What We’re Reading

Preeti Aroon

• In Cuba, Finding a Tiny Corner of Jewish Life in Sunday’s New York Times. With Castro’s health failing and the cover story in the latest edition of FP, my mind has been on Cuba lately. I learned from this Times article that the island has only 1,500 Jews, just one kosher butcher, and no rabbis. One Cuban historian based in Havana says, “To be Cuban and Jewish is to be twice survivors.”

Henry Bowles

• The Clash of Civilizations Revisited,by Samuel P. Huntington in New Perspectives Quarterly. In an interview freewheeling enough to provoke just about anyone, Huntington discusses the trajectory of “Islamic civilization,” the Walt and Mearsheimer kerfuffle, and the rise of Iran.

Christine Chen

• Eastwood’s War, by Ian Buruma in the New York Review of Books. Not content merely to review Clint Eastwood’s latest, Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima, Buruma meditates on what it means to be a hero, how people regard their enemies as faceless during times of war, and how the war movie is often dressed up as patriotic myth.

Michael Cognato

• I’ve never found war-to-war comparisons of Iraq with Vietnam to be very instructive. But the broader strategic contexts are similar, with many now questioning the role of America as global hegemon. A quarter-century ago, Robert Tucker looked at a related situation in The Purposes of American Power: An Essay on National Security. It doesn’t provide pat answers for the problems of his day or ours, but it helps to frame the questions.

Travis Daub

• Watching the Super Bowl in Iraq, TIME, Monday, February 5, 2007. 

Prerna Mankad

• Curse of the Black Gold: Hope and Betrayal in the Niger Delta, by Tom O’Neill in this month’s National Geographic. Tells the story of how Nigeria’s oil has brought armed militia groups, a rise in ethnic tensions, and the destruction of the local fishing economy.

ED KASHI/National Geographic

Carolyn O’Hara

• Officers with PhDs Advising War Effort, by Thomas E. Ricks, Washington Post, Feb. 5. 2007. Gen. Petraeus, the new U.S. commander in Iraq has assembled a brainy (and combat-hardened) brain trust to advise him on Iraq. But can the military’s intellectual dissidents turn the fight around? 

Kate Palmer

• Power, Faith, and Fantasy, by Michael B. Oren. The author of Six Days of War has a sweeping new account of American entanglement in the Middle East, dating from the earliest days of the republic.