Free Republic

Marc Lynch is angry. The word “rage” appears six times on the first page of America’s Middle East: The Ruination of a Region, and comes in response to Israel’s war in Gaza. This should be sufficient warning to anyone expecting a cool, calm, dispassionate analysis of the Middle East that they might have picked up the wrong book. That is not to say that Lynch, who runs the George Washington University’s Middle East program, is not worth reading. On the contrary, and despite the occasional lapse into the sort of political-science-speak favored by academics, he is a fierce and compelling...

SHABUNDA, Congo -- Nsimenya Kinyama carried her 3-day-old baby outside bundled in rags and gingerly placed his tiny, jaundiced body in a rusty blue crib. As the first healing rays of the morning sun reached him, he fussed and wriggled and stretched his arms up. Kinyama, 36, stared at her new son with a flat, empty look in her eyes. She was wondering if this child, like the six who had come before him, would die. It is a common prayer in Shabunda, a former trading center in eastern Congo that was ravaged by war, then left poor and isolated...

More than three million people have lost their lives in central African wars in recent years while the world has stood by doing virtually nothing. Now the slaughter is set to escalate once again. In an effort to prevent free elections in the Congo and secure its ongoing plunder of natural resources, Rwanda is doing its best to aggravate clashes among local militias.