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 night before. One day I was trudging through the rubble of a large building that, until a few hours earlier, had been the Ministry of Labor. As I wandered around the site, a piece of twisted metal caught my eye. I picked it up, and found it remarkably heavy and smooth. Soon I realized that this was not debris from the destroyed building, but a fragment of one of the American cruise missiles that had hit it during the night. I brought that piece of high-tech shrapnel home. It became the first item in an odd collection that I have slowly built. I collect artifacts related to American intervention. * * * One of my books on intervention is All the Shah's Men , which describes the 1953 coup in which...

Ankara -- Over the past half-century, the United States has had few more faithful allies than Turkey. Beginning with the legendary bravery that Turkish soldiers showed while fighting alongside Americans during the Korean War, and extending through Turkey's long membership in NATO and its unfailingly pro-Western stance during the Cold War, the alliance has remained strong despite a host of challenges. Both sides are eager to maintain the relationship, but the policies of the Bush administration are making that steadily more difficult. Turkey is more self-confident than it once was, and increasingly willing to reject policies set in Washington if they seem inimical to Turkish interests. In particular, Turkey is pursuing its own path with regard to Iran and Syria; and the reason Turkey is moving gingerly away from its longtime ally is no surprise. “This is an unintended consequence of the Iraq war,” said Sahin Alpay, a professor of political science at Bahcesehir University in Istanbul...