and history. Growing up in the USA in the early 60s, the Southeast Asian war gave me the opportunity to learn geog...
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A new translation of this fascinating treatise on horsemanship by a fifteenth-century king. This interview with Jeffrey Forgeng comes from...
Kamis, 16 Agustus 2012
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This announcement speaks for itself: Dear Colleagues, After two decades teaching medieval art history and doing photography for my own use,...
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I have always loved maps and history. Growing up in the USA in the early 60s, the Southeast Asian war gave me the opportunity to learn geog...
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A new translation of this fascinating treatise on horsemanship by a fifteenth-century king. This interview with Jeffrey Forgeng comes from...
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From the Guardian: Leading foreign academics from the LSE acting as expert advisers to the UK government were told they would not be asked ...
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...if you are very, very rich. (Most mss. of this age and quality are in national or university libraries and are not for sale at any price... -
Mcleans reports : And then there’s Patrick McGovern, an archaeologist at the University of Pennsylvania who, after analyzing the residue tha...
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Two experts in the Middle East have been more useful to me than most of the more prominent ones. They are Juan Cole and Joshua Landis. If yo...
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Gordon is talking up an art exhibit on the subject of 19th century prostitution in Paris: It was a subject that interested them. Why? The o...
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I am in the middle of this very interesting book. You might expect that the book would have a lot to say about the history of dividing blac...
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Byron York talks to dedicated, long-time Romney supporters right after the concession speech: A few hours earlier, across the street at the...
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