US Military Dead during Iraq War 1057

Perhaps that was a reference to the war with the Barbary pirates (not to be confused with the Pittsburgh pirates).

We may have been inexperienced, but their alleged experience did not seem to help them much. Look at the Suez crisis.

The first to do which?

We didn't get into the colonial biz until then, after taking some colonies from Spain.

Like everything else, it had its good side and its bad side.

Dayan is hardly an unbiased observer. We don't support Israel int he sense that we don't do everything they tell us to, but we were one of the first to recognize them, we give them billions every year in aid (more than we give to any other country; last I looked we gave the 20% of our aid budget), stripping our defenses in Germany to send them tanks in the '73 war, and so on. More often than not we take their side, and we seldom do much more than talk when they do anything bad.

No. Kaplan is a journalist, and Copeland and Crane were involved with the CIA. Crane is a grand-nephew or something of the Crane of the King-Crane Commission.

Lewis? He is somewhat controversial. His writings have had a great influence on the Bush people.

Pick one: *) Nor to anyone else. *) It's all about power.

Sure they do; you just have to look harder. The Kaplan book talks about internal wranglings in the State Department between Arabists and non-Arabists, for example.

Probably not, but try Patai, The Arab Mind; Pryce-Jones, The Closed Circle; Field, Inside the Arab World; Polk, The Arab World Today; or Ajami, The Arab Predicament. Polk has an annotated reading list. None of these is specifically about the issue you mention, but should give the broader background necessary to understand militant Islam. Cleveland, A History of the Modern Middle East is a good overview.

Also see the LOC Country Studies:

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