Eric Rouleau
Essay
Jul/Aug
2002
Saudi Arabia is ailing. Despite the efforts of reformers in the royal family, the kingdom is struggling with economic problems, social unrest, and popular outrage over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Meanwhile, radical Islam and anti-Americanism continue to simmer -- and could soon reach a dangerous boil.
Essay
Nov/Dec
2000
Last year the European Union announced it would finally accept Turkey as a candidate for membership. Now Ankara faces a moment of truth. To conform to European standards of human rights and democracy, Turkey must all but rewrite its constitution. But one force stands in the way: the military. And the fiercely secular, vastly powerful guardians of Atatürk's legacy are not about to give ground. Tension is mounting as Turkey slides toward the inevitable conflict between European-minded reformers and military conservatives.
Essay
Jan/Feb
1995
Sustaining the embargo on Iraq punishes innocent civilians, not Saddam Hussein and his henchmen. Ridiculously, the U.N. Security Council has banned imports of socks, wristwatches, light bulbs, and other militarily useless items. The United States, meanwhile, drags its feet on removing sanctions in the spurious hope of overthrowing Saddam. The sanctions are demoralizing regional allies and costing them billions of dollars. The Clinton administration should treat Iraq as it has treated North Korea and China-with diplomacy instead of crude and ineffective coercion.
Essay
Nov/Dec
1993
Turkey's historical knack for melding contradictions continues. Kemal Atatürk, founder of the modern republic, left a legacy that Turks are actively adapting. Relative isolationism is giving way to rising regional power. Secular democracy has let Islam back out of the bottle. And dogmatic homogeneity is being usurped by growing cultural awareness of, and even fondness for, the Ottoman past. Turks are becoming more Turkish again, and old taboos are falling one by one.
Essay
Fall
1983
The beginning of the end of Yassir Arafat? The Palestine Liberation Front on the point of irrevocable disintegration? The twilight of the Palestinian movement? No sooner had a mutiny been declared in a Fatah barracks in Lebanon's Bekaa Valley last May than the international press was full of such questions -- legitimate, to be sure, but premature to say the least. And the political analysts who hastened to reply in the affirmative often did so without sufficiently taking into account the complexity of the crisis or the roles of the various protagonists -- behind the scenes as well as center stage -- their stated objectives, ulterior motives and miscalculations.
Essay
Fall
1980
From the very beginning of the Iranian Revolution, the West--and particularly the United States--seems to have been struck by a peculiar sort of political blindness. The first signs of revolt passed unnoticed. The explosions of rage in the spring of 1978, first in Tabriz and then in Qum, were attributed to "obscurantist mullahs" hostile to the Shah's agrarian reform. The immense demonstrations by millions of Iranians, as well as the strikes in the administrations, factories, schools, universities and oil fields which paralyzed the state and in the last analysis caused the monarch's inglorious departure, were attributed to the "fanaticism" of the Iranian people. How could it have been otherwise, it was asked at the time, since the population was following a reactionary old cleric in revolt against a man who had devoted his entire life to modernizing his country?
Essay
Jan
1975
In an editorial published in Paris the day after Robert Kennedy's assassination by Sirhan Sirhan, Le Monde wrote that this "criminal gesture by a Palestinian nationalist on this 5th of June 1968-anniversary of the Six-Day War-takes on a symbolic value. . . . Never have despair and hatred been so intense in a people who consider themselves deprived of their homeland."
