Background on the News - 2004-04-14

The Shiites and the Future of Iraq

April 14, 2004

The Shiite uprising in Iraq this past week led by radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr and his militia has shaken leaders from Baghdad to Washington. With unrest continuing in the "Sunni Triangle," American forces are now fighting a two-front insurgency even as they make plans to cede control over the country to Iraqis in a few months. Last summer in Foreign Affairs, Yitzhak Nakash, one of the world's leading authorities on the Iraqi Shia, explained what they wanted and how they should be handled.

• Full text of original essay
• Read Nakash's April 10 op-ed in the New York Times
  (free registration required)

Gideon Rose on Condoleezza Rice

Last week, Foreign Affairs Managing Editor Gideon Rose conducted an online Q&A session at washingtonpost.com, answering readers' questions about the testimony of National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice before the 9/11 Commission.

• read session transcript (free registration required)
• read Rice's January 2000 essay for Foreign Affairs
• listen to Rice's testimony (courtesy National Public Radio)

Previously in Background on the News

Monopoly Games
March 31, 2004
By ordering a record fine against Microsoft for abusing its "near monopoly," the European Commission demonstrated once again last week that it is far more suspicious of free-market forces than regulators in the United States. . . . Read more

3/11
March 17, 2004
Last week's devastating bombings in Madrid may jolt European states into revising their antiterrorism strategies, especially if the attacks turn out to have been orchestrated by al Qaeda. . . . Read more

Did you know . . .
. . . that a columnist at Poynter Online has called Background on the News ". . . a go-to destination for journalists trying to understand important international topics"? We think that what's good for journalists is good for everybody! Read the whole column.

• Newsletter Archive

In the Next Issue of Foreign Affairs

On newsstands starting May 3, 2004

• Kathy Gannon on Afghanistan's relapse into chaos
• Samuel Berger on foreign policy for a Democratic president
• Richard Betts on the new politics of intelligence
• Richard Pipes on the Russian electorate's indifference to democratic liberties
• Joseph Nye on the decline of America's soft power

Plus: offshore outsourcing's unheralded benefits, the global baby bust, Syria's strategic quandary, the payoff from women's rights, and playing election-year politics with China policy.

To get your copy of the May/June 2004 issue, visit your local newsstand or the Barnes & Noble store nearest you beginning May 3, 2004. To receive your copy in the mail, subscribe no later than:

• U.S. Orders: May 31, 2004
• International and Canadian orders: April 29, 2004

Or use our Newsstand Finder.

Special Web Preview

The Outsourcing Bogeyman

Daniel W. Drezner

According to the election-year bluster of politicians and pundits, the outsourcing of American jobs to other countries has become a problem of epic proportion. But this alarmism is misguided, argues Daniel W. Drezner of the University of Chicago in an article that will appear in the May/June issue of Foreign Affairs. Outsourcing actually brings far more benefits than costs, both now and in the long run. If its critics succeed in provoking a new wave of American protectionism, the consequences will be disastrous — for the U.S. economy and for the American workers they claim to defend.

• What people are saying
  (via Google)

In the Current Issue of Foreign Affairs

The complete text of selected essays and of all the book reviews from the March/April issue can be found on the Foreign Affairs Web site. Currently the following essays are available in their full text:

A Normal Country

Andrei Shleifer and Daniel Treisman

Conventional wisdom in the West says that post-Cold War Russia has been a disastrous failure. The facts say otherwise. Aspects of Russia's performance over the last decade may have been disappointing, but the notion that the country has gone through an economic cataclysm and political relapse is wrong — more a comment on overblown expectations than on Russia's actual experience. Compared to other countries at a similar level of economic and political development, Russia looks more the norm than the exception.

• What people are saying
  (via Google)

Trouble in Taiwan

Michael D. Swaine

George W. Bush was right to rebuke Taiwan's president over his plans for a referendum on relations with China. Administration critics assume that democracy and independence are inseparable, that the "one China" principle is no longer useful, and that China would never go to war over Taiwan. But they are wrong on all three counts and fail to appreciate the dangers that may lie ahead.

• What people are saying
  (via Google)

Illusions of Empire: Defining the New American Order

G. John Ikenberry

From Washington to Baghdad, the debate over American empire is back. Five new books weigh in, some celebrating the imperial project as the last best hope of humankind, others attacking it as cause for worry. What they all fail to understand is that U.S. power is neither as great as most claim nor as dangerous as others fear.

• What people are saying
  (via Google)

Outstanding New Books

Plaudits from our book review panel in the March/April issue of Foreign Affairs.

The Choice: Global Domination or Global Leadership
by Zbigniew Brzezinski
" . . . one of the most important books on U.S. foreign policy since September 11."  —Walter Russell Mead
Read the review

Opening Mexico: The Making of a Democracy
by Julia Preston and Samuel Dillon
"[This] brisk narrative, full of shrewd analysis and masterly old-fashioned reporting, takes the reader inside the black box of PRI politics . . . "  —Kenneth Maxwell
Read the review

Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies
by Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit
" . . . [a] grandly illuminating study of two centuries of anti-Western ideas . . . "  —G. John Ikenberry
Read the review

Indonesian Destinies
by Theodore Friend
" . . . few books give so complete and vivid an introduction . . . Friend [is] a masterly political scientist, economist, and anthropologist . . . "  —Lucian W. Pye
Read the review

War Crimes: Confronting Atrocity in the Modern World
by David Chuter
" . . . a penetrating and uncomfortable discussion of the relativism of truth in situations in which victim status is a strategic prize and evidence is treated in self-serving ways by governments, the media, nongovernmental organizations, and even academics. Such groups will surely bridle at Chuter's barbed observations . . . but this is a book that they cannot ignore."
  —Lawrence D. Freedman
Read the review