Why America’s future partners in the Middle East should be Turkey and Iran — yes, Iran.
Stephen Kinzer
Stephen Kinzer teaches international relations at Boston University and is a columnist for The Guardian.
Posted inColumns
The Tchotchkes of War
To spend Christmas in Baghdad is not a dream of many travelers, but it was what The New York Times assigned me to do in 1998. American bombs were raining down on the Iraqi capital that season, as they did periodically during the 1990s. Each morning I visited the places that had been bombed the […]
Posted inDispatches
Nicaragua: The New Guy by Stephen Kinzer
Managua, Nicaragua — Within hours after the left-wing indigenous leader Evo Morales was elected president of Bolivia last December, another outspoken critic of American power in the hemisphere, Daniel Ortega, sent him a message of “revolutionary jubilation.” As the head of Nicaragua’s Sandinista government in the 1980s, Ortega led his country in a war against […]
Posted inArticle
Feels Like the Third Time
Not everyone was shocked by the revelations of the ways American soldiers have abused Iraqi prisoners. Those who have studied techniques that American interrogators taught and used in Vietnam, Latin America, and elsewhere during past decades felt only a grim sense of recognition. “We are living an illusion if we think these practices are unique,” […]
Posted inFeatures
Handle With Care
“You did a great thing!” With that unexpected greeting from an Iranian diplomat in New York last December, my trip to Iran began to take shape. A few months earlier I had published a book that tells how, in 1953, the CIA deposed Iran’s last democratic leader, Mohammed Mossadegh, and set his country on a […]
Posted inFeatures
The Quiet Revolution
In a year of enormous global turmoil, the most astonishing political revolution of all has been unfolding not in Iraq but next door in Turkey. The first hint of its depth came on March 1, when Turkey’s parliament shocked the world by refusing to grant the United States permission to launch an Iraq invasion from […]
Posted inFeatures
Regime Change: The Legacy
A very happy group of men convened at the White House on Sept. 4, 1953, to hear a cloak-and-dagger story that would resonate through all of subsequent American history. Two weeks before, the Central Intelligence Agency had overthrown Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh of Iran. It was the first time the CIA had deposed a foreign […]